The Garden of Evil

by David Hewson

  One

  LA VIGILIA WAS ALREADY STEALING OVER ROME: CHRISTMAS Eve, a pause from the rush and chaos of everyday life. The convoy drove back to the farmhouse through streets that were dark and deserted. There was no need for the fairy lights anymore, no cause to be anywhere but home, in the company of family and friends. Teresa and her team might relish the idea of spending the night poring over the contents of Nino Tomassoni’s secret lair, trying to decode the genetic fingerprint hidden inside the tooth of a skull of an unknown man who just might—Costa knew this was a stretch—turn out to be Ippolito Malaspina. But for the rest of the city, this was a time for reflection and enjoyment.

  And food: seven fishes. No real Roman ate meat at La Vigilia. It was always fish, by tradition seven types, one, his father used to say, for every Catholic sacrament. Even in the Costa household, which, during his childhood, was more solidly communist, and atheist, than any he knew in Lazio, it was impossible to separate La Vigilia from the custom of the seven fishes.

  The godless needed rituals, too, from time to time.

  As they reached the drive and the two guard cars peeled off to block the entrance behind them, Costa wondered why this memory had returned at such a time. Then, dog-tired and ready for bed, just as Agata clearly was, too, he opened the door for her to enter, and a succession of aromas and fragrances wafted out from the kitchen beyond, ones that took him back twenty years in an instant and sent a strong sense of urgent hunger rumbling through his stomach.

  Bea stood there in her best evening dress, wearing a huge white, perfectly ironed apron. By her side, Pepe the terrier sat upright, a red ribbon round his neck.

  “Happy Christmas,” Bea said, welcoming them with a bow, then making to take their coats.

  Agata’s face lit up. She sniffed at the rich and exotic aromas drifting from the kitchen.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “And you a Christian,” Bea scolded her. “It’s La Vigilia. Christmas Eve. And I am a spinster with much time on my hands and a fondness for the old ways. So you will sit down and dine with me. Do not try to play the vegetarian here, young man. I’ve seen you eat fish.”

  “Seven?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she replied, as if it were an idiotic question. “Now go upstairs and change. This is a special occasion. If the dog can dress for it, so can you.”

  Agata ran her slim fingers over the black hand-me-down coat. “I am fine like this, Bea. I have nothing . . .”

  Bea wiped her hands on her apron, then helped Agata out of the coat, holding it away from her, as if it were a thing of no value.

  “Sometimes La Befana comes early. Even for those who come home late. Now go upstairs! Shoo! Shoo!”

  The dog barked.

  “La Befana?” Agata gasped, eyes glittering.

  Bea watched her ascend the stairs quickly, like a child.

  “See,” she said quietly, “she is only human after all.”

  * * *

  THEY SAT AROUND THE LONG TABLE IN THE DINING ROOM, Bea at the head, guiding them through the spread of food, which seemed to grow with every passing minute: cold seafood salad, salt cod, mussels, clams, shrimps, a small lobster, then, finally, the delicacy his father always insisted on, however much it cost, capitone, a large female eel, split into pieces and roasted in the oven, wreathed in bay leaves.

  Agata sat there, astonished, eating greedily. Somehow, during the shopping, Bea had found time to buy her a new white shirt and plain blue trousers. She wore them with the customary battered crucifix around her neck, and within minutes had sauce and debris spattered everywhere, on her clothes and on the table. Bea gave up staring in the end. It was of no consequence.

  “This is obscene,” Agata cried when the eel finally appeared.

  “Compared with what we’ve seen . . .” Costa observed quietly.

  “No work,” Bea snapped. “I didn’t sweat in that kitchen for hours to listen to you two moan about your day. That is the rule. La Vigilia! Eat! And then . . .”

  She went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of sweet cakes and a bowl full of small presents wrapped in gold paper.

  “Then what?” Agata asked.

