by Adam Roberts
‘This is most edifying,’ said Robert, politely.
‘Most contemporary scholars,’ said Teabag, examining the Mona Eda painting again, ‘don’t believe that the grail was ever an actual cup. They see it as, rather, a symbol of the truth and understanding needed to achieve the experience of salvation. More particularly, it is the vessel of Grace, the divine Grace of which Christ was the incarnation. In other words, it is Mary herself . . . for she was the vessel that carried Christ. The “chalice” becomes, then, a symbol of the Eternal Sacred Female Principle, the vessel that carries life and redemption within it. Do you see?’
‘More or less,’ said Robert. ‘Um, what was the middle bit again?’
‘Mary was the grail, and Christ himself the wine within it. Most Madonna-and-Child portraits are aware of this symbolism, and show Mary fully enclosing her child in her arms. Look at the Louvre Mona Lisa, and you can see that she has folded her arms around her lap in such a way as to almost make a seal: you can imagine pouring in fluid.’
Robert tried to imagine this. He looked at Sophie, but she seemed absorbed in Teabag’s words.
‘That is the problem with the “Mona Lisa”, the Baronet continued, almost to himself. ‘In her famous version, she is an empty chalice. It makes no sense. Madonnas are always painted with Child; the one always complements the other. The only exception to the rule is paintings of the Annunciation, when Mary is impregnated by the Holy Spirit, and even that subject is in a manner of speaking Mary and Child. But Leonardo’s Madonna, his so-called “Mona” is clutching her arms around empty space . . .’
‘Except . . .’ said Robert, understanding Teabag’s point, ‘. . . in this picture . . .’
‘Exactly! This makes sense of everything! In this picture the Madonna is cradling her child . . . this is the original that Leonardo copied, and bowdlerised . . .’
‘Her child?’ said Robert. ‘But it’s a fish. Shouldn’t it be a Christ?’
‘In a sense it is a Christ,’ said Teabag. ‘Ichthus. I suppose it’s a sort of visual pun . . . or else—’
‘Or else what?’
‘Well . . . I suppose . . .’
‘What?’ urged Robert. ‘What?’
‘No, the alternative is too extreme to contemplate.’
After a long silence Sophie spoke up. ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Is it really?’
She turned to face them both.
In her right hand was a small pistol.
24
‘Sophie!’ exclaimed Robert.
‘Mademoiselle Nudivue!’ ejaculated Teabag.1
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Robert. ‘You’re pointing a gun at us!’ He stopped for a moment, and then added: ‘I appreciate that that sounds as if I have asked a question and then answered it, but my stating the obvious fact that you are pointing a gun at us does not actually provide an answer to the original question, which I therefore repeat: what are you doing?’
‘Ha!’ announced Sophie.
‘Wait—’ said Robert, with sudden relief. ‘I know what’s happening . . . this is a classic misunderstanding . . . we’ve both jumped to the conclusion that you’re pointing that gun at us . . . when in fact you’re aiming it at some enemy or adversary who is approaching stealthily behind us.’ He looked behind him, but there was nobody there: only the precariously stacked items of art, the books and the curiosities. He turned back to Sophie.
‘No,’ she clarified. ‘I am indeed pointing the gun specifically at you two. Hands up!’
Teabag and Robert put their hands up.
‘But – but – but – ’, sputtered Robert, sounding briefly like a motorboat. ‘But in heaven’s name Sophie – why?’
‘Why? Why am I pointing the gun at you? Because I intend to shoot you both!’
‘Shoot us? What – to injure us?’
‘Shoot you to kill you!’
Robert digested this. ‘Again,’ he said, ‘why seems to be the question that comes first to mind.’
‘Do you mean “why shoot you as opposed to kill you in some other way?” Or “why shoot you rather than let you live?”
‘The second one,’ said Robert.
‘I’d be quite interested to know the answer to the first one too,’ put in Teabag.
‘Well,’ said Sophie, stepping forward and moving the pistol between her two targets. ‘The answer to the first one is that I don’t have any more of those special genetically-modified fish to stuff down your throats; and that therefore a gun will have to do.’
‘
‘Well I think that’s pretty obvious now, isn’t it? My work at Geneticon in Switzerland . . . which Jacques had only recently uncovered, incidentally . . . enabled me to breed a strain of fish in which your fingerprint was inscribed upon every scale. I smuggled eggs of this new breed out of the lab personally; I personally hatched and raised them in a pond not far from here. A pond in a London city garden; a house that belongs to Conspiratus Opi Dei.’
‘You are a member of the secret Consp . . .’ Robert began, with an even breathier gaspiness, but Sophie cut him short.
‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘I think everybody has already worked that out. It should also be obvious that I carried one of those same fish in my shoulder bag when I came along to my appointment with Jacques Sauna-Lurker. You of all people should know, Sir Herbert, that I possess an almost freakish strength in my upper body. I wrestled you to the ground easily enough back at your house.’
‘You did indeed,’ recalled Teabag, almost wistfully. ‘Before you slapped those chokers on my wrist. By “chokers”,’ he added, by way of clarification, ‘I refer, of course, to the handcuffs.’
