by Mitch Silver
“Len” Klimt cleaned everything up, locked the station and, more than a little confused, drove away. A pair of eyes followed him down the road.
Chapter 22
Moscow
Wednesday
In the morning, Lara arrived at the Arkhiv with her rolling suitcase packed full of Vera’s “on-camera” wardrobe options to go over with Gerasimov later in the day. She had come to terms with not being able to lecture on Friday; instead, she’d settle for interviewing the president of the United States.
Leonid the guard opened the bag and went through her clothes, handling, feeling her lingerie. Afterward, he put a sticker on the suitcase. No hello, no nod, nothing to acknowledge he’d been touching her intimate things; all in the name of state security.
Leaving the suitcase in her study carrel—she’d call Gerasimov later and tell him when to pick her up from the Arkhiv—Lara carried the bag of recordings that supposedly led to a million-ruble jackpot (or more, if Tatiana Ivanova was to be believed) and headed back down the corridor to the Listening Room and Mr. Coward.
We now begin cylinder number four. I’ve given instructions I’m not to be interrupted for anything but a true emergency. Now, where were we? Ah yes, the Courtauld.
In the end we brought two books upstairs with us. One was a Bible, in Latin, with a thick cowhide leather binding and pages of vellum, probably printed in Germany, though not by Gutenberg. The other, thinner, also on vellum, had a cracked spine. “Our sacrificial lamb,” Anthony called it.
Back in the Technology Department, he closed the door to the room and turned the lock, saying, “Have you got the quatrains?”
I patted them in my breast pocket. “I wrote them and, even so, I don’t understand them. Heaven knows what the Hun will make of our ditties in your Old French mumbo-jumbo.”
“The Hun, as you say, is smarter than you think.” Blunt fingered a couple of the small bottles of different liquids that lined a nearby shelf before taking one. “And it’s Middle French. Moyen français. There’s a difference.”
Then he spread a large white sheet of paper on the table and took out a doctor’s scalpel from a drawer. “Here, take this.” He brought over the thinner of the two books and set it down. “While I gather a few things, why don’t you do something useful, Noël, and make us some ink?”
With that, he opened the book at random and, taking the scalpel, began to scrape the page. A few bits of the black ink fell off in flakes onto the sheet of paper. “Now you do it. Not so hard that you scrape the parchment. All we want is the ink.”
For the next fifteen minutes I destroyed several pages of what I had originally assumed was a priceless volume, creating in the process a small hillock of the former lettering and causing my wrist and forearm no end of pain with the repetitive motion of the knife.
Blunt was assembling things from around the room over on his end of the table. Then he came closer and saw me rubbing my arm. “Be thankful I didn’t send you back downstairs to harvest dust. Beastly job, and you have to wear one of these.” He slid open a drawer full of surgeon’s masks, and shut it again. “Okay, that’s enough ink for a start.”
The art historian used the scalpel to scrape some of the shavings off the paper and into a Petri dish. Then he took an eyedropper and dipped it into the bottle of nearly clear liquid he’d chosen earlier. It said “Linseed oil” on the label. As soon as he poured two or three drops into the dish, the black scrapings dissolved in the medium, turning it dark.
“You see? Ink made from iron gall will reconstitute itself.” He swirled the mess in the dish with a glass pipette. “We let it sit for a couple of days et voilà, new 16th Century ink.”
“A couple of days?” I was stunned.
Blunt was unmoved. “Can’t be helped. You don’t fool meticulous people like the Germans with slapdash work. Besides, the bookworm will still have her job to do.”
Now I was totally unstrung. “Who … who’s this ‘bookworm’?”
Blunt picked up a matchbox from among the jumble of things on the table. He held it out. Mystified, I stared at it.
“Go on, open it.”
I did as I was told and found what looked like a common beetle.
“You asked who the bookworm was.” Blunt touched the beetle. “This is dear Mater. Oh, you’ve laid your eggs. That’s my good girl.” Blunt put the box back down on the table.
