The Fallen Angel

EIGHT

The black museum was one more place she appeared to know by heart. Mina Gabriel walked straight through the winding corridors of the ground floor, past models of men being torn limb from limb by horses, display cases full of knives and mallets and cruel instruments of torture. It was like reliving a nightmare. An executioner’s blade with a lion’s head handle, used to gouge out eyes, to cut off ears and noses and fingers. The Milazzo cage, an iron shell containing a human skeleton, a victim for once of another nation’s cruelty, in this case the British who had executed a deserter in Sicily by first mutilating the man then letting him starve to death locked inside the contraption. A spiked collar, a gossip’s bridle, pillories, stocks, whipping blocks. The ghoulish red cape of Mastro Titta, Rome’s most famous executioner, a celebrity of death, his uniform now hanging next to the axe he used to decapitate criminals in front of crowds of thousands.

Costa stared at the guillotine used by the Papal States and wondered how many lives had ended on this crude contraption of wood and metal. This place appalled him, made him ashamed of his inherited past, which was, perhaps, its purpose. Perhaps. . There was always a morbid curiosity in people too. He knew that. It burned inside Mina Gabriel, with an urgency she appeared almost to relish. He was curious to know why.

She grabbed his arm and rushed him round one more corner, stopping in front of a long glass exhibit case. He gazed at a nest of hangman’s nooses, each neatly tied. Next to the snarls of fading hemp was a note with the names and crimes of the men and women whose necks had once felt the rope’s deadly embrace. By the side stood a grey hooded tunic in coarse fabric, loosely hung on the wall in the shape of a human being so that it resembled nothing less than the cast-off skin of a ghost.

‘The Confraternita of San Giovanni Decollato,’ Mina said, not that he needed to be told. The Brotherhood of the Beheaded John the Baptist.

‘They have their own church,’ she went on in a low, earnest voice. ‘Near Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Do you think you could get me in? It’s closed usually.’

‘Why do you want to go?’

She seemed transfixed by the dusty cloak.

‘Those monks looked after people before they were executed. They probably cut Beatrice’s hair to make it easier for the executioner. These. .’ There was a zinc alms box bearing a decapitated head and next to it a set of small images of the Virgin and Christ. ‘They’d beg money from the crowd for her funeral, shove those stupid little pictures in her face to. .’ Her pretty features distorted with anger. ‘. . comfort her.’

He thought he’d lost the dreadful image those final few moments had once devised in his imagination. Now he realized the memory of Beatrice was not so easily obliterated, that it was a phantasm that would return to haunt him at the least prompting. A single visual remembrance stood out more than any other, and it was not the obvious, the harsh, bloody violence of that final moment, but the grey, hooded figures dressed like this, charity from the same source that signed her death warrant, gathering around like demons as the executioner approached. One more indignity at the end.

‘They keep things in that locked-up church of theirs,’ she murmured, gazing at the faded grey robe in front of them. ‘The basket her head fell into when she died. The hood of Giordano Bruno when they burned him at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori. Ropes and locks of hair. .’

‘Mina, Mina,’ he said quickly, loudly too, against his own wishes. ‘Enough. Let’s get out of here.’

‘Not yet,’ she insisted, and dragged him back towards the exit, towards the thing that had stolen the breath from him a decade or more before.

It was about a metre long, a specialist weapon, unsuited for warfare or any conventional purpose. Behind the glittering steel stood a black and white photograph of Reni’s portrait of Beatrice, eyes turned to the beholder, even in this tiny print. By its side was an old book, the page open at the story of the weapon — the ‘Sword of Justice’ — that historians were convinced was used to behead Beatrice Cenci and her stepmother Lucrezia on that September day in 1599.

Mina stood stiff and upright in front of the display case, neither girl nor woman at that moment, her dark eyes full of outrage, fixed on the weapon, her breath shallow and irregular.

‘Let’s go outside,’ Costa said. ‘I promised you ice cream.’

‘Ice cream!’ she spat at him.

‘Mina. .’

‘“The Sword of Justice”?’ she asked, her voice full of heat. She was a child again at that moment. Full of the simple outrage that children possessed, the rudimentary innocence that classified all cruelty and hurt and neglect as wrong, never seeking to understand the reasons behind them.

‘They may have meant that in the sixteenth century,’ he said. ‘Not today. If anything it’s ironic.’

‘Because we’re so much more civilized now? More reasonable? More kind?’

‘Next to this,’ he said, nodding at the shaft of old stained steel behind the glass. ‘Yes. We shouldn’t bury our horrors. We should find the courage to face them.’

‘That depends on the horrors, doesn’t it? If Beatrice was alive now. . if all this happened today?’

He found his mind wouldn’t think straight for a moment. She was looking directly at him, demanding an answer.

‘How would you torture a confession out of her, Nic?’ she persisted.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he said immediately. ‘Nor would anyone. We’re not perfect but we’re better than we were.’

There was an expression on her pretty, pale face that could have been the pout of a ten-year-old. He placed a hand gently on her arm and guided her to the door. It was almost six. The place would close soon anyway.

Outside the fierceness of the day was beginning to abate. The Via Giulia looked as quiet and as beautiful as ever.

‘I promised you a gelato. .’

‘Don’t patronize me,’ she interrupted without looking at him. ‘I want to go home.’