The Garden of Evil (28 page)

One

N
INO TOMASSONI CAN WAIT. SHOW ME THIS STATUE YOU
looked at,” she requested as they left the Doria Pamphilj. “It’s not far.”

“It isn’t,” Teresa agreed from the front seat. “But don’t hold out your hopes. We’ve scraped everything we can off these damned things, looking for something that might link us back to Malaspina. Paper. Ink. Spit. You name it.”

The pathologist sighed. She looked exhausted too. There was a nervous tension about them all, one that spoke of desperation and failure.

When they were about to get back into the car, Costa had taken a call from Falcone in the Questura. The legal department was getting restless. Toni Grimaldi, never the most forthcoming of colleagues, was suddenly saying nothing at all.

“We’ve tried the other statues too,” Teresa added. “We could spend months working on that material. Perhaps we will. I don’t know . . . We would need something extraordinary, something direct. Plain DNA won’t help us. We still run up against the same brick wall. We can’t get a thing to corroborate it with.”

They waited for the other cars to stop and the officers to crowd round Agata’s exit. Then they got out and stood in front of the crude, worn statue of Pasquino underneath a grey winter sky. Dusk was descending over the city, and black clouds full of rain, their bellies dotted by the slow-moving starling flocks that circled endlessly high above them.

“This is ridiculous,” Agata hissed under her breath. “Why would anyone wish to kill me? The magistrate has already thrown out my evidence.”

“If we find more evidence, we can reintroduce you as a witness,” Costa argued. “Also . . .”

He didn’t want to say it now, but she was staring at him intently.

“Perhaps he thinks you’re the person who might see something the rest of us will miss. That would worry him deeply.”

“He’s wrong there, isn’t he?” she grumbled. “I can’t even uncover the truth of what happened to Caravaggio and I’ve been studying him for years.”

Like her, he’d read so many books, so many biographies. None of them gave any good answers about what happened the day Ranuccio Tomassoni died, or why.

“Why don’t we know?” he asked, with a genuine curiosity. “It was a criminal case. There were records, surely.”

“Nothing reliable. Caravaggio fled. Most of the others, too, and when they returned, everything was hushed up, damages paid, reputations mended. I simply don’t know. What information we have comes from contemporary accounts by partial bystanders. Caravaggio’s friends. Or his enemies. By rights there should be something in the Vatican archives. I have contacts there. I’ve looked. The cupboard’s bare. Perhaps they incriminated someone important. Del Monte himself even. What’s the point in speculating?”

She took one step forward towards the statue, then reached out and touched the stone. It had been scraped clean recently by the forensic team. Even so, the posters had returned, with their customary vehemence. There were five messages there, all in the curious scrawl of a computer printer, artificial letters posing as handwriting. Three seemed to be nonsense. One castigated a senior politician as a criminal. The final poster was a foul-mouthed rant, calling the Pope any number of names and comparing him to Hitler.

“So much hate in the world,” Agata said quietly. She stared at the statue’s battered face, barely recognisable as a man. “Why do the police spend their time looking at things like this?”

“Because sometimes it’s worth it,” Rosa cut in. “It was here, in the end. Though normally”—she shrugged—“it’s just racist or political material. We need to keep tabs on that kind of information. Where else would you find something that . . . frank?”

“Where else?” Agata echoed, not taking her eyes off Pasquino for a moment. “Where were the others?”

Rosa told her. Then the slight woman in black pushed her way back through the huddle of officers, finding the middle car, only to sit there, waiting, engulfed by her own private thoughts.

When he got in, Costa found her staring at him.

“Tell me about these statues, Nic,” she asked. “I must have walked past them a million times. I’d like to know.”

It was good to discuss something that was not to do with paintings or Caravaggio or, directly, Franco Malaspina.

So Costa told her about Pasquino, Abate Luigi, and Il Facchino, and some of the other lesser-known statues he’d discovered in his recent research, the curious encrusted figure of Il Babuino beyond the Spanish Steps, Madama Lucrezia in the Piazza San Marco, and Marforio, once Pasquino’s partner, until the displeased authorities of the Vatican moved the recumbent figure of a sea god to the Campidoglio.

She laughed at his stories, a little anyway, and then, in a few short minutes, they were in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, where she ceased to laugh at all.

