The Library of Shadows (18 page)

'Hello?' she called. 'Anyone here?'

She stepped inside with Jon right behind her. The space had not been used as a stable in a very long time. The stalls were filled with rubbish, the remains from the collapsed roof or crates and furniture.

'Over there,' said Jon, stepping past her.

At the other end of the stable, closest to the main building, a door opened and they saw a silhouette run out, slamming the door. Jon raced for the door, having to jump over crates and old junk blocking his way. Katherina instead turned on her heel and ran out into the yard and then over to the main house. She reached the corner of the building just as Jon came bursting out of the door. They continued on together to the gable end and then around to the back of the house. They didn't see anyone, but they did hear a door slam. Banging and pounding sounds revealed that the door was being emphatically bolted.

They slowed down and stopped outside a dark, solid-looking door with black metal hinges.

'We just want to talk to you,' shouted Jon, out of breath.

There was no reaction from inside the house.

'Tom?' Katherina ventured. 'We need your help.'

Jon knocked on the door.

'Tom Nørreskov? We know you're in there.'

They listened tensely.

'Go away,' they suddenly heard from behind the door. 'You have no business being here.' The voice was low and hoarse.

'We just want to talk to you, Tom,' said Katherina.

'I have nothing to say to you. Get out of here, or I'll call the police.'

'Won't you at least confirm that your name is Tom Nørreskov?' asked Jon.

'There's no Nørreskov here. My name is Klausen. It says that on the door. Now go away.'

'We know that you changed your name in eighty-six,' said Jon. 'We know that you were thrown out of the Society, and we know why.'

For several seconds there was no response from behind the door. Then they heard a faint muttering. Katherina and Jon looked at each other.

'It sounded like he repeated the words "thrown out",' whispered Jon.

'What are you whispering for?' yelled the man behind the door. 'Who are you? What do you want?'

'We just want to talk to you,' Katherina repeated. 'My name is Katherina, and Jon Campelli is with me.'

Again a couple of seconds of silence behind the door.

'Campelli?'

'Jon Campelli,' Jon confirmed. 'I'm the son of—'

He was interrupted by the sound of bolts being thrown. Slowly the door opened a crack and a head came into view. The face was almost completely hidden by hair and a beard. A pair of wide-open blue eyes looked Jon up and down.

'Campelli,' said the man again, nodding to himself.

'We just want ...' Katherina began, but stopped when the man pulled the door wide open and took a step back.

'Come in, Jon, come in. I have a message from your father.'

Jon's feet suddenly felt very heavy. He couldn't lift them but just stood there staring at the man in the doorway. A tall, smiling man with a mass of hair, a lean body, probably even skinnier than his loose dark-green sweater and baggy cords intimated, and a slightly bowed back. His big beard was grey at the ends, and in several places it was matted and knotted.

'Come in,' said the man again, motioning them eagerly inside with bony fingers.

Jon felt Katherina's hand on his shoulder, and he slowly stepped through the doorway into the house. When they both stood inside a small dark hallway, Tom Nørreskov slammed the door behind them. They stood still in the dark, listening to him carefully locking the door. The air was rank and heavy.

'Excuse me,' said Nørreskov as he slipped past them. 'Just let me turn on the light.' A dim lamp in the ceiling came to life, casting a yellow glow over a cramped hallway cluttered with cardboard boxes of various sizes. 'I don't use it much myself. The light, I mean.'

He disappeared through an opening between the boxes, which led to another room, and there too he turned on a light. Katherina and Jon followed him into a big room. All four walls were plastered with newspaper clippings, pictures and countless little yellow slips of paper with hand-written notes. Multi-coloured strings were stretched between many of the pieces of paper, so the whole thing looked like a web of information, a paper version of the Internet. In the middle of the floor, right underneath the glare of a bare bulb, stood a big, worn leather chair, and in front of the chair was a Morocco ottoman that looked as though it had been punctured. All around the chair were stacks of books, in no apparent order.

Tom Nørreskov ushered them onwards into the next room, which was filled with bookshelves as well as a large sofa which, judging by the bedclothes, also functioned as a bed. In front of the sofa was a low coffee table covered with countless leather-bound volumes. He quickly gathered up the bedclothes and tossed them behind the sofa. After giving the cushions a cursory brushing with the palm of his hand, he motioned for them to sit down.

'We have a lot to talk about.'

Jon and Katherina sat down on the leather sofa while their host went to get the Morocco ottoman from the other room and placed it across from them. He kept his eyes fixed on Jon the whole time, with a little satisfied smile playing over his fleshy red lips.

'You said that Luca left me a message?' Jon began.

Tom nodded eagerly. 'You see, your father had a feeling that they were going to make a move soon, and in case something happened to him, and you turned up, I was supposed to give you this message.'

'Which is?'

