Veritas (Atto Melani) (64 page)

We remained standing around the little cage with its revolting contents. Everyone was too upset to speak. Cloridia could not take her eyes off the macabre container with its severed pudenda. She
grew thoughtful. Suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, she found the door and opened it. Then she lifted the container and stroked its bottom, as if her fingertips might catch something that the
darkness concealed from our eyes.

The Hungarian reappeared almost immediately, his face deathly pale, his eyes staring wildly.

“We must get away, at once, all of us,” he said in a strangled voice.

“What’s the matter, Koloman?” I asked him.

“Dragomir wasn’t . . . We thought he was . . . there was nobody there with him, nobody, nobody . . .” he said with the first tears streaming down his face.

Our inspection took just a few moments.

Cloridia had cleaned up Abbot Melani’s head as best she could, and he, leaning on his stick and on my wife’s arm, looked at the corpse without saying a word. I stared balefully at
the old castrato. Nothing could shake my feeling that he knew more about this than he was letting on.

“Away, come away from here,” I said. I looked around and took Cloridia’s hand and gripped Abbot Melani under the armpit, while Simonis seized Koloman by the arm, ordering him
to stop crying, or else we would be noticed.

We began to walk down Mount Calvary Street, resisting the temptation to run and trying not to show our faces when we met the rare passers-by.

Until some couple in heat discovered it, Dragomir Populescu’s corpse would remain there, as we had seen it shortly before: the trousers lowered, his torso leaning forward. Underneath his
lustful body, however, there was no concubine, but three pointed candlesticks, the sort they stick Easter candles on. Some robust hand had thrust them hard into the chest and heart of the poor
Romanian student from the Black Sea.

More black blood was slowly soaking his thighs and trousers, seeping from the stump of lacerated flesh where once his sex had been.

We joined Penicek again, who had been waiting for us at the bottom of the street. While the cart set off, Simonis told him briefly what had happened.

“Half-Asia!” the Greek muttered by way of conclusion.

“And suppose it had been the Turks?” I asked.

“Asia or Half-Asia, it’s all the same.”

“Signor Barber, if I may be so bold, we must get rid of Populescu’s body,” intervened Penicek, “otherwise the guards will find this whole story a little too atrocious. A
Bettelstudent
does not die like this. They might carry out some serious investigation.”

“You’re right, Pennal,” agreed Simonis, “we can’t run the risk of being involved. We also knew Dànilo. We saw him die.”

“You’re talking as if you were the murderers,” objected Cloridia.

Simonis responded with silence, staring at us with his slightly foolish eyes. Was it not he who had set his friends off on the trail of the Golden Apple? And was it not Cloridia and myself, I
thought, who had started off the whole story, alarmed by the strange embassy of the Agha? Furthermore we had said nothing to Simonis’s companions about Ciezeber’s plot. If they had
learned in time that the Turks wanted someone’s head, and especially that this someone was in all likelihood the Emperor himself, at this hour they might still be alive.

I decided that the moment had come to tell Koloman Szupán about the dervish. Obviously I omitted to say that I had known this for days and had said nothing. The Hungarian was terrified.
He knew well, coming from where he did, what the Infidels were capable of.

Penicek interrupted us, offering to get rid of the remains of Populescu with the help of two cart drivers, unlicensed like himself, whom he could trust.

“You won’t make it in time. Some couple will spot something first and raise the alarm,” I said, shaking my head.

“But they live just round the corner,” insisted Penicek. “Trust me.”

Having said that, without even waiting for any sign of assent from me or from his Barber, he pulled up the cart and climbed down, slipping into a doorway with all the speed that his crippled leg
would allow him. When he came back, two shadowy figures emerged with him, who set off quickly in the direction of Mount Calvary.

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm! Coolness and . . . sang-froid!” chortled Penicek with a macabre humour that was quite out of place, while his colleagues prepared to
carry out their melancholy offices.

“Shut up, you filthy Pennal!” Simonis snapped indignantly, whacking him on the neck.

Once we had started moving again, Penicek now driving quietly on the box seat, conjectures started to fly freely.

“It’s clear to me,” began my assistant. “The girl Populescu had arranged to meet was the death of him.”

“It’s the same one Dragomir had asked about the Golden Apple. But it can’t have been her,” objected Koloman. “She wouldn’t have had the strength to skewer him
with those candlesticks.”

I looked at Atto Melani. He was sitting beside me, with his head leaning backwards. He had been well wrapped up by Cloridia, who was talking encouragingly to him in a low voice, asking him how
he felt, but getting no answer. The Abbot’s eyes were half closed; he seemed half asleep, but I knew the old fox of a castrato. I knew that he was listening to everyone and pondering within
himself.

“Say it, I dare you: you think this death is just another coincidence?” I whispered into his ear.

Atto gave a slight start, but kept quiet.

Koloman meanwhile went on: “I would say that it’s the work of at least two men, probably her relatives, and also to hide that little cage so high up –”

“It’s a
tandur
,” Cloridia interrupted him.

“What?” I asked, not remembering where I had heard that name.

“I’ve examined it carefully. The container of your companion’s severed pudenda is an Armenian
tandur
.”

“Armenian?” I said with a start.

“Yes, it’s a kind of little stove for warming yourself.”

Now I remembered. Cloridia had mentioned it to me when she came back from the audience with the Agha. It was a little stove full of cinders and burning coal to be placed under a table covered
with woollen drapes that hung down to the ground. The Armenians would pull the blanket up around themselves and put their hands and arms underneath to keep warm.

“So it must have been the Ottomans!” I exclaimed. “You yourself, Cloridia, told me that some of the Armenians in the Agha’s retinue insisted on lighting a
tandur
to sit around, at the risk of setting the palace on fire.”

