"Moscow Rules" - читать интересную книгу автора (Silva Daniel)

2 UMBRIA, ITALY

The Villa dei Fiori, a thousand-acre estate in the rolling hills between the Tiber and Nera rivers, had been a possession of the Gasparri family since the days when Umbria was still ruled by the popes. There was a large and lucrative cattle operation and an equestrian center that bred some of the finest jumpers in all of Italy. There were pigs no one ate and a flock of goats kept solely for entertainment value. There were khaki-colored fields of hay, hillsides ablaze with sunflowers, olive groves that produced some of Umbria ’s best oil, and a small vineyard that contributed several hundred pounds of grapes each year to the local cooperative. On the highest part of the land lay a swath of untamed woods where it was not safe to walk because of the wild boar. Scattered round the estate were shrines to the Madonna, and, at an intersection of three dusty gravel roads, stood an imposing wood-carved crucifix. Everywhere, there were dogs: a quartet of hounds that roamed the pastures, devouring fox and rabbit, and a pair of neurotic terriers that patrolled the perimeter of the stables with the fervor of holy warriors.

The villa itself stood at the southern edge of the property and was reached by a long gravel drive lined with towering umbrella pine. In the eleventh century, it had been a monastery. There was still a small chapel, and, in the walled interior courtyard, the remains of an oven where the brothers had baked their daily bread. The doors to the courtyard were fashioned of heavy wood and iron and looked as though they had been built to withstand pagan assault. At the base of the house was a large swimming pool, and adjacent to the pool was a trellised garden where rosemary and lavender grew along walls of Etruscan stone.

Count Gasparri, a faded Italian nobleman with close ties to the Vatican, did not rent the villa; nor did he make a habit of lending it to friends and relatives, which was why the staff were surprised by the news that they would be playing host to a long-term guest. “His name is Alessio Vianelli,” the count informed Margherita, the housekeeper, by telephone from his office in Rome. “He’s working on a special project for the Holy Father. You’re not to disturb him. You’re not to talk to him. But, most important, you are not to tell a soul he’s there. As far as you’re concerned, this man is a nonperson. He does not exist.”

“And where shall I put this nonperson?” asked Margherita.

“In the master suite, overlooking the swimming pool. And remove everything from the drawing room, including the paintings and the tapestries. He plans to use it as his work space.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Will Anna be cooking for him?”

“I’ve offered her services, but, as yet, have received no answer.”

“Will he be having any guests?”

“It is not outside the realm of possibility.”

“What time should we expect him?”

“He refuses to say. He’s rather vague, our Signore Vianelli.”

As it turned out, he arrived in the dead of night-sometime after three, according to Margherita, who was in her room above the chapel at the time and woke with the sound of his car. She glimpsed him briefly as he stole across the courtyard in the moonlight, a dark-haired man, thin as a rail, with a duffel bag in one hand and a Maglite torch in the other. He used the torch to read the note she had left at the entrance of the villa, then slipped inside with the air of a thief stealing into his own home. A moment later, a light came on in the master bedroom, and she could see him prowling restlessly about, as though looking for a lost object. He appeared briefly in the window, and, for several tense seconds, they gazed at each other across the courtyard. Then he gave her a single soldierly nod and drew the shutters closed with an emphatic thump.

They greeted each other properly the next morning at breakfast. After an exchange of polite but cool pleasantries, he said he had come to the Villa dei Fiori for the purposes of work. Once that work began, he explained, noise and interruptions were to be kept to a minimum, though he neglected to say precisely what sort of work he would be doing or how they would know whether it had commenced. He then forbade Margherita to enter his rooms under any circumstances and informed a devastated Anna he would be seeing to his own meals. When recounting the details of the meeting for the rest of the staff, Margherita described his demeanor as “standoffish.” Anna, who took an instant loathing to him, was far less charitable in her depiction. “Unbearably rude,” she said. “The sooner he’s gone, the better.”

His life quickly acquired a strict routine. After a spartan breakfast of espresso and dry toast, he would set out on a long forced march around the estate. At first, he snapped at the dogs when they followed him, but eventually he seemed resigned to their company. He walked through the olive groves and the sunflowers and even ventured into the woods. When Carlos pleaded with him to carry a shotgun because of the wild boar, he calmly assured Carlos that he could look after himself.

After his walk, he would spend a few moments tending to his quartersand laundry, then prepare a light lunch-usually a bit of bread and local cheese, pasta with canned tomato sauce if he was feeling particularly adventurous. Then, after a vigorous swim in the pool, he would settle in the garden with a bottle of Orvieto and a stack of books about Italian painters. His car, a battered Volkswagen Passat, gathered a thick layer of dust, for not once did he set foot outside the estate. Anna went to market for him, resentfully filling her basket with the air of a virtuoso forced to play a child’s simple tune. Once, she tried to slip a few local delights past his defenses, but the next morning, when she arrived for work, the food was waiting for her on the kitchen counter, along with a note explaining that she had left these things in his refrigerator by mistake. The handwriting was exquisite.

