by David Hewson
Why? Why?”
“It’s a jug,” Teresa said again.
“A poor man growing poorer sells what’s of value to others and attempts to hold on to what is of value to himself,” she declared. “This is the flask. It was like everything else. He used it more than once. I can show you the paintings if you still doubt me. Bacchus in the Uffizi. Boy Bitten by a Lizard in London. Nothing later. Nothing after he fled Rome.” She stared at them and her eyes didn’t brook any argument. “Because he didn’t have it.”
She held up the glass for them to see. There was a distinct stain, like old blood, in the base.
“Wine, I imagine,” Agata added. “There’s another reason to keep it. He could paint it. He could drink from it too.”
She noted the scepticism in their faces.
“If Caravaggio lived in that house,” she went on, “Franco Malaspina must have known. He said it himself. It’s part of the Malaspina estate, the poorer part, in Ortaccio, but property all the same. These families keep records for everything. Most of what we know about painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comes from the bookkeeping of either the Church or the aristocracy.”
“Even for me,” Teresa remarked quietly, “this is stretching things.”
“Nic! Tell them what we discovered on that painting before Franco stole it from us. Tell them!”
“We saw a signature,” he said. “Caravaggio’s. It said . . .”
He paused. All the paintings they’d seen, all the same faces, the same objects . . . these were alive in his head and intermingled, one with the other.
“It said,” Agata interjected, “fra. michel l’ekstasista. Michelangelo Merisi, the Ekstasist. Franco did not pluck the name of his murderous, thuggish gang out of the ether. He picked it out from history. Or it picked him. What he and Buccafusca and Castagna and poor, stupid Nino Tomassoni did came from that act, and it destroyed them in the end. Look . . .”
She pointed at the beautiful slumbering woman with the tear shining on her cheek like a transparent pearl.
“We know her name. Fillide Melandroni. A prostitute, a violent one, too, a woman who had been to court for marking her rivals by slashing their faces with a knife to make them less saleable. Here she is the Magdalene. Elsewhere Judith slaying Holofernes, Catherine leaning on a wall before her martyrdom. Here!”
She indicated the adjoining painting and the figure of Mary, with the infant Jesus in her arms, on the flight to Egypt.
“A holy whore,” she said quietly. “And note the dress.” She pointed at the rich olive fleur-delis brocade of the sleeping Magdalene’s flowing halter gown. “This was the costume of a moneyed Roman prostitute, the kind of woman who slept with cardinals, then talked art and philosophy with them afterwards, before going out onto the streets of Ortaccio at night and . . . what? Making mayhem with Caravaggio and his friends.”
To Costa’s astonishment, Agata reached out and touched, very briefly, the soft, pale skin of the sleeping woman on the wall.
“Both good and evil, and each to excess,” she said quietly. “Nec spe, nec metu. Without hope or fear. She was surely with them. Franco Malaspina did not invent the Ekstasists. He merely revived them, brought back from the dead the ugly gang that included Caravaggio and Fillide before everything fell apart so terribly.”
Agata took her attention away from the wall. “Here is a word I thought I would never utter,” she said again. “I read what records there were of the case against Caravaggio last night. They disclosed that one possible reason for the fight was that Ranuccio Tomassoni was Fillide’s pimp. The man who sold her to others. Is that right?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “No, no. I know it is. This is all part of your world, not mine, but yours intrudes, I can’t avoid it. Tell me also. Is it possible this was Véronique Gillet’s relationship to Franco Malaspina too? Accomplice. Lover. Muse. Fellow criminal. Could that be true?”
Costa was lost for words. Watching Agata struggle with these ideas—ones that seemed to make so much sense to him—he could see the mix of excitement and distress they caused.
“They re-created something we still don’t understand,” Agata went on. “Something to do with that painting. With Tomassoni, perhaps, or some link with Franco’s own lineage.”
Her eyes scanned each of them. “This much I do know from what I’ve read. Ranuccio Tomassoni was the caporione of his quarter. The boss of it. The man who ran the gangs, who ruled the streets, and handed out vengeance and a kind of justice as he saw fit. Just as Franco is today. For a while Caravaggio was with him, alongside Fillide. Somehow . . .” She squeezed her eyes tight shut again, trying to concentrate. “Franco and Nino Tomassoni found out about this, and re-created it around that painting. Then, with Véronique’s assistance, they made everything so much worse. How? Why? I have no idea.”
Teresa shook her head and sighed. “If this is true, it still doesn’t give us enough evidence to put Franco Malaspina in front of a magistrate. Even if we could find one who wasn’t tame. They’d look at us as if we were crazy.”
“It’s a question of time,” Costa insisted. “And work. The more we know, the closer we get to this man. Sooner or later . . .”
“Nic,” Teresa objected, “it’s a piece of very old glass and a lot of interesting connections that may or may not add up.”
“No, it’s not,” Agata said, and reached into her bag again.
She took out something else and rubbed it hard against her sleeve. Dust and dirt fell from it onto the Doria Pamphilj’s polished floor. Then she held the object next to the painting on the wall for all to see.
