Veritas (Atto Melani) (77 page)

Since no one was above reproach, the Italians had no difficulty in lording it over everyone. Acrimony, quarrels, backbiting, envy and calumny lit the fuse of hatred between the Teutonic monks
and the Italians, and if the new prior tried to make peace, he would quickly be insulted by the Germans and get drawn into the intrigues of the Italians, who had a damnable gift for sowing discord
and creating incomprehensible disputes out of nothing, so that everyone suffered, including the Italians.

“In the end the Jesuits got involved in the matter, obtaining a bull from Pope Urban VIII with permission to confront the Augustinian Hermits – Italians and non-Italians – and
move them outside the walls, without any warning, into the suburb of Landstrasse, where they still remain. Their place was then taken by the Barefoot Augustinians, ‘imported’ from
Prague, a far more virtuous order.”

“The order of Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara,” I said.

“The very one. And as far as I know there’s not a single Italian among them,” sniggered Penicek.

“Are you happy now, Pennal?” grumbled Simonis. “What have you proved with your tirade? That the monks from Prague are better?”

“Or that the Jesuits, as usual, are the cleverest?” added the Pole. “In any case the story of the expulsion of the Augustinians is as old as the hills.”

“But the news of the Augustinian murderer . . .”

“Was he an Augustinian Hermit or a Barefoot Augustinian?” asked my assistant point blank.

“Mm . . . Hermit.”

“Koloman’s monk friend is a Barefoot Augustinian,” snapped Simonis.

“So, nothing to worry about,” I concluded with a sigh of relief, while the cart pulled up in front of the gate of a vineyard.

We had arrived at the House Goat. It was one of those delicious
Heuriger
, open-air inns kept by vine growers and their families, where you can go and taste
Heuriger
, the new
wine produced in the vineyard at the back of the house. The House Goat was considered one of the best wine shops, but actually it was difficult to go wrong with the
Heuriger
inns: the
white or red wine trodden in the family cellar is never less than decent, the turkey coated in breadcrumbs by the host’s wife or mother is always crisp, the pork with caraway seeds as
fragrant and juicy as the cheeks of the maiden with blond tresses who serves it to you piping hot.

Usually you pass through a gate and find a table under the trees, in an internal courtyard, where even the coarsest customer has the good manners to whisper (in such a place in Rome you would
have to plug your ears against the noisy chattering, the guffawing and the clattering of plates, tables and chairs). If there is no room at the tables, you find a place in one of the niches carved
into the centuries-old tree trunks, or you can eat at a makeshift counter, formed by rustic planks fixed roughly to a low wall or, if it rains, inside an old barrel quaintly kitted out with table,
stools and lace cloths like a squirrel’s den in a fairy-tale. At the entrance you are at once charmed by the graceful, gentle atmosphere, so that even if they served you vinegar instead of
wine, and dry bread instead of turkey, you would eat and drink with relish all the same, revelling in the rustle of the branches, the twittering of the birds, the smile of the host’s daughter
and the peace that breathes forth from the blessed land where Vienna the Wise sweetly reposes. And as you rotate a glass of ruby-coloured new wine in your hands, and lose yourself in its vermilion
depths, the clucking of the nearby hen house will sound like a chorus of Aegean virgins, the braying of the donkey on the nearby farm a verse from Sophocles; and you will not be surprised to find
yourself recalling, as happened to me that day, the austere description of Austria by Enea Silvio Piccolomini which I had read before I came to Vienna, and in your memory it will almost turn into a
poem:

My wife and I dreamed of opening a wine shop one day, in the vineyard in the Josephine that Atto Melani had donated to us, I reflected, as I sat on a bench in the
Heuriger
, which was curiously deserted at that moment, while Penicek waited on the box seat and the other two went in search of Koloman. With my little boy I would keep up our profitable
chimney-sweeping activity, in which my son would succeed me; Cloridia would find a steady job as a hostess in our
Heuriger
; our two daughters would join us, and they would help their
mother in the kitchen and the wine shop, while we would find a couple of good strong boys from the neighbourhood to work in the vineyard, and, who knows, maybe they would ask our blessing to wed
our daughters, and so the whole family, including (God willing) our grandchildren, would prosper in . . .

“Signor Master, Signor Master, quick!”

The voice came from afar, and from above. I looked around but could see nothing. I got up from the garden bench and walked a few steps. Simonis was calling to me from the attic of a service
building, which looked onto the animal yard and was connected to the main house by a low building, perhaps the stables. He was at a dormer window, on the rear side of the building, and was waving
to attract my attention, rousing me from the languor I had been lulled into by the idyllic setting and the first sips of red wine.

There was no need to climb the stairs and go all the way up there. Walking round in search of the entrance, I ran into a small crowd of people. They were clients of the
Heuriger
(so
that was where they had all ended up) and with them were the host and his wife. They were gathered around the hen run. Then I saw.

At first I took it for a scarecrow, one of those figures made of old clothes and straw that are used to keep birds off the newly sown fields. But what was a scarecrow doing in a hen run? It was
Koloman. It wasn’t very different from the way we had found Populescu: Koloman too had been impaled, but by wooden pikes, not by candlesticks.

A fence of pointed poles, thrust deeply into the ground, protected the animals from raids by foxes, martens and wildcats, which could not reach their prey either by digging or by climbing.
Impaled on the forest of sharp points, Koloman the great lover, Koloman the poor Hungarian waiter, Koloman the self-styled baron of Varasdin, was gazing eastwards, towards the great plain of his
native Hungary. Chickens, hens and turkeys took no notice. They continued to scratch around calmly in the shady pen, disturbed more by our presence than by their scarecrow of flesh and blood.

