Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  “Look at this,” she said, drawing Niccolo out of his reverie. She handed him one of the books. Niccolo could see that it wasn’t written in the Latin alphabet, and the characters seemed so fanciful and bizarre, that he doubted it was written in Jewish. Hebrew, he corrected himself. In fact, the characters seemed so fanciful and bizarre that he doubted it was written in any alphabet at all.

  “What is it?” he asked, leafing through the pages and remarking symbols that looked like trees and extravagant fish and fish hooks. “A picture book?”

  “It’s a list of names, of people all over Europe, and even in the East and Africa. These were people my father knew and trusted. They’re people I can trust. Don’t you think that’s a valuable list to have?”

  “If you can read it,” said Niccolo.

  “That’s what this is for,” said Giuditta brightly, holding up another book. She handed it to Niccolo. This book was filled with page after page of tables, the key to the codes. In addition to many sets of grotesque, imaginative symbols, Niccolo could make out columns of Latin characters, and what he knew to be Greek, and what he supposed to be Hebrew. There were others he could not identify. Sumerian? Egyptian?

  “With the codebook, you can decipher the other book,” said Giuditta. “Or you can write messages—secret messages.”

  “You can write as well as read?” Niccolo was amused.

  “Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, and, of course, Florentine,” she said off-handedly. What about you?”

  Niccolo whose command of Greek was nonexistent, to say nothing of Hebrew, fell silent, and the bemused smile vanished from his face.

  “I don’t know the symbols well enough to use them without the codebook,” she was saying. “There are so many, and they can be confusing. Do you want to try one? Look here.” She opened the book of the names of the people her father trusted and found the page she wanted. “See, the book is arranged according to city. At the top of the page, it tells you what city.”

  She took the codebook, opened it to the correct page, and put the two side by side in front of Niccolo. “This is the table to use to read this page. Don’t ask me to explain how you know which code to use for which message—that’s too complicated. Just trust me. Go ahead, figure it out.”

  Niccolo was intrigued and set himself to looking up the symbols in the table Giuditta had given him. It took a while to piece the letters together, and the slow going was made worse by the dim light. L - E - P - O - R - E - S. Lepores, the Latin word for hare. So what? He was puzzled. “So what does this mean, what does it tell me?”

  “You’ve only done half of the work, so far,” she said. “You’ve decoded each of the letters, but ‘lepores’ is obviously a code word. You have to look up the code words in another table. Here.”

  Niccolo ran his finger down the column she had indicated. The words were all names of animals and birds and fish. He found “lepores” and next to it read, “gentes florentinorum.” Florentines! This was the page for Florence. He was pleased with his decoding abilities.

  “Try one more,” she said. “Try this one,” she pointed to the bottom of the page. Niccolo began work on the entry she had indicated. He noted that it was written in a different hand from the other entries on the page. The symbols seemed more carefully traced. They were easier to make out. He pronounced the letters out loud—M - A - C - H—he stopped abruptly and looked up, knowing what he was going to find.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, softly. “Go on, finish.”

  When he was done, he had read in the book of the names of people who could be trusted:

  Machiavelli, Niccolo, Via Romana.

  Giuditta touched his hand gently. “I made that entry,” she said, “Just this evening, while I was waiting for you.”

  Niccolo was moved, and a little embarrassed, too. Luckily, the light was too dull to reveal the deep crimson blush that crossed his face. He put the books down and spoke quickly to hide his discomfort, “What’s the last book, more codes?”

  “No, that’s something else. It was one of my father’s favorites,” she said. “I took it to remember him by. And because I think I can use it for myself. It’s a very old book by Maimonides.”

  Niccolo turned the little volume over in his hands. “What’s it called?”

  “A Guide for the Perplexed.”

  She finished speaking and began to put her things back together, thoughtfully. Niccolo watched the careful hands arrange their few precious belongings on the red cloth in a tidy pile. Before she wrapped and tied the bundle, he spotted one last object that had escaped his previous inventory. It was a small, well-balanced dagger with an unreadable sign carved in its smooth black handle.

