Slowly she shakes her head. “Many men look at me. Some with contempt, some with longing. But no one else looks at me the way you do. You study me; you examine me, as if I were a flower or an insect whose parts you wish to catalog. Why?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but he can find no words. If he lies, she will see through it; if he tells the truth, she will hate it. He looks away, fixes his eyes on a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and sighs. “Forgive me, my lady.”
“Sienese.” She says it slowly, musingly, turning it over in her mind as she turns it over in her mouth. She looks down, then she reaches down, taking his right hand in hers, lifting it, examining his rainbow-tipped fingers. “You are a painter. The Sienese painter. Simone of Siena.” He bows slightly in awkward confirmation. “I have seen your frescoes in Siena. They are wonderful. I was glad to hear that you had come to Avignon.” He bows again, more deeply, and when he straightens up, he meets her gaze frankly for the first time. Her eyes continue to bore into him, but there is no anger in them, only curiosity, as well as the glimmer of something else crystallizing in her mind. “Why do you study me with your painter’s eyes, Simone of Siena?” How can he even begin to explain? He does not have to. “Do you paint me, Master Simone?” He hesitates, then nods slowly. She looks away, and when she looks at him again, her expression has changed. “Do you paint me for him — for the poet who puts me on a pedestal?” He nods again. She looks down, and when she looks up, tears are beading at the corners of her eyes: dewdrops on a gray autumn morning. “I did not ask to be his goddess, Master Simone. I do not want to be his goddess. Why do I not have a choice? He has pinned me to the pedestal, in view of everyone, and now, no matter what I do, I cannot get down. With his eloquent and unrelenting insistence, he has made me into what he imagines. I’ve heard a story, Master Simone, about a Greek sculptor long ago who managed to turn a statue into a woman. This poet is transforming me from a woman into a statue.”
“Forgive me,” he says again. “I did not know — did not consider — how his…attentions…might affect you. I should never have accepted the commission. I will destroy the picture this very day.”
“No!” Her eyes widen, and she puts a hand to her throat. “No. Wait.” Her breath is rapid now, her cheeks flushed. “First, you must tell me about this picture. How are you painting me, Master Simone? What scene am I in? What biblical figure do I portray?” The corners of her mouth twitch. “I cannot be the Virgin Mary. Am I the woman caught in the act of adultery?”
The question makes him blush; can she read his nighttime thoughts? “Of course not, my lady,” he says, perhaps a bit too swiftly and loudly.
“Am I Elizabeth, the withered old wife of Abraham, who finally conceives at age ninety?” Her eyes twinkle, and he’s both shocked and delighted by the boldness of her teasing.
“Old and withered? Far from it, my lady. In my painting, you are young and beautiful. In my painting, you are no one but your own true self.”
She smiles. “I knew you were a fine painter, Master Simone. I did not know you were a skilled flatterer, too.”
“No. I have no gift for words. Only my brush can speak, and it says you are lovely and luminous.”
She pinks. “And in this secret picture, what does your brush say that I am wearing?”
“You are wearing your green silk gown with the collar embroidered in gold, the one you were wearing when Petrarch first saw you. The one you were wearing when I first saw you. Pearls — the choker, not the long strand — encircle your neck. Your hair is pinned up, as it is now, but it is the cloisonné comb, not this tortoiseshell, just above your left ear. Your head is turned a little to the right, which is why we can see the comb, but your eyes are looking straight at the viewer. Straight at me.” As he says the words, her eyes are indeed locked on him, just as in the portrait; just as in his imaginings. He continues, “The irises are mostly green — almost emerald at their edges — but flecked with gold, especially near the center, where the iris meets the pupil.” He is leaning closer now, staring at her eyes, talking almost in a whisper, almost to himself. “I wish I could paint the way the pupils pulsate in time with your heartbeat: larger, smaller; larger, smaller. But even at their smallest, they are large. I have never seen pupils so large as yours. They are quite…remarkable.”
Her eyelids close, and her breath whistles slightly across her lips as she breathes in deeply. Then her eyes reopen, glazed for just a moment before they refocus and fix on him again. “I do not wish for you to destroy the picture, Master Simone. I want you to finish it. But I want you to grant me one request in return.”
