The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  “Or a resting actress looking for something to do between jobs.” Rachel pictured herself in a black turtleneck and leggings, reading Jean Genet on her lunch break and talking about the Theatre of Cruelty. That seemed like a good persona for a library. She could discourse knowledgeably about the Theatre of Cruelty, if she could just remember which one it was—did it come before or after Theatre of the Absurd? Or did they overlap? She foresaw a weekend spent on the Internet.

  “No,” Alan said again. “None of those are any good. A version of you. You need something like you, but not exactly you. The best lies are the ones that stick most closely to the truth. If you say you’re a ballerina filling time between performances, then you’ll have to remember everything that goes along with being a ballerina, and that makes the risk of forgetting very high. Plus, if they decide to look you up on the web, you’re in trouble. What you need to do is design a life close to your own but with all the memorable details taken out. So you live in the sixth in an apartment, but don’t mention that you’re a poet. And you have a husband, but he’s not more like a god than a man …”

  Rachel laughed, but she was impressed. She often found her husband’s common sense irritating, but sometimes she saw how useful it was. He really could be quite an asset, she thought—the Bosley to her and Magda’s Charlie’s Angels.

  Magda turned back to Rachel, “So … what would you do if you weren’t a poet?”

  “I don’t know.” Rachel thought of all the jobs she’d imagined having when the writing was going badly—shop girl, baker, costume restorer, hand model—and then of the only full-time employment she’d ever actually had. “I guess I’d work for a caterer?”

  “I think we’re a little too old to be cater waiters anymore.” Magda tapped her dessert spoon on the table thoughtfully. “But something to do with catering …”

  * * *

  As they were undressing later, Rachel asked Alan, “What’s your problem with Susan Vandeventer?”

  He snorted. “You say that like she’s a real person.”

  “Okay, what’s your problem with the name Susan Vandeventer? I think it’s the perfect alias; it’s unlikely enough to be real, and classy enough to keep people from enquiring further. But you’ve never liked it.”

  He draped his shirt on the valet and turned to face her. “It’s just … It’s a ridiculous name. Who could forget ‘Susan Vandeventer’? It’s like calling yourself … I don’t know … Crystal Farnsworth, or … Ginevra Higginbotham. The goal of an alias is to make you go unnoticed. So if you want an effective one, it should be something easy to forget. Like Jane Smith, or Susan Davis. Or if it has to be French … uh …” He thought for a second. “Jeanne Martin.”

  “Jeanne Martin!” Rachel’s tone made it clear what she thought of this simplistic effort. But as she got into bed, she thought, Score another one for Bosley.

  Chapter Five

  When Rachel arrived at the Bibliothèque the next day, she was a married woman living in the sixth arrondissement who was trying to build a catering business. Her husband, a lawyer at a successful firm, worked long hours, and she’d decided to do some volunteering while she waited for the catering to take off. At college in America she’d majored in drama (“There you go,” said Magda comfortingly), but she’d worked in the university library to support herself. That was long ago, though (here, she imagined, she would give a little self-deprecating laugh; she spent her walk to the library practicing it in her head), so she had a lot to learn now.

  Given the fully rounded back story she had ready, she was a little irritated when the first question anyone asked her was, “You’re Jewish?”

  “Yes.” Turning from her newly assigned locker, she nodded at Giles Morel. “Yes, I am.”

  “I thought so.” He looked pleased. “Rachel Levis sounded Jewish. And your accent sounds American.” She nodded again, and he looked pleased again. “American Jews are cool.” The word was English, but he pronounced it with the French intonation: kuhl. “American Jewish authors have really influenced me. Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut … really questioning the imposed norms.”

  Who was she to tell him that Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t Jewish? Rachel thought. He was in enough trouble if he thought Norman Mailer questioned norms. Instead she said, “You’re a novelist?”

