The Garden of Evil

by David Hewson

  “I’ve an appointment with Signora Agata Graziano,” he explained. “Will she be long?”

  She folded her slender arms and stared at him. “Are you a detective?”

  He shuffled on his feet, stealing glances at the painting. “Rumour has it,” he muttered.

  “Then tell me what you make of this. You have an appointment with a woman. You come here. I am a woman. You see me.” Her skinny arms opened wide, a look of theatrical disbelief spread across her dark face. “And . . . ?”

  Costa blinked. “I never thought you’d be a nun.”

  “I’m not. Sit down, please.”

  He took the chair next to her.

  The woman’s alert, dusky face took on the patient, if slightly exasperated, expression of a teacher dealing with a slow pupil. “I am a sister, not a nun. I took simple vows, not solemn ones. It’s complicated. I won’t trouble you with this.”

  “I’m sorry, Sister.”

  “Agata, please. When I am here, I am here as an academic. When I am at home, you can call me ‘Sister.’ Except you are not allowed in my home. So the point is moot.”

  “I consider myself both enlightened and chastised.”

  She laughed. “Oh . . . a sarcastic detective. I like that. Convents lack sarcasm. Throw it at me as much as you like. Now, your first question.”

  “Is it genuine?” he asked, gesturing at the painting.

  She rolled her large brown eyes and threw back her head. Then, to Costa’s amazement, something akin to a curse, albeit a very mild one by Roman standards, escaped her lips.

  “Nic, Nic, Nic,” Agata Graziano complained. “When I walk outside my convent, I’m a historian first and a lover of art second. I don’t make rash judgments. I need to ask some scientific people in here to examine paint and canvas samples. To take X-rays and consult with others of their ilk. Also, I need to look further at what records we have from that time.”

  The painting was so near he could almost touch it. Costa was enjoying the ability to see it up close again, under decent light. Nothing there changed his original opinion.

  “The records won’t tell you much,” he suggested.

  She stared at him, another teacher-like look, this time of exaggerated surprise, and said, “What?”

  “If this is a private commission of Caravaggio’s, the chances are there won’t be a mention of it anywhere,” Costa replied. “From what I’ve read, the only reliable records are for his church works. It makes sense. Those paintings had to be paid for with public money. That had to be accounted for. When he was employed by individuals, he might have had nothing more than a letter. Perhaps not even that.”

  “I was under the impression art was the responsibility of the Carabinieri,” she observed.

  “I was under the impression the Barberini employed its own people.”

  She delivered up a jocular scowl, one that said touché. Then nothing else.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Because they believe I happen to be the best person for the job. Their usual suspects are in New York, supervising some coming show at the Metropolitan Museum. My luck. And”—she emphasised this point with a sharp look at the painting—“they are correct. There are a few things I don’t know about our mutual friend Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. But they are just a few, and on those no one else is any the wiser either. There. Immodesty masquerading as frankness. I have one more thing to confess.”

  She hesitated. “And you?” she asked.

  “I’m just interested. That’s all,” Costa answered.

  “I meant about something to confess.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  Agata Graziano screwed up her eyes with a sudden embarrassment so real Costa wondered what to do.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I read the papers. I’m an idiot. I apologise.”

  “For what?”

  “For treating you like this. You lost your wife and here I am making jokes.”

  Costa wanted to utter something about the way the earth kept turning regardless of individual tragedies. Instead, he said, “I came back to work because I wanted to. I’ll deal with what that brings.”

  “A brave idea,” she observed. “But a wise one? What do I know? I’m just an academic who thought this was purely business when clearly it isn’t.”

  “This is business,” he emphasised.

  “If you insist. I am not very good at sympathy, I’m afraid.”

  “There’s no need to be. You don’t know me.”

  “Is that relevant?” she wondered. “In any case I am saddened by your cruel loss. I cannot begin to imagine how it must feel.” She paused, a little uncertain of herself. “Can we consider that done with now?”

