by David Hewson
Two
ALDO CAVIGLIA STRODE TOWARDS THE CAMPO DEI FIORI and entered a small cafe located in one of the side roads leading to the Cancelleria, determined to count his gains, then dump the evidence. This particular hole in the wall was a place he’d always liked: too tiny and local to be of interest to tourists, and one that kept to the old tradition of maintaining a bowl of thick, sticky mixed sugar and coffee on the bar so that those in need of a faster, surer fix could top up their caffè as much as was needed.
All the same, Caviglia had added a shot of grappa to his cup, also, something he hadn’t done for some months. This chill, strange winter day seemed to merit that, though it was still only twenty to eleven in the morning.
Within five minutes he was inside the tiny washroom, crammed up against the cistern, struggling, with trembling fingers, to extract what was of value from the bulging leather purse.
Caviglia never took credit cards. Partly because this would increase the risk but also, more important, out of simple propriety. He believed people should be robbed once and once only—by his nimble fingers and no others. That way the pain—and there would be pain, which might not merely be financial—would be limited to a few days or possibly a week. Nor would Caviglia look at the private, personal belongings which people carried with them in their daily lives. He had done this once, the first time he had been reduced to thieving on the buses to make ends meet. It had made him feel dirty and dishonourable. His criminality would always be limited to stealing money from those he judged could afford it, then passing on the excess to the kind and charitable nuns near the Pantheon. As a Catholic in thought if not in deed, he was unsure whether this was sufficient to guarantee him salvation, if such a thing existed. But it certainly helped him sleep at night.
Caviglia attempted to remind himself of these facts as he wrestled with the wallet in the extraordinarily narrow and confined space in which he found himself, increasingly aware that the large shot of grappa in his coffee cup had not been a good idea. Then the worst possible thing happened. The wallet folded in on itself under the pressure of his clumsy fingers, turned over, and spilled everything—notes, coins, credit cards, and what looked like a European driving licence—straight onto the grubby toilet floor.
He lowered himself onto the seat and felt like weeping. Nothing could be left here. Every last item would have to be retrieved from the dark, grimy corners beneath the little sink, packed away again, and rushed to the nearest litter bin. If a single item belonging to the woman was found, he would surely be identified by the youth behind the bar. There had been two cases against him already, occasions when his concentration had lapsed and he had tried to ply his trade in the presence of an undercover officer. A third would mean jail and with it the loss of the little apartment the two of them had shared as a couple for more than thirty years. Everything that was of value to him might disappear if he left one stray item behind on the floor of this toilet in a tiny cafe built into little more than a cave behind the Campo dei Fiori.
With a sudden determination to put the situation right, he set about his work, recognising a growing inward conviction, one he had noticed but never acknowledged before: his time as a Roman street thief was coming to an end. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, he would be back walking round the bakeries, looking to return to the world of early-morning heat and dust, and the fragrant smell of rising bread.
After a minute he looked at what he’d collected; there was no alternative in the circumstances. The woman’s wallet contained just under four hundred euros in cash and a few coins, several membership tickets for cinema and arts clubs, three credit cards, a passport size photo of a handsome, though unsmiling, dark-haired young man with a closecropped beard, and, to Caviglia’s shock, a single condom in a shiny silver sheath. Her driving licence gave her name as Véronique Gillet and an address in the 3ème arrondissement in Paris. The same name was also on an identity card for the Louvre Museum. She was, it said, a senior curatorial assistant in the Départment des Peintures. The photograph was many years older than that on the driving licence, which showed a lovely young woman, perhaps in her student days, with shoulder-length lighter hair and a fuller, more contented face. She had an almost palpable air of happiness about her. It made his heart ache.
And you’re sick, Caviglia thought immediately, feeling a stiff, cold weight of self-loathing begin to form in his stomach.
Something else had fallen out of the wallet, too, a small pink plastic box, one that had puzzled him at first, and now, to his despair and mortification, was beginning to make sense.
