The Secrets of Casanova (39 page)

Jacques plodded back to the grave, hunkered down, then sat and propped his back against the mound of earth that bore down on the Jesuit’s corpse. For a long while, a cloud bred a shadow, encasing the dismal scene.

“Old Quentin Gray, you claimed that assassins from the Church murdered your Jesuit brethren,” Jacques said while dangling the crucifix. “I believe you now. Now that you, too, are murdered. By Catholic assassins. So my curiosity pleads: what treasure is so vast, so prized, that the Church of Rome is willing to kill its own holy men? What treasure? What secret?”

After he unpinned the Order of the Golden Spur that rested on
his bosom, Jacques smudged his fingers across the ribbons. He
placed
the medal and the crucifix in his hand and slung both into the
woods.

INTO CONDE DE TAROUCA’S UNFINISHED PALACE
tramped Jacques, his shoulders hunched against the merciless rain, the mare he led looking as exhausted as he himself felt.

Petrine gingerly lifted himself from a rock, took the animal’s reins, and signaled Jacques to take his place. “You look soaked. And you’re wan,” he said. “But I’m happy you’re back.”

Jacques said nothing.

“Where is Senor Gray?”

When there was no reply, Petrine, for a time, went about his
business with the mare until he again broached the subject. “When shall we expect Senor Gray?”

“He’s gone. For good.”

“For good?” Petrine sputtered. “To where? Where would he go? He’s not coming back at all?”

“Didn’t say.”

The mare snorted. Petrine jerked the bit. He balled his fist,
punched the mare’s neck, and again yanked the mouthpiece. “Did Senor return your scroll?” Petrine demanded, looming over Jacques.

“A scroll, a scroll cover, an intaglio rubbing, and a replenished purse,” Jacques said, tapping the tips of each finger for emphasis. “All mine.”

“How is it the Jesuit’s so openhanded?”

“He’s murdered.”

“Murdered?” Petrine’s features turned black. He fixed on his master’s eyes, swollen, rheumy.

“The man with the silver-plated gut. And his fellow assassins. The Jesuit’s dead.”

Petrine crooked over toward Jacques, leaning into his face. “But you say we have the scroll, cover, and purse?”

“As I say.”

The valet tied the horse to a rock on the palace wall, and unable to build a fire in the rain, he prepared a cold meal while Jacques sat.

Afterwards, the valet busied himself nearby.

In a much measured manner, Jacques, rainwater streaming his face, nodded his head, and taking his hand from his pocket, he held close the nautilus shell from the citadel and began to imagine it neatly cross-sectioned.

A sudden epiphany emblazoned his brain. He sat straight and whispered hoarsely. “The mathematics for our mystery.”

“What?” asked Petrine. He turned and quickly crouched
opposite his master. “The mystery, the treasure?”

What little light that was left of the day was so submissive to the rain that Jacques could barely see his valet before him. He planted his elbow in his lap, rested his chin on his hand, and began talking with himself. “Must now fuse all drawn-out thoughts in my head. You may stay. Or you may go.”

Petrine stooped even more forward, his scowl beginning to reappear. “Obliged to stay.”

 
“A riddle is a delicate item. And multifaceted. An item
unlocked by the means of clues.“

“I’m well aware, sir, that clues—”

“Our assumption,” Jacques said lazily, not looking at Petrine, “our assumption is that the symbols and verses on Fragonard’s scroll
are clues
.
The cover of Fragonard’s scroll is also significant, is also a
clue.

“However, any of these clues may have been created by their
originators, the Templars, to be false lures, decoys. Or perhaps the Templars constructed a clue symbol that’s useful only if utilized in concert with another symbol or verse. And what of the possibility
that our scroll and cover don’t possess every one of the clues we
need to solve the riddle?”

Jacques persisted. “Further, because our world, our cultures, have changed greatly since the time of the Templars, we also are obligated to keep ourselves open for clues in contemporary forms.
Clues not on the scroll and cover itself but possibly adopted—
adapted—from them.”

Jacques pulled at his cheeks as if he were trying to wring the rainwater from them. “I’ve been dwelling—”

“You have a grip on the mystery?” Petrine asked, impatience grating his voice.

