The Book Of Secrets Part 30

'The pilgrimage has been postponed, not cancelled. All we need is to hold our nerve and sit out one extra year. Then we will be as rich as we ever dreamed.'

'I cannot sit out an extra year! ' He bellowed it like a gelded colt. I looked to see if anyone had heard, but the sawing of carpenters hid it.

'I should have listened to my brother Jorg,' he moaned. 'He told me you were a vagabond, a conjurer. That you would be the ruin of my family.'

It was then I realised, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I was responsible. I was too old to run. I owed too many men too much to be able to disappear. One-armed Karl would find me, or someone like him, and my crushed body would be dragged off one of the ca.n.a.l weirs, snagged among the sc.u.m and branches.

I had to free myself. And like a drunk who finds release in one more draught, I reached for the only cure I knew.

'There is another art I know. Less advanced than the mirrors, though with rewards that might dwarf them. All it needs is patience.'

He shook his head. 'I have had enough of your secret arts.'

'Did you never wonder what Kaspar and I were doing in your bas.e.m.e.nt? The mirrors were never more than a sideshow, sowing the seeds for our greater work.'

Even in his despair I could see he was interested. 'You never spoke of this.'

'Of course not. The mirrors are already secret enough. But this new art is ten times greater. Only four men know of its existence.'

'Can it be carried off before next year?'

'Difficult to say. As I told you, its progress is less advanced than the mirrors. But once it is ready there will be no delay. No waiting for pilgrimages, no s.h.i.+pping it down the river. Even the plague could not stop it. All it will require is a little investment.'

He grabbed my coat and thrust me against the cathedral wall. 'Are you deaf? Have you listened to a word I say? I have no more money. How can I spend my way out of bankruptcy?'

With a calmness I did not feel, I pulled his hand off my collar and stepped away. Light sparkled on a gold pin he wore on the shoulder of his coat, Christ on his cross with a verse of scripture scrolled around it.

'What about that?'

He cupped his hand over it. 'It was a gift from my wife.'

It was beautifully made. Every sinew in Christ's body strained against death, as if his flesh tried to fight back the spirit from breaking free. The lettering underneath was perfectly even, punched into the thin metal with impossible finesse. It reminded me of the task at hand.

'You can borrow the money we need. I will be at my house in St Argobast if you change your mind.'

Sometimes I believed that borrowing money was my true business, and all my work with ink and metal existed merely to provide a pretext for the loans. The mirrors had become a monster devouring itself; when nothing remained, I needed a new idea to borrow against. In those days I no longer thought of the arts in terms of profit, or even if they would work. All that mattered was that they kept the stream of money flowing.

Three days after our meeting in the cathedral, Dritzehn came to my house. I met him in the yard between the barn and the forge. Hens pecked around our feet; my pig rooted for apples fallen from the tree behind the barn.

'How much?' Dritzehn asked without preamble.

I had thought of little else in the intervening days. 'One hundred and twenty-five gulden.'

He spluttered in indignation, which rapidly exploded into a violent fit of coughing. I watched him anxiously. I did not want him to die before I had his money.

'That is more than I have loaned you already and that has almost bankrupted me.'

'Sometimes the only way across the river is to go deeper. What about your house?'

He wiped spittle from his mouth with his sleeve. 'What about it?'

'You can borrow against it.'

'I already have.'

'Borrow more,' I urged him. 'If your debts fall due and you cannot pay, they will take your house however much you owe. Better to risk everything on success than fail with half measures.'

I knew he would agree. Otherwise, he would never have come. It took a few minutes for him to come to terms with himself. He scuffed his boot in the dirt; he swung his shoulders and kicked his feet like a straw man on a stick.

'I can give you forty gulden now. The rest, I can raise in a few weeks.'

'Are you sure? Once I have taught you this art you cannot leave our partners.h.i.+p. If you have any doubts, go home now.'

He wanted rea.s.surance. 'This money is to be used only for the good of the enterprise?'

'Of course,' I said, already calculating how best to distribute it among my creditors. 'And we will share the profits in the same proportion as before.'

'And if any of us dies before the venture is complete, all the investment will revert to his heirs?'

I looked at him sharply. 'Are you expecting to die?'

'No.' Another fit of coughing overtook him; he tried to swallow it and only made himself choke. 'But I am older than my father was when he died. Life is short; death stalks all our shadows.'

I crossed myself. 'This secret is too great to hazard to inheritance. If any of us dies, he will take it to his grave.'

This agitated him. 'What of my wife? She must get something if I die. Am I to mortgage her widowhood?'

'A merchant who invests in a voyage cannot reclaim his capital while the s.h.i.+p is at sea. Any money you put in must remain with the partners.h.i.+p until it is completed.'

He sighed, his face grey with defeat. I clapped him on the shoulder and tried to feign enthusiasm. 'Forget this talk of death. In two years' time you will laugh that you ever doubted me.'

I stood at the gate and watched him wander down the road, a sad and haggard man. Had I reduced him to this state? Lost in the labyrinth of my schemes and my debts, I could no longer tell if I was his benefactor or his nemesis.

'Did he bite?'

Kaspar walked out of the barn. His sleeves were pulled up, and a round welt shone on his palm from pus.h.i.+ng the engraving tool into the metal.

'He'll pay.'

'Then why so sad?'

Kaspar reached out to stroke my cheek. But my dealing with Dritzehn had left me in a solitary mood. I turned away.

'What has come over you? You are so morose: you trudge around as if all the world was piled on your shoulders.'

'Perhaps it is the weight of the gold I owe.'

'Do you remember the old times? You were a much more interesting man then. Before this obsession with gold and loans and debt. You were an artist; now you are a money-changer.'

