The Pop’s Rhinoceros (87 page)

This last part had a very familiar ring to it. Being blamed for things he had not done struck deep chords within Bernardo. He watched Salvestro and Diego construct this edifice of supposition and guesswork as they faced each other over the table. Then it dawned on him that, by “the men,” the murders of Aldo’s family who were not the murders of Aldo’s family and the soldiers in Diego’s service who were not in Diego’s service (although they thought they were), the two men talking amongst themselves actually meant himself and Salvestro.

There followed something about the “men” also being the “men” who would, assuming both the Beast and Fernando’s ear were gained, form the first link in a chain that would drag “the man I detest most in the world” into the light, where his guilt would be clear and thus Diego’s honor restored, and their own, too, it seemed, although Bernardo was far from certain that he had ever lost it or even had it to lose in the first place. Also, his nausea was growing worse. He hiccuped and swallowed.

“Cardinal Medici,” Salvestro was saying.

“Yes. Our beloved Pope. May he burn in hell—”

“I’m going outside,” Bernardo broke in then.

The two men looked up, and the girl too raised her head, roused by the unfamiliar voice. The other two had been talking on for hours.

“To be sick,” Bernardo added, reaching urgently for the cabin door and slamming it behind him.

Salvestro and Diego looked blankly at each other, as though nonplussed to find themselves in a little wooden room floating in the middle of the sea when, only a moment ago, they had been standing on terra firma in a little town at the end of the valley of Mugnone, hundreds of miles to the north. The sound of vomiting reached them faintly: a gurgle from the deck, a soft slop over the side.

“We were amongst the vanguard, when the order to attack came. I found Aldo in the palace, the very room outside which I had waited while he and Medici talked. Only the old women had stayed with him. There was no guard, and we would have killed them if there had been. There was no defense, do you remember that?” Salvestro nodded. “He was all but dead already, rotting from the inside, by the smell of him. All he said was, ‘So the stories of the Spaniards are true.’ Later he asked to see his family, but they had fled, so I thought. He smiled when I told him this, and I was not unhappy for it. He already knew that his would be a miserable death. Later the Cardinal arrived and asked my permission to administer the last rites to ‘his old friend.’ I agreed, naturally. Another mistake. When he had gone, Aldo was transformed, almost: mad. He asked again for his family, and again I told him that they were far away by now, perhaps already in Florence. This time he would not have it, and ranted that they were yet in the city, that I must find them and keep them safe, for my own sake as much as his. He was a clever man. He had already understood what was happening. I ignored him. I understood nothing then.”

“But you did send out patrols, did you not?” Salvestro asked.

“Too late,” said Diego. He stared into the oil-lamp. It might have been anyone putting the question to him.

The door opened again and Bernardo stepped carefully over the sill. It banged behind him, the noise bringing Diego’s head up quickly, as though startled from sleep.

“I was sick,” said Bernardo.

Salvestro glared at him.

“What?” protested Bernardo. “What now?”

“You know the rest,” said Diego, “if what you tell me is true.” He watched Salvestro. “There were no ‘last rites’ for Aldo. Medici had his family as hostages for his silence, and you were intended as Diego’s men, so Diego’s fault. Rufo was Medici’s man, but you never thought to ask his name, did you?”

Salvestro did not answer, so Bernardo shook his head. He was feeling somewhat better now, though the beads of sweat on his brow were still cold. The moon was quite bright. His vomit had resembled a waterlogged shirt, and obviously he had missed several important episodes while outside. Salvestro would explain them to him later.

“Aldo died on the twenty-fifth day of the sack,” Diego continued, “though no one knew until two days later, not even Medici. Another day and I would
have had his family safe.” He frowned then. “It was the Pratesi themselves who told him. The sheep who whistled for the wolf.”

“The bells,” said Salvestro, and then it was Diego’s turn to nod.

“The whispers began the next day. Men I had fought with the length and breadth of Italy began to turn their faces from me. I had found their bodies, but that proved nothing. There was a tribunal later, and your old comrade Groot performed the tricks he had been taught in the cellars beneath the fortress. …”

“Groot!” Bernardo burst in then. “Groot’s alive?”

“Alive,” Diego confirmed. “Is that not what led you to Rome?”

