The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  As if he had been following Denton’s thoughts, Maltby said, ‘Some of them are just like that corpse. Really! I can’t put that down in a report. An old man owning pictures like…you know!’

  ‘I’d say they were self-portraits.’

  ‘Oh!’ Maltby sat down on the stool. ‘This is too much for me. I’d say it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, but this isn’t a straw, it’s a boulder! It makes me sick. I’m going to resign. I didn’t join the Foreign Office to have to look at stuff like this.’

  ‘Don’t look at it.’

  ‘I have to look at it! I have to write a report about it. First, I’m supposed to be an estate agent, and now I’m supposed to be an art expert! And to deal with pornography! I suppose it’s nothing to you. You’ve seen it all. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop saying that.’ Denton was touching the sculptures that surrounded Christ in his crown of thorns. Some of the cutting that had formed them had left flat planes that had not been sanded round, so that the figures, although scrupulously, sometimes shockingly, realistic, nonetheless proclaimed their nature as carvings. They were brilliant work, he thought; no two were alike; none was conventional, a mere type, a cliché. All were painted, even the smallest showing details of wrinkles and eyebrows and dirt. They were, in a sense, presepe figures of torment and suffering. And he saw, now that he really looked at them, that old spider webs, sagging with dust, joined them, almost shrouded some. He said, ‘I agree that you shouldn’t say too much about this room in your report.’

  ‘I can’t lie. Suppose somebody found out!’

  ‘You can be strictly correct—so many paintings, so many stations of the cross, the carving bench, the figures. You don’t have to be lurid about the subject of the paintings. You could say something like “painted in a mood of honest realism” or some such. Skip the nudity and the mutilation, say something like “not for the squeamish, and certainly not for ladies”.’ He thought of what Janet would say if she could hear him use ‘ladies’ that way. ‘Probably be best to list them like a catalogue—“Six paintings of martyrdoms, the devils represented as young children”. Nobody could argue with that.’

  ‘I wish I had your gift. Say all that again, will you?’ Maltby had his notebook out.

  ‘We’ll do that later. You’ve got to look at the rest of the house—you want to be honest, you said. You want to see it all. Take these—’ Denton pulled out the keys. ‘You go on; I’ll close up here.’

  Maltby grasped the keys and stood, then hung there, looking down the room. ‘How could he? Didn’t he care what people would say?’

  ‘I have an idea that this was between him and God.’

  Maltby looked up. The angel looked down. Maybe something of the angel’s lack of interest reached him. He said, ‘But—how awful!’ He walked slowly the length of the room, which seemed a great distance because of his slow, heavy walk, and he stood under the literal, cruel carving of the crucifixion. He said, ‘He meant it—didn’t he!’ He turned around and looked at Denton.

  ‘Yes. I think he saw himself on that cross, although that isn’t his face.’

  ‘Poor devil.’ Maltby came slowly back, head down, hands behind him. ‘Poor old devil.’ He looked up at Denton. ‘I have an awful thing to confess. I didn’t think of him as a man before. I mean, in the morgue. When we talked about him. But—’ He looked around him, turning a full circle to take in the whole madness of it. ‘The poor old sod…’

  Denton put a hand on his shoulder. ‘How old are you, really?’

  ‘What?’ Maltby seemed to have trouble coming from some other place. ‘I’m twenty.’

  ‘Don’t get your dander up—I mean this as a compliment: for twenty, that was a big thing to recognise.’

  ‘People say I’m dense.’

  ‘No, you’re twenty. You go on downstairs. I’ll finish up here.’

  When Maltby was gone, Denton walked again around the room, turning the gas lamps off until he was back at the entrance and only one was burning. He wondered what he was going to do, or if in fact there was anything he could do. He was as sure as he was of anything that the old man had, indeed, created this room for himself and his God. It was not a work of art in the sense that it was intended to be seen by anyone else, and probably its purpose had lain in the making of it and not in any future—the pictures, the carvings, the room. That it was the work of a wounded, perhaps a twisted, mind Denton accepted; he didn’t accept Maltby’s response that it was ‘disgusting’. Yet Maltby had broken through his own conventional self to say ‘poor old sod’, and that was a triumph for Fra Geraldo’s art. There must have been some of the same feeling in his making of it, some sense of pity—self-pity, but not what that term usually evokes—pity for sufferer and torturer both. And pity for the man who was seeking atonement up here in the hidden, closed space of his own mind.

