The Fallen Angel (11 page)

Three months separated them. That last comment seemed unnecessary. Determined to disprove the slight, Peroni did manage to keep up though, which was probably the point.

The door to the Gabriel apartment was open. Falcone stood there, a look of blank fury growing on his face. Peroni went ahead and walked through.

The entire floor seemed empty save for a single chair on which Joanne Van Doren sat, head down, fingers tapping at the keyboard of a tiny laptop computer. Every chair, every table, every book
and personal effect, every last shred of possible evidence had disappeared. What had been the Gabriels’ home a few days before now resembled the gutted, empty spaces in the storeys below.

Peroni went over to the woman and, when she kept on typing, coughed loudly.

She looked up at him and said, ‘Yes?’

‘Where’s the bedroom?’ Falcone asked.

‘Which bedroom?’ Joanne Van Doren wondered, eyes wide open with apparent innocence.

They were still pink. Peroni thought she looked even more miserable than the day before. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

They walked into Mina’s room, the one at the corner, with the double French windows opening onto the shattered terrace. Everything was gone: the books, the shelves, the curtains, the
compact desk and chair. The bed and all the sheets.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, joining them.

‘You didn’t mention you were going to clear the apartment,’ Peroni said, trying to quell his own anger.

‘You didn’t ask. Cecilia Gabriel’s taken what she wanted. This is the only part of the building with working heat, power and water. I can lease it. Maybe I can even sell it if
I’m lucky. The bank keep saying they need money straight away.’

‘Signora,’ Falcone interrupted. ‘A man died here in the early hours of Saturday night. There’s an investigation into the circumstances.’

‘I told Di Lauro I was clearing the place. He didn’t say a thing.’

‘Di Lauro?’ Falcone asked.

‘The city building inspector,’ Peroni murmured.

‘A building inspector?’ Falcone looked livid. ‘We’re police officers.’

The skinny American looked close to the edge, ready to burst into tears.

‘Will you get off my back!’ she screeched. ‘The only people who stuck around here yesterday were Di Lauro’s. I told them what I was doing. They didn’t look
interested. Why should they be? The accident happened outside. I haven’t touched anything there.’

The inspector glanced unpleasantly at Peroni.

‘Get onto the Questura. Get a warrant for this place. All of it. I want a court order barring any further construction work anywhere in this entire block until I say so. Nor do I want
anyone allowed in.’

‘You can’t do that!’ she shrieked. ‘I have a buyer coming.’

His sharp eyes scanned the bedroom.

‘Your buyer can wait. The things from here. Where are they now? With the Gabriels?’

‘Some of them. What they wanted. Cecilia’s still got a key. I told her to come in last night when we were gone and take whatever she liked before the men dumped it. Probably best we
didn’t meet, what with everything. Look, seriously. You can’t . . .’

Peroni found this interesting.

‘You paid people to clear this building on a Sunday evening? Isn’t that expensive? Why not wait until today?’

Her pale face coloured for a moment.

‘This is my place. For now, anyway. I can do what I want. Please. I might have someone coming round who’s going to buy.’

‘The bedclothes?’ Falcone said. ‘The furniture? The personal items? Cecilia Gabriel has them now?’

‘Some, I guess. I told you. I wasn’t here when she came round. She took what she wanted and the workmen got the rest.’

‘Where did they take it?’

‘Wherever trash goes in this city. You tell me.’

Falcone demanded the name and phone number of the contractors and told Peroni to get someone to try to track down the material.

‘Talk to forensic and get a team in here to see if there’s anything they can find in this mess. We can go and see the Gabriel woman ourselves.’

‘What?’ the American barked. ‘Did you hear a word I said? I’m desperate.’

‘Why did you let the Gabriels stay here for next to nothing?’ Peroni asked, trying to bring the temperature down a little. ‘I don’t understand. You could have got someone
in paying a proper rent, couldn’t you?’

‘With all this construction work going on?’

‘It’s going on now and you think you can sell it.’

The question discomfited her.

‘It was a favour. OK? Bernard Santacroce, Malise’s boss, asked me. They’d lodged with him at the Casina when they first came here. It didn’t work out. Bernard and Malise
were . . . on opposite sides of some philosophical fence I didn’t begin to understand.’

