by David Hewson
“I only have a few minutes before I need to go. I can’t explain everything. I don’t want to. Talk about something else.”
“I don’t want to,” he objected. “You spent your entire life in that place. I don’t understand.”
Her eyes widened with outrage. “I killed a man, Nic. How can I be a sister after that? It’s impossible.” She looked at her hands, as if remembering the moment Rosa Prabakaran’s weapon sat in her fingers. “I feel no guilt either. That’s the worst thing.” She stared at him. “He would have killed you. Instead of me, because your friends, Gianni, Leo, would have been there in time to stop that. But why do I tell you this? You know already. This is what you do, isn’t it? Put yourself in the way instead.”
He tried to pull a wry smile. “It seems to work most of the time.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not really.”
He stirred the sugar in the grounds of his coffee a little harder, hearing that.
“What will you do?” Costa asked.
She seemed relieved to be able to shift the focus of the conversation. “There are many illegal immigrants coming to Malta each month. Mostly from Africa. They want to come to Italy. One way or another most of them will. The Church has a program trying to help them. I will teach. Children, young men and women. These are people who need me. They’re desperate. As my father must have been once. I can’t sit by and ignore them. It’s unthinkable.”
He had no difficulty imagining her excelling at that kind of work. Or being in Malta.
“Will you go to Valletta? And the co-cathedral? You said you always wanted to see those paintings.” An image of the Caravaggio flashed through his own mind. “John the Baptist. And Saint Jerome, of course.”
The laugh returned, and it was still light, still mostly untroubled.
“I’m there to try to help people in difficulty. Why would I walk away from that to see a painting? I spent too long in that daydream. I was like Franco Malaspina, obsessed with something that was unreal. Trapped in a world that had nothing to do with the way people actually live.”
He shook his head firmly. “Caravaggio’s real, Agata. Those people he portrayed… You said it yourself. They came from the streets. They’re you and me.”
“Oh, Nic.” Her hand crossed the table and almost fell briefly on his before returning to the plastic bag by her side. “I have work to do.” The amusement in her face vanished. “Sins to atone for…”
“What you did was self-defence,” he replied instantly. “Not a sin.”
“That’s not for you to decide. Or me. It’s a question of faith.”
“Faith,” he snapped without thinking, his voice rising so that the woman at the next table raised an eyebrow in their direction.
“Yes,” she went on. “Faith. You think I lost it? No. Not for a moment.” Her eyes stayed on him, clear, insistent, knowing. “I found more. I found real faith was awkward and uncomfortable. It asked questions I didn’t want to hear. Demanded sacrifices I didn’t want to make.” She shook her head. The stray black curls flew around her neck in a way that mesmerised him. “I discovered it existed for my salvation, not my enjoyment. That it was awkward and uncomfortable and occasionally” — she peered at the empty coffee cup on the table, her eyes misty — “that it meant I had to avoid… forgo things I might come to want for myself.”
“And I don’t have that?” he asked.
“Not in the same way,” she answered carefully. “I’ve watched you. Your faith lies in others. Not in politics. Not in religion. Not even in the law or justice, I think, anymore. It’s rooted in the people you love.” Her voice caught with emotion. “More than that. I envy it. I look at you and think, ‘I wish I could feel that way too.’ But I can’t.”
“Love isn’t something you can control or call up on demand. None of us knows when it might happen. I didn’t with Emily. I had no idea and nor did she.”
Her slender lips curled in a deprecating smile. “You’re not listening. This isn’t about that kind of love. I’m trying to stay away from my beliefs for a while in the hope I might find some answers to my doubts. You’re making the same journey, but in reverse. We’re moving in opposite directions. It’s not Emily you’re looking for, it’s God, and since you think he doesn’t exist that makes it all the worse for you.” Her shining eyes held him. “Also, people die. Everyone in the end. Does this small, plain faith of yours die with them?” Her fingers reached out and touched his hand, for the briefest of moments. “Did it?”
“For a while,” he answered honestly.
He felt so inadequate, so tongue-tied, and had no idea whether he believed what she said, about him or about herself.
Over the hubbub of the busy airport, they were calling the plane. He could see from her face she had heard the announcement.
“If I came to visit in Malta…”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Costa sighed and said nothing.
“I have to go,” she murmured. “There’s no need to see me to the plane. I have a little time, I think. I would like to spend it on my own.”
She was standing, picking up her two plastic bags, an independent young woman entering a world she barely understood, alone, determined to explore its dark corners and intricacies without the help of another.
“Here,” he said, getting up too. “You’ll need one of these at some stage.”