Tom shook his head and broke out in a big smile. 'I'm so glad to see you again, Jon. You probably don't remember me, but I visited Libri di Luca many times when you were a boy.' His smile disappeared. 'I was very fond of your father. We were close friends, and he's the only one who ever visited me for all these years.'

'He came here?' said Katherina with astonishment.

'Once a month, I'd say. Usually on Sundays, when the bookshop was closed.'

'He never mentioned anything about that,' said Katherina.

'No, of course not,' replied Tom, a bit annoyed. 'That was all part of the plan.'

Jon had so many questions that he didn't know where to start. Even though he hadn't seen his father in years, this place and this man didn't fit at all with the image he'd had of Luca. And it seemed even less plausible that Luca would have made plans with a banished member of the Bibliophile Society, of which he was such a faithful defender. And to top it all off, Jon's own arrival was supposed to have been predicted, like some sort of resurrection.

'What's the message, Tom?' Jon insisted.

Tom regarded him with his clear blue eyes as he made a tent with his bony fingers. He was no longer smiling.

'Stay away,' he said finally.

'What?' exclaimed Jon and Katherina in unison.

'Forget what you think you know, sell the shop and get on with your own life,' said Tom, clasping his hands with his fingers interlaced. 'Turn around, get going and don't look back.'

'But—' Jon began.

'It's for your own good. Your father loved you more than anything on earth. He was so proud of you – your success in school, your travels, your career. He talked about you for hours, how smart you were, how you'd made a success of everything. Did you know that he went to a lot of your court appearances?' He shook his head. 'Probably not, but he did, and he was damn proud.'

'Then he had a strange way of showing it,' said Jon, crossing his arms. 'Why didn't he ever say anything?'

'Haven't you figured that out?' said Tom impatiently. 'He wanted to protect you. Luca preferred to be a terrible father than a childless one.'

Jon got up from the sofa and paced around the room with his eyes on the floor and his hands on his hips. He felt nauseated, no doubt because of the stale air in the house. How could anyone stand to live like this? It was impossible to think. The questions he'd been burning to ask only moments ago had now disappeared to be replaced by others, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answers.

'You mentioned a plan,' said Katherina as Jon kept pacing.

'I'm sorry,' said Tom, 'but I can't tell you any more. I promised to convey Luca's advice to his son, but I don't think it would be appropriate to involve him any further.'

Jon stopped and turned to face Tom. 'And what if I choose not to follow his advice?' he said angrily. 'I'm already involved. There are people who expect something of me, and other people who have tried to scare me off. So don't tell me I should just turn my back on everything and go on as if nothing ever happened, no matter how much I might want to.'

'I can see that,' Tom admitted. 'But I think you should—'

'I'm tired of being kept in the dark. Tell Katherina what she wants to know. What sort of plan was it?'

'Okay, okay.' Tom turned to Katherina. 'The plan. Yes, all right,' he began, nodding to himself. 'The plan was that we'd make them show themselves, or at least we'd find proof of their existence.'

'Who?' asked Katherina, casting a glance at Jon, who had resumed his pacing.

'We called them the Shadow Organization,' said Tom with a smile.

'Maybe you'd better start from the beginning,' Katherina suggested.

Tom hesitated, glancing at Jon.

'Go on,' Jon commanded.

Tom sighed. 'It all started with an obsessive idea,' he said. 'It was almost a game we had, Luca and I. I don't remember which of us came up with it first, but one day it occurred to us that there might be another organization besides the Bibliophile Society, a group that operated in secret, in the shadows. An organization different from the Bibliophile Society in that the members consistently used their powers for criminal activities or at least for selfish purposes.' He cleared his throat. 'It was mostly for our own amusement, a sort of in-joke. Soon we started looking through the newspapers for events that might support our theory. We'd show them to each other with a glint in our eyes. "The Shadow Organization has struck again," Luca used to say when he triumphantly presented a newspaper clipping about a politician who had suddenly changed his opinion, or a businessman who had done something unexpected.' Tom smiled to himself. 'It was of course nothing but our wild imaginations. We were younger back then, and our imaginative powers weren't nearly as ossified.'

Tom cleared his throat again, and Jon surmised he hadn't used his voice in a long time.

'The examples of events and coincidences began to pile up,' Tom went on. 'And finally we could no longer ignore the fact that there was a strong possibility that what we had invented as a private joke might be a reality. For a long time we dismissed the idea, but our eyes had become trained to see possible connections in the stories, and we found more and more events that indicated the existence of such an organization.

'What did the others say?' asked Katherina.

'We kept it to ourselves,' said Tom with regret in his voice. 'I suppose we were seized by some sort of persecution complex. One of our assumptions was that if such an organization had been kept secret from the Society, that must mean only one thing: that we had spies among us.'

'Who?' asked Katherina.

Tom shook his head. 'There were several candidates, but we never found any concrete proof. That was why we devised "the plan" to flush them out.'

