'It was a footnote. Nothing more: a pa.s.sing reference, so obscure no reader would even notice it. Just for my own pride.

'Two weeks before the book was to be published, my editor called me to his office. He polished his spectacles; he was very regretful. He said that very serious allegations of plagiarism had been made against my work.

' "But there is no plagiarism in my book," I protested. You must understand, to an academic it is like being accused of harming your children. I had sweated five years of blood to make that book.

' "Surely there is not," said my editor. "But they are suing us for a large sum of money and if we lose we will be bankrupt. Your book is important, but I cannot risk all our other authors for you."

' "Then what do we do?"

' "They require that we recall all copies and pulp them. They are not vindictive men; they have even offered to help pay for the costs of destruction."

' "Who?" I demanded. "Who are these men who say what will or will not be published?" I guessed, of course. "Was it the priest?"

'My editor played with his pen. "Make sure you bring in the advance copies you have at your house. We must account for every one."

'Three days later, I drove home from a dinner party with my wife. It was late, an icy night. Perhaps I had had a little too much schnapps but in those days, everybody did. I came around a corner. Some fool had skidded and abandoned his car in the middle of the road. I had no chance.'

Olaf folded his hands. 'My wife died at once. I spent six months in hospital and came out in a wheelchair I have never left.'

'Did they catch the people who did it?' said Emily.

'The car was stolen. The police said it was youths, joyriders who panicked when the car skidded. I did not believe them.

'After that I abandoned my history. It was too dangerous. I wrote some tourist guides to Mainz; I volunteered at the museum. Those people took away my past, my present, my future. I lived forty years waiting to die. I never spoke of it.'

'But you told Gillian,' said Nick.

The old man rocked back in his wheelchair. 'My second wife died five years ago from the cancer. I was almost glad: at least I could not blame myself. We have no children. There is nothing more they can take from me. When Gillian Lockhart contacted me, I thought it was my last chance. My wound still has not healed.'

'How did she find you?'

Olaf chuckled. 'Do you know the Hawking paradox?'

'As in Stephen Hawking?' said Nick. 'His calculations showed that when matter enters a black hole all information about it is destroyed. But that contradicts a fundamental law of physics: that information cannot be destroyed.'

'Dr Hawking was proved wrong. Even in a black hole, some information survives. So also with my little book. Somewhere, somehow, a few copies leaked out of the black hole Father Nevado made for them. One sat on a library shelf who knows where fifty years. Waiting. Until, it seems, an Internet company started digitising this library's collection as part of a project to acc.u.mulate all knowledge. If Father Nevado knew about it, he would probably tear down all the World Wide Web to get rid of it. But even he cannot police everything. Gillian found it first. Then she found me. I sat in this same church and told her what I have told you. Like me fifty years ago, she was too stubborn to hear the warnings.'

'You told her about the letter?'

'About the letter yes. But for her it was more important to learn about the library.'

'Which library?' Nick felt like a drunk wandering across a frozen lake: slipping and skidding, with only the faintest idea of the airless depths beneath.

'The Bibliotheca Diabolorum. The Library of Devils.'

The blue light seemed to wrap Nick closer. Emily slid along the bench, pressing against him. By the altar, a young priest was reciting a litany.

'You know of it?'

Nick and Emily shook their heads.

'Few people have even heard its name. It is a construction, a myth. A h.e.l.l for condemned books. The last curse of the thwarted scholar when all his efforts to find a book have failed: it must have gone to the Devils' Library.'

'Does it exist?'

'It must.' Olaf's hands were trembling. He knitted his fingers together. 'They almost killed me to protect it. That was the footnote in my book: "We should consider the possibility that some books from Johann Fust's collection may have been confiscated, perhaps to the so-called Devils' Library." That was why they killed my wife.'

'Was that what Fust's letter said?'

'Not precisely. You can see yourself.'

