The Pop’s Rhinoceros (61 page)

“Wait! Amalia wait!” She had turned and was walking, no, skipping deeper into the bog, into darkness. “Wait! What about us!” he pleaded.

“God will save you,” she called out over her shoulder. “Good-bye, Salvestro!”

She was gone.

“A bog.” Groot shuddered. “No wonder they never found her body. How did you get out?”

“On our bellies. It took us most of the night. … We thought they’d hanged you, Groot.”

The boy had disappeared somewhere, and they were alone.

“Hanged, eh?” Groot chuckled. “Well, you’ve been wide of the mark before. No, it was just as I said it would be, in the end.” He grew quiet, inspecting his gloved fingers. When he looked up again, he was trying to smile. “They wanted to know where you and Bernardo were. Rather insistent on it.” He pulled the glove off his left hand. Salvestro stared at the hand that Groot held up to his face. “This one”—Groot indicated the gap where his little finger should have been— “they took off with a small knife. This one, though”—he wiggled the next stump feebly—” this one they used pincers.”

There was a long silence.

“I’m sorry for it,” Salvestro said eventually.

Groot nodded. “One finger for you. One for Bernardo. It wasn’t so bad. Rufo saw me all right, in the end. …”

“Rufo?”

“The sergeant, the dressed-up devil himself. Had me out of there in no time. As soon as I told them who I took my orders from, they were throwing food down my throat and gold in my pocket. Bought this place with it.” He put the glove back on.

“He’s here,” said Salvestro.

“Here? How do you … He’s not. I know for a fact he’s not…”

“I saw him. The Colonel.”

“Oh, him! Yes, well, I’ve seen him myself. You don’t have to worry about him. They pulled his teeth after Prato.
Captain
Diego trots around on a pony now and wouldn’t dare harm a fly on his own account.”

Salvestro looked about him at the moldering sacks and dough-encrusted instruments of Groot’s trade. “A bakery, eh? Very nice.”

Groot accepted the compliment and looked curiously at Salvestro’s clothes but said nothing. Salvestro fiddled with his neck chain. “There’s one more thing I should tell you. It’s not important, but I’m not calling myself Groot these days.” Salvestro looked at him expectantly. “Grooti,” he said, “I’m a Roman citizen now.”

They talked on. It was not until “Grooti” asked after Bernardo that Salvestro remembered his companion. Hurried farewells and promises to meet at the Broken Wheel were offered and accepted. Salvestro rose to leave.

“Where are you staying?” Groot asked casually.

Salvestro was already in the outer room. “A dump. You don’t want to know. In the Via dei Sinibaldi.” The door slammed shut.

Groot sat quietly for a few seconds. He scuffed his toe on the floor. It made a line in the dirt accumulated there. “Ought to sweep,” he murmured to himself. He sighed and raised his eyes to the ceiling, which bulged above his head.

Then he raised his voice. “He’s gone.”

First the boots, buffed to a high sheen, then the hose, laced to a doublet of shot silk with ballooning sleeves, buttons, and badges, a belt, and hanging from it a scabbard worked with gold. The face that topped this ensemble eyed Groot coldly.

“You’ll have to do better than that, old friend,” he said.

“Yes,” said Groot.

“Wouldn’t want to meet those pincers again, eh? Eh, Grooti-the-Baker?”

“No,” said Groot.

Rufo squeezed the imagined instrument. “You’ll do better next time.”

Once great, now this: a yawn-inducing acreage of alluvial dullness, a river-riven floodplain that shelves at the rate of one vertical foot to the horizontal mile, the drop corresponding to the land’s sinking self-esteem and the coast to its despair. The land has been creeping slyly out to sea for the last twenty centuries or so and meeting zero resistance en route, the Tiber flopping about like a sciatic drunk, this channel, that channel, a delta briefly. At present the river’s flattened tongue gasps its way seaward in baffled meanders, accepting the indignity of sandbanks and sandbars, deferring politely to the town’s token flood-control measures, a river of sloppy shallows and directional silliness, unrigorous in summer and sulky in winter. This is Ostia, where the malaria-resistant locals busy themselves with viniculture, offshore sardine fishing, or the rearing of farinaceous food-crops; they point proudly to the ruins from former and greater times, which are magnificent, amphitheatrical, sadly overgrown with undergrowth, and invisible, their existence often disbelieved.

