Chapter Twelve

Rachel hated the Châtelet–Les Halles Mètro station. She hated it viscerally and profoundly, with a passion she usually reserved for nylon clothing, basic punctuation errors, and people who said passed instead of died. The source of her loathing lay deep underground, in the long tunnel through which passengers needed to walk in order to change lines. Rachel felt that any Mètro stop that required its users to make their way further than three hundred yards in tunnels was in fact two Mètro stops, or possibly more, and she felt this most keenly when she stood at rush hour on one of the Châtelet–Les Halles tunnel’s moving walkways, sweating in the oppressive air with a thousand other people trying to get home.

Today she tried to distract herself by thinking about what had just happened at the Bibliothèque. Was book theft so common that two thieves might operate in the same library? Or were book thieves so devoted to certain libraries that one might wait a year to strike again in the same place? And how on earth could Guy Laurent’s murder connect to Machiavelli’s speeches and the Supplementum Chronicarum?

“Supplementum Chronicarum,” she suddenly said aloud. “SC!”

The yarmulke-wearing young man in front of her turned around, and she smiled apologetically, then folded her lips between her teeth to keep herself from crowing out loud. The SC on Laurent’s sheet of paper could stand for Supplementum Chronicarum! And could M/F simply stand for Machiavelli en Français? What if Laurent had figured out the identity of the people who’d stolen the engravings and had been blackmailing them? And what if one of them killed him for it?

She burst out of the tunnel onto her Mètro platform. Normally she stayed on the train for as long as possible, basking in the air conditioning, but tonight she left two stops before it reached her stop at Notre-Dame des Champs. There was no wireless service in the Mètro, and she could wait no longer. This evening she had no desire to stand silent before Paris. Instead she walked with her head bowed and the side of a thumb stroking the screen, researching prices at an online bookseller and finding her way home by occasional glances and muscle memory.

As soon as she was in the apartment, she turned on her computer. She typed WWW.VITALIBRORUM.COM into the browser search bar; while the page loaded, she opened the narrow center drawer of her desk and took out the photocopy of Laurent’s sheet. THE LARGEST ONLINE MARKET FOR RARE BOOKS, the screen now said. Underneath that sentence were thick blocks of text, sometimes flanked by tiny photos of books. She clicked on one of these, and a larger version of the text and the photo appeared.

“Yeah, baby,” she said to the empty room. What she had in front of her was a precise description of a book, right down to the discoloration on page twenty-two, and a row of photos to match. At the bottom was a price in a blue box, another in a red box, and a third in a white box. Just what she’d managed to access on her phone, only large enough to read.

She heard the door open as Alan arrived home from work. “I know what the letters mean!” she called.

He appeared behind her left shoulder. “Huh?”

“The letters on Guy Laurent’s sheet! I figured out what they mean.”

“Oh, right.” He bent over her and put his hand on the desk.

“Look.” She pointed out the screen. “This is the website of an online clearinghouse for antiquarian books. So here”—she scrolled up for a second—“is a listing for a manuscript of the Processional à l’usage des Dominicaines de Saint-Louis-de-Poissy.” She made a face to show she had no idea what that was. “Published in the fifteenth century. And here’s the price.” She scrolled down a little and pointed again. “Thirty-three thousand euros direct from a single seller. But here”—she scrolled back up—“is Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and there are three prices: two thousand euros, two thousand five hundred, and one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. That’s because there are three different sellers; it’s showing the prices of three possible places you can buy it. Now look here.”

She pointed to one of the scrawled lines of numbers on the photocopy.

“Here’s 123899, followed by 122500, followed by 122999. If you read these as prices, they’d be one hundred twenty-three thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine euros; one hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred euros; and one hundred twenty-two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine euros. Three different prices, but very close together, like with the Mozart. I think these are book prices. I think he was looking up books to see how much they were worth. And I think these”—this time she pointed to the letters on the bottom two lines—“are his abbreviations of two book titles. It turned out today that someone had stolen an illustration from a book called the Supplementum Chronicarum.” She moved the pad of her index finger next to the SC. “And a year ago one had gone missing from a French translation of Machiavelli’s speeches.” Now she pressed it next to M/F.

“I think these numbers are his calculations of how much he could get from the person who stole those pages. He started with the price of the books, or books like them, tried to figure out how much the loss of an engraving might lower the value, and then tried to calculate how much he could ask for from the thieves for keeping quiet.”

“Thief,” Alan said.

“What?”

“I’d say it’s one thief. You wouldn’t add up the numbers and bracket them if you were dealing with two different people. Still”—he kissed the side of her neck and started to walk away—“good job. Now I have to go shower. Walk-home sweat is the worst kind of sweat.”

Rachel sat alone in front of the computer. “Good job,” and then a shower? What kind of reaction was that? There was supposed to be an exchange of proud glances, an acknowledgment of Rachel’s craftiness, a silent agreement that they were a match for any police force. With Magda there would have been all of those. She knew Alan felt them, but—well, somehow it wasn’t the same.