Chapter 4
The Man Who Reads Rooms
Gideon Strake had a rule about rooms. Never walk into one with an opinion.
At nine the next morning he stood just inside the Minister's study, hands in his pockets, and said nothing for a full minute. Teodoro Salgueiro opened his mouth three times. Each time, the thin, pleasant man in the doorway did not look up, and the speech went away.
Strake noticed a small chair set against the wall. "Dona Leonor sits there," he said. "She never sits at the desk. You rely on her a great deal."
"Twenty-three years."
"Minister, a man I trust told me something is missing. You've told the police, the press and the Prime Minister that nothing was taken. It's wise. I'd have done the same. But I can't help with a thing I'm not allowed to see."
For ten seconds, nobody breathed. Then Salgueiro unlocked a drawer and laid the black ledger on the desk.
Strake went through it quickly, like a man checking a coat's pockets. He held page forty-one to the window. He sniffed the spine.
"This is very good," he said. "It isn't a forgery. A forger gets the capital G wrong. This is a copy. Someone photographed every page over days, then traced each one in matching brown ink. Look at the cover. The red cloth is from a stationer in the Chiado, but yours came from a shop in Coimbra that closed in 1996. They matched everything inside, then gave up on the outside. They knew you wouldn't look."
"At three in the morning."
"When you were tired and pleased." His grey eyes were not unkind. "It's the best psychological work I've seen in years. I'd like to hire him. Who knew this book existed?"
"No one."
"Minister."
"Dona Leonor. Myself. And certain people in Geneva. I gave my word not to say more."
"I won't ask you to break it." Strake nodded gently. "Just tell me what the thief wanted. If he'd wanted the diamond, he'd have had it. I think you knew that at three in the morning."
The silver head lowered. "He wanted to be seen taking nothing."
"Yes," said Strake. "That's what I'm afraid of."
Afterward he phoned from the garden, in leather gloves, under bare plane trees.
"Gideon," said an old, soft voice, Swiss and English and neither. "I hope the Portuguese are civil."
"They're terrified, Conrad. It's restful. The ledger is gone, but not the way anyone thinks. He copied the first forty pages and left the rest blank. From page forty-one on, the references."
"I see." The old voice never rose. "Then that makes three. Marseille I took for chance. Zurich I did not. This man has been reaching into my friends' pockets for four years and never taking anything anyone would miss. He's taking numbers. I thought he was a nuisance. Find him. How are you with Interpol?"
"They sent a man called Kamara. Grey cardigan. He doesn't talk much."
"Those are the dangerous ones. Be nice to him."
"I'm always nice, Conrad."
"I know," said the old voice.
At noon, in the Hall of Mirrors, Idris Kamara found a man standing three feet away who had crossed the whole room without a sound.
"Inspector Kamara. Gideon Strake. I've been sent to be a nuisance." His handshake was dry and exactly as firm as Idris's own. "I've read your work. The Kovač case. You noticed the dead man's signature was younger than he was."
"That was my analyst."
"I rather think it was you."
Idris said nothing. People took his silence for shyness. It was more useful than that. "May I ask a question? Everyone here says he took nothing. Yet you were hired by the Minister within thirty hours to find a thief who stole nothing. What are you looking for?"
Strake's smile did not flicker. It was the most impressive thing Idris had ever watched a man do: a perfect absence of reaction.
"When a careful man goes to great trouble to take nothing," said Strake, "he has usually taken something. I want to know what."
Idris took the evidence bag from his pocket and held it out. It had been in the cold room twenty minutes, so the ink stayed hidden. Strake held the blank card to the light. For a moment, something moved far back in his pale eyes. It wasn't suspicion. It was the look of a man who has been handed a puzzle and realises it has an answer.
"A man who leaves a blank card," Strake said. "It's rather poetic. I find it perfectly dreadful. That's why I'm so good at it."
He glanced at his wrist. Idris noticed the watch: old, steel, plain, on a grey canvas strap, with a crack at the seven o'clock mark and a deep nick in the bezel. It was a poor watch for such an elegant man. It had been worn a long time.
When Strake had gone, Idris wrote in his notebook: Strake knew something was missing before I told him what. He underlined it twice. Then, because he was honest, he added: Likeable. He never wrote that lightly.
Joaquim, the silver street statue, sat on a crate in the Rossio when a man in a dark coat sat beside him with a paper bag.
"I'm not a policeman. Would you like a custard tart?"
Joaquim hadn't eaten since yesterday. He took it. "I told them everything. She called herself Marguerite, from an events agency. She paid me four hundred euros."
"How did she speak Portuguese?"
"Very well. She sounded like my aunt. But she said obrigado funny. Too round. The d was too soft. Like she learned it from someone who wasn't from here."
"Thank you," said Strake gently. He left a folded banknote under the crate.
Crossing the square, he rang the real Mr. Ashby. "The man who phoned you from the car park, what did he sound like?" He listened to a long, furious answer. "A deep voice. West African. Very correct English. And when you shouted, did he say anything in another language?"
A short pause.
"Viennese German," said Strake softly.
He rang off. A Marseille woman. A West African with a Vienna vocabulary. Someone clever with machines. A man who talked to policemen like old friends and left blank cards that weren't blank, and who had spent four years in the pockets of men Gideon Strake was paid to protect.
He looked at the pale sky.
"Hello, David," he said.