Light in the Shadows by Linda Lafferty & Andy Stone

Author:Linda Lafferty & Andy Stone [Lafferty, Linda & Stone, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
ISBN: 9781542044080
Google: k82uuwEACAAJ
Amazon: 154204409X
Barnesnoble: 154204409X
Goodreads: 41723465
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2019-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Lucia was not going to cry. She would not let herself. She might have dedicated her life to studying art, but she had always felt that people who wept openly in the presence of great art were just showing off. But now, staring at The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, she felt tears flooding her eyes. She blinked hard, unwilling to let the tears fall or to wipe them away.

Not that anyone was paying attention to her. The brightly lit room in the Valletta cathedral was much larger than the dark chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, but even on this midwinter morning, it was filled with a bustling crowd. There were a hundred people talking, pointing, corralling children, answering cell phones, and taking pictures despite the prominent signs declaring that photography was absolutely prohibited. From time to time, a guard hushed the mob with a sharp, “Shhhh!” And then, little by little, the murmur rose again.

But none of it mattered to Lucia. The enormous painting’s focus, power, and clarity swept everything away. The crowd and the noise that had indeed distressed her when she first walked into the room faded quickly. For a long moment, she forgot to breathe, and then, when breath returned, her eyes filled with tears.

She blinked again and focused on the painting. The central drama was intense, a tight cluster of figures: the saint lying dead—no, she decided, not dead, dying, his blood still spurting—after the savage slash of the executioner’s sword, that sword now dropped clattering on the stones of the courtyard; the executioner, one hand reaching down to grab the saint’s hair, his extended arm an arrow, like the neon sign outside the Naples hotel, pointing to the moment of death, while his other hand reached behind him for his knife to finishing severing the head; the young woman—was she Salome, who had demanded the saint’s head? No, certainly a serving girl, this was servant’s work—holding out a platter to receive the severed head; an old woman, clutching her own head in horror; a prison guard, pointing sternly, trying to take control of the moment.

It was a frozen instant of horror and death. But it wasn’t the death that brought those tears to her eyes and held her attention.

It was the life.

Life pulsed from those figures, from those bodies. Even from the dying saint. From the half-naked executioner, master of death. From the servant girl, the guard, the old woman staring in horror. And from the two other prisoners, figures Lucia had overlooked at first, but who now riveted her attention, peering through the bars of a shadowed window at the fate they might soon enough share.

The genius of Caravaggio was the life force that surged off the canvas.

And now, as that force vibrated within her, Lucia was sure: the same force had surrounded her and held her in the dark of the warehouse as she waited and wondered, like those two prisoners witnessing the beheading, whether her life would be sacrificed next.

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