The Book of Secrets

LXIX

Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

They spent the night in the motel. They’d paid in advance, and their hoard of euros was running out. When bedtime came they undressed and crept under the blankets together without discussion. They slept wrapped around each other, their naked skin the only warmth in the room. At seven, they rose and left.

A thick fog had come down on the heels of the snow, leaving the world a damp and lonely place. They crossed the Rhine at dawn and barely saw it, then turned north. Emily had the laptop out on her knees but didn’t open it; the white silence seemed to possess her completely. The only cars they passed were ghostly wrecks abandoned at the side of the road.

‘Mainz was Gutenberg’s home.’ Emily’s voice was hardly audible over the ineffectual clatter of the heater. ‘I wonder if that’s why Olaf chose it.’

Olaf had set the meeting for eleven o’clock at St Stephan’s church, a whitewashed building trimmed in red sandstone, capped by a bullet-nosed dome. It stood at the top of the hill behind the city: looking back from the terrace outside, Nick saw a snowy forest of roofs and aerials sloping down into the fog. For a moment he felt a powerful sense of dread, of unseen enemies sniffing for his trail in the snow. He shook it off and went inside.

It was like stepping into a fish tank. A soft blue light filled the church like water, so thick it was almost tangible. It came from the windows, a nebula of swirling blues speckled with white: birds in a cloudless sky, a starcloth, souls flitting into heaven.

Only at the back of the church, behind the altar, did the blue become a canvas for more literal illustrations. Nick walked up to examine them. An angel with fairy wings carried up a body that had swooned into its arms. A naked Adam and Eve considered an apple, while a blue serpent twined through the tree. A golden angel reading a book turned somersaults over a lighted menorah.

‘The windows are new. The church burned in the war.’

Nick turned sharply. A straight-backed old man wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket had rolled up behind him in a wheel-chair. His hooded eyes looked old enough to have seen the church’s devastation first hand. His lips curled in and hid whatever teeth he had left, while tufts of grey hair poked from under his battered hat.

‘The new windows are by Chagall,’ the old man continued. His tone was precise, unhurried. Nick guessed he didn’t have much to do other than collar unsuspecting tourists. Nick and Emily might be his only catch that day. ‘We were very proud in Mainz when so great an artist agreed to devote his work to our little church.’

‘They’re good.’ Nick tried to steal a glance over the old man’s shoulder. Olaf had refused to say how they would recognise him. Nick was terrified of missing him.

‘But I liked the medieval windows too. I saw them in my childhood, before the war. Very beautiful – and so exotic. Stags, lions and bears, birds…’

‘Flowers.’ Nick stared at him and tried to remember. ‘Wild men.’

‘Indeed. The medieval symbolism, so dense, you know? If you start to look close you never know where you go. ’

Emily took the plunge. ‘Are you Olaf?’

The old man coughed loudly. A nun kneeling in the front pew looked up from her prayers and frowned. ‘My name is most certainly not Olaf. But it serves. Let us find somewhere to talk.’

He waved away Nick’s offer to push him and led them to a pew at the back of the church.

‘I’m glad we found you,’ Nick said. ‘It was a clever trick, the way you hid your phone number.’

Olaf gave him a shrewd look. ‘You mean you are surprised a man of my age can even read email, let alone have heard of an IP address. But I have always sought knowledge. Many ways of finding it have come and gone in my lifetime.’

He manoeuvred his wheelchair against the end of a pew, leaning forward as if about to launch into prayer. Nick and Emily slid onto the bench beside him. He pointed to the wall, where a mounted photograph showed pyramids of flame leaping out of the burning church. All that could be seen of the building was a row of steep gable ends standing tall and black like witches’ hats.

‘God’s beauty is infinite,’ he said inscrutably. ‘Churches can be rebuilt, maybe more beautiful than before. But history. You cannot hire Chagall to restore that.’ He gave a heavy sigh. ‘Are you believers? Christians?’

‘Not really,’ said Nick.

‘I was, once. Then I decided I knew better. Now I am not so sure.’

A mournful silence gripped him as he stared at the windows, into some painful corner of the distant past.

‘You said you had something to tell us about Gillian,’ Nick prompted. Olaf didn’t seem to hear.

