The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (13 page)

The Judge nodded.

‘Tell me about your relationship with these children.’

‘I will take care of them, educate them and provide for their well-being. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?’

‘And you are fond of them?’

‘Of course. They have grown up before my eyes.’

‘I believe, sir, that you have no children of your own.’

The Composer stiffened slightly. The Judge, however, was not entirely sure what point of weakness she had touched. So she persisted.

‘Can you comprehend, Monsieur, how a mother and father could murder their own unknowing, unconscious children for the sake of a belief that cannot, in the normal course of things, ever be verified?’

The strange, beautiful face before her darkened and closed.

‘Murder, you say. I do not judge.’

‘Yes, I do say murder. Tiny children cannot and do not commit suicide, which is an act that requires an adult awareness of what is at stake. The adult members of the Faith who took their own lives in the early hours of New Year’s Day murdered their children first.’

The Composer glittered, roused.

‘And do you have any children, Madame Carpentier? Children of your own? You do not, or you would answer me at once. I have told you that I respect my friends and their strange faith. I tell you that I do not judge them, and I do not because I understand what it means to dedicate my life to a vocation, a calling – as they have done.’

His voice rose.

‘I did not choose to live alone, like a hermit, cut off from all the social ties, which other men value. I did not choose to circle the earth like the Wandering Jew, without love or comfort, to live on in uncertainty and unknowing. I am a man who creates beautiful things. I too am chosen. I hear a language more beautiful than anything in the world and it is my task, the task for which I was born, to transcribe that language and to donate this music, along with my life of service, to the kingdom of this world. That is my sacrifice, Madame, and I make it willingly, gladly. It is my offering of joy. I am a Composer who honours his calling and accepts his burden, just as Christ once willingly lifted up the Cross.

‘No one else can create my life’s work. I have accepted a sacred trust and I will obey its laws. Yes, there are laws other than the ones you serve, Madame. I acknowledge my allotted task and I will carry this cross to my life’s end.’

The Judge’s face sharpened during this extraordinary speech and Gaëlle’s fingers whirled silent across her pad. Get it down, Gaëlle, get it down, but don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t look up. The Composer took a deep breath.

‘And now, Madame, if you have no further questions I wish to be left in peace.’ He stood up.

‘I have one more question,’ said the Judge quietly, ‘and something to show you.’

She reached into her briefcase and drew forth the Book. The cool authentic leather binding and strange folding clasp were placed in the man’s hands before he had a chance to recoil, and his fingers settled carefully on the inlaid golden rim.

‘Do you know what this is?’ The Judge watched his every gesture. She remained seated, unmoved, intensely aware of Gaëlle’s death’s head pen frozen in mid-air. This moment, planned, anticipated, calculated and yet fraught with risk, had been forced upon her sooner than anticipated.

His eyes darkened, the black core swallowing the blue, and a faint red stain blossomed on his chin and neck beside the collarbone.

‘This book belongs to Marie-Cécile Laval,’ he said softly. The pressure in the room changed, as if they were descending rapidly inside a diving bell.

I have you, thought the Judge, I have you now. His hands closed around the book. A long stillness surrounded them all, and faintly, as if from another country, they could hear the birds calling to each other in the gardens and the distant tussle of horns and bells warning each passage of the boats through the locks on the river.

‘You gave that book to Madame Laval.’ The Judge risked this statement, but lowered her voice, making each deadly word distinct. ‘I believe that you can also read the coded language written in that book.’

Two white lines appeared down either side of his face, which was now wrenched, cadaverous, into a terrible mask of pain. The Judge froze. She had expected bluster, denials, recriminations, rage – not the agony of a man crucified. She sat very still and cold, and waited for developments.

‘I must now ask you to leave my house.’ His violent grasp upon the book tightened and clenched. He rose up over them like a ghoul, his great shoulders and white hair shaking. ‘Please leave.’

The Judge never flinched.

‘Monsieur Grosz, that book is now a piece of evidence in an ongoing investigation conducted by officers of the French Republic. And I am afraid that I must ask for it back.’

‘Get out of my house!’ He towered above her, as dangerous as the hideous phantasm created by Frankenstein. The Judge stood up carefully and held out her hand.

‘Give back the book and we will leave your house.’

Gaëlle, who was struggling into her coat, turned instantly to stone and attempted to vanish. The Judge barely reached the middle of his chest. One blow from his hand would have crumpled her into the flagstones. The Judge took one step closer, so that she was almost touching him, and looked up. This was the moment when the confrontation tipped in her favour. She stood too close to him. You cannot strike someone who is standing in your arms. She had stepped inside his defences, her nose and the dark frames of her glasses pressed fast against the window of his anger, and this uncanny lack of distance gave her the upper hand. She ushered the violence out of his countenance with her defiant, unwavering glare and reached for the book. He let her take it, like a man stunned.

‘Gaëlle?’ The tiny engine of her discipline growled back into action. She collected her briefcase and tucked the book under her arm. ‘I believe that we have outstayed our welcome. Thank you for your time, sir.’

And with that she swept out of the house, Gaëlle scuttling behind her. As the door thudded shut the city erupted into a great peal of bells; the seven towers pounded out a crescendo of triumph and celebration. This was the first thing they heard as they returned to the world. It was midday.

