The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  It had been the day he’d found the ship—the Santa Lucia, a tub impounded at Ostia for her drunkard captain’s debts. A thunderstorm rumbled and threatened on the ride back to the city but finally came to nothing. Vich was squinting over his papers, politely interested in his progress. A ship? Well done. And a crew? Not yet. But the crew Seròn sought could be found in any tavern in Ripetta; the crew did not trouble him, nor his Ambassador. They sat across from one another, the light outside falling, cartwheels rumbling faintly as they passed over the paving about San Simeon’s.

  “I wonder, Don Jerònimo, have you remarked a change in our Captain Diego’s disposition?”

  Should his curiosity have been so naked? Should he not instead have waited for Vich to remark the change himself or exercise his wits about the question of why he had not? Too late to worry now, and his fears were groundless, for Vich was happy to nod his puzzlement. The soldier’s sullenness had evaporated in recent days and been replaced by a lofty and private amusement.

  “We may even see a smile,” Vich speculated, “by next Easter.” Seròn laughed politely. They called for wine and began drinking, matching each other cup for cup. It was after the fourth or fifth that Seròn began to muse aloud about Diego, to wonder at his aptness for his duties in Rome. He felt his curiosity grow like an appetite, sitting there as an equal, throwing out casts into his ignorance. Diego’s disgrace hovered like an omen between them, and Vich became untalkative, awkward. Eventually there was silence. He realized that he was drunk, in danger. He could not remember what he had said. In his sudden anxiety he got up to light the candles, and that seemed to rouse Vich, who said, “You know most of it already, Antonio. Why is he here? A favor to Cardona. What else was he to do with him after Prato? The smoke still lies thick over that business.”

  More drinking. More nods and nudges. Were they both pretending to be drunk? More disclosures.

  “It turned on Tedaldi’s surrender, whether given or not, and to whom. … Or not. Tedaldi’s wife was killed in a cellar with the children, as hostages to his silence, perhaps. Or perhaps they knew as much as he. … Someone took Tedaldi’s surrender, and then someone lied. Prato was sacked. Tedaldi’s family were killed. These acts were the offense, the lie was its cause.”

  He stopped there, as though he had reached the limit of his discretion. Seròn watched him toy with his glass, hold it up to the candlelight. It was quite dark outside. He refilled the Ambassador’s cup.

  Vich spoke again, but now he was unguarded, speculating as though to himself. “Who, though? Who accepted Aldo’s terms? Somewhere between the square of San Stefano and the camp outside the walls, the surrender became a defiance. I passed through that square once, it is a short ride out of town. It was Diego who parleyed with Aldo, he who carried the challenge back to Cardona. …” Vich was almost unaware of him now, swimming alone in a current of wine and confused memory.

  Seròn pushed a different piece of the puzzle forward. “But he believes himself innocent, and maligned.”

  “He was not the only one to speak with Tedaldi. I do not know all the comings and goings. He claimed to Cardona that he was not privy to the terms of the agreement. He never challenged the fact that Aldo gave up the town. The men who put the knife to his family were never found, and without them his accusations were baseless, futile. …”

  “Accusations?”

  “Who knows what took place, or who in fact spoke with Aldo that day, or what was said. … One man entered, another waited outside. Who knows?” Vich shrugged and swallowed more wine. Seròn watched him slump in his chair.

  “But the other man,” he said. “He would know, whoever he was.”

  “Whoever he was? You need not pretend, Don Antonio. We both know the other man was Cardinal Medici as he was then. Our beloved Pope as he is now. Yes, he would know.” Seròn looked down into his lap. Tiny flies flew in noiseless circles about the candle. Warm air rising out of the courtyard carried the smell of the stables into the room. Then Vich spoke more crisply, rising from his chair. “But as to his new cheerfulness, I have no idea. Perhaps His Holiness would know?”

