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classical authors, nor to the epistles of the Church fathers or to the articles of canonical law. These seven lines disobeyed the most elementary cipher codes employed by cardinals, bishops and abbots, who in those days encrypted almost all their communications with the Papal States, for fear of being spied upon. Rarely were their writings legible: they were translated from official Latin into a jumble of consonants and numbers, thanks to very elaborate substitution charts, cast in bronze by my much admired teacher Father Alberti. In general, these charts consisted of a series of superimposed wheels along whose rim were printed the letters of the alphabet. With skill and a few minimum instructions, the letters on the outside wheel were substituted by those on the inside wheel, turning any message into a cipher.
    So much precaution had its reasons. For the papal court, the nightmare of being discovered by noblemen whom they hated or courtiers against whom they plotted had, in a very short time, multiplied the labors of Bethany a hundredfold and had turned us into an indispensable tool for the administration of the Church. But how was I to explain all this to the kind Alessandro? How was I to confess that the clue that tormented me escaped all known methods of encoding and, for that very reason, had become my obsession?
    No: oculos ejus dinumera was not the sort of message that one could simply explain to someone uninstructed in secret codes.
    “May I ask what you’re thinking, Father Agostino? I’m beginning to believe that you pay me no attention whatsoever.”
    Father Alessandro took hold of my sleeve to lead me back to the dormitories through the dark corridors of the monastery.
    “Now that you’ve eaten,” he said in a fatherly tone, without however losing the mocking smile he had worn since our first encounter, “it would be best if you rested until the office of lauds. I’ll come and wake you shortly before dawn and you can let me know your business then. Agreed?”
    Against my will, I said yes.
    At that hour, the cell was frozen, and the very idea of stripping off my habit and slipping into a hard, damp bed terrified me more than staying awake. I asked the librarian to light the candle on the night table, and we agreed to meet at dawn and stroll through the cloister to clarify matters. And yet the idea of sharing details of my work with someone else was far from appealing. In fact, I had not yet paid my respects to the prior of Santa Maria, but something told me that Father Alessandro, in spite of his lack of skill in ciphers, would be of some use to me in this puzzle.
    Fully dressed, I lay down on the bed and covered myself with the only blanket at my disposal. In this position, letting my eyes stray over a ceiling of whitewashed beams, I went over once again the problem of the encrypted verses. I had the impression of having overlooked something, an absurd but fundamental “za.” And so, with my eyes wide open, I recalled all I knew about the origin of the lines. If I was not mistaken in my judgment, and the coming dawn was not fogging up my wits, it seemed quite clear that the name of our anonymous informant—or at the very least his number—was hidden in the two first verses.
    It was a curious game. As with certain Hebrew words, there are some that, besides their usual sense, carry a determinative particle that complements their meaning. The two Dominican mottoes indicated that our man was a preacher: of this I was almost certain. But what about the preceding lines?
    Count its eyes
    but look not on its face.
    The number of my name
    you shall find on its side.
    Eyes, face, name, side…
    In the gloom, utterly exhausted, I came upon the answer. Perhaps it was another impasse, but all of a sudden the number of the name no longer seemed absurd. I remembered that the Jews call gematria the discipline that consists of assigning to each letter of the alphabet a numerical value. John, in his Book of Revelation,