Chapter 10

After their nap, Keith and Maddie stopped in the hotel restaurant and ordered black coffee. He looked around the café as they waited for the coffee to be delivered. A man in a gray suit too small for the width of his shoulders sat at a nearby table and seemed never to take his eyes off of them. Another man slouched near the entrance to the café reading a newspaper. A young man stood in the lobby engaged in texting on his cell phone. Two women sat at a sidewalk table sipping coffee and talking animatedly.

“It would be a lot more comforting having a bodyguard if I knew which one it was,” he whispered. “Any of these people could be either a security guard or a terrorist. They should all wear nametags.”

“Whatever happened to the days when the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black ones?” Maddie agreed. “In fact, whatever happened to good coffee?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be good coffee,” Keith answered. “Just strong. Come on. We’re only a few blocks from Dr. Schneider’s house.”

“Why are we going there? We could have stayed in bed.”

“Dr. Schneider has access to certain tools that we need,” Keith said. “Let’s just say that the Guild is an underground society.”

They stopped at the door of a house in a long row of buildings so close together that they touched. A ramp led up to the door in addition to the steps. Answering Keith’s knock, a man in a wheelchair opened the door. As he slipped inside, Keith looked behind him to see which of the people he had spotted were following him. He saw three people, but none looked familiar.

“Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor Drucker,” the old man said to Keith. The two talked casually in German for a few moments and then Keith turned to Maddie.

“Herr Doktor Schneider, hier ist Fraulein Doktor Zayne. Doktor Zayne, Herr Doktor Rolf Schneider.” Maddie mumbled a quick “Guten Morgen” to the old man in Kennedy-esque German.

“Do not worry, Dr. Zayne,” said Dr. Schneider. “I speak English and welcome the opportunity to use it.”

“Dr. Schneider was my advisor in antiquities when I came to study in Germany,” Keith said to Maddie. “There’s no one better qualified to help us decipher whatever it is that Gutenberg left us.”

She smiled and warmly shook the old man’s hand.

“I’m very pleased to meet someone who was so influential to Keith, Dr. Schneider,” she said.

“Könen wir du sprachen?” Dr. Schneider said. Maddie raised an eyebrow at Keith for a translation. “Use first names,” Dr. Schneider continued. “Please call me Rolf. There is no need for academic formalities in my kitchen. Come and have coffee and tell me what you have found. We have not opened the box in your absence. Frank would not hear of it.” At the mention of his name, Frank stepped through the kitchen door and embraced the couple.

“Yes, please call me Madeleine,” she said as Frank led her back into the kitchen. They sipped coffee from Rolf’s countertop espresso machine with satisfaction. It was much better than the hotel coffee.

“We have a clue to the puzzle,” Keith said when they were served. “We have a page of the Schoeffer manuscript that talks about a treasure revealed in the other Gutenberg. And we have the other Gutenberg.”

“And you stole it?”

“It was an emergency. All we needed were the padding sheets. They are a rubric for the 36-line Bible,” Keith explained. “They were behind plain rag book papers in a bound copy of the Bamberg Gospels.”

“And what makes you think that all you needed was the rubric?” Frank asked. “We may still need to wait for an official transfer of the Gospels to an evaluation center in order to complete the puzzle.”

“I don’t think so,” Keith said. He hungrily accepted biscuits from the tin being offered. It was almost time for lunch, but Keith was starving for breakfast. “The Gospels were identical in every way to any other 36-line Bamberg. It just happened to be only the first four books of the New Testament.”

“What made you think the rubric was the key?” Maddie asked.

“There were three things,” Keith said. “First, a vellum copy of the rubric was bound into the cover. Vellum would normally have been scraped and reused or it would have been bound into the book as final pages as we’ve seen on a number of occasions.”

“Not exactly conclusive,” Frank said, noncommittally.

“That brings me to the second item,” Keith said. “The bound book was only the first four books of the New Testament—The Gospels—but the rubric is the full 12 pages of the Bible copy sheets. And they are unused—no scribe crossed out letters or made annotations. So, the message, whatever it is, must be in the rubric, and if the Bible is needed at all, only the Gospels will be required. I seem to recall that there is a 36-line New Testament in the collection.”

“Lots of speculation going on there,” Frank said.

“Which brings me to point three,” Keith said. He was used to this skepticism from his grandfather. It was the way they worked together when Keith was beginning his dissertation. Frank may have had no more than a high school education, but his probing questions and demand for more proof drove Keith to some of his best work. “I think there’s an anomaly in the rubric.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Frank said. “Without that we could use any rubric for the Bamberg and any set of Gospels. What’s the nature of the anomaly?”

