Popes and Phantoms

‘No, Admiral, I haven’t. I don’t go to Rome to sight-see.’

But to be told who to kill, thought Slovo. ‘Quite. Well, on reflection, perhaps your omission is not so surprising. The lion is tame and gentle and easily intimidated by the brutality of the Roman crowd. It therefore rarely emerges from its cage. Even so, the related cost is said to be thirty silver florins per annum and in memory of the price paid to Judas for the betrayal of the Christ-person, such a sum is yearly extracted from the Roman Hebrews. Conjoined with all the other depredations they are prey to, it presents them with no small problem.’

‘Well then,’ said Droz, his conversational attention span reaching its limits, ‘they should kill it.’

‘The lion, you mean?’ queried Slovo, somewhat puzzled.

‘Why not?’ replied the Swiss mercenary, enviably untouched by doubt. ‘The lion, the custodian, whoever …’

‘So here we are again,’ said the Admiral, idly amused. ‘Your explanation and remedy for all ills: kill it.’

Numa Droz adopted his ‘honest peasant among sophisticates’ persona. ‘Well, it’s a maxim that always served me well,’ he sad stoutly.

Admiral Slovo would have been hard put to dispute the point. Captain of the Ostia Citadel at twenty-one, roving problem-remover for three Popes by the age of thirty, possessor of a smooth and unstressed family life, Numa Droz occupied the high ground in any such argument.

Silence, save for the sounds of perpetual war between owl and vole, fell as the duo on the tower resumed their vigil, peering out into the unlit night, grading shadows and evaluating the mutation of shades.

Admiral Slovo would have been content never to speak to mankind again, but Numa Droz, for all the bloodiness of his progress from the Alps to the Apennines, retained a degree of sociability. To his mind, speech and noise were useful indicators of life – lack of them usually meaning his job was done. The corollary of this, however, was that prolonged quiet made him uneasy. He worried that he too might have crossed the great divide without realizing (another of his range of tricks).

‘You’re very pally with Jews, aren’t you?’ he said eventually.

Slovo undermined his answer by hesitation. ‘… Yes – and why not?’

Numa Droz ignored the riposte. ‘We’ve got Jews in Canton Uri,’ he said. ‘Came from Heidelberg where the people gave ’em a hard time. It turned those left into a vicious bunch of daggermen: neutral, close-grained sort of folk as far as humanity goes; bad enemies. I really like them.’

‘Remind me never to introduce you to my acquaintance, Rabbi Megillah,’ mused Slovo.

‘There’s a saying about Hebrews in Uri, Admiral,’ continued Droz unabashed. ‘If anything’s really dangerous – you know, an iffy bridge or splintery seat – “it’s like a Jew with a knife”, we say. Now, is that high praise or what?’

‘Dangerous?’ queried the young lady emerging through the Tower’s trap door, catching the echo of conversation and repeating it with hot interest. ‘What’s so dangerous?’

‘Nothing that need engage your attention,’ growled Numa Droz, turning back to scan the outer darkness. Free as she was with her favours, the Lady Callypia de Marinetti would never sleep with a barbarian such as a Swiss. Knowing this, Droz was accordingly tormented with desire.

‘How are you, my lady?’ asked Slovo with great courtesy. ‘Can you not sleep?’

The beautiful young patrician unleashed a full volley of charm at the Admiral, and then remembered that in his case her powder was damp and useless. The charm was extinguished like a light.

‘I cannot sleep,’ she said, reverting to tartness, ‘because I am plagued by your Englishman following me: he even attempts to settle outside my door. I have come to complain.’

‘She’s plagued by something all right,’ said the soldier who now joined them on the roof. ‘Or maybe lack of something, hur hur!’

‘Then you still suspect there are matters afoot, Master Cromwell?’ asked Slovo gently.

‘Borr … she’s up to something tonight,’ said Thomas Cromwell. ‘There’s fires lit in there expecting quenching before cock crows, I reckon.’

To the fastidious Admiral, all speech bar his native Italian sounded like angry coughing but he recognized the control and cultivation overlying the soldier’s earthy peasant tones.

‘How dare …!’ exclaimed de Marinetti, for probably the fiftieth time that day. No one paid attention, for the act was wearing thin.

Cromwell dared because he was abroad and armed and fortified with the qualities expected of a Cockney Brewer’s son. ‘They may be all eyes and legs, these nobility,’ he continued, ‘but I know the spirit of the farmyard when I see it.’

‘Yes … yes, thank you,’ said Admiral Slovo, only his Stoicism preventing an impermissible show of embarrassment.