Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “I don’t understand anything either,” Simonis whispered to me, looking very doubtful.

  The notary stopped reading. It was then that things changed abruptly. The guard (if that was what he was) who had something familiar about him pulled out a set of irons, and from the tone with which the presumed notary shouted something at us, I gathered they were for our wrists. We were under arrest. But the operation was interrupted by a further surprise.

  It was at that moment that something absurd happened. As in a drunken dream, Ciezeber came in and greeted us courteously in Italian.

  “The dervish!” I whispered to Simonis sotto voce, incredulously.

  Ciezeber continued to smile cordially. For a moment in the semi-basement of the mansion there was an unreal silence.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Perhaps you have already understood what the notary read to you. It’s a decree by the imperial chamber. You are under arrest for conspiracy against the Empire, as well as for having made an attempt against the life of the Ambassador of the Sublime Ottoman Porte, Cefulah Agha Capichi Pasha.”

  “Conspiracy? There must be some mistake,” protested Atto. “I’m from Italy and –”

  “Silence, Abbot Melani,” the dervish interrupted him. “We already know how you sneaked into Vienna. And don’t pretend to be blind!”

  Atto’s cover was blown: the dervish and the strange band that surrounded us, whether they were guards or not, knew that Atto Melani was not the postal intendant, Milani. At that point I guessed it all.

  It had all happened too quickly for us to save ourselves. Atto had had a flash of insight a moment earlier, but we had already arrived at Neugebäu, and it was too late.

  There was one thing Penicek had omitted in his story at the graveyard: who our leader was, since he believed we had one. He wanted to kill us, a sign that he had learned what he wanted: who the bigwig was whose orders Simonis and I were supposedly obeying. And so he thought he had finally identified this person. And whom would he suspect if not Atto Melani? The sham cripple believed that Atto was the leader of a conspiracy, with me and Simonis under his command. He had met the Abbot as a passenger in his cart. It would have been child’s play for him to look into his background and find out who he was. Of our group of four – Cloridia, myself, Atto and Simonis – two were spies. If anyone had told him that it had all begun with my own and my wife’s simple suspicions, and that it had not been Melani who had suggested looking into the Agha’s phrase (indeed, Atto’s attention had been fully engaged in his forged letter and his pursuit of Madame Pálffy), he would never have believed it.

  It was the typical mistake of petty spies: they think that their slippery way of reasoning must be applied to all mankind and they cannot conceive of initiatives, deliberations, and actions that arise from the free impulse of a spirit stirred by a pure sense of justice or a thirst for knowledge. They will not acknowledge in anyone else the true feelings they have banished from their own hearts. As the good Umbrian nun who had brought me up loved to repeat: “Treat your body ill, bad thoughts all minds will fill” – or, to interpret the vernacular anacoluthon, “He who treats his own body badly (and so lives dishonestly) thinks that everyone else reasons in the same wicked way.” People of this sort are thus exposed to the whims of fate, which mocks them more often than they think.

  But this time Penicek’s mistake had been fatal to us. He had planned to kill us along with Opalinski, and then undoubtedly to kidnap Atto and torture his old limbs to get information from him. The plan had failed, of course, but how could we have believed that the sham cripple would leave things unfinished? During our last journey from the Place with No Name he had heard that Simonis, the Abbot and I would be returning to draw up the report for the complaint I intended to lodge. He knew where and when we could all be nabbed together. But now he could not eliminate us immediately: the functionaries of the imperial chamber were present and the thing had to have an appearance of normality. Of course, the accusation that these bullies were making against us was as false, ham-fisted and brazen-faced as any cheap trickster’s tale. Under the guise of an arrest was an organised ambush, I thought, as I recognised the guard who had something familiar about him: his eyes. They were the same deep dark eyes I had seen in the masked individual who would have killed me in the Prater had I not been saved first by Hristo’s chessboard and then, irony of fate, by Penicek’s arrival. All was lost.

