Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  The laundry van jolted. A sharp turn. Then another. Lucia was thrown forward as the brakes slammed on, then again as the van lurched backward in reverse. She heard a muffled curse, and in the near dark, she could see that Moto had been buried in an avalanche of snow-white linen. He cursed and thrashed and fought to free himself. In other circumstances, Lucia might have laughed. Now she wondered if Moto’s dirty footprints on the linen would be the final mistake that got them killed.

  They sat silently in the dark, breathing heavily. She heard the driver’s door open and slam shut, footsteps circling to the back of the van. As the latch clicked and the rear door opened, Lucia braced herself for whatever might come next—discovery, arrest, desperate explanations. Moto had refused to offer any guidance. The door opened and her eyes were dazzled by the light, but not for long. They were parked inside some kind of building, and her eyes adjusted quickly. The light was dim, bright only by contrast with their hours in the dark.

  The driver was standing outside the open door, a clipboard in his hand. He stared right at them and looked right through them, as if they weren’t there. As if the pile of disordered linen didn’t exist. He seemed to be counting bundles on the shelves, and then he turned away. The van was backed up to an elevator, and the driver pushed the call button. Lucia could hear the elevator creaking down the shaft. It stopped, and as the doors opened, the driver bent down to tie his shoelace. Moto grabbed Lucia’s hand and pulled her out of the van and onto the elevator behind him. The doors closed and the elevator lurched upward.

  Moto had a brief moment to offer his usual cheerful smile.

  “See? Under control.”

  The elevator stopped. The doors opened. Four men in military uniforms were standing immediately outside. Two rushed into the elevator. One grabbed Moto, one Lucia. A third, carrying an assault rifle, stood guard. The fourth, with a hand on a holstered pistol at his hip, said only, “Come!” And they were hurried—half dragged—down a long, dark hallway.

  Lucia started to object, but the man with the pistol hissed, “Silenzio!” And the man who held her arm in a fierce grip spun her halfway around and gave her a look that convinced her that silenzio was indeed a good idea.

  Minutes later, they were led into a room flooded with fluorescent lights that flickered and pulsed and filled the air with the buzz of a swarm of industrial hornets. The walls were bare, the floor concrete, everything tinged a faint green by the flickering light. After depositing Lucia and Moto, firmly and silently, in a pair of unpadded metal chairs, on opposite sides of the room, three of the uniformed men left. The fourth, the one with the assault rifle, stood by the closed door, silent, impassive, his face, like the walls, tinged green. There was no insignia of any kind on his uniform. Moto wasn’t smiling now; he sat, as silent and impassive as the man with the gun. Lucia tried to ask what was happening, but the man by the door took a threatening step in her direction, and she fell silent again. Time passed. Occasionally the room vibrated with the roar of a jet taking off.

  After what felt like an hour but could have been half that—or twice that—the lock clicked, the door opened, and the three men returned.

  They led Lucia and Moto—firmly, but perhaps more gently—down the long hallway. Lucia fought to calm herself. Whatever lay ahead, panic wouldn’t help. Maybe, she thought, that was why Moto seemed so calm. He was making certain he was ready when action was called for.

  They went through a doorway, then down another hall and through another door. Lucia tried to keep track of the twists and turns, but it was hopeless. There was no way she could find her way back if they somehow broke loose. At one final doorway, the man with the pistol entered a series of numbers on a keypad, then held a plastic card against the pad and the door clicked open. On the other side was what looked like a standard airport security system: a walk-through metal detector and a conveyor belt for luggage, leading to an X-ray machine. The man gestured for them to take off their shoes, empty their pockets. Suddenly, it was shockingly normal. Just another visit to the standard hell of airport security. She slipped out of her shoes, took off her belt, dug her cell phone out of her pocket, and put her shoulder bag—somehow still miraculously with her—on the belt. As she walked through the metal detector, it occurred to Lucia—fleetingly, pointlessly—that their luggage, the two small suitcases they had taken for their trip to the villa in Tuscany what seemed like many weeks ago, had been left behind somewhere along the way. In the van? In the elevator? In the parking garage at the airport in Milan? She couldn’t remember, and it really didn’t matter, did it? Clean underwear was the least of her worries right now.

