by Tom Harper
Nick’s stomach tightened as he caught the policeman watching them. Had he been recognised? Was he on some sort of watch list? Had the NYPD circulated his photograph to Interpol? His movements felt more and more unnatural as he walked towards the policeman, his body seizing up under the pressure. He half-turned towards Emily and muttered something irrelevant; she nodded and looked uncomfortable.
At least the jet lag helped: it was hard to look too tense when you were still half asleep. Nick had spent the short night cramped upright on the plane while Emily dozed under a blanket next to him. Fear kept him awake right across the Atlantic: fear of what he had left behind, fear of what he would find waiting for him. Just as he’d begun to nod off, the cabin crew had turned on the lights to begin their descent into Brussels. Then it had been a rush through the airport, a taxi into the city and the first train to Paris. That had been Emily’s idea. From Brussels they could travel anywhere in Europe without having to show their passports again. Though there were other ways to be discovered.
Nick looked around and realised they were past the policeman. He was too tired to be relieved. At the back of the station they queued ten minutes for a taxi.
‘Cent soixante dix-sept rue de Rivoli,’ Emily told the driver. Nick looked at her in bleary-eyed surprise.
‘I spent six months here for my doctorate,’ she explained. ‘It’s hard to do much original research if you can’t speak the language.’
It reminded them both how little they knew each other. Emily clutched her bag on her lap and leaned against the door; Nick looked out the car window.
Number 177 rue de Rivoli was an anonymous building, a bank sandwiched between an American chain store and a shoe shop. A guard was just rolling back the iron security gate when they arrived. They got a coffee and a croissant in a café across the road and waited for other customers to arrive. Lost in their weary thoughts, they barely spoke to each other. Nick felt as if he was limping over the finish line of a long nightmarish race. All he wanted to do was give up and sleep.
At half past nine they walked into the bank. A receptionist behind a grey desk greeted them, and listened patiently while Emily explained that she had a valuable necklace her grandmother had given her and needed somewhere safe to store it while she pursued her studies in Paris for six months.
The receptionist nodded. They had deposit boxes available for just such a purpose.
‘Are they secure?’
The receptionist gave the sort of shrug they surely taught in all French schools. ‘Oui, je pense.’ She saw Nick looking blank and switched seamlessly to English. ‘You have a card which opens the door to the safe room, and a pin number to open your box.’
‘Et ça coûte combien?’ Emily persisted in French. ‘Now you pay five hundred euros, and then each month one hundred euros.’
Emily affected indecision. ‘Is it possible to see the safe room?’
The receptionist pointed to a glass-panelled door in the back wall. ‘C’est là.’
They walked over and peered through. Behind the door was a small carpeted room with rows of anonymous steel cabinets running from wall to wall. Red numbers glowed from digital readouts on their faces. Nick tried to find box 628 but couldn’t make out the numbers through the thick, bulletproof glass. Though the door looked like wood it was cold to the touch – three-inch steel.
‘I guess we’re not breaking in there,’ he muttered.
They went back to the receptionist. Emily reached in her purse and pulled out five hundred-euro notes and her passport.
The receptionist gave an apologetic smile. ‘You have to pay in advance six months. Another six hundred euros.’
Nick winced. Emily handed over the money and waited while the receptionist tapped the details into her computer. A machine under the desk spat out a plastic card, which she handed to Emily with her passport and a sheet of paper.
‘That is your PIN number. You have box 717. Merci beaucoup.’
Emily swiped her card. The steel door opened with a hiss of air, then closed with a heavy click the moment they’d stepped through. They walked silently across the carpeted floor. The red numbers on a thousand doors blinked from the sidelines, every one slightly out of sync with the others. Together with the harsh fluorescents above, Nick felt as if he’d stepped into a migraine.
Emily stopped in front of one of the deposit boxes. ‘This is 628.’
