The Fallen Angel (4 page)

How had he first encountered the Cencis? It was in his teens, when questions, about the world, about the imperfection of his parents, began to cast a shadow on a life he had previously thought
perfect. Around the time his own mother died after a long illness, Costa found himself briefly obsessed with Beatrice, compelled to read these two books, trying to understand her fate.

Through her story he began to appreciate that men held an ambivalent attitude to women, one that praised and adored their beauty while condemning, and punishing on occasion, their courage and
individuality. It was a failing commonly acknowledged, but always in silence, unmentioned, unmentionable. And so Beatrice Cenci cast a long shadow across Rome because her story came to embody this
very human frailty in a way that allowed it to be expressed and exorcised, century after century.

After her execution thousands had followed her coffin along the Via Giulia, across the Ponte Sisto, up the steep hill in Trastevere to the little church of San Pietro in Montorio at the foot of
the Gianicolo hill. There she was buried in an unmarked grave beneath the altar. Costa knew the church, though not well. This quiet little place was rarely visited except by those seeking
Bramante’s haunting little temple which was supposed to mark the site of St Peter’s martyrdom, not the last resting place of a childlike girl butchered as a common criminal. Even there
Beatrice found no peace. Local rumour had it that Napoleon’s troops, when they ran riot in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century, exhumed her famous corpse and played football with the
severed skull.

For a few brief, agonizing months of his mother’s illness Beatrice was rarely from Costa’s head, a distraction and a nagging reminder of another approaching tragedy, one much closer
to home. He could still recall walking past the Ponte Rotto, the ruins of the imperial-era bridge stranded in the river near Tiber Island, which Beatrice had offered to rebuild from her own
fortune, if only the Church would let her family survive. It had seemed to his young mind utterly savage that the tyrant in the Vatican should have refused her offer and instead taken her life, and
those of her brother and stepmother.

Beatrice was a victim, one transformed into a heroine by her indefatigable will and serene beauty, and her refusal to bend to the power of the Pope who, some sources claimed, pursued her for his
own reasons, among them the seizure of the valuable Cenci estates.

Buoyed by popular stories and Reni’s portrait of a tortured innocence, her savage end came to touch people far beyond Italy. Painters had been drawn to it for centuries. Some had even
depicted Reni and the girl together in prison the night before she was beheaded, the artist at his easel, she sitting quietly, patiently, without fear, but with a muted sense of fatalistic
resignation that would be captured on canvas for eternity. On the opera stage and in the theatre, in the exquisite Victorian photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the story of the virginal Roman
girl caught the imaginations of poets and writers and musicians. Alexandre Dumas had told her tale before moving on to
The Count of Monte Cristo
and
The Three Musketeers
. The American
Nathaniel Hawthorne made her fate a focal part of the moral argument in his book,
The Marble Faun
.

Fifty years before Hawthorne, the English poet Shelley had seen Reni’s portrait in the Barberini and set down a description of the doomed girl which, for Costa, summed up the general
conception of her character and its perennial appeal.

‘There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features; she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness,’ Shelley
wrote.

Costa couldn’t shake from his head the idea that the selfsame words could so easily be applied to the English girl, Mina, doggedly staying by her dead father, eyes brimming with tears,
afraid, yet refusing to move until he agreed to her demand to carry the man’s broken body to safety.

And the words of her brother, fleeing into the night after firing a gun, apparently at the building where they’d lived.

She’s safe now.

Safe from what? The collapse of the building above her? Or something else altogether?

In the eyes of the world Beatrice Cenci was a righteous criminal, guilty of a just conspiracy to murder the father who oppressed, beat and raped her. A young woman guilty of the heinous crime of
patricide in concert with her brother, stepmother and two henchmen, who had hammered a nail through Francesco’s skull then – and this element troubled Costa as the detail came back to
him – thrown the battered body out of the window, hoping to pretend to the world that he had died accidentally from the fall.