  “Mais bien sûr!” As if it should have been obvious. “Although maybe not what you think of when you think of a novelist. I really distrust the givens of the form—well, of all form, really. I want to interrogate writing even as I write. Imagine a mixture of Georges Perec and Michel Houellebecq.” He slid his eyes toward her quickly to see if she appreciated the names.

  “Huh,” Rachel said. She had difficulty imagining how anyone could combine French literature’s most puckish writer and its most tedious satirist, but again, she wasn’t going to say anything. She was there merely to observe and report.

  “Yeah, not easy.” Giles nodded. “But both of them leave so much undone, you know? I like to think my work pushes their approaches into new territory. I’m writing a novel novel.”

  He guffawed loudly and opened his mouth to continue, but Docteure Dwamena appeared in the doorway behind him. “Good morning! They just opened the doors, so we better get out there.”

  As she turned away, Giles rolled his eyes. “Okay, Maman.” He looked back at Rachel. “She’s always trying to control us. We’ll have to talk later about my influences.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, there was no later. Rachel was kept busy all day, except for a lunch break she spent sitting in the park across the road trying to gather her strength. The Rare Books and Manuscripts reading room was a light-filled square, its white walls and long windows set high in the walls providing illumination without the sun’s heat, but the stacks behind it where Rachel worked stretched for what seemed like miles of dim shelves dotted with fluorescent lights. Whereas the reading room had a smooth carpet and air-conditioning set for maximal comfort, the stacks were dust filled, chilled and dehumidified to preserve the books, and whereas the reading room had glossy wood tables at which scholars sat while they leafed through what they’d ordered, Rachel had a metal trolley that she collected books on by reaching up to high shelves and down to low ones, then pushed to the swinging door behind the reading room’s service counter to be picked up. The low light strained her eyes, the reaching and pushing strained muscles she didn’t know she had, and trying to remember shelf numbers and locations strained her mind. By the end of the day she felt coated in book dust and was fantasizing about massages that would take in every inch of her back.

  As they gathered their belongings from their lockers, Giles smiled at her. “We’re always busy on Mondays. Let’s have lunch tomorrow to talk about the novel.”

  As if there were only one, Rachel thought. But she nodded as he grabbed his messenger bag from his locker and left. She arched her back to ease a nagging ache at the base of her spine.

  “Giles’s novel is terrible,” said a voice behind her. Startled, she turned around to find LouLou leaning against the doorframe.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” LouLou gave a mocking half smile. “I thought you might want to know that if you’re going to talk to him about his writing.”

  “Thank you.”

  LouLou shrugged and went to her locker.

  “Have you read it? His novel, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “But I heard some of it once.”

  “He read it to you?”

  “Not exactly.” LouLou pulled her bag out of her locker. “About six months ago someone here figured out the combination of Giles’s lock. He took the manuscript out. He made it look as if it had fallen out—the pages were all over the floor—but while we were helping to pick it up, he started reading it out loud.”

  Oh, dear, Rachel thought. “Was Giles angry?”

  “Oh yeah. And embarrassed. He grabbed the page out of the other man’s hand and ran around picking up the rest, an
d the next day he brought in a huge new lock.” Rachel glanced across at Giles’s locker, locked with a square steel block with a digital mechanism. It was the sort of thing you’d find on a warehouse, not a simple metal locker.

  “Who was this man?” Although she bet she already knew.

  “His name was Guy Laurent. He … used to work here.”

  “He doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

  For a moment LouLou’s expression was wounded. “Oh, no! He could be very pleasant!” Then her face closed again. “I mean, he could be charming to start off with. When he wanted.”

  Rachel waited, but LouLou didn’t say anything more, and her face stayed the same. If that expression had been an opening, it had been a fleeting one—but still, it might have been one. Rachel had left a woman alone after spotting an opportunity once before, then kicked herself over the revelations she might have missed. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. “Listen, would you like to go for an aperitif?”

  LouLou looked at her for a few seconds, as if weighing her up. “Sure, why not? But I can’t stay long. I have an appointment.”

