The Alchemist’s Code (11 page)

I realized she was taking a rather bizarre route: we passed the same place twice, then, suddenly, she turned round and went back up the road we'd just travelled down.

“Are you lost?” I asked foolishly.

“No, I'm trying to outrun them. Don't turn around – there's a red Ducati following us.”

I stiffened and checked the rear view mirror, where I caught a glimpse of the bike she was talking about.

“Are you sure?”

“They've been tailing us since we met. You're not very good at not being followed.”

“Do I need to remind you that I'm an antique dealer? What the hell are
you
? A cop? A secret agent? How do you know all this?”

“I had to learn. But let's wait until we get to a safe, quiet place to talk.”

Anna darted through the narrow streets leading from the Riviera di Chiaia to Corso Vittorio Emanuele with the Ducati still behind us, then cut into the Spanish Quarter, where our escape began to attract a bit too much attention.

I noticed the annoyance of some passers-by on the pavements. “Listen, unauthorized chases are not exactly welcome around here, slow down.”

“What, so we can get caught? I say, let's turn the situation to our advantage.”

Anna gestured to a group of young people gathered at a crossroads, indicating our pursuers, and a couple of them who were sitting on a motorbike by the side of the road went into action. As soon as we'd passed, I turned and saw that the bike with the two guys had stopped in the middle of the road leading down to Via Toledo, while another motorbike had suddenly emerged from a side street. The Ducati was travelling at speed, and had no choice but to slow down.

“I can't believe it – saved by the Spanish Quarter!” I exclaimed in amazement.

“You should have more faith in your fellow citizens.”

*

We soon reached Piazza Municipio and to avoid the risk of being located again, we left the scooter in a side street near Castel Nuovo and climbed aboard one of those double-decker tour buses.

“Let's sit inside, at the back. That way we won't be seen so easily,” said Anna, her hat pulled down over her face and her eyes hidden by her sunglasses.

Apart from us, there were four or five other people on board.

We sat in silence as the bus began its tour. After a few minutes, though, Anna turned to face me.

“The same thing happened to me, Lorenzo, that's why I know so much about it.”

She paused, gazing sadly at the road that whizzed past the bus window.

“What's going on, Anna? Because of you, or should I say thanks to you, my life has been turned upside down in a matter of hours. I don't want to believe it, but what I've seen has left me in no doubt – I was living in a fiction until yesterday.”

“I don't know if things were exactly the same for you,” said Anna, “but we are certainly part of something complex – part of the same diabolical plan.”

Another pause, accompanied by a sigh.

“My story begins six months ago. As I said, I'm Russian. I was born in Ekaterinburg, but my mother is – was – Ukrainian. I studied law in Rome, but after I graduated I returned to Russia because my mother suddenly fell very ill. And at my mother's sickbed, I found my father. They'd divorced several years earlier, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. I always thought he'd abandoned us, and I was very resentful towards him. Anyway, at the funeral we exchanged nothing more than a quick 'hello'. I decided to move to the village where my poor mother had come from, a small place near Kiev. When I recovered, I finally found a job there as a teacher.

At the beginning it was tough. It's quite a small place, but in summer it's really nice. I began to make friends and I met a nice man who I got on really well with. In short, everything was going well, and at a certain point my life had become almost perfect.

The odd thing is that from being just pleasant it
suddenly
became perfect, and I couldn't tell you when it happened exactly. I just know that one day, as I was going to work, happy and carefree as usual, I bumped into someone – a very old man who was polite and kind, and somehow strangely familiar. The man told me he was an old friend of my grandfather, my father's father. At first I was frightened. This old fellow – Konstantin was his name – said that my grandfather had given him something before he died and told him to give it to me when my life had taken a certain turn. I tried to get him to tell me what he meant, but he was vague. He just handed me a package and said not to open it in front of anyone, not even in front of the people dearest to me. And not at my house, he added, but somewhere secluded.

You can imagine my fear. I didn't want to accept anything from him. But Konstantin insisted, and convinced me of his good faith by saying three words.”

She paused a moment, and I waited anxiously for her to reveal to me what those words were.

“He said
De' Vova-Vova –
the name I used to call my grandfather as a child, truncating the word
ded
which means grandfather. It was a kind of secret word that only he and I knew, because I only used it when we were alone. That silly baby talk made me realise that my grandfather had given this man something important.

I took the package and tried to get more information out of him, but he just told me that the contents would reveal everything.

That day, I had an appointment with Anatoli, the man I was seeing, right after school. I went to meet him, going a longer way round than usual and walking by a beautiful lake that's near the village. I stood on the shoreline, contemplating the still water and, not without hesitation, opened the package. Inside were a book and a small wooden box of apparently little value. The book was some kind of anthropological essay written by my grandfather many years earlier which I had never seen before, while the casket looked familiar. I turned it over in my hands and little by little remembered where I had seen it. It was on a shelf in my grandfather's house, along with a myriad of objects dating back to the last war. I had forgotten this casket.

It was empty, but what was carved into the bottom was worth perhaps more than any object I could have found: a symbol, clearly visible. A kind of four-spoked wheel.”

“Did you say a four-spoked wheel?” I broke in.

“Yes, why?”

“I think I saw the same thing in a vision I had. But it's a vague memory. Please, go on.”

Anna's expression became even more serious.

“It's no coincidence, I'm sure. The exact moment I saw that symbol, I was overcome by a flood of images – of visions that invaded my mind. Faces, places, past episodes of my life, and also things that I didn't remember ever doing. Numbers and strange symbols unknown to me flashed before my eyes.

