The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  The noisy crowd outside the Questura seemed to be getting bigger. They didn’t look twice at him. Dressed the way he was they’d never believe he was police.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ he asked some beefy-looking woman yelling obscenities into thin air. She had bright red hair and was waving a banner bearing the name of one of the far-left groups the Questura dealt with from time to time.

  She looked him up and down a couple of times then rattled off some stupid story she’d heard on the news. Riggi listened carefully. This was interesting. Worrying.

  ‘So the cops are trying to fit up this poor girl?’ he asked.

  The woman nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Bastards. And they really think she killed her old man? For messing with her?’

  ‘No,’ someone else cut in. ‘They think her brother did it. But maybe she egged him on. And the mother.’

  ‘Happy families,’ he said with a sardonic smile.

  ‘Violence against women. .’ she began.

  ‘. . is a very bad thing,’ he interrupted. He flicked a thumb back at the Questura. ‘Give ’em hell from me.’

  Then Riggi walked out of the Piazza San Michele, bought a copy of the evening paper and kept on going until he reached the tiny square in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. There he struck a match on the strange statue of an elephant with an obelisk sprouting out of its back, lit a cigarette and began to read the front page story. It was wild stuff. With pictures too. A pretty middle-aged American property developer, a cute-looking kid. The kind of thing the Italian media loved.

  There was a lot to consider here. He stared at the crowds in front of the Pantheon, a straggle of foreign tourists mulling around in the heat. Riggi looked like any other impoverished visitor in Rome at that moment. This was, he felt, a good disguise.

  He took a look round then pulled out the list of numbers he kept on a single rolled-up sheet of paper in his pocket, each with just an initial next to it, the letter three places along in the alphabet, a simple code he used as a precaution.

  Robert Gabriel was at the end, filed under ‘U’. The English boy had four different mobile numbers, more than anyone else on Riggi’s list. He was a nervous type, with a high opinion of himself. Nothing could be simple.

  Riggi called and listened as a quiet, uncertain voice asked, ‘Yes?’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t answer the phone like that here. Makes you stand out. When are you going to learn? Try again.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Gino. Who d’ya think? Try again, you moron.’

  ‘Pronto.’

  Riggi took another sweep of the crowd to make sure no one was watching.

  ‘I did not appreciate receiving that text from you earlier. Do not contact me again. I don’t care if it’s from a number I’ve got or not. They can still trace you. Do not call. When I need you, I’ll find you. Is that understood?’

  ‘I. . I. . I. .’

  The boy always stuttered when he was scared.

  Riggi cut in with a sharp, mocking tone, ‘I. . I. . I. . What are you? Some scared little girl or something?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You’re wanted for murder. That’s what.’

  The line went quiet. Then Robert Gabriel said, in a voice that, to Riggi’s surprise, seemed a little calmer, ‘They don’t think that. Not really.’

  ‘They don’t know what to think. This is a mess. All I know is you’re turning into a lot of trouble. Where are you gonna be around seven thirty? We need to talk.’

  Another long and unexpected silence.

  ‘Can’t make seven thirty. Has to be eight.’

  Riggi laughed. It was ridiculous.

  ‘Oh. I’m so sorry. Am I interrupting your social schedule here? Some moron on the run? Do I need to make an appointment to try and keep you out of jail?’

  ‘Can’t explain. Eight’s fine.’

  ‘Where?’

  Riggi listened to him reel off the name of the meeting place and thought: I might have guessed. The kid didn’t have a single original idea in his head.

  ‘Eight then,’ he said. ‘Oh. By the way. You should buy yourself a paper. They’ve got some pictures of your sister. Big ones.’ Not a word. Funny how you could hear anger down the line, though. ‘You know something? She’s really hot. Thin girls. Gotta love them, huh? I can see your old man’s point. Who couldn’t?’

  ‘Eight,’ the young, scared voice repeated, and then the line went dead.

  ‘Children,’ Riggi murmured.

