The Book Of Secrets Part 14

He'd started to rush his words, spilling out the grievances and injustices that were swilling around inside him. He felt energised, purged. 'All because of that card.'

'Because of the card,' Emily repeated. She looked shocked by his outburst but less than he'd expected. 'I looked at it some more last night. Of the eight animals on it, three don't appear on any of the other cards.'

'It could still be a forgery.'

'Or else Gillian Lockhart made one of the most valuable finds in the field in the last twenty years.' She spoke solemnly, no trace of exaggeration.

'I thought you said it would only be worth ten thousand dollars.'

Emily's look made Nick cringe. 'That card would be one of the first ever printings from copper engraving. It's also an impressive work of art in its own right. The money you'd pay for it doesn't begin to describe what it's worth.'

'Worth someone killing for?'

Emily retreated a little. 'Maybe it's not the card. Maybe that's only part of something else.' She tipped her head to one side and examined him as she might a medieval tapestry. 'There's something else, isn't there?'

Nick had always been a hopeless liar. 'I can't tell you that.'

'Can't or don't want to?'

'Believe me, you don't want to know.'

She leaned forward over the table. 'I do.' Again her naked stare. 'What else did you find?'

Nick swallowed. The laminated sides of his paper cup were as wizened as tree bark from being mangled in his hands. He looked out of the window, listening for the squawk of sirens.

'Gillian sent me another message. The same time as the card, but I only just got it.' He didn't elaborate how. 'It gives an address.'

'You think Gillian might be there. Or have left something there?' Emily's face was alight with excitement, painfully vulnerable. 'You're going to find it.'

Nick didn't deny it. 'Please don't tell the police. Not until tomorrow, at least.'

'I won't.' Emily spun the water bottle on the table. She had a habit of tucking her arms in close to her sides when she was thinking, Nick had noticed. When she looked up, her gaze was clear and strong.

'I'll come with you.'

It would be a lie to say he hadn't thought of it. Part of him desperately wanted her with him a companion, a confidante, a friend he barely knew. But it was madness.

'No.' He tried to sound definite.

Emily just stared at him, manipulating the silence.

'It would be too dangerous. For both of us. We don't know each other. For all you know I'm a thief and a murderer.'

A flicker of Emily's eyes dismissed the idea. 'And it's not like we're just hopping over to New Jersey. It's .. . a long trip.'

'It's in Paris, isn't it?' Emily bit her lip. 'I thought you said the police confiscated your pa.s.sport.'

Nick marvelled at how someone so delicate could be so relentless. 'I'm not interested in the card. I just want to find Gillian.'

'Of course. I want to help you.'

'Why?'

'Because I don't want to stay in New York, coming home every evening and wondering if that's the night they'll come back for me. Because I want to find out if that card really exists. And because I think you'll need all the help you can get.'

She put the bottle down. It rang hollow on the plastic table. 'How do we get there?'

'There's a Continental flight departing JFK for Brussels Zaventem at six thirty tonight.' The agent tapped on his computer. 'That has availability.'

Nick couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a travel agency probably not since college, when the Internet got invented. He'd forgotten how slow it could be. He tried not to peer over his shoulder too often at the traffic crawling down Forty-Second Street.

'I just need to see your pa.s.sports.'

Emily snapped open her purse and slid her pa.s.sport across the desk. Nick reached inside his coat for the travel wallet, feeling the stiff lump of the booklet inside. He fished it out and laid it on top of Emily's, slightly fanned out like cards, waiting for the dealer's verdict.

The travel agent flipped through it and checked the photograph. 'You're British?' he asked Nick.

'On my mother's side.' He'd applied for the pa.s.sport when he'd gone to Germany, to save the ha.s.sle of getting a work permit. He'd never imagined he'd use it to sneak out of his home country. He still wasn't sure if it would work.

It seemed to satisfy the agent, at least. He handed them back.

'Enjoy your flight.'

XXVI.

Stra.s.sburg, 1434

Stra.s.sburg the city of roads. Roads from the north, from the rich cloth markets of Bruges, and London beyond; roads south from Milan, Pisa and across the Mediterranean to the dark coast of Africa; roads which came from the west, from Paris and Champagne, and continued east into the heartlands of empires: Vienna, Constantinople, Damascus and the spiced cities of the East. And a few miles distant the great flowing road of the Rhine, the warp of my life.

The roads were the arteries of Christendom; Stra.s.sburg was its heart. It stood on an island in the river Ill, a tributary to the Rhine, which necessity and human ingenuity had channelled into a many-stranded necklace of ca.n.a.ls ringing the city with water and stone. Merely entering the city was a bewildering journey across bridges and moats, through gates, towers and narrow alleys that seemed to lead nowhere but another bridge, until at last you turned a corner and came out in a great square. There, where all roads met, stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. There I found what I sought.

