The Pop’s Rhinoceros (54 page)

“The fellow here a week ago, the one looking for you. It wasn’t Don Antonio, or whatever his name was.”

“Who, then?” Salvestro felt the beer all cold in his veins. He wanted to piss, get outside.

“Didn’t leave a name, just said he’d be back,” said Rodolfo.

“Well, what did he look like?” Salvestro persisted. He felt suddenly wide awake.

Rodolfo thought for a moment. “Didn’t get much of a look at him,” he said. “A gentleman, from his clothes. But from the way he carried himself, and the way he spoke, I’d say he was a soldier.”

Imagine … Ambassador Seròn.

Or,
Don Antonio Seròn
, Orator of Fernando the Catholic of Aragon and Castile. Don Antonio this and Don Antonio that. His Excellency. … Early morning favors such contemplations, with its steely blues and abated sunlight, the inevitability of sunrise. Few birds twitter in the vicinity of the palazzo (Palazzo Seròn?); a cautionary silence prefaces the loose-tongued and beady-eyed day to come. Settle, he tells himself, ensconced in his cot, ancillary panic-flutters rising about him in scalloped wavelets, sucker-mouthed fish contained therein. The future gives him gooseflesh.

Two ships, two beasts, a contest—of sorts.

“And so I devolve this duty to you, my trusted secretary. I need hardly stress its importance, nor its difficulty. Our Pope will have his way. …” And so on. Don Jerònimo, Idiot of Vich. That was weeks ago, and what since? Polite inquiries about the enterprise and complaints about his mistress, who sweats “like a horse” and whines for money “like a stuck pig.” But he keeps going back. Why?

More flutters at that, foamy-fringed and rhipidate, tortile as eels or conscience. No one else is up. He is alone in a rowboat straked with sapwood, tossed lightly by the surging currents beneath. There are no “friends at court” for Antonio Seròn. There would be no appeals, no judicial messiness in the cellars, as they cut his guts out for the confession. Something at the point of a knife in an alley, and here in Rome, without warning if his allegiance were known. And the hand on the haft would be Diego’s. …

The fluttering subsides at that thought, becomes winglike and unliquid: Seròn rising. Below, little ambassadors confer in roofless buildings, little secretaries attend them, little soldiers march up and down. Secrets are represented by yellow envelopes and whispering; policy by an empty scabbard. The order is being given to dispose of himself, of Seròn. The soldiers draw their swords and run about under the orders of their commander, although their victim has already fled, forewarned, it seems. But by whom?

Let it rain powder, a fine volcanic ash to a depth of three inches, in which the tailored shoes and boots of the players make fine, crisp prints. Here—these tiptoed heelless ones—these are Venturo’s as he creeps in the back door of the palazzo. Hoofprints record the Orator’s cortege as it plods from stable to stable, and these more martial impressions signal a militia of some kind. There are indecipherable scuffs and skids, meaning violence, perhaps, and then there are the looping and overlapping tracks that lead from the palazzo, swerving south of Navona, north of the Campo de’ Fiori, taking alleys and backstreets westward to where the Tiber bumps up against the city. A little way north once more—here the trail grows circular—in the back and out the front of a discreet and well-known stew, back down toward Tiber island, where a top-floor room at the Sign of the Portcullis appears as just another point on the route, for footprints in volcanic ash are mute on their own relative importance, assigning no more significance to the heels that will drum on the boards in this cramped room
overlooking the Tiber wharves than the boot-marks that later lead back to the stew, in the front and out the back, and then, a little more deliberate, a little footsore, perhaps, retread the path back to the palazzo. That path is his. He has trodden it seven times now. Today will be the eighth.

It had been the day he’d found the ship—the
Santa Lucia
, a tub impounded at Ostia for her drunkard captain’s debts. A thunderstorm rumbled and threatened on the ride back to the city but finally came to nothing. Vich was squinting over his papers, politely interested in his progress. A ship? Well done. And a crew? Not yet. But the crew Seròn sought could be found in any tavern in Ripetta; the crew did not trouble him, nor his Ambassador. They sat across from one another, the light outside falling, cartwheels rumbling faintly as they passed over the paving about San Simeon’s.