It had taken the investigators of the Vatican to discover the truth, through means the sixteenth century thought normal: torture, in all its forms. He had shivered as he read again how the young
woman’s arms had been ripped from their sockets as her inquisitors hauled her to the ceiling on ropes, fighting, and failing, to extract a confession. Giacomo, her brother, was less brave,
and through his cowardice and unpredictable behaviour doomed them all. Under duress the truth, and the admissions, emerged, though never from her. Beatrice’s father, a rich and cruel
nobleman, was a monster who sexually molested his daughter over a period of months, forcing her to take part in vile trysts with her own stepmother and with other men as he watched. His murder was
the patricide of a heartless tyrant, hated by all. But patricide nonetheless, a crime the Pope of the day saw fit to punish with the utmost severity.

And so, on 11 September 1599, Giacomo was paraded through the streets of the
centro storico
in a tumbrel as torturers tore the flesh from his body with red-hot pincers. When they reached
the piazza by the Ponte Sant’Angelo they bludgeoned him to death with a mallet to the temple. His corpse was decapitated and dismembered, the four quarters of his body hung from the bridge on
butcher’s hooks for all to see. Beatrice’s stepmother followed to the same scaffold. Finally, watched by her younger brother, the only member of the Cenci family allowed to live,
Beatrice walked impassively to the block, her head held high in front of sympathetic crowds that lined the bridge and the banks of the Tiber, all screaming for mercy for a sinner surely more
deserving than most.

They fell silent at the final moment. The executioner raised his blade and the hooded monks of the Confraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, the Brotherhood of the Decapitated John the Baptist,
waved their images of Christ in her face. She died from a single blow of the sword, refusing to admit her guilt or confirm a single detail of her father’s criminal and incestuous abuse.
Thousands of mourners followed her bier to San Pietro in Montorio that evening. Even now the anniversary of her death was marked each year by a faithful few, and there were those who claimed her
ghost haunted the environs of her old Roman home in the ghetto, the Palazzo Cenci, and the bridge in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo close to where she died.

Why this obsession that spanned centuries and continents? Perhaps because her fate asked awkward, unanswerable questions. How compliant was she in the death of her father? Did she initiate the
attack, and spur on the murderers themselves when they faltered, as Giacomo had hinted? Or was she the silent victim, resigned to her death, simple and profound in her fatalism, as she had been to
her depraved father’s abuses until, in the eyes of her admirers, finally she chose to place her rights as an individual above the harsh, inflexible tenets of the law?

There was, he thought, more to the enduring attraction of this story than met the eye. The sympathy the Cenci case aroused seemed to stem also from a general sense of unease surrounding the
taboo of incest, a crime that always generated extreme emotions. Costa had been a police officer long enough to understand that sexual abuse within the family was more common than many appreciated,
and usually went unreported and unpunished.

‘Daddy,’ he said quietly to himself, remembering the night before.

He got himself a coffee and something to eat. Outside the kitchen window the vines were beginning to grow heavy with fruit. Another ten days of inaction remained. He could call
Agata, ask her out for lunch. Or tinker with the Vespa’s temperamental two-stroke engine, work on the field, tackle so many things that needed his attention.

The book lay on the table, the cover, that evocative image of Reni’s, uppermost.

There were questions that needed to be answered and he wondered if, in the stifling dying days of August, anyone would notice.

At a quarter to nine he phoned the Questura. Falcone was on duty. The inspector sounded cheery if a little tired.

‘You can’t keep out of trouble, can you?’ Falcone observed when he had listened to Costa’s questions.

‘So you’d have walked away?’

‘We’re not on duty permanently, Nic. What exactly do you want?’

‘I’d like to know what’s happening. Whose case is this?’

Falcone grunted something inaudible. There was the sound of fingers clacking on a keyboard.

‘Not ours, that’s for sure. The city building inspectors are going to look at the contractor and the works records. If there’s a criminal prosecution it’s theirs, not
ours. We don’t do construction work.’

‘The brother?’

‘Narcotics are handling that. They knew him already. Strange family. English. The father was an academic, quite well known in some circles. The mother a part-time office worker and
musician. The daughter a saint, it seems. And the son a dope dealer to all those charming foreign kids who hang around the bars on the Campo. Takes all types.’

‘He had a gun.’

‘Fired it in the air, or so the witnesses said. Did he look popped up?’

Costa tried to remember.

‘I didn’t see him very well. I got the impression he was scared.’

