Prague, the last days of spring, 2 a.m
“All right, so Hašek thought he should give the vial and manuscript to me because I’d be able to guard them, maybe even use them?”
“More or less.”
I shook my head doubtfully. “Fine, but these are only fragments of the collection of letters – where’s the rest?”
“Who knows, the letters and the alchemical treatise are all we’ve got. Perhaps the most important parts were stolen from Hašek’s house two weeks ago, just as he’d finally decided to confide in me and ask for my help. That’s why I couldn’t examine them. Someone knew, there’s no doubt about that, and the phone calls became more than just vague threats. Hašek didn’t want to report the theft and kept repeating: ‘Without the parts I’ve removed, they can’t do anything’. Maybe he’d understood that the two pages you found in the bag were more important than the other documents. That’s why he hid them with the vial. But it wasn’t enough to save him.”
“Well, if our ‘friends’ came to pay me a visit a few hours after they’d presumably killed Hašek, it means that these two pieces of paper are not just important, they’re fundamental.”
I gently unfolded one of the sheets, the one which looked like a map.
A large snake diagonally bisected the paper, extending from the lower right-hand corner to the upper left corner. Two points – one near the tail at the bottom, the other on the head – were marked by five-pointed stars. In addition to the two stars, mountains and trees had been drawn on the inside of the snake. Small boats, on the left and right, indicated the sea. It looked like an island.
“You said that in the letters, Sansevero and Saint-Germain refer to a map,” I said. “I imagine that it’s this.” I then took the other sheet, upon which densely written text was interspersed with motifs – lions devouring a sun, eagles emerging from a pond, phoenixes rising from fire. Shaking my head I leaned back into the chair. “But this other one… Well, apart from the obvious alchemical symbols, it’s completely incomprehensible. The text is obviously in code and it’s impossible to make head nor tail of it. But the characters remind me of those in the so-called Voynich manuscript.”
“But the Voynich is almost certainly a fake, right?”
“It was just a thought. And moreover, the symbols here are half-drawn, as if the author didn’t have time to complete them.”
“Yes, like on the map, look. You can see the outline of letters near the second five-pointed star at the bottom.”
I nodded, then frowned. Riccardo had given me a strange idea. I took a close look at both pages, inspecting them one after the other.
“Symbols and incomplete letters on both… Had Hašek kept these sheets because he’d cracked the code?”
I laid one page over the other and held them up to the light. What I saw made my eyes widen and brought a smile to my lips.
“What’s up? What have you found?” Riccardo asked, astonished by the look on my face.
I held the pages up in front of him, positioning them before the light of the lamp. As if by magic, the letters took shape, and Riccardo grinned. “Incredible…”
“It seems that the text is just a decoy – that it doesn’t really mean anything at all. A fake, just like the Voynich. Don Raimondo simply wanted to hide the name of the place where the trail should begin.”
