The Bookseller (11 page)

“Are you serious, sir? I don't—”

“Yes, I'm serious. And truthfully, I'm not sure how or why. That's why I need the book. Tell him he'll get his money back, every penny.”

“That reminds me, sir. Do you want to know how much it sold for?”

Hugo realized he'd not even thought about the sale price. “Sure.”

“Five hundred and thirty thousand Euros. That's almost three-quarters of a million US dollars.”

“Yes,” said Hugo, his voice a whisper, “it is.”

“Several bidders pushed the price up. We honestly didn't think it'd go for more than three hundred thousand Euros. Good news, wouldn't you say?”

 

 

When Eric Ambler wrote that Paris had “the macabre formality of a steel engraving,” he could have been sitting at the window of Hugo's apartment those early hours of Wednesday morning. A steel engraving because the buildings and streets had a uniform grayness, dulled further by an endless low cloud that hung above the rooftops, flattened the light, and drew the color right out of the city. And macabre because Hugo had just seen a significant clue, and possibly a lifeline, disappear into the hands of a remote and anonymous buyer. He was furious with himself for selling the book in the first place. Would he ever,
ever
, have been so careless with potential evidence in the past?

After he'd calmed himself he refocused and wondered, just for a moment, whether the buyer was somehow connected with all this. But the idea was impossible to explore in any rational sense, and so not worth thinking about. For now, anyway.

He called Claudia but hung up before she answered. Two minutes later, the phone rang and he smiled. Of course, her cell phone had registered his call. It was hard to change your mind in the modern world.

“Miss me?” she said.

“
Mais oui
. I miss Max, too.”

“I didn't know you felt that way about him.”

“Hush.” Hugo couldn't help but smile. “You're not too big to go over my knee, you know.”

“Oh, Hugo.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “I think I'd fit rather nicely.”

“Tell me, my crime reporter, what's the word on our new bouquiniste?”

“Nothing yet. I called a detective friend and persuaded him to send over a couple of uniformed men.”

“Thanks.” He'd never been good at asking for favors. “Any idea when they might report back yet?”

“
Non
. But it's only just eleven.”

“Oh right. I've been up too long.” He told her that the book had sold already, heard the sharp intake of breath when she heard how much it went for.

“Maybe this
is
about the book,” she said. “Did you ever look inside it?”

“You mean for something hidden?” He thought for a moment. There was the card in the Agatha Christie but the only time he'd seen the Rimbaud open was at Kendall's store. “No. But it's not a big book, it would have to be something small.”

“Like invisible ink or something?”

“Silly, if it was invisible ink I would never have seen it. I meant like a piece of paper, or words underlined.”

“Whoever bought it at auction, would he have known beforehand whether there was something inside?” she asked.

“I don't see how, he bought over the telephone.”

“Maybe someone looked it over for him before the sale.”

“Maybe,” Hugo said. “That's a lot of money for something you haven't seen.”

“Although you bought it without inspecting it.”

“I didn't pay half a million Euros.”

“Fair point.”

“Look, can you get away for lunch? Or dinner? I don't mean to sound needy but I do like your cooking.”

“Oh, I can't.” Her voice was suddenly distant. “I have plans already. Let me call you this afternoon when my gendarmes return. And I will see you tomorrow, I promise.”

Hugo hung up, feeling like a foolish teenager. He'd not imagined he would feel disappointment at such a slight rejection, yet he did. They barely knew each other, why wouldn't she have other plans, even other lovers? Because he didn't? Hugo almost laughed at himself. If the
world's inhabitants matched their sex lives to his, it would be a world with few children.

He looked at his watch. Nothing he could do about finding Max right now, but he had to do something. Not work, he didn't want to go to the embassy and have Emma read in his face…what, disappointment? Frustration? Whichever emotion he was feeling, he'd never get to his desk without Emma spotting it, without her seeing through him. He didn't feel like dealing with that today. Plus, he was on vacation.

Lunch would be a good start, a catalyst for what Hercule Poirot called “the little gray cells.” He could still taste the garlic from last night's snails and thought that a salad might be just the thing to cleanse the palate. He set off down Rue Jacob, glancing up at the solid gray sky and expecting to feel the spit of rain. He didn't mind, content that a hat, a coat, and the occasional doorway would offer enough shelter.

He meandered through the Sixth Arrondissement, never tired of the tight streets and small, cozy boutiques. Overhead, window boxes spilled red geraniums, brightening the stone façades of the two-star hotels that catered to the not-so-wealthy Americans and weekend visitors from Britain, tourists who wanted to be in the center of Paris and didn't mind tiny rooms, or didn't know they were getting one.

By the time he reached the Seine, he'd forgotten about eating. Across the Quai de Conti lay Max's stall. Hugo stood by the crossing light, impervious to the mass of cars rushing by just feet away. He fixed his eyes on the slight man moving back and forth in front of the open green box, adjusting his wares and occasionally looking up to spot potential customers. Something about the way Chabot moved galled Hugo, as if he'd been there for years, as if this was and always had been his territory.

Except it wasn't. It belonged to Max.

Hugo wanted to go over and shake the truth out of the man. He knew Chabot had lied about Max and he wanted to know why. But he also knew that there was a better way. Two decades of FBI training and experience had taught Hugo that rushing in before thinking could be the death knell for an investigation. Evidence could be missed, spoiled,
or contaminated, witnesses scared off. And if it did become a police matter, maybe even get as far as a courtroom, he didn't want to be the one to screw it up. Not for his sake, and not for Max's.

