Veritas

Day the Eighth

THURSDAY, 16^TH APRIL 1711

5.30 of the clock: first mass. From now on the bells will ring in succession throughout the day, announcing masses, processions, devotions. Eating houses and alehouses open.

The next day it was again impossible to shake Abbot Melani from his slumber. At dawn I returned to his rooms, and Domenico tried to prevent me from even entering, protesting that his uncle was in no fit condition. I did not give up, and after a short argument I managed to force my way in and approach his bed.

Unfortunately Atto’s nephew was right: on account of the previous day’s excessive exertions, and above all the emotions aroused, the Abbot was in an almost catatonic state. I managed to wake him and speak to him for a minute or two, but all I got was a dazed stare and a few muttered words. Even though I knew that Domenico would be listening to my words, I tried to communicate to Atto the gist of my most recent conversation with Cloridia: in all probability the Turks had arrived in Vienna with intents that were far from evil. Indeed, they wished to collaborate in healing the Emperor, and so his theorem was wrong, his suspicions about Eugene unfounded. But it was no use. After a while Atto closed his eyes again and turned away from me. Domenico, vexed and worried by my insistence, all but kicked me out.

Back in my rooms, I received the expected summons from the imperial chamber: that afternoon my assistant and I were to meet the authorities at the Place with No Name, where we would dictate a report on the events that had taken place there and sign it.

Meanwhile Cloridia had returned in great agitation after a brief excursion.

“The Most Serene Prince’s carriage has left his palace. He has set off for the front again,” she announced gravely.

The man who had plagued our thoughts for over a week was returning to his old job: the outer struggle against the French enemy, and the inner one between Dog Nose, Madame l’Ancienne and the Captain of Death.

But we had a job to do. It was almost seven o’clock: time for our appointment with Opalinski.

It was a short journey, but it was at once interrupted by a wholly unexpected encounter.

“Eh, Italian chimney-sweep! Stop, wait!” a familiar voice addressed me.

At first I did not recognise him. His head was bandaged, and he was leaning on a stick. As he came towards me I thought I was seeing a ghost.

“Frosch!” I exclaimed.

If he was not a ghost, the keeper of the Place with No Name had risked becoming one. Ceaselessly rubbing the bandages on his head, he told us what had happened when the animals went on the rampage and held us hostage in the ball stadium. While we were working in the mansion of Neugebäu, Frosch was in his usual place close to the animal cages. After which, as often happens in the case of sudden assaults, he could remember nothing. All he knew was that someone (it was impossible to say whether it was just one person or several) had taken him by surprise and bludgeoned him. He had remained unconscious for an indefinite period. He had only woken when Pup had licked his face with his trunk.

“Pup?”

“Yes,” answered Frosch, as if that pet name were the most obvious thing in the world for the elephant, probably hoping we would ask no questions about the secret he had kept all that time within the walls of the mansion.

When he re-awoke, the keeper went on, he had taken stock of the disaster, which could only have been caused deliberately. Weaving his way miraculously among the maddened animals in the drenching rain, his blood-soaked head throbbing painfully, the keeper had managed to bar all the exits from the Place with No Name, after which he had asked at the nearest farm for help.

Frosch recounted the whole story in great detail, speaking slowly and peppering his speech with frequent curses. He was still in pain and had clearly been drawing frequently on his bottle of Slibowitz schnaps. It was growing very late, but there was no way to get the befuddled keeper of the Place with No Name to be more succinct.

At first the peasants in the area, Frosch continued, had refused to help him, declaring that Rudolph’s ghost had returned, that Neugebäu was haunted and what was more they had even seen a ship in the sky — at which point the keeper gazed at us inquisitively. However, since we had asked no questions about the elephant, he asked none about the Flying Ship.

Despite Frosch’s efforts, some animals had escaped from the Place with No Name, and the hunt to round them up, which had spread into the neighbouring countryside, would go on for the next few days. I said that we had no idea who could have freed the animals, nor who had attacked him. We had escaped from Neugebäu, I declared, as soon as we saw some of the ferocious animals wandering around freely. Once back in Vienna, I told him, I had informed the authorities of what had happened and that very morning I had received a summons to draw up and sign a report in situ.

“Good; but I won’t be able to move from here for a while,” he said, massaging his bandaged head and pointing to the building he had just emerged from to take a short walk: the Bürgerspital, or City Hospital.

He went on to list all his wounds and the stitches that had been applied to them, and the number of tragic cases he had seen in the hospital, a place he hoped, once discharged, never to set foot in again, because he was sensitive by nature, and certain things he just could not bear, et cetera et cetera, and on and on he went until the Slibowitz sloshing around in his veins came pouring out in the form of tears. As often happens with alcoholics, Frosch ended his account by sobbing like a child. We endeavoured to cheer him up, and fearing he was about to faint we accompanied him back inside the Bürgerspital, where we entrusted him to the tender care of a young nun.

The building was like a great many others near the southern ramparts. To find our meeting place we had to follow the instructions Opalinski had left us. Our encounter with Frosch meant that we arrived over an hour late.

As soon as we turned into the street, Simonis stopped me with his hand.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Why?”

“Let’s try and arrive at the building by another entrance — you can never be too careful.”

“But Opalinski wrote that we should follow his instructions.”

“We’ll find him just the same, Signor Master, trust me.”

It was not difficult to arrive at the place stipulated. Houses in Vienna are often linked to one another. We slipped into the doorway of a small house situated in a side street, and passing from the corridor to the courtyard, we were soon at our destination.

“The empty apartment? It’s the one on the top floor, the Zwitkowitz family lives there. Or rather, they used to,” said an old woman on the ground floor in a tone that was both sour and despondent, just before closing the door again. “It’s the only one they’ve already assigned to a functionary. The other apartments are all closed, nobody knows till when. Everyone has been evicted. I’ve just come to collect my last few things.”

The old woman’s voice was full of bitterness at the imperial functionaries, who had driven out all the inhabitants of the building. I was thus coming into direct contact with the effects of the right of quarters that Simonis had told me about: all the tenants had had to leave their homes at the behest of some court parasite. This latter, as usual, had illegally sublet the Zwitkowitz family’s apartment, and Opalinski collected the rent of the new lessee.

We quickly climbed the stairs without meeting a living soul.

We immediately guessed which apartment it was, because the door was open. We entered. The place was half empty. Various items of furniture and paintings had been taken away recently; one could still see the marks on the floor and there were white patches on the wall where paintings, crucifixes and clocks had hung.

I was now well acquainted with Viennese homes, having seen dozens of them during my inspections of fireplaces. The objects on show in them and the architecture would make anyone’s fortune in my home town; the possessions of a modest family in Vienna are the equivalent of five wealthy families in Rome. The walls are thick and solid, the windows large, the roof high, covered with tiles and crowned by impressive, well-built chimneys. The apartments generally have a hallway and well-supplied kitchen. The front door is broad, like the one we had just passed through.

“Jan, are you here?” said Simonis.

There was no answer.

“He’ll have gone by now,” I said.

From the first room one could turn left or right. We chose to turn right and so entered the kitchen. As usual in Vienna, there was a large oven and a great variety of utensils, such as would only be found in rich, well-furnished homes in Rome. In the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns the kitchenware is always of the best quality: the forks have three, and sometimes even four, prongs.

The Zwitkowitz family had carried away some furniture, but not their effects: on the floor were heaps or stacks of items of copper cutlery, metal jugs, brass pans, zinc bowls and glasses of every shape and form. Near a pile of plates, stacked in a corner waiting to be carried away, I spotted some red drops. I pointed them out to Simonis.

“Blood,” he said evenly.

In the larders and storerooms of Vienna you will always find a great number of dishcloths, cloth napkins and serviettes, finely decorated with beautiful designs and patterns, because grease and oil flow like rivers in the kitchens of this city.

On a table I spotted a beautifully embroidered table cloth with its napkins, all neatly folded and stacked. Something struck me. I counted the napkins: there were just three. Not six or twelve, as was usually the case.

In Vienna the cooks use special spits, known as Bratspieße. They put three or four in the oven one above the other, so that the juice of the various meats that are speared on them, as they cook, can run down from the one at the top to the one at the bottom. Since no one likes to spend hours in front of the fire turning the spits, the Viennese have invented an ingenious automatic system — governed by weights, spheres and chains like a clock and powered by the force of the hot steam from the cooking — which allows the meat to turn regularly and so come to the table well cooked. Lying on the ground, I saw a rack with six Bratspieße. As usual they were extremely well made: the long tip, sharply pointed and equipped with little teeth that grip the meat and prevent it from slipping off, were detachable. However there were only four tips: two were missing.

“Opalinski, where the devil are you?” said Simonis again, but without much conviction this time.

From the kitchen we entered another room, very common in Austria, known as the Stube, which is a little like our dining room. It’s where people spend most of their time because it contains a closed stove of a special kind, only found in northern countries. This produces a moderate and regular heat, and combats the harshness of the winter better than any fireplace. In the Stube the Viennese like to keep a great number of songbirds and they collect all sorts of strange ornamental objects (silk headrests, wall hangings, porcelain, pictures, chairs, mirrors, clocks, plates), which make it difficult to walk across the room without knocking over and shattering some nick-nack or other: concessions to luxury and vanity quite rightly disapproved of by Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara.

