The Pop’s Rhinoceros (70 page)

From the east window he could see the river curling through the flat plain of the Romagna, marshy and desolate on the north bank, dotted with fishermen’s cottages to the south. Two hundred paces upriver from the inn was a dilapidated warehouse with barn doors on its landward side. One stood open, and some children were wandering about outside it. Next to the warehouse, a landing stage extended tentatively from the riverbank, supported by salt-encrusted piles to which the watermen tied their boats. When the current caught them, the whole structure swayed gently. River weed collected underneath, rotted, and eventually floated into the estuary. They had arrived the night before last, a soldier on leave and his widowed sister, the latter so pious that she wore a veil. That, at least, had been the explanation he had offered the innkeeper. Concealed behind her mask of lace, Eusebia had snorted derisively.

“Her grief,” Diego offered weakly. The skeptical innkeeper had nodded without replying.

A soldier and his commanding officer’s wife had been the consensus amongst the regulars at the Last Gasp after they had retired. The following morning, the “soldier” had spent freely but shrewdly in the workshops and storehouses of the quayside tradesmen, directing his purchases to the
Santa Lucia
. So he was a Spaniard, like the other Spaniard, who had spent less freely, and less shrewdly, and was vaguely but broadly disliked. On any other week he would have excited more comment, but the Pope was coming, His Holiness himself, whose breath smelled of violets, whose urine was thick as honey, whose piercing gaze could cure goiter, calm storms, kill cats at a distance of fifteen paces, sometimes more. … He called himself Captain Diego and carried a short, businesslike sword. No one inquired further.

The previous evening, the boatman had run aground twice in the approach to the landing stage, each time pushing off with an oar. It was a Roman wherry, keeled and drawing a good foot of water to negotiate the currents and eddies of
faster and deeper waters than these. The local boats were closer to punts, flat-bottomed to skim above the sandbars of the estuary. There had been three moored there the previous night. There were still three this morning. Someone had strung bunting around the rails. Diego watched the river, the morning sun full in his face so that he squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand. Still early, he told himself. Somewhere within the inn, boards creaked under stumbling footsteps, sleep-thickened voices shouted at each other, then doors and shutters banged open as the Last Gasp took its first gulps of the morning air. The river’s meanders bristled with light, a silk rope dropped carelessly from heaven. Diego blinked and rubbed his eyes, then looked again. Minutes ago it had been a dot of black floating in the glitter and glare of the water. Now it was a boat, and now a high-sided boat, with a tall stem-post and a man standing there using an oar for a rudder. She joined him at the window then, watching with him as it neared the landing stage, cutting smoothly through the water, its three passengers motionless and looking away from one another, not speaking.

“Which is the one you fear?”

Her voice broke his reverie. “Not fear,” he corrected her. “I am wary of him. He is not amongst them.” The landing stage was too open, too exposed, and his instincts would warn him off. The Pope’s smiling sergeant would not arrive by boat. “He might be here already,” Diego said. “He will not show himself yet.”

Rufo’s business was with the three men now stepping out of the boat, stretching their legs, yawning, and looking about. The giant scratched his stomach. Stay close to them, he told himself. Rufo would circle, wait, choose his moment. The three men climbed the steps from the landing stage and walked toward the inn. Wary of showing himself at the window, he stepped back and lost sight of them as they drew near. They would bolt if they saw him, Seròn too, perhaps. But Seròn he could not avoid. He had business to conduct with the secretary. A singular decision to inform him of.

Diego walked quickly across the room to the south-facing window, picking them up again as they filtered through the crowd in front of the stand, the big man easy to track, his companion harder. Seròn was leading the way, talking to them over his shoulder as they made their way farther down the quay and paused there before turning onto the jetty. A man watched their approach from the deck of the
Santa Lucia,
then ushered them aboard. The mate, he thought, though the distance was too great to make out his features. He smiled to himself, thinking of the conversation that must now be passing between them. The secretary’s surprise, his anxieties and ensuing calculations. They will do you no good, Don Antonio, he counseled. No good at all.

