The Sixth Key(109)

38


Dead or Alive?

‘I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, as proof of his true superiority’

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘William Wilson’


Venice, 2012

‘So have you worked it out yet?’ the Writer of Letters said, sitting back.

I smiled but he didn’t smile in return. My earlier anxieties having been mollified by Rahn’s troubles, I found myself turning congenial. ‘What, precisely, should I have worked out?’

‘The question of what you’re doing here, of course. I believe that was the first question I put to you.’

I hesitated and he gestured with a hand. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I realise that you can’t really answer that until you know something about me and I’m afraid I haven’t been totally truthful with you. Now, I’m prepared to “come clean”, as they say.’

He was coming clean? I wanted to trump him, to show him that I was one step ahead of his game. ‘I do hate to spoil your plans, but I’ve already seen through the role you’re playing.’

‘You have?’ he said, looking pleasantly surprised.

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘Well, you can’t spoil my plans because I don’t have any plans. They are all yours – the plans – you see? But I’m comforted that you’ve started to see through me. It was what I’d hoped for.’

I held his eyes and they gleamed like pools.

‘Why would you hope for that?’

‘Because we are near the end and so by now you must be better acquainted with the character you’ve written for me. Am I right?’

He was playing the game again. He had no intention of coming clean. But I would play along, because in spite of my host’s strange spirit of contradiction and the words of the woman at the grave earlier today, I liked the game more than I cared to admit. I looked at him with as much equanimity as I could muster. ‘You don’t give much away, but so far I imagine that it is an intelligent, somewhat eccentric character. I think you came here a long time ago, so long ago in fact, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in the outside world. Perhaps you were banished to this place, perhaps you were running from something? Whatever the case, what’s important is not why you are here, it is the fact that in the meantime you’ve had the opportunity to indulge in your first love, books. Erudition has always been dear to you and this library has become your labyrinth.’

The Writer of Letters nodded his appreciation. ‘Go on.’

‘However,’ I continued, ‘as time passed you became like that man in the library of galleries, moving from one gallery to the next, all alone, looking for meaning while surrounded by the marginalia of death. Here, you came across Rahn’s story and because you have no story of your own, it became yours and you wanted to tell it. You thought that you could draw me here by promising to solve a puzzle, hoping that once I heard the story I would not be able to leave until it was finished.’

‘And is this so?’ the Writer of Letters asked.

‘Well . . . yes – but the point is, you believe that somehow by telling me the story of Rahn you will also solve the puzzle of your life. Perhaps you will be allowed to leave this labyrinth then, because you have found a suitable replacement?’

‘And who will that be?’ The Writer of Letters sat forward, expectantly.

‘Well . . . obviously me!’

‘But how would I know you are suitable?’

‘I would have to pass a test.’

‘What test?’

‘I haven’t figured that out yet.’

The Writer of Letters kept me waiting a moment and somewhere beneath the look in his eyes there was a hint of irony. ‘Perhaps I live only in your imagination. What do you think?’

‘Let me answer you this way,’ I said. ‘Aulus Gellius once asked, “When I lie and say I’m lying, am I lying or telling the truth?”’

‘That’s an unsolvable puzzle,’ he said.

‘And so is your question.’

He laughed a little and I believe he was amused. ‘Have you heard of metatheatre?’

‘Where there is a play within a play?’

‘Yes, during the performance the actors allow the audience to see that they are playing roles. Shakespeare uses this device to create an illusion of reality, to make the audience draw closer to the play, to make them feel a part of its machinations.’ His dark eyes wrinkled slightly. ‘This collusion between audience and actor helps both to reach new heights because it suspends disbelief. To create a sense of reality based upon an illusion is an interesting paradox, don’t you agree?’ he asked.