The Caravaggio Conspiracy

by Walter Ellis

  ‘Shenanigans? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Goings-on. Things that shouldn’t be happening.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Just thinking aloud. If he heard there were people in high places putting undue pressure on certain cardinals to give their vote to a certain hardline candidate, would that be something your father would take notice of?’

  She looked at him hard. It was obvious to him that she didn’t like the direction in which their conversation was going. ‘Of course he’d take notice,’ she said. ‘But there’d be nothing he could do … not unless there was murder involved, or blackmail – something of that order. You have to realize that in the interregnum between two papacies my father’s primary, indeed sole loyalty, is to the College of Cardinals.’

  ‘But there are hundreds of cardinals, from all over the world, most of whom he’s never met. How can he be loyal to all of them?’

  ‘It’s an institutional loyalty, stupid. It works through the Camerlengo.’

  ‘Cardinal Bosani?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘And what if the Camerlengo is pursuing his own agenda?’

  Maya bristled. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  Dempsey’s eyes darted round the tables next to them, where various combinations of Italians and lesser races were enjoying their lunch. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know, the Curia’s agents are everywhere?’

  This stopped her in her tracks. Then she caught the look in his eyes and the tension dissolved in a flash. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I get it. You are making fun of me.’

  ‘Maybe I am and maybe I’m not,’ he said. ‘It’s just that my uncle has got the crazy idea that Cardinal Bosani wants a pro-European, anti-Muslim Pope. He thinks there’s a faction in the Curia out to provoke a confrontation with Islam.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ She looked dubious.

  ‘A Catholic revival, I suppose. Just what we need in these troubled times.’

  Maya leaned in, sensing the antipathy. ‘Bosani is not my favourite cardinal. He’s a smooth-talking bully with an over-inflated sense of his own importance. But he’s not a madman. No one who wanted war in Europe could ever earn the confidence of two popes. The idea that he could rig the vote in favour of his own candidate is preposterous. For a start, it ignores the fact that most of the cardinals due here next week have all sorts of ideas about who would do the best job. Take it from me, all Cardinal Bosani wants is a pope who stands up for the faith in troubled times. Is that so too much to ask?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Dempsey, appearing to accept the logic of her argument. ‘I think maybe my uncle’s just a bit on edge because there aren’t any Jesuits in the race. Even so, if you hear anything, you might let me know … just to put his mind at rest.’

  ‘He sounds a bit paranoid, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ he said. ‘More to the point, are you still on for a film tonight? Only, Rome’s full of tourists and I’d need to book in advance.’

  She looked at him and her face softened. He was a hard man to say no to. ‘I’m not sure if the Irish and the Swiss were ever made to get along,’ she said. ‘But I’ll give it a go … for now. Call it an experiment.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty. Dress informal.’

  9*

  Conclave minus 14

  Dempsey had never even heard of the Galleria Doria Pamphilj until his uncle gave him a free ticket courtesy of the Rome tourist office.

  ‘Take my word for it,’ O’Malley said. ‘There’s no finer gallery in Rome. What’s more, this is no ordinary ticket. It grants you admission for an hour after the gallery has officially closed, so you should have the place almost to yourself. A rare privilege.’

  ‘Do you get upgraded on flights home as well?’ Dempsey asked, impressed despite himself.

  ‘Matter of fact, I do,’ the Father General replied. ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

  Next day, Dempsey spent eight straight hours in the National Library on the Viale Castro Pretorio, researching material for his PhD. It turned out to be a rather one-sided quest. While there were hundreds of letters and documents relating to Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel, the papers of Pope Pius IX were mostly locked away in the Vatican Library. He did, though, find one quotation from Pius – the last pontiff to reign as sovereign of the Papal States – that struck him as relevant to present-day tensions in Italy. The Jews, His Holiness said in a speech in 1871, were ‘dogs’, and there were too many of these ‘dogs’ in Rome. ‘We hear them howling in the streets. They disturb us everywhere we go.’ Substitute Muslims for Jews and it was the same situation today. Now there was a pope Bosani could respect.

  It was after four o’clock before he started out for the Pamphilj gallery. It was rush hour – what the Italians called l’ora di punta. The pavements were packed with commuters heading to the Metro or making their way to the main railway station a little further west. Dempsey drew a deep breath as he left the cool seclusion of the library. It was yet another sticky summer’s evening. The air-conditioning units, turned up to high despite the latest government regulations, droned overhead, dripping water steadily onto the ground. He considered taking a bus, but Roman bus routes were incredibly complicated. It was said you had to be born in the city to have any hope of understanding them. Better to take a little longer on foot than end up a kilometre or more in the wrong direction.

  It was when he stopped for a cold beer off the Via della Gatta that he learned from RaiNews 24 that the gardener injured by the bomb in the cloisters of the Lateran cathedral had died two hours earlier in the San Giovanni Hospital. Few of the tourists in the crowded bar understood the bulletin, but a definite murmur of hostility rose from the Romans present.

  ‘Bloody Arabs!’ one man with a leather jacket and a comb-over said beneath his breath. ‘One minute they’re shooting at a judge, the next they’re blowing the legs off one of the Pope’s gardeners.’

