“The Signory has provided me with a draft on the Pazzi bank for the sum of six hundred crowns. You will have to wait until the Republic’s purse is a little fatter before you look for the rest.”
Bruni opened a drawer and took out a long yellow slip of banker’s paper. He held this out to Nicholas, who took it, and for a moment over the voucher Bruni at last let his eyes meet Nicholas’s.
He said, “How could you do this? It will ruin me. My family—everyone.”
Nicholas folded the voucher in half and put it away in his wallet. “I was forced, Excellency.”
“Forced to serve Valentino, maybe—but to be caught—ah—”
Bruni’s gaze slid away toward the dark at the end of the room, and again his hands scrubbed one over the other; deep lines pulled at the corners of his mouth. “You may use the remainder of the morning to remove your personal belongings and neaten your chambers.”
“Good day, Excellency.”
Bruni grunted at him.
Nicholas went out to the corridor. There was nothing here that belonged to him, and he knew no duty to neaten his chambers. He went down to the workroom, where the scribes were only beginning to take up their work, and getting his hat and coat from the rack he left.
The sweltering summer heat slowed the pace of life. The French army loitered below the Alps on the vast plain near Milan. Rome was quiet. The Orsini had withdrawn into their impregnable fortresses in the campagna, and the Borgia Pope’s soldiers no longer swaggered in the city streets.
Valentino made a formal entry into Rome.
Nicholas went to see it, and stood with a hundred others on the grassy slope of the Gianicolo opposite the Colosseo. They waited nearly an hour before they heard in the distance the brassy heralding of horns. The sound grew louder and louder, until the first rank of the trumpeters strode into sight down the road from the Lateran. All the people watching shouted, overjoyed that the wait was over.
After the trumpeters came heralds, very expensively got up, who walked along reading loudly from scrolls. The topic seemed to be the achievements of Valentino; Nicholas caught only a few words. The sun was high in the sky, and he was wondering why he had come here to sweat along with dozens of other people to the enlargement of Duke Valentino.
Valentino’s men in their gold and black livery marched by, some on foot and some on horseback. Halfway through the line rode Valentino himself, wearing black from head to foot, and riding a black horse. He looked bored.
As the Pope’s son went by, the people around Nicholas shouted and whistled and waved their caps, making a good show; the courtiers coming in the prince’s train were throwing coins and sweetmeats. Nicholas stood silent, his hands gripped together behind him. Valentino passed by toward the Arch of Constantine. Showers of money and sugared fruits pelted Nicholas and the people around him.
“Carlini,” muttered a man behind him. “The Borgias are poor again. We’ll see some new cardinals soon.”
Stefano rode after Valentino, one of a group of young men.
Nicholas lifted his head so that he could watch Stefano beyond the crowd. Ahead, the progress had reached the ancient Arch, where an old man, a nun, and two children would present Valentino with flowers and tokens of faith. Stefano drew rein. He was behind another man, so that Nicholas could not see his face. He slouched in his saddle, his elbow thrust out. His horse sidestepped so that Stefano’s back was to Nicholas. The sunlight glanced off a medal pinned to the sleeve of his black and gold coat.
“Señor Dawson,” a man said, behind Nicholas.
Nicholas turned. It was Gonsalvo, in a dark hat, smiling at him.
“I stopped by your house. Your man said you were here.”
Nicholas glanced once again at Stefano and began to sidle his way through the crowd. Gonsalvo followed him; the others were all leaving, anyway, some going down to hear the speeches at the Arch, and some drifting away to their work. Nicholas and Gonsalvo started away toward his house.
“If you have come to bargain with Valentino,” Nicholas said, “you must find another go-between. He’s turned me out.”
“So I have been told.”
“And betrayed me to the Florentines, so they’ve turned me out as well.”
“That also I’ve been told,” Gonsalvo said placidly.
