In the dimly lit space behind the wall he could just make out some paintings hanging on the walls. The hole was about half a metre above the gallery floor.
Peter wiped the sweat from his forehead.
He was amazed by how easy it had been to get in. But then, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam had been broken into by burglars using nothing more than a ladder and a screwdriver …
It had been so simple. Reality was stranger than fiction sometimes.
Peter stuck his arms through the hole, and then his head, followed by the rest of his torso. With a bit of wriggling and worming, he managed to crawl all the way through.
He started to brush the dust and grit from his clothes. And then he froze. Deep furrows gathered on his brow like ripples of sand formed on a beach by a strong wind.
He looked up.
Bach’s Matthäus Passion was being played quietly through the gallery’s speakers. He would recognise that music anywhere. It was appropriate for the time of year, but in the middle of the night in a museum?
The effect was spooky.
Peter knew the lyrics to Matthäus Passion by heart. Not just because he had listened to it so often, but also because he had taken part in a few Matthäus Passion from Scratch concerts. He’d studied the piece for one day as part of an impromptu choir and performed it in the evening.
As he walked through the galleries looking for something that might help him, he listened to Jesus and Matthew’s words at The Last Supper …
Jesus – Take, eat, this is my Body.
Evangelist – And he took the cup and, giving thanks, he gave it to them, saying:
Jesus – Drink, all of you, from this; this is my Blood of the New Testament, which hath been poured out here for many in remission of their sins. I say to you: I shall from this moment forth no more drink from this the fruit of the grapevine until the day when I shall drink it anew with you within my Father’s kingdom.
It was like being in a dream, wandering past paintings in semi-darkness, accompanied by the timeless music of Bach. Despite the gravity of his situation, he found himself softly singing along with the lyrics.
It made him think of the enthralling scene from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, with the unhinged German actor Klaus Kinski playing Dracula. In it, Dracula’s beloved meanders over the Grote Markt in Delft to the hypnotic drone of a Georgian folk song. The market square is filled with doomed plague victims, abandoning themselves to an absurd last supper with music, dancing, wine and song. A danse macabre.
Peter reached the main hall in the middle of the museum, where one of the museum’s highlights, The Last Judgement by Lucas van Leyden was displayed. It had originally hung near the baptismal font in the Pieterskerk, but here it had been hung from posts on a pedestal in the middle of the room so that visitors could walk all the way around it. It was one of the very few altar pieces which had survived the Beeldenstorm, the ‘Iconoclastic Fury’ of 1566.
Bach was still playing in the background.
Soprano Aria – I Will Submerge Myself In Thee
The atmosphere created by the music and the images he recalled from the film complemented the mood of the painting perfectly. Lucas van Leyden had painted a vivid representation of the Day of Judgement as it was described in the Book of Revelation. The large middle panel showed Christ, flanked by his Apostles on either side. From his throne above the clouds, he looked down and watched as angels selected the people, all of them naked, who had been judged righteous. They were separating the chaff from the grain. The scene was one described in Matthew 25, in which the good people, those who clothed the naked, fed the hungry and gave drink to the thirsty went to the left, at Jesus’ right hand. They were eventually taken up to heaven where an eternal reward was waiting for them. Those who had not done the Six Good Works described in the Gospel of Saint Matthew were dragged by terrifying demons to the other side of the altarpiece on the right, where the eternal fires of hell were already blazing. They were doomed to an eternity of torment, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Something on the floor caught Peter’s eye. He switched on the flashlight on the phone and shone it at the ground. There was a dotted line running from where he was standing to the back of the altarpiece.
He crouched down to look at it more closely.
The thin trail was made of tiny drops of something red.
20
Saturday 21 March, 3:00am
Peter stared at the red line that ran under the painting. It was like something from a gruesome version of Hansel and Gretel.
This painting was about the theme of eternal life too, Peter thought. Life after death, reward, punishment …
He slowly took a few steps along the trail, being careful not to stand on any of the red drops, then he walked around the painting.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul were painted on the back of the triptych on the two wings. They were both depicted sitting barefoot on rocks, and behind them was same landscape of water and mountains. The panel on the right showed Saint Peter dressed in green with a large, white cloth draped over his left shoulder. The panel on the left showed Saint Paul, wearing blue and wrapped in a cloth of red. A sword lay at Paul’s feet and in his left hand he held a bible that rested on his left knee. Saint Peter was pointing at Saint Paul, but looking away from him, while Saint Paul pointed at Saint Peter while looking towards him.
The trail stopped at the image of Paul.
‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ Peter whispered softly to himself.
Something gold-coloured twinkled in the light from the phone, near where the trail stopped. Peter got down on his knees and held his nose above the floor, tentatively sniffing the red drops. They had the unmistakable metallic smell of blood.