Olaf twisted in his seat and began fiddling with his wheel-chair. It was an old contraption, with wooden armrests screwed to a metal frame. One of the screws was loose. Olaf scrabbled underneath and slid out a piece of paper folded over and over, concertina-style, so as to be no wider than the armrest.

He handed it to Nick. 'Even in the blackest hole, information survives.'

'To the Most Reverend Father in Christ, Cardinal Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini: I am writing in order that I may humbly acquaint your most exalted person with the injustice which diverse blackguards and vagabonds have caused to be perpetrated in the name of the Church; which deeds, if you knew of them, you would surely deplore, as I do, to the depths of your soul. Yesterday, in the afternoon, two men came to my house by the church of St Quintin, the Humbrechthof. They interrupted various works my son was undertaking there, the nature of which need not detain Your Grace, and ransacked the workshop until they had found a certain book they sought. Though small and unremark able in every way, this book had come into my possession from a particular gentleman known to Your Grace.

Despite my heated protestations, these men took the book away with them. Wherefore I pray Your Grace, if you know anything of this outrage, to bend your authority to seeking out the evil-doers and restoring to me my rightful property.

Johann Fust Humbrechthof, Mainz Emily stared at the piece of paper, as wrinkled as Olaf's skin. 'You remember it word for word?'

'The priest took all my papers, but he could not take my memory. Even after the accident. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not recited it.'

'Who was Piccolomini?' said Nick. 'A man who rose from a farmer's son to be a cardinal, and eventually pope. He was also a novelist, a poet, a travel writer and a keen horseman.'

'A real Renaissance man.'

'Some decades in advance of the Renaissance itself. It is from him, incidentally, that we have the only eyewitness account of Gutenberg's famous Bible. He saw it at a fair in Frankfurt and wrote to describe it to a fellow cardinal.'

' "A particular gentleman known to your Grace," Emily read off the page. 'You think it was Gutenberg?'

'Gillian thought so.'

Olaf looked up. His eyes were pale, the colour dried up long ago. He fixed them on Emily, then Nick, stretching forward, trying to discern something distant.

'She was right.' Emily took the reconstruction out of her bag and gave it to him. The paper shivered in his hands.

He sighed deeply and settled forward in his chair. The wrinkles on his face seemed to sag, as if something inside him was slowly deflating. He murmured to himself in German: to Nick it sounded like, 'Only the spear that made the wound can heal it.'

'Thank you.'

'Did Gillian say where she found the reference to this Devils' Library?' Emily asked.

'Here in Mainz at the Stadtarchiv, the state archive.'

'I bet it's gone now,' said Nick. 'The men who took your book seem to be pretty good at clearing up after themselves.'

'By the time she came here, your friend had started to realise this too. So she hid her discovery.'

'Did she tell you where?'

'She hid it where she found it,' said Olaf. For a moment, Nick wondered if his mind had started to wander. 'The clue she did not say what it was she found in an inventory of books from the Benedictine monastery in Eltville. This inventory came in a box which has a bar code for the catalogue. Gillian replaced this with a different bar code. If you look for the Eltville monastery inventory, you will find nothing. If, how ever, you look for a seventeenth-century treatise on agronomy, you may be surprised.' He wrote the reference on their paper.

'Did you go and have a look at it.'

Olaf shook his head. 'It would have been too dangerous. Even now.'

He reached across the pew and grabbed Nick's arm. Nick flinched, though there was no strength in the withered fingers.

'I said this library if it exists is a h.e.l.l for condemned books. But books cannot endure torment as humans can. Be careful.'

LXX.

Mainz

A sultry day in June. The sun streamed through every crack in the close-packed houses, steaming the limp-hanging laundry and baking the dung on the streets into bricks. Children played in the fountain outside St Christoph's church, screaming with delight as they splashed each other. Butchers put down their cleavers and wielded horsehair whisks in vain efforts to keep the flies away. The city slumped in a daze, stupefied by the smell and the heat.

