The Fallen Angel (3 page)

Then he took a deep breath and began to lift the girl’s father off the ground.

The body felt unexpectedly light in his arms. Something warm and liquid trickled onto his neck. He didn’t want to think about what it might be. Steadily, making sure he didn’t
stumble, Costa crossed the street and staggered towards the alley opposite. When he felt sure he was sufficiently distant from the palace behind, he lowered his burden gently onto the pavement. The
girl and Agata were a few steps away. The daughter watched him for a moment then withdrew herself from Agata’s grip and came to stand at the end of the cul-de-sac, her eyes on the building
opposite.

The stream of rubble was turning into a torrent. Costa looked up and saw that a good five metres of scaffolding at the end of the balcony had begun slowly to tear itself from the front, dangling
downwards, swaying from side to side like some timber and metal pendulum struggling to mark the passage of time as it dispensed itself and the fabric of the balcony onto the street below.

Finally there was a siren. He turned and saw the mirrored flash of a blue emergency light on the Lungotevere de’ Cenci. Costa made a frantic call to the control room to warn them about the
state of the building and demand an emergency construction crew. A police van turned into the head of the lane and found itself blocked by parked cars. It stopped, and some men got out and began to
walk directly towards the area of the collapse.

Ignoring the continuing torrent of debris raining down on the street, Costa stepped out and waved at them to stop. At that moment the final segment of hanging terrace and scaffolding began to
give way and tumbled to earth in a deadly rain of metal and timber and concrete that shattered on the black cobblestones a few metres in front of him. He retreated quickly, trying to find safety,
listening to what sounded like the crackle of gunfire.

‘Nic . . .’ Agata was by his side, peering anxiously into his face, as he reached the pavement. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ She was alone. ‘Where’s the girl?’

‘Here.’ Agata Graziano turned to look behind her. The crowd had retreated into the alley when the balcony began to collapse. Now they were cautiously starting to return. Agata put a
puzzled hand to her head. ‘Well, she was . . .’

He heard that young, almost childish voice again, and this time it bore something different, something he hadn’t expected. Anger. Fury. Perhaps even blame.

‘Robert!
Robert!
’

The girl was back in the road, walking towards the inky pool of darkness around what he assumed was the palace door. Costa found the questions kept coming. Why had no one else in the building
noticed what was happening here? There were no lights on the lower floors, only in the windows close to the collapsed balcony. No illumination over the entrance itself, where surely there should
have been at the least a set of lit bell pushes of the kind that sat outside every apartment block in Rome.

‘OK,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘I am past persuasion.’

He marched into the road, stood in front of the girl and ordered her to return to the safer side of the street. She ignored him completely, her eyes fixed on the palazzo, calling someone’s
name again and again.

Costa sighed, seized her by the waist then threw her over his shoulder the way a father did with a recalcitrant child. She weighed more than he expected but she didn’t protest, just kept
calling that single name, plaintively, out of fear, he thought, nothing else.

Robert . . .

‘Don’t leave here again,’ he ordered as he let her down onto the pavement.

She went quiet and shut her eyes briefly. Then she looked at him and Costa felt his heart skip a beat. There was something she wanted to say, and wouldn’t, out of fear, perhaps. Or
something else. He knew it. Could feel it. Understood, too, that there was nothing he could do to persuade her to speak what was on her mind, in her heart.

‘My brother’s in there somewhere,’ she murmured. Then, shouting again, ‘Robert . . . !’

Another shape came out from the darkness by the entrance. It stayed in the shadows. Costa could just make out a tall figure walking through the continuing shower of dirt and stone as if it
didn’t matter.

There was a gun high in his right hand, waving towards the stars. Costa felt his heart sink. Quickly he held out both arms, told those around him to retreat further back into the alley behind,
and tried to think.

A good half-dozen uniformed men were slowly working their way up the street, wary of the building. They saw what was happening and took positions by the parked cars, reaching for their
weapons.

The girl tugged on Costa’s arm.

She stared into his face, pleading.

‘It’s my brother. He’s not . . . bad.’

