The Pop’s Rhinoceros (52 page)

Not there, he thought, and not here, either. The chamber stank. The straw in the palliasses was unchanged since their arrival, and many of the monks’ habits were crusted with filth, although Gerhardt and those who gathered about him went better-kempt. He did not know how they filled their days. It was Gerhardt who now led the evening prayers, which were brief and concerned principally and successively with their “plight,” their “trial,” their “error,” and finally the “error into which they had been led.” Jörg remained silent, sitting isolated on his palliasse. HansJürgen moved among Florian, Joachim-Heinz, Heinz-Joachim, and a few others, whose numbers slowly dwindled with the passing of the days.

Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf came and went as they pleased. Their habits were skirts of rags caked with river mud, for they spent most of their time amongst the beggars and ruffians below the Ponte Sant’Angelo. Salvestro and Bernardo had twice seen them as they passed above, for the three would shout up, “Bernardo! Bernardo!” in unison, drawing curious glances from the pilgrims waiting to board the lighters, small rowboats, and pirogues. They would raise their arms and hold them there in a mute acclamation that was only part mockery. When Salvestro called for them to come up and return with them to the Stick, they ignored him. When Bernardo himself called they ran away. In the chamber they acted as though none of this had ever taken place, ignoring the two men along with the rest of the monks. The hour or two before the lights were dowsed was a time of intercepted glances and constrained silence.

Only Jörg seemed oblivious. Night by night, the monks sleeping closest to him would shift their mattresses away from his until his sightless figure became the center of an island eroded to himself, HansJürgen, Salvestro, and Bernardo. On the other side of the chamber, Gerhardt’s territory swelled. Still the Prior said nothing and offered no challenge. He woke, prayed, slept, and scribbled. Salvestro lay back on his mattress and stared into the darkness. The scabbard concealed in the straw of his palliasse dug into his back. He thought idly of telling Bernardo that it was Gerhardt who had formed the islanders into a lynch-party. The thought of the man’s neck snapping like a wax candle as Bernardo dangled him from one hand was a pleasant fantasy. Why did the Prior not expel the malcontent? The question was plausible only in darkness. To look on Father Jörg now was to know that he would do no such thing.

Having taken the westernmost alley that led from the Via Alessandrina one evening, they had waited and watched from the safety of the passageway as a group of men carrying bales of straw, then a man with a laughing woman on his arm, then someone being pulled along by two yapping dogs disturbed the Via dei Sinibaldi’s darkness. It was the dogs that gave him pause, for they had seen them that morning, leading the same man down the Via dell’Elefante, when they had barked furiously at Bernardo, prompting the latter’s usual disquisition against the
hatefulness of dogs. “The ones I don’t mind are small, or asleep,” Bernardo had begun, and Salvestro had half-listened to the remainder of the familiar meander through the different breeds and their relative hatefulness, which boiled down finally, as it always did, to the observation that “the bigger the dog, the worse it is.” Those now disappearing around the bend the Via dei Sinibaldi took about the Chapel of Santa Simonetta were medium-size dogs. He waited until their barking had subsided into silence, and then he noticed the shadow.

A little way past the entrance to the Stick, amongst the jumble of dim shapes that were the broken wall, an oddly shaped patch of dark added its outline to those of the toppling masonry. He raised his finger to his lips, then whispered in the man’s ear. Bernardo crept back into the alley. Salvestro waited. He was already thinking of tomorrow’s dawn, when the ghostly face that haunted his waking would appear to him as usual, say the same words—
Welcome to Rome. …
—and be banished for good with the thought of what they were about to do:
Last night we rubbed you out for keeps. …
When he judged a sufficient time had passed, he stepped boldly into the center of the street and ambled toward the Stick. The saliva pooling in his mouth was salty and thick. He thought of Bernardo skipping forward silently, at his best now, a silent phantom, big in the darkness, his hands big and quick. What if instead of doing as instructed, he simply launched himself at his target? He moved forward. The shadow did not move, though he knew it for a man now, crouching, perhaps, or sitting. A man can assume a lot of shapes, he thought, or was thinking as he moved forward, and he barely had time, the split second it took to open his mouth and shout, as it seemed a silent cannon fired two bodies into the street and Bernardo raised his arm above the skull, which will split open like ripe fruit in another instant—no, no, no, “No!” he shouted out, for it was not the figure he feared. The man was winded, lying on his back and waving his arms and legs feebly. He was not the Colonel at all.

