A Name in Blood (33 page)

Only when he was working did he not feel as though he were heading downhill. He tried not to think about the future, because he knew the dangers and hardships he faced. He could hardly explain
that to the monk. The Franciscans sought out mortification of the flesh among the poor. For all he knew, Brother Benedetto had skinned the bean and thrown away its meat when he made the soup.
‘Wherever I go, Brother, I’ll miss your cooking. Where else will I find these sumptuous delicacies?’

Benedetto laughed. ‘You’re an odd one, Maestro Michele.’ He leaned on his knife to cut through a loaf of cheap spelt-flour. The bakeries gave the bread to the Franciscans when
it was too stale even for a pauper to dip in his gruel. ‘Brother Camillo said you raged at him the other day, because he suggested you wash your clothes.’

Caravaggio slurped his soup.

‘You told him
they
might come to take you while you were naked. Who’re
they
, Maestro?’

‘Innkeepers who wish me to steal your luxurious recipes for them.’

He slouched up the stairs to his studio. He had painted this
Nativity
for the Oratory of San Lorenzo, intending to give the Virgin the face of Lena. But when he came to depict her gazing
at the naked baby on the straw, he had been unable to clear his mind of her pale, perspiring, suffering face after she lost their child. He had painted the features of the Maltese girl from the
Beheading
instead.

The few times he had been out into Palermo, suspicion had exhausted him. Every door through which he passed and every sentence he uttered seemed to be a trap, a means by which he might give
himself away, make himself known to his murderers. He thought he had seen one of the Tomassoni brothers in the street. He chased after the man, but didn’t catch him. Then he fled, when he
thought he glimpsed Roero outside the Spanish Viceroy’s palace. As he ran, he wondered if he had lost his mind.
It makes no difference. They’ll come for me, even if I’m
mad.

In the middle of the day, he started to think that even the beanskin had been an illusion and that the soup had been nothing more than discoloured water. He touched the bones of his face under
his beard and found them prominent. His ribs, too, pressed at his skin when he lifted his shirt to look. Hunger overcame his fear.

He went out into the street and headed towards the Norman palace to find an inn. After so many days in the darkness of the monastery, the sun seemed to penetrate his skull. Dizzy, he leaned
against the wall outside a pie shop. His eyes blanked, everything was dark. The smell of the baking pastry made him desperate and weak. When his sight returned, the colours were bright and flat,
like the first oils laid onto a painting before they were shaded.

A dog scampered out of the pie shop with a sausage in its mouth. The piemaker chased it and cursed. A look at Caravaggio and he was silent. Clearing his throat he returned to his shop. A woman
passed with her basket, averting her eyes. Caravaggio squinted into the street. Smiling people quailed when they glanced at his face.
What do they see?
he wondered.
They’re
repulsed. As if they caught sight of a wounded cat run down by a cart. They know my fate, and they don’t want to think about it.

He followed the piemaker into his shop, laid down a coin, and took a filled focaccia. He stuffed the food into his mouth. His tongue rolled between the soft strips of calf’s spleen and
lung and throat cartilage. From the entrance of the pie shop, he glanced across the street through the passing mass of carts and people. He saw a man in the red surcoat of the Knights of Malta.

Roero was staring up at the Franciscan compound. Narrowing his protuberant eyes, the knight crossed the road and entered the Oratory.

Caravaggio spat the wad of bread and sweetmeats from his mouth. He rushed into the courtyard of the Franciscans. In his studio, he took up a small sack. Into it, he shoved his brushes and the
pigments he hadn’t yet ground. He strapped on his sword and took his money belt from the locked box of stamped Spanish leather where he had stashed it.

He leapt down the steps and ran through the gate. From the corner, he spied on Roero as he left the Oratory and went up the staircase to the studio. Thankful for the hunger that had driven him
outside, he whispered a blessing for Brother Benedetto’s thin broth.

At the port, the next boat was a merchant galley bound for Naples. Once aboard, he crouched behind a barrel, watching for Roero. The sailors avoided him as they prepared to cast off. Gulls
hovered over the deck until they chased after the departing sun. The boat put out to sea.

The Prince of Stigliano’s palace at the edge of Naples overlooked Chiaia and the ellipse of the bay out to the grottoes of Posilippo. For the past several years, the
Marchesa of Caravaggio had lodged with her cousin the prince so that she might attend to affairs of property and inheritance around the city. Costanza Colonna sat on a stone bench beside the garden
fountain, as Caravaggio waited upon her. She flicked her fingers against two letters in her lap. Her nails were pale and grey. Something in the letters tormented her.

‘The Spanish Viceroy has heard of your arrival in Naples.’ Costanza cleared her throat. ‘He orders you to complete
The Flagellation of Christ
that you left
unfinished.’