‘Please go back to where you were.’ She didn’t move. ‘Mina . . .’

‘Don’t you dare hurt him,’ she said, retreating.

He stepped out onto the cobblestones, arms held high and open, trying to assess what he was seeing.

‘Robert,’ he said firmly. ‘We need to get medical attention for your father.’

The brother was half in shadow. From what Costa could see he was wearing a bloodied T-shirt and jeans. His free hand still kept the gun high in the air. A stray and ludicrous thought went
through Costa’s head: he’s running away from home, the way children sometimes do.

All that the uniforms would see was a man in possession of a firearm. They would be quietly telling themselves to waste no time or niceties in bringing this confrontation to an end, and Costa
couldn’t blame them for that.

‘Your sister needs you,’ Costa added, watching him closely.

He wished he could see the face of this figure in the shadows, read some expression there. But the youth stayed back in the darkness, as if afraid. Only the gun was in the half-light,
wavering.

‘She’s safe now,’ a stony voice said in English.

Costa found his head was beginning to hurt.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Robert?’ the girl cried in a begging, childlike tone from behind.
‘Robert . . . ?’

Another explosion ripped through the warm Roman night and this time it was a gunshot. Costa found himself blinking, cowering instinctively, unable to see what had happened, where the weapon was
aimed.

Then a memory. Another time. Another shot, by the grim walls of the mausoleum of Augustus, one that had taken his wife from the world.

He wheeled round anxiously, dark images rising in his head. Agata was there, with the girl. They stood backed up against the wall, eyes shiny with fear. Unharmed.

‘Thank God for that,’ Costa muttered to himself, and heard the uniforms moving swiftly, heard shouts.

When his attention returned to the street it was empty save for the taut, determined shapes of five or six cops working their way through the lines of parked cars, cautiously, step by step,
making sure to stay on the safe side of the street.

The brother was gone, fled into the spider’s web of lanes that ran throughout the ghetto in this labyrinthine quarter of the
centro storico
.

A uniformed officer he knew walked over, gun in hand, pushed up his helmet visor and asked, ‘What the hell was that about? The kid could have got himself killed.’

It almost seemed as if that was the idea, Costa thought.

‘Did he fire at me?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the officer said, shaking his head. ‘He took a shot at that . . .’ A nod at the decrepit palazzo behind them. ‘Then he was off. I’ve got two men going
after him. For what it’s worth. This place is like a rabbit warren. Besides . . .’ He eyed the girl, who was now on the ground next to her father, sitting quietly, cross-legged in the
dirt, Costa’s jacket still round her shoulders. She was holding the dead man’s hand, rocking to and fro, eyes listless, focused on nothing. ‘We’ve got a name, haven’t
we? English? Been . . . ?’ He made a familiar gesture with an imaginary bottle. ‘. . . knocking it back?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Costa admitted. ‘I’m off duty.’

The uniform man smiled and said, ‘It’s my case then.’

‘What? It’s a collapsed building. And a dead man.’

‘If some scary-eyed kid waves a gun in your face . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a case.’

Costa wasn’t listening. The girl called Mina was watching him from beside her father’s body on the other side of the street and there was an expression on her beautiful young face
– a pained, resigned sadness so profound, so innocent, it gave him a chill.

He walked over and crouched down next to her.

‘Mina,’ he said, trying to look into her face, though it wasn’t easy.

‘What?’

‘Is there something we should know? Something you want to tell us?’

It was the hesitation that struck him. She waited a good two seconds, staring at the ground, then mumbled, ‘What kind of thing?’

‘I don’t know. I just wondered.’

Then she did look at him and he found he couldn’t interpret the expression in her eyes at all.

‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.

‘I called her. She said she’d be here soon.’

Agata put an arm round her and glared at him. He wanted to say to her:
this is my job, this is what I do.
Notice things. Little things sometimes. Though not now, not when he was on
holiday, with little to occupy him except bringing an ancient Vespa back to life.

