The Alchemist's Gift

by Martin Rua

  I put down the last morsel of the sandwich and got up. “Okay then, so let’s try not to make any more mistakes. If you agree, I’m going to go back to the lab to carry on the work I’ve begun, which is perhaps the only thing that can stop this absurd game.”

  Oscar exchanged a look with Andrea and Viola, and then nodded. “Go on, but keep us informed.”

  As I was leaving the room I heard a phone ringing. It was Andrea’s. Maybe there was news from Prague. I hoped it was good.

  *

  I took a taxi back to the centre. While I was still on the road I called home to see how Àrtemis was.

  “She’s resting,” came the response from Alex. “She was very agitated, but I insisted that she try and get some sleep and I might have actually managed to persuade her to.”

  “Thanks Alex. Call me if there’s any news.”

  I hung up and took a call from Carlo Sangiacomo.

  “Lorenzo, finally! I tried to call you an hour ago, but your phone was off.”

  “Good – that means that I was in the right place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Where are you?”

  “At home, waiting to work out what to do.”

  “How come you’re not at Palazzo Penne?”

  “Something strange happened. Massimiliano Lupo and I were there studying the manuscript this morning when suddenly the guard received a phone call and kicked us out without further ado. He told us that he would let us know when we could come back. He was very worked up and he took everything, even the Peregrino Neapolitano.”

  “Oh shit, Michele will kill me.”

  “What’s going on, Lorenzo? Why did he behave like that?”

  “Unfortunately the police arrested one of them and things got messy…” I sighed. “Thanks for your help, Carlo – I’ll call you later and let you know how to proceed.”

  “Okay. Ah, if you go home, you’ll find two messages, one from me and another from Memmo who was working in the lab. Memmo sent you an email too, but perhaps you haven’t seen it. I think you’ll find them useful.”

  “I do not know how to thank you.”

  “Simple – don’t.”

  Apparently there was no point going to Palazzo Penne, so I went to Palazzo Sansevero. There was no one in our office, but I did find the messages Carlo had told me about. One was in the lab, next to some glass containers filled with a reddish liquid. It was from Memmo and repeated the message I had read in the email immediately after my call to Carlo.

  Lorenzo, we tried to call you, but either your phone is off or you’ve got no reception. If you get here before us, start cooking the compound that you’ll find in these containers. All that’s missing is the ‘boiled dew’.

  Memmo

  The other message, from Carlo, was even more interesting.

  I don’t know what’s happened, but we were kicked out of the apartment in Palazzo Penne. Obviously, they didn’t let us keep the correspondence and unfortunately they took the Peregrino Neapolitano too. But I memorised the other two symbolic itineraries which still need deciphering and I’ve written them below. Call me as soon as you read this message if we haven’t already spoken.

  Carlo

  Carlo was incredible. Even without the prince’s brief guide, perhaps I had what I needed to recover the other clues thanks to his amazing memory. I read the first of the two texts that he had saved for me.

  De li Apprendisti per la porta entrasti,

  A dritta ’l Copritore, Iside a manca vedesti;

  Se nel laberinto con ardor vagasti,

  Seguendo de la dea li occhi mesti,

  Pretiosa alba alfine ritrovasti

  Nell’arca dove basso alto facesti.10

  This time the prince had actually composed a short poem. The symbolic references scattered throughout the lines were incredibly familiar to me: tyler, apprentices, labyrinth. This was Masonic symbolism, there was no doubt about it. And then, my old friend Isis appeared.

  “There she is again,” I thought, quickly trying to figure out where the prince was referring to that time. A place where there was a Tyler – the guardian of a Masonic temple – and a labyrinth, Isis and a mysterious ark.

  After a few minutes spent reading and re-reading those verses, a spark of understanding finally lit up my mind. I looked out of the laboratory window. A ray of sunlight was laboriously making its way across the narrow alley that separated Palace Sansevero from the chapel of the same name. Illuminated by the oblique light, the simple facade of the temple of the Sangro family seemed to be calling me.