  A sharp, unpleasant bell, rung at short, quick intervals, warned of the beginning of curfew.

  The two of them slipped silently out of the Machiavelli house and headed toward the river along the route that Niccolo had devised. It was a route that steered clear of the well-traveled avenues and the main squares. It was an indirect route through the back streets and dingy alleys of Florence.

  Niccolo was an odd sight. He was stooped forward under the weight of a broken barrel that he wore on his back like the shell of a turtle. The barrel was perhaps three-quarters the height of the boy who carried it. Although the bottom end of it chafed against the back of Niccolo’s knees with every step, his legs moved swiftly and with assurance.

  Several staves had been broken out of this barrel in such a way as to form an open space on one side. Sitting with this open side up, the modified barrel resembled nothing if not a squat, clumsy boat.

  Giuditta padded along effortlessly behind him, but Niccolo was breathing hard from his exertions. When he calculated that they were about halfway to the end of their furtive nocturnal excursion, he stopped to rest. As she had done since they left the house, Giuditta continued to look around her in amazement, even awe. The city deserted and suffused in moonlight was an unearthly sight to her, one that she had never seen before, because Jews were not allowed out after dark.

  Niccolo, a veteran sneak, had seen the soundless, sleeping city many times before and took little notice of her quiet beauty. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the wonderstruck face of his companion, her features illuminated by the full moon, whose pale light turned earthly women into ghosts and angels.

  They kept close to the deep shadows and recessed doorways into which they could dissolve if need be. Niccolo concentrated on his route and his strategy. Everything was working so far, but the hardest part was yet to come. He shuddered when he thought of the river—at night. Things floated down, bloated things, dead dogs and cats. Corpses were not unknown, some of local manufacture, others coming from as far upstream as Bibbiena or Poppi. And beneath the black surface of the water? God only knew. Could rats swim?

  They reached the river just to one side of the Ponte all Carraia. Niccolo had chosen this spot for their point of departure because the shore here was crowded with sheds and warehouses right down to the water line. They would not be seen approaching. He put down the barrel and took a deep breath. This was it.

  Giuditta looked at him with a deadly serious expression on her face. “I can’t swim,” she stated flatly.

  “God help us,” thought Niccolo, but they had come too far to turn back now. “You don’t have to swim,” he said. “All you have to do is drift. Hang onto the barrel and drift. I won’t let you drown. Now get ready. Hitch your skirt up and tie it so your legs won’t get caught in all that cloth.”

  Niccolo went down to the water’s edge. He looked out across the river. No floating debris. The river was calm and flat, as if someone had poured an enormous quantity of oil on its surface. He dipped his hand into the black water. Cold, but not too cold. Thank God it was September and not December. He pulled out his shirt and loosened the laces on his hose. With his cupped hand, he splashed water several times on his exposed belly. Giuditta was observing this odd ritual from a few feet away.

  “What on earth are you doing,
” she asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “For the digestion,” he explained. “If you jump into the water and it’s cold, the sudden change in temperature can cause a really violent constriction, total blockage of the digestion. It can kill you. Did you know that most of the people who drown don’t drown in the water? They crawl up on the shore and die from the constrictions, strangled.”

  “Oh, really?” was all she said.

  Standing facing each other at opposite ends of the barrel, they lifted it in unison, up over their heads. They eased it down, working their heads into the interior, through the side where the staves were missing. Wearing the barrel like a large, outlandish helmet for two, they walked sideways, one step at a time to the waterline.

  The round hole where the tap would go and the spaces between the dried shrunken staves let in enough light for them to make out each other’s features, barely, and enough air for them to breathe. They inched into the water. It was cold enough to make them shiver.

  Ankle deep, then knee deep. The river bottom was muddy and soft and slippery. Niccolo had warned Giuditta that when the water reached midthigh, the bank dropped off sharply and they would no longer be able to touch bottom.

  “Aaaap!” she let out a cry that was cut off as her head went under. Instinctively, Niccolo shot both legs forward and caught her. He heaved. Up came her head, sputtering and coughing. For a moment, Giuditta gasped, unable to catch her breath, then she recovered.

