Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “So you phoned in a bomb scare!” Lucia couldn’t resist finishing the story.

  “Bravo!” Professor Richman applauded softly.

  “First and last call on my new cell phone,” said Moto. “I bought it while Lucia was staring at the Beheading, and I threw it in the trash right after I made that call.”

  “I told you those things come in handy.” Lucia couldn’t resist.

  Moto gave her a look. Raised his eyebrows. Then, maybe just to change the subject, he turned to Professor Richman.

  “So . . . I guess you were right when you ditched us in Milan because we were certain to get in trouble.”

  The professor, who so far had spent the entire morning listening as Lucia and Moto recounted their adventures—and misadventures—since they’d left him at the Milano Centrale station, smiled and steepled his fingers.

  “Well, that might be debatable.”

  And then he told them about his own adventures over the past days, starting with the fact that he had gone to Siena, not back here to Monte Piccolo as they had expected, and ending with: “It wasn’t a great deal of spit, I must admit. But it was the best I could do. And I thought I was dead. I was certain he was going to kill me. Why he didn’t, I don’t know.”

  And he smiled with undeniable satisfaction at their astonishment.

  “One last note. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I can’t resist. He pushed me down in the chair and stood there—knife in one hand, gun in the other—and looked at me like he was still making up his mind whether to kill me. Then he cleared his throat, stood up as straight and tall as a gorilla like that could, and spit very precisely on the toe of my Hotel Continental slipper. And he said, ‘That’s how you spit, old man. Now go home. Read your books.’”

  “Professor,” said Lucia, “you continue to amaze me.”

  “Thank you, my dear. In any case, the advice that, um, gentleman gave me seems very much like the advice you two got in Naples. As I believe you quoted your friends—if I may use the term loosely—‘Go back to your fucking books.’ And that sounds like excellent advice under the circumstances—given that the circumstances include attempted abductions and heavily armed thugs.”

  “I agree!” Moto chimed in.

  “Excellent,” said the professor. “And that is exactly what I have been doing. Research. And I have come up with several interesting discoveries.”

  “About the painting?”

  “What else? So first”—the professor ducked his head and rummaged around in a briefcase on the floor by his side—“there’s . . . this!” And with a theatrical flourish, he produced a large blowup of a photo of the painting.

  “And what I noticed, when I studied it carefully, was one little detail. Here.”

  He pointed to a dark corner of the image. In the murky shadows of the background, an arm was flung haphazardly out from the crowd, the hand falling, as if at random, on a rough stone monument in the landscape of Gethsemane. One finger pointed at a single carved letter, all that was legible on the stone. The letter R.

  Lucia bent close over the photo, then leaned back.

  “OK. The letter R. And what is that supposed to tell us?”

  The professor shrugged. He’d been working on his Italian shrugs in the mirror every morning.

  “If you’re right and this is Michele’s work”—the professor was again insisting that they stop using the name Caravaggio, but now it was for safety, not superstition, and Lucia was willing to go along—“and someone painted over the faces for whatever cursed reason, then the rest of it—the bodies, the background—is Michele’s. And he painted a hand pointing directly to the letter R. So it must mean something.”

  “Unless it means absolutely nothing.” Lucia was a determined skeptic.

  “Our friend may have been a madman, but I don’t think he ever did anything by accident in his paintings. The letter R. I don’t know what it means, but it’s something we have to keep in mind.” He put the photograph down. “And now I have a second item to discuss with you. It may require a little explanation.”

  He looked down, almost a little shamefaced for a moment, then he brightened again and reached into the leather satchel next to his chair.

  “This.” And he proudly displayed the soft leather book with the battered cover.

  “But that was in the villa. In the fire. How did you . . .”

  “I borrowed it for academic purposes.”

  “You stole it!” Lucia almost shouted.

  “I was certainly going to return it when our research was finished.”

  “But now you can’t,” she insisted.

  “Indeed, now I can’t.”

  “You stole that from a dead girl.”

  “She wasn’t dead.”

