by David Hewson
“The gas line runs up the original right-hand wall,” Di Capua explained. “There are so many twists and turns on this narrow staircase, it’s hard to make out what’s happening here. But this isn’t the same wall, and that’s why it doesn’t have it. The mains goes straight up from the ground to the top floor, and into that room over there…” He pointed to the single door across the landing. “But not here.”
Agata walked up and tapped the wall with her knuckles.
“It’s still brick,” she said. “If you’re right, this predates gas surely. These houses are from ancient and difficult times. The caporione lived here. A man who might have been involved in crime. It would not be unusual to have some private, secret storage place. Most houses of this kind would.”
“Precisely,” Di Capua agreed, and lifted up the sledgehammer again.
Costa tried to think this through, aware that he felt tired and his shoulder was beginning to ache again.
“But…”
Di Capua was getting ready to strike a blow.
“If it’s a hidden compartment,” Costa pointed out, voice rising, “there has to be a way in.”
The hammer stopped in midair. He was aware they were all staring at him, as if expecting an answer.
“Maybe,” Di Capua suggested, “there used to be a door.”
Teresa swiped him around the head. “In that case, idiot, it wouldn’t have been much of a secret, would it?”
Signora Barducci pushed her way to the front, then stood in front of Di Capua, between his hammer and the wall.
“This is another reason why you can’t start knocking things down. This and…”
She began to reel off a seemingly endless string of statutes and orders, laws and conventions, all to do with her own city department, each demanding prior written permission before a single brick of a protected building in the centro storico could be touched.
“Also…” she added happily, “does it possibly occur to you for one moment that this wall might be structural? That by removing its support you could bring this whole house down around our heads? It’s happened. I’ve seen it.”
Di Capua blinked and shook his bald head from side to side. He was wearing his remaining hair long again these days, and the locks deposited dust everywhere as they moved.
“Structural?” he asked. “Structural? Of course it’s not structural. If it was, don’t you think—”
He stopped. They all went quiet, even the Barducci woman. There was a sound, a new sound, at that moment, and it took a few long seconds for Nic Costa to appreciate its source.
Someone was behind the wall, making scrabbling noises, like some gigantic rat rummaging around in the dark.
“What the hell—” Teresa began to say.
And then stopped. There was a human being behind the brick and she was screaming.
“Agata,” Costa murmured.
He looked upstairs, closed his eyes for a moment, swore, and then took the steps to the upper floor three at a time.
* * *
There were two forensic officers in the big open room and they retreated behind a couple of paintings when he stormed in.
“Where is she?” Costa shouted.
“Went in there,” said the first one, who looked like a student fresh from college, with bright yellow hair and a terrified expression.
“Where?”
The woman was pointing at a large, long, fitted wardrobe running almost the entire length of the wall. It wasn’t difficult to work out this had to stand over the suspect area on the floor below.
“We gave her a flashlight,” the other forensic monkey added plaintively, as if that were an excuse.
Costa was at the door by then, staring into a Stygian pool of inky darkness.
“Wonderful. Do you have a spare one for me?”
They shrugged.
He stepped through into the wardrobe and almost immediately found himself struggling to stay upright.
“Agata? Agata?”
It was like yelling into a black hole that lurked somewhere beneath him. Costa stumbled, and managed to hold on to something made of old, dry wood. The hatch, he guessed, and it was up.
“Where are you?”
His right leg found whatever chasm led down to the floor below, and he began half testing, half lunging for some kind of step.
“Nic?” said a small, frightened voice from below him.
Then a yellow beam of light worked its way back towards him and he saw, for the first time, what she’d found. There was a trapdoor, and steep, almost vertical steps, virtually a stepladder made of worn old wood, though there was little in the way of dust, as if this place was used regularly.
“It’s all right,” he said, reaching the bottom of the stairs. “I’m here. Walk towards me. Bring the flashlight.”
The light turned further towards him. She kept it low to the ground always. He couldn’t see her face, but soon she was close enough for him to sense her presence. Her hands found his and thrust the flashlight into his fingers. That brief touch told him she was shaking like a leaf.
“It’s all right,” he said again automatically.
“No,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s not.”
Voices began to clamour from behind and above. Teresa had found the entrance too. Costa called up for them to await orders.
The place was a narrow rectangle, perhaps two metres wide and longer than he expected, a good eight metres or so. Big enough to be a child’s bedroom, but that wasn’t the purpose. She had understood what this was for from the beginning, understood too that there had to be some way in that wasn’t obvious, and it could only be from above or below.
At first glance there seemed to be nothing there but battered cardboard boxes that looked many years old and, at the very end, some kind of tall cabinet reaching up two metres.
