The Pop’s Rhinoceros (53 page)

“Pies, bread, and beer,” Salvestro explained tersely to Bernardo. The two men peered anxiously at a scrap of stained cloth on which rested a solitary soldo. They had tried, in the days preceding their inevitable bankruptcy, to eat the Broken Wheel’s bread. But the bread was hard to countenance when there remained, wafting temptingly out of the kitchen, steaming enticingly on tables all around them, being guzzled and served up a second time in the guise of loud and happy
belches, the possibility of pies. They ate the pies. They were broke. “There were times we would have counted ourselves kings just to eat the bread,” Salvestro complained. “Remember Vühl?” They had eaten raw millet at Vühl. “Or Barr?” They had eaten a mole at Barr. “What about after Marne?”

Bernardo’s distress increased sharply. The Christian Free Company had spent five days camped in a stony valley while the villagers of Marne and their neighbors had scoured the countryside for them, carrying pitchforks, mattocks, and scythes. Marne was where the boy had been killed, or worse than killed. “Why’d you bring all that up?” Bernardo whined.

Salvestro looked away. “I meant, after Marne, we didn’t eat anything at all,” he said. Bernardo was shaking his head, not listening. Salvestro reeled off the names of other villages and other dishes they had eaten only with the greatest reluctance: corn husks at Hummingen, raw sheep’s trotters at Wöhlfart, and, at a particularly miserable place whose name for the moment escaped him, a dog. “And what about the herring?” he appealed finally. None of this made any difference. They could not bring themselves to eat the bread.

Pierino was the first to notice their predicament. Nursing their mugs of beer for hours on end, they looked up more than once to find him glancing at them curiously. He stood them rounds and bought them food, shielding his purse with his hand as he counted out the coins to conceal the paucity of those remaining. Even Bernardo quickly came to feel that this was unendurable. Lucullo too inquired discreetly after their means, but Salvestro brushed him off airily by saying that the situation would soon put itself right and winking in a conspiratorial manner. Inwardly he berated his stupidity. He had planned to exchange the scabbard the next day, which, being a gift from Lucullo to themselves, was awkward enough in the first place. Now it was impossible. The greetings that heralded their arrival each day at the Broken Wheel remained as hearty as before, but the two men found themselves more and more ill at ease as mugs and platters were ordered and consumed. One night, one of their intermittent drinking partners, a horse-dealer in Navona called Rosso on account of his carrot red hair, leaned back in his chair and asked in a loud voice, since everyone else had bought a round that night, and the same the night before, if they were planning to do the same anytime soon. He was instantly shouted down by the others, yet after that they began to be regarded differently. Lucullo and Pierino continued as friendly as before, but other tables at which they sat would mysteriously break up a few minutes after their arrival and reconvene, without them, across the room. Other patrons would sit in stubborn silence with empty mugs before them until Salvestro rose, tapping Bernardo on the shoulder to follow him. They began to run up debts, and Rodolfo, although he said nothing, regarded them archly from his station by the door to the kitchens. Salvestro watched Bernardo. Fear of a catastrophic outburst of temper from his friend joined the list of his worries as Bernardo grew vaguely but increasingly bewildered at the various cold shoulders offered them by the tavern’s patrons. He remembered the parting comment of
the leader of the brigands who made their home in the Ruins. We don’t belong here, either, he thought.

But it was neither Rodolfo nor any of their erstwhile drinking partners, not Pierino, and not Lucullo, either, who finally made their situation clear to them. They had stayed away for several days until, sick of their own company, bored and aimless, above all hungry, they had been driven by the tedium of the streets back to the warm bunker and welcoming fug of the tavern.

Rodolfo was nowhere in sight. They slipped past the kitchens and installed themselves at an empty table. A few men sitting at a neighboring table glanced around to look at them. One nodded. Salvestro nodded back. Anjelica and a girl he had not seen there before drifted in and out of the kitchen carrying large trays of food and drink. Salvestro raised his arm to catch her eye a number of times, but she seemed not to notice.

“Bread today, Bernardo,” he said. Bernardo said nothing.

Eventually the men at the table next to their own ordered another round of beer, and Anjelica was forced to acknowledge their presence.

“We’ll take a loaf of the bread,” said Salvestro.

Anjelica eyed them blankly.