It was a fragment of fabric, a square, deliberately cut, about the size of a hand.
Agata kept it there and no one said a word.
“A memento,” she suggested, “of love at a time when Michelangelo Merisi was happy, inhabiting a world full of light. And later, an item of comfort, a reminder of that abandoned past, when he himself lived in permanent darkness and violence and blood. Look!”
It bore the same fleur-de-lis pattern as the fabric on the dress of Fillide Melandroni, sleeping as the penitent Mary Magdalene. Costa reached out and touched it with his fingers. The cloth felt thick and expensive.
If one imagined away the dust and the dirt of centuries, it would surely exhibit the same olive colour too.
One
NINO TOMASSONI CAN WAIT. SHOW ME THIS STATUE YOU looked at,” she requested as they left the Doria Pamphilj. “It’s not far.”
“It isn’t,” Teresa agreed from the front seat. “But don’t hold out your hopes. We’ve scraped everything we can off these damned things, looking for something that might link us back to Malaspina. Paper. Ink. Spit. You name it.”
The pathologist sighed. She looked exhausted too. There was a nervous tension about them all, one that spoke of desperation and failure.
When they were about to get back into the car, Costa had taken a call from Falcone in the Questura. The legal department was getting restless. Toni Grimaldi, never the most forthcoming of colleagues, was suddenly saying nothing at all.
“We’ve tried the other statues too,” Teresa added. “We could spend months working on that material. Perhaps we will. I don’t know . . . We would need something extraordinary, something direct. Plain DNA won’t help us. We still run up against the same brick wall. We can’t get a thing to corroborate it with.”
They waited for the other cars to stop and the officers to crowd round Agata’s exit. Then they got out and stood in front of the crude, worn statue of Pasquino underneath a grey winter sky. Dusk was descending over the city, and black clouds full of rain, their bellies dotted by the slow-moving starling flocks that circled endlessly high above them.
“This is ridiculous,” Agata hissed under her breath. “Why would anyone wish to kill me? The magistrate has already thrown out my evidence.”
“If we find more evidence, we can reintroduce you as a witness,” Costa argued. “Also . . .”
He didn’t want to say it now, but she was staring at him intently.
“Perhaps he thinks you’re the person who might see something the rest of us will miss. That would worry him deeply.”
“He’s wrong there, isn’t he?” she grumbled. “I can’t even uncover the truth of what happened to Caravaggio and I’ve been studying him for years.”
Like her, he’d read so many books, so many biographies. None of them gave any good answers about what happened the day Ranuccio Tomassoni died, or why.
“Why don’t we know?” he asked, with a genuine curiosity. “It was a criminal case. There were records, surely.”
“Nothing reliable. Caravaggio fled. Most of the others, too, and when they returned, everything was hushed up, damages paid, reputations mended. I simply don’t know. What information we have comes from contemporary accounts by partial bystanders. Caravaggio’s friends. Or his enemies. By rights there should be something in the Vatican archives. I have contacts there. I’ve looked. The cupboard’s bare. Perhaps they incriminated someone important. Del Monte himself even. What’s the point in speculating?”
She took one step forward towards the statue, then reached out and touched the stone. It had been scraped clean recently by the forensic team. Even so, the posters had returned, with their customary vehemence. There were five messages there, all in the curious scrawl of a computer printer, artificial letters posing as handwriting. Three seemed to be nonsense. One castigated a senior politician as a criminal. The final poster was a foul-mouthed rant, calling the Pope any number of names and comparing him to Hitler.
“So much hate in the world,” Agata said quietly. She stared at the statue’s battered face, barely recognisable as a man. “Why do the police spend their time looking at things like this?”
“Because sometimes it’s worth it,” Rosa cut in. “It was here, in the end. Though normally”—she shrugged—“it’s just racist or political material. We need to keep tabs on that kind of information. Where else would you find something that . . . frank?”
“Where else?” Agata echoed, not taking her eyes off Pasquino for a moment. “Where were the others?”
Rosa told her. Then the slight woman in black pushed her way back through the huddle of officers, finding the middle car, only to sit there, waiting, engulfed by her own private thoughts.
When he got in, Costa found her staring at him.
“Tell me about these statues, Nic,” she asked. “I must have walked past them a million times. I’d like to know.”
It was good to discuss something that was not to do with paintings or Caravaggio or, directly, Franco Malaspina.
So Costa told her about Pasquino, Abate Luigi, and Il Facchino, and some of the other lesser-known statues he’d discovered in his recent research, the curious encrusted figure of Il Babuino beyond the Spanish Steps, Madama Lucrezia in the Piazza San Marco, and Marforio, once Pasquino’s partner, until the displeased authorities of the Vatican moved the recumbent figure of a sea god to the Campidoglio.
She laughed at his stories, a little anyway, and then, in a few short minutes, they were in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, where she ceased to laugh at all.
