more a matter of a look, an expression, an attitude. Yet there was a connection between them, a bond visible in the way this modern girl’s eyes were fixed on the painting with an avid intent so heated that Costa wanted to walk straight out of the room, out into the scorching, sunny day and forget everything he knew about the Cenci, their prison in the ghetto, the terrible family intrigue which had led to Beatrice’s tragedy.
‘You see what they’ve done?’ Mina asked, dragging him back to earth. ‘They hide her up there, so you can’t see her eyes, her pain and how she forgives them too. All of them. So they make you stand back, hoping you won’t see the truth. When Shelley was here. .’ He caught sight of her hands. Her delicate long fingers were balling into tense, angry fists. ‘That picture wasn’t high on the wall like that. He could look her straight in the face. Read the books. He was allowed to see. It’s as if they’re still ashamed. Four hundred years later.’
‘The Barberini has a lot of paintings to show,’ Costa said, and that was true.
She was chewing gum like any other teenager, thinking, looking like any other teenager. There was a music player and a set of cheap headphones poking out of her jeans pocket. She squinted at the canvas and said, ‘Thanks for reminding me.’
Then she dragged him by the arm back into the room they’d just passed quickly through, and he knew exactly what they were going to see, understood that she had made the very link that had occurred to him some fifteen years or so before, when he was around the same age, mooching in these great chambers, staring at the dead faces on the walls.
Caravaggio’s
Mina stared at the work, a thoughtful finger to her lips.
‘This was painted the year, maybe the year after, Beatrice was executed. When she died, all of Rome was there. Caravaggio must have been among them.’ She waited, watching him. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘He wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ Costa said quietly.
She hesitated for a moment, her expression quite impenetrable, then asked, ‘So is this a version of what he saw? The death of Beatrice painted through some kind of mirror? I don’t mean the physical details. They’re unimportant. Look at Judith’s face.’
He saw what he always did when he came into this room. A woman forced to commit a terrible act out of duty, not desire. There was shock, regret, even shame in her pained features, which were not dissimilar to those of Beatrice Cenci in the adjoining room.
‘What do you want me to see?’ he asked.
‘That she’s sorry! Holofernes was the general sent to wipe out her people. By killing him she saved them. Why would she pity him?’
‘Because in the classical tradition a woman was thought to be more compassionate, gentler, more merciful than the man.’
‘Weaker, you mean?’ Mina muttered. She glanced back to the portraiture room and repeated her question. ‘What do you think? Is this her too?’
‘I think that, without Beatrice’s execution, Caravaggio wouldn’t have painted this Judith. That the two are linked. One dependent on the other.’
‘Action, reaction,’ she said in a low, unemotional tone.
‘Precisely.’
The girl said nothing. She walked out of the room, and Costa followed.
THREE
Around the time Costa and the girl were walking up the grand winding staircase of the Palazzo Barberini, Gianni Peroni was gazing mournfully at a more modest and grubby set of steps, those inside the grey shell of the building in the Via Beatrice Cenci, wondering how many more times he was going to have to climb them before the questions surrounding the death of Malise Gabriel were resolved. He and Falcone were in their fifties. They needed modern conveniences like lifts, particularly on a hot, airless Roman day.
‘You mean there’s no one else living here?’ Falcone asked as they began to march up the first set of stairs. Some floors were empty, stripped bare and midway through the process of renovation, full of timber, copper piping, sinks and WCs waiting to be installed.
‘Not a soul, apparently. The American architect who owns the place is trying to gut it and turn the place into some fancy-price apartment block.’
The woman had buzzed them in from the front door. He’d expected to hear the sound of construction: machines, men’s voices, hammers. It was silent behind the block’s thick grey walls.
Falcone shook his head.
‘A fancy apartment block here? It’s not exactly the Via Giulia, is it?’
The ghetto was an unfashionable part of the centre. The streets and alleys around the Piazza delle Cinque Scole were still modest in nature, with a busy and occasionally insular Jewish community. Outsiders, particularly foreign ones, would not be welcomed as warmly as they would elsewhere, in Trastevere or the busy expatriate streets around the Spanish Steps and the Piazza Navona, where the tourist dollar was the primary source of income. The ghetto lived to its own rhythm, a distinct and separate little community tucked into the heart of Rome, almost invisible behind the high walls of bleak, imposing palaces such as the one through which they now trudged.
‘I told you she was American,’ Peroni said. ‘Probably got sold a pup by some local property crook who knew a soft touch when he saw one. She was in quite a state.’ Almost as if she’d been bereaved herself, he thought. ‘Money problems. She as good as told us she was about to go bust. The Gabriels were paying a pittance to live here and now the widow says she’s going to sue over the accident. This whole place feels. .’ He hated instinct. But sometimes it was impossible to ignore. ‘. . bad.’
The tall, lean figure ahead kept on marching upwards. On the third floor Peroni was forced to halt for breath. Falcone folded his arms, waiting.
‘It’s a long way, Leo,’ Peroni grumbled. ‘We’re not young men any more. Also. .’ This had concerned him from the moment Falcone had outlined his thinking. ‘Why’s it just the two of us? Either this is a case or it isn’t, and if it is. .’
‘It isn’t a case. If it turns into one I’ll let you know.’
‘So we’re just snooping?’
Falcone smiled and tapped the side of his nose.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ He glanced up the stairs. ‘This whole business. . It doesn’t fit somehow, does it? Why would someone like Malise Gabriel, a man who once had a little fame and notoriety, wind up scratching a living in some oddball academy in Rome, without two cents to rub together?’
‘Because the notoriety beat the fame in the end? He was a troublesome bastard who kept on getting fired from every job he had,’ Peroni suggested.
‘Quite. And he had an eye for young girls.’
‘A long time ago. And only the one girl we know of. The woman he married and stuck with.’
‘What about the bookmark you found?’
‘It’s just an arty glamour picture. You can buy that kind of thing in a shop. We don’t know it’s the daughter. We don’t know anything.’
‘It wasn’t bought in a shop. It was printed at home. Forensic are taking a closer look. Now come on, old man.’
Three months separated them. That last comment seemed unnecessary. Determined to disprove the slight,
