Chapter Thirty-Nine

Camille Murat sounded surprised to hear Rachel at the other end of a telephone line after a year of silence, but once she heard the name Alphonsine Dwamena, she didn’t hesitate. She would be right over.

Rachel, Magda, and Docteure Dwamena stood in the foyer waiting for her. “A promising CV,” the doctor had said as she locked her office door. “North Bennet Street School in your country, followed by an MA at West Dean College in England. Two of the best programs outside France.”

Now, standing next to Rachel, she suddenly said, “Why did you need Madame Murat’s help?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said Madame Murat had helped you in the past, and that made me wonder under what circumstances you had met her. I wasn’t aware that you’d had any experience with rare books before coming here. How did you come to know a book conservator?”

Rachel and Magda exchanged a glance. How did you explain to someone that although you were not really interested in rare books, you knew this particular rare book expert because someone else had sold her a rare book—well, a facsimile of a rare book, but one that was rare in its own right—that was evidence in a murder case you had been investigating before anyone else thought it was a murder; a book that, once the case was resolved and after you made sure she got her money back, you claimed for yourself in accordance with a promise in the will of the murder victim whose unsuspected murder you’d been investigating?

“We met professionally,” Rachel said. “When I was responsible for cataloging a friend’s library.”

*   *   *

Madame Murat looked precisely as she had a year earlier, even down to her white blouse and straight black skirt. Her low heels clicked across the granite floor, and as she approached she switched an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel from her right hand to her left so she could shake hands.

“Madame Levis, what a delightful surprise to hear from you! And Madame Stevens, it’s good to see you again as well.”

Rachel took her outstretched hand, then indicated Docteure Dwamena. “And this is Docteure Alphonsine Dwamena, head of Rare Books and Manuscripts here.”

“Docteure Dwamena!” Madame Murat was obviously delighted. “I have read your recent work on ascribing pamphlet authorship by clustering false publication information. Most exciting, most suggestive. Vraiment, un honneur.”

Docteure Dwamena gave her a skeptical look. “Suggestive in what way?”

“It made me wonder what might happen if one paired the clustering with paper type and watermark information. This might help to narrow the date quite tightly.”

Docteure Dwamena thawed. “Yes, this is an interesting idea. I have been thinking about it myself. There are some risks involved if one doesn’t know how long the paper was held before use.” She gestured down the hallway toward the reading room. “Let me tell you about my ideas as we go.”

The doctor had cleared her desk of everything but two lamps, wiped the surface clean, and placed two boxes tied with tape on its right-hand side. Madame Murat turned the lamps on; their light was dazzlingly strong. From her bag she took a pair of white cotton gloves like those Docteure Dwamena had worn when examining the Supplementum, tweezers, and a pair of black-framed glasses with the thickest lenses Rachel had ever seen. All of these she laid on the desktop before pulling toward her the nearest of the two boxes. She opened it carefully, untying the ribbon and folding out four flaps so that the container became a flat surface. Then she pulled on the gloves and put the glasses on her nose—she looked like Mr. Magoo, Rachel thought, trying not to laugh—and opened the cover of the psalter.

There in front of them was a page of stark black calligraphy, relieved by an initial B that stood out like an elaborate jewel. Outlined in red, it held in its upper loop a tiny representation of a Madonna and Child, in its lower loop a small crucifix. Even from where she stood Rachel could see the love that softened the Virgin’s face and the lines of pain on the Christ’s, each bellying chamber surrounded by twining vines tipped here and there with gilded leaves.

“Ah!” Madame Murat looked at Alphonsine. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

It was beautiful, Rachel could see; although the ink had cracked in places, the colors still sprang out vividly fresh.

Madame Murat turned the pages reverently until she arrived at the stub of the missing sheet. She bent over, flicking her enormously enlarged eyes up and down. Rachel could hear the breath of every person in the room as Madame Murat moved her head, carefully taking a survey of the damage. Then she began to talk.

“Books are unique objects because they speak to us twice. They have words and pictures on their pages, but they also speak to us with their form, with the matter that makes their existence. Every book—” She tugged gently with the tweezers at the stub’s fringe of fibers; She tugged gently with the tweezers at the stub’s fringe of fibers, peered at their feathery tips and at the pages that flanked them, inhaled deeply, smelling. Then she continued. “Every book is a history. It contains the story of the world that made it.”

She moved the psalter carefully to one side and unpacked the Supplementum. Rachel held her breath, and she could feel Magda doing the same.

“Now”—Madame Murat opened its cover with her gloved hands—“here you had a Supplementum Chronicarum, printed in Venice in 1490, its particular pages printed in a particular typeface on sheets folded and stitched in a particular way and with illustrations interleaved at particular places and for particular reasons—perhaps because that was the hallmark of the printer, perhaps because it was expected that such books would be created in such a format, or perhaps because it wasn’t expected.” She looked up at Rachel and Magda for a moment with her magnified eyes. “This book contained numberless answers, some to questions we don’t even know we should ask yet, all waiting to be discovered to help us trace the evolution of books, of printing practices, and to help us understand the expectations and desires of people in fifteenth-century Venice. This book might have told us a little bit about how different the current world is from that of Venice, or how similar it is to it. It might have illuminated for us something about human nature.

“And now—” She lowered her head over the Supplementum, peered at the pages flanking the stub, and inhaled as deeply as she had with the psalter, then lifted her head again. “Now you have a book with a page missing. Now it has a new story, perhaps a story that will still ask and answer questions—certainly a story that illuminates something about human nature. But your thief has destroyed a history. On the other hand, of course, he has also created a new one.”

She pulled off her gloves and glasses, and as she did so it seemed she shed her philosophical skin and resumed a practical one. “Alors. Here is what I can tell you: the lines in your psalter have been drawn with lead, and at least one of the monks who worked on it was blond—a hair was preserved in the binding. Your Supplementum was preserved, but it wasn’t opened very often. The pages show scarcely any wear, and the binding is still very tight. And your thief is clever and careful, as well as very, very discreet, because the pages in both books have been removed with liquid.”

“Liquid!” Rachel didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but certainly not that.

“Yes. It’s not unheard of, although I myself have never seen it before. The page is softened with liquid so that it can be pulled away easily and quietly. Hence the little hairs sticking out from the stub. You would need to be familiar with ancient papers and parchments to manage it—one second too short and the page would rip; one second too long and the string might dry to the page. But if done right, no ripping, no slicing, just a soft wiggle, and—” She clicked her tongue. “One shouldn’t admire destruction, but … such ingenuity! I recently read an article in which someone even did it using string. A map seller, I think. He would go to a library with a length of string tucked in his cheek. He would keep it wet with saliva—you know.” She moved her jaw to demonstrate. “And when no one was looking he would take it out, straighten it into the book margin, and rest it there until the saliva softened the page.”

Rachel went cold. “Say that again.”

Madame Murat looked confused. “Which part?”

“The end. Just the end. No, wait, never mind. Saliva!” Rachel held out an arm as if stopping an advancing horde. “I’ve got it. I mean, I get it. I’ve got it. I know who did it.”

“Who?” Magda sounded breathless. “Was it LouLou? It was the familiarity with papers that made you realize, wasn’t it?”

“No, it wasn’t LouLou.” Thank God, she added silently.

“It was Cavill?” Magda shook her head. “Man, all along! We should stop discounting the most obvious—”

“Hush! It wasn’t Cavill.” She turned and looked at Magda. “It was Homer Stibb!”