Secretum

'We shall find no one here for months,' announced Sfasciamonti.

'Where is Abbot Melani?' I asked.

'He must have followed the other one. But if we had no luck, you can just imagine how he got on…'

'Teehereteeamteeaye!' we then heard chanted by a mellifluous and satisfied-sounding voice.

It was Atto, and he was on horseback. In one hand he held his pistol, in the other, the reins and a tether, which ended around the neck of the person whom we had seen escaping at the moment when the young man had cried out. Sfasciamonti's jaw fell. He had returned empty-handed, while Atto had succeeded.

'Il Roscio,' exclaimed the catchpoll, pointing incredulously at the prisoner.

'Gentlemen, may I present you Pompeo di Trevi, alias Il Roscio. He is a cerretano and he is now at our disposal.'

'By all the bolted visors, you may say that again!' exclaimed Sfasciamonti approvingly. 'We shall now make our way to the prison of Ponte Sisto, where we shall get him to talk. Just one question: what the Devil did you say just now, when you greeted us?'

'That strange word? That's a long story. Now take this wretch and let us tie him up better, then be on our way.'

Atto had chosen, as was his wont, to go against the rules and against the dictates of good sense. Instead of following the cerretano on foot, as Sfasciamonti wanted, he had mounted a horse, with difficulty and without any help. Before mounting, however, he had taken care to see which route the fugitive had taken: to the left of the other; in other words, moving north, in the direction of the clear, sweet-smelling countryside of the Castro Pretorio. Spurring on his modest mount, Atto had then set out on the traces of the cerretano. At length he had caught sight of him, by now exhausted by his exertions, in the process of scaling a wall towards citrus groves and vineyards in which he would find easy refuge.

'Another moment and i 'd have lost him. i was too far off to threaten him with the pistol. So I thought I'd yell something at him.'

'What?'

'What he was not expecting. Something in his own language.'

'His own language? D'you mean the jargon?' Sfasciamonti and I asked in unison.

'Slang, lingo, cant… All stuff and nonsense. No, all teestufftee- andteenonteesense,' he replied, laughing, while I and the catchpoll looked dumbly at one another.

On the way out, during our ride from Villa Spada to Termine, Atto had turned over again and again in his mind the mysterious words which the cerretano had uttered when I fell into the courtyard at Campo di Fiore. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration had come to him: to look, not for what made sense but for what made none.

'The jargon used by these ragamuffins is sometimes as stupid and elementary as they themselves are. There's only one principle involved: you stick a foreign element between syllables, as is sometimes done in cipher, to create confusion.'

While Atto was explaining this to us, our strange caravan was wending its way across the Piazza dei Pollaioli towards the Ponte Sisto; at its head, Sfasciamonti, to whose horse the cerretano was firmly tethered, with his hands tied behind his back and his legs hobbled in such a way that he could not run; then came Atto's horse and then mine.

'What do you mean?' I asked.

''Tis so simple that i 'm almost ashamed of saying it. They place the syllable 'tee' between the others.'

'Teeyooteelai… So the cerretano said to me 'you lie'!'

'What had you said to him just before that?'

'For heaven's sake, how am I to remember?… Wait… Ah yes: I told him that the German would kill him.'

'And you were indeed lying, you were trying to buy time. And that is what I was trying to do, albeit somewhat differently. When

I greeted you a while ago, I said…'

'Tee-here-tee-am-tee-I. In other words, 'Here am I.''

'Precisely. So I said something to Il Roscio in Teeese, which is what I've decided to call their stupid language full of tees.'

That was the last thing Il Roscio had expected. Hearing the sound of Atto's voice mixed with the threatening clatter of hooves drawing near, his hands froze and he lost his grip, falling heavily to the ground.

'Pardon the question, but what did you say to the cerretano?'

'I acted like you and said the first thing that came into my mind.'

'And what was that?'

'Teepateeter teenosteeter. The first two words of the Paternoster.'

'But that meant nothing!'

'I know; but he for a moment thought that I was one of his people and was shocked. He fell like a sack of potatoes. Indeed, he hurt himself. At first, he couldn't even get up, so I had time to tie him up. 'Tis just as well that the grooms who equip these horses know what they're doing and provided a good long rope. I trussed him up thoroughly, then tied the end of the rope to the saddle and, just to remind him not to do anything silly, I pointed my pistol at him.'

Melani then reconstructed what had taken place at the Baths of Diocletian. The vagabond whom Sfasciamonti had interrogated, sitting on his belly, had given us away.

'That wretch,' said the Abbot, turning to the catchpoll with an ironic smile, 'Il Marcio pointed out to you when he told you to ask him, but without revealing that he himself was one of the pair you were looking for. And you fell for it.'

Sfasciamonti did not reply.

'So it was Il Marcio who screamed out those strange words to

Il Roscio?' I asked.

'Precisely. He called out that 'the Saffrons' were there and that, I think, meant us: the catchpolls.'

'He added, 'buy the violets', so that meant 'run for it' or perhaps 'take up arms',' I conjectured.

'I tend to think it meant 'run', seeing how matters developed. This isn't Teeese but some other rather more impenetrable jargon, because one needs some experience of it. But everything's possible.'

With the exception of my few questions, Atto's self-satisfied account of how he had captured the cerretano had met with silence, punctuated only by the clip-clop of the horses' hooves on the flagstones.

Sfasciamonti kept quiet, but I could imagine what he was feeling. Proud as he was of his crude catchpoll's abilities, he had seen the tiller of action suddenly snatched from him. Where he had failed, using force and intimidation, Atto had succeeded through intellectual sagacity, plus a pinch of well-deserved luck. It could not have been easy for the representative of the law, already scoffed at by his colleagues in the matter of the cerretani, to see another snatch from before his eyes one of those mysterious scoundrels who drew him as a hound is drawn to the prey when the beat is on, yet inspired in him an all-too-human fear. That, however, was what had just happened: thanks to a mispronounced Pater noster we now had in our hands a member of the mysterious sect.

This was the very reason for another silence: my own. How strange, said I to myself, that in so little time we had arrested a cerretano, while all the catchpolls in Rome, and the Governor, Monsignor Pallavicini himself, denied their very existence. I had it in mind to raise this with Sfasciamonti, but once again events prevented me from so doing. At that very moment it was decided that I was to leave them and make my way to Villa Spada and wake up Buvat (always supposing that he had got over the effects of his tippling) and return with him. Abbot Melani's secretary would, we ail three thought, be able to provide us with precious assistance (although, as I shall later recount, the nature of this assistance was to be somewhat unorthodox).

We were all to meet up at our final destination: the prison of

Ponte Sisto, giving onto the Tiber just under the Janiculum Hill, not far from the Villa Spada. Here, the interrogation of the cerretano was to take place.

The room was in a wretched basement, covered in lichen, sordid and windowless. Only a grate, high on the wall to the left, provided a little air and, in daytime, light.

The cerretano was still bound and in pain, his features blanching for fear of ending up before the hangman. He did not know that his presence in that stinking dungeon was thoroughly illegal. Sfasciamonti had arranged through one of his many friends to usher our entire group discreetly into the prison through a side door. Il Roscio's