The Revolution of the Moon Page 17

  “You’ll pay before and after,” said don Severino.

  Before and after? What did that mean?

  “You want half the money before and the other half after giving me the information?”

  “No. I want to be paid first for the information, and then twice as much afterwards, for telling you how to get out of your pickle.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “No.”

  “So how much is this information worth?”

  Don Severino closed his eyes. Then he opened them and delivered the blow.

  “Three thousand scudi, taking into account that we’re friends.”

  Turro Mendoza gave a start in his chair.

  “Have you gone insane?”

  “Does that mean no?”

  “Of course it means no.”

  “Then I’ll be on my way,” said don Severino, standing up and heading for the door.

  But before going out, he stopped, turned round, and asked:

  “Does the name Bonifati mean anything to you?”

  “Come back here!” said the bishop.

  He’d wanted to shout his command, but the voice that came out of his throat was that of a turkey-cock being strangled.

  Don Severino, grinning, returned and sat down.

  But the bishop already regretted not having been able to stay calm. He put on an expressionless face.

  “They say so many things about me . . . ” he said.

  “This is written down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I want three thousand scudi in front of me first.”

  “You want to dispossess me.”

  “You’ll still be better off than having no more possessions at all, like me.”

  “Let’s make it two thousand.”

  “Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, I now want three thousand five hundred scudi. And that may go up to four thousand.”

  “All right, all right.”

  The bishop sat there a moment, thinking it over. Then he stood up.

  “Wait for me here. This will take a while.”

  “I have all the patience in the world.”

  It was a good forty-five minutes before Turro Mendoza returned, followed by Don Puglia carrying three small sacks full to bursting and quite heavy. The priest set these down on the desk and then left, closing the door behind him.

  Don Severino removed the string holding each bag shut, opened them up one by one, then closed them again.

  “Prior to anything else, I would like to tell you something entirely for free. It’s not true that I came directly here after running into my friend the scribe. I went to my ex-servant’s house and gave him a note on which it is written that I’ve come here to talk to you about Bonifati. If I don’t return this evening, he will give this note to the Grand Captain. Do we understand each other?”

  The bishop became immediately convinced that don Severino was lying. He hadn’t written anything, but was only trying to cover his rear. He pretended to believe it.

  “Perfectly,” he said. “Now speak.”

  “Bonifati has denounced you for butchering his son.”

  The bishop acted as if he was having a heart attack. He made as if to stand up, but then fell back down in the armchair, shaking his arms in the air as if trying to grab something that wasn’t there.

  “He denounced me?!”

  “And that’s not all. They have proof. You haven’t been arrested yet because donna Eleonora wants Giaraffa—whose earlier denunciation of you for the same misdeed, as you’ll recall, was rejected by our Council—to return to Palermo to re-submit it. At this point, with two proven denunciations, you’re screwed once and for all.”

  Turro Mendoza sat there saucer-eyed, sweat dripping down his brow and panting heavily. His entire body was mildly trembling, as a string of spittle dangled from a corner of his mouth. He was unable to speak. He gestured with one hand for don Severino to wait a minute.

  “I’m sorry, but I have no time to lose,” said the other. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  He grabbed the sacks, put them inside a larger sack that he’d been carrying tied round his waist, wrapped his cloak around this, and went out. In the antechamer, Don Puglia, who was sitting behind a table covered with papers, looked at him and stood up.

  “His Excellency told me to come with you.”

  “I think His Excellency may have changed his mind,” don Severino said to him smiling, “At any rate I think he needs you here.”

  When don Severino returned without the sacks, he found the bishop as pale as a corpse, but clearheaded again.

  “I have no time to lose,” he began, sitting down.

  “Me neither,” said Turro Mendoza.

  “Then let’s get straight to the point. Have you meanwhile come up with any ideas of how to get out of this?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve done a count.”

  “What kind of count?”

  “A count of how many days you’ve got until they arrest you. You’ve got about six or seven. I know about these things.”

  “And so?”

  “And so donna Eleonora must be stopped before these seven days are up, before the Grand Captain gives the order to imprison you.”

  “And how can we do that?”

  “I know how. And it’s your only way out. The best part is that you yourself know it too, but you can’t see it.”

  “Then make me see it.”

  “First the gold.”

  “And what if your idea doesn’t work?”

  “It’ll work, it’ll work, I assure you. But the more time you waste, the worse it is for you.”

  “Listen, I’ll tell you quite frankly: I haven’t got six thousand scudi here in the house. I have less than that.”

  “How much have you got?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Then all right.”

  The bishop stood up with effort.

  “I’ll go and . . . ”

  “We’ll do as I say,” said don Severino. “Listen carefully. I’ll go out first. When you come downstairs with Don Puglia carrying the five sacks, you’ll find a carriage outside the front door, with me inside. Don Puglia will give me the sacks and go back and lock the front door. Then, after Don Puglia leaves, you will get into the carriage and I’ll tell you everything. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  The first thing don Severino said to the bishop as soon as Don Puglia closed the front door to the house, was:

  “Let me warn you that I’m armed. If you set some kind of trap for me, you’re a dead man.”

