Veritas (Atto Melani) (65 page)

“And so?”

“The traitors, Schahin and the nameless servant, the ones who injected into the suffering limbs of the besieged city the deadly poison of treachery, were two Armenians.”

He explained, in excited tones, that the Armenians originally inhabited a remote kingdom between Turkey and Persia, which was subjugated by the Ottomans. They began their journey westwards from
the Crimea, sometimes from Constantinople itself, the capital of the Turkish Empire, and swarming across Poland and Galicia they finally reached Vienna. They hated the Turks, who oppressed their
small and ancient kingdom, and from whose yoke they wished to free themselves. For this reason many of them travelled back and forth between Vienna and the Ottoman Porte, acting as spies for the
Empire. But as soon as they could, they would take advantage of the trust that the noble Council of War granted them, and would sell themselves to the enemy.

They were capable of the boldest enterprises, and of unprecedented feats; disguised as merchants, interpreters, couriers, they would undertake to carry out acts of sabotage, defamation and
assassination for their masters. They would lead whole caravans into the desert for weeks, without any fear of hunger, thirst or fatigue, and they remained active until old age. They could handle
explosives, and were skilled in medicine and also in the secret arts of alchemy. Poison was a docile instrument for them. In exchange for their services, they received by imperial decree the
licence to open coffee shops or to practise as court couriers, travelling freely between the Empire and the lands of the East. In the lands between Poland and the Empire there rose villages
populated entirely by Armenians, where they governed themselves with their own laws and their own judges. They were not subject to customs duties and, moreover, having the monopoly of the office of
translating and interpreting, they actually controlled the flow of trade in its entirety, not only from east to west, but also from north to south. Thanks to these advantages they grew rich on the
worst kind of trafficking.

An Armenian named Johannes Diodato, a great friend of that Schahin who had betrayed the city during the siege of 1683, had rushed into the remains of the Turkish camp the day after the
liberation of Vienna to sell the abandoned weapons of the losers, and after the conquest of Ofen he had speculated on the slave trade.

“The notorious Georg Kolschitzky himself, the founder of the Blue Bottle coffee shop,” declared Koloman with concern, “is said to have gone calmly back and forth across the
enemy lines during the siege bearing dispatches – he operated as a spy of the imperial forces against the Turks, but almost certainly also vice-versa.”

In Ottoman lands they purloined silver coins and smuggled them into the Empire. About thirty years earlier, thanks to the protests of the Viennese traders, they had reached the point of
expelling almost all of these dubious figures.

“But the war council always needs them and in the end they managed to get back in,” explained the Hungarian student.

“And the coffee shops?” I asked.

They were nothing more, Szupán explained, than places where the wicked Armenians trafficked in secret and sycophantic messages, corruption and intrigues. They seemed to be untouchable:
whenever they aroused scandal and the waters grew too troubled, they would go off to Constantinople, but they would come back, with impunity, just a short while later. They married among themselves
to cement their business alliances. But since they were evil-hearted, they would sometimes ruin one another, denouncing the treachery of friends and relatives to the Emperor.

I listened in utter amazement. Those beautiful shops, their ineffable peace, the smell of coffee . . . All this, according to Koloman Szupán, concealed levels of deceit and treachery that
the fair face of Vienna would never make one suspect.

“If there’s any intrigue or speculation to be done,” continued Koloman, “nothing will stop the Armenians.”

Not only were they as elusive as eels. It was even difficult to identify them: you might have always called one of them by the exotic name of Schahin, the betrayer of the besieged city in 1683,
but you would then discover that his real name was Kalust Nerveli, or Calixtus or Bonaventura, and his friend Diodato also answered to the name of Owanes Astouatzatur. Others did not even have a
surname, like the mysterious Gabriel, from Anatolia, who in 1686 with a dreadful explosion blew up the powder magazine inside the castle of Ofen, or Buda, so that the imperial forces regained it
from the Turks after over a century.

“And we were imbeciles too,” concluded Koloman Szupán. “Dragomir told us that his girl worked in a coffee shop. Those places are always in the hands of Armenians. It was
natural that she should have been one. We should have thought of it and warned him.”

“Populescu did describe her as dark in appearance,” agreed Simonis.

“And he told us that the brunette had heard about the Golden Apple from her master,” I added, “who must therefore have been an Armenian coffee shop owner.”

I broke off. While I was speaking, my mind repeated two words mechanically, “brunette” and “coffee”, as if in search of some hidden meaning.

At last I found it. I stared at Cloridia with my mouth open.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“The Blue Bottle . . . When we last went there – do you remember Signor Atto? – we were served by a brunette, the one who offered you the chocolate scoop.”

“The coffee shops of Vienna, if they’re all Armenian as you said,” objected the Abbot with irritable scepticism, “will be full of dark-haired waitresses.”

“But if it’s as I say it is, if that waitress who served us is the same one that Populescu had an appointment with here at Mount Calvary, then the talk about the Tekuphah that we
heard at the Blue Bottle could have been a threat addressed to us.”

“Yes, it’s possible,” agreed Simonis. “Perhaps he was related to the girl, and already knew who we were.”

