The Fallen Angel

FOUR

There was a tall stool by the window. She climbed onto it, bleary-eyed but not crying any more, composed, with her arms wrapped around herself. Old again, he thought, wondering whether the other Mina Gabriel, the one he believed he’d first met, was a myth, a creation or just one more victim along the way. And whether she knew herself.

‘We’d no money,’ she said, staring at the palm trees and the ordered flowerbeds of Bernard Santacroce’s garden. ‘Everything we had went on Daddy’s treatment. Robert even took to selling Bernard’s drugs to make money. Working for other people too. He hated it. And Daddy was dying. Everything we had went on trying to save him but it didn’t work.’ She was hunched up, clinging to herself. ‘There was nothing any of us could do. A few months. That was all he had. It didn’t matter to him. We did.’

Mina sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

‘I never knew him so unhappy. It wasn’t like him. In Canada or England, even when he got fired, he could laugh at them, at their stupidity. He was a good man. He loved us. He read to me. Not kids’ books. Real books. I was never just a child. He treated me as if I mattered. Someone with an opinion, a right to express it. When I was older he taught us. Literature. Languages. Science. Robert couldn’t take it so he went away to boarding school. That was his choice. Daddy was everything to me, to Mummy, and then. .’ She gazed into the garden, remembering. ‘We came here and he became someone else. So full of despair. For us, because we were going to be alone and penniless. In a city of strangers.’

She thought for a moment and said, ‘He blamed himself for this. Not the cancer. Only himself. But Bernard. .’

Mina closed her eyes for a moment and when she looked at him again there was something dark and savage there.

‘He knew Daddy was vulnerable. That was why he invited him to Rome in the first place. He saw there was something to exploit. That was Bernard’s talent. He could read people, see into their pain, and use it. The bastard.’

Her arm shot upwards, towards the office above.

‘At first Bernard said he wanted Daddy to add some academic weight to the Confraternita delle Civette.’ She cast a vicious glance around the room. ‘It was a joke to him. He’d no idea what he’d resurrected. In memory of Galileo? Please.’

She stopped. He waited. These were thoughts she’d never spoken before, and their release was both painful and cathartic.

‘Daddy would have gone along with the charade of being his lackey, for our sake. It was either that or. . God knows. But whenever you accommodated Bernard he made a note, smiled, and sooner or later he came back for more. Finally he put that idiotic paper he’d written in front of Daddy and said he wanted his name on the cover too. Not just as editor but as joint author. Bernard knew what he was doing. He was asking a man who was a million times his intellectual superior to renounce everything he believed in. To throw away his life. He even threw in his own little joke. The title. E pur si muove.’

Mina groaned at the memory.

‘He wanted to be the Inquisition, making Daddy take back everything he believed in. And in return? They would have Galileo’s own whispered denial on the front page. Along with the recantation of the heretic Malise Gabriel, a mea culpa the whole world could see. And that was just the start.’

Curt, dry laughter.

‘Bernard got more pushy. I didn’t really understand at the time, but we had to leave this place and move into Joanne’s dump. It didn’t make any difference. The pressure was always there, and Daddy getting sicker by the day. Then. .’ Mina turned and looked at him earnestly. ‘Bernard decided he wanted more. He thought he was God’s gift to women. He’d got Joanne into a corner over money or something. She wasn’t enough. He could never keep his eyes off Mummy. He seemed to think we were. . his right. Just like this place. He was born to be master of everything. So when he began to get really impatient over Daddy’s stalling, he turned to Mummy instead. She didn’t have a choice. None of us ever did.’

‘Did your father know?’

She looked at him, surprised, and said, ‘About Mummy? Of course. From the outset. We were a family, Nic. Trying to find some way through this mess, to survive. Why shouldn’t she have told him? It was for all of us. Even poor, lost Robert, wasting away in those stupid bars in the Campo. Whenever Bernard got pushy Mummy would keep him quite for a while. Needs must. Then. .’

Mina placed a finger in her shiny, chestnut hair, twirled the side, a little nervous perhaps.