  “We have done nothing wrong, you can’t arrest us,” said my assistant in a calm voice, after studying the whole company intently: two functionaries, who actually looked tense and pale, the dervish and five guards, undoubtedly his own thugs.

  At this point, having verified the arrest, the two imperial functionaries left. They asked no questions about the escaped animals, of course. Very different matters were at stake now.

  “Be quiet, cur,” answered Ciezeber with biting scorn, as if Simonis merited a special hatred. “None of the men with me understands the language you express yourself in, and I have no ears for the blathering of worms.”

  “And how does a dervish,” said Atto, torn between fear and the desire for knowledge, “happen to know my language so well?”

  Ciezeber, who was facing in the other direction, turned slowly with an amused and malicious smile. It was as if that were the first sensible thing any of us had said. Then he answered.

  “I am one of those who know all languages, who are of all ages, who come from all countries in the world,” he said, and then signalled to his men to chain us and disarm us.

  The vanity of the dervish, who had wasted valuable moments on these remarks, provided us with the golden opportunity to save ourselves. A moment later and it would have been too late; it was worth attempting something desperate.

  When Simonis leaped into action, none of our enemies was able to grasp what was happening. His flying kick smashed into the jaw of the closest armiger, but just before launching the attack, Simonis had pulled his pistol from his bag and thrown it to me, already loaded, I presumed. About a second later, one of the five fired at me, missing me by a hair’s breadth. Nonetheless I felt an incandescent atom pierce my left thigh, and hoped it was nothing important.

  In the three seconds that followed several things happened: Atto Melani fainted; the guard struck by Simonis now had a trapezoid-shaped face instead of a round one, which he clutched in both hands, apparently out of action; I fired into the face of a guard to my left, not knowing whether I had hit him or not; finally, after his successful kick, my assistant, fully erect and with no hint of a stoop, swivelled and plunged a knife into the closest armiger. This last man did not succeed in drawing his sword in time and, although managing not to take the knife in his belly as my assistant had intended, received a great slash on his neck, and it was quite likely that he would die from it fairly soon.

  In the next two seconds, there were further interesting events: two of the armigers shielded the dervish, who withdrew in terror from a fight he had not considered possible; one of them fired at Simonis’s chest and hit him at point-blank range. Meanwhile Abbot Melani disappeared without anyone realising. For a few seconds I faced one of the wounded armigers: it was the one who had been about to kill me in the Prater. Then I fled without being pursued.

  As I ran I glanced back. Simonis, although struck full in the chest, was picking up the chains that had been intended for us, and then he swirled them round and twice struck one or two armigers, but these were just fleeting glimpses, as I was already running out of the half-basement into the courtyard of the maior domus. I thought I heard my assistant’s footsteps behind me. There was no knowing how long he had left to live.

  Two of the (false) guards were probably out of action. That left three, plus the dervish.

  When I got outside I caught a glimpse of Atto, limping to the left. Perhaps he had faked his faint, in order to make a break for it at the right moment, but he had not got very far and was already exhausted. From inside the half-basement
we heard echoing shouts and then another shot. Someone had succeeded in reloading a pistol, I thought; they had killed Simonis, or he had killed one of the five, giving us valuable time. We panted our way into the main courtyard, from which we had entered, and saw the gate (usually open) locked and barred. Turning back and trying to escape from the opposite side of the mansion meant running into the dervish’s clutches.

  The next few moments occupy a dark, empty space in my memory. The fatigue, the certainty of imminent death and the small but smouldering crater of pain that I felt in my thigh probably prevented me from making any sense of events as I perceived them and from taking any decisions. I remember very little of Abbot Melani. I think I pushed and dragged him (there was no alternative, as his own strength were non-existent) down the spiral staircase that led to the animal cages, and then towards the Flying Ship, while expecting another pistol shot, sooner or later, to hit us in the back.

  After which all I know is that we waited: Atto inside the ship, which I had heaved him into with difficulty, and I myself squatting among the broken planks of the birdcages, shattered the previous day by the incursion of the elephant and abandoned at the far end of the ball stadium.

