Quinten himself wasn't sure, either; but he did not doubt for a moment that they could force their way into that chapel and find the tablets there. They were simply waiting for him. In his half of the narrow cupboard things were less comfortable; there was only a bench for kneeling on, on which he had sat down. Separated by a partition with a barred diamond-shaped opening, they listened to each other's breathing.
"Can you hear me, my son?" whispered Onno.
Quinten turned around cautiously and put his mouth to the grille. "Yes."
"Satisfied, now you've finally got your way?"
"Yes."
"What would . . ."—"Ada" was on the tip of Onno's tongue—"Max say if he saw us sitting here like this?"
"I can't imagine."
"Do you know what I think? He'd have died laughing."
Onno thought of Max's fit of laughter in Havana when they had discovered what kind of conference they had wound up in. There on that island not only had Quinten been conceived, but the seeds of his own political downfall had been sown. Koos's face, on the boat to Enkhuizen: "Does your stupidity know no bounds, Onno?" Helga's death the same day . . . Ada. . . . And Quinten also thought of Max, vanished so completely from the world as if he had never existed. His empty coffin in the earth. His mother . . .
"Perhaps it's because it's so dark and silent here," whispered Onno, "but I keep thinking of your poor mother the whole time."
"Me too."
"Do you remember we went to visit her together?"
"Of course. We were chased by the police."
"Yes, I vaguely remember something of the sort."
Quinten hesitated, but a moment later said: "That evening I had a really fantastic dream for the first time."
"Can you remember that too? It's almost ten years ago."
"Didn't I say that I hardly ever forget anything?"
"What did you dream, then?"
"I'm not going to tell you," said Quinten, turning his head away a little. "Something about a building." The center of the world. He thought of the deathly fear with which he had woken up after hearing that calm, hoarse voice, how afterward he had groped around helplessly in just such a darkness and silence as he found himself in now—but although he was not dreaming now, and although the fact that he was here was completely bound up with that dream, he didn't feel a trace of fear. "But at the very last moment it suddenly turned into a nightmare. I had no idea where I was. I stared screaming, I think, and it was only when Granny came out of Max's bedroom and put the light on that I saw that I was on the threshold of her room."
Onno caught his breath. Did Sophia come out of Max's bedroom at night? What did that mean? He had the feeling he really shouldn't ask about it, but he couldn't help himself:
"Did Max and Granny sleep together, then?"
"Never noticed it. Perhaps they'd been talking, for all I know. Be quiet for a moment..."
Far away a soft, sing-song voice resounded: probably from the refectory, where a priest was reading an edifying text, while the others sat silently eating their frugal meal and did not listen.
Onno would have liked to ask what Sophia was wearing that night, but he knew enough. Bloody lecher. He stopped at nothing—not even that frigid Sophia Brons, who was a thousand years older than him. How could he ever have believed otherwise? But had he ever believed otherwise? He'd never wanted to think about it, because of course he suspected that there was something going on between those two in that lonely castle with its long nights, but he hadn't wanted to admit it to himself. Why not? What was wrong with it? Because Max's offer to bring up his son had to be an act of pure, self-sacrificing friendship? How pure were his own motives when it came down to it? He also realized with a jolt that this meant that his mother-in-law had recently—without anyone knowing—been widowed for the second time, at the age of sixty-two.
"If we ever get out of this alive," he whispered, "we must get in touch with your grandmother immediately."
"All the same to me," said Quinten indifferently.
Everything that followed lay before him as though on the other side of a mountain, of which he could see only the summit ridge at the moment: beyond that might be the sea, or a city, or a desert, or a mist-filled abyss. He felt as if up to now he had done everything by himself, and as if he still had to do the most important thing in the next few hours—afterward, he knew with absolute certainty, events would take their own course and he would see what happened to him. He slowly nodded off, though nothing escaped his ears, like a dozing dog ...
"Quinten?"
