“I don’t understand it either,” Populescu answered him, in the voice of one awash in beer, “but there must be a reason why the Turks talked about the Golden Apple to Prince Eugene.”
“I say we should look into this Eyyub, Mahomet’s standard-bearer: it can’t be an accident that Dànilo spoke his name before he died,” the Greek suggested, climbing onto the cart.
“No, our Dragomir mustn’t investigate anything at all now,” I intervened, casting an angry glance at my assistant and pulling out the money to pay Populescu. “Nor must your other companions, because –”
“Well said!” exclaimed the Romanian, breaking into a broad smile at the sight of the coins. “I agree with you. For the moment we’ve learned enough. This evening I’ve got a date with my beauty at an Andacht on the Kalvarienberg, and this money is just what I need, thanks!”
“Be careful, Dragomir,” I tried to speak to him, handing him the money. “There’s something you should know . . .”
“I’ll be very careful! She says she’s a virgin,” he laughed, “but I have a couple of tricks to see if that’s true.”
He was drunk. Not an ideal condition for hearing and, above all, for understanding what I had to say to him. We made him get up onto the cart with us.
“Yes, but now listen: the Agha’s dervish . . .” I tried to start off.
“The dervish? That spinning top in the white skirt?” he sneered, and then he burped. “I’ll be lifting different sorts of skirts this evening! I don’t give a damn whether the dervish is a virgin or not, ha ha! But my dark-haired chick from the coffee house . . . Heh heh, just listen to me: I’ll get her to drink Armoniacum salt with spring water, and if she’s not a virgin, she’ll piss herself, ha ha! And I’ve also got carbonised roots of ephen – or celeriac or whatever you want to call it – to put under her nose: if she’s not a virgin, another piss! Just imagine what a fool she’ll feel, ha ha!”
I felt dispirited. Dragomir’s coarse laughter was soon joined by that of my assistant, and if that were not enough, he ordered the Pennal to laugh as well.
“Of course, it’s a real pity if she’s not a virgin,” declared Dragomir, with fussy exactitude, “but at least I can be sure of getting my oats, and without too much of a fuss! Ha ha!”
The cart pulled up. We were outside Populescu’s house. Before I could open my mouth, he opened the door and got out.
“Just a moment, Dragomir,” I called him, “there’s something you should know . . .”
“A thousand thanks, Signor Master,” he laughed, totally drunk, bowing several times and waving the little bag of coins in the air before entering the front door.
“Off you go, Pennal!” ordered Simonis.
“No, wait!” I protested. “Simonis, I hardly said anything!”
“He’s drunk too much. He wouldn’t have understood anything. If you like, you can talk to him this evening – he said he has a date with that girl at an Andacht, on the Kalvarienberg.”
“Well, I have no choice now,” I said resignedly. “I’m worn out, and we haven’t managed to warn any of your three companions. I wonder if we shouldn’t have looked for Koloman or Opalinski first, instead of Dragomir.”
“They were both at home. Sleeping.”
“What?” I said furiously. “So why did you advise me to start with Dragomir?”
“It wouldn’t have been polite to wake them up: they’re not under my orders, like the Pennal.”
I was silent, overcome by amazement. It was too idiotic an answer, I thought, to come from a half idiot.
5.30 of the clock: first mass. From now on the bells will ring in succession throughout the day, announcing masses, processions, devotions. Eating houses and alehouses open.
On our way back to Porta Coeli, the roads began to come to life. From bread shops, inns and sweet bread bakeries there came wafting the smell of chocolate – the same smell that will unexpectedly tickle your nostrils (the only city I know where this is true) in the middle of an alleyway, a garden, or a crowded avenue, like mystic manifestations of the afterlife.
Snow-white milkmaids, ruddy bakers, whistling musicians and lazy footmen came into the streets and began to swell the ranks of the humble toilers, while the noblemen, still in bed, breathed sluggishly in the coils of sleep.
Proceeding cautiously so as not to knock down some careless shop boy, Penicek’s cart was turning from Carinthia Street into Porta Coeli Street, and I had already glimpsed my Cloridia standing outside the door of the nunnery, when I realised something strange was happening.
