The manuscript itself was not in the curator's home when Mackie and his colleagues from the California Prison System broke and entered, but they found a substantial number of photographs. To avoid suspicion, he only took this one photograph. Sadly, Mackie thought, as he contemplated the photograph, every attempt at stealing the actual manuscript had failed.
Outside his mobile home, a late model car circulated the mobile home park. Mackie's truck was in the only parking space attached to his mobile home. However, there were places to park along the road. Purchased with funds from his now indicted venture capital company, the mobile home would at some point be valuable for its original 1950's interior, but festooned with cheap "home sweet home" signs and located in a low rent trailer park, his temporary home was not in an area where tourists visited, and -- or so he thought -- it was unlikely that his whereabouts would be discovered except, as in this case, when the visitor was welcome.
Veiled by lace curtains, Mackie Alarie watched warily as a man emerged from the car and approached his mobile home. FBI agents were not likely to dress like a dealer in stolen manuscripts, he reasoned, as the man he was expecting knocked on the door of his pink-painted mobile home.
"Without this map", Alarie's visitor told him, "the manuscript you are interested in is -- depending on its provenance -- worth anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000. I'd have to see the actual manuscript and verify the provenance to give you a more precise estimate. However, if it's origin in Jean Bourdichon's studio is verified, it would be worth on the high end of the figures I gave you. Furthermore, if the map it contains is authentic, it could be among the earliest known maps of the French Maritimes, and it's worth would be inestimable."
The 1950 Dodge Power Wagon, parked outside a mobile home somewhere in the California Gold Country, was so apparently faded that its value was barely evident. Inside the mobile home, Mackie Alarie sat at a pristine 1950's white Formica table. In front of him was a photograph of the map of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland that appeared in the Music Box Book of Hours.