The Fallen Angel

TEN

‘Leo? Gone for a walk?’ Peroni asked, amazed.

They sat on the porch of Costa’s villa near the Via Appia Antica, sipping Pellegrino, watching the birds pick at the black grapes on the vines. Netting, Costa thought. That might be what he needed if he ever got round to trying to put the vineyard back in order.

‘He never goes for a walk,’ the big cop went on. ‘And this dinner? What’s he playing at?’

‘We don’t know what Leo does when he’s off duty, do we?’ Costa said.

There’d been a time, once. When he was briefly in love with the woman from Venice. But then that fell apart, as his affairs usually did after a while. And Leo Falcone was back to being the man they knew: a dedicated and talented police officer whose life revolved around the Questura, and barely seemed to exist outside it.

‘Suppose not,’ Peroni replied.

He turned and looked at Costa.

‘Is he happy, Nic? I mean, just a little bit. I’d never expect Leo to be really happy. Not like a normal human being. But a little bit. It would worry me if he didn’t have even that.’

Some more birds — finches, he thought — had begun to descend on the crop of grapes. They looked better than usual this year. He ought to be making wine, inviting people round to pick the crop, take part in the entertaining ceremony of crushing them, turning the juice into bad wine, just as his father had done with his friends a generation ago when Costa was a child. But those times, that way of life, seemed gone now. Everyone was so busy. The hectic round of work and duty never seemed to offer the space, the opportunity for leisure, time with the people you loved. Then the seasons turned once more, summer to autumn, autumn to winter. Another year gone, lost forever, haunted by the ghosts of words unspoken, promises never kept.

‘He’ll be happy when this is over,’ Costa said. ‘Something about this case. .’ He knew what it was, and so did Peroni. There was no need to say it out loud. Falcone was haunted by the thought of Mina Gabriel’s damaged innocence, and the idea that she might be punished for defending herself against the brutish attentions of her own father. ‘It gets to him, doesn’t it?’

‘Gets to all of us,’ Peroni said. ‘Can I take the car? I need to change too. You can make your own way there?’

‘Of course.’

The big man stood up and stretched a little painfully. Both he and Falcone faced retirement in a few years. Neither, Costa thought, would find it easy to leave the Questura behind. It wasn’t just the job. It was the people, the companionship, the notion of some shared sense of direction. The idea that, in some small way, their mutual efforts represented a glimmer of hope, a trace of humanity, in a world going bad.

‘We need to get Leo out more,’ Costa said without thinking. ‘We need to go back to the way we were. When Emily was alive. When we felt like. .’ There was no other word, and he was a Roman so it was not difficult or embarrassing for him to use it. ‘. . like a family.’

Peroni nodded.

‘We do,’ he agreed. ‘Starting tonight.’

Costa watched him go, thinking all the time about Agata, what to say, how he might help her through this difficult transition. He became lost in his thoughts after a while. So much so that, when the time came to go, he simply walked upstairs, threw on the first set of clean clothes he found, then came back down, fell on the Vespa and kicked it into life on the first try.