The Books of the Dead Read online

  The Books of the Dead

  A Death in Paris Mystery

  EMILIA BERNHARD

  The arrondissements of Paris

  Floor plan of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Rare Book Reading Room*

  *Although the exterior and public spaces of the Bibliothèque Nationale described in this book are based on those of the real Bibliothèque, the reading rooms and private spaces are entirely the product of imagination.

  To Dr. Marren,

  swan to my duck,

  and to Jeremy Burns,

  who does not need to get over himself.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Before I do anything else, I want to apologize to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Although I’ve been in its courtyard, its foyer, and its lounge, I’ve been no further. The interior that I describe (and map) in this book is entirely the product of my imagination. I also entirely made up the Hotel Etoile and the Hotel Palais. I have no doubt that both exist in Paris, but I’m also sure they are much, much, much better than the ones I describe.

  As with my first book, I must begin my acknowledgments by thanking my agent and my editor. Laura Macdougall, receiver of worried emails and sender of reassurance, made my writing career, and I can’t thank her enough. Chelsey Emmelhainz is a living demonstration of the importance of editors, and I’m both proud and fortunate to have her as mine.

  I couldn’t have written this book without the help and support of Janice Duffin, Jemmelia Jameson, Frances Kee, Stephen Markman, and Xandy Wells. A writer’s life, which consists mostly of sitting in one place for large amounts of time, could look very much like a con job to unsympathetic viewers, but all of the above never questioned my right to disappear for hours every day, emerging only to make tea and gloomy prognostications. Thank you. I am also thankful for the support and diversion provided by Isabel and Jeoffry Jackson.

  Richard Fox gave me much-needed help in an area about which I knew nothing, as did Ash Bowen. Lydia Burton graciously allowed me to take inspiration from her. Sakeenah Feghir and Aurora Murgo Aroca pinch-hit in ways that solved a central problem. And once again, I thank the AirBnB hosts who put me up in their Paris homes—as well as all the unknowing tenants in their buildings whose surnames I copied off the mailboxes when I realized I didn’t know any “real” French names.

  This book wouldn’t have been produced without the love and certainty of Jennifer Piddington and Ashley Bruce.

  Moving from the human to the digital, I must once again, and even more profusely, thank Google, Google Satellite, Wikipedia, and countless other websites, without which I couldn’t have walked the streets of Paris, found out how much it costs to go from central Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport, or learned about the holdings at the various sites of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  I also used the following books to help me get law and pathology details right: Pekka Saukko and Bernard Knight, Knight’s Forensic Pathology (Hodder Education Publishers, 3rd edition, 2004); Walter Cairns and Robert McKeon, Introduction to French Law (Routledge-Cavendish, 1995). Homer Stibb’s method of detaching pages came from an article in The New Yorker: William Finnigan’s “A Theft in the Library: The Case of the Missing Maps” (October 17, 2005, pages 64–78). The quotation from Mallarme is from “So Dear” by Stephen Mallarme, in Un Coup de Dès and Other Poems, translated by A.S. Kline (Poetry in Translation, 2004–09).

  Both my parents died while I was finishing this book. My mother, Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, would have got all the jokes and been appropriately surprised by all the bits I wanted to be surprising. She also told me from a very early age that I was a wonderful writer, and always insisted that her belief in this had nothing to do with the fact that she was my mother. In other words, she was as motherly a mother as could possibly mother, and I owe her almost everything.

  What I don’t owe to her I owe to my father, Thomas Jackson. Daddy loved France, and he loved me, so I think he would have enjoyed what I produced here—and without years of his wise writing instruction I would never have produced it.

  I am unmoored without them.

  Chapter One

  If someone had told Rachel Levis that morning that by six o’clock in the evening she’d be face-to-face with a corpse, she wouldn’t have believed them. Yet here she was at 5:55, bending over a dead man in a toilet stall.

  The man was propped against the white tile wall. He wore an olive-green shirt and his black hair fell over his forehead, but after that normality ended. His face was purple and swollen, as if it had been beaten violently and then inflated. Open eyes, their whites turned pink, bulged out of their sockets; a swollen tongue poked out of his black-lipped mouth. His neck was bruised around a red groove that looked as if it had been incised into his flesh, the skin on either side of it swelling around the mark. A trickle of dried blood wound its way out of his left ear.

  Rachel didn’t scream. The rational part of her was surprised about that. She’d seen death before, certainly, but she hadn’t stared it in the face. By rights she should have been horrified, terrified, or at least shocked. But after her first gasp she didn’t open her mouth at all, maybe because she didn’t want to alert the crowded room across the hall, or maybe because she hadn’t fully processed what she’d seen—or maybe, she thought, because she had the instincts and sangfroid of a true detective. She backed silently out of the stall and closed its door. She didn’t bother to try to avoid leaving fingerprints. She’d used a naked hand to open the door, so the damage was already done. She walked swiftly across the bathroom and out, then pulled the door closed, stood in front of the sign on it that said HOMMES, and reached into her bag for her phone.

