The Garden of Evil (14 page)

Two

T
HEY WALKED THROUGH THE
CENTRO STORICO,
AGATA
pointing out the streets he thought he knew well, now realising how mistaken he had been. She understood them so much better, and in so many different dimensions: where the painters they both revered had lived and fought and died. It was like a lesson from the freest and frankest of university professors. Agata talked of the society—rich, violent, hedonistic, and yet, in a sense, deeply religious, even moralistic—that had first nurtured Caravaggio, then, as his behaviour worsened, began to reject him, finally delivering the death sentence for the killing that dispatched him into exile. As she spoke, Costa realised there was something he had never really sought before: the spirit behind the brush, the burning creative animus that had driven one lone rebel, with little in the way of formal education or tuition, to redress the focus of painting and seek the divine in the mundane, the thieves and prostitutes, the criminals and the vagabonds, who walked the streets of Rome.

It was all, she said, a question of
disegno,
which, for the painters of Caravaggio’s generation, meant not simply “design” but, as one of his contemporaries put it, “
il segno di Dio in noi
,” the sign of God in us.

“Do you see the sign of God anywhere today?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, and shrugged. “Sorry. Do you?”

“Everywhere! You must learn to look properly. I will deal with this lapse.”

They strode past the grand home of Caravaggio’s onetime patron, Agata speculating about the behaviour of the eccentric Archbishop Del Monte and his bizarre household in what was now the genteel home of the Senate, guarded by innumerable uniformed Carabinieri. Then they made their way across the busy Christmas traffic bickering to fight its way through the perennial jam at the Piazza delle Cinque Lune as she talked passionately about the past in the present, daring him to sense its nearness. No more than three minutes away, towards the Corso, stood the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, the place where Caravaggio fell into the deadly street fight that led to his exile from Rome. The same distance towards the river, beyond the Via della Scrofa, which led towards the Vicolo del Divino Amore, lay the Tor di Nona, the tower where some of his fellow ruffians had been imprisoned after the desperate knife battle, perhaps with the wounded Caravaggio among them, until, with the aid of some of his aristocratic admirers, the painter was able to flee the executioner.

“They are here, Nic,” she insisted. “
He
is here. You simply have to look and listen. Come.”

They turned the corner into the small cobbled piazza. The early Renaissance façade of the Church of Sant’Agostino stood above them, its pale travertine, visibly plundered from the Colosseum some five hundred years before, now luminescent in the orange streetlights. He followed her up the long, broad flight of stone stairs, through into the vast echoing nave. Instinctively, he turned to his left, towards the painting he’d seen countless times, and knew would see afresh through her eyes.

“No,” she said, and took his elbow, guiding him away. “I didn’t bring you here for that.”

The Madonna of Loreto,
an exquisite Caravaggio Virgin with the infant Jesus in her arms, the holy pair framed in the doorway of a simple stone house, staring down at two grimy pilgrims, stood in the gloom at the edge of his vision, like a sombre, glowing beacon.

“If he worshipped,” Agata said, “and I believe he did, he worshipped here. They all came to this place. The artists and the poets. And worse. This was an altar for the fallen. They had need of it most of all. Where would the Church be without sinners?”

She turned to face the entrance and he did the same, seeing the sculpture there, a pale study of two figures illuminated by a sea of candles.

“This was the whores’ church, too,” Agata Graziano told him. “The seat of worship for what was once Ortaccio. The mistress of Cesare Borgia is buried here. So were some of the most famous prostitutes of Rome, not by the Muro Torto, where the law dictated. You won’t find their tombs here anymore, though. All gone, out of a sense of . . .” She frowned. “. . . decorum. I’m just a humble sister with a fondness for art. I know no more of your world than I wish to. But this puzzles me. That men should want a thing so badly, and then feel filled with shame when they achieve it. Fillide felt no shame. Why should she? Look, Nic, look closely . . .”

He’d never spent much time on the figures there at all, though a dim memory told him that they had some special significance for the ordinary women of Rome. Sometimes, when visiting the Caravaggio, he’d seen them slip up to the larger statue, the Madonna, almost furtively, place an offering in the box, light a candle, cross themselves. Then, with one last sideways glance, step gently forward and touch the silver slipper that protected the Virgin’s foot.

