by Tom Harper
‘The ladies’ room at the public library.’
‘Is that the one with the lions outside?’
‘Yes. Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. ’
‘OK.’ Nick’s mind raced. ‘The man who’s following you, what did he look like?’
‘I didn’t see his face. He had his hood up. He-’ A small gasp. ‘Someone’s here. I-’
He heard the bang of a door, then a rushing clatter that ended in silence.
‘I’m coming,’ said Nick. But he was speaking to an empty phone.
New York is an unforgiving city if you don’t have money. Nick didn’t have enough for a cab: he ran to the subway on Washington Square Park and dropped his last token in the slot. Would it have been faster to walk? He stood on the platform and stared into the tunnel, willing the train to come. The seconds ratcheted round on the grimy station clock.
There’d been no more calls on his phone when he came up at Forty-Second Street. He sprinted the block from the station to the library, pushing against the wind and the cramp in his side. Two stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, watched him race up the steps. He found an information desk on the first floor.
‘Where are the restrooms?’
He choked the words out through gasping breaths. The woman behind the desk must have thought he was deranged, a drug addict maybe. She glanced over his shoulder at the security guard, then raised her eyes to the ceiling.
‘Third floor.’
He took the steps as fast as he dared, trying not to attract attention while he scanned the faces he passed. He had his hood up. But it was a cold day, and half the people on the stairs wore hooded coats. Up ahead, he saw a man in a white shirt and jeans coming round the second-floor landing; his mind flashed back to the rooftop and the gun. He almost slipped on the stairs. But the man was a Nordic type, blond and fair, not the man from the roof.
He reached the third floor. Through a wood-panelled rotunda that he barely noticed, down a sparkling white corridor signposted for the restroom. He stopped outside the door.
What now? He couldn’t just burst in to the ladies’. Royce would love that.
The door swung in. The blast of a hand dryer intruded on the quiet of the library. He tensed, but it was only a pair of college-age girls.
‘Excuse me.’
They slowed but didn’t stop. ‘I wonder if you could help me. I lost my girlfriend – can’t find her anywhere. Do you think one of you could check…?’
‘Sure.’
One of the girls gave him a brisk, happy-to-help smile and poked her head back inside the door. ‘There’s nobody in there,’ she announced.
His heart sank. ‘Thanks anyway.’
The moment they were out of sight he slipped inside the restroom. It was empty. No trace of Emily, just white tiles, white handbasins, white lights reflected in stark white floors.
One of the cubicle doors hung shut, not locked. Still gripped by a sense of unholy trespass, he nudged it in. The stall was empty, but in the toilet bowl something gleamed. He peered in. Just where the bowl funnelled away into darkness, he could see a corner of a silver cellphone poking out of the waste pipe like sunken treasure. Was it Emily’s?
An electric trill broke the silence. He stared at the sparkling phone in the water for a second, stupefied, before he realised it was coming from his own pocket.
‘Hello?’
‘Nick?’
His whole body seemed to unclench as he heard Emily’s voice. Weak with relief, he sank against the stall partition. ‘Where are you?’
‘The payphone in the stairwell.’ An embarrassed pause. ‘I dropped my cellphone in the toilet.’
‘I just found it. Are you OK?’
‘I think so. I think the man lost me. Where are you?’
‘Heading over to you now. Stay on the line.’ He shouldered through the door, glad to be back on legitimate ground. A well-dressed woman walking up the corridor shot him a nasty look: he grinned and tapped the cellphone against his head like an idiot.
‘Wait a minute.’ Panic rose in Emily’s voice. ‘I think he’s coming back. I’ll meet you in the Salomon room on the third floor.’
Nick started running. As he came around the corner he saw a flash of red disappearing into the gallery off the main rotunda. Was that her? He slowed his pace for a second, watching. Five Japanese tourists followed her in. An elderly couple came out. A short, well-built man in a black parka hurried past them, almost tripping on the old man’s stick. His hood was down, revealing a shaved head with a row of gold glinting from his left ear. A face Nick had seen before.
