‘He’s a capitano because his father’s a big noise in the Catholic Liberty Party. I checked. It’s like me being made a detective inspector at Scotland Yard if my pa was an MP. Of course, I’m not elevated enough for that. Some people have all the luck.’
‘Look.’ Denton had turned to him and stuck out a finger. ‘If we’re going to spend time together, for God’s sake stop thinking that life’s supposed to be fair. It isn’t! About nine parts in ten of it is chance. That scugnizzo over there on the pavement looks at you going by in the carriage and says, “Some people have all the luck.” If Donati got where he is because his father’s a bigwig, it doesn’t change the fact he’s smart and he knows police work.’
‘You don’t have to get your back up about it.’
‘I’m an older man trying to pass on some wisdom to a younger one.’
‘Oh? Oh. Wish somebody’d do that at my shop—job might be more bearable. Well, mm, thanks. Much appreciated.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘What’s a scoo-neat-something?’
‘Scugnizzo. A kid who lives on the streets.’
‘Oh, those rotten street arabs.’
‘My God, you make yourself difficult to deal with. They’re starving kids who live on their wits and probably do it a damn sight better than you or I would in their place. For Christ’s sake stop being a narrow-minded English ass.’
‘I don’t like you insulting England like that.’
‘Oh, good God.’
‘I’m a moral chap.’
‘You’re a damned prig. Come on, we’re there; let’s look at this palazzo. If we’re quick about it, I won’t have time to insult you again before we’re done.’ Denton climbed down, wondering why he was being so direct with this rather oafish kid. Something parental, maybe, but Maltby wasn’t anything like his two sons, and he hadn’t raised them since they had been five and seven, anyway. Still, he looked at Maltby as he climbed out of the carriage, and wondered who he—red-faced, narrow-minded, deeply unsure—reminded him of. With a feeling as if a loud cracker had been banged just behind him, he thought, It’s me. It’s me at twenty.
Not that Maltby was really like him: Denton at twenty had been through a war, was married, had had a farm. But he, too, had been something of a bully because unsure; he, too, had thought the world too much for him. And he, too, had had a great deal of learning to do before he knew which side his bread was buttered on. His even younger wife had tried to smooth his rough edges and had infuriated him by doing so. She had tried to teach him table manners and he had got angry and shouted, Why? Why the hell should I? and she had said, Because you eat like a pig, and that had been the first time he had hit her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Maltby. ‘I was rude to you.’
‘Oh…’ Maltby was standing by the portiere’s lodge, waiting for the keys to the Palazzo Minerva. ‘Well. I suppose you were doing it for my own good.’
‘I was, yes. But why?’
‘Well. I flatter myself that you see something in me.’ Maltby got redder. ‘Hope so, anyway.’
The rodent face of the portiere appeared, then the keys. The little man nodded to Denton and gave him something like a bow that didn’t go below the breastbone. Maltby gave him money, apparently too much, because he got a bow that went to the waist.
‘I never give them the right amount,’ Maltby grumbled as they went towards the door. ‘Some fellows always know exactly what to give. They learn it in the cradle or someplace.’ He had the biggest key ready and put it in the lock.
The air in the lobby smelled stale and mousy. The big hall where the stairs stood was hardly better; the house already had that dead, trapped feeling that long-closed places get.
‘Gloomy place,’ Maltby said.
‘All it needs is some paint and a good cleaning. What do you want to see?’
Maltby groaned. ‘I’ve been stuck with writing a description of it for the heirs. They mean to sell it. They don’t understand how unbelievably sordid the neighbourhood is. I’m supposed to “evaluate” it. As if I’m some damned estate agent.’ He sighed. ‘I should look at everything and take notes, I suppose.’ He showed a leather-bound notebook and a patent fountain pen.
Things were coming back that Denton had forgotten: he found he was thinking of the room upstairs whose proportions had seemed off somehow. His curiosity about the old man’s death stirred. He said, ‘You go ahead and look. I’m going up to the top floor.’
