Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

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

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

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

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

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

  Then I saw him clap his hand to his forehead.

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

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

  “Exactly, that one,” answered the Greek.

  “What is it?”

  “A bowling alley.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Dives?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s closed,” I said

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

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

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

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

  The Greek was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No, let’s go on.”

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

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

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

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

  “Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ah.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “How useful?” I asked doubtfully.

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

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

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

  My assistant addressed me in heartfelt tones:

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

  I was silent for a moment.

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

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

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

  Simonis said nothing. He seemed relieved.

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

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

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

  “Never.”

  At that very moment Populescu returned.

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

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

  “Spectators or owners?”

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

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

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

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