The Delphi Agenda (6 page)

The Giant, forgetting his own autopsy, stared over Viètes’ shoulder. “Isn’t ‘O-U-T’ an English word? Could it be a code of some kind, unless he was raving. Fear? Perhaps he thought he was writing something intelligible but the strain was too much.”

Viètes shook his head. “He had great presence of mind. He drew something in a book with his own blood before he died.”

“Drew something?”

“A symbol.” Viètes sketched the circle-triangle-line on a pad.

“Never saw that before, either,” the Giant said. “But if this is a message, and it’s important, who was it intended for?”

Viètes lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know, unless it was the young woman. This is a mix of Roman and Greek letters.…”

The Giant started to reply but Viètes ran to the office and picked up the phone. “
Oui, alors
,” he muttered, going back to his drowning victim. She, at least, had been pulled from the Seine and presented no real mysteries; her lungs were full of water.

“Captain Hugo?” Viètes spoke quickly into the receiver. “This is urgent, so I’m going to bring it over. I believe Foix has given us a message for Mademoiselle Emmer.”

He coiled the tape around a pencil, put it in his pocket, and hurried out to the parking lot on the lower level. On the rough stone of the wall next to the door he passed a sign reading “Depart de Convois.” Hearses bearing the dead began their final journeys here.

As he was getting into his car he noted through the canopy of the shade trees that the clouds forecast for later in the day were beginning to build up to the west.

Hugo put away his portable phone. “That was Vietes calling from the Institut Medico-Legal.”

“Mm-hm?” Lisa ran her fingertips along the bookshelves, pausing occasionally to touch a spine.

“He believes he has a message for you.”

She turned. “A message for me? What kind of message?”

“He only said it might be important and he’s on his way.”

She lifted her shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Hugo went downstairs with Bernard and Lt. Mathieu. Time passed. The front door opened and closed. One of the policemen hummed a few bars of “Le petit monsieur triste,” an old Edith Piaf tune. There was quiet conversation. A cell phone rang. The door opened and closed again.

Lisa picked up the phone on Foix’s desk, thinking she should explain to the Fondation Roulot why she hadn’t shown up, but there was no dial tone. That was odd, but it was probably one of those temporary outages in the phone system. She cradled it and walked once more around the perimeter of the room, touching the shelf edges as if that way she might glean from them some meaning to Rayond Foix’s death. She felt his presence everywhere. She could almost smell his shaving cream, a ghost perfume wafting through the room, and see the little dab of it that always seemed to remain just under his ear.

Hugo reappeared.

“Did you notice the windows?” Lisa asked him, pausing in her slow circuit of the room.

Hugo spoke at the same time. “So, what did you mean, one of the books?” He stopped, and they both laughed. He gave a little bow. “What about the windows?”

She bent down to look at a book title and moved on slowly. “They were both closed. It was warm last night and he would normally have had both windows open to catch the breeze. But they were both closed. Stranger still, the courtyard shutters were also closed, but not the ones on the street.”

“Why is that strange?” Hugo was frowning.

“He didn’t sleep in here. He was working. He often worked late at night. He liked the air, so he would have had the shutters and the windows open. Yes, it’s odd, the windows, the shutters.”

“Does this have anything to do with the books?”

“Well, it’s a break in the pattern, don’t you see? I think he knew he was going to be attacked. I think he closed the courtyard shutters and both windows, locked the door, wrote the list of composers, pulled books out of the bookcase, and sat down at his desk to wait.”

Hugo nodded, visibly impressed. “It seems so.”

“I think everything he did meant something.”

“What? What do these things mean?”

“I don’t know, not yet. But what about the wheels? They’ve been bothering me as well.”

He shook his head. “Excuse me?”