‘You said you’d do it with me!’
He was scared, Denton thought. Not so much scared of the house as of the responsibility. ‘Come on up with me, then. You can look into the rooms up there while I do something.’
‘What?’
‘Not your business.’
They trudged up the stairs, Maltby redder faced and breathing hard by the time they reached the top. Along with his other troubles, he was getting fat, Denton thought. He gave Maltby a little push towards the far end of the corridor and, taking the keys from his hand, said, ‘Off you go.’
‘The keys.’
‘The rooms are open. I’ll be right down there at the end.’ Maltby sighed and took out his notebook and began to write, presumably a description of the upper floor. Denton turned right and went to the room at the end, the room with the armoire where he’d found the wood shaving. He unlocked it and went in without looking back at Maltby. The room was as he remembered, and he stood in the doorway and stared at it and tried to remember why something had seemed off.
He looked at the armoire and remembered.
He stepped back into the corridor and looked down towards its closer end. He paced off that distance, then went back to the room and paced off the distance from the doorway to the wall against which the armoire stood.
The room was about four yards from doorway to wall. The corridor outside was eight yards from the doorway to the blind wall at the end.
He opened the armoire, as he had done on his first visit, and knelt, one of his knees cracking. The armoire’s doors opened in the middle; the one on his left, open, blocked the light from the dirty window. Denton took out his flash-light, held it low, almost on the armoire’s floor. Two small objects cast long shadows. He picked them up, turned off the light, took them to the window.
Wood shavings. Quite small ones, almost chips, one of them probably the one he had found and replaced the first time.
Dropping them into a pocket, he returned to the armoire and stepped inside, found it big enough to stand in, and rapped with his knuckles on the back. The piece was at least a couple of hundred years old, he supposed, solidly made. The wood was thick: even the interior was carved into panels. Could he try to move the piece alone? Probably not. Should he ask Maltby to help him? Anyway, if they were able to move the armoire, and he suspected that it would prove too heavy even for the two of them, would they find anything behind it?
Denton stepped out and closed the doors and tried to look behind the armoire, but it was tight to the wall. And unbudgeable, as he found when, after all, he tried to move it.
He stepped back and looked at the wall again. On its other side, he thought, was a space ten or a dozen feet wide and probably as long as this room—eighteen feet, more or less—to make up the longer dimension in the corridor. A space without a door, apparently.
Or was it?
He went out into the corridor again. Maltby had disappeared, probably into one of the other rooms. Denton pressed his face against the plaster, looked along the wall towards the corridor’s end. Old plaster was always wavy, but fifteen or so feet down from the doorway this plaster became flat. Visibly different from the rest. He walked to the flatness, felt up and down, saw where there had once been an opening. Two faint joints in the moulded baseboard showed where, he thought, a doorway had been filled in. The workmanship was superb, the scarf joints almost invisible. And so, too, the plastering, which was in fact too good, for it was flat and smooth where the rest of the wall had undulations.
He steppe
d back. The wall had once been covered with a dark blue cloth, perhaps satin. Most of that was gone, revealing under it the remains of a stencilled pattern in terracotta and black. Where the doorway had been filled in, the new surface was identical to the old, even to the scraps of cloth and the faded, damaged painting. Again, the workmanship was superb.
Somebody was really skilled. And really wanted to hide something.
Maltby appeared at the far end of the corridor and waved. Denton raised a hand, his eyes on the wall. ‘Depressing!’ he heard Maltby call. ‘What have you found?’
‘Nothing.’
He went back into the room and closed the door behind him. He jingled the big ring of keys. Mysteries intrigued him; they also annoyed him. He wanted to take an axe to the wall next to the armoire. Something lay on the other side, if only a dead and empty space.
He stepped into the armoire again. Dumping the keys in a coat pocket, he felt over the panels of the back. They were hand planed; he could feel the slight unevennesses. He pushed on the panels, then on their corners. Nothing. He rapped.
