The Borgia Portrait, page 23
‘I think I’ve got it. Lady L.’
A couple of blinks, then bleary-eyed she said, ‘Do you always wake someone up with an inconsequential remark after sex?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not if I remember right.’ She scrabbled by the sheets for her pile of clothes, then came back with a watch. ‘It’s four in the morning. I’m shagged out. Twice over. Can I sleep now, please? We can talk about this later.’
‘I’d rather talk about it now, if that’s all right.’
‘Not really.’
Pictures were flashing through my head. That strange, wordless act that makes two into one, takes you out of yourself, puts the external world, the real one, in its place, makes you believe for one fleeting moment there just might be something eternal out there.
‘Been a while,’ I said. ‘You know.’
‘Me too.’
‘I’m sorry if …’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about, Arnold!’ Then, more softly, ‘You know you’re lost now? Welcome to the club.’ She yawned, and I watched every moment, every changing aspect of her face. ‘Can we please discuss this later?’
‘Lady L. The friar in Ognissanti. You remember what he said?’
She pulled herself up in the bed and leaned against the wall, hands behind her head. ‘Can’t say I do.’
‘When he pointed at his eyes. “If the hospital or that nice lady saint of ours ever make these better …” We keep thinking Lucia was referring to Lucrezia. But what if—’
‘What if we talk about this in the morning?’
‘Who’s the patron saint of the blind?’
A shake of her head. ‘The woman who runs Specsavers?’
‘It’s …’ I needed my books. A connection to the web. My phone. ‘This is important. I guarantee it. Give me a little time.’
‘Arnold. Did you hear me? It’s four in the morning.’ A groan and she pulled a pillow over her head. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’
Eleanor and I spent a couple of weeks exploring Sicily when we were mulling over where in Italy to move to. Venice won in the end, in part because we adored the idea of a place where you never saw a car. But Ortigia came a close second, though much of the time it was choked with traffic along its ancient snaking lanes and alleys. It’s a small island connected to the larger Siracusa by two narrow bridges. The oldest part of a very ancient city that was once home to the Greeks who’d emigrated to form the colonies of Magna Graecia. Its story embraced Athenians and Phoenicians, Carthage across the sea in Africa, and brutal conquest by the Romans. It was here, somewhere in those narrow streets, that the famed philosopher and inventor Archimedes was murdered by a Roman soldier during a bloody invasion.
History was everywhere, in the columns of the Greek temple that formed the handsome Christian cathedral, in the hills outside where classical dramas were still performed in the semicircular theatre the Greeks had built more than two millennia before. We dined on fish and fruit and vegetables from the busy market. And we absorbed the tale of one local saint in particular.
Many of the more lurid stories of Christian martyrs were at best dubious or, in the case of a few, such as the Ursula depicted in Carpaccio’s cycle of paintings in the Accademia, creations of the lively imaginations of later writers. No one had heard much of St Ursula, a legendary British princess, until the tenth century or so, a good four or five hundred years after she was supposedly murdered by marauding Huns. Not that this made Carpaccio’s paintings any the less moving. Most martyr stories are fairy tales of a kind.
Ortigia’s local saint was different. Her name was Lucia, Lucy in English, and her story was being recorded by the late 400s AD, perhaps a hundred and fifty years after she died. It was as colourful, as cruel and as miraculous as any of those invented by later fabulists. She came from a wealthy Ortigia family and converted to Christianity as a child. When she wanted to donate the family wealth to the poor, the young pagan who hoped to marry her betrayed her to the Roman authorities. This was during the reign of the vile emperor Diocletian, one of the harshest tyrants when it came to seeking out and punishing anyone who followed Christ. Lucia was dragged before the Roman governor and ordered to make an offering to the pagan gods or be sent to a local brothel and raped.
She refused, naturally, and here the miracles begin. No soldiers could move her to the brothel, even when they brought in oxen to pull her out of her cell. Wooden pyres were built around her, but they refused to light. And then, the inevitable gory detail no martyr legend can do without, we come to the eyes. Some stories claim the furious governor ordered them to be plucked out. Others suggest Lucia gouged them out herself and gave them to her former suitor, since he’d told her they were the most beautiful in the world.
