Now it was Nick's turn to keep silent, frozen by the fear that the wrong word would ruin everything.

'Come to Mainz and I will tell you.'

LXVIII.

Mainz

I stepped out of the front door, under the carved pilgrim, and turned towards the cathedral and the market square. It was not far, but in that meagre distance the street expanded and contracted many times. Sometimes it was so narrow even a dog cart could barely pa.s.s; in other places it spread wide enough to become a small platz, where gossips lingered and hucksters sold pies and hot wine from barrows. It made even the shortest journey a tale of many chapters.

One of these places where the road opened was outside St Quintin's church, where women came to gather water from a fountain in the church wall. A tall house stood on the corner opposite. The plaster between its timbers was coloured a l.u.s.ty red, which had in turn been painted with garlands swagged along the dark timber ribs. Its name was Humbrechthof; it belonged to my third cousin Salman, who had lived there until a committee of guildsmen took over the administration of Mainz some years previously. Thinking these new men meant to beggar the ancient families into bankruptcy, Salman fled to Frankfurt. The house had stood empty since then. I had written to him, giving him to understand that the situation in Mainz was worse than his most outraged imaginings, and declining fast. When I offered to take his empty house off his hands for a token rent, to protect it from the mob who would otherwise surely make it a brothel or a church of the black ma.s.s, he could not agree fast enough.

I entered by a gate, pa.s.sed through a pa.s.sage under the main house, and entered the courtyard within. Fust and the others were already there: Sas.p.a.ch, Father Gunther, Gotz, Kaspar and a young man I did not know. Fust nodded to him.

'My adoped son, Peter Schoeffer.'

He was a thin, earnest-looking youth, with pimpled skin and fair hair that flapped in the November breeze. I thought him diffident enough, but when he shook my hand it was with a look of extraordinary intensity.

'An honour, Herr Gutenberg.' His eyes were pale, icy with purpose. 'Father has told me about your art. You may rely on me absolutely. I thank G.o.d I will be part of it.'

'Writing makes his hands sore,' joked Fust. He stood a little further from his son than affection would have permitted, an old dog wary of his pup.

'So this is where we will make our workshop,' Gotz said. The house suited our purpose well: it was not tall, but wide, with large windows onto the yard. Over time, my cousin Salman and his forebears had closed in what had once been an ample garden, joined the outbuildings together and extended them upwards until they stood almost as high as the house. They enclosed the courtyard completely, like an inn or a trading hall, so that nothing overlooked it.

I unrolled the sheet of paper I carried and hung it on a nail on the storeroom door. The others gathered around. Most of them had seen some part of it, but only Kaspar had seen it in its entirety.

'This is why we are here.'

Two columns of text ran down the page, perfectly aligned, exactly as Kaspar had sketched them. The grey cloud of pencil shading had become words, painstakingly set and carefully imprinted in the Gutenberghof. The text was black, save for the incipit on the first line, which was written blood red.

here begins the book of Bresith which we call Genesis A long 'I' hung off the next line and dropped down the margin until its stem became a spiral tendril creeping around the edge of the page. 'In the beginning . . .'

The page flapped and snapped in the breeze; I had to hold it down for fear it would tear.

'Everything you see was pressed onto the paper by Sas.p.a.ch's machine.' This time it was true: there was no craft or trickery on the page. We had set and reset the text until every line filled its row exactly, stuffing parchment strips between the words to create the exact s.p.a.cing. We had inked the incipit red and pressed it again. Finally we had run the whole page through another press to add Kaspar's engraved initial.

Schoeffer was the first to respond. Unless Fust had shown him the indulgence, he had never seen our work before. I had expected he would be awestruck. He stepped forward and examined the page closely.

'The words look faded.'

'We used the old types,' I explained. 'Some are uneven; others not the exact height. Gotz is preparing a new set which will improve the impression.'

'And the alignment. It is almost perfect.'

'Better than you could do,' Kaspar growled from the back.