I knew she would be worried by my long absence, and so I had stood up in the cart and was waving to her festively when I saw a shadowy figure emerge from nowhere and grip her arm. Cloridia yelled.
The memory of what happened in the next few moments, and the great agitation that overwhelmed all of us, is still hazy to me. However, I will try to describe those whirling moments as faithfully as possible.
We were not more than twenty paces from Porta Coeli. Simonis leaped down from Penicek’s cart and ran to assist my spouse. I tried to do likewise, even though I knew my stride to be much shorter. However, the nag that was pulling the Pennal’s cart, sensing danger, lost its head. The cart tottered and I stumbled as I jumped out, and went crashing to the ground. I looked up at once and saw more clearly the shadowy figure that had attacked Cloridia. He was now backing away as Cloridia hurled insults at him. From his clothing I realised immediately who it must be: the hooded man, the friend of Ciezeber the dervish, who had so menacingly dogged Cloridia at Prince Eugene’s palace.
Simonis was almost upon him, but the individual had already taken to his heels, vanishing into the ash-grey haze of dawn. Cloridia was on the ground, terrified and weeping. Simonis lost valuable seconds in checking that she had not been wounded in any way. Then, while I moved forward half-limping, my assistant set off in pursuit again, and I followed him. The hooded man could not escape us.
The passers-by watched this early morning chase incredulously: from the windows they urged us to catch the thief (although he was not one), and one or two sleepy-looking youths even gave signs of joining in the chase, although they desisted almost immediately. Running all the way down Porta Coeli Street the hooded man first reached the circle of the ramparts, then turned left along the Seilerstätte road and then down the lane behind the convent of the Augustinian nuns of St James. Simonis was hot on his heels, but I had worked out a better move: I took the parallel street, the Riemergasse, which, unlike the other route, which twisted and turned, ran straight as a die. Although I was by no means a fast runner, I reached the confluence between the two arteries at the same moment as Simonis and the hooded man.
And so it was that when the two burst out of the lane, I appeared in front of the pursued man. The monstrous face loomed up ahead of me and, even as we laid hands on my wife’s unknown aggressor, I realised to my immense surprise that I knew him and that he knew me.
As he came lurching towards me, in shape halfway between a mole and a stone marten, he goggled at me and then grinned bestially, opening his arms to enfold me in a lurid embrace. But Simonis fell upon him from behind, and we all went crashing into a nearby cart of fruit and vegetables, knocking it over along with its owner and sending a torrent of apples, cauliflowers, turnips and radishes cascading over the pavement in a thousand directions, like drops of quicksilver escaping from an alchemist’s alembic and slithering across the ground in a crazy bid for freedom.
A great blow to my temple set my head reeling. While the shouts of the bystanders and the desperate greengrocer deafened the whole street, I struggled to come to my senses, eager to see and understand what was going on. I saw the hooded man’s face leering down at me, while the arms of three or four robust passers-by held him tight. With his yellowing teeth and treacherous grey pupils, he continued to smile at me:
“I am surprended to find Your Illustriosity here in Vindobona, very live and kicksome.”
“Ugonio?!?” I exclaimed wi
th difficulty, before losing my senses from the blow.
Hunter of relics, catchpoll in the service of the sects of beggars, hardened swindler involved in every disreputable affair in the Holy City: it was not the first time that Ugonio had burst in upon my life.
Our first encounter had been in the underground tunnels of Rome, when, twenty-eight years earlier, I had met Abbot Melani. He was a corpisantaro, a raider of “holy bodies” or sacred relics. I had then bumped into this bizarre individual eleven years ago, again on the occasion of Atto’s visit to Rome: at that time the corpisantaro was working for the secret companies of beggars. There was not actually any direct relationship between Melani and Ugonio: it was simply that the Abbot’s shady affairs were inevitably tangled up with the subterranean and sordid world in which the latter wallowed.
“How stupid of me, I should have realised,” I murmured, as soon as I came to my senses. “Ugonio is from Vienna.”
The corpisantaro came from the capital city of the Empire, and that was why his grip on our language was so precarious.
