The Garden of Evil (27 page)

Two

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER AGATA SAT IN THE BACK OF THE
car with Costa, sorting through the contents of a plastic grocery bag: books, notepads, pens, and pencils.

She didn’t say much until the vehicle rounded the Piazza Borghese and came to a halt at the top of the little alley, some twenty metres short of the small crowd of spectators and a couple of photographers who stood, bored and stationary, outside the yellow barrier of tape now beginning to look old from the rain and mud.

“This city seems different from a car,” Agata mused. “I prefer walking. Don’t you?”

“No sane person drives in Rome,” he replied with feeling.

“In that case this is a city of lunatics,” Rosa Prabakaran cut in from the front seat. “Sister Agata, do you mind if I make a suggestion?”

The car had stopped. The two guard vehicles were either side, front and back. Officers were getting out, checking the area, as was Rosa, with a professional, calm intent Costa liked.

“You can’t drag your life around with you in a grocery bag,” Rosa said suddenly, then passed something over from the front seat. It was a smart new satchel in black leather with a shiny silver buckle. “Please take this. A gift from the Questura.”

Costa caught her eye. This was surely not from the police fund. The thing had all the hallmarks of the cheap yet serviceable goods Rosa’s father sold to tourists from his stall near the Trevi Fountain.

“I’m worried you will lose something from one of those bags,” she added. “This is purely practical . . .”

Agata took it from her and stared at the shiny leather, sniffing it for a moment and wrinkling her dark nose at the smell.

“Grocery bags have served me well for a very long time,” she noted.

“You’re not walking from convent to work and back, a few minutes each day. Not anymore.” Rosa was adamant. “Please.”

Agata shrugged and took the thing, flipped up the buckle, then prepared to empty the entire contents of one bag by the simple act of turning it upside down over the satchel’s open mouth.

She stopped, staring inside, then reached in and delicately removed a black metal object there. It was a small police-issue handgun.

“What is this?” she asked. “No. That was a stupid thing to say. I know what this is. Why do you want me to have it? That’s impossible.”

“Guns are not useful in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them,” Costa remarked. “What on earth are you thinking, Agente?”

“Commissario Esposito spoke to me before we left, sir,” she replied. “He wants Sister Agata to have this and for me to give her instructions on how to use it if necessary. It won’t come to that. Nevertheless . . .”

Agata held the gun in front of her, touching the black metal gingerly, as if it were something poisonous.

“Those are your orders, Rosa, not mine,” she muttered.

“Why did Commissario Esposito suggest this?” Costa asked, furious the man had never raised the subject directly.

“Operational reasons.”

The duty guard officers were beginning to mill around the car door, anxious to move. Costa persisted.

“What operational reasons?”

Rosa frowned. “Sister, do you have any idea what the Camorra is?”

She shook her head. The hair didn’t move anymore. The crucifix around her neck, lying on the cream business shirt, and the bulky, scruffy boots apart, Agata Graziano no longer looked the woman she still felt herself to be.

“Should I?” she asked.

“There is no reason whatsoever,” Costa snapped, angry that Esposito, for some reason, had not used him to approach Agata on such a sensitive matter. “The Camorra are criminals.”

Agata stared at him, wide-eyed, curious. “Just ‘criminals’?”

“They’re a criminal fraternity based in Naples, though they have arms, tentacles, everywhere in Italy, and in Europe and America too,” he went on. “Imagine a kindred organisation to the Sicilians, the mafiosi. I imagine you’ve heard of them.”

“As I told you once before, I am not a monk.”

“Quite,” he answered. “What on earth has this to do with us?”

Rosa wasn’t taking the proffered gun from her.

“They’re good Catholics, too, mainly,” she said. “At least they think of themselves that way. We heard from Naples this morning that one of them, a man who is occasionally friendly with the police there, wanted to warn us of something he’d heard. That a Roman, one unidentified, at least someone he was unwilling to name, was seeking someone to carry out an attack, and looking to pay well for assistance.” She gazed at Agata, a mournful look in her brown eyes. “He said the target was to be a Catholic nun.”

