The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  If there was one thing Rachel hated more than being used, it was having to rethink her opinions, and she found the combination of the two almost too much to bear. When the waiter approached, she ordered a hot chocolate. Cold drinks were for relief and celebration. In moments of deflation, only a hot drink would do.

  “I don’t like being given the brush-off,” she said to Magda.

  “Well …” Magda smiled slyly.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if he realized it, but while he was brushing you off, he also brushed a lot of information your way.”

  “Like what?” All Rachel could remember was a detailing of police superiority.

  “Well, now you know that each of the reading room patrons we interviewed has a motive.”

  That was true, Rachel realized. She tried to put her personal feelings aside and reexamine what the capitaine had said. “They don’t have any forensics available yet beyond what they gathered at the scene.”

  “They haven’t found the tall person,” Magda added.

  “Or Jean Bernard, who was there Wednesday morning, but nowhere to be found after that.” Rachel remembered something else. “And because of the murder and the interviews, I completely forgot to tell Boussicault what we figured out about Laurent’s sheet of paper.”

  The two women looked at each other.

  “So”—Magda’s voice was precise—“the police don’t know five things, and of those five we do know one.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d say that puts us ahead.”

  “Yes.” Again Rachel luxuriated in that us. She felt her own blood rise. She realized that she hadn’t wanted more vocal support from Alan, and she hadn’t wanted to work on equal footing with Boussicault. She’d wanted to be working with Magda. She put her left hand on Magda’s where it lay on the table. “I’m sorry.”

  Magda met her gaze. “You should be.” She shook free of Rachel’s hand and waved her hand for the waiter. “Two spritzers.” When she turned back to Rachel, her eyes were glowing. “Now who is Jean Bernard?”

  We can do this, her eyes said. We’re more than a match for any police force.

  Rachel explained about the phone call, and the way the name echoed in her head.

  “It’s not one I know,” Magda said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t heard it before. Maybe a poet? Or a publisher?”

  “No.” Rachel shook her head. “It’s not someone I know through work. That’s the problem: I know who it isn’t. I just don’t know who it is.”

  “Oh, wow.” Magda was distracted by the ghoulish possibilities. “You could have met the murderer without even being aware of it.” She sounded pleased at this notion. “Some Jean Bernard you ran into at an event could have killed two people you knew.”

  “I only knew one of them. And I just said it wasn’t someone I met through writing. It was closer to home. Anyway, I don’t believe murderers can be good writers.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  Rachel shook her head. “All that time planning crimes would take away from the focus you need to produce good work.”

  “What about that serial killer in Germany? He was a writer. Remember, they said that in the documentary.”

  “He was a journalist. The only real book he wrote was his autobiography.” Rachel made this sound like the basest sort of labor.

  Magda raised her eyebrows at such foolishness. “Back to the original topic. Just let it go and focus somewhere else. The memory will come to you.” As if she were eager to help with that, she reached into her bag and pulled out her pad and pen. “Let’s think about where our investigation should start.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Magda had to admit that Boussicault was right about trying to find a specific tall person with a black jacket in the middle of Paris—“Not that I’m going to stop looking.” But there also didn’t seem to be any point in interviewing the suspects they knew were in Paris. In fact, Magda pointed out, there were good reasons not to do that: “The capitaine promised you could come to the second interviews, and if they’re moving as quickly as he says, then that should be soon. It would be a waste of energy.” LouLou was the logical place to start—“Just a friend, dropping in to check up on her and have a little chat,” Magda cooed—but Rachel not only foresaw great difficulties in extracting LouLou’s phone number from the Bibliothèque now that she no longer worked there but also pointed out to Magda that she didn’t have the skills necessary to deal with a grieving, possibly sedated, potential murderess.

  So they started with Jean Bernard. Finding him involved only collecting addresses and then visiting them. It was easy to access addresses via Whitepages.fr, Magda explained. and although visiting each of them would be tedious, they could do it. And how many Jean Bernards could there be in Paris? They could work through the ones they found in a couple of days, and if they didn’t locate their man, they could move further afield. They arranged that Magda would take the weekend to gather the information. Then they’d start their investigation on Monday—and although neither one said it, both thought of the pleasure they’d get by bringing their results to the police a couple of days later.

  Rachel spent her weekend wrestling with her hymns and her calling. She couldn’t really remember ever wanting to be anything other than a poet. Even when she hadn’t believed she could be a poet—when she hadn’t known she had talent and when she’d had no notion of what being a poet might actually involve—she’d loved the idea of putting words together to tell the truth through emotion. And even though the world of poetry writing had turned out to be pretty thankless—self-printed pamphlets outnumbering published collections a hundred to one, readings supposedly made worthwhile by small but devoted audiences and access to free wine, the rare event of publication battling the sinking feeling that you were claiming a title you had no right to—her interest in and love for the art had waned only twice: first when investigating the death of Edgar Bowen eighteenth months previously, and again now. She thought of all the saints gathered in the stacks at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Had they ever doubted their vocations? As she worked, she tried to access the grace they must have felt in the presence of God, but at the end of the weekend all she had of the hymns were some vague lines about sheep. She went to bed on Sunday night longing for the quick arrival of Monday morning.

