Veritas

Day the Fourth

SUNDAY, 12 APRIL 1711

Like a sleeping giant, the Place with No Name lay quietly under the blanket of the snow. As I crossed the great garden with its hexagonal towers, myriads of immaculate flakes pirouetted earthwards in a graceful dance. There was no wind, the air was sharp and still as in a memory. The pinnacles of the towers, like minarets, were adorned with fantastic pearly caprices.

As I approached the front of the manor house, I had to shield my eyes against the blinding glare of the alabaster stone, intensified by the reflecting snow and milky-white sky. I turned to the right, went beyond the maior domus and reached the courtyard of the main entrance. Here I went down the spiral staircase that led to the cages where the wild beasts were held.

The snow came down on my head like a blessing, everything gleamed as in heaven. Even the naked trees, with their claw-like, crooked branches seemed softened by all this whiteness. As I descended the spiral staircase I caught glimpses through the windows of the fish pond in the garden north of the Place with No Name, sealed by a light stratum of ice, as opalescent as almond paste and as crisp as a biscuit.

I reached the lion cage. Frosch was waiting for me.

“Mustafa has escaped,” he announced. “He went into the ball stadium and disappeared.”

How could that be? I let him lead me to the stadium, wondering whether Frosch had had one too many drinks again, and had forgotten where he had left his favourite lion.

“There, that’s where it happened.”

He pointed to the Flying Ship, lying as ever on its belly in the middle of the ball stadium. In the whirl of events in the last few hours I had almost forgotten its existence.

I looked back at Frosch, my doubts clear from my expression. A lion does not disappear just like that.

But since the guardian of the Place with No Name continued to point towards the old airship (if it had in fact ever flown), I decided to have a look.

“If Mustafa should turn up come and help me at once,” I told Frosch.

I walked all the way around the Flying Ship. Nothing. On the snow there were indeed the old lion’s paw prints, but they disappeared just where I was standing, next to one of the two large wings.

So I climbed up on the wing, went aboard and began to explore the living quarters in the middle of the ship. It was at that moment that it all started.

At first it was a slight pitching, then a vigorous shudder, which increased rhythmically. It was as if the tail and wings of the Flying Ship were radiating powerful jolts through the wooden structure, and these were passed on to the rest of the ship, making it creak. Suddenly the vibrations ceased.

Frosch gazed at me attentively, but without any surprise. The ship was rising.

Instinctively grabbing hold of a wooden handrail, I saw the prominent walls of the ball stadium dropping away, and the horizon broadening, and the roof of the Place with No Name coming towards me, and the indistinct glimmer of the winter landscape bursting open, like the gates of heaven, and the blessed light of the sky pouring in on all sides — around, above and below me. The Flying Ship, at last, had taken flight again. I heard the creak of the tiller. I turned round and saw him: the black helmsman was gazing straight ahead, as he steered the ship through the airy billows with a confident hand. But he soon left the tiller, which continued to move by itself, as if governed by an invisible spirit, bending down and reappearing with a violin. Skilfully handling the bow he modulated the first notes of a motif I knew. In that instant I recognised him: it was Albicastro, the violinist I had met years ago in the Villa of the Vessel, and the music was the Portuguese folia he was always playing.

And I realised that it was true, the gazette Frosch had shown me had not lied: two years earlier that old craft had indeed flown, and had circled the bell tower of St Stephen, brushing against the pinnacle on which was perched the Golden Apple. And its mysterious helmsman was no Brazilian priest, but none other than Giovanni Henrico Albicastro, the Flying Dutchman and his Phantom Vessel, as Atto Melani, petrified with terror, had called him the first time we saw him, apparently held in the air by his mantle of black gauze above the Vessel’s crenellated walls.

But now that my eyes were ranging over the gardens of the Place with No Name, the snow-covered plain of Simmering, and the distant roofs of Vienna and the spire of St Stephen’s, and even as I walked up to Albicastro who was playing his folia and smiling at me, and I wanted to re-embrace him, everything ended. Behind me I heard a new juddering, a sort of dull, hostile growling. “I should have guessed it: he was hiding in here,” I said to myself in a flash of intuition, as I turned round and suddenly felt his warm, inhuman breath upon me. Mustafa growled once, twice, thrice, his right paw lashed out at me and his claws struck my cheek, ripping it to shreds. Before it all ended, another yell — mine — rose desperately, and at last I woke up.

No one could jerk me out of this nightmare but myself, and I had managed it. The sheets were soaked in sweat, my face was as hot as Mustafa’s breath, my hands and feet as cold as the snow in the dream. It was not enough for the Place with No Name to fill my thoughts during the day; now it had to invade my nights as well. It was as if Neugebäu had too many secrets to be classified among the reasonable things of this world.

Cloridia had already got up with our little boy and had gone out. They were undoubtedly waiting for me to go to mass. Praise be to God, I thought; prayer and communion would save me from the aberrations of nocturnal shades once and for all.

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

As I got ready, I heard a gentle rap of knuckles on our door. A discreet hand had slipped a note under it. Atto was summoning me urgently: we were to attend morning mass together at St Agnes in Porta Coeli, the convent’s church.

The sudden April snow shower, rare but not impossible in Vienna, had covered the whole city and the suburbs with a thick and graceful mantle, just as in my dream. I set off with Cloridia and our little boy towards Via Rauhenstein, or Road of the Rough Stone, the street that ran alongside the convent, where the main entrance to the church of St Agnes was. We found Atto and Domenico waiting at the entrance to the nave. I noticed with surprise that the Abbot, although wearing different clothes from those of the day before, was once again dressed in green and black, almost as if he had refurbished his entire wardrobe with just those two colours.

Already shivering from the sudden drop in temperature, we took our places among the pews on the left.

“Today we are celebrating the first Sunday after Holy Easter, also known as ‘White Sunday’ or Quasi Modo Geniti,” began the celebrant. “The Gospel we will hear is John, verse 20, and it tells of the doubting of Thomas.”

Within my temples the memory of Dànilo’s death was hammering away; I had described it in detail to Cloridia as soon as I got back to Porta Coeli. It hardly needs saying that the episode had thrown us both into a state of deep anguish. The student’s final words suggested that the murder had been committed by the Turks. Dànilo had been about to tell us of the first results of his research into the strange question of the Golden Apple.

“Today,” the priest went on, “marks the end of the celebrations of the holy passion, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which began three weeks ago with Black Sunday, known also as Judica, when, as cited in John’s Gospel in chapter 8, the Jews stoned Jesus. There then followed Palm Sunday, when, as we read in Matthew’s Gospel chapter 21, Jesus entered Jerusalem. Last Sunday, Holy Easter, we read the account of the resurrection of Our Lord as handed down to us by the Evangelist Mark. On Easter Sunday we read Luke, 24: the walk to Emmaus; on Tuesday, idem, Jesus among the children. All telling of joy and happiness.”

But what was the meaning of the arcane words that Dànilo had muttered in his death throes? Only vague recollections of what he had learned? Or obscure anathemas that his murderers had hurled at him before killing him? Cloridia and I were deeply worried that someone might connect Dànilo’s death with me and Simonis, and that we might somehow get involved in a trial.

“It is no accident that the next four Sundays all have names of great jubilation and hope: Misericordia, Jubilate, Cantate and Rogate. And do not forget the miracle of forgiveness and love that took place centuries ago in this very convent and from which it took its name Himmelpforte, Heaven’s Gate (in Latin, Porta Coeli): when the sister doorkeeper erred and fled with her confessor, the Blessed Virgin took her place, assuming her appearance. And only when the sinner returned in penitence did the abbess learn of the substitution and the Virgin reveal herself, blessing the sinner, and disappearing before the astonished eyes of all the nuns. Rejoice and hope in the clemency of the Most High!” concluded the priest.

It really was time to hope, I told myself, swayed by the words from the pulpit. Nobody had yet come looking for us, at home or elsewhere. If all went well, as my assistant had predicted, Dànilo’s death would be written off as the result of a drunken brawl, or a settling of scores among minor criminals. The exequies would be taken care of by some merciful charitable confraternity.

During the religious service Atto asked Domenico to look first this way, then the other, and then back again. He was looking for someone, and I knew perfectly well whom. At the end he asked me.

“Has she come?”

“Who?” I pretended not to understand.

“What do you mean, who? The Pálffy woman, curse it. On some pretext Domenico got one of the nuns at Porta Coeli to describe her to him. She told us that she often comes to St Agnes for the first mass. But there’s no one here who matches the description.”

“I can’t help you, Signor Atto,” I answered, while someone in the pew behind shushed us, muttering disgruntled remarks about the usual prattling Italians.

I looked upwards. In the gallery sat the nuns, while the lay sisters were at the front of the nave. I also saw the Chormaisterin: bent over her kneeler, she was praying fervently, raising her face to the holy crucifix and then to the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli. I stared more attentively: from the way her shoulders shook I would have said that Camilla was weeping. The evening before she had struck me as tense and nervous. Cloridia remarked it too, and looked at me inquisitively; I answered with a show of dumb perplexity. I had no idea myself what was agitating our good friend.

At the door Atto and Domenico waited a little longer for the Emperor’s lover to appear, or at least a young woman corresponding to the description they had received of her, but in vain.

Another possibility, said Domenico, was that Countess Marianna Pálffy might go to the nine-thirty service, the mass for the nobility, in the Cathedral of St Stephen. There was nothing for it but to arrange to meet there, in the hope of better luck.

There was a little time before the service began and so we lingered in the convent church. Cloridia and I were looking around for Camilla; we were hoping to be able to speak to her and to find out what was upsetting her. Meanwhile Atto had asked Domenico to escort him towards the headmistress of the convent’s novitiate, who, he hoped, would lead him to Pálffy.

“Suor Strassoldo?” said Atto with great urbanity, using Italian since the nun’s surname was Italian.

“Von Strassoldo, please!” brusquely answered the sister — a thin, middle-aged woman with small, menacing blue eyes.

Atto was caught off-guard: omitting the patronymic “von”, which testified to the Strassoldo family’s noble blood, was not a good start.

“Please excuse me, I — ”

“You are excused, but so am I,” von Strassoldo cut him off. “I have many things to see to and I don’t speak Italian. I’m certain that the Chormaisterin will be able to help you in anything you need.” With that she turned and walked away, leaving Abbot Melani and Domenico flustered and above all humiliated, since other nuns had been present at the short conversation. Not even with a blind man had the tetchy mistress of the novitiate sweetened her manners.

“Signor Abbot,” I whispered in his ear, while the other nuns moved away, “people behave differently from the way they do in Italy, and perhaps in France too. When they don’t welcome a conversation, they cut it short.”

“Oh, forget about it,” Abbot Melani interrupted me, extremely irritated. “I understand perfectly: that silly old woman of Italian origins does not like her old compatriots. They’re all the same, people of that sort: after just one generation they pretend they don’t remember where they came from. Just like the Habsburgs and the Pierleoni.”

The latter name was entirely new to me. What had that Italian surname got to do with the glorious Habsburgs, the Emperor’s family?

“Don’t you know who the Pierleoni are?” asked Atto with a cruel little smile.

According to official historiography, he explained, the Habsburg Empire was born from the ashes of the Roman Empire, which had died out on account of the barbarian invasions of Goths and Longobards. Thanks to his heroic valour, Charlemagne drove the Longobards from Italy and was acclaimed Roman Emperor. Subsequently, thanks to the undefeated virtue of the German Otho the Great, the name, insignia and authority of the Roman Empire passed down to the most glorious Germanic nation, and at present they rested with the Austrian lineage of the Habsburgs, the resurrected progeny of the Caesars.

“But this is the balderdash that historians peddle,” hissed Atto, throwing a malevolent glance in the direction of Strassoldo, “because nobody wants to dig up the truth on the origins of the Habsburgs.”

The history of the Habsburg emperors began with Rudolph I, who ascended to the throne in the year of Our Lord 1273. All were agreed on this point.

“But what happened before that day,” said Abbot Melani, “nobody knows.”

According to some scholars, the origin of the Habsburg blood should be traced back to to a certain Guntram, whose son around the year 1000 was supposed to have founded a castle of the name Hasburg, which is to say Habsburg. Others traced it back to a certain Ottobert, around 654. Still others to Aeganus, the royal house-steward of France, who had married Gerbera, daughter of St Gertrude.

Other scholars answered indignantly: not a bit of it, the Habsburgs descend from the royal blood of the Merovingians. Prince Sigebert, son of Dietrich of Austrasia, in the year 630 had received the county of the Alemans from the King of France, and his successor Sigebert II had assumed the title of Count of Habsburg. It was from his son Pabo of Alsatia, after nineteen generations, that Rudolph I was finally to descend.

Most certainly not, thundered scholars even more learned than the previous ones: the Habsburgs descend from Adam.

The dynastic series (which included the kings of Babylon, of Troy, of the Sicambrians, kings and counts of France, kings of Gaul, kings of Austrasia, dukes of Alsatia and of Alamannia, counts of Habsburg and of Ergau) according to these scholars was as clear and limpid as the sun, although a little patience was required to read it all through: Adam, Seth, Enos, Cain, Mahalel, Iared, Enoch, Methusalem, Lamech, Noah, Chus, Nimrod, Cres, Coelius, Saturn, Jupiter, Dardanus I, Erichthonius, Tros, Ilus, Laomedon, Antenor I, Marcomir, Antenor II, Priam I, Helenus, Diocles, Bassan, Cladodius I, Nicanor, Marcomir II, Clogius, Antenor III, Estomir II, Merodacus, Cassander, Antharius, Franco, Chlodio, Marcomir III, Clodomir, Antenor IV, Ratherius, Richimerus, Odemar, Marcomir IV, Clodomir IV, Farabert, Hunno, Hilderich, Quather, another Chlodio, Dagobert, Genebald, another Dagobert, Faremond, yet another Chlodio, Meroveus, Childeric, Clodoveus the Great, Clothar, Sigisbert or Sigebert, Childepert, Theodopert, another Sigisbert, yet another Sigisbert, Ottbert, Bebo, Robert, Hettopert, Rampert, Gunstramo, Luithardo, Luitfrido, Hunifrido, another Gunthram or perhaps Gunstram, Belz, Rapatus, Werner, Otto, another Werner, Albert the Divine, Albert the Wise and finally the usual Rudolph I.

Of course, in this reconstruction the names of many kings appeared several times, with uncertain spellings (Bebo or Pabo? Gunstramo or Gunthram? Sigisbert or Sigebert?), and nothing was very clear at the end of it. What was good, however, was that the competing scholars, worn out, had given up rebutting one another.

But there were other researchers, the most learned and unstinting, who objected: did Rudolph I not descend from Albert the Wise? Well, Albert the Wise descended from Alberto Pierleoni, Count of Mount Aventine, member of an ancient and illustrious Roman family. Having moved from Rome to Switzerland, Alberto Pierleoni had married the daughter of Werner, last count of Habsburg, thus founding the dynastic line, Habsburg-Pierleoni. The Roman family went back to Leone Anicio Pierleoni, who died in 1111, of highly noble blood because he descended from none other than the Roman Emperor Flavius Anicius Olybrius.

“Unfortunately, the theory of their descent from Pierleoni, which was very fashionable under Leopold, Joseph I’s father, proved suicidal,” sneered Atto, still furious at being humiliated by Strassoldo.

The Pierleoni, as other experts observed, were a rich and powerful family but had been tarnished by some extremely embarrassing affairs. It included cardinals and bishops but also grasping and unscrupulous merchants and bankers, who maliciously financed the Holy See with the aim of making it an accessory to simony, so they could blackmail it and turn it into their own profitable backyard. A Pierleoni was elected pope under the name of Gregory VI in 1045, but it was then discovered that he had shamelessly bought the papal seat from his predecessor, Benedict IX. This reached the ears of Emperor Frederick III, who descended upon Italy, forced Gregory VI to resign and retire into exile in Germany, where the ex-Pope then died, surrounded by general scorn.

Another Pierleoni was elected pope in 1130 under the name of Anacletus II, but on the day of his election another cardinal was appointed pope under the name Innocent II, causing a grave schism that created anguish and torment throughout Christianity (Anacletus was to quarrel with five more popes). In addition, according to other rumours, the Pierleoni family (who, like so many medieval Roman families had their own private army and fortified castles in the middle of the city, and regularly went to war against rival families) were actually of Jewish blood: their forefather, a certain Baruch, was a Jew who had converted to Christianity, and the legend according to which some popes had been secretly Jewish was based on the true story of the Pierleoni. In addition, the Jews were far from popular with Emperor Leopold I, father of Joseph I the Victorious, and he had confined them in a ghetto on the other side of the Danube, the Leopoldine Island, just where the Turks had pitched camp during the siege of 1683.

“In short,” concluded Atto, taking me by the arm and cackling, “the glorious Roman family from which the imperial blood of the Habsburgs is supposed to descend was composed of popes, long disliked by most people in Vienna; of Jews, disliked by Emperor Leopold I; and by Italians, disliked by everyone: you saw how that idiotic Strassoldo woman behaved.”

