by David Hewson
It was getting ridiculous. Rosa was racing these black streets in vain. Peroni was breathless, trying to keep up with her. Even if Teresa could have picked up the phone and brought in support, she doubted they’d have much chance of tracking down a lone figure, in a dark coat, face unseen, on a night like this.
Then, to her astonishment, she saw him. Him. It was the centre screen on the monitor. He was stopping to take cash from an ATM machine in the Via della Scrofa, his black frame captured perfectly by the surveillance camera situated to keep an eye on the location. She watched. The machine coughed up. Lots and lots of notes that went straight into his coat pockets. Not the kind of amount you’d take out for a night on the town. He had a scarf up tight around his face. She couldn’t see who he was. But this was the same man, Teresa knew. It had to be: the stance, the clothes, the shifty way he kept his head down . . . Instantly, she was on the line to Rosa, sending her in the right direction, with Peroni, breathing heavily down the phone line, some way behind.
Then, as she heard Peroni’s rasping, loud voice bellow something she couldn’t hear, the landline handset on the table rang. She knew she ought to ignore it. But this being Leo Falcone’s apartment, the man had to have one of those newfangled phones with a little panel on the top that told you the number of the person calling, and the name if you’d put it into the address book.
It was flashing at her now and it said: Questura—Falcone.
Typical. He even keyed in his own office phone number.
“What?” she yelled when she picked it up.
There was a pause. Falcone never liked shouting unless it came from him.
“I was merely calling in to enquire about progress.”
“We have him, Leo,” she yelled back. “He came along and tried to scrape that stupid poster of yours off the statue.”
“You saw him? Who he was?”
“No! Do you ever look at these little toys of yours before you give them to other people to play with? You can’t see people’s faces very well. Particularly when they’ve got their collars turned up. Have you seen the weather out there?”
The brief silence that followed was so typical of the man she wanted to scream. Leo Falcone had many talents, and one of them was the unerring ability to hear something in your own voice you desperately didn’t want him to detect.
“I told you to try to identify him, either visually or by tracing where he went,” he said. “Nothing more. Well?”
“Peroni’s going crazy, Leo. Emily died, remember?” she screeched. “We can’t all just bottle up our emotions like you. . . .”
It was uncalled for, unfair, and, quite simply, cruel. Falcone felt the loss as much as anyone. Perhaps his inability to show that made it worse. She would never know.
“I’m sorry—” she began.
“Where is he?” the calm, distanced voice interrupted. “Where’s Peroni? And Prabakaran?”
She rattled off the street names in an instant. Then the phone went dead without another word.
“You’re welcome,” Teresa murmured, and stuffed the mobile headset back on. It took a moment before she realised both Rosa and Peroni were screaming for directions over the crackly line.
“He’s leaving a cash machine in the Via della Scrofa, still going north,” she said without thinking. “Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Anywhere in that area. Also, I suspect Leo’s on his way, too, so be careful.”
Peroni said something quite unlike him. He sounded old, she thought. Old and thoroughly pissed off with the job. And that wasn’t just because of Emily or the mess that had followed.
“Be careful,” she murmured again, to no one, and then went quiet. “He’s taken some money. A lot of money.”
A thought came to her: it was only intuition, but it had seemed, for a moment, as if this were a strange, foreign act. A man taking out cash from a street machine, something he didn’t do often. Then putting all that money straight into the pockets of his coat, not a wallet.
“I think it’s Franco Malaspina,” she said quietly. “Or someone else who isn’t in the habit of keeping a lot of cash about his person. The rich are like that, aren’t they?”
The figure in black had stopped under a streetlight. She watched as he paused, took out a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and lit one. It made a small white point of light on the monochrome screen. He seemed so calm, so certain of himself. For a second the light of a passing vehicle caught his face. With a flash of her fingers, she stopped the video, rewound a couple of frames, and froze the picture. It might be Malaspina. There wasn’t enough in the way of detail to tell one way or another.
No more traffic came along to help. The roads were empty. It was getting late.
The figure stood back from the rain-filled gutter as a dark and shiny new van drove up. It stopped by the side of him. A man got out. He wore a hooded anorak, the top close around his head. Unrecognisable in their similar clothes, the two of them exchanged words.
She watched what happened next and felt her mind go numb.
The second man went to the rear of the van, took out something the length of a child’s arm, and began to examine it under the streetlight. He passed it to his colleague. Quickly, with the swift, professional skill she’d expect of a soldier or a cop who’d spent too long in weapons training, the first man in black bent back into the open van and removed a stack of cartridges, loaded several into the repeating magazine, then tucked the sawn-off shotgun beneath his coat before slamming the door shut.
Then the two of them got back in the van and began to drive away. North. Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Towards Ortaccio.
“Gianni!” she yelled into the neck mike. “For Christ’s sake! Peroni!”
Her voice rang around Leo Falcone’s empty dining room. Nothing came back from the phone but static.
Six
HE COULD FEEL HIS HEART POUNDING AGAINST HIS RIBS, his breath coming in short, painful gasps. Peroni was running along some dark, nameless alley leading off the Via della Scrofa, seeing Rosa’s short, dark frame ahead, steadily adding to the distance between them.