  Behind her, she heard Moto cursing. “My cell phone!” He slapped his pockets in the standard hopeless search for something too bulky to be misplaced in his tight jeans. “Fuck! It must have fallen out in the—” He turned to go back the way they had come, but the man with the pistol grabbed his arm and wrenched him back toward the metal detector.

  “No! I have to—”

  The man pulled Moto closer and gave him a shove that sent him stumbling through the metal detector, into Lucia, almost knocking her off her feet. She grabbed him to steady them both, and she could feel he was trembling as energy surged through him. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew there was nowhere to go. No turning back. The man with the pistol entered numbers on another keypad. The door swung open to fierce daylight and the smell of jet fuel. They stepped outside onto airport tarmac. The roar and rumble of a jumbo jet taking off shook the air. A few yards away, dozens of passengers were boarding a bus that would take them to their plane. Lucia thought about screaming for help, thought about breaking loose and running. They wouldn’t shoot her here, in front of so many people. She was glad she’d calmed herself to be ready for this moment. Her muscles tensed. It would be desperate, but—

  The man holding her released her arm and stepped back. The man with the pistol handed Moto some papers and said, “Your boarding passes.”

  Moto nodded. He took Lucia’s arm, gently guiding her onto the bus.

  Nothing to it.

  Wedged in the crowd on the bus, she leaned against Moto, her cheek pressed to his, like a pair of lovers, and whispered, fighting to control her emotions, “What’s happening?”

  He pulled his head back slightly. He was in control of himself again, and his smile was as wide and innocent as sunrise on the Mediterranean. “We’re going to Malta. Wasn’t that the plan?”

  She didn’t know whether to hit him. Or hug him. Or kill him. Or cry. She settled for none of the above.

  But she was tempted to reconsider the second of those three options an hour later when the plane landed. In Naples, not Malta.

  If keeping up with Lucia and Moto was exhausting, hunting for a four-hundred-year-old grave in Siena on a cold, rainy winter evening was much worse. On the long walk back to his hotel, through twisting, dark streets, Professor Richman kept himself moving with the thought that it would be too ironic to die alone in the cold after lecturing his young accomplices about the foolish danger of their plans. Death by murderous thugs was terrifying, death by irony was humiliating—and he’d be dead in either case.

  Hours later, wrapped in a thick hotel robe, he emerged from a long, hot bath and, wreathed in steam, stepped into the bedroom of his hotel suite. He relaxed with a sigh of pleasure into the thick, soft leather of an armchair, picked up the house phone, and ordered an extravagant room-service dinner. He knew he deserved it.

  To pass the time while he waited for his dinner, the professor went to the small safe in the room’s walk-in closet, punched in the combination—the number of the apartment where he and his wife had lived as newlywed graduate students in Boston—and pulled out a small book, its soft leather cover stained and swollen, battered and bruised. The journal of Mario Fenelli, poet, adventurer, thief.

  He held the book a long time, his face blank. Then his lips tightened and his shoulders raised slightly, almost a shrug. The murders of the young woman and her fa
ther were certainly tragic. But now the fact that he had borrowed the book—definitely borrowed, he had absolutely intended to return it—had proven providential. The book was irreplaceable. Invaluable. And now saved. It had been worth the bloody nose, a maneuver he had been able to call on almost at will throughout his life, but one which he thought he had left behind long ago as he reached the tranquility of what were supposed to be peaceful twilight years.

  He paged through the book gently. He was going to need a lot of help interpreting the scrawled words. He closed the book and considered names, scholars he could rely on, colleagues he could trust. There were more than a few—and certainly some of them would still be alive.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. An impressively fast performance by room service. He hurried to the closet and locked the book in the safe again, as the knocking repeated, more firmly this time. Professor Richman pulled his bathrobe tight and went to the door, calling, “Sì, sì, arrivo!”