Now he looked at the gold-coloured squiggles on the floor. Someone had written something there. When he shone the light on them from the side, they became clearer.
It looks like … honey, he thought with astonishment.
He moved closer, until his head hovered just a few centimetres above the floor.
He couldn’t make much of the gold scribbles; they appeared to be meaningless symbols. He straightened up a little and then bent over them again, holding his head to the side. Now that the light shone on them from a different angle, he saw that the scribbles on the ground were numbers.
Very clear numbers.
Was he supposed to look for numbers? For a code?
He felt a tiny spark of hope, glad to finally have something he could work with.
Bach, he thought suddenly.
He was about to slap his hand down hard on the floor, but caught himself just in time and instead let it land gently.
41!
If they wanted him to look for numbers, one of them had to be 41.
Bach always hid numbers in his music; simply composing music wasn’t interesting enough for him. He had set up certain conditions for himself, obstacles to make his work more challenging, and worked symbolic numbers into his compositions … The most well-known example of this was the number 41. In Bach’s time, the alphabet consisted of 24 letters; I and J were not separate letters, and neither were U and V. When the numerical value of the letters J, S, B, A, C and H were added together, where J equalled 9 and S equalled 18 and so on, the result was 41.
Excited now, he took The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy out of his pocket and opened it at pages 42 and 43, where the quote from the Song of Songs had been hidden.
Then it came to him. 42. They meant the number 42.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide the answer was being sought to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. A supercomputer was built to work out what it might be, and after seven and a half million years, it finally produced an answer: 42. The answer was useless to the characters in the book, but perhaps not to Peter.
He put the book back in his pocket.
Now he had 42 from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, 41 from Bach … and from Niobe in the synagogue … that atomic number was also 41.<
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41, 41 and 42 … Whatever that was supposed to mean. The tiny spark of hope he’d had was extinguished just as quickly as it had been ignited, like a candle flame sputtering in the smallest of draughts.
He followed the numbers on the floor with his finger, reading them aloud like a small child still learning his letters.
6 … 10 … And something that looked like 17. Added together they made 33. Maybe it wasn’t Bach’s 41 after all.
Or was it a reference to scripture? Chapter 6, verses 10 to 17? But which book?
Then he noticed three other squiggles – they were barely perceptible which explained why he had missed them until now – in front of the others. They looked as though they had been scratched with something sharp like a nail. The first was clearly a capital letter E, but the other two were harder to make out. Were they letters or numbers? They looked like an ornate letter P and an H.
Eph …
The word ‘Ephesians’ instantly sprang to mind, the letter from Paul in the New Testament. It was the obvious answer, since he was standing, or rather kneeling, in front of a painting of Saint Paul.
Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 10 to 17. It was a good place to start.
He dipped the tip of his little finger into the letter E and held it up to his nose, then tasted it, softly smacking his lips.
It was honey.
Ephesians, Ephesians … That was … Wasn’t that the passage about the struggle against dark powers?
He quickly took the iPhone out of his pocket and typed ‘Ephesians 6:10–17’ into Google. He opened the first link. He read the verses in a half-whisper like a pious man rattling off a familiar prayer.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
It was a well-known scripture, popular with priests and vicars who used it to urge their flocks to lead active, militant Christian lives as God’s soldiers.
Peter stood up. He stared at the painting of Saint Paul, at the sword by his feet …
And then he saw it, as clearly and sharply as someone who, after years of not knowing their vision was poor, puts on spectacles for the first time.
But he didn’t get the chance to process what he had just seen. The music, which had been playing in the background since he’d arrived, stopped abruptly in the middle of a movement.
The silence was overwhelming.
Peter rushed back over to the place where he had crawled through the wall. He heard a door open in the distance, followed by footsteps on the wooden floor.
He crawled back through the hole. It was more difficult this time because it was half a metre above the ground and the floor in the gallery wasn’t on the same level as the floor in the house on the other side. He was almost all the way through when he felt a hand grab his ankle.
‘Stay where you are!’ someone yelled from the gallery. He held onto Peter’s leg with an iron grip and tried to pull him back into the museum.
Peter kicked his left leg. His heel slipped out of his shoe, but he kept kicking. He felt his foot hit something soft, heard someone swear, and the grip on his ankle loosened. He kicked again, and felt the kick land. This time the man let go of his ankle completely. Peter hauled himself through the hole.
When he looked back, he saw a man lying flat on his back on the gallery floor. He had a security firm logo on the sleeve of his jacket. The man tried to catch a glimpse of Peter through the hole.
‘Don’t you dare …’ the man shouted, but the rest of his words were muffled by the huge sack of cement that Peter had pushed over to cover the hole.
He fumbled his shoe back on and flew down the stairs. The door was still ajar. He ran through it and out onto the street.
