Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “Don’t be angry,” said the painter. “It stiffens your features.” He laid his hands on either side of her shoulders, pressing her to her knees. “Think of your whorish ways,” he said. “Remember them, Annunccia.”

  “You bastard,” said Anna. Yet the power in this man’s hands, pressing her to her knees, cast a spell. Her nose rubbed the velvet between his thighs. His scent was potent, like an animal’s.

  She fumbled for the strings on his trousers. She felt his arousal in the cup of her palm.

  He closed his eyes, his hand resting in her hair. He drew a throaty breath. “Cecco! Bring a stool for the signorina. Now!”

  Cecco ran toward Anna with a low stool.

  Anna didn’t notice. Her hands had slipped inside the artist’s trousers, cradling him. A shudder rocked his body.

  “Signorina. Not now,” he said, drawing himself away from her. “Not now. Sit on the stool.”

  Anna’s hand dropped at her side. “Not now?” she said. “But—have I done something wrong?”

  Caravaggio helped her onto the low seat. “No. Now catch your dress hem in your hand like this,” he said, showing her.

  Anna lifted her taffeta dress into a bunch and settled onto the stool. As she sat, she reached out to smooth down her dress. “Fillide will pull my hair if I wrinkle—”

  Caravaggio caught her hand.

  “No,” he said. “Leave it as it is. It is perfect.”

  She cocked her head at him. He drew her hand to her lap. “Lay your left hand in front of your wrist, like this,” he said, moving her as if she were a doll.

  “The box of jewels, Cecco. Fetch them. The flagon of white wine. Grasp it with a clean cloth. No fingerprints!”

  “What are you doing, Maestro?”

  “Now look down, Signorina Anna. Think of the shame you feel.”

  “Shame?”

  “Look down, damn it! Think how it felt to be slapped in the osteria by a buggered painter in front of all the patrons. And publicly whipped in the Piazza Navona as a whore. I saw you—”

  “Stop!” cried the girl. “You’ve got no right—”

  “Ah! Think of the beads the other puttana broke. Strewn across the floor.”

  A wave of sorrow crossed the face of the prostitute, like a storm cloud racing across the sky.

  “That’s it! Hold that pose. Do not move a muscle and I will pay you well.”

  No sex! And paid all the same!

  “Don’t you dare smile!” snapped Caravaggio. “You are useless to me that way, you whore.”

  Anna looked down again, a hot rush of blood washing over her features.

  She saw the boy Cecco’s foot. A ringing shower of jewels—gold bracelets and necklaces, a strand of pearls—was scattered on the floor next to her.

  “You are my penitent Mary Magdalene!” said Caravaggio. “You are magnificent, Anna Bianchini.”

  He drew his paint-encrusted fingertip across her jawline.

  “I shall make you immortal.”

  Chapter 7

  MONTE PICCOLO

  Lucia woke, disoriented and thrashing. The phone! Her damn cell phone was ringing!

  It wasn’t on the bedside table. Where? There! The pile of clothes on the battered armchair across the room. She scrambled out of bed, dizzy. The room spun, she lost her balance, but managed to fall in the direction of the noise. She pawed at the clothes and the phone fell onto the floor.

  “Cosa?” She was shocked at the sound of her own voice. Rough and raspy.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was Moto. Good. She didn’t have the strength to be polite right now, and Moto wouldn’t care. That’s what best friends were for. He didn’t wait for her to answer.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Wait! What? The hell you will.” She had to get a grip on things.

  “We have to get to the hospital.”

  “Hospital? I don’t need to go to the hospital. I’m fine.” She wasn’t sure she was fine, but she was certain she didn’t need a hospital.

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Moto sounded concerned, which was so unlike him that it forced her to stop for a moment. She realized she had no idea what was going on. Or what had gone on. How she’d wound up here, in her apartment in Monte Piccolo. In her own bed. More exactly, on the floor next to her bed.

