She brought me coffee, turned on the lights, and went back to her garden, leaving me in full charge. The room had smooth, white walls, no cupboards, nooks, or crannies where I could rummage, but I neglected nothing. I looked above, below, and inside the few pieces of furniture; I searched through an almost empty wardrobe containing a few suits filled with mothballs; I looked behind the three or four framed engravings of landscapes. I’ll spare you the details, but, take it from me, I did a thorough job. It’s not enough, for instance, to feel the stuffing of a sofa; you have to stick needles in to make sure you don’t miss any foreign object….”
The colonel’s experience, I realized, was not limited to battlefields.
“That left the books. I made a list of the titles and checked for underlinings and notes in the margins, for any hint at all. After a long while, I clumsily picked up an old volume with a heavy binding; I dropped it, and a handwritten sheet of paper fell out. It was notebook paper, and the texture and ink suggested that it wasn’t very old: it could have been written in the last years of Ingolf’s life. I barely glanced at it, but suddenly noticed something written in the margin: ‘Provins 1894.’ Well, you can imagine my excitement, the wave of emotion that swept over me….
I realized that Ingolf had taken the original parchment to Paris, and that this was a copy. I felt no compunction. Mademoiselle Ingolf had dusted those books for years and had never come across that paper, otherwise she would have told me. Very well, let her continue to be unaware of it. The world is made up of winners and losers. I had had my share of defeat; it was time now to grasp victory. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.
I bade Mademoiselle Ingolf good-bye, telling her that, though I had found nothing of interest, I would nevertheless mention her father if I wrote anything. Bless you, she said. A man of action, gentlemen, especially one burning with the passion that blazed within me, can’t have scruples when dealing with a dismal woman already sentenced by fate.”
“No need to apologize,” Belbo said. “You did it. Just tell us the rest.”
“Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It’s not distrust. I don’t want to subject the original to further wear.”
“But Ingolf’s copy wasn’t the original,” I said. “The parchment was the original.”
“Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original.”
“But Ingolf may have made errors in transcription.”
“You don’t know that he did. Whereas I know Ingolf’s transcription is true, because I see no way the truth could be otherwise. Therefore Ingolf’s copy is the original. Do we agree on this point, or do we sit and split hairs?”
“No,” Belbo said. “I hate that. Let’s see your original copy.”
After Beaujeu, the Order has never ceased to exist, not for a moment, and after Aumont we find an uninterrupted sequence of Grand Masters of the Order down to our own time, and if the name and seat of the true Grand Master and the true Seneschals who rule the Order and guide its sublime labors remain a mystery today, an impenetrable secret known only to the truly enlightened, it is because the hour of the Order has not struck and the time is not ripe….
—Manuscript of 1760, in G. A. Schiffmann, Die Entstehung der Rittergrade in der Freimauerei um die Mitte des XVIII Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, Zechel, 1882, pp. 178–190
This was our first, remote contact with the Plan. I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn’t been in Belbo’s office that day. I could be—who knows?—selling sesame seeds in Samarkand, or editing a series of books in Braille, or heading the First National Bank of Franz Josef Land. Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.
The colonel handed us the page with a flourish. I still have it here among my papers, in a little plastic folder. Printed on that thermal paper photocopies used in those days, it is more yellowed and faded now. Actually there were two texts on the page: the first, densely written, took up half the space; the second was divided into fragments of verses….
The first text was a kind of demoniacal litany, a parody of a Semitic language:
Kuabris Defrabax Rexulon Ukkazaal Ukzaab Urpaefel Taculbain Habrak Hacoruin Maquafel Tebrain Hmcatuin Rokasor Himesor Argaabil Kaquaan Docrabax Reisaz Reisabrax Decaiquan Oiquaquil Zaitabor Qaxaop Dugraq Xaelobran Disaeda Magisuan Raitak Huidal Uscolda Arabaom Zipreus Mecrim Cosmae Duquifas Rocarbis.
“Not exactly clear,” Belbo remarked.
“No, it isn’t,” the colonel agreed slyly. “And I might have spent my life trying to make sense of it, if one day, almost by chance, I hadn’t found a book about Trithemius on a bookstall and noticed one of his coded messages: ‘Pamersiel Oshurmy Delmuson Thafloyn….’ I had uncovered a clue, and I pursued it relentlessly. I knew nothing at all about Trithemius, but in Paris I found an edition of his Steganographia, hoc est ars per occultam scripturam animi sui voluntatem absentibus aperiendi certa, published in Frankfurt in 1606. The art of using secret writing in order to bare your soul to distant persons.
A fascinating man, this Trithemius. A Benedictine abbot of Spannheim, late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries, a scholar who knew Hebrew and Chaldean, Oriental languages like Tartar. He corresponded with theologians, cabalists, alchemists, most certainly with the great Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim and perhaps with Paracelsus…. Trithemius masked his revelations about secret writings behind magical smoke screens.
For instance, he recommended sending coded messages like the one you’re looking at now. The recipient was then supposed to call upon angels like Pamersiel, Padiel, Dorothiel, and so on, to help him decipher the real message. But many of his examples are actually military dispatches, and his book—dedicated to Philip, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria—represents one of the first serious studies of cryptography.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but didn’t you say that Trithemius lived at least a hundred years after the manuscript we’re talking about was written?”
“Trithemius was associated with a Sodalitas Celtica that was concerned with philosophy, astrology, Pythagorean mathematics. You see the connection? The Templars were an order whose initiates were also inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Celts; that has been widely demonstrated. Somehow Trithemius also learned the cryptographic systems used by the Templars.”
“Amazing,” Belbo said. “And the transcription of the secret message? What does it say?”
“All in good time, gentlemen. Trithemius presents forty major and ten minor cryptosystems. Here I was lucky—either that or the Templars of Provins simply didn’t make any great effort, since they were sure nobody would ever crack their code. I tried the first of the forty major systems and assumed that only the first letter of each word counted.”
Belbo asked to see the page and glanced over it. “You still get nonsense: kdruuuth…”
“Naturally,” the colonel said condescendingly. “The Templars may not have made a great effort, but they weren’t altogether lazy either. This first sequence of letters is itself a coded message, and I wondered whether the second series of ten minor coding systems might not give an answer. For this second series, you see, Trithemius used some wheels. Here is the wheel for the first system.”
He took another photocopy from his file, drew his chair up to the desk, and, asking us to pay careful attention, touched the letters with his closed fountain pen.
“It’s the simplest possible system. Consider only the outer circle. To code something, you replace each letter of your original message with the letter that precedes it: for A you write Z, for B you write A, and so on. Child’s play for a secret agent nowadays, but back then it was considered witchcraft. To decode, of course, you go in the opposite direction, replacing each letter of the coded message with the letter that follows it. I tried it, and I was lucky again; it worked the very first time. Here’s what it says.” He recited: “‘Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes.’ That is: the thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups.”
“Which means what?”
“Apparently nothing, at first glance. It’s a kind of headline announcing the establishment of a group. It was written in secret language for ritualistic reasons. Our Templars, satisfied that they were putting their message in an inviolable inner sanctum, were content to use their fourteenth-century French. But let’s look at the second text.”
a la … Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6 … entiers avec saiel
p … les blancs mantiax
r… s … chevaliers de Pruins pour la … j.nc.
6 foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a … 120 a…
iceste est l’ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunz joste iceus qui … pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame de l’altre part de l’iau
it a l’ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste … la Grant Pute.
“This is the decoded
