The Inquisitor's Key (16 page)

Avignon
The Present

STEFAN WAS LEANING AGAINST THE WALL AT THE
southwest corner of the palace, waiting beside the door where he’d made his midnight exit a few nights before. As we approached, he dropped a cigarette to the cobblestones and ground it out, then took the lanyard from around his neck and unlocked the door. The key to the palace fascinated me: It was made of silver, or perhaps steel; its head was cut with an elaborate pattern of filigreed scrollwork; branching symmetrically from two sides of the cylindrical shaft were stubby bars of varying lengths—bars that resembled ribs jutting from a spine. Never had the term “skeleton key” seemed so descriptive.

“So. You wish to see frescoes by Giovanetti?”

“Please,” I said. “Giotto has an alibi, so Giovanetti’s our new prime suspect.”

Stefan rolled his eyes. “Now you think
Giovanetti
made the snuff movie?” Miranda had filled him in on the trip to Turin, the
short-lived Giotto theory, and my conviction that the bones of Avignon were linked to the Shroud of Turin. Was there a hint of scorn in Stefan’s voice when he asked about Giovanetti?

“He’s worth a look,” I said, trying to keep my irritation under control. “Giotto never left Italy. The bones were in France—and the Shroud first surfaced in France. So geographically, at least, Giovanetti fits the facts.” Stefan looked annoyed but took us inside.

He led us through a labyrinth of passages and stairways I’d not seen before—how long had it taken him to learn his way around the sprawling, soaring maze of the palace?—and stopped before a locked door near the top of one of the towers. This door, too, answered to the master key, and Stefan ushered us into a room that took my breath away. Every square inch of the plastered walls and ceiling vaults was covered with vivid images: people and landscapes and buildings, scene upon scene, all set against a background of deep blue.

“Oh, my,” breathed Miranda.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“
Oui,
not bad. This is the chapel of Saint Martial. In the third century, the pope sent him to France. They say he converted many people and made many miracles.” He pointed to specific panels, one by one. “Healing the sick. Raising the dead. Casting out devils.” The last of the ceiling panels showed an old man kneeling before a handsome, haloed saint; flapping overhead, on batlike wings, was a scaly brown demon that two angels were shooing away. “One legend,” Stefan went on, “is that Saint Valérie of Limoges—a martyr, beheaded for her faith—walked to Saint Martial carrying her head in her hands, so he could perform the last rites for her.”

Miranda scanned the walls and ceiling. “I don’t see a headless woman on the hoof. I guess she’s offscreen, digging her own grave.”

“You’re twisted,” I said. “You know that?” She nodded happily.

My eye was drawn to an area where the fresco was badly damaged. The bright, vivid images were absent altogether or were reduced to faint outlines. Looking closer, I saw that a layer of plaster a half inch or so thick was missing in these areas. “What caused all the damage? Water?”

“
Non
. Soldiers. During the nineteenth century, the palace was used as a military barracks. The soldiers chiseled out the faces and sold them.”

I scanned the frescoes, and sure enough, virtually all the missing images were faces. One panel showed Jesus flanked by four followers. The four followers’ faces were gone, but Jesus remained unscathed.
Pious vandals,
I wondered,
or just superstitious?

I walked closer to inspect the damaged figures. Faintly traced on the base coat of plaster—the layer exposed when the surface had been pried off—was the black outline of a woman’s face: a face that fit perfectly with the undamaged body. I turned to Stefan. “Why is the outline of her face still visible? Did that bleed through the layer of wet plaster?”

“Ah,
non
. That’s a charcoal sketch. A study. The artist draws the scene on the rough wall, then puts on a layer of smooth plaster. He paints the scene while the plaster is still fresh—that’s why it’s called ‘fresco.’ The paint soaks in, and
voilà,
it becomes part of the plaster. Over time the colors can fade, but the paint cannot peel off. Except with a chisel.”

“How did the artist remember all the details, after the sketch was covered with wet plaster?”

Stefan looked at the ceiling, or beyond, lifting the palms of his hands. “A miracle.”

“So, Boss, what’s the verdict?” Miranda finally asked. “You think Giovanetti’s our guy? Did he do the Shroud?”

