The Caravaggio Conspiracy by Walter Ellis Page A

us everywhere we go.’ Substitute Muslims for Jews and it was the same situation today. Now there was a pope Bosani could respect.
    It was after four o’clock before he started out for the Pamphilj gallery. It was rush hour – what the Italians called l’ora di punta . The pavements were packed with commuters heading to the Metro or making their way to the main railway station a little further west. Dempsey drew a deep breath as he left the cool seclusion of the library. It was yet another sticky summer’s evening. The air-conditioning units, turned up to high despite the latest government regulations, droned overhead, dripping water steadily onto the ground. He considered taking a bus, but Roman bus routes were incredibly complicated. It was said you had to be born in the city to have any hope of understanding them. Better to take a little longer on foot than end up a kilometre or more in the wrong direction.
    It was when he stopped for a cold beer off the Via della Gatta that he learned from RaiNews 24 that the gardener injured by the bomb in the cloisters of the Lateran cathedral had died two hours earlier in the San Giovanni Hospital. Few of the tourists in the crowded bar understood the bulletin, but a definite murmur of hostility rose from the Romans present.
    ‘Bloody Arabs!’ one man with a leather jacket and a comb-over said beneath his breath. ‘One minute they’re shooting at a judge, the next they’re blowing the legs off one of the Pope’s gardeners.’
    ‘Poor bastard,’ someone said. ‘Didn’t even know what hit him.’
    The barman nodded. ‘But when’s the government going to bloody well do something? Pity we can’t have Berlusconi back. They’ll be bombing my mother when she comes out of Mass before anyone sits up and takes notice.’
    Dempsey finished his beer and headed back into the evening sunshine. He understood the sentiment. After his own experience, he had no time for Islamic terrorists. But he still found this kind of talk wearing.
    Two minutes later, he arrived at the Palazzo Pamphilj, next to the old Collegio Romano. He showed his invitation to a uniformed guard and was directed towards a set of marble stairs. The sculpture room, the first stop on the tour, didn’t interest him. He’d never cared much for sculpture, which always reminded him of public parks filled with bronze aldermen in frock coats, or ‘martyrs’ calling on others to follow their example. Hurrying past a lubricious centaur and a tiny figure of Socrates reclining in the fireplace, he followed the signs up another set of stairs to the first of the picture galleries.
    The initial impact was of a saleroom he had once visited in Dublin. There were paintings – hundreds of them – stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Some were so jammed together that it was hard to make them out. It was the painterly equivalent of l’ora di punta .
    There was, of course, one exception. The celebrated portrait of Innocent X by Velàsquez was displayed in its own secluded gabinetto , next to a bust of the pontiff by Bernini. The decision to keep the Velàsquez separate from the rest of the collection was nothing new. Isolation was a fact of life for those who sat on the Throne of St Peter’s. It was central to their role. And it was appropriate that the only face Innocent had to gaze upon when the public took their leave each evening was his own – which was almost certainly the case in real life.
    Dempsey sympathized. For the first four weeks of his burns treatment, smeared with antibiotic cream, he had been secured inside a pressurized steel chamber filled with oxygen. The sensation was disorientating. He had felt like an astronaut lost in space. Every day he went to sleep and wakened in the same position , face down, arms and legs outstretched, as if he were crucified – except that he had never felt further from God. The longer-term treatment was only marginally more bearable. His extreme susceptibility to infection