The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  Magda handed her one of the cups. “It’s Aurora Dale.”

  “Aurora Dale? Is she—” She stopped; if they were in Emergency, Aurora Dale couldn’t be dead. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just got here myself.”

  They set off down the hall, only to find Aurora sitting up in bed, lively but bruised around the neck, with the capitaine leaning on the window ledge across from her. When they entered, he stood up. “Ah! Professeure Dale asked me to telephone you. I only arrived myself a half hour ago; SAMU contacted me at a crime scene in Sentier.”

  So he hadn’t yet been to the commissariat, Rachel thought, carefully not catching Magda’s eye. As for Aurora Dale, Rachel was sorry she had ever thought she might be the murderer, or even questioned her veracity. The red marks around her throat were proof of the foolishness of those ideas.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked.

  She had gone to the Bibliothèque, Aurora explained. “I was still bothered by the question of what I did or didn’t remember from that morning in the courtyard—the one I talked to you about. Mr. Stibb gave me his email address when we first met, so I emailed him, and he emailed Mr. Cavill, who emailed me. I’m sorry”—she held up a hand to forestall impatience no one had expressed—“I know this must seem like unnecessary detail, but it does all matter. I arranged to meet both of them at the Bibliothèque late yesterday afternoon, separately, because I wanted to find out if they’d actually seen the person or if they only remembered remembering the sighting, like me.” She touched the livid bruises on her neck and smiled ruefully. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve been reading too much Lord Peter Wimsey, I suppose. In any case, I went to the ladies’ before the first meeting. And as I was washing my hands …” She touched her neck again.

  “Holy God.” Now Rachel did exchange a glance with Magda. “But what did you do? I mean, how did you …?”

  Capitaine Boussicault took over. “Professeure Dale tells us she used something called the ‘sing method.’ ”

  “You sang?” Rachel sat back in her plastic chair. Was Aurora that bad a singer? Had her voice stopped a murderer in his tracks?

  “No.” The older woman gave a hoarse cough. “I’m sorry, let me explain. S.I.N.G. stands for solar plexus, instep, nose, groin. I saw it in a film.”

  “Miss Congeniality,” Magda interjected.

  “Yes, that’s right. When he threw the, well, the garrote, I suppose, over my head, I grabbed it with my hand, just instinctively—so it wasn’t fully pressing on my throat. Then I put my other elbow in his stomach, stamped on his instep, and smacked him in the face with my knuckles. I didn’t do very well on groin, I’m afraid.” She looked abashed. “When I tried to hit him there, he jumped back. Although that did make him break his grip. Only then he ran before I could grab him.”

  “Did you get a look at him?” Magda asked.

  Boussicault said, “Professeure Dale has told me that she is unable to identify her attacker.”

  The older woman shook her head sorrowfully. “He stood behind me, you see. And when he was running away, I was trying to get my breath back.”

  “You keep saying he and him. You’re sure it was a man? It was in the women’s room, after all.” A terrible realization had begun to make its way to the front of Rachel’s mind.

  Aurora looked taken aback, then abashed. “I’m sorry. That must be because I was expecting Mr. Cavill or Mr. Stibb. I suppose it could have been a woman, although she’d have needed to be a tall woman, given my size. But why would it be a woman?”

  “No reason. I just wanted to be sure it was a man.” Under the guise of folding her hands in her lap, Rachel pressed her fingertips into her knuckles. Hadn’t she told a tall woman the previous afternoon that Aurora was going to the police? That she was still working at the Bibliothèque? She thought of LouLou’s face, white with what she had read as relief. Calming herself, she asked, “What happened next?”

  “Well, once I’d got my breath back, I asked to use a phone. Then I rang emergency services and they sent an ambulance.”

  “You asked to use a phone?”

  “Yes.” Aurora seemed surprised at Rachel’s surprise. “I didn’t bring my mobile to France with me.”

  “And the ambulance brought you here? Surely there’s a hospital in the second arrondissement that they could have taken you to.”

