The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  I looked back down. Tristan d’Amboise had gone. Before I could blink, a rough hand reached around my shoulders and pinned my arms; a knife pressed against my neck. Stubble scraped my cheek as he put his mouth to my ear. ‘Who are you? What are you doing?’

  ‘Pr… praying,’ I whispered, terrified that if I so much as swallowed he would slit my throat.

  ‘You followed me all the way from the bookseller’s shop. Why?’

  ‘The book,’ I gasped. My eyes swivelled in their sockets, desperate for some sexton or curate to rescue me. The churchyard was empty.

  ‘What about the book?’

  ‘I know what you seek. I – I want to help.’

  He pulled the knife away and spun me around, holding me at arm’s length. The knife lingered between us.

  ‘How?’

  It was the first time I had seen much more than his back. He was beautiful, with a head of dark curls and creamy skin that flushed easily. His eyes burned with the fire of youth. Despite the situation, I felt the long-dormant demon stir in my loins.

  ‘I trained as a goldsmith. I know how to alloy metals and how to purify them with quicksilver. I can fire them with powders, hammer them thin as air or carve them with mystic symbols. And I know the ways of gold.’

  The knife wavered. He hushed his voice, though there was no one to hear us but the dead.

  ‘Do you know the secret of the Stone?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. I fixed my gaze on his and stepped towards him, daring him to either drop the knife or impale me. He lowered the blade. ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘After long errors of three years or thereabouts – during which time I did nothing but study and labour – finally I found that which I desired.’

  So wrote Flamel in his book. I did not persevere for three years, but after six months all I had discovered were his errors. The further I delved into the secrets of the Art the further I seemed from it. Yet I could not abandon the quest. At first I assisted Tristan one or two evenings in the week, but in those early, heady days our progress seemed rapid, success imminent. Evenings gave way to long nights spent sweating over the forge, both stripped to the waist, until dawn came and I slunk back to Olivier’s house. With so little sleep my eyes became unreliable. My scripts grew ragged and irregular, feeble imitations of the proud specimens by the door. Olivier, proofreading, spilled so much red ink on my manuscripts it became an embarrassment.

  Inevitably, he soon realised how little I went to my bed. The first time he caught me trying to creep in just after sunrise he warned me not to repeat it; the second time he threatened to expel me from his house; the third he pleaded with me not to ruin my livelihood. I resented his kindness even more than his anger. Deep in my soul I knew he spoke the truth.

  I left the next day. Tristan gave me a room in his house, and there I devoted my every hour to breaking Flamel’s secret. I slept only when exhaustion compelled me, ate little and left the house so rarely his neighbours must have taken me for a ghost. After six weeks I realised I was, to all effects, a prisoner.

  XXI

  New York City

  They were back in the same room, with its police-issue plastic table and folding metal chairs. This time the door was open, offer ing a view into the busy corridor beyond. Perhaps that was what made the room feel safer. Perhaps it was because he’d brought Seth Goldberg. He’d been an idiot for ever coming here without a lawyer. But then, he hadn’t thought he had anything to hide.

  Seth sat at the table and flipped through some papers in his briefcase. Nick had always assumed defence lawyers were magicians – wise, grey-bearded, irascibly benevolent – but Seth was only in his mid-thirties, young enough to have been at college at the same time as Nick. The difference might as well have been a decade. Where Nick felt like a perpetual kid trying to get served in a bar, Seth moved with a bow wave of authority that seemed to impress itself on everyone he met. They’d known each other at NYU, connected in a loose sort of way by over lapping acquaintances and softball. Nick had never imagined they’d end up in a police station together as client and attorney.

  Nick glanced out of the door and felt the fresh scar on his chin. The first thing Seth had done that morning was buy Nick breakfast. The second thing he’d done was send him to the drugstore across the road for a razor and some shaving gel, which he’d then insisted Nick use in the coffee shop’s cramped bathroom.

