Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  She stared at the bookcase, pulled the manila envelope containing her grant application from her bag and wrote down the titles of the books, chewing on her lower lip. She put the papers back in the bag and looked once more at the bookcase.

  Hugo waited.

  “The City of God!” She closed her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “It was a copy of De civitate dei by St. Augustine. That’s it, that’s the missing book.” She paused, her expression quizzical. “One of them, anyway.”

  9.

  In an examination room on the lower level of the unprepossessing yellow brick edifice of the Institut médico-légal on the Quai de la Rapée near the Austerlitz bridge, a short, plump man with brown eyes was frowning at a large X ray negative with the name FOIX printed in the corner. He had dark hair slicked forward and a dapper moustache. Dr. Viètes clipped it to the light panel next to an X ray of a skull. The stiff plastic rattled in his hands. He stepped back and his frown deepened. It was as strange as he had thought it was.

  He could easily have examined the photos on the computer monitor in the small office on the other side of the room. Dr. Viètes would never turn his back on technology. After all, the computer showed you things film might miss.

  But sometimes his intuition directed him to do things the old-fashioned way. Film could also reveal things the computer missed.

  With his finger he traced a line down the esophagus to a mass in the stomach. It looked like a very skinny snake uncoiling. “You, my friend, will have to come out into the open, eh?”

  He looked back at the body on the table. He had already recorded his preliminary notes: subject male, early eighties, cochlear implant left side, heart monitor RFID chip under skin of left pectoral. No visible scars, no unusual marks or tattoos. Shot twice. Estimate nine millimeter. First shot struck the throat on a downward angle from the right side, striking the larynx. The bullet then struck the wall behind the victim next to the window. The trauma left the trachea, larynx, lower pharynx and esophagus exposed. There was heavy bleeding, though no major veins or arteries were severed. A wild shot, probably the second, glanced off an ornamental cupid on the victim’s desk and struck bulletproof glass of the window facing rue du Dragon. A third shot, precisely placed, penetrated the frontal bone at the glabella and fragmented inside the cortex. He judged this wound would probably have been instantly fatal, pending final dissection.

  He was glad to get the preliminaries out of the way. This strange ribbon on the X ray, this was unique and piqued Dr. Viètes’ professional curiosity. “What could it be?” he murmured absently.

  The pathologist working at the next table looked up. “What’s that?” he rumbled. The staff referred to him as the Giant.

  Viètes grinned. “Just wondering about this thread down the alimentary canal.”

  “Oh.” The Giant started an electric saw and began slicing down the sternum of the drowning victim before him, showing no further interest.

  “Ah, well.” Viètes decided to see if the ribbon or tape would come out without cutting. It would be safer.

  He took a pair of forceps and grasped the end showing in the esophagus. It resisted. He pulled a bit harder. It gave slightly and stuck again.

  With a regretful sigh he set aside the forceps and took out his own saw, and for some time the whine of blades cutting bone and flesh echoed in the room.

  When he had opened the thoracic cavity and sliced vertically down the esophagus, thus exposing the metallic tape, he took up the forceps again. “Eh, bien,” he murmured. This time the ribbon came out easily, though it was coated in fluids. Soon he had it laid out on the table alongside the body. “Take a look at this, Etienne,” he said.

  The Giant came over. “Metallic ribbon of some kind. What do you think? Recording tape?” He grunted and started to turn away. He turned back. “Wait a minute. This guy swallowed it?”

  Viètes nodded. “I suspect he knew the autopsy procedure and prepared for it. He wanted this to show up in the X ray. It must be important.”

  “Is that writing?” the Giant asked, pointing out part of a letter. “Looks like an L.”

  Viètes carefully swabbed the tape with cotton and plain water. Soon he had uncovered a long series of block letters printed in a neat vertical line down the tape. “It is an L,” he said, feeding the tape through his fingers and reading off the letters. “L C E A A T R F Y M H O U T…. Does this mean anything to you?”

