Death Mask. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ they took in their work?”

      “You think he enjoyed it?”

      “Oh, absolutely. Without doubt. His interests lay far beyond driving non-Christians out of Spain. It might have begun that way, a means of driving Jews and Muslims out of our land, but it lit a fire in the dark places of his soul. In the earliest days of the Inquisition, the Moors and Jews were given the option to convert, which meant they were able to remain in the country as second-class citizens. Later, their conversion offered no protection. The Inquisition turned on them and on other minorities that were considered to be outside the teachings of the Bible.”

      “If only they’d been the last ones to take that approach,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

      “We never learn the lessons of the past, despite the threat of being doomed to repeat it,” he said. “But I suppose you know that as well as anyone.”

      They both fell silent for a moment as they considered the wider implications of what they’d been saying. It was a comfortable silence, interrupted only by the clatter of metal buckets and the spilling of water. The two women seemed to bicker rapidly, but the words quickly turned to laughter and they set about mopping up again.

      “We should leave them to it,” the curator said, turning his back on the women. “I have something interesting you might like to see.”

      Maffrici led the way out of the cloister toward the church that stood inside the monastery walls. He opened the door for her to follow. Annja noticed he was wearing white gloves, and assumed he was being careful not to leave greasy fingerprints on the relics here. It was a good precaution, with so many enzymes secreted by even carefully washed human skin. Years and years of handling would damage just about anything, and why risk making a further impact?

      Annja was only half listening as Maffrici talked her through the architecture of the building. Garin was still sitting in that chair somewhere, battered and bloody and needing her help...help that, right now, she was in no position to give. She needed help of her own to find the mask before the seconds ran out.

      That meant being direct, even if it felt rude. “Is there any more you can tell me about the mask?”

      “Not really. I’m afraid that there are no pictures of it, not even a drawing from the time, as far as I am aware.”

      “But you are sure it was buried with his body?”

      He nodded. “Assuming it actually existed, yes, but you know how it is—stories get passed down from generation to generation, records get lost. A lot of truth becomes legend, but much more legend becomes truth. What we believe has a tendency to change over the generations. There is almost always a kernel of truth at the core of any enduring story, but it is so much harder to identify it among the embellishments that come later.”

      Annja tried to read between the lines. “Are you suggesting Torquemada might have not been as bad as he’s currently portrayed?”

      “Quite the reverse, actually—that he was perhaps not as pious and devout as he is now remembered to be. For a man who was a scourge on nonbelievers and heretics, isn’t it peculiar that he carried what he believed to be the horn of a unicorn for protection?”

      “No more crazy than the zealots who think they’re carrying a piece of the True Cross,” she said.

      “Ah, perhaps not, but does a man wielding supernatural protections—the objects of witchcraft—strike you as someone who believes absolutely in the protection of his God?” The curator came to a halt. “His tomb was broken into in the 1830s, his bones removed and burned here, on this spot, mimicking an auto-da-fé, the kind of act of faith Torquemada would have ordered during his lifetime. It was something in the nature of poetic justice. The Inquisition had fallen out of favor and the people were no longer afraid of the Church in the way they had been for hundreds of years. So much of the monastery was destroyed thanks to those revolutionary hammers. Which is of course how we lost that wonderful Mudéjar ceiling.”

      “And that was when the mask was removed?” Or more likely destroyed, she thought.

      “There is no record of anything other than his remains having been removed from the tomb, but that was not the first time his rest had been disturbed.”

      “The tomb had been broken into before?”

      “Indeed, yes. Only a couple of years after his death, in fact. Records indicate that a ring was taken from the remains. It was recovered and returned to the corpse. The thief was given the same treatment as many of Torquemada’s own victims. Of course, that doesn’t mean something else wasn’t taken and never returned.”

      Annja was already running the permutations in her head. If the mask had remained in the tomb until the 1830s, then it had almost certainly been destroyed in the desecration or fallen into the possession of some rich private collector with a penchant for the macabre. The latter possibility would only make the treasure hunt more difficult. Theft a few years after the dead man’s burial was preferable, since it meant there was much more time for the mask to have become lost and ultimately forgotten. But its chances of survival increased markedly if it had been stolen in the nineteenth century. The question was, where was it most likely to have gone next?

      “There is a plaque,” the curator said. “Let me show you.”

      The man led her through to what remained of Torquemada’s tomb. It was little more than a symbolic plaque.

      “‘Here Lies the Reverend Tomás de Torquemada, One of the Holy Cross, the Inquisitor General. This House’s Founder. Died 1518, on 16 September,’” Annja translated from the Latin inscription.

      “Very impressive,” said the curator. “It’s rare to find a—” he checked himself before saying woman “—person these days with a fair grasp of Latin.”

      “I’m all about the dead languages.” She laughed, spotting another inscription on the wall. “They look great on the dating profiles.” That confused the poor guy for a moment, reminding her that they were communicating in what was obviously his second or even third language.

      She mouthed the next words without actually making a sound. May This Plague of Heretics Pass.

      “I don’t think he really wanted to be buried here. It was more of a political decision than anything else,” Maffrici said. “He was born in Valladolid and never really severed ties with the city. He established a tribunal for the Inquisition there and remained connected to the Convent of San Francisco until his dying day. The strange thing is...” He broke off suddenly, as if not sure he should be speculating so freely in front of her. Annja waited patiently while he considered whatever it was he was about to say—or not say.

      “What is it?” she asked eventually, breaking into his private world.

      “There’s a novel,” he said. “El hereje. The Heretic by Miguel Delibes, one of our most celebrated novelists. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The inscription there reminds me of it. The book is set in Valladolid and describes something called the path of the heretic, or the pass. But that is not what I just realized...what...stopped me. I haven’t really thought about this before, but it has been staring me in the face for such a very long time.” He rubbed his white-gloved hands together as though in appreciation or greed. “The ceiling, the one that’s missing from the dome...that depicted Valladolid, too.”

      “So what you’re saying is, in terms СКАЧАТЬ