Lucia stopped and waited by a row of Vespas jammed helter-skelter against the curb—certainly she wasn’t expecting him to ride on the back of one of those death machines. She’d said “car,” and he was going to hold her to it. The moment she touched one of those contraptions, the whole trip was off. He slowed down to catch his breath.
She smiled again. It really was an engaging smile. “Cheer up, Professor. It’s going to be fine. We’ll drive over to Cortona, talk to Zio Te-Te, look at the painting, and come home. It’s a great day for a drive, and we’ll have the whole project under control. OK?”
He shrugged.
“Come on! Cheer up! It’ll be easy. We’ll be the stars of the seminar. You look like a perfect professor”—he didn’t bother to point out that was because he actually was a professor—“and I’m the only one in the class who speaks Italian. We’ve got this. Let’s do it.”
He allowed himself a smile. Her enthusiasm was genuine and infectious. She took him by the arm and marched past the Vespas to a tiny beat-up Fiat jammed into the lineup. It wasn’t much longer than the scooters, but it was a car.
She patted a dented front fender and said, “Professor, meet Otto.”
Richman thought for a moment.
“Otto? I’ve never named my cars, but I am under the impression that cars are always given women’s names.”
“Well”—for a moment she looked almost sad, then she shrugged—“this one’s unreliable. It hates to work. And one of these days, it’s going to leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere.” She pulled open the driver’s door. “Isn’t that just like a man?”
And as she climbed in behind the wheel and slammed the door, she added, in a voice that seemed meant mostly for herself, “Bastard.” Then she shook her head and laughed.
She started the engine, which sounded more like a lawn mower than a car, and Professor Richman wedged himself into the passenger’s seat, deciding, what the hell, he’d consider this part of his Italian adventure. By the time he realized the trip was going to be hell on his knee, it was too late, the Fiat was on the move, swerving through the Vespas, rolling across the piazza—terrifying the nuns one last time—and heading out of town and into the hills of Chianti.
“We have to go back.”
They were sitting in the car on the outskirts of the tiny town—not Cortona, at all, as Lucia had promised, but an almost nonexistent speck of a village, far enough up into the Umbrian hills that the battered Fiat had barely managed the climb. They had already spent—“wasted,” Professor Richman would have said—half a day at Father Antonio’s chapel at the orphanage. Now, heading home, they’d driven less than a kilometer when Professor Richman had threatened to jump out of the car unless she stopped immediately and explained to him what she and Father Antonio—Zio Te-Te to her—had been talking about.
“It would have been hard enough for me if you’d been speaking Italian, but whatever language that was, I couldn’t understand a word.”
“It was Italian, Professor, the way we speak it in Sicily, where my family comes from—and Zio Te-Te’s family too.”
And then she told him about Zio Te-Te’s plans: he was going to sell the painting and use the tens of millions of euros it was obviously worth to repair the orphanage, and buy books for the school and a new well for the village. That was when the professor cut her off.
“We have to go back. We have to tell him the truth. The obvious truth. He thinks he has a long-lost Caravaggio, and that painting is absolutely not a Caravaggio. He’s delusional.”
She reached down to release the hand brake and pull back onto the road, but with a sudden lunge and a twist of the wrist, he switched off the ignition and snatched the keys.
She laughed. “You’re quick for an old man.”
“And you’re slow for a young woman. But we’re still going back. We have to tell him.”
“No! I can’t break his heart like that.” Lucia’s voice was sharp.
Zio Te-Te had told her how he’d discovered the painting in a storage room at the orphanage, where it had been sitting for perhaps a century. He’d done what research he could, without a computer and without revealing his secret to anyone. And he was certain it was one of the paintings—four paintings, he explained, not three, the way everyone else mistakenly insisted—that Caravaggio had been carrying to Rome when he died. Now he was ready to announce his great discovery to the world. A new Caravaggio: Il bacio di Giuda—The Judas Kiss.
