Veritas

Day the Fifth

MONDAY, 13^TH APRIL 1711

It was midnight when, with lightning speed, I dashed to Simonis’s room.

“We must find your companions,” I exhorted him, waking him from a deep sleep, “and at once. I’ll pay them and tell them to leave off their enquiries: it’s too dangerous.”

I told him about the Emperor’s sudden illness, about my suspicions that he was being murdered (but I omitted Atto’s probable involvement), and I showed him the little piece of paper written in poor Hadji-Tanjov’s own handwriting.

“The King is enclosed,” the Greek read slowly, and I could not tell whether his tone was one of distraction or concentration.

“Do you understand, Simonis?” I asked, wondering whether at that moment I was speaking to the usual idiot or the alert student I had discovered over the last few days. “Hristo told you that the solution of the sentence was in the words soli soli soli, and that it was linked to checkmate. Now with this piece of paper we can finally understand the meaning of Hristo’s words: ‘checkmate’ comes from ‘shah matt’, which I imagine is Persian, since chess, unless I’m mistaken, comes from that part of the world.”

“And ‘shah matt’, according to what Hristo wrote here, literally means ‘the King is enclosed’,” concluded the Greek.

“Exactly. I think Hristo, playing one of his chess games, had an intuition and understood something that links the Agha’s statement with the Emperor.”

“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? Are we sure that ‘the King is enclosed’ refers to His Caesarean Majesty?”

“Just use your brain,” I said impatiently, “who else could it be? The Agha came to Rome, he uttered that strange sentence, his dervish wants someone’s head, Joseph the First just happens to fall ill. .”

“How can you be sure they’re poisoning him? And suppose it were really smallpox?”

“Trust me,” I answered curtly.

I would have liked to say, “When Abbot Melani’s around, nothing happens by chance and above all nobody dies a natural death.”

“But what’s the link between soli soli soli and ‘the King is enclosed’?”

“Well, we don’t know that yet,” I admitted, “but I know enough already not to want any more students on my conscience. I’ll tell your companions what Cloridia heard from Ciezeber. I want to be sure they drop this business and that none of them takes it any further, even just out of curiosity.”

Simonis grew thoughtful.

“All right, Signor Master,” he said at last, “we’ll do as you wish. This matter concerns you. Tomorrow I’ll start looking for my friends to tell them that you — ”

“No, look for them now. At once. Right now those boys are running the risk, without knowing it, of ending up like Dànilo and Hristo. Who shall we tell first, at this hour?”

“Dragomir Populescu,” answered my assistant, after a moment’s reflection. “With the job he does, the night is his world.”

Saint Ulrich, Neustift, the Jägerzeile, Lichtenthal and the lands of the chapter of the cathedral: we were rapidly combing all the zones in the suburbs where music and dancing took place. Thanks to Penicek’s mysterious connections — Simonis had got him out of bed and forced him to drive us in his cart — we had passed through the city gates by paying a mere “offering”, as he called it, to the guards.

Simonis had already hinted that Populescu scraped the barest of livings, and that night he revealed to me the list of his various occupations.

“A cheat at cards and billiards, and a specialist in rigging all forms of gambling: dice, bowls and so on. And in his spare time, an unauthorised violinist.”

“Unauthorised violinist?”

The Greek explained that dancing and music were not such an obvious and innocent pastime as one might think. Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara had thundered against them in his sermons: “It is well known good habits can by good strings be ripped: chiefly in dances, where leap as you may, one’s honour oft is tripped.”

For about a decade now, for reasons of public decency and morality, the authorities had been trying to impose limitations on dances: two years earlier the municipal council had even asked the Emperor to abolish them. An exception was made for weddings, during which violins were allowed to play until nine or ten p.m., but no later. However, these rules were not respected; indeed, there had been a wild outbreak of Geigen und Tanzen, those dances to the merry sound of violins, especially in the suburbs.

In the meantime we had visited a dozen places with orchestras and dancers: there was no sign of Populescu.

In the beer halls, Simonis continued as we drove on to the next tavern, the town council had even forbidden dancing entirely, on the pretext that the instruments played in such places (reed-pipes, colasciones or mandoras) did not deserve the name of musical instruments, and the customers — people vilioris conditionis, of vile condition — under the influence of beer, violins and dancing, abandoned themselves to unmentionable liberties and abominable practices.

In the end, however, since these prohibitions achieved very little (even the Emperor was in favour of greater freedom for innkeepers, dancers and musicians), they had introduced a tax on dancing; as Austrian wisdom has it, what cannot be forbidden must be taxed.

Everyone was taxed, except the noblemen, so long as the balls they gave were free of charge. There was a tax on weddings, baptisms and all the various local celebrations et cetera. The owners of taverns, beer halls and such like had to pay five florins a year. In addition, places of entertainment within the city walls, on the occasion of public festivals, had to pay thirty kreutzer per musician, and a full florin for private parties! The result was that people played and danced in secret, or declared fewer musicians than there actually were. The Office of the Court Treasury sent inspectors out but the innkeepers would not let them in and even threatened them. Even the musicians had to pay something: to play they had to have a licence. The fine for unlicensed musicians was six florins.

“So one of our Dragomir’s thousand trades is that of unlicensed musician,” said Simonis, who seemed, as he chatted away, to have forgotten how urgent our search was.

While my assistant explained the secrets of Populescu’s nightlife, we visited the umpteenth tavern, asking the owner and customers in vain if they had seen him around. As we left the place, where about twenty clients were dancing to the sound of a small orchestra, we saw the host talking in the doorway to a couple of individuals, who looked like officials or secretaries. In the middle of the conversation, the host (a corpulent and rather grim-looking man) suddenly spat into the face of one of his two interlocutors, and then slapped him repeatedly. He then summoned a couple of robust young men from inside the tavern, on whose appearance the two officials immediately took to their heels.

“Another fruitless inspection,” confirmed Simonis with a smile.

We had now toured all the places likely to hold dancing, but had found no trace of Populescu.

“Strange,” said Simonis seriously, “I was almost sure we would find him in one of these places. .”

Then I saw him clap his hand to his forehead.

“How stupid of me! Of course. At this hour he’ll be at the Three Bumpkins! Quick, Pennal!” he ordered.

“Are we going to the Three Bumpkins? The one in the Neubau suburb?” asked Penicek.

“Exactly, that one,” answered the Greek.

“What is it?”

“A bowling alley.”

“At this hour?” I asked in amazement. “You can’t play bowls at night!”

“You’re quite right, Signor Master, but you need darkness to rig the long alley,” answered my assistant nonchalantly. “And so our good Dragomir, or the gallant gentleman who commissioned the task, will go there tomorrow and win, and so will all his gambling accomplices.”

“Everyone knows Dragomir in the gambling world, especially the crooked part, heh heh,” sniggered Penicek, turning towards us while with his reins he steered the cart towards a small bridge.

“Shut up Pennal! Who said you could open your mouth?” the Greek snapped.

Humbled and contrite, Penicek turned his face back towards the dark road.

“But how much can he make?” I asked in some doubt. “I’ve seen bowling alleys in noblemen’s gardens, it’s true, but unless I’m mistaken, bowls are generally considered a pastime for ordinary people. And playing the violin at the weddings of common people can’t earn him that much either.”

“That’s the point. Populescu supplements his income by occasionally spilling the beans to the guards, letting them know who’s dancing, playing or gambling without a permit, or without paying taxes.”

“He sells himself to his own enemies?” I asked in surprise.

“Obviously when he’s not the one playing or organising the game or the bet. .” Simonis winked at me.

Since public gambling houses were forbidden, explained the Greek, individual games were subdivided into legal and illegal ones. Games of skill, such as chess, were almost always allowed, while the greater the role of chance, the greater the prohibitions.

“The bans have nothing to do with morality: they just serve to keep the social classes divided, as usual,” said Simonis ironically. “You can never win that much with gambling. And so you won’t get any nouveaux riches. To make a lot of money, luck by itself isn’t enough — you need merit. Or rather, you have to be rich already: the nobles don’t pay taxes on gambling.”

Dice were often forbidden, bowling and cards went up and down. What made it difficult to enforce the bans was the fact that from the feudal age on, in order to elude inspections the names of the games and sometimes even some of their rules were constantly being changed, or the games that were allowed — games not played for money — were often turned into games played for money. And so the list of forbidden games was always getting longer, in an endless race between the law and the sharpest players, said Simonis, laughing with relish. Once again I had the impression that my assistant was more concerned to tell me about these aspects of Viennese life than to find Populescu. But maybe I was mistaken, I told myself.

As with dancing, in the end the law gave up and chose to make money from the situation rather than to forbid it. Forty years earlier an all-inclusive “entertainment tax” had been introduced, the revenue of which was to go towards the city’s prisons.

“The easiest to tax are the bowling alleys,” remarked Simonis, “because they can’t vanish. But Dragomir has to be very careful every time: as you’ve already seen, the hosts can be very vindictive. Woe betide any informer they catch.”

The taxes on card games, on the other hand, were almost impossible to collect.

“That’s why last year they made yet another attempt to tax all games.”

After a long series of surveys, Simonis explained, they had decided on the following plan: a tenth of the winnings must be paid into the public coffers. The organiser of the game had to buy certain ivory game tokens from the Oberamt, the communal office, and these would be changed into cash for the winner after a tenth had been detracted from it. This was paid to the Oberamt, which as a reward gave half to the organiser of the game, explained Simonis, strangely inspired by this account, which was so punctilious that it reminded me of the stories in the German-language gazzettes, abounding in details.

“Needless to say such an intricate procedure fell apart in just a few months. All over Vienna people laughed: ‘Cards aren’t like music: you can play cards in silence!”’

And so they had fallen back on the Viennese penchant for snooping.

“And that’s Dragomir’s most profitable trade,” said my assistant, “organising secret games, crooked gambling, forbidden dances, mass dives into the Danube, and then denouncing the whole thing and getting a reward.”

“Dives?”

“Of course, you won’t know about that, Signor Master, because you only got her a few months ago and you haven’t yet admired a Viennese summer. .”

You see, Simonis went on, open-air bathing had been very fashionable for about ten years in the Caesarean city, despite the fact that it had been forbidden since the last century. Almost every day you would see children and adults of both sexes bathing stark naked in the various branches of the Danube and in the Wienn, the city’s other river. And it did not only take place in secluded spots, but in the very centre, among the houses and along the crowded streets. Amidst the city bustle you would suddenly see someone strip off and, leaving his clothes on the side of the road, he would cheerfully dive in, immediately followed by other passers-by, in an effort to cool down. It scandalised respectable ladies, irritated gentlemen and did great harm to the education of children, who found themselves confronted by the unedifying spectacle.

“In the summer Dragomir goes along, strips off, dives in, shouts ‘Ah it’s lovely!’, and as soon as he’s got a number of passers-by to imitate him, out he gets and off he goes to the guards to tip them off and get a reward.”

“Another spy, like Dànilo. Even worse,” I said.

“Half-Asia. .” whispered Simonis into my ear.

“Populescu won’t make many friends, with this trade.”

“Oh, on the contrary, he has a lot of friends. They’re the ones who don’t know about his double-dealing: dupes waiting to be fleeced.”

We had reached our destination, in the suburb of Neubau. We left Penicek on the box and approached the entrance of the Three Bumpkins. It was completely dark.

“It’s closed,” I said

“Of course. The little jobs that Dragomir does are very. . unoffical. We’ll climb over the gate.”

It was a tavern with a fine garden equipped with two alleys for bowls. We patrolled them. They were deserted. The Greek frowned.

“The Seven Yards!” he commanded Penicek when we got back to the cart. Then he turned to me: “It’s the city’s shooting range, along the Als, just outside the western ramparts.”

“Finding Populescu isn’t as easy as you thought,” I said.

The Greek was silent.

Nor was there any sign of our man at the Seven Yards.

“We’ll look for him elsewhere,” announced Simonis as we made our way back to the Pennal’s cart. “We’ll search all the bowling alleys he uses.”

“Why are you so sure we’ll find him there?” I asked doubtfully.

“After the snow the weather looks more promising. Over the next few days, as soon as the weather gets a little warmer, Viennese citizens will come pouring out as usual, driven crazy by their city’s eternal cold. And Dragomir will be waiting for them with open arms. .” he laughed.

The Greek was right. In many countries bowls are the people’s favourite amusement in warm weather; even too much so, as Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara rightly complained: “In summer the common people go swarming into the gardens and bowling alleys where they indulge in swearing and cursing and fighting and bickering.”

“But how many bowling alleys are there in and around Vienna?” I asked, to get some idea how much more travelling we were in for.

I was extremely tired, and already a little sorry that I had not waited until the next day, as my assistant had suggested.

“Six hundred and fifty-eight short alleys, or circular ones, and forty-three long ones.”

“My God! And how do you expect to find him?” I exclaimed, afraid that the Greek had succumbed to a bout of idiocy.

“Don’t worry, Signor Master. Apart from the two we’ve already visited, Populescu is a regular customer of just one other alley. We’ll find him there for sure. But if you’re tired we can put it off till tomorrow.”

“No, let’s go on.”

“Pennal, get this old crock moving and we’ll go to the alley. . the Golden Thingie, what’s it called? Ah yes, the Golden Angel,” ordered Simonis.

“The Golden Angel? The one in the east, on the Landstrasse, opposite the Gate of the Stoves, where the Commorrers, the Stullweissenburgers, the Neuheußlers, the Bruggers and the Altenburgers all call?” asked Penicek, listing the coach drivers from the various cities of the Archduchy of Austria, the Empire and beyond, who evidently ended their journeys to Vienna in this tavern.

“No, the other Golden Angel, the one in the north, in the suburb of Währing.”

“Ah, I’ve got it. It’s on the Alstergasse, isn’t it?”

“Exactly.”

We inspected the fourteen short alleys and the long alley of the Golden Angel, but with no luck: everything was draped in the desolate silence of the night.

“I could have sworn he would be here,” said my assistant gloomily, as we climbed over the fence on our way back to the cart.

“My God,” I exclaimed disconsolately. “First we found Dànilo dead, then Hristo. And now, God forbid. .”

“Just a second! Could it be that I remembered wrongly?” Simonis said suddenly, as he climbed into the cart. “Perhaps the place Dragomir always hangs out at is the Golden Moon, or something similar. Pennal!”

“Perhaps Signor Barber means the Golden Moonshine, in Wieden,” stammered Penicek deferentially.

“Yes, yes, that’s it,” exclaimed my assistant.

Driving Penicek’s poor horse to the point of collapse, we visited the seventeen short alleys of the Golden Moonshine; the fifteen short ones and the long one of the Golden Deer on the Leopoldine Island, across the Battle Bridge, where travellers from Leipzig and Nuremberg arrive; and then the Golden Ox, where the Nurembergers lodge, together with the Schlasckwalters, the Planners and the Neuhausers; the Golden Eagle, terminus for the coach drivers from Silesia; the Golden Ostrich, arrival point for postillions from Breslau, and for the Neusers and the Iglauers; the Golden Peacock, hostel for the Poles; and even the Golden Lamb, where the Pennal’s fellow-citizens lodged, the coach drivers from Prague; without counting a whole host of other alleys with gilded names. Penicek himself drew on his expertise as a driver, taking us to all the places he knew: in the south, in the suburb of Wieden, opposite the Carinthian Gate, we inspected the Golden Capon, where the Venetian coach drivers stayed, and the Golden Amber, where the drivers from Villach stayed. It was all in vain: the name of the correct inn was buried in Simonis’s memory, and it seemed to have got blocked.

I was in a grim mood and trembling with anxiety for Populescu’s life. If he had been murdered, the number of corpses on my conscience would have risen to three. Because now I was sure of it: Dànilo Danilovitsch and Hristo Hadji-Tanjov had been killed on account of their investigations into the Golden Apple.

Weariness finally won out over these funereal conjectures. I closed my eyes. Luckily I managed to sleep a little in the cart between one place and the next. Having searched all the places with gold in their names that we could remember, we took Penicek’s suggestion to visit other taverns, where travellers came from outside Vienna: for profiteers like Populescu, foreigners are always the ideal dupes. So we went back to Wieden to inspect the Basket of Coal, where coach drivers from Graz, Marburg and Neustadt called; and then to the Black Goat on Landstrasse, a haunt of traders in oxen from Hungary; and finally, in the suburb of Rossau, opposite the Scottish Gate, where Penicek himself had a stable, we looked in at the Black Amber, the arrival point for people from places in Lower Austria, like Passau, Crems, Wachau and others, and the White Lamb, where sailors from St John, from Greifenstein et cetera et cetera landed.

At these last few stops, to tell the truth, I let Simonis go and search, while I continued to doze.

“Aren’t you sleepy?” I asked my assistant, while Penicek himself nodded off placidly on the box.

“I have my bat with me, Signor Master,” he answered, pointing to his little shoulder bag.

“What? Oh yes,” I said, remembering the strange remedy against sleepiness that my assistant had adopted on the night of the Deposition. “But won’t it suffocate, shut up in there?”

“It’s used to it. And anyway it’s asleep now!”

“Ah.”

“Talk of the devil!” exclaimed Populescu the moment he saw us.

I heaved a sigh of relief. At the Golden Crown, on the Leopoldine Island, we had finally found the Romanian. After rigging the bowls and the hard clay of the alley, he was getting ready to go. I was about to tell him about the danger he was in, but Populescu got in before me: he had some important new things to tell us about the Golden Apple. There was just one problem: his informer, with whom he had fixed a meeting, had not turned up. He jumped onto Penicek’s cart, inviting us to accompany him to an address not far off.

“Let’s go to the Hetzhaus, Pennal. And hurry, by God,” he ordered him cheerfully, and then turned to me. “Don’t worry, the last time I found him easily. He’s a Romanian boy, like me, but he comes from an area of beggars, in the mountains, nothing like my part of the country,” he was keen to clarify, lifting the palm of his hand to show that he came from far more civilised lands. “There’s Romania and Romania: I was born on the Black Sea, and I’m a prince!”

“Yes, of course, your highness,” said Simonis, winking at me, amused by his “half-Asiatic” companion’s clarification.

“The boy’s father was taken prisoner of war by the Turks,” Populescu went on, “and knows a lot about their legends. He promised he would give us some useful information.”

“How useful?” I asked doubtfully.

“He says he knows where the Golden Apple comes from, and where it ended up.”

“Listen, Dragomir,” I interrupted him, “I have to speak to you. You must stop. .”

But the Romanian had not heard me. We had already arrived. Populescu got down from Penicek’s cart and signalled to me and Simonis that we should wait.

My assistant addressed me in heartfelt tones:

“If I may be allowed, Signor Master, before you speak to Dragomir and tell him to stop his investigation, it might be better to wait and see what his informer has to say about the Golden Apple. We’re almost there. I wouldn’t want my companion, after he hears that the Agha’s dervish is plotting a murder, to run off right now.”

I was silent for a moment.

“You could be right,” I agreed then. “After all there are four of us. I don’t think Populescu is in any immediate danger.”

Simonis looked at me in silence, waiting for my last word.

“All right then. I’ll speak to him afterwards,” I concluded.

Simonis said nothing. He seemed relieved.

It was still the middle of the night, and we were still on the Leopoldine Island, outside the Tabor Schantz. The Pennal had parked his cart near a strange building, which I had never heard of before: the Hetzhaus, or “House of Incitement”. It was a tall wooden building of a circular shape, from which, despite the late hour, there came an infernal clamour of human shouting and animal cries.

“What’s going on in there?” I asked Simonis.

“Have you never heard of the Hetzhaus, Signor Master?”

“Never.”

At that very moment Populescu returned.

“It’s full tonight. Come with me, it’ll be quicker if we do it together.”

The Pennal, as usual, waited outside for us. We made our way to the entrance, where a huge, ogre-like man stopped us:

“Spectators or owners?”

“Don’t you recognise me, Helmut?” answered Populescu, “I’m looking for Zyprian.”

The ogre replied that he had seen our man about an hour earlier. However, he did not know if he was still around, and he let us through. I looked at Simonis questioningly.

“You’ll understand everything in a moment, Signor Master.”

The entrance was a simple low and narrow corridor leading towards the middle of the wooden building. As we advanced, the din grew even louder and I was able to distinguish its two principal noises: men yelling and poultry squawking. Finally we emerged into a large amphitheatre, illuminated by a great number of torches. On the ground level there were a number of compartments, in which animals were caged; when the grating was lifted they came out into the arena and fought. Next to the grating was the spectators’ entrance and large containers for dogs.

A heaving mass of individuals was swarming around the centre of the arena, yelling and gesticulating. The noise was now deafening, and was accompanied by a stifling stench of beasts, sweat and urine. The crowd, all male, was made up of rough burly types, peasants and louts.

“Welcome to the Hetzhaus,” said Simonis, pointing to the scene at the centre of the amphitheatre, while Populescu asked someone for information. We moved towards the centre of the show. A group of quarrelsome-looking brutes passed in front of us, greeting Populescu with cheerful coarseness.

At that moment, peering through the crowd, I finally saw what it was that held the attention of the swarming crowd. In the arena two large cocks were massacring one another with sharp pecks, incited by the spectators’ furious yells, amplified by the echo created in the building’s hollow space. Just then, the larger of the two cockerels firmly seized the other’s neck with its claw, pinned its head to the ground and with its beak pitilessly pecked it. The crowd cheered, spurring the two creatures on — one to kill, the other to die — with equally bestial fervour.

“So Simonis,” I asked him, “what does ‘spectators or owners’ mean?”

“Spectators are the ones that come here to bet,” said Simonis, as I watched the bloody spectacle, “owners are the ones that own the animals they bet on.”

In the meantime Populescu had rejoined us.

“It’s no use, I can’t find out if the boy is still here or not. We’ll have to look for him. He’s easy to recognise, because he only has one eye, the left — the other is covered by a bandage. He’s a boy aged thirteen, as thin as a rake and almost as tall as me.”

As Populescu moved away again, greeting strangers to left and right, I asked Simonis: “What does Populescu get up to in the Hetzhaus?”

“He scrapes together a little cash by cheating mugs with rigged bets. The Hetzhaus was opened a few years ago by two Dutch traders, and is very successful. In Vienna animal fights have been in fashion for over a century, and there are lots of people who live by betting on them. The boy we’re looking for, even if Populescu won’t say so openly, is undoubtedly one of the little tricksters that hang around these places. Now let’s split up, keeping an eye on each other: whichever of us sees the little squinter first must signal to the others.”

Left on my own, I studied the place. All around, the numerous barred cages held animals of every sort: in addition to cocks, there were dogs, bulls, oxen, wolves, boars and hyenas, and their yelps of angry fear made the place sound like one of the circles of hell. The cages were set out in radial fashion, and from each one the animal inside could be unleashed and led straight to the combat. It was as if some wicked enchanter had transformed Noah’s ark into a place of slaughter. At the entrance, ignoring the yells and yelps, the stink and the blood, a salesman was cheerfully peddling bread, sausages and cheap Schwechat wine.

Meanwhile the larger cock had finished massacring its rival, which was carried off half-dead from the arena. The owner of the winner picked up his beloved pet and held it high to the jubilant acclaim of the audience. I saw gold and silver coins changing hands, filling the winners’ eyes with joy, and the losers’ with rage.

At that moment, above the uproar of the gamblers and their beasts, I heard a shout:

“It’s him!”

I looked up. Populescu was pointing at a figure moving swiftly and almost invisibly through the forest of legs, arms and rustic faces. I saw him clearly: a pale, thin face, the right eye blindfolded. I tried to intercept him, but taking advantage of the obstacle of a small knot of people the boy managed to dodge past me and to flee towards the exit. We all three chased after him, pushing aside anyone in our path, and just a few seconds later we were in the street. By the time we got outside, as was to be expected, the boy had been swallowed up in the dark. The massive Helmut, who stood on guard at the door, had just glimpsed him darting by.