In the end, the story says, a soldier ran a sword through her throat. But when they came to bury her, they found her eyes had been miraculously restored, as they were when her tomb was uncovered a century later.
That detail came to define her, not least because the name Lucia comes from lux, the Latin for ‘light’. During the Middle Ages, when she became one of the most popular Catholic saints, she was commonly depicted holding a plate on which her eyes rested. Her name was invoked to aid the blind and those suffering from ailments of the eyes. In Siracusa, she was the local hero, celebrated by a gloriously spooky depiction of her burial by Caravaggio, painted while he was on the run for murder. It was just two years before his own death, and there was something prophetic in that dark, strange canvas that brought us back to see it twice in the church just along from the cathedral where, legend had it, the brothel to which she was condemned once stood. I can still remember …
‘This is all quite fascinating. But we’re not in Sicily. This is Venice. Which I’m pretty sure is quite a long way from there.’
We were in Mamafè for what was either a late breakfast or an early lunch. Lizzie had slept till gone ten and I’d no intention of rousing her. There’d been plenty of work to do anyway, reading and checking my memories against what I could find online and in the old books of Ca’ Scacchi’s little library.
‘I was getting to that.’
‘Good.’
She’d chosen one of the sweet pies, full of pale green pistachio cream. A tiny smear was dripping down the side of her mouth. Without a second thought, I picked up a paper napkin and dabbed at it. The kind of automatic intimate gesture I’d have made with Eleanor, who was just as messy an eater. It never occurred to me this was someone I’d only known for little more than a week. Someone who was still in some ways a stranger.
‘Thanks.’ She took the napkin and did the rest herself. ‘Do we not talk about last night?’
‘If you want.’
‘Was it a mistake?’
‘It didn’t feel that way to me. Anything but.’
She finished her coffee. ‘Me neither. I will leave you, though. You do understand? Whatever way this works out. I don’t stick with people. I don’t have the patience. Or the temperament.’ She raised the empty cup in a toast. ‘It’s not you.’ She looked around the charming little café. ‘It’s not this place. It’s me. Sooner or later, I’m going to want to be on my own. Stories …’
‘What about them?’
‘I feel as if I’ve lived my entire life stuck inside one written by someone else. That it’s time I tried to write my own.’
I thought of her mother, and that strange tale of Casanova she’d left us. ‘Stories are ways we have of talking to one another. Of saying we feel the same things. Terrified at times. Elated at others. We need them.’
‘We do. But after all these years, I want one that belongs to me.’
‘Perhaps your mother felt that way too. She invented all these riddles.’
Lizzie sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think any more. Whether to believe the picture Dad painted. What to trust. What’s … true.’
‘I know you’ll leave,’ I said, and it wasn’t a lie. ‘I don’t expect anything. I’m just glad we met. Glad you brought something bright and young and sunny into my life when I least expected it.’
That was it. The only real conversation we’d ever have on the subject, or so I thought. Brief, circular, evading anything that might edge too close to the emotional. I must have sensed that too, because I did something quite unlike me. I held both her hands across the table, then leaned over and kissed her quickly, fondly on the lips. She tasted of pistachio and deep, dark Italian coffee. In my memory, she always will.
‘Back to St Lucy,’ she said.
It was complex in the way the remains of saints so often are. Holy martyrs were, it seemed to me, the celebrities of the Catholic hierarchy, stars to be lauded, worshipped, remembered on their name day each year. Icons served up to flocks around the world as proof that God was real, along with deliverance for the pious and damnation for the wicked. Lucia belonged to Siracusa and always would. But her earthly relics were the property of the Catholic Church and would come to be scattered across Europe like sacred confetti made of flesh and bone.
