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The first time Judith sees her namesake, she is in Florence, and she is 23. Her objective is simple: get in, quickly and quietly poison the mafia don who has made a number of people very unhappy by supplying arms to the KLA, and get out. Her downtime is minimal, but she knows her secondary objective is to continue honing her Italian, which means she needs to find conversation partners, which are in short supply in her single occupancy safehouse.
She spends a morning sitting outside of a cafe in a piazza near the river, watching people come and go, taking note of their body language, of the slang terms they use. She sips at an espresso and observes from behind her sunglasses how the women who appear to be near her age are dressing and how they wear their hair, and she knows what she needs to adjust. When she goes to a club that night–not the one her target will be at the next evening, but a different one–she studies the sway of the waitresses’ hips and the practiced way they easily convince old men to part with their lire. She briefly hits a second club to confirm the suspicions she had after the first; as long as what she wears tomorrow is short, tight, and black, she will blend in with the staff with ease.
Judith’s second day in Florence begins with a check-in with her handler, confirming that her objective remains the same and that the intel she was provided with is still good. She ambles through town in a way that seems aimless but is actually the exact route she will take that night, under cover of darkness, after her target finishes what only she knows will be his final drink. It takes her past the Uffizi Gallery, and a quick glance at her watch tells her she has just enough time to play tourist before she has to lock in.
Her walk through the gallery is truly aimless, unlike the walk that led her there. When she first sees it, she feels stricken, her chest tightening in a way that reminds her of running down the drive away from the care home when she was fifteen, chasing after the sedan that she knew in her bones held her future. She doesn’t need to read the placard to know what this is. The painting is large, much larger than she would’ve guessed it would have been, and it’s just there, on the wall, like it was waiting for her to find it.
Holofernes struggles against Abra—in this rendering much more youthful than the others, a maiden instead of a crone—and Judith, the two women pinning him down as Judith pulls the blade across his throat. Blood runs down his shoulder onto the bed, and arcs out of his carotid, splattering Judith’s dress even as she leans away from him. Her avoidance of the blood isn’t avoidance of the act; Judith looks down at him, focused on her task and at the way she is winning, even as he puts up a fight. Abra is the same, staring down, focused, even as Holofernes’ hand grips at the neckline of her dress. The colors are vivid and unforgiving, the bright gold of Judith’s dress contrasting so beautifully with the blue of Abra’s gown and the red of Holofernes’ blood.
It is lightness and darkness. It is justice and it is murder. It is a woman taking control, making the decision to make a bad man pay for the choices he has made. It is Judith, both of the apocrypha and of the Agency.
In the gift shop, Judith stares at the print of her namesake for longer than she has time for. In the end, she buys a postcard of Michelangelo’s David instead.
That evening’s Holofernes meets a significantly less bloody end; a lethal dose of strychnine has its flavor well-hidden by a bitter aperitivo, and Judith is out the door by the time the don is convulsing on the floor beneath his table, gripping at the tablecloth like it’s a bodice.
—-
The next time Judith sees her namesake, she is 42, and this time she isn’t alone. She hates–hates–being partnered for operations but Redback seemed inevitable on this one; she’s as beautiful as she is deadly and even Judith can admit that getting a handle on the Sammarinese uprising that’s brewing at the consulate is a job best divided. They can’t afford to lose San Marino; every tiny, obscure nation who won’t extradite for capital punishment is important in their line of work.
They don’t have time to stop by the gallery, not really, but they find themselves there anyway. Judith guides Ana through the hall with a gentle hand on the small of her back, unsure what she’s playing at but certain of the destination. Neither woman speaks as they approach it, and it feels like Ana knows already what this is, and what it means to Judith.
“There’s another one, you know,” the younger woman finally says. “In Naples. An earlier version.”
Judith nods, her throat tight. She’d learned that sometime after her first visit, that both the Judith of the painting and the Judith who studied her weren’t the earliest versions of themselves. That they had both been reexamined and reworked and redefined. Only the Judith of the painting had her earlier version on display, though. The Judith before Whiptail, who hadn’t even been Judith at all, was hidden away under a floorboard, long forgotten and, legally, long dead.
“We should go,” Judith finally manages to say. “The, ah, the tour guide said we had to be back on the bus by 4:30.” This time, it’s Ana who leads Judith out by the hand.
That night, things play out differently than in the painting. At least once, it is Whiptail who hoists a man by his hair to expose his throat while Redback flicks a blade from ear to ear. The red of the blood is the same, the geometry of the arc as perfect as expected, in the way that only nature can replicate.
After, in the shower, Judith finds a curved gash in her side. The way it bleeds is quiet; a trickle, not an arc. It’s not deep, it won’t require stitches, but even with the steri-strips she’ll apply after she dries off, it will scar. On the canvas of her body, battle wounds are brush strokes.
Sometime later, Judith finds Ana on her knees in the foyer of their shared hotel suite, scrubbing droplets of blood off the tile floor. It doesn’t matter whose they are, the evidence has to go. She threads her fingers into the messy bun atop Ana’s head, her hair damp after her own post-operation ablutions. They stay that way for a long moment.
“I’ll get the enzyme cleaner,” Whiptail finally says. Redback nods as Judith’s fingers slip out of her hair.
——
Judith is 45 when Abra becomes Holofernes. When the line between what is right and what is necessary blurs, and when the blade becomes a gun, and the arc of spurting blood becomes the arc of Redback’s body falling over the ledge and into the sea.