City of God (32 page)

On the broad upright post at the foot of the Ponte Elio there was scribbled: DOWN WITH THE POPE! and ORSINI! ORSINI!

Nicholas passed over the bridge and made his way down the narrow street from Castel Sant' Angelo to the Vatican. There were no markets here, but the little open-air tavernas along the way to Saint Peter's were thronged with foreigners and churchmen, and on the street were the vendors, selling oranges and nuts, vials of blood, the knucklebones of saints, little crosses wearing the name of Rome. A file of barefoot Franciscans was walking briskly toward the basilica.

At the Vatican, the guard knew him and waved him in past the gawking foreigners at the gate. Nicholas heard them exclaim at that, as if he might be someone great. He hurried away from the gate and their awed murmuring. Ahead the palace presented its broad wall, checked with banks of small windows. By contrast to the stone, the gardens on either side of the path and along the foot of the palace were softly splashed with beds of the first spring flowers, primroses and little white clumps of lily-of-the-field.

The Borgias would learn in time that someone at that meeting had betrayed them. He had to seem honest then by being honest now. That thought whipped him on; he was walking as fast as his legs would carry him. Across a bank of daisies he saw three or four of the Pope's pages, loitering in the shadow of a tree. Nearby was the little garden house, covered with ivy. Cutting through the rows of flowers, Nicholas made his way there.

Before he reached the garden house, which was set up on a little slab of white marble with steps all around, like a pedestal top, a page had gone inside to announce him. Nicholas waited, his hands behind his back. The pages eyed him but did not speak. One was eating marzipan. The odor of almonds reached him. The first page returned.

“Messer Dawson, His Holiness desires you to leave. The time is inappropriate.”

“Ask the sublime Vicar of Christ to grant me a moment's patient hearing on a matter of importance to the Magnificence Duke Cesare.”

The page went inside the garden house again. Nicholas turned his eyes toward the flowers and the dark ugly mass of the palace beyond them.

This time he was let into the presence of the Pope. He knelt, kissed the jeweled cross on Alexander's shoe, and made another little bow to Giulia Farnese, sitting on the Pope's right. One table before them was set up for a meal but there was no food on the plates.

“What is it, Nicholas?” the Pope said. “Can you not send this matter directly to my son?”

“Your Holiness, I ask your pardon, my resources are limited.”

“As whose are not, may I ask?” Alexander pouted. He squirmed in his chair; fat as he was, he could not sit comfortably. Nicholas had heard it said that in their congress Giulia sat on top of him, like Mohammed on the mountain. “What is it, Nicholas?”

“This morning from Florence we received a message that gave all the details of the meeting between Duke Valentino and the Spanish captain Gonsalvo. Specifically it spoke of the quarrel—that Gonsalvo denied him, and that my lord Cesare walked out.”

The Pope had raised his huge bull's head. His black eyes glittered.

“From Florence, you say? Did the dispatch offer any source?”

“A French dispatch.”

“Ay, ay,” the Pope said calmly. “How wicked is the world! We are betrayed again.”

A page entered. “Your Holiness, the platters from the kitchen—”

“Wait outside.” Alexander motioned with his hand. He brought his head around again to face Nicholas. “Who was there, at the meeting?”

“Valentino, Gonsalvo. Miguel da Corella. Des Troches d'Avila and I.”

“You have a servant?”

“He was gone—I sent him off.”

“One of you, then. Miguelito I cannot suspect. You or des Troches.”

“Or Gonsalvo,” Nicholas said.

Alexander stirred, all his silk robes hissing like a gown of snakes. “You do not trust Gonsalvo?”

“It is not beyond possibility that he could find some value in betraying us.”

Nicholas stirred, as he said that; he knew Gonsalvo would not betray his honor by using another man's secrets.

“Us,” the Pope said, with peculiar stress. “What of you yourself, Messer Dawson? You are much more suspect to me than a knight like Gonsalvo.”

Nicholas said, “Whether I am innocent or not, I will still maintain it. It seems tedious to belabor the issue.”

Alexander lifted his cheeks into a brilliant smile. “Yet you are clever enough to do it, and to come here with the announcement of it. Well. I shall send word on to my child at his play. You may go.”

Nicholas knelt again and kissed Alexander's shoe. “Thank you, Your Holiness.”

