“You’d better be joking.” Sara’s eyebrows shot up in indignation. “Who do you think I am, Miss Piggy? My last ex left them here. I guess he was a bit larger than you.” She shrugged. “His stuff has been waiting in my old clothes collection ever since. Somehow I find it harder to part with them than with their owners.”
Steven smiled. “Not particularly easy to be in a relationship with you?”
“Let’s just say I’m high maintenance,” Sara said. “I’m not about to cuddle up to someone on the sofa while he watches Formula One. Plus, most men don’t like their girlfriends to be smarter than they are.” Grinning, she let her eyes go to the T-shirt Steven was wearing, which was adorned with the logo of some grunge band. “I’ll admit that David was quite cute, but a time comes when you want to talk to your boyfriend about something other than surfing, trendy clubs, and house music.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” Steven said, raising one hand as if taking an oath. “I can’t surf, I don’t know any trendy clubs, and I can’t stand house music. And no doorman would ever let me in in this getup anyway.”
Suddenly he thought of his bloodstained corduroys, now in a garbage bin in the hallway, and all at once he was serious again.
“That guy in the tracksuit jacket,” Steven said. “Bernd Reiser . . . what could he have been looking for in my bookshop?”
“I assume he was posted there to lie in wait in case you came back,” Sara said. “First thing tomorrow I’m going to check up on that inscription, Tmeicos Ettal, and the swan on the amulet. There’s something not quite right about it. It looks more like something a twelve-year-old girl would wear, not some bruiser.” She reached eagerly for another sandwich. “But it’s the other guy who bothers me more. I’d been thinking it was only the thugs we know who are after the book. But obviously there are other interested parties.”
“You think the man in the black hooded sweater was already down in my stockroom looking for the book, and Reiser took him by surprise?” Steven asked.
Sara shrugged her shoulders and bit into her salmon sandwich, sending out a spray of sauce. “Or the other way around,” she said with her mouth full. “In any case, there are obviously several people who’d like to get hold of your little box and the book inside it.”
“Or else the man in the hoodie was a perfectly normal burglar who saw the smashed display window and took the opportunity to come in,” Steven suggested.
“A thief with a weakness for Rilke and Flaubert? I don’t know about that.” Sara swallowed her mouthful and pointed to the old book on stenography. “One way or another, we’re a step ahead of those guys. Unlike them, we know how to decipher the notes made by our friend Theodor Marot.”
“We don’t know anything yet.” Steven wearily rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “First of all I have to make my way through three hundred pages of stuff about tachygraphy. Ask me again in a few hours.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”
“I’m far too worked up to sleep.” The bookseller pushed the comfortable leather chair over to the table and opened the book to the first page. “And you’ve made me very curious.”
“Okay.” Sara went over to the leather sofa and threw a thin woolen rug over herself. “Just wake me up when you know who the murderer is.”
She yawned, stretched, and closed her eyes. Steven hadn’t even heard that last remark because he was so immersed in the introduction to Shelton’s shorthand. He soon realized that it wasn’t as difficult as he had assumed. While it would be weeks before he could write Shelton’s shorthand fluently, he was able to decipher it surprisingly quickly. The signs were repeated; many words were simply abbreviated or a single sign stood for them. Steven realized that he hadn’t completely forgotten the stenography lectures he’d attended at university. After two hours, he decided to attempt deciphering Marot’s notes. He would simply regard the notebook as an exercise to be solved. Later, he could go back to the strange sequences of capital letters that began occurring on the second page.
The bookseller opened the diary, and once again that sense of familiarity immediately came over him, together with an unfounded fear. His throat constricted, and he felt slightly nauseated. What was it about this book? Was it magic in some way? Or was he simply seeing ghosts?
Laboriously, he tackled word after word. At first he had to consult Tachygraphy constantly, but as time went on he got faster and faster. He worked his way through the lines like a scythe cutting through tall grass. When he couldn’t entirely decipher certain sentences, he tried to reconstruct the sense of them. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, Steven wrote it all out in a notebook on Sara’s desk, mingling his own style with the old-fashioned expressions of the assistant physician.