by Tom Harper
Gillian. Nick leaned back in his chair. His apartment was dark: the only light was the purple glow of the monitors on his desk, and at the opposite end of the room, an answering beacon where the unwatched television played a late-night movie. He’d longed for this moment for months: checked his cellphone, his voicemail, his instant messages and his different email accounts, even got his hopes up when the mailman came each day – a dozen ways to be ignored. And now here she was.
The cursor hovered over the green button, still flashing. Nick’s heart had kicked into overdrive. He took a deep breath to steady himself, tugged on the neck of his sweater to straighten it. He should have shaved. He clicked.
The scream ripped through him like a knife. His first thought was it must have come from the TV, but that was on mute. He waited a second for it to come again. Nothing. Had he imagined it? On screen, a grainy image had appeared in the window. It looked like wallpaper: a grey-white wall with small green Christmas trees stencilled on it. Or perhaps a curtain – the trees seemed to ripple and sway in front of the camera. The picture was so jerky it was hard to tell.
‘Gillian?’ he said to the microphone above his computer. ‘Are you there?’ He squinted into the camera. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ A sourness began to spread inside him. He should’ve known it would be a disappointment.
But someone must be there. He heard voices – men’s voices – and some sort of commotion. Suddenly, the Christmas trees shot back. A man’s face appeared – dark Mediterranean features squashed like a potato where the camera lens distorted it, a glowing cigarette jammed between his lips. There seemed to be splash of blood on his cheek – perhaps he’d cut himself shaving. Nick could see brown tiles and a small bathroom mirror over his shoulder.
The man shouted something furious that Nick couldn’t understand, then reached forward as if to drag Nick through the window. The hand filled the screen, blurry and pixellated but so vivid that Nick pushed back from the desk in panic. Then the image went black.
Nick looked at the screen, dazed. The video was blank, but the message panel was still open. For the first time, he noticed the two lines of text that had come through underneath.
use this. bear is the key
help me theyre coming
Beside it, a flashing icon showed that a file had been downloaded.
Naples, Italy
The black Mercedes prowled through the cobbled streets. The morning half-light made the world a grim place: men and women in sober coats and suits scurried to work under the clouds, sometimes glimpsing their reflections in oily puddles. Cesare Gemato watched them from the back seat of the car, through tinted windows that made the world almost black. He liked this time of day, this season. He’d lived all his life in the shadows.
A sudden squawk of opera broke the silence in the limousine – a tinny Pavarotti singing Puccini through a mobile-phone speaker. Gemato’s grandson had changed the ringtone when his back was turned; for all his undoubted power, Gemato hadn’t yet found a way to undo it.
The young man sitting beside him fished a phone out of the calfskin briefcase on his knee, spoke a few words, then passed it to Gemato.
‘Ugo,’ he said. ‘Si.’ Gemato listened. ‘Good. You found anything with her? The book?’
He frowned.
‘Is it possible he saw you on this machine?’ Through the window, he noticed a young woman in a white raincoat pedalling hard on a bicycle. Black hair tumbled down her back; the wind blew her coat taut against her body.
‘Send it to our friends in Tallinn. Find out who, where, what this man knows.’
He ended the call and passed the phone back to his assistant. That was the problem with doing favours, he thought, even for someone he owed as much as his patron. There was always one more thing to take care of.
‘Get me Nevado.’
New York City
Nick sat on the bench in the diner. His laptop lay open on the table, next to a sheet of paper and a vanilla milkshake in a stainless-steel shaker. At four in the morning the place was almost empty, but he liked coming here when he couldn’t sleep, liked the neon and chrome, the leatherette and Formica and the dollar-fifty bottomless cup of coffee. It felt authentic – though he knew he only thought that because a hundred Hollywood movies had perfected the fiction. Gillian had pointed that out to him.
Gillian.