“I wonder, Don Jerònimo, have you remarked a change in our Captain Diego’s disposition?”

Should his curiosity have been so naked? Should he not instead have waited for Vich to remark the change himself or exercise his wits about the question of why he had not? Too late to worry now, and his fears were groundless, for Vich was happy to nod his puzzlement. The soldier’s sullenness had evaporated in recent days and been replaced by a lofty and private amusement.

“We may even see a smile,” Vich speculated, “by next Easter.” Seròn laughed politely. They called for wine and began drinking, matching each other cup for cup. It was after the fourth or fifth that Seròn began to muse aloud about Diego, to wonder at his aptness for his duties in Rome. He felt his curiosity grow like an appetite, sitting there as an equal, throwing out casts into his ignorance. Diego’s disgrace hovered like an omen between them, and Vich became untalkative, awkward. Eventually there was silence. He realized that he was drunk, in danger. He could not remember what he had said. In his sudden anxiety he got up to light the candles, and that seemed to rouse Vich, who said, “You know most of it already, Antonio. Why is he here? A favor to Cardona. What else was he to do with him after Prato? The smoke still lies thick over that business.”

More drinking. More nods and nudges. Were they both pretending to be drunk? More disclosures.

“It turned on Tedaldi’s surrender, whether given or not, and to whom. … Or not. Tedaldi’s wife was killed in a cellar with the children, as hostages to his silence, perhaps. Or perhaps they knew as much as he. … Someone took Tedaldi’s surrender, and then someone lied. Prato was sacked. Tedaldi’s family were killed. These acts were the offense, the lie was its cause.”

He stopped there, as though he had reached the limit of his discretion. Seròn watched him toy with his glass, hold it up to the candlelight. It was quite dark outside. He refilled the Ambassador’s cup.

Vich spoke again, but now he was unguarded, speculating as though to himself. “Who, though? Who accepted Aldo’s terms? Somewhere between the square of San Stefano and the camp outside the walls, the surrender became a defiance. I
passed through that square once, it is a short ride out of town. It was Diego who parleyed with Aldo, he who carried the challenge back to Cardona. …” Vich was almost unaware of him now, swimming alone in a current of wine and confused memory.

Seròn pushed a different piece of the puzzle forward. “But he believes himself innocent, and maligned.”

“He was not the only one to speak with Tedaldi. I do not know all the comings and goings. He claimed to Cardona that he was not privy to the terms of the agreement. He never challenged the fact that Aldo gave up the town. The men who put the knife to his family were never found, and without them his accusations were baseless, futile. …”

“Accusations?”

“Who knows what took place, or who in fact spoke with Aldo that day, or what was said. … One man entered, another waited outside. Who knows?” Vich shrugged and swallowed more wine. Seròn watched him slump in his chair.

“But the other man,” he said.
“He
would know, whoever he was.”

“Whoever he was? You need not pretend, Don Antonio. We both know the other man was Cardinal Medici as he was then. Our beloved Pope as he is now. Yes, he would know.” Seròn looked down into his lap. Tiny flies flew in noiseless circles about the candle. Warm air rising out of the courtyard carried the smell of the stables into the room. Then Vich spoke more crisply, rising from his chair. “But as to his new cheerfulness, I have no idea. Perhaps His Holiness would know?”

No, thinks the secretary, rising now, dressing. His Holiness does not know. There is a picture to be painted, beginning in darkness of the cellar where Tedaldi’s family offer their throats to the murderers, whose other hands stretch, palm held out for payment by one whom the frame has yet to capture. His hand is visible, for the cutthroats must have been paid. Part of his sleeve, too, and bright sunlight. … Diego’s joy would be to wrestle him into view, but it is the cutthroats who will do that. The soldier’s face comes to him now, pressed close to his own—he had been intimidated, felt encroached upon, as Diego had accosted him—the man’s mouth moving clumsily to relate the tissue of acts that made him clean, graced and favored once again. Why had the soldier come to him? “They are something he cannot deny, do you see, Don Antonio? Ally yourself with me, be ready when the time is right. He would rather give up his tiara than let the truth of this be known. …” It seems His Holiness’s hirelings are in Rome.

