me) and then back again. I was exhausted and in pain from the innumerable kicks, shoves and bruises I had received. My clothing stank of a thousand strange essences and, what was more, I had the inexplicable feeling that my back was covered with a fine layer of lard. Last but not least, I was burning with shame at having been the one member of the group to have fainted from fear, and what was more, at the very moment when Atto and Sfasciamonti had brought the situation under control.
Atto's torch had ended its brief life; we found ourselves suddenly proceeding in the most stygian darkness, testing the terrain with our feet and groping along the walls with our hands. I trembled at the thought that another battle might break out on that airless staircase, with unforeseeable and surely bloody consequences. However, the hooded troop proceeded up the stairs in good order; Atto and Sfasciamonti needed to suppress no insurrection. That was in the nature of the corpisantari. shamelessly deceitful cheats, up to all manner of scheming and chicanery, yet incapable of harming anyone or offering violence; except, of course, when (as I had seen seventeen years earlier), it came to aiding some high-ranking ecclesiastic, on which occasion their Christian zeal inspired them to act with a courage and audacity worthy of true heroes of the Faith.
'Accursed ragamuffins,' Atto railed. 'First of all that hoax with the Inferno and now these infernal stairs.'
'Signor Atto,' I found the courage to ask him, 'we were enveloped in a strange blue light. How the deuce did they manage to make us look like spectres?'
'That is an old trick. Indeed, if I remember rightly, two tricks were involved. In the first room, where we seemed to be under a rain of fiery droplets, there was an iron platform, under which they had placed hot coals. The platform was burning hot, but that we realised only after the heat had penetrated our shoes. Under the iron plate, on the coals, they will have placed a vessel, probably made of enamelled terracotta, containing wine spirits, together with a piece of camphor, which will have filled that small space with its exhalations.'
'I see! That is why I smell so strange. I thought that it was…'
'It was just what you thought: camphor,' Atto cut me short. 'What they use against moths. But let me continue: at a certain point in our advance, we tripped against a mobile step which lowered and, in so doing, activated some machinery. That in turn caused a trap door to fall vertically, making a hellish noise. Meanwhile, the flame from our lantern penetrated that den full of the vapour of spirits and camphor, which immediately caught fire. The surprise and the tremendous burning under our feet worked perfectly. What with all that dancing fire and the heat coming up from below, we thought we were in hell. Then we escaped through the little door, taking the only way out, down the iron rungs, when we were sucked down as not even Scylla and Charybdis could have engulfed us.'
'Quite! But how was that done?'
'I and Sfasciamonti worked that out while you were taking your little nap. At the end of the iron rungs, there was a metal slide, smooth and well greased with abundant kitchen fat.'
I touched my backside. Yes, it was just the same lard I had used when I was an apprentice at the inn, when I greased the pots and pans before cooking chicken in a wine sauce with walnuts, or preparing some poultry in broth.
The grease, Atto continued, caused us to rush down the slide at great speed, descending the whole height of the tower in an instant.
'The whole height? What does that mean?' interrupted Sfasciamonti who had listened open-mouthed to Atto's explanation.
'The tower is not really as low as we had thought; on the contrary, it is very high, but over the centuries it has been partially buried. We entered through a sort of lean-to hut that was built quite recently and led, not to the ground floor of the tower, but about halfway up its original height. The slide, however, hurled us down, down to the original, ancient base of the tower, which is today many feet under the ground.'
'And deep down, the tower communicates with a whole network of tunnels,' I concluded, drawing on the strength of my old acquaintance with subterranean Roman galleries, all joined up to one another.
'Yes, and here the second trick awaited us. As soon as they saw us arrive at the Baths of Agrippina — what was more, at a late hour, which gave away our intention of entering their rabbit warren — they burned a glass of spirits or some similar liquor in this second space. And in the spirits, if I recall the recipe correctly, they dissolved a little common salt.'
