Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [233]
But my triumph is near. Soapes, when I was Kelley, told me everything in the Tower of London. The secret is to become someone else.
By shrewd plotting I had Giuseppe Balsamo imprisoned in the fortress of San Leo, and I stole his secrets. Saint-Germain has vanished; now all believe I am the Conte di Cagliostro.
Midnight is struck by all the clocks of the city. What unnatural peace. This silence does not persuade me. A beautiful evening, though cold; the high moon casts an icy glow over the impenetrable alleys of old Paris. It is ten o’clock: the spire of the abbey of the Black Friars has just tolled eight, slowly. The wind with mournful creaks moves the iron weathercocks on the desolate expanse of rooftops. A thick blanket of clouds covers the sky.
Skipper, are we turning back? No. We’re sinking! Damnation, the Patna’s going to the bottom. Jump, Seven Seas Jim, jump! To be free of this anguish I’d give a diamond the size of a walnut. Luff the mainsail, take the tiller, the topgallant, whatever you like, curse you, it’s blowing up!
Horribly I clench the cloister of my teeth as a deathly pallor flushes my green, waxen face.
How did I come here, I who am the very image of revenge? The spirits of Hell will smile with contempt at the tears of the creature whose menacing voice so often made them tremble even in the womb of their fiery abyss.
Holla, lights!
How many steps did I come down to reach this den? Seven? Thirty-six? There is no stone I grazed, no step taken that did not hide a hieroglyph. When I have uncovered them all, the Mystery will be revealed at last to my faithful followers. The Message will be deciphered, its solution will be the Key, and to the initiate, but only to the initiate, the Enigma will then be revealed.
Between the Enigma and the deciphering of the Message, the step is brief, and from it, radiant, the Hierogram will emerge, upon which the Prayer of Interrogation will be defined. Then the Arcanum will be drawn aside, the veil, the Egyptian tapestry that covers the Pentacle. And thence to the light, to announce the Occult Meaning of the Pentacle, the Cabalistic Question to which only a few can reply, and to recite in a voice of thunder the Impenetrable Sign. Bent over it, the Thirty-six Invisibles will have to give the Answer, the uttering of the Rune whose Meaning is open only to the sons of Hermes. To them let the Mocking Seal be given, the Mask behind which is outlined the Countenance they seek to bare, the Mystic Rebus, the Sublime Anagram...
“Sator Arepo!” I shout in a voice to make a specter tremble. And Sator Arepo appears, abandoning the wheel he grips with the clever hands of a murderer. At my command, he prostrates himself. I recognize him, for I had already suspected his identity. He is Luciano, the handicapped shipping clerk, who the Unknown Superiors have decreed will be the executor of my evil and bloody task.
“Sator Arepo,” I ask mockingly, “do you know what is the Final Answer concealed behind the Sublime Anagram?”
* * *
“No, Count,” the imprudent one replies. “I wait to learn it from your lips.”
From my pale lips infernal laughter bursts and reechoes through the ancient vaults.
“Fool! Only the true initiate knows he does not know it!”
“Yes, master,” the maimed clerk replies stupidly. “As you wish. 1 am ready.”
We are in a squalid den in Clignancourt. This evening I must punish, first of all, you, who initiated me into the noble art of crime, who pretend to love me, and who, what is worse, believe you love me, along with the nameless enemies with whom you will spend the next weekend. Luciano, unwelcome witness of my humiliations, will lend me his arm—his one arm—then he, too, will die.
The room has a trapdoor over a ditch or chamber, a subterranean passage used since time immemorial for the storage of contraband goods, a place always dank because it is connected to the Paris sewers, that labyrinth of crime,