Two

T
HE TOMASSONI HOUSE WAS WREATHED IN BARRIERS
and yellow tape. A lone press photographer hung around outside. For no obvious reason he pulled out an SLR and began firing it the moment the three-car convoy arrived. The officers from the front car leapt out and were around him in an instant. Costa ordered Rosa to take Agata straight to the house. While she was doing that, as quickly and efficiently as her charge would allow, he walked over to confront the individual with the camera.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Costa asked the man, who was struggling and swearing in the arms of two plainclothes officers.

“Earning a living,” the photographer barked back in a southern accent. “Or trying to. What do you bastards think you’re doing? This is a public street. I can do what I like.”

“ID,” Taccone, the sovrintendente in charge of the first car, said, and it wasn’t a request. He was pulling the card out of the man’s wallet already.

“All you had to do was ask,” he moaned. “This is persecution. We’ve got rights.”

Costa took the wallet and looked at the photograph and the bare details there.

“Carmine Aprea,” Costa read off the state identity card. “Well, Carmine . . . where are your press credentials?”

“I don’t work inside the system, man,” Aprea answered.

“Then how do I know you do what you say?”

“You call any of the papers. Give them my name. They know me. Maybe they don’t like me, but what the hell? So long as they’re buying . . .” He nodded at the house. “Normally I take pictures of the living. But all these dead people you’ve got around here. It’s been a while since I took a few stiffs. A man needs a change from time to time.”

“Paparazzo,” Taccone muttered, and spat on the ground. “There are no bodies for you in this place. Go find some cheap little actress to pester.”

“How much are you making, moron?” Aprea retorted, looking Taccone up and down. The old sovrintendente never was one much for sartorial elegance. It was almost a joke in the Questura. “I could buy you with one picture, man. . . .”

At that point Peroni intervened and his big, scarred, ugly features made the small, pinched-faced individual with the camera go very quiet.

Peroni snatched the bulky black Nikon from Aprea’s hands and held it in front of the man’s face, lens uppermost, fat metal barrel just a couple of fingers from his swarthy nose.

“Do you know what an endoscope is, Carmine?” he asked.

Aprea screwed up his swarthy features, baffled. “Kind of, it’s—”

“Wrong. This,” Peroni barked, pushing the Nikon right into Aprea’s face, “is an endoscope. If I see your plug-ugly face again, I’ll shove the thing so far up your ass you’ll be taking pictures of your own throat. Now get the hell out of here.”

It didn’t take another word. Aprea snatched the camera and was walking quickly away, muttering, just loud enough for them to hear, “Big guys. Big guys. So really big . . .”

“Get out of here . . . Hey!” Peroni yelled.

The photographer had turned and was firing away at them as he walked backwards. Except the lens wasn’t aimed in their direction. It was going to the door of Nino Tomassoni’s house.

Agata was there, looking at the exterior and the cobbled street, as if trying to re-create some scene in her imagination.

“Inside!” he yelled at Rosa. “Like I said.”

Peroni started to move. Aprea stopped shooting, just long enough to call out to the two women by the door, “
Grazie, grazie!
I will make you both look beautiful tomorrow.”

Then he turned on his heels and ran, faster than a man of his age ought to, a bulging black shape disappearing into the web of lanes that fed towards the river.

“Leave it,” Costa barked at Peroni.

“We didn’t even check—” the big man began.

“I said . . .”

He stopped. There was a bigger argument going on and it was coming from the door of Nino Tomassoni’s home.

THE TALL, SKINNY WOMAN FROM THE CITY COUNCIL WAVED
some kind of card in his face, yelling, “You will not touch a thing in this house or I’ll call my superiors and have you in court for cultural terrorism before dinner.”

Costa looked at her ID. She was from the city heritage department and seemed quite senior.

“Signora . . .” he said calmly. “We are in the course of a very serious investigation. One that involves multiple murders. Please . . .”

“You are not allowed to knock down protected buildings,” she shrieked.

“For Christ’s sake, I keep telling you! I don’t want to knock it down.”

Silvio Di Capua was in a white bunny suit that didn’t look very white anymore. It was covered in mortar and dust. He was holding a sledgehammer in his hands. It looked as if it had been used.

“What do you want to do?” Costa asked.

