Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [185]
“Why?”
“Because, clearly, the sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don’t know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?”
“I must say I’m persuaded,” Belbo said. “But where in the Balkans were the Popelicans waiting?”
“If you ask me, the natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the Templars of Provins couldn’t have known that a few years later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and remain under their dominion for five centuries.”
“Which would suggest that the Plan was interrupted at the link between Germany and Bulgaria. When was that to take place?”
“In 1824,” Diotallevi said.
“Why’s that?”
Diotallevi quickly sketched the following diagram:
PORTUGAL ENGLAND FRANCE GERMANY BULGARIA JERUSALEM
1344 1464 1584 1704 1824 1944
“In 1344 the first grand masters of each group establish themselves in the six prescribed places. In the course of a hundred and twenty years, six grand masters succeed one another in each group, and in 1464 the sixth master of Tomar meets the sixth master of the English group. In 1584 the twelfth English master meets the twelfth French master. The chain proceeds at this pace, so if the appointment with the Paulicians fails, it must fail in 1824.”
“Let’s assume it fails,” I said. “But I don’t understand why such shrewd men, when they had four-sixths of the message in their hands, weren’t able to reconstruct it. Or why, if the appointment with the Bulgarians fell through, they didn’t get in touch with the next group.”
“Casaubon,” Belbo said, “do you really think the lawmakers of Provins were fools? If they wanted the revelation to remain concealed for six hundred years, they must have taken precautions. Every master of a group knows where to find the master of the following group, but not where to find the others, and none of the later groups know where to find the masters of the preceding groups. If the Germans lose the Bulgarians, they’ll never know where the Jerusalemites are, and the Jerusalemites won’t know where anyone else is. As for reconstructing a message from incomplete pieces, that depends on how the message has been divided. Certainly not~ in logical sequence. So if only one piece is missing, the message is incomprehensible, and the one who has that missing piece can’t make any use of it.”
“Just think,” Diotallevi said. “If the Bulgarian meeting didn’t take place, Europe today is the theater of a secret ballet, with groups seeking and not finding one another, while each group knows that one small piece of information might be enough to make it master of the world. What’s the name of that taxidermist you told us about, Casaubon? Maybe a Plot really exists, and history is simply the result of this battle to reconstruct a lost message. We don’t see them, but, invisible, they act all around us.”
The same idea then occurred to Belbo and to me; we both started talking, and we quickly worked out the right connection. In addition, we discovered that at least two expressions in the Provins message—the reference to thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups, and the hundred-and-twenty-year