He switched the flash-light on and trained it along the edges of the panels, then upward into the joint where a narrow moulding filled the corner between the armoire’s back wall and its ceiling. The light showed him nothing. The searching fingers that came behind it felt a greater smoothness a foot from the left-hand wall; then the light, held at a different angle, showed a shininess there as if the spot had been polished. He switched the light off and ran his hands along the moulding to the right and found the same smoothness near the right-hand wall, and he put a hand on each of the smooth places and first lifted, then pressed in, and finally pushed sideways, and the moulding moved two inches to the right with a sound of scraping wood and a sudden tunk, and the centre panel of the wardrobe swung away from him.
A complex and delightful smell rushed towards him, made up of candle wax and wood and oil paint and cedar, incense and flowers, and, less delightful, dust and mice. Deep, velvety darkness opened before him. He stepped back, as if something was going to come out of it at him, and then fumbled for the flash-light and switched it on.
The pale light picked out first a stool and then a crude bench. Metal glittered: tools, a knife blade identifiable. Then colour: beyond the bench, something in a rich red, a hand. Then a torso and the red of blood.
He trained the light downwards. A step down of a few inches where the floor of the armoire ended would take him to the floor within. There, however, the floor almost glittered with white and black and red, some sort of tiling. Denton knelt and put his hand down and felt only a continuous surface; he shone the light again and looked close and saw that the tiles were only painted.
He stepped down into the darkness. He flashed the light around. Colour, figures, carving, woodwork gilded and polished, and overhead vaulting rafters and a ceiling painted like the sky. He swung the light lower and caught the glint of glass and recognised a shaped lamp, then another on the narrow space’s far wall; he turned the light to the little bench and saw there a packet of sulphur matches and a single burnt match with its blackened head sticking out over the edge. He picked up the matches and, juggling his flash-light while he held the box, struck one—odd, he thought to himself, because he carried his own matches in a pocket—and held it near the glass shade and found the gas tap and turned it and heard the low hiss and saw the light come.
He went from lamp to lamp, six in all—two on each long wall, one at each end—and then stood in the middle of the space and marvelled, a man not attuned to art but sensitive to other men’s skills. Here was a dazzling, a perhaps mad creation: a chapel in miniature that rose only a dozen feet in the air but that simulated greater height, not with tricks but with proportion and the evolution of vertical, carved oak beams into arches that met overhead.
A faceted oak beam ran up each corner, three more between them on each long wall. Between the beams were painted scenes that filled the spaces down to low, carved wainscoting. On the beams themselves were near-life-sized figures at floor level, one for each beam, and others at the figures’ feet, and, climbing the beams, smaller figures, complete statues, a few as big as three feet tall, others less, some as little as a foot high, most of the small ones well up the beams so that they increased the sense of height.
Denton was not a churchgoer and not a Catholic, so he didn’t recognise the big sculptures. It didn’t take him long, however, to recognise the crucified figure at the far end of the chapel, rendered with gruesome frankness, and then the suffering, the scourged, the ridiculed major figures on the beams, and then the smaller figures grouped around them—Roman soldiers, Pharisees, taunters and torturers and challengers. And others—imps, demons. And grotesques, half animal. And children. Oddly, so many children.
The beams framed six major paintings on the long walls. Their skies joined the blue sky and puffy clouds of the ceiling at the top; below were distant cities or conical hilltops with roads winding down them, then rivers and forests and farms, men harvesting and women washing clothes, horses and cattle, a dog chasing a hare, a cat washing itself. There were summer and winter and autumn there. In the middle distance, people, especially children, ran, all of them running towards the bottoms of the paintings, where, dominating each one, a man was being tortured. By children.
The man and the children seemed to have been made to different scales, the man big, the children small.
