The Woman Who Died a Lot

A lean woman with a face pinched by hard workout walked forward to greet me. She was in her mid-fifties, did not look well disposed to joy in any form and was wearing the standard SLS combat fatigues, replete with the distinctive camouflage pattern of book spines for blending into library spaces.

  When I was at SpecOps, she was at the Search/Destroy division of SO-5, and you didn’t get to join them until you’d killed eight people with a gun, four with a blunt instrument or two with your hands—it was a sliding-scale sort of thing. Wexler’s appointment to the SLS was enough to precipitate a 32 percent drop in late returns.

  “Welcome to Wessex Library Service,” she said in a voice that sounded like a twelve-mile run washed down with two raw eggs, “and good to see you again.”

  We shook hands.

  “You too, Mel. Husband well?”

  “Dead.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  She shrugged. “I killed the man who did it with my thumbs,”

  she said. “I’ve not washed this one since.” She showed me a grubbylooking thumb.

  Duffy quickly intervened with an embarrassed cough. “Colonel Wexler offers her full support, don’t you, Colonel?”

  “Of course,” she said in a hollow tone. “What sort of leadership can we expect from you? Decisive and bold or faltering and ambivalent?”

  “The first, I hope.”

  “Good,” said Colonel Wexler, visibly pleased. “The previous chief librarian refused to sanction dawn raids to retrieve overdue books. But that will change under you, yes?”

  “I’ll be giving it all due consideration,” I said, meaning that I’d do no such thing.

  “That’s a start,” she said. “I’d also like you to review the rules regarding spine bending and turning over the corners of pages. If we let simple things like that slide without punishment, we could open the floodgates to poor reading etiquette and a downward spiral to the collapse of civilization.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Will you memo your ideas to me?” She said she would, and we shook hands again and moved off. “She’s certifiably insane, isn’t she?” I asked once we were out of earshot.

  “I’m afraid so,” replied Duffy, “but loyal to a fault. She and the rest of the SLS would die protecting any book in the library— with the possible exception of those bloody awful Emperor Zhark novels and anything written by Daphne Farquitt.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  We walked into the main fiction lending floor. It was light and airy, and there were racks and racks of books and very little computer space, which I liked the look of. The second floor was more of the same but was for nonfiction and general interest.

  “This is where we relax,” said Duffy as we toured the luxurious staff recreation room, complete with Ping-Pong table, a Zen meditation room for chilling out and a Michelin-starred chef to make lunch.

  “Nice recreation room,” I said with a nod. “The only thing missing is a string quartet.”

  “They’re here on Monday mornings, to ease in the workweek. Let me show you to your office.”

  We took the elevator to the fourteenth floor and walked across the swirly-patterned carpet to my office. The room was large and square in plan, with a ceiling that sloped down from the windows. Two sides of the office were glazed and were on the corner of the building, where they faced the glassy towers of Swindon’s financial district and would thus afford me a spectacular view of the smiting, should it come to pass. Another wall was covered by a bookcase and three videoconferencing screens, in front of which were two sofas and a coffee table for more informal meetings. The final wall contained two doors. One led into Duffy’s office and the assistants, the other to the waiting room. The office was large, modern and very corporate. In an instant I didn’t feel as if I belonged here. Dingy basements smelling of photocopier toner and old coffee suited me better. “This is your desk,” said Duffy.

  In a bit of a daze, I sat down on a plush armchair and looked around. I was parked behind a desk that seemed like an acre of finely polished walnut. There was a large internal phone with a separate button for every library in Wessex, and next to this was a single old-fashioned red telephone without a dial—just a single button with NP etched onto it.

  “That’s the emergency hotline to Nancy at the World League of Librarians,” explained Duffy. “She’ll be on the first tube from Seattle if you call her. But make sure it’s a real emergency,” he added. “If Nancy is dragged all this way for nothing, you’ll be in big trouble.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Do you want a light day or a heavy day tomorrow?”

  “Better make it a light one.”

