The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  She grinned at her own thoughts, then let the silence soothe her. After a few seconds it came home to her that she was alone in the lounge with Guy Laurent’s locker. She glanced at it. Guy Laurent’s lockless locker.

  She bit her lip. Laurent wouldn’t have touched his locker since the day he died, obviously. Who knew what he might have left behind? There could be an appointment book, or even a journal filled with—her imagination ran wild—entries detailing his cruelties and the victims of them. Perhaps there were further suspects she and the police knew nothing about. The uselessness of the trip to the restaurant and the disappointments of the day began to fade. Rachel Levis, Investigatrix and Police Consultant, was on the case.

  She stood up. Like every person about to commit a furtive act, she suddenly became immensely fearful that someone with hyperacute hearing might be listening or someone with silent steps might sneak up on her in the middle of it. Gathering her courage, she walked to the central locker with a catlike tread. She lifted its handle, steadying the door with her free hand so it wouldn’t rattle. After one more careful look around, she peeped inside.

  The locker was empty except for a combination lock that lay on the bottom, its shackle cut open.

  She resolved not to mention this moment to Magda. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that, since the locker was missing its lock, someone might have gone through it already? How had she let her excitement get the better of her? With detective skills like this, she wouldn’t even win a game of Clue. She opened the door further and picked up the severed lock. The bolt cutter had made a clean slice: the raw edges gleamed against the worn metal. She sighed and replaced it. Then she stopped. Had it been farther back? She pushed it slightly. Or had it been farther forward? She put her head inside the locker to see if the lock had left any trace she could use as a guide.

  This, she reflected, would be the moment when someone walked into the employee lounge and found her.

  Just as she was thinking that, she noticed a little flick of white on the locker’s back wall. Reaching a hand all the way inside, she touched it with her index finger. It wasn’t a place where the paint had peeled off or a nail head gleaming in the light. It was the corner of a piece of paper. She scraped at it with her thumbnail. It didn’t move. She scraped it again. It still didn’t move. She pulled herself out of the locker, checked once more to make sure the silent observer hadn’t entered the room, then opened the matching locker on the row below. That one was empty. She stuck the top half of her body inside; she had to get on her knees, but it worked. There at the back, caught in the top of the locker, was all but one small corner of a piece of a paper. As she gently pulled it out, she saw it was a folded sheet from a school notebook. She unfolded it. The inner side was covered in scrawled numbers.

  A clue, an actual clue! She was so excited that she spelled it the old-fashioned way in her head to give it added emphasis: a clew! The first real one of the investigation! Now she just had to get it out of the building without anyone’s notice. She stood up, opened her own locker, and eased the sheet into the side pocket of her bag. Then she took the bag, shut her locker, and left the room. The back door, which led directly outside, was locked, so she used the one that opened onto the corridor next to the reading room. She could feel her heart pounding and breathed in and out deeply, trying to force a sense of calm. She made herself walk more slowly. You’re just leaving work after a normal day, she told herself. A normal day.

  Over these thoughts she gradually began to make out a conversation. The farther down the corridor she went, the louder it grew. It came from Docteure Dwamena’s office. A second clew! Or was it? Could conversations be clues, or were they just leads? Could only material objects be clues? Shut up, shut up, she hissed to her whirling brain. Calm down and listen. Observe and report. She flattened herself against the wall next to the office and held her breath.

  “—like this much longer,” Docteure Dwamena was saying.

  “But it’s hard for me.” The second voice was LouLou’s. “It hasn’t been that long since—”

  “I know it’s been difficult. I know you still have a lot to deal with. But you’ve been neglecting significant aspects of your job for quite a while now, and it’s starting to cause problems.”

  “I’m sorry,” LouLou said, but she added belligerently, “I come in early.” After a breath, her tone became more conciliatory. “I know I’m very backed up.”

  “Of course I empathize,” Docteure Dwamena said. “How could I not? As you know, he and I had—well, you know.” But I don’t know, Rachel thought. Tell me. Docteure Dwamena began again, her voice firm. “But now we all have a chance to wipe the slate clean and move on.”

  “He made some assertions about your behavior as head. That is not the same as what he did to me.” LouLou’s voice teetered on the edge of sullenness, but Rachel heard caution in it, too.

  “Assertions,” said Docteure Dwamena, her tone so flat that it could only be suppressing explosive emotion. “I wouldn’t call them just assertions.”

  What would you call them, then? Please say what you would call them.

  But the doctor moved on. “In any case, while as your friend I understand what you mean, as your chef I must tell you that you need to catch up on your outstanding work or I will have to submit a written warning.” There was a long pause, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer. “Believe it or not, I do know what it is to feel that you will never recover from something. One must just work through it. Eventually one does heal.” Another pause, the sound of hands meeting a hard surface, and then she said crisply, “Alors. There is nothing else to say, so now we go home, and tomorrow is a fresh start.”

  Taking the cue, Rachel hurried to the door that led out into the main hall. What had the doctor been going to say at the end of “he and I had—”? What did she mean by “I wouldn’t call them just assertions”? What could she mean? Once out in the Bibliothèque’s square courtyard, she had one thought: Magda. Her fingers itched for immediate consultation. She felt in her bag for her phone.