  ‘Rule number one: you’re only as innocent as you look. If they play the tape of this interview back in court and twelve jurors see you looking like the Unabomber, they’re not even going to care what you say.’

  ‘What happened to not judging a book by its cover?’

  ‘Did you ever buy a book with a shitty cover?’

  The door banged against the wall as Royce blew in. Today’s suit was grey again, but sliced with white pinstripes that made him look like a stockbroker.

  ‘Thanks for coming back. We won’t take too much of your time.’

  Royce sat and waited while the technician adjusted the camera.

  ‘We’ve spoken to your neighbour’s kid. He confirmed that he saw you in the corridor at approximately the time the shot was fired.’

  ‘When the shot was fired,’ Nick corrected him.

  ‘He wasn’t able to confirm the presence of the masked gunman you described, because he ran inside his apartment as soon as he heard the shot. But he heard footsteps.’

  For the first time since Bret had called, Nick felt the knots inside him begin to unwind. He sat back, so relieved he barely heard what Royce was saying about other lines of enquiry, potential connections, different angles. Only when he heard a name -

  ‘Could you please describe your relationship with Miss Gillian Lockhart.’

  Nick blinked with surprise. Gillian’s name still produced a physical reaction, even now. A part of him was always ready to talk about her, desperate even, a sad drunk at a bar. Seth shot Nick a look that said, Be careful.

  ‘I met Gillian about a year ago, on a train. We got talking. I gave her my number, we kept in touch, eventually we started…’

  Started what? Nick had dated girls where he’d have known the exact word, each phase of the relationship analysed and classified in earnest conversations. Dating. Going steady. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Married. Divorced. A complete taxonomy. With Gillian, things just sort of happened.

  ‘We got together.’

  That wasn’t good enough for Royce. ‘Was it a sexual relationship?’

  Nick blushed. It was like being back in the cabin at summer camp, adolescents in the dark desperately bragging about who’d done who. He glanced at Seth, who simply shrugged.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you living together?’

  ‘Gillian kept her own place. Somewhere on the East Side. She had a room-mate from hell – we never went there.’

  That was another wound. He’d always been emotionally a step ahead of her, always ready to commit. But she’d been adamant. ‘I need my space, Nick. I’ve opened myself up before. I need to take it slowly.’ And he’d sworn to himself that he’d prove he was different, that she could trust him.

  ‘And what was her occupation at this time?’

  ‘She worked as a conservator at the Cloisters museum.’ He would have bet money Royce had never been there. ‘Up in Fort Washington Park. It’s where the Metropolitan Museum keeps its medieval collection.’

  ‘Was Ms Lockhart acquainted with your room-mate, Bret Deangelo?’

  Nick checked with Seth, who nodded and made a note on a yellow legal pad.

  ‘Sure. Bret and I were in the apartment together while I was going out with Gillian.’

  ‘Did they get along?’

  ‘I guess.’ Though it was a small apartment and Bret didn’t often leave, Nick couldn’t remember more than a couple of times when the three of them had been together. He remembered how awkward it had been: Bret trying not to be caught looking at Gillian’s breasts, Gillian sitting stiff on the couch, and Nick bus
tling about trying to break the ice with inanities. Otherwise, Bret had somehow contrived to make himself invisible whenever Gillian was around. The best part of six months. It occurred to Nick that Bret had been doing him a favour.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Ms Lockhart?’

  ‘Some time last July.’ July 23, around half past ten. ‘Did she dump you?’ Again, the sudden lurch into high-school crudeness. Nick flinched, but Seth was quick off the mark.

  ‘Would you like to rephrase that question, Detective?’ Royce adjusted his tie. ‘Did your relationship end acrimoniously.’

  ‘No.’

  There had been a lot of fights with Gillian. Sometimes he thought she provoked them deliberately, because she couldn’t resist the drama. She’d threaten to leave him, and he’d be up until four in the morning begging her to reconsider. Other times it just seemed to be the inevitable eruption of two tectonic plates colliding or moving apart – those were the ones that could last days. It kept him on a knife-edge.