“The wheels, or the wheelchair!” She stopped by the courtyard window and pointed at the carpet, tilting her head as though listening to a distant voice. Her blond hair fell to the side. “Captain Hugo, you said the gun was fired downward and that meant the shooter was tall. As tall as me, perhaps a bit taller, that’s how you put it. A person in a wheelchair wouldn’t be tall, would they? So it’s unlikely the impressions on the carpet are from a wheelchair. There must be some other explanation. Perhaps someone else was here, two attackers.”

“I had thought of that, yes. And yes, it’s a possibility.”

“Oh, right. OK.” Lisa placed her hand over the gap where the St. Augustine had been. “Now, you asked about the books.” She spread her fingers to measure the gap and showed him the distance. “This space is too big for the
De civitate dei
. There would have been a gap, and I don’t remember a gap. So I think there were two books in this space.”

“The assassin stole two books?”

“Perhaps.” She went back to the small sofa facing the long bookcase and stared at it, letting her eyes go slightly out of focus. It was something she did when she was thinking.

Lisa Emmer was a shy, inward child, with strawberry blond hair even as an infant (Swedes in the family tree, her father had told her more than once). She had passed much of her childhood wandering alone along a creek bed near her home. She found delight in the stones and plants of the closest thing to wilderness she knew. It had come as an epiphany one day that there were animals, too, skunks and opossums and foxes and birds, and if she stayed still and let her eyes go soft she could sometimes see them as clearly as if they were outlined in light against the complexity of leaf and trunk.

It was a technique she had perfected later in the desert when searching in the sand and dust of ancient trash heaps for fragments of papyrus or the pieces of broken crockery on which Roman soldiers wrote letters home. In the tan chaos of the dirt some small, unnatural edge would often pop out, but only if she didn’t stare too hard. This was called a ‘search eye,’ this trick of letting training and instinct work together by keeping the rational mind from interfering.

She had no particular reason to use the technique now. After all, the St. Augustine was gone and she was pretty sure another book had gone with it. There was no real point in looking. So she was just thinking, and avoiding the distraction of visual stimulation.

“Which books did Raimond pull down?” she mused. “Was one the Augustine? What of the other missing book? Was he trying to say something? Well,” She stood up and smoothed her skirt with her palms. “I won’t find it like this. You’ll just have to find the killer, Captain Hugo.”

“Of course.” His irony was palpable, but she was already across the room examining the bookshelf. As along the creeks, as in the desert, something had leapt out of the background precisely when she wasn’t looking for it.

“It always happens like that, doesn’t it, Captain Hugo? I knew something was out of place, but I didn’t know I knew it. Well, you asked me to tell you if I saw something, even if it was small. This is small, but I’m sure it means something.” She reached up and slipped a volume from the top shelf. “This,” she called triumphantly, “is the
Histoire de Theodose le Grand
by Valentin Esprit Flechier, published in Paris by Mabre-Cramoisy in 1679.”

Hugo was not impressed. “And so?”

She swept her hand across the bookcase. “The books in this case are all more or less contemporary volumes. There’s nothing rare or exotic here – Dostoyevsky, Loeb classics, Philosophy, literature, science. The rare books were in the cases at the end, on either side of the window.”

“So this book was in the wrong place? Was that unusual?”

“Raimond Foix would never have allowed one of his treasures out of place, especially not one this rare. By the way, this biography of Theodosius the Great is a wonderful example of printing, but Bishop Flechier was much better known for his funeral orations and the fact that he was tutor to the son of Louis XIV. It isn’t a great book in itself.”

“So, if Foix moved the book, he was trying to tell us, or you, something?”

“Yes, of course. He pulled those books out to call attention to books. He misplaced this one so I’d find it here. He was certainly trying to tell me something.” Her elation collapsed. “But what?” She looked helplessly at Hugo. “Was the Augustine part of the message? If so, perhaps the killer took it. If not, and the Augustine was taken from the shelf, it disturbs the message. I don’t know what he wanted me to see. The color? The subject? The date?”

