The Book of Secrets

XV

New York City

A stiff wind hit Nick’s face as he walked out of the elevator onto the roof terrace. A memory of the night before seized his mind: water tanks and fake grass and the terror he would die. This was very different: bone-white paving slabs and a glass-boxed café, now shuttered for the winter; a huge spider sculpted from twisted iron, taller than he was. Beyond the box-hedge balustrade stretched the lifeless trees of Central Park, a dead forest. He could just see the reservoir through the branches. It reminded him of a poem from school:

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

He found Emily Sutherland sitting on a steel bench, waiting for him. There was something anachronistic about her – not like the medieval studies majors he’d known at college, with their pre-Raphaelite curls and flowery dresses, but the formal elegance of the mid-twentieth century. She wore a fitted black skirt that ended just above her knee with a high-collared red coat. Her glossy black hair was tied back with a red ribbon, her hands folded demurely in her lap. She looked lost.

He sat down beside her. The cold steel bench pressed against the back of his thighs. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘I wasn’t sure if you were coming.’

I almost didn’t. After Royce let him go, he’d wandered aimlessly for almost two hours. The thought of having to speak to anyone made him ill. What could you say when your whole world had been torn apart? The people he passed on the streets – the hot-dog sellers and traffic cops and tourists pouring out of Macy’s – they had nothing in common with him. He was a ghost among them. But eventually the shock and self-pity had worn itself out. If he retreated into his shell he’d go mad: he needed to act, to do. So he had come.

‘You said you’d found something?’

Emily pulled a book out of her purse and laid it open on her knee. Nick’s printout was folded flat inside it. The book seemed to be in German.

‘The Oldest Surviving German Playing Cards.’ Nick read the title at the top of the page. Emily glanced at him, surprised.

‘You speak German?’

‘I worked in Berlin for a couple of years.’

‘Then you should have a look at this book. It catalogues all the surviving works attributed to the Master of the Playing Cards.’

‘And?’

‘Your card isn’t in it.’ She slid a fingernail between the pages and turned towards the back. A menagerie of finely engraved lions and bears stared up at him, two cards pictured side by side. The animals were shown in various poses.

‘These are the two surviving copies of the eight of beasts. One in Dresden, one at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Do you notice anything?’

Nick studied them for a moment. ‘They’re different.’ He pointed to the top-right corners. Where the Dresden card showed a standing lion with its head tipped back in a defiant roar, the Paris lion sat on its haunches, staring imperiously off the page.

He reached across and pulled out the printout. The layout was the same – four bears and four lions in three rows – but this time the top-right animal was a bear scratching itself.

‘You said the cards were printed. If they all came from the same plate, shouldn’t they look the same?’

‘At some point in their history, the original plates were cut up. You can actually see it sometimes on the cards.’ She traced a fingernail around one of the lions on the Paris card.

Nick leaned over. He could see a faint, irregular outline around the animal, almost as if it had been cut out of a magazine with scissors and pasted on the page.

‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘The best theory is that the original cards were so successful he wanted to make more. Copper plates wear out pretty quickly if you take too many prints from them. Maybe the engraver cut up the ones that were still usable so he could mix and match to make a new deck.’ She laid the palm of her hand flat across the page so that it hid the two lions in the centre. ‘Take them away and your eight becomes a six. Add another and it’s the nine – which is true, incidentally.’ She turned to the next plate in the book, the nine of the suit. Here the animals were in three rows of three, with an extra bear added.

‘In a way, it prefigures the use of printing text from movable type,’ Emily added. ‘Breaking the page elements down into smaller units to give you more flexibility.’

Nick peered closer. ‘There aren’t any of those outlines from the cut-outs on this card.’

‘No,’ Emily agreed. ‘Though it’s a printout of a digital image of… who knows what. Faint lines could easily be lost. Where did you say you found this?’

