Altai: A Novel (2 page)

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.

“It is no accident! The Turkish dog is waging war on us!”

We made our way to the front, Tavosanis just behind me, Rizzi to my left.

On the floor, in the middle of the circle of legs, were two black stains as big as the palm of a hand. The boy who had summoned us pointed to them with a beaming smile.

“Pitch, boss. It’s pitch!”

I leaned forward and touched it, then sniffed my fingertip. Pitch, no doubt about it. Pitch in a powder store. Like stoat-shit in a chicken coop.

“What a spectacle!” Rizzi muttered between his teeth as Tavosanis pushed the boat toward the foundries. “You don’t need pitch to set fire to a store of saltpeter. It only takes a spark.”

“Right” I agreed. “And the motive for all this?”

He started counting on his fingers. One. “If it’s pitch, there’s someone involved.” Two. “If someone’s involved, it’s not an accident.” Three. “If it’s not an accident, then they’re not to blame for anything.”

Well done, Rizzi, a good observation. But I still wasn’t convinced.

“Tell me, what makes you think it was an accident?”

He pointed to the big chimney pots of the foundries—the area we were about to visit. “If the Turks wanted to damage us, they’d have started their fire somewhere more central.”

“There’s not just the Turks in this world.”

“Thank God. But what I say about them applies to anyone: If I wanted to destroy the Arsenal, I’d strike at its heart, not its heel.”

I nodded. “And you certainly wouldn’t wait until half the barrels of powder had been taken somewhere else. Or choose a stormy night, so that the wind would carry the flames outside.”

Tavosanis lifted the oars and took a breath, staring straight into my eyes. “Only chance is as precise as that.”

“Chance, certainly.” I lowered a hand into the water, as if the sea might give me a clue. “Or an enemy other than the Turks. An enemy who doesn’t want to do too much damage.”

3.

As I had expected, the foundries were unscathed, since they were far away from the site of the explosion. The first and second workshops were still bolted shut. Tavosanis and Rizzi slipped into the
calle
between one and the other and checked the perimeter.

The third door was wide open. A sound of hammering came from within. I stepped into the doorway and walked forward slowly, checking the various departments. In the carpenters’ area there wasn’t a tool out of place. The tree trunks that had already been shaped were divided according to caliber and type, in the usual meticulous stacks. Farther along, where the pressing was done, a certain chaos was only to be expected. Bags of lime, ox hair, wax presses for relief decorations: Everything was scattered around big tables or piled up at random in corners. The foul stench of tallow oil emerged from jars that had been left open. Only the clay shells were set down carefully, ready to receive the molten bronze. On the other side, the piercing frames were silent and no one turned the lathe, the wheels of the augers, the bow-drills for punching touch-holes.

The racks for the finished weapons seemed unmanned too, but again a metallic sound reached my ears.

My call of “Who’s there?” received a faint reply a moment later, and a gray head appeared from behind a long, slender cannon. It was Varadian, the Armenian artilleryman who worked on prototypes. I was about to ask the man if he’d noticed anything when he suddenly spoke first: “Signor De Zante, it’s a good thing you’ve shown up, you at least.”

He looked shattered. The room was cold and the kilns were unlit, but his forehead was pearled with sweat.

“What’s troubling you?”

He opened his eyes wide, as if a ghost had appeared behind me. I had to force myself not to turn round and check. “The Turks. Trust me, I’ve worked for them. This fire is just the start of it; they’re going to attack us again. I know the architect Savorgnan is reinforcing the defenses at the entrance to the lagoon. Fair enough, a good precaution, but take a look, look around. There isn’t anyone here yet this morning, no guards or workmen. The treasure that interests our enemies most is here, but no one’s protecting it apart from me, and I deserve more protection than the others.”

“What did the workers do?”

“They spent the night putting out the fire, they got a pay raise, and now they’re resting on their laurels.”

