Then a fear-numbing urgency boiled in him and his brain felt clear as glass. Desperation? Never mind. Take advantage of it, he told himself. Act! He ordered grappa, to the surprise of the other two, then asked Enzo: ‘Do you think we could rescue her?’
‘Us, Excellency?’ The tide showed Enzo’s shock.
Nicola told the papal soldier to take him to his senior officer and, picking up the bottle, followed him to where the officer was eating boiled capon. He was chubby-faced and perhaps twenty-four: young, if you weren’t yourself seventeen with peach fuzz on your cheek. Was there a humorous twitch to his lip? He accepted a glass of grappa.
‘Captain,’ sitting opposite him, Nicola spread his knees in an attempt to enlarge his presence, ‘may I speak candidly?’
There was a twitch. Nicola ignored it. Gravely, he knitted up a story backed by a display of his passports and dispatches. The captain, a man used to responsibility, must understand his reticence about the true identity of the girl he had come to arrest. Yes, the one here in this inn. Seeing the other man sharpen, Nicola said, ‘You sprung our trap,’ explaining that the girl was to have been arrested further along the route ‘by our agents’. The Church wanted her in its own custody and not the Army’s – much less that of the Austrians.
‘You won’t be surprised to know that the interests of the Austrian High Command and our own’ – with a bow to the officer’s papal uniform – ‘are not always the same and that there are matters which we keep from them.’ The girl, he improvised, was an associate of the Principessa di Belgioioso and of Father Gavazzi, ‘whose ordinary, Cardinal Oppizzoni, is my superior’.
The captain said his sergeant came from Bologna.
‘Then,’ said Nicola coolly, ‘he may know me by sight. To return to the girl, the interest of the Holy Office,’ he slid a glance at the officer to see if this absurdity was being accepted, ‘is in tracing responsibilities which,’ he smiled blandly, ‘I may not discuss. Our allies are inclined to be precipitous …’ Like a novice player of a new game, he was trying out turns of thought which he had encountered recently – some as recently as last night. But he was aware that his rigmarole contained contradictions. Would the other man notice?
Apparently not. The young captain – their ages were beginning to feel closer – downed another grappa and said the trouble was that the Austrian officer outranked him. To overrule him, he would need authorisation. Besides …
Nicola, fearing lest the man’s wits might be stirred by speech, interrupted with indignation on behalf of Our Holy Father on whom two overbearing allies were attempting to impose their will. A hotchpotch of feeling steamed as he refilled the captain’s glass.
‘What do you want of me?’
‘Let me take her in my coach. Now, before your Austrian colleague returns.’
‘I’ll need something in writing.’
The balloon of Nicola’s imagination began to dip. ‘Brigands,’ he pleaded, ‘stole my writing case.’
The captain, however, had caught fire. ‘You may use mine. Have you a seal?’
A seal? Nicola’s hand clapped to his chest and felt the small bump of the one which Flavio had given him. It had the wrong pope’s arms on it, was indeed a seal from before not one but two Roman Republics, but, if he smudged the wax, would anyone notice this?
The officer meanwhile confided his dislike of the Austrians. His had been a disappointing war and having to work with the Croats was the last straw. Butchers was what they were. Here, abate, can you use this?
It was a leather writing case with silver ink bottles, paper and wax. ‘Order me to hand the prisoner over to you,’ said the captain, ‘and I’ll handle the Croat. But hurry. If they come back before you get her away, they’ll enjoy refusing you.’
Nicola wrote the letter, signed it in Cardinal Oppizzoni’s name, sealed it with Flavio’s seal and within half an hour was in the coach with Maria, bowling out of the yard, while Enzo, on the coachman’s box, kept his gun at the ready.
Maria sat stunned and listless.
At first Nicola was pleased that she had not spoiled his story by greeting him too familiarly. Then, as the coach jingled over dusky roads and she still sat as unmoving as Niobe, elation fell away. As it did, he began to wonder whether his cleverness was not beside the point. Almost angrily, he tried to rally her, but persuasion had never worked with Maria. She had, he knew, seen her lover killed. Yet – jealousy nipped at his sympathy – for how long could she have known this lover? A week? Less? Until two weeks ago she had been with the Frenchman and the memory of what he had said of her buzzed like some foul fry at the edge of Nicola’s mind. He refused to acknowledge it. Death had consecrated her most recent lubricity.
