“Close your eyes, ‘poet,’” growled a voice in the darkness.
When the erratic light shifted with a drafty gust, Mario saw the brutal sheen in Caravaggio’s eyes, and the bright gleam of a dagger cradled in his hands.
Mario rolled over, shivering under his blanket.
The following morning, Mario Fenelli woke to see the rumpled blanket of an empty bunk. Caravaggio had already risen to watch the sunrise.
Fenelli crept quietly out of his bunk and walked barefooted to the black-tarred chest. He stooped and held the iron lock in his hand—it was the breadth of his palm, heavy, and solid.
He licked his lips. What the artist has locked inside this sea chest must be worth a fortune.
“What are you doing?” growled a voice. Fenelli saw Caravaggio drop off the rope ladder onto the floor and pounce at him.
Fenelli stumbled to his feet, dropping the lock. “N-n-niente!” he stuttered. Nothing.
Caravaggio grabbed Fenelli by his shirt, twisting the material in his hand so it choked him. “If I see you within an arm’s length of that chest again, I’ll cut your face.”
Mario Fenelli stared at the puckered scars crisscrossing Caravaggio’s cheeks and eye. “Sì, signore,” he squeaked.
Caravaggio let go of Fenelli’s shirt and pushed him. Fenelli stumbled backward, hitting his head on the bunk. The artist climbed back up the hatch, leaving the poet moaning.
The sea turned gray green as the wind came up, frothing whitecaps curling as far as the eye could see.
“Rough weather ahead,” said the captain. “Let’s hope it clears before we reach Palo.”
Caravaggio eyed the purple-black clouds. In the distance he could see squalls ripping across the sea, churning the waves white.
“How long do we dock in Palo?”
“Only long enough to show the Roman officials your papers. They mark your entry in their ledger. Then you are back on board.”
Caravaggio looked back at the squalls. A gray shroud of rain descended and the wind began to howl.
“Take down the mainsail. Tighten the jib,” shouted the captain.
Sharp, stinging rain pelted Caravaggio’s skin. The boat lurched up and smacked down hard, knocking him off his feet.
“Get below, signore!” shouted the captain.
Caravaggio went down through the hatch, his fists clinging to the rope ladder. The hatch slammed shut above him in a shower of seawater. He swung left and right, smacking against the wood. He jumped down from the ladder, sprawling across the floor, next to a retching Mario Fenelli.
The stench, acrid and foul, assaulted Caravaggio’s nostrils. The timbers of the boat squeaked and groaned above them.
“I hate the sea!” cried the poet, wiping the vomit from his mouth.
“Poets can’t hate the sea,” said Caravaggio. “They write odes and sonnets to it.”
He climbed into his bunk. “At least you won’t be tampering with my possessions, the state you are in,” he muttered, pulling the blanket over his nose and closing his eyes.
Dawn was still hours off when the anchor splashed into the sea and the first mate called down the hatch.
“The captain says get your papers in order. We’ll anchor here. In the morning, they’ll send a small boat to ferry us in.”
Caravaggio rolled out of his bunk and climbed up through the hatch.
The sea was still rough. The Gabbiano pulled on the anchor line, fighting left and right to free herself, like a hooked shark.
The sea air filled his lungs, salty and clean. Across the water, not far off, stood a castle, the waves beating against the seawall.
“You have pretty good sea legs for a Milanese,” said the captain, a ghostly presence in the moonlight.
“I’ve had some experience in recent years.”
The captain regarded him in the darkness. A tattered cloud sped past the moon. Both men stood silent, watching the changing light and shadow.
“They say you were a knight,” said the captain. “A Maltese knight, the Order of St. John.”
Caravaggio said nothing. Waves lapped against the boat and the rigging creaked above them.
“Beyond the castle is the customhouse,” said the captain. “There won’t be anyone there until morning, but their sentinels will have already spotted us.”
Still, Caravaggio remained silent.
“Guardi, Signor Merisi,” said the captain. “You don’t know me, but everyone in Napoli knows you. You say you have your papers in order. Bene. You’ll need them.”
“I’m traveling with special permission from the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.”
“And he’s given you approval for entry?” asked the captain. “Because, from what I know, there is a bounty on your head.”
“That’s none of your business, Capitano,” said Caravaggio.
“It will be my business if you don’t return to my ship. And that chest of yours—”
“The chest stays on board.”
“They may inspect it.”
“They may not.”
The captain snorted. “Signor Merisi, I don’t care about you. You are a difficult man to like. But I am indebted to the Colonna family—as many Napoletani are,” he said, tapping his pipe against the mast. “I know you have many enemies. I cannot protect you from them.”
“I didn’t ask you for protection.”
The captain held up his hand to silence the artist. He trained his eyes toward the coast.
“What is it?” said Caravaggio.
“What the devil are they doing?”
“What?” said Caravaggio. “I can’t see—”
“You can’t see that torch in the stern of the boat?”
“Boat?”
“The guards are rowing toward us. In the middle of the night!”
Chapter 52
LADISPOLI
Lucia spent three days in a small room on the shore west of Rome. Spring on the Mediterranean Sea was not as mild as in the city. It was raining and chilly, and the man at the hotel desk smiled—“Ciao, bella”—and charged her the off-season rate.