“Just rip it apart,” Di Capua pleaded. “A little bit. Not much.”

“You cannot . . .” the woman began.

Agata Graziano had placed her small body between Di Capua and the councilwoman. There was clearly some recognition there.

“Signora Barducci! Please. You know me. This is important. Listen to these men.”

“You’re that nun from the Barberini,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Helping,” Agata replied, and not bothering to correct her. “Making sure there is as little disruption as possible. This house . . .”

The downstairs hall was covered in the detritus of a police forensic team. Even so, the place was remarkable, like the faded set from some historical movie, with battered furniture and paintings, and a musty, damp smell that spoke of age and solitary occupation.

“Are those gas lamps?” Agata asked.

“The very thing,” said a voice coming down the stairs. It was Teresa Lupo, and she appeared to be covered in even more brick dust than her deputy.

She shook some of the muck off herself, then smiled.

“And that,” she said, “is why we have to take down the wall.”

The woman waved her long arms in the air. “No, no, no! I will not permit it.”

“Show me,” Costa ordered, and they followed Teresa up the winding staircase.

Three

I
T WAS A SIMPLE CONUNDRUM: THERE WERE GASLIGHTS ON
the ground floor and the top. On the landing of the middle floor the lights were electric, though very old indeed.

“This means?” Costa asked.

Teresa glanced at Di Capua. “He’s the building freak. You tell him.”

“It means there’s something wrong,” he explained. “This landing abuts the house next door. This place is such a mess it’s hard to tell whether you’re up or down half the time. There are no building plans we can refer to. Nothing formal at all . . .” He cast a vicious look at the woman from the council. “Not even among the preservation people.”

“It’s preserved!” she said. “The place is sixteenth century, for God’s sake.”

“It’s preserved,” Costa agreed. “What’s wrong?”

Di Capua picked up the sledgehammer and, ignoring Signora Barducci’s shrieks, tapped it lightly on the wall to the left, then to the right.

“That.”

They all heard it. A distinct, resonant tone came from the right wall, one that had to indicate some space behind.

“The gas line runs up the original right-hand wall,” Di Capua explained. “There are so many twists and turns on this narrow staircase, it’s hard to make out what’s happening here. But this isn’t the same wall, and that’s why it doesn’t have it. The mains goes straight up from the ground to the top floor, and into that room over there . . .” He pointed to the single door across the landing. “But not here.”

Agata walked up and tapped the wall with her knuckles.

“It’s still brick,” she said. “If you’re right, this predates gas surely. These houses are from ancient and difficult times. The
caporione
lived here. A man who might have been involved in crime. It would not be unusual to have some private, secret storage place. Most houses of this kind would.”

“Precisely,” Di Capua agreed, and lifted up the sledgehammer again.

Costa tried to think this through, aware that he felt tired and his shoulder was beginning to ache again.

“But . . .”

Di Capua was getting ready to strike a blow.

“If it’s a hidden compartment,” Costa pointed out, voice rising, “there has to be a way in.”

The hammer stopped in midair. He was aware they were all staring at him, as if expecting an answer.

“Maybe,” Di Capua suggested, “there used to be a door.”

Teresa swiped him around the head. “In that case, idiot, it wouldn’t have been much of a secret, would it?”

Signora Barducci pushed her way to the front, then stood in front of Di Capua, between his hammer and the wall.

“This is another reason why you can’t start knocking things down. This and . . .”

She began to reel off a seemingly endless string of statutes and orders, laws and conventions, all to do with her own city department, each demanding prior written permission before a single brick of a protected building in the
centro storico
could be touched.

“Also . . .” she added happily, “does it possibly occur to you for one moment that this wall might be structural? That by removing its support you could bring this whole house down around our heads? It’s happened. I’ve seen it.”

Di Capua blinked and shook his bald head from side to side. He was wearing his remaining hair long again these days, and the locks deposited dust everywhere as they moved.

“Structural?” he asked. “Structural? Of course it’s not structural. If it was, don’t you think—”

He stopped. They all went quiet, even the Barducci woman. There was a sound, a new sound, at that moment, and it took a few long seconds for Nic Costa to appreciate its source.

Someone was behind the wall, making scrabbling noises, like some gigantic rat rummaging around in the dark.

“What the hell—” Teresa began to say.