There is a castle, though, La Rocca, a three-fat-towers-and-bastions affair that the river passes on its left bank a mile short of its mouth. Its walls enclose a pleasant jousting-ground and the cathedral of Sant’Aurea, which the Cardinal of San Giorgio and Vescovo di Ostia of four years’ standing, being Raffaele Riario, is refurbishing to his own exacting standards; lighters are often seen off-loading artisans press-ganged or bribed in Rome together with their equipment (paintbrushes, bits of wood, wine because the local stuff is undrinkable, paint). The lagoons are picturesque but useless.

Farther upriver the coast comes into view, curving, scything in from the left. Straggling lines of cottages bunch up on the riverbank, fronted by a second landing stage where more lighters, barges, rowboats, and pirogues jostle for mooring space. The coastal quayside is less choked; big sheds and warehouses stand at odd angles to one another, attended by little flotillas of huts. A thinning triangle of land is shaved and squeezed between Tiber and Tyrrhenian, which meet and take swipes at each other over an outermost nub of mud-flat. The road from Rome, and Ostia itself, grinds to a halt at a tavern wedged into this last corner of land, known locally as the Last Gasp. Beyond is nothing but water.

Look left: the harbor. Ships wallowed there, in the mucky shore-swill, the green and swelling slop where rot-softened fish exposed the white of their bellies in a heaving lawn of algae. Ships? Two, to be precise. The sardine fleet was out and its leavings littered the quayside: drifts of fish-scales, amphibious filth-mounds, steaming bouillabaisses of suckered and tendriled monsters with their yellow spillage and purple spurts. Useless fish. Refusenik refuse. The crud that will not budge.

So, their leather creaking and pinching, darkly crimson as a choking drunk, and tight as the skin on a sausage, Don Antonio Seròn steered his pewter-buckled pumps between stolid bollards and oily pythons of rope, eyes alert to the dockside dreck and dross and pulp. He passed the proud brig
Alleluia
, now used mostly for storing the harbormaster’s firewood. He passed the empty mooring pins of the sardine smacks. He passed maggots feeding on jellyfish and seagulls feeding on maggots, and nothing smirched his shining shoes as he stepped down to the jetty that stuck its arm out to sea, ten, twenty, fifty feet, rearing, rising, falling, failing … It gave up there, just waved its splinters and stopped, a wooden hiccup that had belched a ship.

Or a ship that had shat a jetty, depending on the point of view, mused Seròn, looking at the vessel that squatted low in the muck-choked waters. Seventy tons, two and a half masts, and three and a half mortgages pressed hard on the
Santa Lucia
. A Genoese had bought her, renamed her after his mother, loaded her up in Naples, and sent her off to Ostia with a cargo of sardines. Bad choice. Times are hard in Ostia, and a harbormaster’s perks are few. Mooring fees add up quickly. By now, by rights, she should have been confiscated, cut up, and aboard the
Alleluia
. Money had intervened. Seronòs money, doled out in large sacks on his two previous visits: five and a quarter mortgages paid out of existence already, only
three and a half to go, and there she was afloat, her integrity maintained, her dignity intact. She was built of oak that two decades on the Tunis-Genoa run had turned into a mush of ratshit, ship-rot, sawdust, and salt held together by a hull-size scab of barnacles. Sagging, bending, creaking, rotting, the
Santa Lucia
looked like the morning after the night before when the night before was the ship-worms’ annual banquet and the shipworms were the size of eels.

From somewhere belowdecks came the stench of the ballast, a warm soupy wave of every liquid that had ever been spilled on the
Santa Lucia
and soaked its way through the sodden timbers of her decks to reach the gravel slopping in the dungeon of her hull, chiefly and most pungently the mingled discharges of the seven hundred and forty-three crew members who in the course of eighty-three voyages had contemplated swinging their buttocks out of the heads on the end of a greasy rope, shaken their heads, and found a quiet corner instead, trousers down,
aaaaaah
. … Forewarned and forearmed by previous visits, Seròn fluttered a cologne-soaked handkerchief before his nose, a flag of smelly surrender doing no good at all because this kind of armor-piercing reek ignores the nostrils, spurns the mouth, and goes straight for the guts. Seròn churned. Where was the captain of this floating piss-pot? Belowdecks.

