“I—” Giles began, but the capitaine hadn’t finished.
“Madame Fournier discovered a page removed from this book.” He gestured at Docteure Dwamena’s desk. “The, ah, Supplementum Chronicarum, I believe?” He cast a glance at the doctor, who nodded.
“The Supplementum Chronicarum?” Giles blanched beneath his beard. “There is a page missing from the Supplementum—” He stopped short. When he began again, his voice was more restrained. “But that’s terrible. Who would do such a thing? What page is missing?”
“A woodcut,” said the capitaine, just as Docteure Dwamena said, “ ‘The Creation of Eve.’ ”
“ ‘The Creation of Eve!’ But that’s the most—Why would someone do that?”
Looking at the expression on Giles’s face, Rachel thought, So he values books as well as Lou Lou. Her heart warmed toward him a little more.
“You tell me,” Boussicault answered him a trifle wearily. “You work with books.”
“The capitaine thinks the thief may be one of our patrons,” Docteure Dwamena explained.
“Yet they love books.” Giles’s expression changed from shocked to thoughtful.
“Never underestimate the power of love to prompt wrongdoing, Monsieur.” Boussicault stood. “I will interview the patrons whose names you gave me as soon as I can arrange it,” he said to Docteure Dwamena, “and then I’ll get back in touch. But now I must go and write my initial report.” He gave her a small smile. “I think I need not mention the earlier disappearance.”
She smiled in return and pushed her chair back. “Thank you. Now please allow me to walk you out. It would be my pleasure. I could show you some of our treasures on the way.”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “You’re a busy woman, and I don’t want to take you away from your work. If your volunteer shows me out, we can discuss what she might have seen.”
* * *
“What are you doing here?” Rachel listened to the soles of his shoes squeak against the marble floor as they walked toward the exit.
“I was at the commissariat when it was called in, and since I’m head of the murder investigation, I thought I was the natural choice to look into this.”
“Do you think Laurent’s murder is connected to this?”
He shrugged. “I have no way to judge at the moment. Docteure Dwamena’s explanation tells me that thefts from libraries are common, and I have no reason to doubt her, although of course I’ll check up on that. Laurent didn’t find this book, obviously, and our only piece of evidence, your piece of paper, is so far inconclusive.” He shook his head. “In fact, the only link I can see to Laurent’s murder is that we seem to have picked up another suspect, given what the doctor told us about his behavior toward her.”
And given that the piece of paper seemed to suggest blackmail and her story suggested she would be an excellent blackmail victim, Rachel added silently. But she wasn’t going to present Boussicault with her ideas about the notebook page until she was more certain she was right. Instead she said, “But would a murderer really tell a story that revealed their own motive?”
“You’d be surprised what a murderer would do. She’s a very intelligent woman; she could be trying a counterintuitive strategy.”
They had reached the main entrance. He turned to face her. “Do you have anything to report, or shall I expect you on Friday as usual?”
Rachel remembered. “Docteure Dwamena asked me to work in the reading room over the next few weeks. August is their busy season. She asked me to take Laurent’s place.”
The capitaine frowned. “Not entirely a bad idea. Potentially more useful, in fact, since it brings you into closer contact. But I’ll have to check with my superiors first, and Raida, of course. I’ll let you know later tonight.” He held out his right hand and smiled. “Now let us shake hands in case anyone is watching.”
Chapter Twelve
Rachel hated the Châtelet–Les Halles Mètro station. She hated it viscerally and profoundly, with a passion she usually reserved for nylon clothing, basic punctuation errors, and people who said passed instead of died. The source of her loathing lay deep underground, in the long tunnel through which passengers needed to walk in order to change lines. Rachel felt that any Mètro stop that required its users to make their way further than three hundred yards in tunnels was in fact two Mètro stops, or possibly more, and she felt this most keenly when she stood at rush hour on one of the Châtelet–Les Halles tunnel’s moving walkways, sweating in the oppressive air with a thousand other people trying to get home.
