The Fallen Angel

THREE

Costa knew this place well, from work, not pleasure. It was one of the busiest bars in the Campo dei Fiori area: a grubby dive serving cheap alcohol to a predominantly international and young crowd. The Lone Star was where the students and backpackers from America and England congregated of a night. To drink, to flirt. To feel free of the restraints of home. He’d lost count of the fights he’d dealt with, the number of drug busts he’d seen recorded among its customers. All just a few short steps away from the plain, upright building that had once been home to the mistress of Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, her presence still marked by a small crest on the wall of the house where Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia came into the world.

He wondered if any of the kids around him knew how much history lay just outside the door, and what the offspring of Rodrigo Borgia, no strangers to debauchery themselves, would have made of the Campo dei Fiori five centuries on. The bar was packed. A hundred youngsters or more. The music was deafening, the voices predominantly English: drunk, elated, expectant. He scanned the faces, looking for one that might jog a memory. Costa was aware that he hadn’t got a good look at Mina’s brother that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci. All he remembered was a tall figure, a head of bushy hair and that curious remark before the gunshot: She’s safe now. Words that had set him wondering in the first place.

After fifteen futile minutes he asked the barman if he knew an English kid called Robert Gabriel. No luck. After half an hour he was ready to go home. Then the phone beeped again. Not a call, just another text message: ‘I wanted to see you were alone. Meet me in the apartment. Via Beatrice Cenci. Fifteen minutes.’

He was here. He had to be. Costa found himself gazing across the sea of bodies again. He stopped at a tall figure in the far corner, near the side door that led to the little lane connecting the Campo with the Piazza Farnese. The kid was watching him, interested, maybe a little afraid. Robert Gabriel looked different somehow. Just as tall, and the hair was long, though a little lank, unwashed. His complexion was darker than Mina’s, his expression bleak and unintelligent. He was wearing a bleached denim jacket over a black T-shirt.

Costa shrugged at him as if to say: we could just talk here.

We could even talk on the phone, he thought.

But then he was gone, out through the side door into the street.

Costa got out as quickly as he could but it was no use. The ancient square, with its hooded statue of the executed monk Giordano Bruno at its centre, had taken on its night-time identity: loose and noisy. Watching the crowds of young men and women meandering between the bars he found himself wondering why Mina Gabriel had never thought to join her brother in this perennial ritual. It seemed easy, natural for the foreigners who came to Rome to study, to spend an enjoyable year pretending to be Roman before real life, with its cares and demands, came to claim them.

The sky was a dark sweep of velvet punctured by stars and the lights of passing aircraft. Fifteen minutes. He tried to call Falcone but the inspector was on voicemail. No one at the Questura would assemble any kind of support in the time he had. Either he went along with the invitation or he walked away from the whole affair, went back to the Vespa in Governo Vecchio, hoped the ancient carburettor had cleared enough to take him home.

He found himself thinking of Mina Gabriel, picturing her that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci, staring at him, needing something.

Costa pushed his way through the shifting, aimless throng in the Campo, and started to walk back towards the ghetto, a route that would, he realized, take him directly past the Palazzetto Santacroce from which she’d made that last, scared call, its message opaque and impeded by some intervention he failed to understand.