The Alchemist’s Code (21 page)

“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.”

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.

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.

A large black Mercedes was waiting for us in the square in front of the monastery's main entrance. Herzog opened the back door and moved to the side to let us in. “
Geh, schnell
!” he said to his mate who had seated himself in the driving seat, then turned to us. His square face was now clearly visible, and, holding the grille and the paper in his hands, he said, “We know what the key is that you've found and we thank you for sparing us the trouble of looking for it. But I would like some clarification as regards these.”

“The wooden rectangle looks like a Cardan grille,” I replied, “a device invented during the Renaissance by an Italian mathematician to write coded messages. The lines written on the paper indicate the Lavra monastery where you found us. We found the key there. Quite a treasure trove, isn't it?”

Herzog seemed unconvinced and continued to look back and forth between the objects and us. “What led you to that building down in the centre?”

Anna replied without hesitation. “A letter that I found in my grandfather's house, written many years ago. The letterhead indicated the address on Andriyivskyy Descent.”

Herzog raised an eyebrow. “Your grandfather, you said?”

“Yes – do you know anything about it by any chance?”

The German pulled himself together immediately. “Even if I did, it would be none of your business.”

“I'd say it was, since it's a past that you've tried to wipe out.”

Anna was starting to get angry, but it was pointless. I squeezed her hand to try to calm her down.