The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  In the corner was what could only be the Casina. It was a tall, circular tower that stood above the grounds of the palazzetto like a guard post. The ground floor was completely windowless. The second possessed nothing but a few narrow slots through which, Peroni assumed, archers were expected to fire their arrows. The remaining two floors had elegant arched openings, medieval in appearance but now with modern glass windows. The roof was a crenellated battlement with embrasures in the raised portions, as if to provide another vantage point for archers. The rosy weathered building seemed more like the abandoned tower of some lost fairy-tale castle than a Renaissance palace. Peroni had never seen anything quite like it in the heart of Rome and said so. Falcone, clearly astonished, agreed, then narrowed his sharp eyes, stared at it again and said, ‘The Porta Asinaria. The place in the walls near San Giovanni.’

  Peroni nodded. He was right. This was a precise copy of the little-noticed gate marooned behind railings next to the busy gap in the walls near San Giovanni, through which streams of modern Roman traffic passed every day.

  They were engulfed in the scent of white jasmine tumbling down in festoons around the door. It almost obliterated the stink of the traffic bustling along the Lungotevere beyond the furthest wall.

  ‘The rich are with us always,’ Peroni murmured and pressed the bell.

  THREE

  Cecilia Gabriel answered the door and led them up three levels of a circular stone staircase, into a large room strewn with belongings: clothes, paintings, photos, books, sheet music on stands. She was a striking woman, tall and statuesque, with an angular face, high cheekbones and attentive blue eyes. Beautiful, Peroni thought, but in a hard, unsmiling way. Her chestnut hair was cut short in the fashion Audrey Hepburn preferred for the movie that still brought tourists to Rome more than half a century after it first appeared. She didn’t seem nervous. Just. . uncomfortable, impatient. Impecunious too, in a faded blue denim shirt and jeans that looked a little too young for her. The woman was, he knew from the records, a little short of forty. Something — strain, illness perhaps — had added a few years to that. She didn’t look happy, which was understandable in the circumstances, though he felt the crows’ feet at the corners of her elegant eyes, the creases around her mouth, were more than signs of age.

  The place was a good step up from the bare apartment in the ghetto. Decent, old-fashioned furniture. Long, gilt mirrors on the walls. Deep, generous carpet and a sizeable polished dining table.

  Malise Gabriel’s widow motioned them to two sturdy antique chairs and sat down gracefully on a small sofa opposite. Her movements were feline, controlled, poised. He could imagine her as a musician, dressed in tasteful black, bent over a cello somewhere in the orchestra, a woman who would draw the admiring attention of those in the audience.

  ‘Where’s your daughter?’ Falcone asked.

  ‘Out somewhere,’ she replied, looking puzzled by the question.

  ‘When will she be back?’

  She didn’t know that either, and it almost looked as if she didn’t care.

  ‘Your son? Robert?’ Peroni chipped in.

  ‘Yes. That’s his name.’

  He could feel Falcone stiffen next to him.

  ‘Where is he?’ the inspector asked. ‘Do you have any idea? Have you heard from him?’

  ‘Robert came round to our old apartment for something to eat the afternoon of the accident. I haven’t heard from him since. I wish he’d get in touch but it’s his decision. There are practical things we need to discuss, apart from anything else. I’m not his keeper. He’s twenty years old.’

  ‘Are there places you know he stayed when he wasn’t with you? Somewhere we could look?’ Falcone asked.

  ‘He never talked about his friends. He liked the bars in the Campo. I imagine you know that.’

  ‘I believe we do,’ he agreed, shooting Peroni a sideways glance.

  She sighed then said, ‘Inspector. My husband died in an accident two days ago. I’m struggling to deal with all manner of things I never knew existed. Life insurance. Funeral arrangements — not that I know when you will allow me to reclaim his body.’ She hesitated and stared at him. ‘Grief. Mine. My daughter’s. Helping you put my son in jail over some stupid drugs habit isn’t high on my priorities.’

