A Name in Blood (35 page)

Caravaggio heard the bass slap of heavy material thrown suddenly back.
He’s searching for me behind the tapestries
.

‘My family wants the Colonnas to pay compensation for the death of Ranuccio, because you’re their creature. I won’t kill you until we get the money. That’s not to say I
can’t give you a
sfregio
, a scar of shame.’ A roar of frustration and effort, and a table turned over. Screaming with rage, Tomassoni called out, ‘Where are you, you
bastard?’

A monk appeared at the entrance to the church. With a Spanish accent, he addressed Tomassoni. ‘You forget yourself. You’re in a house of God, my son.’

Tomassoni sheathed his sword and placed the table upright. ‘I beg your pardon, Father.’ His voice was husky and ashamed.

‘Leave a donation for St Mary Pilar and be gone.’

Caravaggio heard a coin fall into a metal plate and Tomassoni’s footsteps through the door.

The monk approached the side chapel and waited. Caravaggio came from his hiding place and lowered his eyes.

‘You’d better leave through the sacristy and go out the back of the monastery.’ The monk scratched his tonsure and put his hands inside the sleeves of his white habit. It bore
the cross of the Trinitarians, whose mission was to redeem slaves taken by the Moors. ‘There’s a man outside the main doors, waiting for you.’

‘Perhaps I should just face him, after all. I’ll be all right, Father.’ Caravaggio went towards the entrance.

The monk held his arm firmly. ‘I don’t mean that thug. Another man is there, a knight.’

Caravaggio shivered. Roero had come for him.

‘This way.’ The monk led Caravaggio up a spiral staircase. As they passed along a gallery above the cloister of the monastery, he glanced out of the window. Below him, in the
courtyard before the church, Roero leaned against a column in the red doublet of the knights.

Caravaggio felt a halting charge in his breast, as though a fist folded around his heart. He followed the monk to the rear of the monastery and went out into the streets.

He studied his unfinished
Flagellation of Christ
. Jesus wriggled before the great column to which he was bound as though merely being tickled. The two torturers, one at
his side and the other at his feet, appeared no more involved in the infliction of pain than the reverent sponsor of the painting, one Signor de Franchis, who crouched on the opposite side of the
suffering Saviour. Caravaggio sucked on his teeth and frowned. The painting owed too much to the work of previous artists. It was as if he were noting things down in shorthand that every art
collector would already know. Things that weren’t true.

For several days, he had tried to change the tone of the canvas, barely moving from his studio. Roero and Tomassoni were both in Naples, so it was best to stay within the palace walls and work.
He had succeeded only in compounding his aversion to the painting. He would have abandoned the entire piece, but there was a bare wall awaiting it in San Domenico close to the main altar and the
Spanish Viceroy who ruled over Naples had ordered that he fill that space. The whole thing made him feel devoid of energy, constrained and bored. He wanted to be on his way to Rome, to Lena. His
discontent made him reckless.

He tossed his palette down and shrugged his smock over his head. Pulling on his doublet, he shoved a purse inside and stuck his dagger in his belt. Then he went through the twilit streets to the
Cerriglio Tavern.

‘Hello again,
o’ntufato.
’ Stella approached him from the table where the whores congregated. She had a graceless walk, her feet flat and splayed in her sandals and her
hips stiff, so that she appeared to limp. Her arm flapped at her side as though she paddled through the air. A noblewoman’s poised step would have had a fraction of the beauty that Caravaggio
found in Stella’s ungainliness.

‘I couldn’t work, couldn’t concentrate.’ Caravaggio called for a flagon of wine and something to eat.

‘Want me to take your mind off your troubles?’ She sat beside him, put her arm across his shoulders and pushed her breasts towards him.

‘Even you’d have trouble working that hard.’

She grinned. Something was wrong about her face. He stared at her mouth. Her teeth were tiny and uneven.

‘My baby teeth,’ she said. ‘They never fell out.’

The teeth of an innocent child in the painted face of a whore. He expected her mouth to emit the cry of a starving infant, but instead she gave a rough laugh and bit his neck.

The innkeeper brought a flagon of garnet-red
aglianico
and a plate of artichokes. He shared his meal with Stella. She raised her cup. ‘Let the blood of St Gennaro run like this
wine.’

The miracle
, Caravaggio remembered,
the vial of dried blood from the saint’s veins which liquefies three times a year in the cathedral.
He raised his glass with a doubting
smile.

‘You’re sceptical,
o’ntufato
?’ Stella said. ‘If the blood doesn’t turn into liquid, it’s very bad for Naples. Whenever the miracle fails,
Vesuvius erupts or some army invades or the crops fail or there’s an outbreak of the plague.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Caravaggio said. ‘There’s always blood when I’m around.’

A shudder of fear trembled over her face.

He put down a few coins, touched his hand to the girl’s cheek and went to the door. ‘If the saint’s blood doesn’t flow, you can take some of mine.’

The moon was the slightest of crescents. He tripped through a darkness that was close to absolute. He stopped to listen, in case he had been followed. It had been foolish to leave the safety of
the palace so late in the day. He sucked the flavour of the wine from the end of his moustache and elected to make his way through the narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter. There would be fewer
people and he would more easily notice if he was tracked.