He ran.
The Salomon Gallery was a dim room lined with bookshelves and display cabinets. A single glass case stood in the centre of the room like an altar or a tabernacle; inside, reverential lights played over an enormous spreadeagled book. The creamy pages shone back off the glass case, while the black print created holes in the reflection allowing a mosaic view beyond. A small figure in red shimmered in and out of sight behind. Nick wondered if she could see the man in the parka striding through the shadows towards her.
A guard sat in the corner keeping a lazy eye on the visitors. Nick crossed to him.
‘Excuse me, but that man over there, I think I saw him carrying a gun.’
The panic in his voice gave truth to the lie. The guard hauled himself out of the chair, unclipped the flap of his holster and advanced across the room, murmuring something into his radio mic. Nick followed, splitting off around the display case. There was Emily, pretending to peer at the open book while darting nervous glances around the room. She was so frightened she didn’t see him until he was almost on top of her.
‘Nick!’ She flew across to him and wrapped her arms around him. Her thin arms gripped him surprisingly tight. ‘I was terrified.’
‘You’re not safe yet.’
Nick put his hand on her shoulder and steered her to the exit, skirting the edge of the room. In the centre, a second guard had arrived, both deep in conversation with the man in the parka. Nick gestured towards them.
‘Was that him?’
Emily nodded.
They slipped out of the door and hurried to the elevator. None of the men in the room seemed to notice them go, and Nick didn’t look back. Only when they were out on the front steps in the stiff wind coming down Forty-Second Street, did he dare relax.
‘I’ll take you home.’
They caught a cab. Nick let Emily pay. Home for her turned out to be a tidy street in Midtown, whose closely planted trees and plain facades didn’t quite disguise the quiet wealth behind the windows. Emily saw Nick taking it in.
‘The museum owns it.’ An apologetic smile. ‘Just an apartment. I get it for six months, then I have to move into the real world. My time’s almost up.’
He scanned the street for danger while Emily fumbled with the front door. It led into a gloomy hallway, full of stairs and doors. He followed her up to the second floor. He wasn’t sure if he was invited, but she didn’t object. Their footsteps padded on the carpeted stairs; the whole house seemed to be asleep.
A cry from Emily broke the silence. Two steps behind her, Nick looked up. She was standing in front of the door to what must be her apartment, staring at something. She stood aside so he could see.
The door was open. Only fractionally, but wider than any door should ever be left open in New York city. A nest of splinters around the lock showed where it had been forced.
For a long moment they both stood there, frozen like dust in a beam of light. Then they turned and ran. Down the stairs, out the door, along the street past the long row of grey trees. It was only when they reached the intersection that they paused and looked back. The street was empty.
‘Call the police.’ Nick leaned forward, resting his hands on his thighs. ‘Don’t go inside until they arrive. Does anyone else live there?’
Emily shook her head. She looked close to tears. ‘One more thing. Please don’t tell the cops I was here. They alrea
dy think I’m guilty as hell.’
Emily was horrified. ‘Aren’t you going to wait with me?’
‘It won’t do you any good if they find me here.’
‘Please.’ Emily half-stretched out an arm, like a bird with a broken wing. ‘I won’t tell them you were with me.’
Nick glanced across the street. From halfway down the block, the aroma of grilling hamburgers wafted out of a Burger King.
‘Let’s go somewhere warmer.’
Emily perched on the edge of the plastic seat among the screaming kids on their way home from school and sipped a bottle of water. She didn’t take her coat off. Nick played with an empty paper cup left on the table.
‘Do you know who it was in the library?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘The last time I saw you, you warned me you weren’t the sort of person I should be helping.’
‘Not shouldn’t help. Wanted to.’
‘I wondered what you meant by that.’
Nick thought for a moment. ‘The card’s like a virus. Everyone it touches… First Gillian, then Bret. Now you.’