“There are more bloodstains,” I added, looking at the floor and feigning calm.

“Yes. And they are more copious,” observed Simonis distractedly, as if we were talking of a crack in the ceiling or a vase of flowers. Some of the stains were actually long stripes, as if someone had slipped in them.

Returning to the hallway, we noticed bloodstains there as well. We had not noticed them when we entered, because they were in the doorway to the left, while we had gone to the right. We passed through the left-hand doorway.

In Vienna, depending on the size of the family, every apartment contains at least one bedroom. The beds all have comfortable feather mattresses (ah, so much softer than Roman ones!), denounced, not unjustly, by Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara, since they inevitably lead to a softening of the spirit and body.

And so we entered the bedroom. The furniture was of the kind that had long been fashionable, the so-called rosebud style: a great mish-mash of amorphous and irregular decorations, not unpleasing in their way. The chairs had the classic leather backs and seats, fixed to the frame with nails. To the left, up against the wall, was a fine folding table. To the right there was a three-door wardrobe, with a niche and a little statue in the middle. Next to it stood a small cupboard carved in the form of a tabernacle, with a pair of statues on top and, in the middle, a clock. On the wall hung a small pendulum clock and a mirror.

In the centre of the room, finally, was a large double bed. A strange ferruginous smell hung in the air. In front of the bed there was an armchair facing away from us, with someone sitting in it. He turned round.

“You!” exclaimed Simonis.

Only then did I realise that the Greek had taken something from the bag he had been carrying around with him constantly over the last few days: a pistol. And he was aiming it straight at the the person who had greeted us: Penicek.

“What’s the matter? Don’t shoot. I. . I’m wounded,” said the Pennal on seeing the weapon.

He got to his feet with an effort, his legs trembling. He was holding his right arm tightly with his other hand; between the fingers we could see the red of blood. From his left temple trickled another small crimson stream. Simonis and I stood there motionless, just three paces away.

“It was Opalinski,” he went on, “he told me to meet him here.”

“Us too,” I said. “He sent us a note.”

“When I arrived, he asked me if I had heard from you. He was waiting for you and he was very nervous. Seeing how late you were, he thought you were not going to come. Then I told him perhaps you were busy, because you had to go to Neugebäu today.”

“And what do you know, Pennal, of what we are going to do or not going to do?” asked Simonis suspiciously, with his pistol still trained on him.

“You said so yourselves, when you got back, remember? But I wish I hadn’t spoken! That was what ruined me. He pulled out a dagger.”

He paused, supporting himself on the armchair.

“Jan had invited you and me to this appointment so that he could kill us all,” Penicek went on, still shaken by his recent struggle, clutching his wounded arm. “Two henchmen were waiting in the street for you to arrive. As soon as they saw you enter the building, they were going to sneak upstairs, ready to come to their leader’s aid, and kill you.”

Now barely able to stand on his lame leg, he stared at us with frightened eyes, awaiting our reaction. We were frozen to the spot.

“At a certain point he attacked me, I defended myself, we fell to the floor and we fought. In the end. .”

“In the end?” asked my assistant icily.

“He hit me on the head with something,” he said, gesturing to the blood trickling down his face. “He thought I was dead and ran off.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know, perhaps. . a few minutes ago,” he panted. Then he looked apprehensively towards the door. “If anyone heard us and comes in now, what. . what shall we do, Signor Barber?” he asked in a broken voice.

“Let’s get away at once,” said Simonis.

“Where?” I asked.

“Somewhere quiet, to have a chat,” he said, taking the Pennal by the collar and dragging him to the front door, paying no heed to his wounds or his lame leg.

The spring had retroceded once again; the day was cold and unusually foggy, with very few people in the streets, except for a black carriage slowly trundling along in the same direction as us. We could not have chosen, in fact, a quieter and more secluded place than the one Simonis led us to: the small cemetery of the Bürgerspital, the city hospital near Carinthia Street, where Frosch had been treated. Inside the hospital grounds, which we slipped into without any trouble, there was a small graveyard set between the hospital church and the ramparts. A fine drizzle was falling, and there was not a living soul among the tombstones.

“Opalinski set a trap for us, and I fell right into it,” Penicek began, pressing the wounds on his head with his hand. “That’s if we really want to call him Opalinski.”

He stopped for a moment. He continued to look downwards. His little wretched eyes were fixed on the graves all around us, his pupils darting feverishly from one stone to another.

“What do you mean?” I said at last.

“Opalinski doesn’t exist, has never existed. His real name is. . Glàwari.”

“Andreas Glàwari, to be precise,” he said after a few moments’ silence, “and he’s Pontevedrine, not Polish. That’s what he confessed to me, thinking that in a few minutes’ time he was going to finish me off. He didn’t imagine I would survive. So he amused himself by telling me all about it. And now, just as he told it to me, I’ll pass it on to you. Everything.”

Dànilo had been the easiest job. The first victim had imprudently revealed to Glàwari the time and place of the appointment, and so he just had to get there a little earlier to avoid any problems. The victim had ended up in the murderer’s clutches without even recognising him. He had shown surprise only when the knife plunged into his liver like a hot blade into butter.

“When you found him dying, the only thing he managed to say was the name Eyyub and the forty thousand of Kasim, one of the thousand legends about the Golden Apple. Dànilo had learned it in his research. He thought he had been stabbed for this and, thinking it important, he spent his last breath in the attempt to tell you what he had learned. But in fact the Golden Apple had nothing to do with his murder.”

With Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, the chess player, the procedure had been a little more complicated. The stubborn Bulgarian had guessed that it was not a good idea to talk in front of the whole group.

It was true, I thought, while the Pennal talked on: poor Hristo had fixed the appointment with me and Simonis in the distant Prater without anyone knowing.

“Glàwari, who always had all of us followed, already knew at the meeting at Populescu’s house that Hristo was not going to come: his thugs had told him that he was heading for the Prater. And so he realised that the Bulgarian no longer trusted his friends.”

“And he was right,” I put in.

“But Glàwari had to come to the meeting with us, and so he ordered his two hired killers, two Hungarians to carry out the murder. He even told me their names: Bela and T rek; if those are their real names, of course. Anyway, they belong to his network of spies. In executing Hristo there was the risk of being overheard by the Prater’s guards, or by any children who might have gone in to play. That was why the two Hungarians used a dagger. Luckily, he told me with a sneer, it all went well. It’s true that his men could have caused a good deal of trouble, when they fired at us. They hadn’t foreseen your arrival. Glàwari had given orders that they should eliminate any dangerous witnesses, but he didn’t know that Hristo had an appointment with you, of all people. When the two killers saw how attentively you were examining the corpse they at once decided to do away with you. My arrival stopped them, luckily. And you know what, Glàwari even thanked me: he still needed you, he said. While he was telling me all this, every so often he would laugh,” gasped Penicek, shaken by sobs, “and he explained that after thrusting the dagger into his neck they shoved Hristo’s head into the snow until he stopped moving.”

Then it was Dragomir Populescu’s turn. In this case things reached the peak of refinement, Glàwari told Penicek, laughing all the while. Glàwari knew that the Romanian never hit it off with women, and he paid an Armenian girl to trick him. He fell for it easily: all he had to do was invite him to have coffee at the Blue Bottle, where she worked. The ingenuous Dragomir didn’t suspect a thing.

“She was a brunette, a certain Mariza. On Glàwari’s orders she arranged to meet him at the Andacht on Mount Calvary.”

“So it was the waitress who served me and Atto just a few days earlier! How stupid of me, I took Atto right into the enemy’s mouth!” I exclaimed, thinking how many secrets Melani had confided to me in that coffee house. Fortunately he had been prudent enough to tell me the most important things while we were out strolling.

“Everyone goes to the Blue Bottle, and people like Glàwari know it. There are always ears listening in there. It’s easy with the Armenians: they’ll spy for anyone who pays them well.”

“So that same evening when they killed Dragomir, the old man at the Blue Bottle who frightened the Abbot by blathering about the Tekuphah, the cursed blood — ”

“It was all set up for you. But the cruelty with which Populescu was murdered, including the discovery of the Armenian tandur with the mangled pudenda, followed a particular logic. You were supposed to suspect that it was revenge for Dragomir’s excessive attentions to the young Armenian, whose family, like all those strange people, have cruel customs beyond all imagining. It was intended to put you on a false trail, or rather, on a trail that was not only false but also absurd, which would just make you go on with your investigations. And indeed you fell for it.”

Breathing heavily on account of the pain in his arm, and shedding angry and desperate tears, the Pennal broke off briefly, and then resumed.

“The Armenian’s traffickings, the Golden Apple, the Turks, the dangerous trade of each victim: all these possible explanations were used to keep you in continual uncertainty. And so you would go on investigating, until you finally made a false step which would allow Glàwari to identify the person whose orders you were following.”

“Orders? What orders?” I said in surprise.

“In short, the person who set you poking into matters that didn’t concern you.”