Jacques’ lips hastened into a fragile smile before he resumed
talking to the drizzle as if Petrine were not there. “Inside the
Fragonard scroll are four Latin verses and an anagram, S-O-N-B-O-I-S-I-L-A. The scroll also contains—I don’t know which—a hieroglyph or stylized alphabet letter forming the humpbacked camel symbol. The number
1300
is written on the scroll. And finally, the scroll possesses an inherent mathematical symbol, the tiny intaglio drawing.”

Jacques suddenly rose and, sloshing through the mud, crossed the yard of Conde de Tarouca’s palace, spewing words as he went. Petrine attempted to follow but slipped to his knees in the mire. Cursing, he quickly pulled himself up and stumbled toward his master, who stood beside one of his rain-soaked travel trunks.

“Omnipresent,” Jacques said. “Everywhere—relatively
speaking.” With a muddy finger, he drew circles within circles on the top of the
wet trunk. “The intaglios. These circles are ubiquitous.
Commonplace. On the columns in the Stables of Solomon, at Quentin’s Basilica de Santa Maria, on the outside of the scroll, at the citadel, Quentin told us.” Jacques slapped the trunk’s top, making the water leap. “The Templars could incise or draw this intaglio everywhere, anywhere, and because of its undemanding design, it would be seen only as a
simple decorative emblem—concentric circles—by a majority of
men. Undoubtedly, others might see that the intaglios are not concentric
and comprehend the inherent mathematics of Plato’s Theorem, but
only a meager few would ever be able to connect it to anything
further—
unless one had, for instance, our scroll. The cunning Templars
created
the ever-present intaglios as a test. And if one passes their scroll-intaglio association, the Templars offer a strong hint so we may
extend our knowledge about the mystery—with the assistance of mathematics.”

“What?” Petrine croaked.

“Harken to this, ye gods,” Jacques declared. “Since reading
Horace as an adolescent, I supposed his words
Est modus in rebus
to translate as ‘there is a proper measure in things.’ But of late, of very late, in
contemplating this Latin quote in our scroll—and believing
mathematics to be part and parcel of our mystery—I have entertained Quentin Gray’s translation: ‘The golden mean should always be observed.’ What more beautiful mathematics than the golden mean?” Jacques hurled his arms at the menacing clouds. “To solve the mystery, one must recognize the mathematical intent of the intaglios: they point to, must be used in concert with, a specific clue, Horace’s Latin line—the golden mean line.”

Jacques’ shoulders shook. He pushed on his forehead, muttered something, then smeared his hand across the trunk.

Petrine spoke. “I enjoy sharing your thoughts, sir, but I must confess my ignorance when you say this golden mean has …”

“However, this clue has been modified, has been
contemporized—and this contemporary clue has been, at times, right before my very eyes—the
cross section
of the chambered nautilus. The nautilus—its
underlying spiral skeleton—is what Vicomte de Fragonard
commissioned my brother Francesco to paint.”

Jacques held the small dead sea creature at arm’s length. “Would that I could cross-section this shell to view the individual chambers
the nautilus forms while the sea creature inside it grows.” He
brought
the object close to his face, speaking softly, sweetly to it. “As
mathematicians know, the spiral shell of the chambered nautilus—to the amazement of the ancient Greeks—grows, spreads in a fixed and
definite proportion. Mathematically 1.618 to 1. A never-ending,
never-repeating number. The so-called golden mean.”

Petrine stared hard at the nautilus while pacing back and forth. “I think we need to be clear what I’m confused about.”

“The golden mean,” continued Jacques, “was found by these same Greeks to govern
many
phenomena of nature. The whorls on a pinecone, for example, a simple pinecone. Or the spacing of buds on a stem, the shape of an egg, seed-head groupings, and sometimes—the spirals of seashells. The Greeks glorified the golden mean, all but worshipped it.”

“As I certainly esteem you, sir.”