‘And you?’
She turned the question round with a flick of her head. Her eyes were as dark as a summer storm.
‘My apartment’s been broken into; I was almost killed and my friend was shot dead. Someone’s managed to cancel my credit card. The police have confiscated my passport, my computer, and they’re probably about to arrest me for murder. And robbery, if they find out I was here.’
He’d started to rush his words, spilling out the grievances and injustices that were swilling around inside him. He felt energised, purged. ‘All because of that card.’
‘Because of the card,’ Emily repeated. She looked shocked by his outburst – but less than he’d expected. ‘I looked at it some more last night. Of the eight animals on it, three don’t appear on any of the other cards.’
‘It could still be a forgery.’
‘Or else Gillian Lockhart made one of the most valuable finds in the field in the last twenty years.’ She spoke solemnly, no trace of exaggeration.
‘I thought you said it would only be worth ten thousand dollars.’
Emily’s look made Nick cringe. ‘That card would be one of the first ever printings from copper engraving. It’s also an impressive work of art in its own right. The money you’d pay for it doesn’t begin to describe what it’s worth.’
‘Worth someone killing for?’
Emily retreated a little. ‘Maybe it’s not the card. Maybe that’s only part of something else.’ She tipped her head to one side and examined him as she might a medieval tapestry. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’
Nick had always been a hopeless liar. ‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Can’t – or don’t want to?’
‘Believe me, you don’t want to know.’
She leaned forward over the table. ‘I do.’ Again her naked stare. ‘What else did you find?’
Nick swallowed. The laminated sides of his paper cup were as wizened as tree bark from being mangled in his hands. He looked out of the window, listening for the squawk of sirens.
‘Gillian sent me another message. The same time as the card, but I only just got it.’ He didn’t elaborate how. ‘It gives an address.’
‘You think Gillian might be there. Or have left something there?’ Emily’s face was alight with excitement, painfully vulnerable. ‘You’re going to find it.’
Nick didn’t deny it. ‘Please don’t tell the police. Not until tomorrow, at least.’
‘I won’t.’ Emily spun the water bottle on the table. She had a habit of tucking her arms in close to her sides when she was thinking, Nick had noticed. When she looked up, her gaze was clear and strong.
‘I’ll come with you.’
It would be a lie to say he hadn’t thought of it. Part of him desperately wanted her with him – a companion, a confidante, a friend he barely knew. But it was madness.
‘No.’ He tried to sound definite.
Emily just stared at him, manipulating the silence.
‘It would be too dangerous. For both of us. We don’t know each other. For all you know I’m a thief and a murderer.’
A flicker of Emily’s eyes dismissed the idea. ‘And it’s not like we’re just hopping over to New Jersey. It’s… a long trip.’
‘It’s in Paris, isn’t it?’ Emily bit her lip. ‘I thought you said the police confiscated your passport.’
Nick marvelled at how someone so delicate could be so relentless. ‘I’m not interested in the card. I just want to find Gillian.’
‘Of course. I want to help you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want to stay in New York, coming home every evening and wondering if that’s the night they’ll come back for me. Because I want to find out if that card really exists. And because I think you’ll need all the help you can get.’
She put the bottle down. It rang hollow on the plastic table. ‘How do we get there?’
‘There’s a Continental flight departing JFK for Brussels Zaventem at six thirty tonight.’ The agent tapped on his computer. ‘That has availability.’
Nick couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a travel agency – probably not since college, when the Internet got invented. He’d forgotten how slow it could be. He tried not to peer over his shoulder too often at the traffic crawling down Forty-Second Street.
‘I just need to see your passports.’
Emily snapped open her purse and slid her passport across the desk. Nick reached inside his coat for the travel wallet, feeling the stiff lump of the booklet inside. He fished it out and laid it on top of Emily’s, slightly fanned out like cards, waiting for the dealer’s verdict.
The travel agent flipped through it and checked the photograph. ‘You’re British?’ he asked Nick.
