The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  “Because you happen to have some kind of freakish photographic memory for international religious statuary?”

  As the smile widened, his eyes slit, crinkling up at the edges. “You know how normal people like to hang up pictures of their family? Or their pets, or Jesus, or whatever? In my house, it’s nothing but Prague. Everywhere.” He tapped the postcard. “This one’s been hanging over the TV since I was seven. St. John of Nepomuk, queen’s confessor, arrested in 1393 for refusing to share her confessional secrets with the king. Patron saint of silent suffering. Though I imagine he made some noise when they threw him off the bridge.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his long black overcoat. He was seriously overdressed for both the weather and the occasion, but somehow it suited him. “Don’t strain yourself. My parents used to drill me on the salient details of all famous Czech landmarks, to make sure I learned everything I needed to know on the blessed day we finally returned to the homeland.” He stopped smiling. “Mostly I learned I hated famous Czech landmarks.”

  “I didn’t know Chris’s family was Czech.”

  “They’re not,” he said. “Not really, at least not according to my parents. My mother and his father have the same grandfather, and Chris’s side of the family skipped out, like, a hundred years ago. We were slow learners.”

  “You don’t have an accent,” I said.

  “They’re Czech. I’m American. Born here. Raised here. From here. To their great and eternal sorrow.”

  “Kind of amazing, isn’t it, the unlimited variety of ways parents find to screw you up?” I said.

  “Amazing,” he said. “I’m guessing you’d prefer I don’t ask any follow-up questions on that one?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay. Your screwed-up family is your business. Mine is mine. No need to compare notes.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a pause, not the awkward kind, but heading in that direction.

  “That’s the symbol, isn’t it?” he asked abruptly. “The one by his body?” He raised a finger, wait. “Let me stop you before you go all disingenuous on me—the cops told me there was a symbol, and I know you saw it for yourself, and we both saw what’s drawn on the back of that postcard.”

  “I have to go.”

  He grabbed my wrist. His fingers were long and delicate, but his grip was surprisingly strong. “You say he was your best friend. If you know something—”

  “I should tell you? I don’t even know you.”

  “He was family,” Eli said quietly, still holding on. “I realize that doesn’t mean anything to you. Maybe it didn’t mean much to me. But he was family, and now he’s dead.”

  “Let go of me.”

  “That symbol is the key.”

  “You’re crazy.” With a forceful wrench, I ripped my hand free. “It’s just some scribbles on an old postcard, Eli. Let it go.”

  “Like you’re going to?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “I can help you,” he said.

  I wasn’t the damsel-in-distress type, so it wasn’t the prospect of falling into a waiting prince’s arms and letting him slay the dragon that made me hesitate. It was that I was starting to feel a little too close to crazy myself, scouring ancient documents for hidden symbols and imagining secret, sinister connections where none could possibly exist. But I hadn’t imagined the postcard.

  “I’m not the one who needs help,” I said, and I knew Eli would take it as insult, but it was simple truth. Max needed me.

  I went home.

  20

  Not that it did me any good.

  CASTOREM NON PVTO DEVM INCVRIA.

  NAM SVM EGO ACTVS VEHEMENS AVLA.

  DEMVS EI MELA OPPORTUNE. JAM

  EMERSVM JAM SIT VINDICI PAEAN EI.

  PRIMVM ALIENATVS EST COR MIHI. O CITE

  OPE ELISO LICUIT FAS. SIC SINT EXEMPLA

  ET SIM EGO IMAGO DESSE. NON CRIMINIS

  MEVM OPVS AT IN PAVORE REI SVM.

  LACRIMAE SVNT; AD VNDAS MITTE, VBI

  AVET FAS.

  I did not count Castor as a god through my inattention. For I was violent and was driven from his temple. Let us give him songs as we should. Now, already now, may the hymn for that avenger have risen up! First, my heart was driven mad. Oh so quickly, once my wealth had been shattered, did heaven’s will become clear. So let these be lessons and let me be the image of failure. My work was not of crime, but still I am in fear of the matter. There are tears; send them to the waves, where heaven’s will is well.

  Crime, violence, failure, fear.