  The Giant, forgetting his own autopsy, stared over Viètes’ shoulder. “Isn’t ‘O-U-T’ an English word? Could it be a code of some kind, unless he was raving. Fear? Perhaps he thought he was writing something intelligible but the strain was too much.”

  Viètes shook his head. “He had great presence of mind. He drew something in a book with his own blood before he died.”

  “Drew something?”

  “A symbol.” Viètes sketched the circle-triangle-line on a pad.

  “Never saw that before, either,” the Giant said. “But if this is a message, and it’s important, who was it intended for?”

  Viètes lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know, unless it was the young woman. This is a mix of Roman and Greek letters.…”

  The Giant started to reply but Viètes ran to the office and picked up the phone. “Oui, alors,” he muttered, going back to his drowning victim. She, at least, had been pulled from the Seine and presented no real mysteries; her lungs were full of water.

  “Captain Hugo?” Viètes spoke quickly into the receiver. “This is urgent, so I’m going to bring it over. I believe Foix has given us a message for Mademoiselle Emmer.”

  He coiled the tape around a pencil, put it in his pocket, and hurried out to the parking lot on the lower level. On the rough stone of the wall next to the door he passed a sign reading “Depart de Convois.” Hearses bearing the dead began their final journeys here.

  As he was getting into his car he noted through the canopy of the shade trees that the clouds forecast for later in the day were beginning to build up to the west.

  10.

  Hugo put away his portable phone. “That was Viètes calling from the Institut Médico-Légal.”

  “Mm-hm?” Lisa ran her fingertips along the bookshelves, pausing occasionally to touch a spine.

  “He believes he has a message for you.”

  She turned. “A message for me? What kind of message?”

  “He only said it might be important and he’s on his way.”

  She lifted her shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Hugo went downstairs with Bernard and Lt. Mathieu. Time passed. The front door opened and closed. One of the policemen hummed a few bars of “Le petit monsieur triste,” an old Edith Piaf tune. There was quiet conversation. A cell phone rang. The door opened and closed again.

  Lisa picked up the phone on Foix’s desk, thinking she should explain to the Fondation Roulot why she hadn’t shown up, but there was no dial tone. That was odd, but it was probably one of those temporary outages in the phone system. She cradled it and walked once more around the perimeter of the room, touching the shelf edges as if that way she might glean from them some meaning to Raimond Foix’s death. She felt his presence everywhere. She could almost smell his shaving cream, a ghost perfume wafting through the room, and see the little dab of it that always seemed to remain just under his ear.

  Hugo reappeared.

  “Did you notice the windows?” Lisa asked him, pausing in her slow circuit of the room.

  Hugo spoke at the same time. “So, what did you mean, one of the books?” He stopped, and they both laughed. He gave a little bow. “What about the windows?”

  She bent down to look at a book title and moved on slowly. “They were both closed. It was warm last night and he would normally have had both windows open to catch the breeze. But they were both closed. Stranger still, the courtyard shutters were also closed, but not the ones on the street.”

  “Why is that strange?” Hugo was frowning.

  “He didn’t sleep
in here. He was working. He often worked late at night. He liked the air, so he would have had the shutters and the windows open. Yes, it’s odd, the windows, the shutters.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the books?”

  “Well, it’s a break in the pattern, don’t you see? I think he knew he was going to be attacked. I think he closed the courtyard shutters and both windows, locked the door, wrote the list of composers, pulled books out of the bookcase, and sat down at his desk to wait.”

  Hugo nodded, visibly impressed. “It seems so.”

  “I think everything he did meant something.”

  “What? What do these things mean?”

  “I don’t know, not yet. But what about the wheels? They’ve been bothering me as well.”

  He shook his head. “Excuse me?”

  “The wheels, or the wheelchair!” She stopped by the courtyard window and pointed at the carpet, tilting her head as though listening to a distant voice. Her blond hair fell to the side. “Captain Hugo, you said the gun was fired downward and that meant the shooter was tall. As tall as me, perhaps a bit taller, that’s how you put it. A person in a wheelchair wouldn’t be tall, would they? So it’s unlikely the impressions on the carpet are from a wheelchair. There must be some other explanation. Perhaps someone else was here, two attackers.”