‘Of course,’ said Robert.
‘My martial arts skills,’ said Sophie, with a hint of pride, ‘have been honed by the finest Conspiratus martial art tutors. I had no difficulty in overpowering poor Jacques . . . but he proved stubborn. He refused to tell me the location of the Mona Eda, even when I tortured him, marking his head with the Sacred Marks of the Gills . . .’
‘Those cuts!’ expostulated Robert. ‘The cuts that were found on his body!’
‘They have a profound and mystical significance in the secret teachings of the Conspiratus,’ said Sophie. ‘But Sauna-Lurker refused to tell me what I needed to know. I shoved him into his chair, behind his desk and started ransacking his office. But when I turned he had autodialed a number . . . in a flash I had leapt to him and punched him smartly in the chest. He coughed in pain, coughing into the telephone receiver. At the time I did not know the significance of those coughs, although now . . .’ She smiled, self-satisfiedly. ‘Then I dragged him to the centre of the room and thrust the cod down his throat. He knew he was finished. So I turned my attention to searching the room, leaving him choking on the floor. My back was turned for moments only, but I had underestimated his stubbornness. He crawled away, even though he knew he could not remove the cod . . . so he wrote the strange message on the Last Supper in the hall in his own blood; and then struggled up the stairs. I followed him, but by the time I got to him he was already dead. So I returned to the mural, and puzzled over the strange message.’
‘That would explain,’ said Robert, ‘how you suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, in the middle of a Gallery surrounded by police in the middle of the night.’
‘Of course. I heard the police arrive; and then I heard your voice. Imagine my surprise! After all the trouble I had gone to to frame London’s most famous expert in codes and secret communication, here he was in person – brought in by the police. Thinking on my feet, I presented myself as a member of the Sûrité.’
‘Did we ever get the answer to two?’ Teabag put in.
‘Sorry?’
‘You remember . . . there were two things. One was “why shoot us as opposed to killing us in some other way?”, which Mademoiselle Nudivue has answered with her account of breeding the specialist cod. But the other was “why shoot us rather than l
etting us live?” and I am interested in the answer to that question. I mean, I’d rather continue living, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Sophie.
‘But why?’ pleaded Robert. Or pled Robert. Actually, looking at that written down I think I’ll stick with ‘pleaded’. ‘Why do you have to kill us? Come to think of it, why did you have to kill Jacques?’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Sophie, glancing at the painting behind her briefly, ‘that you have both learnt too much. Monsieur Sauna-Lurker was on the verge of revealing the secret at the heart of the Conspiratus – the secret to which this painting oh-too-eloquently alludes. But it is a secret that my organisation has spent two thousand years keeping hidden. A secret too devastating for the world to hear. A secret,’ she said, finally, ‘the protection of which occasionally requires murder.’
‘But you don’t have to murder me,’ said Robert, eagerly. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea what the secret is.’
‘I’m afraid I cannot take your word for that, my dear Robert; not when we consider that you are the world’s leading expert in deciphering codes and uncovering secrets.’
‘But that’s the whole point!’ said Robert, delightedly. ‘I’m a complete fraud! I’ve absolutely no idea how to decipher anything at all! I tell you - those TV quizzes where you phone in an answer, and the TV company makes a fortune from premium rate phone lines by asking things like “who wrote Romeo and Juliet? Was it (a) William Shakespeare, (b) George Rattlearrow or (c) Brian Jiggleshaft” . . . those kind of quizzes, you know? Well I can’t even work out the answer to that level of questioning half the time!’
‘You’ll forgive me,’ said Sophie, in a chilly voice, ‘if I don’t entirely believe you. You knew that Ichthus was Greek, and that it meant “fish”.’
‘That was just sneezing!’
‘You even knew the most secret formulation, the holy mantra at the very heart of the Secret Conspiratus . . .’
‘No I didn’t! No I don’t!’
‘You said it to me not five minutes ago! Pendant to the observation concerning the close relationship between fish and Christianity.’
‘What,’ said Robert flippantly, ‘The Cod and God gag?’ He tried a smile, but it faded from his face. Sophie was not taking his words as a joke. She was looking very sternly at him indeed.
‘This is why I must shoot you! Both of you! You know too much. You know the Sacred Equivalence. There are people in our organisation, the Masonic Illuminated Mafia of Opus Dei Piscinum, who have worked loyally for decades and never reached a level high enough to be told the Sacred Equivalence!’
‘What?’ jabbered Robert. ‘What? The Cod and God? You cannot be serious.’
‘You said it again! You have spoken the Sacred Equivalence twice! If you were to speak it three times within the space of three minutes then . . . disaster will come down upon us. I don’t know how you have come by this secret – you must be far cleverer and far more ruthless than I realised. I am tempted to shoot you right now, to kill you before you utter the blasphemous trilogy of Sacred Equivalences and bring disaster down upon us all . . .’
‘I won’t!’ squealed Robert. ‘I won’t! Don’t shoot!’
‘But Jesus is only a fish in symbolic terms,’ said Teabag. ‘It’s a metaphor. It’s not literal.’
