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by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti


  After rapidly leafing through this last curious volume of moral reflections, Atto shook his head in irritation.

  "What are you looking for?" I asked him in the lowest voice of which I was capable.

  "Is it not obvious? The owner. These days, everyone marks their books, at least those of value, with their name."

  So I assisted Atto and there soon passed through my hands the De arte Gimnastica of Gerolamo Mercuriale, a Vocabularium Ecclesiasticum and a Pharetra divini Amoris, while Atto set aside with a snort the Works of Plato and a Theatre of Mankynde by Gaspare de Villa Lobos, before greeting with surprise a copy of Bacchus in Tuscany by his be­loved Francesco Redi.

  "I do not understand it," he whispered impatiently at the end of the search. "There is everything here: history, philosophy, Christian doctrine, languages ancient and modern, devotional works, various curiosities and even a little astrology. Here, take a look: The Arcana of the Stars by a certain Antonio Carnevale and the Ephemerides Andreae Argoli. Yet in no book is there the owner's name."

  Seeing that fortune had thus far remained on our side, and that we had avoided only by a hair's-breadth being surprised by the mas­ter of the house, I was about to suggest to Atto that we should be on our way when, for the first time, I came across a book on medicine.

  I had in fact been searching on another shelf, where I came across a volume by Vallesius, then the Medicina Septentrionalis and Practical Anatomy by Bonetus, a Booke of Roman Antidotes, a Liber observationum medicarum Ioannes Chenchi, a De Mali Ipocondriaci by Paolo Tacchia, a Commentarium Ioannis Casimiri in Hippocratis Aphorismos, an Enciclopedia Chirurgica Rationalis by Giovanni Doleo and many other precious texts on medicine, chirurgie and anatomy. I was, among other things, struck by four volumes of a seven-volume edition of the works of Galen, all rather finely bound, in vermilion leather with golden lettering; the three others were not in their place. I picked one up, enjoying the feel of the precious binding, and opened it. A small inscription, at the foot of the frontispiece and on the right-hand side read: Ioannis Tiracordae. The same thing, I rapidly established, was to be found in all the other books on medicine.

  "I know!" I whispered excitedly. "I know where we are."

  I was about to share my discovery when we were again surprised by the sound of a door opening on the first floor, and by an old man's voice:

  "Paradisa! Come down, our friend is about to take his leave of us."

  A woman's voice replied from the second floor that she would be coming at once.

  So we were about to be caught between two fires: the woman descending from the second floor and the master of the house await­ing her on the first. There was no door to the little room and it was, moreover, too small for us to crouch in unseen. We should be discovered.

  Hearing, understanding and acting came together in a single movement. Like lizards hunted by. a hawk, we scuttled down the stairs in furtive desperation, hoping to reach the first floor before the two men. Otherwise, there would be no escape.

  In less than a second came the moment of truth: we had just come down a few stairs when we heard the voice of the master of the house.

  "And tomorrow, do not forget to bring me your little liqueur!" said he, under his breath but in a rather jovial tone of voice, obviously addressing his guest, while they approached the foot of the stairs. There was no more time: we were lost.

  Whenever I think back on those moments of terror, I tell myself that only divine mercy saved us from many punishments, which we doubtless deserved. I also reflect that, if Abbot Melani had not had recourse to one of his ploys, matters would have gone very differ­ently.

  Atto had a flash of inspiration and energetically blew out the four candles which illuminated this flight of stairs. We again took refuge in the little room where, this time in unison, we puffed up our chests and blew out the candelabrum. When the master of the house looked up the stairs, he was confronted with pitch darkness and heard the woman's voice begging him to light the candles again. This had the double effect of not giving us away and making the two men return, bearing a single oil lamp, in order to fetch a candle. In that brief lapse of time, we groped our way swiftly down the stairs.