“Leo?” he barked into the neck mike. “Leo?”
The walls were high around him: five or six storeys of apartments set over stores that were full of Christmas gifts, lights dimly twinkling over jewellery and paintings, upmarket clothes and furniture, all the pricey individual glitter that took place at ground level, in public, in this part of the city.
Even so, he found himself yelling out loud, looking like a madman to anyone watching, screaming into the blackness, at nothing but his neck mike, “For Christ’s sake, man. There are two bastards with shotguns wandering out here. Forget the rules. Call in backup.”
There was no reply. Teresa had already told him Falcone had left the Questura for the scene. Was he bringing support? The sight of two armed men wandering through Rome at night was certainly good reason to do so. But if they were from the Ekstasists . . . Peroni knew enough about the labyrinthine workings of the Italian legal system to understand why Falcone might have reservations. With good lawyers and bottomless pockets, it might be easy to get away with a simple fine for possession of a weapon in a public place, and bury forever the prospects of a conviction for Emily and the dead of the Vicolo del Divino Amore.
A good minute before, Rosa had turned a corner, heading left, straight into the web of ancient twisting lanes that led towards the place where those women had been dug out of the cold grey Roman earth, retrieved from the rubble of centuries, wrapped in plastic like still, dark grubs trapped inside a tight cocoon.
He listened to the lilting sound of another female voice, excited, breathless over the open communications line, chanting the names of streets so old, so obscure, he’d never really understood what they meant.
Gasping for breath, cursing his age, Peroni leaned against a wall that was damp from the rain and black with grime and soot.
“Wait for me,” he panted.
“How long?” she demanded.
> “Tell me where. It’s the studio, isn’t it?”
“No,” Rosa said anxiously. “I thought so too. But they turned away from that one block away. They’re going around the back of the Palazzo Malaspina. Towards the Piazza Borghese. Maybe . . .” She hesitated. “Are we sure these are the right people?” she asked. “This looks like a robbery or something.”
It was Teresa who answered. Peroni felt remarkably grateful for the simple sound of her voice.
“It’s them,” she said simply over the line. “Leo? For God’s sake, are you there?”
Silence.
“Wait for me,” Peroni ordered, and began to run again, his legs leaden from the effort, his body soaked in a cold and clammy sweat.
Seven
COSTA STARED AT THE TITLE HE’D UNCOVERED WITH THE chisel. Agata had let go of his arm now. She was crouched down, examining the words with a magnifying glass she had retrieved from the set of tools on the table behind.
The letters appeared carved in an archaic script that was similar to those on the title plate that had been used to cover them, though these were more elegant, more individual. It occurred to him that the two had, perhaps, been contemporaneous, the second placed over the other shortly after the painting was completed, as if to hide it from view, perhaps in a hurry.
The words read: Evathia in Ekstasis.
“It means nothing to me,” he confessed.
“It means everything,” she murmured, and he could hear the trepidation in her voice.
She lifted the glass so that he could see the words more closely. As he did so he realised they weren’t carved at all. That was simply a trick of the artist. They were painted onto the wood in a style designed to imitate the cut and gouge of a chisel. There were scratch marks there, too, fine lines, just as there were on the painting.
“He painted the title?” he asked. “Caravaggio? Why would he do that? Surely it was beneath him?”
“He did it for the best reason of all. No one else would. No one else dared.”
Costa stepped back and had to fight to turn his attention away from the canvas. The woman there, her mouth half open in that eternal sigh, seemed so lifelike he felt that he would touch warm flesh if he were rash enough to reach out and place a single finger on her pale, perfect skin.
“This was a private painting,” he said. “For a man’s bedroom. Kept behind a curtain. I still don’t understand why he’d have to put a name on it himself. And why that would need to be covered up so quickly.”
She’d gone back and retrieved the glass of water he’d fetched for her, and was now sipping it, eyes sharp and thoughtful, shaded a little with fear.
“Evathia is the Greek for ‘Eve.’ Evathia in Ekstasis means ‘Eve in Ecstasy.’ This isn’t Venus at all, though there is a tradition in some quarters to associate the two of them. Remember the Madonna del Parto? Mary with Jesus on her lap. Or Venus with Cupid. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. They’re both associated with the spring, with birth and fecundity.”
“So?” he asked.
“So imagine, Nic. Imagine that the owner of this painting realised how dangerous it was, even hidden behind a curtain. To protect himself he had the artist put a new name on it and afterwards, unless you knew the secret, your perspective was changed. The painting was tamed. We were tamed. Not him, surely. Or . . .” Her eyes never left him. “. . . those who came after and knew what this really was, those who owned it in the years that followed. When someone outside the secret is allowed to see the canvas, we see the new name, not the real one. We behold the beautiful satiated woman and the apple and assume this is Venus with the fruit Paris gave her. Not something else, the elemental gift Eve plucked from the tree. We see this bearded, lascivious figure and assume he is some kind of satyr. But where are the horns? Where are the goat’s legs? This isn’t a satyr at all. This is . . .” Her eyes lost their focus. She was thinking, and deeply shocked by what that revealed. “. . . blasphemy. And pornography.”
