The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra Read Free Book Online Page B

in.
    “Ah!” the librarian exclaimed, still euphoric with the discovery. “You have not yet met him?”
    I shook my head.
    “He is another lover of riddles. He challenges the monks of Santa Maria with one every week. This was one of the hardest ones.”
    “Leonardo da Vinci?”
    “Who else?”
    “I thought…,” I said hesitatingly, “that he seldom spoke with the monks.”
    “That is only true when he’s working. But as he lives nearby, he often comes to supervise the work and jokes with us in the cloisters. He loves wordplay and puns, and he makes us laugh with his witticisms.”
    The monk’s answer, instead of amusing me, filled me with unease. I was here to decipher a message that had baffled all the cryptographers of Bethany. A text bearing no resemblance to the ribald phrase disguised by Leonardo in a musical staff. A text on whose resolution several affairs of state depended. Why was I wasting time on inconsequential chatter?
    “At least,” I said somewhat brusquely, “your friend Leonardo and I have something in common: we both like to work alone. Could you show me to a table and make sure that no one disturbs me?”
    Father Alessandro understood that I was not requesting a favor. He wiped the winning smile from his lean face and obediently assented.
    “Make yourself at home. No one will interrupt your studies.”
    That afternoon, the librarian kept his word. The hours I passed brooding over the seven lines that Master Torriani had given me in Bethany were some of the most solitary I spent in Milan. I knew that, more than any previous task, this one required absolute seclusion. I read the verses once again:
    Oculos jus inumera,
    ed noli voltum dspicere.
    In latere nominis
    mei notam rinvenies.
    Contemplari et contemplata
    aliis radere.
    Veritas
    It would all be a question of patience.
    Just as I had learned in the workshops of Bethany, I applied to those nonsensical lines the techniques of the admirable Father Leon Battista Alberti. Father Alberti would have loved the challenge: not only was there a hidden message to be disentangled behind a common text, but the message would probably lead me to a work of art that held a worthy mystery locked within it. Father Alberti was the first scholar to write about the art of perspective; he was also a lover of art, a poet, a philosopher, the composer of a funeral dirge for his dog and the designer of Rome’s Trevi Fountain. Our praiseworthy teacher, whom God summoned prematurely to His side, used to say that in order to solve any puzzle, no matter what its type or its origin, one had to go from the apparent to the latent. That is to say, to identify first what is obvious—the “za”—in order to then seek its hidden meaning. And he set forth yet another useful law: riddles are always solved without hurry, attending to minute details and allowing them to settle in our memory.
    In this case, the obvious, the very obvious fact was that the verses contained a name. Torriani was certain of it, and I too; the more I read them, the more certain I became. We both believed that the Soothsayer had left us this clue in the hope that the Secretariat of Keys would solve it and communicate with him, so there had to exist an unequivocal way of reading it. Of course, if our anonymous informer was as cautious as he seemed, only the eyes of a shrewd observer would identify it.
    Something else that attracted my attention in those lines was the occurrence of the number seven. Numbers are usually important in this type of enigma. The poem consisted of seven lines. Its strange, irregular metrics had to mean something, like Leonardo’s hook. And if that “something” was the identity I was after, the text warned me that I would find it only by counting the eyes of someone whose face I was not allowed to see. The paradox disarmed me. How could I count the eyes of someone without looking him in the face?
    The text resisted my advances. What did the mysterious allusion to the eyes