The Garden of Evil (8 page)

“Then how come this Marino character got to see it?”

“Where’s your imagination?” She seemed a little disappointed by his question. “Marino was a poet. He lived in Ortaccio, just as Caravaggio did. They probably got drunk together all the time.”

“Ortaccio,” he replied. So much was coming back from the days when he spent every waking hour with a book about Caravaggio and his world. “The cardinal was Del Monte?”

She clapped her small brown hands in delight. The noise rang around the empty room, loud and happy.

“Bravo! I think you are a well-informed detective.” She was idly fidgeting with the crucifix on her chest as they spoke and seemed, to Costa, utterly without guile, without a single layer of self-awareness sitting between her and the world.

“I read in the paper that your father was a communist,” she remarked. “I imagined you would know nothing of a churchman such as Del Monte.”

He felt a little disturbed by the degree of interest she had taken in him since Falcone had, presumably, called her the previous day to ask for assistance.

“Communism is a kind of faith too,” he replied.

“The wrong one. But I imagine a misplaced faith is better than none at all. What do you think?”

“I think Del Monte was no ordinary churchman,” Costa answered. “He had arcane tastes. He was a cardinal, a favourite of the Pope. But he also dabbled in alchemy and obscure science. There were rumours of homosexuality and licentiousness.”

“It was Rome!” she cried. “There are always rumours, just like now.”

“I agree. It was a bohemian court at the time. Galileo was one of his hangers-on while Caravaggio was there. A work such as this would not be out of place, though one can see why it was not on general show.”

She nodded, watching him with those gleaming eyes. “Even a sister knows the sexual content of this painting would be a little rich for the time,” she agreed. “Perhaps for these times too. There is one more thing we know from Marino’s letter. He writes that Caravaggio ‘took Carracci’s whore and turned her into a goddess.’ Any idea what that means?”

“None,” Costa replied, baffled.

She beamed. “Well, I’m pleased
I
can tell
you
something new.”

Agata Graziano led him across the room to a computer screen on a nearby desk, then sat down and began typing. Almost instantly a painting appeared on the screen, one similar to the canvas in the room, but paler, cruder. It was clear from the style and execution that the artist was not Caravaggio.

“You can see this in the Uffizi today when they feel like showing it. Just a few years later, dear old Annibale was painting the ceilings in the Palazzo Farnese and declaring himself the most pious creature in Rome. And here you have him depicting . . .” She stared at him frankly. “. . . what, exactly, do you think?”

Costa was still trying to grasp the implications of the canvas on the computer screen. It was like the Caravaggio, but unlike it.

“Pornography?” she asked bluntly, when he remained silent.

“If it was pornography, I doubt it would be hanging in the Uffizi.”

“Pornography masquerading as art, then,” she observed. “Which would be worse, since therein lies hypocrisy.”

“I really don’t know,” Costa said, and meant it.

“Tell me what you
see,
Nic,” she insisted. “Spare me no details.”

Her skin was so dark he wondered whether he truly saw a blush there.

The computer told him the plain facts. The painting by Annibale Carracci was known as
Venus with a Satyr and Cupids
. It depicted the goddess half reclining on a rich velvet bed, her back to the viewer, a crumpled sheet discreetly covering her midriff, then winding round her torso until her right hand gripped it, in a gesture, perhaps, of fading bliss. A dark-skinned Dionysian satyr leered in front of her, bearing a bowl overflowing with grapes. Behind her head a small cupid played, gazing out of the frame of the canvas. Another small figure was depicted at the bottom left of the scene, and it was this that lent the work its curious, half-obscene nature. The creature’s face was positioned by the thigh of the goddess, as if it had recently been close to her, and, in a gesture of astonishing frankness, a small, stiff, muscular tongue protruded lasciviously from its mouth. Its eyes were wild and rolling. While the body of the goddess seemed to hint at intimacy—in the stiffened muscles of her abdomen and the arched position of her legs—her face was placid, almost detached. It was as if the expression Carracci wished to paint on her had been transferred, instead, to the cupid between her thighs in some final failing of courage.

Costa said this all out loud, keeping his eyes firmly on the canvas.

“Good,” Agata complimented him. “But let’s leave the inferior. What do you think of this?”

She gestured at the canvas on the modern easel. Costa took a step towards it, trying to force himself to think carefully, logically.

An art teacher at school had once told him, “Always begin with the name.” The title of a work was not some simple label. It described both its direction and ambitions, and its origins too. So he dragged his attention away from the canvas itself and looked at a small golden plate in the middle of the lower horizontal arm of the frame. It bore the same words as the Carracci, this time written in carved, archaic capitals: venus with a satyr and cupids.