The stately De Valk Windmill was bathed in light. In front of it was the enormous building site for what would become an underground car park. Seven storeys deep, Peter thought. Would they stumble upon a tunnel there too?
Wanting to avoid the city’s main streets, he went left onto the Tweede Binnenvestgracht and then crossed the Steenstraat. It was only when he reached the quiet shelter of the area around the National Museum of Ethnology that he felt able to relax slightly. He walked towards the Morspoort, the western city gate.
Honey, he thought, honey, blood, 41, 42 … Ephesians …
Although it was certainly bizarre, the trail of blood fit with everything else: Bach’s music, the Last Supper, Jesus instructing his disciples to commemorate his death and the sacrifice of his blood and his body with a meal of bread and wine … But the honey seemed out of place.
What had he just seen? The huge significance of the realisation he’d had as he knelt before the painting of Saint Paul began to dawn on him now.
Saints were always depicted with their particular attributes or emblems, like Saint Peter and his keys, and Saint Paul and his sword …
Fay had mentioned it when she told him about the third grade of initiation, miles, the soldier. At the beginning of the initiation ceremony, the candidate was given a sword and a crown. He was supposed to accept the sword and refuse the crown.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world …
The painting showed Peter with the sword at his feet. As though he had just refused Mithras’ crown.
21
Saturday 21 March, 3:35am
It was only by concentrating very hard that Judith was able to recall fragments of what had happened. Her brain felt so cloudy. Little by little, she put the puzzle pieces together until the whole picture emerged.
After her lunch with Mark and Peter, she had gone back to her office to drop off her things. She had put her camera in her bag so that she could take some photos of the items the man wanted to show her.
It had looked like it would be a routine job, something she’d done many times before: listen to their story, then look at the objects – letters, clothing, or whatever – and photograph them. The man lived in the Mierennesthofje on the Hooglandsekerkgracht.
Judith had walked the short distance from the faculty to his address and rung the bell. The lock had buzzed and she’d pushed the outer door open into a narrow, poorly lit passageway. At the end of the passage, another door had opened. The sun had been shining so brightly behind the person standing in the doorway that she’d not been able to make them out at first.
At that point, she’d felt a vague, nagging pain in her gut. It had been a silent alarm, but she had ignored it.
‘Hello,’ she said. She stood with her back to the door. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Strauss.’
‘That’s right,’ the person at the end of the hall confirmed. He sounded like a young man. ‘That’s my father. He’s inside, come in.’ He stepped back and held the door open for her.
Judith put one hand on the door to hold it open and shook his hand with the other. He said his name so quickly that she didn’t make out what it was.
The young man walked ahead of her into the courtyard. It was an oasis of tranquillity, just like her own Sionshofje. There were only five or six houses here. Unlike with the hofje where she lived, where you might bump into a tourist at any time of day, the Mierennesthofje was closed to the public.
The houses were arranged around a large, lawned garden with a tree at its centre. The garden was bordered on one side by a wall at least three metres high.
They walked to the end of the courtyard, to the smallest house of them all.
Judith hesitated for the briefest of moments at the door. At first, she only took one step inside, as though she was testing the water in a swimming pool to check that it wasn’t too cold. But when she saw an old man sitting in a simple kitchen with a bronze menorah, some books that were obviously quite old, and a stack of letters in yellowed envelopes on the table in front of him, she began to relax.
‘Come in, come in,’ the man said cheerfully as he started to rise from his chair.
‘Oh, no need to get up,’ Judith said and walked over to shake his hand.
He looked like he was in his mid-sixties, with a full head of grey hair, a little on the portly side. He looked healthy, but the light grey circles beneath his eyes betrayed a lack of sleep.
He shuffled back and forth in his chair a few times and then said: ‘I asked my son to come over. He’s such a great help to me.’
‘That’s absolutely fine, of course,’ Judith said.
Although he had introduced the man as his son, Judith couldn’t see any family resemblance. The young man brought over three glasses of cola with ice and lemon and put them on the table. She found it odd to be offered cola instead of tea or a glass of water, but the ice tinkled invitingly.
The old man raised his glass as though making a toast, and the three of them took a few sips.
As she drank, Judith noticed how thirsty she was. She’d not had anything to drink at lunch, and before she knew it, her glass was empty.
‘There’s plenty more, if you’d like,’ both father and son said at the same time. But she put her hand over the glass to decline the offer.
She wiped a few beads of sweat from her forehead, despite not actually feeling hot. Maybe it was something to do with there being three people in the stuffy little kitchen.
They chatted at length about the items on the table. The man told her a long story about his Jewish great aunt who had been in a concentration camp. He hadn’t seen her very often when she had been alive, so he had been surprised to receive a letter from the executors of her will telling him that he had been made a beneficiary. It had been a modest inheritance, he told her without sounding at all disappointed.
St Paul's Labyrinth Page 15
