Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  “Hebrew?” said Niccolo.

  “Not really,” said Giuditta.

  “Well, it’s certainly not Italian.”

  “It is if you know how to read it,” she said. “Look.” Giuditta took a fresh sheet of the coarse paper and jotted a few words on it. At least they looked like a few words. “Now,” she said, taking on the admonitory tones of a schoolmaster, “You know enough about codes and ciphers to appreciate the fact that most often the symbols stand for letters or sounds. The Hebrew characters are just like the letters of your alphabets. You can use them to write Hebrew words, or you can use them to spell out Italian words as well. See here. This character represents the sound ‘N,’ this one ‘C,’ this one ‘L.’ Put them together—and you’ve written ‘Niccolo.’”

  “Amazing.”

  “Well, at least it can be useful. Because the message isn’t obviously written in code, or something that would be easily recognizable as a code, like a page covered with squiggly things and exotic little drawings, I can send a message like this, and it will seem perfectly innocent. Mix it in with a batch of commercial dispatches and no one suspects anything. Daniele can send this letter to Rome for me, along with some of his business correspondence.”

  “Is it difficult to learn?” asked Niccolo.

  “Child’s play. It may take some time to learn how to write the characters, but with a good eye, you can decode a message quite easily, in no time. Here, let me show you.” Giuditta took another piece of paper and ruled it into two columns. Down one side, she put the letters of the Latin alphabet. Alongside them, she inscribed the corresponding Hebrew characters. When she was finished, she wrote a short message at the bottom. “Read it,” she said.

  Niccolo struggled with the unfamiliar symbols, running his finger up and down the columns and tracing the Latin equivalents as he went. Finished, he inspected his work—“Non ti voglio lasciare. I don’t want to leave you,” she had written. Their hands met among the sheets of paper covered with mysterious writing, and Niccolo squeezed. She squeezed back like someone holding onto something she didn’t want to lose.

  The next morning, after taking her leave of Lucrezia, Giuditta would return to Rome. With her she would carry a dispatch from the Florentine envoy to his ambassador there. The letter contained instructions to the Florentine embassy in Rome to aid and assist the bearer in the execution of Caterina Sforza’s escape from the Belvedere fortress and her subsequent safe passage to Florence, where asylum would be waiting for her.

  When she was gone, Niccolo dressed lethargically. He could still smell her like a ghost in the sheets, on the pillows, on his hands. He trudged back to the dirty room he had taken upon his arrival in Ferrara. The innkeeper greeted him with a storm of abuse and from under a counter pulled an enormous stack of letters and dispatches, all doubly and triply urgent.

  Niccolo went up to his shabby room and sorted idly through the correspondence. All of it was from the Signoria, and as he read, he was drawn slowly back into the business at hand. Nothing had changed, though, and it all seemed so endless now, so tiresome. The Signoria renewed their demands for information on Borgia’s moves, they cautioned him to commit them to nothing specific, and, of course, they promised to send money—soon. It took him the better part of the morning to read through it all, and he was just beginning to write his well-crafted responses when there was a rough pounding at the door, and the insolent innkeeper barged in. He threw a letter on the bed and snarled “Another one” before skulking out.

  Niccolo reached for the new missive and his heart leapt. It was from her. He recognized the hand and eagerly, he ripped open the envelope. It was in the Hebrew code! So eager was he to read it that he cursed. He knew it would take a long time for him to decipher the thing and tease its meaning out.

  Taking out the sheet Giuditta had given him, with the two columns of symbols, he went to work. He struggled valiantly against the mysterious, recalcitrant text, letter by letter, impatient for the stubborn page to yield its secrets. It was slow and frustrating work.

  Finally, he was finished, but to his great dismay, he had produced only gibberish. Laboriously, he went back over everything, every character, and still the thing made no sense. Where could he be going wrong? There must be some other level of code. He searched his memory for some clue, carefully going over their conversation of the day before. But to no avail. What was the matter? He stared at the words he had written down. Utter nonsense. Then it came to him. Of course! He had read the thing the way he always read—left to right. But Giuditta had written the Hebrew letters in the order she was accustomed to reading them—right to left!