Jon stopped pacing back and forth across the uneven floor and once again sat down on the sofa next to Katherina. Tom shifted his glance to Jon. There was sorrow in his blue eyes.

'The plan was that if one of us was thrown out of the Society for sufficiently unpleasant reasons, that person would end up being recruited by the Shadow Organization shortly afterwards.' Tom sighed. 'Simple and straightforward.'

He looked away from Jon and began surveying the room. His eyes scanned the ceiling, moved down the bookshelves and then across the worn floorboards. He seemed to be reorienting himself after a sudden awakening. He looked down at his hands.

'The first part of the plan was a resounding success,' he went on with a little smile. 'My supposed crime was so repulsive that everyone distanced themselves from me, and I think they were privately grateful that Luca was the one who took responsibility for banishing me. No one questioned the authenticity of the cover story, because who would make up something like that?' He let the question hover in the air for a moment. 'Then it was just a matter of waiting,' he continued, throwing out his hands. 'So that's what we did. And something happened all right, but it wasn't anything that even in our wildest imagination we would have—'

At that moment both Katherina and Tom got to their feet. They tilted their heads and looked up at the ceiling, as if they were listening for sounds on the roof.

'What?' asked Jon, looking from one to the other. Tom closed his eyes, his forehead deeply furrowed.

'No trespassing,' whispered Katherina, putting a finger to her lips. 'The first sign.'

Jon discovered he was holding his breath. Even though he couldn't hear anything, he could tell how tense the other two were. Katherina had closed her eyes, and very slowly she raised her hand towards Jon, to indicate he should stay seated. He didn't move.

'They're gone,' said Tom after more than a minute. He opened his eyes at the same moment as Katherina did, nodding in agreement.

'They?' said Jon.

'There were at least two people who read the sign,' Katherina explained. 'After that, nothing.'

'It happens often,' Tom reassured them. 'Folk get lost or try to take a short cut. Most of them turn round when they see the first sign.' He sat down again, and Katherina followed his example.

'I don't know many who can receive from such a distance,' said Tom, giving Katherina an appreciative nod. 'Luca told me about your powers.'

'He deserves all the credit,' said Katherina.

'That's one thing we have in common,' said Tom with a smile. 'I was his pupil, just like you. But we all have a natural limit, beyond which we can't go, no matter how zealously we train. For some people the limit is set much lower than what you've just displayed.'

'Can we get back to what we were talking about?' asked Jon impatiently.

'Yes, of course,' said Tom, but then he stopped.

'You were saying that something happened after you were banished,' said Katherina.

Tom nodded solemnly. 'Several things happened. First of all, the number of events increased. They were now so obvious that others in the Bibliophile Society also realized that something was wrong. But instead of looking outside the Society, they turned their attention on their own ranks. The accusations became rampant, and distrust grew between the two divisions of transmitters and receivers.' He fixed his eyes on Jon. 'Luca tried to keep the whole thing together, and he succeeded for a long time, even though factions arose, wanting to split the Bibliophile Society in two.'

'Kortmann?' Jon interjected.

'He was the spokesman for the transmitters, yes,' Tom confirmed. 'Kortmann was an ambitious man, but as long as Luca was at the helm, the group stayed together, however tenuously.' He stopped again and looked down at his hands.

'Then what?' asked Jon.

'Then ... then your mother was murdered,' said Tom quietly.

In the back of his mind Jon had somehow known this would come. Ever since the reason behind Lee's suicide had been suggested, the possibility had been nagging at his subconscious. But he'd managed to suppress it. Now Tom's dry statement that the same thing had happened to Marianne struck Jon like a blow to the chest. He gasped for air and bowed his head as he concentrated on his breathing. Next to him Katherina shifted position. He nodded to indicate that he was okay.

'Luca was devastated, of course,' Tom went on. 'He blamed himself for what happened, as if he were the one who had pushed her from the sixth-floor window. Of course he knew that in a purely physical sense he hadn't had anything to do with it, but he was convinced that it was our investigation of the Shadow Organization that had provoked the murder. He couldn't use the knowledge. He didn't have the resources to do anything with it. Instead he opted out. Out of the Bibliophile Society, out of his family, out of life beyond the walls of Libri di Luca. The bookshop became his refuge during all his waking hours.'

'Yes, I know,' said Jon tersely. 'That part I remember very clearly.'

'He sent you to a foster home to protect you,' said Tom earnestly. 'He knew they wouldn't go after him; they'd go after the ones he loved. Marianne and you. After losing your mother, he wanted to do everything he could to protect the family he had left, even if it meant never seeing you again.'

Jon's feeling of nausea was getting worse. He heard what Tom Nørreskov was saying, registered the words and attempted to assign some meaning to them. In the world that Luca found himself in back then, there was probably some degree of logic to what he'd done. But compared with Jon's own memories from that period, the whole thing made no sense. The leap was too great from believing that his father hadn't wanted anything to do with him to accepting that he had practically sacrificed himself for his son's sake.