‘He should have been. He left behind enough dope to put him in jail for a year or two. The kid wanted out of there with no one chasing him. The drugs squad can do this kind of thing.
It’s beneath us.’

‘The autopsy . . .’

‘It’s Sunday. There’s not the slightest suggestion this is anything but an accident. Half of Teresa’s team are off work, as is the lady herself. It can wait until
tomorrow.’ There was a note of impatience in his voice. ‘Do you really have a single reason to think this is suspicious?’

‘Has anyone even bothered to look inside the apartment?’

‘Yes. Narcotics and the construction people.’

‘If this is a crime scene they’ll leave it in a pretty state.’

‘If, if, if . . . A man steps out onto his balcony for a cigarette and falls five floors from some rickety scaffolding. He was, by the way, drunk too. Uniform found a quarter of a bottle
of Scotch in the girl’s bedroom when we looked.’

‘The girl’s bedroom?’

‘He had to go through there to reach the balcony. Kindly give me some reason to pursue this further or go back to taking a holiday the way normal people do.’

‘If there’s anything wrong here and the city construction people march right through it . . .’

‘Then someone will kick my backside,’ Falcone interrupted.

‘Let me into the building. I can be there in half an hour.’

Falcone hesitated then asked dryly, ‘Is Agata Graziano’s company really so tedious? You do surprise me.’

‘None of your business, Leo. Do I have your permission?’

Costa waited. He’d pushed the right buttons. The building department people could be guaranteed to wipe out anything useful if it existed. The fall-out from that kind of mistake could be
painful.

‘If you can convince Peroni the two of you can go and waste your time in there,’ Falcone said in the end. ‘I’m sick of him malingering around here, moaning about the
heat.’

The line went quiet. Peroni came on. His voice sounded croaky and weak.

‘You want to do what?’ he asked after Costa explained the idea in detail.

‘There’s a little cafe in Portico d’Ottavia. You know it?’

‘No. It’s Sunday. Are they open?’

‘It’s the ghetto, Gianni. Remember? I’ll buy you a coffee.’

‘Sounds promising.’

A memory came back of that part of the city: the first time he took Emily there, and the childlike smile on her face.

‘And some Jewish pizza too.’

‘Thanks for that,’ Peroni mumbled, then hung up.

One hour later they met in the little place in the ghetto. Costa liked this area. The mundane mingled with the remains of the magnificent, the past with the present. A few
strides along from the humble cafe where they met stood the remains of the arch Augustus had erected in honour of his sister Octavia. It was an interesting part of Rome, a mix of grand, sometimes
crumbling palaces, humble homes, some Jewish buildings and organizations, and a few restaurants that didn’t look down on a vegetarian like him.

Peroni fell onto a stool in the cafe with a sigh then placed his head in his hands. The burly, middle-aged cop had lost his customary smile. His scarred, friendly face was wan and bloodless.
Judging by the mournful look in his bleary eyes he had very little confidence that the large, strong coffee and slice of
pizza ebraica
in front of him would do much to change the situation.
He was wearing a pale brown jacket that had seen better days, an ill-matching pair of blue trousers, and a cheap, whitish shirt, the necktie bunched together in a half-knot at the open neck.

‘Why is it you look so bright and breezy when I feel awful?’ he asked, poking at the pastry on the plate. ‘And why are you wearing an office suit? It’s Sunday. In August.
You’re off duty.’

‘I don’t want to look off duty, do I?’

‘God, I hate enthusiasm. It’s so exhausting. Like this heat. I told Teresa. We should have gone on holiday like everyone else, instead of sweating like pigs in Rome.’

Costa went to the counter and got two glasses of tap water then returned and placed them on the table. He’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning while shaving, thinking about
Beatrice Cenci. Just turned thirty, he still ran from time to time. He was fit, a little skinnier than he once was. His dark hair didn’t seem much interested in changing colour or
disappearing in the near future and his face fell into a smile a lot more easily than it had for a few years. Nor did the heat bother him. Unlike Peroni, he’d grown up in Rome. He expected
the dog days to be like this. Were it not for the nagging thoughts that kept bothering him about the incident in the Via Beatrice Cenci he would have described himself as a contented man.