And then stopped. There was a human being behind the brick and she was screaming.

“Agata,” Costa murmured.

He looked upstairs, closed his eyes for a moment, swore, and then took the steps to the upper floor three at a time.

THERE WERE TWO FORENSIC OFFICERS IN THE BIG OPEN ROOM
and they retreated behind a couple of paintings when he stormed in.

“Where is she?” Costa shouted.

“Went in there,” said the first one, who looked like a student fresh from college, with bright yellow hair and a terrified expression.

“Where?”

The woman was pointing at a large, long, fitted wardrobe running almost the entire length of the wall. It wasn’t difficult to work out this had to stand over the suspect area on the floor below.

“We gave her a flashlight,” the other forensic monkey added plaintively, as if that were an excuse.

Costa was at the door by then, staring into a Stygian pool of inky darkness.

“Wonderful. Do you have a spare one for me?”

They shrugged.

He stepped through into the wardrobe and almost immediately found himself struggling to stay upright.

“Agata?
Agata?
”

It was like yelling into a black hole that lurked somewhere beneath him. Costa stumbled, and managed to hold on to something made of old, dry wood. The hatch, he guessed, and it was up.

“Where are you?”

His right leg found whatever chasm led down to the floor below, and he began half testing, half lunging for some kind of step.

“Nic?” said a small, frightened voice from below him.

Then a yellow beam of light worked its way back towards him and he saw, for the first time, what she’d found. There was a trapdoor, and steep, almost vertical steps, virtually a stepladder made of worn old wood, though there was little in the way of dust, as if this place was used regularly.

“It’s all right,” he said, reaching the bottom of the stairs. “I’m here. Walk towards me. Bring the flashlight.”

The light turned further towards him. She kept it low to the ground always. He couldn’t see her face, but soon she was close enough for him to sense her presence. Her hands found his and thrust the flashlight into his fingers. That brief touch told him she was shaking like a leaf.

“It’s all right,” he said again automatically.

“No,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s not.”

Voices began to clamour from behind and above. Teresa had found the entrance too. Costa called up for them to await orders.

The place was a narrow rectangle, perhaps two metres wide and longer than he expected, a good eight metres or so. Big enough to be a child’s bedroom, but that wasn’t the purpose. She had understood what this was for from the beginning, understood too that there had to be some way in that wasn’t obvious, and it could only be from above or below.

At first glance there seemed to be nothing there but battered cardboard boxes that looked many years old and, at the very end, some kind of tall cabinet reaching up two metres.

“I thought the painting might be here. I don’t know why. I dreamed . . .”

That she would be the one to find it. He understood that urge on her part. In some way she felt responsible for its loss.

She pulled away from him. He felt, briefly, the touch of her cheek. It was damp with tears, and she must have realised he’d noticed, since she was soon wiping them away with her sleeve, as she’d wiped away the dust on the glass jug in the Doria Pamphilj.

“It was here,” she insisted. “Look!”

Her firm, determined fingers forced the beam to the left wall.

Costa looked and found his breath locking tight in his lungs.

It was the same shape, surely. The same size. Dust stood around the paler wall where the canvas had hung, undisturbed, for years, centuries perhaps. Above the missing frame, scribbled in pencil, in a hand that looked ancient, someone had written
Evathia in Ekstasis.

Costa looked at it and thought,
That was how they knew.
A line of pencil, scribbled God knows how long before, gave Tomassoni the insight into the true nature of the painting, one he passed on to Malaspina with such terrible consequences, ones that were now visible and very real.

Something had taken the place of Caravaggio’s work.

Knowing she wouldn’t look too closely, Costa walked forward and peered at the items that were stuck there. They were the same kind of photos they had found in the studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore, colour shots from a computer printer, of poor quality, as if snapped by a phone or the cheapest of digital cameras.

There were perhaps ten in all, stuck there with drawing pins. Each depicted a close-up of a woman, all apparently foreign, all seemingly in the throes of ecstasy or pain or the onset of death. Tomassoni may have been reluctant to take part, but he clearly liked to watch, then spill out his fears in anonymous emails to the police afterwards.

“The canvas was here all those centuries,” Agata said, with a cold, sad certainty in her voice. “Then Franco found out and took her. He heard what she said to him. He wanted to. That was Caravaggio’s point.”

