• • •
Early the next morning, word reached Couvret that his ship would depart for England at noon. He repacked what little he had removed from his trunk and paid the innkeeper to have it taken in a cart to the port. Couvret ate a good breakfast and arrived at the quayside an hour before the ship was due to depart. The vessel was a crayer, a single-masted merchant ship designed not for speed but to carry the maximum amount of cargo in its hold. Couvret’s berth was a board and pillow against the hull, sectioned off from the rest of the hold by a piece of sacking hung from nails. He was the only passenger. He stood on the deck as he left the Continent behind, never to return.
The crossing was long and slow. Fully loaded, the crayer was capable of making about two miles an hour, and the distance from Amsterdam to London was almost three hundred miles. Couvret spent much of the voyage sleeping and reading. The food was poor, but filling. He was a good traveler, which helped.
On the last night of the crossing, just as darkness was falling, he woke from a nap to see that the sacking on the empty berth across from his own had fallen, obscuring the interior. Previously he had been able to see its hard pillow and narrow board from his own. Now he could not, and he thought that he detected signs of movement behind the sacking.
He stood, holding on to the edge of his bunk for support until he was certain that he had his sea legs. He moved toward the other berth, and black smoke began to rise from behind it. No, not smoke: oil, or ink, spreading from behind the sacking, adhering to the ceiling and hull and bulkhead, smothering all, darkness upon darkness . . .
Couvret woke for a second time, emerging so suddenly from his nightmare that he banged his head painfully on the deck above his head. When he had stopped seeing stars, he sat on the edge of his board and looked at the opposite berth.
Its sacking hung in tattered ribbons, as though torn apart by gunshot.
Or splinters.
• • •
Couvret found the book at the bottom of his trunk, wrapped in a shirt that was not his. It was, as Van Agteren had noted, warm to the touch. Through the white muslin it resembled meat from a butcher’s block.
When had he passed it on, Couvret wondered? Before they had even met, while Couvret was eating alone at the inn? When he went to make water? It didn’t matter. Getting rid of it hadn’t saved him, because when Couvret unwrapped the book it would open only at one page. It showed Van Agteren, his mouth agape, with flames emerging from his throat. Wherever he now was, Van Agteren was burning.
Destroying the book would do no good. Van Agteren had tried fire and water, both to no avail. But Couvret had something that Van Agteren did not.
Couvret had faith.
He took his Bible and placed it on top of the book. Then he wrapped both in the muslin shirt, and tied the parcel with rope from the hold. He examined the ship’s cargo until he found a Dutch oak chest with a second baseboard laid within it for extra strength. He ascended to the main deck and managed to remove some tools from the rigger’s box without being seen. Then he went to work, and when he was done the book and Bible were safely hidden in the chest. It was not a perfect job, but would pass a cursory inspection.
Couvret left the hold and spent the rest of the voyage on the main deck with the captain. He was cold and wet by the time the crayer entered the Thames, but he did not care. When he disembarked, his letters of introduction in hand, no shadow followed him from the ship.
And London swallowed him up.
II. THE DJINN
Maggs: no first name, or none that anyone could remember, or cared to use. Maggs: redolent with the whiff of poorly dried clothes and old paper, a parcel of books always to hand. Maggs: ready to buy, readier still to sell.
They said that he did not love books, not really, but this was not true. He simply had few sentimental attachments to them. They were useful for the knowledge that they contained, or the money they might bring him. Some were aesthetically interesting, but most were not. He kept a small library in his rooms, containing volumes of particular rarity or attractiveness, although even these he was not above selling for the right price. But most of the books that passed through his living space did so for only the briefest of periods, for they were on their way to other hands. Those for which a buyer could not be found were of no use to him, and so were offloaded by weight, or, as a last resort, left on the steps of a public lending library. Whatever his other flaws, Maggs could not bring himself to destroy a book.
