The Fallen Angel

of a sense of guilt at the failure of his own marriage. It had been used to pay for Agata’s education. When Falcone discovered this, ever curious, he had arranged to meet the young girl, liked her, and the two had come to form an odd bond, close yet detached too, both grateful to the other for something they rarely acknowledged. Unconsciously, perhaps against his own wishes, Falcone had become in some sense a substitute yet distant parent. The relationship allowed her rather more leeway with him than was afforded to most.

‘I like the look of it, Leo,’ Agata said cheerily. ‘You don’t have to eat in a fancy restaurant every day, do you?’

‘It’s not even a restaurant, really, is it?’

Costa pitched in.

‘My father used to bring me here. He said it’s real working-class Roman food.’

Falcone shot him a filthy look, up and down the grubby suit, and grumbled, ‘My point exactly.’

‘You said I could choose,’ Peroni pointed out, waving a handful of tickets. ‘And we’re members now.’

In one sense at least, the grumpy old inspector was correct. Sora Margherita was no longer a restaurant. The city authorities had complained about the lack of facilities in the tiny dining room set behind a small door in the ghetto and, amidst local outrage, forced the place to close. Then the owners discovered a loophole, and reopened as the ‘Associazione Culturale Sora Margherita’. A dining club, membership free, fees charged according to how much one ate and drank. At which point the city gave up and culinary life in the ghetto returned to normal.

Costa walked round to Agata and Teresa, kissed them both on the cheek, took his membership ticket from the set proffered by Peroni and led the way inside. Within fifteen minutes they were in a quiet corner away from the only other group braving the scorching night, seated in front of some of the best carciofi alla giudia, deep-fried artichokes, he’d ever encountered. The wine was from Velletri. The staff were charming and quite unperturbed by the argument at the door. Even Falcone began to smile after a while. Then the conversation started in earnest.

The topic was Malise Gabriel, a man with a curious first name, Gaelic it seemed. He was an ethologist, a scientist specializing in the study of animal behaviour, who graduated from Cambridge and won a readership there before he turned thirty. Ten years later he wrote the book which Peroni found in the apartment, All the Gods are Dead. The title came from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, though Gabriel’s work made Nietzsche’s attack on the Church appear mild. It was a calculated, prolonged and highly detailed assault on organized religion and religious thought, a broadside that had managed to offend Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Buddhists and Hindus alike, while selling millions and entering multiple translations. For one brief year the book had been everywhere: cited as a cruel and corrosive diatribe by its critics and a brave and perceptively fresh analysis by its supporters, the first shot in a war in which secularism would reclaim the moral high ground for good, dispatching religion to the fantasy world of superstition where Malise Gabriel felt it belonged. Then this controversial academic fell abruptly out of the public eye, resigned from Cambridge and left the country, to embark upon the shifting and footloose academic career, much of it spent with inferior institutions, which had led him ultimately to Rome.

Falcone was not idle that afternoon. He had pieced together some of the story and what he had to reveal gave Costa pause. Cecilia Urquhart was, like Gabriel, part of a long-established English aristocratic family, hers Protestant, his originally Catholic. A bright and precocious pupil at school, she had won a place at Cambridge when she was eighteen. It was there, months later, that she met Gabriel, there that she fell pregnant. Gabriel resigned from the university to avoid the ensuing scandal and Cecilia lost what appeared to be a promising academic career. He never wrote another book and became something of a wandering pariah. His last post in Wisconsin ended the way of most of its predecessors: summary dismissal over an undisclosed internal argument. After that, he came to Rome, employed principally as an editor with the curious institution known as the Confraternita delle Civette.

‘Ridiculous name,’ Peroni grumbled.

Teresa sighed and said, ‘You know, you people amaze me. There’s a million television programmes about the history of art and politics and society. But something about science? Never.’

Pasta arrived from a beaming waiter, simple and delicious with tomato sauce.

‘The Brotherhood of the Owls was one of the oldest and most revered scientific institutions in Italy,’ the pathologist went on.

‘Was?’ Costa asked.

She squirmed a touch.

‘I thought it had packed in a few years ago, to be honest,’ she admitted. ‘Apparently some Englishman came back and rescued it. All the same it’s still odd you’ve never even heard of it. This is your history too.’

Costa recalled what Peroni had said about Teresa and hot weather. It seemed spot on.

‘What about Galileo?’ she asked. ‘Anyone heard of him?’

He remembered the bookmark, and the curious words written on the flip side of what looked suspiciously like a photo of the naked Mina Gabriel. Their origin had come back to him that afternoon as he sat on the Campidoglio, beneath the statue of Marcus Aurelius.

‘“E pur si muove”,’ Costa said. ‘“And yet it moves”. Galileo said that when. .’ He fought to recall the precise circumstances. ‘When he was in a tight corner or something.’

Teresa Lupo put down her fork. Always a bad sign.

‘“In a tight corner”? The Catholic Inquisition put him on trial for his life. All because he had the temerity to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the earth moved round the sun, not the other way round, whatever the Pope of the time thought. They made him choose between being burned alive at the stake as a heretic, as the Vatican did with another awkward genius, Giordano Bruno, in the Campo dei Fiori a few years before. Or renouncing his beliefs, which he knew absolutely to be true.’

‘I remember this story,’ Peroni announced, waving some bigoli around the table, spattering sauce everywhere. ‘As Galileo walked away from the Inquisition he muttered, “and yet it moves”. Just to let everyone know he hadn’t really changed his mind.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Brave man,’ he added.

‘Why would Malise Gabriel write that on a bookmark?’ Falcone wondered. ‘And what does this have to do with the Brotherhood of the Owls?’

Teresa cast a savage look in his direction.

‘A lot. Let me tell you something. At the beginning of the 1990s I was a student at La Sapienza. A Cardinal of the Catholic Church came to give a lecture about religion and science.’ She shook her head, as if still unable to believe what she was about to disclose. ‘He turned up and told us that the outrage among the scientific community about Galileo’s treatment, his forced recantation on pain of death, was somehow our problem. Something to do with the self-doubt of the modern age. And who was that Cardinal?’

She leaned forward and looked at Agata, who was sitting quietly picking at her food.

‘None other than one Cardinal Ratzinger. Your Pope!’

‘Not my Pope,’ Agata replied. ‘The Church’s Pope. Everyone’s. Bookmark? What bookmark? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Teresa harrumphed, folded her arms and stared at Falcone.

‘I’m not sure, either,’ she declared. ‘I merely give you some facts. The Brotherhood of the Owls is a scientific academy of like-minded men founded by the supporters of Galileo around the time of his trial, one which made him a member, not that he asked for it, or perhaps even appreciated the honour.’

‘So,’ Peroni asked, trying to understand, ‘they would be on Galileo’s side? Malise Gabriel’s side?’

‘Not exactly,’ Teresa continued. ‘The Brotherhood was formed to try to persuade the Vatican there was a middle way in dealing with Galileo. That the Church and science could live happily alongside one another, agreeing on occasion to disagree. They wanted to say we should leave science to the scientists and religion to the Church.’

She looked at each of them in turn.

‘They were fools. The Pope wasn’t interested in common ground. He did as he pleased, and Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest, simply for telling the truth.’

Peroni ordered some meat and an extra plate of vegetables for Nic. And more water. It was getting hotter in the little restaurant.