I took another look at Jesus, then rescanned the entire room, floor to ceiling. “This is beautiful,” I said. “Giovanetti was a great painter.” Finally I shook my head. “But the
style’s
not right.
His people are…I don’t know…too
pretty
. Too delicate. They don’t have the heft, the fleshiness, the
power
that the figure on the Shroud does.” I sighed. “That’s my two cents’ worth, anyhow.”

“Agreed,” said Miranda. “Too bad, though. Seemed like a great theory. Stefan, what do you think?”

“I think you are chasing smoke.” He checked his watch. “
Merde,
” he cursed, “I must go now. I have a stupid meeting with a petty bureaucrat.”

Miranda laughed. “But how do you
really
feel about him? And who is this charmer?”

“Pfft.”
His meeting, he said, was with the city official who had jurisdiction over the palace. “I tell him I need to move the bones, and he says no, and no, and no,” he fumed. “I keep saying, ‘Someone’s going to steal them, and then you will be sorry,’ but he won’t listen. He is even too cheap to pay for the motion detector—I had to buy it with my own money.
Fou. Idiot.
” He shook his head in disgust. “
Allons-y
. Let’s go.”

He led us out by way of a different door, which—like every door in the palace, seemingly—yielded to his master key. This door opened onto a cavernous banquet hall, which was filled with display cases and milling tourists. Frowning at the tourists, Stefan pointed us toward the far end of the hall, where a doorway led to the main exit.

Miranda ducked through the doorway, and I was just about to, when I stopped dead in my tracks. There on the wall at the end of the banquet hall—on plaster the color of old linen—was the face of Jesus, larger than life. The eyes were piercing; the nose was long and slightly crooked, as if it might have been broken once in a fight; the first two fingers of the right hand, uplifted in a gesture of blessing, were long and thin.

“Miranda—wait! Come back!” She wheeled and hurried toward me, her face full of concern. I pointed; when she saw the picture, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped.

I read the plaque on the wall. The picture was a preliminary study for a fresco, it explained, like the sketch I’d seen upstairs. But this wasn’t a crude outline in charcoal; this was a finely detailed work of art, rendered in the same reddish-brown hue—and the same sure, powerful style—as the face on the Shroud of Turin.

The portrait was the handiwork of another Italian artist, one who—unlike the stylistically promising Giotto—actually
did
work in Avignon at the time of the popes. He was known by three names.

Simone Martini.

Simone of Siena.

Master Simone.

AVIGNON
1328

“MASTER SIMONE, HURRY! PLEASE HURRY! IF WE’RE
caught, this will happen to
us
.” The nervous jailer leans backward slowly, easing his head through the doorway of the cell just far enough into the hallway to look and listen. He sees and hears nothing, but when he straightens and turns his attention into the cell, he pleads again, “
Hurry
.”

His eagerness to leave is inspired by more than just fear of detection. The scene set before him is like something from one of his nightmares—and in fact, after this night, it will
become
one of his nightmares, destined to haunt him for the remaining seven years of his life.

Six oil lamps flicker on the cold stone floor, their wicks sputtering at odd, startling intervals as they’re struck by droplets from the damp ceiling. All around the small cell, the lamps cast shadows of Simone at work. As he bends, straightens, shifts his feet, moves his arms, the shadows jump and writhe, like demons
performing a macabre dance around the dead man stretched at the center of the cell.

Despite the jailer’s entreaties, Simone cannot, will not be rushed; such a remarkable subject demands his full attention and best work. The corpse—an older man, but robust, or a ravaged, ruined version of robust—lies faceup on the stone floor. He is nude, but Simone has modestly crossed the hands above the genitals. The artist is fascinated and horrified by the wounds, the very stigmata of Christ. The punctures in the wrists and feet are fringed by ragged flesh and crusty blood; the knife wound in the side is sharply edged, but the blood and serum from it are smeared down the torso, hip, and leg. A crude wooden cross leans against the back wall of the cell and it, too, bears bloody stigmata.

Simone never expected such an opportunity when he arrived in Avignon. He came simply to test the patronage waters at the papal court—to see if French clerics might consider loosening their purse strings for an Italian painter. But a painter can kiss the hands of prospective patrons only so many times before his lips and his spirit grow chafed. Once that happens, he needs to work, whether there’s money in it or not. So having had his fill of Avignon’s splendor, Simone sought out its squalor, making the rounds of its prisons, hospitals, and cemeteries, concluding each polite inquiry by pressing a florin discreetly into the welcoming palm of a jailer or nurse or gravedigger.

