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"He might, for example, travel some way by boat, moving up­stream to the harbour of Ripetta. That would lengthen his itinerary but make it almost impossible to follow him. Or he might surface at some point unknown to us. It will be as well if we divide our tasks so as to be ready for all contingencies: Ugonio and Ciacconio will keep an eye on galleries A,B, C and D."

"Will that not be rather too much for the two of them on their own?"

"They are not two, but three: there is also Ciacconio's nose. You and I, my boy, shall explore the part of conduit B where we have never yet been; just to make quite sure that Tiracorda cannot get by that way."

"And Dulcibeni?" I asked. "Do you not fear that he too may be wandering underground?"

"No. He has done all that he could: to infect the leeches. Now it will suffice that Tiracorda should visit the Pope and apply those leeches."

Ugonio and Ciacconio departed at once, almost at a run, taking conduit C in the reverse direction. As we began our march, I found myself unable, however, to contain my overpowering curiosity: "Si­gnor Atto, you are an agent of the King of France."

He looked askance at me. "Yes, and what are you getting at?"

"Well, it is just that... after all, this Pope is surely no friend of the Most Christian King, and yet you wish to save him, is that not so?"

He stopped. "Have you ever seen a man beheaded?"

"No."

"Well, you should know that when the head is rolling down from the scaffold, its tongue can still move. That is why no prince is ever content when one of his peers dies. He fears that rolling head and the dangerous things which that tongue might utter."

"Then, sovereigns never have anyone killed."

"Well, that is not exactly the case... they may do so, where the Crown itself is in jeopardy. But politics, and remember this, my boy, real politics consists of balances, not bloodshed."

I observed him surreptitiously; the uncertainty in his voice, the pallor of his face, his shifty eyes, all betrayed the return of Abbot Melani's fears: despite his fine words, I had clearly detected his fum­bling. The
corpisantari
had left him no time for reflection: they had rapidly taken the initiative and were organising the rescue of Inno­cent XI; an heroic enterprise which Atto had not undertaken with such celerity and into which he had now been catapulted by surprise. There was now no turning back. He tried to mask his unease by has­tening his steps, thus showing me only his stiff and nervous back.

Once we had reached the Archives, we searched in vain for some trace of Ugonio and Ciacconio. The two must be waiting there al­ready, well hidden in some corner.

"It is we! Is all well?" asked Atto in a loud voice.

From behind some archway enveloped in darkness, Ciacconio's unmistakeable grunt replied in the affirmative.

We therefore resumed our exploration and, as we walked, again began to converse.

It had, we both agreed, been inexcusably short-sighted on our part not to have collated the very clear clues which had come to our atten­tion during the previous few days. Fortunately, it was still possible to catch the mad horse of truth by the mane. Atto tried once more to sum up the elements of which we were aware: "Dulcibeni worked for the Odescalchi, as an accountant or something of the kind. He had a daughter called Maria, by a Turkish slave. The maiden was abducted by the former slave-trader Feroni and by his right-hand man Huygens, surely in order to satisfy one of the latter's caprices. Maria was prob­ably taken very far away, to somewhere in the north. In order to trace her, Dulcibeni then turned to the Odescalchi, but they did not help him. This is why Dulcibeni detests them, and will naturally feel spe­cial hatred for the powerful Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi, who has in the meantime become Pope. Moreover, after the abduction, some­thing strange happens. Dulcibeni is assaulted and thrown from a win­dow, probably with the intention of killing him. Are we agreed?"

"Agreed."

"And here the first obscure point arises: why would someone, act­ing perhaps on the orders of Feroni or the Odescalchi, have wished to be rid of him?"

"Perhaps to prevent him from recovering his daughter."

"Perhaps," said Atto with scant conviction. "But you have heard that all his searches were in vain. I am more inclined to believe that Dulcibeni had become a danger for someone."

"But Signor Atto, why was Dulcibeni's daughter a slave?"