  “Oh, I asked them to bring me here.”

  “You asked them?” Rachel glanced at Boussicault. He raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  Aurora shrugged. “It’s the most famous hospital in Paris. I wanted to see it.”

  Rachel looked at her smiling face underlined by the bruises around her neck. Doughty, she thought. That was exactly the right word to describe Aurora Dale: doughty.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  They sat on a bench outside the hospital, watching some of the nurses smoke together, chatting and waving their cigarettes for emphasis as they talked.

  “Jesus, what a woman!” Magda said.

  “I know. Let’s hope that’s what we’re like in twenty years.”

  They kept looking at the nurses. One of them laughed and waved her hand at another in a shooing motion. The shooed one mock-dodged away.

  “I have to tell you something,” Rachel explained about her meeting with LouLou, about Rachel’s revelation that Aurora was going to change her story. “It didn’t occur to me until just now in her room that Aurora’s description of what actually happened contradicted LouLou’s own story to the police. She said she was in the record room until she went through the stacks and found Giles, but Aurora said she ran into her coming out of the bathroom!”

  “Well, that’s not so bad.” Magda switched from LouLou’s prosecutor to her defender. “I mean, it’s not unreasonable that you might forget to mention you’d washed your hands.”

  “It’s a lot less reasonable when you’ve been found next to a stabbed man, holding a bloody knife with perfectly clean hands!” Rachel grabbed her own hair in frustration. “And when she said, ‘I’m telling you this because I want you to understand!’ I thought she meant understand why she was so bitter all the time!”

  “Maybe she did. You have her number in your phone. Call her up and ask.”

  That’s right, she did have LouLou’s number! She poked at her screen and waited. No reply. No voice mail. Just endless ringing.

  “Nothing. She’s not picking up. And the way she smiled when she said, ‘Sisterhood is powerful.’ I thought she was thanking me, but what if she was reminding me to stay quiet?”

  “Calm down.” Rachel had just enough sense left to appreciate the irony of Magda saying that to her. “You’re acting like she’s our only suspect. There’s still Cavill, for one. We could go question him.”

  “I’m guessing that by this time Cavill’s been told not to talk to anyone. And Stibb”—she headed off another suggestion—“wasn’t exactly obliging in his interviews with Boussicault, so when it’s just us …” She shrugged.

  One of the nurses flicked her cigarette into the standing ashtray and went back into the hospital. She waved her fingers at her companions over her shoulder, like algae drifting underwater.

  At last Magda said slowly, “All right, so either we can’t talk to our suspects or it’s not a good idea. Then what if we tried some victimology? We could try to learn about the victims instead.”

  Rachel frowned. She couldn’t see how they’d even start investigating Laurent and Morel. Both men had been killed near work, so there were no neighbors to draw on, even if they could get the addresses. But still, presumably they’d made friends and contacts through work … well, she knew they had. “I guess we could start at Chez Poule.”

  “What?”

  “Chez Poule. We could try a different waiter, maybe.”

  Magda laughed. “I don’t mean those victims. I mean the other victims.” At Rachel’s blank look, she said, “The books. Why don’t we see if we can find out anything from the books?
”

  “The books?”

  “Yes. Remember that time when you were thinking about becoming a bookbinder?”

  Rachel nodded. It had been during a period when the poetry was going particularly badly.

  “You told me that when books were damaged, you could take them to conservators, who could look at the damage and tell you the best way to fix it. They knew all about bindings, and about how different things interacted with different papers to cause damage, and they could use that information to fix them. What if we took the books to someone like that? Someone who could tell us what happened to them and what it means? A … a … forensic conservator.”

  “I don’t think it works like that. I think they can tell you what happened to a book, and how it could be fixed, but they can’t tell you who might have done it.”

  Magda huffed. “Yes, but they could tell us something. Which might lead us somewhere. And at the moment we don’t really have any other options.”

  Rachel tried to think of other options, with no luck. “But who would we even get? We don’t know any conservators.”