I could feel my entire plan crumbling away. I’d chosen a madman for the job just because his name was Blunt. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, Anthony, but I assumed … that is, the urgency …”
“Sit down, Noël, and I’ll explain.”
“I don’t want to sit down,” I said.
“All right then, go on pacing, I’ll explain anyway.” Blunt picked up the other book, the Bible, from the table and opened it to the flyleaf. He held it up to me. “This page where our faux prediction will go … do you see this hole here?”
“I thought it was just an imperfection in the paper.” Wrong thing to say.
“Not paper. Vellum. Big difference. In the Middle Ages, vellum, or parchment, was made from calfskin that was wetted down, dipped in a bath of lime and left there for more than a week to get all the hair off, stretched, dried, scraped, and possibly dipped in the lime again until it was nearly translucent. Okay, now what’s the biggest difference between vellum and paper?”
Without even waiting for me to attempt an answer, he went on. “It’s made from the skin of an animal. Animals get all manner of insects gnawing away at them. Some of them deposit larvae that do their gnawing from the inside, making a hole in the animal’s hide so they can get out.”
“I see,” I said, though obviously I didn’t.
“Sit down, Noël. It’s easy, really. Let’s say we’re Germans. Art historians, very good ones; we get an old book and want to make sure everything is on the up and up. What do we do? If we were French or Italian, we’d flip through the pages and see if it looked all right. But no, we’re German. We do scientific tests. On the ink. On the paper, the vellum in this case. On the hole in it. Did someone in England make the hole last month, or did some hungry insect chew his way through it four centuries ago?
“All right, let’s recall our plan: we want it to seem as if Michel de Nostradamus, this apothecary who has visions, was traveling around the countryside in the 16th Century, dispensing his little prophecies about this and that, when he had one of his brainstorms about the future.
“We have a wonderful library here, and I dug a up a few little pearls. From a letter he wrote in 1562, we know Nostradamus visited an abbey at Villers-devant-Orval. So, what if he were overcome in the night by another of his terrible visions—this one four centuries in the future—and wrote down what he had seen on the only ‘paper’ he could find at the abbey: the flyleaf of a Bible?”
“And if the crazy old sod wrote his vision down in someone else’s Bible, he couldn’t very well carry it off with him; books were rather valuable back then. We know he spoke of some final prophecies he never published before he died. Perhaps this was one of them.”
I was still confused. “But that doesn’t explain the beetle in the matchbox.”
“Oh, you mean my Anobium punctatum. She’s a furniture beetle. And she’s just become a mother many times over.”
With a cloth, he cleaned the glass pipette he’d used to stir the ink and now poked the beetle with it so we could better see the eggs she’d laid. There were dozens. “When these eggs hatch, the larvae, the bookworms that emerge, are ravenous. And they do what baby furniture beetles do: eat through anything in their way, boring long cylindrical holes in the leaves of books, the bindings, even the bookshelf.
“So, while the ink is steeping, I intend to take your poetry”—at this he held out his hand, leaving it there until I withdrew the lines I’d laboured over and placed them in his palm—“and translate it into something Nostradamus might recognise as his own. Then I will write it upon the vellum flyleaf with the quill p
en over there, taking care to go directly over the hole you see in it now.
“That hole is our starting point. When the ink is thoroughly dry I will encourage these brand-new and very hungry beetles to create a hole at the exact same spot in the binding and in the overleaf. When we are done, it will appear that bookworms, over the ages, created one continuous hole in the pages on either side of the prophecy, partly obliterating Nostradamus’s writing. Effectively we will have ‘married’ our simulacrum to the original text of the Bible.”
I had been waiting for Blunt to take a breath so I could ask, “And how does one ‘encourage’ a bookworm?”
Blunt drew out a pot of school paste. “With this. The little buggers think it’s caviar. I’ll just dab a bit where I want them to go and let Nature take her course.”