“That was the monks, well, we led them actually,” began Bernardo, and was about to begin the lengthy process of organizing his thoughts on the question of how it was that they found themselves in Rome when Salvestro motioned for him to be quiet.

“He lives, in any case,” Diego resumed. “And on a pension from the Pope, I believe.” His tone was of mild mocking surprise. “He confessed to the killings, carried out on my orders. It was enough.”

“Groot didn’t kill anyone!” Bernardo burst in. “Him and me were there alone, then some other soldiers came along. …”

“It does not matter,” Diego said impatiently.

“But he didn’t—”

“I know!” It was the first time he had raised his voice, and he grimaced as though this betrayed some weakness. He began to speak more calmly, talking of the humiliations that followed, his shunning by his peers, the mutterings from the men he commanded, finally his secondment to Rome, there to trot before the Orator “like a mastiff on a ribbon,” as he put it. “No court was ever convened,” he said. “Medici and Cardona saw to that between them. And Fernando’s ear is an elusive organ, selective in the lips that are permitted to approach it, and in the words that such lips may speak. Sometimes Fernando’s ear even appears quite deaf. Sometimes it is necessary to bang a drum in it merely to gain a hearing. …” He paused for a moment, lost in this thought. “And I will have a hearing. It is my right.” He looked up and smiled, not at Salvestro or Bernardo, but at the figure on the topmost bunk, the girl. “It will be before the clerks of the orators and the servants of the Roman Pope, before the Portingales, and the Aragonese, and the Castilians, who knows, even the French. Two cutthroats will be my witnesses, and my advocate. … My advocate will be a monstrous animal.”

“Ezodu.”

Bernardo looked up, startled by the voice. The girl was staring at Diego, head propped on her elbow, her black face expressionless. The two looked at each other for several long seconds.

“Ess-odoo,”
he repeated carefully. “It is her word for the Beast.”

“I think,” said Bernardo. “I think that…”

It was the worms again, unvigorous as yet but growing more energetic with each passing second. They had already passed the apple stage and moved on now
to the small cabbage stage. They were beginning to thrash and multiply. A small vanguard had formed up and were attempting the climb his gullet. Bernardo gulped, rose, and hastened once again for the door. Salvestro watched a faint smile appear and disappear on the girl’s face.

“She knows this beast,” Diego said. “She has seen it. …”

“She?” The girl had sat up.

Diego stared at her. “She is called Eusebia,” he said. “Or Usse.”

In response to this, Eusebia-or-Usse snorted dismissively.

“Usse,” she said. “Eusebia is only fit for scrubbing people’s feet.”

“Usse,” Salvestro echoed absently. “Eusebia” and “Usse.” “Salvestro,” and “Niklot,” who was far away and long ago. Dropped somewhere and lost. What was “Salvestro” fit for?

The cabin was quiet and the motions of the
Lucia
were confined to a lolling motion, a shiver slowed to the swing of a bucket being raised carefully from a well. He thought vaguely of his flight out of Prato, the little girl skipping away into the darkness. Of Usedom, himself twisting away from the men who had dragged him down to the beach, then beat him to the ground. Of Rome … There was a boy swimming in the black water of the Achter-Wasser, diving deeper and deeper. Was that him? Or was he the one running away? “Salvestro” was fit for that.

Diego flicked his eyes toward the door. “How many stomachs does he have to empty?”

Salvestro shook his head to clear it and rose.

Outside, the sinking arc of the moon was crossing the bows of the
Lucia,
and from the stern of the ship it seemed that their vessel was being drawn down a long white corridor of reflected light. The masts were in shadow and the sails all furled save the foremain, which was reefed to a narrow strip of luminous canvas. The stepped decks were a confusing jumble of harsh angles and shadows, and at first he thought Bernardo was nowhere upon them. Then on the narrow apron of deck between the main hatch and the forecastle, a little before the foremast but obscured by the housing for the pump, he saw a humped shadow crouching down as though trying to hide. He squinted, but the moonlight through the ratlines dropped a confusing lattice of light and shade over the hunched body. It looked as though one figure were leaning over another, which was trying to get up. He saw a hand press firmly down on … something. He watched intently. A head.