"Yes?" He looked at the luminous child's watch that he had bought yesterday for a few thousand lire, with a Mickey Mouse wobbling to and fro as a second hand. It was almost nine o'clock.
"Were you asleep?"
"Just dozing."
"You're completely calm, aren't you? Nothing can happen to you."
"I don't think so."
"I wish I could say the same. I'm dying a thousand deaths, and I feel claustrophobic."
"Why did you wake me up?"
"I didn't know you were asleep."
"What did you want to say, then?"
"I keep thinking of Max," said Onno. "Have you ever had a bosom friend ?"
"A bosom friend?"
"That means you haven't. A bosom friend is someone you even tell something that you'd never tell anyone."
"Do you mean a secret?"
"I don't know what you mean by a secret, but I mean something shameful, something that you are so shamed of that no one must know."
"I haven't got anything like that."
"Really?"
"What sort of thing would it be? Of course I've got a secret that I'll never tell anyone, but not because I'm ashamed of it."
"Not even your mother?" asked Onno after some hesitation.
"No one."
Quinten said no more. Hadn't his father himself said that his mother was really "no one"? So precisely by telling his secret to no one, he was actually telling it to his mother. Should he tell his father this now? He'd understand immediately, but then of course he would have betrayed something of the secret. Was his mother perhaps ultimately the secret?
Again the silence was disturbed by stumbling in the distance.
"There they are," whispered Quinten.
Everything went as expected. In the chapel of San Silvestro the priests were now gathering for complines, after which they would go to bed. A few minutes later the sound of old men's singing rang out.
With eyes closed, squeezed shut by the darkness, Onno and Quinten listened to the thin Gregorian chant, which hung in the air like a silver cobweb. For Onno it exuded a desperate loneliness, a metallic freezing cold, which seemed to flow in through a chink straight from the Middle Ages— but for Quinten its harmonic unanimity evoked the image of ten or fifteen men, sinking after a shipwreck but holding each other to the last. The psalms, intended to help them through the night, were interrupted only by a short chapter prayer.
After a quarter of an hour the door to the convent was closed again.
"Quarter past nine," whispered Quinten. "At ten past ten, then."
In a quarter of an hour the fathers would be in bed and by approximately a quarter past ten they would have gone to sleep. Because Onno had remembered once reading something about the periodicity of sleep, he had looked up a study of it in a university bookshop at Quinten's insistence. Besides the fantastic periods of "paradoxical sleep"—that of the dreams, from which one was easily awakened—sleep consisted of four degrees of depth. The first and longest period of the deepest sleep occurred twenty-five minutes after falling asleep and itself also lasted approximately twenty-five minutes. The second period came seventy minutes later, lasted no longer than ten minutes, but was followed after less than half an hour by the even shorter third and last period.
For Quinten that was enough to decide to work only during the deepest, dreamless phases, from which sleepers could be roused only with difficulty. So, over the course
of the night, he had three quarters of an hour in all to play with. That ought to be enough.
60
The Commandos
"Ten past ten."
When Mickey Mouse showed the correct time to the second, Quinten stood up and silently pushed the curtain aside. Through the three stained-glass windows, the streetlights ensured that there was not quite total darkness. On the altar a red lamp was lit. Quickly and silently, he walked in his soft thief's shoes around behind the Sancta Sanctorum to the choir chapel on the other side, but the light was out there too; by the door to the sacristy he squatted down and peered around the corner: no one had remained behind in silent prayer; only a sour smell indicated that the old men had been there. Back in the chapel of San Lorenzo he saw the shadow of Onno, who was rubbing his left leg painfully. Quinten took his backpack from the confessional, gave his father the pocket flashlight, and walked between the rows of pews to the double door opposite with the two eyes in it, which gave access to the Sancta Sanctorum.
Like a doctor feeling his patient's pulse, he laid his hand momentarily on the top sliding padlock, which formed the nose of the bronze face. Then he knelt down, unfastened the backpack, and carefully spread out on the floor a chamois cloth containing ten or twelve long steel pins, in different sizes, gleaming with oil. With the lamp at its lowest, Onno lit his work.