  “I just woke up. I’m a mess. I need an hour.”

  “Half an hour. I’ll be there.”

  She shouted, “No!” but he’d already hung up.

  She leaned back against the bed and ran her hands through her hair. They came away feeling filthy. She looked at them. White dust. Plaster.

  So that had happened.

  She remembered an explosion.

  That really had happened.

  No time to remember anything else right now. One of Moto’s many faults was that he was always on time.

  She hurried into the tiny kitchen, filled the moka with ground coffee and water, and put it on the stove to boil. Then she rushed into the bathroom for a shower. A glance in the mirror was horrifying. A glimpse of what she might look like if she lived to be a hundred. A hundred and crazy. Her hair was white with plaster dust, wild and tangled. Her face was white and splotchy with the dust and dirt. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  In the shower, she was reminded—as always—that the delights of living in a medieval building in a small Italian hill town did not include reliable hot water. She concentrated on doing the best she could with what was available, scrubbing her hair and face and body, watching the dirty water swirl down the drain and finding enough sore spots to make her think that maybe a visit to the hospital was a good idea. And all the while, she forced her mind away from wondering what had happened.

  When she finished her shower, the moka was making its usual dangerous whistling—demanding attention and threatening an explosion if it was ignored. The whistle died—as always—as she hunted for clean clothes, and she poured a cup of the thick black coffee. She took a sip that burned her lips. The pain helped wake her up. Another sip, careful this time.

  She looked at her clothes on the chair. Despite her digging through them for the cell phone, they still showed signs of having been folded neatly.

  That wasn’t her. Even at her best. Someone had undressed her and put her to bed.

  Jesus!

  She poked into her memory, and the images were terrifying: a bloody hand in sunlight, a knife, a gun, a blinding explosion. She didn’t have the strength or the time for that right now.

  She pulled on clean clothes. Jeans, T-shirt. Good enough. She glanced at the bed. The sheets and pillowcase were smeared with the dust and dirt from her body. She stripped the bed, pulled the coverlet up over the bare mattress, and threw the dirty linens in the closet.

  She had a fleeting memory of stripping her bed in New York this same way in a clumsy attempt to hide a clumsy indiscretion, knowing she’d get caught, knowing she didn’t care, knowing that son of a bitch deserved it. He’d started it with that . . . Stop! That was over. She was here.

  Then Moto was banging on the door.

  “It’s open!” He knew that. She never locked the door when she was home.

  He rattled the doorknob.

  “It’s locked!”

  How? The old-fashioned lock on her door needed a key to lock and unlock from inside as well as out. She glanced around. Her keys had to be in the pocket of the filthy jeans lying folded on the chair. Yes. There. But how?

  Either she had somehow gotten herself home, locked the door, folded her clothes, and crawled into bed while unconscious—or someone else had done all that for her. And then locked the door from the outside. With a key.

  She couldn’t think about it. She unlocked the door, and Moto was there, in his black leather jacket and silk scarf. His hair tousled as always by the wind. Such a pretty boy—but he was really worried.

  He reached out and touched her cheek. She winced.

  “Pretty good bruise,” he s
aid.

  “It’ll heal.”

  “You’re all right then?”

  “Sì, idiota! I’m fine.” Even though they both knew she wasn’t. “What do you know that I don’t? I don’t know anything. What happened?”

  “You’ve been missing for three days.”

  “But I saw you in the piazza . . .” She wanted to say “yesterday.” Right before she and the professor had left to visit Te-Te. But when was that?

  Moto tossed three newspapers on the table.

  The one on top of the pile screamed: “Assassinio nella cappella!” Murder in the chapel.

  And below that, almost as loud: “Morte nel nome dell’arte.” Death in the name of art.

  She remembered Te-Te’s face. His hand. The blood. She shivered.

  The next day’s paper was headlined: “Assassini uccisi a Roma, ancora niente arte.” Murderers killed in Rome, art still missing.

