The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  “In book three of Picatrix, there’s a single reference to something called The Book of Lamps and Banners. It’s an even more ancient and arcane work, rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Gryffin shook his head.

  “So why haven’t I ever heard of this? Why hasn’t anyone ever heard of it? Because this sounds like Dan Brown on really good acid.”

  “Because no copy was known to exist.”

  He reached down for his leather messenger bag and pulled it onto his lap. One hand rested protectively on the bag’s handle; the other grasped his snifter of Armagnac.

  “Until now,” he said, raising his glass to me.

  Chapter 4

  I waited for him to continue. But Gryffin made no move to open his battered leather bag. He just finished his Armagnac and set the empty glass on the table. When his mobile pinged, he glanced at it, then at me.

  “My meeting with Harold Vertigan’s in an hour. Feel like coming along?”

  “Not really.”

  “C’mon. Harold likes meeting new people. What, you got something better going on?”

  I thought for a moment. Gryffin didn’t seem like he was going to rat me out to Interpol. And I didn’t have anywhere to stay. A place in Hampstead was preferable to the rathole where I’d bunked the night before.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  Gryffin signaled for the check. I headed for the loo, staggering a bit. I made a stop at the bar and asked for a glass of tap water, drank it and asked for a second, and downed that, too. In the restroom, I checked myself in the mirror.

  Gryffin was right. I did look younger, unless you made the mistake of catching my gaze, which was more than a little crazed. My buzz had calcified into something hard and sharp. I fished among the pill bottles in my bag until I found what remained of my Focalin, a slower-release dose of pharma amphetamine. I popped the capsule, touched up my lips with Poison Pearl, brushed a bit of dried mud from one steel boot tip, and met Gryffin by the door.

  He seemed a little worse for wear, fumbling to pull on his overcoat and nearly dropping his mobile as we walked outside. A lightweight.

  I shot him a dubious look. “You sure you want me to come?”

  “Yeah. I do.” He grinned blearily, shading his eyes against a shaft of westering light that speared the sidewalk where we stood. “I want a witness! It’s no fun celebrating if you’re alone.”

  His mobile pinged again. “That’s our car,” he said. A minute later a Prius pulled over. Gryffin reached to open the door for me.

  “I’m not your grandmother,” I said as I made room for him.

  “Boy, you’re a tough sell.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  The Prius crept through traffic. Cyclists whizzed past us, and I stared longingly out at an Underground station.

  “We could have walked there faster,” I said.

  “This gives us more time to catch up. What are you doing in London?”

  I gazed out the window, my stomach knotting. “Just seeing an old friend.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy I knew in high school. I used to photograph him, kind of obsessively.”

  “Was he in your book? The one that got all the hype?”

  “Dead Girls? No. I wish he had been.” Near a crowded corner, people laden with carrier bags from Sainsbury’s and Lidl surged toward a double-decker bus. “All the photos I took of him, they just disappeared. So did he. We only reconnected a week ago.”

  I stopped. I sensed Gryffin waiting for me to go on, but I remained silent. After a moment, he asked, “What happened to the prints from that book? Do you still have the negs?”

  “Somewhere. In my apartment, probably, or my dad’s place in Westchester.”

  “You should have another show. I found a copy of Dead Girls online—the price keeps going up. It’s good. You know that, right?”

  I tore my gaze from the window and turned to him. “What about you? Do you come here a lot on business?”

  “Not anymore. I used to, up until about ten years ago. Internet’s killed the book business, including mine. I dealt in mostly twentieth-century stuff. A lot of genre fiction, science fiction and classic crime novels. I started buying when I was a kid—Philip K. Dick, Arkham House. You could still find those books cheap back then. Eventually I began selling at flea markets, sent out a few lists, and got off the street, opened a little shop in San Francisco. The first wave of dot-commers, they were big on collecting science fiction. You make fifty million dollars when you’re still a kid, you want to spend it on toys. The market got crazy—it’s still crazy at the top end—but by then people weren’t going to used bookstores to buy books. I had to close my shop. I still sell stuff online, but it’s not the same.”

