quarter of the
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:
‘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.
PART TWO
ONE
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.
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.