I, meanwhile, looked at Ugonio and a thousand memories raced around my head. Certainly, the Abbot's suspicions seemed utterly justified: if the infamous German was in cahoots with the cerretani, it followed that they too would all have been in the pay of Vienna and conspiring against us. Nevertheless, I was content to see the old corpisantaro again, with whom I had shared so many adventures, and I sensed that the Abbot too was not displeased, despite his indignant reaction.
"What have you to tell me about the stab wound in the arm which I got from that cerretano accomplice of yours? Was it perhaps meant for my breast? Speak!"
"I deny, redeny and ultradeny your absurdious inculpations. Nor was I beware that someone had stubbed your member with a messerblade."
"I see, you don't mean to collaborate. You will regret it. And now, get us out of here," Atto continued. "Show us the way. Sfasciamonti, give me the pistol and keep Ugonio covered with the dagger. Anyone who makes a false move will end up with a hole in his belly."
The group of hooded beings, whom in my momentary panic I had taken for devils, filed back through the niche whence they had come. We followed, keeping them under the threat of pistol and dagger and, obviously, Sfasciamonti's muscular bulk. Thus, we entered a fetid and narrow burrow which led out from what we'd taken for a bolgia from Dante's Inferno, once again towards the unknown.
"But… we are underground!" I exclaimed at one point, as I became aware of a certain strange humidity and recognised the opus reticulatum, the brick structure typical of ancient Roman walls.
"Yes," Sfasciamonti assented, "where did the tower end and this begin?"
"We are in some secondary conduit of the Baths of Agrippina," replied Abbot Melani. "Who knows, perhaps this was once a corridor on the second floor, with windows and balconies, and one could breathe the fresh air. The rest, I'll explain to you later."
As will by now be quite plain, the ambiguous arts of the corp-isantari meant that they had de facto much in common with another execrable group, the cerretani. It was no accident that we should have run into them in the course of our search for the famous German.
As we proceeded along the tunnel, faintly lit by Atto's torch (which he revived by adding a little piece of canvas found on the ground) Sfasciamonti began to interrogate Ugonio.
"Why do they call you the German? And why did you order the theft of Abbot Melani's text and of the relic?"
"'Tis a vilethy, iniquilous falsehoodie. I am pletely innocuous, this I perjure now and forever, indeed almost never, I mean."
Sfasciamonti fell silent for an instant, taken aback by the corpisantari's garrulous and ramshackle jargon.
"He said that it is not true. Anyway, they call him the German because he was born in Vienna and his mother tongue is German," I explained.
Meanwhile, we had passed from the corridor to a stairway. I was still affected by the experiences from which I had just emerged, shaken through and through by having passed from life to death (or so it had truly seemed to me) and then back again. I was exhausted and in pain from the innumerable kicks, shoves and bruises I had received. My clothing stank of a thousand strange essences and, what was more, I had the inexplicable feeling that my back was covered with a fine layer of lard. Last but not least, I was burning with shame at having been the one member of the group to have fainted from fear, and what was more, at the very moment when Atto and Sfasciamonti had brought the situation under control.
Atto's torch had ended its brief life; we found ourselves suddenly proceeding in the most stygian darkness, testing the terrain with our feet and groping along the walls with our hands. I trembled at the thought that another battle might break out on that airless staircase, with unforeseeable and surely bloody consequences. However, the hooded troop proceeded up the stairs in good order; Atto and Sfasciamonti needed to suppress no insurrection. That was in the nature of the corpisantari. shamelessly deceitful cheats, up to all manner of scheming and chicanery, yet incapable of harming anyone or offering violence; except, of course, when (as I had seen seventeen years earlier), it came to aiding some high-ranking ecclesiastic, on which occasion their Christian zeal inspired them to act with a courage and audacity worthy of true heroes of the Faith.
"Accursed ragamuffins," Atto railed. "First of all that hoax with the Inferno and now these infernal stairs."
"Signor Atto," I found the courage to ask him, "we were enveloped in a strange blue light. How the deuce did they manage to make us look like spectres?"
"That is an old trick. Indeed, if I remember rightly, two tricks were involved. In the first room, where we seemed to be under a rain of fiery droplets, there was an iron platform, under which they had placed hot coals. The platform was burning hot, but that we realised only after the heat had penetrated our shoes. Under the iron plate, on the coals, they will have placed a vessel, probably made of enamelled terracotta, containing wine spirits, together with a piece of camphor, which will have filled that small space with its exhalations."
"I see! That is why I smell so strange. I thought that it was…"
"It was just what you thought: camphor," Atto cut me short. "What they use against moths. But let me continue: at a certain point in our advance, we tripped against a mobile step which lowered and, in so doing, activated some machinery. That in turn caused a trap door to fall vertically, making a hellish noise. Meanwhile, the flame from our lantern penetrated that den full of the vapour of spirits and camphor, which immediately caught fire. The surprise and the tremendous burning under our feet worked perfectly. What with all that dancing fire and the heat coming up from below, we thought we were in hell. Then we escaped through the little door, taking the only way out, down the iron rungs, when we were sucked down as not even Scylla and Charybdis could have engulfed us."
"Quite! But how was that done?"
"I and Sfasciamonti worked that out while you were taking your little nap. At the end of the iron rungs, there was a metal slide, smooth and well greased with abundant kitchen fat."
I touched my backside. Yes, it was just the same lard I had used when I was an apprentice at the inn, when I greased the pots and pans before cooking chicken in a wine sauce with walnuts, or preparing some poultry in broth.
The grease, Atto continued, caused us to rush down the slide at great speed, descending the whole height of the tower in an instant.
"The whole height? What does that mean?" interrupted Sfasciamonti who had listened open-mouthed to Atto's explanation.
"The tower is not really as low as we had thought; on the contrary, it is very high, but over the centuries it has been partially buried. We entered through a sort of lean-to hut that was built quite recently and led, not to the ground floor of the tower, but about halfway up its original height. The slide, however, hurled us down, down to the original, ancient base of the tower, which is today many feet under the ground."
"And deep down, the tower communicates with a whole network of tunnels," I concluded, drawing on the strength of my old acquaintance with subterranean Roman galleries, all joined up to one another.
"Yes, and here the second trick awaited us. As soon as they saw us arrive at the Baths of Agrippina — what was more, at a late hour, which gave away our intention of entering their rabbit warren — they burned a glass of spirits or some similar liquor in this second space. And in the spirits, if I recall the recipe correctly, they dissolved a little common salt."