The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  There were no buttons in the elevator. A synthesised voice said something curt in French; the doors closed; the elevator hummed into motion, descending. Nick glanced at Emily, still swaddled in her red coat. She looked frightened, but managed a tired smile.

  The doors opened. Nick stared. His first thought was that he’d stepped into the bowels of a submarine. Everything was bathed in red light, reflecting off row upon row of high glass-fronted cabinets. A low electric hum filled the room.

  ‘Good evening, Herr Atheldene.’

  A man in a pinstriped suit with a white lab coat over it walked towards them between the cabinets. He had a round face, floppy hair and a wide moustache which dropped at the corners, giving him an earnest, eager-to-please look. He didn’t seem bothered by the strange hour. Perhaps in the constant half-light of this basement it made no difference.

  ‘Dr Haltung.’ He shook hands enthusiastically with Atheldene, Nick and Emily. ‘Your visit is very, uh, surprising, no?’

  ‘An urgent request from a client,’ said Atheldene. ‘The Morel collection.’

  ‘Of course, no problem, of course.’ The doctor bobbed up and down. ‘Please, come.’

  They followed him down a corridor between the cabinets. It was an eerie experience: with every step, motion-sensitive lights in the floor came on automatically to guide their way, then faded as they passed. In the cabinets, Nick saw books and piles of paper laid out on shelves like meat in a butcher’s shop. Digital readouts above the doors confirmed the temperature inside: -25oC.

  Dr Haltung stopped at a bank of cabinets near the middle of the room. He fumbled in his lab coat and pulled out a small hand-held computer. ‘The Morel collection.’

  ‘Has anyone been here to look at it since it arrived?’ said Nick.

  Haltung tapped the computer screen. ‘Nobody has accessed this material except our staff. As per your instructions, Herr Atheldene.’

  Nick felt the familiar ache of disappointment. Gillian hadn’t been there.

  ‘For which exact piece do you want to look, please?’

  ‘Catalogue number 27D,’ said Atheldene. ‘Anonymous bestiary, fifteenth century.’

  ‘Of course.’ Haltung tapped the computer again, pursed his lips, then pressed a button on one of the cabinet doors. Nick heard the smooch of a seal being broken, then a hiss of air. Haltung pulled on a pair of heavy mittens, counted down the shelves, then lifted the volume down and laid it on a wooden trolley.

  Nick tried to make out the book in the dim light. It was smaller than he’d expected, about the size of a normal hardback, bound in frayed brown leather. A fur of frost had accumulated along its spine, like ice cream left too long in the freezer. Two bands of gauze strapped the cover shut.

  Moving quickly, Haltung wheeled the cart to a glassed-in room at the end of the basement. A bank of overhead lights snapped on the moment he stepped through the door.

  Nick rubbed his eyes, startled by the sudden brightness. A huge machine like a turbine or a jet engine stood bolted to the floor in the centre of the room: an enormous cylinder attached to a box, all gleaming stainless steel. Red and green lights glowed on the side, while cables and tubes fed into it from the walls and ceiling.

  ‘The process actually is very simplistic,’ Haltung said. ‘Like for making instant coffee.’ He swung open a door on the front of the machine, revealing another stack of racks like a baker’s oven. He put the book inside, then went around the side and began pushing a series of buttons. Lights flickered on the panel.

  ‘Right now, at this moment, the pressure in the chamber is like normal, one thousand millibar. We reduce this to six millibar. This is almost a perfect vacuum.’

  He pressed the final button. All at once the machine began to hiss and vibrate; there was an enormous roar like a hairdryer on full blast.

  ‘The vacuum turns the ice at once into gas, without it becoming water. Sublimation, yes? So, the book is dry. The ink does not run, and the cloths keep the pages in alignment. Perfect, no?’

  ‘Can we have a look now?’

