The Forger, the Killer, the Painter and the Whore

by Alex Connor

  How many indeed, Graver thought, laughing. Everyone put it down to his drinking too much champagne, but for several minutes afterwards Graver Hirst kept laughing. Martin Kemper, Gordon Lambert and Professor Altman all hoodwinked. So many egos toppled in one fell swoop.

  And all by a dealer who had lost his edge.

  THE KILLER, THE PAINTER AND THE WHORE

  Every story begins somewhere – with an event, a person, a situation. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is a tale of missing paintings and murder. The Killer, the Painter and the Whore is the introduction to this book.

  Flak Tower

  Berlin, 1945

  He could hear the guns clearly, even through the five-metre-thick walls of the Flak Tower. The building consisted of a cellar and six upper floors, the tower itself as tall as a thirteen-storey building. And in every room on the second floor – crammed in, piled up, every centimetre of wall space taken – was an accumulation of priceless artefacts and paintings culled from fourteen Berlin museums, including the Kaiser Wilhelm. So precious and valuable were they that the rooms were climate-controlled to protect the masterpieces, something the officials had neglected to extend to the third-floor hospital.

  He had heard the rumours, of course. Fabulously valuable works of art just beneath his feet. Paintings and sculptures collected for centuries, salivated over by the rich and gawped at by the poor. Works usually protected and alarmed in galleries, but now shipped to the Flak Tower for safekeeping. It made you think, didn’t it? Hitler might believe that he had put all Germany’s treasures away safely, but had he? The Allies were carrying out their bombing raids and the Russians were inching closer every day. It was only a matter of time before someone’s bomb or shell struck the Flak Tower and the works of art it was shielding.

  Would it remain standing? Hitler might think it would, but he wasn’t so sure. Hitler had thought many things and was being proved wrong daily. The man winced as the firing began again, crouching down as the stone walls shook. He had been working in the hospital for almost a week, drafted in to help with the injured. Among them was the Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, whose leg had been amputated shortly after admission. The man wondered how Rudel felt listening to the sound of planes overhead and not being involved in the fighting. Did he long to be back in the skies or did he wonder just how close defeat was, how near the end they all were? Rudel’s fame would be snuffed out among cowering strangers, under a fall of masonry.

  The man was thinking fast. There would be no heroes left when the Tower fell. When Germany was defeated – because it was certain that she would be – who would venerate Hitler or Rudel then? Berlin would be burned out, a ruin of what had been promised, buildings destroyed, a nation now under the Allies’ jackboot. Survival was all anyone was thinking about.

  Except for him. Oh, he wanted to survive, he wanted to get away, but not empty-handed. His gaze moved downwards. Like many people in the Flak Tower he had visited the second-floor galleries and marvelled at the bust of Nefertiti and the rows of Old Masters. Even a Caravaggio had been stored there, the head of a beautiful woman staring seductively out of the canvas.

  Paintings that were worth millions were hanging just below his feet, within reach and guarded indifferently, especially now as the soldiers were moved away from their duties and harried up into the tower and the ammunitions above.

  “God!”

  The sound of gunfire was increasing, the vibration making the floor shudder under his feet. The Russians were closing in. Hitler had never expected that. He had built the Tower to protect Berlin, cramming it with ammunition and supplies that were supposed to keep the garrison safe for a year. It had worked for a while, but now Germany was on the defensive.

  The terrified people of Berlin had fled the city and crowded into the Flak Tower for refuge. Over thirty thousand terrified souls had run from the approaching Polish and Russians troops and huddled together there, panicked into cramped conditions, where the air was thick and damp, barely breathable, and the water was stale and running out fast.

  But he wasn’t thinking about that. Berlin had fallen; Hitler was beaten. But while Germans cowered in stale passageways and tunnels, who would be watching the second floor?