  “I had thought of that, yes. And yes, it’s a possibility.”

  “Oh, right. OK.” Lisa placed her hand over the gap where the St. Augustine had been. “Now, you asked about the books.” She spread her fingers to measure the gap and showed him the distance. “This space is too big for the De civitate dei. There would have been a gap, and I don’t remember a gap. So I think there were two books in this space.”

  “The assassin stole two books?”

  “Perhaps.” She went back to the small sofa facing the long bookcase and stared at it, letting her eyes go slightly out of focus. It was something she did when she was thinking.

  Lisa Emmer was a shy, inward child, with strawberry blond hair even as an infant (Swedes in the family tree, her father had told her more than once). She had passed much of her childhood wandering alone along a creek bed near her home. She found delight in the stones and plants of the closest thing to wilderness she knew. It had come as an epiphany one day that there were animals, too, skunks and opossums and foxes and birds, and if she stayed still and let her eyes go soft she could sometimes see them as clearly as if they were outlined in light against the complexity of leaf and trunk.

  It was a technique she had perfected later in the desert when searching in the sand and dust of ancient trash heaps for fragments of papyrus or the pieces of broken crockery on which Roman soldiers wrote letters home. In the tan chaos of the dirt some small, unnatural edge would often pop out, but only if she didn’t stare too hard. This was called a ‘search eye,’ this trick of letting training and instinct work together by keeping the rational mind from interfering.

  She had no particular reason to use the technique now. After all, the St. Augustine was gone and she was pretty sure another book had gone with it. There was no real point in looking. So she was just thinking, and avoiding the distraction of visual stimulation.

  “Which books did Raimond pull down?” she mused. “Was one the Augustine? What of the other missing book? Was he trying to say something? Well…” She stood up and smoothed her skirt with her palms. “I won’t find it like this. You’ll just have to find the killer, Captain Hugo.”

  “Of course.” His irony was palpable, but she was already across the room examining the bookshelf. As along the creeks, as in the desert, something had leapt out of the background precisely when she wasn’t looking for it.

  “It always happens like that, doesn’t it, Captain Hugo? I knew something was out of place, but I didn’t know I knew it. Well, you asked me to tell you if I saw something, even if it was small. This is small, but I’m sure it means something.” She reached up and slipped a volume from the top shelf. “This,” she called triumphantly, “is the Histoire de Théodose le Grand by Valentin Esprit Fléchier, published in Paris by Mabre-Cramoisy in 1679.”

  Hugo was not impressed. “And so?”

  She swept her hand across the bookcase. “The books in this case are all more or less contemporary volumes. There’s nothing rare or exotic here – Dostoyevsky, Loeb classics, Philosophy, literature, science. The rare books were in the cases at the end, on either side of the window.”

  “So this book was in the wrong place? Was that unusual?”

  “Raimond Foix would never have allowed one of his treasures out of place, especially not one this rare. By the way, this biography of Theodosius the Great is a wonderful example of printing, but Bishop Fléchier was much better known for his funeral orations and the fact that he was tutor to the son of Louis XIV. It isn’t a great book in itself.”

  “So, if Foix moved the book, he was trying to tell us, or you, something?”

  “Yes, of course. He pulled those books out to call attention to books. He misplaced this one so I’d find it here. He was certainly trying to tell me something.” Her elation collapsed. “But what?” She looked helplessly at Hugo. “Was the Augustine part of the message? If so, perhaps the killer took it. If not, and the Augustine was taken from the shelf, it disturbs the message. I don’t know what he wanted me to see. The color? The subject? The date?”

  Just then there was a clatter of footsteps on the stair. Viètes appeared in the doorway. “Mademoiselle,” he said, and without waiting for an answer produced the spool of metallic tape and unrolled it vertically across Foix’s desk. “This is the bright thing we saw in Dr. Foix’s throat.”

