The Antiquarian (53 page)

“Quite a mess they've made here,” said Bety out loud to no one in particular.

“You said it,” the attentive dean replied. “There are many days when you'd think yourself on the Ramblas instead of in a true church, but this today looks like a school, or day care, playground. Thank goodness it's the last concert of the season.”

“Do you hold many concerts here?” Bety asked.

“If it's still as it was a few years ago, there are six every season,” Enrique commented.

Surprised, the dean looked at him.

“There are still six. The number has not risen, thanks be to God. Do you like sacred music?”

“I used to come, whenever I could get away. It's beautiful music. Perfect to relax and meditate. And the setting is exceptional, without a doubt.”

“Then there is one thing we agree on,” answered the dean. “When the voices of the choir begin to sing, it's as if the Lord himself was their conductor. Shame that concerts are always preceded by these ceremonies of confusion,” he said, motioning at the apparently futile attempts of the choir director to organize the singers.

They came to the opposite side of the cathedral, next to the Sant Iu Portal, which exited onto the street of the same name. There he said his good-byes.

“Miss, gentlemen, I'll now leave you to your business,” he said after opening the door with a heavy key. “This stairway will take you to the tribunes, then the triforium, and ultimately, the roof. It's steep and narrow, just right for a little old man like myself to fall and break a leg, or crack his head open, so I'd just as soon avoid it. There's an iron door on the roof. To open it, just push hard. One final bit of advice: be careful with the pavement of the roof. Some parts of it are raised, to accommodate the ribs of the pillars.”

“Will you leave this door unlocked?” Carlos gestured at the door to the stairway.

“Yes, I have to. The organist is about to arrive, and this is the only way to the instrument. I can't be waiting on him, and remember that the concert begins in a little less than an hour. And so, that does it. Oh, by the way, I'd like to ask, if you don't mind, that when you're finished investigating, or at nine at the latest when we close, you come by the sacristy and let me know. That way I'll know I can lock the door.”

“No problem.”

Left alone in front of the door, they looked into each other's faces. Carlos took the initiative, opening the door and beginning the climb to the heights of the cathedral. Bety and Enrique, in that order, followed him, first pulling the door closed.

The spiral staircase was tightly twisted, dimly lit by what little light could penetrate from the nave through tiny arrow slits. It didn't take them long to reach the floor of the tribunes, around thirty feet from the ground floor. A small rectangular door communicated the stairs with the Royal Tribune and organ. They continued their ascent without pausing. Farther up, at some 115 feet from the ground floor, was the access to the triforium, a dark and narrow passageway, conceived for the height of Barcelonese of the past, much shorter than today's. Enrique, the tallest of the three, had to duck his head to avoid a collision.

As they advanced, the light from the nave lit the hallway. They reached the edge of the triforium, where simple bars suspended from column to column made up the only safety device to prevent a person's long and final fall from a height of well over a hundred feet. They stood there, astonished, gazing at the cathedral from a vantage point none of them had ever enjoyed. Before them, the nave and the epistle side of the church, prolonged up to the dome. Practically under their feet yawned the crypt of Santa Eulàlia, and the pews before it were crowded with concertgoers anxious for the unique sensations of peace that sacred music would give them. The indefinite murmur typical
of any concert hall was audible, though somewhat quieter perhaps because of the concert being held in a cathedral, or perhaps the height muted its intensity. The choir, properly assembled in the presbytery surrounding the altar, patiently waited for their performance to begin. Waiting for a signal from their conductor, the choristers warmed up their exceptional vocal chords in a flurried cacophony.

A few practice notes came from the immense organ pipes, a brief check of the instrument's capacity. The organist had arrived right after them. The choirmaster, his gazed fixed on the organ, waited for the organist's signal to begin. Once the fine-tuning was done, the soloist must have made a sign to the conductor, who turned to face his choir, arms raised. It was five minutes past seven when from the organ sounded the powerful overture of the oratorio
St. Matthew Passion
, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Carlos whispered to his friends, “Let's get to work.”

With the harmonious notes in the background, omnipresent in every part of the building thanks to the might of its wondrous organ and the exceptional acoustics of the cathedral, Carlos once again took up the route toward the roof. They retraced their steps down the corridor until arriving at the staircase and, little more than one turn higher, they came to the iron door. With one strong push it opened, making an ominous creak as it did. They were on the roof.

“What now?” the private eye asked his fellow investigators.

Bety shrugged: it was obvious that this time she wasn't in the driver's seat. Enrique was the one who'd spoken of the fourth keystone.

“Look at this drawing. I got it from an old English traveler's guide to Spain, by a man named Richard Ford. It's the elevation of the cathedral. Each of the nave's vaults is covered in its center point by what architects call a keystone,” Enrique explained without moving from the spot. “Like the dean said, the roof is partly flat, but there are
other areas where it accommodates the tension of the vaults—which is why he asked us to be careful. So, the keystones are the exact point where the different ribs of the vaults come together, which makes them fundamental pieces of the building. The nave of the cathedral has six keystones. They were built spanning from the presbytery to the dome. As I said in your office, and as it says in the book of works, Casadevall was responsible for sealing the fourth keystone. It had originally been set nineteen years prior, but a fault in its placement made a renovation of the vault necessary. Casadevall took charge of that too. That's why I think it would have been the perfect place to hide the Stone. Within the building, it's an out-of-the-way place that would probably never require any renovation. Moving such a monster, once in place, would have been slightly less than impossible with the technology of the day. Even today it would be a major architectural feat.”

