The Pop’s Rhinoceros (49 page)

It seemed to the two observers that a maddened and mud-bespattered water
buffalo had burst among the unsuspecting crowd, upending pilgrims by the plankful as it cut a swath of chaos in pursuit of the absconding trio. All four disappeared around a bend in the embankment while men and women picked themselves up out of the mud, gazed about in baleful shock, and then began to brush at patches of filth on their clothes, making them worse.

“That’s the second time,” said Salvestro. “They’ll be back again in a minute.”

They were.

“Stop!” barked HansJürgen, and the three novices skidded to a halt, looking up wild-eyed with their shouts and laughter dying on their lips, suddenly the still point amongst the lurching pilgrims about them. “Come here!”

Bernardo reappeared, charging around the corner, heedless of the various pilgrim-shaped obstructions that melted magically at his approach or found themselves facedown in the mud. He ground to a halt at the sight of the three of them, momentarily baffled by this conclusion to the pursuit.

“Up here!” Salvestro called, then turned to HansJürgen. “We saw them down there and thought they were lost,” he explained, “so Bernardo volunteered to, er, collect them. We thought …”

“Quite,” replied HansJürgen. “That was the right thing to do. I was in search of them myself.” He eyed the trio sternly as they trudged up the stairs from the river and waited at the end of the bridge. Wilf looked back at their late pursuer who was trudging up the steps after them. All three began once again to giggle. “Silence!” HansJürgen shouted, then turned back to Salvestro. “Thank you,” he said, and hesitated as if he might say more. He felt awkward, beholden somehow. He is a hired lance, and faithless, HansJürgen reminded himself. He had avoided the two of them since they had found him on the beach, as though his helplessness then were shaming. A few words had passed between them on the journey. That was all.

They walked back against the flow of the crowd with Bernardo at their head, Salvestro and HansJürgen bringing up the rear. The three youngsters chattered in guarded voices between them.

“Did you see the Pope?” Salvestro asked at one point.

“No,” HansJürgen replied shortly.

Dusk was falling as they took an alley off the Via Alessandrina. The streets narrowed and darkened until it seemed to HansJürgen that night had fallen, though when he paused outside the entrance to the Stick and looked up, the sky was still luminous. Joachim-Heinz and Heinz-Joachim had returned in their absence. They had decided to divide and scout out the river from opposite banks, switching over by the bridges at Tiber island. Joachim-Heinz had observed the latter part of Bernardo’s pursuit of the three novices until he had lost sight of them under the bridge at Sant’Angelo. Matthias limped in a little later, helped by Georg. A horse had kicked him. Only Gerhardt was still missing.

Father Jörg lay on his pallet, his lips moving almost imperceptibly in prayer. The other monks gathered in twos and threes to talk in undertones HansJürgen
could not hear. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf fidgeted and jabbered together in whispers. Only their two guides seemed at ease, Salvestro dozing, Bernardo picking the mud from his clothes as it dried. HansJürgen thought to join the Prior in his devotions, but he could not settle. Blind, or almost blind. … He marveled again at his own stupidity. How many of the others had understood the weakness revealed that afternoon? It hardly mattered; they would learn it soon enough. Such a thing could not be concealed. Bring this day to a close, he thought.

He might have fallen asleep, though it was brief and troubled. A sudden commotion had him stirring, looking about him. What? The brothers were getting to their feet. Where was Jörg?

“Brothers, today we have been tested. Our hardships have changed their natures. …”

To what? HansJürgen found himself asking. He struggled to his feet as Jörg spoke of their mishaps, recasting them as tests and trials, necessities on the path to reward. He spoke forcefully at first, and the monks hung on his words. They want to believe, HansJürgen thought, or wished. Soon, though, he began to drift and ramble, to repeat himself, and HansJürgen felt the same drift move through his audience. Then, in the midst of this address, the door banged open.

Jörg stopped and turned to the source of the noise. Gerhardt stood in the doorway. There was a short awkward silence before Jörg said, “You are late, Brother.” Gerhardt was white with dust from the crown of his head to the soles of his sandals, his appearance made even stranger by Jörg’s failure to mention it. He made a casual apology, and Jörg returned to his theme, which had become an analogy between their own misfortunes and the Pope’s; but the monks were no longer listening. They glanced about at Gerhardt, who stood in their midst pulling their attention to himself while outwardly hanging rapt on the words of his Prior. When Jörg was finished it was Gerhardt they watched as he strode to his pallet on the far side of the chamber. Hanno and Georg followed.

The monks settled slowly that night, carefully picking at the lumps that had formed in their mattresses, going out in ones and twos to splash water on their faces. New rituals, thought HansJürgen. His unease ballooned inside him.

Father Jörg had taken out his quill and was writing with painstaking slowness, his face only inches from the parchment.

“The Devil conjured cities for Christ in the wilderness, to test him, and to test his worthiness. Just so do the monks of Usedom face this city called Roma. Some see a city of churches and pilgrims. Others see only difficulties and tasks which they would rather leave to others. Some will persevere, and others will not. The monks of Usedom will be winnowed here, as Christ was, and the chaff will be threshed away. Already the husks are peeling off the corn. …”

Jörg paused there, not quite sure how to proceed. There were matters he wished to treat of and yet no manner in which to treat them. He listened to the sounds in the chamber: low murmurs, straw-rustles, the odd cough or sneeze … Then the scratch of his nib as he resumed.