Meanwhile Camilla de’ Rossi had come up to us and Cloridia had addressed her. The two women were now talking animatedly in front of a small group of young novices. I went up to them, taking Atto by the arm. We came into earshot just as my wife was answering questions from the novices, who were very curious about us, a family of strange Italians who had come to Vienna from the distant city of the Pope. Camilla was acting as interpreter from German to Italian and vice-versa.

The young women (all of excellent families and very well-behaved) asked about Rome and its splendours, the Pope and the Roman court, and finally wanted to know about the life we had led there, as well as our past. I listened with a touch of anxiety, since Cloridia had to conceal the stain of the infamous profession she had practised during her troubled adolescence.

“I don’t remember anything of my youthful years,” she replied, “and besides my poor mother was Tur. .”

Just as she was about to reveal her mother’s Eastern origins, I felt Atto start and his wizened hand clutched my arm. I saw Camilla de’ Rossi’s eyes open wide and she broke in brusquely: “Now my dears, it’s time to get to work, we’ve talked long enough.”

As soon as the little group of nuns had moved away, Camilla took Cloridia’s arm and, approaching me and Abbot Melani, she explained the brusque end to the conversation.

“A few years ago, in the church of St Ursula near here, on the Johannesgasse, Cardinal Collonitz baptised a young Turkish slave who belonged to his lieutenant, the Spaniard Gerolamo Giudici, and assigned her to this novitiate. At once a revolt broke out in the convent, because the nuns, who were all of noble descent, were afraid that Porta Coeli would lose its good name. Giudici insisted and the dispute was taken as far as the Emperor and the consistory, who found for the nuns: the young Turkish woman was refused entrance.”

Actually the poor girl was terrified of being locked up in a convent, continued Camilla. Fearing that sooner or later Giudici would succeed in finding one for her, one night she managed to run away. Despite long and careful searches, nobody could discover where she had fled, or with whom.

“As you can understand, my friends,” Camilla concluded, “certain arguments just cannot be touched on here.”

Collonitz. The name was not new to me. Where had I heard it before? I was unable to answer this. At any rate, the message was clear: if anyone at Porta Coeli were to discover that Cloridia was the daughter of a Turkish slave, we would probably be forced to leave the place in an instant.

A quarter of an hour later, after a short walk through the snowy streets, while Cloridia was at the palace, I went with Atto and Domenico to the Cathedral of St Stephen, in search of Countess Pálffy.

At the nine-thirty service here the atmosphere was very different from St Agnes. First of all, it needs saying that while the three p.m. weekday vespers only brought in a handful of old women and a few beggars, late-morning Sunday masses were so crowded that one had to go from church to church to find somewhere to sit.

In the square outside the church, dazzling with the fresh snow, was one of the typical beggars you will find in front of every Viennese church every day of the year. Dressed in a light blue skirt, she had a little box for alms fastened to her waist, which she shook as people passed her on the way into church. When we approached she leaped as if possessed and shouted to the crowd: “Come and be blessed! Come and be blessed!” Abbot Melani and Domenico were quite startled. The nine o’clock rosary had just finished and the priest was about to give the benediction. There was a sudden rush into the cathedral, and we found ourselves dragged along in a stampede of stomping, sliding, slush-encrusted boots, which bespattered the atrium with mud and snow. Those few people who gave no signs of wanting to enter the church were berated by the beggar with curses and insults.

“Here in Vienna Sundays are truly hallowed, it seems,” remarked Atto, stamping his feet free of snow once inside, while his nephew rearranged his hat and cloak, which had been unsettled by the horde of eager churchgoers.

“Not only Sundays,” I explained with a slight laugh, as I adjusted my own clothes. “Every day, here in St Stephen’s alone, there are eighty masses and three rosaries. The Franciscans celebrate thirty-three masses a day at regular intervals, and in the church of St Michael there’s one every quarter of an hour.”

“Every day?” said Atto and his escort in amazed unison.

“I counted them up myself,” I went on, “and I worked out that every year, just in the Cathedral of St Stephen, they celebrate over 400 pontifical offices, almost 60,000 masses, over a thousand rosaries, and about 130,000 confessions and communions.”

Without counting benedictions, I concluded, as Atto and Domenico listened in astonishment: there were always a few in one or other of the over hundred churches and chapels in the city, so that more than once the city authorities had asked the priests to agree on regular schedules for everyone, to save the people running randomly from one church to another in spasmodic search of a blessing.

Once inside the church we realised that high mass was under way, and the service was being celebrated at a dozen altars simultaneously. Where could Countess Marianna Pálffy be hidden, if she were there? The enterprise was becoming complicated.

As we made our way down the nave, I looked all around myself. Noblemen and ministers with powdered wigs had their backs turned to the altar and were exchanging tobacco, reading letters and recounting anecdotes from the newspapers. Leaning against the columns of the aisle, they observed and remarked upon new fashions or beautiful women, the gigantic dimensions of St Stephen’s guaranteeing confidentiality and safety from prying eyes. The individual altars were meeting places, and even had their own nicknames to distinguish them: “Let’s meet at the whores’ altar,” people would say; or “at the baked cake,” “at the florins’ square,” “at the wenches’ lane,” “at the rampart cottages”. These were all indecent allusions to the fact that these altars were favourite spots to meet women of loose morals; the poor priests could do nothing about this and were often jeered at by the women.

This immoral behavour was so deeply rooted that some religious services had been given abusive nicknames: the 10.30 mass in the church of the Capuchins was referred to openly as the “whores’ mass”, and the one at 11 o’clock in St Stephen’s as the “loafers’ mass”.

But the harlots and their clients were not the only plagues of the cathedral: this morning as ever (and this was Sunday in albis!) the church was crowded with all manner of people and animals and goods: bumpkins and crones stood around with piglets under their arms, or even tubs full of squawking chickens, geese and ducks; lazy noblemen had themselves carried in sedan chairs right up to the altar, and their equally idle servants then parked the chairs inside the church, too lazy to go and wait outside.

In short, the high mass was like a gigantic fairground: a constant profane bustle, with a sottofondo of endless babbling.

His Caesarean Majesty, by means of an imperial licence, had appointed commissioners whose job it was to walk around the church and threaten to fine or arrest anyone disturbing the services with idle chatter or inappropriate behaviour. The revenue from the fines was distributed among the poor. However, these sanctions made no difference. As the circulars of the episcopal consistory complained, in St Stephen’s the people persisted in gathering in groups, gossiping, swearing, blaspheming, walking to and fro, knocking back liquors and engaging in blatant mercenary activities, mocking, vilifying and even threatening those who warned them to respect the sacred temple.

At the end of the mass we waited outside again, observing the congregation as they left the church, mingling with the crowd of Sunday strollers. “Domenico,” said Atto, “even if it’s cold I want to go for a short walk. .”

“Wait, Uncle.”

Atto Melani’s nephew was standing on tiptoes, as alert as a bloodhound. He was observing a group of three young women, and in particular a very tall one with fiery red hair, bundled up under a small hat that was too flimsy for the weather.

“It’s her, Uncle, I really think it’s her. She’s going back home.”

“Let’s follow her, damn it. Boy, come with me,” said Melani, addressing me.

The three young women were heading towards Carinthia Street, and were walking against the flow, pushing their way through the crowd of Sunday strollers all converging on the centre of the city. We followed the three girls at a reasonable distance, not wishing to give the impression that this bizarre trio (consisting of a blind old man, a midget and only one person of marriageable age, Domenico) was trying to force its attentions on three pretty young maidens.

“As soon as they slow down, go and introduce yourself,” Atto ordered Domenico, “and give her the letter.”

“Which letter?” I said with a start, thinking of the letter in which Eugene had offered to betray the Emperor to the French.

“Just a note with a humble request from two Italian cavaliers seeking the honour to be received by the Countess, and offering her our services.”

A propitious occasion presented itself just a few moments later. The three young women paused to exchange a few words with an elderly nun, who then continued on her way. The three girls lingered on the spot for a few moments. Domenico walked up to them and with a graceful bow introduced himself. He was a handsome young man, fresh-faced and well-mannered, with a gentle, pleasing voice. He must have chosen the right words, because we saw Pálffy’s face, which had a slight tinge of sadness, brighten at the compliment he offered. I wondered what hidden worry she had. The little group exchanged a few amiable words. Domenico was about to put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, perhaps his fingers were already touching Atto’s note.

But a familiar noise had been growing louder by the instant. A splendid two-horse carriage, clanking and rattling, was heading straight towards the trio of young women and Domenico. The postillion made a gesture of salutation to the Countess, who responded immediately, taking her eyes off Atto’s nephew. The carriage had now pulled up, the doors opened and the three women prepared to climb in. I described to Atto what was happening.

“The note, has he given her the note?” asked Abbot Melani, frothing and thrusting his face forward like a tethered steed.

At that precise moment two footmen climbed down from the carriage and helped the Emperor’s lover to climb in. As she stepped onto the footboard, Domenico handed her the note. She took it in her hand, but with a very courteous gesture gave it straight back to him without opening it. In the meantime, still holding Atto by the arm, I approached them. An instant before she disappeared inside the vehicle, I saw Pálffy’s face tense up as she gave way to a discreet and subdued fit of weeping. The carriage moved off, Domenico gave a timid wave, but no response came from within.

“Curse it,” said Atto, gnashing his teeth when his nephew told him the outcome of the encounter. “These twenty-year-old lovers are always ready to burst into tears and never understand a thing. We won’t find another occasion like this so easily.”

13 of the clock: luncheon hour for noblemen. The middle classes enter the coffee houses, and performances begin in the theatres.

As he took his leave, Abbot Melani bade me meet him again at lunchtime: we would eat again in some public place. I explained that it would be better to meet before one o’clock, because in Vienna only noblemen eat after one, and prices go up steeply.

“Good to know,” he answered. “So let’s not meet before one o’clock. I like to share my table only with people of my own rank.”

When the time came I took him and Domenico to an eating house near the Hofburg. We arrived just in time: it had started snowing again.

I asked at once if we could be seated at one of the more secluded tables. The cantiniere came up and rattled off the rich list of dishes of the day, which included Styrian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Moravian specialities, and for just a few extra pence some exotic ones: pomarances, oysters, almonds, chestnuts, pistachios, rice, muscatel grapes, wine from Spain, Dutch cheese, Cremona mortadella, Venetian sugared almonds and Indian spices.

We gave our orders and we were soon served a tender veal fillet, a coal-baked pink trout and succulent fritters with cream. As always, the quantities were far beyond the needs of any normal human being. As soon as they tasted it, Atto and his nephew were pleasantly surprised.

“I didn’t know people ate as well as this in Vienna. Are we in some special place?” asked Domenico.

“We’re in an eating house like a great many others. But I have to say that even in the lowest tavern here you’ll be served the most fragrant soups, the crispest fries, the most savory roasts,” I said warmly, proud of my adopted city. “All food in Vienna is of high quality, and always of the finest; every ingredient is as fresh as a rose, every portion generous, every dish freshly cooked. And all at decent prices.”

“And in Paris all you can get are rancid cakes, rock-hard bread and fish from the age of Abraham!” exclaimed the Abbot, with a bitter sneer.

I was overjoyed with Atto Melani’s amazement and I told him in precise detail all the gastronomic specialities of the heavenly soil he had the honour of treading. Actually, what I was really hoping was to lower Atto’s guard and so make him ready to answer the questions I would put to him shortly about the death of Dànilo Danilovitsch. I knew Melani, and were I to subject him to my questions directly all I would get would be sly, hypocritical and misleading replies.

If the wealth of a nation can be measured by its food, I began solemnly, addressing my two wondering fellow-diners, then in Austria it was as if King Midas had passed by, transforming everything into gold. A normal family of three eats half a kilo of meat a day, something unimaginable in Rome.

As I held forth in this fashion, with Atto and his nephew looking more and more dazed, their attention was gradually distracted by an increase in noise from the neighbouring tables.

It was the less poetic side of the gastronomic passion that characterised the Caesarean capital.

Domenico looked around himself and soon his perplexed eyes fixed on the other diners in the restaurant: there were those who were using their napkins to blow their noses, scratch their heads or mop their brows; those who were swigging their wine, gurgling it in their throats and letting it dribble down their chins and necks; those who kept pouring out wines for their neighbours and digging their elbows amicably but forcefully into their stomachs if they did not knock it straight back; those using their forks to drag the heaviest portions of roast meat from a central tray to their plates, leaving an embarrassing trail of grease across the tablecloth; those licking their plates or scraping them with their fingernails; those sneezing or coughing loudly, spraying their neighbours with phlegm; one who was spitting; one who had burned his tongue with a boiling morsel and was roaring with pain; and finally one who had finished and was surreptitiously bundling up the leftover food in his napkin.

The expression on Atto’s nephew’s face was one of consternation. He threw an interrogative glance at me, which I pretended not to catch. He did not know that the Viennese lack of table manners had become the subject of sermons for the great Augustinian preacher Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara, and that other eminent authors had issued patient rebukes to the faithful, instructing them to behave less bestially at mealtimes!

“Domenico, I hear shouting. What is the matter?” asked Atto, picking at his trout.

At one of the central tables a highly embarrassing scene had taken place. A spit of roast meat had been served straight from the oven. One of the diners, wishing to remove the ash from a haunch of pork, had blown hard on the spit and the burning embers had ended up in the eyes of a woman sitting opposite. Her husband had demanded immediate redress from the guilty party. As their spirits were all heated with wine, a small altercation had broken out, which the staff had struggled hard to quell. Unfortunately before they did so the offended woman’s husband had succeeded in plunging the scorching spit into his adversary’s backside, which he had run off to medicate.

“Oh, it’s nothing, Signor Uncle, a slight disagreement,” said Domenico, not wishing to expose the less dignified side of the Viennese culinary passion, whose virtues I had just extolled.

“A friendly exchange of opinions,” I said, trying to back up Domenico’s lie, even though Atto was not fooled.

“These Viennese and their city are as vulgar as I have heard them to be in Paris,” he said, not concealing the smug satisfaction he took in being able to disparage them. “They may be extremely rich, but their streets are as tangled as a ball of wool, and they’re so narrow that the façades of the palaces, which deserve admiration, are difficult to see. . though, of course, that does not matter much to me, since I have lost the gift of sight. I appreciate far more the squares of Vienna, where I can walk without any inconvenience, since they’re all paved with very hard stones, are they not?”

“The stones are so hard that not even the heaviest wheels of the country carts can harm them,” I confirmed.

“As I thought. But there remains the fact that as the roads are so narrow, the rooms are extraordinarily dark and, what is most annoying, there is no building that is inhabited by only five or six families. Highly distinguished ladies, and even ministers of court, are separated from the apartment of a cobbler or a tailor only by a partition wall, and there is no one who lives on more than two floors of a palace: one for himself and the other for the servants. The owners of the palaces rent out the rest to anyone who asks, and so the great stone staircases are always as dirty and shabby as the streets. But then of course you don’t see the dirt: the buildings are too high, the streets are dark and very little light gets in through the windows. Of course, I can see nothing in any case, alas, but that is what they say in Paris about Vienna. Can you confirm it?”

“You’re not wrong — it’s often like that, Signor Atto,” I agreed, overwhelmed by his sudden baleful outburst. “However, I would just point out that the interior of the houses — ”

“I know, I know,” the old castrato broke in. “I’ve heard that once you’ve climbed the stairs, there is nothing more astounding than the rooms where the Viennese beau monde live: a series of eight or ten great spacious rooms, with doors and windows all richly carved and gilded, furniture and ornaments of a quality rarely found elsewhere in Europe even in the most princely residences, tapestries from Brussels, gigantic mirrors with silver frames, beds and canopies with damask and velvets of fine taste, great paintings, Japanese porcelain, enormous chandeliers in rock crystal. .”

While Atto rattled on, I thought of the occasions when my work had brought me into the homes of the wealthy. Amazing the power of Parisian gossip! Atto was blind, but it was as if he had seen everything with his own eyes. He was clearly torn between admiration and envy for the enemies of France: the previous day, when he arrived, he had been full of praise for Vienna, the Caesars and their restrained opulence, and he had lashed out against the arrogant dissipation of the French, which had brought the country to ruin. But now, envy at all this wealth was stirring him to more venomous and defamatory judgements. Old Abbot Melani was becoming somewhat self-contradictory, I thought with a smile. Unless. . I was struck by a doubt: suppose Atto had not been sincere the previous day? Suppose he had extolled the good sense of the emperors and the prosperity of their capital city only to avert any suspicion that he might have come to Vienna to plot in league with the Turks? I decided to try an open question:

“Signor Atto, what do you think of the Agha’s mission? What do you think he’s trying to obtain from His Caesarean Majesty?”

“That is what I would like to know myself. It could help me greatly in my — or rather in our mission. The suburbs of Vienna, I was saying. .” he added, returning to the previous subject and biting into a cream-fritter, “like your Josephina, are exquisite. I wonder how often you yourself have paused to admire that jewel, the Vice-Chancellor’s summer villa, Schönborn, from the outside. Yesterday we went for a walk around it, before going to the theatre. They even talk of it in Versailles. And what a garden! And what enormous orange and lemon trees, all in gilded vases! At least that’s how my nephew described it to me.”

Domenico nodded politely. I returned to the attack, this time with a fairly explicit provocation, hoping to stir Atto into some revealing reaction.

