City of God Read online

Nicholas propped his chin up on his fist, his elbow on the arm of the chair. “I want to know the gossip of the Trastevere. As much to know what folk believe as to learn what is true.”

  “I’ll do anything I’m paid for.”

  Stefano put one hand on his coat, where the purse bulged. The door into the kitchen squealed and Juan returned, collected their glasses, and went out again.

  “When you want to see me, leave word at the Fox and Grapes,” Stefano said. “That’s a taverna, near Santa Maria—do you know it?”

  “I am somewhat acquainted with the Trastevere.”

  Juan returned with the glasses filled. Stefano’s eyes turned to the old man as he crossed the room toward them. Nicholas touched his fingers to his cheek, softly, stroking his own skin. He wondered how Stefano would answer another proposal.

  The old man brought his glass. Nicholas gave him a quick, weighted look and Juan left them. He would not come in again.

  “I’m pleased you like my house,” Nicholas said.

  “Yes,” Stefano said. He was sitting back in the chair, now, with the glass in his hand. “You must have a lot of money, to have a house like this.”

  “Would that were true. I would enjoy showing you the rest of it.”

  “Oh? Are there other rooms like this one?”

  “Only the bedroom.”

  The younger man’s head snapped back. His shocked stare met Nicholas’s and the color rushed into his cheeks.

  “So. You are that kind. I thought so, when first I saw you. Well, I am not!”

  “Very well,” Nicholas said.

  “I enjoy women. Many women. I am very good with them, too—they adore me.”

  “I dislike women,” Nicholas murmured.

  “Yes, your kind does.”

  Nicholas muttered behind his hand. He regretted letting this talk happen.

  “Still, as I told you,” Stefano said, “I will do anything for money.”

  Nicholas smiled, relaxing. He stirred in his chair, one hand on the arm. He wondered why Stefano had changed his mind, or if he had: perhaps he had only been defending his honor.

  “How much?”

  “One hundred crowns.”

  “Per Baccho,” Nicholas said. “This is Rome, after all. For ten crowns I could buy a red hat. Twenty crowns, which is generous.”

  “What am I—a whore? Besides, I am a virgin.”

  “That is no advantage to me.”

  “Forty crowns.”

  “Thirty.”

  Stefano looked away, casual, his attention going to the painted wall again. “Very well.”

  Nicholas stroked his fingertips lightly over the oiled wood of the chair. “We’ll have some more wine,” he said, and rose.

  At nine the next morning Nicholas went into the Leonine City, across the river from the center of Rome, to attend Pope Alexander.

  His walking stick tucked under his arm, he waited in a corridor of the Vatican Palace for his ambassador to arrive. The walls of the corridor were hung with indifferent paintings on mythological themes. Through an open window Nicholas looked out on a brick courtyard, half in sun, half in the shade of a tall stone pine; at the foot of the slender trunk there were piled several empty terra cotta wine jars. Nicholas stood admiring the accident of art in this scene through the window. He compared the sun-warmed colors of the brick and the pine with the lifeless painting of the Minotaur on the wall beside the window.

  Bruni came, the Florentine legate to the Curia, a tall, solid man, smiling. “I am late,” he said, as if that pleased him. “As usual. What happened last night at your tryst?”

  Nicholas cleared his throat. “Nothing.”

  “No one came?” Bruni said sharply.

  “They came. It was a trap, for the money.”

  “Did they get it?”

  Nicholas aimed his gaze out the window, unable to meet Bruni’s eyes. “Yes.” The money had come out of Bruni’s pocket.

  “Fifty crowns!” said Bruni, in a rising voice.

  “I could have refused to give it up,” Nicholas said, “and had my throat cut. And lost the money anyway.”

  Bruni made a sound in his chest. Planting one fist on his hip, he glanced around them to see who might overhear. “How many were there?”

  “Two.”

  “Only two? You couldn’t have escaped? I knew this was a mistake from the beginning. Well, never mind, it can’t be avoided, I suppose, in our position. Let’s go in. Maybe there’s something to be learned here.”

