by David Hewson
This strategy concerned him nevertheless. It was a dangerous trick to play with a witness who might turn into a suspect should it be proved that Malise Gabriel’s death was not the accident it seemed. He wondered what lawyers would make of his attempt to get close to a girl who had just turned seventeen, barely beyond the age at which she could be interviewed formally — and even then only in the presence of her mother.
‘There’s no case and I’m on holiday,’ Costa told himself as he sat on the scooter, waiting for her. ‘I can do what I like.’
Then step away should anything untoward emerge, he thought.
He was still trying to convince himself of this when she climbed up the steps and smiled at him, the two helmets in his hand, and then at the little machine, mostly turquoise paint, though with a modicum of rust and restorative plain grey primer, parked on its foot-stand by the pavement.
‘A scooter?’ Mina asked, wide-eyed.
Another cheap T-shirt, perhaps the same pair of jeans. Her long blonde hair hung loose over her shoulders. She looked like any of the thousands of foreign students who wandered Rome all year long. Perhaps prettier, more engaged than most though. Her eyes had an acuity he hadn’t noticed before. They were no longer touched by recent tears. The scratches on her hands were beginning to fade too.
With them, perhaps, evidence, he thought, and felt immediately guilty.
‘It was my father’s,’ he said without thinking.
She took the helmet from him.
‘What do I do?’
He showed her the footrests and said, ‘You hang on. Where are we going first?’
‘To see the painting,’ she said. ‘To the Barberini. You know the way?’
‘I think I can find it,’ he said, and climbed on the machine.
The Vespa started after two kicks and then they were threading through the hectic traffic and the back streets, crossing the busy shopping street of the Corso, heading uphill towards the Barberini, Mina Gabriel clinging tightly to his waist.
TWO
Costa flashed his police ID and was allowed to park the battered Vespa in a staff area next to the patio of the imposing marble palace on the hill, though not without a few raised eyebrows from the security officers at the gate. They entered through the porticoed entrance and marched up Borromini’s winding helicoidal staircase into the stately residence of the Barberini. He followed the girl as she strode through the vast halls and glittering corridors of a palazzo with which she was clearly familiar. In Rome it was impossible not to stumble over an unexpected nexus in places like this, some snaking, unforeseen connection between events that were, on the surface, unrelated. The most famous member of the Barberini family was Maffeo, Urban VIII, the very Pope who had forced Galileo to recant his beliefs on pain of death. He was a despot, pillaging Rome for his own purposes, removing the precious bronze girders from the portico of the Pantheon in order to make cannons for his army. Knowledgeable Romans still muttered a cynical Latin saying that had been repeated in the city for nearly four centuries: quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini. What the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did. The clan was now extinct. It was ironic that their principal legacy in Rome was a palazzo famed for its rich art collection gathered by others, with Raphael’s supposed mistress La Fornarina and Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII among its treasures.
Mina walked as if he wasn’t there, heading straight for the early seventeenth-century portraits. It all came back. Guercino’s St Matthew and the Angel. The Flagellation of Christ. A minutely detailed Annibale Carracci wooden altarpiece. And behind, high on the wall, with some other, lesser works, the face he’d come to recognize as the girl who died on the scaffold in front of the Ponte Sant’Angelo.
She was as he remembered, a solitary figure mainly in white, set against shadow, staring back at her audience over a shoulder wrapped in pale material like a shroud, her face luminous, sad, dark eyes intent on the viewer, unyielding. Over the centuries this image had become Beatrice Cenci, for the public, for an army of poets and writers and artists. These features had come to sum up the very essence of the young woman’s character: defiant yet submissive to her fate, an innocent forced to resort to the ultimate sin in order to defend her own dignity and independence.
Just then he glanced at Mina. The resemblance between her and the portrait was, he now saw, fleeting, more a matter of a look, an expression, an attitude. Yet there was a connection between them, a bond visible in the way this modern girl’s eyes were fixed on the painting with an avid intent so heated that Costa wanted to walk straight out of the room, out into the scorching, sunny day and forget everything he knew about the Cenci, their prison in the ghetto, the terrible family intrigue which had led to Beatrice’s tragedy.
‘You see what they’ve done?’ Mina asked, dragging him back to earth. ‘They hide her up there, so you can’t see her eyes, her pain and how she forgives them too. All of them. So they make you stand back, hoping you won’t see the truth. When Shelley was here. .’ He caught sight of her hands. Her delicate long fingers were balling into tense, angry fists. ‘That picture wasn’t high on the wall like that. He could look her straight in the face. Read the books. He was allowed to see. It’s as if they’re still ashamed. Four hundred years later.’
‘The Barberini has a lot of paintings to show,’ Costa said, and that was true.
She was chewing gum like any other teenager, thinking, looking like any other teenager. There was a music player and a set of cheap headphones poking out of her jeans pocket. She squinted at the canvas and said, ‘Thanks for reminding me.’