  Denton wondered if he should take something with him, had no idea what it would be. What did he want, a souvenir? He mentally sneered at that. A memento, a relic, a keepsake? He narrowed his eyes at the one painting he could see, now dim in the greenish gaslight. No, he wanted a record. Not Maltby’s cobbled-up catalogue, but a thing detailed and specific.

  To tell the story.

  He pulled the armoire closed and slid the moulding back into place. How many times had the old man done this? At least once a day, surely more often when he was creating it. For forty-odd years. Denton stepped out of the armoire and closed its doors. He would have to come back with the keys to lock the door. He realised that he felt protective of the chapel, as if he had, by finding it, conspired in hiding it. But how long could it be hidden from the new owner, or from a buyer if he sold the Palazzo Minerva? And what business was it of Denton’s?

  Maltby was finishing the rooms on the floor below. He looked pained and weary, moving with his head bent and his eyes down. He shook his head when he saw Denton. ‘Awful place. Just awful. No wonder he…’

  They went down to the piano nobile. Maltby complained about the bathrooms, the dirt, the emptiness. ‘And the neighbours! They’re peasants! What was he doing living here? What was he doing?’

  Denton looked again at the stairs where he had found the body. Again, there was no blood where he had expected to see it, except the small dark spot at the bottom where the head had lain.

  ‘I suppose I’ll be responsible for getting the place refurbished,’ Maltby said at the bottom. ‘I’ll be expected to see it all put to rights and I don’t even speak Italian. Find people to clean, find carpenters, find plumbers. It isn’t f—’ He caught himself.

  Denton put out his hand for the keys. ‘I have to lock that room.’

  ‘My God, yes! Suppose somebody else saw it!’ Maltby squared his jaw. ‘I still have this floor to look at.’

  Denton detached the brass key. ‘I’ll be right down. I think there’s just kitchens and things down here.’ He ran up the stairs, climbed to the top more slowly. He went into the room, opened the armoire, moved the moulding and stepped again into the chapel. He needed only his flash-light, could perhaps do what he wanted in the dark: he found the lump of modelling wax, a slightly soft, plastic stuff that reminded him of taffy-pulling, with the same greasiness. He used his pocket knife to cut off a chunk and pressed the key into it, then went out again and closed the back of the armoire, then its doors. Out in the corridor, he checked by window-light that the impression of the key was deep enough, then pulled the key loose and wrapped the soft wax in his pocket handkerchief with two calling cards to keep it flat. He locked the room and trotted down the stairs.

  Outside, Maltby said, the key back on the ring and the ring in his hand, ‘Look here—will you help me write this report? You’ve got the knack.’

  Denton smiled. He imagined using the word ‘knack’ to Henry James. ‘Bring me something—a draft. We’ll go over it.’

  ‘That’s damned decent of you. You’re the only decent chap I’ve run into in this place.’ He jingled the keys and looked up at
the sky, blue now with white clouds like the sky in the chapel. ‘Do you really suppose he meant it to be himself in those paintings?’

  Maltby, Denton thought, was a lot more perceptive than he seemed. ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Saw himself as being…ripped apart and skinned and—! Was he mad?’

  Denton wondered how much to confide in Maltby. He said, ‘He told me he was being haunted by the ghosts of children. They were trying to kill him, he said.’

  ‘You mean it was suicide?’ Maltby said this with almost a groan, as if it were personally hurtful. Well, he’d taken the wrong lesson from what Denton had said. Denton thought that perhaps that was just as well. He steered them to the portiere’s post and handed over the keys and another coin for future considerations and led Maltby out to the narrow street. They walked towards the brightness of the corner, a real street. Men watched them from the doorways of the bassi, smoking, lounging. Talk stopped as they went past. Women, too, were talking across the street above them, window to window; they, too, stopped, although there was some laughter. Denton looked up. Washing, strung from one side to the other, fluttered. At the top the sky was only a narrow band, like a ribbon laid on the black of the shadowed, shabby buildings.

