The Infinite Library (41 page)

Heaving an exasperated sigh, Angelo said, “Then I suppose we aren't left with much choice: Gimaldi and Angelo enter the labyrinth.” He pointed to the doors.

“Are you sure you didn't have anything to do with this?” I said, indicating the pages of our script. “You could just be acting it out according to the director's plans – whoever that director is.”

“
Gimaldi suggests to Angelo that they go to Detroit,
” Angelo read off mockingly.

It seemed as though both of us would have equal reason not to trust the other. A hundred silver tongues of warning and foreboding were wagging in concert, beseeching me not to go beyond any of those doors. What lay behind them I had only seen in sketch, that one time, and it was most likely they had changed. Did not Setzer inform me that he and Castellemare were merging libraries? Was that not the revealing colophon that would explain Setzer's murder, this eerie deterministic script that detailed every one of my movements since I first clapped eyes on Castellemare? Was Setzer even dead? I had not bothered to inquire of myself if I believed Angelo's words to be true, but accepted them wholesale. It would have been callous of me to demand to see the body in order to confirm Angelo's pronouncement, and perhaps he knew that, lending him the temporary bond of safety to commit this ruse. It would have been a lie to say that I wasn't still sowing seeds of doubt about my ex-colleague – or, rather, there was too much in what he said and did that didn't add up, compounding doubt. Was this an elaborate setup, Angelo paid handsomely on the sly to play a role, lie about a murder, only for him to commit one here in this labyrinth? It was too late now: we were here and had to press on, not leaving me any opportunity to corroborate the details of Setzer's alleged murder. Why hadn't I investigated this, checked the local newspaper or searched online for news of a murder in Detroit? I would have made a lousy detective.

The memory of what I had read previously on the bus was beginning to superimpose its pattern on the present. But instead of the teacher-Gimaldi and student-narrator taking up the challenge of a more wooden Castellemare, it was me and a potentially treacherous man under the employ of a Castellemare who had gone mysteriously missing – and, yet, setting the challenge in absentia, in his own indirect and far-removed way. I could not be certain of this, but it did fit the pattern.

These thoughts were now barreling through my mind, now that panic had urged me to consider them at the precipice of what could have been my end. The gravity of what was before me had broken the idle logjam in my reasoning. I came to realize that it was merely circumstance as to why I seemed to so frequently place blind trust in Angelo, in Castellemare, in Setzer, perhaps even Leo if he was somehow involved in all of this. I could not say it was paranoia, but rather a desperation and hunger to know who was the puppet master in this cryptic menagerie. Who were the players, the played, and who the playwrights?

I thought back to that labyrinth I had read about, how the story's Gimaldi and the narrator ambled for days within it, encountering books I recognized as fictitious or even common in a way unintended by the narrator who desired, and failed, to inject mystery through the tack-on heaviness of Latinate titles, shallowly presented histories. Perhaps more unsettling was the memory of a Borges story I had read long ago, “The Garden of the Forking Paths”:
in one version, I kill you. In another, you kill me.
Perhaps here, in this labyrinth, only one of us would emerge. Perhaps I was destined to kill Angelo – a thought so preposterous given that I was hardly the murdering type. But, then again, my entire life from Vatican City up to this point has been a series of impossible moments and inconceivable events. I went from lapsed lecturer and entrepreneurial rare book hawker to being a hired thief for a library outside of reality and a fugitive from the deceits and possible vengeance of secret orders I knew nearly nothing about. Had I been seeking a bit of extra thrill value in my life, this was clearly not what I would have chosen. I was more surprised with myself that I had become so deeply drawn into this mystery rather than choosing to walk away – which I probably could have at any point. Of course, it was vanity that most likely drew me in, but for all I knew my name appearing in forbidden books foretelling my role in some upcoming 'grand synthesis' could have been forged post facto by Castellemare and company to ensure that I stuck around. For what reason, I was still unsure.

Angelo was becoming unnerved by my silence and reflection. “Are we going in, or are we going to sit here and figure out pi?”

“I'm sorry. I was lost in thought. We really ought to get a move on.”

“Which door?”

“The one with the mystery prize, I suppose. Setzer was an artificer, and so I think it would be a good idea to go through the archives of the fictional volumes.”

“Do you know which door leads where?”

“Yes. One is the room of unfinished novels, another the room of books that were left unfinished by readers, and the last a room for anonymizing books by effacing authorship.”

Angelo sniffed at all this. “So, which door?”

“The door marked with the 'A' – not because it would be the convenient place to start, but because it is the one closest to Setzer's function as an artificer.”

