Altai: A Novel Read online

  Well done, Rizzi, a good observation. But I still wasn’t convinced.

  “Tell me, what makes you think it was an accident?”

  He pointed to the big chimney pots of the foundries—the area we were about to visit. “If the Turks wanted to damage us, they’d have started their fire somewhere more central.”

  “There’s not just the Turks in this world.”

  “Thank God. But what I say about them applies to anyone: If I wanted to destroy the Arsenal, I’d strike at its heart, not its heel.”

  I nodded. “And you certainly wouldn’t wait until half the barrels of powder had been taken somewhere else. Or choose a stormy night, so that the wind would carry the flames outside.”

  Tavosanis lifted the oars and took a breath, staring straight into my eyes. “Only chance is as precise as that.”

  “Chance, certainly.” I lowered a hand into the water, as if the sea might give me a clue. “Or an enemy other than the Turks. An enemy who doesn’t want to do too much damage.”

  3.

  As I had expected, the foundries were unscathed, since they were far away from the site of the explosion. The first and second workshops were still bolted shut. Tavosanis and Rizzi slipped into the calle between one and the other and checked the perimeter.

  The third door was wide open. A sound of hammering came from within. I stepped into the doorway and walked forward slowly, checking the various departments. In the carpenters’ area there wasn’t a tool out of place. The tree trunks that had already been shaped were divided according to caliber and type, in the usual meticulous stacks. Farther along, where the pressing was done, a certain chaos was only to be expected. Bags of lime, ox hair, wax presses for relief decorations: Everything was scattered around big tables or piled up at random in corners. The foul stench of tallow oil emerged from jars that had been left open. Only the clay shells were set down carefully, ready to receive the molten bronze. On the other side, the piercing frames were silent and no one turned the lathe, the wheels of the augers, the bow-drills for punching touch-holes.

  The racks for the finished weapons seemed unmanned too, but again a metallic sound reached my ears.

  My call of “Who’s there?” received a faint reply a moment later, and a gray head appeared from behind a long, slender cannon. It was Varadian, the Armenian artilleryman who worked on prototypes. I was about to ask the man if he’d noticed anything when he suddenly spoke first: “Signor De Zante, it’s a good thing you’ve shown up, you at least.”

  He looked shattered. The room was cold and the kilns were unlit, but his forehead was pearled with sweat.

  “What’s troubling you?”

  He opened his eyes wide, as if a ghost had appeared behind me. I had to force myself not to turn round and check. “The Turks. Trust me, I’ve worked for them. This fire is just the start of it; they’re going to attack us again. I know the architect Savorgnan is reinforcing the defenses at the entrance to the lagoon. Fair enough, a good precaution, but take a look, look around. There isn’t anyone here yet this morning, no guards or workmen. The treasure that interests our enemies most is here, but no one’s protecting it apart from me, and I deserve more protection than the others.”

  “What did the workers do?”

  “They spent the night putting out the fire, they got a pay raise, and now they’re resting on their laurels.”

  I tried to assume a reassuring tone. Varadian knew how much the Mohammedans hated renegades. He had been an engineer in Constantinople for years, before coming over to us. He had become a Christian because the Republic allowed him to work, financing his experiments into cannon recoil. In contrast, the Turkish vizier of war had considered them pointless and unworthy of attention. The Ottomans wanted only one thing from a fiery mouth: that it should be big, gigantic, colossal. They wanted the wide-open jaws of the Devil, bombards spitting out the whole of hell and making the world shake. Why worry about the recoil?

  “I’ll talk to the chief guard, Signor Varadian. Meanwhile I’ll have someone sent over, right away, and I’ll see to it that you and your work are given double protection. But don’t worry—I have a feeling the Turks haven’t got much to do with this business.”

  He gripped my hand between his own, and his voice dripped with gratitude. “Thank you, Signor De Zante. And trust me, I know them well: This is their work.”

