by Rob Swigart
“Yes.” Rossignol closed the door and tossed his cap on the coat rack.
“Can I get you something?”
“A cognac, if you don’t mind. It’s going to be a long day.” The older man crossed the thick gray carpet and sank into a leather Eames chair at an angle to the desk. “We have a situation.” He put his feet up on the ottoman with a sigh.
“Police?” Steve Viginaire closed his copy of Secure Banking Cryptography: a Reappraisal and carefully replaced it in the bookcase behind his desk. His movements were those of an athlete: he seemed to uncoil from his chair rather than stand. He was lean, even lanky, but well muscled. Something in his bearing said there was military in his past.
From a cabinet near the window he poured a snifter of Rémy-Martin. Rossignol took a sip and gazed out the window. A small white cloud raced over the rooftops across the street.
“Raimond Foix was assassinated early this morning,” the banker said slowly.
“Assassinated?” Steve became still and attentive. It was as if ripples vanished from the surface of a pond. “Foix?” he said. “Yes. Do you need the file?”
“No, he’s a special client.”
“He had a monitor? What time did it happen?”
“Just before four this morning.”
“You notified the police?”
The older man looked into the amber liquid in the snifter and sighed. “Of course. I’ve just come from the apartment.”
“Next of kin file?”
Rossignol shook his head and set the brandy aside. “No, I must handle this one personally. Nothing to do with you. It’s messy.”
The telephone chirped. “Your private line,” Steve said with a glance at the screen. “No caller ID.”
“The police were still talking to her so it won’t be the girl calling this soon. Let the machine get it.”
“She?”
“Never mind. I must run an errand. If she calls tell her to meet me here. Her name is Lisa.” He pulled himself to his feet. “So dark,” he murmured. “And now this.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be back within two hours.” Rossignol put on his cap and left, closing the door carefully behind him. Steve listened to his boss’ footsteps descend the stairs and fade away. He checked the machine but whoever had called had not left a message.
With a puzzled frown he retrieved Secure Banking Cryptography and settled once more at his desk.
8.
“Can you say if anything’s missing?” Hugo asked, at once perplexed and annoyed. “You’ve spent time in this room. Perhaps something looks out of place, even something small or that seems insignificant. Anything.”
She remained by the courtyard window. “Aside from these books on the floor, the broken cupid, the body of Professor Foix, a bullet in the wall and another in the window, you mean?” A dozen rare volumes, many of them several hundred years old, were scattered at her feet. It was painful to see them treated like this. She opened the drapes and started to open the windows. “May I?”
Hugo nodded, ignoring her sarcasm. She folded the shutters back. Their elegant wooden slats clattered. The sun had risen above the buildings on the opposite side of the tree-filled court and poured light into the room, setting fire to the deep gold and orange of the Sarouk carpet.
She stepped over the debris and sat on the small sofa near the desk.
Hugo stared at the carpet, tugging on his lower lip. Suddenly he turned and shouted down the stair, “Mathieu!”
The lieutenant downstairs called back, “Oui.”
“Come! And you, too, Bernard.” He beckoned to the stocky policeman on the landing.
They appeared in the doorway.
Hugo pointed at the carpet. “Aside from the mess they made carrying out the body, look down there. What do you see?”
The two officers examined the debris from the explosion. “Here?” Bernard pointed with his pen.
Hugo nodded. “That’s it. What do you think?”
Mathieu touched the spot with the toe of his shoe. “Hard to say. It’s a small indentation, and from the sideways pattern it looks as if someone tried to brush it away. But something pressed splinters into the carpet.”
“I noticed that spot when we started,” Bernard said. “I thought it was just an irregularity in the blast pattern.”
“Go on,” Hugo urged. “Look again.”
“There’s another one!”
Mathieu took out a tape and measured between the two spots in the wood dust. He tipped his head to one side, pursed his lips, and made a questioning sound.
“Now take a look at the carpet over here,” Hugo suggested.
Lieutenant Mathieu moved toward the desk on his hands and knees, staring intently at the carpet from a few centimeters away. He glanced up with a grunt. “Two wheels pressed into the carpet,” he said. “They match, same width.”
Hugo grunted. “What kind of wheel?” He turned to Lisa, who spread her hands. “Did he know anyone in a wheelchair? Did he have one himself?”
“Wheelchair?” Lisa blurted. “What are you talking about?”
“There are the impressions of wheels in the carpet, on top of the sawdust. The trail points toward the landing.”
Mathieu shook his head. “I didn’t find anything, either on the stair or downstairs.”
“Nonetheless something made those tracks after the explosion. Mademoiselle Emmer?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t have a wheelchair. And except for his hearing implant he was in good shape.”
“Still, a wheelchair,” Hugo said emphatically.
“Or some kind of cart?” she suggested. “Or a gurney? Maybe the assassins wheeled something in here. Oh, what am I saying? You’re the detective.” She went back to staring at the bookcases.
“What do you think?” Hugo asked Mathieu.