  “Are you alright?” said Niccolo in a loud, urgent whisper.

  “I think so,” she replied, still coughing.

  “Did you slip?”

  “No, I didn’t slip,” she said slyly. “It must have been a digestive attack.”

  Now they were in position to travel. The barrel floated aimlessly, and apparently innocently, on the surface of the Arno. Niccolo had propelled it into the center of the current with a few scissor kicks, and then they were both still, adrift, at the mercy of the river.

  Underneath, inside, Niccolo and Giuditta held on for dear life, careful to keep their heads above the water, in the small pocket of air trapped on the river’s surface under the barrel. Something long and smooth brushed against Niccolo’s thigh. He cringed at the thought of eels.

  The inner surface of the barrel was crusty and gave off an overpowering, pungent aroma. It had once been used to store not wine but vinegar. Niccolo recognized the smell. It had nothing to do with the thin, acidic fumes given off by everyday vinegar. This was the deep richness of balsamic vinegar. Aged sometimes as long as twenty years, the acid was mellowed by the oak of the cask, and gradually the liquid became more and more concentrated, the flavor more intense.

  With an occasional kick, Niccolo kept the barrel on course, in the center of the current and not too close to either shore, where it might hang up on some obstruction. He was careful not to propel it downstream at a speed any faster than the sluggish current. That would arouse suspicion.

  So they drifted. Carrying them and concealing them, the barrel spun in lazy circles, constantly shifting the slanted rays of silver light that the cracks let in. One would fall, for a moment, across Giuditta’s right eye, and then slowly rotate across her face to the left. For an instant, her mouth would appear illuminated, then disappear.

  Niccolo and Giuditta did not speak. They could hear each other breathing. They were close enough to feel each other’s breath, close enough, thought Niccolo, to kiss.

  From where they had entered the river, Niccolo calculated that they had to go about a hundred yards to clear the circumference of the city walls. Any minute now, they would be reaching the critical point in their strange and secret nocturnal journey—the point where the walls sloped down to form low ramparts along the banks, the point where two turrets manned by armed guards flanked the river, and the point where, if they were lucky, they would pass out of the city into the open country beyond.

  Above the gentle lapping and smacking sounds of the water they could hear voices, at first indistinct, but growing stronger. They were guards’ voices—cursing voices, heavy with drink.

  “Cento . . . centocinquanta . . . duecento—A hundred . . . Hundred and fifty . . . two hundred.” They were gambling. “You cheating bastard . . .” The game was interrupted by a voice from the other bank, “Aaoow, Gianuzzo, Luca, fate attenzione! Something’s coming down the river, closer to your side. Have a look.”

  Niccolo winced. They had been spotted. But there was nothing to do, no conceivable course of action to take. They hung on and waited, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Whasssit?” slurred one of the watchmen. “I can’t make it out. Wait . . . it’s something fat—and short.”

  “Maybe a dead priest,” offered his companion.

  “No, it’s a barrel, a barrel, Luca, that could be, just could be full of strong drink. Get the pole. We’ll pull her in and have a look.”

  Niccolo kicked his legs, almost imperceptibly, hoping to move them out of reach, in the opposite direction, away from the bank. They were so close, they could hear the guards grunting; they could hear the long wooden pole clatter on the stone wall; they could hear the rasp as it slid out over the rough stone. There was a splash not a foot away from the barrel.

  “We almost got it. Here, let me try. Luca, grab me around the waist so I can get farther out.” The scene must have been comic, for there was laughter from across the way.

  The pole made contact with the barrel, a dull thump, then slipped off. Another bump. “Damn, I can’t bring it around. It’s getting away. Yo! Over there! I’m going to push it across your way. See if you can get a line on it.”

  There was a resounding knock on the side of the barrel that sent it spinning off in the direction of the opposite bank. Niccolo almost lost his grip. But he held on and managed to slow their momentum a little. “Come on now, give us a hand and pull it in,” urged the voice of Gianuzzo.

  “You’re both drunk,” said the voice on the other bank.

