by Alex Connor
‘As I say, I’ll ask around. But it might be difficult.’
‘I’ll pay you well,’ Dwappa replied.
Shaw allowed a glint of smugness to enter his tone. ‘I’ve already got plenty of money.’
‘I heard that.’
‘And I don’t need any more work.’
‘I heard that too.’
Smiling, Shaw turned his puffy face to the woman, then glanced back at Dwappa, who was watching him avidly. He could recognise something in the amber eyes: a cold heat and a total lack of empathy. Be careful, Shaw told himself. Be careful and you can still come out of this the winner.
‘Mr Dwappa,’ he went on pleasantly, ‘all I know is that the skull’s been found in Spain. That’s all the information I have.’
‘Who has it?’
Shaw shrugged. ‘I don’t know …’
He was lying. The man now in possession of Goya’s skull was an art historian called Leon Golding. An aesthetic intellectual who had lived and worked in Madrid all his life.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.’
Dwappa’s expression was unreadable. ‘You have to get that skull.’
‘Look, even if I could, it would take time. It’s not as easy as it sounds—’
‘You’ve stolen before—’
‘But not the skull of Goya!’ Shaw whined, wriggling on his seat. ‘Even if I could find it – which I doubt – I couldn’t do it in a couple of days.’
‘I’ll give you time.’
Wrong-footed, Shaw took a moment to reply. ‘Like I said, I don’t know anything—’
In one fluid movement the African lurched forward and struck. Shaw felt the blow and reeled back, then screamed with pain – Dwappa had driven a knife through the back of his hand, pinning it to the table underneath.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Shaw gabbled, blood spurting out from the pale, fatty flesh. ‘Jesus Christ …’
‘Get the Goya skull,’ Dwappa said, leaning forward and twisting the knife around in the wound, ripping up the flesh.
Screaming again, Shaw felt tears come into his eyes, his fingernails scratching at the table top in desperation as Dwappa’s hand moved towards the knife again. ‘No!’ he shrieked. ‘I’ll get the skull. I’ll get it!’
Leaning back in his seat, Dwappa watched the fat man’s face, greasy with fear. Sweat was soaking into his expensive suit, his flabby legs shaking.
‘You said the skull was in Spain?’
The fat man nodded. ‘Yes! Yes! In Spain.’
‘You know who has it?’
Despite his terror, Shaw’s guile was automatic. ‘I’m not sure. I think so … Anyway, I can find out.’
‘Good. Get the skull. For your own sake.’
Shaking uncontrollably, Shaw flinched when he saw the African raise his hand again. But he was only beckoning to someone across the room and a moment later the old woman walked over to him. Without saying a word, she handed Dwappa a paper with a ground-up substance on it. Behind him Shaw could hear the little girl laughing softly … Quickly, Dwappa pulled out the knife, then poured the soothing white powder over the wound in Shaw’s hand. His head slumped forward, the powder clotting and turning red as it mingled with his blood.
‘You can go now.’
The words took a while to register in Shaw’s brain, and then he stood up, swaying on his feet for an instant before he headed for the stairs. Holding his bloodied hand to his chest, he paused, but didn’t dare look back. The room undulated with heat and the oppressive odour of herbs and sweat. From the couch came the sound of the woman moaning and from below echoed the scrabbling of the monkeys’ claws.
As Shaw staggered downstairs, a sudden, hot burst of wind blew in from the back yard, making the macaw screech and claw at the cage bars and the snakes rise up and hiss. It shook the meat carcasses so violently that they lurched and jerked, swinging on their butchers’ hooks like a row of skinned men.
3
Madrid, Spain
The two Golding brothers stood beside the grave in a dry cemetery outside Madrid. The heat was building, the sun unhindered by clouds, the brass plaque on the coffin glistening like a lizard’s eye.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ Leon said, his voice so low Ben had to strain to catch it.