And yet he had to do something.

He pulled out his phone and dialed his office. Emma picked up promptly.

“Hi Emma, fancy doing some research?”

“Sure. Fancy telling me what's going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know I don't like to pry. And you know that sometimes I can't help myself.”

“It's OK Emma, curiosity is a sign of intelligence.”

“It's also a sign of nosiness,” she said.

Hugo gave a wry smile. “And?”

“Well, obviously things didn't go well with Christine, but what's with the journalist here? The bookseller calling? Now the research? This is not like any vacation I've ever seen. And where are you? I can barely hear you for the traffic.”

“Sorry, it is loud.” Hugo retreated down a small side street, pausing beside a post office he'd never noticed before, and the roar of midday was instantly muffled. “Better? Look,” he said, “I'm not up to anything, but if I am, I'll let you know.”

“Thanks Hugo, that makes perfect sense.” Her grudging respect for his privacy and sharp tongue were two of her best assets.

“I knew you'd understand. Now, I need a number, and contact name if possible, for the Syndicat Des Bouquinistes de Paris.”

“Syndicat Des Bouquinistes? I never knew there was one.”

“Me neither.”

“Give me a few seconds here. Syndicat Des.…Here you go. Cecilia Roget seems to be its head. No, wait, Bruno Gravois. Took over a year ago.”

“Thanks,” said Hugo. “Where are they based?”

Emma gave him an address in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, on Rue Nollet. “Closest metro stop is Place de Clichy,” she said. “Hugo, are you going there now?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason. Sometimes I have the urge to tell you to be careful and I don't always know why.”

“Because in a former life you were my mother?”

“If I'd been your mother, Hugo, I would have been reincarnated as a saint, not a secretary.”

“But you are a saint, didn't you know?”

“Oh hush. Anything else you need me to do?”

“No,” he said. “No doubt I'll call you tomorrow for something.”

“No doubt,” she said, and rang off.

Hugo walked back onto the Quai de Conti. He looked toward Jean Chabot's stall and saw two gendarmes talking to him.
Thank you, Claudia
. He resisted the urge to trot across the street and eavesdrop, or butt in completely, and instead turned east and headed alongside the sluggish roll of the river, walking toward the metro stop at Les Invalides, which, if memory served, would take him directly to Place de Clichy station. And the thirty-minute walk would give him time to come up with some sort of plan.

After exiting the metro station at Place de Clichy, Hugo walked northwest on Rue Biot against the traffic into the Seventeenth Arrondissement, which sat just to the west of the hopping Montmartre area. The Seventeenth was one of those truly French parts of Paris that rubbed shoulders with, but never quite got to know, the tourists who shuttled between the Place Pigalle, the Sacre Couer, and the arrondissements that sit either side of the Seine. A business hub since the 1970s, only the most avid historian would travel to this part of Paris and recognize the village of Batignolles, where in the 1870s painter Edouard Manet and his
groupe des Batignolles
captured the busy cafés and local parks on canvas.

As he walked, he noticed the windshield wipers of a few cars ticking back and forth, but under hat and coat he felt no rain. He spotted a
small park on his left, the direction he wanted to go, and crossed the street toward it.

He pushed open a waist-high gate and heard it squeak as it swung shut behind him. The metal latch clattered, catching the attention of two Arab men playing chess on a nearby bench. They quickly returned to their game—he was of no interest to them. A gravel path led him between two rectangles of brown grass, each bordered by the entrails of lifeless plants, inert but preserved by the Paris winter.

The grass soon gave way to a large square of gravel where half a dozen men played or watched
petanque
, some standing and some sitting. The eldest, a stooped little man with an impossibly red nose, stood just inside a small green shed and brewed coffee, a line of tin mugs on a table by the door. Another of the men, as French as a postcard in his blue beret and baggy canvas pants, turned his palms upward to gauge the rain. Unimpressed by the feeble spatter, he went back to the game. A row of players awaited their turn on one of the worn park benches, cooing and nodding their approval of the action like a row of pigeons on a tree branch. Wraiths of smoke greeted Hugo as he approached, the pungent, raw aroma of unfiltered tobacco so much more pleasing to him than the sharp, clinging smell of the thin cigarettes smoked in the bars and clubs of the Fifth Arrondissement.

Hugo watched the game, too, for a moment, wondering if he could tell anything about these men from the way they spoke and what they wore. He gave up after a couple of minutes, amused by his own pretensions. All he could tell was that they were content and that they hoped that the sun might eventually come out.

The park let him out at the corner of two streets, the larger one being Rue de Dames. Diagonally across from him, kitty-corner as his grandmother would say, was Rue Nollet. Like a thousand other streets in Paris, it was part residential and part business, apartments stacked three and four high on top of stores, and the occasional heavy wooden door leading to a courtyard surrounded by more numerous, and more expensive, apartments. There were few people on the street—lunch and the chill bluster of the afternoon had seen to that.

He looked for number twenty-three and found it sandwiched between a bakery and a small store selling handmade linens from Provence. He stopped at the window of this store and looked in, trying not to think about Claudia and which design of napkins she might like. As if either of them were the napkin-buying type.

The door Hugo wanted was dark red, and beside it was a brass plaque, screwed into the brick, announcing it to be the home of the Syndicat Des Bouquinistes De Paris. A piece of paper with neat, flowing handwriting let visitors know that the bell was broken and that they should let themselves in.