The Fallen Angel

FOUR

The little turquoise scooter wound its way slowly around the hot and humid streets of Rome as Costa listened to Mina unearthing the traces of Beatrice Cenci’s past as if they were ley lines waiting to be rediscovered beneath the dust.

They stopped at the site of the ancient Tordinona prison, northwest of the Piazza Navona, where she was tortured. Then the Vespa worked through the back streets towards the Campo dei Fiori, to the spot in the Via di Monserrato where a plaque on the wall marked the position of another former Vatican hellhole, the jail of Corte Savella. It was in this narrow, ordinary street that she spent her last night on earth before being walked by hooded monks to the block a few minutes away by the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It had taken until 11 September 1999, four hundred years after her execution, for the city’s rulers to make public their shame about her death. The words on the wall marked the site from which she had been taken to the scaffold, ‘vittima esemplare di una giustizia ingiusta’ — an exemplary victim of an unjust justice, said the sign.

By lunch time they stood outside the Palazzo Cenci. In the bright August sunlight the place still seemed forbidding, a private fortress, built on its own little hill which, like much else around, had taken on the Cenci name. Mina showed him the tiny pink-walled church in the intimate little piazza at the summit of the modest mound, in the shadow of the palace. The tablet on the facade marked its reconstruction in 1575, thanking ‘Franciscus Cincius’, Beatrice’s own tormenting father, for the work. Inside the closed building, Mina said, was an unmarked tomb originally planned for Francesco. It now contained the quartered remains of Giacomo, his son and murderer. The father himself was hurriedly buried in the countryside where he was killed, in the hope that the crime would never be discovered.

‘Every September the eleventh,’ she said, looking back at the palace, ‘there’s a mass here for Beatrice and her family in the chapel. I want to go if I can.’ She looked at him. ‘Some Romans still love her.’

‘It was Romans who killed her,’ Costa pointed out.

‘Not the ordinary people. They approved of what she did. Standing up for herself.’

‘Do you?’ he asked.

She sat down on the bonnet of a Fiat saloon parked lazily in the road and toyed with her long, blonde hair again.

‘Yes, I think she was right. What choice did she have?’ She took a piece of gum out of her pocket, popped it in her mouth and said, ‘You know an awful lot for a policeman.’