They were attending the funeral of the woman who had raised them. Head bowed, Ben could feel the sun burning the skin on the back of his neck and longed for the cool drizzle of London. He could sense Leon’s excitement as his brother stood beside him, the nervous scuffling of his feet, the intermittent hoarse coughs. Was he taking his medication? Ben wondered, stealing a glance at Leon, who was gazing, unblinking, into the grave. He wondered momentarily how his brother would cope with the loss of Detita – if the old woman’s death would herald another breakdown. But apparently Leon had something else on his mind, something so important that it overshadowed the funeral of a woman he had loved since childhood.
‘We have to talk—’ Leon said urgently.
‘We will. Later,’ Ben replied, looking down at the grave.
Irritated, Leon studied his brother. Tall and olive-skinned, any other man would have taken advantage of his appeal, but Ben had no vanity. He wasn’t a player either. In fact, for the last six years Ben had lived with Abigail Harrop, disappointing many nurses – and a couple of female doctors – at the Whitechapel Hospital in London, where he worked as a reconstructive plastic surgeon.
They had met when Abigail had been admitted as a patient after a car accident badly disfigured the left side of her face. Having been a good-looking woman she was affected both physically and psychologically by the accident and therapy had been of little use. Withdrawing into herself, she resigned from her job as an advertising executive and began to work from home, her only forays into the outside world being to the Whitechapel Hospital, or to visit her family. Depression didn’t overtake Abigail but shyness did. The self-confidence she had once taken for granted disappeared with the accident, and she would keep her head averted if anyone spoke to her. It was not the first time Ben had seen a pretty woman lose her looks overnight, but Abigail was different. Her lack of anger surprised him; her composure unfathomable.
It took Ben many months to realise that what really affected Abigail was her loss of appeal, something she had taken for granted before. Believing herself repellent after the accident, she rejected the opposite sex. Ben was the only man she turned to, first as a doctor, then later as a friend. Much later still, when she had left the Whitechapel Hospital, as a lover.
Restless, Leon continued the scrutiny of his brother. ‘We have to talk—’
‘Later.’
Glancing down at the coffin again, Leon could hear the priest’s monotonous litany of prayers and began to jiggle his left foot as Ben gazed at him questioningly.
There were only a few people at the funeral; the widowed Detita had had no family apart from a daughter who had left Spain long ago. Detita had been wealthy once – although she had never fully explained her background – but bad luck and widowhood had overtaken her. Coming to work for the Goldings, she had appealed to their cultured sensibilities, her breeding obvious and unusual for a housekeeper. Her Spanish hauteur, coupled with her domestic competence, ensured that within weeks she was indispensable.
Soon Detita found herself courted by her employers, who were only too pleased to have her take care of their sons during their frequent absences. Reliable and regal as a duchess, by the end of the first year Detita lived only for the boys. Taken into Miriam Golding’s confidence, she slid, boneless, into the family. So when an air crash over the Atlantic killed the parents, it was no surprise that Detita had been nominated the brothers’ guardian.
She took on the role like a Spanish grandee, and over the years which followed leaked tantalising – but measured – information about her past, enough to incite curiosity but never enough to satisfy. Indomitable, she ran the old ramshackle farmhouse, intimidating the gardener and shadowing the cleaner. She
was a bully with her own people but the equal of her charges. For two Jewish boys growing up in the predominantly Catholic Madrid, Detita managed to straddle the gap between the heat and suspicion of Spain and the cool learning of the boys’ Anglo-American parents.
Although the brothers had been sent to an English boarding school in term time, when they returned to Spain Detita continued their education. She taught them fluent Spanish and took them to lectures and museums, pounding culture into them like a cook over-stuffing a pair of quail.
Leon had loved Detita very much – perhaps a little too much – but even her death couldn’t stop the overheated excitement in his brain. As the service ended, he grabbed his brother’s arm, leading Ben over to his parked car. His face was a mirror image of his brother’s in all but tone. Leon was a watercolour study, Ben a masterwork in oil. One paper, the other tempered canvas.
‘They’ve found the skull.’
Slipping into the driver’s seat, Ben looked at his brother and wound down the window. ‘Whose skull?’
