A Name in Blood Read online

  MATT REES was born in Wales and read English at Oxford before moving to the Middle East to become a journalist. He is also the author of the award-winning Omar Yussef series, which follows a detective in Palestine, and is now published in twenty-four countries.

  Visit his website at www.mattrees.net

  ALSO BY MATT REES

  Mozart’s Last Aria

  THE OMAR YUSSEF SERIES

  The Bethlehem Murders

  The Saladin Murders

  The Samaritan’s Secret

  The Fourth Assassin

  First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Matt Rees 2012

  The moral right of Matt Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 919 5

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 918 8

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 678 0

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For Mari Carys, my little Madonna

  CONTENTS

  Main Characters

  Prologue Things Thought Hidden

  I In the Evil Garden

  1 The Calling of St Matthew

  2 Martha and Mary Magdalene

  3 The Madonna of Loreto

  4 The Death of the Virgin

  5 The Madonna with the Serpent

  II A Name in Blood

  6 Portrait of the Grand Master

  7 The Beheading of St John the Baptist

  III The Head of Goliath

  8 The Flagellation of Christ

  9 The Denial of St Peter

  10 David with the Head of Goliath

  Author’s Note

  The Paintings

  Acknowledgements

  In July 1610, Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, the most celebrated artist in Italy, disappeared. Though he had dangerous enemies and had been on the run with a price on his head for several years, he was said to have died of a fever. His body was never found.

  He died as badly as he had lived.

  Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643), on Caravaggio in The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1642

  What a good end he makes, who dies loving well.

  Petrarch (1304–74), Sonnet 140

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Michelangelo Merisi (called Caravaggio, after his hometown), an artist

  Maddalena ‘Lena’ Antognetti, Caravaggio’s model

  Giovanni Baglione, artist

  Scipione Borghese, Cardinal, nephew of Pope Paul V

  Domenica ‘Menica’ Calvi, courtesan

  Costanza Colonna, Marchesa of Caravaggio

  Leonetto della Corbara, Inquisitor of Malta

  Onorio Longhi, architect

  Antonio Martelli, Knight of Malta

  Fillide Melandroni, courtesan

  Mario Minniti, artist

  Francesco del Monte, Cardinal, patron of Caravaggio

  Gaspare Murtola, poet

  Prospero Orsi, artist

  Giovanni Roero, Piedmontese nobleman, Knight of Malta

  Fabrizio Sforza-Colonna, Costanza’s son, Knight of Malta

  Ranuccio Tomassoni, ruffian, pimp

  Giovan Francesco Tomassoni, Ranuccio’s elder brother

  Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta

  Prudenza Zacchia, courtesan

  PROLOGUE

  The town of CARAVAGGIO,

  in the Duchy of Milan

  Things Thought Hidden

  1577

  The boy sat in the dark. Watch him, he thought. Watch this man lurching upright with his hands to his belly, retching, grimacing, sweating, kneading himself with blackened fingernails. The sheets stank, but the boy remained on the bed. He wanted to be near the invalid whose privates and armpits were bulbous with the scabbing sores of the plague. This was his father, who was dying.

  Across the bed lay the boy’s grandfather. Each breath choked the old man, rattling his narrow chest. Perspiration shone on his grey beard. Runnels of sweat glimmered between every stark rib in his heaving torso. Rotting plague weals brimmed out of his armpits like leeches. Bloody urine seeped into the mattress. His face quivered with shame under the sallow shaft of sun from a crack in the shutter.

  His father’s voice. Would he forget it? He knew he would remember the words: ‘Michele, why are you here?’ But would he recall the tone? A mellow bass, warped and desiccated in the furnace of the Black Death until it sounded like the futile gurgling of a man smothered by a mouthful of sand. ‘Why?’

  ‘To keep you company, Papa.’ His own speech. When he was older and alone, he remembered it like the cadence of an ineluctable melody. Lost and innocent, he would hear it in his head. Ah, but never in his throat. That voice – the one that would resonate when he opened his mouth as a grown man – that speech was stripped of all innocence.

  ‘Go, my boy. You’ll catch the—’ His father heaved and rolled on his side, shivering. He drew up his knees.

  The air was sharp with the lime and sulphur his mother said would chase away the disease. It prickled in the boy’s nose and his lungs. It made him sneeze. His father lifted his head, a motion quicker than any he had made since the infection had come on. The man’s features were taut with horror. A sneeze was the first symptom. The boy twitched a wavering smile to reassure him.

  The father’s head dropped as though his son’s grin had sliced it from his shoulders. He descended again into his own tortures. The boy wondered about the sneeze too, and he reached his thin, pale arm under the drawstring of his calico pants to feel around his groin. No lumps, no buboes. The sulphur scent returned and he realized he had been holding his breath.

