by David Hewson
Peroni fell onto a stool in the cafe with a sigh then placed his head in his hands. The burly, middle-aged cop had lost his customary smile. His scarred, friendly face was wan and bloodless. Judging by the mournful look in his bleary eyes he had very little confidence that the large, strong coffee and slice of pizza ebraica in front of him would do much to change the situation. He was wearing a pale brown jacket that had seen better days, an ill-matching pair of blue trousers, and a cheap, whitish shirt, the necktie bunched together in a half-knot at the open neck.
‘Why is it you look so bright and breezy when I feel awful?’ he asked, poking at the pastry on the plate. ‘And why are you wearing an office suit? It’s Sunday. In August. You’re off duty.’
‘I don’t want to look off duty, do I?’
‘God, I hate enthusiasm. It’s so exhausting. Like this heat. I told Teresa. We should have gone on holiday like everyone else, instead of sweating like pigs in Rome.’
Costa went to the counter and got two glasses of tap water then returned and placed them on the table. He’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning while shaving, thinking about Beatrice Cenci. Just turned thirty, he still ran from time to time. He was fit, a little skinnier than he once was. His dark hair didn’t seem much interested in changing colour or disappearing in the near future and his face fell into a smile a lot more easily than it had for a few years. Nor did the heat bother him. Unlike Peroni, he’d grown up in Rome. He expected the dog days to be like this. Were it not for the nagging thoughts that kept bothering him about the incident in the Via Beatrice Cenci he would have described himself as a contented man.
‘It was a great party,’ he said. ‘Memorable.’
‘Memorable for the hangover I had yesterday.’ Peroni lifted the little pastry and stared at it. ‘What on earth is this?’
‘Jewish pizza,’ Costa said, taking a bite of his own. ‘You’ll like it.’
‘That’s not pizza.’
‘It’s sweet.’
‘I don’t do sweets.’ Peroni breathed deeply, took a bite and nodded, as if half-impressed. A few raisins, some candied fruit and a stream of crumbs began to trickle from his mouth to the floor.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off at home?’ Costa asked.
‘No, no, no.’ Peroni shook his big head very carefully, as if it might fall off. ‘The air conditioning’s packed in. Teresa’s there and she’s worse than me in the heat. That wouldn’t be a good idea, honest. What are we doing here again?’
Costa explained in more detail about the incident in the ghetto, the girl called Mina, the dead father, the son running away after firing off a single aimless shot. He didn’t mention anything else, not even when Peroni kept staring at him as if he was wondering, ‘Is that it?’
‘Nic,’ he said finally. ‘The building inspectors went straight in there yesterday morning. Those people are good. They’d let us know if there was something wrong.’
‘There was something wrong. The son pulling out a gun, shooting it in the air then running off into the night. With his father dead on the ground. His sister there too.’
‘Dope.’
As if that explained everything.
‘It needs looking at.’
‘It is being looked at. By the drugs people. They knew the kid anyway. And the building inspectors can deal with the structural stuff.’
‘The girl . . .’
Costa didn’t elaborate. Peroni was a very smart man. It was hard to keep anything hidden when he was poking around.
‘What about the girl?’
‘Where is she now?’
Peroni pulled out a notepad and looked at it.
‘With her mother round at the academic place where her father worked. Some institution called the Confraternita delle Civette. Near the Campo. Heard of it? I haven’t.’
The Brotherhood of the Owls. The Little Owls, to be precise. Costa had been an avid birdwatcher when he was young, and knew where to find these charming little birds when they nested in the ruins and bosky corners of the Appian Way.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘New to me.’
‘It seems they’re being very generous in the circumstances. Providing the family with accommodation. Uniform interviewed the mother and the girl, as you’d expect after an accident. They’re pretty upset, naturally. Didn’t have a lot to add. The girl was at home on her own for most of the evening. Father came back around ten. They spoke briefly. He seemed cheerful. She got dressed for bed then went into some music room they had and spent most of the night practising. Got a concert coming or something. She thought her father was going to read a book then go to bed. Some time after midnight she heard a shout and a noise, saw what had happened, went outside. The rest you know. The father didn’t like to smoke in the apartment. He’d got into the habit of stepping out onto the balcony.’
‘Even when it’s covered in scaffolding?’
Peroni looked a little annoyed, which was unusual for him.
‘Don’t you have better things to do on your holidays? The whole block was being renovated. That was why they got the apartment on the cheap. They probably never even saw it without scaffolding. Why would they worry?’
Falcone had looked into this after all.
‘Did she see the brother that night?’
Peroni scanned his notes.
‘He was out drinking with his friends in the Campo. Where he was most nights. The sister says she glimpsed him in the downstairs hall when she was rushing out after her father fell. Must have been on the way back and got caught up in the whole thing.’
‘The father’s dead on the ground. The mother’s God knows where. And the son doesn’t even step out of the shadows to help his own sister?’
