The Fallen Angel

TWO

Five minutes later he was in the Via Governo Vecchio dragging his scooter onto its stand. He got a lascivious wink from the old woman who was once again sweeping up outside as he knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment. Agata answered the door still in her office clothes: a smart blue suit. She didn’t look him in the eye as she let him in.

The place was a beautiful little studio, an elegant home packed into no more than a hundred square metres. A gigantic print of Botticelli’s Venus ran along the main wall. A tiny kitchen was tucked into the far corner. The timbered floor was covered in fashionable ethnic rugs. At the end of the room an open staircase with a banister led up to a double bed set in a gallery suspended directly over a small dining table. Once this had probably been no more than a storeroom for the house above. Now it was transformed into a sophisticated compact apartment just a few steps from the Piazza Navona, home to the young woman who sat opposite him, in front of Botticelli’s ill-proportioned goddess rising naked from her scallop shell, a pale, northern figure set against Agata’s darker, Sicilian features.

Something linked them, though. An expression of doubt, anxiety even, at the circumstances in which they found themselves.

‘How’s work?’ he asked. ‘Did you have a nice meal with your boss?’

‘I didn’t ask you here to talk about that,’ she said very quickly. ‘It’s this case of yours. That poor girl in the street. Mina Gabriel.’

Costa privately cursed the media and asked, ‘What about her?’

‘All this talk about Malise Gabriel and Galileo and Beatrice Cenci. This picture. .’

She had a copy of the evening paper, the one which had placed Mina’s features over the portrait in the Barberini.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read.’

‘Well, I might not, if I hadn’t heard it from your friends first.’

She looked unhappy. The way Agata had avoided talking about work — this wasn’t like her. She’d seemed so enthused by the idea of getting a job, one that was entirely about her first love, art.

‘I can’t really talk about a live case. I’m sorry.’

‘You already have talked about it. In a restaurant, of all places.’

She watched him from her plush chair on the other side of the coffee table. He wondered if a teacher’s wages would really pay for a place like this. It seemed unlikely.

‘On Sunday night,’ he said, ‘we still thought. . we hoped Malise Gabriel’s death was an accident. That seems less likely now, and Leo certainly has a confirmed case of murder which is obviously linked to the family. The American woman who leased them their apartment.’

Her eyes grew wide with shock and indignation.

‘Do you honestly think that poor girl could have been responsible for the murder of anyone? Let alone her own father? Or that a man like Malise Gabriel could have done such horrible things to his own daughter?’

Costa didn’t want this conversation.

‘Agata,’ he said. ‘The world’s full of truths we’d rather not face. Evil isn’t some dry, philosophical debate. Or at least not only that. It’s people. Ordinary people. Decent people, given another throw of the dice. You learn to live with it.’

‘I don’t want to live with it! I hate it. My world. .’ He caught her naive, slightly wild expression and saw again the young, innocent sister he’d first met, bustling through Rome in her black uniform, tackling everything she encountered with a fine, sharp intellect, but always from a distance, disengaged.

‘The world you lived in wasn’t real,’ he said, and hoped he hadn’t gone too far. ‘You looked at the rest of us from behind the walls of your convent. As if we were specimens. I’m sorry if people disappoint. They’re just human.’

Agata waved him away with an impatient arm.

‘You’re missing something here. An important point.’

She picked up the paper and stabbed a finger at the photograph of Mina, superimposed upon the frail, sad figure of Beatrice in Guido Reni’s painting from the Barberini.

‘This,’ she insisted, ‘isn’t reality. It’s myth, manufactured myth at that.’

He didn’t understand her point and said so.

‘Look.’ Agata walked over to the sideboard and picked up a blue folder full of documents. ‘I’ve been doing some research. Real research. Academic research.’

‘You’ve had time?’

‘I made time. I thought it was important.’ She flicked through the folder. ‘If Mina and her family are consciously trying to copy Beatrice Cenci they’re following in false footsteps, and they must surely know it. This painting for one thing.’

