"Of course there are decent people too," he said to Edgar in the street, without paying any attention to the looks that passersby gave them. "I estimate them at about eight percent of mankind. But another eight percent always and everywhere consists of the worst rabble imaginable, who are capable of anything. If they get the chance, the first thing they will do is to exterminate the good eight percent. The rest are neither good nor bad; they cut their coat according to their cloth. The first and the thirteenth in every hundred are the ones to watch; the other eleven don't matter. That means the first must make sure he gets them on his side, to keep the thirteenth down, because they could just as well follow him. In the best possible case number thirteen finally hangs himself, like Judas, or is hanged, like in Nuremberg, or he is put in front of the firing squad, like in Scheveningen; but always only after they have done their work, when it doesn't really matter anymore. My head's spinning again, Edgar. The grip of the first is gradually loosening; everywhere the thirteenth is probing his limits, seeing how far he can go, slashing the seat on a train here and there, then vandalizing another telephone booth. That's what's happening now, Edgar, in a world without God and with a Golden Wall that is about to collapse. I contributed to it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And when he appears in court, then a psychiatrist will probably immediately appear as devil's advocate and explain his behavior from causes. Wretched childhood, abused a lot, parents divorced. But causal explanations can never be justifications for his behavior. Man is not a machine, or simply an animal, like you — and I'm not even so sure about you. That's why behavior must be judged not causally but finally.
"Do you mind my taking a scientific tone for a moment? The moral judgment has disappeared from the causal description, and the residue is subsequently presented judicially as mitigating circumstances, resulting in a reduction in sentence. But that of course implies a denial of human freedom, and man is dehumanized by taking away his responsibility. I vaguely remember that there was something like that in the sentence on Max's father; the fellow had probably been betrayed in his childhood by his mother. Denial of punishment is inhuman punishment. Moreover, it's an unacceptable insult to people who have had an equally rotten childhood and who do not commit crimes. According to the same principle, they should actually be rewarded by the government. That would cost the state dear, but if this system is not introduced, then justice demands that psychiatrists be driven out of court, like the moneychangers from the temple. No, what the judge needs is an iron hand, like Gotz von Berlichingen. Unless you have the sweetest flesh of the Messiah, you can only fight evil brutally with evil. In the service of good you must necessarily and tragically embrace evil, but that's the price you must pay. 'No one can rule innocently,' said Saint-Just before he went to the guillotine himself."
The glances cast by the passersby at the eccentric, talking to himself with unintelligible guttural sounds, did not move him. He no longer belonged among people; all he did was think about them, like an ornithologist about birds. When he crossed a busy, square piazza, with full café terraces at the foot of orange-plastered houses, Edgar jumped to the ground and mingled with the pigeons, who gave way to his black figure in alarm.
"Good idea, Edgar. Let's inspect thirteen people here in the sun at our leisure."
He sat down on the steps of a fountain and put his plastic shopping bag next to him. From the basin rose a sculptured pedestal, with dolphins spouting water, on top of which was an obelisk, eighteen feet or so high, covered with hieroglyphics, crowned by a gold star, from which sprouted a bronze cross.
"Thirteen men, that is — as a gentleman I'll leave women out of it. You know what Weininger said: 'Woman is man's fault.' Hitler was a man, but through three elections he only came to power thanks to the lovelorn women of Germany; so let's shroud that in the democratic and feminist mantle of love. Take him," and he nodded toward a carefully groomed, graying gentleman with a newspaper under his arm and his coat draped loosely over his shoulders. "Decent man, chief accountant at a medium-sized bank, manager of some department or other. Reliable, bit vain, in any case not the first and not the thirteenth. And neither is that one over there," he said, and his eyes followed a man in overalls walking past and studying some machine component or other that had to be repaired or replaced. "He's doing his job. He's too busy to murder or perform miracles. But those two talking over there — one of them I don't like at all. That smile is no good. And that face is just a bit too pale and too smooth."
The man was in his late twenties and noticed immediately that he was being watched. Instantly, his smile vanished completely, as though a switch had been turned off, and a cold, threatening expression remained focused on Onno. Onno averted his gaze.
"Dammit, Edgar, if you ask me there's the thirteenth. But don't look, because he's dangerous. He's dangerous because he can control his emotions, like someone else's car; what he uses to steer them with is itself not an emotion. Hopefully, he'll get run over by a car today. Who have we over there?" he said, looking at a boy who crossed the square diagonally, stopped open-mouthed, and took in the building opposite. At the same moment Onno caught his breath. He began trembling and slowly stood up.
The Pantheon! There it was! Quinten felt as though what he was looking at was not real. The Roman temple of all the gods, twenty centuries old: gray and bare, scraped clean from top to bottom by barbarians, emperors, and popes, it stood there as something not only from a different time but from a different space — like sometimes during the daytime an alarming image loomed up from the dream of the preceding night.
MAGRIPPA L•F•COS•TERTIVM•FECIT
The Quadrata! There they were, those wonderful, inspired letters on the architrave above the eight pillars, under the two triangular pediments, which Palladio had studied so closely: Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, who had allegedly made this during his third consulate; but in reality it was the emperor Hadrian, as Mr. Themaat had taught him. He wondered how Mr. Spier was getting on there in his Pontrhydfendigaid.
To the left and right of the doorway and the round building behind with the cupola, grooves many feet deep had been cut down to Roman street level, which made the temple appear to be rising from the earth, like the erratic stones in Drenthe. At the front, he knew, the entrance steps were still buried below the asphalt. Slowly he walked along past the row of waiting horse carriages, toward the shadow of the high, rectangular portico, supported by another eight pillars — together making as many columns as he had years. A group of visitors was already waiting. A little later one of the bronze doors, over twenty feet high, was opened a fraction by two men, which required all their strength.
As he crossed the threshold, the colossal empty space took his breath away. As in the impenetrable interior of a crystal, the shadowless light hung on the blond marble floor, against the columns and alcoves and chapels, where the proud Roman gods had been replaced by humble Christian saints. The highest point of the cupola was occupied not by a keystone but by the blue sky, a round hole measuring almost thirty feet across, through which a diagonal beam of sunlight shone like an obelisk, producing a dazzling egg on a damaged fresco. The cupola with the hole in it reminded him of an iris with a pupiclass="underline" the temple was an eye, which he was now inside. From outside, the hole must be black. The building was an observatory.