  Rachel’s heart thumped. She was going to get to do some actual detecting. Too late, she remembered Boussicault’s orders and Madame Duonôt’s: only observe and report. But surely when Boussicault had said that, he hadn’t believed she would have any actual chance to engage with a suspect? She was certain he wouldn’t want her to pass up an opportunity to gather valuable evidence. In fact, he’d probably be upset if she didn’t take this chance. He’d probably applaud her for taking initiative. “That’s fine,” she said to LouLou. Clutching her bag, she felt the outline of her notebook through the leather.

  “I saw a place over on the Rue Chabanais. How about there?” She watched the other woman’s face as she made the suggestion. Would she flinch at the mention of the street? Recoil at the thought of Chez Poule?

  There was no particular change of expression. “Why don’t we just go to Le Bijou across the road? It’s closer.”

  They managed to snag a table in the crowded tabac that was Le Bijou. LouLou ordered a whiskey, which made Rachel feel that her own vodka tonic was unbearably feminine. But she noticed that LouLou’s body language didn’t match the strength of her drink; she crossed her legs and hunched her shoulders as if she were trying to avoid drawing notice—although as far as Rachel could see, no one was paying the least attention to them. Maybe she was embarrassed about her height.

  “So …” Rachel leaned in a little, trying to create a sense that they were just two colleagues gossiping, the kind of intimacy that might lead to revelation. “You said Giles’s novel is terrible. What’s it about?”

  LouLou took a swallow and frowned. Finally she said, “I don’t know, really.” She shrugged. “There was a man standing on a railway platform, but then he turned into a lobster, I remember. And there was a lot about how important it was to drive on back roads and see real peasant life.”

  Rachel longed to ask how a lobster could drive on any road, but she wasn’t going to spoil her first opportunity for detection with logical questions.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound so awful to have some of that read aloud. Maybe Giles is a little oversensitive?”

  LouLou snorted. “Giles is more than a little oversensitive. No defenses at all, that one. We used to be friends when I first started working here, and even now he still follows me around like a little puppy, trying to get me to like him again.” She took a sip, but Rachel had no time to ask what had ended the friendship before she continued. “In any case, no, the reading aloud was the least of it. About a month later Giles received a letter from an agent saying they’d read his sample and didn’t feel his novel was right for them. Then he started receiving emails and letters from other agents, all turning down his novel based on a sample he’d sent them. He finally figured out that the other man had sent what Giles had written to every agent in Paris, signing Giles’s name to a cover letter. After that, Giles hated him.”

  Rachel couldn’t blame him. Maybe you could recover from having your embarrassing work in progress displayed to your colleagues, but you had only one chance to impress agents with a manuscript. Laurent had essentially ensured that Giles’s novel would go nowhere. Still—she thought of that puffy face—that didn’t mean he deserved to die. Although she found it hard to square that story with LouLou’s earlier assertion that Laurent could be pleasant.

  “But you said the other man could be charming? That doesn’t sound like it. What was so pleasant about him, this Guy Laurent?”

  She used the name deliberately to see how LouLou would react. As she watched, LouLou’s nostrils contracted for a moment; she pressed her lips between her teeth and glanced up to her left. The spasm passed in less than a second, but Rachel, veteran of many such twitches, recognized it with no trouble: LouLou had been refusing to cry.

  When she spoke, though, it was in her usual vaguely caustic tone. “It doesn’t matter. He could be pleasant, but only until he wasn’t pleasant anymore. He was pleasant as a first step in breaking people down. That’s what men like: breaking.” Her upper lip curled back slightly. “Even the puppies. Giles thinks his book will be his ‘big break’—he’ll break the world of books. Laurent tried to break Giles; he tried to break everybody.” She gave a little smile. “Then, of course, he got broken himself.”

  Three thoughts came to Rachel in quick succession. The first was that she sincerely hoped LouLou’s verdict was not true. Level-headed Alan, Magda’s delightful boyfriend Benoît, her own father: had she misread them all? Did they secretly long to be cruel?

