by David Hewson
Costa nodded, beginning to understand. “He will be there. Malaspina.”
“I expect so,” Falcone admitted. “Oh…” He half turned as he strode away. “Have fun, won’t you?” he ordered, and was gone.
PART SEVEN
One
He found her in the Saletta del Seicento, exactly where he expected: in front of the central painting on the long wall, Caravaggio’s sumptuous depiction of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, with its elderly Joseph holding the music for an ethereally beautiful angel, who bowed a violin to a slumbering Virgin and Child. Agata Graziano was accompanied by a slender man with bright golden hair and a face not unlike that of the divine being with the violin, though somewhat older and a little careworn. Both he and Agata were, however, intent on studying the painting to the work’s left: another Caravaggio, this time the slumbering penitent Mary Magdalene.
She turned to smile at him as he arrived.
“Riddles,” she remarked. “Nothing but riddles. Do you recognise the woman here?”
“Fillide Melandroni,” Costa said promptly.
“Exactly. One of the busiest ladies of her time, and here she is, the model for both the Magdalene and the Virgin herself. And” — a flicker of puzzlement crossed Agata’s dark eyes — “the woman in our own mysterious canvas. Do you wonder Caravaggio wound up being run out of Rome? Even if he’d never murdered that man in the street.”
Her gaze fell on the slumbering Magdalene, a portrait so exquisitely human in its portrayal of both physical and spiritual exhaustion that its subtle, intense power made Costa’s mind reel whenever he saw it.
“Here’s another thing,” she pointed out. “You see what she’s wearing? These are the clothes of a Roman prostitute. An Ortaccio whore. This is what Fillide looked like when she went about her business.” That glimmer of self-doubt flickered across her face again. “Not that I’m much qualified to offer you an opinion there. Caravaggio would have produced these about the same time, working no more than a five-minute walk from where we stand. You can see it in the colours, the people, the style. The life, more than anything. This was perhaps 1596. Michelangelo Merisi was still young, undamaged by the harsh reality of everyday Rome. He had just entered the household of Del Monte, painting by day, listening to philosophers and alchemists in the evening. And Lord knows what else…”
She glanced at him. “Still, that’s not my territory either, is it? Here’s something else.” Her hand pointed to the scroll of music held by the elderly Joseph, listening, in wonder, to the angel’s violin. “Music. Real music. Alexander?”
The man standing beside her looked at Costa and smiled. Then he began to sing, a slow wordless melody detailed in a perfect alto voice, halfway between a choirboy and a diva.
When he stopped, he grinned at Costa’s discomfort. “Don’t worry, we won’t get thrown out. This is one of my party tricks. Alexander Fairgood. I run music events here from time to time.”
“Ah,” Costa replied, understanding. He walked forward and examined the sheet of music in the raddled Joseph’s worn and elderly hands. “I always thought it was just… notes.”
“That’s what riddles are for,” Agata pointed out. “Making you think. Tell him, Alex.”
He was American but spoke Italian in the easy, fluent way foreigners did after a few years in the city. “This is what’s known as a Marian motet. A form of medieval religious music dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This particular piece is an extract from a work by an obscure Flemish composer, Noël Bauldewijn. The words are from the Song of Songs, 7:6 to 7:12. I have this from memory, in Latin or Greek, Hebrew or English. Lord knows I’ve sung it enough.”
His clear, firm voice rang throughout the chamber and the corridors beyond once more, timeless and in perfect, controlled pitch, now declaiming a set of rich and sonorous verses precisely, word by word.
The man’s voice had an ethereal clarity that stilled every other sound in the gallery. Costa didn’t understand a word.
“It’s Latin,” Fairgood announced, looking a little testy. “No problem. I’m used to translating it for Romans. The price is you get it in English. It sounds more alluring that way. Can you manage?”
“I’m fine with English,” Costa said, knowing somehow he didn’t have to ask this question of Agata.
“Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.”
Fairgood grinned. “That was the King James Version. Pretty racy for an old Protestant Scot, don’t you think?”
“It’s a love poem?” Costa asked. “An erotic love poem?”
“It’s the Song of Songs!” the American replied, astonished by Costa’s ignorance. “The erotic love poem. And this other thing you gave me to look up… Not that I know why, though I might guess.” He glanced at Agata, hoping for clarification.
“When I can tell you, I will tell you, Alex,” she said sweetly.
“I should hope so,” the American grumbled. “It’s the same piece of music but with a different verse set to it. One Bauldewijn never put there in the original.”
He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and, this time, spoke the words in his relaxed Italian.
“His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.”
Alexander Fairgood stared hard at the canvas in front of them, a wan smile on his handsome face.
“You know,” he said softly, “I always used to think this was the most sensual thing I’d ever seen in my life. The way that half-naked angel has his feathered wings turned towards you, making you ache to stroke them.” He indicated the lazy, knowing eye of the donkey behind the grizzled head of Joseph, its gaze taking in everything. “I always wondered what would happen if Mary woke and discovered this vision there, next to the old man who wasn’t even the father of her child.”