  The letters, written in a clear block hand in indelible ink, flowed down the shiny strip: L S C E A A T R F Y M H O U T E E F L O M D T L N I R Δ I F S A ϝ S O E W I T I R E L E Γ T R O N N H S V T Ω E E E O Θ D E Y R Ι O K O Γ Σ O T U N Ε R H B Ω Α O E E Θ Υ P P C I Τ E R A Σ Ο N O R E Ν

  “What is this?” Viètes demanded. “And what does it mean?”

  11.

  Brother Cedric, a dark, brooding man of middle years, wore the neon green of the Paris street cleaners, a color so bright and remarkable as to render the wearer invisible. The ubiquitous uniform, with its yellow vest and band under the knee, was the perfect disguise, aided by his dark complexion and blank expression. The street cleaners of the Propreté de Paris were everywhere, sweeping the omnipresent trash along the curbs with their green plastic brooms. Thus dressed, he had no difficulty following Rossignol from the Foix apartment on the rue du Dragon to the office on the rue Argenteuil, where he waited across the street, apparently engrossed in examining the water outlets set into the curb.

  Rossignol emerged from the building and went north. Cedric, broom in hand, stayed twenty meters behind. Once the banker paused and looked back, forcing Cedric to pretend he was perusing Le Monde at a newsstand. His quarry disappeared around the corner.

  Two blocks later Rossignol entered an art gallery on a small side street and went out the back. Cedric had to run to a passage some distance down the street, arriving on the rue Montpensier in time to see Rossignol enter a doorway. This time the banker did not look around. Either he felt safe or he was getting careless.

  Cedric made a cell phone call.

  A few minutes later a gray van pulled up in front of the building. Cedric climbed inside. A minute later he climbed out wearing a blue worker’s jacket. He turned and pulled two gray and green ‘men working’ barriers from the van.

  While he was setting them up, Rossignol was taking the elevator to the top floor apartment and let himself in with two multi-sided keys. The antechamber was quietly furnished with a late Empire entry table and two chairs. He pressed the frame of a painting beside the opposite door. It swung back, revealing an oblong metal plate. He placed his palm over it and said in English: “Nightingale.”

  The door clicked. He pushed into a spacious salon and the door latched quietly behind him.

  The room was larg
e for a Paris apartment, with conversational groupings, a marble fireplace, and a number of well cared-for houseplants. Large windows on the other side looked onto the lush green of the gardens of the Palais Royal. “Alain?” Rossignol called over his shoulder.

  The gardens were in full bloom. Tourists and Parisians on their lunch break filled the benches. The tree canopies were thick with dark green leaves. It was an ordinary day. The threatened rain had yet to appear.

  A large man in a dark suit appeared in a doorway. He could have been a valet, or a bodyguard. “Yes, M. Rossignol?”

  Rossignol watched the crowd below for a moment. A nun in the habit of a Dominican Sister rolled her wheelchair across the open space near the fountain. Such a sight was not that unusual, but the chair turned toward his windows on the west side of the vast rectangle and stopped. Was she scanning the façade looking for him? He pulled back from the window and turned. “We have a last request, Alain.”

  “Very well, M. Rossignol.” He led the way into the next room, which in turn opened onto a corridor with several doors. At the far end he produced a key with which he unlocked a door opening into a small, wood-paneled elevator.

  As they descended, Rossignol listened to the quiet choral music that flooded the elevator, one of his favorites from the seventeenth century: “Veni, Sponsa Mea” by Etienne Moulinié.

  They descended several floors before the cage stopped. They were now well below street level. The elevator opened into a small square room. Thick beige carpet covered the floor, paintings of Burgundy landscapes adorned the walls, and the lighting was indirect, but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a vault built into the subbasement of the building. The only access was the elevator from the penthouse apartment. A plain steel door, painted blue, faced them.

  They each produced a key and turned them together in locks on either side. The steel separated in the middle and slid open to both sides. They now faced a metal grill. This required both handprints. The grate rose into the ceiling and while Alain waited by the door Rossignol entered a small chamber. Forty-eight large, numbered safety deposit boxes eight high by six wide were set into each of the three walls.