As the days ground gloriously past, the nonperson called Alessio Vianelli, and the nature of his mysterious work on behalf of the Holy Father, became something of an obsession for the staff of the Villa dei Fiori. Margherita, a temperamental soul herself, thought him a missionary recently returned from some hostile region of the world. Anna suspected a fallen priest who had been cast into Umbrian exile, but then Anna was inclined to see the worst in him. Isabella, the ethereal half Swede who oversaw the horse operation, believed him to be a recluse theologian at work on an important Church document. Carlos, the Argentine cowboy who tended the cattle, reckoned he was an agent of Vatican intelligence. To support this theory, he cited the nature of Signore Vianelli’s Italian, which, while fluent, was tinged with a faint accent that spoke of many years in foreign lands. And then there were the eyes, which were an unnerving shade of emerald green. “Take a look into them, if you dare,” Carlos said. “He has the eyes of a man who knows death.”

During the second week, there were a series of events that clouded the mystery further. The first was the arrival of a tall young woman with riotous auburn hair and eyes the color of caramel. She called herself Francesca, spoke Italian with a pronounced Venetian accent, and proved to be a much-needed breath of fresh air. She rode the horses-“Quite well, actually,” Isabella informed the others-and organized elaborate games involving the goats and the dogs. She secretly permitted Margherita to clean Signore Vianelli’s rooms and even encouraged Anna to cook. Whether they were husband and wife was unclear. Margherita, however, was sure of two things: Signore Vianelli and Francesca were sharing the same bed, and his mood had improved dramatically since her arrival.

And then there were the delivery trucks. The first dispensed a white table of the sort found in professional laboratories; the second, a large microscope with a retractable arm. Then came a pair of lamps that, when switched on, made the entire villa glow with an intense white light. Then it was a case of chemicals that, when opened, made Margherita feel faint from the stench. Other parcels arrived in rapid succession: two large easels of varnished oak from Venice, a strange-looking magnifying visor, bundles of cotton wool, woodworking tools, dowels, brushes, professional-grade glue, and several dozen vessels of pigment.

Finally, three weeks after Signore Vianelli’s arrival in Umbria, a dark green panel van eased its way slowly up the tree-lined drive, followed by an official-looking Lancia sedan. The two vehicles had no markings, but their distinct SCV license plates spoke of links to the Holy See. From the back of the van emerged a vast, ghastly painting depicting a man being disemboweled. It was soon propped on the two large easels in Count Gasparri’s drawing room.

Isabella, who had studied art history before devoting her life to horses, recognized the canvas immediately as Martyrdom of St. Erasmus by the French painter Nicolas Poussin. Rendered in the style of Caravaggio, it had been commissioned by the Vatican in 1628 and resided now in the Pinacoteca at the Vatican Museums. That evening, at the staff dinner, she announced that the mystery was solved. Signore Alessio Vianelli was a famous art restorer. And he had been retained by the Vatican to save a painting.

His days took on a distinctly monastic rhythm. He toiled from dawn till midday, slept through the heat of the afternoon, then worked again from dusk until dinner. For the first week, the painting remained on the worktable, where he examined the surface with the microscope, made a series of detailed photographs, and performed structural reinforcements on the canvas and stretcher. Then he transferred the canvas to the easels and began removing the surface grime and yellowed varnish. It was a markedly tedious task. First he would fashion a swab, using a blob of cotton wool and a wooden dowel; then he would dip the swab in solvent and twirl it over the surface of the painting-gently, Isabella explained to the others, so as not to cause any additional flaking of the paint. Each swab could clean about a square inch of the painting. When it became too soiled to use any longer, he would drop it on the floor at his feet and start the process over again. Margherita likened it to cleaning the entire villa with a toothbrush. “No wonder he’s so peculiar,” she said. “His work drives him mad.”

When he finished removing the old varnish, he covered the canvas in a coat of isolating varnish and began the final phase of the restoration, retouching those portions of the painting that had been lost to time and stress. So perfect was his mimicry of Poussin that it was impossible to tell where the painter’s work ended and his began. He even added faux craquelure, the fine webbing of surface cracks, so that the new faded flawlessly into the old. Isabella knew enough of the Italian art community to realize Signore Vianelli was no ordinary restorer. He was special, she thought. It was no wonder the men of the Vatican had entrusted him with their masterpiece.

But why was he working here at an isolated farm in the hills of Umbria instead of the state-of-the-art conservation labs at the Vatican? She was pondering this question, on a brilliant afternoon in early June, when she saw the restorer’s car speeding down the tree-lined drive. He gave her a curt, soldierly wave as he went hurtling past the stables, then disappeared behind a cloud of pale gray dust. Isabella spent the remainder of the afternoon wrestling with a new question. Why, after remaining a prisoner of the villa for five weeks, was he suddenly leaving for the first time? Though she would never know it, the restorer had been summoned by other masters. As for the Poussin, he would never touch it again.