  The question was, whom should she call first? Her husband Alan, her best friend Magda, or Capitaine Boussicault, the policeman she knew from the last time she’d encountered a murder? The first would bring worry and common sense; the second would bring excitement and fellow feeling; the third would bring the law and an investigation. She thought carefully for a moment, then sighed and unlocked her screen.

  * * *

  “So you entered the toilettes and the body was there for you to see?” Capitaine Boussicault’s pen hovered over his pad. He’d had his men clear the café immediately upon arrival, and now he and Rachel sat alone in the dining room as scene-of-the-crime technicians went over the men’s room.

  “No, when I came in, the door to the cabinet was closed. I saw the feet, and I swung the door open. Then I saw the body.”

  “And you touched it?”

  “No. I only touched the door.”

  “I see. I’ll tell the technicians. They will want your palm print to rule it out of what they find. But they will also want to know … and I myself would like to know …” He frowned. “Why were you in the men’s room in the first place?”

  “Well.” Rachel had expected this question, and she began her answer at the very beginning. “It all started with the condom machine.”

  “The condom machine.” Boussicault’s tone was doubtful, and now that the words were out of her mouth, Rachel could see why. She plunged on. “Yes. I was actually going to the women’s room. But the men’s room is on the way, and when I passed by, the door was open. And I’m always curious about what’s in the condom machines in men’s rooms. Is it the same as in the women’s room? So I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and go look. And as soon as I was two steps in the door, I saw the shoes inside the cabinet. But it was the soles of the shoes, and that seemed odd. So I went over and tapped on the door and asked if the person was all right. When there wasn’t an answer, I gave it a little push to see if it was locked. It swung open. And”—she made an expansive gesture with one hand—“there he was.”

  Boussicault op
ened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Alan appeared in the restaurant doorway, his body momentarily blocking the early-evening sun. He crossed the room, wrapped her in a long hug, then peered into her face. “There was a delay on the Mètro. Are you all right? What’s happening?”

  “I was a little shaken, but I’m fine.” She sat back down. “It’s nothing to worry about, really.”

  He sat down next to her. “You’re developing quite a tendency to stumble across murder in your middle age.”

  Rachel waved a hand dismissively. “Hardly a tendency. One eighteen months ago, and one now. Anyway”—she looked at Boussicault—“this might not even be a murder.” Although of course it is.

  “It is.” Boussicault nodded. “Murder by ligature strangulation, to be precise.”

  “What were you doing over here, anyway?” By over here, Alan meant in Paris’s second arrondissement. He and Rachel lived in the sixth arrondissement, across the Seine and a good half hour’s walk away—a walk that, on this day of blasting July heat, would be more likely to keep Rachel inside than tempt her to go out.

  “It was the hymns,” she said. “The hymns Valerie’s friend asked me to write.”

  Alan nodded. He was very familiar with these hymns, a commission from a church committee on the recommendation of a friend. They had been proving difficult to write for two months, and he’d heard all about Rachel’s struggles.

  “I tried all day,” she said now, “and finally around four I thought I could go to the Bibliothèque Nationale for inspiration. I checked online, and they have a lot of medieval religious manuscripts at the site in the next street.” She jerked a thumb to the right, indicating the location of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s site on the Rue de Richelieu. “I took a Vélib’, just to feel some sort of breeze, but by the time I got here it was only half an hour until the library closed. So I went to Bistrot Vivienne—”

  Alan nodded again. Bistrot Vivienne, his wife’s favorite restaurant, sat on a corner across from the Bibliothèque.

  “But it was full,” Rachel continued. “I couldn’t even find a space to stand at the bar. So I started walking back to the Vélib’ rack, and on the way I saw this place. I had a spritzer, and then I went to the bathroom, but the men’s room door was open and—”

  “You couldn’t resist the condom machine.”

  “Right. Only, two steps over the threshold and—”

  Rachel stopped. A technician had come into the room and crossed to speak to Boussicault. He kept his voice low. The capitaine nodded and the man sank back toward the hallway, his white paper suit slowly dyed gray by the gloom.

  Rachel’s natural detecting antennae tingled. “What was that about?” The capitaine shrugged. “Is there something about the body? Did they get a time of death? Did they find a weapon?”

  The capitaine gave a little smile. He might have felt respect, and perhaps even some warmth, toward Rachel by the end of their earlier investigation, but his face said he was still a policeman first, and policemen did not answer questions from civilians. He shrugged one of the huge shrugs at which the French excelled and said, “It was nothing. Thank you for your time, Rachel. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Rachel didn’t see that she’d been helpful at all, but he snapped his pad shut and rose. “If you will excuse me, I must go. Didier will help you out.” His young blond brigadier, familiar to Rachel from eighteen months before, appeared as if conjured by his name. He waited, stone-faced, as she rooted under the table for her bag. Rachel hadn’t liked this blankness a year and a half ago, and she found she still didn’t like it now.

  * * *

  “Magda will be sorry she missed that,” Alan said when they were out on the street. “Where is she, anyway? I was sure you would’ve called her.”

  Rachel shrugged.

