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that he kept to keep a deathbed promise, a covenant with his father as sacred as that he had made with his God.

Chapter Two
    P ETER F ALLON stared into the eyes of William Shakespeare.
    William Shakespeare stared back.
    Peter Fallon blinked.
    William Shakespeare didn’t. But, then, Shakespeare hadn’t blinked in almost four centuries.
    They met in what Peter Fallon considered a perfect environment: constant temperature of sixty-eight degrees, constant humidity of 50 percent, u.v.-filtered glass on the windows—the Harry Elkins Widener Room, sanctum sanctorum of Harvard’s Widener Library.
    Peter was looking at a First Folio, the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623. It was displayed next to a Gutenberg Bible, in a case that defined the term “embarrassment of riches.”
    In the frontispiece portrait, Shakespeare was staring across the centuries. The eyes were piercing, smart, and just a little puffy, as if he’d stayed up all night to finish a scene. The nose was sharp and straight, the nostrils slightly flared, suggesting his impatience to get back to work. The mouth didn’t tell much, though it could probably tell everything. And that high forehead? Well . . . it looked as monumental as the dome on St. Paul’s.
    What a face. What a book. All man’s best thoughts and basest emotions, all his joys and tragedies, all the vast parade of humanity, all in a single volume worth . . . what? There were some two hundred First Folios, though only seventeen in what the rare-book dealers called “very fine” condition. And one of them had recently fetched close to $6 million. Six million.
    Peter Fallon dreamed of selling a First Folio. He dreamed of just holding one, of touching the leather binding and fine rag paper and feeling the words imprinted on every page . . . those ageless, wondrous words and wisdoms and cadences and characters. And if not a folio, then a quarto, a single play published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Very rare. A quarto of Hamlet could be worth a million or more.
    Peter Fallon knew all this because it was his business to know. He was a dealer in rare books and documents. And he visited the Widener Room every few months because for someone in his business, this was a shrine.
    The portrait of Harry Elkins Widener, Class of 1907, hung above his treasures, looking as ethereally handsome as an angel . . . a book-loving angel who went down on the Titanic because he left his lifeboat to retrieve a rare volume from his stateroom. That was the legend, anyway. Another legend was that every Harvard freshman had to pass a swimming test because Harry hadn’t been able to swim a stroke, and when his mother honored him by giving Harvard a library, it was swimming tests for everyone . . . even though Harry probably froze to death before he had time to drown.
    But no tradition in America was older than giving to Harvard. They’d named the place after a Puritan who gave books and money in 1638. And they’d been naming things after big donors ever since. And sometimes, big donors made strange requests.
    Peter Fallon was a small donor. He gave five hundred dollars a year to augment Harvard’s $19 billion endowment, which was like pissing in the water to raise the level of Cape Cod Bay. But he’d gone to Harvard on a scholarship, and he believed in giving something back. That was one of the reasons he was at Harvard that evening.
    Outside, the October dusk was coming down.
    The students hurrying to the dining halls, the workers making for the subway, the chill wind blowing leaves through the air—it was all like a thousand October evenings before. You could come back after decades and still feel as if you were part of the place, because the lay of the light never changed from one year to the next, and the buildings in Harvard Yard seemed as solid and resolute as New England’s old mountains. They always reminded you of your youth, no matter how far your belly had sagged.
    But Peter