  “A girl who was about to die. You stole it.” Lucia didn’t know why it made her so angry, but after everything that had happened, somehow this one thing was more than she could take.

  “If you’re going to say it that way, it’s always going to sound wrong. And maybe I wasn’t exactly ethical—”

  “Ethical!”

  “—in my methods. But now it’s been saved. That poor unfortunate girl would not be any happier knowing her great discovery had been destroyed along with her.”

  “Nothing’s going to make her happy.”

  “So let’s be happy on her behalf that her historical document has not been lost. And I believe it can provide us with a treasure trove of clues.”

  Lucia took a deep breath. “All right. What are we supposed to do now?”

  “We should limit ourselves to what we can actually do. I believe we have conclusively proved we are not superheroes. We should stick to our research.” The professor spread his arms wide. “Back to school, kids!”

  He tried to make it sound like a grand adventure.

  Lucia wasn’t convinced.

  A chill winter rain was falling in the nighttime hills of Sicily. A scattering of small stone houses withstood the weather with patience, as they had for centuries. Though the modern age had brought electricity to even these outposts, curls of smoke fighting their way up into the sky through the rain showed that wood fires were still the main source of winter warmth.

  High on the hillside, one house loomed in the dark, larger than the rest by far. Its windows were brightly lit. Three sturdy chimneys sent plumes of smoke into the dark.

  In the kitchen, the air was filled with the aroma of roasting meat and the laughter of women as they cooked a meal to serve a dozen. Downstairs, in a windowless room, the air was filled with the aroma of cigar smoke and the muttering of men as they discussed business with an ingrained reticence. No names. No details. Shrugs, grunts. The Sicilian they spoke would have been nearly incomprehensible to most Italians.

  “Accussi?” So?

  “Taliannu.” Watching.

  “E . . . ?” And . . . ?

  A shake of the head, a shrug.

  “Accussi . . . spittamu.” So . . . we wait.

  “Ppi ssempri?” Forever?

  “Sì, sempri. Idda è a famigghia.” Yes, forever. She is family.

  “Arreri?” Still?

  “A famigghia è ppi ssempri.” Family is forever.

  At the villa in Chianti, Lucia tried to dive back into the art history seminar as if nothing had happened. Moto took to cruising the piazza on his Vespa again. The professor stuck to his rooms. He went out rarely, as if concerned that the conte might notice he was out of the suite and reclaim his quarters, forcing Professor Richman back to the drafty dorms.

  A week passed, two, then Richman summoned Lucia and Moto to his quarters.

  Moto opened a bottle of wine, while Richman explained that he had been working with the conte’s fourteen-year-old nephew, who had taken pictures of every page in Fenelli’s journal and sent them back to one of the professor’s old colleagues. The nephew was quite a virtuoso. He had shot the photos on his phone and transmitted them flawlessly, even while he seemed completely absorbed in a fierce video ga
me of some sort on another phone.

  “I got some helpful responses surprisingly quickly. We old boys may be fading fast, but the old-boy network still crackles.” He smiled benevolently.

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I think there’s a lot of interesting material in there that the unfortunate young woman in the villa overlooked. I suspect that she preferred the drama of the doomed fool, the brawling poet, to the drudgery of documenting history.”

  He shuffled through a thick sheaf of papers and pulled out one sheet.

  “There’s a place in the journal where Fenelli wrote ‘Back of painting’ at the top of the page. My translator put in a note that the top line seemed like a label, and then below it were a few lines that looked like Fenelli had made a point of copying exactly what was written on the back of the painting and how it was written. And a suggestion we might want to look at the original journal page.”

  He had the leather book there, already open, and he held it for Lucia and Moto to see.

  At the top was written: “retro del dipinto.”

  And below that, four short lines carefully written in a blocky script.

  Scavare dentro,

  tradimento, peccato,

  trovare il vero

  Giuda Iscariota.

  And next to them, off to the side of the page, a one-word note, scrawled at an angle in Fenelli’s informal writing: “Poemetto.”

  “It almost is a poem,” said Lucia.

