The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Pujol had asked her to come at 8:30, when he could find time for her. It was a little odd he spoke of ‘finding time’ when he was the one who had issued the invitation. Surely he wasn’t on a clock—the senior librarian in charge of the Salle Peresc, an aboveground display room that exhibited a constantly changing sample of the ancient treasures stored in the library’s boasted ten kilometres of subterranean shelving. Perhaps after her tour Pujol intended to take her across the road to the café she could see opposite the library entrance—still closed at this hour, its chairs stacked on its tables. Or there’d be a proper morning tea, and he’d introduce her to all his colleagues. After that she’d be free, unoccupied, under the saturated blue Provençal sky.

  Taryn’s phone vibrated. She took it out, swiped, and pressed it to her ear.

  Silence.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I know you’re creeping up on me. But there are people listening in on us, and they’re not the sort of people you’d want to disregard.’

  Silence.

  ‘You should just stop. Go back into the woodwork.’

  She let the silence run on for another thirty seconds before ending the call.

  The Bibliothèque Méjanes was a modern refit of a medieval building. What had once been an entrance with steps and tall doors, was now a courtyard flanked by bicycle racks. Auto doors opened from the courtyard into an atrium, with a cinema, public library and the Salle Peresc, with its ever-rotating sample of the subterranean collection. The glass doors were in two sections, interrupted by an artwork.

  Three giant-sized books had been reproduced in enamelled steel. Two of them were severely upright, apparently held in place by to-scale bookends, which were in fact steel security gates, open and clipped back against the walls. One book leaned into the others, as if another volume had been removed from the shelf. The book in the middle of the three towered over the top of the building, and was painted to imitate gilded leather. The other two had their famous illustrated dust jackets. In order they were The Little Prince, leaning; Moliére’s Les Malades in the middle; and Camus’s The Stranger, which was nearest to Taryn.

  Taryn didn’t usually like giant replicas, but these were perfect, three beloved French books shelved in the building. She paused to appreciate them, the quiet street and the promising blue morning.

  Before Taryn had turned into the Allée the bus station had been before her. She could still hear the wheeze of air brakes and hydraulic doors. And the perky warning bell of a bicycle.

  There was no one about. Only one parked car—a sizeable four-wheel-drive with tinted windows.

  Taryn tapped the backs of her heels on the path to dislodge grit, and approached the building. She was only a little early. The librarian might already be poised beyond the auto doors waiting to buzz her in.

  He wasn’t. So Taryn waited.

  She took the opportunity to drum her knuckles on the dust jacket of the Camus, to test what it was made of. The steel rang. She got out her phone and stepped back out of the bay to take a photo of the sculpture. She framed her shot, horizontal, then vertical. Neither did it justice. It really needed a wide-angle lens. Perhaps she should try a pano.

  That bicycle bell seemed to be going on and on.

  Taryn crossed the road to try once again to get the books fully in shot, and spotted someone standing in the smaller of the two ingress points, between the wall of the building and canted cover of The Little Prince. A person almost as wide as he was high. Despite the warm morning he was wearing a heavy coat and perspiring so much that his face seemed more sticky than wet with perspiration. His cheeks looked like sweaty boiled lollies. His eyes and lips were horribly glossy.

  Taryn lowered her phone before Mr Sticky could decide he was being photographed, rather than just accidentally included in her shot. She made herself look away.

  The chirping of the bicycle bell had changed to chiming—like tambourines, or the bell-sticks of Morris dancers.

  Or like bear bells. Like the sound that had accompanied Taryn on her walks in the woods of the Rockies, all those years ago.

  She spun around, looking for the source of the sound and, at the same time, letting each rotation carry her towards the auto doors. There was someone there now, behind the glass. A stooped figure in brown slacks and beige jacket. Taryn put a brake on her agitation and raised a hand in greeting. Claude Pujol responded with a wave.

  The tinkling was raining all around Taryn, as if she were standing in a shower of invisible coins.

  How could this be anything to do with the Muleskinner? I just spoke to him, Taryn thought.

