Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  The Age of Man was over, now the long agony of the world was beginning: the Last Days of Mankind.

  “He was in the service of the great powers. Hidden men capable of overturning everything, of switching the moon with the sun. That’s why the names of the dead students never appeared in the obituaries.”

  Dressed in fresh clothes, once again in a mood to act and argue, Atto Melani made these observations on Penicek’s flight and the subsequent events, which I had briefly outlined after bursting into his room more dead than alive. Atto had sent Domenico out on some pretext. While the Abbot talked, I listened, my expression distant, overcome by all that had happened. We were alone, and free to talk of my assistant as well.

  “It’s no accident,” he said, “that when the other students offered to collect information on the Golden Apple, Simonis advised you not to reveal to them that the dervish wanted someone’s head. He didn’t want to dissuade them too soon – he needed them. On one point Penicek did not lie: Simonis too was a spy. Idiot, indeed. I told you so. He was eager to get his friends’ help, at whatever cost. That’s how it is, when you live a life that is not your own, that belongs to a secret master.”

  “Great heavens,” I complained, “is there no one I can trust? Who is Simonis Rimanopoulos, or rather Symon Rymanovic?”

  “Who do you think he is?” the Abbot cut me short. “Maybe he doesn’t even know himself. Just ask yourself who he has been to you up to this point. And do the same when you ask the same questions about me. All that matters is who I am to you; the rest is vain and fruitless speculation. Only God knows everything.”

  When there was talk of spies, Abbot Melani never lost a chance to grind his own axe. How well it would have suited him if, all the time I had known him, I had never asked myself who he really was!

  “I’ll speak to him. He owes me an explanation,” I announced after a while – without any great conviction, to tell the truth.

  “Forget it. Things are complicated enough already. Why do you need to know any more? In certain cases, like this one, where everything is cursedly confused and could turn lethal at any moment, there’s only one thing that is necessary: to understand for whom the person beside you is working, whether for God or for Mammon. The rest is just a hindrance. And you can trust Simonis.”

  Now, after the account I had given him, Atto had completely reversed his opinion of the Greek. As certain animals do with the help of their sense of smell, Melani the spy had recognised Simonis the spy, and had finally established that he was not an adversary. Like the rest of us, they had both been taken in by Penicek, and the great powers that Atto talked of seemed to have attacked both of the kingdoms that Atto and Simonis belonged to, and in the same way: the mysterious smallpox of Joseph in Vienna, and that of the Grand Dauphin in Paris.

  Atto and I proceeded to re-examine, step by step, the way things now stood. On the eve of the Agha’s arrival in Vienna, the dark forces that were probably participating in the conspiracy against the Emperor had decreed a state of alert. All those people like Simonis, spies on the opposite side whose identities were known, were placed under surveillance. Penicek was chosen to keep an eye on the Greek. That was why the Pennal had asked for him as his Barber! His leaders had probably designated him on account of his affinities in training with Simonis: he too was a student of medicine and had studied in Italy, in Padua. It was no accident that Penicek was the only one who did not belong to the little band of students who had come to Vienna from the University of Bologna.

  At times he had not been able to learn or to foresee our moves because we did not always travel by cart. He had checked up on us day by day, taking us everywhere in that strange carriage of his, which was allowed to go everywhere and at any time of day. After sowing death among us, with a skilful reversal he had succeeded in attributing to Opalinski, whom he had just butchered, his own role: that of a bloodthirsty spy.

  He was never caught off guard. We had found him in the apartment where he had just massacred poor Opalinski with atrocious cruelty, only because he did not know that his victim had an appointment with us.

  Finally, his reconstruction of events. This was all true, so long as the two names Opalinski and Penicek were reversed. That was all. It was he, and not Opalinski, who had arranged everything. He had chosen that building requisitioned by the imperial authorities, so that we would believe that it had really been Jan who organised the ambush. But on account of our meeting with Frosch, we had arrived over an hour late. Thinking that we were not coming or, even worse, that we had smelt a rat, he had executed the poor Pole. As soon as he had completed his horrifying masterwork of violence, he must have heard our footsteps on the stairs. My assistant must have spotted or scented something: that was why he had suddenly made us turn back. Entering by the adjacent buildings, we were not seen by Penicek’s hired killers.

