The Book Of Secrets Part 19

Emily looked worried. 'Do you think it's safe to split up?'

'Safer for you than being together. I'm the fugitive, remember.' He stood. 'Anyway, hopefully we left all the bad guys in New York.'

x.x.xIV.

Stra.s.sburg

The press stood on a solid table at the front of the room. It consisted of a base which held a slate bed, two upright legs which supported a crossbar, and a wooden board, the platen, suspended between them on an iron screw. It was little different from the presses the paper makers used to squeeze their sheets dry.

There were four of us in the room. I would have preferred it to be only Kaspar and me, but our enterprise had long since outgrown its beginnings. Dunne was there, of course; also Sas.p.a.ch the carpenter to tend the press he had built. Upstairs, I knew Dritzehn the landlord would be crouching by the cellar door, listening at the keyhole, but I had refused point-blank to allow him down. The more gold I spent, the more possessive I became of our secret.

Yet though I had strived so long towards this moment, I felt strangely detached from it. It was not that I had s.h.i.+rked the work. I had boiled the inks with Kaspar; measured timbers with Sas.p.a.ch; pored over copper sheets with Hans Dunne, filing down the sharp edges left by the graving tools. I had written out the text of the indulgence, then spent countless hours staring at it in front of a mirror so that I could translate it in reverse for transfer onto the copper. Most of all, I had paid for it. Yet I did not feel it belonged to me.

Drach took the plate out of a felt bag and rubbed it clean with a cloth. He laid it on the end of the table and poured a pool of black ink onto it from one of the jars. He spread it with the flat of a birch-wood blade until all the copper was black, then sc.r.a.ped it away again with the sharp edge. Finally, he wiped the plate with a stiff cheesecloth. I marvelled at his touch. He could be so careless of some things, often gratuitously rough-handed, but he could also work with the most exquisite precision when he wanted. The cloth bloomed black as it soaked up the ink from the polished surface, yet in the incisions only a few hairs' breadths deep the ink remained untouched.

Drach arranged the plate on the stone bed of the press. I dampened a leaf of paper with a sponge and pa.s.sed it to him. He laid it over the plate and stepped away.

Hand over hand, Sas.p.a.ch and Dunne turned the bar that drove the screw. It squeaked in its grooves. The wooden platen touched the paper and squeezed. I heard a tiny liquid belch probably the water I had used to moisten the paper, but in my mind it was the sound of ink being drawn out of the copper into the paper.

Sas.p.a.ch and Dunne screwed down the platen as far as it would go, then spun back the lever to loose it. I stared at the paper, imagining I saw faint shadows on the underside. Drach peeled it away from the copper plate and raised it to show us. I held my breath.

It was hideous. In stark black and white, letters that had looked neat and regular in the engraving were now as wild as a child's hand. On some of the words the ink had come out thin as cobwebs, on others, thick and heavy as tar. I wanted to weep, but with the other three men looking on I did not dare.

'Why has this happened?'

'Copper is like human flesh. The deeper the cut, the more the bleeding.' Drach traced his finger over a particularly obese A.

'But your cards every line was perfect.' I knew I sounded like a petty child consumed by jealousy. That was how I felt.

'Yes.' Drach stroked his chin and affected to contemplate the paper. 'These are not as good.'

'It is easier to cut a long line than a short one,' said Dunne. He had engraved some of the text himself and had to defend himself. 'Each letter requires so many fine cuts it is inevitable some go too deep or shallow.'

'Inevitable in the wrong hands,' Drach muttered.

I pointed to a U, so deformed it looked like a B. 'And that?'

'The shape of the letters allows no room for error,' said Dunne. 'Any fool can make a picture. Change the shape of a deer's antler and it is still a deer. Change the shape of an A and it is meaningless. I think perhaps Drach's art is not suited to this purpose.'

'Perhaps you are not suited to this purpose,' said Kaspar. 'Perhaps the next one will be better.' Sas.p.a.ch tried to broker peace. His face showed none of the despair I felt, only irritation. For him, this was merely a job that had wasted his talents.

We repeated the procedure. When it was done, Drach took the paper from the press and laid it on a bench beside the first. We leaned over to examine them.

'The same,' grunted Dunne. He turned away in disgust. Yet I kept looking. Where he saw confirmation of our failure, I saw a spark of hope. They were the same. The same erratic script, the same malformed letters and drunken lines, the same place on the third sentence where miserere was misspelt misere. In their manifest imperfections, at least, they were perfect copies.

'The process is fine,' Drach declared. He thrived on perversity. 'All we need is to improve it.'

x.x.xV.

