Corso read:
It is the animal with the tail in its mouth that encircles the labyrinth
where you will go through eight doors before the dragon
which comes to the enigma of the word
Each door has two keys:
one is air and the other matter,
but both are the same thing.
You will place matter on the serpent's skin
in the direction of the rising sun,
and on its belly the seal of Saturn.
You will break the seal nine times,
and when the reflection in the mirror shows the way,
you will find the lost word
which brings light from the darkness.
"What do you think?" asked the baroness.
"It's disturbing, I suppose. But I don't understand a word. Do you?"
"As I said, not much." She turned the pages of the book, preoccupied. "It provides a method, a formula. But there's something in it that isn't as it should be. And I ought to know what that is."
Corso lit another cigarette but said nothing. He already knew the answer to the question: the hermit's keys, the hourglass, the exit from the labyrinth, the chessboard, the halo ... And other things. While Frieda Ungern was explaining the meaning of the pictures, he had discovered more differences, confirming his theory: each book differed from the other two. The game of errors continued, and he urgently needed to get to work. But not with the baroness breathing down his neck.
"I'd like to take a good, long look at all of this," he said.
"Of course. I have plenty of time. I'd like to see how you work."
Corso cleared his throat, embarrassed. They'd reached the point he'd worried about: the unpleasantness.
"I work better on my own."
It sounded false. Frieda Ungern frowned.
"I'm afraid I don't understand." She glanced at Corso's canvas bag suspiciously. "Are you hinting that you want me to leave you alone?"
"If you wouldn't mind." Corso tried to hold her gaze as long as possible. "What I'm doing is confidential."
She blinked. Her frown became threatening, and Corso knew that everything could go out the window at any moment.
"You're free to do as you like, of course." Frieda Ungern's tone could have frozen all the plants in the room. "But this is my book and my house."
At that point anyone else would have apologized and beat a retreat, but not Corso. He remained seated, smoking, his eyes fixed on the baroness. At last, he smiled cautiously, like a rabbit playing blackjack about to ask for another card.
"I don't think I've explained myself fully." He smiled as he took a well-wrapped object from his canvas bag. "I just need to spend some time here with the book and my notes." He gently tapped the bag as he held out the package with his other hand. "As you can see, I've brought all I need."
The baroness undid the wrapping and looked at its contents in silence. It was a publication in German—Berlin, September 1943—a thick brochure entitled Iden, a monthly journal from Idus, a circle of devotees of magic and astrology which was very close to the leaders of Nazi Germany. Corso had put in a marker at a page that had a photograph. The photograph showed a young and very pretty Frieda Ungern smiling at the photographer. She had a man on each arm (for she had both arms then). One of the men was in civilian clothes and the caption named him as the Furher's personal astrologer. She was mentioned as his assistant, the distinguished Miss Frieda Wender. The man on the left had steel-rimmed glasses, a timid expression, and wore a black SS uniform. One didn't need to read the caption to recognize Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
When Frieda Ungern, née Wender, looked up and her eyes met Corso's, she no longer seemed a sweet little old lady. But it lasted only a moment. She nodded slowly and carefully tore out the page with the photo, ripping it into tiny pieces. And Corso reflected that witches and baronesses and little old ladies who worked surrounded by books and potted plants had their price, just like anyone else. Victa meet Virtus. And he didn't see why it should be any other way.
ONCE HE WAS ALONE, he took the folder from his bag and set to work. He sat at a table by the window, The Nine Doors open at the frontispiece. Before starting, he parted the net curtains and glanced out. A gray BMW was parked across the street. The tenacious Rochefort at his post. Corso couldn't see the girl at the bar on the corner.
He turned his attention to the book: the type of paper, the pressure of the engravings, any flaws or misprints. Now he knew that the three copies were only outwardly identical: the same black leather binding with no lettering, five raised bands, a pentacle on the cover, the same number of pages and location of the engravings ... With great patience, page by page, he completed the comparative tables he'd begun with book number one. On [>], at the blank page on the reverse side of engraving number V, he found another of the baroness's cards. It was a translation of a paragraph on the page.
You will accept the pact of alliance that I offer you, surrendering myself to you. And you will promise me the love of women and the flower of maidens, the honor of nuns, the rank, pleasures, and riches of the powerful, princes, and ecclesiastics. I will fornicate every three days and the intoxication will he pleasing to me. Once a year I will pay homage to you in confirmation of this contract signed with my blood I will tread upon the sacraments of the Church and I will address prayers to you. I will fear neither rope nor sword nor poison. I will pass among the plague-ridden and the lepers without sullying my flesh. But above all I will possess the Knowledge for which my first parents renounced paradise. By virtue of this pact you will erase me from the book of life and enter me in the black book of death. And beginning now I will live for twenty happy years on man's earth. But then I will go with you to your kingdom and curse God.
There was another note on the back of the card, relating to a paragraph deciphered on another page:
I will recognize your servants, my brothers, by the sign impressed on some part of their body, here or there, a scar or your mark....
Corso cursed emphatically under his breath, as if he were muttering a prayer. He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.
He got goose bumps. Just like a vulgar fan.
