The Pop’s Rhinoceros (64 page)

Apollo sawed on a fiddle held upside-down on his shoulder. Winged horses pranced in the background, and a woman scratched in the soil with a bent stick, or perhaps she was stringing a bow. A headless figure propped itself on one elbow beside her. The severed head had horns. The walls of the
sala
were broken by doors, windows, and at the far end a fireplace as high as himself. Between these were other paintings of women against identical soft, monotonous landscapes. Woman with a stylus and tablet. Woman playing a flute. Another woman playing a lyre. Woman pointing at a globe. Four or five others.

Art, thought Rufo.

The southern corner of the lodge overlooked a laboriously leveled pasture that would be planted with limes next season. Beyond that was the river, which aimed itself at La Magliana, then recoiled, curved ninety degrees to flow away toward Ostia, six hours downstream by barge. Three by galley. Rome was an hour or two in the opposite direction, by river or the road that ran alongside it. He had ridden and arrived to find the stables in uproar. Tool-garlanded workmen clothed in tattered habits hung amidst beams suspended on blocks and tackle from the bare upper-floor joists, while the ostlers shouted insults at them from the floor below. Oxen and horses were corraled in the yard. None of this interested him. He could hear their shouting now, though the huge and shambolic stables was out of direct sight. A man in a gray felt hat walked slowly across the pasture, cradling a heron, its beak tied shut. Three hatless colleagues followed. Ghiberti had gone in search of his master almost an hour ago. Rufo idled, gazing out of the window. Grass. Stands of trees. The minutes passed. His Holiness’s passion for hunting was well-known.

Footsteps. Voices. Door, the one behind him and to the left. He turned, knelt to kiss the proffered hem, rose. Leo squinted, red-faced and puffing from the climb up the stairs. Ghiberti hovered near the door.

“You may leave us,” Leo said.

The door closed behind the secretary. For a few pregnant seconds the Pope said nothing at all, only peered at him as though weighing him up. “You have found them?” the robed prelate asked at last.

“I have,” said Rufo.

It seemed for a moment that His Holiness might jump with happiness and
clap his hands. His robes flopped about him as he hunched to spring up, hands floating out in general benediction, flying together in applause. … But no. He steadied himself. The leap became a bobbing double curtsy, the clap a considered and prayerful handclasp. He touched his lips to his united fingertips. “How?”

“Your pensioner. Groot. One of them was bound to fetch up there sooner or later.”

“Ah, Baker Groot. Yes, of course. Bound to. Bound to.” He was pacing now, back and forth in front of the fireplace. Rufo began to relate what he had overheard at the bakery.

“Her body was never found,” Leo said when Rufo reached Amalia’s part in the story. “Poor little mite. One presumes she died in the bog, or was savaged by animals. … Poor, poor little girl. The wretches! To use a mere child. …” It seemed to Rufo that the man might be on the verge of anger. “Even the charity of the Pope knows limits,” Leo declared finally. He gathered himself. “And you followed this monster back to his lair?” he asked abruptly.

“It was not possible,” Rufo replied. “But I have found them. They share a cellar in a hostel. I called there. The proprietor knew them by name, and another man.” He recalled the old man crouching blindly in the stench of the chamber. “He was weak in his wits, but he knew them.”

Leo was nodding. “Good. Very good.” He walked over to the window, calm now, unreadable. “There will be a hunt here in twelve days. Do you like to hunt, Sergeant Rufo?”

He shook his head. Leo eyed him neutrally.

“Well, there will be a hunt in any case.” He paused and thought. “Did you see this Salvestro? His dress?”

“He was dressed as a gentleman,” said Rufo.

“As a gentleman. And how do you think he came by his costume?”

Rufo shrugged. Costumes. Hunting. None of this interested him. He did not care. He dressed himself expensively, and it gave him no pleasure.

“Spanish gold,” said Leo then, and began to chuckle.

“I will kill them and then it will be finished,” Rufo said. “It should have been done at Prato.”