“Their Prior led the monks of Usedom to Roma, but some came only against their will…”

He stopped again. He heard the same sounds as before. Other than these, there was silence. Gerhardt, Hanno, and Georg were still huddled together on the far side of the room, the latter two nodding from time to time. Jörg bent over his parchment and began scribbling more quickly than before, his earlier reservations brushed aside.

“Their Prior found in Rome that his enemies had not changed. Brother Gerhardt plotted against him on the island and undermined him in Rome. He mocked his Prior, and the monks of Usedom ignored his authority, mocking him, too. To begin with, he would disappear for the best part of the day in order to raise speculation about his true activities. Thus were the monks of Usedom distracted from the proper object of their attention, namely their Prior. After that he would gather select groups of malcontents and instill in their breasts the selfsame bile which poisoned his own, namely envy, for he once believed that he would be Prior himself, but Our Lord directed otherwise. …”

He continued in this vein for the remainder of the page, then stopped and began to read through what he had written.

HansJürgen lay back on his pallet, watching Gerhardt out of the corner of his eye and listening to the sound of Jörg’s writing. Gradually the tiny noises ceased: the nib stopped scratching as Jörg ceased his account, the rustling quietened, only a few low voices disturbed the hush. The Prior was still bent over his parchment when he motioned with his hand for the lights to be put out. The smell of candle-smoke drifted around the chamber. He heard the Prior shift and guessed that he had taken up his quill once again. Its point scratched across the parchment, but more harshly than before and the same motion over and over again. He is scratching it out, HansJürgen realized belatedly, whatever he had been writing. … He was asleep, or on the brink of sleep, when the voice sounded in his ear.

“It was lime dust. We saw him at the quarry.”

He could not rouse himself in time. He raised his head, but there was no one. Lime dust. Quarry. … Was there more? The voice had been Salvestro’s.

“Ghiberti.”

“Holiness?”

“Where is Sergeant Rufo?”

A serving man bearing a candle-snuffer maneuvers himself gingerly through the panel door in the far chamber, catches sight of the two men, and stops, legs straddling the sill. Leo gestures impatiently for him to get on with his business. Soon candle-smoke wafts toward them from within the darkening room. Minatory rumblings gurgle in the softness of his bowels; tomorrow’s turd promises much pain. It is possible, he thinks, that Leno’s intelligence will prove baseless. And it is possible, he thinks, that it will not. Only Rufo will know with certainty,
for only Rufo came face-to-face with them. They listen to the man pad about in the adjacent room. Rufo and, perhaps, the Colonel. At length, the far door closes.

Ghiberti says, “I believe he is in the service of the Republic of Venice, Holiness.”

Is it foolish of him to reconvene Prato’s combatants here in Rome? Would it not be more foolish for him to do nothing while they maneuver about him? Undirected, men err. Misdirected, they sin. Misfortunes follow, and gluttonous categories yawn open: the cavernous “Unforeseen,” the engulfing “Unexpected,” dimensionless as the adjacent darkened
sala
with spongy Bishop-of-Spezia lips. The future almost always exceeds expectation. … Is this wise?

Yes; he thinks, weighing, pondering, best to err on the side of caution. Better to have their throats cut.

“Send for him,” he says.

“…?”

“…!”

It takes a week. Premasticated by clerkly molars and part dissolved in the mouth-juices of garrulous
papal fonctionnaires,
this juicy morsel of gossip is passed mouth-to-mouth Tiber-ward, west across the bridge, then coughed up in the city proper: a sickly information-slick to be sniffed as cautious dogs sniff the acidic foam on one another’s vomit. What’s His Roly-Poly Holiness up to now?

“The Bishop of Spezia?”

“That was
months
ago. …”

“It was last week.”

But it isn’t the Bishop of Spezia, and it isn’t the escalating rat-problem, and it isn’t the eels, either. Disrobed women and semipublic copulation? Buggery? The French? No, no, no, no. … Well-placed sources from the kitchens to the Apostolic Camera report a
conversation. …

“Bor—and may I add—
ing.”

“No, wait, listen to this. …”

There follows, “Mmm-hmmm,” and “Uh-huh,” and “So what?”

So this is not exactly Rome’s staple rumor-fare; no pratfalls, pranks, or pox. No precipitous falls from grace or richly deserved comeuppance, not a mention of the ever-unpopular Cardinal Armellini. The city’s ticklish collective cortex sweats in its travertine-and-tufa brainpan. The gossip meanwhile mutates, sprouts odd prehensile limbs, gradually becoming something Rome can recognize. … Enter the Rumor-Beast, sporting a pelt of voided velvet with a pomegranate design, seven legs, a single head, and three tails (two more than the average Englishman). Iberia-on-Tiber is at odds with itself, bruits the Beast, extending a number of lobster-like antennae. Ambassadorial discontent is hardly enthralling but at least offers a point of purchase on this nebulous and somewhat abstract anecdote.

“Well, what would you expect from the Portingales?”

“And the Spaniards.”

“Hmmm. … Do they really brush their teeth in piss?”

The Rumor-Beast gallops about, evolving and disintegrating, shedding a pair of udders in Pescheria; growing gills in Ponte; in next-door Parione excreting a bubble of quivering mucus within which movement becomes more labored, notwithstanding the addition of fifteen virile tentacles. A last sad schlepp down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a slimy southward sashay for the salving river. … Too late. Fate decrees suffocation within an exoskeletal carapace of its own sun-hardened snot. The Beast is dead. The Rumor lives on. A gravelly tongue slaps and slobbers in the ears of hemispherical friars, demimondaines, quavering, crotchety semirecluses …