My body was now held up by four robust arms, and I was assisted towards the convent of Porta Coeli. The blow that had laid me out had come from the greengrocer’s cart, which had hit me right on the head as it overturned. I could hear my rescuers commenting on what had happened, and inveighing against Ugonio. At the side of the street, a double row of spectators was gazing as I staggered past, preceded by Simonis and by a cluster of people who were pushing and shoving the corpisantaro. They were busily collecting the testimony of Cloridia, so that they could hand Ugonio over to the authorities to be tried. I stared at him.
His disgusting appearance, which Cloridia had described, was well-known to me. He had the same drab, wrinkled and flabby skin, grey bloodshot eyes, crooked hands and cankered nose, all wrapped in a filthy greatcoat with a cowl. Although his age was hard to guess, the years had taken their toll on him too: previously Ugonio had been repellent; now he was also hoary. But he was clearly in good physical shape: it had taken two of us to bring him down, after an exhausting chase.
Eleven years earlier, to help the Abbot and me, the corpisantaro had aroused the enmity of the most powerful beggars in Rome, and had had to flee from Rome, and from Italy itself. I could still remember his blood-caked face and his bandaged hand, when he had come to Villa Spada to take his leave of Atto and me. He had told us then that he would retire here, to the city where he had been born.
I asked to be set on my feet: I could now stand up unsupported. I summoned Simonis. When my assistant was assured that my condition was satisfactory, I explained that not only did I know our prey, but that this individual, however unsettling in appearance, had certainly not intended any harm to my wife.
“Are you sure, Signor Master?”
“Leave him to me. And send away all these people. As you speak good German, explain that it was a quarrel between me and this man, and that it’s all been resolved amicably. I’m not going to press charges against him.”
“Actually, if I were you, I would . . . But all right – as you wish, Signor Master.”
Simonis had some trouble in convincing the people around us, but in the end we managed to get them to leave us and to avoid any intervention by the city guards. Now came the most difficult part: to explain everything to my wife.
“Is he still here? Why haven’t you taken him straight to jail?”
We were in our lodgings in Porta Coeli. Cloridia was gazing at Ugonio in fear, holding our little boy tight in her arms, like a hen with its chicks.
“The fact is that you don’t know him, but he knows you,” I explained, as I invited Simonis and Ugonio to sit down.
My assistant looked at the corpisantaro with a mixture of surprise, disgust and diffidence, and he took care to sit as far as possible from him. Every so often he gave a discreet but marked sniff, as if to see if it really was his coat (as indeed it was) that gave off the stale smell that was rapidly filling the room.
“He knows me? Since when?” asked my sweet consort suspiciously.
I explained who Ugonio was, that he was a rogue, undoubtedly, but that when required he had proved trustworthy and had given incontrovertible proof of his loyalty.
Eleven years earlier, when Cloridia and I were working in Rome, in Cardinal Spada’s villa, he had broken into his house secretly several times. He had first seen Cloridia’s face then, and he knew that she was my wife, while Cloridia had no idea of Ugonio’s appearance. At Prince Eugene’s palace he had looked at her several times, intently, not with any hostile motive but because he was not yet sure that he had recognised her. In the end he had become convinced that she was my wife. That morning he had decided to present himself. He had approached her in front of Porta Coeli, hoping to be recognised, but Cloridia had reacted with fear. He had tried to hold her by the arm, and those who had witnessed the scene, including me, had taken it for an attack.
“I see,” Cloridia said at last, forcing herself to smile.
“Ugonio can be trusted,” I repeated, “if you take him the right way.”
“So why does he trade in people’s heads? And why did he steal the Landau coins from Prince Eugene?” asked Cloridia, scowling suspiciously again.
“He’ll tell you himself, if he doesn’t want me to press charges, as I could do,” I said, looking meaningfully at Ugonio.
The corpisantaro started.
“First of all: the Landau coins you stole are part of your usual trade, aren’t they?” I asked.
Amid the shapeless mass of Ugonio’s features his yellow-brown pointed teeth displayed themselves in an expression that was a mixture of surprise, disappointment and childish satisfaction at his skilful and nefarious theft of the coins.
“I do not dispute the accusement of Your Lordliness,” he replied in his clumsy, catarrh-filled voice. “But decreasing the scrupules so as not increase one’s scruples, I would like to assurify your married lady, the wedded spice and consortium of Your Highfulness: I, yours truthly, this identifical person of myself, never, not even for a split century, did I dream of harmifying a head on her hair.”