Just then there was a clatter of footsteps on the stair. Vietes appeared in the doorway. “Mademoiselle,” he said, and without waiting for an answer produced the spool of metallic tape and unrolled it vertically across Foix’s desk. “This is the bright thing we saw in Dr. Foix’s throat.”

The letters, written in a clear block hand in indelible ink, flowed down the shiny strip: L S C E A A T R F Y M H O U T E E F L O M D T L N I R Δ I F S A
S O E W I T I R E L E Γ T R O N N H S V T Ω E E E O Θ D E Y R Ι O K O Γ Σ O T U N Ε R H B Ω Α O E E Θ Υ P P C I Τ E R A Σ Ο N O R E Ν

“What is this?” Vietes demanded. “And what does it mean?”

Brother Cedric, a dark, brooding man of middle years, wore the neon green of the Paris street cleaners, a color so bright and remarkable as to render the wearer invisible. The ubiquitous uniform, with its yellow vest and band under the knee, was the perfect disguise, aided by his dark complexion and blank expression. The street cleaners of the Propreté de Paris were everywhere, sweeping the omnipresent trash along the curbs with their green plastic brooms. Thus dressed, he had no difficulty following Rossignol from the Foix apartment on the Rue du Dragon to the office on the Rue Argenteuil, where he waited across the street, apparently engrossed in examining the water outlets set into the curb.

Rossignol emerged from the building and went north. Cedric, broom in hand, stayed twenty meters behind. Once the banker paused and looked back, forcing Cedric to pretend he was perusing
Le Monde
at a newsstand. His quarry disappeared around the corner.

Two blocks later Rossignol entered an art gallery on a small side street and went out the back. Cedric had to run to a passage some distance down the street, arriving on the Rue Montpensier in time to see Rossignol enter a doorway. This time the banker did not look around. Either he felt safe or he was getting careless.

Cedric made a cell phone call.

A few minutes later a gray van pulled up in front of the building. Cedric climbed inside. A minute later he climbed out wearing a blue worker’s jacket. He turned and pulled two gray and green ‘men working’ barriers from the van.

While he was setting them up, Rossignol was taking the elevator to the top floor apartment and let himself in with two multi-sided keys. The antechamber was quietly furnished with a late Empire entry table and two chairs. He pressed the frame of a painting beside the opposite door. It swung back, revealing an oblong metal plate. He placed his palm over it and said in English: “Nightingale.”

The door clicked. He pushed into a spacious salon and the door latched quietly behind him.

The room was large for a Paris apartment, with conversational groupings, a marble fireplace, and a number of well cared-for houseplants. Large windows on the other side looked onto the lush green of the gardens of the Palais Royal. “Alain?” Rossignol called over his shoulder.

The gardens were in full bloom. Tourists and Parisians on their lunch break filled the benches. The tree canopies were thick with dark green leaves. It was an ordinary day. The threatened rain had yet to appear.

A large man in a dark suit appeared in a doorway. He could have been a valet, or a bodyguard. “Yes, M. Rossignol?”

Rossignol watched the crowd below for a moment. A nun in the habit of a Dominican Sister rolled her wheelchair across the open space near the fountain. Such a sight was not that unusual, but the chair turned toward his windows on the west side of the vast rectangle and stopped. Was she scanning the façade looking for him? He pulled back from the window and turned. “We have a last request, Alain.”

“Very well, M. Rossignol.” He led the way into the next room, which in turn opened onto a corridor with several doors. At the far end he produced a key with which he unlocked a door opening into a small, wood-paneled elevator.

As they descended, Rossignol listened to the quiet choral music that flooded the elevator, one of his favorites from the seventeenth century: “
Veni, Sponsa Mea
” by Etienne Moulinié.

They descended several floors before the cage stopped. They were now well below street level. The elevator opened into a small square room. Thick beige carpet covered the floor, paintings of Burgundy landscapes adorned the walls, and the lighting was indirect, but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a vault built into the subbasement of the building. The only access was the elevator from the penthouse apartment. A plain steel door, painted blue, faced them.