Caravaggio leaves the party in a car.  It crunches over the slowly curving gravel path leading out of the grounds, the automobile purring, serene as ink within the summer night. For the rest of the evening during the Villa Cosima gathering he had been looking at the photographer, spinning his body away whenever she lifted the camera to photograph in his direction. Now that he knows of its existence he can avoid it. He moves into the range of her dialogue, her name is Anna, mistress to an officer, who will be staying here in the villa for the night and then in the morning will travel north through Tuscany. The death of the woman or the woman’s sudden disappearance will only arouse suspicion. Nowadays anything out of the ordinary is investigated. 

 

Four hours later, he runs over the grass in his socks, his shadow curled under him, painted by the moon. He stops at the gravel path and moves slowly over the grit. He looks up at the Villa Cosima, at the square moons of window. A palace of war-women. 

 

A car beam—like something sprayed out of a hose—lights up the room he is in, and he pauses once again in mid-step, seeing that same woman’s eyes on him, a man moving on top of her, his fingers in her blonde hair. And she has seen, he knows, even though now he is naked, the same man she photographed earlier in the crowded party, for by accident he stands the same way now, half turned in surprise at the light that reveals his body in the darkness. The car lights sweep up into a corner of the room and disappear. 

 

Then there is blackness.