Jacques’ body shook again, his eyes growing wide as if a ghost
had crossed his path. He pinched at his lip. “Ye gods, ye gods,” he
whispered, a catch in his voice. “Thwarted. Thwarted, I confess.”
After his jaw fell open, he slowly lowered his head. With crossed arms, Jacques Casanova sought to protect the chambered nautilus from the drenching rain. He pried open the lid of his trunk, stuffing the shell deep inside.

“Where’s the treasure we look for?” Petrine asked.

Raking and raking his fingers through his hair, the adventurer watched the raindrops, like tears, drown in the watery mud. “Wit’s end, sirrah. Stygian darkness is my sole companion. What I’ve relayed is the absolute sum of what I know.”

“That’s all?”

Jacques Casanova laughed with such strange glee that Petrine could only blink in amazement.

***

Jacques left Petrine early in the week, making clear he would again return to Conde de Tarouca’s abode but that his stay in Lisbon would be as long as his investigations required.

“You, valet, will stay here and care for the mare,” Jacques said. “My piles, aggravated to distraction, have made riding a less than pleasant prospect for me, but we’ll need a horse in future days.”

The main library of the city of Lisbon remained in one piece.
Although the mighty earthquake had reduced many of the
surrounding buildings to odd-angled rubble, yet that stout repository of wisdom
stood barely molested. There were, to be sure, breaches in the
structure and one major wall slanted uncertainly, but from a quick reckoning Jacques knew he might—and must—gain access to the library, even
if it were ready to fall down around him. He also knew that, for
reasons of public safety as well as to prevent looting, the library would be off-limits to all patrons.

The immediate hindrances were the three guards, soldiers of
Carvalho e Mello who gave vigilant watch at the library’s entrance.
Banter and barter must win the day
.

Jacques, charming the soldiers with personal flattery and tales of exotic women as well as monetary tokens from Quentin’s purse, soon was slipped through the doors of the institution, only to be met by two gentlemen in the library’s sanctum. Coins of the realm did not seem a motivating gift for these two learned men, but Jacques,
now the mad fox, had planned well. He expounded on his
“obsessive
hunger for knowledge,” then displayed one of his most prized possessions, his treatise on squaring the cube—the vexing
mathematical problem he’d mentioned to Dominique, a solution toward which he’d worked for years.

The two gentlemen well understood the paper’s importance, even incomplete as it was; to examine that “honeyed treatise,” as they put it, they were willing to grant Jacques what he wished.

Jacques intended, he explained, to inspect as many monastery maps as achievable. Maps from the time of Bernard of Clairvaux, if possible. Ideally, originals. Or, hopefully, exact copies. What Jacques didn’t say was that his task was to scrutinize the thinnest of these maps to discover if the unfurled scroll cover could be suitably seen when situated underneath a map.

Jacques was stunned when he was told the library owned no monastery maps. But hundreds of maps of Europe existed. Jacques agreed to see those.

At last within the confines of the library, he stood gazing at the
shelves before him. A thorny challenge. Five hundred maps,
perhaps, or more. Most all in scroll form—well taken care of, neatly arranged, no sign of bug or rodent invasion, and little dust upon the shelves in which they nestled.

He began his investigation.

Four days and nights Jacques conducted his research, the only disruptions being the naps he took or the sparse meals he had brought with him.

When he at length found his way out of the library vaults, it was
difficult to say if the outlandish smile on his face was one of
happiness, relief—or one of madness.

***

On the morning Jacques left for Lisbon, Petrine had planned to secretly follow his master into town to mind his actions. The valet allowed Jacques a head start toward Lisbon, but at the last moment, he’d decided a quick forage for food supplies was needed. Petrine soon delayed his trip entirely, for in an abandoned dwelling he discovered, then confiscated, three bottles of wine.

The spirits fulfilled their role. Drinking from late afternoon to sunup, Petrine deemed it reasonable to hard-gallop the mare.

Just as the newly washed rays of morning spilled over the horizon, the valet slunk from the saddle to the ground. Waking
much later, he discovered the result of his rashness: the horse had drunk from a nearby creek till it foundered and died.

“I shouldn’t have trusted the beast,” Petrine announced angrily.

He soon traded the mare’s saddle for an abundance of food and wine and returned to Conde de Tarouca’s palace to wait.