“There is more to it than Prato,” replied Leo, though he seemed almost unaware of the other man, gazing out of the window at the river’s fat bend half a mile away. “Much more than Prato,” he murmured. Then, “They think they can make a fool of me.” He said it softly. Rufo barely caught it.

“They are the fools,” he said. “Though they will know it only briefly.”

“What?” He looked about as though suddenly awakened. “The cutthroats? Yes, them too. Mere instruments. Mine, and others’. You must leave Groot until last, until you are sure of the other two. He knows more, does he not?”

Rufo nodded. The unfamiliar sensation of curiosity had gripped him. Them too? So who else? He choked back the urge to ask His Holiness to explain himself.
Curiosity was a poison. Men died of it. Instead he said, “I return to Rome tonight. It can be done then. Tomorrow at the latest.”

“No!” The Pope’s voice echoed in the high-ceilinged room. “No, it must be the day of the hunt. Or that night.”

Rufo kept his silence, waiting for an explanation of the delay, but Leo offered none. “Very well,” he replied. “I will attend you here when it is done.”

“Not here,” said Leo. He was smiling now. “Ostia. The day after the hunt is the day the Spaniards launch their expedition. The court will be at Ostia. To bear witness to its magnificence.” The smile was broader now. “To salute the brave men who serve the whims of their foolish Pope.”

As Rufo walked down the main stairs, he heard the Pope’s laughter rise and echo in the Sala della Muse behind him, inexplicable and of a piece with the questions that had arisen shyly out of Leo’s careless hints. Riding back to the city, he allowed his mind to dawdle amongst them: the two men he was to dispose of were shadowed now by two whose role he could not guess at. Two specter-men. It was all undefined and unpursued. Did he like to hunt? No. Who would kill for pleasure?

He waited twelve days in Rome. On the last of these, he settled himself behind the broken wall opposite the Pilgim’s Staff and waited for the two men to appear. He had a flask of wine, and every hour or so he would empty a little of its contents onto the ground beside him. If anyone should ask what his business was there, he would pretend to be drunk. But no one asked. An ever-thinning stream of men and women walked past without seeing him. A dog sniffed his boot at one point. He kicked it on the nose and it fled howling. The spilled wine smelled putrid in the heat, resinous and plummy. He was not clear on how he would do it. He had killed his first man by waiting half a day on a roof, crouched behind its parapet until the man he sought had walked beneath. He had smashed his skull with a brick.

What if he had looked up? He was a big, powerful man. What if he had looked up and seen him, rising to his feet above with the weapon in his hand? His victim had been well liked in the village, better liked than Rufo. What would he have done then? He had been fourteen years old.

Flies circled erratically and lighted on the spilled wine. It was better to think nothing, plan nothing. The opportunity came and was taken. He walked away from the cadaver’s twitching mess. Contemplation of a killing clouded the judgment, and the moment blunted itself, or stretched, or fattened into minutes. Sometimes it seemed like minutes. His mind was perfectly blank and the act perfect and clear within it. They struggled often enough, knees and elbows, the smell of their sweat while he pulled them about or pushed them up against a wall. They were awkward, their cow-bodies heavy and difficult to maneuver on the way to death. People trudged up and down the street. A few disappeared inside the Pilgrim’s
Staff. No one had come out yet. The afternoon sun was falling off now. He had his sword and some short knives with him. Two men were driving a mule up the street. Four monks followed who hung about at the entrance to the hostel. They talked for a few minutes before one walked off. The other three went in. He thought about this for a while, then rose, stretching and yawning theatrically. He walked across the street, dawdled at the door. It might be better inside. Quicker and neater. The two of them would be sun-blind, easily marked in silhouette. He would not be seen. Then Groot.

