The Delphi Agenda

by Rob Swigart

  The Cité Florale was a tiny triangular pocket of two and three-storey houses shrouded in flowering vines, a rich green this time of year. The short cobbled streets were named after flowers like Wysteria, Mimosa, Morning Glory.

  Only last night she had come to herself sitting against the wall of the house he was opening for her on Rue des Iris. Something had brought her here earlier this day, but what? She was an ordinary person, a scholar. Except for her lapses into fugue she had no special gifts. Yet she was here the moment Raimon was murdered, under the window of this very apartment. Her foreboding increased. Too many coincidences.

  There were two apartments in the building. The ground floor was occupied by someone named DuBellecque. She was hardly surprised to find there was no name on his apartment, which occupied the upper floor of the house. Hardly surprised at all.

  “I always loved this little neighborhood,” she said, sinking into a leather chair in his salon to conceal her disquiet.

  The hardwood floors were dark and worn and creaked underfoot. Bookcases lined the walls. Many of the books were technical ­– economics, mathematics, or cryptography – but there was a fair amount of French, Canadian, American, and British literature, as well as a long shelf of books on cinema. The furniture was modern and utilitarian but surprisingly comfortable: a sofa, three chairs, a low coffee table of glass and brushed aluminum. The broad windows along the street side framed the lush greenery surrounding the shuttered windows of the house opposite.

  He closed the curtains. “We need a plan of action, but first you might consider buying some clothes and toiletries; we can walk up to the Monoprix at Daviel.”

  She arched an eyebrow and thought how disingenuous she was being, affecting this calm. “This is a one-bedroom, isn’t it?”

  He dipped his head in agreement.

  “Won’t your fiancée object?” She indicated a photograph on the end table of an athletic brunette wearing full bicycling gear. Her head was tilted and she was smiling at the camera, but the dark glasses that curved around her temples concealed her eyes.

  He shook his head. “No fiancée, not any longer.” He picked up the photo and looked at it fondly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need.” He put the picture down gently. “It didn’t work out. Lasted four years, but in the end she married a stockbroker and moved to New York. Nothing here any longer but this photograph and some pleasant memories.”

  “I see.” Her tone was dry.

  “Don’t worry, if it comes to that, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  She stood briskly. “All right, let’s shop.”

  An hour later Steve dropped a plastic sack full of clothing and toiletries by the front door. “That’s it,” he said. “Now for the plan. It’s nearly four. I don’t know how long this apartment will remain secure. The police at least know you’re with me. It’s possible the killers know it as well. I don’t think they tracked us here, but we can’t be sure how long that will last since we don’t know the extent of their resources. I think we should move tomorrow at the latest, just to be safe.” He picked up their shopping. “We’ll take these with us.” He packed their purchases in a duffel bag and threw the plastic Monoprix sack into a wastebasket.

  “Are you always this well organized?”

  “Yes. I suggest we get going.”

  Twenty minutes later he parked his Renault on the Rue de la Sorbonne and placed a special police placard on the dash. “Banking privileges,” he said, leading her to the entrance at number 17. “Useful for quick getaways for important clients.”

  “You do know your way around.”

  “I studied economics here,” he said.

  Just inside the entrance to the sprawling complex they passed through security. Steve started to lead her away down a long corridor when she stopped him, “I work here, you know.”

  People flowed around them. “Of course you do.” He gave a courtly bow. “Lead on.”

  With a comic flip of her hair she took him up a series of stairways to the fifth floor on the inner side of the Court of Honor.

  She was about to open the door to the Institut de Papyrologie when she stopped. “I’ll be damned,” she said softly. “The door opens the drawer! It’s the door code! The door opens the drawer! How could I be so slow? Come on!”

  She pulled him inside. They skipped waiting for the elevator and wound up flights of stairs and down a corridor.

  The thin blond boy seated at the computer by the door looked up as the two hurried past. “Dr. Emmer!” he called, suspending his game of Solitaire.