  Evening fell. I do not know how long we spent lurking in our two hiding places. Every so often we heard pistol shots, and we gathered that a two-way hunt was under way in the gardens of Neugebäu between Simonis and the surviving guards. On each side there must have been at least one functioning pistol, together with powder for reloading and sufficient desire (or need) to kill. It was a war of position: the objective was to hit, but without running any risks. Simonis could not get away; our enemies on the other hand apparently could not rely on any reinforcements. The close-range battle of the first few moments had given way to a shooting match in the dark, in which the winner would be whoever was best at hiding, reloading his weapon and exploiting the element of surprise. I wondered just how Simonis was holding out: just before I escaped from the semi-basement, he had been hit directly, and at close range.

  At each new detonation we heard the lions make tired and tetchy complaints to the black sky over the moor of Simmering: the beasts of the Place with No Name, I thought, were back where they were supposed to be. The carcasses must have been removed earlier in the day. The shots did not worry me: each new exchange of fire told me that Simonis was still alive. Twice I heard the enraged yells of our enemies: it seemed likely that Simonis had hit someone, and that the others were giving vent to their pain or anger.

  Every so often Atto and I would call out to one another, just for reassurance. We were stuck there with no weapons, and unable to engage in hand-to-hand combat (I was too small and the Abbot too old), in the darkness of the Place with No Name. With the darkness shrouding everything, there was no point in trying to get out of Neugebäu by climbing over the walls. I attempted a brief sortie into the main courtyard to check whether it was possible to open the gate. A couple of shots fired somewhere nearby persuaded me to return to my hiding place. Back in the ball stadium, passing by the Flying Ship, I heard Abbot Melani whispering a Hail Mary, pleading for his safety.

  After a long time something changed. With a violent start I felt a couple of shots behind us: the action seemed to have shifted to the narrow corridor from which on the previous day the elephant Pup and the other animals had burst into the ball stadium. This, as I well knew, led straight towards the ditches with the wild animals.

  Then for a while I heard nothing. I knew that Atto would stay inside the Flying Ship without moving a muscle. So I moved, and left the ball stadium. The moon was favourable; crawling along the ground I got close enough to catch a glimpse of the scene. I had some misgivings, and I found they were all too well-founded.

  As pale as a tragic Pulcinella, gasping with fatigue, bent double with pain (in how many places had they hit him?), Simonis was in the middle between the two ditches of animals, balancing on the narrow wall that divided them. He looked like a circus acrobat who realised that the exercise he had chosen was too difficult and did not know how to make his excuses to the audience. Beneath his feet were two howling hordes of felines enraged by his audacious incursion. The faint moonlight may have deceived me, but I really thought I recognised, amid the roaring of the bloodthirsty beasts, the icily furious voice of the black panther that Simonis had struck with the broom just before our second flight in the Flying Ship.

  To escape the shots of his adversaries, my heroic assistant had passed behind the ball stadium, as I had heard, and from there had slipped into the gallery that bordered the ditches of the animals, from where they could be observed. Here, however, the final act was about to be staged. Ciezeber’s thugs had hemmed him in: there was one at each end of the corridor. To escape them, Simonis, like a tightrope walker, had begun to make his way along the wall that divided the lion cage from the cage containing other wild animals, hoping to reach the opposite side. But he had forgotten that the other end was blocked by an iron grating.

  The darkness was only faintly relieved by the moonlight. I at once guessed what the matter was: they had run out of ammunition. It was now just a question of numbers, and Simonis was on his own. Probably he had hoped, by nimbly passing along the wall between the two ditches, to get beyond the abyss. Instead he had found himself up against a dead end: the wall terminated in a long series of iron bars, placed there to prevent anyone from accidentally falling into the ditches.

