The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  A handful of people were beginning to gather from the riverside road and the streets that entered from the ghetto. They grew quiet as they approached, encountering the invisible dread that came from meeting mortality out in the open, on a hot, idle August night. From somewhere came the sound of someone retching and he wondered whether the cause was the broken body on the paving stones or drink, or both.

  The girl crouched down again, next to the dreadful shape. Her long, straight hair fell on the bloodied torso there. She kept mumbling one word over and over, in English, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. .’

  It sounded wrong somehow. Too young a cry to leave the lips of a teenager.

  Costa took in the way the dead man, a tall, skinny individual of late middle age he guessed, was leaking blood out into the cracks in the cobbles.

  Around the body stood a pile of shattered rubble, old stone and cement. A few steps away lay a single piece of metal scaffolding and some planking. A thin trickle of pale dust was falling in a vertical line onto the ground next to what looked like fresh rubble close to the fathomless pool of darkness that was the entrance to the building behind them.

  He looked up and saw the same beautiful, starry sky he’d been sharing with Agata Graziano only a few moments before. The man seemed to have fallen from an old, decrepit palace that stood a good five storeys high, one of the tallest on this side of the street. Against the moonlit night he could make out that the top floor had a balcony running the width of the building, with scaffolding attached for part of its length, suspended on cables that led to some apparatus on the roof. The nearest corner, almost directly above them, was gone entirely, both metal railings and terrace ripped away, leaving a line of broken tubing, cracked concrete and ragged wire clinging to the stone facade.

  The contraption was moving perceptibly in the darkness.

  The steady trickle of fragments of stone and sand grew stronger, depositing a growing pile of rubble on the ground.

  Four years before he’d been called to a tenement in Testaccio rented to illegal immigrants, the clandestini who performed the jobs that Romans had come to believe were beneath them. The building had been denied maintenance for years, against the city statutes. On one grim December day an entire wall had collapsed, burying those unlucky enough to be inside. He’d never forget clawing at the rubble to get to a child, or the relief he’d felt when he was able to retrieve a single young soul from that bloody, choking mess.

  His head cleared very quickly as he turned on the growing crowd of bystanders, many of them foreign, some of them drunk, and yelled, ‘Police! Get back! This is a building collapse. Clear the area. Now!’

  FOUR

  A few of them obeyed, a few others retreated into the darkness of a narrow alley opposite that seemed to run uphill, in the lee of a vast, hulking palazzo. Costa yelled again, in English this time, then took the young girl’s arm as she knelt by the corpse on the cobblestones. The falling trickle of sand and brick and plaster had turned into a growing stream that made a rising, relentless rattle as it reached the earth.

  ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘I’ve got to get you out of here.’

  ‘My father!’ she said, turning, looking into his eyes. There was such pain and despair in her pale face it sent a chill through him. She didn’t move, not a millimetre.

  He crouched down by her side.

  ‘My name’s Nic Costa. I’m a police officer. You are. .?’

  ‘Scusami?’ she said in Italian so easy and natural she sounded like a native. Her hands were on the man’s bloodied chest. She bent down, placed an ear next to his unmoving mouth, listening.

  Costa gripped her arm and made the girl look at him.

  ‘Your name!’

  ‘Mina.’ She glanced at the terrace above them. ‘I think he went out for a cigarette. There was a noise. Like. . a whip cracking. The scaffolding. .’ She put a hand to her mouth. It was covered in blood. Her eyes were very large, bright and lustrous with tears, like jewels. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Stand on the far side of the road, Mina. When you’re there I’ll carry your father over. Please do this now. If the building falls and we’re still here I can’t help anyone.’

  He looked up. The man must have tumbled five floors from the balcony. No one could have survived such a fall onto the ancient stones of Rome.

  ‘I need you to move,’ he said with more force.

  She stayed on the ground and gripped his arm.

  ‘You’ll bring him. .?’

  ‘I’ll do as I promised. When you’re safe. I can’t carry two of you.’ Costa quickly snatched off his jacket and wrapped it round her bare shoulders, over the bloodied pyjamas. ‘Now stand on the other side of the road.’

  Slowly, she got up and wiped her brow with her arm, casting towards him an expression so sharp and full of expectation he wondered how old she really was.

  The girl was tall, almost his own height, and sylph-like. She crossed the street then walked into the dark alley opposite. A familiar female shape was there, a shorter one. Agata had followed him and immediately approached the distraught teenager the moment she arrived, coming out of the crowd of bemused and distant bystanders to help. He watched as she placed her arms around the girl and held her.

  Something the size of a small rock landed no more than a metre away, followed by a steady rain of pebbles. A sharp object cracked against his skull then a line of metal tubing clattered noisily to the ground next to him, bouncing around in a manic dance across the cobbles.

  Costa steeled himself. It was wrong to move the man. Wrong medically, if by some miracle there were still some faint flickering light of life. Wrong from an investigative point of view too. But this was an accident, not a crime scene, one that was not, perhaps, entirely finished. Besides, it was a way of getting the girl to move, perhaps the only means he could find. Protect the living.

