With the Baron away at the villa, they probably didn’t get up early, Leo thought, and this might be a good time to survey the site. He hastened his step along the Giudecca, then struck inland beside one of the minor canals.
A few people were now going to work, and near San Barnaba’s neoclassic façade a boat full of fruits and vegetables was setting up as a floating greengrocery. A priest in a black cassock crossed the square and unlocked the main door of the church. Then Leo noticed two rather conspicuous shoppers: surely there weren’t that many Indians living in this quarter? Perhaps the palace guardians were early birds after all.
Leo immediately sat down at a café table that commanded a view of the market boat and its customers. The Indian man made a few purchases while the woman looked on; perhaps she couldn’t speak enough Italian. Then he handed her the shopping bag and preceded her along the quay to what Leo realized must be the back door of the Palazzo Riviera. It was a small green-painted door in a wall, over which were visible the branches of a giant plane tree. Leo could see that the man opened the door without using a key. He must have thought that there would be little risk in leaving it unlocked for such a short time, at this hour of the morning—unless an intruder were waiting for just that window of opportunity.
That was enough for the time being. Above all, Leo thought, he must not become a conspicuous or familiar figure. As no one had yet come to serve him, he left his table and headed for the nearest vaporetto stop.
Leo spent the day alternately dozing and planning his break-in.
At 6:45 the next morning, he arrived at the vaporetto stop again, a small backpack on his back, and this time waited in the shadows of the church, nearer to the green door. Sure enough, it opened, but this time it was only the Indian man who came out, shopping bag in hand, and walked straight toward the market boat. “His wife probably doesn’t stand by the door waiting for him to return,” thought Leo. Within ten seconds he had crossed the little canal, turned the handle of the service door, and was inside.
He was in a dark corridor, but off to the right a gleam showed through a frosted glass door. Surely, with only two servants in the vast building, he could lurk and avoid discovery; and as for the Cave of Mercury, to judge from Orsina’s description, it might as well be on another planet. With a quick backward glance, he opened the door and closed it quietly behind him.
As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, Leo saw that he had come straight into the androne. The morning light, percolating through the pierced canal-entrance, revealed a magnificent staircase, two gondolas resting on trestles, like a pair of coffins, and an ancient fire pump. He quickly moved away from the service door and stood in the deep shadow behind the apparatus. Moments later the Indian came through the garden door, groceries in hand, crossed the androne, and disappeared up another staircase at the canal end. As his footsteps died away, the silence was broken only by the drip of a wall-fountain. Biding his time, Leo stared at the floor, which was inlaid at regular intervals with the family’s emblem: the Tree of Life with a stylized river (for the Riviera) flowing from its roots. Right at the start of anyone’s route through the palace, was it a propitious signal?
Among the many outlandish books Leo had consulted at the library in Washington after reading too much C.G. Jung, he had come across a thin volume by one Victor Émile Michelet. In it, the author explained that a proper coat of arms was built upon astrological calculations, and represented the directions indicated to the lineage by their ascendant. Both the secret and the destiny of a patrician family pulsated within the coat of arms. Down the centuries, the Tree of Life of the Riviera lineage had grown tall and strong, as if perpetually watered by the river. Lately, however, several tragedies had occured to the family. The tree must be suffering, as if the river had dried up during a severe drought. Leo was overwhelmed by a foreboding of doom. With no water to irrigate it, the tree was destined to wither, and die. It was ironic that the palazzo should be built above seawater, which does not sustain the life of either trees or humans.
Leo realized that he had been caught up in a reverie: it was cold, he had not slept enough, but it was the last thing he could afford to do at the moment. He snapped out of it and concentrated on what to do next. From what he knew of Venetian palaces, the servants would not spend their time on the piano nobile, the main floor, unless serving the family there. They would have their own quarters on an upper story; that was why the Indian had not gone up the principal staircase, which he could well have done, with no one to object.
Leo, therefore, would take the ceremonial way. Immediately he noticed the sculpted figures on the banisters. Their attributes mimicked the garden sculptures of the Villa Riviera and, from what he could remember, they had the same inscriptions, but they were all putti, cheerful toddlers aping the gestures of their elders. Was this a way of saying that the Great Work was nothing but child’s play? As a trespasser in a palace, with an indefinable or even compromising relationship to the kidnapped woman, he felt horribly responsible and not at all playful.
The ballroom was still gloomy, with its windows facing every direction but east. Leo felt sure that he was not going to find the “windowless storage room” there. If only Orsina had told him more about the place during their conversations; but the architecture hadn’t seemed important then. The visual impressions he had formed during the whole telephone episode that ended with her fall were of some unfrequented wing, or floor, of the palace; though everything he thought he knew about it, he was beginning to realize, was his own fantasy. He’d better make a circuit of the main floor, anyway, while no one was about. It hit him then that his actions were marked by a calm self-control, a distinct coolness that, according to Cesare Della Riviera himself, belongs to the hero. He had expected trepidation, as never before had he broken into a house. But then, a hero?