At home he had seen Quinten busy with his preparations and they had seemed to him so ridiculous that he had found it too embarrassing to inquire about them—but what he saw now filled him with astonishment. Quinten tucked a hammer with a rubber head into his trouser belt and like a professional burglar picked up a couple of pins, which fitted into the H-shaped keyhole. While he slid them slowly into the colossal lock, leaning with one ear against the door, he averted his eyes in order to concentrate fully on what his hands felt on the inside. Suddenly Onno remembered something from his earliest childhood, from before the war: the photographer on the beach at Scheveningen. After he had taken the cover off the lens behind his tripod, he put his arms in the two black sleeves that hung down from his huge camera and performed mysterious movements inside, which must not see the light of day, while he kept his eyes focused just as blindly on the horizon as Quinten now did on the invisible ceiling paintings. While his movements became even more minute and precise, Quinten closed his eyes and parted his lips a little. Finally he pulled the hammer from his trouser belt, looked precisely at what he was doing, and gave the pins a short, dull tap. From the inside of the lock came a stiff click. He looked up at his father with a smile and carefully pulled the heavy shackle from the box and the rings on the door.
"One down," he whispered.
Onno looked at him open-mouthed. Quinten had told him about Piet Keller, the locksmith at Groot Rechteren, whom he had often visited as a little boy; but it had seemed to him impossible that after so many years it could result in what he now saw: the opened lock. While Quinten wasted no time and immediately took the lower lock in hand, Onno realized that everything had now suddenly become much more dangerous.
If they had been discovered before or afterward, they would have said that they had wanted to spend the night in the proximity of the acheiropoeton out of devotion; he had been convinced that after fiddling with the lock a bit, they would have gotten no farther than the chapel of San Lorenzo. But in the meantime the lock had been picked and the pins were already in the second lock. His initial lightheartedness had disappeared instantly—but at this stage there was obviously no stopping Quinten any longer. The only way of putting an end to it was to go immediately to the convent door, bang on it with his stick, and rouse the fathers from the deepest level of their sleep. But then he would have lost his son for good.
By the time the second lock had also admitted defeat with a click, things had still gone without a hitch. Quinten looked at his watch: twenty-three minutes past eleven. In the bronze of the right-hand half of the door there were a couple of keyholes in incomprehensible places; he had read in Grisar that the door was originally Roman, and hopefully they were simply separate relics from that time. He cautiously pushed against the left-hand side, and it immediately gave way . . .
The center of the world!
He took his backpack and, lit by his father's flashlight, stepped across the threshold. He would have preferred to do it more solemnly, striding slowly, like a Pontifex Maximus—but now that he had gotten here he was suddenly in a hurry: there were twelve minutes left for the first part of the operation. Was it always like this, perhaps? Did the real work lie in the preparations and was the actual achievement nothing more than a bonus?
As he went down a passageway, approximately four yards long, that led into the chapel, a Chinese fairy tale that Max had once told him came back to him: the emperor had once commissioned a draftsman to draw a cockerel, and the latter had said that he needed ten years for the work; after he had lived at the emperor's expense for ten years and had drawn a thousand cockerels every day, he went to the palace again; when the emperor inquired if he had the drawing with him, the draftsman asked for a pencil and paper and drew a cockerel with a single line, whereupon the stupid emperor became so furious that he tore up the drawing and had the draftsman beheaded.
The low, narrow passageway, the fifteen-hundred-year-old connection with the former papal palace, seemed to explode at its end into the high, square space of the Gothic chapel. Without looking up or around, Quinten went to the altar and knelt down with his tools. Onno followed him with the flashlight, and although he had not been drinking, he gradually felt as if he were becoming tipsy. Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus. The things that were happening now were so outrageous that he could scarcely comprehend them. Probably he was dreaming. Unlike the fathers, he was in the state of paradoxical sleep: any moment now he would wake up, bathed in sweat, as the saying went; Edgar would be sitting on the windowsill and the sun would have risen over another hot day in Rome, full of politics, tourism, and things that twenty-four hours later would all be forgotten for all eternity. He glanced back and now saw the barred window from the inside, in a dim light that came through the windows on the ground floor up the Holy Stairs.