“I am not—”

Rosa put her hand on Agata’s tightly clenched fingers. “We know. But the name he had was yours. This is good news, Sister, trust me. At least we are forewarned. We also know that no one accepted the commission. The man was appalled by the very idea and believed those in the Camorra would feel the same. But they are just a few criminals among many. Franco Malaspina knows more and he has money that shouts very loudly. So please . . .” The policewoman pushed the weapon back over the seat. “Do this for me,” she added. “I will show you how to handle a gun safely should the need arise. But it won’t. We will protect you. Nic and I and”—she indicated the officers beyond the door—“all of us. This will not be necessary. It’s simply a precaution.”

Agata uttered a small, slight curse and, with pointed disdain, placed the weapon back where it came from.

“I like the bag, Agente,” she conceded with a curt brusqueness. “Thank you for that.”

Three

T
HE LAST PIECE OF PHYSICAL EVIDENCE HAD BEEN REMOVED
from the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. But the smell of death—sweet, noxious, sickly—remained. Agata feigned not to notice. Rosa Prabakaran and Peroni, on the other hand, both made excuses to stand outside. Costa understood why. Something—perhaps the work in lifting the floors or the exposure of so much dull, dark earth itself—made the stench worse than it had been at the moment the first body was found.

There was, surely, nothing left of interest to be removed from the charnel house that had been the lair of the Ekstasists. Nevertheless, Teresa Lupo, as she guided her visitors around its interior, explaining its grim, dark secrets, insisted each of them wear the standard white forensic suit and move within the tapes while she went through each and every victim with painstaking care and in exact detail.

Agata listened, asking questions only rarely, eyes wide open in wonder mostly, occasionally misted with shock and dismay.

“What do you know about these women?” she asked when Teresa had finished her main exposition. “Who they were. Where they came from.”

“Not much,” Teresa said sadly. “Not real names. Not history. They worked the streets, probably in the rougher parts of town. That much we know. Not a lot more.” She hesitated. “You understand what AIDS is?”

“Of course,” Agata answered with a sigh.

“Four of them were HIV-positive. One possibly was developing AIDS itself.”

Agata shook her head. She looked oddly young in the white bunny suit. “Poor things . . .”

“They weren’t alone in that,” Costa pointed out. “Véronique Gillet suffered from AIDS too.”

“What a world you inhabit,” Agata murmured. “And you think that of Caravaggio was primitive by comparison. Did you find any artist’s materials that didn’t seem to be modern?”

This was a subject that clearly didn’t interest the pathologist.

“There was some paint and a small number of brushes that were a few years old. They hadn’t been used in a while.” Teresa glanced around her. “This was a studio, though, wasn’t it? You can see how it would be suitable for that purpose? Tell me I’m correct, Agata.”

“I think so,” she answered.

“Caravaggio’s studio?” Costa asked.

Agata gave him a stern look. “You can’t give me firm answers about events that happened here in the past few months. Yet you expect me to illuminate you on matters that may or may not have occurred four hundred years ago?”

Teresa folded her strong arms. “Yes, Sister, we do. Otherwise why are you here?”

Agata laughed. “Very well. Let me tell you what I read about last night, in the deadly quiet of Nic’s lonely farmhouse. Caravaggio did live in this street, right up until the moment he fled Rome after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in a brawl, involving several others on both sides, and knives. It’s difficult to be more precise than that. In those days this street had a different name. It was the Vicolo dei Santi Cecilia e Biagio—don’t ask me why it changed, I have no idea.”

She turned and stared around the room. “When Caravaggio fled, the authorities made an inventory of his home. Most of the possessions, one assumes, were his, not those of his boyfriend or servant.” A look of brief dejection crossed her face. “Reading the list of his belongings, you wonder what he had come to. It was pathetic. A guitar. Some very old and poor furniture. Some weapons, of course, among them a pair of duelling swords in an ebony case, possibly the most valuable things he owned.”

She stared at them. “That was the man. He saw everything, lived everything. Good and evil. The touch of grace, the absence of it. He simply wished to paint it all, every last detail. But here?” Agata Graziano held out her arms in empty despair. “I don’t know. Perhaps he lived and worked in the same room. Many did when they were poor. The street name has changed. The numbers have changed. I have no idea. Did you find nothing?”