  Rome? That had all happened in Rome? Hours in the dark in that truck. They could have been driven that far.

  And below that: “L’eroismo dei carabinieri.” The heroism of the police.

  So that was what she had heard through the door at the end. The shouting, the gunfire. That was the carabinieri. But something had happened before that. The screams. What was that? And who had been attacking the door with an axe? And at the end, the explosion? And . . .

  This was completely out of control.

  Then she looked at the third newspaper.

  “Morto per un imbroglio.” He died for a fraud.

  The story called Te-Te a hero and made fun of him at the same time: a foolishly sincere old man of God, hero of the orphans, who had tricked himself into believing he had found a missing Caravaggio that no one else had recognized. And died for his mistake. The police had found a small photo of the painting that Te-Te had kept in his desk. Experts had taken one look at the photo and declared that the stolen painting was clearly not a Caravaggio. Couldn’t be. No one with any knowledge of art could have looked at those too-perfect faces and made such a mistake.

  The last line of the story was, “Il peccato del prete era tracotanza.” The priest’s sin was hubris.

  Te-Te didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t deserve to be mocked in death.

  She wanted to hit someone—and Moto knew her well enough to back away, raise his hands.

  She caught her breath. “Wait. What about Professor Richman? He was with me.”

  “That’s why we’re going to the hospital.”

  Nothing made sense, and asking more questions wasn’t going to help. She’d have to figure it out as they went. She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  As they walked down the stairs, she thought about having to ride behind Moto on the Vespa. Her car was still outside Te-Te’s chapel, where they had parked it before the . . . Never mind. She was going to have to get back there somehow and then drive home. A full day.

  But suddenly—right here, right in front of her building—there was her Fiat, with two wheels up on the curb, as always, right below a sign that said, “Divieto di sosta.” No Parking.

  Right where she always parked it.

  But there wasn’t a parking ticket on the windshield, which was some kind of miracle. She had been having a running battle with Vittore, the Monte Piccolo poliziotto, who apparently relied on parking fines for his income. She usually got at least one ticket a day—some days more. She would argue there was no reason for the “No Parking” sign, except so that he could write tickets. He would respond that reason played no part in this matter; it was a question of law, and if she didn’t pay her fines, he would regretfully have to seize her car. She’d point at the car and scoff, “Who cares?”

  He’d shrug. “So I’ll throw you in jail.”

  And eventually she always paid the fines.

  But today, there was a handwritten note under her windshield wiper. While Moto ran to get his Vespa, she read the note.

  Addressed to “mia signora”—milady—it begged her pardon for ever having bothered her with those trivial parking tickets. He hoped she would forgive him for his unspeakable rudeness and she should rest assured that she would never be annoyed in that way again. He would protect her car with his life. And he signed it, “il vostro umile servitore.” Your humble servant.

  In a world that wasn’t making any sense, she didn’t trust herself to drive—maybe she had a concussion—so she climbed behind Moto, threw her arms around his waist, and held on tight as they raced thirty kilometers through the hills to the next town while Moto shouted at her over his shoulder. He had a cousin who worked in the hospital here, and he had told Moto about the American professor who had appeared that morning in what had been an empty bed the night before.

  He said a lot more, but the wind blew his words away. Lucia tucked her chin and tried to let it blow everything else away too.

  And when the memories came back anyway—the blood, the explosion, and, as she only now remembered, only barely remembered, the strong hands that grabbed her and pulled her out of the darkness and the dust—when all of that became too much, no matter how hard she tried to think of nothing but the wind and the clattering buzz of the Vespa, she swung her focus away from all of it and filled her mind with the image of the painting, as she had watched it through the night in that dark room, in the faint pool of smudged moonlight that traveled down and across the canvas, angled and shadowed onto the bodies, not the too-perfect, too-clean faces, but the battered hands and dirty feet of the carpenter and his betrayer.

