The Fallen Angel (2 page)

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve enough litter in Rome as it is.’

He got to his feet, took the half-finished cone from her fingers, went to the bin at the end of the bench and deposited both ice creams there.

When he got back she was standing up, a diminutive and beautiful young woman with her arms folded across her chest. She wore a tight dark jacket, a scarlet silk shirt and grey slacks. Around her
neck was a silver chain with some abstract ornament – not a cross – that he’d noticed earlier. Her dusky, compact face was stiff with a familiar bemused anger. The noise of the
revellers finding their way home from the Campo and Trastevere was getting louder all the time. Bellowed shouts and obscenities in foreign languages. This was the price of being an international
city.

‘Perhaps not all the ghosts have gone,’ Agata said. ‘I wonder . . .’

‘Enough talking,’ Costa said, then took her in his arms and kissed her, chastely almost, on the lips, holding her very gently so that she could withdraw easily from his grip.

He imagined this was the first time any man had embraced Agata Graziano, not that he had much idea of what she’d done in Malta for the last two years.

They broke for breath. Since they’d last met scarcely a day had passed when he hadn’t thought about the curious little sister from the convent in the
centro storico
who had
fought so bravely to find some justice for him after the efforts of the police and the judiciary had failed.

To his astonishment her eyes stayed wide open throughout.

‘I’m sorry,’ Costa said quickly.

‘No, no, no . . . don’t apologize.’

‘I didn’t mean . . . I thought . . .’

She waited, then said, ‘Thought what?’

‘I thought that perhaps you wanted me to . . .’

Before he’d finished she dashed forward, kissed him quickly and rather roughly on the lips, then pulled back grinning, looking a little wild.

‘I did. And I like this!’ Agata announced brightly before lunging at him once more.

The kiss was brief, the embrace longer. She stayed in his arms, smiling, her head against his chest.

‘I like this a lot,’ she murmured. ‘Nic . . .’

She glanced up at him. At that moment, from somewhere in the network of streets on the city side of the bridge, there was a cry, that of a man in terrible pain. Then, not long after, came a
young female voice calling, shouting, words that were so high-pitched and full of distress they were incomprehensible.

‘You can’t take your car home,’ Agata declared, trying to ignore the din. ‘You’ve had too much to drink. A taxi driver will charge the earth to take you out to that
beautiful house in the country. My job comes with a little apartment.’ She hiccupped, out of embarrassment perhaps. ‘In the Via Governo Vecchio, believe it or not. Please . .
.’

He shuffled from side to side and stared at his feet. He hadn’t been driving a car lately. At the beginning of the month, when the city began to wind down, he’d decided to resurrect
his father’s ancient Vespa scooter from the garage. With the spare time from his holiday he’d got it back on the road. The thing was parsimonious with fuel and it was wonderful to feel
the fresh air against your face in weather like this, dodging the traffic, parking anywhere. The Vespa was a little rusty in places but the engine still had noisy fire in its little belly. Now the
decrepit little turquoise beast was just round the corner, waiting in a side street.

The racket from across the road kept getting louder and louder.

‘In my apartment I have a . . .’ She struggled for the words as her skin took on the warmth of a rising blush. ‘A . . .’

‘A couch?’

‘I have a bed.’ Agata blinked at him, wobbling a little. ‘There. I’ve said it.’ She smiled, a little bashful, perhaps even a little ashamed. ‘You’re
happy, just like Teresa said you’d be. Finally. The Nic I always knew was there even when I could see your heart was breaking. My Nic . . .’

‘You’re babbling,’ he said, reaching forward and taking her shoulders. ‘Do you have a couch?’

‘I am
not
babbling. Of course I’ve got a stupid couch. I live in the Via Governo Vecchio.’

‘Good. Then . . .’

The unseen girl was screaming again, at the top of her voice. There was real agony and fear in her cries, not the drunkenness and violence he’d come to recognize over the years. He could
see his concern reflected in Agata’s shocked features.

‘There’s something wrong,’ she said, her eyes wide and glassy with trepidation.

‘Stay here, please,’ Costa ordered.

