Prologue - The Last Room
The painting was in the last room of the exhibition.
Hitomi Hotei let the crowd carry her into the darkened gallery and stopped in front of a single canvas on the far wall.
David with the Head of Goliath. Galleria Borghese. First time ever shown in Japan.
That was all the placard said.
Up until that room, she had been calm. She had studied the gloss on Boy with a Basket of Fruit, read the direction of the brushstrokes, estimated the thickness of each layer of paint. Looking at the beads of light on the skin of the fruit, she had measured the distance between his technique and her own. She had given Young Sick Bacchus a colleague’s attention—the bloodless pallor of the skin, the way each ivy leaf was told apart from the next. She had passed through every canvas with a painter’s eyes. Analytical eyes. Evaluating eyes. Safe eyes. Eyes that let nothing touch what was inside her.
In front of this one, those safe eyes broke.
David’s hand gripped the hair of a severed head. There was no triumph in the young man’s face. The arm that held the sword hung tired, the wrist sagging under its own weight. And the head. Goliath’s face—the face scholars call the painter’s self-portrait. Eyes half open. Teeth showing at the corner of the lips. Old scars across the brow and cheek, and newer ones, still raw.
Hitomi looked into Goliath’s eyes.
Those half-open eyes held something that was neither rage nor pain. They were the eyes of a dying man. But not only that. They were looking at something. At the young hand that held his head, perhaps. At the inscription on the blade. Or at something farther away, something outside the frame.
I know these eyes, Hitomi thought. I know them.
She couldn’t say why. She had pored over this plate a hundred times in the art historian Roberto Longhi’s books. She had seen it in every catalogue. But standing before the real thing, a completely different feeling was rising from the bottom of her chest. It wasn’t the thrill of seeing a masterpiece. It came from somewhere older and deeper. A feeling with no name swelled in her throat and pressed against the backs of her eyes.
Her left hand had risen on its own and was touching the base of her throat. Her fingertips were rough with dried paint.
The gallery air was dry and smelled faintly of dust. Around her, people shuffled past; the murmur of audio guides overlapped in low layers. Someone’s phone made a shutter sound, and a guard told them to stop. Ordinary noise. But it no longer reached her. Goliath’s half-open eyes filled her vision, and the rest of the world receded behind a thin membrane.
These eyes are looking at someone.
Not at the one who killed him. Not at the one who painted him. At someone closer. At someone lower down. That was who those half-open eyes were watching.
Hitomi had no idea what that meant. But her body did. The inside of her nose burned. Her jaw went tight. Her breath turned shallow. She was about to cry.
A grown woman, a professional painter, could not stand in a museum and weep for no reason.
She bit her lip and turned her back on the painting. In her bag, her phone buzzed. One missed call from her father. I’ll call him back later. Her steps quickened toward the exit. She didn’t want to look back. If she looked back, she’d cry—and she wouldn’t know why. That frightened her. Her own feelings slipping out of her hands had always frightened her.
Outside, it was raining.
The trees of Ueno Park gleamed black and wet, and water ran from the museum eaves in long threads. She had no umbrella. The sky had been grey that morning, but she hadn’t thought it would rain. The thin coat she’d thrown over her paint-stained work clothes was already soaking through by the time she reached the bottom of the steps. Drops slid from the ends of her tied-back hair and down the nape of her neck.
She crossed the park and came out onto the main road. Headlights smeared across the wet asphalt. The crosswalk signal turned green, and she started across. Rain struck her face; she narrowed her eyes. Her paint-stained fingertips went cold. The signal began to blink. She walked faster.
A horn blared.
Long, tearing.
It hit her from behind.
She turned, and something white filled the left edge of her vision. Huge. The side of a truck, slick with rain, bearing down like a wall—and before she could even think it’s going to hit me, it hit her. Her body left the ground. The asphalt spun. Raindrops streaked sideways. The grey sky over Ueno swept across her eyes in a single band.
She should have slammed into the road.
But there was no pain. After the impact, a strange blankness spread out, and the rain, the horn, even the sound of her own breathing all went silent. Where the pain should have been, a smell rushed in instead.
Turpentine.
In a rain-soaked Tokyo intersection, an impossible smell flooded her nose. Distilled pine resin, that sharp, stinging, volatile bite. Old. Raw. Mixed into pigment that had just been ground by hand. Not the refined turpentine on an art store shelf. Coarse. Harsh. The kind that clings to your hands, that stays in the whorls of your fingertips.
The smell of four hundred years ago.
She didn’t know why she thought four hundred years.
Her consciousness was slipping away. The grey sky darkened; the rain receded. At the very edge of her vision, for an instant, Goliath’s half-open eyes flickered. They were still looking at someone. At someone lower down.
Only the smell of turpentine remained. Only that, lodged deep in her nose.
Author’s note: Caravaggio (1571–1610) was one of the most influential painters of the Italian Baroque—and a man with a famously violent life. You don’t need to know anything about him to read this story. Hitomi does, though. That’s going to hurt.