He saw quickly that they were all the same man, as the Christs were all the same Christ. The tortures were different—a flaying alive, a roasting on a gridiron, an impaling—but, and it took him minutes of walking back and forth among the paintings to work it out, the two principal torturers were also always the same, a black-haired boy and a lighter-haired boy, unsmiling, hot eyed. They were naked, as the tortured man was. In one scene, they were garrotting the man with a rope, each holding an end and leaning back as if they were pulling in a tug of war, their faces contorted with effort and, perhaps, hatred. Their spread legs revealed their hairless groins, their pink, carefully painted sex.
‘Oh, my God!’
Maltby was standing behind him in the entrance from the armoire. His mouth was open and he was staring into the space. ‘What is this place?’
‘Step inside and shut the door behind you.’ In fact, Denton had closed it so as to study the portion of a painting on the back, but Maltby must have seen the light around the edges.
‘But what is it?’
‘I’d say it’s the chapel of the Brotherhood of Saint Simeon Stylites.’ Denton moved from the centre of the room to the little bench. He fingered the tools, a big lump of modelling wax stuck all over with dust and hairs, the half-finished presepe figure that was fixed in a carver’s vice. ‘And Fra Geraldo’s workroom.’
‘But it’s—it’s—fantastic.’
‘I think that’s exactly what it is.’
‘But I say—are these old? They must be quite valuable. Oh, that picture there—that’s disgusting.’ Maltby looked away from a painting of a nude man having his guts pulled out with a hook. ‘People shouldn’t be allowed to paint things like that.’
Denton had wondered about the paintings’ age, too, and now he saw that some distant figures were wearing clothes that could have been seen on the Naples streets that day. Others were recognisably of an earlier style, but no older than fifty years or so.
He had visited enough museums to have some rough idea of what different periods looked like, and these paintings, despite an overall feeling of antiquity—the conical mountains, the disparity in the size of figures, the conventional look of the rivers and roads—were contemporary. No Giotto here. He pointed out a carriage that could have been the one they had arrived in.
‘But who could have done such a thing?’
‘He was a painter. Also a sculptor.’ Denton pointed to one of the major figures on the beams. ‘Do you understand the sculptures?’
‘Well, the big ones are the stations of the cross, of course—Christ on the
way to Calvary, and so on. The little ones—quite disturbing. Grotesque. Gothic, wouldn’t you say? Look at that one, a chap with a tail like a lizard and hands like claws. Fantastic. And the Roman soldier with a snout like a rhinoceros. Whatever does it mean, do you think?’
Denton was walking along a wall, studying a painting. Seeing it that close, he noticed that the paint was flaking; when he touched it, he felt a soft bubble, as if the paint were detaching itself from the plaster. He turned away and felt his foot strike something on the floor and bent to find a cat-o’-nine-tails. A moment’s search with the flash-light revealed the painted tiles so worn there that the terrazzo showed through. ‘He lay here and flogged himself.’
‘You mustn’t say things like that.’
‘He told me he scourged himself. Didn’t say for what. I think he whipped himself every night, from what he said.’ He looked up at an angel who was hanging over him in the sky, wings spread, a look of bemusement on his or her face—impossible to tell which. A water stain ran across the face like a birthmark; paint had flaked from one wing as if it were moulting.
‘But the angels didn’t weep.’
The angel was looking down on the spot where he had found the whip.
Maltby said, ‘I don’t know what I can possibly say about this in my report. If I were to set this down, they’d think—They’d laugh at me. Anyway, one can’t say things about peers of the realm.’
‘Like what—that he whipped himself?’
‘That he—’ Maltby was whispering. ‘That he had thoughts like these.’
Denton was looking at one of the tortured men. He was thinking that, yes, this one probably looked like Fra Geraldo at some much younger age; when he looked around at the others, he saw the face at different ages: the hair receded, grew grey; the muscles wasted. And after the one—apparently the youngest—that showed him with pubic hair and a penis and a scrotum, he lost the scrotum and then the penis, and the hair vanished.
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