“Of course, it would be very convenient for France,” I said, “if a new conflict were to break out between the Empire and the Turks: His Caesarean Majesty would have to engage his armies in the East as well. It would be a great relief to the Most Christian King.”

“I really don’t think that can happen,” answered Atto blandly. “After the treaty of Karlowitz the Eastern waters are peaceful. The Turkish embassy that has just arrived has no other aim than to remind people that the Sultan is still alive, and it strikes me as a purely theatrical gambit.”

He had contradicted himself. Just a moment before he had said that he had no idea what the motive for the Ottoman embassy was and that he would like to know more.

“By the way,” he added, changing the subject yet again, “as I mentioned, yesterday afternoon we went to the theatre. They told me that Marianna Pálffy adores comedies, and I hoped to meet her. We took a box for four people; the ticket was very cheap, a ducat. The theatre was dark and the ceiling too low, but I’ve never laughed so much in my life! Thanks to the description my nephew gave me, of course.”

I made no reply to this idle chatter, but Atto went on regardless:

“It was a comedy in which Jove assumes the guise of Amphitrion in order to go to bed with his wife Alcmene. But mostly he runs up a series of debts in his place, and for most of the play we see poor Amphitrion being pursued by his creditors. Idle nonsense, with bawdy jokes that wouldn’t be tolerated from a fishwife in Paris, ha ha.”

Atto persisted in ignoring my questions about the Agha’s embassy, which was the hottest news of the day in Vienna. It was so blatant that it became suspicious.

“Fashion is terrible here as well, isn’t that right Domenico?” he continued to ramble.

“Yes, Signor Uncle.”

“Sadly I am denied the light of day, dear nephew. In such a large city I can’t even observe the attire of the inhabitants, but I’m not missing much. I know this very well because Domenico reads to me from the Parisian gazettes just how awful the fashion of the Caesarean court is if compared with that of France or England. The only thing they have in common is that ladies wear skirts. Otherwise, Viennese fashion is monstrous and against all common sense. Here even the richest fabric is embroidered heavily in gold and a dress only has to be costly to be admired, no matter whether it’s in good taste or not. On other days, people just put on a simple cloak and whatever they want underneath. Isn’t that true, dear nephew?”

“Yes, Signor Uncle,” repeated Domenico.

I was beginning to lose patience.

“For example, here in Vienna it’s considered especially beautiful to have as much hair as an average-sized barrel could contain. And so ladies have enormous scaffoldings of starched gauze set up and fixed to their heads with ribbons. Then they put them on their heads, resting on round rods, the same ones, the same ones that our dairymaids use to hang buckets of fresh milk on, and they cover this whole infernal contraption with false hair, which everyone here considers extremely elegant.”

“Signor Atto — ” I tried in vain to interrupt him.

“Then, to hide the difference from real hair,” he went on regardless, “they sprinkle the whole contrivance with pounds of powder and wind it round with three or four strings of diamonds fixed with enormous brooches of pearls or other stones, red, green or yellow. And then, with this paraphernalia on their heads, they can barely move! You can imagine how this outlandish way of dressing brings out the natural ugliness that nature chose to confer on women here, to match their sour, crabbed characters. They told me in Paris that there’s no liveliness here, everybody is stolid and phlegmatic and no one ever gets excited, except over questions of ceremonial. That’s where the Viennese expend all their most frenzied passions. But is it true?”

“Not so far as I’ve noticed,” I answered, irritated by the stream of insults that Atto was directing at my adopted city; if he had such a bad opinion of it, I would have liked to say, why had he sent me here?

“And yet I have looked into the question and at the post station I heard that a little while ago two carriages crashed into one another in a narrow street and the ladies inside refused to agree to reverse and give way to the other, since they were both of the same rank. They spent almost the whole night listing their own titles and merits to prove that the other should reverse and soon enough their yells could be heard in the neighbouring streets. It seems they even woke the Emperor, who had to send his own guards to make them stop, and the only way they could resolve things in the end was by pulling both carriages back at the same time and sending them on their way by alternative routes,” he concluded with an impertinent little laugh.

All I could do was try the final thrust:

“Signor Atto, there’s been a murder,” I suddenly said.

At last Abbot Melani’s chatter came to a halt.

“A murder? What are you saying, boy?”

“Last night. A friend of Simonis, my apprentice. Simonis had asked some of his friends, whom I’d met, to look into the question of this strange Golden Apple that the Turkish Agha talked about in his audience with Prince Eugene.”

“I remember it perfectly. And so?”

“Last night Simonis and I had an appointment with one of these students, on the ramparts. His name was Dánilo, Count Dánilo Danilovitsch. We found him on the point of death. They had stabbed him several times; he died in our arms.”

Abbot Melani took his blind eyes off me, turning mournful and worried at the same time.

“It’s a very sad affair,” he said after a few moments of silence. “Did he have any family?”

“Not in Vienna.”

“Did anyone see you while you were tending to this Count Dánilo?”

“We don’t think so.”

“Good. So you shouldn’t get involved in the matter,” he said with a note of relief in his voice; if I were to be drawn into the enquiries, someone might follow the thread and arrive at him, an enemy spy.

“Did you say his name was Danilovitsch? That isn’t a German name. Where did he come from?”

“From Pontevedro.”

“Ah, well, they’re not civilised people. Count indeed! Pontevedro! They’re little more than brutes, rough people. .”

Abbot Melani seemed to see things just like Simonis, who had coined the term “Half-Asia”.

“I’ll bet that to support himself in his studies he took on some fourth-rate job,” added Atto.

“Spying. He denounced anyone who broke the laws on modesty in dress for money.”

“A spy by profession! And you’re amazed that someone like that, a Pontevedrin what’s more, should end up stabbed? Boy, it’s always sad of course, but there’s nothing surprising about this death. Forget all about it,” Melani said decisively, apparently not remembering that he too was a spy by profession.

“And suppose it was the Turks? Dànilo was looking into the Golden Apple. While he was dying he whispered some strange sentences.”

Atto listened with interest to what the poor student had muttered before breathing his last.

“The cry of the forty thousand martyrs,” he repeated thoughtfully when I had finished, “and then this mysterious Eyyub. . It sounds like the ravings of a poor wretch in his death throes. Dànilo Danilovitsch may have found out something about the Golden Apple, but it all seems quite clear to me: the Turks have nothing to do with it, your friend ended up just as one might expect a Pontevedrin spy to do.”

The meal with Atto left me with a sense of sour uneasiness on two accounts. Abbot Melani had avoided my questions about the Turkish embassy too openly, somehow, as if the event were of no interest, and instead had subjected me to an annoying series of irrelevant reflections on Viennese customs. Too cold a reaction, I said to myself, for such a consummate diplomat as Atto, drawn to all intrigues and secrets, to any item of news on the political front.

The second reason for concern was the way he had dismissed the death of poor Dànilo Danilovitsch. Just why, although he listened with interest to the last words Dànilo had uttered before dying, had he chosen to draw all suspicion away from the Turks?

Atto announced that in the afternoon he would try to approach Countess Pálffy once again. I made no reply. Let him handle it by himself, I thought.

I had to go with Simonis to an important meeting: his study companions were going to to get together to report the information they had gathered on the Golden Apple.

A short while later I was in Penicek’s trap, alongside Simonis. I was beginning to appreciate that my assistant had at his disposal a docile Pennal, even though lame, with a means of transport thrown in. Simonis had a slave: something that not even I, who fed him, could boast.

We began the journey in total silence. The memory of Dànilo’s last moments weighed on us. It was easy to deduce that the death had been due to Dànilo’s dangerous activity as a sycophant, as Abbot Melani had at once affirmed. But the suspicion that the poor wretch had been killed on acount of what he had learned about the Golden Apple, although not supported by any definite evidence, was in our minds and, drop by vitriolic drop, was injecting remorse into our hearts. I caught Simonis gazing at me absorbedly.

“You still haven’t asked me, Signor Master,” he said, forcing himself to smile, “what jobs my companions do to support themselves in their studies so that they don’t end up in the academic prison for illegal begging.”

The Greek was trying to tear down the curtain of doleful silence.

“You’re right,” I said, “I know hardly anything about them.”

Overwhelmed by all that happened in the last few days, I had asked my assistant very little about his friends. Given poor Dànilo’s ambiguous occupation, and Penicek’s irregular one, I was both curious and diffident as to the kinds of jobs they might be engaged in.

“Koloman Szupán is the richest of all,” Simonis informed me, “because he’s a waiter. As you already know, our Pennal here present is a coach driver. Dragomir Populescu has little time to earn a crust of bread; he spends all his time with women. He tries it on with all of them, but with very little success. Koloman hardly ever tries but always succeeds.”

“Oh yes? And how does he do that?”

“He has what you might call extraordinary means at his disposal,” said Simonis, with a slight smile. “The word has spread among young Viennese women, who focus on the essentials and who are always very, very satisfied with Koloman. If you’re lucky, Signor Master, soon we’ll have proof.”

“Proof?”

“It’s three p.m. and at this hour Koloman is always hard at it. He has extraordinary vigour; every day at this hour he has to give free vent to his energies, otherwise he gets sad. If he doesn’t have a fine wench to hand, he’s liable to climb the first window he sees, wherever he is, and make his way across roofs and eaves to find some willing beauty. I’ve seen him at it with my own eyes.”

We had reached a modest little house near the ramparts. After ordering Penicek to wait for us outside, the young Greek knocked. A young man opened up, saying at once:

“He’s upstairs, he’s busy.”

Simonis answered with a knowing smile. When we were inside he explained that the whole house, a small two-storey building, was rented to a group of students, who were all intimately acquainted with each other’s habits. In the narrow hallway we sat down on an old bench, close to the staircase leading to the upper floor. I had hardly had time to shake the snow from my cloak when a cry came to us from upstairs.

“Aaaaahhh! Yes, like that, again. .” cried a girl’s voice.

“We won’t have long to wait, Koloman knows we can’t arrive late,” whispered Simonis, winking at me.

“You’re an animal, a beast. . Again, go on, please!” continued the Teutonic woman imploringly.

But Koloman must have heard we had arrived. We heard his voice offer some tactful objection. The discussion continued for a while and then grew more animated. Suddenly we heard a door slam violently, the same woman’s voice insulting Koloman and then footsteps descending the stairs. We saw the young woman (quite pretty, blond hair gathered at the back of her neck, plain but new clothes) running towards the door, foaming with rage. Before stepping outside, ignoring our presence, she turned back towards the staircase and shouted a last epithet at Koloman:

“You’re just a miserable Hungarian waiter, you deformed beast!”

She slammed the door so hard that the whole hallway shook.

“The usual Viennese refinement,” said Simonis with a soothing smile.

Just then our friend came downstairs, buttoning his shirt with an expression halfway between embarrassed and amused.

“Actually I’m a baron, the twenty-seventh Koloman Szupán of my family, to be precise, and I only work as a waiter to support myself while studying,” he said as if the young woman were still there. “Excuse the rather unedifying scene, but the Viennese are like that: when you have an engagement and are obliged to speed things up, they lose their tempers and turn unfriendly. Whereas in Italy. .”

“Women are more patient?” I guessed, while Koloman put on his cloak to go out.

“In Italy I never speed things up,” smiled Koloman, slapping Simonis on the back and walking towards the door.

The Pennal’s trap set off again slowly, plodding along the road with its soft mantle of snow towards Populescu’s home: the same apartment where two days earlier I had attended the scene of the Deposition. It was here that the group of students had agreed to meet: each of them had sought information about the Golden Apple, and they would undoubtedly have some news to give us. Unfortunately, what might have been an enjoyable get-together among students had become an emergency meeting. Word of Dànilo’s tragic death must have spread throughout the university, but obviously it was his friends who had been most affected by it. Koloman Szupán himself, after that first moment of cheerfulness, grew taciturn. To drive away sad thoughts, just as Simonis had done with me a moment earlier, I tried to strike up a conversation on the journey, and asked him if he was satisfied with his job as a waiter.

“Satisfied? For the moment, I thank God that Lent is over,” said Koloman, mopping imaginary sweat from his brow.

“Why’s that? I thought that in Lent waiters in inns worked less than usual, since you can’t eat meat and so the diet must be lighter.”

“Lighter?” Koloman burst out laughing. “In Lent you have to sweat twice as hard to do all those complicated fish recipes! Roast eel with lard; pike in sour cream; baked crabs with parsley-roots stewed in oil with lemon and oyster sauce; roast stockfish with horseradish, mustard and butter, not to mention roast beaver. .”

“Roast beaver? But that’s not a fish.”

“Tell that to the Viennese! And you have to catch them, the furry wretches. Good job there are also Luther’s eggs.

“Luther’s?”

“Yes, the ones Luther will never eat. They’re the Lenten eggs. They call them that as a joke, because Catholics eat them to abstain from meat, while the Protestants laugh and eat whatever they want. Then there’s fish.”

During the Lenten penitence, explained Koloman, in the kitchens of Viennese inns you’ll find an unimaginable quantity of fish, and of an even greater variety than in Italy. Even among the mountains of the Tyrol there were those, like the famous doctor Guarinoni (yet another Italian), who advised people not to overdo it with all the things on offer: fish from streams, rivers, lakes and the sea, from the most unlikely places; from the Hungarian lake of Balaton, from Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Bosnia and the Italian coast of Trieste. From Venice special mail coaches brought heaps of oysters, sea-snails, mussels, crabs and clams, frogs and turtles, and other specialities arrived on special swift convoys even from Holland and the remote North Sea.

“I know they’re placed under blocks of ice but don’t ask me how on earth they get here still fresh after such a long journey; I’ve never understood it,” added Koloman.

As it was a tough job to abstain from meat until Easter, and as water is always water, during Lent the menus would contain, alongside the fish and crustaceans, otters and beavers! All served roasted and eaten with great relish.

Abraham from Sancta Clara was quite right, I thought, when he said that in Vienna no animal of land, air or water can be sure of not ending up on the table.

“These Viennese,” Koloman added, “didn’t curb their appetites even when the Turks were breathing down their necks.”

“What have the Turks got to do with it, Koloman?”

He explained that during the famous, dramatic and glorious siege of 1683, which has gone down in history, the Viennese never lost their appetite and relish for good cooking. While the city risked being conquered and razed to the ground, groups of Viennese, including women and children, would leave the fortress at night, at great risk to themselves and their fellow citizens, to go and buy bread from the Turks.

“From the Turks? And they sold it to them?”

“They had some really poor soldiers who needed the money. And in the Turkish camp they were never short of bread.”

Those found guilty of such trafficking were punished in the respective camps, both by the Christians (three hundred whiplashes) and by the Ottomans. However, Koloman explained, there was no way to put a stop to it. And in Vienna there was also the problem of thirst.

“Of course, water. .” I remarked.

“No, there was always water. It was wine they’d run out of.”

As the gourmet always prevailed over the soldier in the Viennese spirit, entire cartloads of wine were often intercepted, which had been brought down from the surrounding countryside, and which stole their way into the city at night. Sometimes unthinkable things would happen, like the occasion when the besieged Viennese, while the battle was raging, managed to get hold of an entire herd of over a hundred bullocks, from behind the Turkish lines (how this was managed was a mystery).

I heard with ill-concealed disappointment this behind-the-scenes insight into the great siege. How far removed from my grave meditations on the heroic resistance of the Viennese! Things had apparently been quite different.

“Not exactly the unblemished, fearless heroes of legend,” I remarked dazedly.

“Oh, they were fearless all right. But they had plenty of blemishes: of wine and fat, on their collars and shirt sleeves,” laughed Koloman.

Just think, he concluded, that during the siege in 1683 there was even someone in the city who had treacherously passed on a very valuable piece of information to the Turks: within the stronghold civilians and soldiers were no longer collaborating; the Viennese were exhausted and wanted to surrender.

“It was 5th September. Hardly anyone knows this story, which could have changed history. For some mysterious reason the Turks did not attack at once, and what a stroke of luck that was! Six days later reinforcements arrived and the Christian armies won.”

But I knew why the Turks had not attacked Vienna at once: I had discovered it twenty years earlier in Rome with Abbot Melani. But it was a highly complicated story and if I told it to Koloman, he would not believe me.

By now we had arrived. Shaking the snow from our boots and our clothes, we were welcomed in by Dragomir Populescu, who was waiting for us with Jan Janitzki Opalinski. They greeted us with an anxious, anguished air. This time Penicek came in with us, and made his greetings, as awkwardly and ponderously as ever, with his ugly little eyes like a bespectacled ferret.

“I have news,” said Opalinski at once.

“So have I,” added Populescu.

“Where’s Hristo?” asked Koloman.

“He was busy. He told me he’d be a little late,” answered Simonis. “In the meantime we can start.”

“But Koloman, what are you doing here at this hour? Have the good ladies of Vienna all stood you up today?” sniggered Dragomir, with a hint of bitterness in his voice.

“On the contrary. But you always leave them so horny, with your little sparrow’s twig, that it just takes me three minutes each to make them come.”

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm. .” muttered Populescu, clenching his fists.

“That’s enough joking,” said Simonis. “Dànilo is dead, and we all have to be very careful.”

They all fell silent for a moment.

“Friends,” I spoke up, “I thank you for the help you’re giving me on the question of the Golden Apple. However, after your companion’s death, I won’t blame you if you want to go no further.”

