Love's Labour's Heist

You won’t find The Days of Yore Bookstore in any registry. You can’t walk in the front door and browse their selection. The storefront lacks signage and sits on a lonely London commercial road well away from the city center. To gain access requires high-end personal connections, a three month advance appointment, and a stringent proof of bank account: prospective customers wire the store five million Swiss francs, which will wire the money back in seven days. This is the highest-end bookstore the world has ever known. The lowest price tag on any of their wares reads in the six digits.

The security checkpoint at the front of the store features a trio of guards armed with Beretta pistols, all former soldiers, two of them veteran mercenaries, plus a heavy barred door requiring both passkey and retinal scan. Behind that door, steel stairs descend ten feet into the earth, into a golden hall twelve feet wide and thirty feet long flanked by mahogany bookshelves that reach the ceiling. At the end of the hall lies a desk behind which stands a prim man in a navy blue blazer. A single burly guard stands at attention nearby. On the rear wall hang two large paintings depicting African wildlife: one of wildebeests, the other of Nile crocodiles. Beneath those paintings, a locked glass case trimmed in silver holds additional items.

The initial shelves house the sort of items you might expect: first edition classics, rare books, even antiquity-era stone tablets from near-east civilizations. The pricing-labels prove quite reasonable given the pristine condition of the wares and the reputation of the store. There’s a catch of course, every item lacks traditional provenance. And this is because every item for sale in this bookstore was acquired illegally, literally snatched out of time.

Between these two shelves strides a small woman, both short and slender. She wears sunglasses, a trench coat, designer jeans, and low-heeled pumps. The man behind the main desk, the owner of the store, admires the woman as she approaches.

She’s like something out of a noir film, he considers, admiring her olive skin and confident gait. This man prefers literature to movies, but understands the power of visual symbols. It follows that she would want to keep as much of herself secret considering the nature of their business.

And yet… the guards at the front searched her thoroughly, which meant they’d taken off her coat and glasses. She’d made the conscious decision to put them back on.

“This place is smaller than I’d imagined,” the woman says as she grows close. Her voice isn’t as elegant as her fashion implies, more nasal with a hint of New York accent. Still, that her first words are a saucy joke intrigues the man even further.

“Elegance can come in smaller packages, and often does. Will you sit?” The woman nods, and so the owner swiftly maneuvers to pull out a straight-backed, gold-trimmed King Louis chair out for his guest to sit. She accepts his courtesy with a graceful nod.

“What may I call you?” He asks once they are both settled.

“Call me Scarlett,” she replies. “And you are…”

“Call me Kairos.”

“As in the Greek God? I’d have assumed Chronos.”

“A reasonable option. But Chronos is too obvious. And Kairos fits better with what I do, time as opportunity and all.”

The woman smiled. And Kairos found himself slightly disappointed, as Scarlett’s teeth weren’t the pearly perfection he’d imagined, one of her incisors even being a snaggletooth. He’d assumed her a trophy wife of some billionaire, sent on this errand as a bit of excitement for his younger bride. But she was clearly something else, something mysterious. His pulse quickened.

“Before we get to business, let me say your reputation for keeping things anonymous, while maintaining trust and security, is well-earned,” Scarlett said.

“Thank you. But first, would you mind taking off your glasses? If this is the only time we are to meet, I would like it to be cordial.”

“As cordial as can be,” she replied, and whisked off her sunglasses in a dramatic flourish. This time Kairos was not disappointed. Her eyes were stark blue, as dark as he’d ever seen, like mountainside lakes at twilight. Even beyond that, something seemed otherworldly about her gaze. Perhaps her irises were so dark they made the whites of her eyes seem even whiter. Or maybe it was the contrast of blue eyes with her dark skin. Either way, he found himself transfixed.

“I understand there are a couple of items you’d like to take a look at.” Kairos said to break the tension, “And the items you’ve chosen are on the high end of our wares. I must ask: how much do you know about our operation here at Days of Yore?”

“I know you travel back in time to snatch rare or lost books. I know you’re among the most precise time operators in the world. And I’ve heard what can happen if a job goes bad-”

Kairos held up a finger to interrupt: “We do not ‘snatch’ books, we recover them. You’re correct about the risks though: spending more than a few minutes in the past can destroy a traveler’s body, something about the flow of time catching up to you. In addition, changing too much in the past can destroy a traveler’s mind. Recovery missions need to be fast, precise, and change little. The governments that ban this work don’t understand how meticulous time travel technology can be… in the right hands.”

“I apologize if I was flippant. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t respect your work. I still don’t understand how even small changes to the timeline don’t destroy the present completely, chaos theory and all that.”