A woman passed carrying a bundle of rags, old clothes, perhaps. Her movements seemed slow and heavy. His heart beat a dull monotone. He thought about the quick focus and moment of concentration that would turn this collection of limbs and organs into the instrument of the act, the sensation like seeing a pattern in a jumble of shapes, quick like that. Inside was better. Then he would walk away, slowly, not looking back, already outside the ugly flurry of a second ago and suddenly innocent, for nothing preceded the cadaver’s twitching and nothing succeeded it, either. The entrance was black as the mouth of hell. He picked a strand of dead grass from the breast of his doublet, its velvet a deep rust with designs cut into the pile. Its sleeves were unpadded silk that shimmered in light. He wore rings of heavy gold, chains too sometimes. A peacock’s gaudy feather bobbed above his hat. He shone and sparkled and glittered and dazzled. He swaggered and cut a fine figure. No one remembered his face.

“Where in hell have
you
been?”

“Me?”

“You.”

Rodolfo was standing at the door to the kitchens. Anjelica and Pierino flanked him, the latter just arrived. The trio turned as one to indicate the main room through which, it seemed, a small wind storm had passed. Chairs were scattered about the floor. The tables were piled in one corner of the room in a defensive heap that rose most of the way to the ceiling.

“He won’t talk,” continued Rodolfo.

“Who?”

“Him. Bernardo. Your friend Antonio was here. Then he left. That’s what happened next.” The tables shifted slightly, in the manner of a tortoise scaling a wall. Salvestro approached, accompanied by Rodolfo.

“Bernardo!” he addressed the table-pile.

There was no response.

“Bernardo! Come out!” barked Salvestro.

A long silence followed in which Salvestro noticed that the tables were not perfectly still, but quaked slightly, little creaks and knocks accompanying this movement.

“No,” said Bernardo’s voice eventually from somewhere in their midst.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” Salvestro went on.

“I know,” said the voice. (More creaking and quaking.)

“Then come on out.”

“No.”

“Come out! Now!”

“No!”

He tried shouting, then cajoling, then threats, then promises, then bribes, then shouting again. None of it worked. Bernardo remained stubbornly immured behind his tables and sullen “no’s.” Patrons drifted in, stared at him curiously, asked what was up, then offered advice. Lucullo arrived and wafted tempting fumes from a large bowl of hot fish soup into the cracks and crevices of Bernardo’s makeshift carapace. Rodolfo was on the point of pouring boiling water over the whole contraption with the purpose of flushing out its architect when Salvestro realized that his approach to the whole problem had been wrong from the start.

“Well, Bernardo, you won’t come out,” he began. “I respect that. If you won’t come out, you won’t come out, and that’s that. No point in my trying to persuade you otherwise.” He left a pause. “So I’ll be off.” The table-pile maintained a wooden silence, its denizen a fleshly one. Salvestro walked back across the room, watched now by Rodolfo, Anjelica, Lucullo, Pierino, and nine or ten of the Broken Wheel’s other patrons. “Good-bye, Bernardo,” he called.

He had not reached the foot of the stairs before the heap began to shift and jiggle, the topmost tables teetering on those below. The whole pile shook, seemed to rise, split, and then with an enormous crash Bernardo erupted from its midst.

“The rocks,” was all he was later able to get out of his friend by way of explanation. That, and a resentful, “You left me on my own.” He paid Rodolfo for the damage and found himself left with less than twenty soldi.

“Why didn’t you ask Antonio for more money?” he demanded of the big man as they walked back to the Stick.

“More? I never got any in the first place,” protested Bernardo. “We didn’t talk about money.”

“What, then?”

He listened to Bernardo ramble through the confused wreckage of something that a few hours ago had been whatever Antonio had said. The greater part of it concerned his own absence. Most of the rest did, too, although recurrent references to Antonio’s having just got back
from
Ostia slowly began to reshape themselves into Antonio’s having soon to go back
to
Ostia. With them, it would appear. In fourteen days. Or ten, he was unsure. It might have been the day after tomorrow. When Salvestro pressed him on the point, Bernardo reached into his doublet and drew out a carefully folded sheet of paper. A row of marks lined its top edge. Below was a winding line, crossed through at two points with a crude
sketch of a castle and an X next to one of them. Salvestro counted the marks. There were fourteen.