  “Very well.” He pressed the intercom button and leaned down to speak. “Geraldine, would you bring in the light schedule, please?”

  “I’ll tell you what I will do,” I said as we waited for Geraldine.

  “What’s that?” said Duffy.

  “I’m going change the name of the library service. All that ‘Fatso’s all-You-Can-Eat’ stuff is nonsense.”

  Duffy raised an eyebrow. “That’s what the last chief librarian said. He didn’t like Fatso’s and told them he was going to do a compulsory sponsorship buyback.”

  “How did he get on?”

  “The engine was still running when they found his car on the Lambourn Downs. His wallet and cell phone were on the passenger seat. Under the wiper there was a discount voucher from Fatso’s for kids to eat free, but that might have been a coincidence. Of the chief librarian, no trace. I should forget that idea. If you want something controversial to do on your first week out, then announce biometric data for library cards. Identity theft is a big issue with people eager to take out more than six books at one time.”

  “How about we up it to seven?”

  Duffy gave a polite cough. Clearly I had a lot to learn about libraries.

  An assistant of not more than twenty and dressed in a bottle green suit entered the room and walked nervously up to the desk. “This is Geraldine,” said Duffy, “the assistant’s assistant to the assistant personal assistant of my own personal assistant’s assistant.”

  “Hello, Geraldine.”

  “Hello, Chief Librarian,” she said nervously. “Have you really killed seven people?”

  “I tend to try to dwell on the people I’ve saved,” I replied.

  “Oh,” she said, obviously intrigued by the notion of an ex–Literary Detective running the library service. “Of course.”

  “How many assistants do I have?” I asked, turning back to Duffy.

  “Including me, three.”

  “Three? Given Geraldine’s job title? How is that possible?

  “They have multiple jobs. Geraldine, apart from being the assistant’s assistant to the assistant personal assistant of my own personal assistant’s assistant, is also my own personal assistant’s assistant’s assistant.”

  “No,” said Geraldine, “that’s Lucy. I’m not only your assistant’s assistant’s subassistant but also the assistant to the assistant to your personal assistant’s assistant.”

  “Wait,” I said, thinking hard, “that must make you your own assistant.”

  “Yes. I had to fire myself yesterday. Luckily, I was also above the assistant who fired me, so I could reinstate myself. Will there be anything else, Chief Librarian?”

  There wasn’t, so she bobbed politely and withdrew. I looked at the schedule she had deposited on my desk, packed full of meetings, budgetary discussions, two staff disciplinary hearings and several forums with Swindon’s readers’ groups.

  “How does the heavy schedule differ from this one?” “The same—only it’s on blue paper and instead of lunch you get two more meetings: The first is a pep talk to the many frustrated citizens who weren’t selected last year to train as librarians and will have to console themselves with mundane careers as doctors, lawyers and lion tamers.”

  “And the second meeting?”

  “A round table with the Swi
ndon Society of Bowdlerizers. They’re anxious that ‘certain passages’ be removed from ‘certain books’ in order that they can ‘shine with greater luster’ and be made more suitable for family audiences.”

  “Which books in particular?”

  Duffy handed me a list.

  “Wanda Does Wantage?” I read, “There’d be nothing left except nine prepositions, six colons and a noun.”

  “I think that’s the point.”

  I handed the list back. “Tell me,” I said, “did the previous chief librarian really vanish without a trace?”

  “Not entirely,” said Duffy, passing me a photograph of a concrete monorail support somewhere on the Wantage branch line.

  “We were sent this.”

  I stared at the photograph. “Did you tell the police?”

  “They said it was nothing and that people get sent pictures of concrete monorail supports all the time.”

  “Do they?”

  “No, not really. Can I schedule the budget meeting for Thursday morning first thing? The city council wants to reassign some of our financial resources.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “We’ve got generous funding not only because it’s sensible and right and true and just and proper but because we’ve been doing all SO-27’s work for the past thirteen years. But now that Detective Smalls is taking over the Literary Detectives, much of our budget will be reassigned to her.”

