The Death of Noah Glass Read online

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  Against these episodes of distance, they practised kindness together. It was Dora’s idea to accompany him to Syracuse. She would teach him, she said. He might know the island better with her informative company. She smiled. She was already in the habit of creating his expectations. Noah saw again the promise of her attention, wanted her smart conversation, needed her hand upon his forearm and the graze of her skin, her body open beneath him. He imagined unbuttoning her blouse. He almost felt the rocking sensation that absurdly reminded him of lifeboats. If she had asked then and there, he would have been ready.

  Noah became interested in Caravaggio after his retirement, the year he saw The Crucifixion of St Peter in Rome. It was three years since he’d stood in dwindling light in the Santa Maria del Popolo—at a bad time for viewing, everyone said, too late and too shadowy—and with his euro coin lit the dim chapel to pull the image from obscurity. Here was the vision of the old man, crucified upside down, and three burly men trying to heave him into place. St Peter was bald, with a white beard, and furious at his crucifixion. Though he’d seen it years ago, Noah now understood, for the first time, the tribute of Caravaggio’s heresy: to make the man so physical, to up-end authority in this way, to invent an agony of reversal.

  ‘Pissed-off St Peter’ was how Martin had described it, when Noah showed him the postcard.

  They’d laughed about it then, but his son seemed to understand what he had glimpsed in the brown light of that Roman church, with the dust filtering down, the clotted groups of tourists departing, and a sense of how thin, how unmuscular, his own ageing body had become. When the bells rang and the church closed, he had hurried back to his conference, just in time to hear the final paper of the day. It was a talk on the chemical composition of Baroque pigments, and it sent him to sleep.

  In Syracuse Noah and Dora stayed in a cheap hotel in a hard-to-find street in Ortygia. Their room had white linen curtains, open-worked in a pattern of daisies, and the hotel offered a breakfast of bread rolls, lemon cake and bitter coffee. Both were happy, knowing this afterwards, realising only in retrospect how very easy it had been, still exultant during the first weeks of their affair. Dora was always instructing him, and refining his Italian; he in turn found her presence exciting and her manner charming. All the components of his life, he reflected, had conspired to lead him to her, to this Syracusan room. The lonely anxiety of the last few years was as nothing in her presence.

  He liked to watch her dress in the morning, the way she looked like a Degas dancer, elbows out, closing her bra; and the vigour with which she brushed her mid-length hair, then pinned it back, not looking, with plastic combs. He felt like a younger man. He felt something had returned to him. When they made love, they took their time. When he could not, when he urged his body but nothing happened, she embraced and reassured him. His own naked thighs seemed no longer contemptible. The immodest look of an unmade bed was now a sensual motivation. The sunlight streaming through the daisies, falling in a slanted row of petals, failed to incite their derision or irony.

  He had come to see Caravaggio’s depiction of the burial of St Lucy. She was the patron saint of Syracuse, and her church, Santa Lucia alla Badia, stood exactly where she was martyred, or so the story went. Noah knew the various accounts, how her eyes had been gouged out, then miraculously restored, how she was undefiled though condemned to a brothel. Eventually her throat was cut, and she entered eternity. The relics of her body were scattered all over Europe, her saintly head coming to rest in Rome. Martin and Evie liked to ridicule their father’s addiction to saints’ tales, but Noah knew they also loved their holy-roller excess.

  The church was simple, fifteenth-century, and the painting was from 1608, when Caravaggio was briefly in Sicily, on the run from the law. It was a dark, soiled image, inept in some ways, and distinctive in the prominence it gave to the gravediggers. They were labouring giants, not unlike the massive blokes lifting St Peter’s cross, and took up the entire foreground. They had bulky legs and buttocks and formed a kind of barrier one had to look past in order to see Lucy, horizontal and attractively dead, awaiting her burial. Dora reminded him this was an example of pentimento—that Caravaggio had originally painted the head severed from the body, but then reattached it when his image was considered too grotesque. A thin red line showed the cut to her throat.

  They stood in the church longer than Noah expected. Dora could see something in the painting that he could not. She did not disclose her thoughts. She was alone in her own world of contemplation. Noah sat in a pew and flicked through his guidebook, quietly unable to interrupt or to hurry her.

