Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Kat is here, sitting up front, way off to the side, talking quietly with Mat and Ashley. She’s wearing her houndstooth blazer again. There’s a green scarf around her neck, and she’s cut her hair since the last time I saw her; now it stops just below her ears.

We are no longer dating. There has been no formal declaration, but it’s an objective truth, like the atomic weight of carbon or the share price of GOOG. That didn’t stop me from pestering her and extracting a promise to attend. She, of all people, has to see this.

People are shifting in their seats and the vegan oat cookies are almost gone, but I have to wait. Lapin leans forward and asks me, “Are you going to New York? To work at the library, perhaps?”

“Um, no, definitely not,” I say flatly. “Not interested.”

She frowns and clasps her hands together. “I’m supposed to go, but I don’t think I want to.” She looks up at me. She looks lost. “I miss the store. And I miss—”

Ajax Penumbra.

He slips in through Pygmalion’s front door like a wandering ghost, fully buttoned into his dark peacoat, the collar turned up over the thin gray scarf around his neck. He searches the room, and when he sees the crowd in the back, full of the fellowship—black-robes and all—his eyes widen.

I sprint over to him. “Mr. Penumbra! You came!”

He’s half-turned away, and he puts a bony hand up around his neck. He won’t look at me. His blue eyes are glued to the floor. “My boy, I am sorry,” he says softly. “I should not have vanished so—ah. It was simply…” He lets out a whispering sigh. “I was embarrassed.”

“Mr. Penumbra, please. Don’t worry about it.”

“I was so sure it would work,” he says, “but it did not. And there you were, and your friends, and all my students. I feel like such an old fool.”

Poor Penumbra. I’m imagining him holed up somewhere, grappling with the guilt of having cheered the fellowship forward to failure on Google’s green lawns. Weighing his own faith and wondering what could possibly come next. He’d placed a big bet—his biggest ever—and lost. But he didn’t place that bet alone.

“Come on, Mr. Penumbra.” I step back toward my setup and wave him along. “Come sit down. We’re all fools—all except for one of us. Come and see.”

*   *   *

Everything is ready. There’s a presentation waiting to start on my laptop. I realize that the big reveal really ought to happen in a smoky parlor, with the sleuth holding his nervous audience spellbound using only his voice and his powers of deduction. Me, I prefer bookstores, and I prefer slides.

So I power up the projector and take my position, the blank light burning my eyes. I clasp my hands behind my back, square my shoulders, and squint out into the assembled crowd. Then I click the remote and begin:

SLIDE 1

If you were going to make a message last, how would you do it? Would you carve it into stone? Etch it into gold?

Would you make your message so potent that people couldn’t resist passing it on? Would you build a religion around it, maybe get people’s souls involved? Would you, perhaps, establish a secret society?

Or would you do what Gerritszoon did?

SLIDE 2

Griffo Gerritszoon was born the son of a barley grower in northern Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. The elder Gerritszoon was not rich, but thanks to his good reputation and well-established piety, he was able to snag his son an apprenticeship with the local goldsmith. This was a great gig back in the fifteenth century; as long as he didn’t screw it up, the younger Gerritszoon was basically set for life.

He screwed it up.

He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith’s trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones—and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.

So he did what he was told, and he learned the craft—he was really good at it, too—but when he turned sixteen, he said so long and left the goldsmith behind. He left Germany altogether, in fact. He went on a pilgrimage.

SLIDE 3

I know this because Aldus Manutius knew it, and he wrote it down. He wrote it down in his codex vitae—which I have decoded.

(There are gasps from the audience. Corvina is still standing at the back and his face is tight, his mouth a deep grimace, his dark mustache pulled down around it. Other faces are blank, waiting. I glance over at Kat. She’s wearing a serious look, as if she’s worried that something might have short-circuited in my brain.)

Let me get this out of the way: There’s no secret formula in this book. There’s no magic incantation. If there truly is a secret to immortality, it’s not here.

(Corvina makes his choice. He spins and stalks up the aisle past HISTORY and SELF-HELP toward the front door. He passes Penumbra, who’s standing off to one side, leaning on a short shelf for support. He watches Corvina pass, then turns back toward me, cups his hands around his mouth, and calls out, “Keep going, my boy!”)

SLIDE 4