  He pushed his arms beneath the bloodied torso, reaching forward as far as he could until his own face touched the stained and dirty shirt that enclosed the fractured body in front of him. It was impossible to ignore the smell of violent injury, though at least this awkward position, so close he had to turn away his own head as he strained to lift the body upright, meant that he didn’t have to look at the shattered skull.

  Then he took a deep breath and began to lift the girl’s father off the ground.

  The body felt unexpectedly light in his arms. Something warm and liquid trickled onto his neck. He didn’t want to think about what it might be. Steadily, making sure he didn’t stumble, Costa crossed the street and staggered towards the alley opposite. When he felt sure he was sufficiently distant from the palace behind, he lowered his burden gently onto the pavement. The girl and Agata were a few steps away. The daughter watched him for a moment then withdrew herself from Agata’s grip and came to stand at the end of the cul-de-sac, her eyes on the building opposite.

  The stream of rubble was turning into a torrent. Costa looked up and saw that a good five metres of scaffolding at the end of the balcony had begun slowly to tear itself from the front, dangling downwards, swaying from side to side like some timber and metal pendulum struggling to mark the passage of time as it dispensed itself and the fabric of the balcony onto the street below.

  Finally there was a siren. He turned and saw the mirrored flash of a blue emergency light on the Lungotevere de’ Cenci. Costa made a frantic call to the control room to warn them about the state of the building and demand an emergency construction crew. A police van turned into the head of the lane and found itself blocked by parked cars. It stopped, and some men got out and began to walk directly towards the area of the collapse.

  Ignoring the continuing torrent of debris raining down on the street, Costa stepped out and waved at them to stop. At that moment the final segment of hanging terrace and scaffolding began to give way and tumbled to earth in a deadly rain of metal and timber and concrete that shattered on the black cobblestones a few metres in front of him. He retreated quickly, trying to f
ind safety, listening to what sounded like the crackle of gunfire.

  ‘Nic. .’ Agata was by his side, peering anxiously into his face, as he reached the pavement. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was alone. ‘Where’s the girl?’

  ‘Here.’ Agata Graziano turned to look behind her. The crowd had retreated into the alley when the balcony began to collapse. Now they were cautiously starting to return. Agata put a puzzled hand to her head. ‘Well, she was. .’

  He heard that young, almost childish voice again, and this time it bore something different, something he hadn’t expected. Anger. Fury. Perhaps even blame.

  ‘Robert! Robert!’

  The girl was back in the road, walking towards the inky pool of darkness around what he assumed was the palace door. Costa found the questions kept coming. Why had no one else in the building noticed what was happening here? There were no lights on the lower floors, only in the windows close to the collapsed balcony. No illumination over the entrance itself, where surely there should have been at the least a set of lit bell pushes of the kind that sat outside every apartment block in Rome.

  ‘OK,’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘I am past persuasion.’

  He marched into the road, stood in front of the girl and ordered her to return to the safer side of the street. She ignored him completely, her eyes fixed on the palazzo, calling someone’s name again and again.

  Costa sighed, seized her by the waist then threw her over his shoulder the way a father did with a recalcitrant child. She weighed more than he expected but she didn’t protest, just kept calling that single name, plaintively, out of fear, he thought, nothing else.

  Robert. .

  ‘Don’t leave here again,’ he ordered as he let her down onto the pavement.

  She went quiet and shut her eyes briefly. Then she looked at him and Costa felt his heart skip a beat. There was something she wanted to say, and wouldn’t, out of fear, perhaps. Or something else. He knew it. Could feel it. Understood, too, that there was nothing he could do to persuade her to speak what was on her mind, in her heart.

  ‘My brother’s in there somewhere,’ she murmured. Then, shouting again, ‘Robert. .!’

  Another shape came out from the darkness by the entrance. It stayed in the shadows. Costa could just make out a tall figure walking through the continuing shower of dirt and stone as if it didn’t matter.

  There was a gun high in his right hand, waving towards the stars. Costa felt his heart sink. Quickly he held out both arms, told those around him to retreat further back into the alley behind, and tried to think.

  A good half-dozen uniformed men were slowly working their way up the street, wary of the building. They saw what was happening and took positions by the parked cars, reaching for their weapons.

  The girl tugged on Costa’s arm.

  She stared into his face, pleading.

  ‘It’s my brother. He’s not. . bad.’

  ‘Please go back to where you were.’ She didn’t move. ‘Mina. .’

  ‘Don’t you dare hurt him,’ she said, retreating.

  He stepped out onto the cobblestones, arms held high and open, trying to assess what he was seeing.

  ‘Robert,’ he said firmly. ‘We need to get medical attention for your father.’

  The brother was half in shadow. From what Costa could see he was wearing a bloodied T-shirt and jeans. His free hand still kept the gun high in the air. A stray and ludicrous thought went through Costa’s head: he’s running away from home, the way children sometimes do.

  All that the uniforms would see was a man in possession of a firearm. They would be quietly telling themselves to waste no time or niceties in bringing this confrontation to an end, and Costa couldn’t blame them for that.

  ‘Your sister needs you,’ Costa added, watching him closely.

  He wished he could see the face of this figure in the shadows, read some expression there. But the youth stayed back in the darkness, as if afraid. Only the gun was in the half-light, wavering.

  ‘She’s safe now,’ a stony voice said in English.

  Costa found his head was beginning to hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Robert?’ the girl cried in a begging, childlike tone from behind. ‘Robert. .?’

  Another explosion ripped through the warm Roman night and this time it was a gunshot. Costa found himself blinking, cowering instinctively, unable to see what had happened, where the weapon was aimed.

  Then a memory. Another time. Another shot, by the grim walls of the mausoleum of Augustus, one that had taken his wife from the world.

  He wheeled round anxiously, dark images rising in his head. Agata was there, with the girl. They stood backed up against the wall, eyes shiny with fear. Unharmed.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Costa muttered to himself, and heard the uniforms moving swiftly, heard shouts.

  When his attention returned to the street it was empty save for the taut, determined shapes of five or six cops working their way through the lines of parked cars, cautiously, step by step, making sure to stay on the safe side of the street.

  The brother was gone, fled into the spider’s web of lanes that ran throughout the ghetto in this labyrinthine quarter of the centro storico.

  A uniformed officer he knew walked over, gun in hand, pushed up his helmet visor and asked, ‘What the hell was that about? The kid could have got himself killed.’

  It almost seemed as if that was the idea, Costa thought.

  ‘Did he fire at me?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ the officer said, shaking his head. ‘He took a shot at that. .’ A nod at the decrepit palazzo behind them. ‘Then he was off. I’ve got two men going after him. For what it’s worth. This place is like a rabbit warren. Besides. .’ He eyed the girl, who was now on the ground next to her father, sitting quietly, cross-legged in the dirt, Costa’s jacket still round her shoulders. She was holding the dead man’s hand, rocking to and fro, eyes listless, focused on nothing. ‘We’ve got a name, haven’t we? English? Been. .?’ He made a familiar gesture with an imaginary bottle. ‘. . knocking it back?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Costa admitted. ‘I’m off duty.’

  The uniform man smiled and said, ‘It’s my case then.’

  ‘What? It’s a collapsed building. And a dead man.’

  ‘If some scary-eyed kid waves a gun in your face. .’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a case.’

  Costa wasn’t listening. The girl called Mina was watching him from beside her father’s body on the other side of the street and there was an expression on her beautiful young face — a pained, resigned sadness so profound, so innocent, it gave him a chill.

  He walked over and crouched down next to her.

  ‘Mina,’ he said, trying to look into her face, though it wasn’t easy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is there something we should know? Something you want to tell us?’

  It was the hesitation that struck him. She waited a good two seconds, staring at the ground, then mumbled, ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just wondered.’

  Then she did look at him and he found he couldn’t interpret the expression in her eyes at all.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘I called her. She said she’d be here soon.’

  Agata put an arm round her and glared at him. He wanted to say to her: this is my job, this is what I do. Notice things. Little things sometimes. Though not now, not when he was on holiday, with little to occupy him except bringing an ancient Vespa back to life.

  ‘I’ll ask someone to look after you,’ Costa told the girl, got to his feet, and took a look around him, trying to remember what he knew about this part of the city.

  The memory came back suddenly, like a ghost emerging from behind some long-forgotten door.

  A name. That of a beautiful, tragic young woman. One notorious enough to have earned her a legacy close to the Lungotevere, the stretch of busy
road by the river here. Even to the very place where Mina’s father had died.

  There was a sign on the corner of the palazzo with the shattered scaffolding. The street was the Via Beatrice Cenci. His eyes refused to leave the girl called Mina as Costa found himself recalling a tragedy from another age.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  The following Sunday morning, more than twenty-four hours after the incident in the ghetto and his encounter with the strange young English girl, Costa found himself downstairs on the sofa in the living room of his home near the Appian Way, flicking through two old history books of his father’s which retold the tale of the Cenci family.

  It was almost seven thirty. The Questura would be slowly coming to life, such as it was on this last weekend of August. Someone, perhaps Leo Falcone, would be looking at the previous day’s report of the building collapse, wondering if this was in any way the business of the police.

  The media didn’t think so. The TV bulletins ran brief stories that told of a tragic accident, one that had taken the life of a foreign academic. Knowing the way these things worked, Costa felt sure their verdict came directly from the authorities. The dog days of August were the slowest, most enervating time of the year. The crime figures fell through the floor in these scorching, exhausting weeks. Any Romans who had the time and money fled the city for the beach or the mountains, somewhere cool to relax. Those who remained drifted through the weeks until September arrived, with a sluggish return to work and, at some point, a welcome hint of autumn.

  He’d spent the previous day alone at home, tinkering with the Vespa, sleeping, thinking about tackling some of the persistent chores that the big, old farmhouse he’d inherited seemed to demand with an ever-increasing frequency.