  Haltung tutted. ‘The book is still at negative twenty degrees Celsius. If you try to turn the page it snaps in your hand. Now we must restore the normal pressure and the normal temperature of plus twenty degrees.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Maybe two hours.’ Haltung stepped away from the machine. The gale-force blast died away, replaced with a low whirring. ‘You want some coffee while you wait?’

  ‘Do you make that in the machine too?’ Nick asked. Haltung missed the joke. ‘We use Nescafé.’ He picked up a phone on the wall and dialled a number. He waited.

  ‘Perhaps the guard has gone to the toilet.’ He put the phone down, looking vaguely puzzled. ‘I go up. Please, wait here.’

  He left the room. Nick followed his progress through the red-lit warehouse, watching the glow of the floor lights rippling ahead of him like a bow wave, then fading behind him. Haltung stepped into the elevator and vanished.

  Nick wandered back over to the machine and peered through the porthole. The book lay on the shelf, inert. The crust of ice had vanished. A pair of gauges next to the door showed the temperature and the pressure creeping up.

  ‘It’s incredible, when you think about it,’ said Emily behind him. ‘Five or six hundred years ago, that same book was sheets of vellum and a pot of ink on a desk somewhere in Paris. It’s survived who knows how many kings, wars, owners… It’s been soaked through, frozen, freeze-dried with all the technology the twenty-first century can throw at it… and after all that, the original words the author wrote will still be there.’

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ said Atheldene.

  A wave of tiredness hit Nick hard. It was almost two in the morning – and the jet lag still hadn’t finished messing with his body. There was no sign of Haltung and his coffee.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he announced.

  Atheldene looked as though he was going to argue, but made do with a grunted, ‘Don’t touch anything.’

  The door opened automatically to let Nick through into the red cocoon of the warehouse. He let himself wander along the corridors of frozen books, hypnotised by the way the floor lights seemed to spill ahead of him. He peered through the doors as he passed, the bundled books on the shelves, and wondered what lay within the tattered covers. Could there be pages that no one had ever read, fossils locked in the permafrost waiting for discovery? Could that be what Gillian had found?

  He came around a corner and saw solid concrete: he’d come to the far end of the warehouse. He ought to go back, he supposed. He turned.

  Almost at the same moment, a pool of yellow light appeared halfway along the front wall as the elevator doors slid open. Haltung stepped out. He wasn’t carrying any coffee – which was just as well, for he was trembling so badly he would surely have spilled it.

  A black-gloved hand poked out of the elevator, holding a gun to his spine.

  XLII

  Strassburg

  The screw tightened. The platen wheezed as it pressed the damp paper. We held it a moment then raised it back. Drach peeled the paper away from the plate and draped it over a rope strung between two beams.

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  Twenty-eight. I let go the handle of the press and walked over to examine it. In a sense there was nothing to see: it was exactly the same as the previous twenty-seven. But to me, that was everything. I gazed on it like a parent on his child. Better than a child, for a son is only an imperfect copy of the father. This was flawless.

  It was not beautiful. The text was monotonous, hard to read, for the steel punches had taken me so long to cut that we only had upper-case letters. There was none of the variation of size or weight that a scribe would have applied – except for one flamboyant initial that Kaspar had carved into the copper plate separately. For the twenty-eighth time I looked at it and sighed. My drab rows of words whose chief merit was their discipline, against the vivid curves and wild tendrils of his single lett
er. It captured something.

  Kaspar loaded the next sheet of paper and we took up our positions on opposite sides of the screw handle. These were golden times for me: quiet afternoons locked away in our cellar, the two of us working as one in our common purpose. In these moments I could almost forget how it was paid for.

  ‘I met an Italian once, a merchant who had travelled as far as Cathay,’ said Kaspar. ‘Do you know what he found there?’

  ‘Men with the heads of dogs and feet like mushrooms?’ Kaspar didn’t laugh. Like many quick-witted men, he was impatient with others’ humour.

  ‘Instead of gold and silver, they pay each other in paper.’

