The Woman Who Died a Lot

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.

32. Thursday: MadCon2004