He stared at the placid, beautiful woman carved from stone, seated majestically beneath the half-shell cupola of the alcove, with the child standing, one leg on her lap, one on her throne. How could he have been so blind? Above her hair, lit by the forest of blazing candles in the niche, rose a starry halo. Around her chest, tight beneath her breasts, ran a silver garland. The child was magnificent, rising to face the world, a bright, brave metal robe girding his waist. Wreathed in light, surrounded by flowers and mementos, messages and photographs of children, so many of them, she was beyond Christian iconography, timeless, like Venus displaying the infant Cupid, a prize, a miracle in her arms.

“What do women pray for when they come here? When they touch her feet like that?” he asked.

“Again, you are asking the wrong person. This is the Madonna del Parto, the Madonna of motherhood, of birth. It’s a belief that predates my faith. That through womanhood comes the fecundity of mankind. So I imagine they pray for the child they are bearing or hope to.” She hesitated. “Even a woman like Fillide, perhaps, though a Christian sensibility gave her generation the notion, the stain, of sin too.”

He thought of the painting hidden in the studio, its message lurking beneath so many surface deceptions. And he remembered Emily and the child they had lost. There were no prayers to ease that pain, no candles and flowers, or the worn, comforting touch of a statue’s silver foot shining in the gloomy belly of an ancient church marooned in its own quiet piazza, a few steps from the choking bustle of modern Rome.

“When they came here,” Agata asked, speaking in a loud, firm voice, the way the priest did at Emily’s funeral, when all else whispered, “what do you think they saw? Del Monte and Caravaggio. Galileo and Fillide Melandroni. What did they seek?”

“
Disegno,
” Nic replied simply.

The design of God in us.

He was unable to avoid her fixed, interested stare.

“You are a good pupil, Nic Costa,” Agata Graziano declared with a sudden serious turn. “I only wish I were a better teacher.”

He began to object.

“No,” she interjected. “A good teacher would have some answers.”

“I could ask an easier question,” he suggested. There was a moment’s hesitation before he found the courage to say it. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

All sense of amusement departed her face. This dark, austere, yet pretty woman, hugging herself tightly in the long black coat of the nun she was not, looked back at him, suddenly uncertain of herself.

“What interest is this of yours?” she responded.

“I’m curious. It’s part of the job. Most of the job, to be honest with you.”

“Well, there is nothing to know. I was one abandoned child among many. They thought my mother was a woman of the kind . . .” She looked around the church. “. . . who would once have dreamed she might enter a place like this, and doubtless would never have been pretty enough or rich enough. My father was a seaman. He was African, I think. From Ethiopia. That is all I know and all I wish to know. The sisters took me in, raised me, and then, when they saw something worth cultivating, set me on this present course through the simple medium of education. My story is wholly unexceptional, for which I am grateful.” A shadow of doubt crossed her face. “Now, for a day or two, I am something else. One of you. Thanks to your inspector.”

“Another of Leo’s gifts.”

She looked a little cross. “He told you?”

Costa was aware that he had done something wrong. “Just the basics.”

“Why on earth would he do that?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “In another man I would have said it came from misplaced pride. But not him. Never. How odd.”

She pointed a short, commanding finger at his chest. “What Leo did was charity, and charity is best performed in silence. I am grateful for it, and wish to hear no more.”

She gazed at the statue: the bright, gleaming Madonna, an older goddess, too, perhaps, with the magical child in her arms. There was something there, Nic thought, something that was beyond even Agata Graziano.

“We are done with the dead,” she declared, and set off for the door. “For the time being anyway.”

Costa hesitated, staring at the statue, thinking of Emily. Thinking of what it might be like to be in the same room as the man who had taken her life so casually.

Leo Falcone demanded a high and difficult price of everyone he knew. Costa wondered, for a moment, whether he could pay it, whether he could enter a room with the men he knew to be the Ekstasists and act as if nothing were wrong.

“Nic?” Agata asked from the door. “Are you coming or not?”

He had never said this to Falcone, but the suit the inspector had ordered to be brought from the farmhouse was the one Costa had worn for their wedding.

“I’m coming,” he answered.