  “Then we choose from the bowl,” Bea responded. “What do you normally do at Christmas, for pity’s sake?”

  Agata shrugged, then picked up a large piece of eel, stuffed it in her mouth, and said, while chewing, “Pray. Sing. Think. Read.”

  “And?” Bea asked, ignoring the warning glance Costa hoped he was sending her way.

  “And . . . take a little wine before midnight mass.” She cocked her head towards the window. Her hair was now so different. She was different. Costa wondered whether he ought to feel guilty for that change.

  “Can you hear the cannon from the Castel Sant’Angelo when they fire it?” she asked brightly.

  “No,” he answered. “Sorry. We could find it on the television perhaps.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  Bea carefully refilled their glasses with prosecco.

  “Is a cannon important?” she asked.

  “It means midnight mass is not far away,” Agata responded immediately. “I love midnight mass. More than anything. I love the little shows the churches have, with their manger and their infant, Mary and the shepherds. I love the way people look at one another. Another year navigated. Another year to come.”

  She put down her knife and fork, then wiped her hands with her napkin.

  “There are churches nearby,” Agata said hopefully. “Beautiful ones in the Appian Way. Do you think I could go? How many people would be there in a desert like this? You could come with me.” She glanced at Bea. “Both of you, I mean, naturally. I would not hope to evangelize. You’ve shown me your world. Can I not show you a little of mine?”

  Bea coughed into her fist and stared at her plate.

  “Do you think Leo Falcone would allow that?” Costa asked. “A church is . . . a very open place.”

  “It’s supposed to be,” she said quietly.

  There was silence. Then, after a while, she added, somewhat downcast, “I’ve never missed midnight mass. Not in my whole life. Or the sound of that cannon for as long as I can remember.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled at him. “But you would do it if you could.”

  “Certainly.”

  Agata was watching him in a way he found vaguely unsettling.

  “What would you have done?” she asked. “Before. With Emily.”

  He had to think. “Last year we had a meal with Leo and his friend, and Teresa and Gianni,” he said, when he finally managed to recover the memories. “In the city.” He nodded at Bea over the table. “It wasn’t a patch on this food.”

  But this Christmas it would have been different, more private, spent at home, just the two of them. Emily was his wife, finally. Had they not lost the child she was carrying in the spring . . .

  This thought—another of those painful, hypothetical leaps of a cruel imagination—assaulted him. Had Emily kept the child, she would have given up college by now. There would have been no reason for her to have been lurking near the Mausoleum of Augustus on a dull December day, no energy left to be wasted following a fleeing fugitive the way her old skills from the FBI had taught her.

  There would have been two new lives in the old farmhouse at that moment. If . . .

  Costa blinked back something in his eyes. The two women were watching him. He wondered whether to make an excuse and leave the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Agata murmured. “I should never have asked that.”

  “No,” he replied emphatically. “You can’t undo the past by ignoring it. What has happened has happened. I don’t want anyone”—he glanced at Bea—“to let me pretend it can be undone somehow.”

  The two women exchanged a brief look. He could see they hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  “It’s the silence,” Agata said, changing the subject rapidly. “To me it shouts. Is that stra
nge? That I miss the noise of the traffic? The buses? The people outside my window who’ve had a little too much to drink and sing so loudly, so badly, I have to laugh beneath my sheets?”

  “Of course not,” he answered. “You miss what you’re familiar with. It’s only natural. You miss the background of the world you know. You miss what you love.”

  “Just like you,” she said quickly, without thinking, glass in hand, her eyes bright with life and interest now. “I’m sorry. Just like . . .”

  Her fingers flew to her face. She had drunk the wine too quickly, too freely. Something in her firm reserve, which had been so resolute ever since he first met her in the Barberini’s studio at the back of the Palazzo Malaspina, was now crumbling visibly.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she stuttered. “It’s the food, the drink. It’s me. Oh . . .Oh . . .”

