It was an ingenious idea and completely wrong. I joined the group around the table and looked down at the two trays. Fallon said, ‘Now we’ve got two trays, so we’ll have to go through the whole thing again. Vivero might have alternated his message between them.’
I said casually, ‘What trays?’
Halstead jerked up his head and Fallon turned and looked at me blankly. ‘Why, these two here.’
I looked at the table. ‘I don’t see any trays.’
Fallon looked baffled and began to gobble. ‘Are…are you nuts? What the hell do you think these are? Flying saucers?’
Halstead looked at me irefully. ‘Let’s not have any games,’ he said. ‘Murville called this one a tray, Juan de Vivero called that one a tray, and so did Goosan in his letter to Herrick.’
‘I don’t give a damn about that,’ I said frankly. ‘If everyone calls a submarine an aeroplane, it still can’t fly. Old Vivero didn’t call them trays and he made them. He didn’t say, “Here, boys, I’m sending you a couple of nice trays.” Let’s see what he
did
say. Where’s the transcription?’
There was a glint in Fallon’s eye as he held out the sheaf of papers which were never far from him. ‘You’d better make this good.’
I flipped the sheets over to the last page. ‘He said, “I send you gifts made in that marvellous manner which my father learned of that stranger from the East.” He also said, “Let the scales of enmity fall from your eyes and look upon these
gifts with proper vision.” Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
‘Not much,’ said Halstead.
‘These are mirrors,’ I said calmly. ‘And just because everyone has been using them as trays doesn’t alter the fact.’
Halstead made a sound of irritation, but Fallon bent and examined them. I said, ‘The bottom of that “tray” isn’t copper—it’s speculum metal—a reflective surface and it’s slightly convex; I’ve measured it.’
‘You could be right at that,’ said Fallon. ‘So they’re mirrors! Where does that get us?’
‘Take a closer look,’ I advised.
Fallon picked up one of the mirrors and Halstead took the other. After a while Halstead said, ‘I don’t see anything except the reflection of my own face.’
‘I don’t do much better,’ said Fallon. ‘And it’s not a good reflective surface, either.’
‘What do you expect of a metal mirror that’s had things dumped on it for the last four hundred years? But it’s a neat trick, and I only came upon it by accident. Have you got a projection screen?’
Fallon smiled. ‘Better than that—I have a projection theatre.’
He would have! Nothing small about millionaire Fallon. He led us into a part of the house where I had never been, and into a miniature cinema containing about twenty seats. ‘I find this handy for giving informal lectures,’ he said.
I looked around. ‘Where’s the slide projector?’
‘In the projection room—back there.’
‘I’ll want it out here,’ I said.
He looked at me speculatively, and shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ll have it brought in.’
There was a pause of about ten minutes while a couple of his servants brought in the projector and set it on a table in the middle of the room, acting under my instructions. Fallon
looked interested; Halstead looked bored; Mrs Halstead looked beautiful. I winked at her. ‘We’re going to have a fine show,’ I said. ‘Will you hold this mirror, Mrs Halstead?’
I puttered around with the projector. ‘I’m using this as a very powerful spotlight,’ I said. ‘And I’m going to bounce light off the mirror and on to that screen up there. Tell me what you see.’
I switched on the projector light and there was a sharp intake of breath from Fallon, while Halstead lost his boredom in a hurry and practically snapped to attention. I turned and looked at the pattern on the screen. ‘What do you think it is?’ I asked. ‘It’s a bit vague, but I think it’s a map.’
Fallon said, ‘What the hell! How does it…? Oh, never mind. Can you rotate that thing a bit, Mrs Halstead?’
The luminous pattern on the screen twisted and flowed, then steadied in a new orientation. Fallon clicked his tongue. ‘I think you’re right—it
is
a map. If that indentation on the bottom right is Chetumal Bay—and it’s the right shape—then above it we have the bays of Espiritu Santo and Ascension. That makes it the west coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.’
Halstead said. ‘What’s that circle in the middle?’
‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ I said, and switched off the light. Fallon bent down and looked at the mirror still held by Mrs Halstead and shook his head incredulously. He looked at me enquiringly, and I said, ‘I came across this bit of trickery by chance. I was taking photographs of my tray—or mirror—and I was a bit ham-handed; I touched the shutter button by accident and the flash went off. When I developed the picture I found that I’d got a bit of the mirror in the frame but most of the picture was an area of wall. The light from the flash had bounced off the mirror and there was something bloody funny about its reflection on the wall, so I went into it a bit deeper.’
Halstead took the mirror from his wife. ‘This is impossible. How can a reflection from a plane surface show a selectively
variable pattern?’ He held up the mirror and moved it before his eyes. ‘There’s nothing here that shows.’
‘It’s not a plane mirror—it’s slightly convex. I measured it; it has a radius of convexity of about ten feet. This is a Chinese trick.’
‘Chinese!’
‘Old Vivero said as much. “…that stranger from the East which the Moors brought to Cordoba.” He was Chinese. That stumped me for a bit—what the hell was a Chinaman doing in Spain in the late fifteenth century? But it’s not too odd, if you think about it. The Arab Empire stretched from Spain to India; it’s not too difficult to imagine a Chinese metal worker being passed along the line. After all, there were Europeans in China at that date.’
Fallon nodded. ‘It’s a plausible theory.’ He tapped the mirror. ‘But how the hell is this thing done?’
‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘I went to the Torquay Public Library and there it was, all laid out in the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. I was fortunate that the Torquay Library is a bit old-fashioned because that particular item was dropped from later editions.’
I took the mirror from Halstead and laid it flat on the table. ‘This is how it works. Forget the gold trimmings and concentrate on the mirror itself. All early Chinese mirrors were of metal, usually cast of bronze. Cast metal doesn’t give a good reflective surface so it had to be worked on with scrapers to give a smooth finish. Generally, the scraping was done from the centre to the edge and that gave the finished mirror its slight convexity.’
Fallon took a pen from his pocket and applied it to the mirror, imitating the action of scraping. He nodded and said briefly, ‘Go on.’
I said, ‘After a while the mirrors began to become more elaborate. They were expensive to make and the manufacturers began to pretty them up a bit. One way of doing this
was to put ornamentation on the
back
of the mirror. Usually it was a saying of Buddha cast in raised characters. Now, consider what might happen when such a mirror was scraped. It would be lying on its back on a solid surface, but only the raised characters would be in contact with that surface—the rest of the mirror would be supported by nothing. When scraper pressure was applied the unsupported parts would give a little and a fraction more metal would be removed over the supported parts.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ said Fallon. ‘And that makes the difference?’
‘In general you have a convex mirror which tends to diffuse reflected light,’ I said. ‘But you have plane bits where the characters are which reflects light in parallel lines. The convexity is so small that the difference can’t be seen by the eye, but the short wavelengths of light show it up in the reflection.’
‘When did the Chinese find out about this?’ queried Fallon.
‘Some time in the eleventh century. It was accidental at first, but later they began to exploit it deliberately. Then they came up with the composite mirror—the back would still have a saying of Buddha, but the mirror would reflect something completely different. There’s one in the Ashmolean in Oxford—the back says “Adoration for Amida Buddha” and the reflection shows Buddha himself. It was just a matter of putting a false back on the mirror, as Vivero has done here.’
Halstead turned over the mirror and tapped the gold back experimentally. ‘So under here there’s a map cast in the bronze?’
‘That’s it. I rather think Vivero re-invented the composite mirror. There are only three examples known; the one in the Ashmolean, another in the British Museum, and one somewhere in Germany.’
‘How do we get the back off?’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m not having that mirror ruined. If you rub a mercury amalgam into the mirror surface it improves the reflection a hundred per cent. But a better way would be to X-ray them.’
‘I’ll arrange it,’ said Fallon decisively. ‘In the meantime we’ll have another look. Switch on that projector.’
I snapped on the light and we studied the vague luminous lines on the screen. After a while Fallon said, ‘It sure looks like the coast of Quintana Roo. We can check it against a map.’
‘Aren’t those words around the edge?’ asked Katherine Halstead.
I strained my eyes but it was a bit of a blurred mish-mash nothing was clear. ‘Might be,’ I said doubtfully.
‘And there’s that circle in the middle,’ said Paul Halstead. ‘What’s that?’
