by David Hewson
They hadn’t, in fact. Costa understood why. In some strange way the four of them were so close that they had no need of these spoken reassurances. Those were reserved for outsiders.
“So?” Falcone asked.
“So what?”
“So when would you like to come back to work?”
“I’ll be back the instant you want me.”
“Good. There’s an attachment coming up in Sicily just after Christmas. It would be an excellent opportunity under any circumstances. People-smuggling. Rome needs some expertise there.”
“Sicily.” Costa groaned.
“Sicily,” the inspector agreed.
Costa waited, searching for the words.
“This is what friends are for, Leo. I have never exercised that friendship until now. I want this case. Emily’s murder. You have to give it to me.”
A swarm of dark crows danced on the horizon, near the distant circular outline of the tomb of a long-dead Imperial matron, Cecilia Metella. Falcone watched them for several long seconds, then said, “I can’t do that. I find it grossly unfair of you to exert personal pressure in this way. Compassionate leave could stretch to a month or more if you want it.”
“I’d be even crazier after a month. This is enough. Besides, I have every right…”
The crows lost their importance. Falcone turned to him, a flash of anger in his face.
“You have no rights whatsoever, other than those of any other bereaved civilian. Don’t be so ridiculous. An officer investigating his own wife’s death? What do you think the media would make of that? Or those clowns on the seventh floor?”
“It’s an investigation into several murders. I would leave my own feelings to one side.”
“Who do you hope to fool with that argument? Me? Or yourself?”
Costa didn’t have a good answer, only pretexts, and now, faced with Falcone’s stubbornness, he knew they wouldn’t work.
“I have to do something.”
Falcone shook his bald head. It gleamed under the low winter sun.
Costa sought the words. These thoughts had dogged him ever since her death. They wouldn’t go away. “I can’t bury her, Leo. Not properly. Unless…” He sighed. “I need to work. Otherwise everything just keeps going round and round in my head.”
Falcone shrugged. “Then work in Sicily.”
“I have to do something here.”
“I hate personal issues,” Falcone grumbled. “You feel responsible. It’s understandable. Anyone would. It’s the way we’re made. It will pass.”
“No,” Costa murmured. “It won’t. Not on its own.”
“And what if you fail?” the older man asked severely. “What will that do to you?”
“I won’t fail.” That thought had really never occurred to him.
Falcone sniffed, took a sly look back at the house again, slipped a small cigar out of his pocket, then lit it. “You have no idea what you’re asking. We are more than a week into this investigation, yet I have nothing…” He scowled. Some thought, some irritant, affected him at that moment. “.…nothing concrete to show for all the work we’ve done. Frankly, several aspects baffle me more every time I look at them. With you gone and Peroni drooping around the place like a dog that’s lost its best friend… we’re not in top form, to be honest. They’re already whispering upstairs that perhaps we should hand over everything to the Carabinieri. If I could do this, Nic, do you honestly believe I’d turn you down?”
“You can find a way,” Costa insisted. “You always do.”
Falcone was up on his feet, with an easy swiftness that showed the injuries that had troubled him since the shooting in Venice were now in the past. Falcone could do it. His standing in the Questura was high again. He could do anything he liked, if he wanted.
And now he was angry. The heat suffused his walnut cheeks.
“Dammit!” he barked, just loud enough for a few faces at the window to turn in their direction. “What kind of occasion is this to start throwing professional demands at me?”
“It’s my murdered wife’s funeral, sir,” Costa replied with a flat, cold disdain.
Three
Half-recognised faces, people he hadn’t seen for years. Funerals always brought them out, and Costa had never been good with names. They were almost all gone within thirty minutes, leaving Bea clearing away the plates and glasses and Costa talking to a somewhat embarrassed Raffaella Arcangelo alone in a chair in the dining room, stroking the ancient, half-slumbering dog.
“You’ll have to go and speak to him, Nic,” she said. “It’s freezing cold out there, he doesn’t have a jacket, and he won’t come in of his own accord.”
“It’s like dealing with a child,” he complained.
She nodded. “I have very little experience with children but I must admit it does sound very similar. All the same…”
Costa stormed outside, bracing for another argument. Falcone was back at the decrepit wooden table, puffing on another cigar, blowing the smoke out towards the dead, hunched vines waiting for spring and a reawakening.
He watched Costa sit down, then said, “You’d have to work over Christmas.”
“That,” Costa replied, exasperated, “is hardly an obstacle.”
Falcone nodded. “I hate Christmas too.”
The last few people were drifting outside, Raffaella among them. They couldn’t, Nic knew, leave without saying goodbye. This had to be brought to an end.
“What am I supposed to do, Leo?”