  The sticky person came out of the narrower entrance way. He gazed at Taryn, and parted his lips. Threads of something like sugar syrup stretched and thinned before the dark cave of his mouth.

  Nearby a car door slammed. A solid sound. Taryn heard running footsteps converging on her from two directions. Over the shoulder of Mr Sticky a slight, dark-skinned young man came hurrying along the Allée. He seemed intent on Mr Sticky, not Taryn. He sped up, and appeared to be coming in for a flying tackle.

  But it wasn’t Mr Sticky who was tackled. Taryn was grabbed from behind. The person who seized her said her name. She flailed her arms and fought—because of the timing, the bear bells, because she was being stalked and terrorised and this must be the Muleskinner, who wanted things from her, things which, though she had no idea what they were in their detail, she understood he had a right to, and deserved. She yelled, ‘Leave me alone!’

  Mr Sticky turned to face his assailant just before the young man reached him. Taryn saw this as she was clasped against her own attacker, restrained, picked up, and hustled towards the auto doors.

  Pujol had emerged, but was standing side-on and ready for retreat.

  ‘Ms Cornick!’ said her assailant again.

  The Muleskinner would have used ‘Taryn’.

  Her assailant dropped her. She fell to her knees, jarring them painfully. He vaulted over her, landed deftly, surged forward.

  Taryn saw that Mr Sticky had a long barrelled gun concealed under his coat. He was lifting it free of the coat’s skirts and bringing it to bear on the young man, who saw it but kept on at more or less the same pace, while putting up both arms and swivelling his shoulder against the coming blast. It was an insane thing to do.

  Taryn’s assailant—DI Berger—didn’t hesitate either. He lunged at Mr Sticky.

  Both men hit Mr Sticky simultaneously and drove him sideways and backwards towards the auto doors. Claude Pujol retreated. The doors began to slide closed. Mr Sticky kept his feet, as if he were made of heavier material than the two men bulldozing him.

  Taryn staggered up and tried to dodge them and reach the gap in the closing doors, and the safety of the atrium. The gun might be pointed that way, but Berger had hold of its barrel and was forcing it up, his arm trembling.

  Then the gun went off. Taryn flinched down and hot matter flew past her face. She smelled scorching hair.

  There was a gouge in the cover of the Camus and, below that, three figures, still wrestling with the gun. One was the young man, blood-splattered, the only one in pale clothing—a loose and roughly woven shirt and pants, like a costume from some biblical epic.

  Pujol was back behind the doors, signalling madly to Taryn, urging her his way. Berger still had hold of the gun and was trying to wrench Mr Sticky off-balance. His feet flew—shin gouge, foot stomp, a sharp precise kick to the back of the knee, then an elbow to Mr Sticky’s nose.

  The bridge of that nose caved in under the blow, collapsing in discernible layers, like a rice wafer biscuit, dry, without blood.

  The blow finally knocked Mr Sticky off-balance. He, Berger, and the young man staggered sideways in a struggling mass, and were abruptly behind Taryn. She pushed herself up onto her hands and feet, kept her head low and scrambled towards the doors. There was a yell and she glanced back under her arm and saw the gun barrel swing free and out, preparing for a clubbing blow. It was the young man who’d
shouted. He let go of Mr Sticky and seized a handful of Berger’s hair and hauled him backwards. Berger twisted to face his new attacker and simultaneously delivered a hard kick to Mr Sticky’s hip. The gun barrel swept back incredibly fast and passed only an inch above Berger’s right ear. The young man let go of Berger’s hair. He darted towards Taryn, scooped her up and stretched forward. He pointed his free hand at the auto doors—apparently making a highly choreographed appeal to Pujol.

  His hand was gleaming, was gold, was claws.

  Berger grabbed Taryn too. He pushed, and the young man pulled and they all staggered at the auto doors, and through them.

  But not into the atrium of the Bibliothèque Méjanes.

  Part Three

  Light

  When you are born, you walk on the ark. The ark is the earth. From there the elephants go with the elephants, and the little gold mites with the little gold mites. It makes me long to see a different animal, from a different story. I wish Grendel would burst into the hall and eat us.