  Vengeance.

  A lightning-bolt symbol that marked a killer—that would lead me to reus, the guilty one.

  What was I supposed to get from this? What was the secret?

  What kind of failure was I that I couldn’t figure it out?

  And yes, there were moments when I paused to wonder whether I really wanted to track down the guilty one myself, given that however much I, in principle, would have loved to avenge Chris’s death, I wasn’t much of an avenging angel, lacking as I did flaming sword, armored wings, and anything with which to defend myself other than my razor-sharp wit. I wasn’t the vigilante type. So I would, under almost any other circumstances, have been content to let the police handle or mishandle things. I would have been willing to spend the rest of my life hating a shadow, even if it meant always waiting for a blade to slash out of the darkness and finish what it started. But this wasn’t about principles; this was about Max.

  Google yielded useless information about a million creepy symbols, none of them the one I wanted. I had: Max’s postcard. The letters from his room. Elizabeth’s letter, stained with Chris’s blood. Dubious connections drawn between an old man’s stroke that might or might not have been a murder attempt, a four-hundred-year-old book, and a message traced out in blood, snow, and ink that meant less to me every time I saw it.

  I had nothing.

  21

  Yellow police tape stretched around the perimeter of the old church, but they hadn’t bothered posting a guard. I did have one more thing: the key.

  The office was as we had left it, stuffy and overheated, stacks of paper and unwashed coffee mugs littering the worktable. Turning on the lights seemed risky, but my inner coward won out over my inner paranoiac—I told myself that I’d never find anything guided by only a flashlight beam, but the truth was I couldn’t have made myself sneak into the building if I’d had to do it in the dark.

  The safe that had stored the Hoff’s archives was empty. A stack of books had been knocked off the desk and lay open on the floor, their pages torn and smashed, their spines slowly snapping, and I knew that must have been the Hoff’s last act, committed in a spasm of anger or a desperate attempt to steady himself as the toxin set his neurons on fire, because Professor Anton Hoffpauer would never have left a book in that condition if he’d had any other choice.

  That was the first thing I did: pick them up and stack them in a neat if precariously leaning tower the Hoff would have approved of. Then I got started.

  It turned out that searching when you didn’t know what you were searching for was easier in the movies, when it could be turned into a vaguely boring montage that culminated in cresting harmonies and a triumphant document conveniently snatched out of the first or second file anyone bothered to ransack. It would have taken all week just to page through the first shelf of the Hoff’s Renaissance history journals and sort through the stacks of books, categorized by no metric I could determine, unless it was thickness of dust layer. But, remembering what Max had told me about the Hoff being the black sheep of his field, the Voynich manuscript a refuge for crackpots and conspiracy nuts, I narrowed down the search by ignoring everything that had been printed and bound and looked even halfway reputable. Whoever had poisoned the Hoff had—due to lack of time or lack of interest—left behi
nd the tattered notebooks, annotated photocopies, and stacks of loose-leaf covered in the Hoff’s cramped and illegible writing that represented a life’s work.

  I was midway through a report questioning the methodology of the latest Voynich carbon-dating results when, somewhere across the darkness of the main sanctuary, a door slammed. Floorboards creaked. Footsteps approached the narrow tunnel that led to the Hoff’s office, and to me.

  I turned out the lights.

  I ducked under the desk.

  I didn’t move.

  The footsteps drew closer. A narrow beam of light danced across the shadowed shelves and crooked stacks. It glinted off the stained-glass windows, lighting up Jesus’s mouth, Mary’s hand, Judas’s silver, then released them to darkness again.

  I’d seen enough horror movies to know how this would end.

  I’d seen enough of Chris’s body to know how this would end.

  If I did nothing, if I stayed perfectly silent and still, there was a chance he would never notice me. He would get what he came for and disappear back into whatever hell had spawned him. Maybe never to be seen again.

  Never to be caught.

  My cell was wedged into my pocket. As legs strode toward me, then paused a few inches from my face, the whisper of rustling pages just above my head, I flicked it open. With accuracy honed in uncountable classes where under-the-desk texting was the only escape from death by boredom, I pressed a finger over the speaker, then turned off the volume, wincing at the muted beep.

