The Map

by T. S. Learner

‘It was a piece of Tyson’s jacket. I have carried it with me for all these years. I needed to be in the same city as him – now I have cursed him.’

  The belief in her face was absolute; there was nothing he could say. It is not for me to take this away from her, he thought, all the Cartesian philosophy he learned at Oxford, all the deconstruction of such ritualistic myth and magic now starkly irrelevant. She will take power from where she can; let her. And so he said nothing. Instead he stood and, walking over, the warmth of his body enveloping her cool skin, pulled shut the window.

  ‘You’ll catch a cold this way,’ he said, pulling her into an embrace.

  ‘I will kill him. I will.’ Her muffled voice drummed softly into his shoulder.

  Reaching over to the mantelpiece, he switched on the radio. It spluttered into French, a news bulletin: ‘We’ve just received a bulletin that the young Englishman Jacob Cohen, who was arrested earlier this week for a demonstration at the general assembly hall at the Palais des Nations, has been found dead in his cell this afternoon. Authorities have not ruled out foul play and the police are investigating. The British government have demanded an explanation.’

  August broke away in shock and turned up the volume on the radio.

  ‘August? Did I understand correctly?’ Izarra ventured, her face blanching.

  ‘Jacob’s been murdered. He knew they were going to kill him, he tried to tell me.’

  ‘¡Pobre Jacob, tan joven!’

  ‘It’s got to be Tyson’s work. I should have done something. I should have tried to get him out immediately.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything you could do, you’re wanted yourself.’

  August pulled on his trousers.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘If they can murder him just like that, they will murder us. I have to gather evidence.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Jacob had a dossier he stole from the CIA. He told me where it is.’

  He put on his shirt and jacket. Izarra hurried out of the bed, the beauty of her nudity still a shock to August.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘No, I go alone. There’ll be descriptions of you posted everywhere since this morning. It’s safer that way.’

  ‘But you can’t go like that, you will be recognised. Wait.’ She found her handbag, her breasts swaying as she walked, and pulled out a tube of make-up.

  ‘Here, I bought it when I got the wig. It will make you look dark, olive-skinned. If you put it on and those old trousers you wore in Paris, you will look like an immigrant. No one here even sees them as human.’

  August smiled. ‘You’re learning.’

  He reached into his kit and pulled out the dark stage make-up, gazing into the cracked mirror over the chipped washstand. He tilted his face in the light to check that he’d plastered Izarra’s pancake on evenly, then hollowed out his cheekbones and eye sockets with a touch of the stage make-up. It made him look downtrodden, exhausted, gaunt and unshaven. The challenge was his blue eyes. He looked back into his bag, pulled out a pair of glasses, one arm fixed with wire. They helped conceal the colour of his irises. It was almost impossible to guess that he was Anglo-Saxon.

  ‘How do I look?’

  Izarra examined him critically then reached into her own bag and pulled out an old black beret.

  ‘Put this on.’

  He pulled it low over his ears.

  ‘Good, now you look like a street worker, you look poor.’

  ‘Stay here. Let no one in. If I’m not back in two hours, take the chronicle and go back to Irumendi.’

  ‘You will come back, I know it.’

  In lieu of an answer he kissed her.

  The lockers at the Gare de Cornavin were housed in a discreet side room off the main area of the station. The place was still busy and the Swiss gendarme posted to look out for the blond American his superior had supplied the photograph of. The policeman was momentarily distracted by an attractive woman breaking the heel of her shoe right in front of him. As she stumbled, he rushed to help her up, oblivious to the black-haired, dusky man who limped past clutching a battered suitcase, like so many poor day workers that flooded the station each day.

  August punched in the code and swung open the locker. Inside, wrapped in a brown paper bag, was the dossier, ‘CIA PROPERTY: CLASSIFIED’, embossed across the top. August slipped it into his briefcase then walked swiftly to the men’s public lavatory. He locked himself into a cubicle and took out the dossier.

