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it, and he stood by her, with his hand on the same rail. The other people on the boat seemed to be tourists.
    “Are you all right?” Rolly asked him as they bounced down the middle of the East River.
    “Of course. I’m an old sailor. I spent half my life when I was a kid out on Sheepshead Bay fishing in crummy little rental boats. Would you like me to hold you out over the prow like Kate Winslet on the
Titanic
?”
    She gave him one of her formal deadpan looks and turned forward again. Definitely not a date.
    Carolyn Rolly lived on the second floor of a Civil War-era warehouse made of blackened brick, on the corner of Van Brunt and Coffey streets. Crosetti held the folios while she hauled her bicycle up the dark, splintery stairs. There was a heavy smell in the air he could not identify, sweetish and chemical at the same time. The door to her apartment was thick wood strapped with iron, painted battleship gray.
    Inside was a loft, and not the kind millionaires move into in SoHo. It was a room around sixty by thirty feet in area, with dark-stained wood-planked floors, from which there rose at intervals cast iron columns reaching to the gray stamped-tin ceiling high above. The walls were red brick, edged roughly with crumbling, filthy mortar. The room was oriented east-west, and light flooded in from tall dirty windows on either end, some of whose panes had been replaced by squares of plywood or grayish, tattered plastic sheeting.
    Rolly leaned her bike against a wall by the door, walked toward the window, and placed one of the folio packages on a long table. Crosetti followed, looking about curiously for some door or hallway that led to the living quarters. Rolly was already unwrapping a book. Coming closer, Crosetti observed that the table was handmade, its top composed of many short boards laminated edge-on and sanded to a satiny finish. The six stout legs were constructed of what looked like yellow fiberglass. He placed the rest of the books down on it. It felt as solid as a marble plinth and had the simple elegance of the sort of thing you saw in the design showrooms.
    She unwrapped the folios and lined them up on the table. Even he could see that two of the volumes had sustained irreparable damage to their covers.
    “Nice place,” Crosetti said, when it became clear that Rolly was not about to start a conversation, or offer tea or a beer. No response. Her head was bent down over the ravaged cover of volume one.
    “What’s that smell?” he asked.
    “Mainly malt. There was a brewery here for about a century and then they stored chemicals.”
    “Mind if I look around?”
    Rolly answered this with “There’s a big package of paper towels on those shelves on the south wall. Bring it over here.”
    Crosetti took his time and made a slow circuit around the huge room. In one corner he found stacks of wooden pallets, dozens of them, and also stacks of boards resulting from their disassembly. The south wall was almost entirely occupied with shelving and cabinets constructed from this wood, sanded smooth, stained, and varnished. The shelving was packed with books, all hard-covered, most with dust jackets, some with plastic covers. He looked in vain for any personal items, framed photos, souvenirs.
    The work surfaces in the kitchen (which consisted of a double hot plate, a tiny microwave oven, and a small, chipped porcelain sink) were made of the same edge-on, tightly laminated planking as the big worktable, but coated thickly with amber-colored resin. Along the east wall he found a pallet of pallets, with a futon neatly rolled up on it and a table made from a cable spool and two of the sort of chairs one finds on trash heaps, all competently restored and painted cream. A chair for her and one for a visitor? Spoke to a social life and he wondered who. In the southeast corner an enclosure had been built, also out of pallet wood, within which he assumed was her toilet. Against this leaned a large battered wardrobe, hidden