by David Hewson
‘Your family . . .’
Clear-eyed and frank again, she gazed into his face.
‘I told you the truth. Bernard boasted about me to Daddy, just a few days before he died.’ The faintest glimmer of pleasure crossed her face. ‘Daddy said he was going to come round here and eviscerate the bastard with a bread knife. We had to hold onto him. Mummy, me, Robert. Weak as he was, it wasn’t easy. He wanted Bernard dead that instant. It was only when we thought about it . . .’
She raised her shoulders in a gesture of acceptance.
‘When he thought about it. Daddy was going to die anyway. What he wanted more than anything was a secure future for us. If his death delivered that, and we got rid of Bernard too . . .’ She cast an arm around the apartment. ‘Mummy checked Bernard’s papers. He was an arrogant sod. He hadn’t even made a will to cover all this, all his legitimate money. That meant everything would come to us in the end. There was no one else. You have to admit it has a certain delicate symmetry. Besides, we had all the evidence we needed right here. It was simply a matter of placing it, and waiting. Then when the moment arrived . . .’
Costa pointed at the passport and asked again, ‘Who is he?’
‘Some stupid riff-raff that Robert got to know on the street,’ she said with a shrug. ‘He was willing to pretend to be Robert for a few hundred euros, not quite knowing what the consequences were. I’m sorry, Nic. That was Robert’s doing. I’d no idea it would happen. I suspect Robert didn’t think things would turn out that way either. I imagine he felt he had no choice.’
‘And all of this was your father’s idea?’
‘Not all of it,’ she said quickly. ‘It was our idea. The family’s. It was our way of surviving. Of making the best of what we had. It seemed simple in the beginning. Daddy killed himself. We pushed you first towards us, and then towards Bernard. And one day Mummy killed him. But . . .’
Her eyes strayed outside again.
‘“The best laid plans of mice and men . . .”’ she murmured. ‘Things began to change. Joanne helped us at first and then became scared. Robert was frightened she’d go the police.’
‘So he killed her? And the Albanian. And Gino Riggi.’
‘I knew nothing about those things until they happened, I swear,’ she insisted. ‘I’d never have allowed him to hurt Joanne. You’ve got to believe that. But by the time it was done . . . We’d become part of the trap we set ourselves.’
Costa remembered seeing her the day after the American woman’s death. She was truly distraught, he believed. That was not an act.
‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that you take one small step on the path of righteous wickedness, and the next seems to happen of its own free will. One that isn’t righteous at all. I’m sorry. That’s what we did. Why we did it. Do you still not understand?’
‘Not really,’ he said and went to the window.
She joined him there, standing so close he could feel the sweet heat of her breath.
‘I used you, I know,’ she whispered. ‘I had to. We needed someone who’d follow the trail. If they didn’t, what was the point?’
He remembered her pale, frightened face in the night, outside the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci. Costa had known from the start there was something she wanted to tell him. Yet it took all this time.
‘I never realized it would be someone I’d like so much,’ Mina said quietly. She sidled up to him, brushed against his body.
‘The passport, Nic. You haven’t done anything with it, have you? No one else in the Questura has a clue?’
He didn’t want to answer. She knew anyway.
She took his hand and wound her fingers in his.
‘Why is that?’
Costa could see the bend in the Tiber, the miasma rising from the water in the heat, could imagine the dome of St Peter’s just out of view, and ahead of it, near the Castel Sant’Angelo, the bridge with its blind angels, and the patch of road where, centuries ago, a young girl had been brutally executed.
Her lips moved to his cheek, to his ear. Mina kissed him once, biting lightly. Her hands ranged over his chest. She took them away and pulled the half-unbuttoned shirt over her head, the lazy, easy way a child did, then pushed her small breasts against him.
‘I know what you want,’ she murmured. ‘I saw it in Bernard’s eyes. I see it in yours . . .’
He tried to push her away.