  But there’d been no fight the night she left him. She’d cooked him dinner, teased him about his new haircut and gone to bed with him. She’d been subdued all evening, which was unusual but not unheard of. The next morning he woke alone to find a note on the pillow.

  It’s over. x G

  No apologies, no explanation, no tears, no way back. A one-night stand that lasted six months.

  ‘Did you try to contact her again?’ Royce asked.

  Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘A few times.’

  Those were memories he didn’t want to relive: dark days of phones that rang and were never answered; emails written, re-drafted and abandoned; meals forgotten; work ignored so long that even Bret started to worry.

  ‘So – just so we can be clear – when exactly was the last time you communicated with Ms Lockhart?’

  ‘Last July. Then nothing until I got the video call from her three days ago.’

  ‘So you weren’t aware that she had moved to Paris and got a job with an auctioneers?’

  ‘I learned that after I got the message.’

  ‘Even though you’d shown no interest in finding it out for the previous six months?’

  ‘I was worried. I told you what I saw on the computer.’ Royce leaned closer. ‘And did you then call Ms Lockhart from your cellphone about an hour before Bret Deangelo was murdered?’

  The room seemed closer, the lights too bright. ‘I got the number of her office in Paris and called it.’

  ‘Paris is six hours ahead of East Coast time. Did you really expect she’d be there?’

  ‘The auction house told me there was a late-night sale going on. I thought it’d be worth a try. You can check that with Stevens Mathison, if you like,’ he added. Too defensively, judging by the look Seth gave him.

  Royce powered on. ‘Was it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  ‘She wasn’t there, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But you spoke to someone? Someone who’ll confirm your story.’

  ‘I don’t remember his name. I – I don’t think he gave it. He sounded English.’

  ‘We’ll look into it.’ Royce dismissed it and moved on. ‘Now, when Ms Lockhart contacted you via email-’

  ‘It was Buzz,’ Nick interrupted. ‘Right. The same thing you used for snooping on your room-mate.’

  Seth raised his pen, a silent objection.

  ‘OK, she Buzzed you – have I got that right?’

  Nick nodded.

  ‘Did she send anything with her message?’

  He was trying to be casual, but Royce couldn’t really manage low key. He knows, Nick thought. Did I tell him? He didn’t think so. They must have looked on the computer they’d taken.

  There was no point stalling. ‘She sent me a file – a picture of a medieval playing card.’ He saw the next question coming and cut it off. ‘I have absolutely no idea why. I wish I knew.’

  Something in the hopelessness of his voice seemed to check Royce’s momentum. Seth took advantage.

  ‘My client’s been very cooperative in answering all your questions. Would you mind informing him why you’re so interested in his former partner?’

  Royce stood. ‘I think, Mr Goldberg, you and I should have a moment alone.’ He held the door open and gestured Nick to go out. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’

  In fact they were ten. Nick watched them through the window in the door, the wires of the safety glass like prison bars. He could see both men standing, facing each other across the table and arguing intently. When they were finished, it wasn’t Seth who came out but Royce.

  ‘Your lawyer wants you.’ He smirked. ‘I’ll be by the coffee machine.’

  Nick went back in the room. The video camera had been turned off. Seth gave a weary sigh.

  ‘They want you to surrender your passport. They think you might be a flight risk. They seem really hung up about this call you made to Paris just before Bret was killed.’

  ‘Do they think I hired some French guy to kill him?’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ Seth glanced at the windows. ‘Rule number one: never use sarcasm to the police. Same goes for irony. That stuff is filet mignon to prosecutors – they slice it up, serve it to the jury any which way. This whole thing is a mess. You should’ve talked to me before you told them anything, especially that story about the assassin on the roof. Did you expect them to believe that?’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Nick protested.