“Curse it,” hissed Populescu, his breath steaming in the cold night air.

“And now?”

“Zyprian lives a long way off, in the suburb of Wieden,” he answered. “He won’t get back till dawn. He’ll have had to find some place to shelter in. But I know there’s another place he hangs around in, near here, where he sometimes acts as pimp. He won’t expect me to know about it, because it was one of his hustlers that told me about it, and not him. Pennal, curse it, what are you waiting for to get this cart moving?”

This place looked quite different. We were now in the elegant square of Neuer Markt. In the centre, gleaming amid the half-darkness, stood the monument to Joseph the First, Victor of Landau. A large opulent place of entertainment spilled light not only from its ground-floor windows but also from those on the first floor. Next to the street entrance was a life-size wall painting of a be-turbaned Grand Turk holding, as was the fashion in coffee houses, a steaming cup of coffee and beckoning people in. A number of luxurious carriages were parked nearby, whose owners — noblemen and high court functionaries — were being expensively entertained within the building.

“This is the Mehlgrube. It’s the most elegant place for anyone looking for nocturnal enjoyment,” said Populescu. “It has the best billiard tables, the best card players, the best music and the best whores in the city. People drink and dance even at this time of night, despite all the rules. The more successful a place is, the greater the laws it can break: there’s all the more money for bribing magistrates.”

On the upper floor the notes of the orchestra were almost drowned by the laughter and clatter of the dancers. A piece in three-quarters time had just finished, greeted by rapturous applause.

“Did you hear?” snorted Populescu. “People are no longer happy just to dance Ländler or Langaus: now they all want this strange dance from who knows where, called Walzer, or something similar. And yet doctors say that this waltz is too fast and immoral, it can lead to overheating and illness, and even to early death. If you ask me, in a couple of years people will have forgotten all about it.”

While Populescu went off in search of Zyprian, Simonis had to answer my questions.

“Dragomir acts as a factotum for the professional swindlers. While they play cards, he peeks at the hand the dupe is holding, a poor fellow who has no idea he’s playing with two or three tricksters. If they play billiards, he makes sure the victim gets given a cue of poor quality, which is guaranteed to make him lose, or every so often he switches the cue ball with a faulty one, so that the poor sucker’s decisive shots all go wrong.”

In the meantime Dragomir had returned, looking exultant.

“I’ve found him. They’re keeping him warm for us.”

Through a little door that gave onto the road he led us into the cellar, at the bottom of a short staircase. Just one dim lamp illuminated a little room full of wine and beer barrels, where we found the one-eyed boy sitting at a table. He was being watched over by a paunchy fellow, who had dull, half-closed eyes but looked imposing and threatening. He was even larger than the ogre Helmut who had stopped us at the entrance to the Hetzhaus. His arms, I calculated, were as thick as my thighs.

“He helps me to get my clients to pay up,” Populescu explained, pointing to him with a knowing smile, filling a flagon of wine from one of the small barrels.

The young Zyprian looked more angry than frightened, and gazed at us with his one eye like a caged animal. He at once assailed Populescu with a stream of abuse; the latter answered him in the same language.

“He says he won’t talk, and that he doesn’t remember anything,” explained Populescu, draining his flagon. “Earlier he promised to help me. Then he started saying that these things are sacred for the Turks, that you shouldn’t ask too many questions, otherwise their god might get angry and punish us. But I pointed out to him that promises must be kept. Otherwise Klaus will step in,” he said, nodding to the brute next to Zyprian.

“Among themselves,” Simonis whispered into my ear, “Half-Asiatics are particularly cruel.”

Zyprian spat on the ground as a mark of contempt. Populescu gave a sign to Klaus, who gave Zyprian’s left cheek a resounding slap. The impact was so violent that the boy tottered on the chair.

“Go to hell,” he hissed in German.

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm,” muttered Populescu to himself. “Klaus, again,” he ordered.

This time three backhanders were delivered. The first made the victim shake again, the second made him lose his balance, and the third knocked him to the floor. Klaus hit without any style, but efficaciously. Zyprian bore up.

“You’d better leave us for a while,” Populescu said to us. “We’re going to have to use strong measures.”

I shivered and looked at Simonis, who jerked his head as a sign that we should take Dragomir’s advice. We went and sat down a little way off. A few moments later we heard Zyprian’s first screams, followed by Populescu’s burps, as he knocked back another flagon of beer.

“Half-Asia,” muttered the Greek, shaking his head.

“I don’t think that has anything to do with the violence,” I objected. “You talk as if they were the outcasts that live in the Americas: now those really are savages.”

“These are no better, Signor Master. An old Pontevedrin joke says that a peasant, at the gates of heaven, is offered whatever he wants, on condition that his neighbour, who’s still alive, will get twice as much. ‘Take out one of my eyes,’ answers the peasant with a malicious smile. There, that’s how people in Half-Asia treat each other.”

From Zyprian’s screams it really did seem that Populescu was giving orders for not just one but both of his eyes to be taken out.

“Believe me, Signor Master, in those parts men live like wild animals,” the Greek said heatedly. “Don’t be fooled, there’s nothing heavenly or idyllic about the wildness of lands like Pontevedro; it’s a state of utter darkness, of obscure, foggy and bestial crudeness, an eternal cold night, beyond the reach of any ray of civilisation, any warm breath of human love. It’s neither day nor night there, just a strange twilight, possessing neither our culture nor the barbarism of Turan, but a mixture of both: Half-Asia!”

“That’s enough, for the moment,” we heard Dragomir Populescu order the brute, who had just set his knee on the boy’s stomach and was preparing to hit him again.

Simonis and I approached. I was shocked by the coldness with which Dragomir Populescu, a student with an unsuspected double life, had set the thug on the poor child. Obviously it was not the first time that our companion had had someone beaten up; only one who belonged to the sordid criminal world, I thought, could deal so casually in violence and bullying. Cheats, tricksters, pimps, spies and fornicators. Simonis was not wrong: although his companions might call themselves students, they were anything but lovers of letters and sciences.

Zyprian’s resistance seemed to have been broken. The boy was lying on the ground with a blood trickling from his lower lip and a dark ring swelling round his eye even as we watched. He mumbled something under his breath.

“Louder,” ordered Populescu, pouring his beer over his head.

Zyprian kept quiet. At another signal from Populescu, Klaus gave him a kick in his ribs.

The boy moaned and turned on his side.

“Aren’t we overdoing things?” I interposed.

“Shhh!” Populescu hissed at me. “Now then, Zyprian, what can you tell us about this Golden Apple? My friends are here for you.”

Zyprian began talking in his own language again, this time slightly louder. To make his mutterings intelligible, Dragomir translated them simultaneously into Italian, stopping every so often to ask him to repeat words that he had not pronounced clearly on account of his swollen lip.

“Everyone talks about the Golden Apple, the secret of all power. Everybody is looking for it, but no one knows where it’s ended up. One day in Constantinople the sheik Ak emseddin had an idea: he exercised his gift for visions, and identified the spot where Eyyub, Mahomet’s standard-bearer, who died during the victorious siege of the city, must be buried.”

“Eyyub!” declared Populescu, turning to us with a look of triumph. “It’s the name pronounced by Dànilo before he died! And so he’s the standard-bearer of Mahomet that my beautiful brunette in the coffee house was telling me about. .”

Together with Sultan Mehmed and three men, the story went on, Ak emseddin dug for three days. At last, at a depth of three cubits they found a large green stone, with an inscription in Kufic letters that said: “This is the tomb of Ebû Eyyub El-Ensârî”. Underneath the stone they found the corpse of Eyyub, wrapped in a saffron-coloured shroud. His face was so beautiful and holy that it looked as if he had just died. In his blessed right hand he held a Mühre.”

“A what?” interrupted Simonis.

“For men of no understanding,” went on Zyprian’s tale, “it’s just a small spherical object, like the little balls they use to flatten paper. But for anyone kissed by the benediction of true knowledge, it is infinitely more: it’s a stone with magical forces of divine origin.”

“But is this Mühre the Golden Apple?” I asked.

“The Mühre is formed in the head of a snake of royal blood,” Zyprian’s muttering tale continued, in Populescu’s translation, “and it is actually solar matter. It is protected by seven layers of skin, which drop off one by one. And so it has to be kept in a dark nook, where no ray of sunlight can enter, and it must be covered in gold. If even a single bead of sunlight enters, the Mühre flees into the heavenly spheres, towards the matter it is related to.”

This was not all. According to what the poor boy told us, every so often clutching his head in pain, the old emperors of Byzantium, or Constantinople, had a shiny stone on their crown as rulers of the world; this stone had been taken from the chamber of Nebuchadnezzar, the founder of Babylon. It had been given to him by the Magi. Nebuchadnezzar, to defend his conquest magically, had had countless signs drawn throughout his kingdom, in the shape of a snake.

“This was because the Cosmos-City itself was surrounded by a snake, which imitated the snake that surrounds the whole earth,” explained Zyprian.

And he recounted that Alexander the Great, when he was searching for the fountain of life in the land of eternal darkness, had placed a splendid stone on the tip of his spear: in the West they said that he had obtained it at the gate of the earthly paradise; in the East, however, the wise men said that Alexander and his vizir Sûrî had reached the City of Copper built by Solomon. This stone then became the Golden Apple.

“Just a moment, Dragomir, just a moment. I’m getting lost,” I protested, rubbing my eyes, as if seized by a terrible headache.

“I haven’t changed a single word the brat said,” Populescu defended himself, pouring himself another flagon.

The boy went on, and explained that Hüma, the bird of paradise, had revealed to Solomon the origins of the precious stone known as Mühre.

“In the Fourth Heaven there’s a mountain of golden sand, on top of which stands a splendid palace. The dome of this palace consists of the stone rings of all the men of power who governed the world before Adam. After subduing the earth, they yielded to the ambition of wishing to conquer the heavens and become gods. And so the Angel of Death went to meet them and asked for their rings back. In the dome of the heavenly palace the only one missing is the last ring, the one that closes the dome. That’s what the Mühre is formed from.”

Simonis and I looked at each other in amazement. Zyprian’s revelations led in contrasting and extremely intricate directions.

“In my opinion, this Mühre is the garnet stone from the statue of the Madonna of St Sophia, as Koloman told us,” remarked Simonis.

“But it could also be the golden ball that Suleiman had them mount on the bell tower of St Stephen’s, as Jan Janitzki said,” added Populescu.

“Let’s ask him where Eyyub got the Mühre from,” I said.

“It was in the centre of the world. Eyyub stole it to hand it over to the future conquering sultan,” was Zyprian’s answer.

“The centre of the world must be Constantinople,” explained Populescu, “since these are Turkish legends.”

“And now where is the Mühre?” I asked.

“Nobody knows.”

“And Kasim’s forty thousand? Ask him if he knows about the forty thousand martyrs.”

The boy unwillingly muttered a few words.

“He said: the forty thousand martyrs shout on Friday,” translated Dragomir.

“But Dànilo already told us that before he died,” I said.

Populescu asked Zyprian again.

“To be precise, they shout on Friday evening. He knows nothing else.”

The last answer, which verged on stupidity, was not encouraging.

“Ask him if the words soli soli soli mean anything to him,” I suggesed.

Zyprian, who in the meantime had sat down again, wiped the blood from his lip. On hearing the question he shook his head and spat on the ground. Klaus clenched his fist and with a glance sought instructions from Dragomir Populescu, who indicated he should let the boy go.

“I don’t understand any of it,” remarked Simonis, as we left the cellar and walked towards Penicek’s cart. “A lot of the information tallies, but none of it makes any sense. It’s not clear whether the Golden Apple is this Mühre, and whether the Mühre is the ball of the statue of the Madonna, or of Justinian or Constantine, or the one on the top of St Stephen’s, depending on the various versions. Zyprian says it actually came from the centre of the earth, and even from Alexander the Great, from the Fourth Heaven and from Solomon’s ring. Whatever it is, if this ball of solar matter, as he calls it, was kept in Eyyub’s tomb, the Agha’s phrase ‘we have come alone to the Golden Apple’ makes no sense anymore.”

“I don’t understand it either,” Populescu answered him, in the voice of one awash in beer, “but there must be a reason why the Turks talked about the Golden Apple to Prince Eugene.”

“I say we should look into this Eyyub, Mahomet’s standard-bearer: it can’t be an accident that Dànilo spoke his name before he died,” the Greek suggested, climbing onto the cart.

“No, our Dragomir mustn’t investigate anything at all now,” I intervened, casting an angry glance at my assistant and pulling out the money to pay Populescu. “Nor must your other companions, because — ”

“Well said!” exclaimed the Romanian, breaking into a broad smile at the sight of the coins. “I agree with you. For the moment we’ve learned enough. This evening I’ve got a date with my beauty at an Andacht on the Kalvarienberg, and this money is just what I need, thanks!”

“Be careful, Dragomir,” I tried to speak to him, handing him the money. “There’s something you should know. .”

“I’ll be very careful! She says she’s a virgin,” he laughed, “but I have a couple of tricks to see if that’s true.”

He was drunk. Not an ideal condition for hearing and, above all, for understanding what I had to say to him. We made him get up onto the cart with us.

“Yes, but now listen: the Agha’s dervish. .” I tried to start off.

“The dervish? That spinning top in the white skirt?” he sneered, and then he burped. “I’ll be lifting different sorts of skirts this evening! I don’t give a damn whether the dervish is a virgin or not, ha ha! But my dark-haired chick from the coffee house. . Heh heh, just listen to me: I’ll get her to drink Armoniacum salt with spring water, and if she’s not a virgin, she’ll piss herself, ha ha! And I’ve also got carbonised roots of ephen — or celeriac or whatever you want to call it — to put under her nose: if she’s not a virgin, another piss! Just imagine what a fool she’ll feel, ha ha!”

I felt dispirited. Dragomir’s coarse laughter was soon joined by that of my assistant, and if that were not enough, he ordered the Pennal to laugh as well.

“Of course, it’s a real pity if she’s not a virgin,” declared Dragomir, with fussy exactitude, “but at least I can be sure of getting my oats, and without too much of a fuss! Ha ha!”

The cart pulled up. We were outside Populescu’s house. Before I could open my mouth, he opened the door and got out.

“Just a moment, Dragomir,” I called him, “there’s something you should know. .”

“A thousand thanks, Signor Master,” he laughed, totally drunk, bowing several times and waving the little bag of coins in the air before entering the front door.

“Off you go, Pennal!” ordered Simonis.

“No, wait!” I protested. “Simonis, I hardly said anything!”

“He’s drunk too much. He wouldn’t have understood anything. If you like, you can talk to him this evening — he said he has a date with that girl at an Andacht, on the Kalvarienberg.”

“Well, I have no choice now,” I said resignedly. “I’m worn out, and we haven’t managed to warn any of your three companions. I wonder if we shouldn’t have looked for Koloman or Opalinski first, instead of Dragomir.”

“They were both at home. Sleeping.”

“What?” I said furiously. “So why did you advise me to start with Dragomir?”

“It wouldn’t have been polite to wake them up: they’re not under my orders, like the Pennal.”

I was silent, overcome by amazement. It was too idiotic an answer, I thought, to come from a half idiot.

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.

On our way back to Porta Coeli, the roads began to come to life. From bread shops, inns and sweet bread bakeries there came wafting the smell of chocolate — the same smell that will unexpectedly tickle your nostrils (the only city I know where this is true) in the middle of an alleyway, a garden, or a crowded avenue, like mystic manifestations of the afterlife.

Snow-white milkmaids, ruddy bakers, whistling musicians and lazy footmen came into the streets and began to swell the ranks of the humble toilers, while the noblemen, still in bed, breathed sluggishly in the coils of sleep.

Proceeding cautiously so as not to knock down some careless shop boy, Penicek’s cart was turning from Carinthia Street into Porta Coeli Street, and I had already glimpsed my Cloridia standing outside the door of the nunnery, when I realised something strange was happening.

I knew she would be worried by my long absence, and so I had stood up in the cart and was waving to her festively when I saw a shadowy figure emerge from nowhere and grip her arm. Cloridia yelled.

The memory of what happened in the next few moments, and the great agitation that overwhelmed all of us, is still hazy to me. However, I will try to describe those whirling moments as faithfully as possible.

We were not more than twenty paces from Porta Coeli. Simonis leaped down from Penicek’s cart and ran to assist my spouse. I tried to do likewise, even though I knew my stride to be much shorter. However, the nag that was pulling the Pennal’s cart, sensing danger, lost its head. The cart tottered and I stumbled as I jumped out, and went crashing to the ground. I looked up at once and saw more clearly the shadowy figure that had attacked Cloridia. He was now backing away as Cloridia hurled insults at him. From his clothing I realised immediately who it must be: the hooded man, the friend of Ciezeber the dervish, who had so menacingly dogged Cloridia at Prince Eugene’s palace.

Simonis was almost upon him, but the individual had already taken to his heels, vanishing into the ash-grey haze of dawn. Cloridia was on the ground, terrified and weeping. Simonis lost valuable seconds in checking that she had not been wounded in any way. Then, while I moved forward half-limping, my assistant set off in pursuit again, and I followed him. The hooded man could not escape us.

The passers-by watched this early morning chase incredulously: from the windows they urged us to catch the thief (although he was not one), and one or two sleepy-looking youths even gave signs of joining in the chase, although they desisted almost immediately. Running all the way down Porta Coeli Street the hooded man first reached the circle of the ramparts, then turned left along the Seilerstätte road and then down the lane behind the convent of the Augustinian nuns of St James. Simonis was hot on his heels, but I had worked out a better move: I took the parallel street, the Riemergasse, which, unlike the other route, which twisted and turned, ran straight as a die. Although I was by no means a fast runner, I reached the confluence between the two arteries at the same moment as Simonis and the hooded man.

And so it was that when the two burst out of the lane, I appeared in front of the pursued man. The monstrous face loomed up ahead of me and, even as we laid hands on my wife’s unknown aggressor, I realised to my immense surprise that I knew him and that he knew me.

As he came lurching towards me, in shape halfway between a mole and a stone marten, he goggled at me and then grinned bestially, opening his arms to enfold me in a lurid embrace. But Simonis fell upon him from behind, and we all went crashing into a nearby cart of fruit and vegetables, knocking it over along with its owner and sending a torrent of apples, cauliflowers, turnips and radishes cascading over the pavement in a thousand directions, like drops of quicksilver escaping from an alchemist’s alembic and slithering across the ground in a crazy bid for freedom.

A great blow to my temple set my head reeling. While the shouts of the bystanders and the desperate greengrocer deafened the whole street, I struggled to come to my senses, eager to see and understand what was going on. I saw the hooded man’s face leering down at me, while the arms of three or four robust passers-by held him tight. With his yellowing teeth and treacherous grey pupils, he continued to smile at me:

“I am surprended to find Your Illustriosity here in Vindobona, very live and kicksome.”

“Ugonio?!?” I exclaimed with difficulty, before losing my senses from the blow.

Hunter of relics, catchpoll in the service of the sects of beggars, hardened swindler involved in every disreputable affair in the Holy City: it was not the first time that Ugonio had burst in upon my life.

Our first encounter had been in the underground tunnels of Rome, when, twenty-eight years earlier, I had met Abbot Melani. He was a corpisantaro, a raider of “holy bodies” or sacred relics. I had then bumped into this bizarre individual eleven years ago, again on the occasion of Atto’s visit to Rome: at that time the corpisantaro was working for the secret companies of beggars. There was not actually any direct relationship between Melani and Ugonio: it was simply that the Abbot’s shady affairs were inevitably tangled up with the subterranean and sordid world in which the latter wallowed.

“How stupid of me, I should have realised,” I murmured, as soon as I came to my senses. “Ugonio is from Vienna.”

The corpisantaro came from the capital city of the Empire, and that was why his grip on our language was so precarious.

My body was now held up by four robust arms, and I was assisted towards the convent of Porta Coeli. The blow that had laid me out had come from the greengrocer’s cart, which had hit me right on the head as it overturned. I could hear my rescuers commenting on what had happened, and inveighing against Ugonio. At the side of the street, a double row of spectators was gazing as I staggered past, preceded by Simonis and by a cluster of people who were pushing and shoving the corpisantaro. They were busily collecting the testimony of Cloridia, so that they could hand Ugonio over to the authorities to be tried. I stared at him.

His disgusting appearance, which Cloridia had described, was well-known to me. He had the same drab, wrinkled and flabby skin, grey bloodshot eyes, crooked hands and cankered nose, all wrapped in a filthy greatcoat with a cowl. Although his age was hard to guess, the years had taken their toll on him too: previously Ugonio had been repellent; now he was also hoary. But he was clearly in good physical shape: it had taken two of us to bring him down, after an exhausting chase.

Eleven years earlier, to help the Abbot and me, the corpisantaro had aroused the enmity of the most powerful beggars in Rome, and had had to flee from Rome, and from Italy itself. I could still remember his blood-caked face and his bandaged hand, when he had come to Villa Spada to take his leave of Atto and me. He had told us then that he would retire here, to the city where he had been born.

I asked to be set on my feet: I could now stand up unsupported. I summoned Simonis. When my assistant was assured that my condition was satisfactory, I explained that not only did I know our prey, but that this individual, however unsettling in appearance, had certainly not intended any harm to my wife.

“Are you sure, Signor Master?”

“Leave him to me. And send away all these people. As you speak good German, explain that it was a quarrel between me and this man, and that it’s all been resolved amicably. I’m not going to press charges against him.”

“Actually, if I were you, I would. . But all right — as you wish, Signor Master.”

Simonis had some trouble in convincing the people around us, but in the end we managed to get them to leave us and to avoid any intervention by the city guards. Now came the most difficult part: to explain everything to my wife.

“Is he still here? Why haven’t you taken him straight to jail?”

We were in our lodgings in Porta Coeli. Cloridia was gazing at Ugonio in fear, holding our little boy tight in her arms, like a hen with its chicks.

“The fact is that you don’t know him, but he knows you,” I explained, as I invited Simonis and Ugonio to sit down.

My assistant looked at the corpisantaro with a mixture of surprise, disgust and diffidence, and he took care to sit as far as possible from him. Every so often he gave a discreet but marked sniff, as if to see if it really was his coat (as indeed it was) that gave off the stale smell that was rapidly filling the room.

“He knows me? Since when?” asked my sweet consort suspiciously.

I explained who Ugonio was, that he was a rogue, undoubtedly, but that when required he had proved trustworthy and had given incontrovertible proof of his loyalty.

Eleven years earlier, when Cloridia and I were working in Rome, in Cardinal Spada’s villa, he had broken into his house secretly several times. He had first seen Cloridia’s face then, and he knew that she was my wife, while Cloridia had no idea of Ugonio’s appearance. At Prince Eugene’s palace he had looked at her several times, intently, not with any hostile motive but because he was not yet sure that he had recognised her. In the end he had become convinced that she was my wife. That morning he had decided to present himself. He had approached her in front of Porta Coeli, hoping to be recognised, but Cloridia had reacted with fear. He had tried to hold her by the arm, and those who had witnessed the scene, including me, had taken it for an attack.

“I see,” Cloridia said at last, forcing herself to smile.

“Ugonio can be trusted,” I repeated, “if you take him the right way.”

“So why does he trade in people’s heads? And why did he steal the Landau coins from Prince Eugene?” asked Cloridia, scowling suspiciously again.

“He’ll tell you himself, if he doesn’t want me to press charges, as I could do,” I said, looking meaningfully at Ugonio.

The corpisantaro started.

“First of all: the Landau coins you stole are part of your usual trade, aren’t they?” I asked.

Amid the shapeless mass of Ugonio’s features his yellow-brown pointed teeth displayed themselves in an expression that was a mixture of surprise, disappointment and childish satisfaction at his skilful and nefarious theft of the coins.