“What did he say?” asked Simonis in bewilderment. As a non-native speaker of Italian he had trouble in following Ugonio’s verbal convolutions.
“The theft of the coins: all right, I confess. But I never touched the good lady, nor thought of doing so,” the corpisantaro translated rapidly, his mother-tongue being German.
“Yes, I gathered this,” I agreed. “You just wanted to introduce yourself to Cloridia, though there were certainly more elegant ways of going about it. Now tell me: are you working for Abbot Melani?”
Ugonio again seemed taken aback by this.
“I ignorified completely, and also wholesomely, that Abbot Melani had taken abodance here in Vindobona,” he answered after a moment’s silence. “But to be more padre than parricide, I can confide that, negating the true with sincerity, I do not comprend the insinulation that Your Pomposity makes against me”
Simonis raised one eyebrow, puzzled again.
“Melani: I know nothing of him,” Ugonio translated with a grunt.
“Oh yes?” I pressed him. “So why were you plotting with the Agha’s dervish to cut some poor innocent man’s head off? Who is your victim? Maybe someone high up, very, very high, even too high up?”
A heavy silence fell on the room. Very soon I would find out if my suspicions about Abbot Melani’s journey were well-founded. Ugonio, stunned, said not a word. I returned to the attack.
“The Emperor is ill. Very ill. They say it’s smallpox. They say. But I suspect there’s something else behind it. It just so happens the illness started with his head – with his head, I say. Do you know anything about it?” I asked threateningly.
Ugonio stood up. His murky grey face looked flushed, and (if his sallow complexion had allowed it) almost crimson.
“I can testiculify to Your Imminence my profundest facefulness. Not to be a rustic physician, I swear and curse to you, from th
e fundaments of my heart, my full allegiance. To make things crystal-clean: I am not in the know of nothing about his Scissorian Majesty and his pathogenic indisposability. For the other tissue, about the dervishop I cannot spill even a single pea, because . . .” And he broke off.
Simonis and I exchanged glances: this time my assistant had understood everything. Ugonio’s face was even more purple. He swallowed and finished the sentence in German:
“. . . because otherwise they’ll cut me into pieces.”
“You don’t imagine that I’ll be satisfied with this lie,” I answered in a harsh voice.
The corpisantaro’s face seemed on the point of exploding. He had met me in Rome when I was the timid boy servant in a fourth-rate inn. Now I was a mature man, I knew life and its hardships. The old corpisantaro, who had shown he still had plenty of life and vigour in him, surely had not expected to be grilled so intensely.
“The head you talked to Ciezeber about,” I said clearly and menacingly, going right up to him, “now you’ll tell me whose it is.”
By way of reply Ugonio, with a gasp of lacerating terror such as I had never heard from him before, leaped to his feet and staggered towards the door in an improbable attempt to flee. He was of course immediately caught by Simonis, who, as he grabbed him by his coat, caused a curious tinkling sound to come from the corpisantaro. At a sign from me the Greek opened his coat (not without a grimace of distaste) and we saw, hanging inside it, something I well knew: an enormous iron ring to which were tied dozens, nay hundreds, of old keys of every shape, condition and size. It was Ugonio’s secret arsenal, his precious key ring.
The corpisantaro, who spent more time underground than above, often needed to penetrate the subsoil by way of cellars, warehouses or doors barred by bolts and locks. To solve the problem (“decreasing the scrupules so as not increase one’s scruples” he had specified) he had devoted himself from early days to the systematic bribery of servants, maids and valets. Knowing full well that the masters of villas and houses in possession of keys would never in any circumstances have let him have a copy, the corpisantaro had bartered with the serving staff for the duplicates of keys. In exchange, he would let the servants have some of his precious relics. Of course, Ugonio had been careful never to give up his best pieces, even though he had had to make the occasional painful sacrifice, like a fragment of St Peter’s collarbone. But he had managed to get hold of the keys to the cellars and foundations of the palaces of much of Rome. And the locks to which he did not have keys could often be opened with one of the many other keys of a similar kind.
Veritas (Atto Melani) Page 37
