The Pop’s Rhinoceros (66 page)

He paused there, and Salvestro wondered if he should say something. He heard the other man shift on his knees, drawing nearer to him, perhaps.

“I know of your trials before you led us to this place,” Jörg said quietly. “On the island. HansJürgen thinks I know nothing of these things. I believed then that you were sent us to aid us in our labors, more fool me. … It was exactly otherwise. Our church crumbled to admit you, Salvestro. It was for you, not us. We are your last trial, do you see? Sometimes I see a little light, like a candle-flame, flickering and distant. It is your soul, but your soul as it will be. I know this. We are each other’s sternest tests, you and I.”

There was a short silence while Salvestro again debated whether he should speak.

“As it will be? As it will be when?”

“When you take us up again, dear Salvestro,” Jörg replied. “When you lead us home.”

So there was the Castel Sant’ Angelo, crennellated and squatting on its slab. There was the crowded bridge below it and Salvestro on the bridge. He was leaning over the parapet at the point where he and Bernardo had spied Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf mudlarking amongst the pilgrims on the landing stage below. They had not been seen at the hostel in weeks now. He looked for them amongst the beggars and rowdy boys milling about on the riverbank. Little boats spilled out and lurched in the loose grip of the water, dark green and surfaced with glass. There was the Castle of the Squatting Toad and the Bridge of the Creeping Pilgrims and below them the rolling swelling river telling him,
tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
… He quit his station there and walked without purpose or direction through the streets of Parione. He must have walked for hours, but his very aim-lessness seemed to lead him inevitably to the river and westward along its banks to the Borgo, for there were no more tomorrows. Tomorrow they would be gone, and he had not told Father Jörg. The day seemed endless.

At the end of the Via dei Sinibaldi there was a short red-faced man sitting on a tall open-weave basket of pears. The man sweated and mopped his brow. Salvestro sat in the shade opposite. They exchanged glances and did not speak. The short man’s partner arrived presently, and they toted the basket away between them. There was that. Then some women walked past and stared at him, sitting there on the ground in his finery, waiting. One spoke in an undertone and another one laughed. At him? Waiting for what? A gang of boys with a dog?

No. Though the dog sniffed his foot. He patted it on the head, and they all ran off up the street. He rubbed his knees and got to his feet. He had only to walk fifty yards to be in the hostel. The old fountain. The broken wall. The door to the hostel and the interior beyond the door. He had only to deliver his message and leave. In the Via dei Sinibaldi the armies of the sun were being routed by lengthening spears of late afternoon shadow. Chimneys, washing lines, and parapets cast
shady swords and shields on the ground. He advanced on the hostel. Two men passed him. They were driving a mule.

It appeared that Lappi had concealed himself in some other part of the building, for the various alcoves and niches in which he was inclined to lie in wait for his nerve-racked guests were empty. Salvestro peered about him at the staircases on either side of the passage. The light from the doorway gave out after twenty feet, and thereafter his progress was the usual fumbling grope, a cautious stumble-with-handholds. Plaster crumbled at his touch and rattled on the flagstones. Salvestro’s footfalls ground them to dust. Presently his fingers felt the wood of the chamber door. It stood open. No lights. No sounds, either. He entered gingerly, feeling for the tinderbox and candles that were kept beside the chest. The door should have been locked, he thought, inching forward into the darkness. If there was no one to safeguard their belongings, then the door … It was the tiniest of sounds, the merest disturbance of the air, unseen, unguessed. A wall of muscle seemed to strike his head, chest, legs, lift him off his feet, and hurl him back, the floor slamming into his back and knocking the breath out of him. His head rose dizzily. A leathery hand clamped itself to his face.

The crystal-moment is in here somewhere.

There are corridors and passageways, curves and corners, stains, stairs, intrinsic difficulty in the obstacles. But clarity will be found amongst these coordinates, this lapsed geography. He is inside, and the darkness does not help.

Three men blocking the entrance to the back-chamber. Problem. He moves sideways, up a flight of stairs. Think of the passage at the top as an overhanging gantry and move quietly, with appropriate humility. Nothing is clear yet.

A door. The door? Surely yes. In here, then, wait for the clarity to come, which it will, Salvestro-shaped and unsuspecting. He kits out the darkness with remembered details: palliasses, a chest, pillars (no sweeping cuts with the sword), a mad old man who is not here now. He would hear the breathing and the rustling of his clothing as he breathed. No one here. Except himself, Rufo. Rufo waits.

Soon, the terrible cutting, the panic and struggling, blood and piss running in their breeches …

Let us dispense with that. The approaching footsteps can be counted as they intrude on his awareness and advance on his racked-up fury, twenty-two of them. He is in the door now. Wind him first? Yes, but smother him, too, just in case. Stick him in the guts and throat and leave. He is not quite himself when he does these things; coincident with the man who pounces and stabs, but not the same man. It has taken place, already happened, is done. He walks away and leaves his man twitching in a flood of blood. He leaves a murderer brooding over a corpse. Calm now. Someone passes him on the stairs. Someone rages in the back of the building, “Out! Out, you barbarian!” Outside, the soft and fading sunlight is
blinding after the darkness in which he has ensconced himself, days or years of the dark and now this searing light, this heat-drenched Roman light.

He will wait for the big man where he waited for his companion. He might even sleep. Someone will find the cadaver, and the cries that follow will draw him to the small, ghoulish crowd that always gathers on occasions such as these. The lumpish weight will be hauled out in a blanket to be inspected by the sheriff or his man. There will be brief municipal formalities. Someone will identify the dead man.