“I do not dispute the accusement of Your Lordliness,” he replied in his clumsy, catarrh-filled voice. “But decreasing the scrupules so as not increase one’s scruples, I would like to assurify your married lady, the wedded spice and consortium of Your Highfulness: I, yours truthly, this identifical person of myself, never, not even for a split century, did I dream of harmifying a head on her hair.”

“What did he say?” asked Simonis in bewilderment. As a non-native speaker of Italian he had trouble in following Ugonio’s verbal convolutions.

“The theft of the coins: all right, I confess. But I never touched the good lady, nor thought of doing so,” the corpisantaro translated rapidly, his mother-tongue being German.

“Yes, I gathered this,” I agreed. “You just wanted to introduce yourself to Cloridia, though there were certainly more elegant ways of going about it. Now tell me: are you working for Abbot Melani?”

Ugonio again seemed taken aback by this.

“I ignorified completely, and also wholesomely, that Abbot Melani had taken abodance here in Vindobona,” he answered after a moment’s silence. “But to be more padre than parricide, I can confide that, negating the true with sincerity, I do not comprend the insinulation that Your Pomposity makes against me”

Simonis raised one eyebrow, puzzled again.

“Melani: I know nothing of him,” Ugonio translated with a grunt.

“Oh yes?” I pressed him. “So why were you plotting with the Agha’s dervish to cut some poor innocent man’s head off? Who is your victim? Maybe someone high up, very, very high, even too high up?”

A heavy silence fell on the room. Very soon I would find out if my suspicions about Abbot Melani’s journey were well-founded. Ugonio, stunned, said not a word. I returned to the attack.

“The Emperor is ill. Very ill. They say it’s smallpox. They say. But I suspect there’s something else behind it. It just so happens the illness started with his head — with his head, I say. Do you know anything about it?” I asked threateningly.

Ugonio stood up. His murky grey face looked flushed, and (if his sallow complexion had allowed it) almost crimson.

“I can testiculify to Your Imminence my profundest facefulness. Not to be a rustic physician, I swear and curse to you, from the fundaments of my heart, my full allegiance. To make things crystal-clean: I am not in the know of nothing about his Scissorian Majesty and his pathogenic indisposability. For the other tissue, about the dervishop I cannot spill even a single pea, because. .” And he broke off.

Simonis and I exchanged glances: this time my assistant had understood everything. Ugonio’s face was even more purple. He swallowed and finished the sentence in German:

“. . because otherwise they’ll cut me into pieces.”

“You don’t imagine that I’ll be satisfied with this lie,” I answered in a harsh voice.

The corpisantaro’s face seemed on the point of exploding. He had met me in Rome when I was the timid boy servant in a fourth-rate inn. Now I was a mature man, I knew life and its hardships. The old corpisantaro, who had shown he still had plenty of life and vigour in him, surely had not expected to be grilled so intensely.

“The head you talked to Ciezeber about,” I said clearly and menacingly, going right up to him, “now you’ll tell me whose it is.”

By way of reply Ugonio, with a gasp of lacerating terror such as I had never heard from him before, leaped to his feet and staggered towards the door in an improbable attempt to flee. He was of course immediately caught by Simonis, who, as he grabbed him by his coat, caused a curious tinkling sound to come from the corpisantaro. At a sign from me the Greek opened his coat (not without a grimace of distaste) and we saw, hanging inside it, something I well knew: an enormous iron ring to which were tied dozens, nay hundreds, of old keys of every shape, condition and size. It was Ugonio’s secret arsenal, his precious key ring.

The corpisantaro, who spent more time underground than above, often needed to penetrate the subsoil by way of cellars, warehouses or doors barred by bolts and locks. To solve the problem (“decreasing the scrupules so as not increase one’s scruples” he had specified) he had devoted himself from early days to the systematic bribery of servants, maids and valets. Knowing full well that the masters of villas and houses in possession of keys would never in any circumstances have let him have a copy, the corpisantaro had bartered with the serving staff for the duplicates of keys. In exchange, he would let the servants have some of his precious relics. Of course, Ugonio had been careful never to give up his best pieces, even though he had had to make the occasional painful sacrifice, like a fragment of St Peter’s collarbone. But he had managed to get hold of the keys to the cellars and foundations of the palaces of much of Rome. And the locks to which he did not have keys could often be opened with one of the many other keys of a similar kind.

Now the ring was more than twice as large as when I had last seen it on him: in addition to the Roman keys there were now the keys to all the cellars of Vienna. And that was no small achievement: as Cardinal Piccolomini had observed three-hundred years earlier, the city’s cellars are deep and spacious, giving rise to the saying that in Vienna there are as many buildings below as above ground.

“If you don’t confess straightaway, I’ll tear all your adored keys from you and throw them away,” I threatened.

Ugonio began to whimper and said that if that was how things were he could tell me some more about the matter, but not until tomorrow. He repeated several times that he would rather go straight to hell than talk now, and he would prefer a thousand times to rot in the terrible imperial dungeons, where — he well knew — he risked being tortured and having his limbs mutilated. It would still be far preferable to the horrifying fate that would await him if he revealed to us the secret of his pacts with the dervish.

Ugonio’s terror was practically a confession. I had no doubt about it now: it was Atto who had tracked Ugonio down and hired him; he was the link between the Abbot and the Turkish embassy. Atto had known the corpisantaro for thirty years. He had learned how valuable he was for certain shady dealings. And he also knew how to make the best use of him without being swindled. Had the decrepit old castrato really hoped, I thought with a smile, that I would never find him out?

“All right. Tomorrow morning here, then. Let’s say at nine: I’ve got a cleaning job at Porta Coeli — immediately afterwards we can meet. In the meantime, for surety, I’ll keep hold of these,” I said at last to Ugonio, taking from his overcoat the ring with the keys, to keep as hostages. “I’ll give them back when you show up again.”

Ugonio desperately stretched out his hooked hands towards the ring. Then he lowered his head: if he had had the slightest idea of doing a bunk, now he knew that it would cost him his precious keys.

“Now listen carefully, Ugonio. We saw Ciezeber performing strange rites in the wood,” I announced, glancing meaningfully towards Cloridia, who was caressing our son’s head, as he was clearly scared.

My wife went out, taking the boy into the cloisters, to spare him from hearing this grim conversation.

I started up again, recounting the arcane rituals that we had seen the dervish performing, right up to the point when Ciezeber had pulled out his little knife from his bundle of things and the small mass of dark stuff. At the end I fixed my pupils questioningly on Ugonio’s. He was still highly offended by the loss of his key ring and drummed his yellow, claw-like fingers on the table nearby. Then he said:

“I cannot furnish Your Presumption with any furtherances. My dealifyings with the dervishite are only on businesses, and wholly licit swindlifications. But I was able to identificate the little knife and the black objection that Ciezeber extricatified in the forestal woodiness, and which you have descripted with such claret.”

“So you know what I’m talking about?” I said, taking heart.

“Undoubtfully. I had notified the peculiarousness of the dervishite’s paraphernations.”

“And so? Did you work out what that stuff was for?”

“To be more padre than parricide, I can ensure you, after careful exanimation, that they are instrumentations of an insanitary purpose.”

“They’ve got something to do with diseases?” asked Simonis.

“Are you deaf, by any chance?” asked Ugonio impatiently, casting a longing look at the key ring I still held in my hands.

“Ah, they’re medical instruments,” I muttered in disappointment.

“I confirmate.”

How had I failed to think of that? Cloridia had even told me that some dervishes were also healers. And what we had witnessed in the wood near the Place with No Name must have been a mystic ritual to confer greater power on their treatments. In the dervish’s operations I had sought a trace of the poison which, under the false name of smallpox, was killing the Emperor; now I discovered that it was the exact opposite, a therapeutic intervention.

I was stuck midstream. I had not yet managed to find any proof of my suspicions with regard to Atto Melani, the Ottoman embassy and the secret poisoning of Joseph I. And yet I had to find something: I had to do something, damn it, I repeated to myself as I observed Ugonio and wondered how to proceed. If by ill chance someone were to discover Atto Melani, the enemy agent, I would end up on the gallows with him. The mystery of the head remained unsolved, and this — by now it was clear — was the key to everything, but I still had to find a way to drag the truth out of the corpisantaro. There was another path, which might lead to the truth.

“Ugonio, have you ever heard of the Golden Apple?”

He caught his breath. He was not expecting that question.

“It is a complicable and horrendiful story,” he said at last.

According to Ugonio, the whole thing had begun three years earlier. As we already knew from Frosch, in 1708 a sister of Joseph the Victorious, Anna Maria, had married the King of Portugal, John V. After a few months, the young Queen had heard from the ladies of her new court of a strange popular belief. Spain’s war of succession, which was raging throughout Europe, would only be won by the Empire if the original Golden Orb or Apple of Justinian, which guaranteed the supremacy of the Christian West, were to be placed on the tallest spire of the most sacred church of the Caesarean capital — which is to say, the bell tower of the Cathedral of St Stephen: substituting, that is, the sacrilegious orb created and mounted on the bell tower by Suleiman. In some mysterious fashion Justinian’s Golden Orb had ended up in Spain, and then had gone on to Portugal. That was not all. Emperor Ferdinand I had had a holy cross placed on top of Suleiman’s orb after a rather disconcerting episode: as soon as the Sultan had abandoned the siege of the Caesarean capital, there had appeared in the sky, in full daylight, none other than the Archangel Michael, who, with the blazing tip of his unsheathed sword, had engraved in letters of fire a mysterious message at the top of the spire, on the pedestal supporting the sacrilegious orb.

“The Archangel Michael is the very figure who traditionally holds the Imperial Orb in one hand, while he drives out Lucifer with his sword in the shape of the holy cross,” I said in amazement, recalling Koloman Szupán’s tale.

“Exactly,” said Ugonio.

The corpisantaro went on. Seven times the Archangel pointed his sword at the pedestal, and seven were the words he engraved there. The sparks from his sword were seen by a multitude of the faithful gathered in the square before the Cathedral of St Stephen. They testified without a shadow of a doubt to the truth of the miraculous event, and the Emperor at once sent two labourers to the spire to make a faithful copy of what the Archangel had written there. The two labourers were carefully chosen among the illiterate, so that no one apart from the Emperor would be aware of the secret. What they delivered to him troubled him to such an extent that he spent the whole night praying in the Caesarean chapel, prostrate, with his face to the ground, and the next day he ordered that the holy cross of the Redeemer should be placed immediately on top of the sacrilegious orb, thus transforming it into the Imperial Orb of the Archangel Michael. Ferdinand I chose never to confide to anyone what the Archangel had written, and took his secret with him to the tomb. After his death several attempts were made to send someone up there to read the message on the spire, but various misfortunes rendered all attempts vain: one person tumbled from the tower, another was blinded by a sudden flash from the sky, another one fell, et cetera et cetera. It was even rumoured that a priest of the Cathedral Chapter, on a night of full moon, had ventured up there, but nothing further was heard. The story related that the Archangel’s message concluded with an express imposition of silence.

These tales of the Golden Apple and the Archangel Michael were reported to Joseph I’s sister, the new bride of the King of Portugal. And so it was that a flying Ship had set out from Lisbon, equipped with a highly secret system of propulsion and driven by a mysterious and unidentified figure, whose mission it was to put the true Golden Apple in its place, on the highest point of St Stephen’s, and at the same time to read the Archangel’s mysterious message.

Simonis and I exchanged glances: Ugonio’s tale tallied with the accounts of the students. Hristo, Populescu, Koloman and their friends had established that, according to the legends, the Golden Apple was the symbol (but maybe something more) of the power of the West. They had learned that the mysterious object dated back to Justinian; that it had been buried in Constantinople with Eyyub, Mahomet’s standard-bearer; that it had then ended up in Spain; that during the first siege of Vienna, Suleiman had had another one made. And finally, that Ferdinand I had had a holy cross placed on Suleiman’s orb, which had enraged the Sultan. And recently, we ourselves had read in Frosch’s gazette that the Flying Ship had arrived in 1709 from Portugal, steered by a person nobody knew, and that it had got stuck — it just so happened — on the spire of St Stephen’s. These things could not just be coincidences.

There was something else that tied in curiously with these events, which only I knew about: the mysterious flying helmsman, mentioned in the Diary of Vienna as a presumed Brazilian priest, in fact had all the characteristics of the strange individual I had met in Rome eleven years earlier, during my second adventure with Atto Melani: the violinist Albicastro, who, it just so happened, always played the same melody known as folia, a dance that originated in Portugal.

“Let’s sum things up,” I said. “While all these strange things are happening in Portugal, the Agha is received by Prince Eugene and tells him soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum. Meanwhile, your Ciezeber plans to chop off — ”

“Just a momentum.”

Ugonio asked me to repeat the sentence that the Turkish ambassador had pronounced in front of Eugene of Savoy.

“It is an indicative phraseology, incontrovertebrate and plause-worthy.”

“What?” asked Simonis.

“He says the Turks’ message is perfectly clear,” I translated.

There was no doubt, the corpisantaro declared with conviction: the Ottomans, too, had come to Vienna to get back the Golden Apple. Only in this sense had they “come to the pomum aureum”, as the Latin phrase used by the Agha said literally.

“It may be so,” I admitted, “but why did they declare it to Eugene?”

“I ignorify that,” Ugonis merely said, shrugging.

“And where is the Golden Apple now?”

“I have besought it highly and lowly and with undefaltering fast-steadness. Some insinufy that the driver, before they threw him into deep dudgeon, snuggled it into the Flying Ship. Misluckily I have not catched a glint of it there. The guardian and his feline ferocities are too snoopivigilant.”

“So where is it?”

“To be more padre than parricide, I hope to be able to beseek it more caringfully. I’m also doing my utfulmost to get a deacon of the cathedral to speak: he is obsessified with sacred relishes. Tomorrow, in exchange for a corpus santus he will perhaps belch forth the Archangel’s phrase.”

“That’s the way. Give him Adam’s apple core,” Simonis scoffed.

My assistant and I had hardly any time to discuss the encounter with the old corpisantaro; a few minutes after he had left, the Chormaisterin herself came and knocked at our door. She had heard what had happened, since her sisters had told her about the attack on Cloridia, the subsequent chase and finally the chaotic arrest of Ugonio. I explained how things had gone, taking care to play down my relations with the corpisantaro. I said he was a minor thief I had met long before in Rome, whom I had decided to forgive as a compatriot. Much more important was the news that Camilla herself gave us:

“Let us all thank the Lord,” she declared with a sigh, “the Emperor is much better. His illness seems to be progressing well, the doctors foresee that in a few days’ time His Majesty will not only be out of danger but restored to full health.”

The public prayers that had begun the day before throughout the city, and especially in St Stephen’s, had had an effect. For this reason they would continue to recite the sacred orations for another six days, that heaven might grant in full the imperial subjects’ prayers. But in particular they had commenced the oration of the Forty Hours, which had been recited a few years earlier when Archduke Charles, Joseph’s younger brother, had fallen dangerously ill; on that occasion, too, the illness had passed with the help of God. The oration could only be done by men, it lasted a week and prayers had to be recited six hours a day, in shifts which were divided (it hardly needs saying) by social classes. On the first day, the Sunday that had just passed, the imperial family had started the prayers. Today it was the turn of the nobility, then the five social classes would pray, obviously during working-hours: from eight to eleven and from three to six. The oration would be concluded by us artisans and traders with all our employees. The women, during this period, were exhorted to pray in church as fervently as possible.

We all rejoiced at the splendid news. Simonis and I embraced poor Camilla, who had been suffering so grievously until that moment and who was already preparing herself for the long prayer vigils that awaited her for the whole week. We had not slept and nor had we had breakfast, but the news revived our spirits and our senses.

“Today is Monday, Simonis.”

“To work, Signor Master,” answered my assistant, with his slightly foolish smile that always inspired such confidence.

Work, of course. But we both knew that what was really calling us was the mystery of the Golden Apple. The key to our doubts awaited us at Neugebäu, in the Place with No Name.

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

The road was finally clear of snow. The news of the improvement in the poor Emperor’s health was, I thought, truly welcome. But the dark shadow of misfortune and death that those days had cast over us was far from dissipated. As we trudged along I still pondered on the terrible end of Hristo and Dànilo Danilovitsch, and the suspicious origins of the illness of Joseph the Victorious — and such unexpected facts as the revelation that Hadji-Tanjov was an Ottoman subject. Not to mention the highly mysterious indications left by the Bulgarian student of a link between soli soli soli and checkmate. .

The nocturnal quarrel with Abbot Melani had yet to be settled; my suspicions were far from allayed. Sooner or later Atto and I would talk again, and then perhaps I would get a clearer view of his shady conduct. It was true that he had been taken seriously ill when I accused him of conspiring for Joseph’s death, but that could have been the perturbation of a guilty man caught red-handed, rather than that of an innocent man wrongly accused. Or again, it could have been a skilful performance to get out of a tight spot, playing the part of the guileless innocent: I was all too familiar with the prodigious acting skills of the old hypocrite, impostor and trickster.

That day at Neugebäu it was not only the riddle of the Golden Apple that awaited us, but also a great deal of work. I was afraid that I would not be able to get the full benefit of Simonis’s assistance: he had to go back to town to take part in the ceremony to mark the return to lessons after the Easter holidays.

“Don’t worry, Signor Master,” he reassured me. “The celebration is in the afternoon.”

“In the afternoon? And the lessons?”

“They don’t start till tomorrow. Otherwise there would be more people absent than present.”

“And why would that be?”

“The students here get the most out of all holidays. They will have been revelling and feasting, eating and drinking right up until dawn. Today the student body of the Alma Mater Rudolphina will be snoring peacefully in their beds, sleeping off their hangovers. That’s why they wisely postpone the reopening ceremony until Monday afternoon, and lessons until Tuesday.”

We stopped for a break in the vineyards that Porta Coeli owned at Simmering. We identified the buttery and cleaned the flue, as we had promised the Chormaisterin. It was a spacious room, so that we could not resist the temptation to draw off a little wine and go and drink it in the commodious room where the fireplace stood.

As we continued on our way, it struck me that on my two previous visits to the Place with No Name I had seen no trace of any other artisans. Nor had Frosch, the gruff watchman at Neugebäu, made any mention of other artisans, workers or architects in the manor house or in his gardens. Indeed, Frosch had seemed totally in the dark as to the imminent restoration work ordered by the Emperor. Perhaps, I told myself, the architects and carpenters had preferred to wait until the thaw. Over the next few days maybe they would come along as well and start their operations, but it still struck me as strange, and I made a note to myself to ask Frosch about it.

After the unexpected snow of the previous days, the countryside now seemed to show the first timid signs of the new season. The unseasonable snow was already melting, the sharp air and thick morning mists were definitely yielding to the rays of the day star and to the cold crystalline air of the Viennese spring.

We came in sight of the Place with No Name just as dawn was shyly caressing its pure white walls. Wielding immaterial paintbrushes, a fiery ray tinged the towers with pink and gold, daubing them with the first patina of dawn light. As soon as the last traces of mist lifted, brilliant rays struck the roofs of the castle, the spires of the corner turrets and the peaks of the great hexagonal towers, scattering the reflections of the copper tiles in all directions. Sharp and powerful, refracted by the roofs of the Place with No Name, the fair and blessed light of the sun shimmered throughout the plain of Simmering. With a murmur of wonder, we immediately lifted our hands to our brows in order not to be blinded by the dazzling light; every bush, every blade of glass, every single stone seemed to be overwhelmed by that magnificent and almost unbearable vision. It was as if the castle, suspended in the grassy plain, were being annihilated by fire and, at every instant, freshly recreated, ready for a new ineffable combustion. What a striking contrast, I thought, between our journey shadowing the obscure Ciezeber along this same road and the overwhelming splendour of this vision.

“Look!” exclaimed my little boy, pointing towards the sun.

Fighting against the light, I fixed my eyes for a moment on the day star.

“It’s blood-red, it’s blood-red again,” I observed with dismay.

Simonis did not remark on the bizarre phenomenon that had manifested itself repeatedly over the last two weeks and which was feared as a sign of ill omen.

With our hands still shading our eyes, we slowed down as the spectacle both enthralled and blinded us. At that point, above the creaking sound of the cart carrying our tools, we heard a distant sound of salutation. It came from behind the towers, behind the garden’s encircling walls and behind the castle itself, almost as if it issued from a Beyond that belonged only to the Place with No Name: in the still undisturbed dawn peace, the cavernous roar of the lions resounded again.

This time we entered by the West Gate, the one we had left by on our last visit. Crossing the main courtyard, in front of the façade of the castle, I cast watchful glances around myself, remembering with a shiver my adventure with Mustafa.

Our first thought, obviously, went to the Flying Ship. But we were disappointed; no sooner had we arrived in the ball stadium than we found Frosch wandering around restlessly. He was taking food to the birdcages, opposite the stadium, and every so often he threw pieces of meat to the wild animals in the ditches. The watchman gestured towards a hole low down in the wall of one of the ditches: it was a small tunnel, barred by a simple little gate. It was what remained of the underground passages that once made it possible to escape, when necessary, from the Place with No Name and to re-emerge in the surrounding countryside.

While Frosch chattered away, Simonis and I exchanged knowing glances: we would have to wait for a more suitable moment to inspect the Flying Ship. In the meantime, to work.

While we lifted the tools out of our cart and got ready for work, I asked Frosch the question I had pondered on our way from the city: whether we were in fact the only people — artists, labourers or artisans — who had turned up at Neugebäu to start the restoration work.

“Of course you’re the only ones. Who else would dream of working here?”

I answered that the imperial chamber paid generously for this kind of work, and there was no reason why carpenters, painters, bricklayers or decorators should not be happy to honour the ancient and glorious manor house with their labour.

“Oh they would honour it willingly enough,” said Frosch with a laugh, “if they were not afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Of the lions?” I said in surprise.

Frosch burst into noisy laughter, and asked me who could possibly be frightened of poor old Mustafa, the only ferocious beast at Neugebäu that was ever allowed out of its cage. My face flushed a little with anger; Mustafa had frightened me, sure enough, when I had met him for the first time. His paws and teeth were not made of feathers or wool, after all. Suddenly Frosch grew serious again and said almost inaudibly:

“No, no, nothing like that: they’re afraid of the ghosts.”

This time it was my turn to smile, showing my scepticism. Frosch paid no heed, and explained in all seriousness that — according to what the people said — for decades now at Neugebäu strange presences had been manifesting themselves, making the place inhospitable and frightening.

“Everyone knows about the spectres of Neugebäu,” he added, “but they pretend not to know. If they’re asked about it, they look the other way.”

He moved off for a moment, in search of a little millet to distribute to the birds. From the birdcages behind the old stables we could hear them squawking.

Left on my own I remembered that, when I had asked my fellow chimney-sweeps about the Place with No Name, none of them had offered to accompany me to the place, and indeed they had pretended not to know the old mansion at all, although it must be familiar to all inhabitants of Vienna.

But another memory, a more remote one, made me even more pensive. Eleven years ago in Rome, during my previous adventure with Abbot Melani, in the deserted villa of the Vessel I myself had had an experience of immaterial presences, whose nature I had never been able to ascertain. I had reflected on this just a little earlier, that same morning, on hearing Ugonio’s tale: had not the mysterious pilot of the Flying Ship from Portugal, in his monk’s habits, whom I had learned about from the old gazette that Frosch had shown me, reminded me of the black violinist, named Albicastro, who had appeared to hover over the battlements of the Villa of the Vessel and who had played the Portuguese melody of the folia?

And now from Neugebäu, the forgotten mansion, came another unexpected reminder of the abandoned villa of the Vessel. What was this allusion, this echoing chime between two places and two experiences so distant from one another in time and in space?

In the meantime Frosch had come up to me again. I certainly could not share all my cogitations with him, and confined myself to asking him if he knew any more details about the ghosts of the Place with No Name.

