Page 58 of The Art of Theft
You don’t need to do everything for everyone, Holmes had said.
One of these days he ought to listen to her.
But his wiser future self obviously dwelled too far in the future to save him tonight.
The tunnel itself, steadily climbing, didn’t have any obvious turns, but his compass indicated that he’d proceed in a semi-spiral. He’d been facing west earlier; now he was facing near south.
A few feet farther along he came to a half door set directly before him, rather than above. He listened for a long time, wary of meeting any oncoming guards as he stepped into the château. But when he opened the door, he encountered not a room or corridor, but more darkness.
After some hesitation, he let light out of his lantern and looked around.
It was not so much a passage as a narrow, rectangular well, with stones protruding an inch or two out of the walls to provide footholds. The floor, too, was stone, what he had been praying for, but he almost wished he had some more by-now familiar dank earthen passages to crawl through. In the stillness, his breaths echoed against the walls.
He took off his dirt-soiled outer layer of oversized garments. Those, along with his shoes, he stowed on the other side of the half door. In his stocking feet, the lantern again lit and clasped between his teeth, he climbed up until he reached another trapdoor.
Above the trapdoor was yet another passage. He examined the floor. There wasn’t much dust. In such an enclosed space, without ready changes of air, the supply of dust was limited. But the distribution was what one would see in a normal corridor that wasn’t cleaned frequently: a layer of encrusted dirt near the edges of the walls, the center of the passage clear from foot traffic.
He bent his face almost to the floor. Too clear. The passage had been used recently. Within days.
Now the choice of whether to keep his small, dim lantern lit. In the end, he did not close the front panel, though he did close it asmuch as possible, while still letting out a sliver of light. He was counting on being the only intruder in this space tonight. Hoping that even if someone else came in, it would be a customary user, walking with a bright light and heavy footfalls, who would give him enough notice to darken his lantern and get away.
Twenty feet out he was glad he’d left the lantern on, or he might have knocked over the item placed directly in his path, even if he’d been feeling his way with his hands. The lantern emitted so little light that at first he thought he’d encountered a barrier. Only when he opened the lantern’s front panel a little more could he make it out as a tripod. A surveyor’s tripod, the sort that could easily support the weight of a theodolite, or some other optical instrument.
As an archeologist, he’d done his share of land surveys and always shipped a few such tripods in crates as part of his equipment. But what was a surveyor’s tripod doing in a secret passage concealed inside the walls of a château?
Of course.
He lifted the tripod carefully, moved it eighteen inches out of the way, and took its place. But the spot where a camera would have aimed was nothing but wall. He pushed, tapped, and even ran his fingers up and down lines of mortar, but nothing at all happened.
Unless... the one he thought to be the inner wall was actually the outer wall?
He turned around 180 degrees and pressed and prodded the opposite wall—and almost leaped back when a panel slid open. Beyond the panel was a pane of something cool and smooth.
Glass.
And beyond the glass, darkness.
His fingertips tingling, he shut the panel. Had the light from his lantern been seen? His heart pounding, he stood and listened, but heard nothing. After a while he dimmed the lantern and slid open the panel again.
The same unrelieved darkness beyond the glass pane. Secondsticked by. A minute. The darkness didn’t change at all. He set his ear against the cold, slick glass: still nothing, except for a faint din that could be either reverberations from the reception or merely blood pumping through his own veins.
He drew back and wiped a handkerchief across the glass pane, removing any trace of oil or dirt his skin might have left behind. Then he closed the panel, put the tripod back, and walked on.
About twenty-five feet out, he encountered another such tripod—and another hidden panel in the wall, with another glass pane behind it.
Another twenty feet or so, yet another tripod. Altogether he counted five tripods before the tunnel ended. He felt around but couldn’t get any part of the wall to move or even recess. He retraced his steps.
The trapdoor he’d come through was somewhere in the middle of the long passage. The five tripods he’d encountered were all west of it. There were more tripods on the other side of the trapdoor.
The process had become familiar to him by now: Move aside the tripod, peer behind the wall panel, see nothing, and move on. He fully expected the same result to keep repeating, but the second wall panel east of the trapdoor opened to reveal an illuminated room beyond.
Not only illuminated, occupied: Two women were walking out of the luxuriously appointed bedroom. Instinctively he moved to the side, afraid that there might be others in the room and his silhouette would be seen.
When he risked another peek, however, the room was empty, though the door was left open to the passage outside. The peephole was oddly placed, perhaps two feet from the floor, implying that the secret passage itself straddled two floors. Which made sense. Walls were punctuated with windows, and the passage must be placed higher than the tops of the windows below and lower than the sills of the windows above.
Other than its rather low vantage point, the peephole gave aclear panorama of the room, as if the furnishing had been placed just so to avoid obstructing the view.
He was about to pull out Mr. Marbleton’s detective camera and take a picture when a grinding sound came from the middle of the passage: a secret door being opened.