“We were looking for evidence from now,” Teresa answered. “We’re forensic scientists, not archaeologists. Of course we found other material. We were digging up bare earth.”

“Old brushes? Papers? Anything with writing on it?”

Teresa brightened a little and said, “Let me show you what we have.”

They followed the pathologist over to a set of bright red plastic boxes stacked four deep. They were positioned next to the rear exit to the yard behind, a sight that brought back too many memories for Costa, so that he turned and looked away for a while, wondering if it was really possible to feel the past, to detect the presence of an extraordinary human being through some odd sixth sense that defied explanation.

When he turned, Agata was rummaging forcefully through the boxes, turning over broken crockery and trash and piece after piece of unidentifiable rubbish accrued across the centuries in the black Roman dirt.

“A brush,” she said, and threw something on the floor at his feet. “It’s probably of the period. But it could be anyone’s. This is a waste of time. There’s nothing . . .”

She stopped. Costa and Teresa watched in silence as she withdrew an object from the box and put it to one side. Then she tore into the second box with flailing hands, raked through the contents for a minute or more before finding something else and removing it.

They scarcely had a chance to see what she had found before both items went into her bright new shiny black satchel.

Agata Graziano gazed at her small, silent audience.

“I don’t care to remember things that happened months ago,” she declared. “It seems to me a waste of my time to dwell too much on the immediate past. But . . .” There was a sharp glint of excitement in her eyes. “I do recall a conversation I had with Véronique Gillet one night when they were opening that exhibition at the Palazzo Ruspoli, the one that had so much Caravaggio material from abroad.”

Costa closed his eyes. He had worked security for that event. He and Emily had decided, at its close, to marry.

“I teased Véronique. She was French, for pity’s sake, and the French demand it. Besides, they have stolen so much of ours, and do not even deign to share it either. This was”—she pointed at them to emphasise the matter—“the subject of our little playful argument. There was a painting that ought to have been there.
The Death of the Virgin.
The Louvre wouldn’t allow it out of their grasping hands. Some excuse about security or preservation or whatever. It should have been in Rome, not sitting in Paris, gawked at by tourists who haven’t the slightest understanding of what they see. Listen to me now. Caravaggio painted from life. Always.”

“I’ll try,” Teresa replied. “And the point you’re making . . . ?”

“There was an outcry when he delivered that painting of the Virgin. The Madonna was swollen and lifeless. She was dead, after all. Very obviously human, not some goddess awaiting the call to divinity. Worse, there was a widespread belief that he painted her from the corpse of a common Roman whore recovered from the Tiber. I believe this too. It’s there for the world to see. In the way she looks. In the sympathy with which she is regarded by the figures around her—a common sympathy.
Disegno.
He sought the sign of God in all of us.”

She stared into space, not seeing anything, intent only on the questions racing through her head. “We know precisely when that work was executed, because it was a Church commission. There are records. If this was Caravaggio’s studio, that corpse must have lain here,” Agata said finally, staring at Costa with eyes that brimmed with both shock and a terrible knowledge. Her fingers pointed to the ground. “
Here.
Four hundred years before your poor black street women . . .”

“If . . .” Teresa murmured.

Agata shook her head free of the forensic suit’s hood and started to struggle out of the white plastic. “I wish to go to the Doria Pamphilj immediately,” she declared, then, still fighting with the bunny suit, swept through them, marching for the door. No one moved.

“I can phone Commissario Esposito if you like!” she shouted, turning to face them, beckoning with her short, skinny arms.

“So you could,” Costa groaned, and followed.

Four

T
HEY STOOD IN THE PIAZZA DEL COLLEGIO ROMANO, IN
mild winter drizzle, six police officers crowding around the small figure of Agata Graziano, who was huddled inside a raincoat Rosa Prabakaran had spirited from nowhere. The gallery was closed for the afternoon. Costa took it upon himself to phone to the Doria Pamphilj internal office, but by the time he’d finished the call the door was open and a beaming attendant was waving them in. Agata had spoken a few words into the intercom; that was all it required.