  “I’ve set no trap,” said Turro Mendoza. “Now tell me the way out.”

  “The way out has always been there, right under your nose. And instead of taking it at once, you started screwing things up, stirring up the populace, giving sermons at the Cathedral . . . making ghosts appear . . . They told me everything, when I was in jail. You’ve got her weakness right before your eyes, and you can’t—”

  “Quit bullshitting,” the bishop cut him off. “What weakness?”

  “She’s a woman,” said don Severino.

  The bishop flew into a rage.

  “Give me back those five thousand scudi!” he yelled. “You are a thief!”

  “And you’re a stupid shit!”

  “And how is that going to help me, telling me she’s a woman? What will that do for me?”

  “It’ll do everything for you.”

  “How?!” the bishop shouted in despair.

  “How? You immediately send a letter to the Pope and ask him how is it possible that his Legate in Sicily is a woman?”

  For a moment the bishop was breathless.

  “Holy shit of Jesus! You’re right!” he exclaimed aft
er he’d recovered his strength.

  Getting out of the carriage, he went and started knocking wildly at the door. Don Severino’s coach and the five thousand scudi took off at high speed.

  Don Severino did not know, as the carriage rolled along and he contentedly stroked the five little sacks at his feet, that he was carrying death along behind him.

  Indeed Don Puglia, the moment he’d gone through the main door of the bishop’s palace, had quickly run across the interior courtyard and come back outside through a small door at the back of the building. Then he’d turned the corner and, hunching over to keep the coachman from seeing him, he approached the carriage from behind and climbed aboard, remaining upright with his feet on the axle and his hands gripping the metal handles used by footmen on the carriages of the nobility.

  Shortly after the carriage had entered the woods of La Favorita, Don Puglia decided to spring into action. It was an old carriage, and the canvas covering had grown slack. By slightly shifting the position of his right hand and touching ever so lightly, he could feel the bulge created in the canvas by don Severino’s shoulders leaning against it from the inside.

  He took out his dagger and, hanging tight onto the metal grip with his left hand, raised it in the air and brought it down with all his might in the middle of the bulge. The blade tore through the canvas, the clothing, the skin, and the flesh of don Severino. Don Puglia kept still and let a few minutes pass, and then he touched the canvas and felt that it was damp. With blood, naturally. Only then did he extract the weapon. Now came the most dangerous part. He didn’t know whether the coachman was young or old, and he didn’t know whether he’d been hired or was a friend of don Severino. He raised his right foot as far as he could and stuck the toes inside the handle where his hand had just been. He then pressed hard to see whether it would bear his weight. It would. In a flash he was on his belly on the roof of the carriage, dagger between his teeth. The darkness was very dense, and he couldn’t see a thing. He slid forward, fearing that at any moment the poles supporting the canvas might break. Then he realized that the coachman’s shoulders were just a short distance in front of him, less than an arm’s length away. He slid forward a little more. At that moment the carriage entered a stretch of road along which the trees grew more sparse. The wan moonlight was enough for Don Puglia to spring like a snake. The coachman let go the reins and without a word flopped to one side and then fell to the ground. In one bound, Don Puglia took his place, grabbed the reins, and stopped the two horses.

  He got down from the coach, walked back to where the coachman had fallen, recovered his dagger, returned to the carriage, opened the door, pulled out don Severino’s lifeless body, throwing it to the ground, then climbed into the box, turned the horses around, and headed back for Palermo.

  As soon as he’d returned to his palace, Turro Mendoza had raced into the library and had all the candelabra lit, ordering his servants to lay out on the table all papers and books having anything to do with the Apostolic Legacy—a phenomenon unique in all Christendom, which concentrated in a single person, the King of Sicily, and therefore the Viceroy who represented him, all civic as well as ecclesiastical power. This fine idea was the work of Pope Urban the second, who in 1098 had it passed into law with the bull, Quia propter prudentiam tuam. But then everyone forgot about it for centuries, or tried to forget, until, in the late 1400s, a certain Gian Luca Barberio dredged it back up. And this created a big row with the pope, who no longer wanted to recognize it. And so there were a great many disputes, squabbles, spats, tiffs, and vendettas between the kings of Spain and a variety of popes. Until, in 1605, one Cardinal Baronio machinated the conclusion that the famous bull had not been written by Pope Urban after all, but by the antipope Anacletus, and was therefore worth less than a counterfeit scudo. The kings of Spain replied that they didn’t give a holy fig about Cardinal Baronio, but wanted only to know what the pope himself thought about the authorship of the bull. The pope answered saying he needed a little time to decide. But then decades and decades went by and the papal decision had never come.

  The bishop set aside everything he’d read and began to reflect when he was interrupted by Don Puglia entering the room.

