Free Altai: A Novel by Wu Ming Page A

tongue with disapproval. He lifted one hand a little, Efrem left the room, and the door closed. We were left on our own.
    “Such ingratitude, Messer De Zante. If it wasn’t for us, you would be dangling from a rope in Venice now, or perhaps with your guts scattered in all directions. Don’t you think you owe us something?” He spoke without rancor, but his feigned politeness was at most a thin veneer.
    “If I wasn’t who I am you would have let me die.”
    “You’re wrong,” he said. “ We saved you because we don’t know who you are. Or rather, we don’t know who you’ll want to be from now on. Because the man you were in Venice no longer exists, or am I mistaken?”
    I didn’t reply. I was expecting an argument with the Sphinx and I knew the game very well. I couldn’t afford to give him an excuse.
    “Oh, plainly, some things we do know,” he went on, his lips barely curling into a smile. “Trifles, like the fact that you were an agent of the Venetian secret service and that you’re accused of setting fire to the Arsenal.”
    “And nothing new so far,” I spat contemptuously. “Tell me something I don’t know. For example, what you want from me.”
    He stroked his moustache affectedly, then folded his hands in his lap again. “I told you: gratitude. Like the gratitude of the shipwrecked man for the sailors who pick him up. You were floundering in the water, traps awaited you at every landfall, along with people ready to stab you in the back. Venice wants your head, and she’s telling the four winds.”
    “Get to the point,” I snapped.
    “Very well. Then let’s go back to the beginning. How did a Jew from Ragusa end up protecting the secrets of La Serenissima?”
    I was taken aback by my own reaction. I wanted to be honest. I had often imagined a plight like this: kidnapped by the enemy, grilled, tortured. Every time, in my head, I imagined myself concealing or twisting the truth, throwing my questioner off the track, serving him up some intriguing blend of reality and lies. And in fact, now that the moment had come, I wanted to tell the truth. But why? I tried to contain my thought, give it some sensible motivation. I convinced myself that openness was appropriate. Spill the beans, and see what happens. Before I had finished reasoning thus, already my lips were moving.
    “I’m not a Jew anymore.”
    Navarro looked interested. The movement was tiny, almost imperceptible, but I saw him leaning forward. And then I went on.
    “I left Ragusa when I was very young, because I didn’t want to be like you. I was fed up to the back teeth with this hypocritical clique, with meanness, with fear. Fed up with cultivating a rat-like soul.” I paused, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. Navarro looked at me in silence. He was definitely thinking about the intention behind my words. At last he said, “Go on.”
    “My father was a gentile, a Venetian. One day he returned to Ragusa to redeem my wretched life. He took me with him to Venice; he made me study. He concealed my origins; he gave me his name and his faith. Once my studies were over, he introduced me to Consigliere Bartolomeo Nordio.”
    There was no need to add anything else. Just as Jupiter is lightning personified, Nordio’s name embodied the secrets of the Republic.
    “What tasks did you perform for him?”
    Still I held my cards close to my chest: “At first, I followed people who came to Venice from the Levant. I collected rumors about possible spies, I tailed them, I checked up on what they were doing.”
    There was a knock at the door. Efrem came in with a tray and two steaming little glasses. “I don’t want coffee,” I said. “Bring wine.”
    “You’ll have that later,” Navarro reassured me. “For now, I need your mind to stay alert.” He waited for the door to close again, and then he gestured to me. “Go on.”
    I sipped the black brew, scorching my palate. I cursed under my breath. “After a few years, I was