The Garden of Evil

One

When Nic Costa opened his eyes, he was somewhere that smelled familiar: the scent of flowers and pine needles.

People, too, in a room that wasn’t meant for a crowd.

Christmas, Costa said to himself, waking with a start, then sitting upright in his own bed, in the house on the edge of the city, his head heavy, his mind too dulled by the hospital drugs to think of much at that moment.

He reached for the watch by the side of his bed, aware that his shoulder felt as if it had been run over by a truck, and saw that it was now almost four on the afternoon of December 23. He’d lost more than half a day to sleep and medication. Then his eyes wandered to the room and stayed fixed on the single point they found, the person there.

Franco Malaspina was wearing a grey, expensive business suit, perfectly cut, and sat, relaxed, on the bedroom chair where Emily used to leave her clothes at night. He stared back at Costa, legs crossed, hands on his chin, looking as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

“What in God’s name…” Costa found himself muttering, wondering where a gun might be in this place that was so familiar, so private, yet at that moment so profoundly strange to him.

Malaspina unfolded his legs, then yawned, not moving another muscle. He had strong, broad, athletic shoulders, those of a powerful man. In the bright daylight streaming through the windows, his dark Sicilian features seemed remarkably like those of Agata Graziano.

“This was their choice, not mine,” the man protested in his easy, patrician accent. “Take your anger out on them.”

Costa’s attention roamed to the others in the rooms. All eyes were on him. Some he knew. Some, mainly men in suits like Malaspina’s, were strangers, as was a middle-aged woman with bright, closecropped blonde hair who wore a black judicial gown over her dark blue business jacket and sat on a dining room seat in the midst of the others, as if she were the master of proceedings.

“What is this?” Costa asked.

“It is a judicial hearing, Officer,” the woman said immediately.

“Your superiors felt it so important, we came here and waited for you to wake up. This was their prerogative. My name is Silvia Tentori. I am a magistrate. These men here are lawyers representing Count Malaspina. The Questura has legal representation.…”

Toni Grimaldi stood next to Falcone, with Peroni on the other side. None of them looked happy.

“I thought he didn’t like being called Count,” Costa found himself saying immediately. His head hurt.

Agata Graziano sat next to Falcone, looking frail, bleary-eyed, and unusually upset.

“You know the judiciary,” Malaspina observed. “Very well, I imagine. It’s all formality, even these days. You can call me Franco.”

“Get out of my house…”

He tried to move and couldn’t, not easily, not quickly.

It was Agata Graziano who rose from her chair, picked it up, and came to sit by him. Costa couldn’t help noticing the pain this caused Leo Falcone.

“Nic,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry about this. It was never meant to happen.” She glared at Malaspina. “His lawyers made it so. If there was some other way. If I could prevent this somehow—”

“You could just tell Signora Tentori the truth,” Malaspina interrupted. “Then” — he purposefully looked at his watch — “I might be able to go about my business.”

“The truth,” Costa murmured.

“The truth?” Malaspina echoed in an amused, nonchalant voice. “Here it is. After the festivities I hosted on behalf of this ungrateful woman’s gallery, I spent last night in my own home, until eleven, when I went out to meet a companion, who will vouch for me. After that, I received a call saying the police were making enquiries. So” — he shrugged — “I did what any good citizen would. I went to the Questura. And sat there. From a little before one in the morning until five, when Inspector Falcone here finally managed to find the time to see me.”

“I did not know—” Falcone butted in.

“That is not my fault,” Malaspina responded.

“The others,” Costa said. “Castagna. Tomassoni.”

Malaspina’s dark face flushed with sudden anger. “My friends, you mean? And Buccafusca too. They are dead, murdered, and you sit here pointing the finger at me when you should be out there looking for whoever did this. I wish to see their families. I wish to help them make arrangements. Yet all I hear are these stupid accusations. Again. I tell you… there is a limit to what one man will bear before he breaks, and you have crossed that limit now. To be told one is under suspicion in these circumstances. Of crimes committed when I am sitting in your own Questura, offering whatever assistance I can…”

Costa could read the look in their eyes. It was despair. He could only guess at what the night had brought them: death and disappointment. Malaspina believed he had won again, and this informal judicial hearing, with his rich-man’s lawyers hanging on every word, was surely some formality he hoped to use to seal that fact. And to take pleasure from the act of entering the home of a man whose wife he had murdered. It was there, plain in his face.

Still, his timing was not perfect.

“Emilio Buccafusca was murdered… this painting was stolen… before you went to the Questura,” Costa pointed out.

Malaspina leaned forward, like a schoolteacher making a point to a slow pupil. “While I was at a private dinner. With someone who can vouch for me.”

One of the grey men in grey suits said, “It offends my client that you waste time on this nonsense when you could be looking for the real criminals in this case.”

“It offends me that the man who shot my wife is sitting in my bedroom, smiling,” Costa answered immediately. “Ask your questions, then get out of here. But this I tell you…” He pointed at Malaspina. “I am not done with this man yet.”

