“My beloved, my Sophia,” I purr as only the secret chief of the Okhrana can purr. “I have been waiting for you; come, crouch with me in the shadows, and wait.” And you laugh a hoarse, slimy laugh, savoring in advance some inheritance, loot, a manuscript of the Protocols to sell to the tsar…. How cleverly you conceal behind that angel face your demon nature, how modestly you sheathe your body in androgynous blue jeans, and your T-shirt, diaphanous, still hides the infamous lily branded on your white flesh by the executioner of Lille!
The first dolt arrives, drawn by me into the trap. I can barely make out his features within the cloak that enfolds him, but he shows me the sign of the Templars of Provins. It is Soapes, the Tomar group’s assassin.
“Count,” he says to me, “the moment has come. For too many years we have wandered, scattered over the world. You have the final piece of the message. I have the one that appeared at the beginning of the Great Game. But this is another story. Let us join forces, and the others…”
I complete his sentence: “The others can go to hell. In the center of the room, brother, you will find a coffer; in the coffer is what you have been seeking for centuries. Do not fear the darkness; it does not threaten, but protects us.”
The dolt takes a few steps, groping. A thud, a splash. He has fallen through the trapdoor, but Luciano grabs him, wields the knife, the throat is quickly cut, the gurgle of blood mingles with the churning of the chthonian muck.
A knock at the door. “Is that you, Disraeli?”
“Yes,” answers the stranger, in whom my readers will have recognized the grand master of the English group, now risen to the pomp of power, but still not satisfied. He speaks: “My lord, it is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal that a great part of Europe is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads….”
“You said that in the Commons, on July 14, 1856. Nothing escapes me. Get to the point.”
The Baconian Jew mutters a curse. He continues: “There are too many. The Thirty-six Invisibles are now three hundred and sixty. Multiply that by two: seven hundred and twenty. Subtract the hundred and twenty years at the end of which the doors are opened, and you get six hundred, like the charge of Balaclava.”
Devilish man, the secret science of numbers holds no secrets for him. “Well?”
“We have gold, you have the map. Let us unite. Together we will be invincible.”
With a hieratic gesture, I point toward the spectral coffer that he, blinded by his desire, thinks he discerns in the shadows. He steps forward, he falls.
I hear the sinister flash of Luciano’s blade, and in the darkness I see the death rattle that glistens in the Englishman’s silent pupil. Justice is done.
I await the third, the French Rosicrucians’ man, Montfaucon de Villars, ready to betray the secrets of his sect.
“I am the Comte de Gabalis,” he introduces himself, the lying ninny.
I have only to whisper a few words, and he is impelled toward his destiny. He falls, and Luciano, greedy for blood, performs his task.
You smile with me in the shadows, and you tell me you are mine, that your secret will be my secret. Deceive yourself, yes, sinister caricature of the Shekhinah. Yes, I am your Simon; but wait, you still do not know the best of it. When you do know, you will have ceased knowing.
What to add? One by one, the others enter.
Padre Bresciani has informed me that, representing the German Illuminati, Babette d’Interlaken will come, the great-granddaughter of Weishaupt, the grand virgin of Helvetic Communism, who grew up amid roués, thieves, and murderers. Expert in stealing impenetrable secrets, in opening dispatches of state without breaking the seals, in administering poisons as her sect orders her.
She enters then, the young agathodemon of crime, enfolded in a polar-bear fur, her long blond hair flowing from beneath the bold busby; her eyes haughty, sarcastic. With the usual fraud, I direct her toward her destruction.
Ah, irony of language—this gift nature has given us to keep silent the secrets of our spirit! The Daughter of Enlightenment falls victim to Darkness. I hear her spewing horrible curses, impenitent, as Luciano twists the knife three times in her heart. Déjà vu…
It is the turn of Nilus, who for a moment thought to possess both the tsarina and the map. Filthy lewd monk, you wanted the Antichrist? He stands before you, but you do not know him. I send him on, blind, amid a thousand mystical flatteries, to the evil trap awaiting him. Luciano rips open his breast with a wound in the form of a cross, and he sinks into eternal sleep.
I must overcome the ancestral distrust in the last, the Elder of Zion, who claims to be Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, immortal like me. He is suspicious as he smiles unctuously, his beard still steeped in the blood of the tender Christian creatures he habitually slaughters in the cemetery of Prague.
But I will be as clever as a Rachkovsky, cleverer. I hint that the coffer contains not only the map but also uncut diamonds. I know the fascination uncut diamonds have for this deicide race. He approaches his destiny, dragged by his greed, and it is his own God, cruel and vengeful, that he curses as he dies, pierced like Hiram, but it is difficult for him to curse even now, because his God’s name cannot be uttered.
In my delusion, I thought I had concluded the Great Work.
As if struck by a gust of wind, once again the door opens, and a figure appears, a livid face, numbed fingers devoutly held to the chest, a hooded gaze: he cannot conceal his identity, for he wears the black habit of his black Society. A son of Loyola!
“Crétineau!” I cry, misled.
He raises his hand in a hypocritical gesture of benediction. “I am not I am that I am,” he says to me with a smile that contains nothing human.
It is true: this has always been the Jesuits’ method. Sometimes they deny their own existence, and sometimes they proclaim the power of their order to intimidate the uninitiated.
“We are always other than what you think, sons of Belial,” that seducer of sovereigns says now, “But you, O Saint-Germain…”
“How do you know who I really am?” I ask, alarmed.
He sneers. “We met in other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of Postel, when under the name of Abbé d’Herblay I led you to end one of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille. (Oh, how I still feel on my face the iron mask to which the Society, with Colbert’s help, had sentenced me!) We met when I spied on your secret talks with d’Holbach and Condorcet….”
“Rodin!” I exclaim, thunderstruck.
“Yes, Rodin, the secret general of the Jesuits! Rodin, whom you will not trick into falling through the trapdoor, as you did with the others. Know this, O Saint-Germain: there is no crime, no evil machination that we did not invent before you, to the greater glory of that God of ours who justifies the means! How many crowned heads have we made tumble into the night that has no morning, or into snares more subtle, to achieve dominion over the world! And now, when we are within sight of the goal, you would prevent us from laying our rapacious hands on the secret that for five centuries has moved the history of the world?”
Rodin, speaking in this way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood, a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around him.
How to strike this last enemy? To my aid comes an unexpected intuition … an intuition that can come only to one from whom the human soul, for centuries, has kept no inviolable secret place.
“Look at me,” I say. “I, too, am a Tiger.”
With one move I thrust you into the middle of the room, I rip from you your T-shirt, I tear the belt of the skin-tight armor that conceals the charms of your amber belly. Now, in the pale light of the moon that seeps through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman is an armed woman.
The Egyptian klaft descends over your thick hair, so black it seems blue; your breast throbs beneath the filmy muslin. The gold uraeus, arched and stubborn, with emerald eyes, flashes on your head its triple tongue of ruby. And oh, your tunic of black gauze with silver glints, your girdle embroidered in sinister rainbows, with black pearls! Your swelling pubis shaved so that for your lovers you are sleek as a statue! Your nipples gently touched by the brush of your Malabar slave girl, who has dipped it into the same carmine that bloodies your