He reached beneath the foot pedal for the water tap on the basin and retrieved it. The front had the universal emblem for medicine, a symbol Caviglia had come to know and recognise during his wife’s illness. The caduceus, a kindly doctor had called it. Two serpents writhing round a winged staff. With a deepening sense of foreboding, he opened the lid. Inside was a collection of transparent foils containing tiny red pills, almost the colour of her hair. A date and a time were written beneath each tablet. He peered at them. The next was to be taken at eleven-thirty, just forty minutes away. And the next after that at three o’clock, then again four hours later. Whatever ailment the woman suffered from required, it seemed from the medication, six doses a day, at very exact intervals.
A small card sat next to the foils. He took it out and read there, in a very precise female hand, written in French, English, German, and simple Italian, This medication is very important to me. If you find it, please call me on the number below, at any time. Even if I am unable to collect it, I will at least know I need to find some more. I will, naturally, be grateful.
Aldo Caviglia leaned back on the flimsy plastic toilet seat and felt stinging tears—of rage and shame and pity—begin to burn in his eyes. The woman’s face hung suspended in his memory, pale and damaged and in need. All because an idle old man would rather steal wallets on the 64 bus than go out and earn an honest living.
He scooped up what he could of her belongings, gathered them into his pockets, and stormed out of the cafe without pausing to utter a customary farewell. He had no phone but he knew where she was. Caviglia strode across Vittorio Emanuele without stopping, holding his arms outstretched, like a cross, like a figure in one of those church paintings he admired so much, utterly oblivious to the discordant chorus of angry horns and the stares of the astonished locals watching from the pavement.
Three
NO MORE THAN SEVEN MINUTES LATER—HE CHECKED ON his watch—he was in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, wondering how he could track her down. It was like many a city vicolo: narrow, dark, hostile to the outside world. Behind some of these plain doors and stone façades might lie entire mansions, busy offices, veterinary clinics, or private clubs for visiting foreigners seeking female company. This was, he reminded himself, Ortaccio. But Rome’s whores were no longer confined to a specific quarter on the orders of the Pope. Like all criminals, like Aldo Caviglia himself, the prostitutes roamed freely, on the streets, in apartments and houses scattered throughout the city.
He strode along the dark, narrow alley, avoiding the badly parked scooters, scanning for a pencil-thin Titian-haired figure in a white gabardine coat. There was no one in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Just dead grey buildings and the small church he half knew, locked, without a light inside, and, opposite, a long wall of plastic sheeting and scaffolding. A vague memory pricked Caviglia’s imagination. The construction men were probably labouring to repair some distant part of the great Palazzo Malaspina, which sprawled through this part of the city, a vast monstrosity of Renaissance brick that was one of the last private palaces still in original hands in Rome.
This told him nothing. Without concern for the consequences, Caviglia dashed the length of the vicolo, then, when he reached the Piazza Borghese without seeing a thing, entered the nearest cafe, ordered a single macchiato out of politeness, and commandeered the house phone. He fed a couple of coins into the machine and dialled the number she had giv
en on the card, waiting as it ran through some invisible ethereal network he could not begin to imagine, from Rome to Paris and back again, finally delivering a ring tone after a good half-minute. All the while he fought to perfect his story, how he would explain what he had “found” in the street and had immediately decided to follow her in order to return it.
But it was pointless. The ring tone went on and on. Nothing more. No message. No voice at the other end. He glanced out the window, hoping her business was done and she might have gone on to the bright open space of the square behind the palace of the family that had once been known as the Borgias. She could be anywhere. If the pills were so important, she should surely have left some answering service on her phone.
Except, Caviglia reminded himself, she was ill. Sick people, as he knew only too well, lacked logic sometimes. Towards the end they lacked any concept of care for themselves at all.
“Signora . . .” he said to the woman behind the counter, then described the Frenchwoman in detail, thinking, as he did, of the way she was dressed, which was not casual, but careful, the kind of clothes a woman would wear for a business appointment. Or a date.