Two
THE TOMASSONI HOUSE WAS WREATHED IN BARRIERS and yellow tape. A lone press photographer hung around outside. For no obvious reason he pulled out an SLR and began firing it the moment the three-car convoy arrived. The officers from the front car leapt out and were around him in an instant. Costa ordered Rosa to take Agata straight to the house. While she was doing that, as quickly and efficiently as her charge would allow, he walked over to confront the individual with the camera.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Costa asked the man, who was struggling and swearing in the arms of two plainclothes officers.
“Earning a living,” the photographer barked back in a southern accent. “Or trying to. What do you bastards think you’re doing? This is a public street. I can do what I like.”
“ID,” Taccone, the sovrintendente in charge of the first car, said, and it wasn’t a request. He was pulling the card out of the man’s wallet already.
“All you had to do was ask,” he moaned. “This is persecution. We’ve got rights.”
Costa took the wallet and looked at the photograph and the bare details there.
“Carmine Aprea,” Costa read off the state identity card. “Well, Carmine . . . where are your press credentials?”
“I don’t work inside the system, man,” Aprea answered.
“Then how do I know you do what you say?”
“You call any of the papers. Give them my name. They know me. Maybe they don’t like me, but what the hell? So long as they’re buying . . .” He nodded at the house. “Normally I take pictures of the living. But all these dead people you’ve got around here. It’s been a while since I took a few stiffs. A man needs a change from time to time.”
“Paparazzo,” Taccone muttered, and spat on the ground. “There are no bodies for you in this place. Go find some cheap little actress to pester.”
“How much are you making, moron?” Aprea retorted, looking Taccone up and down. The old sovrintendente never was one much for sartorial elegance. It was almost a joke in the Questura. “I could buy you with one picture, man. . . .”
At that point Peroni intervened and his big, scarred, ugly features made the small, pinched-faced individual with the camera go very quiet.
Peroni snatched the bulky black Nikon from Aprea’s hands and held it in front of the man’s face, lens uppermost, fat metal barrel just a couple of fingers from his swarthy nose.
“Do you know what an endoscope is, Carmine?” he asked.
Aprea screwed up his swarthy features, baffled. “Kind of, it’s—”
“Wrong. This,” Peroni barked, pushing the Nikon right into Aprea’s face, “is an endoscope. If I see your plug-ugly face again, I’ll shove the thing so far up your ass you’ll be taking pictures of your own throat. Now get the hell out of here.”
It didn’t take another word. Aprea snatched the camera and was walking quickly away, muttering, just loud enough for them to hear, “Big guys. Big guys. So really big . . .”
“Get out of here . . . Hey!” Peroni yelled.
The photographer had turned and was firing away at them as he walked backwards. Except the lens wasn’t aimed in their direction. It was going to the door of Nino Tomassoni’s house.
Agata was there, looking at the exterior and the cobbled street, as if trying to re-create some scene in her imagination.
“Inside!” he yelled at Rosa. “Like I said.”
Peroni started to move. Aprea stopped shooting, just long enough to call out to the two women by the door, “Grazie, grazie! I will make you both look beautiful tomorrow.”
Then he turned on his heels and ran, faster than a man of his age ought to, a bulging black shape disappearing into the web of lanes that fed towards the river.
“Leave it,” Costa barked at Peroni.
“We didn’t even check—” the big man began.
“I said . . .”
He stopped. There was a bigger argument going on and it was coming from the door of Nino Tomassoni’s home.
THE TALL, SKINNY WOMAN FROM THE CITY COUNCIL WAVED some kind of card in his face, yelling, “You will not touch a thing in this house or I’ll call my superiors and have you in court for cultural terrorism before dinner.”
Costa looked at her ID. She was from the city heritage department and seemed quite senior.
“Signora . . .” he said calmly. “We are in the course of a very serious investigation. One that involves multiple murders. Please . . .”
“You are not allowed to knock down protected buildings,” she shrieked.
“For Christ’s sake, I keep telling you! I don’t want to knock it down.”
Silvio Di Capua was in a white bunny suit that didn’t look very white anymore. It was covered in mortar and dust. He was holding a sledgehammer in his hands. It l
ooked as if it had been used.
“What do you want to do?” Costa asked.
“Just rip it apart,” Di Capua pleaded. “A little bit. Not much.”
“You cannot . . .” the woman began.
Agata Graziano had placed her small body between Di Capua and the councilwoman. There was clearly some recognition there.
“Signora Barducci! Please. You know me. This is important. Listen to these men.”
“You’re that nun from the Barberini,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Helping,” Agata replied, and not bothering to correct her. “Making sure there is as little disruption as possible. This house . . .”
The downstairs hall was covered in the detritus of a police forensic team. Even so, the place was remarkable, like the faded set from some historical movie, with battered furniture and paintings, and a musty, damp smell that spoke of age and solitary occupation.
“Are those gas lamps?” Agata asked.
“The very thing,” said a voice coming down the stairs. It was Teresa Lupo, and she appeared to be covered in even more brick dust than her deputy.
She shook some of the muck off herself, then smiled.
“And that,” she said, “is why we have to take down the wall.”
The woman waved her long arms in the air. “No, no, no! I will not permit it.”
“Show me,” Costa ordered, and they followed Teresa up the winding staircase.