The Fallen Angel

by David Hewson

  The sun shifted position. A ray of sunlight burst through one of the high church windows. It fell on her left cheek and he saw that the white skin there was wet with tears, awash with some released emotion she’d kept back for the shade of the basilica.

  The sight of her touched him, more than he expected, more than he wanted. Costa found his own eyes growing damp as he followed her anxious, taut body flying over the keys and stops and pedals of the ancient organ, extracting from the instrument the composer’s tortured paean to an invisible yet omnipresent creator, a frail young girl trapped entirely by its mechanisms and the effect they produced.

  He wiped his face with his sleeve and quietly walked out by the side door, to the little staircase that led up to the more familiar Campidoglio, the summit, a stage in stone set by Michelangelo to mark the caput mundi, the head of the world.

  The early evening was airless and hot. There was no time to return home before the meal Peroni had organized. He sat in the piazza, in the shadow of the great bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, waiting, thinking, wondering.

  FOUR

  Peroni’s choice of restaurant was always likely to prove controversial, with Falcone at least. When Costa arrived, feeling more than slightly grubby and sweat-stained, the small gathering was standing in the Piazza delle Cinque Scole, directly opposite one side of the squat mass of the Palazzo Cenci on its little hill.

  ‘There must be somewhere else,’ Falcone complained, arms folded, face suffused with heat. He had looked a little leaner of late, which made his silver goatee seem somewhat theatrical, almost like that of a stage wizard. In a pale linen suit, stiff with outrage in this modest corner of Rome, his anger seemed almost comically petulant, a point not lost on Agata Graziano, who stood to one side with Teresa, scratching her petite dark nose to hide her mirth. Agata and Falcone had enjoyed a long, secret and somewhat strange bond. She was an orphan child who grew up in a convent school. As a young cop Falcone had secretly donated part of his salary to charity, perhaps out of a sense of guilt at the failure of his own marriage. It had been used to pay for Agata’s education. When Falcone discovered this, ever curious, he had arranged to meet the young girl, liked her, and the two had come to form an odd bond, close yet detached too, both grateful to the other for something they rarely acknowledged. Unconsciously, perhaps against his own wishes, Falcone had become in some sense a substitute yet distant parent. The relationship allowed her rather more leeway with him than was afforded to most.

  ‘I like the look of it, Leo,’ Agata said cheerily. ‘You don’t have to eat in a fancy restaurant every day, do you?’

  ‘It’s not even a restaurant, really, is it?’

  Costa pitched in.

  ‘My father used to bring me here. He said it’s real working-class Roman food.’

  Falcone shot him a filthy look, up and down the grubby suit, and grumbled, ‘My point exactly.’

  ‘You said I could choose,’ Peroni pointed out, waving a handful of tickets. ‘And we’re members now.’

  In one sense at least, the grumpy old inspector was correct. Sora Margherita was no longer a restaurant. The city authorities had complained about the lack of facilities in the tiny dining room set behind a small door in the ghetto and, amidst local outrage, forced the place to close. Then the owners discovered a loophole, and reopened as the ‘Associazione Culturale Sora Margherita’. A dining club, membership free, fees charged according to how much one ate and drank. At which point the city gave up and culinary life in the ghetto returned to normal.

  Costa walked round to Agata and Teresa, kissed them both on the cheek, took his membership ticket from the set proffered by Peroni and led the way inside. Within fifteen minutes they were in a quiet corner away from the only other group braving the scorching night, seated in front of some of the best carciofi alla giudia, deep-fried artichokes, he’d ever encountered. The wine was from Velletri. The staff were charming and quite unperturbed by the argument at the door. Even Falcone began to smile after a while. Then the conversation started in earnest.