The woman with the robes around her shoulders sighed and said, “After that I wonder if there is really any point in going on. From a serving police officer…”

“One who was shot in the course of duty last night,” Peroni pointed out. “By this bast—”

A look from Falcone silenced him.

“The point of this proceeding,” the woman went on, “is to discuss the police application for papers which will allow you to search the Palazzo Malaspina freely, and take specimens from Count Malaspina. Or is there something new you wish to add to that list now, Inspector?”

“That will suffice,” Falcone replied. “It’s all we need.”

The woman picked up a briefcase and took out a substantial wad of papers.

“At a previous hearing, I established that you will not be allowed to ask Count Malaspina for specimens without firm and incontrovertible evidence linking him to these events, which you have so far failed to provide. There are rules about harassment. There are avenues open to an individual persecuted by the state.”

“Four men died last night,” Falcone pointed out. “One of them an innocent security guard. Sovrintendente Costa could have been killed. Sister Agata—”

“This is irrelevant to Count Malaspina unless you have proof,” she declared with a peremptory brusqueness. “How many times do I have to say this?”

“I don’t know,” Falcone barked back. “Given that it always seems to be you who deals with these requests when they are made, possibly many, many more.”

Grimaldi put a hand to his head and emitted a groan. The woman turned and glowered at him.

“Are you letting your officers accuse me now?”

“There is only one person in this room we accuse,” Grimaldi answered. “Please address the point, Falcone.”

“I merely note that,” the inspector added icily, “I find it intriguing that whenever the subject of prosecuting Franco Malaspina comes before us, the name of Silvia Tentori invariably appears on the sheet. It is… illuminating to discover that the judiciary works so efficiently these days that it is able to supply us with magistrates who seem already to be familiar with the case we wish to bring before them.”

“This will not take long,” the woman muttered. “Sovrintendente?”

Costa nodded at her, taking in Falcone’s bitter, resigned expression. “What do you want to know?”

“In spite of yet another application for discovery and specimens concerning Count Malaspina, your colleagues can supply no evidence linking him to these crimes. Nothing except this identification from you and Signora Graziano last night. Tell me. You are certain of this?”

Costa glanced at the seated aristocrat, who watched him, relaxed, waiting for an answer, a finger to his lips, something close to a smirk on his face.

“I am certain of it.”

“How is that?” she asked. “The man was hooded.”

“I recognised his voice. The tone of it. The way he spoke to Sister Agata.”

The lawyer in the grey suit leaned forward. “You had not met the count until last night, and then spoke to him only briefly. We have witnesses for this.”

“I spoke to him once before. When I followed him from the Vicolo del Divino Amore, the day he murdered my wife.”

There was a chill in the room and an awkward silence. Then the lawyer added, “Another hooded man, in another hurried situation. Furthermore, if this was true, you would surely have reported the fact to the Questura immediately. Not returned to the Barberini studio to look at this painting. All the more so because of the personal nature of this so-called identification.”

He was not going to pursue this. It was pointless.

“And what lying bastard was he supposedly dining with last night?” Costa asked. “When he stole that painting and killed Emilio Buccafusca?”

The lawyer sniffed. “The count dined with me, at home, just the two of us. My wife is away. We were together from eleven until twelve forty-five, when his household contacted us to say the police had enquired after him. After that I accompanied him to the Questura immediately in order to offer whatever assistance was required.”

“Then,” Costa replied, “after I am done with his lies, I will deal with yours.”

Silvia Tentori glared at him, furious. “Thank you, Officer. That is enough. I reject this identification entirely. It is clearly based on nothing more than personal animosity.”

“It is based on the truth,” Costa insisted.

“I doubt that,” the woman said. “This leaves one so-called identification alone. Signora Graziano.”

“Sister…” Agata corrected her quietly. A surge of anger in Silvia Tentori’s eyes indicated she did not appreciate this.

“You say you can identify Count Malaspina as the man you saw in the studio last night?”

All eyes in the room were on her.

“I believe so.”

“You believe so?” the magistrate demanded. “What does that mean? We know you never saw his face. How is this possible?”

“I have known Franco for several years. I know his voice. I recognise the way he speaks to me.”

Silvia Tentori nodded, listening. “And were you helped in this identification?” she asked. “Did one of these police officers suggest to you this man whose face you never saw, whose voice you only heard in the course of a violent robbery, was Count Malaspina?”

She shook her head. “No. I mean… Nic and I… talked.”

“You talked. When? What was said? The details, please.”

Agata looked so exhausted. Nic felt like screaming at them all to get out of the room.

“Sister Graziano was the victim of a violent attack herself,” Costa pointed out. “You have to expect her to be hazy on some details.”

He knew it was a stupid thing to say the moment the words were out of his mouth.

“Quite,” the magistrate observed with visible pleasure, then openly, as if she didn’t mind, glanced at Malaspina, who was studying his nails, and added, “but this is a very serious accusation to base upon a few barely heard words from a man whose face she never saw.”

“I know,” she insisted. “Say something for me, Franco.”

