by L. S. Hilton
‘Do you remember anything else?’
‘It was described as a sketch, in chalk with an oil. I remember that, because the English sounded strange. An oil.’
‘Elena, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t mean a thing. These provenance photos can be faked – it’s a classic. There was a couple in Germany who got away with it for years. You mock up a Victorian photo to show that your picture or whatever has been around for a while. And even if the photo is genuine, there’s no way this portrait can be real. Maybe it’s all in good faith, an honest mistake, but, please, you have to give up on this. Really. Look.’ I held out my phone, with the saved paragraph from the journal article:
*
Despite contentions that Caravaggio visited Venice on his journey to Rome from Milan in 1592 (Provorsi et al, 2001; Filicino, 1990), the hypothesis of such a visit has been definitively dismissed (Raniero, 2003) as indicative of a mere ‘fantasy of influence’ (Raniero, ibid) with regard to his Milanese tutor Peterzano. Quite simply, no evidence exists of his presence in Venice.
*
Elena looked into my face for a long moment, then lowered her eyes. I wished I hadn’t been so mean with the Pinot.
‘I am leaving Venice today. Please, let me send you the photo. And you can take my numbers?’
‘I’m sorry, Elena. I really am.’
The booze fell out of her face along with its gentleness. She leaned forward and spoke in a harsh, cold voice. ‘No, I am sorry for you. If you don’t find the picture, I think you know what will happen to you. You are young, you have many, many years ahead of you. Where would you like to spend them? Here –’ she gestured at the view, always familiar, always astonishing – ‘or in prison?’
‘You have nothing on me, Elena.’
‘Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But whatever I can do to you, believe me, you’ll be grateful for it if my husband gets to you first.’
I could feel the twitch of my pupils expanding. The clatter of cutlery and multilingual conversations suddenly roared in my ears. There it was, the rushing impulse I had felt with Alvin, that almost ecstatic departure from reality that would last until it was over and I was looking down at what I’d done. I pressed my nails into my palms. Control the consequences. Deliberately I closed my eyes, sullenly I passed her my work phone and let her send the photo across and put her details into my contacts.
Elena was assembling her handbag and sunhat. ‘I think you will be in touch. You’ll see. Take care of yourself.’
I watched her walk away with the concentrated steadiness of the practised drunk. Ignoring the ostentatious tuttings of an American couple at the next table, I lit a fag. My fingers hovered over my phone like a bloody teenager’s. And then, while I waited for the bill, I looked at the photo, then googled a map of the Grand Canal. The view from the window – I noticed that the only boats visible were gondolas – showed what looked like a corner of the Palazzo Grassi, which would place the pensione in one of the buildings opposite. Not hard to find. I tracked down the names of the palazzi, checked them in turn. All hotels. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to track down the apartment in that photo, just to ascertain that no such picture could exist? It couldn’t hurt. When I contacted Yermolov, it might even prove to be a bargaining chip, the suggestion that his sodding Caravaggio was a fake. A means of getting him off my back. Plus, I admitted, there would be a certain pleasure in imparting the information.
I thought of Masha and her network of old biddies. All of their countless relatives worked in hospitality. Maybe she might know someone who could help me find the hotel in the picture?
*
Masha didn’t respond to her buzzer, so I rummaged in my bag for a scrap of paper and hunched awkwardly on my knees to write a note. But then I didn’t like to leave that under the street door, which was kept locked since the burglary, so I buzzed my way through the neighbours until one of them let me in, and started up the stairs.
Silence is not a constant. It has different qualities – the silence of a phone ringing in an empty house, the silence of a room where someone is sleeping. The silence on Masha’s landing had a taut feeling, as though the air had been wrung free of noise behind the slightly open door. The silence of an imperceptible lack. She was lying face down on her tatty Persian rug, one black-sleeved arm stretched towards the window. Had she been trying to crawl across the room, to cry out across the rooftops for help? The purpling wound on her right temple was a painted rose on the heavy powder of her pale cheek. She looked so very small in her tight colourful shawl, a broken matryoshka dropped by a careless child. Her skirts had ruched up as she fell, exposing her shrivelled legs in their thick beige tights; there was a sharp stink of piss above the usual fug of tea leaves and dripping. I watched her hopelessly for a few endless heartbeats, but I knew there would be no breath, no stirring. Whoever had done the job would have finished it. And I had seen the crumpled emptiness of death, its subtle inhumanity.