  Line by line, Niccolo went back over the text, his excitement growing with each new word, each new revelation. He would have been happy with a love letter, ecstatic even. That was all he wanted—a small avowal, a tender word. But this was something altogether different. With a growing sense of disbelief, Niccolo read on. Giuditta had gone to see her former mistress, Lucrezia. Although content with her new husband, and very much in love with him, she was disconsolate over something she had learned only recently from her brother. When Niccolo was done reading, he knew Caesar Borgia’s terrible secret.

  In the middle of the piazza and attracting quite a bit of attention was a gentleman richly dressed in a red velvet mantle trimmed with silver. His hands and forearms were sheathed in spotless, white kid gloves, and he wore boots to match. A lush, black beard and long, curly, black hair framed his handsome features, although he wore a look of surprise and consternation at being the object of so much gawking and scrutiny.

  Niccolo had followed Caesar Borgia south from Ferrara, through Imola and Forli, back here to Cesena. As he prodded his weary mount toward yet another overpriced inn, the commotion in the piazza attracted his attention, and he nudged the horse in its direction to see for himself what it was all about. It took Niccolo a few seconds to actually assemble the confusing visual evidence in front of him. The “gentleman” around whom the crowd was seething had been cut into two pieces. Neatly, cleanly, rather surgically, his legs had been separated from his torso. His trunk was planted upright on the paving stones from where he stared at the onlookers in frozen disbelief.

  When he was over his initial shock, Niccolo was able to identify the body in the square as that of Ramiro de Lorca, a Spaniard Caesar had left to govern Romagna in his absence. Apparently Ramiro had not done a satisfactory job. Abruptly and grimly, Niccolo was transported back into the mysterious, violent world of Caesar Borgia and his machinations.

  Niccolo was sick, but he had been sick before. He was tired, but he had been tired for months, and so he went about his business, which by now had become routine. He secured lodgings, stabled his horse, and settled in to write dispatches. And to wait. Sooner or later the great man would send for him. There was no need to advise Caesar of his whereabouts. Caesar would already know.

  Toward midafternoon, after a heavy meal and a brief nap, Niccolo went out to see what he could learn. He avoided the main square, where the bug-eyed corpse was still attracting curiosity seekers and a great many flies as well. Apart from the crowds milling around the grisly spectacle, Cesena was a veritable beehive of activity. Troops moved in and out of town, and from what Niccolo could tell, they were moving in all directions at once. A contingent of Swiss mercenaries entered from the south. At the same time, a troop of seasoned Romagnouli left the city by the same gate. What was it Giuditta had said? “The pope never does what he says and Caesar never says what he does.”

  Niccolo smiled. It was not the first time he had found himself using that phrase, “What was it Giuditta had said?” In his dreary life of waiting and anticipation, she was the only bright spot. At night, instead of lying awake and wrestling with demons who all looked suspiciously like Caesar Borgia, he found a little solace in thoughts of her and in his memories of their brief, sweet time together. “Someday,” he told himself, “when this business is finished, I’ll go to Rome and . . .”

  B
ut this business was far from being finished. He knew it, and he tramped off through the cold, wet streets of Cesena to see what he could do about it. An entire section of the city had been taken over by several divisions of Caesar’s troops who were making their winter headquarters in Cesena, and it was into that quarter that Niccolo directed himself. He was getting to know Cesena pretty well—and Forli and Faenza and Imola—all Borgia’s cities. But Niccolo was growing weary of these Romagnouli cities. He wanted to go home. He wanted to sleep in Florence and eat Florentine food. He wanted to be among family and friends. To make matters even worse for him, in two weeks’ time, it would be Christmas. As Niccolo looked at the troops around him sharpening and grinding weapons, cleaning armor, attending to animals and siege machines, his heart sank. They were preparing for something, and it was not a joyous celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.