  The professor nodded. “My friend added a note saying that it had required only the very slightest effort to render the lines as an appropriate little poem in English.” He cleared his throat and read, “‘To find the real Judas, dig within. Betrayal and sin.’

  “My admirable translator also said we should note ‘the eccentric capitalization.’ He typed, ‘trovare il vERO.’”

  Again, he held out the journal. Those three letters—ERO—were indeed larger, darker than the others.

  “Fine. E . . . R . . . O.” Moto spelled it out.

  “Ero,” said Lucia, turning to the professor. “That’s ‘I was’ in Italian. So the message might be ‘I was the real Judas.’ Il vero Giuda.”

  “No,” said the professor. “Here’s what I think.”

  Lucia bridled for a moment at the dismissal, but the professor kept going.

  “We have ERO on the back. And that finger pointing to the letter R on the front. I said we had to keep that in mind. Toss in the ERO and you have RERO. Juggle that a little and you come up with ‘Roero.’”

  “That’s nice juggling, Professor. Maybe he’s spelling out ‘errore.’ Error.”

  “Like ‘TILT’ on a pinball machine.”

  “A man ahead of his time.”

  Professor Richman kept going. “R . . . O . . . E . . . R . . . O. Roero. Specifically Cavaliere Giovanni Rodomonte Roero.”

  “The one on Malta.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So why would Michele put . . .”

  “He was holding a grudge. Michele lived for grudges. Remember how his grudge with Ranuccio turned out.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Moto. “Who’s Roero? I don’t—”

  “Roero was the knight that Michele got into a fight with on Malta,” Lucia explained. “Roero was wounded. And that landed Michele in the dungeon on Malta and got him kicked out of the knights. Michele never got over it—and neither did Roero.”

  Moto nodded. “Another enemy. It’s a long list.”

  “But why would Michele carry that painting with him to Porto Ercole?” Lucia kept going. “He was carrying three paintings for the pope’s nephew—” She waved her hand, trying to conjure up the name.

  “Borghese. Scipione Borghese.”

  “That one. Three paintings to bribe him for getting his uncle to pardon Michele. But why did he have this fourth one with him?”

  “Insurance,” Moto broke in. “He was carrying insurance. This painting was a threat. He’s saying, ‘Don’t fuck with me. I’ve got this! I’ll use it.’”

  “What kind of a threat is that?” said the professor. “A secret message. ‘Roero is Judas.’ That’s an insult, not a threat.”

  “We’re missing something.”

  “Lucy, dear, we’re missing a lot.”

  “Wait a minute!” Lucia held up her hand for silence. After a moment, her eyes flew open. “In the catacombs. When they were dragging me out. I told you I got a glimpse of the cross on his robe. And there was the letter R. Right at the top of the cross.”

  “An R. You’re sure?”

  “It’s hard to be sure of anything from that disaster. But yes, pretty sure.”

  “Roero again?” asked Moto.

  Professor Richman raised his eyebrows.

  “Well now, that would be for us to find out. From our fucking books, as the gentlemen suggested.”

  Chapter 33

  Napoli

  1606

  The Napoli awaiting Caravaggio was the serpent of dark corruption, coiled around a sapphire-blue bay. The Spanish viceroy don Juan Alfonso Pimentel de Herrera had taxed the lifeblood out of the city, slapping tariffs on foodstuffs, especially flour—while shipping grain surpluses to Spain for a tidy profit. Salt, fruit, vegetables—nothing escaped his grasp, everything was taxed beyond reach of the miserable hordes. The starving poor died alone and anonymous in the dark corners of narrow streets. The street cleaners hauled them away before dawn in rickety donkey carts, their lanterns swinging as they hunted the dead. The creaking hinges and grunting curses of men heaving the corpses into the wagon beds haunted those who still possessed life.

  Compared to the wide streets and open piazzas of Roma, Napoli was a dark tangle of a city shrouded in the shadows cast by tall buildings that sprouted in the land trapped between the hills and the sea. Tripling in size in less than a hundred years of Spanish rule, Napoli was the second-largest city in Europe, after Paris.