I hooked my elbow under the door handle and stepped inside, pushing it quietly closed behind me. Kneeling, I tugged gently at the hem of her petticoat with my fingertips. At least I could make her decent. She was lying on something hard, partly concealed beneath the black nylon. I tugged it out, then pulled my hand back as though it had been scorched. It was the icon, the Madonna that had been damaged during the burglary. Half the face had been torn away.
I stepped carefully around poor Masha and went to the cubbyhole kitchen, where I retrieved a tea towel to wrap around my right hand. There was a shuddering beneath my ribs but I forced it back like a cough. Using the towel, I carefully opened Masha’s bulbous cracked handbag, which sat on a painted stool next to the door, and extracted a worn blue leather diary. I had seen her use it to contact students and note their payments – I always gave her cash, which meant that the only thing linking her to my name was my phone number in her book. Couldn’t have that lying around. I was starting to shake, gulping in the close air, but I manoeuvred the diary into my own bag and returned the towel to the kitchen. I hated that I had thought of that, but there was nothing that could help her now. Someone would come eventually, if only because of the heat.
12
And then I ran. Dodging cruise-ship crocodiles, piles of fake designer bags, plastic gewgaws, mask stalls and glass stalls, cursing the impossibility of a cab and the detritus of the Venice streets, I banged out the familiar route to the gallery, my mind keeping pace with my feet, fumbling for my keys as I passed the San Basilio vaporetto, slamming open the metal shutters with a desperate heave until the sight of what lay in there knocked the breath back out of me and I reeled back into the street to recover. Then, carefully, I stepped inside and lowered the blinds once more, blinking in the undersea twilight. The floor was a churned mass of papers, glinting with fragments of glass. The top of my beautiful desk. Less beautiful now that it was smeared all over with the new paint for the walls and the deep blue ink I used for handwriting receipts. They hadn’t had much to work with – as I said, I like to keep things tidy – but mixed with the fragments were the pieces of the delicate little espresso cups I kept for clients, my orange Venini water glasses and jug, all my kit – tape, hammers, tacks – everything crushed and trampled together. That empty space, which had so recently shone with the pleasure of my own private kingdom, was now sneering in its smallness. Automatically, I stooped and began a futile attempt at tidying, but I soon stopped. Dislocated and smashed, all my carefully chosen things were reduced to rubbish. I skirted the mess and wincingly opened the bottom drawer of the desk, closed my eyes in relief. The gun was still there.
It had been as quick a job as it looked. Not a search, a scare. Moncada’s pistol was where it always laid, underneath the false surface of the bottom drawer. I retrieved it, careful not to mark my arms with the tacky paint, and slipped it into my bag. For a long moment I stood and looked at the wreckage of everything I had thought I ever wanted. I’d seen worse installations. Maybe a better gallerist would have scrawled a title in lipstick over one
of the wrecked catalogues, pinned it to the door and flogged the whole mess off, but I had lost patience with knowing art jokes. The dim, artificially lit atmosphere recalled that of the warehouse back in London where Dave and I had spent so much time with the pictures, but the light was the only honest thing left.
*
It took me a moment to absorb that sharp, astonishing thought. What I felt, looking again at the destruction, was not rage, but relief. Never one to miss a cheap shot, my subconscious threw up another idea. Frankly, I was bored to blisters of Elisabeth Teerlinc. Yermolov’s people had smashed her shell, and suddenly, with a surprising sense of release, I could see her for the hollow fake she was. Elisabeth Teerlinc might have convinced a few idiot art buyers, but she’d never really convinced me. Try as I might to become her, her skin had always sat awkwardly. Elisabeth knew what was expected of her; Judith just hadn’t been all that interested in going along with it. The persona I had invented for Elisabeth – sleekly and discreetly Eurowealthy, vaguely educated, monstrously entitled, was the distillation of everything that Judith Rashleigh had despised. It troubled me that my model for my future self turned out to have been Angelica Belvoir all along.