He said that the son and successor of Maximilian II, the unhappy Emperor Rudolph II, had been a fanatical occultist. Forever surrounded by astrologers and alchemists, for years and years he had spent huge sums acquiring rare materials, retorts and alembics, and hiring magical consultants, in the attempt (pursued in vain by legions of alchemists) to give life to the famous and mysterious Philosopher’s Stone.

I asked him why he had called Rudolph “unhappy”?

“Everyone knows that!” he exclaimed. “Because of his father’s death.”

It was perhaps because of the calm that reigned in the plain of Simmering, and the privacy that the large isolated mansion guaranteed him, that Maximilian’s son had chosen the Place with No Name as his laboratory, setting up there a well-equipped secret alchemical workshop.

“It was down there, in the basement,” said Frosch, pointing at the doorway to the round keep on the east side of the mansion, where we had entered on the previous occasion and I had bumped into the bleeding sheep carcass.

The watchman added that when Rudolph carried out his nocturnal experiments, people on the plain of Simmering had been able to see, through the single little round window of his alchemical workshop, the iridescent flames of the alembics with which Maximilian’s successor invoked the occult forces of the elements.

“There are ghosts there, but they also call it the ‘witches’ kitchen’,” said Frosch, with a little ironic smile, making it clear that the fear everyone felt for that place was as strong as its spectres were evanescent.

“Signor Master, the boy and I are ready,” Simonis interrupted us. He had put on his working clothes and had selected all the tools necessary for the job at hand.

I had a special task for my boy: I told him to keep an eye on Frosch, and to let us know if he went away. We would take advantage of his absence to visit the Flying Ship.

Obviously I was tingling all over with the desire to inspect the Flying Ship. But now, after Frosch’s words, the Place with No Name had been graced by yet another mystery. As we worked away amid the dust of the chimneys and flues in the kitchens of Neugebäu, completing the job we had begun on the previous occasion, Frosch’s words continued to echo in my mind.

The keeper of the lions had referred to Maximilian’s death and to the son who had succeeded him, the unhappy Rudolph II. Curiously, it was at Maximilian’s death that Simonis’s tale had broken off during our last visit to the mansion of Simmering: it was then that my assistant had suddenly remembered that the gates into Vienna were about to close and we had had to rush back to town.

I told him what Frosch had just recounted about Maximilian and his son Rudolph. He paused briefly; he was scraping encrusted brick dust off a large iron palette knife. He wiped his cheeks and forehead with the back of his hand, and it was as if with the particles of coal and dust a thin layer of skin fell from his face, and my assistant Simonis, the penniless young man with a vaguely idiotic smile, the listless and slightly retarded student, turned back into the acute connoisseur of imperial history that he had revealed himself to be over the last few days.

“The lion keeper wasn’t lying to you, Signor Master; the Viennese really do believe that there are ghosts in this place. And it’s true that Rudolph, Maximilian’s son, was an alchemist, occultist and a very unhappy person. But Frosch didn’t explain why this came about. As you well know, this place doesn’t have a name.”

“Right. Which is why it’s known as the Place with No Name.”

“But you also know that it has a nickname: Neugebäu, which means ‘New Building’.”

“Of course, I know that.”

“Well, don’t you find it strange? Such an impressive place, and two non-names: ‘Place with No Name’ and ‘New Building’.”

“I thought that Maximilian had died before he found a definitive one,” I answered.

“No, Signor Master. There are residences, like Schönbrunn for example, that received their names even before the first stone was laid. Neugebäu would never be baptised with its real name: it had to be guessed.”

“Guessed?”

He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and started cleaning the palette knife once more, which had fallen from his hands in the meantime and got dirty again.

The construction of the Place with No Name, explained Simonis, in his tortuous, long-winded fashion, was the riddle whose solution would be revealed as work proceeded. Only when it was completed would the mansion and its gardens reveal, to those who knew how to look, their true nature. Its name would burst spontaneously from the eyes and lips of those who had guessed the metaphor.

And then the vox populi would call it “Suleiman’s Tent”, or “The Ruin of the Turks”, “Maximilian’s Revenge” or even “The Triumph of Christ”, depending on the inclinations and acumen of those who would visit it.

But Maximilian had died too soon. His jewel had been left incomplete, and therefore anonymous: it was simply “the new building”, and therefore a Place with No Name.

“Maximilian’s death, Signor Master: all the events that followed had their origin there.”

In 1576, the year the Emperor died, Neugebäu was not yet finished. The main body, in particular, did not have its interior furnishings: the long gallery on the ground floor, which in the designs was intended to hold an antiquarium, a gallery of wonders to amaze the world. It was to have contained statues, displays of weapons, paintings, tapestries, coins, works in gold and porcelain. The great Jacopo Strada — the brilliant Italian antiquarian whom Maximilian had engaged at great cost, and who was famous for having conferred glory and splendour on the greatest palaces in Munich — was to have collected them. When this last part had been completed, Neugebäu would be ready to be presented to the world.

However, with Ilsung and Hag breathing down his neck, as Simonis had already recounted, the Emperor was having problems in finding the money.

The previous year Ungnad had returned from Constantinople after a two-year sojourn there, and shortly afterwards the Turks (it just so happened) had once again begun to threaten the borders of the Empire. The Diet of Regensburg, the assembly of all the princes of the Empire, urgently needed to be convened. On 1st June Maximilian set out from Vienna to superintend the meeting. Like the first session he had presided over ten years earlier, it was a diet of crucial importance: it was essential that the princes, both Catholics and Lutherans, should rediscover a form of unity or the Turks would prevail.

Maximilian confided to his acquaintances that he intended to be present no matter what, even should it cost him his life. Prophetic words. The imperial caravan made its way up the Danube. The weather was bad, and so was the Emperor’s mood. He confessed to his counsellors that if he had not found the strength to start his journey just then, maybe he would never have set out at all. He was indisposed, and felt weak at times. He opened the diet on 25th June; after the initial speeches he himself addressed the assembly. His hearers were impressed by the eloquence with which he described the Turkish threat, which loomed ever closer and ever more formidable. An agreement must be found, if the whole of Christendom was not to be overwhelmed. Negotiations began at once among the Protestant and Catholic princes and the Pope’s legates. There were long, tortuous and exhausting discussions. Maximilian seemed worn out again. He complained that the air of Regensburg did not suit him, and wished he were back in Vienna.

At the end of July he was seized with haemorrhoidal pains. The month of August went by without any problems, but in the night between the 29th and 30th he had a severe attack of calculosis accompanied by tachycardia, which continued until 5th September. On that day, amidst severe pain, he expelled a calculus the size of an olive pit.

“The 5th of September was a fateful day, Signor Master. If you remember what I told you, on that same day ten years earlier Suleiman had died without Maximilian hearing anything about it. And in the days that followed there had come the military defeat against the Turks which had ruined his fame and prestige forever.”

From 5th September Maximilian’s condition grew visibly worse. The tachycardia persisted, his breathing grew laboured, his appetite vanished. A fit of palpitations lasted for ninety consecutive hours. Everybody, except doctors and imperial counsellors, was forbidden to approach the bishop’s house, where Maximilian was staying. The bells were forbidden to ring. The Emperor was in his fiftieth year: a critical age, said the doctors. Over the next few days he would have colic, difficulty in breathing and stomach pains. He slept badly, and this made it difficult for him to recover.

Meanwhile his old personal doctor was called for, the Italian Giulio Alessandrino, who on account of his advanced age had retired and was living in Italy. But at the same time, those attending on Maximilian began to talk about a strange woman. She came from Ulm and was called Magdalena Streicher.

“She was a healer, according to some. Others called her a charlatan,” said Simonis with a sharp edge to his voice. “At first no one was against her visits. Perhaps because the idea came from someone highly influential: Georg Ilsung.”

“Ilsung?” I said in amazement, “Ilsung the traitor?”

Yes, Simonis repeated, it was he who recommended that this charlatan woman should be hired. He assured everyone that she was able to solve the most difficult cases, ones that had baffled official medicine. Princes and court dignitaries all quickly agreed: they had heard good things about this woman, and some even claimed to have been treated by her, and successfully.

Our inspection of the kitchens had finished. Simonis stood up, and for the umpteenth time he dropped the palette knife, which ended up on my poor right foot. My assistant apologised. As we gathered our tools and prepared to enter the mansion itself, I noticed once again how awkward Simonis’s movements were, and what a contrast they made with the sharpness of his storytelling and the adroitness of his nocturnal activities.

There were three Simonises, I thought as we made our way into the interior of the mansion. The first was the Simonis of every day: a rather foolish student, with a silly expression, slightly squinting eyes, a dopey smile and clumsy movements. Then there was the second Simonis: he still had the doltish expression, but beneath his half-lowered eyelids his mind (as in his stories about Maximilian) darted about nimbly and sinuously. Finally there was the determined, courageous and even cruel Simonis, who bullied the poor Pennal and led me around nocturnal Vienna in Penicek’s cart facing mortal dangers. The face of this last Simonis, the third one, had no trace of the foolish expression. I still trembled at the thought of the bullet that had been fired into my back in the Prater, miraculously repelled by Hristo’s chessboard. What memory did he have of the terrible dangers we had faced together, of Dànilo’s last gasp, of Hristo’s frozen corpse? His face showed nothing.

As to the existence or not of a fourth Simonis, the Simonis who pretended to be an idiot and like a puppeteer pulled the strings of the first three just as he wished, I could not yet form an opinion. I thought I had caught just one fleeting glimpse of him since we first met: the previous night, after taking leave of Populescu. But finding no reason for such behaviour, I had instinctively shelved the suspicion.

And so, from the anonymous kitchen spaces lying outside the main body of Neugebäu, we made our way towards the mansion. As we approached we were at once caught up in the dark, sombre atmosphere of those walls, which contrasted so sharply with its white stone, its airy gardens and its lofty, soaring towers.

As we crossed the eastern courtyard, leaving the maior domus to the left, Simonis went on with his story.

As soon as she arrived in Regensburg, Magdalena Streicher, the mysterious healer, went to converse with Maximilian, who nonetheless rejected her treatment: he was still waiting for his trusted Italian doctor, Giulio Alessandrino.

On 14th September the invalid’s condition inspired greater optimism. But over the weeks he had made a number of dietary errors: he had eaten sour fruit and drunk frozen wine. He complained of heart trouble and he was never free of an insidious cough for more than an hour or two. His pulse was weak and irregular.

Maximilian granted no audiences, but he had enough strength to work: every day he summoned his secret imperial council and dealt with the most important matters. On 26th September Giulio Alessandrino, on whom they were all pinning their hopes, finally arrived. But while the Italian was on his way, the charlatan woman had been given a free hand, and she had started to administer her own treatment to Maximilian. The invalid was immediately entrusted to the care of Giulio Alessandrino, but then for mysterious reasons he was consigned once again to Streicher. This toing and froing between the experts had disastrous consequences. Ever since the charlatan had started treating him at the beginning of October, Maximilian’s condition had worsened to such a point that they were all expecting him to die. When they approached his bed, they would hear him murmuring heartrending phrases: “Oh God, no one can know how much I suffer. I beg you, Lord, let my hour come.”

On the afternoon of 6th October he fell unconscious, and for a moment they all feared he was dead. But he regained his senses and vomited a great quantity of catarrh. Over the next few hours, against all expectations, he slept well and long. Meanwhile his son Rudolph had been summoned from Prague, with the task of attending the final conference of the diet in his father’s place.

After a beneficial night’s sleep between 6th and 7th October, thanks also to the treatment of Giulio Alessandrino, Maximilian seemed restored to health. He received the Ambassador of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Ambassador of the Republic of Venice, who found him much improved. He spoke aloud the whole time, and was only disturbed by a slight difficulty in breathing and tachycardia. His cough had almost disappeared.

This improvement seemed to stabilise. Plans were made for the patient to set forth on 20th October on his way back to Austria. On 10th October, however, Maximilian had a relapse, and so, on the night of the 11th, despite Alessandrino’s protests, Ilsung brought the charlatan back onto the case. The Emperor felt pains in his upper left abdomen; the woman diagnosed pleurisy and brought in a great number of remedies, the sad effect of which would be seen shortly after. Finally, Maximilian’s former personal doctor, Crato von Crafftheim — whose services had been dispensed with because he was old and sick, and above all Protestant — was also consulted. “A great deal has been done up to now,” whispered Crato, pointing at the woman from Ulm in front of the court, “but nothing right.”

At one in the morning Rudolph and other dignitaries and court officials were summoned. Now it was clear that the end had arrived. The Empress, who had spent every hour close to her husband and had never left his bedside for the last three days, was awoken at five by the Duchess of Bavaria, Maximilian’s sister, who was relieving her. About to go to mass, she then she returned and tearfully embraced her husband, who had had another heart attack in the meantime. The Empress could not bear the distress and was carried away unconscious. Doctor Crato was once again admitted to visit Maximilian. He took his pulse in his fingers, but the Sovereign interrupted him: “Crato, there’s no more pulse.” The old doctor still pressed his fingertips, and found a feeble throb. He moved away and confided to those present: “This is the limit of human help. We can only hope in divine help.” The charlatan had disappeared in the meantime. No more would be heard of her.

I interrupted him: “Are you telling me that Streicher poisoned him on Ilsung’s instructions?”

“There was no poison. To kill a sick man you just need to get the treatment wrong,” answered Simonis with a slight smile.

Death was imminent by now. One great question remained: would Maximilian the Mysterious, who had never made a clear choice between the Church of Rome and that of Luther, die as a Catholic or a Protestant?

“Whichever choice he declared,” explained Simonis, “would be a deathblow for the unity he longed for among Christians.”

In his final hours, relatives, priests and ambassadors gathered around his bed. They tormented him right up to the last moment, begging him to take the Catholic sacraments of confession and extreme unction. He surely did not want to declare himself a Protestant?

Maximilian, weaker and weaker, held out and gave no answer. Finally the Bishop of Neustadt was brought to the bedside. The Bishop insisted and grew heated, raising his voice. “Not so loud, I can hear perfectly,” answered the dying man. But the Bishop went on, until he was almost yelling.

“Not so loud,” repeated Maximilian for the last time. Then his head dropped and he breathed his last. It was a quarter to nine on the morning of 12th October, his saint’s name day.

“He was dead, but he had won his last battle. Refusing the Catholic sacraments, but without proclaiming himself a Protestant, he had defeated those who wanted to take advantage of his final moments. Maximilian had rejected the corruption of the Church of Rome, but he had not given himself over to the Protestants, who supported the Turks and wanted the Empire to move away forever from the Catholic religion. His Lutheran enemies, backed by the traitors Ilsung, Hag and Ungnad — the same ones who had elected him and who were now killing him — were left empty-handed.”

“But why had they decided to kill him just then?”

“Because it was clear now that Maximilian would not become a puppet in their hands. He had not agreed to recant the Catholic faith, and he had fought against the Turks as long as he could. He was no longer of any use to them. Perhaps his successor would be more pliable. When Maximilian set off on his journey and arrived on Protestant soil, no moment could have been more suitable to make a clean end of things.”

In the meantime we had begun our inspection and audit of the chimneys in the large rooms on the ground floor of the mansion. We had entered by the great front door, which Frosch had kept open for us. What we found was a large room with a ceiling of triple height, where our voices echoed as in the nave of a church. The floor had once been muddied by the boots of Maximilian the Mysterious; there his heart had rejoiced on seeing a column finally set in place, a moulding hoisted onto the wall, a wall plastered properly.

A large window opened in the opposite wall, giving onto the northern gardens. In the walls to left and right two large doors led into other rooms. Everything in that enormous cubic space was bare: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. For those desolate walls Maximilian the Mysterious had desired impressive paintings, trophies, statues and tapestries.

“You see, Signor Master? There’s nothing. Plans, hopes, desires: everything crushed in the coils of the conspiracy between Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag.”

Turning around, we saw through the doorway the spires of the hexagonal towers rising above the wall that separated the courtyard of the mansion from the gardens. From the point where we were standing Maximilian must have had a sweeping view over his immense project, while the workers and craftsmen laboured away. The tale proceeded.

While Maximilian was dying, his young son Rudolph was delivering the closing speech of the diet at the town hall of Regensburg. The text had been drawn up urgently by his moribund father: it was Maximilian’s final effort. In the previous years he had seen his son’s mind gradually yielding to the mental torments of the educators imposed by his enemies, so that now the heir to the imperial throne was a frail being in the hands of Ilsung and his acolytes.

As he stood there before the princes of the Empire and the Pope’s legates, holding the pages in his hands, Rudolph was approached by a messenger, who whispered into his ear that Maximilian had passed away. He listened impassively, as if it were the blandest of news. Then the young Rudolph, who now knew he was Emperor, continued reading, and his voice never trembled. He knew that if he lost control of the session the princes who were his father’s enemies would take advantage of it to stir up trouble and sabotage his election to the Caesarean throne.

The session finished in good order; Rudolph had won the battle fought in his throat. But the inner turmoil of these moments and the other momentous matters that awaited him were bound to have their effect.

Rudolph asked the princes not to leave Regensburg and summoned them for the following day. He would have to inform them of his father’s death; till then the imperial court would keep its secret. An autopsy was carried out, and the innards were interred in a copper case in the cathedral of Regensburg.

While David Ungnad set out again calmly for Constantinople, where he would remain for two more years, Maximilian’s final journey began: the saddest, darkest and most painful.

At the moment of his death it had not been decided where he would be buried. He had chosen Vienna; instead they decided on Prague.

“And why was that?” I asked in surprise.

“Maximilian had twice kept the great Suleiman outside the sacred walls of Vienna, and with him the enemies of Christ: by way of revenge Maximilian himself was to be kept forever far from the dear land that he had saved from the insult of Mahomet.”

“So it was actually a post mortem revenge?”

“The hatred of certain people knows no end.”

I shivered while the Greek proceeded with the tale. A funeral procession, led by Rudolph, would take the body from Regensburg to Prague, travelling for hundreds of miles over the lands of the Empire in the grip of winter. At every halt the coffin must be greeted solemnly by the local authorities. The procession would be grand and awe-inspiring. The imperial family, the courtiers, pages, footmen, trumpeters, organists, drummers, officers, cooks, quartermasters, councillors and chancellors, even the carriage-drivers and boatman who were to transport the cortège: everyone, their ashen faces framed by white ruffs, would be wrapped in dark cloaks and black vestments, urgently procured from the markets of Augsburg and Nuremberg, together with massive supplies of candles, cutlery, blankets, imperial insignia, banners, standards, horses, not forgetting a final stock of priests and choristers.

But right from the outset fate was against them: the city council, made up of Protestants, refused to escort the procession out of the city, or to light their way with lanterns. Their enemy was dead: let him go to the devil by himself.

Finally the cortège set off. The coffin was loaded onto a boat that headed down the Danube. The winter set in: rain, wind and snow made the roads impassable, causing injuries and wearing out the horses. The procession struggled onwards. In each city they reached, fewer and fewer subjects came from their homes to honour the corpse of this Emperor who had been too mysterious.

The procession straggled and trudged through the winter landscape. Amid the howling gale, within the stone-cold coffin, dragged awkwardly by creaking carts, by hacks half-dead from exhaustion, by frostbitten hands, scorned by the welcoming committees, led hither and thither like a burden with no destination, Maximilian the Wise was an unloved, shelterless and peace-denied body: he was now the dead man with no homeland.

It was January 1577. It had taken three months for the funeral cortège to arrive in Austria, at Linz. It was hoped that they would reach Prague in eight more days. But a fresh blizzard began to rage, blocking the road they had intended to take. They had to change their route, staying in isolated castles, continually losing their way and re-finding it with difficulty.

When the funeral procession reached Bohemia, the few who turned out to greet it were not even sufficient to carry the coffin. They finally arrived in Prague on 6th February, almost four months after Maximilian’s death. But their misadventures were not over yet. The Castrum doloris, the funeral baldachin set up in the church of St Vitus, was not yet complete. The ceremony had to be postponed; many declared that they would not be able to attend, even including two archdukes of the House of Habsburg.

The funeral rites were at last celebrated, and the procession made its way through the streets of Prague. Finally there was something of a crowd: it was led by the papal legate, the Ambassador of Spain, the Ambassador of the King of France, Hungarian magnates, the Ambassador of Ferdinand, the Archduke of the Tyrol and Maximilian’s brother. Then came the princes of the Empire, envoys from Austria, from Silesia, from Moravia, priests and laymen, in addition to numerous knights, bishops, abbots and Jesuits, who had come flocking from all around.

The bier that held the sarcophagus was of dark, knotty wood. The shroud was crimson against a gold background, with six glittering imperial coats of arms. Behind the sarcophagus marched Rudolph, his sallow face hidden by a black, ankle-length cloak, his nervous hand clutching his sword hilt at his belt. He was followed by his brothers Matthias and Maximilian, who were also cloaked and armed with swords. Then came the papal legate in a broad-brimmed hat with green tassels, holding a large white candle in his joined hands, kept warm by pearl-studded gloves. More candles, enlivening the procession with shining points of light, were held by the princes of the Empire, who followed in the procession. Some of them were weeping, and the rain washed away their tears. In the grim multitude, groups of noblemen bore the holy imperial crown, the crown of Hungary and those of the other lands of the Empire, glittering tremulously like stars in the wintry night sky. After the procession of men came another: that of the horses. The first was Maximilian’s steed, sadly swathed in a dark cloth with the imperial coat of arms. Then came the horse of the Empire, which was the most richly adorned, surrounded by banners and standards. Finally there were the Barbary horses of Silesia, of Spain, of the Tyrol and of France, all with lowered eyes, drooping ears and unsteady gait, as if they too wished to pay their tribute of tears.

The procession arrived in front of the church of St James, in old Prague, just beyond the town hall. The sarcophagus was crossing a road between two pharmacies, where the faithful have always gone to worship the relics of the body of St John Chrisostomos. Suddenly someone, to stir up trouble, threw coins among the common people observing the procession. The tactic proved entirely successful; with eager shouts the mob hurled themselves on the coins and fights broke out. The soldiers forming the armed escort ran down the side streets to reinforce the head of the procession; the scuffles and the clash of weapons raised the alarm: “Treachery! Treachery! It’s Antwerp again!” shouted the spectators, perched at the windows, on the gutters and ledges, alluding to the recent massacres of Catholics in Protestant lands.

The pallbearers began to panic, the coffin lurched, Maximilian’s rotten bones were about to fall to the ground. Those who continued to resist witnessed grim omens; underneath the sarcophagus there inexplicably appeared an enormous and hideous sow. The pallbearers tried to drive it away with their lighted torches, but in vain, and so they fled in terror, convinced it must be a diabolic apparition, while the animal vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

Rudolph, pale and trembling, was left on his own. While everyone abandoned him, the young man stayed beside his father’s sarcophagus and was about to draw his sword. But one of the courtiers, perhaps a ghost from who knows where, held his arm, preventing him from unsheathing the weapon. Rudolph turned round but saw no one. He was now expecting to be stabbed in the back, but at that moment mounted archers came to his assistance.

The people from the procession were now fleeing in chaos down the back streets, through the mud and slush. Violence broke out. Madness had seized Prague, and the people’s hatred against the clergy was let loose; anyone wearing a cassock was hunted down like a dog. Everyone was fleeing. The fastest were the bishops, abbots and Jesuits: they leaped from the bridges into the freezing waters of the river, ran into homes, into cellars, were caught by the owners of the houses, knocked about and kicked out. The dean of Hradschin fell into a cellar breaking his leg, and a canon and two abbots came crashing down on top of him, and all of them were at once beaten out of the house by the women there. One of the three sought refuge in a nearby tavern, but was thrown out amid insults. In the fury people pushed aside their neighbours, fell or were knocked down and trampled into the mud, the horseshit, and finally killed.

“The traitors had cast their net everywhere,” remarked Simonis. “The folly of those days in Prague was the poison they had injected into the body of the Empire. It was a dress rehearsal for what they could have done later. And it was a sign of the curse they had cast on Maximilian.”

