Veritas

Day the Sixth

TUESDAY, 14 APRIL 1711

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

“Man has always dreamed of being able to soar into the airy heights, of avoiding the ineluctable fate of his mortal species, which can only attain heaven by divesting itself of its earthly raiment.”

“Get to the point, stupid Pennal. We’ve got no time to waste. Isn’t that right, Signor Master?”

I would have liked to go to the Coppersmiths’ Slope, to repair the chimney flue of Anton de’ Rossi, former gentleman of the chamber of Cardinal Collonitz, and also friend of Gaetano Orsini. Instead, I had barely had time to finish the jobs I was already committed to: I had been working for no more than three hours when Cloridia sent for me. She needed my help. She had to go and see the wife of Prince Eugene’s first chamberlain. The woman was about to give birth, and as a good midwife my consort took care to check up on her as often as possible. Since she clearly could not take Abbot Melani with her, she was leaving him briefly in our charge.

And so at that early hour in the morning, Simonis, my little apprentice and I, in the company of Atto and Penicek, were sitting in the Yellow Eagle, an alehouse in the Greek quarter, not far from Porta Coeli. The poor cripple was expounding the fruits of his research to us: following my assistant’s instructions the previous evening, the Bohemian student had at once asked the other students for material that might throw light on the great mystery of flying, and at dawn, as soon as the libraries opened, he had proceeded to look for books on the subject. Simonis and I were quite certain that we had not dreamt it. The Flying Ship had indeed taken off and lifted us high into the skies over Vienna. We were now eager to know whether, as Cloridia suggested, we could exploit the art of flying. The information gathered by Penicek, I hoped, would provide the answer.

We had said not a word either to the Bohemian or to Abbot Melani about what had happened on the Flying Ship, since there was a very real risk of being thought mad. And in any case I did not trust Atto.

Simonis had suggested the Yellow Eagle, in the Greek quarter, as a suitable place to talk about this curious subject, which might attract the attention of prying ears. This place, close to the meat market, was also known as the Greeks’ Tavern, since many of its customers hailed from that community. Abbot Melani, despite his blindness, had sensed that we were in a place not entirely befitting his rank.

“Only low people,” I explained, “come to alehouses.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s nothing the Viennese are so keen on as class divisions. It’s no accident they don’t play billiards here. And all you’ll see on the gaming tables are dice and German cards.”

“Anyway, let’s get back to the question of flying,” I said, addressing Penicek.

“I don’t understand. Why have you asked this clever young man to instruct you on such a strange subject?” asked Atto.

“Oh, it’s nothing important,” Simonis answered, “it’s just for an exam at the university. Go on, Pennal.”

“All right, I’ll try and be quick,” stammered the poor young man humbly.

Noticing the disappointed expression on our faces after these stories that were at least two centuries old, Penicek hastened to add that he had succeeded in finding something more recent. Indeed, this was the most interesting part of his whole account, and at the centre of it — as ever — there was an Italian: a Jesuit priest.

His name was Francesco Lana. He was born in Brescia in 1631 into a noble family, and at the age of sixteen he had entered the Society of Jesus, embarking on a serious career of study and research in the field of mathematics and natural science. His lively intelligence and tireless commitment took him to numerous Italian cities, and then led him to a career of teaching, whereby he earned the esteem of scholars and men of learning in every country.

In Brescia, at the age of thirty-nine, he published his masterpiece: the treatise entitled Prodromo, or an Essay on Some Inventions, in which with unrivalled acumen he tackled a number of scientific questions, including the project of a vehicle capable of flight.

This jolted us from the state of semi-lethargy we had been cast into by Penicek’s previous prattle.

Lana’s project, he explained, was based on a simple observation: air has a clearly determined weight, although much inferior to that of the other elements, and if a body is lighter than the volume of air that it moves, then it will rise. Consequently, if by means of a simple pump the air were to be removed from a pair of large and very light spheres, constituted for example by a thin sheet of copper, then they would become lighter than the surrounding air, and rising from the ground they would be able to lift a small craft.

“Something like a. . Flying Ship!” I remarked.

“Indeed, that’s exactly what the Jesuit called his idea,” said Penicek, showing us a copy of Lana’s design, which he had taken from an illustration in his treatise.

“And. . did this ship ever fly?” asked Simonis.

Actually, explained the Pennal, the ship described in the Prodromo was never even built. Some claimed that the Jesuit had himself decided to give up the plan, fearing that whoever piloted the ship might endanger his own and other people’s lives. Lana had confined himself to an experiment with a small model of the ship in the courtyard of a palace belonging to the Jesuits in Florence. But nobody knew whether the little model had actually flown. The Italian priest was in any case reluctant to create his flying ship, because he was sure that it would immediately be used for military purposes. And nobody could get him to change his mind. Under the weight of all his great intellectual work, the Jesuit died in 1687 aged only fifty-six, without his ideas ever having been put into practice.

Simonis and I exchanged a glance of suppressed disappointment. Four-fifths of Penicek’s account consisted of useless anecdotes and remote happenings, and in the only part of it that bore any relation to what had happened to us — Francesco Lana’s flying ship — all he could give us was the vaguest information.

“I had to end up with a stupid Pennal from Prague!” muttered the Greek in annoyance, miming despair by running his hands through his hair.

“One last question,” I said, silencing my assistant with a jab of my elbow, not wanting poor Penicek to be totally intimidated. “Once it had taken off, just how would Francesco Lana’s ship have been able to steer itself?”

“There’s no word of this in the Prodromo. They say that Lana had thought of a system of ropes that could influence the stability of the craft. He is even supposed to have tried it out in the little model he experimented with in the courtyard of the Jesuits in Florence, but this is just rumour: nothing specific is known.”

Simonis swore under his breath, cursing himself, the Pennal and even the glorious institution of the Deposition, which had lumbered him with this bumbling student from Prague.

The two students took their leave. Simonis ordered Penicek to keep rummaging through the papers he had collected to find something more useful, and then to go to the Alma Mater Rudolphina to follow some lessons on his behalf and to bring him the notes at the convent. My assistant then went off to work with my son again: they had a few small cleaning jobs to do in the suburbs. Unfortunately it was a little too far to take the old Abbot in the cart: the journey would break every bone in his body. And so, alas, I was left alone with Atto.

“Now, can’t we talk about something a little more serious?” he started as soon as the others had left.

I would have done anything to get out of this conversation, but I had already eluded Abbot Melani the previous evening, during the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, and then again at the Blue Bottle. Populescu’s death had thrown the whole group into fresh turmoil, but now there was no way of avoiding things.

I was determined not to be made a fool of again. A thousand times the maleficent castrato had succeeded in getting what he wanted out of me by deceit, only to turn his back on me afterwards. But this time I would not fall for it: his excuses would neither move nor persuade me.

“Boy, I have a mission to carry out,” he began.

“That does not concern me. The mission is yours, not mine. You have rewarded me for the services I rendered you in Rome. Well, that was what you had promised to do, wasn’t it? The account is settled. I owe you nothing else. And I don’t intend to get mixed up in political affairs that do not concern me. You are a subject of the Most Christian King; I am a subject of the Emperor. France is an enemy of the Empire, and I wish to have nothing to do with it. If I can do something for his Caesarean Majesty, I will. But not in league with you.”

“You don’t trust me,” he answered. “I had gathered this a while ago. But don’t you understand that I need you? And not just because I’m old and blind, and good for nothing now. Thanks to you, in the past, I have managed to pull off the most difficult of missions.”

“Of course,” I said with a sardonic little laugh, “but thanks to lying. You lie. You have always lied. On each occasion you have done just what you wanted: you always had a secret plan in mind, and you took great care not to tell me the truth. You have always used me as your pet slave.”

“It’s not true, I have never meant to do anything of the sort,” he protested keenly.

“But the facts are there to prove it, Signor Atto. When we met I was just a little boy, and you, with your shameless gift of the gab — ”

“Do you want to make me ill again?” Atto interrupted me, a tragic expression on his face.

“Cut the pathetic performance,” I replied angrily, getting up. “Try not to gobble so much chocolate next time!”

“So now you’re spying on me?”

“Stop it, both of you!”

It was Cloridia’s voice. She had come back, breathless and panting, and she stood there holding a piece of paper in her hand.

“Cloridia, try and understand, the Abbot and I — ”

“First read this.”

She opened the paper and thrust it into my hand. It was a pamphlet, one of those gazettes folded in four, not published on any regular basis but only for extraordinary events. I read it straight through and at once changed colour. Then I translated it for Abbot Melani. He leaned against the back of his chair, as if suddenly the weight of his years had become unbearable.

The Grand Dauphin, the firstborn son of the Most Christian King, was seriously ill. The pamphlet did not say so clearly, but as with Joseph the illness could be fatal.

The heir to the throne of France had smallpox.

The entire universe had turned upside down in front of my eyes. Some mysterious force had so arranged things that the two main contenders in the war of succession to the throne of Spain — France and the Empire — had been struck down by the same mortal illness. On one side it had struck the young reigning Sovereign, on the other the heir to an old king, who could not have long to live.

They called it smallpox, but it mattered little what name it was given: a fatal claw had lashed out at the two greatest contenders in the War of the Spanish Succession. Could it be a coincidence that the Emperor of Austria and the heir to the throne of France should have both fallen ill at the same time, and right in the middle of a terrible war that had thrown the whole of Europe into turmoil, with a disease showing the same symptoms? Obviously not. Now I was more positive than ever that a deadly poison was carrying out its slow, insidious and murderous task.

But what part was Abbot Melani playing in all this?

Atto had come to Vienna to conspire with the Turks against the Emperor. It was no accident that he had arrived just a day after the Agha and after Joseph I had fallen ill. But the Abbot could not have poisoned the Grand Dauphin of France: you do not change your master at the age of eighty-five.

I looked at Atto and, as if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned towards me. It was no longer the face of a decrepit old man that I saw but a skull, as if Atto were already a corpse: ashen pallor, half-open mouth, teeth protruding on account of his sunken withered cheeks, blue lips and eye-sockets. The Kingdom of France risked losing the successor to its throne, and maybe countless others after him, and perhaps it would end up like Spain, which was now being torn asunder by the forces fighting over its spoils. . All these fears I saw passing over the yellow parchment of his forehead, visible under the carefully daubed white lead of his make-up.

My suspicions about him suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Atto was not poisoning anyone, and so his arrival at the same time as the Turkish Agha was just a coincidence. . Whatever dark force was now pulling the strings of life and death in Vienna and Versailles, it was certainly not controlled by Abbot Melani.

Cloridia looked at me gravely and caressed my hand: she guessed my thoughts. Melani asked me to step outside the alehouse, just me and him. My consort nodded; she would wait for us at Porta Coeli.

The Abbot and I walked towards the nearby meat market. The road was full of people, and every so often a carriage trundled by. We just needed to talk with a little prudence in order not to be overheard by any passers-by.

He remained silent. I looked at him as he walked, leaning on my arm and his stick: he was panting laboriously, almost as if he did not have enough breath. From the rapid pulsations in his scrawny neck I guessed that his heart was palpitating feverishly and depriving him of breath. I was afraid he might collapse.

“Signor Atto, maybe we should go back to the convent.”

He came to a halt. He passed his trembling hand behind his dark glasses, over his half-closed eyelids, as if to wake himself from a bad dream. Then he straightened his bent back and let out a long sigh. His forehead was furrowed now, but he seemed to have regained strength.

“One day, a long time ago,” he said in a grim voice, “I explained that there are two types of forged documents. The first, the genuine forgeries, just recount balderdash. The others are the forgeries that tell the truth,” he said at last.

“I remember, Signor Atto,” I said. Did he mean to say that the pamphlet with the news from Paris could be a forgery?

“The forgeries that tell the truth have been drawn up for a beneficial purpose: to divulge, even in the absence of authentic proof, a true piece of news. The forgeries of the first kind are simply mendacious and nothing else. However, that does not necessarily mean that they might not have been produced for a good purpose as well.”

This ambiguous speech surprised me a little. What was Abbot Melani leading up to?

“Well,” he went on, “in the last few days you’ve come up against a document of this latter kind.”

I gave a start.

“A forgery, which was, however, drawn up with praiseworthy intentions,” he explained, “from a desire for peace.”

When he added this, my mouth dropped. I was beginning to understand.

“I didn’t want to tell you this, curse it,” he whispered with vexation, tapping the pavement with the tip of his walking stick.

“The letter that tells us that Eugene wanted to betray the Empire. . you mean the letter that is at the heart of your mission. It’s a forgery, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice cracking with incredulity and surprise.

“Let me explain, boy,” he said, squeezing my arm a little tighter.

Much of the story that Atto had told me was, in fact, true. It was true, that is to say, that at the beginning of the year an anonymous officer had gone to the Spanish court of Madrid, over which reigned Philip of Anjou, grandson of the Most Christian King. It was true that the anonymous officer, before disappearing into thin air, had succeeded in passing to Philip a letter, from which it transpired that Eugene of Savoy was ready to sell himself, in exchange for a large recompense, to the French enemy. And finally it was true that on reading those lines, the young Catholic King of Spain had been flabbergasted.

But then Atto told me what had followed. Philip had had a copy of the letter sent to his grandfather, the Sun King. The French sovereign had been equally amazed. But his minister Torcy had also examined the letter, and reacted quite differently.

“Torcy said that Eugene would never have written such a letter. In his opinion the Prince of Savoy would never have been so ingenuous as to offer himself to the enemy, jeopardising all that he had so laboriously achieved by serving the Empire: fame, power, wealth. .”

The minister of the Most Christian King was convinced that it was a trap set by Eugene himself, a trick very much in keeping with the condottiero’s twisted, indirect mind: if the French were to contact Eugene, responding positively to the offer contained in the letter, he would at once denounce a plot against himself, orchestrated by some conspirator in Vienna in league with the enemy.

“And was Torcy right?”

“Yes and no. The letter is indeed a forgery, as he said. But it was not commissioned by Eugene, who is actually in the dark about this whole story.”

“And so who. .”

I paused, holding my breath. We looked at one another for some long seconds. I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. Atto’s silence was as clear as a written admission.

“I had hoped,” he went on, his eyes lowered, “that the French secret agents in Vienna would get that letter to the Emperor. I was already prepared to come here myself, to superintend the operation. But the whole thing was blocked. Unfortunately Torcy had persuaded His Majesty to do nothing about it. I have never seen eye to eye with that minister: far too circumspect.”

At that point, Atto explained, there was nothing he could do but come to Vienna himself and deliver the letter to Joseph I — or, more precisely, to someone who would be able to pass it on to him, like Countess Pálffy.

“Does France want peace? I am seeking to obtain it,” he said, “and if no one gives me the means, I make shift as best I can.”

Those words were followed by another silence, broken only by the sound of our feet on the paving stones, the shouts of a group of young boys chasing one another, the subdued laughter of young ladies out strolling and the clatter of a carriage turning a corner. This silence between me and Atto said it all: the decline of Abbot Melani, his last desperate attempt to influence political events, the indifference of the King (attentive, however, to the suggestions of his ministers), the solitude of the old counsellor of the crown, his impotence and his refusal to accept defeat.

“Of course, foreign ministers still seek me out to obtain secret audience with His Majesty, and to talk of particularly reserved matters — it is difficult to find a trustworthy and esteemed go-between at court,” said Melani, with a fresh surge of pride. “But it’s something quite different to make one’s own advice reach the King’s ears, and persuade him of the best thing to do.”

Matters were clear: Atto, the King’s trusted servant, was still a good channel for people seeking an audience with the Sovereign or his ministers. But his opinions, at court, were no longer heeded. With the forged letter from Eugene he had once again endeavoured to write a chapter of European history, as he had successfully done in the past. But this time he had had to play a direct role in the game: no one at Versailles paid attention to the old castrato anymore. To put his plan into effect, he had first needed to find a skilful calligrapher (eleven years earlier I had met such a person in his service) to produce the forged letter from Eugene, and then make it reach the King of Spain.

I already knew Abbot Melani’s technique: it was the same as eleven years earlier, when he had had a forgery made of the will of the dying King Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. That forgery had enabled a French Bourbon to sit on the Spanish throne. On that occasion who had taken the paper with the false signature all the way to Spain? I had met her myself: Atto Melani’s old friend, the Connestabilessa Maria Mancini, aunt of Eugene of Savoy, former lover of Louis XIV and for a long time a French spy in the Spanish court. I had had first-hand experience (and had been an unwitting instrument) of her and Atto’s secret machinations on behalf of France, and also of the ambiguous mishmash of amorous affairs, politics and espionage that conjoined Maria Mancini, Atto and the Most Christian King. I had seen then just how casually Atto and his friends practised the art of forgery. And only the day before, talking with Cloridia about the bad chocolate that had made him ill, Atto had let it drop that he was still in touch with Maria Mancini.

It was ironic. Eleven years earlier the three of them — the Abbot, the calligrapher and the Connestabilessa — had been the devisers of a forgery, the last will and testament of the King of Spain, that was to light the fuse of war.

And now the same three characters wanted to redress that colossal error, and the only scheme they could come up with was to repeat, step by step, exactly the same procedure: to produce and take to Spain a second forgery, the letter from Eugene, so as to put an end to the conflict that had devastated Europe and, what was worse, had brought France to wholly unforeseen ruin.

But this time they had failed: the fuse once lit could not be extinguished; the course of events, now hurtling forward at an apocalyptic gallop, could not be bridled a second time. And so the decrepit old castrato had had to drag his tired limbs all the way to Vienna to get a copy of the forged letter into the Emperor’s hands, hoping thereby to create such a scandal that Eugene, the enemy of peace, would be divested of all authority.

“The great French ministers of the past, my friends, are all dead, even those much younger than me,” he said bitterly, to explain why no one listened to him at court anymore. “There are no longer the Pomponnes, the Chamillarts, the de Lionnes, the Le Telliers. I was truly in their confidence. The only one left is that suspicious cur Torcy, who, it just so happens, is the son of Colbert, the Serpent. I can never get Torcy to pass on even the briefest note to His Majesty, let alone a memorandum, like the ones the Most Christian King used to receive from me regularly. Today anyone who wants to do anything good for France has to make shift for himself. And that is what I have done, boy. In your opinion, is Prince Eugene’s reputation worth more than peace?”

The question was rhetorical, and I did not answer. I was reflecting bitterly on something quite different.

In the past it had always been I who had uncovered (when already too late) Atto’s lies, and the secret games he had played with my unwitting help.

This was the first time, in the thirty years I had known him, that I had had the honour of hearing Melani confess directly to his own intrigues. It was a sign that the times had changed, I thought, and the old Abbot did not belong to this new age. Atto was the only survivor of a vanished era: his longevity, far from granting him repose and recompense, had condemned him to sip the bitter chalice of defeat and oblivion.

Fate had made a toy of him. Just twenty-four hours before the unwitting Abbot set foot in Vienna, the Turks had arrived and the Emperor had fallen ill. A coincidence? No: this was a slap in the face from destiny. In this new era Atto was simply irrelevant; it made no difference whether he was here or not. In the great fresco of the world, Abbot Melani no longer figured.

I looked with compassion at the poor old man, whose services were no longer required by anyone. He turned his face to me and I thought I saw a grimace of wounded pride, almost as if his eyes had perceived my pity.

“Signor Atto, I truly. .” I tried to rally him, seeking consolatory phrases, but they just would not come to my lips.

Melani halted me with a dejected wave of his hand, as if to say, “Don’t bother.” We walked on in silence for a while, arm in arm.

“Now that the Dauphin is also on the point of death, everything is clearer,” he said at last. “Something or someone is plotting against both France and the Empire. Something or someone that is above everything, since the Sun King and Joseph the Victorious are mortal adversaries in the war that is tearing Europe to pieces.”

“Don’t you think that the Dauphin is really sick with smallpox?”

“And do you think the Emperor is?” he snapped back, with bitter sarcasm.

There was no need to say another word. Now that the Grand Dauphin was lying ill, Atto revealed his thoughts: he too had never believed that Joseph the Victorious had smallpox.

“To pass off poison as a contagious disease is child’s play: not only the arch-doctor at court, Monsieur de Fagon, but all the other doctors of the royal family are totally without experience of such illnesses,” explained Atto, “because as soon as a house is found with smallpox or any other contagion, they are forbidden to go near it, for fear that they might infect a royal prince. Common sense would suggest that in such cases they should consult those doctors in Paris who treat such illnesses daily.”

“Maybe they have done.”

“They never do,” he said with a meaningful smile.

“And so the same thing could have happened at the Caesarean court!” I said, aghast. “The Emperor’s doctors might have just as little experience of smallpox as those of the Grand Dauphin.”

I had at once suspected that behind Joseph’s illness lay the sinister and secret work of the poisoner, but to hear it directly confirmed by Atto’s voice sent shivers up my spine.

