The club has no sign. You knock on a door behind an antiquarian bookshop in Berlin, a man looks at you for a long time, and if he decides you're expected, you go down. I am expected. I am Solveig, thirty-two, a restorer of paper and leather, and I have my brother's debt folded in my coat pocket like a receipt for something I didn't buy.
Downstairs it smells of cigar smoke and old glue. Card tables, green baize, low lamps. Nobody looks up. At the far end, in a leather chair with a book open on his knee, sits the man they call the publisher.
He closes the book when I reach him. He doesn't stand.
“Solveig Aalto,” he says. “Trained in Florence. Left after a year. Your mother still keeps the shop in Lübeck, and your brother owes me eighty thousand euros.” He says it all in the same mild voice, the way you might read a colophon.
“I came to settle it.”
“With what?” Not cruel. Curious. He gestures at the chair opposite and I sit, because standing has stopped being an option. Up close his hands are very still, and his eyes stay on my face while everything in me wants to look at the exit.
He slides a single sheet across the table. It is a page from a sixteenth-century psalter, water-damaged, the ink lifting. “Restore this by dawn, here, at this table, and I halve the debt. Fail, and you will owe me the other half yourself.” He leans back. “Or leave now, and we'll see how your brother fares. Choose, Solveig. I find I'm curious what you'll do.”
