Caravaggio's Angel (14 page)

The newcomer reached the study door, then stopped short, doubtless surprised by my unexpected presence. Turning, I found myself face-to-face with the looming figure of Jean-Jacques Rigaut.

For perhaps half a minute we stared at each other in silence. He was dressed much as when we’d met before, in expensive leisure garments. But his expression was as unleisurely as possible – a mix of astonishment and fury, as though my presence was the last straw in what was clearly already a very bad day. I noticed a vein throbbing in his temple, and his forehead was beaded with perspiration. Had Juliette told him what she’d done to his letter? (Had I left it in my bag or decanted it into my suitcase? I sincerely hoped the latter – Rigaut in this mood would be quite capable of helping himself to anything he felt like possessing.) Or perhaps he had a migraine. Joe got them sometimes, with not dissimilar effects. If so, he’d be even more unpleasant than usual: migraine renders its victims exquisitely irritable. Where on earth had he sprung from? He must have arrived in the past few minutes and I’d been too absorbed to notice – unless his car was parked some-where out of sight, in which case he could well have been here all the time.

‘May I ask what exactly you’re doing?’ he demanded, not unreasonably.

I felt like asking him the same thing. Instead I said meekly, ‘
Bonjour
, Monsieur Rigaut. I’m waiting for Madame your mother. We arranged yesterday that I’d come round this morning. I rang the doorbell, but nobody answered, so I came in. I thought I might find her in here.’

Well, you thought wrong. She’s away,’ he said.

I felt the blood rise to my face, and knew my ears must be glowing red as traffic lights. ‘But that’s impossible. She telephoned me not half an hour ago, to tell me to come. She must have been here then.’

‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken,’ he said coldly. ‘Do you usu-ally walk unannounced into strange houses?’

‘I wasn’t unannounced. I told you, Madame your mother asked me to come.’

He glared, then swept the room with that restless gaze of his, glancing first at the picture – still there – and then, or so it seemed to me, checking that all the small, movable objects were in their accustomed places. Just when I thought he was going to ask me to open my handbag for inspection he said, ‘And what exactly were you hoping to do when she arrived?’

I felt disinclined to tell him about the notebook, still less that I’d already photographed part of it. In his current mood he’d probably demand my camera and insist on deleting the photos then and there. I’d already lost one camera to him, indirectly – quite enough, in my view. And I wanted to look at what I’d got. Of course there was no way of knowing if I’d photographed the relevant bits, but it was possible: I’d done about half the book, a fifty-fifty chance. I said, ‘I wanted to talk to her a bit more about your father.’

‘I’d be grateful if you would stop pestering my mother,’ he said. ‘I’ve already made it perfectly clear that borrowing the picture is out of the question. She’s a very old lady, and I don’t want her tired by journalists. Also I think I should remind you that it’s not only impolite to break into other people’s houses, it’s illegal.
Au revoir, madame
.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Please go,’ he said. ‘I have things I need to get on with.’

Arrogant pig! I decided to join him on his high horse – there was plenty of room for two, and what did I have to lose? ‘I’m not a journalist, Monsieur Rigaut,’ I said stiffly, ‘but a curator at the National Gallery in London. Forgive my asking, but what is it about this picture? What exactly is the problem about lending it? I’d be genuinely interested to know.’

It was clear my question astonished him – perhaps less for what it asked than the fact that I’d had the nerve to put it. If he gave an order, people didn’t question it – and not just because he was Monsieur le Ministre: they never had. Some people charm their way up the ladder, some out-manipulate their rivals, but with Jean-Jacques Rigaut it was clear that, as his mother said, intimidation had always been the weapon of choice. ‘I don’t think I have to explain my reasons for doing what I like with my own property. Just because you’re desperate for something doesn’t give you the right to have it.’

‘I’m not desperate for it, as you put it, though it’s true I’d very much like to borrow it. And I still believe it belongs to your mother, in which case it’s up to her to say whether or not that will be possible.’

‘Are you saying I’ve lied? I’d be careful if I were you, madame.’

He looked so angry as he said this – the vein throbbing so violently that I was afraid he was about to have a stroke – that it was almost an admission. For a moment I felt tempted to threaten him with lawyers – then we’d find out the real truth. But that would be stupid: quite apart from the expense (I could just imagine Tony Malahide’s expression!) the law was his to play with, and the odds would be stacked against me, whatever the objective situation. Better, and more effective, to try and defuse things. I said ‘Monsieur le Ministre, this is all getting rather out of proportion. You keep acting as if I’m trying to steal this picture. The National Gallery of London is probably the most respectable institution in the entire art world. We’re mounting an exhibition and we’re asking for a loan. That’s all.’