“Opalinski, I mean Glàwari, thought we weren’t acting alone?” I said in amazement.

“Exactly,” repeated the Bohemian.

So Glàwari had really believed that our interest in the Agha’s phrase had not arisen spontaneously, but had been inspired by someone else, someone much higher than us! But he had been wrong: Cloridia and I had grown suspicious all by ourselves, and it would have all ended there if Simonis had not offered to get his companions to look into things.

“So all those crimes were just a. . little performance set up to keep you busy,” Penicek summed up.

“A barbarous trick to see how we reacted,” I repeated, aghast.

“Like a cat with a mouse,” Penicek agreed, gasping more desperately. “And finally Koloman: it was a real stroke of luck. .”

“Just a moment. Opalinski can’t have killed Koloman: he was with us at Porta Coeli!” Simonis interrupted him, his face transfigured by suspicion, by perturbation, by repressed rage.

“Of course, of course,” Penicek agreed at once, clearly scared of his Barber. “In fact Opalinski, or rather Glàwari, had killed Koloman before joining you at Porta Coeli. He had come to the convent with me with the deliberate intention of framing me. It was no accident that he threw him out of the window, in the Prague fashion. As I said, it was a real stroke of luck for him that you asked me to go to the apothecary. At that point he pretended to reveal unwillingly where Koloman was. Because from the moment I left Porta Coeli to buy the ingredients I no longer had an alibi, and would not be able to prove my innocence. We are all students of medicine, it’s true, but Glàwari is better than me: he knew that I would have to wait for the Galenic preparations and, what’s more, that at the apothecary of the Red Crab they were bound to get suspicious of that long list of things to buy. Ah, if only I had suspected something, I would have returned in the twinkling of an eye. I wouldn’t have wasted any time arguing with the apothecary and I certainly wouldn’t have racked my brains over the Agha’s phrase in front of that stupid statue of the Circassian!”

“That means,” I murmured, “that Opalinski’s grief over Koloman’s death. .”

“It’s always the truth that seems incredible, I know,” sobbed Penicek. “It was all a cold-blooded performance on that devil’s part! But one day divine punishment will strike him: a heart finds peace only if God wills it.”

“That’s why Jan, or Andreas, or whatever the devil his name is, at first didn’t appear frightened by the murders!” I exclaimed, in stupefaction. “Polish courage, indeed!”

“Glàwari knew very well,” added Penicek, wiping away his tears, “that at the fourth corpse your suspicions would inevitably fall on the survivors. It was me or him, therefore, and he had prepared everything. When by sheer chance you discovered the murder just before three p.m. and right opposite Koloman’s window was the window with the host’s daughters, Signor Barber surmised that Koloman had fallen out of the window by accident — an unforeseen hitch that caught Glàwari off guard and forced him to accuse me openly. But if you think carefully, he was the only one who had always known where Koloman was hiding.”

“Why, God Almighty, why?” I repeated several times in confusion.

“I told you: he wanted to know who was behind you. He killed all the companions Signor Barber was fond of to induce you to reveal yourselves, to betray yourselves in one way or other, so that he could spy on your moves. He wanted to see if you were acting alone, or if you were under orders from someone higher up. Only Hristo had realised this, and that is also why he died. And there was another reason: he knew that it wasn’t prudent to talk in front of the whole group!” the young Bohemian laughed hysterically, and then sighed: “Oh, Hristo! You have gone from our lives, but you will always live in our hearts.”

Simonis and I stared at each other with a mixture of stupefaction, suspicion and anguish. Then the Pennal continued:

“The Turkish trail was a pure waste of time. There’s nothing concealed behind the Golden Apple: it’s just the Turkish name for Vienna. The enquiries into the Agha’s phrase just served Glàwari to get you both alarmed. He wanted to unmask the bigwig who’s above you.”

Those words set me shivering, and at the same time they lit a lamp within me. So I had guessed right: there really was a link between me and the murders!

I ran my hand through my hair. By some tragic quirk of fate, the series of murders had begun with a mistaken assumption on Glàwari’s part: he had not believed that the enquiries into the Golden Apple arose from any genuine interest on my part; he thought that I was carrying out an order. Penicek concluded:

“Finally there was me. Glàwari left me to the last because none of you loves me, you all despise me. I don’t belong to your little band. You put up with me just because I’m a poor Pennal, and I act as your slave. I would be much more use as a culprit than as a victim. If he had killed me, you wouldn’t have shed many tears. My death would not have spurred you to further investigations or action, which was what Glàwari wanted so that he could discover your secrets. You would all have been ready to believe in my guilt, as soon as Glàwari pointed his accusing finger at me.”

These words stirred a sense of remorse which I had kept repressed for too long. How foolishly I had let myself be fooled by appearances! And how wrong I had been never to protest at the cruel treatment they inflicted on the poor Pennal!

“Up there, in the apartment, after massacring me,” concluded Penicek, “time was ticking away and Glàwari felt things were getting too hot for him. You hadn’t come, he was afraid you had smelt a rat and at last he decided to make off.”

“Just a moment, I still don’t understand,” I stopped him. “Opalinski, or Glàwari, or whatever his name is, had known Simonis ever since their days together at the University of Bologna, like all the others, long before I arrived in Vienna. Is it a coincidence, or had he already got onto Simonis’s trail? And if so, what was his motive?”

The Pennal did not reply at once. He seemed to have trouble in breathing. His wound gave him acute spasms. Then he spoke:

“He seems to be a man, but he lives in another world: one of solitude, lies and dirty games. Glàwari is a secret agent. One of the many whose task is to cover up a highly delicate operation. He told me no more than that. He had been chosen years ago to stay close on the heels of Simonis; that was why he was first sent to Bologna.”

Simonis did not answer. His pistol was still trained on him, under a fold of his cloak.

“But Simonis and the others came to Vienna because of the famine two years ago!” I protested. “Two years ago now! I have only been here a few months. How is it possible. .”

Here Penicek gazed at my assistant with eyes that gleamed anxiously:

“. . that a Bettelstudent of medicine and an assistant chimney-sweep, ordinary simple Simonis, could be of such interest to a spy like Glàwari? Easy, if he too is not what he seems. If instead of being called Simonis Rimanopoulos, his name is Symon Rymanovic, a Pole with a Greek mother.”

“You?” I exclaimed, turning towards Simonis.

“But don’t think he’s just a simple spy,” Penicek interrupted. Then, breathing more shortly than ever, he addressed my assistant: “You, Signor Barber, apparently so absent-minded, are actually one of the best-trained, most courageous and faithful servants of the Holy Roman Empire. A loyal and generous defender of the cause of Christ, isn’t that so?”

Simonis turned as white as a sheet, but did not answer. He slowly lowered his pistol. I looked at him again, astonished by what I had just learned. It was as if Penicek’s words had wrapped the weapon and his face in an invisible shroud, which disarmed him and made him helpless: the shroud of truth.

“Now you’ll excuse me, Signor Barber,” gasped the Pennal at last, rising from the ground and heading towards the hospital. “This arm is too painful, I must get medication. My strength is at an end. Take me, Lord, into your hands.”

He made off, still clutching his wound, limping and staggering towards one of the doors behind us which led into the hospital.

I turned to follow him with my eyes. At that moment I happened to glance at a gravestone:

My strength is at an end

Take me, Lord, into your hands.

Andreas Glàwari

1615–1687

And then the stone next to it:

You have gone from our lives,

But you will always live in our hearts

Bela T rek

1663–1707

And then another, even more mocking than the previous ones:

A heart finds peace

only if God wills it.

Farewell grandmother Mariza

1623–1701

It was too late. Simonis and I ran desperately in pursuit of Penicek. We were just in time to catch a glimpse of him as, with a nimble gait (where was the lame leg now?) he caught up with the black carriage that we had seen pull up at the Bürgerspital and calmly climbed into it. He bestowed a final glance of total indifference on us, closed the door and, tossing something out of the window, disappeared amidst the clattering of the hooves and wheels. We stopped running only when we reached the point from which the black vehicle had darted off into thin air. On the ground we saw what Penicek had just thrown away: his spectacles, which he had used to create the role of the timid, inexperienced Pennal. It was all too clear that we would never see him again.

A few minutes later we were back in the same bedroom where we had found Penicek. Turning to the left this time, we found a door that gave onto the last room in the house, the only one we had not yet visited, probably a little study. The ferruginous smell I had noticed during our first visit had grown even thicker, more turbid and fleshy. Simonis went up to the door. It was locked but the keyhole was empty. With a few robust shoves he burst open the double doors, which sprang apart like a theatre curtain. Bouncing against the wall they closed behind us. Now there were three of us.

It was like a cross between a man and a beetle. It had two black antennae sticking out from its face, its head and torso were as red as warrior ants. Just before dying it had collapsed onto the armchair that was positioned there in front of us. The blood that soaked the torso had dripped onto the floor.

Hurled into his eyes with the swiftness of a skilled knife thrower, the tips of the two missing spits from the kitchen must have caught him by surprise. Then he had been eviscerated. The three embroidered napkins from the table had been thrust into his throat and fixed there by two twists of rope behind his neck, so that he had no way of crying for help. It was not clear whether he had bled to death (ten or twenty stab wounds are too many for anyone) or choked to death.

