City of God (26 page)

“We shall need wood, now that you've burnt it all up for his sake.”

“I will hire a carter to bring some here from the legation supply.” Nicholas opened the gate.

Juan put out his hand to hold the gate open for him. He turned up his long face, graven with lines. “If Valentino falls, what will become of us?”

Nicholas's jaw fell open. He had never guessed that Juan might know. He must have inferred it all long since, as he did everything, watching and dreaming.

“Valentino will not fall,” Nicholas said. “Don't—”

He shut his mouth again, looking out to the street; he had intended to warn the old man to keep the secret, but that was fatuous. Juan pushed the gate open a few feet.

“Don't worry about the wood,” Nicholas said, and went out. In the street, the first gusty rain of October was beginning to fall. Hunching his shoulders, he put his face into the wind and walked across Rome to the Vatican, to report what Bruni had told him to the Pope.

Nicholas woke with a start. His mouth tasted stale and foul. He was still in his chair in the sitting room; he had fallen asleep there, by the fire. The first thought into his wakened mind was that Stefano had not come.

He stirred himself, his stiffened limbs protesting. The hour was late. Juan had gone to bed; the kitchen was dark. It was very late. Perhaps Stefano had fallen into a game, although on Thursdays he always came to Nicholas's house. Nicholas padded around the room in his stocking feet—his shoes lay under the chair where he had slept—to pour himself a glass of wine and wake himself up. When the game was done Stefano would come, however late the hour; he always came on Thursdays.

The fire had gone out. Nicholas fed it bits of wood and blew on it and nursed the first little flames into robust life. He crouched in the warmth and light of the fire, enjoying the baking heat on his face.

When Stefano came he would be hungry. They could warm his dinner over the fire.

He made another circuit of the room, putting on his shoes. Stefano was often late. He had no sense of time or the propriety of being on time. But he always came on Thursdays.

He remembered the first Thursday, when Stefano had come very late. That time he had been waylaid leaving the game. Nicholas stood by the fire again and poked furiously into its heart. Stefano was a big man, and hard. He was always in fights. If Nicholas began worrying about such things he would never stop. He forbade himself to worry what had befallen Stefano this time. He would learn it when Stefano came.

He drank another glass of wine. He forced himself to read a few pages of a book. The fire died down, and he fussed over it again, reviving it.

The hour could not be all that late, after all—he had not heard the midnight bells, or the watch pass. At that moment he heard or thought he heard a cock crow, off in the distance, the cock at the end of the street. It was a myth they only gave voice at dawn; they crowed all night. The Sforza of Milan even took a family name from that,
Galeazzo
, because when the first Galeazzo was born the cocks crowed all night. Nicholas went back to his chair and his book.

He drank the last wine in the jug, thinking to fill it again from the keg in the kitchen, when Stefano came.

He could not read; he was too sleepy. He thought of putting his head down and napping, but instead rose and walked around the room again and prodded the fire, and he took the jug out to the kitchen to fill it.

He had to light the candle, to fill the jug, and while he was standing there scratching his knife over the flint in his tinderbox, the pantry door opened and old Juan padded into the kitchen, yawning, a candle on a dish in his hand.

His eyebrows rose like arches over his eyes. “You are early to rise.”

Nicholas said, “No—it is still the middle of the night.”

“But it is dawn,” Juan said. “Look—see the window?” He pointed into the pantry, at the pale shape of the window in the far wall. The flame of the candle danced in his eyes. He said, in a different voice, “He did not come?”

Nicholas closed the lid of his tinderbox with his thumb. He went out again to the sitting room.

He almost went into the Trastevere, instead of to his work, to find out what had happened to Stefano. He saw the folly of that. Youths let their longings trick them, not men like Nicholas. Above all he would not make a fool of himself over any man, even Stefano.

When he reached his office there was a slip of paper on his desk.

He pounced on it. It read: “Come at the second hour after nones to the lane behind the candlemakers' market, near the Piazza Navona, and wait by the olive tree for a man in a red hat.”

