by David Hewson
“I’ve just watched Franco Malaspina tell me that. I’m a free woman. I may do as I wish. Best start working. Perhaps if you hammer those computers of yours a little harder. Or find some newer science for your games…”
“It’s an old name,” Costa interrupted, hoping to cool the temperature. “Tomassoni.”
“It is an old name,” she agreed. “Here is one more fact I doubt any of you know, for all your wonderful toys and resources. I would have told you, but it seemed irrelevant until today. Possibly it still is.”
Agata got up and walked to the line of bookshelves by the fireplace. Volume after volume from the days of Costa’s father sat in rows, gathering dust along the walls. She picked up two substantial editions, both bought years ago, books on art, then brought them back to the table, where she began to leaf through the pages as she spoke, looking, surely, for something she knew was there already.
“It is a known fact,” she said, “that Caravaggio lived in the Vicolo del Divino Amore for some time. Not during the happier part of his life either. This was after he left the hedonistic paradise of Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama. He had little money. He kept bad company. Very bad. This was Ortaccio, remember. The Garden of Evil.”
She found what she wanted in one of the books, placed it in front of them, and covered whatever lay there with a napkin from the table.
“I have walked every inch of Rome in that man’s footsteps,” Agata added. “I know where he lived and ate, where he whored and fought. No one can be sure of this precisely, but you must remember something, always. In Caravaggio’s days, men kept records. They noted down details of crimes and property transactions, small civil disturbances and matters of money and debt. Many of those papers are with us still.” She smiled at them. “Out of your reach, true, safe in archives in the Vatican, in a country where you people have no jurisdiction. But a small and curious sister of the Church, with a little interest in history…”
Costa found himself transfixed by her, and he wasn’t alone.
“You looked up the records for the street?” he asked.
“Of course I did! When Leo first told me the painting had been found there. Who wouldn’t?”
“Well…?” Teresa demanded.
“The house where Caravaggio lived was either that same property or one of the two to either side. I cannot be more specific. The street had a different name then, different numbering. But there is a record in the church register which names Caravaggio as a resident in 1605, with a young boy — a servant, a student, a lover, who knows? He was reduced to poverty. He was constantly in fights and brawls and arguments.” She paused. “It was his home when he murdered the man whose death forced him to flee Rome.”
They were silent and, Costa apart, dubious.
It was Peroni who spoke first.
“Agata,” he pointed out, reasonably, “this was hundreds of years ago.”
“Caravaggio took that man’s life on May 28, 1606, while he was living in what we now know as the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Within days he was gone from Rome forever, travelling ceaselessly — Naples, Malta, Sicily — dependent on the help of allies and patrons to feed him and keep him from the executioner.”
“A long time ago,” Falcone repeated, staring at the book on the table, wondering, like the rest of them, what it contained.
“They fought in the street,” she went on, ignoring him, “over what we don’t know. When it was over, the man was dead. His name was Ranuccio Tomassoni. He died in the house where he and his family had lived for almost two centuries, and for all I know continued to live thereafter. It was in the Piazza di San Lorenzo di Lucina.”
Costa closed his eyes and laughed. “How on earth did I forget that?”
“You forgot it,” she said instantly, “because you regarded it as history and irrelevant to the present. As I may one day tire of telling you, it isn’t. These are not the stories of people turned to dust. They are our stories, and in some curious way they became the stories of Franco Malaspina, Nino Tomassoni, and the rest.” She shook her head. She looked exhausted, but immensely energised by her subject too. “Something has placed them alongside what happened then. Perhaps that painting that means so much. Perhaps… I don’t know. Look…”
It wasn’t the picture they were expecting, but another from the second book.
“Caravaggio painted this while he was in Malta.”
It was a dark study of an elderly man, half naked on his bed, writing. Saint Jerome. Another of the canvases in Valletta that Costa knew, one day, he had to see.
“At this time of his life, Caravaggio chose what he did for a reason,” she went on. “Money. Survival. The passing friendship of influential men. We know for a fact that this particular work was painted at the request of someone who helped him escape from mainland Italy and reach the temporary safety of the Knights Templar in Valletta. A few months later Michelangelo Merisi was fleeing once more after committing some other crime, which the Knights hid for fear it shamed them too. This patron continued to assist him. In Sicily. All the way to the end, when he returned to the mainland and sought to come back to Rome.”
She took a sip of water from a glass on the table. “That man’s name was Ippolito Malaspina. I have never raised this fact with Franco. But I know for sure that he must be a direct descendant.
The man had many children. The castle Franco continues to own in Tuscany, from which he has lent the Barberini works for display from time to time, was the property where his ancestor lived with his family before leaving for Malta with Caravaggio.”
Her dark eyes stared at them. “There was a connection between the Medici and the Malaspina clans. Perhaps Franco’s fury stems from that. What more do I have to show you? Are these subjects you will pass on to some young police officer and hope they can comprehend? Even I don’t understand them. Perhaps in time.” She glanced at Costa. “With help and insight. But…”
She sat back, closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them and glared at Commissario Esposito. “You will provide the books I need. A computer. An officer who can carry out external research and fetch and carry when I require. Tomorrow I shall see this house of Tomassoni’s. And the place in the Vicolo del Divino Amore…”
“It’s not pretty,” Teresa observed, shaking her head.
