With Bradelli dead, I needed to find Grialet. The Dorignac bookstore, like everything in Paris, was hidden. If I hadn’t written the address down, I would have walked right past it. There was a main room where history books, innocuous new arrivals, big volumes with pictures of military uniforms, and anatomy guides were gathered on large tables. But all those books were the facade behind which Mr. Dorignac carried out his true mission: the chosen few had to go down some stairs and to the back of the shop to find, behind a worn velvet curtain, the real bookstore.
Two other people were there when I entered, a tall, elegantly dressed lady who wore rings with snakes on them, and a gentleman who had rather greenish skin. Apart from his color, he seemed to be in perfect health. The gray-bearded bookseller completely focused on assessing a shipment of used books that had arrived in a trunk. The lady feigned interest in a dictionary, which she set aside quickly, and made a gesture to the bookseller with her head. He responded with a nod of approval, and the lady vanished behind the red curtain. Minutes later, after leafing through a thick book by Michelet entitled Bibles of the World, the green gentleman made the same sign of complicity and received an identical response. I waited for the gentleman to disappear behind the curtain and then I perfectly imitated the seriousness of the gesture. I was about to go past the threadbare curtain that separated me from the Mystery, when the bookseller stopped me.
“Who are you? Where are you going?”
I shook the hand that he put in my way, and I introduced myself.
“Monsieur Dorignac? My name won’t mean anything to you. I am Monsieur Arzaky’s assistant.”
“Arzaky is an enemy of everything here.”
I drew close to his ear.
“Monsieur Arzaky is having a crisis of faith. He has poured himself into reading the occult texts, but he has no discipline. He wants it all at once: alchemy, spiritualism, black magic. He mixes stills with crystal balls, sulfur with Haitian dolls. I’m afraid he’s headed for disaster. And that he’ll end up like…” Just then the green gentleman left the bookstore empty-handed. He had spent no more than a minute in the forbidden section.
“Poor Serdac, so persistent in his experiments. He comes here to look at the cover of the most expensive book I have. It’s enough for him to know that it’s here and then he leaves. He doesn’t look good, but he’s in better health than he was when his skin was white. Similar methods have greatly reduced the clientele of our bookstore. The ones that don’t end up in a hospice, blow themselves up. The ones who don’t die in an explosion, end up with sulfur poisoning. Suicides are the order of the day. I’ll confess that lately I’ve been hiding the most dangerous books, so I won’t go bankrupt for lack of readers. As for Arzaky, I can’t help him. I’m sure your detective already has the books he needs.”
“One never has the books he needs: he has too many or too few. That’s why I was looking for Monsieur Grialet. I trust that he can help me get Arzaky back to his cases.”
“And why would I want Arzaky back on his cases?”
“Do you want them to accuse the Martinists of having driven Paris’s great detective crazy? Or the Rosicrucians? Or you yourself, who nourishes all those impressionable minds with your books?”
“He’s not the Detective of Paris, Darbon is.”
“He was, but Darbon was murdered while investigating some of your customers.”
“Don’t think you’re telling me anything I don’t know. I run a bookstore, but I read the newspapers too.”
The curtain opened slightly and a woman’s hand, filled with rings, waved the bookseller over. Did she want to know the price of a book? Was she looking for some title that wasn’t on the shelves? Dorignac’s haste in attending to her made me think that it was something more mundane than the search for knowledge. From what I had been able to observe, good booksellers invariably wait on customers in an offhand manner, convinced that everyone will eventually find the book they want without any help. If the bookseller takes care of a customer, it’s not about a book.
Dorignac, rushing to help the woman, found a pencil and jotted down the name of a street that I wasn’t familiar with.
“I recently sent him a package at this address. Grialet devotes his days and nights to searching through thousands of pages to find the perfect quote, the one that will save him. Then he gets rid of the books. He believes in these things.”
“And what do you believe in?” I asked as I put the piece of paper in my pocket.
“Surrounded by dangerous books as I am, I believe that our only hope is in forgetting the quote that we once read, the one that will lead to our downfall.”
Dorignac vanished behind the red curtain.