The Fallen Angel

SIX

Costa had just crossed the Ponte Garibaldi, past the spot where a few days earlier he’d embraced Agata Graziano, when he heard the shots and saw a cloud of dusty grey urban pigeons scattering into the blue sky against the Gianicolo hill.

Rosa Prabakaran clung to him more tightly on the pillion as he tried to twist a little more power out of the Vespa’s weedy guts. He broke over the lights on red, weaving through the slow-moving cars heading south-east, away from Trilussa, ignoring the blare of horns and the angry shouts. Rosa had to tighten her grip around his waist as the Vespa mounted the pavement, scattering a couple of bums who tugged at grimy lengths of rope to get their dogs out of the way, then rattled down the cobbles of the tiny horseshoe piazza.

The movement of the people on the street guided him. The source of the gunfire was two alleys away running north. A group of shocked bystanders was starting to gather round two dark, stationary shapes on the ground. Costa slewed the scooter to a halt, turned to Rosa and said, ‘Deal with it.’

She dismounted in a flash, ripping off her helmet, and was down with the figures on the grey cobbled street. Costa snatched off his own headgear too and started to ask questions.

‘Him,’ said a young kid, no more than sixteen, in a bright purple shirt.

The youth was pointing back across the piazza they’d just crossed to a street that dipped down by the side of the Lungotevere and led back towards the bridge.

There was a red motorbike there, a serious machine, the rider anonymous in black, carefully weaving his way through the early-evening crowd that had ground to a halt, puzzled by the nearby commotion.

‘The bike?’ he asked.

The kid nodded.

Costa wheeled the little scooter round and set off back the way he’d come. When he entered the open space of the piazza he lifted the front wheel onto the pedestrian space that ran from one side to the other, shortcutting the distance between him and the red bike slowly disappearing down the narrow street opposite. Tramps bellowed at him, brandishing their bottles of cheap beer, tourists licked their ice creams in silence, looking shocked and scared.

When he made it to the far side the bike was starting to edge its way towards the end of the lane at a steady, decent speed, one that wouldn’t attract attention. Costa jerked back the throttle on his little machine until the twist grip would go no further, tried to ignore the screeching, high-pitched whine it made, and began to close the distance between them.

With no more than ten metres to go, the rider ahead noticed what was happening and began slowing to a crawl, one so leisurely he had to put down his feet to keep the big bike upright.

Costa had no weapon, nothing much that could change the situation. This was more than a little foolhardy. But he couldn’t get those two bodies on the ground out of his head, and the nagging thought that he knew who one of them was, and could already begin to feel the pain that loss would cause.

The helmet on the bike turned to watch him, attentively, in a way that gave Costa pause for thought as he flew along the cobbled alley, bare-headed, wondering what would happen when they met.

The black-leather figure faced the road ahead and tore open the throttle on his machine. The powerful engine roared like a whipped beast. The front wheel lifted. The machine burst away towards the bridge with a turn of speed that seemed impossible. In a second or so it was already outpacing the rusty Vespa, increasing the distance between them. The front wheel came down, found purchase on the cobbles, then Costa watched as the red beast rode onto the steeply sloping pavement, using the incline as a ramp to leap high into the air, over the static stream of traffic locked on the choking Lungotevere.

It landed on the bonnet of a large black official-looking Mercedes with a crash so loud Costa could hear it over the two-stroke engine beneath him. The bike rider kicked and fought to stabilize the machine as its heavy wheel punched deep indents into the bonnet of the vehicle beneath. With the skill of a stuntman he kept himself upright, then blipped the throttle again and lurched forward, working his way over the bonnets of two more adjoining vehicles, kicking at windscreens, levering his boots off doors and roofs and anything he could use to keep upright and get himself to the other side. Drivers opened their windows, shook their fists, furious, impotent as the rider used them as a pontoon across the broad riverside road.

As he got closer to the pavement the engine roared to its full extent again. The red shape and then the black-clad figure disappeared. Costa listened as the loud, violent voice of the bike ripped through the evening, diminishing with distance.

He took out his phone, called the control room, gave them the licence-plate number that he’d memorized when he got close enough.

At the bridge the bike could turn left into the centro storico, or right for the Via Garibaldi and the suburbs beyond. There were so many escape routes. Or. . Costa was trying to think like a fugitive, aware it came naturally after all these years.

Or the rider would simply pull into some deserted alley nearby, leave the machine, take off the black leather suit and the helmet, dump them too, and stride off into the city, one more face among thousands, anonymous, invisible.

The control room said officers were already on the way. There was nothing else to do, no other chore he could think of that would delay the inevitable any longer.

He turned the scooter around and slowly worked his way back towards the Piazza Trilussa and the bar beyond. The street was packed with people, both scared and curious, the way the public always was in such circumstances. A uniform car was there already, blocking the foot of the alley.

He knew one of the cops.

‘What should we do?’ the officer asked when Costa turned up. ‘They said it was a guy on a bike.’

‘He’s gone.’

Someone had placed blankets over the shapes on the ground. Rosa was on a stool by the door to the bar. Her make-up had run with the tears. She was clutching a drink that didn’t look like soda water and ice any more. Her eyes never left him.

Costa walked over, put a hand on her arm and asked, ‘Riggi?’

‘What do you think?’

She looked down the little street, back towards the river and shook her head. There was fury as well as shock in her face.

‘How the hell did you know he was here?’ she demanded.

‘I put a trace on his phone and called him.’

‘You might have told me.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I’m sorry. There wasn’t time.’

I was thinking, he wanted to say. About Agata and what she’d told him. About fairy-tales and the curious, insubstantial nature of human belief.

‘If we’d been here a couple of minutes earlier. .’ Rosa added.

He took the drink away, put it on the table, took her arms. She fought him a little, but not much.

‘Then we’d be dead too. Don’t you know that?’

She grabbed hold of the booze and took a clumsy drink.

‘He was still a cop, wasn’t he?’

Costa turned round, bent down, lifted the first sheet and saw Riggi’s sour features beneath the fabric.

It was wrong to stop there and he knew it. So he walked round and removed the sheet from the second corpse. A woman in the crowd cried out, a shriek of shock mixed with disgust, and it sounded like a scream of protest, at him, for letting this ugly, bloody fact be seen beneath the fading light of a beautiful Roman evening.

A small red fire lit up in Costa’s head. He turned round, saw the woman, saw the anger and outrage in her face, and said, ‘If you don’t want to see, Signora, I suggest you walk away.’

A few of them started to mutter. None moved. He didn’t care any more.

Costa knelt down by the corpse and looked at the kid’s face. Part of his scalp had been blown away, revealing bone and tissue. His glassy eyes seemed locked on something in the distance. The thin line of his mouth was pulled back in a rictus leer. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, cheap jeans, curly dark hair. The same clothes Costa had seen in the Lone Star bar the night before, when this same youth had led him to the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci, and the corpse of Joanne Van Doren, a suicide that wasn’t.

Gingerly, he lifted the edge of the jacket, aware that Teresa would screech at him for this. But there was something in the inside pocket, a shape that looked familiar, and Costa knew he had to see.

A stash of notes. Eight euros, just enough for a meal and a drink or two. A small plastic bag with white powder in it. A single condom. A passport with the maroon cover of a European Union document, and the crest of the United Kingdom.

He opened it up and saw the same face he’d seen the previous evening, the same blank, surly expression too on the photograph beneath the clear security film, issued only six months before. And a name: Robert Peter Gabriel.