Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  As the cardinal spoke, Niccolo became uncomfortably aware of the odor seeping up out of his bowels and intestines through the rich cloth and gradually filling the tiny room. It was true what they said about his uncontrollable flatulence. The odor of sanctity. Niccolo wondered if it embarrassed him or if he was even aware of it—or if he used it consciously as a weapon to disconcert his interlocutors.

  As the fetid gas rose, the cardinal talked on, unconcerned. “Tell me, Machiavelli, do you think the people put us back in power?”

  “Not exactly, Your Excellency,” said Niccolo, trying to be as discreet as possible.

  The cardinal smiled at his candor. “Of course you’re aware that only a very small number of the people, and the better people at that, arranged for us to return to Florence.”

  Niccolo hazarded, “The people didn’t put you where you are today, but they might easily remove you one day.”

  “Perhaps,” said the cardinal. “So what would you advise?”

  “Gaining their support, as I wrote to Giuliano.”

  “I don’t agree with you. I think the will of the people can be, how shall I put it, managed?”

  “Giuliano seemed to agree with me,” countered Niccolo.

  “But Giuliano’s gone to Rome,” said the cardinal through his gas cloud. “I sent him there on some urgent business.”

  Just as he finished speaking, a small dark woman in diaphanous green veils—one of the merry diners—came running into the room shrieking, “The pudding! The pudding!”

  “Ah, the pudding!” The cardinal’s face lit up. “I must go and attend to the serving of the pudding.” Turning to Niccolo, he said, “Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat. I appreciate your advice and the work you’re doing in the chancery. Feel free to call on us anytime.” With that, he swept out of the room, leaving Niccolo more than a little puzzled at the reason for this interview.

  As he passed through the dining room, Niccolo saw the pudding being carried out in a giant bowl, a tub really, and placed before the cardinal. Something appeared to be bubbling beneath the surface of the thick, sweet desert. Suddenly emerging from the murky depths of the pudding, two naked children stood up in the bowl! The cardinal threw back his head in exaltation, and the hall erupted in another orgy of laughter.

  As Niccolo stalked out of the Medici palace, ruminating on the apparently pointless exchange that had taken place between himself and the cardinal, he saw flocks of people lining up at tables in the Via Larga. Free wine was being dispensed. And sweets. The people were being, how did the cardinal put it, “managed.”

  After Niccolo was gone and the diners, stupefied with food and drink and entertainment, began to disperse, the cardinal rose and repaired once more to his day bed. A woman entered the small chamber from another door.

  “Well?” said the sleepy cleric.

  “He’s the one,” she said as her hand closed on the cardinal’s pudgy wrist. “He’s the one who tried to poison me and Don Micheletto. Her long black fingernails sank into the soft pink flesh.

  “Messer Niccolo!” The bidello popped his head into Niccolo’s study. “The council wants you again.”

  Again. For the past several weeks, Niccolo was continuously summoned before the council to explain this, to account for that, to offer his opinion on such and such an option. He had never realized before how indispensable he was. No matter who ruled the city, they needed to know where the funds were deposited, what couriers were reliable, which allies could be trusted, which could be used. A thousand details.

  “What will it be this time?” he wondered, as he made his way to the Council Chamber past the rows of portraits of the illustrious ancestors of the Medici. It was never without a twinge of nostalgia now that Niccolo entered the vast hall where the council sat. The room had been given its present form by Savonarola. It was enormous, intended to accommodate an enormous council. Under the republic, one thousand representatives were seated on the council. All around the perimeter of the great hall, benches had been built. From these rows of benches, the people were allowed to witness the debates and hear the speeches of their representatives.

  Now armed guards stood at the doors. Admission was by invitation only. Now the benches were gone. And the tables at which one thousand elected representatives once sat had been removed. Only two tables were needed to seat all the members of the new council. They were placed against the far wall, under the windows. From where you entered, you could barely make out the features of the men who occupied those tables now, across that big, empty room. It took forever to reach them. And as you crossed, the only sound was the clicking of your own heels on the marble floor in that great, abandoned, lonely hall. Saddened as always by this state of affairs, Niccolo went nevertheless, with his ledgers tucked under his arms, to do what he could for the good of Florence.