‘The problem was that Bernard was the kind of man who got bored rather easily. Mummy was a worthwhile diversion for a couple of months, no more. After that he was back again, demanding the paper, with Daddy’s name on it. And games. Games with Daddy and Joanne, in that place of his in the basement. I don’t think it was about sex. Not really. It was about power. About humiliation. That’s what he wanted most of all.’

He knew what was coming and wondered whether he wanted to hear.

‘Then you?’ Costa asked.

She stared out of the window.

‘I knew what he was thinking. I could tell from the way he’d started looking at me. One Thursday I was in here, alone, doing some work for Mummy. She had to be at a rehearsal. I can type. I can file. I can be a menial when required.’ She pointed to the sofa. ‘I was there reading some more of his interminable manuscript. He came downstairs and sat next to me. It was the afternoon. I think he’d had wine for lunch or something. I could smell the drink on his breath.’

He watched her, fascinated, horrified.

‘Bernard asked me what Mina was short for. Whether I was Wilhelmina, like someone else in the family. I told him I was Minerva. He knew that already. It was all a part of the game.’ Her hand twitched nervously over her lips. This was a difficult memory. ‘He said, did I know that this place was called after me? The Casina delle Civette. The owl is Minerva, you see. The goddess of wisdom.’ Mina’s voice fell a tone, as if talking to someone else. ‘Of warfare too, Bernard. Perhaps you should have remembered that.’

She beckoned to Costa to come closer, then she took his hand and placed it on her thigh.

‘Then he touched me like this and said, “You’re wise like her, Mina. She was a virgin goddess.” I can remember his face. The smell of his breath. The stupid leer when he grinned me at me and whispered. .’ Her voice fell away, but not enough to disguise the sardonic tone. ‘“Are you?”’

Costa took away his hand and sat on the cushion on the window sill, looking up at her.

‘“Are you?”’ she repeated, gazing out at the cloudless blue sky. ‘It wasn’t a lot to give really. Not when I thought about the consequences of saying no. Bernard was a. . frantic little man at times, though he didn’t get bored with me quite so quickly. I imagine the novelty was greater. Coming to my room with his little camera. I managed to get the card out of that. I thought it might come in useful. It was only afterwards that he told me he was my uncle. I think that was meant to seal the secret between us somehow. Make me as guilty as him.’

‘Your family. .’

Clear-eyed and frank again, she gazed into his face.

‘I told you the truth. Bernard boasted about me to Daddy, just a few days before he died.’ The faintest glimmer of pleasure crossed her face. ‘Daddy said he was going to come round here and eviscerate the bastard with a bread knife. We had to hold onto him. Mummy, me, Robert. Weak as he was, it wasn’t easy. He wanted Bernard dead that instant. It was only when we thought about it. .’

She raised her shoulders in a gesture of acceptance.

‘When he thought about it. Daddy was going to die anyway. What he wanted more than anything was a secure future for us. If his death delivered that, and we got rid of Bernard too. .’ She cast an arm around the apartment. ‘Mummy checked Bernard’s papers. He was an arrogant sod. He hadn’t even made a will to cover all this, all his legitimate money. That meant everything would come to us in the end. There was no one else. You have to admit it has a certain delicate symmetry. Besides, we had all the evidence we needed right here. It was simply a matter of placing it, and waiting. Then when the moment arrived. .’

Costa pointed at the passport and asked again, ‘Who is he?’

‘Some stupid riff-raff that Robert got to know on the street,’ she said with a shrug. ‘He was willing to pretend to be Robert for a few hundred euros, not quite knowing what the consequences were. I’m sorry, Nic. That was Robert’s doing. I’d no idea it would happen. I suspect Robert didn’t think things would turn out that way either. I imagine he felt he had no choice.’

‘And all of this was your father’s idea?’

‘Not all of it,’ she said quickly. ‘It was our idea. The family’s. It was our way of surviving. Of making the best of what we had. It seemed simple in the beginning. Daddy killed himself. We pushed you first towards us, and then towards Bernard. And one day Mummy killed him. But. .’

Her eyes strayed outside again.

