by Martin Rua
“Our hands are tied, Oscar,” said Andrea Kominkova, breaking the silence. “The only thing we can do is go along with this Asar and help Lorenzo to try and find this phantom Cathedral of the Nine Mirrors place.”
In addition to Oscar and Andrea, there were also Amato and Brancato, who – like myself, Àrtemis and Professor Ricciardi – would be spending the next four days in anguish.
Oscar ran his hands through his hair, exasperated by his feelings of helplessness. “But Andrea, we have no idea whether this is a physical place or a symbol. And what if Lorenzo can’t do it? What will happen? In four days you will all be dead? Wouldn’t it be better to try to identify the poison hidden in your bodies and neutralize it?”
“But that would take time!” I countered. “And even if we could find the microscopic capsules, we would have to figure out which scorpions the poison was taken from and then find the antidote, if there is one. We only have a few days.”
Amato slammed his fist on the arm of the chair. The thud startled us. “Oscar, I don’t want to wait for your fucking mysterious investigations, I’m sorry,” snapped the burly vice commissioner. “I’m amazed you’re all happy to dedicate yourselves to studying a manuscript instead of getting us a CAT scan and blood tests or whatever! And I’m especially surprised at you, Mr Aragona, seeing as you’ve got your wife mixed up in all of this!”
I shook my head. I understood his frustration, but there was nothing we could do. “Mr Amato, Andrea is right – the only thing we can do is to get to work on the documents we have and give these fools what they want. They told me very clearly that any clinical tests would be useless.”
“Enzo, I can imagine how you feel, how you all feel…” said Oscar, trying to calm his deputy.
“No, Oscar, you can’t!” Amato replied, even more angrily. “I can accept the fact that I have to take risks in my job, but I can’t accept the fact that my wife might have to tell my son ‘daddy died because a bastard in a carnival mask poisoned him!’ No, that is not going to happen!”
In an attempt to calm him down, Viola put her hand on her boss’s shoulder, but all she succeeded in doing was making him jump up and head for the door. “Oscar, I follow orders, but if you haven’t solved the problem by tomorrow morning I will have all the necessary tests done and I will hunt the bastards down myself, alone. I’ve got every right to.”
He left the room without another word. Oscar, sweating in the heat and tension, ran his hands over his face and then looked at us. “Vincenzo is right, but you’re right too, Lorenzo. You and others from the lodge get on with these manuscripts, while we try and track down these pieces of shit.”
I grabbed a bite to eat and went back towards the city centre, destination Palazzo Penne. I had an appointment with Carlo Sangiacomo, who was to begin helping me. As a freelance architect he had more time available than the others and had managed to put off a number of commitments. I needed help and the depth of his esoteric knowledge was awe-inspiring.
While I was walking down Via Donnalbina my phone started ringing.
“Hello?”
“Lorenzo, it’s Riccardo, how are you?”
My first reaction when I heard the Sicilian’s voice was to tell him to go to hell. If I was in this situation it was his fault, at least in part.
“Riccardo, you and the dearly departed Basile Cobalière have really got me into a fine mess here.”
“You’re right, brother Aragona – but it might all be worth it in the end.”
“It will not be worth the lives of my wife and myself.”
“What do you mean? What has happened now?”
I quickly filled him in.
“I’m terribly sorry, Lorenzo… I should have ignored Hašek’s request to involve you and taken care of the matter personally.”
“Well Hašek must have had his reasons. What about you, how are things going there?”
“I’ve cleared everything up with the police. Not only is my alibi perfect, because at the time of the murder I was with you on Charles Bridge, but it also seems that there was a surveillance camera not far from Hašek’s store which caught the murderer on film and it definitely wasn’t me!”
“Good for you! Were they able to identify him?”
“They were able to do more than that – apparently they have already found the assassin.”
“Ah.”
“Prague is unusually violent at the moment. A couple of nights ago they fished out a dead body from the river – a Bulgarian. It appears to have been suicide, though in his pocket they found a scalpel and some fragments of antimony.”
“Antimony?”
“That’s right. On TV they said he might be the murderer because the scalpel is compatible with the wounds on Hašek’s body. If so, the Vladislav murderer got rid of himself too.”
“I don’t know what to say, it all seems too easy. But this is a job for the police, I’ve got my hands full with that masked lunatic, whether he’s behind it all or not.”
“You’re right, let the police deal with it. Look… if it’s ok with you, I’ll come to Naples and give you a hand.”
“Yes, you’re involved in this case too, of course you can come. My masonic brothers are giving me a lot of help but the more heads we have, the better.”
“I’ll come as soon as possible. Take care, Lorenzo.”
The thought of the disturbing – or comforting, depending on your point of view – news from Prague occupied my mind for the last stretch of road until I arrived at Palazzo Penne where I found Carlo waiting for me. The hooded man opened the door and let us in without a word and we went over to the table where the correspondence was ready for us. I had brought with me the pages Hašek had torn out and the Peregrino Neapolitano. Just as he had not mentioned the vial, Asar had not mentioned Sansevero’s pamphlet. Either he knew nothing of them or he thought it was more important that I had them with me.
