The Project (5 page)

Luke waited his turn to enter, then stepped inside and instantly drew in his breath. Beside him, he heard Tommy do the same.

For what looked like hundreds of yards in front of them, a narrow corridor led between two enormous shelving units that were packed with books from floor to ceiling. To his left and right, as far as the eye could see, more units reached out into the distance. There were more books here than Luke could possibly imagine, and if Claudia thought they were going to move all of those upstairs in a couple of days, she was sadly mistaken—even with his bucket brigade idea.

She must have read his thoughts. She said, “We’ll concentrate on the lower shelves and on the rare or older sections. Librarians will select the books and pass them, one at a time, to the first person in the line. They’ll pass them to the person next to them, and so on, all the way up to the third level, where other library staff will decide how to stack them.”

The crowd began to sort itself out into a single long line. A human conveyor belt.

Luke found himself alongside a dark metal cage. A thin-faced university student stood to his right, Tommy was to his left, and, to his surprise, Ms. Sheck took the place to the left of Tommy.

“Hi, Ms. S,” Luke said.

“Hi, Luke. Hi, Tommy,” she said.

“Nice tat,” Tommy said with a grin.

She went a little red and instinctively moved her hand to cover the lion on her arm.

“No, really,” Luke said, “it looks cool.”

“Yeah, Luke’s getting one just like it,” Tommy said.

“You are not!” she said, laughing.

“Yeah, he is, with your name underneath,” Tommy said.

It was Luke’s turn to feel his cheeks go red. “Piss off,” he said.

Ms. Sheck laughed.

They waited for a while. Nothing happened at first. Luke guessed the librarians were organizing themselves inside the storage room.

“How did you boys do with
The Last of the Mohicans
?” Ms. Sheck asked. “Did you find it on Google?”

It was pretty clear that she doubted they would. Luke debated for a moment whether to tell her about the most boring book in the world but decided not to.

“Not yet,” Tommy said. “But I’m sure it will be there.”

“We’ve been busy,” Luke said. “We’ve been down at the river, helping out.”

Ms. Sheck nodded. “I know. I’ll put in a good word for you with Mr. Kerr.”

“It won’t help,” Luke said. Just then, the first book arrived and he turned to take it.

The first book looked like an encyclopedia and must have been, because it was immediately followed by another identical book and another. Thirty-six of them in all, each
numbered, although he couldn’t read the titles, as they were in some foreign language. There were lots of consonants, so it might have been Dutch, or German, or Swiss. He asked Tommy.

Tommy’s family was from the Amana community of Iowa, a historic German religious group. And although his grandparents had left the community back in the 1930s, his family had kept its native language. Tommy was as fluent in German as he was in English.

“Not German,” he said. “I think it’s Dutch.”

Luke took each book that was passed to him and handed it on to Tommy. It wasn’t hard work although the books started to come faster and faster as the workers settled into a routine.

Book after book flew through his hands. From Luke to Tommy to Ms. Sheck. Big books, small books, old books, modern-looking books. Archival cartons that were full of papers and quite heavy. The stream of books seemed endless, and still he felt they were merely scratching the surface of the mountain behind the painted green door.

He hadn’t really imagined that there were so many books in the world, and it occurred to him that the amount of knowledge that had passed through his hands in just a few hours must have been phenomenal.

His father had once written a book, a practical guide to dairy farming, so Luke knew how much work went into it. Each book he handed Tommy had been researched, written, edited, proofread, and finally published, no doubt celebrated with a party and a launch for the book, only for it to end up,
years later, locked in a concrete dungeon in the basement of the university library.

It seemed sad, in a way.

The hours went quickly. The hand-over-hand action of conveying the books kept them busy, and simple chat filled in the time.

“What did you do before you were a teacher?” Luke asked Ms. Sheck with a sideways glance at Tommy.

She shrugged. “I had a couple of jobs.”

“What did you do?” Luke asked.

“Oh, you know …” She shook her head. “Just something different.”