As they rushed through the streets of Prague, terrorised by the thought of the Protestants, the priests threw off their cassocks in order to run faster and were left half naked. The Father Superior of the convent of Our Lady Mother of God was struck down by a blow to the face with a halberd and a Viennese Jesuit was found with his skull smashed in. The Bishop of Olmütz, battered and tattered, slipped into a shop and begged the owner on his knees not to betray him; he even offered her a hundred florins but was kicked out all the same. A soldier attacked the Bishop of Vienna, stealing his precious crozier studded with pearls and gems, and beat his servant mercilessly, while the Bishop ran for his life, abandoning his holy ornaments. Even the Archbishop of Prague, who previously had walked with great difficulty, ran off like a hare.

It was two hours before calm was restored. Slowly the fugitives reappeared and formed a straggling train behind Maximilian’s bier. But the new procession was dirty, ragged, trembling and as grey as the leaden skies that hung over the city. The participants no longer had precious stoles and pearl-adorned gloves; the gold-and silver-embroidered caps were buried in the mud or in the pockets of the jackals. There was only half the number of priests, the singers had disappeared, and the procession moved forward in total silence. Some were limping, most were looking nervously over their shoulders and to their sides. No one dared to comment on the shameful behaviour of a few moments earlier. Everyone asked in vain what had sparked off this pandemonium, and why it had ended as quickly as it had begun. The sermon in the church of St Vitus at Hradschin lasted only half an hour. After the holy service the young Rudolph made his way to the altar to bestow his alms, with a great white candle held solemnly in his hands.

Everyone’s eyes were fixed on him, and they were all seeking an answer from him. How had he been scarred by the events of Regensburg and Prague? The people observing him did not know it yet, but that nightmare had inflicted the final blow on his psyche, already so sorely tried by his father’s enemies: henceforth he would be Rudolph the Misanthrope, Rudolph the Indolent, Rudolph the Mad.

“After his first years of government,” declared Simonis, “everyone understood that his intellect was clouded, obsessed with magic arts and alchemy, consumed by fears and phobias. As time passed Rudolph locked himself up in secret laboratories of necromantic arts, and gave heed to the lowest and unworthiest of his own servants. And in the end he soiled even this place with these absurdities.”

“So it’s true that he had an alchemical workshop here at Neugebäu as well.”

Simonis nodded gravely. “Rudolph was mad, but, what is worse for a Caesar, he was also, sadly, ridiculous. He had seen too many horrors in his youth. And so he preferred to spend his evenings stargazing, instead of using his eyes and judging for himself.”

Going against his father’s will, Rudolph moved the capital: from Vienna the sweet the court was transferred to Prague the magical, Prague the obscure, Prague the diabolic. It was here that the disgrace of Maximilian’s funeral had taken place, it was here that Rudolph would lose his senses.

In August 1584 two English magicians arrived in Prague: Jan Devus (but he was called John Dee) and Edward Kelley. Devus, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, was preceded by his fame as a wise man. He conversed with spirits after summoning them with a magic mirror, a globe of quartz he said he had received from the Archangel Uriel. It was not clear whether he was an impostor or was actually possessed. Kelley wanted to be called Engelander (but his real name was Talbot) and appeared to be a vulgar swindler; his ears had been cut off (the punishment for forgers in England) and he covered them with his long greasy hair. He had a corvine nose, mouse-like eyes and a base, greedy expression.

The two men charmed and wheedled and swindled their way into court, extorting money with astrological predictions, remedies against sickness, vague promises to find the philosopher’s stone. Rumours arose: they were spies and rabble-rousers, sent by Queen Elizabeth to undermine the Habsburgs’ power in the region. Or contrariwise, their ugly appearances were deceptive: they were real enchanters. But what difference did it make? The devil is English, people say.

Like crazed magnets, Devus and Engelander attracted legions of warlocks, necromancers, dark wizards, alchemists and spagyrists. Prague opened up its soft, dark underbelly; the forces of darkness were welcome, the Emperor’s feeble mind threw wide the gates, and the fetid wind of the magical arts swept in triumphantly.

The people were confused, the noblemen let themselves be swindled, the slimy English pair grew rich rapidly and finally wormed their way into Rudolph’s confidence. The Emperor was also obsessed with astrology; he asked all those who visited him to bring their own horoscopes with them. If the astrologers gave a negative verdict, the visitors were driven out. Rudolph spent crazy sums on talismans, elixirs, amulets and panaceas. He never stirred a finger, even with women, if he suspected that the person in front of him was born under an evil star. Everyone took advantage of this and bribed his councillors to gain access to him. Anyone could deceive the Emperor.

Pious Maximilian’s son was first fond of Devus, then drove him out because the Papal Nuncio scented the stench of black magic. That left him with Engelander, who was even worse, spending his time guzzling, bullying and drinking. He bought a house next to that of a certain Dr Faust, an expert in the dark arts (black magic and the printing press) who was said to fly over Prague mounted on a horse with dragon wings and to have made his way from his own village of Kutna Hora (Gutenberg in German) to Germany, to invent printing. Engelander was hot-headed; during a duel he killed a nobleman, and Rudolph took advantage of this to lock him up in a tower: he wanted to extort the secret of the philosopher’s stone from him with hard imprisonment. The Englishman refused, tried to escape, fell into the moat of the fortress and broke his leg, which was replaced with a wooden one. No-Ears thus became Wooden-Leg. His wealth was swallowed up by his creditors, and Rudolph did not want him anymore, but he still believed him to be the custodian of countless secrets, loved him and hated him. Sent back to prison, Engelander tried to escape again; he broke his other leg and committed suicide.

In Prague, the diabolic city, the revenge plot of Ilsung and his companions had been fully accomplished: Rudolph was now a prey to hallucinations and fits of anger; he saw plots and conspiracies on all sides and sought death himself several times. What was worse, his madness was to survive him: his bastard son, the bloody Don Giulio, obsessed with hunting, always surrounded by packs of wild dogs, a beast among beasts, often drunk and reeking with the stench of the skins he liked to tan himself, passed from a passion for the chase to a passion for tormenting animals, and then for torturing men and women, until, in a mad night of love and slaughter, he ended up killing and cutting to pieces his own lover, the defenceless daughter of a barber in the village to which he had retired. He was declared mad and locked up in the castle of Krumau, where he later died, probably assassinated.

I said nothing, overwhelmed by the terrible story. I had been gripped from start to finish by Simonis’s words. From one of the windows I cast a glance out at the immense gardens of the Place with No Name.

“As you can imagine, Signor Master,” concluded Simonis, “with Maximilian it wasn’t only his son’s brain that fell into ruin, but also Neugebäu. Since then no one has ever done any work on these gardens, this villa or the menagerie. But without maintenance gardens die, walls crumble and animals are no longer acquired. How much longer can all this go on? Joseph I is the first Emperor to have wanted to save this place. May God grant him his wish.”

From the great entrance hall we passed into the room on the left. Here too the bare walls, the time-worn floor, the great windows that opened onto the sky and the immense vault above our heads, which transformed our voices into a chorus of echoes, seemed to warn the visitor of the greatness of the Place with No Name, an uncompleted glory still awaiting its moment.

While we explored the walls of the great room, in search of the flues, a date was nagging at me: the 5th of September, the day Maximilian had begun to succumb to death. As we had made our way towards one of the students’ meetings, Koloman Szupán had recounted that on that same date, during the great Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, from within the city a traitor had informed the Ottomans that Vienna was in its last throes, and could be conquered at once. But that day also figured in the memories of my first adventure with Atto, twenty-eight years earlier: it was on 5th September in the distant year of 1661 that Nicholas Fouquet — the French finance minister and Atto Melani’s friend, whose destiny would be bloodily fulfilled in Rome in the inn where I worked, and where I had met Atto — had been arrested. The day of Fouquet’s arrest was also the Sun King’s birthday: the greatest and most powerful sovereign in Europe had been born on 5th September. And Suleiman’s death: again, 5th September.

That date, the fifth day of the ninth month of the year, seemed to sound a fateful knell in the history of Europe, but also in my own life. The Sun King, Emperor Maximilian and Sultan Suleiman, Fouquet, Vienna, Rome and Paris: these imposing names all seemed to be swirling around me, a mere nothing in the great theatre of human affairs, as if my destiny were mysteriously bound up with theirs. Or was this just the delusion of a poor chimney-sweep?

Having completed my work in the room to the left and in the identical, mirror-image one on the right, we passed through the door that led beyond the second of the two rooms. Suddenly the pure cold air of the wintry countryside lashed our faces: we had emerged onto the great terrace overlooking the northern garden. There was a broad view over the plain of Simmering, the surrounding countryside, the distant walls of Vienna and, even further off, the hazy green of Kahlenberg. The terrace was supported on Cyclopic stone columns, hewn from entire blocks: sculptural marvels. Above our heads, the high vault of the terrace was ready to receive the enormous frescoes that Maximilian must have imagined, maybe conceived, perhaps even sketched in pencil with his Italian artists, and which had never been realised.

High up on the great walls of the terrace there hung a horizontal line of stone ox skulls of splendid workmanship. These skulls, horrid and solemn, set something stirring in my memory. What did they remind me of? And at once I realised: Rome, twenty-eight years earlier, during my first adventure with Abbot Melani. In the underground passages beneath the Holy City we had visited a strange island where we had found precious Roman remains, amid which Atto, a great connoisseur of ancient things, had recognised a taurobolium: a pagan religious image, dear to the worshippers of the god Mithras, depicting a scorpion and, more significantly, a bull. Another echo, I thought, another thread linking past and present. The Place with No Name continued to cast subtle allusions around me, like a tangled web I had to unravel.

I looked out again at the great terrace and the view that could be enjoyed from it.

“Everything is grand here,” I sighed, “and on a scale I’ve never seen before. It’s like the Villa Medici in Rome, and at the same time also like a Venetian villa, and then. . well, I imagine Versailles to be a bit like this,” I said, gesturing to the gardens and the fountains that extended to north and south of the mansion, behind and in front of us.

“I don’t know what Versailles is like,” answered Simonis, “but anyone can understand what a great jewel Neugebäu could have been, instead of being condemned to oblivion.”

It was just then that I heard a curious noise coming from the west wing of the mansion. It was halfway between a trumpeting and a roar, and I could not have said whether it was mechanical or human in origin, or whether it came from above or below. I instinctively turned to Simonis, but my assistant had already gone back inside and had not heard anything. From the large interior room my little boy had called to us: he had been looking for us everywhere in the enormous spaces of the mansion. He had at last seen Frosch walking away from the eastern entrance; the old guard had been heading towards a cottage some way off. It was the moment we had been waiting for.

Lying lazily on the ground, which was still frozen, the Flying Ship seemed to be patiently awaiting the arrival of spring. I quickly climbed aboard to reconnoitre, using the large raptor’s wing, and then I jumped down again.

“We have to search methodically,” I said to Simonis. “I’ll explore the keel, you start inside.”

While Simonis rummaged through the cockpit I remained on the ground to explore the exterior of the ship, exhausted by the work we had been doing in Neugebäu and nervous about Frosch’s possible return. I was looking for the Golden Apple in the worst of spirits. The embassy of the Turkish Agha, the ambiguous position of Eugene of Savoy, the outcome of the war, the deaths of Dànilo and Hristo, Abbot Melani’s journey, the dervish Ciezeber, the Emperor’s sickness, Ugonio’s strange manoeuvres, even the Flying Ship itself: everything revolved in some way around the mystery of the Golden Apple. It was imperative that we get to the bottom of this matter. If we did not clear up these secrets, everything would remain shrouded in impenetrable fog, and maybe I would stay entangled in Abbot Melani’s manoeuvres without even realising it. There was no choice: we had to find the Golden Apple, or at least discover what had happened to it.

Spurred by these reflections, my poor blackened fingers scraped desperately at the freezing wood of the ship, in search of a crack, a hiding hole or a drawer that would finally reveal the symbol of power over the West.

“If only we could understand just what happened to this wretched thing. .” I muttered to myself, uncertain whether to address a plea to the Almighty or to let off steam by cursing.

At that moment the Flying Ship juddered slightly. This was followed by another light tremor, like a jolt that shook the strange bird-shaped craft from its tail to the tip of its beak. I thought that it was Simonis’s movements in the cockpit that had provoked these oscillations. I looked up, but the Greek was sitting calmly and fingering the seats, to see if they concealed a false bottom. If it had not been an inanimate object I would have been tempted to stare hard at the Flying Ship’s eyes, to see if they moved. . And at last I did so. The two lifeless wooden eyeballs had the harmless expression of all stuffed creatures.

I climbed on board myself. As soon as I had done so, I felt another strange vibration.

“Signor Master, did you feel that?” Simonis asked me, when I reached the prow.

I did not answer. Something else had caught my attention. Something wrong. I looked out of the cabin: the ground had become. . too low down. If I were to leap down now, I would break my leg. How could that be?

Then came a new perception: no longer that of the air coming towards me, but rather of my cheeks cleaving the cold wind of the plain of Simmering; they themselves had become small, trembling vessels. And then a crazy, inexplicable conviction: that underneath the Flying Ship an immense wave, a sort of powerful volcano, was exerting a propulsive force skywards, and we were just above it.

“What’s happening, Simonis?” I asked at last, dimly realising that the same bizarre thoughts were in both our minds.

Everything came to a sudden head: the sensation of a volcano erupting beneath our buttocks, our cheeks being jerked backwards, the ground dropping. My heart began to hammer hard, and I thought back to the dream I had had a few days earlier, the mad dream in which I had risked being eaten by Mustafa, in which I had foreseen precisely what was now happening: the Flying Ship was taking off.

How will I ever explain or describe those moments to my grandchildren? And yet one sensation was perfectly clear to me. It was as if the laws of nature, mastered by some benign sorcerer, had chosen to grant us our wish to find the Golden Apple, and tremendous ancient forces, capable of overturning the world, had been revived for us, and like mystic handmaids had clustered to form a circle, or rather a chalice, and were lifting the Flying Ship higher and higher. My little child, down below, was gazing up at us in dismay: was it possible that his father was escaping into the heavens?

“Simonis, I. . I felt the ship moving beneath me, the first time I climbed aboard, to escape from Mustafa, but I wouldn’t believe it!” I almost yelled to my assistant, as if these words could explain the impossible.

As we ascended, the great terrace of the Place with No Name seemed to plunge downwards, but it was we who were climbing, and far below my son reacted with a mixture of laughter, tears and shouts. After a few exclamations of surprise and horror, Simonis now fell silent. I looked downwards, assessing the fatal dive we were soon bound to make, and I prayed.

But we did not fall. Like a young bee greedy for pollen, a powerful and mysterious force continued to suck us upwards. We were now twice as high as the roof terrace of Neugebäu. We felt like the highest thing in creation, higher than the hills, than the mountains, maybe even than the clouds themselves. While the wood of the old ship creaked beneath our feet, as light and dry as a cuttlebone, my head began to spin, stifling my cries of wonderment and fear, and I joined my hands in prayer, since Deus caritas est (this grave concept is given us by the Lord with his miracles!); and if God created the world out of love, those ancient divine forces, which had now been unleashed to grant us the exhilaration of flight, perhaps wished to free us for a few instants from the tyranny of matter, and to teach us and welcome us at last into their wild recklessness of love.

“Signor Master, we. . we’re flying! Like a bird — or rather, like an angel,” Simonis said at last, his voice choking, making the sign of the cross over and over again.

As the wind whipped through my hair, I admired the boundless view over the plain of Simmering, and in the distance I could see, as on an architect’s drawing board, the suburbs of Wieden, the Danube, the Leopoldine Island, even the distant Josephina, with their almost invisible inhabitants, and I laughed and cried in a mixture of fear and madness: perhaps the same folly that, they say, unhinges the mind in the high mountains, when the air is too thin.

Between one prayer and another I murmured those famous lines of the Divine Poet that refer to a magic air vessel: I did it for Cloridia and our children. As I saw the gardens of the Place with No Name become as small as a kitchen garden, its towers shrink to childish toys, the great fish ponds contract to miserable wells, Frosch’s lions turn into mice, I asked the Poet for protection, and recited under my breath:

Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I,

Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend

A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly

With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,

So that no change, nor any evil chance

Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be,

That even satiety should still enhance

Between our hearts their strict community

And then I saw the clouds sailing below us, and, much as father Dante had done, I wished that my wife and our children were on the ship, and that we could always remain together with those dearest to us.

. . and here always talk about love.

“Look, Signor Master, look at the city!”

The Caesarean city, its ramparts, its towers, its steeples, the spire of St Stephen’s: even at that distance, everything seemed to be flattened on the ground and to become our slave. Simonis, as white as a sheet, was torn between his desire to gaze out and enjoy the view, and his instinct to crouch down in the middle of the ship in order not to fall.

Meanwhile we had ceased to rise.

“Maybe we’ll go down now,” I muttered in a hoarse voice, desperately gripping the seat.

But I was wrong. No sooner had I uttered those words than my cheeks and forehead felt the cold rush of air coming straight at me. The Flying Ship was now proceeding, as a sailor might have put it, full speed ahead.

“It’s going towards Vienna,” I shouted, torn between dismay and exaltation.

As fields with fruit trees, cottages and vineyards slipped beneath us, I realised I was trembling from head to foot. The temperature was freezing up there, as if we had climbed a mountain. Powerful gusts of wind lashed through our chimney-sweeps’ overalls, and also through the ship, which offered us no shelter. Goaded by the wind, the craft juddered and creaked.

“How can this be, Signor Master? What’s keeping us up?” asked Simonis repeatedly, and I could answer with nothing but dumb amazement.

Then, once the crazy exaltation of the first minutes of flight had died down, we noticed a strange phenomenon. Above our heads, in the ship, were the four guy ropes I had observed the first time I visited the Flying Ship. From the ropes, as I remembered, hung numerous fragments of amber, but now the precious yellow stones were completely transformed. They were no longer dead matter: the gems vibrated, as if an invisible energy were stirring them, and they were resonating in harmony with it. A light rustling noise came from the amber stones, a sort of faint poem of sounds.

I touched one. It immediately stopped vibrating. Then, just an instant later, it started again. I touched the rope with the tip of my finger. The cable was completely motionless, and showed no sign at all of agitation. It was as if it were secretly transmitting some form of invisible vitality, coming from the tail of the Flying Ship, which was transmitted to the fragments of amber, and the intense impulse that it conveyed made them chirp with the celestial music. Was this the force that made the ship fly? And if so, how? What sublime engineer and musician had managed to compel a secret force to serve an equally secret motor, and to turn it into a prodigy? He must have been greater than the famous Leonardo, than Bernini, and even than Heron, who had succeeded in forcing the doors of a temple open by lighting a fire somewhere else entirely.

But other details seemed inexplicable. As I have already mentioned, the hull of the Flying Ship did not consist of simple planks with smooth surfaces, but of polished tubes, which formed a huge bundle whose extremes were, at the stern, the tip of the tail, and at the prow, the bird’s head, which acted as figurehead. Well, those wooden pipes, which had seemed lifeless and inert when I examined the Flying Ship on the ground, now seemed to be the channel for a current of air, an interior gust or flow, which, like that of the pieces of amber, radiated from the tail of our aircraft towards the prow. Whether this current was of air or of some fluid, it was impossible to say: all that issued from the tubes was a kind of lowing noise, like the sound that can be produced by rolling up a sheet of paper into a tube and shouting into it.

At the prow, enigmatic and impassive, the Flying Ship’s hawk’s head cleft the air of the sky above Vienna like a real and living bird. Above the cabin, and therefore above the ropes that held the pieces of amber, the bellying sail that gave our ship almost the appearance of a sphere, flapped cheerfully as it was buffeted by the wind. At the stern, the flag of the Kingdom of Portugal, lashed by the gusts of the upper air, flapped proudly and seemed in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Why?” I asked the aged airship, fingering its age-blackened boards, “why did you choose this day after all this time? Why with us on board?”

The bird’s head, at the prow, continued on its way undaunted.

“Maybe, Signor Master, I don’t know. . but. .” shouted Simonis, trying to outdo the din coming from the tubes of the craft.

“Go on,” I urged him, terrified and at the same time disheartened, while the Flying Ship described a great curve to the right, and seemed to want to head towards the bends of the Danube. Then it resettled towards the left. For a moment we slightly lost our balance and had to hold on to our seats. My heart pounded with the force of a fusillade.

“It’s as if the ship took off just to grant us our wish!”

“I would have been happy to stay on the ground!” I replied.

In part I was lying; under the mantle of panic I could feel a sense of absurd euphoria at being one of the few, the very few, men (indeed, who else was there?) to have ever flown.

“I meant another wish!” shouted Simonis again. “To find the Golden Apple! Isn’t that what we want, and what we wanted when the ship took off?”

I fell silent, bowing my head, partly because of the strong wind, partly because I was ashamed to admit that I shared that totally irrational thought with Simonis, the foolish student (if that is what he was). I, too, had thought, or rather I had felt, that the Flying Ship had unfurled its wings for us, in response to our wish to discover the secret of the Golden Apple and settle its final fate. It was as if our own willpower had set in motion some arcane mechanism, some ancient hidden force, which had been awaiting this moment of reawakening for a precise purpose: was not the Golden Apple, according to Ugonio, the reason the ship had been built?

Penetrating the secret of the Golden Apple, as we wished to do, would probably lead us to solve many other questions connected with it, if not all of them: the outcome of the war, the fate of the Emperor, and with it the fate of Europe itself and of the world. Supposing that objects had free will, was this what the Flying Ship wanted as well? If so, our fear and the risk we were running would be of some use. I was overcome by an excess of emotions and I could not restrain myself. “O majestic ship of the celestial air,” I said in a low voice with my hands clasped, while the freezing wind whipped my forehead and neck, “I don’t know if I will come out alive from your belly. But if I do, and if you really wish what we wish, use your power justly and be for us the Ark of Truth, of Redemption and of Justice. So arrange things that the Golden Apple shall lead us from the labyrinth where we are lost.”

We were now flying through that portion of the sky over the curves of the Danube. I could see the Prater (and with a sudden pang I saw Hristo’s livid, snow-crushed face again), and the series of curiously named muddy islets around which the river weaves its way: the Stone, the Walkway, the Valley of Tabor, the Old Stove, the Port of Hunters and finally the Embankment, not far from that path in the Prater where my life had been saved by a Bulgarian chessboard.

Simonis and I pointed out to each other places and districts in the city. As if we were bending over a geographical map, we competed in identifying the monastery of Porta Coeli, my house in the Josephina, and then the walls of the Caesarean Palace, this or that rampart in the walls, the city gates, villas and gardens in the suburbs, the great expanse of the Glacis or the little suburb of Spittelburg. We could clearly make out even the distant gate of Mary Help of Christians in the Linienwall and the road towards Hietzing. The great wall of the Linienwall was so clear that it might have been visible from much higher up, said Simonis, perhaps even from the moon.

“O Ark of Redemption and of Justice,” I said with tears in my eyes, as I counted one after another the gardens of Lichtenthal, the villas of Rossau and the gate of Währing, “O Ark of Truth, if you deserve this name, which of my few merits made you choose me for this feat? Were you not deterred by my many weaknesses as a man and a sinner?” And even as warm tears coursed down my chilled cheeks, I smiled at Simonis, and he was crying himself and smiling at me, and not even his foolish face, his untrimmed fringe and protruding teeth could conceal his and my perturbation: we wanted a god of the air that we could kneel to, but we were confronted only by a mystery.

“Signor Master, suppose someone down there sees us?”

“Let’s hope not, otherwise they’ll put us in prison as they did with the man who brought the ship from Portugal. If anyone does see us, let’s hope they take us for a flight of geese, or that they think they’re seeing things.”

“If they take us for geese they’ll shoot us. Goose stew is a favourite dish here in Vienna,” said Simonis with a strained smile.

