The Book Of Secrets Part 15

XXVII.

Paris

The taxi drove past the tourists already gathering in front of Notre-Dame cathedral. It crossed the river on the Pont Neuf and turned into the block of tiny alleys that wound around the church of St Severin, near the Sorbonne. It stopped about halfway down the lane outside a hotel, an old building with an awning over the door advertising a brand of beer. A tabby cat jumped down from the receptionist's chair as Nick and Emily walked in and stalked away. A moment later, an elderly man appeared from the adjoining office. He answered Emily's question with a nod and a smirk, and produced a pair of keys from the drawer. He didn't ask for any paperwork.

They took the elevator up to the room. Nick looked at the double bed and tried to hide what he was thinking.

'I asked for a twin,' Emily apologised. 'I'll go down and ask them to change it.'

'I can sleep on the floor.' Just at that moment he could have slept anywhere. But not yet.

He dropped his bag and went to the small table by the window. He pulled the stiff-backed envelope from his inside coat pocket. By unspoken agreement, they had waited until they got back to the hotel room.

Like a pair of clumsy lovers they both reached for the envelope at the same time. Their hands collided, withdrew. Nick took it. He forced his finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Something firm and smooth to the touch waited inside. He slid it out onto the table. A flat oblong about the size of a postcard, wrapped in white tissue paper.

'Let me.'

This time he let her have her turn. Emily slid a nail under the tape and peeled back the folds of paper. They both stared.

After everything he had endured, Nick's overwhelming feeling was disappointment. The object of his quest was utterly familiar. Four bears and four lions, no longer on a screen but printed on stiff, fluted paper. Age made it grey, though the printed lines were still sharp.

Emily pulled on her gloves and picked it up by the edges. 'There isn't any stamp or insignia on it.'

'Should there be?'

'If it came from a library or a major collection.' She flicked on the table lamp and held the card against the shade so that it glowed. 'There are no outlines around the animals. This was printed from a single copper sheet not one of the later cut-up composites. And there.' She pointed to the middle of the card. 'The watermark a crown. That's the same as the other early cards.'

'What about those?' Nick pointed to a cl.u.s.ter of dark blots smeared on the bottom-right corner of the card. Some were black, others a reddish brown. 'They look like dried blood.'

'Maybe wine spilled during a game?' Emily laid the card back in its tissue paper and covered it reverentially, like a corpse. Her lips were moist with excitement. 'This is genuine, Nick. The first of these cards to be discovered in a century.'

Nick didn't respond. If anything, her excitement only fuelled his resentment. He felt a sudden urge to tear the card into pieces.

'We're supposed to be finding Gillian.'

'Who wanted you to have the card.'

'And what am I supposed to do now? Put it in a museum with a sign? "Gift of Gillian Lockhart, shame she disappeared." ' Nick knew his tiredness was running away with him but couldn't make himself care enough to stop.

'Did she leave anything else?'

Emily's question stopped him like a slap in the face. Nick picked up the envelope and shook it. Something rattled inside.

He turned it over. A credit-card-sized piece of plastic and a small gold microchip tumbled out onto the table.

He examined the plastic card first. It was red with 'BnF' next to an image of an open book. He turned it over and stared. There was Gillian, printed into a one-inch box in the corner, staring down the camera like the barrel of a gun. It took him a moment to recognise her. An overhead light glared off her forehead and drowned her face in an unflattering, office-issue shadow. She'd cut her hair since he last saw her and dyed it blonde. He remembered a line from a poem she'd liked to quote at him: 'Naught shall endure but mutability'.

'BnF is the Bibliotheque Nationale de France,' said Emily. 'The French national library. Forty of the original playing cards are there. This must be her pa.s.s.' She pointed to the gold microchip. 'What about that?'

Nick picked it up between his finger and thumb. 'It's a SIM card. For a cellphone.'

'Why would she leave that?'

'Maybe so we could see who she called.'

Nick pulled out his own phone and prised off the back cover. He slid the SIM out of its holder and replaced it with Gillian's. He was about to turn it on when suddenly he paused. His finger hovered over the power b.u.t.ton. 'Or . . .'