Nothing happens quickly in Roman cafes. The formidable middle-aged figure behind the counter discussed the possibilities with her husband, who was making panini for the lunchtime rush, with an elderly pensioner loitering over a cappuccino, then a workman in grubby blue overalls at the end of the bar, and finally three women gossiping over cakes. Caviglia listened, feeling miserable.
No one had seen a flame-haired pencil-slim woman in a pale coat and scarlet skirt.
“Why was your friend here?” the woman asked. “We don’t see many tourists. . . .”
He thought of the identity card. “She’s in the art business. I think she had an appointment perhaps. Is there a dealer nearby? Or a painter?”
The woman laughed. “You’ve missed the painters by four hundred years. They all lived here once, you know. Caravaggio had a place . . .”
“Where?” he asked immediately, for no good reason.
“It was a long time ago. Who knows?”
The old man at the end of the bar raised a skinny finger. “There is a studio, though,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Enzo?” she barked at him. “We can barely afford to live here anymore. How could some painter manage the rent?”
“I don’t know. But he does. Opposite the church. The green door before all that damned . . .” He stopped and stared at the workman at this point. “. . . noisy building work down there.”
The man in the blue overalls finished his coffee and laughed. “If Franco Malaspina’s offering money, do you think I should turn him down? How often does that happen?”
The pensioner tapped the side of his nose, ignoring the question. “I’ve seen artist types going in there. Brushes. A canvas. That I-am-so-much-smarter-than-you look all those arty-farty queers have.” He drew in a long, asthmatic breath to make one final point. “They wear black all winter and summer long too.”
“Green door,” Caviglia repeated, and was out into the street.
SURE ENOUGH, OPPOSITE THE CHURCH WAS A FLIMSY WOODEN entrance the colour of cemetery grass, not to a house or office, but to an alley, no more than two metres wide, running alongside what he took to be some rear extension to the Palazzo Malaspina. The door was unlocked. He walked through. The sunlight deserted him. It was cold and damp in this stone and brick slit cut between an ancient mansion and some nondescript building that could have been anything: a home, an office, or simply some cheap storage place for the busy city centre half a kilometre away.
There was a single obstacle at the end: a bright, shiny metal security door, the kind used to protect warehouses and places worth looting. Not expecting anything, his head in a whirl, knowing he was running short of options and ever more desperate to return the wallet and the drugs, Caviglia strode purposefully forward and tugged on the handle.
To his surprise, it slid easily on silent runners, disappearing behind the wall to the right. Inside was darkness, a sea of black so unmarked by any visible feature it surely betokened a space of some size. He blinked, walked in, and groped around both sides of the wall, hunting for a light switch, finding nothing. After a moment his eyes began to adjust. In the distance to the right he could just make out a slender line of yellow light, the kind of illumination that might fall beneath a distant door leading off to one side.
Aldo Caviglia felt for the woman’s belongings in his pocket, seeking, with no good reason, some kind of reassurance from them. Then he edged gingerly forward into the gloom, hands in front in order to detect any high obstacle, hoping his feet wouldn’t encounter anything low and hidden on the floor.
He was, he judged, halfway to the door when he heard her. The voice—high, pained, stretched by such an agony he could not begin to imagine what caused it—drifted through the damp, fusty air of the black space before him, pulsing with an exact and heart-rending rhythm, not that of a breath, but a blow of some kind, a persistent, continuous attack which drew from her a long, harrowing cry as if she were being tortured.
Wild, formless fears rose in Caviglia’s head. He pressed on, more determined than ever, stumbling over stray bricks, feeling the right-hand wall to keep himself upright, watching the diagonal slant of light grow larger with each tentative, trembling step. There was a smell to the place, too, organic, sweet, and a little rotten.
Her repetitive, rasping sighs increased, in pitch and rhythm and volume. Through the wordless stream of anguish and stress there began to ring a single comprehensible word, spoken in French, the first consonant soft and breathy, the final silent, sounds so unlike the Italian.
“Jésus . . . Jésus . . . Jésus. . .”