  He flung the door open and was stunned for an instant. A heavyset man in an overcoat stood in the hall. Definitely not room service. He started to explain that the man had the wrong room, but before he could find words, a meaty hand shoved him hard and he stumbled backward into the room. The door slammed shut.

  “Dov’è lei? Dove sono loro?”

  “What?”

  Thrown off-balance by the stranger’s presence and his thick, guttural accent, the professor couldn’t understand anything the man said. The intruder took a menacing step forward, and the professor replayed the questions in his mind. Where is she? Where are they?

  “Who?”

  The man spoke more slowly, clearly.

  “Non sprecare il mio tempo.” Don’t waste my time. He held his big hands up, about a foot apart, as if he were going to reach out and crush the professor’s skull. “Lucia and the ragazzo. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man stepped even closer. He reached out and patted the professor’s cheek. It didn’t feel like a playful gesture.

  “Don’t lie to me. Not ever. Capisci? Where are they?”

  To his surprise, the professor found the courage to lie one more time. One last time, he hoped.

  “I told them they were crazy. It was getting too dangerous.” That much was certainly true. “I didn’t want to know what they were doing or where they were going.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Dangerous? You don’t know what is dangerous. Listen to me. You went to the villa outside Siena. All three of you. Then you went north. Then you stopped. Turned around. Went back to Milano. You hear what I’m saying? Capisci? They left you at Milano Centrale. They went to Malpensa. Then to Aeroporto Il Caravaggio. Then they disappeared. Now tell me. Where were they going?”

  Aeroporto Il Caravaggio? This thug already knew more than the professor did. He looked to heaven, but there was no rescue there. He was going to lie again.

  He raised his hands. His best Italian shrug of bewilderment.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t—”

  The man put his hand in the middle of the professor’s chest and pushed him. He stumbled backward, tripped over an ottoman, and wound up sprawled in a chair.

  The man pointed a warning finger at him, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a cell phone. He punched in a number and held the phone to his ear. While he apparently waited for an answer, phone in his left hand, pressed to his ear, he reached under his overcoat with his right hand and pulled out a pistol. He held it up to make sure the professor saw it. Then he started talking into the phone, rapidly. The professor couldn’t understand a single word. He kept his eye on the gun, now waving in the air as the man gestured while he spoke into the phone.

  Though he couldn’t understand what the man was saying, the professor thought it sounded as if he was having an argument. His voice got louder, the tone took on a hard edge. His gestures with the pistol were more violent. After a long silence, he nodded sharply, spat out a final phrase, and snapped the phone shut.

  He brought the pistol to bear on the professor and cocked the hammer.

  The professor had escaped a kidnapping, fled from beheadings, fought through the cold Siena drizzle, and now he was going to die in his hotel room. In his bathrobe. This was beyond irony.

  He grabbed the arms of the chair and levered himself forward, saying, even as he struggled upright, “I will die on my feet, you bastard.”

  There was a long moment. The gun pointing at the professor’s chest never wavered.

  “If you shoot me, everyone will hear. You’ll never get away.”

  The thug smiled and nodded judiciously, as if acknowledging that the professor had a good point. He switched the gun to his left hand and dug his right hand into his overcoat pocket. A moment later, there was a metallic click and a long knife gleamed in the thug’s thick hand. Lowering the gun, he raised the blade and took a step closer.

  In a moment of determination that, if he was going to die, he should die well—and even finding an instant to think, Nec spe. Nec metu—Professor Rafael Aristotle Richman took a sharp breath and spat into the man’s face. His mouth was dry and all he managed was a fine spray of spittle, but some of it splattered on the weathered, dark-browed face that was going to be the last thing he saw on earth.

  Chapter 17

  Roma

  1605

  Cecco had acquired the skill to discern the quality of pigments and haggle for the best price for his master. Now, Caravaggio trusted him to procure most of the raw colors for his paints. The most costly ones the artist bought himself while still instructing the boy how to determine quality and value.