  No, thinks the secretary, rising now, dressing. His Holiness does not know. There is a picture to be painted, beginning in darkness of the cellar where Tedaldi’s family offer their throats to the murderers, whose other hands stretch, palm held out for payment by one whom the frame has yet to capture. His hand is visible, for the cutthroats must have been paid. Part of his sleeve, too, and bright sunlight. … Diego’s joy would be to wrestle him into view, but it is the cutthroats who will do that. The soldier’s face comes to him now, pressed close to his own—he had been intimidated, felt encroached upon, as Diego had accosted him—the man’s mouth moving clumsily to relate the tissue of acts that made him clean, graced and favored once again. Why had the soldier come to him? “They are something he cannot deny, do you see, Don Antonio? Ally yourself with me, be ready when the time is right. He would rather give up his tiara than let the truth of this be known. …” It seems His Holiness’s hirelings are in Rome.

  It seems that they are once again for hire.

  It is another game, anterior to his own. Diego must be placated, humored, eventually thwarted. It will be to the soldier to whom Vich will go, if his secretary should be unmasked. And now Seròn has that. For the moment, Diego is his. Whatever else it may cost him, his own business will not cost him his life. Diego’s loyalty was stitched into his very sinews. Betrayal would always destroy a man like that. And then he thought of Cardona, Medici, even Vich, who appeared to him as infinitely calculating giants, slow-moving and implacable as thunderheads. If the heavens opened above him, if the rain scoured him of his subterfuge, the two men would be much more than figureheads nailed to the Santa Lucia’s prow, more useful here in Rome than afloat in a leaky ship. Without the giant and his keeper, Diego’s claims were nothing. If the rains were to be brought down on him, then Diego’s impotence, or the promise of that (the unspoken threat of its opposite?), might stay the heavy hands raised against him: the Pope’s, Vich’s … He trussed the two men in gaudy new clothes, gave them money. Fed them and drank with them at the tavern. Fattened them up for sacrifice. When the storm broke, who demanded justice of the weather?

  Outside now, the shadow-city is being folded into the cracks and recesses of the City of the Sun. The spectral casts of Rome’s eaves and overhangs, the lightless juts of her churches and towers, are yielding to the sun’s corrosion: dark diagonals steepen on the stained plaster of the walls, stunted silhouettes swing slowly into coincidence with their templates. A night-city echoes the arc of a climbing sun and creeps toward its vanishing-point, shrinking, foreshortening, triangulating itself out of existence. By midday there will be nothing. A minute past and the cycle begins again. Don Antonio quits the palazzo and heads west, a horseless gentleman with a high forehead and thinning hair hurrying past the sleep-caked early risers, smooth-faced himself, head down, unremarkable and unremarked.

  The walking calms him—he cannot eat before these assignations—the steady thudding of his feet on the hard-packed dirt. He waits for a train of carts loaded with barrels of fish on the way up to Pescheria, looking left and right before crossing and ducking into the alley running along the side of the Chapel of Ambrosio. The ropemakers are stringing lines in the Via di Funari. They barely glance up as he hurries past. Another look about at the entrance to the courtyard, in the door at the old stonemason’s place, always unlocked, long abandoned, down the steps. He finds himself in front of the kitchens, another staircase rising above him.

  Rumors of two loudmouthed tellers of tall tales, of two buffoon-explorers, had first drawn him to this place. He had found them ragged and penniless. Two days in the tailors’ shops, an hour with the barbers in Navona, the pair of them being shaved side by side with apples in their mouths. Pigs for the oven. Since then he has been back here only to ensure that they remain in Rome, to drink with them and celebrate their good fortune and, on three mornings since the
night of their peacock reappearance, to perform on himself the same transformation in reverse. The tavern is deserted at this hour, except for Rodolfo, who seemed so wedded to the place as to be unimaginable anywhere else.

  “We never see you except at the crack of dawn, Don Antonio,” the innkeeper’s voice addresses him from above. “Are you still in search of a ship? A Genoese passed through a few days ago. …”

  But the ship is already got, or as good as, and Antonio is in no mood to swap pleasantries this morning. Rodolfo slaps him on the shoulder as he passes, and his voice pursues him up the next flight of stairs. “Anjelica and Isabella have been asking after you, say they miss the smallest tip in the city,” he shouts up, laughing, disappearing into the kitchen.

