The Woman Who Died a Lot

31. Thursday: Finisterre

We took the elevator to the subbasement and stepped out into the same small security cubicle I had visited two days ago with Finisterre. A different guard was staring at us from behind the glass, and he smiled when he saw me.

“Good morning, Chief Librarian.”

“Shiny, shiny,” I muttered, “bad times behind me.”

“I’m sorry?”

Jack tightened his grip on my arm, which, while not actually painful, made me at least realize he was serious, and it sobered me up. The patch was gone, but its effects would be with me for a while.

“Nothing.”

I licked my finger and placed it in the DNA tester. The green light flashed, and the door swung open.

“So easy, isn’t it?” said Jack as we walked down the corridor. “I always say it’s not what you know but whom you know . . . you can bully.”

We continued along the corridor, past the glazed display cases I had seen earlier and into the main conservation room. Finisterre was there, but no one else. I could sense Jack’s suspicions.

“Where is everyone?”

“It’s lunch,” I said, then giggled out loud.

“Are you okay?” asked James.

“Yes,” I replied as soberly as I could. “I’ve got something odd in my bloodstream that generates inappropriate responses. This is Jack Schitt, the Goliath rep. He wants to vandalize our St. Zvlkx codices.”

James looked at Jack, who stared back impassively. Finisterre wouldn’t be armed, but Day Player Jack would know that already from the way James’s clothes hung on his body.

“He was the guy at the Lobsterhood on Tuesday?” asked Finisterre, still staring at Jack but addressing me.

“In a manner of speaking. He’s ruthless,” I added, “and has no fear of death or pain. I recommend you do as he asks.”

“These are my children,” replied Finisterre, indicating the shelves of old books, “and I would die to protect them.”

“Noble,” replied Jack, “but, in war as in literature, we have to sacrifice our babies.”

There was a pause, and I noticed Finisterre’s eyes flick to something behind us. Jack saw it, too, and drew and fired in one smooth movement without looking or turning around. The guard didn’t even make a sound as he fell, and I looked at Finisterre, who swallowed nervously. He did love his books, but after due consideration was decidedly not willing to die for them.

“Which book are you after?” he asked.

“It was a thirteenth-century bestseller,” replied Jack. “Zvlkx’s Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day.”

Finisterre looked momentarily confused. “You’d kill someone for that?”

“I’d kill someone for fun, Mr. Finisterre.”

“Well, you’re going to have to be disappointed. We haven’t got a copy of the Brothels of Dorset.”

“It’s awaiting cataloging,” replied Jack confidently, “from the library of the now-extinct Brotherhood of Perpetual Defenestration. I have good intelligence.”

Neither Finisterre nor I moved. I could feel my head clearing, and my hands were a little less numb. In five minutes I’d be merely useless, not utterly useless as I was at present.

“Listen,” said Jack, taking a pair of cutters from his pocket, “it’s very, very, simple. I’ll remove your fingers one joint at a time until I get what I want. How many fingers and how much pain do you think a Zvlkx codex is worth?”

He was right, in an odd sort of way. Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day was not rare; it could be bought in any antiquarian bookstore for about five hundred pounds, more if it had salacious margin notes and “interesting” staining.

“Take it,” I said, “and leave.”

“I’m so glad you’re seeing it my way at last,” he said. “Mr. Finisterre, lead us to it.”

We walked over to the other side of the room, where the books awaited cataloging. The Brotherhood of Perpetual Defenestration’s small collection was lying in a cardboard box on one side of the copying table, and as soon as Jack saw this, his mood changed abruptly.

“What is this?” he demanded, indicating a flatbed scanner.

“We copy all books,” said Finisterre while rummaging in the cardboard box. He found it eventually—a sad, tired and very well-thumbed book, the racier pages darkened with seven centuries of surreptitious titillation. This would be a copy that would barely make two hundred pounds, even on eBay.

“Has it been copied?” asked Jack, and I looked at the records.

“Yes,” I replied, “this morning.”

“Where would the copy be?” he asked angrily.

“Uploaded to our server, two floors down.”

“Anywhere else?”

“Zurich,” I replied. “Our servers are backed up every hour.”

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “That was a waste of time.” He took a deep breath. “Then again,” he added, “I could kill the pair of you—at least then the morning won’t be a total loss.”

I think he would have done it, too, but just as he raised his gun arm, there was a sound like a melon exploding, and James and I were spattered with the contents of the Day Player’s head.

We stood in silence for some moments, and I picked off a scrap of bone fragment that had landed on my upper lip.

“That,” said Phoebe, who had appeared at the other end of the vault, “was for Judith Trask.”

She walked up and tapped the headless corpse. Those old top-break revolvers carry a fearsome punch. She handed me her gun and badge.

“Arrest me, Thursday—I should stand trial for murder.”

“You didn’t murder anyone,” I told her. “It’ll take more than that to avenge Trask. But I’ll tell you this now, I’m grateful you did what you did.”

They both looked at me, then at the corpse, which was starting to ooze an unnatural yellowish liquid from the top of its spine.

“What in hell’s name is that?” said Finisterre.

“It’s a kind of temporary satellite consciousness,” I said in a soft voice as I felt a tingling return to my leg. “Let me explain.”

I told them what a Day Player was and how Jack Schitt would be back in his suite at the Piper-Astoria right now. Phoebe apologized for disbelieving me, and after we had discussed it at length, I called Stig to alert him that we had another nonevolved life-form for collection. And while the colonel secured the scene, Finisterre and I cleaned ourselves as best as we could with a box of wet wipes.

“So why did he lose interest once he knew that Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day had been copied?” asked Phoebe when we’d explained to her what had happened.

“No idea.”

Finisterre was busy looking through the small volume. “What palimpsest was he after?” I asked.

“We can find out,” said James, “by using multispectral filming, and by superimposing the images we should be able to view each palimpsest and identify the source of every single reused page in the book. Some recycled pages will have been well washed and scraped, others less so. And the comparing of the palimpsests with known works that Zvlkx bought in bulk will take some time. I suggest dismembering the book and having several teams working on it until we find something.”

“Like what?”

“Something we don’t expect to find. I’m thinking that perhaps a book of peculiar rarity and importance made it into Zvlkx’s rebinding factory—and that those pages made their way into random copies of his books.”

“Then we should get started right now,” murmured Phoebe, who seemed relieved that she wasn’t going to be arrested for murder after all.

I told them to call me when they had anything and left them to it.

John Duffy was waiting for me back up in my office. I borrowed some spare clothes from the lost-property bin and went to have a shower and emerged refreshed twenty minutes later wearing a tweed skirt, mismatched socks and a large Swindon Mallets sweatshirt, something that Conrad Spoons found unaccountably funny when I returned to the office.

They were busy inventorying what the Wessex Library Service actually owned and had found about 2.4 million pounds’ worth of cars, vans, two tiltrotors and forty thousand date stamps that had been ordered in error.

“How much time will two point four million buy us?” I asked.

“About a week.”

“It’s a start. Anything to give us some breathing space. Duffy?”

I beckoned him over, and he asked me what I needed.

“Keep this quiet, but did Geraldine score any more of those patches?”

“Ten, I think. She was considering selling them around the office and making enough profit to buy a new car.”

“Get me another one and a pair of scissors, will you? I think a half might be just about perfect.”

“Are you certain?”

“Never been more so.”

Duffy did as I asked, and a few minutes later I headed off for MadCon2004.