‘I think I’ve solved that one,’ I said. ‘Old Vivero wanted to reconcile his sons, so he gave them each a mirror. The puzzle can only be solved by using both mirrors. This one gives a general view, locating the area, and I’ll lay ten to one that the other mirror gives a blown-up view of what’s in that little circle. Each mirror would be pretty useless on its own.’
‘We’ll check on that,’ said Fallon. ‘Where’s my mirror?’
The two mirrors were exchanged and we looked at the new pattern. It didn’t mean much to me, nor to anyone else. ‘It’s not
clear
enough,’ complained Fallon. ‘I’ll go blind if we have much more of this.’
‘It’s been knocked about after four hundred years,’ I said. ‘But the pattern on the back has been protected. I think that X-rays should give us an excellent picture.’
‘I’ll have it done as soon as possible.’
I turned off the light and found Fallon dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. He smiled at me. ‘You’re paying your way, Wheale,’ he said. ‘We might not have found this.’
‘You would have found it,’ I said positively. ‘As soon as your cryptographer had given up in disgust you’d have started to wonder about this and that—such as what was concealed in the bronze-gold interface. What puzzles me is why Vivero’s sons didn’t do anything about it.’
Halstead said thoughtfully, ‘Both branches of the family regarded these things as trays and not mirrors. Perhaps Vivero’s rather obscure tip-off just went over their heads. They may have been told the story of the Chinese mirrors as children, when they were too young to really understand.’
‘Could be,’ agreed Fallon. ‘It could also be that the quarrel between them—whatever it was—couldn’t be reconciled so easily. Anyway, they didn’t do anything about it. The Spanish branch lost their mirror and to the Mexican branch it was reduced to some kind of a legend.’ He put his hands on the mirror possessively. ‘But we’ve got them now—that’s different.’
Looking back, I think it was about this time that Fallon began to lose his grip. One day he went into the city and when he came back he was gloomy and very thoughtful, and from that day on he was given to sudden silences and fits of absent-mindedness. I put it down to the worries of a millionaire—maybe the stock market had dropped or something like that—and I didn’t think much about it at the time. Whatever it was it certainly didn’t hamper his planning of the Uaxuanoc expedition into which he threw himself with a demoniac energy. I thought it strange that he should be devoting
all
his time to this; surely a millionaire must look after his financial interests—but Fallon wasn’t worried about anything else but Uaxuanoc and whatever else it was that had made him go broody.
It was in the same week that I met Pat Harris. Fallon called me into his study, and said, ‘I want you to meet Pat Harris—I borrowed him from an oil company I have an interest in. I’m fulfilling my part of the bargain; Harris has been investigating Niscemi.’
I regarded Harris with interest although, on the surface, there was little about him to excite it. He was average in every way; not too tall, not too short, not too beefy and not too scrawny. He wore an average suit and looked the perfect average man. He might have been designed by a statistician. He had a more than average brain—but that didn’t show.
He held out his hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Wheale,’ he said in a colourless voice.
‘Tell Wheale what you found,’ ordered Fallon.
Harris clasped his hands in front of his average American paunch. ‘Victor Niscemi—small time punk,’ he said concisely. ‘Not much to say about him. He never was much and he never did much—except get himself rubbed out in England. Reform school education leading to bigger things—but not much bigger. Did time for rolling drunks but that was quite a while ago. Nothing on him in the last four years; he never appeared on a police blotter, I mean. Clean as a whistle as far as his police record goes.’
‘That’s his official police record, I take it. What about unofficially?’
Harris looked up at me approvingly. ‘That’s a different matter, of course,’ he agreed. ‘For a while he did protection for a bookie, then he got into the numbers racket—first as protection for a collector, then as collector himself. He was on his way up in a small way. Then he went to England and got himself shot up. End of Niscemi.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘Not by a hell of a long way,’ said Fallon abruptly.
‘Go on, Harris.’
Harris moved in his chair and suddenly looked more relaxed. ‘There’s a thing you’ve got to remember about a guy like Niscemi—he has friends. Take a look at his record; reform school, petty assault and so on. Then suddenly, four years ago, no more police record. He was still a criminal and still small time, but he no longer got into trouble. He’d acquired friends.’