Veritas

Day the Third

SATURDAY, 11^TH APRIL 1711

7 of the clock: the Bell of the Turks, also called the Peal of the Oration, rings.

Headache, shaky limbs, muddy mouth. The riotous night spent with the students had robbed me of those lively forces so essential for a fresh start to the day.

The bizarre ceremony of the Deposition had finished around two o’clock. When I got back to Porta Coeli (of course I had a copy of the keys to the gate) I was in a state of feverish excitement, which kept me awake almost till dawn. Yielding to the friendly insistence of Simonis’s friends, during the ceremony I had ended up accepting a tankard of good beer myself, which had been followed by a second, and then a third. To avoid the effects of the carousal, Simonis and his study companions had each knocked back a glass of vinegar and had wrapped a cloth soaked in freezing water around their pudenda. Infallible remedies, they claimed, but I had not been persuaded. And I had been wrong: although I had avoided total inebriation, I woke up with all its symptoms.

When I opened my eyes, roused by the Bell of the Turks, Cloridia was already at work in Prince Eugene’s palace. Our little boy must have already gone off to work with Simonis. That morning we had two urgent jobs in the Josephina area, cleaning flues. Simonis and my son would be there on the spot already, waiting for me with all the tools. The idea was that I would work with them for a while and then let them finish on their own, while I went to see the work that was being done at our own house, situated not far away, as the master-builder had been wanting to consult me about it for a few days now. However, it was not too late, and after saying my prayers there was still plenty of time for me to have breakfast.

As usual my consort had left a little bread and jam near the bed, and something interesting to read. Whereas in Rome hearing or reading the news (always full of murders and acts of violence) would leave me feeling anguished and dismayed, in Vienna I often enjoyed leafing through the gazettes, and it was also highly recommended by Ollendorf, our German teacher, as a way to fill those deplorable gaps in my learning.

Unfortunately (for him), in Vienna there were only two gazettes, and the older of the two was Italian. To be precise, it was written in Italian. As I have already had occasion to mention, it was called Corriere Ordinario. It came out every four days from van Ghelen, the Italian court printer, and had been founded by Italians about forty years earlier. It was of little use for the purposes intended by Ollendorf, but much more enjoyable to read.

I thought back to the evening spent with the students, in which I had spoken Italian almost the whole time. Simonis’s friends had all studied in Italy — in Bologna and in Venice — and they still felt nostalgic for those days. To feel really at home, I said to myself joyfully, in Vienna you just had to speak Italian. Glowing with pride in my origins I picked up the Corriere Ordinario.

As I idly leafed through it, I thought how hard life must have been for Abbot Melani in Paris. I knew from his stories, and from the vox populi, that in France the Italians had almost always been despised, hated and persecuted. The famous Concino Concini, Louis XIII’s Italian favourite, had been executed after his removal from office, after which the Parisians had taken his corpse, cut it into pieces and eaten it. Then along had come Cardinal Mazzarino (or Mazarin), a truly Italian schemer, who had imported our country’s music and theatre into Paris. The excessive power he had accumulated, and the arbitrary way he had used it, had made him unpopular with everyone. During the Fronde, Italian artists had been subjected to all kinds of cruelties: Jacopo Torelli, the stage designer of Orfeo, had almost been lynched by the mob, despite having Frenchified his surname into Torel, while Atto himself and his master Luigi Rossi had had to flee Paris. After the Cardinal’s death, the Italian musicians had been packed off back to Italy. Having driven them out, the French had been very happy to replace them with their own Jean-Baptiste Lully (forgetting that his real name was Giovan Battista Lulli, and he was from Florence). So just what would the French say if they ever saw Vienna?

The Italians here were not only numerous, well respected and influential. In Vienna, quite simply, it was like being in Italy.

Ever since my arrival I had been very pleased to discover that the corporation I belonged to, the chimney-sweeps, was in the hands of my fellow countrymen. But that was only the start of it. Everything, every corner, every living being that did not belong to the vulgar mass, seemed to speak my language. Among Viennese gentlemen one conversed, dressed, courted, handled money, preached, planned, wrote and read in Italian. Letters were dictated, goods bought and sold, friendships made, loves and hatreds formed using the idiom of Dante and Petrarch. We Italians were admired, much sought after, and, if not loved, certainly respected. At court our tongue was actually the official language.

As I meditated along these lines, taking a complacent pride in my origins, at the foot of the bed I spotted the German-Italian phrase book that Atto Melani had given me. It had been printed in Vienna, but its author, the tutor of the imperial family Stefano Barnabè, was an Italian friar. Even the works in German by the court preacher, the barefoot Augustinian Abraham from Sancta Clara, were printed by the Italianissimo typographer Viviani. We had St Francis, Dante and Columbus, the discoverer of America; we were a people of saints, poets and navigators. Why be surprised that Vienna’s first newspaper was also our work? I began reading.

The first correspondence was from Lisbon, and reported tumults in the Kingdom of Portugal. Despite the war, the news had arrived quite quickly: the article was dated 23rd February, just a month and a half ago. It was followed by a report on the meetings of the parliament in London and news on the war from Saragossa in Spain, where Joseph I’s brother, Charles, was competing for the throne with the French Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV. I skipped to the second page where, after leaving aside sad military news from Aslan in Crimea and Danzig, I at last found something interesting:

Tuesday 7th April, third feast of Easter. The most August Sovereigns with the Serene Archduchesses their Daughters, and the customary entourage proceeded after luncheon to visit the Church of the Barefoot Carmelite Fathers in the suburb of the Island of St Leopold; and there they attended the Vespers and Litanies.

The Turkish Agha having arrived here on the same day with a retinue of about 20 Persons, he was provided with lodgings in the aforesaid Suburb of St Leopold on the Bank of the closest Branch of the Danube; and the day before yesterday at midday he had an audience with the Serene Prince Eugene of Savoy, who to this end had sent a 4-horse Carriage for six. .

There followed a description of the audience, up to the leavetaking between Eugene and the Agha. All this was well known to me since I had either been present myself or had heard Cloridia’s account of it. The anonymous chronicler provided just one new detail:

And now it is said that the aforementioned Most Serene Prince Eugene is preparing to leave for the Low Countries, to initiate the operations of the Campaign against France.

As I have had occasion to say, it was well known that Prince Eugene was longing to leave for the front again. Now it seemed that having received the Agha with all honours he had decided it was time to set off.

There followed some reports from Madrid on the appointment of major generals and brigadiers, and then lesser news from Paris and the Low Countries.

While I put the Corriere Ordinario back on the ground, another bundle of papers slipped from its inner pages. Cloridia had been concerned about my German, and had also bought the Wiennerisches Diarium, or the Diary of Vienna, the city gazette in German which every three days or so reported the latest events. It was, essentially, the paper the good Ollendorf wanted me to read. Like the Corriere Ordinario, the Diary of Vienna was today’s issue; Cloridia must have bought it as usual at Rothes Igel, the little palace of the Red Porcupine, in Tuchlauben, or at the Portico de’ Tessutari, where the gazette was on sale.

I began to work my way painfully through the first item. Screwing up my eyes and drawing on my scanty resources I managed to make out that on Wednesday, three days earlier, the Emperor had appointed as member of the Secret Council the Count of Schönborn, otherwise known as Hugo Damian, Lord of Reichelsperg and Hepenheim, Count of Wiesenthaidt and Old Biesen. Pleased at having grasped at least the gist of the article, I went on to the second page. Here an account was given of the arrival of the Turkish Agha. Not wishing to attribute too much importance to the dreaded Ottomans, they had compressed the news into just ten lines, while the appointment of Count Schönborn as Secret Councillor took up twenty-five.

There followed various reports from Hungary, from Poland and Russia (the Czar was preparing for war against the Tartars), from Naples (earthquake in the city of Reggio), from Rome (Cardinal Gozzadini blessed the Bishop of Perugia). I then read news of the war in Spain (the French General Vendôme was withdrawing with 4,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry towards the Dauphiné) and many other items from every part of Europe. As time was now pressing, I passed quickly to the last pages. Here were bulletins that the Viennese read avidly: the list of people of every rank who had arrived in or departed from Vienna, and that of the new baptisms, weddings and deaths. I myself often enjoyed glancing through this section, looking for names I knew, such as my clients, but today there was no time. I was just about to drop the Wiennerisches Diarium onto the floor alongside the Corriere Ordinario when my eye fell on the bulletin of new arrivals in the city, and on one name in particular:

My eyes remained glued to the page of the gazette. I cast another glance at the second announcement: Herr Milan, “Il Signor Milani” if translated into Italian, “Official of the Imperial Post, coming from Italy, alighted at the Post Station.”

“Il Signor Milani.” Milani?

It was as if all the bells in the city were sounding the fire alarm. Surprise was mixed with disappointment: after immersing myself for so long in the Italian conquest of Vienna, I had stumbled on this priceless item not in the Italian newspaper but in the Viennese one.

I got dressed at lightning speed, dashed out of the room slamming the door behind me and rushed towards the convent gates. Where was the Post Station? Could it be on the Wollzeile, the Wool Road, as I seemed to remember? I mentally prepared a question for the first passer-by I should encounter, cursing my awkward German: “Excuse, I look for Post Station. .”

I ran into the street, my breath steaming in the cold morning air, and immediately turned right into the Rauhensteingasse. It may have been the icy breeze but at that moment everything came together in my head: the memory of the previous evening, when we had met a young man talking to a servant outside the convent, the proverb about eagles and crows that I had overheard; and before that the two porters carrying a heavy trunk full of clothes to the convent; the thought that Porta Coeli had a second guest house, round the corner, right on the Rauhensteingasse; the announcement in the Wiennerisches Diarium; finally, as I ran headlong into the side road, like a ray of sunlight cutting through the fog, that voice:

“. . and later we’ll go and look for the boy.”

I smiled at “the boy”, something I had not been for a while now, and tripping on the cobbles in my haste, and perhaps also from a sudden whirling dizziness, I found myself staring upwards. Gazing down at me was a pair of curious dark glasses above a large, lead-whitened nose, in a face half concealed by a large green cloak and a black hat. I did not recognise him, but I knew it was he.

By his side, the young man from the previous evening stared at me in surprise.

“I’m. . I’m here, Signor Abbot,” I stammered.

11 of the clock: luncheon hour for artisans, secretaries, language teachers, priests, servants of commerce, footmen and coach drivers.

The sudden encounter with Abbot Melani was followed by an exchange of warm, brotherly greetings.

“Let me embrace you, boy,” he said, patting me on the cheek and running his fingers over every part of my face. “I can’t believe I’ve found you again.”

“I can’t believe it either, Signor Atto,” I answered, quelling my starts of surprise and tears of joy.

Between my first and my second encounter seventeen years had passed, and between the second and this last one another eleven. For a long time I had been sure I would never see him again. But now Atto Melani, prince of spies, secret shadow behind the intrigues of half Europe, but also my irreplaceable leader in life and its adventures, was here in flesh and blood before my eyes.

At each meeting it had been he who had sought me out, and each time from afar, from his own Paris. Eleven years earlier he had surprised me in Rome, emerging from nowhere like a sharply delineated shadow in the July sunlight, as I hoed the gardens of Villa Spada, and he had taken a sly relish in my amazement. Now he had joined me here, in remote Vienna, in the frosty Habsburg spring, where I had been resurrected to new life thanks to his benevolence.

“Tell the truth,” he said, masking his emotion with irony, “you were not expecting to see old Abbot Melani round these parts.”

“No, Signor Atto, even though I know anything can be expected of you.”

After our embraces we had to separate: I explained to the Abbot that my obligations at the Josephina could not be postponed, that duty called me, alas. We would meet up again later that day to pick up the threads of our friendship.

So we fixed a meeting later, near the Cathedral of St Stephen.

Abbot Melani knew all too well what sort of work I was doing in Vienna, since it was he who had procured me the job. However, when we met again a couple of hours later, he could not refrain from raising a handkerchief to his nose as soon as he caught the smell of soot from my chimney-sweep’s clothes.

“There’s no one nosier than a nun,” he then began to grumble. “Let’s keep away from Porta Coeli and look for somewhere quiet where we can chat at leisure.”

I could tell him just the place. Knowing the Abbot, I had foreseen his request and had already dropped in at the convent to leave a message for Cloridia and Simonis with the address. There was a coffee shop not far away, in Schlossergassl, or Road of the Locksmiths, a place known as the Blue Bottle. It was certainly not a place frequented by the aristocracy, but neither by the rougher elements of the rude populace, and games of cards or dice were forbidden there, being considered pastimes for blasphemers. The middle classes went there, always after lunch; so you would encounter self-important court functionaries, their moustaches still dripping with boar’s gravy, or dignified governesses on amorous trysts, if it was too cold to lurk in the thickets of the Prater. One certainly did not go to coffee shops to be in society! Every table, every discreet nook and corner was practically a separate niche, which could be used for meetings with friends, confidants, lovers or for the solitary rite of reading. Nobody talks in coffee shops, everybody whispers; the Viennese know the art of discretion, and you will never find anyone’s eyes rudely fixed on you, as so often happens in Rome. The arrival of two or even three people at the next table does not disturb even the most cantankerous lover of solitude. I have been there and can testify: no one knows the true meaning of peacefulness until they have visited a Viennese coffee shop. In any case, at that hour the middle classes had not yet taken luncheon, and so the place was practically deserted.

As soon as we entered, Abbot Melani was recognised as a customer of distinction thanks to his clothes, and when we were seated a pretty girl with olive skin and jet-black hair served us swiftly. It was coffee, but I did not even notice what I was drinking, my spirit was in such turmoil. We were sitting at a table for four. Shielded by his black lenses, Abbot Melani introduced me to the young man in his company: it was his nephew Domenico.

“So, do you feel settled in this city?” he asked with an imperceptible grimace, which, like the ingredients of a successful pudding, mingled formal curiosity, allusive complicity with my new prosperous status, a desire to be thanked for the generous gift he had bestowed on me, plus the secret intention modestly to decline such thanks.

We had just taken off our cloaks and overcoats, and for the first time I was able to observe the man I had been waiting to meet for eleven years. Contrary to his usual preferences in matters of clothing and colours (red and yellow tassels and ribbons everywhere), Abbot Melani was soberly dressed in green and black. Behind the dark lenses that concealed his pupils, a strange novelty on Atto’s face, I noticed his drawn features, his sagging skin, and the furrows of time vainly coated with a piteous shroud of white lead. Twenty-eight years earlier in Rome, at the Inn of the Donzello, I had first met the mature Abbot; at Villa Spada there had appeared before me a sprightly old man; now in the Caesarean city he struck me as decrepit. Only the cleft in the middle of his chin was there where I had left it; the rest had yielded to the scythe of time, and if not entirely decayed, it was gently withered, like an old prune or a fallen leaf. Only his eyes, which I remembered as triangular and sharp, escaped my assessment on account of his dark glasses.

I looked at him hesitantly, unfurling a broad smile. My heart was brimming with gratitude and I did not know where to begin.

“Domenico, will you please hang it up,” said Atto, handing his walking stick to his nephew.

It was at that moment that I took in the fact that, when we entered the place, I had seen Abbot Melani offer his arm to his nephew in order to avoid tripping on the entrance stairs, and that, once inside, he had let himself be guided step by step so as not to knock against the chairs and tables.

“I have to tell you that thanks to your generosity,” I said at last, “and only thanks to that, Signor Atto, we are properly settled.”

As I concluded my predictable response, the steed of my thoughts had set off at a gallop: earlier, as we approached the coffee house, had I not seen Atto avoiding obstacles by waving his stick close to the ground, from left to right?

“I’m pleased to hear it. And I hope your children are all well, and your good lady wife,” he answered amicably.

“Oh certainly, they’re all very well — the little one, whom we brought with us, as well as the two girls, whom we’ve left in Rome for the moment, but we hope soon. .” I said, while this new conjecture thrust itself forward. I did not dare ask about it.

“Praise be to heaven, just as I had hoped. And congratulations on the little boy, who had not arrived yet when we last met,” he remarked, as amiably as before.

Meanwhile the pretty waitress had come up to offer us the gazettes: she had guessed we were Italian.

“Read the Corriere Ordinario, signori! Or the the Diary of Vienna,” she said, carefully spelling out the titles of the two newspapers in their respective languages and offering us a copy of each.

Domenico made a gesture of refusal. Atto let out just one heartfelt exclamation. “If only. .”

It was then that I cast a last dismayed look at his glasses and was sure of it. Atto was blind.

“But forget about your thanks,” he added straightaway, turning to me, without my having said a word. “It is I who owe you an explanation.”

“Explanation?” I repeated, still distracted by the discovery of his distressing condition.

“You will naturally be wondering how the devil Abbot Melani managed to get into Vienna when there is a war with France, and all French enemies, and even their goods, have been banned from the Empire on account of the war.”

