“What happened?”
“Koskinen died. He burned to death in a fire at his home in Vaasa a few years ago, along with his collection.”
“Accidental?”
“A misplaced cigar, but the Finns remain anxious to trace a female suspect caught by a neighbor’s security camera leaving the house shortly before the conflagration commenced. The image was poor, but she had silver hair, which caused the Finns to suspect she might be an older woman. Also, some documents and volumes thought to have been in Koskinen’s collection were subsequently put up for sale through very select channels.”
“Was Gruner one of those channels?”
“He was. Curious, is it not, that an object of your search should answer to the description of the woman captured on camera in Vaasa?”
Mors. The woman certainly got around.
“Any other reason to believe Gruner might be the link I’m seeking?”
“The combination of occultism and passports in this instance is quite distinctive. In the good old days, Gruner maintained a steady trade in forged Dutch, Belgian, and German passports, as well as driving licenses, national identity cards, and whatever else the discerning international criminal might require. His clientele was high end, because he charged a considerable premium. Gruner had access to blanks through contacts at the relevant bureaus, and he paid those contacts well. The result was not only quality papers, but also entries on the relevant national databases, which meant Gruner’s documents stood up to official scrutiny. After that, it was simply a question of renewing the originals when the time came, and so the forgeries became genuine articles, like painted lead transmuted to gold.
“It’s more difficult now, of course, as biometrics have rendered some of Gruner’s skills largely redundant. Even the more active national security agencies struggle to maintain an up-to-date collection of unsullied papers for their operatives, and woe betide anyone who burns a useful identity without good cause. Anyhow, Gruner has made his money, and no longer needs to take such risks. He can indulge his love of books and art, if love is what it truly is.”
“Art?’
“I can’t attest to the truth of this from personal experience, but his rooms above the Oak are reputed to contain some fine paintings. Nothing after the end of the eighteenth century, and most from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but tastefully curated. Even the walls of the bar are not unadorned, although the display is mostly for effect; the paintings are all damaged, or from the schools of minor figures. They add to the atmosphere, if you like that kind of thing.”
Louis picked up on something more than a critic’s disdain in De Jaager’s voice.
“Any other reason why you’re not a regular patron of the Oak, the artwork apart?”
“That old man, for one—I don’t want to put money in his purse—but the Oak is also not a place I care to visit. There’s a reason why a bar so old, one that dates back to the sixteenth century, isn’t on tourist maps, or mentioned in every guide to the city. It’s almost as though Gruner has deliberately contrived to have it excluded, or has managed to mask its presence so that it passes virtually unnoticed by citizens and strangers alike.
“If one chooses to enter, it seems quite acceptable, in an unremarkable way, like any of a dozen older bars in this city I could name off the top of my head. But then one orders a drink, and sits, and something odd happens. The chair no longer feels so comfortable, and one perceives it to be the wrong height for the table. Whatever one is drinking—beer, wine, or the house-made jenever—starts to taste wrong: stale, bitter, whatever it might be. The light becomes bothersome: too bright or too dim. I have heard people complain of a low, insistent buzzing, as though insects—bees, or more likely wasps, because there is malevolence to the sound—are swarming nearby. And if one perseveres, one experiences a rising nausea, until one is forced back onto the street, into the fresh air, and perhaps one resolves never to darken the door of the Oak again, because it has quite enough darkness of its own on which to thrive.”
Louis listened to all of this without interruption.
“So who drinks there?” he asked, when De Jaager finished speaking. “Because that is one fucked-up business model.”
“Not if one of its purposes is, or was, to launder money.”
“A big black hole in the shape of a bar.”
“Exactly.”
“Was all the money Gruner’s?”
“He was known to take on temporary partners.”
“Who became disappointed investors.”
“Yet remained sanguine about their losses.”
Below, Gruner began putting away his papers and pens as the closure of the museum was signaled.
“Do you have any idea what he’s researching?” said Louis.
“We have friends in each library, so we know exactly what he’s requested in every case.”
De Jaager reached into an inside pocket of his coat, and removed a single sheet of white paper.
“This list is accurate up to yesterday, and includes publicly available books that didn’t require him to file a formal request. As soon as the Rijksmuseum closes, we’ll be given details of whatever is currently occupying him, and I’ll ensure the titles are passed on to you. For now, though, I can tell you that at the Scheepvart he sought records relating to the manifest, crew, and passengers of a British vessel named the Orcades, which plied the route from Amsterdam to London during the late sixteenth century. At the Rijksmuseum, and at the Ritman and Ets Haim, he has displayed an interest in old maps and atlases, as well as in late medieval Dutch craftsmen who specialized in the creation of stained glass, both here and in England.”
At that moment Gruner, as though somehow realizing he was the subject of interest and speculation, stared up at the observation gallery upon which they were standing. Neither man reacted, and a good ten seconds passed before Gruner looked away to resume packing his belongings into a worn leather satchel.
“Does he know you?” Louis asked.
“Only as I know him: distantly. But he is now aware of our regard.”
“Let him wonder. We’ll be talking to him presently.”