“We have good digital close-ups,” he replied. “If there’s a tire pattern, our search software might find it, but I wouldn’t expect much. The wood debris is too large and scattered for a decent impression. I would say it was pretty heavy, though.”
They fell into a technical discussion of rubber traces, fiber density and weight calculations.
Lisa looked from the books to the shelves and back. Finally she interrupted Hugo by tapping him on the shoulder. “May I?” She gestured at the books.
He frowned a moment, then turned down his mouth and spread his hands. The gesture was so familiar, so Gallic, so dismissing, that she flashed him a bright smile that said more than words. She bent down and measured the spine of the Hesiod without touching it. Standing, she held her forefinger against the shelf and moved it slowly back and forth in front of the gaps. She made a small mewing sound. “Yes,” she breathed. “That one was there.” She turned to Hugo. “It seems to me something’s missing but I can’t really tell without actually replacing them.”
“Very well, go ahead. We have detailed pictures.”
She lifted the Hesiod from the floor and blew off the scattering of wood chips and dust on the cover. She started to replace it in the bookcase when she stopped abruptly. “Well, now, that’s something!”
“What’s that?”
“These books were on the floor before the explosion.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Yes?”
“The splinters are on top. The books were already on the floor.”
“Ah, yes, very observant. That would be strange, would it?”
“Yes, that would be strange,” she agreed. “He took good care of his books, especially these. He’d never do this without a reason.”
Hugo broke into a broad smile. “I am impressed. That is good, Mademoiselle Emmer. Very good. Please continue. It may be important to know what was taken, if anything.”
“They’re from different shelves,” she muttered. “From different places from the case left of the window. The right hand case is untouched. Was he trying to say something? And if so, what? And to whom?”
“Pardon?” Hugo
was trying to follow her ruminations in English.
“What does it mean, Captain Hugo? Raimond spilled these books on the floor. Was there a pattern in the way he did it? If it’s another damn acrostic I’m going to be very angry with him.”
“I doubt that, Mademoiselle Emmer.”
“These books mean something.”
Hugo nodded, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Perhaps, but it all seems a bit complicated for someone under stress,” he said. “I still think someone else was here before the killer.”
She was placing the Hesiod in its place on the third shelf from the top. “It was open to line 500,” she said, reading him the title.
He wrote it down.
One by one she held books, considering their spines and titles, their size and relation to one another, and after reading out their titles carefully returned them to their places, moved them, tried again, matching width of spine, color of leather, height. It was like piecing together a puzzle. Once she removed them all and started again.
Time passed. Finally she was satisfied.
An empty spot remained. “That’s it!”
“Yes?”
She drew a face. “Well, there was a book there and now there’s no book. So that one was taken. Someone broke into the apartment to…”
“No, Mademoiselle, as I told you, there is no sign of forced entry downstairs. Here, of course, is another matter.”
She raised her eyebrows. “All right, someone entered, killed Raimond and took a book.”
“It would seem so.”
“OK, which book?”
Hugo struggled to suppress his impatience. “I was hoping you would tell me, Mademoiselle.”
She appraised him. He’s under pressure, she thought. Raimond’s death was important, more important than the death of an obscure old Greek professor would seem to warrant. An obscure professor with bulletproof windows, she reminded herself. There was more to this case than she thought at first. Hugo wants results, a quick solution. Was she a witness or a suspect? She pressed her lips together and stepped over the debris. “I need some time to think.”
She stared at the bookcase, pulled the manila envelope containing her grant application from her bag and wrote down the titles of the books, chewing on her lower lip. She put the papers back in the bag and looked once more at the bookcase.
Hugo waited.
“The City of God!” She closed her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “It was a copy of De civitate dei by St. Augustine. That’s it, that’s the missing book.” She paused, her expression quizzical. “One of them, anyway.”
9.
In an examination room on the lower level of the unprepossessing yellow brick edifice of the Institut médico-légal on the Quai de la Rapée near the Austerlitz bridge, a short, plump man with brown eyes was frowning at a large X ray negative with the name FOIX printed in the corner. He had dark hair slicked forward and a dapper moustache. Dr. Viètes clipped it to the light panel next to an X ray of a skull. The stiff plastic rattled in his hands. He stepped back and his frown deepened. It was as strange as he had thought it was.
He could easily have examined the photos on the computer monitor in the small office on the other side of the room. Dr. Viètes would never turn his back on technology. After all, the computer showed you things film might miss.
But sometimes his intuition directed him to do things the old-fashioned way. Film could also reveal things the computer missed.
With his finger he traced a line down the esophagus to a mass in the stomach. It looked like a very skinny snake uncoiling. “You, my friend, will have to come out into the open, eh?”
He looked back at the body on the table. He had already recorded his preliminary notes: subject male, early eighties, cochlear implant left side, heart monitor RFID chip under skin of left pectoral. No visible scars, no unusual marks or tattoos. Shot twice. Estimate nine millimeter. First shot struck the throat on a downward angle from the right side, striking the larynx. The bullet then struck the wall behind the victim next to the window. The trauma left the trachea, larynx, lower pharynx and esophagus exposed. There was heavy bleeding, though no major veins or arteries were severed. A wild shot, probably the second, glanced off an ornamental cupid on the victim’s desk and struck bulletproof glass of the window facing rue du Dragon. A third shot, precisely placed, penetrated the frontal bone at the glabella and fragmented inside the cortex. He judged this wound would probably have been instantly fatal, pending final dissection.
