His eyes drifted down. A blurred white shape stood out against the darkness, a sheet of paper lying on the passenger seat. The printout. Emily must have left it there in her haste. He flicked on the map light and studied it. In the rush to be away from the computer lab he hadn’t even looked at it; when he asked Emily what she’d found, she’d only put a finger to her lips.
The image in his hand looked like a half-finished jigsaw, one that had been put together impatiently by someone who didn’t have the attention span for the fiddly background bits. Nick had told the program to ignore any fragments which had no marks on them, so as to speed up the assembly process. The result was an hourglass portion of the torn-up page. Whatever Emily had seen certainly wasn’t obvious to Nick. Half the page was taken up with a picture that looked like an ox with an unusually long tail. The digital reconstruction wasn’t perfect: false overlaps and subtle distortions gave the picture an impressionistic blur that wasn’t helped by the dim light in the car. Even so, Nick was pretty confident he could identify the artist by his style. He’d seen enough of the Master of the Playing Cards’ work in the last few days to become an expert.
Underneath the picture were a few lines of writing. This was sharper – Nick’s algorithms were tuned to pick out text – but he still struggled to decipher it. The letters were thick, densely packed into their lines and irregularly shaped: the upright strokes had a vertical solidity like the pillars of a cathedral, while the vaulting curves and cross-strokes bridged them with thread-like delicacy.
He delved in his bag for the bestiary they’d rescued from the warehouse in Brussels and opened its first page to compare. They were different. The book’s pictures were pushed to the side of the text, while on the printout it sat proudly centred in its own space. The handwriting looked neater on the printout too, though when Nick actually tried to read it he found it harder to make out the letters.’
A vivid white flash split the night open. Nick turned in absolute terror. Had he been seen? Photographed? Shot at?
It flashed again – not a camera or a gun, but a strobe light mounted on the front of the library. Nick realised that the sound he’d thought was the panic of his own subconscious was actually the muffled ringing of an alarm bell.
The alarm got suddenly more frantic as the library door burst open. Emily ran out down the steps. She threw herself into the car and slammed the door.
Nick looked at the book in her hands, a tall slim volume bound in red and black cloth.
‘Did you just steal a library book?’
‘Borrowed.’ She shoved it into the pocket in the door. ‘Just drive.’
The car lurched off the kerb and down the road. Nick checked his mirrors but didn’t see anyone coming after them.
‘Now will you tell me what this is all about?’
LX
Mainz, 1448
Two old men stood on a hillside. A passing observer might have taken them for brothers. They were a similar age, near fifty, both with grey beards and lean bodies wrapped in furs against the autumn chill. Their features differed in detail, but beneath the aged skin and crooked bones both faces bore the hunger of men who still had business with the world.
They were not brothers. One was Johann Fust. The other was me. All around us, labourers turned the soil in the sloping field. They pulled up rocks and deposited them in piles to be fitted into walls. In the middle of the field, a group of carpenters raised timbers for a watchtower. When spring came, the derelict land would be planted with vines and blossom into a vineyard. In the same way, I hoped Fust’s seeds would make my own venture flourish.
I had not spoken to him in fifteen years, not since our chance encounter in Olivier’s workshop in Paris. In some ways it was surprising we had not spoken sooner. I had been there a year, and Mainz was not so big that two men engaged in the work of books and papers should not cross paths. But I had avoided him. Until now.
I cannot count the disappointments of those intervening years. Kaspar once told me that the mystery of pressing copies of the playing cards was not one great secret but a dozen – the ink, the metal, the press, the paper – each element in its correct form and proportion. In that I suppose it resembled alchemy, though he produced more than my efforts in Paris ever had. But if his art was a dozen secrets, each to be unravelled and understood, mine comprehended a hundred, or a thousand. Every one of them eluded me. And, as Dunne once told me, every time I solved one problem I created ten new ones.
Yet unlike earlier setbacks, they did not make me despair. I was an overenthusiastic pilgrim who had embarked without knowing his route. Thinking the journey would be short, I had blundered blind in the thickets of the forest. Now I had found my road, though my destination proved to be further than I could have imagined when I set out. And that gave me confidence which stones and blisters could not break.
But though faith sustains a pilgrim, he makes his way in the world of men. I still needed money. And that was why I had come home to Mainz. I had left the city of roads and returned to the city of my birth, like an old bear returning to its cave. When I set out, almost thirty years previous, I had left behind a home, a mother, two siblings and a half-sister who had stolen my inheritance. Now all were gone except the old house, which had finally passed to me.
Fust’s vineyard stood on the hill that rose out of the river valley behind the city. Below, I could see all the walls and spires of Mainz, dominated by the great red dome of the cathedral, stretching forward to the banks of the Rhine. A brown haze smudged the air above it, smoke of countless fires. The autumn sun had reached its zenith, but no bells tolled noon. Every church stood silent. The effect was eerie, as indeed it was meant to be.
‘You chose a strange time to return after so long,’ Fust said. ‘Golden Mainz has lost its lustre.’
I knew. For decades, the patricians who ran the city council – men like my father – had operated an elaborate system of annuities which diverted the tax revenues into their own pockets. The interest they paid themselves had spiralled, much like my own debts, until at last the city was forced to declare bankruptcy. Among its angry creditors was the Church, which promptly suspended all services in the city. Masses went unsung, babies were not baptised and the dead suffered without Christian burial.
‘There must be some wealth still in Mainz.’ Beyond the distant walls, craft of all sizes clustered at the riverbank, while cranes and stevedores loaded bales onto barges. Three milling boats swung at their moorings, grinding the last of the harvest.
‘This vineyard, for example. It will take years of careful nurturing to bear fruit. You would not be reclaiming it if you thought the city’s prospects were tarnished for ever.’
‘There will always be a demand for wine. The worse things get, the greater it will be.’
Fust looked at the rough earth around him a moment longer, then switched to me. Why have you come here? his sharp eyes said. But he would make me go first.
‘Wine is not all that can flow out of a press,’ I said.
He waited. From the bag I was carrying, I handed him a sheet of paper.
‘I have discovered an art. A new form of writing without a pen.’
He unfolded the paper and studied it. ‘Indulgences?’
‘That is just the beginning.’ I reached in my bag again and pulled out a small booklet, four leaves folded inside each other to give sixteen pages.
‘The Latin primer of Aelius Donatus. Every student in every school needs one.’
He gave me an impatient look: he knew what it was. ‘I must have sold three hundred of these. They sell as fast as the scribes can copy them.’
‘I can copy them faster and more cheaply than any scribe. In a month, I could produce all the copies you have ever sold – and more.’