by Rob Swigart
“Why is that strange?” Hugo was frowning.
“He didn’t sleep in here. He was working. He often worked late at night. He liked the air, so he would have had the shutters and the windows open. Yes, it’s odd, the windows, the shutters.”
“Does this have anything to do with the books?”
“Well, it’s a break in the pattern, don’t you see? I think he knew he was going to be attacked. I think he closed the courtyard shutters and both windows, locked the door, wrote the list of composers, pulled books out of the bookcase, and sat down at his desk to wait.”
Hugo nodded, visibly impressed. “It seems so.”
“I think everything he did meant something.”
“What? What do these things mean?”
“I don’t know, not yet. But what about the wheels? They’ve been bothering me as well.”
He shook his head. “Excuse me?”
“The wheels, or the wheelchair!” She stopped by the courtyard window and pointed at the carpet, tilting her head as though listening to a distant voice. Her blond hair fell to the side. “Captain Hugo, you said the gun was fired downward and that meant the shooter was tall. As tall as me, perhaps a bit taller, that’s how you put it. A person in a wheelchair wouldn’t be tall, would they? So it’s unlikely the impressions on the carpet are from a wheelchair. There must be some other explanation. Perhaps someone else was here, two attackers.”
“I had thought of that, yes. And yes, it’s a possibility.”
“Oh, right. OK.” Lisa placed her hand over the gap where the St. Augustine had been. “Now, you asked about the books.” She spread her fingers to measure the gap and showed him the distance. “This space is too big for the De civitate dei. There would have been a gap, and I don’t remember a gap. So I think there were two books in this space.”
“The assassin stole two books?”
“Perhaps.” She went back to the small sofa facing the long bookcase and stared at it, letting her eyes go slightly out of focus. It was something she did when she was thinking.
Lisa Emmer was a shy, inward child, with strawberry blond hair even as an infant (Swedes in the family tree, her father had told her more than once). She had passed much of her childhood wandering alone along a creek bed near her home. She found delight in the stones and plants of the closest thing to wilderness she knew. It had come as an epiphany one day that there were animals, too, skunks and opossums and foxes and birds, and if she stayed still and let her eyes go soft she could sometimes see them as clearly as if they were outlined in light against the complexity of leaf and trunk.
It was a technique she had perfected later in the desert when searching in the sand and dust of ancient trash heaps for fragments of papyrus or the pieces of broken crockery on which Roman soldiers wrote letters home. In the tan chaos of the dirt some small, unnatural edge would often pop out, but only if she didn’t stare too hard. This was called a ‘search eye,’ this trick of letting training and instinct work together by keeping the rational mind from interfering.
She had no particular reason to use the technique now. After all, the St. Augustine was gone and she was pretty sure another book had gone with it. There was no real point in looking. So she was just thinking, and avoiding the distraction of visual stimulation.
“Which books did Raimond pull down?” she mused. “Was one the Augustine? What of the other missing book? Was he trying to say something? Well…” She stood up and smoothed her skirt with her palms. “I won’t find it like this. You’ll just have to find the killer, Captain Hugo.”
“Of course.” His irony was palpable, but she was already across the room examining the bookshelf. As along the creeks, as in the desert, something had leapt out of the background precisely when she wasn’t looking for it.
“It always happens like that, doesn’t it, Captain Hugo? I knew something was out of place, but I didn’t know I knew it. Well, you asked me to tell you if I saw something, even if it was small. This is small, but I’m sure it means something.” She reached up and slipped a volume from the top shelf. “This,” she called triumphantly, “is the Histoire de Théodose le Grand by Valentin Esprit Fléchier, published in Paris by Mabre-Cramoisy in 1679.”
Hugo was not impressed. “And so?”
She swept her hand across the bookcase. “The books in this case are all more or less contemporary volumes. There’s nothing rare or exotic here – Dostoyevsky, Loeb classics, Philosophy, literature, science. The rare books were in the cases at the end, on either side of the window.”
“So this book was in the wrong place? Was that unusual?”