  He gazed past me, through the crawl of cars and buses to a Topshop, its entrance crowded with teenage girls in high boots and short puffer jackets. “That used to be Joseph’s. Waterstones is still around, and Foyles, but the indie shops are dead.”

  “What about back there in Cecil Court? Those shops seem to be doing okay.”

  “That’s toward the high end. And they cater to the tourist trade.”

  “Your friend Harold—I take it that’s not his thing?”

  “Not really. I mean, he’s happy to entertain whoever walks through the door. But he deals in antiquarian stuff, the real deal—last year he sold a Shakespeare Second Folio for half a million pounds.”

  I whistled, and he nodded. “I know. I get altitude sickness in his place sometimes. But Harold’s a sweetheart. I help him out when he has clients interested in the kind of books I specialize in. Like, if you want H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others—the 1939 Arkham House edition that has the first complete version of ‘At the Mountains of Madness,’ with the Virgil Finlay jacket—I’m your guy.”

  “So how did you come by that?” I tapped his leather bag. “It doesn’t seem to fall within your remit.”

  “Everything’s within my remit if someone’s paying for it. But I wasn’t the one who found this.”

  His hand tightened on the bag’s handle, and he went on, “A friend of mine who’s a business journalist went to Baghdad a few years after 9/11. Back then he was working for the Washington Post, but he visited the Bay Area a lot for work. That was when I still had a shop. He was a customer, not a dealer, but I’d find him things he wanted. Simenon novels—there’s always one of those you haven’t read. Anyway, he was in San Francisco and dropped by the shop before he left. I think he was a little concerned he might not make it back.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh yeah. He wasn’t a war correspondent—he was covering the buildup there. Hazeldean, that whole pack of jackals. It was after Hussein was killed, a little golden moment when it seemed like Iraq might rebound. He asked if there was anything he could bring back for me. He was joking, but I told him that there is—was—a very famous book bazaar in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street. I’ve never been, but I used to dream about it—all those volumes dating to the Ottoman Empire, rare Arabic books, hookahs and mint tea at the Shahbandar café…a pipe dream.

  “So I told him to visit it on my behalf, and if he came across a first edition of The Arabian Nights, to bring it back for me.” Gryffin paused. “That was a joke.”

  “Ha.”

  “Because an actual first of that doesn’t even—well, never mind. But he did visit al-Mutanabbi Street, just wandering around, since he had no idea what to look for. He thought it’d be good for his article, a little background. In and out of shops, browsing the books on tarps on the sidewalk, soaking up local color, all that. It’s where Iraq’s intelligentsia used to gather, scholars and book collectors, university students. Tourists, once upon a time.

  “Late in the afternoon, he came upon a t
able heaped with books in front of a tiny storefront. He said it was about the size of a closet. Books on shelves and stacked everywhere. Nothing behind glass. Old books—ancient books. The kind of place you spend your whole life thinking you might stumble on, but you never do. I never do. Only, he did.”

  He stared out the window, his expression distant. “He started looking through the books. Some titles were in French or Greek, but nearly all were Arabic. Which, of course, he couldn’t read. But he found a book, about so big—”

  He measured out a small rectangle. “It was in black leather, not in very good shape, dating maybe to the early 1800s. But when he opened it, he saw that what was bound inside was actually a much older book. Handwritten in Greek and Arabic, with beautiful little illustrations throughout, animals and plants, and what looked like star charts. My friend thought it might have been a travel diary, dating to the late Renaissance. So, a somewhat valuable book, though mostly a curiosity.

  “The shop’s owner was out that day, and his son was minding the shop. When my friend asked how much the book was, he said seventy-five thousand dinars—about sixty dollars. A lot more than my friend wanted to pay for a souvenir for me.”