“I’ve told you a million times,” Agata said patiently. “The subject — or at least one subject, because there are many here — is the same as the Song of Songs. Does love stem from spirituality or from sexuality? Will one beget the other? And where, in the balance, lies the love of God?”
He eyed her, his expression coy, teasing. “It’s sex wrapped up as religion, Agata. If you spent more time out of that chaste little nunnery of yours, you’d know it.”
“I am spending more time out of it, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she retorted. “Thanks to a dispensation.”
“Temporary only, then,” he murmured with a frown. “What a pity.”
“Thank you, Alex,” she said, and glanced at the door.
“Oh,” he said. “I have overstayed my welcome.”
She folded her small arms and said nothing.
The American took one last look at the painting in front of them. Like the work in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, it seemed to pulse with a vibrant life of its own, though one softer and more gentle.
“I never tire of coming here,” Fairgood told them. “Particularly in such interesting company. But this other painting I heard about…”
His voice was transformed in an instant into a disembodied plainchant that sent a shiver down Costa’s spine.
“ ‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me,’ ” Alexander Fairgood sang, then stopped, clearly delighting in the resonance of his own voice as it echoed through the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj’s labyrinthine galleries.
* * *
“It’s real,” she said, in a low, excited voice when the musician was gone. She gripped Costa’s arm, her fingers tight on the cloth of his coat. “I knew it the moment they first brought me to it. But that was instinct. This is fact. See here for yourself. This is the same model. Fillide. The music has the same an
tecedents. The style, the artistry, the feeling of the thing… I can sense Caravaggio in the paint, for pity’s sake. Can’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered quietly, and felt a pang of concern.
“And yet…” She breathed deeply, unhappy with her own bemusement. “What does it mean? Why a subject he never broached before or after? He must have understood how wonderful it was. Why stop there?”
The same questions kept nagging at him.
“He produced our painting while he was in the employ of Del Monte?”
She nodded energetically. “I think so, but towards the end. If you look closely, you can detect the man’s age, his moods, his growing anger and depression in the strokes of the brush. In the early years, when Caravaggio produced canvases like these he was as happy as he would ever be. This was before the churches began to hire him, before the gloom and the fear we see beginning to rise in the Contarelli Chapel and the Matthew cycle. Before death and decay began to infect his mind. He lived with Del Monte, with those poets and magicians and alchemists, their whores and their boyfriends, and somehow, somewhere along the way, a patron — perhaps Del Monte himself — came along and showed him that inferior Carracci, put some money in his pocket, and said… what?”
“Be better and more daring,” Costa replied immediately.
“More daring?” she echoed, astonished. “He was trying to outpaint even himself. He was trying to put on canvas something — some moment, human, divine, diabolic, I don’t know — except that it had never been painted before. And when it’s finished… nothing. Except for that brief mention in the journal of Giambattista Marino, it may well have never existed. From the moment of its creation that painting’s been some kind of secret. Who’s kept it? Why has it never been displayed, discovered, sold? Where has it been? In Rome, surely. But where?”
Some unfathomable inner knowledge threw an idea into his head at that moment. “In the hands of someone, some family that never needed the money,” Costa suggested. “Or the public acclaim of owning it.”
Agata Graziano scowled. “That’s guesswork. Besides, what rich family would own a painting like this and not show it? Those people delight in letting the rest of us know how fortunate they are.”
“I’m a police officer,” Costa replied, shrugging. “Sometimes guesswork is all I have.”
“Then I pity you.” She took his hand, turned the wrist, and glanced at his watch. Timepieces, it seemed, were another possession Sister Agata Graziano avoided. “I can’t stay here any longer. My head will burst.”
And yet, in spite of herself, Agata found herself turning again to the wall, this time to the smaller canvas of the Magdalene: Fillide Melandroni, asleep, slumped, dressed in the rich costume of a late-sixteenth- century Ortaccio whore.
“Do you ever hear their voices?” she asked softly.
Costa knew instantly what she meant. “When I look at the paintings, of course,” he answered honestly. “That’s Caravaggio. These aren’t idealised human beings. They’re the people he met every day, and when we see them we realise they’re the same as those we meet, too, people just like you and me. They’re not history. They’re us.”
“They are us,” she agreed, and there was some grim note of selfreproach in her voice. “Still. I know where they lived and where they died. I walk the same pavements, pass the same buildings, stay awake at night over the same fears and doubts.”
Her attention never left the canvas on the wall for a moment: Fillide Melandroni, long dead, sleeping, gripped by a deep, exhausted fatigue that verged on mortality itself.
“Sometimes,” Agata said slowly, “I imagine I see a man in the street, a dark-haired man, with that incomplete beard and a sad, shocked face. He is staring at me from the other side of the road, not seeing the traffic, not noticing anything except the faces and the pain and the same bright, damaged humanity he saw there too.” She gripped his arm more firmly. “We inhabit their world, Nic. They inhabit ours. Why else would a man want to paint, except to live forever?”