  Lost in his thoughts and torn between twin longings—for Giuditta and for his native land—Niccolo heard something that he at first mistook for a part of his lazy dream. At first he thought it was only his imagination, but when he cocked his ear and listened attentively, it was unmistakable. Someone was speaking with a Florentine accent. Niccolo’s ears, too long tortured by the hard, foreign accents of unfamiliar dialects, leapt with excitement at the clear, bright sounds of his beloved Florentine. A little audible piece of home! Like food for a starving man! Like manna in the desert!

  Glancing around, he quickly spotted the Florentine. He was a large, imperious man barking orders at a few laborers. And he was not dressed like a respectable Florentine. His rose-colored satin cape barely descended to his buttocks and did nothing to hide the immodest bulge in his skintight hose. Lace was visible at his wrists and neck. His great plumed hat was downright Spanish!

  The man paid no attention to the unassuming Florentine envoy and went about his business of berating the laborers. His voice was high and unpleasant and rushed out of him like air under pressure being squeezed out of a bladder. When he moved, he moved with the easy grace of an athlete entering the arena and with the extreme self-consciousness of one who is always sure he is being watched—and admired. Niccolo followed, shuffling along behind him.

  The man seated himself on the edge of a fountain and opened a large notebook he was carrying. Immediately, he was absorbed in it. Niccolo settled next to him and tried to get a look at what he was doing. When the man became aware of Niccolo’s presence, he looked up from his work and eyed him suspiciously. “What do you want?” His voice was sharp, but it was Florentine.

  “To talk to a fellow Florentine. That’s all,” said Niccolo. “To ease the burden of my exile a little by sharing it.”

  “Go talk to someone else then,” said the stranger. “You call me a Florentine. I call myself a citizen of the world.” With that dismissal, he turned back to his work.

  He pulled out a piece of red chalk and began to work on a drawing, throwing a hostile glance over his shoulder from time to time in Niccolo’s direction. Finally exasperated by the fact that Niccolo was refusing to go away, he shoved the notebook in his face: “There, ignoramus, have a good look. Now, what did you see?”

  “Enough to recognize a siege machine,” said Niccolo. “And an antiquated siege machine at that. A trebuchet.”

  “If I want to design a trebuchet, I will, whether its antiquated or not,” said the stranger gruffly.

  “Do you know how Germans use them now?” asked Niccolo shrewdly. “Since the arm in one of those contraptions is useless against anything much stronger than a wooden stockade, they use it to lob things up over the walls, not directly at them. They hurl terrible things into besieged towns, noxious things. They’ll sling a rotting sheep’s carcass over the walls and hope that sooner or later the smell will cause the inhabitants to surrender. Or the disease.”

  The sharp-tongued man turned to Niccolo. “So you think you know about siege machinery?” he asked guardedly.

  “I should,” said Niccolo. “Florence has been in the process of besieging Pisa for the better part of a century now.”

  “That only shows the Pisans know more about defensive fortifications than the Florentines know about siege warfare.”

  Niccolo had to concede the point.

  “Here, Florentine, take a look at these,” said the man, moving closer to Niccolo and showing him his notebook. As he flipped through page after page of sketches, Niccolo saw designs for advanced fortifications as well as wheeled penthouses and movable ladders for scaling those fortifications. He saw mortars for showering an advancing enemy with stones or jagged bits of metal and assault wagons for protecting men and horses against just such a barrage. There were innumerable sketches of cannon—light, medium, and heavy. Many of them were decorated with fanciful ornaments—a head of Mars, dragons.

  Still, Niccolo could not conceal his admiration for the man’s work. Although much of it was distilled from earlier designs with which Niccolo was familiar, much was provocative and new. And the diversity! The eccentric engineer puffed up a little, sensing Niccolo’s approval and interest. He was suddenly eager to show off his work and explain it. “You see here,” he said, talking rapidly and indicating an odd device with pipes and levers, “a suction pump. It can be used to drain a moat in no time, run the water right out.”