  It was evening when we got back to the palace. Some of my men, keen to demonstrate their zeal and ruthlessness, had already got things started. They had assembled a handful of seditious wretches, people used to singing songs against the Doge and the noblemen: con men, provocateurs.

  On the wheel, one arsenal worker had confessed to be Giuseppe Nasi and the son of the Devil. A blacksmith from Chioggia had sworn himself blind that he had always been a Turk, a janissary and friend of the Kapudan Pasha, who had personally issued the order to start the fire. A woodcutter from who knows where had started talking a language entirely his own, saying that it was the language of the Turks of Asia Minor, adding a few words in Latin that he had picked up from the Mass.

  Spilled blood and the stench of excrement. Torture is pointless when you’re looking for the truth. And in any case I was soon disgusted with it.

  I made them stop. The foreman had given me a list of hotheads and discontented arsenal workers. I asked Rizzi to check if any of them were among the ones arrested in our absence. There were a few.

  I ordered Tavosanis to start on the first one.

  Usually I waited at least half an hour before coming into the room. Meanwhile Tavosanis asked general questions and got to work with his fists. This time I was more impatient: I had to end the day with a result, something to give the Consigliere.

  The man’s head was hanging over his chest. He was tied to the chair; he seemed to be still conscious. Tavosanis came over and whispered in my ear what he had managed to get out of him. Now it was my turn.

  “What’s that song you were singing at the inn a few evenings ago? ‘Come, Turk, free us from our masters . . .’ That was it, wasn’t it?”

  Silence. Tavosanis looked at me. I gestured to him to wait. “We know what you were singing; we know who you were singing with. We know what you ate, what you drank, when you got up to go for a piss. We know everything.”

  The man pleaded, “What do you want from me?”

  I slowly circled the chair. The wolf isolating his prey.

  “It’d be a good idea to speak now. Think of the magistrate. Think of the wheel. You’ll miss this chair and my mate’s knuckles.” Tavosanis drew back his arm and hit the man in the jaw. “We know your friend Battiston kept saying ‘I know a way of getting them to up our pay.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “I was plastered. I don’t remember a thing.”

  He didn’t remember a thing, and yet he was crying. He was about to give up and he felt guilty for his friend.

  “And in fact it looks as if you’re going to get your pay raise, doesn’t it? As a reward for putting out the fire.”

  He said nothing. I stopped in front of him. I lifted his chin. His expression was blank; the hatred had fled. He would tell the truth.

  4.

  The Consigliere’s palazzo overlooked the Grand Canal, but shadows like me came by the land route. The waterside entrance was for the aristocrats. I’d only come in on that side once, with my father. A silk carpet guided our steps across the bridge to the marble sirens guarding the front door. I was to introduce myself to the head of the household. An audience with the pope himself would not have stirred me as much.

  Some days later they showed me the back entrance, and from then on that was the only one I used: across the big garden, invisible from the street and protected by high walls. In the middle, the fountain and the stone angel, wings outspread, that never ceased to unsettle me. His face and body were tense, raptorial, as if he were about to take flight and seize his prey. One day I had pointed this out to my lord, and he had put it down to bad conscience, to my sinful soul.
r />   Today, a servant walked with me into the palazzo, up to the threshold of the main hall. He knocked and ushered me in.

  The Consigliere was standing by the window. He seemed to be observing the clouds reflected in the lagoon, but perhaps his eyes saw something entirely different. His soul was labyrinthine, his mind impenetrable. I looked at his tall, slender form, wrapped in a long robe that fell to his ankles; his black hair, sprinkled with gray; his back, still straight.

  He beckoned me in. I already knew where to go and sit, and I knew that he would ask his first questions from a standing position, to dwarf me.

  “You have a determined gait this morning.” He stared at me, as if he were still trying to recognize me. “How do your inquiries progress?”

  “We’ve questioned twenty-three suspects.” I paused, to stress the number. “Most of them gave irrelevant statements, but two of the arsenal workers have confessed names and details that are extremely interesting.”