“Well, to tell the truth. . I suspect I know how you managed it.”

“Really?”

“It was in the newspaper, Signor Atto. I read it there, in the list of travellers who have arrived in town. It helped that you are Italian. I realised that you passed yourself off as an intendant of the imperial posts, signing yourself, as you sometimes do, as Milani instead of Melani. I imagine that you made it seem that you had arrived from Italy, using a passport that had been forg-”

“Yes, that’s it, very good,” he interrupted, breaking me off as I uttered the most compromising word in my whole speech. “I asked the good Chormaisterin of the convent of Porta Coeli not to let a word get out about my arrival here, I wanted to surprise you. But I see that, contrary to your old habits, in Vienna you read the newspapers — or at least the Wiennerisches Diarium, which is a very well-informed paper. The Austrians are like that, they love being in the know,” he added with a tone that revealed a combination of fear of the enemies of France, admiration for their organisational skills and vexation at their talent for espionage.

“So you too read the column with. .”

“My dear Domenico, who also knows German,” he said, gesturing towards his nephew who continued to remain silent, “sometimes illuminates the darkness into which God has chosen to plunge me,” he recited, alluding to the fact that it was now Domenico who served as reader for him.

Atto Melani’s arrival in the city really was quite incredible: coming from the enemy city of Paris, he had managed to penetrate the capital of the Empire with impunity. And the border controls were extremely strict! There had always been a rigorous mechanism for checking up on new arrivals and on dangerous individuals: foreigners, spies, saboteurs, bearers of disease, gypsies, beggars, rogues, dissolute characters, gamblers and good-for-nothings. Ever since the Turkish threat had become a constant one, and particularly since the last siege in 1683, Emperor Leopold I, father of the present Caesar, had tightened all controls. There were regular censuses on all those living within the walls, excepting soldiers and their families. Everyone who had anything to do with travellers and visitors was subject to careful checks. Owners of apartments, landlords, hotelkeepers, hosts, coachmen: nobody could transport, host or feed anyone without reporting all data on the person to field-marshals, burgomasters, magistrates, commissioners for streets or districts, security commissions, culminating with the fearful Inquisitorial Commission. Anyone who secretly took in strangers, even for just one night, risked serious trouble, starting with a hefty fine of six imperial Talleri. To prevent foreigners from getting through the city gates unchecked, by simply changing from a long-distance carriage into a city wagon, coachmen, postillions and trap-drivers were all subject to checks. And that was not all: to deter hardened offenders, two secret stations were set up for anonymous denunciations against suspicious travellers and their accomplices, one in the Town Hall in Via Wipplinger, the other at Hoher Markt, the High Market.

Despite all this, Abbot Melani had quietly entered Vienna.

“How on earth did you elude all the checks?”

“Simple: they made me sign the Zettl, that sheet where they register your details, and I passed through. And I signed in my usual way: I had no intention of changing my name into Milani. I know I sometimes write hastily, but it was they who read it wrongly. In these cases the best strategy is not to hide at all.”

“And no one suspected anything?”

“Look at me. Who is going to suspect a blind, 85-year-old Italian, obliged to travel in a litter?”

“But an 85-year-old blind man surely can’t be a postal intendant!”

“Yes, he can, if he’s retired. Don’t you know that here in the Empire you keep your titles until you die?”

Then he began to touch my face, as he had done when we first met, to rediscover with his fingertips what he still preserved in his memory.

“You have been through a good deal, my boy,” he remarked, feeling the furrows delved in my forehead and cheeks.

He gripped my hands, still hardened by the calluses and chilblains I had brought from Rome. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Signor Abbot,” I managed to say without taking my eyes from his face, while all the words of gratitude — and even of ardent filial love for the decrepit old castrato — died in my throat at the sight of those two impenetrable black lenses.

He stopped fingering me, tightening his lips as if to repress a grimace of sadness, at once concealed by the cup of coffee that he raised to his lips and by an affected little gesture as he adjusted his black lenses on his nose.

“You will be wondering why I am here, apart from the pleasure of seeing you again, a pleasure which, at my age and with the serious ailments that trouble me, would not have sufficed to over-rule the doctors. To the very last they tried to prevent me from leaving Paris to face such a long and dangerous journey.”

“So. . you came for some other reason,” I said.

“For some other reason, yes. A reason of peace.”

And he began to explain while the coffee, sweetened with a touch of perfumed lokum (a sort of gelatinous Turkish nectar, which unlike honey does not spoil the taste of beverages), flowed through my stomach and veins and I was finally able to enjoy the warm sensation of having rediscovered the scoundrel, impostor, spy, liar and perhaps even murderer, to whom I owed not only my present prosperity but also a thousand teachings that had lightened my existence, either through my acceptance or — more often — through my rejection of them.

Melani’s story began with the events of two years earlier: 1709 and its cruel winter had been dire not only in Italy, as I myself knew all too well, but also in France. It had been the most terrible year of Louis XIV’s entire reign. In January all the roads and riverbanks were frozen, sudden deaths were carrying off both the rich and the poor in great numbers. Many of those who ventured forth through the country, on foot or on horseback, died from frostbite. The churches were full of corpses, the King had lost more of his subjects than if he had been defeated in battle. Even the King’s confessor, Father La Chaise, had died of cold, on the short journey from Paris to Versailles. Atto himself had stayed shivering in his bed the whole month. The troops were ill-paid and the officers, unless supported by their families, fought unwillingly. The bankers no longer paid in gold coins and ready silver, but in notes from the mint known as currency notes. All letters of exchange and other payments were made with these notes, and by order of the King, if anyone demurred over them, or wanted to change them into gold or silver (“real money and not waste paper!”, exclaimed Melani), they were only exchanged for half their nominal value.

In April famine struck. The city was besieged by swarms of poor peasants who were dying of hunger; no one could leave Paris without the risk of being robbed and killed. The people were exhausted, famished and desperate. At the end of the month there was almost a general uprising: in the church of St Roch a pauper, who had been begging in church, was arrested by a group of archers. As the transgressor (even though unarmed) resisted arrest, the archers beat him to death in front of the shocked congregation. The people then rose up and tried to lynch the guards, who only escaped by taking refuge in a nearby house. Meanwhile the flame of revolt had been kindled: hordes of enraged citizens came to St Roch from all over Paris, and the tumult lasted for hours and hours before being finally quelled.

In May the famine merely multiplied the number of tumults; the only bread available was as black as ink, and cost over a Julius a pound! On market days there was always the danger of the whole city rising up.

In June the city’s coffers were exhausted, there was no money except for the war, and yet even the soldiers no longer received any wages and had to get their families to send them money.

When the cold season returned, the frost killed all the olive trees, a vital resource for the south of France, and the fruit trees turned barren. The harvest was wiped out and the storehouses were empty. Corn, which came cheap from eastern and African ports, was continually plundered by enemy fleets, against which France had very few ships. The King had to sell his gold plate for a mere four hundred thousand francs; the richest lords in the kingdom had their silverware melted by the mint. While Paris only ate jet-black bread, in Versailles the King’s table was furnished with humble oat-bread. But in the gazettes not a single word was said about all this grinding poverty, thundered Atto; the newspapers contained nothing but barefaced lies and bombast.

“You will have wondered what your dear old Abbot Melani was up to in Paris,” he said sadly. “Well, I suffered from hunger, like everyone else.”

The Sun King had realised by now that he had to make peace with his Dutch, English, German and Austrian enemies at all costs. But his overtures, addressed to the Dutch by diplomatic paths, were scornfully rejected over and over again.

“No one must know,” whispered Atto Melani, leaning towards me, “but even the Marquis of Torcy humbled himself in an attempt to obtain peace.”

Torcy, who was considered abroad as the principal minister of France, left Versailles for Amsterdam under a false name and turned up at the palace of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who learned to his amused surprise that this great enemy was humbly waiting for him in the antechamber to sue for peace. He turned him down. Torcy then made the same request to Prince Eugene, commander of the imperial forces, and to the Duke of Marlborough, leader of the English army. They too turned him down. The French then tried to bribe Marlborough, again without success. The Sun King was finally reduced to the unthinkable: he sent a letter to the governors of his cities and to the whole population, in which he endeavoured to justify his conduct and the terrible war that was bleeding the land dry.

“Really?” I said, amazed at Atto’s last words, never having heard anything about the Most Christian King other than how arrogant, scornful, implacable and cruel he was.

“This war has changed many things, boy,” answered the Abbot.

“Including the greatest king in the world?” I asked, citing the definition of the Most Christian King that I had heard from Atto thirty years earlier.

“Le plus grand roi du monde, the greatest king in the world, yes,” he repeated in a tone that was new to me, adding to the sugary tinkle of those words a dose of vinegary scepticism. “Which is the greatest king in the world? The proud Sun or the sober and patient Jove? The bloody barbarous condottieri or the best Caesars of the Roman Empire? And in truth, whose mind does not marvel at the contemplation of Caesar’s military ardour, Augustus’s royal arts, Tiberius’s profound and arcane mind, Vespasian’s economy, Titus’s amiable virtues, Trajan’s heroic goodness?” Atto proclaimed heatedly. “Who does not admire Hadrian’s various and manifold literature, Antonine’s clemency and equity, Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, Pertinax’s strict discipline, Septimus Severus’s fierce and versatile simulation? What can I say of Diocletian’s nobility of spirit, Great Constantine’s sublime piety and victorious fortune, Julian’s perspicacious spirit, Theodosius’s tolerance, religion and parsimony and the many virtues and high prerogatives of the other Roman emperors? It was these virtues that made them eternal in the grateful memory of the human race, certainly not the blood spilled in military campaigns!”

I could not understand what Abbot Melani was leading up to.

“Much could be said to commemorate the majesty of the laws, the gravity of the senate, the splendour of the equestrian order, the magnificence of the public buildings, the riches of their treasury, the valour of the captains, the number of the legions, the maritime armies, the royal tributaries, and Africa, Europe and Asia held under the will of one single man. But if the sovereignty of the Roman Caesars’ imperial rule lasted a thousand years it was due less to blood and martial valour than to good sense and the gift of reason, of true freedom and of righteous rules of living bestowed upon the subjugated peoples.”

It had certainly not been, I reflected, the policy of the Most Christian King to bestow freedom and righteous rules of living on his conquered peoples: his first concern was to put everything and everyone to fire and the sword. He had even done so in the Palatinate, although it was the birthplace of his sister-in-law. I had never heard Atto Melani lavish such praise on virtues of government so remote from those of his sovereign; indeed, I had always heard him seek to justify the dubious conduct of the French.

“In like fashion was Deioces exalted to the throne of the Medes,” continued the Abbot. “Venerated for his rectitude, he was called to settle their differences with fairness. Similarly, Rome, when still unregulated and fierce, called Numa Pompilius from the Sabines as their ruler, his only known merit being the austere and religious severity of his habits. And what other aim did the ancient republic have than the universal peace of its peoples, and the eradication of barbarism and blind brutality, perennial sources of vices, and wasteful ravagers of human concord and civil life? It was thus only fair that an empire founded on reason and on true valour, governed by the rule of honesty, whose aim was peace among its peoples, and in which each member was granted free access to dignities and to honours, should still be universally venerated as legitimate and holy, and its leader be recognised and obsequiously adored as the living oracle of reason and of true valour. The legitimate heir of that ancient Roman Empire is the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and your Most August Caesar Joseph the First, the Victorious.”

“Your words surprise me, Signor Atto, but I cannot but agree with you. The wisdom of the Caesars of the House of Habsburg spared Vienna the insult of the famine that raged throughout Europe,” I declared.

“Remember, boy: no praise is more befitting to an Emperor than that of virtue: true nobility is nothing if not virtue ingrained in a family, passed on from father to son,” Melani pronounced solemnly. “Without virtue the royal family is destined to perish and with it the whole kingdom. The Habsburgs will sit on the throne of the Hofburg much longer than the lineage of the Most Christian King in France.”

I could not believe my ears. Was this the voice of Atto Melani, the faithful servant of His Most Christian Majesty, the secret agent of the crown of France, whom I had always seen blindly serving his king, even at the cost of tarnishing himself with appalling crimes? Now of all times, in the middle of a war?

“The French care for nothing but appearance, and at that they are true masters,” he went on. “His Most Christian Majesty has created around himself the grandest, costliest and most magnificent of spectacles. He has outdone every other monarch in the splendour of his court, and the trumpets of glory and fame have sounded for him every day. His cannons have pounded half Europe, his money has corrupted every foreign minister. The tentacles of France have extended everywhere, but to what end? Now its body is like a beached octopus: empty, flaccid and rotten.”

He adjusted his black glasses on his nose, as if to insert a pause that his impatience barely accepted.

“How much has all that glory cost France? How many peasants have died of hunger to pay for their king’s cannons and ballets? In France they waste as much as 250 thousand silver scudi on the court, a third of the state’s budget, while in Austria they spend less than 50 thousand. They drove my friend Fouquet from the ministry of finance and slandered him; but it was only then that the public finances truly collapsed, with the court now spending three times as much as it did in the days of Louis XIII, and the kingdom in ruins! So who is the thief?”

He fell silent and wiped a bead of sweat from above his lips. Then he replaced the handkerchief in his pocket with hasty annoyance.

“Ah, my dear! I wish I could roll up the surface of the world like a carpet and drag the adversities of Paris right here, before your eyes. Then you would see it all for yourself: people dying of hunger, desperate citizens, bakeries assaulted for a crust of bread, riots brutally crushed. You would see families selling their meagre possessions to survive, war widows prostituting themselves for their family’s sake, children begging in the streets, newborn babies dying of cold. Is this glory? Everything is falling apart in Louis’s kingdom. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four in number, but only one, the white steed of War, is galloping at such speed. One day you will come and see me in Paris, at Versailles. That is when you will appreciate the greatness of Vienna.”

“Of Vienna?”

“The French adore show, and at Versailles everything is show,” sighed Atto. “In that false universe, everything revolves around the Sun King and his radiance. Any mortal being can walk quite undisturbed into the gardens, the royal palace, even the royal apartments: only His Majesty’s little room for private meals is private. You can see him take lunch and dinner or attend his morning levée, when he wakes up with his breath still rancid from the previous evening’s partridges. When he comes out from mass, there are so many people waiting for him you would think you were in some square in Paris. And between the Tuileries and the Louvre there are only supposed to be a few authorised courtiers; instead there’s such a crowd of carriages, idle strollers and domestic servants that one might as well be at the fish market. There are so many people bustling around the royal palaces, both inside and outside, and they behave so shamelessly, that in order to reduce the number of thefts in the Royal Chapel the death penalty is supposed to be in force. Wholly absurd, since no one is ever executed. At lunchtime any parasite can worm his way into the rooms, maybe chatting with His Majesty’s nephew, and sit down at the table of the great master of the house, or at that of the chamberlain, of the almoner, that of the court preachers or the King’s confessors. Amid this drunken bedlam, where idle chat and extravagance have free rein, while you bow in some corridor as the golden salt cellar is carried towards His Majesty’s table, you will be surrounded by gossip about lovers and the sodomitic adventures of this or that person. If you are ill, you can let yourself by touched by the King during the toucher, when he touches invalids with the same hand that throughout his life has penned orders for invasions and the butchering of entire nations. If you have an important friend, you can take part in the débotté, when His Majesty graciously allows his boots to be removed: foolish rituals which he now uses for his own glorification, but which go back centuries, to the days of the Valois. And over these years, while the courtiers have quarrelled among themselves for the most prestigious position, for a higher salary or just out of mutual hatred, and have dared to mock the sovereign who tolerates them, France has been bleeding itself dry with the cost of the war and sinking ever deeper into its present inferno. On the other hand, in Vienna. .”

“In Vienna?” I repeated again, amazed to hear Atto praising the enemies of France.

“Can you not see with your own eyes? In France it is waste that reigns, and in Austria parsimony. There adultery is the rule for every sovereign, and here faith to one’s consort. Only servants enter the Emperor’s bedchamber, and not every passing flatterer. He does not have himself portrayed in a chariot crushing all those that resist him, nor does he order operas from that bootlicker Lulli showing himself dressed up as Perseus, slaying dragons and conquering princesses. Instead, Leopold, the father of the present Emperor, had himself portrayed in the act of bowing down before the power of the Lord, thanking Him for removing the plague from Vienna.”

In his decrepitude Atto Melani was experiencing the bitter defeat of his king’s arrogant and overbearing ideals, and with it the failure of an entire life, his own, spent in the arduous (and all too often humiliating) service of France.

The French who had visited the imperial treasure chamber here in Hofburg, Melani went on, had gone guffawing back to France, to tell the Most Christian King how little — in comparison with the treasures of Versailles — the jewels of the Habsburgs were worth.

