Matt placed his knife and fork next to each other across his plate. He wasn’t sure if it was the processed meat in the Schnitzel, or the anticipation of finding some hard evidence of a Spanish discovery of New Zealand that left him feeling a bit sick in his stomach. Either way, it was 12:50pm, time to get back upstairs.
‘Welcome back,’ Herr Mischeler greeted them. ‘Everything’s arranged. If you’d like to follow me, we can make our way to the archives right now.’
Matt, Andreas, and Julia followed Mischeler through a sliding glass door at the back of the collection room. He took a key from his pocket and the group passed through the door he unlocked. It was a different world.
They passed through corridors lined with rolling shelves stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Large steel chests of files and wide drawers crowded another hall. A conveyer system ran overhead, books frequently going past to an unknown destination. There were even yellow boxes running around on an overhead track, turning corners, crossing intersections, and going down through the floor. Matt was suitably impressed. The whole place had a familiar smell of old books. They took a cargo lift down to floor D.
Matt was amazed that anyone could find their way around this building. As they went down a flight of stairs, he completely lost his bearings. Herr Mischeler led them to another small stair against a wall. Here, they passed through a door that Matt would never otherwise have noticed; it was concealed so subtly in the wall panels.
‘This is quite some place you have here,’ Matt said, intending to compliment Herr Mischeler, as they started down a long, narrow, flight of stairs that the door had hidden.
‘Thanks, we make do with the space we can find. It’s an old building and wasn’t designed to house a library. Most of the building is taken up by smaller offices and some auditoriums. It makes squeezing in a library a bit of a challenge, but then this is just one of our many book storage facilities.’
At the bottom of the stairs, the slightly ajar door opened out into a triangular room. Sitting at a desk on the other side of the room, by a large opening into the next room, was a stern-looking, silent man. Herr Mischeler simply nodded at him as they walked past. Matt wasn’t sure if he was a guard of some sort, or just someone having a coffee break. They walked past and through the opening beyond him. Matt’s mouth dropped open but words didn’t come out.
In front of him, Matt stared at a huge space, full of floor to ceiling shelves running in perfectly ordered rows as far as the eyes could follow. Off to the sides of these shelves were further openings into other large chambers which also housed rows and rows of shelves. Continuing along in Herr Mischeler’s footsteps, Matt saw that both Julia and Andreas were also struggling to take in what they were seeing.
‘Is your Dad’s library like this?’ Matt asked Andreas.
‘Not even close.’
‘It’s incredible,’ Julia said.
‘Not many people get to see this,’ Herr Mischeler said with a proud grin. ‘It’s always nice to hear happy reactions like yours. Here we are… the Kirstein Collection.’
Matt looked at the shelves they had stopped at. Nothing here told him that this was the Kirstein Collection. The shelves looked like all the rest. The only thing different was the shelf number, printed in bold letters at the top right.
‘So…’ Herr Mischeler continued. ‘…we’re looking for the content of his last journey, the journey to New Zealand.’
Herr Mischeler pulled a card from his jacket pocket and looked at a number he had written on it. He moved along the shelves, his finger tracing the reference numbers that appeared on each shelf, under each row of books and small carton boxes. Eventually he stopped, four shelving units further along, and looked up at Matt, smiling.
‘The content of these three shelves is everything Kirstein brought back from New Zealand with him. This content was stored days before his death. Everything here was catalogued, but nothing has been made public or properly investigated. We had no reason to believe there was anything special beyond what he had noted in his journals. He certainly never made mention of anything that could change history, but who knows, huh?’
‘Perhaps he also wanted to look into things a little before he went public,’ Matt suggested.
‘And little could he know he would die before the month was out,’ Andreas said.
‘Too true,’ Mischeler said. ‘So where should we start? What are we looking for?’
‘Hopefully, a journal of some sort,’ Matt answered. ‘Something written in Spanish, and probably about 500 years old.’
‘I suggest we work one box at a time then,’ Herr Mischeler said, taking the left-upper-most box from the shelf and opening it.
The four of them worked together in hopeful silence.