Mister B. Gone Read online

  “Such a story!” said another voice, this of a well-rounded woman who had come in behind me at some point in my exchange with Gutenberg. I turned and bowed to her.

  “This is my wife, Hannah. Hannah this is Mister B.”

  “The man you dreamt about,” Hannah replied.

  “Down to the last . . .” he seemed lost for the appropriate word. “Last . . .”

  “Scar,” I prompted him, smiling the horror of my appearance away.

  “He suffered greatly,” Gutenberg said to his wife. “His story should be heard. Will you have Peter fetch wine?”

  “Might I also respectfully request some bread?” I asked Gutenberg. “I have not eaten since I woke from my dream of this house.”

  “We can do better than bread,” Hannah replied. “I will bring what’s left of the pork.” Then she threw a less than loving glance at the Archbishop. “And some cheese, with the bread and wine.”

  “That is most generous,” I said. I wasn’t faking my gratitude.

  I was both parched and fiercely hungry.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Hannah said, her discomfort at being in my presence all too plain. She departed hastily, muttering a prayer as she went.

  “My wife is uneasy, I’m afraid,” Gutenberg said.

  “Because of me?”

  “Well . . . you’re part of it, to be truthful. I described you to her when I woke from my dream, and now here you are in my workshop.”

  “I’ve told her she has nothing to fear,” the Archbishop said. “I am here to protect this house from the workings of the Evil One.

  They all have their tricks, of course, but I can see right through their guises as clearly as I see you before me, Mister B.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I said.

  The conversation died away for a time, during which I heard whispered exchanges from beyond the door on the far side of the room.

  “I was told you were a goldsmith,” I said.

  “Once. Before I knew what greater work I had to do.”

  “And what is that greater work, if I may ask?”

  Gutenberg looked troubled. He glanced over at the Archbishop, then back at me, then at the floor between us.

  “I understand,” I said, “you’ve invented something of great consequence, yes? Something that must be kept secret.”

  Gutenberg looked up from the floor, and met my gaze. “I think it will change everything,” he said very softly.

  “I know it will,” I replied, matching his calm tone with a comforting softness of my own. “The world will never be the same again.”

  “But there are spies, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And thieves.”

  “Of course. Everywhere. Something like this, something so significant, brings out the predators. It’s bound to. But you have friends.”

  “Fewer than I thought,” Gutenberg said, his face taut, his voice grim. “There’s corruption wherever I look.”

  “There’s also help from Heaven,” I said. “I’ve seen both sides. They’re on your roof right now.”

  “Both sides, huh . . .” His gaze strayed to the ceiling for a moment.

  “Yes, both. I swear. You’re not alone.”

  “You swear.”

  “I just did. And there are more warriors in the streets.

  Moving in the ground beneath people’s feet.”

  “Is he telling the truth?” Gutenberg asked the Archbishop.

  Before he could answer the question, his Excellency had to chew and swallow the mouthful of pork he’d surreptitiously bitten off. He made one attempt to reply with his mouth still half-full, but his words were incomprehensible. So we waited another minute or so while he thoroughly emptied his mouth.

  Then he set the pork bone down on the plate where he’d been served it, wiped his hand and mouth with the fine linen cloth laid beside his plate, and finished off by taking a cleansing mouthful of wine before finally saying:

  “For all the sad state of him, this visitor of yours knows whereof he speaks. And I know for a fact that angelic forces are here with us, assembled as a consequence of my request to the Pope. Inevitably their presence here aroused the interest of the Fallen One. We should not be surprised at that. Nor should we be surprised that he sent his vermin to do battle with those the Pope requested to protect you.”

  “So now they fight on the roof of my workshop,” Gutenberg said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “And in the street,” the Archbishop added, plucking the detail from my own report to fuel his own. In truth, I doubt the man had ever laid his eyes upon any creature that had not first been spiced and roasted to his taste. But the weight of his robes and crosses and rings seemed to lend their heft to his words.