At the end of this bizarre experience, my mind began to form a picture of this amazing reality, because the images that I had seen, including what appeared to be hallucinations, were scenes of my former life, scenes of my everyday life. Only that they didn't correspond to the memories that I had. I didn't know whether to trust the visions or just accept that, somehow, I was simply making them up.”

At these words, I shook my head and stared at the empty seats in front of me.

“What is it Lorenzo? You don't believe me?”

I came back to myself and looked at her.

“Yes – yes, I do,” I said, showing her, not without some embarrassment, my old plastic Spider-Man toy. “The same thing happened to me when I touched this.”

Anna looked at me with a smile and nodded.

“Apparently, there's something in our minds which is activated by these special items which are linked to our childhoods.”

As we spoke, the bus was heading down Via Orazio, one of Naples' most scenic spots, and the tension in Anna's face and voice jarred with the beauty of the city parading past.

“Anyway, to cut a long story short, I closed the little casket and the visions disappeared, but they left me with this feeling of… of unbearable anguish. I continued on my way to Anatoli's house and that's when my nightmare began. He behaved as politely as usual, but my mind was still reeling from the visions I kept seeing of another person, as though Anatoli wasn't really himself, or as though his actions were false. My head was spinning and I had no appetite. Anatoli noticed and, very thoughtfully, offered to accompany me to the doctor. I said that it was nothing, that maybe I was just tired, but he insisted, to the point of actually getting aggressive.

I started to get frightened, and so I decided that the best thing to do was to go along with him. We went to the doctor together, but he barely examined me. All he did was take a syringe and try and give me an injection. I refused, and said I didn't want it. It seemed incredible at the time, but Anatoli and the doctor tried to force me to have it against my will. I don't know how but I managed to escape, and they came after me like a couple of hunting dogs. I ran like crazy in search of help until I reached the main road. Unfortunately there was no one about at that time of day, and Anatoli and the doctor were catching up. They were almost on me when suddenly an old truck – the kind that the farmers in the villages round there use to transport goods – appeared on the road. I ran towards it and begged the driver to let me get inside

to escape from the bad men who were trying to catch me. He was alarmed, especially because there didn't actually seem to be anyone following me. I didn't know how to explain, but I begged him to give me a lift, and in the end the old man finally let me get in.

I didn't even go home, I just went straight to the station, and took a train from there to Kiev.

I rented a hotel room in town for the night and hid there for fear that I'd been followed. I was very ill, I vomited and trembled as though I had a high fever. My head was bursting because of the pain and the visions that kept coming.

The next morning I was certain that I'd been drugged and that my perception of reality had been altered. I remembered my life up to about two months before, but when I thought about what I'd done during those two months, all that passed before my eyes were a succession of days which were always exactly the same.”

Anna became silent again, visibly agitated. It seemed that in remembering everything that had happened, she'd lost some of the self-possession of a few minutes before.

I took advantage of the break in her story to ask some of the questions that had been crowding my head for the last twenty-four hours.

“How did you find me?”

Anna reached into the backpack she was carrying, pulled out a small wooden object and handed it to me. It was the box that she had spoken of.

I opened it and saw the symbol carved inside, the wheel with spokes.

“Look at the bottom,” she said.

I turned it over to examine the base. Engraved into the wood was a sentence in English.

I read and re-read that sentence without understanding it. Then I looked up and stared at Anna, who in the meantime had pulled out a scrap of paper.

“Actually, there was something inside. This package. With an address,” she said, handing me a piece of folded paper.

“But… this is the address of the Églantine, my antiques shop. And what does the dedication mean? What is this, a joke? I've no idea who your grandfather was and I've never seen this box before. And look at the date – 1945—”

I broke off abruptly and re-read the sentence. “Wait a moment.”

“What is, or was, your grandfather's name?”

I looked out of the window for a second, and my eyes caught the unmistakable profile of Capri. Still staring into space, I replied.

“Lorenzo. Lorenzo Alexander Aragona.”

Reconstruction based on the secret files of Group 9 and the memoirs of Sean Bruce

Berlin, the night between the 24th and 25th of March, 1945

When Henri Theodore von Tschoudy regained consciousness, his ears roared and strange shadows danced before his eyes.

“Where are they?!” he thought, still half stunned. “I remember the bombs… Yes, that's it – a bomb must have hit the synagogue and buried us all.”

Slowly he managed to focus on his surroundings. The room in which he found himself was dark and damp, and only an oil lamp illuminated the room. In the dim light he could make out figures watching him carefully. Then one of them walked over to him, and in the lantern light his face seemed familiar.

“Good evening, brother Henri,” said the man.

Henri Theodore von Tschoudy realized what had happened, and his lips twisted into a bitter grin. “Well done Nathan, and well done the rest of you. It took a lot of courage to risk your lives under your own bombs. And well done Wolff – you even sold out your own country.”

Now his eyes were entirely focused upon the eight people in that room, faces which were extremely familiar to him.

“Well, isn't it nice to be back together again?” he commented sarcastically, shifting his gaze from one to another.

“You're lucky that our Master is a magnanimous man, otherwise you'd already be rotting somewhere in this shitty town of yours,” said François David harshly, with his unmistakable French accent.

“If it has become so, that is thanks to you,” spat von Tschoudy with contempt.

“No, Henri, it's your Führer's fault – the Führer for whom you betrayed us,” said Nathan bitterly.

“That's your opinion, Nathan. You're serving the Stars and Stripes, I serve the Reich. Until the end.”

“Right now I'm serving the brotherhood, Henri, just like all the rest of us. We were called upon to execute a task far more important than this absurd war. But you broke your oath.”