by David Hewson
What was it Bea had said the day of the funeral? For pity’s sake, Nic, let a little of this grief go. He hadn’t wept, not truly, not yet. The taut dark tangle of loss and anger remained locked inside him. In the company of Teresa and Peroni—Falcone too—up to a point, it was easy to pretend it wasn’t there, until they started subtly introducing the subject into the conversation. Talking to Agata Graziano, a woman of the Church, quite unlike any he’d ever met, that inner act of delusion was possible too. But the knot remained, begging for release, like some bitter black tumour inside, waiting to be excised.
Then Agata reached the door of her room, the focus of her tight, enclosed universe of intellect, and turned on the light. Costa found himself dazzled once more by the painting, which, under the glare of the harsh artificial bulbs, seemed to shine with a force and power that burned even more brightly than they had during the day.
She walked over to the computer and called up a familiar painting on the screen: a stricken man on the ground, an executioner standing over him, clutching a knife.
“What can you tell me about this?” she demanded, returning, so easily, to the role of teacher.
“The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Valletta, Malta. Caravaggio painted it while he was in exile from Rome, trying to be a knight and failing.”
She looked unimpressed. “In order to become an apprentice knight of the Order of Saint John, he would have had to swear an oath that went something like ‘Receive the yoke of the Lord, for it is sweet and light. We promise you no delicacies, only bread and water, and a modest habit of no price.’ Bit of a comedown after the Palazzo Madama and Del Monte’s bohemian crowd. No wonder the poor boy didn’t stick it. You’re giving me history, Nic. Facts, for pity’s sake. I can get those from a book. I want more. I want insight.”
He felt tired. He didn’t want to go on. He needed sleep, needed a break from this world that Agata had dragged him into. It possessed too many uncomfortable dimensions. It was the universe that Caravaggio had spun around himself, and it was too real, too full of flesh and blood and suffering.
Nevertheless, the memories were there. He’d spent so much of his life, before the arrival of Emily, in the company of this man. It was impossible to break that bond now.
Costa sighed and pointed at the stricken Baptist, dying on the grimy stone of the prison cell, his executioner about to finish the act with a short knife drawn from behind his back.
“He signed it,” Costa said wearily. “It’s the only painting he ever put his name to. It’s in the blood that flows from the saint’s neck.”
“Really?” she asked. “You’ve been to Malta? You’ve seen his name there?”
“I can’t go everywhere there’s a Caravaggio painting, Agata. Can’t this wait until the morning?”
“No.” She frowned. “I’ve never been to Malta. They won’t let that painting travel. It’s the only one of his important works I’ve never seen. One day perhaps. But now. Look!”
She hammered at the computer keys and zoomed in on the focal point, the dying man, and then, more closely, the pool of gore running in a thick lifelike flow from his neck.
“Use your eyes, Nic, not secondhand knowledge. There is no name. He didn’t sign this painting. You picked that up from a book, like everyone else. Paintings are to be seen, not read. What Caravaggio writes in the saint’s blood is f. michel. Which, depending on your viewpoint, means frater Michelangelo—to denote his joy at becoming this trainee knight. Or, perhaps, fecit, to denote his authorship of the painting. I know which I believe. Three months later he was expelled from the order, from Malta entirely, ‘thrust forth like a rotten and fetid limb,’ they said in the judgment, which they delivered to him in front of this selfsame masterpiece. There’s gratitude.”
He shook his head. “I give up. I am tired. I am stupid. I do not see the connection.”
She dragged him back to the luminous canvas that dominated the room.
Costa stood in front of the naked red-haired woman, who seemed so close she was real, her pale, fleshy back towards him, her mouth open, legs tantalisingly apart, sigh frozen in time, watched by the leering satyr with Caravaggio’s own face, holding music that clearly came from the same brush as that in the Doria Pamphilj earlier in the day.
“You will stand there until you see something,” Agata ordered. “Concentrate your attention on the area beneath this lady’s torso, please. I offer that advice out of more than mere decorum. Now I must fetch something.”
With that, she left the room.
He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, then focused on the painting. The nude female form swam in front of his eyes. It was the most seductive, the most dreamlike, of compositions, from her perfect, satiated body to the lascivious satyr and the two cherubs—putti, common symbols in religious Renaissance painting, though here they had a more earthly and lewd aspect, each fixed on the woman’s orgasmic cry. One sang from the left-hand corner. The second perched in a perfect blue sky, carelessly pouring some ambrosial fluid from a silver jug, the thin white stream spilling into the goblet below, then—he could see this now he had learned to stand close—running over the edges, down to a hidden point behind and beyond the central figure’s fulsome torso.
It was hard to concentrate on the area she had indicated. This part of the canvas contained nothing: no object, no intriguing swirl of pigment, no depth or the slightest attempt to create it. What he saw, beneath the gentle curve of the nude’s ample thighs, was a patch of vermilion velvet, lacking the sheen and texture of the remaining fabric around her, the coverlet on which she lay.
He stared and he thought. When Agata came back, carrying something he didn’t dare look at, Costa said, “This isn’t right.”
“Go on,” she urged.
