A Name in Blood (36 page)

In the doorway of the Cerriglio Tavern, he touched his fingers to del Monte’s letter tucked inside his doublet. He went through the first room and under the arch to the
inner chamber of the inn, where distinguished people came in by a side door to avoid being seen entering such a low place. He went straight out to the rear courtyard whose walls were decorated with
proverbs celebrating the pleasures of food and wine. Stella sat at the edge of the small fountain, bleaching her hair in the sun. Mahogany highlights shone in the long russet strands spread over
the brim of her wide, crownless hat. She saw the joy on his face. ‘
O’ntufato
,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to find a different nickname for you.’

Stella opened the shutter. The sun lanced through Caravaggio’s eyeballs into the pulsating dryness in his head. He rolled onto his side in the bed, stifling a retch.

Stella was already in her purple gown. ‘I’ll go and tell Ugo to put aside a focaccia for you. It’ll calm your stomach.’

He frowned at her. She shook her head. Her smile was touched with bitterness. ‘If I had a ducat for every time I’ve seen that nervous “What did I do last night?” look on
a man’s face, I’d have a dowry big enough to make me a duchess.’

‘I don’t see you as new nobility. You’re more the type to endow a convent.’

‘You’re still sarcastic. So you can’t be too hungover. I see you’re wondering, so let me fill you in: you didn’t get into any fights last night and you fell asleep
while I was undressing. I couldn’t wake you no matter what I did. It was as though you hadn’t slept deeply in years.’

He would have told her it was true, but he couldn’t find the spit to lubricate his tongue.

‘Come down when you’re ready to eat.’ She shut the door.

After he had dressed, his sluggishness left him in a moment and he was alert. Del Monte’s letter was missing. He went around the room, wrenching Stella’s few items of furniture
across the floor, turning over the dresses in her trunk. It wasn’t there. His nausea made him dizzy. He had to get some food, to settle himself, so he could think straight enough to find the
letter. He went down to eat.

The focaccia tasted gummy and bitter. He sat back to chew it and hit his head against a big round of cheese, hung up to mature. The cook noticed his frown. He rolled out another ball of dough,
sprinkled it with rosemary and laid it in the oven. ‘Hard to get it down, right?’

Caravaggio rubbed his head and stared accusingly at the cheese. ‘What’s wrong with the focaccia, Ugo?’

‘The sirocco blew up during the night. I could tell as soon as I awoke. It makes me feel a pressure in my ears. Drives me crazy. But it isn’t only people who get irritable when the
damp wind comes. It changes the way the ingredients in the focaccia react with each other.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘It’s true. Watch out today, Michele. Everyone misbehaves when the sirocco comes to Naples – even my dough.’

Caravaggio drank a cup of wine and went out onto the slope in front of the inn. The clouds carried in by the sirocco seemed to press the sun down low. It glared off the roofs and the damp
cobbles. He blinked and tried to get to the shaded side of the street.

In the impenetrable Neapolitan dialect, every voice around him sounded like a threat. He was suddenly aware of his vulnerability.

The silhouette of a man approached him from his right. The man flicked his fingers off the tip of his chin. Caravaggio went for his dagger, but someone who had come up on his left grabbed his
hand.

Two other men held him from behind. Their breath strained as he struggled. The sun dazzled him.

Something cold drew down his right cheek. A glint of sunlight caught the edge of a dagger. He had been cut. The men who held him kicked at his legs. When he dropped, they thrust their knees into
his ribs, laughing quietly.

Another blow to his face. He didn’t see the weapon, but he knew the wound was deeper. It rang through his skull. The blustery air entered the gash and froze the bone.

He remembered the letter, the freedom that was soon to be his. He searched for Roero or for Tomassoni – whichever of them led this attack.
Get him and the others will fade away
. The
glare blinded him. He butted the man directly before him. The man went down, falling into the low shadows where Caravaggio could make out his features. Giovan Francesco Tomassoni snarled as he came
to his feet, the point of his dagger at Caravaggio’s gullet.

A terracotta chamberpot struck Tomassoni full in the face. The pot smashed to the ground and Tomassoni dropped back, out cold. The other men let go their hold and dragged Tomassoni away. They
cursed at someone, though it wasn’t Caravaggio.

‘
O’ntufato
, you forgot your letter.’ Stella leaned from her window on the upper floor of the Cerriglio with a parchment in her hand. ‘Why did you drop it in my
pisspot, anyway?’

Caravaggio sat in the street, wondering if he was dying. The girl came down to him. She pressed a cloth against the wound in his cheek.

‘How bad is it?’ he asked.

She hissed and grimaced.

‘Bad enough to shut even your mouth, eh?’

‘Let’s just say, you’ve painted your last self-portrait,’ she said. ‘Unless you really want to turn people’s stomachs.’

Cardinal Del Monte’s hairline had receded beneath his beret since Caravaggio had left Rome. Good living coloured his face almost to the shade of his scarlet robes. When
he stepped from his carriage outside the Prince of Stigliano’s palace, he saw the wounds beneath the painter’s right eye and turned away with a wince.

They climbed the steep steps to the Church of San Domenico, guarded by a half dozen men in the Stigliano livery. Costanza had forced them to take bodyguards from among the palace grooms who had
been cutting the grass in the gardens to sell for hay. She was sure Tomassoni would attack again.

‘In Rome, it was reported that you were dead.’ Del Monte paused outside the door of the church to recover his breath from the climb.

Caravaggio scanned the piazza, the palaces of the Dukes of Velleti and Casacalenda and of the Prince of San Severo.
He’s watching for Tomassoni
, del Monte thought.
Or someone
else, for all I know. He never was short of enemies.