She would lie undisturbed in Siracusa for four centuries, only to be disinterred and moved to Abruzzo when Sicily fell to a Lombard warlord. From there an arm would be dispatched to a monastery in Germany, and the rest of her to Constantinople. In 1204, when the Venetians and their fellow Crusaders sacked the city – still a holy Christian site – Lucia’s relics fell into the hands of the then Doge, Enrico Dandolo. They would be shipped back to the lagoon along with priceless works of stolen art, among them the famous four bronze horses that adorned the loggia of the basilica of San Marco until weather and good sense saw them replaced with copies and moved to the museum inside.
Two centuries later, another Doge gave Lucia’s head as a present to the king of France, a bribe in the savage and complex politics of the day. The rest of her would remain in Venice, in her eponymous church in Cannaregio. Even then, her journey was not at an end. In 1860, the Austrians who then occupied the Veneto demolished the church, despite its connections with Palladio, to make way for a railway station that would be reached by the first ever bridge from terraferma. Not that many of those who pass through Santa Lucia station today know the origins of its name.
Fourteen hundred years on, the saint’s remains would be transferred to another church in Cannaregio, San Geremia, where they would remain in a glass case, partially ‘incorrupt’, clothed and with a silver mask placed on her in the 1960s to hide the empty sockets of her skull.
‘Cripes,’ Lizzie said after I related the narrative I’d built that morning while she slept upstairs. ‘Old Lucy did get about, didn’t she?’
‘Haven’t finished. In 1981, two men wielding guns broke into San Geremia, dragged her mummified remains out of the glass coffin and left in such a rush her head and mask broke off and got left behind as they made off with the rest.’
‘I thought you said the head was in France.’
Lizzie Hawker never missed a thing. ‘Perhaps it was a fake head. I don’t know. Saintly parts tend to multiply over the years. There’s one chap from Spain I read about who has thirty-seven recorded penises.’
‘I imagine that’s a curse rather than a blessing.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Why on earth would someone pinch an old corpse?’
A question that had struck me too. There was a suggestion that the ransom note demanded a passage of a book by Primo Levi about his experience in Auschwitz during the war be read out in all schools in the Venice area. But the details seemed hazy.
‘In any case,’ I added, ‘the relics were found five weeks later. Intact. On her saint’s day, December the thirteenth.’
‘A happy and fortuitous ending then.’
‘Very saintly, I suppose.’
‘You’re good at this. Finding stuff out.’
‘It’s what I do. What I’ve always done. It’s the only thing I know.’
‘Not the only thing, love. You’ve found it then? This St Jeremy place?’
‘San Geremia.’ I hesitated, wishing I hadn’t sounded quite so certain of all this. ‘Possibly.’
We walked outside and went round to stand in front of San Pantalon. Lizzie put her sunglasses on immediately. The day was so bright it hurt the eyes. The newsstand by the bridge had a new billboard for the morning paper. The shout line on it now: Scacchi Mystery Deepens, Dead Woman Unknown.
I was still blinking when a hand touched my arm and a too-familiar English voice, half public school, half rogue, said, ‘Mr Clover and Miss Hawker. What a lovely couple you make. A word in your shell-likes, if I may.’
Once again, I felt it would be impossible to meet Alf Lascelles – or Gervaise, as he introduced himself now – without the phrase ‘bugger off’ leaping instantly to my lips. But before I could utter it, Lizzie was smiling at the fellow, acting as if she was perfectly fine with having a lowlife tabloid hack on her case.
Our case, in fact. I didn’t like the way Lascelles was looking at the pair of us. Wondering, perhaps, if he had another twist to tell in whatever sordid tale he had in mind.
‘Rum do this, love,’ he said as he pulled out his phone. ‘Mind if I take a photo of the two of you?’
‘We do actually,’ I told him. ‘So put that thing away.’
He did, with a shrug. ‘You made a canny decision getting Arnold on your side. Hasn’t been here long, but he’s made some good friends. Got to know the ropes.’
‘Did Enzo Canale send you?’
He didn’t like me asking that at all.
‘I’m not here on anyone’s behalf but my own, thank you. Canale and I aren’t exactly the best of chums at the moment.’
Lizzie’s ears pricked up. ‘May I ask why?’
