“There’s three things I won’t touch with the end of a pole,” the last told them bluntly. “One’s Swedish dalers, and the other’s raw metal.” Bernardo was already turning away.
“Well, where can we sell it?” Salvestro burst out in exasperation.
“Something like that? I’d hammer it down and sell it in Ripetta if I were you, and I’d keep it wrapped up in the meantime.”
Salvestro digested this. “We didn’t steal it,” he said.
“And we haven’t got a hammer,” added Bernardo.
The man eyed them steadily. “It’s yours by right, so you say?” They nodded. “Well, if it is, you could try Lucullo.” He pointed a little way down the Via dell’Elefante where a large crowd engulfed a number of benches, behind which three or four young men scampered about, weighing and counting out coins at extraordinary speed.
“What’s the third thing you wouldn’t touch?” asked Salvestro as two men approached carrying between them a large weighty sack.
“The French,” the man said, turning to serve his customers.
Howls of outrage, followed by claims of a rate twice as good and offered only minutes earlier, pursued them across and then down the street.
In contrast with the other customers in the piazza, the crowd about Lucullo’s pitch seemed calm and good-humored, jovial even, with bags changing hands every few seconds rather than every few minutes, no haggling, and one man who feigned outrage at the offered rate was quickly frowned into silence by his neighbors as if this were the height of ill manners. Little flows of geniality and goodwill darted back and forth across the benches. Pilgrims were passing the wait comparing flea-bites and rolling down their stockings to show off knees scabbed from the crawl up the Holy Stairs of the Lateran. Salvestro waved the scabbard about until one of the young men turned from serving another satisfied customer.
“We’re looking for Lucullo,” announced Salvestro. “Are you him?”
The young man shook his head. “I’m Lucillo, his son. We all are,” indicating the others. “His sons, I mean. Unusual piece.” He took the scabbard. “I’m afraid we cannot offer a price on raw metal until Father returns. That will be late this afternoon. Can you wait?”
“This is all we have,” Salvestro confessed. “What do we do in the meantime?”
“And what do we eat?” Bernardo added.
“Well, you could look for him at the Broken Spur; if not there, then the Sly Batavian, or perhaps the Golden Shower.” He thought for a second, then called out, “Where else might he be?” to his brothers.
“It’s Tuesday. He’ll be at Rodolfo’s,” one of them shouted back.
“Of course. He’ll be there, gentlemen. That’s the tavern of the Broken Wheel in Ripa, a little way past Santa Caterina’s. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Salvestro looked about at the smiling faces pressing in on the benches to either side of him. “You must give very good rates here,” he said.
“Actually, taken as a mean of all our rates, the rate here is marginally worse than everyone else’s,” said Lucillo. “We do however offer exchange rates on several low-rated currencies unexchangeable elsewhere in Rome, and these anomalous rates drag down the mean.”
“Swedish dalers, for instance?”
“A good example,” Lucillo replied gravely. “We will exchange copper dalers, but only on a raw metal basis. The current rate is four thousand two hundred and fifty-eight dalers, or a little more than a bucketful, to the soldo. Our strong advice to daler clients is to spend their dalers where they are accepted as coin, the northernmost parts of the kingdom of Sweden, for instance.”
“And what about the French?” continued Salvestro. Customers on either side of him shook their heads at this, but, a brief expression of startlement aside, Lucillo retained his poise.
“Lucullo and Sons has an active policy which is reviewed on the basis of events as they become apparent and implemented at our discretion in regard to ad hoc transactions presented to us by individual livre clients. At times we have conducted French livre transactions, and at other times we have dealt directly with clients whom we believed at that time to be French, but never the two together.”
“And now?”
“At the present time, our policy regarding the French is not to touch them even with the end of a long pole.”