'Or what?'

'Or because they could trace the signal to locate her.'

He put the phone in his pocket, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Emily jumped up in alarm.

'Where are you going?'

'To the Metro station.'

The cold hit him the moment he stepped out of the hotel. A raft of bruising clouds hung low over Paris, and there was a bite in the air that promised snow. He hurried around the corner to the Saint-Michel station. Across the Seine, a flock of birds wheeled around the towers of Notre-Dame. He bought a ticket, pushed through the narrow turnstiles and down a flight of stairs to the crowded platform.

He switched on the phone. Searching, said the screen. When he was satisfied there was no reception, he went to work.

He started by scrolling through her phone book. A few of the names sounded familiar in a second-hand way; some were French, others looked American. Nothing leaped out. 'Museum, Natalie Cell, Paul Home . . .'

No 'Nick'. His stomach tightened. She deleted me. After everything else it was a petty disappointment, but it hurt like a bullet to the gut. Perhaps more because it was so ba.n.a.l: not a gesture or a message, just a piece of housekeeping.

Maybe she wanted to protect me, he tried. But he couldn't convince himself.

So why did she send me the card?

A red double-decker train pulled into the station. For half a minute everything was chaos as one group of shoppers and sightseers exchanged places with another. The train lumbered away.

He rummaged through the folders to check her text messages. They were empty every message deleted. Except one.

I don't know what I've done but please please call me. Even if you don't want to talk, just call once. I still love you. Nick The time stamp said six months ago. She'd never replied. Why had she kept it, leaving it to gather digital dust in this forgotten corner?

Nick closed the message. The platform was beginning to fill up again. At the far end, a dreadlocked guitar player was singing Pink Floyd in French. Without much hope, Nick went to the phone's call log.

There were three calls. Two of them to numbers that looked French and weren't in her phonebook, the third and most recent to someone called Simon. Nick clicked to view the number. That looked local too.

He scribbled down the three numbers with the time and duration of the calls, then switched off the phone.

He spent fifteen minutes in an Internet cafe, then went back to the hotel room. Emily was sitting on the bed examining the playing card again, her feet tucked under her like a schoolgirl.

'Did you find anything?' said Nick.

She shook her head. 'You?'

'Three numbers.' He pulled the sc.r.a.p of paper out of his pocket. 'The last three calls Gillian made from her cellphone.'

'If it was hers,' Emily cautioned. 'You don't know that.'

'It was hers.' Nick slumped into an armchair. His hands were still stiff from the cold outside. 'One of them was to a taxi firm. I've got the time and date of the call, so we could see if they have any records. Then there was one to a guy listed as Simon.'

'Does he have a surname?'

'Not even an initial.' What did that imply? He'd never heard Gillian talk about any friends called Simon. He pushed the thought out of his mind.

'But the third one I had more luck with. His name's Professor Jean-Baptiste Vandevelde. He's a particle physicist at the Inst.i.tut Georges Sagnac, just outside Paris. He specialises in X-ray fluoroscopy, whatever that is.'

Emily raised an eyebrow. 'Her phone told you all that?'

'He's got a website.' Nick handed her the printout he'd taken from the Internet cafe. 'All his contact details. When I searched for the phone number, it came up.'

Emily squinted at it. 'Why would Gillian want to talk to a particle physicist?'

'Let's ask him.'

XXVIII.

Stra.s.sburg, 1434

What can I say about Kaspar Drach? He was the most obscenely talented man I ever met more so, I believe, than Nicholas Cusa.n.u.s. While Cusa.n.u.s tended his thoughts in walled gardens, Drach roamed freely across the earth; where Cusa.n.u.s pruned, watered, shaped and cropped, Drach sprayed his seed without thought for where it would land. Tangled meadows of bright and fantastical flowers sprouted wherever he walked. Though among their twisted stems, serpents lurked.

