Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

Bib Diab. Portus Gelidus.

Footsteps rang on the steel stairs. Nick jumped, but it was only the archivist. Emily swept up the catalogue and put it back in the box.

The archivist tapped her watch. ‘Time you must go.’

They followed her back up. On the stairs Nick asked, ‘Does the name Portus Gelidus mean anything to you?’

The archivist frowned, surprised.

‘Portus Gelidus is the name in historical times for Oberwinter. It is a village on the Rhine, in the mountains.’ She pushed through the door into the lobby and pointed through the front windows. Across the busy road, limp flags hung over a gangway on the pier. ‘You can go by the ferry.’

Nevado checked the street – still empty. His hat would have hidden his face from anyone watching from the windows above, and any CCTV cameras. He doubted the police would even bother to check: it was plain enough what had happened. An old man had lost control of his wheelchair on the ice, skidded and died. A tragedy. He walked briskly away until he found a street down the hill where the pavements had been shovelled clear. In the distance, he could hear sirens.

A vibration in his coat pocket reminded him his work wasn’t finished yet. He snapped open the phone and listened for a moment.

‘Do nothing. Wait for me.’

Once, Mainz had been protected by stone; now its walls were ramparts of snow, ploughed to the sides of the two-lane highway that divided the riverfront from the rest of the city. Traffic was at a standstill, the cars pulled over so that an ambulance could nose its way through. Someone must have skidded – easy enough, in this weather. Nick looked for the accident but couldn’t see anything.

They weaved between the stationary cars and came out on a wide concrete promenade over the Rhine. A biting wind hit them; out on the river it whipped the water into serrated white-capped teeth. By the flagpoles, a sailor in a blue boiler suit unwound a rope from the gangway. They hurried over.

‘Does this boat go to Oberwinter?’ Nick asked.

A roar drowned whatever answer he got as the ferry revved its engines to depart. Clouds of diesel smoke filled the air. The sailor pulled two tickets off a ring and shoved them in Nick’s hand.

‘You pay on board. Maybe we get you there.’ He looked at the sky. ‘Maybe not.’

They tottered down the gangplank and went inside out of the cold. They didn’t look back, so they didn’t see a man run across the road, dodging between the cars that had finally started moving, and examine the ferry timetable posted on a noticeboard on the pier. Nor did they see the man in the dark overcoat and low-brimmed hat who strode up a minute later.

Ugo heard Nevado coming and turned. ‘The first stop is Rüdesheim – not far. Maybe with the car we can beat it.’

The cardinal shook his head. Out in the river, the ferry was passing between two huge coal barges.

‘We know where they are going.’

Mainz

The ferry pulled away from the pier, navigating carefully between two barges loaded with timber from the forests upriver. It had been a wet August: a powerful current struck the small craft side on as it emerged from the lee of the larger ships. A brown wave slopped over the side; the water man paddled furiously, while the passengers gripped each other and crossed themselves. I watched their huddled faces from the safety of the riverbank. I had sat on that ferry once, a whey-faced youth setting out into the world. How far I had come.

Fust came out from a warehouse, passed behind a group of travelling players who had just disembarked, and approached. He greeted me as he always did.

‘How many pages?’

‘Nine.’

‘Where should we be?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘So far behind already.’ He frowned. ‘Why?’

‘In a project of this magnitude, certain problems only emerge with time. The types wear out faster than we had anticipated. We are using more ink than we allowed for – I do not know why. And we still cannot get the initials to align properly.’

‘The second press?’

‘Saspach promises it will be ready in two weeks.’

‘He said that two weeks ago.’

‘One of the posts wasn’t seasoned properly. He insisted we pull it apart and start again.’

Fust rolled his eyes. ‘Perfectionist.’

‘That is not what is delaying us. It is taking the compositors longer to compose the text than it takes the printers to print it. I have set them to work in two teams on different parts of the Bible, but Günther still finds too many errors. He sent one page back fifteen times yesterday before it was ready. Even then, mistakes slip through. We had pressed nine copies of one page yesterday before we noticed that two lines were the wrong way round.’

‘Paper or vellum?’

‘Vellum.’

‘You should press the paper copies first,’ he rebuked me. ‘It will make our mistakes cheaper. And you should be more relaxed about trivial errors. If we redo every page for each spelling mistake, we will still be pressing at doomsday.’

My face prickled. Any thought of a flaw in the book was like sores under my skin.

Fust turned away. ‘Walk with me.’

I hurried after him, skirting the puddles that soaked the waterfront. I glanced at the overcast sky; there would be more puddles by nightfall. I would have to check the roof on the paper store before bed.

‘The work you are doing is extraordinary, Johann.’

I kept silent. I did not trust it when he called me by name. Overhead, a crane squeaked as it winched sacks of quicklime off a barge. Some of the powder seeped through a tear in the sackcloth, hissing and boiling as it landed in the water.

‘I know that with any new art there will be difficulties. Problems we did not anticipate. But we cannot be complacent. We must respond vigorously, or we store up troubles to come. And there are other considerations.’

While he spoke, we had come to a warehouse set back a little from the quay. It was built like a castle, with slit windows and a crenellated rampart around its roof. He presented a clay tablet to the watchman, who waved us in. Inside, it smelled of sawdust and wine. Bales of cloth, jars of oils and, in one bay, a pile of boxes sealed with wax and painted with the symbol of a bunch of grapes.

Fust took a clasp knife from the pouch on his belt and prised up the lid of the topmost box. He slit open the oilcloth which wrapped the contents. I knew what would be inside: I had opened a dozen myself in the store at the Humbrechthof. A bale of paper, brittle and shiny from the sizing glue.

‘I did not order any more paper,’ I said.

‘I did.’

I counted nine more boxes. Each held two reams, almost a thousand sheets. A quarter as much again as we had already laid in.

‘How much has this cost? Even with the wastage, we have plenty for our needs.’

‘I have been speaking with my customers.’ A reassuring hand on my arm. ‘Discreetly. I have performed some calculations. You said yourself, the greater part of the labour is composing the page. That is a fixed cost – whether we press one copy or one thousand. Once that is done, putting it through the press is comparatively quick. So the more copies we press, the more we spread the costs of composition. The cost of the extra time, paper and ink almost pays for itself.’

‘How many more?’

He pulled me away from the pile of boxes, back to the wharf outside. ‘Thirty copies. All on paper. By my reckoning it will add ninety gulden to our costs – I will pay it – and nine hundred gulden to our profit.’

‘If we sell them,’ I cautioned. ‘And it will put us even further behind our schedule.’

‘We cannot let our deadline slip. The money I have invested in the work of the books is borrowed at interest and it must be repaid in two years.’