"Hold the flashlight still," whispered Quinten in a commanding tone.
The door to the chapel was probably still regularly used, but the locks of the barred doors in front of the altar had not been opened since 1905. There were just over ten minutes left for the first phase, but he did not have to force himself to be calm, because he was calm. He'd seen that the two bottom padlocks, no bigger than a hand, were conventional in construction and proof only against force, not careful thought: from the five simple skeleton keys, which he had had made by a locksmith behind the Pantheon, he immediately selected the right one.
Without much effort the locks clicked open; obviously they had been restored in the days of Grisar, and so the same would probably apply to the monstrous sliding padlock. For the first time Quinten saw it from close quarters. He smiled and thought: what an angel. It locked a heavy iron rod, which prevented the barred doors opening across their whole length. A few minutes later, after a tap with the rubber hammer, this item had also capitulated.
With a small can he quickly applied some oil to the four hinges, put the tools into his backpack, and laid it next to him on the altar.
"Give me a hand," he whispered. Onno put his stick on the papal prayer stool—and in order not to make any noise, they carefully moved the bar from the two rings and laid it down on the worn marble step, upon which for a thousand years 160 popes had celebrated mass daily.
Quinten looked at his watch.
"Twenty-five to eleven. It's time."
After hanging back the locks of the entrance door temporarily, Quinten lay down on a prayer stool opposite the altar in the chapel of San Lorenzo and immediately felt himself dropping off. . .
The reddish-brown wall, at reading distance from his eyes, is a little darker in the middle, so it is as if he is looking into a tunnel. A little later a small tangled vio
let sphere, like a turning ball of wool, no larger than a marble, starts revolving; shortly afterward it sheds its skin for a moment to reveal the accurately drawn snout of a monkey, also very small, and immediately disappears, while another new little whirlpool emerges, turning into a small, monstrous mouth with sharp teeth, again just as precisely etched. Even in his semisleep he is completely conscious; he looks in fascination at the spectacle unraveling before his eyes; watches as it evaporates and is replaced by a fish, a woman's face, with disheveled hair, a strange pig, a cat, a jar, a man with a furrowed brow and a beard, each in sharp focus, like in a photograph. Where does it all come from? He's not imagining it; he's never seen the apparitions before and has no idea what the next one will be. Were they all there before he saw them? Do they still exist when he no longer sees them? They remind him of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch—so Bosch didn't invent anything; he simply remembered everything well. But then something begins to change. The wall, about a foot away from him, suddenly becomes transparent, as he had once seen with Max and Sophia at the Holland Festival, in a Mozart opera, The Magic Flute—when a front-lit gauze curtain, which closed off the whole proscenium arch, was slowly lit from behind, gradually revealing an enormous space with perspective decor in the style of Bibiena . . .
Onno had not gone back to the confessional, either; with Quinten on one side of him and his stick on the other, he stared into the darkness and listened to the sounds, his legs outstretched, his hands folded behind his neck. A soft hum surrounded the building, Saturday-night traffic; far away he heard the siren of an ambulance or a police car. The Romans were going out for the evening.
Everywhere, the restaurants and the cafes and the theaters were full, the city was blossoming around them; but they themselves were sitting here, on their metaphysical commando raid, like an incredible anachronism in search of the tablets of a Law about which not only could no one care less any longer, but which most people had never even heard of. He glanced sideways at Quinten, who was breathing deeply and now descending in his turn into the deepest stage of his sleep, while the fathers of the Holy Cross began rising into dreamier regions. Onno sighed deeply. For as long as he lived he would never forget the sound of those clicking locks. Whenever anyone said to him that this or that was impossible, he would hear click and laugh in the person's face.