Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next morning Rachel shouldered her bag with optimism. The sun was shining in the frosty sky and she was filled with a sense of new possibilities. When she arrived at Edgar’s residence, her positivity seemed rewarded, for the elevator was resting at ground-floor level, something that had never happened before.

Alas, when the doors opened on Edgar’s floor, her luck came to an end. Waiting on the landing were the man in the suit and his attendant. Rachel felt herself flinch (she hoped unobtrusively), but the man in the suit—it was electric-blue this time—seemed delighted to see her.

“Ah, the father’s friend!” Again he gave his grim grin, then said in heavily accented English, “We ’ave to stop meeting like thees.” He laughed, showing scraggly teeth.

“I agree,” said Rachel.

Luckily, he didn’t understand the joke. He patted the pockets of his suit. “We are going out for a big day, to spend some money. You’ll come?” He winked.

“No, thank you.” She took a step toward the door of the appartement. “I have a lot of work to do.”

He shrugged. “D’acc. Another time.” He winked again, more salaciously. Then, as if suddenly inspired, he pointed to the short man and said, again in English, “Say ’allo to my leetle friend!” They both burst out laughing, and as the elevator doors closed, her final glimpse was of the tall man punching at the small one’s stomach, stopping just short as he doubled over.

Inside, she said to Fulke as she slipped her coat off, “I met some men outside.”

“Ah, yes. Monsieur David came home this morning with those gentlemen. They had coffee before leaving.”

Trust Fulke to turn a night on the town into a morning at a gentleman’s club. But she noticed for the first time that his usually implacable face was a little pale. She wanted to say something sympathetic, but it was difficult to think of Fulke as needing sympathy. She didn’t know where to begin.

“Monsieur David is a young man, with a young man’s habits,” she said at last.

For a second his features relaxed into fondness, even if his only reply was, “Indeed.”

Was he too thinking of David as a small boy? After all, Fulke had been there. But again it seemed somehow improper to say such things, to breach the wall that hid his private self. Instead she gave him a wide smile into which she tried to put all her empathy and sincerity, and went into the library.

*   *   *

When she stood up at the end of the morning, she was surprised to see that she was very nearly finished. She had put all the shelves in order and moved the books from most of the stacks into their proper places, organized first by category and then by author. There were three or four piles remaining, but in about a week the only task left would be to type up the catalogue, and that she could do at home.

Then she caught sight of the gap still waiting for the lost Gutenberg, and in a second the sense of calm she’d cultivated in the past few days seemed like so much willed foolishness. Not only had she not solved Edgar’s murder, but she hadn’t even done her duty by his books. Had the volumes of the bible somehow slipped behind the shelves, maybe? She ignored the unlikelihood of this and flattened herself against the wall so she could peer into the narrow gap. But no matter how she craned her neck or what awkward positions she took to look fully behind, above, between, and below the shelves, there was no Gutenberg facsimile.

Her optimism, fragile as any recent vow, cracked. Her eyes filled with tears. What had she achieved, then, on today’s grand reentry into the fields of detection and librarianship? Nothing. Murders were not solved, and she couldn’t even find a three-volume book! Which meant that, so far, all she’d done for Edgar was lose him an eight-thousand-euro investment. She was not a good friend.

Magda would have lightened her flagellation with a sardonic remark or the observation that excessive guilt was its own form of narcissism, but Magda wasn’t there. Maybe that was just as well, because it forced Rachel to scold herself. What had she expected to discover in the last twelve hours? She shouldn’t be sulking over the little time she had left; she should be figuring out how to increase it. Should she refuse to type up the catalogue until she’d checked and rechecked every entry? Should she insist on remaining until the Gutenberg facsimile had been found? She sighed. She should call Magda, of course.

“You don’t need more time!” Magda’s voice sounded crisply down the line. “All the case needs is fresh eyes, and now that we’ve had a chance to regroup after Elisabeth, our eyes are fresh. Meet me at Bistrot Vivienne in an hour.”