'One moment,' I interrupted, 'how do you know all these details?'
'These things are child's play. In France, everyone knows them; one need only purchase some suitable book, like that of the Abbe de Vallemont, which I think I have already mentioned to you.'
'The one of which you spoke to me at the Vessel?' I asked, vaguely troubled.
'Exactly.'
The artifice that followed, Abbot Melani went on to explain, worked, not in the presence of fire, but if one lit a candle and then extinguished it. And our lantern, as those who organised all that machinery could easily foresee, reached the bottom of the slide still lit but was smashed upon contact with the ground. If the room had been well impregnated with the vapours of the mixture of spirits and salt, faces seen through that artificial atmosphere would take on the pallid, livid, deathly semblance of exhumed corpses, or lost souls. And that is what happened.
'Excuse me,' I then asked, realising that our ascent through utter darkness was practically at an end, and we were again walking on flat ground. 'Why did you not realise at once that this was all an artifice?'
'Surprise. They organised everything to perfection: first, the dancing fire, then our faces turned into spectres, and lastly the army of devils and the flaming sword, in reality heated up on some stupid fireplace… Unfortunately, in a state of shock, I too was slow to recognise the smell of camphor, otherwise I'd have warned you in time.'
'Then, what made you realise what was happening?'
'When that idiot Ugonio, alias the German, opened his mouth. It was impossible not to recognise him, even after all this time. He, too, knew you. He said 'periculous blunderbungle', realising that he was on the point of committing a dangerous blunder. I'd say that his eyes and his memory are better than yours, heh!' guffawed Atto.
'Was that why he did not strike me?'
'I never bestrike,' interrupted Ugonio's offended voice from the end of the line.
'Never?' I asked, not without a trace of anger in my voice, recalling those terrifying moments at the mercy of the incandescent dagger.
'All trespissers emergency profoundamentally pissified,' grunted Ugonio, stifling with great difficulty an outburst of malign, conceited laughter.
He was right. Before fainting, I too had involuntarily wet myself like a terrified infant.
The purpose or all that infernal theatre was quite plain. Down there among the tunnels in and around the Baths of Agrippina, the German had his lair and no one was to enter there uninvited; the point was that anyone foolhardy enough so to do was to be subjected to that carousel of terror so that he would run for his life, ejected like a dog, soaked in his own urine.
It was the first time for seventeen years that I had ventured into the subterranean city beneath Rome, and here again I had found Ugonio, just as when I last emerged from that labyrinth. What had brought me there? The investigations into the theft perpetrated against Abbot Melani: loot consisting of papers, a telescope and the relic of the Madonna of the Carmel with my three little Venetian pearls. Yes, the relic. I had almost forgotten it. I should have realised earlier, I thought with a little smile: relics and tunnels… the daily bread of the corpisantari. Now it only remained for us to find the place where the stolen goods were stored.
By this time, we had come to the end of the stairway that had led us away from the second infernal chamber. Here we met with a surprise.
We found ourselves in a spacious storeroom, at least thirty yards long by thirty wide, with a good level floor and walls reinforced with bricks, equipped with a number of exit doors (leading, presumably, to other tunnels) and a spiral staircase leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Here reigned indescribable chaos: piles and piles of objects of every imaginable and unimaginable shape and form made of the storeroom a mad pandemonium of knicknacks, remnants, relics, trifles, hardware, ornaments, toys, souvenirs, sweet nothings, playthings, scrap, builders' waste, shards and splinters, antique junk, food leftovers, bagatelles, detritus, rubbish and much other vile material regurgitated from burglaries and robberies in the city's most sordid back streets.
Thus, I saw heaps of coins half-eaten by time, immeasurable piles of paper pressed together and tied up with string, baskets of filthy, greasy clothes, moth-eaten furniture piled up to the ceiling, dozens, indeed hundreds of pairs of shoes of all kinds, from rustic boots to courtesans' finest slippers, sashes and belts, books and exercise
