Secretum

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  Atto said nothing. He seemed to be thinking of something else.

  "I have a place in mind," said Sfasciamonti, "and I think it is the right one."

  We advanced towards the granaries, the walls returning the rhythmic echo of our horses' hooves. Passing close to a great block of ruins, we found ourselves facing a high, irregularly shaped wall, with a tall unguarded doorway set into it.

  "When it is not raining, many come here," said Sfasciamonti in a low voice.

  We found a hidden tree to which to which we tethered our horses and at last prepared to enter the ruins.

  "I warn you," insisted Sfasciamonti as we dismounted, "the people we are about to meet must not be rubbed up the wrong way. If we encounter anyone, let me do all the talking."

  Thick though the silence was, with my senses no doubt deceived by the sinister nature of the place, I was, however, practically certain that I had seen an ironic little smile cross Abbot Melani's face, barely illumined by the crescent moon.

  We drew near then to the doorway (now, in truth, nothing but a great gaping gap without any doors) leading inside the ruins. As we entered, in a flash of the imagination, I pictured the grandiose gatherings that must have taken place centuries ago in that place: swarms of sweating patricians, but also plebeians, enjoying the steam baths, the inhalations and ablutions, all under the protective wing of those lofty vapour-filled vaults. ..

  Of vaults: there were none; the roof had collapsed. Hardly had I crossed the threshold of the great portal leading to the ruins than my eyes were drawn upwards by the moonlight, and were amazed to find themselves still under the just, indifferent gaze of the stars.

  We were in a sort of great arena open to the sky, bounded on four sides by the massive walls of the ancient baths. Time and neglect had robbed them forever of the covering placed sixteen centuries ago by the zealous efforts of architects and masons.

  Thanks to the moonlight, we could make our way cautiously through that alien space without constantly tripping over. Here and there, pearly white in the white sidereal glow, lay huge, indolent blocks of stone, columns painfully cast to the ground, voluble capitals and vainglorious pilasters.

  In the gaps between one piece of wreckage and the next, and between these and the undulations in the terrain, sprawling on heaps of rags and quilts, one could make out the silhouettes of sleeping bodies.

  "Cerretani and vagrants: they are scattered all over the place," murmured Sfasciamonti.

  "How are we to find those two," I replied in a similarly light whisper, "what were their names. . . Il Roscio and Il Marcio?"

  Instead of answering, the catchpoll broke away from Atto and me and moved towards a mound, behind which one could see a sort of architrave, so gently sunken into the ground that it seemed to have gone to sleep there after centuries of vainly awaiting the return of imperial glories.

  For a while, he looked around, searching for some objective, until he found his next victim: a wretched vagabond who lay sleeping at his feet. The latter, however, inured to scenting danger, was not unaware of the catchpoll's threatening presence. He turned once or twice in his sleep and then gave a violent start.

  Just before the vagabond could change position, I almost stopped breathing for surprise. Sfasciamonti had sat on the unfortunate fellow. We drew near, looking over our shoulders in fear of some reprisal on the part of the vagabond's companions. Nothing happened; Sfasciamonti had conducted his assault so discreetly that no one, among all those sleeping in the great arena, seemed to have realised a thing.

  With one knee, the catchpoll had immobilised his victim's arm. Then he had sat down, planting his massive posterior on the adversary's belly, while with both hands he kept his mouth and eyes closed, thus preventing him from uttering the faintest whimper and from seeing who it was that had overwhelmed him. From the ease with which he had accomplished all this, it was plain that he must have made use of the same technique on previous occasions.

  "Il Roscio and Il Marcio - two cerretani - do you know where they are?" he ordered, whispering in the man's ear.

  Slowly he raised his hand from a corner of the poor wretch's mouth, allowing him to whisper something.

  "Ask that one, under the striped blanket," said he, pointing to someone sleeping not far off.

  Sfasciamonti passed rapidly to the other, on whom he practised the same interrogation technique.

  "I've not seen them for days," rasped this man, of whose youthful face I caught a glimpse when the catchpoll raised his huge hands. "I don't know whether they're sleeping here tonight. Look over there, beyond the ditch."

  He had pointed at a sort of ditch from which a strong stench of urine arose. That was probably where the vagabonds relieved themselves by night. Sfasciamonti loosened his grip, not without warning the young man with a last threatening look. He then moved off towards the ditch. He took one step, two, three. He was already some way off when we heard the scream.

  "Roscio, the saffrons! Buy the violets!"

  It was the young man whom Sfasciamonti had just interrogated. After crying out, he fled in the direction we had come from, towards the great expanse of Termine.

  "Get him!" Sfasciamonti yelled at me, who, having remained a little behind, was closer to the young man.

  Meanwhile, other bodies all around me, wrapped in rags and wretched greatcoats, awoke and returned to life. I felt the blood pumping hard in my veins while the air thickened in my throat. That barren space barely lit by the moon teemed with poor beggars, but also with cutthroats. Hunter and prey could exchange their roles at any moment; I began to follow the young man more from the desire to get away than that of catching him.

