The Garden of Evil

One

Christmas day was grey and wet, the clouds so low they almost touched the tops of the jagged monuments littering the horizon of the Appian Way. Costa woke late, his shoulder hurting. The women were downstairs already, dressed and ready for whatever the day would bring. Peroni was with them, looking thoroughly miserable.

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

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

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

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

There was a small silver crucifix inside.

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

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

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

They sat down. Peroni pointed back towards the kitchen.

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

“Bea?”

“Not Bea.”

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

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

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 The tentative tipoff from the informer in Naples had been superseded.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

“You told her?” Costa asked.

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

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

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

“You could try making her,” Costa suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Besides what?”

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

“Such as?” Costa asked.

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

“How the hell do they know?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two

She spent an hour in the Convent, an anonymous grey building close to the river and the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo. No men were allowed past the high wooden door, so Rosa Prabakaran and two other female officers accompanied her, and came out none the wiser. Agata had simply gone to her room and the chapel, spoken to some other sisters, entered the library to consult some books, then returned in just enough time for them to make the meeting with the forensic team.

The terraced house in the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina was unrecognisable. Half the square was now blocked off to allow forensic officers clear access. The ancient, moth-eaten furniture from the ground floor had been removed. A sanitized plastic tunnel now ran through the front door for visitors. In the space between plastic and wall, men and women in white suits were on hands and knees performing a fingertip search of every last crack in the ancient floor, every mote of dust in the corners. The route led through the entire central, twisting staircase, a sterile cocoon through which they would pass until, Teresa said, they got to the top floor, where the work was essentially done and there was enough room for a meeting.

Halfway up, Agata stopped and stared at the area where, the day before, she had found herself face-to-face with the skull of the corpse Costa prayed would turn out to be Ippolito Malaspina. This section of the building was unrecognisable. Silvio Di Capua had clearly won his battle with the city planning authorities. Gigantic iron supports had been brought in to run from floor to ceiling, and workmen had removed the wall brick by brick, revealing the rectangular hidden room behind. Open to view, it seemed much smaller. The cabinet was still there, now empty. The boxes of documents that he had seen lining the far wall had disappeared too.

He knew Teresa’s methods well. She was a woman who was directed, always, by priorities, and possessed an instinctive grasp of what was worth seizing first. Forensic on the strange skeleton Agata had found would surely be uppermost in her mind. But she understood, as well as any, that this was no straightforward case, no hunt for incriminating evidence. They had that already. What they needed was a link — a connection that placed Franco Malaspina in this dingy, rotting building, and made him a part of the Ekstasists, in such a firm and undeniable way that even the most sceptical or malleable of magistrates could not ignore it.

Whatever hopes he had in that direction faded the moment they entered the top floor, where the canvases were now stacked neatly to one side. Toni Grimaldi stood close by in a grey suit, a short cigar in his hand and a sour expression on his face.

“Oh, wonderful,” Peroni murmured, rather too loudly for comfort.

“Merry Christmas, gentlemen,” Grimaldi announced with a yawn before lifting the sackcloth on one of the canvases, squinting at what he saw, and adding, “They say this stuff is worth millions.”

Agata strode over and threw the sackcloth off entirely.

“Poussin,” she declared, with the briefest of scowls. “At least it’s supposed to be. Leo?”

Falcone came away from the window, where he’d been staring idly into the piazza.

“Poussin it is,” he agreed. “If you think it’s a fake, best tell the people in Stockholm now, because they have other ideas.”

“It’s their painting,” she replied, then stared at the newcomer.

“How goes your case, Sister?” Grimaldi asked under the heat of her glare.

“I don’t have a case.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you’re not the only one. Let me make my position clear. Today… Christmas Day… I listen to what they have to say. Then I decide whether to allow you to put it in front of a magistrate. Once again. Think of me as that man or woman of the judiciary. Before you can convince them, you must convince me. Should you fail…”

He bestowed a humourless smile on all of them. Grimaldi almost always wore the expression Costa associated with Questura lawyers, the one that said, I will stop you doing anything stupid because I know I can. He was also one of the smartest and most assiduous men they had, a decent, dedicated police official who would work every minute of the day to get a conviction when he thought there was a chance of one.

“Franco stole all these paintings, didn’t he?” Agata asked, raking her slender arm around the room. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Prove it,” Grimaldi replied.

Falcone’s long, lean face wrinkled with displeasure. “You know we can’t. Yet. But look at the circumstantial evidence.”

“I’ve looked at little else for weeks,” the lawyer answered. “Let me summarise. Nino Tomassoni was involved in an art theft ring. So, the French would have it, was this Véronique Gillet. Malaspina knew both of them socially, and perhaps, in the case of the woman, intimately.”

“He slept with her,” Costa said. “He told me so.”

“Sleeping with a suspected criminal is an offence?” Grimaldi threw his big arms open in a theatrical gesture.

Peroni spoke up. “Toni, we have known each other for many years. I understand your caution—”

“This is not caution. This is plain common sense and good practise. You have nothing. Even those dreadful photographs you found here. Have you one single woman to interview as a result?”