Nick angled himself so that he stood between Emily and the door, fighting back the urge to check if anyone was watching. Emily pulled on a pair of black leather gloves. With sharp, birdlike movements, she pecked out the number: 300481.
The door swung ajar. Emily reached in.
Hans Dunne the goldsmith took the card from my hand and glanced at it.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘A nobleman in Paris.’ A vision of Jacques’ broken face flashed before me. ‘He said it came from here.’
Dunne laid the card on his counter. ‘Not from me.’
Four months’ pent-up hope tottered on its foundations. Before it could crash, Dunne continued, ‘That was one of Kaspar Drach’s. The painter.’ A strange look crossed his face. ‘Among other things.’
‘Is he here?’
He saw me peering over his shoulders at the apprentices in the workshop behind him. ‘Not now. Come back tomorrow if you still want to see him.’
‘Where is he today?’
‘At the crossroads of St Argobast.’ He glanced at the sun. ‘You’ll struggle to get there and back before dusk.’
‘How will I recognise him?’ I persisted. ‘Look for a man on a ladder.’
There are many days, perhaps most, when destiny eludes us, slipping from our grasp while we bump around like blind men. There are days, few and rare, when it runs to meet us like a mother gathering her children. And then there are days when it taunts and teases but holds out the promise of victory to the persistent. That day I would not be denied. I felt it in my soul, a trembling excitement that only grew as I wound my way back across the bridges and canals, past the mills and farms that lined the banks of the Ill. Canvas sails spun the sun into flashes of light. Yellow-downed ducklings teetered in the mud at the water’s edge.
I reached the crossroads an hour before sunset. The labourers had left the fields and the road was empty. Haze filled the air. A few birds chirruped in the hedgerows, but otherwise all was still. A little beyond, I could see a few timber-framed houses that made the hamlet of St Argobast.
A copse of three rowans, just coming to bud, stood where the roads met. A panel showing the Virgin had been raised on a high pole in front of them, a shrine for travellers. A man with a palette in one hand and a brush in the other stood on a ladder against it, apparently careless of the height. Though he had his back to me, I knew at once he was the man I had come to find. I only had to look at the Madonna he had painted. The crown had been smudged into a halo, and instead of a deer there was a docile child sitting on her skirts, but otherwise she was the queen from the cards. The same abundant hair, one raised hand carelessly stroking it; the same full lips and coquettish eyes admiring her reflection in the hand mirror – which in this incarnation had become the face of her child. With her full hips, her swelling breasts and her legs spread wide open under the folds of her gown, she was the most brazen Virgin I had ever seen.
I walked to the foot of the ladder. ‘Are you Drach?’
He looked down. The sun hung behind his head like a nimbus, hiding his face in its brightness.
‘Did you make the cards? The deck of birds and beasts and flowers and wild men that miraculously duplicate themselves?’ I held up the eight. The low sun shone through so that the paper glowed amber in my hand. The swirling outlines of the beasts traced themselves on the back of the card.
I heard the soft laughter that afterwards I came to know so well.
‘I did.’
XXVII
Paris
The taxi drove past the tourists already gathering in front of Notre
-Dame cathedral. It crossed the river on the Pont Neuf and turned into the block of tiny alleys that wound around the church of St Severin, near the Sorbonne. It stopped about halfway down the lane outside a hotel, an old building with an awning over the door advertising a brand of beer. A tabby cat jumped down from the receptionist’s chair as Nick and Emily walked in and stalked away. A moment later, an elderly man appeared from the adjoining office. He answered Emily’s question with a nod and a smirk, and produced a pair of keys from the drawer. He didn’t ask for any paperwork.
They took the elevator up to the room. Nick looked at the double bed and tried to hide what he was thinking.
‘I asked for a twin,’ Emily apologised. ‘I’ll go down and ask them to change it.’
‘I can sleep on the floor.’ Just at that moment he could have slept anywhere. But not yet.