  In the hills above the city, a black-lacquered coach, emblazoned with a white column on a red background and capped with a golden crown, paused at a summit.

  Inside, two weary travelers shared the stuffy air turned sour with wine, sweat, and cheese during the two-day journey from Paliano outside Roma.

  “There she is! Che bella!” shouted the driver with a gesture that encompassed the city spread out below—beautiful, indeed, at least at this safe distance. The crescent bay embraced the clustered buildings of ochre, red, and dun. Mount Vesuvius smoked in the distance, a fire-breathing dragon guarding and threatening the Napoletani.

  “Wake up, Cecco!” said Caravaggio, giving the boy a kick across the coach seat. The boy shook his head vigorously, his eyes unfocused, wandering. Sleep had been almost impossible on the bone-shaking ancient Appian Way from Roma to Napoli, paved with stones laid before the birth of Christ. He groaned, rubbing his lower back.

  “Look at our new home!” said Caravaggio.

  The boy stared at the city, the blue sea, and the smoking volcano.

  Our new home? Grazie a Dio that we will exit this torturous rolling box and put our feet on solid ground once again.

  For most of the journey, they had lowered the canvas curtains on the coach to keep out the mosquitoes of the vast marshes along the coast. The suffocating heat in the semi-dark coach had been unbearable. In the shadowy light, Cecco had watched his master brooding hour after hour. Certain that Caravaggio was sinking into the depths of Hades, Cecco feared the explosion sure to come when the artist hit bottom.

  But now, suddenly, Caravaggio was elated. Cecco knew too well the mercurial nature of his master and was cautious not to say anything that would catapult Caravaggio into yet another mood swing.

  “È bella, Napoli,” ventured Cecco, craning his neck out the window for a better perspective.

  “Yes, beautiful!” said the driver, hearing his words.

  “We’ll be safe there, ragazzo,” said Caravaggio. “Spanish territory—the pope has no jurisdiction here. I am a free man!”

  “Sì, Maestro.” Cec
co licked his dry lips, glancing up at his master. “But they say Napoli is more dangerous than Roma. The thieves, and rough—”

  “Not for a swordsman like me,” said Caravaggio, touching the scars on his face. “A Milanese has nothing to fear from a Napoletano!”

  The driver grunted, uttering an unintelligible curse in Napoletano.

  Cecco said nothing.

  Hasn’t my master learned anything? He flees from a murder charge. Yet he is ready to fight and spill more blood!

  As the Roman coach rattled down the hill and across the ancient stones of the city streets, two ragged men jumped onto the rear luggage rack where Caravaggio’s trunk was strapped. They slashed at the ropes, trying to cut it free.

  “Cecco!” Caravaggio roared. “Give me my sword!”

  Cecco unsheathed the sword, handing it to his master. Caravaggio shouted, balancing precariously on the running board. He swiped madly at the assailants, roaring like a wild animal. He struck one in the shoulder and the other in the shin. A thief screamed in pain, dropping to the ground, writhing. The other fell, clutching his leg. He struck the stone road hard, wailing.

  “Cazzo! City of thieves! A fine introduction to Napoli!” said Caravaggio, waving his blade.

  The driver slapped the reins hard against the two horses’ backs, laughing.

  “An authentic welcome, Maestro Caravaggio. Benvenuti a Napoli!”

  Caravaggio’s coach did not pull up to the grand entrance of the Palazzo Colonna but drove straight to the stables. A sweaty farrier was bent over an anvil, muscles bulging as he hammered on a horseshoe. He unfurled his great torso when he heard the coach approach, wiping his face with his forearm.

  A red, puckered scar ran from his left nostril across his cheek to his ear.

  “Driver! Why do we stop here?” called Caravaggio. “Take me directly to the palazzo, subito!”

  The driver steadied the horses. “The marchesa ordered me to deliver you here, Maestro,” he said.

  “Get out, Maestro Merisi,” ordered the blacksmith, pointing to the straw-strewn ground. “Let’s see what we are dealing with.”