‘The mother was playing in the orchestra at an amateur concert. From what we know she came as soon as she could. The son was maybe drunk. Doped up. Who knows? People get funny around death. I’ve seen cops scared of going near a corpse. So have you.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Narcotics say he was a runner for one of the Turkish rings dealing stuff to the foreign kids. They had him on their radar for a little chat soon. He’d dumped a very valuable stash of coke and heroin in the doorway. The narcotics people found even more in his room.’ Peroni thought about this for a moment. ‘The question you might want to ask is: why did he stay around at all? And did his sister know what he was up to? She didn’t tell you he was there for quite a while, did she?’
That didn’t add up.
‘She was more concerned about her father. Here’s another question. Would you walk out onto scaffolding five floors up for a cigarette?’
‘You never smoked, did you? Of course I would, particularly if I had a wife who hated the smell of tobacco in the house. The scaffolding ran the length of the balcony. It was the sort they suspend from the roof on arms or something. You can see that from what’s still up there. Seems pretty stable to me. Looks like it’s been there forever. Too long maybe. Perhaps it got rusty. The construction people will know.’
Costa sighed and said, ‘You’ve been there already?’
‘Walked past on my way here,’ Peroni admitted with a grin, then called for another coffee, coughed a couple of times, and straightened up as if he felt a little better. ‘We do get the job done without you, believe it or not. If there is a job. Which there isn’t. So what’s really on your mind?’
‘Beatrice Cenci,’ Costa muttered, not expecting a response.
The man opposite stiffened.
‘What the hell has that poor girl got to do with it?’
Costa blinked.
‘You know who I’m talking about?’
‘I’m not a complete idiot. There was a play about her a few years back at the Teatro Sistina. Teresa took me.’ He frowned and the foreign expression made his big, friendly face age several years. ‘I bawled my eyes out. Then she told me it was all true and I bawled them out again. What a horrible story. Want another piece of the funny pizza?’
>
‘Not really.’
‘I’ll take one for later.’
He turned, smiled at the woman in the headscarf at the counter, and got himself some more.
‘The man died in the Via Beatrice Cenci,’ Costa went on, and knew how ridiculous that sounded.
Peroni looked at him and raised a single eyebrow.
‘The daughter,’ Costa continued. ‘Mina. She had blood on her pyjamas.’
‘Her father had just fallen five floors. She was bent over him when you arrived. His blood, don’t you think?’
‘Do we know that?’
‘No,’ Peroni admitted. ‘Are you really suggesting there’s more to this just because it happened in the street where the Cenci girl lived, what, five, six centuries ago?’
‘Four and a bit actually. No, of course I’m not.’ There had to be more to it than that. ‘Sometimes you see things, Gianni, and you know they’re wrong. You don’t understand why. Or what it is you’re half-seeing either. But you know.’
‘Oh yeah, you know.’ Peroni peered at him across the table. ‘And a few days or weeks or months later you get to understand that, half the time or more, you were just an idiot. We’ve all been there. It can turn out nasty. Particularly when it involves kids.’
Costa bridled at that remark.
‘And the other half?’
‘You’re on holiday. Leave it to someone else.’
‘I’m not in the habit of asking favours. Let’s just go there and run through the basics.’
‘Uniform and narcotics have done that already.’
‘Uniform think this is nothing more than a building collapse. Narcotics see what they want to see.’
‘And we’d be different?’
‘Maybe,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I don’t know.’
Peroni leaned forward and peered into his eyes.
‘Maybe you’re bored. Or turning suspicious in your old age. You’re on holiday. It’s sunny out there. Why aren’t you taking Agata somewhere? Not trying to turn some terrible accident into a crime scene?’
It was the second time he’d heard this suggestion. Costa knew a conspiracy when he saw one. They could have told him in advance that Agata was going to be there that Friday night. It might have saved some embarrassment.
‘Don’t presume to organize my life, please. And pass that message on.’
Peroni folded his arms and said not a word.
‘One quick look inside the apartment,’ Costa suggested. ‘Indulge me. Then we’re done.’
‘You’re . . . off . . . duty,’ Peroni said emphatically.
‘And you’re barely fit for work. We make the perfect pair.’
The big man looked him up and down.
‘Fine talk coming from you. That was a nice suit once. Not a Sunday suit but a nice one. Have you noticed you’ve got oil stains and dirt on your trousers?’
Costa looked down, saw the problem and tried to brush off some of the marks. It just made everything worse.
‘This is that grubby old scooter you told me about, isn’t it?’ Peroni asked.
‘It’s a Vespa Primavera ET3. Not a grubby old scooter. If it was good enough for my father it’s good enough for me.’
‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa,’ Peroni sang suddenly, in a rather good baritone. The woman at the counter clapped her hands and joined in, and together the two of them chanted, ‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa . . . subito!’
Costa sat there feeling like a fool.
‘It was a TV advert for those things,’ Peroni explained. He glanced at the woman at the counter. ‘Back when we were young.’
She laughed, called him a mildly rude name and sang again, ‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.’
‘Ah.’ Costa got it. ‘The sound of the engine.’
‘That’s an engine? Please. You’re going through a second childhood and that’s the truth. You won’t call Agata, then?’
‘In my own time. She was there, with the girl, and the father. She saw more of Rome than she wanted. Our Rome. Not hers.’
