‘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.’