The door was very well hand-crafted, politely recessed with an elaborate, almost Carolingian 'A' in gold leaf on brass, bolted into the wood upon a placard of dull metal. It differed from when I saw it before. There was a circuitous relief in wood depicting the usual elements of French restrained Baroque ornamentation: vine leaves and winged cherubs playing harps and blowing horns – the whole of it symmetrical, an ordered mimicry of nature. I consulted the code papers having forgotten them. There was only one legible line before the writing fell into pure code:

The crime of Gutenberg is not righted by a return of singular inscriptions.

“What do you suppose that means?” asked Angelo, peering over my shoulder.

“To be honest, it sounds like a Luddite's lament, really: a sentimental longing for a time now gone when books were written by hand instead of reproduced through mechanical means.”

With some force, I was able to push open the door and enter that most arcane of spaces, that which lay beyond Door A. We were immediately confronted with the strange geometry of the room, which was pie shaped. On the left and right were two doors, and lodged in the thinnest wedge of the room were four circular shelves, each about two feet high. The bottom one was moving at a considerable click, while the one above it was slower. The one above that was even slower, and the top one seemed almost stationary. There were six equal sized books on each shelf.

“A revolving display,” mused Angelo.

“Yes, but I am sure there is a reason as to why these four shelves are moving at different speeds. Let's tarry here for a while – we cannot risk missing out on any clues.”

I looked at the books on the shelves. On their spines were not titles or authors, but a series of 6 letters and numbers with no intelligible order. I tried to pull one out, but they seemed wedged in too tightly, perhape glued together. I consulted the code papers and looked for anything to suggest anything remotely four in number.

Chiffre 1: 3(2)6, 6(3)18, 18(4)72, 72(5)360

The number 360 resonated with me for obvious reasons; this was a circular shelf rotating on a central axis, performing its revolution of 360 degrees. The pattern to the numbers would have been rather easily solved by a child writing their elevenses. The relationship between the numbers was particularly evident: 3 x 2 = 6, 6 x 3 = 18, 18 x 4 = 72, and so forth. The sum of each multiplication would then be multiplied by a number ascending by one to eventually result in 360. The relationship of the simple equation was no problem to deduce, but what did it have to do with these rotating shelves? It then dawned on me.

“Angelo, do you have a watch?”

“Yeah.”

“On my signal, count me off one full minute.”

Angelo did as I asked, and I kept my focus on one book on the top shelf. Angelo announced the end of the minute, which corresponded precisely to the book I had been keeping track of disappearing into the left hand side of the wall, revolving away from view. I repeated the experiment with the second shelf from the top and discovered that three books rotated from view. The shelf below that tucked away 12 books, while the fast-moving bottom shelf caused books to disappear at one a second.

“I have it,” I declared. “Each of these shelves has 360 books, or 1440 books total. The fast-moving shelf at the bottom rotates them in and out of view every second. The sums on this code sheet are all divisible by 6 in order to determine the number of seconds.”

“I don't entirely follow you.”

“Let's call the top shelf 'A' and the bottom shelf 'D'. A's sum makes a book appear to view every minute. Shelf B gives us 3 books in that minute, or one every 20 seconds. Shelf C gives us 12 books a minute, or one every 5 seconds. While the rather rapid shelf D displays them at a rate of one per second.”

“Then how do you know there are 360 books per shelf?”

“Simple deduction and observation. In just a few minutes, the first book I saw on shelf D will be returning.”

We waited out the minutes, and my reasoning proved correct.

“Okay,” Angelo figured. “We are always presented with 6 books per shelf for a total of 24 at any given moment, leaving 1416 we cannot see until the shelves rotate them into our view. Heh, 24 visible books corresponding to the hours in the day: how numerologically predictable. But what is the purpose?”

“That, I am unsure of.”

I took out a pencil and wrote on the blank side of the code papers.

6 books / shelf, 4 shelves = 24 visible books at time T

Each book has 6 characters on its spine (A-Z and 0-9). Total visible characters = 144.

1440 books total, characters total = 8640

1+4+4+0 =
9
, 8+6+4+0 = 18 -> 1+8 =
9

Chiffre 1's sums all equal
9
, except for the first sum that equals 6: 18, 72, 360 (all add up in numerology to 9).

I referred to the next page of the code and discovered a small table circled in red with a hard to decipher note:
tablature, 9 sigs.

“Does this mean anything to you?” I asked Angelo, showing him the table.

He took it from my hand for closer inspection, looking for some kind of intelligible pattern. I couldn't see one. He laughed as if the discovery was too obvious.

“Gimaldi, do you not see the pattern? Start with A and run down diagonally. B, C, D, E, F... And then it starts again at the top with G down to K, with L having no place but at the beginning of the bottom row. All of them are here, A to Z, 0 to 9. If you wanted to predict a seventh row at the bottom, you would just have to subtract 5 steps... L would be G and so on. If you wanted to predict a seventh column on the right, just add 6 steps so that four would become A, and so on. It's a code for a combination lock. So,” Angelo took the pencil from my hand and drew: