The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “In the back.” The second tot followed the first, and he gestured with the empty glance toward a thickening of the gloom in the back wall. “Follow the corridor, and don’t open any doors that aren’t already open.”

  The noise grew louder and more distinct as they stumbled down the corridor, registering as loud competitive talking mixed with odd shouts and interjections, until the two of them emerged at the top of three steps and found themselves surveying a spacious rectangular room, almost a hall. Large candles blazed from every table, for the place was windowless, throwing a strong yellow light over the faces that turned from their conversations and tankards to stare at them now in silence. Two pillars emerged from the stone floor and continued up into a wooden ceiling. The floor itself was filled with tables and chairs and surrounded by raised wooden booths, seven or eight on each side. Cooking smells wafted in from somewhere.

  Salvestro cleared his throat. “We’re looking for Lucullo.”

  More silence. Then, when they were about to turn tail and go back the way they’d come, a voice called from one of the booths, “Here. In here,” and at that the rest of the Broken Wheel’s patrons turned away from them as one and resumed their earlier conversations. Salvestro and Bernardo threaded a path among the tables to the source of the voice. A head peeked out, followed by a large hand that beckoned them to sit down.

  He was a big man, richly dressed, broad-chested, and gray-haired. A strong brow jutted over steady eyes that watched their scramble onto the bench across the table from his own. A number of pies sat before him, hot and meaty smelling. Bernardo watched the pies carefully.

  “You know me?” asked Lucullo, putting down the spoon that he had been about to plunge into the nearest of the pies. Salvestro shook his head, but as he did so a strange sensation began to creep over him, as if he did know Lucullo, had known him for years, in fact, always enjoying his company, sad when they parted, delighted at their meeting once again: an enveloping pleased-to-be-there well-being. It seemed to radiate out of Lucullo in warm, irresistible waves while Salvestro explained how they came to be there. “Shall we take a look?” Lucullo suggested. Salvestro passed the scabbard across the table. Bernardo continued to monitor the pies.

  “Bit of copper in it, that’s normal enough,” Lucullo began. “The wire fused in this pattern round the top, that’s almost pure. Nice design, too; unusual.” He balanced it on two fingers—” Just over a pound in weight”—then thought for a moment. “I can give you one hundred and eighty-five soldi for it.”

  Salvestro was already reaching across the table to shake on the deal when Lucullo raised his hand. “Wait. As the founder of Lucullo and Sons, I must advise you of certain facts. First, the value of the silver in this scabbard is probably a little over three hundred soldi by weight; thus in choosing to deal with me, you are accepting a loss of more than a scudo. Were you, take this to the Zecca, you would be offered something close to that sum, minus fees, which are commonly a tenth on small articles. Lucullo and Sons would urge this course of action. You would need to produce some form of provenance, of course, and then wait ten days for the dividend.”

  “Ten days!” Salvestro exclaimed. “We need to eat now, not in ten days.”

  “Ah.” Lucullo’s brow furrowed. “I rather feared that might be the case. Your friend here, I couldn’t help but notice, has the look of a man eager for sustenance, and that being the case, I’m afraid that I have to insist on a prior condition. Before we make the exchange, you will have to eat. In the current situation, it’s only proper.”

  “Only proper,” Bernardo agreed happily. The pies, four of them, were beginning to get cold.

  “Proper?” Salvestro burst out. “What on earth … I mean, we can’t eat because we can’t pay. And we can’t pay because we can’t eat…?” He felt he should feel more outraged by this twist, but again some strange benevolence from Lucullo seemed to sap his belligerence. His resistance ended when Lucullo pushed the four pies across the table and Bernardo took the first of them and simply swallowed it. Salvestro reached for the spoon.

  The bruises on his face began to throb as he ladled lumps of meat and pastry into his mouth, trying at the same time to pay attention to Lucullo, who explained that these pies were in the nature of gifts and implied no contract between them, that had he exchanged the scabbard while they were hungry, it might have been said that the deal had been done under passive duress, while if he had loaned them the money for the meal, he might then have demanded its immediate repayment and set the price as he liked, and that to protect the probity of Lucullo and Sons, he was thus forced to either forgo the business or buy them lunch, and in the meantime how were the pies?

  “Good,” answered Bernardo, who had finished his two already.

  “Now leth make the eckthange,” said Salvestro, who was still chewing.

  Again the hand came up. “One more thing. It is a slippery matter, but as necessary in its way as the pies. Your respective dispositions, here, at this moment. Would you be so good as to describe them to me?” Salvestro translated this for Bernardo, and then both men indicated that their dispositions at that moment were exceptionally good. “You feel well in yourselves?” They nodded. “Agreeable toward others?” They nodded again. “In particular toward me?” Salvestro hesitated then, suddenly and briefly wary. He swallowed the last of the pie and gave a slow nod. An expression of resignation appeared on Lucullo’s face. “As I thought,” he said. “It is an entirely spurious sensation, which I must urge you to ignore. It’s me. Since I was a child, people have liked me, agreed with me, found me agreeable, been agreeable around me. My whole life, all I have ever heard is the sound of concord. Can you imagine that?”

  “No,” said Salvestro, but really feeling that, yes, it made perfect sense. Why not agree with a man like Lucullo?

  “We get chased a lot by dogs,” said Bernardo.

  “My sons suffer the same affliction, though to a lesser degree than their father. You noted yourselves the nature of our trade in the piazza. I mention it because I would like you to discount it from your decision on the exchange. You could leave now, having gained a lunch, and try your luck at a pawnshop. No obligation. Now dismiss your feelings and decide.”

  “Done,” said Salvestro, and reached across to shake on it. Lucullo began counting out coins from a large satchel resting on the seat beside him and stacking them in columns of ten.

  “We get chased a lot by dogs,” Bernardo said again.

  “I have never been chased by a dog” replied Lucullo.

  “You’re lucky, then,” said Bernardo.

  Lucullo said nothing to that but after a moment or two murmured, “It’s a curse.”

  Salvestro and Bernardo looked at each other, Salvestro wanting to nod happily at this, but both of them feeling at the same time that immunity from dogs was most emphatically not a curse. “Why?” asked Salvestro.

  “Imagine what life would be like if everyone always agreed with you,” said Lucullo then. “I mean everyone, and always. You’re with a woman, your first love, for instance, and you say to her, Shall we take a walk together in the orchard? Of course she agrees, so off you go. You tell her that you love her and ask does she love you? Of course she does, and a little later, when you ask her for a kiss, she yields. And yields further, too, naturally, if you suggest it, and says yes when you ask for her hand in marriage, and yes again when you ask that she forgive your infidelities, which are numerous and sometimes monstrous—why should her sister prove any less compliant than she?—and when you tire of her off she trots to the dower-house, or the nunnery, or the stew. … Take a tavern, another instance. There you sit with your old drinking partners. Another drink? Of course. And another? Why not! You decide you’ve had enough. So have they. But a tiny glass of rum, perhaps? Capital idea! And then a gallon of brine? Very well. And then round the evening off with a pint of pig’s blood? Everyone hurries to knock it back, and anything else you want to suggest. Do you see? Do you see what it would be l
ike?” Salvestro was nodding sympathetically.

  “Perhaps you do,” Lucullo continued more quietly. “And perhaps my wife does indeed love me, and my friends do truly live only to drink with me. But perhaps you are all merely agreeing with me, with Lucullo, the most agreeable man in Rome. I will never know.” He was silent for a moment. “Anyway”—Lucullo roused himself—” this is all very gloomy, and as your friend here says, there are indeed patches of sunlight in it.” Bernardo looked blank. “The dogs,” Lucullo reminded him. Bernardo shrugged. There was a short silence.

  “And your line of business,” Salvestro ventured. “It must be helpful there.”

  “Money? Well, what is money but agreement? Silver is a pretty metal, as everyone agrees. But if they did not, would it still be pretty? Perhaps it is a little more beautiful in Venice today, or the Hansa ports, or Constantinople, or less. How many ducats to the dinar? How many dinars make a Reich dollar? Scudi, zecchini, gulden, and groshen. … Their little quarrels are a noise the world cannot bear to hear, and their makings-up are how we bancherotti make our fortunes. Since Adam covered his privates, our sadnesses and joys have been theirs. What can we agree upon when we cannot agree upon that? Money is the most agreeable thing in the world.”

  As an archer sure of his target will look to his quiver rather than follow the shaft’s inevitable path to its target, Lucullo looked away when this little speech was ended, and sure enough, Salvestro found himself agreeing, nodding, hardly understanding more than the gist of what had been said yet still convinced that whatever it was, it was so. Lucullo sighed heavily. Bernardo was silent.

  The back room of the Broken Wheel had grown more crowded. A few men had entered by the passage that the two of them had taken earlier and been greeted by receptions similar to their own. More frequently, though, a door in the wall opposite swung open and disclosed glimpses of a staircase as men walked in and out with oily-skinned young women dressed in gaudy-colored satins and muslins. Two young men came and went through a curtained doorway next to it, carrying trays of food and drink. Then Bernardo spoke.

  “No, it’s not,” he said.

  Lucullo turned to look at him, his astonishment all the stranger for registering on a face so unused to astonishment. Then, as if in sympathy, Bernardo’s own face began to move. First his brow furrowed, then wrinkled, his lower jaw began to jut, and his eyes narrowed, anchoring themselves to a point just beyond the end of his nose. Salvestro’s own surprised face mirrored Lucullo’s. The two men watched as Bernardo’s jaw began to work, his cheeks contorted, the muscles there flexing left and right as though two fat men were fighting for sole possession of his mouth. His Adam’s apple pumped steadily, then quicker. He chewed on his tongue. Salvestro’s astonishment became amazed recognition at what was taking place. He’s thinking, he thought. Then Bernardo spoke again.

  “Money,” he said. “It’s not agreeable. It’s not agreeable at all because …” A pause then as his face heaved in the grip of a final contortion—part gulp, part spasm—which unfurrowed his brow, retracted his jaw, and sent both fat men tumbling down his gullet. “Because there’s not enough of it.”

  An hour later—no, two or three, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling his shirt back over his head, Salvestro reflected on Lucullo’s reaction. He felt the bed move slightly as the woman rolled over behind him. A dim clangor of banging doors and raised voices reached him from below. It was precipitate, in his opinion. Precipitate, and even unconsidered.

  Lucullo had sat bolt upright at Bernardo’s contradiction, and for a few seconds he had said nothing, only stared incredulously across the table. But then he had risen to his feet, slowly, and even before he’d opened his mouth Salvestro had felt it—great waves of it rolling out and engulfing the room, flooding it in an instant: bonhomie, or good cheer, or a vast and irresistible happiness. When Lucullo spoke, calling for drinks, more food, for general celebration, it seemed to Salvestro that the light brightened about their corner of the room, shining in the faces that turned toward them, already calling for food themselves, drink, too, for a general celebration.

  “In a barrel, you say?” Lucullo’s fascinated face drew the other patrons like a beacon, agog, shaking their heads in wonderment, exclaiming along with him as the two of them spun the yarn of their undersea voyage to Vineta. The customers of the Broken Wheel were a shabby and ill-dressed crowd beside Lucullo, peering over the backs of the adjoining booths, clustered on stools about the end of the table, and standing room only behind, all nodding away with Lucullo.

  “And this would be where you acquired the scabbard, I imagine.” It seemed that Lucullo was breathless to hear more, so it was breathlessness that the other patrons aped then, and Salvestro heard himself agreeing that yes, it was indeed, wondering at the same time how it might have been possible to pick something from the bottom of the sea while sealed in a barrel. Then it was Bernardo who would say, “No, actually. You see, he was in the barrel. …” And Lucullo would throw up his hands in delight, exclaiming, “There’s a man who speaks his mind,” or, “He certainly tells it like it is.” He proposed a toast to “the explorers,” and the Broken Wheel drank to their health as a single Lucullo-like entity. Food arrived, pots of steaming soup in which to dip the hard, flat bread that was the best the Broken Wheel offered. Pots of beer and cups of rough wine were ordered in a constant stream, but even as he nodded and smiled with the others, Salvestro felt a second disposition underlying the general merriment. The talk drifted casually, but only when Lucullo spoke, and when he did not a vague panic seemed to take hold of his court, which they assuaged with drink. The faces about him glowed and shone with Lucullo’s excitements, his own, too, he realized at one point, and he wondered if the others sensed something beneath their own reflected agitations and excitements. For it was fun, and good-humored, and underneath that were imperturbable depths that cared nothing for laughter and delight in the Broken Wheel. Underneath was a yawning emptiness, and this too was Lucullo’s.

  Now a single yelp pierced the wall of the upstairs chamber, a woman’s voice. It was followed by another, then a succession of deep grunts. Something on the other side of the partition began to knock rhythmically. The bed, he thought. It roused the girl, who cocked an ear. “That’s Anjelica. Your friend must be …” She stopped in midsentence.

  “The Pilgrim’s Staff? You mean to tell me that you’re staying at the Stick, the worst doss-hole in the city? Stay with me!” Lucullo had burst out. Salvestro was already accepting, the press of their audience closing on him, urging him on, for only a fool would refuse, and what an offer, and yes, yes, yes. …

  “No,” said Bernardo. Was it the brief stilling of his deeper disquiet that he felt then? “We can’t. We have to stay with the monks,” Bernardo went on, and for a second it seemed as if Lucullo might protest before he clapped his hands together, saying, “Well, that’s a ‘no,’ no question. Certainly knows his own mind, this one, eh?” Yes, yes, yes. … Respectful comments on the quality of Bernardo’s mind followed, and then the talk ranged wider, to the time that Lucullo had once spent in a madhouse, then back again to Bernardo and himself and their journey from Usedom far to the north. When it was time for Lucullo to meet his sons in the piazza, he exacted promises from them that they would return and drink with him again. He left, waving, and the gathering faltered as suddenly as it began. Their audience drifted away, rubbing their eyes and looking about them in vague bewilderment as though just awakened from sleep. They were left alone with the last of the celebrants, a man of about their own age who introduced himself as Pierino, a scholar who seemed to have found himself marooned in Rome for want of funds to leave. “Just get out, just get yourselves out,” he kept muttering, for he was quite drunk, then would apologize for his rudeness: “I mean Rome, not this place.”

  They left him eventually, Salvestro demolishing Lucullo’s colonnade of soldi and scooping them into a ragged triangle of cloth torn from his shirt, which he tied carefully. The other drinkers
nodded perfunctory farewells as they weaved through the tables to the door opposite the one they had entered. At the bottom of the stairs, one of the women he had seen earlier barred their way. “Anjelica!” she shouted up the stairwell.

  “What?” Salvestro had asked.

  “Lucullo left you a gift,” she said, then shouted again. Anjelica appeared and looked down at them both over the balustrade.

  “So which one of you is the famous Bernardo?” she asked, and when Bernardo indicated himself he was told, “Come on up.”

  The bed next door was silent now. Salvestro pulled on his boots. The woman was quiet, dressing herself quickly on the other side of the bed. She stood and dusted herself with a powder that smelled of roses. Salvestro felt her hand trail over his shoulder as she walked past him to the door. “Why so quiet, Master Explorer?” she asked. “It happens to everyone one time or another.”

  As he waited for Bernardo to emerge, Salvestro heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. A man with thinning hair poked his head around the door. “You Bernardo or the other one?” he asked.

  “I’m the other one,” Salvestro replied.

  “Well, you’ll do.” He was unwrapping something from a length of cloth. “Lucullo left you this.” He weighed the scabbard in his hand. “Nice story, that business with the barrel. We can always use a good story here at the Broken Wheel. You’ll have met Simon out the back. He’s there to scare off the pilgrims. Next time, come in from the other side, through the yard. I’m Rodolfo, the most dis-agreeable man in Rome.” He laughed then at Salvestro’s continuing bafflement. “I own the place. Anyway, there you are.” He handed over the scabbard. “Where’d you get it?”

  He recalled coming blearily awake that morning from a dream in which his teeth had clamped themselves to tree-trunks and would not let go. He swallowed twists and slivers of bark, and his incisors gouged shallow grooves in the tree-flesh beneath. The sour sap seemed still to fill his mouth as he opened his eyes. Bernardo was already awake, gnawing on a cabbage-stalk. He motioned to him silently and put a finger to his lips. They rose, and it was only then that he noticed the Prior, wakeful like themselves amongst the other sleeping bodies.