He kept an eye on the obituary columns, and it was said of him that only flies could beat him to a bibliophile’s corpse. He haunted estate sales and preyed on the relatives of collectors who were too numbed by grief to pay close attention to the disposal of assets like books, or had little or no understanding of the worth of a collection to begin with. He was adept at haggling over volumes of minor value in order to distract attention from those that really interested him, and regarded it as a sorry day indeed if he were forced to pay more than half of a book’s true price. His every waking moment was consumed by covers and pages, and they haunted his dreams by night.
Maggs specialized in what was often euphemistically described as “esoterica,” a term capable of encompassing everything from the erotic to the occult. He was a sexless being, so the former did not interest him, and also a committed atheist, which meant that the latter did not frighten him. Rather, he regarded the buyers of both as depraved in similar ways, and endeavored to spend as little time as possible in their company. If forced to make a distinction, Maggs might have opined that the collectors of pornography were less inclined to quibble over price, and, although clearly the possessors of polluted minds, were less sinister than the occultists, whose connection to the ordinary tenets of humanity was tentative at best.
There were exceptions, of course, for the ranks of the occultists numbered some for whom money was no object at all, as long as they got what they wanted. Unfortunately for Maggs, they tended to seek volumes of extreme rarity, most of them private printings, or even manuscript copies of otherwise singular works. In addition, some of the books on their wish lists had been consigned to the flames by various clerics over the centuries, and now existed only as smoke-tinged rumors. Still, Maggs was occasionally lucky, although his good fortune was a consequence of his tenacity and perseverance. Twice in recent years he had mined valuable occult gems from otherwise ordinary collections, the relatives of the deceased—and, possibly, the deceased themselves, given the solitary nature of the finds—quite unaware of the uniqueness of the dusty, battered old works in question. At other times, he had been alerted by his network of lesser book scouts and minor informants to the existence of noteworthy assemblages in the estates of gentlemen collectors—for they were almost exclusively gentlemen—who were so discreet in their interests as to have bypassed Maggs’s attentions entirely. But he also retained meticulous lists of his own private customers so that, upon their demise, he might be in a position to buy back, for pennies on the pound, the books he had sold them in life.
The bibliophilic possessions of one such customer—Sandton, late of Highbury, interested in illustrated volumes from the Far East, mostly seventeenth and eighteenth century, floral, but occasionally with a mild erotic bent—now lay in boxes on the floor of Maggs’s modest rooms. Some he had himself sold to Sandton, and he welcomed them back like old debtors with bankers’ notes in their pockets. Others were less familiar to him, but he had been able to make a shrewd estimate of their value based on his knowledge of similar items. Unfortunately, Sandton’s son was no fool, and Maggs had been forced to pay more for the choicer items in the collection than he would have liked, even if he were still certain of eventually turning a profit from the whole business.
Maggs carefully examined each book, noting the nicks and tears, checking the binding and the edges, shaking his head over any recent foxing. Sandton had been more careful than most, but a number of volumes betrayed signs of ill use. Maggs was inclined to blame the son.
His w
ork took him into the small hours, and it was only as he was repacking the books that he spotted, lying in a corner of one of the boxes, the shape of a small volume wrapped in cloth. He couldn’t recall handling it during the negotiations with Sandton’s son, and he certainly hadn’t paid any money for it. The boxes had been empty when he brought them to Highbury to transport the books, and he had packed everything himself in order to prevent any accidental damage. He couldn’t imagine how this interloper had contrived to gain passage, unless Sandton had added it when he wasn’t looking, although Maggs could understand neither why nor how Sandton might have done such a thing, for he had kept his distance from Maggs throughout the entire process, appearing to regard it as a dull necessity destined to yield only a small profit, and doing little to hide his distaste for the book scout.