“You said that by superimposing the two pages torn from the letters you found the location of this book,” said Carlo, taking off his jacket and leafing through the Peregrino.
“Exactly,” I replied, nodding, then glanced over at the hooded man, who was sitting by the window, motionless. “Look, can we open the window a bit? It’s hot in here.”
The hooded man just shook his head.
It was useless to insist with these people. Carlo gave me a re-assuring look as though to tell me not to worry.
“All right, let’s concentrate,” I whispered, choking back a protest. “We have two elements, the letters and the prince’s curious tourist guide. Now we have to figure out if the two documents mention each other.”
Carlo nodded.
“Logically, the collection of letters should contain references to the book.”
“I agree. First let’s analyse the Hašek codex, even if, what with this tiny handwriting, it won’t be particularly easy for two people to work on the same document.”
“Then let’s split the job,” Carlo suggested. “I’ll work on the mysterious itinerary that you noticed in the Peregrino Neapolitano and you study the correspondence.”
“Ok.”
I realized that the Hašek manuscript consisted of just four letters which were rather long, two contained summaries of the Count Saint-Germain’s journey and a final one written by the Prince of Sansevero. In the first letter, dated January the 3rd, 1770, Saint-Germain thanked the prince for the hospitality he had shown him during his recent visit to Naples, before going on to speak about something which had evidently begun on that occasion. As soon as I noticed that the principal topic of the letter seemed to be a certain Egyptian secret, I concentrated on trying to extract what it was from the count’s elegant handwriting.
It would be a good starting point for the meeting that awaited Carlo and I with the other members of the Silver Shadow Lodge.
Chapter 24
The First Letter of the Count Saint-Germain to the Prince of Sansevero
Place Unknown, January the 3rd, 1770
I shall, however, waste no further time in presenting to Your Excellency my dutiful homage, and will come straight to the point of my letter, picking up once again the thread of that conversation of ours which was interrupted so rudely by my departure. Your Grace will certainly be aware of the details of my early studies – what we have agreed to call the Septemplex Solis Rota – and it is with a soul brimming with doubt, though also with pleasant surprise, that I permit myself to present for your perusal the following facts.
The circumstances of the discovery, in the Middle Ages, of that prodigious and secret mystery of the Egyptians, precisely as your Grace described it to me, has accompanied my investigations just as the moon acts as a guiding glow in the darkness of the night. I became convinced that only an enlightened mind which was familiar with the arcane sciences – a mind such as yours – would know how to harness its power.
It was with these thoughts and this determination in mind that I embarked upon the return journey from Naples, making a detour south before going back to the cold of the northern mists and abandoning the sweetness of Campania Felix. I went to the place that Your Excellency had indicated to me and I found it to be in a very miserable condition. Nevertheless, it is certainly where the Stupor Mundi must have hidden the clues to aid in finding the Egyptian secret. Being, of course, a place designed to give shelter to an arcane science, the innermost secrets of which escape us, the function of the Sancta Maria de Monte fortress was, no doubt, not military but one of study. Yet today it is reduced to a sorry state and is used as a jail or as a shelter for goatherds.
And in actuality, it was one of these last – a rough and simple man, though one of refined intelligence – who directed me to the monastery not far from the fortress which your Grace had indicated to me, whence dwell monks who are well learned in the occult. A strange thing indeed for men of the Church, but they do in fact possess uncommon arcane knowledge.
Thus, I went to the monastery and, daring to use your name, so well known not only in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, I asked to be received by the librarian. I was welcomed by this aged man possessed of a vigilant and penetrating gaze who consented to give me the gift of his precious confidence, begging in exchange that I extend to Your Grace his most heartfelt greetings. This friar – who, for convenience, we will call Brother Anfibolo – told me that in the times before the de Monte fortress found itself in its current state of disrepair, there was a bas-relief which, when struck by a ray of sunshine on the day of the 8th of April, revealed a particular path which was to be followed in order to discover an arcane secret. That indication was a revelation for me, and great was my surprise when the friar hinted at its being an artefact of pagan origin, feared even by popes and cardinals.
I sensed that the friar knew more than he was revealing and, through the use of all my faculties, was successful in convincing him of my absolute honesty and thus to show me an exceptional document. I had not hoped for so much, your Grace! The monk possessed an extremely well-made reproduction of how the relief I mentioned above would have appeared when it was revealed by the sun’s rays. He told me that the parchment had been in possession of the monastery for over three hundred years, brought there by a rider fleeing northward.
The bas-relief, as it appeared on the reproduction, showed, without the slightest doubt, what I recognized as the most mysterious symbol man has ever created, and which your Grace knows well. So that you may realise the importance of my discovery, I shall draw below what I saw.