  “I am glad, De Zante. Just leave out the details. I know how scrupulous you are.”

  A long breath. The Consigliere didn’t like excessive passion. I had to set out my conjectures coldly, as if referring to someone else’s thoughts. “The caulkers have been asking for a pay raise for months. Some of them thought starting a fire and intervening to put it out again might be the best way to get one.”

  He bit the inside of his lip, a sign that he was displeased with this information. I had to find out why. “And these ‘some,’ how many might that be?”

  “I couldn’t yet say, Excellency. We have precise accusations against one Erio Battiston. We’ve been looking for him since yesterday morning; he is said to be the man responsible for coming up with the plan. As to those who carried it out, we do not yet have sufficient evidence.”

  He started drumming impatiently on the wood with his fingers. I couldn’t work out what was bothering him so.

  “I will tell my men to put every effort into capturing Battiston, and . . .”

  “Do you really imagine,” he cut in, raising his voice slightly, “that a discontented arsenal worker could hatch a plot of this kind? Come on, De Zante. You’re doing your own intelligence a disservice.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. I tried to follow my instinct and took some time to put my words in order. Impulsiveness leads inevitably to ruin. “Permit me to express myself better, your Excellence. Various clues suggest a provocation that got out of hand. The men carrying out the plan had apparently taken care to avoid . . .”

  “Care?” This time he allowed me an enigmatic smile. “Our job is not to grant extenuating circumstances to the guilty men.” He slumped onto his chair, emphatically, to show me how wearying he found my stupidity. Then he rearranged the pieces of paper on his desk, as if he needed to calm himself by performing a meticulous task.

  “Listen, De Zante.” he said, looking up. His voice had changed; he sounded as if he were about to have a man-to-man chat with me. “I know your zeal. I can imagine the determination with which you gathered this information. But that’s exactly the problem: You are examining things so closely that you lose the vision of the whole, which all of Venice, apart from you, has seen from the very first.”

  I felt the muscles in my neck twisting like the strands of a cable.

  “Let’s admit that the workers have something to do with it, and they stand to gain financially. Would you agree to bring Venice to its knees for a few ducats? Would you risk your life for an extra slice of bread to dip in your soup? No, of course not, you’d want a higher prize. And who could offer you that?”

  Now I could see what he was getting at. I said, “We’ve arrested various Turkish spies over the past few weeks. We’ve made them talk, and there was no inkling of anything like . . .”

  “It’s not the street spies you should be looking at, De Zante. We won’t hunt down the eel by asking the shrimp. There must be a traitor somewhere higher up, one much more important than an arsenal worker or a mere spy. Someone who can influence, if you like, spies, agitators and Arsenal hotheads. Someone who can act as intermediary between them and Giuseppe Nasi’s money.”

  Nasi. The name on everyone’s lips, the people’s word made flesh. If I’d written him off, it wasn’t out of absentmindedness.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Someone high enough up to be able to hatch an attack on the Arsenal. Someone sufficiently beyond suspicion to be able to do it. Someone holding a major post, but not necessarily a patrician. Someone with a secret, and therefore vulnerable to blackmail by the Turk. If possible, someone not Venetian by birth. I trust you, De Zante. Find a name appropriate to the task, and the Republic will derive greater glory even from this outrage.”

  “I understand.” I tried to remain impassive. “The perfect culprit.”

  The Consigliere nodded agreement, then rose to his feet and, as if nothing had happened, returned to studying the gray vault of the clouds.

  I reached the door. I knew he was listening to my footsteps on the floor, but however much I tried, I couldn’t keep them sounding as confident as they had on the way in.

  5.

  I wandered aimlessly, in the places of the city I thought of as home, wherever my legs might take me. I thought of the people I would have to make pay, first with pain, then with their lives. I wondered about the meaning of the Consigliere’s words, winnowing names and faces. I was determined not to disappoint him: No one would ever want to disappoint Bartolomeo Nordio. However, I had no name that matched the characteristics of the perfect culprit as they had just been outlined to me.

