The Garden of Evil (30 page)

Two

H
E KNEW THE HOUSE SO WELL HE FELT HE COULD HEAR
the old stones breathing as they slept. When he awoke, the clock by the bed said 3 a.m. and someone, elsewhere, was awake.

Costa pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs. She was where he least expected, in the studio, and it didn’t look anything like he remembered.

From somewhere—Rosa had brought them, he guessed—she had found a series of photographs of the missing painting. Caravaggio’s sensual, fleshy image of Venus—or Eve, he was unsure which anymore—stood on several of Emily’s easels, in full frame, close-up, and very fine detail in several of the shots too. Agata was perched on the single artist’s stool by the desk, staring at the biggest photo, a finger on her cheek, brooding, seemingly as alert as ever, a large pile of documents and what appeared to be an old book by her side.

“It doesn’t really look like that now, though,” he said.

She jumped, surprised, perhaps a little embarrassed, by his appearance. She still wore the clothes Bea had found for her, the shirt spattered with food. She hadn’t been to bed at all.

“How do you mean?” she asked, placing her elbow over the papers, as if she didn’t want him to see.

“You found the signature. And the real name.”

She frowned. “
You
found the name. Besides, now I’ve had the chance to think about it, I’m not sure it’s as important as all that. Caravaggio was playing a game with them. Painting something they thought they could keep to themselves because it was so shocking . . .”

She pointed to the face of the satyr, the artist’s own. “He was part of it too. One of the Ekstasists. The man had a sense of humour, you know. He was laughing at them, and perhaps at himself as well.”

Costa came and stood next to her. The photograph did not do the painting justice. The work seemed distant somehow, lacking in the force and meaning that were so powerful, so unavoidable, when the canvas was in front of one’s face. It possessed something that could not be conveyed through the modern medium of a camera.

“It doesn’t mean he was a part of whatever they did. Perhaps he simply knew them and accepted the commission.”

“Oh, don’t talk such rubbish.” She gave him a withering look. The teacher in her had returned. “Remember the way he signed it? Why would he describe himself as an Ekstasist if he was outside the club? How would he even know the name? Don’t blind yourself to the truth, Nic. Michelangelo Merisi was part angel, part devil. Like most men, only more so. We know he was involved in cruel and criminal acts. In the end it cost him everything. He was with them. I can feel it. Nothing else makes sense. I just wish . . .” She stopped and scratched her head.

“Why are you still awake?” he asked.

“How can I sleep?” she complained, still unable to take her attention away from the photographs. “I miss everything about my home. The noises. The female company. The routine. The fact I’m safe there. I don’t have to worry about all these troubles that bother you . . .”

“You will return,” he assured her. “As soon as possible.”

“I hope so,” Agata replied, but not with much conviction. She stared at him. “Tell me. If there was some way I could find out why it all went wrong that first time round, with Caravaggio and Tomassoni. Why some stupid, juvenile band of thugs degenerated into murder and bloody hatred. Just as it did with Franco. Would that help?”

“You still don’t understand this, do you?” he declared, almost exasperated. “What it is that we do.”

“You establish facts and then act on them. Of course I understand that.”

Costa shook his head. “No, you don’t. Sometimes the facts lead nowhere. You have to fill them out with guesswork, imagination.”

“That idea offends me. It’s not scholarly. Not scientific.”

“Is the Bible?”

“It’s scholarly.”

“As is Teresa’s laboratory, but Franco Malaspina has denied us that. We don’t have those luxuries anymore. Emily and those women are dead. Franco Malaspina and his accomplices were responsible somehow. What we need are plain, ordinary, unassailable facts that link him to them. We can’t find any. So instead . . .”

“Guesswork,” she grumbled. “But would it help if you understood about the Ekstasists?”

“I have absolutely no way of knowing. Why?”

She hesitated and eyed him nervously. “I was just curious. I’m sorry about tonight,” she said in a low, nervy voice. “Sometimes I speak too freely.”

“Too much wine.”

“That was an excuse. I hardly touched the wine. I simply . . .” Still she wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t belong in a place like this. It’s mundane and close and personal in a way that’s beyond me. I know that’s selfish. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t say that. It does. All that beautiful food. The care Bea took.” She shrugged her slender shoulders and wrapped her arms around the stained white shirt. “I never expected to be a part of such an evening. I didn’t even know anything like it ever existed really . . .”