This painting was like its inferior relative in some respects, perhaps even inspired by it, since the canvas in the Uffizi was dated circa 1588, when Caravaggio was fifteen and merely an apprentice. But in execution it was entirely different. This work was more adventurous, more competently delivered, and infinitely more erotic, too, though in a subtle, almost sinister way. The artist had produced nothing explicit. Instead he placed the onus of interpretation entirely upon the viewer. An innocent might see this as some strange classical idyll, a mythical female beauty surrounded by her admirers. But a more mature—more carnal—interpretation was hidden inside the exquisite strokes of the artist’s brush. Caravaggio had played this trick often enough, daring the beholder to imagine what deeds and actions were taking place just out of view or obscured behind some foreground object. Never had the master done it with such elusive wit and cunning skill.

There were clear references to another Caravaggio work Costa knew only too well, and had often visited in the sprawling palace of the Doria Pamphilj in the Piazza del Collegio Romano, perhaps a ten-minute walk away. The model for this Venus was surely the same as the beautiful red-haired woman in
The Rest on the Flight from Egypt.
But she was not slumbering with the infant Jesus in her arms, unknowingly listening to a lustrous angel playing the violin to sheet music held by a grizzled Joseph. Here she was entirely naked, back half turned to the viewer, as in Carracci’s work, recumbent on some scarlet sofa, and attended again by two cupids and a more dominant leering satyr, central to the composition behind the woman. Like Joseph in the painting in the Doria Pamphilj, this larger male figure had in his hands a piece of music, single notes this time, distinct on the stave, with impenetrable lyrics in Latin beneath. The cherub in the sky to the right held a jug from which some pale liquid fell slowly, carelessly, into a silver goblet in his left hand, poured, one imagined, for the goddess. The second cherub, in the left-hand corner, lay lazily on one elbow, mouth open, singing from the satyr’s notation, and with a tongue that protruded only slightly, not with the rigid, suggestive vigour of Carracci’s satyr, though once again it seemed to carry some reference to the earlier work, with its fleshy, almost obscene grotesqueness. The creature carried a perfect golden
apple in its right hand. In the background were more trees, some bearing fruit, and a scene reminiscent of a classical Renaissance garden, a subject Caravaggio had never, to Costa’s recollection, depicted in any other work.

Costa examined the satyr’s face closely and felt, for a moment, dizzy with a sense of revelation. The bearded individual there, inquisitive, prurient, unable to draw himself away from the scene though a part of him found it disturbing, was uncannily similar to the several self-portraits Caravaggio had inserted in everything from the famous martyrdom of Saint Matthew in Luigi dei Francesi to the late, spectacular beheading of John the Baptist in Malta. At that moment Costa felt he was staring into the very features of the stricken, violent genius who had died on the beach at Port’Ercole in 1610, a hundred kilometres from Rome, on a futile final journey home spurred by a papal pardon for the murder of an enemy in a street four years before.

“It has to be authentic,” he murmured.

“Then what is it?” Agata demanded. “Caravaggio would never stoop to making copies, even when he was starving.”

Costa saw her point. The central figure in the painting—he recalled now the name of the volatile Ortaccio whore, Fillide Melandroni, used by Caravaggio as a model for biblical and mythical characters—was quite unlike the Venus in Carracci’s version, remote, distanced, controlled, almost detached from the scene. On the canvas before them, Venus had been transformed by a knowing adult imagination. Alive, engaged, ecstatic, she ceased to be an unreal mythical goddess at play in paradise. She became a living woman, one in a familiar state for those able to recognise it. The canvas was innocent—until seen by someone who was not.

Even so, it seemed distant from the grim and seedy serial murder into which he had unwittingly led Emily, with such terrible results.

“I don’t know exactly,” he murmured. “Do you?”

Her small, round mouth screwed up into a childlike grimace. “I told you,” she replied. “I’m thinking. Slowly. There’s no other way. How can I call you?”

She took a small notebook out of the nearest plastic bag and stared at him. Costa once more had the feeling that he was a schoolboy in the presence of the brightest and sternest teacher. The encounter was over, he realised, with some relief. In truth it wasn’t a meeting at all. It was a test, an interrogation so subtle he had scarcely perceived it.

Wondering how well he had done, Costa circled the cell phone number on his card and passed it over.

“Just use this for the time being. You won’t find me in the Questura.” He had to ask. “And you?”