I arrived on the road from the west. It was a perfect spring morning: a gentle sun in a smalt blue sky, following rain the night before that had washed the streets clean. A dewy freshness lingered in the air and brought colour to my cheeks. I was unrecognisable from the wretch who had prostrated himself before Tristan's furnace. The scalds and blisters on my hands had healed, with only a telltale gap in my beard where the vitriol had burned my cheek. I had a new coat of sober blue cloth and a new pair of boots I had bought in Troges with money I had earned copying indulgences over Christmas. I felt a new man. Strangers no longer recoiled or crossed the road when I stopped to ask them my way. And so I found my path to the house at the sign of the bear.

I would have found it anyway. It stood opposite the cathedral, across the square, which had become a field of stones for the building of the new tower on the cathedral's west front. I weaved my way between the vast blocks. On the far side, a gilded bear climbed an iron vine hanging over the door of a goldsmith's shop.

I took the card from the bag that hung around my neck and held it up. I hardly needed to look. After four months every image was stamped on my being, as perfect a copy as the card itself. The bear in the top-left corner was the same, though on the card the vine was invisible.

I approached the shop nervously. It was too familiar: the rings on their spindles, the boxes of beads and corals, the gold plates and cups gleaming from the shadows behind the cabinet bars. Even the man at the counter reminded me of Konrad Schmidt, paternal in a way my own father never was. He offered me a wary welcome as I approached.

I held up the card and saw at once that he recognised it.

'Did you make this?'

Paris

A fine mist hung in the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock that morning, as if steam was still settling from a hundred years ago. A policeman loitered by the cafe at the end of the platform and watched the pa.s.sengers just arrived off the early train from Brussels. There weren't many on a Sat.u.r.day morning: clubbers not yet sober and football fans not yet drunk; a few solitary businessmen; gaggles of backpackers wearing shorts and sandals in their perpetual adolescent summer.

Last off the train came a curious couple a man of about thirty in jeans and a long black coat, and a young woman in a high-necked red coat and bright red shoes. The policeman watched them. They were clearly travelling together, but there was an awkwardness between them that suggested unfamiliarity. They spoke without looking at each other; when the man had to squeeze past a pillar and brushed the woman's arm, both apologised. A one-night stand, the policeman decided two colleagues who had got drunk on business, too young to have made a habit of it yet. The man probably counted himself the luckier of the two. The girl was beautiful, in a prim sort of way. The policeman undressed her with his eyes, following the curve of her slim legs to the hem of her coat, then to the small, tightly belted waist and the full b.r.e.a.s.t.s above, to the dark eyes, disarranged hair and provocatively scarlet lips. The man just looked scruffy and dazed. Perhaps he had a wife to face.

Nick's stomach tightened as he caught the policeman watching them. Had he been recognised? Was he on some sort of watch list? Had the NYPD circulated his photograph to Interpol? His movements felt more and more unnatural as he walked towards the policeman, his body seizing up under the pressure. He half-turned towards Emily and muttered something irrelevant; she nodded and looked uncomfortable.

At least the jet lag helped: it was hard to look too tense when you were still half asleep. Nick had spent the short night cramped upright on the plane while Emily dozed under a blanket next to him. Fear kept him awake right across the Atlantic: fear of what he had left behind, fear of what he would find waiting for him. Just as he'd begun to nod off, the cabin crew had turned on the lights to begin their descent into Brussels. Then it had been a rush through the airport, a taxi into the city and the first train to Paris. That had been Emily's idea. From Brussels they could travel anywhere in Europe without having to show their pa.s.sports again. Though there were other ways to be discovered.

Nick looked around and realised they were past the policeman. He was too tired to be relieved. At the back of the station they queued ten minutes for a taxi.

'Cent soixante dix-sept rue de Rivoli,' Emily told the driver. Nick looked at her in bleary-eyed surprise.

'I spent six months here for my doctorate,' she explained. 'It's hard to do much original research if you can't speak the language.'

It reminded them both how little they knew each other. Emily clutched her bag on her lap and leaned against the door; Nick looked out the car window.

Number 177 rue de Rivoli was an anonymous building, a bank sandwiched between an American chain store and a shoe shop. A guard was just rolling back the iron security gate when they arrived. They got a coffee and a croissant in a cafe across the road and waited for other customers to arrive. Lost in their weary thoughts, they barely spoke to each other. Nick felt as if he was limping over the finish line of a long nightmarish race. All he wanted to do was give up and sleep.

At half past nine they walked into the bank. A receptionist behind a grey desk greeted them, and listened patiently while Emily explained that she had a valuable necklace her grandmother had given her and needed somewhere safe to store it while she pursued her studies in Paris for six months.

The receptionist nodded. They had deposit boxes available for just such a purpose.