‘Do you want to tell me how it was?’
Numb headshake.
‘I’m taking you to the border with Tuscany. There’s a priest there who’ll smuggle you across. A friend of Garibaldi’s.’ Nicola remembered this from the dossier on suspect clerics which he had kept for Cardinal Oppizzoni. ‘Are you,’ he asked the numb silence, ‘hungry?’
More silence. She drooped and it was an anguished rapture to have her here safe from everyone except his own soured desire. His was a bruised love and he tried to make it generous, telling himself that he wanted nothing from her – only to make her happy. But that hope, in the immediate circumstances, was childish. She made him seem perennially backward in experience, feeling the wrong things and unable to catch up.
*
Modigliana was a small town heaped in a valley like eggs in a basket. It was also off his route which meant that he was not proceeding to Bologna as fast as promised. One mission of mercy was interfering with another.
Don Giovanni Verità, a convivial countryman who, like Father Bassi, committed the solecism of wearing trousers instead of a cassock and a round, instead of a three-cornered, hat, groaned at news of the Austrian ambush, rallied, gabbled a prayer, then told them that Garibaldi had been here and was almost certainly now in safety. Rumours were coming thick and fast and the latest was that Garibaldi’s wife, Anna, was wounded or ill and that Father Ugo Bassi, who had been with the couple, had left them, set off alone with one companion and been taken prisoner. This news revived Nicola’s sense of urgency and he asked whether they could get a change of horses and press on for Bologna tonight. But the priest, the coachman and even Enzo opposed the idea. Driving after dark was illegal and, besides, the roads were infested by dangerous men. They must spend the night where they were.
‘But you go out at night?’ Nicola reminded the priest.
Ah, said the reverend smuggler, that was different. He knew the country around here as well as any goat. Even so, he would not brave the dark tonight. Tomorrow, he would take the girl over the border and see her into safe hands.
He spent the rest of the evening telling smuggling stories.
*
Early next morning, Nicola and his two companions drove off into a lemon-bright dawn. An image of Don Giovanni Verità, waving his round hat, danced behind them at the door of the presbytery which, when the cloths came off the cages in its small corridor, vibrated with a private dawn chorus. The priest had explained that though, as a smuggler, hunting was his great cover, he loved birds and spent winter evenings making these light, roomy cages from reeds and willow twigs.
‘He’s like the Pope,’ said the irreverent Enzo. ‘He loves his subjects so much that he keeps them caged in.’
Nicola had not tried to say goodbye to Maria who was asleep.
*
Outside Fognano one of the horses cast a shoe and they had to look for a farrier. While the man heated the metal to a red-hot transparency, a procession of schoolgirls in white pinafores dawdled past. Two nuns walked with them and their black habits against the white had a bleak, prophetic harshness.
‘That’sh Shishter Paola,’ said the smith, speaking through a mouthful of nails. ‘Clever woman! Ushed to be the Pope’sh penitent. She cured my back.’
The slim nun
waved at the smith who waved back, then went on hammering. ‘Look out for Garibaldini,’ he warned as he pocketed his fee.
Again the roads were hilly and Nicola imagined Don Giovanni Verità negotiating one with Maria riding pillion behind him. He wondered if he would see her again. As the coach was moving at a snail’s pace, he decided to dismount and relieve himself.
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ he told the coachman, then, a minute or so later, hearing Enzo’s whistle somewhere above his head, guessed that, if he were to climb straight through the woodland, instead of following the road’s bend, he would come out ahead of the coach. Accordingly, he struck up the hill.
Suddenly he was thrown to the ground. The sun, blazing through a ring of heads in silhouette, fell into his eyes. The sole of a boot loomed. He heard a shot.
‘Idiot,’ said a voice from one of the silhouetted heads. ‘What’s he trying to do? Attract the Austrian High Command?’
