In the Company of the Courtesan

  “We are occupied,” I said lightly, cutting him off a bit of leftover meat. “And have been entertaining the enemy.”

  “Fiammetta?”

  “Is upstairs with a captain of the Spanish guard. She used her charms to buy his protection.”

  Ascanio laughed, but it rolled back into his lungs, and for a moment he couldn’t speak for coughing. “Do you think when Death comes she’ll offer to fuck it first?” Like every man in Rome, Ascanio had a longing for my mistress. He was assistant to the city’s greatest printer-engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi, a man of stature enough to be an occasional visitor to my lady’s soirees, and like his master, Ascanio knew the ways of the world. How many evenings had the two of us sat together while the powerful went to bed with the beautiful and we drank their leftovers, talking scandal and politics long into the night? While Rome was now being punished for its worldliness and decadence, it had also been a place of wonder and vibrancy to those with the talent or the wit to join. Though not anymore…

  “How far have you come?”

  “From Gianbattista Rosa’s studio. The Lutheran devils have taken everything. I barely got out alive. I’ve been running all the way with my belly close to the ground. I know how you see the world now.”

  He started to cough again. I refilled his glass and held it up to him. He had come from the country originally, with a fast brain and deft fingers for setting the letters into the press, and like me, his dexterity had got him further in life than he could have expected. His master’s books were in the libraries of Rome’s greatest scholars, and the workshop engraved the art of men whom the pope himself employed to beautify his sacred ceilings and walls. But the same press also inked satire and gossip sheets for Pasquino’s statue in Piazza Navona, and a few years before, a certain set of engravings had proved too carnal even for His Unholiness’s steady gaze, and Ascanio and his master had tasted the hospitality of a Roman jail, which had left them both with weak chests. There was a joke that they now mixed the ink for the paler washes with their own phlegm. But it was meant well enough. In the end they earned their living by spreading the news rather than by making it, and thus they were neither wealthy nor powerful enough to be anybody’s enemies for long.

  “Sweet Jesus, have you seen what’s happening out there? It’s a charnel house. The city is blazing halfway to the walls. Bloody barbarians. They took everything Gianbattista had, and then they set fire to his paintings. The last I saw him he was being whipped on like a mule to carry his own riches onto their carts. Ah! God damn it!” Under the draining board, the cook gave a grunt and knocked a wooden spoon across the floor, and Ascanio jumped like a fish out of water. “I tell you, Bucino, we’re all going to die. You know what they’re saying on the streets?”

  “That this is God’s judgment upon us for our sins?”

  He nodded. “Those stinking German heretics are reciting the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah as they smash the altars and ransack the churches. I tell you, I keep seeing that madman hanging off the statue of St. Paul and ranting about the pope.”

  “ ‘Behold the bastard of Sodom. For your sins will Rome be destroyed,’ ” I said, rolling my voice down into my chest. It had been the talk of the season: how the wild man with flaming red hair and a naked, stringy body had come out of the country, climbed up onto St. Paul’s stone shoulders with a skull in one hand and a crucifix in the other, damning the pope for his evil ways and foretelling the sack of the city within fourteen days. Prophecy may be a divine art, but it is an imprecise one: two months later he was still in prison. “What? You really think that if Rome had changed her ways, this wouldn’t be happening? You should read more of your own gossip sheets, Ascanio. This place has been rank for decades. Pope Clement’s sins are no worse than those of a dozen holy embezzlers who came before him. This isn’t bad faith we’re suffering from but bad politics. This emperor doesn’t brook challenge from anyone, and any pope who took him on—especially a Medici one—always risked getting his balls squeezed.”

  He sniggered at my words and took another gulp of wine. The screaming began once more. The merchant again? Or maybe the banker this time? Or the fat notary, whose house was even bigger than his paunch and who earned his living creaming off cuts from the bribes he processed into the papal coffers. On the street, he had a voice like a gelded goat, but when it comes to agony, one man’s screams sound much like another’s.

  Ascanio shivered. “What do you have that’s so precious you wouldn’t give it up, Bucino?”

  “Nothing but my balls,” I said, and I tossed two of my lady’s pomades high into the air.

  “Always the smart answer, eh? No wonder she loves you. You may be an ugly little sot, but I know a dozen men in Rome who’d swap their fortunes for yours, even now. You’re a lucky fellow.”

  “The luck of the damned,” I said. Strange how, now we were so close to death, the truth seemed to tumble out so easily. “Ever since my mother first looked at me and fainted in horror.” And I grinned.

  He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of you, Bucino. For all your twisted limbs and fat head, you’re an arrogant little bastard. Do you know what Aretino used to say about you? That your very existence was a challenge to Rome, because your ugliness was more true than all of its beauty. I wonder what he’d make of all this, eh? He knew it would happen too, you know. He said as much when he blasted the pope in his last prognostico.”

  “Just as well he isn’t here then. Or both sides would have set fire to his pen by now.”

  Ascanio didn’t say anything, just slid his head down on the table as if it was all too much for him. There was a time when you would have found him hunched over the machines late into the night, running off newly printed gossip sheets to keep the city informed of its own bowel movements. He had liked being on the edge of it all then; I daresay it made him feel like he owned a slice of it. But the rankness of a prison cell had drained his spirit and pumped bitterness into his veins. He gave a groan and started up. “I have to go.” But he was still trembling.