  “Please. There’s one other reason to think you won’t find a record,” he said quickly, wishing to change the topic.

  “That being?”

  “Paintings like this weren’t for public viewing. They were commissioned for some special room in the house. To be seen only by a wife or a lover, or a male friend one wanted to impress.”

  He stopped, wondering whether he was blushing. Years ago he had read widely about this type of work in an effort to understand how much of Caravaggio’s output, and that of his peers, might have been lost. The depressing answer was: a lot. The famous canvases of naked young boys—works that, some believed incorrectly, had led the artist to be accused of being a homosexual—fell precisely into this category. They were daring, at the very edge of acceptability in a city where sexual crimes could carry heavy penalties and sodomy itself was deemed worthy of a death sentence. Such paintings only survived because they had entered large and well-maintained collections early in the seventeenth century. Lesser, or more obscure, works were often destroyed or reused by later artists for their own purposes. Countless examples from private collections of the period, by Caravaggio and his contemporaries, had been lost forever, recorded, if at all, only in the private correspondence and diaries of those who had been lucky enough to see them. Costa was unsure how to elaborate on these delicate matters with a woman who called herself a sister.

  “So you think it might be genuine?” he asked again.

  “Persistence,” she answered. “You are a detective after all. I have a confession. When your inspector called, I was able to obtain a dispensation from my normal duties in the convent. Most of them, anyway, for a few days. So I have a little spare time on my hands, which I spent yesterday examining this painting, then this morning looking at what archival material I could lay my hands on easily. They kept very good records in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the way. You should be grateful. The Uffizi owns a letter from a contemporary of Caravaggio’s, the poet Giambattista Marino, which may refer to a canvas very like this one. In 1599 Marino writes that he saw a painting of Caravaggio’s which was so consummate in execution, and so reckless in subject, he doubted anyone dare show it, even to those closest to him. Least of all the man who commissioned it, who was a cardinal in the Church.”

  “Then how come this Marino character got to see it?”

  “Where’s your imagination?” She seemed a little disappointed by his question. “Marino was a poet. He lived in Ortaccio, just as Caravaggio did. They probably got drunk together all the time.”

  “Ortaccio,” he replied. So much was coming back from the days when he spent every waking hour with a book about Caravaggio and his world. “The cardinal was Del Monte?”

  She clapped her small brown hands in delight. The noise rang around the empty room, loud and happy.

  “Bravo! I think you are a well-informed detective.” She was idly fidgeting with the crucifix on her chest as they spoke and seemed, to Costa, utterly without guile, without a single layer of self-awareness sitting between her and the world.

  “I read in the paper that your father was a communist,” she remarked. “I imagined you would know nothing of a churchman such as Del Monte.”

  He felt a little disturbed by the degree of intere
st she had taken in him since Falcone had, presumably, called her the previous day to ask for assistance.

  “Communism is a kind of faith too,” he replied.

  “The wrong one. But I imagine a misplaced faith is better than none at all. What do you think?”

  “I think Del Monte was no ordinary churchman,” Costa answered. “He had arcane tastes. He was a cardinal, a favourite of the Pope. But he also dabbled in alchemy and obscure science. There were rumours of homosexuality and licentiousness.”

  “It was Rome!” she cried. “There are always rumours, just like now.”

  “I agree. It was a bohemian court at the time. Galileo was one of his hangers-on while Caravaggio was there. A work such as this would not be out of place, though one can see why it was not on general show.”

  She nodded, watching him with those gleaming eyes. “Even a sister knows the sexual content of this painting would be a little rich for the time,” she agreed. “Perhaps for these times too. There is one more thing we know from Marino’s letter. He writes that Caravaggio ‘took Carracci’s whore and turned her into a goddess.’ Any idea what that means?”

  “None,” Costa replied, baffled.

  She beamed. “Well, I’m pleased I can tell you something new.”