His head whirled with images, other canvases, other works by Caravaggio, as his mind fought to find some comparison with what he saw now, so close he felt he could sense Michelangelo Merisi’s presence alive in the room.
“We’re meant to witness what only God saw before, Adam and Eve at their first coupling,” Agata murmured, almost to herself. “ ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife.’ Genesis 4:1, directly after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The Lord said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Full of that knowledge, they make love, and the world loses its innocence. Seven verses later Cain kills Abel. Lust and evil with all their consequences are set loose on humanity. Caravaggio paints the very instant the world turned, when, with that single sigh of ecstasy, Pandora’s Box is opened, and everything we now think of as good and bad comes flying out, never to be confined again.”
It was cold in the studio, and deathly quiet. She glanced at Costa, guilt and fear etched in her dark features.
“This is the moment of the Fall. The instant no one ever dared depict before because it was too intimate, too shocking,” she murmured. “Caravaggio seeks to be both sacred and profane at the same time, and to engage us in his guilt for doing so, since this canvas only becomes each of those things because of our presence here, our shared part in that original sin.”
She shook her head, then glared at him. “Why did Leo Falcone give me this? Why me?”
If she was right—and it seemed impossible to think otherwise—this surely was the worst sight with which to confront a woman like Agata Graziano. It was something a sister of the cloth was never supposed to face. Perhaps—and he realised this was a thought that had been dogging him since they first met—it stirred doubts, about herself, her calling, even her religion, that had been swimming around that intelligent head for years.
She deserved the truth, he thought.
“Because Franco Malaspina’s gang of thugs call themselves the Ekstasists,” Costa said quietly, feeling sick with guilt. “Because we need to stop them.”
Her hair flew furiously around her shaking head.
“What? What?”
“I’m sorry, Agata. We never knew.”
“This dispensation is done with,” she spat back at him, livid, her eyes bright with rage. “Take me back to my convent. None of this concerns me now.”
Her arms gripped her small frame tightly. Costa didn’t know what to say or do to comfort this woman. He could only guess at the whirling conflict occurring inside her at that instant. And yet . . . she couldn’t take her eyes off the canvas.
“I’ll drive you,” he said. “Please . . .”
Then there was an unexpected sound, one that made them both start with shock. His phone had sprung to life, shrieking in his jacket pocket with a harsh, electronic tone that was out of place in the studio, an unwelcome intruder from another world.
Costa took it out and tried to listen.
Something got in the way. It was the growing noise of voices, angry voices, shouting, bellowing, from outside the door, down the long dark corridor where the security guard in the blue suit had been gently dozing, a revolver at his waist.
As they listened, too taken aback to speak, the roar of a weapon rent the air. Costa felt seized by a sudden spasm of cold dread. He recognised the precise timbre of that sound. He had heard it once before, in the muddy grass at the foot of the Mausoleum of Augustus, the moment Emily had been ripped from the living.
Agata was walking towards the door, furious.
He raced to intervene, grabbed her roughly around the waist, and stopped her forcefully. Two small brown fists beat on his chest. Agata Graziano’s tearstained eyes stared at him in rage and fear.
He was an off-duty cop, chasing the ghost of an idea, with nothing in the way of official police backing. That meant many things. But at that moment, more than anything, it meant he didn’t have a gun.
“We need somewhere to hide,” Costa said, scanning the room.
A second e
xplosion burst down the corridor, echoing off the thick stone walls of this distant, half-forgotten outpost of the Palazzo Malaspina. Afterwards the air was filled with the rank dry smell of spent ammunition, and the sound of a man in agony.
Eight
THERE WERE TOO MANY DARK STREETS, TOO MANY DISTURBING possibilities running through Leo Falcone’s head. He’d heard Peroni’s bellowed call over the open voice link. Then he’d issued a single order before sending his Lancia screaming hard across the black, slippery cobblestones of this tangled quarter of the centro storico.
The two men weren’t heading for the Vicolo del Divino Amore but for Agata’s laboratory. That could only mean one thing. They wanted the painting.
He had pushed his luck to the limits, setting up a private, possibly illegal, covert operation with the sole aim of placing unauthorised surveillance on Malaspina and his accomplices. He could put up with the heat from that if he had a conviction, certain and guaranteed, lying down the line. If there was the slightest doubt, the tiniest crack through which these most slippery of men might wriggle, then he would be lost. They would escape once more, for good in all probability. His career would be over, alongside that of Peroni and possibly Costa and Rosa Prabakaran too. He had no great concern about his own fate; he surely did not wish to share it with others. However loudly Peroni yelled, Falcone was determined he would not call in for assistance until he was certain it was both necessary and would result in success.
The long, sleek car sped along the Via della Scrofa, now just a minute, perhaps two, away from the half-hidden lane where the Barberini’s outpost lay.
There was one other cop in the vicinity, too, Falcone remembered, at the party in the palace nearby. He was reluctant to involve him, given the history. But they were shorthanded. They needed help.