  Hardly had we reached the ground floor than we rushed into the abandoned bedchamber, then into the kitchen and, thence, to the coach-house. There, in my haste, I tripped and fell headlong on the fine layer of hay, making one of the nags nervous. Atto rapidly closed the door behind us, and Ugonio had no difficulty in locking it in time.

  We remained motionless in the dark, panting, with our ears glued to the door. We thought that we could hear two or more people de­scending into the courtyard. Footsteps moved over the cobbles in the direction of the doorway to the street. We heard the heavy door open, then slam shut. Other footsteps turned back until they were lost on the stairs. For two or three minutes, we remained in sepulchral silence. The peril seemed to have passed.

  We then lit a lantern and went through the trapdoor. As soon as the heavy wooden lid had closed on us, I was at last able to inform Abbot Melani of my discovery. We had entered the house of Giovanni Tiracorda, the old court physician to the Pope.

  "Are you certain of that?" asked Abbot Melani as we again de­scended into the subterranean city.

  "Of course I am," I replied.

  "Tiracorda, what a coincidence," commented Atto with a little laugh.

  "Do you know him?"

  "It is an extraordinary coincidence. Tiracorda was physician to the conclave in which my fellow-citizen Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi was elected. I was present, too."

  I, however, had never addressed a word to the old Archiater. Tiracorda, having been chief physician to two popes, was honoured in the quarter, so much so that he was still addressed as Archiater, although in reality his office was now that of locum. He lived in a little palazzo belonging to Duke Salviati, situated in the Via dell'Orso, only a few houses beyond the Donzello, on the corner of the Via della Stufa delle Donne. The map of the underground galleries which Atto Melani had drawn had proven to be accurate: moving from one gallery to another and coming to Tiracorda's stable, we had almost arrived back at our point of departure. I knew little, indeed very little indeed, about Ti­racorda: that he had a wife (perhaps the Paradisa whose name we had heard him call not long before), and that in their large and fine house there also lived two or three maidservants who helped with the work of the household, and that he practised his art at the Arcispedale di Santo Spirito, at Sassia.

  He was more rotund than tall, with rounded shoulders and almost no neck, and a great prominent stomach on which he often rested his joined hands, as though he incarnated the virtues of patience and tolerance. All this suggested a phlegmatic and pusillanimous charac­ter. Sometimes I had seen him from a window walking down the Via dell'Orso, trotting along in a garment that reached almost to his feet; oft had I observed him, smoothing his mustachios and the goatee on his chin, in lively conversation with some shopkeeper. Caring little for periwigs despite his baldness, with his hat constantly in hand, his slightly bumpy pate, crowning a low, wrinkled forehead and pointed ears, shone in the sun. Crossing his path, I had once been struck by how rosy his cheeks were and how kindly his expression: with eyebrows that screened the deep-set eyes and the tired eyelids of a physician accustomed, yet never resigned, to looking upon the suf­fering of others.

  When we had covered the most difficult portion of the return journey, Abbot Melani asked Ugonio if he could procure him a copy of the key which he had used to open the stable door.

  "I assure your most worshipful decisionality that I shall not emit to execute your desideration; and that, upon the earliest importu­nity. However, to be more padre than parricide, it would have been more perfectly ameliorating to have had it fabricated upon the past nocturn."

  "Are you telling me that it would have been better to have the copy of the key made last night?"

  Ugonio appeared to be surprised by the question.

  "Indubiously, in the street
of the chiavari, the key-facturers, where Komarek impresses."

  Atto's forehead creased. He plunged a hand into his pocket and drew out the page from the Bible. Several times, he passed the palm of his hand over it, then held it up to the light of the lantern which he held in his hand. I saw him carefully examine the shadows which the folds cast in the lamplight.

  "Confound it, how can I have allowed that to escape me?" cursed Abbot Melani.

