The Book Of Secrets Part 39

He padded after me down the gallery. I brought him to the press room, where silver shafts of moonlight bathed the machinery in their glow.

'We set each letter separately,' I gabbled. I was trembling. 'You would not believe how true-'

A cold hand gripped my neck and forced me down, squeezing my face against the inky bed of the press. I bent double, gasping for breath. Kaspar held me down with one hand, while the other fumbled with his belt.

'What are you doing?' I cried. 'In Christ's name, Kaspar . . .'

He was smothering me, thrusting himself against me from behind. The coffin smell of wet earth was all around me.

'Do you know what they did to me?' he hissed in my ear. 'What I suffered while you were playing with your toys?'

'I thought you were dead.'

His hands were tearing at my clothes, scratching my skin. 'Please,' I begged. 'Not like this.'

'What is this?'

Tongues of light flickered around the room. In an instant, Kaspar was away from me. The shadows seemed to draw around him like a cloak. I pushed myself up and looked round.

Father Gunther stood in the doorway holding a lamp, straining to see in. 'Johann?'

I stammered something unintelligible. 'I heard a scream.'

'The press squeaked. I was demonstrating it to . . . to my friend.'

Gunther moved the lamp so that Kaspar's face swam out of the darkness. He gave him a searching stare but said nothing.

'If all is well . . .' he said doubtfully.

'I will be fine.'

Kaspar had come back, but he was not the same. The darkness in his nature, which I had once accepted as the inevitable shadows of a brilliant sun, had consumed him. After that first, terrible night, he did not talk about what he had suffered; nor, thank G.o.d, did he attack me. I forgave him that what I could not accept were the small changes. The tiny cruelties, the savagery in his eyes. Like a ghost, he could chill a room the moment he entered it. I resisted the idea as long as I could, but in the end I was forced to admit it. I did not love him any more.

Yet his talent remained. Even the demons that ravaged him could not quench his interest in the work of the book. I encouraged it: I hoped it might draw out some of the poison and fix his mind on purer things. I gave him a room at the top of the house: ink, pens, brushes, paper, whatever he needed. And he repaid me.

He showed me one evening, when I climbed to the attic after the rest of the press crew had gone. Kaspar sat at a sloping desk at the far end of the room. He was writing intently and did not look up as I entered.

I leaned over to see what was on the desk. A single leaf of paper, twice the size of the indulgences, criss-crossed with faint pencil lines and sweeping arcs like the blueprint for a cathedral. A heavier line roughed out a rectangle in the middle of the paper, subdivided into two weighty columns like pillars on the page. Kaspar had shaded them with the flat of the pencil, except on the first line of the first column where he had written in a bold, meticulous hand, 'In principio creavit deus celi et terram.' In the beginning G.o.d created heaven and earth.

'This is how it should look,' Kaspar said. He traced one of the arcs with his finger. 'The most harmonious proportions. Your perfect book.'

I rested my hand gently on his shoulder, imagining the columns filled with rows of words. 'It's beautiful.'

He seemed to be waiting for something more. When I said nothing, he sighed.

'You see how I have written the letters so they fill the column exactly, edge to edge? No scribe could do that except by luck. It took me a dozen attempts to do it just for this one line. But with your types, you can control the exact position of every word, every letter. Like a G.o.d.'

I knew at once that he was right. I could feel the familiar resonance, the echo of angels singing. I had been so busy staring down, getting each letter to print evenly, I had not raised my gaze to consider the broader scheme. We could arrange the words so that each line was as solid as carved stone: ma.s.sy columns of text supporting the weight of the word of G.o.d. Something no human hand could do.

In the fading light, my old eyes blurred. For a second, I focused not on the shaded columns on the page but at the wide, white surrounds. Background and foreground reversed themselves: the blank paper became a window framing the misty darkness beyond its panes. The scribbled pencil marks seemed to swirl like ink drops in water, threading themselves into words that spoke of G.o.d.

It was the last, best gift Kaspar gave me.

LXVII.

Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

The battered Volkswagen crawled along the street. No one noticed it, except maybe the snowmen standing sentinel on the suburban lawns. If anyone had been watching, they would have been struck by the car's erratic progress. It nosed forward a few yards, braked suddenly, paused, then lurched into gear again. A few moments later it repeated the manoeuvre. Perhaps the driver was afraid of ice except that the road had been ploughed and salted only that afternoon. Perhaps he was lost, or drunk. That might explain why the car always stopped in the shadows.

'In a different neighbourhood we'd be arrested for soliciting,' Nick complained.

They'd slept through the brief day; now it was evening. Nick advanced the car three more driveways and halted. Emily sat beside him with the laptop open on her knees. The glow of the screen was the only light in the car.

'Here's one.' She tapped the trackpad twice. 'Oh encrypted. No good.'

Nick tapped the accelerator again. They'd set out from the motel an hour ago to find an Internet cafe, but the sleepy commuter town had no provision for tourists. They'd tried the public library, but that was closed. In the end the best they could come up with was trundling down residential streets trying to piggyback an unwitting family's airwaves.

Nick turned a corner and stopped beside a cl.u.s.ter of snow-covered trash cans. Emily leaned closer to the screen. 'How about this? "Hauser Family Network unsecured wireless connection."'

'That's what we want.'

Nick took the laptop from her and clicked the new connection.

CONNECTING TO HOST 190.168.0.1.

A green icon shaped like a radio tower appeared. He pa.s.sed the laptop back to Emily, who opened a web browser and typed in an address. Mottled parchment lit up the screen.