“Murderers, beasts . . . They’re just beasts,” stammered Opalinski, stifling his sobs.

We were now in the little attic room from which Simonis had called out to me.

“Murderers? Who?”

It was my assistant who said this, without removing his eyes from the corpse.

“The ones who murdered Koloman,” I answered, fearing that he was feeling the effect of this blow.

The Greek said nothing. He stood there, looking out of the dormer window. He looked up, to the roof, and then down, towards Koloman and the pikes. Then his eyes shifted again towards the stables
that joined the building to the host’s house. I followed the direction of his eyes, and at the window opposite ours I saw the shocked faces of two rosy-faced girls, probably the host’s
daughters. Beside them, on the wall of the house, a sundial showed that it was half past three. At that moment Simonis turned towards us:

“What if it were an accident?”

Nothing was clear anymore. We had made a hasty departure from the House Goat and now we were wandering around the nearby high ground known as The Pulpit.

From the top of the steep hill, there was a view over the Caesarean city. It stretched out before our eyes, under the menacing shade of black rain clouds, while we were bathed in warm and
inopportune sunlight.

Much had happened since we took our leave of poor Koloman, starting with the scuffle that had broken out involving Opalinski. Things had gone in this fashion.

In exchange for a hefty tip the host had agreed to wait another half-hour before calling the city guard.

The landlord stood gazing at us with an impatient air, waiting for us to go: he had not even asked our names. The only thing he was interested in was the money with which we had bought those few
moments of peace for our final farewell to our friend; he thought we were friends or relatives of Koloman who had come to visit him. When the city guard eventually came he would simply show them
the boy’s body and say that he had fallen from the roof.

He had never seen or met him, he would say. Actually, he had met him most definitely the day before, when Koloman had been brought to him by the Italian monk to whom the student had turned for
help. What had happened after that, the host neither knew nor cared to know. The money he had been given by the monk was enough, he said, though he was quite happy to take our offering as well.

We had just a few moments to ourselves before we slipped away. Koloman’s death, the fourth, left only Simonis and Opalinski of the group of friends I had met at the Deposition just a few
days earlier. It was all too obvious that their deaths were interconnected, and that I, in one way or another, was not unrelated to them. And yet we could find no evidence of a common motive or of
a link between those deaths and myself. The enquiries into the Turks had led to a dead end. Ciezeber the dervish had nothing to hide, nor did the Agha’s phrase on the Golden Apple, and it was
highly improbable that the paper on which it was written concealed anything either. And so Atto Melani’s allusion to the fact that both Hristo and Dragomir were Ottoman subjects meant
nothing. By contrast, each of the four victims had an excellent reason for passing into the next world. Dànilo’s and Hristo’s dangerous occupations had perhaps been fatal to
them; the Armenian girl to Dragomir; and Koloman?

“He died at three, his regular hour for lying with a woman.”

“Right,” I said, remembering the hour marked by the sun dial, “and at the window opposite there were the host’s two beautiful daughters. Do you think he fell trying to
reach them?”

“Koloman, I’ve already told you, was a specialist in climbing over roofs and cornices for his romantic appointments. Perhaps this time he put a foot wrong. It’s just that . .
.”

“What?”

“It’s just that it seems very unlikely to me that, terrified as he was, he would have felt like having a woman.”

With Koloman Szupán, in short, it was very difficult to work out whether he had been killed or not. Although I myself had looked repeatedly at the place where it had happened, at the
position of the body and the trajectory of the fall, although I had examined every detail in the little room in which Szupán had spent his last hours, I could but reach the same conclusion
as Simonis: the only thing certain was that the Hungarian had fallen. God alone knew if he had been pushed.

Only Opalinski, overwhelmed with despair and remorse at having betrayed the name of Koloman’s hiding place, seemed sure that his friend had been murdered. And he accused Penicek.

“Augustinian murderer, my foot! Filthy demon from Prague, I’ll tear your eyes out!” he bellowed as we climbed aboard the Bohemian’s cart, after leaving the House
Goat.

We just managed to rescue the poor cripple before Opalinski, who was a great strapping fellow, choked him to death in his powerful grip. When he heard what had happened, Penicek repeated the
story of the Italian monk, and that Koloman should not have trusted him,
et cetera et cetera
. But Janitzki attacked him without even letting him finish, so that Simonis and I had to
grapple with him to prevent him from strangling the Bohemian.

“But you made a mistake, foul beast of the Evil One! You defenestrated Koloman! You just can’t help yourselves, you Praguers!” yelled Jan, finally slackening his grip on the
Pennal’s throat.

At these enigmatic words from Opalinski, Simonis briefly explained that for centuries it had been a brutal custom in Prague to murder people by defenestration. The first such act had taken place
on 30th July 1419, when a group of dissatisfied Bohemian nobles had broken into the town hall and thrown the mayor and his councillors out of the window, killing them. Since then the list of
precipitations from windows had lengthened. A hundred years earlier a delegation of Protestants had defenestrated two Catholic counsellors of the Emperor, who had landed on a cart full of dung and
thus been saved. A famous defenestration, finally, had been the trigger for the Thirty Years’ War.

“When you left to go to the apothecary, you already knew where to find Koloman!” sobbed Opalinski now. “You did all you could to worm his hiding place out of me. And like an
imbecile, I fell for it!”