The Caravaggio Conspiracy (7 page)

Dempsey had never even heard of the Galleria Doria Pamphilj until his uncle gave him a free ticket courtesy of the Rome tourist office.

‘Take my word for it,’ O’Malley said. ‘There’s no finer gallery in Rome. What’s more, this is no ordinary ticket. It grants you admission for an hour after the gallery has officially closed, so you should have the place almost to yourself. A rare privilege.’

‘Do you get upgraded on flights home as well?’ Dempsey asked, impressed despite himself.

‘Matter of fact, I do,’ the Father General replied. ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

Next day, Dempsey spent eight straight hours in the National Library on the Viale Castro Pretorio, researching material for his PhD. It turned out to be a rather one-sided quest. While there were hundreds of letters and documents relating to Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel, the papers of Pope Pius IX were mostly locked away in the Vatican Library. He did, though, find one quotation from Pius – the last pontiff to reign as sovereign of the Papal States – that struck him as relevant to present-day tensions in Italy. The Jews, His Holiness said in a speech in 1871, were ‘dogs’, and there were too many of these ‘dogs’ in Rome. ‘We hear them howling in the streets. They disturb us everywhere we go.’ Substitute Muslims for Jews and it was the same situation today. Now
there
was a pope Bosani could respect.

It was after four o’clock before he started out for the Pamphilj gallery. It was rush hour – what the Italians called
l’ora di punta
. The pavements were packed with commuters heading to the Metro or making their way to the main railway station a little further west. Dempsey drew a deep breath as he left the cool seclusion of the library. It was yet another sticky summer’s evening. The air-conditioning units, turned up to high despite the latest government regulations, droned overhead, dripping water steadily onto the ground. He considered taking a bus, but Roman bus routes were incredibly complicated. It was said you had to be born in the city to have any hope of understanding them. Better to take a little longer on foot than end up a kilometre or more in the wrong direction.

It was when he stopped for a cold beer off the Via della Gatta that he learned from RaiNews 24 that the gardener injured by the bomb in the cloisters of the Lateran cathedral had died two hours earlier in the San Giovanni Hospital. Few of the tourists in the crowded bar understood the bulletin, but a definite murmur of hostility rose from the Romans present.

‘Bloody Arabs!’ one man with a leather jacket and a comb-over said beneath his breath. ‘One minute they’re shooting at a judge, the next they’re blowing the legs off one of the Pope’s gardeners.’

‘Poor bastard,’ someone said. ‘Didn’t even know what hit him.’

The barman nodded. ‘But when’s the government going to bloody well do something? Pity we can’t have Berlusconi back. They’ll be bombing my mother when she comes out of Mass before anyone sits up and takes notice.’

Dempsey finished his beer and headed back into the evening sunshine. He understood the sentiment. After his own experience, he had no time for Islamic terrorists. But he still found this kind of talk wearing.

Two minutes later, he arrived at the Palazzo Pamphilj, next to the old Collegio Romano. He showed his invitation to a uniformed guard and was directed towards a set of marble stairs. The sculpture room, the first stop on the tour, didn’t interest him. He’d never cared much for sculpture, which always reminded him of public parks filled with bronze aldermen in frock coats, or ‘martyrs’ calling on others to follow their example. Hurrying past a lubricious centaur and a tiny figure of Socrates reclining in the fireplace, he followed the signs up another set of stairs to the first of the picture galleries.

The initial impact was of a saleroom he had once visited in Dublin. There were paintings – hundreds of them – stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Some were so jammed together that it was hard to make them out. It was the painterly equivalent of
l’ora di punta
.

There was, of course, one exception. The celebrated portrait of Innocent X by Velàsquez was displayed in its own secluded
gabinetto
, next to a bust of the pontiff by Bernini. The decision to keep the Velàsquez separate from the rest of the
collection
was nothing new. Isolation was a fact of life for those who sat on the Throne of St Peter’s. It was central to their role. And it was appropriate that the only face Innocent had to gaze upon when the public took their leave each evening was his own – which was almost certainly the case in real life.