  That evening when he returned home, his face was a white mask of shock and disbelief. He lowered himself uneasily into a chair and sat, just staring into space.

  “Tesoro, what’s wrong?” asked Giuditta.

  He looked at her for a minute without saying anything, then tears welled up in his eyes and the words tumbled out: dismissed . . . stripped of all offices . . . barred from the Signoria . . . and banished!

  The next morning, Niccolo trudged up the stairs of the Palazzo della Signoria for the last time. He would render up a final account of his administration, and then he would be forbidden to cross the threshold of this building ever again. He was also to be exiled from the city of Florence for a period of one year and made to pay a surety of 1,000 lire to guarantee his submission to the sentence.

  Although many of the other clerks had already begun to distance themselves from him—the proscribed, the disgraced, the exiled, the tainted—Michelozzi had been very helpful that last day. Niccolo was grateful for this small kindness.

  “You’ll be back, Niccolo,” he said, trying to sound encouraging.

  Niccolo just shook his head.

  “I bet within the week they’ll have to send someone out to consult you on something or other. You wait and see.”

  “How did it happen, Michelozzi? How did all of this happen? How did the republic just disappear?”

  “Try not to think about it, Niccolo.”

  “What else am I going to think about?”

  “Think about the future.”

  Niccolo grunted. “The future,” he said bitterly. “What future?”

  “Come on, the sentence is only for a year. You’ll be back, I tell you. Sooner or later, they’ll realize they can use you. They can’t ignore your experience or your talent. In the meantime . . .”

  “In the meantime, I can take up beekeeping or some sort of animal husbandry. Great.”

  “It could be worse,” said Michelozzi.

  “You’re right,” said Niccolo. “It could be a lot worse. Look what happened to Boscoli and Capponi.”

  “What did happen to them exactly?”

  “They just disappeared. I heard they’d been arrested, but there doesn’t seem to be any confirmation of that. The council denies it.”

  Michelozzi shook his head. Boscoli and Capponi were two younger men who held minor positions in the chancery. A week ago, they stopped coming to work, their desks were cleared out, and they were replaced by two new men. Their families were worried. Nobody seemed to know what happened to them, but Niccolo was about to find out. As he and Michelozzi speculated on the fate of their two young colleagues, Niccolo’s door flew open, and a dozen rough and bearded Spaniards with drawn swords burst into the little room.

  “Which one of you is Machiavelli?” said the captain.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” said Niccolo, jumping to his feet, indignant at the intrusion.

  “You Machiavelli?”

  “Yes, and who are you?”

  “You’re under arrest,” said the captain. And before Niccolo could even open his mouth to protest, he was in the grasp of two soldiers. Their vicelike grips pressed his arms to
his body, and a sharp-pointed sword held at his throat ensured his cooperation.

  Helpless thus pinned, Niccolo was led from the room. He cast one furtive glance over his shoulder, and caught Michelozzi’s eye. “Giu-dit-ta,” he mouthed the word silently with his lips. Michelozzi indicated that he understood.

  Niccolo’s warders had escorted him in silence, not to a magistrate for arraignment, not to the podesta to hear charges read against him, but directly to the stinche, a dank subterranean system of prison cells in the bowels of the city, along the banks of the Arno. The only communication he received at all from his captors were the last words of the jailer as he banged the heavy door shut behind him: “I’ll make you shit as small as a rat shits.”

  There was water on the floor of Niccolo’s cell, about an inch of it. It squeezed in through the cracks in the damp, glistening walls and trickled down endlessly, day and night. He had heard rumors that when the level of the river rose, these cells were allowed to flood and that prisoners sometimes found themselves waist deep, neck deep, in icy water. It was part of the punishment.