“But perhaps Dànilo was bumped off by someone taking revenge for one of his acts of spying,” muttered Opalinski thoughtfully.

“It may even have been one of his fellow-countrymen from Pontevedro,” Populescu said in support. “They’re real beasts there, not like where I come from in Romania.”

“After all, he’s certainly not the first student to end up murdered,” added Koloman.

And they all competed in bringing up sad cases of students of the University of Vienna who had died violently for the most varied reasons: in duels, surprised while stealing; involved in smuggling et cetera et cetera.

“And they were all from Half-Asia,” whispered Simonis to me with a significant glance, as if to underline the particular inclination of those people for an iniquitous life.

“Perhaps these Turks have nothing at all to hide,” ventured Opalinski at last.

“Well, yes, it strikes me as strange that the Agha should have pronounced those words publicly, if there was anything secret behind them,” said Populescu.

“Perhaps he wanted to send a coded message to someone, confident that anybody who was not in the know would not get suspicious,” conjectured Koloman.

“That doesn’t sound a great idea to me,” answered Populescu.

“But they’re Turks. .” laughed Simonis.

The Greek’s quip set them all laughing. I was almost tempted to tell them that I had seen the Agha’s dervish carrying out horrifying rituals, and especially that Cloridia had heard him plotting to get someone’s head, and that was why we were investigating the Golden Apple. In fact, none of those who had attended the Agha’s audience, as Cloridia had done, had had the slightest suspicion and they had all interpreted the phrase “soli soli soli ad aureum venimus aureum”, or “we’ve come here all alone to the Golden Apple”, as a declaration of peaceful aims.

I guessed that the enthusiasm of those boys was strengthened by the mirage of the money that I had promised as a reward. But now Dànilo was dead, the game was turning dangerous, and perhaps it was right to talk. But Simonis, guessing my doubts, signalled to me with his eyes to keep quiet. And once again, like a coward, I did so.

Having no more to say about the sad end of their Pontevedrin companion, we started to talk about the Golden Apple.

Populescu explained that he had met a beautiful brunette, who served in a coffee shop. At first he had tried to ensnare her for base, seductive ends, but then he had thought it worth exploiting her acquaintance to ask a few questions about the Golden Apple, since the coffee shop owner came from the East.

“A brunette?” I said, surprised. “I thought that as students you would go searching in libraries and archives.”

Simonis’s companions explained that there was nothing to be got from books, other than information on the Imperial Apple or Orb, or the Orb of the Celestial Spheres, distant relatives of the Golden Apple.

“The Imperial Orb, as I’m sure you all know,” explained Opalinski, who was very erudite, “is constituted by the terrestrial globe surmounted by the cross of Christ. The Archangel Michael holds it in one hand, while with the other he grips a cross in the form of a sword and hurls Lucifer into hell for his crimes of envy, pride and vanity against the Most High. It’s no accident that in Hebrew the name Michael means: ‘Who is like God.’ That’s why the Imperial Orb became the Caesarean emblem, given to the Holy Roman Emperors during their coronation as a symbol of the person destined by God to govern and protect the Christian people from evil. It derives in turn from the Orb of the Celestial Spheres, a representation of the sky surrounding the terraqueous orb. The Orb of the Celestial Spheres was a symbol of power as well: for the Romans and Greeks, it was an attribute of Jove, King of the Gods.”

“What nonsense!” Populescu broke in. “Terracqueous orb, indeed. Everyone knows that in ancient times they thought the earth was flat.”

“That just shows how ignorant you are,” retorted Koloman Szupán, a great friend of the Pole. “That’s the usual propaganda to make us think that today we’re more evolved, intelligent and modern than in the past. And you’ve fallen for it.”

“Quite right, Koloman,” approved Opalinski. “The Greeks and Romans knew perfectly well that the earth was round; just think of Parmenides and the myth of Atlas, who holds the terracqueous orb on his shoulders. And even in the despised Middle Ages they all knew it. Did St Augustine not say that the earth is moles globosa, which is to say a ball? Apart from Cosmas Indicopleustes and Severianus of Gabala, only Lactantius went round saying that it was flat, but in his day no one believed him. But unfortunately some dunces with professorships dug up the ravings of Lactantius and passed them off as the ruling doctrine of the Middle Ages.”

“Bah, historical nonsense,” the Hungarian said, spitting on the floor.

“In any case,” Populescu resumed, “the story of the Golden Apple is exclusively Turkish, and has been handed down by word of mouth alone. My brunette, as I was saying. .”

“From mouth to mouth. .” sneered Koloman. “The erudite Dragomir enjoyed an oral encounter with his brunette!”

“Are you just jealous because you couldn’t think of anything better than asking those queer friars?” retorted the Romanian.

“By the way, they send their greetings to you. They told me they have unforgettable memories of you.”

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm!” snarled Populescu, infuriated by the quips from the duo of Koloman and Opalinski.

The story of the Golden Apple as related by the young woman, he continued, was as follows:

“When the new sultan is crowned in Constantinople, they follow a very detailed ceremonial. The Sovereign is carried in a procession to a sanctuary outside the city: the tomb of Mahomet the Prophet’s standard-bearer, the condottiero who conquered Constantinople, seizing it from the Christians. Here they make him put on a belt with the holy scimitar. Then he re-enters Constantinople and passes on horseback in front of the barracks of the janissaries, the Sultan’s élite guards, where the commander of the sixty-first company, one of the four companies of archers, hands him a goblet full of sherbet. The new sultan drinks the entire contents of the goblet, then fills it with fragments of gold and hands it back, shouting: Kizil Elmada görüsürüz!, which means, ‘We’ll meet again at the Golden Apple!’ It’s an invitation to conquer the Christian West, whose churches are actually crowned by the Imperial Orb of Archangel Michael, or the gilded sphere surmounted by the cross of Christ, first and foremost the golden ball of the Basilica of St Peter. That’s why Dànilo also mentioned Rome.”

“But we knew most of this already,” I objected. “What we really want to know is why the Golden Apple has that name. Otherwise we’ll never understand why the Turks talked about it to Eugene of Savoy, and why they said they came soli soli soli, which is to say all alone. And we’ll never truly understand what Dànilo said before he died.”

“Just a moment,” Populescu protested. “I haven’t finished.”

The story actually began, he explained, in the year 1529, during the first great siege of Vienna by the Turks. The date was familiar to me by now: in that year the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent had set up their general headquarters on the plain of Simmering, where Maxmilian was later to create the Place with No Name.

“As everyone knows,” said Populescu, “after the long siege Suleiman’s army had to give up the idea of conquest and go back home because of an exceptionally early and harsh winter, and the cold was too much for the Ottomans in their tents.”

Suleiman then pointed out to his men the bell tower of St Stephen’s, which could be seen very clearly from the Turkish camp. The Sultan could have given the order to destroy it by cannon fire, but instead said: “This time round we have to renounce the conquest of Vienna. But one day we will succeed! On that day, the tower you see will become a minaret for Mahometan prayer, and alongside it will rise a mosque. For this reason I want the tower to bear my own sign as well!”

And so Suleiman had them make a massive ball of pure gold, big enough to hold three bushels of grain, and sent it to the Viennese, offering an exchange: if they hoisted the ball to the top of the bell tower of St Stephen, Suleiman would refrain from destroying it by cannon fire. The Emperor agreed, and the ball was placed on the top of the tower.

“That is why Vienna has been known ever since as the Golden Apple of Germany and Hungary,” concluded Populescu.

“But I found out something else,” intervened Opalinski. “I questioned an Infidel stableman of Ofen, which is to say Buda in Hungary, who in turn had spoken to the interpreter in Agha’s retinue, Yussuf, also from Ofen.”

There was a murmur of approval, mixed with concern: one of the group had succeeded in getting information directly from the feared Ottomans.

“It wasn’t easy,” Janitzki stated. “At first he was very diffident. He didn’t speak a word of Italian or German, and only understood a little lingua franca, the Ottoman jargon imported to Constantinople by Venetian and Genoese merchants.”

Opalinski had approached the Infidel stableman, invoking Allah several times by way of greeting, in order not to arouse any suspicion, and had then started with the questions: but the other man had not been taken in and had asked at once:

“Say, Turque, who be you? Be Anabaptist? Zuinglist? Coffist? Hussite? Morist? Fronista? Be pagana? Lutheran? Puritan? Bramin? Moffin? Zurin?”

“Mahometan, Mahometan!” Jan had given the obvious answer to his diffident interlocutor, concerned to know whether he was of another religious faith.

“Hei valla, hei valla,” the stable-keeper said, seeming a little reassured. “And what your name?”

“Giurdina,” lied Opalinski.

“Be good Giurdina Turk?” the stable-keeper asked, with one finger raised, wanting to make certain of the Pole’s loyalty to the Sultan.

“Ioc, ioc,” he reassured him.

“You not be plotter? You not be cheat?”

“No, no, no!”

At which point the Infidel had started up:

To Mahomet, for Giurdina,

I will pray both morn and e’en-a

I will make a Paladina

Of Giurdina, of Giurdina,

Turban give, and sabre-ina,

Galley too, and brigantina,

For defence of Palestina,

To Mahomet, for Giurdina,

I will pray both morn and e’en-a.

This was the traditional greeting in lingua franca, indicating complete trust in the interlocutor. From now on Opalinski could ask any favour he wanted from the Infidel stable-keeper.

“Tch,” Populescu snorted impatiently with a touch of envy. “You’ve made it quite clear how learned you are and we admire your infinite knowledge. Now please get to the point!”

According to what Opalinski had learned from the Agha’s interpreter, thanks to the good offices of the stable-keeper, as soon as Suleiman’s army left Vienna, Ferdinand, the Emperor’s brother, had a holy cross placed on top of the ball. When Suleiman heard this, he flew into a rage and announced a new invasion. And so, putting enormous pressure on the Sultan’s coffers and those of his financial backers (already ruined by the failure of the siege), the Turkish army in 1532 invaded Styria and ravaged it. Luckily, once again he failed to enter Vienna; in fact, he did not even get there: the fortress of Gün in Styria, and its heroic commander Nicklas Jurischitsch, although fully aware they faced a certain and horrible death, chose to resist to the bitter end and so, paying with their own lives, they succeeded in saving the capital. The imperial army commanded by Charles V in person arrived and drove Suleiman back, inflicting on him a loss of ten thousand men.

“It was truly a fortunate year, that 1532,” sighed the Greek Simonis, delighted at the account of the defeats of the hated Ottomans. “The imperial forces, commanded by the Genoese Andrea Doria, freed Patrass from the Turks along with other cities in southern Greece. Ah, what glorious times! Rejoice, Penicek!”

And Penicek, obedient as usual to the commands of his Barber, began to laugh.

“But not like that,” Simonis upbraided him, “with pleasure and satisfaction!”

So Penicek mimed contentment: he nodded and shook his fists in a pathetic little performance while they all mocked him.

“More!” ordered the Greek.

Penicek got to his feet, continuing the same gestures, until Opalinski, sniggering, gave him a thwacking kick in his behind. The poor Pennal, who was already lame by nature, fell heavily to the floor.

“He knows Italian as well,” I observed.

“Yes, but he’s not part of our little Bolognese group. He studied at Padua, this dunce, and you can tell!” sneered Opalinski.

However, the Emperor, Opalinski went on, when Penicek, thoroughly humiliated, took his seat again, judged it wiser to remove the holy cross from the golden ball and to make a peace treaty with the Sultan. Ever since then the ball has been the symbol of Vienna for the Turks, and their objective.

“Just a moment, there’s something wrong here,” I objected. “Simonis, you told me that for the Ottomans the Golden Apple means not only Vienna but also Constantinople, Buda and Rome. But if I remember correctly, Constantinople was conquered by the Turks several centuries ago.”

“Yes, in 1453,” answered Koloman and Dragomir in unison; clearly between one amorous adventure and another they had found the time to learn a few historical dates.

“And so long before Suleiman besieged Vienna, in 1529,” I remarked. “Simonis, you explained that the Golden Apple indicates the objective of the Ottoman conquest. So why indicate Constantinople as the Golden Apple, if that name only came up during the later siege of Vienna, when Constantinople had already been conquered?”

“Simple: because in Constantinople too there was a gilded ball,” Koloman intervened. “As you know, I asked the monks, who always know everything. In the Augustinian monastery I spoke to an Italian monk, who was evangelist and confessor to the Turkish prisoners of war who had asked to convert to the True Faith.”

According to what the monk had told Koloman, it all went back to an ancient Byzantine legend, when the ancient statue of Emperor Constantine used to stand in Constantinople. Some claim that the statue was of the Emperor Justinian. Whichever it was, the statue, all gilded, stood opposite the imposing church of St Sophia, on a great column. In his outstretched left hand the Emperor held an orb, also of gold, and pointed it threateningly towards the East.

It was a kind of warning to the people in the East. It was intended to signify that he, the Emperor, held power, symbolised by the orb, in his hand and they could do nothing against him. According to some the orb was surmounted by the holy cross: an Imperial Orb, therefore, rather than a Golden Apple.”

Other Turkish prisoners, continued Koloman, had told the monk that the statue in front of St Sophia was of the Madonna, not of Justinian or Constantine. It stood on a green column, and in her hand the Madonna held a miraculous stone of red garnet, as large as a pigeon’s egg. They say that the stone was so splendid it lit up the whole building, and travellers came to see it from every country, also because at the foot of the green column the holy remains of the Magi had been buried. But during the night of the birth of the Prophet, as the Turks call Mahomet, the statue of the Madonna collapsed.

“And the garnet stone?” we all asked.

“The monk told me that according to some people it’s now at Kizil Elma, which is to say the Golden Apple. Others claim it was stolen and taken to Spain. Yet others say it was walled up in the side of St Sophia that looks towards Jerusalem.”

We looked at one another, a little confused.

“I still don’t understand,” I declared. “And it’s not clear who Eyyub and the forty thousand martyrs were, the ones poor Dànilo talked about.”

“Maybe some Pontevedrin rubbish, which has nothing to do with the Golden Apple,” conjectured Opalinski.

“We’ll have to get more information,” said Populescu. “Maybe my brunette at the coffee shop can help us: you know, she told my fortune!”

“Does she read hands?” asked Koloman.

“No, coffee grounds. For the first time I saw how it’s done.”

The young woman had served Populescu a good cup of boiling coffee, telling him not to drink it all, but to leave a little at the bottom. And then our friend followed her instructions: holding the cup in his left hand, shaking it three times he stirred the mixture up again, and then drained the contents into the saucer, and finally passed the cup to the Armenian woman. After scrutinising and interpreting the vague shapes that the coffee had left at the bottom, the young woman gave a clear and unequivocal response.

“The trumpet, rectangle and mouse came up,” said Populescu, all excited.

“And what does that mean?” asked Opalinski.

“The trumpet indicates great changes on account of a new love.”

“It’s true, love changes people,” Koloman mocked him. “You’re always so much like yourself that not even your fingernails grow!”

“Very witty. Then the rectangle: it means great erotic activity, and that hits it right on the nail.”

“Why, have you been raped?” asked Simonis.

“Cretin. You should have seen how my little one looked at me, while she explained the rectangle to me. It was as if she were saying: you’ll see what we can get up to. .”

“All right, Nostradamus,” said Koloman with a sceptical smile, “and the mouse?”

“Well, that’s the least favourable of the three signs but, judging from the rubbish you come out with, that’s right on the nail as well. In fact it means: watch our for your friends.”

“But you haven’t got any!” exclaimed Koloman, while the whole group burst into ferocious laughter, which was the last straw for Populescu.

“Laugh away, but I hope my little brunette in the coffee shop.. ”

“Hope away, she’ll never go with you,” sneered Koloman.

“Nor with you: she hates the stink of armpits.”

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).

We took our leave of Koloman and Opalinski, not without paying them for the work carried out so far, and then took some rapid refreshment with Penicek and Dragomir in a nearby taphouse (chicken soup, fried fish, mixed dumplings, boiled meat, roast capon and wild cockerel). Then I prepared to travel back to Porta Coeli.

Instead Simonis surprised me with an unexpected piece of news:

“We must hurry, Signor Master, Hristo might already be waiting for us,” he said, inviting me to climb back onto Penicek’s cart and ordering the Pennal to set off towards the great space of the Prater.

“Of course, Hristo. But didn’t you say that he would join us at the meeting?”

“You must forgive me this little lie, Signor Master. As you saw, he didn’t come. But it’s not that he couldn’t. The fact is that he didn’t want to talk in front of everyone.”

“Why on earth not?”

“I don’t know. I saw him briefly this morning and he told me that that’s what he preferred, because there is something he finds suspicious.”

“And what is it?”

“He didn’t tell me. But he did mention that he thinks the real meaning of the Agha’s sentence is all hidden in the words soli soli soli.”

“And why?”

“He said that’s it to do with checkmate.”

“With checkmate?” I said with a mixture of surprise and scepticism. “In what sense?”

“I’ve got no idea. But if I were you I’d trust his instinct. Hristo is a real philosopher of chess.”

Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov, explained Simonis, had a passion for chess, and he supported himself by playing matches for money, which he always won. Vienna at night was the undisputed kingdom of gamblers. All over the city people pitted themselves against lady luck — in coffee shops, luxurious establishments and dingy taverns.

The cart jolted: Penicek had suddenly switched direction.

“What’s up, Pennal?” asked Simonis.

“The usual: a procession.”

It was the Oratorian Fathers of St Philip Neri. That was why Penicek had abruptly changed his route and gone down a side street: if we had been spotted by the people in the procession, we would have had to stop, kneel down and wait patiently for the Holy Sacrament to make its slow way past us, and so risk arriving late at our meeting with the Bulgarian.

“Hristo usually plays at the inn called the Green Tree, in Wallner Street,” said Simonis. “A fine inn, always very crowded.”

He explained that it was frequented not only by artisans, merchants and common folk, but also by irreproachable aristocrats with noble names and clergymen of exemplary reputation, all eager to be robbed blind by professional players of dice, cards, bassette, thirty-forty and trik-trak, and, last but not least, chess.

“Most of them come from your country, Italy, and they’re the best, including the chess-players: Hristo often tells me about a certain Gioacchino Greco, a Calabrian, who, in his opinion, is the greatest player of all time. They too only play for money, lots of money,” added Simonis.

We were interrupted once again. Penicek’s vehicle had given another jerk.

“And now what is it?” asked my assistant severely.

“Another procession.”

“Again? What’s going on today?”

“I’ve got no idea, Signor Barber,” answered Penicek with the utmost deference. “This time it’s the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception. They’re all heading towards the Cathedral of St Stephen.”

I leaned out and before our vehicle set off down the side street, I had time to see the participants’ afflicted faces and to hear their fervent voices raised in song.

Every night, Simonis went on, entire estates would change hands, ending up in the pockets of Italian adventurers, leaving behind a trail of tears, desperation and suicides: gold, land, houses, jewels, and, for those who had nothing else to offer, even hands or eyes.

“People bet their eyes? What on earth do you mean?”

“Such things are unknown to those who work honestly, Signor Master, and who stay at home at night, instead of hanging around places of entertainment. Well now, to curtail certain excesses, an ancient communal ordinance of 1350 is still in force which forbids anyone who has run out of money but who still wants to offer a pledge, to bet on his own eyes, hands, feet or nose. There are people who have done it. And who have lost. That’s partly why about fifteen years ago Emperor Leopold had to re-declare his condemnation of gambling, as a sower of poverty and despair.”

While Simonis was explaining the mysteries of Viennese nightlife, the progress of the cart was interrupted by a great gathering.

“Pennal, what the devil is it this time?” asked Simonis.

“Forgive me, Signor Barber,” he said, in a humble tone. “I just wasn’t able to avoid this procession.”

“What’s going on today?” I said in amazement; even on a Sunday, and even in such a sanctimonious city as Vienna, it was unusual to have so many processions all so close together.

“It’s the corporation of the smiths and knife-grinders this time. And they’re on their way to the Cathedral of St Stephen as well,” Penicek told us.

“There must be a great prayer-meeting there. Do you know anything about it, Pennal?” asked the Greek.

“Nothing, I’m afraid, Signor Barber.”

The road was indeed barred by the arrival of a holy procession, announced by the insistent sound of a bell and preceded by two road-sweepers, who were shovelling the snow into piles on either side of the road to make way for the Holy Sacrament. In accordance with Viennese custom, we all had to get out and kneel down for a minute making the sign of the cross and beating our chests, like all the passers-by around us.

“Curse it, we’ll be late,” moaned Simonis, as the cold of the snow penetrated our bones.

Meanwhile the procession advanced, led by the priest who was holding up the Holy Sacrament. I noticed quite a few faces in tears in the crowd. Next to me a group of young men had seized someone of their own age by the scruff of the neck and thrown him to the ground, forcing him to kneel. In the Caesarean city, Protestants (the poor wretch must have been one) on such occasions were officially only required to take their hats off; but in fact they were often forced to kneel down like all the others. It was said that once an incident of this sort had befallen the Ambassador of Prussia, so that the imperial court had been obliged to issue a formal apology.

The delay was getting worse: because of the procession other carriages had stopped, and the passengers had knelt down inside them. The people kneeling on the ground glared hostilely at them. If we had been in the suburbs, where manners were rougher than in the city, the passengers would probably have been forced to get out and prostrate themselves on the ground.

At the same time (this I knew from experience) at the sound of the bell all the occupants of the houses nearby would have stopped working and knelt down, making the sign of the cross and beating their chests.

Even a puppet theatre, which just a minute earlier had been offering one of its scurrilous shows, had become magically petrified: as the Holy Sacrament passed by, the street artists had all been transformed into devout worshippers.

As soon as the tail of the religious procession had passed on its way, everything and everyone went back to their previous activities, as if nothing had happened.

“I can understand losing at cards or dice, which have always led to ruin,” I said, turning to Simonis once again, as soon as the cart had started up again, “but chess? Who would let himself be fleeced by a chess player?”

“Hristo will definitely be able to tell you more about that than me. But everyone knows that chess, of all ludic pastimes, is the most sublime and elevated. Many claim that for its subtlety, chess is the only game suited to princes. You may have heard that among the Viennese nobility it’s beoming fashionable to take lessons in the science of chess playing, just as they used to do with music, philosophy or medicine.”

I recalled that in the living rooms of the houses of the rich, when inspecting their chimneys, I had almost always seen chessboards of exquisite workmanship, finely inlaid or even in beautiful coloured stone.

“Today the best chessboards are made in Lyons, in Paris and Munich,” added my assistant. “And before the war broke out, they used to import the most beautiful specimens here. Chess is becoming a game for the rich. Hristo often has the chance to teach chess to pupils who pay well. When he accepts games for pay, the challenger is very often a wealthy young man. So, all in all, he does pretty well.”

“But professional players like Hristo must lose occasionally.”

“We students are protected by special legislation. In an ancient privilege brought in by Duke Albrecht, around 1267, it was established that a student when gambling can only lose the money he has on him, and not a penny more, and he cannot give up his books or his clothes. In addition the win is only valid if there’s a guarantor who administrates the players’ winnings. And since Hristo plays without a guarantor, on the rare occasions he does lose, he cites this law, which his opponents don’t know about. And he doesn’t pay. But if the loser is not a real cavalier, and suspects he’s been tricked, he could try to get his revenge.”

By now we had reached the Leopoldine Island, on the other side of one of the branches of the Danube, the area where the house stood that was going to host the Agha’s embassy the next day. After travelling down a long tree-lined avenue, we crossed a bridge over another canal separating the Leopoldine Island from the generous open stretch of the game reserve known as the Prater.

What Hristo wanted to tell us must be genuinely hot stuff, I thought, for him to fix an appointment all the out way here in this intense cold.

As we crossed the bridge, leaving on the right the villa of the noble family Häckelberg and on the left the Löwenthurm property, we were faced by the immense stretch of the Prater.

On the opposite side of the bridge we stopped. We were alone. Simonis and I got down from the cart, while Penicek remained on the box and nodded when my assistant ordered him not to move until we returned.

The winter weather had driven everyone into their houses and emptied the roads, especially in this corner of the city close to cold forests and damp, grassy meadows. There was no sign of any of the numerous boys from the Leopoldine Island who would come out to the Prater at every snowfall, entering secretly by some gap in the fence, to play on their sledges.

“The entrance is barred,” I remarked, pointing to a large gate that must be the way in.

“Of course, Signor Master, this is an imperial game reserve. Come along, follow me,” he said, inviting me to walk alongside the fence towards the right.

“But once Cloridia and I entered by this very gate and walked around here for a whole day,” I objected as we walked along.

“The gamekeepers often close an eye to respectable-looking couples. But in general common people are barred from entering: only His Caesarean Majesty, dames and cavaliers, imperial councillors, chancellors and functionaries of the court chamber are allowed in. It was Maximilian II who made the Prater the great reserve that it is today, joining together a number of separate plots of land. Some of these areas, for example, belonged to the convent of Porta Coeli. The nuns owned half Vienna.”

“Yes, they’ve still got that vineyard at Simmering, not far from the Place with No Name.”

“Here at the Prater,” my assistant went on, “Maximilian also created the great tree-lined avenue you must have seen on your previous visit.”

So, I thought, we were once again following in the footsteps of Maximilian II, the lord of the Place with No Name. Maybe it was a sign of destiny.

At last Simonis stopped, pointing to a spot where a wide gap in the fence, hidden by a bush, made it possible to slip through.

“The children of the Leopoldine Island use these gaps to go and play in the Prater. And my friends and I use them too, when we need a little privacy,” commented Simonis.

No sooner had we slipped through than we were greeted by an idyllic and unreal landscape. The reserve was entirely covered by a blanket of snow. The tips of the trees thrust upwards into the milky immensity of the celestial vault; the snow seemed to have been transfused into every object, so that the green earth and blue sky were embraced in the blankness of a pure and opalescent coitus. In that fantastical world, pheasants, deer and bucks lay hidden, prey to the Emperor’s venatic passion.

“Strange,” said Simonis looking around. “Hristo should have been here ages ago. That damned procession, I don’t know whether we’re late or he is.”

“There are tracks here,” I observed after we had waited for a few minutes.

In the mosaic of scuffled marks and scrapes on the ground by the unauthorised entrance, some human footprints could be seen, clear and fresh. The snow was getting thicker.

“What do you think, Simonis, could they be his?”

“Judging by the size of the foot, Signor Master, they could well be.”

So, with the incessant snow making it harder and harder to see anything, we began to follow the tracks.

There was not much time; soon the snow would obliterate them. The footprints headed to the right and joined a long path flanked by a double line of trees: the great avenue which, as far as I knew, ran all the way through the Prater to the Danube. But almost at the beginning there was a fork to the left.

“He didn’t go left or right,” declared Simonis, observing the traces, “he went between the two prongs, through the woods. And do you see that the footprints have got wider apart?”

“So he started running.”

“So it seems, Signor Master.”

No place, in the snow, is as beautiful as Vienna. Trees, hills, bushes, lawns, mossy rocks: the Prater was a single immaculate expanse. In the distance, much further than we could see, I knew that the branches of the bending Danube flowed, sinuous and seething.

Since ancient times the river Danube has been considered the prince of European rivers, and one of the world’s pre-eminent rivers. It is no surprise that Ovid compares it with the Nile of Egypt, and it should be noted that, along with the smaller Po in Italy and the Thames in England, contrary to the nature of all flowing water in the world, it flows eastwards: only in Hungary does it turn briefly towards the west, and in Misia, it bends slightly northwards, thus, as already noted, impeding — thank God! — the westward march of the Ottoman peoples. The Danube was also an important source of sustenance for the Caesarean city. There were numerous landing places for the commerce of wines and foodstuffs, as well as numerous smaller harbours for the transportation of people and for fishing. One of these wharves, for example, lay in a canal that divided the Prater from an island known as the Embankment. It was there that Cloridia and I, during a Sunday stroll we had taken months earlier in the Prater, had engaged in laborious chit-chat in German with some boatmen.

The snow and wind were increasing in intensity. Pluvial Jove and the Wind Rose seemed to have been sharpening their wits upon one another, in a combined effort to recreate January conditions in April. The wind was blowing straight into our eyeballs, and we had to shield our faces with our hands in order to proceed without stumbling.

“Can you see anything?” I said to Simonis, almost shouting over the roar of the wind.

“There’s something ahead. On the ground.”

A bag. An old cloth shoulder bag, half-buried in the snow, containing something heavy, hard and square, the size of a plate. Brushing away the flakes that had settled on the bag, we opened it: there, wrapped in a red rag, was a large chessboard in solid wood, with its base reinforced by a plate of inlaid iron, and a little pouch full of small, finger-sized objects.

“Signor Master, it’s Hristo’s chessboard.”

“Are you sure?”

He opened the pouch. He pulled out a black pawn, and then a knight painted in peeling white: they seemed to be a microcosmic representation of the white mantle of snow and the black of the wizened bushes that embroidered the Prater in two-tone lacework.

“They’re his chess pieces. He always uses these in his games,” said Simonis, as I picked up the poor abandoned bag and its contents.

“Let’s go on,” I exhorted him, though I was beginning to look over my shoulders by now.

The last stretch, still flanked by snow-shrouded trees, was almost all uphill. We puffed and panted our way upwards, numb with cold. By now Hristo’s tracks (if they really were his) were covered in snow. The last prints vanished just before a small hill that rose in front of us, whose gradient was even steeper than the slope we had just struggled up. From its top there must be a view of the Danube.

“Let’s go back,” I proposed. “I wouldn’t like. .”

A noise, distant but quite distinct in the muffled silence of the snowfall, made the words die on my lips.

Simonis and I looked at each other: there were footsteps on the snow. Immediately, the noise stopped. The snow and the small whirls of flakes driven by intermittent gusts of wind limited visibility to a few paces.

Without saying a word, Simonis made a sign that we should climb to the top of the hill. With our heads bowed and our backs bent, as if we were trying to hide in fields of corn, we clambered up as fast as possible. As soon as we got to the top, thanks to a favourable flurry of wind, the view opened up miraculously on the thousand isles of the bend of the Danube, and I thought back to a book I had read in Rome, before we set off on our journey to Vienna, in which I had learned that the springs of the glorious river are at Donaueschingen, in Germany, where its calm, limpid waters emerge from the mysterious depths of the Black Forest, which the ancients called Sylva Martiana, and then spout forth from a cemetery lying in the territories of the counts of Fürstenberg. And while my eyes took in those celebrated waters, which had travelled over four hundred leagues on their way here from Germany, I almost forgot what we were doing up on the top of that hill, and I only just heard Simonis’s voice saying:

“Signor Master, Signor Master, come here, quickly!”

Hristo’s body was lying face down near a tree, his head squashed in the snow. We had to pull with all our strength to extract the head, as it had been pressed with inconceivable violence into the bottom of a hollow, which had somehow been dug into the fresh snow. Just below the nape of his neck, we found that a deep knife wound had soaked his back with blood. But that had probably not been fatal; for this reason they had pushed his face into the hollow until his heart and lungs had given out.

When we turned him over his face was a mess of blue and white blotches. It looked as if he had only been dead for a while, a very short while.

“Curse it! Poor Hristo, my poor friend, what have they done to you?” said Simonis, in a mixture of perturbation, anger and grief.

Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, the chess-playing student, had ended his young life in the snow-covered fields of the Prater: he would never see Bulgaria again.

I got to my feet. As if to console me, a vision in complete contrast presented itself to my eyes: three small sledges, probably left there by a group of playmates, tied to a tree and ready to be used in next winter’s snow. While Simonis prayed in a low voice, I made the sign of the cross myself, wondering whether the Lord was showing us the sledges, an innocent relic of childish pleasures, to console us in the midst of our worldly pains.

“What shall we do?” Simonis asked at last.

Hristo was at least twice as tall as me, and one and a half times as broad. Carrying him was clearly impossible.

“We’ll have to bury him in some way,” I remarked. “Or. . just a moment.”

I had spotted something. While they were suffocating him, Hristo had thrust one hand into the snow, and it was lying outstretched and half frozen. The other hand, his right one, was still clutching his belly. Perhaps, as they attacked him and forced him to the ground, he had not had time to free himself. In that right hand I had seen something. I got closer and, trembling convulsively, I forced the fingers open and extracted the object. Now Simonis was next to me. I handed it to him.

“A chess king. The white king,” he observed.

“So while they were following him, Hristo left the chessboard on the ground, the one we found earlier, with the other pieces. He just kept this white king in his hand. But why?”

“I don’t know,” answered Simonis. “But now that I think of it, whenever he played an important match, if he couldn’t make up his mind about a move, he would always turn over in his hand one of the pieces that his adversary had already taken. I’ve often watched his companions playing. There are some players who scratch their heads, others who tap their feet under the table, and others who fiddle with their noses. He would release his tension on the pieces already taken. Once, during a match, I saw him hold a knight in his hand for almost an hour. He played with it obsessively, continually passing it from one hand to the other.”

“And so today, before being followed, he was already holding the white king,” I concluded. “As he ran away he certainly didn’t have time to put it back in the bag, and it stayed in his hand right up to the end. But why did he have it in his hands? He wasn’t playing a game.”

At that moment we heard it again: the same scuffling of feet. Then a shot: a bullet whistled very close to us, burying itself in the snow. Two shadows darted from the trees. We took to our heels without a single glance at one another. Simonis was already running towards the Danube when I suddenly made him change direction.

“Over here!” I yelled, gesturing towards the sledges.

Just a few seconds later we were on the slope of the hill and could hear the pursuers’ steps close behind us. My sledge was scarcely bigger than a toy, but for that very reason, with just the barest minimum of its surface resting on the snow, it shot downhill like a bullet. In front of me I could see Simonis, thanks to his greater weight, descending even faster. Suddenly I saw a trunk ahead of me, twice as broad as my sledge. I swerved to the right, braked slightly with my feet so as not to roll over in the snow, but there was already another bush in front of me; miraculously I dodged it, leaning to the left.

Only then, as I regained speed, did I look back. Carefully avoiding the tree trunks, one of the unknown men was still following us, but he was proceeding uncertainly on that rocky, snow-covered slope.