I felt my restlessness coming back, so I got to my feet. I tried a smile. “And how much time does Nature require?”
“Not more than six weeks.”
“Six weeks! Why that’s … that’s almost September! The whole country might be forced to learn German by then!”
Blunt carefully shut the matchbox with the beetle in it and put the gluepot away. “Well, that’s where I have you at a disadvantage, old man. I already know German.”
Chapter 23
Bells were going off in Lara’s brain; unconscious connections were being made. Hadn’t she read something, somewhere in the Chronologies, about a book; last year or the year before? Could it have been a Bible? She knew the way her mind worked; if whatever was lodged in her cerebrum was important enough, her subconscious would bring it to the surface—sooner, she hoped, rather than later.
Lara was making a note to herself about it when she noticed her iPad telling her she had email. She touched the Mail.ru icon on the screen and typed in her user ID and password. Russians were the world’s greatest generators of electronic spam, offering cheap watches and pharmaceuticals, sex aids (or just plain sex), and phony “phishing” messages from financial institutions, requesting personal information to “update our files.” Often, spam was all Lara received in a day. But today she had—tseluyu!—thirty-four new messages in her Inbox. One, from her department chairman, had nine Reply All responses from her fellow teachers. She started with the original.
“Dear Colleague, Superintendent Nazimova tells me a member of our professional staff has agreed to appear on various TV networks and be compensated for said appearance. As you know, University rules forbid such compensation during the academic year, and only the entire Faculty Senate can grant a waiver from the rule. Therefore, I solicit the Faculty’s opinion: should we hold a meeting on the matter, with a vote to follow, of the History Department tomorrow in the Faculty Dining Room at 10:00? Please reply soonest.”
Lara quickly scrolled through her follow-up emails. They amounted to her colleagues trying to guess which teacher it was and what to do about the “waiver,” Nazimova’s way of trying to turn Lara’s friends against her. Some of those friends solicited Lara’s own opinion of the matter. When she hadn’t answered, several more implored her to make her whereabouts known.
The woman took money to make Lara appear on Gerasimov’s program, and then she reported the deal as some kind of honor violation on Lara’s part.
She knew only too well how a Department meeting would go. The Modernists, her friends, would be all up in arms over Nazimova trying to keep her off an obviously educational program. The Tsarists, sitting by the coffeemaker to get the freshest brew, would submit to the administration’s intrusion, as if by divine right. The acolytes of the “Greats,” Peter and Catherine, would talk and smirk among themselves at the three tables at the far end of the room. And all fifty-eight of them would have to have something to say, whether or not they actually had an opinion. All over a done deal. As the hypocritical Superintendant had said, in the new Russia, money talks. And talks. And talks.
“Suka! Samka! Bitch!” The bilingual anger came out involuntarily. Good thing the Listening Room was soundproof.
Lara, still shaking, got up and, leaving her iPad behind her, stepped beyond the glass doors and began to navigate the perimeter of the Arkhiv. It took four complete trips around the vast building this time before Lara could compose herself enough to head back to the Listening Room, four trips before she could settle down enough to do any work.
Pushing on the thick glass door, she was startled to see a man, enormously big and muscled with closely cropped hair, seated now before the middle of the three Dictaphone machines. He had his huge head in his left hand, poring over some papers at the edge of the communal worktable, looming over the tablet computer that held her notes. The man was practically staring down into the bag of wax cylinders Lara had left on the floor. He was beefier than any academic Lara had ever seen.
She made a little noise so he would look up, and she smiled a greeting. After a moment he arranged his face into a corresponding smile and shifted his work so Lara would have room to sit down. She retook her seat and, placing the iPad in her lap, hurriedly put the headphones on, isolating herself as best she could from the one who had invaded her space.
We come to Dictaphone recording number five, Robert old man. Or should I say, “Meacham for the Defence,” as the tabloids have it? I realize I’ve mentioned the quatrains, but have failed to describe all the fun I had in writing them. So, here goes.
