Chapter Seven

The Delivery of the Keys

He memorized the Village: each winding street, the shops, the park and sporting grounds, the gravelled access-road to the beach, and the farthest limits he might advance through the outlying meadowland before the Guardians would roll forward to establish the invisible but undeviat­ing boundaries of his microcosmic world.

He determined, as best he could, the locations of the cameras by which his Arguseyed jailers surveyed the wide expanse of their bucolic jail; he discovered fifty–he might have missed as many more. He also located the various concealed speakers of the public address system, an easier task since Number 2 would at odd moments during these explorations (it made no difference where he might be) address some homely piece of wisdom to him, a stale poem or a grandfatherish admonition not to walk throughthat gate, not to try the handle ofthis door. When he did walk through the gate or try the door, he would find, as often as not, that Number 2 had been having a joke with him, that there was nothing beyond or within that merited special prohibition.

In that first week he had narrowed the range of his curiosity down to the Village’s two chief points of “inter­est” (they were the most common subjects on the picture post cards sold at the Stationer’s).

The first of these was beyond question the administra­tive center of the Village. Once, as he had stood outside the heavy iron gates staring up at the great gray mass of the place, Number 2 had delivered over the PA system a long appreciation of this building–its functional beauty, its impregnable defenses, the Minoan complexity of its corri­dors, and the warmth and simplicity of his own suite of offices at the heart of the labyrinth. The encircling fence was a formidable thing, its gates patrolled by armed guards and a beige sphere acting as Cerberus at the single entrance to the building proper. (“We call him ‘Rover,’ ” Number 2 had explained. “He’s unique among the Guardians in that his design allows him to–how shall I say?–annihilatewhoever causes him undue aggravation.”)

He decided that, for the time being at least, he would not try to breach these defenses. Soon enough, Number 2 had assured him, he would be invited inside, and it was more than likely that even then his satisfied curiosity would not seem worth the price of entrance, whatever it might prove to be.

The second “point of interest” was the Village church. Twice during that first week he had entered the church in the routine course of his explorations, but though he had been somewhat taken aback to find the interior even more incongruously elegant, even more accurately Lombardic, than its facade, he had not paid it anymore attention than he would have given, just then, to an altarpiece by Cosimo Tura (an example of which, unless it were a forgery, was displayed above the main altar; it was the same, possibly, that had been stolen from the Colleoni chapel in the last days of the war.) It was lavish, it was beautiful, and though it couldn’t be authentic it was entirely convincing. But it was (it had seemed) altogether unimportant.

On both occasions the church had been empty.

Then (this had been on the afternoon of that second visit) he had been sitting at his usual table at the terrace restaurant. He had been coming here at four o’clock each day to observe and to be observed. He was not ready yet to approach strangers himself (he wanted to be able, first, to distinguish between the jailers and the jailed) but he was willing they should approach him. As yet the only person who would speak to him was the blond waitress he had so unaccountably upset when he had found her crying in the kitchen. Of course, she had little choice in the matter–he was a customer who had to be served. The tweedy woman was never again at the restaurant, but her companion, the man with goitres, was often there. The goitres would leave his table just as promptly as he came to his, and on this particular afternoon, having nothing better to observe, he had watched the goitres making his way purposefully toward the steps of the church. Shortly after he had gone in at the door two other men, both as lacking in the external signs of piety as the goitres, followed him inside. After another brief interval three different men left the church. So much bustle in and out of a building that had been empty only minutes before suggested that something else was at issue here than could be accounted for by the com­bined attractions of Cosimo Tura and pious exercise. After he had finished his coffee he walked to the church himself.

He found it, as he had left it, empty: the nave empty, the transepts empty, the five small side-chapels of the ambulatory empty.

There were no other doors but the one he had come in at, which he had been watching constantly since the goitres and the two other men had entered.

From that afternoon he began to make more regular vis­its to the church. He bought a sketchpad at the Stationer’s and made studies of architectural details: the Tuscan pilasters, the caissons of the arched vault, the fine mould­ings (stone, not stucco), the gigantic festooned bucranium surmounting the door–and the three cameras mounted high on the cornice 10ft below the base of the vault and 50ft above the floor, inaccessible. Together they commanded a view of the whole interior of the church, except for the darkest recesses of the first and fifth side-chapels.

Though the cameras were out of harm’s way, their cables had been strung along the cornice and down the west wall (concealed by some slovenly stucco work), where they disappeared at a point just above the bucranium.

It was reassuring to find them making such simple mis­calculations. This, admittedly, was only a chink in their inner defenses, but if he could discover their first error as easily as this, he would eventually find a way to breach the outer walls. Hewould escape.

In the meantime, there was this. A secondary mystery admittedly, but the unravelling of it would keep him in trim. The occasion came so soon and required so little effort that he was never able to decide, afterward, whetherthey had not in effect, handed him the keys and written out the password.

Five o’clock of a heavily overcast day: he was watching from the terrace the high breakers curl in upon themselves with a distant roar, and rush, foaming, up the shingle beach. Two figures came on to the beach at a stumbling run, carrying an orange liferaft between them. As they reached the water, a klaxon sounded. The restaurant’s clientele gathered at the edge of the terrace to watch. They pointed to other figures–guards clambering down the steep descent and cheered when, just as the two fugitives had wrested the bobbing raft to the seaward side of the break­ing surf, a pastel sphere bounded into view on the access-road. Perhaps, after all, it was the fugitives they cheered–or (most likely) they were prepared to applaud pursued and pursuer indifferently, so long as either put on a good show.

