Veritas (Atto Melani) (73 page)

Before finishing the sentence in an almost incomprehensible mumble, the
corpisantaro
had hesitated as if he found it hard to remember.

“Can you repeat that?” asked Abbot Melani, taken aback by this disjointed sentence.

Ugonio took a deep breath, as if preparing for a three-day apnoea.

“
Quis pomum aureum, de multiis ignoravisti . . .
” he began to say.

“Previously you said
cognoravisti
, not
ignoravisti.
”

Ugonio gave a foul, yellow-toothed smile, which combined sympathy, clemency and a touch of good humour.

“If I am grillified too closefully, I misremember everything sometimes always.”

“You’ve also forgotten, it seems, that the Archangel Michael only wrote seven words. You told me so yourself, don’t you remember?”

“Mmm . . . ye-es . . .”

“That’s enough, Ugonio,” I interrupted him. “I can see that there’s nothing else for it.”

I got up and opened a little cupboard where I kept several of my chimney-sweeping tools. I chose a large pair of pincers and made as if to break open the key ring.

“No-o-o!” yelled the
corpisantaro
, throwing himself upon me. He was at once seized by Simonis’s strong arms.

“Keep your ridiculous lies to yourself,” I warned Ugonio. “I must know whether there is really anything written where the Golden Apple used to be, and what. If you don’t
give me any proper help, I’ll break the ring and throw all your precious keys one by one into the Danube.”

“You’ve won. This evening all right?”

“So soon? If you try and fool me again . . .”

After delivering the head to the dervish, Ugonio had something else “urgentitious and appeteasing” to carry out, he explained with a greedy smile: probably one of his lurid
traffickings. After that, he announced importantly, he would devote himself heart and soul to the Archangel Michael’s message; he had an appointment with the deacon of St Stephen’s and
he counted on coming straight back to us then with good news.

“Ah yes,” I remembered, “the relic collector. Don’t fob him off with anything obviously fake, otherwise say goodbye to any revelations about the Archangel.”

“And to your keys,” added Simonis, with a laugh.

So we agreed on another meeting at the convent at dinner time, at 17 of the clock. After that, I explained to Ugonio, I would be busy with the rehearsal of
Sant’ Alessio
in the
Caesarean chapel.

Ugonio urged us a thousand times to be there ready and waiting with his keys. His “business” could not survive another minute without his beloved key ring, which opened up all gates;
his activity as
corpisantaro
risked total financial collapse. He was old and tired, he whimpered, and had to collect enough resources for the few days that were left to him.

He calmed down only when I swore solemnly on the Bible that I would guard the keys like pieces of pure gold.

After replacing the head in his jute sack, his own face made even greyer, more flaccid and wrinkled by his failure to recover the keys, Ugonio left our rooms, bestowing on them by way of parting
gift the same stale stench that I remembered from twenty-eight years earlier, when I had first encountered his shadowy figure in the lugubrious tunnels of subterranean Rome.

As soon as the room was free of his mephitic presence, I replaced the key ring in the cupboard that I had chosen as its hiding place. At that very moment I saw a slip of paper twirl down to the
floor in capricious spirals. I picked it up.

It was a little sheet of paper, which had been stuffed inside the key ring until that moment. As a result of all the to-and-fro movement of the ring, it had finally detached itself and in
graceful swirls had come to rest at my feet. I opened it up.

“Well, well,” I murmured.

“What is it?” asked Atto.

It was a memorandum: Ugonio’s sordid criminal enterprises, the cream of his depraved and brutal existence, written as a precaution in Italian (or rather, Ugonio’s Italian), lest the
note should end up in anyone else’s hands. The first lines referred to the previous days:

The notes left one in no doubt of the
corpisantaro
’s regular nefarious practises: extortions from shopkeepers; a fraud practised on a young nun; perjury before a
court of justice; trafficking in forged money; restitution, on payment of a ransom, of goods brazenly purloined from a poor blind orphan; theft in a church, after purchasing the priest’s
acquiescence. Nothing new, in short: the usual outrages to be expected from this creature of the underworld. But what could one say of the note for the following day?

I should have guessed it! The head Ugonio intended to deliver to Ciezeber was not the precious (to the Ottomans at least) head of Kara Mustafa, but that of a certain
Hüseyin Pasha. Whoever he was, his skull was certainly not the one the dervish was expecting. For all his magic arts, he was about to become the dupe of the fraudulent tricks of a simple
corpisantaro
.

As soon as I read the note to Abbot Melani, he was as amazed as I was. But imagine our surprise when, at the very end of that sequence of infamies, I read aloud two expressions, one in Latin,
which referred beyond all doubt to someone well known to us:

It was too much. I tossed the note into Abbot Melani’s hands, as if he could have deciphered it (and to tell the truth, probably spurred by his impossible desire to read
it, he snatched at the scrap of paper with singular alacrity).

I rushed to the door and then into the street, in pursuit of the
corpisantaro
.

It was too late. By the time I reached Porta Coeli Street, Ugonio had already vanished. I went as far as Carinthia Street, turned back and explored the side roads: nothing.

Back at the convent, I reported my discovery to Abbot Melani.

“Al. Ursinum? Of course, it’s perfectly clear.”

Ugonio had become especially nervous when his collection of keys had been confiscated. With it he had also lost his weekly memorandum, in which he revealed that the head he wanted to palm off on
Ciezeber was not that of Kara Mustafa, but some quite different person. The dervish had threatened Ugonio with reprisals should he not keep his assignment secret; one can only imagine what would
happen if he were to discover he had been cheated.