‘I was thinking that you could get someone – a specialist – to look at it,’ Leon hurried on, ignoring the question. ‘You’re a doctor. You know people who could reconstruct it, check out the measurements, teeth. Do whatever you have to do. Just find out how old it is—’
‘Whose head?’
‘Goya’s.’
Ben smiled and leaned back in his seat. A sudden gush of hot wind made the leaves flap and sent dust eddies shimmying around the bonnet of their car.
‘His skull’s been missing for over two centuries—’
‘Until now. Builders were digging up the foundations of a house in Madrid, somewhere Goya stayed for a while. They found the skull under the cement in the cellar. The foreman, Diego Martinez, brought it to me, knowing I’d be interested in the possibility that it might be the artist’s. You remember Diego – we knew him as a kid, when he used to come to the house with his father. You must remember him.’
Ben frowned. ‘I don’t.’
‘Carlos fixed the guttering and the pipework.’ Leon sighed, irritated. ‘Diego was always getting sunburnt.’
‘How much did he ask for the skull?’
‘He didn’t charge me for it!’ Leon snapped. His voice was picking up speed, but he wasn’t manic. Not yet. ‘Jesus, what’s the matter with you? I thought you’d be interested. We grew up near to where the Quinta del Sordo used to be, for Christ’s sake!’ He paused, his tone coaxing. ‘Think about what this could mean for me. If it is Goya’s skull it would be world news – and it would make my reputation.’
‘They thought they’d found the skull before. But it was a fake—’
Leon wasn’t listening. ‘There’s an exhibition of the Black Paintings this autumn. What a coup that would be – the genius’s skull found just in time to coincide with the show. I’d be the most famous art historian on the bloody planet.’
‘If it’s genuine,’ Ben said calmly. ‘If it isn’t you’ll look a moron.’
‘But it is Goya’s skull! Goya died in Bordeaux in 1828 and was buried there until the Spanish authorities brought him back home to Madrid and re-interred him in 1899. Seventy-one years later.’
Ben sighed. ‘I know the story, Leon. God knows how many times Detita told us that Goya’s head was missing. But all this is supposition, not fact …’
Pausing, Ben glanced out of the car window, his own composure rattled by memory. Detita had made certain that her charges understood Spain and Spanish art. In her eyes, Goya came next after God. Ben could almost see her alive again, sitting at the kitchen table. Automatically he loosened his collar, the heat swelling, her image filling the car.
‘… Goya’s home, the Quinta del Sordo, was only a little way from here …’ she would begin, sitting down in the kitchen, her back straight, her eyes unreadable. Overhead, the old house would creak, water pipes banging, the sound of wild geese coming, mournful, over the river. It had been nothing like their school in England, where the trees grew rich and straight. It had been another country. Another country of location. And of mind. ‘… Goya was one of the greatest artists who ever lived.’
‘What about Michelangelo?’
She had made a dismissive sound as she turned to Ben.
‘No fire. Goya knew the dark side. He lived in that big old house, near the river, near enough to see Madrid, far away enough not to be a part of the city. In that house Goya painted his private pictures, the Black Paintings. In them he left a message …’
Pausing there, she had reached for her books, turning over the pages slowly, grotesque images oozing off the paper.
It required no effort for Ben to remember the queasy unease which had wept from the reproductions.
‘Look,’ Detita had said, her white forefinger turning over the page to expose the Witches’ Sabbath. Not the earlier version, with its light blues and comic devilry – this was the image of Goya’s later years. After the Inquisition and the Spanish War of Independence, after the murder and torture. When the indigo power of Black Magic had been not merely a superstition, but a possibility. The Devil was no longer comic, but a shadow which had followed many Spaniards. The End of Reason in the Age of Enlightenment.
Ben had been repelled, but compelled to look at the painting: at the stupid, animalistic faces of the cohorts crouched on the ground. Women, once beautiful, had been turned by Goya into salacious hags, monochromic heads cowled, eyes wide open and blank with cruelty. And while Detita talked of Goya, she also talked of Spanish history – and the unknown. Of the two boys, she had caught Leon’s imagination first because he was mercurial in temperament, needing constant excitement and stimulus.