  Approaching the scene of action had been imprudent on my part; if I were to try to steal away now, the dervish’s henchmen might hear me. I noticed that Ciezeber had approached the beginning of the wall on which Simonis was dangerously poised, and was leaning forward as if he wished to address the fugitive. In the darkness I could barely discern Simonis, and I imagined that he could not see me at all. But suddenly I realised that he had spotted me. At that very moment the dervish spoke.

  “Stop,” he ordered Simonis in a dry, serious voice.

  “I don’t have much choice,” answered my assistant in an ironic tone.

  “You have no way out.”

  “I know, Ciezeber.”

  The dervish paused to take breath, then said:

  “You know me as Ciezeber the Indian; others call me Palatine Caldeorum. Yet others, Ammon. But my name is of no consequence to me. I am one, no one, and a hundred thousand. But I need nothing, I look for no one, I do good to the poor and the imprisoned. I appear to be forty-five years old, but I have travelled for fifty-eight and I am ninety. I can become young again, change my facial features, smooth out my skin, make my fallen teeth return. My dominion is everywhere. I have trodden the roads of Turkey and Persia, I have been a guest of the Great Mogul in Siam, in Pegu, in Chandahar, in China. I have learned to suffer hunger in the desert of the Tartars, I have shivered with cold in Muscovia, I have been a pirate on the seas of the Indies. I have miraculously survived seven shipwrecks and have been locked in prison eight times, even in that of the Inquisition in Rome. Each time powerful protectors have got me out, but prison itself is nothing to me. On a pure whim, I once had all the other prisoners escape, and I remained in my cell.”

  Simonis said nothing. The dervish went on:

  “I was thirty when I left my land. Then I was called Isaac Ammon. I was the firstborn son of Abraham Ammon, patriarch of the Nestorian Christians of Chaldea. For generations our family had proudly passed down the honour of the patriarchy, but it was of no value to me. I admired only one man: my mother’s brother, who had retired to a mountain in Chaldea. He was like me, like us: more than a mere man. A great sage and astrologer, he lived as a hermit and treated all others as beasts. He raised me with the whip, teaching me the occult virtues of the herbs and the stars, their links with the stones, the animals of air and water, the quadrupeds, the reptiles. He revealed to me the periods and hours of the day to exploit these virtues, their temperament and the effects they have on men.”

  Simonis still said not a word. But Ciezeber did not seem disappointed by his adversary’s silence.
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  “You’ll say: why don’t you shut up, dervish? Why are you telling me all this? Why don’t you just kill me? But I’m not talking just to brag about myself. The loser must know he has lost, and suffer. We, the winners, feed on your pain: it’s our lifeblood and our reason for living.”

  Then Ciezeber (or Palatine, as he said he was known) continued in a more relaxed tone, as if he had now said all that was important to say.

  “It was a relative, my mother’s brother, who enlightened me with real wisdom. This is nothing if you possess it, but everything if you do not know it. Thanks to it a healthy and whole man can live a thousand years, as in the days of Abraham and Noah: he just needs to keep away from women and excesses. My master, my uncle, was seven hundred years old.”

  I was listening to the words of a fanatic; and Simonis must have had the same idea:

  “He must have a good many stories to tell,” said my assistant sarcastically. “I imagine it was he who advised you which poison to put in the Emperor’s dish.”

  The dervish took no notice of the irony.

  “What do you know of poisons?” he answered, quite unruffled. “There are seventy-two different types, and the subtlest are not taken via the mouth. A pair of shoes, a shirt, a wig, a flower, a curtain, a door, a chisel, a letter: a thousand objects can be poisonous. But for each one there exists an antidote in nature. Some only work at certain hours, or on certain days, or weeks, or months – but they are all infallible. One just needs to know the condition and temperament of the person. In Joseph’s case, you think it is poison and not illness. Well, the illness is poison, and the poison is illness. They are not alternatives, but the same thing: a disease induced by medical means. The smallpox was injected skilfully into the Emperor’s limbs, as into those of the Grand Dauphin of France, obviously with the help of the traitors who can always be found among you Christians, and in both cases it will seem a natural death.”