  The Bohemian, realising that his men were not going to be on hand to back him up, locked Janitzki’s mangled corpse in the little study at the far end of the apartment, threw away the key and sat down to wait for us. He was in a trap; but with amazing coolness he pretended to be the victim, instead of the aggressor. We attributed the smell of blood that filled the room to the struggle between the two of them, as recounted to us by the Pennal (a term that now sounded painfully ridiculous for the murderous impostor). He undoubtedly had a hidden pistol on him, but first he tried the bloodless way: scaring us with the possible arrival of some passer-by alerted by the screams, he got us to leave the building as fast as possible without our discovering Opalinski’s corpse. And so he avoided pulling out his weapon and confronting Simonis in a duel that could have been fatal to both of them. Seeing him leave in our company, the black carriage that was waiting for him in the street followed us, perhaps in obedience to a secret signal from Penicek.

  The story he told us in the graveyard was actually a confession. He described all the murders he himself had committed, blaming them on Opalinski. He chose the best way to make things up: describe true events, and just change the characters’ names. When he needed a false name, so as to provide corroborative details, or some heartfelt invocation to make it sound more convincing, he drew on the stones around him: Glàwari, Mariza, Bela T rek, and their respective epitaphs.

  After the performance in the graveyard, he disappeared in the black carriage that had been lurking nearby at his orders. Outside the city he would have met up with other individuals of the same murky, bloody kind, other puppets manoeuvred by the invisible network that was polluting Europe.

  The Bohemian (or Pontevedrine?) had fooled us all. Everything fitted in with his designs. When Simonis and I were on our way to our appointment with Hristo, Penicek, with the excuse of the processions, had tried to take us by long, tortuous routes and also to travel slowly and even to stop the vehicle, so as to delay our arrival at the Prater. He was afraid that his henchmen might kill us, as he himself had told us at the graveyard, attributing the notion to Opalinski. That was why my assailant, on seeing Penicek, had gone off without a fight! He had seen his master.

  After the murder of Dragomir Populescu, Penicek had insisted on getting rid of the corpse; he had almost forced us. He knew that a third body could not just vanish into thin air, that sooner or later we would wonder why there was no sign of any investigation on the part of the authorities. And so he had come up with the idea of hiding the poor Romanian’s body, charging two of his underlings with the task before our very eyes. Would we ever have suspected that they were not simple coach drivers?

  With Koloman, the self-styled Prague student had deployed all his diabolic arts. The so-called trick of Balamber was an invention, as were Attila’s cryptographic skills and Szupán’s passion for secret codes. By voicing doubts with equal candour and skill and dropping the right remarks at the right moment, with little stories made up on the spot, he had led us to say and do just what he wanted. And yet when he was concocting these lies I had sometimes seen him waver and look into the air, as if in search of some good
idea; just how had we all fallen for it? It had to be admitted that Penicek’s powers of invention never failed him. Just think of the non-existent murderous Augustinian monk and the Circassian’s palace, which, of course (there was no need even to verify it), did not really belong to Prince Eugene.

  I announced to Abbot Melani that there was other news. I had been trying to tell him about it since the previous evening, but he had been dead to the world in his bed. At Eugene’s palace Cloridia had discovered that the Turks, principally the dervish, intended to collaborate in treating the Emperor, and they were going to act in concert with the Caesarean Proto-Medicus: the von Hertod Cloridia had seen going in person to meet Ciezeber. That very day they would administer the decisive treatment to Joseph, if they had not already done so.

  “Wha-a-a-t? And you believed this madness?” he gasped, changing colour as soon as I had finished.