“Which is the traitor?” she asked. She stood behind him, so close they might be touching. He shook his head impatiently, absorbed in his own calculations. The crowd would be safe, big now and in constant movement. He could move there unseen, wait for the secretary, snatch him as he passed. He smiled again
then: more anxieties and calculations, a morning full of surprises for Don Antonio Seròn.

The downstairs room was already crowded, the tables and booths all taken and men standing with mugs in their hands, talking loudly to each other. The woman from the sail-loft was there; no business would be done today. She nodded to him as he moved quickly through the crush. The sunlight outside was dazzling. Men and women were dawdling about outside, and he forced himself to dawdle with them, gradually traversing the open ground that separated him from the cover of the crowd.

“Brave, very brave. …” “Foolhardy, I’d say.” “The one’s t’other, but in my book it’s brave.” “Book? What book? They’re fools. That ship’s not fit for firewood. …”

Their voices drifted in and out of his ears, an irrelevant soothing noise. He was coiled tight with purpose, as if on the eve of battle. He jumped when a hand touched his shoulder. An old woman was selling apples, her whining voice pursuing him as he moved away, “Sir? Oh, sir? Would you …”

He calmed himself, ambling slowly among the chattering groups, looking down the quay to the ship every few seconds. Two dwarfs passed him, strolling arm in arm and blithely ignoring the stares that attended their progress. The time seemed to pass very slowly, but this too was familiar. He kept near the edge of the crowd so that their bodies might not block his view. He must have glanced at the
Santa Lucia
fifty times before they reemerged, there on the deck, then the jetty, then walking toward him, toward the crowd, all three of them together. He sank deeper into the mass of bodies, watching them approach. They stopped. A discussion of some sort? Seròn was pointing down the quay to the sail-loft. He saw Salvestro nod and then point the other way, the big man following obediently. To the inn? Surely they would part now; yes, Seròn was retracing his footsteps, away again. Diego slipped through the crowd to intercept the secretary, moving swiftly and surely, intent only on his quarry …

He saw a man impale himself once. On a pike. It was a skirmish outside Piacenza, an accidental death in an accidental fight. The man had been charging full tilt and had simply run onto it. His assassin had done nothing, a halberdier frozen with fear, only stood there with arms presented. One moment, the dash forward. The next, stopped dead. Diego wondered what had passed through the dead man’s mind as he’d looked down at his chest, the point in as far as the crosspiece. His legs had continued running for a second. What had he been thinking in that moment, in that absolute disjunction? Now he knew. He stared through the crowd, and the shock of recognition knocked him backward, already turning and ducking, reaching within his doublet for the short knife there, his sword useless in a crowd, stupid thoughts in a stupid head. … Rufo was standing directly in his path.

He caught himself before breaking into a run. He looked down. The knife
was in his hand. Rufo behind him. Walk calmly, he told himself. Put the knife away and do nothing. His mind was fogged. He had lost concentration. Move slowly away—this was better—drift, merge with the others.

He found himself on the far side of the crowd, the side nearest the inn. Salvestro and his companion were nowhere in sight. Nor was Seròn, who had walked away down the quay where he could not follow, not yet. Rufo had not seen him, perhaps a glimpse of his back amongst a hundred other backs. He had been lucky. Now he must think quickly. Stay in the crowd or risk the hundred yards between the stand and the inn. Rufo in the crowd. The two men at the inn. He felt shaken and strangely relieved. The thought that the Pope’s sergeant might not be waiting for him here had tempted him, taunted him. It was not fear, but it was close to that. He stepped out of the crowd’s cover. Seròn would have to return to the inn to collect his men; he would have to content himself with that. The back of his neck prickled. His limbs felt awkward as they mimed the stroll to the doorway of the Last Gasp, a tiny rectangle that grew larger with agonizing slowness.

The interior was more crowded even than before. He settled in a corner, barricaded behind a group of five men too busy with their beer to notice him. He scanned the room for Salvestro and his companion, who should at least be easy to spot. It does not matter, he told himself. Seròn in the crowd or Seròn as he approached the inn to collect his charges, the two men who must be here somewhere. He scanned the room again. Then a third time, and then a fourth. … He began to curse under his breath. A tide of unease rose within him, growing turbulent, on its way to becoming panic. The two men were not there.

Eek
.