I walked down the street from the Gutenberghof towards the Humbrechthof. Behind me, two apprentices hauled a hand cart loaded with small casks. Whatever the neighbours thought we transacted behind the Humbrechthof's doors and shuttered windows, they knew it was thirsty work. How else to explain all the barrels that rolled down that street?

This was my life's journey, I thought: a matter of a hundred yards. Past the baker where I had bought sweet pies as a child, the stationer who had sold me my schoolbooks, the sword master who tried to teach me fencing when my father still believed I might become a worthy heir. If I had walked past the Humbrechthof, the same distance would have taken me to the mint where I first glimpsed perfection. I walked more slowly now. The page of my soul bore the imprint of many pressings, some indelible, others written in hard point, invisible to all but the author. The ink was dense, heavy with crossings-out and corrections, new words overwritten on washed-out texts still visible beneath. In places, the nib had nicked tears in the paper. Water had stained it, fire curled the edges.

Today I would start a new page.

In seven months, the Humbrechthof had been transformed. All the walls had been whitewashed against damp. The thatch on the outbuildings had been stripped and replaced with tiles. The weeds in the courtyard had been trampled to dust by the criss-crossing of many feet, and a saw pit dug beside the old pastry kitchen. Stout timbers lay beside it. All the doors brandished new locks, and a heavy block and tackle sprouted from a dormer in the roof. Empty barrels like those that had just arrived stood stacked in a corner waiting to return up the road.

The apprentices unloaded the barrels and prised them open. Inside, large jars of ink lay nestled in straw like eggs. They began to unload, but I gestured them to follow me quickly into the house. Others had seen us arrive and emerged from the outbuildings: the paper shop, the ink store, the tool shed and the refectory. They followed me up the stairs, along the corridor and into the press room.

Everyone was there. Fust, with the haunted look of a soul approaching judgement; Gotz, still wearing a leather ap.r.o.n from the forge; Father Gunther, whose inky fingers played with the cross around his neck; Sas.p.a.ch, a hammer in his hand ready for any last-minute adjustment; and around them all our a.s.sistants and apprentices from both houses, almost twenty men in total. Even Sarum, the ginger cat who kept rats out of the paper store, had wandered in and crouched behind one of the table legs. And in the middle of them all, the press.

It stood like a gate in the centre of the room: two thick uprights, joined at the top and again halfway down by heavy crosspieces. The posts had been nailed into the ceiling and bolted to the floor, so that the whole instrument was knitted into the fabric of the house. A screw descended through the middle and held the platen over a long table that stuck out like an ap.r.o.n between the posts. That supported a flat carriage on runners, which could be slid under the press or pulled out to change the paper and the type. It was far removed from the wobbly device we had first erected in Andreas Dritzehn's cellar a dozen years earlier.

I stood beside the press and addressed the a.s.sembled team. I do not remember what I said, and I doubt they paid much attention. The only words that mattered that day lay set in lead on the press bed. I concluded with a prayer that G.o.d would cast his blessing on our humble enterprise, which we offered in His name and to His purpose.

As soon as I was done, Kaspar stepped forward. He did not look at his audience. He had always been capable of great concentration, in starts, but since his injury he had acquired an almost ferocious power to ignore all around him. I suppose he needed armour against the stares and mockery his deformity drew in the streets.

He uncorked two ink bottles, a large one of black and a small of red. First, he dipped a brush in the red and carefully painted it onto the head line, the rubrication. Then he poured the black into a pool on the block beside the press. It came out thick and sticky as naphtha.

He swirled the ink around the slab with a knife until it was evenly spread, then picked up two leather b.a.l.l.s on sticks. He dipped one in the ink and rubbed the two together. When the brown leather was a uniform black, he rubbed them on the metal type in the press, using short round motions like kneading dough. A thin film of ink spread across the form.

He stepped back. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had wanted Kaspar to be a part of this moment because his painter's hands were more deft than anyone's with the ink b.a.l.l.s, but also because it was right. He was my lodestar, the beginning of all that followed. Yet as ever I felt a drift of unease. There was something about an audience that made him unpredictable, that stoked dangerous fires inside him.