We both vomited.

“This time we’re really in trouble,” I began as soon as I could speak. “They saw us in the building. They’ll come looking for us.”

“Not necessarily. The false motive for the crime will help us,” said Simonis with icy calm.

“What do you mean?”

“It’ll look like a vendetta by Mr Zwitkowitz, or a quarrel among students.”

“You don’t stick a spit into someone’s eyes for a quarrel.”

“But for an eviction you might.”

“Not in Vienna,” I rebutted.

“In this city there are people from Half-Asia who would do it for much less.”

“And Zwitkowitz sounds like a name from those parts.”

“Exactly.”

We walked out. The old woman we had seen earlier on the ground floor was no longer there. Out on the street I found my legs still shaking, while the icy air lashed our faces refreshingly. Everything — the street we were walking down, the buildings around us, the sky itself — seemed clear and distant at the same time. We walked all the way back to the convent without saying a word. I was expecting Simonis to say something, to explain, or at least to try. But he said nothing. Whoever he really was, he had been overwhelmed by the horror of Opalinski’s murder no less than I had. I felt I had been catapulted into another universe. Everything was changing because of that wretched war, I thought, the War of the Spanish Succession.

The Age of Man was over, now the long agony of the world was beginning: the Last Days of Mankind.

“He was in the service of the great powers. Hidden men capable of overturning everything, of switching the moon with the sun. That’s why the names of the dead students never appeared in the obituaries.”

Dressed in fresh clothes, once again in a mood to act and argue, Atto Melani made these observations on Penicek’s flight and the subsequent events, which I had briefly outlined after bursting into his room more dead than alive. Atto had sent Domenico out on some pretext. While the Abbot talked, I listened, my expression distant, overcome by all that had happened. We were alone, and free to talk of my assistant as well.

“It’s no accident,” he said, “that when the other students offered to collect information on the Golden Apple, Simonis advised you not to reveal to them that the dervish wanted someone’s head. He didn’t want to dissuade them too soon — he needed them. On one point Penicek did not lie: Simonis too was a spy. Idiot, indeed. I told you so. He was eager to get his friends’ help, at whatever cost. That’s how it is, when you live a life that is not your own, that belongs to a secret master.”

“Great heavens,” I complained, “is there no one I can trust? Who is Simonis Rimanopoulos, or rather Symon Rymanovic?”

“Who do you think he is?” the Abbot cut me short. “Maybe he doesn’t even know himself. Just ask yourself who he has been to you up to this point. And do the same when you ask the same questions about me. All that matters is who I am to you; the rest is vain and fruitless speculation. Only God knows everything.”

When there was talk of spies, Abbot Melani never lost a chance to grind his own axe. How well it would have suited him if, all the time I had known him, I had never asked myself who he really was!

“I’ll speak to him. He owes me an explanation,” I announced after a while — without any great conviction, to tell the truth.

“Forget it. Things are complicated enough already. Why do you need to know any more? In certain cases, like this one, where everything is cursedly confused and could turn lethal at any moment, there’s only one thing that is necessary: to understand for whom the person beside you is working, whether for God or for Mammon. The rest is just a hindrance. And you can trust Simonis.”

Now, after the account I had given him, Atto had completely reversed his opinion of the Greek. As certain animals do with the help of their sense of smell, Melani the spy had recognised Simonis the spy, and had finally established that he was not an adversary. Like the rest of us, they had both been taken in by Penicek, and the great powers that Atto talked of seemed to have attacked both of the kingdoms that Atto and Simonis belonged to, and in the same way: the mysterious smallpox of Joseph in Vienna, and that of the Grand Dauphin in Paris.

Atto and I proceeded to re-examine, step by step, the way things now stood. On the eve of the Agha’s arrival in Vienna, the dark forces that were probably participating in the conspiracy against the Emperor had decreed a state of alert. All those people like Simonis, spies on the opposite side whose identities were known, were placed under surveillance. Penicek was chosen to keep an eye on the Greek. That was why the Pennal had asked for him as his Barber! His leaders had probably designated him on account of his affinities in training with Simonis: he too was a student of medicine and had studied in Italy, in Padua. It was no accident that Penicek was the only one who did not belong to the little band of students who had come to Vienna from the University of Bologna.

At times he had not been able to learn or to foresee our moves because we did not always travel by cart. He had checked up on us day by day, taking us everywhere in that strange carriage of his, which was allowed to go everywhere and at any time of day. After sowing death among us, with a skilful reversal he had succeeded in attributing to Opalinski, whom he had just butchered, his own role: that of a bloodthirsty spy.

He was never caught off guard. We had found him in the apartment where he had just massacred poor Opalinski with atrocious cruelty, only because he did not know that his victim had an appointment with us.

Finally, his reconstruction of events. This was all true, so long as the two names Opalinski and Penicek were reversed. That was all. It was he, and not Opalinski, who had arranged everything. He had chosen that building requisitioned by the imperial authorities, so that we would believe that it had really been Jan who organised the ambush. But on account of our meeting with Frosch, we had arrived over an hour late. Thinking that we were not coming or, even worse, that we had smelt a rat, he had executed the poor Pole. As soon as he had completed his horrifying masterwork of violence, he must have heard our footsteps on the stairs. My assistant must have spotted or scented something: that was why he had suddenly made us turn back. Entering by the adjacent buildings, we were not seen by Penicek’s hired killers.

The Bohemian, realising that his men were not going to be on hand to back him up, locked Janitzki’s mangled corpse in the little study at the far end of the apartment, threw away the key and sat down to wait for us. He was in a trap; but with amazing coolness he pretended to be the victim, instead of the aggressor. We attributed the smell of blood that filled the room to the struggle between the two of them, as recounted to us by the Pennal (a term that now sounded painfully ridiculous for the murderous impostor). He undoubtedly had a hidden pistol on him, but first he tried the bloodless way: scaring us with the possible arrival of some passer-by alerted by the screams, he got us to leave the building as fast as possible without our discovering Opalinski’s corpse. And so he avoided pulling out his weapon and confronting Simonis in a duel that could have been fatal to both of them. Seeing him leave in our company, the black carriage that was waiting for him in the street followed us, perhaps in obedience to a secret signal from Penicek.

The story he told us in the graveyard was actually a confession. He described all the murders he himself had committed, blaming them on Opalinski. He chose the best way to make things up: describe true events, and just change the characters’ names. When he needed a false name, so as to provide corroborative details, or some heartfelt invocation to make it sound more convincing, he drew on the stones around him: Glàwari, Mariza, Bela T rek, and their respective epitaphs.

After the performance in the graveyard, he disappeared in the black carriage that had been lurking nearby at his orders. Outside the city he would have met up with other individuals of the same murky, bloody kind, other puppets manoeuvred by the invisible network that was polluting Europe.

The Bohemian (or Pontevedrine?) had fooled us all. Everything fitted in with his designs. When Simonis and I were on our way to our appointment with Hristo, Penicek, with the excuse of the processions, had tried to take us by long, tortuous routes and also to travel slowly and even to stop the vehicle, so as to delay our arrival at the Prater. He was afraid that his henchmen might kill us, as he himself had told us at the graveyard, attributing the notion to Opalinski. That was why my assailant, on seeing Penicek, had gone off without a fight! He had seen his master.

After the murder of Dragomir Populescu, Penicek had insisted on getting rid of the corpse; he had almost forced us. He knew that a third body could not just vanish into thin air, that sooner or later we would wonder why there was no sign of any investigation on the part of the authorities. And so he had come up with the idea of hiding the poor Romanian’s body, charging two of his underlings with the task before our very eyes. Would we ever have suspected that they were not simple coach drivers?

With Koloman, the self-styled Prague student had deployed all his diabolic arts. The so-called trick of Balamber was an invention, as were Attila’s cryptographic skills and Szupán’s passion for secret codes. By voicing doubts with equal candour and skill and dropping the right remarks at the right moment, with little stories made up on the spot, he had led us to say and do just what he wanted. And yet when he was concocting these lies I had sometimes seen him waver and look into the air, as if in search of some good idea; just how had we all fallen for it? It had to be admitted that Penicek’s powers of invention never failed him. Just think of the non-existent murderous Augustinian monk and the Circassian’s palace, which, of course (there was no need even to verify it), did not really belong to Prince Eugene.

I announced to Abbot Melani that there was other news. I had been trying to tell him about it since the previous evening, but he had been dead to the world in his bed. At Eugene’s palace Cloridia had discovered that the Turks, principally the dervish, intended to collaborate in treating the Emperor, and they were going to act in concert with the Caesarean Proto-Medicus: the von Hertod Cloridia had seen going in person to meet Ciezeber. That very day they would administer the decisive treatment to Joseph, if they had not already done so.

“Wha-a-a-t? And you believed this madness?” he gasped, changing colour as soon as I had finished.

“But Signor Atto, it seemed likely to me that the Ottomans — ”

“Likely my foot! How could you possibly think that an Indian dervish of the Ottoman faith could devote himself to the health of the Caesar of the True Faith? A less worm-eaten brain than yours would have dismissed such an idiotic idea immediately. But I’m amazed at Monna Cloridia. You and she have not understood a damned thing. This is the Emperor’s death sentence!”