IT WAS NIGHT BY the time he left. He paused in the doorway a moment and glanced to the left and right, but saw nothing to worry him. The gray BMW had disappeared. A low mist was rising from the river, flowing over the stone parapet and sliding along the damp paving stones. The yellowish glow of the street lamps, illuminating successive stretches of the embankment, was reflected on the ground, lighting up the empty bench where the girl had been sitting.
He went to the bar. He searched for her face among the people standing at the bar or sitting at the narrow tables at the back, but couldn't find her. He sensed that a piece of the jigsaw was out of place, something that had been setting off alarm signals intermittently in his brain ever since her call to warn him of Rochefort's reappearance. Corso, whose instincts had become a great deal sharper recently, could smell danger in the deserted street, in the damp vapor rising from the river and trailing to the door of the bar where he was standing. He shook his shoulders to rid himself of the feeling. He bought a packet of Gauloises and gulped down two gins one after the other. They made his nostrils dilate, and everything fell slowly into place, like a picture coming into focus. The alarms faded in the distance, and echoes from the outside world were now comfortably softened. Holding a third gin, he went to sit down at an empty table by the slightly misted window. He looked out at the street, the quayside, and the mist sliding over the parapet and swirling up as the wheels of a car cut through it. He sat there for a quarter of an hour, looking for any unusual signs, his canvas bag on the floor by this feet. In it were most of the answers to the mystery posed by Varo Borja. The book collector hadn't
wasted his money.
In the first place, Corso had now solved the problem of the differences between eight of the nine engravings. Book number three differed from the other two copies in engravings I, III, and VI. In engraving I, the walled city with the horseman riding toward it had only three towers, not four. In engraving III, there was an arrow in the archer's quiver, while in the Toledo and Sintra copies the quiver was empty. And in engraving VI, the hanged man hung by his right foot, but the figures in books one and two hung by their left. He could now fill in the comparative table he'd started in Sintra.
In other words, although the engravings appeared identical, one of the three was always different, with the exception of engraving Villi. Moreover, the differences were distributed over the three books. But the apparently arbitrary distribution acquired meaning when one examined the differences alongside those between the printer's marks for the signatures of inventor printer's marks for signatures of inventor (the original creator of the pictures) and sculptor (the artist who made the engravings), A. T. and L. F.
If he superimposed the two tables, he found a coincidence: in each of the engravings that differed from the other two, the initials of the inventor were also different. This meant that Aristide Torchia, as sculptor, had made all the woodcuts for the prints in the book. But he was identified as inventor of the original drawings in only nineteen of the twenty-seven engravings contained in the three books combined. The other eight, distributed over the three copies—two engravings in book one, three in book two, and three in book three—had been created by somebody else, somebody with the initials L. F. Phonetically very close to the name Lucifer.
Towers. Hand. Arrow. Exit from the labyrinth. Sand. Hanged man's foot. Board. Halo. This was where the errors lay. Eight differences, eight correct engravings, no doubt copied from the original, the obscure Delomelanicon, and nineteen altered, unusable engravings, distributed over the pages of the three copies, identical only in text and outward appearance. Therefore none of the three books was a forgery, but none of them was entirely authentic, either. Aristide Torchia had confessed the truth to his executioners, but not the whole truth. There did indeed remain only one book. As hidden and as safe from the flames as it was forbidden to the unworthy. The engravings were the key. One book hidden within three copies. For the disciple to surpass the master, he had to reconstruct the book using the codes, the rules of the Art.
Corso sipped his gin and looked out at the darkness over the Seine, beyond the streetlights that lit up part of the quayside and threw deep shadows beneath the bare trees. He didn't feel euphoric at his victory, nor even simply satisfied at finishing a difficult job. He knew the mood well: the cold, lucid calm when he finally got hold of a book he'd been chasing for a long time. When he managed to cut in front of a competitor, nail a book after a delicate negotiation, or dig up a gem in a pile of old papers and rubbish. He remembered Nikon in another time and place sticking labels on videotapes, sitting on the floor by the television, rocking gently in time to the music—Audrey Hepburn in love with a journalist in Rome—keeping her big dark eyes fixed on him, eyes that constantly expressed her wonder at life. By then, they already hinted at the hardness and reproach, premonitions of the loneliness closing in like an inexorable, fixed-interest debt. The hunter with his prey, Nikon had whispered, amazed at her discovery, because maybe she was seeing him like that for the first time. Corso recovering his breath, like a hostile wolf rejecting his prize after a long chase. A predator feeling no hunger or passion, no horror at the sight of blood or flesh. Having no aim other than the hunt itself. You're as dead as your prey, Lucas Corso. Like the dry, brittle paper that has become your flag. Dusty corpses that you don't love either, that don't even belong to you, and that you don't give a damn about.
ENGRAVINGS
PRINTER'S MARKS FOR SIGNATURES
For a moment he wondered what Nikon would think of him now, and his groin tingled and his mouth was dry, as he sat at the narrow table in the bar, watching the street and unable to leave because here, in the warmth and light, surrounded by cigarette smoke and the murmur of conversation, he felt temporarily safe from the dark premonition, from the danger without name or shape that he sensed approaching him through the deadening thickness of the gin in his blood, through the sinister low mist rising from the river. As on that English moor, in black and white. Nikon would have understood. Basil Rath-bone, alert, listening to the hound of the Baskervilles howling in the distance.
