The Fallen Angel (26 page)

‘I’d nothing to do with that.’

‘You’d everything to do with it. You painted yourself as her, didn’t you? What did you expect? What did
we
expect?’

That was a question she could answer.

‘Freedom,’ she said softly. ‘The chance to live. To breathe. Security, I don’t know.’

The very things Beatrice Cenci had sought too, only to finish her days beneath the flash of an executioner’s sword a few short steps from where they now stood.

‘So it’s all worth it, then?’ he asked, and stood closer to her, backing Mina’s willowy body against the stone parapet of the bridge across the Tiber.

‘Worth what?’

He leaned against her, leering, nudged his lips against her ear and whispered something coarse and common. His fingers fell to the belt of her jeans, slipped below, stroking the tender skin
beneath her navel.

Mina Gabriel pushed him back and said, ‘Cut that out.’

‘Sorry. I forgot. You’re a saint.’

‘And you’re an animal.’

‘Animals are useful too, aren’t they? A bit more than saints, I’d say.’

She walked away from him, back towards the lost place of execution and the endless stream of cars. This hadn’t been a good idea. It wasn’t worth the risk. He was, she realized,
beyond hope, beyond advice.

Robert followed her, struggling to voice some pathetic excuses.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked as they reached the shops and houses that led into the
centro storico
. ‘Where are you going to stay?’

‘Best you don’t know.’

Mina Gabriel wished more than anything she could make him take off those opaque sunglasses, could do the same herself. That they could look straight into each other’s eyes, just this
once.

‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Be serious, please. They’re going to come for us. Just like the papers are saying. You act as if it’s all some kind of a joke.
Everything.’

‘A joke,’ he repeated. ‘Not even a very funny one either. You as Beatrice. Me as Pangloss. Watch and wait. And remember . . .’

He slapped her backside, hard.

‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. See you, sister. Take care.’

The blow hurt. She felt her eyes begin to sting, heard some tiny little voice start to chant inside, the vicious, pained refrain that had been absent for a little while, along with all those
familiar words she never dared utter out loud.

Don’t touch me, don’t hurt me, don’t, don’t, don’t you dare . . .

Costa wasn’t ready to listen to Falcone’s orders. There were too many questions buzzing around his head. So he went back to the Questura for a few hours, checking
to see if forensic had picked up anything new, and whether there was any more information about the missing brother. It was early evening by the time he’d finished, none the wiser.
Falcone’s determination to pin everything on searches and formal interviews with Cecilia and Mina Gabriel the following day was starting to make sense. There seemed no other way forward.

Around six thirty he went outside and perched on the scooter, checking the messages on his personal phone, looking forward to some time at home. Someone prodded him on the shoulder. It was Rosa
Prabakaran, looking glamorous in her evening uniform: short dress, skimpy T-shirt, gaudy jewellery. She sashayed in front of him and said, ‘Oh my, Nic. A Vespa. You need me on the back,
don’t you? Complete the look.’

‘I’m a little old for that,’ he replied.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She was smiling in a way she hadn’t when they’d met earlier, with Gino Riggi. Costa had always liked this smart, difficult woman, and was
aware his feelings had, on occasion, been reciprocated, perhaps more than he wanted. ‘We’d make a good pair together down the Campo. You’ve never worked that beat, have
you?’

He had, back when he was a young
agente
, and said so.

‘Ten years ago? It’s different now.’ The smile disappeared and she looked like the pretty young Indian woman he first got to know a few years before. ‘Lots of things are
different. It’s important to notice.’

He still didn’t understand why she’d wound up in narcotics. Rosa was back studying for her legal degree in her spare time. She had all the makings of an ambitious officer, one
who’d rise swiftly up the ranks. The drugs squad was an important unit in the Questura, but a career in itself, one that usually excluded other areas. It seemed a sideways move.

‘Have a nice night with your friend,’ he said.

‘Gino Riggi is not my friend,’ she replied straight away.

Costa became aware that there was a side to this conversation.

‘Colleague, then.’

She didn’t reply. There was an awkward look in her deep brown eyes, one he thought he recognized. Costa tried to remember the circumstances of Rosa’s departure from Falcone’s
unit. It had happened quickly, with no fuss, no recriminations. And she didn’t turn up in narcotics straight away either.