'Is that it?'

'The British Library have two Gutenberg Bibles. They've scanned both of them and put them online.'

Emily turned the computer so he could see better. Dense text stood in two columns on the page, each as straight as a knife. Time had browned the parchment but the ink remained vividly black, defying the centuries. Despite the Gothic typeface and its obvious age, the design was startlingly clean.

'I can see why people get excited about it.'

'Those straight margins were his calling card. Scribes couldn't get the right-hand margins to line up so cleanly; you can only do it if you have the freedom to move the type around and s.p.a.ce it exactly.'

'Guy must have been a perfectionist.'

Emily extracted the printout of the rea.s.sembled page. On the back she'd written a series of letters and numbers next to brief descriptions of the card figures.

'Read me the page numbers.'

Nick tried and failed to find them. Emily pointed to a column.

'f.117r?'

'F stands for folio the physical, double-sided leaf. Medieval books didn't have page numbering like we do, so historians number from the first leaf. The final letter stands for recto or verso the front side of the leaf, which appears as the right-hand page when you open the book, or the reverse side. So what we would count as page three would actually be-'

'f.2r,' said Nick. 'Top side of the second leaf. Got it.'

One by one, he read out the page numbers. There were about a dozen of them, starting from f.117r about page 233, he figured and ending at f.280r, some 325 pages later. It was a time-consuming process. For each reference, Emily had to find the scanned page, read the Latin text, then work out which book of the Bible it came from. At that point she read it out to Nick, who jotted the reference down next to the page and the description of the image.

But his thoughts were elsewhere. Somehow, the arcane system of page numbering had prompted a thought, an irritation at the back of his mind like a pebble in his shoe. He worried at it while Emily tapped out her searches on the computer.

'What's next?'

He consulted the list. 'f.226r.'

'Got it.' She stared at the screen for a moment. 'The sins I have committed outnumber the sands of the sea. I am not worthy to look up and see the height of Heaven because of the mult.i.tude of my iniquities.'

Nick waited for her to read out the chapter and verse. When she didn't say anything, he glanced across. Emily was staring at the screen.

'What is it?'

'What picture goes with that page?'

Nick consulted the chart. 'A digging bear.'

'The same one that's on the card?'

He didn't even need to check. 'Why?'

'That page is the prayer of Mana.s.ses.' She turned, her face glowing with discovery. 'The prayer that's supposed to be part of the lost book of the Bible, the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.'

'He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing .. .'

'. . . which is hidden in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. And here it is, with an ill.u.s.tration from the card on that same page.'

They sat there for a moment in silence.

'I don't get it,' Nick said at last. 'All these clues join up, but they just go round in a circle. The Bible with the ill.u.s.trations by the Master of the Playing Cards is in Princeton, right? That can't be what Gillian was after. So there must be another book that connects with the card, with the Bible, and with the bestiary Gillian found in Paris.'

'Another book of beasts.'

'So where is it?'

Emily stared at the windscreen. Condensation made the outside world invisible. It was too apt, Nick thought: stuck in a fogged-up car going nowhere.

'There must be another piece of the jigsaw,' said Emily.

'Maybe it was on the first page of the bestiary. The one that got cut out.'

'Maybe there's more here. We haven't looked at all the Master's pictures yet.'

Emily leaned over the computer again and began typing, her keystrokes erratic with nervous haste. Nick glanced at the display. Printed page on web page, the fifteenth-century cowskin rewritten in the liquid crystals of the screen. For all the gulf of technology, it struck him how similar they were in essence: vehicles for information. However you wrote a page number or for that matter, a biblical chapter and verse it was nothing more than an address for looking up data.

Page 233, f.117r, Judges 5:4: ultimately they were all shorthand for (Emily said), 'The earth trembled and the heavens poured out water.' The same way that 190.168.0.1 was a convenient equivalence for the Hauser family's home broadband.

But what if you reversed it? What if the information pointed back to its number?

Nick flipped over the piece of paper in his hands. Recto and verso, front and back. He looked at the ox in the fuzzy engraving and thought of a smiling cow standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in its hoof.

I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz Emily had stopped typing and was staring through the window, lost in thought. Nick grabbed the laptop.

'I haven't finished,' she protested.

'I won't be a minute.'

His fingers skidded on the keyboard in his excitement; he had to type the address three times before he got it right. The rainbow-striped cow grinned from the top of her ladder.

He pressed a b.u.t.ton. The written address resolved itself into a string of digits which he scribbled on the sheet of paper.

Emily leaned over, still looking cross. 'What's that?'

'Every web address translates to a number.' He opened the car door. Fifty yards up the street, a payphone huddled under a blanket of snow. 'Maybe another kind of number.'

He ran to the payphone. Fresh snowflakes were beginning to spiral down in the light from street lamps; his fingers almost froze to the metal b.u.t.tons as he dialled the number and waited.

The s.p.a.ce between each ring felt like an eternity. Every crackle on the line sounded like a receiver being lifted off the hook. Then: 'Ja?'

'Is that Olaf?' Nick said in German.

A pause. 'Who is calling?'

'It's about Gillian Lockhart,'

The man said nothing.

'Have I got the wrong number?'

'Who are you?'

'A friend of hers from America. She's missing; I'm trying to find her.'

'Ha.' Another long silence. 'I don't know where she is.'

Nick gripped the receiver tighter. His breath frosted the gla.s.s of the phone booth.

'But I know where she was going.'