  Agata Graziano led him across the room to a computer screen on a nearby desk, then sat down and began typing. Almost instantly a painting appeared on the screen, one similar to the canvas in the room, but paler, cruder. It was clear from the style and execution that the artist was not Caravaggio.

  “You can see this in the Uffizi today when they feel like showing it. Just a few years later, dear old Annibale was painting the ceilings in the Palazzo Farnese and declaring himself the most pious creature in Rome. And here you have him depicting . . .” She stared at him frankly. “. . . what, exactly, do you think?”

  Costa was still trying to grasp the implications of the canvas on the computer screen. It was like the Caravaggio, but unlike it.

  “Pornography?” she asked bluntly, when he remained silent.

  “If it was pornography, I doubt it would be hanging in the Uffizi.”

  “Pornography masquerading as art, then,” she observed. “Which would be worse, since therein lies hypocrisy.”

  “I really don’t know,” Costa said, and meant it.

  “Tell me what you see, Nic,” she insisted. “Spare me no details.”

  Her skin was so dark he wondered whether he truly saw a blush there.

  The computer told him the plain facts. The painting by Annibale Carracci was known as Venus with a Satyr and Cupids. It depicted the goddess half reclining on a rich velvet bed, her back to the viewer, a crumpled sheet discreetly covering her midriff, then winding round her torso until her right hand gripped it, in a gesture, perhaps, of fading bliss. A dark-skinned Dionysian satyr leered in front of her, bearing a bowl overflowing with grapes. Behind her head a small cupid played, gazing out of the frame of the canvas. Another small figure was depicted at the bottom left of the scene, and it was this that lent the work its curious, half-obscene nature. The creature’s face was positioned by the thigh of the goddess, as if it had recently been close to her, and, in a gesture of astonishing frankness, a small, stiff, muscular tongue protruded lasciviously from its mouth. Its eyes were wild and rolling. While the body of the goddess seemed to hint at intimacy—in the stiffened muscles of her abdomen and the arched position of her legs—her face was placid, almost detached. It was as if the expression Carracci wished to paint on her had been transferred, instead, to the cupid between her thighs in some final failing of courage.

  Costa said this all out loud, keeping his eyes firmly on the canvas.

  “Good,” Agata complimented him. “But let’s leave the inferior. What do you think of this?”

  She gestured at the canvas on the modern easel. Costa took a step towards it, trying to force himself to think carefully, logically.

  An art teacher at school had once told him, “Always begin with the name.” The title of a work was not some simple label. It described both its direction and ambitions, and its origins too. So he dragged his attention away from the canvas itself and looked at a small golden plate in the middle of the lower horizontal arm of the frame. It bore the same words as the Carracci, this time written in carved, archaic capitals: venus with a satyr and cupids.

  This painting was like its inferior relative in some respects, perhaps even inspired by it, since the canvas in the Uffizi was dated circa 1588, when Caravaggio was fifteen and merely an apprentice. But in execution it was entirely different. This work was more adventurous, more competently delivered, and infinitely more erotic, too, though in a subtle, almost sinister way. The artist had produced nothing explicit. Instead he placed the onus of interpretation entirely upon the viewer. An innocent might see this as some strange classical idyll, a mythical female beauty surrounded by her admirers. But a more mature—more carnal—interpretation was hidden inside the exquisite strokes of the artist’s brush. Caravaggio had played this trick often enough, daring the beholder to imagine what deeds and actions were taking place just out of view or obscured behind some foreground object. Never had the master done it with such elusive wit and cunning skill.