  “We are entirely surrounded by soldiers of the Lord,” he told Gutenberg. “These are warrior-angels, Johannes, their one purpose to protect you and what you have made from harm.”

  “Speaking of which—” I began.

  “I am not finished!” The Archbishop snapped, a stringy piece of greasy pork escaping with the words to land upon my cheek.

  His vulgarity made me reorder my execution list somewhat: this pork-spitting Excellency had just been elevated to second place, directly below Quitoon.

  Quitoon. Ha. Though I’d come here in pursuit of him, so much else had happened, or was in the process of happening, that I’d forgotten him for a time, which had been a pleasant release. For too many years I’d thought of him and only of him: I’d been perpetually concerned for his comfort, intimidated by his rages, anguished whenever he staged one of his departures, and pathetically grateful when he returned to me. But paradoxically this final pursuit of him had brought me to a stage where a drama greater than love was being played, a stage where the agent of destruction that my sorrow had made of me was ideally placed to do harm. Indeed, if even a part of what had been claimed on behalf of Gutenberg’s creation was true, then by destroying it I would—oh God, how strange to even shape the words, much less consider their reality—be wounding the world.

  There was a sweet thought.

  “What do you think, Mister B.?”

  I had briefly lost track of the conversation as I’d mused on love and destruction. To gain myself a little thinking time, I repeated the question:

  “What do I think? Now that you ask, what do I think?”

  “How can there be any doubt?” the Archbishop said, slamming the base of his Shepherd’s crook on the bare boards of the workshop floor to emphasize his feelings. “The Devil will not carry this day.”

  Now I understood what I’d missed: Gutenberg had voiced some doubt as to how the battle being raged around his house (and on the roof all the way up to Heaven, and in its bowels all the way down to Hell) would come to an end. To judge by the fretful look he wore, Gutenberg was by no means certain that the angelic legion would triumph. The Archbishop’s response was unequivocal.

  “Do not doubt the Lord’s power, Johannes,” he breathed.

  Gutenberg offered no reply to this, which further inflamed the Archbishop, who again hammered the floorboards with his dazzling crook.

  “You!” he said, turning in my direction and striking the floor a third time, just in case I missed the fact that I was now being blessed with his attentions. “Yes, Mister B., you! What is your opinion on the matter?”

  “That we’re perfectly safe, your Excellency. Yes, the battle is fierce. But it rages outside. In here, we are protected by your presence. No soldier of Hell would dare enter this fortress with your Excellency’s holy presence to drive him off.”

  “You see?” the Archbishop said. “Even your dream visitor understands.”

  “Besides,” I added, unable to resist the fun of this, “how would he enter? Just knock on the front door and invite himself in?”

  Gutenberg seemed to see the sense in this, and was reassured.

  “Then nothing can undo what I have made?”

  “Nothing,” the Archbishop
said.

  Gutenberg looked at me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Perhaps I should show it to you then,” he suggested.

  “Only if you wish to,” I replied lightly.

  He smiled. “I do.”

  So saying, he led me across the room to the heavy door with Do Not Enter carved into it. He knocked, rapping out a code of entry, and the door, which was twice the thickness of any door I’d ever seen, was opened. I could not see what was inside; Gutenberg was blocking my view. But I caught the oily, bitter smell that came through the door like a greasy wave.

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Ink, of course,” Gutenberg replied. “To print the words.”

  I should have taken the warning that “of course” offered me: He expected me to know that he was more than something as commonplace as a copier of books. But I blundered on, stupidly.

  “So you copy books?” I said. “What have you invented? A new quill?”

  It was meant as a joke, but Gutenberg did not see the humor in it. He stopped on the bottom step, preventing me from descending any further.

  “We don’t copy books here,” he said, his tone far from friendly.

  I felt the weight of the Archbishop’s hand and rings upon my shoulder. He was behind me, blocking my exit with crook and girth.