  At last Dora turned and led the way into the uninterrupted sunlight of the piazza. ‘Campari, now, don’t you think?’

  In the geometrical shade of a café umbrella, they drank to St Lucy, looking back into the light. The façade of the church stood before them, the larger duomo to their left. The sky was cloudless, indigo. A handcart festooned with multicoloured balloons in the shapes of cartoon characters was steered into the piazza and parked in front of the duomo. Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob SquarePants flashed their wide smiles. The balloon seller, an old man, extracted a cigarette and lit up, his hand cupped against the wind, his head inclined as if he were a priest, straining to listen to a whispered confession. He stood patiently smoking, the balloons with their simplified faces shivering and squeaking above him in the breeze from the ocean. Later, this memory would have the quality of a dream. Later, Noah would wonder how they could have been so effortlessly happy.

  And afterwards, lying beside her, he casually remembered. He said, ‘It was Stromboli, the movie. In Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman witnesses the mattanza. It’s a terrible scene—she is splashed with water and blood from the killing of the fish.’

  Dora did not respond.

  Noah felt miserable. A movie. He had ruined the luxurious repose of their afternoon with one untimely sentence. He imagined then, in the severity of her silence, in her refusal to engage, that he had now fulfilled her lowest expectation. He had no real cultural knowledge and must reach in his naivety for cinematic models.

  She was turned away from him, impatient perhaps, and in another time. She may have been thinking of Uncle Vito, long ago, Uncle Vito with his bloody hands open, standing in shadows at a doorway.

  14

  ANTONIO STOOD AS Martin entered the restaurant. Again, he was the early one. Martin half-expected the Italian double kiss, but instead they shook hands and sat down. The restaurant this time was a trattoria in the old town not far from Tommaso’s; it specialised, said the sign, in true Sicilian cuisine. There were bright overhead lights, a sideboard piled with antipasti, and a mountain of bread, already cut, stacked in straw baskets, daintily balanced for distribution. The tables were covered in thick plastic cloths. Relaxing with the expectation of a good meal, Martin ordered the wine, a Nero d’Avola, and prepared himself for what Antonio would tell him.

  After the inevitable small talk about the rain, for which Antonio apologised with an obsequious smile, he guided Martin to the antipasti and recommended the neonata—newborn whitefish cooked whole and conglomerated in a fritter. The tiny black eyes of the whitefish stared up at him.

  ‘You must try them, the season is very short,’ said Antonio. ‘This is a delicacy.’

  He heaped Martin’s plate with the whitefish, then with artichokes, mozzarella, olives, tomatoes, salami. Martin tried to be a good tourist and accept his recommendations. The pile of eyes was disconcerting. When the secondi came—they both had pasta con le sarde, pasta with sardines, breadcrumbs, fennel and pine nuts—Martin was wondering if Antonio would ever speak of his father.

  Antonio waved his fork. ‘Mangia! Mangia!’

  He commented that the cook had forgotten the sultanas, but nevertheless ate with undaunted enthusiasm. Martin watched the spaghetti twirled and sucked and flicked into his companion’s mouth. He could not match the alarming rate of consumption. He’d never seen a plate of pasta disap
pear so quickly. Only when the main meal came did Antonio relax. By then both had drunk several glasses of wine, and Martin had ordered more.

  Over braised goat Antonio leaned forward, his lips shiny with olive oil. ‘It is Dora, you know. Her family was wiped out by the mafia and she has always wanted revenge.’

  Martin had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Dora?’

  ‘The mafia trade in stolen art. It’s not as lucrative as drugs or arms, but a handy little side business. And good for collateral. You know they stole Caravaggio’s Nativity from San Lorenzo, just down the road from here? In 1969. Never recovered!’ Antonio stabbed at his meat in emphasis. ‘Never recovered,’ he repeated.

  ‘What has all this to do with my father?’

  ‘Art theft is the biggest illegal trade after drugs, arms and people-trafficking. Less than ten per cent is recovered. About twenty thousand art thefts are reported in Italy every year.’ Antonio took another mouthful, chewing hard, and then extracted a tendon string from between his teeth. ‘So why do you think the Carabinieri would have followed up something as minor as a Vincenzo Ragusa?’

