The Garden of Evil (40 page)

He folded his arms, waiting for the explosion. “I know what love is, Franco. Most people do. But not you. Never you. She was simply an obsession. Something you owned. Like this palace. Like the painting you forced Nino Tomassoni to give you. One more beautiful object you’ve torn apart as if it were worthless . . .”

He was screaming, moving, releasing Agata Graziano, throwing her to one side in his fury. Costa backed up, watching the stiletto flash through the air, feeling it make one arc in front of his chest, just close enough to cut a scything line through the fabric of his jacket.

Another sweep, another blow. There was nothing he could do, no weapon, no physical manoeuvre he knew that would offer any defence against a man like this.

Then the growing hubbub from the gallery above, the sound of racing footsteps, shouts, screams, disappeared beneath a deafening, cataclysmic clamour.

The blade swept through nothing and fell from view. The rage was gone from Franco Malaspina’s face. In its place was shock and surprise . . . and fear.

Costa looked beyond the figure stumbling towards him and saw her now. Agata Graziano had withdrawn something from the pocket of the cheap office-girl’s jacket. It was the gun Rosa Prabakaran had given her, a weapon Costa had never expected to see again. Grey smoke curled from the short snub barrel. As he watched, Agata raised the pistol again and fired one more shot at the falling figure between them, then a third.

Malaspina jerked with pain and the physical blow of the impacts. Blood rose in his mouth. His eyes turned glassy. The knife fell to the floor with a hollow echoing ring, followed by the stricken man, who clutched at the legs of the stand on which Caravaggio’s naked goddess rested, watching the scene, unmoved, her throat locked in a cry that was lost in the clamour of Franco Malaspina’s death.

A pebble-sized hole, surrounded by broken shards of skull, gaped above Malaspina’s ear. The dun, viscous matter Costa could see beneath the man’s hairline matched that which now ran in a spraying line, mixed with blood, across the naked figure of Eve like the splash of a murderous graffiti artist seeking something beautiful to defile.

Agata was shouting, screeching; was not herself; was quite unlike the woman he knew.

He watched in dismay as she emptied every last shell from Rosa’s gun into the still, frozen form on the canvas, painted by the artist she had come, in her own fashion, to love, watched as the mouth and its inaudible eternal sigh disappeared beneath the blast of a shell.

When the bullets ran out, she began to tear at the canvas with her bare hands, ripping into four-hundred-year-old pigment with her nails, weeping, screaming.

He strode over and pulled her away.

Her face stole into his neck, damp with tears. His hand fell on her rough, tangled hair and held her small, slim body close.

Agata Graziano looked up and the power of her gaze was unmistakable. She was staring at him and there was something in her expression—a kind of dislike, bordering on hatred—that was reminiscent, for a moment, of Franco Malaspina.

“This is done now,” Costa said, and wondered, seeing the look persist in her eyes, what it was that she saw.

One

F
IUMICINO WAS ALWAYS BUSY JUST AFTER THE NEW YEAR.
Families on the move, businesses returning to life. Part of the daily round of modern life. They were together at a small table in the cafe drinking coffee, an awkward silence between them, one he was desperate to break.

It was the mother superior of the convent who had called and asked if it was possible for him to give Agata a lift to the airport. The sisters were, she said, too upset about her decision to be trusted. He didn’t have to think twice before saying yes.

Now they sat, she with two plastic grocery bags bulging with personal detritus on the floor after checking in a small, cheap canvas tote for the flight. Costa with . . . nothing but regrets and thoughts he found difficult to turn into words. He wished she weren’t leaving so soon and was determined not to burden her with that knowledge. Agata had enough to carry now.

“What’s the order like there?” he asked finally, unable to bear the thought that they could part in a few minutes without having exchanged more than a few perfunctory words. “Is that the right word, ‘order’?”

She smiled weakly. Her face seemed to have aged over these past few weeks. She now looked like the person he would have met had she never worn the black robes of a nun: a beautiful woman just turning thirty, with flawless dark skin, high cheekbones, and eyes that shone with intelligence, and a new sense of sadness that had never been there before.

“There is no ‘right word,’ ” she said. “I left. Didn’t they tell you that?”

“No . . . I mean, I assumed you wanted to move to a convent somewhere else. Away from Rome.”

“I’m not just going somewhere different,” she replied emphatically.

“Oh . . .”