It seems that they are once again for hire.

It is another game, anterior to his own. Diego must be placated, humored, eventually thwarted. It will be to the soldier to whom Vich will go, if his secretary should be unmasked. And now Seròn has that. For the moment, Diego is his. Whatever else it may cost him, his own business will not cost him his life. Diego’s loyalty was stitched into his very sinews. Betrayal would always destroy a man like that. And then he thought of Cardona, Medici, even Vich, who appeared to him
as infinitely calculating giants, slow-moving and implacable as thunderheads. If the heavens opened above him, if the rain scoured him of his subterfuge, the two men would be much more than figureheads nailed to the
Santa Lucia’s
prow, more useful here in Rome than afloat in a leaky ship. Without the giant and his keeper, Diego’s claims were nothing. If the rains were to be brought down on him, then Diego’s impotence, or the promise of that (the unspoken threat of its opposite?), might stay the heavy hands raised against him: the Pope’s, Vich’s … He trussed the two men in gaudy new clothes, gave them money. Fed them and drank with them at the tavern. Fattened them up for sacrifice. When the storm broke, who demanded justice of the weather?

Outside now, the shadow-city is being folded into the cracks and recesses of the City of the Sun. The spectral casts of Rome’s eaves and overhangs, the lightless juts of her churches and towers, are yielding to the sun’s corrosion: dark diagonals steepen on the stained plaster of the walls, stunted silhouettes swing slowly into coincidence with their templates. A night-city echoes the arc of a climbing sun and creeps toward its vanishing-point, shrinking, foreshortening, triangulating itself out of existence. By midday there will be nothing. A minute past and the cycle begins again. Don Antonio quits the palazzo and heads west, a horseless gentleman with a high forehead and thinning hair hurrying past the sleep-caked early risers, smooth-faced himself, head down, unremarkable and unremarked.

The walking calms him—he cannot eat before these assignations—the steady thudding of his feet on the hard-packed dirt. He waits for a train of carts loaded with barrels of fish on the way up to Pescheria, looking left and right before crossing and ducking into the alley running along the side of the Chapel of Ambrosio. The ropemakers are stringing lines in the Via di Funari. They barely glance up as he hurries past. Another look about at the entrance to the courtyard, in the door at the old stonemason’s place, always unlocked, long abandoned, down the steps. He finds himself in front of the kitchens, another staircase rising above him.

Rumors of two loudmouthed tellers of tall tales, of two buffoon-explorers, had first drawn him to this place. He had found them ragged and penniless. Two days in the tailors’ shops, an hour with the barbers in Navona, the pair of them being shaved side by side with apples in their mouths. Pigs for the oven. Since then he has been back here only to ensure that they remain in Rome, to drink with them and celebrate their good fortune and, on three mornings since the night of their peacock reappearance, to perform on himself the same transformation in reverse. The tavern is deserted at this hour, except for Rodolfo, who seemed so wedded to the place as to be unimaginable anywhere else.

“We never see you except at the crack of dawn, Don Antonio,” the innkeeper’s voice addresses him from above. “Are you still in search of a ship? A Genoese passed through a few days ago. …”

But the ship is already got, or as good as, and Antonio is in no mood to swap pleasantries this morning. Rodolfo slaps him on the shoulder as he passes, and his
voice pursues him up the next flight of stairs. “Anjelica and Isabella have been asking after you, say they miss the smallest tip in the city,” he shouts up, laughing, disappearing into the kitchen.

Minutes later he is out by the “front” entrance, under the signless signpole, down the alley toward Santa Caterina’s. Strings of horses are being led into the stables, the streets more crowded here. Now he wears a stained apron, heavy boots, a scarf tied about his head. Faint river-vapors taint the air with fetid watery whiffs as he strides toward the wharves. He is a porter at the docks, or some such. It is a loosely themed disguise.