‘“The best laid plans of mice and men. .”’ she murmured. ‘Things began to change. Joanne helped us at first and then became scared. Robert was frightened she’d go the police.’

‘So he killed her? And the Albanian. And Gino Riggi.’

‘I knew nothing about those things until they happened, I swear,’ she insisted. ‘I’d never have allowed him to hurt Joanne. You’ve got to believe that. But by the time it was done. . We’d become part of the trap we set ourselves.’

Costa remembered seeing her the day after the American woman’s death. She was truly distraught, he believed. That was not an act.

‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that you take one small step on the path of righteous wickedness, and the next seems to happen of its own free will. One that isn’t righteous at all. I’m sorry. That’s what we did. Why we did it. Do you still not understand?’

‘Not really,’ he said and went to the window.

She joined him there, standing so close he could feel the sweet heat of her breath.

‘I used you, I know,’ she whispered. ‘I had to. We needed someone who’d follow the trail. If they didn’t, what was the point?’

He remembered her pale, frightened face in the night, outside the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci. Costa had known from the start there was something she wanted to tell him. Yet it took all this time.

‘I never realized it would be someone I’d like so much,’ Mina said quietly. She sidled up to him, brushed against his body.

‘The passport, Nic. You haven’t done anything with it, have you? No one else in the Questura has a clue?’

He didn’t want to answer. She knew anyway.

She took his hand and wound her fingers in his.

‘Why is that?’

Costa could see the bend in the Tiber, the miasma rising from the water in the heat, could imagine the dome of St Peter’s just out of view, and ahead of it, near the Castel Sant’Angelo, the bridge with its blind angels, and the patch of road where, centuries ago, a young girl had been brutally executed.

Her lips moved to his cheek, to his ear. Mina kissed him once, biting lightly. Her hands ranged over his chest. She took them away and pulled the half-unbuttoned shirt over her head, the lazy, easy way a child did, then pushed her small breasts against him.

‘I know what you want,’ she murmured. ‘I saw it in Bernard’s eyes. I see it in yours. .’

He tried to push her away.

‘I saw it in Daddy’s face. That last night. When he was sitting on the bed, crying, scared as hell, half-drunk, head bleeding because he’d tried to go outside once and fallen at the window, failed. He was scared. Ready to back out. To go whimpering all the way back to Bernard and offer to put his name on that testament of lies after all. Let Bernard do what he liked to the rest of us so long as he got enough money to live a few more weeks. When we’d worked so hard for this. So hard. .’

He tried to say something. He didn’t want to hear more.

Her voice was hot in his ear. Her lips worked damp and warm against his skin. Her fingers fought to drag his to her small, taut breast.

‘So I sat down on the bed and kissed him. Told him I loved him. I always would. That I’d prove it for him and I did. And he stepped out of the window and I watched him fall.’

Costa wished he’d never come to this lonely hidden tower in the garden by the river. That he’d taken the advice of Falcone and buried this case deep in the ground until it was as lost as the scattered remains of Beatrice Cenci.

‘Was that one of your guesses, Nic? Did you dare go that far? I don’t think so. It wasn’t Joanne Van Doren with Daddy. Not that night.’

Closer, closer.

‘Are you glad you were right in a way? I was Beatrice after all but willingly, lovingly. It was his last moment on earth. He was frightened and lonely and desperate. I owed him all that and he wanted it. Besides.’ She kissed his ear, biting the flesh. ‘There was no going back then, was there?’

She had the stance of some cheap coquettish model. He watched as she pushed the red passport down the front of her slacks then placed his fingers there, on the warm skin of her stomach.

‘You want your evidence, Nic? Take it. That’s why you came, isn’t it?’

He withdrew his hand, bent down, picked up the cotton shirt from the floor and gave it to her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the last thing on my mind.’

Out in the garden, among the lilies and the orange trees, beneath the shadow of the tower of the Casina delle Civette, he found himself looking back towards the window, unable to prevent this last backward glance. She stood there, a little hunched, still half-naked, clutching the shirt to her pale skinny chest, watching him leave.

He was too far away to read the expression on her face, and for that Nic Costa was grateful.