She retrieved a copy of the original portrait from the Barberini.

‘It’s not Beatrice,’ Agata stated with the same kind of certainty she’d possessed when evaluating the mysterious lost Caravaggio that had first brought them together.

‘According to the Barberini,’ Costa began.

‘I know what the Barberini say and they’re wrong. The best they should offer is an attribution. The work didn’t even appear in any known catalogue until the late eighteenth century, only thirty years before Shelley saw it and gave the Beatrice myth international appeal. Guido Reni probably never painted a single canvas in Rome until eight or ten years after her execution, so it can’t have been painted from life, whatever the guide books say. Stylistically too. .’ Her fingers ran across the original’s features. ‘I won’t bore you with the details but there are strong reasons to believe that not only is it not Beatrice, it’s not by Reni either.’

This seemed interesting, but he felt bound to ask, ‘Does that matter? In terms of our case?’

‘Of course. Do you think this is the only fabrication?’ She stared at him. ‘How old was Beatrice when she died?’

He glanced at the familiar portrait and said, ‘Seventeen or eighteen. I forget.’

‘You’ve forgotten nothing. You never really knew. Here, read this.’

She threw across a single sheet. It was a printout from an academic website, a report of a book published in 1879 by a Roman historian, Antonio Bertoletti. In a former city library Bertoletti had found Francesco Cenci’s own register of the births and deaths of his children. An entry in the list detailed the birth of Beatrice, in the palace in the ghetto, on 6 February 1577, a Wednesday, at eleven in the evening.

Costa tried to work this out. ‘That must mean. .’ His arithmetic was never wonderful when it came to dates.

‘She was actually twenty-two when she died. Not that you’d believe that from Shelley or Stendhal or any of the other great fabricators. Now. .’

Another page from Bertoletti’s account. It was a codicil to Beatrice’s will, lodged in Rome just a few days before her execution. The change was made to give a bequest of one thousand scudi to an unnamed ‘poor boy’. This was a substantial amount of money. Beatrice was a wealthy woman. Earlier she’d divided her fortune predictably among her surviving relatives. Only when the Vatican confirmed her death sentence did she bring in an annuity for this anonymous child, with an instruction that he be given complete control of the capital if he survived to the age of twenty.

According to Bertoletti the money was intended for Beatrice’s illegitimate son, fathered by the married servant, Olimpio Calvetti, who was known to be her lover, and one of Francesco Cenci’s murderers. Bertoletti went so far as to suggest that the reason Beatrice was banished from Rome to the distant Cenci castle where Francesco died was to hide the pregnancy.

Costa glanced at the picture he’d assumed was Reni’s portrait of Beatrice and wondered what to say.

‘Rather spoils the story, doesn’t it?’ Agata asked. ‘If Beatrice wasn’t the innocent, virginal teenager, but twenty-two years old, with a child by a married servant? If, as her brother alleged, she was the focal point of the conspiracy, and forced the others to continue when they were beginning to have second thoughts. .’

‘That doesn’t change the circumstances of the crime.’

‘Are you sure?’

It was a ridiculous thing to say and he knew it.

‘There’s evidence that Francesco Cenci sexually assaulted his own daughter?’ Costa asked.

‘I don’t think you’d regard it as that. Most of the story that’s been handed down to us was actually invented in the 1740s as part of a ragbag collection of fiction about life in Italy. No one disputes the idea that the father was a bad-tempered bully and a brute. But the idea of incest was only introduced into the trial by her lawyer very late on. Beatrice didn’t stay bravely silent either. When she was interrogated a few weeks before she was executed she said on oath that her stepmother urged her to kill her father with these words. .’ Agata checked the page. ‘“He will abuse you and rob you of your honour.” Note that word “will”. Doesn’t it suggest a threat of abuse, not the fact?’

