To cross Campo San Francesco I had to step over men and women on their knees, busy singing the Psalms as they waited for the Lord’s Judgment. I don’t know if it was that suggestion, my weary, dusty eyes or the smoke-filled air. I know that I looked at the bell tower of the church and for a moment I was sure that it was rising into the air. I nearly fell to my knees myself, to shout out witness to the miracle and forget my duties.
Instead, I made for the Porta da Terra. The austere elegance of the marble framed a chaotic hubbub of people pushing, running and shouting. Above it, the Lion of San Marco observed the crowd with its jaws half open and its claws on the Gospel.
I shoved my way through the entrance hall. The fire was blazing at the far end, where the powder was stored.
I came upon a line of helpers passing buckets and leather bottles. There were splinters of wood and bits of scattered metal everywhere, but the main buildings seemed to be undamaged, and the wind had driven the fire beyond the outside wall toward the private dwellings and the Celestia Monastery.
I advanced toward the flames, drawn like a moth to a lantern. The heat burned my face; I was boiling inside my clothes and drenched with sweat. Smoke-blackened carpenters carried big wooden planks out of a workshop still threatened by the flames.
It was then that I heard someone say the name Giuseppe Nasi. It was the first time, that night, but it would become a refrain: the Swine of Judah, the Sultan’s Catamite, the Archenemy of La Serenissima, the evil mind behind the catastrophe.
I reached the galley basin. The fire was still consuming two saltpeter mills, and one galley was ablaze on the still waters of the dock. The waves thrown up by the explosion had dislodged it from its moorings, and no one could get close enough to it to extinguish the blaze.
As I watched the galley burn, the outside wall of the dock began to crumble. The water of the lagoon was forcing its way in, as if inviting the ship to come away on a voyage. The galley set off slowly, the keel ablaze, and the flames seemed to be emerging from the sea and climbing up the masts, the stays and the sails, and then still higher up, like banners stirred by the wind.
Like an evil spell for the coming days.
2
We floated slowly on a silent, funereal sea. The sheet drifted toward us on the surface of the water. An oar seemed to sink it but instead brought it closer to us. I leaned out of the dinghy and caught it between my fingers: the page of a book. The burned edges framed inky blurs. Only a single sentence was still legible: Et tulerunt Ionam et miserunt in mare; et stetit mare a fervore suo.
The Bible, the Book of Jonah, the storm-tossed ship. Jonah turns to the crew and asks to be thrown into the water. He is to blame for the storm, because he disobeyed the Lord. They take him and do as he asks, and the sea is immediately calm.
I too had to calm a storm, throw the guilty party to the Consigliere, free Venice from fear. I looked for fragments of the disaster, tiles to reassemble the mosaic. Perhaps this oracle would help me.
The galley canal was a graveyard, full of detritus. Wooden beams, smashed packing cases, whole oak trunks, scraps of sail, sheets, fragments of biscuit, ropes, the scorched and disemboweled carcasses of horses and mules. And the corpse of a man, his face and belly immersed in the water.
The scene was like a naval battle, when the ships have rowed or sailed away from the theater of death and all that remains is flotsam, bodies and the memory of the rage just passed.
On dry land, on the other hand, everything was in a state of agitation: dockyard workers, gawpers, people cursing and wailing, getting in the way of those with a task to perform. That was why we were in the boat. From the water I could look around, reflect and talk to my men as they rowed their way around the wreckage.
Silence. The sounds from the shore were drowned out by the waves. There was nothing but the lapping of the hull and the heavy breathing of Tavosanis the Friulian. My breath was the same, open-mouthed, as if I, too, were rowing.
“What an absolute disaster,” murmured Rizzi from Rovigo. And it was true that the water seemed to have emerged from the Apocalypse, and yet you had only to look up to realize that the scene was not as tragic as all that. The fire had only consumed three warehouses. Pillars of black smoke were still rising from the rubble, but the other buildings around the dock were largely intact. Shattered glass, doors off their hinges, but not much more.
Perhaps the fire had been confined to the water, but I had to get a better understanding of what was going on, do things logically, check the site of the explosion in person.
The powder house, in the furthest corner of the Arsenal.
I came ashore just opposite the ruins of the three burned warehouses. To reach the powder store we had to pass all the way through one of them. Thank God it was empty, like all of the structures in that brand-new wing. Work on the galleys had not yet begun; the big merchant ships that were there to be repaired and refitted for the purposes of war rested calmly in a corner of the port.
Suddenly Rizzi pulled me by my jacket against what remained of the wall. Rubble rained from the blackened skeleton of the roof. We quickened our pace.
The powder monkeys were in a state of utter confusion. Tavosanis looked at them grimly and opened up a passage for us through the crowd. We found ourselves on the edge of a blackened crater, all that remained of the storehouse. All around, not so much as a stone, as if the explosion had thrown everything onto the moon. I asked to speak to the head armorer, and they pointed me to the saltpeter mill, now reduced to a pile of rubble.
Teams of dockyard workers were digging among the debris, carrying away rubble, drawing up inventories, trying to decide what could be saved and what had been lost forever. A big quern stone had got stuck upright in the ground. It looked like a wheel about to set off on a solitary journey.
The man I was looking for had a terrified expression on his face, a child woken by nightmares. “Signor De Zante, have you seen? A ruin. I’d said to myself, and you know it, too, and I’ve been saying it these thirty years or more, you can’t make powder where you make ships. Now that at last the Senate has listened to me, the storehouses are ready on the islands. Look, over there. Luckily, half of the boats left yesterday.”
He was scared, and the stream of his words couldn’t hide it. He knew I was there to provide answers for the Republic, and he knew that the easiest way would be to accuse him of negligence.
“Calm down. I want to know what happened.”
He spread his arms. “I don’t know what to say. My men are all careful; I do the rounds of the Arsenal five times a day and everything’s been fine for months.”
“That’s great, but you haven’t answered my question. I want to know how the fire has spread.”
He gestured beyond the wall, toward San Francesco. “Last night’s wind drove the fire outside. The Celestia Monastery is ruined, and the houses all around it were destroyed. We had one only man dead here, a guard. Over there, though. .”
“Boss, boss!” A dockyard worker was waving his arms around a few yards away. “Look what we’ve found!”
We joined him, already surrounded by an excited crowd. The name of Giuseppe Nasi ran from mouth to mouth, from lips twisted into grimaces of disgust, and on faces expressions of alarm appeared. Giuseppe Nasi, the Swine of Judah, La Serenissima’s greatest enemy.