Mikkel Birkegaard - The Library of Shadows

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.'

Tom cleared his throat again, and Jon surmised he hadn't used his voice in a long time.

'The examples of events and coincidences began to pile up,' Tom went on. 'And finally we could no longer ignore the fact that there was a strong possibility that what we had invented as a private joke might be a reality. For a long time we dismissed the idea, but our eyes had become trained to see possible connections in the stories, and we found more and more events that indicated the existence of such an organization.

'What did the others say?' asked Katherina.

'We kept it to ourselves,' said Tom with regret in his voice. 'I suppose we were seized by some sort of persecution complex. One of our assumptions was that if such an organization had been kept secret from the Society, that must mean only one thing: that we had spies among us.'

'Who?' asked Katherina.

Tom shook his head. 'There were several candidates, but we never found any concrete proof. That was why we devised "the plan" to flush them out.'

Jon stopped pacing back and forth across the uneven floor and once again sat down on the sofa next to Katherina. Tom shifted his glance to Jon. There was sorrow in his blue eyes.

'The plan was that if one of us was thrown out of the Society for sufficiently unpleasant reasons, that person would end up being recruited by the Shadow Organization shortly afterwards.' Tom sighed. 'Simple and straightforward.'

He looked away from Jon and began surveying the room. His eyes scanned the ceiling, moved down the bookshelves and then across the worn floorboards. He seemed to be reorienting himself after a sudden awakening. He looked down at his hands.

'The first part of the plan was a resounding success,' he went on with a little smile. 'My supposed crime was so repulsive that everyone distanced themselves from me, and I think they were privately grateful that Luca was the one who took responsibility for banishing me. No one questioned the authenticity of the cover story, because who would make up something like that?' He let the question hover in the air for a moment. 'Then it was just a matter of waiting,' he continued, throwing out his hands. 'So that's what we did. And something happened all right, but it wasn't anything that even in our wildest imagination we would have-'