Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “Archives? I’m afraid not. The failed aristocrats left us nothing but”—he gestured expansively—“these magnificent bones. Which we have been pleased to restore to life.” His Italian was perfect. As was his English, which he switched to as soon as Professor Richman introduced himself—and which he continued to use, apparently just to annoy Moto, who was obviously having trouble following the discussion in a foreign language. The villa’s proud new master had dismissed Moto with a glance. Motorcycle trash. So he tried to ally himself with the distinguished professor and went on in his smiling English about the art and the furniture they had gathered at great trouble and expense.

  “Ma nulla dal Cavaliere d’Estrato? Come può essere?” Lucia had seen the look Hafez al-Rachmaan had given Moto, understood what he was doing, and wasn’t going to let him get away with it. She was going to insist on speaking Italian. Even if it meant al-Rachmaan sent them away. But even as she insisted—in Italian—that there must be something from Cavaliere d’Estrato, she knew she shouldn’t be surprised that they’d hit a dead end. The D’Estrato family hit a dead end of their own and vanished long ago—not all grand families have happy endings. There was no reason to expect there would be some kind of archive that could offer a trace of the painting as it passed through. One lucky break in the contessa’s archives was no reason to expect another one at the next antiquity they visited.

  “Well,” al-Rachmaan admitted, “there are the books.” And suddenly Lucia thought maybe she hadn’t been so foolish after all. The owner spoke in even more firmly fixed English, his British accent softened by the indefinable trace of another language, an original tongue, worn smooth like river rock. He spoke the last word on a falling tone. Dismissive again.

  “Libri?” Lucia was still insisting on Italian.

  “From the seventeenth century. We found them buried in the rubble of the cellars. No wine down there, of course. Just the books. Mostly military history. Dreadfully dreary.” Showing off his English. “Histories of the Knights of Malta. You know, D’Estrato was—”

  “Yes, yes. I know,” Lucia answered in English. If he really had something, he’d earned his choice of language.

  “And a book of poetry, dreadful poetry by someone named Mario Fenelli.”

  “Fenelli?” Fenelli was the name listed with Il bacio di Giuda in the inventory of the dowry for the fourth daughter of Cavaliere d’Estrato of Siena when she married the third son of Ranieri dei Marsi. “Fenelli’s not a poet. He’s a painter.” Lucia was staying with English. Moto was on his own.

  Hafez al-Rachmaan raised an eyebrow. Still smiling. “Well, I do hope he was a better painter than poet. Dreadful poetry. Shockingly dreadful.”

  “Might we examine the document?” Professor Richman leaned into his formal professorial tone, but al-Rachmaan had apparently decided he’d been polite long enough.

  “I’m afraid I really don’t have the time for—”

  “I have time, Father.”

  Lucia turned toward the unexpected voice behind her. A young woman in a black silk hijab, lightly embroidered with a red geometric pattern, her hair covered, a thin layer of material drawn across her face. “I think we should share what we have found. We must be hospitable. Perhaps their research will add to the luster of your art collection.”

  He nodded. Gracious if he must.

  “Very well. Professor Richman, this is my daughter, Aysha. I hope you will pardon her interruption. I find that sometimes her education exceeds her manners. Aysha, if you wish to show the professor and his assistant the book, I will be in my office. I hope you will all excuse me.”

  “I’m not his—” Lucia caught herself.

  “And when you are done, come see me.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  With a nod, Aysha led them out of the entryway and down a hallway, walls lined with paintings. As they walked, she reeled off artists and provenance, where and how each painting had entered her family’s collection over the past decade.

  “Your father seems very liberal to allow you to be alone with strangers.”

  “Yes. Perhaps.” She answered Lucia with a smile that she expanded to include Moto. He smiled back.

  When they reached the end of the hall, Professor Richman stopped.

  “If I was listening properly to your fascinating tour, all your paintings are from at least a century after the D’Estratos lost control of the estate. Your father was talking about the historical accuracy of the renovation.” Lucia was glad al-Rachmaan wasn’t there to take offense.

