The Tower (7 page)

‘You’re wrong,’ rasped the old man. ‘Garrett had found a bilingual fragment . . .’

‘But viewing of that text has always been absolutely banned! How could you lift such a prohibition and let an outsider see that text? Why did you do it?’

Two tears fell from Father Antonelli’s nearly lifeless eyes and his voice sounded like a wail. ‘The desire . . . desire for knowledge . . . ungodly presumption . . . I too wanted to read that forbidden book, to penetrate the meaning buried within it. I agreed to show him the Stone of the Constellations and “The Book of Amon” if he would teach me the key for deciphering them. Absolve me, Father, I beg you . . . Absolve me!’

‘What did you learn? Did Garrett manage to read all of the text or just a part of it?’

The old man’s fleshless cheeks were lined with tears. His eyes were staring and haunted by pain. His voice became hollow, hoarse, full of uncontrolled terror. ‘A Bible . . . a different Bible, the story of a fierce, alienated race, maddened by their own arrogance and intelligence . . . They had reached the oasis of Amon from an ancient ceremonial site buried in the southern desert . . . from the city . . . the city of . . .’

‘What city?’ demanded Father Boni relentlessly.

‘The city of . . . Tubalcain. In the name of God, absolve me.’

His hand reached out towards the man who was questioning him, who might have lifted his own in the sign of the cross, but they never met. His last strength abandoned him and the old man collapsed onto his pillow.

Father Boni got even closer. ‘The city of Tubalcain . . . what does that mean? What is it? The translation, where is the translation? Answer me. Where is it, in the name of God!’

Father Hogan moved away from the wall then and confronted him. ‘Can’t you see he’s dead?’ he said in a steady voice. ‘Leave him. There’s nothing more he can tell you.’

He drew close to the bed and closed the dead man’s eyes with a light gesture, nearly a caress. He raised his hand in the sign of the cross. ‘
Ego te absolvo,
’ he murmured with shining eyes and a trembling voice, ‘
a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti et ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti . . .
’

T
HEY RETURNED
to the car amid gusts of wind and squalls of rain. Father Hogan started it up and the vehicle shot off, cutting a path through the deep green of the dripping forests at every turn. The silence weighed heavily on both men.

Father Boni was the first to speak. ‘I don’t want . . . I wouldn’t have you judge me too harshly, Hogan. That text is just too important . . . We have to know. I only . . .’

‘You haven’t told me everything about that book. What else do you know? I must be told, if you want me to keep working with you.’

Father Boni raised his hand to his brow. ‘It all started with Father Antonelli’s diary. I found it in that safe when I took over his office. As I told you, he was suddenly taken ill and didn’t have the time to find a good hiding place for his private papers. The diary refers to a text called “The Book of Amon”, which foretells of a message that was to due to arrive from the heavens on a precise day, month and year. Had he gone mad, I asked myself, or could there be a germ of truth in what he asserted? I thought his words over long and hard before I decided to act on them, even though at the time the probability of getting anywhere seemed very small indeed.

‘That’s why I first asked to meet Marconi. What I asked him to do was a true challenge to his intelligence. I wanted him to build a radio for the Vatican Observatory, a radio with very specific characteristics. An ultra-short-wave radio. Something that no one had ever heard of or was capable of building.’

An old lorry laden with timber was making its way up the road, groaning and creaking, and Father Hogan slowed down to let it pass. As he turned his head towards his companion, the lorry’s headlights carved out the older priest’s sunken features and put a disturbing gleam in his light-coloured eyes.

‘The patent for such an invention would earn a fortune for its creator,’ Father Hogan mused. ‘Marconi has been working with you for three years. What have you promised him to persuade him to keep this a secret? You don’t have access to that much money . . . or do you?’

‘We’re not talking about money here. If we succeed in our intent, I’ll explain, in good time . . .’

Hogan dropped the subject. ‘Tell me more about the text,’ he said.