She reached over and touched his wrist. Automatically—he knew this gesture so well by now he never thought about it—he turned it so she could see his watch.

“I only have a few minutes before I need to go. I can’t explain everything. I don’t want to. Talk about something else.”

“I don’t want to,” he objected. “You spent your entire life in that place. I don’t understand.”

Her eyes widened with outrage. “I killed a man, Nic. How can I be a sister after that? It’s impossible.” She looked at her hands, as if remembering the moment Rosa Prabakaran’s weapon sat in her fingers. “I feel no guilt either. That’s the worst thing.” She stared at him. “He would have killed you. Instead of me, because your friends, Gianni, Leo, would have been there in time to stop that. But why do I tell you this? You know already. This is what you do, isn’t it? Put yourself in the way instead.”

He tried to pull a wry smile. “It seems to work most of the time.”

“No, it doesn’t. Not really.”

He stirred the sugar in the grounds of his coffee a little harder, hearing that.

“What will you do?” Costa asked.

She seemed relieved to be able to shift the focus of the conversation. “There are many illegal immigrants coming to Malta each month. Mostly from Africa. They want to come to Italy. One way or another most of them will. The Church has a program trying to help them. I will teach. Children, young men and women. These are people who need me. They’re desperate. As my father must have been once. I can’t sit by and ignore them. It’s unthinkable.”

He had no difficulty imagining her excelling at that kind of work. Or being in Malta.

“Will you go to Valletta? And the co-cathedral? You said you always wanted to see those paintings.” An image of the Caravaggio flashed through his own mind. “John the Baptist. And Saint Jerome, of course.”

The laugh returned, and it was still light, still mostly untroubled.

“I’m there to try to help people in difficulty. Why would I walk away from that to see a painting? I spent too long in that daydream. I was like Franco Malaspina, obsessed with something that was unreal. Trapped in a world that had nothing to do with the way people actually live.”

He shook his head firmly. “Caravaggio’s real, Agata. Those people he portrayed . . . You said it yourself. They came from the streets. They’re you and me.”

“Oh, Nic.” Her hand crossed the table and almost fell briefly on his before returning to the plastic bag by her side. “I have work to do.” The amusement in her face vanished. “Sins to atone for . . .”

“What you did was self-defence,” he replied instantly. “Not a sin.”

“That’s not for you to decide. Or me. It’s a question of faith.”

“Faith,” he snapped without thinking, his voice rising so that the woman at the next table raised an eyebrow in their direction.

“Yes,” she went on. “Faith. You think I lost it? No. Not for a moment.” Her eyes stayed on him, clear, insistent, knowing. “I found more. I found real faith was awkward and uncomfortable. It asked questions I didn’t want to hear. Demanded sacrifices I didn’t want to make.” She shook her head. The stray black curls flew around her neck in a way that mesmerised him. “I discovered it existed for my salvation, not my enjoyment. That it was awkward and uncomfortable and occasionally”—she peered at the empty coffee cup on the table, her eyes misty—“that it meant I had to avoid . . . forgo things I might come to want for myself.”

“And I don’t have that?” he asked.

“Not in the same way,” she answered carefully. “I’ve watched you. Your faith lies in others. Not in politics. Not in religion. Not even in the law or justice, I think, anymore. It’s rooted in the people you love.” Her voice caught with emotion. “More than that. I envy it. I look at you and think, ‘I wish I could feel that way too.’ But I can’t.”

“Love isn’t something you can control or call up on demand. None of us knows when it might happen. I didn’t with Emily. I had no idea and nor did she.”

Her slender lips curled in a deprecating smile. “You’re not listening. This isn’t about that kind of love. I’m trying to stay away from my beliefs for a while in the hope I might find some answers to my doubts. You’re making the same journey, but in reverse. We’re moving in opposite directions. It’s not Emily you’re looking for, it’s God, and since you think he doesn’t exist that makes it all the worse for you.” Her shining eyes held him. “Also, people die. Everyone in the end. Does this small, plain faith of yours die with them?” Her fingers reached out and touched his hand, for the briefest of moments. “Did it?”

“For a while,” he answered honestly.

He felt so inadequate, so tongue-tied, and had no idea whether he believed what she said, about him or about herself.

Over the hubbub of the busy airport, they were calling the plane. He could see from her face she had heard the announcement.

“If I came to visit in Malta . . .”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Costa sighed and said nothing.