One

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER THEY STOOD ON THE STEPS OF
the Palazzo Malaspina. The entrance dominated much of the narrow seventeenth-century street that led, in a few short minutes, to the Mausoleum of Augustus, a place Costa had yet to find the courage to revisit. The Vicolo del Divino Amore was even closer around the corner, as was the Barberini’s small external studio, where the canvas of Venus with her satyrs now resided. Everything about this case, it seemed to Costa, was contained in the small, secretive warren of dark, dingy alleys here, the labyrinth that was once Ortaccio.

They stopped at the foot of the curving stone staircase. A heraldic decoration ran the length of each side: a stone shield half a metre high, divided into two halves, one stippled, one plain. A bare angular tree in the centre with three short horizontal branches on the left and two on the right. From each emerged sharp spines, top and bottom of the branches.
Mala spina
. The bad thorn.

Agata Graziano looked at him, a shadow of guilt in her charming face.

“I lied a little, Nic,” she confessed. “This isn’t simply the Barberini’s Christmas party. We’re sharing it with one of the private galleries too. It’s about money, of course. We can’t afford it on our own anymore.”

He thought of Falcone and realised he should have expected this.

“Let me guess. The Buccafusca Gallery.”

“Yes,” she replied, impressed. “You’re quite the detective. How did you know?”

“Falcone told me. After a fashion.”

“Ah. He is an . . . interesting man. He likes you. I can see that.”

“Interesting,” Costa agreed.

“I merely wish you to know that some of the things you see here will be Buccafusca’s,” she added. “Not ours.”

“I can’t wait,” Costa replied, and then followed her through the front doors into a grand marbled reception area set beneath an alcove with a carved scalloped half shell many times the size of that over the Madonna del Parto. He watched the private security men, who seemed to know Agata Graziano, nod gravely and take off their caps before ushering the pair of them into a square, echoing hall of pillars and shining stone façades, an extravagant lobby more in keeping with that of an embassy than a private home. A palace like this was, for Costa, a rare blank sheet. The home of the Malaspina dynasty—now occupied, as far as he knew, by its sole surviving member—was a sprawling complex that covered a vast area of this part of Rome, and never opened its doors to the public, not even for a day.

The place was a wonder; the crowds would have flocked there. Smaller mansions, such as the Palazzo Altemps, had been acquired by the state and turned into grand museums, former aristocratic homes that were as much exhibits themselves as the rich and varied collections they held. The Malaspina clan had escaped such a fate. They maintained their secret hidden lives behind the soot-blackened walls of a city fortress that was dark and forbidding from the outside and full of light and beauty within.

Beyond the entrance was a vast cobbled courtyard, with a large statue of Cupid stretching his bow at its centre. On all sides rose three floors, the first two open to the elements, with an arched colonnade on the ground, and a balustrade balcony on the second. Lights blazed from every level, silhouetting a sea of bodies talking animatedly, members of a society to which Costa knew he would never belong. He felt hopelessly out of place, and perhaps she saw that, because Agata Graziano took his arm for one brief moment, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you if you look after me.”

“Agreed,” he murmured, and then they pushed their way through the first ground-floor hall, where a noisy throng of people gossiped. The Buccafusca Gallery insignia, a black mouth, open in greed or ecstasy, it was unclear which, appeared everywhere; all the objects surrounding them appeared modern and ugly.

“
Salut,
” Agata declared, grabbing two glasses, orange juice for her,
prosecco
for him, as a scantily clad waitress fought her way past. “I may join you in that before long.”

He cast his eyes around the room: bright, shiny people, beautiful, fixed on each other, looking as if they owned the world.

“So this is how the upper classes live,” he observed. “I always wondered what I was missing. Perhaps . . .”

He could see them now, across the room, and the sight of them blended with the images in his head: of Rosa Prabakaran’s photographs, and that dreadful experience close by a long-dead emperor’s tomb, just a short walk away from where they now stood in this strange, artificial party.

Looking at the four—Malaspina, Buccafusca, Castagna, and the stocky, uncomfortable Nino Tomassoni by their side—he realised that any of the taller men could, in theory, have been the hooded figure. But there was something about Malaspina—the commanding, stiff stance, the smug assumption of superiority—that convinced Costa he was the man, could only be the man.

“Are you comfortable with the aristocracy?” Agata Graziano asked, watching him.

“I don’t have much experience,” he admitted.

“Well,” she said, shrugging, and beginning to fight her way through the sea of silk-clad bodies with a jabbing elbow and a forceful determination, “let’s start.”