Where. …

An eye opened, took a direct hit of daylight through the open door, and closed again. A nostril twitched at a strange and tarty aroma. A cough escaped, ungumming a phlegm-filled mouth. Fat and fully clothed in the fastness of his bunk, Captain Alfredo di Ragusa registered an alien midmorning presence in his cabin. A quick internal check: Still drunk? Yes.

Captain Alfredo? … Are you awake, Captain Alfredo?

He waited for this to stop. It did not.

Captain? … Captain Alfredo?

Yes, he thought, I am Captain Alfredo. Then he went back to sleep.

Reemerging on deck, shoes still gleaming, stomach heaving soggily in time with the soggy lurching of the ship, Seròn looked about for the mate.

“What’d I tell you?”

The voice came from behind him. The mate was lounging on the foredeck, arms folded. Lank black hair swung about his ears, while his lips curled and bunched in a range of sneers and smirks. “He’s a sot,” the mate went on. “Wring his guts and you’d get a bucket of brandy.”

He’ll do it, thought Seròn for the fiftieth time that week as the feckless tirade sprayed bile over the deck. He had considered the mate, assessed his suitability, weighed him up. Now he was sure. The mate’s voice was bored and spiteful with boredom. He didn’t care one way or the other. He was perfect. Almost as perfect as the ship. Almost as perfect as the two buffoons back in Rome, and they were
absolutely
perfect.

“You bought this piece of shit,” the mate was saying now. “I mean, you actually paid actual money for …” He swallowed, looking over the vessel, searching
for the right word, digging deep for squalor and stupidity, not finding it. “For … this?”

“I paid her debts. She’s mine, or will be,” said Seròn.

“You want us off, then.”

Resignation, a dash of despair. It’s good, thought Seròn. This is the man. This can work. “Not yet,” he said. “Maybe not at all. How many men are needed to sail this ship?”

“Sail her? She hasn’t got any sails. Harbormaster took ’em.”

“They will be returned. With sails, how many?”

“The minimum?”

Seròn nodded.

“Twenty. Fifteen, at a pinch.”

“And what, in your opinion, would need to be done to make this vessel seaworthy?”

The mate stared at him in disbelief. “Seaworthy?” Seròn nodded again. The mate choked back a laugh. “Well,” he said, “let’s begin at the beginning. The keel…”

The keel, it turned out, was sound. Unlike the ribs, the stem-post, and the stern-post. The planking was warping off the frame, and ragged fringes of caulking were coming loose from the top of the wales to somewhere below the water-line. How far below? No one knew. The
Santa Lucia
, having been tied down by the masts and careened in the Italian style once a year for two decades, had finally protested this brutal, shallow-water scraping by snapping off her own foremast, and Captain Alfredo had not dared repeat the procedure since. The bilges were choked, the pump cracked, and her rotting timbers had rotted her nails. She was iron-sick and creaky and coming apart at the seams. She had no sails. A sad, sad ship.

“The sails don’t make much odds,” the mate finished up. “Any wind stronger than a sparrow’s fart would snap the masts in any case. Might as well rig that handkerchief of yours.”

Seròn thought briefly, then pointed to the quay. “If a group of people were seated over there by the
Alleluia
, on a platform, for instance, how many of these, ah, defects would they notice?”

The mate considered this. “So long as they were upwind, and so long as they weren’t sailors, they wouldn’t know a thing. Except for the sails. Why?”

“This ship could be yours,” Seròn said softly. “If you do as I tell you. …”

“Mine? This magnificent old woodpile? Well, thank you
so
much. That smell you try to keep out of your nose, you know what it is? It’s rot. This isn’t a ship, it’s a coffin. …” And so on and so forth, up and down the list of the ship’s past, present, and future failings from keel to crow’s nest, from cracked rudder to sprit-less prow, until at length this sarcastic tirade exhausted itself just as the earlier one had. “If I do what?” he asked.