“I have to go,” she murmured. “There’s no need to see me to the plane. I have a little time, I think. I would like to spend it on my own.”

She was standing, picking up her two plastic bags, an independent young woman entering a world she barely understood, alone, determined to explore its dark corners and intricacies without the help of another.

“Here,” he said, getting up too. “You’ll need one of these at some stage.”

He took off his watch and passed it to her. She tried to put it on. The leather strap was too large and needed another hole. She’d no clue how to make one, no idea that a man would simply push the spike hard through the old soft leather and find some new purchase that way.

“Let me . . .”

Gently, he wound the strap around her soft, warm wrist, worked out the size, removed it, forced through the hole, and wound it back around her dusky skin again, fastening the strap, making sure it fitted well.

They stood there, so close.

Nervously, Costa extended his right hand and waited.

Agata Graziano closed her eyes and there was a single line of moisture beneath each dark lid.

“Oh my, oh my,” she whispered, laughing, crying, he wasn’t sure quite which. “For God’s sake, Nic. My hand?”

She opened her arms and walked forward, enclosing him, waiting as his own arms fell hesitantly around her slender shoulders.

Outside the dead, half-forgotten nightmare of the funeral, it was the first time he had embraced anyone since Emily had died. He was crying now, he knew that, not much, but enough to feel some tight interior knot inside him relax, release, then, if not disappear, begin to dissipate somehow.

Costa held her, tightly, his face against her dark hair, acutely aware that she was unlike any woman he had ever known, simple, pure, innocent. There was no fragrance about her, nothing but fresh soap and her skin against his, as young and smooth and perfect as that of a child.

“Enough of this,” she said, her voice breaking a little, pushing him away. “Farewells are something new to me also, and clearly I am as terrible at them as you.”

They looked at each other, lost for words. Then, very quickly, she came close again, reached up, and kissed him once, tenderly, on the cheek, with a swift, embarrassed affection.

“Goodbye, Nic,” she murmured, then, without looking back, scooped up her bags and scurried off down the corridor towards the gate.

Two

T
WO HOURS LATER COSTA WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN.
It was a chill, bright afternoon. Through the window, he could see planes high in an eggshell sky leaving vapour trails in their wake. Beyond the lines of black, dormant vines, crows bickered in the trees by the road. Bea had returned to her apartment with the little dog. The house was empty. He was alone again, back in the sprawling farmhouse his late father had built with his own hands, a place where every brick and tile was familiar, every angle and corner carried a cherished memory.

Grief was a journey, a transition through opposing phases, of knowledge and ignorance, togetherness and solitude, pain and consolation. What counted was the passage, the recognition that at the heart of life lay motion. Without that there was nothing but stasis, a premature quietus that rendered everything and everyone it touched meaningless.

Here, surrounded by Emily’s lingering fragrance, the shelves with the food and drink only she would eat, her music by the hi-fi system, her jars and bottles still lurking in cupboards in the bathroom, it was to his dead wife that his thoughts turned constantly, and would for years to come. Her presence was everywhere, a benevolent ghost forever active in his conscience. He had lost her, but not entirely. When he closed his eyes, he could hear her voice. When he called up those precious memories of their time together, he could sense the soft grip of her fingers in his, the warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear.

As she whispered now, calling,
Live, Nic, live.

He felt the shiny marble urn in his fingers, its smooth surface as cold as a statue’s skin, the way it was the day he’d taken it home from the crematorium.

Costa got up from the table and went outside into the cold, walking on until he was among the rows of vines they had tended together, so carefully, and with such rudimentary skill. As he reached that point he began to let her go, to let the stream of dust and ashes tumble from the vessel’s grey marble neck, out into the air, to scatter among the slumbering black trunks, across the dun, chill earth. He walked on and on, the horizon rising and falling with his steps, blurred by the tears that flooded his eyes in a way they never had before. It took no more than a minute. Then he threw the empty container as far as he could, out towards the road and the distant outline of the tomb of Cecilia Metella.

In the field, shaking with fierce emotion, lost, blind, choking, he found himself consumed by a swirling plume of grey dust raised from the earth by a sudden fierce squall. It clung to his head. Like a sandstorm in miniature, a miasmic cloud of pale particles, it swirled around his head, danced in his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils, clung briefly to his fingers like a second, shedding skin.

Then a fresh blast arose and it was gone.