  “Impressive,” said Niccolo. “All these machines are impressive. But what are you going to do with them? Who’s going to use them?”

  “I am engaged, sir, as military engineer to Caesar Borgia, by the grace of God, duke of Romagna, Valentinois, and Urbino, standard-bearer and captain general of the church,” replied the stranger with a flourish.

  “Pompous ass,” thought Niccolo, but he said, “So you work for Borgia? Let me ask you something. You’re a Florentine. Suppose Borgia chooses to attack Florence. Will you make your wonderful engines available to him for that?”

  “What do I care where he strikes, whom he attacks?” replied the man. “He pays me. In exchange, I design fortifications and the means for destroying them.”

  Niccolo eyed the engineer, not without a certain disdain. “Your allegiance is only to money, then?”

  “Fool! Money I need to live, but my allegiance is to my designs, to my inspiration, to my own genius!”

  Niccolo did not appreciate being called a fool, but he let it pass. He contemplated the self-declared genius as the latter once again applied himself to his sketches. With a mild shock, Niccolo realized that the man was drawing with his left hand. “Sinister implications,” he thought, “the devil’s work is in the left hand.”

  He watched that left hand fly across the pages of the sketchbook. The strokes it made were bold and sure, never tentative. “Whatever else he is,” thought Niccolo, “he has talent.” As if to confirm this observation, a mangy, half-starved dog limped across the piazza in front of the two Florentines. In a heartbeat, the “genius” flipped to a fresh page of his notebook and in less than a dozen strokes, reproduced the dog. The accuracy of the depiction was uncanny. The speed with which he did it, astounding.

  Then, without looking up, he went back to the sketch of the catapult on which he had been working. He was drawing in dotted lines to indicate the trajectory the missiles would follow when launched. From time to time, he scribbled something along the lines or at the base of his machine. Niccolo assumed that these were indications of distance and the corresponding angles of fire, but he couldn’t exactly read them. There was something odd about this man’s handwriting. Niccolo had noticed it when he was reviewing the sketches of the war machines. At first, he dismissed it as an eccentricity, an odd, cramped hand with a funny slant—probably the result of writing left-handed.

  But as he looked at sketch after annotated sketch and sometimes entire pages of notes written in the book, Niccolo began to realize that the hand was not just difficult to read, it was completely illegible. Moreover, he began to suspect that it was deliberately so. When he saw the man actually jotting in the numbers and figures on his drawing, Niccolo’s suspicions
were confirmed. Not only was he writing with his left hand, he was writing backward, from right to left!

  “Hebrew!” was the first thought that entered Niccolo’s mind. He remembered the way Giuditta had written and how her message had eluded him until he read it in the proper direction. As he was pondering these mysteries, a ragged beggar approached them, pitiful and deformed. He held out an emaciated hand for alms. The genius took one look at him, muttered, “Dio, che faccia”—“God what a face,” and flipped back to the page where he had drawn the mangy dog.

  He sketched the sunken eyes, the toothless leer, the ratty hair, and dirty beard. The portrait was startling in its immediacy, and Niccolo watched spellbound as it emerged line by line on the page. When the brash artist was finished, however, he turned immediately back to his work on the siege machine, leaving the pathetic beggar standing in front of him perplexed and disappointed. It was Niccolo who finally extracted a few coins from his pocket and pressed them into the artist’s model’s quivering hand.

  “Amazing,” thought Niccolo, “simply amazing.” He had in mind not only the man’s extraordinary talent, but his callousness as well. For the better part of an hour, Niccolo watched him. Whenever anyone of interest, anyone physically arresting or bizarre entered the piazza, the genius quickly found a fresh page in his notebook, recorded the image in chalk, then returned to his engines of war. He went at it with a dispassionate objectivity, flipping the big pages back and forth, but he worked at a feverish and unrelenting pace. He drew boys and prostitutes, soldiers and grandmothers. He sketched cannons and mortars and battlements and fortifications. And all the while, he scribbled notes to himself, scribbled from right to left.