“As I keep telling you, I am not a child. You will do these things and I will help you. And if it’s no use, then what’s lost?”
They were silent, even Costa.
“Commissario,” Agata declared. “I will not stay here and learn to knit. The choice is yours.”
“Very well,” Vincenzo Esposito snapped. “Indulge Sister Agata as she requires. You will organise security, Falcone. Agente Prabakaran will act as go-between for anything the sister demands. The details of these visits outside will not leave this room. Franco Malaspina is a far more dangerous individual than any of us appreciated. If his talents run to taming magistrates and international art smuggling, then he will know men who are capable of anything. As is he.”
“Good,” Agata said, then removed the napkin from the page of the second book, an old biography of Caravaggio, one of Costa’s favourites, and held it up for them all to see.
They found themselves looking at the black-and-white photograph of a portrait of a gentleman, round-faced with a pale complexion, a double chin, and large, very bulbous eyes. He sat on a velvet-covered chair and wore rich, sumptuous clothes, as if he were of some importance.
Agata ran a finger over the man’s unattractive features. “You must excuse me in a moment. I’m tired. I need to rest. I expect some time on my own. This is by Caravaggio from his Malta period,” she said. “It was in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin from the early nineteenth century on. Unfortunately the work was destroyed when the city was retaken at the end of the Second World War. What you see is a portrait of Ippolito Malaspina painted by Caravaggio shortly before he fled Valletta.”
Costa stared at the portly, bloodless individual in his
faintly ridiculous court clothes. He had the face of a weak and lascivious civil servant. It was tempting to see some sarcasm or ridicule of the subject in the face; such sly, slight jokes were not unknown to Caravaggio.
“This pasty-faced idiot doesn’t look anything like that pig we had here!” Teresa said, jabbing a finger at the portrait.
“Precisely,” Agata replied quietly, then snapped the book shut.
Four
At eight in the evening, Bea was standing at the foot of the stairs, tapping her feet, looking mildly cross.
“A part of me wishes to say this is the worst girl you have ever brought back, Nic,” she muttered, perhaps only half joking.
“I wouldn’t call her ‘girl’ to her face,” he said. “Nor do I think it accurate to say I brought her back.”
“No,” she grumbled. “More like putting her in prison really, isn’t it? And I’m the warder.”
Bea didn’t like the men at the bottom of the drive. Some urge within her made it essential she take them coffee and water and panini from time to time. On the last occasion, she had encountered Peroni, who was singing a bawdy Tuscan song at the top of his voice. Costa understood this was as much to keep up morale as anything. It was Peroni’s way to try to lighten the situation and keep a team going. He couldn’t expect Bea to understand such an idea, and so there had been a chilly encounter between the two of them.
“Also… she hasn’t yet had a bath. She may be a genius but to me the poor thing’s positively feral in normal company.”
“Normal company being us, naturally. Agata does not live the way we do. If you want to return to your apartment…”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t expect a woman like her to be alone in a house with a man. It wouldn’t be right. Also… someone shot you last night, in case you forgot.”
“Buckshot,” he answered. “Water off a duck’s back, really. You know the Costa breed. We feel nothing. Seriously. It’s uncomfortable. Nothing more.”
“The arrogance of men…” she muttered. “There will be food on the table in five minutes. I would be grateful if someone turned up to eat it. I’ve called several times. Not a word in return. You speak with her. I give up.”
With that she marched back to the kitchen, leaving Costa at the foot of the steps, wondering.
This was an awkward situation, but it was his house.
He went upstairs, along to the largest guest room, which had been hastily cleaned by Bea, with new sheets found for the double bed, and towels and soap for the bathroom. It was a beautiful room, his brother’s when he was young, with the best view in the house, an undisturbed one back to the Via Appia Antica, and scarcely a sign of modern life, no roads, just the single telegraph pole leading to the property, visible in the very corner, beyond the vines and the cypresses lining the drive.
He knocked on the door and said, “There’s food.”
“I know.”
Nothing more.
“Are you coming?”
“Yes.”
He was about to go when she added, “Come in, Nic. Please. I want to ask you something.”
With a sigh, he opened the door. Agata sat in front of the dresser staring at herself in the mirror, an expression of puzzlement and fear on her face. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and black slacks. Her hair was tied back tightly, drawing the rampant curly locks away from her face, which, now he saw more of it, was angular and striking. This was the head of some artist’s model, not beautiful in a conventional sense, not even pretty necessarily, but one that was fated to be looked at, stared at even, because it contained such an intensity of life and thought and — the word did not seem inappropriate — grace.
“Look what they’ve done to me,” she complained. “I asked for books and information. They bring me these clothes, too, and say I must wear them to look less conspicuous. Why?”