‘I would really appreciate it if you came with me tonight,’ she said with a sudden, earnest intent. ‘It could be in your interest, just as much as mine.’

He looked around. They were outside the Questura, in the Piazza San Michele, beyond the tiny crowd of demonstrators still waving banners in support of Mina Gabriel and women’s rights.

‘Are you looking for Riggi?’ he asked straight out.

She raised her trim shoulders slightly and frowned.

‘Him. And Robert Gabriel.’ He watched as she tried to stifle the briefest moment of embarrassment. ‘Why do I tell you things I’m not supposed to? Things I don’t
tell anyone else?’

‘I imagine because you want to.’

‘Yes,’ she said, exasperated. ‘But why?’

He shrugged and waved the phone.

‘Got to make a call. Private. Where do you start and when?’

‘The Coyote. Seven. You know it?’

‘Oh yes. I’ll be there.’

‘Thanks.’

She started to walk away. He caught her arm gently.

‘Does Riggi have any idea he’s under investigation?’ Costa asked. ‘And that you’re the one who’s trying to nail him?’

Rosa looked worried, uncertain of herself, and that was rare.

‘I wish I knew. He’s a slippery bastard. I’ve been with him for a month now. I don’t know half the people he deals with. What he does most of the time.’

He thought about this and asked, ‘What about Robert Gabriel? Have you met him?’

‘Met him? I haven’t even seen him. Riggi insists he deals with the English kid alone. No one else goes near.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and watched her go.

He looked at the phone. There was a missed call from a number he recognized. He returned it, heard Agata answer, and the relief in her voice, followed quickly by indignation.

‘You never called,’ she said.

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the battered stone wall of the Questura.

‘It’s only been a day. Also, I seem to be back at work. Sorry.’

He didn’t say what was in his head: this wasn’t a good idea, she was better off if he stayed out of her life.

‘Can you come round, please? Now?’

He felt tired and grubby. His head ached. Costa checked his watch, calculated he had forty minutes before the appointment with Rosa at the Coyote, took a deep breath and said, ‘Of
course.’

Five minutes later he was in the Via Governo Vecchio dragging his scooter onto its stand. He got a lascivious wink from the old woman who was once again sweeping up outside as
he knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment. Agata answered the door still in her office clothes: a smart blue suit. She didn’t look him in the eye as she let him in.

The place was a beautiful little studio, an elegant home packed into no more than a hundred square metres. A gigantic print of Botticelli’s
Venus
ran along the main wall. A tiny
kitchen was tucked into the far corner. The timbered floor was covered in fashionable ethnic rugs. At the end of the room an open staircase with a banister led up to a double bed set in a gallery
suspended directly over a small dining table. Once this had probably been no more than a storeroom for the house above. Now it was transformed into a sophisticated compact apartment just a few
steps from the Piazza Navona, home to the young woman who sat opposite him, in front of Botticelli’s ill-proportioned goddess rising naked from her scallop shell, a pale, northern figure set
against Agata’s darker, Sicilian features.

Something linked them, though. An expression of doubt, anxiety even, at the circumstances in which they found themselves.

‘How’s work?’ he asked. ‘Did you have a nice meal with your boss?’

‘I didn’t ask you here to talk about that,’ she said very quickly. ‘It’s this case of yours. That poor girl in the street. Mina Gabriel.’

Costa privately cursed the media and asked, ‘What about her?’

‘All this talk about Malise Gabriel and Galileo and Beatrice Cenci. This picture . . .’

She had a copy of the evening paper, the one which had placed Mina’s features over the portrait in the Barberini.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read.’

‘Well, I might not, if I hadn’t heard it from your friends first.’

She looked unhappy. The way Agata had avoided talking about work – this wasn’t like her. She’d seemed so enthused by the idea of getting a job, one that was entirely about her
first love, art.

‘I can’t really talk about a live case. I’m sorry.’

‘You already have talked about it. In a restaurant, of all places.’

She watched him from her plush chair on the other side of the coffee table. He wondered if a teacher’s wages would really pay for a place like this. It seemed unlikely.

