The Book Of Secrets Part 20

Gillian, on the other hand, was spontaneous. Sometimes, when he was too tired to keep up, Nick thought it was almost a neurosis. She'd find a flyer for a concert or an exhibition lying in the gutter and go that night; friends he'd never heard of would call at midnight, just arrived in New York, and she'd scoot out to Penn Station to bring them back to the apartment. She'd meet a guy on a train and be in his apartment at two the next morning playing canasta.

'People's lives go like clockwork,' she told him. 'They start out buzzing with energy, and by the time they hit thirty they've totally run down. If you don't act, you're doomed. You need to introduce some random chaos into your life.'

After she left him, he'd seen those flyers blowing down the street and wondered if that was what he'd been. Something she'd found, an impulse acted on to prove she still could. Random chaos.

The taxi office was a small kiosk that had somehow wormed itself into a crevice between two large buildings. There wasn't much inside: a wilting plastic pot plant, three plastic chairs scarred by cigarettes and two women sitting behind a window in front of a faded map of Paris. Their faces were so heavily made up that they too might have been plastic. Both wore coats, wool hats and fingerless gloves. Each time the phone rang the woman on the left would answer it, bellow a series of questions, then relay the answers to the woman beside her. She in turn would pick up a radio mike and repeat everything the first woman had just said. It looked like the sort of division of labour that only the French could have dreamed up.

Nick went to the window. 'Do you speak English?'

The radio woman was still shouting orders into her microphone. The telephone woman glanced at him, then jerked her head at her colleague. Nick waited for her to finish.

'Anglais,' the telephone woman barked.

The radio woman scowled. 'A little.'

'A friend of mine took a taxi on the fourteenth of December. I want to know where she went.' He looked around, losing confidence. There was no sign of a computer, not even a filing cabinet. 'Do you have any records?'

The woman stared at him from turquoise lagoons of eyeshadow. 'Non.'

If he was honest, he hadn't expected any more. Hope was painful; he was almost grateful to her for killing it off. He turned away.

'Nom,' the woman said behind him again. 'Sa nom. Her name.'

Nick looked back, sheepish as he realised he'd misunderstood.

'Gillian Lockhart.'

The ring of a telephone interrupted the exchange. The ritual played itself out between the two women. When it was dispatched, the radio woman looked back at him. Closing her eyes, she recited as if into a microphone, 'Gillian Lockhart. 14.30. From rue Saint Antoine, she comes here.'

Nick looked around the plastic office. 'Here? Ici?'

The receptionist pointed across the road to a grand neocla.s.sical building. 'The station. The Gare de l'Est.'

It extended his quest by a few minutes, so Nick walked across the street and into the station. It smelled of diesel fumes and steel. He stared at the banks of monitors on stalks that sprouted from the walls, reading the destinations. He'd always loved European railway stations: the grandiose architecture dimmed with soot, the sleek trains, the destinations that stretched across a continent rather than just safe commuter suburbs. He read the names off the flickering screens. Bale; Epernay; Frankfurt; Munich; Salzburg; Strasbourg; Vienna.

Where now?

The tongue of the turnstile rolled over and spat Emily out into the foyer. The information desk was ahead of her in the middle of the room. She searched for Nick but couldn't see him.

She glanced at the gla.s.s wall to her right, through onto the balcony that overlooked the forested courtyard. In summer it became a cafe, packed with tables and chairs; now it was all but deserted. A short man in a silver puffer jacket leaned against the bal.u.s.trade smoking a cigarette. Was he looking at her?

He threw his cigarette b.u.t.t onto the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. Emily went up to the information desk.

'I had a message in the reading room. Is there a Nick Ash to see-'

'Right here.'

A hand clamped on her arm so tight she thought the bone would snap. It pulled her away from the nodding receptionist and spun her towards the door, pulling her along. Fear froze her into obedience. Was this what had happened to Gillian? She looked up and saw a heavyset man with a crooked nose and bristling black eyebrows. His left arm reached across his body to hold her; his right jabbed something round and blunt into the small of her back.

'I have a gun. Do not scream; do not try to run.'

She would never have run. Her legs were jelly; she could barely walk. Her captor almost had to drag her across the carpet. They were halfway to the door already. Outside, the man in the puffer jacket hurried to meet them.

The beep of an alarm cut through her panic. By the entrance, the security guard was patting down a long-haired student whose profusion of chains and studs had set off the metal detector. Emily stared at it. Could you really get a gun through that? Or was he bluffing?

'Please don't take me,' she whispered to her captor. They were almost at the exit. 'I know what you want. It's in my bag. You can have it. Just please let me go.'

