“It’s a manuscript. I don’t think it’s bound.”
“Do we have a problem, sir?”
“No problem.”
“End of the hall. I’ll meet you there.”
“Thanks. One other thing: Can I view the request history for the item?”
He reacted as though I’d asked for nudes of his grandmother. “That information is confidential.”
“Okay.”
“How would you like it if I told people what you were reading?”
“I admire your commitment to privacy.”
He sniffed. “End of the hall.”
Along the way I passed a walnut display rack stocked with the current issue of California, the UC alumni magazine. My own copy had come in the mail a few weeks ago. The cover story, “Cuisine of Culture,” was about lab-grown meat.
I hadn’t read it or any of the articles, skipping straight to the class notes to check on my peers. Who’d made partner; had a baby; won a prize; written a book. Then there were the obits, citing car accidents and cancers. No cause given translated to suicide.
The reading room was glass-walled and light-drenched. A white-haired woman pored over a folio. I chose the seat farthest from her, by a window overlooking a wide, grassy expanse. Sprinklers hiccuped in the wavy heat.
The woman cleared her throat and turned a page.
The desk librarian arrived, pushing a cart loaded with archival boxes.
He hiss-whispered, “Gloves. Please.”
I obliged, and he gently set out the boxes — five of them, made of sturdy gray cardboard with protective metal edges. They touched down on the table with a soft, confident thunk. Call labels displayed a barcode, catalog number, and author information.
I nodded thanks and the librarian departed, looking back once to ensure obedience to protocol.
I pried up the cover of box one. It resisted, then rose with a farting sound, emitting the scent of old paper and attracting the white-haired lady’s disapproval.
I set the cover aside and leaned in.
I expected Prado’s frenzied handwriting, chaos in black and white.
Instead I saw a glossy full-color photo of a tentacle grasping a sealed jar.
It was the May — June 2024 issue. The cover story, “Sucker for Learning,” was about octopus intelligence.
I removed the magazine.
Beneath it was another, identical issue.
Below that, a third.
I reached into the box and removed the entire stack.
Octopi.
Same for boxes two, three, four, and five.
I refilled the boxes and balanced them in my arms. The white-haired woman glanced up as I butted through the door and into the hall.
Seeing me coming, the desk librarian began to hop up and down in alarm.
“Excuse me, sir. You can’t do that. Sir. Please wait while I get the cart.”
I dropped the boxes on the counter. “We have a problem.”
“Excuse me. Special Collection items are not to leave the reading room.”
“They already have. Take a look.”
He frowned. Opened a box. Frowned harder.
“What is this?” he said.
“It’s supposed to be a two-thousand-page handwritten manuscript,” I said.
He started removing magazines one by one, piling them sloppily on the counter.
“What is this,” he mumbled.
“I know what it looks like to me.”
He didn’t answer. He seized the next box, shook off the cover, and dumped the contents out. Magazines slid to the floor.
“The fuck,” he said.
I held up my PI license. His pupils dilated.
I said, “How about we rethink your commitment to privacy?”
The head of library security, Roy Trujillo, was a retired twenty-seven-year veteran of Merced PD, easygoing and happy to shoot the breeze with a fellow ex-cop.
He didn’t mind civilian life. His might not be the most exciting job, but it came with a respectable benefits package. He’d tweaked his schedule to spend Fridays with his granddaughter. Add in his pension and he was doing pretty well.
“I toyed with applying to the Forest Service,” he said.
“What stopped you?”
“My wife has this thing about bears. Hates ’em. I told her: They’re more scared of me than I am of them. She said, ‘Then you need to be more scared.’ ”
We were sitting in Trujillo’s windowless basement office, reviewing CCTV footage from May 11, 2024: the day a man calling himself Nicholas Prado had visited Special Collections to view the manuscript of Cathedral.
“You think somebody’d notice he used the same name,” Trujillo said.
There were no cameras in the Special Collections reading room. The closest was by the front desk, offering a slice of the hallway, including the magazine rack.
Trujillo had set the playback speed to 3x. Bodies zipped in and out at a rate of one or two per hour.
“Hold up,” I said.
He rewound a smidge and set the playback to normal.
A man walked down the hall in the direction of the reading room. He wore shorts, a backpack, and a hoodie, and was carrying a pair of white gloves and a baggie of shoelaces. His back was to the camera. The timestamp read 14:12:50.
Five minutes later, the desk librarian appeared, pushing a cart loaded with archival boxes.
He returned two minutes after that, having deposited his cargo.
At 14:37:48, Hoodie re-emerged. He’d left his backpack behind and was wearing the library-issued gloves. I couldn’t make out his face before he turned to the display rack and began grabbing magazines by the handful.
“Son of a bitch,” Trujillo said.
“Can’t return empty boxes.”
The gloves were making it hard for Hoodie to hold on to the slippery magazines. He kept dropping them on the carpet and snatching them up, stuffing them under his arms.
He left, was gone for a few minutes, came back for more.
And again.
“Big-ass book,” Trujillo said.
The next time Hoodie appeared he had the backpack on.
He walked toward the camera.
The light caught his face. Trujillo hit Pause.
I said, “It’s him. Can you follow him out?”
Trujillo switched cameras, tracking Nick as he took the elevator to the first floor. The backpack sagged with the weight of the manuscript.
In the lobby he stopped, staring at the main entrance.
“What’s he waiting for?” Trujillo asked.
“Maybe worried about setting off the theft detector.”
“He doesn’t have to be. The tag’s embedded in the boxes.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Trujillo put up his palms. “Not my system. I inherited it.”
On-screen, Nick was still frozen. Students skirted him as if he were furniture.
He started forward, his gait stilted and unnatural. Cleared the detector pillars and pushed through the doors.
Trujillo switched to an exterior camera.
Nick crossed a concrete plaza toward the parking lot.
“What’s he drive?”
“Black 2009 Civic.”
Trujillo switched to the lot exit camera.
He said, “There he goes.”
The Civic followed Scholars Lane to the edge of campus, turning onto Lake Road toward town. Then off-screen and out of sight.
Trujillo tapped Pause and faced me. “Can you get my book back?”
I thought it ironic that Prado’s work, ignored during his life, had value now that it had been stolen. By the one person who cared about it most.
I said, “I’ll try.”