Twilight of Gutenberg

by Hitoshi Goto

  Twilight of Gutenberg

  By Hitoshi Goto

  Translated by Kat Yamada

  Hitoshi Goto’s debut work Labyrinth of the Scriptorium was awarded the prestigious Ayukawa Tetsuya Award in 2002. Named after the famous mystery writer and administered by Tokyo Sogensha, this is the foremost crime novel award focusing on the logic mystery genre. Twilight of Gutenberg is his second work.

  Twilight of Gutenberg

  by Hitoshi Goto

  First published in Japan 2005 by Tokyo Sogensha Co., Ltd.

  Translated by Kat Yamada with revisions by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9992573-9-5

  Copyright by Hitoshi Goto, 2018 eBook Edition

  Hitoshi Goto graduated from Keio University, Tokyo with a BA in Economics in 1980, and received an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1986. Before becoming a full-time crime novelist, Mr. Goto worked for Nomura, Japan’s largest investment bank, and Egon Zehnder, a Swiss consulting firm. He has lived, worked, and travelled extensively throughout Europe developing a keen interest in European history. Goto’s debut crime novel Labyrinth of the Scriptorium was awarded the prestigious Ayukawa Tetsuya Award in 2002, Japan’s foremost crime novel award focusing primarily on the logic mystery genre. Goto is also the author of Gutenberg-Dämmerung (Twilight of Gutenberg), 2005, Ein Gordischer Knoten (A Gordian Knot), 2009, and 39 more important things than English, to work in the world, 2014

  Twilight of Gutenberg is a fast-pasted mystery thriller with the action set mostly in Europe during WW2, against the background of a story spanning eight centuries up to the present day. Yasuo Hoshino, an artist from Japan, finds himself caught up in a series of strange events that take him as a special agent between Paris, Guernsey, London, and Berlin, as opposing sides in the war collaborate for the sake of world peace. Unable to solve all the puzzles he encounters, he leaves a written memorandum and clues to enable the mystery to be taken up by his daughter and granddaughter in turn. Not only did the mystery bring Hoshino together with his French wife Catherine, but it also brings the next generations together with their future husbands.

  The novel is the second volume of a trilogy. It continues the story started in Labyrinth of the Scriptorium, and many of the characters that appear in the first two volumes of the trilogy also appear in the third, A Gordian Knot, which features a number of murder cases set in Germany and Malta in 1968.

  Kat Yamada is a British translator currently resident in Japan specialized in fiction and literary nonfiction.

  C o n t e n t s

  Prologue: Five Snapshot Scenes

  Chapter 1

  Memorandum

  Chapter 2

  July 1943 Guernsey, German-Occupied Channel Islands

  Memorandum

  August 1943 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

  Meanwhile… Zehlendorf, Berlin

  Memorandum

  August 1943 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin

  Memorandum

  August 1943 London

  Memorandum

  August 1943 Berlin

  Memorandum

  Intermission: Professor Tomii’s First Deduction

  April 1967 Kichijoji, Tokyo

  Chapter 3

  November 1605 London, England

  6 June 1944 Normandy, France

  Memorandum

  July 1944 Rastenburg, East Prussia

  Memorandum

  September 1944 London

  December 1944 Ardennes Forest

  Chapter 4

  Memorandum

  April 1945 Führerbunker, Berlin ~ Port of Kiel

  Memorandum

  13-15 April 1945 The Battle of the River Oder

  16 April 1945 The River Oder Front East of Berlin

  Memorandum

  18-20 April 1945 Eastern Berlin ~ Führerbunker

  Memorandum

  23-24 April 1945 Berlin

  Memorandum

  26-30 April 1945 Berlin

  Memorandum

  1-2 May 1945 Escape from Berlin

  Memorandum

  1 May 1945 Oslo

  Memorandum

  2 May 1945 Oslo

  A Request

  Addendum

  Chapter 5

  Professor Tomii’s Final Deduction

  March 1990 Kichijoji, Tokyo

  March 2003 Kichijoji, Tokyo

  It was 22 November 2002, ironically the same date as President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. That day, President Ryan was in Boston to attend the opening ceremony to commemorate the newly constructed Federal Museum of Modern Art. The time bomb exploded just as the president entered the building at 08:46 Eastern Standard Time. The blast was powerful enough to clean blow away the building’s foyer, instantly killing the president and many people standing near him. A number of famous Art Nouveau works on display for the opening, including some by Alfons Mucha, were also lost. According to the subsequent investigation, it was highly possible that the explosives had been packed inside a number of columns quite some time beforehand. President Ryan’s visit to the gallery had been decided over a year earlier, so that information must have somehow been leaked and the attack carefully planned. Given the timing of the explosion, it was thought to have been triggered by remote control. There was speculation that it might have been an Islamic extremist group or the Branch Davidians, but no group has ever claimed responsibility and the truth remains unknown. Following the assassination of President Ryan, Vice President Healey was hastily inaugurated as the forty-third president of the United States of America. As America’s first woman president, she demonstrated remarkable skill in leading the Iraq War to victory.