'Absolutely perfect,' I insisted. 'If you rule a line down the margin, it touches the outer edge of every final character.' G.o.d knew how much wasted paper had fed our fire to achieve it.

'It is perfect,' Schoeffer conceded. 'But it does not seem it.' He considered it a moment. Despite his youth and his presumption, everybody waited. 'Some lines end with minor characters hyphens and commas. They are so small they make the line look shorter than it is.'

He pointed to a section of text halfway down the page.

G.o.d called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered togethere he called Seas. And G.o.d saw that it was good.

'If you put the hyphen in the margin, the weight of the text will be more evenly spread. More pleasing to the eye.'

I glanced at Kaspar. The mesh of scars on his face puckered as anger took hold of him. Before he could react, I said, 'We will have to see. It is not like taking a pen and simply adding a stroke to the end of the line.'

Kaspar threw the boy a murderous look. Gunther the priest prudently changed the subject. 'How many Bibles will we be making?'

'One hundred and fifty. Thirty on vellum, the rest on paper. I calculate we can manage two pages of the whole edition each day. Less in winter. We will have two presses, which Sas.p.a.ch will build there.' I pointed across the courtyard, to the first floor of the house. 'We will put them in the hall and the parlour.'

'We will need to strengthen the floors,' Sas.p.a.ch noted.

'Brick pillars in the rooms below. We will use these as our paper store. Once you're done with the presses, you can build a hoist to bring the paper directly up to the press rooms.'

'What about the press in the Gutenberghof?' Gotz asked.

'Too small. We will keep that to produce indulgences, grammar books, whatever else we can sell. There will be plenty of offcuts and sc.r.a.ps from the Bible we can reuse.'

Fust raised a stern hand. 'There will not. Whatever is bought for the Bible goes to the Bible.' He swung his stick in an arc around the courtyard, indicating the house while fixing each man there with a severe look. 'Do you understand? This is our joint venture. I do not want my investment entering by one door only to steal out through another. I know many of you will often have cause to be at the Gutenberghof; some of you live there. What you do with your own time or your own materials is your concern. But every penny that is paid into this project will stay in it. Not one sc.r.a.p of paper, not one letter of type, not one drop of ink.'

'Nothing will be taken away from your investment in the project,' I a.s.sured him quickly. 'Everything will be accounted for, down to the last comma. As surely as they count every coin in the mint.'

'As you know, I would prefer that you concentrated all your energies on this business.'

'I have given you my word that nothing will delay it. But it will be months, G.o.d willing, before we are ready even to start pressing here, and a year until we reach full capacity. Even if all goes well, it will need two more years for the Bibles to be complete. Running the Gutenberghof press will provide income through these lean years, and a good place to train new apprentices.'

I walked across the courtyard to the stairs.

'Let me show you where it will happen.'

LXIX.

Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

They spent the night in the motel. They'd paid in advance, and their h.o.a.rd of euros was running out. When bedtime came they undressed and crept under the blankets together without discussion. They slept wrapped around each other, their naked skin the only warmth in the room. At seven, they rose and left.

A thick fog had come down on the heels of the snow, leaving the world a damp and lonely place. They crossed the Rhine at dawn and barely saw it, then turned north. Emily had the laptop out on her knees but didn't open it; the white silence seemed to possess her completely. The only cars they pa.s.sed were ghostly wrecks abandoned at the side of the road.

'Mainz was Gutenberg's home.' Emily's voice was hardly audible over the ineffectual clatter of the heater. 'I wonder if that's why Olaf chose it.'

Olaf had set the meeting for eleven o'clock at St Stephan's church, a whitewashed building trimmed in red sandstone, capped by a bullet-nosed dome. It stood at the top of the hill behind the city: looking back from the terrace outside, Nick saw a snowy forest of roofs and aerials sloping down into the fog. For a moment he felt a powerful sense of dread, of unseen enemies sniffing for his trail in the snow. He shook it off and went inside.