IMAGINE
Your Grace will certainly have immediately recognised what it is and will be amazed, just as I was when the monk showed me the drawing. But this is not all. Again thanks to the rays of the sun, under the bas-relief there also appeared a phrase. I asked Brother Anfibolo whether it had truly been present upon the original, and he said that everything which that knight had seen in the de Monte fortress had been faithfully reproduced by him. This was what was written:
SERPENTIS HIC IACET CAPUT
Your Grace, you know well the importance of this discovery. Your assumptions, and my own, seem to be confirmed. And there is no doubt that the doctrine which the place has hidden for millennia has been known at least since the time of the Crusades and perhaps even before; there is no doubt that Svevo knew of it. He must have, leaving this clue in order to help find the caput serpentis and indicating precisely the place where it is hidden. I assume that the relief had already been deliberately deleted in ancient times, perhaps in the Middle Ages, when, after Svevo’s death, wise men feared that the path to finding that holy place where the ancient wisdom lies was too exposed.
I shall add no more. I await your Grace’s rapid response in the usual manner, with suggestions as to how I should proceed. Together we initiated this undertaking, and together shall we proceed.
Your humble servant and Brother,
The Count of St Germain.
Chapter 25
Naples, 17th of June, 17:10
Four days to the summer solstice
I leaned back, exhaling loudly to release the excitement which had mounted as I read through that letter and brief passages of the others. Not without some difficulty, I had managed to interpret the elegant handwriting of the Count Saint-Germain. The letter was written in Italian, a language which, from everything that we know of him, the famous alchemist must have known well. I realised that the correspondence was perhaps the only text written personally by that mysterious character and the fact that he had enjoyed such a close relationship with the Prince of Sansevero put the studies of the Neapolitan esoteric tradition in a totally new light.
But at that moment I had other things on my mind. I put together the elements at my disposal: I had a fortress, clearly identifiable as Castel del Monte; I had the unusual name of a monk, ‘Anfibolo’, a sophisticated way of communicating to the informed reader that the speaker is using an occult, distorted language. Amphibolic, in fact. I also had the mention of an Egyptian secret, but also of a ‘caput serpentis’, the head of a snake, a clear reference to the telluric serpent Riccardo had mentioned, the ‘Wouivre’ of the Druids. And above all, I had a maze. That map, drawn with precision by Count Saint-Germain, had reminded me of the dream I had in Prague where my old high school religious studies teacher, father Angelo Ravelli, had spoken precisely of the cathedral in a small French village and a labyrinth drawn on the floor of the nave. The vision of the maze had opened the little drawer in my memory which contained the name of that place.
“Chartres…”
Carlo, still immersed in the Peregrino Neapolitano, raised his head.
“Excuse me?”
I turned to look at him. “Notre-Dame de Chartres is the Cathedral of the Nine Mirrors – or at least, it’s where we have to look.” I flipped through the few pages of the correspondence and showed the labyrinth to Carlo. “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes, of course. Isn’t it one of the most common maze patterns?”
“Yes, it’s based on that of Knossos in Crete, but this is the version that was common in the Middle Ages. It’s more complex than the Minoan one, and is exactly the same as the version at Chartres. You won’t believe this, but while I was in Prague I dreamed of my old high school religious studies teacher, Father Ravelli. One day he gave us a very interesting lesson on cathedrals.”
“You dreamed about it? You dreamed about Chartres?”
“Why are you so surprised? It happens all the time.”
“I’ll never get used to you,” said Carlo, w
ith a smile. “Go on.”
“Believe it or not, that dream was a kind of message or something. What Saint-Germain wrote here is the confirmation. The place to which he was referring can only be Chartres. But the thing leaves me dumbfounded.”
“Why?”
I lowered my voice to a whisper so that the guard could not hear me.
“Because unless they are complete idiots, our delightful masked friends will have come to the same conclusion. And so I wonder, what use is my… our help?”
We both simultaneously looked up at the hooded man, who was sitting motionless beside the window. Carlo nodded. “Maybe you should ask him, so we can stop wasting time.”
“Excuse me,” I said to get the man’s attention, “I need to speak to Asar.”
The man remained motionless, staring at me, then after a while he stood up and walked slowly towards the table.
“Why?”
I sighed. “Because in order to save time, I need to understand what you already know and what I can actually help you with. You must have already learned much yourselves from reading these letters.”
The man did not reply but simply pulled out his smartphone and called a number. He placed the device on the table and then, after a while, someone answered. Thanks to the loudspeaker, we could all hear.
“This is Asar,” said the voice, as raspy and low as before.
“The antique dealer has some questions for you, master.”
“I’m listening, Dr Aragona.”
“I imagine you have read the letters.”
“Naturally.”
“Then you must already know a lot about all this.”
“I would say that I do, yes.”
“Such as what lies behind the symbolic name of the Cathedral of the Nine Mirrors. You were so sure of its existence because it is obvious.”