moved out of the labyrinth, the better to follow the scent of Dulcibeni. Hardly had he entered the open space when he gave a start. 'Gfrrrlubh,' said he, indicating a point on the immense and impervious perimeter walls of the Colosseum.
'Are you sure?' we asked in unison, vaguely put out by the danger and inaccessibility of the place.
Ciacconio nodded and we at once set out for our objective.
The great perimeter walls of the stadium were composed of three superimposed orders of arches. The point indicated by Ciacconio was an arch at the intermediate level, at a height above ground perhaps exceeding that of the entire Locanda del Donzello.
'How are we to get up there?' asked Abbot Melani.
'Get some help from your monsters,' we heard Dulcibeni cry; this time Atto had spoken without lowering his voice sufficiently.
'You are quite right, that is a good idea!' he yelled back. 'You were not mistaken,' he then added, turning to Ciacconio, 'the voice does come from up there.'
Ciacconio was meanwhile beating a path in all haste across the labyrinth. He led us towards one of the two great wooden gates which were left open in daytime to give access to the interior of the amphitheatre. Just in front of the gate there rose a great, steep staircase which entered into the majestic body of the Colosseum.
'He must have come up this way,' murmured Melani.
The stairs did indeed lead to the first storey of the building, in other words to the level of the second order of arches. Hardly had we ascended the last steps than we emerged into the open and found ourselves in an enormous corridor which ringed the entire amphitheatre. Here, rising no little above the level of the auditorium, the moonlight spread more surely and more generously. Spectacular was the view over the central space and the ruins of the tiers of seats; and, above us, the enormous walls that contained the entire mass of the circus, standing out majestically against the heavens. With our breath short after our rapid climb, for an instant we halted and almost forgot our objective, ravished by so grandiose a spectacle.
'You are almost there, spy of kings,' the harsh, grating voice of Dulcibeni called us from the right.
From there, came a detonation that terrified us, and almost instantly we flattened ourselves on the ground. Dulcibeni had fired at us.
We were then startled by a loud clatter a few paces away. I approached on all fours and found Dulcibeni's pistol, half-broken by the hard impact.
'Two misses, what a pity! Take courage, Melani, now we are on an equal footing.'
I handed the arm to Atto, who looked thoughtfully in Dulcibeni's direction. 'There is something that escapes me,' he commented, as we approached the place from which the voice and the pistol had come.
For me, too, something was amiss. Already, as we ascended the great staircase, I had been assailed by no few doubts. Why had Dulcibeni drawn us into that bizarre moonlight pursuit among the ruins of the Colosseum, thus losing precious time and risking being caught by the police in flagrante delicto?
Why should he have wanted so much to attract Abbot Melani all the way up here with the promise that he would reveal to him all that he wanted to know?
Meanwhile, as we clambered breathlessly over the last time-worn tiers of seats, we heard the echo of distant cries, sounding something like the warlike bustle of troops converging upon an agreed objective.
'I knew it,' commented Abbot Melani, panting. 'It was impossible that a few caporioni and members of the watch should not show up. Dulcibeni could not hope to pass unobserved after that episode with the runaway carriage.'
With his mocking provocations, our prey had facilitated our search. Yet it at once became clear that it would be very difficult indeed for us to approach him. Dulcibeni had in fact hauled himself up on top of one of the walls supporting the terraces; from the corridor in which we stood, the wall climbed obliquely to a window in the perimeter wall, at almost the highest point of the Colosseum.
There he was, comfortably seated under the window with his back to the wall, still holding the chest with the leeches tightly in his arms. I was astounded by the extraordinary way in which he had succeeded in taking refuge up there; under the oblique wall on top of which he had ventured there yawned a horrible and most perilous gulf, and anyone who fell into it would meet with a ghastly death. Beyond the window, there was a chasm as deep as two entire palaces were high, yet Dulcibeni did not seem in the least perturbed by this. Three awesome and sublime worlds opened up around the fugitive: the great arena of the Colosseum, the tremendous abyss beyond the facade, and the starlit night which set the seal on the grandiose and fatal theatre of that night's events.
Under the Colosseum, in the meantime, we seemed to hear the voices and presence of strangers: the men of the watch must have arrived. We were separated from our prey by a space of empty air as wide as a middling city street.
'So here they are, the saviours of the usurer with the tiara, of the insatiable beast from Como,' and he exploded into what seemed to me to be forced, unnatural laughter, the fruit of an insane blend of wrath and euphoria.
Atto glanced questioningly at me and Ciacconio.
'I have understood, you know,' said Atto.
'Tell me, tell me, Melani, tell me what you have understood,' exclaimed Dulcibeni.
'The tobacco is not tobacco…'
'Oh, how clever. Do you know what I have to say to that? You are quite right. So many things are not what they appear to be.'
'You inhale those strange dried leaves, what are they called…?' insisted Atto.
'Mamacoca' I exclaimed.
'How perspicacious! I am lost in admiration,' Dulcibeni replied caustically.
'That is why you are not tired at night,' said the abbot. 'But then in the daytime you become irascible and feel the need to have more and more of it, and so you continue to stuff your nostrils with it: and then you declaim complete speeches before your mirror, imagining that you still have your daughter with you. And when you launch into one of your insane diatribes about sovereigns and crowns, you become inflamed, and no one can stop you, because that herb sustains your body, but it… In short, it confuses the mind, which becomes possessed. Or am I mistaken?'
'I see that you have amused yourself teaching the art of spying to your little prentice instead of leaving him to his natural destiny as a source of amusement for princes and of astonishment for fairground idlers,' replied Dulcibeni, with roars of laughter which he flung vengefully at me.
It was, moreover, true that I had spied at the Jansenist's door and had then gone to recount all that I had heard to the abbot.
Dulcibeni then bounded nimbly along the oblique wall, oblivious of the chasm beneath his feet and (despite the burden of the little chest which he still carried) hauled himself onto the top of the great wall of the fagade, the width of which exceeded three paces.
There our adversary now stood, majestically dominating us from above. A few yards away from him rose a great wooden cross, higher than a man, placed above the facade of the Colosseum to signify the consecration of the monument to the memory of the Christian martyrs.
Dulcibeni glanced downwards, outside the Colosseum. 'Take courage, Melani. Reinforcements will soon be arriving. There is a group of guards down there.'
'Then tell me, before they arrive,' Atto rejoined, 'why do you want the death of Innocent XI?'
'Rack your brains,' said Dulcibeni, withdrawing from the edge of the great wall; at that precise moment, Atto was climbing in his turn onto the narrow cornice that led to the perimeter wall.
'What has he done to you, damn it?' Atto continued with a strangled voice. 'Has he dishonoured the Christian faith, has he covered it in shame and ignominy? Is that what you think? Say it, Pompeo, admit that you are possessed, like all the Jansenists. You hate the world, Pompeo, because you cannot manage to hate yourself.'
Dulcibeni did not reply. Meanwhile Atto, holding tightly onto the naked stone, was climbing painfully along the wall that led up to him.
'The experiments on the island,' he continued, clumsily grappling on all fours with the top of the wall, 'the visits to Tiracorda, the nights in the underground galleries… You did all that for a bastard, half-Infidel bitch, you poor madman. You should thank Huygens and that slobbering old Feroni if they did her the honour of ripping open her maidenhead before they threw her into the sea.'