The sphere hit the line of the surf at the wrong moment and was hurled back into the frothing undertow, where it spun wildly, a tire trapped in a drift of snow. The two men were in the raft now, rowing out into the heavy sea.

The klaxon continued its alarms. Guards were arriving on the beach on foot and by car. More guards were scurry­ing down the rocky paths. Other rafts were being inflated. It was a grandstand show.

He counted them as they left the church: a pair of them within moments of the klaxon’s first shriek; then after an interval, the goitres.

He left his table unobtrusively and walked directly toward the church, relying on the excitement of the escape to provide his camouflage. He approached the camera that eyed the entrance to the church, shinnied up the lamppost on which it was mounted. With the fountain pen from his breast pocket he squirted the camera’s lens, then tamped a bit of paper napkin on the ink-damp glass.

He mounted the steps to the church three at a time, threw open the door, and leaped up to grasp the splayed horns of the garlanded ox-skull. The stone held his weight as he pulled himself up. Now, if the church were being monitored, he could be observed, but only for–he caught hold the cable above the bucranium, yanked–seconds.

He was, effectively, alone: the cameras defunct. For perhaps the first moment since his arrival he was unobserved.

Outside the klaxons still agonized. He wished the fugi­tives the best of luck–if not (for he was realistic) complete success, then at least a quarter-hour of sustained illusion.

The high, leaded windows filtered out most of what lit­tle sunlight the day offered. Somewhere he had noticed . . . Ah, there by the door, of course. He flicked the switch up, and a loudspeaker coughed:

“KRAUGF! Mmmmb. You have come here,” purred a velvety voice from the vault, “seeking comfort. At these moments when the burdens of daily life grew too heavy to be borne alone—”

He swore. No other switch in view. He should have thought of this before.

“—we look to a Higher Power for assistance, as children will turn trustingly toward their loving Father. We raise our eyes—”

To the front of the church, at a half-run. Lifted the altar cloth, rapped the marble facing of the altar: itsounded solid enough. So, the entrance to the crypt must be concealed elsewhere; they were subtler than he would have supposed.

Then, to the side-chapels, each resplendent with its own Old Master, so that the church was a kind of digest of the major art thefts of the last quarter-century: Bellini’sMas­sacre of the Innocents from the Hermitage; one of Ribera’s more graphic martyrdoms (a flaying); the missing panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, representing the temptations of St Anthony; the Rouault “Judge” from New York, and . . .

By a trick of light the fifth side-chapel was as dark as the entrance to a cavern, and by a trick of acoustics the recorded sermon here reverbed with such force that its meaning became lost in its own resonances, like the jab­berwocky of a great railway terminal.

“—the perfect joy of this surrender (OR RENDER) for only by (or render) giving (FORLORNLY) up the illusion of a (UP THE HILL, forlornly) personal identity can we hope (ENTITY) to achieve real (WEEP, entity)freedom (EDAM! EDAM!)—”

There was something disturbing, something out of plumb about the interior of this chapel. The enfouldered darkness gave it the illusion of being much deeper than the other chapels, while in fact (yes, a glance into the Rouault chapel confirmed his suspicion) it was two to three feet shallower. The placement of the huge, time-blackened can­vas on the back wall reinforced this impression (in the other chapels the paintings hung, in the usual manner, on the side walls where the light was stronger), so that the murky recessions of the painting contributed a second false depth to the chapel.

He took out his pocket torch and played its faint light across the painting. In the upper left corner, the least dark­ened, an oblate circle was sliced into ochrous stripes by the bars of a tall, ornamented gate, which enclosed nothing more, apparently, than this sunset. The heavy gilt lock of the gate was placed so as to provide the chief focus of interest, while off in the lower right corner, dwarfed by the rocky landscape, two figures stood, two dark silhouettes. The first, with his foot planted awkwardly upon a sharp outcropping, seemed to be trying to push away the second, who stood facing away from the viewer, a hand lifted, admonishing. In the other hand he held a small golden object.

He stepped closer to the painting; the ellipse of light tightened to a circle and intensified. Now he could recog­nize the painter–it was a Rubens–if not the subject. The white-bearded man seemed to be Peter. And the other figure: Christ?

Yes, for there, resting in the palm of his hand, were the two keys that he was offering to the reluctant apostle.

The painting began to move to the side with a slight squeaking sound. The light of the torch had been intense enough to have registered on the photoelectric cell behind the keys (heavily retouched by another hand) and to trigger the release mechanism.

He jumped on to the altar and stepped across the ormolu frame (copied from Boulle) on to the first iron tread of the narrow spiral staircase.

Here the light was bright as in an interrogation cham­ber. He poked his torch through the thick wire lattice, shat­tering the light bulb it guarded.

Five steps farther down, a second bulb, and twelve steps on, the third. Pitch-darkness, and he heard above him the whirr and squeak of the painting moving back into its frame, the last muffled words of the sermon:

“—within this new hierarchy (IRE) of values (key of) lies the key to (LIES) the sturdy edifice (lies, dead) of our moralit—”

Silence, and the darkness. He continued the descent.