Falcone was interested.

‘Why should you do this Santacroce a favour?’

‘Because . . .’

‘Because what?’

She placed her thin hands together and pleaded with him, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I need the money.’

Falcone scanned the room.

‘I’m not happy with Malise Gabriel’s death, Signora. You’ve removed what may be material evidence from these premises in circumstances I still do not understand. As long
as I remain unhappy I will keep the keys to this building. Why did you do these people a favour?’

She looked angry. And worried too, Peroni thought. Close to the edge. Falcone could have tackled this with a little less aggression, even if it wasn’t his usual style.

‘Because I felt sorry for them! OK?’ The blood had drained from her face. ‘I felt sorry for Mina most of all. It wasn’t her fault her father couldn’t walk down the
street without picking a fight with someone. They were all going nuts in that crazy little place of Bernard’s. They had to leave.’ She got a little closer. ‘Look. I’m sorry
if I’ve done something wrong here. I didn’t mean to. I can help you out. Tell me what you want. It can be fixed. But I’ve got to let these people in to view. If I don’t . .
.’

Falcone dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

‘I want this entire apartment closed except to my people and a forensic team until further notice. No one is coming in without my permission. Including you.’

‘Are you trying to bankrupt me?’

He wasn’t interested.

‘You may stay here until the forensic team arrive. After that you’ll have to leave. We will tell you when we’re finished.’

‘This is going to a lawyer right now,’ she said and stormed off.

Falcone walked over to the window and looked at the broken scaffolding. Then he leaned out and peered down to the street below. Peroni joined him. The Via Beatrice Cenci was open again now. This
part of Rome looked the way it usually did, quiet, residential, a little run-down.

‘Why would she clear this place so quickly?’ the inspector asked. ‘On a Sunday night? Without giving you a clue it was on the cards when you came here yesterday
afternoon?’

‘It’s annoying. I wouldn’t read into it any more than that. Go easy on that woman, will you? She looks in a bad way. Worse than yesterday I think.’

Falcone raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

‘OK,’ Peroni sighed, thinking about it. ‘I agree. Something here stinks. I’ll get Teresa’s people in straight away and see if they can find something in all this
muck and dust. One of the juniors can start hunting the dumps to see where all that stuff has gone. That may not be easy. If they’ve used some illegal site . . .’

Falcone closed his eyes for a moment and muttered, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t come round myself.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, sir,’ Peroni said and didn’t regret the note of acid in his voice. He wasn’t taking the blame. They had all thought this was the accident it
appeared.

‘I want to see Cecilia Gabriel,’ Falcone said, barely noticing. ‘And this girl, Mina. I want that brother found too.’

‘Narcotics are looking.’

Peroni thought of the way Nic had talked about the daughter, about how bright and sincere she was, and the pain he’d seen on her pretty young face. He wondered how Nic would feel when he
realized it was his insistence on examining events more closely that would bring Mina Gabriel into a police interview room before long.

‘We’ve got a case, haven’t we?’ he asked, knowing the answer.

Falcone moved his foot through the grime and rubble on the floorboards. Joanne Van Doren’s voice was rising to a scream in the big room beyond. Some Roman lawyer was beginning to feel her
anger. It sounded as if the man wasn’t giving her the news she wanted.

The inspector’s mournful grey eyes scanned the bare room, and the larger space outside, then came to rest on Peroni.

‘I honestly don’t know. I hate this sort of thing. It’s starting to feel grubby already. I wish Nic were on duty. Perhaps if I—’

‘He needs a break,’ Peroni cut in. ‘He needs to learn there’s more to life than work. There’s Agata too. We agreed on this, Leo. Remember?’

‘I remember,’ Falcone muttered and threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

The little turquoise scooter wound its way slowly around the hot and humid streets of Rome as Costa listened to Mina unearthing the traces of Beatrice Cenci’s past as if
they were ley lines waiting to be rediscovered beneath the dust.

