by Tom Harper
The trees began to rise above her as she rode an outside escalator into the pit. It brought her halfway down, to a mezzanine level where a bored guard gave her bag a perfunctory search. It was warm inside: a plush atmosphere of red carpets and polished wood, like a theatre foyer. Even the computers were housed in wooden cabinets. Emily crossed to one and laid Gillian’s card on a flat metal scanner. An onscreen message in French welcomed Gillian Lockhart. Emily looked at the trail of cables snaking out of the computer into a duct in the floor, and wondered how far those tentacles stretched, which corners of the electronic world had just been alerted to the fact that Gillian Lockhart had apparently reappeared at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Emily tapped a fingernail on the touchscreen. A list appeared:
Lost Books of the Bible
Studies on the Physiologus in the Middle Ages
Physiologus (Anonyme, XVème Siècle)
She frowned. A physiologus was a bestiary, a collection of fables masquerading as zoology. She’d studied plenty for her work on medieval animal motifs. Why had Gillian consulted them? Had she found something to do with the animals on the playing cards?
She tapped the screen again to order the books down from the towers where they were kept.
Merci, Gillian Lockhart
A twinge of discomfort ran up Emily’s back. She didn’t like being Gillian Lockhart. They’d never met, but Gillian had lurked in the Cloisters like a ghost brought over with the medieval stones, a name guaranteed to change the subject. All museums have their mysteries, and Emily – fresh from her doctorate, eager to please, her own secrets to hide – had let it lie. She wondered if Nick knew. There was something desperately innocent about the way he’d plunged headlong into the search for Gillian, a knight errant come to rescue his damsel. Emily had read enough medieval romances to know that women who drew knights onto quests weren’t always what they seemed.
The books would come to the reading room on the court yard level. She checked her bag into the cloakroom, then walked to the row of turnstiles and pressed the card against another reader. The barrier opened and she stepped through, trying not to shiver at the bar’s cold touch through her stockings.
*
GILLIAN LOCKHART
is in mortal peril
(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)
In an Internet café on the rue St Georges, Nick sighed. There had always been aspects of Gillian that remained a mystery to him. The way she would spread peanut butter on hamburgers. The way she sometimes turned off her phone and didn’t come home at night. When he’d dared to ask if she was seeing someone else, she’d accused him of having no imagination and locked herself in the bedroom.
Why had she written ‘mortal peril’? If she’d been in real danger she’d have called the police, or run, not logged on to the Web to update her profile. Unless it was a last gesture of defiance, a joke to belittle what was coming. That would fit.
Next to her name was a thumbnail photograph – different to the one on the library card. This was an older picture, Gillian with long black hair combed in a straight fringe, with panda-bear eyes like an art student.
He tried exploring the site. There was the billboard, where other users could post the usual banalities, rants and badly spelled insults that passed for wit on the Web. It was blank. He flipped to another part of the site, a photo album. There were a few pictures: Gillian swigging beer at a party wearing an enormous sombrero; Gillian sprawled over a rock in Central Park pretending to hug it while she smiled coyly at the camera; Gillian standing outside a boulangerie with baguette tucked under her arm. She’d gone blonde by then, the same face as on the library card. He wondered who’d taken the picture. Atheldene?
There were none of Gillian with Nick. He told himself he hadn’t expected any, and wondered who he was really looking for.
Before he left he checked the news sites for anything about himself. He’d assumed it would have made headlines somewhere: SUSPECTED MURDERER FLEES COUNTRY. He found a
couple of stories about Bret’s murder, but nothing in the last forty-eight hours. Didn’t they know he’d fled? Had they come to their senses and realised he was innocent? He thought of Detective Royce and decided it was unlikely.
It reminded him of something Gillian had said. He’d caught her one day looking out of the apartment window, peering between the blinds at the empty street. He’d pointed out there was nobody there; she’d answered in a fake-deep voice: ‘Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they can’t see you.’