Now Maggs unwrapped the book. It had a brown leather binding—relatively undamaged, although clearly of considerable antiquity—and an unusual locking device consisting of a pair of concentric silver rings, each marked with tiny symbols, and each capable of being turned independently. Maggs took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and examined the lock and its inscriptions. He then went to his shelves, removed one volume of an encyclopedia, found the reference that he sought, and returned to his desk with the book. Yes, the symbols were Arabic-Indic numerals, and Eastern—in all likelihood Persian or Urdu: he could tell by the differences in the designs of the four, five, and six numerals. What he was looking at was an early combination lock of a kind that he had never encountered before. He spent a few minutes experimenting with the dials, to no avail, before putting the book aside. He would look at it again in the morning. It was curious, though. He wondered if he should return it to the younger Sandton and decided to sleep on the matter. The testy negotiations over the purchase of the books still rankled. Had he been a man of faith, Maggs might have chosen to view the little volume as a gift from God, a way of making up for some of his lost profit. He brought the book to his bedroom and placed it on his bedside table. It was the last thing he saw before he turned off the light and closed his eyes.
That night, Maggs dreamed he was working on the lock. His fingers moved in his sleep—testing, turning.
When the click came, it was so slight that it did not disturb his rest.
• • •
Maggs slept late the next morning. He woke feeling fractious and unsettled, and barely glanced at the leather book by his bedside, for there was money to be made. He went to the window, checked the sky, and saw no sign of rain clouds. He dressed hurriedly, stuffed a slice of buttered bread into his mouth for sustenance, then placed two boxes of Sandton’s choicest books on his little trolley and headed out.
Most of Maggs’s business was conducted with the bookshops that lined Charing Cross Road. His dealings with them followed an established pattern. He would divide up his hoard, determining which books were best suited to each individual dealer, and then, once a week, he would pay them all a visit: this one on Monday, these two on Tuesday, that fellow on Wednesday. He preferred not to try to sell books toward the end of the week, when the booksellers’ coffers might already have been emptied by other scouts, and a good price would be harder to obtain as a consequence. Then again, Maggs was not above offering to buy a drink come close of business on Friday in order to draw in a buyer, especially if he felt that he had a nice prize with which to bait his hook.
But most of the dealers were not particularly sociable, regarding Maggs and his kind as an unfortunate necessity in the trade, and one that was best left publicly unacknowledged. Some—the ones who regarded themselves as “gentlemen booksellers”—refused even to have him on their premises for longer than it took him to drop off a parcel of books for examination, and then parted only reluctantly with money when they found something they liked, as though doing Maggs a favor by consenting to accept the volumes, let alone pay for the pleasure. Maggs preferred dealing with those who, like himself, were not afraid to get dusty and dirty and sniffed after treasures with all the grubby energy of pigs seeking truffles in a French forest.
Atkinson was just such a dealer. He owned one of the smaller bookshops on Charing Cross Road, although nobody could ever have accused him of not using the premises to its fullest advantage. He had fitted out the shop himself, and any space capable of containing books had been adapted for shelving. He appeared to own only one shirt, or multiple versions of the same: a red-and-white-striped affair that, in fabric and hue, reminded Maggs of a deck chair. In fact, since Atkinson closed his shop for one week each August in order to take the sun at Brighton, it wouldn’t have surprised Maggs to learn that, somewhere in the town, one or more such chairs had been reduced to wooden slats in order to serve the bookseller’s sartorial needs.
Atkinson didn’t allow smoking on his premises, as he claimed that it damaged the books. He refused to drink tea anywhere but in the little office behind the counter, for fear that an accidental spillage might ruin a volume, and even then he sipped directly from a Dewar flask, and always replaced the lid between mouthfuls. There was, it was said, a Mrs. Atkinson, although nobody had seen her in years, possibly not even Mr. Atkinson, whose place of business was the first on the street to open each morning, and the last to close each night. Even then, Atkinson could still be glimpsed inside, examining books by lamplight, or just sitting in his little office, reading and sipping tea.
Atkinson’s particular areas of interest included the kind of Asian volumes contained in Sandton’s collection. His knowledge of the subject was greater than Maggs’s, and his list of potential buyers for such items commensurately larger. Maggs wanted to turn the books around as quickly as possible, for he had his eye on an estate sale in Bath next month, and he trusted Atkinson more than any other dealer in London. Even allowing for Atkinson’s percentage on the sale, Maggs would still be comfortably in the black on the Sandton collection, and the money would be in his hands more quickly than if he tried to sell its contents himself.