“Raimond Foix would never have allowed one of his treasures out of place, especially not one this rare. By the way, this biography of Theodosius the Great is a wonderful example of printing, but Bishop Fléchier was much better known for his funeral orations and the fact that he was tutor to the son of Louis XIV. It isn’t a great book in itself.”
“So, if Foix moved the book, he was trying to tell us, or you, something?”
“Yes, of course. He pulled those books out to call attention to books. He misplaced this one so I’d find it here. He was certainly trying to tell me something.” Her elation collapsed. “But what?” She looked helplessly at Hugo. “Was the Augustine part of the message? If so, perhaps the killer took it. If not, and the Augustine was taken from the shelf, it disturbs the message. I don’t know what he wanted me to see. The color? The subject? The date?”
Just then there was a clatter of footsteps on the stair. Viètes appeared in the doorway. “Mademoiselle,” he said, and without waiting for an answer produced the spool of metallic tape and unrolled it vertically across Foix’s desk. “This is the bright thing we saw in Dr. Foix’s throat.”
The letters, written in a clear block hand in indelible ink, flowed down the shiny strip: L S C E A A T R F Y M H O U T E E F L O M D T L N I R Δ I F S A ϝ S O E W I T I R E L E Γ T R O N N H S V T Ω E E E O Θ D E Y R Ι O K O Γ Σ O T U N Ε R H B Ω Α O E E Θ Υ P P C I Τ E R A Σ Ο N O R E Ν
“What is this?” Viètes demanded. “And what does it mean?”
11.
Brother Cedric, a dark, brooding man of middle years, wore the neon green of the Paris street cleaners, a color so bright and remarkable as to render the wearer invisible. The ubiquitous uniform, with its yellow vest and band under the knee, was the perfect disguise, aided by his dark complexion and blank expression. The street cleaners of the Propreté de Paris were everywhere, sweeping the omnipresent trash along the curbs with their green plastic brooms. Thus dressed, he had no difficulty following Rossignol from the Foix apartment on the rue du Dragon to the office on the rue Argenteuil, where he waited across the street, apparently engrossed in examining the water outlets set into the curb.
Rossignol emerged from the building and went north. Cedric, broom in hand, stayed twenty meters behind. Once the banker paused and looked back, forcing Cedric to pretend he was perusing Le Monde at a newsstand. His quarry disappeared around the corner.
Two blocks later Rossignol entered an art gallery on a small side street and went out the back. Cedric had to run to a passage some distance down the street, arriving on the rue Montpensier in time to see Rossignol enter a doorway. This time the banker did not look around. Either he felt safe or he was getting careless.
Cedric made a cell phone call.
A few minutes later a gray van pulled up in front of the building. Cedric climbed inside. A minute later he climbed out wearing a blue worker’s jacket. He turned and pulled two gray and green ‘men working’ barriers from the van.
While he was setting them up, Rossignol was taking the elevator to the top floor apartment and let himself in with two multi-sided keys. The antechamber was quietly furnished with a late Empire entry table and two chairs. He pressed the frame of a painting beside the opposite door. It swung back, revealing an oblong metal plate. He placed his palm over it and said in English: “Nightingale.”
The door clicked. He p
ushed into a spacious salon and the door latched quietly behind him.
The room was large for a Paris apartment, with conversational groupings, a marble fireplace, and a number of well cared-for houseplants. Large windows on the other side looked onto the lush green of the gardens of the Palais Royal. “Alain?” Rossignol called over his shoulder.
The gardens were in full bloom. Tourists and Parisians on their lunch break filled the benches. The tree canopies were thick with dark green leaves. It was an ordinary day. The threatened rain had yet to appear.
A large man in a dark suit appeared in a doorway. He could have been a valet, or a bodyguard. “Yes, M. Rossignol?”
Rossignol watched the crowd below for a moment. A nun in the habit of a Dominican Sister rolled her wheelchair across the open space near the fountain. Such a sight was not that unusual, but the chair turned toward his windows on the west side of the vast rectangle and stopped. Was she scanning the façade looking for him? He pulled back from the window and turned. “We have a last request, Alain.”
