In spring, a year after the verdict in Mainz, I made another discovery. It was a warm day in April and there was little work to do, so Konrad decided to teach us a lesson. While Gerhard kept the counter and watched for customers, Konrad brought me and Pieter to the workbench and laid out a bottle, a small piece of paper, a saucer and a spindle of signet rings.
‘All our skill and artifice – where does it come from?’ he asked.
‘From God, Father,’ said Pieter.
At the front of the shop I saw Gerhard smirking. Perhaps he thought – as I did – that God’s glory was hard to discern in Pieter’s craftsmanship.
‘All art comes from God and we learn it as best we may.’ A grimace at Pieter. ‘The greatest tribute we can pay perfection is to perfectly imitate it.’
He took a ring off the spindle and slipped it onto his forefinger, just above the knuckle. Then he did something I had not seen before: he took the bottle, poured a little pool of ink into a dish and touched it with the ring. It came away black and sticky. He wiped a finger across its face, then pushed it hard with his fist into a scrap of paper on the table. When he lifted his hand, the wet image of a running stag was pressed perfectly into the paper. Another touch, another wipe, another impression and a second, identical stag appeared beside the first. Konrad tore the paper in two and handed Pieter and me half each, together with blank rings from the spindle.
‘There is your design. A penny to whoever produces the more perfect copy.’
The penny did not interest me: I knew I would win it. Something about what Konrad did had chimed false, though I did not know what it was. I pondered it while I worked on the ring. First, I took a flimsy piece of parchment that had been soaked to become translucent and traced the image on the paper with a leaded stylus. I washed a thin layer of wax over the face of the ring, and rubbed the back of my parchment with the lead. Then I put the ring in a vice, overlaid the parchment and retraced the image, bearing down hard with the stylus. When I took the parchment away, a light grey stag had appeared on the wax-coated ring.
I reached for the original ring and held up the two to compare. I saw what was wrong at once.
‘Herr Schmidt,’ I called. ‘Which image did you mean us to copy?’
He turned away from his conversation with Gerhard and scowled at me like an idiot. ‘The image on the ring.’
‘It was just that…’ I faltered under his gaze, but gathered strength to carry on. ‘The deer on your ring is facing right, but the deer on the paper is facing left. A truly perfect copy…’ I trailed off.
‘The image on the ring,’ he repeated, and turned away.
Now my mind was hungry with the challenge. I scraped the wax off the ring, erasing the wrong-headed deer, and started again. I took another, bigger ball of wax and worked it on the tabletop until it was flat and smooth. Pieter watched wide-eyed but said nothing; his own effort looked more like a lame dog than a stag.
I retraced the image onto the wax plaque. I carved it out with a burin, then I dipped the wax in the bowl of ink and pressed it out on the paper, as Konrad had done with the ring. When I pulled it away, I had a second copy of the stag, who now stood back to back with the first, facing left. Hot with success, I traced the new image and then transferred it back onto the ring with the stylus.
But the more I examined it, the more dissatisfied I became. The stag was facing the right direction now, but in every other respect he was inferior. His antlers were a muddied tangle. One leg was spindly and another like a ham, while his tail looked like a protrusion of his rump. His nose had completely disappeared.
I studied his lineage, strewn across the table on paper, parchment, wax and gold. The changes were apparent across every generation. With every copy the stag moved further from the perfection I sought, until it became the unrecognisable monstrosity I had on the ring, fit only for the pages of a bestiary.
Across the square the cathedral bell tolled the hour. Customers were beginning to gather at the counter; I knew that soon Konrad would call us away to some other task. There was no time to try again. I carved out the animal as he was, mending his deformities as best I could with the graver. It made him a little more like a deer, but further still from Konrad’s prototype.
When I was finished, I took the ring to my master. He examined it briefly, grunted, and threw a penny to Pieter. Pieter’s face glowed with rare success; my own was red with shame. I struggled to fight back tears. Konrad must have seen it for he told me, gently, ‘True perfection exists only in God.’
But I knew I could do more.
XI
New York City
Bret had never been so popular as he was in death. Nick stood in the corridor, a blanket around his shoulders, and watched an army of police officers and technicians go in and out of the apartment like ants picking over Bret’s carcass. How could it take so many people to figure it out when he’d seen Bret die himself? They wouldn’t even let him in, but kept him in the corridor with only a cup of coffee and the blanket. A token strip of black and yellow tape barred the door.
He was exhausted – he just wanted to collapse. He’d already told his story twice to two different officers. They hadn’t looked as sympathetic as he’d expected. They’d told him a detective would want to talk to him soon – but that had been half an hour ago.
Two men appeared in the doorway, one in uniform, the other in a grey suit that looked more expensive than anything Nick owned. The uniform pointed at him and muttered something that Nick couldn’t hear. The suit nodded, ducked under the tape and walked over.
‘Mr Ash? I’m Detective Royce.’
Detective Royce was lean and far too tanned for January; he looked like he ran marathons. He had close-cropped hair that was probably going grey, and pointed sideburns that crossed his cheeks like spurs.
‘I hear you’ve got quite a story to tell.’
Nick leaned back against the wall and pulled the blanket closer around him. He felt faint.
‘Is there any way of getting another cup of coffee?’
‘It won’t take long at this stage. If you could just tell me in your own words…’
Who else’s words would they be? ‘Bret-’
‘You mean the deceased? Mr Deangelo?’
‘He rang me on my cellphone.’
‘Approximately what time was that?’
‘About five, I guess. I can check my phone.’
‘We’ll check out the phone company records anyhow. You weren’t in the apartment at this time?’
Was Royce even listening? ‘I told you, he rang me on my cellphone. I was out.’
‘Do you remember where you were?’
Nick thought back a couple of hours. It seemed forever ago. ‘A coffee shop by Fifteen and Tenth. I had my phone switched off. When I-’
He stopped. Royce had turned to look down the corridor, where a man in a white boiler suit, white hood and facemask was walking towards him. He looked as if he’d just walked out of a nuclear reactor. In his gloved hand he carried the killer’s pistol wrapped in a clear plastic bag.
‘We found this on the roof. We’ll get it checked for prints and ballistics.’
Nick started. ‘Wait a minute. It’ll have my fingerprints on it.’
Royce looked at him with more interest.
‘I picked it up where it was hidden, behind the air conditioner. I told you.’
The technician jerked his head at the detective. ‘Put it in the statement.’
He wandered off into Nick’s apartment. Royce turned back to him with an out-of-my-hands grimace.
‘I’m sorry. I know you think this probably isn’t the best time for all this. Believe me, it never is. You’ve heard the line that ninety per cent of murders are solved in twenty-four hours or never?’