I could well understand the colic that had seized the poor Abbot two days earlier. It was nothing to do with chocolate from the Connestabilessa! He had collapsed on hearing the news of the Emperor’s illness: the worldly-wise old spy had immediately understood that evil powers, as yet unidentified, were at work, and that France, not being among them, was exposed to the same dangers. In certain games — I had learned this myself — if you are not among the killers, then you will undoubtedly end up among the victims.

“Boy,” he whispered, suddenly halting and gripping my shoulder, “I was about to succeed, all by myself, in bringing to an end a European war that has raged for eleven years! A group of conspirators, all in league with one another and highly organised, can do much more, and with great ease.”

“The Turks!” I exclaimed, and told Atto about the strange machinations of the dervish with Ugonio.

“Ugonio?!?” cried Atto, on hearing the corpisantaro’s name.

I explained the circumstances in which I had found him.

“Of course, now I remember; the filthy creature is from Vienna. The world is very small,” he concluded, shaking his head almost incredulously. “After all these years I wouldn’t mind seeing him again — or rather, meeting him again,” he corrected himself sadly, alluding to his blindness.

From Melani’s surprised reaction I had the confirmation (if I really needed it after his confession) that he was in the dark about everything. I had got it all wrong: the Abbot could not have known anything about the shady dealings between Ugonio and Ciezeber.

I explained that Cloridia had heard them plotting to get someone’s head. The Abbot listened in a tense silence. While I talked I watched him closely, but his black lenses prevented me from fathoming his innermost secrets. I also reminded him of the mysterious phrase pronounced by the Agha before Prince Eugene, and finally I summed up the strange Ottoman legends about the Golden Apple.

“Only one thing puzzles me,” I concluded. “What do the Turks have to do with the Grand Dauphin’s sickness? The Sublime Porte has always been allied with France. .”

“That does not matter. What matters is the method.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Ottomans, by themselves, would be nothing. Over the centuries, they have always been the military arm of the West, directed against the West itself. Two hundred years ago the King of France, Francis I, suggested to Suleiman the Magnificent that he should attack the Empire in Hungary; the suggestion was taken up, and successfully. In Italy the city of Florence summoned Mehmet II to its aid against Ferdinand I, King of Naples. Venice, to drive the Portuguese, her trading rivals, out of the East, made use of the forces of the Sultan of Egypt. And there are scores of Italian military engineers who have offered their services to the sultans, as long as they were well paid. When Philip II of Spain set out to conquer Portugal, in order to mollify the neighbouring King of Morocco he gave him an estate, thus placing Christian lands in the hands of the Infidels, and he did this with the aim of dispossessing a Catholic king. Even Popes Paul III, Alexander VI and Julius II, when it struck them as opportune, called on Turkish help.”

I had heard many of these unedifying examples three decades earlier, in 1683, from the same Abbot Melani. Just one episode was missing from the list, and I could understand why he had omitted it: in that very year 1683 the Most Christian King had secretly supported the Turks when they threatened Vienna.

“The Ottomans are the ideal instrument. In my long life I have seen many of them, including bandits and malefactors.”

I had no difficulty in believing it; who could say how many shady deals Atto had engaged in with the Infidels at the behest of his king. .

“Some of these bandits had faces enlivened with expressions of brutal passion,” Melani went on. “There was no prostration; it is not enough to have a soul, you also have to feel the divine guest’s presence to suffer when it declines, to be ashamed, upset and dejected. Christian criminals, thank God, usually bear on their foreheads signs of their struggle, even if a lost one, against their own perversity. Even the air of triumph that sometimes brightens the face of a hardened criminal, is it not a sign of this struggle? Among the Ottomans, however, the criminal is not a man whose character is any different from that of a wise man. The Turkish bandits had a more confident stare than I did as I looked at them. I could not help but see in them men whose nature was different from ours, men who truly did not know the Christian meaning of the words virtue and vice. No Christian is ignorant of the distinction between vice and virtue; anyone who does not understand it is outside Christianity, and indeed outside simple human nature. But from my dealings with Ottomans, I realised unfortunately that in the bosom of a civilisation almost as ancient as the Christian one, but founded on completely different bases, such a phenomenon existed: the man without a conscience!”

Atto’s words left me utterly dismayed. I now felt in my body a piercing fear of the Turk, as one dreads a hurricane which destroys people and things but is totally unaware of what it does. As he said, without a conscience. The Abbot was right: the Turks had always been pawns in the hands of the West. Had not Simonis told me that poor Maximilian II, the father of the Place with No Name, had been a victim of the treachery of the Protestant princes, who had incited the Ottoman armies against the Empire? And what had Maximilian’s councillor, Ungnad, been up to, if not scuttling between Vienna and Constantinople, manoeuvring the Turks so as to favour the intrigues against the Emperor?

“But precisely because the Ottomans are bloodthirsty people, with an inclination for wars of conquest,” I objected, “it’s easy to see that they want to invade Europe.”

“Bloodthirsty people, with an inclination for war, you say?” asked the Abbot, resuming his walk. “I could tell you things about the Ottoman Empire that you don’t even imagine, and which would change your mind at once. Do you know what the derebeys are?”

“The dere-what?”

Like all empires, Atto explained, the Ottoman Empire was based on a feudal system. The Grand Sultan, absolute Sovereign, was represented in the provinces by a network of rulers, who were, however, far from loyal: the derebeys.

“They are restless, ferocious lords, forever in revolt against the Sultan. They seize control of the collecting of taxes, which are supposed to be paid to the Sultan; they refuse to respond to the central government’s conscription call, instead enlisting troops for their own personal armies; they have their own standards and wear their own uniforms; and they often go to war against the Sultan himself.”

Almost all of Asia Minor was subdivided among a small number of such derebeys. Not to mention the mountain territories, Atto went on, where again nobody answered the conscription calls.

“In the Giaur-Daghda not a single mountain dweller wears the uniform or pays a single para, which is the fortieth of a piastra, to the Sultan’s treasury.”

Whenever the Sultan tried to reduce them to obedience, the inhabitants of the valleys would all flee to the mountains, leaving the enemy army to wander over their abandoned lands, or they would pour out en masse to confront the Sultan’s men, twenty-five thousand mountaineers against a thousand soldiers, which was enough to put an end to hostilities and re-establish peace with Constantinople. At least until the next recruiting drive or the next tax collection, when the war would inevitably start up all over again.

“The Ottoman empire has many such peoples. This shows how absurd it is to claim that the Turks are ready to invade the neighbouring nations. The very opposite is true: they have huge internal problems, which would make any act of external war highly inadvisable. The desire to expand at all costs into Europe, as they have done, threatening Vienna, Venice or Hungary, while just a few miles from Constantinople their empire is wholly ungovernable, means that their main aim is not the preservation of the Ottoman Empire, but the destruction of those faithful to Christ and their lands.”

“But don’t you think that is inevitable? They’re different from us, incompatible by birth with the Christian religion.”

“That isn’t true either. Countless Christians live in Constantinople and carry on their trades there freely. But I’ll go even further. Suleiman the Magnificent, like his predecessors, chose the highest ranks of the Ottoman state from the devsirme, the so-called ‘harvest’: the nursery of fifteen thousand Christian children who were kidnapped every year on his orders in Rumelia, the European part of the Ottoman Empire, for example in Hungary. These children were then brought up in Constantinople, because he secretly believed they were more intelligent than the Turks.”

From this “harvest” they then chose the ones who would join the janissaries, the elite and highly trained army corps. The janissaries were therefore all Christians by birth, and had not a drop of Turkish blood, also because originally they were obliged to remain celibate, and so had no offspring: year by year the old members were replaced by kidnapping new children. When they arrived in the territories of the Muslim empire, the children were carefully studied from a physiognomical point of view: depending on their facial features, which revealed this or that inclination, they were sent to serve in the Sultan’s private palace, in the state administration or in the army, among the janissaries.

“But I imagine that the highest-ranking dignitaries, the ones closest to the Sultan, were Turkish,” I objected.

“On the contrary. The Grand Vizier, or the prime minister, subordinate in authority only to the Sultan, has hardly ever been Turkish, and not even Muslim. Of the forty-seven Grand Viziers who succeeded to the Porte between 1453 and 1623 only five were of Turkish origin: the others included eleven Albanians, six Greeks, a Circassian, an Armenian, a Georgian, ten Chaldeans and even an Italian. And Ibrahim Pasha, the famous Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent, was not Turkish but Venetian.”

“Venetian?”

“Certainly! He was born in the territories of the Venetian Republic. That is why I say: the destructive power of Mahomet in reality does not exist, it is a creation of the West, turned against the West itself.”

These words made me thoughtful: Atto’s explanations tallied with what Simonis had told me about Maximilian and his struggle against Suleiman the Magnificent. Had not the fire of Ottoman aggression against the Empire, according to my assistant, been lit by the German Protestant princes and their secret emissaries, Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag? After seeking in vain to convert Maximilian to Lutheranism, they had taken their revenge by unleashing the Turkish armies against him.

“But the financiers of the siege that Suleiman laid against Vienna in 1529 were from Constantinople,” I objected.

“And where do you think they came from, if not from Europe? Families of merchants who had moved to Constantinople for the greater freedom they could enjoy there in trading. There have never been any Turks so rich that they could choose to bleed themselves dry for the sole pleasure of seeing the Sultan take up arms against the Holy Roman Empire.”

I was surprised. It was hard for me to think that beneath the Turkish turbans, the distinctive mark of Mahomet’s fearsome followers, more Christians were concealed than Turks.

“With Joseph and the Grand Dauphin,” Atto went on, “we are faced with two assassination attempts in which the victims are fortunately still alive. To solve the case, we must presume the instigator is someone manipulating the Turks and capable of striking at the highest level. But who?”

The Abbot now indicated that he was tired. I suggested returning to the Golden Eagle.

“Better to rest here, by the side of the road,” he answered.

The old spy was forever afraid of eavesdroppers, I thought. I led him to a staircase leading up to a small building set back from the road, which appeared to have been closed for years. I cleaned the dust and dirt from the steps as best I could and helped the Abbot to sit down.

There are a thousand people who might desire these deaths, Atto continued in a low voice, each one for a different motive.

“The maritime powers, Holland and England, are interested in weakening the two greatest contenders in the conflict, the Empire and France, to prevent whichever of them wins the war from gaining a position of supremacy. If the anti-French alliance won the conflict, and Joseph’s brother Charles ascended to the throne, the Habsburgs would hold Europe in a vice-like grip from east to west, from Vienna to Madrid, becoming far too powerful a giant.”

“That’s exactly what the English and Dutch want to stop France from becoming,” I remarked.

“Precisely, and you don’t change your mind after eleven years of war. Now they have almost reached their objective: to make France powerless. The country is already on its knees financially. In addition, the grandson of the Most Christian King has not proved as pliant to his grandfather’s wishes as was feared. It is rumoured that he is even thinking of proclaiming a formal renunciation of the throne of France, just to finish the war. There is only one last step: to deprive the Most Christian King of an heir who might disturb their plans to weaken France.”

“How could the Grand Dauphin disturb them?” I said in surprise. “From the gazettes it’s clear that he doesn’t have his father’s strong temperament.”

“That is all outward show, as with his mother, the deceased Queen Maria Theresa of Habsburg — may the glory of God be upon her. He is a man of few words and has made it clear that he has no wish to interfere in political and military matters. But it is not from want of experience, but rather on account of the great respect and deference he has for His Majesty. France and the whole of Europe would suffer a great loss if the Grand Dauphin were to die, because if he ever becomes king, his reign will be a golden century for his own people and for those of other states: “For, unlike his father,” and here the Abbot pronounced his words very carefully, “ambition would not lead him into any enterprise prejudicial to the general peace, as he is a prince of justice, of prudence and fairness, full of humanity and charity towards the poor.”

“And why should such a good, peace-loving sovereign be a source of trouble for the maritime powers?”

“The power of Holland and England is based on large-scale commerce throughout the world, which makes its greatest profits through war.”

“I thought war was the ruin of commercial transactions.”

“Small transactions, certainly. But large-scale trafficking thrives on the weakening of nations. The Lord God gave man the possibility to live on an earth fecund with fruits. But when the fields are made barren by the raids, fires and ravages of war, the people fall into the hands of speculators and usurers, who make them pay for their goods fifty times what they are worth! Peasants can no longer rely on the efforts and skill of their own hands to survive; they need money, a great deal of money, to buy for its weight in gold what in peacetime they used to produce for themselves with no difficulty. Without money one can no longer do anything, even in the remotest village. You don’t know how many have grown immensely rich thanks to war! Take the Thirty Years’ War, which broke out under a century ago. The usurers of then are the powerful of today. And when it was kings that incurred debts, those vultures were even rewarded with noble titles.”

From a wily and unscrupulous castrato to a moralising old codger: what changes life can bring about, I reflected while Atto talked. Now the Abbot was even railing against the aristocracy. His arguments were quite different from those I had heard from him twenty-eight years ago; they almost sounded like the grumblings of my late father-in-law, who had been a Jansenist.

“With a king like the Grand Dauphin,” Melani went on, “France would finally emerge from its downward spiral of arrogance and destruction; England and Holland want the opposite to happen. The country must continue to degenerate, the court must be hated by the people. It annoys them that the Most Christian King has adult sons and grandsons; the ideal would be if there were no heir, or if he were a baby, which amounts to the same thing. It would not be like the days when the Most Christian King ascended the throne, aged just four: then there were the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria and the Prime Minister, Cardinal Richelieu and later Cardinal Mazarin, who defended the country from any interference by other potentates. Now there is no longer a queen, nor a prime minister. Louis XIV has taken everything into his own hands. After his death a regency would leave the country at the mercy of the first scheming meddler, who might just happen to be sent by England or Holland to set off a mine under France’s backside.”

But there was more to it than that, continued Atto:

“There has been a rumour going round since February that Joseph I is thinking of proposing to France that Spain should be divided, so as to leave his brother Charles at least with Catalonia and its capital Barcelona.”

“Really? That would solve the Spanish question.”

“Quite. But you know what it would really mean? That the two major contenders, France and the Empire, would lead the peace process, and the destiny of Europe would remain in their hands, as has been the case for centuries. This is just what England and Holland do not want: the commercial powers are planning to sweep away the old world order and create a new one under their auspices. No, France and the Empire must not make peace, it must be imposed on them. On conditions set by England, above all, and Holland.”

“So you think that Joseph I is not going to find favour with England and Holland, no matter what he does.”

“Exactly. War or peace, the Empire, France and Spain must no longer be arbiters of their own destiny. The English and Dutch want an end to national sovereignties. That’s why they entered the war, and why they cannot wait to carve up the possessions of the Spanish Crown in the New World. A rich, boundless, virgin land, with no law or morality: sharp-eyed merchants as they have always been, they know perfectly well that whoever dominates it will rule the world. And they have no intention of leaving it to the Spanish, French or Germans.”

“So you say it’s for these reasons,” I summed up at the end of Atto’s harangue, “that the two maritime powers are plotting against His Caesarean Majesty.”

“It’s a possibility. But it’s not the only one.”

There was a second hypothesis: a motive within the Empire.

“You know that Charles and Joseph detest each other,” said Atto. “They have always done so, ever since their father set them against each other, favouring the younger over the elder. Nature made them different, the family made them enemies. And ever since Joseph became emperor, Charles has hated him even more profoundly, he himself being forced to fight for his throne.”

If Joseph were to die, Charles would lose an uncertain crown, that of Spain, for one that was perfectly secure and far superior: that of Emperor, in Vienna.

“Joseph has only two daughters; his only son died as a child. If he died, Charles would succeed him. Does that not strike you as a slight motive for murder?”

But that was not all. During his short life, Joseph had left a formidable trail of hatred and envy.

“The Jesuits hate him: when he ascended the throne he at once excluded them from government, and was quite brusque about it. You may have heard about the threatening remarks a Jesuit made to Joseph as soon as he ascended the throne, and Joseph had him expelled. But his father’s old ministers also hate him: even as a boy Joseph fought them mercilessly, until he finally became emperor and drove them all out. All except one. But he hates Joseph too.”

I knew who we were talking about.

“Signor Abbot, you have already shown me a letter from Prince Eugene, and it was forged.”

“Yes, but everything else I told you — about Landau, Eugene, his jealousy of the Emperor, his fear of being cast aside when the war finishes — is true.”

“And if Joseph really comes to an agreement with France to carve up Spain, leaving his brother Charles with Catalonia, there will be peace.”

“Exactly. And there’s no way that Eugene can make the young but inflexible emperor change his mind. And so our prince, at the age of forty-eight, will have to submit to the decisive temperament of an emperor aged just thirty-three. If he is really implicated in the poisoning of His Caesarean Majesty, I have to admit that he has made his calculations very carefully: unlike Joseph, Charles has a weak character and will not stop him from pursuing the war, even without the support of England and Holland. And when this one dies down, there will always be another one. One war is as good as another for Prince Eugene; he will always need a war from which he can reap honours and power, at least until he retires from old age. But it’s a game that Joseph will no longer tolerate.”

“True,” I agreed, “the Emperor is making peace with everyone, even with the Pope, who is on the French side.”

“Quite. Believe me for once, now that I’ve even confessed the truth about that letter. The moment has come for everyone to show their cards.”

“I’ve always done that with you.”

“Yes, you have. But Eugene is one who does not know what a straight line is. He is twisted, oblique, sinuous. Like all those of his race.”

“What race?”

He rolled his eyes to heaven, as if entreating the Most High to grant him the strength to keep quiet.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said evasively. “What I am anxious to make you realise is that Eugene’s military envy — which is all one with his craving for glory and power — is a real scourge. It was born long before him, and will die after the last soldier.”

“But one doesn’t kill out of military envy, least of all one’s own sovereign!” I protested.

“It’s obvious you know no history. I could give you scores of examples, starting with ancient Athens, where this unhealthy and underhand passion has led to the best commanders of the fleet being put to death unjustly,” said the Abbot, lifting the palm of his hand to emphasise the great worth of these captains. “It brought the city to defeat in the Peloponnese War, it led to the destruction of the walls of the Piraeus and finally to ruin.”

At that moment a group of passers-by, seeing Atto’s outstretched hand and his blind man’s glasses, took my working clothes for those of a beggar and casually tossed us a coin.

“What was that?” asked Melani, at the tinkling sound.

“Nothing. A few coins slipped out of my pocket,” I lied in embarrassment.

“What was I saying? Ah yes. Mind, we are only making conjectures to identify which of the various suspects is really plotting against the Emperor: to work out whether it’s England and Holland, or Charles, or the Jesuits, or the old ministers, or Eugene. As for military envy, leaving aside the numerous exempla from history, I would rather talk to you about a case closer to our own days: Count Marsili. Do you remember?”

It was odd that Atto should mention Marsili. Just a few hours earlier I had been reading of his feats until interrupted by my assistant’s knock at the door.

“Of course I remember,” I answered. “The Italian who suggested the winning strategy to Joseph, denouncing the errors of Margrave Louis of Baden.”

“Exactly. The continuation of that story will make you realise what role military envy might be playing in Joseph’s fatal disease: since it — envy, that is — almost always kills.”

A few years before the siege of Landau, narrated Atto, Marsili had taken part in the siege to free Belgrade from Turkish occupation.

There the first incident took place. General Guido Starhemberg, in order to impose his own personal strategy, caused grave loss of life among the imperial troops. The 59th Infantry Regiment was almost wiped out. For too long now the imperials had been wearing themselves out pointlessly around the fortress. Marsili openly criticised Starhemberg’s strategy, even though the latter was superior to him in rank. And Marsili did not spare his subordinates either: he demanded swiftness, discipline, parsimony in expenses (quite a few officers took advantage of the availability of military money to pocket a few “tips”). He had one of his lieutenant-colonels locked up for insubordination; this man then denounced him for tyranny and had him removed from the service. Only at the end of the conflict did he obtain justice.

“In battle Count Marsili had always demanded fidelity, honesty and courage from every soldier. But he courageously denounced his superiors if they made mistakes that cost human lives.”

“Bold,” I remarked.

“And very dangerous. Fortunately, his enemies could do little or nothing against such a valuable officer: no one knew the territories where the war against the Turks was being fought as well as he did.”

With the capture of Landau the military star of Joseph the Victorious was in the ascendant, continued Abbot Melani. It was before him that the French garrison laid down their arms, but a good share of the glory fell upon Marsili. By now he was considered the greatest expert in fortifications and sieges in the Caesarean camp. He knew the secrets of every military school, be it French, German or Italian. He had even won the sympathy of the troops, whom he had treated so strictly, and that of his fellow officers, who recognised his loyalty and impartiality. Because dishonesty, like ignorance, is an offence to the nobility of war.

But the Margrave of Baden foamed with rage at the way Marsili had denounced his shortcomings directly to the King of the Romans. This Italian had not only shamed him, but was also insufferably cultivated, honest and virtuous. Just who did he think he was?