  “But Signor Atto, it seemed likely to me that the Ottomans –”

  “Likely my foot! How could you possibly think that an Indian dervish of the Ottoman faith could devote himself to the health of the Caesar of the True Faith? A less worm-eaten brain than yours would have dismissed such an idiotic idea immediately. But I’m amazed at Monna Cloridia. You and she have not understood a damned thing. This is the Emperor’s death sentence!”

  There was no time for discussion. Half an hour later we were inside a hired carriage, like Penicek’s, on our way to the Place with No Name. I could not be late: the police authorities were expecting me and my assistant to draw up our report on the events of the previous day. I could have gone to Neugebäu in our usual cart, but Atto, as he had announced the day before, insisted on coming along too. I had made him dress modestly and I had forbidden him his wig, false moles, white lead and carmine. I would introduce him as a blind old relative whom I was temporarily looking after. He made no objection.

  And so there were three of us in the carriage: Abbot Melani, truly unrecognisable in this natural state, Simonis and myself. I had chosen not to bring our little boy with us but had left him at Porta Coeli, safely with Cloridia. My assistant fixed his gaze, no longer idiotic, on the horizon. I guessed he did not intend to talk; on the Abbot’s advice, I did not press him. Atto himself sat scowling sullenly. The news of the secret operation that the Emperor was going to undergo had put him in an acerbic, touchy mood, almost as if he were in the service of His Caesarean Majesty rather than that of the Most Christian King of France.

  Around our little group I could still smell the powerful, painful stench odour of blood. I pretended to myself that I could accept what I had seen. Deep down, however, I felt that I could not. The images and events of the last few hours were pounding at my senses and my memory. The Pennal’s serpentine presence had gouged a deep trough of anxiety and alienation within me. He had been among us, but not of us. He appeared to be a man, but was of another breed: he was a helmsman of the new order, the Agony of Mankind. He had infiltrated our group by means of the Deposition, exploiting the university traditions, and had become Simonis’s shadow.

  How badly I had judged Penicek! I said to myself for the second time that day. Now I knew for sure: to evaluate a man you have to look him in the eyes. If they are wicked, as were those of the bespectacled ferret the Pennal, the soul that lies hidden behind them cannot offer anything good. Never let oneself be swayed by logic, that flawed human art, which leads us to judge our neighbour on the basis of his words and our fallacious reasoning: the eyes, mirror of the soul, never lie.

  Simonis, I thought, did not have wicked eyes. He had never had them; not even for an instant had I ever caught that alienating sign in the pupils that makes one flinch inexplicably. In the Greek’s glaucous gaze, both when he was feigning idiocy and when he was telling me about Maximilian II, I had always been able to swim as in the clear sea, even if only shorewards, since the spy that lay within him lurked in the sand of the submarine recesses. I had only ever perceived the blue horizon, without the murky sludge that clouds everything: the colour guaranteed the purity of the expanse that lay before me, but I was forbidden to dive beneath the surface.

  But suddenly a surge of disgust overwhelmed me: a sham bespectacled cripple and a sham idiot, what a great combination! I had spent all my efforts taking care not to get tricked again by Abbot Melani, and I had never spotted these two behind my back. One lied for good purposes and one for bad, but was I so sure that, if his mission required it, Simonis would not sacrifice me and perhaps even my little apprentice on the altar of the human aberration they call “just cause”? I knew all too well what spies are like, I thought with a shiver.

  “What sense is there in racking your brains with doubts and questions?” sighed Atto, whispering into my ear, as if guessing my cogitations from my long silence. “Everyone is responsible for his own actions. Before God we will be alone on the day of the Last Judgement. No one can hide his own crimes behind the pretext of obedience, because he will be told: you could have disobeyed and lost your life, but you would have gained it in the kingdom of heaven.”

  The Abbot was talking on his own account as well. I remembered all too clearly when obedience to his King had led him to crime.