Then he exclaimed:

“Look, Signor Master, a cloud is coming towards us!”

Instinctively we shielded our faces, as if that vaporous cotton wool could hurt us. Obviously nothing happened, except we found ourselves immersed in its unreal white haze.

In Rome the sky is of gold and lapis lazuli, perfumed and rounded, and the clouds are always high and distant. In Vienna the light and tint of the sky express plainness of spirit, linearity of thought, a love for things noble and ancient, the typical inclinations of that people. The clouds are almost always low, the firmament is periwinkle-blue. The ship leaned slightly to one side, tracing a broad semicircle to the left.

“We’re circumnavigating the city,” I deduced.

The Flying Ship was gradually steering its prow back towards the Place with No Name.

We completed the short flight back from the city to Neugebäu without saying a word. When our ship began to descend towards the stadium, we were almost sorry that the secret gods of the sailing ship had decided to take their leave of us. It all ended in the calmest and neatest fashion, as if the invisible pilot who had been steering the ship by our side wished to round things off with a neat display of his prowess. We saw Frosch’s little mice gradually turn back into lions and tigers, the puddles of the Place with No Name grow into fish ponds, and the mansion shed its toy-like appearance and reassume its majesty. The Flying Ship landed without any trouble, as if it were always doing this, right in the centre of the stadium, almost in the exact same spot from which it had taken off. The ship settled on the ground with a dull thud, as if the vital force that had animated it had suddenly vanished. My little boy had been watching us on our homeward journey for a while now, and as soon as we stepped to the ground he burst into a welcoming clamour of tears and laughter. My legs, sorely tested, trembled as if I had been fasting for a week; when I leaped from the ship I almost fell headlong to the ground.

Not knowing what to say, I hugged my child and, as if returning from a simple donkey ride, I said: “Well, that’s that done.”

Frosch had not yet returned from his patrol outside the Place with No Name. He might have seen the Flying Ship take off; it was probably better to go straight back to town, so that he could not know for sure that we had been aboard the ship.

“You never know,” I said, urging Simonis and my boy towards the door out of Neugebäu, “no one can guarantee that Frosch wouldn’t tell on us. I’ve already risked my life twice in this place: with Mustafa and with this Flying Ship. I’d rather not end up in prison.”

In just a few minutes we had collected all our equipment and were on our way back to Porta Coeli. As we left the Place with No Name, still dazed by what had happened and still suffering from that dizzy feeling that hits you when you come back to land after a long voyage, my son continued to bombard us with questions. It was only by a miracle that I heard the same curious noise, halfway between a trumpet and a drum, that I had first noticed on the great terrace of Neugebäu. But I was still too befuddled by our recent experiences to pay any heed to it.

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

When we got back to Porta Coeli it was too late for Simonis to take part in the re-opening ceremony at the university.

“Anyway there will be a second unofficial ceremony this evening, organised by us students,” he told me. “God willing, I won’t miss that one.”

“I could come with you, to look for Populescu and the others.”

“Certainly, Signor Master, if you wish.”

Despite the many events of that day, I had not forgotten that I wanted to put the Greek’s three surviving companions on their guard and to tell them to proceed no further. With Dragomir, to tell the truth, I had already tried the previous night, but the Romanian had been too drunk to understand a single word, and so now we were looking for him again, in the hope of finding him sober, or at least of finding Koloman Szupán or Jan Janitzki Opalinski.

On the journey home we had chosen not to talk about our adventure in front of the little apprentice. I asked my assistant to take him to dinner. Meanwhile, with my stomach still taut from my aerial journey, I rushed to see Cloridia.

I had had no opportunity to spend any time with her since the previous evening, when, in the convent chapel we had learned the sad news of the Emperor’s illness. The events that had followed had overwhelmed me: my rage with Atto, my visit to Simonis, the wanderings in search of Populescu, the encounter with Ugonio, the happy news of Joseph I’s improvement and finally, while she was at work, my absurd flight on the winged Portuguese ship at Neugebäu. Now I surely had the right to spend a little time with my wife and to tell her all that had happened! I was already thinking that I might take her with me to the Place with No Name to show her the Flying Ship and ask for her advice, since she was never astounded by the supernatural. Cloridia might be able to explain what had happened to me.

Now my little wife was once again all for me, I thought exultantly. Her stint at the palace of the Most Serene Prince must have finished that morning. After a new audience with Eugene, the Agha and his retinue would have returned to the palace of the widow Leixenring, on the Leopoldine Island. The Prince of Savoy was to set off tomorrow for the war at The Hague, in the Low Countries.

“My love,” I called out as I opened the front door.

There was no reply. I looked for her in the bedroom — no sign. Cloridia was not there. Maybe they had kept her back at the palace of the Most Serene Prince, I said to myself. I was crossing the cloisters, heading back towards the porter’s lodge to ask the nun there if she had seen her come home, when I heard:

“It was so long since I had felt any discomfort, except for the weakness in my sides and my legs, that it struck me as strange last night to have an attack of colic — and one that lasted for several hours. I felt some relief after taking a large glass of fresh water with citron, which has been my usual remedy for over thirty years now. There is no worse torture than gravel: calculi and urine retention. It’s a terrible illness, and if it had happened to me on the journey I would have died in some inn. And what was worse, it was accompanied by painful intestinal discharges.”

It was Abbot Melani’s voice. He was telling someone about his collapse the previous evening, when I had burst so furiously into his room. He was coming in my direction, perhaps to go for a short walk in the cloisters with his nephew. I decided not to let him see me: I did not want to risk being dragged into any more of his intrigues. I hid behind a column.

“And so I suppose,” Atto’s voice continued, “that this mishap struck me because two days ago I took two mugs of chocolate that the Signora Connestabilessa sent me some time ago from Madrid. The Chormaisterin to whom I showed them told me that they were not high-quality chocolate. Alas, I’m blind now and I didn’t notice anything strange in the taste. I swear that I’ll never go through this again, and as long as I live I’ll never touch chocolate again!”

I grew pale. So Atto was still in touch with the Connestabilessa Colonna! I knew that name well: she was Prince Eugene’s aunt, sister of his mother Olimpia Mancini. The Connestabilessa’s name was Maria, and eleven years earlier she had been the Abbot’s accomplice in the intrigues in favour of France, which had led to the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession.

I also noticed that Melani, talking with his unknown interlocutor, attributed his malaise of the previous evening not to the news of the illness that threatened the life of his Caesarean Majesty, but to. . a cup of bad chocolate. He was certainly not making an excuse: no one could be ashamed of having been taken ill at the grave news that had shaken and distressed the whole city. And so all the elements in his defence came tumbling down: the accusation of plotting with the Turks to have Joseph poisoned had provoked no reaction in Abbot Melani.

“My head still feels very weak, so I know I must take a rest and I mustn’t tire myself out as I have been doing until today. The March moon has always been fatal to me and I committed the imprudence of setting forth on a journey in that very month — and what’s more, to come to this freezing place, while in the rest of the civilised world it’s already spring!”

Atto, worn out by his eighty-five years, was inveighing against the long Viennese winter.

“Well, my dear, I’m so glad that you have accepted my proposal. Deprived as I am of the gift of sight, and with Domenico confined to bed by that awful cold, you are my salvation.”

“It’s a pleasure, Signor Abbot, and I thank you once again for your generous remuneration.”

I was dumbfounded. It was my wife’s voice.

It did not take me long to understand. Atto’s nephew had fallen ill and the old castrato had suddenly found himself without assistance. He was travelling incognito in a foreign land — even worse, in the enemy’s land; who could he have turned to if not my trusted consort? By a stroke of luck, furthermore, Cloridia had just finished her term of service at Prince Eugene’s palace. My wife had obviously been very happy to accept the offer from Abbot Melani, who, as I had just heard, had clearly hired her on generous terms.

So I grumpily bade farewell to the idea of any intimacy with my wife this evening. Curse Melani! We did not need his money: I was already earning enough myself, and I even had enough left over to send to our daughters in Rome. I had wanted to be able to relax a little with my wife at last, and instead she had been whisked off by the old castrato. My anger at this unwelcome surprise made me even more distrustful of the sinister Abbot.

Crestfallen, I went off to have dinner at the tavern, where I joined Simonis and my little apprentice. I arranged with the Greek that later he would pick me up to go and see the students’ post-paschal ceremony.

On the way back to the convent, my little boy said he urgently needed to urinate. As usual with children, it is wisest not to keep them waiting in such circumstances, lest they should wet themselves. So I judged it best to go swiftly into a narrow, dark side street off Porta Coeli Street. While my son relieved himself, I heard:

“So how did it go?” said a voice in Italian, which I immediately recognised.

“As you can imagine, it wasn’t easy, effendi,” answered the other, in a foreign accent. “But in the end we managed it — when they saw your money, they gave in.”

“How much did it cost?”

“All that you gave me, effendi.”

“What?!”

“They sold their master’s heart. There’s no price for such a thing, effendi.”

These words were spoken by a man dressed in the Armenian fashion, in the classic turban and cloak. His interlocutor was Atto Melani. Cloridia was not there.

The Abbot was standing, leaning on his stick, in the recess of a palace in the dark street. I saw the Armenian hand him a small coffer, which he opened to touch its contents carefully. Atto held out a little bag.

“Here is your reward. Farewell,” he said, moving furtively in the direction of the convent.

“May God bless you, effendi,” answered the other man, bowing several times in the direction of the Abbot after quickly checking the contents of the bag.

Atto walked slowly in the direction of the convent, staying close to the wall so as not to get lost and feeling the way ahead with his stick, to avoid tripping up. Bold behaviour, I thought, for Abbot Melani to venture out into the street, blind and alone; the business he had with the Armenian must have been very important!

The master’s heart: one did not have to be a genius to understand what this shady transaction was all about, or whose heart it was! One just needed to put two and two together! Not only had Atto Melani arrived in Vienna at the same time as the mysterious Turkish embassy, just when the Emperor had fallen ill: now I had actually caught him in secret consultations with an Armenian — which is to say, a subject of the Sublime Porte! What was more likely than that he was one of the Armenians in the Agha’s retinue, maybe a minion of the dervish, Ciezeber, who wanted the Emperor’s head? This time the Armenian had mentioned the heart: fine metaphors these Easterners had for their misdeeds! Strip away the poetic flourishes and the meaning was clear: do away with His Caesarean Majesty.

That crazy castrato, I moaned, would drag me with him to the gallows! And we would be joined by that madman Ugonio. I had to run back and tell Cloridia what I had just seen and heard. She must give up that new job with him at once.

When I got home I saw that my wife had preceded us.

“Wohlan! Come along now!” Ollendorf addressed us, when I opened the front door.

It was the evening appointed for our German lesson and Cloridia had started without us.

As soon she saw us she broke into a broad smile. She asked Ollendorf to continue the lesson with just our little boy and led me swiftly to the bedroom.

“You’ll never guess what news,” she exclaimed radiantly as soon as we had closed the door behind us.

She told me all about her new job working alongside Abbot Melani.

“What do you think? This way you and I can spend more time together!” she concluded.

I answered with a forced smile. Suddenly my courage failed me. Poor Cloridia: every time Melani had turned up in my life, I had neglected her to go in pursuit of intrigues and misadventures. Now that she could finally spend the day with Atto, I was supposed to tell her to keep as far away from him as possible. What was worse, the mere thought that to spend time with my wife I would have to put up with the old spy’s company made me feel sick.

“Darling, I’m afraid it’s not possible,” I began to say, hugging her close.

“What’s not possible?” she said acidly, drawing away.

She did not yet know the gravity of the situation and I had spoiled her mood. I started my explanation from the very beginning. I told her of my suspicions about the Emperor’s illness and the Abbot. And also of the furious accusations that I had hurled against him the previous evening and his subsequent collapse. I ended with the episode I had witnessed just moments earlier.

“For these reasons, dear, you must leave Abbot Melani alone. Tomorrow you’ll tell him that you can’t work for him,” I concluded. “Anyway, before accepting you might have consulted me: you knew that his sudden arrival here in Vienna had struck me as suspicious right from the start.”

“Is that all?” she asked in surprise. “What you’ve just told me seems a very good reason to stick close to him and keep an eye on him.”

“But we could get involved. . And in any case,” I added with a touch of impatience, “haven’t you reproached me all these years for letting Melani drag me into terrible danger? Now that it’s your turn you don’t seem to be so keen on staying away from him.”

“My love, I told you before we came to Vienna that the Abbot was up to his old tricks again, but you wouldn’t listen to me. And in a certain sense, you weren’t wrong: now we’re doing fine and I wouldn’t go back to Rome and our hungry life there for anything in the world. As for your Abbot’s shady dealings, accept it, we’re already in it up to our necks. In fact you should be happy that this time it’s I who will be keeping an eye on him: you never notice anything and you regularly fall into his traps. Trust me.”

She was right, I am sorry to say. There was nothing for it but to trust in my wife’s shrewdness. It was a good thing she was always so courageous.

“Just listen to what a clever little boy we’ve got,” she said, putting her ear to the door.

The young pupil was diligently spelling out:

“Nach dem ich deß Morgens aufgestanden bin, so lege ich mich an, campele, und wasche mich, und thue mich GOtt dem Herrn befehlen, und nach dem ich mein ordinari gebet verrichtet habe. .”

“After I have got up in the morning, I get dressed, I comb my hair and I wash, and I commend myself to God, and after I have said my ordinary prayers. .”

My wife hugged me; in this sweet conjugal embrace all my tension suddenly evaporated and like a river in spate I poured out my heart to her. I recounted all the recent events, giving an awe-inspiring description of the journey on board the Flying Ship and telling her about the Golden Apple that it was supposed to have carried from Portugal to Vienna, with the aim of placing it on top of the spire of St Stephen’s.

Cloridia, as always when faced with a supernatural or at any rate inexplicable event, reacted naturally and practically:

“Why don’t you try and exploit the Flying Ship?”

“How?”

“To spy on the Turks, for example. Today they left Prince Eugene’s palace and went back to their lodgings in the house of the widow Leixenring on the Leopoldine Island. It would be interesting to have a look through their windows.”

“But I’m not a sailor, I don’t know how to navigate a ship — let alone a flying one!” I protested. But the niggling notion of such a move began to stir at the back of my mind. “By the way, today they had their farewell audience with the Agha, didn’t they?”

“Yes. Prince Eugene is leaving tomorrow for The Hague,” Cloridia confirmed.

“Did the Agha say anything else that was strange?”

“Nothing at all. And I don’t think I saw anything that was remotely suspicious. The dervish wasn’t there.”

I still had a little time before Simonis would call to take me to the students’ post-paschal ceremony, where we would find his companions. I started tidying up my papers and I came across the two treatises by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the man who had brought to Europe the recipe for drawing the piquant beverage from the coffee plant, but more particularly the Italian who, during the first siege of Landau, had been favoured by Joseph I over the inept Margrave of Baden and who had enabled the Emperor to conquer the citadel in just four days. To tell the truth, I had scarcely glanced at them since buying them. But now, after Melani’s gripping account of Landau, I was curious and wanted to embark on a more careful reading of the treatises written by this valiant compatriot, which — in the editions I owned — also contained exhaustive biographical data on the distinguished author.

And so I discovered, with no little patriotic pride, that Count Marsili was a man of refined understanding and acute spirit, always ready to take on mental as well as physical challenges. In his youth he had made keen studies of mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences, and had been the disciple of some of the most brilliant minds of the day, like the famous Marcello Malpighi. He had enriched his senses and his intellect by visiting Venice, Padua, Florence, Rome and Naples: an artistic and intellectual journey that only the scions of the wealthiest and most illustrious families could afford. As a member of the retinue of the Ambassador of the Most Serene Republic of Venice he had visited the glorious and remote city of Constantinople, observing the Turkish army, on which he had then written an essay, revealing its character and organisation. On his trip to the Orient he also carefully studied the coastal waters and shorelines of the lands he traversed, even studying the underwater flora and fauna, which resulted in further learned publications. This enterprising spirit cost him dearly: infected by the plague, he had to return to Venice for treatment, and his father, on account of the frequent visits he paid him, also fell victim to the disease and died of it. In 1682, only twenty-four-years old but fully mature, he decided to embark on a military career in the service of the Empire. With humility he rose through all the ranks: simple soldier, corporal, sergeant and finally captain.

It was 1683 and the Turkish siege was raging at the gates of Vienna. Marsili was one of the defenders of the city. Wounded and captured by the Ottomans, he avoided certain execution by casting off his uniform and documents and passing himself off as the servant of a Venetian merchant: thanks to his previous trips to the East he knew a little Turkish and managed to fool his prison guards. They medicated him with ox dung and salt, and he ended up as a slave in the Turkish camp at the gates of Vienna, where he suffered mistreatment and torture. He was assigned to a coffee shop, his task being to grind the beans and offer them to purchasers (in the Ottoman camp every sort of luxury was available, even artificial fountains to give a sense of pomp and opulence). Just like any other slave he was sold to two visiting Bosnians who hoped to make a profit by reselling him to the merchant whose servant Marsili had — mendaciously — claimed to be. And so negotiations began with Italy; friends and relatives in Bologna paid two hundred florins and so freed him.

He came back to Bologna from Vienna on foot. He arrived in the city at two in the morning, the left side of his body semi-paralysed, his legs swollen, his right arm wounded and dangling, one eye tumefied and swollen with tears, his skin burned by the sun. He had lost his hair, and he covered the baldness as best he could with a wig. But as soon as he had recovered some of his strength, he returned to Vienna, to Emperor Leopold, to report what he had learned of the Turkish army. They put him in charge of the imperial cannon foundry. He immersed himself in the study of military engineering and with great skill he created the fortifications of the fortresses of Esztergom and Visegrád. Then he returned to the war zone and took part in the siege of Buda, in which he revealed his unfailing military talent: he drew a map of the city, planned the conduct of the siege, selected the building materials and personally chose the utensils for the sappers. As soon as Buda was conquered, his soldiers pillaged the city. He, meanwhile, although wounded in one arm, wandered through the smoking rubble in search of the famous library of the King of Hungary, which he had long dreamed of exploring (alas, he was to find only a few volumes).

He was not a simple man of arms: for Marsili the art of war was the handmaid of knowledge and of right thinking. War, for him, was less and less an exercise in cruelty and more and more a chance to observe and understand. He studied the course of the Danube, revealing its every secret detail, publishing the results in a lavish scientific volume. He discovered an ancient bridge, hitherto unknown, constructed by Trajan, and many other Roman remains. As soon as the military operations gave him a little breathing time, he applied himself to the study of wave motion, of the riverbed and of the winds. He observed and scrupulously recorded numerous species of fish, of aquatic birds and of mineral stones. He summarised his observations in notes, illustrated tables and maps. He knew that the art of war was always advancing; to keep up with it, one had to follow developments in all subjects: geography, medicine, engineering, politics, diplomacy and even economic science. “Idiots believe,” he said scornfully, “that soldiers are destroyers of the fine arts, ememies of literature and ultimately that they are people who profess something wholly barbarous, believing that they do nothing but burn, pillage and kill, without realising what art and what study are required to reap rewards from this profession and what profits the human republic derives from it. Many who have sons or brothers with no aptitude for study say: we will send them to war. In so doing they malign the nobility of war.”

In 1699, when the imperial troops had to sign the peace of Karlowitz with the Ottomans, he was invited to take part in the negotiations: he was the only one able to make detailed suggestions for the new borders that the peace treaty was to establish. During the pauses in the negotiations he tirelessly inspected the territories of Croatia and Hungary destined to be divided with the Turks, without neglecting his scientific observations: he ordered his soldiers to collect the local species of mushrooms, complete with the clods of earth; this led to another treatise.

On his return to Vienna he was rewarded with the title of General of Battle. But another war had already broken out: the one for the succession to the throne of Spain, King Charles II having died without leaving an heir. The first theatre of operations to which he was assigned was none other than the siege of Landau, where he would emerge victorious, along with his emperor.

But at this point I had to break off: there was a knock at the door.

“What a noble creature the student is, has been sufficiently well proven. But the nobler he is, the more he is exposed to disadvantages, misfortunes and dangers!”

Simonis and I were attending the students’ ceremony for the recommencement of university lessons. My assistant’s knock at the door had brusquely torn me from my admiring contemplation of the life and feats of the valiant Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, my compatriot.

We arrived right in the middle of the inaugural speech, delivered by Jan Janitzki Opalinski, who was standing on a ramshackle table in what appeared to be a damp cellar:

“In youth the student must put up with great disappointment and hard blows from dull rod masters who thrash these tender young plants instead of treating them with sympathy and benevolence, and so impede their full blossoming. As Horace says, and even more eloquently the scholar Dornavio Anitympanistas, they treat students in the manner of an executioner and so repress the free workings of the spirit.”

Applause broke out.

“It is commonly said — we heard it said by our own rector at the ceremony today — that there are six mortal dangers for students: drunkenness, anger and idleness; and then constant lechery and the pursuit of prostitutes, which is said to be fatal to the soul, to weaken the understanding and memory, to dim one’s sight and to cause shaking in the limbs; and finally post-meridian slumber, which is said to be fatal to good temper. False, it’s all false! And whoever says such things has no love for us, nor any understanding of our delicate nature.”

The cellar was crowded with students right up to the ceiling. They were nearly all Bettelstudenten, poor students. Some of them still bore on their chests the much-coveted university badge which allowed them to beg in order to support themselves in their studies. In one corner, a rickety table with miserly slices of black bread and a scanty collection of chipped glasses gave an idea of their straitened circumstances. The only thing that flowed in abundance was youthful merriment.

“Opalinksi is there making the speech. But how are we going to find the others in this mob?” I asked Simonis disconsolately.

“We’ll just have to try. Along with poor Hristo, Jan Janitzki Opalinski is one of the most erudite students I know. It’s no accident that he’s Polish — Poland is a beacon of Christian civilisation facing Half-Asia. Jan is perhaps the best orator in the whole Alma Mater Rudolphina — when he talks the students all listen entranced,” answered my assistant. “When Janitzki finishes, you can talk to him. We’ll ask him about the other two. He should at least know where Koloman is, they’re great friends.”

“What are truly insidious and fatal to students’ health” continued the Polish student, as we elbowed our way through the crowd — “are other factors, wrongly considered virtues. First of these are the long vigils of study and meditation, which consume every humour of the body, desiccate the limbs and organs and, according to Hippocrates, leave food and drink raw in the stomach. The body undergoes a wasting process known as marasmus, your breath grows shorter and tuberculosis wells up. Elucubration is an oppressor of health, especially at night, when the smoke of oil lamps clogs the air. It is not necessary to read a great deal to be good students, but to read what is useful, and not continuously but with order and method. Otherwise you grow pale, your body begins to itch in several places, your eyes burn and your expression becomes bovine and absent.”

“Look, there’s Populescu over there!” I said, suddenly spotting the imposing bulk of the Romanian.

“Where?” asked Simonis, stepping in front of me to have a look himself.

When he moved, Populescu was no longer there.

“Damn it, we’ve lost sight of him,” I groaned.

“Signor Master, let me look for him. I’ll do a tour and report back to you.”

He was right. With my short stature I could hardly see anything: I certainly could not compete with his bird’s-eye view. I crouched down on a step descending to the cellar and waited for the Greek to get back to me after he had found his companions.

“Most harmful to the health of us students,” the speech continued, “is perpetual sedentariness, which clogs the veins and arteries, squeezes the bowels so that they emit too much bile, makes the body grow sour, forms stones in the kidneys and turns the face yellow and black.”

“It is extremely beneficial to bathe and dive in the beautiful rivers of this blessed city,” Jan concluded, “to smoke tobacco, and to drink wine and beer. It is not so harmful to health, if not indulged in to excess. You can drink as many as three times: the first as a toast to health, the second to friendship and the third to favour sleep.”