“We mustn’t touch anything,” he insisted. “This place will soon be crawling with forensic. Teresa . . .”

“I’m waiting,” said an enthusiastic voice from above.

Agata took the flashlight from him. Then she strode to the back of the chamber and the cabinet there. The black wooden door was ajar. She’d looked already. It was this, Costa understood, from the way she steeled herself, that had made her scream, not the shocking photographs in the space that had once held the painting.

She stopped, her wary eyes urging him to go on.

“Please. I have seen and wish to see no more.”

Costa walked past her and opened the door.

There was a figure there dressed in an archaic tattered and ratgnawed velvet jacket, an ancient shirt the colour of ochre visible at the point that had once been a human neck. It was merely a skeleton now, dusty bones and the familiar rictus of death set in a crooked skull.

Costa paused for a moment, thinking. Some kind of notice sat on the bony chest, held there by dusty string tied around the back of his head.

He picked it up and read out loud the archaic, awkward words, knowing they sounded familiar.

“I know that,” he said, not expecting a reply. “Almost. It’s familiar . . . and strange too.”

“Everyone’s favourite poet,” she murmured. “Around here anyway. Dante. From
Purgatorio
, if I remember correctly. You probably read the modern translation. Most schoolchildren do.

Agata reached out and touched the notice, seeing, with her historian’s eye, something that had been lost on him.

“There are two lines through the word
paricida,
” she pointed out. “What do you think that means?”

He looked. She was right. It had been crossed out the way a teacher would mark a mistaken word in a piece of homework.

“Perhaps that part at least is untrue. They regarded him only as a traitor and a thief.”

“Good,” she said, nodding. “I would see it that way too. They were like Franco. They enjoyed showing off their so-called learning, even when it was in part inappropriate.”

She had recited the words with the perfect precision of a poet herself. He recalled what Malaspina had said in the palazzo that night:
She sees herself as Beatrice. Beautiful, chaste, alluring. And dead.

“I’m sorry. I thought I would be some use to you. All I do is make everything murkier. I bring you more puzzles when you need more light. It’s a waste of time. Put me somewhere safe if that’s what Leo wants. I won’t complain.”

“I will,” he said, shifting the sign to one side, looking at what lay beneath it, resting on the grey bones of the rib cage that was visible through the ripped fabric of the shirt. “We need you.”

“Why?” she asked softly. “So that you can bury your wife, finally? Is that what I’m supposed to do for you?”

Costa turned and looked at her. In the yellow half-light of the flashlight, she seemed, for the first time, he thought, a woman, much like any other. Not part of some different life he couldn’t begin to comprehend.

“No,” he replied simply. “I’ll do that myself, when I’m ready.”

“Then what?”

The heat rose in her eyes.

Costa put a finger to his lips. This once, she obeyed him and became silent. He walked to the steps, barked a few questions at Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua, then had them throw down a couple of clear plastic evidence bags.

“You may not want to watch this,” he said when he got back to the cabinet.

“Why not?” she demanded. “What have you seen? Tell me!”

“This . . .”

He moved the sign to one side and indicated an area on the left of the corpse’s chest. There was an object there, some kind of round medallion, dull dark metal on a similarly coloured chain, but with the outline of the emblem at its centre still visible, still comprehensible.

Three dragons, limbs thrashing, talons wrapped around the figure of a woman who writhed in their grip, screaming, eyes rolling wildly.

“This is the same symbol we found on the notes the Ekstasists placed on the statues,” he said. “Now we know where that came from. It’s a link. A tentative one, but I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“A link,” she grumbled, and folded her arms.

“And this . . .”

He pushed aside completely the yellowing paper bearing Dante’s words and shone the flashlight directly on the portion of the velvet jacket next to the dull black medallion. At first it had seemed a wild guess. Now, under the fierce beam, it was unmistakable.

“You don’t recognise it, do you?” he asked.

It was a heraldic badge: a shield divided into two halves, with a skeletal tree bearing three short horizontal branches on one side and two on the other, dotted with spines.

“I don’t notice much except paintings,” Agata replied with a frown. “Usually.”

“It’s all over Franco’s beautiful palace. It’s his family crest. The bad thorn.”

In this small, stuffy room that was cold and damp, Agata Graziano laughed. “That’s impossible!”