PART FIVE - MOUNT IDA
- 2 -
"Wait," Gabe, confused, demanded clarification, "You're saying that Robert White, the eminent academic expert in classical mythology, the author of Love's Children; and the transgender woman shot with an arrow at the National Gallery, the one who left the symbol on the wall, are the same person?!"
"Don't sound so surprised," Gerard, the Hospitaller Grand Prior grinned evilly, "It has always been really rather obvious."
"As I said, I had suspected it from the first," Saphy replied, "But something held me back from committing to the idea. Because, to make sense, the theory relies on one important detail."
"The victim was transgender, she looked nothing like the picture of White in his book?" Gabe asked.
"Exactly. In order for us to believe that the Rokeby Venus victim was Robert White, we couldn't believe that he had had himself surgically or hormonally transformed. There was a far deeper physical difference. The victim was naturally intersex, a hermaphrodite. To believe it was Robert White is to believe, truly believe I mean, that a power exists to transform a male body into a hermaphrodite, to believe in a real Fountain of Salmacis."
"But, if it requires such a leap of faith from you then why do you believe Robert White was that woman?"
"Because it's the only explanation that fits...'Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth'," Saphy responded, quoting Sherlock Holmes' famous words, "We already know that the victim was killed by naiads, the white feathered arrow tells us that. As I told you before, that's a fairly unique murder weapon. So, why do the naiads kill?"
"To protect their secret," Gabe responded instantly, beginning to follow Saphy's train of thought.
"Right. That means that they must have thought that this transwoman was in possession of some knowledge that threatened that secret, that could lead to the Fountain of Salmacis. We also know that the victim's clothing was another unusual detail. She was dressed in a plain white smock and no shoes running through the London streets. It meant nothing to us at the time, but it might do now."
"It's what I'm wearing," Gabe realised how obvious a lot of this should have been to him.
"So, she must have recently been held prisoner by these thugs. The victim was never identified because they had a completely new physical identity," Saphy went on, "But that doesn't mean she had no identifying marks. She left a symbol behind, remember, the joined Venus and Mars symbol, right in front of the Rokeby Venus. We were both there, we saw the hurried panic, saw how she headed straight for that particular painting and left that symbol with some painful determination. Whoever she was, she must have known the secret of the painting, what it really depicts and left that symbol as a clue, a warning about the men hunting her, the assassins Phobus and Deimus. Who else knew how to interpret all of that?"
"Professor Cavendish?" Gabe recalled.
"Exactly. So, the victim, the person who left those clues, would have to have a similar background, similar knowledge, maybe even left the clues for Jane herself. It suggests somebody who was a colleague of hers. Somebody like Robert White," she paused for a moment, looking around at the Hospitallers and Gerard, all were staring at her, listening in rapt attention to her laying the whole case out, "Do you remember in White and Gerard's office, you found a piece of paper?"
"Yes, the list of museums: 'Louvre, Villa Borghese, Palazzo Massimo Alle Terme, Uffizi, Prado, Met'," Gabe remembered, "All the places with a Hermaphroditus sculpture. It's what lead us to the Louvre and then to Bodrum."
"So, that is how you managed to make such quick progress," Gerard cut in, "By stealing from my office!"
"You said it listed all the places with a sculpture," Saphy responded to Gabe, ignoring the Grand Prior, "But it's not quite all. An ivory miniature of the Borghese Hermaphroditus was brought back from Rome in the 17th century by the diarist John Evelyn. I looked it up when we were in Paris, suspecting that there had been something torn from the bottom of that list. However, with what we discovered at the Louvre, the missing sculpture never seemed important. At least, not until Bodrum, where we saw Dr. Gerard there baptise his minion from a miniature ivory sculpture that looked very much like the one Evelyn brought back from Rome."
"But that didn't do anything," Gabe added, "We saw it."
"Yes, but that may just be that these guys don't know the secret," Saphy smirked tauntingly at the sinister hooded figures standing around them, "They don't know what White knew, what the naiads knew. There must be some way of activating the waters, of making them transformative, otherwise the secret would have been known years ago."
"So, how could White have known it?" Gabe asked.
"White was a historian, right? A researcher with an interest in rare books," Saphy explained, "John Evelyn's diaries aren't so well known these days as Samuel Pepys', but they have always been read and published. White would have been familiar with them. He would also have known that all the earlier years, the time when Evelyn would have acquired the Hermaphroditus sculpture were compiled much later by notes he took at the time. There has always been an idea that there may be some original lost diaries of those years. What if those diaries from the time he acquired the sculpture contained some other discoveries, some lost information? Evelyn's tomb was broken into in 1992, nobody knows why, but his skull was stolen. Perhaps he was buried with something else as well."
"You're saying that a secret diary or set of instructions for the sculpture and the Fountain's waters might have been taken from his tomb?" Gabe asked.