"Did you not hear Tiracorda? Because her mother was a Turkish slave whom Dulcibeni was unwilling to marry. I am not well informed on the trade in negroes and Infidels, but—according to Dulcibeni— the bastard child was also considered to be a slave of the Odescalchi. I only wonder: why did Huygens and Feroni not simply buy her?"

"Perhaps the Odescalchi did not wish to sell her."

"Yet they did sell her mother. No, I think it was rather Dulcibeni who opposed his daughter's being ceded; that would explain why she was abducted, perhaps with the support of the Odescalchi them­selves."

"Do you mean to say that such an abominable action might have had the backing of the family?" I asked, horrified.

"Surely. And perhaps that of Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi him­self, who has since become Pope. Do not forget that Feroni was ex­ceedingly wealthy and quite powerful. That would suffice to explain why the Odescalchi should not have wished to help Dulcibeni to find his daughter."

"But what means had Dulcibeni to oppose the sale, if the girl was the property of the Odescalchi?"

"You rightly ask: what means had he? That, I think, is the point. Dulcibeni must have unsheathed an arm that posed a real threat to the Odescalchi and left them no choice but to arrange the abduction with Feroni and to try to have Dulcibeni silenced forever."

Feroni: I was about to tell the abbot that the name did not sound new to me. However, being unable to recall where I had heard it, I held my peace.

"An arm against the Odescalchi. A secret perhaps... who knows," murmured the abbot, with a Iubricious gleam in his eyes.

An inadmissible secret in the past of the Pope: I understood that Atto Melani, secret agent of His Most Christian Majesty, would have given his life to know what that might have been.

"We must come to a conclusion, damn it!" he exclaimed at the end of his cogitations. "But first, let us recapitulate: Dulcibeni hatches the idea of assassinating no less a personage than the Pope. He can surely not hope to obtain an audience with the Pontiff and to stab him with a knife. How can one kill a man from a distance? One may attempt to poison him; but it is exceedingly difficult to in­troduce poison into the Pope's kitchens. Dulcibeni, however, works out a more refined solution. He remembers that he has an old friend who will serve his purpose: Giovanni Tiracorda, Physician in Chief to the Pope. Pope Odescalchi—and this Dulcibeni knows—has al­ways suffered from delicate health. He is Tiracorda's patient, and Dulcibeni can take advantage of the situation. Just at this moment, moreover, tormented by the fear that the Christian armies might be defeated in Vienna, the condition of Pope Innocent XI has worsened. The Pope is treated by blood-letting, and this is effected by means of leeches which, of course, feed on blood. So, what does Dulcibeni do? Between one riddle and another, he gets Tiracorda drunk. This is not too difficult a task, because the physician's wife, Paradisa, is a bigot and half-crazed: she believes that alcohol leads to the damna­tion of the soul. So Tiracorda is compelled to drink in secret, and thus almost always to gulp down large quantities at speed. As soon as he is inebriated, his friend Dulcibeni infects the leeches intended for treating the Pope with the pestiferous humour which he has pro­duced on his islet. The little creatures will sink their teeth into the Pontiff's holy flesh and he will be attacked by the infection."

"How horrible!"

"I would not say that. This is simply what a man thirsting for vengeance is capable of. Do you recall our first incursion into Tiracorda's house? Dulcibeni asked him: 'How are they?'", referring, as we now know, to the leeches which he planned to infect. Then, however, Tiracorda accidentally broke the bottle of liquor and Dulci­beni was compelled to postpone his operation. Last night, however, his plans progressed smoothly. While he was infecting the leeches, he pronounced the words, 'For her'": he was fulfilling his vendetta against the Odescalchi for the abduction of his daughter."

"But," I observed, "he needed a quiet place in which to prepare his plan and to carry out his operations."

"Bravo. And above all to cultivate the pestiferous humour, using arts unknown to us. After capturing rats, he caged them on his island and inoculated them with the infection. Then he extracted their blood and so treated it as to produce the infected humour. It was surely he who lost the leaf from the Bible in the galleries."

"So could he also have stolen my little pearls?"

