A Name in Blood (30 page)

‘That the Messiah is coming?’

‘No, no, not as St John – as you. You’re butchered in a dungeon. The last thing you see is the dirt floor.’

Anguished acceptance passed across the boy’s face. It was the material Caravaggio needed for his art, but it was also the devastating face of his own shame. His excitement shuddered
through every limb. He called out, ‘You have it.’

Fabrizio came to the Italian Inn to see what progress Caravaggio had made with
The Beheading
. ‘You’ve changed your style, Michele. This is different from the
works I saw in Rome.’

‘It doesn’t stop at the brush,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ve changed myself.’

Fabrizio stood a long time, stroking his chin, his face puzzled and then illuminated – stricken, then joyous.

Caravaggio, too, contemplated the scene. The Baptist was chest down on the ground. His executioner leaned over him with his fingers in his victim’s hair. From Fabrizio’s changing
expression, Caravaggio understood that he had succeeded. He had depicted what went before and after this arrested moment. The painting was a whole episode, communicated in the swiftness of the
brushstrokes and in the drama of the composition.

His face half-lit by the lantern in front of the canvas, Fabrizio grimaced at the dying saint. ‘I think of that instant always, Michele.’

Caravaggio knew what he meant.

‘I felt absolute justification, when I killed that Farnese.’

‘I know.’

‘When you killed Ranuccio . . .?’

I stepped into another world
, Caravaggio thought.

Fabrizio twirled his hand as though signalling the passage of time that seemed to take place on the canvas. ‘I often think of the moments before and after with regret. But the instant in
which I killed him – I could never see it. Until now.’ He put his hand on the back of a chair and leaned heavily, as if he were exhausted. ‘You’re so good at showing us the
moment of death. You seem to know it so intimately. But do you understand what it’s like to be alive? I’ve been pardoned for killing the Farnese. No one seeks my life. Yet when I look
at your painting I’m suffocated by guilt and fear and foreboding. It must be terrible to be you, Michele.’

‘Is that my fault?’

‘Don’t be angry, Michele. There’s only one other time in my life that has meant as much to me as that instant when I became a murderer.’ Fabrizio’s pale eyes welled
up, gleaming in the lantern light with an old longing. He reached for Caravaggio and put his hand to his neck, drew him close. Their lips met and the length of their bodies. Fabrizio moaned with
the pure voice of a boy, all the raggedness of the man’s throat soothed.

Caravaggio knew that sound from his boyhood. He recalled the feel of his friend in his arms. But he also tasted the fear that had come afterwards, the loneliness of leaving Costanza’s
house, the poverty of his first years in Rome. He had paid for the pleasure he heard in Fabrizio’s voice.

He pulled away. Fabrizio held on, but he shoved him in the chest. ‘Leave me.’

‘Michele, don’t.’

Who’ll beat me this time?
Caravaggio thought.
Who’ll throw me out and tell me it’s for my own good? While this man goes on being a prince.
‘I said, leave
me.’

When he was alone, Caravaggio extinguished his lantern. He remembered Fabrizio’s question. Yes, he knew what it was to be alive. Only an artist or a killer or God could know it, those who
make or who destroy.
They’re the ones who can tell the price of every breath.

Caravaggio was at his prayers when he sensed the temperature in his studio dip. He shivered and opened his eyes. The Inquisitor was examining
The Beheading
with a look
of glowing calculation, like a cheating saint.

‘Is this how
you’ll
end up?’ della Corbara said.

Caravaggio recited another ‘Our Father’.

‘I think it more likely that your body will disappear and never be found at all,’ the Inquisitor said. ‘What’s worse, do you think? To die like the Baptist in a dark
dungeon? Or to be staring at the sky and the flowers and the sea when one’s head is taken from one’s body by a bounty hunter?’

‘
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.
’

‘Amen.’ The Inquisitor folded his hands over his stomach. It seemed a gesture he had borrowed from a better-fed priest. His own body was meagre and the cord of his belt threatened to
slip over his hips to the floor. ‘I hear you had a tussle with Brother Roero in the courtyard downstairs. As a churchman, I’m not subject to the rules of vendetta. Perhaps I might
intercede between the two of you, so that the rancour doesn’t escalate.’

‘Surely you’d have to side with the knight. He’s a member of a holy order, just as you are.’

‘Roero doesn’t respect the Church. He carries out the will of the Holy Father in fighting against the infidels, that’s true. But I don’t count such murderers as true men
of the cloth.’

‘An Inquisitor ought not to talk so lightly of murder.’