  Lisa waved. She and Steve rushed toward the computer on a desk at the back of the room next to the Director’s office.

  The boy continued, “There was a man looking for you.” Behind him the windows looking down on the Court of Honor of the Sorbonne glowed with gray light. The glass was beaded with rain.

  She stopped. “A man? What man?”

  The boy shrugged. “A religious, a monk or something, said he was interested in papyrus and wanted to talk to you.”

  “Why not the Director? He’s in, isn’t he?”

  Again the thin-shouldered shrug. “He went home early. Anyway, this guy asked for you. Said he didn’t want to bother the Director. Seemed really disappointed you weren’t here. He was quite insistent you must be here, but you’re not due in today, that’s what I told him. He wanted to know if he could call you, but I know you don’t have a portable phone. I told him you were at the Fondation Roullot, though, maybe he could catch you there. Did I make a mistake?”

  “No, no mistake. Thanks, Olivier. If he comes around again, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him the same thing. I don’t want to meet him.”

  Olivier gave her a strange look. “He didn’t seem dangerous.”

  “You never can tell,” she said, and with an anxious glance at Steve sat at the computer and entered “Procroft” in the query line of the Institute database.

  “Why not just go through the Procroft collection?” Steve said.

  “First, it takes up several drawers full of papyrus and papyrus fragments, and second, we don’t know what to look for.”

  Steve indicated the screen. She was scrolling through seemingly endless lists. “You seem to know.”

  “Here it is,” she said. The scrolling text stopped.

  “Here’s what?”

  “The door code to Raimond’s building: 2214. The door opens the drawer. It’s the number of the drawer. That’s where we’ll find what he wanted me to find. Come on, it’s upstairs.”

  They climbed the spiral staircase to the top floor. Here the ceilings sloped inward under the roofline. The windows looked onto the university rooftops and the troubled sky.

  The suite of rooms contained library stacks, a separate windowless chamber lined with bookcases, a small electronics lab and an extensive series of wooden cabinets with wide, shallow drawers.

  Number 2214 was on the east side three drawers up from the floor.

  Lisa pulled it open.

  “Now what are we looking for?” Steve asked.

  He was looking at a pile of sheets in glassine sleeves, each with a small label pasted in the upper corner. Other than that, there was no particular order. It looked as if someone had just tossed the entire collection into the drawer and forgotten about it.

  Lisa cupped her chin on her palm, supporting her elbow with the other hand. “A document of some kind, I should think.”

  “I see,” he said dryly. The drawer contained nothing but documents.

  His irony was so palpable she glared. “Sorry. The tape had another number; I think the one we need.”

  “I don’t recall any other numbers.”

  “A Delta and a Digamma. Letters represented numbers in ancient Greece. Raimond said, ‘Delta Digamma.’

  “Delta could mean infinitesimal change,” Steve suggested.

  “Really? I didn’t know that. But digamma could be the symbol for six.”

  Steve nodded. �
�So we’re looking for number six, plus or minus infinitesimal change? Unless, and I doubt this somehow, Raimond was thinking of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac's Delta, the unit impulse function with the value of infinity for x = 0, and zero elsewhere.” He started to remove envelopes, examine the labels and set them aside on the floor. After a while he added, “These numbers are all over the place. There’s no order at all.”

  She examined one of the envelopes in the light from the window. The sheet of papyrus inside was covered with Greek lettering in an elegant hand. “This is a complaint supposedly written by a bride to the local magistrate. Her husband failed to plant the fields she brought to the marriage in her dowry and she’s divorcing him.”

  “I guess she was what you would call empowered? Why supposedly written?”

  “It’s a forgery, and not a very good one, clumsy hand, anachronistic vocabulary. For tourists.” She tossed it aside. “Do you think Raimond wanted me to multiply the numbers? I just don’t see how. Add or subtract an infinitesimal quantity, maybe seven or five?”

