City of God (12 page)

Miguelito looked asleep. His head was tipped forward on his chest. He wore riding clothes; his boots were scuffed. Nicholas stood there a moment, drawn to his aloneness. Everyone hated Miguelito, just as everyone ignored Nicholas.

He was about to go when Miguelito raised his head. Their eyes met. Nicholas went into the room.

“Hello, Messer Mouse,” Miguelito said, in a drowsy voice. “Were you looking for me?”

A small round table stood beside his chair, and on the far side, another chair; Nicholas sat down in it. He was uncertain what to say. Miguelito's head dropped backward onto the padded shoulder of the chair.

“What do you want to know? How we fared in Naples?”

“That's common knowledge,” Nicholas said. “From the moment Capua fell, there was no doubt anyway, was there?”

“None at all, even before,” Miguelito said dreamily. “Mene Tekel Upharsin. Except that this kingdom was divided between the French and the Spanish.”

“Did you fight at Capua?”

“That farce?”

“The stories were rather more colorful than believable. Is it true that Valentino sorted through the female prisoners and kept the forty most beautiful for himself?”

Miguelito laughed, an unpleasant growling in his throat. “There are not forty beautiful women in Capua.” He raised his head again, facing Nicholas. “It was bloody, boring work, Messer Mouse. Be thankful you are no soldier.”

“Who has given me the unappealing name?”

“My master. ‘The little mouse, who nibbles all the cheese.' He says you know everything that happens in Rome.”

“Would that I did.”

“I overheard you adding to your knowledge, in there with the ladies. What if he had taken the women? Would that offend you?”

“Rome feeds on scandals. It's an offense not to provide them.”

Miguelito was leaning toward him over the arm of his chair. The lamp on the far wall threw his shadow over the little table top.

“All creatures are bound in the chains of nature. All save man. So says my master. Only man may choose what he will be. Therefore it behooves a man to live beyond all limits, however reasonable or natural they seem.” Miguelito's black eyes gleamed. “Do you understand?”

“I try,” Nicholas said. “Do you customarily indulge in Italian philosophies? I thought you disliked Italians.”

“I obey my master.” Miguelito let his head fall back onto the chair. “Go away, mouse. I am very tired.”

Nicholas sat still, watching the other man compose himself and shut his eyes. Miguelito like all actors needed his audience. After a long silence Nicholas rose and went out to the room full of statues.

“Nicholas! There you are.”

In the gallery Angela swooped at him. She had Stefano by the hand.

“I found this lovely fellow looking for you. You should not leave him alone, love, really, not here.”

Stefano put out his free hand. “I need some money. Not much. I left my purse at your house.”

Nicholas slid his hand into his wallet. Angela leaned against Stefano's side, her fingers pressing and pulling on his arm. He paid no heed to her at all. Nicholas gave him the wallet.

“Come watch,” Stefano said.

“I will,” Nicholas said. “Madonna, you will join us?”

He glanced back through the open door. Miguelito's eyes were open, watching. Nicholas went away amused.

Stefano sat down to play cards with the men in the sala grande. Angela was devoting herself to him, playing with his hair and simpering into his ears; Nicholas went off to the nearest window to breathe cool air. The room was full of drunken dancers, swaying to the sound of laughter, since there was no music. A page brought Nicholas a glass of wine. He watched Stefano play cards. The lamplight shone on his face and the faces of the four men he was gaming with; only Stefano was smiling.

After a few turns of the cards, Stefano swept half the money stacked before him into Nicholas's purse and gave it to Angela. She brought it to him, glowing.

“What a beauty,” she said, and stuck her tongue out.

He took the purse, turning away from her, disgusted.

The dancers swayed and bobbed in the center of the room, like weeds under the ocean, their feet hardly moving. In the darker corners men and women were joined in lascivious embraces. There was wine spilled on the floor. Nicholas kept his nose turned to the fresh air coming through the window beside him; he laid his hand on the sill. The wine he was drinking was very strong and he resolved to have no more of it. The light fooled his eyes. He thought he saw winking eyes watching all around him but when he looked straight he saw only the reflection of the lamplight on the shining surfaces of the room, the golden cups, the jewels, the puddled wine on the floor. He strangled down a yawn.

