The Pop’s Rhinoceros (39 page)

“How?” demands Diego. “How did you do it?” But Cardona only stammers and sobs. The real Cardona could answer, thinks Don Diego, running him through. He is growing tired of Cardona’s presence in these nightly parades and beckons impatiently to the next witness. Another pudgy body hurries to take the corpse’s place. “Forgive me, Colonel Diego,” begins Cardinal Giovanni di Medici himself, bug-eyed with fear. “I am scum, I am traitorous and mendacious, I—”

“How? How did you do it?” barks Diego. Medici’s stammering. His disgusting sobbing, but no answer. Diego thrusts quickly at his stomach, then slashes sideways. “If not how, why?” he shouts. The prelate looks down in amazement at the innards spilling out of his belly. He tries to gather them in his hands and stuff them back in. Diego cuts his throat. Boring. Who next?

In his mind’s eye a whole crowd of panicky preening courtiers whirls up. Diego scans their faces as they mill about and chatter. They are interchangeable, copies of one another. That was how I missed him, thinks Diego. But the face he seeks soon comes into view, there, at the very edge of this shrieking flock, and there, in its midst, and at its rear, moving smoothly about amongst them. “You!” he commands. “Come here.”

A man in his late thirties steps forward confidently. He is dressed like a courtier, in French silks, sleeves slashed, ostrich feather in his hat. His sword, though, is a heavy steel affair, not the useless brittle rapier affected at court, and his gait is vaguely military, a gentle swagger. His face gives away nothing, and that too is as Don Diego remembers, for the first time he set eyes on the man he saw only that: a face poked through the flaps of a tent.

It had been evening and they were gathered in Cardona’s marquee: he, the Viceroy, five or six of the other commanders. They were arguing about supplies, as they had been the night before and the night before that. They were on the march to Prato.

The army that had left Bologna two weeks before was almost ten thousand strong. They had all but exhausted their own provisions in a week, and the chests loaded with Bolognese ducats were now in the possession of the victuallers who had followed the baggage train, sold their wormy meal and rancid bacon, and turned tail. They were camped near the headwaters of the Savena. A little village had been ransacked the night before while the sergeants stood by, either helpless or cheering on the men. The next day had seen the first attack on the baggage train, and when they’d pitched camp three men, the ringleaders, had been hung. There would be nothing more until Barberino, and even there they might have to fight before they filled their bellies. None of that had been settled yet.

Suddenly there had been horses and shouting outside the tent. They got up quickly, though no alarm had been sounded. It was Medici and a party of horsemen, a dozen or so, who acted as his escort. He came in alone and the talk went on, Medici saying little or nothing, until the talk turned to Prato, which was ruled by an old condottiere called Aldo Tedaldi, according to Cardona, who might or might not resist them.

“Tedaldi? Tedaldi put us to the bother of a siege?” Medici had spoken up abruptly. “Aldo and I all but grew up together. No, no, no. …”

They had accepted that. Medici seemed untroubled, content to leave the situation in their hands. He took a cup of wine or two, listened carefully. A short time later a face poked itself through the flaps of the marquee. Medici looked around, nodded to the man, and bade them all good night. Diego left shortly after, walking the short distance to his tent flanked by Don Luis and Don Alonso, two of his more trusted men-at-arms. Outside, all about them, the darkness seethed with movement. Heads turned toward them and followed them as they passed. In the dark, the men were not bombardiers and pikemen, harquebusiers
and crossbowmen, not captains and sergeants, companies and battalions, not Spaniards and Germans, not
stradiots, avventureros,
and
lanze spezzate
. They were sloping animals, hungry patches of darkness. By night, the camp was theirs.

“It was you, the face in the tent,” Diego tells the phantom now.

“It was.”