  Nicholas went after him down the corridor to the door at the end. They passed into a crowded, noisy room. Bruni sniffed. As his custom was in crowds, he thrust his head up and his chin into the air. “Get us through this mob,” he said. He maneuvered his way to the nearest window, took a handkerchief from his coat, and stood looking out and fluffing the handkerchief before his nose. Nicholas went toward the head of the room.

  This was only the antechamber; the Pope would keep his informal audience in the next room. At the door between the two, several pages were loitering, some wearing the livery of the Borgias, some in other colors, and Nicholas moved in among them to the doorway.

  This room was dark, but the next room was full of a golden light: its windows faced the sun. The walls were painted with murals, court scenes and crowds, like the court scene and crowd moving around the room. Nicholas could not see the Pope for the milling men and women, but he knew everyone there, and before half a minute had passed he had caught the attention of three or four people. Turning away from the door, he moved off a few steps along the wall.

  Bruni’s remarks about the fifty crowns still ruffled him; he wished that he had spoken up more for himself. He steered his thoughts away from the uses he had made of Stefano Baglione, who now had Bruni’s money. Bruni was standing framed against the window. He wore a splendid coat of Milanese stuff, green with an intricate pattern woven through it in silver thread. The Florentine Signory would frown at that. They wanted a sober, mercantile appearance in their orators. Someone tugged on Nicholas’s sleeve.

  It was a page in the Borgia colors, little bulls embroidered on his fluffed-up velvet cap. He said, “His Holiness will receive the legate from Florence.”

  Nicholas went to tell Bruni. The ambassador, putting on his smile, strode toward the door, Nicholas in his wake.

  At this hour Pope Alexander saw only a few people outside his court. In fact he was not even in the golden room beyond the antechamber. The page led them through the scattering of people there; the chatter of voices made a complex music, and because of the painted courtiers on the walls they seemed many more than they were. Going out the far door, the page turned a corner and went through another door. Bruni and Nicholas waited in the tiny empty room where the page had left them. Nicholas could still hear the muffled voices in the sala grande.

  “Are you coming in?” Bruni asked, between his teeth.

  “Excellency, perhaps I could accomplish more without going in with you.”

  “Very good.” Bruni waved at him, a vague salute, half blessing. The page returned and Bruni followed him away through the narrow door that led to the Pope.

  Nicholas remained there, listening. Through the door he heard the patter of the page’s announcement, and then the round jovial boom of Pope Alexander.

  “There you are, Monsignor Bruni. What a shame you do not play tarocco, we might make a better game of it.”

  Nicholas wondered whom the Pope was playing cards with and guessed it was his mistress, Giulia. The Pope’s favorite partner, his daughter Lucrezia, was not in Rome. There was a screen across the door and he could hear very little of Bruni’s peroration to the Pope. For months now the Florentine legation had been trying to persuade the Pope to release a prisoner from the dungeons of Sant’ Angelo and this audience today was supposed to deal with that, not with the threat Val
entino’s army posed to Florence herself.

  Nicholas wandered away from the door. He did not go back to the golden room full of courtiers; he went on deeper into the private apartments of the Borgias.

  In the next room, which overlooked from another angle the pretty little courtyard he had admired from the corridor, kitchen servants in white scarves were setting out plates and glasses on a table. He turned toward the next room; he could hear music ahead of him, and a woman laughed. But before he could go on, a little page in pink satin ran out the door and all but collided with him.

  The page blinked at him, round-eyed. “Messer Dawson!”

  “Good morning, Piccolo.”

  The page shrugged, still looking surprised, but of course he would not expect to find Nicholas here. He said, “Come with me, please.”

  “I am looking for—”

  “My mistress urgently wishes to see you.”

  Nicholas raised his eyebrows. He followed Piccolo into the next room. That explained the little boy’s look of surprise, that he had found Nicholas already on his way. They crossed the next room, where a man in work clothes was scrubbing off the wall; the Pope intended to paint every room of his apartments, but the work was hardly well begun yet. The page took him toward the music.