My sledge ran into a rock protruding from the ground (April snowfalls are never as abundant as February ones), and I cursed as I jerked it free, darting a backward glance as I did so and seeing that my advantage over my pursuers had diminished.

My sledge got stuck again, this time on a stretch of ground where the snow was too shallow. I got off and began to run. I had lost sight of Simonis, who had gone much further down the hill. Behind me I heard our pursuers’ voices. I turned and saw that they too were splitting up — one was continuing to follow me, while the other was going after Simonis.

Praying that they would not understand Italian and that the Greek would hear me, I shouted: “Simonis, to the right, towards the canal!” I could have turned to the right as well, and shared my fate with Simonis. Instead I decided to keep straight on: ahead of me the slope continued, and I had seen that by going downhill I was able to outstrip my aggressor. I could no longer hear his footsteps behind me. Suddenly a boom broke the silence of the Prater: the Turk, if that was what he was, had fired again. The bark of a tree to my right shattered into a thousand splinters. My enemy, clearly exhausted by the chase, had decided not to face me with cold steel: he hoped quite simply to blow my brains out. I began to zig-zag, trying to put as many trees as possible between his pistol and my back. How long would my shoes hold out? I had lost all feeling in my fingers, and from my ankles down I was half-frozen; I could no longer even swear that I was wearing anything on my feet.

Another shot above my head, and a branch exploded into fragments. The man was cursedly fast at reloading his pistol. Each time he did so he lost ground, it was true, but not enough, on account of my short legs.

Meanwhile I had reached the path that led back to the Leopoldine Island. There were fewer trees, and we were now in the open. Neither I nor my assailant was running any longer: worn out by our exertions, we dragged ourselves along on legs that were half-dead. It was at that point that the fourth shot — the decisive one — rang out. Before falling flat on my face in the snow, I felt the impact clearly in my back, just as I started along the path which, if I had had any breath left in my lungs, would have led me out of the Prater, towards safety.

Reanimated by his success in hitting me, the man was soon standing over me. As I tried to get to my feet, he pushed me down. He sat on my chest, trapping my right hand with his knee and my left with his hand. With his other hand he pulled a knife from his pocket. I was squirming like an eel, and with another backward thrust I would have managed to free myself, but he was too swift for me, and it would only take his well-honed blade (so I thought in those last instants when I thought he would stab me) one thrust to finish me off. Perhaps, I reflected with the strange rapidity that thoughts come to one at such crucial moments, Simonis at that moment, in some other part of the Prater, was suffering the same fate. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the red bloodstain from the wound in my back spreading on the snow.

There was a handkerchief over his face, so all I could see were two dark deep eyes glaring down at me; the rest, from the mouth down, was carefully hidden. His pupils bore into mine while the knife rose in the air, ready to deliver my death.

It was at that point I heard, as if in a dream, that voice:

“Stop!”

Just a few feet away from us stood Penicek.

My executioner hesitated just an instant, then left his prey and began to run in the direction from which we had come.

We did not even try to follow him, unarmed as we were. He had decided to avoid an unequal fight, but he still had the pistol with him: if he had time to reload, and above all if he knew we had not the slightest means of defence, we would be in a very tight spot.

“All well?” asked Penicek with a look of dismay, as he came limping up to me.

“My back, the wound in my back,” I answered mechanically, as I got to my feet.

He looked at me and zealously ran his hand over my back.

“What wound?”

“From the pistol! He shot me!”

Then I looked at the ground. The scarlet blotch on the snow, which I had taken for my blood, was just the red cloth that Hristo Hadji-Tanjov’s chessboard had been wrapped in.

Hristo’s former tool of the trade had flown from the bag to the ground during the struggle with my faceless aggressor. I touched my back: it was unhurt. Then I realised. I took the bag from my back: it had indeed been struck by the pistol shot. I bent down on the ground and picked up the red cloth with its contents. The red cloth was also perforated. I drew out the chessboard, whose metal base was slightly dented. The bullet had been parried by the plate of ornamented iron. Hristo Hadji-Tanjov’s chessboard had saved my life.

“Where is Signor Barber?” asked Penicek, in a worried voice.

“He ran towards the Danube,” I answered, exhorting him to follow me. “We must run and help him. He’s being chased by another man — I don’t know whether he’s Turkish or Christian. How did you find us?”

“I heard the pistol shot and realised you were in danger. I followed your tracks in the snow,” he said as we started off again. “But what’s happened to Hristo?”

When I had told him everything, Penicek turned pale with horror. Meanwhile we headed towards the point where I had separated from Simonis.

We found no sign of my assistant. We continued looking for quite a while, anguished at the lack of tracks and the fear of finding Hristo’s murderers on our heels. I was half frozen, and prayed that my toes were not frost-bitten.

We finally reached the little landing stage on the canal between the Prater and the island known as the Embankment. Some small boats for transporting people and animals were lying on the sand, just a few feet from the water of the Danube. But there was no sign of Simonis. We were about to go away when we heard the cry:

“Signor Master!”

“Simonis!” I exclaimed, running towards him.

He had been hiding under one of the upturned boats, sheltered like a tortoise by its shell.

“The villain was still hunting me down until just a few seconds ago,” he told us, still panting with fear and exhaustion. “I was sure he was about to find me, but then he must have seen you coming. He went off in that direction,” he said, pointing more or less to the same spot where my pursuer had vanished.

“They must have met up again to leave the Prater together,” deduced the Pennal. “Obviously they didn’t want to leave by the same gap we used.”

I explained to Simonis just how Penicek had saved my life.

“Are you wounded, Signor Master?” asked my assistant.

I explained in detail how things had gone, showed him poor Hristo’s chessboard and the iron plate dented by the projectile.

“Now let’s get back, before those two change their minds and return,” I urged them.

Once more we trudged across the frozen meadows of the Prater, leaving just three pairs of footprints in the snow. Hristo’s poor shoes, which should have scored the soft snow with us as well, were instead being ravaged by the beak of a crow.

20 of the clock: eating houses and alehouses close their doors.

“You can’t understand the importance of Landau unless you look at a map,” said Atto, sketching an imaginary Europe in the air with his ancient, bony hands.

Once back at the Porta Coeli, I felt a burning need to talk with Abbot Melani, to tell him everything, to seek consolation for the doubts and regrets that were gnawing at me, but above all to look into his eyes to study his reaction. I wanted to understand whether Atto had anything to do with Hristo’s death, or whether the chess player and his companion Dànilo had paid the penalty for their dishonourable trades.

And so, with my face still smeared in muddy slush, my limbs half-frozen and the chill of the young Bulgarian’s death — for which I myself was perhaps to blame — still upon me, I knocked at Atto’s door.

His nephew opened the door, his face crumpled, his voice hoarse and his body racked by serial sneezing; he was suffering from a severe cold.

He observed my pitiable state in some puzzlement, particularly at that hour. Melani was already in bed.

“Forgive me, Signor Atto,” I began, “I didn’t think — ”

“Don’t worry. I lay down out of boredom. An eighty-five-year-old man, blind, in a convent. What do you expect him to do but go to bed with the chickens?”

“If you want to rest, I’ll leave.”

“On the contrary. I was looking for you an hour ago. That blessed Countess Pálffy: I kept watch on her front door all afternoon, and nothing happened. She may be the Emperor’s lover but she lives like a nun. Nothing like Madame de Montespan. . These Austrians are so virtuous, even the adulterers! Virtuous and boring.”

“Signor Atto, I have serious news. Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, another of Simonis’s friends, is dead. They stabbed him and suffocated him in the snow.”

I told him about the tremendous adventure we had had in the Prater, and how I myself had only just escaped death. He listened without saying a word. As I talked, Domenico listened in amazement and made the sign of the cross, wondering to himself where we had ended up, in Vienna or in hell.

At the end Atto asked: “What was this Hristo’s surname?”

“Hadji-Tanjov.”

“Ha. . what?”

“Ha-dji-taniof, he was Bulgarian.”

He raised his eyebrows superciliously, as if to say, “I might have guessed.”

“Half-Turkish, in short,” he remarked dismissively.

“Why?”

“I see you’re not very strong on geography, or history. Bulgaria has been under the Ottoman yoke for four hundred years, in Rumelia, as the Turks call the European part of their empire.”

I was staggered. So Hristo was a subject of the Sublime Porte.

“And how did he earn his living? Did he love dangerous trades as well, by any chance?”

The question, asked in that tendentious tone, caught me off guard.

“He was a chess player. He played for money.”

Atto Melani was silent.

“I know, gambling is not without its risks,” I admitted, “but this is the second time that one of my assistant’s study companions has been murdered, and once again — strangely enough — just when he was about to meet me. And what’s more, his murderers fired at me. Why would they have done that if Hristo’s death had nothing to do with the Turkish Agha?”

“Simple. Because they were afraid you had seen them. Maybe they’re in Hristo’s chess circles and they’re scared of being tracked down. Any more stupid questions?”

“My questions may be stupid, but you don’t seem very bothered by the mortal danger I was in.”

“Listen, with the Pontevedrin’s death, there seems to be no doubt that it was a settling of scores. And Hadji-Tanjov also died because he took some wrong step — made a wrong move, I should say, given his passion for chess. You make sure you don’t make any wrong moves. I will weep for you most sincerely, but if it’s your own fault, you must weep for yourself.”

“You really have nothing else to say to me?”

“No, I haven’t. But if you’re really looking for the person to blame for this, look in the mirror: anyone who makes an appointment with you ends up dead,” he declared, with a sardonic laugh.

I insisted no further. The news that Hristo was an Ottoman had filled me with doubts. Baleful Abbot Melani refused to take the death of these young students seriously, and my urgings only made him clam up. If I wanted to get anything out of the moody old castrato, this was not the way to go about it. But I was now too tired to think.

While Domenico helped his uncle to to emerge from under the blankets and sit up on the bed, I pulled out a piece of cloth from my pocket to wipe my face and I dropped the piece of blackened silver that Cloridia had taken from Prince Eugene’s palace.

“What’s that thing?” asked Atto at once, with a twitch of his eyebrows, looking in my direction.

I gazed in wonder at his vigilant eye.

“My blindness improves a little at night. Thanks to the treatment with the myrobolans, the gerapigra and the fact I sleep barefoot in all weathers,” he explained. “In any case what I meant was, what was that tinkling I heard?”

He groped for his dark glasses on the bedside table. His nephew handed them to him and he put them on. I explained the circumstances in which Cloridia had found the object and placed it in his palm.

“Interesting,” he remarked. He held it and seemed to study it closely with his fingertips.

“Sit down beside my bed. And tell me exactly what’s engraved on it,” he said.

I described in detail the two sides and read the inscription.

“Landau 1702, 4 livres?” he repeated with a slight smile, “and Prince Eugene had it in his hand during the audience with the Agha? I see, I see.”

“It looks almost like a rudimentary commemorative coin of the first conquest of Landau by the Most August Emperor, in 1702,” I commented.

“More than that, my son, much more.”

Landau, began Atto, was the nerve centre at the heart of Europe, right in the middle of the continent, equidistant from Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Milan and Paris. It stood in the Palatinate, in the south-west of Germany, just above Italy and right next to Austria, but for decades it had been in the possession of the Sun King: it was the blade that France pointed at Germany’s underbelly and Austria’s hip.

Given its great strategic importance, more than twenty years ago Louis XIV had entrusted the most brilliant of his engineers, the famous Vauban, with the task of strengthening its fortifications. At once a suspicious fire had reduced three-quarters of the city’s private houses to ashes, and Vauban had found it easy to transform the town into an armoured and impregnable stronghold.

It was the beginning of 1702, and the War of the Spanish Succession was already raging in northern Italy. Everyone was expecting hostilities to start up on German soil as well.

At the end of April the Empire’s troops began to surround Landau and occupy all the access routes to the city. On 19th June the imperial troops dug their trench. Eight days later, 27th July, a colossal boom was heard: the imperial army was giving a martial salute as Joseph, the then twenty-four-year-old King of the Romans, the Empire’s crown prince, arrived in person.

The French commander of the citadel, Melac, at once sent a herald to the enemy camp, preceded by a trumpeter, with a message for the King of the Romans: in addition to respectful compliments on his arrival, they asked him to indicate where he would pitch his tent, so that they could avoid hitting it with their cannons.

“What do you mean?” I said in surprise. “Did the French really offer to spare the leader of the enemy troops?”

“Do you know how to play chess?”

“No.”

“Well, in chess the king, supreme leader of the enemy army, is never killed. When the hostile pieces have forced him into a corner with no way out, checkmate is declared, and the game is over. The defeated king has to capitulate, but does not die. That’s what happens with real sovereigns too: they are not killed. Their peers and generals know and respect the ancient military customs.”

But Joseph, he went on, valiantly turned down Melac’s offer: “My tent is everywhere, shoot wherever you like. And save thou thy labour, gentle herald, come thou no more here. Tell your commander they shall have no other answer, I swear, but these my joints; which if they have as I will leave ’em them, shall yield them little.”

Then he turned to his own men, dismayed and worried at the risk their commander-in-chief had chosen to run: “When I bestride my horse, I soar, I am a hawk. My horse is pure air and fire, and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him. And no one, not even the French dogs, can shoot a hawk.”

In the days that followed Joseph visited the trenches, while the musket balls whistled all around him. A chamberlain of honour suggested that he should not endanger his precious person. He cut him short: “Let those who are afeared go back.”

On 28th July he had the army line up for battle, after examining their equipment himself. On the night between 16th and 17th August the citadel was attacked. The French resisted heroically three times. But in the meantime the coffers of Landau’s garrison had been depleted. Melac did not hesitate: he paid from his own pocket.

“What do you mean?”

Atto brandished the strange piece of blackened silver I had given him.

“It’s another case of the good conventions of war that I was talking about. A true commander will never allow his men to fight without being paid. Domenico, please, could you adjust the cushion behind my back?”

“Of course, Uncle.”

Melac therefore had the silver plates from his own dinner service broken up, and by makeshift means they printed the coins of Landau on them. They were rough, wretched fragments, each one of a different shape — rectangular, square, or triangular, like the pretend money in a children’s game.

“The metal stampings, done half by a French goldsmith and the other half by a German, weren’t all the same either. But each of those coins not in circulation was worth more than gold, boy,” said Atto, staring at me gravely, “because they were the offspring of the noble rules of war.”

“So this coin-like object was the money for Melac’s soldiers. A fragment of his silver dishes!” I said, amazed at the ingenuity of the idea. “That’s why it’s so irregular. So it’s a war souvenir: that’s why Prince Eugene has a whole collection of them. He must really value them if he still keeps one in his pocket.”

During the siege in 1702 Joseph took part in the most dangerous assaults, serving as an example to everyone and exposing himself selflessly. He was charitable to the wounded, he grieved with the widows and consoled the orphans of the fallen. The soldiers were incredulous when they saw his luminous dashing figure amid the cannon smoke, his sword always raised, his long tawny hair, freed from his wig, besmirched with the dust of battle and he, King of the Romans, heedless of fatigue, of danger, of blood, forever to the fore.

The imperial operations were coordinated by Margrave Louis of Baden. Among his subordinates was an Italian, Count Marsili.

“Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, is that right? I know that name,” I said. “I think I bought a couple of his treatises some time ago, one on coffee and one on phosphorus, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s he. A great Italian,” declared Atto.

The Margrave was slow and awkward at manoeuvring men, and unlike Marsili did not know the refinements of trench warfare, the use of explosives or the technique of sappers. For two months no progress had been made, they had suffered great losses and the French resistance seemed invincible. A French army under General Catinat was approaching; if Landau was not conquered soon, they would be crushed. Marsili, who could not bear to see his men die one by one, let Joseph knew about the mistakes made by the Margrave of Baden. They must reinforce their cannons and mortars, he said, and improve their aim. Joseph inspected the lines in person and showed confidence in Marsili: he would follow his advice. Louis of Baden foamed with rage. Marsili promised that Landau would be taken within a week.

Joseph then discovered what no general had had the courage to explain to him: the troops were tired, disheartened and frightened. Capturing Landau seemed an impossible enterprise to them, and if Catinat’s army of liberation arrived it would be a disaster. We need more men — Joseph heard people murmur around him — there are too few of us.

The day before the final engagement, the King of the Romans left his generals and mingled with the troops, amid the simple infantry. He heard a soldier complaining again: the French are a tough proposition, we need more men to win. So Joseph climbed on top of a cannon and spoke to his men on an equal footing.

“Soldiers, subjects of the Emperor, listen to me! What’s he that wishes we were more? If we are mark’d to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honour. God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more. Rather proclaim it, through my host, that he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart; his passport shall be made and crowns for convoy put into his purse! We would not die in that man’s company that fears his fellowship to die with us. Tomorrow will be the day of the Battle of Landau. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named, and rouse him at the name of Landau. He that shall live this day, and see old age, will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, and say, ‘Tomorrow is the day of Landau:’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say ‘These wounds I had on Landau’s day.’ Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day. Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words — Joseph King of Romans, Fürstemberg, Bibra, and Marsili — be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. This story shall the good man teach his son, and the Day of Landau shall ne’er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember’d; we few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition: and gentlemen at home and safe a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon the Day of Landau!”

