The Garden of Evil (18 page)

Three

P
ERONI RAN TOWARDS PASQUINO, FEELING HIS AGEING
legs complain beneath him. He wasn’t fast enough anymore. By the time he made it to the battered statue, now with newly shredded scraps of paper scattered over the litter at its base, there was no sign of their man in the steady winter rain, no dark figure hurrying through the vast, nearly deserted stadium of the Piazza Navona.

Rosa, keeping up easily with his pace, gave him a sideways look, one he recognised because Costa did it a lot these days too. It said:
I’m younger than you, and quicker. This is my call.

“Teresa,” he barked at the neck mike of the phone, “did you see where he went?”

He still wasn’t happy about Rosa being on the case. The girl was inexperienced. She was angry at the way her insight into the investigation had been ignored by her boss, Susanna Placidi. More than anything, in Peroni’s view, she was still marked by the grim Bramante affair that previous spring, a dark, brutal investigation in which the young agente had been attacked by a man who had played the police with the same cruel skill the Ekstasists now appeared to possess, and the same relish too.

“
What am I?
” the voice in his ear snapped back.
“Surveillance now? Of course I didn’t see. These cameras aren’t everywhere.”

“Look north,” Rosa suggested. “He wouldn’t have gone into Navona if he wanted to head in any other direction. He’d have been doubling back on himself.”

She’d keyed herself in to the conference call. Peroni should have expected that. All the young ones were so bright when it came to playing with toys. So were Malaspina and his men. But toys didn’t protect you forever, no matter which side you were on.

“
I’m looking,
” Teresa answered.
“This would all be so much easier if we could call in for support.”

“We can’t!” Peroni yelled. “You know it.”

The line went quiet for a moment.

“I know, I know it. I was just saying. I don’t want you racing round Rome on foot, pretending you’re a teenager. You’re old, you’re unfit, and you’re overweight.”

“It’s pissing with rain, I am looking for a murder suspect, and I have no idea what to do next,” he snapped back. “I am so honoured to receive your personal views on my physical state at a moment such as this.”

He was gasping for breath, too, and his heart was pounding like some crazy drum. She was right, and he wished there were some way he could hide that fact.

“
Well?
” the pathologist asked.

Rosa could probably outrun even Costa, he thought. Nic was a long-distance man, built for endurance, not speed.

“Find him, and Rosa can go ahead.”

He looked at the young woman in the cheap black coat. If he’d been back on vice, he’d have been wondering why exactly she was out on the street on a night like this, flitting through the trickle of late-night shoppers and revellers brave enough to dodge the rain. She was listening to every word, eyes gleaming with anticipation.

“You do nothing without my permission,” he ordered, jabbing a finger in the air to make the point.

“Sir,” she said, with a quick salute.

Peroni heard a familiar sigh of relief in his earpiece.

“There,”
Teresa declared.
“That was so easy. I picked him up a moment ago. At least I think it’s him. If it is, he did go north. He’s not running. He’s walking nice and slowly. I imagine he thinks he’s passing for one more idiot getting wet out shopping for the night.”

“Where?” Peroni yelled.

“Going right past that funny old church, Sant’Agostino. You know, if I were a betting person—and I am—I’d say he’s headed back to where this all began. The Vicolo del Divino Amore. Or thereabouts. What did Nic call it?
”

“Ortaccio,” Peroni murmured, remembering. Then he watched Rosa Prabakaran set up a steady, speedy pace north, out past Bernini’s floodlit fountain of the rivers, picking up speed to put a distance between them he’d find hard to close.

There were still a few stalls left out from the Christmas fair. Men were putting away sodden cloth dolls of La Befana, the witch, dragging in sticks of sugar candy from the wet, covering up the stalls of Nativity scenes as they were buffeted by the choppy winter wind. He looked up and saw the moon caught between a scudding line of heavy black clouds. A spiral of swirling shapes, starlings he guessed, wheeled through the air. It was Christmas in Rome, cold and wet and pregnant with some kind of meaning, even for a failed Catholic like him.

There were times, lately, when Gianni Peroni wished he could remember how to pray. Not the actions or the words. Simply the ability to reconnect with the sense he’d once possessed as a child that there was some link, some bright live fuse, that ran from him to something else, something kind and warm and eternal. Meaningful and yet beyond comprehension, which made it all the more comforting for the solitary, insular child he had been.

After one quick curse at the rain, he began to follow, heart pumping, head searching for solutions.

Four

I
T WAS LIKE WATCHING A SURGEON AT WORK. AGATA
Graziano pulled over an intense white lamp and bent down to the base of the canvas, applying the paste in small squares, one at a time, with a compact paintbrush, then removing it quickly with another solution that smelled of white spirit.