The Margrave soon found a way to avenge himself. In December that same year, 1702, the French were threatening the Austrian fort of Brisach on the Rhine, vital for control over Breisgau. The Prince ordered Marsili to go to Brisach to help another Italian, Marshal Dell’Arco, in case this latter (a strange and equivocal excuse) should fall ill. The Margrave of Baden knew perfectly well that Marsili and Dell’Arco were on very bad terms, and that together they would achieve very little.

There were 24,000 French besiegers. The Brisach garrison had only 3,500 men, Marsili was told; in fact they were even fewer. He found ill-armed men, half-broken cannons, no sappers or miners (indispensable for the defence of a fortified place), and not even any water in the moats to keep the besiegers out. He wrote at once to the Margrave of Baden that the situation was desperate, but received no answer. So he set about strengthening the fortifications, but at once quarrels arose with Dell’Arco, and shortly afterwards Marsili was put under arrest for six weeks. Money ran out, and the troops, who were no longer being paid, complained. So he tried to obtain a loan on the nearby market of Freiburg; the attempt failed, and consequently he had a lead coin struck on the field, which was distributed to the soldiers. Marsili guaranteed it with his own personal property.

“Just as Melac, the French commander of Landau, did!” I interjected.

“As every true commander will and must do in such situations,” replied Atto gravely. “That also explains why officers must belong to noble and wealthy families: nobility can reach where others cannot.”

It was the second half of August 1703. The resistance of the small garrison was heroic, but the French were gaining the upper hand, thanks to the leadership of the Duke of Bourgogne and above all that of Marshal Vauban, the Sun King’s great military engineer.

“The one who had fortified Landau?”

“The very same. And he had fortified Brisach too, when it was under French control, and knew it like the back of his hands.”

The imperial officers had lost all hope now, but Marsili was unflagging: with his own hands he fixed the artillery pieces, designed mines and barriers and kept all those who still wanted to fight close about him. Dell’Arco summoned a war council; the officers no longer hoped for any relief and decided unanimously to surrender. Only Marsili was determined to preserve their honour. The French must grant his garrison military honours — he thundered in front of the other officers — a drum roll and flying colours. Everyone must know that Brisach had been lost with honour. On 8th September 1703 the imperial troops, exhausted, filthy and bleeding, left their fortress, parading with heads held high, while the French stared in disbelief: was it really this handful of scarecrows that had pinned them down for all these months? Someone whispered to the conquerors that the true soul of these wild men was Marsili, who was just as ragged and weary as all the others, but whose reddened eyes gleamed with the rage of defeat; it was clear that he would have fought on and on, if he had only had the right companions, curse it! Because cowardice, like ignorance, is an offence to the nobility of war.

But the worst was yet to come. Released with the other officers, he rejoined the ranks of the imperials, and at once the war tribunal was convened.

“The war tribunal?” I said in surprise. “Why?”

“Dell’Arco, Marsili and the other officers were indicted for having surrendered.”

“But what else could they have done? They were a tenth the number of the French.”

“Listen.”

Very swiftly, on 15th February, the sentences were issued: Dell’Arco was to be beheaded, Marsili to lose his rank and military honour. Three days later, Dell’Arco was executed at Bregenz, in the public square, like an ordinary criminal. Marsili had his sabre symbolically broken. He survived, but was forever dishonoured. The crowd’s rage, and above all the Margrave of Baden’s desire for revenge, were placated: it was no accident that the other officers had their sentences suspended.

It was then and only then that Marsili — the courageous Marsili, who, after enduring hellish imprisonment on the Turkish field, after being tortured and wounded, after dragging his bleeding body to Bologna, had desired above all else to return and serve his emperor; Marsili, who had never bowed his head before the envy, malice and meanness of his fellow soldiers; Marsili, who had won on the field the esteem and gratitude of the King of the Romans, the future Joseph I; Marsili, the scholar and scientist, the Bolognese nobleman who could talk on easy terms with the common soldiery; he who, every evening, wore his fingers away counting the dead that day, while the other officers drank and laughed and gambled away the money stolen from the garrison’s funds — it was then and only then that Marsili understood: all that had been needed to annihilate him, the man who had kept tens of thousands of French troops in check, was the envy of one man, one on his own side: the Margrave of Baden.

“Oh, military jealousy, what horrors you are capable of!” exclaimed Atto mournfully. “Oh, soldier’s envy, how atrocious your crimes are! Oh, officer’s rancour, how shameful your wicked actions, all craven, all secret, all perfect! How many unwitting combatants have you sent to death by deceit? How many courageous captains have you locked up in military prisons, replacing them with idlers and cowards? How many sergeants have you slaughtered treacherously in the ditches of Lombardy, in the snow of Bavaria, in the cold ford of a Hungarian river, so that you might hang on their rivals’ breasts the medal of infamy? The Margrave of Baden is not the real criminal. It is you, military jealousy, the faceless monster that broke the career and life of Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, dishonouring him and turning him into a renegade. You are the monster that kills by shooting in the back, that vilifies the upright, promotes the inept, detains provisions, provides incorrect information about the enemy, sends faulty weapons to the front, denies relief to the besieged, reports lies to headquarters. And so, battle after battle, war after war, you crush the valiant to the ground, devouring their spoils, while you fondly prop up the weak shoulders of the spiteful, the petty and the cowardly: they invoke you and with your aid they seek the ruin of the good.”

Atto fell silent. The old castrato had, of course, never fought, but his voice vibrated with the contempt of one who had understood all the cruelty of war. Questions were already rushing to my lips.

“You said Marsili is a renegade. Why?”

“That’s what they called him, because later he commanded the Pope’s army, even though at the trial of Bregenz he had sworn he would never fight on the same side as the enemies of the Emperor. But the oath had been extorted from him by force: how could it be considered valid? And he said yes to the Pope because he was from Bologna, and therefore a subject of the Pope. The French and the Dutch had offered him a post as general, but he had refused to fight for those enemies that had killed so many of his comrades. Despite this, His Most Christian Majesty invited him to Paris and presented him at court with all honours: ‘Count Marsili, who served the House of Austria for so long and who was so unjustly degraded over the question of Brisach; how grave this injustice is, I know all too well.’ ”

My cheeks had flushed with anger, pity and compassion on hearing Marsili’s absurd and cruel fate. Was that how his loyalty to the Empire was rewarded?

Abbot Melani, meanwhile, was struggling up from our improvised seat. His legs were stiff. I handed him his stick and helped him to his feet.

“But, Signor Atto,” I objected while we resumed our slow stroll, “you attribute to the Most Serene Prince of Savoy the same base passions as the Margrave of Baden. But so far, apart from a forged letter, you haven’t been able to produce anything more than suppositions. Even the coin of Landau, which Eugene held in his hand during the audience with the Agha, well, what does it prove? Nothing. Couldn’t it be that it reminds the Prince of his beloved sovereign’s most beautiful personal victory rather than an affront to his own reputation as a soldier? Everyone knows with what exemplary fidelity Eugene has served the Empire so far. He might be frustrated at having been overshadowed twice at Landau, and at not being able to go and fight in Spain because of Joseph’s opposition, but you must admit it’s very difficult to believe that the Prince of Savoy is conspiring against the life of his sovereign out of military jealousy or from fear that peace will deprive him of his power.”

“It’s not only ancient history that you don’t know, but also the race of those like Eugene.”

“Oh come on now,” I protested, “you referred earlier to this presumed race. Why don’t you speak clearly for once?”

“Oof! I didn’t want to face this question. But since the stakes are so high, may God forgive me. . It’s only fair that you should know. Besides it is not our fault if Eugene is a. . how can I put it?” he hesitated.

I stayed silent, waiting for the word.

“A woman-man,” he said at last with a slight sigh, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“A woman-man?” I said in amazement. “You mean that he too. . that they’ve cut. . I mean. .”

“No, no! What are you thinking of?” exclaimed Atto. “He. . he loves men!”

His irritation at my misapprehension had finally given the Abbot the gift of clarity. He was telling me that the Most Serene Prince Eugene of Savoy was a sodomite.

“The minister of war? The most valiant general in the Austrian army?”

“Here in Austria this matter has been kept more or less secret,” he went on, “but in Paris everyone knows it.”

“You’re lying,” I tried to argue back. “Eugene of Savoy may be ambitious, as you say, envious of his Emperor, but not a. .”

Then I too hesitated. Standing in front of me was Atto Melani, famous castrato. A poor unsexed being, robbed of his virility by the cruel choice of his parents. After his early youth, in which he had been a successful singer, he had undoubtedly known the shame of sodomy, the sorrow of mockery, isolation, loneliness and sadness.

He must have understood my embarrassment at once, and he spared me, going straight on with his explanation.

As Atto had hinted the first time he had spoken of it, Eugene’s youth had been a disaster. He had grown up at the Hôtel de Soissons, the Parisian residence of his paternal family, a splendid building where there was no shortage of comforts, amusements and games. But his parents had left him to vegetate amid governesses and nurses, without providing any upbringing, attention or love. His mother was a famous schemer, obsessed with court intrigues and the power games at Versailles, a suspected poisoner who had eventually been banished from the kingdom on this account. She certainly had no time to waste on little Eugene, the last of her many children. His father was too weak a character to make up for his consort’s errors, and in any case he had died prematurely (she was, indeed, suspected of having poisoned him). The boy grew up under the influence of his older brothers and sisters and other debauched young aristocrats, all arrogant and spoilt, with no guide to teach them any authority or decorum. The children thought they could do anything, and indeed nothing was every forbidden them. Instead of teachers and preceptors, all they had were footmen and butlers. There was no such thing as study: just playthings, toys and games. They knew no limits, no fear of God.

“If the nurses and house tutors dared to remind them that they must not break a certain object, or that a certain game might be dangerous, or that certain words were contrary to the dignity of good families, they were merely derided, mocked, insulted and even spat upon,” said Atto.

After their early years as thoughtless hooligans, Eugene and the young reprobates entered puberty. Everything was transformed; mischief and playfulness were tinged with quite different colours.

“The handsome lads began to lust after the beautiful girls, and the girls to look for their equals,” explained Abbot Melani.

With the same unreasoning wildness of their early years, they now played quite different games. Their bodies no longer thrilled over a stolen toy, a lunge too far with a wooden sword or a foolish prank, but for quite different things. Their mouths, which had till then been used for singing and talking, now also knew how to kiss. Idleness fuelled the flames.

And so, whereas previously the humble servants had tried to prevent the children from coming into contact with each other lest they should get hurt, now, when there was contact, they preferred to turn their backs and leave them to it, because they did not have the right words (and above all the courage) to prevent the little princes and princesses from giving and taking what they wanted.

The games were for two, but also three or four. There was always an audience; the onlookers and participants were always ready to change places. To ensure a greater variety of games, the couplings were free, and knew no limits of gender or of position. The days were long, their energies still wild, and their scruples non-existent.

“Boredom due to excessive wealth often leads down strange paths, and I hardly need go into details. These are things we all know. By hearsay, of course,” clarified Atto, in a grave tone.

When it was cold, they played their games at home. All they required was a curtain, a dark corner, a space under the stairs, and satisfaction was guaranteed for two or more, as the case might be, without standing on ceremony. If there were women, fine. Otherwise they managed without.

“And it’s absurd for the French to call this thing ‘the Italian vice’,” said Abbot Melani, suddenly growing heated. “It’s the same hypocrisy the Italians use when they call syphilis ‘the French sickness’: a stupid attempt to pass off one’s own failings on another. Let us be clear about it: is not France the homeland of that vice? The race of women-men was born there, in the land of Vercingetorix. Do not the French symbolise their homeland with a cock? Well then, I say, what creature better reflects the foolish, overblown arrogance of the French sodomites?”

He had turned indignant, had Abbot Melani, against France and its inverts: he, a naturalised Frenchman and an invert by castration (but I well knew that a woman had been, and was still, the love of his whole life). It was as if in old age Atto suddenly detested all that had been precious to him throughout his life: the kingdom of Louis XIV, who had made him rich and influential, and his castration, which had opened to him the doors of opera and the great world (Atto had been born the son of a poor bell-ringer). The greatest slanderers of sodomites, I thought, are the sodomites themselves, who know their innermost nature better than anyone.

At that point he began to reel off the golden book of the pansies of France, as if he had been waiting for this opportunity for years:

“Everyone knows about Henry III of Valois. But we also know every detail of Louis XIII, father of His Most Christian Majesty. Gaston d’Orléans, His Majesty’s uncle, had the same vice. Monsieur, His Majesty’s brother, was a collector of mignons, or of little boys.”

I was speechless. Grandfathers, uncles, brothers: the Most Christian King of France, according to Atto, was surrounded by perverts.

He went on to list a series of characters; all, he claimed, well known in France: the Gran Condé, the Cavalier of Lorraine, Guiche, d’Effiat, Manicamp, Châtillon. . And many relatives of Eugene: his elder brother Philippe, his two cousins Ludovique and Philippe Vendôme, the Prince of Turenne and the young François Louis de la Roche-sur-Yon, recited Atto, leaving me free to imagine that sodomy went hand in hand with incest.

All those noble names were forever engaged in an obscene ballet of ephebic and virile love affairs, in defiance of nature, religion and decency. They were mad nights, those of the Parisian debauchers, sleepless nights scented with the oils they rubbed all over their bodies before lying down together, nights spent choosing this or that feminine garment, trying on skirts, bracelets and earrings in front of the mirror. .

“ ‘The Italian vice’ they call it!” he repeated, as if this were what most enraged him. “In what Italian court will you find such foul frenzies? Indeed, in what European court? In England there have been just two cases, both well known: Edward II Plantagenet and William III of Orange, who was Dutch. But the former descended directly from the beautiful and depraved Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the latter’s maternal grandmother was Henriette of France, sister of Louis XIII. Exceptions, therefore, in which French blood prevailed. But at the court of France, when you try to draw up a list of the depraved, you always end up losing count. Madame Palatina was right when she said that nowadays the only ones who love women are men of the lowest ranks! And there is no point in making subtle distinctions, as the Parisians do, between the effeminate and the sodomites. In mud, water and earth become a single thing.”

While Atto inveighed in this fashion, I found myself reeling from shock after shock: even William of Orange, the condottiero whose feats I had learned of during my first adventure with Atto, almost three decades earlier, had belonged to the race of women-men!

In Paris, about forty years earlier, his story proceeded, the Cavalier of Lorraine, a well-known sodomite, and his worthy friends Tallard and Biran had founded nothing less than a secret sect of unnatural love. The members vowed never to touch women again — not even their wives, if they were married. The new initiates agreed to be “visited” by the four Grand Masters who ruled over the confraternity, and they swore an oath of secrecy about both the sect and its “rituals”.

The coterie was so successful that it attracted new candidates almost daily, even of illustrious name. For example the Count of Vermandois, illegitimate son of Louis XIV and of Madame La Vallière, who had the privilege of choosing which of the four Grand Masters would “visit” him.

“The other three took it badly, because Vermandois was really very good-looking,” said Atto with a touch of embarrassment in his voice, which betrayed the involuntary preferences cultivated by the young castrato many years earlier.

While Atto talked, I gradually saw more deeply into his innermost self. And I perceived the relief with which the Abbot was living the last stage of his life: decrepitude. He was now finally free from the effects of the mutilation that had precluded him from enjoying the love of women. Extreme old age, which extinguishes all carnal fire, had buried all traces of effeminacy amid the castrato’s wrinkles, just as it had sapped the virility of his contemporaries. Even the white lead of his face, the carmine and the moles on his cheeks were not as exaggerated as in former days; the Abbot applied them now as did all gentlemen. And he was no longer bedecked with tassels or red and yellow ribbons: Melani always wore dark clothes, as befitted an elderly man.

At the ripe age of eighty-five, in short, Atto was a little old man just like so many others. And he was savouring the pleasure of finally railing against the woman-man he had once been.

“So you say that the father, uncle, brother and a son of His Majesty the King of France are notorious inverts. .” I said, almost incredulous.

“Exactly. For years his brother went from one boy to another, and the King pretended not to notice. As if it were perfectly normal for him, too.”

The question was in the air now. Atto anticipated it:

“Well,” he said in a grave voice, “with regard to His Majesty, may God forgive me, similar abominations have also been whispered. But they were just attempts to convert him — sorry, to pervert him. They did not succeed, fortunately.”

Sodomy, observed Atto, is the direct offspring of beauty: was it not born in ancient Greece, when philosophers considered the company of young men sublime, because they were even more beautiful than maidens? Well then, amid that whirl of forbidden games, secret passions and unmentionable experiments into which the whole of Paris had flung itself, Eugene always found himself alone: he was ugly.

It was that time of life when young people blossom: their eyes open, their lips become tumid, their breasts plump and firm, their shoulders robust, girls’ hips grow round and those of boys solid. Poetry becomes flesh, and seeks other flesh.

Eugene’s face, which had never been attractive, opened out like a piece of dried, cracked mud. His nose turned up, while his mouth sagged; his cheeks, neck and body wizened like an old biscuit; his eyes, instead of tapering, remained round and dark. His hair, amid all his friends’ soft fair curls, remained flat, lifeless and corvine. And lastly he was small: the puniest of the whole gang.

“Have you ever seen Eugene close up?” asked Abbot Melani.

“No. Cloridia told me that his face is a little strange, not very attractive.”

“Not very attractive, you say? As a boy his nose was so short that his two upper fore-teeth were always uncovered, like a rabbit’s. He always huffs through his open lips, because he can’t close them.”

When Eugene’s transformation was complete, a new name was ready for him. With that misshapen face, he now became Dog Nose to his friends.

And it was a double humiliation that they inflicted on him, when they took advantage of his lack of strength and sodomised him in the kitchen or on the service stairs, with the serving women pretending not to see; they would then run away, mocking him with that atrocious nickname. He too had joined the race of women-men.

“Look carefully at the portraits of Eugene you see around the place. Yes, they’ve flattered him. The eyes aren’t his, nor the nose or the mouth. But the painters and engravers knew nothing of his vice, and that’s why they made no attempt to eliminate that look of a hysterical old hen: the raised eyebrows, the disgusted expression, the over-rigid, upright bust. All typical marks of the invert,” said Abbot Melani with a note of ostentatious disgust.

“As is the often the case with inverts, his character, torn between guilt and shame, grew duplicitous like that of a woman. He learned the feminine arts of dissimulation, oblique language and allusion. He is sullen and harbours grudges for ages. You yourself have had a clear demonstration of this: the old coin from the siege of Landau. He must have procured it from one of the participants at the siege, since he had to leave the field free for Joseph, and did not take part in the final assault. He preserves it secretly like a dagger steeped in poison: it reminds him of the day when military laurels were snatched from him by the young Joseph. An isolated event, but still a sign that his glory as a general is fragile and subject to the whim, but even more to the worth, of his sovereign.”

I listened in astonishment and thought: Eugene, the castigator of the Turks at Zenta; Eugene, the conqueror of Northern Italy; Eugene, the victor of the massacre of Höchstädt. . What abyss of vice and perdition had spawned the greatest man of arms in Europe? I now understood why days earlier, during our first conversation, Atto had let slip the cruel name, Dog Nose, which Eugene’s companions had saddled him with: the Abbot never lost sight of the dark past of the Most Serene Prince of Savoy.

“To save our hero from bad company, as I have already told you, it was decided he should be launched on an ecclesiastic career: on a trip to Turin, his mother had him receive the priest’s tonsure.”

It was the official act of renunciation of the world and of all earthly passions. But when Dog Nose returned to Paris and saw his friends again, he fell into his old ways. The planned ecclesiastic career was abandoned?

“In that period he earned new nicknames,” said Atto with a malicious little smile, “all very witty: Madame Simone, or Madame L’Ancienne, which is to say, Madam the Elderly — perhaps because, when he dressed up in female clothes, his wrinkled face made him look like a little old woman.”

“He dressed up in female clothes?” I stammered.

“Of course! Don’t you remember what I said a few days ago? Even when he escaped from France to come and place himself at the service of the Empire he disguised himself in female clothes,” sneered Atto. “His mother and his aunt, too, when they fled from Rome to abandon their husbands, dressed up as young men. But a woman dressed as a man is by no means as twisted and ridiculous as a man in petticoats.”

“I don’t understand. If Eugene really is effeminate, how do you explain that he became the great general that he now is? War isn’t for sissies. The Prince has fought the toughest and bloodiest of campaigns, he’s been in the thick of assaults, gunfire and cavalry charges. He’s led sieges, attacks, retreats. .”