  The legs didn’t notice.

  Calling 911 wouldn’t do me any good if I couldn’t speak.

  I keyed in my mother’s number.

  From above, a muttered curse, a thump as something slammed against the desk, a cloud of dust.

  I will not sneeze, I thought. I will not die a cliché.

  The keys were slick with sweat. One letter at a time, careful not to hit the 3 when I meant 6, trying to breathe only when he did, I typed out a message.

  In prof h office call police need—

  Suddenly he held his breath; I didn’t.

  Please, I thought. But the office was too quiet; my breath was like the wind. The legs bent. The beam played across my face, and the world blazed white. I lost my grip on the phone, pressed a button that could, if I were a different, luckier person, have been Send, closed a fist around it, and prepared myself to smash it into something, an eye, the soft cartilage of a nose, anywhere I could do my damage before he did his, and then the flashlight beam skidded from my face to his.

  “That can’t be comfortable,” Eli said, holding the light just beneath his chin like a Boy Scout about to launch into a truly gory campfire tale. He was grinning.

  I considered following through on the cartilage-destruction plan.

  “And before you ask, again,” he said. “Yes. This time I was following you. But in fairness, you’re the one who gave me the idea.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I got out from under the desk, my legs cramped and wobbly from crouching for so long. He put out an arm to steady me but wisely thought better of it before making contact.

  “For expediency’s sake, I’m going to interpret that as What are you doing here?”

  “Fine. Let’s start with that.”

  “You first.”

  I turned the lights back on.

  “You seem angry,” he said, still smiling. He was dressed in all black again, dark pants and a long-sleeved tee that hugged his surprisingly muscled form. A child’s cartoonish idea of a cat burglar’s costume that would have been easier to mock if I hadn’t been dressed exactly the same way.

  “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “And you’re welcome for not doing that, incidentally. So, what’s the problem? Disappointed?”

  “Has anyone ever told you how funny you are?”

  “I don’t actually get that a lot.”

  “Exactly.”

  As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. Déjà vu. Whatever. Why were you following me?”

  “Why are you here? No, let me answer that for you, since you’re clearly not going to. You know something. About Chris. Maybe about that symbol. And, to further demonstrate my brilliant powers of deduction: All of this has something to do with what you were researching here. Yet for some reason, you’ve chosen not to share that with the cops. Or with me.”

  At the mention of the cops, I suddenly realized they might be on the way, and snuck a glance at my phone. I’d managed to delete the message before sending it anywhere.

  So much for my survival skills.

  “Calling someone?”

  “How about the cops, since you think I should be more forthcoming with them,” I suggested. “I’m sure they’d love to know you’re prowling around a crime scene.”

  “Right, because that would look far less suspicious than you, sole witness, girlfriend of prime suspect, doing the same thing.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Stalemate.”

  “So now what?” I asked.

  “You find what you came here for,” he said. “I help.”

  22

  We stayed across most of the night, picking through the Hoff’s unlabeled files, tracing the spiderweb of connections he’d drawn through the Voynich manuscript’s shrouded past, from Bacon to Dee to Kelley to Rudolf. Eli didn’t ask why I was convinced there might be something useful here, even as the hours passed and it became clear that the scribbled names, dates, and snatches of Latin, French, German, Czech, and ancient Greek would be useful only to the Hoff, and maybe—given that the majority of the pages had been unceremoniously stuffed into the back of desk drawers or files layered in dust an inch thick—not even to him. He did ask how he was supposed to find anything if I didn’t tell him what we were looking for, which I admitted was a good question, then went back to the Hoff’s scribbles without offering an answer, because I didn’t have one.

  He was the one who found it.

  Just a yellow sticky note, stuck in between a first edition of The Leviathan and an old issue of Renaissance Quarterly. On the front, the Hoff—or someone—had written Ivan Glockner, Central Library, Prague, reference dept. But it was the back of the note that first caught my eye: the word Hledači, underlined, with a question mark, and above it, inked with enough pressure to break through the page: the eye, the lightning bolt.