  The moldy wooden bench that served him as chair and bed was the only relatively dry place in the underground cell, and it was crawling with vermin swollen to a magnificent size on God knew what offal. For days, Niccolo was left with nothing to do but shiver in the cold and flick the cursed, hungry vermin from his bench and clothes. He lost track of how long he was there. The only interruption in this routine was the daily arrival of the taciturn jailor with his food. And then there were the screams in the night—at least he thought it was night. They seemed to come from far away. They were faint, muffled, but they were long and drawn-out. As indistinct as they were when they reached him, they still made Niccolo’s flesh crawl and his hair stand on end.

  At first he was furious. He hadn’t done anything! Why were they holding him? He was aflame with righteous indignation at not being told what were the charges against him, at being held incommunicado, at not being given a proper hearing. . . . But all these abstractions were beginning to appear insignificant compared to the unbearable immediacy of the numbing cold and the dark and the terror of not knowing what was in store for him. His spirit was sagging, breaking down, and his shit, true to the jailer’s predictions, was as small as rat shit. He wanted out.

  Finally, keys rattled in the lock, the bolt was lifted, and Niccolo’s name was called. He jumped up and sloshed through the water on his cell floor. He felt it seep into his boots as he crossed to the door. Two brawny jailors fixed to his legs fetters that must have weighed forty pounds. Did they think he was going to run away? As he clanked between his captors down the corridor, their torches threw ghostly, moving shadows on the prison walls. To Niccolo’s repeated questions as to where they were taking him, they answered only, “For questioning.”

  He was led into a large, infernal subterranean chamber, domed and ringed nearly all around with blazing hearths and chimneys. The air was filled with the clanking of iron and the rattling of chains. A quick glance around told Niccolo all he needed to know about the nature of the “questioning” to which he was about to be subjected.

  In the sixteenth century, the guilds of Florence covered nearly every aspect of economic life. They were not workers’ organizations, but rather cartels composed of owners, producers, professionals, and skilled craftsmen. Enjoying a virtual monopoly in their particular spheres of activity, they were thus able to fix prices, dominate markets, eliminate unwanted competition, pool resources to lobby, and, if need be, bribe public officials. However, they also provided comprehensive systems of training, licensing, and quality control over the products and services they offered. They were highly specialized organizations, these guilds, and among themselves they divided and subdivided the spectrum of commerce and industry into minute and very particularized segments so that, for example, there was not merely a butcher’s guild, but a hog butcher’s guild, a goat butcher’s guild, a sheep butcher’s guild, a poultry butcher’s guild, and so on.

  There was scarcely a skill known in Florence whose practitioners had not banded together into one of these corporate entities. But there was no guild for torturers. There was no organized system of apprenticeships and journeymen and masters. One who wished to practice the art or craft or trade did not have to pass an examination or present any “masterpiece” before his colleagues as proof of his skill and attainments.

  Although there were undisputed masters of torture, they came from diverse sources. Butchers of large mammals were ideal recruits because their long and thorough study of the disarticulation of animals made them readily adept at the systematic dismemberment of the human system of muscles and nerves and sinews and bones. They knew how to kill painlessly, which meant, by implication, that they also knew how to kill by inflicting a great deal of pain. Other practitioners of the ancient art were often recruited from the ranks of the blacksmiths and ironmongers. Their familiarity with heat and fire and molten metal made them qualified candidates.

  In the Florentine republic under Soderini, this fine art of torture had been allowed to fall into a state of woeful neglect. Institutions and a system designed to protect the individual from rash and arbitrary victimization had eliminated torture from the legal arsenal of the day. Trial by ordeal had been replaced by courtroom proceedings. But these legalistic methods could often be cantankerous in their execution and inconclusive in their findings. In the new autocratic regime under the tight control of the Medici, torture as a method of speedy, simple, straightforward, and cost effective inquiry was enjoying something of a renaissance. Because native Florentines with the requisite experience and will to assume these demanding positions as state torturers were in short supply, it had been necessary to seek outside help. And who but the formidable Spanish were so well suited to the task? The Inquisition, now in its twelfth year, had trained an entire generation of men whose credentials were above reproach and whose reputation for results was legendary. Their experience, along with the stunning variety of hardware at their disposal, had enabled them to attain a dazzling new level of technical achievement that was the envy of all Europe.

