The Fallen Angel

TWO

Peroni and Falcone spent three hours with the forensic team in the Via Beatrice Cenci as they pored over the Gabriels’ apartment, picking and prodding patiently in their white bunny suits. The American woman’s mood had grown progressively more downcast and sullen. Falcone had what he wanted: men and women scouring every last inch of the place for physical evidence. After a little while he had Teresa Lupo to stand over them, watching every step, every last precise action too. Not for a moment did it appear to concern him that the formal search warrant for these actions had yet to arrive from the magistrate. It was, Peroni reminded himself, that time of year.

Joanne Van Doren was in the poky kitchen when they left, skinny fingers around another beer. Peroni made a point of going up to her and asking if there was anything he could do.

‘Write a cheque for fifty thousand euros?’ she suggested wearily.

He tried to treat it as a joke, and to ignore Falcone tapping his toes ready to leave by the door.

‘Signora, if there’s something you’d like to tell us. . it would be better now. To hear it voluntarily, rather than discover it for ourselves.’

Her eyes flashed wildly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I said.’

For a moment Peroni thought he was getting somewhere. Then something, some second thought, intervened and she said, ‘It was an accident. I don’t know what else you expect me to say.’

The place they were headed was so close it was pointless taking Falcone’s Lancia saloon. The directions they had received told them to go to the Palazzetto Santacroce and ask for admittance at the door. The building lay in the warren of lanes a few minutes away on foot across the busy Via Arenula, an area much like the ghetto, dark and cramped, though rather grander in nature. The palazzetto was a grand and imposing four-storey mansion in its own cul-de-sac behind the river, close to the footbridge of the Ponte Sisto with its beautiful view of the dome of St Peter’s.

‘There’s money here,’ Peroni muttered as they walked through a brown stone entrance arch into a small courtyard with a fountain at the centre surrounded by lush, well-tended grass.

‘You can say that again,’ Falcone replied, pointing at the first-floor apartment visible beyond the caretaker’s kiosk. Paintings, statues, grand gilt furniture, rich red velvet walls. This was another Rome, barely touched by the pressure and poverty of the street.

‘We want the Casina,’ Peroni told the uniformed man behind the glass, showing his police ID.

It was only when they went through a second set of doors to the rear that he realized the full extent of the property, which ran all the way to the riverside road, making it as large, surely, as the Palazzo Farnese, the palatial mansion close by that was now the French embassy. The hidden back was almost entirely given over to garden, a rare oasis in the city, carefully laid out with shrubs and palm trees, fountains, flower beds, topiary and shady bowers with seats, all beneath high, unbroken walls which rendered the secluded refuge invisible to the city at large.

In the corner was what could only be the Casina. It was a tall, circular tower that stood above the grounds of the palazzetto like a guard post. The ground floor was completely windowless. The second possessed nothing but a few narrow slots through which, Peroni assumed, archers were expected to fire their arrows. The remaining two floors had elegant arched openings, medieval in appearance but now with modern glass windows. The roof was a crenellated battlement with embrasures in the raised portions, as if to provide another vantage point for archers. The rosy weathered building seemed more like the abandoned tower of some lost fairy-tale castle than a Renaissance palace. Peroni had never seen anything quite like it in the heart of Rome and said so. Falcone, clearly astonished, agreed, then narrowed his sharp eyes, stared at it again and said, ‘The Porta Asinaria. The place in the walls near San Giovanni.’

Peroni nodded. He was right. This was a precise copy of the little-noticed gate marooned behind railings next to the busy gap in the walls near San Giovanni, through which streams of modern Roman traffic passed every day.

They were engulfed in the scent of white jasmine tumbling down in festoons around the door. It almost obliterated the stink of the traffic bustling along the Lungotevere beyond the furthest wall.

‘The rich are with us always,’ Peroni murmured and pressed the bell.