  Gryffin laughed. “So they bargained, and he got the guy down to fifty dollars. Which was still a lot of money for a souvenir, but my friend figured he’d get it back in goodwill and used-book discounts. Which he did.”

  “When he gave it to you, did you know what it was?”

  Gryffin shook his head. “I had no idea. But it was a very beautiful little book, and it was obviously older than my friend thought it was. I thanked him, gave him a really good deal on some very early Simenons, and that was it. I figured I’d do some research on ancient Greek and Arabic texts and see what I could find out. That’s well beyond my field of expertise—was, anyway.

  “But I knew a guy in the Arabic studies program at Berkeley. I scanned a few pages of the book into my laptop and asked him to look at them and translate them for me. I didn’t tell him I actually owned the book, I said I’d found the pages online and, as a bookdealer, I was curious.

  “We met at Starbucks. He looked at the pages, and—I’m not kidding you—his face went pale.

  “‘Where did you get these?’ he asked. I said again that I’d found them online while I was researching something. ‘Yes, but where online?’

  “I had to fudge that—said I couldn’t remember, I don’t read Arabic and it was a site somewhere in the Middle East. I think he knew I was lying.

  “He said, ‘This is from a book that doesn’t exist. If it did exist, it would be priceless, because it could change everything we know about ancient history. There is one reference to it in a volume by a Sufi scholar, a book titled Ghayat al-Hakim. But this book, if it isn’t some sort of hoax, is called The Book of Lamps and Banners. Are you sure you don’t remember where you found it online?’

  “I had to beg off. I thanked him and said I had to get back to the shop to meet a customer. I’ve always felt bad about that—we fell out of touch, and then I heard he’d died. Some kind of freak accident.”

  “What about your friend the journalist, the guy who found it for you?”

  “He’s gone, too.” Gryffin’s expression darkened. “He died in a car accident not long after—someone rear-ended him on Rock Creek Parkway, he went into a tree. They said he must have been speeding, but he wasn’t that guy—I’ve been in a car with him and he’d never go more than five miles above the limit. It used to drive me crazy.”

  “The guy who sold it to him—the son of the shop owner—he must’ve caught hell when the old man came back and found that book was gone.”

  Gryffin shrugged. “If he even knew what he had. Probably he didn’t. In the 1800s, books were often re-bound in morocco or calf, and few of those are ever very valuable. But that shop’s gone now. They’re all gone. In 2007 a suicide bomber took the entire block out. Fundamentalists have destroyed every part of their culture—the archaeological sites, the museums, university libraries. Why should we have thought they’d leave used bookstores in peace? Al-Mutanabbi’s coming back, slowly. But it will never be the same.”

  I stared at the battered messenger bag. “Maybe I should just head back to my hotel.”

  “Oh for god’s sake. Don’t be ridiculous.” He gave a sharp laugh. “None of this is connected. Harold wouldn’t touch this book if he thought there was anything unsavory about it. He’s strictly aboveboard.”

  “I thought you were strictly aboveboard.”

  “I am! It’s an antiquarian book, Cass, not the Ark of the Covenant.”

  “People thought that didn’t exist, either.”

  “Don’t be a spoilsport. We’re almost in Hampstead.”

  Chapter 5

  The car dropped us off at a busy intersection, along a steep incline that overlooked Hampstead Heath. Gryffin extricated his long legs from the cab and joined me on the sidewalk.

  “So what about you?” he asked as we walked. “You still taking photos with that antique?”

  “No. I’m thinking I might get a digital camera,” I lied.

  Gryffin appeared amused. “Really? Well, good for you. Hell must have frozen over, huh?” He pointed at the building behind us. “That used to be a pub. Jack Straws Castle. Now it’s posh apartments and a gym. Every bit of real estate in London’s a link on some rich guy’s key chain.”

  “Is that where your friend has his shop?”