He’d thought it was a joke, a line from a movie, one of the personas she shrugged on and off all the time. He’d gone to fix a sandwich. But when he looked back through the kitchen door she’d still been on the windowsill, watching.
*
Once, the alarm had been a black Bakelite telephone connected to a switchboard, with black cables hanging off it like chains on a dungeon wall. Later, it had become a pager; later still, a succession of ever smaller and smarter cellphones. Through all those incarnations one thing had remained constant: it almost never rang. Months would pass in silence, sometimes whole years.
Now it was ringing for the second time in three weeks. Father Michel Renais, latest in a long line of men who had held that phone, stared at the screen. The last time it had rung he had broken out into a sweat and almost dropped it; this time he was ready.
‘Oui?’
‘One of our flags has come up. Bibliothèque Nationale, garden level, seat N48.’
‘Bien.’
Technology made it too easy, Father Michel thought. Once they’d have had to sift through paper request slips, cross-reference university records, scramble to make even the most basic enquiries. Now they knew even before the readers found their seats.
He dialled the number the cardinal had given him. ‘At the Bibliothèque Nationale. The same book as before. And the same name. Gillian Lockhart.’
He heard a dry laugh on the other end of the phone. ‘I very much doubt it is Gillian Lockhart.’
It was like entering a spaceship, or a medieval dungeon reimagined by a future civilisation. Emily rode a long escalator down through the cavernous hall that formed the outer shell of the complex. An underground moat surrounding the underground castle. The outside walls were solid concrete, while the inside was protected by huge curtains of steel rings like sheets of chain mail. At the bottom, another machine checked her card before admitting her through the final pair of doors. Here, she was back inside the castle: desks, carpets, polished wood.
Emily found the seat that the computer had assigned her and waited. She stared out of the windows at the forested courtyard. It was like something out of legend: thick evergreens bristling among the leafless birches and oaks, with thin icings of snow on the branches. Even in winter, she could hardly see the other side of the courtyard beyond the trees.
A red light above the desk summoned Emily to the issue counter. A bored librarian held out her hand.
‘Votre carte?’
Emily smiled to hide her anxiety. She held up the card, keeping her thumb over the top half of Gillian’s face to hide it. The librarian barely glanced at it before reaching into a cubbyhole behind her and depositing two books on the counter.
‘I ordered three,’ Emily said in French.
The librarian narrowed her heavily made-up eyes. Before Emily could protest, she swept the card out of her hand and slapped it down on the reader by her computer. She studied the monitor.
‘Anonymous, Physiologus. This book is missing.’ She scrolled down. ‘You have requested this book before?’
‘Um, yes. In December.’
‘And it was missing then, also.’
Was that a question? Emily opted for what she hoped was a suitably French grunt, accompanied by a vague twitch of the shoulders.
‘There is a note on the system that we could not find this book the last time you asked for it.’
Emily rested a hand on the counter to steady herself. ‘I… I
just wondered if it might have turned up.’
‘Non.’
‘The online catalogue still shows it as available,’ Emily persisted.
‘Then there is a mistake with the catalogue. I will make another note.’ She lifted her gaze over Emily’s shoulder to the person waiting in line behind her. Emily took the hint.
She went back to her desk with the two books that had come: Studies on the Physiologus and Lost Books of the Bible. Nothing to do with Gillian Lockhart was clear. All she ever saw were distant shadows flitting out of view, uncertain whether they were real or just tricks of the light. She almost felt sorry for Nick.
But she could only work with what she had. She started with Studies on the Physiologus, kneading new facts in with what she already knew. The term ‘physiologus’ had fallen out of use during the Middle Ages, but then revived when new-fangled printers wanted to give their books an old-fashioned stamp of authenticity. The book that hadn’t come was listed in the online catalogue as fifteenth century. Emily flipped to the appendix. There were eleven printed editions of the Physiologus known before 1500. None of them was the one listed in the catalogue.
