The Alchemist’s Code

by Martin Rua

  The old man led us down to the basement. The floor was uneven and covered in rubble as well as more tools and objects of all kinds. Lighting our way with a large torch that looked as if it came from the Soviet era, our guide stopped in front of a door and shone the torch on it.

  The faded words upon it startled Anna.

  “Oh my God – here it is.”

  “This is the place?”

  “Yes, look – ’Michail Izbrannovič Deviatov – Typographer’.”

  The old man nodded and handed Anna the torch and a key, mumbling something as he did so.

  “He says he can’t come inside with us, but that we’ll find what we seek.”

  Our escort departed, and left us staring at the closed door, undecided as to what to do. I took a deep breath and exchanged glances with Anna.

  “All right, let’s do it.”

  The girl opened the door, which creaked eerily on its rusty hinges. The room that stood before us, lit only by the torch the old man had given Anna, was rather down at heel, but certainly more welcoming than the rest of the building. In the middle, surrounded by some chairs, was a large round table upon which sat several candles. We approached it and lit the candles with the matches which had been thoughtfully left on the table.

  “Nine,” said Anna, counting the chairs and candles.

  “You don’t say. Look, there’s something carved into the wood all the way round the circumference of the table.”

  Adonaii, Jub, Ina, Hayah, Gotha, Jeo, Jakinaii, Heleneham, Jahabulum.

  “The Lodge of the Nine—” murmured Anna. “They met here.”

  “Yeah, deep in the heart of the castle along with the ghosts. No one would disturb them. But what was the purpose of their meetings? Did they spend all their time contemplating the Baphomet? And these names… I know them very well.”

  Anna looked at me, awaiting an explanation.

  “There’s a degree in the Masonic path called the Royal Arch. It’s very common, especially in England. The initiation ritual tells of a treasure hidden in the bowels of the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, inside a crypt excavated by Solomon. To get there, he had to go through nine arches, each guarded by a watchman. What you see engraved on the table, set in stylised arches, are the nine secret words that you had to learn to overcome each guardian, get to the crypt and find the treasure.”

  “It looks like we are in the right place. Nine seats, nine names for nine keepers at the place indicated by my grandfather in his book.”

  “Ok, let’s pretend that this mixture of Freemasonry, Templars and Chaldean magic makes any sense at all – the question now is, where is the Baphomet?”

  We looked around us but the room offered up no other interesting details, and so I started to scrutinise the large table. In addition to the names carved along the circumference, I noticed something in the middle. A small square divided, in turn, into two rectangles, one above the other. On the top one there was an inscription in Cyrillic, and the bottom one looked strangely familiar.

  “Translate that writing in the middle of the table for me, Anna.”

  I shone the torch on the small part of wood and Anna read the three lines of text.

  A bird black as asphalt flew/ knocked on the window with his silver beak / how many stars on the glass, how many planets / the bird ate and then died.

  “This is a poem by Dmitry Grigor’ev, a contemporary Russian author. But why is it engraved in the middle of the table?”

  “Maybe it isn’t the content that counts, but what’s hidden in the words, in the letters themselves.” I tried to lift out the lower wooden rectangle, which featured some unmistakable small openings. I was right, it could be removed. I placed them on top of one another, while Anna observed the operation with wonderment.

  “Just as I thought – this is another Cardan grille! Now read what appears in the holes.”

  She read it, but after a while shook her head. “It doesn’t mean anything, I can’t make any sense of it.”

  Not discouraged, I took from my pocket the piece of paper onto which I had copied the other grille, the one I’d found in the safe at Bruno’s house, and replaced the rectangle of wood with it. “Of course! The right key is the one that someone sent to my house, not the one that’s right next to the poem engraved on the table. That would be too easy. Try again.”

  This time her eyes brightened.

  “Yes, now it makes sense! ’Look for us at the third grave after that of Nestor’s’.”

  We looked at each other for a few moments, both trying to find a way to interpret the clue, until suddenly, Anna’s face lit up.

  “Nestor is one of the most famous saints in Ukraine, I know where he’s buried! In the monastery of Pechersk Lavra!”

  19

  The Tomb of Nestor

  Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona

  Kiev, January 2013

  We left the building and set off in search of the bundled up man to give him back the key and ask him a few more questions. I suspected that he was the one who had sent me the package with the Cardan grille and I wanted him to throw some light on the matter. To our left, we saw his stall, standing upside down in the snow, but of him there was no trace.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Look, Lorenzo!”

  Across the street, in the lobby of the building opposite the Castle of Richard the Lionheart was a group of people staring at something on the pavement.

  We spotted a silhouette between the snow and the soil – it looked like a pile of rags.

  “It’s the old man!” I cried, and ran towards him.

  “Wait!” said Anna, holding me back.

  Just across the street, two men wearing dark heavy coats broke away from the group of onlookers and appeared suddenly in front of me.

  “Perhaps you and what you found in that building would like to come with us, Mr Aragona,” said one of them with an English accent that seemed neither British nor American.

