The Pop’s Rhinoceros (86 page)

“What about you, Ruggero?”

Enzo, Bruno, Piero, Roberto, Luca, and Arturro turned to him. They were all of a piece, short thickset men with wiry black hair, drawn from the villages scattered about Fiumicino and the Isola Sacra. They might have been cousins, and they looked at him diffidently now, peering out from under their thick brows and looking away the moment he caught their eyes. Shy country cousins, suspicious and curious in equal measure of the taller artisan who had walked on board with a bag of tools slung over his back and said nothing unless directly addressed. He had wedged himself into the narrow doorway cut in the bulkhead between the steerage and the lower deck. His feet propped against the jamb opposite, he appeared to be digging dirt from under his fingernails.

“I am called Ruggero di Palma Castiglione,” he replied without looking up. “I signed on as a carpenter for a foolish voyage to the Guinea Coast on behalf of a foolish man called Antonio, who I have never met. There was talk of an animal, and need of a cage, and perhaps a boat, too. I remember discussing such things with a man called Alfredo, the master of this vessel and a drunkard, as it turns out, and you.” He indicated Jacopo. “Now, let me understand you correctly, you want me to cut a man’s throat, then his woman’s, then his two companions’. Would that be correct?”

“I could hardly declare my purpose with Captain Alfredo present,” Jacopo began.

“Well, we must add him to the list, then,” Ruggero said sarcastically. “Where are we now? Five?”

A short silence followed this retort. Jacopo stared at Ruggero, and the others exchanged dark looks amongst themselves.

“He’ll talk,” Enzo muttered finally. “He’ll tell them.” He flicked his eyes to the ceiling.

“Six, then,” Ruggero responded immediately, “including myself, if you can decide which of you brave-hearts will do the cutting.” His eyes did not leave Jacopo’s.

“Don’t think I won’t,” growled Enzo.

“Shut up, both of you,” Jacopo broke in then. “It’s true Ruggero here didn’t know anything until an hour ago. So he’s surprised, that’s all. This is a sweet deal if we all stick together. It’s like I said; we get rid of them. We sail the
Lucia
to Tunis. I know some people there who’ll give us a fair price on her. We divide the money between us. …”

He got as far as that, and then Arturro and Enzo broke in, wanting to know just how he proposed to divide up the money, on what basis, how much to whom, and so on and so forth, for even if they knew little of sailing and less of murder, they understood divisions, and shares, and the practical difficulties of who should get what and why. They had been breaking their backs in the floodplain of the Tiber since before Rome was ever dreamed of and waiting for their fathers to die since before that.

“No,” explained Enzo to Arturro an hour of bickering later. “You get
twenty-seven
shares. You know damn well you’ll get that vine-plot behind old Isabella’s when your uncle dies, and don’t tell me again about that cousin up by Tolfa, he may as well be in the moon. You’re not married, so you don’t get the nine being-married shares, and you have a well behind your place, too, so you lose three shares for that. On the other hand, it’s true that your brother’s dead and you’ve got
his
wife to feed, but she hasn’t got any brats, and isn’t likely to get any if you keep your hands to yourself. So you’ll get your brother’s plot, too.”

“I owe Piero over fifty soldi,” Luca broke in. “What about that?”

“What about what?” Enzo retorted. “You’ve got thirty-nine shares already, you greedy little bastard. …”

And so it went on, the six men arguing amongst themselves, offering up their dead and living wives, their sick uncles and hungry children, their dry wells and dead vines, their fields in which nothing would grow except stones. Jacopo watched and listened and said nothing. Nothing and no one had interrupted their six-cornered dispute save the sound of the door above banging as someone left the cabin, then banging again on his, or her, return. They stopped and looked up hastily each time, but a moment later they were back amongst their hedges and ditches, their water shares and rights of passage, already busily chopping up the very ship in which they sailed. Ruggero continued working on his nails and played no part in these discussions until Luca turned to Enzo and asked, “What about him?”

Once again they all turned and stared at the carpenter.

“Well,” said Enzo, “are you in or out?”

Ruggero spoke to his nails. “Put me off at Tunis,” he said. “I don’t want your thirty-one and a half shares or whatever it is. I cut wood and join it, that’s all.”

Enzo nodded. “Fine by me. Don’t get in our way, though, carpenter. And don’t open your mouth too wide, unless you want to swallow one of your chisels.”

The carpenter smiled at that; then, pushing himself upright, he disappeared through the door.