  THE PAINTER AND THE WHORE

  Rome, Italy, 1607

  Rome was burning that summer, its streets mottled with heat hazes, the dry scratches of the Coliseum and the Forum home only to feral cats and criminals. Pickpockets used the Coliseum’s passages as their lair and the lowest of Rome’s prostitutes took their clients to the dank old cells where gladiators had once fought. Deals were struck too, money exchanged by dirty hands under the crumbling lintels of long-missing doors.

  They were the streets that Caravaggio and Fillide Melandroni knew well. As did Ranuccio Tomassoni, another of her lovers, part of the demi-monde that populated sixteenth-century Rome. Jealous and possessive, Caravaggio wanted Tomassoni neutered, never to make love to Fillide again. She was his whore. But she was also Rome’s whore, beautiful and violent, dirty at times, at other times shining, glossy with massage and oils. Her face had forced itself into Caravaggio’s mind, then his paintings: his Madonna, his St Catherine, his Judith cutting off the head of her lover Holofernes. Placid in paint; calmly, rigidly beautiful on canvas.

  On the street, a whore. Leaving the notables and the rich, Fillide slid at night into the bar brawls, the street fights. She could use a knife, was a match for anyone. Caravaggio was alternately stimulated and awed by her. She made a mouse of him, then a bull. She was uncontrollable, capricious, a liar without remorse, afraid of nothing.

  Oh, but she was, and Caravaggio knew it. Knew that she heard the seasons passing, and with them the terrifying power of her appeal. She would age. The fights, the drinking, the whoring – all would age her. If she lived to be thirty, Fillide Melandroni would die foul.

  Caravaggio studied her, pausing in front of the canvas and his image of Fillide: his idol, his vicious muse. All of Rome had come to see his paintings, and her. They gazed at the woman who aped a saint, pretending goodness where there was none. As he watched, a fly settled on her left leg, throwing its skeleton shadow on her damp skin, the window open to an airless day.

  And as Caravaggio worked on, Fillide thought back to the previous night. She had enjoyed two men and woke smelling of them. Idly, she had scratched herself, then rubbed a cloth over her dirty teeth and counted out the money which had been left for her. Her nails had been blackened, her palms soiled, a cut on her wrist reminding her of a fight with another prostitute. Lazy and still drunk, Fillide had then laid her head on her arms and fallen asleep again.

  The afternoon had droned on, sidled into evening, before she finally stirred. Knowing he would send her away if she was dirty, Fillide had washed herself and dressed with resentful attention, leaving her home as the sun had begun to slide into setting.

  He had been waiting for her and pulled her into the studio angrily, slamming the door. Without speaking, Caravaggio – the most notorious, aggressive and talented artist in Rome – arranged Fillide on a raised dais. As he handed her a sprig of jasmine she held his gaze. Past lover, present employer, sometime friend. But not today. Today he was giving her jasmine, the white flower of debauchery. He was painting a whore for all to see.

  Stifling a yawn, Fillide stirred, allowing Caravaggio to rearrange her pose, lifting the third finger of her left hand. It had been broken in a brawl, Fillide drunk and fighting over money in the alley beside the Piazza Cipriani. When he pushed her head to one side she said nothing, just kept her position, her lips slightly parted.

  Satisfied, Caravaggio stood back. It would be a simple painting, a portrait, one of the few female portraits he would ever create. But he knew that Fillide’s beauty, and that undercurrent of sordid promise, would entice. He would sell it easily, poor men slavering over the portrait of Rome’s famous capricious courtesan, rich men gloating over what they had enjoyed.r />
  “Look at me.”

  She turned her gaze back to him, her hand cupping the jasmine, the scent lush in the night air. Around them banks of candles burned in rows, giving the artist the glowing illumination and the glowering shadows for which he was known. The smell of wax, the smoulder of the flames and the familiar odour of linseed oil began to build as the night wore on. Their wicks burned down, candles moist in their acrid wax spluttered and were replaced. Other candles smoked, sending up sooty trails, while yet others flickered and sank like falling, burning men.

