Bookweirder (18 page)

T
he darkness was nearly complete. It took a moment for Norman’s eyes to adjust, but slowly the outlines of the room began to emerge. He was on the couch. In the dim light he could make out the curved backs of two chairs and a small desk, perhaps. Norman brought himself up to a seated position and felt the thick carpet beneath his feet.

On the table beside him he saw the outline of something that looked like a lamp. He groped around the ornately carved base for a power switch, inching his hand higher until he caught something dangling—a pull cord? He yanked decisively. Something came off in his hand and the whole lamp erupted into a musical jingling. Withdrawing his hand, he felt the object in his palm. It was smooth, shaped like a lozenge with sharp, faceted edges. He closed his hand over it quickly, as if to make it go away. Only then did he remember the flashlight that George had given him.

Under the flashlight’s beam, the object sent off light—it was a crystal bead. He turned the beam on the lamp and revealed a glistening tree of beads, a whole elaborate chandelier of dangling glass. It was impossible to tell where the bead belonged. He slipped it into his pocket.

Sweeping the flashlight around the room, he could make out the contents more clearly. The room was crammed with furniture.
There were tables everywhere, cluttered with lamps and statues and tiny boxes. Had Norman attempted to move around the room in the dark he would surely have knocked something over.

He ran the beam of the flashlight up and down the walls, following the vertical stripes of the wallpaper in search of a light switch. There was something there, just at head height—some sort of lamp with small glass globes. On his tiptoes he could almost reach it, but again no switch. He slid his hand across the wall until he touched a small metal dial. Turning it slowly between his thumb and forefinger, he expected a sudden burst of light. There was only a slow hissing sound. Norman smelled something foul.

“Jeeze … gas!” he cried out loud, and he quickly turned the dial the other way until the hissing stopped.

His heart was beating faster now, making the room seem less silent. He strained to hear any other noise, hoping that his cry hadn’t awakened the servants in some other room. He swung the flashlight like a searchlight around the room again, seeking out the corners, the edges of curtains. This darkness was creeping him out.

Crossing the room to the largest of the curtained windows, he felt carefully along its smooth silk surface until his fingers touched the tassels of the centre parting. He stuck his head through at first, just to confirm that he was where he was supposed to be. Outside, Paris was asleep. He gazed across the roofs to the wet streets and the dim streetlights. The apartment was about four storeys up, but few buildings reached higher. Out of the black and grey only one colour stood out, a flash of red here and there from a lit sign in the distance or from gaslight shining through a closed red curtain.

He dared to leave the curtain open just a bit. The lights of Paris at night crept into the room, lighting up its floor with red and grey, but it was not only the lights cast from outside. The apartment seemed to have been painted with the same palette. The dark, wood-framed couch was upholstered in scarlet red. The two armchairs matched it. The wallpaper had an alternating pattern of black and red, an intricate weave of brambles and flowers, so thickly intertwined that they were dark stripes from afar. The whole room
looked like an illustration from an old book, a black-and-white engraving enlivened by a single colour—red.

“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered under his breath.

A particularly strong beam of red light illuminated the small writing desk in the corner, and above it hung a bulletin board of some sort—the card rack. Norman inched closer and shone the flashlight into each of the four cubby holes. There were the visiting cards, little rectangles of thick paper with fussy inscribed names and addresses, and there in the top left compartment was a letter—the purloined letter itself!

It looked harmless, like a piece of junk mail. The paper was ragged and had been ripped nearly in half. Only the large crimson seal of the minister made it look at all imposing. Norman leaned in to read the minister’s name from the address. He couldn’t help it. It bothered him that in the book the minister’s name was only ever written as “D—.”

He read the name once and, startled, read it again slowly to make sure he’d got it right—Deschamps, the same name that he and Malcolm had made up for their story. How weird was that? Norman tried to think of another French name that started with D but couldn’t. His curiosity was getting the better of him now. What exactly was in this letter? He reached in and touched the seal. He had time to read it, didn’t he?