He read it over half a dozen times, trying to make sense of it, and finally sat down at his desk and spread it out between his hands on the surface and read it over again. It was absurd. Was it from Stefano? It had to be from Stefano, or concern him. A ransom, a tryst? He folded the note and put it in his wallet.

When the legation shut down for the afternoon, instead of going to his house for his dinner, he set off across the heart of the city toward the Piazza Navona. The streets were crowded with folk going home, loaves of bread tucked under their arms. The shops were closed or closing. He passed a hatmaker belatedly locking his door. In the lane behind the candlemakers' market, stinking of tallow, there was no sign of a man in a red hat.

Nicholas loitered by the only olive tree, his head turning to direct his gaze to either end of the lane. He was sure now this was a game of Stefano's.

A spot of red appeared, bobbing toward him from the direction of the piazza, and on coming closer resolved itself into a red hat perched on the head of a very tall man. It was no one Nicholas knew. He met the fellow with a smile and a joking remark, which the stranger's sour look quickly cut off.

“Come with me, please.”

Nicholas grunted. This had nothing to do with Stefano. Yet he was curious enough to follow the red hat on down the lane. At the corner the man removed his signal from his head and stuffed it under his coat.

They set off on a mad course through the deserted streets, turning every few feet into another alley or lane, and circling back over their tracks, until Nicholas lost patience.

“What fool's errand is this?”

The stranger said, through tight lips, “I am to see you are not followed.”

“Very well,” Nicholas said. “Assure yourself.” His stomach growling, he thought with regret of his dinner, which by now Juan himself would be eating. He refused to let this hugger-mugger pique his curiosity. In the end it would be a joke of Stefano's or something else petty. They crossed a piazza below a ruined wall, where a fountain streamed green water from a bronze shell and crowds of pigeons waddled around the paving stones pecking at the debris left from the morning's market.

In the next street was the Pantheon. The stranger drew Nicholas to the steps of the Roman relic.

“Go in. A man will come and ask you for a carlini—you must say you have only crowns. He will take you on.”

“This is absurd,” Nicholas said heatedly.

He said the last word to the stranger's back, as the man turned and walked away. Nicholas hesitated, one foot on the ground, one on the worn marble step. He looked up at the battered columns. At last he went into the building.

From outside it looked massive, worn, and undistinguished, but inside all the mass dissolved into the vast upward-arching space below the dome. The coffering on the inside of the dome increased the sensation of height and space. Below the oculus in the center of the dome, the marble floor was still puddled with water from the previous night's rain. Nicholas walked slowly around the edge of the room. Once statues of all the gods had stood in niches around the walls, but the walls were blank now, the niches empty; there was nothing to keep the eye from following the soaring line upward, and like any foreigner he could only look up, gaping.

He wondered if anything built in his own time would endure so long and so well as this; the banality of the thought made him smile, and he let himself wonder next at the innocence of the ancients, who had imagined all future time would be like theirs. It was hard to remember that in history old was young, and that the Pantheon came out of the childhood of the world.

“Have you a carlini?”

He lowered his eyes to a slight homely man who stood before him. “I have nothing but crowns.”

“Come with me, please.”

They left the Pantheon and again went roundabout through the streets. Nicholas decided not to be put off again. When they reached the stopping point on this journey he would demand to be told what was going on, or he would go home.

Probably it was a joke. Once again he considered that Stefano was playing a game with him. Or someone wanted him away from his house.

Treading after the slight man, he came to that idea with a jolt. That was the answer: they were keeping him from his house. Almost he turned in midstep and rushed away across the city to the rescue of his house. While he was gathering the resolve to do that, the slight man stopped.

They had come to an archway between the walls of two buildings. Nicholas reached out and took a handful of the smaller man's coat.

“Who are you? What does this mean? By Heaven, I will not let you go until I understand everything!”

“Go down there, to that door, and knock.”

“You will come with me to the watch.”

The slight man pointed through the archway. “Go there!”

Nicholas looked, his hand still fisted in the cloth of the other man's coat. The archway opened on a narrow alley between two high featureless walls of yellow travertine. Somewhere water was dripping. At the end of the alley there was a door with a lamp hung over it. Nicholas frowned at the man in his grasp, determined to have one at least of these people to take to the watch.