“No beer today,” Salvestro continued in a jovial tone. “Just plain old bread.”

“Rodolfo wants to see you,” said Anjelica.

“Well, that’s as may be,” Salvestro replied, feeling himself color. “That’s fine. Always good to see Rodolfo. In the meantime we’ll take some bread.”

“He saw us last week,” said Bernardo. “Why does he want to see us now?”

Anjelica put down her tray. “That’s between you and him,” she said evenly.

“So,” Salvestro plowed on, sensing himself sink deeper into his own furrow, “some bread.”

Anjelica stared at him. There was a long silence. “People are getting tired of your sponging,” she said flatly. “They’re getting tired of you, too.”

There was a second, longer silence. Salvestro stood up suddenly. “Right. Come on, Bernardo. We’ll have a word with Rodolfo about this.” Anjelica’s expression did not change. She watched as Salvestro walked stiffly across the tavern, followed by Bernardo. At the neighboring table, the man who had earlier nodded now muttered, “Good riddance.”

“What about Rodolfo?” asked Bernardo as they reached the courtyard outside.

Salvestro did not reply. He breathed deeply and slowly, sucking in great lungfuls of the night air, standing with his back to the big man, who asked again in his bafflement, “We were going to see Rodolfo, weren’t we?” A deep breath in, a deep breath out. Like rowing, he thought to himself. Just like Bernardo’s beloved rowing.

“I do not think we’ll be seeing Rodolfo again,” Salvestro finally answered.

Someone coughed.

Someone who was neither Salvestro nor Bernardo, who was half sitting, half
standing, leaning against the sill of a bricked-in window, arms folded, unnoticed up till now behind them, the same supercilious expression as ever plastered across his face, at once infuriating and apt, a smirk that sent Salvestro’s thoughts scuttling back into the mason’s shop-cum-tavern entrance, where resided such articles as rusty saws, lump hammers, and large jagged-edged chisels, ideal for inflicting serious and lasting damage on human flesh and bone, for the cough, a mock polite attention-seeking throat-clearance, was emitted by a tall man with a high forehead and thinning hair, hatless, otherwise dressed in drab but generously cut clothes, who now moved forward with hand disarmingly outstretched, saying, “Rodolfo gave you my message? Thank you, gentlemen, for agreeing to meet me in these circumstances, and let me apologize for my earlier conduct, although as you will shortly see there was a reason behind it. I have a proposition for you,” in such friendly and conciliatory tones that Salvestro was brought up short, undecided as to whether he should forthwith break the man’s nose, take the proffered hand, or simply turn away and leave him standing there: the oaf.

“Perhaps we might speak somewhere in private? Perhaps,” he continued suavely, “I might be so bold as to offer the two of you … supper?”

It was, Rodolfo reflected four days later, not the kind of thing that would be talked about for years. It was more the kind of thing that would be talked about for months. His patrons, after all, were a various and independently minded bunch—he cultivated them as such—thus not easily surprised and inured to reversals of fortune both upward and downward by virtue of having undergone or engineered so many themselves. Nevertheless, he conceded privately, the reappearance, not to say transformation, of the two most recent and wayward of the Broken Wheel’s regulars was more than merely surprising. It was—and he was not a man given to hyperbole or even speech unless absolutely necessary— startling.

It was midevening and the tavern was filled to bursting, men sitting six to a bench, two to a chair, any number to a table. The women rushed about with pint-pots and plates, barging through the knots of drinkers who always seemed to cluster near the door to the kitchens. In the kitchens themselves the cooks were a blur of food-stained aprons and bad temper. They had given up speaking and resorted to growls. Things bubbled, then boiled, then boiled dry, then burned.

“Good God!”

“What?”

“Oh, my. …”

Salvestro first, followed by Bernardo, had entered the Broken Wheel by the main staircase and now stood at the top of the three steps leading down to the main floor. Over the dazzling white cotton of their shirts, they wore tight-fitting doublets of ciselé velvet, its pile cut in intricate designs of curling roses and other ornamental plant life. Gold-braided laces ran up the front, and silver ones secured the sleeves.
Cioppas
of
velluto ricamo
jacketed them in rich blues that shifted as the candlelight caught the warp and weft of the pile. Belts, buttons, and brooches
dotted their ensembles with little gleams of bronze and silver. Their birretas were each set off with a
fermaglio
in the shape of a silver scimitar. Salvestro wore a neck chain.