“They laugh and say that the gallery and the five cabinets are full of cheap trinkets or little more. Among the paintings there are just a few Correggios that are of any value; the jewel cabinet is ridiculous, apart from one piece, it seems, a large bowl hollowed out of a single emerald, so valuable that only the Emperor is allowed to touch it; not to mention the great clock cabinet, which only has one item in any way special: a mechanical crab, whose movements seem so natural that you can hardly tell it from a real one; the agate cabinet is adequate, with a few fine larger pieces, and some vases of lapis lazuli, while the coin cabinet is incredibly feeble: no coins of value and everything set out haphazardly. And the last cabinet, so they tell me, only contains absurdities like little waxen images and ivory toys, suitable for a child of five!” exclaimed the Abbot with his eyebrows raised in wondering arches.

However, the French, Atto commented, changing tone, would have done well to withhold their contempt, since the frugality of these great Caesars had been entirely to the benefit of their subjects, while in France people were dying of hunger.

“In Vienna there had never been any room for favourites and adventurers like Concini, black souls like Richelieu, profiteers like Mazarin, traitors like Condé, crafty concubines like Madame de Maintenon: in the Caesarean court only the ministers chosen by the Emperor hold posts of command. The great noblemen here have served the imperial house for centuries, they are not treacherous serpents. It is not only the treasure chamber but the whole palace that is modest, and there are half as many servants as in Versailles. Displays of splendour and great palaces are left to the noblemen; the Emperor only needs decorum, tradition and religion. He leaves the government of the regions in the hands of the great families; in exchange they accept his primacy. Here there are no plots, poisonings, luxuries, obscure magic rituals, and all the indecencies that dishonour Versailles, which, if I were to tell you about. .”

“Yes,” I agreed, “you spoke to me about them years ago, as you also told me about the calumnies against Superintendent Fouquet, and the black masses of Montespan, the King’s lover. .”

“Ah, that woman. . But have I really told you all these things already?”

Melani’s memory was beginning to fade. No wonder, now he was well over eighty-five.

“Yes, Signor Atto, both in the Inn of the Donzello and at Villa Spada.”

“What a memory. Most fortunate. Whereas I am good for nothing now.”

“Uncle, don’t talk like that,” intervened his nephew Domenico for the first time. “Pay no attention,” he said to me. “He likes to complain. Thank God, he is much better than he seems.”

“If only the Most Christian King would grant me the freedom to leave Paris! I would go straight back to my home in Tuscany,” moaned Atto disconsolately. “I’d be fine, down there, in Pistoia, among my relatives, on my estate at Castel Nuovo. I bought it years ago, and I’ve never seen it yet. I’ve even furnished it with a portrait gallery: the King, the Connestabilessa, the two cardinals, the Dauphin and the Dauphine with the King on horseback between them. . I sent the four small ovals with Galathea that were in the Villa of the Vessel and which Abbot Benedetti bequeathed to me, and I’ve had them hung at an angle above the four small windows in the gallery. But I have to make do with imagining the effect from my nephews’ letters! And if I stay in Paris I’ll be reduced to poverty, with no real money but those notes from the mint that are mere waste paper! The city is full of them, 150 million livres, they say, because in the rest of the kingdom nobody wants them. They’re the work of the devil and the ruin of France; if you change them for Italian money they give you less than half, so that even the slightest outlay for my smallholding costs me a fortune, and I’ve not even been able to afford iron hoops for my wine barrels. .” Here Atto sobbed. “I’ve reached the point of banking on the King’s lottery which they play on St John’s Day, and begging God to grant me a win that I can spend entirely on Castel Nuovo. But the King will not let me go; he says he’s grown up with me, that he cannot do without Abbot Melani, and if I insist he gets angry and sends me away, and each time I make all those awful journeys to Versailles to implore him to let me return to Italy, and they’re terrible on my poor old bones. .”

“Move from Paris to Tuscany? At your age?” I said in amazement.

“What did I tell you?” said his nephew, with a wink. “He took all the hardships of the journey here from France like a twenty-year-old.”

“Do not exaggerate, please, Domenico,” said the Abbot irritably.

The nephew may have been exaggerating; but the fact remained that the old castrato was sitting calmly in front of me after having travelled across the windy plains, through the snowy mountain passes, over the frozen rivers that separate cold Paris from freezing Vienna. All this without the precious gift of sight and, what was more, after crossing the border under the false name of a modest functionary of the imperial post. To carry off this trick he must have hidden his blindness and given up the privilege of travelling in a litter in addition to a whole series of comforts and luxuries that would have aroused suspicion. The art of lying, I told myself, repressing a smile, would be the last gift to abandon Abbot Melani’s weary spirit. .

Even so I was astonished to hear of his financial problems: Abbot Melani must have made great sacrifices to pay for my post as master chimney-sweep complete with house and vineyard!

“Signor Atto, it must have cost you a fortune to send me here, I really had no idea. .”

“Forget it, forget it,” Melani waved away my concerns. “Let’s get back to us. As I mentioned, I’m here on a peace mission. But now let’s pay and leave.”

He gave a slight circumspect shake of his head as if to indicate that it would be more prudent not to talk here.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he announced, “and you will listen to what I have to say to you. Only when walking can we be sure there are no unauthorised eavesdroppers.”

Domenico summoned the waitress with a nod and she helped Atto get to his feet and put his coat back on. After this she kindly put a good piece of chocolate decorated with marzipan into his hand, and the old Abbot munched it without waiting to be asked twice.

“My compliments, excellent service,” Melani praised her, happily leaning on the young woman’s soft, delicate arm and backing up his words with a generous tip.

We set off towards St Stephen’s and then towards the Street of the Red Tower.

On 11th September 1709, Atto started up again, the tremendous Battle of Malplaquet was fought. The French left eight thousand dead on the field. The allied forces, led by Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy, lost twenty-one thousand, but even so the victory was theirs. Immediately afterwards they besieged and conquered the fortress of Mons, and managed to hold those of Tournai and Lille.

The following year, 1710, began for France with another series of military defeats. The enemy was penetrating into the heart of the kingdom; there was even a second front opening up in the south, where, with the help of the Duke of Savoy, Prince Eugene’s cousin and Lord of Piedmont, the enemy forces of Marshal Mercy were threatening to enter. June saw the fall of Douai, Béthune, Aire and Saint-Venant. The allies began to plan a raid as far as Paris. On every front France was defeated. In Spain the French were badly defeated at Saragozza in August. In Germany, France’s unfortunate ally, Bavaria, was dismembered by the Emperor and given in fief among his relatives. The electorate of Cologne, another ally of Louis, had already been annihilated. In Hungary the rebel magnates, whom France supported with the aim of wearing down the Empire in the East, were defeated by Joseph I; their leader Rakoczy was broken forever, his party ruined.

The two crowns, as Atto called France and Spain, were in pieces. The Kingdom of France had no money, no army, no food, and was on the verge of total collapse, exposed to the unprecedented incursions of its enemies. The Kingdom of Spain, which Louis XIV had endeavoured against the rest of Europe to keep in the hands of his grandson Philip of Anjou (this was the reason for the war), had also been crushed. Trade had been wiped out, the countryside devastated, the population exhausted or killed, the country split in two by a fratricidal war between the supporters of France and those of its enemies.

“At this point Louis XIV is no longer asking for peace: he is imploring it,” stated Atto, as we turned into Wool Street.

The Most Christian King of France had begun new secret negotiations with the enemy powers in the Dutch city of Gertruidenberg, but his envoys were still treated with contempt. The conditions demanded by the allies were deliberately absurd: the Most Christian King should forcibly drive his own grandson Philip from the throne of Spain within two months. And so the war continued. A new hope of peace had come from England: power struggles among ministers and the crown were weakening the party of the Duke of Marlborough and strengthening those who were tired of squandering money on the war and were seeking peace.

“In January, just three months ago,” whispered Atto Melani with extreme circumspection, “an unknown priest, a certain Gautier, a secret envoy of the English, presented himself to the Marquis of Torcy offering to negotiate a separate peace. Since then secret negotiations have been opened with the Earl of Oxford and the Secretary of State, St John.”

“But didn’t you say that the English were negotiating with France along with with the Empire and Holland in that city. . in Gertruidenberg?”

“Shhh! Do you want everyone to hear?” Atto hushed me. Then he answered almost inaudibly: “The peace talks of Gertruidenberg have failed. Now the English are negotiating unbeknown to the Empire and Holland. Anything is allowable in war, even this. But it won’t be much use.”

“Why?”

He stopped and turned towards me, as if he could see me.

“Because here in Vienna is the man who is impeding peace. His name is Eugene of Savoy. For his own personal interests he wants to continue the war at all costs, and the Emperor listens to him. But I will convince His Caesarean Majesty to change his mind.”

“The Most Serene Prince Eugene is impeding the path to peace?” I exclaimed in surprise.

“What would Eugene of Savoy do if the war were over? He would go back to being what he was before: a half-blood Italian born and raised on French territory, where he was so cruelly mocked and derided that he had to run away, dressed as a woman, no less. He was only accepted here in the Empire because the Austrians, in war, are utter dunces.”

I was stupefied. I had heard nothing but panegyrics for Eugene. In Austria he was a genuine national hero, second only to our beloved Emperor Joseph the Victorious. We resumed our walk.

“His lucky day is 11th September: the day his mother was welcomed at the court of Paris, where she would meet her husband. The same day as the Battle of Zenta, in which Eugene won his first great triumph against the Turks. And the same day as the Battle of Malplaquet, in which our hero destroyed the French armies of Marshal Villars.”

I could not understand why Atto insisted on talking to me about Eugene of Savoy. It was true that, although he was a hero venerated throughout the Empire, I knew very little about him. I was aware, but only because I had heard it from Atto himself, that his mother was a cruel and wicked woman: Olimpia Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who had procured for her a rich marriage with a cadet of the Piedmontese Dukes of Savoy. I well remembered what Atto had told me all those years ago about the perfidious Olimpia: Mazarin’s scheming niece had even plotted against her sweet sister Mary, the first love of the Most Christian King, whom I had had the honour of meeting through Atto in Rome eleven years earlier.

I also knew that Eugene had been despised by Louis XIV and for this reason had fled Paris when young. But apart from that I knew very little about the man who was considered in the Empire the greatest general of all time, the inscrutable military genius whose life’s mission was war, who was ready to sacrifice all to it.

“Eugene is as indispensable to this cowardly people as a dog to a flock of sheep. Find someone over here, with the exception of Emperor Joseph I, who deserves to be called a soldier! Who drove the Turks from Vienna in 1683?” continued Atto, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you: the great Polish king John Sobieski, the Bavarian Maximilian Emanuel, the French Charles of Lorrain, the Palatine Louis of Baden, the Italian Pope. He was there too, Eugene of Savoy, even though he was only twenty. Everyone, in short, except the master of the house: the late Emperor Leopold. .”

We were now slowly crossing Carinthia Street, on our way back to the Blue Bottle.

“I know, I know, Signor Atto, you told me when we first met. The Emperor had left Vienna.”

“Left? Say rather that he had cut and run in a blue funk. . but let’s get back to ourselves,” Atto said. “As I was saying, this wretched war would have been over long ago if Eugene of Savoy were not hindering peace.”

It would not even have broken out, I wanted to answer back, if someone had not forged the will of the previous king of Spain. . But that was an old story, and the past cannot be changed.

“Do you really accuse the Most Serene Prince of such base intentions?” I asked. “Do you seriously believe he would put the whole of Europe to fire and the sword and constantly risk his own life just for the sake of personal glory?”

“Dog Nose was born. . sorry, I mean, Eugene was born in 1663, boy. He’s the same age as you: forty-eight. I saw him grow up and believe me, he has no life outside of war. He is war. And I can’t blame him.”

“Why did you call him Dog Nose?”

“Oh, it’s just a comic name that his old playmates gave him. Not very well brought-up lads. You see, Eugene’s upbringing was, let’s say, lacking in some respects,” said Atto in a curiously embarrassed tone. “As a boy he fell in with disreputable company, and the military life was the best remedy. At the age of fifteen they had even given him a priest’s tonsure, but he was already thinking of becoming a soldier. When His Most Christian Majesty refused to give him charge of a regiment, he fled from France disguised as a woman of the people, to come and realise his dream of war here, in the Empire.”

Atto Melani was now talking like a river in spate, but I still could not understand why he persisted in expatiating on Prince Eugene, and my attention was flagging. Instead I was pondering on the latest events: when had he come to Vienna? Two days ago, the 8th, to be precise. And when had the Turkish Agha arrived? The 7th. What a coincidence: just a day apart. Atto Melani, agent in the service of the Most Christian King; the Turks, traditional allies of France. What were the odds? Both coming to Vienna on account of Prince Eugene.

I had known Melani for thirty years. I knew all too well that if something momentous was stirring and Atto was in the neighbourhood, he was bound to have a hand in it. Could the Agha’s mysterious embassy have been brought about by some obscure manoeuvre of the Abbot’s? I was almost half a century old, as Atto well remembered, and he was eighty-five. It was not so easy to hoodwink me now; I would keep my ears open.

In any case, that was why Atto had “suddenly” remembered his debt to me and had sent me to Vienna. .

Once again he needed me — poor helpless being that I was, but still affectionate and idealistic — to weave his plots! Benefactor indeed!

I was swaying to and fro, like a felucca adrift, tossed on the currents of contrary feelings. What a generous man Abbot Melani was: instead of vanishing from my life, he had made me prosperous. What a profiteer Abbot Melani was: instead of sending me to Vienna he could perfectly well have given me a piece of land in Tuscany as he had promised! By now my two girls would both be married, instead of waiting on the outcome of my new life in the capital of the Empire. On the other hand, if he had not needed me in Vienna, would he not have left me to rot in Rome in my tufo cellar?

Under the weight of these thoughts my expression had grown baleful and my footsteps heavy and circumspect, when Abbot Melani’s words at last caught my attention again:

“What nobody remembers is that the Savoys by tradition are great traitors.”

“Traitors?” I said with a start.

“They reign over a duchy straddling the Alps, which is not large but extremely important from a strategic point of view. It’s the gateway into Italy for the two crowns, the French and the Spanish. And they have shamelessly exploited this, continually switching alliances. How many times in Paris have I been left with no letters from Italy because the Duke of Savoy had suddenly taken it into his head to arrest all the couriers passing through his states! There has never been any way to check these recurring acts of high-handedness, which amount to little more than blackmail, nor to neutralise the family’s outrageous acts of treachery.”

We had returned to the Blue Bottle. Atto was cold, and wanted to conclude our conversation somewhere warm. We entered and took our seats.

Eugene’s great-grandfather, he continued, Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, in his reign of almost fifty years had managed to switch sides three times. First he had married the daughter of Philip II of Spain; then he had passed over to the French side, hoping they would help him expand his dominions in Italy; then he had gone back to the Spanish side. His son Victor Amadeus I had married a French princess, Christine. When he died, the widow, to keep her power, had to fight not against some foreign power but against her husband’s brothers, who treacherously wanted to depose her.

One of these, Thomas Francis, was glorious Eugene’s grandfather. He too had married a French princess and seemed hell-bent on defending the Kingdom of France, even settling for a certain period in Paris.

“Then came the usual volte-face: he set off for Flanders, entered the service of the Spanish enemy and announced to his relatives that he wished to devote himself heart and soul to the struggle against French power,” said Atto, with a mixture of irony and disgust.

Eugene’s other direct relatives did not shine for their moral qualities, nor for their physical ones. His uncle Emanuel Philibert, the firstborn and thus the heir to the duchy, was deaf and dumb. His aunt Louise Christine, who had married the Margrave Louis Ferdinand of Baden in Paris, suddenly rebelled against her husband, refusing to follow him to his lands in Germany, on the pretext that in France their only son would receive a better education (her husband, a cousin of Eugene’s, responded by simply carrying the child off to his homeland). Eugene’s father, finally, was not a traitor and had perfect hearing and speech, but had married Olimpia Mancini, Eugene’s mother, a perfidious, scheming woman, suspected of numerous poisonings.

“Splendid lineage, the Savoys and their wives,” concluded Atto, “ambitious, traitors, deaf mutes and poisoners.”

“I don’t understand: how can Prince Eugene have come from such a family?” I asked in bewilderment. “He is known as an upright man, an untiring condottiero, and a faithful subject of the Emperor.”

“That is what the people say. Because they do not know what I know. And what I know will enable me to stop the war.”

He instinctively moved his head, as if he could still look around himself. Then he said to his nephew:

“Domenico, are there any snoopers here?”

“I don’t think so, Signor Uncle,” answered the young man, after glancing around at the nearby tables and the rest of the coffee house.

“Good. Now listen,” he turned back to me. “What I am about to tell you, you must reveal to nobody. No-bo-dy. Clear?”

Although worried by this brusque change in tone I agreed.

Atto pulled from his jacket a piece of paper folded in four, which concealed a letter. He opened it and set it before me. The text was in Italian.