There’s nothing surprising, answered Atto, about a famous general belonging to the race of women-men. There have been scores of them among the great French military leaders: Turenne, Vendôme, Huxelle, Condé and many others. In these cases, the soldier’s manly virtue was deliberately transformed into that kind of coarseness that loves to treat men as women, because it is only in them (in their beards, in their muscles, in their stench) that they find their own rough inspiration reciprocated and satisfied. The Marshal of Vendôme, a descendant of King Henry IV of France and a war hero, was an inveterate drinker and smoker, a filthy overbearing braggart, who shared his bed with his dogs and thought nothing of pissing in it. Even as he talked and gave orders to his subordinates he would calmly defecate in a bucket, and then, after passing it in front of his adjutants’ noses, he would empty it and use it to shave. The hardships and atrocities of war were perfectly in keeping with his bestial nature. Such men became lovers of men precisely because they were soldiers. Eugene’s case was quite different, however.

“Dog Nose is not depraved because he’s a soldier. On the contrary: he became a soldier because he’s depraved.”

Then he cleared his throat, as if his very vocal chords were reluctant to tackle such a difficult argument.

“He is one of those sodomites who have not freely chosen their wretched condition. Had he been able, he would willingly have avoided being effeminate. But something, while he was still at a tender age, threw Eugene unceremoniously into the ranks of women-men.”

Now the Abbot was finding it hard to talk. Until now, from the height of his eighty-five years, he had chosen to forget that he himself had been of that unfortunate stock. However, now that he had to talk of the carnal violence that Eugene had been subjected to as a child, he could dissimulate no longer: such acts were all too similar to the painful castration that had been inflicted on Atto Melani’s childish flesh. And the memory made his voice tremble.

On the brink of twenty, Dog Nose felt useless, dirty and empty. His siblings and his youthful companions had derided, humiliated and raped him. These people, the only friends he had in the world, loved to abuse him because he was the smallest and ugliest in the whole group. To escape this condition, Dog Nose had only one option: to turn things on their head. He came from the lowest perversion: to save himself, he had to switch to the greatest virtue. The hardest and most dangerous.

“He stopped dressing up as a woman and dressed up as a soldier instead. In that way he would become someone else, someone he probably would rather not have been, but he was forced into the role, in order to cease being Dog Nose or Madame l’Ancienne. So he couldn’t take religious vows? Then he would take military ones: Dog Nose became a Priest of War.”

He asked Louis XIV for the command of a regiment. The King, who despised him, refused. And so Eugene fled from France and went over to the enemy. He placed himself at the service of the Empire, where he obtained the command and soldiers he desired. From that moment on his religion became war, and only war.

He would grow merciless, unfeeling and brutal: more masculine than a real man. No one would ever know his true nature. He would not write private letters. Ever.

“His missives have often been intercepted, but they are always disappointing. His correspondence deals exclusively with political and military matters. Eugene does not know feelings, human relations or the impulse of passions: only duty.”

And duty, as he conceived it, was simple: to kill as many enemies as possible. In war he would always refuse armistices, in peace he would seek conflict. In his wish to be sent to the most dangerous fronts, to obtain means and money for his armies, he did not hesitate to argue bitterly with the Emperor: first with Leopold, then with his son Joseph the Victorious.

Time wrought another transformation. The Priest of War became the Captain of Death. When he was in command, the fight was always to the death. In this way, his name would never be associated by anyone — least of all by himself — with tranquillity, love or peace. He had known peace at the Hôtel de Soissons, and had seen that it led to vice.

He would never have lovers of the female sex; if they came his way, he would use them as a smokescreen. Women did not in fact disgust him, but the Captain of Death had very different things on his mind. In the meantime the perverse tendencies of his youth would be forgotten: his old companions in depravity had every reason to hope so.

As the years went by, he counted whizzing cannonballs in their thousands, he saw soldiers dying like flies, the countryside ablaze, mothers and fathers weeping over their slaughtered children, entire nations reduced to ruins. But if there was ever any chance of achieving peace, or even just a truce, he would reject it with all his might. The Captain of Death had to trample every last trace of Madame l’Ancienne into the mud of the trenches.

Sometimes he would attract some young night guard into his tent and share moments of reciprocal intimacy. And then, for just a few instants, Eugene no longer knew who he was: Captain of Death, Priest of War, Dog Nose or Madame l’Ancienne? But the next day, with his well-polished marching boots pulled on tight, everything was as it had always been.

“Now you know the real reason why Eugene of Savoy does not want the war to end,” concluded Atto, exhausted by this unsettling explanation. “I tried in some way to make you understand all this the first day we met again. But now you have — how can I put it? — a more complete picture. Eugene has no idea how to face peace. What could he do without braids on his jacket? He would instantly be turned back into his old self: Madame l’Ancienne. He hates peace, because he is afraid of it. He’s not fighting against Louis XIV, but against himself. And the war continues unabated.”

“Joseph’s new strategy — peace with the Pope and the Hungarian rebels, the division of Spain with France — ”

“. . might have driven Eugene to take extreme steps,” the Abbot anticipated me. “Dog Nose would therefore be assassinating the young condottiero who stole the limelight from him at Landau; and also the Emperor who prevented him from winning military glory in Spain; and finally the man who could one day force him to return to Vienna, to cease fighting, and to become Madame l’Ancienne once again. Finally, in his own body, Eugene is suppressing his own childhood companions at the Hôtel de Soissons: those who stole his innocence.”

“But I still don’t understand: we have too many culprits. England and Holland; Charles, Joseph’s brother; the Jesuits; the ex-ministers; and Eugene of Savoy. Which one of them did it?”

“It’s not clear to me either. Partly because it is only England and Holland that have a definite interest in the Grand Dauphin’s death, while I don’t see how this could serve any of the others. We need to keep a close eye on these Turks and understand just what this dervish, who plays with his neighbour’s head, is up to.”

“That reminds me! I was supposed to meet Ugonio half an hour ago!” I exclaimed, looking up at the rich façade of a small palace in front of us, on top of which stood a magnificent blue and gold clock, showing the hour as 9.30.

The sister had knocked at my door in alarm: the man asking for me had come at nine on the dot. She had never seen him before and he had a menacing appearance. The poor woman did not know where to turn: Cloridia was out, having been urgently summoned to Prince Eugene’s palace. The wife of the first chamberlain was giving birth. And so the nun had asked the strange visitor to come back later.

Since he had refused to give his name on both occasions, I asked the sister for a brief description; a few words sufficed to tell me who it was.

After trying to explain things to her in my pitiful German, I asked Simonis, who turned up at that moment with my son to get new orders from me, to tell the nun that there was no need to be alarmed. She could admit the monstrous individual without any fear, since I knew him and he was perfectly harmless, despite his unusual appearance. Then I sent my little boy to play in the cloisters.

“I humpily offer Your Enormity my most obscene respectables,” Ugonio began unctuously in a subdued and catarrh-filled voice.

Then he saw that Atto was present and launched into further salutations.

“I see with the uttermostful pleasuredom that the His Lordliness the Abbey is in excellentitious healthiness. To be more medicinal than mendacious I complimentate Your Highfulness on his most refineried comportment.”

He now took in the fact that Atto was blind and expressed his sorrow with some perfunctory expressions, assuming a highly affected expression of grief.

“But I recognised you at once,” replied the Abbot, lifting his handkerchief to his nose in response to the disgusting stench given off by the corpisantaro’s greatcoat.

On his back Ugonio bore a large bag of filthy and ancient jute, which seemed to be crammed with a great number of vile, stinking objects.

“No idle chatter,” I said brusquely. “What news do you have?”

The news was abundant and extremely positive, explained the corpisantaro: as he had promised during our previous encounter, he was now free to reveal the nature of his mysterious relations with Ciezeber.

“So go on.”

“I must deliver to him a swindlification of excessing rarity and worthfulness.”

“We know that,” I answered icily, “it’s the head of a man.”

The corpisantaro seemed petrified: how did we know that?

Then he gave a quiet grunt, as if by way of confirmation. The story he went on to relate, which I will now try to repeat as faithfully as possible, sounded truly bizarre and implausible. Afterwards, however, my research substantially confirmed it.

The story began in 1683, during the last and most famous siege of Vienna by the Turks.

It was the Turkish Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had wanted the attack on the imperial capital. He had proposed it to the Great Sultan, had led the army in person and had been disastrously defeated. The responsibility was entirely his; after the debacle, his fate was sealed.

Before setting out for war, Kara Mustafa had been so certain of victory that he had promised to bring the Sultan the head of Cardinal Collonitz, who had always been one of the most active fomenters of war against the Turks. To win the divine favour of Mahomet, before setting out on the military campaign, the Grand Vizier had had a sumptuous mosque built in Belgrade.

After the defeat, the Sultan had not forgotten his subordinate’s promise, and took pleasure in turning it against him with savage sarcasm.

“He played a most abominimous and nauseafull trickery on him,” Ugonio said with coarse glee.

On 25th December 1683, the birthday of Our Lord and therefore dear to Cardinal Collonitz (this was the first cruel irony), around one in the afternoon, three high court dignitaries presented themselves in Kara Mustafa’s apartment in Belgrade, led by the Agha of the janissaries, together with some robust individuals. Kara Mustafa, taken aback, asked what they might want at that hour, and whether anything serious had happened. In the midst of the group of dignitaries he saw the severe face of the Capigi-Bachi, the Sultan’s Grand Master of Ceremonies, and he deduced that the dignitaries must bear orders from the Great Lord. The Agha of the janissaries announced that a decree had been issued by the Sultan; as he drew it forth, four brutes leaped at Kara Mustafa’s neck.

The Grand Vizier was strangled with a rope and then beheaded: the same end (the second cruel irony) that he had sworn for Cardinal Collonitz. Following the ancient Turkish custom, the skin and flesh were then stripped from his face and head. To be certain of his lieutenant’s death, the Sultan had them deliver to him the skin of his face, stuffed with cotton and spices. The stripped skull, along with the body and the rope, was buried (the third tremendous irony of the Sultan) in the mosque in Belgrade built by Kara Mustafa, as a perpetual warning to the subjects of the Sublime Porte who failed in their duty.

“But then the Sultan was confunded by a most discomboboling and gastflabbering contangency,” concluded the pestiferous scoundrel.

The Sultan did not imagine that just five years later, in 1688, Belgrade would fall into Christian hands. After a fierce battle, under the command of the Prince-Elector of Bavaria and the Duke of Lorraine, the imperial troops succeeded in breaking into the city and taking control of it. As the Jesuit fathers were the first to intone the Te Deum after the victory, the mosque of Kara Mustafa was entrusted to two of this order, whose task it was to turn it into a Catholic church. The pair were the confessor of the Duke of Lorraine, Father Aloysius Braun, and the missionary father Francis Xavier Beringshoffen.

One night disturbing noises were heard in the mosque, as of a pickaxe bashing the walls, and objects being smashed. Braun and Beringshoffen, terrified by the thought of ghosts, at once summoned a group of soldiers to find out who could be in the building at that hour. The two trembling fathers entered the mosque with the soldiers, shakily holding a holy water sprinkler and lanterns out in front of themselves, followed by the armed men. They found that it was not ghosts that were disturbing the nocturnal quiet but men of flesh and blood: it was a group of seven musketeers, enlisted in the Christian armies that had just reconquered Belgrade. The musketeers, surprised and frightened by the ambush, explained that they had fought hard during the assault on the city, and some of them had been wounded, but they had missed out on the sharing of the spoils. Winter was on its way, and they did not even have the money to buy warm clothes. However, they had learned from a friend that Kara Mustafa had been buried in that mosque, along with many objects of great value, including luxurious winter garments, which would just suit the seven poor musketeers. They had not thought twice and had broken into the mosque, profaning the tomb of the Grand Vizier.

Fearing that the two priests would be angry at the covert violation of the mosque, which legally belonged to the Society of Jesus, the seven soldiers offered to hand over to the Jesuits everything they had found in the tomb of Kara Mustafa, including the most unexpected object: his head.

At that point Ugonio rummaged in his lurid jute bag and pulled out an object the size of a melon, wrapped in a greyish cloth. He unwrapped it: we all instinctively jumped back, even the Abbot.

It was a human head covered in a layer of silver. However, the features could be discerned: a high forehead, a long aquiline nose rather like that of certain Jews, narrow eyes, traces of beard on the cheeks, and a typically Turkish frown transformed by violent death into a contorted and desperate grimace.

“Then that is. .” I hesitated.

“. . the head of Kara Mustafa,” Atto completed, aghast.

“So that’s the head Ciezeber wanted from you!” I exclaimed.

Ugonio offered me the exhibit, which I examined with a mixture of curiosity, disgust and reverence, happy to leave it in the corpisantaro’s claw-like hands.

In that face covered by an accretion of silver, in its grimace of suffering and torment, lay all the tragedy of the last siege of Vienna: Kara Mustafa’s mad plan of conquest, the bloody battle, the final defeat of the Ottomans and the tragic death of the Grand Vizier who had dreamed of crushing Christianity. How many deaths in battle was just one of the wrinkles of that pain-wracked face worth? How many miles of military march had it seen? How many tears of widows, wounded men and orphans were condensed in just one of the tears wept by the dying Kara Mustafa? The patina of silver, which was intended to protect this remnant of human flesh, actually made it a perpetual monument to the vanity of things.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Atto as he listened to the story, as astonished as I was, hidden behind the protective cover of his blind man’s glasses. How many such interrogations I had seen him carry out, years ago! But now it was I who held the cards: I was not just a fully rounded adult, but also a man marked by experience. Old Atto, I thought with a bittersweet mixture of pride, vindictiveness and compassion, was at that age when even the boldest paladins become peons.

But I shook off these thoughts and returned to the present.

“Why were you so afraid to tell us this story?” I asked Ugonio. “How did you think that Ciezeber might hurt you?”

“Decreasing the scrupules so as not increase one’s scruples, I have sworn and cursed not to blabber anything of the task the dervishite has consigned me. The Ottomaniacs desiderate most lustily and lechily the noggin of the Great Visionary. They think it will prevent all misfortunations: it will help them to organise a most cudgelsome and slaughterous army, and to spiflicate Vienna with much pervertitude and ravishment.”

I learned with amazement that the Turks thought that they could obtain from the head of a dead man what he had failed to achieve when alive. But what bewildered me was the new picture that was forming after Ugonio’s revelations. When my Cloridia had overheard Ciezeber demanding someone’s head at Eugene’s palace, it had had nothing to do with assassination, let alone the feared regicide, but merely concerned the theft of Kara Mustafa’s head. The dervish had hired Ugonio on account of the corpisantaro’s long experience in trafficking relics and mortuary objects, and not for any homicidal project.

And I had thought the life of the Emperor himself was at stake!

The corpisantaro meanwhile concluded the story of the decapitated head. From Belgrade the two Jesuits had brought Kara Mustafa’s head to Vienna, where they delivered it — thus bringing the vengeance full and ironic circle — to none other than Cardinal Collonitz. On 17th September the Cardinal deposited the trophy in the city’s arsenal. Twenty-two years had passed since then.

“And how the devil did you get hold of Kara Mustafa’s head? How did you know where it was?”

“I conductified a painstoking investifigation, and then committed a most blackguardsome and mischieving burgledom,” explained Ugonio.

The corpisantaro had succeeded not only in discovering that Kara Mustafa’s head was held in the city arsenal, but also in stealing it. But then, I said to myself, had I not seen him in Rome carrying out dozens of such nefarious enterprises?

Ugonio, he himself explained with ill-concealed pride, had made rather a name for himself among collectors in that sector. While in the Holy City it was saints’ relics that were most profitable, here in the Caesarean city the market was dominated by anything connected with the two sieges, especially projectiles from the Ottoman cannons. The corpisantaro listed a series of desirable items of booty, like the stone weighing 79 pounds that had been fired from the Leopoldine Island in 1683 and which, complete with commemorative inscription, was still embedded in the façade of the Neustädter Hof, a palace not far off, which ran from Press Street to Crab Street. Or the three cannonballs almost half a rod in diameter, also lodged in the walls, complete with commemorative plaque, of the house known, naturally enough, as House of the Three Balls in the nearby quarter of Sievering. Or the famous Golden Ball, fired by the Turks on 6th August 1683 and still embedded in the façade of a corner house in the square known as Am Hof, a tavern that belonged to Citizen Councillor Michael Moltz, who had had the ball gilded and had named the house At the Golden Ball. Or again the Turkish ball that could be admired in the saloon wall of the Golden Dragon alehouse in Steindlgasse. But the Eszterházy buttery, in Haarhof, was also full of sacred Turkish relics, as the defenders of the city in 1683 had often refreshed themselves there with a glass of good wine; not to mention the rare objects left by the great Polish King Sobieski, when on 13th September 1683, the day after the victory over the Ottomans, he had personally recited the Te Deum in the Loreto Chapel. And to conclude, declared Ugonio, now slavering at the mouth, the relic of relics: in the Romanesque chapel of the Scottish Church there was the oldest Marian statue in Vienna, dating from four centuries earlier, which was said to have miraculously extinguished the fire that had broken out in the early days of the 1683 siege.

These, it was fairly clear, would be the next victims of the corpisantaro’s rapacity. While Ugonio listed them avidly, I groaned to myself.

Once again I found myself floundering midstream. And so the head belonged to Kara Mustafa, Ciezeber’s rituals had purely therapeutic aims and Abbot Melani was a poor old man reduced to attempting a feeble forgery, which had failed almost immediately: but the Emperor was ill and so was the Dauphin!

This might matter to Atto, but it was of very little concern to me. Now that the Abbot had confessed that he no longer counted for anything on the European chessboard, I could finally heave a sigh of relief; there was no longer any risk of my ending up on the gallows for high treason. But no — I said to myself, suddenly on the rack again: someone, after all, must have murdered Dànilo, Hristo and Dragomir, Simonis’s student companions! If the Bulgarian and the Romanian, as the Abbot had said, were subjects of the Sublime Porte, Atto himself, the previous evening, had not been able to rule out the possibility that the three deaths were linked to one another.

One thing was certain: we had not yet discovered what was hidden behind the Agha’s Latin phrase. It could not be an innocent phrase, as everyone had interpreted it during the audience at Prince Eugene’s palace: since then there had been three deaths, and all three victims had been carrying out research into the Golden Apple. That was not all. Hristo, before dying, had confided to Simonis that in his opinion the riddle of the phrase lay in soli soli soli and it had to do with checkmate, or “Shah matt, the King is enclosed”, as I had read in the note found in his chessboard. But what did it mean? To find that out, would we have to start our research all over again, this time focusing on chess? Three students were dead already, the Emperor was ill: time had run out. The path indicated by the Bulgarian really looked like a dead end.

Although the Abbot considered the strange tales about the Golden Apple nonsensical legends (and how could one blame him?), they were the only clue we had to the real meaning of the Agha’s phrase. We needed to take a different tack.

I pulled out Ugonio’s precious ring of keys, which he instinctively tried to grab with his gnarled hands, uttering a muttered exclamation halfway between a curse and a cackle.

“Not yet,” I commanded, jerking back the tinkling metal ring.

The corpisantaro drilled me with his bloodshot little eyes.

“Tell me what your plans are for the next few hours,” I bade him.

“I must insinufy myself into Eugene’s palace,” he answered without losing sight of the key ring, “to deliverate the noggin of the Grand Visionary to the dervishite.”

“Once you have handed over Kara Mustafa’s head to Ciezeber you’ll have no more to fear, I gather.”

The corpisantaro did not answer, thus providing mute confirmation.

“Fine. So if you really want to get your keys back, there’s just one small step you need to take. It’s clear there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Our previous pact is no longer valid. We thought we were dealing with a plan for a murder, but it turns out to have been, well, an archaeological mission: the search for Kara Mustafa’s head. You realise that we had to wait quite a while just to discover that you had nothing important to tell us. These are setbacks that call for serious reparation. We have to reconsider our agreement: I will give you back the keys when you find out what words are written on the spire of St Stephen’s, where the Golden Apple once was!” I said, remembering that Ugonio was working on a deacon at the cathedral to get information on the subject. “I’m sorry, but only then will our accounts be settled.”

Ugonio answered first with lively protests (“It is an adulterous swindlification, treacherish and duplishitous!” he yelled, rising to his feet), but seeing that Atto and I were adamant, and observing Simonis’s muscles, he gradually became more submissive, settling down to a cantankerous capitulation. He had no choice: we held all the cards. In fact, we would never have denounced him: with all the murders that had happened around us, Atto and I had as little desire to approach the city guard as he did. But he could not know this, and wanted a quiet life.

“I know it perfectfully, and in most pedantical detail!” Ugonio suddenly exclaimed, looking up with a determined air, his eyes fixed on his beloved keys.

“Ah yes?” I said diffidently.

“We are all ears,” said Abbot Melani, who had remained thoughtful throughout. “Begin by telling us who you heard it from.”

“I. . I was informatised. The peas were spilt to me by. . um, a secretary of the burgermister.”

“A secretary of the burgomaster? When and how, for goodness’ sake?”

“To be more padre than parricide, it was two years, six quatrains, thirteen inches and half a lustrum ago, in a secret and most confidentiable meeting,” he answered, promptly putting his hand on his heart by way of oath.