All the doors stood wide open for the air to circulate, and Leo wished he could have been an inquisitive tourist free to roam; but the parquet floor creaked ever so loudly, or so it seemed to him as he explored each room on tiptoes. He recognized them all too poignantly from their furnishings as Nigel and Orsina’s grand bedroom, Orsina’s room from before her parents died, Angela’s room, and the comfortable salone fronting the Grand Canal. He paced them meticulously and as quietly as he could, comparing their lengths with that of the portego, its frescoes now gloriously lit by the morning sun; but there was no space for a concealed chamber on that side. He was about to explore the opposite range of rooms when from an open doorway came the sound of voices—rough, female voices in some Slavic-sounding language—and moments later the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Feeling horribly exposed, Leo ran up the staircase and did not stop until he reached the top.
But here the door to the fourth floor was locked, and before Leo could gather his wits, he heard Indian voices on the stair beneath, footsteps running up, and the slamming of a door on the third floor. He could not have made a worse choice for a hiding place. The staff would be going up and down it unpredictably, and to open any door off it would risk bumping into one of them. The androne level was unsafe, because that was where everyone entered; the main floor now belonged to the cleaning maids; the third floor was presumably where the Indians lived; and the fourth floor, which Orsina had said was Emanuele’s domain, was locked. All he could do was to hide out until things calmed down. As a precaution, he got some of his equipment out of his backpack: a ski mask and a toy gun he had bought in town, a 1/1 scale replica of a Beretta. If there were a showdown, he would act the burglar, threaten the staff with the gun, and hopefully get away.
There were constant comings and goings on the stair beneath his hideout. Every time they approached, his whole body tensed, and he prepared for the worst: he would kick someone downstairs if he had to. The acoustics of the empty palace amplified everything: voices, both Indian and Slavic, vacuum cleaning, the clatter of crockery, nameless errands. Whenever it subsided for ten minutes and Leo began cautiously to creep downstairs, a door below
flew open again and footsteps approached, stopping just short of the uppermost flight.
Leo felt the urge to pray, but seemed blocked from access to his habitual phrases and invocations. He turned his mind inwards, hoping to find there the familiar words and moods of the Rosary, but his soul, too, was like a block of ice. It was as though he had left his Christian world behind him when he determined to follow the ancient pagan symbols of The Magical World. Other gods and goddesses than Christ and the Virgin were active in this place, and if he wanted help, perhaps he must call on them.
But how absurd: he could not and would not pray to Apollo or Artemis! Yet what were these pagan gods? According to the teachings of the book, they were the sun and moon within man: the sun of his higher intelligence, the moon of his natural energies. Between them, as figured in that sculpture in the villa garden, they generated the Philosophical Child, the newborn Hero. Was this what he was becoming, against all his training, beliefs, and self-image?
There was no one to pray to, then, but himself: to that serene and frozen self that seemed to stretch above him like a protecting roof. Est deus in nobis: “there is a god within us,” as some pagan poet wrote. He was his own guardian angel. With an effort of will, all the harder since it felt like the defiance of a taboo, Leo addressed it. The words that came were, unexpectedly, the so-familiar phrases of the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, Come, Holy Spirit, and “Water what is parched, straighten what is crooked, bend what is rigid …” Turn everything into its opposite, even his faith in powers greater than himself. To the Hero, none such existed. He was god and man in one, like Hercules, taking the place of Atlas with the weight of a frozen sky on his shoulders.
Perched on the top step and perfectly still, Leo waited like a stealthy predator. After two hours or so, the body asserted its rights and demanded food and drink. He had neglected to pack any, but then he had not expected to spend so much time in the palazzo. An hour later, Leo no longer had any choice: good burglars just don’t wet their pants.
The cleaners had been silent for some time, and the only sound now was from a television—no, more like some Bollywood video—coming from the floor beneath. He slunk down the stair to the piano nobile and went straight into Angela’s bathroom, only just checking the automatic habit of flushing. Then he drank from the tap, avidly. Feeling ready for anything, and wishing that he’d been this bold hours before, he entered the north range and passed through the dining room and kitchen. His heart leapt as he came to a corridor, with a door leading inwards. Perhaps it was child’s play, after all, he thought as he entered the dark room.
Orsina had mentioned a stepladder on wheels, from which she was unable to reach the key in Mercury’s hand. Then she had lost her balance, but slithered down a pile of folding chairs and tables. There they all were, as Leo’s flashlight now revealed. And there was something else that couldn’t have been there before: a tall, metal extension ladder, folded up but still reaching almost to the ceiling. And of course there was an electric light. From a windowless room, who would see it? He switched it on, still shuddering at the “click.”
Nothing stirred. He slid some old rags beneath the feet of the cumbersome ladder and started moving it around the room, an inch at a time, until it rested by the ascending Mercury figure. He felt that he was almost levitating as he climbed to the vaulted ceiling and took the iron key out of the plaster hand. He laughed a little crazily when he saw that it was shaped like the Mercury symbol. In order to open the cave door, he had to descend the ladder and move it a little further.
Finally, at three o’clock by his watch, he was ready. He shouldered his backpack, turned out the light, turned on his flashlight, and, ten feet above the floor, fitted the key to the lock.