His words had gradually risen to an exultant cry and all around the King and his unsheathed sword the soldiers were applauding and laughing and weeping with emotion. Joseph then turned with a smile to the infantry soldier who just a moment earlier had been bewailing the lack of reinforcements: “Thou dost not wish more troops, dost thou?”

“God’s will! My liege,” he replied, raising his fist with tears in his eyes, “would you and I alone, without more help, could fight these foul French curs!”

“But was Prince Eugene there?” I asked the Abbot, deeply stirred.

Atto had broken off for a moment, wearied by his long narrative, and was sipping a glass of water. He put the glass down on the table but did not answer me.

“That night, the night before the final battle, no one slept, neither the imperial troops or the French,” he went on. “Now entertain conjecture of a time when creeping murmur and the poring dark fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp through the foul womb of night the hum of either army stilly sounds, that the fixed sentinels almost receive the secret whispers of each other’s watch: fire answers fire, and through their paly flames each battle sees the other’s umber’d face; steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs piercing the night’s dull ear, and from the tents the armourers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation. Proud of their numbers and secure in soul, the confident and over-lusty French do the low-rated imperials play at dice; and chide the cripple tardy-gaited night who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp so tediously away.

Nor does Joseph sleep. The officers offer him their company but he refuses and leaves his tent: “I and my bosom must debate awhile, and then I would no other company.”

He borrows from a field assistant a hooded cloak that conceals his face and explores the camp, pretending to be an ordinary captain.

The poor condemned imperials are exhausted. Their gesture sad investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats presenteth them unto the gazing moon so many horrid ghosts. But the royal captain of this ruin’d band, he who soon shall be Joseph the Victorious, walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent, goes forth and visits all his host, bids them good morrow with a modest smile and calls them brothers, friends and countrymen. A largess universal like the sun his liberal eye doth give to every one, thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all, behold, as may unworthiness define, a little touch of Joseph in the night.

Still hidden in his hood, he lingers with a group of infantry soldiers. One of them says: “Tomorrow perhaps we will die, but the King of Romans need not fear anything: he is surely asleep calmly in his tent. He will fight as well, but is not as we are.”

Then Joseph replies: “I think the King is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man. Therefore when he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are.”

Then as dawn approaches, he is left all by himself: “Upon the King! let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins lay on the King! We must bear all. O hard condition, twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath of every fool, whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, but poison’d flattery? O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts; possess them not with fear; take from them now the sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers pluck their hearts from them. Not today, O Lord, O, not today, think not upon the fault my forebear, Charles the Fifth, made in compassing the sacred crown imperial! He did make expiation, abdicating and becoming then a monk. And every day I have the holy mass said for his soul, and churches and monasteries have I and my good father had erected so the abject stain of moneylenders’ loot shall be washed clean from the imperial crown. O why is it not dawn? The day, my friends, and every other thing await my nod. Tomorrow will I trot a mile and leave in my grim wake a road paved with French faces.”

The voice of Abbot Melani, almost a new Homer, was trembling with weariness and passion.

Dawn breaks, finally they fight. Yet another assault on the stronghold is beaten back. But it is clear that Landau is about to yield. Their spirits are as broken as their bodies, all that every soldier wants is to put an end to the combat, and to seize the neck of the French enemy and cut his throat, and rape his wife and burn and sack his house. As in every real war, man is turned to beast, and the beast goes in search of men.

Then Joseph appeared alone, on a horse, before the walls of the citadel, as close to the wall as he could get while remaining out of shooting-range. Unsheathing his sword he cried out:

“Therefore, you men of Landau, take pity of your town and of your people, whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace o’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds of heady murder, spoil and villainy. If not, why, in a moment look to see the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; your fathers taken by the silver beards, and their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls, your naked infants spitted upon pikes, whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused do break the clouds!”

At the top of the ramparts Governor Melac appeared on horseback. He listened in silence. Terror had gouged dark furrows in his face.

“What say you then,” concluded the King of the Romans. “Will you yield, and this avoid, or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d?”

On 9th September Melac raised the white flag. The next day came the capitulation, which was followed by the exchange of prisoners. By 11th September it was all over.

As promised, Joseph held his soldiers back: the city’s inhabitants had not a hair of their heads harmed. An imperial soldier who had stolen a pyx from a church was immediately hanged by order of the King himself, who attended the execution impassively, even though the condemned man was one of his dearest soldiers. The mothers, who the night before had heard Joseph’s threatening words, and in the darkness of their homes had swooned, clutching their babies to their breasts, knelt down to kiss the imperial insignia. The French evacuated the city the next day; Melac, defeated, had to parade past the King of the Romans: “Great King” was the salutation addressed to him by the French governor, grateful to him for having spared them the terrible violence that frenzied troops always wreak after every siege.

Marsili had predicted that, as a result of his astute moves, Landau would yield within a week. But thanks to his brilliance and to the greatness of the young monarch, it had taken even less time: four days had sufficed.

Atto paused. He had run out of breath. In my collection of writings on Emperor Joseph, I had found several accounts and panegyrics on his deeds at Landau, but unfortunately they were all in German and written in the Teutonic style, with an abundance of boring details and a total lack of anecdotal matter. Abbot Melani’s tale, by contrast, had catapulted me into the feverish heart of the battle and revealed the spirit of my own sovereign.

I could hardly believe the admiration and even the love for the young Caesar that breathed forth from the old castrato’s words. Until then I had never heard him glorify any other monarch than his own Sun King!

“Signor Uncle, at this hour you should be asleep,” Domenico told him.

On his return to Vienna, Atto started up again, paying no attention to his nephew’s words, great festivities were held. In the city a great procession was immediately formed, making its way to the church of St Stephen, where a solemn Te Deum was celebrated. In the New Market Square a column was solemnly erected in honour of St Joseph, protector of Austria. Even Leopold and his wife, those august parents with whom the young King of the Romans had always had difficult relations, were radiant at the triumph of the imperial arms.

Before that victory, Joseph had just been a promising crown prince. After Landau, and thanks to the help of Marsili, he became a hero.

“But before that there was already a hero,” observed Atto. “His name was Eugene of Savoy, the victor of the great Battle of Zenta, the scourge of the Turks. Now in the contest for glory there was an adversary with an unassailable advantage: he was handsome, and he had a crown on his head.”

In Vienna Leopold’s ministers were furious. They knew very well that Joseph could not wait to drive them all out and replace them with his own trusted men. The only way to stop him was to put pressure on his father Leopold. The manoeuvre proved successful. The following year, 1703, when Joseph asked his father if he could go back to war, permission was denied. The ministers’ pressure on Leopold had worked. Eugene, too, who was still resentful at having been put in the shade by Joseph, had done his discreet best to make sure that the King of the Romans did not return to the war. Hostilities continued in the Rhine area, and soon there came bad news: the French had besieged Landau and finally reconquered it.

“So Prince Eugene had a hand in it! But it’s absurd,” I remarked. “Were he and the others not afraid that losing the war might be worse than giving honour and glory to Joseph?”

“The powerful are always ready to destroy the world in order to keep their own positions,” answered Atto. “And at that moment, with a weak emperor like Leopold, no one was more powerful than his ministers, starting with Prince Eugene.”

This brought us up to 1704. The military season was already well under way, autumn was just round the corner and the forces of the Empire and its allies wanted at all costs to close the year with an important victory. They decided to stake everything on Landau, to recapture it from the enemy. On 1st September the young King of the Romans finally arrived. In the end, and only after much tribulation, his father Leopold had agreed to let him depart for the front. On the battlefield he was greeted by Eugene of Savoy and the commander of the Anglo-Dutch allied troops, the famous Marlborough, great friend of Eugene. Now that the hero of the siege of two years earlier had arrived, they were no longer at centre stage. They were sent to the river Lauter, to provide cover for the operations, while the Margrave of Baden greeted Joseph before Landau with twenty-seven battalions and forty-four squadrons.

Once again the leader of the besieged French garrison, Laubanie, offered not to aim his cannons at those places where Joseph would be lodging or visiting, and once again the King of the Romans answered that he was perfectly safe, and would go wherever he wanted without telling anyone.

“Joseph the Victorious never knew it perhaps, but in that second siege of Landau the rule of checkmate was once again respected,” said Atto, “and in the noblest manner.”

“What do you mean?”

“A certain Count Raueskoet, one of Joseph’s hunting companions, presented himself at Versailles, explaining that in his preparations for battle, Joseph used to go hunting close to the French lines without any escort. It would be child’s play to capture him. His Majesty scornfully rejected the proposal and immediately expelled the traitor from France, and even warned the imperial troops of Raueskoet’s treachery. Remember, boy: checkmate yes; assassination among sovereigns and princes of equal rank, never.”

The battle began, even harder and bloodier than the two that had preceded it. This time winter came early, they fought in the cold, in the rain, in the mud. On 27th September the French tried to effect a sortie, but unsuccessfully. Four days later the imperial heavy artillery (carried to the front through the mire with great difficulty and heavy losses of men) began to pound Landau. A hail of fire was unleashed upon the fortress, but the French held out tenaciously. Eugene of Savoy was furious: Landau should have been taken in five or six weeks, he wrote to Vienna from his tent: instead things were dragging out while the French went on the rampage in Italy.

“But maybe there was a more serious reason for his agitation,” said Atto. “He and Marlborough had been pushed to one side by Joseph. They had lost their place of honour.”

In the end the bloodshed was horrific, the fortress of Landau only yielded after nine weeks of relentless cannon fire and assaults. The commander Laubanie lost his sight in both eyes, and would die two years later from his wounds, which never healed. The French garrison surrendered, once again throwing their arms down at Joseph’s feet. The young heir to the throne had shown that he could retrieve the situation with his presence alone. His first victory had made him a young hero, with his second he had become a model for all soldiers. Winter had come, the military campaign of 1704 had concluded with an important victory, the English and Dutch allies could go back home satisfied. In Vienna the victory bells rang out again, and Eugene nursed dark, malicious thoughts of resentment. And suppose Joseph were to become the new rising star of the war, effacing the legend of Prince Eugene, which had been spreading throughout Europe? But the year after the recapture of Landau, things changed. Emperor Leopold, Joseph’s father, died. It was not wise for the new young sovereign to leave Vienna and to set out for war, since he did not yet have any male heirs (his little son, Leopold Joseph, had died in infancy). Eugene remained commander-in-chief of military operations, and the fate of the war lay in his hands for the next three years.

The silent contest between the Sovereign and his general started up again in 1708. The Queen of England asked that Eugene should be sent to fight in Spain, where Charles, Joseph’s brother, was unable to get the better of the French armies of Philip of Anjou, the grandson of the Most Christian King who had ascended to the Spanish throne. The imperial troops in the Iberian peninsula were captained by Guido Starhemberg, on whom fortune did not always smile. Eugene chafed at the bit: he knew he was superior to Starhemberg, and in his place could win great glory and honour.

There began a feverish back-and-forth with the English allies, but the imperial forces were adamant: the Prince of Savoy could not travel so far from Austria. Eugene had to put up with it, and hold his peace.

The silent war was repeated in autumn 1710. Once again there was a plan to send Eugene to Spain, but His Caesarean Majesty was still opposed to it, and it came to nothing. Eugene gave vent to his feelings among his friends, using allusive, indirect words. “Could it be that Stahremberg has not done all that was expected of him?” he asked ironically. And he revealed that with his own eyes he had seen Joseph arrive at the conference of ministers holding the paper nominating Eugene as commander in Spain, but he had rejected the idea without even referring to it. Joseph was not wrong: he was thinking of the safety of the Empire.

Twice with Landau, and twice again with Spain, Joseph had trampled over the pride and ambition of Eugene of Savoy. The loser had kept silent and obeyed; he had no choice in the matter. But what would happen if the secret competition, evident only to the two rivals, continued always to the advantage of one of them? And what connection was there with the strange coin that Cloridia had come across so fortuitously in Eugene’s palace?

“That coin is the symbol of Landau,” concluded Atto, “the first serious defeat that Eugene had to swallow. And it shows that the Prince of Savoy has not forgotten the affronts that Joseph has inflicted on him. Not a single one.”

Caressing the coin in his fingers, Atto gloated. Once Joseph read Eugene’s treacherous letter, the path to peace would be very short.

“If only we could get close to that little Pálffy woman,” he grumbled impatiently, while he was seized by a great yawn, urging him to slip once again under the blankets, into the arms of Morpheus.

Back home, on the other side of the convent, Cloridia came to greet me.

“My love,” she said, stretching her arms out to me, “it’s been a terrible day.”

“You don’t know the whole of it.”

“What do you mean?”

I told her what had happened. At the end we stood there, both trembling, appalled at the violence that had broken out around us. I told her about the coin of Landau as well.

“I’ve a story connected with that.”

“Really?”

“You’re not the only one who’s had a bad experience. Today at Prince Eugene’s palace I was followed.”

“Followed? Who by?”

“By that monstrous fellow who stole the coins of Landau. I kept coming across him. I would go to the kitchen and see him following me at a distance. I would go back to the first floor, and he would turn up from some nook or corner. I would go away and then find him just a few minutes later behind me. I’d go here, and so would he; I’d go there, and so would he. It was enough to drive me mad. If you could only have seen him. . The last time he even walked in a half-circle around me, and then showed me his sharp brown teeth in a frightful smile. Ugh! — like a hellish dream. At that point I ran back home.”

“But who is he, what does he want?” I exclaimed in agitation. “He promises the dervish a decapitated head, then he stares at you, follows you around, steals Prince Eugene’s coins. . What’s the link between all these things?”

“All I know is that a man with a face like that is capable of anything. Including what they did to Hadji-Tanjov.”

But we still had not heard the most serious news of the day.

To cheer ourlseves up we went into the cloisters to see our little boy playing there, and then we went into the convent church. Unnerved by all the evil that had been unleashed around us we felt the need to collect our thoughts in prayer before the Most High and to plead for grace and protection.

As soon as we stepped within its cold, incense-laden half-light, we found the church full of the nuns of Porta Coeli. They had all gathered together to recite the holy rosary. We were a little surprised: that late hour was certainly not a time of prayer at the convent. We made the sign of the cross and, settling in a corner at the back, we joined fervently in the oration, supplicating divine help and praying for the souls of the two poor murdered students.

After the holy rosary came the moment to implore the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli. We gradually realised that an indistinct murmuring was acting as counterpoint to the nuns’ litany, and we soon made it out as the sound of sobbing. Our eyes wandered in search of its source and fell upon the Chormaisterin, prostrate beneath the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli, to the left of the altar, her breast shaking convulsively. Our feeling of puzzlement suddenly turned to utter incredulity and bewilderment.

“Pro vita nostri aegerrimi Cesaris, oramus,” we heard the nun who was leading the prayers cry.

Those words struck us like a gust of icy wind: “Let us pray for the life of our Emperor, gravely ill,” the nun had said. I hoped for an instant that I had misunderstood, but the grief and anguish with which Cloridia lifted her hand to her forehead sadly confirmed that I had heard correctly. So the Emperor was ill? The Most August Caesar, our beloved and radiant Joseph the First, was in mortal danger? What had happened? And how on earth had we not heard anything? But there was no way for us to find out any further details at that moment: we had to wait until the end of the oration. Those moments that separated us from a fuller explanation seemed interminable. And then the church emptied at last and Camilla, rising to her feet, turned towards us. As soon as she saw Cloridia she embraced her.

“Camilla. .” murmured my consort on seeing the young face disfigured by grief.

She motioned us to follow her: she had to put out the candles. The tiny flames were mirrored in Camilla de’ Rossi’s tear-streaked cheeks, and she continued to clutch Cloridia’s hands in a vain effort to repress her sobs.

In town everyone had been talking about it since that morning. At first it had circulated as a vague rumour, then the word had become more insistent, until, like a bolt from the blue, orders were issued for public prayers to be offered every hour and for exposition of the blessed sacrament both in the public Caesarean chapel and in the Cathedral of St Stephen. In the Caesarean chapel the various members of the court had followed upon one another from hour to hour: the tribunals, the ministers, the grandees, the cavaliers, the dames and other people of noble rank. And similarly, in the cathedral, orations had begun in the afternoon attended by Monsignor the Bishop Prince in person and the chapter of the cathedral; and then the religious orders, confraternities, schools, arts, trades and hospitals had come in procession, with great throngs of the common people, who, with anguished devotion and zeal, had implored divine intercession.

Prayers had been going on in all the other parish churches inside and outside the city. Special couriers had even been sent throughout the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, to announce the Oration of the Forty Hours, so that — as the public announcement stated — His Divine Majesty might be pleased to grant longer Life and happy Government to this Most Clement and Most August Monarch of ours, for the consolation of his faithful Peoples, and for the benefit of all Christianity in these grave and dangerous circumstances of War, which involved the whole of Europe.

Even Ottomans and Jews residing in the Caesarean city had called for extraordinary days of prayer and fasting and had distributed special alms.

The Emperor was ill. For some days he had been in bed, isolated from everything and everyone; no one could approach him. And not because Joseph the Victorious was unable to hold a conversation, or to preside over the conference of ministers, but because his illness was contagious. And mortal. The doctors’ diagnosis seemed clear: smallpox.