The colour rose in Falcone’s face. “They’re either dead or back in Africa. Give us a chance, man. A little time.”

“You don’t have time, Leo. This investigation has cost the Questura a fortune in legal fees alone. And how far have you gotten? Malaspina has all of us tied up in knots. You can’t ask him to take the most basic of scientific tests because he’s used your ham-fisted investigations against you—”

“Not ours,” Falcone cut in.

“The law does not distinguish between competent police officers and incompetent ones. You’re all the same in the eyes of the magistrate. That is why you cannot use your swabs on this man. Or anyone else who is unwilling if they know about this loophole. Please, you have made us enough work already. Do you know what our priority is at this moment?”

“To put this murderous bastard in jail?” Peroni snapped, as livid as Falcone now.

“Live in the real world, Gianni,” the lawyer retorted. “In the absence of an impending arrest, our priority must be to overturn this judgment in principle that Malaspina obtained against you.”

Falcone turned and looked at him. “ ‘In principle’?” he repeated.

“In principle. Must I spell this out for you?”

Agata, clearly baffled, said, “For me you must.”

“Very well,” Grimaldi agreed. “If I try to attack the individual ruling that Malaspina won, then I open up every nasty black bag of worms you people have provided him with. The harassment. The unproven and unprovable allegations. The use of evidence that does not meet the most basic of legal rules. The very personal nature in which you pursued this investigation.”

“Malaspina is a crook and a murderer,” Falcone snarled.

“And an aristocrat with more money and connections than most of us could dream of in several lifetimes,” Grimaldi said, unimpressed. “Think about it. See this through our eyes.”

Costa was starting to get a sick feeling in his stomach. “Through your eyes?” he asked.

The lawyer hesitated. He didn’t appear to enjoy his position any more than the rest of them.

“We may have to make choices. Unless you can come up with something very soon. Such as today. Or tomorrow at the latest…” He coughed into his big fist, embarrassed by what he was going to say. “Without that I’m going to have to recommend to the commissario that we scale down this investigation, take the heat off this man, and hope we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Peroni bellowed.

“It means…” Grimaldi looked deeply unhappy. “I have to be practical about this. If you can’t nail him, I must ask myself a broader question. Shouldn’t I be thinking of the future instead? Of all those men like him who’ll get away using the same trick? If I can cut a deal with Malaspina so that he leaves us alone to close that loophole, and we don’t make it retroactive, which might be hard anyway…”

There was silence in the room. Even the handful of scene-of-crime officers had stopped work and turned to stare at the large lawyer in the grey suit, astonished, appalled.

“It’s not as if Franco Malaspina is going to go out there and start his tricks again, is he?” Grimaldi looked like a man at bay. “You people tell me what the right thing to do is. Fail to imprison some murdering bastard who’s finished killing? Or find a way to try to hit the sons of bitches out there who are about to start?”

The man appealed to Teresa Lupo. “You’re forensic. You tell me. What would you rather have? Him on the streets, not daring to touch another woman in his life, and the way it all was before? Or him on the streets and you still trying to do the job with your hands tied behind your back. Well?”

It was Agata who spoke.

“I’m just a sister,” she said, staring at him. “But I think you can only judge a man on what he’s done, not what he might do. These crimes…” She caught Costa’s eye. “If one turns a blind eye to them, what sense of justice is there anywhere?”

“Fine!” the lawyer yelled. “I deal in the law, Sister. I leave justice to priests and nuns like you.” He stabbed a finger at Teresa Lupo. “Tell me, do you want your toys back or not?”

The pathologist just stared at him and shook her head. “You know,” she said quietly, “just when I think I’m working my way out of the habit of wanting to hit people, someone like you comes along. Will you shut up and listen for a moment? I’m greedy. I want both. Let’s run through the small business here quickly, then go to the morgue and stare at some bones. And if that fails—”

“Then I go home to my family,” Grimaldi cut in. “So do you have anything that links Malaspina with this place? Anything at all?”

The two forensic scientists stared at one another, anxious and, for once, silent.

There was, in truth, very little to tie any of it to Malaspina. A set of stolen paintings worth tens of millions of euros, looted from a variety of public institutions throughout Europe over a period of seven years. Some documents, found in the boxes in the hidden room, indicating that Nino Tomassoni acted as a kind of warehouseman for whatever gang was involved in the thefts. The photographs from the gap in the wall where the Caravaggio had once stood. One single piece of paper that linked the late Véronique Gillet to the loop: an email sent from her Louvre address, revealing the movement of a Miró canvas from Barcelona to Madrid, a journey during which it had been stolen. Finally the clear evidence that it was Tomassoni who had been sending messages to the Questura in an anonymous effort to draw the police’s attention to the crimes.

“This is it?” Grimaldi asked. “Not a trace of Malaspina in the house. Not a fingerprint. Not a single document…”

“The emails Tomassoni sent to the Questura name Malaspina,” Teresa pointed out.

“Uncorroborated gossip from a dead man,” the lawyer observed.

“Give us time,” Falcone pleaded. “We’re inundated with material. We can’t cope with what we have. It could be weeks. Months.”