  “But remember,” he added raising his voice, “we are all working for God, even those who do not wish to do so. God makes use of everyone, as and when He wants; even that Penicek, however much he may think to the contrary. Remember boy: not a single hair of ours is lost without the Almighty wishing it. His loving designs are so broad, that it is not given to us mortals to understand them.”

  I gazed grimly at Abbot Melani: he was preaching eloquently now that he had come to the end of his life, but how many times over the decades had he himself exploited me and exposed me to mortal dangers for his own shady intrigues?

  However, at that moment Simonis, surprised by Atto’s words, raised his eyes and they met the Abbot’s. And then it was all clear to me.

  My heart saw all that the two spies, the young one and the old one, communicated with their eyes in that eternal instant. For the first and only time they talked to each other with no filters. I saw between them an interchange of illusions, troubles, inward bereavements, resurrections, a determination to fight, cold-blooded reasonings and burning passions, and finally an awareness – innate in the Greek student, gradually acquired by the castrato – of the divine order of things. Their lives were mirrored in each other’s eyeballs. It lasted but a single mute moment, but it was enough to enlighten me. Thirty years earlier they would certainly not have been on the same side, but would have fought one another – the spy of the Sun King and the faithful servant of the Holy Roman Empire – but now they both recoiled from the world’s headlong precipitation into Godless darkness, and finally they met. That was why Melani had spoken thus in front of Simonis.

  Like a putrid voiding of the bowels, the image of poor Opalinski skewered like a beetle rose up before my mind’s eye.

  “But why such atrocity?” I asked, shaking my head. “There was no need anymore. Penicek had come there to kill us. He no longer wanted to muddy the waters to drive us to go on investigating. The tandur with Dragomir’s pudenda was needed to put us off the trail, but why ram spits into Janitzki’s eyes and napkins down his throat, condemning him to that horrible death?”

  “It was the only way for puny Penicek to overpower the size and strength of Opalinski,” answered Simonis. “His men didn’t come because they were downstairs waiting for us. And so he attacked Opalinski on his own. They fought and Penicek was wounded. He won by blinding him with the spits. The little devil must have been an expert knife thrower, and the eye sockets are among the few things we all have that are soft; pierce them and you get straight to the brain. The pain and suffering must have been unspeakable. He couldn’t use his pistol because of the noise. He may have high-level protection but a shot would be heard by too many people, and the situation could have got out of hand. For the same reason he thrust the napkins into his victim’s mouth, now that he could no longer see, to st
op him screaming. The dagger did the rest.”

  My assistant’s expertise and promptness in describing the dynamics of the murder depressed me more than ever. I had grown old, I thought, but once again I found myself the most ingenuous in the group; and this time I was faced with not just one but two spies!

  “Sorry, boy,” Atto cut in, addressing me. “What did you say? Penicek had come to kill you . . .”

  “Yes, Signor Atto, as I had already told you . . .”

  “Yes, yes, but it’s just struck me that . . . My God! How had I failed to see it earlier?”

  I did not manage to hear what Melani meant. At that moment we arrived at the Place with No Name, where we found a small squad of guards awaiting us.

  As soon as we got out of the cart they made us enter the mansion. The atmosphere was vaguely unreal: there was not a single animal around now, and silence reigned. It was saddening to think that not even rough old Frosch was on hand with his habitual bottle and old Mustafa.

  “What about the lions? Have you caught them all?” I asked, just to break the silence between us and our escorts.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” said one of them, who seemed to be in charge, inviting Abbot Melani to follow us as well.

  “Actually I had nothing to do with all the confusion yesterday. He’s the one who has to make the report,” protested Atto. “Couldn’t I stay outside?”

  The guards were adamant. We were led inside the mansion, down to the semi-basement. One of the men who was escorting us seemed familiar. We paused in the gallery to the west, where the day before we had heard the footsteps of “Pup”, Neugebäu’s secret elephant.

  There now entered an individual dressed like a public functionary, whom I guessed to be a criminal notary. He began to read a document in German, of which I understood hardly a word. I turned questioningly to Simonis, while the notary went on reading.