“I’m sorry.” He gave a slight shrug. “You’re seeing all this for the first time… Of course, you’re taken with it. Why not go out and stroll around the square? I’m sure it’s safe.”
“I will,” she said, a little deflated. Something wasn’t quite right with Geraint, and it puzzled her that she didn’t have a glimmering of what it was.
“When you’ve finished fannying around,” Streak said it a businesslike way as he dragged some bags to the nearest door. “Do the honors, guv.”
Michael unlocked his door on cue. “I have one or two calls to make, and then I think it’s an early night. But we need to plan what we’re going to do tomorrow,” he said to Geraint.
“Fair enough. I think a Ministry interest in the remarkable engineering work of the city would be entirely appropriate. I need to call the consulate office here as well, go and flatter some egos,” Geraint replied. “Okay, let’s get organized. Chop chop.”
“We’re going out,” Kristen told Serrin. It was anything but a question.
“I kind of got that impression,” he said with a smile.
The two of them dumped their bags in their room and strode down the stairs and into the night. The square was uncluttered with drinkers at tables, the ordinances of the city forbidding this in the square before the palace itself, and only small knots of tourists like themselves occupied the piazza, save for the guardsmen stationed decoratively before the basilica itself. They walked across the mosaics of the piazza, through a night that seemed to be hushed before the magnificence of the buildings.
They went quietly toward the basilica, stopping ten meters or so before the central doorways. The horses, underlit with small spotlights, reared into the inky night sky, and the black-and-silver-dressed guardsmen stood impassively before the colonnades of the doorways. The huge frontage of the basilica, with its astonishing statuary and frescoes, stretched out on both sides of them.
“Can you imagine building this?” Serrin asked softly. The wonder of the place had struck him too. Flags and pennants hung down from atop the doorways and alcoves, and as he looked at them he saw they were portraits and paintings. He stepped a little closer to examine the nearer of them.
They were, he guessed, reproductions of paintings by the many artists whose work graced the city’s buildings; and that had been most of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, that time in human history when art and science had not so much progressed or flourished as exploded in the minds of so many men of brilliance. It had been an era when the shackles of a corrupt and authoritarian church had begun to be loosened, yet so much of the art of the era had been sacred, and used to decorate many of the churches and cathedrals of Europe’s great cities.
By sheer coincidence, the first painting he saw on its, lightly fluttering flag was Leonardo’s John the Baptist. Opposite it, across the doorways, was a greatly smoothed and polished reproduction of another of the artist’s surviving works.
“The Last Supper,” Serrin said. “Christ and his disciples. I don’t think the original looks quite as clear that.”
Kristen looked at it curiously, stepping closer to examine it.
“I can’t see Judas,” she said.
“I’m not sure where he is. I can’t even remember if he was there or not,” Serrin said. “I didn’t pay enough attention in Sunday school.”
“He’s got to be there, but the arm is wrong,” she said, pointing to the left of the picture.
“What?” he asked, stepping forward himself to see what she was talking about.
“Look. There. Someone is holding a knife at that man’s stomach, but you can only see the arm. Whoever the arm belongs to you can’t see. And he isn’t pointing it at Jesus,” she added, a little confused. “And why are they all accusing him? Look at their hands.”
He squinted, unsure, but with a strange sense of disquiet and anxiety. Something was terribly wrong with this painting.
“Look, they’re making daggers with their hands. Look, he is,” she said urgently, pointing to the left of the painting. “His hand is a flat dagger across that woman’s throat. That’s it! Those two on the left hate her, not him,” she said, urgently now. “Serrin, what is this? Look at his face, that man with the pointy gray beard, his hand is cutting her throat, and she is so sad, look at her. Who is she? Is that Mary?”
“I think so,” he said uncertainly.
“But she’s too young.” Kristen protested. “That can’t be his mother And look, it’s her again. The Mona Lisa. I’m sure it is. It’s her eyes, even though they’re closed.”
Senin was struck by half a dozen insights in the same instant, and he felt horribly cold and even a little sick.
“It isn’t his mother, it’s Mary Magdalene,” he told her, remembering what he’d read in the book he’d bought. “And I hadn’t seen it, but I think you’re right. The book only says that Leonardo painted himself as one of the disciples. Here,” and he pointed to the other side of the painting, one from the right. “That’s him. Talking to the bald man, there at the end.”
“And why is the young man at his side turned completely away from Jesus?”
“That I don’t know,” Serrin muttered, but his eyes returned involuntarily to the woman in the picture. For a moment he realized that the apparently central figure of the painting, the open-handed Christ staring slightly vacantly at the viewer, almost as if he was shrugging his shoulders, was not what this painting was really about. His eyes were drawn to the Magdalene and the accusing hands of hatred directed at her by the disciples around her.
It is she who suffers, he realized. This man painted a blasphemy.
“I want to read your book,” she said suddenly.
“Hmmmm? What? What book?”
“The book on the man who painted this. And the Mona Lisa, and the other things you look at,” she said simply.
“That might not be a bad idea,” he said. If not for Kristen, he surely wouldn’t have noticed any of the strange things about the painting, He made a mental note to come back after they’d toured the square a bit so he could scrutinize every last detail of every painting and etching.
“But now I want to go on one of the boats,” she announced brightly.
“Gondolas” he corrected her.
“I know,” she said testily. “I want to go on one. Now. Come on!”
He laughed and hugged her, then let himself be pulled along. In some people, such a demand would have been childish petulance, but with her it was a genuinely childlike enthusiasm and desire to learn and experience what seventeen years on the streets of Cape Town had given her no inkling of.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” he said, and they walked through the piazzetta to the Molo San Marco and down to the Giardinetti, where they found a host of men only too ready to take their money and promise to sing into the bargain.
It’s a tourist thing, he grinned to himself, but what the hell? There actually are stars in the sky tonight, we can drink wine, and the canals really don’t seem to stink as Michael said they would. The guy propelling this thing has seen untold lovers clamber aboard his boat and he’s probably given them all pretty much the same patter about how beautiful the lady is and how her face shines in the light of his lantern-after all, he’s an Italian-and I still don’t care.
Leaving the disquiet of the painting behind him, Serrin grinned broadly, paid the man a good tip, whispered in his ear and got a broad smile in return, then settled down among the cushions of the narrow boat for the ride.
“What did you say to him?” she asked, suspicious.
“That you were an African princess and I bad eloped with you,” he whispered into her ear. She was about to hit him when he put up a hand in self-defending protest.
“It’s true! We did elope-after a fashion. We had to smuggle you out of the country,” he pointed out, She drew back from her playful slap.