“What did he buy?” I asked.
“He bought a first edition in English of Les Misérables. As I’m sure you must know if you figured out that he came here. And I am impressed at your detective work. There is a special word in English for that, but I have forgotten it.”
“Sleuthing.”
“Yes, ‘sleuthing.’ I am impressed at your sleuthing.”
“Why does a hat store sell rare books?” Jenna asked.
“Ah, this is a very good question. It has to do with history.”
“What history?”
“The history of a small Catholic church in this city. Not the big one that everyone goes to. But the small one, tucked away, that has almost no congregation left.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “This is a church where a wayward priest once upon a time collected first editions of the works of Victor Hugo.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“Many years ago, my father acquired these books, and my family has been selling them off one by one over the years, as a kind of income-generating asset. Would you like to see those that remain?”
“Perhaps.” I looked at Jenna, who shook her head in the negative. “I guess not right now.”
“May I try on a hat?” Jenna asked.
“Of course. This is a hat store.”
Jenna walked over and picked a black bowler from one of the heads and put it on her head at a jaunty angle. “How does this look?”
“Well,” he said, “it is a man’s hat, but it looks not bad.”
“Is there a mirror I can use?”
“Yes, of course. It is toward the back and around that little corner there.”
“I will be right back.”
While we waited for Jenna to admire herself in some distant mirror, we continued talking.
“This woman you are with is a bit strange, is she not?”
“At times, yes.”
Jenna returned and said, “When we are done I think I will buy the hat. It becomes me. But in the meantime, I have another question about these rare books you sell.”
“Yes?”
“How did your father acquire them?”
“Well, by the same means that many great fortunes are initially acquired. He stole them.”
“Won’t someone want them back if they find out?”
“I don’t know who would have a claim on them, frankly. The priest who collected them is dead almost a hundred years, and I have made sure that there is no record of him left in the church archives.”
“Wait,” I said. “Did you know that the edition our friend bought has a personal inscription from Victor Hugo to Charles Dickens?”
“Yes, of course I know that. An inscription that is almost certainly a forgery. As is the little sketch that purports to be a self-portrait of Hugo, although when they were forged is unclear to me.”
“You have no idea?”
“The most intriguing theory is that it was forged by Victor Hugo’s son, who was a great French translator. Perhaps as a joke, or perhaps to sell to some gullible British person to make money. There is no way to know.”
“So Oscar was aware that you thought it was fake?”
“Oh yes. But for some reason he wanted it anyway and was willing to pay more than I think it is truly worth.”
“And you sold it to him at that price despite your view that it contains a forged inscription and drawing?”
“Of course. If a man wants to pay you the price of a diamond for a potato, why would you not accept?”
“Are you aware that Monsieur Quesana has been kidnapped?”
He shrank back. “No. Is this true?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so, and it seems to have to do with this book he bought from you.”
“I am truly shocked at this. Truly shocked. And I now fear I may have had something to do with it.”
“Explain, please.”
“After your friend bought the book and took it away, a few days later another man appeared—a Russian—and he, too, wanted to buy this book. I told him I had already sold it.”
“And?”
“And he insisted that I tell him the name of the buyer.”
“Did you?”
“Well, to do so would have been unethical. In the book trade, one cannot do such a thing unless one has the permission of the buyer. Some people like to keep the nature of their collections private.”
“But you did anyway, didn’t you?”
“The Russian gentleman made it difficult to refuse.”
“With money?”
“No, with an assistant who sported a pair of brass knuckles.”
He rubbed his chin. I didn’t know if that meant that he’d been hit, and that it was still healing, or if it meant that even now he felt the threat.
He raised his left hand as if he were being sworn in, left-handed, on a witness stand. “But I had no idea, I swear, that this Russian would turn to illegal means to acquire the book. Oscar had said to me he planned to sell it, and so I thought perhaps the Russian would be a buyer from him.”
“Did you give him Oscar’s address?”
“Yes, I gave him Monsieur Quesana’s business card. I assumed he would make Monsieur Quesana an offer to purchase it from him. I assumed that Monsieur Quesana would at that point be pleased to rid himself of what he had presumably concluded by then was a fake.”
“That was very generous of you,” I said. “By the way, did you pay the government the value added tax on that transaction?”
“I have not yet filed my tax returns for that sales period.”
“I see.”
There seemed something wrong with the story, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “What did the Russian guy look like?”
“He was short and fat and almost bald.”
“Like Khrushchev?”
“I am too young to remember Khrushchev.”
“Ah, no doubt true. I always forget how much of history has gone away.”
“Well, if you have no further business with me, I need to get going. And you may consider the hat to be a gift, Madame.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to see the collection?”