He stared at the laptop. The Greeks who ran the diner weren’t so old-fashioned that they hadn’t installed wireless Internet when they noticed their customers drifting to the coffee shop down the street. Nick had been logged on for an hour, watching the screen with tired eyes to see if Gillian reappeared. Her name had leaped to the top of the list, but the icon beside it stayed grey, lifeless.
Last seen: 06 January 07:48:26
He sipped his shake. 7:48, that put her six hours ahead of him. Where was that – somewhere in Europe? What had she been doing there?
Help me theyre coming.
It had to be a joke. With Gillian, anything was possible. But if anything was possible…
Why would she go all the way to Europe to play a prank? He replayed the video in his head: the scream, the snarling face filling the screen, the hand reaching out to the camera. It hadn’t looked like a joke.
With Gillian, anything was possible.
And then there was the file she’d sent. He slid the printout across the table and studied it. He’d expected it to be the answer, some sort of punchline that would explain the whole charade. Instead, it only added confusion. There was no writing, just a black-and-white picture showing eight hand-drawn lions and bears in various poses: stalking, crouching, sleeping, roaring, digging, climbing. One of the lions sat up on its haunches and licked its jaws; it stared out of the page at Nick, holding his gaze, daring him to come closer.
Closer to what?
It must be something she’d been working on. But why send it to him? Was it valuable? Bear is the key. He’d tried clicking on the bears in the picture, but nothing happened.
He tried another tack. He opened the web browser and pulled up sites he knew she’d frequented, a sad lover drifting around his old flame’s former haunts. Blogs she’d posted on, forums she might contribute to. There wasn’t much. A review of a book he’d seen her reading not long before she left him; something about goldsmithing on a discussion board for medievalists. He tried to read it, but the words blurred in his brain. There was almost nothing since July, the last time he’d seen her. Was that a coincidence? Maybe it had affected her worse than she’d let on. The thought was strangely comforting.
Almost as an afterthought, he tried a social networking site he knew she’d used. Like a lot of people, she’d signed up, spent two weeks constantly updating her profile and cajoling her friends to join, then decided she had better things to do with her life. Nick had never known her spend any time on it since. But she must have come back to it quite recently. At the top of the page, in the space where users could upload pithy one-line commentaries on what they were doing, he read,
Gillian Lockhart
is in mortal peril
(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)
Was that another joke? It was the sort of melodramatic overstatement she specialised in. But she also loved the slipperi ness of irony, things that were simultaneously true and not true. She teased you with possibilities but never gave answers.
Nick sucked the last drops of his milkshake out of the cup. The air frothed and popped in the empty straw.
IV
Frankfurt, 1412
In my youth I saw two men burned alive. It was in Frankfurt, a day’s journey from Mainz. My father had some business there at the Wetterau fair and brought me with him, three months after the incident at the mint. He was in a merry mood, laughing with his companions at the hucksters and cripples who thronged the road. I laughed too, though I did not understand the jokes.
The crowd thickened as we reached the town square, but my father used his bulk and his staff to push through
to the front so I would have an unbroken view. My eyes were wide with excitement, wondering what entertainment could draw such an audience. I hoped it would be a dancing bear.
The gallows stood in the middle of the square like the frame of an invisible door. Even at that age, I knew where it led. Bales of straw were piled underneath it. I wanted to cry but knew my father would not allow it.
Two sergeants led the prisoners out of the crowd. One wore a long black gown and a white mitre on which was painted a string of devils holding a banner that proclaimed ‘Heresiarch’, the Archbishop of Heretics. The other man was bareheaded, his skull shaved, his wrists and ankles chained together.
‘What has he done?’ I asked.
‘This man was a mint master,’ my father explained. ‘He debased his coins, like a wicked brewer watering down his beer.’ He squatted down beside me and pulled out a gulden. He turned it in his fingers so that the gold faces winked at me.
‘Who do you see?’
‘St John.’
‘And on the other side?’
‘The arms of the prince.’
My father smiled his approval. My heart glowed. ‘The saint and the prince. The power of God and the power of man. The two pillars of our world.’