  Entitled ‘Profile on Agent Jester and Operation Lizard, October 31st, 1945’, it appeared full of evidence that Tyson had received no orders to execute the Basque soldiers under his command in the village of Irumendi, but had only ever received an order to cease training and withdraw back to Paris, then the US, as soon as possible. The dossier contained sworn statements from four of the officers under Tyson’s command that they had carried out his order believing it came directly from headquarters. The dossier also noted that all four officers had died within a year of the event – and not one of their deaths had resulted from any directive from the Agency itself. The report suggested that Tyson himself was implicated in all of their deaths. But the concluding paragraph was the one that caught August’s attention:

  Agent Jester is a ruthless, well-trained individual capable of the most demanding tasks that require a certain kind of operative. Jester is such a man. If he has any Achilles heel, it is his investment in the occult, particularly artefacts associated with ritual or occult practices, of which he is a serious collector. The Agency and other organisations have exploited this vulnerability in the past to their advantage, but it should be noted, such a weakness could easily be used by enemies of the state. However, in conclusion, although Agent Jester should be considered a maverick capable of deviating from orders, and has certainly been culpable of serving himself before his nation, he is currently an invaluable asset due to his relationship with the Spanish regime and General Franco himself. This status may change in the future.

  Izarra clung to his neck, pulling him towards her even before he had a chance to take off his old coat.

  ‘Jacob’s information was invaluable.’

  She looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘You have something?’

  August held out the dossier. ‘Everything we need to condemn Tyson is in this – evidence he was behind the massacre, sworn statements, and the beauty of it is that he probably doesn’t even know it exists.’

  Izarra took the file from him and sat on the bed, then opened it.

  ‘Izarra, before you read it, you need to understand there is a problem.’

  She looked up at him questioningly.

  ‘The CIA will not let him go easily.’

  ‘They know who he is and they don’t care?’ Izarra’s voice was full of outrage and despair. August lifted the file from her lap and placed it on the table. ‘I promise this will prove to be of immense importance to us. They emphasised his weakness was an obsession with the occult. It’s time we started moving the chess pieces.’

  He pulled the chronicle out of his briefcase, slipped on his reading gloves and opened it.

  ‘Jacob told me that Olivia Henries, the woman in Hamburg, was part of a cult called the Eyes of God and that Tyson had been associated with the cult back in the thirties. What I don’t understand is whether Olivia was in partnership with Tyson or they were working against each other in pursuit of the same object. She warned me that he was a great Magus, but what does that mean?’

  ‘It means he is evil.’

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t believe in such a concept – the devil doesn’t exist for us atheists. There’s amorality, sociopaths, but evil? I know Magus means “wise man” or “magician”, but unless I hold to the same belief system as Tyson he has absolutely no power over me.’

  ‘He had power. You forget I met him.’

  August opened the chronicle. ‘And was Shimon Ruiz de Luna also part of this original kabbalist cult that bore the
same name? The Eyes of God? Or was the name a metaphor for something more powerful, in a literal way?’

  Izarra sat up. ‘You say the name translates as “the Eyes of God”?’

  ‘It’s what the initials of the four sephiroth mean when joined up.’

  Izarra got off the bed and walked over to the desk.

  ‘Can I see?’

  He drew the initials out for her. ‘The chronicle appears unfinished but there must have been a final clue as to where the treasure, whatever it may be, is hidden – one that signals the location somehow?’

  Izarra stared down at the four letters. ‘Los ojos de Dios, the Eyes of God. August! How could I forget! My mother made me promise on her death that I should never forget – Los ojos de Dios are in Córdoba! At the time I just thought she was delirious.’

  ‘Córdoba? That makes sense. Córdoba was a big centre for the Jewish kabbalists – they were practising there as early as the twelfth century. I suspect the cult might go as far back as Elazar ibn Yehuda, whose travels Shimon was re-enacting himself, a man who worked for Caliph Al-Walid.’