  Agata ran from the room, tears welling in her eyes, and raced into the corridor beyond.

  Costa blinked. “What did I say?”

  Bea sighed and declared, “Nothing.”

  “Then . . . what?”

  “Oh, try to think, Nic. The poor child’s not seen anything like this. She’s not used to family. Or the idea two people can talk honestly with each other. Damn the Church for doing that to someone. I doubt she’s had that much decent food and prosecco in her entire life. That and God knows what you’ve shown her. It’s my fault. I’m sorry. This meal was an idiotic idea.”

  “You cannot judge her like that,” he said, with a sudden brief burst of anger.

  Bea put out her hand and touched his cheek. “I don’t. Believe me. I was trying to help. To show her what it’s like outside that prison of hers.”

  “She doesn’t see it that way. It’s none of your business. Or mine either.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  The day had been too long. There was a surfeit of ideas and images and possibilities running round his exhausted head. His shoulder hurt. His mind felt bruised from overactivity.

  “You really don’t have the faintest idea, do you?” she asked tartly.

  “No . . .” he answered softly, a vague, disturbing thought rising from somewhere he wished it had remained.

  Bea held out the bowl with the tiny presents in it. “You might as well take one anyway.”

  He did. It was what had always happened, even when he was a child. The rules, the laws that governed this game, demanded one small box be empty, and as usual it was his.

  “This is not your day,” Bea declared. “Go to bed now, and leave everything—including our young friend Agata—to me.”

  Two

  HE KNEW THE HOUSE SO WELL HE FELT HE COULD HEAR the old stones breathing as they slept. When he awoke, the clock by the bed said 3 a.m. and someone, elsewhere, was awake.

  Costa pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs. She was where he least expected, in the studio, and it didn’t look anything like he remembered.

  From somewhere—Rosa had brought them, he guessed—she had found a series of photographs of the missing painting. Caravaggio’s sensual, fleshy image of Venus—or Eve, he was unsure which anymore—stood on several of Emily’s easels, in full frame, close-up, and very fine detail in several of the shots too. Agata was perched on the single artist’s stool by the desk, staring at the biggest photo, a finger on her cheek, brooding, seemingly as alert as ever, a large pile of documents and what appeared to be an old book by her side.

  “It doesn’t really look like that now, though,” he said.

  She jumped, surprised, perhaps a little embarrassed, by his appearance. She still wore the clothes Bea had found for her, the shirt spattered with food. She hadn’t been to bed at all.

  “How do you mean?” she asked, placing her elbow over the papers, as if she didn’t want him to see.

  “You found the signature. And the real name.”

  She frowned. “You found the name. Besides, now I’ve had the chance to think about it, I’m not sure it’s as important as all that. Caravaggio was playing a game with them. Painting something they thought they could keep to themselves because it was so shocking . . .”

  She pointed to the face of the satyr, the artist’s own. “He was part of it too. One of the Ekstasists. The man had a sense of humour, you know. He was laughing at them, and perhaps at himself as well.”

  Costa came and stood next to her. The photograph did not do the painting justice. The work seemed distant somehow, lacking in the force and meaning that were so powerful, so unavoidable, when the canvas was in front of one’s face. It possessed something that could not be conveyed through the modern medium of a camera.

  “It doesn’t mean he was a part of whatever they did. Perhaps he simply knew them and accepted the commission.”

  “Oh, don’t talk such rubbish.” She gave him a withering look. The teacher in her had returned. “Remember the way he signed it? Why would he describe himself as an Ekstasist if he was outside the club? How would he even know the name? Don’t blind yourself to the truth, Nic. Michelangelo Merisi was part angel, part devil. Like most men, only more so. We know he was involved in cruel and criminal acts. In the end it cost him everything. He was with them. I can feel it. Nothing else makes sense. I just wish . . .” She stopped and scratched her head.

  “Why are you still awake?” he asked.