  I laughed, and nodded to the back of the room. A ream of paper stood baled up on a workbench waiting for the press. ‘We should go to Cathy. We would be rich men. We could use our paper to buy their silver, transport it back here to pay for more paper, use that to buy yet more silver in Cathay…’ I looked at him suspiciously, wondering if this was another of his complicated jokes. ‘Surely if it were that easy every paper merchant in Italy would be rich as the Pope by now.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that their princes must mark their paper with some symbol, as our kings mint coins.’

  ‘You can melt a king’s head off the coin and it will still be gold. Scrub it off a piece of paper and it is only paper. Burn it and you have nothing at all.’ I reversed the screw and pulled the sheet off. ‘Twenty-nine. I think your merchant spun you a traveller’s yarn.’

  ‘Is it so hard to believe? What are we doing here if not the same? We take pieces of paper that cost us a penny a dozen, and sell them for three silver pennies each to the Church. They in turn will sell them for sixpence. Has the nature of the paper changed?’

  This was facetious. ‘Men are not paying for the paper. They are buying expiation of their sins. The paper is just a receipt which the Church provides.’

  ‘Yet without the paper there is no transaction. Do you think that on the last day we will rise up clutching fistfuls of indulgences and present them to St Peter as if we were cashing an annuity?’

  ‘Only God knows.’

  ‘If God knows, why does He need a piece of paper to remind Him? Men need the paper because they are credulous fools.’

  It always surprised me how Kaspar could speak of men thus, as a species apart from himself.

  ‘The paper is blessed by the Church.’

  ‘Because it knows men will pay more if they are given something in return. Even if it is worth no more than the so-called money of Cathay.’ He gave me his peculiar smile, at once conspiratorial and condescending. ‘You know this is true. This is the alchemy you hope will make you rich: taking something worthless and making it valuable.’

  ‘If it succeeds.’

  I turned back to the press. In the time we had been talking, we had run off three more indulgences. I pulled the fresh copy from the press and checked it, still in thrall to its perfection. How many times before I grew tired of it? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

  Yet even as I savoured that delight, I felt it ebbing away. I examined the paper more closely. The letters were all there, each in its proper place. But they looked less defined than before, like stone worn smooth by many feet. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if too many hours in the basement had dulled my sight.

  ‘What is it?’

  I stood under the window. The stippled glass cast wispy shadows over the sheet, but the lettering was clear to see. I was not mistaken. The edges had blurred and spread, thickening each letter. Some had become almost indecipherable blots. Even Drach’s capital flowed less smoothly.

  I found the first page we had printed and compared it. Its text was crisp, far more legible than the other. I showed it to Kaspar.

  ‘Perhaps we did not press hard enough.’

  We printed another, then again. By the third attempt we could not doubt it. With each pressing the lines grew subtly less distinct. Eventually this gradual degeneration would render the text illegible.

  I looked around the room, at thirty-odd indulgences hanging on ropes or stacked on our table. They taunted me with their illusory perfection.

  But I had more urgent concerns. ‘Why has this happened?’

  Drach leaned over the press, pushing his fingers into the grooves of the copper plate. ‘Copper is soft; the pressure we need to make the imprint is immense. Each copy we make squeezes the plate and deforms it.’

  ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

  ‘Make another plate.’

  ‘It took Dunne a week to make that.’ I did a rough calculation in my head. ‘I paid him three gulden for the labour and the copper sheet. If a sheet can only produce forty or fifty indulgences for three pennies apiece, we would lose a full gulden on every batch. Even before we count the cost of ink, paper, rent…’

  ‘You sound like a merchant.’

  ‘One of us has to.’ I rounded on him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this would happen?’

  ‘I never printed enough of the cards to find out.’

  I slumped down onto the floor. The promise of Ennelin’s dowry had been enough to convince Stoltz the moneylender to extend me more credit, but I had already drawn all that I could. Even when I married her I would need most of the capital simply to repay my current obligations.

  I picked up one of the indulgences that had fallen to the floor beside me. Tears blurred the writing to nothing. I had mortgaged my life to pursue this project because I believed I could make something valuable.