  The first evidence of their handiwork to greet Niccolo was the heavy, sick odor of roasting flesh and scorched hair that hung in the air. He stared around in disbelief—fires and furnaces, bubbling pots, chains and ropes, and horrific engines . . .

  “Bring the new one over here,” barked one of the Spanish denizens of this little private hell. “He can say hello to his friend Capponi.”

  The slim, naked body of Agostino Capponi, formerly of the Second Chancery and barely twenty-five years old, was slumped over in a chair. He was prevented from falling out by thick leather straps around his waist, arms, and legs. His body was covered with welts and yellow blisters and, in places where his torturers had been more insistent, burned, blackened skin. Blood was running from his mouth.

  “Is he . . .” Niccolo hesitated before the revolting tableau.

  “Dead? Oh no, there’s plenty of life left in Messer Capponi. We won’t let him die until he tells us what we want to know.” Several of the Spaniards grunted in agreement. While they waited for Capponi to come around, Niccolo was fastened to a pair of irons embedded in the wall.

  Capponi was screaming when he came to. He was spitting and spraying blood from his mouth. The Spaniard who seemed to be in charge turned to Niccolo. “He bit off the tip of his tongue! He thought maybe he would bleed to death that way.” Then, walking over to what appeared to be a forge of some sort, he extracted an iron bar about a foot and a half long. The tip was white hot.

  “Can’t let him bleed to death, can we? We’ll have to cauterize the wound.” The matter-of-fact way this man went about his grisly business made Niccolo shudder. As two other men held Capponi’s writhing head, now slippery with blood, the torturer thrust the iron bar deep into his mouth. There was a searing sound as the hot iron touched flesh and blood. Niccolo saw the intense, momentary explosion of wild panic in young Capponi’s bulging eyes
and then once again the tormented boy descended into darkness. Steam and smoke escaped from his mouth as the bar was withdrawn. When this hellish spectacle was over, Niccolo was returned to his cell to think about what he had seen. That was all for the first day.

  On the second day, Niccolo was shown Pietro Paolo Boscoli, who had disappeared from the chancery at the same time as Capponi. Boscoli was stretched out spread-eagle on the floor, his four limbs tied securely. On his chest was an iron plate, and on the plate were heavy iron weights, upward of three hundred pounds. Boscoli was literally being pressed for a confession. The prostrate Boscoli did not seem to recognize Niccolo. His once-rosy cheeks were ashen pale. He scarcely had the strength left to groan. He was gulping and gasping painfully for air, but the weight on his chest made breathing almost impossible.

  As Niccolo watched, horrified, some of the weights were removed and Boscoli was allowed to speak. When all he said was, “I’ve already told you everything,” the crushing weights were replaced and ten extra pounds were added.

  “He’s been like that for a week,” said the torturer. “It’s surprising he’s held up that long. He looks soft. At the beginning, they scream. He screamed bloody murder, this one. But then they learn to save their breath. They can’t stop breathing. They want to, but they can’t,” he chortled. “You know what this one did? He begged me to jump up and down on his chest to get it over with!”

  Niccolo was led from the chamber with the memory of Boscoli’s weak, labored wheezing in his ears. That was the second day. He knew they were softening him up. He knew that it would be his turn soon. He did not know how he would hold up under torture. And he did not know what they wanted from him.

  On the third day, there was no evidence of Boscoli or Capponi in the torture chamber, but there was a prim young man who seemed out of place in this dungeon, in his fine clothes among these oily Spanish inquisitors. He cut quite a figure in velvet slippers and slashed sleeves. He threw his long, thick, black hair around grandly when he talked. He seemed to be issuing orders to the torturers, and they seemed to be listening to him with the patient acquiescence of men who need no instructions and who know how to go about their business.