  ‘There are a number of questions surrounding your husband’s death,’ Peroni told her.

  Her head crooked to one side and she stared out of the window. There was a palm tree there, its green crown resplendent against the perfect blue August sky, the under-surface a vivid orange.

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘Unanswered ones,’ Falcone said then patiently, persistently, began to extract from Cecilia Gabriel her version of events on the night her husband died. She said she had played at a semi-professional concert in front of several hundred people at the Auditorium Parco Della Musica. The party afterwards had gone on into the early hours. She knew nothing of the accident until she received a phone call from her daughter. Then she went immediately to the street and saw Malise Gabriel being taken away by the paramedics.

  ‘I went to the hospital with Mina. Not that there was much point. Then. .’ Peroni saw the briefest flicker of emotion on her narrow face. ‘We couldn’t go home. To that place. Not after what happened. I called Bernard and he agreed we could use our old accommodation here. It was very generous of him.’

  ‘Why did you leave in the first place?’ Peroni asked.

  She didn’t appear to appreciate the question.

  ‘This apartment didn’t come with Malise’s post. It was kindness on Bernard’s part that allowed us to stay here when we arrived. There was never the slightest suggestion this would be anything but temporary.’

  ‘I gather they didn’t get on,’ Falcone said.

  Her face hardened.

  ‘People talking already? It’s no great secret that my husband and Bernard had differences. Philosophical ones, to do with the work Malise was undertaking for the Confraternita. Nothing more.’

  Falcone told her he wanted a full list of all the items she’d taken from the Via Beatrice Cenci so that they could be handed over to the forensic team.

  She scowled at them.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I may wish to see the things you brought here,’ Falcone said.

  ‘Why? Is this really necessary? My husband’s dead and you want to rifle through our belongings?’

  ‘It may be necessary,’ Falcone insisted. He stopped, watching her. ‘We’re looking for the items you left in the apartment as well.’ He took an envelope out of his pocket. ‘Did anyone have a reason to bear a grudge against your husband?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She flashed an angry look at her watch. ‘There’s paperwork. I don’t have time to deal with these stupid questions.’

  Her words tailed off into silence. Falcone placed his card on the table.

  ‘I need to talk to your daughter. Please ensure she calls me when she returns. If your son should get in touch. .’

  Cecilia Gabriel folded her arms and stared at them.

  ‘Signora,’ Peroni said, remembering how they’d agreed to tackle this subject. ‘Your husband was reading his own book the night he died.’

  ‘Is there a law against that?’

  ‘Not at all. But he used a bookmark. It had a strange message written on it.’

  Falcone took out the plastic evidence envelope and showed it to her, only the reverse side, with the long, cursive scrawl.

  ‘Is that his handwriting?’ the inspector asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘And the words?’

  ‘“E pur si muove”,’ she recited. ‘Galileo whispered that after he recanted in front of the Inquisition. Look it up in an encyclopaedia.’

  ‘We know,’ Peroni said calmly. ‘But the context. .’

  She laughed, as if genuinely amused by their ignorance.

  ‘And you call yourselves
Romans? The context? This is the Casina delle Civette. The home of the Confraternity of the Owls. The society my husband worked for was formed by friends of Galileo when he fell under suspicion. It was their way of supporting him. Galileo was one of the inner circle. He used to come here. To this very building. Secretly. He didn’t dare let the Vatican know. The men who built this tower. .’ She looked around them. ‘They paid a price too. Not with their lives. They were too aristocratic for that. But Bernard’s ancestor, Paolo Santacroce, was persecuted for two decades. This is his legacy. Their legacy. A testament to the power of truth over superstition. That was Malise’s life’s work and so they persecuted him too.’

  ‘Who persecuted him?’ Peroni asked, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she muttered.

  Falcone said, ‘I need to call the Questura. After that I would like to talk to Mr Santacroce.’

  She pointed back to the circular staircase through which they’d entered.