He swallowed and breathed deeply, visibly calming him-self. ‘Please excuse me, madame,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to lose my temper.’ (Liar! That was
exactly
what he’d meant to do.) ‘But things are rather difficult just now. The fact is, it’s not possible either to speak to my mother or to borrow the picture. You’ll just have to accept it.’

We stood there, looking each other in the eye, and to my horror I caught myself thinking how attractive he was. The sheer furious intelligence in that face was something you don’t often meet, and you don’t have to like someone to want to go to bed with them. The truth is, powerful men have that effect on me. Rigaut wasn’t the first I’d met, but he was my first demagogue, and even when he didn’t have a crowd to please you could feel his magnetism, lurking there like some dangerous animal. Caroline always said that whenever she met a magnate the first thing she won-dered was what crimes he’d committed en route to the top, and perhaps, shamefully, that was one reason I found power sexy. I was simply less evolved than Caroline. She’d progressed to the point where civilized values outweigh primitive evolutionary urges, whereas I was still unable to resist the sight of the biggest ape pounding his chest. In conventional terms Manu scored over his father in every way – he was young, good-looking, good-natured insofar as he allowed himself to exhibit any nature at all. But in the sex-appeal stakes he didn’t begin to compete. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, it seemed unlikely Monsieur le Ministre shared my present fantasy (which though brief was surprisingly detailed). Judging by the way he looked at his wife he wasn’t attracted to women of a certain age, and it was hardly probable he’d make an exception for me. Short of undressing on the spot (which might or might not have the desired effect) I’d never find out.

There seemed little more to say, so I nodded with as much dignity as I could dredge up and said, ‘I’ll speak to Madame Rigaut another time, monsieur.
Au revoir et bonne
journée
.’

Have a nice day
– that was what everyone said round here. In this case I felt it achieved exactly the level of subtle insult I was aiming for. Unwise, perhaps – but it made me feel better. If there had been anything to lose I’d lost it already. Rigaut didn’t respond.

I left the room without looking back, got in my rented Saxo and drove off, resisting the temptation to wave good-bye out of the window. Bastard! There was no other car in sight: where he had sprung from I couldn’t imagine.

Despite my nonchalant exterior, I felt extremely agitated. ‘You’ll just have to accept it,’ he’d said. But I couldn’t – not without answers to a few questions. In particular, where was Juliette? I
had
spoken to her: it
hadn’t
been a hallucination. Had he locked her in her room and forbidden her to see me? It looked very like it – and if so, that could only mean she’d told him what she’d done, and perhaps that I was on my way. In which case they’d have had a shouting match, and he’d gone his usual route and simply bullied her. But that was not just out of order, it was ludicrous, excessive. Why should anyone do such a thing?

If it wasn’t absurd – he was the Minister of the Interior, for God’s sake, after the President and the Prime Minister the most powerful man in France – I’d have said I had him rattled at some fundamental level. There was something he deeply didn’t want found out, and it was something to do with the picture.

I drove back to Les Pruniers and found Delphine in the kitchen drinking a mid-morning coffee. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘How did it go? Have you found what you came for?’

I said I had, more or less, and she asked if I’d be spend-ing another night. I said no, paid my bill and put my bag in the car. She then said she was just off to join Olivier and the children at a lake where they sometimes spent the day: the threatened storm had receded but it was very hot and heavy, and if I felt like a swim, she’d show me where it was on the map. But I declined. I had other plans for the afternoon.

Delphine left, and told me to make myself at home. Wandering through the garden room she used as an office I found the phone directory lying on the floor beside the table. On impulse, I called Juliette’s number. But no one replied.

I spent the morning in the orchard, reading and eating the greengages which were falling off the trees all around me, and waiting for time to pass. At two o’clock a combination of boredom and impatience convinced me that the moment had come, and ten minutes later, I pulled up for the second time that day outside La Jaubertie.

There were still no cars in evidence, but judging by the morning’s encounter that didn’t mean anything. Rigaut must have some other parking place, round the back. I sat in the Saxo for a while, but no one appeared. The chairs beneath the cedar tree, where Juliette and I had spent the previous afternoon, were empty, and the windows all shuttered up – but that was normal in heat such as this.

