The Pop’s Rhinoceros (56 page)

His dreams had grown strangely bloodless: robed figures twisting their pudgy fingers, sweating functionaries swapping secrets, quick commotions and anxieties, nothing in earshot. There was a weightlessness to this time. The days deferred their import to other days, which deferred it in turn. The future built its inevitable castle. When he felt his nerves tighten and relax, his stomach knot and unknot, he was drawn back to the minutes before battle when he would submerge his fear beneath the certainty of what was soon to take place: the rush forward, the vast volume of noise, the division of men into victors and vanquished. … This
must
happen. A deep calm lay in it. His Holiness watched him across a battlefield of churches, stables, houses, hostels, and shops, across the clutter of Rome, waiting for him to break as his own men had cracked under the bombardment and run forward across the broken ground at Ravenna. And were cut to pieces there while Cardona fled in panic and the maggotlike Medici left the field unscratched.

But I have the cutthroats, he thought.

Or Don Antonio does. Wrapped safely in stiff new bright white linen and right under the soft priest’s nose. … The secretary’s account of their “recruitment” to the expedition had been delivered to him as a cautious gift. He had accepted it, with caution. “They are yours, when the time is right,” the secretary
had said. “They believe they are to lead our efforts to procure Leo his beast, as if two unlettered simpletons would have the slightest chance of success in such, an enterprise. …” Antonio had laughed. Diego laughed along. He did not trust Don Jerònimo’s secretary.

When the bells of San Simeon’s had rung the hour before midnight, Diego gave orders to the servants that he was not to be disturbed. Leo would have a man amongst them, too. He locked the door to his quarters and trod softly through Vich’s rooms to reach the stairs running from the Ambassador’s private study to the street below. Sometimes there was a mounted man who patrolled in desultory fashion around the backstreets between Scrofa and San Appollinaris. The moon was sunk; that was good. He was soon slipping down one of the side streets that ran south from Navona. He settled into a long stride and followed the same street almost to the river, then dove into the clot of taverns and storehouses behind the waterfront, taking narrow alleys west into Ponte.

He found himself approaching the gate to Fiametta’s house from the north. He walked quickly down the street. He was wondering whether he would have to wake the entire household to extricate the Ambassador. He could not remember a doorkeeper. Perhaps the main gates would be unlocked and he would be able to knock softly on the door. Vich was a light sleeper. They would return together or perhaps go directly to Don Alvaro. Leo’s spies were lowborn oafs. They would not dare report his evasion without adding where he had been. He was turning these matters over in his mind, moving quickly and quietly but not watching. He saw the angular collection of shadows standing quietly opposite the gates only when he was almost upon them.

A man and a horse.

He almost stopped. He almost reached inside his doublet for his knife. But his instincts were better than he was, so he did not stop. He did not reach for his knife. The shadows shifted slightly. The horse snorted. He passed by as though unaware of their existence. The man he did not see. The horse he knew.

It took him the best part of half an hour to work his way around to the back of Fiametta’s residence. The shutters were closed and no lights showed. His head was clear now. It was still possible that Vich was in no danger.

The ground fell away at the back of the house and the wall was higher, but a stepped buttress pressed against the bulge of the masonry. He began to climb, feeling forward for cracks in the crumbling mortar. Twice he lost his footing, and the second time he clung on only by driving in a hand and clenching it there until his foot again found a purchase. The rough stone peeled the skin from his knuckles. Concentrate, he told himself. Rome had softened him.

The roof was tiled, the tiles held in place with little strips of lead. He looked back at the night sky, which was lightless and would reveal no silhouette. Peering over the gable, he saw the courtyard, a woodshed within it, a run-down stable, a well. Then the wall that curtained off the street, its gate barred. He could make
out the shape that was the horse, a big animal, its markings invisible from his vantage point. He had known it at a glance in the street. The horse was the mount of his own counterpart at the embassy of the Portingales. The man he could not see but knew was there was Don Hernando, Faria’s man.

He began bending back the lead ties and lifting off the tiles. Fiametta employed a cook, a man who did the heavier work, a young scullery maid, and the Moorish girl. Only the last two slept on the premises. He stacked the tiles on the parapet and peered down into the hole they left. The room below was a pool of darkness. He swung his legs down and let himself fall.

More men died in the aftermath than in the battle itself. The certainties of the fight gripped men for good or ill, but when the fight turned and was won or lost the lines would break, the companies drift apart, and men drift through the cannon-smoke like ghosts. Some lost their heads in it, running over open ground, shouting the names of their lost comrades. A void of unknowing lay beneath the combat, and men would fall endlessly within it. Diego dropped less than a foot before his feet touched the floor. He landed soundlessly and crouched there, his nerves twitching and tensing.

He told his men, the untried ones and the veterans alike, to be still in these moments, to move slowly if at all, to crawl along ditches, to hide and watch. “If you do not know where you are, why would you move?” he would bellow at them. “Where to? This in the fight—” He raised his right arm. “This after it—” He slapped his forehead. He felt blindly about him, waiting for his eyes to make sense of the darkness about him. A bed. Empty. A chair. Some chests, perhaps, stacked in the corner. The door.

He realized that he was able to make out these things because of a faint illumination. At one end of the bedchamber the floorboards were cracked and separated by slivers of yellowish light. He lowered himself carefully to press his eye to the widest gap. The room below was a bedchamber, too. Two candles stood to either side of a canopied four-poster. Two large fleshy legs were visible upon it. Fiametta’s legs. No sign of Vich. And the bed here was empty, meaning its occupant was elsewhere in the house. Had the bedclothes been warm? Remember Hernando outside, he told himself.