“You didn’t tell me there was an anomaly,” Maddie said.

“It wasn’t an issue when we took the pages.”

“What is it?” Rolf asked.

“There are nicks in some of the characters,” Keith said. “The printing is pristine. The substrate is crisp and clean, but randomly throughout the page, the characters have tiny wedges taken out of them. I didn’t have time to check every page, but the nicks occurred frequently enough on the first page that it stood out.”

“And what does that mean?” Frank asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Keith said. “It just struck me that such a beautiful piece of work shouldn’t have damaged characters in it. I know what you went through to shape characters in exactly the way Schoeffer’s type was worn. But these are a regular shape. There must be a message buried in it somewhere.”

“We should start by just reading the letters that are nicked,” Maddie volunteered. “Maybe they spell something out.”

“There’s enough of them,” Keith admitted, “and we should definitely check that. I’m guessing that we’ll find that there aren’t enough different letters to make out a message when taken in order.”

“Why not?” Maddie asked.

“Think of the rubric in terms of first letters of chapters,” Keith said. “Occasionally there is an entire line of text that will be inked in red, but mostly it is the grand capitals that are left to be filled in by the scribe. In English, the most common letter that begins a sentence is ‘T.’ I’ve never done an exact study of it, but I would guess that in German it is ‘D.’ The rubric for a Latin New Testament has more ‘Es’ and ‘Is’ than all the other letters of the alphabet combined.”

“You say the nicks are wedge-shaped?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” Keith said. He wanted desperately to pull a page of the rubric from the archival box for the four of them to look at, but good document preservation instincts kept them sealed in the box until they could be opened and examined under proper conditions. “It struck me that all the nicks are uniform in size and shape,” Keith said.

“Like arrow-heads,” Frank speculated. “Same size and shape, but not all pointing the same direction? Could be a path we have to follow.”

“Did he actually have to cast type in each letter shape?” Maddie asked. “I know he did a lot of different versions of the same character to accommodate mimicking the scribes and making the lines come out even.”

“We’ll have to get it under high magnification,” Keith said, “but I’m guessing the nicks were made after the characters were cast, and maybe even after they were set. It would be awfully hard to predict and cast characters that had to be set in a specific order through the body.”

“So, we need the laboratory,” Rolf said. “I see no reason to wait.” He led them to a door that Maddie had assumed was a closet, but when opened revealed a small elevator. “If you would not mind using the stairs,” Rolf said, “I will meet you below.” Next to the elevator was a second door that led to a stairway descending in the adjacent space. Keith surprised Maddie, however, by opening yet another door at the bottom of the stairs and leading her and Frank down a much longer set of stairs.

“Rolf guards one of the entrances to the Guild laboratory,” Keith said to Maddie.

“How many entrances are there?” Maddie asked. Frank chuckled behind her.

Keith glanced back at Maddie, remembering his own first time descending to the lab. He had entered through the museum and thought they were going into the basement, but the stairway went down six flights with no doors.

“I’m not sure,” Keith told Maddie, “During the war, everything was at risk. The museum was actually bombed. The caretakers had to find ways to protect the collection, first from the Nazis who were burning what they called seditious texts, then from the bombings, and finally from the Allies who saw victory over Germany as a way to gain a huge number of valuable artworks and spirit them out of the country. It was a wonder that any of the collection survived intact. You know that a Gutenberg Bible that went missing during the war recently surfaced in Russia. It was taken away and hidden during the entire Communist era and the Russians refused to return it to the museum from which it was stolen during or soon after the war. Part of the strategy here in Mainz was to wall off rooms and create a maze in the catacombs under the city. Nothing leads directly to anything anymore, but Rolf has a connecting laboratory just under his house. Other passages might wind for a mile before you connect to the hidden rooms.”

“Were you in Germany during the war, Frank?” Maddie asked.

“No. My family emigrated from here to the United States when I was only seven. But they maintained strong ties back here.”

They reached the bottom of the staircase and Frank opened a door on the right.

The laboratory they entered was as well-equipped and modern as the one Maddie worked in. She gasped when she saw it.

“Part of the work of the Guild,” Keith explained, “is the preservation of the art of printing as represented by the great works that have come from the press. This is actually a kind of teaching facility where Guild members learn every aspect of the printing arts, including hot-metal typesetting, cold-type, and even computer typography.”

“Keith is responsible for having introduced computers into the lab,” Frank said. “Most of my generation was not enthused about it. But it is part of the comprehensive package. It all has to do with the preservation of the word.”