  Minutes later he is out by the “front” entrance, under the signless signpole, down the alley toward Santa Caterina’s. Strings of horses are being led into the stables, the streets more crowded here. Now he wears a stained apron, heavy boots, a scarf tied about his head. Faint river-vapors taint the air with fetid watery whiffs as he strides toward the wharves. He is a porter at the docks, or some such. It is a loosely themed disguise.

  Pressed and swollen by the narrowing of its channels, the current quickens to either side of Tiber island so the rowboats and small barges ferrying sacks of wheat or wine barrels from the larger wharves of the Ripa Grande battle against the flow until the forks rejoin and the flood calms itself once again. Seròn weaves a path along the waterfront between sweating sack-toting men and barrows piled with crates. Someone leads a string of goats toward the wharf, where a bargeman waves him off. “No, no goats. I won’t take goats. …” Bloodshot eyes peering over their drinks accord him less importance than the view (river, boats, cows grazing across the river, the dome of San Pietro in Montorio), the view less importance again than the beer foaming in their tankards, a liquid lower horizon. The man he is here to meet will have marked him by now, will be watching him as he strides past the taverns lining the waterfront, entering at the Sign of the Portcullis, almost the last. A small, nervous-looking boy is wandering about inside, trying to sell— no, give away bread, but bread so flat and hard that it might have been cut from leather. No takers. A moment now to compose himself, though the danger is behind him, not before, unless … Reject that thought. The ship is got, tell him that. Salvestro and Bernardo? No. Keep that close. He will ask too about the bull, about the sheaves of charts, the depositions and supplications, but there is nothing to report on that. Summer is unkind to the busy-brained clerks of the Camera; many have already left to ape their Pope in his forthcoming villegiatura. The bull is stalled and will remain so until one or other ship hoves into view, aboard her decks a living, bellowing, stamping monster. … His Holiness’s decision hangs on that.

  But it will not be my ship, thinks Seròn. Nor Fernando’s ship, either. And not my beast. The knife in the alley is very distant now. Corridors run off to either side of the stairs, once, twice, another shorter flight. There will be two ships, one of wood and canvas, loud with the shouts of its victorious crew. … And there will be a second vessel, a spectral nonship, the ship that does not return. That one will be Vich’s, and though its wreck be a thousand leagues away, unseen by the Ambassador or anyone else, he will sink in it nonetheless. The steps stop.

  There is a small room beyond, its ceiling sloping with the outer roof. In winter it is very cold, but it has a fine view of the bustling wharves below. The man he meets here will be standing in front of the casement, looking down. This is not what he is, but only the necessary interim between what he was and what he will become. Ambassador Seròn. He is not traitorous, he tells himself, opening the door and ducking his head beneath the lintel.

  “You are late, Don Antonio,” says Faria, turning from the window to face him. “What do you have for me today?”

  They light bonfires at dusk and carry furniture into the courtyard. The Pope’s impedimenta are piled onto horseless carts that the ostlers manhandle about the yard in a complicated game of checkers, shunting four or five of the already loaded tumbrels to extricate those remaining empty. Slow processions of favorite chairs, sets of knives and glasses, chests of linen and pewter, and the books of his clerks arrive in the red light below and are stacked on sacks of oats and flour. Dry hams are wrapped in muslin and the muslin soaked in oil. Oil is brought, too.

  Tomorrow a fragmented column of three dozen carthorses and oxen will sweat and foam in the late July sun. Outriders will flank them. The Romagna villagers will turn out and kneel for his blessing at the side of the road. He will give it. They will reach the hunting lodge at La Magliana by nightfall, with luck.

  Awkward bundles are lashed on with fraying ropes and a prayer: the translation of his relics-to-be. This has taken the better part of a day already and will surely continue beyond midnight. When he dies, they will strip his apartments in ten minutes flat.

  Two men emerge, struggling at either end of the barrel of a small cannon. Their silhouettes pass before the red firelight like crabs locked in slow, confused conflict. The cannon will be for announcing things. If he should kill a stag, for instance. His feelings for the man standing quietly behind him are complicated, involving neediness and distaste. He watches incuriously now. A muddy excitement, too? Cooking pans and firewood. What do crabs think of, dismembering one another? The cannon is leaned against a wall and left there.