A museum guard appeared and began speaking forcefully to them in Dutch, but his manner changed as soon as he recognized De Jaager, becoming more deferential, until he left them alone once more. By then Gruner was making his way from the library, a cloth bag under his right arm. One of the young women seated in the far corner of the room followed soon after, leaving the other to walk to the librarian’s desk and speak quietly with him for a few moments. A piece of paper changed hands, the girl slipping it into her jacket pocket as she, too, headed for the door. She glanced up as she passed below Louis and De Jaager, and the latter responded with a nod and a smile.
“They look like teenagers,” said Louis.
“But aren’t, which is precisely the point.”
“And Gruner doesn’t suspect?”
“He has a low opinion of women—of most of humanity, really, but of women in particular. To Gruner, they register only slightly below zwarte mensen like you.”
“Doesn’t like the colored folk?”
“I fear they will ring the bell of his bookshop in vain.”
“You think he might make an exception for me?”
De Jaager took Louis’s arm and guided him toward the stairs.
“I suspect,” he said, “that a great many people make an exception where you are concerned.”
6
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
—James Fenton, “A German Requiem”
CHAPTER LIX
Bob Johnston had never set foot outside the continental United States during the previous sixty-eight years of his existence. It was not a matter of any great shame to h
im. Ever since early childhood, when he had first discovered reading, he had viewed the world through the prism of words; because of his library, he had entire universes at his fingertips.
But thanks to those same books, Johnston was also wise enough to understand that life had, perhaps, disappointed him, or he had disappointed life; he was not entirely certain which statement offered the more substantial truth. He had been too cautious in love, and loneliness was the price he had paid for it. He had grown insular and misanthropic, compounding a solitude that was not always a burden, yet at times was undeniably so. He had discovered worlds in books, but books were not the world entire, and it had taken only a few hours in London to confirm this for him, like a suspicion long hidden but conspicuously ignored for fear of the regrets it might unleash. Now, as he walked along Charing Cross Road, a bag already hanging heavy with his purchases from each shoulder, he felt both sorrow at his own foolishness, and joy that this realization had not come too late.
He should have been wearied after his flight, but was not; he had slept soundly on his aircraft bed, while marveling at the comforts that could be acquired using other people’s money. Parker had presented him with an envelope of sterling before the trip, the majority of which Johnston had deposited in his hotel room safe, the rest being distributed evenly across various pockets, along with forty pounds in his left shoe, just in case he was mugged. He made sure to get a receipt for any expenses he incurred, including a cab ride and a day travel ticket on the London Underground, because he did not wish Parker to think him a spendthrift. He had taken particular advantage of federal funds in only one regard. Upon his arrival at Heathrow, he had been greeted by a driver bearing his name on a card. The driver informed Johnston that he was at his disposal.
“How far is Fairford, Gloucestershire, from here?” said Johnston.
The driver checked his phone. “About an hour and a half, if that.”
So Johnston asked to be driven to Fairford.
* * *
THE EXISTENCE OF THE church of St. Mary’s at Fairford owes much to a wealthy Catholic clothier named John Tame, whose remains now rest in a marble tomb in its Lady Chapel. Tame, concerned for the well-being of his soul after his death, and fearing he was destined for the tribulations of Purgatory, if not somewhere worse, decided to buy his way into Paradise by building a monument of stone and glass to God. There had been a church in Fairford since the eleventh century at least, although nothing of that first structure now remains. With Tame’s support—and after his death in 1500, that of his son, Edmund—a great restoration project commenced, of which the crowning glory was the installation of a complete set of stained-glass windows between the years 1500 and 1515. The windows tell a story to be read by worshippers, one that proceeds in order from the birth of the Virgin Mary to the final Ascension of Christ.
Yet the circumstances of their creation remain a mystery. The records are incomplete, in part due to a lack of interest in pictorial art for the early period of the windows’ existence, but also because of the Reformation, which led to the destruction of many religious icons from the middle of the sixteenth century. Portions of the Fairford windows may even have been removed to save them from ruination, although the evidence is contradictory, and later their panes, along with the paintings on the church walls, were covered with whitewash to obscure them.
So it was that legends arose about the windows, including that John Tame had seized a ship bound for Rome, and upon finding it laden with painted glass, decided to build a church to house it, a tale given the lie by the proportions of the panes, which were clearly designed to fit the church, not vice versa; and that the windows were at least partly the design of Albrecht Dürer, one of the greatest German artists of the age, which remains unproven. What is certain, though, is that they were the work of many craftsmen, Dutch artisans among them, probably supervised by King Henry VIII’s glazier, Barnard Flower, himself a native of the Netherlands; and they are the greatest medieval windows in England.
Bob Johnston stood before the West Window, and the Last Judgment. He had seen so many versions of it on screens, and examined so many pictures in books, that it should have been somewhat unremarkable to him, but it was not. Instead he could only marvel at its detail, at the use of color and the care taken in the presentation of the figures, human, divine, and diabolical alike. Some of the windows, damaged in the great storm of 1703, had been imperfectly reassembled from fragments, lending them the appearance of a modernist collage, but most remained startlingly intact.