  He didn’t want to go back to the Questura. This all felt bad. So he walked round the corner and bought himself a macchiato in Tazza d’Oro, weighing up his options as he sipped at the powerful little cup of coffee.

  The problem with informers was always the same: ownership. As long as Robert Gabriel was his, Riggi could control him, filter the information he fed into the Questura in return for a steady flow of money. Gabriel was a timid little kid but he was no idiot and maybe a little trickier than Riggi had suspected. He knew this was a sport that was played in multiple directions. Not all the leads that Riggi had leaked into the system had proved accurate. A few, a significant few, were false to begin with, and had led the Questura’s narcotics team into blind alleys when they should, by all rights, have been closing down a case.

  Riggi meant what he’d said to Falcone. It was easy for some stiff, middle-aged inspector in a suit to get pompous over rights and wrongs. In the street, surrounded by people who cared nothing for the law and everything for survival, the world was more grey, less inclined to divide itself into right and wrong, good and evil. This was a lesson Gino Riggi had learned for himself the hard way when he entered the Roman night on his own, in the tattered disguise of a street punk, looking for answers, finding all too often nothing but questions.

  Survival.

  That was what it came down to. Nothing else. The English kid was predictable, easy to master when he was just one more unknown face in a Trastevere bar whispering in the ear of an undercover cop. Minions like him helped keep the balance between two sides that had always been there, order and chaos, competing forces that needed to be kept in check, and on occasion learn to work together too. All that was now gone. Gabriel was out in plain sight, a name on the front pages, unidentifiable at the moment, it was true, but still known to those whose lives revolved around the bars and drug dens of the Campo and the back-street dives across the Tiber and beyond.

  Robert Gabriel was vulnerable and that meant those who knew him were too.

  Riggi walked outside and went to stand by the fountain in front of the Pantheon, with its fierce-toothed dolphins and sweating tourists trying to finish fast-melting ice creams. There he pulled out his list and found the number, one he rarely called, and never lightly.

  ‘Cakici,’ he said, holding the handset close to his mouth. ‘It’s your friend in blue.’

  ‘Which one?’ the Turk asked.

  ‘Yeah. Funny. Like you’re running over with them.’

  A grunt. A curse. Then, ‘Maybe I should be. Real friends.’

  ‘Look, this is nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I don’t like seeing people I know in the papers. It could be embarrassing. For both of us.’

  ‘I was starting to think that way. Listen, we can handle this.’

  A pause on the line.

  ‘“We”? Did I hear you say “we”?’

  ‘It’s in both our interests this goes no further.’

  ‘We have nothing in common.’

  ‘I. .’

  ‘Deal with this child,’ Cakici ordered. ‘Yourself.’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  ‘No. You listen to me. If your colleagues, your honest colleagues, find him first, what do you think will happen? How long will he keep his mouth shut? You expect me to go to prison on the word of an infant? No. Deal with this yourself. Or I shall deal with you.’

  Then silence. Riggi looked at the neare
st dolphin, its teeth bared in the bright sun, a snarl on its features, violence in its eyes. He patted its head. The stone was hot and grimy, rough to the touch, like the skin of a petrified corpse.

  Death was everywhere in Rome if you looked for it. He wondered if Robert Gabriel appreciated that fact.

  NINE

  Towards the end of the afternoon Costa, Falcone and Peroni stood on the roof of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci waiting for the arrival of the building inspector Di Lauro. Teresa sat nearby, going through some documents, head down, absorbed. Some eighty police and forensic officers were now in bunny suits searching the floors below, sifting through dust and building debris for the most part, finding little they hadn’t picked up already.