“You told me it had been X-rayed. That it was impossible it had been under-painted and over-painted.”
She was doing something with her hands, down at her waist. He still lacked the courage to look.
“For a policeman you are remarkably imprecise at times. What I said was that it was clear this had not been painted over another work.”
“Perhaps it’s been restored.”
She shook her head. “There isn’t the slightest sign of any general restoration. My guess is this canvas has been in storage for years. Centuries perhaps. Even when it was on display it would have stood behind a curtain, which would have blocked out any daylight, were people stupid enough to position it near a window. It’s never needed restoring. What you see, for the most part, is what Caravaggio painted a little over four hundred years ago.”
For the most part.
“Here,” he said immediately, and pointed to the plain flat patch of paint. “I thought it had to be restoration. It lacks anything. Depth or substance, interest or any deliberate withdrawal of interest, which is what I’d expect of an area of the canvas that he didn’t feel was of great importance.”
She said nothing, simply gazed up at him with that pert dark face, smiling.
“I could have painted that,” Costa said. “And I can’t paint.”
“You can learn, though,” she replied, grinning.
Finally, he looked at what she was doing. He found it hard to believe.
“What’s that?” he asked, knowing the answer. “What are you doing?”
“This is white base and ammonia,” Agata said, dipping the small, strong brush she held in her right hand deep into a tin pot of pale paste that had a distinctive and pungent smell.
She moved in closer to the surface of the canvas, her eyes focused on the area beneath the flaring swell of the nude’s thigh.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m removing some paint.”
Three
PERONI RAN TOWARDS PASQUINO, FEELING HIS AGEING legs complain beneath him. He wasn’t fast enough anymore. By the time he made it to the battered statue, now with newly shredded scraps of paper scattered over the litter at its base, there was no sign of their man in the steady winter ra
in, no dark figure hurrying through the vast, nearly deserted stadium of the Piazza Navona.
Rosa, keeping up easily with his pace, gave him a sideways look, one he recognised because Costa did it a lot these days too. It said: I’m younger than you, and quicker. This is my call.
“Teresa,” he barked at the neck mike of the phone, “did you see where he went?”
He still wasn’t happy about Rosa being on the case. The girl was inexperienced. She was angry at the way her insight into the investigation had been ignored by her boss, Susanna Placidi. More than anything, in Peroni’s view, she was still marked by the grim Bramante affair that previous spring, a dark, brutal investigation in which the young agente had been attacked by a man who had played the police with the same cruel skill the Ekstasists now appeared to possess, and the same relish too.
“What am I?” the voice in his ear snapped back. “Surveillance now? Of course I didn’t see. These cameras aren’t everywhere.”
“Look north,” Rosa suggested. “He wouldn’t have gone into Navona if he wanted to head in any other direction. He’d have been doubling back on himself.”
She’d keyed herself in to the conference call. Peroni should have expected that. All the young ones were so bright when it came to playing with toys. So were Malaspina and his men. But toys didn’t protect you forever, no matter which side you were on.
“I’m looking,” Teresa answered. “This would all be so much easier if we could call in for support.”
“We can’t!” Peroni yelled. “You know it.”
The line went quiet for a moment.
“I know, I know it. I was just saying. I don’t want you racing round Rome on foot, pretending you’re a teenager. You’re old, you’re unfit, and you’re overweight.”
“It’s pissing with rain, I am looking for a murder suspect, and I have no idea what to do next,” he snapped back. “I am so honoured to receive your personal views on my physical state at a moment such as this.”
He was gasping for breath, too, and his heart was pounding like some crazy drum. She was right, and he wished there were some way he could hide that fact.
“Well?” the pathologist asked.
Rosa could probably outrun even Costa, he thought. Nic was a long-distance man, built for endurance, not speed.
“Find him, and Rosa can go ahead.”
He looked at the young woman in the cheap black coat. If he’d been back on vice, he’d have been wondering why exactly she was out on the street on a night like this, flitting through the trickle of late-night shoppers and revellers brave enough to dodge the rain. She was listening to every word, eyes gleaming with anticipation.
“You do nothing without my permission,” he ordered, jabbing a finger in the air to make the point.
“Sir,” she said, with a quick salute.
Peroni heard a familiar sigh of relief in his earpiece.
“There,” Teresa declared. “That was so easy. I picked him up a moment ago. At least I think it’s him. If it is, he did go north. He’s not running. He’s walking nice and slowly. I imagine he thinks he’s passing for one more idiot getting wet out shopping for the night.”
“Where?” Peroni yelled.
“Going right past that funny old church, Sant’Agostino. You know, if I were a betting person—and I am—I’d say he’s headed back to where this all began. The Vicolo del Divino Amore. Or thereabouts. What did Nic call it?”
“Ortaccio,” Peroni murmured, remembering. Then he watched Rosa Prabakaran set up a steady, speedy pace north, out past Bernini’s floodlit fountain of the rivers, picking up speed to put a distance between them he’d find hard to close.