The pilgrims were streaming up the Via dell’Elefante now, the other thoroughfares already choked. Eager, trepidant faces bobbed in and out of view, trying to get a look at whatever lay ahead. One or two stopped for a moment to gawp at Bernardo, and then Salvestro, before they were carried along on the flood. A few inns had opened their shutters and put up awnings of faded sacking against the sunlight. The first of the day’s drinkers were installing themselves at the best tables to watch the jostling throng, tankards in hand. Standing a head or so higher than even the tallest pilgrims, Bernardo looked down the street, then back into the piazza. “I can see the monks,” he said, shading his eyes. “I think it’s them.”
“Come on,” said Salvestro. “Let’s find this Lucullo.”
A large crowd ballooned from the archway leading into the courtyard of San Damaso, packed elbow to elbow at the front, loosening as it swelled and swung back into the northwest corner of the piazza but growing more anxious and ill-tempered there. HansJürgen felt sharp elbows dig at his ribs and smelled his neighbors’ sour sweat. Every few seconds he would rise on the balls of his feet to see if they had made any more progress. Two soldiers armed with pikes and dressed in gaudy pink-and-green uniforms flanked a cleric who questioned each of the petitioners and recorded their names in a ledger before admitting them to the courtyard. “No one gets in after midday,” someone said in a worried tone. Similar comments followed. Tensions whipped themselves into minor panics, subsided, returned in the form of anxious questions and outbursts of temper. It was hot, jammed together. They had been there two hours.
A long row of benches extended along one side of the piazza almost to the rearmost part of the crowd. The money changers behind them barely glanced at the petitioners, the pilgrims doing business there likewise. HansJürgen looked about him to try once again to count the brothers. The crowd’s internal shufflings and drifts had spread them in a long straggling line, but they seemed not to have moved forward since they’d arrived. A sharp yelp sounded, a voice he knew. He looked forward; someone had trod on Brother Matthias’s toe.
More time passed, dawdling seconds, lumpish minutes. He tried to retreat within himself, to direct his attentions there, but the archway pulled and tugged at him. They were none of them any nearer. The sun rose steadily higher. Men and women passed through the archway in an excruciating trickle. He glanced around him and saw faces stamped with his own muted worry. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf were behind him. It was when Wolf was asking him how they should address the Pope that the shouting started.
It was up ahead, nearer the doorway. Angry faces were turned toward a flurry of movement, a gray robe like his own flapping about, entangled with someone’s cloak, perhaps. Then the cloak, or its owner, suddenly disappeared, and HansJürgen saw that the habit was Gerhardt’s and he was shoving forcefully at the petitioners around him, forcing a way through to the front. The whole crowd seemed to be shouting in protest when Hanno reached back a hand, pulling him forward, and he hardly had time to grasp Wolf by the cowl of his habit before the monks were all moving forward in a line, cutting brusquely through the crowd to the gate, where Gerhardt was shouting angrily at the two guards, then the cleric, who nodded and stood aside. HansJürgen kept hold of Wolf. Florian seemed to have the other two and was following. But the crowd understood what was happening now. An old woman screamed abuse into his face. Someone shoved him violently between the shoulder blades, and he almost lost his footing. When they too passed beneath the archway, Father Jörg was pronouncing his name for the benefit of the cleric, “Jo-urg of Yoos-edom,” the two guards were pushing back the other petitioners with the butt-ends of their pikes, a
nd Gerhardt was explaining with satisfaction to Georg, “Well, someone had to do it, else we’d have been standing there all day. …” Someone had spat on Wilf, and he was crying. “We’ll tell the Pope when we see him,” Wolf promised vengefully.
There were scarcely fewer people in the courtyard than outside, but they were calmer, wandering about in little groups, looking up at the loggia, or resting in the shade of the colonnades that echoed it on two sides of their own level. A few were asleep. The sound and smell of horses wafted through a wide, high passage on the south side of the quadrangle, and from time to time someone’s mount would be led out, already saddled, by ostlers dressed in livery similar to that of the guards. There was this and the clamor from the piazza, which sharpened in pitch a little after their entry. The cleric with the ledger had disappeared, and the guards were shaking their heads, barring the entrance with their pikes.