“Sister, Sister!” the middle-aged man in the antiquated uniform bleated. “Come in! Please! Out of this awful weather.” He stared at the army of police officers and Teresa Lupo stamping her big feet on the doorstep. “And your . . . friends too.”

“Thank you, Michele,” she answered, and stomped into the dark hallway, then marched directly up the grand flight of stairs, to the second-floor gallery.

It was hard to keep up. By the time they got to the top of the stairs, Agata had gone through the public entrance, walked quickly through the Poussin Room and the Velvet, and was passing the ballroom, seemingly picking up speed with every step. Then she almost ran through the closed bookshop and turned right, towards the series of chambers that included, in its midst, the sixteenth-century room and the two Caravaggios they had come to visit just a couple of days before.

She was standing rigid, fascinated, in front of the smaller canvas, the penitent Magdalene, when they arrived, her shoulders moving, some unexpected emotion gripping her small, taut body.

Costa felt concerned. Then he realised what was happening. She was laughing quietly, to herself, not minding what anyone thought at all.

“Agata . . .” he said gently.

“What?” Her sparkling eyes turned on him. Her mouth broke in a bright, white smile.

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything is wonderful. And I am an idiot. We are all idiots. Here. Take a look at this . . .”

She reached into the black leather satchel and took out the first object he saw her retrieve from the red box in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Surreptitiously, she must have been working at it in the car on the way to the gallery. It was no longer a dusty, unrecognisable shape. What Agata held in her hands was a glass carafe of the kind used for water or wine, one with such gentle curves it could be only be handmade and very old.

Agata rubbed the sleeve of her raincoat hard against the edge.

“Tell me that’s not evidence,” Teresa said, alarmed.

“It’s wonderful evidence. The best I could ask for. Not for you, though. For me.”

They watched as she held the flask next to the slumbering Magdalene in the painting. An identical glass object sat close to the figure’s feet, next to some discarded jewellery, evidence of some regretted tryst or a life that was in the process of being abandoned.

“It’s the same jug,” Agata said firmly.

“It’s
a
jug,” Teresa pointed out.

“No. He painted from life. He had no money most of the time. Perhaps he was sentimental too. Throughout his life the same objects reappear—props and models. He used what he was familiar with. The items he loved . . .” She glanced at the painting with the deepest of affection. “. . . he tried to keep. Caravaggio painted this work while he was in the Palazzo Madama under the patronage of Del Monte, alongside bohemians and alchemists, geniuses like Galileo, and vagabonds and quacks from the street. In the seven years between the Magdalene here and that squalid pit in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, he rose and fell, to become the most acclaimed artist in Rome and then a hunted criminal, wanted for murder.

Why?
Why?
”

“It’s a jug,” Teresa said again.

“A poor man growing poorer sells what’s of value to others and attempts to hold on to what is of value to himself,” she declared. “This is the flask. It was like everything else. He used it more than once. I can show you the paintings if you still doubt me.
Bacchus
in the Uffizi.
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
in London. Nothing later. Nothing after he fled Rome.” She stared at them and her eyes didn’t brook any argument. “Because he didn’t have it.”

She held up the glass for them to see. There was a distinct stain, like old blood, in the base.

“Wine, I imagine,” Agata added. “There’s another reason to keep it. He could paint it. He could drink from it too.”

She noted the scepticism in their faces.

“If Caravaggio lived in that house,” she went on, “Franco Malaspina must have known. He said it himself. It’s part of the Malaspina estate, the poorer part, in Ortaccio, but property all the same. These families keep records for everything. Most of what we know about painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comes from the bookkeeping of either the Church or the aristocracy.”

“Even for me,” Teresa remarked quietly, “this is stretching things.”

“Nic! Tell them what we discovered on that painting before Franco stole it from us.
Tell them!
”

“We saw a signature,” he said. “Caravaggio’s. It said . . .”

He paused. All the paintings they’d seen, all the same faces, the same objects . . . these were alive in his head and intermingled, one with the other.

“It said,” Agata interjected, “
fra. michel l’ekstasista.
Michelangelo Merisi, the Ekstasist. Franco did not pluck the name of his murderous, thuggish gang out of the ether. He picked it out from history. Or it picked him. What he and Buccafusca and Castagna and poor, stupid Nino Tomassoni did came from that act, and it destroyed them in the end. Look . . .”