The throaty musical sound of her laughter echoed around the room once more.

“I’ve taken vows of common and personal poverty and that includes business cards. I have no phone of my own, mobile or otherwise. You may pass on a message through the convent. Here.”

He watched her scribble something on a sheet of paper and rip it from the pad.

“But if you should need me once this present dispensation is over, do not call between 5:45 a.m., when I rise, and 9 a.m., when I finish breakfast. Or lunchtime. Or after 4:30. If I decide to go out, it will be later.”

“You can do that?” he asked automatically. “Go out?”

There was, finally, something akin to sympathy in her half-pretty, half-plain face, the face, he realised, and admonished himself for the thought, of a shopgirl or waitress, a million young working-class women with lives that had somehow escaped this curious individual in the cheap black dress, a member of some religious order whose name he hadn’t thought to ask.

“Occasionally,” she answered, still laughing. “There. That’s something else we share in common along with poor Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. You see me in my prison. And I see you in yours.”

One

I
T WAS A SHORT WALK FROM THE STUDIO TO THE VICOLO
del Divino Amore, a brief journey blighted by memories of that final pursuit of the figure in the black hood, with the shotgun hidden beneath his khaki jacket. Snatches of that last dark day assaulted him with a cruel swiftness that had in no way diminished with time. The conversation with Agata Graziano, which was both amusing and, when it fell to the subject of the painting, a little disturbing, had proved a distracting interlude. But Emily still lay there always in his imagination, waiting. In spite of her sheltered background, Agata had seen through him from the outset. This was not entirely business. This was personal. It would be impossible to feel quiescent about the end of his life together with Emily until a resolution was reached.

The section of the street outside the studio’s green door was still cordoned off, with three bored-looking uniformed officers stationed outside. In front of them stood a small crowd of the curious: men and women in winter coats, looking disappointed to discover that the scene of the most infamous crime to have occurred in the city in years appeared so mundane from the outside. Costa could see at least two press photographers he knew and ducked through the huddle of bodies hastily in order to avoid them. There was, he thought, precious little in the narrow alley for the prurient. Short of more discoveries, the Vicolo del Divino Amore would surely soon return to some kind of normality.

He showed his pass and went in, preparing himself for Teresa Lupo’s performance. She usually had a theatrical touch to her revelations. Even so, she must have asked them back to this place for a reason. The studio was not as he remembered it, resembling more an archaeological dig than a crime scene. Forensic officers were still busily working there. They had set out a secure walk-through area, outlined by tape, across the worn flagstones. Beyond the yellow markers a small unit of specialists in identical white bunny suits—the same now worn by Falcone’s team—were bent over an array of careful excavations in the floor, each marked out by more tape, some carrying spades and pickaxes, others with evidence and body bags and scientific equipment.

Teresa herself stepped out from behind the barriers the moment Costa walked in, followed by her assistant, Silvio Di Capua. Falcone led the way, followed by Peroni, Costa, and, a little behind everyone else, a woman officer, Inspector Susanna Placidi, who was introduced as the head of the sexual crimes unit. Accompanying her was the last person Costa expected to see: Rosa Prabakaran, the young Indian detective who had been attacked and injured during an investigation the previous spring. After which, Costa had come to believe, she had disappeared from the Questura altogether.

The smell still lingered, pervasive and disgusting, a cloying foul stink.

Teresa Lupo glanced at him with a sad, sideways look, then said to them all, in a calm, formal manner, “Thank you for coming. I asked you here so that you might appreciate a little of the magnitude of the task ahead of us. We are not one-tenth of the way into it. What I will tell you today are simply a few initial findings. I hope for much more in the way of answers, but I can’t give you any timescale about when or how they will come. This place defies conventional analysis in many ways. It was, I think, a real art studio once. It was also . . . something else.” She glanced round the cold interior. “Something I don’t quite understand yet.”

“So long as we have a start,” Falcone observed impassively. “Some facts, please?” He eyed the excavations.

“Facts,” Teresa grumbled, and cast her round, glassy eyes over the excavations in the stone floor “They were all women, all black. All battered to death, from what I can determine. Nor are they all accounted for. There is female DNA here that doesn’t match that of any of the victims. Blood mainly, which means either these women got killed and taken somewhere else, or they escaped or were allowed to leave for some reason. The most recent corpse dates from less than a month ago. The oldest, maybe twelve or fourteen weeks. Beyond that . . . we have a wealth of potential forensic material, but nothing that is linked to any existing criminal records, or . . .” Here, she allowed herself a somewhat caustic glance at Susanna Placidi. “. . . anyone fresh to try them out against.”