Today she tried to distract herself by thinking about what had just happened at the Bibliothèque. Was book theft so common that two thieves might operate in the same library? Or were book thieves so devoted to certain libraries that one might wait a year to strike again in the same place? And how on earth could Guy Laurent’s murder connect to Machiavelli’s speeches and the Supplementum Chronicarum?
“Supplementum Chronicarum,” she suddenly said aloud. “SC!”
The yarmulke-wearing young man in front of her turned around, and she smiled apologetically, then folded her lips between her teeth to keep herself from crowing out loud. The SC on Laurent’s sheet of paper could stand for Supplementum Chronicarum! And could M/F simply stand for Machiavelli en Français? What if Laurent had figured out the identity of the people who’d stolen the engravings and had been blackmailing them? And what if one of them killed him for it?
She burst out of the tunnel onto her Mètro platform. Normally she stayed on the train for as long as possible, basking in the air conditioning, but tonight she left two stops before it reached her stop at Notre-Dame des Champs. There was no wireless service in the Mètro, and she could wait no longer. This evening she had no desire to stand silent before Paris. Instead she walked with her head bowed and the side of a thumb stroking the screen, researching prices at an online bookseller and finding her way home by occasional glances and muscle memory.
As soon as she was in the apartment, she turned on her computer. She typed WWW.VITALIBRORUM.COM into the browser search bar; while the page loaded, she opened the narrow center drawer of her desk and took out the photocopy of Laurent’s sheet. THE LARGEST ONLINE MARKET FOR RARE BOOKS, the screen now said. Underneath that sentence were thick blocks of text, sometimes flanked by tiny photos of books. She clicked on one of these, and a larger version of the text and the photo appeared.
“Yeah, baby,” she said to the empty room. What she had in front of her was a precise description of a book, right down to the discoloration on page twenty-two, and a row of photos to match. At the bottom was a price in a blue box, another in a red box, and a third in a white box. Just what she’d managed to access on her phone, only large enough to read.
She heard the door open as Alan arrived home from work. “I know what the letters mean!” she called.
He appeared behind her left shoulder. “Huh?”
“The letters on Guy Laurent’s sheet! I figured out what they mean.”
“Oh, right.” He bent over her and put his hand on the desk.
“Look.” She pointed out the screen. “This is the website of an online clearinghouse for antiquarian books. So here”—she scrolled up for a second—“is a listing for a manuscript of the Processional à l’usage des Dominicaines de Saint-Louis-de-Poissy.” She made a face to show she had no idea what that was. “Published in the fifteenth century. And here’s the price.” She scrolled down a little and pointed again. “Thirty-three thousand euros direct from a single seller. But here”—she scrolled back up—“is Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and there are three prices: two thousand euros, two thousand five hundred, and one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. That’s because there are three different sellers; it’s showing the prices of three possible places you can buy it. Now look here.”
She pointed to one of the scrawled lines of numbers on the photocopy.
“Here’s 123899, followed by 122500, followed by 122999. If you read these as pri
ces, they’d be one hundred twenty-three thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine euros; one hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred euros; and one hundred twenty-two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine euros. Three different prices, but very close together, like with the Mozart. I think these are book prices. I think he was looking up books to see how much they were worth. And I think these”—this time she pointed to the letters on the bottom two lines—“are his abbreviations of two book titles. It turned out today that someone had stolen an illustration from a book called the Supplementum Chronicarum.” She moved the pad of her index finger next to the SC. “And a year ago one had gone missing from a French translation of Machiavelli’s speeches.” Now she pressed it next to M/F.
“I think these numbers are his calculations of how much he could get from the person who stole those pages. He started with the price of the books, or books like them, tried to figure out how much the loss of an engraving might lower the value, and then tried to calculate how much he could ask for from the thieves for keeping quiet.”
“Thief,” Alan said.
“What?”