  “Of course,” I smiled, “where else?”

  10Apprentice by the door you entered / Seeing to the right the Tyler and to the left Isis / If the labyrinth with ardor you wander / Following the sad eyes of the goddess / A precious dawn you will finally find / In the ark where low was made high.

  Chapter 35

  Naples, 18th June, 16:45

  Three days to the summer solstice

  I entered the chapel an hour before it closed, giving me plenty of time to decipher the prince’s message. Before leaving Palazzo Sansevero I had called Michele de Sangro. The chapel was like a second home to me, but the guards would hardly have let me get close to the sculptures if I needed to, which was why I needed the owner to be present. Accompanied by him I could freely study every corner of the place.

  “So what have you discovered?” he asked, as he welcomed me at the entrance.

  “That book, the Peregrino Neapolitano, is not just a simple guide. The prince has hidden clues here and there for retrieving some sort of secret code.”

  Michele gave me a look which oozed skepticism.

  “Yes, I know, it sounds like something out of one of those ridiculous adventure books people are so fond of nowadays,” I added.

  “Well, you’re usually so prudent and professional about such things,” said Michele with a smile. “Don’t disappoint me now.”

  “I won’t, believe me.”

  “Very well, then, where do we start? Do you have the book with you?”

  I was ready for that question and had already prepared an answer. Keeping my fingers crossed that Michele wouldn’t smell a rat.

  “God, no, are you kidding? I keep it locked up at home. I copied out the parts I need.”

  “I was certain that you would treat it with kid gloves. You are an antique dealer, after all.”

  “I certainly am…”

  He had fallen for it. For now. We stopped to observe the single nave of the chapel’s interior, staying near the main entrance. There were four or five visitors and three security guards, who greeted Michele cordially. In the silence of that hot, late spring afternoon, the sequence of seventeenth century tombs and eighteenth century sculptures commissioned by Raimondo de Sangro surrounded us like some kind of symbolic design. Like the veil of Isis.

  “Okay, I’ll read you the prince’s verses, two at a time: “‘De li Apprendisti per la porta entrasti, / a dritta ’l Copritore, Iside a manca vedesti…’” I said, shaking myself out of the mesmerised stupor into which I fell every time I set foot in that incredible place.

  “The door of the Apprentices… does he mean the side door?” asked Michele, turning to our left.

  “Exactly. In my esoteric reading, as you know, the side door which gives onto Vicolo Raimondo de Sangro represents the northern door of the Masonic temples. The one where, symbolically, the Apprentices enter.”

  Michele pointed to the left side of the chapel. “After you, then, Venerable Master.”

  “Sooner or later I’ll make you change your mind about us masons, you layman!”

  Michele smiled and followed me through the chapel. We passed by the Veiled Christ who, in his marble sleep, represented perhaps one of the most impenetrable mysteries of the Prince of Sansevero, and took up position under the funerary monument of Vincenzo de Sangro, son of Raimondo, located right above the side door.

  “So… ‘a dritta il Copritore, Iside a manca v
edesti’…”

  “The Tyler is the guardian of the temple, right?” asked Michele, pointing to the sculpture above the main entrance, where Raimondo had immortalised his grandfather, Cecco de Sangro. Sword in hand and wearing armour, Cecco was shown jumping out of a chest, in memory of his heroic gesture in the attack on the fortress of Amiens during a campaign in Flanders.

  I nodded. “And if de Cecco di Sangro on the right is the Tyler, Isis to the left can only be…”

  “… the statue of Modesty,” said Michele, completing my sentence for me.

  “Exactly. This confirms what many scholars have long suspected – that behind this statue’s veil hides the Egyptian goddess,” I said, admiring the beautiful, sensual female figure, also veiled, sculpted by Antonio Corradini for the prince’s mother, who died shortly after his birth.

  “Yes, it’s a hypothesis that I’ve always found convincing,” said Michele, as he walked closer to the statue. “How does the text go?”