  And he pointed out with his finger a form which I only then seemed able to detect in the middle of the. paper: "If you observe carefully, despite the precarious condition of this piece of paper," he began explaining to me, "you will be able to find more or less in the middle of the paper the outline of a large key with an oblong head, exactly like that of the closet. Look, just here, where the paper has remained smoother, while on either side it is crumpled."

  "So this piece of paper is just the wrapping of a key?" I concluded, in surprise.

  "Precisely. And it was indeed in the Via dei Chiavari, where all the locksmiths and makers of keys have their shops, that we found the clan­destine workshop of Komarek, the printer used by Stilone Priaso."

  "Ah, then I understand," I deduced. "Stilone Priaso stole the key and then went to have a copy made in the Via dei Chiavari, near Komarek's place."

  "No, dear boy. Some of the guests—you yourself told me this, do you not remember?—said that they had stayed at the Locanda del Donzello previously."

  "That is true: Stilone Priaso, Bedfordi and Angiolo Brenozzi," I recalled, "in the days of the late lamented Signora Luigia."

  "Good. That means that Stilone most probably already had a copy of the key to the little room that leads from the inn to the under­ground galleries. Moreover, he already had sufficient reason to visit Komarek, in order to have some clandestine gazettes and almanacks printed. No, we need not look for one of Komarek's clients, but sim­ply one of our own guests. The person who briefly removed Master Pellegrino's bunch of keys needed to have a copy made of the key to the closet."

  "And then the thief is Padre Robleda! He mentioned Malachi to see how I would react: perhaps he realised that he had lost the sheet of paper with the prophecy of Malachi underground and thought up a trick worthy of the best spies to unmask me, just as Dulcibeni says," I exclaimed, after which I told Atto of Dulcibeni's harangue about the Jesuits' vocation for spying.

  "Ah yes. Perhaps the thief is none other than Padre Robleda, also because..."

  "Gfrrrlubh," interrupted Ciacconio politely.

  "Errorific and fellatious argumentations," translated Ugonio.

  "How, pray?" asked Abbot Melani incredulously.

  "Ciacconio assures that the provenance of the foliables is not Malachi: this, with all due circumspect for your decisionality, and, of course, decreasing the scrupules rather than increasing one's scru­ples."

  At the same time, from under his clothing Ciacconio produced a little Bible, worn and filthy, but still legible.

  "Do you always keep it on you?" I asked.

  "Gfrrrlubh."

  "He is exceedingly religious: a bigot, almost a trigot," explained Ugonio.

  We looked in the index for the Book of Malachi. It was the last of the twelve books of the minor prophets, and so was to be found among the last pages of the Old Testament. I turned the pages rap­idly until I found the title and, with some difficulty because of the microscopic characters, began reading:

  PROPHETHIA MALACHITE

  CAPVT I.

  Onus verbi Domini ad Israel in manu Malachiae.

  Dilexi vos, dicit Dominus, & dixistis: in quo dilexisti nos? Nonne frater erat Esau Iacob, dicit Dominus, & dilexi Iacob, Esau autem odio habui? & posui montes ejus in solitudinem, & hereditatem ejus in dracones deserti.

  Quod si dixerit Idumaea: Destructi sumus, sed revertentes aedificabimus quae destructa sunt: Haec dicit Dominus exercituum: Isti aedificabunt, & ego destruam: & vocabuntur terminis impietatis, & populus cui iratus est Dominus usque in aeternum.

  Et oculi vestri videbunt: & vos dicetis: Magnificetur Dominus super terminum Israel.

  Filius honorat patrem, & servus dominum suum: si ergo Pater ergo sum, ubi est honor meus? & si Dominus ego sum, ubi est timor meus? dicit Dominus exercituum ad vos, & sacerdotes, qui despicitis nomen meum, & dixitis: In quo despeximus nomen tuum?...