  Martin began to think that this man, who had seemed a mild-mannered academic, might be slightly unhinged. ‘So tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Because it is personal. Because of the connections. One of the capos here is well known for his interest in Ragusa, and has some connection to the Tokyo yakuza.’

  Martin sat back in his chair. He watched Antonio wolf down the last of his meat, then mop at the plate with a torn piece of bread. His own fish meal was barely touched.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Martin. He was thinking: yes, unbelievable, this man is a nutcase. What did any of this have to do with his father?

  ‘A mafia boss loves his Ragusas. He has a private collection. The Jap sees them and wants one. All those Japanese faces, here in Palermo: miracolo! The boss finds out that Dora is the expert, and gets her to steal one from the museum. Noah is a convenient distraction. Easy to blame. That simple.’

  ‘You’re telling me that crime bosses collect art, and that this woman named Dora was responsible for a theft.’

  ‘Art is a trophy, like everything else. They like to think they’re cultured. Here, look at my Monet. Here, look at my Ragusa. What? You haven’t heard of him? The great Italian genius of sculpture after Michelangelo? The great Sicilian? What a peasant you are. What an ignoramus. Idiota! Cretino!’ Antonio was warming to his topic. ‘So this capo, see, he wants to impress this Jap. Offers to have a nice piece stolen for him. But then, presto! It never arrives in Japan. Who but Dora?’

  Martin was nonplussed. How did he know these things? Antonio poured each of them another generous glass of red. ‘Dessert!’ he commanded. He waved his arm like an emperor. ‘Tiramisù!’

  The more Antonio drank, the more he repeated his story. Dora had stolen a Ragusa sculpture from a museum and Noah had been blamed. There were still mafiosi in Palermo, still Cosa Nostra. But not, he insisted, like in The Godfather.

  ‘It’s easy,’ he said drunkenly. ‘A few years back a ten-kilo Dali sculpture was taken from a museum in Bruges. Just lifted up and walked out the door. No alarm. No nothing.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve thought of it myself,’ he said. ‘But steal from a capo? Never! It was meant to be delivered in Japan, see? But Dora didn’t deliver.’

  Antonio’s beaked nose looked enormous, leaning so close. His neck was all columns and his eyes had narrowed into stones. Martin had now begun drinking more rapidly. He must meet this woman, Dora. But he thought that Antonio was a bullshit artist. He was tempted to say so.

  ‘There’s no way,’ Martin began, ‘that Noah would be mixed up in anything criminal.’

  ‘Ah, but he might be mixed up with a woman, yes? They went on a holiday together.’

  Antonio looked pleased with himself. He ordered coffee. They drank in silence. Then he ordered Strega, and Martin endured another version of his speculations on underworld connections and missing art. Antonio had his own theory about the missing Caravaggio, which also involved a Japanese connection.

  By the time Martin asked for the bill both were stupidly drunk, swaying like seaweed as the room washed fluidly around them. Everything Antonio had claimed now sounded entirely credible.

  Antonio had done a special course in art theft, he explained, a famous course run annually by Interpol, in Tuscany. He hoped eventually to retire from the university and become a private investigator of stolen paintings. ‘Big money,’ he said, rubbing his fingers with his thumbs.

  Antonio bestowed upon Martin two sloppy farewell kisses, and disappeared unsteadily into the night. Martin stood on the corner in the cold and realised it was not raining. He wished he’d brought his camera. There was an eerie loveliness to the city night, long shadows falling in fractal patterns, pools of street light in quivering reflections. The old church nearby, grimy in daylight and clothed in an air of neglect, now recovered in its looming form a colossal spiritual ambition.

  He lurched off through the dark, glossy streets for Tommaso’s, took a wrong turn and almost immediately became lost. Somewhere in a laneway in Kalsa he felt afraid; a man in shadows called out to him, something obscene. Sober, Martin would have shouted Vaffanculo! Fuck off! But drunk he felt vulnerable, and hurried away, stumbling over broken flagstones, almost colliding with a motorbike that came roaring from nowhere to menace and scare him.

