by David Hewson
‘I’m afraid my French isn’t so good,’ he said.
Mina screwed up her nose. For a moment she was childlike again.
‘I suppose you could translate it as, “My heart is a silent lute, touch it and it sounds.” Poe uses it as an epigraph, misquoted unfortunately. I think I prefer The Tell-Tale Heart, to be honest. Usher’s a bit . . . I don’t know. A bit too creepy.’
Her words trailed off into silence.
‘You’ve done something?’ he said, indicating her hair.
‘You like it?’ She bobbed the side with her long fingers. ‘Photographers. I had to do this magazine shoot. What a pain! They said I couldn’t look like a schoolgirl. Not that I ever was one. Apparently it was some famous cutter. I don’t know. And these clothes. I don’t care much for them really. Appearances.’
‘Your mother?’
‘She’s seeing the lawyer again. Everyone’s so kind in Rome. I’m glad this happened here. Anywhere else . . .’
Something he remembered brought a shadow of a smile to Costa’s face.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘A friend of mine from Turin says all Romans are children, really. We spend our days luxuriating in one long daydream, trying to imagine we’re in a world that’s always beautiful, one without pain and grief, cruel reality. That if we were left to our own devices everything, ourselves, Italy even, would fall apart.’
‘It’s a compliment, isn’t it? We’d all stay children if we could.’
He nodded and said, ‘Perhaps. How is she?’
Mina Gabriel frowned.
‘Mummy will survive. We’re good at that. Plenty of practice. The lawyers say she won’t go to jail. She got bail easily enough. I don’t know who put up the money. Why am I telling you all this? You’re a policeman. It can’t be news.’
He was aware of the details. They were insignificant.
‘A million people would have put up the money to keep her out of prison,’ Costa said. ‘If it was left to most Romans she wouldn’t be in court at all. She’d be getting a medal. A heroine. The mother who stood up for her child against the man who violated her. It’s as if the Cenci case happened all over again. Only this time we got it right.’
She put down the book and sat upright on the sofa.
‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t. Will you stay here? In Rome?’
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she replied immediately, shaking her head. ‘When Mummy’s free to travel again and they’ve sorted out wills and ownership and things, she thinks we might sell this place and move to New York. I’m supposed to need a college education.’ She grimaced. ‘I keep getting all these offers. Talking. Writing.
Media. Why? Because I’ve something to say? I don’t think so. They just want to stare at me and say: so that’s what she looks like. That’s the one it happened to. Perhaps they want to . . .’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘They want to picture it in their own heads. I’m theirs now, aren’t I? I belong to them. They can imagine whatever they like.’
‘It’s not easy being in the public eye,’ he said.
‘I’d be an idiot to turn it down, though, wouldn’t I? I’ve never really been outside my own family before. I ought to see what’s there. And I get paid.’
He looked around the beautiful apartment.
‘Everyone needs money,’ he agreed. ‘Independence. Self-respect. It’s when we deprive people of these things . . .’ He thought of the many troubled individuals he’d dealt with over the years. How difficult it was to reconcile the evil they inflicted with their own ordinariness. There were no monsters. Every murderer he’d ever met, however vicious, however cruel, was someone who would never turn a head on the subway. ‘The miracle is how often we treat others badly, how people suffer with poverty and hatred and cruelty and still turn out sane and decent in the end. Not everyone, though.’
‘What makes the difference?’ she asked, suddenly interested.
‘One unkindness too many. Some brutal act that goes beyond the pale. I don’t know. I don’t think those it affects understand either. They feel the pain and the anger and crave some way to release it, to let all that disappear by passing on the hate to someone else. And then they’re a little happier for a while. Not cured. Not quite. But free for a time. Able to pretend that it was all someone else’s fault, another man’s evil.’ He thought about it a little more. ‘In a way it is, I suppose. Mine. Yours. Everyone’s. I think we created the Devil for a reason, a selfish one. He makes it easier for us to accept the imperfect, fallen state we’re in. He allows us to shrug off the blame.’