He paused just shy of the velvet rope that marked the edge of the foyer. At least he was listening. He looked down at her empty hands.

'Where is your bag?'

She jerked her head at the cloakroom. 'I had to check it in before I went to the reading room.'

As abruptly as he'd grabbed her, he swivelled her back around and marched her towards the cloakroom. Just before they got there he let her go, pushing her off balance so that she stumbled headlong into the counter. She thrust her ticket at the startled attendant, who came back a moment later with her brown bucket bag. As soon as she had it in her hands she felt the grip back on her elbow.

'One euro,' said the attendant.

Emily snapped open the bag and rummaged in the bottom. The vice around her arm tightened; she felt faint with the pain. But she'd found what she was looking for. She pulled out a coin but she was clumsy. It slipped out of her fingers and dropped onto the carpet.

She smiled a weak apology at the attendant and made to bend down and pick it up. Unsure whether to allow it or not, her captor loosened his grip.

It was enough. She came up faster than he'd expected, knocking him back off balance. That brought her room to turn around. She thrust her hand up towards his face and before he could respond, squeezed hard on the can wrapped in her fist.

A jet of pepper spray erupted from the nozzle, straight into his face. He reeled away clutching his eyes. An alarm bell started to screech; Emily wondered if the spray might have triggered a smoke detector. But it was coming from the door. The man in the puffer jacket had seen what was happening and had burst in, triggering the metal detector. He was reaching inside his bulky coat, then went down as a security guard tackled him to the floor.

Emily picked up her bag and fled.

x.x.xVI.

Stra.s.sburg

A paw was taking shape. Just as the mother bear licks unformed flesh into the shape of her young, the chisel's tongue rasped against the stone to carve the image. I could already see the curve of a haunch bulging out of the block; a sloping back and a k.n.o.b that would become an ear or a snout.

The stone carver stood over his bench in the square and chipped it out. Behind him loomed the cathedral, where the animal would eventually graze among pillared glades and vaulted branches.

This is how G.o.d forms us all, I thought: raining down blows to draw out shapes from the crude stone of our creation. A tap and a crack, a puff of dust, the rattle of fragments falling on the cobbles. Another piece of our imperfection cut away. The smoothest skin is scar tissue.

'The curve of the knee is too sharp.'

A shadow fell over the bench. Drach had arrived, stealing up behind me in silence. He glanced at the bear, emerging from the stone as if from a forest, then at the drawing pinned to the tabletop.

The stone carver looked up. He was well-used to Drach's interruptions. 'The bear needs to fit the column. I made him crouch lower.'

Drach laughed and swung away. I followed him through the stone yard. It was like a cemetery: a field of stones in every stage of refinement, from boulders fresh out of the quarry to fluted sections of arches that only wanted a keystone to make them stand erect.

'That is the way to create copies,' Drach said. 'I make a picture and he copies it. What could be simpler?'

'You said yourself it isn't a true copy.'

'True enough.'

'Not for me.'

We sat down on a roughly dressed ashlar. On a stone capital opposite, a bearded man parted foliage like curtains and peered out. I squinted, but it was not one of Kaspar's.

'I have found a way we can raise the money,' he said, without preamble.

A season had pa.s.sed since our experiment in Dritzehn's cellar. I had not meant it to, but sometimes time escapes all plan and reason. For three days afterwards I could not raise my spirits to even think about it. When the worst of my melancholy had pa.s.sed, I no longer cared. I found other things to occupy me; I concentrated my energies on earning my living and maintaining my household. My stays in St Argobast became longer; Drach's visits less frequent. The pa.s.sion that had run so full in my veins had eased. Yet when Drach sent a boy to call me to this meeting, it had flooded back unbidden, as high as ever.

'Tell me.'

'There is a widow in this town named Ellewibel. She lives by the wine market.'

He paused, playing up the suspense. I humoured him. 'Do you expect me to marry this widow for her fortune?'

'No. But she has a daughter, Ennelin. Twenty-five years old and not yet married. If Ellewibel could find a husband to take her, the dowry would be immense. All the money we need to advance our art.'

I stared at him. He smiled, nodding, encouraging me to follow his train of thought.

'That is the most preposterous idea you have ever suggested.'

'Why?'

'You know why.'

We had never spoken of the demon that possessed me. But from the moment we had shared our first drink in the Wild Man, he had surely known. He allowed me to wash his back in the river and watch him dress; when he stayed at my house we slept in the same bed wrapped together like an old married couple. Sometimes he allowed my hand to slide into the hollow of his hips, so I could lie awake and torment myself with possibilities. I never went any further. The demon had wormed itself into my soul so deep it had become a part of me, a tumour I could not remove without also destroying myself. Drach was different. I knew he did not desire me, but encouraged my cravings because he loved perversity, danger, the hair-thin ledge he walked along the cliffs of d.a.m.nation. Perhaps, I begged G.o.d in the solitary hours of the night, because he loved me.