A dead end. She turned to the other book, the Lost Books of the Bible. This was more of a struggle: she found it hard to engage with the text without knowing what she was looking for. She turned through the pages looking for any pencil marks that Gillian might have made in the margins, any words she might have underlined. She scanned for references to animals, bestiaries or cards; all she got were prophets, ancient kings and angry gods.
She heard a cough behind her and looked round. It was the librarian.
Her heart beat faster. ‘Have you found it?’
The librarian shook her head. ‘There is a message. You must go to the information desk on the upper level. There is a man there to see you – Monsieur Ash. He says it is an emergency.’
The last number Gillian had called from her cellphone was a taxi company. Nick could have rung, but that would have been too quick. This was his last lead; once it was done, he’d have nothing left. So he got the address off the Internet and walked, trying to fool himself for a little while longer that he was achieving something.
He hated the feeling of not knowing what would happen next. Gillian used to tease him that he wanted all life to be like school. ‘If God handed you a schedule for the rest of your life – three periods of work, a half-hour for lunch, forty minutes online, an hour extra-curricular sex – you’d be happy.’ He hadn’t denied it.
Gillian, on the other hand, was spontaneous. Sometimes, when he was too tired to keep up, Nick thought it was almost a neurosis. She’d find a flyer for a concert or an exhibition lying in the gutter and go that night; friends he’d never heard of would call at midnight, just arrived in New York, and she’d scoot out to Penn Station to bring them back to the apartment. She’d meet a guy on a train and be in his apartment at two the next morning playing canasta.
‘People’s lives go like clockwork,’ she told him. ‘They start out buzzing with energy, and by the time they hit thirty they’ve totally run down. If you don’t act, you’re doomed. You need to introduce some random chaos into your life.’
After she left him, he’d seen those flyers blowing down the street and wondered if that was what he’d been. Something she’d found, an impulse acted on to prove she still could. Random chaos.
The taxi office was a small kiosk that had somehow wormed itself into a crevice between two large buildings. There wasn’t much inside: a wilting plastic pot plant, three plastic chairs scarred by cigarettes and two women sitting behind a window in front of a faded map of Paris. Their faces were so heavily made up that they too might have been plastic. Both wore coats, wool hats and fingerless gloves. Each time the phone rang the woman on the left would answer it, bellow a series of questions, then relay the answers to the woman beside her. She in turn would pick up a radio mike and repeat everything the first woman had just said. It looked like the sort of division of labour that only the French could have dreamed up.
Nick went to the window. ‘Do you speak English?’
The radio woman was still shouting orders into her microphone. The telephone woman glanced at him, then jerked her head at her colleague. Nick waited for her to finish.
‘Anglais,’ the telephone woman barked.
The radio woman scowled. ‘A little.’
‘A friend of mine took a taxi on the fourteenth of December. I want to know where she went.’ He looked around, losing confidence. There was no sign of a computer, not even a filing cabinet. ‘Do you have any records?’
The woman stared at him from turquoise lagoons of eyeshadow. ‘Non.’
If he was honest, he hadn’t expected any more. Hope was painful; he was almost grateful to her for killing it off. He turned away.
‘Nom,’ the woman said behind him again. ‘Sa nom. Her name.’
Nick looked back, sheepish as he realised he’d misunderstood.
‘Gillian Lockhart.’
The ring of a telephone interrupted the exchange. The ritual played itself out between the two women. When it was dispatched, the radio woman looked back at him. Closing her eyes, she recited as if into a microphone, ‘Gillian Lockhart. 14.30. From rue Saint Antoine, she comes here.’
Nick looked around the plastic office. ‘Here? Ici?’
The receptionist pointed across the road to a grand neoclassical building. ‘The station. The Gare de l’Est.’