After ten minutes or so, I got out of the car, softly shut the door, and began to prowl round the outside of the house, turning first to my right, a side I hadn’t examined during my earlier explorations. The lawn here was less extensive, the trees closing in nearer to the château. In amongst them stood a stone outbuilding I hadn’t noticed before, a barn, with big double doors. I tried them, but they were locked. The grass in front of them was worn and slightly rutted. You could easily leave a car here. Perhaps it was here still. There was no way of knowing.

Nervously, I walked back to the house, rang the bell and waited. Nothing.

I rang it again. Still nothing.

I tried the door. It was locked. So was the small door at the back. La Jaubertie was closed. Rigaut had gone, and taken his mother with him.

Seething with frustration I got back in the car and drove to Angoulême, where the TGV whirled me towards Paris, the Eurostar, and a sleepless night in Kentish Town.

13

Freddie Angelo: London, August

I got back to find London depopulated. At work all those who had children were absent on holiday duty. My inbox was full of spam offering penis extensions, my voicemail harboured legions of bluff Yorkshire voices urging me to call premium line telephone numbers and be ripped off while I waited to learn if I’d won a holiday in Majorca, no extras included. Outside, the rain rained and the wind howled, driving tides of tourists to shelter in the Gallery’s free, dry halls. I loved it all, even Kentish Town High Street, where swirls of old newspapers blew round my ankles as I scudded past the endless estate agents on the way to the tube. It was all so wonderfully normal and ordinary. Although I couldn’t help wondering about Juliette, from the familiar perspective of the mundane workaday world the events of the past few days seemed wholly unreal. Jean-Jacques Rigaut was no ogre, just another overblown politician. Even my moment of passion with Olivier, at the time so all-consuming, had begun to fade, a sort of shipboard romance.

Amid the nonsense on my voicemail, one message caught my attention. ‘Good morning, Miss Lee,’ it began. The speaker was male, cultured, confident, slightly drawling. ‘You don’t know me, my name’s Freddie Angelo. I understand you’re working on an exhibition around the Caravaggio St Cecilias. Could you call me? I’ve got something here you may be interested in.’ He left a central London telephone number.

I called him back, but no one was there. On the answering machine the same voice instructed me to ‘Please leave messages for Freddie Angelo after the tone,’ so I did, telling him I was back in the office and awaiting his pleasure, before immersing myself in a conference paper I was sup-posed to have finished last April.

Half an hour later, my phone rang. ‘Miss Lee,’ said the voice. ‘Angelo here. So kind to call me back so bright and early.’ (Early? I looked at my watch – it was a quarter to eleven.) ‘There’s something I’d like to show you. I wondered if you might like to come round here and see it?’

‘Depends what it is,’ I said.

‘Ah, that would be telling. When could you manage? Are you free tomorrow?’

‘Any time.’

We agreed that I’d visit him at eleven the following morning. Bright and early.

The address he’d given me was in Albemarle Street. It had stopped raining, so I walked there under a fitfully lukewarm August sun. In Leicester Square a mournful Mongolian busker made sad sounds on some ethnic stringed instrument, and was comprehensively ignored by crowds of almost-naked schoolgirls, their whole attention concentrated upon their mobile phones. As I progressed down Piccadilly it was noticeable that the ratio of visible flesh diminished sharply – perhaps in deference to all those tailors in Savile Row, perhaps because the passers-by were older, and less inured to the chill of a British summer.

Freddie Angelo’s directions took me to a shiny black panelled door set between two shops, with a highly pol-ished brass knocker. Beside the door was a round brass bell-push, also very shiny, and a brass plate engraved with the name
Angelo
. Unfortunately, when I pressed the bell it didn’t seem to be working. That’s to say, I couldn’t hear anything, and there was no response. I looked at my watch: five past eleven. Surely he must be there? I rang the bell again, but still no one answered. The knocker produced no result either, and nor did anyone answer the phone, whose number I’d noted down. That figured, if it was inside the building outside which I now stood. If Mr Angelo had a mobile, he hadn’t given me its number. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to run the risk of being disturbed before time began at 11 a.m.

I looked at my watch again. Ten past. Obviously he was-n’t coming. Time to get back to my desk. Doubtless he’d call again sometime. Or not.

I’d almost reached the Royal Arcade when a cyclist passed me, a portly fellow in a white suit with thinning dark hair and a pink complexion, riding an upright black gentleman’s model. He stopped outside the door at which I’d been vainly ringing, swung his leg athletically over the back wheel, undid the bicycle clips that tethered his trousers to his legs, settled his jacket, opened the door and wheeled his bike inside. By then I was on the spot. ‘Mr Angelo,’ I said severely.

