The Blue Last

the illusion of reality. The centric point, the vanishing point. You have seen the Trinity?”

They both grunted what they hoped would pass for an “Of course.”

Tomas Prada smiled beatifically. He could easily have taken the place of one of these panels. “I think not. I think you have not been to the Santa Maria Novella.”

What the hell was this, anyway? Did Prada mean to give them a lie-detector test? Wasn’t it enough for these Italians they had come all the way from London? And driven over half of Tuscany pursuing this dream?

“You must go, obviously. You see, Masaccio made an astonishing leap between the style of the San Giovanni triptych and the Trinity. No other painter, not even Leonardo, changed so quickly and with such amazing results. You must see this vaulted ceiling. The perspective, the blurring, the vanishing point. What is interesting is that the doctrine of redemption is also a blurring, a sfumatura, of space and time. Christ gives himself once, but then there is the Eucharist, where he gives himself again and again, unendingly, in complete contradiction of time and space. You see? The receding diagonals give the illusion of reality so that one might, in seeing the forms in the painting as real, believe in the subject. Perspective was Masaccio’s theology.” As he said this he was looking at Trueblood’s painting.

“To see what pieces have been recovered of the Carmine polyptych, you would have to go to Vienna, Berlin and, of course, London. The National Gallery houses-” Prada grew thoughtful “-the central panel, I believe. The Madonna and Child. The entire predella story is in Berlin. This”-he tapped Trueblood’s panel-“would have been one of the wings, the side panels next to the Madonna. St. John or St. Nicholas, probably. I mean if it was authentic.”

Melrose shot Trueblood a look to see if Berlin, having got two mentions, was now in the travel plans, but Trueblood was wholly taken up with what Tomas Prada was saying.

Right now, Prada was smiling. “Perhaps I must join my friend Di Bada on the wall-”

“Fence?” said Melrose, matching the smile.

“Si. Only, there’s one thing that greatly perplexes me, Mr. Trueblood.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you see, what we know of the Pisa polyptych in its wholeness, we know only from Vasari’s description. We haven’t the advantage of seeing these parts in a catalog or as a print, have we? So if this is a fake, a forgery, what was it copied from?”

Trueblood looked befuddled. “A good question, a good question, Signore Prada.”

Prada sighed. “A good question, perhaps. But I think a better question might be, ‘Can you live without an answer?’ ”

Trueblood considered. “I could; I’d just rather not.”

He was beating his head on the dashboard and loving it.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” said Melrose, as they drove down the curving road away from the Prada house.

“Why didn’t we think of what they were copied from? It’s so obvious.”

Melrose was enjoying the feel of the car as they rolled through the Tuscan landscape, verdant even in December. They had been here for only three days and it felt like weeks, months, even. Travel had that sort of intensity; sights, events crushed together so that one wound up thinking, No, it surely must have taken me a week to see that, not merely an hour.

The fingers of his gloved hand upon the steering wheel (he was wearing his new gloves) tapped out a little tune. He was in good spirits. Trueblood was winched down in the passenger’s seat, contemplating nothing except his own thoughts and turning now and then to look at the painting in the back, where it lay, now unwrapped as if it had no more to hide.

That night they dined at the Villa San Michele on an ambrosial fish netted in some heavenly stream. For dessert, there was a souffle Grand Marnier. When they finished, Trueblood asked the waiter to bring their coffee and cognac out to the terrace. “Fa caldo, Signore.”

“Si,” said Trueblood, not caring whether it was or wasn’t. The waiter brought the drinks and withdrew.

“They’re so ceremonial,” said Melrose, with a laugh. In the dark, they looked down on the city of Florence, its lights spread out across the city like drifts of fallen stars.

Trueblood uttered a giant sigh. “We leave tomorrow.”

They sipped their cognac, lighted cigarettes. Standing in the softly scented air, there came what felt to Melrose a mortal silence. Here he was in a place he had not wanted to come to, and which now he did not want to leave. He felt out here an awful longing; he felt like crying, really. Images flickered in and out of consciousness: the vine- wrapped towers of San Gimignano, its laddered, uphill streets; the conspirator’s wink of the lad who was hurried away from the Museum of Torture; Siena, the color of warm earth; its purple-shadowed streets; the blue door of the house in Lucca; the echoing stairway of their little hotel.

“Maybe,” said Melrose, “Diane was right after all.”

“How so?”

“See Florence and die.”

III Moonlight Sonata

Twenty-six

As it happened, it was not Oliver Tynedale who had been prevented by ill health from attending Simon Croft’s funeral two days before, but Simon’s sister Emily; her heart simply could not accommodate either the travel or the stress. “He looked remarkably chipper,” Mickey had said of Oliver Tynedale. “Certainly doesn’t look in his nineties.” Mickey had told Jury this; Mickey had gone to the funeral, but kept his distance, hanging back beneath the dripping trees.

Jury had hoped to speak to Emily Croft following the funeral, but since he couldn’t, that meant a trip to Brighton.

Brighton in December, although still a fairly bustling city, bore little relation to Brighton in June or August. Jury often felt there were few things bleaker than a seaside town in winter. He walked across a beach less sand than shale and broken shells and stood listening to the hollow fall of waves, the hiss and whisper of the foaming tide coming in. He had come here as a child. It was a memory that now receded like the tide. He was no longer sure about memory.

Emily Croft was a thread that had loosened from the tightly knit Croft and Tynedale clans. Not that he expected or even wished that she’d spill all sorts of secrets about the others. It surprised him, though, that she lived here in Brighton in a “facility” such as this that could only be depressing.

Jury thought about this standing in front of a high window that looked over the edge of the bluff to the sea, pewter to dark gray farther out and rather quiet today. He had been shown into this sitting room with its cold and glaring marble fireplace to wait. The furniture was sound but homely, dark blue and brown, the armchairs bulbous with stuffing.

The door opened and Emily Croft walked in. She was wearing yellow, which made him smile. One so seldom saw it in clothes, not a pale, liquid yellow, but a sunny yellow dress and cardigan. She was thin and a little angular, but still, at seventy-three, in possession of skin and cheekbones a model would kill for. She did not look the least bit infirm, nor did she move as if she were ill. He wondered if this iron stamina which both Emily Croft and Oliver Tynedale had in abundance was characteristic of the rest of the families.