  She and Magda had arranged to meet at the Anticafé on the Rue de Richelieu. Rachel was intrigued by the Anticafé, which she had discovered walking home from the Bibliothèque the previous week. A sign in its window told her it charged by time spent rather than by food consumed, and this arrangement struck her as so eminently sensible that she longed to try it. Pushing the door open now, she found herself imagining a cheap quick meeting amid a paradise of free snacks.

  Magda sat at one of the rickety wooden tables with four sets of stapled pages in front of her. As Rachel sat down, she pushed one of the taller stacks toward her. It turned out that the Jean Bernards of Paris filled ten double-sided pages. But whereas to Rachel this would have indicated that they should abandon the search, to Magda it meant only that they would need to move at a brisker pace. She took a map out of her bag and unfolded it on the table between them.

  “I’ve made a series of concentric circles, with the Bibliothèque as the central point. Since we’re right here, I thought we’d start with the smallest circle and work outward.” Rachel glumly recognized her tone as hearty. “Each circle has a radius of a kilometer. In our first circle—that’s on the first page of your document—there are fifteen Jean Bernards. The second circle has twenty-five. There are twenty circles in total. I reckon we can do one circle a day.”

  Twenty doors average per day! Rachel felt her heart sink.

  Maybe Magda sensed this dismay, because she added, “Although I doubt we’ll even have to cover all of them before we find our man.” She snapped the map closed with an air of satisfied finality. “Now, I’ve put together a questionnaire for us to use as
a guide. I thought we could say we were doing outreach to determine how well the Bibliothèque is known to Parisians.” She shoved one of the smaller sets of pages across the table.

  The questionnaire was two pages long. Rachel glanced down the first page. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE? HAVE YOU USED THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS? WHICH READING ROOM DID YOU USE THERE? “ ‘Try to determine if subject wears dark outerwear,’ ” she read aloud. “How? Are we going to ask to use the toilet at every stop, so we can get inside and check out their coat stand?”

  “No, one of us can just—” Magda craned her neck and mimed moving her head to get a better look.

  Rachel envisioned a long line of doors being slammed in the faces of two twitchy emissaries from the Bibliothèque Nationale. But Magda seemed to have no such qualms (of course she didn’t, Rachel thought). Instead, she placed her two stapled sheets on top of her thick stack and considered the pile. Then she placed her thick stack on top of her two stapled sheets and considered that. She nodded approval, then straightened the edges of the resulting pile with a look of enormous satisfaction on her face. She looked up. “Ready?”

  Rachel, who hadn’t had the chance to consume even one cookie, nonetheless saw no way to stall. A Magda with her hands full of printed pages and her heart full of determination was a force to be reckoned with. She took a deep breath. “Ready.”

  * * *

  No one answered the door at the second-floor apartment of the first Jean Bernard.

  The second Jean Bernard lived on the fifth floor of a tall, slender building where, once Rachel and Magda climbed the stairs, they discovered no one was home, either.

  The third Jean Bernard lived three flights up, around the corner from the second. His door was answered by a young woman with an anxious face holding a King Charles Spaniel with an equally anxious face. Yes, she said, Monsieur Bernard did live there, but he and his companion were in Nice until the end of August. She was taking care of their dog while they were gone. She’d be happy to give Monsieur Bernard a message, if they wished. Rachel and Magda shook their heads, patted the dog, and apologized for wasting the girl’s time. Then they caught their breath and walked down the thirty-six steps they had just climbed up.

  For the next three days they trekked all over Paris. There were Jean Bernards living near Les Halles; there were Jean Bernards living in the tourist-thronged streets of Montmartre; there were Jean Bernards who could pop out for a stroll in the nearby Jardin des Plantes—and once, to Rachel’s mingled excitement and relief, there was a Jean Bernard in the building next to hers, which meant they could stop home for a rest before gearing up to go visit the Jean Bernard who lived across the Jardin du Luxembourg near the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Médecine. These various Jean Bernards were tall, short, elderly, young, frail, hale, at home, at work, and often away on vacation having left behind locked doors and knocks that echoed in their empty apartments. Those who were at home had dropped by the Bibliothèque Nationale to see the famous Labrouste reading room with its ballooning glass ceiling, or had casually noticed the blackened original doors on their way to somewhere else. In one exciting case the Jean Bernard had actually used the library, but only the previous January and not the Rare Books reading room; in one depressing case the Jean Bernard did not know there was a Bibliothèque Nationale, nor what its purpose might be, and couldn’t be made to see why that purpose might have value. But not one of these Jean Bernards had filled out book request slips at the Bibliothèque Nationale anytime in the previous six months.

  Rachel reflected that perhaps before starting they should have considered the wisdom of trying to track someone down in the month when most Parisians fled their city. She felt so silly trudging from door to door all over Paris with no luck that she didn’t say a word to Alan about what she was doing, instead telling him that her feet hurt from long walks seeking inspiration.