  Then she stopped. She’d forgotten about the capitaine. Should he be her first call? From a practical standpoint, of course. He was her boss. But Magda was her best friend. And she would recognize the drama of the discovery! She tightened her lips. Maybe she could scan the page, then take it to the capitaine, then share the scan with Magda? But what if the original had all sorts of clues that a scan couldn’t capture? And was there even a place to scan in this area now that the Bibliothèque was closed? She stood in the courtyard, trapped on the horns of her dilemma. Her loyalties had never been so divided.

  Chapter Ten

  “A scan,” Magda snorted half an hour later as she and Rachel sat side by side on a bench in the Jardin du Palais Royal. Rachel had slipped her feet out of her shoes and was resting them on a metal chair in front of her, feeling the curious combination of pain and bliss known only by those relaxing their overtaxed feet after a long day.

  Now she leaned back on the bench and closed her eyes; her face was in shadow but she could feel the sun on her toes. Stretching them out the way she imagined a cat might stretch its paws, she looked down at Magda’s long brown feet on the chair next to them. “But I didn’t give you a scan, did I? I called you up and told you to meet me here before I took the page to the commissariat. I first read it at precisely the same time you did.”

  This was, in fact, exactly what she had done. After keeping her curiosity in check for twenty minutes while she waited for Magda to arrive, she had used the tweezers from her mini Swiss army knife to hold up the paper between them, her other hand behind it to keep the sun from shining through and making it illegible.

  On the top line were written the letters BN. Beneath that, scrawled numbers and calculations covered nearly the whole page. Some of the numbers were large—tens of thousands or higher—but often they were then divided on lines beneath, or had amounts subtracted from them until they became relatively small. The largest had APD 4.7 scra
tched next to it. Written neatly on a line underneath all the figures and calculations was M/F-500, and on the line beneath that, SC-1000. A bracket joined these two, and written next to its point was 1500, with a circle around it.

  * * *

  “We thought it might be a code,” she explained to Capitaine Boussicault in his office half an hour later with Magda next to her. The sheet of paper now lay on his desk, encased in a plastic protector. “ ‘BN’ seemed to us pretty clearly to mean ‘Bibliothèque Nationale,’ so we thought it might be coded information about what he was doing there.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, and she preened a little under his agreement. “Thank you very much. It has the potential to be significant.” He put it on top of a pile to his left, then folded his hands on his desktop.

  “That’s it?” Magda said.

  Boussicault smiled at her. “No. Tomorrow morning I’ll take it down to the lab and see what they can do with it.”

  “But it could be a major clue. Your first break in the case!”

  He fixed her eyes with his own. “Do you know what the numbers mean?”

  “We thought that they might be some sort of calculations. And we thought the letters at the bottom might be the initials of people related to the numbers.”

  “Which means you don’t know. It’s plain that at least some of the numbers are calculations from the way they’re arranged. And as for the initials”—Boussicault shrugged—“you could be right, but equally you could be wrong. They could stand for streets, or for restaurants, or they could be entirely personal mnemonic devices. As I say, it’s a very promising item—but at the moment utterly inconclusive. We don’t even know if Laurent wrote it or if it belonged to him.”

  Magda was outraged. “It was at the back of his locker!”

  “The locker beneath his. Please, Madame Stevens. We can’t move forward based on assumptions of what must be true or what could be true. There is a process. There are steps. The lab will compare the sheet to samples of Laurent’s handwriting. They also have experts in codes who will be better equipped to decipher it.”

  Magda looked mutinous. She shrugged. It was not quite a French shrug, but it nonetheless managed to express both her belief that Boussicault was a hopeless slave to bureaucracy and her knowledge that she couldn’t do anything about it. As if to drive the latter point home, she said, “Well, you’ve got the paper now, so it’s not like we have any choice.”

  * * *

  “You don’t seem very troubled,” Magda said as they walked down the steps of the commissariat.

  “Oh, well, you know.” Rachel was digging around in her bag.

  “No, I don’t know. I thought you’d be more upset.”

  “There’s no point.” She kept digging. “Like you said, he’s got the page now. It’s a done deal. Besides”—she pulled her hand out of her bag, holding a slightly crumpled sheet of paper—“I made a photocopy.”

  * * *

  That night Rachel, Magda, and Alan had dinner together again. When they had finished their raspberries with cream and nearly consumed their bottle of wine, Rachel brought out the photocopy of Laurent’s note and laid it on the table, smoothing it down so they could all see.

  “And this is it,” Alan said. “Just this one side.”

  She nodded.

  Magda put an index finger on the top line of the sheet. “Since Laurent worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and since this was found there, we figured ‘BN’ must stand for ‘Bibliothèque Nationale.’ ”

  “Makes sense,” Alan said. “And I’m guessing you also figured the letters at the bottom must somehow relate to that abbreviation, since they’re the only other letters on the page.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said, “but after that we’re at a loss. They could be names”—she remembered Boussicault’s comment and reddened—“or streets, or really anything. And what’s happening with all those numbers in the middle?”