  “What the hell—?”

  The guy reached into his coat, but I had no time to see what he was about to pull out because something or someone banged violently against me, throwing me to the ground. I saw Anna placing herself in front of the man and giving him a powerful kick to the nether regions.

  He folded, gasping “Nutte!” – ’whore’ in German. Unperturbed, Anna completed her move by throwing him at his mate, and both tumbled to the ground to the amazement of the passers-by who were still busy helping the old man lying on the pavement.

  “Run!” shouted Anna tugging at my coat.

  We raced off at breakneck speed, but the two were already on our heels. The few people who were in the street at that time of day watched the scene with curiosity and concern, but no one intervened.

  At the end of the Andriyivskyy Descent, when our pursuers were now a few metres away, Anna slipped into a supermarket on Kontraktova Ploshcha, the old square where contracts were once signed.

  Completely unaware of what she had in mind, I followed her in.

  We started walking down the aisles and between the freezers of the supermarket, keeping an eye on the entrance, and after a few moments the two men came in and looked around. As soon as she saw them, Anna pushed me back against a high shelf – we were hidden from sight, but she could observe them.

  Breathing hard and peering closely at her, I attempted to hide my embarrassment at the touch of her body and couldn’t help but ask her, “Anna, who the hell are you?”

  “Someone who has learned to defend herself,” was her enigmatic reply, then, looking right and left, she pointed at something at the back of the shop. “We need to get to the warehouse at the back of the supermarket. Follow me.”

  After making sure that the two weren’t looking in our direction, she moved cautiously, and we slipped into the warehouse. One of the staff in charge of loading and unloading goods gazed at us in puzzlement and then shouted something. Anna ignored him and then pushed him unceremoniously out of the way.

 
“There’s the exit,” she said, as the guy from the shop started coming towards us again.

  Anna went over to him and whispered something in his ear. It must have been something convincing, because the man first turned white, and then began to back off.

  As we walked out into the courtyard at the back, I asked her what she had said.

  “Ukrainian things you wouldn’t understand.”

  I realised that this was no time to protest.

  Back in the square, we jumped into a taxi which took us to the monastery.

  The necropolis of Pecherska Lavra was a dense network of tunnels dug into the flank of Berestov mountain, overlooking the Dnipro River.

  “It’s a place many visit,” said Anna, as we walked past heaps of freshly fallen snow. “I think it was founded in the year one thousand.”

  “Who was this Nestor?”

  “He’s regarded as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Nestorian manuscript, the oldest Russian chronicle, is ascribed to him. He lived in Pecherska Lavra until his death, just toward the end of the year one thousand. He’s considered a saint.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  “My mother was very religious, she was always talking about him.”

  We reached the entrance of the necropolis of the so called Near Caves – to distinguish them from that of the Far Caves, located a few hundred metres away – and Anna bought two tickets and two candles at the counter where icons, books and other material about the monastery were also sold. We lit the candles and walked into the tunnel.

  The few visitors meant we would be more or less undisturbed once we had found the tomb of Nestor, and we soon found ourselves in a claustrophobic, closed space with no openings and with whitewashed walls, lit almost exclusively by candles. Anna explained to me that the complex of the Near Caves had been founded by St. Anthony of Pechersk who, wishing to lead a more cloistered life, had retired there, leaving the management of the rest of the monastery to his brother Barlaam and appointing him abbot. Other caves were added to the first as the number of brothers grew. Three underground churches were built, and one by one they started to bury the monks in niches dug into the narrow corridors. These graves now appeared as wooden coffins with glass lids, through which you could see the bodies of the monks, mummified and covered in precious garments.

  We wandered around that underground labyrinth, bumping into the occasional lost tourist or one of the bearded monks who were there as guards, proceeding cautiously because Anna had no idea where the coffin of Nestor might be.

  After drawing a couple of blanks, and with our hands by now covered in melted candle wax, Anna spotted it at last.

  “There it is.We’re there.”

  The coffin, resting on a kind of low shelf carved into the rock, was at the beginning of a tunnel. Nestor’s body was covered with a richly decorated robe, his macabre mummified hand sticking out from under the garments.

  “Ok, now we have to look for the third grave after Nestor’s,” I said.

  We walked to the end of the corridor, passing two graves and, at the third, just before the corridor joined another long section of the tunnel, we bent down to read the name of the monk buried there.

  “St. Nicetas,” Anna said.

  “The Victorious. Let’s take a look.”

  “What exactly should we be looking for, in your opinion?” Anna asked me as she examined the decorations and inscriptions on the mummified body wrapped in precious garments.

  “A key, perhaps, or another coded message, since your grandfather had such fun hiding them around the city. In any case, I doubt that he opened the coffin and hid something inside it.”

  “And so?”

  A couple of visitors walked past us and we pretended to be praying at the sacred remains of St. Nicetas. As soon as we were alone again, we resumed our exploration.

  “Find us at the third grave,” I whispered as I knelt down and examined the base of the coffin. “There must be more than one object if the message says ’find us’.”