Dempsey sympathized. For the first four weeks of his burns treatment, smeared with antibiotic cream, he had been secured inside a pressurized steel chamber filled with oxygen. The sensation was disorientating. He had felt like an astronaut lost in space. Every day he went to sleep and wakened in the same
position
, face down, arms and legs outstretched, as if he were crucified – except that he had never felt further from God. The longer-term treatment was only
marginally
more bearable. His extreme susceptibility to infection meant that for the next three months doctors and nurses, wearing masks and speaking to him in French, were his only contact with the world. Each morning, to a background of Mozart, Berlioz and Strauss, specialist technicians would scrape away the dead tissue from his back, buttocks and thighs – an excrutiating procedure known as debridement. In a bid to promote the generation of healthy tissue beneath, whole layers of scabs were removed. But the worst part came when grafts from a specially bred pig were attached to the still-forming sub-cutaneous layers of his skin. It was as if he were being robbed of the last remaining vestige of his humanity and turned into someone, or something, else. Yet dreadful though all of this had been, nothing was as bad as the overwhelming sense of solitude. If it was true that a drowning man reviewed his whole life in the minute or so it took him to die, it was also the case that a man staring at the floor for six months revisited again and again and again every decision he had ever taken, every mistake he ever made, every girl he ever slept with. He was bound to his past like Prometheus to his rock, constantly reminded of his failings, waking each morning to be devoured alive.

Prominent among the spectral presences was the shade of his father, who moved through secret doors inside the chambers of his memory, turning up when he was least wanted, asking questions to which there were no answers. He had never understood the nature of their relationship. Perhaps they didn’t have one. Perhaps they had just lived in the same house. He told himself that if his mother had survived, everything would have been different. She would have given him love and understanding. The farm would have known laughter as well as whiskey fumes. But that was just fantasy. After she died giving birth to him, the old man, like Miss Havesham in
Great Expectations
, became suspended in time. His long silences, interrupted only by prayer and periodic torrents of abuse, had persisted for more than twenty years.

Not that his own life since had lacked variety. There had even been moments of sublime black comedy. A week after his father died, as he lay face down in France, unable to attend the funeral, his fiancée, Siobhán, wrote to him from Dublin to tell him she was sorry, but she couldn’t cope with his injuries and was breaking off their engagement. ‘I know I must seem heartless,’ she had written, ‘and I want you to know how dreadful I feel about leaving you like this. I can only ask you to see the situation from my perspective.’ He saw it well enough. Given everything else that had happened, the blatant egoism of her decision had made him laugh out loud – which hurt. The duty nurse, who had read him the letter in her heavily accented English, only half understanding it, thought he was out of his mind and summoned the doctor, who gave him a sedative.

The last he heard, Siobhán had married a hedge fund manager whose brother played cricket for Ireland. Cricket! Well, good luck to her. It had been a foolish relationship to begin with, which would never have lasted. She’d have divorced him inside of three years, pausing only to take him to the cleaners.

But time, as the cliché had it, was the great healer. Having never believed it, he now knew it was true. The scars on his back would always be there, but the ones inside his head had begun to close. He could feel life returning, like sap rising in a tree after a long winter. It had come back not only in the muscles of his back and the wasted sinews of his arms and legs, but in his altered view of the world and its possibilities. He had learned things about himself that he could never have known otherwise. He was less carefree since Iraq, less self-obsessed. He was more thoughtful, more discriminating. But the other side was always there, too. There were things he had learned that you weren’t supposed to know until you were old. The fragility of human life and the despair that hid around every corner, waiting to declare itself, was something he could not dismiss. The only thing he could be sure of was that he was different now – new-forged – and he would have to be satisfied with that.

He felt a hand on his arm. A woman standing next to him in the gallery asked him in English if he was all right. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else. It was then he realized that he had been gazing for a several minutes into the cold, sceptical eyes of Innocent X. He turned to the woman, who happened to be an American. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I was just trying to work out what he was thinking.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, moving away. ‘I’m a Baptist.’

Smiling to himself, he backed out of His Holiness’s presence and made his way down a long, brilliantly lit gallery until he was moved to halt in front of a double portrait of two lawyers by Raphael and
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
by Titian. Both were extraordinary. The glistened as if they had only just been completed. But it was the Caravaggios he had come to see.

Earlier in the day, determined to show his uncle that he was not a complete prat when it came to art, he had taken the opportunity to view
Judith with
the 
Head of Holofernes
in the Palazzo Barberini, at the bottom of the Via Veneto. It was easily the most terrifying painting he had ever seen. According to his audio guide, Holofernes was an Assyrian general who had threatened the destruction of Israel. So no change there. Judith, a wealthy and beautiful Jewess, seduced him, then cut off his head as he slept. Must have been employed by Mossad, he reckoned. Holofernes had woken up just too late to avoid his fate. His killer, looking as if she found the task frankly distasteful but necessary, had slit his throat with his own sword, then just carried on sawing while a leather-faced crone stood ready to wrap up the head in a sheet. The victim’s blood shot out thickly from his gaping neck, soaking his sheets and pillow, while his stifled scream echoed across the gallery.