  ‘Most of the Moors’ palaces are in Seville or Alhambra near Granada, not Córdoba.’

  ‘But Shimon was originally from Córdoba.’

  He opened the chronicle to the last pages of the unfinished chapter. A simple drawing of a gardenia sat above the title. In silence August began inking the text, then using his small mirror, translated the original reversed words, reading out loud, Shimon’s voice echoing through him, as if he were a mere portal into another time.

  I write now in the last days of my life; although I am not yet thirty-five years of age, I know I will not see another winter, which might be a blessing in this English prison.

  I might be facing Death yet I am no longer dwelling in the time that is of this moment but in the past and the future that stretches out like the burning light of a dying star. I am with Ein Sof and as such I feel no fear.

  The last sanctuary I made was in the kingdom of my forefathers, land of the pomegranate and orange, this holds the crucible, the final key to the window of enlightenment, the lightning bolt along which I can now ascend and descend at will. But although my spirit is no longer bound terrestrially, my flesh remains mortal, and I confess I fear the torturer’s rack that I know awaits.

  But enough of dark meanderings, tomorrow I will be executed, but I still believe King James will visit me and when His Majesty learns of this great treasure I have promised him, one that will put the full weight of responsibility and the shaping of history upon his royal shoulders, I might be pardoned. I hope him worthy, just as I hope myself courageous.

  Here the writing broke off and the page was covered with a rusty-looking stain that resembled blood. August gazed at the phrase ‘kingdom of my forefathers, land of the pomegranate and orange’. It had to be in the South, in Córdoba.

  They left early the next morning. August had decided the safest way to travel would be disguised as a young married couple. He had taken a pillow and created a false pregnancy under Izarra’s dress. The disguise was perfect. He adopted the persona of a nervous, solicitous first-time father, while Izarra, rounded and tottering, looked dangerously pregnant. Just before they left, August stole a flower from a vase on the reception desk, then pinned it above the door of their room – a deliberate clue for Tyson to follow.

  The petals were a yellow cream, just beginning to curl at the edges, a gardenia. Tyson held it up to the corridor light, an electric bulb in a cheap plastic chintzy lampshade. The flower had a pinkish tinge to its centre that made him think of a heart, of a faint bloodstain threading through its capillaries like memory. It was a calling card, an invitation – the question was to where? Tyson searched his mind – flowers, symbols of sex organs, of lineage, of surrender and conquest; they all had a magical and mystical symbolism, but the gardenia? He looked at the blossom that seemed to be looking back up at him, taunting him, then remembered seeing the flower somewhere else, somewhere meaningful. It came back to him – the flower on the seal of the letter from Alhambra, the one that spoke of the relationship between the Caliph and Elazar ibn Yehuda and the citadel.

  Córdoba.

  23

  August decided he would book a first-class sleeping compartment for them both to go as far as Barcelona, assuming they would be less disturbed travelling that way. It was a two-day journey and he planned to change trains at Valencia and take the minor train onto Alicante, then go inland to Córdoba itself. It would be easier for them to pose as Spaniards on the smaller trains, and the trains themselves would be less policed.

  August bustled Izarra through the station at Cornavin, speaking French to her like an authoritative peasant husband to his young, confused wife. At the ticket office he noticed a flyer on the wall with the mugshots of people wanted by Interpol. The image they had of him was at least ten years old and looked like it had been supplied from the old SOE office. Thank you, MI5, August thought bitterly to himself, again reflecting on Malcolm Hully’s lack of trustworthiness. But the photograph was so out of date they’d unwittingly done him a favour. In the Interpol profile he looked blond and youthful – in his current disguise he was unrecognisable. He saw no photograph of Izarra, but he noticed a separate written description of a potential blonde female ‘assassin’, who had created the ‘disturbance’ in the UN building. The ticket officer, a friendly-looking woman in middle age, was just about to check their passports against the Interpol description when August nudged Izarra, who let out a great groan.

