Veritas (Atto Melani) (52 page)

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 with 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 the 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.

Now the ring was more than twice as large as when I had last seen it on him: in addition to the Roman keys there were now the keys to all the cellars of Vienna. And that was no small
achievement: as Cardinal Piccolomini had observed three-hundred years earlier, the city’s cellars are deep and spacious, giving rise to the saying that in Vienna there are as many buildings
below as above ground.

“If you don’t confess straightaway, I’ll tear all your adored keys from you and throw them away,” I threatened.

Ugonio began to whimper and said that if that was how things were he could tell me some more about the matter, but not until tomorrow. He repeated several times that he would rather go straight
to hell than talk now, and he would prefer a thousand times to rot in the terrible imperial dungeons, where – he well knew – he risked being tortured and having his limbs mutilated. It
would still be far preferable to the horrifying fate that would await him if he revealed to us the secret of his pacts with the dervish.

Ugonio’s terror was practically a confession. I had no doubt about it now: it was Atto who had tracked Ugonio down and hired him; he was the link between the Abbot and the Turkish embassy.
Atto had known the
corpisantaro
for thirty years. He had learned how valuable he was for certain shady dealings. And he also knew how to make the best use of him without being swindled.
Had the decrepit old castrato really hoped, I thought with a smile, that I would never find him out?

“All right. Tomorrow morning here, then. Let’s say at nine: I’ve got a cleaning job at Porta Coeli – immediately afterwards we can meet. In the meantime, for surety,
I’ll keep hold of these,” I said at last to Ugonio, taking from his overcoat the ring with the keys, to keep as hostages. “I’ll give them back when you show up
again.”