  “‘Se nel laberinto con ardor vagasti, / seguendo de la dea li occhi mesti, / pretiosa alba alfine ritrovasti / nell’arca dove basso alto facesti’. That’s it.”

  Michele followed the sculpture’s gaze and pointed to the high altar. “She’s definitely looking at the high altar, but what does ‘se nel laberinto con ardor vagasti’ mean?”

  “It must refer to the original floor of the chapel.”

  Michele nodded several times. “Of course! Just think about how the chapel must once have been… A huge maze of imitation alchemical marble acting as a floor.”

  “Blame your ancestors who had it removed in the nineteenth century.”

  Michele shrugged. “I’d probably still be paying if they’d decided to have it restored. But in any case, when the prince died the floor still had that incredible labyrinth motif and I’d guess that’s what he’s referring to.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “And the ardor calls to mind the alchemical fire that burns and transforms matter.”

  “If you say so – you’re the alchemist.”

  We approached the altar and, almost like two penitents, knelt before the great Deposition of Francesco Celebrano to observe the curious sculpture under the altar. Two marble cherubs were engaged in something rather unusual: one was lifting the lid of a kind of chest – the Ark of the prince’s composition – while the other was looking inside it.

  “‘Pretiosa alba alfine ritrovasti / Nell’arca dove basso alto facesti’. These are the last verses and they lead here, there’s no doubt,” I said, observing the sculpture closely under the curious gaze of Michele, the security guards and the few tourists present.

  “What does ‘Pretiosa alba alfine ritrovasti’ mean?” my friend asked, as he joined me to inspect the sculpture.

  “It means, if we find the clue concealed here we are on the right track. The first indication I deciphered together with one of my brothers referred to darkness, and this to dawn, the alchemical albedo, the second phase of the work. The prince was following a criteria familiar to him, evidently.”

  Michele stood up, doubtfully. “Yes, but what do we expect to find, and how? You can’t want to dismantle the chapel?”

  “I don’t think we’ll need to.”

  I reflected for a moment, then turned to look at Michele. “Do you have a mirror?”

  “Do I look like I need to adjust my makeup?” asked Michele, with a smile.

  I looked around. At that moment, a few metres from us, there was a young couple gazing rapturously at the sculpture of the Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sammartino. I had an idea. I approached them and, on realising that they were American tourists, I asked the pretty girl if she had a makeup mirror with her. Surprised, she smiled and nodded, making her braided hair shake, and pulled from her bag a round mirror.

  “I only need it for a second!” I said, thanking her.

  I went back to Michele triumphantly, but he stopped me. “Why don’t we wait for the chapel to close? We have some curious eyes upon us at the moment.”

  My elation at having interpreted the prince’s message gave way to concern, and the dying face of Professor Ricciardi appeared before my eyes. But Michele could not know about that. “Unfortunately, this is not mere intellectual curiosity, Michele. A few hours ago another person died, and perhaps the ones who started all this were responsible.”

  “No, I can't believe it…”

  “It’s true.”

  Michele sighed, looked at me with sincere sorrow, glanced toward the inside of the chapel, rubbed his chin and then raised a finger. “Right, I have an idea. Wait for me here.”

  He walked towards the crypt. I wondered what he had in mind, but I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. He returned after a few seconds in the chapel with a large cardboard panel advertising an exhibition that would be opening there in a few weeks time.

  “There,” he said, putting down the massive panel. “That should hide us from prying eyes.”

  “Brilliant!”

  I pulled out my smartphone, which was equipped with a powerful LED flashlight, and slipped it into the gap between the lid and the marble chest beneath the altar. There wasn’t much room but I hoped to be able to see enough.

  “If you even scratch it, I’ll be billing you for the damage,” muttered Michele.

  “Don’t worry, I have no intention of scratching it,” I said, as I inspected the inside of the ark. I suddenly thought for an instant of the Peregrino Neapolitano – I hoped I wouldn’t have to pay for that as well.

