Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  But that didn’t matter. The area was closed—and even a call to Moto’s helpful cousin couldn’t get them past the barricades.

  Things got worse yet that afternoon, when they finally stood in front of the three Caravaggio paintings in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. They had walked past a row of side chapels that were dark, filled with paintings that were ignored, the same way Caravaggio’s paintings had been ignored for centuries. But the Contarelli Chapel, where the Caravaggios hung, was flooded with light and mobbed with tourists. Even now in midwinter, Caravaggio was an irresistible draw. Guides lectured. Cameras clicked. The impatient elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, looked, shrugged, and moved on.

  Lucia was crushed. It was hopeless. She dragged Moto out of the church into the cold. The stone buildings and cobblestone streets that reflected the heat and turned the city into an oven in the summer now hoarded the biting cold and damp. Lucia shivered and pulled her jacket tighter.

  “I’m an idiot. I should have known it’d be mobbed.” She stopped, looked around. “Let’s go home.” She’d had enough. “There’s an afternoon train.”

  But Moto had a better idea.

  “I can handle this,” he said.

  Lucia shifted uncomfortably on a cold marble bench in the Piazza Navona, home, even in winter, to a few desperate jugglers and clowns and artistic panhandlers. A freezing wind funneled through the narrow Via Agonale, and a would-be troubadour in a down jacket and knit cap gave up on his guitar, stuffed his cold hands in his pockets, and sang on, unaccompanied and off-key.

  Moto had left her there with assurances he’d be right back. She’d tried warming herself with a bag of roasted chestnuts from a sidewalk vendor, but the warmth hadn’t spread, and now the chestnuts lay in an uneasy lump in her stomach. As the last of the afternoon light drained out of the sky, Lucia surrendered to the cold and moved inside one of the cafés on the piazza whose winter prices still reflected their privileged summer position.

  The chill and the dark and the overpriced espresso suited her mood. She idly considered taking a taxi to Fiumicino Airport and flying back to the States—or better yet, somewhere warm. She had her passport, her wallet, and clean underwear in her day pack. There was nothing in her apartment in Monte Piccolo that she cared much about. She could be gone. Just like that. She could escape the cold and the feeling of failure and the despair of seeing Te-Te lying dead in a spreading pool of blood. She thought about lying on a beach in the sun and just enjoying where she was. For once in her life. Instead of always searching for something or someone—or worse, drowning in the feeling that she ought to be searching, if only she knew what she was supposed to be searching for. She’d had enough boyfriends and lovers to know that neither love nor sex was the answer to that urge.

  And that thought pulled her mind back to Te-Te and a question that continued to puzzle her. Why did she feel so deeply about a man she had barely known so many years ago? The horror of his death had been shattering. But even before that, in the short time they had spent at his chapel and orphanage, something deep had pulled her toward him, and she couldn’t understand what it was. She remembered so little from those years. When she searched her mind for memories from that village in Sicily where she knew she’d been born, there was nothing but fog. She couldn’t remember her mother or her father, no matter how hard she tried. And she did try. Desperately. But there was only the fog, and the harder she tried, the thicker it got. When she tried to focus on her parents’ faces, the fog would close in completely, leaving her lost and alone. But if she looked sideways into her memory, occasional small details would come back to her. A sunny moment on a dirt street. A scrap of cloth. A laugh. And now Te-Te suddenly seemed to matter. But why? She pictured his face. Those scars. She had to—

  “Ciao, tesoro.”

  Moto was there beside her table, breaking in on her misery, smiling with pleasure.

  “Everything’s under control. Let’s get out of this trappola turistica and find someplace decent for dinner. We have a few hours to kill and I want to stay warm.”

  Those few hours were more than a few.

  They had a decent dinner and a cheap bottle of wine, then walked a block to a bar where they settled into a dark corner. Moto refused to offer even a hint of what he had planned, and Lucia found herself falling back into her fantasy of racing to the airport and flying someplace with palm trees and warm beaches.

  Finally, long after midnight, he ordered due caffè doppi—two double espressos—one for each of them, and when they were finished, he led the way out into the dark, cold streets.

  It was a short walk back to the Chiesa di San Luigi, but it was a very different world now with a few harsh lights and endless deep shadows.

  A sullen priest was waiting outside and, without a word and certainly without a smile, he took them down a dark passageway beside the church, through a side door, and into a maze of corridors, and finally they were standing face-to-face with three of Caravaggio’s early masterpieces: The Calling of St. Matthew, The Inspiration of St. Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. Together they gave the arc of a religious life: from redeemed sinner to slaughtered saint. But it was the last of the three, the martyrdom—the murder of the saint—that held Lucia’s attention.

  They stood for a moment in silence. The church was as cold and dark as the expression on the face of the priest.

  “No lights,” he grumbled.

  “I don’t want light,” Lucia whispered. The priest swiveled his head and looked at her, perhaps for the first time. “I can see the painting during the day. I need the quiet and the dark to feel the presence of the saint.” That was true—she didn’t add that she needed to feel the presence of the executioner as well as the saint, and all the figures screaming and fleeing in horror, including Caravaggio, who had painted himself into the crowd, fleeing with the rest, even as he looked back in pity and regret.