It’s not that Simone is morbid; far from it—no one loves life more than Simone of Siena! But it’s always a good idea to study and sketch a corpse or two, if opportunity presents itself. In a religious painter’s line of work, the quick outnumber the dead, but not by so wide a margin as one might suppose. There’s a steady market for martyr paintings, of course, but the real money is in dead and dying Christs: A painter who’s quick with his brush and smooth with his tongue can feed a family of ten solely with commissions for crucifixion paintings. It’s crucial, therefore, to
master death and dying, but where to find the examples? Living models—thieves and prostitutes and beggars, who’ll pose for a pittance or a porridge—are far easier to come by than dead ones. Far more troublesome, too, though: the living wheedle and whine and fidget, while the dead demand no fee or food. Corpses hold stock-still, no matter how many hours the sitting lasts. On the other hand, if the sitting stretches too long, the stench becomes distracting, especially in summer. Ripeness is a virtue in fruits, women, and opportunities, Simone has learned, but not in corpses.
This
corpse, though—freshly dead, laid out on a cold stone floor in late fall—this corpse is a godsend.

The trip to Avignon came up unexpectedly in the midst of a chapel commission in Tuscany. Simone had spent months drawing the sinopia studies on the rough walls; finally every scene was sketched, and all that was needed was the duke’s final approval. That would surely be a mere formality—after all, each scene featured at least one family member in a prominent position, a flattering light. The Virgin Mary bore a striking resemblance to milady the duchess; Joseph, to the duke himself; the baby Jesus, to the duke’s squalling brat and heir; John the Baptist, to the duke’s younger brother; and so on and so on, down to the final feebleminded cousin, portrayed as a simple shepherd. The sketches done, Simone had ground his pigments, made new brushes, set up his worktable, and asked permission to mix plaster and proceed. But fate had intervened: His honor the duke had galloped off into the night, narrowly escaping an assassination, and was now rumored to be hiding in Rome, or perhaps Naples, or possibly Venice by now. The chapel project had ground to a halt for god knows how long.

So when the invitation came to accompany a musician friend to Avignon—Avignon, which Master Giotto claimed would be the new promised land for artists—only a fool would have refused, and Simone was no fool. He and the musician, a mis
chievous flute-player, set off through the Susa Valley, paying a larcenous toll at the Savoy Gate, the monumental arch guarding access to the Alps. They’d followed, in reverse, the tortuous route taken by Charlemagne’s troops five centuries before, and by Hannibal’s lumbering war elephants ten centuries before that.

The ancient alpine route was well traveled but not easy. Winding along foaming rivers, skirting the faces of looming glaciers, the road was often blocked by rock or ice, occasionally cut by landslides; the June weather alternated between mild sunshine, fierce rainstorms, and occasional brief blizzards. If not for the help of a band of monks crossing from Turin to Grenoble, Simone and his friend might never have completed the crossing. But complete it they did, and as they followed the Rhône down to the arches of the beautiful bridge and the bustling papal city on the hill, Provence had wrapped her warm arms around Simone like a sweet lover, and he’d found Avignon to be quite fetching.

Also quite chaotic. If ever a modern-day Babel existed, surely it was Avignon. The official language of the church was Latin, but with French cardinals and courtiers, Roman emissaries, German and English theologians, aimless Spaniards in varying degrees of drunkenness, and the Provençal natives jabbering in their own ancestral dialect, it was not uncommon to hear half a dozen languages within the space of a block, and to understand none of them. Fortunately, a city so brimming with languages was also brimming with translators, so Simone found ways to communicate.

He spent his first few days sketching faces and buildings in the city’s main squares and churches, but then—inspired by the chance sighting of a cart bearing a body to a graveyard—he decided to cast his net in different waters: the waters of the Styx, river of death. Simone liked knowing that he was swimming against the current, and he smiled as he thought of a passage of scripture he was deliberately turning on its head. The day of
Christ’s Resurrection, when His grieving followers went to visit His tomb, an angel had asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Here in bustling, booming Avignon, Simone set about to seek the dead among the living.