Desiring ardently to testify to Your Majesty my humble devotion and my keen yearning to act in such a manner as to put an end to a conflict that has troubled all Europe so gravely and for such a long time, I consign this present missive to a trusted person so that You might be informed of my offer, and take the decisions that will seem to you most befitting and necessary.

As is common knowledge, Spanish Flanders has for many years been greatly troubled by disputes and wars, and being as it is in need of true and secure leadership we consider that assigning that land to the House of Savoy in our person would be the most potent means to free that land and its people from such dire suffering.

Such a decision would, with immediate and irrevocable effect, lead the war towards settlements closer to the legitimate desires of Your Majesty and of the Most Christian King of France, on account of the gratitude that such a measure would necessarily arouse.

Confirming myself a most humble and devoted servant of Your Majesty, and with the ardent desire to be able to contribute to the re-establishment of peace, as well as to the precious service of Your Majesty,

Eugenio von Savoy

“This obviously is a copy. The original is in the hands of the King of Spain, Philip V, to whom it was addressed,” whispered Atto.

He closed the letter and replaced it with great speed in its hiding place, bestowing a complacent little smile on me. Even without seeing me he must have guessed my stupefied and confused expression.

“The matter arose at the beginning of the year,” he went on almost inaudibly.

An anonymous officer had gone to the Spanish court in Madrid, over which reigned Philip of Anjou, grandson of the Sun King. The anonymous officer had succeeded in getting the letter delivered to Philip, and had then disappeared. On reading those lines, the young king of Spain had been thunderstruck.

“If I’ve understood properly,” I said, “with this letter Eugene is proposing an agreement. If Spain hands him its possessions in Flanders — ”

“You call it an agreement,” Atto interrupted me. “The correct name is treachery. Eugene is saying: if Spain promises to award me the hereditary possession and government of its territories in Flanders, then out of gratitude I will abandon the Empire and its army. The Emperor, deprived of his valiant commander-in-chief, will undoubtedly accept an armistice, which France desires intensely, and the path towards peace negotiations will be open.”

I kept silent, bewildered and disturbed by the tremendous revelation. I did not like the turn the conversation was taking.

Philip, continued Atto, had immediately transmitted a copy of the letter by confidential paths to Versailles, where only two people had read it: the Sun King and his prime minister Torcy.

“Let me tell you,” said Atto, “that I myself have the honour of reporting to Torcy all the arguments, even secret ones, that foreign diplomats do not wish to present to His Majesty in official audiences. In short, they still make intensive use of my services at court. And so His Majesty and Minister Torcy decided to entrust me with this mission.”

“You mean your peace mission?”

“Exactly. The young Catholic King of Spain and his grandfather, the Most Christian King of France, cannot accept such a barefaced offer of betrayal. But they can take advantage of the situation, and achieve the same result: peace. That’s why they decided to send me to Vienna to inform the appropriate authorities of Eugene’s treachery. In this way the imperial army will find itself effectively without a leader, and the path towards the armistice will be open.”

“Inform the appropriate authorities?” I stammered, guessing where the conversation was leading.

“Certainly: the Emperor. And you will help me.”

The terror I suddently felt must have been painted so clearly on my face that Atto’s nephew asked me if by any chance I wanted a glass of water. Now it was clear why Atto had forced me to listen to all that preamble about Eugene of Savoy. I wiped a few beads of sweat from my forehead, as gelid as the flowing Danube under its crust of winter ice. In the confusion that swirled around my brain, where the Turkish Agha was weaving enigmatic dances first with Abbot Melani and then with the Duke of Savoy, one thought outweighed all others: Atto had once again ensnared me in one of his fateful intrigues.

What could I do? Refuse outright to help him, and maybe arouse his ire, with the risk that he might revoke the gift he had bestowed on me or that he might commit some indiscretion and reveal me as his accomplice? Or take the risk, and try to satisfy him, maybe in as uncommitted a fashion as possible, hoping that he would leave Vienna very soon?

One thing was certain: the donation that had made me wealthy was not a reward for the services I had done him in the past, but for those that he was expecting from me over the next few days.

“Holy heaven,” I sighed, my voice choking, as I myself began to look around to see if anyone was listening in, “and how do you think I can help you?”

“It’s simple. My cover as an intendant of the imperial posts cannot hold out for long, here in the city. If I tried to present myself at court I would be recognised as a French enemy, and cut into pieces like a sausage. We’ll need some kind of shortcut to reach the Emperor.”

He leaned forward again, to whisper even more tremulously: “In the same street as the Porta Coeli there lives a person who is close to the Emperor’s heart. She is a girl aged just twenty, named Marianna Pálffy. She’s the daughter of a Hungarian nobleman faithful to the Emperor and she is Joseph’s lover.”

“Lover? I had no idea. .” I said in consternation.

“Of course you had no idea. These are tempting items of gossip that the Viennese do not confide to foreigners; but French agents ensure that they reach Paris. Joseph found lodgings for her in Porta Coeli Street, on the suggestion of Eugene, whose own palace is next door. She lives, to be precise, in a small building owned by a nun from Porta Coeli, Sister Anna Eleonora Strassoldo, a noblewoman of Italian origins, who is now headmistress of the convent’s novitiate. She can also serve as a means to reach the Pálffy woman,” he replied, in the most casual of tones.

I felt crestfallen: that was why Atto had found lodgings for himself and for me at Porta Coeli! The convent was right at the heart of the web of intrigue that he was busily weaving between Eugene’s palace and the house where the lover of Joseph the Victorious lived. I felt like telling him that I had understood his design, but I did not have time to open my mouth. Atto had already asked his nephew to hand him his stick and was now standing up.

“I’m going for a stroll. Let’s not go out together again, people might notice. You stay here, if you want to enjoy the warmth a little longer. I’ll contact you when it’s time to act.”

I was quite prepared to stay there by myself, sitting at the table, dazed and disconsolate, when the door of the coffee shop opened again and a new arrival took Atto and his nephew by surprise. At the entrance to the Blue Bottle stood Cloridia.

“I got your note at the Porta Coeli,” she said to me — and then she saw who was with me. At first she could not believe her eyes.

“Signor Abbot Melani. . Signor Abbot Melani! Here?”

Unlike the previous occasions when they had met, Cloridia broke into a broad and heartfelt smile on seeing Atto. She was full of generous affection and thanked him profusely for the gift that had finally brought us comfort and prosperity. The Abbot responded to Cloridia’s words with great tact and equal friendliness, and when she expressed her sorrow at his loss of sight, Atto even seemed to be touched. Time had left its marks on both their faces, but had sweetened their characters. Cloridia found a withered, fragile octogenarian, and Atto a mature woman. While they were still exchanging affectionate words, the door opened yet again. It was Simonis. He humbly greeted Cloridia, Atto and Domenico; Abbot Melani, catching the unpleasant smell of soot, raised his handkerchief to his nose again.

“We must hurry,” my wife announced. “In a moment he’ll be leaving Prince Eugene’s palace. We can follow him.”

“Who?”

“That Ciezeber, the dervish. I saw some strange things at the palace today. And after what the Agha said to Eugene, we had better try to get things straight.”

“What did the Agha say to Eugene?” put in Atto.

“A strange phrase,” answered Cloridia. “He said that the Turks have come here all alone to the pomum aureum. .”

“It’s a complicated story,” I said to Melani, trying to interrupt my wife, who still knew nothing of my suspicions about Atto and the Turks. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Pomum aureum?” asked Atto, clearly very interested in all that was going on in Eugene’s palace, “and what does that mean?”

“The city of Vienna, or perhaps the whole Empire,” answered Cloridia, who had failed to catch my numerous stern looks advising her to say nothing.

“Very interesting,” remarked Atto. “I don’t think one often hears a Turkish ambassador express himself in such imaginative terms. It almost sounds like a coded message.”

“Exactly!” said Cloridia. “The expression pomum aureum clearly indicates Vienna, but why specify that the Turks have come here all alone? Who could have come with them? To understand that we need to know where this expression ‘Golden Apple’ comes from.”

“If you like,” put in Simonis, “I can help you solve the problem.”

“And how?” asked Atto.

“I can get some student friends of mine to examine the case. They’re all very sharp young men, as you know,” he said, addressing me. “All you need do is offer a suitable cash reward. It wouldn’t be too expensive; they don’t expect much.”

“Perfect. Excellent idea,” Cloridia pronounced.

I could not protest: we were not short of money, after all. The situation had slipped from my control.

“Now let’s go, quickly,” urged my wife, “otherwise the dervish will get away from us.”

We made hastily towards the door, abandoning Atto Melani and Domenico in the coffee shop, instead of being abandoned by them as had been the earlier plan. As I bade them a hasty farewell, I saw the surprised and slightly bewildered expressions on their faces.

As soon as we stepped outside, a freezing gust of wind impelled us on. We were just about to reach Porta Coeli Street when Cloridia held me back:

“There he is, he must have just left the palace,” she said, pointing at a dark figure of unusual build.

“Simonis, go back to Porta Coeli and carry on with the afternoon’s cleaning rounds with our boy. As for me and Cloridia, I don’t know what time we’ll get back.”

The pursuit began.

Ciezeber had a large white cloak, a long, grizzled and unkempt beard, and a grey pointed felt cap wrapped around by a green turban. He had a hunting horn by his side, a bag on his shoulders and in his hand he held a stick with a sort of large iron hook at the top. His demeanour, despite his advanced age, was grim and wild. I would not have cared to meet him in a lonely spot. His tattered clothes, pale, deeply furrowed face, emaciated figure and fierce brutish features gave him the appearance of a cross between a priest and a vagabond. He seemed totally unaware of the curiosity of the passers-by, who at every corner turned round and gazed at him in amusement. He was moving at a swift pace away from Porta Coeli, measuring his stride with his stick, in the direction of the church of the Augustinians.

“Curse it, Cloridia,” I said as we followed him, “what made you talk about the Turks and the Agha in front of Atto? Didn’t it strike you that he might have come here for some shady dealings, as is usually the case?”

I explained that Abbot Melani had arrived in Vienna at almost the same time as the Turks, and that it might not have been just a coincidence.

“You’re right,” she admitted, after reflecting for a moment. “I should have been more careful.”

It was the first time in her whole life that my intelligent and acute consort, able to foresee, calculate and assess everything, and to analyse and connect every event, had ever had to admit to an oversight. Could it be that with age the implacable blade of her acumen was losing its edge?

“Do you know something?” she added contentedly. “Ever since we stopped being poor and started to enjoy your Abbot Melani’s gift here in Vienna, I’ve finally learned how to be careless.”

Ciezeber had meanwhile walked all the way down Carinthia Street and was about to leave by the gate of the same name: the gateway to the south, the same one by which Cloridia and I had first entered Vienna on our arrival.

The pursuit was not without its difficulties. On the one hand Ciezeber was easy to distinguish even at a distance, thanks to his headgear and clothing. On the other hand, the flat landscape of the suburbs to the south of Vienna makes it difficult to follow anyone without the risk of being spotted.

As he made his way through the Carinthian Gate the dervish drew a number of amused remarks from travellers and merchants, who were passing through in their carriages, but he remained wholly indifferent and did not vary his pace. Along the way Cloridia explained certain details of Ciezeber’s clothing.

“The kind of horn he has is sounded by dervishes at fixed hours every day, before prayers. The stick is used to support his head in the brief moments he devotes to rest, but actually it’s an instrument of spiritual training: dervishes love to rest their chin on the large hook at the top of the stick and close their eyes; but the stick holds him up only when the hook is completely still. If the dervish really falls asleep, the hook sways, the stick falls down and wakes him up.”

“Almost an instrument of torture, I’d say.”

“It all depends on your point of view,” smiled my wife. “The fact is that these dervishes, as my mother told me, can do some really bizarre things.”

After leaving the Carinthian Gate, we had crossed the dusty clearing known as the Glacis which surrounds the ramparts of Vienna, and we had crossed the city’s lesser river, called the Wienn, from which some say the Caesarean city derives its name. The dervish proceeded at a good pace, making his way towards the suburb of Wieden, beyond which stretched long rows of vines, a pleasant expanse of green as far as the eye could see. We left Nickelsdorf and Matzesdorf behind, and we came in sight of the external fortifications, the so-called Linienwall, erected just a few years earlier by Italian experts.

Still following the dervish we passed through the gate in the defensive walls, thus leaving the city’s territory altogether. Our pursuit continued in the open countryside, along the road that leads from Vienna to Neustadt.

All around us were ploughed fields, with just the occasional building. We kept walking behind our man for a good hour, often at the risk of losing him: outside the walls there were no palaces or houses to conceal us, so to avoid detection we had to stay at a good distance. As I have already said, his tall stature and unmistakable Turkish turban made him recognisable from a long way off. Luckily I knew the road well: it was the same one I had travelled along with Simonis and our little boy to get to the Place with No Name.

In the meantime Cloridia told me what she had seen at Eugene’s palace that day.

“Today Ciezeber received a visit from a mysterious individual. For some very, very shady business.”

“A mysterious individual?”

“Nobody was able to see him. He entered by some back door, and left the same way. But I was lucky: not only did I discover he was there, but I managed to find out that he was not Viennese, and perhaps not even Christian.”

Things had gone this way. Cloridia had accompanied a servant girl to the palace as two members of the Agha’s retinue wanted to purchase some fabrics from her. They were bargaining in one of the rooms on the first floor, when Cloridia, through a chink in the door, saw a strange, evil-smelling figure stealing up the stairs, wrapped in a filthy overcoat which carefully concealed his face. He was accompanied by one of the Ottoman soldiers who usually escorted the dervish. As the servant girl seemed perfectly at ease in her negotiations (one of the two Turks interested in her fabrics spoke a little German, and above all knew how to count and was familiar with the value of the coins), Cloridia found a pretext to leave them and managed to identify the room to which the mysterious individual had been taken. Once the girl and the two Turks had come to an agreement, my crafty little wife went to spy on what was going on in the mysterious visitor’s room.

“I immediately identified Ciezeber’s voice. In addition to him there were at least two other Turks present. Obviously they were talking in their own language. Then there was that strange filthy man, the mysterious guest, who expressed himself in a language I did not know — it could have been European or Asiatic. He had a hollow, stammering voice, but I don’t know whether it was due to age or some speech defect. The strange thing is that, although the individual words were incomprehensible, the general sense of what he was saying was fairly clear.”

“And what was he talking to the dervish about?”

“About a head. The head of a man. The dervish wants it at all costs.”

“Good heavens,” I exclaimed, “they’re planning a murder! And who are they going to kill?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t catch that, maybe they’d already said it before I arrived. It’s probably someone important, or at least I got the impression that that’s how the dervish and his two companions consider him.”

“And the head — when are they planning to. . to obtain it?”

“That’s what Ciezeber was asking the visitor, and insistently. The visitor promised to set about it and to get news to them by this evening or tomorrow.”

My mood, already dampened by my awareness that I had become a pawn in Abbot Melani’s conspiracy, became even more depressed. Cloridia and I had guessed correctly: the Turkish embassy had come to Vienna not for diplomatic ends, but for some shadowy and bloody design.

Our pursuit continued. We had long ago left Matzelsdorf behind with its poetic little houses, among which welcome taverns lay concealed, and the Linienwall. We had started along the road towards Simmering. Every so often the land rose slightly, affording us a distant but impressive view of the city, surrounded by its powerful walls.

Ciezeber maintained a steady rhythm in his walking, without ever hesitating at the crossroads; he seemed to have no doubt about his final destination.

“When we started out you said you knew where he was heading,” I reminded Cloridia.

“At the end of the conversation with the mysterious guest I heard Ciezeber announce that he was going to a distant lonely place. A wood, I’d say, since there’s no shortage of them around Vienna.”

We looked at each other: a wood, for example, like the one at the Place with No Name. Which, by now it was clear, was where we were heading.

Soon the fields gave way to the green shades of oaks and larches, spruces and red beeches, which clustered together around the Place with No Name. We took a path that made towards a little hill near Maximilian’s manor, from which the house could clearly be seen. At every step the vegetation grew thicker.

No one who has not seen them can imagine how rich and blessed the Viennese woods are. When you finally leave the vine-clad hills and orchards behind and immerse yourself in the dense sylvan foliage of the basin of Vienna, it’s like being received into the soft lap of a tender mother, who comforts her children, still choking from the dust of the city, and consoles them with gently caressing leaves and sweet birdsong, cushioning their footsteps with velvety leaves and dewy lichens.

It was that season of early spring when the forest floor delights the eyes with its emerald green, and a pungent culinary aroma tickles your nostrils and your imagination. What stirs these feelings is a herb, whose name I did not know then, which fills the Viennese woods in April, and whose spicy effluvium makes you think that every nook conceals a dish of river trout with herbs, or a stuffed leg of pork.

