The Fallen Angel (27 page)

According to Bertoletti the money was intended for Beatrice’s illegitimate son, fathered by the married servant, Olimpio Calvetti, who was known to be her lover, and one of Francesco
Cenci’s murderers. Bertoletti went so far as to suggest that the reason Beatrice was banished from Rome to the distant Cenci castle where Francesco died was to hide the pregnancy.

Costa glanced at the picture he’d assumed was Reni’s portrait of Beatrice and wondered what to say.

‘Rather spoils the story, doesn’t it?’ Agata asked. ‘If Beatrice wasn’t the innocent, virginal teenager, but twenty-two years old, with a child by a married
servant? If, as her brother alleged, she was the focal point of the conspiracy, and forced the others to continue when they were beginning to have second thoughts . . .’

‘That doesn’t change the circumstances of the crime.’

‘Are you sure?’

It was a ridiculous thing to say and he knew it.

‘There’s evidence that Francesco Cenci sexually assaulted his own daughter?’ Costa asked.

‘I don’t think you’d regard it as that. Most of the story that’s been handed down to us was actually invented in the 1740s as part of a ragbag collection of fiction about
life in Italy. No one disputes the idea that the father was a bad-tempered bully and a brute. But the idea of incest was only introduced into the trial by her lawyer very late on. Beatrice
didn’t stay bravely silent either. When she was interrogated a few weeks before she was executed she said on oath that her stepmother urged her to kill her father with these words . .
.’ Agata checked the page. ‘“He will abuse you and rob you of your honour.” Note that word “will”. Doesn’t it suggest a threat of abuse, not the
fact?’

Myths and inventions, Costa thought. Rome was full of them. Some, Malise Gabriel among them, believed the Catholic Church was built on nothing but fabrication from the outset.

‘But does it matter?’ he asked. ‘If you tell a story often enough for people to believe it, doesn’t it become real in some way? The most important way? In our
heads?’

Agata’s eyes never left him. He felt uncomfortable beneath the power and naked interest of her gaze. Talking to this earnest young woman was a challenge usually, no more so than now. She
prompted him to think, to question matters that others took for granted. He felt too tired, too confused for that. And he needed to go. Rosa would be in the Coyote bar already.

‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘Can we talk about this another time?’

Her face fell.

‘I have to go,’ he added. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

She sighed and seemed suddenly miserable at the thought of the following day.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow yet. There’s so much work. The hours . . .’

He got up and said, ‘We’ll work something out. This is very interesting. But to be honest I don’t see how it affects Mina Gabriel.’

‘No,’ she said wryly. ‘You don’t.’

There was a touch of scorn in her voice.

‘Enlighten me.’

She winced and admitted, ‘I can’t really. It doesn’t add up. When I tried to comfort Mina that night, outside the house. When her father . . .’ Agata shook her head and
he was mesmerized by her quick and ready capacity for sympathy towards someone she didn’t even know. ‘That
scene
. I’m telling you, Nic. I know suffering when I see it.
Living in a convent didn’t spare me from the presence of death. I’ve held the hand of someone as the life slipped out of her. I know that pain and I’m telling you. Mina was
grieving when I put my arms around her. No one could possibly invent that. Certainly not a girl who, unlike Beatrice Cenci, really is seventeen. She loved her father. I’m sure of it. And
Malise Gabriel believed in the truth, or at least his definition of it. Truth was more important to him than anything else in the world. That’s what his book’s all about, isn’t
it?’

He wished he had more time. More insight too. There was something here, an elusive idea he couldn’t quite grasp.

Agata Graziano stood in front of him, her fierce intellect working as it always did, and asked, ‘Why would Mina look for inspiration in a fantasy? A fairy-tale concocted out of a squalid
little domestic murder, embroidered over the centuries by storytellers and artists? Why? Shelley said the story of Beatrice was about the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.’ She
took his arms. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? Poetic licence, nothing more. Mina Gabriel must know that better than anyone.’

There was something there he did understand, perhaps better than the inquisitive yet unworldly young woman in front of him.

‘Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong cavern,’ he said.

‘Or there are places you’re not supposed to look at all,’ she told him. ‘However much a man like Malise Gabriel might have hated the idea.’