  Prologue

  Five Snapshot Scenes

  December 1170

  Canterbury, England

  It was freezing inside the cathedral. It wasn’t just his hands and feet that were cold, he could feel it seeping through his thick cassock. He exhaled deeply. Breath as white as the Holy Spirit flowed towards the floor and dissipated.

  Where on earth had this disagreement sprung from?

  He knelt and said a prayer. Then as he raised his eyes and looked at the altar, a thought suddenly occurred to him.

  By virtue of being Lord Chancellor he, the son of a mere merchant, was now chief advisor to the king. As a descendant of the Normans in England since William the Conqueror, he couldn’t have hoped to reach a higher position.

  It had been possible because of his friends, as well as the material and moral support of Henry II. He understood that to the marrow of his bones without needing to be told.

  He also knew it was said that theirs was an inseparable bond.

  Nevertheless, while Henry was the most powerful man in the mundane world, Thomas served God. The absolutely uncrossable line between these two positions had carved a deep gulf between them.

  Yes, it was all because of their individual fates, that was all.

  Thomas sighed again. Past events ran through his mind at a dizzying pace.

  The first had been that canon of Bedford, hadn’t it? A year after he’d been made archbishop, that case had been the trigger. He’d had no option but to fiercely oppose Henry over that acquittal in the court of the Bishop of Lincoln. The authority of the king had clashed with the righteousness of God. He’d simply wanted to be true to their shared faith, but as the days went by, t
he conflict grew more severe.

  Henry had secular authority and the military power that came with it. Thomas lacked military power, and for once he’d abandoned his glory as a man of the church and spent six painful years on the continent to escape the pressure.

  But he did have the weapon of excommunication with the backing of the pope in Rome. He could use this against anyone considered an enemy of the church. He even toyed with the thought of excommunicating Henry himself. However, this would be difficult. Despite the threat of excommunication, Henry had recklessly ignored custom and had the Archbishop of York perform the coronation of his eldest son. No, this wasn’t recklessness, it was more likely he was openly refusing to be held hostage to their past bond.

  After that they were reconciled, and Thomas had been able to make the crossing back to Dover and return to Canterbury. Yet surely they would never be able to return to that honeymoon of their youth. What would his friendship with Henry be like from now?

  He bowed his head.

  Just then, the air behind him wavered slightly.

  He sensed someone there. Four people. With murderous intent…

  So it has come to that, has it?

  The corners of his mouth curled into a smile.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and a glint caught his eye.

  A sword struck him, cutting him down to the ground.

  The finishing blow was aimed at the archbishop’s head. The blade fell straight down splitting open his shaved cranium, staining the stone floor of the cathedral’s northern transept with his blood.

  The day after his assassination, his body was buried in the basement, and Canterbury instantly became a pilgrimage site. In 1173, Thomas Becket was canonised as a martyr.

  February 1912—October 1929

  Munich, Germany

  Two hours and thirty-two minutes had passed since the start of a new day. A fine drizzle enveloped the city in silence. Just ten minutes outside would be enough to rob the body of all its heat, and there wasn’t a soul in sight on the dark streets. The drizzle seemed to have erased even the faint traces of people’s lives. However, just as living creatures remained underground during the winter when the earth was covered in snow, impatient for spring’s arrival, so people went about their lives in the sombre, mist-enshrouded buildings.

  In Isabella Strasse in the borough of Schwabing, a major turning point in the lives of one family living at number 45 had come. They were about to welcome the birth of a new life.

  A healthy cry from the newborn rang out through the room.

  A schoolteacher father and seamstress mother welcomed their second child into the world, a conventional middle class family blessed with a modest happiness.

  “Well done, Fanny,” said Friedrich with a smile, squeezing his wife’s hands as he stood by her bedside.

  At his side stood four-year-old Ilse rubbing her eyes, just become a big sister.

  The faint disappointment in her husband’s eyes wasn’t lost on Franziska. Of course he was disappointed. Oh, why had she given birth only to girls?

  “I’m sorry. It’s another girl. It’s not a Rudolph after all,” she said.

  Friedrich quickly recovered himself, and said, “No, don’t worry about it. True, a boy would have become a loyal soldier to His Imperial Majesty, but she is our precious daughter. In fact, I’ve already thought of another name.”

  “Really?”

  Friedrich nodded emphatically and the two again squeezed each other’s hands hard.

  Their daughter’s name was Eva.

  It wasn’t a very Catholic-sounding name, maybe due to her protestant father’s influence. But her education, they had promised Franziska’s parents, would be under Catholic auspices. But her parents’ opinion of religion didn’t matter a thing to Eva at the time. She grew fast, like a sapling in the forest in the fresh May air. Dolls were her play partners, but her parents took pride in she herself being doll-like. She looked just like a Habsburg princess, they said, admiring her rosy cheeks.