  Now all I had was paper.

  XLIII

  Near Brussels

  The man pushed Haltung forward and stepped out of the elevator. Another man followed. Both were dressed in black leather jackets and black balaclavas that hid their faces. Both carried guns.

  One of them leaned forward and muttered something to Haltung, who pointed a trembling arm towards the machine room at the end of the warehouse. The two gunmen exchanged a couple of words; one gestured the other to go around the side of the room. Instinctively, Nick took a step back.

  That was his mistake. The floor lights by his feet had faded out while he stood still; now they sensed his movement and immediately came on – not bright, but enough to betray him in the red murk of the basement. The two gunmen spun round and saw Nick; one of them lifted his pistol, but in that moment Haltung wrestled free of his grip and started running towards the machine room. The gunman hesitated, just long enough for Nick to fling himself down the corridor to his left.

  It was the same nightmare as on the roof of his apartment. Shots rang out, though Nick had no way of knowing who they were aimed at. He ran down the corridor between the cabinets, reached a corner and turned right. A luminous path spread on the floor ahead of him. He swore, but there was nothing he could do. He made another left and another right, then stopped and waited for the lights to go out. He must be about halfway to the machine room. But what if the gunmen got there first?

  The footlights faded and left Nick in half-darkness, leaning against the cold glass, breathing hard. He tried to twist around without moving his feet and scanned the space above the cabinets for the telltale glow of movement.

  He was so busy looking up he almost didn’t see it coming. Only a sixth sense – perhaps a reflection in the glass, or something in the corner of his eye – saved him. He glanced back the way he had come and froze. The lights were coming on, rippling forward one by one as the footsteps advanced. They spilled around the corner and lapped towards his feet like a rising tide. Then stopped.

  The intruder must be just around the corner. Did he know Nick was there? Was he waiting to see if the lights came on again? Nick’s body screamed at him to run, though he knew it would mean certain death. But he couldn’t stand there.

  The lights were still on. Nick could move without being detected, but only towards the danger. He fought back the fear.

  Terrified that the lights would fade, he edged towards the corner of the cabinets, like a child shuffling to
wards the end of a high diving board. He crouched down, feeling the warmth of the lights on his face.

  The lights flashed up again as the gunman stepped around the corner. Nick didn’t wait: he pushed off on his feet and launched himself forward. The man fired, but too high. Nick crashed into him and brought him down, then rolled away. He wouldn’t win any sort of fight. He kicked the gun out of the man’s hand, then scrambled to his feet and ran.

  Panic took over. Nick zigzagged through the cabinets, trying to work his way towards the machine room. He was trapped in a maze, unable to see more than an arm’s-length ahead or behind. Three more shots came, three bolts of lightning, terrifyingly loud in the low-ceilinged room. The last one rang on in his ears; the flash echoed in the darkness. Had he been hit? Was this what it felt like to die?

  It was an alarm. Perhaps one of the bullets had hit something sensitive. It was no help to Nick. The alarm lights strobed the room; the bells drowned any hope of hearing his enemies. At the far end of the aisle, steel shutters were descending from the ceiling, blocking out the glass walls of the machine room. They were already below head height and slithering down with ominous speed. Nick had no choice. He hurled himself forward and sprinted down the corridor, praying there was no one with a gun behind him. All the floor lights were on full blast now, while a recorded voice barked urgent instructions he could neither hear nor understand. The grinding shutters and trilling bells were all around him, while in the background rose an enormous whine like a jet engine revving for take-off.

  The doors sensed him coming and parted automatically. With the shutter closing, the opening was little more than a foot high: he flung himself onto the floor and slid underneath it.

  The shutter touched the floor and snapped taut. Nick looked around, shivering with shock. Atheldene and Emily were peering out from behind the machine. There was no sign of the gunmen.

  He pushed himself to his knees. He didn’t trust himself to stand. ‘What happened?’ He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar coming from behind the shutters.