He didn’t understand what any of this meant, any more than Agata did. But there was something here, something hidden inside these twin tragedies that linked them, even if it was not the
obvious.

‘I don’t think she’s guilty,’ Costa said. ‘Whatever Leo and the media say. The mother, brother, I don’t . . .’

Agata’s voice shrank almost to nothing.

‘Please God, I hope you’re right. What kind of place . . .’

Her small, dark hand went to her mouth. Her eyes were lustrous and damp. She was close to tears. For whom, he wondered? An English girl she didn’t know? Or herself, stranded in the harsh
reality of everyday life, a world she didn’t recognize and perhaps could not begin to face?

They stood close to one another and he remembered that awkward moment on the bridge, with the screams rising from the ghetto as the two of them hesitantly closed towards a kiss.

‘Tomorrow,’ Costa said, seizing her by the shoulders, ‘you will go into work and think of nothing but delivering the most astonishing lecture on Caravaggio you’ve ever
given. Later, some time, I don’t know when, this will all be behind us and we’ll go to Baffetto. I will buy you the best pizza in Rome. Who knows? Maybe I can even entice you onto my
battered little Vespa. It’s not an Alfa Romeo, I know . . .’

‘Don’t joke about that,’ she said sullenly.

He wondered what to say, whether to pry further.

Then his phone rang. Costa found a mild curse slipping his lips and immediately apologized.

It was Rosa. He had to go.

The Coyote Bar was in a side street between the Campo dei Fiori and the Via Giulia, a grubby little dive that scarcely seemed to be in Italy at all. The drinks were two-for-one
until nine, the music deafening rock and reggae, the clientele almost entirely foreign, pushing and shoving to get the free pizza and couscous that had just been placed on the bar.

Rosa sat on a high stool sipping what looked like a mojito and picking at a slice of flabby dough covered in bright red tomato sauce. She didn’t see Costa at first so he was able to watch
her for a minute or two as she alternately smiled at and insulted a couple of young men trying to talk to her, all the while wearing the jaded and arrogant expression that seemed
de rigeur
for women in places like this. She’d always been a good cop, one who could shrug off the uniform and become someone else without so much as a second thought. It was a talent and a curse too
sometimes.

A persistent American kid, tall and strong, like a football player, was standing over her, getting pushy and mouthy when Costa finally walked over.

‘Nic,’ Rosa said brightly, glad to see him arrive. ‘Meet my new friend, Jimmy.’

Costa looked at the gigantic youth towering above him. Jimmy had a crew cut and a blank, unmemorable face. He was wearing some kind of sports shirt with huge numbers on the chest and a baseball
cap on backwards.

‘What are you doing in Rome, Jimmy?’ Costa asked, briefly shaking his hand.

‘History.’

Costa looked more closely at the shirt. The logo made out that it was from the Raffaello College football team, the academy for foreign kids in the Via Corso where Agata taught.

‘Is it fun?’

‘My old man made me do it. History sucks.’

‘That’s an interesting point of view. A friend of mine just started work at the Raffaello. Agata Graziano. She teaches art.’

His small, piggy eyes lit up.

‘Oh wow. The new one? Black-haired chick? She’s a babe. You gotta introduce me.’

Costa frowned and said, ‘I think you should tell her she’s a babe yourself. Now . . .’ Costa picked up a slimy, limp slice of pizza, placed it in Jimmy’s paw-like hand
and waved at the far corner where a bunch of similarly attired kids were standing slack-jawed beneath a TV set showing American football. ‘Go over there. Eat that. And don’t come
back.’

The American kid looked as if he might be trouble for a moment. Then he thought better of it and slunk off.

Rosa was shaking her head.

‘You’ve absolutely no idea how to handle them, have you?’

‘Really?’ he wondered. ‘He’s gone, isn’t he? Where did I go wrong?’

‘We find things out by talking to them. Not scaring them away.’

He took her by the arm and led her to a dark and empty corner where the music was just a little less loud, though still of sufficient volume to afford a curiously noisy form of privacy.

‘We find things out by talking to Robert Gabriel.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Or Gino Riggi. Isn’t that right?’

‘If only,’ she grumbled.