  Two and a half years after Eva was born, the quiet happiness of the ordinary family from southern Germany was about to be engulfed in the rapids of time. Tensions were mounting between the various superpowers laying bare their national interests and ambitions all over the world, from Britain seeking to preserve what was left of its empire, to France seeking to redress the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, Austria-Hungary wanting to suppress the nationalist movement simmering in the empire, Germany clashing with Britain everywhere, Turkey’s worsening sense of crisis at Britain’s expansion in the Middle East, and Russia being unnerved by the small far Eastern country of Japan. Amidst all this, a shot fired in Sarajevo in the Balkan Peninsula, the powder keg of Europe, finally severed the chains holding the savage beasts together. For the first time in history, the superpowers were launching into a war on a worldwide scale.

  This was the moment Friedrich had long been waiting for. At long last the time had come for him to carry out his duty as a subject of His Royal Highness. The German people excitedly rushed out into the streets of Berlin, Breslau, Königsberg, and Munich to give a rapturous send-off to the soldiers headed for the front. The scene was reminiscent of the Easter festivities. Everyone was certain of a speedy victory over their old foes the French, and Friedrich too joined the parade of soldiers, his face flushed with pride at being on his way to confront the British and French allied forces at Flanders.

  Funnily enough, beyond Alsace and Lorraine, the same scene was unfolding on the other side of the English Channel. The people were certain of a speedy victory over Austria-Hungary. Young people were flocking through the barracks gates.

  Just like many wives seeing their husbands off to the battlefield, after Friedrich had gone Franziska made a living by stitching together uniforms for soldiers.

  The war soon became deadlocked on the western front, and initial fervour turned to despair and exhaustion. It became all-out war, and households on the home front began fearing attacks by airships. The word “war” began losing the romantic image it had once held of knights in shining armour. And then in 1918, the war unexpectedly ended in defeat for Germany.

  Eventually Friedrich was demobilised and returned home, overwhelmed by feelings of despondency and hopelessness. While Eva’s father seemed to think that the collapse of the German empire was the end of the world, for her, life was just beginning. She was just six years old and a tomboy, possibly affected by her father’s desire for a son. She was good at filching her favourite desserts from friends during lunch at school, but when presented with hated food like mashed turnips, she conveniently lost all her appetite. She was a good all-rounder at sports, perhaps due to her mother’s excellence in skiing and swimming, but other than that she was lazy.

  She was educated at a Catholic lyceum in Munich and at a convent in Simbach am Inn, but that hadn’t been enough to make her religious. As she emerged from childhood into womanhood she was like any other vivacious Bavarian woman growing up loving American movies and music.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror once more.

  The training she’d had on the parallel bars in the club in Schwabing had paid off. She was still a little plump, but her waist was quite trim. Keeping her legs straight, she bent forward. She could place her palms flat on the floor.

  She glanced at the poster stuck on the wall next to her. It was a poster of a famous actress by an artist from Moravia. It wasn’t an original: it was a reproduction that her friend Ulrike had bought for her on a trip to Paris. Eva loved Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau. She particularly liked the fashionable tones of the illustrations in the magazine Jugend.

  It was the same with this poster. The golden-haired woman was standing haloed in a ring of roses with her upper body twisted around to look at the viewer. The woman was portrayed in lively, graceful lines. And the woman’s gaze—what a captivating
look!

  As always, Eva adopted the same pose as the woman in the poster and then brought her face close to the mirror. Her rather dark lipstick stood out against her face powder.

  And the chestnut-coloured hair that fell to her shoulders. She lightly touched it. Perhaps she should have dyed it blonde. She dabbed a little of her coveted Makassar perfume on her wrists and behind her ears. She felt like a real grown-up.

  “You’re fine,” she said again.

  In any case, the introduction had been made by her father. It was in the photographic studio office. The work would probably be rather boring. She’d rather get up on the stage and be photographed herself.

  Eva left her home on Hohenzollern Strasse and headed for Schelling Strasse.

  She stood outside number 50, looked at the grey building before her. It was a small, unassuming studio. The sign read PHOTO・HAUS HOFFMAN. So this was it.

  She reached for the bell next to the door.

  This was the first step that would change her life.

  She was just seventeen.

  Eva was taken on as a shop assistant, and had to work overtime that day too.

  The mail and bills had piled up. She hummed one of the Al Jolson songs from the talkie The Jazz Singer that she liked so much as she searched for the documents file.

  Not having found it on her desk, she remembered that it was on top of the filing cabinet. She’d just climbed the stepladder and was reaching out for the file when Mr. Hoffman came back.

  She called out a greeting, then noticed a gentleman standing behind him. He had a moustache, a light brown trench coat over his shoulders, and a large felt hat in his hand. She felt his gaze on her legs. She blushed, and hurriedly got down off the stepladder.