  It came from a narrow sunlit room, the music of flutes and a little harpsichord. Nicholas paused just inside the threshold. The floor was of black and white tiles, like a chessboard. Two people were dancing across it like errant chessmen. The page went off to the musicians, and Nicholas stood there waiting to be noticed.

  “Ah.” The woman abruptly stopped in the dance and turned out of her partner’s arms. “Messer Nicholas.” Her bell-shaped skirt, weighted with jewels and metallic thread, went on swaying around her in its own dance.

  “You may kiss my foot,” she said, and tittered and pulled her skirts up halfway to her knees to thrust out her slippered foot.

  Nicholas bowed deeply over one knee. “As you have said it, Madonna Angela, consider I have done it.”

  “Show me some respect, now—” she said. “I keep one of the keys under my pillow. Cecco, you may go.”

  “Madonna.” Her dancing partner bowed and went out, with the musicians trailing after in his wake.

  “I require something of you,” Angela Borgia said to Nicholas.

  “Madonna, you need only ask.”

  “Do you still keep your secluded house by the Colosseo?”

  “Yes, Madonna.”

  “I would like the use of it, tomorrow night.”

  Nicholas said, “I will bring you the key to it with my own hand. Shall you need my house servant?”

  “No—remove him. And yourself, entirely, Nicholas.”

  “As Madonna wishes.”

  “I shall send Piccolo for the key.” She sauntered closer to him; she had a little looking glass on a chain, at her belt, and she took it and looked at herself in it, then turned it to look at him in it. “And you, my love, will you need some other place to stay? I can provide you one.” She touched the enameled back of the mirror to his arm.

  “I will stay at the embassy,” Nicholas said.

  She sniffed at him, her black brows tightening over her nose. She was the only one of the Borgias not fair and tall. Raising the mirror at arm’s length, she watched herself in it, saying, “I shall send Piccolo.” Slowly she began to dance again, her skirts swaying out, and observed her steps in the mirror.

  Nicholas bowed again and went out. Before he had gone many steps the pink-satin page reappeared and led him back through the unpainted rooms to the painted ones.

  In the sala grande Nicholas withdrew by himself to the wall and propped himself on his walking stick. Before him the other courtiers wandered around the room, pausing to talk to one another. Nicholas fell to musing over what Angela Borgia had asked of him. She would want use of his house for only the most obvious reason, having no real interests beyond herself and her pleasures. Yet for that same reason her own resources were sufficient. There was more to her request than what it seemed.

  “Let us go,” Bruni said, beside him.

  Nicholas had not noticed him come up. He raised his head, frowning at Bruni’s frown.

  “What did he say?”

  Bruni shrugged his shoulders, made broader by the heavy stuffing inside his coat. The chains he wore around his neck chimed together. “He said he can do nothing in the matter of the Lady of Forli, who is in his son’s charge.”

  “Did you manage to get him onto the subject of Valentino’s invasion of Tuscany?”

  “I could not get him off! He never stopped talking—he said we ought to be asking rather for our own safety than for the Lady of Forli, since we have angered him by supporting his enemies in the past. Then he sent me out again.” He looked fretfully around them at the other courtiers.

  “What took so long, then?” Nicholas asked.

  “I had to wait to talk to him until he had finished his game of cards.”

  “Who was he playing with?”

  Bruni gave him a sideways glance. “What does that matter? The divine Giulia.” He drew out the name to make the epithet ironical.

  Nicholas started toward the door leading out, Bruni at his side, keeping silent. They went out through the antechamber and into the corridor. Most of the people waiting to see the Pope had either gotten in or gone home. Three or four men in half-armor, carrying pikes with ribbons on the hafts, were leaning against the wall, waiting to go on sentry duty when the audience ended. Halfway down the corridor, near a sunny window, several other men were clumped together talking. Nicholas touched Bruni’s arm.

  “The French.”