The sun edged into the line of the window. A shaft of piercing golden light fell on her face. Her hand went to her eyes. She shuffled along the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable.
‘Why did you come?’
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the deep red document.
‘I brought back the passport I found in Robert’s jacket.’
‘Thank you.’
Costa held it up, open at the photograph: a young man with dark hair and a sullen, dusky face.
‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘Who is it really?’
THREE
Mina Gabriel leaned forward and said, ‘Excuse me . . . ?’
‘The young man in the photo. The one who died. My guess . . .’
He pulled out the photo he’d got from Ciampino two days before. The immigration officer he’d met when he went to see the Turk, Cakici, had let him run through the departure camera records. He only had the old photo of the brother to use, and a tentative link.
‘. . . is that he’s an Albanian kid called Arben Dosti. Someone of Robert’s age flew from Ciampino to Tirana using a passport with that name. It’s on a low-level drugs-watch list we have. Not sufficient priority to stop him. He was leaving anyway.’
He showed her the picture taken at the immigration control booth and said, ‘That’s Robert, your brother. Using the passport of the young man we have in the morgue, identified as him.’
Mina Gabriel’s face contorted the way he’d seen in so many teenagers: marred by an angry disdain at the apparent stupidity of the question.
‘What are you talking about? Robert’s dead.’
He relaxed in the comfortable chair and threw the passport across the table, towards her. She didn’t pick it up.
‘No. That passport’s been tampered with. It’s genuine enough. It was Robert’s. I asked a friend in forensic to take a look at it. Someone clever. Discreet. So it’s just between him and me. He said someone had changed the photograph. They did a good job. I imagine that, through Santacroce, Robert had some contacts in the drug trade who could do that kind of thing. Arben was one more dope dealer in the ring. For Santacroce maybe. For Cakici. Does it matter?’
Costa studied her icy, frozen face for some sign of defeat.
‘He’s still out of the country, Mina, isn’t he? I don’t think you’d dare allow him to stay here. Not right now.’
‘Nic! You know it’s Robert. You met him in that bar in the Campo.’
‘I briefly saw him,’ Costa said, stabbing the passport on the table. ‘You made sure of that. One more piece of bait along the trail. Arben got paid to pretend to be Robert. To carry one of his phones. The one you’d set up with the incriminating email. He thought it was all part of some scam. And it was. You’d worked it out in advance, just as you’d worked out everything else.’ He stopped, remembering that night. ‘The kid I saw in the bar never spoke English. I just got a message on my phone. That seemed odd at the time. When I was in the building, with Joanne Van Doren’s body, that really was Robert, which was why he wouldn’t let me see him. He couldn’t. That would have broken the spell.’
Her eyes turned wide and limpid, the way he had come to recognize.
‘You set up this Albanian kid,’ he went on. ‘Just as you set up Bernard Santacroce. It was very clever, very calculating. Why would we check his identity? You’d
confirmed it. I’d seen him. We knew it was Robert.’
‘My brother’s dead!’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘He’s not, Mina. You wanted us to think we were trying to unravel some scheme to kill your father. That way we’d never notice that the real plot had only just begun. That was to give your mother the opportunity and the motive to murder Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel, the uncle who’d really been abusing you, all of you, one way or another. A plot you planned very carefully, minutely, step by step. From the time your father died in the street to the moment your mother stabbed Santacroce in his study here. You brought the suspicion on yourself, you left us the evidence that would first incriminate and then clear you. And when we reached the conclusion you’d concocted for us, your mother murdered him, as you’d planned all along, knowing that public sympathy would keep her out of jail.’
‘Why are you saying these awful things?’ she asked in a voice that was beginning to break. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please. Haven’t I been through enough?’
Her arm came up to her face, wiping away the tears. She was the teenager once more, the damaged innocent pleading for understanding, for mercy.
‘You tried not to lie, I guess,’ he said.
‘I told you the truth!’
He pushed the passport closer to her.