A creak in the floor as he reached up made him jump and reminded him otherwise. He didn’t have time. The map was obviously not here in the card rack. Deschamps had left the purloined letter in full sight amongst other letters. That was the whole trick to the story. The stolen map would be hidden in plain sight amongst other maps.

Norman shuffled the papers on the desk. They appeared to be bills and legal documents, but then, Norman knew only about five words of French. Anyway, they certainly weren’t maps. He turned and scanned the room again. There was a tall bookshelf in one corner and beside it another small desk. It was worth a try. The floorboards creaked as he stalked over there. He kept the beam of
his light low along the floor to make sure he didn’t trip … but then something stopped him in his tracks. Footprints—muddy sneaker prints. He gazed down at his grimy white sneakers. They were his own footprints. He cursed himself under his breath.

The library of Minister Deschamps resembled the more boring shelves of the cottage library back in England. The books were curiously sized, either ridiculously small—small enough to fit into the pocket of your jacket—or crazy big. They were all bound in black or deep burgundy leather and engraved with gold curlicues and arabesques.

The Undergrowth map was small, a single sheet of paper drawn by tiny weasel hands. Folded twice, it could be hidden in the pocket of Norman’s jeans. It didn’t need a huge book to hide it. Norman took a few of the smaller books and used the technique of the Parisian police as described by Dupin, shaking them vigorously upside down to see if anything fell out. Nothing.

The beam of the flashlight passed over the titles on the spines of the larger volumes:
Great Criminal Masterminds
,
Timeless Schemes and Conspiracies
,
An Atlas of Infamy
. “A-ha,” Norman whispered dramatically to himself, “an atlas.”

He slid it down from the shelf and, resting it on the table, opened it to the frontispiece, which was elaborately engraved with daggers, skulls and men hanging by their necks from trees. “Nice,” he muttered as he turned the thick, yellowing pages. Page after page of maps revealed themselves—biblical Egypt, the Roman forums, Hadrian’s Wall, the siege of Quebec—fascinating, but not Undergrowth. Again he turned the book upside down and shook out its pages.

A single red banknote wafted to the floor. Norman bent down to retrieve it. Only then, with the flashlight level with the floor, did he notice the black leather tube beneath the little desk. His mother used translucent plastic tubes like that to carry posters and display materials to her talks. Minister Deschamps’s black leather one was just the sort of thing you’d put a map in.

The lid of the tube came off with a satisfying pop. Norman reached in and felt a tightly rolled set of plans inside. They were too
large for the desk, so he spread them out on the floor and kneeled down to pore over them. They were not maps but architectural plans to some palace. He flipped the pages cautiously. Nothing was concealed between them. He was running out of options. If the Undergrowth map wasn’t here, then where?

“Come on, come on,” he muttered. “Be here. Please be here.”

He rolled up the plans and was sliding the tube back into place when a cough interrupted him. Norman jumped to his feet defensively and trained the flashlight in the direction of the sound.

The two upholstered chairs had definitely been empty when Norman arrived. They were not empty now. One was occupied by a tall man, dressed entirely in black. His dark hair was swept back across his forehead, and he held his left arm across his chest, supporting the elbow of his other arm, which reached up to cradle his chin. His eyes narrowed under the beam of Norman’s light, but he did not take them off the boy for a moment.

“I gather you have not found what you are looking for?” The voice spoke English with a thick French accent.

Norman gulped and shook his head. The Frenchman’s eyes had apparently become accustomed to the light, as he stared unblinkingly back towards him.

“I had heard that the English secret service occasionally employs children for certain delicate assignments. A child, after all, can go safely where a man might quickly be detected. But wouldn’t it be wiser, in France, to employ French children?”

Norman did not answer his question. His mind was racing for a solution. What advantage did he have here? How could he save himself?

“I know where the letter is,” he blurted out.

“Indeed you do. Indeed you do,” the man replied calmly. “This is the most interesting thing about you.”

