Page 30 of The Crimson Lily
Both Alejandro and I agree with a simultaneous nod.
The apartment is all you’d expect from an art lover in Paris. Tall white walls adorned with large paintings of dukes, duchesses, and still life pieces, along with many vases, amphoras, and giant fruit bowls made of clay and painted blue. Maksim slips through the back window, which he managed to open too easily. I wonder, for a brief moment, if he’s already been in this apartment before. It sure seems like it because he knows exactly where he needs to go, and how he can avoid the security guards posted at different parts of this monstrous place.
“You’ve prepared this, haven’t you?” I ask—it’s a rhetorical question, of course.
He doesn’t answer. He can’t at the moment.
“How long have you and him…” Alejandro attempts to ask his prying question.
I know Maksim can hear. I wonder what he’ll think if I give Alejandro an arbitrary number of days, or what he’ll think if I tell Alejandro he and I are nothing.
“We’re not…together, if that’s what you think,” I reply. I could say anything, but I picked the truth.
“Ah!” Alejandro blurts, drily. “So he beats you, and that’s where you guys leave it?”
I don’t know if he’s referring to the faded bruise on my cheek, the hickey, or something else I haven’t yet noticed, but his wordshave crossed a line. Béatrice shushes him; his comments are going too far, even for her.
In the meantime, Maksim clears his throat. Through the camera, I can see the safe I now recognize perfectly. He appears to be standing in a darker room, much smaller than the rest, with a large desk and this oversized metallic box.
“There’s a screen and a keyboard,” Maksim reports.
I know exactly why.
“Press the A and tell me what you see,” I direct.
He does, and I see a single word pop on the screen through the camera.
“Anathema,” he reads the word out loud.
Instinctively, I go for the closest pad of paper and Opera pencil. I am doing random operations, replacing letters for others. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it all makes sense to me. After a few computations, I return with the response. “Detonate.”
He types in the word, and another shows.
“Clairvoyance.”
I replicate what I did before, crossing out letters, switching them around, adding and subtracting vowels and consonants.
“What are you doing, Lili?” Alejandro asks, too curious.
“It’s based on a substitution table,” I reply, spontaneously, realizing it’s exactly that. I finish solving my next equation. “Encyclopedia.”
“Beautiful.”
I swallow something in my throat, hearing that word in Maksim’s husky voice. I trace new lines and scribbles with my pencil. “Colocynth. What’s the last word?”
He finishes typing, and the final word appears.
“Dark.”
I don’t have to calculate anything for that one. I take a deep breath before giving him the appropriate response. “Love.”
We hear a few clicks on our end, the sound of released gears spinning. The first door opens, and there’s William’s favorite toy: the puzzle box. It looks like the facet of a flat Rubix cube, joined by moveable sticks and circular symbols that can move across each case of this complex matrix.
I tell Maksim exactly which stick to pull, which token to move, which color to slide where. He executes each of my instructions meticulously, attentively. I can only hear his tamed breathing through the camera’s microphone. He opens the second door and comes face to face with the last piece of this intricate riddle.
“It’s another screen and one button,” he declares.
“Press the button,” I instruct.