‘I was fourteen when the war ended.’

Nick did a quick calculation and was surprised by the result. It must have shown on his face.

‘You think I look older than I am.’ Olaf coughed again. ‘I feel older than I am. But I will come to that. For now, imagine me as I was. Old enough to have had a rifle pushed in my hands when Zhukov crossed the Oder; young enough to still have pride in Germany. Even when they told us the truth, all the things that make Germans ashamed today, I had pride. Those things were done by Nazis. I was a German.

‘That is why I became a historian. I wished to reclaim our history from the monsters and foreigners who took it away from us. I went back further and further into the past, trying to escape the poison that had infected us. While my generation built a new future with the Wirtschaftswunder, I wanted to dig its foundation. A new past. A clean past.’

He sighed. ‘You must understand, to be a historian in Germany is to be in thrall to a beautiful woman who has shared herself with everyone but you. There is hardly an archive or a library that has not been looted, burned, destroyed or lost at some point in its history. Sometimes facsimiles of original documents survive; sometimes even the copies have been destroyed. This has always been so – but after the war it was intolerable. A young researcher who wants to make a career needs documents, discoveries he can publish. But all our archives were only smoke and ashes. Until one day, in a convent library looking through old books of receipts, I found what I sought. A treasure.’

‘What was it?’ Emily asked.

‘A letter. A single sheet of paper written in a fifteenth-century hand. In the corner was a device: two shields blazoned with the Greek letters chi and lamda, joined by a noose that yoked the neck of a raven. I knew at once whose it was.’

He glanced up to see he still had their attention.

‘Johann Fust. You know Fust?’ Olaf was too far into the past to wait for their answers. ‘Fust was Johann Gutenberg’s business partner. You know Gutenberg, of course. Everyone knows Gutenberg. Time magazine says he was the Man of the Millennium. But if you came to Mainz five hundred years ago, everyone knew Fust and no one knew Gutenberg. Gutenberg printed one book; Fust and his son Peter Schoeffer printed one hundred and thirty. A letter from Fust is like a letter from St Paul. And I found it.’

‘What did it say?’

The knot of veins pulsed under Olaf’s knuckles as he fretted with the frayed blanket. ‘I should have published it. I should have told the librarian what I found. It would have stopped everything. But I did not.’

He took a furtive look around the church. ‘I stole it. Almost before I knew it, I slipped it into my pocket. At last I had found my princess sleeping in her tower. She would not give herself to me, so I took her. The archive had no security: they thought they had nothing worth taking.’

‘But you didn’t publish?’

‘The letter was just the beginning. It hinted at things much greater. I could have published, of course; I would go back to the archive, pretend to find it again, announce my discovery. But then I risked being left with the hook while someone else walked off with the fish. And I was jealous. I was like an old man with a young wife – except I was twenty-four and she was five hundred years old. I hid her away. My secret.’

While he spoke, he spun one of the threads of his blanket around the knuckle of his index finger, so tight the tip went white. He didn’t seem to notice.

‘I guarded my privacy. But not well enough. I was a young man: I had women to impress, rival scholars – who sometimes were also rivals in love – to outshine. I hinted; I made remarks; I allowed speculation. I was careless. I thought I was very clever.

‘Then one day a man came to see me. A young priest, Father Nevado. He came to my house. He was thin – we all were then, but he was thinner; he had red lips, like a vampire. He told me he had come from Italy, though he was obviously Spanish. From this I deduced he worked for the Vatican. ‘He told me, “I have heard rumours you have made a remarkable discovery.”’

‘“A letter from a man who complains that the Church has stolen something from him,” I said. I was arrogant. “Have you come to give it back?”

‘The priest’s eyes were like black ice. “The letter is the property of the Holy Church.”

‘He looked at me then. I tell you, I had watched dead-eyed Russian soldiers march into our guns until they choked them with their own blood. I had watched them shoot children and rape girls in the street. They had not frightened me as much as this priest did when he looked at me.

‘ “You will give me the letter,” he said. “You will give me all the copies you have made, including translations. You will give me the name of every person you have told about it. You will never mention it again; you will forget it ever existed.”