Paris

A freezing wind whistled down the Seine. On an embankment above the river, four L-shaped towers jutted towards the grey sky. The architect had meant them to look like open books stood on end, but to Emily they looked more like the corners of a vast gla.s.s castle. Except there was no castle to be seen. The s.p.a.ce between the towers a slab of ground the size of several football fields was empty. It was only when you looked down that you saw the inside-out heart of the complex: a gla.s.s pit, a deep rectangle dug sixty feet into the earth, with the different floors of the library looking out over a sunken courtyard. And instead of a castle in the forest, a forest in the castle, for the courtyard was filled with trees, so deep that their uppermost branches only just reached to ground level. It was like no other library Emily had ever seen.

The trees began to rise above her as she rode an outside escalator into the pit. It brought her halfway down, to a mezzanine level where a bored guard gave her bag a perfunctory search. It was warm inside: a plush atmosphere of red carpets and polished wood, like a theatre foyer. Even the computers were housed in wooden cabinets. Emily crossed to one and laid Gillian's card on a flat metal scanner. An onscreen message in French welcomed Gillian Lockhart. Emily looked at the trail of cables snaking out of the computer into a duct in the floor, and wondered how far those tentacles stretched, which corners of the electronic world had just been alerted to the fact that Gillian Lockhart had apparently reappeared at the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Emily tapped a fingernail on the touchscreen. A list appeared: Lost Books of the Bible

Studies on the Physiologus in the Middle Ages

Physiologus (Anonyme, XVeme Siecle)

She frowned. A physiologus was a bestiary, a collection of fables masquerading as zoology. She'd studied plenty for her work on medieval animal motifs. Why had Gillian consulted them? Had she found something to do with the animals on the playing cards?

She tapped the screen again to order the books down from the towers where they were kept.

Merci, Gillian Lockhart A twinge of discomfort ran up Emily's back. She didn't like being Gillian Lockhart. They'd never met, but Gillian had lurked in the Cloisters like a ghost brought over with the medieval stones, a name guaranteed to change the subject. All museums have their mysteries, and Emily fresh from her doctorate, eager to please, her own secrets to hide had let it lie. She wondered if Nick knew. There was something desperately innocent about the way he'd plunged headlong into the search for Gillian, a knight errant come to rescue his damsel. Emily had read enough medieval romances to know that women who drew knights onto quests weren't always what they seemed.

The books would come to the reading room on the court yard level. She checked her bag into the cloakroom, then walked to the row of turnstiles and pressed the card against another reader. The barrier opened and she stepped through, trying not to s.h.i.+ver at the bar's cold touch through her stockings.

GILLIAN LOCKHART.

is in mortal peril

(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)

In an Internet cafe on the rue St Georges, Nick sighed. There had always been aspects of Gillian that remained a mystery to him. The way she would spread peanut b.u.t.ter on hamburgers. The way she sometimes turned off her phone and didn't come home at night. When he'd dared to ask if she was seeing someone else, she'd accused him of having no imagination and locked herself in the bedroom.

Why had she written 'mortal peril'? If she'd been in real danger she'd have called the police, or run, not logged on to the Web to update her profile. Unless it was a last gesture of defiance, a joke to belittle what was coming. That would fit.

Next to her name was a thumbnail photograph different to the one on the library card. This was an older picture, Gillian with long black hair combed in a straight fringe, with panda-bear eyes like an art student.

He tried exploring the site. There was the billboard, where other users could post the usual ba.n.a.lities, rants and badly spelled insults that pa.s.sed for wit on the Web. It was blank. He flipped to another part of the site, a photo alb.u.m. There were a few pictures: Gillian swigging beer at a party wearing an enormous sombrero; Gillian sprawled over a rock in Central Park pretending to hug it while she smiled coyly at the camera; Gillian standing outside a boulangerie with baguette tucked under her arm. She'd gone blonde by then, the same face as on the library card. He wondered who'd taken the picture. Atheldene?

There were none of Gillian with Nick. He told himself he hadn't expected any, and wondered who he was really looking for.

Before he left he checked the news sites for anything about himself. He'd a.s.sumed it would have made headlines somewhere: SUSPECTED MURDERER FLEES COUNTRY. He found a couple of stories about Bret's murder, but nothing in the last forty-eight hours. Didn't they know he'd fled? Had they come to their senses and realised he was innocent? He thought of Detective Royce and decided it was unlikely.

It reminded him of something Gillian had said. He'd caught her one day looking out of the apartment window, peering between the blinds at the empty street. He'd pointed out there was n.o.body there; she'd answered in a fake-deep voice: 'Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they can't see you.'

He'd thought it was a joke, a line from a movie, one of the personas she shrugged on and off all the time. He'd gone to fix a sandwich. But when he looked back through the kitchen door she'd still been on the windowsill, watching.