  ‘That’s not what I said. Royce is convinced you’re either half-crazy or guilty as hell. The only thing keeping you out of jail is the testimony of an eight-year-old kid. Bret’s not an easy case for the defence. And they’ve got something on Gillian too.’

  ‘What?’ Nick felt dizzy. Had the police cracked the picture? What else did they have?

  ‘I’ve done the best I can for you,’ Seth was saying. ‘Royce was ready to arrest you right there. I convinced him to go easy for the moment. This passport thing’s his compromise.’

  ‘It’s at the apartment. Will they let me in there?’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  XXII

  Paris, 1433

  Tristan’s house was an enormous hôtel: a square stone-built mansion near the church of St Germain. It could have been anywhere. The moment you passed its gate the city was relegated to a distant smudge of smoke and spires behind the wall. Tristan’s father had a role at the court of King Charles, from where he had been dispatched on some diplomatic errand to Constantinople. He had been gone some months and would be away for many more. He had taken his wife, his two daughters and most of his household, leaving Tristan with an almost-empty house and stern instructions to behave himself.

  If Tristan’s father feared that his son might consort with prostitutes, idlers and gamblers then he had every reason to worry. If the secret of the Stone could have been discovered through fornication, or won at cards, Tristan would have had it within a month. But the whores and drinking and gambling were merely diversions from his true aim. With three older brothers and two sisters who would soon need dowries, he knew his days of living in the grand house – all he had ever known – were drawing to their end. The knowledge seemed to tear him apart, pitting the two halves of his soul in war against each other. He squandered his inheritance ever more savagely in couplings and wagers whose only pleasure was defiance, but he also pursued the Art with the obsessive conviction that it would free him from his father’s legacy.

  Tristan had made his laboratory in a tower that had been added to the east wing some years earlier. The first time he brought me there it took my breath away. With the sort of architectural absent-mindedness that only the nobility can afford, the inside of the tower had never been finished: you could stand on the ground and stare all the way up to the coned roof, so high it seemed to funnel into eternity. Broad windows for chambers that were never built pierced the stone walls above, while at our level the whole surround was painted with perfe
ct copies of Flamel’s panels in St Innocent’s. Only a brick furnace set into the far wall, and the door opposite, broke its sweep.

  Tristan pointed up into the giddy darkness. ‘Truly a place to dream of grasping the secrets of heaven.’

  I thought of Nicholas and the tower of Babel. The sin God punished was not ambition but overambition.

  Tristan was a humourless and petulant collaborator, neither master nor friend. I did not care. I was back in my element. All I thought of was unravelling Flamel’s riddles. The fever I had felt in Cologne was returning – and with it came other feelings, harder to resist. I disliked Tristan; sometimes I hated him. But on sweaty nights when we worked the furnace half-naked together, or when his hand brushed mine as I held the pestle for him to grind our powders, the worm inside me thrilled with perverse lust. The tower became my prison, then my world. Flamel’s paintings were my horizons, the dark roof my heaven, the bats and swallows who nested in the rafters its angels.

  One day, very excited, Tristan brought a stooped old man back to our workshop. He had white hair down to his shoulders and a white beard that touched his chest; he hobbled on a stick, poling himself like a barge. Blindness clouded his eyes, yet still there was something vigorous and watchful in his bearing.

  Tristan sat him on a bench amid our apparatus and fetched him wine.

  ‘This is Master Anselme,’ he said. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Seventy-eight.’ His voice was thin, but he smiled when he spoke.

  ‘Tell my friend what you told me in the churchyard at St Innocent’s.’

  ‘Many years ago – before my father died, God rest his soul – when I was young and eager, I delved into the secrets of the Art. As you yourselves do. And so it pleased God that I met the greatest adept of this age – of any age – a man who blazed over the rest of us as the sun vanquishes the moon. Nicholas Flamel.’

  I sat bolt upright. Even the figures in the paintings seemed to straighten. ‘You knew Flamel?’