The Book Of Secrets Part 45

'First you have to find my present to you,' she told him, with a gleam in her eye that said he'd have his work cut out.

He'd turned the apartment upside down. Even Bret had been shocked by the mess. Gillian watched, goading him with hints that seemed completely arbitrary. The waffles went cold. Several times he begged her to tell him, but she just laughed and said love would find a way. Eventually he got so mad he pulled on his clothes and stormed out to the park.

She never told him.

Bret found it four days later. He was sitting on the toilet reading a dirty magazine when he came to the end of the toilet tissue. He came blundering out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, a tiny envelope in one hand and a cardboard tube in the other.

'I think it's for you.'

Bret had already opened the envelope. There was a card inside with a plastic gold key on the front, under the legend 'Key to my heart'. Over the flap Gillian had written three words.

'You got me.'

'Gillian used to have a trick.'

He went over to the radiator and pulled the toilet roll off its holder. He slid his finger in the cardboard tube. Don't expect anything, he told himself.

There was a crack. He squeezed his fingernail into it and teased it apart. The cardboard tube coiled back. Instead of a flimsy wad of toilet tissue, he felt the crisp crackle of writing paper. He pulled it out. Two pages, ragged at the top where they'd been torn from a spiral notebook.

A creak sounded from the stair.

LXXVI.

Mainz

Devils haunted our house. So many of our crew believed. Over the next autumn and winter, a sullen joylessness overtook our works. They did not speak of their fears in front of me; they knew I did not like it. But I caught s.n.a.t.c.hes in conversations heard through open doors: nervous comments muttered under their breath. I knew some of the men still distrusted the press. They found its power unnatural, felt discomfited by its casual surpa.s.sing of human ability. Some ascribed its powers to black magic. I thought these notions must have come from the townsfolk, anxious and ignorant of the goings-on behind our walls, but clearly many who should have known better thought so too.

And I had to admit strange things did happen. Sometimes at night I could have sworn I heard the creak and clank of the press in the room below. I thought it must be my cares creeping into my dreams, but gradually I discovered that others heard it too. One night the whole house woke to the sound of a great crash. We rushed to the press and found a fresh ink jar smashed open on the floor. We blamed the cat, or swallows who had come in the window.

Eventually it became something of a joke. When a compositor reached into his case and found an x in place of an e; when a ream of paper was found to be two sheets short; when Gotz's tools went blunt overnight; when a form left in the press was backwards next morning, men crossed themselves and blamed the press devils.

One morning, I found the compositors gathered in a high state of excitement. It was unusual to see them thus: by their nature most were sober and quiet men. They were examining a composing stick filled with type. When they had calmed enough for me to understand, Gunther explained that they had found it on the desk when they arrived for work. None knew where it had come from.

I took it through to the proofing room and rubbed ink on the type. I used my thumbs to press a sc.r.a.p of paper against it. A crude line of text appeared.

tifex is a most curious beast with mouths at 'That is no verse from the Bible,' said Gunther.

I shot him a cautioning look. I did not want him frightening the others.

'It's nonsense obviously. One of the apprentices must have crept in last night thinking to make himself a compositor.'

'The room was locked,' said Gunther's a.s.sistant.

'Then you must have forgotten to take the key out of the door.'

'Or Kaspar Drach unlocked it.'

I rounded on him in a fury. 'Drach had nothing to do with this. He is never even in this house.'

'I saw him skulking by the paper store yesterday afternoon.'

'You were mistaken.' I looked for a ruler or a stick to beat him for his insolence, but all I could reach was the composing stick. I overturned it so that the letters scattered over the table. The sentence was broken.

'You see gone.'

But I could not scatter my thoughts so easily. When at last they were settled back at their work, I left the house and hurried up the street to the Gutenberghof. I looked in on the press room, where a fresh batch of indulgences were being made, then climbed the stairs to Drach's attic.

I had not been in there for months. The room was a mess though, typically for Kaspar, even then there remained something austere about it. All the surfaces, from the floorboards to the desk in the corner, were draped white with sheets of vellum and paper. Some bore s.n.a.t.c.hes of writing; others were painted, or filled with charcoal sketches. Some looked like book pages ready for the binder; some were blank as snow.

I stood in the doorway. 'Where did all this come from?'

'Goats,' said Kaspar. He was wearing the silk smock he used for painting. 'And rags. You should have knocked.'

He scrambled off his stool and knelt on the floor, gathering the papers to his chest and piling them on the straw mattress in the corner. I stepped around him and crossed to the desk to see what he was working on.

It was a quire from a Bible. For a second my eyes tricked me, convincing me it must be one of mine. Before I could embarra.s.s myself, sense returned. It was enormous a quarter larger than mine at least, so big that even when folded it overflowed Kaspar's desk and relegated his paints to the floor. The gall-brown letters were neat enough but after months of staring at the pressed Bible crooked as an old man's teeth. Strange to relate, I looked at it and felt a stir of something like loathing.

'Not yours,' said Kaspar. 'It was commissioned by a curate at the cathedral.'

I admired the illumination. The page was framed by a riotous border of twisting columbines, in whose tendrils lurked the usual creatures who inhabited Kaspar's world. An affronted stag recoiling as a wild man brandished a forked spear at him; two old lions squatting on a flower stem with mournful expressions, beneath a rose that concealed a demon's face. A bear crouched in the corner and tried to dig up the roots of the plant.