  ‘Appalling,’ Maltby muttered.

  ‘I kind of like it.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘A lot of the real swells actually live here—the counts and the princes and the old nobility—cheek by jowl with what you call the peasants. It’s the middle class who hate the Lower City.’

  ‘I must be middle-class, then.’

  They walked to the Via Toledo and then along it, and instead of rushing to the consulate Maltby stopped with Denton at a baker’s and had coffee and a pastry. He took out his notebook and went over the details of the Palazzo Minerva yet again. Denton wondered if the young man would ever get over his fear of doing everything wrong.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Fra Geraldo’s chapel had re-charged his interest—changed his idea of the old man and therefore of his death. He felt as if he had peeled flesh and bone off the would-be monk’s skull and looked into a heaving mass of maggots, into a hell of self-hatred and self-torment. Still, he understood no more of the death, although the symbolic violence of the chapel suggested that real violence might well have tracked the old man. He knew that he would try to make sense of it now—an old story with him, a sense of obligation to the unsolved.

  He must make an effort to find the truth, Gianaculo and Donati and Maltby to the contrary. There was still ‘no evidence’ of unnatural death, at least not physical evidence; therefore, he must go elsewhere.

  Would the old man speak to him from the Other Side? The idea was laughable without being comical. It made him want to spit.

  Would a medium tell him how Fra Geraldo had died? Not a cat’s chance. But—just in case. That was always the catch. Just in case. He had promised to visit Fanning’s favourite medium, anyway.

  Fanning was staying at the Canterbury, a very English hotel on the Vomero that was designed to make the travelling Briton feel that he or she had come no farther than the city for which it was named. He had been there longer than Denton had been in the Casa Gialla, conducting his ‘scientific research’ on the Neapolitan mediums.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come to your senses about seeing Signora Palladino at last. She’s absolutely the one,’ he said to Denton after they had settled themselves in the hotel’s writing room with tea. ‘Not showy enough for your book, I suppose, but authentic. You must see her. And see her first. The rest are—’ He sighed.

  ‘You’ve tested her—really tested her?’ Denton had done a lot of reading about spiritualism; he knew the lingo, at least, although he was a great sceptic.

  ‘I’m happy to say that I approached Signora Palladino in the most objective kind of manner. I have observed her in three séances and interviewed her at some depth, and she is absolutely genuine. If yours were to be a more, mm, scholarly work, you would want to make her its centrepiece.’

  ‘That would throw the thing out of balance.’

  ‘She’s the only one for whom I can vouch wholeheartedly. Some of the others are rather questionable. Not outright charlatans, I wouldn’t say that—well, I wouldn’t say it of all of them, although between you and me, far too many of them are charlatans and nothing else—but they are rather more theatrical than Palladino. One can’t vouch for them scientifically. More your sort of thing, I suppose.’ Fanning sat with his feet together on the figured carpet and his hands on his knees, as if he were a boy being examined by an adult. He held out a plate. ‘They do butties rather well here.’

  Denton took one, said, ‘I don’t want to sit through a lot of claptrap about flying banjos and spook voices. And I don’t want to be told that my uncle’s name is Charlie and he has a wart on his nose.’

  Fanning chuckled and slapped his knees and poured them more tea. ‘Let me warn you of something. All the Naples mediums know each other. Contrary to what you might think, they exchange information about clients and potential clients. You’d be astonished at what complete dossiers they build of even the most personal information. One has to be particularly careful—you’ve been in the press, and you’re a well-known man, and they will all seem to be able to summon the most remarkable information about you, whether in automatic writing or slate writing or spirit voices. It’s quite discouraging from a scientific point of view.’ He rubbed his thumb and fingertips together to rid them of butter. ‘We investigators are very sceptical men. But you won’t be investigating, so I shan’t bore you with details of controls and all that.’

  Denton had read enough to know how the mediums operated. He said, ‘But I want to know what I’m getting into. You insist that the séances be done in full light?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Fanning tittered. ‘Near-darkness is a condition of communication with the Other Side.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It simply is. If one’s examining water vapour, one can’t ask that it be done in a dry atmosphere.’

