The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  He sat down beside her. The cold steel bench pressed against the back of his thighs. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you were coming.’

  I almost didn’t. After Royce let him go, he’d wandered aimlessly for almost two hours. The thought of having to speak to anyone made him ill. What could you say when your whole world had been torn apart? The people he passed on the streets – the hot-dog sellers and traffic cops and tourists pouring out of Macy’s – they had nothing in common with him. He was a ghost among them. But eventually the shock and self-pity had worn itself out. If he retreated into his shell he’d go mad: he needed to act, to do. So he had come.

  ‘You said you’d found something?’

  Emily pulled a book out of her purse and laid it open on her knee. Nick’s printout was folded flat inside it. The book seemed to be in German.

  ‘The Oldest Surviving German Playing Cards.’ Nick read the title at the top of the page. Emily glanced at him, surprised.

  ‘You speak German?’

  ‘I worked in Berlin for a couple of years.’

  ‘Then you should have a look at this book. It catalogues all the surviving works attributed to the Master of the Playing Cards.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Your card isn’t in it.’ She slid a fingernail between the pages and turned towards the back. A menagerie of finely engraved lions and bears stared up at him, two cards pictured side by side. The animals were shown in various poses.

  ‘These are the two surviving copies of the eight of beasts. One in Dresden, one at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Do you notice anything?’

  Nick studied them for a moment. ‘They’re different.’ He pointed to the top-right corners. Where the Dresden card showed a standing lion with its head tipped back in a defiant roar, the Paris lion sat on its haunches, staring imperiously off the page.

  He reached across and pulled out the printout. The layout was the same – four bears and four lions in three rows – but this time the top-right animal was a bear scratching itself.

  ‘You said the cards were printed. If they all came from the same plate, shouldn’t they look the same?’

  ‘At some point in their history, the original plates were cut up. You can actually see it sometimes on the cards.’ She traced a fingernail around one of the lions on the Paris card.

  Nick leaned over. He could see a faint, irregular outline around the animal, almost as if it had been cut out of a magazine with scissors and pasted on the page.

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘The best theory is that the original cards were so successful he wanted to make more. Copper plates wear out pretty quickly if you take too many prints from them. Maybe the engraver cut up the ones that were still usable so he could mix and match to make a new deck.’ She laid the palm of her hand flat across the page so that it hid the two lions in the centre. ‘Take them away and your eight becomes a six. Add another and it’s the nine – which is true, incidentally.’ She turned to the next plate in the book, the nine of the suit. Here the animals were in three rows of three, with an extra bear added.

  ‘In a way, it prefigures the use of printing text from movable type,’ Emily added. ‘Breaking the page elements down into smaller units to give you more flexibility.’

  Nick peered closer. ‘There aren’t any of those outlines from the cut-outs on this card.’

  ‘No,’ Emily agreed. ‘Though it’s a printout of a digital image of… who knows what. Faint lines could easily be lost. Where did you say you found this?’

  Nick looked around the roof terrace. The sky had clouded over again; most of the other visitors had gone back inside. A couple of students were examining a piece of sculpture and trying to sound knowledgeable, while an Orthodox Jew in a black suit and a Homburg was doing a crossword by the railing. A janitor brushed some dead leaves off the paving stones. Otherwise, there was no one.

  And no birds sing.

  He realised Emily was watching him, waiting. Her pale cheeks had flushed rose pink in the cold air. What could he tell her that didn’t sound crazy?

  ‘Gillian Lockhart – my, ah, friend – sent me the file two nights ago.’

  ‘Can’t you just ask her where she got it from?’

  Nick ignored the question. ‘Do you think she discovered one of these original cards? One that nobody knew about?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. Or it could be a fake. Either a physical forgery that she’s found or a digital fake that she’s created as some sort of joke.’ As if she could read his face, Emily added, ‘I asked around the museum about Gillian Lockhart when you said you knew her. Apparently she had quite a reputation for being unpredictable.’