  “Okay. Okay.” Alan leaned closer to the sheet, idly tapping it with the side of his thumb as he focused. At last he said, “What if instead of trying to figure it out globally, we do it like for like? What if we work on the hypothesis that things that are similar stand for the same thing? Like you did with the letters.”

  “What?” Rachel said.

  He put his forefinger on the letters at the bottom of the page. “Okay. So, because you assumed ‘BN’ was an abbreviation of ‘Bibliothèque Nationale,’ you also assumed that these letters were abbreviations for something.”

  Now Rachel understood. “So we would assume that the numbers are all the same kinds of numbers—that they’re all doing the same thing.”

  “Right.” He grinned at her, his hair flopping in his eyes. He loved numbers, Rachel knew. “Now, look at the numbers next to these letters on the bottom. They’re smaller, yes, but this number”—he put his finger on the 1500—“is the sum of those two, and he’s circled it. And it’s been my experience that when people add two numbers and circle the result, they’re only dealing with one thing.”

  “Money!” Magda slapped her hand on the table triumphantly. She also loved numbers.

  Alan nodded. “Money. I don’t know why, but they always circle the total if it’s money.”

  “So,” Magda continued, “using like for like, that would mean that all the numbers on this sheet were money. Okay. But that still leaves us with the question of what the money is doing. Or what Laurent was doing with it.”

  “Yes, that is a puzzle.” Alan frowned.

  “Or maybe …” Rachel bit her lip. “Not if we apply like-for-like again.”

  The other two looked confused, but she kept going. “First, let’s think about what he was like.”

  “He was a shit,” Magda said.

  “Yes, but a particular kind of shit. A shit that liked to hurt people, and to hurt them by using their own experiences against them. Think about it. He hurt Giles with his own novel, and he hurt LouLou by playing on her attack. Now apply like-for-like. What kind of activity involving money would be like that kind of hurting?”

  Alan still looked confused. “Say that again.”

  But the answer had come to Rachel in a flash. “Blackmail!” She slapped her hand on the tabletop. It did feel good. “Blackmail is like the other things he did. It’s using someone’s own experiences against them to get money out of them.”

  “Ooooh.” Magda got it. “So this,” she put her finger on the circled 1500, “would be the amount he was asking for.” Rachel nodded. “But what are all the other numbers?”

  “I think they’re calculations to figure out how much he could get. I think he’s working that out somehow all over the page, and at the bottom he comes to a decision.”

  Magda looked at the page, then at her. “That’s good. That’s really, really good.”

  “Thank you.” Rachel felt like patting herself on the back. Look how much she’d grown by working with the police! But her satisfaction faded quickly. “There’s still the question of the letters, though. They could be the initials of the person—well, people—he’s blackmailing …” She petered out uncertainly.

  “Which means not either of your current suspects,” Alan pointed out.

  “Well,” Magda said practically, “there are lots of other people at the Bibliothèque who could be suspects.”

  “Like who?”

  “Whom,” Magda corrected.

  “Okay, like whom?” Rachel asked.

  “Well, Docteure Dwamena, for one.”

  “Yes, I need to figure out how to find out more there.” Aside from that afternoon’s conversation, Rachel had hardly seen or heard the Head of Manuscripts in the two weeks she’d been at the library.

  “Or maybe one of the people using the reading room.”

  “The patrons?”

  “Sure, why not? They interacted with Laurent.”

  “But Capitaine Boussicault thinks—”

  “Oh, Capitaine Boussicault thinks!” Magda was exasperated. “You didn’t care so much
what Capitaine Boussicault thought the last time you were investigating a murder.”

  Rachel was shocked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Alan stood up and took his wine glass to the sink.

  “It means”—Magda’s voice was slow and clear—“that all your references to what Boussicault thinks and how Boussicault sees the crime are getting a little tiring.”

  Rachel was affronted. “He is a policeman. He does know best how to proceed with an investigation.”

  “He put this piece of paper on a pile! And he thought we were fantasizing about Edgar’s murder!”

  “He wanted to have professionals look at the evidence, not make guesses himself!” About the reference to their previous case she could say nothing; Magda was right.

  “All I’m saying”—Magda’s voice was weary now—“all I’m saying is that I think you’re relying a little too much on the captain, when we’re doing very well on our own.” She gestured toward the sheet they’d just deciphered.

  No one spoke. After a couple of minutes Magda stood. “I think I better go home. Thank you for dinner.”

  “Oh, come on, Da!” Rachel half-stood as she used the old nickname. “It’s not a big deal. C’mon, Maggie May.”

  But Magda was immune to nicknames. She let herself out. Rachel sat in the cone of light shed by the fixture over the table and listened to Alan say nothing.

  Chapter Eleven

  On her walk to work the next morning, Rachel deliberately did not think about her argument with Magda. She observed the way the light glittered on the Seine as she walked over the Pont du Carrousel and noticed that people were already setting out towels on the riverside plage. She admired the shape of the Louvre against the sky as she approached it and again once she’d passed, and when she arrived at the Bibliothèque, she greeted the guard at the gate with such care and focus that an observer would have thought she’d recently done him a personal injury.