And Lucia wasn’t going to let this foreigner, this American professor, destroy those dreams. Though she would have found it difficult, even impossible, to explain exactly why, she felt fiercely protective toward this much older man she barely remembered from her childhood in their small Sicilian village. Did he give her candy? Save her from bullies? Maybe. She really didn’t remember anything from those days when she was so young. But she knew she felt that she had to shield this man who had been part of her distant past.
She glared, but Professor Aristotle Rafael Richman had faced off against more than a few angry young women in his career.
“If we don’t break his heart today, think how he’ll feel when he’s a laughingstock on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Unveil a new Caravaggio, and everyone will be watching—and the moment that painting is shown in public, the experts are going to savage him. It will be a bloodbath gory enough for Caravaggio himself to paint. It’ll make Judith Beheading Holofernes look like recess at play school.”
“Don’t make jokes!” She looked down, shook her head. “Te-Te . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t understand her feelings, but she had to accept them. Still, the professor was right. She glared at Richman and stuck out her hand. “Keys. We’ll go back.” He gave her the keys. She started the engine. “And don’t be so pleased with your damn metaphor. Judith Beheading Holofernes!”
He said, “Don’t you mean ‘simile’?”
“You’re getting your way. Don’t be a sore winner.”
And on the short drive back to the orphanage, he wondered exactly how the discussion was going to go. Father Antonio, Zio Te-Te—call him whatever you wanted—the priest wasn’t going to roll over when they told him his painting was most certainly not a Caravaggio.
When Lucia had introduced them, the priest looked Richman up and down, gave a snort, and turned his full attention to the young woman he hadn’t seen in more than twenty years. Lucia had explained it all to Richman on the long drive over the mountains. She knew him as “Zio,” but Father Antonio wasn’t anybody’s uncle. And Te-Te stood for “tipo tosto,” a tough guy. He was Uncle Tough Guy, at least he had been all those years ago, before Lucia was sent to live with her grandparents in New York.
And the tipo from twenty years ago still looked tosto: a square head on a broad, stocky body and huge, rough hands—more like a hit man than a village priest who nurtured a school filled with orphans. Lucia was worried about broken hearts? Richman thought broken heads might be more his style.
But the painting wasn’t a Caravaggio. Couldn’t be. Yes, it looked old enough and dirty enough to have been kicking around since 1610—the year Caravaggio took the trip that ended with his much-disputed, still-mysterious death. But beneath that ancient dirt, the painting in the orphanage chapel revealed a hand other than that of the genius. It was the faces that gave it away.
Caravaggio painted real people, even in the most sacred of scenes. The faces of his saints were the faces of workmen and pimps and whores from the streets of Rome. Lesser painters relied on idealized images, distilled perfection: the Bible brought to life, rather than life itself made biblical. And the faces in this painting were exactly that. Too perfect to be real. Well executed, but not in any way the genius of Caravaggio.
Richman had seen that immediately, and he assumed Lucia had seen it too. To be polite, he’d studied the painting closely in the dim light of the sacristy and made noncommittal noises. He’d taken a few shots of it with his camera. Lucia had done pretty much the same, t
aking pictures with her cell phone—and mocking Richman for his “antique” camera, one that used film. “How are your pictures coming out?” she’d teased him, flaunting the digital images on her phone.
Then she and the priest had talked at length, intently, eagerly, in their incomprehensible dialect. Richman had stood, listening for a while, but eventually his knee began to hurt, so he’d found a chair and settled in, just watching from a distance, glancing from time to time at the painting: Judas embracing Christ, kissing him, while shadowy figures lurked in the background. It was hard to tell much through the grime of centuries.
One moment in the conversation between Lucia and her “zio” stood out. The priest had scars on his cheeks, both cheeks, running close to his eyes, as if he’d been clawed by a jungle cat. They were old scars, thick and white. Lucia had reached out tentatively, gently, and run her fingers across the scar tissue. She winced, as if the touch was painful to her. But the priest didn’t react at all. He acted as if he hadn’t even noticed she was touching his face. And then he bent forward and kissed her on the forehead.
Right after that, she and Professor Richman had left.