Agata walked rapidly over to the desk, which was still littered with Emily’s drawings. “Do you think I’m wasting my life?” she asked him from across the room. “Be honest.”

“Do you?”

“It’s very unfair to answer a question with another question. Answer me, please. Look at what your wife did. She drew, she thought, she tried to create things. One day I imagine you would have had a family. And I . . .” She scowled, an expression of moody dissatisfaction spreading across her face. “I stare at paintings and try to find life in them. Why? For myself. Because I daren’t face the real thing. It’s egotistical, obsessive, unnatural.”

“I can’t give you an answer,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know you well enough. And even if I did, it would be presumptuous. To ask another human being whether there’s value in your own existence . . . that’s for you to judge.”

She thought about this.

“But you placed a value on Emily’s life,” she pointed out. “You still do. I see her in your eyes, like a mist that’s always there. Her memory drives you, more than anything I have ever seen in another person. I can’t imagine what you’ll feel if this need you have to bring Franco Malaspina to justice isn’t satisfied.”

“That won’t happen.”

“It might.”

She walked over and stood in front of him again. “You’re trawling through grey dust and old bones for an answer now. How desperate does a man need to be to do that?”

“I prefer to think of it as determined.”

Agata laughed. Not in the way she did when they first met. This was open and happy and carefree.

“You know,” she murmured, “I used to stare at people in your world and pity you all. So much pain. So much to worry about.” She grimaced. “And so much
life
too.” Her hands came away from the silver cross on the chain. Nervously, she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, then looked him straight in the eye and said, “I had to ask myself tonight whether I really wanted to go back to the convent. Whether this life—your kind of life—wasn’t a more honest one. I’ve never really faced that question before. But it’s been there. Before any of this happened. I recognise that now.”

“Agata . . .”

Her dark eyes burned with the keen curiosity that was never far away.

“It’s very late, Nic. I think I should go to bed.”

His head felt heavy. He was unsure what to do, what to think.

Then the lights came on in the corridor, and he heard the sound of feet on the old wooden floor, and not long after the yapping of the dog.

Bea appeared at the door and turned on the big bright floods Emily had installed in the ceiling of the studio for her work. Costa stood there, blinking in the glare.

“I . . . I’m sorry,” Bea stuttered, embarrassed. “I heard voices. I didn’t know—”

“No matter,” Agata cut in swiftly. “We had business to discuss, Nic and I. Now that’s done I shall sleep. Good night.”

She walked away from him, kissed Bea on the cheek, and left the room.

“Good night,” Costa said to the small, slight figure disappearing towards the stairs.

One

C
HRISTMAS DAY WAS GREY AND WET, THE CLOUDS SO LOW
they almost touched the tops of the jagged monuments littering the horizon of the Appian Way. Costa woke late, his shoulder hurting. The women were downstairs already, dressed and ready for whatever the day would bring. Peroni was with them, looking thoroughly miserable.

“Coffee,” Agata ordered, raising her cup.
“Buon Natale!”

The smell of Bea’s cappuccino could wake the dead. He gulped it down gratefully with some fruit and pastries. Then Bea went through the ceremony that had been interrupted the night before: the bowl and the little gifts.

This time round he got a tiepin. Peroni picked out a cheap key-ring with a tiny flashlight attached to the chain and managed to look extraordinarily pleased with it. Bea grabbed one of the remaining two boxes—and didn’t open it—then pressed the final one on Agata.

“This seems like a fix,” she murmured, but took it anyway.

There was a small silver crucifix inside.

“It’s beautiful,” Agata said gratefully. “I will wear it on special occasions. It’s too good”—she wrinkled her nose—“for anything else.”

“Whenever suits you,” Bea said easily, and opened her own box. It held something similar, doubtless from the same collection: a brooch in the shape of a butterfly. She looked at the two men. “Now go away, you two, and have the conversation you want to have. We don’t wish to hear.”

“Conversation,” Costa began, and found Peroni dragging him off to the sitting room, his face like stone.

They sat down. Peroni pointed back towards the kitchen.