“Very well, M. Rossignol.” He led the way into the next room, which in turn opened onto a corridor with several doors. At the far end he produced a key with which he unlocked a door opening into a small, wood-paneled elevator.
As they descended, Rossignol listened to the quiet choral music that flooded the elevator, one of his favorites from the seventeenth century: “Veni, Sponsa Mea” by Etienne Moulinié.
They descended several floors before the cage stopped. They were now well below street level. The elevator opened into a small square room. Thick beige carpet covered the floor, paintings of Burgundy landscapes adorned the walls, and the lighting was indirect, but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a vault built into the subbasement of the building. The only access was the elevator from the penthouse apartment. A plain steel door, painted blue, faced them.
They each produced a key and turned them together in locks on either side. The steel separated in the middle and slid open to both sides. They now faced a metal grill. This required both handprints. The grate rose into the ceiling and while Alain waited by the door Rossignol entered a small chamber. Forty-eight large, numbered safety deposit boxes eight high by six wide were set into each of the three walls.
Rossignol pulled out box 108 and placed it on a small shelf. He pressed his forefinger against an oval on the top. When nothing happened, he tried his other forefinger. Software in the lid selected at random the one that would open the box. This time the lid clicked open.
He removed a bronze disk a little over three inches in diameter. It had a hole in the recessed center. Around the rim were inscribed the alphabet and a series of numbers. A dark patina gave it the appearance of great age.
He slipped it into his pocket and spent a few moments longer looking into the empty box. This was what remained of Raimond Foix, his friend for nearly thirty years. This disk. Now it must go to the young American girl. Foix had chosen her and Rossignol, servant of the last Pythos, knew the burden she would have to carry. It was his duty to transmit to her the secret of a tradition thousands of years old, and what he knew of the struggle it represented. The world, if it were not to descend into chaos and death, depended on her taking up the burden.
He also knew she wasn’t ready, and he would have to prepare her carefully, but there was only so much he could tell her. Foix had many secrets, even from his private banker and closest advisor. Before he gave her the disk they would have several conversations. He would have to lay the foundation. It was too much for anyone to take in all at once.
And then there was this disk, and what it represented….
He closed the box. There was a muted buzz as the print recognition software reset. He replaced it and closed the door.
They repeated the process in reverse, lowering the grill, relocking the vault. Upstairs in the apartment Alain said, “Good luck, M. Rossignol.”
“Thank you, Alain.” He glanced out the window but the nun was no longer there. Resolutely he turned back. “I can tell you only that her name is Lisa Emmer.”
“I understand.”
When he emerged from the building under scattered clouds, there was a dark gray van screening him from the street. “AGON?” he read aloud from the side of the truck. He had only a moment after that to register that the nun in a wheelchair nearby was the same one he had seen in the garden. He turned back toward his entrance, but it was too late. She stood and blocked the way. The door of the van slid open and someone grabbed him from behind and hauled him inside. The door slid closed behind him, something slipped over his face and the world went dark.
Brother Cedric collected the folding barriers and replaced them in the back of the van. He stowed the wheelchair while the nun opened the passenger door and disappeared inside. Cedric closed the back, retrieved his broom and sauntered down the street.
The van moved away. Another car filled the empty parking space.
12.
Lisa, Hugo and Viètes frowned at the string of letters. The doctor straightened. He spread his hands and shook his head. “I just don’t get it.”
Hugo said, “What is it?”
“It’s a message,” Lisa said. “Just as you thought, Dr. Viètes.”
“I see some words in English,” Viètes said. “Out, and wit and tire and tune. But they don’t make sense. ‘O Tuner?’ ”
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“And Greek letters,” Viètes continued, “as well as Roman. And that thing.” He pointed at the odd character: ϝ.
“An F,” Hugo suggested.
“Funny F,” Viètes commented.
“It’s a Greek letter, abandoned early,” Lisa said. “It stood for a sound something like a ‘w’ in English, a Gamma with an extra arm, a Digamma.”