  “Is this important?”

  “Funding’s about the most important thing there is.”

  “I suppose you should, then.”

  I stared at the huge amount of meetings I still had to attend on my schedule.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I’ll just turn up tomorrow morning and start having meetings until my brain turns to jelly. Then we’ll stop and I’ll hide for a bit, then do some more while thinking of other things, then forget it all by the evening, and we’ll do pretty much the same thing again the day after—and rely on subordinates and assistants to deal with actually running the place.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” said Duffy with a sigh of relief. “I was worried you had no experience of running a large public department.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a tall, fastidious-looking man appeared. “Am I disturbing anything?”

  It was James Finisterre.

  “Jim!”

  We embraced, and he held my hands in his.

  “Great to have you on board. We need some safe hands in the boardroom. Duffy looking after you well?”

  “He has been exemplary.”

  Finisterre had been one of our backroom boys at SO-27, one of the dependable brainiacs who rarely did fieldwork but could answer almost any literary question you might care to ask. His particular expertise was the nineteenth-century novel, but he was fully competent to professorial standard in almost all fields of literature, whether it be Sumerian laundry lists or the very latest Armitage Shanks Prize–winner. He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. “Friends,” he’d once said, “are probably great, but I have forty thousand friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.”

  I thanked Duffy for his time, then followed Finisterre to the elevators.

  “Surprised to see you here,” he said. “I heard you were in the frame for heading up SO-27.”

  “Overrated,” I replied. “Phoebe Smalls got it. She’ll be good.”

  “I’m sure she will. How long do you give her before she’s either killed in the line of duty or resigns a quivering wreck? A week?”

  “A lot longer than that, I should imagine.”

  “I’m not so certain. As soon as she opens for business, we’re dumping thirteen years of unsolved caseload at her feet. Up until this morning, there was no one to take responsibility for the wholesale theft and bootlegging, copyright infringement and larceny. We logged reports but didn’t do anything. It’s been a bibliothief’s smorgasbord for the past decade. Why do you think the library is so heavily armed?”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “You’ve been out of the loop for a while, haven’t you?” I stared at him. “I’ve been working more on the . . . supply side of the literary world.”

  “Really? Well, Braxton was doing you a seriously big favor not giving you that job. Any idea how much of our budget is being transferred to SO-27?”

  “Duffy says quite a lot. I’ll speak to Braxton.”

  “Good luck with that. Want to see what I do here?” I nodded, and we descended in the lift to the basement.

  We stepped out into a small lobby with a single armored door and an armed guard sitting behind a window of bulletproof glass. Finisterre licked his finger and held it in the DNA reader’s aperture. There was a puff of air, the light turned green, and I did the same. The door clicked open, and we stepped inside.

  “Welcome to the antiquarian section,” said Finisterre, leading me along shiny white corridors. “The Swindon All-You-Can-Eat at Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library isn’t just a central lending library, but a repository of all the important documents currently in county of Wessex’s possession.”

  He indicated a row of historic documents displayed in a glass cabinet that stretched down the corridor.

  “That’s our copy of the Magna Carta,” he said, walking slowly past the treasures, “and this is a rare first edition of the Mathematica Principia dedicated ‘To dearest Googly-bear. Love, Newt.’ ” He moved to another glass case. “This is St. Zvlkx’s original list of Revealments, and over here as unique a treasure in the whole of Shakespeareana—a blindingly rare First Folio Advanced Reader’s Copy, still with the front page marked ‘Not for sale or quotation.’

  We walked into a larger room in which a dozen conservators were working their way over a series of vellum parchments folded into books with flaking leather covers.

  “This one’s from the eleventh century,” said Finisterre, showing me a volume that looked like a prayer book, “and we’ve two dozen or so from the ninth. Religious texts mostly, but we’re hoping for a few treasures.”

  “In Wessex?” I asked, for the county was not noted for its stock of tenth-century manuscripts.