Caravaggio’s assent was grudging. The picture for the Church of San Domenico had left him uninspired. He had been glad to drop it when he took ship for Malta.

‘Everyone wants something from you, don’t they?’ Costanza said.

And you, what do you want?
he thought.

She raised her hand, reaching for him, but the fingers clenched and she put her fist back in her lap. She stood and slowly rounded the fountain. ‘Look at this balustrade. It’s
engraved with the crests of some of the most powerful families in the Italian lands. The Carafa, the Stadera, Morra, Capua, Orsini. These clans guard you, Michele, as a service to me, because
I’m related to all of them.’

The fish darted in the brown bottom of the fountain.

‘We’ll get you back to Rome, back to Lena.’ Costanza held one of the letters out to him. ‘It’s from her. When you reply, remind her that Naples is where Boccaccio
met his love, Fiammetta. The poet said that to enjoy love it must be sensual, illicit, sweet and difficult.’

‘He didn’t know the half of it.’ Caravaggio turned the letter over. On the back, above the seal, was Lena’s name. His excitement mingled with suspicion. Few knew where to
find him, and Lena was illiterate. The letter could be a trap. His hands trembled.
She’s alive, and I may hope.

‘I need you too, Michele. As she does.’ Costanza’s neck flushed. ‘For Fabrizio’s sake.’

‘And only for him?’

She twisted the wedding ring given by her long-dead husband. Her voice rose, scolding. ‘You have always eaten the bread of my house. Do I now ask so much of you?’

‘You ask nothing, my lady, though I would perform any service for you.’

‘Brother Antonio Martelli writes to me from Malta.’ She lifted the other letter as if it were a diagram of all the shame she had ever felt. ‘A sailor was intercepted sculling
back from Sicily in a wherry a few days after you escaped the knights’ dungeon. He was a crewman of
The Capitana
, Fabrizio’s flagship. The sailor was taken by a knight named
Roero. He didn’t last long under Roero’s tortures, but while he lived he confessed that Fabrizio had rescued you from the
guva
.’

‘Fabrizio.’ He covered his eyes with his hands. ‘What’s to become of him?’

‘If this knight Roero had gone to the Venerable Council, Brother Martelli says Fabrizio would’ve been suspended for a few months. But Roero took some of his friends to arrest
Fabrizio. You remember a Brother Giulio?’

‘A bit of a joker.’

‘The joke’s on him now. Fabrizio refused to go quietly. He ran Brother Giulio through with his rapier and killed him.’ Costanza’s voice shattered into a sob. ‘My
son languishes in the dungeon from which he helped you flee.’

Caravaggio remembered the penalty for killing a knight. The sack, sewn up and thrown into the sea.

Just as Lena came closer to him with the letter he held in his hand, his oldest friend moved into mortal jeopardy. ‘All my prayers, my lady, shall be for Don Fabrizio, and all my works
shall be for him too.’ He strained his eyes towards the Sorrento peninsula, as though he might spy his friend’s corpse borne on the currents from Malta. Out in the bay, the two jagged
peaks of the isle of Capri were a hazy indigo.

In the street, Caravaggio felt mauled, as if the throng that packed Naples was blind and made its way by touch alone. A pair of women quarrelled at a vegetable stand at the
crest of the hill leading to the Spanish palace. Children with their noses running and their red eyes streaming jostled around the vendors. Their knees were skinned and scabbed, and their bodies
were daubed in filth as if some moralist had tried to paint clothing over their nakedness with mud. The people were feral, reacting to all movement and approach with fear, poised to strike out and
bracing to take a blow. They moved like cats – a few quick paces, then they would search around for the next safe spot, hurry there, and assess the threats again.

I’m a murderer
, Caravaggio thought,
but I may be the most innocent man for miles around.
He touched the letter inside his doublet. He knew at once where he would read it.

He went towards the oldest part of the city. Since his return to Naples, he had yet to visit the church which held the greatest of his works there. He entered the narrow streets, parallel blocks
just as the first Greek settlers had laid them out, and crossed the Spaccanapoli, the long, straight scar that cut the city in two.

Outside the taverns, Neapolitans lifted long handfuls of
maccheroni
and lowered it into their mouths, their heads cast back as if they might feed it directly through their throats and
into their stomachs like sword swallowers. The wailing of the
zampogna
cut through the noise of the crowd, a shrill melody and a low bagpipe drone that reverberated in his very ribcage.

He slipped into a pew before the altar of the Pio Monte. Lena gazed on him with compassion. She was
Our Lady of Mercy
, the Virgin he had painted surveying the crowded streets of Naples.
He unfolded the letter and read.