Hugo straightened. “So, what is it?”
“As I said,” Lisa answered, looking around, “it’s a message. Of course!” She took down the desk lamp and removed the shade.
“What are you doing?” Hugo asked.
“It would certainly be easy for anyone to decipher this today but it’s just the sort of thing Raimond would think of, a skytale, an ancient method of secret communication. You can read about it in Thucydides. The Spartans used it to send messages to their generals.” She wrapped the strip of tape around the five-sided body of the desk lamp, anchoring the beginning with her thumb. When she had finished the letters lined up and the message leapt out at them:
LAMEMISERTHEDOOROPENSTHEDRAWERSEEKTHEPROCROFTΔϝILOVEYOUBECAREFULLISTENTORΓΝΩΘΙΣΕΑΥΤΟΝFOIΓΝΩΘΙΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ.
“I still don’t understand it,” Hugo said.
“The words are all run together,” Viètes said. “See. ‘LAMEMISER.’ What’s that, Lame Miser? ‘Lame’ is a blade in French. Miserable Blade?”
“It’s an anagram of my name,” Lisa said.
“Of course!” Hugo nodded. “Sure. Lame Miser. Are you a lame miser?”
Her smile was grim. “Raimond’s joke: he often said I was stingy. My apartment in the Buttes aux Cailles is too small, too cheap. I shop at the outdoor market on Auguste-Blanqui and sometimes stay after it closes to scavenge free fruit and vegetables, stuff they would otherwise throw away. I consider it a form of recycling.”
“You’re not lame,” Hugo accused. “You’re a gleaner.”
“No, I’m not lame. He just thought it was lame, the way I lived. It’s a joke in English, not French… unless you think ‘lame’ is for blade, in which case I guess you could say it cuts both ways.”
She was rewarded by a brittle laugh from both men.
“Anyway, all we have to do is punctuate it.” She wrote it down on a page from Hugo’s notebook.
LAME MISER, THE DOOR OPENS THE DRAWER. SEEK THE PROCROFT Δ ϝ. I LOVE YOU. BE CAREFUL. LISTEN TO R. ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ. FOI. ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ.
“More puzzles,” Viètes said. “What’s the Greek?”
“It’s an old saying,” Lisa r
eplied. “It means, ‘Know thyself.’ ”
“Ah,” the doctor breathed. “Very nice.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to your dead bodies?” Hugo asked him.
“Yes, of course, but this is too interesting.” Viètes saw the detective’s expression and backed away, hands raised. “All right, all right, I’m going. But I want to know what happens, what this message means. After all, I’m the one who found it.”
He left.
Hugo turned back to find Lisa poring over the strip of letters with a magnifying glass, pausing to write on a scrap of paper. After a moment she crumpled the paper, stuffed it in her bag and took out Rossignol’s card.
“What is it?” Hugo asked.
“May I use your phone? Raimond’s doesn’t work. You see, ‘Listen to R’? That has to be Rossignol. I need to call him.”
Hugo handed her the phone. Almost immediately a man answered, “Private banking.”
“M. Rossignol, please.”
“I’m afraid he’s not in. This is Steve Viginaire, his assistant. Can I help you?”
“Lisa Emmer.”
“Ah, Mademoiselle Emmer, he said you would be calling. He went out. He should be here soon. In fact, he was due back a half hour ago.”
“You must find him. I think he’s in danger.”
He didn’t hesitate. “One moment.” A minute later he said, “He doesn’t answer his portable. Where are you?”
“Raimond Foix’s apartment, rue du Dragon.”
“I’ll be right over. Are the police still there?”
“Yes.”
“Tell them M. Rossignol is missing. And wait there. Don’t move. Don’t say anything more to the police, and don’t move.”
The line went dead.
13.
Lisa stood at the open window behind the desk, watching a policeman remove the barricades at the end of the street.
What had Raimond meant by closing the shutters on the court and leaving them open to the street? Why were the windows closed? Was Raimond afraid someone would shoot through them? Or was he saying something about transparency, about seeing or not seeing?