The Fallen Angel

TWO

The girl was alone in the living room in the upstairs apartment of the Casina delle Civette, curled up on the sofa with a book in her hands. Her adult black business suit had been replaced by fashionable tight slacks. Mina Gabriel wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a beaded necklace. This close he regretted the loss of her young, blonde hair, its replacement with a short, stylish cut, more sophisticated, more adult. The young, distressed girl he’d met that dark hot August night seemed to be gone for good.

It was just past midday. Bright, sunny, cloudless. The palms shimmered in the heat beyond the windows. The room hummed gently to the tune of the air conditioning.

He took the chair opposite her and asked, ‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Sorry? I was deep in the book.’

She showed him the title: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe.

‘ “Mon c?ur est un luth suspendu: sitot qu’on le touche, il resonne”,’ she recited, reading from the page in front of her.

‘I’m afraid my French isn’t so good,’ he said.

Mina screwed up her nose. For a moment she was childlike again.

‘I suppose you could translate it as, “My heart is a silent lute, touch it and it sounds.” Poe uses it as an epigraph, misquoted unfortunately. I think I prefer The Tell-Tale Heart, to be honest. Usher’s a bit. . I don’t know. A bit too creepy.’

Her words trailed off into silence.

‘You’ve done something?’ he said, indicating her hair.

‘You like it?’ She bobbed the side with her long fingers. ‘Photographers. I had to do this magazine shoot. What a pain! They said I couldn’t look like a schoolgirl. Not that I ever was one. Apparently it was some famous cutter. I don’t know. And these clothes. I don’t care much for them really. Appearances.’

‘Your mother?’

‘She’s seeing the lawyer again. Everyone’s so kind in Rome. I’m glad this happened here. Anywhere else. .’

Something he remembered brought a shadow of a smile to Costa’s face.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘A friend of mine from Turin says all Romans are children, really. We spend our days luxuriating in one long daydream, trying to imagine we’re in a world that’s always beautiful, one without pain and grief, cruel reality. That if we were left to our own devices everything, ourselves, Italy even, would fall apart.’

‘It’s a compliment, isn’t it? We’d all stay children if we could.’

He nodded and said, ‘Perhaps. How is she?’

Mina Gabriel frowned.

‘Mummy will survive. We’re good at that. Plenty of practice. The lawyers say she won’t go to jail. She got bail easily enough. I don’t know who put up the money. Why am I telling you all this? You’re a policeman. It can’t be news.’

He was aware of the details. They were insignificant.

‘A million people would have put up the money to keep her out of prison,’ Costa said. ‘If it was left to most Romans she wouldn’t be in court at all. She’d be getting a medal. A heroine. The mother who stood up for her child against the man who violated her. It’s as if the Cenci case happened all over again. Only this time we got it right.’

She put down the book and sat upright on the sofa.

‘I never thought of it that way.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t. Will you stay here? In Rome?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she replied immediately, shaking her head. ‘When Mummy’s free to travel again and they’ve sorted out wills and ownership and things, she thinks we might sell this place and move to New York. I’m supposed to need a college education.’ She grimaced. ‘I keep getting all these offers. Talking. Writing.

Media. Why? Because I’ve something to say? I don’t think so. They just want to stare at me and say: so that’s what she looks like. That’s the one it happened to. Perhaps they want to. .’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘They want to picture it in their own heads. I’m theirs now, aren’t I? I belong to them. They can imagine whatever they like.’

‘It’s not easy being in the public eye,’ he said.

‘I’d be an idiot to turn it down, though, wouldn’t I? I’ve never really been outside my own family before. I ought to see what’s there. And I get paid.’

He looked around the beautiful apartment.

‘Everyone needs money,’ he agreed. ‘Independence. Self-respect. It’s when we deprive people of these things. .’ He thought of the many troubled individuals he’d dealt with over the years. How difficult it was to reconcile the evil they inflicted with their own ordinariness. There were no monsters. Every murderer he’d ever met, however vicious, however cruel, was someone who would never turn a head on the subway. ‘The miracle is how often we treat others badly, how people suffer with poverty and hatred and cruelty and still turn out sane and decent in the end. Not everyone, though.’

‘What makes the difference?’ she asked, suddenly interested.

‘One unkindness too many. Some brutal act that goes beyond the pale. I don’t know. I don’t think those it affects understand either. They feel the pain and the anger and crave some way to release it, to let all that disappear by passing on the hate to someone else. And then they’re a little happier for a while. Not cured. Not quite. But free for a time. Able to pretend that it was all someone else’s fault, another man’s evil.’ He thought about it a little more. ‘In a way it is, I suppose. Mine. Yours. Everyone’s. I think we created the Devil for a reason, a selfish one. He makes it easier for us to accept the imperfect, fallen state we’re in. He allows us to shrug off the blame.’

The sun edged into the line of the window. A shaft of piercing golden light fell on her face. Her hand went to her eyes. She shuffled along the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable.

‘Why did you come?’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the deep red document.

‘I brought back the passport I found in Robert’s jacket.’

‘Thank you.’

Costa held it up, open at the photograph: a young man with dark hair and a sullen, dusky face.

‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘Who is it really?’