A leopard stalked into the room.

Sluggish from the wine, he needed a moment even to become alarmed. A woman gasped. It was real; it was huge. It paced slowly forward through the room, its broad head turning from side to side. The lamplight struck a gleam from its golden collar.

No one moved. The dancers, suspended in their drunken rhythm, stood goggling at the leopard as it passed among them. Its long body hung supply from the frames of its shoulders and hips; it seemed about to move in every direction at once. Nicholas put his other hand on the windowsill and without moving his head looked quickly out. The drop was too far, he could not escape that way. The beast passed him, and its long tail flicked and the fur grazed his knee.

With a scream a woman wheeled and bolted for the door. The cat recoiled at the sound; its head like an arrowhead swung to point at the running figure, in her billows of skirts, and everyone else in the room broke and fled. Nicholas alone did not move, having nowhere to go. Stefano shot up from his chair, gripped Angela Borgia's arm, and swung her around behind him into a corner. In the two doorways the screaming dancers fought to get through and clogged the way out with their bodies. The leopard crouched and leapt on them.

Nicholas cried out. The cat landed in the midst of the people; Nicholas saw the broad paws stroke down a puffed sleeve and slash it into fifths, the white padding gushing out like guts. The shrieks hurt his ears. The people fled back into the room and the leopard turned and sprang again.

“Nicholas!”

The animal brought down a woman, rolling on the floor.

“Nicholas!” Stefano shouted into his ear, and pulled him.

He could not move. Through the door a tall man came, laughing, and whistled.

The cat, straddling the woman on the floor, lifted its head and looked around. Behind him, the tall man advanced a few steps and stopped; a leash dangled coiled in his hand. It was Valentino. The screaming stopped. In the sudden calm everyone heard Valentino say, “That's enough, now. Sit.”

Nicholas let out his breath in a sigh. Valentino could deal with it. Indeed, the cat was moving away from the sobbing woman, its long tail trailing over her, and it went up by Valentino's side and tucked its hindlegs under it and sat. The big man fondled it. Nicholas thought he saw the cat lick the man's hand.

Stefano still clutched his arm; Nicholas moved a little, and Stefano let him go. Nicholas looked around at him. “Are you saving me?” His sleeve was rumpled and he stroked it smooth again. Valentino with the leopard was gone. All the tension left the room with him, and the frozen folk along the walls sighed and slumped and went over to inspect the woman crying in the middle of the floor.

“Did he do that on purpose?” Stefano asked. “Turn the cat on us?”

Nicholas had the same suspicion, and he turned away, back to the window, to the darkness and the cool air. Down below him a door opened in a wedge of light and let out the golden-haired Valentino and his golden hunting cat. The beast sprang forward across the grass and the man ran lightly after it.

Stefano had gone back to his card game; Nicholas turned his head enough to watch him. Like everyone else, the other players were moving restlessly around the room and talking over the incident. Angela Borgia, in the corner, was staring at Stefano with eyes that glowed unpleasantly. Nicholas looked out the window again. Far out there in the darkness the man running and the beast were two shadows in passage over the grass.

On the windowsill by his hand a half-full glass of wine still stood. He reached for it with an untoward haste and poured the liquor down his throat.

The racket of talk behind him swelled to a cacophony. The woman was unhurt; the others were jabbering about the leopard, mostly nonsense, foolish things they repeated over and over. “Did you see that? Did you see that?” The smell still lingered in the room of the excitement, a taint of sweat, souring all the perfumes. Stefano and Angela Borgia were gone.

Nicholas took his glass off in search of more wine; he found it in a carafe on the table across the room, under the lamp. His hands were trembling. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

Of course it had not really happened to him at all. He had watched, only. He was that sort of man. His life was one thing observed after another; he lived at a window, looking in. He drank a full glass of the wine in a few swallows, unable to take his mind from the memory of the man and the leopard racing across the grass.

Stefano came in again, through the far door; his coat was open and his eyelids drooped. He pulled out his chair at the gaming table and sat in it and picked the cards up.