Uncle Declan had warned him that Caravaggio was obsessed with capital punishment. At least a quarter of his paintings featured severed heads, some of them based on his own pain-racked features. Perhaps he had had a premonition. Following some dismal murder or other, he’d passed his last years as a fugitive. The story went that he’d been hunted down by unknown enemies who in the end had got their man.

But the two canvases Dempsey sought out in the Pamphilj could not have been more different. The first showed a penitent Mary Magdalene, the ‘bad girl’ of the New Testament, with her head bowed and arms loosely folded in her lap. The idea, evidently, was that she was repenting of her past and turning to Christ, but to Dempsey it was more like she ached for something that had been taken from her. There was certainly more to her melancholy than a renunciation of high living. But then he looked at the painting next to it,
Rest During the Flight into Egypt
. At first, he didn’t think much of it. For a start, the Sinai looked less like a desert than a glimpse of the Garden of Eden, which made no sense. As Mary cradled the baby Jesus, Joseph, looking distinctly world-weary – as well he might, given the recent turn of events – held up a music score so that a half-naked angel violinist could play not a lullaby, as he first thought, but the Song of Songs.

But then he looked closer – and that’s when it got interesting. It was the same girl in both paintings. Had to be: the same red hair and generous figure, head turned down, eyes closed. As Mary Magdalene, her arms were empty, clutching only empty space. But in the second work, she held her baby close to her heart – and it made all the difference in the world. Art, Dempsey was coming to realize, was not always about what it was about. Had the model, obviously well known to Caravaggio, maybe lost a baby? Was the artist giving us, in fact, a before and after portrait of loss? Whatever the truth, there were obviously two Caravaggios, one a consummate artist, a sensitive observer of the human psyche; the other haunted, fatalistic and disabled by self-loathing.

Just like that, Dempsey felt he had found a friend.

There were summonses in Rome that you could ignore and those you could not. Those from the office of the Camerlengo fell very definitely into the second
category
. A constable of the
sbirri
had pounded on Caravaggio’s door. When the artist answered, wiping sleep from his eyes, he was told that he was to present himself that afternoon at the Palazzo Battista on the Via Monseratto.

‘What for?’

‘No prizes there, Merisi,’ the constable said, with a sneer. ‘To answer charges about your scurrilous personal behaviour. From what I hear, His Eminence wants to find out whether or not you’re a heretic who should have his head cut off. So I wouldn’t worry about it. Just routine.’

The constable, a thug Caravaggio had run across several times in the last year, sniggered before adding: ‘I wouldn’t advise you to keep His Eminence waiting. He can be very
persuasive
with people who get on the wrong side of him. Know what I mean?’ Leaning forward, he wrinkled his nose, making snuffling noises like a bloodhound. ‘And something else: I’d have a wash first. He’s very particular about that.’

Caravaggio felt his blood run cold. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘No need to send for reinforcements. Now oblige me, Constable, and fuck off.’

It was just after three according to the clock in the Piazza Firenza when he reached the front door of Battista’s residence. It was no more than a hundred paces from the Corte Savella prison, where Beatrice Cenci had been tortured before her execution, which did not seem a good omen. The last time he had felt this nervous, he realized, was October 1601, when he was arrested for brawling in Trastevere and carrying a sword without a permit. On that occasion, he had spent two terrifying nights in the cells of the Tor di Nona. The offence was his fifth of a serious nature since coming to live in Rome in 1592, and the head of the
sbirri
, enraged by the boldness and seeming impunity of the city’s self-styled
bravi
, was determined to make an example. He had been thrown into the prison’s deepest, dankest dungeon, known as the ‘pit’, where, as he lay in the darkness, all he could hear were the screams of the damned. Twenty-four hours later, he was brought out and shown the instruments of torture by a priest of the Holy Office, which had made him piss himself. If Cardinal Del Monte, prompted by the Colonna family, his father’s employers, hadn’t acted to free him, he had no doubt that he would have been hung up by his arms, with stone weights attached to his feet – an ordeal known as
strappado
– until he confessed to whatever crimes the
sbirri
needed to clear up and which they found it convenient to attribute to him. His next appointment, his last, would then have been with the headsman on the Ponte Sant’Angelo – a prospect that filled him with mortal dread.