Then he ran across the riverside road and down towards the tortuous web of lanes and alleys that meandered in every direction out from the ghetto like a tangle of veins and arteries wound around
the human heart.

The commotion was in the first street on the right after he crossed the Lungotevere de’ Cenci. In the half light of a single street lamp he could see a body lying on the
ground, legs apart in a broken, unnatural fashion, the upper torso in darkness at the foot of a tall residential building.

Something was next to the figure, a pale shadow in what looked like child’s pyjamas, faint pink. This was the source of the keening, wailing scream that had brought him here.

He took out his phone, called the control room, identified himself and ordered an emergency medical crew.

‘We’ve had a call already,’ the operator told him. ‘Didn’t leave a name. Do you know what happened?’

‘No, but someone’s hurt.’

‘Need anything else?’

The figure in the pyjamas fluttered out into the light like a moth struggling to break free of a spider’s web. It was a girl, Costa thought immediately, and there was blood on her, on her
chest, and in the loose, flapping fabric around her legs.

‘Make sure there’s some backup,’ he said, without quite knowing why. This was a complex, rambling part of town, on the very edge of the ghetto. There were people closing in,
attracted by the noise. No blue flashing lights. Not a sign of a uniform, police or Carabinieri.

He was off duty, unprepared, a little heady from Falcone’s wine. But there was no one else around.

Crossing the street he called out, ‘Signora.’ Then looked more closely as he approached, saw her fully in the light, crying, distressed, quite beside herself, blood sticking in a
messy smear across her slender chest and thighs.

‘Signorina,’ Costa corrected himself as he approached. ‘Police.’

He reached her, stopped, a little breathless. The girl was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Her long blonde hair was the colour of old gold under the lamps and hung in thick tresses around her
shoulders as she twisted and turned, trying to see what was around them, glancing anxiously at the shape on the ground. She had a beautiful, pale, northern European face, trapped between womanhood
and the world of a child, innocent yet on the verge of knowledge.

There was a strange noise from somewhere nearby, like the trickle of water or sand.

‘Daddy,’ she mumbled in English, looking at the stricken body on the ground.

‘Signorina . . .’ Costa took her skinny bare arms and held her. This was odd. There was still the sharp sense of danger somewhere close by. ‘Tell me what happened.’

She looked into his eyes and he found himself lost for a moment.

‘He fell,’ the girl said simply and glanced at the building behind them.

Costa looked at the figure on the black Roman cobblestones. After a decade in the force the rules came back without a second thought. Protect the living, protect yourself. Then, and only then,
think of the dead. And this man was gone. He could see it, in the shattered skull, so broken he didn’t want to peer too closely, and the unnatural, agonized way the corpse was sprawled on the
hard ground.

A handful of people were beginning to gather from the riverside road and the streets that entered from the ghetto. They grew quiet as they approached, encountering the invisible dread that came
from meeting mortality out in the open, on a hot, idle August night. From somewhere came the sound of someone retching and he wondered whether the cause was the broken body on the paving stones or
drink, or both.

The girl crouched down again, next to the dreadful shape. Her long, straight hair fell on the bloodied torso there. She kept mumbling one word over and over, in English, ‘Daddy, Daddy,
Daddy . . .’

It sounded wrong somehow. Too young a cry to leave the lips of a teenager.

Costa took in the way the dead man, a tall, skinny individual of late middle age he guessed, was leaking blood out into the cracks in the cobbles.

Around the body stood a pile of shattered rubble, old stone and cement. A few steps away lay a single piece of metal scaffolding and some planking. A thin trickle of pale dust was falling in a
vertical line onto the ground next to what looked like fresh rubble close to the fathomless pool of darkness that was the entrance to the building behind them.

He looked up and saw the same beautiful, starry sky he’d been sharing with Agata Graziano only a few moments before. The man seemed to have fallen from an old, decrepit palace that stood a
good five storeys high, one of the tallest on this side of the street. Against the moonlit night he could make out that the top floor had a balcony running the width of the building, with
scaffolding attached for part of its length, suspended on cables that led to some apparatus on the roof. The nearest corner, almost directly above them, was gone entirely, both metal railings and
terrace ripped away, leaving a line of broken tubing, cracked concrete and ragged wire clinging to the stone façade.