“We should kill him, too,” said Luca. “I don’t trust him. He’ll talk, I know he’ll—”

“Shut up,” said Jacopo. They were the first words he had spoken since the others had begun dividing the ship among them. “You’ll leave him alone, and he’ll leave us alone. We’re all hanged men if we’re caught. Him as much as us, and he knows it.”

The mention of “hanged men” silenced them. It was hot in their little wooden box. They grew somber again, anxious and sickly-looking in the yellow light of the oil lamp. Stupidity and greed and fear, thought Jacopo. Sons of the soil, and all at sea.

“You’ll divide half what we get between yourselves,” he said. “The other half goes to me.” He watched their outrage swell, their eyes widening, faces turning thunderous. “Unless one of you wants to strike the first blow. … Any of you want to be the first? … Luca? … Piero?”

He looked at each of their faces in turn. Enzo’s eyes were the last to drop, but drop they did. “No takers? Well then, I must suppose that it will be me.” He spoke lightly, toying with them. They so wanted to be old and fat, and ashore. “I’ll kill the first, since none of you have the guts. We’ll all do the others. All of us, mind you. And together.” They were frightened now and relieved. He had brought them near enough.

“Which one first?” It was Luca who spoke, his lips pursed with nerves.

“The big one. Bernardo. Without him, the others will be easy.” Lank black hair framed his face like a bonnet. The men watching him were apprehensive and silent. He had put himself beyond them; he frightened them now. “I’ll do it tonight,” he declared, “if they ever rouse themselves from that bloody cabin.”

All seven of them glared up at the ceiling.

“What are they doing in there, anyway?” asked Enzo, lowering his eyes from the boards above his head and fixing them, for no good reason, upon Luca.

“Talking?” Luca replied doubtfully. “What have they got to talk about?”

Jacopo did not answer. He was thinking of Don Antonio’s stray remarks about “our two fools,” a phrase he had varied only rarely. Once he had dubbed them “our beast-catchers,” the title bestowed with a strong sarcastic inflection; once, and in the same tone, he had called them “our licensed brigands,” a phrase that he had puzzled over until he had seen the two of them following this “Captain Diego,” hurrying across the quay to the jetty with the girl, unnoticed as all eyes turned to the barge and its robed passenger. They had walked in step.
Marched, as it were, and when this captain had directed them to settle the girl in the cabin, to drag out its drunken occupant and dump him on the deck, then take up their station at the stern to doff their hats to His Holiness, they had obeyed without delay or reflection. “Licensed brigands” meant only one thing to him then.

“I believe that they were soldiers together,” Jacopo said eventually. “Once.”

Their faces clouded, and he cursed his loose tongue. “A long time ago,” he added, but they were inwardly shaking their heads, slipping away from him, back to their drudgery and digging. “Soldiers” were a black stain that appeared on their horizon, a monster with ten thousand hacking limbs that pulled them out by the heels, then their women and children. … No one had told them that these were “soldiers.” He eyed them contemptuously. Don Antonio had somehow neglected to mention that one of the “fools” stood almost two heads taller than he, that they would be joined by their old commander, if that were the case, who had even brought a woman on board. Don Antonio would have a few questions to answer if they ever met again.

“I’ll take the big one,” he spat at them. “Then it’s all of us together.”

He tripped on the doorsill as he quit the cramped chamber. Behind him, he heard a couple of them snigger.

It began as ants. Then became worms, a ball of them the size of an apple, then the size of a small cabbage, vigorous and slithery in the pit of his stomach. His mouth filled with spit, which he swallowed every few seconds or so. The worms drank it, then lashed about with their tails and mated, producing more worms— bigger ones. It might have been something he ate, except that he had eaten nothing since the night before, when five or six of Rodolfo’s pies had disappeared down his gullet at the Broken Wheel. These had shown no intention of returning. It might have been the drink, which was more likely, and it might have been his “nerves,” which still jangled from the moment when he had released the dwarf in mid-heave and found himself staring into the face of the very man who had chased them out of Prato, and Rome, over mountains, through rivers, and down them, eventually to a fishing port, where a ship waited to take them to “somewhere safe”—this was how he had understood it. So here he was aboard ship.