Nicholas filled his glass once more. He walked back across the room to the window where the air was markedly cooler and sweeter. The woman whom the cat had struck was propped up on the couch among three or four courtiers who plied her with wine and draughts.

At the gaming table the other players were one by one taking their places. Stefano shuffled the cards.

Angela had returned, her hair mussed, looking angry. She crossed the room to Nicholas's side. Her teeth were set together like a cage over her tongue, and she spoke through them.

“You should have warned me.”

“Warned you about what, Madonna?”

She jerked her head around and with one hand raked back her heavy shining hair. A huge gold earring dangled from one ear but the other was bare.

Nicholas laughed; he was too drunk with the wine to stop himself, or even to want to, and he shook his head at her. “Someone will give you another pair.”

“They are a gift from a very important man,” she said. She tossed her head violently so that her hair covered her ears again. “Get it back for me, Nicholas.”

Behind him he heard the slap of the cards on the table. He said, “What will that win me?”

He saw her hand move but in his wine-haze he was too slow to dodge. Her palm cracked across his cheek. She marched away from him across the room to the door. The door slammed behind her. Everyone turned to look.

Nicholas's cheek burned and he laid his hand over it. He glanced across his shoulder at Stefano. His lover's gaze was turned on him, and when their eyes met, Stefano smiled, broad and merry. Nicholas grunted. He reached for his glass of wine again.

“The Borgias' next ambition,” Nicholas wrote, “is to marry off the Pope's daughter, the princess Lucrezia, to her third husband. Although any sensible man would abhor such an offer, it is believed here that His Holiness and Duke Valentino have settled on the heir of the Duke of Ferrara to warm the bed of the notorious princess.”

Actually Bruni did not believe that; Bruni as usual refused to commit himself until the choice was obvious to everybody.

“Why the Borgias should desire an alliance with the Estensi, no one can misguess, since the duchy of Ferrara borders on the Romagna; and Alfonso d'Este, the proposed spouse, is an expert in the forging and handling in the field of the new artillery; the mystery in the scheme derives from the question of why the Duke of Ferrara, whose house is accustomed to marry only into the purest and most noble lineages, should agree to bestow his eldest son and heir in marriage on a lady who, while not yet twenty years of age, has been quit of two husbands already, under the most unsavory circumstances, and who has, if gossip may be believed, filled the interstices with countless lovers.”

Nicholas dipped his pen into the ink. He was proud of that sentence; no one familiar with Bruni's style would believe anyone else had written it. In spite of its length, its meaning was rather too clear, but that Nicholas could not help, since unlike Bruni he intended to be understood.

“It has been remarked, indeed, that since the negotiations with Ferrara began, the princess and her court have observed an utter propriety, which ought to surprise no one, since the past summer witnessed such extraordinary and shocking events in the Vatican that as far away as Germany the pamphleteers have been moved to righteous indignation that such behavior should take place in the residence of the Vicar of Christ.”

He sat back, chewing his lip, while he hunted through his mind for some choice libel. Ever since he had found out that the Borgias kept a spy in the Florentine offices, he had been trying one way and then another to discover him. Nothing so far had served. Of late he had been salting his dispatches with scurrilous remarks and gossip about Valentino's family. Alexander laughed at slander but Valentino heated violently at it. Every time Nicholas saw the Borgia prince, he watched him keenly for any sign that Valentino knew of the backbiting in the dispatches; if he did, then his spy had to be in the chancery offices in Florence herself.

He went on, “In spite of this, I—”

There was a sharp rap on his door. “Messer Nicholas, the courier is here.”

He left his desk and the letter and went down to the workroom.

Throughout the end of the summer, when the heat was at its worst and the damp unhealthy air of Rome hummed with insects, Nicholas was overwhelmed with work. Besides his usual duties at the legation, Bruni piled him up with other matters: the Signory required certain information, or wished a summary of old knowledge; everything had to be done at once. The Papal datary was still trying to force someone to pay a fee for the Pope's kindness in releasing Caterina Sforza, and Nicholas met with him every few weeks to discuss and deny any responsibility for Florence. The Borgias also insisted on his time, dragging him here and there over Rome on errands of no real importance, except to show him who led him.