  He spread out a handful of the envelopes. “Here I have number two, then 2409, 156B, 9600….” He trailed off and sat back on his heels. “There must be hundreds of these things in here.”

  “This is the right drawer, I’m sure of it, so we’d better get to work. We’re looking for Delta six, so let’s look for five, six, or seven.”

  All the envelopes were on the floor and they had found none of the numbers. “I don’t understand,” Lisa said. “He wrote Delta-Digamma. He must have meant something else.”

  “Maybe the number wasn’t in the tape. Maybe the other number is somewhere else. He sent you to the Procroft, so the door code makes sense. But Delta-Digamma doesn’t match anything. What about Delta?”

  She hugged him hard. “You’re a genius,” she whispered in his ear.

  He hesitated before letting his arms close loosely around her. “I’ll take your word for it, but why?”

  She stepped away. “Raimond mixed it all up. He was really cautious. He wrote two numbers in the book, Turner’s Greek Papyri, a Delta and a Phi. I think the Delta on the tape was directing me to the Delta in Turner, the Delta with a Phi inside. The number we’re looking for is Phi, not Delta at all; that was just a way of pointing from one to the other.”

  “So we’re looking for the golden mean, 1.618….”

  She shook her head. “No, but he could have anticipated his killer might be fooled into thinking he meant that.”

  “Look,” Steve began, “just draw an equilateral triangle inside a circle, and then find the midpoints of two sides and draw a line to the circumference. The ratio between the line inside the triangle and outside will be Phi, the golden mean, a proportion, see? What else could it be?”

  “Raimond wouldn’t refer to the golden mean. It doesn’t make sense in the context. In Greece Phi was the symbol for five hundred.”

  “I know, but the Golden Mean is Greek,” he persisted. “Phi was proposed by Mathematician Mark Barr because it was the first letter in the name of the Greek sculptor Phidias. His sculptures were perfect examples of the Golden Mean.”

  “Too modern,” she insisted. “Raimond might make a reference like that, but not here. I vote for the simple number: five hundred and six.”

  “So, no Dirac Delta and no Barr Phi?”

  “No,” she said decisively, again flipping rapidly through the envelopes. “Five hundred six.” A moment later she gave a cry of triumph and tipped an envelope to extract its contents.

  A sudden sound sent them both to the staircase.

  There was a scuffle followed by a crash, as if a computer had fallen from a desk. Someone shouted, “Get out of my way.”

  Another yelled, “No, don’t!”

  There followed the sound of shattering glass and a long scream abruptly cut short.

  18.

  Captain Hugo was pushing down firmly on his desk with both hands, towering over the man seated before him. “You lost them?” A file folder slid to the floor, scattering a fan of papers. He bent down to collect them.

  Guardian of the Peace Philippe Dupond shifted uneasily. “They ate lunch,” he said to the back of the captain’s head. “They took a walk, caught a bus. It seemed innocent enough.”

  “Innocent?” The captain straightened and replaced the folder on the desk. He regarded its alignment with the edge and shifted it slightly. “She’s a suspect, Guardian. No one is innocent until proven so. Napoleon was right in this. Did they spot you?”

  “I don’t think so; they went to Mouffetard. It was crowded and they must have turned off somewhere. I realized I’d lost them when I got to Contrescarpe.”

  He was so discouraged Hugo almost relented. “Then what?”

  “I went to her building on rue de l’Esperance, but she never returned. I’m sorry, Capitaine.”

  “How long have you been a Guardian of the Peace?”

  “Three years, Capitaine.”

  “You’re no longer an intern, then, so I suppose you did manage to call in to have his portable phone traced?”

  “Of course, but without result. He must’ve turned it off.”

  Hugo made a chopping motion with the edge of his hand at the desk, but stopped and let it drop before it connected. “Never mind; they won’t go far. Unless Mademoiselle Emmer really did kill Foix she won’t disappear on us. If she does run for it that can only mean she’s guilty and we’ll find her. Maybe they went to Viginaire’s place. There was something between them.”

