'We just want to talk to you,' Katherina repeated. 'My name is Katherina, and Jon Campelli is with me.'
Again a couple of seconds of silence behind the door.
'Campelli?'
'Jon Campelli,' Jon confirmed. 'I'm the son of-'
He was interrupted by the sound of bolts being thrown. Slowly the door opened a crack and a head came into view. The face was almost completely hidden by hair and a beard. A pair of wide-open blue eyes looked Jon up and down.
'Campelli,' said the man again, nodding to himself.
'We just want…' Katherina began, but stopped when the man pulled the door wide open and took a step back.
'Come in, Jon, come in. I have a message from your father.'
18
Jon's feet suddenly felt very heavy. He couldn't lift them but just stood there staring at the man in the doorway. A tall, smiling man with a mass of hair, a lean body, probably even skinnier than his loose dark-green sweater and baggy cords intimated, and a slightly bowed back. His big beard was grey at the ends, and in several places it was matted and knotted.
'Come in,' said the man again, motioning them eagerly inside with bony fingers.
Jon felt Katherina's hand on his shoulder, and he slowly stepped through the doorway into the house. When they both stood inside a small dark hallway, Tom Nшrreskov slammed the door behind them. They stood still in the dark, listening to him carefully locking the door. The air was rank and heavy.
'Excuse me,' said Nшrreskov as he slipped past them. 'Just let me turn on the light.' A dim lamp in the ceiling came to life, casting a yellow glow over a cramped hallway cluttered with cardboard boxes of various sizes. 'I don't use it much myself. The light, I mean.'
He disappeared through an opening between the boxes, which led to another room, and there too he turned on a light. Katherina and Jon followed him into a big room. All four walls were plastered with newspaper clippings, pictures and countless little yellow slips of paper with hand-written notes. Multi-coloured strings were stretched between many of the pieces of paper, so the whole thing looked like a web of information, a paper version of the Internet. In the middle of the floor, right underneath the glare of a bare bulb, stood a big, worn leather chair, and in front of the chair was a Morocco ottoman that looked as though it had been punctured. All around the chair were stacks of books, in no apparent order.
Tom Nшrreskov ushered them onwards into the next room, which was filled with bookshelves as well as a large sofa which, judging by the bedclothes, also functioned as a bed. In front of the sofa was a low coffee table covered with countless leather-bound volumes. He quickly gathered up the bedclothes and tossed them behind the sofa. After giving the cushions a cursory brushing with the palm of his hand, he motioned for them to sit down.
'We have a lot to talk about.'
Jon and Katherina sat down on the leather sofa while their host went to get the Morocco ottoman from the other room and placed it across from them. He kept his eyes fixed on Jon the whole time, with a little satisfied smile playing over his fleshy red lips.
'You said that Luca left me a message?' Jon began.
Tom nodded eagerly. 'You see, your father had a feeling that they were going to make a move soon, and in case something happened to him, and you turned up, I was supposed to give you this message.'
'Which is?'
Tom shook his head and broke out in a big smile. 'I'm so glad to see you again, Jon. You probably don't remember me, but I visited Libri di Luca many times when you were a boy.' His smile disappeared. 'I was very fond of your father. We were close friends, and he's the only one who ever visited me for all these years.'
'He came here?' said Katherina with astonishment.
'Once a month, I'd say. Usually on Sundays, when the bookshop was closed.'
'He never mentioned anything about that,' said Katherina.
'No, of course not,' replied Tom, a bit annoyed. 'That was all part of the plan.'
Jon had so many questions that he didn't know where to start. Even though he hadn't seen his father in years, this place and this man didn't fit at all with the image he'd had of Luca. And it seemed even less plausible that Luca would have made plans with a banished member of the Bibliophile Society, of which he was such a faithful defender. And to top it all off, Jon's own arrival was supposed to have been predicted, like some sort of resurrection.
'What's the message, Tom?' Jon insisted.
Tom regarded him with his clear blue eyes as he made a tent with his bony fingers. He was no longer smiling.
'Stay away,' he said finally.
'What?' exclaimed Jon and Katherina in unison.
'Forget what you think you know, sell the shop and get on with your own life,' said Tom, clasping his hands with his fingers interlaced. 'Turn around, get going and don't look back.'
'But-' Jon began.
'It's for your own good. Your father loved you more than anything on earth. He was so proud of you – your success in school, your travels, your career. He talked about you for hours, how smart you were, how you'd made a success of everything. Did you know that he went to a lot of your court appearances?' He shook his head. 'Probably not, but he did, and he was damn proud.'
'Then he had a strange way of showing it,' said Jon, crossing his arms. 'Why didn't he ever say anything?'
'Haven't you figured that out?' said Tom impatiently. 'He wanted to protect you. Luca preferred to be a terrible father than a childless one.'
Jon got up from the sofa and paced around the room with his eyes on the floor and his hands on his hips. He felt nauseated, no doubt because of the stale air in the house. How could anyone stand to live like this? It was impossible to think. The questions he'd been burning to ask only moments ago had now disappeared to be replaced by others, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answers.
'You mentioned a plan,' said Katherina as Jon kept pacing.
'I'm sorry,' said Tom, 'but I can't tell you any more. I promised to convey Luca's advice to his son, but I don't think it would be appropriate to involve him any further.'
Jon stopped and turned to face Tom. 'And what if I choose not to follow his advice?' he said angrily. 'I'm already involved. There are people who expect something of me, and other people who have tried to scare me off. So don't tell me I should just turn my back on everything and go on as if nothing ever happened, no matter how much I might want to.'
'I can see that,' Tom admitted. 'But I think you should-'
'I'm tired of being kept in the dark. Tell Katherina what she wants to know. What sort of plan was it?'
'Okay, okay.' Tom turned to Katherina. 'The plan. Yes, all right,' he began, nodding to himself. 'The plan was that we'd make them show themselves, or at least we'd find proof of their existence.'
'Who?' asked Katherina, casting a glance at Jon, who had resumed his pacing.
'We called them the Shadow Organization,' said Tom with a smile.
'Maybe you'd better start from the beginning,' Katherina suggested.
Tom hesitated, glancing at Jon.
'Go on,' Jon commanded.
Tom sighed. 'It all started with an obsessive idea,' he said. 'It was almost a game we had, Luca and I. I don't remember which of us came up with it first, but one day it occurred to us that there might be another organization besides the Bibliophile Society, a group that operated in secret, in the shadows. An organization different from the Bibliophile Society in that the members consistently used their powers for criminal activities or at least for selfish purposes.' He cleared his throat. 'It was mostly for our own amusement, a sort of in-joke. Soon we started looking through the newspapers for events that might support our theory. We'd show them to each other with a glint in our eyes. "The Shadow Organization has struck again," Luca used to say when he triumphantly presented a newspaper clipping about a politician who had suddenly changed his opinion, or a businessman who had done something unexpected.' Tom smiled to himself. 'It was of course nothing but our wild imaginations. We were younger back then, and our imaginative powers weren't nearly as ossified.'