He went uphill a couple of blocks and turned left towards Chiaia. A single torch burned a hundred paces ahead of him. He advanced carefully, feeling his way along the walls of the quiet
buildings. In the torchlight the silhouettes of four men quivered. Angry voices resounded off the tenement façades.

As he came closer, Caravaggio saw that one of the men was bound and his shirt had been ripped away. Another man sat on his haunches by the wall, holding the torch. The other two manhandled the
captive. They kicked him behind the knee and he stumbled. One of the men yanked at the rope around the prisoner’s wrists and pulled him backwards. The man cried out in a language Caravaggio
didn’t recognize. It sounded guttural and breathy like the speech of the Maltese.
Arabic
, he thought.
He’s a slave.

The man who held the rope lifted his foot and shoved it into the small of the slave’s back, pulling on the rope with one hand and gripping the man’s long dark hair with the other. In
his snarl was an intensity so demonic Caravaggio’s teeth chattered with fear.

They laughed and taunted the slave. The man with the rope hauled the slave’s arms up and pushed against his back with his foot. A cry of agony echoed in the street.

Caravaggio went slowly to the corner, confused and fearful. He would have put a stop to this, but there were three of them and he had only a dagger.

The second man struck the slave a series of blows behind the neck. With each impact, the victim’s twisted torso jumped out of the darkness into the strong glow of the torch. The muscles of
the slave’s chest and belly pulsed in the light.

The man who held the rope handed it to his companion. ‘My stomach’s killing me,’ he said. In the wavering shadow of a doorway, he pulled down his breeches and groaned through a
noisy burst of diarrhoea.

His companion giggled and pointed to the slave. ‘You’ll be dead of the shits even before this heathen goes down to Hell.’

The man came to his feet and tied up his breeches. ‘I may shit myself to death, but I’ll be damned if I don’t outlive this bastard.’ He lifted the slave against the wall
and pressed his hands to his neck.

Caravaggio felt his own throat constrict as if he were the one throttled. He pictured the
Flagellation
in his basement studio. What would he have done, had he been in the dungeon where
the legionaries tormented Our Lord? Would he have risked himself to save Christ? Was this his moment to redeem himself?

He was about to come forward into the light of the torch, when he heard footsteps from the other corner of the street. A cloak billowed as the newcomer closed upon the group. His arm lifted, a
rapier catching the orange glow of the fire. ‘Leave that poor soul, you scum.’

Caravaggio recognized the anger and the arrogant tone.

‘Get lost,’ the strangler said.

Roero cut the man’s hamstring with a neat motion of his wrist.

One of the thugs fled right away. The younger one, who held the torch, made to go. But Roero halted him, the tip of his weapon at his chest. ‘Give me that light. Pick this man up and help
him to walk.’

The young man handed the torch to Roero. He looked down at the slave, slumped against the wall, and at the man who had been his tormentor, writhing in the dirt, clutching his ruined leg,
breathless with pain. ‘Pick him up?’ the young man said. ‘Which one do you mean?’

‘Let me make it easier for you.’ Roero stabbed down with his rapier through the wounded strangler’s heart. ‘Clear enough now?’

Roero went towards the boulevard with the torch. The young man followed, supporting the shuffling slave.

If Roero hadn’t been distracted by the violence against the slave, it would have been Caravaggio who lay dead at the point of the knight’s sword. Relief carried him to the Stigliano
Palace so fast through the dark he seemed barely to touch the mud and the cobbles. In his studio, he set to work right away.

He opened out the canvas, extending it with a fold that he had made behind the original frame to allow a little extra material in case he wanted to change his composition as he worked. He
widened the frame by a foot and filled in the holes from the original tacks with stucco. It would give him room to add another torturer for Christ. He painted out the reverent, kneeling patron who
had been on the right of the picture.

Caravaggio worked through the night and all of the next day. He concentrated the light on Christ’s torso, calling up the shock he had felt as each blow landed on the slave in the Spanish
Quarter. On the face of the torturer at the left of Jesus, he painted the frightening viciousness of the man who had died on Roero’s sword. The second torturer shoved his leg against
Christ’s calf, compelling him to take a painful, off-balance stance, as the other pulled his hair and prepared the next blow.

In the last light of the afternoon, he sat on a stool in his studio, slugging wine from a flask. There were still many touches he would need to make, but he had it now.
The Flagellation
was awash with cruelty and pain. It stank like a killing in a backstreet. He stared at the malicious pleasure on the face of the man at Jesus’s shoulder. He wondered if this was what people
saw on his own face when rage overcame him. The thought shamed him.

9

T
he Denial of St Peter

Costanza brought a letter to Caravaggio in his studio. She found him reclining on his bolster, as if he were watching the oils dry on the
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
he had
been working on for a week. He intended to ship it to Wignacourt, hoping it would so please the Grand Master that he would order Roero back to Malta.

‘Good news from Cardinal del Monte in Rome.’ Costanza tried to read Caravaggio’s expression in the half-light. She found apprehension there, pure and animal.
‘You’re to be pardoned.’

He blew out his cheeks as though he had feared to breathe until this message arrived.

‘The cardinal writes that Scipione is to pay off the Tomassonis. In return, they won’t seek your life.’

He took Costanza’s hands and kissed them.

She felt the pressure of his grip as if he had touched her all over. She put her palm to his beard. ‘You’re not in Rome yet, Michele.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. He kissed her hand once more and ran up the steps to find someone who would be happy for him.