‘Look at the picture,’ he ordered. ‘Look at it and tell me that’s your brother. Lie to me now, Mina. I want to see what that looks like.’
She was thinking, he guessed. Scheming. Wondering what avenues were left to her now. There were none. None he could think of anyway.
Mina snatched the passport, got up and stumbled to the bright windows, staring at the palm trees moving in the placid breeze. The years had fallen from her. This was the girl he first saw, beneath the street lamps of the Via Beatrice Cenci and later, lovingly feeding the cats in the ruins where Julius Caesar had lost his life. Young, bright, pure.
She was crying, half-sobbing, clutching the document to her, unopened. Then she tucked it beneath her arm and rubbed her eyes with the back of her fists, trying to recover her composure.
‘I can’t believe you’re saying all this . . .’
‘Look at the photograph!’
She wiped her face once more then opened the pages of the familiar red document and stared at it.
Costa got up and walked to stand by her side, peering into her face.
‘Is that your brother Robert?’
‘I didn’t do this,’ Mina Gabriel cried. ‘Any of it. Robert must have . . .’
She looked up at him, her glassy eyes full of fear.
‘Please, Nic. Believe me. You. Of all people.’
‘Sorry,’ he said simply. ‘It doesn’t work.’
‘But . . .’
‘If I’m honest,’ he added, ‘I’m not sure it ever did.’
She placed her palm on his chest, held it there and asked, ‘What do you want?’
He glanced out of the window. September in Rome. Heat, lethargy, people too tired, too lazy or too honest to wish to witness the deceit that lay beneath the city’s radiant façade.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
FOUR
There was a tall stool by the window. She climbed onto it, bleary-eyed but not crying any more, composed, with her arms wrapped around herself. Old again, he thought, wondering whether the other Mina Gabriel, the one he believed he’d first met, was a myth, a creation or just one more victim along the way. And whether she knew herself.
‘We’d no money,’ she said, staring at the palm trees and the ordered flowerbeds of Bernard Santacroce’s garden. ‘Everything we had went on Daddy’s treatment. Robert even took to selling Bernard’s drugs to make money. Working for other people too. He hated it. And Daddy was dying. Everything we had went on trying to save him but it didn’t work.’ She was hunched up, clinging to herself. ‘There was nothing any of us could do. A few months. That was all he had. It didn’t matter to him. We did.’
Mina sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand.
‘I never knew him so unhappy. It wasn’t like him. In Canada or England, even when he got fired, he could laugh at them, at their stupidity. He was a good man. He loved us. He read to me. Not kids’ books. Real books. I was never just a child. He treated me as if I mattered. Someone with an opinion, a right to express it. When I was older he taught us. Literature. Languages. Science. Robert couldn’t take it so he went away to boarding school. That was his choice. Daddy was everything to me, to Mummy, and then . . .’ She gazed into the garden, remembering. ‘We came here and he became someone else. So full of despair. For us, because we were going to be alone and penniless. In a city of strangers.’
She thought for a moment and said, ‘He blamed himself for this. Not the cancer. Only himself. But Bernard . . .’
Mina closed her eyes for a moment and when she looked at him again there was something dark and savage there.
‘He knew Daddy was vulnerable. That was why he invited him to Rome in the first place. He saw there was something to exploit. That was Bernard’s talent. He could read people, see into their pain, and use it. The bastard.’
Her arm shot upwards, towards the office above.
‘At first Bernard said he wanted Daddy to add some academic weight to the Confraternita delle Civette.’ She cast a vicious glance around the room. ‘It was a joke to him. He’d no idea what he’d resurrected. In memory of Galileo? Please.’
She stopped. He waited. These were thoughts she’d never spoken before, and their release was both painful and cathartic.
‘Daddy would have gone along with the charade of being his lackey, for our sake. It was either that or . . . God knows. But whenever you accommodated Bernard he made a note, smiled, and sooner or later he came back for more. Finally he put that idiotic paper he’d written in front of Daddy and said he wanted his name on the cover too. Not just as editor but as joint author. Bernard knew what he was doing. He was asking a man who was a million times his intellectual superior to renounce everything he believed in. To throw away his life. He even threw in his own little joke. The title. E pur si muove.’