Most of the courtyard was in shade when they entered, but as the time passed and the sun crept higher, the shade began to ebb. The entrance to the palace was a pair of heavy and fantastically carved doors. They remained closed. HansJürgen restrained the urge to pace the courtyard. His stomach felt light and quivery. Jörg stood a little apart from the others in the full glare of the sunlight. The other petitioners watched him curiously. He seemed to be looking at nothing, his face calm and composed. HansJürgen thought back to the times he had seen that same expression, on the night of the church’s destruction, on that of the Abbot’s death. The day that followed it, too. How had he doubted the man? Was his own faith so weak? And now the impossible pinprick of light their Prior had glimpsed was a whole blazing sun. Soon they would be ushered into the cool of the palace and he would be waiting there to receive them: the Pope himself.
“Man of the cloth, eh?” The voice startled him. He turned to find an old man addressing him, his face wrinkled and creased from the sun. HansJürgen nodded. “How’d you get in, then?” the man continued, “Don’t usually let monks in here. Not often, anyway.”
“We have come all the way from Usedom to petition His Holiness,” HansJürgen replied, smiling benevolently at the man. “I’m sure he will at least see us.”
“See you?” exclaimed the man, and began laughing. “That’s another tale entirely. I was wondering how you got in here.”
“We are here to present our petition,” said HansJürgen, more stiffly.
“Ah! Single petition. That’d be how you got in. Why let thirty petitioners in when you can get one and twenty-nine of his friends? Yes, that’d be it. Clever, these clerks. I’m Batista, in case you’re interested, or even if you’re not.”
At that moment there was a sudden shout, and almost as a man the men and women leaning against the walls and columns, laid out on the ground, or standing together in little groups began to call up to the empty loggia above. A dozen or so ran to the palace doors.
Batista looked around casually. “False alarm,” he said. “You get used to them after a while.”
The noise died down as quickly as it had started. Batista ambled away. Beneath the colonnades, three women had surrounded a man dressed in strange purple robes and were taunting him, “What, the Prior of Minervino? The famous one? Well, your Minervino-ness, let me kiss your arse unless you want to kiss mine. …” The man was swatting at them furiously but without effect. HansJürgen looked again at the Prior. He was standing alone, quite motionless. Most of the monks were sitting on the flagstones, backs leaning against the wall, fanning themselves in the heat. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf were playing a game that involved hopping and jumping. Two men were throwing small coins against a wall and gambling on the outcome. There was a current of controlled impatience. The recalcitrant minutes dripped and pooled in the courtyard, he did not know how many.
He walked slowly up and down one side of the courtyard, up to the wall of the palace, turn, back toward the piazza. Gerhardt, Hanno, and Georg sat together in silence, and each time he passed them he felt their attention as a kind of prickling in the air. Since his defeat in the chapter-house, Gerhardt’s demeanor had changed. Through all the hardships of their journey, the constant wet and cold, the terrible emptiness of the mountains, he had affected a steadfast simplicity, answering all but the most matter-of-fact questions by saying, “I am a builder, that is all,” or, “I know stone and wood and nothing else,” or merely holding out his hands as though their scars and calluses were stigmata exempting him from inquiry. It was a retreat only, as HansJürgen understood it. There had been no recanting or any sign of remorse. He had doubted, and conspired, and been proved wrong, for here they were in Rome itself, and if he should let his thoughts run only a little ahead, then they would be ushered into the audience hall, within it a throne, upon it a man, and a man like no other in Christendom. A Pope, HansJürgen told himself, rolling the enormity of it over in his mind, daydreaming, paying no attention, or not enough, when it happened.
Afterward he would recall the sequence of sounds more exactly, as a rustling and scraping, as quick footsteps and the bang of the doors, then the great clamor that started up and at which he looked around to see that the doors were open and a man in dark robes was standing in them, surrounded by the same Switzer guards, holding open the same ledger, his mouth opening and closing but the words quite inaudible beneath the shouting, something quickly passed through the door not once, but five, six times, and the petitioners all scrambling and flailing at one another to get nearer. Then the note changed to anger, and then it was a groan of disappointment, shouts of “No! No!” but the doors were closing, and succeeding the dull boom of their slamming shut, an abrupt silence. There was a moment only of this before the mass of bodies seemed to come apart, murmuring and grumbling. He saw one man crying.