  Denton didn’t get that but let it pass. ‘The medium still has her—or his—“cabinet” behind him? Or her?’

  ‘Yes, yes, they require it.’

  ‘But as I understand it, the “cabinet’s” just a curtained-off space in the corner of a room. Nothing magical about it.’

  ‘We’re not talking about “magic,” Mr Denton.’

  ‘Well, I mean… There’s nothing to suggest a telegraph line to the Other Side, or anything. It doesn’t have special equipment, like a, mmm, spectral Marconi antenna or something.’

  Fanning sighed. ‘The medium is the “spectral antenna”. Actually, the metaphor is quite a good one. We investigators are, as it were, testing a kind of Marconi apparatus. Does it really transmit to a distant spot? Does it really receive? Hmmm?’

  ‘So the medium insists on having the “cabinet”, although it gives her a convenient place to hide things—’

  ‘Things are not hidden! We examine the cabinet with the utmost care before the séance. We examine each object in there!’

  ‘The mandolin or ukulele or whatever it is.’

  ‘Often a toy trumpet or a guitar, yes.’

  ‘But you don’t put anybody inside the cabinet during the séance.’

  ‘No more than we’d put somebody inside the cage while trying to trap a tiger.’

  Denton didn’t see the aptness of that, either, so he tapped his lip and said, ‘And you don’t bolt the medium’s little table to the floor or nail her sleeves to the table or anything like that.’

  ‘Of course we don’t!’ Fanning looked shocked. ‘The medium must be in a receptive state to enter the trance! How in the world could she be receptive if she were being treated like a convict?’

  ‘Um. So then during the séance the dead “come through”?’

  Fanning looked prim. ‘Not in the way I think you mean. I have never personally sat in on a séance in which there were scientifically verified
spirit voices. It’s why I have such high hopes for you and Fra Geraldo—you and he have an affinity, and you can verify anything he says.’ He made a little smile with closed lips. ‘I am not to be taken in by show. One hears of—I have myself seen “spirit plasma,” “ectoplasm,” et cetera, but they were easily shown to be sham. I remain uncommitted on the subject of ectoplasm. I want to test ectoplasm under laboratory conditions. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t exist, mind you—only that it isn’t proven.’ His little smile widened. ‘I astonish you with my scepticism, don’t I?’

  ‘When you say that Signora Palladino’s genuine, what proof do you have of her contact with the Other Side?’

  ‘Physical manifestation.’ Fanning put his cup and saucer aside. ‘I wish I had my notes, but they’ve been sent to London for our report. Physical manifestation—sounds and the degravitation of an object.’ He held up a finger. ‘But a caveat concerning Mrs Palladino! She will cheat if you let her. I think it’s a game with her. She’s absolutely genuine, as I said, but—she’s like a child. She’s a peasant. She’ll cheat for the fun in it.’

  ‘“Physical manifestations.” The mandolin gets played?’

  ‘A parlour guitar, actually. Yes. The guitar was struck.’

  ‘Inside the cabinet.’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘And when you say “degravitation”, you mean—?’

  ‘The movement of the table. Up and down, yes.’

  ‘Signora Palladino couldn’t have done it?’

  ‘Impossible.’

  It all sounded to Denton like a stage trick. Still, he said, ‘I don’t understand why dead folks—spirits, whatever—play the guitar and bump a table up and down. I mean, if they have a message, surely there are better ways to send it than whacking guitar strings.’

  Fanning looked severe. ‘Mr Denton! Do you think that if it were easy to penetrate the barrier between our world and the Other Side, the spirits would bother with tables and guitars? Of course they would not! But think of what they must do—the gulf between us and them that they must cross—the near-impossibility of it! The wonder is not that they don’t play Sir Arthur Sullivan on the piano, but that they cause the guitar string to vibrate at all! Think of it—entities without physical existence crossing the barrier between life and death and managing to move a metal string in our world! It is a phenomenal accomplishment! It is as if we aimed a Marconi apparatus at the farthest star and received an answer!’