There was no time for discussion. Half an hour later we were inside a hired carriage, like Penicek’s, on our way to the Place with No Name. I could not be late: the police authorities were expecting me and my assistant to draw up our report on the events of the previous day. I could have gone to Neugebäu in our usual cart, but Atto, as he had announced the day before, insisted on coming along too. I had made him dress modestly and I had forbidden him his wig, false moles, white lead and carmine. I would introduce him as a blind old relative whom I was temporarily looking after. He made no objection.

And so there were three of us in the carriage: Abbot Melani, truly unrecognisable in this natural state, Simonis and myself. I had chosen not to bring our little boy with us but had left him at Porta Coeli, safely with Cloridia. My assistant fixed his gaze, no longer idiotic, on the horizon. I guessed he did not intend to talk; on the Abbot’s advice, I did not press him. Atto himself sat scowling sullenly. The news of the secret operation that the Emperor was going to undergo had put him in an acerbic, touchy mood, almost as if he were in the service of His Caesarean Majesty rather than that of the Most Christian King of France.

Around our little group I could still smell the powerful, painful stench odour of blood. I pretended to myself that I could accept what I had seen. Deep down, however, I felt that I could not. The images and events of the last few hours were pounding at my senses and my memory. The Pennal’s serpentine presence had gouged a deep trough of anxiety and alienation within me. He had been among us, but not of us. He appeared to be a man, but was of another breed: he was a helmsman of the new order, the Agony of Mankind. He had infiltrated our group by means of the Deposition, exploiting the university traditions, and had become Simonis’s shadow.

How badly I had judged Penicek! I said to myself for the second time that day. Now I knew for sure: to evaluate a man you have to look him in the eyes. If they are wicked, as were those of the bespectacled ferret the Pennal, the soul that lies hidden behind them cannot offer anything good. Never let oneself be swayed by logic, that flawed human art, which leads us to judge our neighbour on the basis of his words and our fallacious reasoning: the eyes, mirror of the soul, never lie.

Simonis, I thought, did not have wicked eyes. He had never had them; not even for an instant had I ever caught that alienating sign in the pupils that makes one flinch inexplicably. In the Greek’s glaucous gaze, both when he was feigning idiocy and when he was telling me about Maximilian II, I had always been able to swim as in the clear sea, even if only shorewards, since the spy that lay within him lurked in the sand of the submarine recesses. I had only ever perceived the blue horizon, without the murky sludge that clouds everything: the colour guaranteed the purity of the expanse that lay before me, but I was forbidden to dive beneath the surface.

But suddenly a surge of disgust overwhelmed me: a sham bespectacled cripple and a sham idiot, what a great combination! I had spent all my efforts taking care not to get tricked again by Abbot Melani, and I had never spotted these two behind my back. One lied for good purposes and one for bad, but was I so sure that, if his mission required it, Simonis would not sacrifice me and perhaps even my little apprentice on the altar of the human aberration they call “just cause”? I knew all too well what spies are like, I thought with a shiver.

“What sense is there in racking your brains with doubts and questions?” sighed Atto, whispering into my ear, as if guessing my cogitations from my long silence. “Everyone is responsible for his own actions. Before God we will be alone on the day of the Last Judgement. No one can hide his own crimes behind the pretext of obedience, because he will be told: you could have disobeyed and lost your life, but you would have gained it in the kingdom of heaven.”

The Abbot was talking on his own account as well. I remembered all too clearly when obedience to his King had led him to crime.

“But remember,” he added raising his voice, “we are all working for God, even those who do not wish to do so. God makes use of everyone, as and when He wants; even that Penicek, however much he may think to the contrary. Remember boy: not a single hair of ours is lost without the Almighty wishing it. His loving designs are so broad, that it is not given to us mortals to understand them.”

I gazed grimly at Abbot Melani: he was preaching eloquently now that he had come to the end of his life, but how many times over the decades had he himself exploited me and exposed me to mortal dangers for his own shady intrigues?

However, at that moment Simonis, surprised by Atto’s words, raised his eyes and they met the Abbot’s. And then it was all clear to me.

My heart saw all that the two spies, the young one and the old one, communicated with their eyes in that eternal instant. For the first and only time they talked to each other with no filters. I saw between them an interchange of illusions, troubles, inward bereavements, resurrections, a determination to fight, cold-blooded reasonings and burning passions, and finally an awareness — innate in the Greek student, gradually acquired by the castrato — of the divine order of things. Their lives were mirrored in each other’s eyeballs. It lasted but a single mute moment, but it was enough to enlighten me. Thirty years earlier they would certainly not have been on the same side, but would have fought one another — the spy of the Sun King and the faithful servant of the Holy Roman Empire — but now they both recoiled from the world’s headlong precipitation into Godless darkness, and finally they met. That was why Melani had spoken thus in front of Simonis.

Like a putrid voiding of the bowels, the image of poor Opalinski skewered like a beetle rose up before my mind’s eye.

“But why such atrocity?” I asked, shaking my head. “There was no need anymore. Penicek had come there to kill us. He no longer wanted to muddy the waters to drive us to go on investigating. The tandur with Dragomir’s pudenda was needed to put us off the trail, but why ram spits into Janitzki’s eyes and napkins down his throat, condemning him to that horrible death?”

“It was the only way for puny Penicek to overpower the size and strength of Opalinski,” answered Simonis. “His men didn’t come because they were downstairs waiting for us. And so he attacked Opalinski on his own. They fought and Penicek was wounded. He won by blinding him with the spits. The little devil must have been an expert knife thrower, and the eye sockets are among the few things we all have that are soft; pierce them and you get straight to the brain. The pain and suffering must have been unspeakable. He couldn’t use his pistol because of the noise. He may have high-level protection but a shot would be heard by too many people, and the situation could have got out of hand. For the same reason he thrust the napkins into his victim’s mouth, now that he could no longer see, to stop him screaming. The dagger did the rest.”

My assistant’s expertise and promptness in describing the dynamics of the murder depressed me more than ever. I had grown old, I thought, but once again I found myself the most ingenuous in the group; and this time I was faced with not just one but two spies!

“Sorry, boy,” Atto cut in, addressing me. “What did you say? Penicek had come to kill you. .”

“Yes, Signor Atto, as I had already told you. .”

“Yes, yes, but it’s just struck me that. . My God! How had I failed to see it earlier?”

I did not manage to hear what Melani meant. At that moment we arrived at the Place with No Name, where we found a small squad of guards awaiting us.

As soon as we got out of the cart they made us enter the mansion. The atmosphere was vaguely unreal: there was not a single animal around now, and silence reigned. It was saddening to think that not even rough old Frosch was on hand with his habitual bottle and old Mustafa.

“What about the lions? Have you caught them all?” I asked, just to break the silence between us and our escorts.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” said one of them, who seemed to be in charge, inviting Abbot Melani to follow us as well.

“Actually I had nothing to do with all the confusion yesterday. He’s the one who has to make the report,” protested Atto. “Couldn’t I stay outside?”

The guards were adamant. We were led inside the mansion, down to the semi-basement. One of the men who was escorting us seemed familiar. We paused in the gallery to the west, where the day before we had heard the footsteps of “Pup”, Neugebäu’s secret elephant.

There now entered an individual dressed like a public functionary, whom I guessed to be a criminal notary. He began to read a document in German, of which I understood hardly a word. I turned questioningly to Simonis, while the notary went on reading.

“I don’t understand anything either,” Simonis whispered to me, looking very doubtful.

The notary stopped reading. It was then that things changed abruptly. The guard (if that was what he was) who had something familiar about him pulled out a set of irons, and from the tone with which the presumed notary shouted something at us, I gathered they were for our wrists. We were under arrest. But the operation was interrupted by a further surprise.

It was at that moment that something absurd happened. As in a drunken dream, Ciezeber came in and greeted us courteously in Italian.

“The dervish!” I whispered to Simonis sotto voce, incredulously.

Ciezeber continued to smile cordially. For a moment in the semi-basement of the mansion there was an unreal silence.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Perhaps you have already understood what the notary read to you. It’s a decree by the imperial chamber. You are under arrest for conspiracy against the Empire, as well as for having made an attempt against the life of the Ambassador of the Sublime Ottoman Porte, Cefulah Agha Capichi Pasha.”

“Conspiracy? There must be some mistake,” protested Atto. “I’m from Italy and — ”

“Silence, Abbot Melani,” the dervish interrupted him. “We already know how you sneaked into Vienna. And don’t pretend to be blind!”

Atto’s cover was blown: the dervish and the strange band that surrounded us, whether they were guards or not, knew that Atto Melani was not the postal intendant, Milani. At that point I guessed it all.

It had all happened too quickly for us to save ourselves. Atto had had a flash of insight a moment earlier, but we had already arrived at Neugebäu, and it was too late.

