Paris by the Book(68)

And one very special criminal, a very special scribbled-in copy of Robert Eady’s Central Time.

“I think I remembered some of the kids from Ellie’s app night,” Daphne said.

“Nice,” Ellie said. “Blame me.”

“I wasn’t!” Daphne said. “And maybe I was wrong. There were just so many of them, and I thought, this is odd—it just felt odd. Maybe it was because this kid, and I’m not even sure if he was a kid—he was wearing sunglasses and a hat—”

“What did he take?” said Annabelle.

“Probably the nightmare book,” said Ellie.

“Ellie,” I said, but Annabelle shot away to check. Then Peter said to himself, Tintin, and he ran away, too.

“Lovely, girls,” I said. “Daphne, I’m sorry this happened, and you won’t find yourself in that spot again, all alone in the store, but let’s also try to remember not to talk about such things in front of the jumeaux, d’accord?”

“I feel fine,” Daphne said.

Now Ellie got up and ran away.

“Well,” Eleanor said.

“Never a dull moment at The Late Edition,” I said.

“It makes me worried for you,” Eleanor said.

“Don’t be,” I said. “Shoplifters are—irritating. But normal. You may recall that I stole something from a bookstore once.”

“I’ve heard that story,” Eleanor said. “But I thought we weren’t going to talk about—”

Ellie returned, staring at Daphne’s tablet.

“That’s mine,” Daphne said.

“I know,” Ellie said, “it’s just easier to see on this—wait—”

“No technology at the dinner table, Ellie, you know the rules,” I said.

“I just got the tail end,” Ellie said, still staring at the screen. “It only saves the last two hours, and then it overwrites, I guess, so we’re missing most of this guy’s visit, and I can’t even see what, or if, he stole anything, but here he is, going out of the store.”

For some reason, she showed Eleanor first. She tilted back her head. “Honestly,” Eleanor said, “I’m no good without my glasses.”

Ellie gave the tablet to me. Daphne came and looked over my shoulder. “Yes, that’s him,” she said, and we studied him, and Ellie paused and zoomed this way and that, and we all agreed that yes, in the crowd Daphne had seen, there had been a boy who had stolen a book. (The camera even allowed us to read the title: The Cloud Atlas.)

But here was what was more remarkable by far.

I seemed to be the only one of us who saw that someone else had broken free of the crowd to move across the opposite corner of the screen at the precise moment of the “heist” (as Ellie had come to call it). He quickly disappeared from the shot when Ellie zoomed in on the thief, and as I said, he was in a corner of the room opposite from where the heist had occurred. Which meant no one noticed him.

But of course, I did.

I’d know my husband anywhere.

This was different from seeing him in the static pages of a book, imagining that I’d seen him in a photograph taken a half century before. This was a film, from two hours ago. This was Robert. This was life catching up to my imagination, or the other way around.

The reason I’d been having more and more trouble, ever since coming to Paris, imagining he was dead was because he had come to Paris.

He’d come to our store.

We’d found him. I’d found him.

And he’d found us.

I looked at the girls, but they’d already set off with the twins for the children’s section to see what else might be missing. I looked at Eleanor, but she just shook her head sleepily at me. I felt my vision freeze and scatter, as though my eyes were just another balky piece of technology.

Robert was alive.





CHAPTER 13


Ellie had left the tablet behind and I took it up now, slowly slid my finger back and forth, REWIND, PLAY, left, then right, not unlike Robert’s old experiment, the book that erased itself, back and forth, except this was different. The story got clearer with each pass.

It was him.

It was not a good picture of him. The camera never caught his face, only him moving away. He appeared to have lost a good deal of weight, but still, on this tiny, grainy film, there was his shape, his profile, how he moved. How he moved amongst books, that was the greatest marker for me. I remember this from almost any bookstore we ever visited anywhere. He moved through them with a strained delicacy or grace, the bull who knows he’s in a china shop and is terrified his hooves will slide out from under him. Books drew him, I knew, not just as things to be read but as things. I’ve never known a writer who didn’t like just holding a book, feeling its mass. (And I’ve found a surefire way to close a sale is to put the book in a customer’s hands, let them feel it, fan it.) I get it: a physical book of paper and glue, it conveys its worth through its weight. The reason people once lined their shelves with encyclopedias was not that they thought they’d turn to them daily, but rather that they might daily bear witness to those spines: it’s a complicated world, and all that mass was a moat.

But as much as Robert loved books, he’d also grown to hate them, especially in stores where he wasn’t shelved, but also in those where he was: what was he doing in the bargain bin? He hated when other people published books he had not published. He hated the books of authors he hated, and he even hated the books of people he loved. At the bargain table of our Paris bookshop, he did exactly what he used to always do at every other bargain table at every other bookstore: he lifted up a copy and gave a quick glance beneath. If a black mark was flecked across the bottom of the bound pages—something invisible to absolutely everyone else in the world but authors and booksellers—that meant it had been remaindered. That meant it hadn’t sold at full price the first time around. That meant another author had, like Robert, come up short. Those marks were a comfort, I knew Robert thought that. And, needless to say, those marks also meant a bargain. He liked that, too. Because as much as he came to hate books, he also couldn’t not love them in the end. When he disappeared back in Milwaukee, my first thought was to go to the library. I told the police this, and they went, and they didn’t find him, so I went, and although I didn’t find him either, I saw him, I could imagine him in every corner, under a toppled bookshelf, a massive dictionary striking the fatal blow, or perhaps even squeezed to death by one of those mechanized accordion shelving systems. That was the end I foresaw for him, though I’m sure he saw otherwise. Such a death would have been too showy, too apt.