As always, Fulke was waiting for her in the entrance hall. For a single, weary second Rachel thought of asking him what he thought on the subject: Who might have killed Edgar, and why? Butlers neither heard nor saw, but they knew everything, and she was willing to bet that Fulke had information that would put her puny investigations to shame. She would never ask, of course. They may have known, or known of, each other for years, but she would never feel comfortable enough with Fulke to be so bold and so frank. That knowledge made her glum all over again: it seemed to her that the fate of a good butler was to remain forever a perfect stranger.

As Fulke helped her into her coat, she was surprised to see David appear. He looked as if he hadn’t yet slept after a night out, his wide eyes bloodshot, his hair disarranged. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sneezed, then had to wipe it again.

“Hello,” he said at last.

“Hello.” She smiled at him. “Oh, dear. How are you?”

He shrugged. “Well enough.” He watched her button her coat, then spoke. “Rachel?” For the first time she heard the boy he used to be in his voice. She nodded encouragingly. “When will you finish the library?”

“Oh, how funny! I was just trying to figure that out.” She puffed out her cheeks and thought. “Maybe in two weeks?”

“Oh.” How pale he looked! Winter was not kind to people with sallow skin.

“And after that you ought to have the books valued.”

“Valued?” His voice was high with confusion. “I thought you knew how much they’re worth.”

“I’m just cataloguing them. I could guess at some things, but I can’t tell you what the whole collection is worth.”

“And how long will valuing take?”

Rachel thought. “A month? Depending on how soon they can come and how quickly they research.”

She saw the edges of his nostrils pale. He shook his head and his voice rose to a yelp. “No! That’s not good enough! It has to be sooner!” Then he halted abruptly. He took a deep breath, made an almost physical effort to relax. The blood came back into his face. “Well, now I know. Thank you.” He turned and walked back down the hall.

Rachel stood frozen by confusion. What had just happened? Would David come back? She waited a few seconds, but, no, he didn’t, and when she looked at Fulke, he gave no hint about how she might interpret the outburst. Instead, he smoothly opened the door for her.

“Tomorrow as usual, madame?”

With a noncommittal murmur, Rachel walked out onto the landing. She saw her finger shaking as she pressed the button for the elevator; she felt shaken as it descended. She wasn’t scared, merely mystified and off-balance. Had she said or done something to anger David? But running over the exchange in her mind, she found nothing.

As she stepped out into the street, she noticed that the air was fractionally warmer than it had been that morning. Spring was coming, however slowly. She would walk home in honor of its approach, and to clear her mind of what had just occurred.

She crossed the Seine via the Pont Neuf, thinking about time and change. This was the oldest bridge in Paris. It had been built in 1604 and officially opened by Henri IV, her favorite French king. But the Pont had now been repaired and restored so many times that it was difficult to know how much of the original remained. So was it the oldest bridge in Paris, or had it become new? Or was it new, but no different? Had it outlasted time or fallen victim to time’s passing?

Maybe because of the word “victim,” her mind wandered back to her encounter at the elevator and the two grotesque men. There was evidence of time’s passing. Edgar had probably never even brushed up against such people, and here was his son entertaining them in his home. But she thought of the lines from Hamlet: “Your father lost a father; that father lost, lost his.” Who knew what David’s children would bring home to horrify him when it was their turn? As she passed Café Buci, where breakfast was expensive but the croissants had been perfect for as long as she could remember, she engaged in an enjoyably poignant rumination on the changing of young cubs into old lions. As Kiki had said, time passed. It was inexorable. Time moved on; seasons rolled round; the young Turks became the old guard.

She would have laughed at this foray into metaphysics, but as she passed the hundreds of modern stores squashed into ancient buildings—a spa! a chocolatier! a Marionnaud perfume boutique!—they made abstract speculation all too real. The French were good at preservation, good at lasting. They had a different notion of time and different ideas about survival. She thought of Kiki in her appartement, accepting the inevitability of loss with an equability that would never occur to an American. No matter how long she lived among them, she thought, she would never be French.

She wandered aimlessly down the Boulevard Saint Germain and into the Rue des Carmes, meditating on these topics as she glanced in the passing store windows. Then suddenly she did a double take and stopped short. For there, in the window of P. Brunet, Livres Anciens et d’Occasion, was a Gutenberg facsimile.