The contraption was moving perceptibly in the darkness.

The steady trickle of fragments of stone and sand grew stronger, depositing a growing pile of rubble on the ground.

Four years before he’d been called to a tenement in Testaccio rented to illegal immigrants, the
clandestini
who performed the jobs that Romans had come to believe were beneath them.
The building had been denied maintenance for years, against the city statutes. On one grim December day an entire wall had collapsed, burying those unlucky enough to be inside. He’d never
forget clawing at the rubble to get to a child, or the relief he’d felt when he was able to retrieve a single young soul from that bloody, choking mess.

His head cleared very quickly as he turned on the growing crowd of bystanders, many of them foreign, some of them drunk, and yelled, ‘Police! Get back! This is a building collapse. Clear
the area. Now!’

A few of them obeyed, a few others retreated into the darkness of a narrow alley opposite that seemed to run uphill, in the lee of a vast, hulking palazzo. Costa yelled again,
in English this time, then took the young girl’s arm as she knelt by the corpse on the cobblestones. The falling trickle of sand and brick and plaster had turned into a growing stream that
made a rising, relentless rattle as it reached the earth.

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘I’ve got to get you out of here.’

‘My father!’ she said, turning, looking into his eyes. There was such pain and despair in her pale face it sent a chill through him. She didn’t move, not a millimetre.

He crouched down by her side.

‘My name’s Nic Costa. I’m a police officer. You are . . . ?’

‘Scusami?’ she said in Italian so easy and natural she sounded like a native. Her hands were on the man’s bloodied chest. She bent down, placed an ear next to his unmoving
mouth, listening.

Costa gripped her arm and made the girl look at him.

‘Your name!’

‘Mina.’ She glanced at the terrace above them. ‘I think he went out for a cigarette. There was a noise. Like . . . a whip cracking. The scaffolding . . .’ She put a hand
to her mouth. It was covered in blood. Her eyes were very large, bright and lustrous with tears, like jewels. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Stand on the far side of the road, Mina. When you’re there I’ll carry your father over. Please do this now. If the building falls and we’re still here I can’t help
anyone.’

He looked up. The man must have tumbled five floors from the balcony. No one could have survived such a fall onto the ancient stones of Rome.

‘I need you to move,’ he said with more force.

She stayed on the ground and gripped his arm.

‘You’ll bring him . . . ?’

‘I’ll do as I promised. When you’re safe. I can’t carry two of you.’ Costa quickly snatched off his jacket and wrapped it round her bare shoulders, over the
bloodied pyjamas. ‘Now stand on the other side of the road.’

Slowly, she got up and wiped her brow with her arm, casting towards him an expression so sharp and full of expectation he wondered how old she really was.

The girl was tall, almost his own height, and sylph-like. She crossed the street then walked into the dark alley opposite. A familiar female shape was there, a shorter one. Agata had followed
him and immediately approached the distraught teenager the moment she arrived, coming out of the crowd of bemused and distant bystanders to help. He watched as she placed her arms around the girl
and held her.

Something the size of a small rock landed no more than a metre away, followed by a steady rain of pebbles. A sharp object cracked against his skull then a line of metal tubing clattered noisily
to the ground next to him, bouncing around in a manic dance across the cobbles.

Costa steeled himself. It was wrong to move the man. Wrong medically, if by some miracle there were still some faint flickering light of life. Wrong from an investigative point of view too. But
this was an accident, not a crime scene, one that was not, perhaps, entirely finished. Besides, it was a way of getting the girl to move, perhaps the only means he could find.
Protect the
living.

He pushed his arms beneath the bloodied torso, reaching forward as far as he could until his own face touched the stained and dirty shirt that enclosed the fractured body in front of him. It was
impossible to ignore the smell of violent injury, though at least this awkward position, so close he had to turn away his own head as he strained to lift the body upright, meant that he
didn’t have to look at the shattered skull.