Veritas (Atto Melani) (66 page)

“And . . . did this ship ever fly?” asked Simonis.

Actually, explained the Pennal, the ship described in the
Prodromo
was never even built. Some claimed that the Jesuit had himself decided to give up the plan, fearing that whoever
piloted the ship might endanger his own and other people’s lives. Lana had confined himself to an experiment with a small model of the ship in the courtyard of a palace belonging to the
Jesuits in Florence. But nobody knew whether the little model had actually flown. The Italian priest was in any case reluctant to create his flying ship, because he was sure that it would
immediately be used for military purposes. And nobody could get him to change his mind. Under the weight of all his great intellectual work, the Jesuit died in 1687 aged only fifty-six, without his
ideas ever having been put into practice.

Simonis and I exchanged a glance of suppressed disappointment. Four-fifths of Penicek’s account consisted of useless anecdotes and remote happenings, and in the only part of it that bore
any relation to what had happened to us – Francesco Lana’s flying ship – all he could give us was the vaguest information.

“I had to end up with a stupid Pennal from Prague!” muttered the Greek in annoyance, miming despair by running his hands through his hair.

“One last question,” I said, silencing my assistant with a jab of my elbow, not wanting poor Penicek to be totally intimidated. “Once it had taken off, just how would Francesco
Lana’s ship have been able to steer itself?”

“There’s no word of this in the
Prodromo
. They say that Lana had thought of a system of ropes that could influence the stability of the craft. He is even supposed to have
tried it out in the little model he experimented with in the courtyard of the Jesuits in Florence, but this is just rumour: nothing specific is known.”

Simonis swore under his breath, cursing himself, the Pennal and even the glorious institution of the Deposition, which had lumbered him with this bumbling student from Prague.

The two students took their leave. Simonis ordered Penicek to keep rummaging through the papers he had collected to find something more useful, and then to go to the
Alma Mater
Rudolphina
to follow some lessons on his behalf and to bring him the notes at the convent. My assistant then went off to work with my son again: they had a few small cleaning jobs to do in the
suburbs. Unfortunately it was a little too far to take the old Abbot in the cart: the journey would break every bone in his body. And so, alas, I was left alone with Atto.

“Now, can’t we talk about something a little more serious?” he started as soon as the others had left.

I would have done anything to get out of this conversation, but I had already eluded Abbot Melani the previous evening, during the rehearsal of
Sant’ Alessio,
and then again at
the Blue Bottle. Populescu’s death had thrown the whole group into fresh turmoil, but now there was no way of avoiding things.

I was determined not to be made a fool of again. A thousand times the maleficent castrato had succeeded in getting what he wanted out of me by deceit, only to turn his back on me afterwards. But
this time I would not fall for it: his excuses would neither move nor persuade me.

“Boy, I have a mission to carry out,” he began.

“That does not concern me. The mission is yours, not mine. You have rewarded me for the services I rendered you in Rome. Well, that was what you had promised to do, wasn’t it? The
account is settled. I owe you nothing else. And I don’t intend to get mixed up in political affairs that do not concern me. You are a subject of the Most Christian King; I am a subject of the
Emperor. France is an enemy of the Empire, and I wish to have nothing to do with it. If I can do something for his Caesarean Majesty, I will. But not in league with you.”

“You don’t trust me,” he answered. “I had gathered this a while ago. But don’t you understand that I need you? And not just because I’m old and blind, and
good for nothing now. Thanks to you, in the past, I have managed to pull off the most difficult of missions.”

“Of course,” I said with a sardonic little laugh, “but thanks to lying. You lie. You have always lied. On each occasion you have done just what you wanted: you always had a
secret plan in mind, and you took great care not to tell me the truth. You have always used me as your pet slave.”

“It’s not true, I have never meant to do anything of the sort,” he protested keenly.

“But the facts are there to prove it, Signor Atto. When we met I was just a little boy, and you, with your shameless gift of the gab –”

“Do you want to make me ill again?” Atto interrupted me, a tragic expression on his face.

“Cut the pathetic performance,” I replied angrily, getting up. “Try not to gobble so much chocolate next time!”

“So now you’re spying on me?”

“Stop it, both of you!”

It was Cloridia’s voice. She had come back, breathless and panting, and she stood there holding a piece of paper in her hand.

“Cloridia, try and understand, the Abbot and I –”

“First read this.”

She opened the paper and thrust it into my hand. It was a pamphlet, one of those gazettes folded in four, not published on any regular basis but only for extraordinary events. I read it straight
through and at once changed colour. Then I translated it for Abbot Melani. He leaned against the back of his chair, as if suddenly the weight of his years had become unbearable.

The Grand Dauphin, the firstborn son of the Most Christian King, was seriously ill. The pamphlet did not say so clearly, but as with Joseph the illness could be fatal.

The heir to the throne of France had smallpox.

The entire universe had turned upside down in front of my eyes. Some mysterious force had so arranged things that the two main contenders in the war of succession to the throne
of Spain – France and the Empire – had been struck down by the same mortal illness. On one side it had struck the young reigning Sovereign, on the other the heir to an old king, who
could not have long to live.

