The Book of Secrets

LXVII

Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

The battered Volkswagen crawled along the street. No one noticed it, except maybe the snowmen standing sentinel on the suburban lawns. If anyone had been watching, they would have been struck by the car’s erratic progress. It nosed forward a few yards, braked suddenly, paused, then lurched into gear again. A few moments later it repeated the manoeuvre. Perhaps the driver was afraid of ice – except that the road had been ploughed and salted only that afternoon. Perhaps he was lost, or drunk. That might explain why the car always stopped in the shadows.

‘In a different neighbourhood we’d be arrested for soliciting,’ Nick complained.

They’d slept through the brief day; now it was evening. Nick advanced the car three more driveways and halted. Emily sat beside him with the laptop open on her knees. The glow of the screen was the only light in the car.

‘Here’s one.’ She tapped the trackpad twice. ‘Oh – encrypted. No good.’

Nick tapped the accelerator again. They’d set out from the motel an hour ago to find an Internet café, but the sleepy commuter town had no provision for tourists. They’d tried the public library, but that was closed. In the end the best they could come up with was trundling down residential streets trying to piggyback an unwitting family’s airwaves.

Nick turned a corner and stopped beside a cluster of snow-covered trash cans. Emily leaned closer to the screen. ‘How about this? “Hauser Family Network – unsecured wireless connection.”’

‘That’s what we want.’

Nick took the laptop from her and clicked the new connection.

CONNECTING TO HOST 190.168.0.1

A green icon shaped like a radio tower appeared. He passed the laptop back to Emily, who opened a web browser and typed in an address. Mottled parchment lit up the screen.

‘Is that it?’

‘The British Library have two Gutenberg Bibles. They’ve scanned both of them and put them online.’

Emily turned the computer so he could see better. Dense text stood in two columns on the page, each as straight as a knife. Time had browned the parchment but the ink remained vividly black, defying the centuries. Despite the Gothic typeface and its obvious age, the design was startlingly clean.

‘I can see why people get excited about it.’

‘Those straight margins were his calling card. Scribes couldn’t get the right-hand margins to line up so cleanly; you can only do it if you have the freedom to move the type around and space it exactly.’

‘Guy must have been a perfectionist.’

Emily extracted the printout of the reassembled page. On the back she’d written a series of letters and numbers next to brief descriptions of the card figures.

‘Read me the page numbers.’

Nick tried – and failed – to find them. Emily pointed to a column.

‘f.117r?’

‘F stands for folio – the physical, double-sided leaf. Medieval books didn’t have page numbering like we do, so historians number from the first leaf. The final letter stands for recto or verso – the front side of the leaf, which appears as the right-hand page when you open the book, or the reverse side. So what we would count as page three would actually be-’

‘f.2r,’ said Nick. ‘Top side of the second leaf. Got it.’

One by one, he read out the page numbers. There were about a dozen of them, starting from f.117r – about page 233, he figured – and ending at f.280r, some 325 pages later. It was a time-consuming process. For each reference, Emily had to find the scanned page, read the Latin text, then work out which book of the Bible it came from. At that point she read it out to Nick, who jotted the reference down next to the page and the description of the image.

But his thoughts were elsewhere. Somehow, the arcane system of page numbering had prompted a thought, an irritation at the back of his mind like a pebble in his shoe. He worried at it while Emily tapped out her searches on the computer.

‘What’s next?’

He consulted the list. ‘f.226r.’

‘Got it.’ She stared at the screen for a moment. ‘The sins I have committed outnumber the sands of the sea. I am not worthy to look up and see the height of Heaven because of the multitude of my iniquities.’

Nick waited for her to read out the chapter and verse. When she didn’t say anything, he glanced across. Emily was staring at the screen.

‘What is it?’

‘What picture goes with that page?’

Nick consulted the chart. ‘A digging bear.’

‘The same one that’s on the card?’

He didn’t even need to check. ‘Why?’

‘That page is the prayer of Manasses.’ She turned, her face glowing with discovery. ‘The prayer that’s supposed to be part of the lost book of the Bible, the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.’

‘He also made another book of beasts using a new art of writing…’

‘… which is hidden in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. And here it is, with an illustration from the card on that same page.’

They sat there for a moment in silence.

‘I don’t get it,’ Nick said at last. ‘All these clues join up, but they just go round in a circle. The Bible with the illustrations by the Master of the Playing Cards is in Princeton, right? That can’t be what Gillian was after. So there must be another book that connects with the card, with the Bible, and with the bestiary Gillian found in Paris.’

‘Another book of beasts.’

‘So where is it?’

Emily stared at the windscreen. Condensation made the outside world invisible. It was too apt, Nick thought: stuck in a fogged-up car going nowhere.

‘There must be another piece of the jigsaw,’ said Emily.

‘Maybe it was on the first page of the bestiary. The one that got cut out.’

‘Maybe there’s more here. We haven’t looked at all the Master’s pictures yet.’

Emily leaned over the computer again and began typing, her keystrokes erratic with nervous haste. Nick glanced at the display. Printed page on web page, the fifteenth-century cowskin rewritten in the liquid crystals of the screen. For all the gulf of technology, it struck him how similar they were in essence: vehicles for information. However you wrote a page number – or for that matter, a biblical chapter and verse – it was nothing more than an address for looking up data.

Page 233, f.117r, Judges 5:4: ultimately they were all shorthand for (Emily said), ‘The earth trembled and the heavens poured out water.’ The same way that 190.168.0.1 was a convenient equivalence for the Hauser family’s home broadband.

But what if you reversed it? What if the information pointed back to its number?

Nick flipped over the piece of paper in his hands. Recto and verso, front and back. He looked at the ox in the fuzzy engraving and thought of a smiling cow standing on a ladder with a paintbrush in its hoof.

I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz

Emily had stopped typing and was staring through the window, lost in thought. Nick grabbed the laptop.

‘I haven’t finished,’ she protested.

‘I won’t be a minute.’

His fingers skidded on the keyboard in his excitement; he had to type the address three times before he got it right. The rainbow-striped cow grinned from the top of her ladder.

He pressed a button. The written address resolved itself into a string of digits which he scribbled on the sheet of paper.

Emily leaned over, still looking cross. ‘What’s that?’

‘Every web address translates to a number.’ He opened the car door. Fifty yards up the street, a payphone huddled under a blanket of snow. ‘Maybe another kind of number.’

He ran to the payphone. Fresh snowflakes were beginning to spiral down in the light from street lamps; his fingers almost froze to the metal buttons as he dialled the number and waited.

The space between each ring felt like an eternity. Every crackle on the line sounded like a receiver being lifted off the hook. Then: ‘Ja?’

‘Is that Olaf?’ Nick said in German.

A pause. ‘Who is calling?’

‘It’s about Gillian Lockhart,’

The man said nothing.

‘Have I got the wrong number?’

‘Who are you?’

‘A friend of hers from America. She’s missing; I’m trying to find her.’

‘Ha.’ Another long silence. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

Nick gripped the receiver tighter. His breath frosted the glass of the phone booth.

‘But I know where she was going.’

Now it was Nick’s turn to keep silent, frozen by the fear that the wrong word would ruin everything.

‘Come to Mainz and I will tell you.’