Tales From the Black Chamber (5 page)

“Really, why?”

“Well, nothing else was taken. Mildred had an inventory of all her personal books on that computer on the library desk. All present and accounted for. There's no sign they touched her jewelry—of which she had a lot—or any of the silver or other valuables she had out in plain sight.”

“Maybe they got scared and ran?”

“Maybe, I don't know. But as I said, for some reason the police seemed to think these were very cool characters. And the neighbors didn't hear a thing. So maybe they used a silencer.… Then again, the walls in those old houses are incredibly thick. It'd be hard to hear much from next door.”

“So you think they found what they were looking for, killed Mrs. Garrett almost by accident, and left.”

“Could be. But I wonder if they didn't kill Mildred on purpose. If the book is the key, then she clearly saw something significant. Maybe they didn't want anyone knowing what it was. I mean, Mildred is—was—four-foot-ten or-eleven? And she couldn't have weighed more than about a hundred pounds at most. If you are two big, bad armed criminals, how hard is it going to be to manage a little old lady? I know Mildred knew how to shoot—and well—but her gun was still in her purse on the little couch in the hall.”
Mildred carried a gun? Something to ask about later.

“Well, if it's something
in
the book, I mean, on the page, rather than in the binding or covers, we could look for it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, confused.

“I've got a copy.”

“Of the breviary?” John asked, excited, then continued, his voice dropping in disappointment, “No, I mean, if it's as common as you say, there's no reason that they had to kill Mildred for that particular one.”

“No, no, I'm sorry,” Anne explained, “I mean, I've got a digital copy of the book she bought. I make it a practice to take high-resolution photos of every page of every book that passes through my hands in order to have a record for authentication in the future. Occasionally you get someone who'll buy a valuable book from you, then modify a less-valuable copy until it resembles the expensive one, then try and sell it back to you as the original. So early on, I made it a practice to build a private archive of all the books I've sold. I put it in the contract any seller has to sign, but it's a tiny little clause and no one even notices, I don't think. Plus, since it's only for my legitimate business use—I'm not publishing facsimile editions of their books—I don't
think
there are any copyright issues. I mean, I haven't run it past a lawyer. I probably should now that I'm a partner; I don't want to get the firm in trouble …”

“You have
pictures
of
every page
of that book?”

“Yep. And the covers, end papers, spine, too. Do you think I should tell the police?”

“Ah, no.… I don't know that they'd be able to evaluate them.” John paused, thinking. “In fact, don't tell
anyone
. Here's the thing—if she was killed for knowing something about what was in the book, if the killers know you have a copy of the book and were friendly with her, they might think you could know the same thing. And then …”

“Come after me. Oh, God. Do you think that's possible?”

John paused a moment, then said, “I have no idea. But that's why you shouldn't tell anyone. Do a lot of people know about your archive?”

Anne thought for a moment. “No. A couple people at work. The computer guy who got me all the storage space and off-site backup. But it's really just a personal thing of mine, like a Rolodex or whatever.”

“Okay, well, tell you what, I'll go home, throw some stuff in a suitcase, and get in my car. I'll be up there late tonight. I'll check into the Marriott at Times Square, and tomorrow we can see if we can figure out what Mildred saw. That ok with you?”

Anne noticed she was smiling and had to laugh. “Actually, it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. I mean, not to make light, but seriously, this sounds like a Nancy Drew book—
The Clue in the Jesuit Breviary!
”

“You're not worried?”

“Well, that there's a non-zero chance someone could try and kill me is inherently worrisome, sure. But my chance of getting hit by a crosstown bus on my way home is probably much higher.”

“Probably.”

“Okay, then! Nerdy Rare-Book Girl gets pulled into exciting intrigue revolving around a mysterious tome! Seriously, who wouldn't want to be her?”

John cracked up. “Okay, Nancy, I'll see you tomorrow.”

“‘Night, Ned!” Anne said chirpily and then hung up quickly, even though she heard him saying, “Huh?” Ned Nickerson was, after all, Nancy's famously smitten boyfriend.

Anne's cell phone rang at eight the next morning.

“Hi, Anne, I hope I didn't wake you.”

“Nope. I'm so worked up over all this, I didn't sleep well. I've been up for a couple hours.”

“Sorry about the insomnia. You want to meet for breakfast?”

“Only if we can get to work on this over the food.”

“Okay, your place or mine?”

Anne laughed. “I thought about that. If it was the guy who was in my office, they definitely know where I work, and they might even know my apartment, right?”

“That's not out of the question,” John said cautiously.

“So, why don't I come down to Times Square, mingle with the crowds, and meet you in the lobby of your hotel. We can pick a place to eat then.”

“Sounds good. See you in a bit.”

Less than an hour later, John and Anne shook hands in the lobby of the Marriott. After exchanging pleasantries, he pointed to the manuscript box under her arm.

“So, is that it?”

She nodded. “So where do you want to eat?”

“How about here?”

“I don't know, if this is cloak-and-dagger, a restaurant might not be the best. And, nothing personal, but I'm not really comfortable with going up to your room.”

“Oh, no problem. I checked with the business center, and they've got a free conference room. I figured if we needed to spread things out, a big table would be great. And the room-service breakfast menu looked good. Murderously overpriced, but good. They'll bring it right to us in the conference room.”

“Sounds perfect.”

Comfortably ensconced in a black leather chair at a polished oval cherrywood conference table with a futuristic-looking speakerphone in the middle, Anne opened the box.