“Castagna, Buccafusca, and Nino Tomassoni are dead,” he pointed out. “Like it or not, you’re our only material witness. These precautions—”
“Franco simply hates anyone who’s black. Even half black. We all saw that today.” She couldn’t stop looking at the image of herself in the glass. “We don’t have these big mirrors at home,” she murmured. “Or private rooms with beds large enough for four. And this house…”
She stood up and walked to the window. “I can’t even see a light from here. Or hear a human voice or a car or bus.”
“Most people would think that an advantage.”
She turned and stared at him, astounded. “What? To be denied the sounds of humanity? I’ve lived my entire life in the city. I know it. Those are the sounds of its breathing. Why do people wish to run away from everything? What are you frightened of?”
“Tomorrow,” he replied, shrugging. “Today sometimes too.”
She laughed, just. “Well, thank you. That’s one trick you’ve taught me. I never feared anything until you people came into my life. Now I see a man with a gun round every corner, and I look at a painting — a painting by Caravaggio — and wonder if it should shake my faith. Thank you very much indeed.”
“This is the world, Agata,” he replied meekly. “I’m sorry we dragged you into it. I’m sure, someday soon, you will be able to go back to where you came from. Just not now.”
She was silent for a moment.
“And you?” she asked in the end.
“I will find my own way,” he answered. “By some means or other. Provided I eat from time to time. Now, will you join us? Please?”
Five
At nine-fifteen Rosa Prabakaran delivered the items Agata had demanded, then left for the night. Costa watched Agata carefully unpack what had arrived, taking immense care over several ancient academic tomes and a notebook computer bearing the stamp of the Barberini on the base, and very little notice indeed of two plastic grocery bags with what she said were her personal items from the convent.
Bea stared at the paltry collection of cheap, well-worn clothes and asked, “Is that it?”
“What more am I supposed to need?”
Bea walked out of the room and came back with her arms full of soft towels, some so large and suspiciously fresh Costa wondered if she’d bought them that afternoon, along with boxes of soap and other unidentifiable cosmetics.
“The plumbing in this place can be difficult sometimes,” she declared. “When you are ready, I will introduce you to the mysteries of the bathroom.”
Then she went upstairs.
Agata watched her leave.
“What is Bea to you, Nic?”
“A family friend. She and my father were… very good friends once upon a time. That died. The closeness remained.”
“Does she think I’m odd?”
“Probably,” he admitted.
“Do you?”
“You’re not the normal houseguest.”
“Who is?”
He groaned. Agata did not give up easily. She had insisted she wanted to retire to her bedroom to work. Yet now…
“I have to speak to the men outside. You have your belongings. Is there anything else I can provide?”
“Yes. There is a room with some art materials in it. Along there…” She pointed to the rear of the house and the place he hadn’t entered, not since Emily’s death. “What is it, please? I couldn’t help but notice earlier. I may need something.”
“Let me show you,” he said, and led the way.
The studio was clean and tidy, though it smelled a little of damp, as it always did when the place went unused and unheated for any amount of time. Emily’s work was everywhere: line drawings of buildings, sketches, studies, ideas, doodles.
“Your wife was an artist?” Agata asked.
“An architect. Or she was hoping to be one. When she finished her studies.”
“You can’t learn to build well overnight,” she countered, picking up a sketch from the nearest pile. It was of the Uffizi in Florence, from the weekend in October when he’d found the time to take a break from w
ork, the first since their wedding in the summer. He didn’t find it easy to look at now.
“She could draw,” Agata commented. “Very well. Art and architecture go hand in hand, but then, you know that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t treat you like an imbecile.”
She looked around the room and shivered. It was cold. She was wearing just the cheap, thin white cotton shirt and the equally inexpensive slacks that came from the convent. The Questura budget hadn’t run to clothes, though Rosa had told him quietly she intended to correct this in the morning. In some strange, subtle way, they were beginning to adopt Agata Graziano, form a protective, insular wall around her, and not simply as a way of keeping out Franco Malaspina and his thugs. A part of her seemed too delicate to be allowed to wander free in the world the rest of them inhabited. Costa wondered whether this was fair, or even an accurate reading of the facts.
“I shouldn’t be in this place, prying. It’s private. I’m sorry.”
“It’s just a room,” he said, and smiled. “You’re welcome to use it as much as you wish. Before Emily had it, my sister worked here. She is an artist too. It needs…”
The white walls were now a little grey and in need of paint. He remembered the sound of voices in the house when he was growing up, and how he would come in here for peace sometimes, watching his sister work at some strange, abstract canvas he would never understand.
“It needs company,” he murmured, and found the thought began to bring a sharp, stinging sensation to his eyes.
She noticed and said quickly, “Good night, Nic. I must see what Bea has to teach me about this bathroom of yours.”
Six
He waited at the foot of the stairs, thinking, wondering whether he should stay nearby in case there was some difficulty between the two. But after a while he heard their voices from above, happy voices, followed by the running of water, then, drifting down the steps, the smell of soap and shampoo.