“Like Ferdinand IV. . just like him,” sobbed Camilla.

Within my breast, as on a racecourse trampled by the hooves of maddened horses, dire portents were galloping towards their own incarnation.

My thoughts ran to Ferdinand IV, the young King of the Romans carried off by smallpox fifty years earlier. The firstborn of Emperor Ferdinand III and elder brother of Leopold, he had suddenly died at the age of just twenty-one. I had read the story of Ferdinand, a child prodigy, in the books I had bought on my arrival in Vienna. It was on his magnificent gifts that his father had set his hopes of reviving the Empire after the ill-fated Thirty Years’ War. This blow had fallen at such a delicate moment that the House of Habsburg had even risked losing the imperial crown. France had immediately taken advantage of the situation to block Leopold’s election as Emperor and he had been forced to pay out huge sums of money to the Protestant princes to get himself elected, and had had to renounce solemnly before them any intention of going to assist the Habsburgs in Spain in their war against France. And so the French-Spanish war had ended with the defeat of Spain and King Philip IV had been forced to give the hand of his daughter Maria Teresa to Louis XIV rather than to Leopold. And it was that very marriage that had given the French their right to the throne of Spain, which was at the root of the present War of the Spanish Succession. In short, if Ferdinand had not died so prematurely and unexpectedly, the Bourbons of France would not have become related to the Habsburgs of Spain and so the war of succession would not have broken out.

The young Ferdinand, despite enjoying excellent health and rare good looks, had been swiftly carried off by smallpox. When the older people recalled that bereavement of the imperial family, which had led to so many other past and present bereavements, they trembled: Joseph was not yet geblattert — which is to say he had not yet had smallpox.

Now it had happened.

“The first symptoms began five days ago. Until today the thing had been kept secret. I myself only heard about it last night,” said the Chormaisterin, her voice still hoarse from weeping.

And so we learned that on Tuesday 7th April Joseph the Victorious had dined with his mother and had been affected by a slight headache. A minor nuisance, which disappeared the next day, so that on Wednesday morning the young Emperor had decided to devote himself to his usual hunting trip. On his return he had complained of a strong constriction in his chest, trouble in breathing and strange pains all over his body. Suddenly he had been seized with a fit of vomiting, expelling a considerable quantity of pituitary matter. The doctor had been summoned, and he had attributed the sickness to excessive eating during the Easter celebrations, and for that evening he had prescribed shredded hyacinth with some species of buds.

The night had been troubled. The morning of the next day, Thursday 9th April, Joseph had been seized with another violent fit of vomiting, regurgitating viscous, ill-digested matter, followed by pure bile in quantities equivalent to several spoonfuls. The slight headache had returned, but above all he was afflicted with great pain shifting between the abdomen and chest, and finally settling in his loins. Joseph the Victorious, a young man, robust and vigorous, a most courageous soldier, was to be heard screaming like a child. Fortunately, his urine and pulse were normal, and so an enema had been applied — an insufflation of water and salt, which had proved highly beneficial. But the pains had continued until the evening, together with the screams. The enema had been repeated, bringing on copious bilious excretions, and an eye powder had been prescribed (in accordance with Aristotle’s well-known instructions), as well as a powder of native cinnabar. In the evening his pulse had begun to quicken, and at one in the morning he had begun to grow decidedly feverish.

While Camilla talked, like a lugubriously tolling bell, a date was thrumming in my mind: 7th April. On that day Joseph’s illness had begun, but also the Turkish Agha had come to Vienna. And that was not all: the next day Abbot Melani had arrived in the city.

“Are you absolutely sure it’s smallpox?” I asked Camilla.

“That’s what they’re saying at the moment.”

“How is the Emperor now?”

“Nobody knows. All information about the last three days is kept strictly private. But. . where are you going?”

“Eh? What are you saying?” mumbled Abbot Melani from beneath the blankets, his tongue still thick with sleep.

“You’re acting the innocent? I knew it!” I shouted, beside myself.

I had come crashing into Atto’s apartment like a Fury. I had hammered frantically on the door (the nuns’ cells were all at some distance, after all) and Domenico, jumping out of bed in alarm, had opened up to me, convinced the city must be on fire at the very least.

“The Turkish Agha arrived in Vienna just a day before you, and you pretend you know nothing about it! Once again you had it all planned, you and that dervish!”

“Dervish? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Atto, sitting up in his bed.

“Signor Uncle. .” Domenico tried to interpose.

“Yes, the dervish in the Turkish retinue, that Ciezeber, who slices himself up with his disgusting rituals and then heals himself as if nothing had happened. Nice people you go around with, Abbot Melani! And you’re conniving with the dervish to get the Emperor’s head. Ah, now you put on your astonished look! You didn’t think I knew, did you?”

Uncle and nephew fell silent. This gave me courage and I went on:

“You, Abbot Melani, you say you came here to force the Empire to make peace. You waved that letter under my nose from the traitor Prince Eugene, who wants to sell himself to France, but you kept quiet about the other manoeuvre, the more important one, which removes the main obstacle in this war: the Emperor! His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I has no sons. If he were to die, the heir to the throne would be his brother Charles, who for the last ten years has been fighting to wrest the throne of Spain from Philip of Anjou, the Sun King’s grandson. If Joseph died, Charles would have to come straight back to Vienna to become emperor, and that would be the end of the war. Eugene has betrayed his side by now: even if the Empire wanted to, it no longer has a king to set up in Spain, nor a general. The throne of Madrid would be left permanently to your sovereign’s grandson. A perfect plan! That’s why the Emperor is sick. Smallpox, my foot: it was you French, in league with the Turks as usual, who poisoned him.”

“Is the Emperor sick? Smallpox? What are you saying, boy?”

“And the sickness, strangely enough, started with the head. . the same head that the dervish was plotting to get. Or is that just a coincidence? But who could believe that! Not me, that’s for sure, knowing you as I do, alas! But how could you do it? At your age, do you have no fear of God?” I asked, my voice broken.

“I don’t know where you — ” protested Atto, who had put a hand to his belly, while his face contracted.

“And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that Philip of Anjou was proclaimed King of Spain thanks to a forged will. And it was you who forged it, eleven years ago in Rome, under my nose!”

“Signor Uncle, you shouldn’t allow him — ” said Domenico.

“Such a generous reward — I don’t think!” I went on with renewed fury. “You found me a job and a home here in Vienna so that you could exploit my loyal service yet again, and then skip out at the right moment, as you did twice in Rome! This time it’s an even dirtier game: get the Emperor assassinated, a young man not yet thirty-three! That’s why you made me rich. You wanted to buy me. But you won’t succeed, ah no! This time you won’t get away with it. There’s no price for the life of my king! I’ll go back to Rome and starve in the tufo, but not before I’ve done all I can to impede your dirty plans. It’ll have to be over my dead body!”

“Good heavens, boy, you don’t. . Domenico, please!” implored Atto, pressing his hand to his belly with a grimace and making as if to get up.

“Signor Uncle, here I am,” said his nephew solicitously, rushing to hold him up and lead him behind a curtain, where there was a seat for his bodily needs.

Here Abbot Melani had an attack of colic, the so-called gravel sickness, accompanied by discharges of diarrhoea and by a robust venting of piles or haemorrhoids, or whatever they are called. I suddenly found myself without an adversary, and in a state of great embarrassment. I offered my assistance, but Domenico rejected it from behind the curtain with a sulky grunt.

“The Emperor. . the poison. .” I heard Atto gasping.

“Signor Uncle, you’re losing a lot of blood, you must drink your citron juice.”

“Yes, yes, quickly, I beg you. .”

Domenico drew aside the curtain and signalled to me to support the old Abbot for a few seconds, who was sprawling awkwardly on the seat. For the first time I saw his castrato’s pudenda. Atto, paying no attention to me, continued to moan, while his volcanic intestine gave no sign of settling, nor the piles of ceasing to gush forth. His nephew rushed away and poured a few drops from a little flask into a large glass of fresh water, which he handed to his uncle.

“Well, I think that. .” I blathered, getting ready to take my leave.

But Domenico thought that I wanted to continue with my accusations and from behind the curtain he yelled:

“Have you no pity for a poor old man? Do you want to kill him? That’s enough now. Go away, go away!”

Thus dismissed, I crossed the convent in a daze and dragged myself to my bed, where Cloridia was still sitting up, in a light doze. She had tried to stay awake for me, but had been overcome by weariness. And so I was left to writhe in solitary despair and doubt. I collapsed on the bed, with my head between my hands. Ever since we had heard the fateful announcement in church I had not had a single second to reflect: so was the Emperor about to die? It seemed a nightmare; but sadly there were too many signs that I was not dreaming. That same Sunday, had not my assistant and I encountered as many as three processions heading towards the Cathedral of St Stephen, while Penicek’s cart took us to our appointment with poor Hadji-Tanjov?

I saw Hristo’s chessboard on the table. I ran my fingertips over the dent which, by blocking the projectile, had saved my life.

The evening before, I reflected, we had all noticed the Chormaisterin’s inexplicable nervousness during the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, when she had lashed out at poor Gaetano Orsini with such unusual irritation. Camilla had chosen an extremely melancholy and gloomy aria for the rehearsal and had then talked of omens: now I realised that she had been brooding over grim presentiments of death. She had been thinking of the Emperor, who had lingered at the tomb of his friend Lamberg, and undoubtedly also of the sombre prediction of the English divine and the anathema of that treacherous Jesuit, Wiedemann, and probably of countless other signs, since there was no shortage of people wishing for the death of His Caesarean Majesty. How could one blame her? Twenty-eight years earlier, as a servant boy in the Inn of the Donzello in Rome, with my own eyes I had read in an astrological gazette a correct prediction of the death of a sovereign: the unfortunate consort of the Most Christian King.

No, unfortunately it was not a bad dream, I moaned, as I opened the chessboard. One question tormented me above all others: what lay concealed in Abbot Melani’s heart and mind? He had arrived in Vienna on the same day that the Emperor had fallen ill, and just one day after the Agha’s arrival. Atto had come to play France’s game on two different boards. On the one hand, to expose Eugene’s treachery, putting him out of action once and for all, without even granting him the Low Countries, as he had asked. He had confessed this to me openly. On the other hand, the more radical solution: to assassinate Joseph I. Just how the two things were linked to one another was not entirely clear to me, but what did that matter? The Abbot himself had taught me years ago: it is not necessary to know everything, but just to understand the sense of what happens. And the sense of it all — I had grasped that all too well. With all the experience I had accumulated alongside the scheming castrato, I just needed to put two and two together. This time it had not been necessary to wait for all the misadventures to come to fruition for me to work it out; I had not discovered Melani’s game only after his departure, but just twenty-four hours after first meeting him again. I was getting better at this game, I told myself with bitter sarcasm.

And yet it was also true, on the other hand, that my accusations seemed to have upset Atto greatly. But I should not let myself be fooled, I told myself: he had always pretended in front of me, even at the most dramatic moments. I had even seen him sobbing over the death of his dearest friends, only to discover later that he himself had been involved in it up to his neck! I must not forget that Atto had come to Vienna on the very day that the Emperor had felt the first symptoms of his illness. The same thing had happened in the past: twenty-eight years earlier Melani had turned up at the Inn of the Donzello on the same day that the aged French lodger had mysteriously died…

The baleful castrato had always used me as a pawn, as if I were of no more importance than the poor white pawn I now held in my hand, a helpless meal for the treacherous black bishop — the scoundrel of an abbot.

Poor me: I had become a master chimney-sweep, and the owner of a cottage and vineyard in the Josephina, only thanks to Atto Melani! If his plot were to be discovered, I would end up on the scaffold alongside him. After putting my life and my family’s livelihood at risk, now the old castrato might easily drag me with him to death! But he was a venerable old man of eighty-five: the executioner, after all, would only be anticipating the grim reaper by a few days or weeks. Whereas I was in the full flush of life and had a family to support! I suddenly felt giddy and began to shake with fear.

I clutched the black bishop tightly in my other hand, almost as if I could thus strangle Abbot Melani, crush him, make him miraculously vanish from my life.

I looked at our child, serenely asleep, and then at Cloridia’s sweet face. I cursed the castrato and his intrigues, so eager to unsettle their dreamless sleep! And what about my two girls, who had stayed in Rome and were longing to join us? What would their wretched fate be, when they heard that their father had been condemned for high treason and hanged like a common malefactor, or beheaded, or even (and here my shudders became uncontrollable) drawn and quartered on the terrible wheel?

With overpowering remorse, I confessed that I had brought these ills on my family by myself. What an unworthy husband and father I had proved! A poor insipid foot soldier, just like the white pawn I now clutched in my hand and whose head I would have liked to rip off with one bite out of sheer rage.

Oh, my Cloridia, the bold, enchanting and learned courtesan of twenty-eight years ago, who had set my boy’s knees a-trembling! To what wretched fate had I consigned that lovely complexion of gleaming dark velvet which contrasted with her luxuriant Venetian blond curls, which framed those large black eyes and the serrated pearls of her mouth, that rounded yet proud little nose, those lips smiling with a touch of rouge just sufficient to remove their vague pallor, and that small but fine and harmonious face and the fine snow of her bosom, intact and kissed by two suns, on shoulders worthy of a bust by Bernini? I had met her when she was more sublime than a Raphael Madonna, more inspired than a motto of Teresa of Ávila, more marvellous than a verse of the Cavaliere Marino, more melodious than a madrigal of Monteverdi, more lascivious than a couplet by Ovid and more edifying than an entire tome of Fracastoro.

What had I done to her? Widow of a gallows bird! To begin with I had not been a bad husband, I told myself: to unite herself with me she had abandoned prostitution, into which she had been cast by the foul and secret events that I had uncovered when we met in the Donzello Inn. Yes, but afterwards? We had lived in the little house purchased by my father-in-law, not by me, and until two years ago we had lived on the income of the small farm he had bequeathed to us. I had worked hard at Villa Spada, it was true, but what about the fame that Cloridia had won as an excellent midwife, to the great financial benefit of the whole family?

What a good-for-nothing I must be, since in three decades I had been unable not only to guarantee my Clorida prosperity but even to spare her the insult of poverty and finally the loss of the property inherited from her father. And yet she had not stinted herself: she had given herself to me wholly, remaining ever-loving and faithful, giving birth to three children, bestowing on them with her womb the gift of being, and with her breast the gift of well-being.

At the end of all this reasoning, the trial I had been conducting against myself concluded with a conviction.

I looked again at the black chess bishop. I had to admit it: if he had not arrived, the black Abbot Melani, to save us from poverty, at this hour we would still be in Rome, in the jaws of hunger, our little boy perhaps already dead from cold after yet another hard frost, myself dead from a fall from a roof, or, worse, burned alive in a chimney fire. Who could say? It is true that with his donation Atto had been fulfilling a promise, I considered with wavering spirit; but if I had never met him, would I not in any case have fallen victim to the famine of 1709 and the decadence of the Spada family, for whom I had been working?

Vienna and Rome, Rome and Vienna: suddenly the hidden thread of my existence unravelled in my mind. Twenty-eight years earlier, while the future of Europe was being decided in Vienna, in that small inn in the centre of Rome, just a few yards from Piazza Navona, the meeting with Abbot Melani had changed my life forever. He had trained me in the ruses and stratagems of politics, of state intrigues, in the dark facies of human existence. He had pulled me prematurely from the blind ingenuousness to which I would otherwise have been destined. Revealing to me the evil of this world, he had caused me (although that had not been his purpose) to flee it, to abandon my vacuous youthful dream of becoming a gazetteer and instead to withdraw into a world constituted by the important things of existence: my family, the love of my dear ones, a modest and virtuous life, marked by the fear of God.

But over the course of time, in order to achieve his ends he had tricked, exploited and deceived me. I had been his docile and unconscious instrument, and I had helped him to set in motion machinations favouring the King of France. He had got what he had wanted from me: help, advice, even affection.

Everything now seemed changed, and even to have turned into its opposite. I was no longer the ingenuous little boy of our first meeting, nor the young family man he had met on his return to Rome. I was a mature man of forty-eight, hardened by a life of labour. In the Vienna that had played such an important part in our first adventures, almost three decades earlier, I had finally found the reward for all that Atto Melani had taken from me with his empty promises. My God, did it all have to end tragically on a gallows?

Having given vent to panic, rage, a thousand regrets and torments, just like a duck flapping his wings dry on leaving a pond I now shook off all reminiscences and pondered on the present. The old castrato’s fainting fit had not seemed faked: with my own eyes (and not least with my nose…) I had had clear evidence of the pitiful state he had been reduced to by the news of the Most August Caesar’s illness. And in any case, had I not heard Atto describing in passionate tones the heroism of Joseph the Victorious? And even earlier, the very day we had met at the coffee house of the Blue Bottle, had not Atto himself painted in gloomy colours the wretched end of France and the failure of the vainglorious reign of Louis XIV, while he praised Vienna and the Habsburgs? Those had not been the speeches of an enemy of the Empire. Unless. .

Unless he had made all those speeches deliberately to deceive me and allay any suspicions I might have.

I did not yield to sleep — rather, I almost fainted when, after dropping Hristo’s chessboard, a little piece of paper emerged from its false bottom:

Shah matt

checkmate

the King is enclosed