She worked slowly, patiently, with a hand so steady Costa couldn’t imagine how such precision was possible.

And as she laboured, something began to emerge from beneath the pigment that had been dashed on, then revarnished, to hide it.

He lost track of time. She sent him for some water, for her, not the process. When he came back, he looked at this woman. He’d not met Agata Graziano before that day, yet now he felt he knew her, in part at least. There was an expression in her eyes—excitement, trepidation, perhaps a little fear—that he connected with, and that connected the two of them too. This painting contained something she needed to know, had to know, with the same relentless hunger he felt. There was a shared desperation between them, and he wondered what pain on her part had placed it there.

“I can’t work with you hovering over my shoulder,” she said after a while.

Beads of sweat stood on her brow, like lines of tiny clear pearls. She wore a taut, serene expression of absolute concentration. When she finally beckoned him over, he looked at his watch. She had been working on the canvas for no more than twenty-five minutes. It had seemed like hours. What he saw when he came to her side was something new and entirely unexpected. Agata had not simply uncovered a signature. She had found something else, something that took a moment to make its identity clear, because nothing he had seen, in any work of that period, by any artist, bore the slightest resemblance to what had been painted there by the artist in the original version.

It was the size of a child’s hand, a pool of white, milky liquid, the same colour as the stream that fell from the cherub’s jug and spilled over the lip of the silver goblet set by the nude’s pale thighs. The feature sat with the same sticky intensity he had seen in the puddle of gore flowing from the dying Baptist’s neck. The trickles that ran from it formed letters in the same flowing, erratic hand as on the canvas in the co-cathedral in Valetta: the writing of Caravaggio himself.

“What is it, Nic?” she asked, her voice trembling. “That substance. I need you to tell me.”

“It could be. . . . milk. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“This was a private painting. It was kept behind a curtain. Perhaps in a master’s bedroom. Perhaps in the palace of Del Monte, where Lord knows what occurred. Milk?”

He understood the question—and the answer. Agata had told him earlier that day what kind of trick the artist was playing here, putting flesh on the ideas that had been forming in his own head. This canvas was challenging the viewer to make his or her interpretation of what it portrayed, daring the beholder to transform a scene that was, at first glance, almost innocent into something else, something that became illicit, secret, intensely intimate, but only through the presence of a living human being to provide the final catalyst.

“It’s the aftermath of sex,” Costa said. “In Malta he wrote in warm blood. Here, he wrote in . . .” He stared at the leering satyr’s face, Caravaggio’s face. “He wrote in a simulacrum of his own semen.”

She took his arm. Costa bent down to read the words as she spoke them aloud:
fra. michel l’ekstasista.

“Brother—there can be no doubt about that here—Michelangelo Merisi, the Ekstasist, a made-up word,” Agata said. “This is impossible! It makes even less sense than before. What is an Ekstasist, for pity’s sake?”

He couldn’t speak. He didn’t have the courage to tell her.

She threw the damp and now misshapen paintbrush onto the stone floor and swore once more. Then she placed her small fists together and, eyes closed, looked up at the ceiling.

“Why does this elude me? Why?”

This close there was something else he noticed, and he knew why Agata had missed it. All that interested her was the canvas. Everything else was irrelevant. He remembered his old teacher’s words again.
Always look at the title
.

Costa walked over to the table where she kept her tools and implements. He found a small chisel and returned with it to the canvas.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He placed the chisel beneath the nameplate. There was the smallest of gaps there.

“If we’re going to take this thing apart, we might as well do it properly. When you made me stand here staring at that part of the painting, I noticed something else. This isn’t right either.”

He forced the chisel blade beneath the plate, twisted, and forced away the wood there.

Agata came to join him, looking, staring, entranced.

“Oh my God . . .” she whispered.

Five

T
HIS WASN’T HER KIND OF WORK. TERESA LUPO FOUND
it hard keeping her attention on ten or more tiny video screens at one time, each showing the same kinds of figures, people in dark winter coats, struggling through rain that was starting to turn sleety and driving. The man—if it still was him—had continued to head north, through the labyrinth of Renaissance alleys that had turned into the shopping streets and the offices of modern Rome.

It was getting ridiculous. Rosa was racing these black streets in vain. Peroni was breathless, trying to keep up with her. Even if Teresa could have picked up the phone and brought in support, she doubted they’d have much chance of tracking down a lone figure, in a dark coat, face unseen, on a night like this.