Her dark glittering eyes studied him before returning briefly to the painting of the sleeping Fillide. “And… Alexander said it. He would kill to see a painting like that. Someone has. People have died. The reason you wish to talk to me is that you believe I can tell you why.”
“I hope so,” he replied.
“Will that help you, Nic? You?”
There was no similarity whatsoever between Emily, his lost wife, and this eccentric woman whose life was so distant from anything he could imagine that she might have come from the moon. Nothing except their mutual insistence on one subject alone: the truth was there to be faced, however terrible it might turn out to be.
“I don’t know, but I hope so,” he answered, and found himself following the line of her gaze, straight to the slumbering female figure on the canvas on the wall.
Something caught his attention on the face of the Magdalene, a detail he had never seen before. He blinked, then looked again. At first it appeared to be a flaw, a rip in the canvas, exposing some tiny bright white element beneath the paint. Then, as Agata noticed what he was seeing, he moved closer, so close it seemed improper, yet he was propelled by her insistent arm.
Nic Costa had lost count of how many times he’d walked through the doors of the Doria Pamphilj, how many hours he’d spent in its glorious corridors, overwhelmed by the beauty of its collection, and the open, everyday way in which it was displayed, as if in a home, not a museum. He had never before seen this minuscule speck on the cheek of the sleeping woman. Agata Graziano had taught him something: how to look. Now he felt transfixed by the revelation, so small and yet so large: a single element, infinitely human, depicted with the rudimentary perfection of an unconscious genius.
A single glassy tear was caught, frozen in a discrete moment of time on the cheek of the slumbering Fillide Melandroni. As she slept, in the guise of the once-fallen Magdalene after the Crucifixion, aware of the tragedy that had newly entered the world, a part of her, her soul perhaps, wept. The sight of this infinitesimal secret ripped at his heart, dragging out its own dark tragedy from the depths, as it was meant to.
“You’re learning,” Agata whispered, casting him a glance that seemed to contain some distant, studied admiration.
Two
They walked through the Centro Storico, Agata pointing out the streets he thought he knew well, now realising how mistaken he had been. She understood them so much better, and in so many different dimensions: where the painters they both revered had lived and fought and died. It was like a lesson from the freest and frankest of university professors. Agata talked of the society — rich, violent, hedonistic, and yet, in a sense, deeply religious, even moralistic — that had first nurtured Caravaggio, then, as his behaviour worsened, began to reject him, finally delivering the death sentence for the killing that dispatched him into exile. As she spoke, Costa realised there was something he had never really sought before: the spirit behind the brush, the burning creative animus that had driven one lone rebel, with little in the way of formal education or tuition, to redress the focus of painting and seek the divine in the mundane, the thieves and prostitutes, the criminals and the vagabonds, who walked the streets of Rome.
It was all, she said, a question of disegno, which, for the painters of Caravaggio’s generation, meant not simply “design” but, as one of his contemporaries put it, “il segno di Dio in noi,” the sign of God in us.
“Do you see the sign of God anywhere today?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, and shrugged. “Sorry. Do you?”
“Everywhere! You must learn to look properly. I will deal with this lapse.”
They strode past the grand home of Caravaggio’s onetime patron, Agata speculating about the behaviour of the eccentric Archbishop Del Monte and his bizarre household in what was now the genteel home of the Senate, guarded by innumerable uniformed Carabinieri. Then they made their way across the busy Christmas traffic bickering to fight its way through the pere
nnial jam at the Piazza delle Cinque Lune as she talked passionately about the past in the present, daring him to sense its nearness. No more than three minutes away, towards the Corso, stood the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, the place where Caravaggio fell into the deadly street fight that led to his exile from Rome. The same distance towards the river, beyond the Via della Scrofa, which led towards the Vicolo del Divino Amore, lay the Tor di Nona, the tower where some of his fellow ruffians had been imprisoned after the desperate knife battle, perhaps with the wounded Caravaggio among them, until, with the aid of some of his aristocratic admirers, the painter was able to flee the executioner.
“They are here, Nic,” she insisted. “He is here. You simply have to look and listen. Come.”
They turned the corner into the small cobbled piazza. The early Renaissance façade of the Church of Sant’Agostino stood above them, its pale travertine, visibly plundered from the Colosseum some five hundred years before, now luminescent in the orange streetlights. He followed her up the long, broad flight of stone stairs, through into the vast echoing nave. Instinctively, he turned to his left, towards the painting he’d seen countless times, and knew would see afresh through her eyes.
“No,” she said, and took his elbow, guiding him away. “I didn’t bring you here for that.”
The Madonna of Loreto, an exquisite Caravaggio Virgin with the infant Jesus in her arms, the holy pair framed in the doorway of a simple stone house, staring down at two grimy pilgrims, stood in the gloom at the edge of his vision, like a sombre, glowing beacon.
“If he worshipped,” Agata said, “and I believe he did, he worshipped here. They all came to this place. The artists and the poets. And worse. This was an altar for the fallen. They had need of it most of all. Where would the Church be without sinners?”
She turned to face the entrance and he did the same, seeing the sculpture there, a pale study of two figures illuminated by a sea of candles.