Mina groaned at the memory.
‘He wanted to be the Inquisition, making Daddy take back everything he believed in. And in return? They would have Galileo’s own whispered denial on the front page. Along with the recantation of the heretic Malise Gabriel, a mea culpa the whole world could see. And that was just the start.’
Curt, dry laughter.
‘Bernard got more pushy. I didn’t really understand at the time, but we had to leave this place and move into Joanne’s dump. It didn’t make any difference. The pressure was always there, and Daddy getting sicker by the day. Then . . .’ Mina turned and looked at him earnestly. ‘Bernard decided he wanted more. He thought he was God’s gift to women. He’d got Joanne into a corner over money or something. She wasn’t enough. He could never keep his eyes off Mummy. He seemed to think we were . . . his right. Just like this place. He was born to be master of everything. So when he began to get really impatient over Daddy’s stalling, he turned to Mummy instead. She didn’t have a choice. None of us ever did.’
‘Did your father know?’
She looked at him, surprised, and said, ‘About Mummy? Of course. From the outset. We were a family, Nic. Trying to find some way through this mess, to survive. Why shouldn’t she have told him? It was for all of us. Even poor, lost Robert, wasting away in those stupid bars in the Campo. Whenever Bernard got pushy Mummy would keep him quite for a while. Needs must. Then . . .’
Mina placed a finger in her shiny, chestnut hair, twirled the side, a little nervous perhaps.
‘The problem was that Bernard was the kind of man who got bored rather easily. Mummy was a worthwhile diversion for a couple of months, no more. After that he was back again, demanding the paper, with Daddy’s name on it. And games. Games with Daddy and Joanne, in that place of his in the basement. I don’t think it was about sex. Not rea
lly. It was about power. About humiliation. That’s what he wanted most of all.’
He knew what was coming and wondered whether he wanted to hear.
‘Then you?’ Costa asked.
She stared out of the window.
‘I knew what he was thinking. I could tell from the way he’d started looking at me. One Thursday I was in here, alone, doing some work for Mummy. She had to be at a rehearsal. I can type. I can file. I can be a menial when required.’ She pointed to the sofa. ‘I was there reading some more of his interminable manuscript. He came downstairs and sat next to me. It was the afternoon. I think he’d had wine for lunch or something. I could smell the drink on his breath.’
He watched her, fascinated, horrified.
‘Bernard asked me what Mina was short for. Whether I was Wilhelmina, like someone else in the family. I told him I was Minerva. He knew that already. It was all a part of the game.’ Her hand twitched nervously over her lips. This was a difficult memory. ‘He said, did I know that this place was called after me? The Casina delle Civette. The owl is Minerva, you see. The goddess of wisdom.’ Mina’s voice fell a tone, as if talking to someone else. ‘Of warfare too, Bernard. Perhaps you should have remembered that.’
She beckoned to Costa to come closer, then she took his hand and placed it on her thigh.
‘Then he touched me like this and said, “You’re wise like her, Mina. She was a virgin goddess.” I can remember his face. The smell of his breath. The stupid leer when he grinned me at me and whispered . . .’ Her voice fell away, but not enough to disguise the sardonic tone. ‘“Are you?”’
Costa took away his hand and sat on the cushion on the window sill, looking up at her.
‘“Are you?”’ she repeated, gazing out at the cloudless blue sky. ‘It wasn’t a lot to give really. Not when I thought about the consequences of saying no. Bernard was a . . . frantic little man at times, though he didn’t get bored with me quite so quickly. I imagine the novelty was greater. Coming to my room with his little camera. I managed to get the card out of that. I thought it might come in useful. It was only afterwards that he told me he was my uncle. I think that was meant to seal the secret between us somehow. Make me as guilty as him.’