“The timeline finds a way to balance out if the changes are small enough. And even attempting to make big changes mostly just destroys the traveler. That’s why going back to recover a masterwork is such a fertile use of the technology. Who would even notice a single lost book, while the present time gains so much!”

“That sounds reasonable,” and Scarlett cast a subconscious azure glance over Kairos’s shoulder to one of the paintings. Did she know that that’s where some of the most valuable items in the world were hidden?

“Enough with the history lesson, would you like to look at some of our wares? The glass case behind me houses our mid-grade items. Lost titles recovered for the betterment of the world.”

The guard cast them a sidelong glance as the pair rose and moved to the case. Scarlett squatted down to look at the books as close as she could, and raised a finger to trace along as she read the titles:

“Archimedes on Spheres… Lady Mary Wortley’s Journal… Hesiodic Catalog of Women… that’s a funny title. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? That one’s famous, surely not lost.”

“It’s the original draft. Quite different. Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife thought the draft was awful and argued for a rewrite. So Stevenson destroyed the first draft… or tried to. One of our agents managed to save it from the fire right when the author turned his back!”

“Fascinating. How complex it must be for your agents to plan these heists, er, recoveries.”

“The research alone requires a PHD-level understanding of four dimensions with no corresponding PHD-level courses available to teach you. We had to learn most of the technique ourselves.”

Scarlett scanned the rest of the selection in silence. By the end, her eyes turned to slits of concentration.

“There’s something missing.” She said, “I don’t see the, the… why is it so hard to say the author’s name? Shakespeare. It’s like he might hear his name mentioned and get angry, might think us a pair of perfect thieves.”

And she took on a more formal tone as she quoted The Bard:

“The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun”

Kairos felt his mouth twist, he wanted to both smile and frown. Here was an intriguing woman, arguably beautiful, quoting Shakespeare, a quote he recognized but couldn’t place. That should stimulate him, attract him, coax his imagination toward midnight rendezvous even though that was expressly against the company’s code of conduct, which he himself had written.

But she also annoyed him: why did she keep hinting at theft? Few in the world sympathized with his profession. And he didn’t appreciate this small woman joking about real dangers.

“Oh, I do apologize,” she cooed. She must have read the struggle on his face. “Perhaps we should move on. I’d very much like to see the most illustrious items. Both The Bard and Homer as well, if you’re willing.”

“Yes. Yes.” Kairos regained his concierge composure. “We’ll go chronologically, so Homer first. What do you know about the work?”

“Just that so little about Homer survives. We know basically nothing about him save those two stories: The Iliad and The Odyssey. That you found a third Homer epic is miraculous. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it: Mar-geets?”

“More like Mar-geez. It’s the story of a lucky fool and his misadventures. Perhaps we were lucky fools to pin-point the relevant scrolls.”

“To read such an ancient text must be such an honor.”

“An honor you could share.”

“Just to see it would be half an honor. Would you show it to me now?” She locked eyes with him again and giggled softly.

Kairos felt suspicion crawling up his back. Most of his clientele were billionaires with more money than literary knowledge. They just wanted something unique they could brag to their buddies about. Few had more than a Wikipedia-level of understanding of any of the products. But this woman clearly had an education in the arts, and her playful attitude despite the dangers-

An image flashed through his mind of Scarlett pulling a knife from some hidden spot on her body, dispatching the guard, and pinning him against the wall. “Open the safe!” She’d say playfully. “You’ll never get away with this,” he’d reply. And she’d just flash that snaggle-toothed smile. Why was his imagination so cliché?

“Wait here.” He rose and strode to the leftmost painting, of wildebeests approaching a murky river. He lifted it from the wall revealing a safe featuring four separate locking mechanisms: combination, biometric, physical key, and electronic key. If unlocked in the incorrect order, the whole system would shut down for twenty-four hours, meaning no one could get inside without a serious cutting torch. Kairos slowly and deliberately went through the motions while blocking vision of the process with his back.

“Ah, there we are,” he proclaimed as the door slid open, revealing the dark, dry recess beyond. When a book is valued in the tens of millions, it’s well worth its own climate controls.

Kairos returned with three large scrolls, and smiled to find Scarlett sitting patiently. “Do you know any ancient Greek?” He asked.

“My Greek’s a bit rusty.” She was clearly joking, but couldn’t bring herself to giggle this time. Her eyes were wide and laser-focused on the artifacts before her.

“I can show you the style of lettering, and even read you a bit. I must admit this isn’t from Homer’s own hand, but a scholar of the day producing copies. That’s the main reason we aren’t asking for the full nine figures.”

And so Kairos unfurled the first scroll, letting Scarlett marvel over the blocky serifed text. He read the opening sentences of the story of Margites, introducing a happy-go-lucky boy who didn’t even understand which parent had given birth to him. Scarlett laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Soon enough, however, Kairos placed the scrolls back into the climate-controlled vault. Sixty cubic feet holding a bit of parchment worth many millions.

