The Traitor's Emblem Read Free

navigator, unconvinced.
    “It will just be the tiniest bruise. Don’t be so cowardly, man. It has to look like the castaways attacked you in order to escape. Stay down on the floor for a bit.”
    There was a dry thud and then a head appeared through the hatch, quickly followed by the castaways. Night was beginning to fall.
    The captain and the German lowered the lifeboat into the water, to port, the side farthest from the mess. His companions climbed in and waited for their one-eyed leader, who had covered his head with his hood once more.
    “Two hundred meters in a straight line,” the captain told him, gesturing toward Portugal. “Leave the lifeboat on the beach: I’ll need it. I’ll fetch it back later.”
    The German shrugged.
    “Look, I know you don’t understand a word. Here—” said González, giving him back his knife. The man tucked it away in his belt with one hand while he fumbled under his raincoat with his other. He took out a small object and placed it in the captain’s hand.
    “Verrat,” he said, touching his index finger to his chest. “Rettung,” he said next, touching the chest of the Spaniard.
    González studied the gift carefully. It was a sort of medal, very heavy. He held it closer to the lamp hanging in the cabin; the object gave off an unmistakable glow.
    It was made of solid gold.
    “Look, I can’t accept . . .”
    But he was talking to himself. The boat was moving away already, and none of its occupants looked back.
    To the end of his days, Manuel González Pereira, former captain in the Spanish navy, dedicated every minute he could spare away from his bookshop to the study of that gold emblem. It was a double-headed eagle set on an iron cross. The eagle was holding a sword, and there was a number 32 above its head and an enormous diamond encrusted in its chest.
    He discovered that it was a Masonic symbol of the highest rank, but every expert he spoke to told him that it had to be a fake, especially since it was made of gold. The German Masons never used noble metals for the emblems of their Grand Masters. The size of the diamond—as far as the jeweler was able to ascertain without taking the piece apart—made it possible to date the stone approximately to the turn of the century.
    Often, as he sat up late into the night, the bookseller thought back to the conversation he’d had with the “One-Eyed Mystery Man,” as his little son, Juan Carlos, liked to call him.
    The boy never tired of hearing the story, and he invented farfetched theories about the identity of the castaways. But what excited him most were those parting words. He had deciphered them with the help of a German dictionary, and he repeated them slowly, as though by doing so he might better understand.
    “Verrat—treachery. Rettung—salvation.”
    The bookseller died without ever having solved the mystery hidden in his emblem. His son Juan Carlos inherited the piece and became a bookseller in his turn. One September afternoon in 2002, an obscure old writer came by the bookshop to give a talk about his new work on Freemasonry. Nobody turned up, so Juan Carlos decided, in order to kill time and lessen his guest’s obvious discomfort, to show him a photo of the emblem. On seeing it, the writer’s face changed.
    “Where did you get this photo?”
    “It’s an old medal that belonged to my father.”
    “Do you still have it?”
    “Yes. Because of the triangle containing the number 32, we worked out that it was—”
    “A Masonic symbol. Obviously a fake, because of the shape of the cross, and the diamond. Have you had it valued?”
    “Yes. The materials are worth about 3,000 euros. I don’t know if it has any additional historical value.”
    The writer looked at the piece for several seconds before replying. His lower lip trembled.
    “No. Definitely not. Perhaps as a curiosity . . . but I doubt it. Still, I’d like to buy it. You know . . . for my research. I’ll give you 4,000 euros for it.”
    Juan