He took off his watch and passed it to her. She tried to put it on. The leather strap was too large and needed another hole. She’d no clue how to make one, no idea that a man would simply push the spike hard through the old soft leather and find some new purchase that way.
“Let me…”
Gently, he wound the strap around her soft, warm wrist, worked out the size, removed it, forced through the hole, and wound it back around her dusky skin again, fastening the strap, making sure it fitted well.
They stood there, so close.
Nervously, Costa extended his right hand and waited.
Agata Graziano closed her eyes and there was a single line of moisture beneath each dark lid.
“Oh my, oh my,” she whispered, laughing, crying, he wasn’t sure quite which. “For God’s sake, Nic. My hand?”
She opened her arms and walked forward, enclosing him, waiting as his own arms fell hesitantly around her slender shoulders.
Outside the dead, half-forgotten nightmare of the funeral, it was the first time he had embraced anyone since Emily had died. He was crying now, he knew that, not much, but enough to feel some tight interior knot inside him relax, release, then, if not disappear, begin to dissipate somehow.
Costa held her, tightly, his face against her dark hair, acutely aware that she was unlike any woman he had ever known, simple, pure, innocent. There was no fragrance about her, nothing but fresh soap and her skin against his, as young and smooth and perfect as that of a child.
“Enough of this,” she said, her voice breaking a little, pushing him away. “Farewells are something new to me also, and clearly I am as terrible at them as you.”
They looked at each other, lost for words. Then, very quickly, she came close again, reached up, and kissed him once, tenderly, on the cheek, with a swift, embarrassed affection.
“Goodbye, Nic,” she murmured, then, without looking back, scooped up her bags and scurried off down the corridor towards the gate.
Two
Two hours later Costa was sitting in the kitchen. It was a chill, bright afternoon. Through the window, he could see planes high in an eggshell sky leaving vapour trails in their wake. Beyond the lines of black, dormant vines, crows bickered in the trees by the road. Bea had returned to her apartment with the little dog. The house was empty. He was alone again, back in the sprawling farmhouse his late father had built with his own hands, a place where every brick and tile was familiar, every angle and corner carried a cherished memory.
Grief was a journey, a transition through opposing phases, of knowledge and ignorance, togetherness and
solitude, pain and consolation. What counted was the passage, the recognition that at the heart of life lay motion. Without that there was nothing but stasis, a premature quietus that rendered everything and everyone it touched meaningless.
Here, surrounded by Emily’s lingering fragrance, the shelves with the food and drink only she would eat, her music by the hi-fi system, her jars and bottles still lurking in cupboards in the bathroom, it was to his dead wife that his thoughts turned constantly, and would for years to come. Her presence was everywhere, a benevolent ghost forever active in his conscience. He had lost her, but not entirely. When he closed his eyes, he could hear her voice. When he called up those precious memories of their time together, he could sense the soft grip of her fingers in his, the warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear.
As she whispered now, calling, Live, Nic, live.
He felt the shiny marble urn in his fingers, its smooth surface as cold as a statue’s skin, the way it was the day he’d taken it home from the crematorium.
Costa got up from the table and went outside into the cold, walking on until he was among the rows of vines they had tended together, so carefully, and with such rudimentary skill. As he reached that point he began to let her go, to let the stream of dust and ashes tumble from the vessel’s grey marble neck, out into the air, to scatter among the slumbering black trunks, across the dun, chill earth. He walked on and on, the horizon rising and falling with his steps, blurred by the tears that flooded his eyes in a way they never had before. It took no more than a minute. Then he threw the empty container as far as he could, out towards the road and the distant outline of the tomb of Cecilia Metella.
In the field, shaking with fierce emotion, lost, blind, choking, he found himself consumed by a swirling plume of grey dust raised from the earth by a sudden fierce squall. It clung to his head. Like a sandstorm in miniature, a miasmic cloud of pale particles, it swirled around his head, danced in his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils, clung briefly to his fingers like a second, shedding skin.
Then a fresh blast arose and it was gone.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction constructed around some certain facts, so I feel it is important to give a few guidelines on where this division is drawn. There is no painting entitled Evathia in Ekstasis, by Caravaggio or any other artist of the same period. Canvases close to its subject matter certainly did exist, however, among them Annibale Carracci’s Venus with a Satyr and Cupids, which remains in the possession of the Uffizi today. Erotic paintings, some by well-known artists, others pure graphic pornography, were popular throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome among the richer classes and with influential men of the Church. The more risqué works would be kept in private rooms, covered by a curtain, and shown only to close and discreet friends. This penchant for private interests bordering on vice was not uncommon. Cardinal Francisco Maria Del Monte, Caravaggio’s patron and landlord for a while, did indeed tinker with the forbidden art of alchemy in the privacy of the casino of the Villa Ludovisi, and paid the artist to produce a unique fresco associated with his experiments there.