I tried to assume a reassuring tone. Varadian knew how much the Mohammedans hated renegades. He had been an engineer in Constantinople for years, before coming over to us. He had become a Christian because the Republic allowed him to work, financing his experiments into cannon recoil. In contrast, the Turkish vizier of war had considered them pointless and unworthy of attention. The Ottomans wanted only one thing from a fiery mouth: that it should be big, gigantic, colossal. They wanted the wide-open jaws of the Devil, bombards spitting out the whole of hell and making the world shake. Why worry about the recoil?

“I’ll talk to the chief guard, Signor Varadian. Meanwhile I’ll have someone sent over, right away, and I’ll see to it that you and your work are given double protection. But don’t worry—I have a feeling the Turks haven’t got much to do with this business.”

He gripped my hand between his own, and his voice dripped with gratitude. “Thank you, Signor De Zante. And trust me, I know them well: This is their work.”

It was evening when we got back to the palace. Some of my men, keen to demonstrate their zeal and ruthlessness, had already got things started. They had assembled a handful of seditious wretches, people used to singing songs against the Doge and the noblemen: con men, provocateurs.

On the wheel, one arsenal worker had confessed to be Giuseppe Nasi and the son of the Devil. A blacksmith from Chioggia had sworn himself blind that he had always been a Turk, a janissary and friend of the Kapudan Pasha, who had personally issued the order to start the fire. A woodcutter from who knows where had started talking a language entirely his own, saying that it was the language of the Turks of Asia Minor, adding a few words in Latin that he had picked up from the Mass.

Spilled blood and the stench of excrement. Torture is pointless when you’re looking for the truth. And in any case I was soon disgusted with it.

I made them stop. The foreman had given me a list of hotheads and discontented arsenal workers. I asked Rizzi to check if any of them were among the ones arrested in our absence. There were a few.

I ordered Tavosanis to start on the first one.

Usually I waited at least half an hour before coming into the room. Meanwhile Tavosanis asked general questions and got to work with his fists. This time I was more impatient: I had to end the day with a result, something to give the Consigliere.

The man’s head was hanging over his chest. He was tied to the chair; he seemed to be still conscious. Tavosanis came over and whispered in my ear what he had managed to get out of him. Now it was my turn.

“What’s that song you were singing at the inn a few evenings ago? ‘Come, Turk, free us from our masters . . .’ That was it, wasn’t it?”

Silence. Tavosanis looked at me. I gestured to him to wait. “We know what you were singing; we know who you were singing with. We know what you ate, what you drank, when you got up to go for a piss. We know everything.”

The man pleaded, “What do you want from me?”

I slowly circled the chair. The wolf isolating his prey.

“It’d be a good idea to speak now. Think of the magistrate. Think of the wheel. You’ll miss this chair and my mate’s knuckles.” Tavosanis drew back his arm and hit the man in the jaw. “We know your friend Battiston kept saying ‘I know a way of getting them to up our pay.’ Isn’t that right?”

“I was plastered. I don’t remember a thing.”

He didn’t remember a thing, and yet he was crying. He was about to give up and he felt guilty for his friend.

“And in fact it looks as if you’re going to get your pay raise, doesn’t it? As a reward for putting out the fire.”

He said nothing. I stopped in front of him. I lifted his chin. His expression was blank; the hatred had fled. He would tell the truth.

4.

The Consigliere’s palazzo overlooked the Grand Canal, but shadows like me came by the land route. The waterside entrance was for the aristocrats. I’d only come in on that side once, with my father. A silk carpet guided our steps across the bridge to the marble sirens guarding the front door. I was to introduce myself to the head of the household. An audience with the pope himself would not have stirred me as much.

Some days later they showed me the back entrance, and from then on that was the only one I used: across the big garden, invisible from the street and protected by high walls. In the middle, the fountain and the stone angel, wings outspread, that never ceased to unsettle me. His face and body were tense, raptorial, as if he were about to take flight and seize his prey. One day I had pointed this out to my lord, and he had put it down to bad conscience, to my sinful soul.

Today, a servant walked with me into the palazzo, up to the threshold of the main hall. He knocked and ushered me in.

The Consigliere was standing by the window. He seemed to be observing the clouds reflected in the lagoon, but perhaps his eyes saw something entirely different. His soul was labyrinthine, his mind impenetrable. I looked at his tall, slender form, wrapped in a long robe that fell to his ankles; his black hair, sprinkled with gray; his back, still straight.