Every few minutes, Bernardo looked across at Salvestro to see his friend was immersed in a conversation with the very man they had taken passage to escape: the Colonel, who it now seemed was not about to kill them, and who it seemed was no longer “the Colonel,” but “the Captain.” So it was in all probability his nerves, and if not that, then the strange musty smell that clung to the whole ship, a noxious vapor of the sort that caused fever, and if not that, then it was the actual motions of the vessel, though these were gentle and almost imperceptible. The cabin was furnished with a kind of table built into the stern bulkhead, a stool and chair on which Salvestro and Diego respectively sat, an open-fronted cupboard
filled, so far as he could see, entirely with empty bottles, and two bunk beds. He sat on the lower, the girl was asleep on the upper. She had not been mentioned yet by the two men. One corner was piled with a heap of dirty rags, clothes possibly. The other held a small chest with bands of iron about it held shut with three formidable locks. Its contents clinked occasionally, usually when the boat rolled. Worms, pies, drink, nerves, the stink or motions of the
Santa Lucia
… Bernardo felt that he might very soon be sick. The cabin did not contain Captain Alfredo. Or a bucket.

“It was an unholy trinity,” Diego was saying, shaking his head. “Aldo, Medici, myself. If it had been I who went in to parley with him, then everything would have been different. Of course Medici wasn’t going to let that happen, and Aldo was sick with a wasting disease, it was eating his flesh, and I, I had little wish to breathe the air in there. Even in the antechamber, you could smell it. … No, they spoke alone.”

Bernardo had heard this bit already and almost understood it. He remembered a lot of waiting around outside Prato. More specifically, a lot of being hungry. This had happened then. Diego and the Cardinal had talked terms with Aldo. … No, he’d got that part wrong. The Cardinal had talked terms with Aldo, and Aldo had surrendered the town, on terms that… He did not quite grasp “the terms.” Then the Cardinal had ridden back to the camp with a story about Aldo’s defiance, which had been the pretext for all that followed. There was something wrong with this, Bernardo felt, but whether it was his fault or someone else’s was still unclear.

“The boy knew,” Salvestro was saying. “Aldo’s son. He thought his father a coward for it.”

“Then they all knew,” replied Diego. “No wonder Medici kept them hidden. Aldo was brave enough, though. He had little choice. …”

This was going too fast for Bernardo. He had the talking bit, the surrender bit, but the Aldo and his family bit he did not understand. Nor were “the terms” getting any clearer. He heard the girl shift on the bunk above him. He was going to have to be sick soon. Very soon, actually.

“Medici came out of that room shaking his head, lamenting his ‘old friend Aldo’s pigheadedness.’ He was almost in tears, the charlatan. I even remember him trying to persuade Cardona not to attack. Imagine if he had acceded! “The soldier grinned quickly, but then his face fell again. “Of course, Cardona would have known everything. Even then he would have realized that Aldo had to surrender, that Medici was lying through his teeth, and there was I, standing next to him, an officer under his own command. … He must have known then where the blame would fall.” His voice had a strangled quality to it.

Bernardo cleared his throat loudly.

Salvestro furrowed his brow. “Why?” he said at last. “Why would he wish the town sacked?”

“I await the chance to ask him. I await the chance to ask many things. Why
else am I here, aboard a floating jakes on a fool’s errand for the man I detest most in the world?”

The talk drifted and meandered around this question. Bernardo followed intently, certain in the belief that if he only listened hard enough, Diego’s role in this whole affair and his presence here on the ship would make perfect sense to him, or at least become less inexplicable. The Beast, he gathered gradually, was central to the soldier’s project, which was intended to gain Fernando’s ear. Possibly the ear was central, too, but anyway, the one clearly led to the other: the beast in some sense was the key to the ear, and this had something to do with “renown.” With the ear gained, the rest more or less fell into place. There would be a petition to Fernando (via the ear) against the injustice done Diego by, as he had put it, “the man I destest most in the world.” This could only be the Pope, guessed Bernardo, basing this belief on the fact that every time the word “Medici” or “Leo” was mentioned, it was invariably preceded by the epithet “loathsome” or “vile” and followed by clauses portending violence such as “whose head I look forward to parading on a pole.” The Pope had been the murderer at Prato, albeit through the actions of men who did not know whom they served (Rufo was mentioned here), who believed they served Diego while actually serving the Pope and thus were intended to implicate Diego when caught, except they had escaped, or some of them had, and Diego had been disgraced anyway. And these “men” had been dupes just as much as Diego, for they had been led to believe they were protecting Aldo’s family, even though they were actually guarding them only so that the murderers, who were not they, could kill Aldo’s family later. And then the “men” would be blamed for it, and Diego, too.