Let’s stop everything,” said Francesca.
It was noon.
“We’re not stopping anything,” said Van.
“That’s what I just said.”
“We agree on that.”
“You have no other choice,” said Heffner decisively as soon as he joined them, ten minutes later, in the big office on the rue Dupuytren. “You have to bring together your eight electors and tell them everything—there were a number of details I didn’t go into—and you have to get them to agree to press charges and you have to decide with them how to handle things from here on out.”
The eight electors: he’s using our words, thought Francesca, our expressions. It’s an understatement to say he’s with us. He is one of us.
Ivan was gloomy.
“Press charges,” he objected. “That means the investigation will go out into the open: there are bound to be leaks, and the names of the eight committee members will get around. The very principle of The Good Novel will be compromised, that the books are chosen by an anonymous committee. By coming to you, we hoped to avoid initiating legal proceedings and revealing the identities of our committee members.”
“If you want to save the four electors who, thus far, have been spared from an attack, then you have no choice,” repeated Heffner. “Revealing both their names and the threats hanging over them, that’s the best way to protect them. It’s fairly simple—you publish a communiqué in which you say, Those who have a bone to pick with us have gone too far, they’ve managed to find out the names of our committee members; four of them have been attacked. But we refuse to be intimidated. We are pressing charges, we are changing the committee. And then you reveal the eight names: they are respected writers, and it will be excellent for the image of The Good Novel.”
“We would have had to set up a new committee sooner or later,” said Francesca. “We never envisaged a permanent committee.”
“Where were we?” said Van. “We get the eight together. To begin with, they will get to know each other.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” asked Heffner.
“In fact,” said Van slowly, thinking out loud, “there was one principal reason why we did not want them to get to know each other, and that was because we wanted the secret of their names to be kept as well as possible. Now that the secret is out, it no longer has any importance.”
Francesca was giving little nods of her head: “If only we knew who gave the list of names, and who has it.”
Heffner looked at her for a few seconds.
“I think I can throw some light on that,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know who has the list—although I’m beginning to have some ideas on the matter. But I think I do know how the list got into the hands of those brutes.”
“Tell us.”
“I’ve been hesitating to do so ever since I understood what must have happened. First of all, it won’t change anything, the deed is done, the names are going around. And then there are two sides to the information. On the one hand, it should be something of a relief. On the other, it’s going to set you up for a rather . . .”
“Go ahead,” urged Francesca, without waiting to be told what would happen.
“The good news is that there is no traitor, I am nearly sure of that, now. Nobody deliberately gave out the names.”
“And?”
“The news that you will find somewhat less pleasant to hear is how the leak came about.”
When Francesca had her handbag stolen, at the beginning of June, she had not been the random target of an average pickpocket. Heffner did not have any proof, but he would have staked his life on it. They were targeting the owner of The Good Novel, they wanted her papers. And they must not have been disappointed. They got what they wanted, the list of the selection committee members.
“But that list wasn’t in my bag!” protested Francesca. “I never wrote it down. I never had it on me.”
“Indeed,” said Heffner. “The thieves compiled it from your address book.”
Francesca didn’t understand. She had never written the name of any of the eight members in her address book—that was the most elementary precaution. Neither name nor pseudonym.
“Just their phone number,” said Heffner.
“Yes, I’ll say it again, there was no name next to it, no initial, nothing that could allow someone to connect the number to a person.”
“That’s what you thought,” said Heffner.
There was not the slightest trace of smugness or reproach in his voice. It wasn’t really an address book, he said, because there were only three or four addresses, and sixty-one telephone numbers, to be exact.
“Yes,” said Francesca. “It’s not really an address book, but a little removable index in a diary, you noticed? I write down the phone numbers that I need frequently. I use it a lot.”
Of the sixty-one phone numbers, explained Heffner, almost all of them corresponded to a name that was written on the same line. Almost all: eight of them were not associated to any name or address—nothing.
Francesca’s features froze.
“Someone who found this notebook by chance would not notice a thing,” continued Heffner. “But someone like me, who is carefully going through the list to try to find particular numbers, will immediately notice that some have been given special treatment. Eight is a good number, eight numbers connected to nothing, spread over several pages.”
“I found my handbag again an hour later, and the notebook was there,” said Francesca, “with all my papers.”
“Elementary,” explained Heffner. The thieves had set it up so it would look like an ordinary theft for money: pickpocket, handbag quickly abandoned, only cash disappearing—they had staged the most common scenario.
“When it was my turn to go through the contents of your little pouch, I gave myself half an hour, less than what your two scoundrels on the motorcycle had. It was more than enough to photocopy all your papers, including your diary and the relevant list, page by page. I did it myself. After that, you have all the time you need to study the photocopies.”
“And here I thought I had been so clever by putting those eight numbers without names on the pages of the corresponding pseudonyms,” said Francesca, her voice muted. “Sarah Gestelents’s number under P. as in Green Pea, Évohé’s number under S. as in Scaf, and so on.”
“It didn’t matter, as it happens. That didn’t make it any less obvious that there were eight numbers without names. If the sleuths wondered why you had written them down on those particular pages, the question must not have preoccupied them for long.”
Francesca looked down, then raised her head again.
“I’m not trying to get myself off the hook,” she said with an effort. “My lack of caution was extremely foolish. But there is something I don’t get. Let’s put ourselves in the place of my thief. He has a list of eight cell phone numbers: what can you possibly do with it?”
“Don’t you remember,” interrupted Van, “we talked about it the other day, some people have no problem gaining access to the files of telephone companies, and to find out who the client is for each number.”
Once they had the eight names, it was clear to them that they had put together the committee list, concluded Heffner. There was only one actual name that remained unknown out of the eight, that of Anne-Marie Montbrun. The seven other names were those of very well-known novelists, like Le Gall, or lesser-known authors who were well-respected in literary circles. (Néon, Néant, you could figure out it was the same person.)
“Which would go to show that the brutes belong to those circles?” asked Van.
“It’s a definite possibility,” said Heffner.