We made our way into the forest on the heels of the dervish, who was still unaware of our pursuit. After another half-hour of walking, Ciezeber finally came to a halt in the very depths of the woods. Beyond him, through the tree trunks, we could make out the imposing white shape of the Place with No Name. It was as if he had chosen that corner of the forest precisely because it was so close to Maximilian’s creation. After all, was not the Place with No Name, known as Neugebäu, dear to the Turks? We hid behind the trunk of a large fallen tree and watched.

After setting his bag down on the grass and taking out some curious tools, he arranged them on a carpet on the ground. He did not look around himself: he seemed certain that he was all alone.

He bowed deeply towards the east, with a grave, impenetrable face. Then he sat down. After pausing with his eyes closed, he stood up again and went and knelt down in front of the carpet where his tools were lying and kissed the ground. Then he put his hands on the implements, as if in blessing, pronouncing some incomprehensible formula in a low voice. Finally, rising yet again, he took off his cloak and goatskin coat. He stood there, half-naked, his chest both skeletal and firm, heedless of the cold.

He pulled out two bracelets with rattles from the bag and slipped them onto his ankles. Then from inside the coat he took a long dagger whose handle was decorated with bells and he stepped barefooted onto the carpet, among the tools. Up to now he had remained perfectly calm and composed. But now he gradually grew animated, as if by the effect of some internal fire: his chest swelled, his nostrils dilated and his eyes began to roll in their orbits with extraordinary speed.

This transformation was accompanied and stimulated by his own singing and dancing. After beginning with a monotonous recitative, Ciezeber soon grew louder, passing onto lilting shouts and cries, to a feverish rhythm set by his swiftly tapping feet, and the rattling of his anklets and the tinkling of the bells on the dagger handle.

When the rhythm became frenzied, the dervish repeatedly lifted and lowered the arm that was holding the dagger as if, stirred by some alien force, he was not even aware of his own movements. A convulsive spasm shot through his limbs. He was now shouting so frenetically that we could hardly hear the rattles and bells. Then he began to jump, executing such prodigious leaps and continuing all the while with his stentorian singing that the sweat streamed down his bare chest.

It was the moment of inspiration. At first he seemed to cast a rapt glance at the distant expanse of white stone of the Place with No Name. Then, brandishing the dagger, which he had never abandoned, and the slightest shake of which set the numerous bells jangling wildly, he stretched his arm out in front of himself. Then, suddenly bending it with great vigour, he thrust the dagger into his cheek, so that the tip penetrated his flesh and appeared inside his open mouth. Blood gushed from both sides of the wound, and I raised my hand as if to ward off the horrifying spectacle.

The dervish bowed down, pulled out the blade and, licking his hand, washed his wounded cheek with saliva. The operation lasted just a few seconds, but when he raised his head and turned in our direction, all traces of the wound had vanished.

Then Ciezeber sat down again with his eyes closed for a few moments. Standing up once more, he began the same performance all over again, and this time wounded his arm, which he medicated in the same way. Once again, the wound vanished.

The third ritual bewildered and horrified me even more profoundly. After rummaging among his utensils, Ciezeber armed himself with a great curved sabre. He gripped it by both ends, placed the concave side of the blade on his belly and with a gentle oscillatory movement made it penetrate his own flesh. At once a purple line stood out on his dark, shining skin, black blood trickled down his legs, staining the rattles on his ankles. As he inflicted this torment on himself, the dervish smiled. Cloridia and I gazed at each other in appalled astonishment.

Swaying slightly, Ciezeber bent down over his tools. He picked up a little box with an ornamented top and opened it. In his hand he held a small piece of dark material, like a crust of bread. Then he extracted from the heap of tools a sort of small pointed knife, and began a strange oration, with his mouth half open.

“It’s as if he were reciting the psalms,” I whispered to Cloridia.

“Indian psalms, though,” she answered.

The psalmody lasted quite a while. Every so often Ciezeber would break off, open his eyes and address the two objects he held in his hands in a strange amorous tone, and then start chanting again.

At last the bizarre ritual ended. The dervish medicated the long cut on his belly with saliva; all traces of suffering vanished from his face and body and the wound seemed to heal almost instantaneously. After replacing the dagger, rattles and anklets, gathering together the heap of tools and rolling up the carpet, the dervish got dressed again and set off calmly back towards the city.

We left our hiding place. I walked towards the spot where he had carried out his horrifying rituals. On the grass, drops of blood could be seen that had run off the carpet. I bent down to touch them, and they stained my fingertips. Still uncertain of what I had seen, I tasted them. It was definitely blood.

What on earth had happened? Had my eyes not seen properly? Had the blood not really come gushing out? Had my hands not really touched it and my mouth not tasted it? I thought back to all the performances I had seen by famous conjurers who flocked into Vienna for the annual markets, but I could remember nothing that bore any resemblance to what I had just witnessed. We had been observing an extremely primitive and simple being — and, in addition, he had thought he was on his own. So there could be no tricks.

Disturbed by the awful spectacle, I listened unenthusiastically to what Cloridia told me about the feats dervishes are capable of.

“My mother often told me: they can cut off any limb, even their own head, and heal it at once as if nothing had happened. It seems they possess natural secrets — or rather, supernatural ones, which come down from the ancient priests of Egypt.”

“How come the Agha brought an Indian dervish to Vienna?”

“I have no way of knowing that. But perhaps he was summoned to carry out an important task, one that could not be entrusted to a Turkish dervish.”

“Aren’t the Turks good dervishes as well?”

“Who do you think a dervish is?” asked Cloridia with a little smile.

“Well, when I saw them mentioned in the books about the Sublime Porte and its customs, I imagined they were monks with a vow of poverty, pious Muslim mendicants, in their own way holy men, subject to a fairly austere rule, subject to some kind of sacerdotal hierarchy, who carry out charitable duties or sacrifices.”

“Nothing could be less like a Turkish dervish than your fantasy figure,” my wife said sarcastically. “Any Turk can be transformed instantly into a dervish, so long as he puts round his neck or onto his belt some kind of talisman, a stone picked up near Mecca, a dry leaf that’s fallen from a tree overshadowing a saint’s tomb, or any sort of thing. There are dervishes who wear a goatskin like a pointed cap on their heads, and this singular ornament is all they need to prove incontrovertibly their right to the title of dervish and the veneration of the faithful.”

The Turkish dervishes, my wife went on, live by begging and are ready to turn to theft whenever people do not prove generous enough. Like every good Turk, they have wives whom they leave in their native villages while they go on their eternal pilgrimages, taking a new wife whenever they feel lonely, and abandoning them as soon as they reacquire their taste for the vagabond’s life. Sometimes, after a few years, a dervish will return to the wife he remembers most fondly. If she has waited for him, the couple will get back together for a while; if she has found some better option or has not been patient enough, she will apologise as best she can and need not fear any resentment on the part of the dervish.

“This is the Turkish dervish,” concluded Cloridia, “an idler and an impostor who will sometimes turn to brigandry, when circumstances permit it. Dervishes worthy of the name are something quite different — for example, the Indians like Ciezeber.”

Dervishes of this kind, explained Cloridia as we made our way back to Vienna, are much sought after: they can heal men and animals miraculously, they know how to cure sterility in women, mares and cows, they can find treasures hidden in the earth, and drive out evil spirits haunting flocks or girls. They have the power to intervene in anything of a magical nature.

“Their mysticism makes them capable of feats like the ones we’ve just seen,” concluded my consort, “but it has nothing to do with fidelity to the Prophet. In fact, their orthodoxy is often questionable and they are suspected of being indifferent to the Koran.”

Unsettled by the spectacle that Ciezeber had offered us, and disconcerted by what Cloridia was recounting, I could only come up with pointless questions:

“Just what were those objects he held while he chanted? And how do you think Ciezeber manages to pull off those miracles?”

“My darling,” she answered patiently, “I know something of the dervishes but I can’t explain the secrets of their rites.”

“I don’t see what all this has to do with the head that Ciezeber wants to get hold of at all costs, nor with the Agha’s visit. And I don’t understand whether he came here, right in front of the Place with No Name, for a specific purpose: this is a sacred place for the Turks,” I said, thinking back to Simonis’s story of Suleiman’s tent.

“I’ll settle for having no opinion. In some cases, it’s the only way not to make a mistake,” Cloridia said peremptorily, as we made our way back, savouring the luscious garlicky smell of the wild herbs that grow in the underwood.

17 of the clock, end of the working day: workshops and chancelleries close. Dinner hour for artisans, secretaries, language teachers, priests, servants of commerce, footmen and coach drivers (while in Rome people take but a light refection).

When we got back to Porta Coeli Street, Cloridia went to Prince Eugene’s palace to see to some matters she had left unresolved before we started following the dervish. At the convent I found Simonis who had just finished cleaning all the soot off our son, and who was setting off with him to the nearby eating house for their evening meal. I joined them, and over dinner I told my assistant about Ciezeber’s gruesome rituals in the woods. However, the difficulty of making Simonis understand what I had seen and the series of idiotic questions that he then asked soon made me regret I had said anything about it. I began to wonder just why the Greek could at times be so lucid and at others, like this moment, so totally doltish.

“Tomorrow we’ll get on with our work at Neugebäu,” I announced, to change the subject.

“If I may, Signor Master, I’d like to remind you that tomorrow is Sunday. If you wish, I can certainly work, but it is also Weisser Sonntag, which is to say dominica in albis, and I think that if some guard should find us. .”

Simonis was right. The next day was Sunday, dominica in albis to be precise, and by law anyone found doing opera servilia et mercenaria would be subject to financial and even corporal punishment and confiscation of goods, since — as the imperial edict declared — working on a holy day aroused divine wrath and therefore paved the way for plagues, wars, famine and pestilence.

“Thank you Simonis, I had forgotten. Monday then.”

“I’m sorry to remind you, Signor Master, that on Monday lessons begin again at the university, the Easter holidays having finished.”

“You’re right. I hope you have found someone to follow the lessons for you again.”

“Of course, Signor Master: my Pennal.”

“Your. . what? Oh yes, that lame boy,” I said, remembering the Deposition I had attended.

“Yes, him, Signor Master; his name is Penicek, I’m his Barber and he’s entirely at my beck and call. However, I’m afraid I’ll have to attend in person the university’s reopening ceremony at least. But I’ll do all I can to avoid any inconvenience.”

I nodded. I was really lucky to have found Simonis as my assistant chimney-sweep. He worked from morning to night, disregarding regular hours, festivities and the thousand and one legal opportunities that Vienna offered every day and every week to stay off work.

To my amazement and dismay I had discovered, soon after moving there, that in the Caesarean city there were no more than 250 working days a year, with interruptions as regular as they were absurd. First of all there were the so-called “blue Mondays”, which is to say the Mondays when, on one pretext or another, the Sunday break was extended. To these were added countless different activities, like the annual markets, which often went on for weeks and gave people the right to take days off to attend them, and pilgrimages, which could also last a whole week. And all these absences from work had to be fully remunerated!

“I’ve been wanting to tell you, Simonis, that I’m satisfied with you and with your work,” I said to the Greek as I meditated on these matters.

“Thank you, Signor Master, I’m honoured,” he answered deferentially, his mouth full of onion and chamois sauce.

I had good reason to thank my assistant! In all that chaos of festivity, Simonis used the great number of university holidays to devote himself wholeheartedly to his work as a chimney-sweep under my authority. There were very few days when I had to do without his labour, and even then it would never be for more than a few hours: like Maundy Thursday, the previous 2nd April, when the Herren Studenten (as it said in the summons) were called to the ritual washing of feet in the chapel of the Caesarean college; or next 25th April, feast of St Mark, when they would accompany the great procession from St Stephen’s to St Mark’s and back again.

When I had told our few acquaintances that we were about to leave for Vienna, they had looked at me as if I were mad: you’re going off to the cold, among those doltish sausage-eaters! After being there just a few months, I had a strong suspicion — or rather, the certainty — that it was the Romans who were the dolts.

“Signor Master,” put in Simonis, stemming the stream of self-satisfaction that was swelling in my breast, “I’ve let my student friends know about your interest in the Golden Apple. I took the liberty of arranging a brief meeting here, so you can tell them what you need and instruct them personally. Dànilo Danilovitsch, however, sent me a note a short while ago asking to meet us at midnight: maybe he already has some information.”

Cloridia came into the eating house on her way back from work at Prince Eugene’s palace. It was clear from the expression on her face that she was deeply upset.

“Oh, my husband, if you only knew what happened to me today,” she began, taking a seat and draining my glass of wine in a few gulps.

Then she smiled at our son, who was gazing across the table at her with a worried expression. She leaned over to give him a kiss and fondled his hair. Then she asked Simonis, who had already eaten, to take the boy back to the convent in time for his German lesson; she and I would join them shortly.

Cloridia wanted to report some grave circumstance to me, but was afraid of our son’s reaction. When Simonis and the boy had gone, my wife dropped her motherly smile and pressed my hand between hers, which were damp with cold sweat.

“What’s the matter?” I asked in alarm.

“Thank God that Monday is my last day working at the palace; the Agha will be received by Prince Eugene again, but then he’ll go back to his lodgings on the Leopoldine Island. On Tuesday Eugene will leave for The Hague. The end of the job will mean the end of my pay, but no matter. If what happened to me today were to happen again, it could all get very nasty.”

“Get very nasty? Why, what happened?”

“That foul creature. . the one who promised to get the head for the dervish.”

“Yes?”

“He was at the palace again. I met him twice. The first time was on the servants’ staircase, with his Turkish companions. If you could have seen how he eyed me! I saw his face at last, if you can call that bundle of leathery scraps a face. He stared at me with bloodshot eyes, and his grey, suspicious pupils bored into me like grappling hooks. I walked away quickly, but I had the impression his eyes were still on me. I’m afraid he guessed something; let’s hope that later, when I saw him the second time, he didn’t realise I was spying on him.”

“And why did you have to spy on him?” I exclaimed, horrified at the thought that my sweet spouse might end up a target for a head-hunter.

After her first encounter with the hooded man, Cloridia had been acting as interpreter between the Agha’s major-domo and one of the palace cooks, when out of the corner of her eye she had seen this monstrous individual again, this time walking up the palace’s main staircase. He had a furtive air and would have got by unobserved if Cloridia had not happened to open the door of the room she was in just as this creature was going up to the second floor. Intrigued by his cautiousness, Cloridia had slipped away from her interlocutors and silently followed him.

“I was scared, but it was worth taking the risk. Maybe the hooded man was going to have another talk with Ciezeber,” explained my courageous little wife.

But the unknown figure continued to wander around the palace in perfect solitude. He must have been well informed: it was the hour when the staff was usually concentrated downstairs, between the kitchens and the service rooms, and there was no one about in the corridors on the first and second floor. After quickly exploring some rooms on the second floor, the furtive figure went back to the lower floor.

Here, explained Cloridia, in a room that looked onto Porta Coeli Street, some large bookcases were being set up: “They say that Eugene intends to fill them with a great collection of books, and to this end he’s already planning to buy a great number of printed volumes and manuscripts as quickly as possible.”

As the carpenters had not yet finished their work on the bookcases, some wooden chests had been temporarily placed on the empty shelves, whose contents were unknown to everyone, except Eugene and his collaborators. The hooded individual, acting with feline swiftness, entered this future library unchallenged.

Not being able to enter herself (and above all not wanting to do so), Cloridia tried to work out what he was up to by putting her ear to the door. First she heard a scuffling noise on the left-hand side of the room. Then a tinkling of coins, as if someone were picking up handfuls of them and dropping them into a bag. Finally, footsteps approaching the door.

The individual then emerged from Prince Eugene’s future library and slipped away along the corridors of the palace, probably planning to leave by some service door.

As soon as she was left alone, Cloridia entered the library. On the shelves were several large wooden chests of various shapes and sizes. The individual could have searched any number of them but only one drew her attention: its lid was not properly closed, perhaps because it was defective, so that the light-coloured wood of its interior was visible.

Raising the lid, Cloridia found a dusty jumble of objects: heaps of old gazettes, military maps and drafts of letters. Apparently all things of little value, which Eugene must have put there temporarily, until the library should be ready. Although she only had a few moments to spare, Cloridia groped around the bottom of the chest and her fingers felt something cold and metallic, which emitted the same tinkling sound she had heard a few moments earlier. She peered more closely into the chest and made out a small heap of strange metal fragments of irregular shape.

“I took one of them, have a look.”

My sweet spouse had hesitated a while before pocketing the strange object, which after all did belong to the Most Serene Prince, but since there were a great many of these strange metal fragments bearing effigies of coins, it would not make much difference to take just one of them, for the moment at least. There would be plenty of opportunities for her to replace it. In the meantime we could work out just what the devil it was, and why this mysterious individual had apparently carried off a heap of them.

I turned it round in my hands.