“I’d say it’s one thief. You wouldn’t add up the numbers and bracket them if you were dealing with two different people. Still”—he kissed the side of her neck and started to walk away—“good job. Now I have to go shower. Walk-home sweat is the worst kind of sweat.”
Rachel sat alone in front of the computer. “Good job,” and then a shower? What kind of reaction was that? There was supposed to be an exchange of proud glances, an acknowledgment of Rachel’s craftiness, a silent agreement that they were a match for any police force. With Magda there would have been all of those. She knew Alan felt them, but—well, somehow it wasn’t the same.
Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday morning was unexpectedly cool, the sky overcast. Rachel shoved her red umbrella into her bag as she left the apartment, but by the time she arrived at the Bibliothèque the sun had come out and she could feel the temperature beginning to climb once more. She had phoned Docteure Dwamena after she’d arrived home the previous evening to let her know that she wanted to accept her offer, and now they stood together in the empty reading room, waiting for LouLou to appear so Rachel’s training could begin.
“Where is she?” Docteure Dwamena consulted her sliver of a watch. “She’s been coming in early recently. I expected her to be here by now.”
Rachel shrugged. “Maybe she’s ill?”
“Maybe, although I would expect her to call to let me know.” Docteure Dwamena frowned. “If she doesn’t arrive in the next few minutes, I’ll pair you with Giles. Of course he’s late, too. As usual. No doubt lingering over a coffee at that little hole-in-the-wall he likes on the Rue Chabanais, talking to the barman about poetry. Although he said something about not going there anymore since Laurent—” She realized she was talking out loud and stopped.
So Giles had spent a lot of time at Chez Poule. And Capitaine Boussicault was right again: overhearing could be more useful than asking.
Docteure Dwamena flipped her wrist over to look at her watch a second time. “What on earth is going on with them?” She walked across the room and began flicking on the lights, then unlocked the reading room door.
A bell sounded: the Bibliothèque was open for the day. Rachel heard the sound of sensible soles squeaking on marble, and patrons began to trickle into the reading room. One of them, a man, immediately darted to the computers on the far wall.
“Mon dieu!” Docteure Dwamena moved to stand behind the counter, thinning her lips. “Was there some sort of librarians’ party last night that I didn’t know about? I see we will have to postpone the commencement of your training. I apologize on LouLou’s behalf. I can deal with these people myself for a few minutes, if you’ll collect their requests from the stacks.”
The man began to bear down on the doctor, a sheaf of call slips in his hand. She smiled at him, tore the slips, and handed Rachel her halves.
The History and Wonderful Legend of Catherine of Siena
The Miracles of St. Otto of Bamberg
The Miraculous Visions of Brother William of Felpham
The Life and Miracles of Saint Opportuna
Boy, those medieval writers really loved their miracles. Rachel put out her hand to swing open the door to the stacks.
As her fingertips touched the dark oak a scream split the air, so loud it seemed to tilt the room. Without thinking, she pushed the door all the way open and began running into the stacks. The scream came again and again, each time loud enough to hurt Rachel’s head. Fighting the desire to cover her ears and retreat, she ran through the maze of shelves, trying to find the source of the noise. At last, after what seemed like an eternity but could only have been about a minute, she tracked it to the far depths of the stacks, where one row was lit up, its fluorescent overheads flickering in the gloom. She rounded its corner.
On the floor in front of her sat LouLou, her mouth open, her screams now turning into one long keening yell. She held one hand out in front of her. Its fingers grasped the end of a serrated knife, the blade covered in blood but the handle clean. Lying facedown in front of her, at the center of a red pool that crept slowly toward the hem of her dress, was the body of Giles Morel.
Chapter Fourteen
Two hours later Rachel was in a low-slung white chair in the Bibliothèque’s public lounge, which was now being used as an impromptu conference room and waiting area. In a far corner Capitaine Boussicault and Alan conferred, while here on the other side of the room she waited. In the background various police officers came and went, talking among themselves and making notes on little pads.