*   *   *

“What do you think it means?” asked Magda. She was standing outside the store window with Rachel ten minutes later.

“I don’t know,” said Rachel, though she had a pretty good idea what it meant.

“Well, are you sure it’s Edgar’s facsimile? Did you recognize it when they showed it to you?”

“They didn’t show it to me. I haven’t been in.”

“You haven’t been in!” Magda gaped at her.

“I just—I just …” Rachel couldn’t explain that it would be equally awful to know that the facsimile was Edgar’s edition or that it wasn’t: either way, they would either be back at zero yet again, or she would once more have to face uncomfortable possibilities. “I waited for you.”

“Well, here I am.” Magda pushed open the shop door.

A woman looked up from a glass counter she was wiping. “Bonjour.”

“Bonjour. We would like to see the Gutenberg facsimile from your window.” Magda’s tone suggested she was an expert in biblical facsimiles, perhaps out shopping for another to add to her collection.

“Of course.” Coming back with the books in the slipcase, the woman laid it on the counter in front of them. “A very fine example. In near-perfect condition except for some fading on the case.” She turned it on its side to show them.

“May I?” Rachel removed the first volume from the case, carefully opening it and turning the pages. Halfway through the Song of Solomon, she stopped; she reached out an index finger and pointed at a black hair that lay on the page. She looked at Magda; Magda looked back.

“Ah, it must be the seller’s!” The woman reached out and gently brushed the hair from the page. “One sees this all the time if one works with antiquarian books. Readers’ hairs are sometimes preserved for centuries.”

Magda turned back to the bookseller and smiled her interest. “So it could be an ancient hair! But what makes you think it must be the seller’s?”

The woman shrugged. “Oh, he had black hair. But as I say, it could be hundreds of years old.”

“Did the seller also have a cold?” Rachel’s voice shook a little.

“Why do you ask?” The sale assistant peered anxiously at the open pages. “I gave him a tissue and made sure only I handled the volumes. Is there—”

“Excuse us a moment.” Magda took the book from Rachel and laid it on the counter. The two women moved to stand beside a glass case filled with religious figurines, including a particularly gruesome crucifixion in which blood coursed from the wound in Jesus’s side into a puddle beneath. Why were early representations of Christ so obsessed with suffering? Rachel wondered. She remained focused on this statuette until Magda made a noise.

“I’m sorry,” Magda pitched her voice low. “I know she hasn’t exactly offered us ironclad proof, but …” She winced. “I think we really need to talk about David.”

Rachel sighed. “I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes.” After the hair, there was no point in keeping her misgivings secret. “You were right. We were suspicious of Mathilde because of her spitefulness and greed, but David is the one who really has the best motive to kill Edgar. All right, you’d hope it would be Mathilde, but whether we like it or not, markets go up and down, and her fortunes could improve on their own. David, on the other hand, actually became rich because Edgar died. And he fits the neighbor’s description of the man who visited Catherine—I mean all right, eighty percent of the men in Paris fit that description, but he fits it too. And I didn’t tell you—I couldn’t bear to tell you—that before Edgar died, David was evicted for some reason, and Edgar wouldn’t help him. He was sleeping on a friend’s couch.” She forgot herself for a moment and wailed, “But he was such a lovely little boy!”

The saleswoman looked up, but quickly back down. She turned a page of the bible with ostentatious concentration.

“I just meant we should talk about him and the bible,” Magda said. “But yes. Absolutely. He obviously did benefit most from Edgar’s death. And he was sleeping on someone’s couch? I’d like to hear more about that.”

Her interruption, however, had given Rachel time to doubt. “Wait.”

Magda lips thinned. “Yes?”

“He did have a motive, it’s true. But motive is irrelevant unless there’s a reason to suspect the murderer acted on it. Our problem with Mathilde is that we have no solid proof that anything actively pushed her to murder, right?”

Reluctantly, Magda nodded.

“Well, it’s the same with David. Just because he benefited from Edgar’s death, that doesn’t mean he was responsible for it. He has something that could be a motive, but we don’t know if he has any actual motivation.” She shook her head. “The David I’ve been talking to over the past few days had less than no reason to kill his father. He and Edgar adored each other.”