“That may be. But just yesterday you didn’t know it. And what are the words?”

“Er. . hum. . Quis pomum aureum,” began the corpisantaro with his index-finger solemnly raised as if to recite a speech by Cicero, “de multiis cognoravisti. . etiam Viennam multorum turcarum. . talis mela-mangiaturpaternosteramen.”

Before finishing the sentence in an almost incomprehensible mumble, the corpisantaro had hesitated as if he found it hard to remember.

“Can you repeat that?” asked Abbot Melani, taken aback by this disjointed sentence.

Ugonio took a deep breath, as if preparing for a three-day apnoea.

“Quis pomum aureum, de multiis ignoravisti. .” he began to say.

“Previously you said cognoravisti, not ignoravisti.”

Ugonio gave a foul, yellow-toothed smile, which combined sympathy, clemency and a touch of good humour.

“If I am grillified too closefully, I misremember everything sometimes always.”

“You’ve also forgotten, it seems, that the Archangel Michael only wrote seven words. You told me so yourself, don’t you remember?”

“Mmm. . ye-es. .”

“That’s enough, Ugonio,” I interrupted him. “I can see that there’s nothing else for it.”

I got up and opened a little cupboard where I kept several of my chimney-sweeping tools. I chose a large pair of pincers and made as if to break open the key ring.

“No-o-o!” yelled the corpisantaro, throwing himself upon me. He was at once seized by Simonis’s strong arms.

“Keep your ridiculous lies to yourself,” I warned Ugonio. “I must know whether there is really anything written where the Golden Apple used to be, and what. If you don’t give me any proper help, I’ll break the ring and throw all your precious keys one by one into the Danube.”

“You’ve won. This evening all right?”

“So soon? If you try and fool me again. .”

After delivering the head to the dervish, Ugonio had something else “urgentitious and appeteasing” to carry out, he explained with a greedy smile: probably one of his lurid traffickings. After that, he announced importantly, he would devote himself heart and soul to the Archangel Michael’s message; he had an appointment with the deacon of St Stephen’s and he counted on coming straight back to us then with good news.

“Ah yes,” I remembered, “the relic collector. Don’t fob him off with anything obviously fake, otherwise say goodbye to any revelations about the Archangel.”

“And to your keys,” added Simonis, with a laugh.

So we agreed on another meeting at the convent at dinner time, at 17 of the clock. After that, I explained to Ugonio, I would be busy with the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio in the Caesarean chapel.

Ugonio urged us a thousand times to be there ready and waiting with his keys. His “business” could not survive another minute without his beloved key ring, which opened up all gates; his activity as corpisantaro risked total financial collapse. He was old and tired, he whimpered, and had to collect enough resources for the few days that were left to him.

He calmed down only when I swore solemnly on the Bible that I would guard the keys like pieces of pure gold.

After replacing the head in his jute sack, his own face made even greyer, more flaccid and wrinkled by his failure to recover the keys, Ugonio left our rooms, bestowing on them by way of parting gift the same stale stench that I remembered from twenty-eight years earlier, when I had first encountered his shadowy figure in the lugubrious tunnels of subterranean Rome.

As soon as the room was free of his mephitic presence, I replaced the key ring in the cupboard that I had chosen as its hiding place. At that very moment I saw a slip of paper twirl down to the floor in capricious spirals. I picked it up.

It was a little sheet of paper, which had been stuffed inside the key ring until that moment. As a result of all the to-and-fro movement of the ring, it had finally detached itself and in graceful swirls had come to rest at my feet. I opened it up.

“Well, well,” I murmured.

“What is it?” asked Atto.

It was a memorandum: Ugonio’s sordid criminal enterprises, the cream of his depraved and brutal existence, written as a precaution in Italian (or rather, Ugonio’s Italian), lest the note should end up in anyone else’s hands. The first lines referred to the previous days:

Thursday — extort shopkeepers.

Friday — swindlificate nun.

Saturday — Court: bear false witnessification.

Sunday — Distribute forgified coins.

Monday — Return stealified swaggery to blind orphan, but extortify ransom.

Tuesday — Theft in church: bribify priest

The notes left one in no doubt of the corpisantaro’s regular nefarious practises: extortions from shopkeepers; a fraud practised on a young nun; perjury before a court of justice; trafficking in forged money; restitution, on payment of a ransom, of goods brazenly purloined from a poor blind orphan; theft in a church, after purchasing the priest’s acquiescence. Nothing new, in short: the usual outrages to be expected from this creature of the underworld. But what could one say of the note for the following day?

Wednesday — Decapitated head of Hüseyin Pasha to the dervish.

I should have guessed it! The head Ugonio intended to deliver to Ciezeber was not the precious (to the Ottomans at least) head of Kara Mustafa, but that of a certain Hüseyin Pasha. Whoever he was, his skull was certainly not the one the dervish was expecting. For all his magic arts, he was about to become the dupe of the fraudulent tricks of a simple corpisantaro.

As soon as I read the note to Abbot Melani, he was as amazed as I was. But imagine our surprise when, at the very end of that sequence of infamies, I read aloud two expressions, one in Latin, which referred beyond all doubt to someone well known to us:

Wednesday afternoon-Al. Ursinum. Two hanged men.

Then — Deacon of St Stephen’s.

It was too much. I tossed the note into Abbot Melani’s hands, as if he could have deciphered it (and to tell the truth, probably spurred by his impossible desire to read it, he snatched at the scrap of paper with singular alacrity).

I rushed to the door and then into the street, in pursuit of the corpisantaro.

It was too late. By the time I reached Porta Coeli Street, Ugonio had already vanished. I went as far as Carinthia Street, turned back and explored the side roads: nothing.

Back at the convent, I reported my discovery to Abbot Melani.

“Al. Ursinum? Of course, it’s perfectly clear.”

Ugonio had become especially nervous when his collection of keys had been confiscated. With it he had also lost his weekly memorandum, in which he revealed that the head he wanted to palm off on Ciezeber was not that of Kara Mustafa, but some quite different person. The dervish had threatened Ugonio with reprisals should he not keep his assignment secret; one can only imagine what would happen if he were to discover he had been cheated.

But it was the word “Ursinum” that was most deeply worrying: it could only indicate the Latinised name of Gaetano Orsini, the castrated protagonist of Sant’ Alessio. And the abbreviation “Al.” obviously stood for “Alessio”: the name of the oratorio in which Orsini played the role of protagonist. Less clear, but by no means secondary, was the identity of the two hanged men.

What on earth did Ugonio have to do with Orsini? What could a professional sneak thief have in common with a celebrated tenor, a friend of Camilla de’ Rossi, who was actually close to the Emperor? Did the two have an appointment, or even some secret agreement?

Perhaps, quite simply, Orsini was another collector of relics, I told myself, and Ugonio had an appointment to sell him one of his “rare pieces”. But in that case why would the corpisantaro have been so reluctant to tell us about it? With a covetous expression, he had defined his next engagement, after the delivery of the head to Ciezeber, as “urgentitious and appeteasing”: if he had nothing to hide, he would have said whom he was meeting. I had just informed him that I went to the Caesarean chapel every evening for the rehearsals of Sant’ Alessio, so he knew very well that I was acquainted with Gaetano Orsini!

No, Orsini and Ugonio were hiding something. It was as if the devil and holy water were being mixed together, light and dark, nothing and everything. Or maybe it was all too predictable: wasn’t the musical world traditionally a den of spies? Was it not obvious that spies should get together with swindlers? Yes. But who were the two hanged men? We had just heaved a sigh of relief over the head the dervish had demanded, and along came two more corpses!

“So Ugonio is in league with Gaetano Orsini, that beggarly Sant’ Alessio,” exclaimed Melani. “Damnation! And just think we had the filthy corpisantaro in our hands just a moment ago.”

“He won’t abandon his keys, Signor Atto,” I consoled him. “As soon as he comes back we’ll question him closely on the contents of the note.”

Looking shattered, the Abbot sank more profoundly into his armchair. I sat down as well. The sudden shift of perspective brought about by the revelations of the old trafficker in relics had left us speechless.

The corpisantaro had explained things most convincingly: the dervish was not interested in anyone’s death, but in the head of Kara Mustafa. So if there was no shadow of a Turkish plot, who had done away with Dànilo, Hristo and Populescu?

It was a fact that no proof existed against the Turks. There remained Dànilo’s last words just before dying: the young Pontevedrin had clearly stated the name of the elusive Eyyub and of the no less mysterious forty thousand martyrs of Kasim.

But it was possible, I told myself at last, that the poor dying man had been simply delirious, and had been senselessly repeating the results of his research into the Golden Apple. Perhaps Dànilo too had come across the legends whereby the Golden Apple was supposed to have entered the tomb of Eyyub, as we had heard from Zyprian.

Like a ray of sunlight capriciously refracted on the troubled surface of water, everything was multiplying in a thousand directions, its contours and outline becoming blurred. Was the riddle of the Ottoman embassy now somehow mixed up with the mysterious bond between Orsini and Ugonio? And did it have anything to do with the Emperor’s illness? After all, Atto had told me that musicians were all spies; he himself was a living example! And did that also apply to the Chormaisterin?

At that moment there came a knock. It was Penicek. At the porter’s lodge they knew the Bohemian cart driver and let him through without any trouble. He stuttered that he was looking for Simonis: he had come, as promised, to provide more information on human flight and he also had to hand over the notes he had taken on the lessons that he was following on behalf of his Barber. He was accompanied by Opalinski, the Pole.

“Brontology. . stilbology. . nubilogy?” I stammered in bewilderment.

“They are philosophical doctrines one can use to investigate the most mysterious phenomena of nature,” said Simonis rather mechanically, as if he were parroting a university lesson.

Nubilogy, in particular, according to Penicek, suited our case. I turned to Atto to ask if he had ever heard of it, but the old Abbot, overcome by weariness, had dozed off.

“And what is it?” I asked Simonis.

“It’s a science that studies, how can I put it, the interventions and influences of air on bodies, so that they perform a certain sort of motion, which. . I don’t know how to put it. . You explain, Pennal!” ordered my assistant.

Limping forward, the Bohemian opened a bag full of books and laboriously and fumblingly placed the volumes on the table before him.

“Watch where you put your clumsy feet!” Simonis snapped, the Pennal offering him his only chance to vent the fears of the last few days.

“I’m truly sorry, Signor Barber,” he humbly apologised.

Poor Penicek then confessed: not knowing how to proceed with his research into the subject of flying, he had turned to Jan Janitzki Opalinski, who, as everyone knew, was extremely knowledgeable and had been happy to help him out.

“I don’t know why you are so keen to know if a wooden ship can rise into the air,” Opalinski then began, stepping forward, “but it is a much debated issue.”

There was, continued the Pole, a learned professor of natural science who had answered the question. As was always the case in Vienna when there was a technical problem to face, it was an Italian who came to our aid: his name was Ovidio Montalbani, and he had taught for a long time at the University of Bologna. In academic circles he was very well known for having published books of unprecedented doctrinal profundity in which he investigated the most abstruse and obscure fields of knowledge: calopiedology, charagmaposcopy, diologogy, athenography, philautiology, brontology, cephalogy, stilbology, aphroditology and above all nubilogy.

I gave a glance at the first of the books that the Pennal had piled up on the table.

Some pages were marked by little strips of paper. I opened at one of these markers and read:

This Aristotelian anathimiasis, which is none other than a smoky mist which has risen into the air, according to Pliny, and the watery concave vapour of which Metrodorus held discourse, and the Air swollen with Anaximenes, when it is coined in clouds, then still under a fluxile form it becomes visible within the penetrated body of the air, which for this reason appears under a troubled turgidity that is itself also swollen. .

I raised my eyebrows in wonder. Rather than a book of natural science it seemed to be a riddle. I went on to the next bookmark, and tried again:

The total figure of cloudy bodies of the circular, or more appropriately elliptical, air, which might appear, as can be seen, an aggregate of infinite, partial, highly variable and varied circumscriptions. It must conform itself in accordance with the figure of its local and conservative space, which is circular, or elliptical. .

“Damn it, this is totally incomprehensible,” I exclaimed impatiently, giving the book to the Bohemian.

Penicek received the book still open at the page where I had read this last passage, adjusted his glasses on his nose, read through these lines, and finally, with a contrite air, passed it to Opalinski, who, after reading it through, declared: “It’s perfectly clear.”

“What’s perfectly clear?”

“Summarising very roughly, clouds are not made of a particular substance, but of a certain vaporous mist. Since air is mobile, this mist can be lifted and moved.”

“But I know this!” I protested.

“Well, Signor Master,” replied Opalinski, remaining unruffled, “at this point another work by Montalbani might be useful to us, the Brontology, which examines with most fertile acumen all the secrets of thunder, lightning flashes and thunderbolts. But as time is short, it will be better to consider directly the work of another author, a compatriot of Montalbani, master of great science and doctrine, the most learned and glorious Doctor Geminiano Montanari.”

He picked from the pile a tattered little book with a curious title and handed it to me:

THE FORCES

OF AEOLUS

PHYSICAL-MATHEMATICAL

DIALOGUE

I turned it round uncertainly in my hands.

“And so?” I asked, not even bothering to try to read it.

Opalinski took the book back and opened it at one of the usual strips of paper, then handed it back to me.

“It’s one of the most exquisitely erudite books of the great master,” he informed me.

I looked. There were two illustrations that were, for once, very clear:

“Here, do you see? This is the ship, and the whirling current of a vortex is approaching. These vortices, also known as waterspouts, can flatten homes, churches, bell towers or even lift entire buildings with all the people inside.”

Then he pointed at the second picture.

“You see? Here the sailing ship has been picked up and — whish! — carried up into the sky.”

Simonis looked at me in utter amazement.

“I know about whirlwinds,” I said, “and their devastating effects.”

Opalinski and Penicek nodded.

“A thousand thanks, Jan, for your valuable help,” said the Greek, looking highly satisfied. “Signor Master, may I leave you a moment?” he asked. “I’ll just take my friends to my room and come straight back.”

I nodded.

“And you, take your hat off, idiotic Pennal! Say goodbye properly to Signor Master, you grinning ape!” he said, cuffing the poor cripple on the head. The latter humbly and contritely bowed several times, supporting himself awkwardly on his lame leg.

A few minutes later my assistant was back.

“In short, Signor Master,” he began, smiling radiantly, “the Flying Ship could have been taken and lifted into the air by one of those whirlwinds or vortices or tornadoes or whatever they’re called, which can swallow up entire fleets, lift them up, transport them to some other place and set them down on the ground, without the crew being harmed at all.”

“Yes, and the Flying Ship is much smaller and lighter than the vessels that sometimes get lifted by waterspouts,” I added thoughtfully.

The Greek nodded with satisfaction.

“But. .” I objected, “was there any wind, when we took off from the ball stadium?”

Simonis was silent.

“I don’t think so,” I answered myself.

“No, there wasn’t,” he confirmed, already less self-assured.

“Were there any great gusts, or any especially swirling currents?” I insisted.

“Well, no. No, there wasn’t anything like that,” he admitted.

“So it is highly improbable that the Flying Ship rose into the air because of a whirlwind,” I concluded.

“Highly is the right word, Signor Master, very good,” Simonis complimented me.

I said nothing for an instant, to be sure that my assistant had no other arguments. He had not. With a tinge of melancholy I looked at the pile of books Opalinski had gathered together. My assistant was picking them up to replace them in Penicek’s cloth bag.

“Just one question, Simonis: why does Jan Janitzki understand what’s written in those books and you don’t?”

“Simple, Signor Master: he studies.”

I was about to ask him what he did do at the university, but I refrained; he had already explained all too clearly what the real occupations of Viennese students were.

When the Greek had closed the door behind himself, I turned towards Atto. He was still snoring, with his head bent awkwardly and stiffly to one side.

He was lucky! Old age deprived him of the strength needed to face distress, and consigned him into the oblivious arms of Morpheus. In the past he would have racked his brains ceaselessly over what was happening, just as I was doing. I was at a loss. Nothing seemed to make any recognisable and logical sense, but at the same time I could not afford to overlook anything and risk losing the thread of my actions and ending up involved in some disaster. Having escaped a death sentence for espionage on behalf of France, I now risked being accused of complicity in a series of murders, or of shady manoeuvres against Prince Eugene and his Ottoman guests.

And I thought: Cloridia and I had arrived in Vienna to turn our lives around. We had left the city of popes with all its illusions: Rome the turbid, Rome the duplicitous, Rome the cold stepmother, heedless of its children. In the Caesarean city we had felt we were breathing pure, fresh air. But now the carriage of our existence seemed to be mired once again in the marsh of suspicion, ambiguity and deceit. Even the diabolical Abbot Melani, sheltering behind his dark glasses, could hardly keep up with matters.

Oh, Flying Ship, I suddenly said to myself, oh Ark of Truth, did you raise me to the heavens only to delude me? I had fled the mud of Rome; I was once again trudging through the murky swamp of the possible.

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

“They start at three in the morning with a soup containing three eggs and spices. At five, cream of three eggs and chicken soup. At seven, a couple of fresh eggs. At nine, egg yolk soup with spices and a good few pancakes, plus a goblet of aromatic wine from Traminer. At midday roast capon and other birds, wild cockerel and wine, with assorted types of bread. At one o’clock a couple of baked cakes and more wine. At three, a snack with roast capon, a dish of fried fishes, with wine, bread and mixed dumplings. At five a good egg pie, with wine. For dinner: from five to six courses, including boiled and roast meat, freshwater fish. At seven another good chicken soup. At nine a frying pan full of baked cakes, bread, wine and assorted loaves. At midnight, another egg yolk soup with spices. Can you believe it?” exclaimed Cloridia.

The first chamberlain’s wife had given birth to a beautiful boy. My gentle consort had just returned from Prince Eugene’s palace. Now she could take up her post with Abbot Melani again and relieve me of my duties. As Atto was snoring, my wife recounted the birth to me. Immediately after delivery, the mother had begun, after the Viennese fashion, to gorge herself on every possible delicacy.

“I said to her: do you really want to guzzle all that stuff? It’s not a calf you’re suckling. Do you know what she replied? That where she comes from, in Lower Austria, new mothers eat much more. Immediately after birth, what with snacks, luncheons and dinners, they stuff themselves 24 times in 24 hours. Not to mention the parties after the baby’s born: to celebrate a birth it’s considered an offence to the guests to consume anything less than 110 pounds of lard, 60 of butter, from 1,000 to 2,000 eggs, 120 pounds of breadcrumbs and an entire barrel of aromatic wine from Traminer.”

While Cloridia chattered away, all afire as she always was after a successful delivery, my mind was on other things. The first chamberlain’s wife: it was she who had told Cloridia that Prince Eugene kept the piece of paper with the Agha’s mysterious utterance in his personal diary.

It was true that the Turks now seemed to have little to do with the Emperor’s illness, but if we wanted to know just what the Agha’s phrase concealed, perhaps all that remained was to have a look at the paper on which it was written. At this point anything was worth trying.

I waited for my wife to conclude her rant and I went on to tell her, in a low voice so as not to wake Atto, what had happened so far that day: the Abbot’s confession, Kara Mustafa’s head and the rest.

“I had thought of that myself,” Cloridia said at the end. “Perhaps the phrase needs to be interpreted in a different way. Perhaps it’s a secret code, or maybe the paper the Agha read from, the one he gave to Eugene, contained something else.”

“Do you think you could get hold of that piece of paper from your new mother, even for just an hour?”

“I told you, I had already thought of that!” she answered, and pulled it from her pocket.

I had no wish to enquire with what promises (or subterfuges) and at what risk Cloridia had obtained it from the first chamberlain or from his wife.

“I must give it back this very evening. Prince Eugene writes in his diary every day after dinner.”

“Speaking of that, wasn’t he supposed to leave for The Hague today?”

“He’s put it off.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Maybe because of the Emperor’s illness,” I suggested.

“Could be. But His Majesty is continuing to get better. Whatever the reason, Eugene takes his diary with him when he’s at war. We’re lucky that he hasn’t left yet.”

She handed the piece of paper to me. In the centre of it, in the uncertain handwriting of a Turk, lay the famous phrase soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum. Nothing else.

“May I?” asked Simonis at that moment, drawing near.

He scrutinised the paper carefully, taking it to the window to examine it better in the daylight.

“Signor Master, if you have no other orders for me today, I could perhaps help you to find out whether this piece of paper conceals anything.”

“We’ll go the Place with No Name tomorrow. This matter is more urgent. But what do you plan to do?” I asked with some curiosity.

“In my room I have just what is needed.”

A moment later we were all in Simonis’s room. There we found Penicek, zealously scribbling away in the Greek’s notebooks, and Opalinski intent on copying the notes for himself.

“Have you finished, Pennal?” asked Simonis brusquely.