‘That could be a good reason for you to talk to her.’
‘My business . . .’
Peroni sighed. Then he folded the extra piece of sweet pizza into a napkin, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, got up and went to the door. It was for Teresa. Costa just knew.
‘Thirty minutes. That’s all you get,’ he said. ‘Then I’m back to the Questura for a nap. The street’s still closed, by the way. You’ll need your ID. And don’t you dare bring that stupid scooter.’
FOUR
The ancient cage lift was out of order so the two men had to walk up a long and grubby winding staircase, past bare timber planks and sacks of cement, the detritus of building work. On the fourth floor Costa paused to let Peroni catch his breath, then called Falcone. There had to be more background on the family who’d been living here above what was essentially a construction site, empty save for the topmost storey.
Falcone told him what he knew. The dead man was an English university professor named Malise Gabriel, sixty-one years old, a peripatetic lecturer who had moved to Rome nine months earlier from Madison, Wisconsin. The name rang a distant bell, though not one Costa could immediately place. Gabriel was attached to the academic organization called the Brotherhood of the Owls, which was based in the Palazzetto Santacroce, a few minutes away on foot, near the Campo. His wife also worked there as a part-time personal assistant to the director. The daughter was older than Costa had first thought. She had turned seventeen three weeks earlier, something of a prodigy according to the uniformed officers, fluent in several languages, taught at home by both parents, never at school, though she attended lectures in art, music, literature and history at a variety of city colleges. She was also a volunteer with local charities, for animals and the homeless, and, in spite of her youth, understudy organist at the great church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Campidoglio, the Capitoline hill overlooking the Forum.
Her brother Robert, though just three years older, seemed to belong to an entirely different family. He had been cautioned, though never charged, over two fights in the bars near the Campo, and had no apparent job. Nothing had been seen of him since he fired that single shot into the night and fled the scene of his father’s death. According to his mother, who seemed concerned, though scarcely beside herself, his absence was not unusual. For the past few months he had lived at home sporadically, spending the rest of the time with ‘friends’ she didn’t know.
‘What does the morgue have?’ Costa asked.
He could hear Falcone tapping away at his keyboard.
‘It says here that the injuries are consistent with a fall from a substantial height. Gabriel had been drinking. There are no apparent suspicious circumstances, at least from a cursory examination. As I keep emphasizing, this is Sunday and August too . . .’
‘Teresa needs to see him.’
‘Teresa isn’t here. Tomorrow she may take a look.’
He knew Falcone well. The man was not going to budge.
‘I’ll let you know what we find,’ Costa said and started to climb to the top floor of the building.
He leaned over the banister and looked down five storeys to the ground-level entrance. The centro storico had its share of old buildings like this, unappealing grey stone leviathans built in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, cold and empty homes to rich and bickering clans like the Cenci.
The customary closeness of family meant little in the world that enclosed Beatrice Cenci. The murderous plot that had begun with one nobleman’s vile treatment of his daughter had taken root in the Palazzo Cenci just around the corner, a vast, hulking pile by the side of the little alley into which Mina and Agata had retreated when the scaffolding began to collapse. These grim mansions were sometimes little more than prisons, invisible to the world beyond their shuttered windows. Francesco Cenci’s mulish will had run unchecked through the many floors and rooms of the building he came to regard as his own private kingdom, a solitary and perverted paradi
se where he was God, able to do whatever he wanted. Behind these thick stone walls, invisible to humanity, strange passions flourished.
Peroni finally reached the top, coughed three times, pulled himself upright and managed a cheery smile.
‘Thirty minutes,’ he repeated. ‘Not a second more.’ The door to the Gabriel home was open. Costa pressed the bell and walked in.
FIVE
The apartment extended across the entire top floor of the palace. It consisted of a spacious living area, an attached open kitchen, and five or six rooms off, bedrooms, bathrooms, it was impossible to tell at a glance. The furniture was old and worn, the walls badly in need of paint. There were no carpets, only scratched floorboards that hadn’t seen polish in years and a few threadbare mats. The dining table was the kind of cheap plastic stuff sold by the discount warehouses. There was a battered, baggy sofa, with a woman on it, sitting back, eyes closed, listening to music from the speakers of a portable audio player in her lap. Jazz. Costa recognized the familiar tune: Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat played by a piano trio.
To add to the confusion, gangs of men Costa assumed were from the city construction department were wandering to and fro carrying instruments and cameras, treading the dirt of the building work from the lower floors into the bare floorboards and occasional scattered rug. Two of them came out of the furthest room in the corner, the one where he assumed Malise Gabriel had stepped out onto the balcony. They were talking in low tones, looking bemused.
The music came to an end. The woman pressed a button to switch off the player, looked at them and asked, ‘Can I help?’
She was about forty, very thin with short blonde hair and a pained, mannish face. Her eyes were raw and pink. Costa guessed she’d been crying very recently. He thought she looked a little anxious. Nervous. Scared even.
‘We’re police,’ Costa told her.
‘I’ve already spoken to the police.’
She had a curious accent. The Italian was good but not native.