  A gust of wind whipped the words away. Nick felt a chill shiver down his back. A joke? It had seemed the only explanation when the card arrived. Part of him still insisted it must be. But seeing Bret die; cowering on a rooftop while a man with a gun hunted him; sitting in a police station being interrogated: those were real enough. And they had all started with the card.

  ‘If the card is real, how much would it be worth?’

  Emily frowned. ‘I really don’t know. I don’t work in acquisitions. I don’t think any of the cards have changed hands in decades, so there’s nothing even to compare it to.’

  ‘Ballpark. Are we talking millions of dollars?’ He could see the question offended her. He felt embarrassed, as if he’d offered money to sleep with her.

  ‘I’ve seen Dürer engravings offered privately for under ten thousand dollars. He’s later, but better known. For the Master of the Playing Cards…’ She thought for a moment. ‘You’d be talking tens of thousands. Maybe a hundred thousand at the most.’

  ‘Worth killing for?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Nick took a deep breath. Part of him was desperate to say it, to give voice to the thoughts that obsessed him. Every second he didn’t say it made him feel a fraud. Part of him was terrified she’d think he was nuts.

  ‘Gillian sounded like she was in some kind of trouble when she sent me the card. I haven’t heard from her since. Then last night my room-mate was murdered.’

  She gasped. ‘I’m so sorry. How – terrible.’ She stared at the book in her lap, her arms pressed tightly against her side.

  ‘I think they – whoever did it – were after me.’

  It sounded ridiculous – and presumptuous, appropriating Bret’s tragedy for himself. He glanced at Emily. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Have you been to the police?’

  ‘Of course. They think it’s crazy.’ They think I did it.

  ‘It’s not crazy.’ The words were quiet but clear. ‘I don’t know what happened to Gillian Lockhart, but… You can see it when you mention her name in the museum. People react, like you’ve opened a room you’re not supposed to go in. They don’t say much, but…’

  A flock of birds rose squawking from the trees by the reservoir. They wheeled against the towers on the far side of the park. Emily tugged on the collar of her coat.

  ‘Then there are the cards. They’re so strange. None of the animals look happy. As for the people…’ She turned to another plate in the book. Five miniature people danced and strutted across the page, though the closer Nick looked the less human they seemed. Some were as hairy as animals; on others, the skin seemed to hang off them like leaves. They blew horns, aimed arrows, swung cudgels. One strummed a lute, a fool oblivious to the mayhem around him.

  ‘This is the fifth suit, wild men. There’s something so unsettling about them.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘Now you probably think I’m crazy.’

  ‘No.’ Nick touched her arm to reassure her and immediately wished he hadn’t. She shied away like a frightened bird, hugging her arms across her chest.

  ‘Sorry.’ He wished he hadn’t said that either. It made him sound guilty.

  She got to her feet, smoothing her skirt behind her. Her face was almost lost behind her high collar. ‘I should go.’

>   Nick stood, keeping an awkward distance. ‘Be careful. I’m really grateful for your advice, but I might not be the guy you want to help right now.’

  XVI

  Basle, 1432-3

  My father once said there is no change a man cannot get used to given a fortnight. Not in his soul, perhaps, but in his actions and routines, his choices and expectations. The first night of my journey with Aeneas, I slept on the floor of the inn and ate only bread. Midway through the second night, I crawled into the common bed and wrapped myself in a corner of a blanket. On the third night, I ate as much as any other man in the tavern, drank my fill and thought nothing of sleeping on straw rather than earth. Aeneas paid a barber to cut my hair and my beard, and that alone shaved ten years from my face. An hour’s scrubbing in a bathhouse removed another five.

  ‘Although,’ Aeneas told me, ‘you should certainly seek out the Holy Baths in Basle. They think nothing there of men and women bathing together quite promiscuously. The sights you see…’ He made an obscene gesture with his hand; I tried not to shudder. Some memories take more than a fortnight to heal.