5

THE PRINTER OF LÜBECK

‘Well? Is that it? Can we go home now? I don’t ever want to see him again. Schweigen was right. He’s a monster.’

They kicked off their shoes and lounged on the Judge’s bed, flattening the sculptured duvets, which had all been restored into spiked points, like bishops’ mitres.

‘Our plane’s not till midday tomorrow, ma petite chérie. And we have work to do. You’re going to do a tour of the antiquarian booksellers with two photocopied pages, one all in code and one with code and German. And take this photograph, don’t crease it, or bend the plastic. I had it laminated. I think you can see the book’s binding quite clearly. Ask them if they have ever seen this book, have any copies ever been offered for sale and do they recognise the code.’

‘I thought you had dozens of experts cracking the bloody code?’

‘Well, two of them. They’ve already told me what it’s not, which is helpful, I suppose. I thought that it might be unaccented Hebrew, without the vowels, like holy scrolls of the Torah. But it isn’t.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

The Judge fluttered through
gewusstwo
, the local register of businesses and service providers for Hansestadt Lübeck.

‘Lübeck is famous for its printing industry. There are some very old publishers here. The binding on this book is at least fifty years old, if not older. One of our experts thought that the pages were taken from an older document because the paper is handmade but not watermarked, and the whole thing has been rebound. It’s been typeset, even the title page, the ink actually hit the paper. We now know that Friedrich Grosz is F.G. – unless he has a double – and that the book once belonged to him. I’m certain that, in some irrevocable way, he is bound to the Faith. Lübeck is his home town. He was born here. If he had anything to do with the making of this book then I’m prepared to bet that it was restored, if not printed, here. I’m going to traipse round the printers.’

Gaëlle stretched out, groaning.

‘I’m a recorder and an office clerk, not a policewoman. Isn’t this Schweigen’s work?’

‘Yes, it is. But he’s not here and we are.’

‘Did he leave a message for us last night? I forgot to ask.’

‘Several. I’ve asked Reception to intercept all his calls. And I’ve switched off the mobile.’

‘You didn’t! What if he has important information?’

The Judge peered at Gaëlle over the top of her glasses. She spread the map of Lübeck across her knees and began matching printers’ addresses to the geography of the town.

‘Don’t worry about Schweigen, Gaëlle. At the moment we know more than he does. And that’s driving him mad.’

_{*  *  *}

The morning betrayed them; it was raining in the streets. The sky sank, torpid and veiled in milky cloud, but the wind’s breath stole down the river in warmer currents. The earth opened its pores, unclenched against the vanishing cold and basked in fine, fresh spring rain. The Judge slithered across the slick cobbles, treasuring the book, swathed in plastic sheets, stowed inside her black rucksack. She balanced her umbrella at a lower angle, against the advancing crowds. Everyone else appeared to be several sizes larger than she was. The scale of the Altstadt varied from street to street. Sometimes grand baroque buildings with grey window frames and white cladding reared up beside her, ending in dramatic stone statues, a naked Mercury and Pomona, one breast exposed, clutching her basket of white marble apples, ready to dart between the stately, garlanded urns. Sometimes the red-brick Gothic gables, neatly repointed and reinforced, pushed their steepled façades upwards like stage sets, the last gable standing proud of the red-tiled roofs with their long sharp slopes and high chimneys. The gables were often supported by metal rods as the buildings settled, over centuries, into the damp earth of the medieval island city. The town, beautiful, comfortable, at ease with itself in the spring rain, embodied its official policy, proclaimed upon the Holstentor,
CONCORDIA DOMI, FORIS PAX
, Unity within the walls, peace before the gates. Pausing before the frilly windows of a patisserie, the Judge confronted an identical scaled model of the Holstentor, decorated in marzipan, bearing the same pompous declaration.

She turned up the Mengstrasse, away from the river, and wrinkled her nose: the lower reaches of the street stank of old, rotting, dead fish. A portly yet agile rat flickered down a crumpled entrance to a drain beneath the stone steps. She checked her map. The printers that once stood at No.
42
were no longer there. She stalked onwards through the rain, patient, thorough, unhesitating, learning the city as she negotiated the old streets, practising whispered German sentences, ready with her explanations.

The Judge travelled a good deal in the course of her work. She was used to the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially Canada and America. There she settled into suitable clothes, at ease with the tacky culture of the streets, the plastic hotels, unintelligible accents and appalling food. But she did not know Northern Europe and was troubled by this sharp green cold settling on the late afternoon, and the alien politeness of these people. She could not understand the casual talk around her and disliked the sensation of being silenced, shut out. The men and women she approached all fingered the book in its plastic covers, fascinated, entranced by its secret language. But it could not have been made here, not here, no, not here. Those methods of production, that stitched binding, old-fashioned, uneconomic, long fallen into disuse. But look, Madame, this stitching is immaculate, this book was made by hand. No one understood or even recognised the code.

A pile of brown boxes cluttered the doorway of the last house in the Engelsgrube, before the Siebente Querstrasse. Each one had the brochure’s cover stuck to the carton, indicating the contents. A small brass plaque mounted the plastered wall.

BARDEWIG GmbH

LÜBECKS ÄLTESTES VERLAGS-UND DRUCKHAUS

Seit 1579