None of which I knew that spring evening. I remember his bare feet slapping on the rungs as he descended the ladder. The crooked grin as he saw my surprise. I had expected someone like the goldsmith, wise and venerable, a man who had given his life to attain his new art. Instead, I saw a slight young man with a mop of unruly black curls, younger than me by several years. His skin was the colour of raw honey, his eyes like viscous oil blue, green, grey or black by the changing whim of the light. A barbarian streak of blue paint creased his forehead.

He plucked the card from my hand and glanced at it. I looked for a sign of recognition, perhaps a glow of paternal pride that his prodigal child had been brought back to him. There was nothing. He handed it back to me.

'Did you lose?'

'What?' I had not been paying attention. His fingers had brushed mine as we exchanged the card. In that moment, I had felt the demon who inhabited me stir, a gust that brings a taste of the storm.

'The game. Did you lose it?'

I thought of Jacques' pulverised face, his blood on the stones. 'No.'

Drach gave me his crooked smile. 'A bad workman blames his tools. A bad gambler blames the man who made the cards.'

He suddenly turned his back on me and began walking towards the river. I could not tell if it was a dismissal or an invitation. I followed. He squatted on the bank and sluiced water over his palette. Threads of colour streamed off it into the river.

I stood at the top of the embankment and watched. 'How did you make them?' I shouted down. My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the evening stillness. 'How do you make them so perfect?'

He didn't look round. 'What is your trade?'

I hesitated. 'I used to be a goldsmith,' was the best I could say. 'And if I came into your shop and asked for the secret of enamelling, or the way to fire gold with copper to bring the engravings to life, would you tell me?'

'I-'

'I discovered something which no man ever did before. Do you think I would share that with every stranger who pa.s.sed me at a crossroads?' He pulled the wooden palette out of the river, shook the water off and tucked it under his arm. He marched up the riverbank, straight past me.

'I want to make something perfect,' I said, and something in my voice desperation or desolation must have rung true. Drach turned back.

'Only G.o.d is perfect.'

Written down now it looks a pompous rebuke. But writing cannot capture the way he said it: the overblown solemnity undercut by a twitch at the corner of his mouth, the mischievous cast in his eyes as they met mine in complicity.

'G.o.d and your playing cards,' I said.

This answer pleased him very much. He spread his arms and took a bow. Everything was theatre to Drach.

'Even G.o.d could not make two men so exactly alike as my cards.' He considered this thought while I tried not to show my shock. 'Except twins. And they are unnatural.'

He looked at the sky. The sun had disappeared; the heavens were darkening to black.

'Are you hungry?'

We crossed the fields to the village. The path was narrow and broken by the plough; often we collided. I longed to take his hand and walk arm in arm, for I was already besotted, but of course I did not dare. I contented myself with the brush of his sleeve, the occasional b.u.mp of his shoulder.

He kept his paint jars in a sack, which tinkled like harness bells wherever he walked. His conversation was the same: flowing chatter that pleased my ear and never grated. He asked my name and where I came from; when I told him Paris, he fixed me with a look that made me think he knew everything.

'There is a story there,' he said. 'Someday I will force it out of you.'

I could not think of anyone I would more happily tell it to. We came to an inn called L'Homme Sauvage, the Wild Man. On the sign, a man whose skin peeled off his body like foliage strummed a lute and looked over his shoulder. It was as if I had entered a different world; everywhere I looked, the cards seemed to come alive. Drach saw my gaze and nodded.

'I am always welcome here. They will give us a meal and a bed for the night.'

He said 'us' so casually I could not tell if he meant anything by it. To me it was like a b.u.t.ton fallen unnoticed off his coat, to be picked up and cherished long after he had forgotten it.

We crossed the stableyard and entered the inn. The candles burned bright after the darkness outside, while the fire in the hearth dispelled the spring chill. Though the village was too close to Stra.s.sburg to detain many travellers, there was no shortage of custom. Three men-at-arms in fine cloaks sat in the middle of the room and bragged of their deeds. In a corner, two merchants from Vienna haggled and gossiped.

A girl with flaxen hair braided into pigtails brought wine. Drach drained his almost immediately and called her back for more. I waited for her to leave, trembling with the idea I had been nursing in all the months of my slow journey across France.

At last she left us.