  There were clear references to another Caravaggio work Costa knew only too well, and had often visited in the sprawling palace of the Doria Pamphilj in the Piazza del Collegio Romano, perhaps a ten-minute walk away. The model for this Venus was surely the same as the beautiful red-haired woman in The Rest on the Flight from Egypt. But she was not slumbering with the infant Jesus in her arms, unknowingly listening to a lustrous angel playing the violin to sheet music held by a grizzled Joseph. Here she was entirely naked, back half turned to the viewer, as in Carracci’s work, recumbent on some scarlet sofa, and attended again by two cupids and a more dominant leering satyr, central to the composition behind the woman. Like Joseph in the painting in the Doria Pamphilj, this larger male figure had in his hands a piece of music, single notes this time, distinct on the stave, with impenetrable lyrics in Latin beneath. The cherub in the sky to the right held a jug from which some pale liquid fell slowly, carelessly, into a silver goblet in his left hand, poured, one imagined, for the goddess. The second cherub, in the left-hand corner, lay lazily on one elbow, mouth open, singing from the satyr’s notation, and with a tongue that protruded only slightly, not with the rigid, suggestive vigour of Carracci’s satyr, though once again it seemed to carry some reference to the earlier work, with its fleshy, almost obscene grotesqueness. The creature carried a perfect golden apple in its right hand. In the background were more trees, some bearing fruit, and a scene reminiscent of a classical Renaissance garden, a subject Caravaggio had never, to Costa’s recollection, depicted in any other work.

  Costa examined the satyr’s face closely and felt, for a moment, dizzy with a sense of revelation. The bearded individual there, inquisitive, prurient, unable to draw himself away from the scene though a part of him found it disturbing, was uncannily similar to the several self-portraits Caravaggio had inserted in everything from the famous martyrdom of Saint Matthew in Luigi dei Francesi to the late, spectacular beheading of John the Baptist in Malta. At that moment Costa felt he was staring into the very features of the stricken, violent genius who had died on the beach at Port’Ercole in 1610, a hundred kilometres from Rome, on a futile final journey home spurred by a papal pardon for the murder of an enemy in a street four years before.

  “It has to be authentic,” he murmured.

  “Then what is it?” Agata demanded. “Caravaggio would never stoop to making copies, even when he was starving.”

  Costa saw her point. The central figure in the painting—he recalled now the name of the volatile Ortaccio whore, Fillide Melandroni, used by Caravaggio as a model for biblical and mythical characters—was quite unlike the Venus in Carracci’s version, remote, distanced, controlled, almost detached from the scene. On the canvas before them, Venus had been transformed by a knowing adult
imagination. Alive, engaged, ecstatic, she ceased to be an unreal mythical goddess at play in paradise. She became a living woman, one in a familiar state for those able to recognise it. The canvas was innocent—until seen by someone who was not.

  Even so, it seemed distant from the grim and seedy serial murder into which he had unwittingly led Emily, with such terrible results.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he murmured. “Do you?”

  Her small, round mouth screwed up into a childlike grimace. “I told you,” she replied. “I’m thinking. Slowly. There’s no other way. How can I call you?”

  She took a small notebook out of the nearest plastic bag and stared at him. Costa once more had the feeling that he was a schoolboy in the presence of the brightest and sternest teacher. The encounter was over, he realised, with some relief. In truth it wasn’t a meeting at all. It was a test, an interrogation so subtle he had scarcely perceived it.

  Wondering how well he had done, Costa circled the cell phone number on his card and passed it over.

  “Just use this for the time being. You won’t find me in the Questura.” He had to ask. “And you?”

  The throaty musical sound of her laughter echoed around the room once more.

  “I’ve taken vows of common and personal poverty and that includes business cards. I have no phone of my own, mobile or otherwise. You may pass on a message through the convent. Here.”

  He watched her scribble something on a sheet of paper and rip it from the pad.

  “But if you should need me once this present dispensation is over, do not call between 5:45 a.m., when I rise, and 9 a.m., when I finish breakfast. Or lunchtime. Or after 4:30. If I decide to go out, it will be later.”

  “You can do that?” he asked automatically. “Go out?”

  There was, finally, something akin to sympathy in her half-pretty, half-plain face, the face, he realised, and admonished himself for the thought, of a shopgirl or waitress, a million young working-class women with lives that had somehow escaped this curious individual in the cheap black dress, a member of some religious order whose name he hadn’t thought to ask.