“Now, for the work I know you’re most interested in. This one was easier to acquire but has more significance for most people. Hundreds of years after his death, people still yearn for the work of William Shakespeare!”

“I’m among them. I fell in love with Shakespeare at a young age. It started with Romeo and Juliet, but I developed quite a fondness for his comedies. Love’s Labour’s Lost might have been my favorite as a teenager.”

“So Love’s Labour’s Won, the great lost work of Shakespeare, must tempt you mightily. You know, we have another bidder for this item, correct, though they haven’t been in to see it yet?” Kairos spoke as he moved the painting of the crocodiles, and slowly began undoing the locks.

“Yes. I heard someone offered eighty million. I might be ready to commit to a purchase today.”

“It would be a shame to sell the only copy of The Bard’s lost masterpiece to someone who didn’t live locally… almost no one even knows why printings never made it to the present, though upon reading it, there are some hints.”

Kairos turned the final key. His back was hiding more than combinations now, but also a wickedly satisfied smile that crawled across his face. Any worry that Scarlett might have some nefarious plan to steal a masterwork had completely melted away. He was finally going to make the big sale. He might get one hundred million dollars out of her, the highest price ever known for illicit merchandise!

He pulled the small silken bag from the cool chamber within. Then intentionally slowed his steps back to the table where Scarlett sat, wide-eyed, heightening the otherworldly look of her deep azure irises. Kairos considered she must have had eye work done, perhaps an American procedure he’d not heard of. He further considered she should invest a few of those dollars into her teeth…

But then, during the final tortured reveal, something went wrong. As he slid the thin, plain yellow volume from the bag, he immediately noticed it did not look correct. The title was there, but the font was wrong. The stylized ink border was completely different. Everything about it was wrong!

“No. No!” Kairos snatched at the book. He could barely turn the pages with the way his hands were shaking. The words on each page were garbled, random, barely even shaped like the text of a play. It was a fake, a replacement. But how? When?

What followed were hours of inspection and hurried phone calls to Kairos’s partners. Two female guards thoroughly searched Scarlett twice, but by midnight they let her go. She seemed as befuddled and shocked as they were, though just as she left, Kairos thought he caught a glimpse of a coy smile escaping her lips.

At some previous date someone must have snuck in and performed the ultimate heist. Or maybe one of the guards… but how? The cameras showed nothing. Kairos knew his partners would suspect him. A complete audit of every square inch of the store would be needed. It might take months to clear his name, that’s assuming one of his partners didn’t put a hit out on him.

***

A week later Kairos, whose real name is Stephan, found himself at a dingy London pub drowning his stress in a pint. Suddenly Scarlett claimed the stool beside him. He wasn’t shocked, as if somehow he’d expected her.

“May I buy you a drink?”

“Only if you’ll tell me whether you’re the one that stole my Shakespeare.”

“Not last week, I didn’t. Three years ago, however…”

“Three years?”

“Or a month back, depending upon how you look at it. My partners thought that if I went back in time three years, by the time I returned you’d have realized what happened. How did you not notice for three years?”

Stephen’s mind traced the last three years, had he really not cast his eyes on Love’s Labour’s Won that whole time? Yes, it was true! He’d had his underlings do the yearly inventory, and somehow he hadn’t checked their work!

“It’s true what they say, staying too long in the past can do strange things to your body.” She leaned toward the bar, and popped out a pair of contact lenses. When she met his gaze again, her irises were no longer that perfect, dark azure, but blazing red, a mix of crimson, rust… and scarlet. “The four-dimensional move could have easily put me inside one of your steel walls. That’s what I thought happened at first. It was terrifyingly cramped inside that tiny, cool, dark space, wondering how long it would be before the Time Operator brought me back.

“I worked as a contortionist for many years, you know. You’d be surprised how many magic tricks revolve around being a small, flexible, talented woman. But we didn’t plan on you not noticing the fake for three years! And we couldn’t just announce the theft, you might deny it, making things tricky. We had to force you to put the disappearance out into the world, force you to make a public underworld stink about it. And after I’d put my life on the line, there was no one but me who would get the pleasure of showing you.”

Kairos grasped at what he should do. Lunge at her? Try to make a deal? His mind couldn’t hold onto anything.

“Anyway, let me pay for your drink.” Scarlett put a twenty pound note on the bar. “And don’t feel too bad. You stole the play from history. And I stole it from you. I’m planning to make copies and mail them to every school system in the world, then I’ll sell the original to a museum for a modest profit, if we can find one which will take it.”

She patted him on the back, leapt down off the stool, and walked out of his life.