The shrewd old eyes flashed at him again. There was an unmistakable expression of self-doubt in them, something Costa had rarely seen in his boss. Falcone reached into his jacket pocket. He withdrew a copious set of keys and removed two from the ring.
“These are for my old apartment in the centro storico, in Governo Vecchio. You know it?”
Costa had never been invited there. The place predated Raffaella and the apartment she had shared with Falcone. But he knew the location, just a stone’s throw from the Piazza Navona.
“I had been planning to move back there now that I can walk properly,” Falcone went on. “But Raffaella prefers Monti. Here.”
He handed Costa the keys.
“I have a home,” he protested, waving a hand at the house.
“Bea can look after it. In three days’ time I want you to pack your bags. Expect to be gone a week or more. And” — the finger jabbed at him — “don’t tell a soul where you’re going.”
This was interesting, Costa thought.
“Teresa is due to deliver some kind of news to me then,” Falcone continued, before Costa could ask a single question. “The woman never hurries, naturally. You have a reason to be at that meeting. Take it. We are due at that damned studio for her theatricals. Afterwards you will return to compassionate leave. In my apartment. I will explain later.”
He looked lost for a moment, staring at the grey horizon as if seeking answers. “Finding a criminal is only half the challenge,” he added cryptically. “Don’t make me regret this, Nic.”
Costa didn’t have time to answer. A voice drifted from the door. It was Raffaella. Falcone dipped the cigar down below his waist and flicked it into the vineyard with a long, agile finger.
“You have some identification for these dead African women?” Costa asked in a quiet voice.
“What do you think?” Falcone grumbled. “If a man wishes to commit a crime, best commit it against the underclass. These women’s families are too scared to complain. Or…” He didn’t wish to go on.
“Someone has to be able to ID them, Leo.”
“You’d think…” the inspector replied with a sour, pinched smile. “Fake names. Fake identities. These are illegal immigrants desperate to stay out of our way. Even when we do find them…” He shrugged.
“There must be—” Costa insisted.
“Nic. Please. Enough. I have two officers in Nigeria at this very moment, following up the only real lead we have. It could take months of work, even
if people there are willing to speak to us, and they won’t be. Do not equate your absence in all this with a lack of effort on our part. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Costa shook his head. “I never meant it that way,” he murmured. “I just don’t understand—”
“None of us understands. Perhaps Teresa will shed a little light on matters when we meet. But there’s something else you must do first. That painting we found in the studio. You must either tell me it’s important or let me forget about it altogether. An art expert attached to the Barberini is due to start looking at it shortly. I will make some calls, arrange an appointment for you. I happen to have made this expert’s acquaintance before. She comes highly recommended. The woman’s name is Agata Graziano. The gallery has a laboratory close to the Piazza Borghese. She’s the best apparently. And there’s one more thing…”
He elaborated no more and simply gazed at the still-smouldering cigar on the cold winter earth. Then he said: “I want whoever did this, Nic. Just as much as you.”
PART FOUR
One
It was raining when he drove out of the farmhouse three days later, leaving Bea performing some unnecessary cleaning, and issuing persistent queries about where he was going and why. Costa had no sensible answers. He had a suitcase full enough for a week away, as Falcone had demanded. He felt glad to be out of the place, too, to be moving. Inactivity didn’t suit him, and perhaps the inspector understood that only too well. The previous night he’d barely slept for thinking about the case, and Falcone’s strangely gloomy assessment of what had been achieved so far. It was highly unusual for the old inspector to be so pessimistic at such a relatively early point in an investigation.
The city was choked with holiday traffic. The narrow lanes, now full of specialist shops selling antiques and furniture and clothes, were cloaked in skeins of Christmas lights twinkling over the crowds. It took ten minutes to find somewhere to park near the Piazza Borghese, even with police ID on the vehicle.
Costa’s opinion of the painting at the crime scene had not altered since the black day of December 8. In truth, for him, little had changed since the moment Emily had been snatched from life. It was as if his world had ceased to move, and in this sense of stasis the only certainty that remained was what he’d realised about the canvas he had first seen in the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Either it really was an unknown Caravaggio or somehow they had come across an extraordinary fake. There had been plenty of copyists over the years, both genuine artists working in Caravaggio’s style by way of tribute and con men trying to hoodwink naive buyers into thinking they had discovered some new masterpiece. At home, alone, desperate to think of something other than those last moments by the mausoleum, Costa had taken out his old art books, delved deep into the images and the histories there, welcoming the respite he could take from the thoughts that haunted him. The dark, violent genius who was Caravaggio had lived in Rome for just fourteen years, from 1592 until 1606, when he fled under sentence of death for murder. Every genuine homage that Costa could find had made it plain through some reference, stylistic or by way of subject, that it came from the brush of another. Every fake was, by dint of the original’s extraordinary technical skill, modest in reach, an attempt to convince the potential buyer that it came from Caravaggio’s early period in Rome, when he was open to quick, cheap private commissions, though even then only on his own terms and for subjects of which he approved.
