The Fallen Angel

‘This is that grubby old scooter you told me about, isn’t it?’ Peroni asked.

‘It’s a Vespa Primavera ET3. Not a grubby old scooter. If it was good enough for my father it’s good enough for me.’

‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa,’ Peroni sang suddenly, in a rather good baritone. The woman at the counter clapped her hands and joined in, and together the two of them chanted, ‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. . subito!’

Costa sat there feeling like a fool.

‘It was a TV advert for those things,’ Peroni explained. He glanced at the woman at the counter. ‘Back when we were young.’

She laughed, called him a mildly rude name and sang again, ‘Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.’

‘Ah.’ Costa got it. ‘The sound of the engine.’

‘That’s an engine? Please. You’re going through a second childhood and that’s the truth. You won’t call Agata, then?’

‘In my own time. She was there, with the girl, and the father. She saw more of Rome than she wanted. Our Rome. Not hers.’

‘That could be a good reason for you to talk to her.’

‘My business. .’

Peroni sighed. Then he folded the extra piece of sweet pizza into a napkin, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, got up and went to the door. It was for Teresa. Costa just knew.

‘Thirty minutes. That’s all you get,’ he said. ‘Then I’m back to the Questura for a nap. The street’s still closed, by the way. You’ll need your ID. And don’t you dare bring that stupid scooter.’

FOUR

The ancient cage lift was out of order so the two men had to walk up a long and grubby winding staircase, past bare timber planks and sacks of cement, the detritus of building work. On the fourth floor Costa paused to let Peroni catch his breath, then called Falcone. There had to be more background on the family who’d been living here above what was essentially a construction site, empty save for the topmost storey.

Falcone told him what he knew. The dead man was an English university professor named Malise Gabriel, sixty-one years old, a peripatetic lecturer who had moved to Rome nine months earlier from Madison, Wisconsin. The name rang a distant bell, though not one Costa could immediately place. Gabriel was attached to the academic organization called the Brotherhood of the Owls, which was based in the Palazzetto Santacroce, a few minutes away on foot, near the Campo. His wife also worked there as a part-time personal assistant to the director. The daughter was older than Costa had first thought. She had turned seventeen three weeks earlier, something of a prodigy according to the uniformed officers, fluent in several languages, taught at home by both parents, never at school, though she attended lectures in art, music, literature and history at a variety of city colleges. She was also a volunteer with local charities, for animals and the homeless, and, in spite of her youth, understudy organist at the great church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Campidoglio, the Capitoline hill overlooking the Forum.

Her brother Robert, though just three years older, seemed to belong to an entirely different family. He had been cautioned, though never charged, over two fights in the bars near the Campo, and had no apparent job. Nothing had been seen of him since he fired that single shot into the night and fled the scene of his father’s death. According to his mother, who seemed concerned, though scarcely beside herself, his absence was not unusual. For the past few months he had lived at home sporadically, spending the rest of the time with ‘friends’ she didn’t know.

‘What does the morgue have?’ Costa asked.

He could hear Falcone tapping away at his keyboard.

‘It says here that the injuries are consistent with a fall from a substantial height. Gabriel had been drinking. There are no apparent suspicious circumstances, at least from a cursory examination. As I keep emphasizing, this is Sunday and August too. .’

‘Teresa needs to see him.’

‘Teresa isn’t here. Tomorrow she may take a look.’

He knew Falcone well. The man was not going to budge.

‘I’ll let you know what we find,’ Costa said and started to climb to the top floor of the building.

He leaned over the banister and looked down five storeys to the ground-level entrance. The centro storico had its share of old buildings like this, unappealing grey stone leviathans built in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, cold and empty homes to rich and bickering clans like the Cenci.

The customary closeness of family meant little in the world that enclosed Beatrice Cenci. The murderous plot that had begun with one nobleman’s vile treatment of his daughter had taken root in the Palazzo Cenci just around the corner, a vast, hulking pile by the side of the little alley into which Mina and Agata had retreated when the scaffolding began to collapse. These grim mansions were sometimes little more than prisons, invisible to the world beyond their shuttered windows. Francesco Cenci’s mulish will had run unchecked through the many floors and rooms of the building he came to regard as his own private kingdom, a solitary and perverted paradise where he was God, able to do whatever he wanted. Behind these thick stone walls, invisible to humanity, strange passions flourished.

Peroni finally reached the top, coughed three times, pulled himself upright and managed a cheery smile.

‘Thirty minutes,’ he repeated. ‘Not a second more.’ The door to the Gabriel home was open. Costa pressed the bell and walked in.

FIVE

The apartment extended across the entire top floor of the palace. It consisted of a spacious living area, an attached open kitchen, and five or six rooms off, bedrooms, bathrooms, it was impossible to tell at a glance. The furniture was old and worn, the walls badly in need of paint. There were no carpets, only scratched floorboards that hadn’t seen polish in years and a few threadbare mats. The dining table was the kind of cheap plastic stuff sold by the discount warehouses. There was a battered, baggy sofa, with a woman on it, sitting back, eyes closed, listening to music from the speakers of a portable audio player in her lap. Jazz. Costa recognized the familiar tune: Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat played by a piano trio.

To add to the confusion, gangs of men Costa assumed were from the city construction department were wandering to and fro carrying instruments and cameras, treading the dirt of the building work from the lower floors into the bare floorboards and occasional scattered rug. Two of them came out of the furthest room in the corner, the one where he assumed Malise Gabriel had stepped out onto the balcony. They were talking in low tones, looking bemused.

The music came to an end. The woman pressed a button to switch off the player, looked at them and asked, ‘Can I help?’

She was about forty, very thin with short blonde hair and a pained, mannish face. Her eyes were raw and pink. Costa guessed she’d been crying very recently. He thought she looked a little anxious. Nervous. Scared even.

‘We’re police,’ Costa told her.

‘I’ve already spoken to the police.’

She had a curious accent. The Italian was good but not native.

‘You’re with the construction company?’ Peroni asked.

‘I am the construction company.’ She pulled out her card and passed it over. It said: Joanne Van Doren, CEO, Cenci Enterprises.

‘You speak good Italian,’ Peroni noted.