“Wow, those are beautiful pictures,” John said, as she took the top few pages out. “Was the book really
this
big?”

“No, the breviary was a fat little book that would fit in a pocket. I just printed these scaled up for eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper on the theory that if we were looking for something small, it'd be easier to spot.”

“Good idea. Nice printing and paper, too.”

“We have a high-resolution printer in the office for printing off last-minute signs and labels for things for auctions. Okay, now look here where the file name is printed in the corner. The three numbers after the P tell you the page number, starting with the inside front cover as 001.”

“And the V and R after the numbers?”

“Verso and recto. Left- and right-hand pages. It's redundant in most cases, since odd-numbered pages are always left-hand, or verso, and the even ones are recto. But sometimes you have some odd fold-out pages, or printer's errors that leave blank pages, and the like. It's just another way to triple-check you've got the right book.”

“So, maybe we should start with the cover—” John had begun when a knock at the door startled them. Room service brought in their breakfasts and two pots of coffee. John insisted on the Coolidge Foundation's picking up the tab. Over Belgian waffles and eggs Benedict, Anne explained she'd been up since six or so, drinking less-good coffee and going through a number of the pages at her breakfast table. She hadn't come up with a thing. The type and the content were exactly what you'd expect, and the marginalia were pretty conventional stuff. Devotional remarks, underlinings. Occasional explication of a word in Latin or Greek. As she remembered and the photos showed, the cover and binding were also unremarkable.

John asked a few questions but mostly just needed to be brought up to speed on sixteenth-century books. He was obviously not the expert Mrs. Garrett had been, but Anne found his rapt attention to her explanations a more than slightly pleasurable compensation.

His suggestion of dividing up the book into sections by content seemed to make a lot of sense in terms of how to work through it. Anne chose to start at the beginning, and John in the “demonological” section. His Latin was evidently excellent, Anne noted, occasionally looking up to find him engrossed in the text, sometimes chuckling, sometimes nodding his head gravely.

“How's it going?” she asked him an hour or so into reading.

“Well. This is really neat stuff. I love how they've got exorcisms for individual, named demons. I'd think the trick would be finding out their names. Who knows, maybe they'd get cocky and answer to them. Or maybe you just run through them all and hope one works?”

“Got me,” Anne said. “I do know that they believed that when you called a demon by its name, it had to answer.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Anne, warming to one of her favorite topics. “And, in fact, a demon's name was one of the keys to controlling it. Necromancers and the like spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the names of demons from the Bible and other sources in order to be able to summon them and bend them to their will.”

“Hmm.” John frowned. “If they were real, I think I'd want to keep my distance from them as much as possible.”

“Really?” Anne smiled. “Not even to gain power over your enemies? Or obtain forbidden knowledge? Raise the dead? Contact Mrs. Garrett and ask her who killed her?” Anne stopped as she heard her own words, her joke suddenly leaden and dreadful.

John spoke up quickly, rushing past the discomfiture. “No, no, I mean, I just wouldn't want those things knowing where I lived.”

“Well, there's two things there,” Anne said, her feet back on academic ground. “First, if you're a necromancer, in the context of the day, you're doing science. You're doing experiments on the nature of life, death, and so forth. Secondly, you might—and it's a big might—even consider yourself a Godly person, since the essence of controlling a demon is harnessing some of the Divine to compel the demonic. Some necromancers were priests.”

“Still.” Did John shiver? “Still. I don't like the idea.”

“Why?” asked Anne. “Are you superstitious?”

John paused, then carefully said, “No.”

He must be religious
, thought Anne.
Not sure how I feel about that
. “Do you want me to look at those instead?” she offered.

“No, no, as I said,” John smiled, “it's great stuff.”

They sat together in silence until they ordered some sandwiches for lunch, then compared notes over food. Neither of them could come up with anything, though they had covered only a fraction of the book's pages. They spent the afternoon in companionable silence, occasionally discussing a point of Latin syntax or typesetting. They shared a bottle of wine and some very good sole for dinner, bouncing ideas off of each other, then ordered lots more coffee and dessert for the caffeine and sugar.

Anne heard the knock on the door and John saying, “Come in” to someone who she assumed was Milton, their Ugandan room-service waiter. What happened next was a blur. Thinking back later, she thought she'd seen, out of the corner of her eye, John's head come up in shock. She heard some soft whistling sounds. John lunged across to the far side of the conference table and pulled it over towards them, just missing Anne's ankle. Papers flew everywhere. Anne's first thought was to scream, “What are you doing?!” at John, but when she looked over again, he'd produced a black semiautomatic pistol from somewhere and began firing it over the table. The sheer incongruity of the sight of him standing there in a shooter's stance, pulling the trigger incredibly rapidly, with everything she thought she knew about him stunned her into silence.

John dropped down below the tabletop to load a fresh magazine and noticed her, frozen. “The pages!” he said in a stage whisper she made out through the ringing in her ears. “Get all the pages!” then popped back up and began firing the gun again, this time more slowly and precisely. As Anne tried to gather all the hundreds of pages and stuff them haphazardly back in the manuscript box, she noticed for the first time the pocking sound coming from the table. She realized there must be bullets hitting the underside.
They must have silencers
, she thought. She'd been around enough guns in New Mexico to know that she was only hearing John's pistol.

John changed magazines twice more, firing more slowly and carefully each time. Anne surmised he was trying to hit someone through the doorway and buy her time. He went to change the gun's magazine again and whispered, “Last one. You ready?”