  *

  By the time we reached Basle I was a new man. I had a new pair of boots, a new hat and a tunic that Aeneas had bought for three pennies from a French merchant. Even so, the city terrified me. It reminded me of Mainz: a rich town by the Rhine, a city of tall houses and high towers whose weathercocks and crosses sparkled like dew in the dawn sun. A ring of stout walls circled it, beyond which its tributary villages stretched almost unbroken in every direction.

  The city was crammed to its rooftops with men there for the council, but Aeneas’ silver tongue soon found me lodgings in a monastery. He took me there, then excused himself – having been away for two months, he had much to learn and report to his masters. I lay on my pallet shivering, feeling abandoned in that strange city; I thought I must run down to the river and leap on the first barge that would carry me back to my hut in the forest. But the terror passed, I slept, and the next morning Aeneas bounded in, beaming with excitement.

  ‘A splendid opportunity,’ he enthused. ‘A countryman of yours, a most remarkable man. His secretary has just eloped with a girl from the bathhouse.’ He winked. ‘I told you they were promiscuous. But he is a prolific thinker: if he does not find a scribe to tap his words soon they will flood his mind until it bursts. I saw him this morning – no sooner had I mentioned your name than he told me to fetch you without a moment’s delay.’

  One of Aeneas’ most appealing traits, then, was his utter lack of inhibition. He had as fine an instinct for politics as any man I ever knew, but he could praise others with unthinking generosity. I had no doubt that in his description I had become the greatest scribe since St Paul. I only feared that I could not possibly satisfy my prospective employer if he believed even half of what Aeneas said.

  *

  The man in question inhabited a small room on the upper level of a whitewashed courtyard at the house of the Augustinians. Aeneas did not wait for an answer to his knock, but pushed straight through. I followed more tentatively.

  There was little in the room except a bed and a desk. The desk was the larger. Two candlesticks gave it the appearance of a sacred altar. Sheaves of paper covered every inch of its surface, weighted down with anything that came to hand: a penknife, a candle end, a Bible, even a brown apple core. There were three inkpots for red, black and blue ink, a selection of reed and goose-quill pens, a bull’s-eye glass for magnification and a half-drunk cup of wine with a dead fly in it. Stacks of books surrounded the desk like ramparts – more than I had ever seen in one room. And behind it, the lord of this paper kingdom, the man we had come to see.

  He barely seemed to notice us, but stared at an icon of Christ that hung on a nail on the wall. His eyes were pale blue and pure as water. There was something ageless about him, though in the course of my employment I learned he was actually a few months younger than me. His head was shaved bare, revealing an angular skull whose bones seemed to press out against the skin. I remembered Aeneas’ joke about his mind bursting with words, and wondered if it might be true. Ink stained the white sleeves of his cassock, though his hands were surprisingly clean.

  Aeneas did not wait. ‘This is Johann who I told you about. Johann, it is my honour to introduce Nicholas Cusanus.’

  I gave a small bow and steeled myself for the inevitable questions about my past.

  ‘Can you write?’

  ‘He knows Latin better than Cicero,’ Aeneas insisted. ‘Do you know the first thing he said to me after he fished me out of the river? He said-’

  ‘Take a pen and write what I dictate.’ Nicholas pushed back his chair and stood. Barely looking, he picked up the cup and sipped it. I did not see whether he drank the fly. I took his chair, sharpened one of the pens with the knife and then made a clean cut in the point. My hands were shaking so much I almost sliced it in half.

  Nicholas walked around the desk and stood with his back to me, still contemplating the icon.

  ‘Because God is perfect form, in which all differences are united and all contradictions are reconciled, it is impossible for a diversity of forms to exist in him.’

  He waited while I wrote. There was something profound in his silence which hushed even Aeneas. The only sound in the room was the scratch of my pen. My cheeks pricked with sweat as I tried to remember how to form the words. I had barely picked up a pen in ten years. As for remembering what he had actually said, I felt as if I was stumbling blind. Absolute. The words hemmed me in like a fog.