“Were you, like, an assassin?” Luke asked.

She laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

“Or a stri—” The words were choked off in Tommy’s throat as Luke’s elbow caught him in the ribs.

“But it must have been something really secret if you can’t tell us about it,” Luke rushed out before Ms. Sheck could catch what Tommy had been about to say.

“Or really embarrassing,” Tommy said, still a little winded.

She shook her head. “No, nothing secret or embarrassing.”

“Then why are you avoiding telling us?” Luke asked.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“Okay, then.”

“Well?” Luke asked.

“I was a singer,” she said.

“A singer? Awesome! What kind of music?” Tommy asked.

“I sang lead vocals for a local jazz band, and I had a
six-week gig in Vegas one year as a backup singer for Michael Bolton.”

“I thought you said it was nothing embarrassing,” Luke said.

“Why’d you give it up?” Tommy asked.

There was a long pause; then Ms. Sheck said, “I cut a single. Just me. A song I wrote, arranged, and performed. It got some local airplay and that was that. I sold thirty-seven copies at the local record store, and it was illegally downloaded about a hundred and fifty times. What with all the late nights, it seemed like too much hard work to me, so I gave it up and got my teacher certification.”

“Wow!” Luke said. “You got a copy of it? I’d love to hear—”

A dusty gray book with a tattered cover passed through his hands so quickly that he almost didn’t notice it.

Almost.

But he did.

When he took it, it was upside down, but for reasons that he could never quite understand afterward, he turned it over as he gave it to Tommy. Tommy’s hands covered the title, but Luke had just enough time to register the spidery line drawing of a man in a circle, his arms and legs outstretched, and then the book was gone, on to Ms. Sheck and the next person, disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

Luke stopped taking books and jumped out of line, causing a momentary disruption in the flow.

“What are you doing?” Tommy asked, frowning.

“Nothing,” he said, red-faced, getting back in the line.

He hadn’t been able to see the title of the book, but he had certainly seen the picture.

The man in the circle! The
Vitruvian Man
. That was supposedly the picture on the front cover of
Leonardo’s River
—the two-million-dollar book!

Tommy’s hands had obscured the title, but he had seen the first letter. The letter
L
.

“Get a grip, dude,” Tommy said, and Luke realized that he had slowed down and was still holding up the line. He forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, but his mind would not let it go.

Could it have been
Leonardo’s River
?

If it was, why didn’t the library know they had it? According to the website he’d read, the only known copy of the book was missing.

As he was pondering this, there was a commotion from around the corner toward the storeroom. Luke heard someone say, “Don’t panic,” and thought that when people say that, there is always a reason
to
panic.

Claudia appeared, looking stressed, a cell phone in her hand.

“There’s no need to panic,” she said, not reassuring Luke at all. “But we’ve just lost the dam at Coralville.”

“Has it burst?” Tommy asked, wide-eyed.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Claudia said. “It’s overflowed. They’ve lost control of the river level, and it looks like a flood is certain. We need to evacuate. Stay calm,” she said.

But she didn’t sound very calm.

“Y
ou gotta be kidding,” Tommy said for the third time.

“Two million bucks!”

“If it is the book,” Luke said.

“The dumbest book in the world,” Tommy said.

“The most
boring
book in the world,” Luke corrected him. “And I didn’t see the title of the book, just the illustration on the front cover.”

“So you don’t even know if it is that book?”

Luke sighed. “On the cover of the boring book is a drawing of this nude dude in a circle. It’s a famous picture by that da Vinci bloke.”

“I know it,” Tommy said. “It’s called the
Vitamin Man
or something like that.”

“The
Vitruvian Man
,” Luke said.

“There could be thousands of books with that picture on the cover,” Tommy said.

“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil,” Luke said. He
closed his eyes for a moment, replaying the movie inside his head of the book chain in the basement. He saw the glare of the fluorescent lights and felt the pressure of the deep concrete walls. He smelled the dust of old paper and watched as book after book traveled past. Then came the gray cloth-covered book. He watched it turn over as he handed it to Tommy, and pressed
PAUSE
on his mental movie player.