“But, Minister Deschamps,” Norman said, the start of a plan forming, “someone else knows where it is. If you let me go—”

The man in the chair let out a low, chuckling laugh. “Oh, I am not Minister Deschamps. I doubt the minister would have received
you so politely. The minister would have beaten you soundly and turned you over to the police by now.”

“Dupin?” Norman asked.

“Indeed,” the man replied, running the tip of his finger over his eyebrow as if just registering another interesting fact. “You are quite the perspicacious little
espion
, aren’t you? May I ask,” he continued after a pause, “what it is you are looking for?”

Norman resorted to his last trick, the truth. “I’m looking for a map.”

“A map, you say?” A note of intrigue rose in Dupin’s voice. “And the minister has this map?”

Norman shook his head slowly.

The detective leaned in ever so slightly. “And yet you believe it is here. Why so?”

Norman opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t say what he meant to say. He couldn’t tell Dupin that he believed the map was here because his mother had insinuated that it was in a Poe story. Dupin wouldn’t believe that he was just a character in a story.

“Relax, my boy. The worst has already happened. You have been caught breaking into the chambers of a minister of the French government, and you have not even found what you were looking for. Come, I enjoy a puzzle. Let me help you. Why did you believe that your map was in this apartment?”

“I was told that the map was hiding in plain sight,” Norman admitted finally.

“Interesting.” Dupin ruminated, drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair. “And who told you this?”

“The person who took it,” Norman said, hoping to avoid telling him exactly who that was.

“That,” Dupin declared with some satisfaction, “is a clue in itself. It tells us a lot about the thief. It is possible to understand the
how
of almost any crime by understanding the
who
. We know that our thief is clever enough to use the same scheme as our Minister Deschamps, and is so overconfident as to tell you that he has done it. What else do we know about this criminal?”

“Erm …” Norman hesitated. He wasn’t sure how much more he should tell Dupin.

“You can count on my discretion. I can assure you of that.” Dupin sounded eager to help solve the mystery. “Understand the criminal and understand the crime.”

“How is that?” Norman asked, edging closer and lowering the flashlight.

“Ah well, young sir, this is the first lesson in criminology. I understand that Compte Rochambault himself introduced his game to your George Washington.”

“Roshambo?” Norman repeated, perplexed.

“Ro-cham-bault,” Dupin repeated, making in turn the sign of a rock, paper and scissors with his fingers at each syllable.

“Oh, sure! Rock, paper, scissors,” Norman guessed. Perplexed, he stepped closer to the chair so he could examine the detective’s face. He appeared neither nervous nor angry. He might have been sitting in his own apartment having a chat with a friend.

“Do you have an older or younger sibling?” Dupin asked.

“A sister, younger.” Norman wrinkled his nose reflexively at the thought of her.

“And do you usually win when you two play Rochambault?”

Norman nodded his head emphatically.

“Because you can predict what she will pick,” the detective summarized.

That was exactly it. “She always picks rock first,” Norman said. “Little kids always pick rock.”

The detective smiled knowingly. “And children your own age?”

“Smarter kids pick paper, because they expect you to pick rock.”

“And yet more intelligent children, like yourself?” Dupin asked, raising a languid finger and pointing.

Norman smiled, finally getting Dupin’s point. “You pick scissors, because the other person picks paper, expecting you to pick rock.”

“So you see, understanding our opponents helps us to understand their methods.” Dupin concluded his lesson with the same
professorial tone that Norman’s father used. “And who is our opponent in
l’affaire de la carte
?” he continued.

Norman whispered his answer hoarsely. “My mother.”

Dupin leaned forward as if to say something, then leaned back and repeated the peculiar gesture of rubbing his forefinger across his eyebrow.

“Very interesting. Very, very interesting,” he repeated. He thought for a moment before saying, “May I ask an additional, impertinent question?” When Norman assented cautiously, the detective asked, “Does your mother love you?”

“Yes …” Norman replied quickly, shocked by the question.

“Well, then,” Dupin began as he rose from the chair, “I assure you that your map is not here in this apartment.” He removed a large silver pocket watch from his breast pocket and squinted at it.