“No,” I said. “I think we have learned what we came to learn, and we thank you for your candor.”
He backed up a few steps, pulled a gun from his left pocket and pointed it at us. “I’m afraid I have to insist that you inspect the collection. Move toward the back of the store now, slowly.”
I looked at him carefully, trying to decide if we could take him without being shot. I concluded that the answer was no. Plus his hand was shaking. That suggested he didn’t normally use a gun, and people with no experience with firearms are even more likely to shoot you. My hand was shaking, too, which showed that beneath what I hoped was a calm exterior, I was scared out of my mind.
Jenna was already moving toward the back, and I followed.
“Stop there.”
We did. He moved to one side of us, still pointing the gun, and, with his right hand, which was also shaking, reached down and pulled aside a throw rug. Beneath it was a metal ring set into the floor. He reached down and pulled up on it, although he seemed to wince as he did so. A trapdoor opened, and a spring-loaded, segmented wooden ladder, attached to the trapdoor by some kind of trip cord, unfolded downward, its bottom hitting on the floor below with a bang.
“Take your cell phones out of your pockets and place them on the floor.”
We did as he asked.
“Now, Madame, please take off that hat and lay it on the floor next to the trapdoor. There’s no point in losing a good hat.”
Jenna complied.
“Now climb down the ladder. If either one of you tries to run or does a
nything funny, I will shoot both of you.”
We climbed down the rickety ladder into a dimly lit basement, whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books.
“I hope you will enjoy the collection while you are down there. You will not be there long, though. There are some people who I suspect want to talk to you. And I apologize, but the light switch is up here. I think it better that you stay in the dark.”
He closed the trapdoor, which blotted out almost all light. I heard rather than saw the ladder snap upward, and then the snick of a lock of some kind being closed. A few minutes later, I heard the very faint jingle of the bell on the front door as he left.
“Well, Jenna, good thing he doesn’t know you can pick locks. I’m sure that, even in the dark, you can have us out of here in no time.” It was a statement of hope more than logic, used to stave off my growing fear that we weren’t going to get out of this alive.
“Robert, that was the sound of a long metal bolt being slid through a u-shaped piece of metal on the other side of the trapdoor. In locksmith jargon, the u-shaped piece is called a staple. It’s a primitive from of deadbolt. I saw one on the outside of the trapdoor when he opened it. It can’t be picked from the dead side, which is where we are.”
I was silent. Finally, I said, “Why did you try on the hat?”
“A crazy person just locked us in a basement and you’re asking about the hat?”
“I’m trying to keep my fear at bay by engaging in small talk.”
“I used the time when I was out of sight at the mirror to send a short text to Tess telling her I thought we might be in trouble. I told her if she did not hear from us in an hour, to come to this address and bring the police and a dog that could find us. The clothes that are left in our room should have our scent on them.”
“You put all of that in a short text?”
“You don’t text much, do you?”
“No.”
“Trust me, it was short.”
“Well, in any case, it’s very good you did tell her to come look for us.”
“Yes, but we may not have an hour. We may be dead in less than that.”
“Why were you suspicious? He seemed kind of nutty but harmless.”
“Because he used his left hand to do things, and he seemed awkward at it, as if he were actually right-handed but for some reason couldn’t use his right hand. And then I looked carefully at his right hand and saw that the ring finger of his glove was flopping loose. There was clearly no finger inside it.”
“So?”
“There was also what looked to me like dried blood that had soaked through the base of the glove’s ring finger.”
“How do you know what dried blood looks like?”
“I worked in a hospital OR one summer during college. And I was a little kid once, weren’t you?”
“I guess. But with the blood, you think . . .”
“That the finger we received in the box was his.”
“We need to get out of here.”
“No kidding.”
CHAPTER 29
After a few minutes, Jenna said, “I don’t think we’re going to have a problem. I just remembered that I have a second cell phone. It’s in my purse. It’s the one I carry in the US. When I got to France, I rented a local one at the airport so I wouldn’t have to pay the outrageous roaming charges.”
“Great!”
“Yeah. If that guy had been a pro he would have searched my purse, but he didn’t.”
I watched as she rummaged in her purse, found the cell, turned it on and waited for it to power up.
“Shit. The battery’s dead.”
“Try shaking it. Sometimes that works.”
She shook it, hard.
“Didn’t work.”
“Try taking the battery out and putting it back in.”
She tried that, too.
“Still dead. I guess we have to try Plan B.”
“Which is?”
“I wish I knew.”