More men, dressed half in military, half in civilian, clothes now pushed Enzo and the coachman through the bushes. Garibaldini!
‘Why did you shoot?’ asked the one who had spoken before.
‘Had to,’ said one of the newcomers. ‘He,’ indicating Enzo, ‘had a gun.’
Nicola, addressed a dazzle of sky. ‘Please,’ he gasped, ‘I’m being sent to get better treatment for the captured men. It’s more urgent now because the Austrians have got Father Bassi.’
‘Lies. General Garibaldi’s party got over the border.’
‘They got separated.’
The boot rose again and pressed down on Nicola’s chin. ‘Tricky little abate!’ The boot’s owner’s voice lilted and the boot pressed. ‘A bit young for an abate, aren’t you? But when did priests play by the rules? We don’t care for Father Bassi, see?’ The boot rose and Nicola squirmed away his face. ‘You let a few priests stay with us so that if we win you’ll be able to say you were really on our side. Decoys is what they are. Bassi too. The priest at Modigliana is another.’
‘Stop tormenting him.’
‘Why? Like pretty priests, do you? Got plans for him, eh?’
There was the sound of a scuffle and Nicola found that he had been released. Dust however had got into his throat and a cough jolted him so that he missed seeing the fight. When he recovered, Enzo had been stripped and tied to a tree. Someone unbuttoned Nicola’s jacket. ‘Sorry, abate, we need your clothes.’ Then he too was tied up and some red shirts left beside him. ‘In case you’re cold,’ mocked a voice.
‘Leave the dispatches. What use are they to you? Mine is a mission of mercy,’ he argued.
‘So is ours. Mercy for ourselves! Save your own skin is the first rule of war. Here, though, keep your dispatches.’ And they were tossed on the ground beside him.
*
By the time Enzo had wriggled free of his bonds and released the other two, it was again dusk and, under its cover, having decided against wearing the dangerous red shirts, they got into their carriage which their captors had preferred not to take and drove back to Modigliana in their underclothes, reaching it just as the priest returned from delivering Maria across the border. She was safe, he assured, though still mute. Not a word to be got from her. Don’t worry. Young women recover. Come and I’ll get you some food.
So they spent another night, drinking the priest’s sharpish wine while he confided that he had argued hammer and tongs with Father Bassi because he, Don Giovanni Verità, had never had any hope of this pope or any pope and did not think the Church should rule the secular roost. His was a family of smugglers whose smuggling was a moral act. It was a defiance of borders which should not exist and a remedy for the wounds which criss-crossed Italy. A lot of priests smuggled, he said, and conspired. Always had. Yes, he had heard of Don Mauro. He’d been unlucky. Let’s drink to him, poor man! In exile again, was he? Well, this life was an exile too and while we were in it, shouldn’t we defy oppression even when, here he lowered his voice, it came from our own Church? Which in these parts it often did. See what had just happened! How the Pope had called in the Austrians to brutalise his people into submission! You couldn’t close your eyes. You had to follow your own lights. If you didn’t, how could you pray or ask God to help you? Smuggling was a short cut, a stop-gap while waiting for a new dispensation which wasn’t going to come tomorrow. It was safer to take the law into your own hands than to trust popes or kings.
‘This pope,’ he said, ‘is not a lot better than the infamous Duke of Modena who intrigued with nationalists and then betrayed them. That was what started the troubles of 1831, which in turn shocked Mastai-Ferretti into thinking he was a Liberal. Spiritually speaking, he’s the progeny of the duke who murdered his confederate. How many of his followers will end up dead?’
This cast a gloom over the company which began arguing as to whether treachery was endemic to Italy. Enzo declared it to be a matter of poor timing at a time of change. The traitor was the man who got out of step with it.
The priest’s view was that traitors were men dazzled with hope, like poor Bassi who thought you could bring God’s kingdom to earth but was now – the news had been confirmed – in the hands of authorities which would judge him by mean and rigid laws. ‘I admire his heart but not his head,’ said Don Giovanni. ‘If you serve two masters, as I know well, you’ve got to keep your wits about you and be as tricky as a fox.’ By two masters, he explained, he meant God and the Pope.