Yet even as he took them in, he was conscious of a growing perception of being observed, like a specimen under a microscope or—and he could not think how this image had presented itself to him, only that he wished it had not—of a living body on a slab, about to be explored by the instruments of vivisectionists. Strangest of all, while the saints and angels, even Christ himself, bore expressions of serenity, even vacancy, the demonic representations were more alive, more vibrant, and often seemed to be staring directly and intently at him.
Johnston might have put this down to his own knowledge of the Atlas, and its connection to these windows, had it not also been for a feeling of restriction, as though the walls and ceiling of the church were closing in on him; or the play of light on the panes before him, which cast Christ and the saved in shadow while giving added illumination to the depiction of Hell; and a tickling in his mouth and throat that, within the space of a minute, became a burning, so that he was once again in the cancer ward, once again enduring radiation therapy, once again weeping, and wishing to die.
He was being corrupted by this place, by Fairford, the dormant cancer cells in his body reawakening at the instigation of the images in the glass, because they knew about him, knew why he was here, and would deal with his curiosity by turning his body against him, leaving him to rot from the inside out, all because he couldn’t mind his own business, because he was foolish enough to believe that he might still be able to reclaim some value, some purpose, from his existence—
Then he was outside, standing amid the gravestones of the cemetery, heaving great sobbing breaths, and he could not recall leaving the church, only that it was now behind him, and the burning sensation had passed. The driver was standing by the limousine, smoking a cigarette, and the sun was shining upon all.
Johnston walked away from St. Mary’s, and did not look back.
But he had no more uncertainty.
This was the place.
CHAPTER LX
Cornelie Gruner walked slowly toward the heart of the city, traversing each canal without looking back, seemingly watching only for the endless phalanxes of cyclists that made negotiating Amsterdam on foot such a perilous business. He had registered the presence of the two young women in the Rijksmuseum library; even with his failing eyesight, one of them had been familiar to him from the Ets Haim a few days earlier. He might have dismissed this as mere coincidence—after all, he had found fertile soil to till in both institutions, so it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that others might also have—but he possessed a researcher’s acuity, and so had taken note of the titles on her desk on each occasion, the first time out of simple curiosity, but the second, at the Rijksmuseum, out of something more akin to concern. He had found no point of correspondence between the works being consulted by the girl in the two institutions: the selected volumes were notable only for their randomness.
Now the appearance of De Jaager had confirmed to Gruner that he was indeed under observation, because De Jaager did not take a casual interest in anyone. The question was, at whose behest was he operating? De Jaager was a broker and facilitator. If he was monitoring Gruner, someone was paying him to do so. The zwarte who had been with De Jaager at the Rijksmuseum, though, was unfamiliar to the book dealer, and did not resemble the natives of the old Dutch colonies who formed the majority of Amsterdam’s black population, infesting the Bijlmer district to the southeast. Gruner might have regarded black as inferior to white—in general term
s if not the specific, as he was grudgingly prepared to concede that some exceptional specimens managed to overcome the natural deficiencies of their race—but he was not so blindly prejudiced as to perceive them as entirely indistinguishable.
He traversed Singel, and chose his favored route through the Oudezijds Achterburgwal by way of the Book Passage. Gruner took his time examining the stock on display, although he didn’t expect to uncover any treasures. Still, it troubled him to discover one of the girls from the Rijksmuseum perusing battered paperbacks and old vinyl records in which she clearly had little interest, while her companion went ahead, presumably to pick up Gruner when he finally elected to emerge on the other side. He saw no sign of De Jaager, or the black man; it appeared they were content to let children do their work for them.
Gruner wondered how long De Jaager had been keeping tabs on him. Yes, he had noticed the young women in just two libraries, and could not recollect their faces from elsewhere, but this did not mean De Jaager had not assigned others to watch him, or that the surveillance did not extend to monitoring Gruner’s requests for books or documents. He was forced to accept that De Jaager might now possess more information about his research than was desirable, which meant that certain parties would need to be informed of De Jaager’s interest.
The girl in the passage had her back to Gruner as she flicked through a box of old prints, but she was watching his reflection in a pane of glass. She wore a summer dress that ended just above the knee, and favored battered sneakers over shoes—just in case, Gruner supposed, she had to move quickly in pursuit of her quarry, although given his age, and the parlous state of his knees, she could have attached a ball and chain to one of her ankles and still have been in no danger of losing him.
The situation was delicate, and complicated. While Gruner had an obligation to share the fact of the surveillance, he could not risk action being taken against De Jaager as a result. Only the young underestimated the old: over the years, De Jaager had served the interests of many men, both honest and crooked, but always behaving with the same integrity toward both. If they failed to adhere to similar standards, De Jaager simply declined to aid them again, regardless of the money on offer. He was, therefore, not entirely mercenary in his dealings, which meant he had accumulated markers to be called in when required. He was liked and respected, contributing, in his way, to the smooth running of the city. There would be consequences if De Jaager or any of his people were harmed. Gruner did not like to think of what might transpire if Quayle dispatched Mors to confront De Jaager in order to force him to reveal the identity of his client.
A Book of Bones Page 32