‘He broke me right there. I was a medieval historian; I knew what the Church could do to its enemies. Even in the twentieth century. It was in his voice. His eyes. I gave him the letter and all my notes.

‘ “If you ever tell anyone of this, you will surely suffer the torments of the damned,” he told me.

‘And so I kept silent. For ten years I devoted myself to my work. I completed my thesis and found a position at a provincial university. I attended seminars and workshops; I invited colleagues to dinner and flattered their wives; I reviewed obsequiously. I married. But my wound never healed.

‘I wrote a book. A small book, interesting only to scholars, if anyone. But I was proud of it. To me, it was vindication. The priest had taken the treasure that would have elevated my career to Olympian heights, but I had clawed myself up nonetheless. And I could not resist a small crow of triumph.

‘It was a footnote. Nothing more: a passing reference, so obscure no reader would even notice it. Just for my own pride.

‘Two weeks before the book was to be published, my editor called me to his office. He polished his spectacles; he was very regretful. He said that very serious allegations of plagiarism had been made against my work.

‘ “But there is no plagiarism in my book,” I protested. You must understand, to an academic it is like being accused of harming your children. I had sweated five years of blood to make that book.

‘ “Surely there is not,” said my editor. “But they are suing us for a large sum of money and if we lose we will be bankrupt. Your book is important, but I cannot risk all our other authors for you.”

‘ “Then what do we do?”

‘ “They require that we recall all copies and pulp them. They are not vindictive men; they have even offered to help pay for the costs of destruction.”

‘ “Who?” I demanded. “Who are these men who say what will or will not be published?” I guessed, of course. “Was it the priest?”

‘My editor played with his pen. “Make sure you bring in the advance copies you have at your house. We must account for every one.”

‘Three days later, I drove home from a dinner party with my wife. It was late, an icy night. Perhaps I had had a little too much schnapps – but in those days, everybody did. I came around a corner. Some fool had skidded and abandoned his car in the middle of the road. I had no chance.’

Olaf folded his hands. ‘My wife died at once. I spent six months in hospital and came out in a wheelchair I have never left.’

‘Did they catch the people who did it?’ said Emily.

‘The car was stolen. The police said it was youths, joyriders who panicked when the car skidded. I did not believe them.

‘After that I abandoned my history. It was too dangerous. I wrote some tourist guides to Mainz; I volunteered at the museum. Those people took away my past, my present, my future. I lived forty years waiting to die. I never spoke of it.’

‘But you told Gillian,’ said Nick.

The old man rocked back in his wheelchair. ‘My second wife died five years ago – from the cancer. I was almost glad: at least I could not blame myself. We have no children. There is nothing more they can take from me. When Gillian Lockhart contacted me, I thought it was my last chance. My wound still has not healed.’

‘How did she find you?’

Olaf chuckled. ‘Do you know the Hawking paradox?’

‘As in Stephen Hawking?’ said Nick. ‘His calculations showed that when matter enters a black hole all information about it is destroyed. But that contradicts a fundamental law of physics: that information cannot be destroyed.’

‘Dr Hawking was proved wrong. Even in a black hole, some information survives. So also with my little book. Somewhere, somehow, a few copies leaked out of the black hole Father Nevado made for them. One sat on a library shelf – who knows where – fifty years. Waiting. Until, it seems, an Internet company started digitising this library’s collection as part of a project to accumulate all knowledge. If Father Nevado knew about it, he would probably tear down all the World Wide Web to get rid of it. But even he cannot police everything. Gillian found it first. Then she found me. I sat in this same church and told her what I have told you. Like me fifty years ago, she was too stubborn to hear the warnings.’

‘You told her about the letter?’

‘About the letter – yes. But for her it was more important to learn about the library.’

‘Which library?’ Nick felt like a drunk wandering across a frozen lake: slipping and skidding, with only the faintest idea of the airless depths beneath.

‘The Bibliotheca Diabolorum. The Library of Devils.’

The blue light seemed to wrap Nick closer. Emily slid along the bench, pressing against him. By the altar, a young priest was reciting a litany.

‘You know of it?’

Nick and Emily shook their heads.