  I set off, heading down the Ruga Rialto and cutting through the calli, impelled by the gravity of my thoughts. On the Riva del Vin I stopped to look at the canal, the boats, the chaos of people, and to listen to the voices. I had to solve the riddle. I had to come up with a name. As I walked, I realized that my feet were taking me in a precise direction. Arianna, like her namesake, had unspooled her invisible thread, and I, half unaware, had followed it.

  I found myself in Calle del Paradiso, outside a door that I knew very well. I knocked until the maid opened up. She saw me, nodded in greeting and climbed the stairs. She was going to announce my presence to her mistress.

  Arianna welcomed me with an expression of faint surprise. The smile on her freckled face was cheerful. “I wasn’t expecting you. But your visit fills me with joy.” She surveyed me from head to toe. “You look glum. What’s up?”

  “The whole of Venice knows what’s up. But I will tell you afterward.”

  I wasn’t the best of lovers that day. Too hasty, too brutal. I drank from her lips like a man parched by the August sun. I pounced on her full, heavy breasts like a hungry man on loaves of bread. I agitated her hips like a drunk shaking a bottle to get at the last drop.

  My courtesan, besides, wasn’t the best in the universe just then. Perhaps, I thought, she could sense my unease.

  As God willed, the embrace came to an end.

  “Now tell me what’s wrong.”

  I looked at the woman. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Blonde, curly hair; dark, shining eyes. She had been one of the best-known courtesans in Venice before she became mine alone. For some years I had been the only one who paid for her services. My condition prevented me from visiting brothels, where rumors spread like wildfire. Arianna kept me out of trouble.

  “I have to find a culprit for the fire at the Arsenal. Someone up to the job. It’s irrelevant whether he really organized or committed the crime.”

  “A scapegoat,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re often called to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, or at least I thought she did. I was barely listening to her, thinking out loud.

  “I need a perfect culprit to feed to the people of Venice. Consigliere Nordio is thinking of a man with a double life, because he says the man has to be beyond suspicion.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I turned my boss’s word
s around in my head, trying to enter them from all sides, to grasp their every implication.

  Beyond suspicion.

  Someone with a sufficiently elevated position.

  Someone with a secret, an impostor.

  I felt the warmth of my lover close to me.

  Beyond suspicion.

  I looked at Arianna. She smiled, uncertainly. Furtively, swiftly, she checked the door. It just took a moment. I looked down.

  A secret.

  My flaccid penis dangling to one side.

  An impostor.

  A penis without a foreskin.

  A Jew.

  A wave of horror ran through me. I suddenly turned to Arianna: she had hidden her face with her arms. I leaped to my feet and ran to the window that faced the calle. I glanced through the crack between the shutters.

  Five guards were waiting outside the front door. I recognized two of them. My most trusted men. Gualberto Rizzi and Marco Tavosanis.

  They owed everything to me. So, they were the most likely to want to get me. Men hate their benefactors. Do somebody a favor and nine times out of ten you’ll make an implacable enemy.

  My lover had withdrawn to the end of the bed and covered herself with the sheet. Fear assumed the garb of modesty. Her eyes were moist. “They forced me—they did, Emanuele. Against my very will.” My lover, the only person I trusted, had sold the secret of my origins. Strip down Emanuele and you will find Manuel, the Jewish boy from Ragusa across the Adriatic.

  They needed a culprit for the storm et tulerunt me, the Jew, the impostor, the liar, et stabit Venetia a fervore suo.

  Hurry downstairs, confront the bastards in plain view. Counting on surprise and on my dagger, I could overpower two or three men, but not all of them.

  Flight isn’t running full tilt with other people after you. Flight is disappearance.

  Arianna came a few feet toward me, letting the sheet fall. Her face was anxious, but resolute. “They won’t get you if you do as I say. There’s a passageway that leads to the house next door, which is uninhabited. From there you can escape through the back way.”