Libraries and bodies, Rachel thought. Bodies and libraries. Was this her fate now, to encounter dead bodies in or near libraries? First she had organized Edgar’s library and discovered his son’s corpse in a nearby room, and now there was Giles dead amid the medieval Miracles. Of the two events, she preferred the first—there had been blood everywhere then, too, but it hadn’t been fresh. It hadn’t been moving. She shuddered at the memory of Giles’s blood oozing across the floor.
A shadow fell across her, and she looked up to find Capitaine Boussicault with a plastic cup in his hand.
She smiled. “I hear hot drinks aren’t really a good idea for people in shock.” She knew he’d recognize this reference to their previous case.
Indeed, he lifted the corners of his lips before he responded, “They find drinking difficult, or often they drink too quickly and burn their mouths.” He handed her the cup. “You remember unexpected things.”
“Well, you did say that to me in pretty memorable circumstances.”
“Vraiment.” He bent his head. “But in this case, like the last, I think a cup of tea might be good for you. At the very least, its familiarity will soothe you.” He crouched beside her, his trench coat brushing the floor. He had also dressed for rain, Rachel noticed. Or did he always wear that coat? He’d certainly been wearing it the last time he’d squatted next to her, which was also the last time she’d found a body. Substitute an expensive carpet for the marble floor, and it could have been a year and a half ago all over again.
“You are very brave, Rachel.” Boussicault shook his head. “I know many policemen who wouldn’t run toward a scream.”
“Oh, well.” She felt proud for a moment, then remembered the blood again. She took a gulp of the tea. It was only tepid, but it did soothe her. “Never mind me. How is LouLou?”
He dragged over a chair and sat down, facing her. “At the moment Madame Fournier is resting. She has been sedated.”
“Was she able to tell you what happened?”
He cleared his throat. “According to Madame Fournier, she arrived late for work and was making her way toward the reading room when she encountered Monsieur Morel’s body.”
“That makes s—wait. According to Madame Fournier?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Madame Fournier was found alone at the scene with Morel’s body, holding a kni
fe. She must therefore be treated as a suspect.”
“Oh, no.” Rachel shook her head vehemently. She kept shaking it. “No, no, no. Not LouLou.”
“You yourself told me she was angry at and scared of men, and you told me she complained about Monsieur Morel’s advances.”
“I didn’t say advances.” But she remembered how LouLou had flinched when she’d passed by Giles on the way through the door the previous week. She’d been angry at even the hint of contact with him. Encountering him in the dimness of the stacks, with him perhaps saying or doing something unwelcome … But still, she thought. Slap Giles, yes, maybe even punch him, maybe even scream as she had. But do something savage enough to produce all that blood? She couldn’t believe it. “There must be another explanation, surely. An accident, or …”
“Monsieur Morel was stabbed twice in the chest. That does not suggest an accident.”
“Well, then, maybe … You said Laurent’s death could have been an attack by a stranger, so why not this one, too?” She began to warm to this scenario that might clear LouLou. “Maybe there’s some kind of serial killer on the loose. Someone with a grudge against librarians, or libraries, or rare book research!”
“S’il vous plait.” The capitaine leaned in and put up a hand. “Be calm. A good detective goes slowly.” Go slowly? When a man had been killed and an angry woman was the prime suspect? Maybe Boussicault didn’t know, but Rachel was well aware of how society reacted to female anger.
But the capitaine remained calm. “Don’t try to guess the answer before you are sure you have all the available evidence. Par exemple, I would like to question all those who were at the scene when the murder was discovered.”
“But that’s just LouLou. And me. And you’ve—” Then she got it. “The people in the reading room?”
“And la bonne Docteure Dwamena. My scene-of-the-crime médecin légiste estimates that Morel was killed shortly before the Bibliothèque opened. Those using the reading room could easily have slipped in and out of the group of patrons waiting for the doors to open—or they may have seen someone else do so. These people are our best possible witnesses, and also possible suspects.”
The Books of the Dead Page 8
