Rachel felt Magda tense up. She reached out under the table and put a gentle hand on her arm. She, too, remembered Boussicualt’s assertion that the saliva on Laurent’s neck was too degraded to yield DNA, and she was betting the rest of his statement was equally untrue. But Stibb didn’t necessarily know that.
In the silence Stibb looked down into his lap, then back up again. His eyes moved rapidly back and forth. “Well,” he said finally. “DNA. Well.” He thought for a few seconds more, then swallowed. “Can I get some water? When I’ve had some water, I’ll tell you what happened.”
* * *
When he put down his plastic cup a few minutes later, he closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at Rachel. “Yes, I remove the pages with the string. I get it out of my mouth by coughing, or by pretending to clear my throat.” He mimed bringing a hand up to cover his mouth politely, then switched his focus to Boussicault. “That’s how it began with the first librarian. I coughed, but I was too loud. It caught his attention, and he saw me spit the string into my hand. He kept watching, and eventually he also saw me roll up the page and put it inside my shirt.” He shook his head. “You should really thank me for getting rid of that man. He was loathsome. He watched me do it twice, just to be sure he had enough on me. He didn’t care about the books at all.”
“And he blackmailed you,” Rachel prompted.
“Yes. He called and told me to meet him at that restaurant. When I got there, he told me what he’d seen and demanded a thousand euros not to say anything.” He shrugged. “I don’t have a thousand euros. Well, you know that. I suppose I could have pleaded with him, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to negotiate. He started telling me about other people he’d blackmailed in the past, and how he’d turned them in if they’d refused. It was so unfair!” They jumped at this sudden shout. “He didn’t care about the illustrations one bit, but he expected me to pay him for them? He said he was going to go to the men’s room to give me some time to think. That’s when I realized I still had the string, and it came to me how easy it would be to solve the problem.” He made a little hmm! noise. “And it really was. I just held the string tight around his neck for a few minutes, then paid the bill and left.”
Just like that, Rachel thought. She hadn’t been too far off when she’d imagined the murderer all those weeks ago. “And Giles Morel?” She was genuinely puzzled. What had poor Giles ever done to Stibb?
“Oh, that one! When I handed the psalter back in, he noticed the page was missing. He said he happened to flick through it because he had a spare second. He asked me to come in early the next morning because he wanted to find out the ‘concatenation of circumstances’—that was his phrase—that could bring a man like me to destroy books. But I knew his goal was to get money too. He let me in around back, but then he said he thought we’d be more comfortable in the reading room while we ‘talked.’ ” Stibb made quotation marks in the air on the last word. “And while he was leading me through the stacks, I just—Well, I’d bought a knife the previous evening, thinking I’d slit his throat, but I realized in the moment that if I did that, his blood would get all over the books. So I stabbed him in the chest.” For a moment he looked pleased at his ability to adapt to circumstances, but then he frowned. “Stabbing is a lot more difficult than it looks in the movies. It really takes the breath out of you. I had my mouth open, and my string dropped onto his neck. But I collected it again when I finished, before I wiped the knife handle with my sleeve. I didn’t want the two crimes connected, obviously.” He looked at Boussicault. “So much for that, huh?”
Oh, Giles, Rachel thought. Killed by his own lack of common sense. How could he have thought a thief would stop by for a chat about his theft? Still, death was a harsh punishment for ignorance of human nature. She sighed.
Magda leaned forward. “And then you made up Jean Bernard to confuse things?”
“Yes.”
“But how did you do it?” Rachel broke in. The question had been puzzling her ever since Alan’s explanation that Jean Bernard didn’t exist. “You need an ID number to place book requests.”
“Not exactly.” Stibb looked pleased with himself again. “You need an ID number, and you need a name, but there’s some kind of glitch in the system that means they don’t connect. I found that out one day when I accidentally typed an author’s name into the patron’s name space. So I just typed in the most generic French name I could think of and a number I found when someone forgot to log out.” Rachel raised her eyebrows. She could see how this fault could go unnoticed by the Bibliothèque and its honest patrons, but the library was still going to have some explaining to do.
“Of course, there’s always a risk that the person whose number you’ve stolen might figure it out,” Stibb continued. Shades of Charlotte Loftus, Rachel thought. “So I was irritated when Cavill told me about his debt. I could’ve saved myself the risk. He was scared at that point, and wanted someone to confide in, I think, but obviously the debt made him a great suspect. So I figured, better safe than sorry …”
“And you put the woodcut in his jacket.”
“Mm-hmm. Although that was harder than I thought. I was able to bring the blade in by putting it in my pants cuff, and I avoided the risk of cutting myself by shoving most of it into an eraser I could use as a handle, but I had to move very quickly to pull the whole thing off while he was over at a computer ordering books. I really thought I might not make it. And I did feel bad about it. I loved that woodcut. But I needed to take this illumination home with me.” He gestured toward the plastic envelope. “You can see why.”
Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t see. The page was beautiful, yes, but not as beautiful as the one Madame Murat had shown them. And according to Laurent’s calculations it wasn’t worth much outside its book—certainly not two murders and an innocent man in jail. But she could see from the look in Stibb’s eyes that it enchanted him.
Boussicault must have agreed with Rachel’s assessment of the page, because he said uncomprehendingly, “You did all of this over two pieces of paper. Two illustrations you could have asked to have photographed, or could have found reproductions of in a book.”
Stibb looked at him. His face said plainly that other people were very strange. He gestured at the illumination once again. “Look at this. This was made to bring readers closer to God, to entice them to holiness by means of beauty. Libraries keep things like this shut up in the dark. They make complex rules about who can access them, and where, and for how long.” He barked a laugh. “What kind of lover never looks at his beloved? I look at my illustrations every day—I’d look at them every hour if I could. I feel ecstasy in their presence. I feel what they were made to make men feel. And my love is pure. Someone else might be interested in profit, but I’m not. I want them for themselves. I’ll be struggling financially until the day I die, and I don’t care because my eyes will be filled with beauty.” He took a breath and looked at Boussicault. “Now you tell me: who deserves this beauty if not the man who loves it most?”
All three sat stunned by his sudden eloquence, and in their silence Stibb’s left hand suddenly came to life. He pressed its fingertips down hard on the surface to brace himself, then shot forward. The other three instinctively reeled back for a moment, long enough for him to grab the psalter page. In a blur of movement he shook off its plastic protector.
Boussicault jumped up and stretched his arm across the table, but Stibb simply leaned away. Just out of the capitaine’s reach, he looked at the page for a split second, his face a vision of tender joy. Then he tore a strip from the side with the illumination and stuffed it in his mouth. Raising some saliva with the familiar jerk of his jaw, he swallowed it.
Chapter Forty-Two
“He ate it?” Alan’s voice was disbelieving. “Why?” He, Magda, and Rachel were at a table in Bistrot Vivienne with a bottle of the restaurant’s best rosé in front of them. The women were celebrating; Alan was trying to understand.
“He
didn’t say.” Rachel lifted her shoulders. “In fact, he didn’t say anything. He literally did not speak again, and Boussicault told me this morning that he still hasn’t offered a word of explanation. But my thought is that he wanted to—to make it part of him. He knew he was going to prison for the rest of his life, and that was the only way he could keep what he loved with him.”
“I don’t think it was love,” Magda put in. “I think it was more like addiction. Didn’t you see the way he couldn’t keep his eyes off the page while we were questioning him?”
“But doesn’t an addict love the thing they’re addicted to? They end up needing it, but it all starts with love.”
They considered for a moment. Then Magda turned to Alan. “Actually, eating’s the least of it. After his arrest Stibb gave Boussicault permission to let the Tennessee police go in his house, and they found stacks of illustrations. Hundreds, they said.”
“So he’d been stealing for years?”
“Yes,” Rachel cut in, “but even that’s not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is, they were all in a safe in an empty room.”
“He didn’t even have them on display?” Alan’s tone said, Then what’s the point?
“Not just that. He didn’t have anything on display. Anywhere in the house. All he had were the pages in the safe. And the Tennessee police told Boussicault there was nothing else in the room except a chair. I guess Stibb would just shut the door, open the safe, and sit there looking at them.”
“And he didn’t feel guilty at all about stealing them,” Magda added. “Or about the murders. He really seemed to think the pictures were better off stuffed in a safe in Tennessee with him.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“Well, you got your psychopath,” Alan said to her. “No guilt, convictions of superiority …”
“I guess.” Magda looked disappointed. “But I thought a psychopath would be more unusual. You know, a ruthless murderer, not some skinny guy with dusty aviator glasses.”
“Although he was a murderer in the end,” Rachel pointed out. “His glasses were dusty, but he saw through them well enough to kill two people.”
“I thought it was LouLou.” It was Alan’s turn to shake his head. “You told me that Aurora Dale said she saw LouLou coming out of the bathroom when LouLou said she was in the records room.”
“Yes. But, well, LouLou lied. Boussicault told me he called her to let her know they’d caught the murderer, and she was so relieved that she came clean. She was really scared, because everyone knew she hated Laurent and was jumpy around Giles. She’d gone to wash her hands before going back to the stacks, and she knew how that would look. So she lied and said she was in the record room the whole time until she went into the stacks. She didn’t remember passing Aurora, so she didn’t know Aurora had seen her.”
“People, eh?” said Alan. “They never do the sensible thing. She should’ve just told the truth at the start.”
Magda, disappointed by her psychopath, nodded agreement. “I will never understand the human mind.”
“Ah, the human mind,” Rachel said philosophically. “It is indeed a mystery.” She paused. “For example, sometimes someone seems set. Their path seems secure. You might even say that you know them. But then they change course completely. Well,” she qualified, “not completely. But a lot. Or they begin to. They make a decision to begin changing course.”
Magda stared at her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, sorry, I got a bit lost at the end. Hang on …” Trying to regain the drama, she reached into her bag and took out what looked like a miniature day planner. She put it down in front of Magda.