There was a wine shop in the next street. Nicholas turned them in that direction, and buying a jar of wine took it across the street to a bench in the sun. Gonsalvo did not sit beside him but stood facing him, his back to the street. Nicholas offered him the jar and he took it and drank.
“In fact,” Gonsalvo said, “I have no need of Valentino, who is unsuitable, shall we say, to the purposes of my king. Have you found other employment?”
“I have a little money,” Nicholas said. He retrieved the jar and drank from it. The street was busy. In the shop where he had bought the wine two girls were filling jars with oil; the cats were gathering on the corner for the old woman who fed them there every noon. Nicholas tilted his head back to talk to Gonsalvo again. “There is always some use for a secretary who writes a fine hand.”
“A secretary,” Gonsalvo said. “Your talents would be wasted.”
“When you have taken Italy,” Nicholas said, “my talents will be irrelevant.”
“I disagree with that,” Gonsalvo said. “Enough to offer you a place in my service.”
That startled Nicholas; he put his hand up to his face, rubbed his nose, and imagined himself great again, restored to eminence; able, perhaps, to revenge himself on Valentino. At the thought of Valentino his vision underwent some adjustment. He lowered his hand again.
“I think myself the godchild of fortune that I am still alive,” he said to Gonsalvo. “I shall not tempt Valentino.”
Gonsalvo still held the jug. He raised it to drink again and handed it back to Nicholas.
“Valentino is unimportant. The ultimate end of all we do is the Crusade—to redeem the world for Christ as we have redeemed Spain. Nothing is more important than that—we ourselves are nothing.”
Nicholas dashed the jar down and leapt to his feet, face to face with Gonsalvo. “Are you mad? That was Valentino’s purpose, you know—to save Italy.”
Gonsalvo’s face settled, and his smile disappeared behind the grizzled droop of his moustache. Softly he said, “I am not Valentino.”
“That is simply a matter of degree,” Nicholas said.
Gonsalvo flushed deeply, his eyes glittered, narrowed and direct, and he stood straight as a sentry. Quietly, he said, “I see I have misled myself. I ask your pardon. Good day.” Turning on his heel, he walked stiffly away down the street. Nicholas, feeling tired, went back to his house.
Nicholas brooded on the words he had used against Gonsalvo. He of all men had no place making a judgment of Gonsalvo da Cordoba, as great a man as anyone in Christendom. He might have talked his way into a position Valentino himself would have envied. Now he was considering the necessity of putting some of his furniture out for sale to buy bread for himself and his servant.
A few days after his angry talk with Gonsalvo, Miguelito da Corella nearly rode him down in the street near the Colosseo. Nicholas dodged out of the horse’s way, and Miguelito wheeled his mount around.
“Go to the Torre Nona,” Miguelito shouted. “If you want to save your pretty boy from the galleys.”
He galloped away across the meadow again, toward the lane that wound around the foot of the Palatino. Nicholas scrubbed his hands against his thighs, wondering anxiously what Miguelito had meant, and making sure of his wallet started off across the city.
The Torre Nona was across Rome in a quarter of wretched huts and ruins. Nicholas walked more than an hour to reach it. When he entered the courtyard a crowd already filled the margins of the long narrow yard, waiting to see the executions. At the forge in the middle of the court the executioner’s
knave was pumping on the bellows and the executioner himself lounged on the tower step eating his dinner. The city prison occupied the bottom floor and the underground rooms of a crumbling tenth-century tower. The upper stories were vacant, their rotting wooden floors too treacherous to walk on.
Nicholas went up to the executioner, who was eating onions; when he turned, Nicholas took a long step backward from the stench on his breath.
“Have you a man among your prisoners named Stefano Baglione?” Nicholas asked.
“Maybe I do.” The executioner reached for a piece of cheese on the step at his feet. He was a lanky man, half Nicholas’s age, with blue eyes so pale they looked almost white.
Nicholas tipped his head back to look up at the tower. The Borgias knew him well; they sent a messenger with a handful of words, and he scurried reliably away to this human sump, his tongue hanging out.
