by Tom Harper
With a calmness I did not feel, I pulled his hand off my collar and stepped away. Light sparkled on a gold pin he wore on the shoulder of his coat, Christ on his cross with a verse of scripture scrolled around it.
‘What about that?’
He cupped his hand over it. ‘It was a gift from my wife.’
It was beautifully made. Every sinew in Christ’s body strained against death, as if his flesh tried to fight back the spirit from breaking free. The lettering underneath was perfectly even, punched into the thin metal with impossible finesse. It reminded me of the task at hand.
‘You can borrow the money we need. I will be at my house in St Argobast if you change your mind.’
*
Sometimes I believed that borrowing money was my true business, and all my work with ink and metal existed merely to provide a pretext for the loans. The mirrors had become a monster devouring itself; when nothing remained, I needed a new idea to borrow against. In those days I no longer thought of the arts in terms of profit, or even if they would work. All that mattered was that they kept the stream of money flowing.
Three days after our meeting in the cathedral, Dritzehn came to my house. I met him in the yard between the barn and the forge. Hens pecked around our feet; my pig rooted for apples fallen from the tree behind the barn.
‘How much?’ Dritzehn asked without preamble.
I had thought of little else in the intervening days. ‘One hundred and twenty-five gulden.’
He spluttered in indignation, which rapidly exploded into a violent fit of coughing. I watched him anxiously. I did not want him to die before I had his money.
‘That is more than I have loaned you already – and that has almost bankrupted me.’
‘Sometimes the only way across the river is to go deeper. What about your house?’
He wiped spittle from his mouth with his sleeve. ‘What about it?’
‘You can borrow against it.’
‘I already have.’
‘Borrow more,’ I urged him. ‘If your debts fall due and you cannot pay, they will take your house however much you owe. Better to risk everything on success than fail with half measures.’
I knew he would agree. Otherwise, he would never have come. It took a few minutes for him to come to terms with himself. He scuffed his boot in the dirt; he swung his shoulders and kicked his feet like a straw man on a stick.
‘I can give you forty gulden now. The rest, I can raise in a few weeks.’
‘Are you sure? Once I have taught you this art you cannot leave our partnership. If you have any doubts, go home now.’
He wanted reassurance. ‘This money is to be used only for the good of the enterprise?’
‘Of course,’ I said, already calculating how best to distribute it among my creditors. ‘And we will share the profits in the same proportion as before.’
‘And if any of us dies before the venture is complete, all the investment will revert to his heirs?’
I looked at him sharply. ‘Are you expecting to die?’
‘No.’ Another fit of coughing overtook him; he tried to swallow it and only made himself choke. ‘But I am older than my father was when he died. Life is short; death stalks all our shadows.’
I crossed myself. ‘This secret is too great to hazard to inheritance. If any of us dies, he will take it to his grave.’
This agitated him. ‘What of my wife? She must get something if I die. Am I to mortgage her widowhood?’
‘A merchant who invests in a voyage cannot reclaim his capital while the ship is at sea. Any money you put in must remain with the partnership until it is completed.’
He sighed, his face grey with defeat. I clapped him on the shoulder and tried to feign enthusiasm. ‘Forget this talk of death. In two years’ time you will laugh that you ever doubted me.’
I stood at the gate and watched him wander down the road, a sad and haggard man. Had I reduced him to this state? Lost in the labyrinth of my schemes and my debts, I could no longer tell if I was his benefactor or his nemesis.
‘Did he bite?’
Kaspar walked out of the barn. His sleeves were pulled up, and a round welt shone on his palm from pushing the engraving tool into the metal.
‘He’ll pay.’
‘Then why so sad?’
Kaspar reached out to stroke my cheek. But my dealing with Dritzehn had left me in a solitary mood. I turned away.
‘What has come over you? You are so morose: you trudge around as if all the world was piled on your shoulders.’
‘Perhaps it is the weight of the gold I owe.’
‘Do you remember the old times? You were a much more interesting man then. Before this obsession with gold and loans and debt. You were an artist; now you are a money-changer.’
‘Finance is as much part of this art as lead or ink or copper,’ I snapped. ‘It is the size of this enterprise which justifies it. You want to create things of rare and novel beauty – and no man is better at it. But for this art, the beauty comes from its scale. A drop of water is nothing, but a river is majestic. An ocean is unfathomable.’
‘Have you ever looked at a drop of water? Suspended from a branch on a sunlit morning, the whole world reflected in its orb – stretching as the bough shakes, not knowing if it will cling on or fall and disappear into the earth. That is beautiful.’
‘If I could do this work for nothing and give it away for free, I would. But you have seen how the costs pile up on each other – and we are not nearly finished yet.’
‘Either beauty is present or it is not.’ Kaspar and I were in different conversations. ‘If you print one indulgence, or cast one mirror, it is what it is. Whether it is unique or there are a thousand others the same, it does not matter.’
‘What about gold? Are a thousand gulden more beautiful than a single coin?’
‘They are to you.’
Two months later, Andreas Dritzehn died.