He raised himself from the floor, opened the door, and felt for the first step with the tip of his toe. So intent was he on his noiseless descent that it was not until he reached the landing of the piano nobile that he heard voices. They came from downstairs and grew more distinct as he negotiated the second flight. Men’s voices, unguarded, careless of being overheard. One of them was Vich’s. The other? The other he knew too and, taking the last step from the wood of the staircase to the stone of the hallway, would have put a name to in the next instant. Instead he stopped in his tracks. The mystery of the empty bed revealed itself to him in the shape of the girl silhouetted and stationed at the door, but it was not at her that he started. Hernando’s presence at the gate was suddenly obvious, self-evident.

“And what shall be done with Venturo?” Vich’s voice reached him through the door.

“Leave him to us,” answered the voice, which he recognized now as Faria’s.

She saw her future one time in an inlet of the river. A grove of thick-trunked iroko-trees grew along the bank, clinging to the loose clay with roots that stuck out of the ground like knobbly elbows. The river had found a way through them farther upstream, and a little cascade of water spilled down over some rocks, then fell into a long still canal. It was cool and shaded beneath the high canopy of the trees. The sunlight was hard and white as it struck the surface of the river, a great restless glare. Here it prickled the dark gloss of the leaves a hundred feet above her head and fell in shafts onto the forest floor. The earth was cool on the soles of her feet. It crumbled between her toes.

A boy was fishing. He stood very still, only his arm moving in a deliberate arc as he drew a long fishing-pole over the still surface of the water. He was on the other side of the pool, a little way down from her. He looked up when he noticed her presence and smiled. His teeth were a flash of brilliant white. A heron crashed about in the undergrowth farther within the forest but did not dare to come closer. She sat down, clasped her legs to her chest, and watched him fish, only her eyes visible above her knees. His arms had a nice shape, and his movements were calm and graceful. The rains had come twice since she had become a woman and none of the boys at home had touched her.

From time to time, men’s voices reached her from their canoes on the river. They were from Atani, a half mile or so upstream. Namoke, her father’s brother, was there now talking with the elders about their yam harvest. The yams at Atani were no bigger than alligator peppers, shriveled little things. Namoke thought the villagers’ quarreling had soured the earth in the yam-plots, and he was there to draw the sourness out and throw it into the River. She had helped him tie on his headdress, and then he had started the talking. It was still going on. She had slipped away because the Atani people seemed to do nothing but whine and Namoke seemed to do nothing but nod, very slowly and very gravely. Atani was two days’ walk from Nri. She had never seen this boy before. He was self-conscious now, knowing that she watched him. His movements were stiffer.

The pole twitched. The boy flicked. The pole bent and shuddered. He drew his arm back slowly, its tip passing over his head, the line rising out of the still pool and shedding little beads of water. A fat brown fish broke the surface. The boy drew it slowly toward him and reached for it, his arms stretched wide apart. He fumbled in its mouth for the hook, and when he drew it out, she saw that a tiny silver bait-fish was still fixed to it. It wriggled and glittered. When the boy cast again, he did not use the pole but set the tiny fish gently in the water and watched as it swam into the center of the pool, drawing the line behind it. The
forest smelled of earth and ferns. She hugged her knees hard so her legs pressed against her breasts. The boy caught two more fish in the same manner, extricating the bait-fish alive both times and letting it pull out the line.

That was me, she thought, alone, in the dark of her room. The little fish wrestled with the weight of the line, darting forward and being pulled back, swimming vigorously toward the dark water where the pool deepened and the larger fish waited. What did it think when the jaws closed about it? What when they opened again and it found itself alive? The big fish were gathering about her now. From the bedchamber below, Fiametta’s token protest sounded: a wheezy “Make him wait. …” Vich strode toward the door. She heard the other man’s voice as they greeted one another downstairs, the creak of the door to the kitchen. She slipped on her shift and pressed her face to the floorboards.

Fiametta flopped in sweaty disarray on the bed. She rolled over and reached for the chamber-pot, squatted, pissed lengthily. Eusebia watched as her mistress emptied the last of a wine-jug into a glass and drained it in one swallow. There was some blood on the sheets, though whose she could not tell. Their lovemaking had sounded no more violent than usual. She would wash them in the morning. Violetta would have to face the wine-merchant. Fiametta had taken to drinking rough wine when Vich was absent. A glass or two in the afternoon had increased to a bottle or more in the last weeks. She complained of strange aches and pains and ordered Eusebia to massage her shoulders and legs for hours on end until she fell into a stupor sometime in the evening. She would sleep then, though badly, and wake the next morning with the wine still on her breath, her face blotched and puffy. She fell back now amongst the pillows and sheets, grunting softly in her drunken discomfort. Presently she was snoring. Eusebia rose silently from the floor and crept downstairs.

“… wonderful, apparently.” That was Vich’s voice. She put her eye to the door.

“He will be there for the rest of the summer, if left at the mercy of his whims. Who would have guessed our Pope such a huntsman?” the other replied.

“He bags nothing but rabbits, even hunting in the French manner. He took to his bed for a day after the ride, and La Magliana is less than a day’s easy riding.”

“He might be sick.”

Both men fell silent at that.

“Sick or not, he will be at Ostia. He must see the ship leave, and be seen to do so.” Vich’s tone was inflexible.

The other murmured his agreement. There were glasses of wine before both men. He took a swallow, then said, “I have heard nothing from Ayamonte in over a month.”

Vich raised his own glass. “Nor I.”

“My last dispatch was from Fernão de Peres. It spoke only of problems and delays. …”

“Their problems. Their delays,” Vich retorted. “My beloved secretary tells me
that our own vessel will be ready to sail in three weeks. He has a crew, a captain, two men who will wave prettily to His Holiness from the deck and, according to Don Antonio, will be capable of holding a rutter the right way up and even drawing lines upon it. …”