But now he was pitiless. 'You are a bachelor of thirty-some years. You have an income, a house, a good family behind you. Why should you not marry this girl?'

Because I love you, I wanted to scream. But I understood that to say it would destroy everything.

'If she is twenty-five with a substantial dowry, why is she still unmarried?'

He stroked my cheek with his finger, taunting me. 'So uncharitable, Johann. She is probably a rosebud who has not yet opened.'

'At twenty-five?'

'Then perhaps she is as ugly as a two-headed mule.' He shrugged. 'You shouldn't mind. When indulgences are pouring out of our press like wine, you can buy one to salve your conscience.'

He slid off the stone and paced around me. 'If every challenge was overcome at the first attempt, it would never have been a challenge. Do you know how many sheets of paper and copper I ruined to make the playing cards? How many three-legged bears and unicorns that looked like goats?'

'Your unicorn still looks like a goat.' I wanted to wound him, but he shrugged it off with rare modesty.

'Catch me one and I will draw it better.'

'At least a unicorn would be worth something.'

'But we are hunting a rarer beast. If when we make it right, a more valuable beast.'

He pulled a coin out of his pocket and flipped it towards me. He must have brought it with him precisely for this piece of theatre, for I never otherwise knew him to carry any money. I s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air.

'Imagine that is your bride.'

The image on the coin was a man, John the Baptist, his head framed in a heart-shaped halo. I read the inscription around the border. IOHANNIS ARCHIEPISCOPVS MAGVNTINVS. John, Archbishop of Mainz.

'I saw Dunne the goldsmith yesterday,' Drach said. 'He has been carving a new plate which he says will make the lettering more even. But it takes hours to make. He cannot afford the time without extra payment.'

I was not listening. The lettering on the coin had transported me back to my childhood. Some colleagues of my father from the mint had lived in our house for a time. A die maker had been one. I remembered tiptoeing into his room one afternoon and watching him at work. He took the block of iron that he had engraved with the design, held a steel rod against it and struck it hard with a hammer. Sparks flew; I whimpered in surprise. He heard me and beckoned me over. He let me hold the steel rod and told me it was called a punch. He showed me the end, which had been carved away so that the letter A stood proud on its tip. When he struck it against the die, it left a perfect imprint in the iron. Later it would be filled with gold, and the impression of that letter hammered into the coin. Such was the unceasing cycle of creation and reproduction: punch and form, male and female, stroke and imprint.

Like all obvious ideas, the wonder afterwards is that it took so long to discover. Why had we wasted months trying to carve the words with a graving tool, when Dunne and I both knew that the best way to imprint letters in metal is with a punch-stamp? All I can say is that Drach had engraved his cards, and we were so bent on following his method we did not pause to think.

Drach was watching me impatiently. He hated to be ignored. I met his gaze and smiled. Of course I saw what he was doing. But I could not help myself.

'How much is Ennelin's dowry?'

x.x.xVII.

Paris

'Could they have followed me?'

It had taken Emily three hours to get back. She'd changed trains, jumped indiscriminately on and off buses, browsed in the reflections of shop windows, made sudden detours all the while looking over her shoulder for any sign of pursuit. Darkness had fallen by the time she sneaked back into the hotel. She'd shaken Nick awake from his jet-lagged sleep and dragged him to a cafe in a quiet backstreet near Montparna.s.se. She still didn't feel safe.

'If they'd followed you, they'd have come back to the hotel.' Nick sipped his beer and looked around the cafe for the dozenth time. He couldn't sit still. 'It was lucky you had that pepper spray.'

'I had a bad experience once.' Emily barely moved. Shock gripped her like stone. 'It must have been the book. It must have triggered some kind of alarm somewhere. A tripwire.'

Not so long ago it would have sounded ludicrously paranoid. Now, Nick just nodded. 'Maybe that's how they found Gillian. That's why she left her library card in the bank vault.' The cards Gillian had left them were beginning to look more like a box of sharpened knives than a treasure trove. 'If only we could find her that easily.'

Emily cupped her palms around her mug of coffee in silence. Twice she looked as if she was going to say something, but held back. Nick could guess what it was.

'If you want to go home, I understand.' He said it quickly, knowing he'd regret it if he gave himself time to think about it. 'G.o.d knows what those guys would have done to you if you hadn't escaped. There's no reason for you to risk it for Gillian.'