“At this very moment, Signor Barber,” he stammered. “Here, I’ve made a fair copy of everything.”

“Good,” declared my assistant, after giving a quick glance at the lame Bohemian’s work. “And don’t you ever dare to give me a rough copy of the notes again, do you understand?” he reprimanded him severely.

“Yes, yes, Signor Barber, forgive me, Signor Barber,” said the Bohemian, his head bowed.

“A Pennal from Prague I had to end up with,” grumbled my assistant to himself, while he rummaged through the books in his trunk.

He pulled out a tiny volume, then he went to fetch a chair for Cloridia. I picked up the book. The title page was decidedly spare in its details:

Doctoris Henrici Casparis Abelii

Studenten Künste

Which is to say “Artifices of the Students” by Doctor Henry Gaspar Abelius. No date or place of printing, nor even the printer’s name. It was no more than forty or so pages. I opened it. There was no preface, no letter to the gentle reader, and not even a dedication to some respectable patron. It was divided into short chapters. I dipped into it.

“Secret against wounds from weapons,” I read slowly in my laborious German.

“Here, Signor Master,” Simonis said quickly, snatching the book from me and opening it at another page. “This is the part that interests us: ‘How to do invisible writing and make it reappear.’ ”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed Cloridia. “Just what we need. How does it work?”

Opalinski looked up inquisitively.

Simonis explained the arduous and dangerous task we were embarking upon.

I was afraid that the Pole might get alarmed and go rushing off. But he did not. As I had already noticed the previous evening, Janitzki did not seem particularly alarmed by the deaths of his fellow students.

“So now,” concluded Simonis, “we finally have the chance to discover whether the Agha’s phrase conceals a secret or not. If we don’t find anything on this piece of paper either, it means that the Turks have nothing to do with the matter. And so our three companions did not die on account of their investigations into the Golden Apple.”

“You can rely on my help,” answered Opalinski.

“So,” the Greek went on to read, “here it says that to make writing invisible, you have to put acqua fortis in the ink, but this often results in yellow stains.”

According to Doctor Abelius’s little book, Simonis went on, others write with strong vincotto mixed with straw ash, as is explained even more clearly in Weckeri Secretis, which we did not have.

“If necessary we can send the Pennal to go and get it,” the Greek stated imperiously.

“Um, what would that be?” asked Penicek timidly.

“The De Secretis by Alessio Pedemontano, translated from Italian into Latin by Jacob Wecker — everyone knows it!” Opalinski mocked him, once again in a good mood.

“Ass of a Praguer!” raged Simonis, cuffing the poor Pennal repeatedly and noisily.

The Polish student, as Simonis had said and as I had observed myself, was extremely erudite. Poor Penicek, by contrast, did not seem so well prepared.

My assistant began to read from the book again:

“To make the writing reappear, take gall apples, crumble them into large pieces, leave them for an hour in vincotto, distil the resulting water, soak a cotton wad in it and dampen the writing.”

“Right, we can start from there,” proposed Penicek.

“Have you got any gall apples, idiot of a Pennal?” Simonis attacked him.

“I haven’t but I know that Koloman Szupán is a real artist in these tricks.”

“Really? He never told me,” said Opalinski, who was his great friend, in surprise.

“Koloman is Hungarian: he has the blood of Attila, King of the Huns, who was more famous in his day for his skill in ciphering and deciphering messages, by means of invisible writing and such things, than for being the Scourge of God. He was a great diplomat,” stated Penicek.

“Attila?” we all said in amazement.

“Attila.”

Hungary got its name from the Huns, explained Penicek. Those fearsome barbarians occupied it in remote ages. It was part of ancient Pannonia, subjugated by Rome under the Empire of Augustus, and famous for its continual rebellions. In Pannonia, explained the Pennal, there was a certain nation close to the banks of the Maeotian Marshes. The people that lived and traded there were wild, misshapen brutes, unable to communicate articulately; they used a certain grunting sound that always seemed to finish with hunhun, from which they became known as the Huns, and then the Hungarians.

“By the way,” my assistant asked Jan, “do you know where Koloman is?”

“No.”

“No one’s seen him,” observed Penicek. “A pity. He’s the one who knows Balamber’s trick.”

“What is that?” we all asked together.

The Huns — explained the Bohemian gazing upwards, as if searching in his own memory — had lived isolated from everything and everyone until the year of health 370. The Church of Christ was governed at that time by St Damasus, the Empire by Valens, and the Kingdom of the Scythians by Balamber. When hunting a deer, Balamber was drawn by it away from his lands, to the Maeotian marshes, which were frozen at the time. Without knowing it, he was the first foreigner to arrive in Hungary. After observing the view, Balamber forgot about the deer and began to consider the new lands before him and to explore them. When he got back home he talked about them and praised them so highly that the desire to take possession of those lands grew, and very soon the Hungarian lands were overwhelmed by a great invasion. Balamber crossed over the Tanaïs, subjugated the Tauric Chersonese and the Goths who occupied it, and joining up with the Alans moved on towards the provinces of Moesia and Dacia.

“Nobody could resist him. He gave his messengers little pieces of blank paper, from which only his allies could extract the messages of the Scythian king.”

On his way through these regions, however, Balamber died, and was succeeded by Mundsuch, captain of the same nation. Mundsuch finally conquered the lands of Hungary. His sons were Attila and Bleda.

“Bleda did not last long: Attila, who had a nasty temper, very soon killed him. Because of his cruelty he was known as the Scourge of God, but he had inherited the secret of his grandfather Balamber, and it was thanks to that — and not to his strength — that he was able to descend into Italy undisturbed with a hundred thousand men and put the peninsula to fire and the sword. But he also founded the beautiful and most serene Venice, which — and it is no coincidence — is the queen of espionage. It is said that the Doges secretly hand down the secret of Balamber, left to them by Attila, from one to another. And everyone knows the shady dealings that go on between the Most Serene Republic and the Sublime Ottoman Porte.”

Penicek was right, I remembered at that moment. Twenty-eight years earlier Abbot Melani himself had told me that when the Pope had called upon the whole of Europe to defend Vienna from the Ottomans, only one other power, apart from France, had held back: Venice.

“So this piece of paper could hold a secret message written using Balamber’s trick!” I exclaimed.

“Highly possible,” confirmed the Pennal. “And in that case Koloman is our last hope.”

“First of all, let’s read on,” Opalinski proposed, returning to the recipes of Doctor Abelius. “Perhaps we’ll find less secret means.”

“I agree,” Simonis echoed him. “If we fail we’ll look for Koloman.”

To cancel something written, continued the little handbook, some used lemon juice, Spiritu vini and Sale armoniaco, but if you then added Alumine piumoso and distilled it in an alembic, the writing would reappear. Of course, as my assistant’s little room was hardly an alchemical laboratory, we did not have any Alumine piumoso on hand, nor even a simple alembic.

“There, maybe I’ve got it,” exclaimed Simonis. “Here it says how to write something secret using normal words.”

This happens, explained the book, when the words or letters that matter are counter-marked by little signs or hooks, or the words follow in a fixed number, or when the seventh or eighth word or letter matter, but in such a way that both meanings — the patent and the hidden one — work well in the context, so that the secret is not noticed by third parties and yet is understood by those who need to know it.

We pored over the paper but could find no trace of little marks, however miniscule. So then we tried the other method. But there were very few words and they were all short; one of them, “ad”, consisted of only two letters.

“Sssapva, ooodoeu, solaone. .” we all tried together, one of us taking the first letters, one the second, and one the first, second and third in succession, and then starting over again with the first. .

Soon Simonis’s room echoed with a confused mewling that lasted until we had exhausted all possibilities. In vain, alas.

The Greek leafed through his curious handbook again.

“Ah, there are writings that remain invisible until the paper is immersed in water or passed in front of the fire. This is much simpler.”

“What?” said Cloridia, startled. “I have to take that piece of paper back to the palace just as it is!”

“Give it to me,” I said to Simonis, taking the book from him and beginning to read: “Take vitriol or galanga, dissolve it in water, throw in powder of gall apples and stir it. After twenty-four hours filter with a clean cloth and use it to write; when it is dry you will not be able to see anything on the paper.”

If you wanted to read what was written, concluded the recipe, you had to put the paper in clean water and after a few minutes white letters would appear.

But if the invisible writing had been done with the juice of onions or garlic, anyone who wanted to read it would have to hold the letter over the fire and at once reddish writing would appear.

The other systems indicated by Doctor Abelius were, unfortunately, even more complicated. If lemon juice had been used to write, in order to read it you had to grate a Lithargyrium nut, or silver foam, boil it in vinegar and then immerse the paper in it. This would reveal white script. But if the ink consisted of vitriol that had been crushed and dissolved in water, you would have to pulverise a dram of gall apples, pour a half measure of pure water over it, stir, sift with a cloth and wet the paper with this water; this would reveal black script.

Another way to make invisible writing and bring it to light, was to make an ink by dissolving vitriol in vincotto, filtering it with a linen cloth and leaving it to stand until it became clear. Then you took oat straw reduced to ashes and rubbed it with pure water on a coloured stone, until it became a convenient colour for writing. With this ink you then wrote — between the now dry invisible lines on the same piece of paper — a normal letter with nothing secret in it, so that no one would suspect there was anything hidden. Anyone who wanted to read the hidden lines would have to boil gall apples in wine, dip a sponge in it and wipe it delicately over the letter. The visible lines would disappear and the previously invisible ones would emerge in their place.

In short, the waters that should bring out the hypothetical writing on the Agha’s piece of paper were complicated concoctions of ingredients that only an apothecary could supply. But the worst hypothesis of all was yet to come. If the writing had been done with a mixture of minced silver foam, strong vinegar and egg white, to read it we would have to burn the Agha’s paper until it turned black: at that point white letters would appear.

“Have you gone mad?” my wife kept repeating as we read the book aloud, with her hands on her chest.

In the end she was persuaded to allow the least risky expedient: rapid immersion in water. But she did not want to witness the experiment, which made her extremely anxious, and took the opportunity to go back to our rooms to watch over Abbot Melani as he slept and to take care of our son.

Fortunately the Agha’s paper was of the best and thickest, the kind used for messages to be sent by courier through rain and snow, over rivers, lakes and countless other obstacles. It was designed to stand up to all the discomforts of travel; I was sure it would resist. Almost as if it were a sacred ceremony, Simonis fetched a bowl of water, while Opalinski stretched out a white cloth on which we would lay the Agha’s paper. With my heart pounding, I dipped it for an instant into the bowl, taking care not to wet the part with the Agha’s phrase, for fear the ink would run.

Nothing happened, but fortunately the paper passed the test more or less unharmed. We waited for it to dry, placing a small brazier a little way off. Then we tried with the gentle flame of a candle stub to see if any hidden writing emerged. Nothing. For obvious reasons I discarded the carbonisation method, and resigned myself to trying the remaining methods. I told Simonis to make a list of what we needed: vitriol oil, alembics, alumine piumoso, et cetera et cetera. Then I gave it to Penicek.

“Here’s some money,” I said. “Go in your cart to the Red Crab apothecary, near the Old Market, and get everything.”

“A pity good old Koloman Szupán isn’t here with us,” sighed the Pennal, screwing up his little eyes to stare at the list for the apothecary. “With all this stuff he would know how to get any secret out of the Agha’s paper.”

“I’d really like to know where he’s got to,” said Simonis.

“Perhaps Opalinski,” the Pennal timidly ventured, “has some notion — ”

“Not the faintest idea,” the latter cut him short.

“A pity,” repeated Penicek. “Perhaps Koloman is hiding because he’s scared. After they killed Dragomir in that way. .”

Opalinski lowered his eyes.

“If he’s vanished because he’s afraid,” the Bohemian considered, limping towards the door, “it would soothe him to know that the dervish didn’t really want to cut anyone’s head off. It’s a pity we can’t tell him so.”

“This evening I’ll go and see if I can track him down in some tavern,” promised Jan Janitzki.

“This evening will be late,” insisted Penicek. “Signor Barber is right, this is the great chance to find out if the Agha’s phrase conceals something or not. Signor Barber says truly: if we don’t find anything on this paper, it means the Sublime Porte has nothing to do with this whole story. And so — as Signor Barber neatly puts it — we will finally have the proof that Dànilo, Hristo and Dragomir were not done away with for their enquiries into the Golden Apple.”

“Bravo, Pennal! Incredible, there really is a glimmering of intelligence in that brute’s head of yours!” exclaimed Simonis, pleased with the praise bestowed on him.

“All the same,” I put in, “if Koloman is hiding, we could end up wandering all over the city. .”

“He’s at the House Goat.”

Opalinski knew where to find the Hungarian. Koloman had confided in his friend: he was hiding in the attic of an open-air inn, known as the House Goat, in the suburb of Ottakring.

Penicek had guessed correctly: after Populescu’s death, Szupán was afraid. And so he had gone into hiding and had made Jan swear that he would not reveal his hiding place to a living soul.

But now the Pole had spoken. It was a question of tracking Koloman down to let him know the reassuring news about the dervish, and at the same time to seek his help in examining the Turkish Agha’s paper. But Opalinski already seemed sorry he had let the secret out, and his face had turned dark.

“Come on, let’s go,” I exhorted him impatiently.

“If you don’t mind, wouldn’t it better if I went first to the apothecary to get the remedia before he shuts up shop?” the Bohemian proposed. “I’ll come straight back, pick you up in the cart and we can all go to Koloman.”

“If we all set out together we’ll be quicker,” I objected. “Once we get to Koloman, we can start the experiments with his help.”

“With Signor Master’s permission, if I may be so bold,” Penicek timidly remarked, “doesn’t Signor Master think it risky to let the Agha’s paper leave the secure walls of this convent and to carry out delicate trials in a public place?”

“Good Lord, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “I must be really tired. You’re right, we had better go and fetch Szupán and bring him here.”

“On reflection,” Opalinski put in, “despite the good news we’ll be bringing him, it might take hours to persuade Koloman to lend us a hand in this matter. And, I repeat, even though we are friends, he has never talked to me about Balamber, Attila, ciphered codes or any of the rest. If he doesn’t agree to help us, we could end up not having enough time to do the experiments by ourselves.”

After further discussion we finally decided to try without Koloman. Opalinski’s face brightened: should the experiments work, his Hungarian friend would never find out that he had blown the gaff on his hiding place. And so we sent the Pennal to the apothecary.

“And hurry!” roared the Greek, making the poor cripple jump.

The Bohemian student returned more than an hour later, panting and sweating from his hurried journey and from a long argument with the apothecary, who had been unwilling to sell him some of the preparations, which were potentially toxic. He had asked a thousand questions about what the devil all this stuff was for, and finally had kept him waiting a good while on account of the laborious Galenic preparation of a couple of remedia.

My assistant’s little room was quickly turned into an alchemic kitchen, with the cauldron on the hearth full of smoking and foaming alembics, while the air was saturated with pungent smells.

“Nothing at all, damnation!” Simonis cursed impatiently.

The only effect achieved by all that busy activity was that the paper now had unsightly creases and singed margins.

“How can we put it back in Prince Eugene’s diary in this state?” I fretted. “If Cloridia sees it, I’m done for!”

It was now two in the afternoon. We had been racking our brains for almost three hours over this little piece of paper, which refused to give up its secrets, if it had any. To the great dismay of Opalinski, our only resource now was Koloman Szupán.

On the way, Opalinski seemed in a state of mute anxiety. Perhaps he was wondering what Koloman would say when he saw us arriving.

I was in a grim mood too. If Koloman could not manage to extract anything from the Agha’s paper, this would be good news in one way, since it would free us from the terror of the Turks. On the other hand, it would leave us in utter darkness: three students had died one after the other and the murderers (or the murderer) did not yet have a name.

I looked at Simonis: he was sitting opposite me, his dull eyes distractedly following the rows of vineyards running by our sides. Before setting out he had put a small bag around his neck, which he now stroked meditatively, probably sharing my serious thoughts.

“Why on earth did Koloman choose to hide in the House Goat?” I asked Janitzki.

“An Italian monk took him there. Koloman actually asked for shelter in a monastery, but they didn’t want him there.”

“Didn’t your companion go to an Italian monk to get news of the Golden Apple?” I asked him at once.

“I remember that,” confirmed Simonis, “an Augustinian who used to hear the confessions of the Turkish prisoners of war who wanted to convert.”

“Yes, it’s true, but I don’t know whether it’s the same one,” answered Opalinski.

“What?” said Penicek in alarm. “Has Koloman gone mad?”

“Why?” we asked in unison.

“Didn’t you hear that they arrested an Augustinian this morning? An Italian who has been accused of a string of murders and rapes.”

A chill descended upon us.

Our lame cart driver, by contrast, seemed in a feverish state:

“So Koloman had to go and hand himself over to an Italian monk, of all people? I thought he was smarter than that!” he repeated, shaking his head, as he drove us outside the city walls, towards the suburb of Ottakring.

“Praguer brute!” Simonis reacted. “How dare you? Apologise and then shut up.”

But either because of the praise he had received earlier from his Barber or from underlying fear, Penicek seemed to have no intention of shutting up. On the contrary, laying aside his humble and contrite air he persisted doggedly:

“Doesn’t Koloman know that monks are the most treacherous and dangerous breed? And Italians to boot!”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, annoyed that this wretched lame Pennal, the servile laughing stock of his companions, should take such a knowing tone when talking about my fellow countrymen.

“Filthy Bohemian animal!” snarled Simonis, leaping to his feet and striking the driver on the back of his neck. “What’s got into you? Apologise to Signor Master.”

“Forget it,” I said to my assistant. “But you,” I said brusquely to the Pennal, being accustomed now to treat him as roughly as all the others did, “I asked you a question. What’s wrong with Italian monks?”

Halfway through the sixteenth century, answered Penicek, made nervous by his Barber’s reprimand, Martin Luther came along and lifted the stones off those whitened sepulchres and vipers’ nests, the monasteries. All the things that had previously gone on in the dark were now exposed to the light. Many monks abandoned their orders, got married and joined the Lutherans. The number of Catholic monks went down alarmingly.

“Just what are you saying, Pennal?” Opalinski said indignantly. “Are you on the side of Luther’s cankerous heresy?”

“What can you expect from a Praguer?” muttered Simonis.

“Go on, Penicek,” I ordered him.

The ancient monastery of the Augustinian Hermits of Vienna, at the time situated next to the Caesarean palace, was on the point of closing down. The order was forced to seek the help of brothers from other countries. Reinforcements came from the religious houses of Italy, which had not been affected by the wind of the Reformation.”

“A godless wind from the backside,” added Opalinski.

But unfortunately the Italian fathers (especially those of a higher rank), being closer to and more familiar with Rome, felt somehow superior and worthier. They despised and mistreated their Viennese brothers and wove mysterious diplomatic intrigues with the foreign ambassadors in the Caesarean city.

“You mean the Italian brothers were spies?” I asked suspiciously.

“The imperial authorities were convinced of it.”

As a consequence of certain visits or inspections in the monastery, suspicious characters of every type were found in the cloisters: bandits, plunderers and all sorts. The Italian monks were accused of exploiting the proximity of the royal palace and their links with the imperial court to spy on all those in the pay of France or other foreign powers, and in the end orders came to drive them out, forbidding them to return and decreeing that in future all fathers superior must be German-speaking.

The Germans were more honest, but they had other faults. They were a little cold in their faith, and, above all, incompetent. They lacked the human touch that, although often perverse, came naturally to their Italian brothers. They were great rogues, these brothers from the south, but they knew how to nurture souls and to win over people, and when necessary they were extremely wily and shrewd. Rome and the fathers general of the Augustinian order meanwhile insisted on having their own men on the spot, and in the end they won. The Italians were readmitted, then driven out again, taken back, thrown out yet again and so on, while the people looked on in amazement and wondered whether the problem was the dishonesty of those being expelled or the confused ideas of the expellers.

Meanwhile the Catholic Counter-Reformation got under way, the principal lines being dictated by Rome. The fathers superior sent some of their trusted compatriots to Vienna. The court could not refuse them, because in the meantime the Prior of the Augustinian monastery, who was not Italian, had fled to Prague just before an inspection, where he was finally arrested. He was guilty of serious financial malpractice, which had left the monastery up to its ears in debt, having broken the same imperial edicts that forbade the monks from selling off the property of the monastery, from turning themselves into wine traders, from trading in agricultural commodities, et cetera et cetera.

In short, within the holy walls peace was a chimera. When the Italians came back, quarrels and rows broke out continually. All privileged relations with the Emperor’s court had broken down in an atmosphere of diffidence and mutual contempt. The monks continued to quarrel with the civil authorities; the fathers superior quarrelled with their subordinates, and also among themselves. If one of them bought a vineyard or a piece of land for the monastery, his successor would sell it, and then they would accuse one another of having squandered the order’s money. The case would end up before the civil authorities, who would find faults on both sides, blaming all the monks, and so on, partly because the fathers superior were substituted too frequently, and this greatly multiplied the number of litigants.

