The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  When she arrived in the employee lounge, LouLou told her that Docteure Dwamena wanted to see her. Rachel felt a sudden flip of the heart followed by a hot surge of questions. Had Docteure Dwamena somehow found out about her eavesdropping? Was she about to be fired? What would that mean for her investigation? She tried to calm herself by pointing out that, as a volunteer, she couldn’t really be fired, but that just made her wonder if Docteure Dwamena was calling her in to tell her that she was such a terrible volunteer that they were firing her anyway.

  She took a deep breath as she tapped on Docteure Dwamena’s door, letting it out slowly as she entered the office.

  “Ah, Rachel.” Docteure Dwamena rose and gestured to the chair in front of her desk, waiting until Rachel settled before resuming her own seat. She smoothed her maroon leather skirt across her lap. “You’ve been with us for two weeks now, and I’ve been very impressed. Not just with your work in the stacks, but also with your outlook. Right from the start you’ve really connected with Giles and LouLou.”

  That was probably due to the minute attention she’d been paying them, Rachel thought. But people usually didn’t praise you as a prelude to firing you, so she relaxed a little. “Thank you.”

  The doctor leaned forward and folded her hands on her desk. “Now I find myself in some difficulty, and I hope you can help. August is our busiest month, and we’ve been unable to find anyone to replace the colleague who … left us. This means we’re going to be very short-staffed at our busiest period. Would you be willing to work in the reading room itself starting next week? We would ask for another volunteer to take your place here, and tomorrow LouLou could train you. It would only be very basic training, I’m afraid, but enough for you to help fill reader requests on Monday. Then you could continue to learn on the job. After another week you would know how to help patrons who have difficulty navigating the online catalog, and we could show you how to manage the record keeping and our other internal systems.” She met Rachel’s eyes and smiled. “Of course, you would become a paid employee from tomorrow—if you’re willing to help us out?”

  Rachel didn’t know what to do. Would Capitaine Boussicault let her become a paid employee of the Bibliothèque? Would the increased access help their case, or would it leave her less time and attention to spare? Would the police higher-ups be okay with it? She opened her mouth to tell Docteure Dwamena she would like to talk with her husband before she made a decision, but just as her lips formed the first sound, the other woman’s gaze shifted.

  “Yes?” Turning, Rachel saw LouLou standing in the doorway, holding a book. She stepped into the office and held it out.

  Docteure Dwamena seemed to know the significance of the gesture instantly. “No,” she said. LouLou nodded. The doctor stood up and took the book, laying it carefully on her desktop before opening the center drawer and taking out a pair of thin cotton gloves. Drawing them on, she opened the vellum cover. She turned some pages, then drew in her breath through her teeth.

  “What? What is it?” Rachel half rose and leaned over the desk.

  “Here.” One of the cotton-clad fingers pointed, and Rachel, leaning even farther forward, saw a vertical stub of paper close to the binding, a stub so narrow that a cursory examination might not reveal it at all. There were only a few pulled fibers to show where the rest of the sheet had been detached.

  “A page is gone,” Rachel said. The removal had been effected with great care; she couldn’t see any damage to the facing pages. She straightened up.

  “A woodcut.” Docteure Dwamena brushed her hand over the open book. “One of three woodcuts in here. This is one of the few remaining pristine copies of the Supplementum Chronicarum, written by Brother Giacomo Foresti and published in 1490. It has a complete set of some of the most complex and fully realized engravings of the late medieval period—well, I suppose it had.”

  Rachel remembered something she’d learned in her previous case: without regular inspection it was difficult to trace changes to ancient books. “But the page could have been removed long ago! There’s no way to know.”

  “No.” Docteure Dwamena bent more closely over the desk. “One can see that this separation has no wear on it, no dirt. It’s fresh, or at least relatively recent.” She closed her eyes, then opened them slowly. “Again,” she muttered.

  “Again? What do you mean, again?” Then Rachel understood. “This has happened before?”

  “Yes.” The doctor rested her head in her hands. Then she pulled them back over her skull and stood with them gripping the back of her head for a moment before picking up the receiver of her desk phone. “Now if you’ll both excuse me, I need to call the police.”

  There passed a half hour in which nothing changed. The readers in the manuscript room leafed quietly through the books they had ordered, and LouLou and Giles went about the business of handing Rachel request slips, then unloading the books she brought and giving her others to reshelve. Rachel felt a deep admiration for Docteure Dwamena. It took a rare steeliness to keep things running normally in the face of such a blow to her department.

  Eventually LouLou came into the shelving area. “The flic is in Docteure Dwamena’s office. He wants to see us.”

  The flic was Capitaine Boussicault. He was talking to the doctor when Rachel entered. She jumped slightly as she saw him, but when Docteure Dwamena said, “And this is Rachel, who was also here when the book was found,” he raised his eyebrows inquiringly and shook her hand without a trace of recognition.

  “If she was there when the discovery was made, she’s a witness,” he said, “so I would like her to stay.”

  The three women and the capitaine arranged themselves in the chairs that Docteure Dwamena had crowded into her office, and he began asking questions.