"Who else? But, do not interrupt me," said Atto, cutting me short, and adding: "After the beginning of the quarantine and your master's being taken ill, Dulcibeni, in order to continue to have access to the underground galleries and, thus, to the isle of the Mithraeum, had to filch a key from Pellegrino's ring and to have a copy made by a locksmith. He wrapped a copy of the key in Komarek's page from the Bible; but, what with all that trafficking with rats, leeches and alembics, it was inevitable that he should have accidentally stained it with blood."

"On the island, we also found a vase for leeches almost identical to Tiracorda's," I observed, "and then, there were all those instru­ments..."

"He used the vase, I imagine, to keep a few leeches in and per­haps to make certain that they could feed on infected blood without themselves being killed by it. When, however, he understood that he was not the only one to take walks in the underground galleries, and that someone might be on his trail, he got rid of the little creatures which might have provided evidence of his criminal designs. The apparatus and instruments on the islet, however, were used not only for his experiments on rats, but also for preparing the pestiferous humour. That is why everything called to mind the cabinet of an alchemist: alembics, unguents, crucibles..."

"And that sort of gallows?"

"Who knows? Perhaps to keep the rats still while he bled them, or to cut them up and collect their blood."

And that was why, we repeated once more, we had found dying rats in the galleries: they had either escaped from or survived Dulcibeni's experiments, and we had encountered them before they died. Finally, the glass phial full of blood which we had found in gallery D had certainly been lost by Dulcibeni, who had perhaps attempted unsuccessfully to infect his friend Tiracorda's leeches directly with the rats' blood.

"But in the underground galleries, we also found leaves of
mamacoca
," I observed.

"That, I am unable to explain," admitted Abbot Melani. "Those had nothing to do with the pestilence or with Dulcibeni's plot. An­other point: I cannot conceive how it was possible for Dulcibeni, day after day, and even at night, to run, to row, to climb and to escape our attempts to stalk him with the energy of a young boy. It seems almost as though someone must have helped him."

While we were engaged in such discussions, we came to the trapdoor at the intersection between conduits A and B. The left-hand branch of B was the last of the three passages which we had undertaken to explore a few days earlier, in order to complete our understanding of the galleries under the Donzello.

Contrary to our usual practice, therefore, we did not lower our­selves through the trapdoor leading from gallery B to A, as we would have done in order to return to the Donzello, but continued on our way. Thanks to the plan drawn up by Atto, it was clear to me that we were proceeding in the direction of the river, with the inn to our right and the Tiber to our left.

The gallery offered no surprises of any kind, until we came across a square stairwell not dissimilar to that all too familiar one which led down from the secret chamber in the Donzello to the galleries below.

"But if we take this, we shall emerge in the Via dell'Orso," said I, as we began to climb the stairs towards the surface.

"Not quite, perhaps a little more to the south, in the Via Tor di Nona."

The ascent led to a sort of vestibule with a floor of old bricks, again very like that which we had crossed so many times on our sor­ties from the hostelry.

On the ceiling of this vestibule, our eyes (and above all our prob­ing hands) discovered a sort of heavy lid of iron or perhaps lead, which muffled all vibrations and resisted any attempts to open it. We needed to remove that last obstacle in order to discover to which point on the surface our path had led us. We put our backs to the heavy disc, and, with a great heave, pushing vigorously against the last step of the stone stairway, our combined efforts managed to shift it, with a loud clanging on the flagstones, just enough for us to squeeze out from under the ground. As we did so, we glimpsed and heard a violent struggle, which was taking place only a few yards from where we emerged.

We moved forward under the dim nocturnal light. In the semi- darkness, I could distinguish a carriage in the middle of the road, upon which two torches set on either side cast a sinister, oblique light. Suffocated cries came from the postillion, who was struggling to break free of the grip of several individuals. One of the attackers had taken the reins and stopped the horses, which were whinnying and snorting nervously. Just then, another individual slipped out of the carriage, holding a voluminous object in his arms (or so it seemed to me). There could be no question about it, the carriage was being robbed.