“It’s blackened with age, but it’s undoubtedly silver,” I remarked.

“Exactly. And if you look at the top edge, it looks like the rim of a plate. A silver plate.”

In the middle was a round engraving, on which a nobleman’s coat of arms could be discerned: a lion’s foot on a striped field. Above it, next to a raised border, were the words:

LANDAV 1702 IIII LIVRE

At the four corners the lilies of France had been stamped.

“What on earth is it?” I asked, bewildered.

“Ah, don’t ask me.”

“It looks very much like a coin; it says ‘4 livre’, and livres are French liras. And at the corners are the lilies of France. But it looks as if it hasn’t been coined at a mint, but with some rudimentary contraption.”

“Perhaps it’s a forged French coin,” said Cloridia.

“It wouldn’t fool many French people, I’d say.”

“Landau is the German city where Emperor Joseph won two battles, if I’m not mistaken,” said Cloridia.

“Exactly, in 1702 and 1704. But this is definitely not a commemorative medal. Firstly, because medals of that sort don’t look as shoddy as this. Secondly, because it has lilies, a French symbol, not an imperial one.”

At that moment we had to break off; Simonis was back. We showed him the strange coin, asking him if he could throw any light on it.

“Never seen anything like it. I know that Landau is an important German fortress in the region of the Palatinate, and our beloved Emperor besieged it and captured it twice. But what this piece of silver is, I’ve no idea.”

The discussion was very short, because at that point Simonis’s student friends turned up. There was the whole group: “Baron” Koloman Szupán from Varasdin, the Romanian “Prince” Dragomir Populescu, the Pole Jan Janitzki Count Opalinski, the Bulgarian Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov, and, to complete the set, the Beano — or rather the Pennal — of the Deposition, the Bohemian Penicek, who limped over to stand servilely behind his Barber, Simonis.

“Thank you for coming to lend us a hand,” I began, inviting them with a gesture to sit at our table.

“Always at your service,” Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov, the Bulgarian, said at once.

“Don’t be fooled by appearances, Signor Master,” said the Greek, as if to reassure me, “you can rely on us. Right, Hristo?”

“Of course, dear Simonis,” said Hristo, drawing breath as if in preparation for a long speech. “Students are the noblest stock of the human race! We are the most valuable treasure, the quintessence of mankind, gold among the baser metals, the gem set in the gold. In the world we are like the wise man among idiots, like man among the unreasoning animals. We are the ornament of the city, the laurel crown of parents, blessed children of the gods, favoured scions of wisdom, pillars of knowledge and of the land!”

This aroused the first of a long series of clappings and whistles of approval.

“It’s only that invert Populescu who has no pillar,” remarked Koloman Szupán, provoking a general outburst of laughter.

“And you have two, one outside and one inside,” retorted Populescu.

“No smuttiness, you idiots, there’s a lady here,” warned Simonis, politely gesturing towards Cloridia, who actually seemed highly amused by these fatuous jokes.

Hristo continued his harangue.

“And what else? We are princes and stars of the world, and all eyebrows should now arch in amazement. I have no doubt that many of our enemies will turn up their noses, but anatomists report that the limbs, veins, flesh and bowels are the same in all men: true nobility resides in the brain and not in so-called noble blood. In ancient Egypt only scholars had a noble title. The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, highly cultured and of temperate habits, preferred to give his own daughter in marriage to an impoverished philosopher rather than to a rich imbecile.”

“He could have given her to Koloman, who’s poor but also an imbecile,” joked Populescu.

“Or to you, a pederast and an imbecile,” replied Koloman.

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm,” grunted Populescu to himself.

“Silence, my good friends, let me finish! Students are to the city what the thumb is to the hand. We should be called angels for our friendliness, since being free and easy is an angelic virtue. Where do civility and humanity flourish, if not in universities? There, even more than in courts, since courtesy in the ignorant is spiced with manifest hypocrisy. We students are the genuine carbuncle, which outshines all other gems; we are the emerald and sapphire of the city, which, with their vivid pleasing colours stimulate the eyes of all spectators: how splendid it is to see these sons of the Muses stroll up and down the city, a feast for the eyes, unlike the vulgar, puffed-up footsloggers! And we will not mention all the indescribable adversities a poor student has to face from early youth to the end of his life! Sources of fear, exhaustion and headaches. . I will just say that students are the most precious of noblemen, a crown contextam splendidissimis virtutibus, gemmis longe pretiosioribus!”

“Come off the high horse!” Opalinski retorted.

“I said we are a crown enriched with the most splendid virtues, and with gems that are even more precious! Does that suit you, ignorant dolt?” Hristo snapped back. “And that’s all I have to say.”

The Bulgarian’s disquisition and his final quip aroused a great burst of applause from his companions, in which Cloridia and I politely joined. “Let’s hope for the best!” I thought to myself, eyeing the troop of scholarly roisterers.

I gave a brief account of the mysterious sentence “Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum!” which the Agha had pronounced at the audience with Prince Eugene, and I promised them a suitable reward in money. However, on the advice of Simonis, to whom I had recounted everything, I omitted the fact that Cloridia had heard the Agha’s dervish plotting to cut someone’s head off. According to my assistant, if I told them that detail, all the money in the world would not suffice to keep them there: they would all take to their heels at once. I also left out the fact that the Most Serene Prince had kept the paper containing this sentence, given to him by the Agha, in his personal diary, no less; I was ashamed to reveal that Cloridia had pried into his private papers. Prince Eugene, to tell the truth, deserved much worse, given the treachery revealed in the letter that Abbot Melani had shown me. But I certainly could not spill such a secret to a whole horde of students.

These high-spirited students all came from the lands east of Vienna. They had suffered under the Ottoman yoke and had a great hatred for that people.

“Turks: beasts dressed up as men,” whispered Populescu with disgust.

“Pennal! Do your Turk’s face,” ordered Simonis.

Poor Penicek mimed an expression that was idiotic and ferocious at the same time.

“No, Pennal, that’s Jan Janitzki, Count Opalinski,” sniggered Hristo, miming grotesque haughtiness.

“Go and get buggered by the Turks, Hristo Hadji-Tanjov Junior,” Opalinski defended himself, “seeing that they adore eunuchs like you.”

The jeering and scoffing against the Sublime Porte and the coarse civility of its subjects went on for a while. I saw Cloridia’s face darken. Simonis’s companions did not know that my gentle consort had a Turkish mother. When she returned from her job at Eugene’s palace, she herself had described the baseness of the Ottomans. But no one likes to hear their own folk scorned by others.

To distract them, I told them about the mysterious hooded creature in filthy rags who had stared so threateningly at Cloridia.

“He must have been Turkish too,” sneered Dragomir. “Their women dress so dreadfully that your radiant beauty, Monna Cloridia, must have literally blinded him.”

I saw my wife cheer up a little at this unexpected compliment.

“But you hear so much about their harems. .” protested lame Penicek, who had probably approached very few women in his life.

“Right, because you get taken in by their boasting; the Ottomans are great at inventing cock-and-bull stories about the supposed wonders of their country. But have you ever entered a harem?”

“Well, not yet. .”

“It’s nothing more than a filthy den, all darkness and confusion, pestilential and full of smoke. Imagine black, peeling walls, wooden ceilings with great cracks, everything covered in dust and cobwebs, greasy torn sofas, tattered curtains, candle grease and oil stains everywhere.”

Turkish women, went on Dragomir, have no mirrors, which are rare in Turkey, so they put on all sorts of frills at random, unaware how ridiculous they look. They make excessive use of coloured powders, for example putting blue intended for the eyes under their nose as well. They help each other to put their make-up on and, since they’re rivals, they give each other the worst possible advice. They dye their eyebrows with so much black that they paint huge arches on their forehead from the bridge of their nose right up to their temples, or, even worse, draw a single long line right across their forehead.

“The effect of all this make-up, combined with their idleness and filth, makes Turkish women quite revolting,” remarked Populescu with a grimace.

“Just when did you become an expert on Ottoman harems?” said Koloman Szupán in surprise.

As if that were not enough, continued Populescu without answering him, every woman’s face is made up in such a complicated way that it is considered a work of art that is too difficult to wash off and redo every morning. The same for their hands and feet, painted in shades of orange. So they never wash, fearing that water will cancel the rouge. What makes the harems even dirtier are the numerous children and the maidservants, who unfortunately are often negresses, who live there with them.

“The negresses rest on the same divans and armchairs as their mistresses, with their feet on the same carpets and their backs resting against the same wall-hangings! Ugh!” exclaimed Dragomir.

“Do you find negresses so disgusting?” sneered Koloman. “I’m amazed you have such a delicate palate. .”

“I’m not like you, who would go with a monkey,” retorted the Romanian.

Populescu added that as glass is still a novelty in Asia, most windows are closed with oiled paper, and where paper is hard to get they solve things by doing away with windows altogether and make do with the light that comes down the chimney, more than enough for smoking, drinking and beating rebellious children, the only pastimes Turkish women engage in during the day.

“The harems, in short, are hermetically sealed, artificial caverns, heated by stifling cast-iron stoves, and full of unkempt women and badly behaved children!” concluded Populescu with a coarse laugh, clutching his neck with both hands to mimic the sense of suffocation.

“There’s nothing to laugh about,” put in Cloridia unexpectedly, having listened in silence to Populescu’s whole description. “There’s no air in the harems, it’s true, but the poor women don’t realise it, and actually stay for hours in front of the fire: the poor things are locked up the whole day, hardly ever moving, and they always feel cold. My mother was Turkish,” she revealed calmly.

This unexpected information cast a sudden damper on the spirits of the jovial crowd.

“Anyway, you have all my compassion: I didn’t know you were a eunuch,” added my wife, turning a broad smile on Dragomir. “You know, don’t you, that entrance to the harems is strictly forbidden to all men, at least those worthy of the name. .”

At this point, she got up and left, leaving them all crestfallen.

When the meeting was over, I rejoined Cloridia and our son at the convent, where I subjected myself to the torture of the German lesson, which had been brought forward since the next day was Sunday. My wife and I did not do too badly, although our minds were on quite other matters. That evening the subject we were dealing with was travel.

“Good sir, I am here to apologise, for in my departure I did not acquire a licence from your good self.”

“Good sir, where no offence was intended, no apology is needed.”

“Truly, good sir, I am greatly obliged for the honour.”

And so on. Ollendorf made us repeat a series of formulas that were as elegant as they were of dubious utility to a chimney-sweep and his family.

20 of the clock: eating houses close their doors.

The orchestra had struck up the introduction to Alessio’s aria. The main part was played on the lute by Francesco Conti, a good friend of Camilla de’ Rossi, who wove his arpeggios against the background of a dark melancholy murmuring of strings.

We were inside the Hofburg, in the Most August Caesarean chapel, at the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio. The notes had the power to relax my sweet wife and to calm her fears after the unpleasant encounter at the Savoy Palace.

With just a few eloquent gestures of her forearm the Chormaisterin contained the threatening mass of the violas, softened the impassioned violins and opened the way to the timid lute. Then Alessio intoned the wise verses with which he tried to console his former betrothed, whom he had abandoned many years before, and who now, having found him again, still did not recognise him.

Duol sofferto per amore

Perde il nome di dolor

Cangia in rose le sue spine

Più non ha tante ruine,

Più non ha tanto dolor. .⁸

While the touching melody softened our hearts and minds, I thought back over the events of the day. Ever since Atto Melani had arrived in the city, even before I had met him or even merely learned of his presence, my calm and satisfying Viennese life had become chaos: first of all, the adventure among the lions of the Place with No Name and its absurd Flying Ship, then the arrival of the ambiguous Turkish embassy, which clearly harboured dark designs (starting from Ciezeber’s awful plan, to chop some poor wretch’s head off). Then the arrival of Atto himself, who wanted to involve me in an international espionage plot against Eugene of Savoy (the Serene Prince who was so generously employing my wife Cloridia!). And should I call him Eugene of Savoy or Dog Nose? Had Atto let that nickname slip out accidentally or on purpose?

After eleven years I had just re-encountered Abbot Melani and I was already quietly cursing him.

Duol sofferto per amore

Perde il nome di dolor. .

Finally there had been the discovery that Ciezeber possessed disturbing magic powers, which he employed in obscure and bloody rituals. As if that were not enough, the dervish was engaged in shady business with some individual who was supposed to bring him somebody’s head and who seemed to be menacing Cloridia. Even in my family something new and strange had occurred: my wife, who had never said a word about her past and about the Turkish mother who had brought her into the world, had suddenly opened up and begun to talk about these matters. To the point of proffering extremely useful information on dervishes and their powers.

Meanwhile the voice of Landina, Conti’s soprano wife, who was singing the role of Alessio’s fiancée, responded to her betrothed without knowing it was he:

Se dar voglio all’Oblio

La memoria di lui, cresce l’affetto

E se cerco bandir dal cor l’oggetto

Di rivederlo più cresce il desìo.⁹

What would have happened, I wondered, if in the wood of the Place with No Name Ciezeber had discovered that Cloridia and I were trailing him? Given his powers, I could only shudder and imagine some tragic and gory finale. And if I did not lose my head through some sorcery of the dervish’s, I was likely to end up being tried and beheaded for plotting against Eugene, supreme commander of the imperial army — and, what was worse, acting in league with a French secret agent, even if he was blind and decrepit. On calmer reflection, there was no guarantee that the letter in which Eugene sold himself to the French would have the effect Atto hoped for: had not Ilsung and Ungnad, the two treacherous counsellors of Maximilian II, remained coolly in their posts even after the Emperor had discovered their imposture? All things considered, the encounter with Mustafa, the old lion of the Place with No Name, had been just a mild foretaste of the mortal dangers I would encounter in the days to come.

“Master Chimney-sweep, you look pale and thoughtful today.”

“Who’s there?” I turned round with a jerk, my heart in my mouth.

The voice that had made me start so violently was that of Gaetano Orsini, Camilla’s jovial castrato friend, who sang the role of Alessio.

The orchestra had paused for a break, Orsini had come over to exchange a few words and I, absorbed in my dark apprehensions, had noticed nothing.

“Oh, it’s you,” I sighed in relief.

“I should have said: pale, thoughtful and very nervous,” he corrected himself, patting me on the back.

“Forgive me, it’s been an awful day.”

“Yes, for everyone. Today we had to rehearse for hours in the afternoon as well; we’re all very tired. But you just have to grit your teeth, or on the day of the performance we’ll make fools of ourselves in front of the Nuncio. And the Emperor will give us all a hiding, hee hee.”

“Including poor Camilla,” I added, struggling to match Orsini’s good humour.

“Oh, not her, of course. No, definitely not,” he added with a curious little laugh.

“Oh no? Special clemency for the Chormaisterin of Porta Coeli?”

“Don’t you know? Our friend is a very close confidante of His Caesarean Majesty,” he said, lowering his voice.

I fell silent for an instant, exchanging a bewildered glance with Cloridia.

“So far Camilla has composed an oratorio per year for the Emperor,” Orsini went on. “That makes a total of four oratorios, and she has never wanted to be paid. It’s a real mystery why, all the more so since His Caesarean Majesty spares no expense when it’s a matter of the court chapel. He’s kept on all 76 of his father’s players and has even hired several others, especially violinists, so that there are now actually 107 of us, something unheard of in Europe. Not to mention the opera theatre that was inaugurated three years ago. After the Ottoman siege 28 years ago, Vienna never really had one worthy of the name.”

Under Joseph I, Orsini went on, Vienna had become the capital of Italian opera, both serious and light, and also of harlequinades, pantomimes, ballets, shadow puppetry, marionettes, tightrope-walkers et cetera et cetera. Opera, in particular, was of a higher quality than anywhere else in Europe: fourteen or more performances a year, all featuring the most famous names among singers, composers and instrumentalists.

“All strictly Italian,” Orsini said with pride.

This gave some idea of the artistic heights achieved thanks to the magnanimity and exquisite taste of His Caesarean Majesty. He himself was as skilled in the musical arts as he was in those of war, and during his leisure hours, when there was no urgent state business, he would sit down at the harpsichord or pick up the flute or try his hand at graceful compositions. These included a fine Regina Coeli for solo soprano, violin and organ and a number of virtuoso operatic arias in the style of the Italian Alessandro Scarlatti. The personal talent of our young and beloved Caesar, together with the great number and high quality of his performers, encouraged every kind of experiment, so that the instruments were often used in new and surprising ways. In this way the Josephine Chapel, as the chapel of the Caesarean court had been renamed in honour of the Emperor, was famous for its innovations, unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.

“But despite all that, our mysterious Chormaisterin has never wanted a florin from the Emperor. Even before entering the convent she always found a way to make a decorous and honourable living.”

“Oh yes, it’s true,” Cloridia and I both nodded, pretending to know what Orsini was referring to.