It wasn’t that long ago that he didn’t worry about death – or at least knew how to laugh about it. Not any more. Now it was as if the darkness was pressing down on him, making his head hurt, transferring the grotesqueries of his dreams into his waking life. Others had noticed it. His temper these days erupted with alarming suddenness, clouding his judgment, causing him to inflate every slight, real or imagined, into a question of honour. Not long ago, he had thrown a plate of hot artichokes into the face of a waiter who couldn’t say which were cooked with butter and which in oil. Not content with humiliating the fellow, he had then drawn his sword and threatened him, for no good reason. It was if a demon possessed him. The only thing that sustained him, and kept him from thoughts of suicide, was his unshakeable conviction that he was the greatest painter in Italy since Tintoretto, perhaps since Titian. This might have been hard for some of his rivals to accept, but it was true. Perhaps because they agreed with him, the others refused to leave him alone. Everything he did, every canvas, every drawing, was placed on the dissecting table of their vanity and minutely examined for flaws, mostly of a moral nature. Fellow painters praised him in public, but in private they spread poison about him and undercut his prices. The Church, meanwhile, suspected him of something close to heresy, as if his vision of Christ and the Apostles was motivated by something other than devotion. He couldn’t understand it. More than that, he didn’t understand himself.

He remembered how he had bounded into the home of Cherubini full of confidence and self-assertion. That wouldn’t work with Battista, said to be cold and cerebral, but, above all, ruthless. No one had the ear of the Pope the way Battista did. Not even Pietro Aldobrandini, the cardinal-nephew, wielded as much raw power.

The bare bones of his story were well known. The son of a Sienese banker who made a fortune working for Venice during its long struggle with Genoa, Battista was rumoured to have paid 85,000 scudi into the papal exchequer in return for the post he now held. The previous record, according to Orsi, was 70,000 scudi. But it was worth it. With the revenues of the Holy See and the Papal States now bigger than ever, the Camerlengo’s control of taxation, gifts and the issue of coins made him a pivotal figure in the economy of Europe far beyond the papal domains. Not even the Medici or the bankers of Switzerland dared defy him. Battista was the master of all he surveyed, and his surveys were no less than the audit of Christendom.

Yet closest of all to the heart of the Camerlengo was said to be his control of the finances that governed the war with the Ottomans. In recent years, while the Turks re-armed and prepared for a renewed offensive in the Mediterranean, money from Rome aimed at the maintenance of strong defences had steadily declined. Battista argued that no other course made sense. To wage war on a grand scale in perpetuity led only to bankruptcy. Let the Sublime Court spend its strength on a course that ultimately spelled ruin; Europe would not make the same mistake. As the power of Spain reduced and the cohesion of France continued to be challenged by religious division, some, like Longhi, thought it strange that Battista took so sanguine a view. But he was not alone. The Pope, with his background in
ecclesiastical
law, saw Protestantism and civil unrest, not Islam, as the greatest threat to the Church. The Ottomans, in his opinion, had had their wings clipped at Lepanto and could safely be left to the emperor and the Knights of Malta.

Caravaggio, waiting in the entrance hall of Battista’s palazzo, prided himself in the sophistication of his political views. He mixed, after all, with princes and prelates, who frequently confided in him and even asked his opinions. But today he had to steer well clear of such matters. Instead, he rehearsed over and over in his mind what he would say if challenged to defend himself against the charge of heresy. The Camerlengo was supposed to be an ascetic, who preferred to say Mass in his own chapel, away from the crowds, and had even turned his back on wine. There certainly weren’t many paintings in his hallway, and none of religious subjects, save for a large and distinctly second-rate Abraham and Isaac. In their place were elegant vases, woodcuts and a series of framed maps. The only sign of ego was a portrait of Battista himself, by Annibale Carracci, that occupied an alcove to the left of the main staircase. As rendered by Carracci, he looked
strong-willed
and calculating, with furrowed brow and fleshy lips: not a man to be crossed.

After a wait of some twenty minutes, a door to the right opened and a young priest emerged. He was of medium height, with no distinguishing features
whatsoever
, dressed from head to foot in black. ‘His Eminence will see you now,’ he said in an unexpectedly high voice, ‘and if you wish to survive the experience you will keep a civil tongue in your head.’

Caravaggio said nothing, merely nodded. The priest, who did not give his name, led the way into a broad
loggia
lit down one side by floor-to-ceiling windows through which a formal garden and fountains could be seen. Beyond, in the middle of a summer’s afternoon, it was insufferably hot and humid; within the walls of the palace it was cool and inviting. Their footsteps echoed on the marble tiles. Suddenly, the priest halted and turned to his right towards a set of heavy oak doors on which he knocked firmly, yet politely.

A voice called out, ‘
Entrato
!’

‘Your Eminence,’ the priest said, pushing the doors open, ‘the artist Merisi.’

‘Ah yes. Come in, Merisi. Let me have a look at you.’ In contrast with the high treble of the priest, Battista’s voice was low and booming.