Malaspina took his attention away from his fingers and stared at her.

“Say something?”

She didn’t flinch. “Say, ‘That bitch always had a sport in the blood.’ ”

He thought for a moment, then uttered the words in a precise, considered, aristocratic Roman accent, one both like and unlike the voice they had heard the previous night.

“Well?” Silvia Tentori asked. “Am I supposed to infer something from this?”

“It was him,” she insisted, “I know it. He knows it. We all do.”

Malaspina shook his head, then got up and walked to the window, with its view out onto a bleak grey winter’s day and a field of slumbering vines. He placed his hands easily on the sill, looking at home, as if he owned the place.

“This is ridiculous, Agata,” he said. “I know you have always resented me. You’re not alone. Envy is everywhere. But to manufacture an accusation like this. Here… Let us see how far you will go with this mindless vendetta.”

There was a bookshelf behind him. Half the titles in the bedroom were still Emily’s, English and American literature, old books, about history and travel and classic stories she must have read time and time again. The rest were Costa’s or the family’s, a collection of texts that hadn’t been looked at for years, Gramsci and Pinocchio, the hard-boiled 1940s thrillers his father loved, and more modern gialli by Italian writers.

One more book, too, its pages unopened for years.

Franco Malaspina pulled the ragged family Bible off the shelf. His father had insisted on having an edition in the house, in spite of his beliefs. He would refer to it from time to time, and not always to prove a point.

He threw the black, battered copy, with its dog-eared and torn pages, across the room. It landed on her lap. Reluctantly, she took hold of the thing to stop it falling to the floor.

“Look me in the eye, Agata, and swear on that precious object of yours that you know it was me last night.”

She had her eyes closed, unable to speak. The faintest outline of a tear, almost invisible, like that of the Magdalene in the Doria Pamphilj, began to roll slowly down one cheek.

It was all lost. Costa knew it.

Painfully, he dragged himself out of the bed and sat on the edge, looking first at her, silent, remorseful, then at Malaspina.

“Get out of my home,” he said again, and, with a glance at the magistrate and the lawyers, added, “and take your creatures with you. When I come for you, Malaspina, you will know it.”

“That is a threat!” Silvia Tentori screeched. “A blatant, outright threat to a man against whom you have not the slightest evidence! I shall report this. I shall report everything here. We do not live in a police state where you people can go around terrorising any innocent citizen you choose.”

There was a steady, dull ache at the back of his head, but Costa knew somehow this signalled the return of his faculties, not the failure of them. Life, his father had said from time to time, often depended upon the ability to drag oneself off the floor and learn to return to the fray anew.

“No, signora,” he said quietly. “We live in a world where the law has become an instrument that protects the wicked, not the innocent.”

A memory rose from the previous day, a single useful fact, prompted by Rosa Prabakaran, one he had filed, wondering if it would ever be of use.

“ ‘Run quick, poor Simonetta!’ ” Costa recited. “ ‘A sport in the blood.’ You hate black women, Franco. Why is that? Would you care to tell us?”

It hit home, and that felt good. Malaspina’s swarthy face turned a shade darker.

“I would guess,” Costa pressed, “that it stems from something personal. Some experience. Some knowledge. Some grudge…”

Agata stirred with a sudden interest by his side. Smiling, she rose and walked towards Malaspina, placing her face close to his, examining his features with the same curious, microscopic interest she would normally reserve for a painting.

“Something personal? Why, Franco?” she asked. “The Malaspinas are cousins to the Medici, aren’t they? Is that the line? Oh! Oh!” She clapped her hands with glee. “I think I see it now. In Florence, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Giorgio Vasari has a wonderful full-length portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici. The first son. A dark-skinned man, Franco. With his helmet and his armour and his lance. And a black slave, Simonetta, for a mother.” She hesitated to emphasise what was coming. “Which gave him his hatred of anyone who reminded him of his bloodline. Is that you, too, Franco? Are you more a Medici at heart? Is the blood you hate most really your own?”

The effect was astonishing. Malaspina rose from his chair, livid, out of control, and began to bellow a stream of vicious threats and vile obscenities, so violent and extreme it was his own lawyers who raced to silence the man and drag him, still screaming from the room, down the stairs and out into the garden, where he stood for a good minute or more, yelling up at the window.

Every sentence seemed like a blow to her. Agata Graziano had surely never experienced words or threats like this, or expected that her idle taunt would generate such a response.

She listened, shocked, pale, glassy-eyed, until she could bear no more and placed her small, flawless hands over the wayward hair above her ears.

Two

Five minutes later, after Silvia Tentori had left the bedroom issuing warnings and threats in all directions, Peroni brought coffee for them all provided by Bea and said, “We could arrest him for that performance. Threatening words and behaviour.”

“For how long?” Costa asked. “You saw those lawyers.”

Agata still looked shocked, and a little ashamed, at the effect her words had had on the man. The hearing was over. They had lost everything, in conventional judicial terms. And yet…

“You touched something,” Falcone suggested. “But what?”