AT LAST HE MADE up his mind. He finished his gin and left some coins on the table. Then he put the canvas bag over his shoulder and went out into the street, turning up his coat collar. As he crossed, he looked in both directions and, when he reached the stone bench where the girl had been reading, he turned and walked along the parapet on the left bank. The yellow lights of a barge on the river lit him from below as he passed a bridge, surrounding him with a halo of dirty mist.
The street and the riverside seemed deserted, with few cars passing. By the narrow passageway of the Rue Mazarin he hailed a taxi, but it didn't stop. He walked on to the Rue Guénégaud, intending to cross the Pont Neuf to the Louvre. The mist and dark buildings gave the scene a somber, timeless appearance. Sniffing the air like a wolf sensing danger, Corso felt unusually anxious. He moved the bag to his other shoulder to free his right hand and stopped to look around, perplexed. In that precise spot—chapter 11: the plot thickens, d'Artagnan saw Constance Bonacieux emerge from the Rue Dauphine, also on her way toward the Louvre and the same bridge. She was accompanied by a gentleman who turned out to be the Duke of Buckingham, whose nocturnal adventure almost earned him a thrust of d'Artagnan's sword through his body: / loved her, Milord, and I was jealous....
Maybe the feeling of danger was false, the perverse effect of the strange atmosphere and reading too many novels. But the girl's telephone call and the gray BMW at the door hadn't been figments of his imagination. A clock struck the hour in the distance and Corso breathed out. This was all absurd.
Then Rochefort jumped him. He seemed to emerge from the river, materializing from the shadows. In fact he had followed Corso along the riverside below the parapet, and then climbed a flight of stone steps to reach him. Corso found out about the steps when he found himself rolling down them. He'd never fallen down steps before, and he thought it would go on for longer, one step at a time or something, as in films. But it was over very quickly. A very professional first punch behind the ear, and the night became a blur. The outside world seemed distant, as if he'd drunk a whole bottle of gin. Thanks to this, he didn't feel much pain as he rolled down the steps, hitting the stone edges. He reached the bottom bruised but conscious. Possibly a little surprised not to hear the splash—a Conradian onomatopoeia, he thought incongruously—of his body hitting the water. From the ground, his head on damp paving stones and his legs on the bottom steps, he looked up, confused, and saw Rochefort's black outline descend the steps three at a time and jump on top of him.
You're buggered, Corso. This was all he had time to think. Then he did two things. First he tried to kick as Rochefort jumped over him. But his weak attempt hit only air. So all he had left was the old, familiar reflex of forming a ball and letting the gunfire fade into the dusk. With the damp from the river and his own private darkness—he'd lost his glasses in the scuffle—he winced. The guardsman dies but falls down the stairs too. So he formed a ball, curled up to protect the bag, which was still hanging from, or rather was tangled around, his shoulder. Maybe great-great-grandfather Corso from the other shore of Lethe would have appreciated his move. It was difficult to tell what Rochefort thought of it. Like Wellington, he rose to the occasion with traditional British efficiency: Corso heard a distant cry of pain, which he suspected came from his own mouth, as Rochefort dealt him a clean, precise kick in the back.
Nothing good was going to come of this, so he closed his eyes and waited, resigned, for someone to turn the page. He could feel Rochefort's breathing very near, could feel him leaning over hi
m, searching inside the bag. Then Rochefort yanked violently at the strap. This caused Corso to open his eyes again, just enough to make out the flight of steps in his field of vision. But as his face was pressed down against the paving stones, the steps appeared horizontal, crooked, and blurred. So at first he couldn't tell whether the girl was going up or down. He just saw her move incredibly fast, from right to left, her long legs jumping from step to step. Her duffel coat, which she had just taken off, spread out in the air, or rather moved toward a corner of the screen surrounded by swirls of mist, like the cape of the Phantom of the Opera.
He blinked with interest, in an attempt to focus, and moved his head a little to keep the scene in the frame. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rochefort, his image inverted, give a start as the girl jumped down the last few steps. She fell on top of him with a brief, sharp cry, harder and more piercing than broken glass. He heard a thick sound—a thump—and Rochefort disappeared from Corso's field of vision as suddenly as if he'd been on springs. Now all Corso could see was the empty steps. With difficulty he turned his head to the river and lay his other cheek on the paving stones. The image was still crooked: the ground on one side, the black sky on the other, the bridge below and the river above. But now at least it contained Rochefort and the girl. For a split second Corso saw her silhouetted against the hazy lights of the bridge. She was standing, her legs apart and her hands out in front of her, as if asking for a moment of calm to listen to some distant tune. Rochefort was facing her, with a knee and a hand on the ground, like a boxer who can't quite get up while the referee counts to ten. His scar was visible in the light from the bridge. Corso just had time to see his look of amazement before the girl again gave a piercing cry. She balanced on one leg and, raising the other in a semicircular movement that seemed quite effortless, kicked Rochefort sharply in the face.
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