  But their lack of success didn’t seem to bother Magda; she walked each area with her list in hand, checking off names and making notations. If it hadn’t been unbearably hot, and if the search hadn’t long since become utterly boring, Rachel might have admitted to being impressed—Magda could get excited too quickly and too completely, but once she had the bit between her teeth, she would follow an idea to the end. In a heat wave, though, three days of temporary failure felt like an eternity, and as they turned from the most recent Jean Bernard’s home street, the Rue Dubois, into the Rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine on Wednesday afternoon, Rachel was too tired to admire anything.

  She stopped. “I need a rest.”

  “But we have …” Magda looked at her pad. “Three more people to see in this circle.”

  “No.” Rachel shook her head. “No.” She knew she was being childish, but she couldn’t help it. They were on a fool’s errand, she thought, and she had gone along with it and gone along with it until she could go along no more.

  She turned sharply to the right and marched up the street, Magda trailing behind. After about a minute she made an equally sharp left through a pair of double doors. Two more sets of doors and one marble entrance hall farther and she and Magda stood in a long wooden room: the Musee d’Histoire de la Medecine, an oasis of quiet in the crowded Odeon area. Glass cases, crowded with antiquarian medical instruments and anatomical models, were set into the walls on either side and around the long gallery above. The silence was absolute.

  “We’ve been here before,” Magda muttered.

  “I know.” Rachel’s whisper was flat.

  Magda waited a moment, as if to show respect, then hissed, “Why are we here?”

  Rachel sighed. She longed to sit on one of the steps that led up to the balcony, but she was sure it was forbidden. Instead she put a hand on the iron balustrade and closed her eyes, letting her lids rest for a moment before she opened them. “It’s just too much. We’ve chased Jean Bernard for three days with no luck.” She saw her friend’s face fall. “And that’s fine. But we’re getting nowhere, and I need some time to regroup.”

  “But we could find him at the next address!”

  “Or we could not. We haven’t so far.”

  Magda waved a hand as if such failure were long behind them. “But that just means we’re getting closer to the time when we will.”

  Or to the final time we won’t, Rachel thought but did not say. “Wouldn’t this be easier if we used phone numbers rather than addresses?”

  “You have to pay to access the phone numbers.”

  Rachel thought of Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent—all the Laws & Orders—where the detectives sat at their desks and called potential witnesses, not moving until they’d separated pointless leads from useful ones. She thought of the Rue de Vaugirard commissariat with all its rows of similar desks, each no doubt fitted with a phone on which Boussicault’s officers could make countless calls, their backs untouched by sweat and their feet nestled comfortably in cushioning shoes. She wondered longingly if they’d fixed the air conditioning there. She decided she would pay for the access to the phone numbers.

  She was opening her mouth to say this to Magda when her portable rang, unbearably loud in the silent room. She groped it out from her bag and looked at the screen. It was Boussicault.

  She stared at the phone, divided, as it rang again. She knew for a fact that she had two more rings before it went to voice mail. Boussicault could be calling about the interviews or to tell her that the police had tracked down Jean Bernard themselves. But he had dismissed them and their possible contributions, and she was with Magda now. They were sisters doing it for themselves!

  A third ring broke the peace.

  “Answer the fucking phone!” Magda snapped.

  Rachel answered the phone. She slipped back out through the door into the foyer, Magda following.

  “’Allo, capitaine?”

  “’Allo.” Boussicault’s voice was businesslike. “I hope I don’t disturb you?”

  “No, no, not at
all.”

  “Put it on speaker,” Magda hissed.

  Rachel put her hand over the portable’s microphone. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She thinned her lips and swept her hand around the marbled hall. Echo would make it impossible to understand Boussicault on speaker. Magda rolled her eyes, but she squashed her head up next to Rachel’s ear. Rachel tilted the phone outward. Now they could both hear, but neither could hear very well.

  “We’ve had the coroner’s report on Morel.”

  “Oh?”

  Magda poked her in the ribs with excitement. Rachel pulled away, taking the phone with her.

  “There’s not much I didn’t expect. He was stabbed twice in the chest; death was from a tension pneumothorax.”

  “A tension pneumothorax?” As Rachel spoke, Magda began to dig in her bag.

  “The knife punctured the lung, and the escaping air blocked possible breathing space. It’s a very quick death. The knife found next to him was definitely the murder weapon. But there are two unexpected details, and interestingly both link his death to Laurent’s.”

  “Oh?” Rachel struggled to keep her voice casual.

  Magda came up with her policeman’s pad.

  “There was saliva on both men’s necks.”

  “Saliva?” Rachel’s voice echoed off the walls.

  Magda began to write furiously.

  “Yes, a good deal on Laurent, a small patch on Morel. I’m not sure what to make of it. It was too degraded to get any DNA, but it does connect the two murders and suggest some form of contempt was involved in both. Spitting on the bodies, perhaps? A partnership gone wrong, or a confrontation ending in violence, with the murderer showing what he thinks of the victims by spitting on them?”