But Magda’s patience had apparently reached its limit. “Stop,” she said. She repeated it as if it were a calming mantra. “Stop, stop, stop.” Then she collected herself and smiled at the woman. “Thank you so much. We just need to confer further before we come to a decision.” She reached for the door.

Out on the sidewalk, Rachel could see the assistant’s hands in the window, putting the bible back on display.

“Someone killed this man,” Magda said, her words angry clouds in the cold air. “We’ve never doubted that. It’s pretty clear Elisabeth is no longer a viable suspect. Mathilde is, but we have questions. But here is a person who, as you just pointed out, benefitted from the death, made use of those benefits quickly, and has some strange habits and even stranger friends. He walks like a duck; he talks like a duck; he hangs out with ducks! You need to at least consider that he is”—she paused awkwardly—“our duck.”

Rachel stood there. It was true; it was all true—it was even her own ideas repeated back to her. She had to stop allowing the David she’d known as a child to make excuses for the adult David’s behavior—and like it or not, the adult David did look like (she clung to euphemism) a duck. Why had he slept on a friend’s couch rather than ask for Edgar’s help? Why was he such close friends with those two menacing figures? Why had he—it still pained her to think it aloud—taken and sold the facsimile? Could there be any other explanation?

“All right,” she said. “You’re right. But here’s the thing: we were sure it was Elisabeth, and we were wrong; we thought it could be Catherine Nadeau, and we were wrong. My point about the difference between motive and motivation is valid. Before we end up wrong again, please could we do some more digging and then draw our conclusion?”

“Brilliant!” Then Magda sobered. “Yes, absolutely we should find out more about him. We could …” She thought for a second; her brightness dimmed a little. “We could …” Finally she said, “Do you want to go see Kiki again?”

Kiki did seem to know everything about everyone, Rachel reflected. But really she only knew everything about a certain portion of everyone: elderly and middle-aged people from long-established families who moved in the same circles she did. David fit only one of those criteria.

“No.” She shook her head. “We need someone closer to David, in age and in culture. Someone who knows him or, if they don’t know him, might know people who know him. Someone who can give us the kind of information only young people know about young people.”

They considered. It was the informant problem again, Rachel thought, except this time she needed a young one. God, did she even know anyone young anymore? She tried to make a list of friends who fit that description and quickly realized that it contained only one name. “Elisabeth.”

“Elisabeth?”

“She might not be close friends with David, but they’re near each other in age, and they must have talked sometimes when they were both in the appartement. Or she might have seen those men at some point. Or known about them.” She could hear her suggestions sounding more and more tenuous, so she fell back on the truth. “She’s all we have.”

Magda smiled. “Well, she is your friend.”

“Oh, don’t.” Rachel winced. “I felt so bad when she said that. It was like when Rosie McAllister told me I’d been kinder to her than anyone in her life. Remember?”

“Because you listened to her cry for one afternoon after Charles Lautremont ended it with her!”

Rachel clenched her teeth at the memory, and for a minute the two women reflected on the awkwardness of uneven bonds. Then Magda said, “Rosie McAllister is head of creative for LaMarchant advertising now.”

“So I was right. Charles Lautremont didn’t know what he was missing out on.”

“My point was that sometimes asymmetrical friendships are worth cultivating.”

“I knew what your point was.” They were near something; she could feel it. That she also felt uncomfortable about exploiting someone else’s attachment to her must be ignored. Would Sam Spade quibble over that? Would Shaft? She pulled out her cell and dialed quickly, giving herself no time to get in touch with her finer feelings.

After she disconnected, she looked up. “We’re going to see her Sunday night.”

“Not ‘we.’ ” Magda shook her head. “I can’t go. I have a date.”

“Another date!” Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Benoît?”

“Mais bien sûr!” She looked abashed, but also happy.

“Oh, Magda.” Rachel smiled. “I’m so pleased.”

“I am too.” She grinned. “Or I kind of am. Now I wish I were coming with you.”

“Don’t worry.” Rachel waved a hand. “I’ll tell you everything.”