Father Boni shook his head. ‘There’s not much to tell, I’m afraid. A Greek monk brought “The Book of Amon” to Italy five hundred years ago, shortly before the fall of Constantinople. He was the only person on the face of this earth who could understand the language it was written in. He read the text directly into the ear of the reigning Pope, who did not dare destroy it, but insisted it be buried for all time in the vaults of the library. The monk was exiled to a desert island, his whereabouts kept a secret from everyone. There’s a well-founded suspicion that he was poisoned . . .’

Father Hogan didn’t speak for quite some time: his eyes seemed to be staring at the alternating movement of the windscreen wipers.

‘Where is the city of Tubalcain?’ asked Father Boni abruptly.

The car was back on the tarmac stretch of the road now and was travelling at a faster and more steady pace under the still-driving rain.

‘A city of that name never existed. You know what the Book of Genesis says: Tubalcain descended directly from Cain, and was the first man to forge iron and to build a walled city. I’d say he personifies the non-migratory peoples whose technology permitted them to settle in one place, as opposed to the nomadic shepherds that the Jews tend to identify with in the most archaic phase of their civilization. But, as you are well aware, current opinion holds that Tubalcain, as well as all the other figures in Genesis, are merely symbolic.’

Father Boni fell silent as the car started down Via Tiburtina in the direction of Rome.

‘Have you ever heard of a theory, a hypothesis set forth by Desmond Garrett, that the people of the Bible can be traced to a very precise period of prehistory, between the end of the Palaeolithic era and the beginning of the Neolithic?’ asked Boni again.

‘Well, yes, I’ve heard of such hypotheses, but they really don’t change much. We use the word “technology” in talking about a Neolithic or even a late Bronze Age city, but the means they had at their disposal were no more than what an Amazon – or Central African or South-East Asian – tribe has access to today.’

‘Of course. But you can’t deny that we have a radio source – suspended at 500,000 kilometres above the earth in a geostationary orbit – emitting signals that seem to match up with the message from the heavens described in Father Antonelli’s diary, taken from a translation of those ancient documents. Coincidence, you say? I’m afraid I can’t believe that. And if we want to get at the real meaning of that message, we absolutely have to find the way to read the entire text. What we have learned up to now is extremely alarming, I would say. We certainly can’t afford to sit back and ignore the rest.’

‘But Father Antonelli is dead. And who knows how long it took him to translate those few lines?’

The car was now crossing the practically deserted city. The rain had stopped and the streets were swept by a cold, damp wind. Father Hogan started down Lungotevere and was soon on the other side of the Vatican walls. He parked in the San Damaso courtyard.

‘Father Antonelli had the key for deciphering “The Book of Amon”. He must have translated much more than just those few lines. Why else would he have been ranting on about a “different” Bible? Antonelli just didn’t want to reveal what he’d learned, not even on his deathbed.’

‘Perhaps he destroyed his translation.’

Father Boni shook his head. ‘A scholar never destroys the fruit of his life’s work, especially when we’re talking about the discovery of a lifetime. A poet maybe, a writer even, but not a scholar. It’s not in his nature. All we have to do is look and we’ll find it.’

He left the car without saying another word and walked across the abandoned square, disappearing into the darkness of an archway.

P
HILIP
G
ARRETT WOKE EARLY
, after a restless night. He had a bath and went down for breakfast. Along with his caffé latte, he was brought an envelope from the Vatican. A few lines from Father Boni, informing him of Father Antonelli’s death. Boni apologized for not having been able to do anything for Garrett, and hoped to have the pleasure of meeting him again.

Disconsolate, Philip dropped his head into his hands. His search had aborted before he’d begun. Played for a fool again by the irony of fate. He thought of returning to Paris at once and forgetting about this crazy idea of finding his father. But he knew that would be impossible.

He walked out in the direction of the Circus Maximus. It was a splendid sight under the early autumn sun after the night’s rain. The sloping sides of what was once a gigantic racecourse, echoing with the screams of rapturous crowds, were empty and smelled like earth and grass, reminding him of the walks he used to take with his mother as a child. A fleeting memory.

