The Pop’s Rhinoceros (69 page)

“To beasts, horned or otherwise.” Faria raises his drink. Both men take a sip, watching each other over the rims of their goblets.

“To their victims,” retorts Vich. They drink again.

“Is everything in place for the embarkation?”

Vich shrugs. “Antonio is your creature. He gives me pretty answers that mean nothing. Tomorrow he gives our Pope a pretty ship with pretty sailors—”

“That mean nothing.”

Vich does not reply. Faria follows his glance across the room. Leo is laughing at a joke of Dovizio’s.

“We are being indiscreet,” says Faria, but Vich does not look away.

Faria murmurs, “He knows. …”

Leo catches Don Jerònimos eye. The Spaniard raises his goblet to the robed figure, who smiles back uncertainly.

“Of course he does,” says Vich.

The river narrowed beneath the Ponte Sant’Angelo. A dank tongue of black dirt poked out the embankment and jutted into the water as far as the first pier of the bridge. Mostly invisible to the passersby above, the orange glow of small fires cast out over the water might nevertheless be seen. There might be heard shouting and sometimes fighting.

A similar shelf of land on the west bank extended farther upstream and was used as a landing stage by the watermen who ferried pilgrims up and down the river. By day the west bank bustled with activity while the east bank was almost deserted. A few crates were scattered about there, perhaps too some bundles of rags that now and again would rise, yawn, and stretch before succumbing again to their stupor. The watermen, by and large, left them alone, for the beggars of the Borgo were a rough crew, suspicious even of each other but capable of uniting against a common enemy when provoked. Having nothing, they had nothing to lose and were known to fight like animals, their crutches doubling as clubs. Julius had sent a troop of Switzers down to clear them out and had his soldiers returned to him with broken heads and, in one case, missing a nose. Under the bridge was their territory, where they shambled between the fires that blackened the stone arch above, where they fought, men and women both, where they shivered in the winter and sweated in the summer, where Salvestro, unable to think of anywhere better, brought a drunken Bernardo to spend their last night in Rome.

Stumbling down the bank, panting with effort, for Bernardo was sloppy as a bag of toads, he saw them crouching in the red glow or moving about like bears, huge and unsteady, their shadows jumbled together on the walls of the embankment and the piers of the bridge.

“Who’re you?” His challenger seemed to rise out of the ground. He stood a full head higher than Salvestro, his voice thick with drink. Salvestro started to talk and was soon cut off.

“Dommi! Over ’ere! Couple of gentlemen looking for lodgings.” He slurred the word “lodgings.”

Murderer disguised as sheep, Salvestro thought as “Dommi” approached. Animal skins had been thrown over him. He had then been baled in string. He punched Salvestro in the face, and Bernardo promptly collapsed. Dommi looked
at him curiously. “Shame,” he said. “The size on him might have saved you a kicking.”

Sacking flapping around their ankles, other beggars shambled over to watch the promised kicking. It commenced, painfully enough, with a punt to the groin. Salvestro leveled himself slowly to the ground. There followed a back heel to the top of the head. Someone said, “Nice clothes,” and someone else growled, “I’m having that doublet,” and someone else again, someone with a high squeaky voice or someone with three high squeaky voices, added:

“Hey!”

“It’s Salvestro!”

“Leave him alone, Dommi!”

Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf were hopping about, sparrowlike in their cut-down habits, dancing over Salvestro while Dommi cursed them foully but with little conviction. Then they discovered Bernardo. Instantly they formed a circle, raised their arms, and began to chant slowly, “Ber-nar-do-oo! Rosserus! Ber-nar-do-oo! Rosserus!” Bernardo snored on.

Dommi interrupted the kicking to consider this. “You can stay one night,” he said, feet planted to either side of Salvestro’s head. “See that bit of wall?” Salvestro nodded gingerly. “You sleep there.” Dommi stepped backward, reached for something behind him, then swung it over his head. Salvestro cowered and tried to raise an arm. The object landed with a loud bang an inch short of his nose. Dommi patted it. “See this crate? I’m going to sit on it, right here, and I’m going to watch you all night, and if you annoy me, I’m going to kick you again. I’m going to kick you till your guts come out your arse and then I’m going to strangle you with them. That sound fair to you?”

Salvestro nodded.

“Good,” said Dommi. “Glad you see it that way.”

“What about his clothes?” a voice protested. “I could use that—”

“Shut up,” said Dommi.

Salvestro crawled slowly over to the wall. Small, sharp-beaked birds were hatching out his head. His groin was a cleft of floating pain that extended from his stomach to his knees. He rolled over and collapsed. One by one, the beggars too keeled over or rolled about on the earth until they found a piece of ground that suited them. A man with one arm snuggled up to an older woman, the two grunted and tussled for a few minutes, then fell silent. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf eventually gave up their chanting. Dommi sat on his crate, watching him.

It was very late, but, watched as he was by a man for whom annoyance was sufficient cause for a brisk disemboweling, Salvestro could not sleep. What constituted “annoyance”? Snoring? He closed his eyes and listened to the rise and fall of Bernardo’s snores, but his mind raced ahead to the morrow, where a ship awaited them both, passage away from this place where he had no place, this Ro-ma.

“Nobody wants us,” said Dommi after an hour or more of silence. He put the accent on the first word, as though it had taken many effortful trials to achieve so complete a state of unwantedness. Salvestro, as awake as ever, opened one eye warily. “That’s who
we
are,” Dommi continued, growing more vehement. “We’re the people nobody wants.”