“You don’t have months, Leo,” Grimaldi replied with marked impatience. “I wish I could say you did. This happens to be my professional opinion. But it’s more than that. It’s a political issue, too, these days. The Justice people are calling. Everyone is calling. The wheels are starting to come off everywhere, not just with us, with the Carabinieri, the local police, the customs people… Everyone is affected by this and I’m the one who gets the phone call. The criminal fraternity know. Very soon every last one of them will understand they can, in the absence of other hard evidence, duck a fingerprint or a swab. Fifteen years ago we didn’t even have these things and we put people in jail all the time. Now it seems that, without them, we’re screwed.”

Costa thought he could hear Esposito’s voice in all this. The new commissario was a pragmatic man, one who would not wish to be tied by the mistakes of others.

“We’ve a wealth of material,” Teresa said confidently. “We’re working as quickly as we can. There are reams of documents downstairs…”

“You said they were historical,” the lawyer retorted.

“They are,” she answered, uncertain of herself.

“So what use is that?” Grimaldi flung his hands in the air. “This is here. This is now. If you want me to prosecute Franco Malaspina, I need evidence from this century, not the scribbles of a few ghosts.”

“And if a ghost could talk?” Agata asked quietly.

“I’d look even more of an idiot trying to sell this farrago of loose ends to a magistrate.”

Agata took the black bag off her shoulder and Costa realised, at that moment, what was wrong. The thing was heavier, and had been since sometime the previous day.

She retrieved a large, thick book from its interior, one bound in dark leather cracked with age. Agata opened it and they all saw what was on the page: line after line of scribbled script, broken into paragraphs with dated headings. A journal. A diary from another time.

“You took this from that room?” Costa asked her. “Without my seeing? You stole it before I even got there?”

She’d been reading it, too, when he’d walked into Emily’s studio the previous night. He recognised the book. It had been by her side.

Grimaldi groaned. “There goes any possibility of introducing it as evidence. Not that I believe for one moment—”

“You have the evidence,” Agata interrupted. “You’ve told me that. Time and time again. What you want is the link, isn’t it?”

Teresa walked over and placed her gloved fingers on the cover. “Prints,” she said. “Silvio. Arrange it. God knows…” She glanced at Agata. “We’ll have to take yours to exclude them from anything we get.”

She held up her hands. They bore white forensic gloves just like Teresa’s. They must have been in the bag as well, and she had slipped them on as she withdrew the volume.

“I stole these from your forensic officers,” she said. “Now, do you wish to prosecute me for petty theft? Or would you like to know what I found?”

Three

It was a diary, one that covered a period of nine years, from June 13, 1597, to May 29, 1606, the day after Ranuccio Tomassoni’s murder. She had spent much of the previous night reading it, but parts had still, Agata said, only been skimmed. She had focused on those that appeared to contain the most activity. Then, when she had made the excuse to visit the convent, she had consulted with another sister there, one skilled in documents of that period and capable of translating some of the words and terms with which she was unfamiliar.

There were many. Agata Graziano’s dark complexion hid her blushes, mostly. The front page of the book bore the title, in ornate gilt lettering, Gli Ekstasisti e Evathia, “The Ekstasists and Eve.” It concealed the private chronicle of the Ekstasists by-week account of a secret male brotherhood that began as a prank of wild young men and developed over the years into something darker, more malevolent. The contents were, to begin with, frank and boastful, the record of a private gang of talented and often moneyed men who spent their days in the bright, chattering intellectual society of Renaissance Rome and their nights in the bleak, hard, physical violence of the Ortaccio underclass. There were wild tales of sexual adventures with society women and prostitutes, and practises among the members themselves that could have attracted a quick death sentence had the truth become known to the Vatican. There were sketches, pornographic cartoons, and ribald, obscene poems. And the pages recorded rituals, too: ceremonies only hinted at, but, Agata said, with pagan and alchemical antecedents.

Among the ancient scribbles were preliminary drawings for paintings, at least some of which were the work of Caravaggio.

“Here,” she said, indicating the strange rough outline of three naked muscular figures seen from below, set around a globe. “This is a sketch for his only fresco, commissioned by Del Monte for the casino of the Villa Ludovisi. It’s still there today. Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, although in truth these are allegories for the triad of Paracelsus, and alchemical conceit… sulphur and air, mercury and water, salt and earth. The casino was used by Del Monte for dabbling in pursuits the Vatican would have regarded as heretical. Possibly with Galileo at his side.”

She turned to the beginning of the book and another sketch, one occupying two full pages as the frontispiece.

“Evathia in Ekstasis. Eve in Ecstasy. The moment those worldly sins they worshipped in secret entered our lives.”

They all crowded round to see. Even this sketch, in crude ink, took Costa’s breath away. It possessed the finished work’s subtle play upon the mind, the ability to shift in perspective and daring, depending on how the viewer gazed on the rapturous woman’s tense and highly physical moment of bliss.

“She,” Agata said quietly, “was the goddess of them all. Mother and wife. Whore and slave. Bringer of both joy and damnation. This was what they worshipped. This” — her fingers traced the sensuous outline of the female nude on the page — “is what Franco Malaspina worships today. Like his ancestor.”