  “The paintings came first,” Aysha admitted. “My father wanted a villa to match his collection, and this was the closest he could find.”

  Moto broke in. “You certainly seem to know the collection.”

  “I have a master’s in art history from the University of Chicago.”

  “Really? Did you know—” the professor began, but Aysha was concentrating her smile and her attention on Moto.

  “It was a very different world. In Chicago, my father was not there to supervise my life. I learned . . . a great deal.”

  She shook her head slightly, and the thin veil slipped down, revealing her full face, young, strong, beautiful. She gave Moto a smile that unmistakably meant he had blindly wandered into dangerous territory. He’d been flirting for fun. Suddenly, he was a nonswimmer thrown into the deep end of the pool. His eyes went sideways, looking for someplace to hide.

  Lucia stepped in. “Can we see the book, Aysha? The poetry?”

  Aysha laughed. She’d been flirting for fun too. She gave Moto another look, one that said she’d learned enough in Chicago to know exactly what Lucia had also known within moments of meeting Moto. She turned her smile to Lucia.

  “I think my father’s wrong about the poetry. It’s much better than he wants to admit. But it embarrassed him to have me read it. Some of it is very . . . intense. Blunt.” She shrugged. “And very crude.”

  “The penmanship or the content?” The professor demanded clarification.

  “Yes, actually, both. Mostly it’s fragments. Notes. A few lines of poetry. A lot of blots. You have to pick your way through it. My father doesn’t have the patience. Or interest. And the parts that are more complete . . . that’s what he can’t allow me to read. Or stop me from reading.” She couldn’t resist teasing Moto with another smile. “Erotic poetry.”

  She opened a drawer and brought out a book—soft leather cover, stained and swollen, battered and bruised. She carefully turned a few of the parchment pages. They were filled as described: disconnected lines, sometimes paragraphs. Savage lines crossed out some sections. Scribbled notes at the edges of the pages. Smeared and smudged.

  In all, incomprehensible.

  “If we had it for a year, we might . . .” The professor let his voice trail off, sounding half wistful, half certain he didn’t want the job.

  “It cannot leave this building. I’m sure you understand.” Aysha smiled. “In fact, I have read most of it and transcribed portions for my thesis. In Chicago.”

  She glanced at Moto again. Clearly just for amusement.

  “Which was on . . . ?” Lucia kept the conversation going.

  “How the love poetry of the seventeenth century reflected the devotional aspects of the art in the churches of the region.”

  “And does it?”

  “No, sadly, not at all. I’ll be discussing that issue with my advisor when the fall semester begins.”

  The professor seemed ready to ask who her advisor was, but Lucia kept on track.

  “Could we see your transcriptions of the book? Or your thesis?”

  “I’m afraid not. I can’t share any of that until I publish. Certainly you understand that.”

  “Why not?”

  Aysha ignored Lucia’s question. “But I can tell you the best single passage.” She turned to a page almost at the end of the book, looked down at what was written there, then recited in a soft voice, in a language neither Lucia nor Moto could understand any more easily t
han the scrawled handwriting.

  “That’s barely Italian,” said Moto, thinking it was safe to reenter the conversation.

  “It was the language of the taverns. Slang. Argot. Blunt and crude and sometimes overwhelmingly obscene. That was Fenelli’s world and that was his language. He wasn’t going to let anyone tell him how he should speak. Or write.”

  “Are you presuming to know what he was thinking?” The professor was in his oral exam interrogation mode.

  “It’s all footnoted in my thesis.”

  “Perhaps we could see the footnotes.”

  Aysha shrugged. “I’ll translate that short passage. And then you’ll go.” Calm scholar’s face. A slight clearing of her throat. “‘And so I cross your borders, a gift of betrayal, the betrayal of a gift. My soul flies to you. I fall to my knees for you. Treasure knows its home.’”