Then she dragged him by the arm back into the room they’d just passed quickly through, and he knew exactly what they were going to see, understood that she had made the very link that had occurred to him some fifteen years or so before, when he was around the same age, mooching in these great chambers, staring at the dead faces on the walls.
Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes was a canvas on a different and darker scale. A large painting, it occupied much of its wall in the adjoining hall, tenebrous and violent, screaming to be seen, to be witnessed. It depicted the young woman, Judith, in a virginal white smock as she decapitated the naked Holofernes, the warrior she had seduced in order to save her city from destruction. The savage, shining blade had hacked through most of the screaming man’s neck as she grasped his hair, pulling, holding tightly. Bone and tissue were visible. Blood flowed freely onto the crumpled sheets beneath him. By Judith’s side stood a servant, a cloth bag in her hands, ready to seize the severed head and return it to the city, proof its tyrannical besieger was dead.
Mina stared at the work, a thoughtful finger to her lips.
‘This was painted the year, maybe the year after, Beatrice was executed. When she died, all of Rome was there. Caravaggio must have been among them.’ She waited, watching him. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘He wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ Costa said quietly.
She hesitated for a moment, her expression quite impenetrable, then asked, ‘So is this a version of what he saw? The death of Beatrice painted through some kind of mirror? I don’t mean the physical details. They’re unimportant. Look at Judith’s face.’
He saw what he always did when he came into this room. A woman forced to commit a terrible act out of duty, not desire. There was shock, regret, even shame in her pained features, which were not dissimilar to those of Beatrice Cenci in the adjoining room.
‘What do you want me to see?’ he asked.
‘That she’s sorry! Holofernes was the general sent to wipe out her people. By killing him she saved them. Why would she pity him?’
‘Because in the classical tradition a woman was thought to be more compassionate, gentler, more merciful than the man.’
‘Weaker, you mean?’ Mina muttered. She glanced back to the portraiture room and repeated her question. ‘What do you think? Is this her too?’
‘I think that, without Beatrice’s
execution, Caravaggio wouldn’t have painted this Judith. That the two are linked. One dependent on the other.’
‘Action, reaction,’ she said in a low, unemotional tone.
‘Precisely.’
The girl said nothing. She walked out of the room, and Costa followed.
THREE
Around the time Costa and the girl were walking up the grand winding staircase of the Palazzo Barberini, Gianni Peroni was gazing mournfully at a more modest and grubby set of steps, those inside the grey shell of the building in the Via Beatrice Cenci, wondering how many more times he was going to have to climb them before the questions surrounding the death of Malise Gabriel were resolved. He and Falcone were in their fifties. They needed modern conveniences like lifts, particularly on a hot, airless Roman day.
‘You mean there’s no one else living here?’ Falcone asked as they began to march up the first set of stairs. Some floors were empty, stripped bare and midway through the process of renovation, full of timber, copper piping, sinks and WCs waiting to be installed.
‘Not a soul, apparently. The American architect who owns the place is trying to gut it and turn the place into some fancy-price apartment block.’
The woman had buzzed them in from the front door. He’d expected to hear the sound of construction: machines, men’s voices, hammers. It was silent behind the block’s thick grey walls.
Falcone shook his head.
‘A fancy apartment block here? It’s not exactly the Via Giulia, is it?’
The ghetto was an unfashionable part of the centre. The streets and alleys around the Piazza delle Cinque Scole were still modest in nature, with a busy and occasionally insular Jewish community. Outsiders, particularly foreign ones, would not be welcomed as warmly as they would elsewhere, in Trastevere or the busy expatriate streets around the Spanish Steps and the Piazza Navona, where the tourist dollar was the primary source of income. The ghetto lived to its own rhythm, a distinct and separate little community tucked into the heart of Rome, almost invisible behind the high walls of bleak, imposing palaces such as the one through which they now trudged.
‘I told you she was American,’ Peroni said. ‘Probably got sold a pup by some local property crook who knew a soft touch when he saw one. She was in quite a state.’ Almost as if she’d been bereaved herself, he thought. ‘Money problems. She as good as told us she was about to go bust. The Gabriels were paying a pittance to live here and now the widow says she’s going to sue over the accident. This whole place feels. .’ He hated instinct. But sometimes it was impossible to ignore. ‘. . bad.’
The tall, lean figure ahead kept on marching upwards. On the third floor Peroni was forced to halt for breath. Falcone folded his arms, waiting.
‘It’s a long way, Leo,’ Peroni grumbled. ‘We’re not young men any more. Also. .’ This had concerned him from the moment Falcone had outlined his thinking. ‘Why’s it just the two of us? Either this is a case or it isn’t, and if it is. .’
‘It isn’t a case. If it turns into one I’ll let you know.’
‘So we’re just snooping?’
