Carter & Lovecraft (19 page)
“The one hundreds section is over here,” she said, easing past Colt to get to the shelves. He made little effort to step aside, falling in behind her as she led the way.
“You use the Dewey system.”
“Got to have a system,” she replied. There was a tautness in her voice Carter hadn’t heard before. She wasn’t just nervous. She was afraid.
She knew Carter was in the store with her, she knew he carried a gun, she had no reason to think that her customer was anything out of the ordinary and certainly not that he was the subject of Carter’s investigation. All of this, yet she was afraid. Carter was aware of the weight of his Glock 19, but it failed to reassure him. He had a sense, a strange tangential awareness, that whatever threat Colt represented was not something a gun could deal with without bad consequences. This was a chess match, not a potential firefight. He couldn’t see why a chess match seemed to put the fear of God into Lovecraft, but it had, and that made him worried, too.
“I’m all about systems,” said Colt.
They were passing the “000” section, the outcasts of Dewey Decimal Classification, amid the things that were new or unknown when Melvil Dewey devised it in the 1870s, along with the things he wasn’t sure what to do with, all salted away under the hand-waving of “Generalities.” Collections, journalism, parapsychology, philosophy, computing, books about books, books about the Dewey Decimal Classification system and libraries in general.
Carter couldn’t see them clearly. He found something interesting to gain his attention in a book about mezzotinting. He had no idea what “mezzotinting” was before he took it down from the shelf, but apparently it was some way of making pictures. He opened it and pretended to peruse it, his attention on Lovecraft and Colt from his new vantage point.
“Jung … Jung … Jung…” Lovecraft chanted as her finger swept along the shelves. Carter half expected Jung to appear, having been summoned.
“Here you go,” she said with relief that must have been obvious to Colt, all the sooner to get him out of her store. She took down a book and showed it to Colt. He took it from her and flipped to the copyright page.
“It’s the 1973 edition,” he said. “I was kind of hoping for a first edition.”
“That’s the only copy we have in stock. We … I could look around other dealers for a 1960 copy, if you’d like?”
Colt looked at her. He was no longer smiling. Then suddenly he was. “No. This will do fine. It’s in good condition for a softcover over forty years old, isn’t it? Yes, I’ll have this. Oh, and this.” He took down another book from the same shelf. “I’ve been looking for this one, too. From the same series. Some crossover, but never mind.” He was holding the book up to show Lovecraft the cover, speaking to her like a child. He looked back over his shoulder at Carter, but Carter had already buried his nose in his book, pretending to find himself fascinated by an example of the mezzotinters’s art (
Artist: Arthur Francis. An interesting view of Anningley Hall manor-house in Essex, circa 1800. 15 by 10 inches
).
Colt was talking to Lovecraft again. “
Psychology and the Occult
. Jung was fascinated by the supernatural. He was pretty skeptical in his early career, but became more open-minded as he grew older. The usual thing to say is ‘Oh, he got more credulous because he was losing his edge.’ Wouldn’t it be more interesting if he was actually getting closer to the truth after a lifetime’s work?” He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
They walked back to the counter, Lovecraft more eagerly than Colt, who dithered by the triple zeroes. Lovecraft realized she was alone and turned to find him studying the spines of the books. “Is there anything else you wanted?” she asked.
“Oh, I want lots of things,” he said. Then he pointed at the shelf. “I was just looking at these books on librarianship. You have a couple of copies of
AACR2
here, the cataloguing rules. There’s a mathematical dimension to that, you know? I’m a mathematician myself. You love books? I love numbers, and the two of them collide right there.” He tapped the copy of
AACR2
. “I used to think math was pure. Icy pure and the most beautiful thing it was possible to be. Everything you call ‘beauty’ bleeds out of math. Symmetry, the golden section, nature itself is a mass of fractals.
“Then I read about Bertrand Russell. You probably just think of him as a philosopher, but he was a mathematician first. Let me tell you about Russell, the absolute purity of math, and library catalogues.”