As Nic remembered it, the canvas from the Vicolo del Divino Amore seemed to fit neither of these templates. That painting was bold, extraordinarily ambitious, and far more substantial than an ordinary collection piece thrown up on some brief commission in order to pay a pressing bill. It stood more than two metres wide and half as high, housed in a plain gilt frame that had faded to the dark sheen of old gold. Even with the briefest of glances, Costa had been able to detect telltale signs of the painter’s individual style. Seen from an angle to the side, close to where the body of Véronique Gillet lay on the grey flagstones, still and deathly pale, he had been able to make out the faintest of incisions, preparatory guidelines cut with a stylus or sharp pen, similar to those etched into plaster by fresco painters, a technique no other artist of the time was known to use on canvas.
The sfumato — a gradation from dark to light so subtle that it was impossible to discern the blend of an outline or border — appeared exquisite. Taken as a whole, the abiding style of the piece went beyond mere chiaroscuro, the histrionic balance of light and shade first developed by da Vinci. During his brief life, Caravaggio had taken da Vinci’s model and emboldened the drama with a fierce, almost brutal approach in which the core figures were set apart from the background and the characters around them by a bright, unforgiving light, like a ray of pure shining spirit. The effect was to heighten the emotional tension of the scene to a degree hitherto unseen in the work of any artist. There was a technical term for the style Caravaggio had pioneered, tenebrismo, from the Latin tenebrae, for shadows, and it was this that made paintings like the conversion of Saint Paul and the final moments of Peter on the cross so electrifying, so timeless.
* * *
He found his vivid recollections of those canvases racing through his head as he followed the directions Falcone had given him for the laboratory of the Galleria Barberini. When he got there, he realised it could have been no more than half a kilometre from the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore itself, though the distance was deceptive, since a straight line would run principally through hard Renaissance brick and stone, unseen halls and buildings hidden behind high, smog-stained windows.
Both the laboratory and the studio appeared to be part of the black lumbering mass that was the Palazzo Malaspina, an ugly façade for what was reputedly one of the finest remaining private palaces still in original hands. No one set foot inside the palazzo itself without an invitation. But it was no great surprise, Costa decided, that areas of the vast edifice were rented to outsiders. Shops, apartments, offices, and even a few restaurants seemed to find shelter in the area covered by its sprawling wings.
The small, almost invisible sign for the Barberini’s outpost was in a side alley off the relatively busy Via della Scrofa. He rang the bell and waited for only thirty seconds. A guard in the blue civilian uniform of one of the large private security companies opened the door. He had a belt full of equipment and a holster with a handgun poking prominently out of the top. There were valuable paintings here, Costa reminded himself. One perhaps more valuable than anyone else appreciated.
Before he could say a word, a short slender figure in a plain billowing black dress emerged from behind the guard’s bulky frame.
“I’ll deal with this, Paolo,” she declared, in a tone that sent the man scuttling back to his post next to the door without another word.
The woman was perhaps thirty, dark-skinned, with a pert, inquisitive face, narrow and pleasant rather than attractive, with gleaming brown eyes beneath a high and intellectual forehead. A large silver crucifix hung on a chain around her neck. A black garment which Costa thought might be called a scapular was draped around her slight shoulders. She seemed somewhat anxious. Her full head of black shiny hair hung in disorganised tresses, kept untidily together by pins. In her left hand she held a couple of creased and clearly old plastic grocery bags bulging with papers and notes and photographs, as if they were some kind of replacement for a briefcase.
It took a moment for Costa to understand. “I’m sorry, Sister,” he apologized. “I’m looking for the Barberini laboratory. I have an appointment.”
She reached into one of the plastic bags, took out a very green apple, bit into it greedily, and, mouth full, asked, “You are Nic?”
He nodded.
“Come in. You don’t look like you do in the pictures in the papers,” she replied, turning, then marching down the long corridor with a swift, deliberate gait, her heavy leather shoes clattering on the wooden floor.
He followed, hurrying t
o keep up. “You read the papers?” he asked, surprised.
She turned and laughed. “Of course I read the papers! What am I? A monk?”
They walked into a brightly lit chamber at the end. It was like entering an operating theatre. The painting sat on a bright new modern easel beneath a set of soft, insistent lighting that exposed every portion of it. Costa stared and felt his breath catch. The canvas radiated light and life and an extraordinary, magnetic power.
The nun sat down and finished her apple in four bites. Then she placed the core back in one of the grocery bags, took out a wrinkled paper handkerchief, and patted her lips. Costa had little experience in dealing with the city’s religious community. There was rarely any need.
“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.”