His initial inquiries, at charnel houses and hospitals and apothecaries, were met with suspicion and incredulity, not surprisingly. After all, why would any artist in his right mind want to draw corpses when he could paint pretty women instead—chaste virgins or, better yet, lovely madonnas, baring ripe breasts to suckle holy infants? But gradually, as he persisted in his rounds and deployed his charm and his coins, nuns and priests and gravediggers began to trust and like the crazy painter. Fortune smiled on him during his second week in Avignon: A stonemason fell from a scaffold in the nave of a church, breaking his neck when he hit the floor. The sketches of his corpse would surely be useful references for some future painting of the death of Lazarus or the murder of Abel. Two days after the mason’s fall, a child was trampled by a runaway horse—not ideal, the mangled little body, yet still potentially helpful if Simone is someday commissioned to depict, say, King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents.

But this latest find—a robust man killed by crucifixion!—this, for a fresco painter, was manna from heaven. Simone had profusely thanked both God and the jailer for this unique opportunity. To God, he expressed his thanks in prayers; to the jailer, in florins.

Now, studying the corpse in the warm glow of the flickering lamps, he marvels at how poorly the crucified Christ is always portrayed. In every representation Simone has ever seen—and ever done—the wounds look contrived, even silly, with their spurting fountains of blood, and the flesh and bone lack any semblance of sinew or substance. For the first time, Simone Martini feels a sense of obligation and duty—not to the sacred subject matter of some scene he’s being paid to paint, but to the human subject himself, this dead man offering himself so freely
to the hungry gaze of the artist. “This is my body,” the man seems to be saying, “which is broken for you. Feast your eyes upon it.” And so Simone does, devouring the visual banquet of legs, belly, chest, face, and ignoring the jailer’s panicked pleas for haste.

Simone’s first drawings of the corpse are quick and crude—a flurry of fast, flowing lines he makes without even lifting the charcoal, without even taking his eyes off the body to inspect his work. Despite their swiftness and spareness, the sketches capture the essence of the lifeless form: the long, sad face; the strong sinews, now gone slack; the tangibility and carnality of the corpse. Next he makes detailed drawings of individual structures—fingers, feet, nose, eyes, ears—cramming pages full of body parts, like macabre still lifes of some thoroughly dismembered corpse. Finally, having gotten to know the dead man in all his particulars, he draws the entire body with great care. Except that what he draws is not, in fact, the body; what he draws is light and shadow—but no, he draws even less than that. His charcoal pencils cannot draw light, they can only sketch darkness: shades of shadows, ranging from the watery gray of dawn to the soft, utter blackness of velvet. And such magic Simone can work with shadows! Curving a shadow around an oval of blank white, he can create the illusion of roundness and of highlight: the illusion of an egg, or a forehead, or a breast. And from two simple elements—shadow and not-shadow—he now conjures flesh, blood, hair, fingernails, even mortality and mournfulness. Seeing this magic unfold, the jailer is bewitched, finally forgets his fears, and watches in rapt silence.

At last, just as the first paleness of dawn begins showing through the narrow slits that pretend to provide air and light to the prisoners’ cells, Simone tucks the remaining stubs of charcoal into his cloak, rolls the sheaves of drawings, and nods his readiness to leave. After making sure the way is clear, the jailer leads him out. He is about to close the door when the painter stops
him, speaking for the first time since entering the cell and beholding the dead man on the floor. “What can you tell me about him? What crime did he commit to merit such a death?”

The jailer—a man who has witnessed, and who has inflicted, more than a few deaths in his service to the Church—fixes the painter with a long look. Answering questions—especially troubling questions—was not part of the bargain he made with the Italian. He shakes his head and withdraws through the stone archway, and the door groans on its hinges. But just before it closes completely, he puts his lips to the narrow gap. “They claim he preached words from the Devil,” he says, “but I heard him speak only with kindness and faith. I’m a simple man; I don’t pretend to understand the arguments of these churchmen. But his crime, I think, was to put them to shame by his faith and his goodness. I do believe he was a holy man—the only holy man I’ve seen in my twenty years among cardinals and popes. His sin, I think, was to be free of sin.”

“You make him sound like Christ reincarnated.”

“I don’t expect him to rise from the grave, Master Simone. But if he does, the bastards will find a reason to kill him again.”

The vertical strip of shadow narrows, darkening into a thin black line, and then it is gone, displaced by oak planks and iron hardware. The opening into the darkness has closed, at least for now. Simone Martini—altered in ways he will not understand for years, if ever—turns from the realm of shadow and illusion and death, resuming his place in the world of life and breath, light and color.