My feet were treading the circular walkway that runs all around and above the cupola. On the inside, there was a double row of columns, under which one could pass through a series of arches. On the outside, however, the paving sloped downwards to allow rain water to run off, and this made the visitor feel continuously drawn towards the abyss. The only protection was a handrail, beyond which my eyes reeled, intoxicated by the invisible panorama of nocturnal Rome, lethargic and sunk in passivity. Wherever I looked, a plunge to death threatened.
"My sweet wife, from this point on I shall tell you nothing," I murmured, as my legs stiffened with fear and emotion.
Again I heard the panting of the guards. Whoever was hunting me down could not be far off now.
There was almost no time left. I looked for it, knowing from the book I had read with Atto at Villa Spada that it did exist. Halfway around the platform, I found it. A dark corner, an iron grate, two hinges: there it was. A little doorway that seemed almost to have been scraped with fingernails from the hard stone of the cupola. I pulled off my sweat-soaked shirt and drew from my breeches Ugonio's jingling bunch of keys. I looked for the right one. A big one, a slightly smaller one, another, the right size. Seconds passed, I was losing my advantage. I turned the key in the lock, needlessly: the door was already open. No time for cursing; a few rapid strides and I was inside.
The moment I passed through that door, I found myself on a narrow circular platform very similar to that which I had just left, but far smaller, with a handrail surround punctuated by great mushroom-shaped stone supports, even more perilously clinging to the top of the cupola. If only I had had the time, I would have delighted in the sprinkling of lights which the stars scattered across the black vault of heaven, indulging the fantasy that I could reach out and touch them with my hands.
In the midst of that disc-like upper platform, there was a small circular building. I immediately looked around it; there was no door. I was on the point of despairing, for I had heard any number of times that one could get in there, and then I saw it: a sort of low window was set into the wall at about the height of my stomach. I bent down and entered, and just as I did so I heard footsteps on the platform below.
Surprisingly, it was not completely dark inside this structure: a faint dawn light glimmered through the window I had just entered.
I heard a slight reverberation above my head. A ladder stretched upward towards the goaclass="underline" the bronze ball that rises above the very highest point of Saint Peter's, immediately beneath the great cross which surmounts the basilica.
Leaping forward, I grasped a rung and hauled myself up, giving the wall a few kicks to help me on my way. As I clambered up, I saw that the vague light was growing stronger.
It is said that the ball of Saint Peter's can hold up to sixteen people, so long as they are suitably placed. However numerous those chasing us might be, there would, I knew, be no chance to put that report to the test.
At last, I poked my head into the ball, then my shoulders, at last resting on my elbows inside the great bronze sphere. Only then did I realise that I was not alone.
Perched with his great backside on the concave inner surface of the ball was Sfasciamonti, sweating like a donkey and panting, utterly winded. He had made it before me, probably taking another of the four stairs with huge steps that reach up to the top of the cupola within its cavity wall. In one hand, he was holding a little tome: the treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave; in the other, a pistol.
In the middle of the spherical cavity in which we stood, just next to the hole through which one gained access to it, there was a stool. The book must have been deposited on it and the catchpoll had been quicker than me in getting to it. Suddenly, he handed it to me.
"Put it in your breeches, they're coming!"
I heard a noise coming from below. Sfasciamonti's finger curved around the trigger. We seemed to have no way out.
"We can't fire, we are in a church… And besides, they'll arrest us," I observed, in my turn gasping for breath.
"If anything, we're on top of a church," the catchpoll sniggered.
It was pointless to try getting down from the balclass="underline" someone had entered the little structure and was about to climb the ladder. Sfasciamonti and I looked at one another, uncertain what to do next.
Then it all happened: our eyes were struck by a blinding flash which burned our faces like a whip, while our bodies contorted in shock.
Suddenly I understood why. As I penetrated, first, the little building, then the ball itself, I had been vaguely aware of a diffuse glimmer, growing ever clearer. Years back, I had known an old butcher whose son was employed in Saint Peter's Factory, and he had described to me what was now happening. The ball in which we stood had four slits in its sides, placed as high as a man at the four cardinal points: thrusting an incandescent blade into that facing east and flooding all with its presence, the sun had made its joyous introitus among us.
It was dawn.
Day the Ninth
15th July, 1700
As though it were a sign of destiny, the ray directly struck Atto's tome, which refracted its luminous flood into a thousand blinding white rivulets.
Indifferent to this curious event, Sfasciamonti pointed his pistol downwards.
"Halt or I fire, I am a sergeant of the Governor!" he cried.
Then (or so it seemed to me) he tripped over the stool, which fell through the hole in the ball with a great and general clangour. Perhaps the catchpoll fell after it. Perhaps, in his struggle to break his fall, he dragged me with him.
Time was no more. From light I passed to darkness, the world and the ball whirled drunkenly and suddenly I was elsewhere.
While they were carrying me away, a bag of worn-out, weary members, my eyes strove to catch one last fragment of those sacred pinnacles, that eyrie consecrated to the Lord.
I was head down; but by one of those curious algorithms of consciousness that enables some to read perfectly from right to left or to compose impromptu anagrams, before I again lost consciousness, it appeared to me, and I recognised it.
Proud and enigmatic, anchored on the heights of the Janiculum, the Vessel was observing us.
"Behind every strange or inexplicable death there lies a conspiracy of the state, or of its secret forces," pronounced Abbot Melani.
My head was throbbing. My neck was hurting. To tell the truth, I was hurting all over.
"But also those cases of persons who disappear, or are kidnapped, or suffer incredible accidents, then miraculously reappear from nowhere safe and sound, all these things are clear signs of subversive plotting. No one can escape death like that save with the help of an assiduous practitioner."
Atto's voice was suspended in a naked crystalline void. My eyes were still closed and there seemed to be no urgency about opening them.
Some memories came to me: the sensation of my body, lying heavily in the back of a cart; the cold of daybreak; then the return to warm, familiar surroundings.
A few hours passed (or were they only minutes?) until I was awoken by the sound of the door handle opening and closing, and of footsteps in the corridor. My eyelids at last decided that it was time to wake up.
I was lying on Abbot Melani's bed in the casino of Villa Spada, still fully dressed. Atto sat nearby, on an armchair, lost in who knows what thoughts. He had not realised that I had come to my senses. Only after a few minutes did he detach his gaze from that imaginary point in mid-air on which he had fixed it and turn to me.
"Welcome back among the living," said he with a smile at once satisfied and ironic. "Your wife was very worried, she waited up for you all night. Even though it was dawn, I made sure she was informed that you had returned safe and sound.