There were, she said, seven of them, never referred to by name, only by trade or postion: the Painter, the Caporione, the Merchant, the Servant, the Poet, the Priest, and, more often than any, il Conte Nero, the Black Count. This was Ippolito Malaspina, she believed, while Ranuccio Tomassoni was the Caporione, Caravaggio the Painter, and the Priest someone in the service of Cardinal Del Monte, the artist’s landlord at the turn of the century.

“How do you know about the Priest?” Falcone demanded.

“It was” — a sly smile flickered in Costa’s direction — “guesswork. I was in luck. The records of Del Monte’s household still exist. In these days of modern miracles, I can even examine them in the Vatican repository on Christmas Day, at two in the morning, on someone else’s computer. There was a name there… Father Antonio L’Indaco, son of an artist recorded in the annals of Vasari, one who had worked with Michelangelo. This was a bohemian household.”

“And it was him… because?” Costa asked, half knowing the answer.

“Because at the end of May 1606, Antonio L’Indaco disappeared and was never seen again. Why?”

They waited, listening, all of them, the police officers and the lawyer, and scene-of-crime people in their suits.

“He is the one who went to Malta with Caravaggio and pretended to be Ippolito Malaspina, while the man himself was dead, inside this house, murdered in the violence that also brought about the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni.”

Costa touched the pages. The paper was thick and felt a little damp. It was not hard for him to imagine Caravaggio and the other Ekstasists standing over this book, scribbling down the details of their exploits, and small sketches, almost doodles, in the margins.

“Why did he die?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“I can guess,” she answered with a marked, quiet reluctance. “This book covers nine years. A substantial part of many a man’s life in those days. In the beginning” — she frowned — “it’s nothing more than a game. Drinking and fighting and women. The way it began for Franco, I think. Until something — the ‘sport in the blood’ — took hold of him. Then…”

She flicked to a page with a yellow bookmark, towards the end of the book. They crowded round and gazed at what was there: an ink drawing of a terrified woman naked on her back, surrounded by grinning, laughing men.…

He followed the line of her extended finger. In the margin of the page was written, God forgive me, for I know not what I do…

The flowing, easy writing, sloping, somehow almost regretful in its very nature, was the same as that on the missing painting, the same as that of Caravaggio himself.

Four

“You can see them fall apart,” she went on. “Over the final two years. I am certain that it is Antonio L’Indaco who writes most of these entries. There are phrases and terms he uses that would be natural to a priest and to no one else. Here…”

She turned to a page dated November 16, 1604. There was no illustration this time. The entry described the abduction of an Ortaccio prostitute and her removal to a private place, “in front of the Goddess,” where she was subjected to a humiliating series of sexual acts, each described in precise detail though in a fashion that led the reader to believe the author of the account did not approve — or perhaps witness — what had happened.

“It became worse, and it was Ippolito Malaspina and Ranuccio Tomassoni who led this throughout. Time and time again. It is here in these pages. A steady downward cycle of despair and abasement until…”

Another yellow bookmark flagged the place. Agata opened the page. It was dated May 27, 1606, one day before the murder of Tomassoni.

“Read it,” she ordered.

The hand of the writer must have been shaking, with fury or terror or both. In large, uncharacteristically inelegant letters, he shrieked:

Agata glanced towards the window. “The following day, out there, Ranuccio Tomassoni was slain by Caravaggio and the others. In here, I believe, Ippolito Malaspina died. The two of them were about to betray their brothers, using that painting they all adored as a bribe to shift the blame from themselves. This is how the Ekstasists disintegrated, in blood and hate and murder. Remember the sign around the corpse’s neck?”

“A traitor and a thief,” Costa said, recalling every word.

“Lines from Dante,” she added. “Who better than a priest to remember them? These were ordinary men in the main. Ranuccio had brothers, good, honest citizens, who were not involved with the Ekstasists as far as I can see. The records show that they fled Rome a few days after these events, but were allowed to return and remained here, handing their property on to their heirs. As it has been ever since, until poor, weak Nino Tomassoni. I suspect the brothers were ashamed of what had been done in the family’s name. I believe they gave assistance to Caravaggio too. They kept the painting. They stored the body of Ippolito as respectfully as they could. Meanwhile, Antonio L’Indaco assumed the guise of the dead count, escaped alongside Michelangelo Merisi, then wrote letters, copious letters — we have some still — from Malta and the other parts of Italy where he lived thereafter.” She slapped her finger hard on the page. “It is here. It is all here!”

Grimaldi sniffed, then looked at his watch. “I don’t doubt that, Sister. You may have solved a crime that is four hundred years old. Unfortunately, that is outside my jurisdiction. Now—”

“Nino Tomassoni knew that room,” she cried. “It was a secret, handed on from generation to generation. One he shared when he began this second career as an accomplice to Franco’s art thefts! Here! Look!”

She turned to the final page of the book. There, in what looked like modern ink, scrawled with the casual ease of graffiti, stood four names, each in a different hand: The Pornographer, The Merchant, The Servant, and The Black Count.