By that time, my eyes had fully adapted to the dark. I could see a bit better by the small beam of light that leaked through the crack between the ceiling and the trapdoor. What I saw didn’t help much. Just books and more books. Nothing with which we could try to ram the trapdoor and break the hardware that held the deadbolt in place.
“We need to look around,” I said.
The basement was in an “L” shape. We could see a bit in the part we were standing in. When we rounded the corner into the other section, it was pitch black. We felt our way around the walls and found nothing but books. Finally, though, I did come to a closet of some sort. It was unlocked and I opened it. I couldn’t see anything inside.
“I don’t want to go in,” I said. “There could be a pit or something, and it smells bad.”
“I could go,” Jenna said.
“I don’t think you should. We can’t afford for either of us to be injured.”
“Okay.” We returned to the area under the trapdoor, sat down on the concrete floor and talked through various means of escape, rejecting one after the other as impractical. Every time there was a small noise, we both jumped, thinking it was the owner coming back with his gun. At least an hour went by with no solution found. I started to sweat and began to understand what the smell of fear meant.
Periods of talking through solutions—and one discussion of how to disarm the store owner if he came back alone—began to be replaced with periods of resigned silence. My sweat had begun to turn cold, and I was starting to shiver. Suddenly, Jenna said, “I have an idea that might work.”
“Which is?”
“Give me one of your shoe laces.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Just give it to me.”
I bent down, unlaced my right shoe, pulled out the shoelace and handed it to her.
“Oh, good, it’s one of those flat, unpolished stiff ones from your lawyer shoes. I knew you male lawyers wore those ugly shoes for some good reason.”
“I’ll ask again. What are you going to do with it?”
“Here’s my idea. If I can get up to the bottom of the trapdoor, I think I’ll be able to see a little piece of the long bolt that runs across the crack that the light’s coming through. Then I can wrap the shoelace around the bolt and rotate it by pulling the ends of the shoelace back and forth, like we used to do in camp when we were twisting a stick back and forth between our palms to try to make a fire.”
“Won’t that just leave it in place?”
“Maybe, but if I lean and pull in one direction while I rotate it, maybe it will eventually slide in that direction, away from the U-bolt that’s holding it down. I only got a quick glance at it, but it looks as if it’s the simplest kind—a straight rod with a right-angled handle that just pushes the rod into a U-bolt. Usually, the right-angled handle would be locked down in some way on one end, but I think the piece that locks it down must have broken off because I didn’t see it.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have frequent occasion to lock people in his basement.”
She laughed. “Yeah. Or maybe he does, considering that the ladder won’t come down when you’re down here and the trapdoor is closed.”
I heard a sudden scraping noise somewhere behind me. It snapped my head around. Jenna must have heard it, too, because she, too, turned her head abruptly. We both stood stock-still and listened. It didn’t recur.
“Probably a rat in the wall,” I said.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Back to your idea. It’s clever, Jenna. It might work.”
“The only problem is that I have to get up to the ceiling.”
“It’s a really low ceiling,” I said. I stood up, raised up on my toes and stretched my hands over my head as far as they would go. “I can almost touch it.”
“Maybe I can stand on a pile of books,” she said. “Or maybe you could, since you’re taller.”
We both turned and began to pull books off the shelves. “Let’s try to find the thick ones,” I said.
After a couple of minutes, we had created two piles of thick books, set up side-by-side so there’d be more area to stand on. We placed them right beneath the trapdoor. Jenna climbed on top and reached up. “I can just barely touch my fingers to the bottom of the trapdoor, but I’m not close enough to thread the shoelace around the bolt.”
“Can you reach the ladder and somehow unsnap it so it folds down again?”
“No.”
“Maybe I can reach either it or the bolt,” I said.
She jumped down, handed me the shoelace, and we switched places. I was at least six inches taller than Jenna, and once on top of the books, I was easily able to touch the ceiling, although I couldn’t unlatch the ladder, which was secured in a clever way that defeated all of my attempts to lower it.
I focused instead on the bolt, which I could see clearly through the crack. After a couple of tries, I was able to thread the shoelace through the crack and around the bolt, then wrap it around a second time so that when I pulled it tight, it had captured the shaft in its grip. I began to saw it back and forth, using both hands to rotate it, while leaning slightly to the right so that as the shaft rotated it would pull itself away from the U-bolt that was holding it in place. Which is when I fell.
Jenna managed to break my fall, and although I banged my elbow on the floor, I didn’t seem otherwise hurt.
“This isn’t working,” Jenna said. “The book stack is too unstable. And we can’t afford for you to fall again.”
“Obviously.”
“How strong are you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I go to the gym three times a week and lift weights. Plus I work out on a spinner bike.”
“Maybe I can sit on your shoulders and reach the trapdoor that way.”
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