Some response seemed to be required. Neither sympathy nor congratulation sounded fitting. … Would silence provoke the promised kicking? Salvestro remembered the ruffians who made their home in the ruins and began to tell Dommi of the encounter.

“We know about them,” the man cut him off. There was silence again. Salvestro tried a different tack. Perhaps he should respond in kind?

“We’re explorers …,” he began.

“We know about you, too,” Dommi said. “We know all about you two. Hear things, we do. Remember them. You’re a pair of clowns hired for Fat Bastard up there.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. “Pair of bloody clowns.”

Both men looked across the river at the dark stump of the Pope’s fortress, which loomed over the river. By night it appeared more massive than ever, as though it did not contain rooms, halls, passages, and cellars but was solid stone throughout. Then something caught Salvestro’s eye, a movement on the opposite bank. The ground from the embankment to the river’s edge seemed to be moving, rippling and raising ridges in the mud as though it were being plowed, but from beneath.

“Rats,” said Dommi. “They didn’t used to come down here. Now there’s more of ’em every night.” The rats covered the ground in a silent blanket of furry bodies, slithering and scrambling over one another. There might have been thousands, or tens of thousands. “Look at the size of them,” commented Dommi, not watching them now, but watching Salvestro. “They’re Borgo rats.” He spat. “Fat Bastard’s rats.” The river washed and sploshed against the piers of the bridge. They heard sheep-bells somewhere, far away. But no squealing. No squeaking. Clambering and sprawling over one another’s bodies, the rats did not make a sound.

He must have slept. He awoke to the faintest lightening in the blackness of the sky. A solitary boat carrying a solitary passenger was passing under the far arch of the bridge. A mist had settled on the water, as thick and white as smoke. Dommi was still there, awake on his crate. He rubbed his eyes, thought about getting up, decided against it, and dozed. When he came to again, Dommi was gone and the first boats had appeared on the opposite bank. The rats had disappeared.

A tall figure wearing an elaborate hat and ornamental sword climbed carefully down the steps, where he paused to inspect the terrain. He tested the ground with the toe of his shoe, then stepped forward cautiously. The watermen were unloading planks and laying them over the worst of the mud patches to form a gangway from the steps to the water’s edge. The man waited patiently for
them to finish. Salvestro sat up stiffly and looked around for Bernardo. He was sleeping soundly next to a heap of tangled limbs belonging to Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf. He woke the big man gently.

“I was having a dream,” Bernardo protested blearily.

“Come on,” said Salvestro, gesturing across the river. “Don Antonio’s already here.”

There was a bridge, the river, three snoozing boys, and an empty crate. The dream was already fading. There had been no dogs in it, nor rocks. A breathing heap of rags groaned and rolled over some feet away. Bernardo looked about him in perplexity.

“Where am I?” he asked.

The foreman’s mallet could still be heard, its dry reports signaling the soundness of his construction as he moved methodically along the benches, bending and tapping, gradually ascending the stepped tiers of the stand for the second time that morning.

He had begun at daybreak, and when he had reached the little platform on the top he had stopped and looked first west out to sea, then south down the quay, where the last of the sardine smacks were putting out to sea a little beyond the jetty to which the
Santa Lucia
was moored. Stanchions rose at the stand’s four corners to support a trellis of joists and beams. A canvas awning would protect His Holiness from the the sun, to be draped over the frame later that morning. Lastly the foreman had turned north, toward the inn, where from the topmost room Diego gazed back at the man whose labors had awakened him.

The man had stood there for several minutes. He descended carefully, taking the benches as oversize steps, as though the stand were a staircase extracted from the vanished house of a race of titans and leading now to a phantom piano nobile, to nothing. … Wrong, Diego corrected himself. His Holiness would have a fine view from the platform up there, attended by a small and favored coterie. The steps led to the Medici Pope. The rest would sit below.

Then the foreman had walked around to the back of his construction, where the undersides of the tiers were so many overhangs, a sound-box from which his mallet had boomed and echoed. She had stirred then. He had reached for her in the night, and she had refused him. He was unsurprised, though there had been no warning, no particular coolness between them. It was a realignment in their relations, or in their contract. She slept naked, like a whore. He could have forced her if he had wished.

Men and women began to gather on the quay, local people. He recognized the chandler and the woman from the sail-loft. Word had got around in the past week that the Pope was coming to bless a ship—the
Santa Lucia
—and the ship would be sailing to the ends of the earth. A fisherman carrying creels slung on a
rope over his shoulder sat down on the lowest bench of the stand and was shouted at by the foreman. He got up wearily and continued down the quay, past the jetty to his right, past the sail-loft to his left, eventually lost amongst the little sheds and scattered outbuildings that spilled out of the main town and were halted only by the sea. The sea was calm. Later a middling to light nor’easterly would get up, as it had on the last two days, and carry the vessel out past the breakwater into the open waters beyond.

More people were arriving, clustering together in little knots, gossiping and speculating. Sight of a Pope was better than a day of penance in warding off damnation. A mere touch of his hem guarded against quartan fever. His blessing cured certain kinds of blindness and—it was rumored—genital warts and perhaps the French pox, too. Men and women and their children had closed their shops and houses to come and be anointed by the Servant of the Servants of God. He would sit up there, amongst them in a sense, on the platform there. Above them, in a sense. Cut him down, Diego thought vaguely. He turned away.