  “So what can you see?”

  “Marble. Marble everywhere.”

  Pretiosa alba alfine ritrovasti / nell’arca dove basso alto facesti. Where low was made high. But what did that mean? What should I seek, or rather do? There was no clear indication in the poetry, even though that seemed natural to me: if it been conceived as an initiatory journey, the further one went along it, the more complicated things became. That was obvious. But I had no time to follow that path.

  … Nell’arca dove basso alto facesti.

  I put the American tourist’s mirror into the slot, being careful not to drop it, and pointed the torch inside, allowing me to see the corners I could not examine directly while looking under the lid. And there it was, reflected in the mirror – the clue, which at that point became the leitmotif of the search.

  Where low was made high.

  “That’s it!”

  “What? What have you seen?”

  “There’s… there’s a numerical sequence engraved on the underneath of the marble lid,” I said excitedly, bending my wrist into an unnatural position to be able to read it. “Can you write something down?”

  “I’ve got my phone – go on.”

  “Right… there’s a lower case ‘s’… then 3, 2… 4, 3, 5… 4, 6, 5.”

  “3, 2, 4, 3, 5, 4, 6, 5… Unbelievable! In my chapel, under my nose for forty years and I never knew anything about it!”

  “It was Prince Raimondo de Sangro,” I said, continuing to peer beneath the cover of the ark. “He hid enough secrets for all of us… Are you ready? I’ve got some other numbers.”

  “Go on!”

  “6, 5, 4… 3… 2, 1, 2, 4… God, this is hard to read… 3, 5, 1, 3. That’s it!”

  “Wait, let me read them back to you: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 4, 3, 5, 1, 3.”

  “Perfect!”

  I stood up and rubbed my wrist while Michele looked at me in amazement and admiration.

  “This is… well, it’s incredible! A fantastic discovery!”

  “Let’s hope that it actually is – for the moment it’s just a sequence of numbers.”

  “Are you kidding? If the prince hid this message like that it means that it’s valuable, and contains something that could not be publicly shared. That was amazing, Lorenzo.”

  Michele was always full of life, but I had never seen him so excited. His eyes were shining as though he had discovered the greatest treasure in the world. And perhaps that sequence really was it, though of what type I had no idea.
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  We came out from behind the cardboard that we had used as a screen and found the American girl with her boyfriend in front of the statue of Disillusion to our left.

  “Thank you very much,” I said, as I returned her mirror.

  “You’re welcome!” she said, with a smile.

  Chapter 36

  Naples, 18th of June, 17:30

  Three days to the summer solstice

  We left the chapel and went our separate ways. I promised Michele that I would inform him as soon as I figured out what that code meant. He could barely believe that he had possessed the Peregrino Neapolitano for so many years without ever guessing what was really hidden in its pages. But now he wanted to go all the way. Once again, I fervently hoped that I would be able to retrieve the book.

  I returned to Palazzo Sansevero and found Memmo Capogrosso and Luca Bellinfante in the laboratory.

  “Ah, hi Lorenzo,” said Memmo, with his usual seraphic calm. “We’ve just arrived and we are going to start cooking the compound.”

  “I was about to do the same thing.”

  Memmo noticed the pensive and worried expression on my face. “Have you read our messages? We’ve been looking for you for quite a while. What’s been going on?”

  “Maybe another murder, brother,” I said with a sigh.

  “What? Are you serious?” asked Memmo, with a frown. I nodded.

  “Let’s not think about it for now – let’s get on with that,” I said, pointing to the glass containers.

  “All right. We need only add the boiled dew, as I said in the message…”

  I noticed that Luca had picked up the vessel containing that salt which was so important in alchemical operations and, as it is prepared in the spring, is often called boiled dew. At that moment I remembered the words of the last letter Hašek had sent to Matteo before my master died, warning him not to use the dew that Matteo and his lodge generally used but to wait for Hašek to give him the one he had prepared. Matteo hadn’t had time to do it, but maybe I did.