There was one thing Penicek had omitted in his story at the graveyard: who our leader was, since he believed we had one. He wanted to kill us, a sign that he had learned what he wanted: who the bigwig was whose orders Simonis and I were supposedly obeying. And so he thought he had finally identified this person. And whom would he suspect if not Atto Melani? The sham cripple believed that Atto was the leader of a conspiracy, with me and Simonis under his command. He had met the Abbot as a passenger in his cart. It would have been child’s play for him to look into his background and find out who he was. Of our group of four — Cloridia, myself, Atto and Simonis — two were spies. If anyone had told him that it had all begun with my own and my wife’s simple suspicions, and that it had not been Melani who had suggested looking into the Agha’s phrase (indeed, Atto’s attention had been fully engaged in his forged letter and his pursuit of Madame Pálffy), he would never have believed it.

It was the typical mistake of petty spies: they think that their slippery way of reasoning must be applied to all mankind and they cannot conceive of initiatives, deliberations, and actions that arise from the free impulse of a spirit stirred by a pure sense of justice or a thirst for knowledge. They will not acknowledge in anyone else the true feelings they have banished from their own hearts. As the good Umbrian nun who had brought me up loved to repeat: “Treat your body ill, bad thoughts all minds will fill” — or, to interpret the vernacular anacoluthon, “He who treats his own body badly (and so lives dishonestly) thinks that everyone else reasons in the same wicked way.” People of this sort are thus exposed to the whims of fate, which mocks them more often than they think.

But this time Penicek’s mistake had been fatal to us. He had planned to kill us along with Opalinski, and then undoubtedly to kidnap Atto and torture his old limbs to get information from him. The plan had failed, of course, but how could we have believed that the sham cripple would leave things unfinished? During our last journey from the Place with No Name he had heard that Simonis, the Abbot and I would be returning to draw up the report for the complaint I intended to lodge. He knew where and when we could all be nabbed together. But now he could not eliminate us immediately: the functionaries of the imperial chamber were present and the thing had to have an appearance of normality. Of course, the accusation that these bullies were making against us was as false, ham-fisted and brazen-faced as any cheap trickster’s tale. Under the guise of an arrest was an organised ambush, I thought, as I recognised the guard who had something familiar about him: his eyes. They were the same deep dark eyes I had seen in the masked individual who would have killed me in the Prater had I not been saved first by Hristo’s chessboard and then, irony of fate, by Penicek’s arrival. All was lost.

“We have done nothing wrong, you can’t arrest us,” said my assistant in a calm voice, after studying the whole company intently: two functionaries, who actually looked tense and pale, the dervish and five guards, undoubtedly his own thugs.

At this point, having verified the arrest, the two imperial functionaries left. They asked no questions about the escaped animals, of course. Very different matters were at stake now.

“Be quiet, cur,” answered Ciezeber with biting scorn, as if Simonis merited a special hatred. “None of the men with me understands the language you express yourself in, and I have no ears for the blathering of worms.”

“And how does a dervish,” said Atto, torn between fear and the desire for knowledge, “happen to know my language so well?”

Ciezeber, who was facing in the other direction, turned slowly with an amused and malicious smile. It was as if that were the first sensible thing any of us had said. Then he answered.

“I am one of those who know all languages, who are of all ages, who come from all countries in the world,” he said, and then signalled to his men to chain us and disarm us.

The vanity of the dervish, who had wasted valuable moments on these remarks, provided us with the golden opportunity to save ourselves. A moment later and it would have been too late; it was worth attempting something desperate.

When Simonis leaped into action, none of our enemies was able to grasp what was happening. His flying kick smashed into the jaw of the closest armiger, but just before launching the attack, Simonis had pulled his pistol from his bag and thrown it to me, already loaded, I presumed. About a second later, one of the five fired at me, missing me by a hair’s breadth. Nonetheless I felt an incandescent atom pierce my left thigh, and hoped it was nothing important.

In the three seconds that followed several things happened: Atto Melani fainted; the guard struck by Simonis now had a trapezoid-shaped face instead of a round one, which he clutched in both hands, apparently out of action; I fired into the face of a guard to my left, not knowing whether I had hit him or not; finally, after his successful kick, my assistant, fully erect and with no hint of a stoop, swivelled and plunged a knife into the closest armiger. This last man did not succeed in drawing his sword in time and, although managing not to take the knife in his belly as my assistant had intended, received a great slash on his neck, and it was quite likely that he would die from it fairly soon.

In the next two seconds, there were further interesting events: two of the armigers shielded the dervish, who withdrew in terror from a fight he had not considered possible; one of them fired at Simonis’s chest and hit him at point-blank range. Meanwhile Abbot Melani disappeared without anyone realising. For a few seconds I faced one of the wounded armigers: it was the one who had been about to kill me in the Prater. Then I fled without being pursued.

As I ran I glanced back. Simonis, although struck full in the chest, was picking up the chains that had been intended for us, and then he swirled them round and twice struck one or two armigers, but these were just fleeting glimpses, as I was already running out of the half-basement into the courtyard of the maior domus. I thought I heard my assistant’s footsteps behind me. There was no knowing how long he had left to live.

Two of the (false) guards were probably out of action. That left three, plus the dervish.

When I got outside I caught a glimpse of Atto, limping to the left. Perhaps he had faked his faint, in order to make a break for it at the right moment, but he had not got very far and was already exhausted. From inside the half-basement we heard echoing shouts and then another shot. Someone had succeeded in reloading a pistol, I thought; they had killed Simonis, or he had killed one of the five, giving us valuable time. We panted our way into the main courtyard, from which we had entered, and saw the gate (usually open) locked and barred. Turning back and trying to escape from the opposite side of the mansion meant running into the dervish’s clutches.

The next few moments occupy a dark, empty space in my memory. The fatigue, the certainty of imminent death and the small but smouldering crater of pain that I felt in my thigh probably prevented me from making any sense of events as I perceived them and from taking any decisions. I remember very little of Abbot Melani. I think I pushed and dragged him (there was no alternative, as his own strength were non-existent) down the spiral staircase that led to the animal cages, and then towards the Flying Ship, while expecting another pistol shot, sooner or later, to hit us in the back.

After which all I know is that we waited: Atto inside the ship, which I had heaved him into with difficulty, and I myself squatting among the broken planks of the birdcages, shattered the previous day by the incursion of the elephant and abandoned at the far end of the ball stadium.

Evening fell. I do not know how long we spent lurking in our two hiding places. Every so often we heard pistol shots, and we gathered that a two-way hunt was under way in the gardens of Neugebäu between Simonis and the surviving guards. On each side there must have been at least one functioning pistol, together with powder for reloading and sufficient desire (or need) to kill. It was a war of position: the objective was to hit, but without running any risks. Simonis could not get away; our enemies on the other hand apparently could not rely on any reinforcements. The close-range battle of the first few moments had given way to a shooting match in the dark, in which the winner would be whoever was best at hiding, reloading his weapon and exploiting the element of surprise. I wondered just how Simonis was holding out: just before I escaped from the semi-basement, he had been hit directly, and at close range.

At each new detonation we heard the lions make tired and tetchy complaints to the black sky over the moor of Simmering: the beasts of the Place with No Name, I thought, were back where they were supposed to be. The carcasses must have been removed earlier in the day. The shots did not worry me: each new exchange of fire told me that Simonis was still alive. Twice I heard the enraged yells of our enemies: it seemed likely that Simonis had hit someone, and that the others were giving vent to their pain or anger.

Every so often Atto and I would call out to one another, just for reassurance. We were stuck there with no weapons, and unable to engage in hand-to-hand combat (I was too small and the Abbot too old), in the darkness of the Place with No Name. With the darkness shrouding everything, there was no point in trying to get out of Neugebäu by climbing over the walls. I attempted a brief sortie into the main courtyard to check whether it was possible to open the gate. A couple of shots fired somewhere nearby persuaded me to return to my hiding place. Back in the ball stadium, passing by the Flying Ship, I heard Abbot Melani whispering a Hail Mary, pleading for his safety.

After a long time something changed. With a violent start I felt a couple of shots behind us: the action seemed to have shifted to the narrow corridor from which on the previous day the elephant Pup and the other animals had burst into the ball stadium. This, as I well knew, led straight towards the ditches with the wild animals.

Then for a while I heard nothing. I knew that Atto would stay inside the Flying Ship without moving a muscle. So I moved, and left the ball stadium. The moon was favourable; crawling along the ground I got close enough to catch a glimpse of the scene. I had some misgivings, and I found they were all too well-founded.

As pale as a tragic Pulcinella, gasping with fatigue, bent double with pain (in how many places had they hit him?), Simonis was in the middle between the two ditches of animals, balancing on the narrow wall that divided them. He looked like a circus acrobat who realised that the exercise he had chosen was too difficult and did not know how to make his excuses to the audience. Beneath his feet were two howling hordes of felines enraged by his audacious incursion. The faint moonlight may have deceived me, but I really thought I recognised, amid the roaring of the bloodthirsty beasts, the icily furious voice of the black panther that Simonis had struck with the broom just before our second flight in the Flying Ship.