His final words aroused even heartier applause than his earlier ones, accompanied by shouts of approval, whistles and even a few belches.

At the end of his speech Opalinksi climbed down from the table that had served as a platform and came towards us.

“You’ve come to see if your old Jan is busying himself with the Golden Apple, haven’t you?” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ve not forgotten you. In fact I have important news.”

“And what’s that?” said Simonis with interest.

“I’ve discovered who the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim are, the ones poor Dànilo mentioned before giving up his spirit to Our Lord God.”

When Sultan Suleiman moved to attack Vienna and was defeated, Janitzki narrated, just two hours later there fell a famous nobleman named Kasim Beg. He was from Voivodina, a land near Hungary, but, like many rebels from over there, he had found no better way to vent his hatred against the Empire than by adopting the religion of Allah. Kasim had been given the task of distracting the Christian army, which was pursuing the Sultan. Suleiman’s order to him was to ravage all the territories across the Danube, exterminating and setting fire to every village. The trick succeeded. In order to defend the lives of at least the women and children, whom Kasim’s soldiers were slicing up like sausages, the Christian troops lost sight of Suleiman, who thus managed to escape with the rest of the army. Kasim, instead, paid dearly for his crimes. Together with his forty thousand men he was massacred by the Christian soldiers, enraged by his cruel treatment of the helpless. Ever since then the Muslims have considered Kasim’s forty thousand as martyrs for the faith.

“It is said that on Friday nights on the site of the battle one can still hear their war cry: ‘Woe to you! Allah! Allah!’ ” concluded Opalinski. “Even today you can still see the remains of statues representing young soldiers, erected to commemorate the forty thousand martyrs.”

“And so Dànilo Danilovitsch’s last words refer to this story,” I said with disappointment.

“Yes,” said Opalinski. “I’m afraid our poor companion was repeating in his agony what he had just learned: Kasim, Eyyub and so on. Nothing secret, at least apparently not. But my investigation isn’t over, quite the contrary — ”

“No, Jan, thank you very much,” I cut him short. “Leave off. This story of the Golden Apple is becoming too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” he repeated, with a vaguely sceptical air.

And so I told him about the dervish’s disturbing transactions, but the Pole did not seem troubled.

“Here’s some money as a reward for your services,” I said, handing him a little bag. “I want to warn the others as soon as possible,” I concluded. “Do you know where I can find them?”

“Koloman was serving as a waiter here this evening, but I don’t know which room he’s working in,” answered Opalinski, weighing the bag with satisfaction. “Dragomir went off almost immediately.”

“And the Pennal?” asked Simonis.

“Haven’t seen him.”

We had no choice but to go and find Populescu, at the Andacht on the Kalvarienberg, where he had told us he was to meet his brunette. Then we would look for Koloman Szupán.

Simonis and I took leave of one another. We agreed that we would meet up at nine o’clock in a place to be agreed on. The Greek would let me know where: he had to find Penicek, so that we could go there in his cart.

Even in the excitement of the last few hours, I had not stopped thinking of the events of the day. Images of the flight over Vienna on board the Flying Ship rolled ceaselessly through my mind. And Cloridia’s idea kept buzzing in my head even more insistently: to try and exploit the powers of the winged boat. If we could learn how to steer the ship, we could turn it into an invincible instrument in our favour. We could spy on the Turks through the windows of the palace where they were lodging on the Leopoldine Island, as my combative wife had proposed, but we could also fly over the Hofburg, where the Emperor was lying ill, victim of some obscure plot, and, who knows, maybe even descend to look through the windows. . No, no, I told myself, my imagination was running away with itself.

But it would do no harm to find out a little more about this whole matter. And so I decided to take advantage of the authority that Simonis had over the Pennal, and asked that he be entrusted with a small mission: to gather information about the history of attempts at human flight as fast as he could.

However, we would not be able to give the Bohemian student any reason for this task: if we told anyone what had happened in the Place with No Name, we would be taken for madmen.

“All right, Signor Master,” Simonis finally agreed. “I won’t tell him anything, and I’ll order him to bring the results tomorrow morning.”

We separated. There was another matter that required my urgent attention.

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

Trumpet blasts and drum rolls filled the vault of the Caesarean chapel, while the bass voice intoned melodious lines:

Sonori concenti

Quell’aure animate,

Spiegate, narrate

Le gioie del cor¹⁰

Camilla de’ Rossi was conducting the orchestra with a grave face, absorbed in countless cares. I was attending the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio seated in my usual place, and already the events of the last few hours were skittering about in my heart and in my mind: the nocturnal excursion on the trail of Populescu, the touching account that Simonis had given me of the death of Maximilian, the incredible journey on board the Flying Ship…

But I had no time to meditate any further. This brief restorative interval was interrupted as Abbot Melani came up, resting on Cloridia’s arm, and hovered over me.

I glared at my wife, and she responded by rolling her eyes to heaven, as if to say, “There was nothing I could do.”

Since Cloridia had started looking after him, Atto had become as fretful and capricious as a little boy. Instead of staying at the convent of Porta Coeli in the company of poor Domenico, who was still ill, he had demanded and had been allowed to attend the rehearsal of the oratorio. I could imagine his real motive: after my outburst the previous evening, he wanted to talk to me at all costs. As usual, the old castrato was going to come up with some cock-and-bull story to counter my accusations and dismiss them. I was all too familiar with this procedure. It had always happened like this in the past: on every occasion he had managed to allay my justifiable suspicions, playing with me like a puppet and fooling me completely. It would be interesting to see the expression on his face if he found out that I had witnessed his dealings with the Armenian! And that I had met Ugonio! What absurd story would he invent to justify himself?

He was a Siren, wily old Abbot Melani, and I was Ulysses. And so this time I would not listen to a single one of his beguiling words. That was the only way I could be sure of not getting snagged again on the hook of his lies like a simpleton.

“After all, Signor Abbot is a musician,” said Cloridia, to justify their arrival, referring to Atto Melani’s former career as a singer.

With a skilful manoeuvre, Abbot Melani somehow managed to get past Cloridia and sit down beside me.

“Over the last few days I’ve lost a lot of blood from the piles,” Atto whispered to me, sounding like a victim.

I did not turn round.

“A few years ago in Paris,” he added, “the change in the weather and the thaw caused a great turmoil in the humours of my body. In the morning I had gone to pay my respects to the Lord Marquis of Torcy and I was obliged to go straight back home without seeing him.”

I remained impassive.

“You know, I’m used to it by now, and it doesn’t bother me too much. And I always wear this little ring here on my finger, which they say is good for piles. The Grand Duke of Tuscany sent it to me.”

Atto waved the ring that he wore on his little finger in front of my nose.

“But after a bleeding, when I have a bowel movement it hurts, and these are the worst pains. They torture and weaken one.”

He wanted to stir my compassion. I continued to pretend not to hear.

“I’ve suffered a great deal,” he insisted. “It was five months since my piles last bled. And then I applied leaves of Juno, which softened the varicose veins and, thank God, finally caused them to break. To stop the bleeding I used powder of thalictrum.”

The bass, against a background of brass and percussion, continued his rumblings:

Con gare innocenti

Di voci erudite. .¹¹

“Signor Atto, you’re disturbing the rehearsal,” I whispered in annoyance into his ear, terrified at the thought of drawing the attention of any of the musicians.

“Unfortunately I’ve run out of it now,” Melani went on imperturbably. “The French called it argentine. Do you think you could get some for me? I need it urgently, alas: as soon as I sit on the seat for a bowel movement, the piles come flushing out in clusters, two or three at a time, like cherries, I don’t know if you can picture them.”

. . Cantate, ridete

Le glorie d’Amor¹²

The contrast between Atto Melani’s anatomical descriptions and the sweetness of Camilla de’ Rossi’s music was unbearable. Luckily at that moment there came the break. I took advantage of it to get up and escape from the Abbot’s company. He tried to stand up as well. I ordered him, with a sharp glance at Cloridia also, not to move from his seat. And then I moved away quickly.

Almost at once I ran into Gaetano Orsini, who greeted me with his usual joviality.

“How are things, my dear friend? Is your family well? I’m glad to hear it.”

“My compliments to you,” I said deferentially.

“A friend of mine is having problems with his chimney. Can I promise him you’ll drop by one of these days?”

“Of course, I’m at your service, and his as well. Would it be one of my fellow workers who didn’t do his job properly?”

“Who can say? From what I’ve heard, every time he came he was as drunk as a lord — he doesn’t remember anything either, ha ha ha!” chortled Orsini.

He gave me the address, a small palace near the Coppersmiths’ Slope. I promised that I would see to it as soon as possible.

“Do your best,” he urged me. “My friend was a gentleman of the chamber of the late Cardinal Collonitz, the hero of the siege of Vienna.”

“Hero?”

“Yes, in 1683, during the final battle against the Turks, Collonitz always managed to find money to provide food for the people and to pay the soldiers. How he did it, no one knows. And he was always in the front line, saving souls and rescuing orphans. He was made a cardinal in 1686 for his heroism. He died four years ago.”

In 1686: so Collonitz was appointed cardinal by Pope Innocent XI, Benedetto Odelscalchi, whose sinister plots I know all too much about. My deceased father-in-law had worked for the Odelscalchi. Now I remembered: it was my father-in-law who had mentioned the name of Collonitz to me. He was one of their right-hand men at Emperor Leopold’s court.

“I beg you to remember me most warmly to my friend. His name is Anton de’ Rossi.”

I noted the coincidence but said nothing.

When Orsini had left me, I saw Abbot Melani approaching swiftly on Cloridia’s arm.

“Nothing I can do about it, he won’t stay in his place,” whispered my wife, rolling her eyes to heaven again.

I silently cursed the Abbot and my own consort.

“Signor Atto, you’ve arrived most opportunely. I wanted to introduce you to Gaetano Orsini, the soprano who’s singing in the role of Alessio. Come with me,” I said.

I was trying to get rid of him by palming him off on the good-natured and talkative Orsini, who was a castrato like the Abbot and might distract him from his purpose of sticking close to me all evening.

“No, for heaven’s sake,” the Abbot said with a start.

“I’ll introduce you as Milani, intendant of the imperial post, of course,” I assured him in a whisper. “Our dear Chormaisterin certainly won’t betray you, will she? And Orsini isn’t exactly the sharpest of — ”

“I see that in thirty years I haven’t managed to teach you anything at all! Is it possible that you’re still taken in by appearances?” hissed Atto in exasperation. “Instead of tormenting yourself with disgraceful suspicions about me,” he added acidly, “you would be wiser to keep a closer eye on those around you.”

Of course Camilla would keep the secret, Atto explained, but had he not told me many years ago that you will find the worst spies of all among musicians? Was not trafficking in notes and pentagrams almost synonymous with espionage and secret messages? The name of Melani was all too well known among musicians: in his day he had been one of the most famous castrati in Europe. Presenting him falsely as Milani, he was convinced, would not protect him from the suspicions of one for whom lies were practically his daily bread.

Had he not told me, when I first met him, about the guitarist Francesco Corbetta, who under the pretence of concerts acted as a secret courier between Paris and London? At the same time we had also stumbled across the secrets of musical cryptography which had been most skilfully employed by the celebrated Jesuit scientist Athanius Kircher, who had used scores and pentagrams to hide state secrets of tremendous gravity. And I should be aware that the famous Giovan Battista Della Porta in his De furtivis litterarum notis had illustrated numerous systems by which messages of every kind and length could be concealed in musical writing.

He was right. I had not reflected on this but now I remembered it well. The Abbot had described very clearly just how talented and skilful musicians were at espionage, like the famous John Dowland, Queen Elizabeth’s lutist, who used to hide coded messages in the manuscripts of his music. Had that not been the trade practised throughout Europe by the young castrato Atto Melani?

I had always regarded Camilla de’ Rossi’s orchestra with a mixture of sympathy and innocence. But really I should have looked on them very differently: behind every violin, every flute and every drum there could be concealed a spy.

“So why on earth did you come to the rehearsal?” I demanded sotto voce, looking around myself, suddenly afraid that we might be overheard.

“If I keep my mouth shut nothing will happen. And you already know the answer to your question: I have to talk to you. Seriously. After what happened the other night, when you made all those horrible accusations against me, you and I have to clarify matters. If you will give me a proper chance.”

“I haven’t got time now,” I answered curtly.

I looked at Cloridia. On her face I saw neither approval nor blame, but just an ironic half-smile.

Having once again turned my back on Abbot Melani, leaving him with my wife, I went up to Camilla. The Chormaisterin’s face was tired and drawn.

“Good evening, my dear,” she greeted me affably.

After exchanging a few desultory remarks I decided to say: “I came across the name of a certain Anton de’ Rossi, a gentleman of the chamber of the late Cardinal Collonitz. Was he by any chance a relative of your late husband?”

“Come now, my name is the commonest in Italy. The world is full of Rossis,” she said amiably, before announcing to the musicians, with three handclaps, that the break was over.

She was right, I thought, going back to my place, the world is full of Rossis.

But what a strange coincidence, all the same.

When the rehearsal of the oratorio was over, I went to say goodbye to Cloridia. I had received a note from Simonis in which he told me to meet him at the Blue Bottle coffee shop. I explained to her that I had to go to the Kalvarienberg in search of Populescu.

“Who, that Romanian who bragged about knowing the Turkish harems?” asked my wife, recalling Dragomir’s boasts, which she had cut short by calling him a eunuch.

“That’s the one. I want to tell him — ”

“You’re going to the Blue Bottle, boy? It’s close by, good, good. Monna Cloridia, you’ll take me there, won’t you? A good hot coffee will do me the world of good.”

It was Abbot Melani. He had risen from his seat and rejoined us. I did not bother to protest. I just noticed that, when he was anxious about something, he did not allow his blindness to get in the way.

Cloridia entrusted our son to the Chormaisterin, asking her to put him to bed, and we set off.

On the short journey I explained why I was looking for Populescu: I was afraid for the safety of Simonis’s companions and I wanted them to leave off their investigations into the Golden Apple.

“So you really believe,” interjected Atto with a chortle as we entered the coffee house, “that those Slavic daredevils are in danger because of senseless Turkish legends?”

Simonis was already sitting at a table in the coffee shop waiting for Penicek. He was surprised to see me arrive with other people. I explained that the Abbot had just come for a cup of coffee and then he would go back to the convent, accompanied by Cloridia. Atto did not protest.

“On the Kalvarienberg we’ll also find Koloman Szupán,” the Greek informed me. “I met him coming out from work and took the chance to tell him that you wanted to speak to him and pay him. He said he’ll definitely come along.”

Unlike the previous occasion, when I had entered the coffee house with Abbot Melani just after our first encounter, the place was now full of people. There small groups of cavaliers engaging in friendly conversation, a few elderly gentlemen with books, and waiters bustling between the tables and the kitchen, clearing away plates and cups and tidying up after customers.

“You’re a lucky man, so young and strong. Judging by your voice, at least,” began Atto, sitting down beside the Greek. “My health is very shaky in this changeable season.”

“I’m very sorry, I hope you recover soon,” my assistant answered laconically.

“But the greatest burden is my age,” added Atto, “and the piles that torture me ceaselessly. Especially the other night, when I thought I was going to die.”

Poor Simonis, I thought, now it was his turn to listen to Atto’s endless whining about his aches and ailments. I hoped that Penicek would arrive soon.

“A few years ago,” Melani went on, “the change in the weather and the thaw caused a great revolution in the humours of my body, just like now. I went out one morning to pay my respects to a dear friend in the country and I was forced to go back home without seeing him.”

Atto was repeating to Simonis what he had already told me during the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, but this time he omitted the name of the minister Torcy and anything else that would betray him as a French spy.

A grim-faced fat woman, who usually sat at the cash desk, came to take our orders.

“A pity,” whispered Atto when she had gone. “From the voice I think she’s not the nice waitress we had last time, who so kindly gave me the chocolate scoop with marzipan. Is that right, boy?”

“No, Signor Atto. I don’t think she’s here today,” I answered, after looking around in search of the girl’s raven hair.

It’s really true, I thought with a smile, old people turn into children again. Ten years ago Atto would never have been softened by a scoop of chocolate offered by a simple waitress.

The grim-faced cashier came back almost immediately and served us first with a scowl and then with coffee, cream and the classic Viennese brioches.

“The bleeding from the piles kept me stuck to my seat for the rest of that day,” Melani continued, sipping his hot coffee and nibbling at a pink lokum to sweeten the bitter Asiatic beverage, “and I would almost have suffocated had I not reached the seat in time and so not had the chance and the freedom to abandon myself to the effort that nature was making to heal me. And when nature had finally taken all the blood it thought necessary from me, I recovered. The doctor almost proclaimed it a miracle, attributing it to the effect of my good constitution, because, although I can no longer read or write with my own hand, God has granted me the great gift of preserving my mental faculties at the age of eighty-five, which is what I turned on the 30th of last month.”

While Atto harangued us on his haemorrhoids and on the miracles of his longevity, I whispered into Cloridia’s ear:

“I beg you, my love, try and persuade the Abbot to go to bed as soon as possible. I don’t want him in the way.”

“Are you afraid of falling into his net again?” she smiled. “Don’t worry, this time he can’t fool you: I’m here! He won’t catch me out, the dear Abbot. What is important is that you must never be left alone with him.”

I grew morose. Great confidence my wife had in me. Although I had to acknowledge she had good reason for it, I had never been able to bear that annoyingly maternal way she had of rubbing my nose in my shortcomings. I withdrew into myself and said not a word.

“What is this thing, a croissant?” asked Atto, placing his hand on the tray next to his cup and fingering the warm brioche.

“Here, in the Archduchy of Austria, below and above the Enns, it’s called Kipfel,” Simonis expounded learnedly. “They say it was invented about thirty years ago by an Armenian coffee house owner, a certain Kolschitzki, on this very spot, at the Blue Bottle, to celebrate the liberation of Vienna from the Ottoman Half-Moon. That’s why they’re shaped like crescents.”

“Are we in an Armenian coffee shop?” asked the Abbot.

“Here all the coffee houses are in the hands of Armenians,” answered the Greek. “They were the ones who first started trading in it. They have an exclusive imperial privilege.”

“Have you ever seen them? A most singular people,” I said provocatively to Melani, thinking back to his secret encounter with the Armenian.

“I’ve heard about them,” he said, hastily thrusting his nose into his warm infusion.

Armenians and coffee: gazing at Abbot Melani’s aquiline profile adorned with the dark glasses that gave him the appearance of a bewigged old owl, I thought back to the past.

Once again Vienna took me back to Rome. Once again the Habsburg city shot forth a shaft which plunged deep into my memory, into my recollections of twenty years earlier. Everything led back to my youth, to that inn near Piazza Navona where, as a modest scullion, I had first met Abbot Melani and my Cloridia. The inn had often hosted parties of Armenians, accompanying one of their bishops on a visit to the Eternal City. Shy as I was, I used to observe those exotic prelates and their retinue without daring to ask any questions, hovering about them curiously and deferentially, but I knew that on their way to Rome they must have stopped off in Vienna. And I remembered very clearly their long black vestments, their manner both circumspect and devout, their olive skin, their ash-grey eyes and the strange perfume that wafted about them, rich in spices and coffee.

In Vienna I then discovered that the black Asiatic beverage and the Armenian people were inseparable. I loved now and again to thrust my nose into those dark but welcoming places, where they read gazettes, smoked, played chess or billiards. Sometimes, grateful to the Lord for the financial comfort I was enjoying in Vienna, I would treat myself to a steaming cup, absent-mindedly leafing through the gazette (the Italian one) in the hope that no one would address me, forcing me to resort to my pitiful German. Every so often I would look up and cast a fond glance at the Armenians, individuals with Turkish features who were reserved, industrious and silent; I was grateful to them for inventing the coffee shop, the unique and ineffable boast of the august city of Vienna.

There was no sign of Penicek yet. The delay was beginning to unnerve us.

“This little ring here, they say it’s good for the piles,” I heard Melani say at the end of my cogitations, as he showed Simonis his be-ringed hand. “Putting it on the little finger of my right hand and clasping it continually with the other hand. A niece of mine sent it to me. .”

Niece, indeed, I thought with a little laugh; during the Sant’ Alessio he had told me that the Grand Duke of Tuscany had given it to him. He was getting more and more prudent, Signor Abbot. .

“I hope it works,” Atto went on. “It’s also good for toothache and headaches, if you put it on the little finger of your left hand.”

“Megalleh Tekuphah.”

We turned round. It was a little old man with wild eyes who had spoken; he was sitting hunched over a nearby table.

“You’ve been struck down by the Megalleh Tekuphah, the cursed blood of haemorrhoids,” he repeated, addressing Melani. “You are a cursed being.”

We looked at one another in astonishment. Atto gave a start.

“Tekuphah means rotation, like a spinning ball, or the sun completing its orbit from morn to eve, until it comes round again in the morning.”

With some relief, we exchanged meaningful glances: our interlocutor was clearly a touch deranged.

“His blood shall be on us and on our children, says Matthew the Evangelist. Jesus Christ was crucified, they used four nails to fix him to the cross, and the blood of the Tekuphah is none other than the blood of Our Lord that gushed from his holy wounds: in fact it gushes out four times a year.”

“My God, the man is blaspheming,” exclaimed Abbot Melani in a muffled voice, making the sign of the cross.

While Cloridia administered a glass of water to Atto to calm his agitation, we turned our backs on the moonstruck orator and tried to resume our conversation. But none of us could think of anything to say. I looked around for another free table, but the café was packed full.

There were four Tekuphah a year, the imperturbable old man continued, one every three months. The first in the month of Tischri, when Abraham on Mount Moriah was to sacrifice his son Isaac at the will of God. He already had the knife in his hand and was about to slit Isaac’s throat. And so God saw that Abraham would do anything to obey him, and the angel of the Lord came straight from heaven and said: ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him.’ Abraham did not kill his son, but he had made a cut on his neck from which a few drops of blood fell.

“For this reason every year in this month the drops of blood that fell from Isaac’s neck spread throughout the world, and everyone must take care to drink no water unless they have first put an iron nail in it.”

The other Tekuphah was in the month in which Jephtha was to have sacrificed her only daughter, and for this reason every year all the waters are turned to blood. But if you throw in an iron nail, the Tekuphah will do no harm. The third Tekuphah was in the month of Nissan, when according to the Scriptures the waters of Egypt were turned to blood. For this reason every year at this time it is believed that all the waters become blood, but if you throw in an iron nail, nothing evil can happen. The fourth Tekuphah was in the month of Tammus. At this time God ordered Moses to speak to a rock so that water would gush from it. The rock did not obey and Moses struck it with his stick. Because the rock only let out a few drops of blood, Moses struck it a second time, and at last water came out.

“And so every year, at this time, all the waters turn to blood,” concluded the old man. “This is the most dangerous Tekuphah — so much so that some claim that even the iron nail can do nothing against it.”

“That’s enough now!” I said, seeing the octogenarian Abbot Melani ashen-faced and Cloridia deeply concerned.

I looked around again for the waitress who had served us a few days earlier, but in vain. However, I spotted the coffee shop owner. I signalled to him that the old man was importuning us. But he pretended not to see me and went on serving the other tables.

“Never forget to put an iron nail among the food and on the dishes you eat from!” the madman warned us, “otherwise the blood of the Tekuphah will suddenly appear in all sorts of ways: in jars of lard, as happened in Prague to my parents, who were terrified and threw the whole jar into the water; in saucepans of water or in pitchers of butter. And from there it will leak into you and make its departure from your backsides!”

“Curse indeed. Piles are a natural illness,” gasped Atto, looking at us with a strained smile while his hands trembled visibly. “I confess that it is due to the over-rich food I ate in my youth.”