‘I saw it in Daddy’s face. That last night. When he was sitting on the bed, crying, scared as hell, half-drunk, head bleeding because he’d tried to go outside once and fallen at the window, failed. He was scared. Ready to back out. To go whimpering all the way back to Bernard and offer to put his name on that testament of lies after all. Let Bernard do what he liked to the rest of us so long as he got enough money to live a few more weeks. When we’d worked so hard for this. So hard . . .’
He tried to say something. He didn’t want to hear more.
Her voice was hot in his ear. Her lips worked damp and warm against his skin. Her fingers fought to drag his to her small, taut breast.
‘So I sat down on the bed and kissed him. Told him I loved him. I always would. That I’d prove it for him and I did. And he stepped out of the window and I watched him fall.’
Costa wished he’d never come to this lonely hidden tower in the garden by the river. That he’d taken the advice of Falcone and buried this case deep in the ground until it was as lost as the scattered remains of Beatrice Cenci.
‘Was that one of your guesses, Nic? Did you dare go that far? I don’t think so. It wasn’t Joanne Van Doren with Daddy. Not that night.’
Closer, closer.
‘Are you glad you were right in a way? I was Beatrice after all but willingly, lovingly. It was his last moment on earth. He was frightened and lonely and desperate. I owed him all that and he wanted it. Besides.’ She kissed his ear, biting the flesh. ‘There was no going back then, was there?’
She had the stance of some cheap coquettish model. He watched as she pushed the red passport down the front of her slacks then placed his fingers there, on the warm skin of her stomach.
‘You want your evidence, Nic? Take it. That’s why you came, isn’t it?’
He withdrew his hand, bent down, picked up the cotton shirt from the floor and gave it to her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the last thing on my mind.’
Out in the garden, among the lilies and the orange trees, beneath the shadow of the tower of the Casina delle Civette, he found himself looking back towards the window, unable to prevent this last backward glance. She stood there, a little hunched, still half-naked, clutching the shirt to her pale skinny chest, watching him leave.
He was too far away to read the expression on her face, and for that Nic Costa was grateful.
FIVE
He rode the rattling turquoise Vespa all the way to Montorio, mostly following the route that the bier of Beatrice Cenci had taken four centuries before. Then he parked outside the church where her remains lay hidden, scattered by time and the cruelty of man.
The place was deserted. The day was still terribly hot. Costa perched on the wall and realized there were two calls he could make. One to the Questura. One to another destination. The first would be irreversible. Perhaps the second too, though in a different, more subtle way.
At least one of these decisions could be postponed. So he phoned and waited until finally there was an answer.
Almost thirty minutes later he saw Agata Graziano walking up the hill below and waved to her from the wall, smiling, his heart full of some inexplicable joy.
She trudged round the long, winding hilly corner and joined him as he sat on the brickwork, looking back at the city the way Mina had once done when they came here.
‘Hello stranger,’ she said, and hitched herself up beside him, letting her legs swing, childlike, over the edge.
‘Am I?’
‘What?’
‘A stranger?’
She was back in old
jeans and a T-shirt, hair free and wild, no make-up on her dark, interesting features. There were a couple of crease lines round her eyes. He liked them.
‘Flowers,’ he said, and pulled out from behind the wall the expensive bouquet he’d bought in Trastevere. It was a little battered from the journey up the hill, clutched in his hand as he rode the scooter.
She took them, smelled the fragrant blooms, and smiled.
‘I felt you were a stranger. For a while,’ she said.
‘Sorry. I never meant it that way.’
She watched him with her keen and glittering eyes. Agata had changed again, he thought. Gone was the insular, intransigent sister he’d first met, and the lecturer dressed like one more Roman businesswoman. Perhaps she was finding her real self. It seemed a struggle.
‘It was the girl who got in the way, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Mina. Mina Gabriel?’
She shuffled closer, frowned and toyed with some moss in the brickwork, tugging it out of the cracks.
‘I wish you weren’t so eagle-eyed sometimes,’ she complained.