Costa didn’t have much patience left. He asked her for the background to her assignment: watching the cop from narcotics. Slowly, carefully, Rosa outlined what she knew, with the rigorous
precision he’d come to associate with her.

It wasn’t a pretty story, or a rare one. Riggi was one more cop who’d spent a little too long beneath the surface, so much that he’d failed to remember where the lines were
drawn. Internal investigations suspected him of taking money from the Turkish gang, the Vadisi, playing both sides.

‘We think his contact there is called Cakici,’ Rosa said. ‘Robert Gabriel’s some kind of intermediary who runs between the two. If I could lay my hands on the English kid
I’d offer him a deal. Immunity from prosecution in return for what he knows.
If
I could get close to him.’

She raised her slight shoulders in desperation.

‘Of course that was before Leo decided he was wanted for murder. Now, I just don’t know. He doesn’t sound a lot like his sister, does he? Not from what I read in the papers?
She’s all sweetness and light.’

‘Adoptive sister,’ Costa said. ‘Robert was adopted. Apparently he never quite fitted in.’

‘Ah.’ Rosa nodded.

As if that explained everything, Costa thought. He glanced around the room.

‘You think we might find Robert Gabriel here? Or Riggi?’

‘The
centro storico
is the Vadisi’s territory. They like dealing with the foreign kids. Here one minute, gone the next. It’s easy. The profits are reasonable. They
don’t get involved in long-term deals with suppliers or addicts. The Campo, Trastevere, that’s theirs. The places Romans go for their drugs – San Giovanni, out in the suburbs
– they’re still pretty much Italian. Though I have to say our own people are getting muscled out over time. The Turks, the Balkan gangs, they’re a lot tougher, a lot meaner.
They’ll contemplate things that your average Italian hood would baulk at. No need to go to confession afterwards, is there?’

He’d heard that story in so many places. It was part of the changing face of Italian organized crime.

‘You don’t know what Robert Gabriel looks like?’

‘Just Riggi’s description,’ she said. ‘Lanky, muscular kid around twenty with black hair, lots of it. If he’s got something to sell around here . . .’ Her
finger ran across the crowd in the bar. ‘. . . they’ll know him. The way it works is you walk around, look interested, talk to people. Don’t do anything obvious like asking where
you can score.’

‘Thanks for the advice. I appreciate it.’

‘I’m trying to help! If we bump into Riggi then you and I are out on a date.’ Her big brown eyes focused on him. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve played that game, would it?’

‘No.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Comes naturally.’

‘How many bars are there? Like this? The places the Gabriel kid would have worked?’

She looked at the ceiling, counting the answer off on her fingers.

‘Around here, seven. Near Navona, another five or so. Couple by the Pantheon. Six, eight, maybe more, in Trastevere.’

So many? Costa was surprised. This was a side to Rome he, like most citizens, rarely saw. It happened off camera, in places they never visited, a hidden undercurrent in the city’s busy
tide of daily life.

Rosa raised her glass.

‘Soda water and fresh mint. Long evening ahead. Are you ready for it?’

‘Until midnight. Maybe not even that.’

She turned serious for a moment and her made-up face suddenly seemed a lot older.

‘I need you to understand this, Nic. We’ve got a case against Riggi already but it’s fragile. I have to find a little more. Or to put it another way, I need to make sure we
don’t lose anything we already have.’

He got the message. Her news about Riggi wasn’t an accidental revelation, some personal favour Rosa had idly slipped to him as he sat on his Vespa outside the Questura. It was her way of
warning him off any action that might impact upon her own case.

‘We’d better split up and start talking, I suppose,’ Costa said.

Rosa Prabakaran smiled. Then, as he watched, she changed again, found a sultry smile from somewhere, a walk, a posture that seemed to fit this loud, overheated temple to a form of twenty-first
century hedonism he found deeply tedious.

She ambled over to the counter and started chatting to the barista shaking cocktails. Costa wandered outside, said hello to a couple of pretty girls enjoying the fading sun, then slipped round
the corner and called back to forensic. Di Capua was still on duty. Costa was glad of that. Teresa’s deputy seemed to understand these things better than most.

‘I need you to look up the personal mobile-phone number for a plain-clothes officer,’ Costa told him. ‘After that I’m going to call it and I want a trace to where he is
now. Is that possible?’