Not long afterward, Valentino sent des Troches to Siena on an errand of diplomacy. Even as the man was traveling, the order went out to arrest him on a charge of leaving Rome without Valentino's consent. Des Troches fled. Valentino's agents hounded him from Siena to Genoa, from Genoa to Corsica, where he was taken, and on board a galley brought back in chains to Rome.

As Nicholas was passing beneath the hill of the Campidoglio, one evening on his way home to his supper, Miguelito came toward him from the shadow at the foot of the hill. “Come with me,” he said, without any other greeting. “Duke Cesare wants you.”

Nicholas's back tightened. “Why? What does he want?”

“Just come,” Miguelito said, and put on his thin smile, seldom seen. “Don't look so green. We will see you home tonight, sitting down to your supper. The old man will keep it hot for you, won't he?”

In the thickening dusk they went along behind the hill, past the Mamertine, the loathsome prison of the ancients, and crossed the marshes toward the Tiber. Mosquitoes in clouds rose from the damp ground to meet them. The scrubby brush grew up around chunks of marble, the heads of buried columns, fragments of old buildings. Down the slope some way, the flickering light of a fire and the murmur of voices marked a lime kiln. Nicholas groped with his feet on the dark path, afraid of falling. A cat hissed and yowled and raced away ahead of them.

They came to the river's edge. In the river was moored a small covered boat.

Miguelito put out a plank from the shore and they boarded the boat. It rocked under Nicholas's feet. He put out his hands to balance himself. Ahead, the other man pulled a hatch up and descended into a low cabin, and a swatch of lantern light shot out across the deck. Miguelito doubled the hatch up on its hinges and laid it on the roof of the cabin.

“Go on.”

Nicholas went down through the hatch three steps into the cabin, ducking his head under the ceiling, which was high enough only for the man seated beside the lantern. This man was des Troches. Seeing Nicholas, he lunged forward, but he was tied hand and foot and could only move a few inches. His face was ash-colored, as if he were already dead; he said nothing.

Miguelito came into the cabin. Nicholas crouched awkwardly between them, the sweat popping out all over his body. The cabin gave off a reek of putrid fish and the smoke of the lantern stung his eyes. He pressed his hands to his thighs. He knew why he had been brought here. He knew what was about to happen. He glanced once around the tiny cabin.

Des Troches screamed out suddenly, “How do you know he didn't do it? He did it!”

On either long side of the cabin were two narrow windows cut into the very top of the bulkheads. Three of them shone back the lantern light but the fourth was dark. Its oilskin cover hung below it. Nicholas lowered his eyes. Valentino was out there.

Des Troches screamed and screamed, accusing everyone. Miguelito eased past Nicholas, his back to the bulkhead, to the black window. His face was composed as a saint's. Between his hands hung the loop of his garrotte. He got behind des Troches, who screamed and screamed, and slipped the loop over the thrashing head. Nicholas could not breathe. His head whirled. He thought des Troches was still screaming, but that was impossible, the loop was tight, digging into the flesh of his throat, and his face was turning dark. His eyes bulged. Above him Miguelito's face twisted with the effort of his work. It seemed to go on for hours.

Miguelito lifted his hands, and des Troches fell forward. Nicholas sighed.

He was determined to show them nothing, not even interest. His back hurt from the unnatural posture the low cabin forced on him. The cabin seemed large enough now with des Troches dead. With his fingertips Miguelito dug the garrotte up out of the rut in des Troches's throat and removed the thing over the dead man's head.

“May I go now?” Nicholas said. “My supper will be cold.”

Miguelito put the garrotte away inside his coat. His eyes were dreamy, his mouth a little slack. His head swayed toward the dark window. Remembering, he faced Nicholas again and nodded.

“Well, go, then.”

“Thank you. Both of you.” Nicholas pushed the hatch open and went out onto the deck.

The boat rocked back and forth and he walked with his feet wide apart. The plank had fallen down into the water. Kneeling on the gunwale of the boat, he leaned over, got his fingers on the slimy rotting wood, and pulled it back up into place. He knew they were watching him. He felt removed from what he was doing, as if he watched too, from one side. He walked down the plank to the shore and started away on the path.