But Atkinson was busy when he reached the shop—he was on the verge of offloading half a shelf of nautical volumes for at least twice what they were worth, and ten times what he had paid for them—and Maggs knew better than to distract him from such a windfall, especially when he was about to ask for Atkinson’s assistance. Furthermore, if Atkinson did well with the nautical volumes then he might be inclined to settle for a smaller cut on the Sandton collection. So Maggs simply dropped off the boxes and told Atkinson that he’d call on him again the next day to discuss their contents. With that done, and his burden lightened, he wheeled his trolley down to the Corner House on the Strand, where he treated himself to a hearty late breakfast in anticipation of the influx of funds that would soon be coming his way.
• • •
Maggs spent the rest of the day scouting for books and discovered a nice underpriced first edition of The Water Babies at Marks & Co., which he then sold to a young bookseller at Sotheran’s for a considerable profit. (Both Marks and Cohen, proprietors of the former establishment, had trained at the latter and would have been galled to learn of the oversight.) With his pockets heavier than when he’d started that morning, and the promise of more money to come, it was a cheerful Maggs who returned to his rooms as darkness fell.
He had forgotten about the little volume until he spotted it lying on his bedside table. He instantly saw that the two interlocking silver rings had separated, and the volume was now unlocked. He had a vague memory of dreaming about the book, but that was all. It had certainly been secure when he went to bed, and he was sure that nobody had been in his rooms since he left that morning. He could only suppose that either his efforts of the night before had inadvertently led him to stumble across the correct combination, and the lock had been so stiff with age that it had taken a while for the mechanism to respond, or the lock was long past its usefulness, and the simple act of fiddling with it had caused it to yield.
Maggs examined the damage of the years, and the exposed parts of the
boards and binding. He thought the headband might have been worked at the same time that the book was sewn and cord used instead of catgut. At a guess, he was prepared to date it to the fifteenth century, or earlier, which made it quite the gem. As before, he could still find no trace of decoration on the cover, or any indication of its contents.
He dug up a pair of cotton gloves before opening the book. If it was valuable, he did not want to risk having the dirt and oils from his skin transferring to the paper and staining it. The pages were of a linen fiber mix—he could tell just by looking at them—with rough edges. The first four were entirely blank. The rest—perhaps fifty in all—were covered in script, although rendered in an alphabet and language that Maggs did not recognize. The ink was reddish purple and had not faded in the slightest over the years, so that the pages might have been filled that very morning. The volume was also palimpsestic, so that a turn on the diagonal might reveal a different communication to one familiar with its language of origin.
Maggs’s first impression was that the book had been written with a sense of some urgency, for the calligraphy had none of the beauty and elegance of even the more modest European manuscript copies that had passed his way. It seemed to Maggs that what he was holding was a notebook, but it struck him as unusual that a creation such as this—a leather-bound book, constructed with enough skill to survive relatively intact for five or six centuries at least, its pages of the finest quality—should contain only a palimpsest rendered in untidy script.
He spent an hour going through his encyclopedia, consulting examples of alphabets ancient and modern, trying to find a comparable model for the scribbles. He had no success and finally set the book aside, but not before wondering once again about the extraordinary vibrancy of its ink. He carefully touched it with a gloved finger, half expecting it to stain the tip, but the material came away clean.
He decided that Atkinson might know of someone willing to buy it, earning Maggs a nice little windfall. Then again, he could always take it to the British Library and ask someone there to examine it first. Yes, that might be for the best. After all, he reasoned, he could have in his possession the notebook of some Arab genius, an Eastern da Vinci, although an Arab would surely have written in Arabic, and the book’s only connection to that civilization appeared to be its lock. Could the lock have been a later addition? Possibly, but Maggs was no more expert in locks than he was in the lost languages of the East.
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