“Just like on the beach,” said Bernardo. They both looked at him, confounded for a second, Salvestro bending to offer his hand, the other struggling to rise. It was HansJürgen. “When we found him on the beach,” Bernardo went on, addressing Salvestro now. He laughed briefly and nervously.

The monk gathered himself slowly, standing in the darkened street, taking deep breaths of the warm night air. He cleared his throat noisily. “I wished to speak with you, Salvestro,” he said.

They walked in silence together, with Bernardo trailing ten paces behind. They took an alley that led north, crossing the Via Alessandrina a little way short of the piazza. The silence soon grew oppressive, and Salvestro, certain that this strangely contrived meeting concerned his whispered warning, cast about for some way to broach the subject of Gerhardt. They wove a path through the pedestrians in the Via Hadriani and emerged on the Via dell’Elefante. Here HansJürgen stopped and indicated the far side of the street as it led up toward the piazza.

“There are benches here in the day,” he said. “The money changers work here.”

Salvestro nodded, wondering what this had to do with Gerhardt. The monk’s red-rimmed eyes cast up and down the street. Torches clustered and flared in the great square farther up. He looked bewildered.

“You have coins,” he said. It might have been a question. Salvestro waited. “I have tried to exchange our silver here, but they will not.”

“Raw metal,” Salvestro said. “The
bancherotti
only deal in coin.”

“And you have coin.” HansJürgen nodded to himself as he said this. He seemed uneasy, unsure how to proceed. “How might we, I wonder, exchange silver here if these
bancherotti
will not … I wonder how you, Salvestro, were able to. If you could …”

A horse came to a stubborn halt in the midst of the passersby before them, its hooves scraping on the cobbles. The rider dismounted and tried to pull it forward by the bridle. Eventually he tied a scarf about its head, and thus blindfolded, the animal suffered itself to be led into the piazza, where it quickly disappeared from their view in the sluggish and swirling crowds. Salvestro was about to say that he could exchange the monks’ silver for Roman soldi on the morrow.

“Do you know how we spend our days?” HansJürgen asked, still peering after the horse, though it was nowhere in sight. The palace rose on the far side of the square, black against a black sky. “There—” He pointed to the jumble of towers and rooflines. “We sit in the courtyard in there.” He made a sound that sounded to Salvestro like a stifled hiccup. It came again and was again choked back. Then HansJürgen began to laugh helplessly, a bitter, mocking noise. The people walking past looked at him curiously as he gasped and wheezed. “We sit in a courtyard. That is what we do, I and my Prior. We sit in a courtyard and wait for the Pope!”

“It wasn’t.” Bernardo had approached and now spoke to Salvestro as though HansJürgen were not there. “I told you.”

Struggling with his astonishment, Salvestro turned to his companion in bafflement. “Told me what?”

“I told you it wasn’t, but you didn’t believe me. It wasn’t the Colonel.”

“It was,” said Salvestro, turning back to the monk, whose laughter had become a rasping cough. “We will go tomorrow,” he told HansJürgen. Then he added, “You can count on us,” which started the monk laughing once again, more harshly than before.

The next day they walked into the Broken Wheel with two thick silver bracelets set with milky green stones and, after the same procedure as before, were given three hundred and seven Roman soldi by Lucullo, who after counting out the coins declared that he was a happier man for seeing them, and as before, the rest of the patrons agreed with him. Would they take a drink? They would. So would everyone else.

“Now,” said Lucullo, “I’ve been talking about this with Pierino here, but you’re the men to ask. What do you make of the latest tomfoolery of this Pope of ours?”

Salvestro looked at Bernardo.

“The Spaniards are already hot under the collar, eh?”

“And the Portingales,” added Pierino.

Bernardo looked back at Salvestro.

“So what do you make of it?” Lucullo pressed on.

“Of what?” asked Salvestro.

“This business about the beast.”

There was a short silence.

“What beast?” asked Bernardo.