They called it smallpox, but it mattered little what name it was given: a fatal claw had lashed out at the two greatest contenders in the War of the Spanish Succession. Could it be a coincidence
that the Emperor of Austria and the heir to the throne of France should have both fallen ill at the same time, and right in the middle of a terrible war that had thrown the whole of Europe into
turmoil, with a disease showing the same symptoms? Obviously not. Now I was more positive than ever that a deadly poison was carrying out its slow, insidious and murderous task.

But what part was Abbot Melani playing in all this?

Atto had come to Vienna to conspire with the Turks against the Emperor. It was no accident that he had arrived just a day after the Agha and after Joseph I had fallen ill. But the Abbot could
not have poisoned the Grand Dauphin of France: you do not change your master at the age of eighty-five.

I looked at Atto and, as if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned towards me. It was no longer the face of a decrepit old man that I saw but a skull, as if Atto were already a corpse: ashen
pallor, half-open mouth, teeth protruding on account of his sunken withered cheeks, blue lips and eye-sockets. The Kingdom of France risked losing the successor to its throne, and maybe countless
others after him, and perhaps it would end up like Spain, which was now being torn asunder by the forces fighting over its spoils . . . All these fears I saw passing over the yellow parchment of
his forehead, visible under the carefully daubed white lead of his make-up.

My suspicions about him suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Atto was not poisoning anyone, and so his arrival at the same time as the Turkish Agha was just a coincidence . . . Whatever
dark force was now pulling the strings of life and death in Vienna and Versailles, it was certainly not controlled by Abbot Melani.

Cloridia looked at me gravely and caressed my hand: she guessed my thoughts. Melani asked me to step outside the alehouse, just me and him. My consort nodded; she would wait for us at Porta
Coeli.

The Abbot and I walked towards the nearby meat market. The road was full of people, and every so often a carriage trundled by. We just needed to talk with a little prudence in order not to be
overheard by any passers-by.

He remained silent. I looked at him as he walked, leaning on my arm and his stick: he was panting laboriously, almost as if he did not have enough breath. From the rapid pulsations in his
scrawny neck I guessed that his heart was palpitating feverishly and depriving him of breath. I was afraid he might collapse.

“Signor Atto, maybe we should go back to the convent.”

He came to a halt. He passed his trembling hand behind his dark glasses, over his half-closed eyelids, as if to wake himself from a bad dream. Then he straightened his bent back and let out a
long sigh. His forehead was furrowed now, but he seemed to have regained strength.

“One day, a long time ago,” he said in a grim voice, “I explained that there are two types of forged documents. The first, the genuine forgeries, just recount balderdash. The
others are the forgeries that tell the truth,” he said at last.

“I remember, Signor Atto,” I said. Did he mean to say that the pamphlet with the news from Paris could be a forgery?

“The forgeries that tell the truth have been drawn up for a beneficial purpose: to divulge, even in the absence of authentic proof, a true piece of news. The forgeries of the first kind
are simply mendacious and nothing else. However, that does not necessarily mean that they might not have been produced for a good purpose as well.”

This ambiguous speech surprised me a little. What was Abbot Melani leading up to?

“Well,” he went on, “in the last few days you’ve come up against a document of this latter kind.”

I gave a start.

“A forgery, which was, however, drawn up with praiseworthy intentions,” he explained, “from a desire for peace.”

When he added this, my mouth dropped. I was beginning to understand.

“I didn’t want to tell you this, curse it,” he whispered with vexation, tapping the pavement with the tip of his walking stick.

“The letter that tells us that Eugene wanted to betray the Empire . . . you mean the letter that is at the heart of your mission. It’s a forgery, isn’t it?” I asked, my
voice cracking with incredulity and surprise.

“Let me explain, boy,” he said, squeezing my arm a little tighter.

Much of the story that Atto had told me was, in fact, true. It was true, that is to say, that at the beginning of the year an anonymous officer had gone to the Spanish court of Madrid, over
which reigned Philip of Anjou, grandson of the Most Christian King. It was true that the anonymous officer, before disappearing into thin air, had succeeded in passing to Philip a letter, from
which it transpired that Eugene of Savoy was ready to sell himself, in exchange for a large recompense, to the French enemy. And finally it was true that on reading those lines, the young Catholic
King of Spain had been flabbergasted.

But then Atto told me what had followed. Philip had had a copy of the letter sent to his grandfather, the Sun King. The French sovereign had been equally amazed. But his minister Torcy had also
examined the letter, and reacted quite differently.

“Torcy said that Eugene would never have written such a letter. In his opinion the Prince of Savoy would never have been so ingenuous as to offer himself to the enemy, jeopardising all
that he had so laboriously achieved by serving the Empire: fame, power, wealth . . .”

The minister of the Most Christian King was convinced that it was a trap set by Eugene himself, a trick very much in keeping with the
condottiero
’s twisted, indirect mind: if the
French were to contact Eugene, responding positively to the offer contained in the letter, he would at once denounce a plot against himself, orchestrated by some conspirator in Vienna in league
with the enemy.

“And was Torcy right?”

“Yes and no. The letter is indeed a forgery, as he said. But it was not commissioned by Eugene, who is actually in the dark about this whole story.”