  ‘One floor up. I’ll ask if he will see you. I work as Bernard’s personal assistant.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He looked at the back of the picture. ‘Signora. This is a delicate question but I regret it must be asked. We know from the newspapers, from the controversy that your affair engendered twenty years ago, that your husband was — how do I put this easily? — not averse to relationships with girls much younger than him.’

  She didn’t blink, didn’t move.

  ‘I was nineteen when I fell pregnant,’ Cecilia Gabriel said. ‘That didn’t make Malise a paedophile then. Nor does it even in these supposedly enlightened days.’

  ‘What I have to ask is painfully simple,’ Falcone went on. ‘Did this. . taste stay with him through life?’ He flipped the picture over. ‘This was the bookmark he was using on the night he died. It was more than a message. It was a photograph. See. .’

  Falcone thrust the black and white picture in front of her. Peroni found he couldn’t read the expression on her narrow, agonized face as she stared at the nude adolescent torso twisting on the crumpled sheets, face out of view, a single lock of fair hair falling down onto her slim shoulders, neck twisted as if in pain, face and head cut off by the frame. And on the fabric, the ragged damp mark of a stain.

  ‘One must wonder,’ the inspector went on. ‘Because of the apparent similarity, which seems remarkable. Is this a photograph of your daughter? Is it possible. .’

  The woman lunged forward and struck Falcone hard across the right cheek with her open hand. The noise of the blow echoed around the room and the force brought colour to Falcone’s face, from the silver goatee to his cheek-bones. Gingerly he placed his fingers on the area where she’d hit him. He looked hurt.

  Peroni walked forward, stood between them, looked her in the eye and said, ‘I could arrest you for assaulting a police officer.’

  ‘Do it. I can’t wait to be in court and tell people the kind of accusation you scum throw at a grieving widow.’

  She was utterly calm and in control of herself.

  ‘We’re attempting to find out how and why your husband died,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Malise stepped out onto the balcony for a cigarette and Joanne Van Doren’s lousy scaffolding collapsed. End of story. Why do you have to make everything so complicated?’

  Peroni shrugged his big shoulders.

  ‘Because sometimes it is. The photograph, Mrs Gabriel. It’s unusual. We have a job to do. It’s rarely a pleasant one.’

  She snatched the picture from Falcone’s fingers, held it to her face and glared at them, demanding they see.

  ‘It’s me, you idiot. From twenty years ago. Malise kept it. He reprinted it from time to time. It was ours. A memory of happier days. Sub rosa, if you’re bright enough to understand Latin. All families have their private matters, Inspector. They only look sinister to prying, evil eyes.’

  ‘Privacy doesn’t concern me,’ Falcone said, still stroking the place where she’d slapped him. ‘Death does.’

  ‘It was an accident!’

  He took his hand away from his cheek and retrieved the bookmark from her grip.

  ‘I would like to see Bernard Santacroce now, if you please.’

  FOUR

  The scooter climbed the steep, winding road from Trastevere and the noise it made meant Peroni’s song from the previous day — Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa — rarely left Nic Costa’s head all the way. They got off in the forecourt beneath the white marble facade of San Pietro in Montorio. He recalled what Mina had told him about the procession from the Ponte Sant’Angelo to this small and, by Roman standards, humble, church. It must have been a long and arduous journey, one taken by thousands following the bier that contained Beatrice’s broken corpse.

  Montorio was part way up the Gianicolo hill, by a bend on the busy road to the summit where Garibaldi had once fought. It was a quiet place, green, with expensive houses and views of Rome that encompassed an entirely new perspective. The dome of St Peter’s was invisible. All one saw was a view back over the river to the centre which, from this height, fell into an unfamiliar panorama of distant steeples and towers.

  ‘The Tempietto,’ she declared, snatching off her helmet, shaking her long blonde hair then popping another stick of gum into her mouth.

  He followed her to the iron gate of the cloister next to the church. It was locked. The opening hours had passed. Inside he could see Bramante’s tiny temple, circular with Doric columns, perfectly proportioned in a way which Palladio would consciously copy.