The word Black was underlined in Malaspina’s entry.

“Four hundred years on, they saw that painting and decided to revive the brotherhood. They read this book. They followed in the footsteps of Ranuccio Tomassoni and Ippolito Malaspina.” She hesitated. “And sad, lost Michelangelo Merisi too.”

Something bothered Costa. “Franco had this obsession with black prostitutes,” he pointed out. “Did they before?”

“No,” she replied, a little hesitantly. “Not at all. The street women of the time, those who lived in Ortaccio, were primarily white. We see that from their portraits, from the records we have. Simonetta was a kitchen maid in Florence, almost a century earlier. A slave, effectively. I suspect the real Ippolito Malaspina would have thought it beneath him to mix with a woman of colour. He must have been like Alessandro de Medici. Ashamed of his heritage. Like Franco too…”

Teresa Lupo looked the lawyer in the face. “There. Something modern. Something that goes from there to here.”

“Which means what?” Grimaldi asked. “Tell me.”

“It means,” Agata suggested, “that something happened to light a fire in Franco Malaspina’s head. Something that turned this idea into an obsession. Though what?” She uttered a long, despairing sigh. “This defeats me. It was always a joke in company. That he had a touch of the African in him. I remember…”

She stared at the page in the book, trying to think. “I remember perhaps a year or so ago that it became a joke one no longer made. Franco’s sense of humour had disappeared on this subject.” Her slender, dusky fingers stroked the page. “Yet I can see nothing here that would have proved this connection at all.”

Teresa Lupo glanced at her assistant. “It’s in the blood, you know,” she said quietly. “I just might be able to help.”

Five

Thirty minutes later they were in the Questura morgue, with Grimaldi glancing constantly at his watch, still looking as if he didn’t understand why he was listening to history when he could have been home with his family. Teresa stood over the skeleton that lay on the shining table at the centre of the room, a collection of grey bones now covered with labels and brightened in areas by obvious examination.

“The first thing to say,” Teresa began, indicating the skull, “is that everything I see here supports Agata’s interpretation of events. This man was murdered savagely.”

She indicated a gaping, shattered rent in the skull above the right temple. “It’s a pretty typical sword wound and would have been deep and serious. But” — her gloved fingers ran over the arms — “there are any number of defensive injuries here, on both limbs. Stab wounds to the rib cage. A broken femur. He was attacked and murdered, probably by more than one person.”

“Could this have been a fight?” Falcone asked.

Teresa shook her head. “No. He was fighting them off with his arms. The balance of possibilities is that he was struck down by several men. And also—”

Peroni was staring at the skeleton with a gloomy expression on his long, pale face. “They did that,” he cut in, and stabbed a long, fleshy finger at the largest obvious wound, one a good hand’s length long that ran down the left side of the chest and tore open several ribs.

“Someone did,” she observed with a long sigh. “But not in the way you think. This happened after he was dead. Technically it’s what’s called a postmortem ablation of the heart. It was a known, though not common, funerary practice in some medieval communities. The heart was removed for” — she shrugged — “worship usually. You know the kind of thing you get in churches? ‘Here are the saint’s remains. Pray for his soul… and yours.’ This is how it was done.”

“He wasn’t a saint,” Agata pointed out.

“No,” she agreed. “I think that much is clear. But it was done for famous men, too, sometimes. Kings. Lords. Dukes.”

“Where would they put the heart afterwards?” Costa asked.

“I can tell you where it was meant to be,” she replied immediately. “Silvio?”

Her assistant came over with a series of large blown-up photos. They showed in detail the cabinet in which the skeleton had been found.

“This was specially made,” Teresa said. “When they killed him, they meant to preserve him. The skeleton didn’t get this way by natural decay either. It was boiled. Sister Agata isn’t the only one who’s been looking at the Tomassoni family. Do you know what the brothers did for a living?”

Di Capua flung a few more photos on the table next to the bones. They were medieval prints depicting some kind of charnel house, men working hard to dismember a corpse.

“They were undertakers,” he revealed. “Specialist knowledge would have been around in a profession like that. They would have boiled the body in a mixture of water and vinegar. We can still detect traces of it. It must have taken a couple of days. There would have been some evisceration too. It’s nothing compared with what the Egyptians did, but still pretty impressive.”

“And the heart,” Teresa interjected, “surely sat here.” She indicated a hole in the base of the cabinet, one that looked as if it had been purpose-made for some kind of box. “Whatever was in there has gone missing. And recently,” she added. “We can tell that from the lie of the dust. It must have disappeared around the same time as whatever stood on the wall where Nino stuck up his dirty pictures.”

“Franco took it,” Agata said straightaway. “This was his ancestor.”

“That’s one explanation,” Teresa said hesitantly.

“Can you make the connection?” Falcone asked simply.

“I think we know the answer to that already,” Grimaldi moaned. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be listening to this rambling dissertation.”

“I can make some connections,” she answered quickly. “Whether our friend here thinks they’re enough…”

“I…” Grimaldi looked around at them. He knew when he was outnumbered. “I will listen a little more.”

