Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [73]
I look at the next piece of music in the box. It’s another draft of the same concerto. This one’s showing definite improvements. How cool is that? There are four more drafts of the same concerto. I place them all in order on the table in front of me so I can see all the first pages at the same time. Looking at one after another, I can see what Malherbeau changed and why. I can see how his mind worked. I can see the originality. The genius.
My heart’s beating really fast. I’m so excited by all of this that I start fingering the measures on an invisible fretboard, without even thinking. And tapping the beat with my foot. And singing the notes. “Ba ba ba BAH da dadadada DAH da …”
And then I hear it again. The gavel pounding. And the voice of God: “Number twelve, quiet, please!” I look up. Yves Bonnard is now holding up two fingers. One more strike and I’m out.
“Sorry!” I whisper.
At that second, at that very second, my cell phone goes off. It might not be so bad if I had, say, Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 for a ring tone and the volume was turned down. But I don’t. I have “Kashmir.” Turned up. Way up. And I can’t find the phone. Anywhere. I’m digging in my bag and then my jacket pockets. Robert Plant’s warbling about time and space and I still can’t find it. I grab my bag again. I’m frantically pulling everything out of it—wallet, keys, Alex’s diary—when I see it. Finally. It was under the diary.
I turn it off. And I can hear a pin drop. Nobody’s rustling papers or coughing or scribbling notes because they’re busy staring at me in shock and horror. I don’t want to look up at the front desk, but I do. And I see exactly what I thought I would—Yves Bonnard holding up three fingers.
36
So yeah, I’m out. Big-time. Yves Bonnard sent me packing.
It’s not even eleven o’clock. I should be in the library, photographing Malherbeau’s papers. Instead I’m sitting at a café, drowning my sorrows in a big bowl of coffee. The day’s warm and sunny and I’m sitting outside watching the world walk by.
I still don’t know what happened. I mean, not putting on the gloves was a stupid mistake. And the singing? Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. But honestly, I didn’t know I was. The music just took over. And the cell phone—definitely not my fault. I know I turned the ringer off after I talked to Virgil. I was in a bakery, buying Yves Bonnard that croissant. I remembered the library’s no–cell phones rule as I was waiting to pay and I set the phone to vibrate. Then and there. Just to be safe. So what happened? Something in my bag must’ve knocked against the ringer button and reset it. The diary probably. It was lying on top of the phone. The weird thing is, the caller didn’t leave a message, and there was no callback number, either.
“You can’t throw me out. Please. I just got my documents. I need to finish reading them. And then I need to photograph them. And I need to do it today. Today’s Friday and I’m leaving Paris on Sunday and the Abelard’s closed on Saturday.”
“You should have thought of that before you disrupted the entire reading room. Three times. The people around you are here to work.”
“I am, too,” I tell him. “I really am. It’s just that my work tends to be on the noisy side, you know?”
He said he did not know and then he told me goodbye. And here I am. Totally screwed. If I don’t get those photos, I’m not going anywhere.
I take a deep breath and think it all through. I know what to do—I’ll stay away until after lunch. Give Yves Bonnard time to cool off. When the library opens again, I’ll slink in and beg him on my knees to give me another chance. Until then, I have two hours to kill. I have the diary with me, so I’ll sit here and read it.
“Just like she wants you to,” a little voice inside me says. The same little voice that piped