  Bruni straightened, his face keen. The Frenchmen began moving out of their council, coming down through the shadows toward the Florentines, and Bruni moved to plant himself squarely in their path. Surrounded by his underlings in multicolored clothes, the Cardinal of Rouen saw Bruni, smiled, bowed his head without missing stride, and murmuring a vague greeting in French circled the Florentine to the doorway and went in.

  “Our doom is sealed,” Bruni said.

  Nicholas got him by the arm and led him away. When they were on the steps going down to the courtyard, Bruni said, “They are all against us now. Did you see him? Not even the common courtesy of an inquiry after my health!”

  In fact Rouen had inquired, but in French, which Bruni did not speak. Nicholas said, “Oh, perhaps he was in a hurry.” They reached the double doors that led onto the courtyard and went out into the gusty, chilly day. Nicholas glanced up at the sky, where now gray clouds were shutting out the sunshine, and wondered if there would be rain.

  “What do you think?” Bruni said.

  “My opinion?” Nicholas barely glanced at him. “Such a creature as I has no opinions. I am fit only to run errands and risk my life.”

  Bruni fluffed up his beard, smiling. “How tender you are today, Nicholas. Tell me your opinion.”

  “If you think it would be worthy of your honor’s hearing.”

  “Of course I honor your opinions, my dear fellow. But you must admit, to lose fifty crowns would excite anyone to a careless word. It was not your fault, I am aware of that. Now tell me.”

  “Pope Alexander would hardly suggest that you play cards with him if he intended your downfall.”

  “Bah. You have a trivial mind.”

  “Besides, they have just asked a favor of me.”

  “What favor?”

  “I do not know yet.”

  “Nicholas, you are angering me. What favor?”

  “The Pope’s niece asked for the loan of my house.”

  “That!” Bruni flung his arm out, discarding the whole matter. “That strumpet? You pin so much on the whim of a whore?”

  The day was definitely turning cold. They walked down toward the river, with the high slopin
g wall of the Vatican on Nicholas’s right. For a dozen strides the wall sheltered them from the cutting edge of the wind, but as they turned to follow the street the breeze took them in the face. Nicholas hunched his shoulders. Ahead, the street divided, with one fork running under an archway toward the Ponte Elio and the other turning back up the slope toward San Pietro. In an open-air taverna at the crossroads, foreigners in foreign clothes leaned over a table, arguing in a foreign tongue. Two Franciscans walked by Nicholas, going up toward the gate into the Vatican.

  “I do not believe that she intends to use my house herself,” Nicholas said.

  “I think you are a fool. Besides, you saw how the French cut us dead.”

  “Florence is an old ally of France—if they meant to betray us they would smother us with their attentions.”

  Bruni made another swooping gesture with his arms. “I cannot fathom your reasoning. How can you construct such palaces of inconsequence?”

  “What else did His Holiness say?”

  “I have told you everything.”

  “Will he permit us to talk with the Lady of Forli, at least? Give her some comfort?” The dungeons of Sant’ Angelo were miniatures of Hell. Perhaps they could induce the woman to yield something of value in return for her freedom, although she had already lost nearly everything she had.

  “I tell you, he will not even consider talking about her. This time we have been given an impossible task, Nicholas. Impossible.”

  They walked under the archway. Ahead of them, the narrow street was packed with monks: another Lenten procession. Until they reached the bridge there was no chance to pass by, and Bruni fumed at having to shorten his stride.

  “I do not understand him,” Bruni said.

  “Who, Excellency?”

  “The Pope. He is always the same! Whatever happens, he laughs, he makes jokes, he plays cards, he chases women—he has no sense of the gravity of the world.”

  They had reached the bridge at last. Nicholas made for the railing, where they could edge past the monks, and stepped short to let Bruni precede him. He smiled at Bruni’s back, relishing Bruni’s comment on the Borgia Pope.

  “Mercury is retrograde,” Bruni said over his shoulder. “Mars is in Leo. There is nothing to be done when the stars themselves are our enemies.”