  “You understand why I have summoned you?” says Leo without turning from the window.

  “They are here.”

  Leo nods.

  “Where? It can be done tonight.”

  Where indeed? They have been seen in the Borgo; one or two of the bancherotti have mentioned “a huge simpleton” and his companion. Snippets of similar information have filtered through from Leno’s informants about the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. Is it truly they? Diego had recognized them according to Leno, or Leno’s man, and had done nothing more. It proved nothing, for Diego would know that he was watched. He attends to his duties, is regular in his habits. … He does not confide in his subordinates. … (Or has nothing to confide?) Two weeks ago, He has taken a woman who visits him at night. … If Diego knew where they were to be found, he would avoid them: a dog leading his huntsman astray. He tells the man these things, then turns to face him.

  A wide smooth face watches his own. A smile that never surfaces lurks in the shape of Rufo’s mouth. “I will begin with the taverns here and around Santa Caterina’s,” he says. “And then I will pay a call on a certain tradesman of our acquaintance. He will be happy, I am certain, to renew our old compact.”

  “Yes, yes,” Leo mutters. Rufo’s skin is like wax, his expression immobile. The man’s tasteful finery jars vaguely with what he knows of him. At Ferrara, Ghiberti has informed him, he was acknowledged as the Duke’s torturer. “Ghiberti has made arrangements for you here. It is a short ride to La Magliana, when you have news.”

  “I know their faces,” says Rufo. Is this a boast? A threat?

  “You, and Diego, too,” Leo counters. The two men look at one another. He turns back to the window as Rufo bows and withdraws.

  Below, the crackling of the bonfires, the thuds and scrapes of the baggage, and the fatigued grunts of the men mingle and echo in the courtyard. There are women holding up torches, three of them. Some of the carts are still empty. He will be happy to leave the Rome that has a Rufo in it. A thin trumpet reaches his ears, and his eyes rove briefly over the servants below before he realizes that they cannot hear this sound. It comes from the gardens at the back, a feeble hoot. Hanno is sick again.

  It is the heat, the animal’s keeper tells him. Too much for the beast’s constitution or not enough? He wallows away whole baking afternoons in a pool dug for him on the western edge of the gardens, now reeking from his own feces. There is a plan to soften his skin with lanolin. Leo thinks of the animal’s solitude, entertains the fantasy of their roles being reversed. As he scurries about, curly gray elephant trunks point to him and hoot softly in elep
hant-language: Look, a Pope. Observe his funny hat. Pay attention now, he is saying a Mass for the souls of the soon-to-be dead. Look how wicked he is; no wonder his turds cause him more pain than molten lead. …

  Rufo will dispose of them, and then the business will be finished.

  Now the servants in the courtyard move to and fro among the various entrances and carts carrying large meshed boxes. He realizes he was waiting for these to appear, or their contents. The boxes are stacked in piles beside the last two unloaded carts and left there. The men dawdle for a few minutes, then disappear within the surrounding buildings in twos and threes. For a moment he is puzzled by this, then disappointed. The yapping chaos of paws and tongues he has half-consciously been awaiting will take place not tonight, but, as it always does, on the morrow. He is distracted. Distraction accounts for many of his smaller mistakes. The dogs will be loaded in the morning.

  He did not have the air of a man with something to sell.

  “Not wool itself. The promise of wool,” the merchant explained.

  Diego nodded, listening to the faint note of exasperation as it swelled periodically in the man’s voice, was apprehended and camouflaged, then swelled again. His horse was short and heavy-boned, bred off a jennet by the look of its head. He remembered dark-skinned men driving small herds of mountain ponies down from the Sierra de Segura for the fairs outside Lorca and Murcia. The merchant’s animal was slope-backed like them. It stood patiently outside while the two of them talked in the shade of the stables. Don Antonio usually dealt with these men, listening to the snippets of intelligence they gathered as they swung between Venice and Genoa, then descended through Florence to Rome. In return he supplied them with introductions and (near worthless) passports for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They usually demanded the Ambassador. This one asked for Antonio by name as though he knew that the route to Don Jerònimo da Vich passed unavoidably through his secretary.