  “All taken care of. I recovered the five sacks and put them back from where we’d taken them.”

  The bishop did not ask him how he’d managed to get them back, though he could easily imagine.

  “What have you done with the carriage?”

  “I set fire to it after taking it far away from here. And I set the horses free.”

  “Good. Now go and get a few hours’ sleep, because you’ll be leaving in the morning.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “To Rome. You must deliver a letter from me to the pope. And you cannot take longer than three days. If you succeed, one of those five sacks is yours.”

  “Then I won’t bother to get any sleep. I’ll go straight to the port. I’ll need to hire the fastest sailboat I can find. It’ll cost you a lot, but your letter will be delivered in three days time.”

  It took the bishop more than three hours to write the letter.

  But when he re-read it, he found it masterly. Every word was a nail in the coffin of donna Eleonora.

  In case the pope had forgotten, the letter began with a brief history of the Apostolic Legacy in the Kingdom of Sicily and how this had always been a source of malaise on the island.

  A malaise which, in the past few days, had worsened because of the trouble in which he, as bishop of Palermo and head of the Sicilian Church, had found himself when, upon the death of the viceroy, the man’s wife had taken office in his place.

  Which made her, therefore, the new, born, Papal Legate.

  Now, who had the Pontifical Legates always been? Cardinals, bishops, monsignors—all people who had taken the Holy Orders.

  Had it ever happened before that the Legate was a woman? Not only had it never happened, but such a thing was unthinkable.

  How, then, could a bishop obey a female Legate? Would obedience not smack of heresy? This was the question tearing his soul apart.

  And this was why he, Bishop Turro Mendoza, with filial devotion, was entreating His Holiness the Pope to intervene at once with the King of Spain to have the viceroy repatriated and all her acts of government and fiat nullified, both sub jure proprio and sub jure legationis.

  Most importantly, failing to take measures to eliminate such a monstrum in timely fashion would further complicate any definitive resolution of the question of the Apostolic Legacy in Sicily.

  * * *

  By six o’clock that morning, Don Puglia was already aboard a ship sailing for Naples.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Game Nears Its End

  The bishop had taken care to explain to Don Puglia, in minute detail, how he should proceed once he got to the papal court, and he’d even given him the name of the right person to turn to, a cardinal quite close to the pope and a good and trusted friend of his. Don Puglia followed his advice closely.

  And thus the letter from Turro Mendoza found its way into the hands of Pope Innocent XI, freshly ascended to the papal throne, very quickly—that is, three days and seven hours after it had been written.

  On the afternoon of the thirtieth of September, as Don Puglia was headed back down to Naples to take ship again and return to Palermo, a letter from the Pope to King Carlos left Rome. In it, the pontiff requested the termination of the investiture of donna Eleonora di Mora beginning the following day, the first of October, as well as her immediate repatriation to Spain, for in no way could she remain in Sicily as Viceroy, in as much as being viceroy also meant being the born Legate of the Pope, and a born Legate of the Pope could never, in any way, nor for any reason in the world, be a woman.

  In the letter he also requested, as a logical, inescapable consequence of the aforesaid, that all the acts of law that donna Eleonora had i
nstituted both as viceroy and as Papal Legate, be declared null and void.

  Otherwise, the letter concluded, the Holy Father’s most holy patience, and his most holy prudence concerning the Apostolic Legacy in Sicily, might just suddenly run out, in which case, the Holy Father, with his most holy cojones busted, would, yes, give his much-awaited answer, but it would surely not be favorable to the opinion earlier expressed by the Kings of Spain.

  And so, to be practical about things, wouldn’t it be better to remove at once the object in question and let things remain a while longer the way they were?

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Stefano Giaraffa couldn’t believe he was actually racing from Catania to Palermo to denounce the bishop a second time. When he learned that he’d been denounced by the bishop and then sacked, he was dumbfounded. He asserted that he’d never been either denounced or fired, and that he’d had to leave his administrative post and flee to Catania because of the threats made against him by the bishop.

  He reported to the Grand Captain that he, too, had had to summon a doctor, don Silvestro De Giovanni, for his son Carlino, but that the physician had refused to testify, since he was the doctor for the entire bishopric and would have lost his job. But certainly this doctor, seeing the storm clouds gathering, would sooner or later decide to do his duty. Even if it took giving him a hint of the chance he might himself end up in the slammer if he didn’t tell the truth.

  And thus they came to the most delicate issue of the entire affair: How to arrest the bishop?

  It was the first time anything of the sort had happened, and they had to think things over long and carefully before acting.

  Donna Eleonora, the Grand Captain, and the Judge of the Monarchy were all in agreement that the less brouhaha, the better.

  It was pointless to hope that the bishop would show up at the palace of his own accord upon being summoned, just as it was pointless to hope he wouldn’t put up fierce resistance if they went to arrest him with fifty men-at-arms.

  The best idea came from donna Eleonora.