LIII
Strasbourg
The hotel provided free Internet access in the room. Nick spent ten minutes lying on the bed and staring at the wall socket, fighting the temptation like a saint. After a week offline he felt as though he’d lost a limb; he was desperate to reconnect. But the men who were chasing him seemed to have an almost telepathic ability to trace his movements. Could he risk it?
The Internet was a vast and deafening conversation; Nick’s presence would be a whisper in comparison. And he knew a few tricks. Tingling with doubt, he swung himself off the bed and plugged in his laptop.
Working in digital forensics had made him paranoid about safety. First he cleared all the stored history in his web browser – anything that might inadvertently check in with a site he’d used before and betray him. Then he made his computer a citadel. He threw up a firewall around it and closed all the ports except one, so that all traffic had to pass through a single well-guarded gateway. Like all walls, it was as much about what was kept in as what was kept out. Inside, his antivirus patrolled the corridors and courtyards of the fortress, vigilant to any hint of suspicious activity. It wasn’t a frontal attack he feared but spies.
Now to venture out. He connected to the Internet and immediately went to a website which styled itself an anonymiser. It was the sort of thing popular with perverts, criminals and conspiracy nuts, but it had its legitimate uses. Borrowing a metaphor, Nick thought of it as an invisibility cloak, a way of sneaking around the Web without leaving any trace of who you were or where you’d come from.
Even with all his defences up he still felt nervous – like sneaking down to the living room in the middle of the night to explore his father’s liquor cabinet. Every page he loaded felt like a floorboard waiting to squeak. Gradually, though, the flow of information closed around him. He forgot the dangers and was swept along on currents of knowledge, following connections as they branched all around him.
He began with the kings of Israel and found little beyond a series of names that were at first familiar and quickly bec
ame obscure: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijam, all the way through to Zedekiah. The online encyclopedias provided a lot of regurgitated Bible history, but nothing that looked relevant.
Next he moved on to the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. That brought a run of information that quickened his pulse. The Sayings of the Kings of Israel was a work casually referenced in the Book of Chronicles. Click. 2 Chronicles 33:18: ‘The rest of the acts of King Manasses, his prayer to his God, and the words of the seers who spoke to him, these are recorded in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’ Click. These sorts of references were scattered through the Old Testament, throwaway clues to other books that might once have existed but now only remained as ghosts to taunt scholars. Click. Like Sherlock Holmes adventures alluded to by Dr Watson but never written by Conan Doyle. Click. The case of the politician, the light-house and the trained cormorant.
Nick realised he’d reached a dead end. He backtracked and went down a different path, picking up on another keyword, Manasses. Sixteenth king of Israel. Apostate who was captured and taken to Babylon, but who was restored to his kingdom when he repented and returned to God. Click. Prayer of. Although the Sayings of the Kings of Israel had been lost (if it ever existed), someone around the first century AD had taken it on themselves to invent Manasses’ prayer of repentance and pass it off as the original. A sort of fan fiction. It was a fake, but a fake so old it had acquired its own value. It was now included in the Bible as part of the Apocrypha.
Click back to the Bible. ‘I am weighted down with many an iron fetter, so that I am rejected by my sins and I have no relief.’
I know how you feel, Nick thought.
Finally, he went back to Gillian’s homepage. He knew it was risky, but he had to look.
GILLIAN LOCKHART
is in mortal peril
(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)
It hadn’t changed; she hadn’t been back. He looked at the images again, his own absence, and cringed as he thought of the photo in his wallet. He went back to the billboard, just in case.
There was one new comment.
Are you safe? Did you find it? Please call me. I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz
(posted by Olaf, 11 January 17:18:44)
Nick read the message three times over. He checked the date on his watch. Two days ago. Caution told him he shouldn’t go further; it was a trap. He shouldn’t even be online. But he couldn’t resist.
A new page appeared on screen: a picture of a rainbow-striped cow standing on a ladder, wielding a paintbrush and grinning. ‘Home and industrial paint solutions.’ There was a phone number prefaced by what Nick assumed was a New Zealand area code, and a couple of testimonials from satisfied customers. There was no mention of anyone called Olaf.
Nick checked his online security. Everything showed green. The website didn’t seem to be trying to download any kind of malware.
He had to risk it. He lifted up the hotel phone and dialled the number shown on the website. There was a delay, then the foreign bleep of a distant telephone.
‘Jersey Paints,’ said a New Zealand-accented voice.
‘Uh, hi. Is Olaf there?’
An exasperated silence. ‘Is this some kind of joke? I’ve told you three times already there’s no Olaf here. Would you please stop calling?’
‘Sorry,’ said Nick.
The moment he hung up a wave of guilt overwhelmed him. He shouldn’t have called, shouldn’t even have looked at the website. Certainly shouldn’t have rung from the hotel. I’ve told you three times already. Somebody else had read the message and acted on it.
There was a noise at the door. He froze. Had they come already; had they traced him that easily? From the corridor, he heard the rasp of a key card sliding into the lock. He looked wildly to the window – but it was screwed shut.
The light on the lock went green. With a click, the handle began to turn.
