The Caravaggio Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

brother’s last moments. It was almost done. The headsman directed a savage kick at the back of Giacomo’s legs, forcing him onto his knees, and pushed him forward as if he were a pig in an abattoir. Then, stretching out his hand, like a surgeon, he took hold of the bludgeon. Pope Clement inclined his head almost imperceptibly, as if unwilling to take on such a terrible burden of responsibility. But the executioner did not need further instruction. Raising the bludgeon, with its metal studs, he held it high for a second, then brought it down with all the force at his command. Giacomo’s skull shattered into pieces, splattering everyone with blood and brains. His body shook for a second, and was still.
    The Pope rose and turned away. It was time for His Holiness to pray for the souls of the departed.
    On the scaffold, Bernardo fainted. As the executioners flayed his brother’s body and hacked it into pieces, which they hung on hooks, he was led away into a lifetime of captivity as a galley slave. The boy had done no wrong, but was condemned as a member of a wicked family, guilty by association of the crime of patricide.
    In his dream, as in life, Caravaggio looked down at his sketch of Beatrice and noticed that it was streaked with real blood. His hands shook and he wept.
    When he woke seconds later, still uttering small cries, he wiped the tears from his face and sat up in his bed, which as usual was soaked with sweat. His mouth was dry; he reached for a cup of water on an adjacent table and drank it down. The executions had taken place more than three and a half years before under a different Pope. But to the artist, Beatrice Cenci’s eyes still stared at him as her life’s blood spilled from her neck onto the scaffold on the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It was as if the events of September 1599 had occurred just minutes before. They would be the key to his art and the keenest point of entry into the state of his mind.

5*
    The future: conclave minus 17
     
    Judge Carlo Minghetti was not one of those Italian jurists who pretended indifference to the media. As his cases progressed, particularly those involving terrorism, he found it helped him make sense of the previous day’s proceedings to read a crisp, 400-word summary in La Stampa or the Corriere della Serra . It amused him to compare the commentaries by so-called legal experts and pundits of left and right who presumed to read his thought processes and anticipate his judgments.
    As one of Italy’s top anti-terrorist judges, Minghetti had earned a reputation for upholding the rule of law even in the most difficult of cases. It was well-known that he was a conservative. He had been a member of Opus Dei, the most reactionary religious movement in the Catholic Church, since the year he graduated from the University of Ferrara. But not even his worst enemies – among whom he counted the Jesuits, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Green Party – had ever accused him of bigotry.
    The case on which he was due to rule today was a particularly interesting one. Two men, a Moroccan and a Bosnian, charged with bombing an immigration office in Bologna, had been convicted by a lower court and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, to be followed by deportation. Had anyone died as a result of their actions, they would have faced a life sentence, but the blast had occurred at two o’clock in the morning and the only victim, a passing drunk, had merely required treatment for cuts and brusies. The defendants’ lawyers had appealed on the grounds that their clients, allegedly, confessed under duress – which was perfectly possible. Hearing the appeal had meant reviewing much of the original evidence and then questioning both city detectives and agents of the anti-terrorist police, DIGOS.
    Speculation in the morning’s media, including no doubt the internet – on which his career received detailed, almost line-by-line scrutiny – centred not on the guilt or innocence of the accused but