To escape the shots of his adversaries, my heroic assistant had passed behind the ball stadium, as I had heard, and from there had slipped into the gallery that bordered the ditches of the animals, from where they could be observed. Here, however, the final act was about to be staged. Ciezeber’s thugs had hemmed him in: there was one at each end of the corridor. To escape them, Simonis, like a tightrope walker, had begun to make his way along the wall that divided the lion cage from the cage containing other wild animals, hoping to reach the opposite side. But he had forgotten that the other end was blocked by an iron grating.

The darkness was only faintly relieved by the moonlight. I at once guessed what the matter was: they had run out of ammunition. It was now just a question of numbers, and Simonis was on his own. Probably he had hoped, by nimbly passing along the wall between the two ditches, to get beyond the abyss. Instead he had found himself up against a dead end: the wall terminated in a long series of iron bars, placed there to prevent anyone from accidentally falling into the ditches.

Approaching the scene of action had been imprudent on my part; if I were to try to steal away now, the dervish’s henchmen might hear me. I noticed that Ciezeber had approached the beginning of the wall on which Simonis was dangerously poised, and was leaning forward as if he wished to address the fugitive. In the darkness I could barely discern Simonis, and I imagined that he could not see me at all. But suddenly I realised that he had spotted me. At that very moment the dervish spoke.

“Stop,” he ordered Simonis in a dry, serious voice.

“I don’t have much choice,” answered my assistant in an ironic tone.

“You have no way out.”

“I know, Ciezeber.”

The dervish paused to take breath, then said:

“You know me as Ciezeber the Indian; others call me Palatine Caldeorum. Yet others, Ammon. But my name is of no consequence to me. I am one, no one, and a hundred thousand. But I need nothing, I look for no one, I do good to the poor and the imprisoned. I appear to be forty-five years old, but I have travelled for fifty-eight and I am ninety. I can become young again, change my facial features, smooth out my skin, make my fallen teeth return. My dominion is everywhere. I have trodden the roads of Turkey and Persia, I have been a guest of the Great Mogul in Siam, in Pegu, in Chandahar, in China. I have learned to suffer hunger in the desert of the Tartars, I have shivered with cold in Muscovia, I have been a pirate on the seas of the Indies. I have miraculously survived seven shipwrecks and have been locked in prison eight times, even in that of the Inquisition in Rome. Each time powerful protectors have got me out, but prison itself is nothing to me. On a pure whim, I once had all the other prisoners escape, and I remained in my cell.”

Simonis said nothing. The dervish went on:

“I was thirty when I left my land. Then I was called Isaac Ammon. I was the firstborn son of Abraham Ammon, patriarch of the Nestorian Christians of Chaldea. For generations our family had proudly passed down the honour of the patriarchy, but it was of no value to me. I admired only one man: my mother’s brother, who had retired to a mountain in Chaldea. He was like me, like us: more than a mere man. A great sage and astrologer, he lived as a hermit and treated all others as beasts. He raised me with the whip, teaching me the occult virtues of the herbs and the stars, their links with the stones, the animals of air and water, the quadrupeds, the reptiles. He revealed to me the periods and hours of the day to exploit these virtues, their temperament and the effects they have on men.”

Simonis still said not a word. But Ciezeber did not seem disappointed by his adversary’s silence.

“You’ll say: why don’t you shut up, dervish? Why are you telling me all this? Why don’t you just kill me? But I’m not talking just to brag about myself. The loser must know he has lost, and suffer. We, the winners, feed on your pain: it’s our lifeblood and our reason for living.”

Then Ciezeber (or Palatine, as he said he was known) continued in a more relaxed tone, as if he had now said all that was important to say.

“It was a relative, my mother’s brother, who enlightened me with real wisdom. This is nothing if you possess it, but everything if you do not know it. Thanks to it a healthy and whole man can live a thousand years, as in the days of Abraham and Noah: he just needs to keep away from women and excesses. My master, my uncle, was seven hundred years old.”

I was listening to the words of a fanatic; and Simonis must have had the same idea:

“He must have a good many stories to tell,” said my assistant sarcastically. “I imagine it was he who advised you which poison to put in the Emperor’s dish.”

The dervish took no notice of the irony.

“What do you know of poisons?” he answered, quite unruffled. “There are seventy-two different types, and the subtlest are not taken via the mouth. A pair of shoes, a shirt, a wig, a flower, a curtain, a door, a chisel, a letter: a thousand objects can be poisonous. But for each one there exists an antidote in nature. Some only work at certain hours, or on certain days, or weeks, or months — but they are all infallible. One just needs to know the condition and temperament of the person. In Joseph’s case, you think it is poison and not illness. Well, the illness is poison, and the poison is illness. They are not alternatives, but the same thing: a disease induced by medical means. The smallpox was injected skilfully into the Emperor’s limbs, as into those of the Grand Dauphin of France, obviously with the help of the traitors who can always be found among you Christians, and in both cases it will seem a natural death.”

I held my breath: now we had the answer to our questions. The smallpox that had struck His Caesarean Majesty and the heir of Louis XIV was indeed an illness, but caused artificially, as if by poisoning!

Ugonio had told me that the instruments in Ciezeber’s ritual were used to inoculate, but I had misunderstood the true meaning of “insanitary” and believed that their aim was therapeutic, not criminal.

“For you it’s the ideal solution,” remarked Simonis. “No one will suspect. It’s not the first case of fatal smallpox in the House of Habsburg. Ferdinand IV, the elder brother of the previous Emperor Leopold, was carried off by smallpox fifty years ago. He was too clever, too cultured, too sharp, at the age of just twenty-one. Just like Joseph, no?” continued my assistant with bitter sarcasm. “Two annoying exceptions among the Habsburgs, who are emperors precisely on account of their mediocrity and malleability. As soon as one of them causes any trouble, away with him! Bring on the second-born. And all the better if he’s a coward, like Leopold.”

“Leopold, with his mildness, reigned for almost half a century,” retorted Palatine inscrutably.

“But he himself was the source of one or two disappointments for you. It wasn’t enough that he fled from Vienna when the Turks arrived in 1683: the Christian armies won all the same. Despite all your efforts, Palatine, your wishes are never quite fulfilled — it’s your destiny.”

“You think so? Everyone knows, and you yourself know it: the death of Ferdinand IV made this war possible,” smiled the dervish.

“All of this — why?” asked Simonis in a cutting voice.

“That’s the real question,” answered the dervish. “But only those like you, like me, know it. Why. How and who are just distractions for the rabble. Maybe one day someone will suspect that Joseph the Victorious was assassinated and will wonder: who gained from it? Who had the power to cover it all up? Was it smallpox, or poison. . Always who and how. We’ll keep the people busy as in a game, preventing them from asking the most important thing, why.”

“And yet it’s not very hard to guess,” said Simonis. “First of all the war: Joseph is thinking of dividing Spain with the French, and leaving Catalonia to his brother Charles.”

I started. That tallied with what Atto had told me: the Emperor wanted to divide the Iberian peninsula, leaving his brother with just Barcelona and the surrounding area.

“That settles the Spanish question,” continued Simonis, “and peace begins. But you want the war to go on, to reduce Europe to total ruin, and then impose an armistice on your conditions, so that you can do whatever you want.”

Ciezeber kept silent, as if in agreement.

“Then there’s trade,” persisted my assistant. “War is bad for business — at least, for small-scale business. But your people are engaged in selling arms, building ships, designing fortresses: war is highly profitable for you. And it’s big money. With peace, things dry up.”

Ciezeber-Palatine answered with an amused whimper.

“Finally you want to get rid of dangerous rulers and replace them with more malleable ones. It’s always been your strategy, but now you’ve perfected it. For centuries you have been busily laying waste to the world, conquering one city after another. By manipulating the Infidels you conquered Jerusalem. Then you moved northwards, taking Constantinople in 1453, then Budapest as well. It took centuries for you to obtain all this: enormous sums were squandered, armies were sent to wholesale slaughter, whole nations were annihilated. Only Vienna said no to you: despite the invention of Luther’s schism with which you made Europe rot in the Thirty Years’ War, your Ottomans lost the siege in 1529, and then the one in 1683. It was the last holy city before Rome, the final target. And so you had to reconsider your projects. Instead of attacking the Christian kingdoms directly, you concentrate on internal action: exterminating the kings directly. Then you take possession of the minds of their sons, the future sovereigns, by means of court tutors: tormenters of the spirit, whose only task is to crush the characters of the young princes and destroy all their good qualities. It’s a technique you have known for centuries: here in the Empire, Rudolph, son of Maximilian II, was subjected to it. But from now on it will be your speciality.”

And I remembered: had not my assistant told me that Rudolph the Mad, son of the creator of Neugebäu, had been bullied by his educators? Simonis and Ciezeber were referring to a subterranean conflict whose protagonists were such individuals as Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag, the conspirators who had plotted against Maximilian.

Simonis first looked up, towards the sky, then shot a meteoric and imperceptible glance at me, and finally down, towards the lions that were quivering and slavering, enraged by the prey that was so close but unattainable.