“You are lost in the mazes of error!” thundered the other man. “The Jews do not eat unhealthy foods, they are forbidden all dishes that are said to lead to bleeding. This is why with the force of Divine Law they forbid the pig and the hare, whose meat offends health, floods the heart and obscures the intellect. But it is they who are most grievously struck down by the Tekuphah, because they crucified the son of God and his blood is upon them. My father bled every four weeks. I do not, but only because I converted to the True Faith and always carry an iron nail with me.”

As he said this, with a wild grin he plucked a nail from the cup of coffee he was drinking, and waved it before our amazed eyes.

At last, like a saviour from heaven, we saw Penicek arriving.

“The tremendous Tekuphah is about to pour down upon you and your eyes will cake with blood,” the old man hissed as we paid and rose to our feet.

The image of the patron saint hung in a corner of the courtyard, sitting on a throne. It was illuminated by numerous candles and adorned with green branches. All around was a throng of worshippers: mostly clerks, mothers and old people; the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Some were singing hymns at the top of their voices, others were mechanically muttering the rosary. We looked around. There was no sign of Dragomir and Koloman.

We found seats for Cloridia and Abbot Melani, who had not yet fully recovered from the crazy old man’s chilling words and had refused outright to return to the convent. Then we walked away from the statue of the saint. In the rest of the large courtyard, hardly touched by the flickering candlelight, there were the other worshippers, younger and more numerous, who were celebrating the saint’s feast day in very different ways. Moans, not liturgical hymns, filled the air; and instead of the murmured litanies, little grunts.

“This is just where we should find those two,” sneered Simonis.

In every corner of the courtyard our eyes beheld unspeakable things going on, things that — although passionate — had very little to do with the faith, and even less with the divine office.

I had already heard of this. The area around the church of the Kalvarienberg, or Mount Calvary, in the suburb of Hernals, was the favourite place for men and women, under cover of the evening Andachten, to engage in their operations of mutual conquest;- the church itself had come to be known as “The Foyer”, like the foyer of theatres, where young people get up to all sorts of things. It was said that on the Kalvarienberg in Lent the same things happened as in summer in the Aurgarten, the well-known resort of debauchery on the banks of the Danube.

“Oh, pardon,” the Greek apologised at that moment. Seeking his companions in a gloomy corner he had thrust his nose a little too closely into the manoeuvres of a semi-clad young couple.

“Populescu said he would come here with his brunette,” I said, “but Koloman Szupán didn’t. Shouldn’t we look for him outside? Maybe he’s waiting for us in the street.”

“Someone with Koloman’s gifts is not going to forgo an Andacht,” my assistant answered with a complicit smile.

He was right. Shortly afterwards we found the Hungarian student, hard at work in a dark gap between two bushes:

“Aaaahhhh! Yes, like that, again. . You’re an animal, a beast. . Again, go on, please!” moaned the voice of a Teutonic girl.

“It’s him,” said Simonis without any doubt. “I don’t know how he does it, but Koloman always gives them pleasure in exactly the same way. When you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all.”

“There’s no mistaking a real friend,” I said, with awkward irony.

“No, we won’t find Dragomir in here,” said Koloman, tucking his shirt back into his trousers. “He’ll be in one of the chapels on the Via Crucis, along the main street. That’s the only place where it’s dark enough to disguise his miniscule twig, ha ha!”

So we rejoined Cloridia and Abbot Melani and went out into the street again — the Kalvarienbergstrasse, or the Street of Mount Calvary. It was lined all along with little chapels representing the Mysteries of the Passion. They too provided opportunities for the two sexes to indulge their base instincts. In order to take advantage of this profane custom, at the foot of the Kalvarienberg were clustered countless little booths selling hot sausages, sugar figurines and croissants with hot cream. After the Andachten the couples would flock into the restaurants in the area or to the south, in the suburb of Neulerchenfeld.

The first chapels we inspected, peering into their pitch-black interiors, were all, needless to say, occupied. None of them contained Dragomir.

“He must be of a very religious temperament, your friend,” remarked Atto, hearing that we were passing from chapel to chapel, unaware of what was going on in them.

Cloridia led him a little further downhill (the road sloped noticeably), so that he would not hear the moans of the couples. I saw them enter and take a seat in a chapel, one of the few unoccupied ones.

“There he is at last!” exclaimed Koloman, peering into the gloom of yet another aedicule, after we had passed a few empty ones.

We had found Populescu — or rather, we had caught him in the thick of it. It was lucky Cloridia was not with us: Dragomir was standing with his back to us, his trousers down, his body leaning forward. Beneath him, in the darkness, it was possible to imagine his amorous conquest.

“He’s hiding here so as not to show how tiny his little pin is. It’s no use, Dragomir, your friend will realise all the same,” sniggered Koloman.

It was then that we heard the shouts. It was Cloridia, calling for help.

We all rushed towards her. Abbot Melani was lying awkwardly twisted on the steps of the chapel he had entered just a moment before with my wife, and there was a dark pool spreading around him.

“Signor Atto, Signor Atto!” I yelled, catching him under his armpits.

“The Tekuphah, the curse. .” he suddenly gasped, putting his hand to his chest.

He was alive, fortunately. But in the darkness to which our eyes had now grown accustomed we were able to see that his head and face were striped with black blood.

The seconds that followed were, to put it mildly, frantic. What had happened, who had struck him, how could it have happened in front of Cloridia? While Simonis and Koloman helped me to lay Atto Melani down on the floor of the chapel, I looked at my wife, who was paralysed with fear.

“I. . I don’t know. . suddenly, the blood. .” she repeated.

In our eyes and in our minds we could hear the prediction of the old madman in the coffee house.

I suddenly felt a shiver run down from my head to my shoulders, like a warm tingle of horror. Was I about to pass out from fear? I passed my hand through my hair. It was sticky and greasy. I looked at my palms: more blood. I felt faint.

“Just a second,” put in the Greek.

He pushed me aside firmly and extended his hands to where I had been standing, as if to see if it were raining. It was indeed raining: thick, black treacly drops were dripping down on us from the chapel’s ceiling.

“It’s the blood. It’s coming from here,” said Simonis, looking at the palms of his hands, horribly spattered.

Then he beckoned Koloman, who was thinner than him, to climb onto his shoulders.

“There’s something stuck up here,” said the Hungarian, running his hands over the ornamental cornice above our heads, along the internal perimeter of the little temple. “Like. . a little cage.”

Finally he pulled from the cornice a kind of iron fretwork box. We opened it.

Inside, immersed in a foul puddle of gore, lay a poor limp rag, reduced to a condition in which no man would ever wish to show it to a woman. Only the two spheres, which God had conceived for procreation, still seemed to preserve a touch of dignity. The rest was spongy, shrivelled flesh, wretched tatters of hair and skin, crudely dissected by some rough blade, all deformed and unrecognisable like a death mask.

Koloman immediately turned round, struggling to contain his disgust. Simonis and I were almost hypnotised by this spectacle of senseless ferocity. Who would ever dream of so absurdly mangling a virile member?

Meanwhile Abbot Melani, to whom Cloridia was repeating over and over that it was not his blood and that he was perfectly fine, was gradually recovering from his fright.

“Hell,” remarked Koloman, his spirit reviving, “I knew it’s better not to joke with these Teutonic misses. Dragomir must definitely see this stuff,” and he went back towards the chapel where Populescu, like all the other couples, had clearly been too preoccupied to be distracted by Cloridia’s agitated cries.

We remained standing around the little cage with its revolting contents. Everyone was too upset to speak. Cloridia could not take her eyes off the macabre container with its severed pudenda. She grew thoughtful. Suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, she found the door and opened it. Then she lifted the container and stroked its bottom, as if her fingertips might catch something that the darkness concealed from our eyes.

The Hungarian reappeared almost immediately, his face deathly pale, his eyes staring wildly.

“We must get away, at once, all of us,” he said in a strangled voice.

“What’s the matter, Koloman?” I asked him.

“Dragomir wasn’t. . We thought he was. . there was nobody there with him, nobody, nobody. .” he said with the first tears streaming down his face.

Our inspection took just a few moments.

Cloridia had cleaned up Abbot Melani’s head as best she could, and he, leaning on his stick and on my wife’s arm, looked at the corpse without saying a word. I stared balefully at the old castrato. Nothing could shake my feeling that he knew more about this than he was letting on.

“Away, come away from here,” I said. I looked around and took Cloridia’s hand and gripped Abbot Melani under the armpit, while Simonis seized Koloman by the arm, ordering him to stop crying, or else we would be noticed.

We began to walk down Mount Calvary Street, resisting the temptation to run and trying not to show our faces when we met the rare passers-by.

Until some couple in heat discovered it, Dragomir Populescu’s corpse would remain there, as we had seen it shortly before: the trousers lowered, his torso leaning forward. Underneath his lustful body, however, there was no concubine, but three pointed candlesticks, the sort they stick Easter candles on. Some robust hand had thrust them hard into the chest and heart of the poor Romanian student from the Black Sea.

More black blood was slowly soaking his thighs and trousers, seeping from the stump of lacerated flesh where once his sex had been.

We joined Penicek again, who had been waiting for us at the bottom of the street. While the cart set off, Simonis told him briefly what had happened.

“Half-Asia!” the Greek muttered by way of conclusion.

“And suppose it had been the Turks?” I asked.

“Asia or Half-Asia, it’s all the same.”

“Signor Barber, if I may be so bold, we must get rid of Populescu’s body,” intervened Penicek, “otherwise the guards will find this whole story a little too atrocious. A Bettelstudent does not die like this. They might carry out some serious investigation.”

“You’re right, Pennal,” agreed Simonis, “we can’t run the risk of being involved. We also knew Dànilo. We saw him die.”

“You’re talking as if you were the murderers,” objected Cloridia.

Simonis responded with silence, staring at us with his slightly foolish eyes. Was it not he who had set his friends off on the trail of the Golden Apple? And was it not Cloridia and myself, I thought, who had started off the whole story, alarmed by the strange embassy of the Agha? Furthermore we had said nothing to Simonis’s companions about Ciezeber’s plot. If they had learned in time that the Turks wanted someone’s head, and especially that this someone was in all likelihood the Emperor himself, at this hour they might still be alive.

I decided that the moment had come to tell Koloman Szupán about the dervish. Obviously I omitted to say that I had known this for days and had said nothing. The Hungarian was terrified. He knew well, coming from where he did, what the Infidels were capable of.

Penicek interrupted us, offering to get rid of the remains of Populescu with the help of two cart drivers, unlicensed like himself, whom he could trust.

“You won’t make it in time. Some couple will spot something first and raise the alarm,” I said, shaking my head.

“But they live just round the corner,” insisted Penicek. “Trust me.”

Having said that, without even waiting for any sign of assent from me or from his Barber, he pulled up the cart and climbed down, slipping into a doorway with all the speed that his crippled leg would allow him. When he came back, two shadowy figures emerged with him, who set off quickly in the direction of Mount Calvary.

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm! Coolness and. . sang-froid!” chortled Penicek with a macabre humour that was quite out of place, while his colleagues prepared to carry out their melancholy offices.

“Shut up, you filthy Pennal!” Simonis snapped indignantly, whacking him on the neck.

Once we had started moving again, Penicek now driving quietly on the box seat, conjectures started to fly freely.

“It’s clear to me,” began my assistant. “The girl Populescu had arranged to meet was the death of him.”

“It’s the same one Dragomir had asked about the Golden Apple. But it can’t have been her,” objected Koloman. “She wouldn’t have had the strength to skewer him with those candlesticks.”

I looked at Atto Melani. He was sitting beside me, with his head leaning backwards. He had been well wrapped up by Cloridia, who was talking encouragingly to him in a low voice, asking him how he felt, but getting no answer. The Abbot’s eyes were half closed; he seemed half asleep, but I knew the old fox of a castrato. I knew that he was listening to everyone and pondering within himself.

“Say it, I dare you: you think this death is just another coincidence?” I whispered into his ear.

Atto gave a slight start, but kept quiet.

Koloman meanwhile went on: “I would say that it’s the work of at least two men, probably her relatives, and also to hide that little cage so high up — ”

“It’s a tandur,” Cloridia interrupted him.

“What?” I asked, not remembering where I had heard that name.

“I’ve examined it carefully. The container of your companion’s severed pudenda is an Armenian tandur.”

“Armenian?” I said with a start.

“Yes, it’s a kind of little stove for warming yourself.”

Now I remembered. Cloridia had mentioned it to me when she came back from the audience with the Agha. It was a little stove full of cinders and burning coal to be placed under a table covered with woollen drapes that hung down to the ground. The Armenians would pull the blanket up around themselves and put their hands and arms underneath to keep warm.

“So it must have been the Ottomans!” I exclaimed. “You yourself, Cloridia, told me that some of the Armenians in the Agha’s retinue insisted on lighting a tandur to sit around, at the risk of setting the palace on fire.”

On hearing the Agha’s name again, Koloman Szupán grew pale with terror and, wringing his hands, asked Cloridia in a stammering voice whether she was sure of what she said and what the devil a tandur was exactly.

While my consort replied, I thought back to the Armenian who had met Abbot Melani, and the obscure traffickings between the two of them and the little bag of money that the castrato had put into his hands at the end.

“It was the Armenians, Signor Atto,” I repeated to him in a low voice so as not to be heard by the others, looking at him with spite, “the Armenians of the Agha, to be precise. Doesn’t this tell you anything? Perhaps they have an accomplice: someone who gave them money, a lot of money, for this murder.”

The old Abbot remained silent.

“At last we have the proof that it was those cursed Ottomans. And if they did away with Dragomir, they also murdered Dànilo and Hristo,” I insisted.

Melani did not move a muscle. He seemed to be dozing. I started up again:

“You wanted to talk to me to proclaim your innocence: you’ve been chasing me all evening. Now I’m here to listen to you, come on! How come you have nothing to say to me now?”

Atto turned towards me and behind his black lenses I saw him furrow his brows, almost as if he wanted to strike me down with his blind stare. He pursed his lips, perhaps to hold back words that were ready to burst from his mouth.

He was so stubborn, the old castrato. He just refused to accept the evidence: I was no longer the simpleton he had left at Villa Spada eleven years earlier, whom he had been sure of finding again in Vienna. But above all he could not resign himself to the fact that he had lost that edge, that dialectic agility, and that promptness of response that had always enabled him to fool me. And so he preferred to shut himself up in obstinate dumbness.

“That Populescu was Romanian,” he whispered at last. “If you weren’t so ignorant of those lands, you would know that Romania too is under the dominion of the Sublime Porte. At any rate, Turks, Armenians, or Romanians, it makes no difference to me. I have nothing to do with it.”

“We’re dead, we’re all dead.”

Mortifyingly silenced by Abbot Melani’s reply, I reflected on my ignorance and on the unexpected prospects that were opening up before me. At that moment Koloman began to repeat the same words of terror over and over, his eyes staring, his hands compulsively clutching the celery stalk between his thighs, almost as if he were afraid that by some evil trick it too might end up as a chopped ingredient in a tandur stew.

“Just a moment,” Cloridia stopped him, “we can’t be sure that it was the Agha’s Armenians. Populescu’s girl was Armenian herself.”

My wife’s statement, pronounced in a tone free from all doubts, pulled me from my cogitations and threw us all into amazement.

“How can you say that with such certainty?” I asked.

“Because Populescu boasted he knew the Turkish harems.”

“Right, and you called him a eunuch,” I recalled, thinking with a shiver that Cloridia had proved prophetic: on Mount Calvary Dragomir had indeed been emasculated.

Thinking back to it, she went on, Dragomir Populescu’s talk about the harems could only have come from an Ottoman woman, but not a Turkish one.

“First of all, Dragomir couldn’t have seen a harem because, as I said, men are not admitted, except eunuchs; secondly his description could only have come from someone who had lived in a harem, not just visited one.”

In addition, Cloridia added, the Armenians were a people subjugated by the Turks and so were often servants, and they told the simple truth about the harems because they hated their masters. The details of the rouge also made it clear that Dragomir’s source was a woman, and the contempt for the negro servant women suggested she was Armenian. The Armenians, in fact, despise the negroes, whom they consider subhuman, and they detest having them as workmates.

“Populescu’s pudenda,” concluded Cloridia, “could have been placed in the tandur as a warning to leave Armenian women in peace.”

“It’s not possible,” I protested. “Dànilo, Hristo and now Dragomir. They were friends and all three of them have died within a short space of time. It is not just a coincidence.”

“But it’s a fact,” objected Simonis, “that Dragomir had announced that he wanted to carry out some tests to see if his girl was chaste or not.”

“What were these?” asked Cloridia.

“He was going to make her drink water with armoniacum salt and inhale powdered ephen roots. If she wasn’t a virgin, she would pee herself.”

“Your friend was just asking for it!” exclaimed my wife scornfully. “I’m not surprised his girl emasculated him!”

“Clear proof that the girl was not chaste,” remarked Penicek.

“Shut up, Pennal!” Simonis rebuffed him with irritation.

“What an imbecile Dragomir was! How could he trust an Armenian?” gasped Koloman, his voice choked with apprehension.

“Why?” I said in surprise.

“They’re not people to be trifled with. Don’t tell me you don’t know: their coffee shops should be avoided like the plague. All of them. Even idiots know that Armenians are the most treacherous and lurid individuals of the whole human race. They’re two-faced double-dealers, children of Satan, snakes in human form.”

Koloman recalled a historic event he had told me about earlier: during the great Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, a week before the final battle, there was a serious act of treachery. From inside the city someone had informed the Ottomans that Vienna was at the end of its tether and could be conquered immediately. The army wanted to resist but there were only five thousand soldiers left. The citizens were ready for an armistice with the Turks, to put an end to the hardships of the siege and to ward off the risk — in the event of defeat — of being massacred. The controversy between soldiers and civilians had not yet been resolved and on 5th September it was a highly delicate moment when either side might end up prevailing. Amid the general confusion the city guard on the ramparts was slackened. It was just then that the traitor carried out his dirty work: he sent the Turks a package of confidential letters containing descriptions of the split between civilians and soldiers, so that the Turks could easily deduce that this was the best moment for their attack. The villainous spy was the servant (whose name nobody knew) of a merchant, known to the Viennese as Doctor Schahin. Fortunately, despite this valuable information the Turks decided to wait a little longer. In the meantime reinforcements joined the Christian armies, which then triumphed gloriously in the decisive battle of 12th September.

“And so?”

“The traitors, Schahin and the nameless servant, the ones who injected into the suffering limbs of the besieged city the deadly poison of treachery, were two Armenians.”

He explained, in excited tones, that the Armenians originally inhabited a remote kingdom between Turkey and Persia, which was subjugated by the Ottomans. They began their journey westwards from the Crimea, sometimes from Constantinople itself, the capital of the Turkish Empire, and swarming across Poland and Galicia they finally reached Vienna. They hated the Turks, who oppressed their small and ancient kingdom, and from whose yoke they wished to free themselves. For this reason many of them travelled back and forth between Vienna and the Ottoman Porte, acting as spies for the Empire. But as soon as they could, they would take advantage of the trust that the noble Council of War granted them, and would sell themselves to the enemy.

They were capable of the boldest enterprises, and of unprecedented feats; disguised as merchants, interpreters, couriers, they would undertake to carry out acts of sabotage, defamation and assassination for their masters. They would lead whole caravans into the desert for weeks, without any fear of hunger, thirst or fatigue, and they remained active until old age. They could handle explosives, and were skilled in medicine and also in the secret arts of alchemy. Poison was a docile instrument for them. In exchange for their services, they received by imperial decree the licence to open coffee shops or to practise as court couriers, travelling freely between the Empire and the lands of the East. In the lands between Poland and the Empire there rose villages populated entirely by Armenians, where they governed themselves with their own laws and their own judges. They were not subject to customs duties and, moreover, having the monopoly of the office of translating and interpreting, they actually controlled the flow of trade in its entirety, not only from east to west, but also from north to south. Thanks to these advantages they grew rich on the worst kind of trafficking.

An Armenian named Johannes Diodato, a great friend of that Schahin who had betrayed the city during the siege of 1683, had rushed into the remains of the Turkish camp the day after the liberation of Vienna to sell the abandoned weapons of the losers, and after the conquest of Ofen he had speculated on the slave trade.

“The notorious Georg Kolschitzky himself, the founder of the Blue Bottle coffee shop,” declared Koloman with concern, “is said to have gone calmly back and forth across the enemy lines during the siege bearing dispatches — he operated as a spy of the imperial forces against the Turks, but almost certainly also vice-versa.”

In Ottoman lands they purloined silver coins and smuggled them into the Empire. About thirty years earlier, thanks to the protests of the Viennese traders, they had reached the point of expelling almost all of these dubious figures.

“But the war council always needs them and in the end they managed to get back in,” explained the Hungarian student.

“And the coffee shops?” I asked.

They were nothing more, Szupán explained, than places where the wicked Armenians trafficked in secret and sycophantic messages, corruption and intrigues. They seemed to be untouchable: whenever they aroused scandal and the waters grew too troubled, they would go off to Constantinople, but they would come back, with impunity, just a short while later. They married among themselves to cement their business alliances. But since they were evil-hearted, they would sometimes ruin one another, denouncing the treachery of friends and relatives to the Emperor.

I listened in utter amazement. Those beautiful shops, their ineffable peace, the smell of coffee. . All this, according to Koloman Szupán, concealed levels of deceit and treachery that the fair face of Vienna would never make one suspect.

“If there’s any intrigue or speculation to be done,” continued Koloman, “nothing will stop the Armenians.”

Not only were they as elusive as eels. It was even difficult to identify them: you might have always called one of them by the exotic name of Schahin, the betrayer of the besieged city in 1683, but you would then discover that his real name was Kalust Nerveli, or Calixtus or Bonaventura, and his friend Diodato also answered to the name of Owanes Astouatzatur. Others did not even have a surname, like the mysterious Gabriel, from Anatolia, who in 1686 with a dreadful explosion blew up the powder magazine inside the castle of Ofen, or Buda, so that the imperial forces regained it from the Turks after over a century.

“And we were imbeciles too,” concluded Koloman Szupán. “Dragomir told us that his girl worked in a coffee shop. Those places are always in the hands of Armenians. It was natural that she should have been one. We should have thought of it and warned him.”

“Populescu did describe her as dark in appearance,” agreed Simonis.

“And he told us that the brunette had heard about the Golden Apple from her master,” I added, “who must therefore have been an Armenian coffee shop owner.”

I broke off. While I was speaking, my mind repeated two words mechanically, “brunette” and “coffee”, as if in search of some hidden meaning.

At last I found it. I stared at Cloridia with my mouth open.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“The Blue Bottle. . When we last went there — do you remember Signor Atto? — we were served by a brunette, the one who offered you the chocolate scoop.”

“The coffee shops of Vienna, if they’re all Armenian as you said,” objected the Abbot with irritable scepticism, “will be full of dark-haired waitresses.”

“But if it’s as I say it is, if that waitress who served us is the same one that Populescu had an appointment with here at Mount Calvary, then the talk about the Tekuphah that we heard at the Blue Bottle could have been a threat addressed to us.”

“Yes, it’s possible,” agreed Simonis. “Perhaps he was related to the girl, and already knew who we were.”

“And the fat woman who served us the coffee scowled at us,” I insisted.

“What, that old fool’s gibberish a warning? Never,” Melani said scornfully.

Atto adopted an air of indifference, but I had seen him almost die from fear not long before, when the curse of the Tekuphah, alias poor Populescu’s blood, had dripped onto his head. Now he simply wanted to divert my suspicions from his unmentionable dealings with the Armenians.

At Porta Coeli I helped Cloridia put the old castrato to bed. In the adjacent room, Domenico was snoring laboriously, afflicted by his cold.

Just before bidding Atto goodnight I could not restrain myself:

“Are you still convinced that Dànilo, Hristo and Dragomir died one after the other, just a few hours apart, purely by coincidence?”

“I haven’t changed my mind. I still think that they were not murdered because of their investigation of the Golden Apple. But take note: I have never said that their deaths are not linked to one another.”