He was glad to get the preliminaries out of the way. This strange ribbon on the X ray, this was unique and piqued Dr. Viètes’ professional curiosity. “What could it be?” he murmured absently.
The pathologist working at the next table looked up. “What’s that?” he rumbled. The staff referred to him as the Giant.
Viètes grinned. “Just wondering about this thread down the alimentary canal.”
“Oh.” The Giant started an electric saw and began slicing down the sternum of the drowning victim before him, showing no further interest.
“Ah, well.” Viètes decided to see if the ribbon or tape would come out without cutting. It would be safer.
He took a pair of forceps and grasped the end showing in the esophagus. It resisted. He pulled a bit harder. It gave slightly and stuck again.
With a regretful sigh he set aside the forceps and took out his own saw, and for some time the whine of blades cutting bone and flesh echoed in the room.
When he had opened the thoracic cavity and sliced vertically down the esophagus, thus exposing the metallic tape, he took up the forceps again. “Eh, bien,” he murmured. This time the ribbon came out easily, though it was coated in fluids. Soon he had it laid out on the table alongside the body. “Take a look at this, Etienne,” he said.
The Giant came over. “Metallic ribbon of some kind. What do you think? Recording tape?” He grunted and started to turn away. He turned back. “Wait a minute. This guy swallowed it?”
Viètes nodded. “I suspect he knew the autopsy procedure and prepared for it. He wanted this to show up in the X ray. It must be important.”
“Is that writing?” the Giant asked, pointing out part of a letter. “Looks like an L.”
Viètes carefully swabbed the tape with cotton and plain water. Soon he had uncovered a long series of block letters printed in a neat vertical line down the tape. “It is an L,” he said, feeding the tape through his fingers and reading off the letters. “L C E A A T R F Y M H O U T…. Does this mean anything to you?”
The Giant, forgetting his own autopsy, stared over Viètes’ shoulder. “Isn’t ‘O-U-T’ an English word? Could it be a code of some kind, unless he was raving. Fear? Perhaps he thought he was writing something intelligible but the strain was too much.”
Viètes shook his head. “He had great presence of mind. He drew something in a book with his own blood before he died.”
“Drew something?”
“A symbol.” Viètes sketched the circle-triangle-line on a pad.
“Never saw that before, either,” the Giant said. “But if this is a message, and it’s important, who was it intended for?”
Viètes lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know, unless it was the young woman. This is a mix of Roman and Greek letters.…”
The Giant started to reply but Viètes ran to the office and picked up the phone. “Oui, alors,” he muttered, going back to his drowning victim. She, at least, had been pulled from the Seine and presented no real mysteries; her lungs were full of water.
“Captain Hugo?” Viètes spoke quickly into the receiver. “This is urgent, so I’m going to bring it over. I believe Foix has given us a message for Mademoiselle Emmer.”
He coiled the tape around a pencil, put it in his pocket, and hurried out to the parking lot on the lower level. On the rough stone of the wall next to the door he passed a sign reading “Depart de Convois.” Hearses bearing the dead began their final journeys here.
As he was getti
ng into his car he noted through the canopy of the shade trees that the clouds forecast for later in the day were beginning to build up to the west.
10.
Hugo put away his portable phone. “That was Viètes calling from the Institut Médico-Légal.”
“Mm-hm?” Lisa ran her fingertips along the bookshelves, pausing occasionally to touch a spine.
“He believes he has a message for you.”
She turned. “A message for me? What kind of message?”
“He only said it might be important and he’s on his way.”
She lifted her shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Hugo went downstairs with Bernard and Lt. Mathieu. Time passed. The front door opened and closed. One of the policemen hummed a few bars of “Le petit monsieur triste,” an old Edith Piaf tune. There was quiet conversation. A cell phone rang. The door opened and closed again.
Lisa picked up the phone on Foix’s desk, thinking she should explain to the Fondation Roulot why she hadn’t shown up, but there was no dial tone. That was odd, but it was probably one of those temporary outages in the phone system. She cradled it and walked once more around the perimeter of the room, touching the shelf edges as if that way she might glean from them some meaning to Raimond Foix’s death. She felt his presence everywhere. She could almost smell his shaving cream, a ghost perfume wafting through the room, and see the little dab of it that always seemed to remain just under his ear.
Hugo reappeared.
“Did you notice the windows?” Lisa asked him, pausing in her slow circuit of the room.
Hugo spoke at the same time. “So, what did you mean, one of the books?” He stopped, and they both laughed. He gave a little bow. “What about the windows?”
She bent down to look at a book title and moved on slowly. “They were both closed. It was warm last night and he would normally have had both windows open to catch the breeze. But they were both closed. Stranger still, the courtyard shutters were also closed, but not the ones on the street.”