“I thought the painting might be here. I don’t know why. I dreamed…”
That she would be the one to find it. He understood that urge on her part. In some way she felt responsible for its loss.
She pulled away from him. He felt, briefly, the touch of her cheek. It was damp with tears, and she must have realised he’d noticed, since she was soon wiping them away with her sleeve, as she’d wiped away the dust on the glass jug in the Doria Pamphilj.
“It was here,” she insisted. “Look!”
Her firm, determined fingers forced the beam to the left wall.
Costa looked and found his breath locking tight in his lungs.
It was the same shape, surely. The same size. Dust stood around the paler wall where the canvas had hung, undisturbed, for years, centuries perhaps. Above the missing frame, scribbled in pencil, in a hand that looked ancient, someone had written Evathia in Ekstasis.
Costa looked at it and thought, That was how they knew. A line of pencil, scribbled God knows how long before, gave Tomassoni the insight into the true nature of the painting, one he passed on to Malaspina with such terrible consequences, ones that were now visible and very real.
Something had taken the place of Caravaggio’s work.
Knowing she wouldn’t look too closely, Costa walked forward and peered at the items that were stuck there. They were the same kind of photos they had found in the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, colour shots from a computer printer, of poor quality, as if snapped by a phone or the cheapest of digital cameras.
There were perhaps ten in all, stuck there with drawing pins. Each depicted a close-up of a woman, all apparently foreign, all seemingly in the throes of ecstasy or pain or the onset of death. Tomassoni may have been reluctant to take part, but he clearly liked to watch, then spill out his fears in anonymous emails to the police afterwards.
“The canvas was here all those centuries,” Agata said, with a cold, sad certainty in her voice. “Then Franco found out and took her. He heard what she said to him. He wanted to. That was Caravaggio’s point.”
“We mustn’t touch anything,” he insisted. “This place wil
l soon be crawling with forensic. Teresa…”
“I’m waiting,” said an enthusiastic voice from above.
Agata took the flashlight from him. Then she strode to the back of the chamber and the cabinet there. The black wooden door was ajar. She’d looked already. It was this, Costa understood, from the way she steeled herself, that had made her scream, not the shocking photographs in the space that had once held the painting.
She stopped, her wary eyes urging him to go on.
“Please. I have seen and wish to see no more.”
Costa walked past her and opened the door.
There was a figure there dressed in an archaic tattered and ratgnawed velvet jacket, an ancient shirt the colour of ochre visible at the point that had once been a human neck. It was merely a skeleton now, dusty bones and the familiar rictus of death set in a crooked skull.
Costa paused for a moment, thinking. Some kind of notice sat on the bony chest, held there by dusty string tied around the back of his head.
He picked it up and read out loud the archaic, awkward words, knowing they sounded familiar.
“Noi repetiam Pigmalïon allotta,
cui traditore e ladro e paricida
fece la voglia sua de l’oro ghiotta.”
“I know that,” he said, not expecting a reply. “Almost. It’s familiar… and strange too.”
“Everyone’s favourite poet,” she murmured. “Around here anyway. Dante. From Purgatorio, if I remember correctly. You probably read the modern translation. Most schoolchildren do.
“Then we tell of Pygmalion,
Of whom a traitor and thief and parricide
Made his greedy lust for gold.”
Agata reached out and touched the notice, seeing, with her historian’s eye, something that had been lost on him.
“There are two lines through the word paricida,” she pointed out. “What do you think that means?”
He looked. She was right. It had been crossed out the way a teacher would mark a mistaken word in a piece of homework.
“Perhaps that part at least is untrue. They regarded him only as a traitor and a thief.”
“Good,” she said, nodding. “I would see it that way too. They were like Franco. They enjoyed showing off their so-called learning, even when it was in part inappropriate.”
She had recited the words with the perfect precision of a poet herself. He recalled what Malaspina had said in the palazzo that night: She sees herself as Beatrice. Beautiful, chaste, alluring. And dead.
“I’m sorry. I thought I would be some use to you. All I do is make everything murkier. I bring you more puzzles when you need more light. It’s a waste of time. Put me somewhere safe if that’s what Leo wants. I won’t complain.”
“I will,” he said, shifting the sign to one side, looking at what lay beneath it, resting on the grey bones of the rib cage that was visible through the ripped fabric of the shirt. “We need you.”
“Why?” she asked softly. “So that you can bury your wife, finally? Is that what I’m supposed to do for you?”
Costa turned and looked at her. In the yellow half-light of the flashlight, she seemed, for the first time, he thought, a woman, much like any other. Not part of some different life he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
“No,” he replied simply. “I’ll do that myself, when I’m ready.”