Nick looked around the roof terrace. The sky had clouded over again; most of the other visitors had gone back inside. A couple of students were examining a piece of sculpture and trying to sound knowledgeable, while an Orthodox Jew in a black suit and a Homburg was doing a crossword by the railing. A janitor brushed some dead leaves off the paving stones. Otherwise, there was no one.

And no birds sing.

He realised Emily was watching him, waiting. Her pale cheeks had flushed rose pink in the cold air. What could he tell her that didn’t sound crazy?

‘Gillian Lockhart – my, ah, friend – sent me the file two nights ago.’

‘Can’t you just ask her where she got it from?’

Nick ignored the question. ‘Do you think she discovered one of these original cards? One that nobody knew about?’

‘It’s a possibility. Or it could be a fake. Either a physical forgery that she’s found or a digital fake that she’s created as some sort of joke.’ As if she could read his face, Emily added, ‘I asked around the museum about Gillian Lockhart when you said you knew her. Apparently she had quite a reputation for being unpredictable.’

A gust of wind whipped the words away. Nick felt a chill shiver down his back. A joke? It had seemed the only explanation when the card arrived. Part of him still insisted it must be. But seeing Bret die; cowering on a rooftop while a man with a gun hunted him; sitting in a police station being interrogated: those were real enough. And they had all started with the card.

‘If the card is real, how much would it be worth?’

Emily frowned. ‘I really don’t know. I don’t work in acquisitions. I don’t think any of the cards have changed hands in decades, so there’s nothing even to compare it to.’

‘Ballpark. Are we talking millions of dollars?’ He could see the question offended her. He felt embarrassed, as if he’d offered money to sleep with her.

‘I’ve seen Dürer engravings offered privately for under ten thousand dollars. He’s later, but better known. For the Master of the Playing Cards…’ She thought for a moment. ‘You’d be talking tens of thousands. Maybe a hundred thousand at the most.’

‘Worth killing for?’

‘I’m sorry?’

Nick took a deep breath. Part of him was desperate to say it, to give voice to the thoughts that obsessed him. Every second he didn’t say it made him feel a fraud. Part of him was terrified she’d think he was nuts.

‘Gillian sounded like she was in some kind of trouble when she sent me the card. I haven’t heard from her since. Then last night my room-mate was murdered.’

She gasped. ‘I’m so sorry. How – terrible.’ She stared at the book in her lap, her arms pressed tightly against her side.

‘I think they – whoever did it – were after me.’

It sounded ridiculous – and presumptuous, appropriating Bret’s tragedy for himself. He glanced at Emily. She didn’t look at him.

‘Have you been to the police?’

‘Of course. They think it’s crazy.’ They think I did it.

‘It’s not crazy.’ The words were quiet but clear. ‘I don’t know what happened to Gillian Lockhart, but… You can see it when you mention her name in the museum. People react, like you’ve opened a room you’re not supposed to go in. They don’t say much, but…’

A flock of birds rose squawking from the trees by the reservoir. They wheeled against the towers on the far side of the park. Emily tugged on the collar of her coat.

‘Then there are the cards. They’re so strange. None of the animals look happy. As for the people…’ She turned to another plate in the book. Five miniature people danced and strutted across the page, though the closer Nick looked the less human they seemed. Some were as hairy as animals; on others, the skin seemed to hang off them like leaves. They blew horns, aimed arrows, swung cudgels. One strummed a lute, a fool oblivious to the mayhem around him.

‘This is the fifth suit, wild men. There’s something so unsettling about them.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘Now you probably think I’m crazy.’

‘No.’ Nick touched her arm to reassure her and immediately wished he hadn’t. She shied away like a frightened bird, hugging her arms across her chest.

‘Sorry.’ He wished he hadn’t said that either. It made him sound guilty.

She got to her feet, smoothing her skirt behind her. Her face was almost lost behind her high collar. ‘I should go.’

Nick stood, keeping an awkward distance. ‘Be careful. I’m really grateful for your advice, but I might not be the guy you want to help right now.’