He only wanted to see Stefano miserable. To have his revenge on Stefano, who had cursed him and made him miserable. He put his foot up on the step to the door.
The executioner grabbed the tail of his coat. “Where are you going?”
“To see if he is in there.”
“I’ll tell you who’s in there! No one goes in there but me.” The man’s broad blackened palm thrust out. “Twenty carlini.”
Nicholas thumbed a gold crown out of his wallet and held it up into the sunlight. “Is he there?”
The executioner grunted.
“If he is there, what will become of him?”
“Branded. On the face. He’s a thief. The magistrate sentenced him last night. Taken in the act, he was.” Now the executioner rose to his feet, drawn by the gold; from the creases of his leather apron bits of his dinner sprinkled down to the dirt. He reached for the coin.
Nicholas gave it up. He knew why Valentino had sent him here, to put him to this torture. He could walk away, go away and never think of it again. Never let himself think of Stefano again. The situation squeezed him like a vise. He took another crown from his purse. Precious, the money was, almost all he had, and he thought it over again for a moment. He remembered how Stefano had cursed him, the last time they had talked. How Stefano once had tried to rescue him from Gonsalvo.
He showed the coin to the executioner, who grunted again.
“What’s that for?”
“Don’t brand him,” Nicholas said.
“Two crowns.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said. “I have no more. I’m not a rich man. This or nothing.”
For a moment the man was still, his idiot eyes fixed on the coin. The blast of his breath was making Nicholas sick. At last he reached out for the coin.
Nicholas stood at the edge of the yard, where the crowd was thin. Half a dozen prisoners were brought out for their punishment, but Stefano caught the crowd’s interest immediately, or perhaps they knew him. They began to wail and call out to him, and a woman near Nicholas beat her hands together and shook her head and said, over and over, “Ah, such a beauty, such a beauty to be spoiled by the brand.”
Nicholas’s hands were sweating. He watched the executioner’s knave put the brands into the fire and turn them.
First they branded another thief. The screech made the crowd gasp. Nicholas’s lips were dry; he wished he could go away, go back to his house. Now it was Stefano’s turn. The executioner made him kneel. He chose a brand and stamped it down into Stefano’s face.
There was no scream, and the crowd sighed, disappointed. Someone yelled angrily, “There’s a cheat.” Stefano rose up, holding out his shackled hands to be freed. On his cheek was a great black T. Nicholas clenched his teeth, starting impulsively forward, ready to denounce the executioner for taking his coin, but as he came nearer Stefano he saw that the brand was only smudged char. The executioner had used a cool iron.
Stefano saw him; his face thinned and hardened with anger. Nicholas went to the gate out to the street. Stefano had to go out that way, and so they met there.
“What happened?” Nicholas said. “How did this come to pass?”
Stefano would not look at him, but glared away down the street. “Valentino sent me to break into someone’s house.”
“Whose house?”
“Cardinal Corneto’s palace.”
“Corneto,” Nicholas said. “Why?”
“Never mind that,” Stefano said. “How did you find out where I was?”
“Miguelito.”
They were walking down the street toward the piazza, where, the day being Monday, a number of farmers from the campagna were selling produce from their wagons. Stefano slowed his pace. Before they reached the crowded square, he stopped and faced Nicholas.
“Why did they send you?”
Nicholas’s gaze slid away from the younger man’s face. “They have reasons, I suppose.”
“To humiliate me. To humiliate you.”
Nicholas made some indefinite sound in his throat.
“Doubtless he could not pass it up—the economy must have appealed. He is a devil. Why do we do it? Why submit to it?”
“For our own advancement,” Nicholas said.
“Well, I’ve advanced to the Torre Nona. I won’t submit any more.”
“I doubt he’ll give either of us another chance to do so.”
“Help me.”
Nicholas looked back into Stefano’s face, still blackened by the cold brand. “Don’t be a fool. What do you mean to do?”