He dropped his bag and went to the small table by the window. He pulled the stiff-backed envelope from his inside coat pocket. By unspoken agreement, they had waited until they got back to the hotel room.
Like a pair of clumsy lovers they both reached for the envelope at the same time. Their hands collided, withdrew. Nick took it. He forced his finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Something firm and smooth to the touch waited inside. He slid it out onto the table. A flat oblong about the size of a postcard, wrapped in white tissue paper.
‘Let me.’
This time he let her have her turn. Emily slid a nail under the tape and peeled back the folds of paper. They both stared.
After everything he had endured, Nick’s overwhelming feeling was disappointment. The object of his quest was utterly familiar. Four bears and four lions, no longer on a screen but printed on stiff, fluted paper. Age made it grey, though the printed lines were still sharp.
Emily pulled on her gloves and picked it up by the edges. ‘There isn’t any stamp or insignia on it.’
‘Should there be?’
‘If it came from a library or a major collection.’ She flicked on the table lamp and held the card against the shade so that it glowed. ‘There are no outlines around the animals. This was printed from a single copper sheet – not one of the later cut-up composites. And there.’ She pointed to the middle of the card. ‘The watermark – a crown. That’s the same as the other early cards.’
‘What about those?’ Nick pointed to a cluster of dark blots smeared on the bottom-right corner of the card. Some were black, others a reddish brown. ‘They look like dried blood.’
‘Maybe wine spilled during a game?’ Emily laid the card back in its tissue paper and covered it reverentially, like a corpse. Her lips were moist with excitement. ‘This is genuine, Nick. The first of these cards to be discovered in a century.’
Nick didn’t respond. If anything, her excitement only fuelled his resentment. He felt a sudden urge to tear the card into pieces.
‘We’re supposed to be finding Gillian.’
‘Who wanted you to have the card.’
‘And what am I supposed to do now? Put it in a museum with a sign? “Gift of Gillian Lockhart, shame she disappeared.” ’ Nick knew his tiredness was running away with him but couldn’t make himself care enough to stop.
‘Did she leave anything else?’
Emily’s question stopped him like a slap in the face. Nick picked up the envelope and shook it. Something rattled inside.
He turned it over. A credit-card-sized piece of plastic and a small gold microchip tumbled out onto the table.
He examined the plastic card first. It was red with ‘BnF’ next to an image of an open book. He turned it over and stared. There was Gillian, printed into a one-inch box in the corner, staring down the camera like the barrel of a gun. It took him a moment to recognise her. An overhead light glared off her forehead and drowned her face in an unflattering, office-issue shadow. She’d cut her hair since he last saw her and dyed it blonde. He remembered a line from a poem she’d liked to quote at him: ‘Naught shall endure but mutability’.
‘BnF is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,’ said Emily. ‘The French national library. Forty of the original playing cards are there. This must be her pass.’ She pointed to the gold microchip. ‘What about that?’
Nick picked it up between his finger and thumb. ‘It’s a SIM card. For a cellphone.’
‘Why would she leave that?’
‘Maybe so we could see who she called.’
Nick pulled out his own phone and prised off the back cover. He slid the SIM out of its holder and replaced it with Gillian’s. He was about to turn it on when suddenly he paused. His finger hovered over the power button. ‘Or…’
‘Or what?’
‘Or because they could trace the signal to locate her.’
He put the phone in his pocket, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Emily jumped up in alarm.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the Métro station.’
The cold hit him the moment he stepped out of the hotel. A raft of bruising clouds hung low over Paris, and there was a bite in the air that promised snow. He hurried around the corner to the Saint-Michel station. Across the Seine, a flock of birds wheeled around the towers of Notre-Dame. He bought a ticket, pushed through the narrow turnstiles and down a flight of stairs to the crowded platform.
He switched on the phone. Searching, said the screen. When he was satisfied there was no reception, he went to work.