  Sfasciamonti and I had just launched ourselves on the heels of the fugitive, and Atto in turn had got moving, when another shadow rushed forth from the darkness. He was running with some difficulty across the rough terrain towards the main door.

  Thanks to the advantage gained by surprise, the pair had soon put no mean distance between us and themselves; once out in the vast space of Termine, I was already making my way towards our horses when I heard Sfasciamonti's voice.

  "No, not the horses - on foot!"

  He was right. The young man had run immediately to the left, towards the wall behind which, to the east, stretched the immense and grandiose Villa Peretti Montalto.

  In a trice, he had already reached the corner between the wall of the villa, Piazza di Termine and the road descending towards Via Felice, and was climbing the boundary wall. Sfasciamonti and I reached the spot a few moments after the youth had jumped down the other side.

  "Here, here, there are breaches that they've made!" gasped the catchpoll, pointing out a whole series of holes to me, apparently distributed at random along the surface of the wall, which made it possible to find footholds and thus to scale it rapidly.

  So we imitated the fugitive's clever stratagem and in a few moments we were straddling the top of the wall. We looked down: if we were to go any further we should have to jump down no less than twelve feet, in other words, nearly twice Sfasciamonti's height. Meanwhile, in the distance, we could hear the cerretano's footsteps receding fast down the neighbouring avenue.

  With our feet dangling down the wall, like two anglers happily waiting for a pull on the line, we looked impotently at one another. We had lost.

  "Curse it," rasped Sfasciamonti, prodding the wall in vain in search of more footholds. "He knows by heart where the breaches are to get down the other side. He had no need to jump."

  Once we had got back, we took a look at the great roofless space in which we had carried out our nocturnal ambush on the sleeping beggars. All was quiet; the place was deserted.

  "We shall find no one here for months," announced Sfasciamonti.

  "Where is Abbot Melani?" I asked.

  "He must have followed the other one. But if we had no luck, you can just imagine how he got on. . ."

  "Teehereteeamteeaye!" we then heard chanted by a mellifluous and satisfied-sounding voice.
>
  It was Atto, and he was on horseback. In one hand he held his pistol, in the other, the reins and a tether, which ended around the neck of the person whom we had seen escaping at the moment when the young man had cried out. Sfasciamonti's jaw fell. He had returned empty-handed, while Atto had succeeded.

  "Il Roscio," exclaimed the catchpoll, pointing incredulously at the prisoner.

  "Gentlemen, may I present you Pompeo di Trevi, alias Il Roscio. He is a cerretano and he is now at our disposal."

  "By all the bolted visors, you may say that again!" exclaimed Sfasciamonti approvingly. "We shall now make our way to the prison of Ponte Sisto, where we shall get him to talk. Just one question: what the Devil did you say just now, when you greeted us?"

  "That strange word? That's a long story. Now take this wretch and let us tie him up better, then be on our way."

  Atto had chosen, as was his wont, to go against the rules and against the dictates of good sense. Instead of following the cerretano on foot, as Sfasciamonti wanted, he had mounted a horse, with difficulty and without any help. Before mounting, however, he had taken care to see which route the fugitive had taken: to the left of the other; in other words, moving north, in the direction of the clear, sweet-smelling countryside of the Castro Pretorio. Spurring on his modest mount, Atto had then set out on the traces of the cerretano. At length he had caught sight of him, by now exhausted by his exertions, in the process of scaling a wall towards citrus groves and vineyards in which he would find easy refuge.

  "Another moment and i'd have lost him. i was too far off to threaten him with the pistol. So I thought I'd yell something at him."

  "What?"

  "What he was not expecting. Something in his own language."

  "His own language? D'you mean the jargon?" Sfasciamonti and I asked in unison.

  "Slang, lingo, cant... All stuff and nonsense. No, all teestufftee- andteenonteesense," he replied, laughing, while I and the catchpoll looked dumbly at one another.

  On the way out, during our ride from Villa Spada to Termine, Atto had turned over again and again in his mind the mysterious words which the cerretano had uttered when I fell into the courtyard at Campo di Fiore. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration had come to him: to look, not for what made sense but for what made none.

  "The jargon used by these ragamuffins is sometimes as stupid and elementary as they themselves are. There's only one principle involved: you stick a foreign element between syllables, as is sometimes done in cipher, to create confusion."

  While Atto was explaining this to us, our strange caravan was wending its way across the Piazza dei Pollaioli towards the Ponte Sisto; at its head, Sfasciamonti, to whose horse the cerretano was firmly tethered, with his hands tied behind his back and his legs hobbled in such a way that he could not run; then came Atto's horse and then mine.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "'Tis so simple that i'm almost ashamed of saying it. They place the syllable "tee" between the others."

  "Teeyooteelai. . . So the cerretano said to me 'you lie'!"

  "What had you said to him just before that?"

  "For heaven's sake, how am I to remember?... Wait... Ah yes: I told him that the German would kill him."

  "And you were indeed lying, you were trying to buy time. And that is what I was trying to do, albeit somewhat differently. When

  I greeted you a while ago, I said. .."

  "Tee-here-tee-am-tee-I. In other words, 'Here am I.'"