They began to wander toward the archway that led back into the piazza, and HansJürgen had to push his way through them to reach the Prior. The brothers were clustered about him, looking from Jürg, to the closed door, to the petitioners streaming past them, and back to Jörg again. But their Prior was silent and seemed as bewildered as they. HansJürgen felt a hand on his arm, Batista’s.
“No luck, eh? You’ve got to be sharper than that.”
“But, His Holiness …?” began HansJürgen.
“That was his secretary,” snorted Batista. “It’s a rare day His High-and-Might-iness drags himself down here.” He held up a small chinking bag. “Still, twenty soldi, not bad.”
HansJürgen turned and pushed his way through the men and women who now moved dully across his path. Jörg was turning his head this way and that as though searching for something in the blank wall. He grasped Hansjürgen’s arm.
“What has happened?” he asked. “I heard shouting.”
“There will be no audience today,” HansJürgen said bluntly.
“No audience?” echoed Wolf. They had given up their game and drawn nearer.
“When do we see the Pope, then?” asked Wilf.
“Tomorrow?” ventured Wulf.
The same questions wrote themselves in different hands over other faces: bewilderment in Joachim-Heinz’s, amazement in Heinz-Joachim’s, disappointment in Gundolf’s and Florian’s, mixtures of these in the others ranked behind them. At the very back stood Gerhardt, Hanno, and Georg. Their faces showed only skepticism, and HansJürgen felt the noiseless hum of uncertainty, indecision, a reverberation from the distant monastery, a stirring of the monks’ discontents. It cannot happen again, he thought. He cannot lose them again. But then the Prior’s voice sounded.
“Well,” said Father Jörg, looking into the faces about him, “if His Holiness cannot see us, I am sure he will not object if we worship in his chapel.” His tone was unconcerned, even jocular. The monks looked at one another. The Pope’s chapel? What was this? “Today he tests us. Tomorrow he rewards us. We shall sing a Mass for our benefactor,” Jörg continued, “and we shall sing it in the greatest church in Christendom.”
He turned and began to walk toward the archway. For a moment they did not move, and Hans
Jürgen held his breath. “In Saint Peter’s!” Jörg called out. Peter’s name jolted them, or the confidence of his invoking. Florian was the first, then Volker. They shuffled forward, then hurried to catch up, and the others followed. Bringing up the rear, HansJürgen released his breath slowly, silently, so that none of them might notice.
They had seen signs painted with blue-, black-, and rust-colored cats, crossed and uncrossed miters, smiling suns, headless sailors, drums, compasses, a portcullis, several fish, but not as yet a Broken Wheel. They had been around Santa Caterina’s three times, halfway down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, then back, up and down between the river twice, and had viewed the Melingulo Tower from seven of its eight possible angles before Bernardo noticed a narrow alley running between a large stables and a crumbling granary. Projecting out of a wall at the far end of the alley was a pole from which a sign, perhaps the one they sought, might once have hung. The two of them moved forward.
Beneath the pole was a low and narrow doorway. Bent double to peer in, they were able to make out a sunken floor, some chairs and rough tables, and a counter running down one wall, behind which stood a man who viewed them over the top of a glass tilted to his lips and seemingly frozen there.
“Is this the tavern called the Broken Wheel?” asked Salvestro, at which the man threw the glass’s contents down his throat, gasped, coughed, belched, and nodded. The hum of raised voices sounded from somewhere in the building’s depths. A dog joined the two of them briefly at the door. The man ignored them steadily. Salvestro looked up the bare signpole. “Where’s the wheel, then?” he demanded.
“Broken,” said the man, intent on pouring himself another tot. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Lucullo.” The man looked at them sharply, spilling a little of the liquid on the counter. “His son sent us. Lucillo.” The dog left at this point.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 34