  When he found himself at a night market, Martin saw how lively the late city was, how many people were out and about, and what a spirit the place had, of feasting and unity. The noise he noticed first: squeals and shouts, both men and women, and booming loud laughter. His sense of dreadful isolation was acute. He was the only man in the city, it appeared, standing alone. The scene ought to have been cheering, but the hanging lights looked jaundiced and compressed into hard knobs, the faces had a quality of crude exaggeration, the food on display in the stalls made him feel nauseous. He recognised a local specialty, spleen boiled in lard. Men held it caught in bread in their chunky fists and ate it with vigorous greedy thrusts. Its mushy texture revolted him.

  And he’d lost not only his way, but also his equilibrium. He began to shiver uncontrollably, and felt sure he would fall. Lurching like a drunken tourist, ready to be robbed, Martin saw how outside community he was, and how worthlessly foreign. He’d begun with an artful gaze, an appreciation of the night, but was now exposed as a mess of a man. All around was the sputter of threatening motorbikes and imminent danger. In this, his own darkness, he had no idea how long he was lost. Eventually, he happened upon a major road, Via Vittorio Emanuele. It was nearby all the time. He almost wept with relief. Using this street as a landmark, he found his way home.

  Martin hadn’t been so hungover since the morning of his father’s funeral. He experienced a wave of self-disgust. He calculated he hadn’t drunk much, certainly not as much as he did in his youth, when he went through a stage of getting smashed on straight vodka with his mates. Perhaps he was losing his tolerance for alcohol.

  In the kitchen, with Maria waiting, Tommaso presented him with a double espresso loaded with four teaspoons of sugar, and wanted to know exactly what he had eaten and how much it cost, and what kind of family this Antonio Dotti was from, what district he lived in, how much he earned. Martin was surprised by the interrogation and became evasive, which in turn spurred Tommaso to ask more questions. It occurred to him he might confide in Tommaso, tell him of Noah’s death, of Antonio’s theories. But he felt overwhelmingly tired and ill. His knees ached. He felt weepy. He wanted to sink.

  Martin decided he would Skype Evie. He would tell her how isolated he felt here, how he wanted to leave, but could not, about his attraction to the city and his sense of being lost. Evie would understand. Evie would listen. He would describe to her the palmless palm trees, and she would know what it was he found so compelling, the melancholy of the place, the suggestion of plight, and of undercurrent, and of something important go
ne missing.

  15

  NOW THAT HER job was starting, Evie hesitated before knocking. She thought, for the first time, how old-fashioned it was, like being a servant, perhaps, or an indigent companion. She stood before the dirty white door of the terrace house and realised she had pictured something wealthier, more formal and more admirable, more suited to a barrister. She had seen the advertisement pinned near the door at the Cinémathèque in Paddington: Assistant wanted for blind movie viewer. Descriptive audio. Must be movie enthusiast.

  The advertisement asked for a three-hundred-word biography. Nothing more. Evie had composed a florid and somewhat metaphysical note, which ended: ‘curious about the invisible that lies beyond the visible’.

  She liked the corny internal rhyme and the oblique sentiment. She deleted, on reflection, the quote from Spinoza. The composition had been a pleasant enough exercise. A phone call said she had been chosen from five applicants. Her commitment was to watch the movie herself before viewing it with her employer, and her job was to describe the movie during the pauses in dialogue. There would be a trial period of one week, fully remunerated, during which two movies would be described. The client, said the woman’s voice on the telephone, was a fifty-year-old man named Benjamin who had become blind almost five years ago from something called retinitis pigmentosa. He was a man of means and a devotee of cinema. He had been a barrister and was particularly fastidious about detail. Evie had wondered whether the voice meant ‘neurotically fastidious’, whether this was a warning, or advice, or an instruction as to her method of description. Lots of detail, presumably.

  She tested this out, speaking aloud to herself over the gaps in movies on television, and realised ‘detail’ could only mean precise vocabulary, since pauses in dialogue were often brief, and periods of silence in movies mostly occasional and random. She’d imagined retelling a story, or describing characters’ appearance with assiduous care, but realised that some things must be said before the movie began and ran to its own persisting rhythm. It would seem like chasing silences, in order to fill them. They would be sitting in the dark, perhaps, with only the silver blaze of the screen before them.