‘Did they send you to Naples to work a miracle and bring me back to life?’ Caravaggio blinked, as if his eye were obstructed by some detritus.

‘No one is likely to mistake
me
for the vehicle of Our Lord’s wonders.’ Del Monte went into the church and crossed the nave to a chapel beside the main altar. He stood
before
The Flagellation
, his fingers in his white beard and his weight on one hip. ‘The thought that you might be dead caused the Cardinal-Nephew to make haste, finally. As Scipione
sees it, this sort of art –’ he held out his palm towards the tormented Christ ‘– ought to be in Rome, not in Naples. Actually it ought to be in his personal gallery, not in
a church.’

‘Does Lena think I’m dead, too?’

Del Monte felt himself taken up into the canvas. The life it depicted was so precarious that he sensed Caravaggio’s desperation even before the man stepped towards him and took his arm in
an insistent grip.

‘Does she believe me dead?’

Del Monte hesitated. He was unwilling to admit that he had concerned himself with a maid who washed the floors of his palace and dusted his picture frames. She was Caravaggio’s woman,
which made her someone whom he reckoned into his plans, but his dignity prevented him from further contact. ‘I sent her a message that I’d travel to Naples to investigate.’

‘I made a mistake. I should never have left Rome. She’s not in good health – she needs me. Take me back there, to Rome.’ Caravaggio laid his fingertips on the wound
across his cheek. ‘Surely you see what’ll become of me here.’

‘If it was only your soul that was required to do penance, I might grant you an indulgence from the Holy Father and all your sins would be paid. But, as you point out, it’s also your
body that’s in jeopardy.’ Del Monte extended a finger towards the livid scar below Caravaggio’s eye. ‘Even a document from the Holy Father is no amulet against harm, unless
all the political arrangements have been well made.’

Caravaggio’s eye wavered, drifting to the side as though the dagger blows to his face had damaged some controlling nerve inside the socket. He cursed and cupped his hand over it.

Del Monte recalled the early days of Caravaggio’s triumph after the
Matthew
canvases at the Church of San Luigi. The painter’s rages had been filled with pride and contempt,
but del Monte had forgiven these flaws. He had known them to be a screen for fear and loneliness. Now his protégé was stripped even of these defences. Caravaggio’s arrogance had
been voided, as though his years on the run had exhausted the gland in which it was produced and siphoned it away.

The cardinal examined the brushstrokes in Christ’s calf, where the muscle strained as the foot twisted. ‘It’s a shame we can’t just take this
Flagellation
back for
Scipione.’

‘Take me instead.’

‘Some excellent art would be better received – as an appetizer, if you like. You can be the main course.’

‘Then I’ve got something for him.’

They went back to the Stigliano Palace. In the studio, Caravaggio pulled away the cloth that covered a painting of a bald, bearded man, a woman and a soldier. The man turned his hands to his
chest and pulled in his chin, denying some accusation. ‘St Peter.’

Del Monte went close to the canvas. He glanced sidelong at Caravaggio.
The man makes so many bad decisions
, he thought.
How can he produce such judicious art, such insight into the way
people are, and yet not be a saint?
‘It’s so immediate, Michele.’ He let his hands follow the lines of the brush like a musician conducting an ensemble. ‘Peter almost
looks as
you
might, when you’re an old man.’

‘I hope to live so long.’

Michele gave his own face to Peter at the moment of his guilty denial of Christ
, del Monte thought. The saint pointed at his heart to show sincerity, but it was the lying manoeuvre of a
desperate man. In his expression, del Monte saw that he was guilt-ridden. His eyes didn’t quite rest on the face of the soldier interrogating him. They were distant, looking over the
soldier’s shoulder.

Del Monte turned to Caravaggio in surprise.
He’s ashamed of himself.
‘St Peter overcame his guilt. Remember that, Michele. He went on to found the Church in Rome.’

‘Where he met his death.’

In the dark studio, Caravaggio’s face was shadowed. His wounds marked him as an insulted man. They glinted like silver highlights on black cloth.

The cardinal beckoned to his page and ordered him to roll up the
St Peter
. ‘I’ll take this to Scipione when I leave Naples. Write me a letter for him now. Promise him another
three canvases like this. He’ll be so relieved that you’re alive, he’ll want you back in Rome right away.’

‘What about Fabrizio? The Marchesa’s son, in jail in Malta.’

Del Monte saw the guilt in Caravaggio’s face, just as he had read it in the depiction of St Peter.
Is it only the loyalty of a family retainer that makes him speak up for this Colonna?
There’s something else . . .
‘Unfortunately for Don Fabrizio, his talents are of a less decorative nature than yours. But I’ll do what I can.’

‘He saved me in Malta.’

Del Monte adjusted his beret. ‘Let’s just write the letter now.’

Caravaggio knelt beside a linen trunk for a desk. He scribbled out the letter as del Monte dictated. The pageboy removed the tacks from the edge of the
St Peter.
When the boy started to
roll it, Caravaggio looked up. ‘Not that way,’ he shouted, ‘God damn it.’

The page dropped the canvas.

‘Roll it with the paint outwards.’ Caravaggio’s voice was savage. ‘If you roll it with the paint in, it’ll compress the oils and damage the work.’

Del Monte laid a gentle hand on the page’s shoulder and spoke the final line of the letter. ‘Your most humble, devoted and obliged servant and creature, Michelangelo Merisi of
Caravaggio. Can you put your name to those words?’