Blood on the desk? My legs were weakening under me, but I made myself walk in slowly after the policeman. The room looked as it had on dozens of other occasions when I’d seen it in daylight: neat, pleasant, the furniture in precise attitudes of invitation, books and papers in exact stacks on the tables and the desktop. I stepped closer. Across the desk, on Rossi’s tan blotting paper, lay a dark reservoir, long since spread and soaked and still. The policeman put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Not a big enough loss of blood to be a cause of death in itself,” he said. “Maybe a bad nosebleed, or some kind of hemorrhage. Did Professor Rossi ever have a nosebleed when you were with him? Did he seem ill that night?”
“No,” I said. “I never saw him-bleed-and he never talked about his health to me.” I realized suddenly, with appalling clarity, that I’d just spoken of our conversations in past tense, as if they were ended forever. My throat closed with emotion when I thought of Rossi standing cheerfully at the office door, seeing me off. Had he cut himself somehow-on purpose, even?-in a moment of instability, and then hurried out of the room, locking the door behind him? I tried to imagine him raving in a park, perhaps cold and hungry, or boarding a bus to some randomly chosen destination. None of it fit. Rossi was a solid structure, as cool and sane as anyone I’d ever met.
“Look around very carefully.” The policeman released my shoulder. He was watching me hard, and I sensed the chairman and the others hovering in the doorway behind us. It dawned on me that until proven otherwise I would be among the suspects if Rossi had been murdered. But Bertrand and Elias would speak up for me, as I could for them. I stared at everything in the room, trying to see through it. It was an exercise in frustration; everything was real, normal, solid, and Rossi was utterly gone from it.
“No,” I said finally. “I don’t see anything different.”
“All right.” The policeman turned me toward the windows. “Look up, then.”
On the white plaster ceiling over the desk, high above us, a dark smear about five inches long drifted sideways, as if pointing toward something outside. “This appears to be blood, too. Don’t worry; it may or may not be Professor Rossi’s. That ceiling’s too high for a person to reach it easily, even with a step stool. We’ll have everything tested. Now think hard. Did Rossi mention a bird getting in that night? Or did you hear any sounds as you left, maybe like something getting in? Was the window open, do you remember?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t mention anything like that. And the windows were shut, I’m sure.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the stain; I felt if I stared hard enough I might read something in its horrible and hieroglyphic shape.
“We’ve had birds in this building several times,” the chairman contributed behind us. “Pigeons. They get in through the skylights once in a while.”
“That’s a possibility,” the policeman said. “Although we haven’t found any droppings, it’s certainly a possibility.”
“Or bats,” the chairman said. “What about bats? These old buildings probably have all kinds of things living in them.”
“Well, that’s another possibility, especially if Rossi tried to hit something with a broom or umbrella and wounded it in the process,” suggested a professor in the doorway.
“Did you see anything like a bat in here, ever, or a bird?” the policeman asked me again.
It took me a few seconds to form the simple word and get it past my dry lips. “No,” I said, but I could hardly make sense of his question. My eyes had finally caught the inner end of the dark stain and what it seemed to trail away from. On the top shelf of Rossi’s bookcase, in his row of “failures,” a book was missing. Where he had replaced his mysterious book two nights before, one narrow black crevice now gaped among the spines.
My colleagues were leading me out again, patting my back and telling me not to worry; I must have looked white as a piece of typing paper. I turned to the policeman, who was shutting and locking the door behind us. “Is there any chance Professor Rossi is already in a hospital somewhere, if he cut himself, or if someone injured him?”
The officer shook his head. “We’ve got a line to the hospitals, and we’ve done a first check. No sign of him. Why? Do you think he might have injured himself? I thought you said he didn’t seem suicidal or depressed.”
“Oh, he didn’t.” I took a deep breath and felt my feet under me again. The ceiling was too high for him to have smeared his wrist on, anyway-that was a grim consolation.
“Well, folks, we’ll be on our way.” He turned to the department chairman, and they went off in low-voiced conference. The crowd around the office door was beginning to disperse, and I moved away ahead of them. I needed above all a quiet place to sit down.
My favorite bench in the nave of the old university library was still being warmed by the last sun of a spring afternoon. Around me three or four students read or talked in low voices, and I felt the familiar calm of that scholar’s haven soak through my bones. The great hall of the library was pierced by colored windows, some of which looked into its reading rooms and cloisterlike corridors and courtyards, so that I could see people moving around inside or outside, or studying at big oak tables. It was the end of an ordinary day; soon the sun would desert the stone tablets under my feet and plunge the world into twilight-marking a full forty-eight hours since I’d sat talking with my mentor. For now, scholarship and activity prevailed here, pushing back the verges of darkness.
I should tell you that usually when I studied in those days I liked to be completely alone, undisturbed, in monastic silence. I’ve already described the study carrels I often worked in, on the upper floors of the library stacks, where I had my own niche and where I’d found that weird book that had changed my life and thoughts almost overnight. Two days ago at this time I’d been studying there, busy and unafraid, about to sweep up my books on the Netherlands and hurry toward a pleasant conference with my mentor. I’d thought of nothing but what Heller and Herbert had written the year before on Utrecht ’s economic history and how I might refute it in an article, perhaps an article filched efficiently from one of my own dissertation chapters.
In fact, if I had imagined any part of the past at all, then, I had been picturing those innocent, slightly grasping Nederlanders debating their guilds’ little problems, or standing, arms akimbo, in doorways above the canals, watching some new crate of goods as it was hauled up to the top floor of their houses-cum-warehouses. If I had had any visions of the past, I had seen only their rose-tinted, sea-freshened faces, beetling brows, capable hands, heard the creaking of their fine ships, smelled the spice and tar and sewage of the wharf and rejoiced in the sturdy ingenuity of their buying and bartering.
But history, it seemed, could be something entirely different, a splash of blood whose agony didn’t fade overnight, or over centuries. And today my studies were to be of a new sort-novel to me, but not to Rossi and not to many others who had picked their way through the same dark underbrush. I wanted to begin this new kind of research in the cheerful murmur and clang of the main hall, not in the silent stacks, with their occasional wearily treading footsteps on distant stairs. I wanted to open the next phase of my life as a historian there under the unsuspecting eyes of young anthropologists, graying librarians, eighteen-year-olds thinking of their squash games or new white shoes, of smiling undergraduates and harmlessly lunatic professors emeritus-all the traffic of the university evening. I looked once more around the teeming hall, the rapidly withdrawing patches of sunlight, the brisk business of the doors at the main entrance swinging open and shut on bronze hinges. Then I picked up my shabby briefcase, unsnapped the top, and drew out a thickly full dark envelope, labeled in Rossi’s handwriting. It said, merely:SAVE FOR NEXT ONE.