Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [100]
Once I was under the dryer, I pulled Agatha Christie out of my bag and proceeded unhurriedly toward the dénouement.
Poirot had risen unusually early. He had gone to the third floor of the manor and entered the old nursery. Having run his gloved fingertip along the sills, he opened the westernmost window, took a brass paperweight from his jacket (which he had pocketed in the library in chapter fourteen), and shot it laterally across the slate roof up over the adjoining dormer. Like the ball in a Chinese lottery, the paperweight caromed off the far side of the dormer and rattled down a story until it hit the dormer of the master bedroom, where it then angled off over the living room, spilled onto the eaves of the conservatory, and disappeared into the garden.
Why Poirot would pursue such an experiment one could only imagine.
Unless . . .
Unless he suspected that someone, having shot the heiress’s fiancé, had run up the stairs to the nursery and propelled the gun from the window over the adjacent dormer so that it would careen across the west wing and into the garden, prompting everyone to think that the gunmen had dropped it there during his escape. This would allow the killer to come down the stairs from the opposite end of the house asking demurely what all the commotion was about.
But to accomplish this, one would probably have had to experiment with the angles of the roof—as a child would with a ball. And the only one who had come down the stairs after the shooting was . . . our heroine the heiress?
Uh, oh.
—Let’s take a gander, said Luella.
Coming out of Isabella’s, I remembered Bitsy’s promise to be fast friends and decided to give her a buzz.
—Can you meet for lunch?
—Where are you calling from? she whispered instinctively.
—A phone booth in the Village.
—Are you playing hooky?
—More or less.
—Then of course I can.
Getting right into the spirit of things, she suggested we meet in Chinatown at Chinoiserie.
—I can be there in twenty minutes, she promised gamely from the Upper East Side.
I figured it would take her thirty and me ten. So to give her a sporting chance, I stepped into a used bookshop a few doors from the salon.
The shop was aptly named Calypso’s. It was a little sunlit storefront with narrow aisles and crooked shelves and a shuffling proprietor who looked like he’d been marooned on MacDougal Street for fifty years. He returned my greeting reluctantly and gestured at the books with an annoyed wave as if to say: Peruse, if you must.
I picked an aisle at random and walked far enough into it that I would be out of his line of sight. The shelves held highfalutin books with broken spines and ragged covers—the usual secondhand, bohemian fare. In this aisle there were biographies, letters, and other works of historical nonfiction. At first it seemed as if they had been stuffed on the shelves willy-nilly, since neither the authors nor the subjects appeared to be in alphabetical order, until I realized that they had been shelved chronologically. (Of course they had.) To my left were Roman senators and early saints. To my right the Civil War generals and latter-day Napoleons. Looking straight ahead, I found myself smack dab in the middle of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume. I tilted my head to read their rational spines. A Treatise on this. A Discourse on that. Enquiries and Inquiries.
Do you believe in fate? I never have. God knows that Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, and Hume didn’t. But there at eye level on the very next shelf, as the mid-eighteenth century gave way to the late, was a small volume in red leather with a gold star embossed on the spine. I pulled it out thinking maybe it was my pole star—and lo and behold, it turned out to be Assorted Writings by the Father of Our Republic. Turning past the title page, right after the Contents came his adolescent maxims, all 110 of them. I bought it from the old proprietor for fifteen cents, and he looked as pained to part with it