“That is the most stubborn, pigheaded woman I have ever met in my life. She makes Teresa look like a saint, for God’s sake. I can’t believe—”

“Bea?”

“Not Bea.”

“I’ve been sleeping, Gianni,” he said quickly. “And you speak in riddles. Please . . .”

Costa listened, and wished, deeply, he didn’t have to.

EVEN MAFIOSI CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS. THE TENTATIVE TIPOFF
from the informer in Naples had been superseded. The previous evening one of the most senior capos in the same city had taken an equally senior police officer into his home for a traditional La Vigilia supper. In the course of the meal, the crime boss had told his acquaintance that a contract on the life of Agata Graziano was now in place, in the hands of the ’Ndrangheta from Calabria, secretive men, rarely penetrated by the police, professional criminals who took on commissions from outsiders only rarely, and usually saw them through.

“You told her?” Costa asked.

“Of course I told her,” Peroni answered. “How can you keep something like that secret? Falcone has made all the arrangements. We have a safe house in Piedmont she can use. If necessary we could come up with some kind of new identity, a place in the witness protection scheme . . .”

“Agata won’t agree to that. Not for an instant.”

“Why not?” Peroni demanded. “These are serious people. Malaspina wants her dead. We can’t protect her properly here. Falcone has decided. She must go. Today. Now.” He folded his arms. “Tell her. I have. She refuses. She says if we keep on nagging she’ll take a cab back to that convent of hers and send us the bill.”

“You could try making her,” Costa suggested.

“Don’t play the smart-ass with me, sir. We can’t make her. If she wants to walk straight out of here and wander round Rome till she’s dead, there’s nothing we can do to prevent it. She’s a free woman.”

“I’m not sure that’s really true,” Costa found himself saying.

“We can’t stop her. She’s adamant she wants to be part of the next conference we have. Teresa has called one at the Tomassoni place for two. After that we have to go to the morgue. Like an idiot, Falcone told her.”

“She’s helped us, Gianni,” Costa pointed out. “We’d still be arguing with Toni Grimaldi if it weren’t for her.”

“She won’t be able to help us much if she’s dead. Besides . . .”

Costa stared at the damaged, miserable face of the man who’d come to be one of his closest friends over the past few years. There was more to Peroni’s sorrowful state than the steadfast refusal of Agata Graziano to disappear from Rome.

“Besides what?”

“We are still arguing with Grimaldi. There are bad noises coming from above. The kind people make when they are facing nasty decisions.” Peroni’s big farmer’s face, scarred in ways Costa barely noticed anymore these days, fell into a deep, miserable scowl.

“Such as?” Costa asked.

“I don’t know, but I have a rotten feeling we’re about to find out. Malaspina is starting to affect us in all kinds of ways. Other forces are starting to become involved. The Carabinieri are on the line constantly. I imagine that is just what he wants. There are investigations everywhere crawling to a halt because of evidence problems. The word is getting out there, Nic. These hoodlums understand all they have to do is cross their arms and say no to a swab or a fingerprint and everything goes into the queue with the lawyers.”

“How the hell do they know?”

Peroni looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Because we’re in Rome. Because people are human. There’s talk. What’s new? Everyone’s starting to realise what the problem is. If we can’t corroborate what we have, Malaspina will simply prance up and down in front of us, waving his fingers in the air, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.” Peroni’s sharp, piercing eyes didn’t blink. “Those men from Calabria will get their chance and then they’ll be gone, without a single footprint back to the Palazzo Malaspina. We’ve lost enough people already. Let’s not lose any more.”

Costa got up and walked into the kitchen to find Agata sitting on a stool, her attention deep inside the pages of one of Bea’s women’s magazines. She looked bemused.

“I think there’s something important we need to discuss—” he began.

“The answer’s no,” she cut in. “I called Leo and told him again while you were talking. He is . . . acquiescent. This meeting with Teresa is at two. I would like to visit my sisters briefly along the way, if that is permissible.”

She looked up at him and smiled: a different woman? The same? He wasn’t sure. There was something in Agata Graziano’s face at that moment he didn’t recognise, though in another woman he would have called it guile.

“So, shall we go?” she asked, picking up the black leather bag Rosa Prabakaran had provided the day before, one that looked as much at home on her now as it would have done on any young woman in Rome.