He reached the stripe of yellow, unable to guess what might lie beyond. Some young thug bent upon rape? A vengeful lover turned violent? Madness in a dark and narrow urban street, unseen, unheard by passersby, for whom this was simply another ordinary day?
Without thinking, Aldo Caviglia found himself shouting, too, not knowing what he said, anxious, above all, to drown out the sound of her voice in his brain, since it disturbed him greatly, in ways he could not fully comprehend.
“Stop, stop, STOP!” he screamed, throwing open the door, entering the room, glad that he had finally found a word to which he could pin some logical thread of thought.
It was bright in there. An artist’s studio, as the pensioner in the cafe had said. An array of easels stood around a room that resembled a dusty, jumbled-up warehouse in which pots of paint had exploded in all directions and with extraordinary force. Colours ran everywhere: blues and blacks, reds and yellows, in golden streaks and white, white puddles, spattering the high brick walls, the floors, and even the dusty, pale ceiling. Rays of winter daylight fell through the single long, grimy window.
Caviglia had to force himself to see through the bright, insane confusion there in order to work out what was happening, where the Frenchwoman, in her distress, might be. The moment he had entered, her screaming had ceased, instantly, in a way that was, he hoped, linked with his arrival, not some other dread event.
Finally, the sea of disparate, swirling pigment ceased to churn in front of his eyes and he saw her. Saw them .
They lay like a single conjoined beast in front of a large, brilliant canvas which served as a backdrop for their exertions, and was so bright, so full of some strange simulacrum of life, that he was unable, at that moment, to understand what he was seeing.
Four
VÉRONIQUE GILLET WAS STRETCHED OUT NAKED, A THIN pale skeleton of a figure on a dark red velvet chaise longue drawn up beneath the painting, which itself seemed to feature some similar, though more bulky, nude form. Her head rested on the single raised arm of the sofa’s head, lolling, inanimate. Her legs were loosely entwined around the torso of a standing man who wore a creased and bloodied red shirt and was positioned in front of her waist, still moving forward at the hip with a dying, measured motion Cav
iglia now recognised as the cadence of her diminishing sighs.
The man’s expression was crazed, that of an animal fixed on its prey, mindless, intent on one thing only.
Her face was turned towards Caviglia and the door, not out of some deliberate intent, he thought, but simply because that was the way her head had fallen. The eyes of Véronique Gillet were no longer the vivid, attentive grey of an exotic feline. They were dead and glassy. Her bright red hair was matted with sweat, so much that it clung tightly to her skull. Her attacker’s hand held a knife tight to her throat, where it had drawn a dark red line, lazy and curving, out from her collarbone towards the base of her neck.
Caviglia ran forward, yelling, screaming, shouting as loudly as he could in the hope that someone in the street beyond would hear and come to his aid. Still, he was unable to concentrate on the point where his attention ought to lie—the man, the animal, the murderer—because his mind would not leave two incandescent burning points of visual focus in front of him.
He tripped on something, a can of paint perhaps, and stumbled to the hard floor, cracking the side of his skull hard on the ancient flagstones. The sweet stench of decay seemed to be everywhere, rising in his nostrils, filling his head with nonsense.
In these moments strange thoughts are born. He recalled what the woman in the cafe had said about the artists who had lived in this neighbourhood. Among them Caravaggio, who had painted so many vivid depictions of life and death in Rome: Saint Peter on the cross in Santa Maria del Popolo; David with the dangling head of Goliath in the Villa Borghese, where Caviglia would direct tourists looking for some peace in the city on a sweltering summer day. And the martyrdom of Saint Matthew, in his own church of San Luigi dei Francesi, no more than a few minutes’ walk from where he now scrabbled on a dusty, paint-strewn floor, trying to make sense of the nightmare that had risen from the dark Roman gutter to despoil this lustrous festival of the Immaculate Conception, when no one should have thoughts for anything but life and the world, children and the future, the coming shift of the season with its subtle, eternal metamorphosis from dark to light.