Costa was beginning to appreciate Falcone’s despair. “Wouldn’t it have been obvious there were corpses here?” he asked. “Surely someone would have noticed? The smell . . .”

Falcone intervened, as he’d promised. “Sovrintendente Costa is here out of courtesy,” the inspector announced. “We all share in his grief, though none of us can conceive of its depth, of course. I asked him to attend this one meeting so that he could appreciate that fact, and see how hard we are working to find those responsible for these crimes, and for the murder of his wife. After which he will return to compassionate leave.”

“Thank you,” Costa muttered, embarrassed. “The smell . . .” he insisted.

“Normally you’d be right, Nic,” Teresa replied, and seemed relieved that the conversation had moved on to practical matters. “But our friend—or friends, more likely—had a plan. A little scientific or industrial knowledge, too. You recall how the first victim we found looked?”

Costa thought it would be a long time before he forgot. The corpse had seemed to emerge from some kind of semi-transparent plastic cocoon.

“The bodies were stored in some way?” he asked.

“Out back the killer had a machine,” Teresa explained. “It’s exactly the same kind of device they use in industrial locations or packing plants. Anywhere you need to shrink-wrap something so that it’s airtight. It wasn’t going to keep that way forever. But it did a damned good job in the time they had.”

“He’s clever. He had everything covered in advance,” Susanna Placidi added. She was a neurotic-looking individual in civilian clothes—an ugly tweed wool jacket and a heavy green skirt—with a broad, miserable pale face that looked as if some unseen disappointment lurked around every corner.

“We found a stolen van around the corner,” Rosa Prabakaran added. “Not a large one. Just big enough for a corpse. There was a very expensive bouquet of lilies in it. And a coffin. Plain wood.”

“It was for the Frenchwoman,” Teresa said immediately. “What other reason would there be?”

“The French Embassy is more than anxious for news,” Falcone said. “What am I supposed to tell them?”

“What about Aldo Caviglia’s family?” Rosa snapped. “Don’t they feel the same way? Do you need to be white and middle-class to get attention around here?”

Peroni whistled and looked at the ceiling. Teresa gave the young woman detective a filthy look.

“Everyone gets dealt with around here,” she said patiently. “Caviglia was murdered. Until you people find the man who did it, there’s not much more to say. But the Frenchwoman’s different. Silvio?”

Di Capua shuffled over, a short stocky figure in his bunny suit, bald-headed, with a circlet of long, lank hair dangling over the collar of his top. He carried a set of papers and a very small laptop computer.

Teresa took some of the documents from her colleague and glanced at them. “You can tell the French Embassy she died of natural causes. If it’s any comfort, I don’t imagine we will be using those words about anyone else who’s expired hereabouts. The French won’t argue. I spoke to her doctor in Paris. He’s amazed she lived as long as she did, and frankly so am I. Congenital, incurable heart disease. Plus she had full-blown AIDS, which was unresponsive to any of the extremely expensive private treatments she’d been receiving for the past nine months. They kept away the big day for a while but not for much longer. She saw her physician the week before she died. He told her it was a matter of weeks. Perhaps a month at the most.”

“We’ve been through this before,” Peroni objected. “She still had a knife wound.”

“A scratch,” Di Capua said, and called up on the computer a set of colour photographs of the dead woman’s neck and face, then her pale, skeletal torso. They all crowded round to stare at the images there, frozen moments from a death that had taken place just a few steps from where they now stood. Even Peroni looked for a short while before he turned away in disgust. Costa could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Perhaps time or the light in the studio had played tricks. Perhaps the curious painting had disturbed his powers of observation, amplifying everything—the light, the atmosphere, his own imagination. When he’d first seen the body of Véronique Gillet on the old grimy floor, he’d been convinced she, like Aldo Caviglia, was the victim of some savage, unthinking act of violence. In truth, the knife mark barely cut through her white, flawless skin. Now the thin, straight line of dried blood looked more like an unfortunate accident with a rosebush than a meeting with a sharp, deadly weapon.

“She died of heart failure when he attacked her?” Peroni suggested, coming back into the conversation, pointedly not looking at the photos. “It’s still murder, isn’t it?”