As soon as she got to her room, she pulled out her cell phone and checked her e-mail. There was the usual swamp of unwanted messages and one, astoundingly, from Professor Richman, a man who generally refused to have anything to do with such nonsense as e-mail.
“Great news!” he exulted. The painting had been removed from the damask lining. The poemetto was there, exactly as Fenelli had transcribed it. But—better yet!—the “anomalies in the texture” turned out to be a single thin sheet of parchment, a document of some kind. There was going to be a presentation on it at the symposium.
In a gesture of celebration, Lucia turned off her cell phone and stuffed it deep into her suitcase. She didn’t need any more messages.
She felt as if she had escaped. Escaped from being the only one insisting Te-Te’s painting had to be real, whatever the cost. In a few days, she would speak at the symposium, and whatever she said would be overwhelmed by the brilliantly credentialed voices of the experts who would agree with her—and drown her out in the process.
It was a perfect ending, as far as she was concerned. A perfect time to get on with something else, because this wasn’t going any further. Not for her anyway. The experts would take it from here. Eventually, the painting would be auctioned and the proceeds would go to Te-Te’s orphanage.
Maybe it was time for her to move on with Moto’s happy ending and head back to the States, where eventually she could be his great American friend. Maybe. The uncertainty of what might come next gnawed at her.
Here on the coast, the weather was gray and the beaches were gritty, but the sound of the waves helped calm her down.
The first night, staring out to sea, she thought about disappearing. It was a good time for her to slip out. And everything here would go on perfectly well without her.
She could even go right now. Forget the symposium. What did she care? Just get on a plane and it
was done.
But she didn’t. She spent the next two days walking on the beach, dressed warmly against the sea-chilled wind, seeking out sheltered places to sit and listen to the waves.
Sit and listen and consider that, no, she hadn’t escaped. She might step out of the story now, but people had died. People who would still be alive if she had simply let it go. If she hadn’t insisted on finding Te-Te. Hadn’t gotten in touch with him. Hadn’t felt so strongly when she did meet him.
She had done all that.
And she still didn’t know why.
She was barely five when she was sent away to live with her nonna. And Te-Te was much older. One of the adulti, the adults. He must have only been in his twenties, but when you’re five, they’re all just huge and old and Te-Te was one of them.
That was all she remembered. The only scraps she’d been able to fish out of that fog. Not much. No reason to care about Te-Te. Except, years later, Nonna had spoken his name in the last hours before she died. There was something in her voice that sounded like unfinished business, a family story to track down. A mission for Lucia to focus on during her time in Italy. If she found him, he might be the only person still alive that she remembered from the days in the village when she was young. That was something.
It was part of the reason she enrolled in the seminar in Monte Piccolo—she knew Te-Te lived just a few hours’ drive away.
And if she hadn’t done that, if she’d gone to school in Rome, Te-Te would still be alive. No visiting American “experts” from the art seminar to stir up the orphans and the thieves.
That’s where it all started. With her. So, no, she wasn’t off the hook for any of it.
But the crashing surf did help.
After two long days and restless nights, Lucia packed her suitcase and took a taxi a few kilometers down the coast to Palo. The Posta Vecchia was an elegant manor house hotel, originally a simple inn on the coastal road north from Rome. It had been built centuries ago by a prince, conveniently close to his castle. In the twentieth century, it had passed on to a modern-day prince, an American oil billionaire who converted it to his own private villa. Now it was a small, nearly perfect hotel, beyond deluxe in a slightly informal way, a grand old house looking out over the water. Way out of Lucia’s league, of course, but as a presenter at the symposium, this was where she stayed. It was a short drive from where she’d spent the past days, but it was a different world.
She unpacked her bags in a room with a beautiful view over the sea and then went out to find her way along the shore toward the castle. The castle was centuries older than the hotel and had certainly loomed—grim and forbidding then as now—over Caravaggio’s ship as it approached land.
She made her way along a narrow strip of beach and then up onto the rocks piled along the shore beneath the walls of the castle.
This was the spot, the last place where anyone had almost certainly seen Caravaggio alive, the point in time and space where the mystery of his death really began.
It was the beginning of the trail she had been following back in time, back from Te-Te’s chapel through counts and countesses, knights and fools and scoundrels, a monk and a poet-thief. Here is where it started, and now here is where it would end. For her, in any case.
She turned her back to the castle and looked out to sea.
The surf broke on the rocks and the wind blew a chill spray into her face.
When Lucia woke the next morning, the hotel was full and cheerfully bustling. She went down to the elegant breakfast room and sipped a cappuccino. The tables were filled with chattering groups of what seemed to be old friends and acquaintances who’d all spent years traveling the symposium circuit.
A flutter of action caught her eye, and she glanced up to see Professor Richman sweep into the room, in an elegant blazer with a deep-red scarf at his throat. He looked to fit in perfectly with the rest of the crowd, and Lucia wondered for a moment if he would strike up conversations, find new friends, and abandon her to get by on her own. She knew she could, although she wasn’t certain she wanted to.