“What the …?”

“Incredible!”

“… believe it.”

The first spluttering reactions set off a chain of little sprays and showers of food-bits. Brief drizzles of beer arced gently from the amazed and gaping mouths of the tavern’s patrons. Truncated exclamations succeeded them, and, standing behind the two men, even Rodolfo looked surprised.

“If it ain’t …?”

“It is.”

“It is?”

“It
is!”

Pie-munching mouths concealed themselves behind napkins. Eyes peered over the top and widened to take in the dandyish transformation.

“Friends,” began Salvestro to the agog assembly. “Friends and fellow patrons of the Broken Wheel …” Then he stopped.

He had wanted to say something about their welcome, about belonging, or not belonging, and the places that had evicted them or the bruising chain of bad luck and circumstance that had dragged them to this point. But, as he stood there rocking on his heels with the whole tavern waiting on his words, all he could see outside the ranks of faces turned to his, outside the cocoon of overbreathed air and candlelight that was the tavern, his haven … It was black out there, the outer dark he had emerged from. An endless forest. A bottomless sea. He stood with his mouth open, wondering how to say this.

Bernardo nudged him from his confusion. The faces were turning curious and impatient at his silence. Reaching into the purse attached to his belt, he held up a fistful of coins and said simply, “For the last weeks we have drunk your beer and eaten your food. Tonight Bernardo and I ask you all to eat and drink ours.” He turned to find Rodolfo and poured the coins into the man’s cupped hands. For a moment the Broken Wheel was quiet, then a voice shouted, “A cheer for the Master Explorers!” and, the voice being Lucullo’s, the Broken Wheel cheered.

“Well, you two are full of surprises,” said Rodolfo, still fumbling with the coins. “Hardly expected to see you again. Did the fellow looking for you find you?”

But Salvestro’s eye was roving around the room, spying out Lucullo and Pierino at the far end. “Looking for us?” he answered absently. “Oh. Yes.”

Rodolfo’s eyes followed the trajectory of Salvestro’s thumb back over his shoulder to the foot of the stairs, where a tall, balding man he vaguely recognized lounged against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. Bafflement passed across his face. “But …?” he began to say.

But Salvestro and Bernardo were already halfway across the floor and busy
picking up handshakes, backslaps, and informal salutes. After clearing the forest of raised arms and beer mugs, they took their seats with Lucullo and Pierino, turning to take in the grinning goodwill still flowing their way from all parts of the tavern. A long procession of beer-filled jugs began marching out of the kitchen.

There was a brief pause as Lucullo and Pierino took in the full measure of the pair’s transformation.

“Well?” asked Pierino.

“Well indeed,” Salvestro replied calmly. Then he leaned forward and spoke in an urgent whisper. “We have to keep it under our hats.” The other two nodded. “Delicate business, but we’ve fallen on our feet this time.” They nodded again.

Then, before he could say more, a man appeared beside the table whom Pierino and Lucullo recognized as the ill-mannered scoffer of a few weeks ago. Lucullo raised an eyebrow as the man pulled up a chair. Salvestro and Bernardo shunted sideways to make room for him.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said quietly. “I am Don Antonio Seròn.”

Then Bernardo, who had begun fidgeting on his seat from the moment of sitting on it, blurted out, “We’re going to get an Enigma.” He looked about him excitedly and dropped his voice a fraction. “Me and Salvestro. We’re going to catch one for him”—he indicated Antonio—“and give it to the Pope.”

It was past midnight, Salvestro remembered later. The warm bodies sweating in the Broken Wheel had left their stale and cooling odors to drift about the jumble of pushed-back chairs. Slurred farewells had been exchanged. Antonio had stayed only a few minutes, and thereafter they had added their own voices to the racket. To the Master Explorers! The Beast! The Enigma! And now the soft scraping of brooms, water splashing into a bucket from somewhere within the kitchens, the thud of a head as it rose, focused blearily, then fell once again on the table. The tavern was almost empty. They rose heavily and ambled stiff-legged for the stairs. Rodolfo stopped them there.

“It wasn’t him,” he said.

“What?” Salvestro screwed up his face and rubbed his eyes.