Since no one was above reproach, the Italians had no difficulty in lording it over everyone. Acrimony, quarrels, backbiting, envy and calumny lit the fuse of hatred between the Teutonic monks and the Italians, and if the new prior tried to make peace, he would quickly be insulted by the Germans and get drawn into the intrigues of the Italians, who had a damnable gift for sowing discord and creating incomprehensible disputes out of nothing, so that everyone suffered, including the Italians.

“In the end the Jesuits got involved in the matter, obtaining a bull from Pope Urban VIII with permission to confront the Augustinian Hermits — Italians and non-Italians — and move them outside the walls, without any warning, into the suburb of Landstrasse, where they still remain. Their place was then taken by the Barefoot Augustinians, ‘imported’ from Prague, a far more virtuous order.”

“The order of Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara,” I said.

“The very one. And as far as I know there’s not a single Italian among them,” sniggered Penicek.

“Are you happy now, Pennal?” grumbled Simonis. “What have you proved with your tirade? That the monks from Prague are better?”

“Or that the Jesuits, as usual, are the cleverest?” added the Pole. “In any case the story of the expulsion of the Augustinians is as old as the hills.”

“But the news of the Augustinian murderer. .”

“Was he an Augustinian Hermit or a Barefoot Augustinian?” asked my assistant point blank.

“Mm. . Hermit.”

“Koloman’s monk friend is a Barefoot Augustinian,” snapped Simonis.

“So, nothing to worry about,” I concluded with a sigh of relief, while the cart pulled up in front of the gate of a vineyard.

We had arrived at the House Goat. It was one of those delicious Heuriger, open-air inns kept by vine growers and their families, where you can go and taste Heuriger, the new wine produced in the vineyard at the back of the house. The House Goat was considered one of the best wine shops, but actually it was difficult to go wrong with the Heuriger inns: the white or red wine trodden in the family cellar is never less than decent, the turkey coated in breadcrumbs by the host’s wife or mother is always crisp, the pork with caraway seeds as fragrant and juicy as the cheeks of the maiden with blond tresses who serves it to you piping hot.

Usually you pass through a gate and find a table under the trees, in an internal courtyard, where even the coarsest customer has the good manners to whisper (in such a place in Rome you would have to plug your ears against the noisy chattering, the guffawing and the clattering of plates, tables and chairs). If there is no room at the tables, you find a place in one of the niches carved into the centuries-old tree trunks, or you can eat at a makeshift counter, formed by rustic planks fixed roughly to a low wall or, if it rains, inside an old barrel quaintly kitted out with table, stools and lace cloths like a squirrel’s den in a fairy-tale. At the entrance you are at once charmed by the graceful, gentle atmosphere, so that even if they served you vinegar instead of wine, and dry bread instead of turkey, you would eat and drink with relish all the same, revelling in the rustle of the branches, the twittering of the birds, the smile of the host’s daughter and the peace that breathes forth from the blessed land where Vienna the Wise sweetly reposes. And as you rotate a glass of ruby-coloured new wine in your hands, and lose yourself in its vermilion depths, the clucking of the nearby hen house will sound like a chorus of Aegean virgins, the braying of the donkey on the nearby farm a verse from Sophocles; and you will not be surprised to find yourself recalling, as happened to me that day, the austere description of Austria by Enea Silvio Piccolomini which I had read before I came to Vienna, and in your memory it will almost turn into a poem:

The Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns provides wine for Bavarians, Bohemians, Moravians and Silesians, hence the great wealth of the Austrians. They make the grape harvest last forty days, and two or three times a day three hundred carts loaded with wine enter Vienna from the suburbs, and every day one thousand two hundred horses, or perhaps more, are used in the work of the harvest. It does no harm to anyone’s prestige to open a wine shop in their own house; many citizens keep a tavern, heat the place and do magnificent cooking. .

My wife and I dreamed of opening a wine shop one day, in the vineyard in the Josephine that Atto Melani had donated to us, I reflected, as I sat on a bench in the Heuriger, which was curiously deserted at that moment, while Penicek waited on the box seat and the other two went in search of Koloman. With my little boy I would keep up our profitable chimney-sweeping activity, in which my son would succeed me; Cloridia would find a steady job as a hostess in our Heuriger; our two daughters would join us, and they would help their mother in the kitchen and the wine shop, while we would find a couple of good strong boys from the neighbourhood to work in the vineyard, and, who knows, maybe they would ask our blessing to wed our daughters, and so the whole family, including (God willing) our grandchildren, would prosper in. .

“Signor Master, Signor Master, quick!”

The voice came from afar, and from above. I looked around but could see nothing. I got up from the garden bench and walked a few steps. Simonis was calling to me from the attic of a service building, which looked onto the animal yard and was connected to the main house by a low building, perhaps the stables. He was at a dormer window, on the rear side of the building, and was waving to attract my attention, rousing me from the languor I had been lulled into by the idyllic setting and the first sips of red wine.

There was no need to climb the stairs and go all the way up there. Walking round in search of the entrance, I ran into a small crowd of people. They were clients of the Heuriger (so that was where they had all ended up) and with them were the host and his wife. They were gathered around the hen run. Then I saw.

At first I took it for a scarecrow, one of those figures made of old clothes and straw that are used to keep birds off the newly sown fields. But what was a scarecrow doing in a hen run? It was Koloman. It wasn’t very different from the way we had found Populescu: Koloman too had been impaled, but by wooden pikes, not by candlesticks.

A fence of pointed poles, thrust deeply into the ground, protected the animals from raids by foxes, martens and wildcats, which could not reach their prey either by digging or by climbing. Impaled on the forest of sharp points, Koloman the great lover, Koloman the poor Hungarian waiter, Koloman the self-styled baron of Varasdin, was gazing eastwards, towards the great plain of his native Hungary. Chickens, hens and turkeys took no notice. They continued to scratch around calmly in the shady pen, disturbed more by our presence than by their scarecrow of flesh and blood.

“Murderers, beasts. . They’re just beasts,” stammered Opalinski, stifling his sobs.

We were now in the little attic room from which Simonis had called out to me.

“Murderers? Who?”

It was my assistant who said this, without removing his eyes from the corpse.

“The ones who murdered Koloman,” I answered, fearing that he was feeling the effect of this blow.

The Greek said nothing. He stood there, looking out of the dormer window. He looked up, to the roof, and then down, towards Koloman and the pikes. Then his eyes shifted again towards the stables that joined the building to the host’s house. I followed the direction of his eyes, and at the window opposite ours I saw the shocked faces of two rosy-faced girls, probably the host’s daughters. Beside them, on the wall of the house, a sundial showed that it was half past three. At that moment Simonis turned towards us:

“What if it were an accident?”

Nothing was clear anymore. We had made a hasty departure from the House Goat and now we were wandering around the nearby high ground known as The Pulpit.

From the top of the steep hill, there was a view over the Caesarean city. It stretched out before our eyes, under the menacing shade of black rain clouds, while we were bathed in warm and inopportune sunlight.

Much had happened since we took our leave of poor Koloman, starting with the scuffle that had broken out involving Opalinski. Things had gone in this fashion.

In exchange for a hefty tip the host had agreed to wait another half-hour before calling the city guard.

The landlord stood gazing at us with an impatient air, waiting for us to go: he had not even asked our names. The only thing he was interested in was the money with which we had bought those few moments of peace for our final farewell to our friend; he thought we were friends or relatives of Koloman who had come to visit him. When the city guard eventually came he would simply show them the boy’s body and say that he had fallen from the roof.

He had never seen or met him, he would say. Actually, he had met him most definitely the day before, when Koloman had been brought to him by the Italian monk to whom the student had turned for help. What had happened after that, the host neither knew nor cared to know. The money he had been given by the monk was enough, he said, though he was quite happy to take our offering as well.

We had just a few moments to ourselves before we slipped away. Koloman’s death, the fourth, left only Simonis and Opalinski of the group of friends I had met at the Deposition just a few days earlier. It was all too obvious that their deaths were interconnected, and that I, in one way or another, was not unrelated to them. And yet we could find no evidence of a common motive or of a link between those deaths and myself. The enquiries into the Turks had led to a dead end. Ciezeber the dervish had nothing to hide, nor did the Agha’s phrase on the Golden Apple, and it was highly improbable that the paper on which it was written concealed anything either. And so Atto Melani’s allusion to the fact that both Hristo and Dragomir were Ottoman subjects meant nothing. By contrast, each of the four victims had an excellent reason for passing into the next world. Dànilo’s and Hristo’s dangerous occupations had perhaps been fatal to them; the Armenian girl to Dragomir; and Koloman?

“He died at three, his regular hour for lying with a woman.”

“Right,” I said, remembering the hour marked by the sun dial, “and at the window opposite there were the host’s two beautiful daughters. Do you think he fell trying to reach them?”

“Koloman, I’ve already told you, was a specialist in climbing over roofs and cornices for his romantic appointments. Perhaps this time he put a foot wrong. It’s just that. .”

“What?”

“It’s just that it seems very unlikely to me that, terrified as he was, he would have felt like having a woman.”

With Koloman Szupán, in short, it was very difficult to work out whether he had been killed or not. Although I myself had looked repeatedly at the place where it had happened, at the position of the body and the trajectory of the fall, although I had examined every detail in the little room in which Szupán had spent his last hours, I could but reach the same conclusion as Simonis: the only thing certain was that the Hungarian had fallen. God alone knew if he had been pushed.

Only Opalinski, overwhelmed with despair and remorse at having betrayed the name of Koloman’s hiding place, seemed sure that his friend had been murdered. And he accused Penicek.

“Augustinian murderer, my foot! Filthy demon from Prague, I’ll tear your eyes out!” he bellowed as we climbed aboard the Bohemian’s cart, after leaving the House Goat.

We just managed to rescue the poor cripple before Opalinski, who was a great strapping fellow, choked him to death in his powerful grip. When he heard what had happened, Penicek repeated the story of the Italian monk, and that Koloman should not have trusted him, et cetera et cetera. But Janitzki attacked him without even letting him finish, so that Simonis and I had to grapple with him to prevent him from strangling the Bohemian.

“But you made a mistake, foul beast of the Evil One! You defenestrated Koloman! You just can’t help yourselves, you Praguers!” yelled Jan, finally slackening his grip on the Pennal’s throat.

At these enigmatic words from Opalinski, Simonis briefly explained that for centuries it had been a brutal custom in Prague to murder people by defenestration. The first such act had taken place on 30th July 1419, when a group of dissatisfied Bohemian nobles had broken into the town hall and thrown the mayor and his councillors out of the window, killing them. Since then the list of precipitations from windows had lengthened. A hundred years earlier a delegation of Protestants had defenestrated two Catholic counsellors of the Emperor, who had landed on a cart full of dung and thus been saved. A famous defenestration, finally, had been the trigger for the Thirty Years’ War.

“When you left to go to the apothecary, you already knew where to find Koloman!” sobbed Opalinski now. “You did all you could to worm his hiding place out of me. And like an imbecile, I fell for it!”

The Pennal had come back after more than an hour. According to Jan Janitzki, he would have had plenty of time to go to the House Goat, defenestrate the Hungarian student and come back to us at Porta Coeli.

“That story about your discussion with the apothecary, you just made it up — confess!”

The Pole was raving. Penicek had saved my life, at the Prater, after Hristo’s death. Janitzki’s accusations made no sense. I told him so, looking for support for my words in Simonis’s eyes.

“Jan, calm down. What you’re saying is absurd. Tell him so, Simonis.”

The Greek had been with me at the Prater; he knew that I owed my life to his Pennal. But my assistant, his face pale and shiny with cold sweat, was gazing into the air. It was impossible to tell if his eyes were impenetrable or simply vacant.

The Pole meanwhile had got out of the cart. Beside himself and shaking with sobs, he refused to stay another minute in the Pennal’s company: he would go back to the city on foot.

“Go to the Red Crab and talk to the apothecary!” he shouted, as he set off. “We’ll see if he backs up the lies of that demonic Bohemian!”

Penicek, purple in the face, sat there on the box seat, his terrified, bespectacled eyes wandering from me to his Barber, and then to his Barber’s hand, which was rummaging in his bag.

“To the Red Crab, Pennal!” ordered Simonis.

Penicek did not move.

“Turn round and get moving!” Simonis shouted, seizing him by the neck.

The cripple took his eyes off us and, in obedience to his Barber, turned and looked at the road; but he did not move the cart.

“I. . I. .” he stammered, “Janitzki is right, it’s true, I wasn’t at the apothecary all that time.”

I looked at him in astonishment, and Simonis did not let go of his neck.

“I. . I think I’ve solved the mystery of the Agha’s phrase,” he said at last.

The poor cripple told us that, after leaving Porta Coeli to go to the apothecary, he had driven in front of the little palace known as Haidenschuss, or Shoot the Heathen.

“I look up and what do I see? On the front of the house there’s a little statue of a Turk on a horse, brandishing a scimitar.”

“And so?” said Simonis. “That statue is famous, we all know it.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” I confirmed.

“Do. . do you know the story of the statue?” asked the Pennal, his mouth still quivering with terror.

“No,” we said in unison.

Simonis ordered him to drive us up the nearby hill of The Pulpit, so that passers-by would not get suspicious at our remaining stationary, and Penicek began to talk. According to the tradition of the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman’s name was Dayi Çerkes, which is to say Dayi the Circassian, and he had taken part in the first siege of Vienna. As soon as Suleiman’s mines had opened a breach in the walls, he had rushed inside the city on his horse, scimitar in hand. He knew that if the other Turks followed him, there would be no escape for the capital city of the Holy Roman Empire. However, his companions were not quite so courageous and did not follow him. And so, left alone, Dayi Çerkes was attacked by the Christians and killed. Emperor Ferdinand I honoured the courage of the dead hero: he had him and his horse mummified and placed them under the arch of the façade of a house, renaming the small square in front of it Circassian Square. There you can still admire Dayi Çerkes sitting on his horse, fully armed. The Emperor ordered that the Giaour — which is to say the Christian — who had killed the Turk by shooting him in the back with an arquebus, should be bricked up alive in the wall of the house opposite, addressing these words to him: “Why did you shoot from behind at a soldier armed only with a scimitar? You should have confronted him directly with a mace and sword, not shoot from hiding.” There the Giaour died amid a thousand torments. As the years went by the equestrian mummy deteriorated and was replaced by the statue.

“And so?” said Simonis.

“Dayi Çerkes entered the Golden Apple all alone. For his courage he is still venerated as a saint. If Vienna were to become Muslim, he would be its patron saint,” concluded the Bohemian.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “That’s why the Agha said he had come all alone to the Golden Apple: he wanted to recall the Circassian’s heroism. . But why?”

“Well, I don’t. .” stammered Penicek. “Ah, perhaps it was a way to emphasise their own honourable behaviour as enemies, coming here just as Dayi Çerkes had done, in daylight, on a horse, armed only with his scimitar.”

“So that’s what Hadji-Tanjov had found out!” I remembered. “He said that the meaning of the Agha’s phrase lay in soli soli soli. Now it’s clear: he had discovered the story of the Circassian. That means the Agha’s phrase holds no more mysteries — just like Kara Mustafa’s head and the dervish’s rituals,” I exclaimed in disappointment.

“But someone did murder Dànilo, Hristo and Dragomir. And perhaps Koloman,” objected Simonis.

“And Hristo on that note in his chessboard wrote ‘The King is enclosed’. . What does — ?”

“We’re here,” Simonis interrupted me in a powerful voice, making Penicek jump.

We had reached the top of the hill. I was about to get out of the cart, but the Greek held me back.

“Now you’ll drive around here,” he ordered Penicek, keeping his grip on his neck, while his other hand was still thrust in his bag.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“I just wonder: how could the Agha have been sure that Prince Eugene would understand the meaning of the phrase?”

“Right,” I said, and I noticed that my incomprehensible assistant was for the moment in a happy phase of mental lucidity.

“Em, oh. .” said the Pennal uncertainly, casting oblique sidelong glances at Simonis’s bag with terrified eyes. Then his face lit up: “It’s simple: the Shoot the Heathen palace belongs to the Most Serene Prince!”

“We could go there,” I suggested. “Perhaps the residents will be able to tell us more about this story of the Circassian, something that will help us to understand more clearly.”

“I fear not,” answered the Prague student, still looking at the grassy meadow before him, which Simonis was forcing him to drive around in circles.

What he had recounted so far, Penicek clarified, was the Turkish explanation for the presence of the statue on the front of the house. The Viennese version was quite different. The tunnels dug by the Turks with their mines reached right under the walls. In order to keep track of this subterranean menace, the Viennese set up warning systems in their cellars, such as buckets full of water (when a mine exploded, even far off, the water would start to tremble), or drums with peas or dice on top of them, which would all leap up at an explosion, making a reverberating noise. Obviously a boy had to be set to watch over these systems, day and night. At the time of the first siege, in 1529, the house in question was lived in by a baker. It had two underground floors, used as a cellar. A boy who worked in the deepest cellar, a certain Josef Schulz from the city of Bolkenhain in Silesia, discovered the work on the Turkish mines and excavations thanks to the dice bouncing on a drum. He at once informed the commander of the city and so saved Vienna from ruin. Emperor Ferdinand consequently granted the corporation of bakers the privilege of holding an Easter procession every year in honour of that event, with flags flying and Turkish music. Later the cellar became a wine shop and was called the Cellar of the Turks. And the little statue is supposed to be the symbol of the Turks thwarted by the boy’s alertness.”

“Ah yes, I saw the procession of the bakers a week ago. So that’s what it referred to,” I said.

“If the residents of the palace don’t know the Turkish version of the story, I imagine that you didn’t learn it from them,” said Simonis to Penicek. “So where did you hear it? And why did you take so long to get back to Porta Coeli?”

The Pennal gave a timid half-smile.

“I already knew the legend, but it was only today, when I lifted my eyes to that damned statue, that it became clear to me. And so I got out to question the inhabitants of the house, and that’s why I took so long. But all they knew was the story I’ve just told. If only I had thought of it earlier! At this hour we would already have given up this absurd story of the Golden Apple!”

Penicek broke into sobs, giving free vent to his tension, torment and panic. He wept unrestrainedly, and he was still weeping when Simonis ordered him to drive the cart to Porta Coeli.

On the way back my assistant stared at him with the glassy eyes of a barn owl, behind which, as usual, I could discern nothing.

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).

At the hour of our appointment with Ugonio at Porta Coeli I arrived exhausted and drained.

Our little boy was playing in the cloisters. I sent him to dine in the eating house with Simonis. I found Cloridia in Abbot Melani’s rooms.

“Well?” My wife greeted me anxiously, when I knocked at Atto’s door.

She wanted to know if we had succeeded in extracting anything from the paper with the Agha’s words: she had to return the precious piece of paper to the wife of Prince Eugene’s personal chamberlain.

I told her and the Abbot about Koloman’s death, Opalinski’s reaction and his accusations against the Pennal. My consort fell into a chair like a limp rag. Melani, barricaded as ever behind his dark glasses, stroked the pummel of his stick, immersed in impenetrable thought.

“And suppose it were an accident?”

“And suppose it were the monk?”

“And suppose. .?”

Question after question piled up while I talked to Cloridia.

We both knew it: only the last of the three possibilities, the one that concealed within itself the name of Penicek, connected the deaths of all four students. This hypothesis left just one question open, and that was: why?

I explained, finally, how the Bohemian had solved the mystery, which was in fact no mystery, of the Agha’s phrase: the Turks wanted to emphasise to Eugene that they had come to Vienna with the same integrity as Dayi Çerkes: all alone — that is, without any subterfuge. A metaphor that was perfectly clear to the Most Serene Prince, since the palace with the statue of the Circassian belonged to him.

“The Turks have nothing to do with it and that’s good, I’m pleased. Koloman’s death may well have been an accident. But someone killed the other three students one after the other. And I don’t like that Penicek,” she said, in a grim tone at last.

“But he saved my life,” I objected.

“Don’t exaggerate. Let’s say he turned up at the right moment.”

I didn’t like Penicek either. I had never thought about it, but there was something dark and slimy about the twisted little rat, with his ferret-like eyes behind his glinting spectacles, which often made me look away from him. It was true that his arrival at the Prater had saved me from being stabbed, and now, with the story of the Circassian, he seemed to have made a definite contribution to the solution of the Agha’s phrase. But even so I had never once thought of offering him even a scudo, instinctively profiting from his condition as Pennal. Alas, I had let myself be conditioned by the way he was mistreated by Simonis, or by the wisdom of his country, Greece, which first gave birth to the concept that what is beautiful is also good, while what is not beautiful conceals within itself evil. And Penicek was far from beautiful. In addition, he was lame, like the devil. But I was certainly not the person best suited to make such observations, as I was about to be superseded in height by my eight-year-old son.