  “Madame Fournier, you were the one who first discovered that the book was damaged?”

  LouLou nodded.

  “And how did you make that discovery?”

  She cleared her throat. “Well, when a patron asks for a book, before we hand it to them we quickly look through the pages. We do it to make sure there’s nothing inside that can get lost or misplaced. We just—” She made the gesture of riffling a book’s pages. “When I did that with this book, one pair of pages fell open a little more heavily than felt normal, so I looked closer. When I saw a stub, I knew a page had been removed. I immediately brought the book to Docteure Dwamena.”

  “D’acc.” Boussicault nodded and turned back to the doctor. “And you …?”

  “I saw that there was a page missing. I judged that it had been deliberately removed, and recently.” She rested her hand on the book, as if it were an animal she could soothe by touch. “So I telephoned the police.”

  “How did you know the removal was recent?”

  Docteure Dwamena gave the same explanation she had given Rachel, and the capitaine watched her closely as he listened. He used no notebook, Rachel noticed, just nodded and kept his eyes on the speaker. The effect was of a conversation rather than an interrogation, and she saw how this could relax people into remembering all sorts of half-forgotten details while at the same time allowing him to gather information they didn’t consciously offer. She stored the method away for future use.

  When Docteure Dwamena finished, Boussicault sat for a moment. At last he asked, “Is this your first such loss?”

  Docteure Dwamena said nothing. Then she slowly shook her head. “We had a similar theft about a year ago.”

  “A year?”

  “Yes. We found that a French translation of Machiavelli’s Speeches on the State of Peace and War was missing its final leaf, an engraving of the author’s portrait.”

  Boussicault cleared his throat. “I didn’t see a report on that incident.”

  She looked down, then back up. “I didn’t alert the police to that theft.”

  The capitaine raised his eyebrows. He didn’t speak, but clearly he was waiting for an explanation. So was Rachel. What kind of department head didn’t report a
theft from her department?

  Docteure Dwamena sighed. “Unfortunately, library theft is relatively common. I doubt there’s a national archive or university collection open to the public that hasn’t had something stolen. But this isn’t generally known. It would do severe damage to libraries’ standing. Not only would scholars devalue archives, since books might be missing or incomplete, but libraries would also get reputations for lax security. When we discovered the page missing from the Machiavelli, I had to balance many factors. The page had no particular value on its own: the book is old, but not so rare as to be particularly valuable or consulted particularly often. The stub was not freshly cut as it is here, so I had no idea when the theft might have occurred. I didn’t want to risk what you might call collateral damage because of one illustration that I was certain would not be recovered in any case.” She gave a thin smile. “Our books are rare, but library theft is even more rarely solved.”

  “I see.” The capitaine shifted position in his chair. “You mention security. What was library security like at the time of the first theft?”

  “Much the same as it is now. The library requires readers to fill out a registration form giving their name and local address, and after a short interview they are issued a library card with a photo. Visitors show their card to a guard when they enter the site, when they enter each reading room, and again when they pick up the books they ordered from the counter.”

  “And the readers in this room specifically, do they go through any kind of search on the way in or out?”

  Docteure Dwamena nodded. “Both. We have a guard, like all the other reading rooms here. Readers may only carry their belongings inside in a clear plastic bag. They are not allowed to bring in computer sleeves or shells. As each patron leaves, they must give the guard any pads or notebooks they have brought in, and the guard—” She mimed shaking the pages. “Also, if they brought a computer, they must take it out and open it, then turn it over.”

  “And this room, specifically, added no further measures after the first theft? You didn’t, for example, increase your oversight, your security?”

  She shook her head. “Archival materials can’t be electronically tagged, since it damages them, and we aren’t allowed to have cameras in library areas used by patrons because of privacy issues. Given that, our security arrangements were and are the best we can do. And the truth is, no security setup stops thieves.” She seemed to feel Boussicault might want to challenge her on this, because she continued, “Let me give you an example. Three years ago we switched over to our new ordering system. Now it’s all done digitally. Patrons log on to the system with their identification numbers, tick a box to show which reading room they’re using, and make requests by clicking on the items they want in our electronic catalog. Bon. A year ago the library received a phone call from a Dr. Charlotte Loftus from Widdowson University, Jerilderie, Australia.” Seeing the captain’s surprise at this total recall, she held up a finger. “You’ll see why I remember. Dr. Loftus’s university is very penny-pinching. If they fund a research trip, they demand a list of all the items consulted on that trip, to be sure the researcher did as they said they would. So Dr. Loftus accessed her Bibliothèque account to print out a list of her requests, and what did she discover but that, unbeknownst to her, she seems to have ordered a number of volumes of very hard-core gay pornography from our Jean Genet collection. Dr. Loftus’s area of study, I should explain, is the connection between late Latin and French cognates in the eighth and ninth centuries. After some discussion with a system technician, she acknowledged that yes, she may have forgotten to log out of the computer terminal after she placed her request for materials. Someone used her identification number, then simply lifted the items off her trolley when they came and used them him- or herself. Nothing was stolen, but …” She raised her hands. “There is always forgetfulness, someone memorizing someone else’s card number, human error … We can only do our best and then hope.”

