“Can I come in now?” Nathan called beneath the new fluorescence.
“Yes. And I told you to shut the door.” This time he did.
She found the key to the back room in a drawer beneath the cash register, attached to a plastic keychain bauble shaped like an Arctic fox. Hubert’s silly little fascination.
“Stay here a minute. Browse,” she said.
“Will do,” he replied, kicking the unswept floor and gazing up at the books above.
A smell hung in the back room like the mildewed towel beside the sink. Not good for antique books, though most of the piles on the floor just looked like modern firsts.
“Hubert? Are you even back here?”
She climbed the ladder to his workspace. Not there, either, but the desk lamp was on. A relatively new looking hardcover book and a few loose, older pages lay between his restoration tools and an ancient black rotary phone. She pulled a mint leaf from the plastic bag in her fleece pocket and curled it beneath a molar.
The loose pages looked like vellum, though she was far from an expert. Writing scarcely visible through the brown of age, she was afraid to touch the sheets lest they crumble. What she could make out, however, looked Vanaheimic. Possibly Old Norse, but—
The ladder creaked behind her.
“Hey, this is a cool little room,” Nathan said, poking his prairie dog head through the ladder hole.
“I thought I told you to stay down there and browse.”
“Yeah, I was browsing, but then it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t touch anything… You know, the books being rare and therefore probably fragile. So I figured I’d be better off up here under your supervision. What’s that you’ve found?”
“Nothing related to Garm. Looks like pages from some old book Hubert was restoring. Or maybe something he was checking to see if it was a forgery, since that was sort of his specialty.” Squinting: “As near as I can tell, it’s a history of Denmark… Shit.”
“The Historia Danica?”
She turned her head to him in surprise but then looked back to the pages.
“No. Not exactly. At least not the one I think you’re thinking of…” As she spoke, though, she happened to glance at the book beside the pages.
“But that’s odd,” she said.
“What’s odd?”
“Well, these pages aren’t from the Historia Danica—they’re not even in Latin—but this looks like a modern copy of the Historia Danica right here beside them…” Then, looking up at him: “How do you know about this stuff, anyway? I mean, you don’t exactly strike me as the most likely Saxo buff.”
“Well, I played Hamlet a couple years ago.”
Our Heroine felt a slight shiver in her neck, and she turned her eyes back toward him. He still looked harmless enough. It was probably just a coincidence. Besides which, she wasn’t investigating anything, so what did it matter to her if it wasn’t a coincidence? But still, considering what Shirley had been working on before she died…
“So playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet inspired you to read the Saxo version of the story in the Historia Danica?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I mean, a translation of it, anyway. Just to get into the role, you know, that being the earliest extant version of the story and all. But really, the only reason I’ve even heard of Saxo or any of that stuff is because I read about it in The Memoirs of Emily Bean. Surt’s schemes always revolved around some obscure piece of Scandinavian trivia like that. Or the pseudonyms he used would have some esoteric meaning that was supposed to clue your mom in that it was him. But I guess you know that, don’t you?”
The arch-criminal known as Surt first crossed swords[21] with the Bean-Ymirsons on the case of the Backwards Bookshelf and continued to plague them until his fatal plunge into the Arctic Ocean during the case of the Greenland Gravestone Robberies. His crimes ranged from the bootlegging of beer in Reykjavik during prohibition to the murder of a former Danish viceroy. But the crime that pleased him most was undoubtedly the addition of his sobriquet to the Icelandic Book of Settlements. Despite her philosophical opposition to him, Emily couldn’t help admiring his genius.[22] Jon Ymirson, on the other hand, restrained himself from such admiration quite easily.
Our Heroine followed Nathan out of the shop and then slammed the door shut behind herself.
“Where to, now?” Nathan asked. “I mean, I still don’t get why we’re checking shops if we’re looking for your dog, but—Hey, isn’t that the car that almost hit you?”
She turned to see that he was correct. Her first instinct was to run away. But then she realized how absurd that instinct was. The car was parked. She could at least write down the license plate number. And why not confront the driver, if he happened to be there? What could he do, shoot her? Still, it took a moment for her feet to move.
A man got out of the car as she and Nathan approached.
“What ho!” he called.
“Hey, that’s my agent,” Nathan said.
It was Philip Leshio, literary agent both to Magnus Valison and Shirley MacGuffin. And apparently Nathan, as well.
“Fuck,” Our Heroine said aloud, perhaps a bit annoyed at having her sense of imminent peril resolve into this particular banality.
“Good to see you arrived all of a piece, Nathan, old boy,” Leshio drawled Oxonian. Our Heroine knew that he lived and worked in New Uruk City. She’d never established whether or not he actually had any connection to Oxford.
“Hey, Phil, I was going to call—”
“Why have you been following me?” Our Heroine asked before Nathan could finish his sentence.
“Hello? What’s this? Following you? Do try to make sense, old thing.” He was shivering against the innards of his thin gray suit, too slim himself to fend the cold from his bones. “I’m simply thrilled to see you, of course, but—”
“You almost hit me with your car. Twice.”
“By Jove, was that you? Both times? Yes, well, I certainly understand how you might have misinterpreted my intentions, and I offer my apologies on that score, but pedestrians do tend to look rather similar when one is attempting to gain control of a hydroplaning motor vehicle. I neglected to fit my tires with chains, you see. But dash all that for now; I have a most urgent matter to discuss with you. It’s to do with Shirley, and that Hamlet project of hers.”
“Hey, we were just talking about—” Nathan began.
“Wait a minute. That’s not a satisfactory answer,” Our Heroine interrupted. “Even if you didn’t mean to almost hit me—twice—I’ve still seen your car almost everywhere I’ve gone today. And I want to know why.”
“Indeed! Well, yes, indeed it must seem rather more than a coincidence… But we’ll just save discussion of it for tonight, shall we?”
“Tonight?”
“Hrothgar’s Mead Hall. Did Angus not get in touch with you? No? Tut-tut. Well, a few of us were contemplating a little whatsit there, tonight, circa eight o’clock. Angus will be on hand, similarly ‘Mutt’ Sanders, as well as an old professorial chum of mine by the name of Lorenz. Likely a few others, too. Nothing formal, just fishing in the void for meaning in all of this, with Shirley, of course, as the vertex of our anglings.”
“Who’s Shirley?” Nathan asked.
“I met Lorenz today,” Our Heroine said. “But who’s this ‘Mutt’ Sanders?”
Leshio grinned maliciously. “What say I just introduce you to him tonight. I can count on you being there?”
21
An apt choice of cliché, for once, compared to all of the “derisive snorts” and “malicious grins” found elsewhere in the text. The mythological character from whom Surt derived his
22
A common topic of debate among Valison scholars is whether or not genius was the only aspect of Surt that Emily Bean admired.