All four men were by now drunk on wine and on the strain of keeping up with reality, so they said good night, lay down where they could and blew out their candles.
‘I must get to Bologna!’ Nicola, who had had a nightmare, sat bolt upright in a sweat of desperation.
‘Hush!’ said Enzo with whom he was sharing a bed.
Nicola’s nightmares were filled with knife-blades which, when he finally woke up, turned out to be the cracks in a shutter. Again the priest’s birds filled the air with their sweet captive chorus and the travellers left at dawn. All three wore such oddments as their host had managed to lay hands on without arousing suspicion or alerting anyone to their presence.
*
Cardinal Oppizzoni threw his arms around Nicola’s neck and wept a little. Yes, he confirmed, Father Ugo Bassi was indeed in Austrian hands and about to be brought here to Bologna. General Grozkowski was unlikely to handle him gently. The general was stiff-necked and the cardinal was on bad terms with him. All communications now passed through the hands of Monsignor Bedini, His Holiness’s Commissario Straordinario, an Austrophile who, between ourselves, was less helpful than he might have been. The cardinal had been nettled by the General’s refusal to let him hold the Corpus Christi procession. A slight. A deliberate annoyance. Never in the fifty years that he had been at the head of this diocese had the procession not been held. As he had told Monsignor Bedini who had failed to support him – but he was losing track. What was this message from Gaeta then?
Nicola told him.
The cardinal looked sombre. So they wanted him to condemn Fathers Gavazzi and Bassi in the public newspaper, did they? By name? But, figlio mio, that would be tantamount to throwing them to the wolves. The Austrians would take it as a repudiation of their ecclesiastical status, a withdrawal of the protection of the Church. Surely, surely this would be unwise? The two could then be treated as common criminals.
Nicola explained the bargain. The cardinal was to publish his repudiation of Republican priests and the Austrians would replace Grozkowski. Father Bassi would then receive a more lenient sentence. ‘If you condemn him, they won’t.’
‘But can I rely on this promise?’
‘Cardinal Amandi says the Pope agreed to the plan.’
‘He said that? Clearly?’
‘Yes.’
Oppizzoni put his head in his hands. ‘The Austrians hate us now. They even hate His Holiness. They can’t be trusted.’
He sent Nicola for a copy of the letter they wanted published. He hadn’t written it – or rather, he had, but under duress,
to satisfy the reactionary clergy of this diocese. ‘I’m too old for such gambles. If only we had the electric telegraph here we could ask His Holiness for clarification.’ Changing tack, he noted querulously that he couldn’t publish the letter even if he wanted to. The Austrians wouldn’t let him. He had to submit every word he wanted published to their lapdog and lickspittle, Bedini, who had to submit it to them for their sanction and imprimatur. ‘Can you imagine the humiliation! They won’t forgive us for supporting the war against them. Poor Bassi will pay the price.’
*
Having lost a suit of clothes to the Garibaldini, Nicola remembered the one promised by an anonymous donor and went to see the tailor, only to learn that the order had been cancelled weeks ago which was when Amandi lost the fame of being a Future Secretary of State. ‘From now on,’ he had warned Nicola, ‘our connection may be more of a hindrance than a help.’ Well, thought the young man with regret and amusement, it had already cost him a suit.
*
On 6th August, Oppizzoni’s Notificazione appeared in the Gazzetta di Bologna. It was a copy of his letter to Gaeta, explaining his failure to condemn unruly priests at a time when, since the Republic was in power, the condemnation could have had no practical effect. Nicola was struck by the implication that this effect now could and should ensue.
Heading for the episcopal palace, he was held up by a press of people watching captured Republican soldiers being marched through the streets. They looked alike, as though defeat had soldered them into a homogenous mass.
‘They’ve come from Rimini,’ said someone; ‘they were captured at San Marino. The poor bastards don’t look as though they can remember a square meal. I heard there were eight hundred of them.’
The Judas Cloth Page 31