“It is,” Pete agreed. “Some players can be quite obsessed. A little frightening. I’m honestly not even sure why the map has become such a valued specimen. I just like to win.”
“I’m actually not sure either,” Wolff admitted. “I just know that it’s worth a lot of money, and is very, very rare. Whoever finds one will have bragging rights for life—and a target on their back from the Cartographers.”
Nell managed to strangle a gasp. If her stomach had already fallen through the floor, it was in the basement now.
That name, again.
And Wolff had not said it like he believed they were just an industry rumor.
He’d said it like they were real—very real.
“Who are the Cartographers?” she asked.
“No one knows,” Julian answered. “But out of everyone playing the game, they seem to be the richest by far. And the most dedicated. Too dedicated.”
“You can’t mean an actual target, though,” Nozomi said to Wolff.
“Well.” Wolff paused, suddenly uncomfortable. “I have friends who say they’ve been threatened. And sometimes, other collectors just . . . vanish. Quit the game all at once, drop off the face of the earth. Even—”
“It’s gossip,” Pete interrupted. “Just other players trying to spook the rest of us.”
The others laughed. Nell joined in weakly.
“Actually, I heard from a curator at Sterling House that part of the reason the map’s become so rare is that years ago, when the game must have started, someone went around destroying every copy of it they found,” Julian added.
“Destroying?” Nell cried. Immediately, images from the interinstitution database, with all the vanished copies, and the scorched remains of the old General Drafting building that had burned down, flashed into her mind.
“It’s an old map, and so cheaply made,” Claire replied. “It seems more likely most of the copies were lost to the elements over time or tossed into the trash in favor of an updated edition, and someone’s trying to romanticize it.”
“Then it should hold true for all copies, but if you search for any other year, they turn up in droves. It’s only the 1930 edition that’s become so rare,” Julian replied.
“Maybe it had something to do with the lawsuit,” Wolff said. “I looked into it once, when I thought I was on a hot trail—we have some great paralegals who can chase anything down. There was a court case around the same time as the edition we’re all after was published, about copyright infringement. General Drafting lost, or settled, or something. The suit just disappeared. After that, their fortunes declined.”
“Copyright infringement,” Nell repeated. Had General Drafting been stealing data? she wondered. Or had data been stolen from them?
“Perhaps someone was trying to force scarcity?” Nozomi offered. “Remove a bunch of the remaining copies to increase the value?”
“That was my initial assumption, but the pruning appears to have been so extreme that not a single map has been seen for decades, by even the most dedicated hunters,” Wolff said. “Almost like whoever did it wasn’t attempting to drive up the price, but rather trying to completely eradicate the map.”
Julian sighed. “I’ve mostly given up. But a die-hard few are holding out hope there might be a single one left somewhere.”
Mine, Nell thought with a chill.
She needed to tell Swann what she’d just heard. That some of the wealthiest figures in the amateur collecting field were playing a secret game for millionaires with the very map that someone had robbed the NYPL for. The map that they might have . . . done something to her father for.