Then, to her astonishment, she saw him.
Him
. It was the centre screen on the monitor. He was stopping to take cash from an ATM machine in the Via della Scrofa, his black frame captured perfectly by the surveillance camera situated to keep an eye on the location. She watched. The machine coughed up. Lots and lots of notes that went straight into his coat pockets. Not the kind of amount you’d take out for a night on the town. He had a scarf up tight around his face. She couldn’t see who he was. But this was the same man, Teresa knew. It had to be: the stance, the clothes, the shifty way he kept his head down . . . Instantly, she was on the line to Rosa, sending her in the right direction, with Peroni, breathing heavily down the phone line, some way behind.

Then, as she heard Peroni’s rasping, loud voice bellow something she couldn’t hear, the landline handset on the table rang. She knew she ought to ignore it. But this being Leo Falcone’s apartment, the man had to have one of those newfangled phones with a little panel on the top that told you the number of the person calling, and the name if you’d put it into the address book.

It was flashing at her now and it said:
Questura—Falcone
.

Typical. He even keyed in his own office phone number.

“
What?
” she yelled when she picked it up.

There was a pause. Falcone never liked shouting unless it came from him.

“I was merely calling in to enquire about progress.”

“We have him, Leo,” she yelled back. “He came along and tried to scrape that stupid poster of yours off the statue.”

“You saw him? Who he was?”

“No! Do you ever look at these little toys of yours before you give them to other people to play with? You can’t see people’s faces very well. Particularly when they’ve got their collars turned up. Have you seen the weather out there?”

The brief silence that followed was so typical of the man she wanted to scream. Leo Falcone had many talents, and one of them was the unerring ability to hear something in your own voice you desperately didn’t want him to detect.

“I told you to try to identify him, either visually or by tracing where he went,” he said. “Nothing more. Well?”

“Peroni’s going crazy, Leo. Emily died, remember?” she screeched. “We can’t all just bottle up our emotions like you. . . .”

It was uncalled for, unfair, and, quite simply, cruel. Falcone felt the loss as much as anyone. Perhaps his inability to show that made it worse. She would never know.

“I’m sorry—” she began.

“Where is he?” the calm, distanced voice interrupted. “Where’s Peroni? And Prabakaran?”

She rattled off the street names in an instant. Then the phone went dead without another word.

“You’re welcome,” Teresa murmured, and stuffed the mobile headset back on. It took a moment before she realised both Rosa and Peroni were screaming for directions over the crackly line.

“He’s leaving a cash machine in the Via della Scrofa, still going north,” she said without thinking. “Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Anywhere in that area. Also, I suspect Leo’s on his way, too, so be careful.”

Peroni said something quite unlike him. He sounded old, she thought. Old and thoroughly pissed off with the job. And that wasn’t just because of Emily or the mess that had followed.

“Be careful,” she murmured again, to no one, and then went quiet. “He’s taken some money. A lot of money.”

A thought came to her: it was only intuition, but it had seemed, for a moment, as if this were a strange, foreign act. A man taking out cash from a street machine, something he didn’t do often. Then putting all that money straight into the pockets of his coat, not a wallet.

“I think it’s Franco Malaspina,” she said quietly. “Or someone else who isn’t in the habit of keeping a lot of cash about his person. The rich are like that, aren’t they?”

The figure in black had stopped under a streetlight. She watched as he paused, took out a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and lit one. It made a small white point of light on the monochrome screen. He seemed so calm, so certain of himself. For a second the light of a passing vehicle caught his face. With a flash of her fingers, she stopped the video, rewound a couple of frames, and froze the picture. It might be Malaspina. There wasn’t enough in the way of detail to tell one way or another.

No more traffic came along to help. The roads were empty. It was getting late.

The figure stood back from the rain-filled gutter as a dark and shiny new van drove up. It stopped by the side of him. A man got out. He wore a hooded anorak, the top close around his head. Unrecognisable in their similar clothes, the two of them exchanged words.

She watched what happened next and felt her mind go numb.

The second man went to the rear of the van, took out something the length of a child’s arm, and began to examine it under the streetlight. He passed it to his colleague. Quickly, with the swift, professional skill she’d expect of a soldier or a cop who’d spent too long in weapons training, the first man in black bent back into the open van and removed a stack of cartridges, loaded several into the repeating magazine, then tucked the sawn-off shotgun beneath his coat before slamming the door shut.

Then the two of them got back in the van and began to drive away. North. Towards the Palazzo Malaspina. Towards Ortaccio.

“Gianni!” she yelled into the neck mike. “For Christ’s sake! Peroni!”

Her voice rang around Leo Falcone’s empty dining room. Nothing came back from the phone but static.