  —Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

  7

  The Island of Apples

  Dragged by Berger and supporting the young man, Taryn fell through the auto doors of the Bibliothèque Méjanes—and lost her balance when her feet passed from paving stones to grass, the kind of thick pasture that requires you to step high when you walk through it. She sprawled, and her body broke the young man’s fall.

  It was dark. The grass was damp, thick, scented. Taryn tried to raise her head to see more, to sort in her mind how this outdoor room had been trundled into the atrium of the Bibliothèque Méjanes in time to catch her and close her off from danger. But she couldn’t lift herself with this dead weight on her back.

  She struggled frantically and managed to slip out from under the young man. She was vaguely aware of Berger, somewhere off to her left, twisting this way and that, moving so rapidly that Taryn could hear the grass tearing. He was making hard exhalations, combat grunts, but was finding nothing to fight. Then he was on his feet, and silent. Taryn could see his body, black against a dark blue, dusky sky. His eye-whites glimmered.

  Some stars hung above the rim of a hill. Taryn couldn’t tell whether the hill was nearby or far away. She thought she could make out a body of water below them, a pond or lake. The stars in the zenith were reflected in the water. Taryn looked at the reflection, then up into the sky.

  The only light pollution was from an imminent sunrise, in the east, where the air was ink and indigo. Constellations thundered silently down on her, and she thought of Dante. We came forth and once more saw the stars.

  Then: I was in Aix, she thought. It was morning.

  Berger stopped holding his breath and began to pant raggedly, as if he were wounded or caught in some unstoppable cascade of panic. Taryn thought she should say something to calm him. He was turning around and around again, his eyes seeking and seeking for something to attack, for some lever to move the world, the unyielding, impossible, absolute change in the world.

  The horrible chiming had ceased. A soft wind brushed Taryn’s ears, then dropped again.

  She was alarmed and astonished—but she felt better, as if her heart had been fibrillating and had just been shocked back into its normal rhythm. She felt that she would live.

  She dared a few steps and stumbled over her own bag. Before she even thought of her phone Berger had his in his hand—its light shining blue into his face. Then he turned on the phone’s flashlight and aimed it at the ground.

  The young man was lying on his back, face bloodless, teeth clenched in pain, his hands pressed on the torn, bloody front of his shirt.

  Berger said to Taryn, ‘You hold the light while I check his wounds.’

  Taryn took the phone and fumbled it—the light swung in a small arc and she saw green grass and delicate flowers, pinched closed for the night.

  ‘Hold it steady,’ Berger said. With every word his voice sounded firmer and cooler. Just having something to do was helping him.

  Taryn knelt beside the fallen man and shone her light on the blood.

  The shirt was fastened with ties, not buttons. It resisted Berger’s efforts to tear it. He was forced to pick at the knots with his shaking fingers.

  ‘Iron,’ said the young man. One word, uttered with what sounded like satisfaction and deep amusement.

  Berger parted the shirt. The young man’s chest was perforated by bloody holes and dappled with bruises. Taryn could see some shallowly embedded shot, but some of the holes were welling red.

  ‘Have you got anything that would work as a bandage,’ Berger asked.

  Taryn stripped off her cardigan, then told Berger to wait a minute. She found her bag and the inscribed copy of her book that she’d brought for M. Pujol. She tore out a wad of pages. She passed them to Berger, who sat the young man up and pressed the pages against the thickest patch of holes. He got Taryn to hold the compress in place while he positioned her cardigan. He knotted its sleeves behind the young man’s back and laid him carefully down again.

  Berger tapped the young man’s cheek to rouse him. ‘Where do we go to get help?’ He’d commenced the sentence in a businesslike way and ended it almost choking with fear.

  ‘My house is this side of the lake.’ The young man pointed. ‘See the patches of white? Those are my goats. They’re beside the house.’

  Berger slung the young man’s left arm over his neck and helped him up. Taryn looped her bag across her body and took the other arm. She shone the flashlight at their feet.