“She travelled through all the small towns of Lower Austria, healing hundreds of invalids, in accordance with the dictates of the Rhineland abbess, St Hildegard. Even the priests who had been called to administer extreme unction would consult her. They would have her hurry to the bedside of a dying invalid, she would indicate the most suitable treatment — always based on spelt, I believe — and in less than two days there would be a miracle: the dying man would eat, walk and leave the house on his own two feet.”

“True, she achieved excellent results with our son too,” I agreed.

“Yes, but here in Vienna Camilla only treats friends. The university comes down hard on anyone who practises the art without a degree in medicine.”

“I know all about that,” confirmed my wife, who could not practise the profession of midwifery except secretly.

“Anyway, now everything has turned out nicely for our Chormaisterin,” said Orsini. “When the Emperor asked her to settle permanently in the capital, rather than accept payment she told him that she no longer felt able to compose and asked permission to enter a convent. His Majesty placed her in the Porta Coeli, which is the richest and most liberal of all the monasteries in this city.”

“Liberal?” said Cloridia in surprise. “But isn’t it an enclosed order?”

“In theory, certainly,” laughed Orsini. “However, they can receive any female visitors they want and in their cells they play at Hombre, by permission of the abbess, which is very easy to obtain. They’re always guzzling those little delicacies that the kitchens turn out, especially those sugar figures, which they keep on hand to nibble at whenever they feel peckish.”

“Now that I think about it,” I said, “I’ve noticed that the grating is not much of an obstacle: you can easily put your head through it, and anybody who’s just a little thinner than average could squeeze right through.”

“I’ve seen visitors with my own eyes go up to the grating and kiss the nuns’ hands, and they didn’t pull back — on the contrary, they stretched their hands out through the bars without any hesitation!” added the young castrato.

“I’m glad for the Chormaisterin that life at Porta Coeli isn’t too hard,” remarked Cloridia.

“But that’s certainly not why the Emperor put her there: it’s so that Camilla can console the little Pálffy. .” he concluded in a cheerfully allusive tone. Then he pulled an apple from his pocket and began to munch it.

The little Countess Pálffy! That morning, thanks to Atto, I had learned that she was the Emperor’s lover and that she lived in Porta Coeli Street as well, very close to the convent. The very person that Abbot Melani wanted to use to deliver to the Emperor the letter that revealed Prince Eugene’s treachery. I pricked up my ears and smiled with complicity, to induce the musician to continue.

“. . and so His Caesarean Majesty’s carriage turns up at the oddest hours in Porta Coeli Street, collects someone and takes that person to the Hofburg,” trilled Orsini insouciantly, as if he were saying things everyone knew. “The people think that it’s Eugene of Savoy inside, summoned by Joseph to discuss urgent matters of war. Actually it’s his confidante Camilla, if the Emperor has something to confide. Or, if he feels like doing something other than talk, it’ll be Marianna Pálffy inside, hee hee.”

I was joining in Orsini’s umpteenth little burst of laughter, but Cloridia stopped me at once by squeezing my arm: Camilla was approaching. Although her face was tired and full of apprehension, she greeted us with her usual affability.

“I see that you’ve as good an appetite as ever, even at this hour of day,” she said smiling at Orsini, who held his half-eaten apple in his hand.

“The fruit of the tree of good and evil,” Orsini joked back. “I’ve finally decided to taste it.”

“Don’t say that,” answered Camilla, suddenly serious.

“It was just a joke: I’ve already tasted it many times,” said Orsini, still jocularly.

“Cavalier Orsini, I told you not to use those words,” Camilla retorted, with unexpected harshness.

Orsini and I looked at each other in embarrassment.

“They are expressions from the Scriptures,” added Camilla, perhaps realising that she had gone a little too far. “I beg you not to use them inappropriately.”

“I didn’t foresee that I might offend you,” Orsini justified himself.

“You don’t offend me, but the Scriptures. And what is needed is prudence, not foresight. The latter is the divine gift of the wise. . But please excuse me, we must continue our work,” she said in evident embarrassment, making her way with bowed head to the front of the orchestra, a clear sign that the interval was over.

When we got back to the convent, exhausted after a day full of novelties and surprises, we went straight to bed. Cloridia fell asleep in my arms at once; but although thoroughly worn out, I just could not close my eyes.

A thousand questions swirled around my mind, each linked to the next like the beads of a necklace made of mysteries. Why had Camilla de’ Rossi not told us she was friends with the Emperor? Out of discretion, perhaps. But why did she refuse payment for her compositions, and choose instead to withdraw into a convent?

And also: Camilla had seemed anguished, but what was the reason? I could understand that she did not wish to waste a whole half-hour with us, as she usually did. But why had she not addressed a single word to us? And there were plenty of things we could have said to one another! After all, just the evening before, Atto Melani had taken up lodgings in the convent.

Camilla, as Atto himself had confirmed, had known for some time that the Abbot was coming to Vienna, but at his request she had kept the secret. That was why she had told us earlier, with a sibylline smile, that in the days to come, “happy things” were in store for us. But what did Camilla know of the motives that had brought Atto to the Caesarean city? The Abbot had not said a single word about this. Did the Chormaisterin find nothing strange in the visit of the old castrato, from the enemy country of France, no less? Did she not know that Melani was a spy by profession?

No, no, she probably did not know, I told myself. Atto must have concocted some credible cock-and-bull story. Probably he had told her that he wanted to see me again at all costs before he died. Maybe he had used the theatrical tones that he could adopt so effectively to his own advantage. . And Camilla had fallen for it.

But the questions doubled and multiplied, as in a game of mirrors. Why did Atto not use Camilla to deliver Eugene’s letter to the Emperor? Did he not know that the Chormaisterin was a friend of Joseph’s? No, probably not. Otherwise he would not have set off on the trail of Marianna Pálffy, without even referring to Camilla. I myself, after all, had learned of the friendship between Joseph and the Chormaisterin only by chance, thanks to Gaetano Orsini’s chattering.

What should I do? Pass on that valuable information to Atto, or keep it under my hat? It would be very easy for Camilla to get Prince Eugene’s letter to the Emperor. But what would happen if Atto, as I suspected, was acting in league with the Turks? Would I not then be exposing His Caesarean Majesty to some dangerous plot? I could even be accused of being an accomplice!

No, it was better to say nothing to Atto. Indeed, I should keep a close watch on him (which was not as difficult as it would have been in the past, since he was now an old man). But above all, I should try to conceal from him the fact that the means of contact with the Emperor, which he was seeking so desperately, was just round the corner — indeed, inside the very convent where he was sleeping.

If only Atto knew how easy it was to communicate with the Emperor! From the conversations of my brother chimney-sweeps, my clients and the customers of inns and coffee houses, I knew that, for all the splendour of the young Emperor’s deeds and despite my own profound devotion, he had within himself old griefs and deep wounds, and these had been scarred over by a sort of acerbic ingenuousness. It was this that could serve Abbot Melani as a breach: if he could but obtain an audience with the Emperor by means of Camilla, he would definitely succeed in making himself heard, and probably in obtaining what he hoped for. Which would be all to the good if Atto’s intentions really were directed towards peace, as he claimed. But it would be all to the bad if he were in fact acting in league with the Turks for illicit ends.

Joseph the Victorious was born with the lively spirit, the majesty and the generosity of a great monarch. He was capable of grand gestures, he could persuade the irresolute and move the indifferent. He was impatient, impetuous, rapid in his decisions, ardent and spontaneous. But he would listen to the most insignificant complaints, make promises that he could not possibly keep and he was at times incapable of saying no.

This weakness, so well-hidden and insidious, was due to a cruel trick of destiny: he had been born to a man who was his exact opposite.

His father Leopold had been pious, timid and bigoted; Joseph the Victorious was audacious, self-confident and cordial. Leopold had been prudent, reserved, phlegmatic, indecisive, constant and moderate; Joseph exuded energy from every pore. At the age of just twenty-four he had gone into battle against the French, commanding the army himself, and had conquered the famous fortress of Landau. He had been known ever since as Joseph the Victorious. His father Leopold, by contrast, when the Turks approached Vienna in 1683, had at once taken to his heels.

The young Joseph, the firstborn and thus destined for the throne, had clearly felt a vocation for ruling from the very beginning. He loved his people, and was loved by them in return. But he also expected obedience from his subjects, and so had chosen as his Latin motto: Timore et amore, “with fear and love”, thus declaring that in his rule he would use two of the most powerful passions.

His father, on the other hand, had become emperor by chance: as a young man he had been groomed for the priesthood, because the throne was reserved for his elder brother, who then died of a disease. Reigning had been nought but a burdensome duty for him, to be carried out with patient slowness. It was no accident that his motto had been Consilio et industria: “With commitment and wisdom”. He had been brought up by the powerful Jesuits, who had mastered his impressionable soul. Instead of making religion his guide, Leopold had made blinkers of it. Being of a timorous character, his very faith was faltering, and he was obsessed by superstitions and omens; he was afraid of magic and the evil eye. Convinced that he was cultivating the virtue of patience, he let himself be maltreated even by the beggars he received at court.

Joseph was religious, of course, but he detested the conniving Jesuits. He swore to himself that as soon as he ascended to the throne there would be no more room for them at court.

Out of laziness and in order not to lose his own flatterers, his father had for decades kept a grossly swollen court and government, full of useless, time-wasting ministers, all overpaid and litigious. Joseph could not wait to throw them all out and replace them with people he trusted — young men, efficient and competent. The ministers knew it (Joseph had even founded a kind of parallel palace, the so-called Young Court) and detested him.

His father’s continual rebukes, upbraiding him for his amorous excesses, only worsened matters. In the end, his father banned him from participating in affairs of state. He did not understand and could not tolerate this son who was so different from him, and so similar to his great enemy, the Sun King: splendid, victorious and concupiscent. Leopold preferred mediocrities to wits, old people to young, bunglers to specialists, cowards to heroes. How could he ever have loved his own firstborn child?

And in fact he loved another: Charles, the younger son.

Charles was the perfect incarnation of all the mediocre qualities that put Leopold at his ease. Joseph was impetuous; Charles, educated by the Jesuits, was measured. The elder was attractive, the younger barely passable. Joseph gave his opinion at once, and was garrulous; Charles hesitated, and so kept quiet. Joseph laughed, and made others laugh. Charles was afraid of being laughed at.

They had both come from the same womb, but one was born to rule and the other to be part of the flock. Charles could perhaps have lived with his brother without too much antagonism, but the seed of rivalry was sown between them by their own father, who never concealed the fact that he preferred the younger. On his deathbed, at the very last moment, he hastened to insert a few clauses favouring Charles to the detriment of Joseph, just when the latter was excluded from politics.

And so Joseph felt mortally offended, and Charles hated him because he believed that he deserved the throne: did not his father say he was the better man? The younger son, a gloomy, rancorous spirit, had not been brought up as a younger son, but as a future king — of Spain. And now he was unable to resign himself to the fate of being left without a crown on his head.

The two brothers had not met for eight years: Charles had left for Spain in 1703 to compete for the crown against Philip of Anjou, grandson of the Most Christian King, and he had never been back to Vienna. But there had been a thousand occasions of friction: first the question of dominion over Milan and Finale, then the administration of Lombardy, and finally Naples, where they incited their protégés against one another. Even though Austria and Spain were separated by entire nations, armies, seas and mountains, Charles thought of his brother with envy every day, every hour, every single moment. A fine legacy Joseph had been bequeathed by his father, I thought: the enmity of his ministers, the rivalry of his brother and that strange juvenile ingenuousness, which could only expose him to danger: for example, the machinations of Abbot Melani.

Cogitating in this fashion, I got up from bed and tiptoed towards my papers: all possibility of sleep having evaporated, I was curious to continue reading those papers that I had collected on my beloved Caesar, and which I had promised myself I would finish reading as soon as possible.

I did not only want to find the answers to my questions about the Place with No Name; now that Abott Melani intended with my help to bring Joseph I the proof of Eugene’s treachery, my Sovereign filled my thoughts more than ever.

I began to leaf through the writings in German. I came across an account of his wedding:

Pomposer Einzug Ihro Königl. Mayest. Josephi Römisch: und Hungarischen Königs / etc. Mit Ihro Mayestätt Wilhelmina Amalia, Röm. Könign / Als Königl. Gespons / etc. So Den. 24. Februarij 1699. zwischen 4. und 5. Uhr.

As I ran my eyes over this description, overladen — as was always the case with Teutonic gazetteers — with boring details, I remembered other gossip I had heard around town. Joseph was so sweetly ingenuous in his behaviour, so youthfully spontaneous, so nobly candid! It would be all too easy for a sly trickster like Abbot Melani to gain the young Sovereign’s trust, expressing himself in perfect Italian and concealing the fact that he had been sent by the French. And what if Atto were in league with the Turks?

Only after Joseph had taken a wife (he had married the German princess Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Luneburg) had Leopold allowed him to concern himself with affairs of state again. But by then the young man had earned the hatred of his father’s ministers.

On 5th May 1705, after a half century of rule, Leopold finally died. The position of the Empire was extremely grave: war was raging against France and its allies, entire armies were ready to invade Austrian soil. Taxes were collected haphazardly, the country’s finances were in a disastrous state, the imperial chamber on the verge of bankruptcy. The army was disorganised, the militias badly armed and the men undisciplined. There was a risk of losing all control over the imperial territories (rebellious Hungary, the troubled regions of Italy, never-peaceful Bohemia).

During Leopold’s funeral a Jesuit, the court preacher Wiedemann, dared to admonish Joseph: only a prince educated by the Jesuits, he thundered, could hope to reign happily and successfully.

Joseph refused to be intimidated; he sent the Jesuit into exile and confiscated the two thousand printed copies of his speech. Then he warned the other Jesuits who resided at court: from that moment they would not be allowed to interfere in political matters. After this he sacked, one after the other, the incompetent ministers and functionaries his father had cherished, and replaced them with new men, fresh and eager to serve him. The only one who was not dismissed was Eugene of Savoy. The new ministers chosen by Joseph were not all little lambs. There were plenty of quarrels and rivalries, but thanks to his charisma he knew how to treat them and how to settle disagreements.

The young Caesar set about the long, arduous work of economic recovery, without losing sight of what could improve, even minimally, the daily life of his subjects, starting with Vienna. And so, among the many initiatives, he ordered the city’s streets to be cleaned regularly; he organised the drainage system; he made it obligatory to register deaths promptly in the suburbs as well as in the centre; and he had a theatre built for the common people near the Carinthian Gate, where they put on popular comedies of the old Viennese tradition, which derived from the even older Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Finally, from the city’s arsenal he picked out 180 Turkish cannons, which had been left as spoils of war after the siege of 1683; a foundry was to transform them into the glorious new bell of the Cathedral of St Stephen, the largest and most beautiful that had ever been seen in the capital and Caesarean residence, Vienna. This work was to be presented and inaugurated on this coming 26th July 1711, the propitious thirty-third birthday of Joseph the Victorious.

At this point I came across a “Prognostico cabalistico Prototipo”, a horoscope of Joseph: Horoscopus gloriae, felicitatis, et perennitatis, Joseph Primi, Romanorum Imperatoris, semper Augusti, Germaniae, Bohemiae, Hungariae, amp;c. amp;c. Regis.

It had been compiled with arithmetical calculations on the basis of the Holy Scriptures by Doctor saluberrimae Medicinae of Padua Josepho Wallich, olim Hertzwallich, in 1709. The prophecy, written in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chaldean, Syrian, Cabalistic, Rabbinic, Jerusalemite, Polish, Italian, French and German, was crystal-clear:

Joseph First, Emperor of the Romans, forever August, Father engendering Heirs for the Peace of Kingdoms and Provinces, and all his days will be victorious.

The prophecy had proved true. In that year 1711, after six years of rule, the anathema of the Jesuit Wiedemann seemed to have been definitively disproved. The financial and military situation had greatly improved. The people loved and feared Joseph, as he had wished: Timore et Amore. Now that his father’s memory had been effaced, he felt in charge of his kingdom. But under the surface of this new state of affairs, the old ministers nurtured their undiminished hatred, longing for revenge. And no less poisonous, in distant Spain his brother Charles’s rivalry throbbed like a living thing: a vicious force lying coiled under the unextinguished ashes of hatred.

Here it was again, I thought — hatred; the same terrible passion that had marked the fate of the Place with No Name and its builder, and which had frightened the predecessors of the Most August Emperor. Now, perhaps, I had the answer to my questions: Joseph the Victorious was used to overcoming obstacles. He claimed for himself alone the right to inspire fear: Timore et Amore. .

However, at the end of the previous year, something else had come along to arouse apprehension among his subjects. The almanac of the Englischer Wahrsager, or the English fortune-teller, in its forecasts for the year 1711, had declared:

Man hört von ungemeiner Plage:

am Käyserhof grosse Klage.