“What is your request, my lady?”
“I want to see it. When you have finished it — before you give it to him — you must show it to me. Will you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. When? Where? Shall I bring it to your house?”
“By all means — if you wish for both of us to be killed!” She smiles. “Where is your studio, Master Simone?”
“It’s not much of a studio. More of a shed. Right behind the Carmelite church — the one with the open bell tower. Follow the smell of turpentine.”
“When do you expect to finish?”
“I had thought it was finished, my lady, but I was wrong. I need to fix your eyes.”
“Fix them? What’s wrong with them?”
“I have not made them luminous enough.”
She laughs. “See, such a flatterer. The courtiers in Paris should take lessons from you.”
He holds up a hand. “God’s truth, my lady. I had them right, but then I doubted myself. ‘Simone, you fool,’ I told myself, ‘eyes cannot possibly be so green and also so gold.’ So I changed them, made them more ordinary. Now, I must put them back as they were. As they are. As they must be.”
“I will bring my looking glass with me, Master Simone, so I can inspect your repair work,” she says. “When may I see it?”
“Perhaps next Sunday morning? Before Mass? Or after Mass?”
“Instead of Mass,” she says. “I will be there.”
“My lady? I, too, have one request. So that I can be sure I have it right, is it possible for you to wear the green silk gown?”
She bows. “Yes, Master Simone. And the pearl choker. And the cloisonné comb.”
CHAPTER 31
Avignon
The Present
Elisabeth brought Descartes’s coffee and my tea; by now, she and Jean considered the detective to be a regular fixture at breakfast — the rule rather than the exception — and I made a mental note to ask, when I settled my tab at the end of my stay, if they needed to add an item to my bill: “Descartes’s breakfasts, 40 euros.” It no longer startled me to see him tuck a croissant into his pocket; I halfway expected him to start showing up with a Thermos and a lunchbox so he could load up on coffee, fruit, cheese, and baguettes.
This morning Descartes was branching out. He loaded the grain mill with oats, bran, and sunflower seeds, pressed the button, and presto, out came fresh-ground muesli, which he topped with dried cherries and fresh yogurt. He sampled the concoction, smacked his lips, and nodded in approval. “Bon. Healthy, too.” He took a bigger bite. “So, I’ve been looking for connections between the church in Charlotte and the research place that contacted you.”
“The Institute for Biblical Science?”
“Exactement. As we thought, it’s no coincidence. The preacher, this Reverend Jonah, he’s on the board of directors of the institute. And the scientist—”
“Newman, right? Dr. Adam Newman?”
“Oui, Newman. Guess what else he is doing?”
“Uh…calculating the exact moment when the Antichrist will appear?”
“Ha! Maybe that, too. But for sure he’s working on—”
He was interrupted by a phone call — my phone, not his. I glanced at the display. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I felt a surge of dread. The last call I’d gotten from this number had brought word of Rocky Stone’s death in Amsterdam. “Sorry
, Inspector, I need to take this.” He nodded as I answered.
“Doc? It’s Steve Morgan at the TBI. I hope I’m not waking you up.”
“Not at all. I’m just having breakfast with a French detective. But why aren’t you sleeping? Isn’t it two in the morning there?”
“Three,” he said. “I had some news I thought you’d want to hear. We swooped down tonight — us, the DEA, and the FBI — and rounded up the outfit that killed Rocky and his undercover agent. We owed it to Rocky. The guy he had the shoot-out with in Amsterdam—”
“Morales?”
“Yeah, Morales. The feds recovered his cell phone. It was a gold mine: all his contacts. We picked up one of them in Tennessee, two in Atlanta, four in Miami.”
“Is that everybody?”
“No, but good enough for now,” he said. “The top guys are in Colombia; they’re out of reach, at least for now. But we got everybody who had a direct connection to the Sevierville operation. You can quit looking over your shoulder now — at least on this account.”
I drew a deep breath and let it out. “That’s a relief. Have you told Rocky’s wife yet?”