Two young men flanked the press, an apprentice called Keffer I had brought from Stra.s.sburg, and Peter Schoeffer. Kaspar had complained about Schoeffer being accorded this honour, but I had overruled him. It was politic, with Fust watching and deserved. Schoeffer had already proved himself the most promising of my apprentices. He had an instinct for books that none other of our crew of goldsmiths, carpenters, priests and painters could feel.

Schoeffer laid a sheet of vellum onto a board hinged to the bed of the press. Six pins held it in place. He folded it back so that the vellum was held suspended over the inked type, then slid the tray back. It slotted home underneath the platen. He and Ruppel took the handle that drove the screw and pushed it around.

I would have liked to pull it myself, but I was an old man and it wanted strength. The screw creaked and popped as it tightened; the platen pushed down. They held it there a moment, then turned the screw back.

Keffer slid out the tray and folded out the flap, revealing the underside of the vellum. He loosed the pins and pulled it free, made to hold it up then handed it to me instead. The knot of men around me tightened as all vied for a view.

Thousands of tiny letters glistened on the page, wet and black as tar.

n the beginning G.o.d created heaven and earth. But the earth was void and empty: shadow covered the earth, and the spirit of G.o.d swept over the waters.

It was not complete. The initial 'I' would be added later with Kaspar's copper plate. Tomorrow the leaf would be printed on the reverse. Later it would be brought back for the conjugate pages, two more days, then folded, st.i.tched, eventually bound with all the others. But in itself, it was flawless. Every letter of Gotz's new type had imprinted sharp and whole, more even than any mortal scribe could have made.

I looked to Kaspar, wanting to share the triumph with him. He would not catch my eye. He was staring at the vellum, his face screwed up as if he had bitten a sour apple. I knew what he was looking at: the punctuation in the margin. Peter Schoeffer had been right. The image of perfection was greater if the reality was less so. I could not understand why that should be, but it was.

I was about to go over and embrace Kaspar, to remind him that this was his victory as much as mine, when Fust appeared in front of me. His cheeks were flushed; he was holding a gla.s.s of wine. He clapped me on the shoulder.

'You have done it, Johann. We will run every scribe and rubricator in Mainz out of business.'

I forced myself to smile at him. 'G.o.d willing, this is just the first page of the first copy. We still have almost two hundred thousand to go.'

The true test came ten minutes later, when Schoeffer and Keffer put the second sheet of vellum through the press. Schoeffer pulled it out and hung it on a rack beside the first. I stared between one and the other, scanning every letter for the least deviation.

They were indistinguishable. Perfect copies.

Sunlight shone through a bubble in the windowpane, splaying a fan of colour across the opposite wall. A new covenant. I remembered an old man in Paris.

In the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.

I drank in my moment of perfection and wished it would never end.

LXXI.

Mainz

He was too famous to be doing this. Not that he'd sought it. He despised his colleagues who preened themselves on television, publicising arguments that should have stayed behind the doors of Mother Church. Those men often returned from the studios to find Nevado waiting for them, informing them they had found new vocations in remote dioceses in far-off continents. He enjoyed breaking them, like a gardener pruning branches that disfigured the shape of a tree.

But now he was near the summit of his profession. At such heights, the glare made it impossible to lurk in shadows completely. He became visible. When the last pope died news papers had printed photographs of Nevado, among others. Ignorant commentators wrote ignorant articles for their ignorant readers, breathlessly speculating whether or not he might be papabile. He had read the articles, then used them to light the fire in his Vatican apartments. He'd been burning that sort of waste all his life. It was no more than it deserved.

But error, once it escaped into the world, could not be uprooted entirely. Perhaps fifty years earlier, when he began: not now. Even so, he knew he had to do this. Some men would have called it fate, or destiny; to Cardinal Nevado it was simply G.o.d's purpose.