He wheeled round, his face a picture of unruffled urbanity. ‘Dr Lee? Have you been waiting long? I’m most awfully sorry. I got delayed. When I didn’t see you I thought, Thank goodness, I’ve made it in time. But you’d already been and gone . . . Still, here we are after all. Coffee?’

I said I’d love one.

‘Excellent. There’s a Caffè Nero just over the road – I do have a coffee machine somewhere, but it really can’t compete. Let’s go and get some and take them up.’

Lattes in hand, he led us up a flight of narrow stairs and into a dark, panelled room looking on to Albemarle Street. There was a sort of dais at one end, in the centre of which stood a painting on an easel, covered with a cloth. The only other items in the room were a couple of chairs facing it, sub-Sheraton or possibly even the real thing, the sort called carver chairs, with wooden arms and padded seats and a narrow padded panel in the back. The effect – the gloom, the panelling, the attention focused on the raised easel – was slightly church-like. To our left an open door led into another, larger, brighter room, with a desk, a sofa, some shelves of reference books, and a large sash window giving on to a flat roof, doubtless the back of one of the shops, from which the sun, which had now come out in earnest, reflected hotly. My host removed his jacket to dis-play a pair of red braces, hung it on the back of the desk chair, pushed up the window’s lower sash to its fullest extent and nodded at the sofa. ‘Do sit down, Dr Lee.’

‘Call me Reggie. Everyone does.’

‘Fine, and I’m Freddie. Well now,’ and he sat back expansively, sipping his coffee and fanning himself between mouthfuls with a private-view invitation picked off the mantelpiece at random. ‘How very nice to have you here. And how’s the exhibition going?’

‘Coming along,’ I said cautiously.

‘Good, good. Lots of interesting stuff?’

‘Lots.’

‘Been talking to everybody, I suppose.’

‘Quite a lot of people.’

‘Of course you have. That’s the wonderful thing about art historians, always something to say, even if it’s only to slag off another art historian. How old was Caravaggio when he died? Thirty-nine? I could give you the names of quite a number of people who’ve been thinking about him far longer than that. They all know
far
more about Caravaggio than Caravaggio ever did.’ He chortled with pleasure at the thought.

There didn’t seem any very obvious reply to this, so I said nothing.

‘I expect you’re wondering why I asked you here.’

‘I am, rather.’

‘All right. Finished?’

He took my empty cardboard cup, threw it with his own into a capacious waste paper bin, and led the way back into the adjoining room, shutting the door behind us. Sitting me on one of the chairs, he switched on a light over the easel, and whipped off the cloth to reveal the picture it supported.

It was the, or a, Caravaggio St Cecilia, similar in every way to the others save for a scatter of luscious fruit heaped in the bottom left-hand corner.

‘How about that, eh?’ he exclaimed triumphantly.

I stared at it, no doubt stupidly, and heard myself say, ‘Is it genuine?’

‘Oh, absolutely. Not a shadow of doubt.’

‘But it can’t be,’ I said. ‘There were only three. There’s no record of a fourth.’

‘Indeed. One for the church, one for Del Monte, one for Marcantonio Doria. No records of any more. If there are four,’ he said, with the emphasis on the ‘if’, ‘one of them’s a fake.’

‘How d’you know it’s not this one?’

‘Easy. I’ll show you. How much d’you know about Caravaggio’s methods?’

‘His methods?’

‘Yes. His methods of painting.’ He nodded towards the St Cecilia. ‘That was made in 1604 or 5, right?’

‘If you say so,’ I said stiffly.

‘Oh, believe me, all the tests have been done, it’s the right date, no doubt at all. Original stretcher, right pigments, right canvas. So he was still in Rome, under the protection of Cardinal Del Monte.’ I nodded agreement. ‘Who of course was a friend of Galileo. Up with all the latest in the world of optics.’

‘Optics?’

‘Lenses. Mirrors.’

‘Well, of course I know Caravaggio used mirrors,’ I said. By this time I was feeling thoroughly defensive. I might not have been thinking about Caravaggio for thirty-nine years, but I was not, as Freddie Angelo seemed to imply, proposing to curate an exhibition about an artist of whom I was wholly ignorant. ‘The contemporary accounts all say so. His pictures are full of self-portraits. How else could he do that?’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’ He went back into the office, where he rummaged in a drawer and returned with a powerful magnifying glass. ‘Look at this,’ he said, walking towards the easel.