But it was the word “Ursinum” that was most deeply worrying: it could only indicate the Latinised name of Gaetano Orsini, the castrated protagonist of
Sant’ Alessio
.
And the abbreviation “Al.” obviously stood for “Alessio”: the name of the oratorio in which Orsini played the role of protagonist. Less clear, but by no means secondary, was
the identity of the two hanged men.

What on earth did Ugonio have to do with Orsini? What could a professional sneak thief have in common with a celebrated tenor, a friend of Camilla de’ Rossi, who was actually close to the
Emperor? Did the two have an appointment, or even some secret agreement?

Perhaps, quite simply, Orsini was another collector of relics, I told myself, and Ugonio had an appointment to sell him one of his “rare pieces”. But in that case why would the
corpisantaro
have been so reluctant to tell us about it? With a covetous expression, he had defined his next engagement, after the delivery of the head to Ciezeber, as “urgentitious
and appeteasing”: if he had nothing to hide, he would have said whom he was meeting. I had just informed him that I went to the Caesarean chapel every evening for the rehearsals of
Sant’ Alessio
, so he knew very well that I was acquainted with Gaetano Orsini!

No, Orsini and Ugonio were hiding something. It was as if the devil and holy water were being mixed together, light and dark, nothing and everything. Or maybe it was all too predictable:
wasn’t the musical world traditionally a den of spies? Was it not obvious that spies should get together with swindlers? Yes. But who were the two hanged men? We had just heaved a sigh of
relief over the head the dervish had demanded, and along came two more corpses!

“So Ugonio is in league with Gaetano Orsini, that beggarly Sant’ Alessio,” exclaimed Melani. “Damnation! And just think we had the filthy
corpisantaro
in our
hands just a moment ago.”

“He won’t abandon his keys, Signor Atto,” I consoled him. “As soon as he comes back we’ll question him closely on the contents of the note.”

Looking shattered, the Abbot sank more profoundly into his armchair. I sat down as well. The sudden shift of perspective brought about by the revelations of the old trafficker in relics had left
us speechless.

The
corpisantaro
had explained things most convincingly: the dervish was not interested in anyone’s death, but in the head of Kara Mustafa. So if there was no shadow of a Turkish
plot, who had done away with Dànilo, Hristo and Populescu?

It was a fact that no proof existed against the Turks. There remained Dànilo’s last words just before dying: the young Pontevedrin had clearly stated the name of the elusive Eyyub
and of the no less mysterious forty thousand martyrs of Kasim.

But it was possible, I told myself at last, that the poor dying man had been simply delirious, and had been senselessly repeating the results of his research into the Golden Apple. Perhaps
Dànilo too had come across the legends whereby the Golden Apple was supposed to have entered the tomb of Eyyub, as we had heard from Zyprian.

Like a ray of sunlight capriciously refracted on the troubled surface of water, everything was multiplying in a thousand directions, its contours and outline becoming blurred. Was the riddle of
the Ottoman embassy now somehow mixed up with the mysterious bond between Orsini and Ugonio? And did it have anything to do with the Emperor’s illness? After all, Atto had told me that
musicians were all spies; he himself was a living example! And did that also apply to the Chormaisterin?

At that moment there came a knock. It was Penicek. At the porter’s lodge they knew the Bohemian cart driver and let him through without any trouble. He stuttered that he was looking for
Simonis: he had come, as promised, to provide more information on human flight and he also had to hand over the notes he had taken on the lessons that he was following on behalf of his Barber. He
was accompanied by Opalinski, the Pole.

“Brontology . . . stilbology . . . nubilogy?” I stammered in bewilderment.

“They are philosophical doctrines one can use to investigate the most mysterious phenomena of nature,” said Simonis rather mechanically, as if he were parroting a university
lesson.

Nubilogy, in particular, according to Penicek, suited our case. I turned to Atto to ask if he had ever heard of it, but the old Abbot, overcome by weariness, had dozed off.

“And what is it?” I asked Simonis.

“It’s a science that studies, how can I put it, the interventions and influences of air on bodies, so that they perform a certain sort of motion, which . . . I don’t know how
to put it . . . You explain, Pennal!” ordered my assistant.

Limping forward, the Bohemian opened a bag full of books and laboriously and fumblingly placed the volumes on the table before him.

“Watch where you put your clumsy feet!” Simonis snapped, the Pennal offering him his only chance to vent the fears of the last few days.

“I’m truly sorry, Signor Barber,” he humbly apologised.

Poor Penicek then confessed: not knowing how to proceed with his research into the subject of flying, he had turned to Jan Janitzki Opalinski, who, as everyone knew, was extremely knowledgeable
and had been happy to help him out.

“I don’t know why you are so keen to know if a wooden ship can rise into the air,” Opalinski then began, stepping forward, “but it is a much debated issue.”

There was, continued the Pole, a learned professor of natural science who had answered the question. As was always the case in Vienna when there was a technical problem to face, it was an
Italian who came to our aid: his name was Ovidio Montalbani, and he had taught for a long time at the University of Bologna. In academic circles he was very well known for having published books of
unprecedented doctrinal profundity in which he investigated the most abstruse and obscure fields of knowledge: calopiedology, charagmaposcopy, diologogy, athenography, philautiology, brontology,
cephalogy, stilbology, aphroditology and above all nubilogy.

I gave a glance at the first of the books that the Pennal had piled up on the table.