  In fact, she’d called Magda before she’d called Alan, but Magda’s reaction had been anything but eager. “This is a terrible time!” Her tone had been sulky, as if the murderer had deliberately set out to inconvenience her. “You know I need to do all my ordering by the end of July if I want to be ready for the customers in September.” Magda ran an online store that sold high-end French linens, and autumn was her peak season. “Look”—her voice became severe—“take copious notes. Copious. And I’ll call you tomorrow to hear all about it. Now I have to clear the line, because I’m expecting a call back from a wholesaler in Alsace.”

  “Magda’s busy,” Rachel now said to Alan.

  His raised eyebrow showed his surprise at the notion that she could ever be too busy for a murder, but all he said was, “Let’s stop at Vivienne. If there’s space now, I’ll treat you to a restoring glass of wine.” He put his arm out and drew her close as they walked.

  Chapter Two

  In the ten days that followed, Rachel got no further with her hymns. Part of the problem was simple lack of inspiration. The commissioning priest had asked her for compositions that, in his words, “found the marvelous in the modern world,” but it was no easy task to produce these in the less-than-marvelous heat of a Parisian high summer, when the feel of sweat trickling slowly down her back made her skin crawl. Every day she would work until she could bear it no longer, then take herself out for a drink in an air-conditioned café—and every day when she returned from her drink she would see that what she had written wasn’t much good. Natural heat apparently did not make for creative fire.

  But there was another reason for her difficulty, she knew. She was distracted by the murder. She had begun to think of it as hers, an incident that belong to her. Who was the man in the toilettes? she kept asking herself. When she stood at the long window in her séjour hoping to catch a breath of air, the puffy purple face would float up in front of her and she would try to imagine it deflated, alive, full of expression and attached to a living being. She would feel a twinge of sympathy toward the unknown victim. No one deserved to die like that, disfigured and dumped in that humiliating position.

  Then, hunched over her desk attempting to channel the wonders of a modern God she didn’t believe in, she found herself trying to re-create the murder instead, trying to understand the murderer. She imagined the unknowing victim entering the men’s room, pondered the sheer strength it would take for one person to strangle another—the intention that would be required, and required for all the long minutes it took to finish the job. And at the end of it all to saunter out of the café as if you’d done nothing more than have a drink after work! What kind of person could do that—what kind of person could want to do that—what kind of motive could push someone into doing it? No matter how she tried to focus on the hymns at hand, these thoughts kept elbowing their way in.

  Perhaps that was why she wasn’t surprised to pick up her landline when it rang ten days after the murder and hear Boussicault on the other end, asking her to come to the commissariat.

  * * *

  “Rachel.” He was waiting for her in reception. He led her through corridors unchanged from her previous visit the year before, around the maze of desks that constituted his dèpartement, and into his office, its three glass walls giving it the feel of a giant aquarium. The last time Rachel had been here, Boussicault had dismissed her ideas and she had nearly wept. But, she reminded herself firmly, at the end of that experience she had solved a murder and they had formed a kind of friendship, so she had no reason to feel awkward or out of place. She tried to arrange herself in the chair in a way that suggested she was entirely at home.

  The capitaine cleared his throat. “I asked you here because we’ve now finished our preliminary investigation of the murder at Chez Poule. I thought you might be interested in our findings and possible next steps.”

  Chez Poule: had that been the name of the place? Rachel realized she hadn’t even noticed. But Boussicault was right, she was interested. After all, it was her murder. “Thank you.” She leaned forward.

  “De rien.” He opened a folder. “It turns out the victim was one Guy Laurent. He worked in the Rar
e Books and Manuscripts reading room at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and he was a regular client at Chez Poule.” He flipped over a page. “Scene-of-crime examination suggests that Monsieur Laurent was killed one to two hours at the most before you found him, and the disarrangement of his clothing suggests that he was placed in the stall after he was killed.” He turned another page. “His wallet was in his back pocket, and from his carte d’identité we learned that he was forty years old. We also know that he had just emptied his bladder.” He glanced up. “His fly was still undone when he was found.” Finally, he closed the folder and put it on the desktop, leaning back in his chair. “And, as I said, cause of death was ligature strangulation.”

  Once more the swollen face appeared in Rachel’s mind. She swallowed hard. “How? I mean, what made the …” But she couldn’t finish. She just gestured near her own throat.

  “Well.” Boussicault’s voice was cool, and Rachel remembered that one of his best traits was his ability to meet horror with equanimity. “As you have seen, the ligature was narrow. Next to the body we found a length of string that appears to be a match in size. It was wet from lying on the floor, but we’ve sent it for analysis to see what it can tell us.”

  Grateful for his composure, Rachel tried to match it. “Did anyone see him come into the restaurant?” Her voice shook a little.

  The capitaine gave her an approving look. “Exactly our first question. Unfortunately, Laurent was such a regular customer that no one can remember noticing him on that day specifically. In fact, they can’t remember him or anyone else acting oddly that day. The place gets very busy in the afternoons.”

  “So there’s no obvious suspect.”

  Again an approving look. “Exactly. And this may well be a random crime, or a crime of opportunity. It’s hot; heat exacerbates instability. Random murders do increase in the summer. But the victim was an adult male, and there was no sign of sexual assault, both very unusual in stranger strangulation. Which makes it more likely that he was killed by someone who knew him and wanted him dead.”