Caravaggio lived in turbulent and hypocritical times, variously fêted as the new saviour of the coming generation of Roman artists and vilified as a dissolute sinner who used prostitutes as the models for saints. His output while he lived in Rome — from 1592 until he fled a sentence of death for murder in 1606 — was prolific but is in part uncharted. Like many of his colleagues and rivals, he veered between pious works commissioned by the Church and smaller, often more daring canvases paid for by private collectors seeking something for their galleries and intimate chambers, where visitors were allowed only by invitation.
The reputation of Caravaggio today stands, to a great extent, upon his religious paintings, some of which, such as The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome), The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Oratory of the Co-cathedral of Saint John, Valletta, Malta), and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter (Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome), remain on the very walls for which they were first painted. But the artist accepted private commissions as well. There is no doubt that he embraced a wider range of work when the money and the job interested him. The poet Giambattista Marino certainly owned a painting entitled Susannah by Caravaggio, now lost, which is assumed to have been a rare female nude. Caravaggio was prolific and temperamental, a difficult and violent man, willing to walk away from valuable projects simply because they failed to interest him. At the height of his career he was celebrated as the most famous artist in Rome, and hailed by poets as the defining spirit of a new age of painting. Within the space of a few years, however, he was impoverished, living in simple conditions with a single servant in the alley now known as the Vicolo del Divino Amore.
The Palazzo Malaspina depicted here is entirely fictional, though sprawling palaces similar to it do exist in Rome today. One of the most famous still in original hands is the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, which contains the canvases mentioned in the book and is, in part, open to the public. A palace more reminiscent of the imaginary home of Franco Malaspina is the Palazzo Altemps in the Piazza San Apollinare. The residence of a powerful cardinal related to the papacy by marriage, this ornate and glorious property is on the edge of the area once known as Ortaccio, a red-light district created by the Vatican to be a zone for the city’s prostitutes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inns and lodgings of Ortaccio came to be popular with artists and writers, and were the scene of many brawls and arguments, feuds and vendettas.
Long-running enmities were common in this volatile community, and gangs such as the fictional Ekstasists depicted here certainly existed, taking their cue from the real-life knight’s handbook written by Domenico Mora, which argued for a violent, arrogant attitude towards others. It was a street fight that cost Caravaggio his career in Rome when, in 1606, he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni close to the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina. The circumstances remain a mystery. Contemporary accounts are coloured by bias and riddled with lacunae, though the popular modern theory that the brawl stemmed from a dispute over a game of tennis is probably a myth. Tomassoni was indeed the caporione of his district and closely involved, sometimes intimately, with several of the women Caravaggio knew, among them the notorious Fillide Melandroni.
Alessandro de’ Medici ruled Florence briefly from 1532 until his assassination in 1537. It is generally accepted that he was the son of a black kitchen maid named Simonetta and the seventeen-year-old Giulio de’ Medici, who was to become Pope Clement VII. His lineage was carefully hidden in most portraits, though his enemies frequently referred to him as il Moro, the Moor. Ippolito Malaspina was a real figure and a genuine patron of Caravaggio in Malta; his coat of arms can be seen on the artist’s Saint Jerome, which remains in the co-cathedral in Valletta, for which Malaspina commissioned it. The Malaspina family was at one time powerful in Tuscan politics; an ancestor of Ippolito receives a mention in both Dante’s Purgatorio and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The aristocratic Malaspina dynasty disappeared in the eighteenth century. In the time of the Medici, however, the Malaspina clan had a visible and important presence in Florence. The favourite mistress of Alessandro de’ Medici was Taddea Malaspina. The depiction of Alessandro by Pontormo, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was originally his gift to her. In turn, she bore Alessandro’s only children.
Apart from the canvas of Evathia and the imagined lost portrait of the man pretending to be Ippolito Malaspina in Malta, all the paintings mentioned in this book are real and mostly on public view.
DAVID HEWSON
Rome, Kent, and San Francisco, October 2005-November 2006
About the Author
A former staff writer on The Times, David Hewson lives in Kent, where he is at work on the seventh Nic Costa crime novel, Dante’s Numbers, which Delacorte will publish in 2009.
The Garden of Evil is the sixth novel in a crime series which began with the acclaimed A Season for the Dead, set in Rome a
nd featuring Detective Nic Costa.
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