  The priest nodded. His voice warmed, if only a little. “How long do you need?”

  “Not very—” Moto started.

  “At least an hour.” Lucia was firm.

  “I will return.” And he was gone.

  Lucia stood in the dark and felt the murder swirl around her. Even in the deep shadows, the muscular body of the executioner glowed with life and energy and sacred death—the same way the figure of Judas had boiled off the canvas during her long night in that storeroom. In both paintings, the light seemed to focus on the messengers of brutal death. Sacred and reviled.

  Now, in the dark, the painting had clarity and focus that were missing during the day, when visitors were eager to feed coins into the meter that flooded the chapel with spotlights. It was meant to be seen in the dark, she thought. There were no floodlights in Caravaggio’s day. His shadows blended with the shadows of the darkened chapel, and the scene of horror emerged from the dark.

  Moto tried to talk to her several times, but she hushed him. She needed the silence as well as the dark, to feel the painting hum with life.

  She lost track of time. The hour she had demanded might have passed, it might not, when the silence was shattered by a shout, footsteps sprinting in the dark, a crash, the sound of someone falling heavily. Then silence again, except for heavy breathing. There was a moment when she wasn’t certain if the painting hadn’t come to life, if those fleeing footsteps were the terror-stricken crowd racing away from the scene of the crime.

  “Cazzo!” Fuck!

  No, it was Moto.

  She turned away from the martyrdom reluctantly. Moto was limping toward her in the darkness.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I was back over there”—he waved a barely visible hand—“where it’s really dark. And someone came bursting out—from behind a column, I guess. Almost knocked me over. I was chasing him, until I ran into that goddamn pew.”

  “Watch your language, boy.” The priest materialized out of the darkness, as if he, too, had been watching them the entire time. “You will be
leaving now. Both of you.”

  “What was he doing here?” Moto snapped at the priest.

  “Who?” The priest sounded unperturbed.

  “The son of a whore who was spying on us.”

  “Get out!”

  The priest grabbed Lucia’s arm, but she wrenched it away from him. Still, she followed as he marched them back through the maze of corridors and out a side door that slammed shut and locked behind them.

  They stood alone in a dark space. A trap? Walls closed in around them, and far above, a slice of hazy sky reflected the lights of the city. But after the dark of the church, her eyes adjusted quickly, and she could make out a faint light in the surrounding darkness, which led her around a corner to a narrow alley running along the side of the church.

  There was only one way out. To her left, the alley was blocked by a tall building. She grabbed Moto’s arm, and they hurried the other way down the dank alley, stinking of ancient crimes. But who might be hiding there in the dark, before they reached the street? Who had been watching them in the church? Trying to pick her way across the greasy cobblestones, Lucia couldn’t block the memory of the squeals of terror and death she had heard in the dark of the storeroom—or the sound of the axe splintering the wooden door. That had happened here. In Rome. Would it happen again? She fought to control her breathing and concentrated on keeping her footing. This was no time to slip and fall.

  The other end of the alley was blocked by a wall. Lucia stopped, closed her eyes, even in the dark, to think. They had come in this way, following the sullen priest. There had been a small door set in this wall. Where was it? She ran her hands over the wood. Where was that door? Yes! Here! Her hands found the metal of a latch, and, forcing herself to slow down, she opened the door carefully.

  Right outside, a patch of shadow resolved into a cowled figure, a monk. Next to her, Moto hiccupped in terror and she dug her fingers deep into his arm, half dragging him with her.

  Deep breath. The monk took a step toward them, moving into a pool of light. She got a glimpse of his face as they hurried past—hard eyes above hollow cheeks deep within the cowl.

  For an instant Lucia’s mind was filled with a sense that there was something about that monk—not the menace in his eyes or the black of his robes. Something else. Something wrong. Something—

  “Run!” Moto’s hard whisper jerked her away from her thoughts, even as he yanked his arm free of her grip and started to sprint down the street. Caught by surprise, Lucia started to run too—and without knowing why they were running or where they were going, she raced after Moto into the night.

  They turned a corner, then another. They dashed across a tiny piazza. She thought she heard footsteps behind them. Someone chasing them. Then she heard a rattle, a clatter, metal on metal, and the sound of breaking glass. A shout of pain. And then she could only hear her own ragged breath as she chased after Moto.

  He ran for blocks, twisting and turning into one narrow alley, then another. Lucia lost all sense of direction, where they were or where they were heading, until finally Moto lurched into a doorway where they pressed themselves back into the darkness, gasping for breath.

  She tried to speak, but he pressed a finger across her lips. After another few moments, he whispered into her ear, his breath still ragged.

  “Gun! He had a gun.”

  “What?”

  “A man in the piazza. Across from the church. Some kind of, I don’t know, machine gun.”

  “The monk?” Now that they had stopped running, her mind went back to that dark monk, trying to untangle what she had sensed that was wrong about him.

  “Not him. Across the street.”

  She tried to remember that instant when they’d stumbled out of the alley into the light of the piazza—dim light, but brighter than the alley—was there a man there? Across the street?