  “Yes, I saw that in the restaurant.”

  “Do we know where Viginaire lives?”

  Dupond shifted again. “It would appear he doesn’t live anywhere.”

  “Well, we know that can’t be true.” Hugo sat down. Mathieu appeared in the office doorway holding a file. “Anything?” Hugo snapped.

  “Not much.” Mathieu approached the desk with a cursory glance at Dupond. “The Propreté de Paris didn’t have any street cleaners on Montpensier at that hour, so it was a disguise. Clever, too, since no one remembers what a street cleaner looks like. We’re still canvassing the neighborhood. Many reported suspicious looking Arabs, or Africans, or Asians. One man swore he saw an extraterrestrial, and a woman was convinced her dog had been kidnapped. It’s crazy season. And an elderly woman in the gardens of the Palais Royal saw a nun in some kind of a futuristic wheelchair.”

  Hugo grunted.

  “Other results: the bullet was a nine millimeter hollow point. They’re trying to trace it, but doubt they can; it’s very common ammunition. Explosive on the door contained a small quantity of Penthrite, so it was probably Semtex. Oh, and the tape.”

  “The tape, yes.” Hugo slicked his hair back absently. “You can go, Dupond.”

  The Guardian, looking sheepish, bowed his way out. Once he was gone Hugo reached for the folder. “What about the tape?” he asked Mathieu.

  The lieutenant placed the folder on the desk. “It’s the metallic kind used to decorate presents,” he said. “It’s sold in all the stores before Christmas. It was slightly damaged by stomach acid. No recording or anything like that on it. The rest of the roll was in Foix’s desk.”

  While Mathieu was talking, Hugo flipped open the folder. Several pages were clipped inside along with digital photographs of the wheel marks on the carpet.

  Mathieu trailed off, seeing he had lost Hugo’s attention.

  The captain flicked his fingernail against a page and looked up. “What did you say before?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said something about a nun in the gardens at the Palais Royal. Rossignol’s apartment would look onto the garden, would it not?”

  “Yes. A witness mentioned a nun in a wheelchair.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A nun in a wheelchair can’t be all that unusual. Nuns in uniform may be less common than they used to be, but why notice this one?”

  Mathieu looked at his notes. “She said the w
heelchair looked strange, and the nun was staring at the windows along the west side of the gardens, like she was fixed on them or was looking for something.”

  “I don’t suppose this witness described what was strange about the wheelchair?”

  “She said it had too many wheels. The way she described it, it could have been one of those special things that can climb stairs. The sets of wheels rotated as it climbs. I saw a television special on them. I suppose the nun could have had one of those.”

  “Yes? Well, Mathieu, from the width of the tracks and the weight of the object that made them, forensics thinks it likely they match a very sophisticated kind of chair with four big wheels, the kind belonging to a climbing wheelchair. It’s not certain, of course, just their best guess, but I do believe you’re correct.”

  Mathieu grinned. “You’re not suggesting a crippled nun in a wheelchair shot Dr. Foix? She wouldn’t have been tall enough, for one thing.”

  Hugo started scribbling on a Post-it note. “Not in an ordinary wheelchair, but the one suggested by forensics has hydraulic lifts and microprocessor controls. It’s expensive, well beyond the means of an ordinary nun, I would think, so someone must have got it for her. We have a man dressed as a street cleaner and a nun in a wheelchair. It begins to have a funny aroma, does it not, Mathieu? Have someone check sales records for this model. Maybe something will come up.” He handed the paper to Mathieu and went back to studying the forensics report.

  * * *

  The flames in Teresa’s hut began small, just a few orange flickers barely visible through the half-open door where Rossignol’s body was visible on her bunk.

  The course of the fire was predictable enough: they grew rapidly, aided by the abundance of combustible material heaped inside and soon angry fire engulfed the room. A few moments later they breached the roof and released boiling clouds of dark smoke into the sullen sky.