‘Show off,’ I said.
‘I think you had better secure this,’ he said. ‘And see if you can track down where it came from.’
‘Is it something to do with Ettersberg?’ I asked.
‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘Not everything German relates back to the Nazis.’
‘Is it a translation of the Principia Artis Magicae?’ I asked.
‘I can’t tell without having a look.’
‘I’ll get onto Arts and Antiques,’ I said.
‘Later,’ said Nightingale. ‘After practice.’
Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn’t secure enough. For those items they rent space at the auction house Christie’s where they laugh at cat burglars, tweak the nose of international art thieves and have some of the most serious, and rumoured to be illegal, security measures in the world. That’s why the following morning I found myself down on King Street in St James’s where even a miserable icy rain couldn’t wash away the smell of money.
Nor could a stick of incendiary bombs, back in April 1941, when it destroyed everything except the facade of number 8 King Street, the London home of Christie’s since 1823. They rebuilt in the 1950s, which was why the foyer was disappointingly shapeless and low ceilinged, albeit in an expensive air-conditioned and marble-floored way.
The Folly doesn’t generate the gigabytes of paperwork that the rest of the Met does but what we do produce tends to be a bit too esoteric to be outsourced to an IT company in Inverness. Instead, we have one elderly guy in a basement in Oxford, although admittedly the basement’s under the Bodleian library and the guy is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
I found Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil. F.R.S. B.Mon hunched over the book in a viewing room upstairs. Designed, I learnt later, to be deliberately neutral and not distract from whatever it was you were supposed to be viewing, the room was all beige carpet, white walls and aluminium and black canvas faux Bauhaus chairs. Postmartin was examining his prize on an unornamented lectern. He was wearing white gloves and using a plastic spatula to turn the pages.
‘Peter,’ he said when I entered. ‘You have surpassed yourself this time. Truly surpassed yourself.’
‘Is it kosher?’ I asked.
‘I should say so,’ said Postmartin. ‘A proper German grimoire. I haven’t seen one of these since 1991.’
‘I thought it might be a copy of the Principia.’
Postmartin glanced at me over the top of his reading glasses and grinned. ‘It’s certainly based on Newtonian principles but I think it’s more than a copy. My German is somewhat rusty but I believe I’m right in saying that it looks like it came out of the Wei?e Bibliothek in Cologne.’
My German’s worse than my Latin, but even I thought I could translate that.
‘White Library?’ I asked.
‘Also known as the Bibliotheca Alba and the centre of German magical practice until 1798 when the French, who owned that bit of Germany at the time, shut down the university.’
‘The French didn’t like magic, then?’
‘Hardly,’ said Postmartin. ‘They shut down all the universities. It was one of the unfortunate side effects of the French Revolution.’
Details of what happened to the contents of the library next were sketchy but, according to Postmartin’s records, the entire Wei?e Bibliothek had been smuggled out of Cologne to Weimar.
‘Where, buoyed no doubt by the rising tide of German nationalism,’ said Postmartin, ‘it became the Deutsche Akademie der Hoheren Einsichten zu Weimar or the Weimarer Akademie der Hoheren Einsichten for short.’
‘Because that is much shorter,’ I said.
‘The Weimar Academy of Higher Insights,’ said Postmartin.
‘Higher insights?’ I asked.
‘Hoheren Einsichten can translate as either that or “higher understanding,”’ said Postmartin. ‘As both in fact. German really is a splendid language for discussing the esoteric.’
It wasn’t quite the German version of the Folly. ‘Far more rigorous, much less smug,’ said Postmartin who believed that the Akademie had probably been in advance of the Folly for much of the nineteenth century.
‘Although one likes to think it was neck and neck by the 1920s,’ said Postmartin. In the 1930s it was swallowed up by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, an organisation dedicated to providing both an intellectual framework for Nazism and Indiana Jones with an endless supply of disposable bad guys.
And round we come to Ettersberg once more, I thought. And whatever it was Nightingale and his doomed chums had been doing there in 1945.
I asked whether the Germans had a modern equivalent of the Folly.
‘There’s a branch of the Bundeskriminalamt — that’s the Federal Police Force — based in Meckenheim called the Abteilung KDA which stands for Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten which translates as the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters.’
Leaving aside the wonderful name, the Federal Government maintained a most un-German vagueness about what the department’s responsibilities are. ‘A stance uncannily similar to that taken by their counterparts in Whitehall with regards to the Folly,’ said Postmartin. ‘That in itself is quite distinctive, really.’
‘I supposed it never occurred to you to just phone them up and ask,’ I said.
‘That’s an operational matter, so nothing to do with me I’m afraid,’ said Postmartin. ‘And besides we didn’t think it was necessary.’
It had been an article of faith amongst the post-war survivors of British wizardry that the magic was going out of the world. You don’t need to establish bilateral links with sister organisations if your raison d’etre was melting away like the arctic icepack.
‘And besides, Peter,’ said Postmartin, ‘if this book did come from the White Library then there’s a good chance the Germans may want it back and I for one have no intention of letting it out of my grasp.’ He laid his white gloved hand gently on the cover as emphasis. ‘However did Arts and Antiques come by it in the first place?’
‘It was handed in by a reputable bookseller,’ I said.
‘How reputable?’
‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘reputable enough. Colin and Leech in Cecil Court.’
‘The thief must have been blissfully unaware of what he had,’ said Postmartin. ‘That’s like trying to flog,’ he rolled the word around, obviously enjoying the sound of it, ‘a Picasso down the Portobello. How did they wrest the book from him?’
I told him that I didn’t know the details and that I was following that up as soon we were finished.
‘Why hasn’t that been done already?’ asked Postmartin. ‘Leaving aside its more esoteric qualities, this is still a very valuable item. Surely an investigation has already begun?’
‘The book hasn’t been reported stolen,’ I said. ‘As far as Arts and Antiques are concerned, there’s no crime to investigate.’ And what with the Met currently being seriously mullered by spending cuts, nobody was in a hurry to find an excuse for more work.
‘Curious,’ said Postmartin. ‘Perhaps the owner doesn’t realise it’s been stolen.’
‘Perhaps the owner is the guy who tried to sell it,’ I said. ‘He might want it back.’
Postmartin gave me a horrified look. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I have a security van coming to whisk this book and myself away to Oxford and safety. Besides, if he is the owner, he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. To each according to his abilities and all that.’
‘You’ve hired a security van?’
‘For this?’ said Postmartin, looking fondly at the book. ‘Of course. I even considered coming out with my revolver.’ He checked to make sure I was suitably horrified. ‘Don’t worry. I was a crack shot in my day.’