The Serpent Papers Read Free

wooden boards, one broken. Ornate buckle and clasp suggest baroque period, gilt tooling on cover . . . minuscule patterns. Parchment bifolia, much older, burnished on both sides, gilt highlights and iron gall ink . . . badly cockled, tannins from covering leather have stained early and final pages of the book. Wherever it was stored was unsealed and unstable. Freezing in the winter and very hot and humid in the summer. Most valuable pages missing, presumed stolen. All in all , I sigh, a disaster.
    But I am confident of other things.
    Do not tell him what it is.
    The name spinning round my head.

I park the car just north of the village of Valldemossa, along the easterly road to the Hermitage of the Holy Trinity. They have taken the book to the university, but I have declined going with them. The chemists will handle it, the supervisor. People with the appropriate skills. The book doctors. The surgeons. The right pigments and chemicals and machines. The right scalpels and humidifiers and magnets and weights. I walk angrily, burning off the energy.
    To come so close, only to lose what is most valuable. Think of Harold Bingley, warm in his Belgravia office. Neighbours to the Queen we are, at Picatrix. An idiosyncratic location for an office, far from the relevant libraries and museums, but the one preferred by our funder as it is nearest to his favourite hotel, though we don’t see him. Only Harold Bingley has that privilege. What will he think? We have located the very object you have been looking for, through no genius of our own. A freak storm, an old church, a bunch of monks putting out a fire find a book, which just happens to be the palimpsest we have been hunting for – nothing you have done merits praise. I imagine the man who will receive this information. They have recovered the manuscript, sir, but the Illuminatus palimpsest is missing from within. It has been stolen. Disappeared. Lost.
    Will he be angry?
    Will he be sanguine?
    Will he experience the same raging frustration?
    I know nothing about him, though rumours abound. He is a Texan venture capitalist, American, New York, the guy used to fund the Met. I heard he was a professor of antiquity who came into a vast fortune inherited from his recently deceased Brahmin wife. No, no, no, Picatrix is an Israeli start-up engineer who sold his platform to Google for three billion . . . originally obsessed with collecting Isaac Newton’s alchemical notebooks, he hunts for the source material Newton studied. We talk about him, without knowing anything other than the size of his wallet, which is immense, and his intellectual persuasions, which seem – bizarrely enough – to run in parallel with mine. And now, I number one among Mr Picatrix’s team. I kick the snow. With nothing to show for it but a mildewed book with a missing set of pages.
    I entered Picatrix two years ago on a sleety afternoon. Halting light peculiar to London in October. Summoned to a grand café in St James’s on Piccadilly. Dazzling black and white marble in geometric designs, sumptuous columns sprouting Japanese lacquer. Domed ceilings. Edwardian teapots in the style of George III, silver glinting. Coiffed hair and gold cufflinks. At the appointed hour Michael Crawford, Classics professor and Archivist at the Special Collections Library at Stanford University, arrived accompanied by a severe gentleman in a suit. Crawford brisk in manner, kind in language, comfortably settled into his middle sixties. Soft Midwestern tones. A mentor from my graduate days. Specialist in multispectral imaging. Papyrologist. His friend pinched in a wiry sort of way, the skin on his cheeks so pale I could see the blue of his veins.
    ‘Meet Harold Bingley, Deputy Head of Picatrix,’ Crawford had said.
    ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance.’ I reached out my hand.
    ‘Likewise,’ Bingley lisped.
    With that they demanded service.
    ‘Devilishly miserable day,’ Bingley observed, while Crawford said