It was like stepping into a fish tank. A soft blue light filled the church like water, so thick it was almost tangible. It came from the windows, a nebula of swirling blues speckled with white: birds in a cloudless sky, a starcloth, souls flitting into heaven.

Only at the back of the church, behind the altar, did the blue become a canvas for more literal ill.u.s.trations. Nick walked up to examine them. An angel with fairy wings carried up a body that had swooned into its arms. A naked Adam and Eve considered an apple, while a blue serpent twined through the tree. A golden angel reading a book turned somersaults over a lighted menorah.

'The windows are new. The church burned in the war.'

Nick turned sharply. A straight-backed old man wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket had rolled up behind him in a wheel-chair. His hooded eyes looked old enough to have seen the church's devastation first hand. His lips curled in and hid whatever teeth he had left, while tufts of grey hair poked from under his battered hat.

'The new windows are by Chagall,' the old man continued. His tone was precise, unhurried. Nick guessed he didn't have much to do other than collar unsuspecting tourists. Nick and Emily might be his only catch that day. 'We were very proud in Mainz when so great an artist agreed to devote his work to our little church.'

'They're good.' Nick tried to steal a glance over the old man's shoulder. Olaf had refused to say how they would recognise him. Nick was terrified of missing him.

'But I liked the medieval windows too. I saw them in my childhood, before the war. Very beautiful and so exotic. Stags, lions and bears, birds . . .'

'Flowers.' Nick stared at him and tried to remember. 'Wild men.'

'Indeed. The medieval symbolism, so dense, you know? If you start to look close you never know where you go. '

Emily took the plunge. 'Are you Olaf?'

The old man coughed loudly. A nun kneeling in the front pew looked up from her prayers and frowned. 'My name is most certainly not Olaf. But it serves. Let us find somewhere to talk.'

He waved away Nick's offer to push him and led them to a pew at the back of the church.

'I'm glad we found you,' Nick said. 'It was a clever trick, the way you hid your phone number.'

Olaf gave him a shrewd look. 'You mean you are surprised a man of my age can even read email, let alone have heard of an IP address. But I have always sought knowledge. Many ways of finding it have come and gone in my lifetime.'

He manoeuvred his wheelchair against the end of a pew, leaning forward as if about to launch into prayer. Nick and Emily slid onto the bench beside him. He pointed to the wall, where a mounted photograph showed pyramids of flame leaping out of the burning church. All that could be seen of the building was a row of steep gable ends standing tall and black like witches' hats.

'G.o.d's beauty is infinite,' he said inscrutably. 'Churches can be rebuilt, maybe more beautiful than before. But history. You cannot hire Chagall to restore that.' He gave a heavy sigh. 'Are you believers? Christians?'

'Not really,' said Nick.

'I was, once. Then I decided I knew better. Now I am not so sure.'

A mournful silence gripped him as he stared at the windows, into some painful corner of the distant past.

'You said you had something to tell us about Gillian,' Nick prompted. Olaf didn't seem to hear.

'I was fourteen when the war ended.'

Nick did a quick calculation and was surprised by the result. It must have shown on his face.

'You think I look older than I am.' Olaf coughed again. 'I feel older than I am. But I will come to that. For now, imagine me as I was. Old enough to have had a rifle pushed in my hands when Zhukov crossed the Oder; young enough to still have pride in Germany. Even when they told us the truth, all the things that make Germans ashamed today, I had pride. Those things were done by n.a.z.is. I was a German.

'That is why I became a historian. I wished to reclaim our history from the monsters and foreigners who took it away from us. I went back further and further into the past, trying to escape the poison that had infected us. While my generation built a new future with the Wirtschaftswunder, I wanted to dig its foundation. A new past. A clean past.'