‘It was a guess.’
‘Really? You still don’t know, do you? I saw you with her. That Monday after her father died. My first day at work. I was in the Piazza Venezia and you two whizzed past on that silly little scooter of yours.’ Agata’s eyes fell to the machine on its stand beneath the trees. She shook her dark head. He watched the way her hair moved, ever more grateful it was unruly, untamed once again. ‘I was so mad. So jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ He laughed, couldn’t help it. ‘She’s seventeen years old.’
‘There she was. Holding onto your waist. Young and beautiful. Free as a bird, riding through Rome as if there was no tomorrow. And me trudging to work, wondering what I’d let myself in for.’
Something had happened. He knew it.
‘Mina was a very troubled young girl. I thought that, perhaps, I could help. Nothing more.’
‘I know. But she was so young. So beautiful. Flying through Rome on a scooter. Holding onto you.’ She turned and stabbed him in the chest with a short, dusky finger. ‘I wanted that to be me. Not her. Not anyone else. Me.’ She looked at him. ‘Perhaps if I hadn’t spent most of my life inside a convent . . .’
‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful.’
She raised a single eyebrow and stared.
‘I mean,’ he insisted quickly, ‘you should never look back. Not like that. There’s nothing there you can change.’
‘I know that. But you can still yearn for something, even if it’s just a dream.’
She kicked her legs against the wall, glanced at him, shrugged her slight shoulders then looked at the view, the forest of spires and great buildings, the distant peaks of the Sabine Hills.
‘I quit the college last week,’ she said. ‘While I was in Milan. At the so-called conference.’
Costa scratched his head and said nothing.
‘It seems,’ Agata added, ‘the job entailed certain duties Bruno had never mentioned at the interview. Bastard. It was like working with an octopus.’
‘Any . . . plans?’
She didn’t look at him when she answered.
‘A friend of mine at the Barberini has got me a six-month stint at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They’ll even pay the air fare and find me somewhere to stay. I’m waiting for the confirmation letter. I should be gone in two weeks. Time enough to get out of Bruno’s little love nest in Governo Vecchio. I wasn’t the first, it seems.’
He didn’t know what to say. Or what to feel either.
‘Why did you phone me?’ Agata asked.
‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to ask your opinion. To tell you a story.’
‘What kind?’ she asked, a little alarmed. ‘Not the usual? You know . . .’ She ran a finger across her throat and made a cutting sound. ‘That kind?’
It was the story Mina had told him. About St Peter and Santa Francesca Romana, the church by the Forum, its campanile just out of sight, in its wall a strange stone with what looked like knee marks set in the centre, guarded by iron to save them from the fingers of the curious. He knew that. He’d checked, walking into its cool, dark interior, chatting to the polite and talkative priest he’d found there. It was one of the places on his list for the last few days.
She listened as he told her about the magician called Simon Magus and the saint whose prayers dashed him onto the rocks of the Forum, in front of the Emperor Nero. An act that brought about Peter’s own martyrdom, for murder not faith, on a cross, upside down, no more than a few steps from where they now sat, if the old stories were to be believed.
As he reached that part of the story her eyes travelled to the church and then Bramante’s Tempietto, trapped behind its bars. A steady stream of people, women mainly, were wandering into Montorio. He knew why, and told her. That this was the day of Beatrice Cenci’s death, a day some still marked in sorrowful remembrance.
‘An interesting story,’ Agata said when he was done.
‘I thought so.’
‘And?’
He blinked and asked her what she meant.
‘What is the question you want me to answer?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Costa admitted. ‘Who killed Simon Magus, I imagine? Who stole the old magic from the world? Peter? Or God?’ He tried to find the right words and found they remained as elusive as ever. ‘Who, I suppose, was responsible? In the end?’
‘It’s a fairy-tale, Nic. You shouldn’t read too much into it.’
He thought of the story from the Grimm brothers that Peroni had remembered when they went to see the Turk at Ciampino. Of the bereaved father who fell in love with his own daughter, and pursued her until she gave in.
