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Seventy
PALOMBARA ARRIVED IN ROME ONLY DAYS AFTER VICENZE. The voyage had been good enough for time and seamanship, but the taste of defeat had robbed him of any pleasure at all. He had landed at Ostia, and even the briefest inquiry had told him Vicenze had beaten him by at least twenty-four hours.
The pope and the cardinals were already assembled in the anteroom to the pope’s chambers in the Vatican Palace when Palombara strode in, still travel stained, his clothes shabby with dust and sweat. At any other time he could have been barred entrance in his disheveled state, but the buzz of excitement was in the air, as in a summer lightning storm when the wind was dry, prickling on the skin like the touch of a hundred flies. People started to speak and then stopped. Eyes darted everywhere, seeing him and smiling. Did he imagine the mockery, or was it only too real?
The huge crate stood with its wood neatly opened; only the cloth covering protected the icon of the Blessed Virgin that Michael Palaeologus had carried in triumph when his people had returned home.
Vicenze stood a little to one side of it, his face burning with victory, his pale eyes glittering. Only once did he look at Palombara, then away again, as though he were insignificant, a man who had ceased to matter.
A workman stepped forward at his signal. There was no other sound in the room, no rustle of heavy robes, no shifting of feet. Even the pope seemed to be holding his breath.
The workman reached up and pulled off the protecting cloth.
The pope and the cardinals craned forward. There was utter silence.
Palombara looked, blinked, and stared. God Almighty! What met his gaze was not the exquisite features of the Virgin, but a riotous profusion of naked flesh, in exuberant, joyful detail and painted with great skill. The central figure was a smiling parody of the Virgin, but so overtly feminine that one could not look at it without a quickening of the pulse, a remembrance of the hot blood of passion. One lush breast was exposed, and her slender hand rested intimately on the groin of the man nearest to her.
One of the less abstemious cardinals exploded with laughter and instantly tried to suffocate it in a fit of coughing.
The pope’s face was scarlet, although there could have been more than one reason for that.
Other cardinals choked. Someone snorted in disgust. Another laughed quite openly.
Vicenze was white to the lips, his eyes as hectic as if he were consumed with fever on the edge of delirium.
Palombara tried for a full minute to look as if he were not laughing, and failed. It was exquisite. He too owed someone a debt he would never be able to pay.
Palombara had no choice but to go when Nicholas sent for him.
The Holy Father’s expression was unreadable. “Explain yourself, Enrico,” he said very quietly. His voice trembled, and Palombara had no idea if the emotion all but choking him was fury or laughter.
There was nothing to offer but the truth.
“Yes, Holy Father,” he said piously. “I persuaded the emperor to send the icon to Rome. It arrived at the house we had taken for our stay in the city. It was unpacked in front of us, and it was quite definitely a very somber, very beautiful picture of the Virgin Mary. It was repacked in front of us, ready to ship.”
“This tells me nothing,” Nicholas said dryly. “Who obtained it? You?”
“Yes, Holy Father.”
“And what did Vicenze do about it? Don’t tell me this is his revenge for your superiority? He could never have done this to himself. The laughter will follow him to the grave, as well you know.” He leaned forward. “This looks a great deal more like your wit, Enrico. For which I shall pardon you…” The faintest twitch pulled the corner of his mouth, and with difficulty he controlled it. “If you return the icon of the Virgin to me forthwith. Discreetly, of course.”
Nicholas might not have a towering faith with a light to lead Christendom, but he unquestionably had a sharp sense of humor, and to Palombara that was a grace sufficient to redeem him from almost any other failure.
“Is it still in Constantinople?” Nicholas asked.
“I don’t know, Holy Father, but I doubt it,” Palombara replied. “I think Michael was honest.”
“Do you? Then I am inclined to accept that,” Nicholas said thoughtfully. “You are a cynical man. You manipulate others, so you expect them to do the same to you.” He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t look so crushed! So where is the icon, whoever has it? I do not require to know, if such knowledge would be embarrassing.”
“My guess would be Venice,” Palombara replied. “The captain who brought Vicenze and the icon to Rome was a Venetian-Giuliano Dandolo.”
“Ah! Yes, I have heard of him. A descendant of the great doge,” Nicholas said quietly. “How very interesting.” He smiled. “When you return to Constantinople you will take a letter for me, in which I shall thank the emperor Michael for his gift of good faith and assure him that the union is regarded with the utmost gravity and honor by Rome.” He looked at Palombara steadily. “You will return to Byzantium, taking Vicenze with you.”
Palombara was horrified at the thought.
Nicholas saw his distress and chose to ignore it. “I do not want him here in Rome. I quite see that you do not want him, either, but I am pope, Enrico, and you are not-at least not yet. Take Vicenze. You still have work to do there. Charles of Anjou will sail, and then it will be too late to stop him. Perhaps you can find some Byzantine friend who will curb his excesses for you. Godspeed.”
Palombara had no choice but to leave the reclaiming of the icon to Nicholas. If Dandolo had any sense, he would yield it easily enough. God knows, Venice had relics to spare. And to steal from the pope, and thus from the heart of the Church, was a dangerous thing to do.
Possibly Dandolo might present it to the Holy Father himself, with any claim he could think of as to how it had come into his possession. Nicholas might be inclined to forgive him for it and pretend to believe any tale of its adventures.
Seventy-one
DURING THE VOYAGE BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE, Palombara and Vicenze had barely spoken to each other, and then only in a bitterly civil ma
Now Palombara went to the one person who had the power and the means to destroy a papal legate. He needed to convince her of the need.
Zoe welcomed him with interest, her curiosity sharpened. However, he was not blind to the hatred in her eyes, the hunger to hurt him because he was the one who had persuaded Michael to give the icon of the Virgin to Rome.
Instead of telling her that he too believed in the need for Byzantium to survive, with its values and its civilization, he told her of the shipping of the icon. He described his own fury as he saw Vicenze in the stern of the ship, waving at him. He touched briefly on his seemingly endless voyage in pursuit, but only for dramatic effect. Then in detail, drawing it out, he told her of the unveiling, the moment of incredulity, and then in much freer detail than he would have to any other woman, he described the picture, and the cardinal’s horror, the pope’s laughter, and Vicenze’s incandescent rage.
She laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks. In that moment, he could have reached across and touched her and she would not have pulled away. As thin as spider’s silk and as strong, it was a bond neither of them would ever forget, an unbreakable intimacy.
“I don’t know where it is,” he said softly. “I would guess in Venice. I imagine Dandolo took it from Vicenze. He is the only one who had the chance to. But I will see that the pope receives it, and perhaps even sends it back.”