“Hey!” he shouted, scrambling down onto the hatch. But as he moved forward something caught him about the shins, sending him tumbling onto the wood with a loud thump. He glanced back—a large sack of something left carelessly on the deck, turnips, perhaps. He clambered up again to reach the two of them, challenging the aggressor, “What do you think you’re—”

Bernardo turned around in surprise. He was kneeling beside a figure lying
facedown on the deck. The figure was trying to get up and, at the same time, it seemed, trying not to. Terse grunts escaped from between clenched teeth.

“It’s Jacopo,” explained Bernardo. “He’s hurt himself.”

“Well, get your weight off his head, then,” he commanded, for Bernardo had the mate by the nape of the neck and would not let him rise.

“Can’t,” muttered Bernardo. “He keeps trying to get up.”

“Well, let him up—” Salvestro began to retort, then noticed that one of the mate’s arms was extended along the deck, that its hand appeared to be fixed flat to the planks, that its fingers were splayed, and that the reason for these contortions was a six-inch spike that entered the hand at a point a little below the junction of the thumb and forefinger, then continued through to pin the hand to the deck beneath it.

“Ah,” said Salvestro.

Jacopo turned his head carefully sideways. “Thought. He was. Going. Over-theside. Grabbed. Slipped,” he grunted.

The cabin door opened.

“Watch out! There’s a sack of turnips,” Salvestro shouted back to Diego, who avoided the hazard by simply leaping across the hatch.

“Is that what it is?” said Bernardo. “I fell over it twice.”

Diego reached them a second later. “Foot on the hand,” he said. “Then hand on the handle. Then pull.” Before anyone else had time to move, Jacopo let out a huge shout and his whole body seemed to spring up off the deck. Diego straightened and stepped back.

“Strange tool to be using at this hour,” he observed, weighing the spike in his hand.

Jacopo was wincing and fishing in his pocket with his good hand for a length of rag to wrap around the injured one. For a second it seemed as though he had not heard. Then he said, “I was marling the starboard jib guy when—” He looked about as he spoke and suddenly shouted out, “What the devil…”

Usse had moved silently along the narrow gangway and now stood behind Diego. Jacopo stared at her in bemusement. “A Moor?” No one answered.

“Of course,” said Diego, looking vaguely in the indicated direction. “The jib guys.” He turned and began making his way back to the cabin. He stopped at the door and prodded the “sack” with his toe. The girl said something to him, and he prodded it again. A grunt sounded. “Tomorrow we shall wake him up,” he told her.

The moon had swung to port and now was dipping toward the horizon. Jacopo left them without a word and lowered himself slowly through the trapdoor in the hatch-cover.

“He doesn’t want to kill us now, does he?” Bernardo asked.

“No,” Salvestro replied. “For all the difference that makes.”

He thought of the richly dressed men and women who had crowded to
gether on the benches of the stand. The tiers of faces had formed a rising pyramid, and at its top had sat the Pope. He looked different from the man who had charged about on horseback before the gates of Prato. Fatter, possibly, or perhaps it was the robes. He and Bernardo had waved stiffly, as directed, until the crowd on the quay was a congealed mass of indistinguishable bodies and the men and women under the awning of the stand had shrunk to little puppets, jostling and clambering about under the direction of the string-puller above them. The coastline became a smudge of gray and then they were here, afloat in the middle of the sea.

“I think,” said Bernardo. “I think I’m going to …”

Salvestro looked out over the black waters in which the ship drifted. The
Lucia
creaked gently, and the waves murmured amongst themselves. Bernardo’s stomach emptied itself in a sudden gout, followed quickly by two smaller ones that spattered over the sea’s surface, twin yellow slicks that lengthened, stretched, and finally broke up. He yawned. Bernardo spat. The stars above glimmered indifferently. Below them the air was all but still and the ship, more or less, sailed on.

Captain Alfredo
…

“Captain Alfredo di Ragusa! Wake up, you drunken sot!”

He had been shouting for the best part of an hour, or so it seemed. Diego felt his throat grow hoarse. Initial gentle prods had become firm kicks to the ribs before an arm emerged and groped about in the immediate vicinity of the deck. A brisk volley of slaps brought the head up briefly, though neither of its eyes opened. Then the head disappeared again. The arm was retracted. The remainder still looked like a sack.