The Book of Secrets

LXI

Near Mannheim, Germany

‘What you’re potentially looking at is the first or second book ever printed.’

They were parked in a lay-by. Emily spread the reassembled printout and the bestiary on her lap while Nick checked over his shoulder to make sure no one could see them. There was nothing in front of them except a dark stand of pines sagging under the weight of snow. Behind them, traffic thundered past on the A5 autobahn.

‘The first book ever printed where?’

‘Ever printed ever. To be precise, ever printed from movable type.’

‘Movable type’ was a phrase Nick recognised, though more as a face in the crowd than an intimate friend. The sort of thing name-checked in magazine lists of the Hundred Greatest Inventions or Men Who Changed the World. Usually closely associated with a name:

‘Gutenberg?’

‘Exactly.’ Emily’s skin was grey and tired; without lipstick and mascara, her bold lips and dark eyes seemed to fade back into her face. But when she looked at the pages in front of her, the energy was unmistakable. ‘How much do you know about him?’

‘How much is there to know?’

‘Not much. So little that until the eighteenth century he was almost forgotten. He made some powerful enemies in his lifetime; after his death they did everything they could to obscure his legacy. It was only when scholars analysed the records hundreds of years later that they worked it out.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘He pieced things together.’ She shot Nick a shy grin to see if he’d got the joke. ‘Movable type. He worked out a technique to cast individual letters on blocks of metal, then put them together into words, sentences, eventually an entire Bible – and print it out.’

Nick tried to imagine assembling a whole Bible letter by letter. ‘Must have taken a long time.’

‘Years, probably. But the only alternative was handwriting. Once he had the page set up he could print off as many copies as he wanted. Then he’d take it apart and reuse the letters to create a whole different page. Infinitely flexible, while at the same time creating a product that was completely standardised and could be replicated as often as people wanted it. It was probably the greatest step forward in the communication of information between the alphabet and the Internet.’

‘And when was this?’

‘The mid-fifteenth century.’

‘The same time as the Master of the Playing Cards.’

Emily held up the book from the library. There was nothing on the front cover except a grazing stag embossed in gold. Nick recognised it at once from the suit of deer. Emily turned the book spine on.

‘Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards,’ Nick read.

‘I came across it when I was looking into Gillian’s card, back in New York. You’re not the first one to wonder about a connection. There’s an illuminated copy of the Gutenberg Bible at Princeton whose illustrations look like copies of the playing cards. The author of this book suggested that perhaps there was a partnership between Gutenberg and the Master to produce illustrations for the Bibles. The man who perfected printing text and the man who perfected printing engravings. It’s a seductive idea.’

‘Is there any evidence for it?’

‘Only circumstantial. Most of the arguments in this book have been picked apart.’ Emily stared at the printout as if she couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Until this.’

A siren howled in the distance. Nick tried to concentrate. ‘Isn’t it pretty similar to the bestiary we found in Brussels?’

‘The bestiary is handwritten; this is printed. You can see how regular the type is, how perfectly straight the lines are. The same with the illustrations. The pictures in the bestiary have been hand-painted. It’s hard to be certain with the reconstruction, but it looks as if the one here has been printed like the cards.’

The siren was getting louder. Nick wiped the window and looked out. The only other car in the lay-by was a silver Opel parked at the far end. Its driver stood with his back to them, relieving himself into the snow under the trees.

‘So we’ve got a printed picture that we know dates from the mid-fifteenth century and some printed text. How do you make the leap to Gutenberg?’

Emily pointed to the letters. ‘Gutenberg was the first. He didn’t just invent the printing press; he had to invent, or perfect, everything. The alloys used to cast the types and the tools for making them. The processes for putting together the pages and then holding them in place. The inks.’ She suddenly trailed off.

‘The inks…?’

The siren had swelled to an ear-splitting whoop. An ambulance sped past behind them, blasting its horn to clear the traffic. Nick exhaled a deep breath that promptly crystallised on the windscreen. Emily didn’t seem to have noticed.

‘That must be what alerted Gillian.’ She pulled out the playing card and scrutinised it. ‘Here.’

She pointed to a cluster of dark spots in the lower corner of the card.

‘Gutenberg’s ink is famous for its lustre. It doesn’t fade; it’s as dark and deep now as the day he pulled it off the press.’

‘How come?’

‘No one knows. Even among early printed books it’s unique. People have tried everything to unravel his recipe – even analysing it with spectrometers.’

‘PIXE,’ said Nick. ‘Vandevelde.’

‘Gillian must have noticed the ink and guessed what it was. Vandevelde would have confirmed it.’

‘Before they got to him. But how did you figure it out?’

‘The font. Gutenberg invented that too. It wasn’t a question of selecting Times New Roman or Arial; he had to design every letter and then cut it into blocks of metal for casting. In early printed books, each typeface is as unique as handwriting.’

She ran a finger over the reassembled letters. ‘This is the grandfather of them all. The type he used for his masterpiece, the Gutenberg Bible. So far as we’ve ever known, that was the only major book he printed.’ She caressed the printout like an infant. ‘This is like finding an autographed copy of a lost Shakespeare play with illustrations by Rembrandt.’

‘We haven’t found it yet,’ Nick reminded her. ‘All we’ve got is a printout of a reconstruction of one page that a guy tore up in Strasbourg. I don’t think that was original either, unless Gutenberg printed it off on office paper.’

‘You pointed a gun at him and the only thing he cared about was destroying that piece of paper. It’s a true copy of something. Somewhere.’