The Caravaggio Conspiracy by Walter Ellis Read Free Book Online Page B

us feel most comfortable.’
    ‘Which means that you believe Christ rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven …’
    ‘… “And sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Yes, Liam, I believe that. How could I not?’
    Looking at his uncle, dressed in his cassock, with a silver cross around his neck, Dempsey wondered what his father would have made of all the questioning that fuelled theology at the higher level. Theirs was a house in which the Sacred Heart of Jesus glowed in the dark from its position on top of the mantlepiece. The first thing you saw when you walked in the front door was the Child of Prague – a statue of the infant Jesus, wearing a crown and golden robes. Not divine? Not risen from the dead? Dad would be spinning in his grave just at the thought of it.
    A knock at the door interrupted his musings. It was Father Giovanni, holding a clipboard. ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten, Father General,’ he said, ‘but you have a busy schedule of appointments today, including lunch with the Spanish Provincial General and a three o’clock with the dean.’ He tapped the clipboard. ‘And I’ve got at least twenty letters here awaiting your signature.’
    O’Malley toyed with a paper knife. ‘Okay, Giovanni, I’ll be five minutes.’
    The priest withdrew reluctantly, giving Dempsey a dirty look.
    ‘Don’t mind Father Giovanni,’ O’Malley said, replacing the paper knife. ‘He’s the sort of young man, increasingly common in the order, who thinks the suffix SJ should be followed by MBA.’
    ‘I should go all the same. You’re obviously busy.’
    ‘And you’re due to have lunch with Fräulein Studer – more entertaining company, I should imagine, than the Spanish Provincial. But thanks for dropping in. I appreciate it. It’s not often these days that I get the chance to discuss religion.’
    ‘I won’t even comment on that,’ Dempsey said.
    O’Malley stood up and walked round his desk to embrace his nephew. ‘Next time let’s meet over a pint.’
    ‘Good idea. Just give me a call.’
    Dempsey turned to go. Just as he reached the door, his uncle called out to him: ‘Oh, and give my regards to Maya. Tell her it’s been a while since I saw her at Mass.’
     
    As he walked down the four flights of stairs towards the front hall, past endless photographs and lithographs of leading Jesuits from the previous two hundred years, Dempsey felt the walls closing in on him. He had never had much time for organized religion. It was one thing to talk theology with his uncle, who had a knack of combining faith and scholarship. But these days he could no more genuflect in front of the altar than he could kiss a bishop’s ring. At the bottom of the stairs, he found himself confronted by a portrait of St Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, looking both ascetic and scheming, as if there were no lengths to which he wouldn’t go to promote the power and privilege of God. The eyes, he noted, did not follow him, the way they did in some paintings he had seen. Instead, they stared behind him, almost through him, towards some higher truth to which he would never be privy. He shivered and turned away. Outside, in the real world, the sun was shining.

7 *
    August 1603
     
    Caravaggio had just drawn his shirt over his head – the same one he had worn for the past three days – when he heard his front door open and footsteps on the stairs. He groaned. His lodgings, on the Vicolo dei Santi Cecilia e Baggio, in the heart of the Artists’ Quarter, were an open house for rebels of all kinds. Painters and poets, out-of-work soldiers, pimps and whores, popped in and out just to pass the time of day or to catch up on the latest gossip. But this time it was his pupil and sometime manservant Bartolomeo Manfredi, who in return for lessons on the art and science of chiaroscuro ran errands for him and, when it suited him, prepared his