He started by scrolling through her phone book. A few of the names sounded familiar in a second-hand way; some were French, others looked American. Nothing leaped out. ‘Museum, Natalie Cell, Paul Home…’
No ‘Nick’. His stomach tightened. She deleted me. After everything else it was a petty disappointment, but it hurt like a bullet to the gut. Perhaps more because it was so banal: not a gesture or a message, just a piece of housekeeping.
Maybe she wanted to protect me, he tried. But he couldn’t convince himself.
So why did she send me the card?
A red double-decker train pulled into the station. For half a minute everything was chaos as one group of shoppers and sightseers exchanged places with another. The train lumbered away.
He rummaged through the folders to check her text messages. They were empty – every message deleted. Except one.
I don’t know what I’ve done but please please call me. Even if you don’t want to talk, just call once. I still love you. Nick
The time stamp said six months ago. She’d never replied. Why had she kept it, leaving it to gather digital dust in this forgotten corner?
Nick closed the message. The platform was beginning to fill up again. At the far end, a dreadlocked guitar player was singing Pink Floyd in French. Without much hope, Nick went to the phone’s call log.
There were three calls. Two of them to numbers that looked French and weren’t in her phonebook, the third – and most recent – to someone called Simon. Nick clicked to view the number. That looked local too.
He scribbled down the three numbers with the time and duration of the calls, then switched off the phone.
He spent fifteen minutes in an Internet café, then went back to the hotel room. Emily was sitting on the bed examining the playing card again, her feet tucked under her like a schoolgirl.
‘Did you find anything?’ said Nick.
She shook her head. ‘You?’
‘Three numbers.’ He pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket. ‘The last three calls Gillian made from her cellphone.’
‘If it was hers,’ Emily cautioned. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘It was hers.’ Nick slumped into an armchair. His hands were still stiff from the cold outside. ‘One of them was to a taxi firm. I’ve got the time and date of the call, so we could see if they have any records. Then there was one to a guy listed as Simon.’
‘Does he have a surname?’
‘Not even an initial.’ What did that imply? He’d never heard Gillian talk about any friends called Simon. He pushed the
thought out of his mind.
‘But the third one I had more luck with. His name’s Professor Jean-Baptiste Vandevelde. He’s a particle physicist at the Institut Georges Sagnac, just outside Paris. He specialises in X-ray fluoroscopy, whatever that is.’
Emily raised an eyebrow. ‘Her phone told you all that?’
‘He’s got a website.’ Nick handed her the printout he’d taken from the Internet café. ‘All his contact details. When I searched for the phone number, it came up.’
Emily squinted at it. ‘Why would Gillian want to talk to a particle physicist?’
‘Let’s ask him.’
XXVIII
Strassburg, 1434
What can I say about Kaspar Drach? He was the most obscenely talented man I ever met – more so, I believe, than Nicholas Cusanus. While Cusanus tended his thoughts in walled gardens, Drach roamed freely across the earth; where Cusanus pruned, watered, shaped and cropped, Drach sprayed his seed without thought for where it would land. Tangled meadows of bright and fantastical flowers sprouted wherever he walked. Though among their twisted stems, serpents lurked.
None of which I knew that spring evening. I remember his bare feet slapping on the rungs as he descended the ladder. The crooked grin as he saw my surprise. I had expected someone like the goldsmith, wise and venerable, a man who had given his life to attain his new art. Instead, I saw a slight young man with a mop of unruly black curls, younger than me by several years. His skin was the colour of raw honey, his eyes like viscous oil – blue, green, grey or black by the changing whim of the light. A barbarian streak of blue paint creased his forehead.
He plucked the card from my hand and glanced at it. I looked for a sign of recognition, perhaps a glow of paternal pride that his prodigal child had been brought back to him. There was nothing. He handed it back to me.
‘Did you lose?’
‘What?’ I had not been paying attention. His fingers had brushed mine as we exchanged the card. In that moment, I had felt the demon who inhabited me stir, a gust that brings a taste of the storm.