The boatman pushed off, grunted a warning, then swung the rudder-oar over their heads and settled it in the stern row-lock. The bridge slid away and they were in midstream, the current holding the small boat steady in the Tiber’s black waters. It was early morning, barely light, and the shadowy embankments appeared as extensions of the river’s lightless surface, pulled up at the edges like a channel awaiting the overflow of some mightier flood. Mooring rings of weathered stone projected vaguely out of the gloom. They passed to the right of the island, watched by water buffalo whose heads appeared as monstrous busts until they swung about, suddenly losing interest. Abandoned stairways rose out of the water for a step or two, then broke off, leading nowhere. The entrance to the Cloaca Maxima was the black mouth of an endlessly patient predator, waiting for whatever the eddies might carry within its maw. Salvestro, Bernardo, and Don Antonio stared in as they passed. A dull jolt from the left was the weak summer debouchment of the Marrana. Downstream from the mouth, the buildings set farther back were a jumble of shadows that sank slowly into the sloping ground, becoming the ruins of a past city or the future of the city just passed, Rome and
Ro-ma, both quitted now as the river cut through the old walls at Testaccio and widened into a placid flood a hundred paces wide.

Eek!

A rat? A bird? Something wrong with the boat? Larches and willows lay toppled on the left bank, cut down to clear the paved towpath where, an hour hence, oxen and water buffalo would begin their trudge upriver, drawing after them barges and lighters. For now the river was almost empty. They passed a solitary fisherman, then the first of the boat-stations where men were busying themselves loading cargoes, hoisting small square sails, shouting to each other. It was still early. The sun rose and the river transformed itself, alternately a glaring mirror and a transparent spyglass through which the passengers sprawling in the boat could see the Tiber’s beds of yellow sand shift and roll with the motions of the current. At Magliana a great barge lay alongside a landing stage that seemed hardly sturdy enough to secure it. Switzers stood guard on its decks. Liveried men were draping pennants over its sides. They continued on around this first and greatest of the river’s bends, Don Antonio leaning out over the side to keep the barge in view until their own boat began to heel and he drew back hastily.

E-eek. …

The three men looked at each other, Salvestro, Bernardo, Seròn, but no one said anything, and the boatman stood there, his skin burned nut brown from the days spent under the same sun that burned down now, silently guiding his vessel past the sandbanks and their raucous pelicans, past the clamorous stations whose noise broke over them in washes that just as quickly lost themselves in the gurgling of the waters, past Tor di Valle, Vicinia, and Acilia, past a dozen nameless hamlets whose existence was signaled only by the thin columns of smoke hanging in the sky above them, the river widening almost imperceptibly as they passed the mouth of the Galeria, again when the Tiber itself forked, and rounding the thick brush of the Isola Sacra, they glimpsed the massive worked stones of great walls, smashed and abandoned now, then on the opposite bank a well-kept fortress, lagoons beyond it, the first sprinkling of huts, sheds, and houses, and then there were no more bends to round. Before them was the sea. They were at Ostia.

Eek, eek, eek. …

It was an intermittent squeak, sounding irregularly and without warning as Seròn ushered them out of the boat, now from the left, now from the right, a brief silence as they passed the inn, then right again as they threaded a path through the crowd that had gathered in front of the stand, erupting unpredictably but every few steps that were taken down the quay to the jetty, its source quite clear now: Don Antonio Seròn’s new shoes.

He halted above the mutinous footwear. The brooch pinned to his hat, the tracery of his scabbard, and the handguard of his sword all bore the same intricate floral motif. The buckles of his shoes did, too. Without the shoes the ensemble would appear unbalanced and dissatisfying. His two charges watched him blankly.
In the picture that would surely fix this day in albuminous tempera for the pleasure of posterity, His Holiness would be shown in rich purple, waving from his platform to a beautifully detailed (a certain amount of artistic twisting would be necessary)
Santa Lucia
. The surrounding rabble of prelates, orators, and peasants would be clothed in muddy or madder reds, Vich outstanding in fugitive orpiment, portrayed as a wastrel Hercules in the poisoned skin of a lion; himself, Seròn, in durable ultramarines, the red of his shoes traduced by vairy blues, for their sedition. And these two? The dupes?