“An ideal place,” Carlos agreed, “but if those keystones are the huge pieces of stone that we see from the cathedral floor, how will we reach them?”

“You can't miss them. The roof is peaked where the keystones are. You'll understand as soon as you see them.”

“Then let's go see them.”

Enrique stopped when they reached the site occupied by the fourth keystone.

“There it is.” He pointed to the spot.

Nothing indicated that there was anything there other than a pile of stone meant to cover the roof of the cathedral. Discouraged, Bety studied it.

“We can't start hammering away on the stone and not expect anyone to hear us. Just think if pieces of stone or dust fell on the choir down in the cathedral. They'd catch on right away.”

“The roof is extremely thick,” Enrique observed. “I don't think anything like that would happen. But I do think we need to find some kind of special sign, a symbol that points us to the exact site. If we don't …”

He left the phrase unfinished and sat down on the roof. There was not a single symbol on any of the stones covering the fourth keystone.

“Inside the cathedral, and here on the roof, too, I've seen a lot of different symbols engraved in the stone. Look at this.” Carlos hopefully pointed out one close at hand. “And that other one. Could they be related?”

“No. They're the marks of architects or stonecutters: compasses, scales, triangles … They belong to the language of their guilds,” Enrique explained. “They were used to show the parts of the building they'd worked on beyond a shadow of any doubt. And the only use they had was for making the payments later on. You can find them on any church from the time.”

“So why do we have to look for a mark? Couldn't he have just hidden the Stone and been done with it?” asked Carlos.

“Manolo deduced, from the notes in the manuscript, that Casadevall marked the site with a symbol,” said Enrique. “The problem is, we don't know what symbol.”

“And that's not the only problem,” Bety added. “Think back to that spray can Manolo was carrying. Its only purpose is to bring out old, barely legible inscriptions, right?”

“That's what I said,” Carlos assented.

“The vaults were sealed seven hundred years ago. And many of the marks are so blurred they're barely visible.”

“I see.”

“But Manolo found it!” Bety exclaimed. “And if he found it, so can we!”

“You're too convinced he found it.” Enrique shook his head. “That's just a hunch on our part.”

“People murder out of necessity, and in this case, necessity translates into discovery of the Stone. I think Manolo did find the hiding place,” said Bety. “Listen, the only difference between him and us is—or rather, was—his superior religious and kabbalistic knowledge. And he wrote down everything of importance in the notebook he gave you that you're now carrying.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“It doesn't?”

“He had the information in the notebook and it wasn't enough. He found the hiding place once he had the manuscript in his possession. We had the manuscript, and now we have his notebook. The solution involves combining both pieces. I'm sure of it!”

Enrique handed Bety the notebook without a word. She began to leaf through it with Carlos, and immediately understood the pessimism of her ex. Much of the fifty pages of notes were actually sketches. Some were of buildings or scenes. Most of them were strange and incomprehensible for anyone not initiated in their secrets. The circle of Tzeruf, the sign of Tzimtzum, the aleph from the Pardes Rimonim, a kabbalistic diagram, the Tree of Life and others, drawn with a firm, unwavering hand, demonstrated that the notebook had belonged to Manolo. The illustrations, like the text, were rife with letters from the Hebrew alphabet, with Spanish translations alongside them.

“Do you see now?” Enrique asked after his friends leafed through the pages. “I don't mean to doubt your reasoning: the solution to the riddle, if what Manolo said was true, and there's no reason for it not to be, must be in there. But—”

“Yesterday you said there could be another possibility,” Carlos said. “Tell us what it is.”

“Well, some time back I was thinking about it. Look: Carlos, you don't know this, but Bety does. It's what could be the key paragraph of the Casadevall manuscript. After a long list of buildings, the master wrote this: ‘In the end, assisted and guided by love and judgment, I have found in the Kingdom of God the only logical place that our Lord has deemed fit to show me.' We struggled with that one for hours. There were two possibilities: first, that Casadevall was expressing his gratefulness to God because he found a solution to the problem, a place to hide the Stone. Second, that that sentence in itself was a clue that would reveal that place.

“Both options had us racking our brains. For me, the first option was more probable. For Bety, it was the second. If Casadevall meant to hide the Stone in a place where it would never be found, it wouldn't have made sense to write down a clue, no matter how minimal, as to its hiding place. But Bety took a different angle on it. Anyone subjected to the pressure that Casadevall was under would have needed an outlet. Obviously, he couldn't go around telling everyone about his situation, so he used his log book as a diary to write down everything that worried him. The story of his daughter's illness proves it. Seen in that light, the sentence takes on a new interest—an interest for which we'd found no solution. Until yesterday.”

“Are you saying that you understand what it means now?” Bety blurted.

“I think so, but it seems so sublimely coincidental that I decided, in keeping with the logic, to investigate the fourth keystone first. Seeing how that didn't pan out, there was no other alternative.”

“Come on, tell us what you mean,” she insisted.

“Give me the notebook.”

Bety gave it back to him as Enrique rose to his feet. He skimmed through it until he found the page he was looking for.

“Look at this.”

Above the caption “The Tree of Life,” a diagram showed the relationships among kabbalistic concepts. Three vertical columns of ten circles. Each of them contained a Hebrew word in the original tongue and its adaptation into Spanish. The left and right columns were formed by three circles each; the middle one by four. The connections among the circles took place in many diverse ways: horizontally, vertically, and by diagonal lines.

“Have you ever heard of the Tree of Life?” Enrique asked.

They both shook their heads.