  “It’s getting away, damn it! That barrel is full of the finest vintage wine from Portugal, I know it! Damn it! Damn it!”

  “Why don’t you jump in after it, then,” taunted the other voice.

  “You son of a whore, the least you could have done was . . .” but as the argument began to heat up and the insults to fly, the voices became fainter and receded slowly into distant, indistinguishable snarlings. Then there was only the water, the gentle, reassuring sound of the lazy water carrying them to safety.

  “How much farther?” asked Giuditta, “I can’t hold on much longer.” Both of them were at the end of their strength. Nevertheless, gallant Niccolo encircled her small body with his legs and pulled her to him. His arms and knuckles ached from the effort of holding on, his stomach muscles stiffened as he strained to hold her up and keep her head above water. “It won’t be long now,” he whispered, their faces almost touching. She was shivering, whether from fear or cold, he didn’t know. He drew her even closer in an instinctive gesture of protection and held on.

  “I felt it! I touched bottom,” said Giuditta in an excited whisper.

  Niccolo untangled his legs and planted his feet firmly on the river bottom. They were in about three feet of water. “Can you stand up?” he asked. She did so, so precipitously that she bumped her head on the top of the barrel. Despite the pain, she laughed. They both did. “Keep still a minute,” said Niccolo. “Stay under here and don’t move. I’ll check to make sure we can go ashore.” With that, he took a deep breath and was gone, disappearing into the black emptiness of the water, leaving her alone.

  A minute or two passed. Giuditta crouched down and waited in her tiny bubble of safety between the night and the blackness of the water. Suddenly the bubble burst.

  In a rush of air, the barrel rose, torn from water’s surface. Niccolo stood in triumph, waist-deep in the water and only a few feet from the riverbank. “Come on. We made it,” he cried, perhaps a little too loudly, but making no attempt to conceal his exhilaration. He grabbed her hand, an
d they scrambled up the muddy bank. When they reached dry ground, they stopped, breathing hard.

  “Just a minute,” said Giuditta. “Let me rest. I’m . . . That was . . . I don’t believe . . . ,” she let out a long sigh and sank, almost collapsed, to the ground, allowing herself to relax for the first time since Niccolo had announced his audacious plan to her over three hours ago. The worst was over.

  Niccolo stood, savoring his victory, looking back at the dark walls in the distance. “Formidable, but ineffective,” he thought in exaltation. He had done it. He had gotten her out of the city and away. He was exhausted, but he had never felt better in his life.

  As he watched their miniature Noah’s Ark float downstream, all he could think of was the closeness in there, the intensity of feeling that the closeness brought on, the sense of warmth, even in the cold water, and the sweet smell, and her breath on his face.

  Although tired, both Niccolo and Giuditta were too excited to stay still for long, and after only a few minutes’ rest, they set off. They easily gained the road and set a brisk pace, to build up body heat and keep warm in their wet clothes. A stiff but not unkind wind was blowing crisp but dry from the south. In no time, they were relatively dry and comfortable in their mud-stiffened clothes.

  They kept close to the side of the broad road, ready to throw themselves into the cover of the underbrush and darkness should anyone approach. But no one did. There was a sense of relaxed intimacy between them now, and the sense of shared struggle and victory that unites comrades-in-arms. They had taken risks together, braved dangers and won. Giuditta laughed easily. They joked about bandits. Niccolo wished that the road would go on forever. And that they could laugh and talk together, hurrying down that dark road, all alone, just each other for a thousand, thousand miles. This was the best of all possible worlds.

  He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, so many things he wanted to know. Some of the mysteries of the ghetto, she had been able to clear up for him. Like the prodigious number of clogs in her father’s pawnshop. Where Niccolo had seen conspiracy and perhaps revolution, there was only kindness. Her father often agreed to lend small sums of money to the destitute and took their worn and useless clogs as a sign of good faith. They were poor but too proud to accept charity, no matter how desperate—and from a Jew! The pledge of the clogs kept alive the ritual of exchange and mutual obligation, of equality. And it kept alive in their all-but-crushed spirits some spark of self-respect and dignity. A man could still look his wife and children in the eyes.