  “You do.” Magda was triumphant. “Dr. Dwamena. She’s Head of Rare Books for heaven’s sake. Presumably she knows all about them. She could look at the books and tell us what she sees.”

  * * *

  Docteure Dwamena had not let the police take the Supplementum Chronicarum and the psalter to the commissariat; they might have been potential material evidence in a homicide, but they were also rare works of art and literature that were under her care. And since the Bibliothèque Nationale was technically an arm of the Ministry of Culture, and the police were technically an arm of the Ministry of the Interior, neither outranked the other; the police couldn’t order her to hand over evidence. The books, she told Rachel over the phone, were sitting safely under lock and key in a controlled environment. As she and Magda sat on the Mètro to the Bibliothèque, Rachel wondered if the doctor would be any more receptive to the two of them than she had been to the police.

  In the end, the question turned out to be irrelevant. Docteure Dwamena heard them out, then said simply, “But I am not a book conservator.”

  “You’re not?” Magda looked bemused.

  “No, I am a book historian. That’s quite a different thing. I can tell you the circumstances surrounding a book’s production and history, what kind of materials it’s made of and so on, but I cannot tell you anything about the means of its destruction. And unfortunately our conservation team is away for the August vacation. So I don’t think I can help.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

  For a moment they all stood quiet. Then Rachel remembered, “We know another conservator.”

  Magda looked confused again. “We do?”

  “Yes. She helped us with Edgar’s Bible.” Then, realizing those sentences would make no sense to Docteure Dwamena, she turned to her. “We know a woman named Camille Murat. She works for Librairie Pierre Brunet, a shop for antiquarian religious books. She’s a bookseller there, but she trained as a conservator. She’s helped us in the past.”

  “I know of Brunet. In the Rue des Carmes, yes? It has a good reputation.” The doctor nodded. “And this woman, is she someone who can be trusted in dealing with a priceless book?”

  “Yes.” Rachel thought of the way Madame Murat had assisted with the identification and preservation of a rare facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible. “She’s the one who originally told us that antiquarian books can hold on to evidence for centuries.”

  “You can meet her yourself if you come with us,” Magda put in.

  “Come with you?”

  “In the cab. When we take the books to her.”

  “The cab?” Docteure Dwamena’s voice didn’t rise, but her face told a whole story. “You want to take a rare sixteenth-century Latin chronicle and a medieval psalter across Paris in a taxi cab?”

  “An air-conditioned taxi cab,” Magda replied, as if this canceled out all objections. She added, “Air-conditioned there and back.”

  “No.” Docteure Dwamena said flatly—and definitively. “The books remain here. You may arrange for your conservator to visit us. I will research her background while we wait, and I will evaluate her in person when she arrives. What happens afterward will depend on what I learn.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Camille Murat sounded surprised to hear Rachel at the other end of a telephone line after a year of silence, but once she heard the name Alphonsine Dwamena, she didn’t hesitate. She would be right over.

  Rachel, Magda, and Docteure Dwamena stood in the foyer waiting for her. “A promising CV,” the doctor had said as she locked her office door. “North Bennet Street School in your country, followed by an MA at West Dean College in England. Two of the best programs outside France.”

  Now, standing next to Rachel, she suddenly said, “Why did you need Madame Murat’s help?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said Madame Murat had helped you in the past, and that made me wonder under what circumstances you had met her. I wasn’t aware that you’d had any experience with rare books before coming here. How did you come to know a book conservator?”

  Rachel and Magda exchanged a glance. How did you explain to someone that although you were not really interested in rare books, you knew this particular rare book expert because someone else had sold her a rare book—well, a facsimile of a rare book, but one that was rare in its own right—that was evidence in a murder case you had been investigating before anyone else thought it was a murder; a book that, once the case was resolved and after you made sure she got her money back, you claimed for yourself in accordance with a promise in the will of the murder victim whose unsuspected murder you’d been investigating?

  “We met professionally,” Rachel said. “When I was responsible for cataloging a friend’s library.”