“I have no idea,” Agata answered. “I was simply being mean and horrible. Taunting Franco. The Malaspina clan was related to the Medici. Everyone knows that. They survived when the Medici died out. He makes the odd racist comment from time to time. It always struck me as odd. There had to be the possibility of some distant link with Alessandro, and that meant he had some black blood himself. All the same. The idea he would respond so violently…”

She shook her head, thinking. “I should stick to paintings,” she said. “This is all beyond me.”

“You should,” Costa agreed.

The idea raised a wan smile. “Good. Can I go home now, please? I’m tired and there are many duties I have missed. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

Leo Falcone looked at her frankly. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Commissario Esposito will be here shortly with Dr. Lupo. We will review the case. Perhaps you should join us, for part of the conversation at least.”

She laughed. “I’m a sister who agreed to help you identify a single painting, Leo. One you have lost, which means my work is done. I have more menial chores now. I do not belong here.”

Falcone frowned, looking uncomfortable. “Agata, you’re the only material witness in an investigation where every other one has been murdered. Those guards the commissario put in place last night were not temporary. They are outside now. They will remain there as long as I say. You cannot return to the convent until this is over. We cannot protect you there. You must be somewhere that is private, easily secured, and accessible.”

“Then” — she threw her small arms open wide — “where?”

The old inspector said nothing and simply glanced guiltily at the floor.

“Where?” she asked again.

Costa tried to catch Falcone’s eye. It proved impossible.

Three

“No,” he said again as they sat together at the dining room table, after Bea had thrust more coffee and cakes at them, then taken Pepe out for a brief walk. “I won’t allow it. This is a private home. Known to Malaspina. Also…”

The reason was personal in a way that made it difficult to share with these people. Perhaps it was the presence of Commissario Esposito. Perhaps the problem lay inside himself. It felt awkward having Bea in the house at times. Another woman…

“Nic,” Falcone broke in, “in case you hadn’t got the message by now, Franco Malaspina has many allies, and bottomless pockets. He could find anywhere we chose to keep Agata if it came to that. This place has a long drive, it’s easily guarded, and we know it.” He hesitated. “We’ve done this before. It worked. Until you broke the rules.”

“Will you kindly stop talking about me as if I’m some kind of invalid?” Agata broke in. “What am I supposed to do here for however long this sentence is meant to be?”

“What do you do normally?” Teresa asked out of interest.

“Sleep, pray, think, eat, write…”

Teresa shrugged. “You can do those anywhere. There’s Nic’s housekeeper here, Bea. So you have a chaperone.”

“A chaperone?” Agata asked, outraged. “Why would I need a chaperone?”

“I just thought…” Teresa stuttered. “Perhaps it would make it easier with the mother superior or whoever it is you take orders from. I’m sorry. I’m not good around nuns.”

“She is not a nun,” Falcone interjected wearily. “Nor does she need a chaperone. But you do require somewhere safe and secure. And…” He took a swig of Bea’s strong coffee “.…I hope this won’t be for long. We have… avenues.”

None of them, not Teresa, Esposito, nor Falcone, looked much convinced of that.

“Your painting’s gone, Leo,” Agata pointed out again. “You’ve just been sent away with a flea in your ear by the magistrate you hoped would give you carte blanche to enter the Palazzo Malaspina and take whatever you want. Unless I have misread the situation, you have no scientific evidence in this case.”

“We’re drowning in scientific evidence!” Teresa cried, aghast. “Unfortunately, it now applies simply to dead people. Buccafusca, Castagna, and Tomassoni, who did things in that dreadful house in the Vicolo del Divino Amore a woman like you couldn’t imagine.”

“I am a sister in a holy order, Doctor,” Agata said coldly, “not a child.”

“Well, Sister,” Teresa retorted, “let me tell you this. I have had hardened police officers throwing up in that hell house these last few weeks. Don’t play the heroine until you’ve been there. The plain fact is this. I have more than enough for what I would need in normal circumstances. But a fingerprint, a fibre, a DNA record… they don’t mean a damn thing unless I am allowed to match them with something else, in a way that will stand up in court.”

Agata folded her arms and looked at each of them in turn. “So I could be here for months.”

It was Commissario Esposito who intervened. “We have plenty more possibilities to look at now. There were seventeen canvases in Nino Tomassoni’s hovel in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina.”

She blinked and asked, seemingly amazed, “Where?”

“In the man’s house,” the commissario replied. “Seventeen canvases. Eleven we have identified from the stolen art register. These are works that have been taken from museums as far away as Stockholm and Edinburgh. Tomassoni — and, by implication, one assumes Malaspina — was seemingly part of some illicit art-smuggling ring working on a massive scale. Perhaps this explains why our interesting count finds it so easy to gain access to the criminal fraternity when he has call for their talents. He is simply dealing with his own.”

“Tomassoni’s house? I didn’t know where he lived. It was in the Piazza di San Lorenzo?”

She looked directly at Costa when she spoke. Once again, the name nagged at him.

“Yes,” Falcone agreed. “Is this important?”