  They did not speak. She was awake but drowsing, held in her pose. He was absorbed, intent, bringing her likeness out of the brown ground of the canvas. Neither of them realised what route the painting would follow, from sixteenth-century Rome to twentieth-century Berlin. Across palazzos and smuggled through Europe. Hidden for a while, relished then idolised, the jasmine still as white and luminous as Fillide’s skin.

  *

  They didn’t know about the journey which would take the image from a drowsy Roman summer to the brutality of the Second World War. They didn’t know that the image of the Italian whore would survive the centuries, and indirectly cause the murder of six people.

  THE THEFT

  Sicily, 1969

  Fillide Melandroni’s portrait would not be the only one of Caravaggio’s paintings to travel. One late October night in 1969, in the Church of San Lorenzo, Palermo, The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence was stolen. It was believed that two thieves cut it down from its place over the altar using razor blades. The robbery was a bungled attempt – or so history has it.

  The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence stands at No. 1 on the FBI’s Missing Works of Art list, the sacred cow of the art world that has had people chasing their tails for decades. Rumours are legion about collectors hiring someone to investigate the picture’s whereabouts. A month or a year later, the result is always the same. Nothing.

  But then an unexpected and remarkable solution to the mystery presented itself. In 1996, at a trial in Italy, a Mafia informer, Marino Mannoia, claimed that he had stolen the picture in 1969. With the help of other men he had used a knife to cut the painting out of its frame over the Main Altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, then rolled it up. Unfortunately, in doing so, the canvas had been ruined.

  When the anonymous man for whom he had stolen the work saw the masterpiece, he had wept.

  ‘It made him cry,’ Marino Mannoia explained. ‘It was not… in a usable condition any more.’

  Some doubted Mannoia’s story, but he was considered a reliable witness and had no reason to lie. Besides, it fitted nicely with the theory that The Nativity had been stolen by the Sicilian Mafia. For some, the mystery was solved. Others believed that the painting had met another end. Some adopted the rumour that amateurs had stolen the work and, finding it too notorious to sell on, had had to destroy it. Whichever theory a person favoured, the painting still remained lost.

  But there were a number of dealers, collectors, conspiracy theorists and optimists who believed that one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces was still out there somewhere, hidden away. Maybe in Italy, maybe in the Far East, maybe in someone’s bank vault. But not destroyed.

  If the work came on to the market now, in the twenty-first century, a conservative estimate of its value would be £60,000,000. Naturally that would depend on its condition. There has been another longstanding rumour that the painting was stolen by amateurs and then dumped in a farm shed and destroyed by pigs. No one knows the truth.

  But the enigma of The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence remains. Two Caravaggio paintings – one a massive altarpiece, the other a small portrait – worth in excess of £64,000,000 are missing.

  *

  Or are they? And what if someone should find them? What would a man do for such wealth? What would he be willing to risk?

  THE FOOL

  Berlin, 2014

  Luca Meriss was using straighteners, because he hated the way his hair crinkled up. He liked it to look groomed, not like coarse peasant hair. Still, he thought with pleasure, it was a luscious head of hair for a man of over forty. Leaning towards the mirror Luca then studied his teeth, checking there was no plaque, no irritating reminder of a rushed lunch.

  Of course when he went public Luca Meriss knew that he would be setting himself up as a target. And not just for abuse. Revealing the portrait would be a coup, its history extraordinary, likely to catch the interest of the world. Luca wanted that. Fillide Melandroni was his ancestor: a beautiful, violent whore whose image shimmered out of many of Caravaggio’s paintings. Who wouldn’t want to own it? But The Nativity would stagger the art world. A painting valued at more than £60,000,000 would incite interest and greed across the globe. Every collector, gallery, connoisseur – and villain – would desire it.

  But only he knew its whereabouts. Only Luca Meriss. Anyone who wanted it had to come to him. And if anything happened to him? It would be lost forever.

  As guarantees went, it was irrefutable.

