Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

He nods. “That’s good. Everyday objects … household objects? They’re gone.” He snaps his fingers: poof. “We’re really lucky when we find, like, an awesome salad bowl. But religious objects? You would not believe how many ceremonial urns are still hanging around. Nobody wants to be the guy to throw away the urn.”

“So if I’m lucky, nobody wanted to be the guy to throw away Gerritszoon, either.”

“Yep, and if somebody stole it, that’s a good sign. Getting stolen is one of the best things that can happen to an object. Stolen stuff recirculates. Stays out of the ground.” Then he presses his lips tight. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

Too late, Oliver. I swallow the last of my scone and ask, “So if you’ve got an aura, where does that get you?”

“If these punches exist anywhere in my world,” Oliver says, “there’s one place you’re going to find them. You need a seat at the Accession Table.”

FIRST GRADE

TABITHA TRUDEAU IS OLIVER’S BEST FRIEND from Berkeley. She is short and solid, with curly brown hair and big intimidating eyebrows behind thick black glasses. She is now the deputy director of the most obscure museum in the whole Bay Area, a tiny place in Emeryville called the California Museum of Knitting Arts and Embroidery Sciences.

Oliver introduced us with an email and explained to Tabitha that I am on a special mission that he looks kindly upon. He also relayed to me the tactical advice that a donation wouldn’t hurt. Unfortunately, any reasonable donation would constitute at least 20 percent of my worldly wealth, but I still have a patron, so I replied to Tabitha and told her I might have a thousand dollars to pass along (courtesy of the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts)—if she can help me out.

When I meet her at the museum—it’s just Cal Knit to those in the know—I feel an immediate kinship, because Cal Knit is almost as weird as Penumbra’s. It’s just one big room, a converted schoolhouse now lined with bright displays and kid-sized activity stations. In a wide bucket next to the door, knitting needles are lined up like an armory: fat ones, skinny ones, some made of bright plastic, some made of wood carved into anthropomorphic shapes. The room smells overwhelmingly of wool.

“How many visitors do you get here?” I ask, inspecting one of the wooden needles. It’s like a very slender totem pole.

“Oh, a lot,” she says, hitching up her glasses. “Mostly students. There’s a bus on its way right now, so we’d better get you set up.”

She’s sitting at the museum’s front desk, where a small sign says FREE ADMISSION WITH YARN DONATION. I find Neel’s check in my pocket and smooth it out on the desk. Tabitha takes it with a grin.

“Have you ever used one of these before?” she says, clicking a key on a blue computer terminal. It beeps brightly.

“Never,” I say. “I didn’t even know it was a thing until two days ago.”

Tabitha looks up, and I follow her gaze: a school bus is rounding the corner into the museum’s tiny parking lot. “Well,” she says, “it’s a thing. You’ll figure it out. Just don’t, like, give our stuff away to some other museum.”

I nod and scootch in behind the desk, trading places with her. Tabitha buzzes around the museum, straightening chairs and swabbing plastic tables with antiseptic wipes. As for me: the Accession Table is set.

The Accession Table, I learned from Oliver, is an enormous database that tracks all artifacts in all museums, everywhere. It’s been around since the middle of the twentieth century. Back then it ran on punch cards passed around, copied, kept in catalogs. In a world where artifacts are always on the move—from a museum’s third subbasement, up to the exhibition hall, over to another museum (which is in Boston or Belgium)—it is a necessity.

Every museum in the world uses the Accession Table, from the humblest community history co-op to the most opulent national collection, and every museum has an identical monitor. It’s the Bloomberg terminal of antiquity. When any artifact is found or purchased, it gets a new record in this museological matrix. If it’s ever sold or burned to a crisp, the record is dropped. But as long as any scrap of canvas or sliver of stone remains in any collection anywhere, it’s still on the books.

The Accession Table helps catch forgeries: each museum sets up its terminal to watch for new records bearing suspicious similarities to artifacts already in its collection. When the Accession Table sounds its alarm, it means that somewhere, someone has just been duped.

If the Gerritszoon punches exist in any museum in the world, they’ll be listed in the Accession Table. All I need is a minute on the terminal. But, to be clear, a curator at any legitimate museum would be appalled at this request. These terminals constitute the secret knowledge of this particular cult. So Oliver proposed that we find a back door: a small museum with a guardian friendly to our cause.

*   *   *