  “And the Bibliothèque’s administrators agreed with you? They suggested no changes after the first theft?”

  “Well—”

  For the first time, Rachel saw the doctor look flustered.

  “I didn’t tell them.” She put her hands over her face again. When she removed them, she had aged ten years. “It seemed to me at the time that there really wasn’t anything to be achieved by reporting it to those higher up. As I say, if we publicized the theft or drew any notice to it, there was every chance that the Bibliothèque’s reputation would suffer. Our particular department would come under extra scrutiny that would almost certainly complicate our ability to do our job. So I decided to say nothing to anyone outside this department. We agreed among ourselves that we wouldn’t say anything, but that we would increase our vigilance and watch the patrons more closely.” She shook her head. “After a couple of weeks I realized I had made a bad decision, but by then … well, I would have had to explain not only that the page was missing but why I had decided not to say anything immediately. And, look at me.” She gestured at her face. “I am the only person of my color who is a department head here. And I am the first. I have had to be the best in my cohort—twice the best—all through my training and career. What would be the result if I admitted that I had allowed something to be stolen from my reading room? That I had allowed something to be stolen and then kept quiet about it?” Her voice caught as she added, “Now, of course, it will all come out.”

  The capitaine waited a respectful moment, then turned to LouLou. “And you knew about this?”

  She nodded. “We all knew.” Then she clarified. “Except Rachel. She wasn’t here then.”

  Boussicault appeared to consult the small notebook he now drew from his pocket. “So by we you mean you, Monsieur Giles Morel, and the unfortunate Monsieur Laurent?”

  LouLou nodded again, although her lips moved slightly at this description of Laurent.

  “And you all concurred with Docteure Dwamena’s decision?”

  “Yes. Well …”

  The capitaine waited, then prompted, “Well, what?”

  LouLou suddenly looked uncomfortable; Docteure Dwamena took over. “We did all agree at first. But then Guy Laurent … It was not in Monsieur Laurent’s nature to be loyal. I mentioned to your brigadier his unpleasantness in this area. He didn’t say anything about my decision for a few months, but then he began … poking.”

  “Excusez-moi?”

  “He started to make little comments. He said that it seemed to him that the theft showed I was growing lax. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening in the reading room. Apparently, I wasn’t able to take the appropriate security precautions for the current climate. Did I think it might be time to step down? When I didn’t give in, he began saying his conscience was bothering him.” She gave a little snort at that idea. “He said he had begun to feel it was wrong to keep the theft from the administration, that he was starting to believe it would ease his mind to tell them what had been stolen and what I had done about it. In other words”—she cocked her head to one side—“he never said it straight out, but he made it clear that he wanted to be head of the department, and if I wouldn’t move aside he would push me.”

  “A very unpleasant man,” Boussicault remarked.

  LouLou made a small noise, but Docteure Dwamena simply said, “Yes. Although he could be pleasant when it suited his ends.”

  “I see.” A pause, then he became crisp. “Now, can you tell me who has been working in your archive over the past few days?”

  Docteure Dwamena nodded. Obviously relieved, she smiled and said to LouLou, “Could you bring me the slips?” As LouLou left the room, she explained, “Each time a patron requests a book, our computer prints a slip with the patron’s name, number, and request on two identical halves. One half goes in the requested book, and we retain the souche. We order them and file them away as backup for our records.”

  So that was the work LouLou fell behind on, Rachel thought.

  A
s if to prove her right, LouLou reappeared with a shallow box that held an untidy jumble of printed slips. Docteure Dwamena began sorting through them; Rachel thought she had never seen hands move so fast. After a few seconds she had a small pile. She tapped it sharply against her desktop and reached for her reading glasses.

  “Right. So now I can tell you that today the reading room has been used by an Aurora Dale and a Dr. Robert Cavill, both of Cambridge, England, and a Homer Stibb from Tennessee in the United States.”

  Rachel felt an unexpected leap of pride: Americans used the Bibliothèque Nationale!

  Docteure Dwamena looked at the capitaine over her glasses. “If you give me perhaps an hour, I can tell you if each reader has been here longer than just today, and if so, how long.”

  “No, thank you, that won’t be necessary at the moment. But I would like to see—” He glanced at his watch and made a noise of irritation. “It’s past closing time. In that case, please give my brigadier their contact information, so he can get in touch with them to arrange interviews. But I would like to speak to Monsieur Morel, assuming he is still here.”

  “Of course. He’s probably closing up the reading room. LouLou can easily switch with him.”

  As if she took the announcement as an order, LouLou slipped out of the office. Rachel sat quiet; it seemed they had forgotten her, and she wasn’t going to help them remember her.

  A moment later, Giles came in, smoothing his beard nervously even as he tried to look nonchalant. He sat in the chair LouLou had vacated.

  The capitaine smiled. “I assume Madame Fournier told you that I am here about a mutilated book.”

  Giles nodded sadly. “Yes.” His voice was resigned. “I know. I already knew.”

  “Pardonnez-moi,” Boussicault broke in. “I should have clarified. I’m not speaking of the mutilation last year. There has been a more recent theft.”