I followed him. He was holding the glass over the open music book which lay at the saint’s feet. ‘Here, take it. Have a look. What can you see?’

I looked, feeling stupid. What I could see were musical notes, a few enormously magnified blobs of black paint on a parchment-coloured ground. ‘What am I supposed to be looking for?’

‘The brushstrokes. Which way do they go?’

I peered through the lens. The brushstrokes were indeed visible, the impress stronger where the artist had first put brush to canvas, then tailing off as he raised it. ‘From bottom to top,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed, taking the glass and peering at the picture himself. ‘What does that tell you?’

I felt like a first-former who hasn’t done her homework. What did he expect me to say?

‘All right, let’s have a look at something else.’ Putting the glass down he made for a large cupboard in the panelling, from which he extracted a concave mirror and a photo-graphic tripod. ‘Come on!’ Handing the tripod to me, he rushed back into the office, where he deposited the mirror on the sofa, picked up a small piecrust table, climbed through the window and placed it on the flat roof. Leaning back in, he asked me to pass him a vase of pink roses that stood on his desk, set this on the table, then climbed back in, pulled down a dark blind over the top portion of the window, and pinned a large sheet of black paper on to it. ‘All right?’

‘All right,’ I agreed, mystified.

‘Excellent. Just a couple more things now and we’re ready.’

Carefully he set up the tripod facing the window, fixed the mirror to it on a sort of flexible stalk, then waggled it until he had it in the position he wanted, climbing in and out a couple of times to slightly alter the position of the table. Finally all was ready. ‘Now. Now what do you see?’

What I saw was an upside-down image of the vase of roses, projected on to the black paper. Although it was quite faint, and blurred around the edges, the glowing colours and heightened shadows gave it a jewel-like brilliance, nearer to painting than nature. The effect was oddly hypnotic. You wanted to play with it, to try out more images – to catch it.

‘You see?’ said Freddie Angelo. ‘The painterliness of it.
That’s
what they meant when they said he used mirrors. Of course if the room was darker it would be more distinct. But see how the projection simplifies the highlights and tones? People wonder how he got those photographic effects, those amazing foreshortenings – easy, he was using projections. By 1605 he’d probably moved on to proper lenses. The field of view’s much wider, you don’t have to set up your painting in so many little bits. But the effect’s the same. He used mirrors from very early on. Concave mirrors. And of course, mirrors and lenses both do the same thing.’ He swung round, triumphantly twanging his braces. ‘Elementary optics. The rays of light cross at the point of focus. So the projection’s
upside down
!’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

‘All right, so where would you start if you were going to make a painting from that projection?’

‘I don’t know – top left-hand corner?’ I caught my breath and laughed. ‘I
see
what you mean!’

‘Exactly. If you were going to paint a sheet of music, would you paint it from the bottom up? Of course you wouldn’t! You’d go from the top down. It’s natural. Of course later, when he made copies, he wouldn’t have had any need to do that – he’d just have copied them. So you see what all this means?’ This time he didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘This must be the
originario
– the first of the series. That’s why it has the fruit. Whoever commissioned it saw one of those gorgeous still-lives he’d done a bit earlier and said, And put me in one of those while you’re about it. So he copied it from whatever picture that was – I could probably find it for you – and stuck it in the corner. If you look, you can see the highlights are all wrong – the light source here’s from the top left, but the fruit seems to be reflecting something from the right, that’s why it looks so odd. It wasn’t part of his original plan, and he didn’t bother with it for the others. Now. Have I convinced you?’

‘You’ve bemused me,’ I said. ‘But it certainly seems convincing.’

‘That’s because it is.’ He began dismantling his set, taking down the mirror, folding the tripod, replacing the roses on his desk and the table in its spot beside the sofa. ‘Have you seen all the others?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many? Come on, the truth. I promise I won’t tell tales.’

‘Three. Or rather, I haven’t actually
seen
the one in the Getty, just the photo. But both the others.’

I have never seen anyone look so wonderfully astonished. His eyebrows moved up his forehead, his eyes widened. Then he threw his head back and laughed. ‘Really?’

‘I promise.’

I could see now why he’d been so patronizing earlier. He’d thought he’d caught me out – assumed I’d been skating on thin ice, that I didn’t know where all the pictures were, that I only knew of two and that he’d found the third. And indeed, as regards the thinness of the ice, he hadn’t been mistaken. Although I had found three pictures, only one of them was available for loan. It was no thicker now, either – just differently cracked. I still only had one picture promised. And one of the ones I’d already found must be a fake.