‘Pah!’ said Sophie. ‘If you know the Sacred Equivalence, then you must know that it is far more than merely a metaphor. You must know it is the literal truth – the great secret apprehended only shadowly by human religions and philosophy.’
‘Can I put my arms down now?’ asked Robert. ‘My hands are going a bit tingly.’
‘No!’ snapped Sophie.
‘It’s really quite tiring you know,’ said Robert, tetchily.
‘I don’t care!’
‘The muscles are aching.’
‘You mean the Catholic Church is actually based on the worship of Cod?’ said Teabag. ‘Literally? The stuff that goes into fish fingers?’
‘And now you are playing games,’ said Sophie, dismissively. ‘For you must already know the truth! You must know that only the most senior members of the Catholic Church are aware of the true basis of their faith. Once they are shown the Holy Grail they know the truth. But most ordinary Catholics are satisfied with the apparent meaning of the church. Most ordinary Catholics don’t think twice about how completely their faith belongs to the Cod.’
‘I really don’t see . . .’ said Teabag.
‘How about if I put my hands behind my head?’ suggested Robert. ‘They’d still be up, you know, but I’d be able to rest my wrists on my shoulders . . .’
‘Silence!’ said Sophie. ‘Keep your hands where they are!’
They twitched to attention, whilst Sophie paced all the way around them. She returned to the painting and looked at it again, tracing with the end of her pistol the sinuous path taken by the river on the left side of the image as it curls into the open bay.
‘Water,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Did you never wonder why the Christian faith is so involved with water? Water baptises a Christian into the faith. Why?
Jesus walked upon the water – water was his element; he mastered it completely. Water stands upon the left hand of Christ on the cross - the location of His kingdom. You are of course familiar with the identification of the four elements of the Aristotelian cosmos with the four arms of the Christian cross?’ She sketched a cross in air with her gun, and then identified each of the elements by speaking them aloud and locating them with the pistol’s end:
‘Did you never wonder why Christ welcomed the especially blessed to his left hand? That is why. Christianity is the religion saturated in water. Or, to be more precise: human Christianity is obsessed with a harmony between the ocean and the land . . . between, as the Bible puts it, loaves and fishes.’
‘None of this makes God a Codfish,’ Teabag objected.
‘How about if I moved over to the wall,’ Robert tried, ‘and sort of suspended my hands from something . . . take the weight off them? It really is quite uncomfortable holding them up like this all the time.’
‘Look - do you want to hear my explanation of the whole conspiracy thing before I shoot you?’ Sophie demanded. ‘Or do you want to go whining on about how tired your arms are, so that I shoot you and you never get the bottom of things?’
‘Well,’ said Robert, stung, ‘the former. I suppose.’
‘Right. So stop whingeing and get with it. Now: Robert - specifically Robert. Not you Sir Teabag, you’ve answered enough questions already. I want Robert to try this one. What is the first thing that God does, according to your Christian Bible?’
Robert may have been a fraud as professor of annagrammotology, but even he knew the answer to that question. ‘ “Let there be light”,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows that. First thing he says is “Let there be light”. Then he divides the light from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night.’
‘But before that,’ pressed Sophie. ‘You’re right, Robert. Everybody knows that: “Let there be light”. Fiat lux. But before he creates light, and day and night, and before he creates sun or moon or stars, or dry land, or animals, or man . . . before any of that, do you know what it says, in your Bible?’
‘I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’
‘I can recite it, word for word. Right at the beginning of Genesis. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” ’ She looked triumphantly at him. ‘There it is – the clue of all clues! Hidden in plain sight at the very beginning of the single most read book on the planet!’
‘The face of the waters...’ murmured Robert.
‘Exactly! The waters already existed, before God created anything else! It is even implied that the waters pre-exist God himself! Do you wonder that water is so important in Christianity? Water is the primal medium. Water is God . . . and the spirit of G
od moves through the waters before it moves over the waters.’
‘You mean . . . ?’
‘This powerful religious myth captures a crucial truth. Life began in the water. Your Bible tells of the creation of life on the land . . . but it records, right at the beginning, that the creation of the dry land is posterior to the existence of the Deep. Scientists have known this for centuries now: that life evolved first of all in the oceans.’
‘Another thing,’ said Robert. ‘I mean, quite apart from the sore-arm thing, which is only getting worse, I might say – but I also need to go to the toilet.’
Sophie looked incredulously at him. ‘The toilet?’
‘Yes. To relieve,’ he explained, with a slightly prim expression on his face, ‘the pressure on my bladder. All this talk of water isn’t helping.’
‘Shut up. You’ll be dead in a minute,’ Sophie said, waving the gun at him.
‘It’s easy for you to say that,’ said Robert. ‘You’re not the one about to wet his knickers.’
‘What’s the point in going to the toilet a moment before you die?
‘Well, obviously, I’d rather not die on a full bladder.’
‘Robert,’ Teabag put in, ‘could we go back to what we were talking about before please? It’s really very interesting . . .’
‘All I’m saying is that it’s not a pleasant sensation, that sensation of a distended bladder.’