“Excellent,” Teresa replied, and didn’t take her beady eyes off him. “I have four separate examples of male DNA from that hellhole in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. Three of them come from semen, on the corpses of those women, on the floor, that sofa they used. One has no sexual connotation at all. It is primary physical contact of an everyday nature. Fingerprints and sweat, the kind of evidence anyone would leave walking around a place and touching things.”

“Nino,” Agata intervened. “That was him.”

Teresa nodded. “Good guess.”

“I knew these men,” she objected. “Not well, but I saw them quite often. Franco was their leader. Castagna and Buccafusca were his henchmen. Nino was subservient to all of them. This nonsense Franco believes in, about the life of the knight, his right to behave as he wishes… Nino was a frightened little man. He couldn’t have felt that way for a moment.”

“We have no evidence Nino Tomassoni took part in any of the sexual acts or the murders,” Teresa confirmed. “It’s undeniable from the pictures we found in that house he was there. Maybe he was a bystander.”

“And the rest?” Falcone asked.

Silvio Di Capua picked up a couple of folders of reports from the nearest desk and waved them in front of him.

“We have Castagna and Buccafusca identified without a shadow of doubt.”

“Two dead people,” Grimaldi moaned. “Thanks…”

Silvio Di Capua clenched his small fists and let out a brief scream, then said, “For Christ’s sake, man. Use your imagination. We have one sample that remains unidentified. It has to be Franco Malaspina. All we need is a chance…” “Imagination?” Grimaldi shrieked. “We’re on the brink of getting sued for harassment as it is and you want me to go in front of a magistrate and talk of history and imagination? When will you people learn? We can’t screw around with this individual anymore.”

“We should know our place,” Costa said quietly.

“I didn’t say that!” the lawyer objected. “Do you think I like this? Do you think I want to defend this monster? He’s a murderer and a crook and I’d give my right arm to see him languishing in a cell for the rest of his life. The only way we can do this is through the law. What else do we have?”

Agata looked at him and smiled, a quizzical expression on her face. “The law is an ass. Who said that?”

“Every last stupid cop who thinks I should be able to close a case he can’t,” Grimaldi snapped. “Give me something to work with. Something that isn’t several hundred years old.”

“Like most lawyers, Toni, you have a very closed mind,” Teresa Lupo observed in a censorious tone. “Silvio? Let us talk genealogy.”

Six

Di Capua walked over to the main desk. They followed and watched him unroll three long family charts, two of them clearly printed and official, the third scribbled in the tight, clear hand Costa had come to recognise as the forensic scientist’s own. Di Capua was the department magpie; if an avenue of research existed that didn’t interest him, Costa had yet to see it.

“Alessandro de’ Medici. The Moor,” Di Capua said, and threw a photograph on the table. It was the portrait of a pale-faced scholarly individual dressed in black. He appeared to be drawing, unconvincingly, the face of a woman on parchment with a metal stylus. The man might have been a cleric or a philosopher. His young face was solemn and plain, with a skimpy beard. His skin…

Costa leaned down and looked more closely. Agata was there with him instantly, smiling, pleased, it seemed to him, that someone else had been looking at paintings for a change.

“Do you know this?” he asked her.

“Am I supposed to be familiar with every work of art there has ever been? No…”

“It’s in Philadelphia,” Di Capua explained. “You’re the expert. What do you think of the pose?”

Agata frowned. “It’s a joke. This man was the capo of the Medici dynasty, as ruthless and venal as any. Here he is pretending he can draw, as if any of these great people could do that. Their talent lay in sponsorship, if at all.”

Di Capua produced another photograph: it was of a painting depicting the same man, seated this time in a suit of armour, with a lance on his lap, his face only half seen, turned away from the artist and the viewer, his skin again oddly underpainted, as if the artist had refrained from finishing the final tone.

“A sport in the blood,” she said firmly. “This is the one I know.

Giorgio Vasari. It’s in the Uffizi. Vasari’s timidity is even more obvious in the flesh. They wouldn’t dare admit it, would they? You know the story. We all know the story.”

“Yes,” Grimaldi agreed. “It’s a story. His old man had an affair with a black kitchen maid and the bastard got to inherit the family silver.”

Agata scowled at the lawyer. “His old man was Giulio de’ Medici, who became Pope Clement VII. Not that Giulio admitted it. He got his cousin to put his name to the child. It was inconvenient for a Pope to take his offspring to Rome. We know this for sure.”

“How?” Costa asked.

“Someone like me can go places police officers can’t,” she said, smiling. “The Vatican keeps records.” The body of the crucifix played in her fingers for a moment. “This all happened just sixty years before Caravaggio came to Rome. It’s my job to know. If this cadaver is Ippolito Malaspina…” She reached out and touched the curving line of the rib cage, close to the point where it had been torn apart. “He is the grandson of Alessandro de’ Medici, the greatgrandson of Lorenzo, the Duke of Urbino. He comes from a line that produced three Popes and two Queens of France. Do you wonder they took out his heart, even though they killed him for a traitor and a thief?”