  “No. He’s in the Vale of Health. That way.” He pointed across the road, to gnarled and towering trees more suited to a national forest than a leafy part of London. “We’re early, so I thought we’d walk a bit, burn off some of that wine.”

  Without a backward glance at me, he loped across the street, dodging a bus as it roared downhill. I followed, catching up with him at an entrance to the Heath. I’m tall, but each of his steps equaled two of mine. He turned and squinted through the trees.

  “Does your end buyer live here, too?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.

  “Nope. She’s in Brixton. Has a bunker with a climate-controlled room to house her collection of vintage video games.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  He shook his head. “Harold has. He says it’s like a museum for stuff like Super Mario and Donkey Kong. Ever hear of FlightRisk? That’s her—Tindra Bergstrand. She’s a software designer. Started out with games like FlightRisk, now she’s branching into VR apps. Made a ton of money, maybe not crazy rich, but crazy, from what Harold says. Only instead of collecting Birkin bags, she collects occult esoterica. Harold says she’s working on a new app that incorporates the weird stuff she’s into.”

  “What kind of weird stuff?”

  “I know nothing. I want to know nothing. So should you.”

  “Why would I even be interested in a crazy software designer who collects books that the Taliban wants to blow up?”

  “It was probably al-Qaeda. Anyway, she’s made a fortune.”

  “Which she’s going to spend on your book. How convenient.”

  “I’m starting to remember what a pain in the ass you can be.”

  “That’s because you’re starting to sober up.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” He grasped my arm. “Look, if you can’t pretend to be a boring normal person for an hour, you better go. I cannot afford to lose this sale.” His voice rose as his hold on me tightened. “You owe me this, Cass.”

  “I don’t owe you shit.”

  I glared at him, and he touched my shoulder. I almost laughed. This guy had a thing for me—that, or a deeply buried urge to sabotage his own career. I shrugged, but made no effort to move away from him. After a moment, his hand dropped to touch my chin.

  “You have the strangest eyes,” he said.

  “Takes one to know one,” I retorted.

  Despite my annoyance, I felt a flicker of desire for him. Not for the first time, either. For whatever reason, Gryffin Haselton had exerted a weird pull on me ever since we’d met in
Maine the previous November. He was the anti-Quinn—a geeky straight arrow, with his glasses and rare books and untied shoelaces. But his weird mismatched eyes fascinated me, and so did his paternal heritage.

  We continued walking. Around us, the early winter dusk deepened, a gray curtain falling across a stage dotted with twisted black trees and ghostly figures. Couples, nannies hurrying their charges home for dinner, kids entranced by whatever played on their earbuds or mobile screens. More dogs than I’d ever seen in one place, darting away from their owners to be recalled by a shouted command.

  Also, more American voices than I’d heard anywhere else in London. It reminded me of Kamensic Village, where Quinn and I had grown up, sixty miles north of New York City. The flash of desire I’d felt moments ago dissolved into yearning for the pressure of Quinn’s mouth on mine; for the two of us in another world, before we broke it.

  I started as Gryffin pointed. “Look,” he said.

  Below us stretched a vast sloping field where lights burned against the darkening horizon—the Shard, the Gherkin, a black hair stroke of the Thames—the grimy city transformed by a complex algorithm of clouds, pollution, contrails, and scattered stars. My hand reached for the camera that was no longer there, and I swore softly.

  Gryffin glanced at me. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Are we almost there?”

  “Close.”

  We skirted the field and followed a maze of trails through stands of oak and holly and thickets of gorse. Finally we hit a well-trodden path. I could track other people on the Heath by the fuzzy blue halos of their mobiles, the yip of dogs, and occasionally a child’s voice. After a minute, Gryffin announced, “This is it.”

  A service road led into a parking area crammed with rusted caravans and panel trucks and carnival trailers. The light from an old-fashioned wrought-iron streetlamp made it resemble some bleak outer borough of Narnia. As we passed the streetlight, my gaze snagged on something on the ground.