He had seen him throughout the days that followed, but without ever truly taking note. He seemed to move freely and without fear between the various Free Companies, which contained the real rabble, lawless cutthroats and fugitives who had attached themselves to the regular army at Bologna. The whole force moved through the Mugello valley, herded like cattle by their sergeants and captains. When the smoke from a village was sighted ahead, the pace would pick up. The horses dragging the carts and cannon would be whipped to a reluctant trot; eventually the whole army would be charging a cluster of miserable hovels. The villagers had long since fled, taking all they could carry, driving their livestock before them into the hills. They could be seen sometimes on the higher crags overlooking the valley. They were small as flies, watching the straggling carcass that dragged itself along the valley floor far below. The men were racked by dysentery and fevers. Every morning another group of the sickest was left behind, wailing to their comrades not to abandon them. The peasants would sometimes not even wait until the tail end of the army was out of sight before descending to cut their throats.

Diego organized forage parties and vanguards, sent out scouts. Medici himself seemed serene while the force that was to oust the Podesta and return him to Florence degenerated into a starving mob. The nights were broken with shrieks and cries as suspected thieves were beaten to death by their comrades. Patrolling the column of carts and cannons with his men-at-arms, Diego saw a blankness in the men’s faces. Their eyes would fix on a distant outcrop of rock and not see a man an arm’s length away. The attacks on the baggage carts were desperate skirmishes, the looters almost oblivious of their own injuries. It was Florence that drew them on;
La Crasa Puta,
they called her. They would rip her open and feed on her like wolves. Prato was nothing more than a name.

As the army crawled down the valley of the Mugello, the common soldiers seemed to detach themselves from the spine of carts and cannons and spread out to fill the broadening floor of the valley. They moved like cattle, stumbling forward aimlessly. Riding high on the right-hand slope, Diego looked down at the horde strung out below. He saw a beaten army; within it, an army of murderers. Medici’s sergeant moved through all this unscathed.

“There was a meeting before we reached Prato, was there not, between Cardinal Medici and an envoy from Florence?” Diego inquires now of the foppish sergeant. He thinks of hauling up Medici by the ears again and tickling between his legs with the point of a dagger, but the sergeant will do as well. “I would run you through if I found you alone,” he adds before the man can answer.

“I do not doubt it. And yes, there was a meeting, but I can say no more than that.”

In the darkness of his bedchamber, Don Diego conceives the sergeant standing before him awkwardly, staring at the ground between them, discomfited by the interrogation. But pleading for a hearing? Pressing his case? Begging for his life? That he cannot imagine. “You were not at the center of this business, I know,” he tells the man. “But you were its functionary. Without you, or another like you, I would not have been entrapped. …”

He stops. The man is laughing at him.

“Entrapped? Don’t you understand that you were the factotum all along? Without you, none of it was possible. Without
you,
Captain Diego.”

“Colonel,” grumbles Diego, thinking, True, true, but how? He jabs at the sergeant with his sword, which disappears into the man’s chest to no obvious effect and reemerges bloodless.

There were clues, if he could scratch them up: it being Medici who had ridden ahead to parley with Tedaldi and Prato’s “defenders,” who had returned with a tale of being driven off a mile or two short of the city. “No cause for concern, though,” he said lightly. “They will talk—when the time comes.” The army was three days’ march away then. Cardona nodded complaisantly. There was a studied quickness to their exchanges.

Rehearsed, thinks Diego in the night-silenced embassy. The silky sergeant has disappeared, just as he had in fact disappeared somewhere along the march. He has no memory of him until Prato, where he is spied again here and there amongst the very worst of the militias, sauntering about, at once purposeless and purposive,
at large. …
They called him Rufo. Sergeant Rufo; was that his name? He never knew what the man did, nor Medici—precisely. Nor Cardona. Prato surrendered and yet was sacked. And Tedaldi died. And his family was killed.

Not by me, thinks Diego. And that was not how it appeared at the time. His disgrace had been carefully prepared. With the army bivouacked in the lush fields about the town, the town itself resting in the soft earth, on a river that, though it swamped land a little upstream of the city walls, never flooded, in the soft warmth of late August. They carded wool—the Pratesi—the town was built on it. Softness, warmth. … He is reaching for something, in the unconnectedness of the two, army and town, the horrendous implausibility of what was to happen the next day. He must have been already marked and as ignorant of his fate as the Pratesi were of their own.