  In the frame of the hijab, her face glowed with emotion.

  The professor jumped in. “But that’s brilliant. Of course. Extraordinary. Tell me what you learned about him. About Fenelli.”

  Aysha beamed under the praise. “Just the end of his story. He was running from Naples. I think money was involved. Most likely a gambling debt. But it might have been a woman. I traced him as best as I could in the archives. In Naples. A dreadful place.” She shuddered, still smiling with pride. She was having fun now. They were hanging on her words. “He sailed to Porto Ercole sometime in the summer of 1610. July, I believe.”

  Lucia broke in. “That was exactly—”

  The professor cut her off. “Naples to Porto Ercole. That hardly gets him here, to Siena.”

  “And he went even farther north from Porto Ercole—a long way, in a big hurry. Into the mountains. Almost to the border with France.”

  Aysha paused.

  “Why?” Lucia had no patience for cat and mouse.

  “To visit his brother.” Aysha paused again. “The painter.”

  To hug her or choke her. It was a close call, but Lucia calculated that not touching her at all was best. “His brother was the painter! Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

  Aysha flicked the veil back across her face, then lowered it slowly. “A little mystery makes for a better story, doesn’t it?”

  Lucia reconsidered the option of choking her.

  “Indeed,” the professor agreed.

  “And then?” Lucia was persistent.

  “Mario Fenelli, the poet, spent almost a month with his brother, Federico Fenelli.”

  “The painter.”

  “Yes.” Aysha nodded to the professor. “The painter. And monk. In a monastery outside Milano.”

  “Near Caravaggio?” Lucia could hardly stand it.

  “What?” Aysha was puzzled.

  “The town of Caravaggio. Outside Milano.”

  “Oh. No. Nowhere near there. At the edge of the Alps in the Aosta Valley, up past Piemonte. Mario spent at least a month there, in the monastery. And when he left, he had a painting. He brought it here. To Siena. I don’t know why, but he came here to deliver that painting. And to die.” She stopped for a moment. “The line I recited, ‘A gift of betrayal.’ That was almost the last he wrote. In most of the journal, his hand is strong. You can feel what a renegade he was. But at the very end, his writing is weak. As if he barely had the strength to hold the pen. And then he died.” Touched by her own story. Pulling out of it. “I searched for his grave. In the Istrice contrada, in Siena. The Estratos had a palazzo there. That’s where he brought the painting.” Shrug. “But I never found anything.”

  Impulsively, Lucia hugged her, hard, like an old friend. “Thank you. That was amazing.”

  She got a shy smile in return. Maybe the first real smile they had seen.

  The professor gave Aysha his hand. A formal thank-you.

  Moto offered a last smile. Aysha grabbed him and hugged him, the way Lucia had hugged her. He blushed. She laughed.

  And then, as they headed toward the door, the professor coughed, stopped, and clapped his hands to his face. Bright-red blood leaked through his fingers, down his chin.

  Aysha gasped.

  Lucia grabbed the professor’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  “No, no. Nothing really.” His voice was muffled. He dug into his pockets for a handkerchief, more blood spilling down his face. “Just a bloody nose.” He held the handkerchief to his face. “I’ve gotten them all my life. Give me a moment. I do believe we passed a bathroom back down the hall, didn’t we?”

  Still a little pale, Aysha nodded and waved her hand in the general direction, back down the hallway. “Around the corner.”

  “Yes. I thought so. Please wait and I’ll get cleaned up. I’ll be right back. The blood will stop soon. It always does.”

  Thirty-six hours later, by the light of dawn—their second dawn on the road, a grim industrial dawn on a highway west of Milan—the impulsive decision to drive straight through from Siena to the monastery where the two Fenelli brothers, poet and painter, had spent a month together was beginning to feel like a seriously defective idea. Moto’s insistence that the drive would be five hours, six at most, had proven wildly wrong—although the fault lay with Lucia’s Fiat more than Moto’s knowledge of Italian roads. Optimism had disappeared with the first breakdown. Civility was gone by the third.