And I’d done a pretty good job. So good that I couldn’t stand the sight of the result.
*
After this, Gentileschi was unlikely ever to be in business again. Nonetheless, I wasn’t ready to draw attention to that fact just yet. I spent a while shoving the debris of Elisabeth’s career into three plastic bin liners and put them out for the rubbish boat, like a good citizen. I left the shutters down and fixed the ‘Closed’ sign to the inside of the door. Yermolov’s cronies had smashed the locks – just a hammer, probably – but I reached in through the mail slot and shot the bolt at the bottom. From outside, there was nothing to alert anyone to a disturbance.
Naturally, the next thing I did was go to the bank. I cashed a personal cheque for ten thousand euro and a second for the same amount through Gentileschi. I entered the flat barrel first. The 9x21 Caracal F was the gun Moncada had pulled on Renaud the night of the murder in the Place de l’Odéon. I’d planned to dispose of it along with some other evidence – well, to be frank, along with Renaud’s head – in a Decathlon sports carrier I’d dropped into the Seine, but I’d tweaked it out at the last minute. I’d seen to Renaud with a Glock 26 procured for me by useful Dave, and that piece had also taken care of Julien, a one-time club owner, but I’d disposed of it out of the window of the night train to Amsterdam. The Caracal is not too heavy, just over 700g; even better, it has a take-down lever that allows it to be quickly disassembled. I’d kept it ever since, in the gallery, its eighteen-round box magazine fully stocked. Moncada hadn’t had a chance to fire a shot before Renaud strangled him. On the landing, I clicked the cartridge column back into place and aimed at the door, picturing a tattooed Russian head coming at me. Aim and squeeze. It seemed at first that the ghosts were having a day off. Retrieving my old passport from the linen press was almost calming; at least the spooks in there were familiar. I packed both documents – Elisabeth could come along for the ride, but I would be Judith again, for a while.
I didn’t need to pack; there were two bags waiting ready in the dressing room, black enamelled Rimowa cases with four wheels. Rimowas are heavy, but they have a removable zip lining which is handy for stashing things. Each was packed with a versatile capsule wardrobe, allowing me to curate a variety of different looks, along with identical sets of gym gear and cosmetics. One was Med-bunny style, the kinds of things I would need if I was planning to go on the lam with Tage Stahl, the other more sober and prac-tical, at least as near as my wardrobe got to it. I picked the second, lifted the folded contents to slip the gun and the bulk of the cash into the lining and spun the combination on the lock. Then I moved mechanically around the space, fastening the shutters, emptying the fridge, taking down the rubbish, building a mental dam of basic tasks. I paused to send a text to Dave:
I need a grey hat, I wrote, someone serious, asap. Thanks as ever, Jx
Dave might have gone bucolic, but he still knew people. I was thankful now that, as things sat between us, we rarely bothered with niceties. I completed the packing while I awaited his reply.
Will do. Give me a day? Hope all smooth. D
I don’t have a day.
Soonest then. Hang on.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see my pictures again, but I could try to save them. I moved the dehumidifier I had bought against the Venetian damp from the drawing room to the dressing room, fetched some cotton garment holders to shield them, then lifted them down one by one, caressing them with my eyes, letting my palms whisper over the canvases. It was when I came to my Susanna that I saw the ghosts had been busy after all.
In the painting, the almost nude young woman turns her face away over her right shoulder, in contempt for the two old men conspiring behind the wall against which she cowers. Susanna’s story is a triumph of virtue over vice – the two voyeurs lust after her as she bathes and try to blackmail her into sex, she defies them and their attempts at false testimony against her backfire and they are executed. Yet as with many canonised subjects, the depiction of Susanna is usually a pretext for porn. Why show her denouncing her accusers when one could show her naked in the water? The real subject is not vindicated innocence but the anarchy of lust, the skill with which the painter’s rendering of Susanna’s luscious flesh makes the viewer declare for the wrong side, despite himself. We see ourselves in the elders’ plotting, their besottedness, and the knowledge is disarming.