‘On my mother’s side.’ He’d applied for the passport when he’d gone to Germany, to save the hassle of getting a work permit. He’d never imagined he’d use it to sneak out of his home country. He still wasn’t sure if it would work.
It seemed to satisfy the agent, at least. He handed them back.
‘Enjoy your flight.’
XXVI
Strassburg, 1434
Strassburg – the city of roads. Roads from the north, from the rich cloth markets of Bruges, and London beyond; roads south from Milan, Pisa and across the Mediterranean to the dark coast of Africa; roads which came from the west, from Paris and Champagne, and continued east into the heartlands of empires: Vienna, Constantinople, Damascus and the spiced cities of the East. And a few miles distant the great flowing road of the Rhine, the warp of my life.
The roads were the arteries of Christendom; Strassburg was its heart. It stood on an island in the river Ill, a tributary to the Rhine, which necessity and human ingenuity had channelled into a many-stranded necklace of canals ringing the city with water and stone. Merely entering the city was a bewildering journey across bridges and moats, through gates, towers and narrow alleys that seemed to lead nowhere but another bridge, until at last you turned a corner and came out in a great square. There, where all roads met, stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. There I found what I sought.
I arrived on the road from the west. It was a perfect spring morning: a gentle sun in a smalt blue sky, following rain the night before that had washed the streets clean. A dewy freshness lingered in the air and brought colour to my cheeks. I was unrecognisable from the wretch who had prostrated himself before Tristan’s furnace. The scalds and blisters on my hands had healed, with only a telltale gap in my beard where the vitriol had burned my cheek. I had a new coat of sober blue cloth and a new pair of boots I had bought in Troges with money I had earned copying indulgences over Christmas. I felt a new man. Strangers no longer recoiled or crossed the road when I stopped to ask them my way. And so I found my path to the house at the sign of the bear.
I would have found it anyway. It stood opposi
te the cathedral, across the square, which had become a field of stones for the building of the new tower on the cathedral’s west front. I weaved my way between the vast blocks. On the far side, a gilded bear climbed an iron vine hanging over the door of a goldsmith’s shop.
I took the card from the bag that hung around my neck and held it up. I hardly needed to look. After four months every image was stamped on my being, as perfect a copy as the card itself. The bear in the top-left corner was the same, though on the card the vine was invisible.
I approached the shop nervously. It was too familiar: the rings on their spindles, the boxes of beads and corals, the gold plates and cups gleaming from the shadows behind the cabinet bars. Even the man at the counter reminded me of Konrad Schmidt, paternal in a way my own father never was. He offered me a wary welcome as I approached.
I held up the card and saw at once that he recognised it.
‘Did you make this?’
Paris
A fine mist hung in the Gare du Nord at eight o’clock that morning, as if steam was still settling from a hundred years ago. A policeman loitered by the café at the end of the platform and watched the passengers just arrived off the early train from Brussels. There weren’t many on a Saturday morning: clubbers not yet sober and football fans not yet drunk; a few solitary businessmen; gaggles of backpackers wearing shorts and sandals in their perpetual adolescent summer.
Last off the train came a curious couple – a man of about thirty in jeans and a long black coat, and a young woman in a high-necked red coat and bright red shoes. The policeman watched them. They were clearly travelling together, but there was an awkwardness between them that suggested unfamiliarity. They spoke without looking at each other; when the man had to squeeze past a pillar and brushed the woman’s arm, both apologised. A one-night stand, the policeman decided – two colleagues who had got drunk on business, too young to have made a habit of it yet. The man probably counted himself the luckier of the two. The girl was beautiful, in a prim sort of way. The policeman undressed her with his eyes, following the curve of her slim legs to the hem of her coat, then to the small, tightly belted waist and the full breasts above, to the dark eyes, disarranged hair and provocatively scarlet lips. The man just looked scruffy and dazed. Perhaps he had a wife to face.
