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Monk laid the notes back gently, exactly as he had found them.
“Do you suppose Mary knew?” Hester asked in a whisper. “I … I hope not. I hate to think of her being party to this. I know it is not as evil as really hurting people … it’s only greedy, but …”
He looked at her, his face bleak, the lean planes of his cheeks and brow harsh in the lamp’s glow, his nose exaggerated.
“It’s a filthy crime,” he said between his teeth. “You sound as if there is no victim, because you aren’t thinking. What would you do if half your money was worth nothing and you didn’t know which half? How would you live? Who could you trust?”
“But …” There were no words, and she stopped.
“People would be afraid to sell,” he went on savagely. “You might trade, but who with? Who wants what you have to offer and can give you what you need? Ever since man acquired goods and leisure, specialized his skills and learned to cooperate one with another for everyone’s benefit, we have used a common means of exchange—money. In fact, ever since we began anything one could call civilization and learned that we are more than a collection of individuals, each for himself, and formed the concept of community, money has been pivotal. Pollute that, and you strike at the root of all society.”
She stared at him, comprehension of the magnitude of it dawning inside her, of the totality of the damage.
“And words,” he went on, his face burning with the fierceness of his emotion. “Words are our means of communication, that which raises man above the beasts. We can think, we have concepts, we can write and pass our beliefs from one land to another, one generation to the next. Pollute our relationships with flattery and manipulation, our language with lies, propaganda, self-serving use of images, the prostitution of words and meaning, and we can no longer reach each other. We become isolated. Nothing is real. We drown in a morass of the sham, the expedient. Deceit, corruption and betrayal … they are the sins of the wolf.” He stopped abruptly, staring at her as if he had only just that moment really seen her.
“The wolf?” she urged. “What do you mean? What wolf?”
“The lowest circle of h
ell,” he answered slowly, rolling the words as though one by one. “The last pit of all. Dante. The three great circles of hell. The leopard, the lion and! the wolf.”
“Do you remember where you read that, who taught it you?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
He waited so long she thought he had not heard her.
“No …” He winced. “No, I don’t. I’m trying … but it’s just out of reach. I didn’t even know I knew it at all until I started to think about forgery. I …” He shrugged very slightly and turned away. “We’ve learned all we need to here. This could be the reason Mary was killed. If she learned about it somehow, they’d have to keep her silent.”
“Who? Which one?”
“God knows. Perhaps Quinlan. Maybe she knew about it anyway. That’s for the police to discover. Come on. We can’t find out anything more here.” He picked up the lantern and went back towards the way they had come in. It took him a moment or two to find the door because it had swung closed again. “Damn,” he said irritably. “I could have sworn I left it open.”
“You did,” Hester said from close behind him. “If it swung shut on its own, it must be weighted. That means we can open it from here somehow.”
“Of course we can open it from here,” he said. “But how? Hold the lantern up.” He ran his fingers over the wall experimentally, covering every inch. It took him something less than three minutes to find the catch. It was not (concealed, simply in an awkward place. “Ah …” he said with satisfaction, pulling it hard. But it did not move. He pulled again.
“Is it stuck?” she asked with a frown.
He tried it three times before he accepted the truth. “No. I think it is locked.”
“It can’t be! If it locks just by closing, how did Quinlan get out? He can’t have worked in here without being able to get out if he wished to!”
He turned around slowly, looking at her with the kind of candor they had so often shared. “I don’t think it did lock itself. I think we have been locked in deliberately. Someone realized we took Hector at his word, and waited here to see if we would come. This is too precious and secret to allow us to blunder into and repeat.”
“But the workers don’t come back until Tuesday. Quinlan said it was closed because of the gas lines,” she said with mounting realization of what it meant. The room was small, windowless, effectively sealed but for the air vent. Tuesday was at least thirty hours away. She went over to the vent and stretched up her hand to it. There was no breath of air, no chill. It had been blocked—of course. There was no need to add the rest.
“I know,” he said quietly. “It looks as if the Farralines win in the end. I’m sorry.”
She looked around with sudden fury. “Well, can’t we at least destroy this machine that prints the money? Can’t we smash the plates or something?”
He smiled, then he started to laugh, quietly and with genuine amusement.
“Bravo! Yes, by all means, let’s ruin them. That’ll be something accomplished.”
“It’ll make them very angry,” she said thoughtfully. “They might be enraged and kill us.”
“My dear girl, if we are not already suffocated to death, they’ll kill us anyway. We know enough to hang them … we just don’t know which ones.”
She took a deep breath to steady herself. Although she had already realized it, it was different to hear him say so.
