The Woman Who Died a Lot

“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 Swindon 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.”