  Now they were trying to recapture some sense of camaraderie with a quick breakfast at a small café, in hopes that caffeine, butter, and sugar would work their usual magic. They managed a groggy discussion comparing this glum landscape with the beauty of the sunrise on their first dawn of the trip, in the hills outside Parma, where the Fiat had sputtered to a halt, leaving them stranded for hours before a passing motorist had stopped to help. Eventually that discussion petered out and they sat in silence.

  Staring down at her cell phone, Lucia gave a sudden strangled cry. The professor was sipping a caffe latte. Moto was brushing crumbs off his jacket. They both turned. She pointed at the phone and said, “Google News.” Then she read: “‘Fire destroys villa outside Siena. Two dead.’” Details were scant. The fire had started late at night. Two nights ago. Probably while they were stranded in that spot above Parma. Two bodies had been found. The ancient D’Estrato villa was completely destroyed. There was an investigation.

  Moto said something about calling a friend, pulled out his cell, and walked out onto the terrace of the café.

  “All right,” said the professor. “I think that’s enough.”

  “What?” But Lucia already knew what he was saying, and she wasn’t surprised. The trip had been hard enough on her, and she wasn’t half his age. So she didn’t need to ask. But he answered anyway.

  “We were just talking to those people. That beautiful young woman and her father. We talked to them and now they’re dead. ‘Two bodies.’ I have no interest in being found as a body one morning in charred ruins or anywhere else.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that, so she let him go on.

  “This is too ugly for me. There isn’t anything in the world I want to know about badly enough to go any further.”

  She took a deep breath. He was right, but that didn’t change how she felt. She thought about saying she was impressed he’d made it this far, then thought he might not take it as a compliment.

  “I understand,” she answered. “But I’m not ready to go home yet. I have to know what’s going on. I don’t like feeling I’m the fatal curse. Te-Te. The kidnappers—they deserved it, but still . . . And now Aysha. And her father—what was his name? Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, does it? All of them. Gone. I have to know why. I have to know it wasn’t me.” In some remote corner of her mind, there had always been a feeling that death was shadowing her, waiting for a weak moment to reach out—not for her, but for anyone too close to her. As if she were death’s messenger. It was a feeling so ridiculous that she had never confronted it. But it was too real to ignore. And choosing not to ignore it, she simply marched right over it and past it. That had always been her way.
When nothing made sense, she didn’t try to make sense out of it. She put her head down and kept going.

  She shook her head. Time to keep going. “And the painting. Bacio di Giuda. There’s something there.” She half smiled. “I should be ashamed. People have been murdered, and I’m thinking about that painting. But . . .” She paused for a moment to figure out exactly what she wanted to say, and he cut in:

  “But you can’t stand it when anybody tries to push you around.”

  She managed a grim smile and a nod.

  The professor answered with a nod of his own. “I’m sure there’s a very fine bus back to Monte Piccolo. I’ll go ask.” And he was off.

  Lucia finished her second caffè doppio and thought about that night alone in the dark of the warehouse with the painting. And she thought again about Te-Te, lying in a pool of his own blood. She had a few minutes to think, and then Moto and the professor rushed in from opposite directions.

  “Decapitati!” Moto’s voice was torn.

  “Beheaded.” The professor’s was flat, stunned.

  “What?” Lucia’s head swiveled.

  “Both of them! Decapitati!”

  “What do you mean ‘both’?” said the professor, almost sharply. “There was only one.”

  “No! Two!” Moto snapped. “Decapitati.”

  “Wait!” She cut them off. “You’re not making sense. Either of you. What are you talking about? Moto, what?” She held a hand up to hush the professor.

  “Both of them. The old man and his daughter. Before the fire. They were tied, hand and foot, and beheaded. Decapitati! Both!” He glared at the professor, even as tears ran down his face.

  “This is something different.” The professor held up a small local newspaper. “The caretaker at the monastery—”