And now they were going back to do the right thing and shatter the polite fiction that the painting was a priceless masterpiece.
Lucia stopped the car, jumped out, and led the way around the back of the orphanage to the chapel. If Te-Te’s heart had to be broken, then she had to be the one who did it.
She strode into the chapel and stopped short. Richman, hurrying into the dark room, stumbled and fell as he tried to avoid running into her. He banged his bad knee and yelped with pain when he hit the floor. His hand skidded on something wet and sticky, and when he looked down, he saw it was blood.
Struggling to his feet, he could see in front of them a single outstretched hand highlighted by a shaft of sunlight slicing through the dark through a missing pane in the stained glass windows. His eye moved from the light into the shadow, and now he could see Te-Te—tough guy no longer—lying in a spreading pool of blood. His throat was slashed wide open and a bloody knife lay beside him.
Lucia raced toward the body, but she stopped at the sound of angry voices coming from the sacristy where the painting had been kept. Two men lurched out into the chapel, carrying the painting, their voices rising in a mixture of anger and panic.
“Aspettare! No! Cazzo!”
“Idiota!”
“Stronzo!”
Then they saw Lucia and Richman, and all four froze for an instant.
“Cazzo!”
One of the men suddenly had a gun in his hand.
He raced across the room, leaving the other man to struggle with the painting as best he could.
“Fai il minimo rumore e vi faccio fuori tutti e due!” Make a sound and I’ll kill you both! His voice was a hoarse whisper.
The painting slipped from the second man’s grasp and fell to the floor, cracking the gilt frame. He shouted and the man with the gun turned his head for an instant. Instinctively, Richman lunged for the gun, but he was far too slow, and the man stepped back and swung the pistol, slamming it against the professor’s head.
Richman collapsed to the floor, twitched violently once, and then lay still, his face speckled with colors from the light shining through the stained glass windows, his fresh blood mingling with the congealing pool from the dead priest.
Chapter 3
Roma
1599
The young noblewoman Beatrice Cenci pressed her white-turbaned head against the bars of the cage as the wagon rocked over the cobblestones toward the scaffold. Strands of the young woman’s hair, wet with perspiration, clung to her elegant neck. Her stepmother, Lucrezia Petroni, moaned in prayer on her knees next to her cage, her brocade gown torn and filthy.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio stared at the twenty-two-year-old Beatrice, committing her face to memory. He saw no fear in her eyes, only a dogged resignation.
“So innocent a face,” said a bald-headed man to his wife. “A face that does not lie. I believe her. What father rapes his own daughter?”
“Sì,” said the woman. She dabbed at her eye with her fingertip. “I’d have killed the bastard myself.”
“And bedding down the son too,” said the husband, crossing his beefy arms over his chest. “May Francesco Cenci rot in hell! Serves him right they murdered the stronzo!”
All Roma knew that Beatrice and her older brother, Giacomo, had beaten their monstrous father to death with a hammer. Together the family had then pushed him from the ramparts of his castle to feign suicide.
Pope Clemente VIII showed no sympathy for the abused children and stepmother. Rebellion in the noble order—especially patricide—could not go unpunished. The pope condemned the entire family to death, except the youngest boy, twelve-year-old Bernardo. He was forced to watch the torture and death of his family. Pleas for mercy from the Roman people—both nobles and commoners—fell on deaf papal ears.
There was a scream like the shriek of a dying rabbit. Ahead, on the scaffold, Beatrice’s brother Giacomo writhed in agony as he was tortured with red-hot pincers. The girl cocked her head, straining to hear the last syllables from her brother’s mouth. Lines of anguish crumpled her brow. She extended her filthy arms through the bars toward the sound.
Caravaggio stood riveted.
Ah, Leonardo da Vinci! How cruel your advice to an artist to observe an execution.
“See the reactions of those condemned to death when they are led to their execution. Study those archings of the eyebrows, the spasms of muscles and the movements of the eyes. Examine their bodies after death to understand human anatomy.”