“Between us we know enough of what he’s done—we’ll denounce him.”
“God’s heart, Stefano! He is Valentino. Everybody knows what he’s done. The problem is that no one can bring him to justice for it.”
“The Pope can,” Stefano said calmly. His face was bright with resolution, his eyes snapping and his cheeks flushed. “I can reach Alexander and give him certain evidence of everything. What Valentino meant to do to Corneto, for one.”
“He meant Corneto some harm?” Cardinal Corneto was the Pope’s close friend.
“Come with me. We’ll destroy him.”
“He’ll kill you,” Nicholas said.
“Bah.” Stefano strode away from him. “I’ll do it alone.”
“Stefano!”
The younger man never turned back, but plunged straight on into the crowded piazza. A team of white horses came between them and when the wagon had passed, Nicholas could not pick him out of the passing mob. Nicholas’s hands were shaking. He rubbed them together, as if to brace them against one another, wondering what he could do. There was nothing he could do. Valentino’s men would throw, Stefano out of the Vatican if they saw him. He knew Stefano’s willful resolution too well to hope much for that to save him. All at once he realized that he should have gone with Stefano. It was too late now, with Stefano already on his way there. Too late. He knew it was not too late, that he could go to the Vatican and find him there, but at the Vatican he would also find Valentino, and instead he went home.
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “I know him.” His own calm amazed him.
“What was his name?” the watchman asked.
Nicholas reached out one hand to the curling russet hair, fouled with the Tiber’s yellow mud. “Stefano Baglione.”
The watchman half-smothered a gurgle of laughter. Nicholas ignored it. Stefano’s hair curled itself around his fingers. The garrotte had abraded the skin of Stefano’s neck, and his hands were bruised. He had fought them, not like des Troches.
“Shall I send to the Baglioni to come for the corpse?” the watchman said, with a fine sarcasm in his voice.
Nicholas pulled the ragged cover up over Stefano’s head again. “Bury him with the beggars. It won’t matter to him.”
His icy calm began to thaw, and before it evaporated he took himself quickly away, out of the shed, out to the bank of the Tiber, the graveyard of Rome.
When Ni
cholas reached his house, Juan was out, probably at the market. Nicholas sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth. The morning had exhausted him. His mind rested on the surface of the moment. The white walls of his house shouted at him. He had always meant to have them painted again but had never had the money. He should have filled them with people, faces, hands, eyes, mouths, to give him company now, when he was so ruined a man he could not even feel his grief.
Juan came in, a pail of milk in one hand. “You are back,” he said. “You were gone this morning. What happened?”
Nicholas turned to look at him. “Stefano is dead. His body was washed up on the riverbank last night.”
“Dead,” Juan said, and reliably crossed himself.
“I should have gone with him,” Nicholas said.
The old man dropped the pail and the milk ran across the floor. He rushed forward to Nicholas’s side and kneeling down gripped his arm with a younger man’s strength. “It was them, was it—those other people?”
Nicholas moved his arm in Juan’s grip, without freeing himself. “I should have gone with him.” All his life he had shirked and cheated so that when the one important thing he might have done appeared before him, he had failed it.
His reason caught him by the hair; nothing would have been served had he gone. He would have died too. Juan was shouting at him. Stefano had fought them, hurt them perhaps, while Nicholas sat in his empty house.
“Revenge him,” Juan was shouting. “It is your duty.”
“Ah.” He shoved the old man away and got up from his chair.
The floor was puddled in the white milk. Old Juan knelt by the chair and began to speak prayers. Nicholas swayed on his feet, his legs weak as a newborn’s. He remembered what Stefano had said of Cardinal Corneto.
He realized that he had already decided to do something; now he saw what he could do. He turned again to Juan.
He said, “I am going. I may very well never come back again. If I don’t, the house is yours. It may be sold for a good amount—Amadeo will buy it. You could live on that money. Go back to Spain.”
“Where are you going?” Juan asked.
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