  * * *

  Madame Murat looked precisely as she had a year earlier, even down to her white blouse and straight black skirt. Her low heels clicked across the granite floor, and as she approached she switched an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel from her right hand to her left so she could shake hands.

  “Madame Levis, what a delightful surprise to hear from you! And Madame Stevens, it’s good to see you again as well.”

  Rachel took her outstretched hand, then indicated Docteure Dwamena. “And this is Docteure Alphonsine Dwamena, head of Rare Books and Manuscripts here.”

  “Docteure Dwamena!” Madame Murat was obviously delighted. “I have read your recent work on ascribing pamphlet authorship by clustering false publication information. Most exciting, most suggestive. Vraiment, un honneur.”

  Docteure Dwamena gave her a skeptical look. “Suggestive in what way?”

  “It made me wonder what might happen if one paired the clustering with paper type and watermark information. This might help to narrow the date quite tightly.”

  Docteure Dwamena thawed. “Yes, this is an interesting idea. I have been thinking about it myself. There are some risks involved if one doesn’t know how long the paper was held before use.” She gestured down the hallway toward the reading room. “Let me tell you about my ideas as we go.”

  The doctor had cleared her desk of everything but two lamps, wiped the surface clean, and placed two boxes tied with tape on its right-hand side. Madame Murat turned the lamps on; their light was dazzlingly strong. From her bag she took a pair of white cotton gloves like those Docteure Dwamena had worn when examining the Supplementum, tweezers, and a pair of black-framed glasses with the thickest lenses Rachel had ever seen. All of these she laid on the desktop before pulling toward her the nearest of the two boxes. She opened it carefully, untying the ribbon and folding out four flaps so that the container became a flat surface. Then she pulled on the gloves and put the glasses on her nose—she looked like Mr. Magoo, Rachel thought, trying not to laugh—and opened the cover of the psalter.

  There in front of them was a page of stark black calligraphy, relieved by an initial B
that stood out like an elaborate jewel. Outlined in red, it held in its upper loop a tiny representation of a Madonna and Child, in its lower loop a small crucifix. Even from where she stood Rachel could see the love that softened the Virgin’s face and the lines of pain on the Christ’s, each bellying chamber surrounded by twining vines tipped here and there with gilded leaves.

  “Ah!” Madame Murat looked at Alphonsine. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  It was beautiful, Rachel could see; although the ink had cracked in places, the colors still sprang out vividly fresh.

  Madame Murat turned the pages reverently until she arrived at the stub of the missing sheet. She bent over, flicking her enormously enlarged eyes up and down. Rachel could hear the breath of every person in the room as Madame Murat moved her head, carefully taking a survey of the damage. Then she began to talk.

  “Books are unique objects because they speak to us twice. They have words and pictures on their pages, but they also speak to us with their form, with the matter that makes their existence. Every book—” She tugged gently with the tweezers at the stub’s fringe of fibers; She tugged gently with the tweezers at the stub’s fringe of fibers, peered at their feathery tips and at the pages that flanked them, inhaled deeply, smelling. Then she continued. “Every book is a history. It contains the story of the world that made it.”

  She moved the psalter carefully to one side and unpacked the Supplementum. Rachel held her breath, and she could feel Magda doing the same.

  “Now”—Madame Murat opened its cover with her gloved hands—“here you had a Supplementum Chronicarum, printed in Venice in 1490, its particular pages printed in a particular typeface on sheets folded and stitched in a particular way and with illustrations interleaved at particular places and for particular reasons—perhaps because that was the hallmark of the printer, perhaps because it was expected that such books would be created in such a format, or perhaps because it wasn’t expected.” She looked up at Rachel and Magda for a moment with her magnified eyes. “This book contained numberless answers, some to questions we don’t even know we should ask yet, all waiting to be discovered to help us trace the evolution of books, of printing practices, and to help us understand the expectations and desires of people in fifteenth-century Venice. This book might have told us a little bit about how different the current world is from that of Venice, or how similar it is to it. It might have illuminated for us something about human nature.