Unlike Da Vinci, Caravaggio did not sketch the scene. Instead, he committed it to memory. His eyes homed in on the buckled muscle on the forehead of the anguished girl, her dirty hands and arms, the suffering that drew back the skin around her eyes in torment.
Thousands of Romans spilled out into the dusty streets, accompanying the carts along the Via di Monserrato, Via dei Banchi, and Via San Celso to the Ponte Sant’Angelo, to gape at the execution.
“I knew I’d see you here, Michele.”
Caravaggio felt a hand clasp his shoulder and turned to see Orazio Gentileschi’s hawkish face and spadelike beard. Beside him was a little girl, no more than seven, whose eyes were riveted on Beatrice Cenci.
“You brought Artemisia to witness this debacle?” said Caravaggio.
“She insisted.” Orazio pulled out a small notebook and began sketching. “Look how the little brother suffers.”
Standing horrified adjacent to the platform, young Bernardo was being forced to watch the execution of his mother, brother, and sister. When he fainted in the heat and horror, an attendant splashed a bucket of water on his face to revive him so he witnessed every minute of torment as Giacomo Cenci’s living body was torn apart. Then his corpse was drawn and quartered.
But it was Beatrice’s poise and grace as she walked to the scaffold that garnered the sympathy and pity of the Roman people.
“The father raped her when she was only a child, the bastardo!” whispered a grizzled man to his companion. He pinched savagely at a red wart on his face. “What justice is this?”
“What pope have we who condemns this poor girl to death?” said the younger man, crossing himself. “God would never mandate such suffering!”
“The pope wants the Cenci estate,” muttered the wart-faced man. “After today he will have it.”
Artemisia tugged on her father’s tunic. “What is ‘rape,’ babbo?”
“I’m sketching, daughter,” said Gentileschi gruffly. “I will explain later. Leave me in peace.”
The girl nodded. She pushed Caravaggio aside with a gentle but firm hand so she could see better.
Caravaggio watched not only the faces of the condemned, but the outrage and compassion in the eyes of the Romans. He saw little Artemisia’s face pull taut, a haunted look in her eyes.
“Is the girl all right?” Caravag
gio asked her father. “Look at her, Orazio.”
“She is a sensitive child,” he said, still sketching. “With more heart and conscience than our pope and clergy, the disgusting swine.”
“Perhaps you should take her home.”
Gentileschi shrugged, exasperated. “Why? She is a painter too. She’ll remember this day.”
Caravaggio didn’t answer. He thought of his father’s and grandfather’s deaths, the scene scorched into his mind forever. He nodded to the little girl, who did not reciprocate. Artemisia stared back at him, her eyes steady. She remained silent.
Something in her needs fixing. She may indeed be an artist.
The July sun baked the stones of the piazza, which reflected the merciless heat. The crowd pressed closer to the scaffold, sour body odors mingling. One by one people began to faint. Two were carried out dead of heatstroke.
No one could look away.
Two men dressed in formal cloaks of the papal justice stood to the right of the scaffold.
“Those two,” said Gentileschi, looking up from his sketchbook. “They’re the ones who asked the questions, watching the girl be tortured until she confessed. Ferrante Taverna, the inquisitor, and Mariano Pasqualone, the papal clerk.”
“No remorse on their faces, the bastards,” said Caravaggio, studying them. “No compassion, no empathy. They look bored. Especially that Pasqualone.”
“They are bastard bureaucrats, heartless fucks,” said Gentileschi. “They carry out the pope’s dirty work.”
Caravaggio glanced at Artemisia. She blinked, her eyes solemn. Then she turned back to watch Beatrice Cenci.
After watching the death of her brother, Beatrice betrayed no fear of her imminent execution. She walked like a martyr, dignity in her bearing. Without struggle, she knelt and bared her neck.
“Look at whom the Church condemns. Innocent souls!” wailed a woman.
Voices in the crowd shouted, “Certo! Gli innocenti!”
“Innocent lamb!” cried a fishmonger, stinking of his wares. “What justice is this?” He waved his arms wide, supplicating to the heavens.
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