They stopped at the site of the ancient Tordinona prison, northwest of the Piazza Navona, where she was tortured. Then the Vespa worked through the back streets towards the Campo dei Fiori, to
the spot in the Via di Monserrato where a plaque on the wall marked the position of another former Vatican hellhole, the jail of Corte Savella. It was in this narrow, ordinary street that she spent
her last night on earth before being walked by hooded monks to the block a few minutes away by the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It had taken until 11 September 1999, four hundred years after her
execution, for the city’s rulers to make public their shame about her death. The words on the wall marked the site from which she had been taken to the scaffold, ‘
vittima esemplare
di una giustizia ingiusta
’ – an exemplary victim of an unjust justice, said the sign.

By lunch time they stood outside the Palazzo Cenci. In the bright August sunlight the place still seemed forbidding, a private fortress, built on its own little hill which, like much else
around, had taken on the Cenci name. Mina showed him the tiny pink-walled church in the intimate little piazza at the summit of the modest mound, in the shadow of the palace. The tablet on the
façade marked its reconstruction in 1575, thanking ‘Franciscus Cincius’, Beatrice’s own tormenting father, for the work. Inside the closed building, Mina said, was an
unmarked tomb originally planned for Francesco. It now contained the quartered remains of Giacomo, his son and murderer. The father himself was hurriedly buried in the countryside where he was
killed, in the hope that the crime would never be discovered.

‘Every September the eleventh,’ she said, looking back at the palace, ‘there’s a mass here for Beatrice and her family in the chapel. I want to go if I can.’ She
looked at him. ‘Some Romans still love her.’

‘It was Romans who killed her,’ Costa pointed out.

‘Not the ordinary people. They approved of what she did. Standing up for herself.’

‘Do you?’ he asked.

She sat down on the bonnet of a Fiat saloon parked lazily in the road and toyed with her long, blonde hair again.

‘Yes, I think she was right. What choice did she have?’ She took a piece of gum out of her pocket, popped it in her mouth and said, ‘You know an awful lot for a
policeman.’

Next the Vespa went to the bridge where Beatrice died, now little more than another traffic-choked stretch of road by the Tiber. Mina pointed out what she believed to be the
place: in the middle of the busy Lungotevere where pedestrians crossed to walk onto the footbridge of the Ponte Sant’Angelo. He parked the scooter outside a cafe in a little lane. They waited
for the lights then walked to the cobbled stones that led across the Tiber to the vast, hulking shape which had once been the mausoleum of Hadrian. The Castel Sant’Angelo’s soft brown
stone, a vast cylinder towering over the river, seemed to shimmer in the midday heat. The girl dragged him past each of the angels on the bridge, fanciful, heavenly creatures, some bearing musical
instruments, some vicious devices from the stations of the cross.

This bend in the river was one of his favourite points in Rome, a place where every aspect of the city’s character, imperial, Renaissance and modern, seemed to converge. It was hard to
imagine the streets thronged with crowds, silent, anticipating a hideous act to end a brief and terrible story. Yet here, by the bridge that was now a favourite place for tourists to take pictures,
the city had once executed criminals with a shocking regularity.

Mina stopped him as they walked back to the scooter.

‘They say that every September the eleventh Beatrice’s ghost comes back here, carrying her head beneath her arm.’

Costa frowned. He’d heard so many such tales.

‘Romans have a fondness for the supernatural. We’re a credulous race.’

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked outright.

‘No.’

She seemed to approve of his answer.

‘I remember talking to Daddy about it. He said, if you think of all the millions of people who’ve died there ought to be ghosts everywhere. It doesn’t make sense. We’d be
surrounded by ghosts in mourning. For each other. For us. You wouldn’t be able to think for the sound of their crying.’

Mina Gabriel placed a finger on the stone base of the statue of an angel in front of them, a beautiful figure, fluid and full of movement, in its hands a cruel crown of thorns.

He followed the gaze of the statue above them. The creature’s blank eyes were set on the dome of St Peter’s, as if seeking salvation, or some semblance of reason.

A scowl crossed her innocent face as she glanced towards the great basilica too.

‘They’d kill someone just for wanting to be themselves.’

‘Did you talk to your father about Beatrice a lot?’

‘I was talking about Galileo. And all the others. Don’t you know about the Confraternita?’