  ‘Please,’ he asked the inspector. ‘My wife!’ He indicated Izarra’s advanced pregnancy. ‘She cannot stand for much longer. Could you possibly hurry the process up?’ He flashed one of his famously seductive smiles at the woman, who softened immediately.

  ‘Certainly, Monsieur,’ she replied, stamping the tickets, then handing back both tickets and passports. ‘I remember what that felt like myself,’ she said, smiling. ‘Hopefully she won’t give birth on the train.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ August replied, rather more seriously, then crossed himself piously, as if to make sure.

  There were two policemen at the ticket barrier. As they approached August could feel Izarra’s hand tightening in his own.

  ‘Say nothing,’ he murmured. They arrived at the barrier and August handed over the two passports. The older gendarme inspected them, glancing carefully at August, then the photograph, then at Izarra. He handed them on to his younger colleague.

  ‘Not married?’ He glanced at August, evidently surprised at the two different names in the passports.

  ‘She is my sister-in-law.’

  The younger one cracked a lewd smile. ‘Your sister-in-law? A likely story.’

  August, as cool as a cucumber, shrugged, then stepped forward conspiratorially.

  ‘Well, if you really want to know, we plan to get married as soon as we get home to Spain.’ He said it in as provincial an accent as he could muster.

  The older policeman, now parodying what he perceived as August’s simple manner, leaned forward. ‘So you must hurry and catch your train, otherwise the child will end up illegitimate.’ He handed back the passports with a straight face. As they walked away they could hear the two officers break into laughter.

  The Alps gave way to the dramatic coastline of France and the blue of the Mediterranean. Watching the scenery rush by, August wondered how long they would have to keep running before either the authorities or Tyson caught up with them. He glanced at Izarra’s aquiline profile as she stared out of the window and he wondered about the morality of involving her. In some ways it had seemed inevitable, their meeting, the way the chronicle had thrown their lives together through a series of connections, Izarra herself a living thread back to Shimon Ruiz de Luna himself. If he wasn’t such a sceptic, he might think it destined that she would be one of the final witnesses, the one person apart from himself who would be there when the cipher of the mazes was broken.

  August pulled out his research notes
and placed them on the small fold-out table, then laid out the bunches of dried herbs he’d found planted at each sephirot. The cuttings placed atop the pages covered with his illegible handwriting looked like the eccentric notes of some mad botanist, and he was glad they had their own compartment.

  ‘The herbs planted in the mazes and the four flowers that appear as headings in the chapters, they all have meaning somehow. They too are clues. The question is, what is their actual symbolism?’

  Izarra picked up the first bunch of herbs August had taken from the planted sephirot Malkuth at the maze in Irumendi. A withered lily with strands of vervain wrapped around it. She sniffed it.

  ‘Well, each herb had magical properties – my grandmother used to place vervain at the bottom of our beds to stop demons from taking us when we were sleeping, but she also said it would give us good dreams.’ She picked up the next bunch – found in the sephirot Yesod from the maze in Avignon, which was a withered mandrake root and a handful of anise – ‘She hung a mandrake root over the back door to protect the house and to bring good luck, and this one, what do you call it?’

  ‘Anise.’

  ‘This one she told us could make you dream your future, but perhaps not recognise it when you do.’ Izarra reached for the final bunch of dried herbs, the bay leaves and laurel August had found in the centre sephirot Tiphareth. ‘And bay leaves are also considered to give one both psychic powers and prophetic dreams.’

  ‘But what do they mean in the context of the chronicle? How are they linked to Yehuda’s great treasure?’ he said, thinking out loud. ‘If the great treasure of the alchemist is metaphysical, perhaps it’s something to do with either psychological or psychic powers? The text of the chronicle could be interpreted that way. In which case what do the flowers over each chapter represent? And why have these been used as calling cards by our pursuers?’

  ‘Because they are linked to the final maze?’