By the time the second lock had also admitted defeat with a click, things had still gone without a hitch. Quinten looked at his watch: twenty-three minutes past eleven. In the bronze of the right-hand half of the door there were a couple of keyholes in incomprehensible places; he had read in Grisar that the door was originally Roman, and hopefully they were simply separate relics from that time. He cautiously pushed against the left-hand side, and it immediately gave way. .
The center of the world!
He took his backpack and, lit by his father's flashlight, stepped across the threshold. He would have preferred to do it more solemnly, striding slowly, like a Pontifex Maximus — but now that he had gotten here he was suddenly in a hurry: there were twelve minutes left for the first part of the operation. Was it always like this, perhaps? Did the real work lie in the preparations and was the actual achievement nothing more than a bonus?
As he went down a passageway, approximately four yards long, that led into the chapel, a Chinese fairy tale that Max had once told him came back to him: the emperor had once commissioned a draftsman to draw a cockerel, and the latter had said that he needed ten years for the work; after he had lived at the emperor's expense for ten years and had drawn a thousand cockerels every day, he went to the palace again; when the emperor inquired if he had the drawing with him, the draftsman asked for a pencil and paper and drew a cockerel with a single line, whereupon the stupid emperor became so furious that he tore up the drawing and had the draftsman beheaded.
The low, narrow passageway, the fifteen-hundred-year-old connection with the former papal palace, seemed to explode at its end into the high, square space of the Gothic chapel. Without looking up or around, Quinten went to the altar and knelt down with his tools. Onno followed him with the flashlight, and although he had not been drinking, he gradually felt as if he were becoming tipsy. Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus. The things that were happening now were so outrageous that he could scarcely comprehend them. Probably he was dreaming. Unlike the fathers, he was in the state of paradoxical sleep: any moment now he would wake up, bathed in sweat, as the saying went; Edgar would be sitting on the windowsill and the sun would have risen over another hot day in Rome, full of politics, tourism, and things that twenty-four hours later would all be forgotten for all eternity. He glanced back and now saw the barred window from the inside, in a dim light that came through the windows on the ground floor up the Holy Stairs.
"Hold the flashlight still," whispered Quinten in a commanding tone.
The door to the chapel was probably still regularly used, but the locks of the barred doors in front of the altar had not been opened since 1905. There were just over ten minutes left for the first phase, but he did not have to force himself to be calm, because he was calm. He'd seen that the two bottom padlocks, no bigger than a hand, were conventional in construction and proof only against force, not careful thought: from the five simple skeleton keys, which he had had made by a locksmith behind the Pantheon, he immediately selected the right one.
Without much effort the locks clicked open; obviously they had been restored in the days of Grisar, and so the same would probably apply to the monstrous sliding padlock. For the first time Quinten saw it from close quarters. He smiled and thought: what an angel. It locked a heavy iron rod, which prevented the barred doors opening across their whole length. A few minutes later, after a tap with the rubber hammer, this item had also capitulated.
With a small can he quickly applied some oil to the four hinges, put the tools into his backpack, and laid it next to him on the altar.
"Give me a hand," he whispered. Onno put his stick on the papal prayer stool — and in order not to make any noise, they carefully moved the bar from the two rings and laid it down on the worn marble step, upon which for a thousand years 160 popes had celebrated mass daily.
Quinten looked at his watch.
"Twenty-five to eleven. It's time."
After hanging back the locks of the entrance door temporarily, Quinten lay down on a prayer stool opposite the altar in the chapel of San Lorenzo and immediately felt himself dropping off. .
The reddish-brown wall, at reading distance from his eyes, is a little darker in the middle, so it is as if he is looking into a tunnel. A little later a small tangled violet sphere, like a turning ball of wool, no larger than a marble, starts revolving; shortly afterward it sheds its skin for a moment to reveal the accurately drawn snout of a monkey, also very small, and immediately disappears, while another new little whirlpool emerges, turning into a small, monstrous mouth with sharp teeth, again just as precisely etched. Even in his semisleep he is completely conscious; he looks in fascination at the spectacle unraveling before his eyes; watches as it evaporates and is replaced by a fish, a woman's face, with disheveled hair, a strange pig, a cat, a jar, a man with a furrowed brow and a beard, each in sharp focus, like in a photograph. Where does it all come from? He's not imagining it; he's never seen the apparitions before and has no idea what the next one will be. Were they all there before he saw them? Do they still exist when he no longer sees them? They remind him of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch — so Bosch didn't invent anything; he simply remembered everything well. But then something begins to change. The wall, about a foot away from him, suddenly becomes transparent, as he had once seen with Max and Sophia at the Holland Festival, in a Mozart opera, The Magic Flute—when a front-lit gauze curtain, which closed off the whole proscenium arch, was slowly lit from behind, gradually revealing an enormous space with perspective decor in the style of Bibiena. .
Onno had not gone back to the confessional, either; with Quinten on one side of him and his stick on the other, he stared into the darkness and listened to the sounds, his legs outstretched, his hands folded behind his neck. A soft hum surrounded the building, Saturday-night traffic; far away he heard the siren of an ambulance or a police car. The Romans were going out for the evening.
Everywhere, the restaurants and the cafes and the theaters were full, the city was blossoming around them; but they themselves were sitting here, on their metaphysical commando raid, like an incredible anachronism in search of the tablets of a Law about which not only could no one care less any longer, but which most people had never even heard of. He glanced sideways at Quinten, who was breathing deeply and now descending in his turn into the deepest stage of his sleep, while the fathers of the Holy Cross began rising into dreamier regions. Onno sighed deeply. For as long as he lived he would never forget the sound of those clicking locks. Whenever anyone said to him that this or that was impossible, he would hear click and laugh in the person's face.
Now and then he dozed off for a moment or two. In the convent a toilet was flushed. It was past eleven; it seemed that the sleep theory was true. He thought of the rigid way in which Quinten had drawn up his schedule, down to the minute, as though it were a matter of mathematics instead of psychology. Where did he get that scientific bent from? Not from him. He himself was convinced that nothing made sense apart from math; come to that, even in the heart of mathematics something seemed to be not quite right.
Everything was always a mess. Perhaps that impressive tendency derived from Ada, from music, which was after all in a certain sense audible mathematics. But the technical triumphs that Quinten had tasted up to now with all those locks had of course made his expectations much greater; shortly the disillusion would hit him all the harder. There was no way there would be any tablets of the Law in the altar. Emptiness. Dust. Perhaps a short note from Grisar, with greetings from 1905…