  His grandfather shuddered, eyes flickering upwards, white and blind. He surrendered his vision to the dimming light within his skull, so that some spirit too refined for living perception might reveal itself to him. When the pupils descended, they were fixed and unseeing and the boy’s grandfather was still. His father’s tear ducts were dried by the vinegar with which he had tried to wash away the pestilence; the weeping wouldn’t come. He struck his brow with his fists as though the tears were merely stubborn and might relent, like a donkey, with chastisement.

  The boy stayed with them for hours. His father lay beside the dead man, whispering and incoherent in his fever. That evening he complained that the bed was wet and hot, slid to the floor, stared into the night-black. The boy stood over him.

  ‘You’re too young, Michele,’ he gasped. ‘Too young to see this.’

  At first the boy thought he meant that a child of six shouldn’t witness his father’s parting and so he s
obbed, because he already felt what it would be like to be without him. Then he followed the direction of his squint. With eyes unsynchronized and palpitating, he knew his father was looking into the face of Death. The boy could make out nothing in the darkness. The father opened his mouth to explain what he saw, but his jaw fell and his weight slumped against the side of the bed. The boy grappled with his father’s head, clinging to the tangled hair, so that it shouldn’t be dashed to the floor.

  The boy glanced down at the dead man, his brow ridged with pity. Something moved in the darkness and he sensed it, the sudden illumination that comes to those who make a compact with death. The sufferer from disease or the willing sacrifice. The murderer and his victim.

  Watch the darkness, it told him. What materializes from the shadow? What emerges when you stare at things thought hidden? Keep looking and one day you’ll see its shape. Your gaze will make a light that penetrates the mystery.

  He stroked the dead man’s head. Isn’t that true, Papa?

  I

  ROME

  In the Evil Garden

  1605

  1

  The Calling of St Matthew

  ‘He’s the most famous artist in Rome.’ At the end of the nave, Scipione Borghese crossed himself. His hand passed across his scarlet robes, slow and voluptuous, as if he were stroking a lover’s breast. ‘Do you think you can keep him to yourself?’

  Not now that your uncle is anointed as Pope Paul, Cardinal del Monte thought. The appointment of the new pontiff had made Scipione the most powerful prince of the Church in Rome. He’ll force my protégé to sign his letters ‘your humble creature’. ‘If you think it’s possible to control Caravaggio, my gracious Lord, I shall be happy to introduce you to him so that you may attempt it. He answers to a higher power than you or I.’ He gestured to the golden crucifix glimmering on the altar in the light from the high windows. ‘And I don’t mean the Holy Father, may he be blessed by Our Lord.’ Scipione prodded his wrist downwards, his index and little fingers extended like the horns of the devil.

  Del Monte grimaced to see such an earthy gesture formed by the manicured hand of the new arbiter of art and power in the papal city. ‘From what I hear of his behaviour, Caravaggio’s authority comes not from above, but from below,’ Scipione said. ‘Artists are all rough sorts. I know how to bend them to my will.’

  With 200,000 ducats a year bestowed upon you from the Throne of St Peter, I’m sure you’ll find a way. Del Monte guided Scipione to the chapel in the left aisle. ‘Here they are.’

  Scipione shifted his scarlet beret on the back of his head, scratched his jaw, and pulled ruminatively on the point of his goatee. His tongue ran along his upper lip. He was young and delicate, but something in his face made it easy to foresee what he would look like when he became fat. And this one’s certainly going to be fat, del Monte thought. The body can barely contain the avarice of the man. Just give him a few years with absolute power and unlimited budget, his stomach will swell and his chins will multiply.

  ‘The famous pride of the Church of San Luigi of the French,’ Scipione said.

  The two cardinals passed beyond the green marble balustrade into the Contarelli Chapel. ‘St Matthew and the Angel and The Martyrdom of St Matthew, these are wonderful of course.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s this one. This is the one.’ Scipione turned to the massive canvas on the wall at the left of the altar.

  ‘The Calling of St Matthew.’ Del Monte opened his hands wide. ‘I admit that even I, who recognized his talent before all other patrons, never expected a genius of such virtuosity to emerge.’

  ‘It’s revolutionary. Everywhere such darkness.’ Scipione spread his feet and rested his hands on his stomach. He worked his jaw, rippling his cheeks, as though he were consuming the canvas before him.

  The Calling portrayed five men at a table. Three youngsters wore showy doublets and cockaded hats; the other two were grey-haired. A plain room, its walls dun-coloured; one window, dirty and lightless. But from the right, where a vivid sun illuminated the chapel itself, a shaft of warm yellow and brown tones angled as if cast through a high window into a basement. Just beneath that soft beam, obscured by shadow, his hand reaching out to call his future disciple, the bearded face of Jesus.

  ‘What a brilliant stroke,’ Scipione said, ‘that Our Lord should be displaced from his usual position at the shining centre of the composition.’

  ‘And yet He still dominates the painting.’

  ‘Quite so, del Monte. The meaning of the work isn’t forced upon us by bright skies and radiant angels. We must search. Like St Matthew himself. Search within ourselves.’ Scipione pointed at one of the seated figures who seemed to be gesturing towards himself, questioning whether it was he whom Christ was calling.