  Costa gazed at the Cenci palace on its little hill across the street. Now it was one more apartment block in Rome, of the kind the late Joanne Van Doren had hoped to create: doubtless full of elegant, private residences behind its stylish arched entrance. The vast bulk of the building was easier to appreciate from this height. Behind he could just make out the pink-washed wall of their private church, the place where the dismembered remains of Beatrice’s brother Giacomo had been interred, in the grave meant for his father. The place where a select band of mourners would, in little more than a week, assemble to mark the anniversary of the young woman’s execution by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

  He turned round and realized that he could also see, beyond the rooftops running by the river towards the Via Giulia, the summit of the Casina delle Civette, surrounded by palms, little more than half a kilometre away. The tragedy may have possessed a foreign cast but it also owned one truly Roman characteristic. This case was local, interior, close. A family affair, or so it seemed.

  They’d all watched the media coverage. In spite of denials from the Questura, the story continued to grow, to the extent that it was beginning to slip beyond Falcone’s reach, out into the public imagination. Mina Gabriel had been transformed into ‘the English Beatrice’. One of the later editions had even morphed her picture over Guido Reni’s supposed portrait creating a trompe l’oeil image that fused the past with the present. These were the dog days for hacks too, Costa reminded himself. There was little else to fill the pages, except this story of love and death and sexuality.

  A little hard evidence was beginning to emerge, however, and it only seemed to add to the mystery.

  Teresa Lupo sat on a dead air-conditioning duct a few metres away, flicking through some medical research on her laptop, reading out loud a list of obscure terms, none of which he understood.

  Falcone let her finish then asked the question they all wanted answering: ‘He was dying?’

  ‘Pancreatic cancer. Final stages. Matter of months.’

  ‘Well, that rather complicates things,’ Peroni suggested. ‘Why would somebody murder a dying man?’

  ‘The family didn’t know it was that serious,’ Teresa said. ‘At least that’s what the consultant told me. Gabriel was very specific about keeping them in the dark. Didn’t the mother confirm that too?’

  Peroni scowled.

  ‘Sort of. But you don’t believe her, do you? She must have suspected. You can’t hide something like that, not from your wife and children.’

  Falcone sighed, unable to decide which argument made more sense.

  ‘Let’s try and find a question we can answer, shall we?’ he said. ‘What are the consequences of his illness? How would he behave? What effect would it have on the Gabriels?’

  ‘Ask his wife and daughter,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Theoretically he’d be in the usual cycle — denial, anger, acceptance. Where was he on the scale? Who knows? From what I’ve heard it sounds as if he didn’t have to go far to find the anger part.’

  ‘And sex?’ Costa asked. ‘Would he be interested in that?’

  ‘You’ve seen the pictures from the basement. The disease would affect his desire. There are drugs that can help.’

  ‘He couldn’t afford drugs,’ Peroni said.

  ‘Didn’t he have a son with pharmaceutical connections?’

  ‘There’s no mention of drugs in the autopsy,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I am trying to help here,’ Teresa barked at him. ‘No. Clearly he didn’t take drugs the night he died. Perhaps he didn’t need them. Malise Gabriel wasn’t an invalid anyway. Not yet.’

  Costa wasn’t happy with this idea. They’d peered at Silvio Di Capua’s pictures, trying to see whether there was more information to be extracted from them. But what? Two naked bodies, coupling. Joanne Van Doren looking a little blank, as if drunk, or drugged, or guilty. And Malise Gabriel, his face contorted by an expression that could as easily have been pain as ecstasy. There was something anxious, almost staged in the way they splayed their bodies for the Hasselblad camera that had so caught Silvio Di Capua’s attention.

  ‘Well,’ Peroni said, ‘at least we can rule out the daughter, can’t we? You’ve got pictures of her father in bed with Joanne Van Doren. It’s pretty obvious who he had sex with that night, isn’t it?’

  Falcone and Teresa had got together beforehand, while Costa and Peroni had been checking the roof again. Something had passed between them.

  ‘Gianni,’ Teresa said. ‘I’m afraid that doesn’t stack up either. Joanne Van Doren was having her period. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have sex with Gabriel that night. But I would have expected to have seen some sign of menstrual blood somewhere in this building. On Malise Gabriel. On the sheets. Somewhere. Also, why would he have used a condom in that case? She couldn’t get pregnant. I don’t get the impression this was some highly promiscuous sex ring. Would they have been worried about disease? Sorry. Don’t see it. This is all infuriating, I know.’