He went at an ordinary pace. He did not look back. He had seen men die before, of sickness, of age, of violence, but never in such a way as des Troches's dying. He struggled with words for it, but he could not reduce what he had seen to the abstraction that made words possible. His feet plodded over the soggy marsh, where the ancient Romans had raced their chariots. He remembered Miguelito's face, tuned fine and taut, and wondered what drove him to that unshielded contact with the last absolute.

He longed for that moment again, to live in that moment, beyond the frame of words.

Bruni called him in. Bruni would not look him in the face.

“I have the unpleasant duty of telling you that the Signory no longer desires your service.”

Nicholas held his breath a moment and let it out again audibly. “May I ask why?”

The ambassador twitched a piece of paper toward him. “It seems that it has been you betraying us, and not Machiavelli.”

Nicholas did not have to take the paper; he could see at once what it was. His own even handwriting covered it, beautifully legible, his one manual skill. It was his letter to Valentino, suggesting the advantages of the Spanish alliance.

“I warned you,” Bruni said. “You cannot say I did not!”

His hands wrung together, and he avoided looking even in Nicholas's direction, but spoke to the dark end of the room.

“I am still owed a considerable sum of money,” Nicholas said. “Nearly four years' salary.”

“The Signory has provided me with a draft on the Pazzi bank for the sum of six hundred crowns. You will have to wait until the Republic's purse is a little fatter before you look for the rest.”

Bruni opened a drawer and took out a long yellow slip of banker's paper. He held this out to Nicholas, who took it, and for a moment over the voucher Bruni at last let his eyes meet Nicholas's.

He said, “How could you do this? It will ruin me. My family—everyone.”

Nicholas folded the voucher in half and put it away in his wallet. “I was forced, Excellency.”

“Forced to serve Valentino, maybe—but to be caught—ah—”

Bruni's gaze slid away toward the dark at the end of the room, and again his hands scrubbed one over the other; deep lines pulled at the corners of his mouth. “You may use the remainder of the morning to remove your personal belongings and neaten your chambers.”

“Good day, Excellency.”

Bruni grunted at him.

Nicholas went out to the corridor. There was nothing here that belonged to him, and he knew no duty to neaten his chambers. He went down to the workroom, where the scribes were only beginning to take up their work, and getting his hat and coat from the rack he left.

The sweltering summer heat slowed the pace of life. The French army loitered below the Alps on the vast plain near Milan. Rome was quiet. The Orsini had withdrawn into their impregnable fortresses in the campagna, and the Borgia Pope's soldiers no longer swaggered in the city streets.

Valentino made a formal entry into Rome.

Nicholas went to see it, and stood with a hundred others on the grassy slope of the Gianicolo opposite the Colosseo. They waited nearly an hour before they heard in the distance the brassy heralding of horns. The sound grew louder and louder, until the first rank of the trumpeters strode into sight down the road from the Lateran. All the people watching shouted, overjoyed that the wait was over.

After the trumpeters came heralds, very expensively got up, who walked along reading loudly from scrolls. The topic seemed to be the achievements of Valentino; Nicholas caught only a few words. The sun was high in the sky, and he was wondering why he had come here to sweat along with dozens of other people to the enlargement of Duke Valentino.

Valentino's men in their gold and black livery marched by, some on foot and some on horseback. Halfway through the line rode Valentino himself, wearing black from head to foot, and riding a black horse. He looked bored.

As the Pope's son went by, the people around Nicholas shouted and whistled and waved their caps, making a good show; the courtiers coming in the prince's train were throwing coins and sweetmeats. Nicholas stood silent, his hands gripped together behind him. Valentino passed by toward the Arch of Constantine. Showers of money and sugared fruits pelted Nicholas and the people around him.

“Carlini,” muttered a man behind him. “The Borgias are poor again. We'll see some new cardinals soon.”

Stefano rode after Valentino, one of a group of young men.

Nicholas lifted his head so that he could watch Stefano beyond the crowd. Ahead, the progress had reached the ancient Arch, where an old man, a nun, and two children would present Valentino with flowers and tokens of faith. Stefano drew rein. He was behind another man, so that Nicholas could not see his face. He slouched in his saddle, his elbow thrust out. His horse sidestepped so that Stefano's back was to Nicholas. The sunlight glanced off a medal pinned to the sleeve of his black and gold coat.