'Are they secure?'

The receptionist gave the sort of shrug they surely taught in all French schools. 'Oui, je pense.' She saw Nick looking blank and switched seamlessly to English. 'You have a card which opens the door to the safe room, and a pin number to open your box.'

'Et ca coute combien?' Emily persisted in French. 'Now you pay five hundred euros, and then each month one hundred euros.'

Emily affected indecision. 'Is it possible to see the safe room?'

The receptionist pointed to a gla.s.s-panelled door in the back wall. 'C'est la.'

They walked over and peered through. Behind the door was a small carpeted room with rows of anonymous steel cabinets running from wall to wall. Red numbers glowed from digital readouts on their faces. Nick tried to find box 628 but couldn't make out the numbers through the thick, bulletproof gla.s.s. Though the door looked like wood it was cold to the touch three-inch steel.

'I guess we're not breaking in there,' he muttered.

They went back to the receptionist. Emily reached in her purse and pulled out five hundred-euro notes and her pa.s.sport.

The receptionist gave an apologetic smile. 'You have to pay in advance six months. Another six hundred euros.'

Nick winced. Emily handed over the money and waited while the receptionist tapped the details into her computer. A machine under the desk spat out a plastic card, which she handed to Emily with her pa.s.sport and a sheet of paper.

'That is your PIN number. You have box 717. Merci beaucoup.'

Emily swiped her card. The steel door opened with a hiss of air, then closed with a heavy click the moment they'd stepped through. They walked silently across the carpeted floor. The red numbers on a thousand doors blinked from the sidelines, every one slightly out of sync with the others. Together with the harsh fluorescents above, Nick felt as if he'd stepped into a migraine.

Emily stopped in front of one of the deposit boxes. 'This is 628.'

Nick angled himself so that he stood between Emily and the door, fighting back the urge to check if anyone was watching. Emily pulled on a pair of black leather gloves. With sharp, birdlike movements, she pecked out the number: 300481.

The door swung ajar. Emily reached in.

Hans Dunne the goldsmith took the card from my hand and glanced at it.

'Where did you get this?'

'A n.o.bleman in Paris.' A vision of Jacques' broken face flashed before me. 'He said it came from here.'

Dunne laid the card on his counter. 'Not from me.'

Four months' pent-up hope tottered on its foundations. Before it could crash, Dunne continued, 'That was one of Kaspar Drach's. The painter.' A strange look crossed his face. 'Among other things.'

'Is he here?'

He saw me peering over his shoulders at the apprentices in the workshop behind him. 'Not now. Come back tomorrow if you still want to see him.'

'Where is he today?'

'At the crossroads of St Argobast.' He glanced at the sun. 'You'll struggle to get there and back before dusk.'

'How will I recognise him?' I persisted. 'Look for a man on a ladder.'

There are many days, perhaps most, when destiny eludes us, slipping from our grasp while we b.u.mp around like blind men. There are days, few and rare, when it runs to meet us like a mother gathering her children. And then there are days when it taunts and teases but holds out the promise of victory to the persistent. That day I would not be denied. I felt it in my soul, a trembling excitement that only grew as I wound my way back across the bridges and ca.n.a.ls, past the mills and farms that lined the banks of the Ill. Canvas sails spun the sun into flashes of light. Yellow-downed ducklings teetered in the mud at the water's edge.

I reached the crossroads an hour before sunset. The labourers had left the fields and the road was empty. Haze filled the air. A few birds chirruped in the hedgerows, but otherwise all was still. A little beyond, I could see a few timber-framed houses that made the hamlet of St Argobast.

A copse of three rowans, just coming to bud, stood where the roads met. A panel showing the Virgin had been raised on a high pole in front of them, a shrine for travellers. A man with a palette in one hand and a brush in the other stood on a ladder against it, apparently careless of the height. Though he had his back to me, I knew at once he was the man I had come to find. I only had to look at the Madonna he had painted. The crown had been smudged into a halo, and instead of a deer there was a docile child sitting on her skirts, but otherwise she was the queen from the cards. The same abundant hair, one raised hand carelessly stroking it; the same full lips and coquettish eyes admiring her reflection in the hand mirror which in this incarnation had become the face of her child. With her full hips, her swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her legs spread wide open under the folds of her gown, she was the most brazen Virgin I had ever seen.

I walked to the foot of the ladder. 'Are you Drach?'

He looked down. The sun hung behind his head like a nimbus, hiding his face in its brightness.

'Did you make the cards? The deck of birds and beasts and flowers and wild men that miraculously duplicate themselves?' I held up the eight. The low sun shone through so that the paper glowed amber in my hand. The swirling outlines of the beasts traced themselves on the back of the card.

I heard the soft laughter that afterwards I came to know so well.

'I did.'