  At that moment my eye fell upon a grille that was about ten centimetres above the ground over the stone wall upon which the coffin was set.

  “Anna, stand guard and watch out for anyone coming along.”

  The girl looked around her and gestured to me that we were clear, so I lay down on the ground and peered inside the grille using the little flashlight built into the Swiss penknife I always carried with me. “There’s something in here, I need to open this thing.”

  “Someone’s coming! Get up – now!”

  I was up in a shot and we both assumed again the attitude of people immersed in deep prayer.

  “What did you see?” whispered Anna, her hands clasped.

  “It looks like a small wooden object.”

  Anna looked about her, made sure there was no one around anymore and invited me to hurry up. I knelt down again, pulled out the box cutter and, with a single gesture, easily levered out the grille, which was ineptly wedged into the white plaster of the stone base.

  I reached in and grabbed the small object.

  “Lorenzo, hurry up! We’ve got visitors.

  I put the object in my pocket and the grille back in place, and stayed kneeling down, my hands clasped, waiting for the new visitor – a young monk with long, black hair and a thick beard – to depart.

  He walked past thoughtfully, nodding a decorous greeting, and as soon as he was gone, we headed back towards Nestor’s coffin while I opened the wooden box. Inside it, at last, I found the key with the four-spoked wheel. “Here it is, straight out of the vision. Your grandfather was ill-advised to hide it here.”

  “He must have known what he was doing.”

  In addition to the key, there was a slip of paper written in Russian inside the box. “All yours,” I said, handing it to Anna, “I guess you’ll have to use the wooden grille we found in the Castle of Richard the Lionheart to decode it. It’s obvious now that this is a treasure hunt and that we have to visit every location.”

  Wait for me, and I’ll come back!/ Wait with all you’ve got!/Wait, when from that far-off place/Letters don’t arrive/Wait, when those with whom you wait/Doubt if I’m alive.

  Anna smiled wistfully. “My grandfather used the poems we once read together to encrypt his messages – the ones that I liked best. This one is by Konstantin Simonov.

  “Ok, great, but what’s the message for us?”

  Anna placed the grille over it and for a split second her eyes lit up the twilight of that mystical place. “Here we are! It says—”

  Just at that moment someone came out into the hallway and we immediately began pretending to be devotees of Saint Nestor again. But one of the two people walking by stopped right in front of Nestor’s coffin, to my right. I moved my lips as if I was praying.

  “It wasn’t nice of you to shake us off like that… As soon as you’re done with the mummy, I would be pleased if you would meet us upstairs. You can give what you’ve found to my colleague.”

  They had found us.

  20

  Oblivion

  Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona

  Kiev, January 2013

  We had no choice but to go towards the exit and hand over the wooden grille and what we had just found in the necropolis. I wondered what Anna had read in the message. Unfortunately there was no way for her to tell me.

  It had begun to snow again outside and the temperature had dropped even further.

  The face of the man waiting for us was sunk into the collar of his heavy coat, but even so I was able to distinguish his features and recognize him. This was the man who had seen Bruno alive for the last time – the man whom the CCTVs at the Églantine had filmed while he was shaking hands with my partner, in a chilling and seemingly innocuous greeting.

  “Ah – you’re the son of a bitch who took such pleasure in killing my partner, aren’t you?”

  Herzog stood there staring at me impassively, perhaps a little bit taken aback
by my cheek. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Herr Aragona. You and Miss Glyz are kindly requested to follow us and, of course, tell us what you found in that house in the centre and here in the caves. As you have probably noticed, we will stop at nothing,” he said in Italian with a thick German accent.

  If that was the end of this crazed pursuit of the Baphomet and my attempt to save Àrt, then it made absolutely no sense for me to carry on living and his words didn’t trouble me in the slightest, so I took the opportunity to provoke him again.

  “You are kindly inviting me to follow you? Look, my friend, I don’t give a shit about all of this, if you really want to know. You kept me drugged for God knows how long and who knows why. If I’m still on this absurd treasure hunt, it is because I’m desperate, because I no longer have anything to hold onto and all I want to do is save my wife.”

  It was all true. I had only decided to go along with Anna because Àrt had asked me to and I didn’t want to give up.

  “Your opinion is of no interest to me, Herr Aragona,” the German replied, then nodded to the other guy. Suddenly. I saw Anna stiffen. Clearly, she had a gun pointed at her back. “But I don’t think you would like anything to happen to your friend, would you?”

  I looked at Anna for a moment. I couldn’t let them kill her. I shook my head in defeat.

  “Good, I see that you have understood. This way, please. Our car is parked in front of the monastery.”

  We climbed to the top under an insistent snowfall. My mind was whirling, desperately seeking a solution, but it was clear that we only had two choices: revealing what we’d discovered or getting killed. Unfortunately, besides what we had just learned in the monastery right before they caught us, we had Vladimir Glyz’s book as well. If they hadn’t searched us yet, it was only to avoid attracting too much attention. As soon as we were alone, they would, I was sure.