Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [235]
I hear the sinister flash of Luciano’s blade, and in the darkness I see the death rattle that glistens in the Englishman’s silent pupil. Justice is done.
* * *
I await the third, the French Rosicrucians’ man, Montfaucon de Villars, ready to betray the secrets of his sect.
“I am the Comte de Gabalis,” he introduces himself, the lying ninny.
I have only to whisper a few words, and he is impelled toward his destiny. He falls, and Luciano, greedy for blood, performs his task.
You smile with me in the shadows, and you tell me you are mine, that your secret will be my secret. Deceive yourself, yes, sinister caricature of the Shekhinah. Yes, I am your Simon; but wait, you still do not know the best of it. When you do know, you will have ceased knowing.
* * *
What to add? One by one, the others enter.
Padre Bresciani has informed me that, representing the German II-luminati, Babette d’lnterlaken will come, the great-granddaughter of Weishaupt, the grand virgin of Helvetic Communism, who grew up amid roues, thieves, and murderers. Expert in stealing impenetrable secrets, in opening dispatches of state without breaking the seals, in administering poisons as her sect orders her.
She enters then, the young agathodemon of crime, enfolded in a polar-bear fur, her long blond hair flowing from beneath the bold busby; her eyes haughty, sarcastic. With the usual fraud, I direct her toward her destruction.
Ah, irony of language—this gift nature has given us to keep silent the secrets of our spirit! The Daughter of Enlightenment falls victim to Darkness. I hear her spewing horrible curses, impenitent, as Luciano twists the knife three times in her heart. Deja vu....
* * *
It is the turn of Nilus, who for a moment thought to possess both the tsarina and the map. Filthy lewd monk, you wanted the Antichrist? He stands before you, but you do not know him. I send him on, blind, amid a thousand mystical flatteries, to the evil trap awaiting him. Luciano rips open his breast with a wound in the form of a cross, and he sinks into eternal sleep.
* * *
I must overcome the ancestral distrust in the last, the Elder of Zion, who claims to be Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, immortal like me. He is suspicious as he smiles unctuously, his beard still steeped in the blood of the tender Christian creatures he habitually slaughters in the cemetery of Prague. But I will be as clever as a Rachkovsky, cleverer. I hint that the coffer contains not only a map but also uncut diamonds. I know the fascination uncut diamonds have for this deicide race. He approaches his destiny, dragged by his greed, and it is his own God, cruel and vengeful, that he curses as he dies, pierced like Hiram, but it is difficult for him to curse even now, because his God’s name cannot be uttered.
* * *
In my delusion, I thought I had concluded the Great Work.
As if struck by a gust of wind, once again the door opens, and a figure appears, a livid face, numbed fingers devoutly held to the chest, a hooded gaze: he cannot conceal his identity, for he wears the black habit of his black Society. A son of Loyola!
“Cre’tineau!” I cry, misled.
He raises his hand in a hypocritical gesture of benediction. “I am not I am that I am,” he says to me with a smile that contains nothing human.
It is true: this has always been the Jesuits’ method. Sometimes they deny their own existence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order to intimidate the uninitiated.
“We are always other than what you think, sons of Belial,” that seducer of sovereigns says now. “But you, O Saint-Germain....”
“How do you know who I really am?” I ask, alarmed.
He sneers. “We met in other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of Postel, when under the name of Abbe d’Herblay I led you to end one of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I still feel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert’s help, had sentenced me!) We met