Chapter 3
What the Archivist Sent
The parcel arrived on Thursday, from a bookshop that sold nothing else.
Livraria Pessoa was a narrow, dark shop off the Rua do Alecrim, with ladders, a cat, and an old man who had never once asked Anselm Boateng a question. That was the deal. On certain Thursdays Anselm came in, and the old man went into the back and returned with a parcel tied in string. This time it was a 1957 guide to the Bosphorus, with a pressed violet between its pages.
Inside the back cover, under the endpaper, was a brown envelope sealed with green wax. In the wax was the shape of an anchor.
David broke it with his thumbnail.
It was eleven typed pages. It was always typed, on an old machine whose letter e sat a hair above the line. There was never a name or a signature. For nine years, first through the man who raised him and for the last fourteen months straight to David, those pages had arrived. They had never been wrong.
"Hakan Doruk," he read aloud. "Fifty-eight, Istanbul. Builder. The Yıldız Sitesi."
"The block that fell in the earthquake," said Camille, sitting on the stove. "I remember the pictures."
"A hundred and eighty-seven dead. Seventy of them children. Doruk mixed sea-sand into the concrete because it was cheaper. He bribed the inspector, then collected ninety-four million euros from the state for safe housing." David turned the page. "On the twenty-first of next month, he opens a new tower. He'll say the word safety a great many times."
"And the hard part?"
"He carries a small steel key, the size of a lighter. It opens his accounts in four countries and a vault in Zurich. He never puts it down. He sleeps with it."
"A pickpocket's job," said Camille.
"A pickpocket's miracle."
"There will be a receiving line," said Anselm. "There is always a receiving line."
At the bottom of the last page, as on every page for nine years, was one line: For those counted last.
Ravi cleared his throat. "Can I say something, and can you all promise not to be annoyed?"
"No," said Nell.
"I'm saying it anyway. Three big jobs in two years, each better than the last, each exactly what some stranger in a green-wax envelope tells us. Has anyone ever asked who she is?"
"Many times," said David. "Old Morgan told me not to."
"Old Morgan is dead. He's been dead fourteen months. And she's still writing." Ravi lifted his hands. "I'm not saying she's wrong. I've checked every fact, down to the sea-sand. But when someone knows more than you and wants the same things you do, is that a comfort, or a warning label?"
Nobody spoke. Out in the yard, the goat complained.
"It's fair," said Nell at last.
"It is fair," said David. "I don't know who the Archivist is. Emrys told me a week before he died that I'd be sent things, that I should follow them, and that the day I wanted to know who sent them, I should burn the envelope first. I thought he was joking. If I ever think she's lying, I'll tell you at once. And if any of you wants to stop, you can, with everything you've earned. No questions."
"That's not an answer," said Ravi.
"No. It's the one I have."
Ravi sighed. "Fine. But I'm putting it in the file that I asked."
That night, David sat alone at the kitchen table with the Minister's ledger.
He had told Ravi he was copying account numbers. He wasn't. He was copying something else: a list of codes at the foot of every fourth page, each starting with the same two letters. AF. AF-0417, AF-0422, AF-0431. They weren't accounts. They were clients' codes, of a firm that had helped the Minister move his money: Aldermoor Fiduciary SA, Geneva.
He had seen those two letters before. In Marseille, in a customs man's safe. In Zurich, in a banker's drawer. He had written them down each time and told no one. It wasn't a pattern yet. It was the beginning of a shape, like a face you see in a stained ceiling.
He took a blank white card from his pocket and walked it across his knuckles, the way he did when he was thinking.
"You will ruin your eyes."
It was Camille, in the doorway, in an old cardigan. She had known him twenty years, longer than anyone, longer than the name. She sat down and took the pencil from his hand.
"You looked at those two letters for two years and think I don't see it. I'm not asking what they mean. But Ravi is right. We are not afraid of the dark. You ask us to follow you and you don't say where."
"It's nothing yet."
"That is what you say about everything that is something."
He smiled tiredly. "Emrys would have watched me vanish through that mirror and said, Very pretty. But why does a man who wants to be unseen need a hundred people watching him go?"
She laughed softly. "And you would have said?"
"That's the whole trick. The audience will believe whatever you give them time to believe. I was seventeen when he asked me what the first illusion is. I said, the vanishing lady. He said, no. It's the magician. The first thing the audience believes is whoever they're told is standing in front of them."
"You will tell me when it is time."
"When it's time."
"Swear it."
"I swear it on the elephant." It was a joke from a theatre in Cardiff, a box built for an elephant that never came. She squeezed his hand once and went up the stairs.
He sat for a while. Then he opened the sideboard drawer and looked at a card with a small hole in the corner. It was blank, and it had been there since the winter. He closed the drawer.
In the next room, a late news programme was still on. Anselm, who could only sleep with noise, lay on the sofa with his eyes shut.
"—the Minister's office confirms that, after last night's events, he has hired a private security consultancy to help the police. The firm is headed by a former British Army intelligence officer, Mr. Gideon Strake of Halyard Risk."
Anselm opened one eye.
On the screen, on the palace steps, stood a tall, lean man of about fifty in a dark overcoat, with short iron-grey hair and a calm, narrow face. He didn't look like a man being photographed. He looked like a man reading the room.
"We believe," Strake said quietly, "the thief has told us a great deal about himself. And we're very grateful."
Anselm had driven an ambassador through a coup. He wasn't easily frightened. But something in that patient face made the hair rise on his arms. He sat up.
"David," he called into the dark house. "I think you should come and see this."