'You have surpa.s.sed yourself.'

Kaspar stroked the vellum page, supple and soft. 'If you have your way, there will be no more like it. You know Reissman, the scribe who lives above the Three Crowns? It took him a year and three months to write this. In almost the same time, you can make a hundred times as many, and double again. How will he survive?'

'Your cards have existed for twenty years now. There is no shortage of artists.' I shrugged. 'What difference can one man make in the world?'

I turned away from the desk and scanned the other papers around the room. Most lay bundled under a blanket on Kaspar's bed, but a few had escaped his sweep. One I noticed showed sketches of an ox with curved back horns; another a serpent with a face like a man.

'Have you taken any other commissions? Another bestiary, perhaps?'

He didn't respond.

'We found a curious fragment of type in the composing room this morning. It looked like words from a bestiary.' I tried to look in his eyes, but his gaze was slippery as an eel.

'It must have been the press devil.' A sly look. 'Or perhaps Peter Schoeffer. He is an ambitious young man. He does not want to spend his life pressing Bibles. I overheard him the other day in the type foundry: he thinks you should use the second press to begin a new work.'

'One of the men said he had seen you snooping around the Humbrechthof yesterday,' I persisted.

Kaspar turned back to the giant Bible on his desk. He picked up a brush. 'He must have confused me with Herr Fust. How is he, by the way?'

'He'd be happier if paper didn't go missing from our stores.' I stared hard at the piles of paper on the bed. Kaspar, as ever, ignored me.

'And his daughter Christina?'

I stared at him in astonishment. 'How should I know? I have only ever met her twice, when Fust had me to dine at his house. She cannot be more than fifteen.'

'Old enough to marry.'

I laughed: an old man's laugh awash with bile.

'Are you still trying to arrange me a marriage? Thank G.o.d, I already have Fust's money. I do not need his daughter's dowry.'

Kaspar dipped the brush in an oyster sh.e.l.l br.i.m.m.i.n.g with pink paint. 'It was just a thought. Perhaps you should make certain . . .'

'I have his money,' I repeated.

'. . . that no one else can get it.'

His brush flicked the page like a serpent's tongue, filling in the colour on the wild man's body. Seeing I would get no more sense out of him, I turned to go.

A glint of silver on the wall caught my eye, one of our Aachen mirrors: I had not seen it there before. I peered at my distorted reflection, and wished its holy rays could heal the gulf between us.

LXXVII.

Oberwinter

A creak sounded from the stair. Nick and Emily froze. Outside, the wind blew snow off the rooftop and rattled the windows in their frames. They waited for the creak to come again, to grow into the tread of mounting footsteps.

Nothing came.

'Let's get out of here.' Nick put the toilet roll back and headed out. He locked the door behind him and didn't look back. He didn't want to think about what might have happened in there.

They tiptoed down the stairs as quickly as they dared. On the first-floor landing, Nick heard the murmur of a voice from below.

'We can't stay here,' he whispered. 'They didn't rip that room apart without the owner noticing.'

'Agreed. But where can we go?'

'Anywhere.'

The owner was in the lobby, leaning on the counter and muttering into the phone. He flapped his hand to wave them down, but between the cigarette in his mouth and the receiver in front of it he couldn't manage more than a grunt.

Nick dropped the key on the counter and breezed through the front door.

'We're just going out to get some dinner. We'll be back in about an hour.'

They found a weinstube in a house off the main square, overlooking the river and the railroad tracks. It was a cosy place, with bookshelves on the walls and old wine bottles on the windowsills. The waiter tried to sit them by the front window, but Nick insisted on a table at the back, tucked behind an antique wine press. He wasn't sure who he thought he was hiding from. It was probably the only place in Oberwinter that was open.

He hadn't planned to stay long, but the moment he saw the menu he realised he was starving. He hadn't eaten since breakfast. They ordered beef stew and spatzle noodles. When the waiter disappeared into the kitchen, Nick pulled the pieces of paper out of his pocket and smoothed them on the tablecloth.

'Is that Gillian's writing?'

Nick nodded. His tired mind tried to take in what was written on the creased sheets of notepaper. It was like a replay of his own recent past. Names that would have meant nothing a week ago leaped out at him, jarring memories that had barely had time to form. 'Vandevelde B42 ink??? Other MPC images in G. Bible? 08.32 Paris arr. Strasbourg 14.29. Call Simon. Is bear key? '

The notes covered three sides of the paper, scrawled at various times and in different-coloured inks, crossed out and circled, connected by arrows that branched out into new questions. A palimpsest of the last three weeks of Gillian's life.

On the fourth side they found something different. There was little writing; instead, a sketch that looked like the plan of a building. It was roughly pentagonal, with irregular sides and angular projections. A dotted line led to one of the corners, a red X inked heavily where it met the building. Gillian had written 'Kloster Mariannenbad ' in the margin beside it, and a brief list below: rope

shovel

head lamp

bolt cutters

gun?

'Kloster means monastery,' said Nick.

'That would fit with the picture Atheldene sent us.'

The waiter came out of the kitchen and laid two steaming plates of food on the table. Nick covered the paper with his sleeve.