All these things happen in the next hour, the shouts, the crowd, the body wrapped in a dirty sheet and attended by flies. He is calm, leaning over with the rest of them to get a look at the victim’s face, no different from anyone else. An old woman is being led forward by officials. She looks bewildered and angrily defensive, as though they have accused her. She pulls the sheet down, and for a moment he thinks the light has thickened to pure heat, to a furnace that melts the dead man’s face, for it is featureless at first, then deeply lined and creased, old. … The woman is sobbing now, and he searches the dead man’s face for his chosen victim, tries to dredge those features from the cadaver, pull that face from this face. The heat will not have it, smoothing away eyes, nose, mouth, submerging his quarry in this ancient cadaver, encasing him in its transubstantiating inferno, a Romish mirage in which nothing lives save his error.

Sometimes the Shouting Woman would pull her smock over her head and parade naked for the petitioners of His Holiness. The Switzers would run to remove her, slapping her to the ground and carting her off, still shouting, then screaming, then silence. Sometimes Battista would follow the ill-natured cortege, offering alternate advice and abuse to the dimwit foreigners and their baggage. No one touched Battista. He was licensed, anointed somehow. (By whom?) On better and braver days he had attempted to interest the man in Mass at San Croce. He had discontinued these attempts, for Battista’s laughter burned his ears and scalded his womanish soul. Sometimes Jörg would walk about the courtyard, conversing amicably with the other petitioners who knew and liked him. Sometimes he sat out the hours in impervious silence. Sometimes the doors opened, and sometimes there were alms. The sun burned and they bought water from a man who slung two churns from opposite ends of a yoke carried on his shoulders. They waited for His Holiness, and His Holiness did not come.

That then was the contract. A little one-sided, perhaps, HansJürgen observed to himself and in private. Today a loutish youth had shouted down from the loggia overlooking the courtyard that His Holiness was hunting, had not been in Rome at all for the past two weeks and would not be returning for another two days, so why didn’t they all just bugger off? A calumny. Or the truth. Impossible to know: hence the contract.

“At present,” said Jörg, “we are a little more than seventy paces from the gate of the Cortile di San Damaso, and soon you will be able to glimpse the Chapel of Saint Cecilia on your left. The water-trough for the herdsmen is ahead of us and to our right, thirty paces away, perhaps.”

“Yes,” said HansJürgen, and slowed his pace. They had already passed the water-trough and in fact were not in the piazza at all. It was late in the afternoon. The streets were emptying.

“The alley already? Brisk work, Brother HansJürgen!”

He had attempted, some weeks before, to persuade the Prior to place a hand on his shoulder for guidance. The suggestion had been rebuffed. The commentary on their whereabouts had begun shortly after, and he strode along, pointing left and right with such confidence that HansJürgen found himself looking vainly at the indicated hovels or open patches of sky for some trace of the palazzo of the Cardinal of San Giorgio or the campanile of Santa Maria, which his own eyes told him were not there and never had been. A second city had grown in the Prior’s blindness, a place of shifting landmarks and whimsical streets, of walking churches and galloping palaces: Jörg’s Rome. Its apex was the Stick.

“Well, here we are,” Jörg said, still ten feet shy of the entrance, necessitating a discreetly managed diagonal from HansJürgen. Within, their roles reversed, and he found himself being guided by the confident footsteps of the blind man as they moved through the darkness of the passageway.

“Do you hear that, Brother HansJürgen?”

A muffled grunt issued from the chamber. A fat wedge of candlelight showed through the part-open door. A thud. A grunt. Another thud, some scuffling. Jörg threw open the door and swept in. He followed.

Hanno was holding him down with one hand over his mouth while Georg dealt the blows. The grunts came from Salvestro, whose eyes bulged as the fists dug into his stomach. Gerhardt stood over them, looking up from the beating only when Georg stopped.

“Thieving!” he exclaimed in explanation, his outrage directed as much at Jörg as the floored victim, who flopped about on the floor, retching and trying to catch his breath. “Caught him red-handed with his nose in your precious chest.”

HansJürgen saw that the chest stood open. He walked across the room and rummaged within, rousing a tinny clatter from the cache. It was almost empty, and he said as much. Salvestro gasped and choked, trying to signal something to him.

“Your monkey’s turned on you, Prior. You were warned it would happen.” Gerhardt made no effort to mask his satisfaction.

“Nonsense,” Jörg replied calmly. “If you are speaking of Salvestro, then I am sure he has not acted without good reason.”

“Where’s the silver, then?” Hanno spoke up, his jaw jutting aggressively.

The three of them stared at Jörg, who answered, “I am sure if he has taken it, then it is for safekeeping. He is our loyal servant, is that not true, Salvestro?”

Salvestro coughed and tried to say something. HansJürgen heard “sem,” or “sthem”; some unintelligible gurgle. Coughing followed, then, more clearly, “It’s them. I caught
them.”

Georg raised his fist at this piece of insolence. A shake of Gerhardt’s head stayed his hand.

Jörg’s voice was tolerant, almost genial. “Come now, Salvestro. Simply replace what you have hidden.”

Hanno released him, and Salvestro got to his feet. “I took nothing,” he said.

“He’s lied to you from the start, you stupid old man,” Gerhardt spat.

“Stop this foolishness now, Salvestro,” said Jörg. Then he added more gently, “Do you forget how we spoke this morning?”