triumphal sneeze. Cristofano's door opened.
I took to the stairs and rushed down to the cellars. I heard the doctor reproving Abbot Melani. 'What are you doing outside your chamber?'
The abbot needed all of his wits about him to arrange a clumsy excuse: he was on his way to call on Cristofano because, said he, of a sudden sneezing attack which was suffocating him.
'Good, then why are your shoes all muddy?' asked Cristofano an-grily.
'Oh well… er… yes, indeed, they did get rather dirty on the journey from Paris and I have not yet had them cleaned here, what with all that has happened,' stammered Atto. 'But please, let us not talk here, we shall wake up Bedfordi,'-for the Englishman was indeed sleeping nearby.
The physician muttered something and I heard the door close. A few minutes later, I heard the two emerge once again.
'I do not like this business; now we shall see who else is playing the night wanderer,' hissed Cristofano, knocking at a door. From within came Devize's voice, half-smothered by sleep.
'No, it is nothing, excuse me, just a little check,' explained the doctor.
My sweat ran cold. He was about to knock on Dulcibeni's door. Cristofano knocked.
The door opened: 'Yes?'
Pompeo Dulcibeni had returned.
After leaving a while for the waters to calm, I returned to await Atto Melani in my chamber. What we most feared had, alas, come to pass. Not only had Cristofano found Atto wandering about the inn, but Dulcibeni too had witnessed that nocturnal confusion. Clearly, he had returned to his apartment just when Atto was in Cristofano's chamber. At that moment, I myself was on the stairs, some way below. Thus, I did not hear Dulcibeni's return. The old gentleman must have descended the stairs between the little room and the first floor on tiptoe, despite the fact that he was moving in the dark. What had taken place then was bizarre, although not impossible.
What did seem almost incredible was the fact that Dulcibeni should have succeeded in making a timely return after all those comings and goings in the underground galleries, then in Tiracorda's house, and again in the tunnels; hauling himself up through the trapdoor with his own strength, walking in the dark, climbing steep stairs, and all in complete solitude. Dulcibeni was strongly built and far from short-winded. Too far, I thought, for a man of his age.
I did not have to wait long until Abbot Melani came to my door. He was not a little gloomy because of the stupid and ridiculous way in which we had been caught by Cristofano, arousing the suspicions of Dulcibeni himself.
'And what if Dulcibeni runs away?'
'I do not think he will do that. He would fear that Cristofano might raise the alarm and that, in dread of the Bargello's men, you and I might reveal the underground passage and the trapdoor leading directly to the house of his friend Tiracorda; which might irremediably compromise his mysterious plans. I am rather of the opinion that, whatever Dulcibeni may have in mind to do, after what has taken place tonight, he will quicken his pace. We must be on guard.'
'Yet, finding that letter in his drawers, we did make a great discovery,' I added, recovering my good humour. 'By the way, what led you to find the hiding place so quickly?'
'I see that you cannot bear to think matters through. Who accompanied Dulcibeni when he came to the hostelry?'
'Devize; and Fouquet.'
'Good. And where did Fouquet hide his writings when he was imprisoned at Pinerol?'
'I thought about all that Abbot Melani had narrated to me an hour previously. 'In chairs, in the lining of clothes, and in his undergarments!'
'Exactly.'
'But then, Dulcibeni knows everything about Fouquet.'
The abbot nodded his assent.
'So, Dulcibeni lied on the morning of our sequestration, when he told the Bargello's men that he had met the old Frenchman only recently,' said I in amazement.
'Precisely. To have attained such a degree of intimacy, in reality, Dulcibeni and the Superintendent must have met a long time previously. Do not forget that Fouquet emerged from twenty years' imprisonment in a very poor state of health: I do not believe he can have moved around very much before settling in Naples. Nothing could be simpler than that he should have sought anonymous refuge in a circle of Jansenists, who are among the most bitter enemies of Louis XIV and who are well established in that city.'
'And there,' I concluded, 'he must have made the acquaintance of Dulcibeni, to whom he will have revealed his identity.'
'Just so. That would mean that their friendship dates back three years, and not two months, as Dulcibeni would wish us to believe. And now, with God's help, we shall see this matter through to the end.'
At this point, I felt bound to confess to Abbot Melani that I was not at all sure that I had fully understood the meaning of the letter which we had furtively read in Dulcibeni's chamber.
'Poor boy, you always need someone to tell you what to think. But it does not matter. That will happen, too, when you become a gazetteer.'
As he had told me a few days earlier, Atto had met Kircher four years earlier, when he was already a dotard. The letter which we had just read seemed indeed to result from the great man's mental decline: it was addressed to 'Monsieur le Surintendant des Finances Nicolas Fouquet', as though nothing had ever happened to the poor Squirrel.
'He had lost all sense of time,' said Atto, 'like those old men who think that they have become children again and ask for their mothers.'
The content of the letter was, however, unequivocal. Kircher felt himself close to departure from this earth and was turning to his old friend Fouquet to thank him one last time. Fouquet, the Jesuit reminded him, had been the only potentate to whom he had confided his theory. The Superintendent had indeed cast himself down at Kircher's feet when the latter had illustrated for him in detail the great discovery of his life: the secretum pestis.
'Perhaps I understand!' I hastened to conclude, 'It is the treatise in which Kircher writes of the pestilence. Dulcibeni spoke of it at the very beginning of our quarantine: Kircher wrote that the pestilence depended, not upon miasmas of unhealthy humours, but upon tiny beings, vermiculi animati or something of the sort. Perhaps that is the secret of the pestilence: invisible vermiculi.'
'You could not be more mistaken,' retorted Atto. 'The theory of the vermiculi was never a secret: Kircher published it some thirty years ago in the Scrutinium phisico-medicum contagiosae luis quae pestis dicitur. In the letter in Dulcibeni's possession, there is far more: Kircher announces that he knows how to praevenire, regere et debellare.'
'In other words, to prevent, regulate and defeat the pestilence.'
'Bravo. And that is the secretum pestis. However, in order not to forget what I did manage to read, before coming to see you, I went into my chamber and there noted down all the most important phrases.'
He showed me a few fragmentary words and phrases in Latin, rapidly scribbled onto a sheet of paper: secretum morbi morbus crescit sicut mortales augescit patrimonium senescit ex abrupto per vices pestis petit et regreditur ad infinitum renovatur secretum vitae arcanae obices celant
'According to Kircher,' Atto explained, 'the plague is born, grows old and dies just like men. It feeds, however, at their expense: when it is young and strong, it endeavours to extend its estate as much as possible, like a cruel ruler exploiting his subjects, and through the infection brings about the massacre of an infinity of victims. Then, suddenly, it weakens and decays, like a poor old man at the end of his strength; and in the end, it dies. The visitation is cyclical: it attacks people and then rests; years later, it again attacks; and so on ad infinitum.'
'Then it is a kind of… well, a thing that is forever turning around.'
'Precisely: a circular chain.'
'But then the plague can never be defeated, as Kircher promised.'
'That is not so. The cycle can be modified, by recourse to the secretum pestis.'
'And how does that work?'
'I have read that it is divided into two parts: th e secretum morbi, to cause the plague; and the secretum