Falcone smiled and tapped the side of his nose.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ He glanced up the stairs. ‘This whole business. . It doesn’t fit somehow, does it? Why would someone like Malise Gabriel, a man who once had a little fame and notoriety, wind up scratching a living in some oddball academy in Rome, without two cents to rub together?’
‘Because the notoriety beat the fame in the end? He was a troublesome bastard who kept on getting fired from every job he had,’ Peroni suggested.
‘Quite. And he had an eye for young girls.’
‘A long time ago. And only the one girl we know of. The woman he married and stuck with.’
‘What about the bookmark you found?’
‘It’s just an arty glamour picture. You can buy that kind of thing in a shop. We don’t know it’s the daughter. We don’t know anything.’
‘It wasn’t bought in a shop. It was printed at home. Forensic are taking a closer look. Now come on, old man.’
Three months separated them. That last comment seemed unnecessary. Determined to disprove the slight, Peroni did manage to keep up though, which was probably the point.
The door to the Gabriel apartment was open. Falcone stood there, a look of blank fury growing on his face. Peroni went ahead and walked through.
The entire floor seemed empty save for a single chair on which Joanne Van Doren sat, head down, fingers tapping at the keyboard of a tiny laptop computer. Every chair, every table, every book and personal effect, every last shred of possible evidence had disappeared. What had been the Gabriels’ home a few days before now resembled the gutted, empty spaces in the storeys below.
Peroni went over to the woman and, when she kept on typing, coughed loudly.
She looked up at him and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Where’s the bedroom?’ Falcone asked.
‘Which bedroom?’ Joanne Van Doren wondered, eyes wide open with apparent innocence.
They were still pink. Peroni thought she looked even more miserable than the day before. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
They walked into Mina’s room, the one at the corner, with the double French windows opening onto the shattered terrace. Everything was gone: the books, the shelves, the curtains, the compact desk and chair. The bed and all the sheets.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, joining them.
‘You didn’t mention you were going to clear the apartment,’ Peroni said, trying to quell his own anger.
‘You didn’t ask. Cecilia Gabriel’s taken what she wanted. This is the only part of the building with working heat, power and water. I can lease it. Maybe I can even sell it if I’m lucky. The bank keep saying they need money straight away.’
‘Signora,’ Falcone interrupted. ‘A man died here in the early hours of Saturday night. There’s an investigation into the circumstances.’
‘I told Di Lauro I was clearing the place. He didn’t say a thing.’
‘Di Lauro?’ Falcone asked.
‘The city building inspector,’ Peroni murmured.
‘A building inspector?’ Falcone looked livid. ‘We’re police officers.’
The skinny American looked close to the edge, ready to burst into tears.
‘Will you get off my back!’ she screeched. ‘The only people who stuck around here yesterday were Di Lauro’s. I told them what I was doing. They didn’t look interested. Why should they be? The accident happened outside. I haven’t touched anything there.’
The inspector glanced unpleasantly at Peroni.
‘Get onto the Questura. Get a warrant for this place. All of it. I want a court order barring any further construction work anywhere in this entire block until I say so. Nor do I want anyone allowed in.’
‘You can’t do that!’ she shrieked. ‘I have a buyer coming.’
His sharp eyes scanned the bedroom.
‘Your buyer can wait. The things from here. Where are they now? With the Gabriels?’
‘Some of them. What they wanted. Cecilia’s still got a key. I told her to come in last night when we were gone and take whatever she liked before the men dumped it. Probably best we didn’t meet, what with everything. Look, seriously. You can’t. .’
Peroni found this interesting.
‘You paid people to clear this building on a Sunday evening? Isn’t that expensive? Why not wait until today?’
Her pale face coloured for a moment.
‘This is my place. For now, anyway. I can do what I want. Please. I might have someone coming round who’s going to buy.’
‘The bedclothes?’ Falcone said. ‘The furniture? The personal items? Cecilia Gabriel has them now?’
‘Some, I guess. I told you. I wasn’t here when she came round. She took what she wanted and the workmen got the rest.’
‘Where did they take it?’
‘Wherever trash goes in this city. You tell me.’
F
alcone demanded the name and phone number of the contractors and told Peroni to get someone to try to track down the material.
‘Talk to forensic and get a team in here to see if there’s anything they can find in this mess. We can go and see the Gabriel woman ourselves.’
‘What?’ the American barked. ‘Did you hear a word I said? I’m desperate.’
‘Why did you let the Gabriels stay here for next to nothing?’ Peroni asked, trying to bring the temperature down a little. ‘I don’t understand. You could have got someone in paying a proper rent, couldn’t you?’
‘With all this construction work going on?’
‘It’s going on now and you think you can sell it.’
The question discomfited her.
‘It was a favour. OK? Bernard Santacroce, Malise’s boss, asked me. They’d lodged with him at the Casina when they first came here. It didn’t work out. Bernard and Malise were. . on opposite sides of some philosophical fence I didn’t begin to understand.’