  “How can I sleep?” she complained, still unable to take her attention away from the photographs. “I miss everything about my home. The noises. The female company. The routine. The fact I’m safe there. I don’t have to worry about all these troubles that bother you . . .”

  “You will return,” he assured her. “As soon as possible.”

  “I hope so,” Agata replied, but not with much conviction. She stared at him. “Tell me. If there was some way I could find out why it all went wrong that first time round, with Caravaggio and Tomassoni. Why some stupid, juvenile band of thugs degenerated into murder and bloody hatred. Just as it did with Franco. Would that help?”

  “You still don’t understand this, do you?” he declared, almost exasperated. “What it is that we do.”

  “You establish facts and then act on them. Of course I understand that.”

  Costa shook his head. “No, you don’t. Sometimes the facts lead nowhere. You have to fill them out with guesswork, imagination.”

  “That idea offends me. It’s not scholarly. Not scientific.”

  “Is the Bible?”

  “It’s scholarly.”

  “As is Teresa’s laboratory, but Franco Malaspina has denied us that. We don’t have those luxuries anymore. Emily and those women are dead. Franco Malaspina and his accomplices were responsible somehow. What we need are plain, ordinary, unassailable facts that link him to them. We can’t find any. So instead . . .”

  “Guesswork,” she grumbled. “But would it help if you understood about the Ekstasists?”

  “I have absolutely no way of knowing. Why?”

  She hesitated and eyed him nervously. “I was just curious. I’m sorry about tonight,” she said in a low, nervy voice. “Sometimes I speak too freely.”

  “Too much wine.”

  “That was an excuse. I hardly touched the wine. I simply . . .” Still she wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t belong in a place like this. It’s mundane and close and personal in a way that’s beyond me. I know that’s selfish. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t say that. It does. All that beautiful food. The care Bea took.” She shrugged her slender shoulders and wrapped her arms around the stained white shirt. “I never expected to be a part of such an evening. I didn’t even know anything like it ever existed really . . .”

  Agata walked rapidly over to the desk, which was still littered with Emily’s drawings. “Do you think I’m wasting my life?” she asked him from across the room. “Be honest.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s very unfair to answer a question with another question. Answer me, please. Look at what your wife did. She dr
ew, she thought, she tried to create things. One day I imagine you would have had a family. And I . . .” She scowled, an expression of moody dissatisfaction spreading across her face. “I stare at paintings and try to find life in them. Why? For myself. Because I daren’t face the real thing. It’s egotistical, obsessive, unnatural.”

  “I can’t give you an answer,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know you well enough. And even if I did, it would be presumptuous. To ask another human being whether there’s value in your own existence . . . that’s for you to judge.”

  She thought about this.

  “But you placed a value on Emily’s life,” she pointed out. “You still do. I see her in your eyes, like a mist that’s always there. Her memory drives you, more than anything I have ever seen in another person. I can’t imagine what you’ll feel if this need you have to bring Franco Malaspina to justice isn’t satisfied.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “It might.”

  She walked over and stood in front of him again. “You’re trawling through grey dust and old bones for an answer now. How desperate does a man need to be to do that?”

  “I prefer to think of it as determined.”

  Agata laughed. Not in the way she did when they first met. This was open and happy and carefree.

  “You know,” she murmured, “I used to stare at people in your world and pity you all. So much pain. So much to worry about.” She grimaced. “And so much life too.” Her hands came away from the silver cross on the chain. Nervously, she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, then looked him straight in the eye and said, “I had to ask myself tonight whether I really wanted to go back to the convent. Whether this life—your kind of life—wasn’t a more honest one. I’ve never really faced that question before. But it’s been there. Before any of this happened. I recognise that now.”

  “Agata . . .”

  Her dark eyes burned with the keen curiosity that was never far away.

  “It’s very late, Nic. I think I should go to bed.”

  His head felt heavy. He was unsure what to do, what to think.