The Aztec Heresy by Paul Christopher Page A

cheap plates for smashing, overpriced boutiques selling questionable name brands, and trendy bed-and-breakfasts for trendy tourists. The last remnant of what had once been the essence of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Left Bank was Librarie Pierre Jumaire, a dusty little bookshop on the corner at rue de Petit Pont.
    The shop was a classic: dark, dusty shelves stuck here and there wherever there was room, books in piles everywhere, crammed in willynilly with little regard for price or age, the popular beside the obscure, the sublime sharing space with the profane, and all of it smelling faintly of mildew, ink, and binding glue.
    Jumaire himself was equally an archetype: he was squat, old, his white hair a halolike memory on the edges of a freckled skull; he wore thick bifocals and a black suit with a green bow tie on the worn collar of his wrinkled white shirt. There were two heavy briarwood canes beside his high stool behind the counter in the front where he held court, always with a fat yellow Boyard cigarette dangling between his thin lips and poking out of his bushy white beard, the mustache the color of nicotine, his right eye in a permanent squint where the acrid smoke wound its way up beneath the lenses of his spectacles.
    Librarie Pierre Jumaire had always specialized in nautical books, and the very tops of the bookcases were decorated with ships in bottles, bits of carved ivory, and a collection of brass navigation instruments, none of which had felt the touch of a duster for more than half a century. On the rare occasions that Jumaire left the shop, he inevitably wore an ancient peaked officer’s cap and a dark blue peacoat that could easily have been worn by Melville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick.
    As Finn and Billy entered the store, Jumaire was arguing with a customer in a loud voice and waving his arms to illustrate his point. The customer eventually slapped several bills down on the counter, picked up his purchase, and left in a huff, brushing past them and banging the door hard enough to make the little dangling bell at the lintel ring angrily.
    ‘‘Idiot!’’ Jumaire said to no one in particular.
    ‘‘Trying to bargain?’’ Billy asked, smiling.
    ‘‘Ach!’’ Jumaire answered. ‘‘The price is written on the flyleaf of every volume. This is not some bazaar in the souk at Marrakech. Would they argue over the price of a Royale with cheese at McDonald’s? I think not!’’ Finn burst out laughing. Jumaire eyed her severely. ‘‘You are very pretty, my dear, and I have a weakness for women with red hair, but I am quite serious. The fools try my patience endlessly. Would you barter at Hermes or Christian Dior? No again, of course you would not! They throw you out on your pretty little ear. Faugh!’’
    ‘‘Sorry,’’ said Finn.
    ‘‘Beautiful women should never apologize,’’ answered Jumaire, eyes twinkling behind his glasses.
    ‘‘Martin Kerzner sent us,’’ said Billy.
    ‘‘Really,’’ said Jumaire.
    ‘‘Yes.’’
    ‘‘He said you could help us.’’
    ‘‘Will and can are two entirely different words.’’
    ‘‘We understand that,’’ said Finn.
    ‘‘We’re trying to find out what happened to the San Anton, ’’ said Billy.
    ‘‘She sank in a storm,’’ answered Jumaire.
    ‘‘But where?’’
    ‘‘Ah,’’ said Jumaire. ‘‘As Long John Silver would say, ‘there’s the rub.’ ’’
    ‘‘We thought you could help,’’ said Finn.
    ‘‘Why should I?’’
    ‘‘Because Cavallo Nero is trying to find out as well,’’ said Billy.
    ‘‘Ah,’’ said Jumaire again. ‘‘The fiends from the Vatican. The new great Satan for thriller writers.’’
    ‘‘You think they’re a fiction?’’
    ‘‘No, of course not. They’re genuine enough, but they have nothing really to do with the Vatican. There is no sinister conspiracy of albino men of the cloth protecting the secrets of the new millennium via strange messages embedded in the streets of Paris