‘Before a man who profits from painting the slaughter of a saint, why not?’ The Inquisitor paced in front of the canvas.

Caravaggio took up a dry brush to texture the ochre and burnt umber on the wall of St John’s dungeon. The sibilant stroking of the brush was loud in the stillness.

‘The Baptist on your canvas is dead,’ della Corbara said, ‘but you’ve yet to paint his blood. I wonder if you’ve finally reached the limits of your imitation of
natural things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Perhaps blood is too close to home. Too close to your own, which may be spilled like that of the Baptist on the orders of a king.’

‘The Pope is no king.’

‘Greater than kings. Making your fate even more sticky.’

‘I haven’t painted the blood yet. So what? I’ll get to it.’

‘Your St John is certainly dead. Dead on the floor of a dirty courtyard, pale and lifeless. He isn’t ascending to heaven, as the saints usually do in art.’ The Inquisitor
rubbed his thumb along his lip. ‘If even the Baptist appears not to make it to the celestial paradise, you must doubt
your own
chances of salvation.’

‘If I concern myself with salvation, that’s proof I believe in God’s mercy. If I didn’t believe, I wouldn’t care about my sins or my soul.’

‘Then may He bless you.’ The Inquisitor lifted his hand in benediction.

Caravaggio winced. He felt the man’s gesture, not in loving absolution, but as an unwanted intimacy probing him. ‘Why did you come here again? I’m not going to do what you
want. I’m not going to give you information against the knights, even if you tell me this painting breaks the Church’s rules.’

The Inquisitor examined his hands and slid them into the sleeves of his cassock. ‘Duels, such as the one you fought with Signor Ranuccio, are under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. I
could have you extradited to Rome. Even the Grand Master couldn’t stop me.’

‘Then why don’t you have
him
extradited too?’

Della Corbara whipped his hand from his cassock and slapped Caravaggio’s cheek. ‘Because I need a witness to his terrible crime,’ he yelled.

Caravaggio tensed his fists, but held himself back. The blow had been out of rage, and Caravaggio knew it represented the Inquisitor’s hopelessness.

Della Corbara lifted his hands in apology. ‘Forgive me. The devil is more cunning than I am. He prepares traps for me.’

‘I thought you were working together.’

The Inquisitor stepped close and dropped his voice to a rumbling whisper. ‘You want to be the dog who’s privileged to enter the great hall and eat scraps from the Master’s
table. But these knights will never let you in – because you’re a wolf.’ He pointed to his thin chest. ‘And wolves hunt in packs. You’ll need me in the end. Remember
that.’

He left the studio. Caravaggio returned to the walls of the dungeon.

Caravaggio was painting the black lead teeth of the jailor’s keys, when Martelli pulled back the curtain of his camera obscura. The knight carried a letter. He was
immediately preoccupied by the canvas.

‘You’ve painted the executioner’s knife since I last saw this,’ he said. A thick, white highlight marked the edge of the blade. The Florentine had been cut many times. He
scratched at his scars through his doublet.

‘You feel the executioner’s touch?’ Caravaggio smiled.

‘I don’t doubt I’d recognize it as my own. Actually I was thinking about you.’

‘Thus far, it’s I who has been the executioner.’

Martelli brandished the letter. ‘You need be neither executioner nor condemned from now on. You’re to be a knight.’

Caravaggio kissed the old man’s hand. ‘I feared that if the Holy Father declined . . .’

‘We’d ship you back to Rome in chains? Well, I have some influence with the Grand Master and I’m a determined old bastard. I suppose the Holy Father realized we wouldn’t
let this go. Read it.’

Caravaggio unfolded the letter.

The letter felt hot in his hands. Caravaggio worried that he might set it on fire and burn it to ashes with the force of his feeling. He thrust it back to Martelli.

‘As a knight, you can’t be sent back to Rome. You’ll have the protection of the Order.’ Martelli folded the letter and slipped it into his doublet. He gripped
Caravaggio’s arms and embraced him. ‘Michele, you’d be a knight even if this
St John
of yours were a lesser painting. But it’s astonishing.’

Caravaggio scanned his canvas. Each stroke of the brush had seemed to liberate him.
Martelli knows
, he thought.
I made my work as direct as his description of killing a man.

They shared a confiding silence. Caravaggio’s fingers tingled from contact with the Pope’s letter. A pardon. Perhaps he might return to the Pope’s lands, to Rome, to Lena. It
was all possible now.

At the bottom of his picture, the Baptist’s gaunt face stared at him. It remained only to paint the blood flowing from the dying man’s neck.