Ben was never sure if their parents had understood Leon’s mental frailty, but he had been aware of it all his life – that nauseous dance between stability and hysteria, between appreciation and obsession.
Still staring out of the car window, Ben remembered Detita. The Detita of the daytime, practical, intelligent, stern. And then the other Detita, the night woman, languid as candlelight. Duty had had no place after the light faded – then she had told stories, stories she said had been passed down by generations of Spanish grandmothers, by her Spanish grandmother. But the tales had never been benign. Always, like her, they veered between two worlds.
‘… When you need me, come at midnight to the Bridge of the Manzanares, clap your hands three times and you will see black horses appear …’
Detita had smiled as she recited the quote, Leon leaning forward expectantly under the overhead lamp, Ben’s dark eyes fixed on her. At once she had noticed his expression, the almost warning glance, and felt her power weaken. Many times in the years that followed she had clashed with Ben as her control over him lessened. And then, finally, Detita had shifted her attention from the two brothers to the one. From Ben’s granite control to the soft slush of Leon’s instability.
For an instant, Ben closed his eyes. But still the memories kept coming.
‘… The Spanish people have a dark heart …’ Detita had said, luring Leon in with her stories. ‘When Ferdinand VII reinstated the Inquisition the purges began, the Church re-energised along with its greedy, mercenary priests. And among the pogroms, the Spanish developed an even greater appetite for pain, murder and death. Goya feared Ferdinand because he was a liberal, and after Ferdinand was reinstated the King’s power was absolute again.’
A fly landed on the back of Ben’s hand, throwing a stumpy shadow before he flicked it away. In the overheated car, he wondered why Leon wasn’t talking and glanced over at his brother. Was Leon waiting? Was he biding his time? Or maybe just sulking? Suddenly another memory resonated in Ben’s mind: his brother waking, screaming, in the middle of the night. Every night throughout one long, dry summer as Goya’s image of Saturn picked away at his sanity like a black rook. Relentlessly, Leon had insisted that the house was haunted, that their dead parents lived in the cellar and banged on the water pipes …
Pleading, Ben had asked Detita not to
tell Leon any more stories. She had replied with a limp shrug, smile benign as a lamb’s, eyes like a tree monkey.
‘They’re just old Spanish tales!’ she had said. ‘Children have to know about the world, not just the part they can see. Leon might be scared for a while, but then he’ll forget. No one stays frightened forever.’ She had been playing cat’s cradle with Ben’s emotions, unexpectedly tender. ‘You’re a good boy to worry about your brother. You must always look out for Leon – he’s not strong like you.’
‘So?’
Startled out of the memory, Ben turned to his brother. ‘What?’
‘So will you help me?’ Leon went on, his skin translucent, pale after a lifetime of ducking the Spanish sun. ‘Will you get someone to look at the skull?’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Ben said finally.
‘Thanks …’ There was an awkward pause. ‘You’re staying overnight, of course?’
‘I’ve got a hotel room booked in Madrid.’
‘Madrid? Why don’t you stay with us?’
‘I’ve an early flight in the morning. Why disturb everyone?’
‘But I want you to meet Gina,’ Leon replied petulantly. ‘I want you two to be friends. I was never lucky with women before, you know that. But Gina’s perfect. She understands me, my work. I want you two to get on.’
‘I’m coming back next month. I can meet her then.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Leon, next time, I promise.’
‘She’s very supportive—’
‘Good.’
‘Really cares about me.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Very understanding—’
‘She broke up with you for nine months and then came back without ever explaining why she went off in the first place!’
Ben stopped short, cursing himself. Leon’s tone was prickly as he replied.
‘Gina left because we had problems. It wasn’t all her fault. We’ve sorted things out now … She’s good for me, Ben. She’s interested in sport, health. She said I didn’t need to take so much medication—’