Strange, whenever he thought of his mother it was a sound he remembered more than words, the sound of a little wooden music box playing an odd, indefinable tune. It had been a present from his father, on his fourteenth birthday. A little black-bereted soldier on the top, his uniform shining with gold braid, sprang up and down as if mounting guard.

A sad birthday. His father had been absent that day, far away doing research, and his mother had been taken ill for the first time.

He would play the music again and again, even after she until one day the box disappeared from his bedside table. It had died, been no use asking where it had gone, or who had it; he never got an answer.

One day his father had called him into his study and said, ‘I will not be able to see to your education for some time to come. You’ll be going to boarding school.’

Shortly after that Desmond left for the war, and he began to write to his son from the front, from a number of battle positions. He would always enquire as to how his studies were progressing. He would even send mathematical problems for Philip to solve, conundrums to puzzle out. He would write in Latin at times, or in Greek, and it was only when he used those languages that he would let himself go with an affectionate form of expression, as if only those dead, sterile words allowed him to let out emotion or feeling. Philip had hated his father for that.

And yet he realized that it was his father’s way of staying close, of taking an interest in his personal development and the growth of his mind.

Philip suddenly remembered that his birthday was only three days away, and the dedication that his father had written in the book flashed into his mind. The date: ‘Naples, 19 September 1915’. It was clear now! That was the clue, how could he not have realized it? In 1915, Philip had only been fourteen: how could he have read and understood that book? His father’s gift that year had been the music box.

Could his father’s message be in those notes, that music? Philip tried hard to remember it, but he just couldn’t pin it down. Although it seemed impossible, that brief tune that he had listened to hundreds of times had been snatched from his mind and he couldn’t call it back.

He returned to his
pensione
and sketched out a stave on a sheet of white paper so he could try to jot down the notes of the music-box tune, but it was no use. In the sitting room there was an old piano pushed up against the wall. He sat down and put his hands on the keys, hoping that a stray note might bring the lost melody back into his head. The notes rose incoherently up the stairwell and rained back down inert and meaningless onto the keys. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the little soldier with the black beret, blue jacket and gold frogging, with his jerky movements, mounting guard on his lost memories.

Philip picked up the book again and read the phrase that preceded the second chapter: ‘The brown friars can hear the sound by the volcano.’

He moved on to the third, imagining that the chapter numbers provided the sequence with which the notes were to be read: ‘The sound is beyond the gate of the dead.’

The last phrase was written in before the fourth chapter: ‘Find the entrance under the eye.’

Perhaps the ‘sound’ mentioned in the second phrase referred to the music box whose tune he had tried so hard to remember, but still there was no sense to be made out of the sequence.

Philip felt frustrated and irritated at being dragged into a stupid, infantile game, a ridiculous treasure hunt. A seasoned researcher like himself, trapped by such a childish puzzle! But then he thought of Colonel Jobert’s words when he gave him the volume . . . there must be a reason why his father had chosen such an apparently nonsensical approach to guiding him through this enigma, an approach that would take him back to his childhood . . . and he must surely have taken into account the possibility that Philip would be unable to decipher his messages, or meet with Father Antonelli.

That same afternoon Philip went to the Angelicum Library to look for a directory of the religious orders in Italy. It didn’t take him long to find a Franciscan monastery near the Church of the Madonna of Pompeii. ‘The brown friars can hear the sound by the volcano.’ All right, so he had Mount Vesuvius and the friars: what sound could they hear? Philip decided that he would leave for Naples the next day.

F
ATHER
B
ONI OPENED THE SAFE
and took out Father Antonelli’s diary. At the end, between the last page and the back cover, was an envelope with a single line, written in ink: ‘To be delivered into the hands of the Holy Father’. Boni had never dared either to deliver it to the addressee or to open it himself. He decided to open and read it.

I beg the forgiveness of God and of Your Holiness for what I have done, for the presumption that enticed me into seeking knowledge of evil, and swayed me from the true path of Infinite Good.