While there is no surviving example of a prophecy or anything else in Nostradamus’s own hand, there are one or two pages of printer’s proofs of his books with handwritten notes in the margins—possibly the seer’s—that have come down through the centuries. Anthony was to write out his translation of whatever doggerel I gave him, in a manner consistent with those notes, on the flyleaf of the Bible we’d selected … as long as I limited myself to twelve lines in all.
So, what to write? And how to write it? First, a confession: if I absorbed any history whatsoever in all my schooling, it was purely by accident. I found myself poring over books in the public library any child in the sixth form would consider beneath him. In fact, I got the fish eye from one such urchin when he saw me lapping up Wells’s Outline of History.
Next, I hit upon the idea of reading aloud (no, not in the library) from the little book young Kennedy gave me. When I believed myself to be ‘at speed,’ I would babble out some of my own words and phrases, like “the people of the Rhine” and “in the name of St. George,” in a similarly singsong manner until I had something suitable, sort of the way I came up with “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”
I determined early on that, if I had only three quatrains to work with, the first would seemingly foretell the rise of Hitler; the second would describe, rather murkily, actual events leading up to the war, so the Germans would know this Nostradamus fellow was ‘spot on’; and the third would predict, in a kind of easily-broken code, Hitler’s defeat of Stalin.
I threw in the birthplaces of both Il Duce and the Führer, and the exact count of river crossings from Berlin to Moscow, if the man needed a roadmap. My best bit was a quick mention of the German warrior-king Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor who was leading the Third Crusade in the East when he died in 1190 … someone I’d never heard of until I read about him the day before.
Then Noël Coward stopped and coughed a loud hacking cough, perfectly captured—like his sneeze—on the wax cylinder. He said, “Nigel, dear lamb, pass me that glass of water, would you like a good fellow?”
Lara took her headphones off and rubbed her ears to get the blood circulating before putting them back on. She could clearly hear the long-dead playwright drinking the long-gone water. Looking around, she noticed her fellow Listening Room occupant had put away the papers he was studying and was, instead, writing with a pencil on a pad in front of him.
He must have sensed she was looking at him because he turned and looked her way. A generic one-day Arkhiv guest pass dangled from a chain that barely made it around his thick neck. Lara smiled hello at the man and tapped her headphones, signifying that she
had a lot of work to do and was returning to it.
The man smiled back and held up his work. Lara looked at the pad and was startled to see he’d drawn the beginning of a game of Hangman, just the scaffold.
Noël Coward started clearing his throat on her recording and she turned back to her work, wondering why anyone would travel out to the edge of nowhere just to play a pencil-and-paper game. And why there was no cylinder in his machine.
I’ve got my little ditty still, scribbled on a sheet of copybook paper, one I carry around in my pocket to this day. Here it is:
From the deepest part of dark Europa
A child will be born. Though poor, he will
By his speech induce a great multitude,
And his renown increase among people of
the Rhine.
In the name of St. George
Will come the winged one from across
the water
Warlike at first and then subdued
By the rising Danube and the Ligurian Sea.
Eight centuries on, with Barbarossa’s sword,
This hero will ford twenty rivers at
decade’s dawn.
Into a cage of iron is the usurper drawn,
When the child of Germany overcomes him.
To sum up, Anthony and I intended Hitler to believe a mystic four centuries earlier had foretold his rise. And that he would unite the Germans, pick up their hero’s fallen sword, and lead an army to the gates of Moscow, where he would imprison the Communist leader, Joseph Stalin.
Neat trick, if we could pull it off.
Chapter 24
With a start, Lara realized she’d been so distracted by the strange man sitting next to her that she hadn’t taken any notes. Or heard a word Coward had said. She’d have to replay the recording. Risking a look out of the corner of her eye, she was shocked to see the interloper was gone. Now she was really confused.