  “Why so many questions, Botch?” he said.

  “I like to learn.”

  “But you’ve walked through Gutenberg’s dreams. Or at least you claim you have. How could you possibly pass through the mind of a man consumed by one great labor, and not see that labor?”

  I was trapped, caught by the His Holiness behind, the genius in front, and my own foolish mouth in the middle.

  It was my tongue that had got me into this little mess, so I silently entreated it now to get me out.

  “You speak of your Reprodukagraph, I assume,” I said, my eyes, I’m certain, registering a certain shock at hearing this five-syllable bizzarity emerge from between my lips unbidden.

  “Is that what I should call it?” Gutenberg said, the ice that had been in his voice moments before now melted away. He took the final step down into the workshop floor and turned to look at me. “I was thinking I’d call it a printing press.”

  “Well, you could, I suppose,” I replied, glancing back at the Archbishop as I spoke and giving him a look of aristocratic ill-temper. “Would you be so kind as to lift your hand off my shoulder, your bejewelledness?”

  There were a number of barely suppressed guffaws from the workers in the immense room behind Gutenberg, and even the stern genius himself allowed laughter to bloom in his eyes when he heard my addressing the Archbishop in this fashion. His Excellency duly removed his hand, not without first harshly digging his fingers and thumb into my flesh to inform me silently that he would be keeping a close watch on me. Gutenberg, meanwhile, turned at the bottom of the stairs, inviting me to follow. I did so, stepping down into the workshop itself, finally laying eyes on the apparatus that was the cause of all the conflict around, above, and below the Gutenberg house.

  The invention looked very remotely like a wine press, but there was a great deal about its construction that was purely of Gutenberg’s design. I watched as one of the three men attending to the operation of the press took a sheet of paper and carefully placed it on a bed of ink-stained wood.

  “What are you printing now?” I asked the genius.

  He arbitrarily plucked a page from the dozen or so that were neatly pegged up to dry on lengths of string above our heads.

  “I had wanted to begin with the Bible.”

  “In the beginning was the Word,” I said.

  Luckily for me, Gutenberg knew the rest of the line, because all I recalled was those first six words from the Gospel according to John. Not long after reading them, I’d thrown the book back amongst the garbage on the Ninth Circle, where I’d first found it.

  “And the Word was with God,” Gutenberg went on.

  “The Word,” I murmured. Then looking back at the Archbishop, I said, “Was it any particular Word, do you think?”

  He gave me a silent sneer, as though to reply to me was beneath him.

  “Just asking,” I said, shrugging.

  “This is my foreman. Dieter. Say hello to Mister B., Dieter.”

  A young bald man working on the press, his apron and hands liberally decorated with smears and handprints of ink, looked up and gave me a quick wave.

  “Dieter convinced me that we should start with something more modest in scale than the Bible. So I’m testing the press by printing a school grammar book—”

  “The Ares Grammatica?” I said, having spotted the words on the title page, which was drying at the other end of the room.

  (My demonic vision saw what most human eyes would never have been able to read, so Gutenberg was delighted that I could name the book.)

  “You’re familiar with it?”

  “I studied it, when I was much younger. But, of course, the copy my tutor had was very precious. And expensive.”

  “My printing press will put an end to the great expense of books, because it will make many in the same way, from a plate, set with all the letters. In reverse of course.”

  “In reverse! Ha!” This pleased me for some reason.

  He reached up and pulled down another of the sheets drying overhead. “I persuaded Dieter that we might print one thing that was not so boring as a grammar book. So we agreed to print out a poem from the Sibylline Prophecies as well.

  Dieter was listening to all this. He looked up briefly and cast a loving, brotherly smile in Gutenberg’s direction. Clearly Gutenberg was one of those men who inspired devotion in his employees.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said as Gutenberg handed the page to me.