“I’m nothing but a humble sister, Leo. What would a little woman like me know?”

“The name means something,” Costa said. “And I can’t remember what.”

They fell silent, all of them, and looked at Agata Graziano, waiting.

“You’re asking me?” she said. “I thought I was just supposed to be the silent houseguest.”

“Yes,” Costa prompted her. “We are asking you.”

“What a strange world you inhabit,” Agata Graziano observed. “With your procedures and your science, your computers and your rigid modes of thought. Does it never occur to you that if an answer does not manifest itself in the present, that is, perhaps, because it prefers to do so in the past?”

She looked at Costa. “What did I tell you, Nic? When we were walking through those streets last night? Those ghosts are with us, always. Only a fool wouldn’t listen to them.”

“We’re police officers,” Falcone grumbled. “Not hunters of ghosts.”

“Then perhaps I’ll be here forever. This is not acceptable to me, Leo. I shall allow you a week to bring Franco Malaspina to book. After that I return home, to some form of sanity. Or now, if you do not agree.”

Falcone’s thin, tanned face flared with shock. “No! That is impossible. You cannot set time limits on such things. Who do you think you are dealing with?”

“I’ve just watched Franco Malaspina tell me that. I’m a free woman. I may do as I wish. Best start working. Perhaps if you hammer those computers of yours a little harder. Or find some newer science for your games…”

“It’s an old name,” Costa interrupted, hoping to cool the temperature. “Tomassoni.”

“It is an old name,” she agreed. “Here is one more fact I doubt any of you know, for all your wonderful toys and resources. I would have told you, but it seemed irrelevant until today. Possibly it still is.”

Agata got up and walked to the line of bookshelves by the fireplace. Volume after volume from the days of Costa’s father sat in rows, gathering dust along the walls. She picked up two substantial editions, both bought years ago, books on art, then brought them back to the table, where she began to leaf through the pages as she spoke, looking, surely, for something she knew was there already.

“It is a known fact,” she said, “that Caravaggio lived in the Vicolo del Divino Amore for some time. Not during the happier part of his life either. This was after he left the hedonistic paradise of Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama. He had little money. He kept bad company. Very bad. This was Ortaccio, remember. The Garden of Evil.”

She found what she wanted in one of the books, placed it in front of them, and covered whatever lay there with a napkin from the table.

“I have walked every inch of Rome in that man’s footsteps,” Agata added. “I know where he lived and ate, where he whored and fought. No one can be sure of this precisely, but you must remember something, always. In Caravaggio’s days, men kept records. They noted down details of crimes and property transactions, small civil disturbances and matters of money and debt. Many of those papers are with us still.” She smiled at them. “Out of your reach, true, safe in archives in the Vatican, in a country where you people have no jurisdiction. But a small and curious sister of the Church, with a little interest in history…”

Costa found himself transfixed by her, and he wasn’t alone.

“You looked up the records for the street?” he asked.

“Of course I did! When Leo first told me the painting had been found there. Who wouldn’t?”

“Well…?” Teresa demanded.

“The house where Caravaggio lived was either that same property or one of the two to either side. I cannot be more specific. The street had a different name then, different numbering. But there is a record in the church register which names Caravaggio as a resident in 1605, with a young boy — a servant, a student, a lover, who knows? He was reduced to poverty. He was constantly in fights and brawls and arguments.” She paused. “It was his home when he murdered the man whose death forced him to flee Rome.”

They were silent and, Costa apart, dubious.

It was Peroni who spoke first.

“Agata,” he pointed out, reasonably, “this was hundreds of years ago.”

“Caravaggio took that man’s life on May 28, 1606, while he was living in what we now know as the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Within days he was gone from Rome forever, travelling ceaselessly — Naples, Malta, Sicily — dependent on the help of allies and patrons to feed him and keep him from the executioner.”

“A long time ago,” Falcone repeated, staring at the book on the table, wondering, like the rest of them, what it contained.

“They fought in the street,” she went on, ignoring him, “over what we don’t know. When it was over, the man was dead. His name was Ranuccio Tomassoni. He died in the house where he and his family had lived for almost two centuries, and for all I know continued to live thereafter. It was in the Piazza di San Lorenzo di Lucina.”

Costa closed his eyes and laughed. “How on earth did I forget that?”

“You forgot it,” she said instantly, “because you regarded it as history and irrelevant to the present. As I may one day tire of telling you, it isn’t. These are not the stories of people turned to dust. They are our stories, and in some curious way they became the stories of Franco Malaspina, Nino Tomassoni, and the rest.” She shook her head. She looked exhausted, but immensely energised by her subject too. “Something has placed them alongside what happened then. Perhaps that painting that means so much. Perhaps… I don’t know. Look…”

It wasn’t the picture they were expecting, but another from the second book.

“Caravaggio painted this while he was in Malta.”

It was a dark study of an elderly man, half naked on his bed, writing. Saint Jerome. Another of the canvases in Valletta that Costa knew, one day, he had to see.