There were still a few stalls left out from the Christmas fair. Men were putting away sodden cloth dolls of La Befana, the witch, dragging in sticks of sugar candy from the wet, covering up the stalls of Nativity scenes as they were buffeted by the choppy winter wind. He looked up and saw the moon caught between a scudding line of heavy black clouds. A spiral of swirling shapes, starlings he guessed, wheeled through the air. It was Christmas in Rome, cold and wet and pregnant with some kind of meaning, even for a failed Catholic like him.
There were times, lately, when Gianni Peroni wished he could remember how to pray. Not the actions or the words. Simply the ability to reconnect with the sense he’d once possessed as a child that there was some link, some bright live fuse, that ran from him to something else, something kind and warm and eternal. Meaningful and yet beyond comprehension, which made it all the more comforting for the solitary, insular child he had been.
After one quick curse at the rain, he began to follow, heart pumping, head searching for solutions.
Four
IT WAS LIKE WATCHING A SURGEON AT WORK. AGATA Graziano pulled over an intense white lamp and bent down to the base of the canvas, applying the paste in small squares, one at a time, with a compact paintbrush, then removing it quickly with another solution that smelled of white spirit.
She worked slowly, patiently, with a hand so steady Costa couldn’t imagine how such precision was possible.
And as she laboured, something began to emerge from beneath the pigment that had been dashed on, then revarnished, to hide it.
He lost track of time. She sent him for some water, for her, not the process. When he came back, he looked at this woman. He’d not met Agata Graziano before that day, yet now he felt he knew her, in part at least. There was an expression in her eyes—excitement, trepidation, perhaps a little fear—that he connected with, and that connected the two of them too. This painting contained something she needed to know, had to know, with the same relentless hunger he felt. There was a shared desperation between them, and he wondered what pain on her part had placed it there.
“I can’t work with you hovering over my shoulder,” she said after a while.
Beads of sweat stood on her brow, like lines of tiny clear pearls. She wore a taut, serene expression of absolute concentration. When she finally beckoned him over, he looked at his watch. She had been working on the canvas for no more than twenty-five minutes. It had seemed like hours. What he saw when he came to her side was something new and entirely unexpected. Agata had not simply uncovered a signature. She had found something else, something that took a moment to make its identity clear, because nothing he had seen, in any work of that period, by any artist, bore the slightest resemblance to what had been painted there by the artist in the original version.
It was the size of a child’s hand, a pool of white, milky liquid, the same colour as the stream that fell from the cherub’s jug and spilled over the lip of the silver goblet set by the nude’s pale thighs. The feature sat with the same sticky intensity he had seen in the puddle of gore flowing from the dying Baptist’s neck. The trickles that ran from it formed letters in the same flowing, erratic hand as on the canvas in the co-cathedral in Valetta: the writing of Caravaggio himself.
“What is it, Nic?” she asked, her voice trembling. “That substance. I need you to tell me.”
“It could be. . . . milk. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“This was a private painting. It was kept behind a curtain. Perhaps in a master’s bedroom. Perhaps in the palace of Del Monte, where Lord knows what occurred. Milk?”
He understood the question—and the answer. Agata had told him earlier that day what kind of trick the artist was playing here, putting flesh on the ideas that had been forming in his own head. This canvas was challenging the viewer to make his or her interpretation of what it portrayed, daring the beholder to transform a scene that was, at first glance, almost innocent into something else, something that became illicit, secret, intensely intimate, but only through the presence of a living human being to provide the final catalyst.
“It’s the aftermath of sex,” Costa said. “In Malta he wrote in warm blood. Here, he wrote in . . .” He stared at the leering satyr’s face, Caravaggio’s face. “He wrote in a simulacrum of his own semen.”
; She took his arm. Costa bent down to read the words as she spoke them aloud: fra. michel l’ekstasista.
“Brother—there can be no doubt about that here—Michelangelo Merisi, the Ekstasist, a made-up word,” Agata said. “This is impossible! It makes even less sense than before. What is an Ekstasist, for pity’s sake?”
He couldn’t speak. He didn’t have the courage to tell her.
She threw the damp and now misshapen paintbrush onto the stone floor and swore once more. Then she placed her small fists together and, eyes closed, looked up at the ceiling.
“Why does this elude me? Why?”
This close there was something else he noticed, and he knew why Agata had missed it. All that interested her was the canvas. Everything else was irrelevant. He remembered his old teacher’s words again. Always look at the title.
Costa walked over to the table where she kept her tools and implements. He found a small chisel and returned with it to the canvas.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
He placed the chisel beneath the nameplate. There was the smallest of gaps there.
“If we’re going to take this thing apart, we might as well do it properly. When you made me stand here staring at that part of the painting, I noticed something else. This isn’t right either.”
He forced the chisel blade beneath the plate, twisted, and forced away the wood there.
Agata came to join him, looking, staring, entranced.
“Oh my God . . .” she whispered.
Five
THIS WASN’T HER KIND OF WORK. TERESA LUPO FOUND it hard keeping her attention on ten or more tiny video screens at one time, each showing the same kinds of figures, people in dark winter coats, struggling through rain that was starting to turn sleety and driving. The man—if it still was him—had continued to head north, through the labyrinth of Renaissance alleys that had turned into the shopping streets and the offices of modern Rome.