‘On Sunday night,’ he said, ‘we still thought . . . we hoped Malise Gabriel’s death was an accident. That seems less likely now, and Leo certainly has a confirmed case of
murder which is obviously linked to the family. The American woman who leased them their apartment.’

Her eyes grew wide with shock and indignation.

‘Do you honestly think that poor girl could have been responsible for the murder of anyone? Let alone her own father? Or that a man like Malise Gabriel could have done such horrible things
to his own daughter?’

Costa didn’t want this conversation.

‘Agata,’ he said. ‘The world’s full of truths we’d rather not face. Evil isn’t some dry, philosophical debate. Or at least not only that. It’s people.
Ordinary people. Decent people, given another throw of the dice. You learn to live with it.’

‘I don’t want to live with it! I hate it. My world . . .’ He caught her naive, slightly wild expression and saw again the young, innocent sister he’d first met, bustling
through Rome in her black uniform, tackling everything she encountered with a fine, sharp intellect, but always from a distance, disengaged.

‘The world you lived in wasn’t real,’ he said, and hoped he hadn’t gone too far. ‘You looked at the rest of us from behind the walls of your convent. As if we were
specimens. I’m sorry if people disappoint. They’re just human.’

Agata waved him away with an impatient arm.

‘You’re missing something here. An important point.’

She picked up the paper and stabbed a finger at the photograph of Mina, superimposed upon the frail, sad figure of Beatrice in Guido Reni’s painting from the Barberini.

‘This,’ she insisted, ‘isn’t reality. It’s myth, manufactured myth at that.’

He didn’t understand her point and said so.

‘Look.’ Agata walked over to the sideboard and picked up a blue folder full of documents. ‘I’ve been doing some research. Real research. Academic research.’

‘You’ve had time?’

‘I made time. I thought it was important.’ She flicked through the folder. ‘If Mina and her family are consciously trying to copy Beatrice Cenci they’re following in
false footsteps, and they must surely know it. This painting for one thing.’

She retrieved a copy of the original portrait from the Barberini.

‘It’s not Beatrice,’ Agata stated with the same kind of certainty she’d possessed when evaluating the mysterious lost Caravaggio that had first brought them together.

‘According to the Barberini,’ Costa began.

‘I know what the Barberini say and they’re wrong. The best they should offer is an attribution. The work didn’t even appear in any known catalogue until the late eighteenth
century, only thirty years before Shelley saw it and gave the Beatrice myth international appeal. Guido Reni probably never painted a single canvas in Rome until eight or ten years after her
execution, so it can’t have been painted from life, whatever the guide books say. Stylistically too . . .’ Her fingers ran across the original’s features. ‘I won’t
bore you with the details but there are strong reasons to believe that not only is it not Beatrice, it’s not by Reni either.’

This seemed interesting, but he felt bound to ask, ‘Does that matter? In terms of our case?’

‘Of course. Do you think this is the only fabrication?’ She stared at him. ‘How old was Beatrice when she died?’

He glanced at the familiar portrait and said, ‘Seventeen or eighteen. I forget.’

‘You’ve forgotten nothing. You never really knew. Here, read this.’

She threw across a single sheet. It was a printout from an academic website, a report of a book published in 1879 by a Roman historian, Antonio Bertoletti. In a former city library Bertoletti
had found Francesco Cenci’s own register of the births and deaths of his children. An entry in the list detailed the birth of Beatrice, in the palace in the ghetto, on 6 February 1577, a
Wednesday, at eleven in the evening.

Costa tried to work this out. ‘That must mean . . .’ His arithmetic was never wonderful when it came to dates.

‘She was actually twenty-two when she died. Not that you’d believe that from Shelley or Stendhal or any of the other great fabricators. Now . . .’

Another page from Bertoletti’s account. It was a codicil to Beatrice’s will, lodged in Rome just a few days before her execution. The change was made to give a bequest of one
thousand scudi to an unnamed ‘poor boy’. This was a substantial amount of money. Beatrice was a wealthy woman. Earlier she’d divided her fortune predictably among her surviving
relatives. Only when the Vatican confirmed her death sentence did she bring in an annuity for this anonymous child, with an instruction that he be given complete control of the capital if he
survived to the age of twenty.