He beckoned me in. I already knew where to go and sit, and I knew that he would ask his first questions from a standing position, to dwarf me.

“You have a determined gait this morning.” He stared at me, as if he were still trying to recognize me. “How do your inquiries progress?”

“We’ve questioned twenty-three suspects.” I paused, to stress the number. “Most of them gave irrelevant statements, but two of the arsenal workers have confessed names and details that are extremely interesting.”

“I am glad, De Zante. Just leave out the details. I know how scrupulous you are.”

A long breath. The Consigliere didn’t like excessive passion. I had to set out my conjectures coldly, as if referring to someone else’s thoughts. “The caulkers have been asking for a pay raise for months. Some of them thought starting a fire and intervening to put it out again might be the best way to get one.”

He bit the inside of his lip, a sign that he was displeased with this information. I had to find out why. “And these ‘some,’ how many might that be?”

“I couldn’t yet say, Excellency. We have precise accusations against one Erio Battiston. We’ve been looking for him since yesterday morning; he is said to be the man responsible for coming up with the plan. As to those who carried it out, we do not yet have sufficient evidence.”

He started drumming impatiently on the wood with his fingers. I couldn’t work out what was bothering him so.

“I will tell my men to put every effort into capturing Battiston, and . . .”

“Do you really imagine,” he cut in, raising his voice slightly, “that a discontented arsenal worker could hatch a plot of this kind? Come on, De Zante. You’re doing your own intelligence a disservice.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I tried to follow my instinct and took some time to put my words in order. Impulsiveness leads inevitably to ruin. “Permit me to express myself better, your Excellence. Various clues suggest a provocation that got out of hand. The men carrying out the plan had apparently taken care to avoid . . .”

“Care?” This time he allowed me an enigmatic smile. “Our job is not to grant extenuating circumstances to the guilty men.” He slumped onto his chair, emphatically, to show me how wearying he found my stupidity. Then he rearranged the pieces of paper on his desk, as if he needed to calm himself by performing a meticulous task.

“Listen, De Zante.” he said, looking up. His voice had changed; he sounded as if he were about to have a man-to-man chat with me. “I know your zeal. I can imagine the determination with which you gathered this information. But that’s exactly the problem: You are examining things so closely that you lose the vision of the whole, which all of Venice, apart from you, has seen from the very first.”

I felt the muscles in my neck twisting like the strands of a cable.

“Let’s admit that the workers have something to do with it, and they stand to gain financially. Would you agree to bring Venice to its knees for a few ducats? Would you risk your life for an extra slice of bread to dip in your soup? No, of course not, you’d want a higher prize. And who could offer you that?”

Now I could see what he was getting at. I said, “We’ve arrested various Turkish spies over the past few weeks. We’ve made them talk, and there was no inkling of anything like . . .”

“It’s not the street spies you should be looking at, De Zante. We won’t hunt down the eel by asking the shrimp. There must be a traitor somewhere higher up, one much more important than an arsenal worker or a mere spy. Someone who can influence, if you like, spies, agitators and Arsenal hotheads. Someone who can act as intermediary between them and Giuseppe Nasi’s money.”

Nasi. The name on everyone’s lips, the people’s word made flesh. If I’d written him off, it wasn’t out of absentmindedness.

“Do you have any suggestions?”

“Someone high enough up to be able to hatch an attack on the Arsenal. Someone sufficiently beyond suspicion to be able to do it. Someone holding a major post, but not necessarily a patrician. Someone with a secret, and therefore vulnerable to blackmail by the Turk. If possible, someone not Venetian by birth. I trust you, De Zante. Find a name appropriate to the task, and the Republic will derive greater glory even from this outrage.”

“I understand.” I tried to remain impassive. “The perfect culprit.”

The Consigliere nodded agreement, then rose to his feet and, as if nothing had happened, returned to studying the gray vault of the clouds.

I reached the door. I knew he was listening to my footsteps on the floor, but however much I tried, I couldn’t keep them sounding as confident as they had on the way in.