Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

Emily shook her head. She looked close to tears. ‘One more thing. Please don’t tell the cops I was here. They already think I’m guilty as hell.’

Emily was horrified. ‘Aren’t you going to wait with me?’

‘It won’t do you any good if they find me here.’

‘Please.’ Emily half-stretched out an arm, like a bird with a broken wing. ‘I won’t tell them you were with me.’

Nick glanced across the street. From halfway down the block, the aroma of grilling hamburgers wafted out of a Burger King.

‘Let’s go somewhere warmer.’

Emily perched on the edge of the plastic seat among the screaming kids on their way home from school and sipped a bottle of water. She didn’t take her coat off. Nick played with an empty paper cup left on the table.

‘Do you know who it was in the library?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘The last time I saw you, you warned me you weren’t the sort of person I should be helping.’

‘Not shouldn’t help. Wanted to.’

‘I wondered what you meant by that.’

Nick thought for a moment. ‘The card’s like a virus. Everyone it touches… First Gillian, then Bret. Now you.’

‘And you?’

She turned the question round with a flick of her head. Her eyes were as dark as a summer storm.

‘My apartment’s been broken into; I was almost killed and my friend was shot dead. Someone’s managed to cancel my credit card. The police have confiscated my passport, my computer, and they’re probably about to arrest me for murder. And robbery, if they find out I was here.’

He’d started to rush his words, spilling out the grievances and injustices that were swilling around inside him. He felt energised, purged. ‘All because of that card.’

‘Because of the card,’ Emily repeated. She looked shocked by his outburst – but less than he’d expected. ‘I looked at it some more last night. Of the eight animals on it, three don’t appear on any of the other cards.’

‘It could still be a forgery.’

‘Or else Gillian Lockhart made one of the most valuable finds in the field in the last twenty years.’ She spoke solemnly, no trace of exaggeration.

‘I thought you said it would only be worth ten thousand dollars.’

Emily’s look made Nick cringe. ‘That card would be one of the first ever printings from copper engraving. It’s also an impressive work of art in its own right. The money you’d pay for it doesn’t begin to describe what it’s worth.’

‘Worth someone killing for?’

Emily retreated a little. ‘Maybe it’s not the card. Maybe that’s only part of something else.’ She tipped her head to one side and examined him as she might a medieval tapestry. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

Nick had always been a hopeless liar. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Can’t – or don’t want to?’

‘Believe me, you don’t want to know.’

She leaned forward over the table. ‘I do.’ Again her naked stare. ‘What else did you find?’

Nick swallowed. The laminated sides of his paper cup were as wizened as tree bark from being mangled in his hands. He looked out of the window, listening for the squawk of sirens.

‘Gillian sent me another message. The same time as the card, but I only just got it.’ He didn’t elaborate how. ‘It gives an address.’

‘You think Gillian might be there. Or have left something there?’ Emily’s face was alight with excitement, painfully vulnerable. ‘You’re going to find it.’

Nick didn’t deny it. ‘Please don’t tell the police. Not until tomorrow, at least.’

‘I won’t.’ Emily spun the water bottle on the table. She had a habit of tucking her arms in close to her sides when she was thinking, Nick had noticed. When she looked up, her gaze was clear and strong.

‘I’ll come with you.’

It would be a lie to say he hadn’t thought of it. Part of him desperately wanted her with him – a companion, a confidante, a friend he barely knew. But it was madness.

‘No.’ He tried to sound definite.

Emily just stared at him, manipulating the silence.

‘It would be too dangerous. For both of us. We don’t know each other. For all you know I’m a thief and a murderer.’

A flicker of Emily’s eyes dismissed the idea. ‘And it’s not like we’re just hopping over to New Jersey. It’s… a long trip.’

‘It’s in Paris, isn’t it?’ Emily bit her lip. ‘I thought you said the police confiscated your passport.’

Nick marvelled at how someone so delicate could be so relentless. ‘I’m not interested in the card. I just want to find Gillian.’

‘Of course. I want to help you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want to stay in New York, coming home every evening and wondering if that’s the night they’ll come back for me. Because I want to find out if that card really exists. And because I think you’ll need all the help you can get.’

She put the bottle down. It rang hollow on the plastic table. ‘How do we get there?’

‘There’s a Continental flight departing JFK for Brussels Zaventem at six thirty tonight.’ The agent tapped on his computer. ‘That has availability.’

Nick couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a travel agency – probably not since college, when the Internet got invented. He’d forgotten how slow it could be. He tried not to peer over his shoulder too often at the traffic crawling down Forty-Second Street.

‘I just need to see your passports.’

Emily snapped open her purse and slid her passport across the desk. Nick reached inside his coat for the travel wallet, feeling the stiff lump of the booklet inside. He fished it out and laid it on top of Emily’s, slightly fanned out like cards, waiting for the dealer’s verdict.

The travel agent flipped through it and checked the photograph. ‘You’re British?’ he asked Nick.

‘On my mother’s side.’ He’d applied for the passport when he’d gone to Germany, to save the hassle of getting a work permit. He’d never imagined he’d use it to sneak out of his home country. He still wasn’t sure if it would work.

It seemed to satisfy the agent, at least. He handed them back.

‘Enjoy your flight.’

Strassburg, 1434

Strassburg – the city of roads. Roads from the north, from the rich cloth markets of Bruges, and London beyond; roads south from Milan, Pisa and across the Mediterranean to the dark coast of Africa; roads which came from the west, from Paris and Champagne, and continued east into the heartlands of empires: Vienna, Constantinople, Damascus and the spiced cities of the East. And a few miles distant the great flowing road of the Rhine, the warp of my life.

The roads were the arteries of Christendom; Strassburg was its heart. It stood on an island in the river Ill, a tributary to the Rhine, which necessity and human ingenuity had channelled into a many-stranded necklace of canals ringing the city with water and stone. Merely entering the city was a bewildering journey across bridges and moats, through gates, towers and narrow alleys that seemed to lead nowhere but another bridge, until at last you turned a corner and came out in a great square. There, where all roads met, stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. There I found what I sought.

I arrived on the road from the west. It was a perfect spring morning: a gentle sun in a smalt blue sky, following rain the night before that had washed the streets clean. A dewy freshness lingered in the air and brought colour to my cheeks. I was unrecognisable from the wretch who had prostrated himself before Tristan’s furnace. The scalds and blisters on my hands had healed, with only a telltale gap in my beard where the vitriol had burned my cheek. I had a new coat of sober blue cloth and a new pair of boots I had bought in Troges with money I had earned copying indulgences over Christmas. I felt a new man. Strangers no longer recoiled or crossed the road when I stopped to ask them my way. And so I found my path to the house at the sign of the bear.