To his surprise, the door opened inwards of itself, and a loud musical sound, like the twanging of an out-of-tune banjo, shattered the silence of the room. But there was no going back. Leo bridged the short gap between ladder and doorway and swung himself inside. Turning around, he pushed the door back into place and locked it with the key. Behind the door, he saw the cause of the sound: a device of springs and wire strings that were plucked when the door was opened. The lyre that Mercury gave to Apollo! Of course, the God of Thieves would equip his cave with a doorbell, or a burglar alarm.
The space in which he now stood was just a landing, from which an extremely narrow spiral staircase went up and down. As far as he remembered his orientation, these stairs must be contained in the thickness of the wall between the Cave of Mercury and the ballroom. He could hear the television more clearly than before, which was reassuring. Even if the servants had heard that twang, they would have no idea of what it was, or at least so he hoped. They probably didn’t even know that this stair existed. As for him, he had had enough of the upper regions, and this time he was going down. “Coli umbras inaccessas,” the book had said: revere the inaccessible shades.
Leo counted the steps in order to keep his sense of where he was in the palace, but the tight spiraling caused a momentary vertigo. When at the fortieth step the stairs ended and a narrow corridor opened before him, he guessed that he was at the canal level of the androne but had no idea of the direction. The corridor led directly to an oak door, which opened easily and, as soon as Leo was past, closed behind him with a discreet click. Suddenly nervous, he tried the handle: it had a modern lock, and had locked itself.
For the first time, Leo came close to panic. Had he been fool enough to get imprisoned in an inaccessible and soundproof cellar? He could feel his heart pumping as he shone his beam around.
No, there was another door in the opposite wall, standing a few inches open, so there must be another way out. The relief caused a lightheadedness, as he explored the room with his flashlight.
Leo realized immediately that this was a kind of alchemical family shrine. There were portraits in dull golden frames, presumably of ancestors, and in the center of the room a solid stone altar the size of an average dining table. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were an iron-bound chest and a baronial chair, almost a throne, with a fat red cushion. There were bronze rings let into the corners of the altar, and slotted into these were four fasces, also apparently of bronze, standing about six feet high, with their ax-heads pointing outwards. The table held four candles in baroque silver sticks, and beside each candle, placed with meticulous symmetry, a glass decanter or alembic containing dark, cloudy liquid. Around the base of each, a complicated geometrical figure was engraved into the stone. The center of the table was occupied by the Riviera arms, and laid upon this was a silver casket.
Leo did not waste time admiring the interior decorations or the way the room was evidently waterproofed and climatized. He cautiously opened the casket—might that entail another surprise by Mercury?
No; he was staring at what he had hoped to find: a book, magnificently bound, secured with metal clasps.
On closer inspection, he read the title on the spine: Il mondo magico de gli heroi. Here it was at last: the forbidden book! It seemed as if his heart stopped beating, and an immediate rush of dizziness followed. Gasping, he managed to stir back to consciousness, as he involuntarily hyperventilated. Then, he plucked up courage, and stowed the heavy tome in his backpack.
He made for the other door, forcing it far enough to squeeze himself through and leaving it open. There was no longer any point in disguising his tracks—which he now saw himself to be adding to other footprints in the muddy corridor.
From the increasing dampness, Leo guessed that he was now outside the palace walls, and this was confirmed when he arrived at a long vaulted cellar.
Here and there, the ceiling was dripping, and there were puddles on the floor. Most remarkably, the roots of a tree were growing down through the ceiling, then penetrating the floor. Or had the cellar been excavated around tree roots already there? Their size was so great that Leo realized they could only belong to the giant plane tree he had seen in the garden. Among them was another stone altar. What rites had gone o
n here in the family’s glory days?
More urgent than answering that question was finding a way of escape. Leo could see only two possibilities: trying to find another way back, or taking the dark passageway at the far end of the vault. Without hesitation he took the latter; if he was already under the garden, it made little sense to go back into the palace.
The passage was short, ending with an iron door so decayed that to Leo’s horror its upper hinge broke loose at his first tug. He had passed through the garden wall, and the water of the side canal was lapping his feet.
Opposite Leo, the vegetable boat was doing a roaring pre-dinner trade, and the Campo San Barnaba was thronged with tourists. Some of them noticed the black-clad man standing blinking in the water-gate, and waved. He had the presence of mind to wave back. But the entrance was made for people to enter straight from their boats. To get out, he could swim, but that was out of the question with the precious book in his backpack; or thumb a lift from a passing gondola; or try to swing himself up and onto the garden wall. Any of these would make a spectacle of him. But this sure escape route was a thousand times better than getting himself entangled in the palace again.
Leo checked the door busily a few times, trying to look like a workman rather than a burglar, then carefully closed it and returned to the vault to wait. He relieved himself against the roots of the tree, smiling at his former thoughts about its need for watering.
As the hours passed, he hovered between dream and waking, haunted by images of a frozen sky that was also himself, the incalculable weight of the giant tree, the palace, the water-soaked earth pressing on the vault. Above all, the weight of his vow to Orsina.
The Forbidden Book: A Novel Page 18