  "Precisely. So I said something to Il Roscio in Teeese, which is what I've decided to call their stupid language full of tees."

  That was the last thing Il Roscio had expected. Hearing the sound of Atto's voice mixed with the threatening clatter of hooves drawing near, his hands froze and he lost his grip, falling heavily to the ground.

  "Pardon the question, but what did you say to the cerretano?'

  "I acted like you and said the first thing that came into my mind."

  "And what was that?"

  "Teepateeter teenosteeter. The first two words of the Paternoster."

  "But that meant nothing!"

  "I know; but he for a moment thought that I was one of his people and was shocked. He fell like a sack of potatoes. Indeed, he hurt himself. At first, he couldn't even get up, so I had time to tie him up. 'Tis just as well that the grooms who equip these horses know what they're doing and provided a good long rope. I trussed him up thoroughly, then tied the end of the rope to the saddle and, just to remind him not to do anything silly, I pointed my pistol at him."

  Melani then reconstructed what had taken place at the Baths of Diocletian. The vagabond whom Sfasciamonti had interrogated, sitting on his belly, had given us away.

  "That wretch," said the Abbot, turning to the catchpoll with an ironic smile, "Il Marcio pointed out to you when he told you to ask him, but without revealing that he himself was one of the pair you were looking for. And you fell for it."

  Sfasciamonti did not reply.

  "So it was Il Marcio who screamed out those strange words to

  Il Roscio?" I asked.

  "Precisely. He called out that 'the Saffrons' were there and that, I think, meant us: the catchpolls."

  "He added, 'buy the violets', so that meant 'run for it' or perhaps 'take up arms'," I conjectured.

  "I tend to think it meant 'run', seeing how matters developed. This isn't Teeese but some other rather more impenetrable jargon, because one needs some experience of it. But everything's possible."

  With the exception of my few questions, Atto's self-satisfied account of how he had captured the cerretano had met with silence, punctuated only by the clip-clop of the horses' hooves on the flagstones.

  Sfasciamonti kept quiet, but I could imagine what he was feeling. Proud as he was of his crude catchpoll's abilities, he had seen the tiller of action suddenly snatched from him. Where he had failed, using force and intimidation, Atto had succeeded through intellectual sagacity, plus a pinch of well-deserved luck. It could not have been easy for the representative of the law, already scoffed at by his colleagues in the matter of the cerretani, to see another snatch from before his eyes one of those mysterious scoundrels who drew him as a hound is drawn to the prey when the beat is on, yet inspired in him an all-too-human fear. That, however, was what had just happened: thanks to a mispronounced Pater noster we now had in our hands a member of the mysterious sect.

  This was the very reason for another silence: my own. How strange, said I to myself, that in so little time we had arrested a cerretano, while all the catchpolls in Rome, and the Governor, Monsignor Pallavicini himself, denied their very existence. I had it in mind to raise this with Sfasciamonti, but once again events prevented me from so doing. At that very moment it was decided that I was to leave them and make my way to Villa Spada and wake up Buvat (always supposing that he had got over the effects of his tippling) and return with him. Abbot Melani's secretary would, we ail three thought, be able to provide us with precious assistance (although, as I shall later recount, the nature of this assistance was to be somewhat unorthodox).

  We were all to meet up at our final destination: the prison of

  Ponte Sisto, giving onto the Tiber just under the Janiculum Hill, not far from the Villa Spada. Here, the interrogation of the cerretano was to take place.

  The room was in a wretched basement, covered in lichen, sordid and windowless. Only a grate, high on the wall to the left, provided a little air and, in daytime, light.

  The cerretano was still bound and in pain, his features blanching for fear of ending up before the hangman. He did not know that his presence in that stinking dungeon was thoroughly illegal. Sfasciamonti had arranged through one of his many friends to usher our entire group discreetly into the prison through a side door. Il Roscio's arrest was against all the rules: the cerretano had committed no crimes, nor was he suspected of any. That did not matter: the time had come for certain dirty games of which, as I shall have cause to tell later, the catchpolls had long been inor
dinately fond.

  Sfasciamonti had procured a long coat and a periwig for Buvat, who was to play the part of a criminal notary and to draw up the charges. The sergeant himself would conduct the interrogation. Atto and I, dressed up to look like officers of the court or deputies, or goodness knows what, would be assisting, feeling safe owing to the secrecy of the ceremony and the prisoner's total ignorance of the law.

  There was a table in the basement room, lit by a large candle, and here sat Buvat, solemnly busying himself with paper, pen and inkhorn. In order to lend greater verisimilitude to the scene, Sfasciamonti had taken care of every detail. Next to the candle were placed severe legal tomes such as the Commentaria tertiae partis in secundum librum Decretalium of Abbas Panormitanus, Damhouder's Praxis rerum criminalium and lastly and most threateningly, De maleficiis by Alberto da Gandino. Although all the titles were unintelligible, the volumes had all been placed upright and with their spines facing the prisoner, so that these obscure inscriptions would, supposing that he could read, all imbue his soul with the idea that he was in the hands of a hostile and impenetrable power.