  ‘It’s a martyrium,’ Mina told him, clinging to the bars, poking her pale, narrow face through as she tried to see more, winding her leg round the iron uprights, as a child would with a playground ride. ‘That’s what you call a monument that marks the site of a martyr’s death. Peter, supposedly.’ Her hand rose, and with it a didactic finger, as if she were practising to be the tour guide for Joanne Van Doren’s non-existent condominium customers. ‘They used the hill for crucifixions. That much is true but Daddy said there’s not a shred of evidence Peter was executed here. Or even that he came to Rome.’

  Costa recalled this argument well. It was a recurrent one when sceptics and believers locked horns.

  ‘I think some people would challenge that idea.’

  She watched him.

  ‘Would you?’

  Costa thought about it for a moment and said, ‘I’m not qualified. We all have the right to believe what we want, for or against. I don’t think private opinions are worth fighting over.’

  ‘You sound like Bernard, Daddy’s boss. Typical liberal woolly thinking. The truth is the truth. If you could prove Peter never came to Rome, you should. However much you hurt people’s feelings. They shouldn’t base their lives on lies.’

  ‘Truth can be relative. And unpleasant. Did Bernard and your father quarrel?’

  Mina smiled at him and he wondered if she felt he was prying.

  ‘Do you want the truth? Or a nice, polite answer?’

  He smiled and said, ‘The truth, please.’

  ‘They hated one another. Daddy was supposed to edit some papers about science and religion. Put his name to something he didn’t believe for one moment. Just like Galileo.’ She glanced in the direction of the Tempietto. ‘One more martyr in Rome. We may have been broke but you couldn’t buy his principles. What else did he have left?’

  ‘He had his family,’ Costa said.

  ‘Suppose so,’ she said, then picked up her helmet and tripped off to the church without looking back.

  It was a compact, quiet place. Two people, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman, were on their knees in the shaft of light that illuminated the nave, praying. Mina came close to Costa and whispered, pointing with her right hand, ‘They never marked Beatrice’s grave. Some people say it was beneath the altar. Others in the chapel there.’ He caught the brief sign of an impatient expression on her young face. ‘I can’t believe they hated Beatrice so much they’d deny her that. Then the French came.’

 
By the time Napoleon invaded, the Cenci story was part of Roman folklore. It was this that attracted the marauding soldiers to Montorio, and an orgy of destruction that, rumour had it, saw her remains disinterred then scattered across the hill where imperial Rome once crucified those it regarded as criminals.

  Mina sat down on a bench and stared at the altar. Costa joined her. They stayed there for a few minutes in silence. Then, without another word, she got up and marched outside, crossed the forecourt and climbed onto the perimeter wall overlooking the hill, perching there like any other teenager, hands round her knees, helmet strap gathered round her wrist, gazing at the view: the historical heart of the city stretching in front of them like a magical panorama with the ragged crown of the Sabine Hills beyond.

  He thought it best to leave her alone for a few minutes. Costa went and peered at Bramante’s Tempietto through the cloister’s bars. It resembled a monument that had escaped from Ancient Rome only to find itself locked in a beautiful prison for some reason. Finally he walked over to the wall and saw, as he reached her, that she was crying.

  The tears ran in two vertical streaks down each cheek, bright and viscous. After a little while she sniffed then wiped them away with a scrunched-up tissue dragged out of her jeans pocket.

  ‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,’ he said. ‘I can run you home.’

  ‘I’m not crying for Beatrice,’ she spat at him with a sudden, childish petulance. ‘She’s been dead for four centuries.’

  ‘Of course not. If you want me to go. .’

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I?’

  ‘No. If you want to talk about anything. .’

  She stared at him with cold, glassy eyes.

  ‘That’s why you came, isn’t it? To interrogate me?’

  He hitched himself up onto the wall, sat a little way along from her and said, with a shrug and a wry smile, ‘Actually I came because you asked me. I nearly said no.’