“You must acquiesce to this order,” Segizzi told Galileo. “Otherwise there will be another meeting, and not here.”
There was a long silence. Finally: “I acquiesce,” Galileo said tightly. “I promise to obey the order.”
Bellarmino, distracted, still red-faced, waved a hand and brought the meeting to an end without adding anything more. He looked at his desk, frowning slightly, glancing once at Segizzi, then at his desk again.
Thus concluded the first trial of Galileo.
“What was that all about?” Galileo said as they walked behind the Medici carriage sent to carry them back up to the villa. He had been too agitated to sit inside the thing.
It was a rhetorical question, as he was busy examining his memory to secure his sense of what had been said, but Cartophilus offered up tentatively, “Cardinal Bellarmino did not seem to expect those Dominicans to join the meeting.”
“Really?” Galileo frowned.
“Really.”
“But what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, maestro.” The ancient one shook his head, confused.
Late that night Cartophilus slipped out into the garden of the villa and went to the servant’s gate at the bottom of the orchard. There he met a friend of his named Giovanfrancesco Buonamici. He told him what had happened that day at the Vatican.
Buonamici sucked on his teeth. He was tall and, under a voluminous dark cape, as lithe as a weasel. He chewed a fingernail thoughtfully for a while. “That could be bad,” he said. “They could produce a witness now who would claim that he tried to talk about Copernicus after this warning, maybe use what he’s been saying all this last month against him by postdating it, or something like that. It could happen fast. I’ll get word of this to the father, and see what he thinks we ought to do.”
“Yes, good. Because that was something strange today, I don’t know what.”
“If anyone knows, he will.”
“I hope so.”
Galileo was very lucky, given the power of his enemies, and the situation facing him, and his own fecklessness, that he had allies and supporters working for him too, and not only in public, as with Cesi’s Lynxes, but behind the scenes—and not just us, but the Venetians. Venice had the biggest spy network in Europe, with a particularly comprehensive contingent in Rome—most of it in the Vatican, of course, but penetrating also into the Roman courts, the courier services, the academies, the hostels, and the brothels. Not even the Vatican itself had as complete an understanding of Rome’s tangled mazes of rumor and machination as the Venetian spy service did.
So the following week, when Cartophilus next heard Buonamici’s looping whistle, he took the slops down to the villa’s compost heap and went on to the orchard gate to meet him. Buonamici led him down the hill into the dense tenements east of it, then into the yard of a small church—one of the many moldering away in the city serving a local neighborhood in complete anonymity. There, Buonamici knocked at a battered side door, while Cartophilus looked around at the old hens pecking listlessly in the garden bed of the resident priest. The door opened, and after a word from Buonamici a man emerged, entirely covered by a monk’s habit and hood. He turned to Cartophilus, who was shocked to see it was the general of the Venetian spy service himself: Father Paolo Sarpi.
Sarpi had been the secret general of Venice’s spy service for many years, since before the beginning of the current war of words and knives between Venice and Rome. He was the perfect man for the job—comprehensive in his knowledge of Europe, and imbued with great analytical powers and a keen vigilance when it came to Rome. The fact that Pope Paul had once tried to kill him was of course a factor in this vigilance, but not the main factor. Rome was always a big problem for Venice, and mostly Paul’s assault had only caused the venerable Servite to take Rome seriously as a danger. The vengeance most people would have sought, Sarpi transformed into a plan for a larger victory; not just Paul’s downfall, but the permanent hamstringing of Rome’s imperial efforts.
Now Sarpi stood there with them, right there in a city where he could have been taken up and tossed into Castel Sant’Angelo, after which disappearing forever was the good option.
“Should you be here, Fra Paolo?” Cartophilus could not help asking.
“Bless you, I am well hidden here. An old monk is invisible in this city, as everywhere. I actually once spent months tucked away in this very church, when my presence in Rome was useful. Now I felt the situation is such that I am needed again.”
“It’s that bad?” Cartophilus asked, wondering how much he knew.
“Word has come that there is a faction here that would like our astronomer to be silenced for good. That’s a real danger. So first I need to know all that you saw in the meeting with Bellarmino.”
He listened closely as Cartophilus recited what he recalled of the meeting. “What about the men with Segizzi?” he asked. “Tell me everything you remember of them.”
Cartophilus told him everything he could, humming unhappily as he tried to recall the scene to mind. As Sarpi listened he frowned, causing his scarred face to bunch on the left side. When Cartophilus finished, he stood there silently for a while.
“I think that was Badino Nores with Segizzi,” he said at last, “and Agostino Mongardo, from Montepulciano. They are Borgia men, and so is Segizzi. So I very much doubt they were supposed to be at that meeting, which means Segizzi intruded on a private conference in Bel-larmino’s own house. That is something Bellarmino would not have tolerated if he didn’t have to.”
“But he’s the Lord Cardinal.”
“Yes, in theory he fears no one. But in fact, he can’t afford to cross the Borgias. I’ve been hearing from people in the other parts of this puzzle, and it’s all beginning to fit together. I think Segizzi’s appearance was a surprise attack. Possibly the warning Segizzi made to Galileo was stronger than what either Bellarmino or Paul had intended. And of course it matters what documents have now been placed in Galileo’s Vatican file to memorialize the meeting. They might declare that Galileo was warned even more explicitly than what really happened, for instance. Our Galileo would be thus doubly deceived, so to speak, as to what exactly the pope has allowed or forbidden him to say.”
“Dangerous,” Buonamici said laconically.
“Indeed. Very dangerous, because even when he is fully on guard, our impetuous one is not so good at holding his tongue.”
The two men nodded wordlessly; it was an understatement to say the least.
“So.” Sarpi shook his head. “Let us set about finding out more about what is happening, and then untying this knot around Galileo’s neck if we can.” He smiled at the prospect, which rendered his face even more terrifying than his frown. “No matter what we find, Cartophilus, I think it would help if you were to convey to Galileo that he should ask Bellarmino for a signed declaration, one which memorializes explicitly what Galileo is commanded to do and not to do. I think Bellarmino will accommodate him, because he is likely to see this as a way to pay the Borgia back for invading his home. Then, if our philosopher is hauled in before the Inquisition proper, we may be able to turn the tables on this little plot.”
Cartophilus nodded gloomily. “I’ll do it. I hope it will be enough.”
“It will be just one move in a chess game, of course. But we can only do what we can do, at this point and always.” And with his hideous smile, the scientist priest slipped back into the ramshackle little church, into one corner of the immense complexity that was Rome.
Late that same night, the ancient one carried Galileo’s warmed milk to his room, and when Galileo brought up the subject of Bellarmino and Segizzi’s ominous and contradictory warnings, as he did every night, obsessively, Cartophilus took the opportunity to say, hesitantly, “Maestro, I’ve heard that what people are saying now is that you were forced to make a secret abjuration or something like that.”