I stood behind a gravestone and watched. The sun setting behind the spire of St Innocent’s flung a long shadow across his shoulders. Above him, seven painted panels adorned the great arch over the churchyard gate, set there by Nicholas Flamel, the magician who crossed Mercury with the Red Stone and produced half a pound of pure gold. The pictures returned to me like a long-forgotten dream: the king with the sword, the cross and the serpent, a lonely flower on the high mountain guarded by griffins. Flanking the arch, painted on the walls, two lines of women in coloured dresses processed solemnly towards the gate.
I looked back down. Tristan d’Amboise had gone. Before I could blink, a rough hand reached around my shoulders and pinned my arms; a knife pressed against my neck. Stubble scraped my cheek as he put his mouth to my ear. ‘Who are you? What are you doing?’
‘Pr… praying,’ I whispered, terrified that if I so much as swallowed he would slit my throat.
‘You followed me all the way from the bookseller’s shop. Why?’
‘The book,’ I gasped. My eyes swivelled in their sockets, desperate for some sexton or curate to rescue me. The churchyard was empty.
‘What about the book?’
‘I know what you seek. I – I want to help.’
He pulled the knife away and spun me around, holding me at arm’s length. The knife lingered between us.
‘How?’
It was the first time I had seen much more than his back. He was beautiful, with a head of dark curls and creamy skin that flushed easily. His eyes burned with the fire of youth. Despite the situation, I felt the long-dormant demon stir in my loins.
‘I trained as a goldsmith. I know how to alloy metals and how to purify them with quicksilver. I can fire them with powders, hammer them thin as air or carve them with mystic symbols. And I know the ways of gold.’
The knife wavered. He hushed his voice, though there was no one to hear us but the dead.
‘Do you know the secret of the Stone?’
‘No,’ I admitted. I fixed my gaze on his and stepped towards him, daring him to either drop the knife or impale me. He lowered the blade. ‘Let me help you.’
‘After long errors of three years or thereabouts – during which time I did nothing but study and labour – finally I found that which I desired.’
So wrote Flamel in his book. I did not persevere for three years, but after six months all I had discovered were his errors. The further I delved into the secrets of the Art the further I seemed from it. Yet I could not abandon the quest. At first I assisted Tristan one or two evenings in the week, but in those early, heady days our progress seemed rapid, success imminent. Evenings gave way to long nights spent sweating over the forge, both stripped to the waist, until dawn came and I slunk back to Olivier’s house. With so little sleep my eyes became unreliable. My scripts grew ragged and irregular, feeble imitations of the proud specimens by the door. Olivier, proofreading, spilled so much red ink on my manuscripts it became an embarrassment.
Inevitably, he soon realised how little I went to my bed. The first time he caught me trying to creep in just after sunrise he warned me not to repeat it; the second time he threatened to expel me from his house; the third he pleaded with me not to ruin my livelihood. I resented his kindness even more than his anger. Deep in my soul I knew he spoke the truth.
I left the next day. Tristan gave me a room in his house, and there I devoted my every hour to breaking Flamel’s secret. I slept only when exhaustion compelled me, ate little and left the house so rarely his neighbours must have taken me for a ghost. After six weeks I realised I was, to all effects, a prisoner.
XXI
New York City
They were back in the same room, with its police-issue plastic table and folding metal chairs. This time the door was open, offer ing a view into the busy corridor beyond. Perhaps that was what made the room feel safer. Perhaps it was because he’d brought Seth Goldberg. He’d been an idiot for ever coming here without a lawyer. But then, he hadn’t thought he had anything to hide.
Seth sat at the table and flipped through some papers in his briefcase. Nick had always assumed defence lawyers were magicians – wise, grey-bearded, irascibly benevolent – but Seth was only in his mid-thirties, young enough to have been at college at the same time as Nick. The difference might as well have been a decade. Where Nick felt like a perpetual kid trying to get served in a bar, Seth moved with a bow wave of authority that seemed to impress itself on everyone he met. They’d known each other at NYU, connected in a loose sort of way by over lapping acquaintances and softball. Nick had never imagined they’d end up in a police station together as client and attorney.
Nick glanced out of the door and felt the fresh scar on his chin. The first thing Seth had done that morning was buy Nick breakfast. The second thing he’d done was send him to the drugstore across the road for a razor and some shaving gel, which he’d then insisted Nick use in the coffee shop’s cramped bathroom.
‘Rule number one: you’re only as innocent as you look. If they play the tape of this interview back in court and twelve jurors see you looking like the Unabomber, they’re not even going to care what you say.’
‘What happened to not judging a book by its cover?’
‘Did you ever buy a book with a shitty cover?’
The door banged against the wall as Royce blew in. Today’s suit was grey again, but sliced with white pinstripes that made him look like a stockbroker.
‘Thanks for coming back. We won’t take too much of your time.’
Royce sat and waited while the technician adjusted the camera.
‘We’ve spoken to your neighbour’s kid. He confirmed that he saw you in the corridor at approximately the time the shot was fired.’
‘When the shot was fired,’ Nick corrected him.
‘He wasn’t able to confirm the presence of the masked gunman you described, because he ran inside his apartment as soon as he heard the shot. But he heard footsteps.’
For the first time since Bret had called, Nick felt the knots inside him begin to unwind. He sat back, so relieved he barely heard what Royce was saying about other lines of enquiry, potential connections, different angles. Only when he heard a name -
‘Could you please describe your relationship with Miss Gillian Lockhart.’
Nick blinked with surprise. Gillian’s name still produced a physical reaction, even now. A part of him was always ready to talk about her, desperate even, a sad drunk at a bar. Seth shot Nick a look that said, Be careful.
‘I met Gillian about a year ago, on a train. We got talking. I gave her my number, we kept in touch, eventually we started…’
Started what? Nick had dated girls where he’d have known the exact word, each phase of the relationship analysed and classified in earnest conversations. Dating. Going steady. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Married. Divorced. A complete taxonomy. With Gillian, things just sort of happened.
‘We got together.’
That wasn’t good enough for Royce. ‘Was it a sexual relationship?’
Nick blushed. It was like being back in the cabin at summer camp, adolescents in the dark desperately bragging about who’d done who. He glanced at Seth, who simply shrugged.
‘Yes.’
‘Were you living together?’
‘Gillian kept her own place. Somewhere on the East Side. She had a room-mate from hell – we never went there.’
That was another wound. He’d always been emotionally a step ahead of her, always ready to commit. But she’d been adamant. ‘I need my space, Nick. I’ve opened myself up before. I need to take it slowly.’ And he’d sworn to himself that he’d prove he was different, that she could trust him.
‘And what was her occupation at this time?’
‘She worked as a conservator at the Cloisters museum.’ He would have bet money Royce had never been there. ‘Up in Fort Washington Park. It’s where the Metropolitan Museum keeps its medieval collection.’