“Here you go, dude.” Tommy was back with a pencil and some paper.

Luke sketched the picture that was inside his head. He drew Tommy’s fingers splayed across the cover and the glimpses of other letters that peeked through between them.

“It could be,” Tommy said, examining it. “You sure this picture is right?”

“I’m sure,” Luke said, tapping the side of his head.

“How do you do that?” Tommy asked.

“Dunno, bro,” Luke said.

After the excitement at the library, they had gone around to Tommy’s house, which was big and luxurious and overlooked the river, although it was on high ground and safe from any flood. It couldn’t be more different from Luke’s house, which was located on the other side of the river and was three stories high, ancient, and creepy, like the house out of
Psycho
.

Tommy’s whole house was filled with cool toys. He had the latest PlayStation and an Xbox, both of which were connected to a television that seemed to take up an entire wall. Each room was connected by a video intercom. All the windows
opened or closed at the push of a button and automatically shut if it rained (like now).

It wasn’t the first time that Luke had been to Tommy’s house, but each time he went, he shook his head in amazement.

Luke was staying at Tommy’s that night. Tommy’s parents were out and not due back till late, something to do with the flood, so Luke and Tommy had microwaved some frozen pizza for dinner.

It was raining heavily, and through the big plate-glass windows of the living room, they could barely make out the streetlights that lined the riverbanks. As night had fallen, the shapeless black mass between the banks had seemed to come alive, and malevolent. The river had already climbed over its banks, but it was still held in check by the sandbag barrier that they had all helped to create.

The streetlights illuminated the barrier, and they could see the swell of the river, rising slowly, creeping up the sandbags one by one.

“All we have to do is check the library website,” Tommy said at last. “Every book in the library is catalogued electronically.”

“You sure?” Luke asked.

Tommy nodded.

“Even the rare and specialty ones?” Luke asked.

“You bet. They’re the hardest ones to keep track of, because of how they’re stored in the basement.”

“But the electricity is out in the library,” Luke said. “They shut it down after we evacuated.”

“What’s your point?”

“How can we access their website when all their computers are shut down?”

Tommy rolled his eyes. “Their website is not on a computer in the library, moron. It’ll be on a big server in a data center somewhere, maybe not even in Iowa.”

“I knew that,” Luke said. He actually had known that, if he had bothered to think before opening his mouth.

“So let’s find out,” Tommy said.

Tommy had his own laptop, with a wireless connection. He got it from his bedroom and put it down on the carpet in front of them.

“What was the name again?” he asked, typing in the address of the university library site.

“Leonardo’s River,”
Luke said, and spelled it out to make sure Tommy got it right.

“Nothing,” Tommy said a minute later. “I’ll try some variations on the spelling in case it’s been catalogued wrong.” After a while, he said, “Nope, nothing, zip.”

“Try the author,” Luke suggested, and Tommy did, but that also proved fruitless.

“Must have been some other book,” Tommy said. “One with a similar cover.”

“Nope,” Luke said. “I’m sure it was the book.”

“It’s probably just because you’d read about the book yesterday; then you saw a book that looked a bit similar, so your mind put two and two together and got six,” Tommy surmised.

“But what if it was the book?” Luke said. “That would be
cool. To find a book that has been lost for over a hundred years.”

Tommy nodded. “Even if it is the most boring book in the world.” He jumped up suddenly. “Hang on, we might be able to find out.”

“How?”

“Follow me.”

Tommy led the way to a room at the rear of the house, away from the river.

“Mom has all kinds of books about books,” he said. “Maybe one of them will have a picture of the cover.”

Tommy’s mother was a professor in the English department of the university.

Tommy opened a door and flicked on a light switch. Outside, lightning flashed and thunder roared.

“Do that again,” Luke said, and Tommy flicked the light switch off and on again.

Almost immediately, lightning lit up the skies, and the house shook with thunder.