Once, the alarm had been a black Bakelite telephone connected to a switchboard, with black cables hanging off it like chains on a dungeon wall. Later, it had become a pager; later still, a succession of ever smaller and smarter cellphones. Through all those incarnations one thing had remained constant: it almost never rang. Months would pa.s.s in silence, sometimes whole years.

Now it was ringing for the second time in three weeks. Father Michel Renais, latest in a long line of men who had held that phone, stared at the screen. The last time it had rung he had broken out into a sweat and almost dropped it; this time he was ready.

'Oui?'

'One of our flags has come up. Bibliotheque Nationale, garden level, seat N48.'

'Bien.'

Technology made it too easy, Father Michel thought. Once they'd have had to sift through paper request slips, cross-reference university records, scramble to make even the most basic enquiries. Now they knew even before the readers found their seats.

He dialled the number the cardinal had given him. 'At the Bibliotheque Nationale. The same book as before. And the same name. Gillian Lockhart.'

He heard a dry laugh on the other end of the phone. 'I very much doubt it is Gillian Lockhart.'

It was like entering a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, or a medieval dungeon reimagined by a future civilisation. Emily rode a long escalator down through the cavernous hall that formed the outer sh.e.l.l of the complex. An underground moat surrounding the underground castle. The outside walls were solid concrete, while the inside was protected by huge curtains of steel rings like sheets of chain mail. At the bottom, another machine checked her card before admitting her through the final pair of doors. Here, she was back inside the castle: desks, carpets, polished wood.

Emily found the seat that the computer had a.s.signed her and waited. She stared out of the windows at the forested courtyard. It was like something out of legend: thick evergreens bristling among the leafless birches and oaks, with thin icings of snow on the branches. Even in winter, she could hardly see the other side of the courtyard beyond the trees.

A red light above the desk summoned Emily to the issue counter. A bored librarian held out her hand.

'Votre carte?'

Emily smiled to hide her anxiety. She held up the card, keeping her thumb over the top half of Gillian's face to hide it. The librarian barely glanced at it before reaching into a cubbyhole behind her and depositing two books on the counter.

'I ordered three,' Emily said in French.

The librarian narrowed her heavily made-up eyes. Before Emily could protest, she swept the card out of her hand and slapped it down on the reader by her computer. She studied the monitor.

'Anonymous, Physiologus. This book is missing.' She scrolled down. 'You have requested this book before?'

'Um, yes. In December.'

'And it was missing then, also.'

Was that a question? Emily opted for what she hoped was a suitably French grunt, accompanied by a vague twitch of the shoulders.

'There is a note on the system that we could not find this book the last time you asked for it.'

Emily rested a hand on the counter to steady herself. 'I . . . I just wondered if it might have turned up.'

'Non.'

'The online catalogue still shows it as available,' Emily persisted.

'Then there is a mistake with the catalogue. I will make another note.' She lifted her gaze over Emily's shoulder to the person waiting in line behind her. Emily took the hint.

She went back to her desk with the two books that had come: Studies on the Physiologus and Lost Books of the Bible. Nothing to do with Gillian Lockhart was clear. All she ever saw were distant shadows flitting out of view, uncertain whether they were real or just tricks of the light. She almost felt sorry for Nick.

But she could only work with what she had. She started with Studies on the Physiologus, kneading new facts in with what she already knew. The term 'physiologus' had fallen out of use during the Middle Ages, but then revived when new-fangled printers wanted to give their books an old-fas.h.i.+oned stamp of authenticity. The book that hadn't come was listed in the online catalogue as fifteenth century. Emily flipped to the appendix. There were eleven printed editions of the Physiologus known before 1500. None of them was the one listed in the catalogue.

A dead end. She turned to the other book, the Lost Books of the Bible. This was more of a struggle: she found it hard to engage with the text without knowing what she was looking for. She turned through the pages looking for any pencil marks that Gillian might have made in the margins, any words she might have underlined. She scanned for references to animals, bestiaries or cards; all she got were prophets, ancient kings and angry G.o.ds.

She heard a cough behind her and looked round. It was the librarian.

Her heart beat faster. 'Have you found it?'

The librarian shook her head. 'There is a message. You must go to the information desk on the upper level. There is a man there to see you Monsieur Ash. He says it is an emergency.'

The last number Gillian had called from her cellphone was a taxi company. Nick could have rung, but that would have been too quick. This was his last lead; once it was done, he'd have nothing left. So he got the address off the Internet and walked, trying to fool himself for a little while longer that he was achieving something.

He hated the feeling of not knowing what would happen next. Gillian used to tease him that he wanted all life to be like school. 'If G.o.d handed you a schedule for the rest of your life three periods of work, a half-hour for lunch, forty minutes online, an hour extra-curricular s.e.x you'd be happy.' He hadn't denied it.