He gestured to the mint master. The sergeants had manacled his hands to an iron hook in the crossbar, and were now trying to attach his chained legs to a second hook at the far end. One of the sergeants stood with the condemned man’s legs straddling his shoulders, while the other crouched and heaved from underneath. The crowd whistled and shouted lewd encouragements.
‘Against whom was his sin, Henchen?’
‘Against the prince, Father.’
‘And?’
‘God.’
He licked his fat lips and nodded. ‘If the coinage is not kept perfect – if even one grain of gold is missing – no man will credit it and God’s order will collapse. Even one grain,’ he repeated.
Up on the gallows, the two sergeants had finally managed to sling the mint master between the hooks, a carcass suspended from a spit. This would make him burn for longer before he died. The heretic was more fortunate: he was bound upright to a post, where the flames would quickly consume him. From this I judged that his crime was the lesser.
Bailiffs brought wood and tinder from the corners of the square and piled them over the straw. The sergeants sprinkled them with oil from a flask, making sure that some splashed over the prisoners. The magistrate stood on a box and read the charges from a great sealed scroll. I could not hear what he said, though my father took great pleasure repeating it to me. That the heretic had denied that Christ was the son of God and the Church was the path of salvation. That he had called for the Church to surrender its property. That he had summoned Lucifer himself in a black rite at midnight; mingled the communion wine with the ashes of stillborn children; fornicated on the altar and committed incest with his sister. It was hard to believe, looking at that mild-faced man with his pronounced Adam’s apple; but, as my father said, the devil delights in disguise. Perhaps I should have listened more carefully.
Clouds gathered; the wind rose. The torch in the sergeant’s hand grew brighter as the day darkened. The condemned men whimpered frantic prayers. The magistrate’s face went purple as he bellowed to be heard above the noise of beasts, bells and onlookers. The moment he had finished, he jumped off his box and signalled the sergeant to set the fire.
It took in seconds, racing over the piled wood and licking at the wretches above. The heretic died instantly, or perhaps fainted; the forger lasted longer. I saw flames tear open his shift where spots of oil had soaked in, almost as if the fire were consuming him from the inside out. Screams and the crackle of wood mingled with the shouts of the crowd.
I felt something strike my back and looked up. It was my father. His bandy legs were splayed apart, his eyes turned to heaven, his face burning with righteous glee as his staff rained down blows over my shoulders, beating the memory into me.
Later in my life I watched other men burn for their unnatural sins. And each time, a small part of my soul withered in sympathy.
V
New York City
Even in New York the weather could get to you. Nick was woken by rain, ice-hard needles lancing against his window. He rolled over, clinging to the comfort of the last shreds of sleep for a few seconds longer. Until he remembered.
His eyes snapped open. The watch on his bedside table said ten to eleven, though the sky outside was so dark it could have been any time. No wonder he’d overslept. He swung himself out of bed and crossed to the open laptop on the shelf by the window. He’d left it running all night, the volume turned up in case she called again. There was nothing. He scanned the emails that had come in, not even bothering to delete the junk. Nothing there either. A dull pain began to throb behind his temples. He needed coffee.
He knew he was up too late the moment he saw Bret. His room-mate was sprawled in front of his computer in an easy chair, tapping a keyboard with one hand while the other dangled a limp slice of last night’s pizza.
‘What’re you up to?’
‘Captchas.’ Bret spoke through a mouthful of pepperoni. ‘This site gives you free porn for every hundred.’
When machines took over the planet, Nick thought, Bret would be their fifth column. He was a bottom feeder, a parasite nibbling at the Internet’s underbelly. Harvesting email addresses for spammers, bidding up prices in online auctions, advertising the benefits of dubious medications or, now, deciphering the distorted letters that websites used to block automated registrations: there was nothing Bret wouldn’t do for a few cents. If there was such a thing as an anti-Internet pressure group – Nick supposed they existed somewhere – Bret would be their Exhibit A. Nick still wasn’t exactly sure how they’d ended up sharing the apartment.