Lascelles looked briefly embarrassed. A new one for me, and rare perhaps for him. ‘Is it true he’s your dad?’
‘Is that really any of your business?’ I asked.
‘No. Not really. I do have my standards, Arnold. I know there’s a damned good story here. A messy one, if I’m honest. Dead woman in the ground behind that palazzo. Turns out it’s not Lucia Scacchi either. So where is she? What happened?’
‘We don’t know,’ Lizzie told him. ‘Maybe we never will.’
‘That’s what I gather. Doesn’t stop Canale telling me I’ve got to write some cock-and-bull piece saying Chas Hawker murdered them both. That he’s your real dad. That he’s going to get his hands on Ca’ Scacchi and turn it into something the city will be proud of.’ He leaned forward and jabbed a finger first at me, then Lizzie. ‘I don’t like being used. Even if I do believe that bit about him being your dad. He showed me the papers. The rest …’
Lizzie asked, ‘What do you want?’
He nodded at me. ‘Like I told Arnold, I want the story. The real one when it comes out. I want it all to myself. I’ll tell it straight. No twists and tweaks, I promise. There could be a bit of money if you need it.’
‘How much?’ she said.
He smiled, and I said to myself: you think you have her now. How wrong you are.
‘Depends on the tale you’ve got to tell, love, doesn’t it?’ He glanced at me. ‘How much you’re willing to say.’ He flipped out a business card. ‘Mostly I’ve written opportunistic rubbish round here, as Arnold’s doubtless told you. But I would like to have something proper in my portfolio. Something of substance. If you promise me you won’t talk to anyone else, I’ll stay shtum until the time’s right. You have my word.’
‘And if not?’ I asked.
A shrug. ‘Then I guess it’s back to flogging crap to the tabloids. Like I said … best having me on your side, not your back.’
Lizzie held out her hand. He looked surprised, but he shook it.
‘One other thing I should warn you,’ he added. ‘Canale’s getting more than a little obsessive. He was trying to pay me to spy on you until I told him to get lost. I doubt he’s given up.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Be wary. And good luck. I await your call.’
It was a twenty-minute walk to San Geremia, across the Scalzi bridge then along Lista di Spagna, the busy street that led from Santa Lucia, the station named after our distant saint. I kept looking round, Lizzie ticking me off at regular intervals for being so nervous. I didn’t trust Lascelles and I doubted I ever would. The man was a chameleon, changing his appearance according to the company and the need. All the same, he had warned us in a manner that seemed quite genuine. It would be foolish not to listen.
She came to a sudden halt outside a shop window I’d noticed in the past, not with great interest.
‘Isn’t that lovely?’
Pastries, sweets, chocolates. All very fancy, not my thing at all.
‘Pasticceria Dal Mas,’ I said reading the sign. ‘Rings a bell. Think it’s quite famous.’ She couldn’t take her eyes off the window. ‘You just ate a pistachio pie.’
‘I know, I know, but it was tiny …’
No, it wasn’t.
‘You need to take care around Alf Lascelles.’
‘Gervaise, please. It seems to be his preference now.’
‘I don’t care what he’s called … Can you stop staring at the pastries?’
She nudged me with her elbow. ‘Not easily.’
‘Lascelles is a hack.’
‘You said.’
‘Untrustworthy.’
‘Of course.’
‘Then …’ I was lost trying to understand whatever point she was trying to make.
‘Told you already. I dealt with journos for Dad. Lots. You heard him going on about Canale telling him what to write?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s what they hate most. The good ones anyway.’
‘Alf … Gervaise Lascelles is not a good hack. He writes for the most awful rags.’
She groaned. ‘You’re letting your prejudices get the better of you. The man has ambitions. Something better than his tabloid rubbish, he claimed.’
‘They all say that.’
I checked up and down the busy street.
‘Spotted anyone?’
‘Well, no …’
‘Then,’ she went on with a triumphant smile, ‘let’s find Lucy.’ She headed for the shop door. ‘After I’ve picked up a snack.’