And now in the dark and its gripless substance, in his dark keep, he reaches again for his sword. Tonight has changed everything. Cardona, Medici, his “Sergeant Rufo …” Now, though? “Now the fourth player.”
Drag him up. …
The sword wavers over a white neck, the waxy flesh. Pull him out from under Colonna’s trained apes and stand him on his feet, this
Salvestro
. He had thought him lost, escaped. Here he was.
Peace has always made fools of men like us
. … But
not always. Come now, lift him up and look him in the eye, the one not swollen shut. Regard, a pawn even more miserable than himself. Watch him run away through the streets of Prato with his tame giant in tow. There are horsemen chasing him; himself among them—how foolish he was. Letting him hide in a bog and letting him escape. He knows the rest, this golden pawn—the how of it, if not the why. Was it Salvestro who actually held the knife? Who actually did the cutting? It does not matter. An enormous calm wraps itself about him.

The vagabond is still standing there, waiting apprehensively. I place great faith in you, he tells the wretch. You seem a resourceful fellow, the sort to survive. You will find me again when I need you. Diego is a magnanimous warlord, his sword cradled in his arms. You may go now. … You will find your way back, he calls after the man, who has turned tail and is fleeing into the distance; there’s no escaping me. … Footsteps downstairs; His Excellency’s return. How much longer now will he be His Ladyship’s mastiff? The secretary is ambitious. He will help. Almost asleep now. Almost at rest. … Come back! Does he shout this? Perhaps, for the footsteps stop, above him now, Vich’s apartment. Silence: the sound that listening makes. A kind of chuckling—his own. But look at the wretch come back! Bounding and sprinting and racing to the rescue, just look at him … scrawny, tousled, unwashed, unfed. Look at him run, with his swollen eye and filth-stained rags. Look at his surprise, being pulled to his feet, noticing Diego for the first time.

Welcome to Ro-ma, Salvestro. …

My savior, thinks Diego, laughing to himself. My savior, the throat-cutter. He will have the truth cried in the streets, present his case, appeal to the King. He will restore himself.

Darkness again, although different in kind—more absolute—the eyeless blackness of a mine-shaft or a ship under fifty fathoms of pitch; this rearmost chamber is an inky pit stirred only now, by whispering.

“It wasn’t.”

“It was.”

“It wasn’t.”

Asking after the Pilgrim’s Staff earlier that afternoon, Father Jörg, Salvestro, Bernardo, HansJürgen, and rest of the monks were directed from the piazza to turn left into the “dismal rat-hole at the side of the Albergo del Sol,” left again down “the open sewer of the Via dell’Elefante,” to “follow the most depressing of the three alleys running east until you feel like killing yourself” and eventually find themselves in front of “something that looks like Sodom after Lot left—you’ll know it by the gloom.” This soon revealed itself as flattery.

Apart from a few of the most inaccessible attic rooms, the hostel is window-less. By day the main door is left open—this helps—but the tenement opposite
stands a full story taller, the doorway itself is prefaced by a porch, and the building faces north. Drizzles, downpours, and damps find a welcoming home in the cracked roof-slates and disintegrating pointing: the crumbling fabric of the shambles squatting in the Via dei Sinibaldi is permeable to most kinds of weather. … But illumination? Its passageways and drafty stone staircases are black with candle-smoke, its ceilings gluey with tarry fumes from oil-lamps carried by the denizens who stumble from room to room, dragging immense shadows behind them, skewed
brockenspecters
that stalk their owners through the corridors and enfilades, sliding along the soot-streaked walls like murderers. The Borgo is the dankest quarter in the city, the Via dei Sinibaldi the dingiest street in the quarter, the Pilgrim’s Staff the most dismal building in the street, and the rearmost chamber the darkest in the whole building. Well-known poets have spent nights here in search of the authentically “Stygian.” Sunlight staggers in only to die.