* * *
So, Russell is in his late twenties. He’s already written some interesting papers on the foundations of mathematics, including some work on geometry. Non-Euclidean geometry.
Colt smirked as he said it.
He has a bright idea. He looks at those foundations of math, and he sees something wrong. It’s pretty easy to understand the paradox he saw if you think of it being about books, and catalogues.
Imagine there’s a country where every town and village has a public library, and in the capital is a central library. One day, the chief librarian realizes he doesn’t know what books all the local libraries have, so he sends out a directive. He tells them to catalogue all their books, and send a copy to the central library so there’ll be a record of all the library books in the country in one central location. As good as gold, all the local librarians catalogue their collections, and send copies of the catalogue to the central library.
Now the chief librarian has a stack of the catalogues, hundreds of them, and decides another level of reference is necessary for people to be able to find the right catalogues easily. So, he sits down to create a catalogue of all the catalogues.
Are you following this? Good.
But he finds a problem. The local librarians haven’t all catalogued their collections in the same way. No
AACR2
to guide them, see? All the local libraries have put their copies of the new catalogue they just drew up out for the use of their patrons, but some of them have decided that the catalogue itself is therefore part of their collection, and must therefore list itself. The other librarians haven’t. So you’ve got catalogues that catalogue themselves, and catalogues that don’t.
The chief librarian decides—for no good reason apart from it makes the example work—that he’s going to put the two types of catalogues into two separate catalogues. One lists catalogues that list themselves, the other lists the catalogues that don’t.
All this is completely representable in mathematical form.
But now … do you see the problem? The paradox? When the chief librarian has finished, then for consistency these two catalogues must also be catalogued as they’re part of the central collection. The catalogue of catalogues that do catalogue themselves can safely be listed in its own pages. But what about the other? If it’s added to the catalogue of auto-catalogues, it’s inaccurate because it’s not listed in itself. If it’s added to the catalogue of catalogues that don’t list themselves, then it’s just listed itself and so it’s in the wrong place.
* * *
“There was a seismic shock in math. Set theory had a hole you could drive a truck through.” He shrugged. “They patched the hole, but that’s all it is. A change in semantics. The hole’s still there, but now it has a bunch of mathematicians in front of it telling you to move on, nothing to see here. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What else is broken in the ‘purity’ in math.”
Colt had stopped smiling quite early on in his flight into didactics. Now he seemed very serious indeed, almost angry. He realized he was still standing there with Lovecraft with two books in his hands, and smiled again. It was just a crease in his face.
“How much are these?”
* * *
Carter kept a bookshelf between himself and Colt while the mathematician paid for the books and left with “Have a nice day.” Lovecraft said nothing in response. The bell rang, and Colt was gone.
Carter found Lovecraft backed up against the wall behind the counter, the back of her hand to her mouth, and her eyes wide. She looked like she’d just witnessed a serious accident, not sold a couple of books to a mathematician. She was staring in the direction of the door where Colt had left a moment before. The last reverberations of the bell still hummed, the last high vibration leaving the metal.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She ignored him until he stepped behind the counter and gently touched her upper arm. She cried out then, and looked at him with horror.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck! Did you see him? Where were you?”
“I was right over there the whole time. Calm … calm down, Emily. I was right there, watching. If he’d pulled anything, I would’ve shot him.”
“Pulled anything? Jesus Christ. Didn’t you hear what he…? Don’t you…?” She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “No. Of course you d— Look. It’s nothing. I just got a bad vibe from him. I … thought you’d gone. Some guys, you don’t want to be in the store alone with them.”
She was lying. Carter didn’t need to draw on his police experience to know that Lovecraft had known he hadn’t left the store. Colt had represented a threat to her that even the presence of Carter with a gun at his hip did nothing to ameliorate.
“How do you know him?”
She frowned, and looked at Carter. This confusion, at least, was sincere. “What are you talking about? I’ve never seen him before.”