“Can we use any of this?” Falcone asked.

“It’s fact,” Agata insisted. “I can give you the names of any number of historians who will swear to it in court. Alessandro was the son of a future Pope and a black kitchen maid. But the idea that the Malaspinas were in part the Medicis’ illegitimate line… It was just rumour. Gossip among the nobility. Centuries old.”

“No,” Di Capua insisted, and pointed to the second family tree, that of the Malaspinas, running from the 1400s and ending three centuries later. “It wasn’t rumour. See this woman…”

He pointed to a name: Taddea Malaspina.

“She was Alessandro’s mistress. It’s documented in the Medici archive. Gifts. Love letters. Alessandro wasn’t the most faithful of men. But he loved Taddea. This painting” — he pointed to the Philadelphia portrait — “was given to her as a gift.”

Agata looked impressed. “That must have meant something. Alessandro was murdered, if I recall correctly.”

Teresa stepped in. “He was slaughtered by his own cousin, supposedly on the way to some bedtime appointment. They smuggled out his body in a carpet and even I can’t give you DNA from that. But…”

Agata laughed and clapped her hands. “They opened the tombs a few years ago,” she declared. “I read about it in the papers.”

“Correct,” Teresa answered. “In 2003 the Florence authorities began a methodical examination of the Medici tombs in order to check the structural state of the building. At the same time, they let in a few friendly scientists to look at the bones.” She stared at them all. “The remains of Alessandro are lost. His father, Lorenzo, is buried in the chapels, in a tomb by Michelangelo. There can be no mistake about his identity.”

She gave a set of papers on the side table a sly glance. “It took a little persuasion with those damned Florentines. However, I now have their reports, and preliminary tests back on the DNA from the remains we recovered here yesterday. They need confirmation before we can put them into a form that is good enough for a court. But what I can tell you is this…”

She paused, for obvious effect, then ran her finger along the skull of the skeleton in front of them. “This dead man was a descendant of the duke in the Medici chapels. The unidentified DNA found in the semen on all of these murdered women is a part of the same line.” Her fingers rattled on the cadaver’s ribs as if they were a child’s musical instrument. “These bones belong to the line of Alessandro de’ Medici. That semen comes from the same recognisable dynasty, ten, fifteen, twenty, who knows how many generations on… Who cares?”

Grimaldi smiled for one brief second, then gave a brief nod, as if to say “Well done.” This was, Costa thought, the most enthusiastic sign he had displayed all day.

“And there’s more,” the pathologist added. “Silvio?”

“Do you see this?” The assistant was pointing at the open jaw. “Both front incisors are missing. We only took one. We only need one. Someone else snatched out that other tooth, and they did it recently. You can see that from the socket.”

“Why on earth would someone steal a dead man’s tooth?” Grimaldi asked, bemused.

“For the same reason we did,” Teresa butted in. “The same reason the heart was removed. To find out whether the rumours were true. Look…”

Di Capua produced a printed report bearing the name and crest of an American medical institute in Boston. “If you want to find out about black heritage from DNA, there is only one place to go,” he went on. “This lab specialises in tracing African ancestry from the most minute of samples, however difficult it might seem. They’ve built up a database over the years, tracking down slave movements from all over Africa to the rest of the world.”

Agata rolled her eyes in amazement. “So they could even find my father?” she asked.

Di Capua nodded. “With a match. With two samples. Even from just yours they could look at the DNA and tell you whereabouts in Africa he came from. We contacted these people yesterday and sent them the preliminary results of our own tests. They looked them up for us. This is still early. As Teresa said, we need to work on the confirmation. But this corpse and the semen sample from the Vicolo del Divino Amore show clear connections with female DNA from the Bamileke tribe in what we now call Cameroon, an area plundered regularly for slavery for centuries.”

He threw an indecipherable scientific graph, covered in lines and numbers, on the examination table next to the bones there.

“This is the mark of Simonetta, the kitchen maid some Tuscan aristocrat impregnated in Florence in the autumn of 1509.”

“I told you,” Agata sighed, her eyes full of wonder and elation. “They are us. We are them.”

“It’s in this skeleton,” Di Capua went on, regardless. “It’s in the semen on those dead women. The reason we got to know that so quickly…” He flashed a covetous glance at Teresa.

“It was your call, Silvio,” she said gently.

“He was there before us. Franco Malaspina first sent the heart, hoping they could work with that. It was too old. The man knew nothing about forensic pathology and what was required of remains this old. So later he took that tooth, on the direct instructions of the only laboratory in the world you’d go to if you wanted to trace some black ancestry from a sample of ancient DNA. They already had the work done. They could fingerprint the black strand and come up with some rough geographical location too. It was just a matter of looking up the records.”

No one said a word.

Di Capua made a faux-modest little bow, then took out one more sheet from his folder and placed it next to the skull.

“One final thing. I found this in the archives of the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s by an artist called Pontormo.”

Agata was poring over the image in an instant, holding it in her shaking hands.

“Jacopo Carrucci…” she murmured.

“Pontormo,” Di Capua corrected her.

“It’s the same man,” she said, smiling, and placed the object in front of them. “I have never seen this before.”

