IT WAS ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS of serenity and silence, when her tormented spirit could calm down and indulge in daily reflection. Sephy, whose real name was Elke Zeiss—that's how she was listed in the Berlin census—was abandoned at birth. Placed in an orphanage, she never knew parental love there.
At sixteen, she ran away from the boarding school where she was studying, thanks to aid from the German government, and went to live with an Argentine she had met at a party at a friend's house. He was a failed arms dealer operating in the suburbs of Berlin.
After a year of tortuous relationship, during which they were forced to change addresses several times to elude the police and rival mafias staking out their turf, her lover proposed that she participate in a bank robbery in Potsdam. She accepted without complaint, perhaps because she had no alternative or perhaps out of fear of confronting him.
Unfortunately, two people died in the event: the security guard, who was stationed at the institution's entrance, and an employee who had tried to outwit the alarm. After that, they had no choice but to leave the country and flee to South America.
In Argentina, they had the opportunity to start over, but Oscar—that was her partner's name—had old debts that had ended her life after a bloody reckoning. From then on, Sephy had to survive thanks to the only inheritance her partner had left her: a cold heart, willing to do anything for money, and a mind devoid of conscience and no moral standards.
Two years later, after only four years of life, she joined Corpsson, influenced by a man she had spent a single night with and who was a member of the organization. She spent a brief period in Brazil, where she expanded her practice in the lucrative world of crime, and then decided to return to Germany under an assumed name: Sephy.
IT WAS 3:17 AM ON SATURDAY, and she was still in front of the television, binging on programs that were pure luxury. She lit a cigarette before changing the channel. A veteran of the Iraq War, whose legs had been amputated after stepping on a fragmentation landmine, was publicly criticizing the American president's conduct toward the victims. This upset her so much that she turned off the TV and closed her eyes, firmly resolved to get some sleep. That's when she remembered Frida and the message she had sent her the previous morning. It would be best to call her again. Besides missing a chat with her, she needed to know if she had managed to translate the cipher.
She went to the open balcony, which overlooked the mountainous landscape of the Sierra. Now submerged in the shadows of the night. Without further delay, she called Frida. After the third ring, he heard his companion's cheerful voice on the other end.
She sounded relaxed and alert, but he admitted that she was slurring her words a bit due to fatigue, possibly caused by transcribing the manuscript.
— I'm glad you called. I heard your message on the answering machine and tried to reach you, but it was impossible. You were offline.
— I'm sorry, I forgot to charge the battery before I left this morning... — he lamented his mistake with a furtive grimace, — but... tell me... what did you manage to find out?
— It is, as you said, a medieval codex encrypted according to the security standards of the time. It is based on the exchange of letters and numbers for those of the alphabet in use at the time to form words and sentences. I have to admit that it was more difficult to recognize the Gothic symbols of the alphabet than to decipher the code.
— Did you use the decoder?
— Yes... — he replied immediately — but a problem arose. The message didn't match the common language. — This forced me to spend about five hours in front of the computer, searching through websites that deal with ancient literature to identify common expressions from that time. The truth is, I just finished it!
— Do you have the text? — she asked impatiently.
— Before my tired eyes... Do you want me to read it?
— Wait a moment... — She searched through the menu on her cell phone until she found access to the recorder, which she then turned on, urging her friend to start reading. — Go ahead, whenever you want!
Frida complied with her interlocutor's wishes, slowly speaking the somewhat incongruous written words of a 16th-century Spanish stonemason who claimed to know the secret art of construction and the way to communicate with God.
Sephy didn't know what to think at first. That story seemed to have been concocted by the feverish mind of some madman. The account, however, sounded familiar. She had heard one of her boarding school teachers say that the ancient Jews claimed to know how to speak directly to Yahweh, their God.
And even though it was one of the rabbis' best-kept secrets, I suspected It was said that word had reached Hitler, who organized an investigation into this prodigy, sending Gestapo agents to various locations in the Near East and North Africa to find what he believed would guarantee him victory over his enemies. However, those sent never found what they set out to find.
Whether the account was accurate or not, one detail caught his attention. The writing was dated Murcia. A strange coincidence. The same city where he had met the Master.