“At this time of his life, Caravaggio chose what he did for a reason,” she went on. “Money. Survival. The passing friendship of influential men. We know for a fact that this particular work was painted at the request of someone who helped him escape from mainland Italy and reach the temporary safety of the Knights Templar in Valletta. A few months later Michelangelo Merisi was fleeing once more after committing some other crime, which the Knights hid for fear it shamed them too. This patron continued to assist him. In Sicily. All the way to the end, when he returned to the mainland and sought to come back to Rome.”

She took a sip of water from a glass on the table. “That man’s name was Ippolito Malaspina. I have never raised this fact with Franco. But I know for sure that he must be a direct descendant.

The man had many children. The castle Franco continues to own in Tuscany, from which he has lent the Barberini works for display from time to time, was the property where his ancestor lived with his family before leaving for Malta with Caravaggio.”

Her dark eyes stared at them. “There was a connection between the Medici and the Malaspina clans. Perhaps Franco’s fury stems from that. What more do I have to show you? Are these subjects you will pass on to some young police officer and hope they can comprehend? Even I don’t understand them. Perhaps in time.” She glanced at Costa. “With help and insight. But…”

She sat back, closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them and glared at Commissario Esposito. “You will provide the books I need. A computer. An officer who can carry out external research and fetch and carry when I require. Tomorrow I shall see this house of Tomassoni’s. And the place in the Vicolo del Divino Amore…”

“It’s not pretty,” Teresa observed, shaking her head.

“As I keep telling you, I am not a child. You will do these things and I will help you. And if it’s no use, then what’s lost?”

They were silent, even Costa.

“Commissario,” Agata declared. “I will not stay here and learn to knit. The choice is yours.”

“Very well,” Vincenzo Esposito snapped. “Indulge Sister Agata as she requires. You will organise security, Falcone. Agente Prabakaran will act as go-between for anything the sister demands. The details of these visits outside will not leave this room. Franco Malaspina is a far more dangerous individual than any of us appreciated. If his talents run to taming magistrates and international art smuggling, then he will know men who are capable of anything. As is he.”

“Good,” Agata said, then removed the napkin from the page of the second book, an old biography of Caravaggio, one of Costa’s favourites, and held it up for them all to see.

They found themselves looking at the black-and-white photograph of a portrait of a gentleman, round-faced with a pale complexion, a double chin, and large, very bulbous eyes. He sat on a velvet-covered chair and wore rich, sumptuous clothes, as if he were of some importance.

Agata ran a finger over the man’s unattractive features. “You must excuse me in a moment. I’m tired. I need to rest. I expect some time on my own. This is by Caravaggio from his Malta period,” she said. “It was in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin from the early nineteenth century on. Unfortunately the work was destroyed when the city was retaken at the end of the Second World War. What you see is a portrait of Ippolito Malaspina painted by Caravaggio shortly before he fled Valletta.”

Costa stared at the portly, bloodless individual in his faintly ridiculous court clothes. He had the face of a weak and lascivious civil servant. It was tempting to see some sarcasm or ridicule of the subject in the face; such sly, slight jokes were not unknown to Caravaggio.

“This pasty-faced idiot doesn’t look anything like that pig we had here!” Teresa said, jabbing a finger at the portrait.

“Precisely,” Agata replied quietly, then snapped the book shut.

Four

At eight in the evening, Bea was standing at the foot of the stairs, tapping her feet, looking mildly cross.

“A part of me wishes to say this is the worst girl you have ever brought back, Nic,” she muttered, perhaps only half joking.

“I wouldn’t call her ‘girl’ to her face,” he said. “Nor do I think it accurate to say I brought her back.”

“No,” she grumbled. “More like putting her in prison really, isn’t it? And I’m the warder.”

Bea didn’t like the men at the bottom of the drive. Some urge within her made it essential she take them coffee and water and panini from time to time. On the last occasion, she had encountered Peroni, who was singing a bawdy Tuscan song at the top of his voice. Costa understood this was as much to keep up morale as anything. It was Peroni’s way to try to lighten the situation and keep a team going. He couldn’t expect Bea to understand such an idea, and so there had been a chilly encounter between the two of them.

“Also… she hasn’t yet had a bath. She may be a genius but to me the poor thing’s positively feral in normal company.”

“Normal company being us, naturally. Agata does not live the way we do. If you want to return to your apartment…”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t expect a woman like her to be alone in a house with a man. It wouldn’t be right. Also… someone shot you last night, in case you forgot.”

“Buckshot,” he answered. “Water off a duck’s back, really. You know the Costa breed. We feel nothing. Seriously. It’s uncomfortable. Nothing more.”

“The arrogance of men…” she muttered. “There will be food on the table in five minutes. I would be grateful if someone turned up to eat it. I’ve called several times. Not a word in return. You speak with her. I give up.”

With that she marched back to the kitchen, leaving Costa at the foot of the steps, wondering.

This was an awkward situation, but it was his house.

