"What he was not expecting. Something in his own language."
"His own language? D'you mean the jargon?" Sfasciamonti and I asked in unison.
"Slang, lingo, cant… All stuff and nonsense. No, all teestufftee- andteenonteesense," he replied, laughing, while I and the catchpoll looked dumbly at one another.
On the way out, during our ride from Villa Spada to Termine, Atto had turned over again and again in his mind the mysterious words which the cerretano had uttered when I fell into the courtyard at Campo di Fiore. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration had come to him: to look, not for what made sense but for what made none.
"The jargon used by these ragamuffins is sometimes as stupid and elementary as they themselves are. There's only one principle involved: you stick a foreign element between syllables, as is sometimes done in cipher, to create confusion."
While Atto was explaining this to us, our strange caravan was wending its way across the Piazza dei Pollaioli towards the Ponte Sisto; at its head, Sfasciamonti, to whose horse the cerretano was firmly tethered, with his hands tied behind his back and his legs hobbled in such a way that he could not run; then came Atto's horse and then mine.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"'Tis so simple that i 'm almost ashamed of saying it. They place the syllable "tee" between the others."
"Teeyooteelai… So the cerretano said to me 'you lie'!"
"What had you said to him just before that?"
"For heaven's sake, how am I to remember?… Wait… Ah yes: I told him that the German would kill him."
"And you were indeed lying, you were trying to buy time. And that is what I was trying to do, albeit somewhat differently. When
I greeted you a while ago, I said…"
"Tee-here-tee-am-tee-I. In other words, 'Here am I.'"
"Precisely. So I said something to Il Roscio in Teeese, which is what I've decided to call their stupid language full of tees."
That was the last thing Il Roscio had expected. Hearing the sound of Atto's voice mixed with the threatening clatter of hooves drawing near, his hands froze and he lost his grip, falling heavily to the ground.
"Pardon the question, but what did you say to the cerretano?'
"I acted like you and said the first thing that came into my mind."
"And what was that?"
"Teepateeter teenosteeter. The first two words of the Paternoster."
"But that meant nothing!"
"I know; but he for a moment thought that I was one of his people and was shocked. He fell like a sack of potatoes. Indeed, he hurt himself. At first, he couldn't even get up, so I had time to tie him up. 'Tis just as well that the grooms who equip these horses know what they're doing and provided a good long rope. I trussed him up thoroughly, then tied the end of the rope to the saddle and, just to remind him not to do anything silly, I pointed my pistol at him."
Melani then reconstructed what had taken place at the Baths of Diocletian. The vagabond whom Sfasciamonti had interrogated, sitting on his belly, had given us away.
"That wretch," said the Abbot, turning to the catchpoll with an ironic smile, "Il Marcio pointed out to you when he told you to ask him, but without revealing that he himself was one of the pair you were looking for. And you fell for it."
Sfasciamonti did not reply.
"So it was Il Marcio who screamed out those strange words to
Il Roscio?" I asked.
"Precisely. He called out that 'the Saffrons' were there and that, I think, meant us: the catchpolls."
"He added, 'buy the violets', so that meant 'run for it' or perhaps 'take up arms'," I conjectured.
"I tend to think it meant 'run', seeing how matters developed. This isn't Teeese but some other rather more impenetrable jargon, because one needs some experience of it. But everything's possible."
With the exception of my few questions, Atto's self-satisfied account of how he had captured the cerretano had met with silence, punctuated only by the clip-clop of the horses' hooves on the flagstones.
Sfasciamonti kept quiet, but I could imagine what he was feeling. Proud as he was of his crude catchpoll's abilities, he had seen the tiller of action suddenly snatched from him. Where he had failed, using force and intimidation, Atto had succeeded through intellectual sagacity, plus a pinch of well-deserved luck. It could not have been easy for the representative of the law, already scoffed at by his colleagues in the matter of the cerretani, to see another snatch from before his eyes one of those mysterious scoundrels who drew him as a hound is drawn to the prey when the beat is on, yet inspired in him an all-too-human fear. That, however, was what had just happened: thanks to a mispronounced Pater noster we now had in our hands a member of the mysterious sect.
This was the very reason for another silence: my own. How strange, said I to myself, that in so little time we had arrested a cerretano, while all the catchpolls in Rome, and the Governor, Monsignor Pallavicini himself, denied their very existence. I had it in mind to raise this with Sfasciamonti, but once again events prevented me from so doing. At that very moment it was decided that I was to leave them and make my way to Villa Spada and wake up Buvat (always supposing that he had got over the effects of his tippling) and return with him. Abbot Melani's secretary would, we ail three thought, be able to provide us with precious assistance (although, as I shall later recount, the nature of this assistance was to be somewhat unorthodox).
We were all to meet up at our final destination: the prison of
Ponte Sisto, giving onto the Tiber just under the Janiculum Hill, not far from the Villa Spada. Here, the interrogation of the cerretano was to take place.
The room was in a wretched basement, covered in lichen, sordid and windowless. Only a grate, high on the wall to the left, provided a little air and, in daytime, light.
The cerretano was still bound and in pain, his features blanching for fear of ending up before the hangman. He did not know that his presence in that stinking dungeon was thoroughly illegal. Sfasciamonti had arranged through one of his many friends to usher our entire group discreetly into the prison through a side door. Il Roscio's arrest was against all the rules: the cerretano had committed no crimes, nor was he suspected of any. That did not matter: the time had come for certain dirty games of which, as I shall have cause to tell later, the catchpolls had long been inordinately fond.
Sfasciamonti had procured a long coat and a periwig for Buvat, who was to play the part of a criminal notary and to draw up the charges. The sergeant himself would conduct the interrogation. Atto and I, dressed up to look like officers of the court or deputies, or goodness knows what, would be assisting, feeling safe owing to the secrecy of the ceremony and the prisoner's total ignorance of the law.
There was a table in the basement room, lit by a large candle, and here sat Buvat, solemnly busying himself with paper, pen and inkhorn. In order to lend greater verisimilitude to the scene, Sfasciamonti had taken care of every detail. Next to the candle were placed severe legal tomes such as the Commentaria tertiae partis in secundum librum Decretalium of Abbas Panormitanus, Damhouder's Praxis rerum criminalium and lastly and most threateningly, De maleficiis by Alberto da Gandino. Although all the titles were unintelligible, the volumes had all been placed upright and with their spines facing the prisoner, so that these obscure inscriptions would, supposing that he could read, all imbue his soul with the idea that he was in the hands of a hostile and impenetrable power.
Before the table, next to Il Roscio, stood Sfasciamonti, holding the accused tightly by one end of the rope, while gripping his arm painfully behind his back. The prisoner was a pudgy, stock- ily built youngster, whose little blue eyes, under a rectangular forehead beset by deep horizontal furrows, a sure sign of a dissolute life lived with impunity, were set above two rotund and florid cheeks, which bespoke a coarse, ingenuous nature. Observing him at close quarters, one could understand the origin of his nickname, the Red; for his head was crowned by a thick, bristling plumage of carrot-coloured hair.