  The second thought was that LouLou was filled with rage.

  The third thought was that Guy Laurent had something to do with that rage.

  This was not the situation she’d imagined when she’d thought that going for a drink might lead to revelations about Laurent’s death. She’d thought LouLou might tell her about Giles, explain why he’d stoop to murder, but while she had done that, she’d also made Rachel’s sympathy for Laurent start to slip away. As a corpse on a bathroom floor he had seemed pitiful, but as a living human being he was sounding like a real bastard.

  She knew, though, that a good detective would use LouLou’s rage to learn more. Anger, she imagined Miss Marple saying in her tidy way, is a very revealing emotion. She leaned forward. “You say Laurent tried to break everybody. Did he try—”

  “I’m sorry”—LouLou stood up—“but I must go. I can’t be late for my appointment. This has been fun.” She smiled the first real smile Rachel had seen from her. “Sisterhood is powerful.”

  * * *

  “ ‘This has been fun; sisterhood is powerful’?” Magda asked over the phone later that evening. “She actually said that? Did anything in the conversation suggest that pairing?”

  “Not really. But she obviously doesn’t like men, and she works—well, worked—with two of them. Maybe being with another woman and saying unkind things about men is her idea of fun sisterhood?”

  “But why, is the question.” Magda paused to consider it. “All that stuff about the evils of men, and she tried not to cry when you said Laurent’s name. That sounds like love gone bad to me.”

  “Yes, Boussicault said something similar. I agree.”

  There was silence on the other end. Then Magda said, “You already talked to Boussicault about all this?”

  “Yes.” Rachel stretched out on the couch. “I’m supposed to check in, remember? It’s part of the deal.”

  “You’re supposed to check in once a week. It hasn’t even been two days.”

  “What I found out seems important, so I called him sooner. After all, I’m working with him. I should call him with anything potentially important.”

  Another silence, but shorter. Then, “Yeah, okay. That’s fine.”

  Rachel picked up the thread of the original conversation. “So the question becomes, was it unrequited love with Laurent, or requited love gone bad?”

  “Was that Bou
ssicault’s question?”

  “No, it’s my question.”

  “Well, I don’t see why it matters. Either way, she could be our murderer.”

  Rachel rooted down into the couch. Magda had a point: why did it matter?

  “I know,” Magda answered her own question. “It matters because one way Laurent still comes out looking okay. If it was unrequited love, then he’s not to blame for how LouLou might feel, and he didn’t deserve what he got. From what LouLou told you he did to Giles, though, he already sounds awful. So maybe he did deserve what he got.”

  “Nobody deserves to be murdered.”

  “Nobody? Really? What about Hitler? Was he worth trying to redeem?”

  “I never said anything about trying to redeem people. Anyway, whenever someone brings up Hitler, they’re just looking for a sure way to close down a discussion.”

  “Well, then, I guess this discussion is closed. I’ll talk to you later.” Magda hung up.

  What was going on there? Rachel wondered. Magda hadn’t hung up on her since an argument in the first year of their friendship—about Tonya Harding, as she recalled. And now she was hanging up because Rachel had called Boussicault first and didn’t think their victim deserved to die? Well, she would get over it.

  Rachel sank more firmly into the sofa, but she couldn’t get comfortable. Shrug them off as she might, Magda’s remarks stung. She knew that her friend thought she was naïve about people. And maybe she was right. But her feelings about Laurent’s murder weren’t really about him or his character. They were about justice. Not justice in the legal sense, but justice in the sense of how things ought to be. People shouldn’t kill each other. They just shouldn’t. And if that was true, it couldn’t be a truth that was applied selectively. Valuing life didn’t mean valuing particular people’s lives, as far as she was concerned. It meant valuing life as a principle. She felt that now she was beginning to grasp her point. It was true that some people were terrible, cruel, some people were even Hitler, but that wasn’t the fault of life; it was the fault of what they chose to do inside that life. Life didn’t deserve to be extinguished for what people did with it. That was what she felt.