  The instant I put down my pen Nicholas spun around and picked up the paper.

  ‘Because God is perfectly form in which all differences are different and all contradictions united, it is impossible for him to exist.’ He threw the paper aside. ‘Do you know what my words mean?’

  I shook my head. I felt hot: all I wanted was to be back in the river, feeling the cold current close over me.

  ‘It means that God is the unity of all things. Therefore there can be no diversity in God – and certainly no diversity when we write about God. Diversity leads to error, and error to sin.’ He turned to Aeneas. ‘I need a man who can record my words as if my tongue itself was writing on the page.’

  Aeneas looked crestfallen. But he was not a man to abandon his enthusiasm so easily. ‘There are saints in heaven who would struggle to grasp your words. Johann is out of practice and overawed by your intellect. Let him try again.’

  Nicholas turned back to face the icon. Without even waiting to see if I was ready, he began:

  Lord, to see you is to love; and as your gaze watches over me from a great distance and never deviates, so does your love. And because your love is always with me – you whose love is nothing other than yourself, who loves me – thus you are always with me. You do not desert me, Lord, but guard me at every turn with the most tender care.

  He might have continued, but my pen had stopped moving. It rested forgotten above a half-completed sentence while tears streamed down my face. I felt like a fool – worse than a fool – but I could not help myself. Nicholas’s words were like a hammer, shattering the walls I had built around my soul with a single blow. The echoes reverberated through me, shaking loose the foundation stones of my being. I felt naked before God.

  In the corner of the room, Aeneas looked surprised but not angry. Nicholas was harder to read. Though he could be passionate in his faith, he struggled with emotions on the lowly human scale. I saw the shock in his eyes, his struggle to find an appropriate response. In the end he took refuge in procedure. He slid the piece of paper off the table and read it quickly. There was not much to look at. I waited for him to discard it again, and me with it.

  He frowned. ‘This is better. Not perfect – you misspelled amandus on the third line – but definitely improved. Perhaps even promising.’

  I looked up at him. Hope shone in my tear-rimmed eyes. ‘I will retain you for one week. If your work satisfies me, then I will keep you on for as long as th
e council sits.’

  Aeneas clapped his hands. ‘I told you he would not disappoint you.’

  And that was how I – a thief, a liar and a debaucher – came to work for one of the holiest men that ever lived.

  For the churchmen at the council, I suppose it was not a happy time. They did not lack ambition – many of them, including Aeneas, wanted nothing less than the complete subordination of the papacy to the decisions of the council. But that goal remained elusive. They met in committees and debated resolutions; they passed those to the general congregation to be ratified, and they in turn sent them to the Pope. The number of couriers crossing back and forth that autumn must have worn a new pass in the Alps. But I never saw anything to change the impression of my first day in Basle: that there were too many beggars and not enough rich men to make it matter.

  I did not care. Nicholas had offered me work while the council sat, and I would have been happy for them to deliberate until Judgement Day. I was satisfied with my lot, simple though it was. Every day I went to Nicholas’s study and dutifully recorded whatever he dictated; every evening I returned to my room and read, or prayed. Occasionally I met Aeneas in a tavern, but not often. He was a busy man, constantly on some errand in the service of his ambition. I enjoyed hearing his stories, and did not begrudge him his progress. I felt a serenity, a feeling that the great tides that tossed me in the world had ebbed.

  The council ground on through the winter. Blocks of ice appeared in the river, hard as stone: one cold morning I saw a lump strike a coal barge and smash it in two. In Nicholas’s study, I wrapped rags around my hands so that my fingers could grip the pen. My master never seemed to notice the cold. Day after day he stood staring at his icon, his only concession to the season a fur stole over his cassock.

  ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Do you know where it went wrong, Johann?’