And what if, rather than three of us, there are four? Mystère 1 enters my place at eight and Mystère 2 enters your place at eleven. What relationship is there between Mystère 1 and Mystère 2?
Then again, can we be entirely sure that the person who pursued your Mystère was you and not me? That’s a fine question, you must admit.
In any event, let me warn you. I have my swordstick. As soon as I see another figure in my house, I’ll strike and won’t check first who it is. It’s unlikely to be me, and that I’d be killing myself. I might kill Monsieur Mystère (either 1 or 2). Or I might kill you. So beware.
12th April, evening
Your words, which I read on awakening from a long slumber, troubled me. And, as if in a dream, a picture came to mind of Doctor Bataille (but who was he?) at Auteuil, who, while rather drunk, gave me a small pistol, saying, «I’m frightened, we’ve gone too far, the Masons want us dead, you’d better be armed.» I was afraid, more about the pistol than the threat, since I knew (how?) I could take care of the Masons. The following day I left the gun in a drawer here in the apartment in rue Maître-Albert.
This afternoon you frightened me, so I went back to the drawer. I had a strange feeling, as if I were repeating something I had already done, but then I pulled myself together. Enough about dreams. Around six o’clock this evening I ventured cautiously toward your apartment, along the corridor where the costumes hang. I saw a dark figure coming toward me, a man who was bent forward, holding just a small candle. It might have been you, my God, but I lost my head. I shot him and he fell at my feet, motionless.
He was dead, with a single shot to his heart. I had fired a gun for the first time in my life, and I hope the last. How appalling.
I rummaged through his pockets. All he had were letters written in Russian. And then, looking at his face, I saw he had the high cheekbones and slightly slanting eyes of a Kalmyk, not to mention his blond, almost white hair. He was undoubtedly a Slav. What did he want from me?
I couldn’t let the corpse remain in the house. I carried it down to your cellar, opened the trap door leading to the sewer and this time found the courage to climb down the steps. Dragging the body with great difficulty, and at the risk of being suffocated by the miasma, I took it as far as the point where I thought I would find the bones of the other Dalla Piccola. Instead I had two surprises.
First, that those vapors and that underground mold, by some miracle of chemistry, the supreme science of our time, had helped to preserve for decades what ought to have been my mortal remains, which had been reduced to a skeleton, but with some vestige of a substance similar to leather, so as to retain a form that was still human, though mummified. The second surprise was that beside the presumed Dalla Piccola I found two other bodies, one of a man in a cassock, the other of a half-naked woman, both in a state of decomposition, but one of whom seemed very familiar. Who were these corpses that put me in such turmoil and filled my mind with such unspeakable images? I do not know, nor do I wish to find out. But our two stories are much more complicated than they seem.
Don’t tell me now that something similar has happened to you. I cannot bear this game of double coincidence.
He was dead, with a single shot to his heart.
12th April, night
Dear Abbé,
I don’t go around killing people, at least not without cause. But I went down to have a look at the sewer, where I haven’t been for years. Good Lord, there are indeed four corpses. One of them I left there a long time ago, another one you yourself took down this evening, but the other two?
Who is visiting my sewer and dumping bodies? The Russians? What do the Russians want from me—from you—from us?
Oh, quelle histoire!
21. Taxil
From the diary for 13th April 1897
Simonini was anxious to understand who had entered his house—and Dalla Piccola’s. He thought back to the early years of the 1880s when he used to visit the salon of Juliette Adam (whom he had met as Madame Lamessine at the bookshop in rue de Beaune). There he had come to know Yuliana Dimitrievna Glinka, and through her met Rachkovsky. If someone had broken into his (or Dalla Piccola’s) apartment, he had no doubt been sent by one of those two, who, he seemed to remember, were rivals hunting for the same treasure. But fifteen years or so had passed since then, during which so much had happened. How long had the Russians been following him?
Or was it the Freemasons? He must have done something to upset them. Perhaps they were looking for compromising papers. Back at that time he had tried to make contact with the Freemasons to satisfy Osman Bey, as well as Father Bergamaschi, who was breathing down his neck because Rome was about to launch a full-scale attack on the Freemasons (and on the Jews, who were supporting them) and needed fresh material—they had so little that Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit journal, had been forced to republish his grandfather Simonini’s letter to Barruel, though it had already been printed three years earlier in Le Contemporain.
He thought back: at the time he had been unsure whether it was a good idea for him to join a lodge. He would be subject to certain rules of obedience, would have to attend meetings and could not refuse favors to brethren. All of this would have reduced his freedom of movement. What was more, he could not exclude the possibility of the lodge, before accepting him, investigating his life past and present, something he could not allow. Perhaps it would be better to blackmail some Mason and use him as an informer. A notary who had drawn up so many false wills (and for inheritances of considerable value) must surely have come across some Masonic dignitary or other.
Then again, perhaps he didn’t have to make outright threats of blackmail. Simonini had felt for some time that his move from mouchard to international spy had been profitable, but had not proved sufficient to satisfy his ambitions. Being a spy obliged him to live an almost hidden existence, but as he grew older he felt an increasing need for a more rewarding and respectable social life. This was how he saw his true vocation: not to be a spy but for everyone to think he was a spy, and one who played at different tables, so no one was ever sure for whom he was collecting information, and how much information he might have.
Being thought of as a spy was very profitable, as everyone was trying to get what they believed to be priceless secrets from him, and they were prepared to spend a great deal for them. But because they did not want to be open about it, they used his business of lawyer as a pretext, paying his exorbitant bills without batting an eyelid and, indeed, not only paying excessively for trivial legal services but doing so without receiving any information. They simply thought they had paid their bribe and were waiting patiently for some news.
The Narrator feels that Simonini was ahead of his time: in reality, with the spread of a free press and new ways of communication, with telegraph and radio now imminent, confidential information was becoming increasingly rare, and this could have led to difficulties for the secret agent. Better not to have any secrets, but to make people believe you have. It was like living on a private income or enjoying earnings from patent rights—you enjoy a life of leisure while others boast about having received amazing revelations from you, your fame increases, and the money rolls in without your lifting a finger.
Whom could he contact? Who might fear being blackmailed without any actual blackmail taking place? The first name that leapt to mind was Taxil. He recalled having met Taxil when he had forged some letters (from whom? to whom?), and that Taxil had spoken with a certain self-importance about his membership in a lodge called Le Temple des Amis de l’Honneur Français. Was Taxil the right man? He didn’t want to make a false move and sought advice from Hébuterne. His new contact, unlike Lagrange, never changed his meeting place: it was always a point at the rear of the central nave in Notre Dame.
Simonini asked him what the secret service knew about Taxil. Hébuterne began to laugh. «It’s usually we who ask you for information, not the other way around. But I’ll see what help I can give. The name rings a bell, but it’s nothing to do with the secret service. It’s a police matter. I’ll let you know in a few days.»
The report arrived by the end of the week and was most interesting. It stated that Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, alias Léo Taxil, was born in Marseilles in 1854, had been taught by the Jesuits and, by the age of eighteen, as an obvious consequence, had begun working for anticlerical newspapers. In Marseilles