He went upstairs, along to the largest guest room, which had been hastily cleaned by Bea, with new sheets found for the double bed, and towels and soap for the bathroom. It was a beautiful room, his brother’s when he was young, with the best view in the house, an undisturbed one back to the Via Appia Antica, and scarcely a sign of modern life, no roads, just the single telegraph pole leading to the property, visible in the very corner, beyond the vines and the cypresses lining the drive.

He knocked on the door and said, “There’s food.”

“I know.”

Nothing more.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

He was about to go when she added, “Come in, Nic. Please. I want to ask you something.”

With a sigh, he opened the door. Agata sat in front of the dresser staring at herself in the mirror, an expression of puzzlement and fear on her face. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and black slacks. Her hair was tied back tightly, drawing the rampant curly locks away from her face, which, now he saw more of it, was angular and striking. This was the head of some artist’s model, not beautiful in a conventional sense, not even pretty necessarily, but one that was fated to be looked at, stared at even, because it contained such an intensity of life and thought and — the word did not seem inappropriate — grace.

“Look what they’ve done to me,” she complained. “I asked for books and information. They bring me these clothes, too, and say I must wear them to look less conspicuous. Why?”

“Castagna, Buccafusca, and Nino Tomassoni are dead,” he pointed out. “Like it or not, you’re our only material witness. These precautions—”

“Franco simply hates anyone who’s black. Even half black. We all saw that today.” She couldn’t stop looking at the image of herself in the glass. “We don’t have these big mirrors at home,” she murmured. “Or private rooms with beds large enough for four. And this house…”

She stood up and walked to the window. “I can’t even see a light from here. Or hear a human voice or a car or bus.”

“Most people would think that an advantage.”

She turned and stared at him, astounded. “What? To be denied the sounds of humanity? I’ve lived my entire life in the city. I know it. Those are the sounds of its breathing. Why do people wish to run away from everything? What are you frightened of?”

“Tomorrow,” he replied, shrugging. “Today sometimes too.”

She laughed, just. “Well, thank you. That’s one trick you’ve taught me. I never feared anything until you people came into my life. Now I see a man with a gun round every corner, and I look at a painting — a painting by Caravaggio — and wonder if it should shake my faith. Thank you very much indeed.”

“This is the world, Agata,” he replied meekly. “I’m sorry we dragged you into it. I’m sure, someday soon, you will be able to go back to where you came from. Just not now.”

She was silent for a moment.

“And you?” she asked in the end.

“I will find my own way,” he answered. “By some means or other. Provided I eat from time to time. Now, will you join us? Please?”

Five

At nine-fifteen Rosa Prabakaran delivered the items Agata had demanded, then left for the night. Costa watched Agata carefully unpack what had arrived, taking immense care over several ancient academic tomes and a notebook computer bearing the stamp of the Barberini on the base, and very little notice indeed of two plastic grocery bags with what she said were her personal items from the convent.

Bea stared at the paltry collection of cheap, well-worn clothes and asked, “Is that it?”

“What more am I supposed to need?”

Bea walked out of the room and came back with her arms full of soft towels, some so large and suspiciously fresh Costa wondered if she’d bought them that afternoon, along with boxes of soap and other unidentifiable cosmetics.

“The plumbing in this place can be difficult sometimes,” she declared. “When you are ready, I will introduce you to the mysteries of the bathroom.”

Then she went upstairs.

Agata watched her leave.

“What is Bea to you, Nic?”

“A family friend. She and my father were… very good friends once upon a time. That died. The closeness remained.”

“Does she think I’m odd?”

“Probably,” he admitted.

“Do you?”

“You’re not the normal houseguest.”

“Who is?”

He groaned. Agata did not give up easily. She had insisted she wanted to retire to her bedroom to work. Yet now…

“I have to speak to the men outside. You have your belongings. Is there anything else I can provide?”

“Yes. There is a room with some art materials in it. Along there…” She pointed to the rear of the house and the place he hadn’t entered, not since Emily’s death. “What is it, please? I couldn’t help but notice earlier. I may need something.”

“Let me show you,” he said, and led the way.

The studio was clean and tidy, though it smelled a little of damp, as it always did when the place went unused and unheated for any amount of time. Emily’s work was everywhere: line drawings of buildings, sketches, studies, ideas, doodles.

“Your wife was an artist?” Agata asked.

“An architect. Or she was hoping to be one. When she finished her studies.”

“You can’t learn to build well overnight,” she countered, picking up a sketch from the nearest pile. It was of the Uffizi in Florence, from the weekend in October when he’d found the time to take a break from work, the first since their wedding in the summer. He didn’t find it easy to look at now.

“She could draw,” Agata commented. “Very well. Art and architecture go hand in hand, but then, you know that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t treat you like an imbecile.”

She looked around the room and shivered. It was cold. She was wearing just the cheap, thin white cotton shirt and the equally inexpensive slacks that came from the convent. The Questura budget hadn’t run to clothes, though Rosa had told him quietly she intended to correct this in the morning. In some strange, subtle way, they were beginning to adopt Agata Graziano, form a protective, insular wall around her, and not simply as a way of keeping out Franco Malaspina and his thugs. A part of her seemed too delicate to be allowed to wander free in the world the rest of them inhabited. Costa wondered whether this was fair, or even an accurate reading of the facts.