“And what does Simonis think of this story?” my wife asked. “The Bohemian is under his command, it seems to me.”

“Exactly. At first he put him on the spot. But then, after Penicek revealed the real meaning of the phrase. . you know, Simonis is at times, how can I put it, hard to fathom.”

“Yes, poor thing,” agreed Cloridia, who had always had a soft spot for my bumbling assistant.

“It’s convenient to play the idiot,” Atto put in.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nothing, for the moment. But Monna Cloridia put it well: the lame boy takes his orders from the Greek.”

“And so? It’s a student custom that. .”

“I’m not interested in the form. I look at the facts,” the Abbot cut me short. “In any case, Cloridia told me about the Agha’s piece of paper. May I see it?”

“See it?” I said wonderingly.

“In short, I mean, can I hold it. I’m curious. If only my poor eyes could really see it!”

I pulled it from my pocket. It was a little worn by our deciphering experiments. I gave it to the Abbot. He opened it. He seemed to be trying to glean its contents by the light of the candle that stood on the table next to his armchair, but Cloridia, as soon as she saw the state to which our experiments, suggested by Doctor Abelius’s handbook, had reduced the poor scrap of paper, snatched it from his hands.

“Oh my God! And now what? I certainly can’t give the paper back in this condition!”

“Maybe, with a little trimming at the edges and some smoothing. .” I stammered.

Thrusting the paper into her apron pocket, without another word Cloridia stormed out of Atto’s room.

At that moment the pantry sister entered with dinner for Abbot Melani and Domenico, who was still ill. Atto did not want to move: we were waiting for Ugonio. But he was late.

On the pretext of going to eat something myself, and in order to let uncle and nephew dine in peace, I asked their permission to join Cloridia in our rooms. We were just a few yards away: if Atto needed us, he could call for us.

I found Cloridia busily fixing the Agha’s sheet of paper. She was painstakingly trimming the singed edges. With the iron she would then smooth out the creases the water had produced.

Abbot Melani, Cloridia told me while she worked, had told her what had happened with Ugonio that morning — that the head craved by Ciezeber the dervish was the wizened one of Kara Mustafa, and not the one on His Caesarean Majesty’s youthful neck. He had also told her about the ambiguous appointment that the corpisantaro had with Gaetano Orsini and how this was connected in some way with the two unidentified hanged men. Now that we were alone, I told her what had happened that morning after she had brought us the pamphlet with the news of the Grand Dauphin’s suspected smallpox: Atto’s confession and all the rest that I had learned from him, including Eugene’s tremendous jealousy of His Caesarean Majesty. When I touched on the disconcerting revelations about the Most Serene Prince’s intimate habits, my sweet spouse was less surprised than I had expected; indeed, she made a few salacious comments that cannot be repeated here.

“Bah,” she remarked doubtfully at last, “however badly I might judge the Prince, do you know what I think? I’m sure he would not go so far as to wish for the Emperor to die. As for the rest, I already suspected he was a smart one,” she concluded with a smile. “I bet it was he who had the Pálffy woman set up just here in Porta Coeli Street, almost opposite his palace.”

“Gaetano Orsini said it was the Emperor in person, because of its closeness to the convent, where Camilla is.”

“Perhaps both. In any case I wouldn’t trust Orsini until Ugonio makes it clear just what his relationship is with him. And on that subject, what time is it? Wasn’t he supposed to be here at five?”

It was almost six. The corpisantaro was late. Cloridia, however, could not be late: the time had come to give back the Agha’s piece of paper. She urged me to keep an eye on Abbot Melani’s requirements and left for Prince Eugene’s palace.

A short while later, Simonis and my son came back from the eating house where they had dined. Cloridia’s words on Orsini gave me an idea. I sent both of them to the Coppersmiths’ Slope. They would knock at the door of Anton de’ Rossi. Cardinal Collonitz’s former chamberlain had asked Gaetano Orsini to arrange for his flue to be repaired. I was waiting for Ugonio and could not leave, but Simonis, with his vague air, could manage by himself to get information on the young castrato.

Having given my assistant and apprentice all the necessary instructions and sent them off, I was about to settle in my armchair when Doctor Abelius’s handbook on the artifices of students slipped from my belt.

As I picked it up my eye ran over the titles of some of the mini chapters on the page where it had opened. It was not the part we had read and used for the Agha’s paper. The pages were densely annotated in the margin; I recognised Simonis’s unintelligible handwriting. Alas, it was written in Current, that German cursive which to the eyes of a Latin might just as well be Arabic. Growing curious, I glanced at the passages that seemed to have drawn my assistant’s closest attention:

Do you wish to see if a wounded person will get better or die? Take rue juice and put it in his nose; if he sneezes he will get better, otherwise it means he is fatally wounded.

It was just what Simonis had tried with Dànilo when we had found him dying on the ramparts. So my assistant had taken the trick from Doctor Abelius’s handbook. After this there was a description of another technique to see if a wounded person was destined to die or not. Then there were remedies to make someone drunk without any harm, and other remedies to make a drunk person immediately sober, like drinking a lot of vinegar or putting a wet cloth on their pudenda. I had heard this from Simonis as well. Like his methods for not falling asleep: carrying a bat around with him, exactly as he had done the night of the Deposition and the night we had wandered round all the bowling alleys in Vienna in search of Populescu. When I came across the methods for testing the virginity of girls, I thought of poor Dragomir. . I went on reading where the Greek seemed to have lingered with most attention:

To make someone sleep for three days in a row, take bile of a hare and make him drink it in wine: he will fall asleep at once. When you want to wake him pour vinegar into his mouth. Or take a sow’s milk and place it where he sleeps. Or take bile of eel and mix it in a drink: he will sleep for three days. To wake him up, pour rosewater into his mouth.

To make an animal stay with you, take a piece of bread and put it under your armpits. When it is soaked in sweat, give it to the animal to eat.

To make an animal run with you wherever you want, give it a cat’s heart to eat: it will follow you wherever you go.

Doctor Abelius had written every student’s gospel!

How to make sure that a dagger, sword or knife can cut an adversary’s weapon: take the noble herb known as Verbena, crush it and mix it with mullein and urine, boil them together, leave the weapon in them for a while and you will soon note the difference!

To make a pair of pistols that look the same as others, but which with the same charge of powder and balls can fire further and more powerfully than others: have pistols made with a more resistant and heavier butt than usual. Apparently they will be the same as ordinary pistols. At the rear screw have a little tripod welded to insert into the barrel with a tube in the middle, through which the powder can fall on the ignition hole. Load the pistols as usual: they will fire further and more powerfully. The reason is this: the powder charge is lit at the centre and so more powder is burned.

The short chapters that followed had even more notes and comments penned by Simonis.

Camisole proof against shooting, clubbing or stabbing: take two pounds of the fish called ichthiocolla, shred it and leave it all night in vincotto, then drain the vincotto and pour fresh spring water on it, cook until it becomes a thick muddy pulp, put in five ounces of fine leather rubber and leave it to dissolve in this hot pulp. Then put in four ounces of powdered smir, which has been prepared by heating it and cooling it many times in vinegar, and two ounces of old turpentine. Cook it all together again and spread this mixture on a thick linen cloth which has been stretched out on a smooth board and fixed with nails. Put another linen cloth on top and spread the mixture on this one too, and continue until you have placed ten or twelve linen cloths one on top of the other. Leave them to dry (in summer eight days are enough). Before they are completely dry, fold them and give them the shape you want. With this material you can make camisoles, helmets and such like. A camisole of this sort can be seen at Baron K’s at Labach and also at N. in the Royal Kunstkammer.

Swords, pistols, fighting clothes. What did my Greek assistant want with all this stuff?

Another material resistant to daggers, maces and guns: take ichthiocolla and fish glue, dissolve and squeeze until they become clear. Cook them ad consistentiam melleam, until they have the consistency of honey. Dip a linen cloth into this and when it has dried a little, spread the mixture on it with a brush and leave it to dry. Spread it again and leave it to dry as many times as necessary.

Or, if you want to make a garment proof against a dirk, take a new heavy linen cloth and spread it with fish glue dissolved in water. Leave it to dry on a table. When dry, take yellow wax, resin and mastix, two ounces of each. Dissolve it all with an ounce of turpentine, mix it well and spread it on the linen until the cloth has sucked in the whole mixture.

And again:

A collar proof against musket balls: take the skin of a racing or game ox that has just been killed, and on the cleaner side cut out a collar that is of your exact size and stitch it. Leave it to ferment for twenty-four hours in vinegar and dry it well in the open air.

All of this Simonis had meticulously underlined and commented on in the margin in his abstruse calligraphy.

I thought back to Atto’s sceptical remark on Simonis’s ingenuousness. Clearly the Abbot suspected him. Absurd! In addition, Melani had refused to say another word. Maybe because he had too little to go on and not even he could be sure of anything now.

And in any case, how could one help suspecting everyone? We were groping in the dark. Years ago, when I had followed false trails with Abbot Melani, sooner or later they would peter out, sending us back to the correct path towards the truth. But this time, having abandoned our initial false track, we now found ourselves in the dense tangle of a forest where everything shifted, slipped from our grasp, or turned into its opposite. I had suspected everyone: first Atto and Ciezeber, then Penicek and even Simonis; without counting Ugonio and Orsini, whose relationship was still unclear. All the others were dead: Dànilo Danilovitsch, Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, Dragomir Populescu, Koloman Szupán, the two mysterious hanged men of Ugonio’s note. All of them apart from Opalinski. Should we suspect him as well? Whatever the truth was, the question remained the same: why had the students been murdered?

In the shadow of the illness that threatened the Emperor (and the Grand Dauphin), there were too many deaths, too many culprits and no truth.

The only ones not included among the suspects were Cloridia and myself: and now perhaps. .

The paradox, however absurd it might be, took my breath away. The series of deaths had begun as soon as I had asked Simonis’s companions to carry out research into the Golden Apple, but we had seen that this research had nothing to do with the murders.

Therefore the only connecting element was ourselves — or rather myself. I had already thought of this, but only now had begun to put two and two together: I was in fact the only real suspect. After meeting me, those poor students had started to die, just hours apart, like flies.

That was not all. They had been murdered just when they had an appointment with me and Simonis, or when we were looking for them. True, I had been with the Greek each time I had discovered a corpse, but he had known his university companions for a long time. It was he who had introduced them to me and who had even proposed that I should engage them. Why should he have wanted them to die just now?

Atto was right. If you are looking for a culprit, he had told me a few days earlier, look in the mirror: anyone who has an appointment with you dies.

Now Ugonio was supposed to come, but he was nowhere to be seen yet. Anyone who has an appointment with me dies. .

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

Like a pack of panting hounds following an agile fox, it was only thanks to their great bravura that the orchestra managed to keep up with the serpentine glissades of the soprano. In the fiction of the oratorio, Alessio’s mother sang her anguished rage against cruel destiny. On this rage the Chormaisterin had constructed a sprightly and superb edifice of vocal acrobatics, which, with its sinuous arches, depicted better than any painting, and explained better than any poem, the just anger of a mother grieving over her son’s uncelebrated nuptials:

Un barbaro rigor

Fé il misero mio cor

Gioco ai tormenti

E il crudo fato vuol

Che un esempio di duol

L’alma diventi. .¹³

While these indignant verses echoed in the Caesarean chapel, a similar resentment filled my own heart, and the hearts of those who were with me.

Ugonio had not turned up. We had waited for him for three hours. It was clear that something must have happened to him. The corpisantaro, who had begged for his keys back and had implored us pitifully to treat them like gold until his return, would never have missed the appointment of his own free will. Fearing the worst, I had gone to the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio. What mysterious thread bound Gaetano Orsini to Ugonio? What obscure threat had yet to be revealed to us? After the tragic deaths of Dànilo, Hristo, Populescu and Koloman Szupán, what new tragedy awaited us?

E il crudo fato vuol

Che un esempio di duol

L’alma diventi. .

No, we would not wait passively. Camilla de’ Rossi’s furious and sublime music fired my heart and spirit, exciting me to bold revenge. I looked carefully this time at the Chormaisterin’s Italian musicians and wished I could put them all through the mill, and squeeze from them, like a fistful of olives, the dishonourable truth of their shady pursuits. I stared at the theorbist Francesco Conti and his scrawny face: weren’t they the features of one ready to sell his honour for a handful of coins? I passed onto his round-cheeked wife, the soprano Maria Landina, known to everyone as Landina, and I said to myself: wasn’t that florid face the image of a woman who has grown fat on underhand dealings? And the tenor Carlo Costa, with his pointed beard — didn’t everything about him suggest a shameless, double-dealing mind, wholly bent on evil? And Gaetano Orsini, with his incessant prattle, wasn’t he the epitome of the hypocritical huckster? Then I observed a second violinist with the crafty little eyes of one who knew it all, a group of violone players with hooked noses that betrayed greed, and flutists with the affected manners of congenital liars. There came back to me, like an ill-digested meal regurgitated, Atto’s tales of musician-spies like Dowland and Corbetta, and the conspiratorial and musical activities of Atto Melani himself, and I said to myself: you fool, do you really think you can shake hands with a musician and not find your palm greasy with a spy’s guilty sweat? And I fell back on bitter reflections: on the cruel fate for Euterpe and Erato, sweet Muses of sounds, ever to find sly Mercury, lord of the wicked arts, at their heels. And I felt ashamed of having taken pride in the friendship of such people, who must have been laughing up their sleeves at my naivety.

But what weighed most heavily on me was the thought of the Chormaisterin. Was she, too, involved in this sordid practice of spying? A number of things about Camilla were still obscure to me. How, for example, had she guessed that Cloridia knew Turkish so well? Not even I knew that, and I was her husband! And yet the Chormaisterin had proposed her for the job in Prince Eugene’s palace while the Agha was staying there, already quite certain of my consort’s linguistic skills. And then there was her curiosity about Cloridia’s past, her Turkish mother, and the fact that that she cooked with spelt, just as my wife did, and, finally, her acquaintance with Atto Melani. She had been introduced to him in Paris, she said, along with her husband Franz de’ Rossi, nephew — so she said! — of Seigneur Luigi, Atto’s old master. But what proof did I have of all this? If one questioned her on her past, Camilla would refuse to talk of her life before her marriage. She said she was Roman — Trasteverine, to boot — but she did not have the faintest trace of a Roman accent.

And then this Anton de’ Rossi, Cardinal Collonitz’s ex-chamberlain, must clearly have been a relative of Franz! Simonis, on his return from the Coppersmiths’ Slope, had told me that he had not found the owner at home and had been unable to elicit much about Gaetano Orsini, except that their friendship was based on the fact that the young castrato, years ago, had taken lessons from Anton de’ Rossi’s deceased cousin, a court composer who had died prematurely, named Franz. . Why had Camilla wanted to deny this? Sitting next to Cloridia, I took the opportunity to tell her about it. She gazed at me open-mouthed: shades of suspicion fell on the person she now considered a dear friend. She furrowed her brows. I could guess what she was thinking. Some time ago the Chormaisterin had also denied being a relative of the Camilla de’ Rossi whom Cloridia had known briefly in Trastevere: perhaps she had been lying then as well?

That evening Sant’ Alessio was followed by a short rehearsal of another composition, also to be performed in the next few days.

It was now a sweet boy’s voice that sang, and his innocence, I thought, was in sharp contrast with the murky hearts of the musicians all around. The composition was by Francesco Conti, the theorbist, and the Latin words sung by the boy seemed to have been written specifically to stir my desire for justice. First a heartfelt prayer to the Saviour:

Languet anima mea

Amore tuo, o benignissime Jesu,

Aestulat et spirat

Et in amore deficit. .

“For your love, O sweet Jesus, my soul languishes, burns and sighs, and consumes itself with love“; oh yes, I said to myself sardonically, just the right words for this motley crew of crooked spies. Much more appropriate was the next stanza, which gave way to an allegro moderato:

O vulnera, vita coelestis,

Amantis, trophea regnantis,

Cor mihi aperite. .

“O wounds, celestial life, symbols of victory of the loving sovereign, open your heart to me!”

With all this tangled skein of suspicions I would have been very happy to open the heart of the beautiful and candid Chormaisterin. Oh yes, but I was even more eager to delve inside that of Gaetano Orsini — and very soon I would get the chance to do so, and to get all that I wanted from it.

“Four have already died. If Ugonio has ended up the same way you’ll be the first to follow him.”

“Four people dead? Ugonio? What are you talking about?”

At the end of the rehearsal Simonis, Penicek and Opalinski took Gaetano Orsini by surprise as he walked home.

I had told my assistant about Ugonio’s disappearance and the need to put pressure on Orsini. Simonis had rushed round to Opalinski’s house and had persuaded him to make peace with Penicek. “We must remain united — if we start to accuse one another it’ll be the end,” he said. The Pole’s anger, to tell the truth, had simmered down. He had begun to feel that he had accused the Pennal too precipitately, carried away by his despair at Koloman Szupán’s death, which might have been accidental.

And so the three students moved in threateningly on Orsini. The young castrato was terrified, finding himself menaced by the muscles of the imposing Polish student, by the lanky Simonis and the shuffling, bespectacled Penicek, whose shifty, lopsided figure shuffling along in the dark had something decidedly fiendish about it.

I had simply pointed out the victim to them and then hidden round the corner. In the silence of the evening I could hear their questions and answers distinctly:

“It doesn’t matter if you won’t give us the other people’s names — we already know them. It’s too late for Koloman but if you don’t spill where the corpisantaro is, you’ll be spilling something else: your life’s blood!” the Greek threatened him.

“The corpisantaro? I assure you there’s been a mistake! You’ve got the wrong person, I have no idea what you’re asking me, I swear,” whimpered Orsini.

At a sign from Simonis, Opalinski punched him in the belly. Orsini bent double. The Pole gave him another backhander on his right cheek, while Penicek and my assistant gripped him from behind. The Pennal clutched his hair, pulling his head back, while Simonis twisted his arms behind his back. The poor singer, definitely not accustomed to such low-life techniques, moaned as Penicek covered his mouth.

“Take. . take all the money I have on me. . It’s not much, but not so little either! Please don’t kill me.”

“So we haven’t made ourselves clear,” persisted Simonis. “We want to know about Ugonio, the corpisantaro. Was he supposed to come and see you? Or did you have an appointment somewhere? And what can you tell me about the two hanged men?”

“What are you talking about? I hate forests. I hardly ever leave the walls. I tell you,” he said in a bewildered, imploring voice, “I don’t even know who — ”

Opalinski gave him two more punches in the stomach.

“We’re fed up with your meaningless nonsense, do you understand?” whispered the Greek, while Jan went on: “Ugonio: the one dressed in a stinking greatcoat. The relic thief. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten. .”

Janitzki, just to be certain, smacked him robustly three or four times. Orsini stopped yelling. This earned him a hail of blows on the head and a piece of his own jacket thrust down his throat. The fight was ridiculously unequal.

“I’ve got a little money on me, take it all,” Orsini offered again.

“Let’s try again,” repeated Simonis, paying no attention to the offer. “Ugonio, the one who talks a little weirdly. . Make an effort.”

“I’ll take you to my house, if you like, I’ve got more money there. .” answered the castrato, merely earning himself a series of six or seven raps on his head and face.

“At least ask him if he knows where he lives,” suggested Opalinski.

“You’re right. Did you hear my friend?”

Silence. Orsini was weeping. To make absolutely certain, Jan delivered a few more thumps, which had the opposite effect to the one desired: the castrato, clearly out of control, began to pray in a low voice. The reaction seemed too spontaneous not to be true.

“For this time we’ll let you go. But if we find out you’ve been lying, and especially if you tell anyone about this conversation, well, you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.”

Orsini had now dropped to the ground. I felt a pang for the poor musician, whom I had seen yield to the fairly restrained violence of the three students like a piece of butter to a red-hot knife. Then I thought of the dead lads, of Ugonio, and my pity for Orsini diminished.

The three now came running in my direction. They ran on past me, giving me a quick nod as they went by. I followed them almost at once, running as lightly as possible on the pavement so as not to let Orsini know that a fourth man (and one well-known to him!) had observed the solemn thrashing.

“There are two possibilities: either he’s a sly one, and tough to boot, or you’ve made a mistake,” remarked Jan Janitzki Opalinski before setting off.

We also took our leave of Penicek. Then my assistant and I made our way back to Porta Coeli.

“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” I said before separating for the night. “If Ugonio hasn’t got in touch by the afternoon, we’ll go to the Cathedral of St Stephen. We’ll look for the deacon he was going to talk to about the Archangel Michael’s message. Ugonio told us he’s a collector of relics — maybe that will help us trace him. But. . what is it? Ah, yes, here you are: your book.”

At that moment I had found Doctor Abelius’s little handbook in my pocket. The Greek took it without saying a word. Then we took leave of one another.