  The lines of the poem were neat and legible. There was no elaborate illustration on the first letter, such as monks often took months to create on a manuscript. But the page had other virtues. The spaces between the words were precisely the same size and the design of the letters made the poem marvelously easy to read.

  “The paper feels slightly damp,” I observed.

  Gutenberg looked pleased.

  “It’s a little trick somebody taught me,” he said. “The paper is dampened before being printed on. But you know this, of course. You told me in the dream.”

  “And was I right?”

  “Oh yes, sir. You were quite right. I don’t know how I would have fared without the gift of your knowledge.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I said, handing the sheet with the poem on it back to Gutenberg and wandering on down the length of the chambers, past the printing press to where two other men worked feverishly to arrange lines of mirror-image letters on wooden trays. All the necessary parts of a sentence—the letters in both upper- and lowercases, the empty spaces between the words, all the numerals, and, finally, of course, all the punctuation—were laid out on four tables, so that both could work without one getting in the way of the other. Unlike Dieter and his colleagues working on the press, all of whom took a moment from their tasks to look up at us when we entered, and even laugh when I made fun of the Archbishop, these two were so profoundly immersed in their work, referring constantly to a hand-scribed copy of the text they were concentrated on, that they did not even glance up. Their labor was as fascinating to watch as it was surely demanding to do. I found myself removed into an almost trancelike state by watching them.

  “All the men have signed an oath of silence,” Gutenberg said, “so that none but us should have the power of this press.”

  “Quite right,” I replied.

  It occurs to me now that the revelations, such as they were, are almost over; that there’s only one Secret of any consequence left to tell. And given that fact perhaps a wise soul such as yourself, tired of petty games and schoolyard threats that have on occasion issued from me— mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—that you may think this is not an inappropriate time to forsake the book entirely.
>
  Yes, I’m giving you one last chance, my friend. Call me sentimental but I don’t have any great desire to murder you, as you know I will if you get to the final page. I am so much closer to you now than I was when I first told you about matching my strides; to the number of pages you turned, I can hear you muttering to yourself as you turn the page; and, of course, I can smell you and taste your sweat. You’re uneasy, aren’t you? Part of you wants to do as I have requested and burn the book.

  If I may offer a little advice: That’s the part to listen to.

  The other part, the part that feels defiant and is putting your life at risk just to play a dangerous game of dare, that part is just the willful child in you, speaking out, demanding to be heard. That’s understandable. We all have these slivers of who we were when we were very, very young left in our heads.

  But please, don’t listen to that voice. There’s nothing left in the pages to come that’s of any great interest. It’s just the politics of Heaven and Hell from here.

  The human story is over. Now you know what the mystery of the Gutenberg workshop was you’re probably thinking—and I wouldn’t blame you—all this for a printing press? Ludicrous.

  No, I wouldn’t blame you for setting fire to this damn book out of sheer fury, to have been given something at the end of your journey that turns out to be this inconsequential. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you. God alone knows how many times I told you to do the sensible thing and let the book go. But you insisted on waiting. You obliged me to tell you things, like the curious knot of feelings I had for Quitoon, that I would have preferred to keep to myself, but which I confessed out of respect for the truth, as a thing entire, not scraped together from bits and pieces.

  Well, it’s over now. You can still burn the book and be satisfied that you read the bulk of it. It’s time. There are a few pages remaining, but why waste more of your valuable time? You now know what mysterious invention Quitoon had been in pursuit of—the same one that makes the existence of this very book possible.

  Everything comes full circle in the end. You met me in these pages. We learned to understand one another as we went from the garbage heaps of the Ninth Circle up into the World Above, and then from Joshua’s Field to the long road I traveled with Quitoon. I didn’t bore you with a list of the places we went in search of some new invention Quitoon had heard about. They were mostly instruments of war: cannons and long bows, siege towers and battering rams. Sometimes a thing of beauty would await us at the end of one our searches. I did get to hear the first harpsichord make music, for instance, in the 1390s, I think. I lose track. So many places, so many creations.