  They walked slowly downhill. The light found a way for them, and fragments of landscape: pasture, a rose bush covered in withered rosehips and new shoots, a confined tangle of blackberries, various fruit trees. A goat bleated and leapt away. The goats weren’t penned and Taryn did take a moment to wonder how the new shoots and rosehips had been spared.

  The young man’s house was a hut with round walls and a domed roof. It appeared to be made of woven willow and mud daub. The door was low and had a stone sill. In the juddering light Taryn saw a round, raised fireplace with a large copper trivet over the dead coals. There was a smoke hole in the roof. Carved chests in assorted sizes were pushed up against the walls. There were two stools, one in use as a table. It had a plate and cup on it; the cup was made from horn, the plate was silver. Most of the space was occupied by a low, wide bed of heaped bracken covered with bearskins.

  Berger lowered the young man onto the bed, then sat on the floor, which was laid with overlapping woven rush mats, like tatami. Berger’s back was bowed, his head hanging. Taryn thought he was about to faint.

  She shone the light on the bandage. The pages were rimmed by blood, but the rivulets on the young man’s stomach were beginning to dry.

  The young man was peering at her intently, frowning. Then, when she met his eyes his face relaxed into an expression of expectancy.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘Why were you following me?’ She was sure she’d seen him before, but couldn’t think where.

  ‘I was following the one who was lying in wait for you. The one who shot me.’

  Berger jumped on this. ‘Who was he? The man who shot us?’

  ‘We say “one”. It’s more accurate. Also it annoys them, because it’s the singular, and they are legion.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’ Berger was in full, nervy, interrogatory mode.

  ‘It’s not really “we” when I say it.’

  ‘You’re being rather obstructive in your answers.’

  The injured man laughed.

  Berger said, ‘It’s too dark in here for us to check your wounds.’

  The man directed Taryn to one of the carved chests and a metal jar containing a black herbal paste. The metal was very heavy and bright. Taryn thought it might be gold. A small fortune in gold. He also pointed to a copper caddy. Taryn removed its lid and found it full of greyish-white fibrous clots that clung to her fingers. It looked and felt like bundled spiderweb. Was she supposed to use spiderweb to stop the
bleeding? ‘Don’t you have dressings?’

  ‘I have nothing between primitive and miraculous. And the miracles are offline for now. Sorry.’

  ‘You think apologies are going to buy you time?’ Berger growled.

  ‘Why was that man waiting for me?’ Taryn said. ‘Did he plan to shoot me?’

  ‘The shot is iron. He was armed against the people of the place he’d been trespassing in. I don’t think it was his intention to shoot anyone. But I startled him. And your hero here grabbed the gun.’

  Taryn was puzzled. ‘Trespassing where? I don’t think he came out of the library.’

  ‘Library?’

  ‘The Bibliothèque Méjanes. That’s where we all were.’

  ‘Between The Stranger and The Little Prince,’ Berger said. He sounded droll.

  Taryn said, ‘The librarian, M. Pujol, was standing on the other side of the auto doors. He was about to buzz me in.’

  ‘The door opened,’ Berger said. ‘The librarian seemed to be phoning the police. That’s what I saw, though I guess it’s what I expected to see. When the door opened I pushed you both through. Only suddenly it wasn’t the library.’ Then, ‘Show him your book, Ms Cornick. It’s the thing Khalef and Tahan asked about. And wasn’t it your book that brought you to the Bibliothèque Méjanes?’

  ‘Why would my book cause anyone to assault me?’

  The young man said, ‘Who are Khalef and Tahan?’

  Taryn looked around. There was more light—a soft mushroom-coloured pre-dawn glow coming in at the door. She found her bag, and the book. She was surprised she’d had enough presence of mind to put it back. Its cover was tacky with blood. Taryn saw she had torn pages from the bibliography and index, not the main text. Her carefully cultivated stories and arguments were still intact. She said to Berger, ‘And how can my book explain where we are now?’

  ‘I’m trying to work on one thing at a time,’ Berger said. ‘Someone waylaid you. I’m starting by trying to determine what that person wanted.’