There was nowhere to hide: even the bathroom was down the hall. Nick grabbed his bag with the book and the card inside it. Maybe he could push past the intruder, knock him down and escape.
What if there was more than one of them?
The door swung open. Emily stood in the dimly lit corridor carrying two shopping bags, her hair damp from melting snow. She looked at the bag in his hands.
‘Were you going out?’
Nick slumped on the bed in relief. ‘I thought… I was just making sure the book was still safe.’ He looked at her again, noticing something different. ‘You’ve changed.’
She put down the shopping bags and hung her coat on the back of the door. The skirt she’d been wearing since Paris was gone, replaced by a tight rollneck sweater and figure-hugging jeans. It was the first time he’d seen her not wearing a skirt, let alone in jeans. Part of him was almost embarrassed by it, like running into your teacher in the grocery store at the weekend. Part of him was struck by how good she looked.
‘I thought trousers would be better if we need to run away again,’ she said coolly.
She pulled off her ankle boots and flopped down on the bed next to Nick. Once again, the hotel staff had given them a double when they’d asked for a twin. They lay there side by side, like a married couple in an old movie. To Nick’s surprise, it was strangely comfortable.
‘The snow’s getting heavier outside,’ she said after a moment. ‘We might struggle to get out of Strasbourg.’
‘If we had anywhere to go.’ Nick leaned over and found the TV remote on the bedside table. He turned it on and flipped through the line-up of French game shows and chat shows until he found an English-language news channel. A reporter in a flak jacket was standing in a scorched landscape, while soldiers in hues of brown and tan searched a mud-brick house behind him. It looked like a godforsaken place, but at least it was hot. Nick felt he’d been stumbling around in the cold for half a lifetime.
He muted the TV, letting the images play out in dumbshow in the background.
‘I went back on Gillian’s web page,’ he said. ‘Someone left a message for her.’
Emily didn’t reply. He looked down and saw that she’d fallen asleep. Her eyes were closed, her pale skin framed by the dark hair fanned out on the pillow. He pulled the blanket at the foot of the bed over her shoulders. She murmured something in her sleep and rolled over, burying herself against his side.
Her body was warm against him. Nick felt the heat spreading through his skin, melting the sheet ice that had been encasing him since Gillian’s message first appeared on his desktop. He knew it was a mistake; that when she woke up she’d be embarrassed and he’d be ashamed. But he didn’t want to disturb her. He’d let her stay, for a while.
He turned his eyes back to the television, reading the captions and watching the silent parade of spokesmen, sportsmen, apologists and starlets on the far side of the glass wall. Not so long ago they’d seemed so important to him, heroes and villains and storylines played out in the media. Now they seemed a world away.
The picture cut back to the news anchor in the studio. A new caption had appeared on screen: DISGRACED JESUIT FOUND MURDERED.
Nick reached for the remote and turned up the volume. Emily stirred at the sudden movement. The anchor disappeared, replaced by a grainy mugshot. Nick stared. The man standing too close to the camera, holding the letter-board…
‘That’s Brother Jerome.’ Emily sat up, brushing the hair back from her face.
The reporter’s voiceover droned on through his shock. ‘Neighbours heard gunshots… Police called to the house… Mafia-style execution… Suspicious car reported early this morning… Brilliant scholar… Sex-abuse scandal…’
Nick looked at Emily. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. He wanted to comfort her but she looked so fragile, like she’d shatter if he touched her.
‘I killed him,’ she whispered.
Back on the television, the story had finished and a new one begun, Brother Jerome’s face replaced with a boatload of shivering refugees. Nick muted it again.
‘You had no way of knowing,’ he murmured.
‘I destroyed him.’
‘I know how you feel,’ Nick tried. ‘It’s like Bret. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be alive. It’s like poison inside me. But you can’t think that way. It’s the guys who killed him who are responsible.’
‘I’m responsible,’ she insisted. ‘He wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me.’
‘Because he tried to take advantage of you when you were a student?’
Emily gulped back some tears and stared at the bedspread. Then, just when he thought she hadn’t heard, she said very quickly, ‘It wasn’t his fault. Jerome and I – we had – we were lovers. He didn’t just make a pass at me; we had an affair. When the university found out they fired him, and he was expelled from his order. It destroyed him. Academia was his life.’
Nick thought of the old man with his mop of white hair and tried not to imagine his scrawny hands crawling over Emily’s skin. ‘He still should never have touched you.’
‘He should never have touched me,’ she repeated. ‘That’s right. But not the way you think. I fell in love with him. I seduced him, if that’s the right word. I was infatuated, relentless; I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I didn’t realise what I was doing.’ She wiped a tear from her face. ‘Eventually the guilt got too much for him and he broke it off. I was so angry with him, all I wanted was revenge. I reported him out of sheer spite. I destroyed his life. And now this.’
LIV
Strassburg
I examined the paper with the familiar ache of broken hopes. Some of the letters had barely registered; others had pressed so hard that blots of ink drowned the characters. In several places the paper had torn where we had not smoothed the edges of the cast metal forms. The whole sheet had smudged badly when we removed it from the press. Drach had been right: I could press ten thousand copies of this and it would still be ugly.