Käyserlicher schneller Fall

Gibt weit und breit den Widerschall;

Viel Böses wird dadurch gestifft,

So einen felicem Staat betrifft.

The dire prophecy had spread around the city with the speed of lightning. I had heard it from my fellow countrymen as soon as I arrived in Vienna, and I had rushed to get hold of the Italian version:

A canker now appears:

The palace floods with tears.

The swift imperial fall

With thunder does all ears appal;

A great Evil is perpetrated,

A felix State is lacerated.

The English fortune-teller’s almanac spoke of a “swift imperial fall” that would cause floods of tears and tear asunder a prosperous nation: how could one not fear for the House of Habsburg and for felix Austria, as the land that hosted me was known? Luckily there came the Warschauer Calender, the Almanac of Warsaw, to counter the pessimism of the English fortune-teller, calming the fears of the people with its prophecy written in clear letters:

Oesterreich

Wird die Letzte auf der Welt seyn

This too was quickly published in Italian:

Austria

Will be the last in the world

People’s fears were assuaged and soon forgotten. But since the beginning of April a strange atmospheric phenomenon had been noted: on certain days the sun rose not with its usual golden hue but tinged blood-red. I myself, on my way to work, had often noticed this curious occurrence with amazement. Some attributed it to natural causes, but the Viennese shook their heads, muttering that it was an ill omen: innocent blood would be spilled in the Archduchy of Austria.

As if that were not enough, another bizarre and grim episode confirmed people’s fears.

The Emperor was visiting the church where his beloved friend the Prince of Lamberg was buried — the inseparable companion of his hunting adventures and procurer of young lovers. Joseph I asked a minister where Lamberg’s tombstone was. The minister answered: “Your Majesty, right beneath your feet.” This was interpreted by the young Emperor as an omen that he himself would soon join his friend.

This lugubrious episode was soon on everyone’s lips in Vienna, and some compared it to the Presagium Josephi propriae mortis, the biblical episode in Genesis, where the patriarch Joseph foresees his own death and the fate of his loved ones, telling his brethren: “And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” And people remembered too how Jacob appeared in another portent, because everyone knew that Emperor Ferdinand I had foreseen in a dream that he would die on St Jacob’s day, and so a doleful chain of whispers passed around the city, full of references to famous presages of death taken from the Bible, from history or just from legends.

I went back to bed, thinking over the words pronounced that evening by the Chormaisterin. Foresight, she said, is the divine gift of the wise.

23 of the clock, when Vienna sleeps (while in Rome the foulest trades begin their traffickings).

I had finally dropped off when there came a discreet knock at the door.

“Who’s there? Who wants me?” I exclaimed in German, jumping out of bed. I had been dreaming that I was having a lesson with Ollendorf and in the excitement of this unexpected awakening I repeated phrases that I had just learned, parrot-fashion, from him.

“Signor Master, it’s me.”

It was Simonis: I had completely forgotten the appointment we had at midnight with Dànilo Danilovitsch, his Pontevedrin companion.

Just a few minutes later we were in the street. My sense of the cold was exacerbated by sleepiness, and I would have gladly stayed in my soft bed. Luckily, to alleviate the torture of this nocturnal excursion there was a carriage waiting for us. It was actually an uncovered wagon — or, to put it simply, a cart. A modest vehicle, one of those used to transport people to places close to the city. On the box was Penicek, whom I greeted with amused surprise. When we were aboard, Simonis explained this unexpected presence.

“Our Penicek drives a wagon to maintain himself as a student.”

He reminded me that the Bettelstudenten, on account of the Rector’s edict, risked being locked up in the academic prison if they were found begging without a monthly permit, which was extremely difficult to obtain. He added that the cart we were in was an example of an old Fliegenschutz — an uncovered vehicle with just a cloth by way of protection against insects.

“And is Penicek employed by someone with a licence, as you are?”

“Well, you see, Signor Master, it’s not always possible to find a regular job like the one you were so kind as to give me. Let’s say that Penicek is. . outside the rules.”

“What do you mean? Doesn’t he have a permit to transport people or goods?” I asked, vaguely alarmed.

“Well, officially, no.”

“He’s unauthorised? How can he be? I know that they’re very strict in checking up on travellers. They inspect all coach drivers and I know that they have to file information on everyone they transport!”

“It’s true, I’m afraid,” admitted the Pennal. “My trade is full of spies, but also of inspectors who are, let’s say. . tolerant!” He turned and winked in a knowing fashion.

“Penicek,” added Simonis, “is, so to speak, tolerated by the authorities, as happens with others. You just have to make a little ‘offering’. . and this way of working gives you a number of advantages. You explain, Pennal.”

“Well, yes, Signor Master,” Penicek said, as the old cart went creaking through the deserted city-streets. “First of all, as I’m not included among the Kleinfuhrleute, the small-scale transporters of people, nor among the Großfuhrwerker, who do the heavy transporting, I don’t pay taxes, and they don’t confiscate my cart and horses for court journeys, or for carrying cannons when war breaks out. I’m not obliged to help get rid of rubbish or, in the winter, snow. If I don’t want to, I don’t even have to get dirty carrying coal, or breaking my back between Vienna and Linz. I just do trips between the city and the suburbs, and that’s more than enough for me. The heavy transporters have for some time now been obliged to own at least eight horses and four carts. Last year hirers of horses joined in the same confraternity as the small coach drivers. And so now they have to decide which rules to abide by. Everything’s getting so complicated — I have no wish to be involved! I’ve got my little animal, my four wheels and my shed in the Rossau area. It cost me just two soldi, and when I want to quit I can sell the whole lot. Of course, I have to be careful: if I have an accident, and they find out that I was drunk, I’d not only be fined heavily but I’d get into a lot of trouble. The important thing is to be very careful all the time.”

Despite his subdued air, I thought, this Penicek clearly knew his way around.

“Simonis,” I asked my assistant, “you came into my service to earn some money, while Penicek is a coach driver. But I imagine Danilovitsch, as a count, is kept in his studies by his family.”

“Yes, he’s a count, he belongs to one of the most illustrious families of Pontevedro — which, unfortunately, is a little state that’s totally bankrupt. To restore his nation’s credit Dànilo did try his luck with some rich widows in these parts, but it all came to nothing.”

“Too bigoted!” Penicek shook his head, holding the horse’s reins. “He should have tried in Paris: plenty of merry widows there. .”

“Unfortunately with this wretched war he couldn’t,” the Greek explained. “And so now to make ends meet he’s forced to carry out a rather dishonourable trade: spying.”

I gave a start: after Atto Melani, another secret agent?

“Not in the sense you fear,” Simonis added at once. “He’s a legal spy, an authorised one.”

He explained that the previous Emperor, Leopold, Joseph I’s father, had been a pious, modest, upright and moderate spirit. He had shunned all excesses and cultivated prudence, patience and parsimony. And since Austria, as I well knew, was kissed by the Goddess of Opulence and even the lowest subjects could live like kings, in order that noblemen should not be confused with labourers, princes with woodcutters, ladies with servant girls, Leopold had divided society into five classes: he set down rules on the luxuries that each class was permitted to have. Only noblemen and cavaliers were exempt from these rules, holding special privileges.

“Yes, I’ve heard of these five classes,” I objected, “but ever since I’ve been here no one has ever asked which one I belong to.”

“Perhaps it’s because you’re a foreigner, and no one has thought of checking up on you. But for the Viennese it’s a very serious question.”

For each class there were detailed rules setting out just how much they were allowed to spend on clothing, eating, public appearances, marrying and even dying.

“I don’t understand: who makes sure that all these rules are respected?” I asked.

“That’s obvious: the inhabitants of Vienna themselves. And the students above all.”

Leopold had instituted a kind of vice squad: a body of spies who infiltrated weddings, parties and even private homes to check that no citizen violated the law. Dànilo Danilovitsch was one of these.

“Students, who are always short of money and have quick minds, are among the best spies,” remarked Simonis.

Authorised spies had a right to a third of the fines levied on transgressors, and so it was to be expected that they would carry out their duties diligently. However, it was not always easy; how could they know, for example, whether a dress cost thirty, fifty or two hundred florins? And so tailors, furriers and embroiderers were hired as well, and they were expected to denounce (under the threat of being punished themselves) clients who ordered clothes not permitted to their respective class. In the same way, legions of cooks and larder servants (known as “pan-peepers”) were enrolled to denounce their gluttonous masters. Carpenters reported orders of luxury items of furniture, cloth merchants those of sumptuous textiles, painters blew the whistle on clients who asked for oversized portraits. Excessive opulence in carriages was denounced by coach drivers and postilions, and so on.

It got to the point that there was no corner in Vienna without a lurking spy, staring at people as they passed and at their boots (were the heels too high?), their faces (French face powder?) or the ladies’ false moles (too numerous on the left cheek?). The result of this proliferation of spies was that suspicion reigned in the kitchens, people looked daggers at one another in tailors’ shops, and in carriages the travellers eyed the attendants as if expecting a stab in the back. Those who were spied on (who obviously took their revenge by spying on others in turn) had to lock their larders to hide an extra piglet, or their cellars to conceal their padded armchairs, or they had to bury their youngest daughter’s gold ring in the garden. Besides, who could possibly remember all the prohibitions? On feast days jewels and coiffures were not supposed to cost more than six hundred florins for the first class, three hundred for the second, from twenty to thirty for the third, from fifteen to twenty for the fourth and four kreutzer for the fifth. A wretched, illiterate fieldworker of the fifth class had to be careful not to own towels costing over a florin and thirty kreutzer, scarves and hats over a florin, and not to order meals or banquets for over fifteen florins, or five florins if for children, and woe to anyone who overspent by a single cent. You practically had to live with your nose buried in a notebook full of figures, only raising your eyes to check if your neighbour had broken some rule so that you could denounce him.

Life had become hell, which was certainly not what Leopold had wanted for his subjects. But above all, the Viennese, who have a natural sagacity and like to live peacefully, had realised that what they could get from spying on people was worth much less than the freedom they had lost. All the more so, since noblemen, ministers and high prelates, exempt from Leopold’s prohibitions, continued to stuff themselves, to throw parties and to dress up just as they liked. Indeed, it was fashionable to be round-bellied (a mark of prestige and wealth); topped by the tall curly wigs then in vogue, these bellies gave the ruling class an unmistakeable pear shape.

“So how do you explain,” I objected, “that in the peasants’ homes in the suburbs, where you and I go to clean their chimneys, we see cutlery in carved ivory, magnificent ceramic plates, curtains and tablecloths with wonderful lacework, ornamented glasses, luxurious armchairs and stoves decorated with refined craftsmanship? You’ve seen it all yourself: even the country cottages always have full larders, and the smells that come from the oven make you faint with hunger.”

“Things have greatly improved,” said Simonis.

Tired of all this spying, he explained, the Viennese had begun to turn a blind eye on their neighbours’ offences. Leopold, who had issued the first decree in 1659, had had to repeat it in 1671, in 1686, in 1687 and twice more, because his citizens by now turned a deaf ear, and smart people had found ways to get round the rules by circulating luxury goods under the names of more modest articles.

“So you’ll easily understand, Signor Master, that when the old Emperor Leopold died, after reigning for fifty years, the Viennese heaved a great sigh of relief. And spies like Dànilo began to earn a little less than before, because things had become more tolerant, especially with Joseph who is the exact opposite of his father — he loves luxury, beauty and splendour.”

“How do you know that Dànilo is a spy? Isn’t it supposed to be a secret trade?”

“Signor Master, nothing escapes the trained eye of a student. And we’re his companions: there are too many of us for him to get away with anything under our noses.”

“It’s certainly not an activity that confers any honour on a student, that of Dànilo Danilovitsch; particularly on a count, even if he is as poor as a church mouse,” I remarked sceptically.

“But Dànilo is a Pontevedrin count, Signor Master, and Pontevedro is in half-Asia, you remember?” he answered with a sly smile. “Just like this donkey, my Pennal. Isn’t it true, Penicek, that you’re a half-Asiatic beast? Nod, Pennal!”

Poor Penicek turned and nodded towards us.

“More, Pennal! And look happy!” the Greek rebuked him.

Penicek obeyed and began to jerk his head affirmatively, smiling idiotically the while.

“Yes, Simonis, I remember that you referred briefly to Half-Asia during the Deposition,” I said, watching this performance rather uneasily, but not wanting to interfere as it was a student matter. “You said that the lands on the borders of Asia, like Pontevedro, are very different from ours, I think.”

“In them European culture meets with Asiatic barbarism,” answered Simonis, turning serious, “Western ambition with Eastern indolence, European humaneness with the wild and cruel conflict between nations and religions. Signor Master: to you or me, who are Europeans, it would sound not only alien, but unheard of and incredible. With those people you can never trust in appearances. But now we must break off, Signor Master: we’re here.”

We got down from Penicek’s cart and made our way up a stone staircase. It led up to a large open area at the top of the city walls, looking over the Glacis, the open plain that surrounds the city and separates it from the suburb of the Josephina.

“We’ve often met here, Dànilo’s companions, and. . strange, I can’t see him.” Simonis looked in all directions. “He’s usually very punctual. Wait, I’ll go and look for him.”

Dànilo Danilovitsch had chosen for the meeting place a secluded spot on the city ramparts. The fortified walls were almost entirely accessible; unfortunately they were notorious for the shady dealings that took place there at night. The soldiers of the city’s garrison took advantage of the darkness for secret wine trading, and also for encounters with the numerous young women of loose morals who traded their own bodies on the ramparts. But that evening was so cold, with a freezing wind mercilessly lashing the ramparts, that no soldiers or prostitutes were to be seen.

Simonis had been away for a good quarter of an hour now. What the devil had happened? I was about to go and look for him when I saw his shadowy figure emerging from the darkness.

“Signor Master! Signor Master, run, quickly!” he whispered in a choked voice.

I ran with my assistant to the terrace of a nearby rampart, where a vague dark shape was stretched on the ground.

“Oh my God,” I moaned when I recognised the shape as a human body, and its face as that of a large, bulky youth: Dànilo Danilovitsch.

“What’s happened to him?” I asked, panting from the shock and the fear of being involved in a murder.

“They’ve stabbed him, Signor Master, look here,” he said, opening the greatcoat. “It’s soaked in blood. They must have stabbed him at least twenty times.”

“Oh my God, we must get him away from. . What are you doing?”

I stopped. Simonis had pulled a little flask containing liquid from his pocket and was holding it under Dànilo’s nose.

“I’m seeing if he sneezes. It’s rue juice: if he sneezes, the wounds aren’t fatal; if he doesn’t react, it means there’s nothing we can do.”

Unfortunately the young Pontevedrin did not move.

“My God. .” I moaned.

“Shhh!” the Greek silenced me.

Dànilo was saying something. It was a weak gasp, and as the breath left his mouth, turning into vapour in the cold air, it looked as if his soul were deserting him.

“Zivio. . Zivio. .” he muttered.

“It’s a Pontevedrin greeting,” explained Simonis. “He’s raving.”

“The Apple, the Golden Apple. . the forty thousand of Kasim. .” the student added.

“Who stabbed you, Dànilo?” I asked.

“Let him talk, Signor Master,” Simonis interrupted me again.

“. . the cry of the forty thousand martyrs. .” he went on raving.

Simonis and I looked at each other in desperation. It seemed that Dànilo had just a few moments of life left.

“The Apple. . Simonis, the Golden Apple. . of Vienna and the Pope. . We’ll meet again at the Golden Apple. .”

It sounded like a farewell.

It was the Greek who then urged the dying man:

“Dànilo, listen! Resist, curse it! Who did you talk to about the Golden Apple? And who are the forty thousand of Kasim?”

He did not answer. Suddenly his breathing grew faster:

“The cry. . of the forty thousand, every Friday. . The Golden Apple in Constantinople. . in Vienna. . in Rome. . Eyyub found it.”

Then his breath was cut short, he stretched his neck upwards and opened his eyes as if a celestial vision had appeared to him in mid-air. Finally he had a spasm, and his head, which we were holding up more out of pity than for any useful purpose, fell back. Simonis compassionately lowered his eyelids.

“Oh my God,” I moaned, “how are we going to carry him away?”

“We’ll leave him here, Signor Master. If we carry him away the guards will stop us and we’ll get into real trouble,” said Simonis, standing up.

“But we can’t, he must be buried. .” I protested, thoroughly shaken.

“The garrison will see to it tomorrow, Signor Master. Students drink a lot at night, they challenge one another to duels. In the morning they often find corpses,” said Simonis, tugging me by the lapel, while the wind grew stronger on the bastions and almost howled in our ears.

“But his relatives. .”

“He didn’t have anyone, Signor Master. Dànilo is dead, and no one can do anything right now,” said Simonis, dragging me down the staircase that led away from the bastions, while what had seemed mere wind became a tempest, and on Vienna, unexpectedly, there began to descend, merciful and gentle, the white benediction of snow.