  “You could stay here, for a while at least.”

  “No, no, I can’t…. I—I have to get out.”

  “You going back to the press?”

  “I—I don’t know.” He was up and moving around now, the energy of nerves, twitchy and jumpy, eyes everywhere at once. Outside, our neighbor’s screams had turned to wild, sporadic moaning. “You know what I’m going to do as soon as this is over? Get my stinking carcass out of here. Set up somewhere on my own. Taste the good life for myself.”

  But the good life was seeping away all around us. His eyes darted around the room again. “You should come with me, Bucino. You can do accounting in your head, and those juggler’s fingers would be good with the typesetting. Think about it. Even if you make it through this, the best whores last only a few years. This way I could see us both right. I’ve got money, and with your knowledge of the backstreets, I bet you could find us a way out of here safely tonight.”

  There came a sound from inside the house. Someone was up and moving. Ascanio was at the door before I could answer. He was sweating again, and his breathing was rough. I went with him to the main entrance, and, because he had been a friend of sorts, I told him a back way through to near the gate of San Spirito, where yesterday there had been a city wall but now there would be a gaping hole. If he made it that far, he might stand a chance.

  Outside, in the darkness, the square was empty. “Good luck,” I said.

  He kept close to the wall, head down, and as he turned the corner, it struck me that I would never see him again.

  As I came back into the kitchen, I noticed something lying on the floor under the table, something that must have fallen from beneath his jacket as he got up to leave. I slithered down and retrieved a fabric purse. Out of it slipped a small, scarlet, leather-bound book: Petrarch’s sonnets, its perfect skin tooled with gold lettering and fixed with silver corners and an elaborate silver barrel lock wi
th a set of numbers running across it. It was the stuff of a scholar’s library and the kind of object that would have made any printer’s reputation in a new city. I might have gone after him if I hadn’t heard footsteps on the flagstones outside. As it was, I slipped the volume underneath my doublet the second before my lady arrived in the doorway.

  She had a silk robe pulled around her, her hair tangled fiercely down her back and the skin around her mouth red and puffy from the scrape of the captain’s stubble. But her eyes were bright enough. It is one of her great talents, to make it look as if her glass empties at the same rate as those around her, and so to remain clearheaded long after their lust has blended into the alcohol.

  “I heard voices.” She took in the debris of the kitchen. “Who was here?”

  “Ascanio. On his way back from Gianbattista’s studio. The painter is taken and his work destroyed.”

  “Oh! And Marcantonio and the press? What news of them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ah me…” She moved to the table, sitting in his place and putting her hands palm-down on the table. She moved her head slowly to one side and the other, stretching her neck as if coming back to life after a long sleep. It is a gesture I know well, and there are times when the work is challenging or the night long and she likes me to climb up on the bench behind her and massage her shoulders. But not tonight. “Where’s Adriana?”

  I pointed to the cupboard. “Curled up with the twins. Virgo intacta, all of them. Though I can’t guarantee for how long. How is our captain?”

  “Sleeping in fits and starts, thrashing around as if he were still at war.” She paused. I did not ask. I never do. Which is why, I think, she often tells me. “You should have seen him, Bucino—he was a Spaniard to his loins. So concerned with his reputation that his anxiety undermined him. Maybe he is grown sick of his own power. I think he was almost glad to have someone else taking charge after so long.” She smiled a little, but there was no wit in it. The screams would have penetrated the shutters of the bedroom as easily as they had the kitchen. “But he is young underneath the grime, and I doubt we can trust to his protection for long. We must contact the cardinal. It’s our only hope. Others will be fair-weather friends, but if he is still alive—and Charles’s troops would have reason enough to be good to him, given how he has supported the emperor’s cause in the Curia—I am sure he will help us.”

  We looked at each other over the table, both of us no doubt weighing our chances.

  “In which case, I should go now,” I said, because we both knew there was no one else. “If I move quickly, I might get back before the house is awake.”

  She looked away as if it was still a matter for debate, then slipped her hand beneath her robe and put her fist down on the table in front of me. Underneath her grasp lay half a dozen rubies and emeralds, their edges a little chipped from where she had prized them out of their settings.

  “For the journey. Take them. They can be your own set of pearls.”

  The square was silent now, our neighbors either dead or more effectively gagged. Around me, Rome was caught between fire and dawn, part of the city glowing like hot coals in the dark while clouds of smoke billowed east toward a gauzy gray sky ripe with the promise of another perfect day for killing. I moved like Ascanio, close to the ground and the edges of the walls, before breaking into the main street. I passed a few corpses in the gutter, and once a voice yelled after me, but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone’s nightmare. Farther down the street, a single figure came rolling toward me out of the gloom, moving as if in a daze and seeming not to see me. As he passed, I saw him clutching his shirt, with a bloodied mess of what might have been his own innards in his hand.