  “We’ve your brother to thank. Now that religious orders are transferring their theological allegiances to the Global Standard Deity, they’ve thrown open their collections for scrutiny, and to be honest—no pun intended—it’s a godsend. We’re seeing stuff that we never thought existed. This one here,” he said, pointing to a badly water-damaged tome, “is Gerald of Wales’s book of recipes. It confirmed what nutritionists have long suspected: firstly, that celebrity chefs were as popular in the twelfth century as they are now and, second, that Welsh cuisine has not improved at all since then and may even have gotten worse.”

  He pointed to another, equally worn book.

  “Over here is an account of a night out in Copenhagen in 1182 with Saxo Grammaticus—boy, do the Danes know how to party.”

  “You’re copying all these, yes?” I asked, for an original and unique work was at grave risk of literary extinction if anything happened to it.

  “First thing we do,” he said, leading me into another room where each book was meticulously scanned once the conservators had decided it was robust enough.

  “This is cutting-edge stuff, Thursday. Unique codices, right here in my lap—and we don’t have to be shot at to study them. Well, not much anyway.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  He looked at the trolleys full of old books. “The Sisterhood is opening its Salisbury collection for initial appraisal this afternoon,” he added. “Do you want to come along?”

  I stared at him. By the Sisterhood he meant the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster, one of the most numerous, long-lived and secretive of Wessex’s religious orders. A lot of time and effort had been expended in defending the library against would-be thieves, eager to get their hands on a collection that was rumored to have treasures of a
lmost incalculable value.

  “What a question,” I replied. “Absolutely.”

  “I’ll pick you up at your house at three,” he said. “And bring identification. The Sisters can be a bit trigger-happy with anyone they don’t know. I arrived unannounced last week and had to dodge a rocket-propelled grenade.”

  “Employing mercenaries, are they?”

  “No. The Lobsterhood has often been described as pious but rarely seen as restrained.”

  13.

  Tuesday: Next Thursday

  The dismantling of S0-27 had some peculiar and unforeseen consequences, not least the legalizing of lethal force within libraries, “for the maintenance of the collections and public order.” Originally intended as a deterrent to thieves, the legislation quickly became known as the “Shush Law,” when overenthusiastic librarians invoked a “violent intervention” for loud talking. Libraries have never been quieter, and theft and vandalism dropped by 72 percent.

  Mobie Drake, Librarians: Heroes of the New Generation

  I was searched before leaving the library—no one was exempt. The stealing and selling of rare antiquarian books was still big business, and the library weren’t taking any chances. Recently a thief who’d attempted to steal a first edition of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems had been shot dead. Luckily for the librarian who fired the shot, the potential thief had fallen within the library boundary, allowing the killing to be categorized as “Justifiable Lethal Force by a State-Registered Librarian in the Course of His or Her Duties,” a misdemeanor that required only a few forms to be filled in. As it says on the T-shirts, I DON’T SCARE EASILY— I’M A LIBRARIAN, which was the polite version of the original: DON’T GIVE ME ANY OF YOUR SHIT— I’M A LIBRARIAN.

  I took the longer way back toward the Brunel Centre and was just passing the Swindon branch of Booktastic when I remembered I had walked that way specifically to drop in to the tattooist’s, and had forgotten again. It was a half mile back, and I could drop in when I drove past later. It was probably the Dizuperadol making me forgetful.

  On a whim I walked into Booktastic to check on whether my books were still core stock. I took the lift to the third floor and was relieved to find they were. Relieved not for personal me but for written me inside the books, to whom I owed a huge debt of gratitude—a debt I hoped to repay by keeping her well read. I had changed my tune over the fictionalized account of my life, now being broadly in favor rather than wishing that it was quietly remaindered or, better still, pulped. I placed the books covers out at eye level, noted that there was another in the series, told a browsing couple that the books were probably “worth a look if you’ve nothing better to do,” then heard the cathedral clock begin to chime midday.