  ‘Poor bastard,’ someone said. ‘Didn’t even know what hit him.’

  The barman nodded. ‘But when’s the government going to bloody well do something? Pity we can’t have Berlusconi back. They’ll be bombing my mother when she comes out of Mass before anyone sits up and takes notice.’

  Dempsey finished his beer and headed back into the evening sunshine. He understood the sentiment. After his own experience, he had no time for Islamic terrorists. But he still found this kind of talk wearing.

  Two minutes later, he arrived at the Palazzo Pamphilj, next to the old Collegio Romano. He showed his invitation to a uniformed guard and was directed towards a set of marble stairs. The sculpture room, the first stop on the tour, didn’t interest him. He’d never cared much for sculpture, which always reminded him of public parks filled with bronze aldermen in frock coats, or ‘martyrs’ calling on others to follow their example. Hurrying past a lubricious centaur and a tiny figure of Socrates reclining in the fireplace, he followed the signs up another set of stairs to the first of the picture galleries.

  The initial impact was of a saleroom he had once visited in Dublin. There were paintings – hundreds of them – stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Some were so jammed together that it was hard to make them out. It was the painterly equivalent of l’ora di punta.

  There was, of course, one exception. The celebrated portrait of Innocent X by Velàsquez was displayed in its own secluded gabinetto, next to a bust of the pontiff by Bernini. The decision to keep the Velàsquez separate from the rest of the collection was nothing new. Isolation was a fact of life for those who sat on the Throne of St Peter’s. It was central to their role. And it was appropriate that the only face Innocent had to gaze upon when the public took their leave each evening was his own – which was almost certainly the case in real life.

  Dempsey sympathized. For the first four weeks of his burns treatment, smeared with antibiotic cream, he had been secured inside a pressurized steel
chamber filled with oxygen. The sensation was disorientating. He had felt like an astronaut lost in space. Every day he went to sleep and wakened in the same position, face down, arms and legs outstretched, as if he were crucified – except that he had never felt further from God. The longer-term treatment was only marginally more bearable. His extreme susceptibility to infection meant that for the next three months doctors and nurses, wearing masks and speaking to him in French, were his only contact with the world. Each morning, to a background of Mozart, Berlioz and Strauss, specialist technicians would scrape away the dead tissue from his back, buttocks and thighs – an excrutiating procedure known as debridement. In a bid to promote the generation of healthy tissue beneath, whole layers of scabs were removed. But the worst part came when grafts from a specially bred pig were attached to the still-forming sub-cutaneous layers of his skin. It was as if he were being robbed of the last remaining vestige of his humanity and turned into someone, or something, else. Yet dreadful though all of this had been, nothing was as bad as the overwhelming sense of solitude. If it was true that a drowning man reviewed his whole life in the minute or so it took him to die, it was also the case that a man staring at the floor for six months revisited again and again and again every decision he had ever taken, every mistake he ever made, every girl he ever slept with. He was bound to his past like Prometheus to his rock, constantly reminded of his failings, waking each morning to be devoured alive.

  Prominent among the spectral presences was the shade of his father, who moved through secret doors inside the chambers of his memory, turning up when he was least wanted, asking questions to which there were no answers. He had never understood the nature of their relationship. Perhaps they didn’t have one. Perhaps they had just lived in the same house. He told himself that if his mother had survived, everything would have been different. She would have given him love and understanding. The farm would have known laughter as well as whiskey fumes. But that was just fantasy. After she died giving birth to him, the old man, like Miss Havesham in Great Expectations, became suspended in time. His long silences, interrupted only by prayer and periodic torrents of abuse, had persisted for more than twenty years.

  Not that his own life since had lacked variety. There had even been moments of sublime black comedy. A week after his father died, as he lay face down in France, unable to attend the funeral, his fiancée, Siobhán, wrote to him from Dublin to tell him she was sorry, but she couldn’t cope with his injuries and was breaking off their engagement. ‘I know I must seem heartless,’ she had written, ‘and I want you to know how dreadful I feel about leaving you like this. I can only ask you to see the situation from my perspective.’ He saw it well enough. Given everything else that had happened, the blatant egoism of her decision had made him laugh out loud – which hurt. The duty nurse, who had read him the letter in her heavily accented English, only half understanding it, thought he was out of his mind and summoned the doctor, who gave him a sedative.

  The last he heard, Siobhán had married a hedge fund manager whose brother played cricket for Ireland. Cricket! Well, good luck to her. It had been a foolish relationship to begin with, which would never have lasted. She’d have divorced him inside of three years, pausing only to take him to the cleaners.

  But time, as the cliché had it, was the great healer. Having never believed it, he now knew it was true. The scars on his back would always be there, but the ones inside his head had begun to close. He could feel life returning, like sap rising in a tree after a long winter. It had come back not only in the muscles of his back and the wasted sinews of his arms and legs, but in his altered view of the world and its possibilities. He had learned things about himself that he could never have known otherwise. He was less carefree since Iraq, less self-obsessed. He was more thoughtful, more discriminating. But the other side was always there, too. There were things he had learned that you weren’t supposed to know until you were old. The fragility of human life and the despair that hid around every corner, waiting to declare itself, was something he could not dismiss. The only thing he could be sure of was that he was different now – new-forged – and he would have to be satisfied with that.