She pointed at the beautiful slumbering woman with the tear shining on her cheek like a transparent pearl.

“We know her name. Fillide Melandroni. A prostitute, a violent one, too, a woman who had been to court for marking her rivals by slashing their faces with a knife to make them less saleable. Here she is the Magdalene. Elsewhere Judith slaying Holofernes, Catherine leaning on a wall before her martyrdom.
Here!
”

She indicated the adjoining painting and the figure of Mary, with the infant Jesus in her arms, on the flight to Egypt.

“A holy whore,” she said quietly. “And note the dress.” She pointed at the rich olive fleur-delis brocade of the sleeping Magdalene’s flowing halter gown. “This was the costume of a moneyed Roman prostitute, the kind of woman who slept with cardinals, then talked art and philosophy with them afterwards, before going out onto the streets of Ortaccio at night and . . . what? Making mayhem with Caravaggio and his friends.”

To Costa’s astonishment, Agata reached out and touched, very briefly, the soft, pale skin of the sleeping woman on the wall.

“Both good and evil, and each to excess,” she said quietly. “
Nec spe, nec metu
. Without hope or fear. She was surely with them. Franco Malaspina did not invent the Ekstasists. He merely revived them, brought back from the dead the ugly gang that included Caravaggio and Fillide before everything fell apart so terribly.”

Agata took her attention away from the wall. “Here is a word I thought I would never utter,” she said again. “I read what records there were of the case against Caravaggio last night. They disclosed that one possible reason for the fight was that Ranuccio Tomassoni was Fillide’s pimp. The man who sold her to others. Is that right?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “No, no. I know it is. This is all part of your world, not mine, but yours intrudes, I can’t avoid it. Tell me also. Is it possible this was Véronique Gillet’s relationship to Franco Malaspina too? Accomplice. Lover. Muse. Fellow criminal. Could that be true?”

Costa was lost for words. Watching Agata struggle with these ideas—ones that seemed to make so much sense to him—he could see the mix of excitement and distress they caused.

“They re-created something we still don’t understand,” Agata went on. “Something to do with that painting. With Tomassoni, perhaps, or some link with Franco’s own lineage.”

Her eyes scanned each of them. “This much I do know from what I’ve read. Ranuccio Tomassoni was the
caporione
of his quarter. The boss of it. The man who ran the gangs, who ruled the streets, and handed out vengeance and a kind of justice as he saw fit. Just as Franco is today. For a while Caravaggio was with him, alongside Fillide. Somehow . . .” She squeezed her eyes tight shut again, trying to concentrate. “Franco and Nino Tomassoni found out about this, and re-created it around that painting. Then, with Véronique’s assistance, they made everything so much worse. How? Why? I have no idea.”

Teresa shook her head and sighed. “If this is true, it still doesn’t give us enough evidence to put Franco Malaspina in front of a magistrate. Even if we could find one who wasn’t tame. They’d look at us as if we were crazy.”

“It’s a question of time,” Costa insisted. “And work. The more we know, the closer we get to this man. Sooner or later . . .”

“Nic,” Teresa objected, “it’s a piece of very old glass and a lot of interesting connections that may or may not add up.”

“No, it’s not,” Agata said, and reached into her bag again.

She took out something else and rubbed it hard against her sleeve. Dust and dirt fell from it onto the Doria Pamphilj’s polished floor. Then she held the object next to the painting on the wall for all to see.

It was a fragment of fabric, a square, deliberately cut, about the size of a hand.

Agata kept it there and no one said a word.

“A memento,” she suggested, “of love at a time when Michelangelo Merisi was happy, inhabiting a world full of light. And later, an item of comfort, a reminder of that abandoned past, when he himself lived in permanent darkness and violence and blood.
Look!
”

It bore the same fleur-de-lis pattern as the fabric on the dress of Fillide Melandroni, sleeping as the penitent Mary Magdalene. Costa reached out and touched it with his fingers. The cloth felt thick and expensive.

If one imagined away the dust and the dirt of centuries, it would surely exhibit the same olive colour too.