On hearing the Agha’s name again, Koloman Szupán grew pale with terror and, wringing his hands, asked Cloridia in a stammering voice whether she was sure of what she said and what
the devil a
tandur
was exactly.

While my consort replied, I thought back to the Armenian who had met Abbot Melani, and the obscure traffickings between the two of them and the little bag of money that the castrato had put into
his hands at the end.

“It was the Armenians, Signor Atto,” I repeated to him in a low voice so as not to be heard by the others, looking at him with spite, “the Armenians of the Agha, to be precise.
Doesn’t this tell you anything? Perhaps they have an accomplice: someone who gave them money, a lot of money, for this murder.”

The old Abbot remained silent.

“At last we have the proof that it was those cursed Ottomans. And if they did away with Dragomir, they also murdered Dànilo and Hristo,” I insisted.

Melani did not move a muscle. He seemed to be dozing. I started up again:

“You wanted to talk to me to proclaim your innocence: you’ve been chasing me all evening. Now I’m here to listen to you, come on! How come you have nothing to say to me
now?”

Atto turned towards me and behind his black lenses I saw him furrow his brows, almost as if he wanted to strike me down with his blind stare. He pursed his lips, perhaps to hold back words that
were ready to burst from his mouth.

He was so stubborn, the old castrato. He just refused to accept the evidence: I was no longer the simpleton he had left at Villa Spada eleven years earlier, whom he had been sure of finding
again in Vienna. But above all he could not resign himself to the fact that he had lost that edge, that dialectic agility, and that promptness of response that had always enabled him to fool me.
And so he preferred to shut himself up in obstinate dumbness.

“That Populescu was Romanian,” he whispered at last. “If you weren’t so ignorant of those lands, you would know that Romania too is under the dominion of the Sublime
Porte. At any rate, Turks, Armenians, or Romanians, it makes no difference to me. I have nothing to do with it.”

“We’re dead, we’re all dead.”

Mortifyingly silenced by Abbot Melani’s reply, I reflected on my ignorance and on the unexpected prospects that were opening up before me. At that moment Koloman began to repeat the same
words of terror over and over, his eyes staring, his hands compulsively clutching the celery stalk between his thighs, almost as if he were afraid that by some evil trick it too might end up as a
chopped ingredient in a
tandur
stew.

“Just a moment,” Cloridia stopped him, “we can’t be sure that it was the Agha’s Armenians. Populescu’s girl was Armenian herself.”

My wife’s statement, pronounced in a tone free from all doubts, pulled me from my cogitations and threw us all into amazement.

“How can you say that with such certainty?” I asked.

“Because Populescu boasted he knew the Turkish harems.”

“Right, and you called him a eunuch,” I recalled, thinking with a shiver that Cloridia had proved prophetic: on Mount Calvary Dragomir had indeed been emasculated.

Thinking back to it, she went on, Dragomir Populescu’s talk about the harems could only have come from an Ottoman woman, but not a Turkish one.

“First of all, Dragomir couldn’t have seen a harem because, as I said, men are not admitted, except eunuchs; secondly his description could only have come from someone who had lived
in a harem, not just visited one.”

In addition, Cloridia added, the Armenians were a people subjugated by the Turks and so were often servants, and they told the simple truth about the harems because they hated their masters. The
details of the rouge also made it clear that Dragomir’s source was a woman, and the contempt for the negro servant women suggested she was Armenian. The Armenians, in fact, despise the
negroes, whom they consider subhuman, and they detest having them as workmates.

“Populescu’s pudenda,” concluded Cloridia, “could have been placed in the
tandur
as a warning to leave Armenian women in peace.”

“It’s not possible,” I protested. “Dànilo, Hristo and now Dragomir. They were friends and all three of them have died within a short space of time. It is not just
a coincidence.”

“But it’s a fact,” objected Simonis, “that Dragomir had announced that he wanted to carry out some tests to see if his girl was chaste or not.”

“What were these?” asked Cloridia.

“He was going to make her drink water with
armoniacum
salt and inhale powdered ephen roots. If she wasn’t a virgin, she would pee herself.”

“Your friend was just asking for it!” exclaimed my wife scornfully. “I’m not surprised his girl emasculated him!”

“Clear proof that the girl was not chaste,” remarked Penicek.

“Shut up, Pennal!” Simonis rebuffed him with irritation.

“What an imbecile Dragomir was! How could he trust an Armenian?” gasped Koloman, his voice choked with apprehension.

“Why?” I said in surprise.

“They’re not people to be trifled with. Don’t tell me you don’t know: their coffee shops should be avoided like the plague. All of them. Even idiots know that Armenians
are the most treacherous and lurid individuals of the whole human race. They’re two-faced double-dealers, children of Satan, snakes in human form.”

Koloman recalled a historic event he had told me about earlier: during the great Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, a week before the final battle, there was a serious act of treachery. From
inside the city someone had informed the Ottomans that Vienna was at the end of its tether and could be conquered immediately. The army wanted to resist but there were only five thousand soldiers
left. The citizens were ready for an armistice with the Turks, to put an end to the hardships of the siege and to ward off the risk – in the event of defeat – of being massacred. The
controversy between soldiers and civilians had not yet been resolved and on 5th September it was a highly delicate moment when either side might end up prevailing. Amid the general confusion the
city guard on the ramparts was slackened. It was just then that the traitor carried out his dirty work: he sent the Turks a package of confidential letters containing descriptions of the split
between civilians and soldiers, so that the Turks could easily deduce that this was the best moment for their attack. The villainous spy was the servant (whose name nobody knew) of a merchant,
known to the Viennese as Doctor Schahin. Fortunately, despite this valuable information the Turks decided to wait a little longer. In the meantime reinforcements joined the Christian armies, which
then triumphed gloriously in the decisive battle of 12th September.