  The big old cop murmured a groan of deep despair. Costa looked at Peroni’s face and knew what his friend and colleague was thinking. Sweat. Spit. Semen. Blood. All the bodily fluids. The tell-tale physical stains of humanity. These were the keys to unlocking the secret of the palace in the Via Beatrice Cenci, or so it seemed. What offended Peroni, all of them, perhaps, was the idea that the perpetrator of a vicious murder could not be unmasked by decency, honest intellect and diligent inquiry alone, that justice required this prurient and microscopic search into the baseness of life.

  Someone coughed. The building inspector, Di Lauro, had walked in on their conversation, so quietly no one had noticed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If this is private. .?’

  ‘You said you had something,’ Falcone replied, ignoring the question.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the stiff, middle-aged man from the council agreed. He looked unhappy, with the company, and with what he had to say. ‘I don’t know if this is of any use or not. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It’s why I asked to meet you here. Not inside. You need to see. To comprehend. Or not.’

  He strode over to the edge of the building. They followed, Costa feeling the fluttering of vertigo in his stomach. Di Lauro was in a grey office suit but leapt onto the mechanism of the scaffolding structure as if he were still the builder he’d surely once been.

  ‘You must understand,’ the man said, banging a fist against the rusting pulleys that had once held the timber platform which had collapsed beneath the weight of Malise Gabriel, sending him plunging to the hard cobbled street. ‘I can only tell you the facts. Nothing more. How any of this could happen. .’

  ‘What?’ Falcone asked impatiently.

  ‘These ties,’ Di Lauro said, indicating some rusty hook-like mechanisms that seemed designed to hold the ropes that bore the strain of the structure below. ‘They’re incomplete. I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw them. I asked Signora Van Doren — she was an architect. She found this as baffling as I did.’

  ‘Incomplete?’ Peroni said.

  ‘That’s what I said. A small part of the mechanism is simply missing. It’s supposed to fix the rope to stop it running through. I could only imagine that perhaps the workmen had taken them away after the accident f
or some reason. Otherwise I would have told you earlier, but I needed to speak to Signora Van Doren’s team to be sure. It seems such an extraordinary omission I couldn’t believe it was accidental. But we’ve now interviewed all of the men. They all say the apparatus had not been changed since it was first assembled six months ago. So the pulleys were secure when they finished work on the day before the accident happened. In which case. .’

  He shrugged, as if the conclusion were obvious.

  ‘In which case what?’ Falcone demanded.

  Di Lauro looked at him as if the question were stupid.

  ‘In which case it wasn’t an accident. These things were removed. Once you do that this end of the platform will collapse under the slightest weight. Immediately. It had nothing to hold it in place except the residual tension in the rope itself. A cat might have sent those planks tumbling to the ground. A man certainly.’

  ‘These workmen could be lying to cover up their own incompetence,’ Teresa said.

  ‘No. They’re decent people. I know them. Professionals. If there’d been some kind of mistake I would have expected the missing pieces to be around here somewhere. They’re not.’

  He frowned as he stared at the stork-like rusting mechanism that protruded over the edge of the roof.

  ‘This was deliberate?’ Falcone asked. ‘Sabotage? Murder?’

  Di Lauro shrugged.

  ‘I’m a building inspector. I can only tell you what I find. This is something entirely new to me. I cannot and will not say in my report that this was an accident. Nor will I allow Signora Van Doren’s men to take the blame, since I do not believe in my heart that they could possibly be responsible. It’s unthinkable they would do such a thing, as a prank or anything else. Any one of them, more, could have died if they’d stepped onto that scaffolding in this condition.’

  Falcone looked at Teresa and said, ‘Get a description of these parts he’s talking about. Pass it on to your people. Let’s find them.’

  The council officer stood there, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Falcone asked.