Pierino began waving about a small leather-bound book. “One of the few I haven’t pawned,” he said.” Yet. It’s all in here. Plinius.” He began skipping through the pages. Salvestro and Bernardo drank, and grunted agreement whenever it seemed appropriate. “Alternatively it may be lured out and tamed using virgins. It is very partial to virgins, this beast. …” Pierino was explaining some minutes later. They nodded. Later a disagreeable oaf appeared to challenge their competence on the subject and was rightly shouted down. Later still they left, gazing about them in mild surprise once outside, for they had entered in daylight and now it was night. The happy ambience of the Broken Wheel seemed to blur the distinction between them. They stared up as though in search of a solution to this vague mystery, but the sky, being dark, was of no help.

Brother HansJürgen accepted gravely and without demur the two hundred sixty-five soldi they presented to him that night. Hanno and Georg gaped in open curiosity until a muttered word from Gerhardt reined them in, but Father Jörg said nothing. Salvestro watched and waited as HansJürgen murmured in his ear, but the Prior only nodded. It was later, when the lights had been dowsed and the denizens of the chamber were no more than the sound of their own breathing, the sour scent of their unwashed bodies, and the private anticipation of sleep, that Salvestro heard the man shift on his palliasse and say, distinctly, “Our thanks to you, Salvestro.” Someone on the far side of the chamber laughed.

When they had added what Salvestro called “their commission” to what Bernardo called “their money,” the two men found themselves, according to their respective calculations, in possession of either “a lot” or “fifty-seven” soldi. In the darkness of the chamber, Salvestro quietly tore a second square of cloth from his tattered shirt and tied the coins within it, resolving at the same time that they should buy themselves some new clothes, for even by the flexible standards of the Broken Wheel, they were coming to resemble scarecrows. The next morning, and every morning thereafter, they made their breakfast from hot bread purchased at a bakery in a side street a little way south of the Pescheria, for the bread at the Broken Wheel, though very cheap, was invariably hard and sometimes wormy. The tavern’s pies, however, were without peer, and they took their other meals there
while they held court along with Lucullo and Pierino. Lucullo’s enthusiasm for the independence of Bernardo’s thinking remained undiminished, and with it the enthusiasm of the establishment. Two things only disturbed this happy arrangement: “the oaf” and “their money.”

The oaf reappeared twice in the fortnight that followed. Salvestro had been speaking of their preparations for the voyage to Vineta: the barrel, the rope, problems with the boat. Bernardo had digressed enthusiastically on the rowing: “One, two”—he pumped vigorously on imaginary oars—” one, two, one, two… Like that.”

“Fascinating,” said Lucullo.

Then he was there. The oaf, with a supercilious sneer on his face. He was standing near the back as before, passing comments along the lines of “One, two, one, two? What happened to three?” until someone told him loudly to pipe down. Later, when Salvestro went in search of him, he seemed to have disappeared. None of the regulars had the faintest idea of his identity.

The second time he was more brazen. “Insolent,” was how Lucullo described the tone later. They had come back to the subject of the enigma, as Bernardo persisted in terming it. “I’ve been thinking,” Bernardo began. “This business with the virgins and the knees can’t be right. If all you really needed was a virgin, or a saw-blade, then they’d be so easy to capture. …” He stopped for a moment to consider the position this opinion had brought him to. Those nearest craned forward to catch whatever might follow, echoing Lucullo’s inclination from across the table. “Well,” Bernardo finally continued, “we’d be overrun with the things. …” Lucullo was nodding. “There’d be herds of them. …” Everyone else was nodding, too. “Whole flocks of them. …”

Then the oaf popped up, near the back inevitably. Up came his head with its high forehead and thinning hair. He snorted.

“Not only insolent, but derisive,” was how Pierino described the tone later.

It was not a loud snort, nor particularly prolonged. There was little that was truly horselike about it. Nevertheless, heads turned, lips curled, scowls appeared. It was a nigglingly sarcastic flap of the gums, a plosive “Pah!” a nastily calculated aural fart wherein insolence, derision, and rank disbelief cohabited in an irritatingly smug ménage à trois. “I should have plugged his mouth with this bottle,” was how Salvestro put it later, swiftly plugging his own.

“You should,” Lucullo urged.

“You should,” the whole tavern agreed. But, scanning the tavern, they noticed the oaf had disappeared once again. A few days later, their money had, too.