  “Look at the consistency of color in this lapis lazuli,” Caravaggio said, poking an irregular stone in his palm.

  “Handle it carefully, Maestro,” said the merchant. “If the color rubs off on your hand, you’ll be required to pay for my loss!”

  “I’ll pay when I’m satisfied with its value, signore!” said Caravaggio, turning away from the merchant. “As if the color can rub off a hard stone!

  “See how this piece compares with the last?” he said to Cecco.

  “I see the color is true throughout,” said Cecco quietly. He studied the precious nugget carefully. “And there are no clumps of intensity or texture.”

  “And the vibrant color,” said Caravaggio in a whisper. He nodded to his student.

  “Are you buying or not?” said the merchant, his breath hot on Caravaggio’s shoulder.

  “I don’t use lapis lazuli much,” said the artist, setting down the stone. “Blue is not my color. It rarely visits my palette.” He turned away. “Come on, Cecco. Let’s go. I want to take a look at the yellow ochre at Rafaello’s shop.”

  As they turned to leave, the merchant plucked at Caravaggio’s sleeve.

  “Aspettate, Maestro! Wait, per favore. I’ll make you a special price.”

  Caravaggio nodded, darting a look at his pupil.

  One day, as Cecco wound his way through the streets of Roma toward the pigment merchants, he chanced to see the three Tomassoni brothers. Behind them walked two of the Giugoli brothers, Ignazio and Federigo, walking with their sister, Lavinia, Ranuccio’s wife.

  Cecco crossed the little vicolo to avoid confronting them.

  Ranuccio laughed loudly.

  “Where are you going, little catamite?” he scoffed. The Giugoli brothers guffawed at the insult.

  “Bar-das-sa!” sang Ranuccio in a taunt. Fuck boy.

  “Leave him alone, Ranuccio,” said Giovan, the eldest Tomassoni.

  Ranuccio made a sour face, unleashing another volley.

  “See how you walk, you finocchio! Caravaggio knows not how to fuck or paint!”

  Giovan grabbed his brother by the neck of his tunic, jerking him around to face him.

  “I told you to leave him alone, Ranuccio. Leave him in peace.”

  “Why should I?” snarled Ranuccio. “He is an abomination, as is his master.”

  �
��He’s a boy, you idiot. I want no quarrels with Caravaggio,” said Giovan. He pushed his brother hard, making him stumble and fall to his knees. “You’ll end up skewered through the liver, you stupid fool.”

  Cecco hurried ahead, almost running toward the pigment merchants on the banks of the Tiber.

  Later, Cecco walked home along Via di Ripetta. In a bag by his side, wrapped in a moist linen rag, he had the terra di Umbria, Umbrian earth, a moist clay. He knew it would make a perfect burnt umber with careful heating, a rich dark hue that would enchant his master. He also carried a stoppered glass bottle of fluffy crimson powder—madder root from Smyrna, more precious than even the Dutch root. And there was a good nugget of—

  Cecco halted in midstep. Across Via di Ripetta, he spied Lavinia Giugoli Tomassoni walking alongside her younger brother. She whispered something in his ear and he nodded. He scowled at the apprentice like a mad wolf.

  Lavinia approached Cecco. He tried to hurry by, but she stopped him, putting her moist hand on his bare arm. He pulled back at her touch.

  “Aspetta! Wait,” she said. “I want to apologize for my husband insulting you.”

  Cecco bowed his head, unable to speak. He felt the heat rise from his neck.

  Lavinia’s voice was high-pitched like a little girl’s.

  A most unusual octave for a grown woman.

  “Truly, I apologize,” she said. “It was cruel of him. It has nothing to do with you, ragazzo.”

  Cecco looked into her eyes. She was quite pretty in a fair-haired, blue-eyed way. But the impression she gave Cecco was that she was a weak imitation of beauty, faded like colored linen left in the sun. She did not have the color and passion of a Caravaggio model. And her voice irritated him.