‘Perhaps the guard has gone to the toilet.’ He put the phone down, looking vaguely puzzled. ‘I go up. Please, wait here.’
He left the room. Nick followed his progress through the red-lit warehouse, watching the glow of the floor lights rippling ahead of him like a bow wave, then fading behind him. Haltung stepped into the elevator and vanished.
Nick wandered back over to the machine and peered through the porthole. The book lay on the shelf, inert. The crust of ice had vanished. A pair of gauges next to the door showed the temperature and the pressure creeping up.
‘It’s incredible, when you think about it,’ said Emily behind him. ‘Five or six hundred years ago, that same book was sheets of vellum and a pot of ink on a desk somewhere in Paris. It’s survived who knows how many kings, wars, owners… It’s been soaked through, frozen, freeze-dried with all the technology the twenty-first century can throw at it… and after all that, the original words the author wrote will still be there.’
‘If we’re lucky,’ said Atheldene.
A wave of tiredness hit Nick hard. It was almost two in the morning – and the jet lag still hadn’t finished messing with his body. There was no sign of Haltung and his coffee.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he announced.
Atheldene looked as though he was going to argue, but made do with a grunted, ‘Don’t touch anything.’
The door opened automatically to let Nick through into the red cocoon of the warehouse. He let himself wander along the corridors of frozen books, hypnotised by the way the floor lights seemed to spill ahead of him. He peered through the doors as he passed, the bundled books on the shelves, and wondered what lay within the tattered covers. Could there be pages that no one had ever read, fossils locked in the permafrost waiting for discovery? Could that be what Gillian had found?
He came around a corner and saw solid concrete: he’d come to the far end of the warehouse. He ought to go back, he supposed. He turned.
Almost at the same moment, a pool of yellow light appeared halfway along the front wall as the elevator doors slid open. Haltung stepped out. He wasn’t carrying any coffee – which was just as well, for he was trembling so badly he would surely have spilled it.
A black-gloved hand poked out of the elevator, holding a gun to his spine.
XLII
Strassburg
The screw tightened. The platen wheezed as it pressed the damp paper. We held it a moment then raised it back. Drach peeled the paper away from the plate and draped it over a rope strung between two beams.
‘Twenty-eight.’
Twenty-eight. I let go the handle of the press and walked over to examine it. In a sense there was nothing to see: it was exactly the same as the previous twenty-seven. But to me, that was everything. I gazed on it like a parent on his child. Better than a child, for a son is only an imperfect copy of the father. This was flawless.
It was not beautiful. The text was monotonous, hard to read, for the steel punches had taken me so long to cut that we only had upper-case letters. There was none of the variation of size or weight that a scribe would have applied – except for one flamboyant initial that Kaspar had carved into the copper plate separately. For the twenty-eighth time I looked at it and sighed. My drab rows of words whose chief merit was their discipline, against the vivid curves and wild tendrils of his single letter. It captured something.
Kaspar loaded the next sheet of paper and we took up our positions on opposite sides of the screw handle. These were golden times for me: quiet afternoons locked away in our cellar, the two of us working as one in our common purpose. In these moments I could almost forget how it was paid for.
‘I met an Italian once, a merchant who had travelled as far as Cathay,’ said Kaspar. ‘Do you know what he found there?’
‘Men with the heads of dogs and feet like mushrooms?’ Kaspar didn’t laugh. Like many quick-witted men, he was impatient with others’ humour.
‘Instead of gold and silver, they pay each other in paper.’
I laughed, and nodded to the back of the room. A ream of paper stood baled up on a workbench waiting for the press. ‘We should go to Cathy. We would be rich men. We could use our paper to buy their silver, transport it back here to pay for more paper, use that to buy yet more silver in Cathay…’ I looked at him suspiciously, wondering if this was another of his complicated jokes. ‘Surely if it were that easy every paper merchant in Italy would be rich as the Pope by now.’
‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that their princes must mark their paper with some symbol, as our kings mint coins.’
‘You can melt a king’s head off the coin and it will still be gold. Scrub it off a piece of paper and it is only paper. Burn it and you have nothing at all.’ I reversed the screw and pulled the sheet off. ‘Twenty-nine. I think your merchant spun you a traveller’s yarn.’
‘Is it so hard to believe? What are we doing here if not the same? We take pieces of paper that cost us a penny a dozen, and sell them for three silver pennies each to the Church. They in turn will sell them for sixpence. Has the nature of the paper changed?’
This was facetious. ‘Men are not paying for the paper. They are buying expiation of their sins. The paper is just a receipt which the Church provides.’
‘Yet without the paper there is no transaction. Do you think that on the last day we will rise up clutching fistfuls of indulgences and present them to St Peter as if we were cashing an annuity?’
‘Only God knows.’
‘If God knows, why does He need a piece of paper to remind Him? Men need the paper because they are credulous fools.’
It always surprised me how Kaspar could speak of men thus, as a species apart from himself.
‘The paper is blessed by the Church.’
‘Because it knows men will pay more if they are given something in return. Even if it is worth no more than the so-called money of Cathay.’ He gave me his peculiar smile, at once conspiratorial and condescending. ‘You know this is true. This is the alchemy you hope will make you rich: taking something worthless and making it valuable.’
‘If it succeeds.’
I turned back to the press. In the time we had been talking, we had run off three more indulgences. I pulled the fresh copy from the press and checked it, still in thrall to its perfection. How many times before I grew tired of it? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?
Yet even as I savoured that delight, I felt it ebbing away. I examined the paper more closely. The letters were all there, each in its proper place. But they looked less defined than before, like stone worn smooth by many feet. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if too many hours in the basement had dulled my sight.
‘What is it?’
I stood under the window. The stippled glass cast wispy shadows over the sheet, but the lettering was clear to see. I was not mistaken. The edges had blurred and spread, thickening each letter. Some had become almost indecipherable blots. Even Drach’s capital flowed less smoothly.
I found the first page we had printed and compared it. Its text was crisp, far more legible than the other. I showed it to Kaspar.
‘Perhaps we did not press hard enough.’
We printed another, then again. By the third attempt we could not doubt it. With each pressing the lines grew subtly less distinct. Eventually this gradual degeneration would render the text illegible.
I looked around the room, at thirty-odd indulgences hanging on ropes or stacked on our table. They taunted me with their illusory perfection.
But I had more urgent concerns. ‘Why has this happened?’
Drach leaned over the press, pushing his fingers into the grooves of the copper plate. ‘Copper is soft; the pressure we need to make the imprint is immense. Each copy we make squeezes the plate and deforms it.’