“Paul,” he said, “have you brought me some photographs from Macao? How are they out there?”
“Not this time, Alvaro. I’ve come to ask a favor.”
“Ah.”
Urpi moved a stack of books from his desk to the floor, so that he would be able to see Christopher when they sat down. Urpi worked at a carved table, surrounded by battlements of volumes with ideograms stamped on their spines. A great pile of Chinese manuscript, Urpi’s lifework, stood in the middle of the desk.
Christopher handed him the dozen strips of paper he had clipped from the borders of Yu Lung’s horoscopes.
Urpi examined the calligraphy through a magnifying glass. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses pushed up on his forehead, but Christopher had never seen him use them. Urpi was very near-sighted. When he read, he used the magnifying glass and put his face close to the print, giving soft grunts of frustration.
Urpi touched Yu Lung’s ideograms with his blunt farmer’s fingers. “Lovely work,” he said. “A very fine brush.”
“Can you translate these for me, Alvaro?”
“Yes, yes,” Urpi said, “but it will take some time. These are complex thoughts, very poetically expressed. This man writes a very old Chinese, and he uses Taoist imagery. How odd. What is he?”
“A horoscoper.”
Urpi looked up, shocked at the word. “Oh, my, Paul.”
“Don’t you want to do it?”
“But of course. I didn’t know you had these superstitions.”
“I haven’t. I just want to know what the manuscript says. In great detail.”
“It will be difficult to render the spirit, you know. This is a rare idiom. May I have a little time?”
“Three days?”
Urpi looked at the long strips of paper again. “All right. But in the end, it may mean nothing to you. You’d have to know what and whom he was writing about and make deductions, even after it was translated. What language do you want it in?”
“Whatever suits you best, Alvaro.”
“Latin is easiest for me-that’s what I’m used to, and I have the Latin equivalents for Chinese words already in my mind.”
“Latin will be fine.”
“Good. The day after Christmas, then. I’ll be here from six in the morning, as always. When do you go to Macao again?”
“Not soon, Alvaro. What do you hear from the family?”
“No Christmas message. I thought you might be bringing it to me. It takes me back, you know-I have grand-nephews now who are as old as I was when th.3 Franciscans took me in. I’m sure they’re as bad as I was-thieves, liars, full of lust. Ah, well, God is waiting for them.”
“I expect so, Alvaro. Please guard those papers well. I’ll want them back.”
“They’re safe here,” Urpi said, indicating the thick walls and the slow figures in black that moved among the books. He waved a hand and put his head down among his books and papers, the magnifying glass against his eye.
3
Christopher slept on the train, protected by three nuns and a schoolboy who shared his compartment. In Bologna he leaned from the window and bought a sandwich and a bottle of beer from a platform vendor. One of the nuns peeled an orange and handed it to him, with the skin arranged around the fruit like the pointed leaves of a lily. She was young, with a sensual face from which prayer had scrubbed all traces of desire. However, the pretty orange, handed across the compartment as if she were feeding a horse and was wary of its teeth, was as much a gift of flirtation as of charity.
When Christopher arrived in midafternoon, Milan was bathed by the nickled light of the winter sun. He stayed long enough to buy two hundred feet of nylon climbing rope, a dozen pitons and a mountaineering hammer, a good camera with a closeup lens, and a small, powerful floodlamp bulb. Then he collected the car from Hertz, making certain that the trunk contained a set of tire chains.
There was little traffic on Route E-9, the road to Switzerland. The car was pushed toward the edge of the road by gusts of wind, and in Como the water of the lake blew over the jetties. At the Swiss frontier, Christopher was required by the relaxed police to show nothing but the green insurance card for his hired automobile. He inquired at Bellinzona, where the road forked, about the condition of the passes, and was advised to cross the Alps through the Splügen pass, since the higher Saint Gotthard and the Furka were closed.
There had been a heavy snowfall in the mountains, and he pulled off the road and attached the chains. It took him a long time to maneuver among the cars that had lost traction on the switchback road leading to the summit. At the top he got behind a Swiss postal bus, equipped with a snowplow and a sander, and followed it down the other side of the mountains into the valley of the Rhine.
It was ten o’clock when he reached Zurich. He drove through the dim streets, past the leaden Swiss architecture, until he found the hotel he was looking for. It stood in the Talstrasse, in a block whose rooftops led into the Bleicherweg.
After he had looked up Dieter Dimpel’s address in the telephone book, he walked along the street until he reached the stone town house that was the bank of Dolder und Co. The bank had a mansard roof, with a steep pitch falling to the eaves but a flat top divided by three tall chimneys. The buildings on either side were twenty feet higher than the bank. Christopher fixed the proportions and the distances in his mind and walked on along the lake shore toward Dimpel’s apartment.
Music filtered through the thick door of Dimpel’s flat. Christopher placed his palm against its polished wood and felt the tremor of drums and tubas. He rang the bell, set in a brass plate on which Dimpel’s name was inscribed in flowing script. There was no response. Christopher pressed the bell again and stepped back from the doorway.
When at last the door swung open, Christopher found himself looking into an entryway lined with timepieces. Grandfather clocks stood in all four corners; wall clocks were arranged edge to edge all around the walls; perpetual-motion clocks stood on the polished surfaces of antique tables. The military music had been turned off. Christopher looked downward and saw Dimpel, so short that the doorknob was above his head.
“What do you wish?” Dimpel asked in Swiss German.
He wore a plum-colored dressing gown and a white ascot. His bare calves were as muscular as a cyclist’s. His blond hair was brilliantined and combed flat on his skull. He had the head and face of a normal man, with wary gray eyes and a long broken nose.
“I’m a friend of Major Johnson,” Christopher said.
Dimpel showed no reaction to the name except to throw back his shoulders and lift his head so that he looked directly into Christopher’s eyes.
“The party-card number was 555,” Christopher said.
Dimpel gave a sharp nod and slapped his bare heels together. “The date was June 4, 1943,” he replied. “I am somewhat occupied just now. Is it urgent?”
“Yes, but I can come back.”
Dimpel ran his eye over his collection of clocks. “Thirty minutes,” he said, winked, and closed the door. As Christopher went down the carpeted stairs, he felt the vibration of band music starting up again on Dimpel’s phonograph.
Christopher went to a café across the street and drank a cup of hot chocolate. It was beginning to snow, plump flakes drifting through the lamplight that fell from the window of the cafe. A girl wearing a loden coat and white knee socks emerged from Dimpel’s building. She looked up and down the wet street for a taxi, shook her head angrily, and strode off through pools of streetlight. Christopher dropped coins on the table and left the empty cafe.
All of Dimpel’s clocks were striking the hour when the midget opened the door. He took Christopher’s coat and went ahead of him through the rooms resounding with chimes and cuckoos. Dimpel now wore a tweed suit with a vest. The red handkerchief in his breast pocket matched his spotted tie.