  She burst out laughing.

  Moto clapped a hand over her mouth, and she fought to control her laughter. Finally, with a deep breath, she calmed down, leaned her head next to Moto’s, and whispered in his ear.

  “That was a military guard. The Italian senate is in Palazzo Madama, right next to the church. We just ran away from the safest place in Rome.”

  “Sorry. Saw the gun and . . .” Moto shrugged in apology.

  They stood quietly in the darkened doorway while their heartbeats slowed.

  Then she realized what had been wrong about that monk. Such a small thing. But on his dark robes, there was a red cross—not a normal cross. Something different. Hard to get it clear in her memory, but it had been there. Blood-red on the black robes.

  And now she peered out of the doorway into the darkened street. Looking to see if there was a dark-robed figure with a blood-red cross waiting for them.

  No. She put that image away and stepped out into the narrow street.

  “Where are we?” She refused to whisper.

  Moto shrugged.

  She looked up at the sign over the door where they had taken shelter and almost burst out laughing again.

  “Al Duello.”

  “What?”

  “Ristorante Al Duello. Caravaggio’s duel. When he killed Ranuccio.” That killing had sent Caravaggio running for his life, under sentence of death, fleeing Rome and beginning the years on the run that would end with his own death at just thirty-eight.

  “Basta! No more talk of killing.”

  Lucia couldn’t argue with that, and she peered carefully into the dark as they headed into the Roman night, watching to see if a blood-red cross would appear, floating against the black of a monk’s habit—with hard eyes above, glittering in the dark of the cowl.

  The rising sun, battered by the suburban clutter of buildings and power poles, bridges and tunnels, flickered at the edge of Lucia’s vision as the train rattled north from Rome. She had tried to catch an hour’s sleep on a hard bench at Termini station in Rome, but she kept waking in a panic as dark visions—hooded figures, glittering knives, blinding explosions—shattered her dreams.

  Now, with a vile caffè doppio churning in her stomach and the sun in her eyes, sleep was out of the question, and she was trying to get Moto to explain exactly how he had arranged their late-night visit to San Luigi dei Francesi.

  Moto, just as tired as she was, tried to rally and shrug off her questions with his cocky smile, a raised eyebrow, and a shrug. But—and maybe it was the wretched espresso—Lucia wasn’t going to settle for that. She insisted and Moto’s smile faltered. He looked down and hunched his shoulders.

  “My father . . . Friends of my . . . my family. My f—” He looked down again. He was done. His too-eager smile was gone. His liquid eyes were moist.

  Lucia let it go at that.

  Family. That was going to be all the answer she got.

  As the silence stretched out and the sun rose higher, she realized she knew nothing about his family.

  And that was fair enough. He knew nothing about hers.

  There was nothing secret about Lucia’s family, nothing she couldn’t talk about—but nothing she wanted to talk about either.

  The first few years in Sicily were lost in the fog. The life she remembered started with her waking up one morning in America. In an American house. In a place called Long Island. Where nobody spoke her language. She had been sent there to be raised by her nonna and nonno—her grandmother and grandfather. She was never told why. She had asked over and over why she had been sent away, why she couldn’t go home, where her mamma and papà were, but the faces of her grandparents had slammed shut. That would not be discussed. So she was left on her own to realize that her parents simply didn’t want her.

  She might have been five.

  At first, her nonna and nonno were the only ones who spoke the same language she did. And they didn’t have anything to say to her. The American house was their house, but America wasn’t their country. They hated living in America. And she hated living in their American house.

  Then her nonno died and she was r
aised by her nonna. And that was even worse. She had to be an American girl at school and a Sicilian granddaughter at home, in a house so filled with her nonna’s bitterness and rage that there was scarcely room to breathe. And certainly no room to talk, no room to ask why it had to be like this.

  When she was still very young, she would wake up night after night screaming in terror from nightmares she could never remember. She would sit up in her bed, crying desperately. But no one would come to comfort her.

  There was only Nonna. And there was no comfort there.

  And why would she tell anyone about any of that?

  It was over. Long past. Nothing to tell. Only things to forget.

  She had gone to college close to the house on Long Island—there was no money to go anywhere else—in hopes of escaping, but by the time she graduated, her nonna was dying. The doctors called it cancer, but Lucia knew it was the rage that was killing her. So Lucia had to stay in that house and nurse the woman she hated through the final years of her terrible life. No matter how she felt about her nonna, Lucia was Sicilian enough to know that family is family and some obligations cannot be ignored. And she never let herself wonder if there was any family that would ever feel any obligation to her—or if obligations only ran one way.

  And in the last year, the last months—maybe it was the drugs the hospice nurse gave her—Nonna had begun to talk. She would never answer questions. It was as if she didn’t hear when Lucia asked about her mother and father. Her personal rules of omertà—the Sicilian code of silence—sealed her lips, even within her own family. Despite her insistence that family came first, before and beyond anything else.

  But even though she didn’t answer questions, she rambled, spinning out stories of a land torn by violence, where murder, if never casual, was ever-present, in senseless wars between Mafia families who fought for control of even the tiniest villages.