Myths and inventions, Costa thought. Rome was full of them. Some, Malise Gabriel among them, believed the Catholic Church was built on nothing but fabrication from the outset.

‘But does it matter?’ he asked. ‘If you tell a story often enough for people to believe it, doesn’t it become real in some way? The most important way? In our heads?’

Agata’s eyes never left him. He felt uncomfortable beneath the power and naked interest of her gaze. Talking to this earnest young woman was a challenge usually, no more so than now. She prompted him to think, to question matters that others took for granted. He felt too tired, too confused for that. And he needed to go. Rosa would be in the Coyote bar already.

‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘Can we talk about this another time?’

Her face fell.

‘I have to go,’ he added. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

She sighed and seemed suddenly miserable at the thought of the following day.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow yet. There’s so much work. The hours. .’

He got up and said, ‘We’ll work something out. This is very interesting. But to be honest I don’t see how it affects Mina Gabriel.’

‘No,’ she said wryly. ‘You don’t.’

There was a touch of scorn in her voice.

‘Enlighten me.’

She winced and admitted, ‘I can’t really. It doesn’t add up. When I tried to comfort Mina that night, outside the house. When her father. .’ Agata shook her head and he was mesmerized by her quick and ready capacity for sympathy towards someone she didn’t even know. ‘That scene. I’m telling you, Nic. I know suffering when I see it. Living in a convent didn’t spare me from the presence of death. I’ve held the hand of someone as the life slipped out of her. I know that pain and I’m telling you. Mina was grieving when I put my arms around her. No one could possibly invent that. Certainly not a girl who, unlike Beatrice Cenci, really is seventeen. She loved her father. I’m sure of it. And Malise Gabriel believed in the truth, or at least his definition of it. Truth was more important to him than anything else in the world. That’s what his book’s all about, isn’t it?’

He wished he had more time. More insight too. There was something here, an elusive idea he couldn’t quite grasp.

Agata Graziano stood in front of him, her fierce intellect working as it always did, and asked, ‘Why would Mina look for inspiration in a fantasy? A fairy-tale concocted out of a squalid little domestic murder, embroidered over the centuries by storytellers and artists? Why? Shelley said the story of Beatrice was about the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.’ She took his arms. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? Poetic licence, nothing more. Mina Gabriel must know that better than anyone.’

There was something there he did understand, perhaps better than the inquisitive yet unworldly young woman in front of him.

‘Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong cavern,’ he said.

‘Or there are places you’re not supposed to look at all,’ she told him. ‘However much a man like Malise Gabriel might have hated the idea.’

He didn’t understand what any of this meant, any more than Agata did. But there was something here, something hidden inside these twin tragedies that linked them, even if it was not the obvious.

‘I don’t think she’s guilty,’ Costa said. ‘Whatever Leo and the media say. The mother, brother, I don’t. .’

Agata’s voice shrank almost to nothing.

‘Please God, I hope you’re right. What kind of place. .’

Her small, dark hand went to her mouth. Her eyes were lustrous and damp. She was close to tears. For whom, he wondered? An English girl she didn’t know? Or herself, stranded in the harsh reality of everyday life, a world she didn’t recognize and perhaps could not begin to face?

They stood close to one another and he remembered that awkward moment on the bridge, with the screams rising from the ghetto as the two of them hesitantly closed towards a kiss.

‘Tomorrow,’ Costa said, seizing her by the shoulders, ‘you will go into work and think of nothing but delivering the most astonishing lecture on Caravaggio you’ve ever given. Later, some time, I don’t know when, this will all be behind us and we’ll go to Baffetto. I will buy you the best pizza in Rome. Who knows? Maybe I can even entice you onto my battered little Vespa. It’s not an Alfa Romeo, I know. .’

‘Don’t joke about that,’ she said sullenly.

He wondered what to say, whether to pry further.

Then his phone rang. Costa found a mild curse slipping his lips and immediately apologized.

It was Rosa. He had to go.