Secretum

his apparently senseless acts. And do you know why?'

'He was pretending to be mad in order not to arouse the suspicions of the suitors who had occupied Ulysses' palace,' I replied. 'But, I repeat, I cannot see what this has to do with…'

'Just wait and hear me out. Telemachus himself masked as folly his boldest act, namely drawing the suitors into the fatal trap: the competition to draw Ulysses' bow. He said: 'Alas, Zeus, son of Cronos, made me mad and here I am laughing and joking like a madman.' And was he not, acting like a lark's mirror, the very first to try that bow which he said only his father could bend? He never gave away his own simulation until the moment when Ulysses seized the bow and massacred the suitors.'

'I understand,' said I at length. 'You pretended to believe Sfasciamonti until we had an advantage over him.'

'Exactly. If I had unmasked him earlier, we should never have learned anything from Il Roscio, nor would we have got as far as the German, in other words Ugonio, and so on and so forth. What's more,' Atto concluded with a knowing grin, 'it would have been complicated to get rid of Sfasciamonti earlier; I couldn't very well fill his buttocks with lead in the middle of the festivities at Villa Spada!'

Meanwhile, the carriage made its way in the first light of dawn. Fatigue weighed down our eyelids inexorably, yet too many questions still beset me.

'Signor Atto,' I asked, 'why did you swear when Ugonio told you that the Dutch cerretano was going to unglue the cover of your treatise?'

'At long last, you're asking me. The whole thing hangs on that.'

'What do you mean 'hangs on that'?'

'It was a matter of wrong targets. When you take aim at the wrong target,' said Atto, 'you get nothing but trouble.'

The first mistaken target had been Cardinal Albani. As we now knew, he had nothing whatever to do with the theft of Atto's treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave.

The second wrong target had been Lamberg. We had believed that the Imperial Ambassador was behind the theft, supposing that he meant to get hold of the secret information which Atto intended for the eyes of the Most Christian King only. That was another mistake.

'Lamberg is nothing but a very pious believer who, instead of trying to be an ambassador, should be at court in Vienna, gobbling down haunches of venison and strudel with soft cheese like all his compatriots, and looking after his tranquil estates. It was not he who ordered the theft of my treatise.'

'How can you be so sure of that?'

'I am sure of that because nobody ordered the cerretani to steal the book. It was they who decided to do it.'

'They? And why?'

'Do you remember what Ugonio said when we entered his lair at the baths of Agrippina? The cerretani are nervous, he muttered, because someone has stolen their language. That was confirmed by Geronimo, the cerretano whom Sfasciamonti questioned today. At the time, Ugonio's reply made no sense, but that phrase of his kept buzzing around in my head. The new language: is it not true that the cerretani have a secret language or jargon, gibberish, Saint Giles' Greek or whatever you want to call it? As we know, it is something rather more serious than that ridiculous play on words which you heard when you were thrown off that terrace in Campo di Fiore.'

'D'you mean… 'teeyooteelie'?'

'Exactly. Until now, their secret language was the jargon which we managed to understand a good deal of thanks to the glossary which Ugonio procured for us. Now, however, precisely because that was beginning to become too well known, they had decided to update it. Do you remember what Buvat told us? This is an ancient language. When, however, it ceases to be impenetrable, they modify it a little, using small tricks of speech, just enough to render it incomprehensible once more. This time, however, someone stole the key to their code, the rules governing it, or something of the sort; just as Geronimo told Sfasciamonti and his worthy companions. Now, that something might be no more than a simple sheet of paper with the instructions for speaking and understanding the revised jargon.'

'Yes, I follow you,' said I, beginning to understand.

'Well, once they'd suffered this theft, the cerretani would obviously have done everything in their power to recover that magic scrap of paper, do you not think so?'

'Of course.'

'Right. And what were they trying with all their might and main to get from me and to hold onto until this very evening?'

'Your treatise! Do you perhaps mean that the secret language of the cerretani is contained in…'

'Oh, not in what I wrote. I know nothing of their language. The sheet of paper is, to be precise, concealed in the volume.'

'How?'

'Do you know how they make covers like that with which I asked poor Haver to bind my treatise?'

'By gluing… old papers together! I have it. The instructions for the secret language were glued inside the cover! After all, Ugonio said that the weird Dutch cerretano, the bookbinder, was going to unglue a page.'

'Certainly. He was to separate from my cover the page which describes the new rules of the secret language. In fact, the pages which are used for bindings are usually glued to the cover on their written side.'

'So that's why they brought an expert all the way from Holland to unglue it. But there's something I still don't understand: how did it come to be there in the first place?'

'What a question! Haver, the bookbinder, put it there. Without knowing it, obviously.'

'That's why the cerretani broke into Haver's shop and carried everything off: they were looking for your book!'

'And the poor man died of fright,' Atto added sadly. 'Only, as you'll recall, when they raided Haver, I had already withdrawn my book and so they got nothing. This they realised only after they'd gone through what they'd looted: mountains of old paper.'

'Then they commissioned Ugonio to steal the treatise.'

'Quite. The tomb robber went about it with a sure hand. There were no other freshly bound manuscripts in my apartment. Otherwise, it might have been difficult for him to be sure of taking the right book, seeing that neither he nor the cerretani knew what its contents were.'

'Yes. But how did the sheet of paper come to be in Haver's shop? And how did the cerretani trace him?'

'You will have to use your memory. Do you perhaps recall that this evening, right next to the rostrum where the Maggiorenghi sat, there was a young man we seemed to have seen somewhere?'

'Yes, but I still can't remember where we came across him. Perhaps we saw him begging somewhere in town. Or perhaps he was among the other mendicants at Termine, that evening when we followed I! Roscio and Geronimo.'

'You're wrong. But 'tis hardly surprising. We saw him only for a matter of seconds. Anyway, I saw him better than you, because he sliced up my arm.'

'The cerretano Sfasciamonti was chasing in front of Villa Spada!'

'Precisely. It comes as no surprise that he should have been so near the Maggiorenghi this evening, together with Ugonio and that little monster, what was he called?… Ah yes, Drehmannius. That beanpole of a lad, all skin and bones, was carrying the paper with the secret language somewhere. He collided with us and the sheet of paper went flying off into the air and got mixed up with all the other papers. And it ended up in the binding of my book. For the cerretani, with the help of Sfasciamonti, finding Haver's shop will have been child's play.'

'But why did the skinny cerretano stab you in front of the villa?'

'He didn't stab me. It was an accident. Sfasciamonti had seen him in the area and knew that he was up to no good. After trying to stop him, he ran after him. The catchpoll had an excellent intuition: after all, the lad was carrying on his person the code for the new secret language. He was probably a courier. We now know that the assembly of the cerretani was imminent and preparations were surely in hand. When he was being chased, the lad unsheathed his knife, in order to defend himself if they caught up with him. That was when he collided with me, causing the wound which still hurts me and losing his knife. In any case, Sfasciamonti took the weapon, probably to be sure that no one else should be able to snatch the investigation off him.'

'But why, instead of complicating their lives by stealing your treatise, could the cerretani not simply obtain