The Book of Illumination by Mary Ann Winkowski Page A

could meet Sylvia for lunch. She asked if I wanted to come. Given that my afternoon would otherwise have involved laundry, utility bills, and an hour or twowith fairly ineffectual “green” cleaning products, I was happy to say yes.
    I haven’t lived in Cambridge long enough to miss the “old” Harvard Square, but I’ve heard my share of melancholy rhapsodies about the lost lunch counters and cafeterias, the dark little taverns and folk clubs and quirky bookstores and curio shops that are lodged in the memories of generations of Harvard students. Little of that place remains. At street level now are the locked and empty lobbies of banks and cell phone companies, spilling their harsh fluorescent lighting brightly onto the evening sidewalks and offering passersby all the charm of operating rooms. Creepy, gazeless mannequins haunt the windows of trendy clothing boutiques. Urgent new merchants riding one wave or another surf grandly into town and back out just as quickly, which is probably of cold comfort to the shopkeepers their landlords displaced, genteel old eccentrics who tended their businesses like petunias.
    Café Algiers—like Casablanca, the Brattle Theatre, and Club Passim—has been around for a long time. It was a little too chilly to sit on the patio, so we chose a table on the second floor, tucked in under the steeply sloping wooden ceiling. I ordered a beer and perused the menu, which was studded with tantalizing North African pastes and tagines. We decided to get some hummus with cucumbers to tide us over until Sam arrived.
    “What’s this guy’s name?” Sylvia asked, squeezing lemon into her iced tea. “This … crook?”
    I shrugged, scooping hummus onto a cucumber slice.
    “Does Declan think he did it? How does he know?”
    I shook my head. My mouth was full. I was used to the murky ways in which Declan and his fellow detectives went about their jobs, whispering quietly to friends and felons, dangling favors and pardons, prosecutions and plea bargains, but I could see that it was going to take some explaining.
    “They caught him in a sting,” I finally managed to say. “He delivered a stolen painting to an undercover cop. But he couldn’t have taken your manuscript himself because he’s still in custody.”
    Sylvia looked befuddled.
    “They’ve got him on conspiracy, possession of stolen property, and trafficking. He’s facing jail time, but if he’s willing to work with the police on this—and probably on some other things—they might be able to—”
    “Get him off?” she asked, her eyes widening.
    “No, not totally. Maybe get the charges reduced, or arrange for a plea.”
    She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “What makes them think he knows anything?”
    I sipped my beer, and it was very strange. I’d been intrigued by the description, but the beer itself reminded me of the Christmas pomanders we used to make in Brownies, by sticking dozens of pin-sharp cloves into an unsuspecting orange.
    “They know he’s really connected. They’re pretty sure he’s behind a whole string of robberies from college museums all over New England. They even think he knows where the Gardner paintings are, or knows somebody who knows.”
    “
Really?”
she said.
    I nodded. Visiting Boston’s Gardner Museum, formerly the home of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, is like stepping into a cool, Venetian palace. The air is heavy with floral fragrance from a glorious indoor courtyard.
    In 1980, security guards let two Boston policemen into the museum in the middle of the night. The cops said they were responding to an alarm that indicated a fire in one of the upper galleries. Once inside, their true identities were revealed: they weren’t cops; they were art thieves. They tied up the security guys and made off with $300 million worth of uninsured paintingsand drawings, works by artists like Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. Not one of the stolen pieces has ever been found and