“Then what?”
The heat rose in her eyes.
Costa put a finger to his lips. This once, she obeyed him and became silent. He walked to the steps, barked a few questions at Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua, then had them throw down a couple of clear plastic evidence bags.
“You may not want to watch this,” he said when he got back to the cabinet.
“Why not?” she demanded. “What have you seen? Tell me!”
“This…”
He moved the sign to one side and indicated an area on the left of the corpse’s chest. There was an object there, some kind of round medallion, dull dark metal on a similarly coloured chain, but with the outline of the emblem at its centre still visible, still comprehensible.
Three dragons, limbs thrashing, talons wrapped around the figure of a woman who writhed in their grip, screaming, eyes rolling wildly.
“This is the same symbol we found on the notes the Ekstasists placed on the statues,” he said. “Now we know where that came from. It’s a link. A tentative one, but I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“A link,” she grumbled, and folded her arms.
“And this…”
He pushed aside completely the yellowing paper bearing Dante’s words and shone the flashlight directly on the portion of the velvet jacket next to the dull black medallion. At first it had seemed a wild guess. Now, under the fierce beam, it was unmistakable.
“You don’t recognise it, do you?” he asked.
It was a heraldic badge: a shield divided into two halves, with a skeletal tree bearing three short horizontal branches on one side and two on the other, dotted with spines.
“I don’t notice much except paintings,” Agata replied with a frown. “Usually.”
“It’s all over Franco’s beautiful palace. It’s his family crest. The bad thorn.”
In this small, stuffy room that was cold and damp, Agata Graziano laughed. “That’s impossible!”
“Take a look.”
She did and shook her head. “Who on earth is this? What does it mean?”
“Finally,” he said, “you’re asking me a question.”
“Yes.”
“Then, as a police officer, I would guess this is a murder victim.”
“I know that…”
“Given the identification, one who was once known as Ippolito Malaspina.”
“That’s impossible! How could you know?” She put her fingers to her mouth with shock, then stopped, thinking, eyes glittering.
Everything connects in Rome, he reminded himself. Past and present. And in this case the crimes of four centuries before.
“I can’t. But I can guess,” he said emphatically. “You showed us the portrait that was supposed to be Ippolito in Malta, several years after he left Rome. You said yourself, it was nothing like the description of the man in all the reference books you found…”
“That doesn’t mean…”
“He had a family,” Costa interrupted. “Was that before he left the city with Caravaggio or after?”
“Before. Afterwards he travelled constantly and never…” She stopped and stared at him. “He never returned home. Never went anywhere he had been before as far as I recall. They inherited everything when he died. And…”
He watched her turn this over in her bright, constantly active mind.
“Is it possible,” he asked, “that they inherited everything without ever seeing him again? That Franco Malaspina is descended from the real Malaspina, but the man who went to Malta with Caravaggio was an impostor?”
“Yes,” she answered in a low, firm voice. “From what I’ve read…”
“Good,” Costa said, then took out the plastic envelope and stared at the grey, dusty skull in front of him.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Find the evidence to put Franco in jail.”
“From a corpse that’s four hundred years old?”
“Why not? We can’t go near him. But he is an aristocrat. His lineage is there, set down in the state archives. If the DNA of this corpse is related to that we have from the Vicolo del Divino Amore, all we have to prove is that this gentleman” — he prodded the velvet jacket with his forefinger — “is Ippolito Malaspina. It won’t put his descendant in the dock. But it would make it damned hard for a court to refuse a few tests to prove the truth one way or another, and that’s all we need.”
She didn’t look scared anymore. She looked fascinated.
“You can do that?” she asked. “Take a sample from a skeleton that’s nothing but… bone?”
“No!”
The loud female vo
ice made them both jump. Costa couldn’t work out how Teresa Lupo had found her way down the stepladder without their noticing. She barged her way in front of him and stared at the skeleton. Then she snatched the envelope out of his hands.
“But I can,” she said with a grin that was wide and friendly in the yellow light of the flashlight.
The pathologist leaned forward. In her gloved hand was an implement very like a small set of pliers. She gazed at the skull’s open mouth. The left-hand front tooth was missing already. Teresa fastened the pliers to the remaining one, then, in a swift, twisting movement, snapped it free and dropped the object into the bag.
“You’re coming home with Mummy,” she added, greatly pleased with herself. “Right now.”
She stared at the pair of them. “And you two should go home as well. You’ve done enough for one day.”
Teresa held up the bag. “There is a time for happy conjecture and a time for science, children. Tomorrow is Christmas. Come back and see what La Befana and her little elves have for you.”
PART FOURTEEN
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.