“And the fat woman who served us the coffee scowled at us,” I insisted.

“What, that old fool’s gibberish a warning? Never,” Melani said scornfully.

Atto adopted an air of indifference, but I had seen him almost die from fear not long before, when the curse of the Tekuphah,
alias
poor Populescu’s blood, had dripped onto his
head. Now he simply wanted to divert my suspicions from his unmentionable dealings with the Armenians.

At Porta Coeli I helped Cloridia put the old castrato to bed. In the adjacent room, Domenico was snoring laboriously, afflicted by his cold.

Just before bidding Atto goodnight I could not restrain myself:

“Are you still convinced that Dànilo, Hristo and Dragomir died one after the other, just a few hours apart, purely by coincidence?”

“I haven’t changed my mind. I still think that they were not murdered because of their investigation of the Golden Apple. But take note: I have never said that their deaths are not
linked to one another.”

Day the Sixth
T
UESDAY
, 14 A
PRIL
1711

“Man has always dreamed of being able to soar into the airy heights, of avoiding the ineluctable fate of his mortal species, which can only attain heaven by divesting
itself of its earthly raiment.”

“Get to the point, stupid Pennal. We’ve got no time to waste. Isn’t that right, Signor Master?”

I would have liked to go to the Coppersmiths’ Slope, to repair the chimney flue of Anton de’ Rossi, former gentleman of the chamber of Cardinal Collonitz, and also friend of Gaetano
Orsini. Instead, I had barely had time to finish the jobs I was already committed to: I had been working for no more than three hours when Cloridia sent for me. She needed my help. She had to go
and see the wife of Prince Eugene’s first chamberlain. The woman was about to give birth, and as a good midwife my consort took care to check up on her as often as possible. Since she clearly
could not take Abbot Melani with her, she was leaving him briefly in our charge.

And so at that early hour in the morning, Simonis, my little apprentice and I, in the company of Atto and Penicek, were sitting in the Yellow Eagle, an alehouse in the Greek quarter, not far
from Porta Coeli. The poor cripple was expounding the fruits of his research to us: following my assistant’s instructions the previous evening, the Bohemian student had at once asked the
other students for material that might throw light on the great mystery of flying, and at dawn, as soon as the libraries opened, he had proceeded to look for books on the subject. Simonis and I
were quite certain that we had not dreamt it. The Flying Ship had indeed taken off and lifted us high into the skies over Vienna. We were now eager to know whether, as Cloridia suggested, we could
exploit the art of flying. The information gathered by Penicek, I hoped, would provide the answer.

We had said not a word either to the Bohemian or to Abbot Melani about what had happened on the Flying Ship, since there was a very real risk of being thought mad. And in any case I did not
trust Atto.

Simonis had suggested the Yellow Eagle, in the Greek quarter, as a suitable place to talk about this curious subject, which might attract the attention of prying ears. This place, close to the
meat market, was also known as the Greeks’ Tavern, since many of its customers hailed from that community. Abbot Melani, despite his blindness, had sensed that we were in a place not entirely
befitting his rank.

“Only low people,” I explained, “come to alehouses.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s nothing the Viennese are so keen on as class divisions. It’s no accident they don’t play billiards here. And all you’ll see on the gaming tables are dice
and German cards.”

“Anyway, let’s get back to the question of flying,” I said, addressing Penicek.

“I don’t understand. Why have you asked this clever young man to instruct you on such a strange subject?” asked Atto.

“Oh, it’s nothing important,” Simonis answered, “it’s just for an exam at the university. Go on, Pennal.”

“All right, I’ll try and be quick,” stammered the poor young man humbly.

Noticing the disappointed expression on our faces after these stories that were at least two centuries old, Penicek hastened to add that he had succeeded in finding something more recent.
Indeed, this was the most interesting part of his whole account, and at the centre of it – as ever – there was an Italian: a Jesuit priest.

His name was Francesco Lana. He was born in Brescia in 1631 into a noble family, and at the age of sixteen he had entered the Society of Jesus, embarking on a serious career of study and
research in the field of mathematics and natural science. His lively intelligence and tireless commitment took him to numerous Italian cities, and then led him to a career of teaching, whereby he
earned the esteem of scholars and men of learning in every country.

In Brescia, at the age of thirty-nine, he published his masterpiece: the treatise entitled
Prodromo, or an Essay on Some Inventions
, in which with unrivalled acumen he tackled a number
of scientific questions, including the project of a vehicle capable of flight.

This jolted us from the state of semi-lethargy we had been cast into by Penicek’s previous prattle.

Lana’s project, he explained, was based on a simple observation: air has a clearly determined weight, although much inferior to that of the other elements, and if a body is lighter than
the volume of air that it moves, then it will rise. Consequently, if by means of a simple pump the air were to be removed from a pair of large and very light spheres, constituted for example by a
thin sheet of copper, then they would become lighter than the surrounding air, and rising from the ground they would be able to lift a small craft.

“Something like a . . . Flying Ship!” I remarked.

“Indeed, that’s exactly what the Jesuit called his idea,” said Penicek, showing us a copy of Lana’s design, which he had taken from an illustration in his treatise.