'Finance is as much part of this art as lead or ink or copper,' I snapped. 'It is the size of this enterprise which justifies it. You want to create things of rare and novel beauty and no man is better at it. But for this art, the beauty comes from its scale. A drop of water is nothing, but a river is majestic. An ocean is unfathomable.'

'Have you ever looked at a drop of water? Suspended from a branch on a sunlit morning, the whole world reflected in its...o...b..stretching as the bough shakes, not knowing if it will cling on or fall and disappear into the earth. That is beautiful.'

'If I could do this work for nothing and give it away for free, I would. But you have seen how the costs pile up on each other and we are not nearly finished yet.'

'Either beauty is present or it is not.' Kaspar and I were in different conversations. 'If you print one indulgence, or cast one mirror, it is what it is. Whether it is unique or there are a thousand others the same, it does not matter.'

'What about gold? Are a thousand gulden more beautiful than a single coin?'

'They are to you.'

Two months later, Andreas Dritzehn died.

LIII.

Strasbourg

The hotel provided free Internet access in the room. Nick spent ten minutes lying on the bed and staring at the wall socket, fighting the temptation like a saint. After a week offline he felt as though he'd lost a limb; he was desperate to reconnect. But the men who were chasing him seemed to have an almost telepathic ability to trace his movements. Could he risk it?

The Internet was a vast and deafening conversation; Nick's presence would be a whisper in comparison. And he knew a few tricks. Tingling with doubt, he swung himself off the bed and plugged in his laptop.

Working in digital forensics had made him paranoid about safety. First he cleared all the stored history in his web browser anything that might inadvertently check in with a site he'd used before and betray him. Then he made his computer a citadel. He threw up a firewall around it and closed all the ports except one, so that all traffic had to pa.s.s through a single well-guarded gateway. Like all walls, it was as much about what was kept in as what was kept out. Inside, his antivirus patrolled the corridors and courtyards of the fortress, vigilant to any hint of suspicious activity. It wasn't a frontal attack he feared but spies.

Now to venture out. He connected to the Internet and immediately went to a website which styled itself an anonymiser. It was the sort of thing popular with perverts, criminals and conspiracy nuts, but it had its legitimate uses. Borrowing a metaphor, Nick thought of it as an invisibility cloak, a way of sneaking around the Web without leaving any trace of who you were or where you'd come from.

Even with all his defences up he still felt nervous like sneaking down to the living room in the middle of the night to explore his father's liquor cabinet. Every page he loaded felt like a floorboard waiting to squeak. Gradually, though, the flow of information closed around him. He forgot the dangers and was swept along on currents of knowledge, following connections as they branched all around him.

He began with the kings of Israel and found little beyond a series of names that were at first familiar and quickly became obscure: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijam, all the way through to Zedekiah. The online encyclopedias provided a lot of regurgitated Bible history, but nothing that looked relevant.

Next he moved on to the Sayings of the Kings of Israel. That brought a run of information that quickened his pulse. The Sayings of the Kings of Israel was a work casually referenced in the Book of Chronicles. Click. 2 Chronicles 33:18: 'The rest of the acts of King Mana.s.ses, his prayer to his G.o.d, and the words of the seers who spoke to him, these are recorded in the Sayings of the Kings of Israel.' Click. These sorts of references were scattered through the Old Testament, throwaway clues to other books that might once have existed but now only remained as ghosts to taunt scholars. Click. Like Sherlock Holmes adventures alluded to by Dr Watson but never written by Conan Doyle. Click. The case of the politician, the light-house and the trained cormorant.

Nick realised he'd reached a dead end. He backtracked and went down a different path, picking up on another keyword, Mana.s.ses. Sixteenth king of Israel. Apostate who was captured and taken to Babylon, but who was restored to his kingdom when he repented and returned to G.o.d. Click. Prayer of. Although the Sayings of the Kings of Israel had been lost (if it ever existed), someone around the first century AD had taken it on themselves to invent Mana.s.ses' prayer of repentance and pa.s.s it off as the original. A sort of fan fiction. It was a fake, but a fake so old it had acquired its own value. It was now included in the Bible as part of the Apocrypha.

Click back to the Bible. 'I am weighted down with many an iron fetter, so that I am rejected by my sins and I have no relief.'

I know how you feel, Nick thought.

Finally, he went back to Gillian's homepage. He knew it was risky, but he had to look.

GILLIAN LOCKHART.

is in mortal peril

(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)

It hadn't changed; she hadn't been back. He looked at the images again, his own absence, and cringed as he thought of the photo in his wallet. He went back to the billboard, just in case.

There was one new comment.

Are you safe? Did you find it? Please call me. I have a new number: www.jerseypaints.co.nz

(posted by Olaf, 11 January 17:18:44)

Nick read the message three times over. He checked the date on his watch. Two days ago. Caution told him he shouldn't go further; it was a trap. He shouldn't even be online. But he couldn't resist.

A new page appeared on screen: a picture of a rainbow-striped cow standing on a ladder, wielding a paintbrush and grinning. 'Home and industrial paint solutions.' There was a phone number prefaced by what Nick a.s.sumed was a New Zealand area code, and a couple of testimonials from satisfied customers. There was no mention of anyone called Olaf.

Nick checked his online security. Everything showed green. The website didn't seem to be trying to download any kind of malware.

He had to risk it. He lifted up the hotel phone and dialled the number shown on the website. There was a delay, then the foreign bleep of a distant telephone.

'Jersey Paints,' said a New Zealand-accented voice.

'Uh, hi. Is Olaf there?'

An exasperated silence. 'Is this some kind of joke? I've told you three times already there's no Olaf here. Would you please stop calling?'

'Sorry,' said Nick.