Caravaggio did as he was bid. The priest retreated, closing the double doors.

The cardinal was seated behind a large, ornate desk, an ironic smile fixed on his face. ‘Father Acquaviva did not exaggerate,’ he said after a lengthy pause. ‘You look like one of the men I employ to catch rats in my basement.’

Not the best of starts. ‘I’m sorry to offend you, Your Eminence. But I did in fact wash before I set out.’

‘Really? And what about your clothes? When did they last see soap and water?’

‘I’m afraid I tend to buy clothes and wear them until they are … well, as you see me now. Then I throw them away.’

‘I see. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.’ The Camerlengo, in his early sixties, sturdily built with broad shoulders, wore a scarlet cassock fashioned, Caravaggio thought, from pure silk, with a lace trim. His shoes were brilliant red, with silver buckles. It was impossible not to notice his dark, penetrating eyes. If the eyes were indeed the windows of the soul, Caravaggio told himself, then this man’s soul was as black as anything in Dante’s
Inferno
. The cardinal’s pate was bald on top, with a fringe of dark hair that matched his black beard. His skull cap sat next to him on the desk. But what was most obvious about him was his malformed left arm, perhaps three inches shorter than it ought to be, ending in a hand the fingers of which were retracted, like a claw. Already, a portrait of the man was forming in the artist’s head.

But then he realized that Battista was still speaking.

‘Perhaps you should rethink your sartorial strategy. After all, you are not a swineherd. Your calling brings you into contact with nobles and princes of the Church. You should dress accordingly.’

‘Yes, Eminence.’

‘And if you sweat a lot, wash more frequently.’

‘I shall endeavour to follow your advice.’

‘That would be wise.’ The cardinal looked cool and relaxed. He did not invite his guest to take a chair. ‘Now tell me, why do you keep being arrested? What is wrong with you? You insist on fighting every week as if your life depended on it. Yet the offence given, or imagined, rarely justifies more than a rebuke. Are you incontinent, Merisi?’

‘
What
?’

‘Can you not hold yourself back? Must every slight be met with a rapier thrust?’

‘These are not easy times,’ came the mumbled reply.

‘What was that? Speak up, man.’

‘I said, we don’t live in easy times, Eminence.’

‘Is that so? Is it really? Then let me make things easier for you. I have spoken to Cardinal Del Monte and he agrees with me that this cannot go on. Should you come to the attention of the
sbirri
once more, to the extent that I have to be informed of your behaviour, you may expect to be arrested and detained. Should your offence be grave, you will meet with the full rigour of the law. There will be no further dawn amnesties. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You do, Eminence. As a church bell.’

‘I am glad to hear it. I should regret having to add your name to the list of those being investigated by the Holy Office, but I shall not shrink from it. Your constant street brawls, your whoring, your lack of respect for established
traditions
in art have become a source of public scandal. Your appearance, meanwhile, is an affront to decency. Why are you not married? What age are you?’

‘Thirty-two, Eminence.’

‘Are you a sodomite?’

‘No, Eminence, I am not.’

‘That’s something, I suppose. You know that the penalty for sodomy is death! But let that go – for now. The thing is, you offend the dignity of the Church, Merisi. More particularly, you offend me – and I can assure you that that is not a good position to be in.’ The cardinal squinted at his victim as if he couldn’t quite make him out. ‘Men have died for less. Women, too.’

Caravaggio could feel the veins in his neck begin to swell. Having to repress his natural instincts like this was almost more than he could endure. He wanted to punch the self-righteous prick in his smug, jowly face and tell him what he thought of him. But this time he knew better. ‘No, Eminence,’ he said, between clenched teeth. ‘I can see that.’

‘Good.’ Battista picked up a letter from his desk. ‘I have a note here from Master Laerzio Cherubini. You know him, I think: an esteemed legal adviser to the Holy See and a devout Catholic. He complains that your rendering of the death, or dormition, of the Virgin, commissioned for the church of Santa Maria della Scala, is an affront to the Council of Trent, verging on blasphemy. He adds that you were exceedingly rude to him in the presence of a bishop and implied that he frequented brothels.’

‘Master Cherubini is a pompous buffoon, Eminence, and no expert on what is blasphemous and what is not. He is also a liar and owes me 230 scudi.’

Battista smiled thinly, reminding Caravaggio of the priest who had shown him the instruments of torture in the Tor di Nona. ‘An interesting response. And what about Superior General Acquaviva, who has made a similar complaint about you in relation to a different painting, this time of
The Supper at Emmaus
?’