“Oh, poor sweet innocent,” Teresa said with a sigh. “Take a deep breath. It’s time for me to shatter a few illusions about our pretty little curator from the Louvre. As I told you when we first arrived here, Ms. Gillet had intercourse shortly before she died. And no, I don’t think it was rape. There’s nothing to indicate that. No bruising, no marks on her body. No skin underneath her fingernails. This was consensual. Sex on the sofa, in front of that creepy painting.

With a knife to add a little spice to the occasion.”

Peroni looked out over the stinking holes in the flagstones to the dusty window. It had started to rain: faint grey streaks coming down in a soft slanting veil onto the smoke-stained stones of the
centro storico
.

Susanna Placidi glowered at the two pathologists. “How the hell can you know that?”

“Evidence,” Di Capua said simply. “Here. Here and here.”

He pointed to the photos. Elsewhere on Véronique Gillet’s body, on the upper arms, on the smooth plateau of her stomach, and beneath her breasts, there were healed cut marks and a network of shallow but visible scars from some earlier encounter.

Teresa Lupo went through them, one by one, indicating each with a pencil.

“These are indicative of some form of self-inflicted wound, or ones cut by a . . . partner, I imagine that’s what we’d have to call it. Human beings are imaginative creatures sometimes. If you want specialist insight into sadomasochistic sexual practices, I can put you in touch with some people who might be able to help.”

“They could be just . . .
cuts,
” Placidi objected.

Falcone sighed. “No. They are not simply cuts. One perhaps. Two. But . . .”

Costa forced himself to examine the photos carefully. In places, the light scars crisscrossed one another, like a sculptor’s hatch marks on some plaster statuette. And something else, too, it occurred to him, and the thought turned his stomach.

“There are too many,” he said. “Also . . . I don’t know if there’s a connection, but Caravaggio made this kind of mark in many of his paintings. His incisions are one way people identify his work.”

He looked hard at the photographs. The small, straight cuts on the woman’s flesh, mostly healed, but a few still red and recent, were horribly similar. He tried to remember where they were on the canvas they had found: on the naked goddess’s upper arms and thighs. Just as with Véronique Gillet.

“The painting—” Costa went on.

“Is a subject for another conversation, and another officer,” Falcone interrupted, and gave him a quick, dark glance. This was not, it seemed, an appropriate moment.

“I know nothing about art,” Teresa Lupo declared. “But I can tell you one thing. She came here to die. Or, more precisely, to make sure that when she died, it happened here, which would suggest to me that she knew this place, knew the people, and certainly knew what went on.” Her bloodless face, expressive in spite of her plain, flat features, flitted to each of them in turn. “But what do I know? You’re the police. You work it out.”

“And the man?” Falcone asked.

“Six stab wounds to the chest, three of them deep enough to be fatal on their own,” Teresa replied immediately, and watched Di Capua take out a folder of large colour photographs, ones no one much wanted to look at. Blood and gore spattered Aldo Caviglia’s white, still-well-ironed shirt. “This is extreme violence I would attribute to a man. Women tend to give up around the third blow or go on a lot longer than this. A couple went into the heart.”

“Aldo was not the kind of man to get involved in nonsense like this,” Peroni protested. “Creepy sex. It’s ridiculous . . .”

“You don’t know that, Gianni,” Costa observed. “How many times did you meet him?”

“Three? Four? How many does it take? He wasn’t that type. Or a voyeur or something. Listen . . . I’ve talked to his neighbours. To his sister. She lives out in Ostia. She works in a bakery. Like he used to.” The big man didn’t like the obvious doubt on their faces. “Also, I spoke to the woman in the cafe down the street. She said someone who sounds like Aldo came in, white to the gills, desperate to find some skinny, red-haired Frenchwoman. He was
trying
to find her. He had her wallet. OK. It’s obvious how that came about. Perhaps . . .” Peroni struggled to find some explanation. “Perhaps he just changed his mind and wanted to give it back.”

“Pickpockets do
that
all the time,” Rosa suggested sarcastically.

“He was not that kind of man,” Peroni said, almost stuttering with anger.

To Costa’s astonishment, Rosa Prabakaran reached out, put her hand on Peroni’s arm, and said, “I believe you, Gianni. Caviglia was a good guy. He just couldn’t keep his hands to himself, but that’s not exactly a unique problem in Rome, is it?”

“You’re in the wrong job,” Peroni replied immediately, pointing a fat finger in the younger officer’s face. “You have something personal going on here. I’m sorry about that, Rosa, not that I imagine it helps. But you should
not
be on a case of this nature. It’s just plain . . . wrong.”

The forensic people were starting to look uncomfortable. So was Teresa Lupo. Her people liked to work without disruptions.