Magda looked at it. “What’s that?”
“You’re supposed to open it.” She pushed it toward her. “Open it.”
Magda unsnapped it. It opened like a day planner, too, but each of its four pages was made of fabric, and each had a series of slots holding small rods of different shapes and sizes.
Magda was still confused. “You’re going to start training as a dental hygienist?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “It’s a lock-picking kit! The picks all fit different locks! And wait, that’s not all.” She reached into the bag again, this time pulling out a business card that she laid next to the kit.
Alan recited the card aloud. “ ‘Levis and Stevens, Investigatrices.’ ”
“ ‘We are shameless in the service of detection,’ ” Rachel added.
Magda met Rachel’s eyes with her own across the table. Her face was grave. “Stevens and Levis, I think you’ll find.” But the corners of her lips twitched.
Rachel grinned at her. “We can talk about that later.”
A Glossary of Relevant French Words and Phrases
alcool isopropylique—Rubbing alcohol.
apéro—Short for apéritif, a before-dinner drink.
Arsène Lupin—The gentleman thief and amateur detective hero of a series of French early-twentieth-century novels by Maurice Leblanc; Lupin persistently outwits the police inspector chasing him, Ganimard.
Aux armes, citoyens—To arms, citizens. A line from the French national anthem.
bloc-notes—Writing pad.
bonne chance—Good luck.
ça va—Okay.
carte d’identité—Identity card.
chef—Chief, boss.
choucroute—Cabbage with sausages, often also served with other vegetables and potatoes.
Coca Light—The European version of Diet Coke. Although it has the same label and appears identical to the U.S. version, this version has different sweeteners and so tastes noticeably different.
d’acc—A shortened form of d’accord, which means “okay.”
de rien—It’s nothing.
délit—Offense (see “French Law and Police” section on page XXX for an explanation of how this differs from a crime in France).
un escroc—A swindler.
ecoutez-moi—Listen to me.
eh, bien—Oh, well.
enculé—Motherfucker.
excusez-moi—Excuse me.
fils de putain—Son of a whore.
flic—Policeman.
hein—Huh.
un honneur—An honor.
immédiatement—Immediately.
la bonne—The good. It can also be used for men (“le bon”) and is the equivalent of saying, for example, “The good Dr Kildare has cured her wounds.” It is used to express exaggerated politeness for charming effect, which is very French.
les vacances—Vacation.
mais bien sûr—Of course (literally, “but of course”).
mais oui—Of course (literally, “but yes”).
maître des conferences—The equivalent of an American assistant professor.
mec—Guy.
médecin légiste—Medical examiner.
métier—Area of expertise.
par exemple—For example.
pardonnez-moi—Pardon me.
patron—Owner, boss.
plage—Beach. Every summer Paris turns a stretch of the banks of the Seine into an urban beach by covering them in sand.
portable—Cell phone.
portefeuille—Wallet.
Ressources Humaines—Human Resources.
resto—Short for restaurant.
rillettes—A coarse terrine.
salaud—Bastard.
SAMU—The emergency medical services (Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente).
séjour—Living room.
s’il vous plait—Please.
souche—Counterfoil, one of two identical halves of a receipt or slip of paper.
tabac—A shop or café that sells cigarettes and other tobacco products.
tarte flambée—a French tart with a very thin crust that is piled with cheese, onion, and bacon, then baked in an oven.
tapis roulant—Conveyor belt.
tiens—Wait.
urgences générales—The emergency room.
Vélib’—One of Paris�
��s rentable public bicycles.
vraiment—Truly.
French Law and Police
French law recognizes three kinds of illegal offenses: crime, délit, and contravention. A crime would be a felony (such as murder) in the United States; a délit would be a misdemeanor. Murder is a crime; stealing a page from an antique book is a délit and would only earn a relatively short sentence (up to five years) and/or a fine. A contravention, which doesn’t come up in this book, is a minor infraction—although it still results in a hefty fine.
Below are police ranks with rough American equivalents:
gardien—roughly equivalent to a police officer
brigadier—roughly equivalent to a sergeant
capitaine—roughly equivalent to a detective
A Word About First-Name Usage
The French remain refreshingly formal when it comes to names. In professional relationships such as the one between Capitaine Boussicault and Rachel, neither party would dream of calling the other by his or her first name without receiving permission. Younger people would not call older people by their first names unless invited to do so, and employees would not call their superiors by their first names unless invited to do so. People of the same age working at the same level may use first names, but it helps if—as when LouLou first meets Rachel—someone clarifies that the familiarity is acceptable.
Also available by Emilia Bernhard
Death in Paris
Author bio
Emilia Bernhard is an American living in England. She’s imagined being an actress, a wedding planner, a spy, and a liberal icon, but she’s only ever dreamt of being a novelist. Born in Philadelphia, she lived in Iowa, Massachusetts, Arkansas, London, Cambridge, and Exeter before settling in Bristol, where she lives with her cat, Robert Southey.
The Books of the Dead Page 23