  The only part of his face he truly liked was his eyes. Dark brown, but not welcoming. Hard. Compelling. At times inviting, at other times cold. Rough trade eyes… His gaze moved down to the waiter’s uniform he was wearing. An outfit soaked in resentment, sticky with humiliation. Everything that a customer thought was in their eyes: words were irrelevant. Their expression said it all at they looked at him – man nudging middle age, waiting on tables. Trying to be pleasant and obsequious instead. An outsider, with his slicked-down Mediterranean hair and rent-boy lips. Overblown, slipping out of his good looks and youth…

  Yes, Luca thought. I know how you see me.

  But not for much longer.

  Breathing in, he relaxed. Everything was in place, at last. Within hours he would launch himself on the internet. He would also contact the papers, magazines, radio and television, and begin his blog. Facebook and Twitter were poised like greyhounds in the slips, ready to run.

  He had the name, after all. A name that was famous and, more importantly, infamous. The name of a painter who was also a murderer. Of course Luca knew that people might not believe him, might never accept that he was a descendant of Caravaggio and the notorious Roman prostitute Fillide Melandroni. But he was prepared for that, prepared for people to scoff and think him a madman.

  He knew better. He knew his bloodline and what it meant. How it carried a secret. How he was the only man alive who knew the whereabouts of Fillide Melandroni’s portrait, long thought destroyed. But that wasn’t all: Luca also knew the hiding place of the most famous missing painting in the art world, The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, stolen from Palermo, Sicily, in 1969. Allegedly by the Mafia.

  As for the portrait of Fillide Melandroni – that was believed to have perished in Germany in 1945. Apparently there had been a direct hit on the Flak Tower and the resulting fire had destroyed all the works of art which had been temporarily housed there.

  Or had it? Luca smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge no one else possessed. The paintings hadn’t been destroyed. They weren’t missing. They were simply in hiding. And he, Luca Meriss, was the only man alive who could bring them back into the light.

  THE KILLER

  London, 2014

  As Luca Meriss went public with his claim to know the whereabouts of the two Caravaggio paintings, the behemoth of the art world stirred itself. From New York to London, from Paris to Berlin, the news travelled and the scavengers came out.

  It was barely six thirty in the morning when Sebastian and Benjamin Weir found themselves becoming slowly paralysed. Beyond their gallery walls, London was taking her first morning breaths, while inside the twin brothers were stripped and bound together with wire fastened around their throats. Unable to defend themselves, their legs were posed in the lotus position, their attacker loading a nail gun in front of them
.

  Unable to move, both men had watched as the gun was loaded. Sweat trickled down their backs, their skin pressed against each other, low gurgling noises in their throats. For some reason the killer had turned up the heating and the gallery was suffocatingly hot. The killer approached them, looked down at the two brothers, and then slowly and methodically laid the nail gun against Sebastian Weir’s scrotum.

  He pulled the trigger and Sebastian’s body jerked, saliva running from the side of his mouth as the man kept firing nails, eight in total. Tied to his brother, Benjamin could feel Sebastian pass out and watched, eyes bulging, as the man reloaded. He paused for several moments, watching Benjamin struggle against his paralysis, his teeth biting down on his tongue, blood oozing onto his chin.

  And then he fired. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight times. When he had finished, the murderer stood up and inserted a piece of metal into the wire which was wound around the brothers’ necks. He began to twist it like a garrotte and continued twisting it, cutting off their air supply. As the temperature inside the room increased and the gallery began to steam, Sebastian’s bowels relaxed and the smell of faeces was pungent as the killer stepped back from the dying men.

  Curious, he watched Benjamin and Sebastian Weir turn into corpses. He saw the pink of their flesh fade to the colour of putty and their blood congeal. Then he picked up the two syringes he had emptied into them, wrapped them in a towel, and put them into the small holdall he had brought with him. Taking out a container, he unscrewed the lid and laid a paintbrush beside it. Finally he unsheathed the hunting knife he had brought with him and, grasping the front of Sebastian’s hair, cut into his scalp. It took only seconds for the killer to scalp both brothers.