  The cardinal’s palazzo was off the Via Papalis, where the city gathers to gape at and applaud great church processions that pass through to the Vatican. The streets here are so fine you need to dress up even to walk along them. But the more the wealth, the greater the devastation and the heavier the stench of death. In the dawn light, there were bodies everywhere, some broken and still, others twitching or moaning quietly. A small knot of men were moving methodically through the carnage, poking around for leftover wealth like crows plucking out the eyes and the livers. They were too intent on their business to notice me. If Rome had been Rome and not a battlefield, I would have had to be more careful on the street. While I may be the size of a child, people still spot my rolling walk from a distance, and until they see the gold trim of my cloth—and even then, sometimes—they can tend to all kinds of cruel mischief. But that morning, in the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat. Though I think that is not enough to explain why I didn’t die. Because I saw enough children skewered and split into pieces as I went. And it was not because I had my wits about me either, for I stepped over the remains of all kinds of men, some of whom, from their clothing—or what was left of it—had had more status or wealth than I ever would, though little good it would do them now.

  Later, when the stories from the night screamers who survived told of a hundred ways in which an enemy can squeeze gold out of seared and punctured flesh, it became clear that those who were butchered in that first attack were the lucky ones. But at the time it didn’t feel like that. For every dead soul I passed, there was another barely living one, propped up against the wall staring at the stumps of his own legs or trying to push his guts back into his stomach.

  Yet, strangely, it was not all awful. Or perhaps it was not all awful precisely because it was so strange. In places there was almost a sense of wild pageant to it. In the area closest to the Vatican, where the Germans now ruled, the streets were full of fancy dress. It was a wonder the invaders knew whom to fight anymore, so many of them were wearing their victims’ clothes. I saw small men swamped by velvet and fur, their gun barrels high in the air laced with jeweled bracelets. But it was their wives and children who made the show. The women who follow mercenary armies are legendary, living as they do like cats in heat around the edges of the campfire. But these women were different. They were Lutherans, harpy heretics driven as much by God as by war, their children conceived and suckled on the road, thin and hard as their parents, their features blunt as woodcuts. On their stick bodies, the pearled gowns and velvet skirts fell like tents, the jeweled combs clung to limp hair, and swathes of priceless silk trains turned black in the blood and mud behind them. It was like watching an army of wraiths dancing their way out of Hell.

  For the men, the church costumes were the greatest prize. I saw more than one “cardinal” rolling through the streets in fire-red robes, their hats on backward and great jugs of wine in their hands—though no one bothered dressing up in priests’ robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn’t rich enough. Heretics may read the Devil in decoration, but they’re as greedy as the next man when the gaudiness comes from real gold. There were no rich chalices or jeweled monstranci stamped into the mud that morning. Instead the sewers were clogged with smashed ceramics and wood: enough dismembered Madonnas and Jesus statues to keep the sculptors’ guild at work for the next half century. Then there were the relics. Without belief, Saint Anthony’s rib or Saint Catherine’s finger is just another yellowed old bone, and that morning there were bits of saints littering the streets that pilgrims would have walked five hundred miles to kiss or pray to the day before. If they performed any miracles in the gutter, I never heard about it, though the Church would use that word soon enough to describe their recovery and the shrines would reopen as fast as any shops, so fast I swear that the next wave of gullible pilgrims would be shelling out their scudi to see what could as well have been a fishmonger’s thighbone or a prostitute’s digit.

  Our cardinal’s house was one of Rome’s finest. My lady had been his favorite for years by this time, and he was as faithful to her as any marrying man might have been to his own wife. He was a clever man, an honored member of the pope’s inner circle, as much a pol
itician as a prelate, and right up until the last he had played his hand both ways, supporting the pope in his power games but also arguing the case of the emperor. His evenhandedness was well known, and in theory it should have saved his life. In theory…

  There were two men with guns outside the entrance to his palazzo. I danced up to them, grinning and prancing like a man whose brain was as squashed as his body. One of them stared at me, poking me with a bayonet. I squealed in a way that always seems to delight men with weapons, and then I opened my mouth wide, stuck in two fingers, and brought out a small, glittering ruby, letting it lie in the palm of my hand. Then I asked if I could see the cardinal. First in pidgin German, then in Spanish. One of them answered in a vomit of words, then grabbed at me and forced my jaw open again, but what he saw there made him let me go fast enough. I repeated the exercise until there was another jewel sitting next to the first. Then I asked again. They took one each and let me inside.

  From the main hall I could see deep into the courtyard beyond. A great pile of His Eminence’s possessions were stacked up ready to go, though not all of them were deemed worthy. He was a cultured man, my lady’s cardinal, with a gallery of precious artifacts whose value was their age as much as the weight of any precious metal. As I moved inside, I heard a cry from above and watched as a muscled, marble Hercules came hurtling down over the balustrade, his head and left arm undergoing instant amputation as he crashed onto the flagstones below. Halfway down the corridor, a man in a dirty shirt facing away from me was scrubbing the floor. He sat back, his gaze fixed on the decapitated head. The sentry went over and kicked him so that he fell onto his side. So much for His Eminence’s allegiances: when an army hasn’t been paid for as long as this one, clearly it makes no difference whether the booty comes from friend or from foe.