The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [49]
The room was like a library from a country home somewhere. It was two stories high, with shelves crammed full of books covering every square inch of wall space. A spiral staircase led to a catwalk which ran around the wall, enabling access to the upper shelves. The middle of the room was open plan with desks laid out much like a library’s reading room. Every possible surface and all the floor space were piled high with more books and papers, and I wondered how they managed to get anything done at all. About five officers were at work, but they didn’t seem to notice me come in. A phone rang and a young man picked it up.
“Litera Tec office,” he said in a polite voice. He winced as a tirade came down the phone line to him.
“I’m very sorry if you didn’t like Titus Andronicus, madam,” he said at last, “but I’m afraid it’s got nothing to do with us— perhaps you should stick to the comedies in future.”
I could see Victor Analogy looking through a file with another officer. I walked to where he could see me and waited for him to finish.
“Ah, Next! Welcome to the office. Give me a moment, will you?”
I nodded and Victor carried on.
“. . . I think Keats would have used less flowery prose than this and the third stanza is slightly clumsy in its construction. My feeling is that it’s a clever fake, but check it against the Verse Meter Analyzer.”
The officer nodded and walked off. Victor smiled at me and shook my hand.
“That was Finisterre. He looks after poetry forgery of the nineteenth century. Let me show you around.”
He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.
“Words are like leaves, Thursday. Like people really, fond of their own society.”
He smiled.
“We have over a billion words here. Reference mainly. A good collection of major works and some minor ones that you won’t even find in the Bodleian. We’ve got a storage facility in the basement. That’s full as well. We need new premises but the Litera Tecs are a bit underfunded, to say the least.”
He led me around one of the desks to where Bowden was sitting bolt upright, his jacket carefully folded across the back of his chair and his desk so neat as to be positively obscene.
“Bowden you’ve met. Fine fellow. He’s been with us for twelve years and concentrates on nineteenth-century prose. He’ll be showing you the ropes. That’s your desk over there.”
He paused for a moment, staring at the cleared desk. I was not supernumerary. One of their number had died recently and I was replacing him. Filling a dead man’s shoes, sitting in a dead man’s chair. Beyond the desk sat another officer, who was looking at me curiously.
“That’s Fisher. He’ll help you out with anything you want to know about legal copyright and contemporary fiction.”
Fisher was a stocky man with an odd squint who appeared to be wider than he was tall. He looked up at me and grinned, revealing something left over from breakfast stuck between his teeth.
Victor carried on walking to the next desk.
“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose and poetry are looked after by Helmut Bight, kindly lent to us by our opposite number across the water. He came here to sort out a problem with some poorly translated Goethe and became embroiled with a neo-Nazi movement attempting to set Friedrich Nietzsche up as a fascist saint.”
Herr Bight was about fifty and looked at me suspiciously. He wore a suit but had removed his tie in the heat.
“SO-5, eh?” asked Herr Bight, as though it were a form of venereal