‘Stories mean something,’ he said. ‘They’re how we express ideas, fears we have that we can’t talk about any other way.’
‘Fairy-tales,’ she repeated, glancing at the door of the church where a group of seven or eight women had arrived in dark dresses, bearing bouquets. ‘Like Beatrice Cenci. A convenient myth around which to build our lives.’
‘So you told me,’ he said, watching the stream of visitors too. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? That it’s all a myth?’
‘It didn’t matter to you. I told you it was all fantasy. The painting by Guido Reni. The idea that Beatrice was some virginal teenager, like that English girl. And what did you do with it?’
‘Nothing,’ he said quickly.
‘Quite.’ She smelled the flowers again and smiled. ‘It was terrible the way that story ended. The English girl, I mean. But at least she was vindicated, wasn’t she? Both her and her father. It was that horrible man, Santacroce. Or whatever his name was.’
She hadn’t really listened to the fairy-tale about St Peter and Simon Magus, and perhaps that was for the best.
‘It was that horrible beast all along,’ she went on, then said, very firmly, ‘If it had turned out that young girl was guilty, as the papers said, I couldn’t have borne it. I would have gone back into that convent. This world of yours . . .’
‘. . . of ours.’
‘This world of yours is hard and cruel and too, too real for me at times. I held that girl in my arms that dreadful night her father died. I felt her innocence as surely as I feel the presence of God when I walk into church. I would not have stayed and watched her punished like some common criminal. You know that, don’t you?’
He nodded.
‘I had an idea.’
‘Good. And now it’s past. What next?’
He reached into his pocket, took out his phone, and made a point of turning it off.
Then he picked up the second helmet he’d brought and held it out in front of her.
‘The sights,’ he said. ‘From here to the Aventino, then . . .’ His arm swept the glorious panorama in front of them, the campaniles, the hills, the monuments he loved so much.
‘I know all those places already!’
‘Not from the back of my Vespa. And t
hen Baffetto. Pizza.’
‘Pizza?’
‘The best there is, or so they say.’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, slowly, gently, amused by the clumsiness of his response.
‘You’re worse at this than I am,’ she told him. ‘Why is that?’
‘Lack of practice,’ Costa replied with a shrug. He dangled the helmet once more. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Not yet.’
She jumped off the wall and strode to the church, the bouquet in her hand. Costa followed, watched in silence as she bowed and made the sign of the cross. Agata Graziano walked to the altar where Beatrice Cenci’s shattered corpse had once been interred and gently placed his roses, lilies and gardenias alongside the mass of colourful blooms laid there earlier.
Then she knelt in silence, her hands in prayer. He watched, unable to respond, to think, to envisage any way to touch this part of her.
In a minute or two they were outside again, struggling to put on their helmets, laughing, happy, carefree, if only for a little while.
The Vespa started first time. He knew this little machine now. Slowly they rode to the summit of the Gianicolo hill then wound their way down to the city below.
Author’s Note
Most of this story is invention. But not Beatrice Cenci, who was executed in Rome on 11 September 1599, by the Ponte Sant’Angelo, in front of a distraught crowd of citizens praying for her reprieve. Visitors to Rome can follow the Cenci trail outlined by Mina Gabriel, from the portrait by Guido Reni in the Barberini, to the bridge, her supposed resting place of Montorio, and the artefacts, including the executioner’s sword which is said to have taken her life, in the Museo Criminologico in the Via del Gonfalone. The Beatrice legend is still a matter of some debate among those who follow such stories. Many believe the Shelley version, which portrays her as a young innocent fighting for her own rights and dignity. Others tend to side with the the real-life nineteenth-century historian Antonio Bertoletti who discovered that, whatever the provocation, the girl was not as young or as blameless as many have since assumed. Nevertheless her death is still marked in Rome by a small number of faithful followers, who do indeed hold a mass in the Cenci church near the former family palace.