  Sometimes, maybe, it was better to be crazy than it was to be right.

  “Seekers,” Eli said.

  “What?”

  “Hledači. It’s Czech. For seekers.”

  So that’s why the word looked familiar.

  The letters from Max’s room were in my bag, along with Elizabeth’s. I’d brought them just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d hoped I would find something that linked them all together. Something that made sense of them.

  Maybe I’d hoped I was wrong.

  I took out Max’s letter and handed it to Eli.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “None of your business. There, at the bottom, that’s Czech, right? Can you read it?”

  “None of my business, but you want me to …?”

  “Yes.”

  “This looks really old,” he said.

  “Probably is.”

  “Old like it should be in a library or a museum or somewhere with gloves and alarms and people shushing you.”

  “Can you or can’t you?”

  He squinted at the faded text, then read aloud. “ ‘I swear this solemn vow, that I will seek the Lumen Dei for the glory of my people, the glory of my land, and the glory of God. I will keep a pure heart and an iron will. If I fail, my sons will continue the search, and their sons, and on and on until the Lumen Dei has returned home. Today I am reborn a seeker.’ ”

  “Hledači,” I said, curling my tongue around the strange sounds. Lay da chee, the Hoff’s nonsense words, what I’d taken to be infantile babbling
. The Hoff’s warning.

  “ ‘Přísahám, že budu věrný Hledačům, a zasvěcuji svůj život hledání, dokud neskončí,’ ” he continued. “ ‘I swear my allegiance to the seekers, and pledge my life to the search, until our search has ended.’ ” Eli looked up at me. The letter hid most of his face. “Where did you get this?”

  “That’s not important.”

  It couldn’t be.

  23

  You know I submit this report under great duress, began the final letter in Chris’s mystery stash. I’d postponed translating it, knowing that this was the last of him, even though there was nothing of him in it.

  Someday you will pay for the things you have done.

  The journey was uneventful. The astronomer was hesitant. He pretends to care only for advancement at court. But she charmed the truth out of him. He lives to search for answers, and believes this is where he will find them. She has sewn his calculations into the lining of her cloak. I leave this for you at the Golden Bough, and it will be my last until returning to Prague. For the rest of the journey, we will sleep under the stars. If all goes smoothly, we should arrive at the city wall on the Lord’s Day.

  You have promised not to harm her. I take you at your word. If you break that oath, no threat will stop me from acting.

  12 March 1599.

  I wondered if Elizabeth had known she was being spied on, and if she could have forgiven it if she’d known the spy was also protecting her. A cowardly weasel of a guardian angel was, I supposed, better than none at all.

  24

  The Whitman Center seemed dingier this time around, simultaneously less bucolic and less sinister. Adriane’s door was closed. I knocked, without thinking, then remembered, and felt like a gut-punched fool—until the knob turned in my grip, and Adriane opened the door.

  “Surprise!” She twirled for me, radiant in a strappy yellow dress. Inside the Whitman Center, it was always summer. “You’re surprised, right?”

  “I’m surprised.”

  And then there was all the hugging, crying, snot dripping, and tear wiping you’d expect. She didn’t want to hear anything about what she’d missed in the last few weeks, nor did she have anything to say about her stay and gradual recovery at the Whitman Center, except that “you can turn any place into a spa if you try hard enough, although I’ll admit the food is less than five-star.” She’d had no visitors, as far as she knew, aside from her parents, and as soon as she’d snapped out of it enough to be aware of anything, she’d asked them to make sure I stayed away, along with everyone else, until she was completely well. She couldn’t stand the idea of anyone seeing her like that; so, in true Adriane form, she explained that from here on in, we would pretend no one had. She didn’t ask how I was doing, and she didn’t mention any strange visitors pretending to be her dead boyfriend. The incoherent babbling, the wails of “Oh my god, I was so worried” and “Did you see me on the six o’clock news,” the derision and subsequent dismissal of all well-meaning messages from well-meaning nonfriends, all of that was easy. When she slid to the floor in an effortless split and pressed her face to her knee with that soft, familiar groan of limb-stretching ecstasy, I almost started crying all over again.