The professor stopped, looked around, broke into a smile, and headed straight for Lucia. As he crossed the room, she saw that he had an ebony silver-headed cane in his hand, though he certainly wasn’t leaning on it for support. He bent over, kissed her on the cheek, and settled into a chair.
“My dear young lady . . .”
“Ralphie . . .”
They laughed and settled in to sip cappuccinos and talk with the freedom of old friends who had nothing to do but relax and enjoy themselves in this perfect seaside retreat.
When she asked about the cane, he cocked his head and said, “Looks distinguished, don’t you think?”
A raised eyebrow was her only response, and Professor Richman shrugged. “And that knee of mine does act up from time to time. I’m getting too old to stumble and fall.”
“You getting old, Ralphie? Never!”
He gave a self-deprecating smile and they moved on to other subjects.
After half an hour, Lucia was getting ready to excuse herself and go up to her room when she looked toward the door.
And there was Moto.
His expression was uncertain. His eyes darted, scanning the room.
Lucia jumped to her feet and rushed over. Before he could say a word, she embraced him, gave him a solid kiss, and stepped back to look him in the eye.
“Amico mio.” My friend.
Then she hugged him hard, which she hoped settled all of that. For now, at least.
Moto’s discomfort dissolved in a smile. He threw his arms around her and—still and always Moto—almost knocked a tray full of elegant breakfasts out of the hands of a passing waiter.
Lucia led him back to the breakfast table. The professor rose to his feet, and the two men reached out for a handshake—then Moto pulled the professor closer, or perhaps it was the professor who pulled Moto closer, and the handshake turned into a gently awkward embrace. Lucia smiled and threw her arms around their shoulders, joining all three of them in what became a thoroughly awkward embrace. For a long moment, they stood in warm silence.
Then Moto stepped back abruptly and sat—almost collapsed—into a chair. He took a deep breath and leaned forward, his face grim, as the others sat down. All the joy of a few moments ago was gone.
“They found a body.” His voice was thin and tight.
No one reacted.
“No clothes. No identification. But tattoos. The Maltese cross with an R above it. Two of them. One on his hip and the other below that, on his thigh.” His eyes darted back and forth from Lucia to the professor. “And between them—”
“Wait!” Professor Richman broke in. “Don’t say it.”
“What?” Lucia had no idea what he was talking about.
The professor looked at Moto. “Between the crosses there was a tattoo reading something like ‘J fifteen eight.’ Right, Moto?”
Moto nodded. His lips pressed thin.
“Judges 15:8,” said the professor, sounding almost annoyed. “Samson and the Philistines. ‘He smote them hip and thigh.’ Hip and thigh. This Roero gang was in a fever of biblical megalomania.”
“Not ‘was,’ ‘is,’” said Moto. “They found the body three days ago. Dead a day at most. Shot in the back of the head.”
The sky out over the sea was improbably beautiful. Rose and delicate pink, a canopy of glorious light. But dark clouds were blossoming, drowning the colors as Lucia stood at her window.
Lucia didn’t notice.
She was holding a single sheet of paper in her hand. It had been sitting on her bed—on her pillow—when she returned to the room after an early dinner. Its presence was unsettling. Its contents worse. She had read it once, twice, and then, obsessively, a third and fourth time.
The handwriting was precise, careful, the message less so.
I know who you are. I know your family. I know their secrets. I can tell you what you need to know. Tonight at midnight, below the
castle, at the edge of the Mare Tyrrhenum.
That much of the note was at least comprehensible. Then it continued, the handwriting still perfect, even as the message ran wild.
You must choose whether you will be Queen Tamar the Great who inspired her troops to victory over the Sultan of Rûm and his vile Muslim hordes at Basian. Or the Whore of Babylon, clutching her golden cup full of abominations and the filth of her fornication, running with the dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters! The truth awaits in the dark at the edge of the waters! The decision is yours.
It was signed with a single initial: R.
She stood motionless as the sky turned black over the Tyrrhenian Sea, Mar Tirreno in Italian. And for some reason, the note’s lapse into Latin—Mare Tyrrhenum—tore at her mind almost more than the ravings from the Book of Revelation. Or the reference to the unknown Tamar the Great.
A speedboat cut across the dark water, moving fast, carving a wake, searchlight dicing the black. If Lucia had been outside in the night, she would have heard the slap of its hull against the waves, like gunshots above the roar of the surf.
The night deepened as, one by one, the lights inside the hotel went dark. The gibbous moon had disappeared, swallowed by black clouds. As the darkness became nearly complete, she threw open the window. The roar of the surf was deafening. The wind rose, as if to match the sea. Flags of foam were torn from the crests of the waves, and the air was wet and heavy with the tang of salt.
She knew he was out there in the dark.
Roero.
Whoever he was.
She wasn’t crazy. He was real. Very real. And the people he murdered were very dead.
She thought of those people who would still be alive if she hadn’t been compelled to find the tough-guy priest she’d never really known. And then compelled to prove to the world that he wasn’t a fool.
Right now she was the fool. Because only a fool would answer this call from an obvious madman. But she knew she had to.
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