  I broke off: Abbot Melani had taken from his pocket the sheet of paper found by Ugonio and Ciacconio. We compared the two. Although mutilated, one could read in it the names Ochozias, Accaron and Beelzebub, all of which were absent. Not a single word corresponded. "So... it is another text of Malachi," I observed hesitantly. "Gfrrrlubh," retorted Ciacconio, shaking his head. "To be more auspicious than haruspicious and more medicinal than mendacious, the foliable is, as Ciacconio suggested and ingest­ed, with all deference to the sagacity of your decisionality, from the secondesimal Book of Kings."

  And he explained that "Malachi", the truncated word which could be read on the scrap of Bible, was not "Malachia", the Latin name of the prophet, but what remained of the word "Malachim", which in Hebrew means "Kings". This is because, Ugonio explained patiently, in many Bibles, the title is written according to the version of the Hebrews, which does not always correspond to the Christian one. The Christians do not, for example, admit among the Holy Scrip­tures, the two books of the Maccabees. Consequently, the complete title, mutilated and masked by the bloodstains, originally read, ac­cording to the corpisantari:

  Carattere Lettura Tonda.

  LIBER REGUM.

  Secundus Malachim.

  Caput Primum.

  "Liber Regum" meant "Book of Kings", while "Secundus Mala­chim" stood for the "Second Book of Kings" and not for "Malachi". We looked up the Second Book of Kings in the Bible of the corpisantari. And indeed, the title and text corresponded perfectly both with the scrap of paper and with the explanation of Ugonio and Ciac­conio. Abbot Melani's face darkened.

  "I have but one question: why did you not say so before?" he asked, and I could already imagine the reply which the corpisantari would utter in unison.

  "We had not the honorarium to be bequested."

  "Gfrrrlubh," confirmed Ciacconio.

  So, Robleda had not stolen the keys and the little pearls, nor had he entered the underground galleries, he had not lost the loose page from the Bible, nor did he know anything of the Via dei Chiavari or Komarek. And even less of Signor di Mourai, that is Nicolas Fouquet. Or to put it more precisely, there was no reason to suspect him more than anyone else, and his long discourse concerning Saint Malachy had been purely coincidental. In other words, we were back to our starting point.

  In compensation, we had discovered that gallery D led to a great and spacious dwelling, the owner of which was chief physician to the Pope. But another mystery had arisen that night. To the discovery of the Bible had been added our finding the phial of blood which some­one had inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately) mislaid in the gallery leading to the house of Tiracorda.

  "Do you think that the phial was lost by the thief?" I asked Abbot Melani.

  At that moment, the abbot tripped on a stone protruding from the ground and fell heavily. We helped him to his feet, although he re­fused all assistance; he dusted himself down hurriedly, most put out by what had happened, and uttered many imprecations against the builders of the gallery, the plague, physicians, the quarantine and, finally, against the blameless corpisantari who, overwhelmed by so many unmerited insults, exchanged glances full of humiliation.

  I was thus able, thanks to that apparently insignificant incident, to measure clearly the unexpected change which had, for some time, come over Abbot Melani. While, on the first days, his eyes had spar­kled, now they were often lost in thought. His proud bearing had tak­en on a more cautious aspect, his once confident gestures had grown hesitant. His acute and perspicacious reasoning sometimes gave way to doubts and reticence. True, we had successfully penetrated the house of Tiracorda, exposing ourselves to the gravest risks. True, we had boldly
explored new passages almost blindly, guided more by Ciacconio's nose than by our lanterns. Yet Abbot Melani's hand seemed from time to time to tremble slightly, while his eyes would close in a mute prayer for salvation.

  This new state of mind, which for the time being surfaced just occasionally like a half-submerged wreck from the past, had be­come manifest only recently, indeed very recently. It was difficult to tell exactly when it had begun. It had, indeed, arisen from no particular event, but from occurrences both old and new, which were now settling awkwardly into one single form: a form which, however, remained undefined. Its substance was, however, black and bloody, like the fear which, I was now certain, troubled Abbot Melani's thoughts.

 

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