“Good. You know a great deal, and you suffer because you cannot do anything about it,” replied the dervish. “So listen now: I tell you that Louis XIV, King of France, will die from poison. It will look like gangrene in the leg, but it will be an artificially induced illness. The doctors, who are the most ignorant of men, will be in the dark. Before the Sun King, it will be the turn of the Dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne, and their son the Duke of Berry: they will all end up the same way, with a skilfully induced false illness. The late King of Spain, Charles II, whose inheritance has set all the nations of Europe at each other’s throats, even though he had just months to live, was poisoned in the same way. Now you know: the Emperor, Joseph the Victorious, is about to die. This evening the decisive inoculation will be administered.”

I started again: Ciezeber was talking about the medical treatment that Cloridia had heard about that morning at Eugene’s palace: but instead of curing, it would kill him. So Joseph had been betrayed by his own Proto-Medicus! And by countless others along with him. Abbot Melani was right.

“The Emperor will die — how can I put it? — poisoned by smallpox,” continued the dervish. “It is a fitting end for one who thought himself so powerful that he could do without us: the only man alone on earth.”

“Ah yes, soli soli soli,” recited Simonis.

“Exactly. With that phrase the Agha announced to Prince Eugene how things are: either with us or against us. The Emperor thought he could do as he wished: finish the war in his own way, divide up Spain with the French, as if we did not exist. But the war will end on our terms, as and when we say. For Joseph thinks he governs the Empire, but actually he is a man all alone, who cannot even decide for himself: the Turks came soli soli soli, ‘to the only man alone on earth’. Eugene of Savoy, who understands oblique phrasing, understood perfectly, and has chosen to abandon his sovereign and join us. There is your valiant general, your great hero: another traitor, like all the others.”

I was listening in utter amazement. Thanks to Atto we had guessed the real meaning of soli soli soli; now we were learning why the phrase had been said by the Agha to Eugene of Savoy.

“You say ‘we’. But who are you? Ottomans? The English? Dutch? Jesuits?”

“Are you so ingenuous? No, I don’t believe it. You just want my confirmation, but you already know. We are everywhere and we are everyone.”

I looked around: a pair of henchmen were standing stiffly by as their master talked away in a language incomprehensible to them.

“We are the real power,” continued Palatine. “He, the Emperor, is as outcast and isolated as the most miserable beggar. The Turkish Agha said nothing but the truth to Eugene, which is there for all to see, but which no one does see. This is our power. We are everywhere, omnipresent but invisible, we eat at your table, sleep in your beds, rifle through your purses, and you do not see us. We seem to be very few and isolated, but we are in fact legion. You think you are many, and yet you are all the same person — a man alone.”

“You feel omnipotent: that’s why you had the Agha pronounce his phrase in public.”

“We never hide anything from you. It is you who have no eyes to see.”

“No, Ciezeber, the people have eyes to see, but faced with your inhumanity no one believes what they see. And this is your real strength.”

“Now be silent,” the other man said. “The House of Habsburg will soon be extinct. Thanks to Joseph’s death, Italy will have its own king, as will Germany.”

“And that is why you had a poor child, just one year old, killed by your doctors — Leopold Joseph, the Emperor’s little son.”

“Italy has been broken up for centuries into a myriad of principalities,” continued the dervish without replying, “and Germany into electorates for just as long. And yet both will become great nations, while the Habsburgs must come to an end once and for all, because we wish it, and history is in our hands.”

“Yes, and after killing the kings and their sons and grandsons, you’ll put the new heirs on the throne — all still children or mere youths — in the hands of tutors faithful to you, who will turn them into imbeciles, cruel and ridiculous,” said Simonis, repeating what had just been said.

“Their subjects will rightly hate them, the crowned heads will fall under the axe of the people, which will therefore think it is controlling the revolution while all it is doing is implementing our designs,” concluded the dervish. “A new order will replace the old world. For each new right we concede to the rabble, we will secretly abolish ten. Laws will get better, life will get worse. We will rewrite history: we will make fun of the ancients and convince mankind it is now living in the best of all possible worlds, so as to remove any desire to return to the past. We will spread artificial diseases to weaken the health of entire nations. Indeed, we are already doing so: you see how Joseph has ended up? The remedies we supply will be worse than the disease: the doctors and the propaganda are almost entirely in our hands. We will snatch babies from their mothers’ breasts. The people will not even realise, and their weakness will be handed down to their children, and to their children’s children. The tremendous wars which we will organise in the meantime will serve to destroy the documents of the past, to disperse its memory and to turn the world into a grey prison, to make man sad and reduce him to a state of resignation.”

“Resignation? It’s hard sometimes,” said Simonis, jerking his head towards the beasts that roared angrily at him from the ditch.

The dervish did not grasp the irony, and went on as if nothing had happened, happy to humiliate Simonis with that grim and apparently inevitable vision of the future.

“Everyone will accept suffering as something normal, and those who are happy will be looked down upon. Oh, I ardently hope that envy will guide and illuminate the centuries to come! The imbecilic masses will live in ignorance, but we will allow those like you, those who have understood, to rebel just a little. We won’t kill all of you: quite simply, we will see to it that you are provided with false prophets under our guidance, who will keep you under surveillance and count you one by one, in case it is decided to eliminate you. But take comfort: we actually need you. Your impotent suffering nourishes us, and gives a joyful meaning to our task. What glory would there be, otherwise, in triumphing over a herd of blind, deaf beasts? There is no greatness in agreeing with the laws of nature. True power consists in making water flow against the current, making the mediocre triumph over the virtuous, rewarding injustice, praising ugliness. We will separate man from nature. We will imprison everyone in large windowless hives, people will end up ignorant of how a hen’s egg is laid, what a haystack is, or a common little dandelion plant. Our triumph will come when we can separate the people from God as well, and we will take His place. This is what destiny has in store, and we are destiny.”

“You may be destiny, but without money, weapons and lies you are nothing,” answered Simonis in a strangely calm tone, as if the dervish’s endless lecture were all too familiar to him, and this last objection was dictated more by duty than from any sense of real utility, like a soldier who wearily fires his last shot against an overwhelming enemy.

“Money and weapons are useful,” admitted Palatine-Ciezeber, “but we are already very rich. Wealth bores us. Indeed, it no longer exists: we are replacing gold with paper money, payment with promises. Wealth is an idea. And the most powerful weapon is the dominion of ideas. Lies are part of the game, they make it more amusing. Because we are — ”

“. . you are all mad,” Simonis interrupted him, packing into these few syllables all the paternal sarcasm that the pranks of little children, imbeciles and madmen merited. “No human being agrees to sacrifice his own life just to inflict evil on his neighbour, and to pass on his mission to his descendants. But you do. And if the world succumbs to your vileness, it is simply thanks to the only real weapon you have: madness.”

Caught by surprise, Ciezeber remained motionless for an instant. Then he nodded to the two henchmen. One of them headed towards the tunnel that led out of the cages. In the meantime the other one, after a good deal of fumbling, had succeeded in reloading his pistol, and he aimed it at Simonis’s legs. It was clear what was about to happen: the first henchman would empty one of the two lion cages, the other one would shoot Simonis in a non-vital spot, maybe his foot. Then my assistant would have to fall into one of the cages, and obviously he would choose the empty one. There he would be at the mercy of the three enemies, who would drag him away by force. With torture they might be able to extort something interesting out of him.

“We will keep you just for a while,” said the dervish, “then you will be free. Obviously you will go out and recount what happened to you here, but no one will believe you, not even your own people. We will slander you, and we will spread the word that we bribed you. Soon people will suspect that you can no longer be trusted. They will say: why was Simonis spared? You’ll be alone, with no honour, no homeland. But alive.”

“You’re going too fast. You make it sound as if you’ve already succeeded. Because of you the world is getting worse and worse, it’s true, but according to your plans it should have been ruined long ago. The truth is that you are desperate, because for centuries, for thousands of years, you have been struggling to eradicate Christ from the world, but the fruit of your efforts is always inferior to your hopes. Your problem is always the same: ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, as the Psalm says. The game is never really over, least of all yours. And so I ask you: are you really sure that it is you who direct the world? Have you never suspected that God leaves you alone — indeed, that He has even elected you for His own inscrutable ends?”

These were the very ideas that we had heard from Atto before we arrived at the Place with No Name. I smiled bitterly. The Abbot and Simonis were really on the same side: that of the humans, not of those who only appeared to be human.

“The world is the test bed of souls, Ciezeber,” continued the Greek, “and you are no more than unwitting tools of this divine plan: we are all a part of God’s plans, even damned souls like yours.”

A shiver ran down the dervish’s spine, making him shudder. Perhaps it was the cold. Or perhaps Simonis’s words.

“And as for us,” my assistant went on, “are you really sure that things will really go just as you said? Don’t you think that at the last moment someone might spoil your party?”

At that exact instant Simonis’s eyes sought out mine in the darkness, and he was certain that I was observing him. In the dark I could just make out a weak smile, perhaps a farewell. I realised that he was about to act, and that he expected the same from me.

“So who’s going to prevent us?” Ciezeber said with a sneer. “Your two friends perhaps? Your little dwarf boss and that mummy Abbot Melani?”

The bow of possibilities had been stretched taut, the arrow of events was about to be launched. It was at that moment, enormous and deafening, that the noise began.