He sighed. 'You must understand, to be a historian in Germany is to be in thrall to a beautiful woman who has shared herself with everyone but you. There is hardly an archive or a library that has not been looted, burned, destroyed or lost at some point in its history. Sometimes facsimiles of original doc.u.ments survive; sometimes even the copies have been destroyed. This has always been so but after the war it was intolerable. A young researcher who wants to make a career needs doc.u.ments, discoveries he can publish. But all our archives were only smoke and ashes. Until one day, in a convent library looking through old books of receipts, I found what I sought. A treasure.'

'What was it?' Emily asked.

'A letter. A single sheet of paper written in a fifteenth-century hand. In the corner was a device: two shields blazoned with the Greek letters chi and lamda, joined by a noose that yoked the neck of a raven. I knew at once whose it was.'

He glanced up to see he still had their attention.

'Johann Fust. You know Fust?' Olaf was too far into the past to wait for their answers. 'Fust was Johann Gutenberg's business partner. You know Gutenberg, of course. Everyone knows Gutenberg. Time magazine says he was the Man of the Millennium. But if you came to Mainz five hundred years ago, everyone knew Fust and no one knew Gutenberg. Gutenberg printed one book; Fust and his son Peter Schoeffer printed one hundred and thirty. A letter from Fust is like a letter from St Paul. And I found it.'

'What did it say?'

The knot of veins pulsed under Olaf's knuckles as he fretted with the frayed blanket. 'I should have published it. I should have told the librarian what I found. It would have stopped everything. But I did not.'

He took a furtive look around the church. 'I stole it. Almost before I knew it, I slipped it into my pocket. At last I had found my princess sleeping in her tower. She would not give herself to me, so I took her. The archive had no security: they thought they had nothing worth taking.'

'But you didn't publish?'

'The letter was just the beginning. It hinted at things much greater. I could have published, of course; I would go back to the archive, pretend to find it again, announce my discovery. But then I risked being left with the hook while someone else walked off with the fish. And I was jealous. I was like an old man with a young wife except I was twenty-four and she was five hundred years old. I hid her away. My secret.'

While he spoke, he spun one of the threads of his blanket around the knuckle of his index finger, so tight the tip went white. He didn't seem to notice.

'I guarded my privacy. But not well enough. I was a young man: I had women to impress, rival scholars who sometimes were also rivals in love to outshine. I hinted; I made remarks; I allowed speculation. I was careless. I thought I was very clever.

'Then one day a man came to see me. A young priest, Father Nevado. He came to my house. He was thin we all were then, but he was thinner; he had red lips, like a vampire. He told me he had come from Italy, though he was obviously Spanish. From this I deduced he worked for the Vatican. 'He told me, "I have heard rumours you have made a remarkable discovery."'

'"A letter from a man who complains that the Church has stolen something from him," I said. I was arrogant. "Have you come to give it back?"

'The priest's eyes were like black ice. "The letter is the property of the Holy Church."

'He looked at me then. I tell you, I had watched dead-eyed Russian soldiers march into our guns until they choked them with their own blood. I had watched them shoot children and rape girls in the street. They had not frightened me as much as this priest did when he looked at me.

' "You will give me the letter," he said. "You will give me all the copies you have made, including translations. You will give me the name of every person you have told about it. You will never mention it again; you will forget it ever existed."

'He broke me right there. I was a medieval historian; I knew what the Church could do to its enemies. Even in the twentieth century. It was in his voice. His eyes. I gave him the letter and all my notes.

' "If you ever tell anyone of this, you will surely suffer the torments of the d.a.m.ned," he told me.

'And so I kept silent. For ten years I devoted myself to my work. I completed my thesis and found a position at a provincial university. I attended seminars and workshops; I invited colleagues to dinner and flattered their wives; I reviewed obsequiously. I married. But my wound never healed.

'I wrote a book. A small book, interesting only to scholars, if anyone. But I was proud of it. To me, it was vindication. The priest had taken the treasure that would have elevated my career to Olympian heights, but I had clawed myself up nonetheless. And I could not resist a small crow of triumph.