‘I’ll ask someone to look after you,’ Costa told the girl, got to his feet, and took a look around him, trying to remember what he knew about this part of the city.

The memory came back suddenly, like a ghost emerging from behind some long-forgotten door.

A name. That of a beautiful, tragic young woman. One notorious enough to have earned her a legacy close to the Lungotevere, the stretch of busy road by the river here. Even to the very place
where Mina’s father had died.

There was a sign on the corner of the palazzo with the shattered scaffolding. The street was the Via Beatrice Cenci. His eyes refused to leave the girl called Mina as Costa found himself
recalling a tragedy from another age.

The following Sunday morning, more than twenty-four hours after the incident in the ghetto and his encounter with the strange young English girl, Costa found himself downstairs
on the sofa in the living room of his home near the Appian Way, flicking through two old history books of his father’s which retold the tale of the Cenci family.

It was almost seven thirty. The Questura would be slowly coming to life, such as it was on this last weekend of August. Someone, perhaps Leo Falcone, would be looking at the previous day’s
report of the building collapse, wondering if this was in any way the business of the police.

The media didn’t think so. The TV bulletins ran brief stories that told of a tragic accident, one that had taken the life of a foreign academic. Knowing the way these things worked, Costa
felt sure their verdict came directly from the authorities. The dog days of August were the slowest, most enervating time of the year. The crime figures fell through the floor in these scorching,
exhausting weeks. Any Romans who had the time and money fled the city for the beach or the mountains, somewhere cool to relax. Those who remained drifted through the weeks until September arrived,
with a sluggish return to work and, at some point, a welcome hint of autumn.

He’d spent the previous day alone at home, tinkering with the Vespa, sleeping, thinking about tackling some of the persistent chores that the big, old farmhouse he’d inherited seemed
to demand with an ever-increasing frequency.

Thinking about Agata Graziano too, wondering what exactly he should do about her unexpected reappearance in his life. Their brief semi-drunken embrace had happened a little too suddenly. When
he’d gone out to the party that Friday night he hadn’t, for one moment, expected to meet the woman who’d flitted through his life so quickly, yet with such intensity, two years
before. He didn’t want to lose touch with her again. Equally he didn’t want to rush anything, to add one more complexity to her return to Rome, and a life quite unlike that of the
cloistered sister she had been.

The accident had ended messily. Police, construction crews and paramedics had descended on the Via Beatrice Cenci. After a little while the girl’s distraught mother emerged from the night
and went with her in the ambulance to the hospital in San Giovanni. Exhausted, dirty, confused, he’d seen Agata to the door of her little apartment in Governo Vecchio then, perhaps foolishly,
taken his little scooter home, only to sleep for ten solid hours and wake with a single name ringing round his head.

At first he’d been unwilling to listen to its siren call. He’d called Agata, had a slightly strained conversation about the night before, and made a tentative arrangement to meet
later in the week. Still there was another name that wouldn’t leave him, that of Beatrice Cenci, a young woman whose fame and notoriety were commemorated both in an old and narrow street in
the heart of Rome and a body of literature and art that spanned centuries and continents.

She was there, on the table, her face in front of his eyes, very much alive in the famous portrait from the Barberini gallery. A young girl executed by the Vatican in circumstances that still
had the power to haunt those who came across her story. Beautiful Beatrice, muse to poets and writers and artists, captured forever by the artist Guido Reni, a defiant symbol of youthful innocence
punished with unimaginable cruelty for avenging the sexual tyranny of a parent.

He looked again, recalling that shocking incident in the early hours of the previous day and his conviction, which had not waned more than twenty four hours later, that the daughter had wanted
to tell him something. This long-dead face, staring out from the canvas, beseeching the viewer in silence, was disturbingly close to that of Mina, the frightened yet defiant figure in the bloodied
pyjamas, bent over the broken corpse of her own father. It was more than a physical similarity. Something in the eyes of Reni’s Beatrice seemed to have carried over into the expression of the
English girl, some guileless, mute acceptance of the harshness of life, a burden borne with the serene stillness of a saint awaiting martyrdom.