The luminous mirror of Susanna’s face was slashed beyond repair. The sfregio. Inserted into the gash was the lower half of the Madonna icon from Masha’s flat. As if Yermolov hadn’t made his point. Removing the scrap of coloured paper, I traced the tear in the painting, which rendered Susanna not only disfigured but lifeless, a flat lump of oil and colour, no longer even an object. The movement of my hands hypnotised me as I gazed at the dark wood of the mount through the hole, my fingers circling its rim. After all, there was nothing there. I watched the fingers insert themselves beneath the shredded canvas, watched it strain and split, watched the varnish crack and flake, until the canvas bubbled and sagged and the fingers closed in a fist as Susanna’s body was torn from the frame, the hands scrabbling frantically at her skin, enacting the elders’ desires, to strip her to flay her to make her shudder and gape, clutching and squeezing her loveliness into shredded ruin.
After a while I noticed that my nails were torn ragged, and there were long stripes on my arms where they had raked at my skin. There were flakes of paint in my hair, in my eyelashes, shreds and scraps of canvas in a crazed bag lady’s nest about me on the floor. The image of Masha hovered at the edge of my brain, and for a moment I considered how soothing it would be to lie there on the floor and let them come, all of them, all the ghosts, to lie quiet as they teased out all that was left of me until I was as hollow as Susanna’s frame. No. Not yet. The doors of the linen closet were in my sightline. I jumped to my feet and began to clear up the mess.
*
Now that I was finished with my preparations, the flat felt like no refuge. I considered a siesta and a bracing wank, but I just didn’t feel that way about myself any more. Masturbation can make you feel so used. And I was strangely scared that if I tried, all I would find would be blunt emptiness. Giving a final glance to see if I had missed anything, I left the bags locked inside the street door and trailed off to the campo to kill time. I took a coffee outside the flat, but I couldn’t keep still, so I walked the canals of Dorsoduro, tourist-blind, clutching my phone and checking the screen every few minutes. Finally Dave sent me a Snapcode and a time: 7 p.m. Good. I sat at another café, ordered another unwanted coffee and a bottle of water, took out my Montblanc and began to make a list.
I needed to know what Yermolov could do if he really wanted to make trouble for me, and if so, how. Most people might think that a dead teacher already represented enough trouble, it was
a beginning, merely a signal of intent. The ‘Caravaggio’ could only be a fake, but Yermolov clearly believed that it was real, and that I had it. Simply telling him I knew nothing about it, even if that were possible, wasn’t going to cut it. And from what Elena had explained, Yermolov knew I had been there in Place de l’Odéon, knew that I was connected, somehow, with Cameron Fitzpatrick’s death. If the grunts didn’t get me first, it wouldn’t be long before the police came knocking. What about Balensky? If Yermolov believed that I was in cahoots with the Man from the Stan, surely he would be anxious to dissociate himself also. I had no ideas as to how I could get to Balensky while my throat was still intact, unless he was on Tinder. I found my pen doodling a little dagger on the corner of the page. In the hieroglyphs of Russian crime, a tattooed dagger on the neck signified that the bearer had murdered someone in prison. Seeing Yury again wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but I had to know how much time and distance I could buy.
3.30 p.m. sour-mouthed from too much coffee, wandering again. Somewhere near Campo San Polo I heard the siren of the ambulance boat from the canal. It had always struck me as essentially comic that emergencies in Venice were dealt with by dashing boats, but considering where they could be on their way to, it didn’t seem that funny anymore. But right now I could only consider myself. Another table, another espresso. At exactly 7 p.m. by the clock back in the square, I entered the code.
‘White hats’ are coding experts who work legitimately, investigating problems or bugs within systems. ‘Black hats’ abuse their expertise, sometimes for profit, often for shits and giggles. ‘Greys’, obviously, sit somewhere in between. Many of them hire out to military outfits, hence my request to Dave. Once my hat and I had connected via the Snapcode, I started immediately with my questions; I didn’t introduce myself and nor did he or she.