‘You went out late,’ said Bret. ‘Your pimp call?’
Nick went to the kitchen counter and flipped on the kettle. ‘I had a message from Gillian.’
‘Mmmm.’ Bret licked grease off his fingers and reached for the mouse. ‘Is she back in town?’
‘I think she’s in Europe.’
‘One hundred.’ Bret clicked. The letters disappeared, replaced on screen by a grappling pair of naked women. Their mouths hung open in frozen masks of delight. ‘She is nice.’
Nick splashed hot water over the coffee grounds, then decided he couldn’t face the wait. He’d get one at the store on the corner.
‘I’m going out.’
Bret waved. The pizza flapped in his hand like dead skin. ‘I’ll be here.’
Nick rode the A train to 190th Street and walked up Fort Washington Avenue. The rain had softened into a fine freezing mist that seeped down his collar into his bones. The last time he’d come here it had been midsummer, leafy trees shading the street and kids chasing each other with water pistols. He’d bought Gillian an ice cream from the Good Humor van. Now the trees were bare, the street empty. On the grey hill in front of him the stone tower of a medieval monastery poked above the forest, a fragment of a foreign place and time resurrected on the tip of Manhattan. The Cloisters museum. Beyond it, the slope fell away to the Hudson, the bluffs on the far shore little more than shadows in the mist. The bass roar of traffic crossing the George Washington Bridge lingered in the air like distant thunder.
The museum was all but deserted. Nick paid his admission and wandered across to a guide, a white-haired lady poised like a hawk to pounce on visitors. The brooch on her lapel tagged her like an exhibit: ‘PAM’. Manhattan, mid-20th century, possible Jewish origin. Her eyes gleamed as Nick approached.
He pulled out the picture Gillian had sent.
‘Do you recognise this?’
The docent’s gaze flicked over the page. Four lions and four bears stared back at her.
‘I don’t know.’ Nick could see her disappointment. ‘Maybe you should try Dr Sutherland.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘Her. She’s probabl
y in the Unicorn room.’ She pointed to the cloister through the open door. ‘Down to the end.’
The Cloisters was a strange place. A chimera, Gillian had called it: a museum stitched together from the dismembered pieces of other buildings brought over from the Old World. A Romanesque corridor leading to a Gothic hall, a Spanish chapel next to a French chapter house. Nick walked down the empty arcade, ducked through a twelfth-century doorway and entered a long, dimly lit room. Its walls were almost invisible behind the seven vast tapestries that covered them. A young woman knelt in front of one, examining the threads with what looked like a small torch. Above her, a horde of dogs and men with spears surrounded a unicorn, who had impaled one of the dogs on its horn. Its sad eyes brimmed with desperation.
Nick’s shoes squeaked on the polished floor and the woman started.
‘Dr Sutherland?’ She looked as though she’d stepped out of a black-and-white photograph: black hair tied back with a black ribbon, smooth ivory skin, a neat black skirt-suit with a white blouse buttoned close to the neck. The only colour came from her shoes, glossy red patent leather.
‘My name’s Nick Ash. I’m sorry to bother you…’ He hesitated. ‘I’m a friend of Gillian Lockhart.’ A blank. ‘She used to work here.’
‘Oh.’ An apologetic smile. ‘I’ve only been here since October. I don’t know…’
She sounded British. ‘Perhaps you can help me anyway.’ Nick unfolded the printout and passed it to her. He saw something flicker in her dark eyes. ‘I got sent this yesterday, sort of, um, mysteriously. I was hoping someone here could tell me what it is.’
She studied it for a moment, her lips mouthing silently. ‘It’s fifteenth century. Copper engraving by a German artist, probably of upper Rhenish origin. Datable to around 1430.’ She saw confusion on Nick’s face and laughed, embarrassed at herself. ‘It’s a playing card.’