“I shouldn’t be in this place, prying. It’s private. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just a room,” he said, and smiled. “You’re welcome to use it as much as you wish. Before Emily had it, my sister worked here. She is an artist too. It needs…”

The white walls were now a little grey and in need of paint. He remembered the sound of voices in the house when he was growing up, and how he would come in here for peace sometimes, watching his sister work at some strange, abstract canvas he would never understand.

“It needs company,” he murmured, and found the thought began to bring a sharp, stinging sensation to his eyes.

She noticed and said quickly, “Good night, Nic. I must see what Bea has to teach me about this bathroom of yours.”

Six

He waited at the foot of the stairs, thinking, wondering whether he should stay nearby in case there was some difficulty between the two. But after a while he heard their voices from above, happy voices, followed by the running of water, then, drifting down the steps, the smell of soap and shampoo.

If Bea had had a daughter, she would have been about Agata’s age. He had seen that glint in her eyes the moment this bright, dishevelled young woman had walked through the door. The poor thing’s positively feral.

Costa found himself amused by the description. It was both apposite and somehow ridiculous. Agata was an extraordinarily sophisticated woman. She simply chose not to show it on the outside.

He found his coat, walked down the drive, and went to the men in the marked car blocking the entrance. It was a cold, clear night, full of stars, bright with the light of a waxing moon.

Peroni was there with an officer Costa didn’t recognise. They were listening to the radio — old, bad Italian jazz, the kind Gianni would force on anyone given half the chance — and drinking coffee from a thermos.

“Is there anything I can get you gentlemen?” he asked as they wound down the window.

“Some ladies, some wine, some food,” Peroni responded instantly. “Actually, just the food will do. Got any?”

“You know where the kitchen is. I’m going to bed.”

“How’s the shoulder?” Peroni asked, suddenly serious.

“Aching. But it’s not worth worrying about. Is everything OK here?”

“It’s good,” Peroni said, nodding, meaning it. “Better than it looked. You know, when that bastard stormed out of here all smug and knowing this afternoon, I didn’t think so. I thought… there you go. Some rich jerk is going to walk all over us again. But I don’t now. I have no idea why. It’s probably the early onset of mental degeneration. I just think… we will nail him, Nic. We’re here. There are a hundred good men and women or more on the case back at the Questura. This new commissario is on our side too. It will work out. Somehow or other. I promise.”

He turned and stared out of the car window. “You know what makes me so certain? It’s that awful detail Rosa got out of the hooker who went away. The idea that these animals photographed those women like that. You know. Just when…”

He did know. Costa thought he understood why too. It was the precise instant captured on the canvas. Agata described it exactly: the moment of the fall. In the cries of those women, however unreal, however they were brought about, by sex or violence or — and he had to countenance this — the imminence of death, lay some secret pleasure the Ekstasists craved to witness.

“I don’t believe in God,” Peroni went on, “but I’m damned sure that men like that will not walk away from us, not in the end. It’s only Malaspina now, and we will have him.”

Costa agreed. “We will,” he said, then went back to the house, poured himself a small glass of the Verdicchio, which was barely touched, and found the chair by the fire, once his father’s, always the most comfortable in the house.

The dog was there already, a small, stiff furry shape curled up in front of the burning logs, slumbering.

There was a photo on the mantel. He reached up and took it in his hands, wishing, in the futile way one did, that his father could have seen this before he died.

He and Emily stood where newly married couples often did on their wedding day in Rome, by the Arch of Constantine, next to the Colosseum, in their best clothes, Emily with a bouquet in her arms, smiling, happier than he had ever seen her, he in a suit Falcone had helped him buy, the best he’d ever owned, a perfect fit, now consigned to Teresa’s evidence pile, torn apart by Malaspina’s pellets, stained with Costa’s own blood.

Lives were drawn together by invisible lines, unseen contours that joined waypoints one never noticed until they were already fading in the receding distance of memory. From the moment captured here to Emily’s death was but a few brief months, and nothing could have told him that then, nothing could ease the ache he felt now, the pain, the regret over so many unspoken words, such a proliferation of deeds and kindnesses that never took place.

Time stole everything in the end. It had no need of an accomplice, some arrogant, deranged aristocrat hiding behind a mask and a gun.

From above him he heard a sound, one he struggled, for a moment, to recognise. Then it came… laughter. Bea and Agata, happy together, their amusement running like a river, almost giggling, the way that children did, or a mother and daughter, joined by some mutual amusement over something that would never, in a million years, reach his ears.

This was how it was supposed to be. This was how it should have been.

He closed his eyes and held the photograph in its frame close to him.

God gave us tears for a reason.

Perhaps, he thought. But something stood between him and Emily’s pale, remembered face, still alive, still breathing in his memory. It was a figure in a hood, one who now possessed a voice and a face and a black, evil intent that was not yet sated.