Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

‘The process actually is very simplistic,’ Haltung said. ‘Like for making instant coffee.’ He swung open a door on the front of the machine, revealing another stack of racks like a baker’s oven. He put the book inside, then went around the side and began pushing a series of buttons. Lights flickered on the panel.

‘Right now, at this moment, the pressure in the chamber is like normal, one thousand millibar. We reduce this to six millibar. This is almost a perfect vacuum.’

He pressed the final button. All at once the machine began to hiss and vibrate; there was an enormous roar like a hairdryer on full blast.

‘The vacuum turns the ice at once into gas, without it becoming water. Sublimation, yes? So, the book is dry. The ink does not run, and the cloths keep the pages in alignment. Perfect, no?’

‘Can we have a look now?’

Haltung tutted. ‘The book is still at negative twenty degrees Celsius. If you try to turn the page it snaps in your hand. Now we must restore the normal pressure and the normal temperature of plus twenty degrees.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Maybe two hours.’ Haltung stepped away from the machine. The gale-force blast died away, replaced with a low whirring. ‘You want some coffee while you wait?’

‘Do you make that in the machine too?’ Nick asked. Haltung missed the joke. ‘We use Nescafé.’ He picked up a phone on the wall and dialled a number. He waited.

‘Perhaps the guard has gone to the toilet.’ He put the phone down, looking vaguely puzzled. ‘I go up. Please, wait here.’

He left the room. Nick followed his progress through the red-lit warehouse, watching the glow of the floor lights rippling ahead of him like a bow wave, then fading behind him. Haltung stepped into the elevator and vanished.

Nick wandered back over to the machine and peered through the porthole. The book lay on the shelf, inert. The crust of ice had vanished. A pair of gauges next to the door showed the temperature and the pressure creeping up.

‘It’s incredible, when you think about it,’ said Emily behind him. ‘Five or six hundred years ago, that same book was sheets of vellum and a pot of ink on a desk somewhere in Paris. It’s survived who knows how many kings, wars, owners… It’s been soaked through, frozen, freeze-dried with all the technology the twenty-first century can throw at it… and after all that, the original words the author wrote will still be there.’

‘If we’re lucky,’ said Atheldene.

A wave of tiredness hit Nick hard. It was almost two in the morning – and the jet lag still hadn’t finished messing with his body. There was no sign of Haltung and his coffee.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ he announced.

Atheldene looked as though he was going to argue, but made do with a grunted, ‘Don’t touch anything.’

The door opened automatically to let Nick through into the red cocoon of the warehouse. He let himself wander along the corridors of frozen books, hypnotised by the way the floor lights seemed to spill ahead of him. He peered through the doors as he passed, the bundled books on the shelves, and wondered what lay within the tattered covers. Could there be pages that no one had ever read, fossils locked in the permafrost waiting for discovery? Could that be what Gillian had found?

He came around a corner and saw solid concrete: he’d come to the far end of the warehouse. He ought to go back, he supposed. He turned.

Almost at the same moment, a pool of yellow light appeared halfway along the front wall as the elevator doors slid open. Haltung stepped out. He wasn’t carrying any coffee – which was just as well, for he was trembling so badly he would surely have spilled it.

A black-gloved hand poked out of the elevator, holding a gun to his spine.

Strassburg

The screw tightened. The platen wheezed as it pressed the damp paper. We held it a moment then raised it back. Drach peeled the paper away from the plate and draped it over a rope strung between two beams.

‘Twenty-eight.’

Twenty-eight. I let go the handle of the press and walked over to examine it. In a sense there was nothing to see: it was exactly the same as the previous twenty-seven. But to me, that was everything. I gazed on it like a parent on his child. Better than a child, for a son is only an imperfect copy of the father. This was flawless.

It was not beautiful. The text was monotonous, hard to read, for the steel punches had taken me so long to cut that we only had upper-case letters. There was none of the variation of size or weight that a scribe would have applied – except for one flamboyant initial that Kaspar had carved into the copper plate separately. For the twenty-eighth time I looked at it and sighed. My drab rows of words whose chief merit was their discipline, against the vivid curves and wild tendrils of his single letter. It captured something.

Kaspar loaded the next sheet of paper and we took up our positions on opposite sides of the screw handle. These were golden times for me: quiet afternoons locked away in our cellar, the two of us working as one in our common purpose. In these moments I could almost forget how it was paid for.

‘I met an Italian once, a merchant who had travelled as far as Cathay,’ said Kaspar. ‘Do you know what he found there?’

‘Men with the heads of dogs and feet like mushrooms?’ Kaspar didn’t laugh. Like many quick-witted men, he was impatient with others’ humour.

‘Instead of gold and silver, they pay each other in paper.’

I laughed, and nodded to the back of the room. A ream of paper stood baled up on a workbench waiting for the press. ‘We should go to Cathy. We would be rich men. We could use our paper to buy their silver, transport it back here to pay for more paper, use that to buy yet more silver in Cathay…’ I looked at him suspiciously, wondering if this was another of his complicated jokes. ‘Surely if it were that easy every paper merchant in Italy would be rich as the Pope by now.’

‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that their princes must mark their paper with some symbol, as our kings mint coins.’

‘You can melt a king’s head off the coin and it will still be gold. Scrub it off a piece of paper and it is only paper. Burn it and you have nothing at all.’ I reversed the screw and pulled the sheet off. ‘Twenty-nine. I think your merchant spun you a traveller’s yarn.’

‘Is it so hard to believe? What are we doing here if not the same? We take pieces of paper that cost us a penny a dozen, and sell them for three silver pennies each to the Church. They in turn will sell them for sixpence. Has the nature of the paper changed?’

This was facetious. ‘Men are not paying for the paper. They are buying expiation of their sins. The paper is just a receipt which the Church provides.’

‘Yet without the paper there is no transaction. Do you think that on the last day we will rise up clutching fistfuls of indulgences and present them to St Peter as if we were cashing an annuity?’

‘Only God knows.’

‘If God knows, why does He need a piece of paper to remind Him? Men need the paper because they are credulous fools.’

It always surprised me how Kaspar could speak of men thus, as a species apart from himself.

‘The paper is blessed by the Church.’

‘Because it knows men will pay more if they are given something in return. Even if it is worth no more than the so-called money of Cathay.’ He gave me his peculiar smile, at once conspiratorial and condescending. ‘You know this is true. This is the alchemy you hope will make you rich: taking something worthless and making it valuable.’

‘If it succeeds.’

I turned back to the press. In the time we had been talking, we had run off three more indulgences. I pulled the fresh copy from the press and checked it, still in thrall to its perfection. How many times before I grew tired of it? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?