The man shrugged. He led Nicholas down to the door and rapped on it with his knuckles.

Nothing happened. The two men stood expectantly before the closed door a full minute. Abruptly Nicholas said, “No, per Baccho!” He turned, walking away from the doorway, to go back to his house.

“Wait!”

He stopped. The slight man knocked heavily on the door again, and this time the door opened at once.

“Go in,” the slight man said to Nicholas.

Nicholas went up behind him and pushed him. “You first.”

The slight man went in and Nicholas followed. They entered a gloomy little cellar, windowless, with only a table and a few wooden chairs for furnishings. A candle burned on the table. The slight man sidled away from Nicholas, going toward the door. In the big chair behind the table was a man wearing a black velvet mask; he watched Nicholas, his eyes glittering through the holes in the mask. He had the broad shoulders and narrow waist of a horseman. With a gesture he dismissed the slight man, who went out the door into the sunlight, and shut Nicholas into the room with this stranger.

Nicholas stood fixed in his tracks, unknowing what to do, or what was about to happen. The tail man removed his mask. It was Gianpaolo Baglione.

“My lord,” Nicholas said, amazed.

The Baglione dropped his mask on the table. “I bid you a great good day, Messer Dawson.”

Nicholas looked swiftly around him. They were alone in the room, but other doors led out of it than the one he had entered in by, and behind them crowds of armed men might be waiting for a signal from their lord. He faced Gianpaolo again; he had always suspected Gianpaolo of leading the conspiracy against Valentino.

“My lord,” he said, “may I ask you the purpose of this gaming?”

“Gaming,” Gianpaolo said. “I would it were a game, Messer Dawson. It's a little more than just a game. I want a message taken—no, that is wrong.”

He pushed with his foot at the table, looking sour.

“We swore to destroy him,” he said. “All his captains together, in one voice, we vowed to rid Italy of him. Well, Messer Dawson, I am sorry I swore it. I want to be his friend again.”

Nicholas's tongue slid into his cheek. He made a surprised face for Gianpaolo's benefit. “That may be difficult to arrange. Why have you come to me?”

“Bah. I heard you talk to him, that time, when you told him how to take Urbino. He'll listen to you.” With a rush of activity Gianpaolo stood up and walked off into the shadow at the back of the room. “The Valentino I knew—grew up with, damn him!—he was like me, he loved horses and swords and thrashing one's enemies. You don't understand that, do you? Little scribbler, city man, you have no idea what war is supposed to be. To take a city by guile—that isn't war.” Gianpaolo sat down again, this time on the table, with the candle behind him, so that he loomed up before Nicholas like a black beast.

“That's the nobility of war, to use force, to force your enemies down on their knees. Not to take from them when they aren't looking.”

Nicholas took a step backward, away from Gianpaolo. “Valentino decided everything, not I.”

“He's always been a cheat,” Gianpaolo said. “But not like this. Go tell him I'm sorry.”

“I will do what I can.”

“It was a stupid notion, anyway. I don't know why we thought Venice or Florence would help us. And the French in Milan—go tell him I will come to his side again.”

“I shall. How may I find you?”

“I will find you.” Gianpaolo moved in the dark, an indeterminate movement, and suddenly Nicholas found himself gripped by the arm. “I will find you.” The tall man slid off the table, took his mask, and went out, leaving the door open.

Nicholas stood where he was, full of thoughts. Before he left, he pinched the candle out.

When Nicholas came to his gate that evening, he found Stefano there.

They mumbled a greeting at each other; Nicholas could not look Stefano in the face and bent his attention to finding his key and using it in the lock. They walked in under the trees. Ahead, a light showed: Juan had opened the house door. Nicholas was walking first, ahead of Stefano, so that he did not have to look at him. Stefano had come only for a free meal and a bed. With every step Nicholas told himself to save his dignity and send Stefano away but he knew he would keep him there as long as he could, suffer much to keep him there.