  ‘When these were delivered to San Luigi five years ago,’ del Monte said, ‘I knew they’d transform painting forever. In any church in Rome now, you’ll see that every new work of art is either a copy of Caravaggio’s style by one of his admirers or an angry rejection of it by someone who wants to stick to the manner of the last half-century. Caravaggio is present in every work these days, whether painters admit it or not.’

  He snapped his fingers. A manservant came from the rear of the church in del Monte’s turquoise livery, bowing low. ‘Command Maestro Caravaggio’s presence. I will receive him at my gallery.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’ The manservant genuflected towards the altar and went into the piazza at a trot.

  ‘He paints without any of the usual preparation, you know,’ del Monte said. ‘No sketches. He works directly onto the canvas from life – from the models he positions in his studio.’

  ‘The moment is simply captured.’ Scipione rolled his fingers across each other, like a thief limbering up to pick a pocket. ‘As Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs house: And He said to him, “Follow me.” And he arose, and followed Him.’

  Del Monte watched Scipione’s face transform with each detail he noticed on the painting, moving from perplexity to understanding and admiration.

  ‘Look here, do you see?’ Scipione touched del Monte’s sleeve. ‘It’s as though when Our Lord lifts his hand everyone holds their breath. It’s truly alive.’

  The two cardinals left San Luigi, their footmen going before them to part the crowd of Romans passing between the Piazza Navona and Santa Maria Rotonda, the church inserted within Emperor Hadrian’s great Pantheon. They crossed the street to del Monte’s palace, named after the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor who had been known as the ‘Madama’. They climbed the broad stairway.

  Scipione paused at the landing so that he might recover his breath. ‘This painter didn’t train in the town of Caravaggio, I’m sure. I’ve been up that way. It’s a backwater good only for producing the silk in my underwear.’

  Del Monte measured his step to the younger man’s laboured ascent. They reached the floor where he kept his private apartments. ‘He apprenticed with Maestro Peterzano in Milan.’

  ‘Milan, now I see it. You can find something in his work of other great artists of that region. I’m thinking of Savoldo’s use of light and dark. But an artist has to come to Rome to make anything of his career.’

  Del Monte inclined his head. Come to you, you mean. ‘It wasn’t merely the grey skies of the north that compelled Maestro Caravaggio to quit Milan.’

  Scipione opened his palm, questioning.

  ‘It was something to do with a whore disfigured and the wounding of her jealous lover, who also happened to be a policeman,’ del Monte said.

  Scipione’s shrug indicated that such circumstances neither surprised nor perturbed him.

  ‘When he came to live at this palace,’ del Monte said, ‘Caravaggio was just a Milanese neckbreaker. In some ways he still is. His work changes more than he personally seems to do. There’s something sweet and spiritual in his depths, and it’s there that he finds his art.’

  ‘He came di
rectly to you when he arrived in Rome?’

  ‘He stayed for a time with a priest who kept him as a favour to his patrons in the Colonna family.’

  Scipione’s eyes became distant. Del Monte saw that the Cardinal-Nephew was reckoning Caravaggio’s place in the calculus of influence and domain that a man in his position maintained at all times. The Colonnas were among the most powerful of Roman families.

  ‘I see.’ Scipione’s movements slowed, as though he needed all his functions to estimate the political advantages he might contrive through the artist.

  ‘He came to me a decade or more past,’ del Monte said. ‘I gave him a room and a studio, and a place at table with the musicians and men of science who live at my pleasure.’

  ‘The Tuscan embassy under your direction is renowned as a place of art and of reason par excellence. Does Caravaggio have no other protector?’

  Del Monte barely restrained his smile. He wants to know who else he must brush aside to take possession of Caravaggio? This man’s in even more of a hurry than I expected. ‘The Mattei family has commissioned some works.’

  Scipione’s arithmetic of prominence and prestige seemed to spread across his features as though he sketched out its equations in fresco. ‘Cardinal Mattei is—?’ He rolled his wrist to suggest the question, as if it would be indelicate to speak it.

  ‘Not an art lover. But his brothers are great admirers of Caravaggio and are inclined to spend money on pleasures the honourable cardinal denies himself.’ Del Monte waited as Scipione assessed the connections he might cement with the gift of a painting or whose gallery he might raid to sequestrate one of Caravaggio’s works.

  I’ll allow him to discover for himself just how many other links Caravaggio has built in a dozen years here, del Monte thought. Soon enough Scipione would learn about the commissions from Marchese Giustiniani, from the banker Don Ottavio Costa, from Monsignor Barberini whom many believed would be pope one day. As for the works in the collection of the Lady Olimpia Aldobrandini, he thought it best they remain unspoken. She was the niece of old Pope Clement, whose family Scipione was engaged in denuding of all influence and wealth now that his uncle controlled the Vatican. ‘In spite of his range of admirers, Maestro Caravaggio has remained under my ultimate protection.’