‘Few people have even heard its name. It is a construction, a myth. A hell for condemned books. The last curse of the thwarted scholar when all his efforts to find a book have failed: it must have gone to the Devils’ Library.’

‘Does it exist?’

‘It must.’ Olaf’s hands were trembling. He knitted his fingers together. ‘They almost killed me to protect it. That was the footnote in my book: “We should consider the possibility that some books from Johann Fust’s collection may have been confiscated, perhaps to the so-called Devils’ Library.” That was why they killed my wife.’

‘Was that what Fust’s letter said?’

‘Not precisely. You can see yourself.’

Olaf twisted in his seat and began fiddling with his wheel-chair. It was an old contraption, with wooden armrests screwed to a metal frame. One of the screws was loose. Olaf scrabbled underneath and slid out a piece of paper folded over and over, concertina-style, so as to be no wider than the armrest.

He handed it to Nick. ‘Even in the blackest hole, information survives.’

‘To the Most Reverend Father in Christ, Cardinal Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini:

I am writing in order that I may humbly acquaint your most exalted person with the injustice which diverse blackguards and vagabonds have caused to be perpetrated in the name of the Church; which deeds, if you knew of them, you would surely deplore, as I do, to the depths of your soul. Yesterday, in the afternoon, two men came to my house by the church of St Quintin, the Humbrechthof. They interrupted various works my son was undertaking there, the nature of which need not detain Your Grace, and ransacked the workshop until they had found a certain book they sought. Though small and unremark able in every way, this book had come into my possession from a particular gentleman known to Your Grace.

Despite my heated protestations, these men took the book away with them. Wherefore I pray Your Grace, if you know anything of this outrage, to bend your authority to seeking out the evil-doers and restoring to me my rightful property.

Johann Fust

Humbrechthof, Mainz

Emily stared at the piece of paper, as wrinkled as Olaf’s skin. ‘You remember it word for word?’

‘The priest took all my papers, but he could not take my memory. Even after the accident. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not recited it.’

‘Who was Piccolomini?’ said Nick. ‘A man who rose from a farmer’s son to be a cardinal, and eventually pope. He was also a novelist, a poet, a travel writer and a keen horseman.’

‘A real Renaissance man.’

‘Some decades in advance of the Renaissance itself. It is from him, incidentally, that we have the only eyewitness account of Gutenberg’s famous Bible. He saw it at a fair in Frankfurt and wrote to describe it to a fellow cardinal.’

‘ “A particular gentleman known to your Grace,” Emily read off the page. ‘You think it was Gutenberg?’

‘Gillian thought so.’

Olaf looked up. His eyes were pale, the colour dried up long ago. He fixed them on Emily, then Nick, stretching forward, trying to discern something distant.

‘She was right.’ Emily took the reconstruction out of her bag and gave it to him. The paper shivered in his hands.

He sighed deeply and settled forward in his chair. The wrinkles on his face seemed to sag, as if something inside him was slowly deflating. He murmured to himself in German: to Nick it sounded like, ‘Only the spear that made the wound can heal it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Did Gillian say where she found the reference to this Devils’ Library?’ Emily asked.

‘Here in Mainz – at the Stadtarchiv, the state archive.’

‘I bet it’s gone now,’ said Nick. ‘The men who took your book seem to be pretty good at clearing up after themselves.’

‘By the time she came here, your friend had started to realise this too. So she hid her discovery.’

‘Did she tell you where?’

‘She hid it where she found it,’ said Olaf. For a moment, Nick wondered if his mind had started to wander. ‘The clue – she did not say what it was – she found in an inventory of books from the Benedictine monastery in Eltville. This inventory came in a box which has a bar code for the catalogue. Gillian replaced this with a different bar code. If you look for the Eltville monastery inventory, you will find nothing. If, how ever, you look for a seventeenth-century treatise on agronomy, you may be surprised.’ He wrote the reference on their paper.

‘Did you go and have a look at it.’

Olaf shook his head. ‘It would have been too dangerous. Even now.’

He reached across the pew and grabbed Nick’s arm. Nick flinched, though there was no strength in the withered fingers.

‘I said this library – if it exists – is a hell for condemned books. But books cannot endure torment as humans can. Be careful.’