  And eventually the Vespa stopped and the wind died and they walked into the hospital, where the woman at the reception desk told them quite firmly that, no, there was no American professor there. No Aristotle Rafael Richman. Not now, not ever in the history of this small hospital. And she would certainly know.

  Lucia turned to Moto.

  “But your c—”

  He cut her off by grabbing her arm and pulling her away from the desk.

  Outside, before they got back on the Vespa, he said, “Someone wants it to be that way. They have their reasons. Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

  And riding back to Monte Piccolo, while the Vespa buzzed and her wind-whipped hair lashed her cheeks, she had time to think that she had searched for Te-Te and found him—and that had ended so very badly. And now she was searching again. This time for Professor Richman. Despite Moto’s empty reassurances—“Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”—she couldn’t escape the feeling that this search would end badly as well. Was that the fate of all her searches? Should she stop searching for things?

  Those weren’t questions she could answer—at least, not on the back of a Vespa, clinging to Moto as he careened through the Chianti hills.

  The room looked like a scholar’s office: dark wood and leather, subdued light, walls lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves crammed with leather-bound volumes. In one corner, atop a fluted walnut column, an ancient manuscript in Greek lay open under a protective glass cover. A small man sat in a large chair behind a massive wooden desk. A much larger man stood opposite him, in a pool of gentle light. Neither man spoke. A hush filled the room.

  With no warning, the small man slammed the flat of his hand on the desk, and the room was filled with the unexpected thunder of the impact. His hand was outsized—sinewy and muscular all out of proportion to his frame.

  But he was not in any way a man of reasonable proportions or well-fitted pieces. He seemed assembled instead from oddly chosen parts—not freakishly short, not quite, but seeming even shorter than he was because of his scrawny frame. He was dressed in a plain gray tunic, buttoned to the top, military in cut, but with no insignia, except for a small red cross embroidered on his chest.

  His overlarge hands had still-larger thumbs, which, coupled with skinny arms and knobby elbows, could have once been the appendages of an awkward boy—now hardened into hickory as a man. His nose jutted surprisingly from his face, sharp, a dagger, the corvine beak of a raven, more threatening
, if less impressive, than the hook of the eagle’s beak. Beneath that nose, his lips were painfully thin and the pale-blue eyes above, magnified behind steel-rimmed glasses, could have seemed gentle, even kindly, but were glacial instead. He had small ears, tucked tight against his small skull, like a dog bred for fighting.

  His voice was most often much deeper than seemed reasonable for his size, but right now it had risen in pitch, not to a squeak but to a knife edge.

  “I never should have listened to you! Never!” He emphasized the word by slamming his hand on the desk again. “If we had acted immediately, the way I wanted to, we would have it right now and we could move on. But you urged caution, and now we’ve lost years of work. Years!”

  The tall man across the desk stood at ramrod attention, not reacting by twitch or quiver to the noise or the accusations.

  The thin lips beneath the dagger nose tightened again.

  “So now we are distracted from our mission.”

  He leaned forward, steepled his fingers, closed his eyes, and made a conscious effort to relax his face. He nodded once, sharply, and broke the silence, his voice dropping back into its normal surprising register.

  “Fra Filippo Lupo! Action report!”

  The tall man somehow managed to draw himself up even more erect.

  “Sì, Comandante Pantera! We lost two of our best men, both Knights of Justice, assassinated by the carabinieri. We will feel their loss most acutely. Before their deaths, they dealt properly with the two common thieves who brought this misfortune down upon our order and who paid the proper price for having allied themselves with the Turks by interfering with our sacred mission.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Sir?”

  “And. What. Else. Do. We. Know.” He bit off each word as it slipped past his tiny, sharp teeth and darted between those thin lips. Then he clamped his mouth shut, and the frigid blue eyes were hidden for a moment behind reflections off the lenses of his glasses.

  “The painting was not in the room with the thieves, and our men were apparently trying to break down a locked door when the carabinieri arrived. One would assume they believed the painting was behind that door.”