The Ludwig Conspiracy(22)
Realizing he was staring at her, Sara smiled at him and pointed behind her. “I guess I’d better make us something to eat,” she said. “My mother always said the world looks different when you have something inside you. Not that it was true, but that could have been just my mother’s terrible cooking.”
“How can you think about eating right now?” Steven asked indignantly. “I just killed someone! Is that all part of a day’s work for you?”
“I assure you, it isn’t.” Sara cocked her head and looked at him thoughtfully. “But it could be that my skin’s rather thicker than yours. Where I grew up, violence was the order of the day.”
“Let me guess,” said Steven sarcastically. “New York’s Bronx? Soweto in Johannesburg?”
Sara grinned. “The Wedding district of Berlin. Ever been in that part of the city? One-third immigrants, one-third unemployed. If you never got a bloody nose, no one wanted to play with you. The best entertainment was when the police raided some junkie’s apartment. We used to find used syringes in the sandbox in the playground near where we lived.” She drew in the air as if smoking an invisible cigarette. “That guy down in your stockroom looked just like one of the dealers who were always kicking us kids off the swings.”
Steven nodded thoughtfully. “I assume your parents weren’t much help?”
“My parents?” Sara laughed under her breath. Abstractedly, she examined her green-painted nails. “I helped my parents, not the other way around. Ever had to get your mother, drunk as a skunk and babbling, into bed and then undressed?”
“I . . . I’m afraid I can’t say I have, no,” Steven muttered. “Not an experience I’ve ever had.” He hesitated for a moment before going on. “But couldn’t your uncle do anything? I mean, he was a university professor. You’d think he . . .”
“You didn’t know my mother,” Sara said roughly. “Uncle Paul did all he could, but if people like that are going to drink, then they will, and if you give them money, they won’t buy clothes for their kids; they’ll buy cheap booze.” She rose to her feet abruptly. “Now, excuse me, please. The kitchen calls.”
Steven watched Sara disappear into the kitchen. He couldn’t understand this woman. She seemed to be surrounded by invisible armor. Whenever he tried to be friendly, she retreated. It was as if Sara was a magnet, attracting him briefly and then pushing him away again.
Sighing, Steven turned back to the leather-bound volume of Shelton’s Tachygraphy on the table in front of him. It was not the original edition but a revised version from 1842. Luckily, it would serve its purpose just as well as the original work, maybe even better. Steven had already leafed through it. The text was in an old-fashioned English that the bookseller knew from other books of that period. But he had problems with the curious scribbles that Shelton had established as shorthand in England in the seventeenth century.
Steven knew a little about stenography. At university he had attended lectures on Johann Gabelsberger, whose nineteenth-century shorthand system was at the root of modern German shorthand. But Shelton’s signs were different, reminiscent of the scribblings of a five-year-old.
Steven sighed and took another sip of his strong tea. It would probably be some time yet before he was in a position to decipher Marot’s diary. And what the curious sequences of capital letters that appeared on a number of pages might mean was a complete mystery to him.
“Sandwiches?” Sara came out of the kitchen with a tray full of them. She was smiling now. “I went all out with the mustard sauce. Not that that means much with me.”
Repulsed, Steven shook his head. The consistency of the grainy sauce dripping from the salmon sandwiches reminded him of the blood on his stockroom floor. “Thanks, that’s very kind of you,” he murmured. “But somehow I’ve lost my appetite in these last few hours. I hope your decision not to call the police was really right.”
“Oh, it was. Definitely.” With a sandwich oozing sauce in her hand, the art detective gestured at the book in front of Steven, a volume nearly two hundred years old. “Getting anywhere yet?”
Steven instinctively pushed Shelton’s Tachygraphy a little farther to the right. “Mind that sauce,” he said. “This isn’t some tabloid.”
“Sorry.” Smiling, Sara put the plate down. “I was forgetting that you have such an erotic relationship with books.”
“I just don’t like it when they get mustard all over them,” Steven replied. “Apart from which I wouldn’t want to get grease spots on these distinguished garments.” He pointed to his T-shirt and the old jogging pants that hung loose around his thighs. “Belonged to you once, did they?”