“It’s certified that it was painted in 1534 or 1535,” Di Capua went on. “The work is recorded in the Medici archives. This is a genuine representation of Alessandro de’ Medici, the only one that ever acknowledged who he really was.”

They began to crowd around the image. It was a full-face portrait of a young and apparently sensitive man, clearly the Alessandro of the two earlier images, but this time seen at close quarters, where there was a baleful, almost malevolent look in his eyes, and some militaristic metal brooch at his neck. His skin was almost the colour of Agata’s, darker than any native Tuscan, and his lips were full and fleshy.

“It’s Franco,” Agata whispered. “It is him.”

Costa stared at the painted face of this long-dead aristocrat and felt an icy shiver grip his body. The hair was different and the skin had been lightened a little, even in this frank depiction of the man. But the resemblance was obvious and disturbing.

Falcone turned on the lawyer. “Is this not enough for you?” he demanded.

Grimaldi shrugged. “A picture? Some old books? And many, many circumstantial connections? Of course it’s not enough.”

Teresa swore.

“All the same,” the lawyer added quickly, “this business in Boston. It’s here. It’s now. If I can prove he was in contact with them, that he dispatched first the heart, then the tooth on their instructions…” Toni Grimaldi burst into a broad grin that changed his countenance entirely and made him look like a grey-suited Santa shorn of his beard. “If we have that, then we are home. It places Malaspina in the Tomassoni house, at the centre of everything, with undeniable knowledge of those stolen paintings. I will push the swab into his mouth myself. After which we will throw so many charges at the bastard he will never walk free again.”

“The swab is mine,” Teresa said softly.

“So,” Grimaldi added, beaming, “these people in Boston will provide an affidavit. A statement. We can take such things by email these days. If I have that tomorrow, I go before a magistrate immediately.”

The two pathologists stared at each other.

“When I say it came from Malaspina,” Teresa continued carefully, “what I mean is we know it came from Rome. A year ago. It was a very expensive business. Not something one would do lightly.”

The lawyer’s smile disappeared. “Did they give you his name?” he asked.

“The lab said it came from Rome. Who the hell else could it be?” she pleaded. “How many other people here had the motive, the money, and the opportunity?”

“I need his name,” Grimaldi emphasised. “On a piece of paper.”

“This is medical research! There are ethical issues! Of course they won’t give me a name.”

The man in the grey suit swore. “Ever?” he asked.

“Show a little faith,” Teresa pleaded.

“This is not about faith. Or justice. Or anything other than the law.”

“The law is an ass,” Agata repeated quietly, staring at the bones on the table.

“The law is all you have,” Grimaldi muttered. “I have wasted Christmas Day. As have you. Excuse me. I will leave you to your bones and your books and your fantasies.”

“Sir,” Agata said, and stood in his way.

She had the photo of the portrait from Chicago in her hands.

“Look at him,” she implored. “We all know this face. We all know what he’s done. There is a man here” — she glanced at Costa — “who lost his wife to this creature, and I am only here thanks to this same man’s courage. Do not abandon us.”

Grimaldi’s face contorted with a cold, helpless anger. “I abandon no one. Give me a case and I will work day and night to put Franco Malaspina in the dock. But you have none, and these officers know it. I have a duty to those who will be harmed in the future by this paralysis he has created in our investigative procedures. It cannot be allowed to continue.”

He turned and looked at them all. “In the morning I must tell Commissario Esposito the truth. I have no confidence we can bring this man to book. We should… sue for some kind of peace that lets us go back to catching fresh criminals the way we wish. We draw the line with Malaspina. In return we negotiate to be allowed to bring back the old evidence rules he has removed from us, with no retroactive clause applied to him. I am sorry. Genuinely. That is my decision.”

“Toni…” Peroni began.

“No. Enough. We do not have the resources or the evidence to defeat this man’s money and position. There comes a time when one must admit defeat. I see it in the eyes of all of you, yet you refuse to let it enter your heads. This is your problem. Not mine. Good day.”

Teresa Lupo watched him walk out the door, then muttered something caustic under her breath.

“No.” Falcone was holding the photograph of Alessandro de’ Medici and spoke in a quiet, dejected voice. “He’s a decent man who has the courage to tell us the truth. We’ve done what we can and we’ve failed. Malaspina has defeated me as surely as he defeated Susanna Placidi. Money…”

“Tomorrow—” Costa said firmly.

“Tomorrow this all becomes history too,” Falcone interrupted him. He pointed a long bony finger at Agata Graziano. “Tomorrow you will go to that safe house in Piedmont. Until we have concluded these discussions with the man. I will make your safety a precondition, naturally.”

“You will not negotiate with this evil creature on my behalf, Leo,” she shouted. “How can you even think of such a thing? How?”

He waited for her fury to subside.

“If we cannot prosecute this man, then negotiating something quietly, through a third party, is the best we can achieve.” He cast a brief glance in Costa’s direction. “I’m sorry, Nic. Truly. That is the way it must be. Now, go home all of you, please. It’s Christmas. We should not spend it in a place like this.”