“You don’t know who that was?”
She was starting to look worried again. “Should I?”
Carter frowned, too, now, looking at Lovecraft as if he didn’t know what to make of her at all.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She was becoming angry, reacting against her earlier fear. “I’m not lying. Why the hell would I know who some random guy coming in off the street is?”
Carter didn’t know whether he should tell her. But he had a feeling he was going to need allies, and that meant going from a position of trust. She might have just lied to him, but she had her reasons. That much was very evident.
“That was Colt. William Colt.” He’d never mentioned the name to her before, and it was plain that it meant nothing to her now. “The man I’m investigating for the Belasco and Atlantic City deaths. Him. He’s the guy.”
“Him?” Lovecraft looked at the door. She seemed to be finally understanding something. “It was him,” she said under her breath.
Lovecraft didn’t want to talk, and began mentioning that she was going out with Rothwell soon and had to go. Carter didn’t like the way the air had soured between them. There seemed no reason for it. She clung to the lie that she thought she’d been alone with Colt in the shop, and he could see that challenging her on it would cause things to deteriorate between them still further, so he let her be.
William Colt, on the other hand, he was not about to leave be. No fucking way.
Hill’s Books was nowhere near the university campus. It wasn’t impossible that he’d decided to hunt around local bookstores to see if he could find those Jung books, but the timing made it unlikely. “Synchronicity.” Carter knew that was the idea that there might be something behind coincidences, but he didn’t buy that, just like he didn’t buy that Colt had just decided to wander into that store right then on a whim. He’d come in knowing damn well that Carter was there, and he’d intimidated Lovecraft somehow. That, Carter admitted to himself, was something that confused him. His experiences of threats were legal, financial, or physical. He couldn’t see how you could scare the shit out of somebody with math, but it seemed you could. Well, okay. Just because he didn’t understand the threat didn’t mean it wasn’t one, and he wasn’t going to stand by and watch a self-satisfied fucker like Colt walk away from having laid it on Carter’s business partner. That wasn’t happening.
Carter realized he was getting almost unreasonably angry over something he didn’t understand. He was pacing up and down in the apartment over the bookstore, leaving Lovecraft to close up.
He heard the bell, and the sound of the door being locked, and realized she’d gone without even saying good-bye, and that just made him angrier still. He went to the window and watched Lovecraft cross the road. She waited on the corner for about a minute, before Rothwell, punctual as ever, arrived in a blue Buick Verano Turbo. Carter watched disconsolately as they drove away; the Buick was one of three different and expensive cars he’d observed Rothwell driving or, sometimes, being driven in on the four occasions he’d seen him pick up Lovecraft. The man’s garage must look like a luxury dealership.
He was watching it disappear into the distance when he saw a red Mazda3 swing out of a parking lot down the way and head in the same direction.
Carter was past believing in coincidences.
“Mother
fucker
,” he swore as he went down the stairs three at a time. Unlocking and relocking the door behind him took too long, and by the time he reached his car—a two-year-old white Toyota Camry, chosen specifically because they were a common sight on the roads—both vehicles were long gone.
Undeterred, Carter followed the road in the hope that he might regain sight of the distinctive Mazda. Ten minutes of frustration and too many sets of red lights later, he gave up. The chance of them staying on the same road fell every minute and the pursuit was already becoming a fool’s errand. Instead he pulled over and called Lovecraft to warn her. He was shunted to voice mail twice before he gave up in frustration. He sent her a text message in a last attempt, but doubted she’d bother to check her phone until it was irrelevant.
He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and tried to think what to do next. The first thought that came to mind was a bad, idiotic, dangerous one. In the normal run of things, he would probably have disregarded it for exactly those reasons, but he was angry and frustrated, the encounter in the bookstore had left him feeling marginalized and stupid, and any distance he felt in the Colt investigation had just gone out the window. Colt had decided to make it personal, to beard the lion in his den.