  He felt a hand on his arm. A woman standing next to him in the gallery asked him in English if he was all right. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else. It was then he realized that he had been gazing for a several minutes into the cold, sceptical eyes of Innocent X. He turned to the woman, who happened to be an American. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I was just trying to work out what he was thinking.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, moving away. ‘I’m a Baptist.’

  Smiling to himself, he backed out of His Holiness’s presence and made his way down a long, brilliantly lit gallery until he was moved to halt in front of a double portrait of two lawyers by Raphael and Salome with the Head of John the Baptist by Titian. Both were extraordinary. The glistened as if they had only just been completed. But it was the Caravaggios he had come to see.

  Earlier in the day, determined to show his uncle that he was not a complete prat when it came to art, he had taken the opportunity to view Judith with the Head of Holofernes in the Palazzo Barberini, at the bottom of the Via Veneto. It was easily the most terrifying painting he had ever seen. According to his audio guide, Holofernes was an Assyrian general who had threatened the destruction of Israel. So no change there. Judith, a wealthy and beautiful Jewess, seduced him, then cut off his head as he slept. Must have been employed by Mossad, he reckoned. Holofernes had woken up just too late to avoid his fate. His killer, looking as if she found the task frankly distasteful but necessary, had slit his throat with his own sword, then just carried on sawing while a leather-faced crone stood ready to wrap up the head in a sheet. The victim’s blood shot out thickly from his gaping neck, soaking his sheets and pillow, while his stifled scream echoed across the gallery.

  Uncle Declan had warned him that Caravaggio was obsessed with capital punishment. At least a quarter of his paintings featured severed heads, some of them based on his own pain-racked features. Perhaps he had had a premonition. Following some dismal murder or other, he’d passed his last years as a fugitive. The story went that he’d been hunted down by unknown enemies who in the end had got their man.

  But the two canvases Dempsey sought out in the Pamphilj could not have been more different. The first showed a penitent Mary Magdalene, the ‘bad girl’ of the New Testament, with her head bowed and arms loosely folded in her lap. The idea, evidently, was that she was repenting of her past and turning to Christ, but to Dempsey it was more like she ached for something that had been taken from her. There was certainly more to her melancholy than a renunciation of high living. But then he looked at the painting next to it, Rest During the Flight into Egypt. At first, he didn’t think much of it. For a start, the Sinai looked less like a desert than a glimpse of the Garden of Eden, which made no sense. As Mary cradled the baby Jesus, Joseph, looking distinctly world-weary – as well he might, given the recent turn of events – held up a music score so that a half-naked angel violinist could play not a lullaby, as he first thought, but the Song of Songs.

  But then he looked closer – and that’s when it got interesting. It was the same girl in both paintings. Had to be: the same red hair and generous figure, head turned down, eyes closed. As Mary Magdalene, her arms were empty, clutching only empty space. But in the second work, she held her baby close to her heart – and it made all the difference in the world. Art, Dempsey was coming to realize, was not always about what it was about. Had the model, obviously well known to Caravaggio, maybe lost a baby? Was the artist giving us, in fact, a before and after portrait of loss? Whatever the truth, there were obviously two Caravaggios, one a consummate artist, a sensitive observer of the human psyche; the other haunted, fatalistic and disabled by self-loathing.

  Just like that, Dempsey felt he had found a friend.

  10*

  4 October 1603

  Jesus said: ‘So secret
is predestination, O brethren, that I say to you, truly, only to one man shall it be clearly known. He it is whom the nations look for, to whom the secrets of God are so clear that, when he comes into the world, blessed shall they be that shall listen to his words …’ The disciples answered, ‘O Master, who shall that man be of whom you speak, who shall come into the world?’ Jesus answered joyous of heart: ‘He is Muhammad, Messenger of God.’

  —The gospel of Barnabas, Chapter 163

  There were summonses in Rome that you could ignore and those you could not. Those from the office of the Camerlengo fell very definitely into the second category. A constable of the sbirri had pounded on Caravaggio’s door. When the artist answered, wiping sleep from his eyes, he was told that he was to present himself that afternoon at the Palazzo Battista on the Via Monseratto.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘No prizes there, Merisi,’ the constable said, with a sneer. ‘To answer charges about your scurrilous personal behaviour. From what I hear, His Eminence wants to find out whether or not you’re a heretic who should have his head cut off. So I wouldn’t worry about it. Just routine.’

  The constable, a thug Caravaggio had run across several times in the last year, sniggered before adding: ‘I wouldn’t advise you to keep His Eminence waiting. He can be very persuasive with people who get on the wrong side of him. Know what I mean?’ Leaning forward, he wrinkled his nose, making snuffling noises like a bloodhound. ‘And something else: I’d have a wash first. He’s very particular about that.’

  Caravaggio felt his blood run cold. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘No need to send for reinforcements. Now oblige me, Constable, and fuck off.’