It extended his quest by a few minutes, so Nick walked across the street and into the station. It smelled of diesel fumes and steel. He stared at the banks of monitors on stalks that sprouted from the walls, reading the destinations. He’d always loved European railway stations: the grandiose architecture dimmed with soot, the sleek trains, the destinations that stretched across a continent rather than just safe commuter suburbs. He read the names off the flickering screens. Bâle; Epernay; Frankfurt; Munich; Salzburg; Strasbourg; Vienna.
Where now?
The tongue of the turnstile rolled over and spat Emily out into the foyer. The information desk was ahead of her in the middle of the room. She searched for Nick but couldn’t see him.
She glanced at the glass wall to her right, through onto the balcony that overlooked the forested courtyard. In summer it became a café, packed with tables and chairs; now it was all but deserted. A short man in a silver puffer jacket leaned against the balustrade smoking a cigarette. Was he looking at her?
He threw his cigarette butt onto the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. Emily went up to the information desk.
‘I had a message in the reading room. Is there a Nick Ash to see-’
‘Right here.’
A hand clamped on her arm so tight she thought the bone would snap. It pulled her away from the nodding receptionist and spun her towards the door, pulling her along. Fear froze her into obedience. Was this what had happened to Gillian? She looked up and saw a heavyset man with a crooked nose and bristling black eyebrows. His left arm reached across his body to hold her; his right jabbed something round and blunt into the small of her back.
‘I have a gun. Do not scream; do not try to run.’
She would never have run. Her legs were jelly; she could barely walk. Her captor almost had to drag her across the carpet. They were halfway to the door already. Outside, the man in the puffer jacket hurried to meet them.
The beep of an alarm cut through her panic. By the entrance, the security guard was patting down a long-haired student whose profusion of chains and studs had set off the metal detector. Emily stared at it. Could you really get a gun through that? Or was he bluffing?
‘Please don’t take me,’ she whispered to her captor. They were almost at the exit. ‘I know what you want. It’s in my bag. You can have it. Just please let me go.’
He paused just shy of the velvet rope that marked the edge of the foyer. At least he was listening. He looked down at her empty hands.
‘Where is your bag?’
She jerked her head at the cloakroom. ‘I had to check it in before I went to the reading room.’
As abruptly as he’d grabbed her, he swivelled her back around and marched her towards the cloakroom. Just before they got there he let her go, pushing her off balance so that she stumbled headlong into the counter. She thrust her ticket at the startled attendant, who came back a moment later with her brown bucket bag. As soon as she had it in her hands she felt the grip back on her elbow.
‘One euro,’ said the attendant.
Emily snapped open the bag and rummaged in the bottom. The vice around her arm tightened; she felt faint with the pain. But she’d found what she was looking for. She pulled out a coin – but she was clumsy. It slipped out of her fingers and dropped onto the carpet.
She smiled a weak apology at the attendant and made to bend down and pick it up. Unsure whether to allow it or not, her captor loosened his grip.
It was enough. She came up faster than he’d expected, knocking him back off balance. That brought her room to turn around. She thrust her hand up towards his face and before he could respond, squeezed hard on the can wrapped in her fist.
A jet of pepper spray erupted from the nozzle, straight into his face. He reeled away clutching his eyes. An alarm bell started to screech; Emily wondered if the spray might have triggered a smoke detector. But it was coming from the door. The man in the puffer jacket had seen what was happening and had burst in, triggering the metal detector. He was reaching inside his bulky coat, then went down as a security guard tackled him to the floor.
Emily picked up her bag and fled.
XXXVI
Strassburg
A paw was taking shape. Just as the mother bear licks unformed flesh into the shape of her young, the chisel’s tongue rasped against the stone to carve the image. I could already see the curve of a haunch bulging out of the block; a sloping back and a knob that would become an ear or a snout.
The stone carver stood over his bench in the square and chipped it out. Behind him loomed the cathedral, where the animal would eventually graze among pillared glades and vaulted branches.