  The topic was Malise Gabriel, a man with a curious first name, Gaelic it seemed. He was an ethologist, a scientist specializing in the study of animal behaviour, who graduated from Cambridge and won a readership there before he turned thirty. Ten years later he wrote the book which Peroni found in the apartment, All the Gods are Dead. The title came from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, though Gabriel’s work made Nietzsche’s attack on the Church appear mild. It was a calculated, prolonged and highly detailed assault on organized religion and religious thought, a broadside that had managed to offend Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Buddhists and Hindus alike, while selling millions and entering multiple translations. For one brief year the book had been everywhere: cited as a cruel and corrosive diatribe by its critics and a brave and perceptively fresh analysis by its supporters, the first shot in a war in which secularism would reclaim the moral high ground for good, dispatching religion to the fantasy world of superstition where Malise Gabriel felt it belonged. Then this controversial academic fell abruptly out of the public eye, resigned from Cambridge and left the country, to embark upon the shifting and footloose academic career, much of it spent with inferior institutions, which had led him ultimately to Rome.

  Falcone was not idle that afternoon. He had pieced together some of the story and what he had to reveal gave Costa pause. Cecilia Urquhart was, like Gabriel, part of a long-established English aristocratic family, hers Protestant, his originally Catholic. A bright and precocious pupil at school, she had won a place at Cambridge when she was eighteen. It was there, months later, that she met Gabriel, there that she fell pregnant. Gabriel resigned from the university to avoid the ensuing scandal and Cecilia lost what appeared to be a promising academic career. He never wrote another book and became something of a wandering pariah. His last post in Wisconsin ended the way of most of its predecessors: summary dismissal over an undisclosed internal argument. After that, he came to Rome, employed principally as an editor with the curious institution known as the Confraternita delle Civette.

  ‘Ridiculous name,’ Peroni grumbled.

  Teresa sighed and said, ‘You know, you people amaze me. There’s a million television programmes about the history of art and politics and society. But something about science? Never.’

  Pasta arrived from a beaming waiter, simple and delicious with tomato sauce.

  ‘The Brotherhood of the Owls was one of the oldest and most revered scientific institutions in Italy,’ the pathologist went on.

  ‘Was?’ Costa asked.

  She squirmed a touch.

  ‘I thought it had packed in a few years ago, to be honest,’ she admitted. ‘Apparently some Englishman came back and rescued it. All the same it’s still odd you’ve never even heard of it. This is your history too.’

  Costa recalled what Peroni had said about Teresa and hot weather. It seemed spot on.

  ‘What about Galileo?’ she asked. ‘Anyone heard of him?’

  He remembered the bookmark, and the curious words written on the flip side of what looked suspiciously like a photo of the naked Mina Gabriel. Their origin had come back to him that afternoon as he sat on the Campidoglio, beneath the statue of Marcus Aurelius.

  ‘“E pur si muove”,’ Costa said. ‘“And yet it moves”. Galileo said that when . . .’ He fought to recall the precise circumstances. ‘When he was in a tight corner or something.’

  Teresa Lupo put down her fork. Always a bad sign.

  ‘“In a tight corner”? The Catholic Inquisition put him on trial for his life. All because he had the temerity to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the earth moved round the sun, not the other way round, whatever the Pope of the time thought. They made him choose between being burned alive at the stake as a heretic, as the Vatican did with another awkward genius, Giordano Bruno, in the Campo dei Fiori a few years before. Or renouncing his beliefs, which he knew absolutely to be true.’

  ‘I remembe
r this story,’ Peroni announced, waving some bigoli around the table, spattering sauce everywhere. ‘As Galileo walked away from the Inquisition he muttered, “and yet it moves”. Just to let everyone know he hadn’t really changed his mind.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Brave man,’ he added.

  ‘Why would Malise Gabriel write that on a bookmark?’ Falcone wondered. ‘And what does this have to do with the Brotherhood of the Owls?’

  Teresa cast a savage look in his direction.

  ‘A lot. Let me tell you something. At the beginning of the 1990s I was a student at La Sapienza. A Cardinal of the Catholic Church came to give a lecture about religion and science.’ She shook her head, as if still unable to believe what she was about to disclose. ‘He turned up and told us that the outrage among the scientific community about Galileo’s treatment, his forced recantation on pain of death, was somehow our problem. Something to do with the self-doubt of the modern age. And who was that Cardinal?’

  She leaned forward and looked at Agata, who was sitting quietly picking at her food.

  ‘None other than one Cardinal Ratzinger. Your Pope!’

  ‘Not my Pope,’ Agata replied. ‘The Church’s Pope. Everyone’s. Bookmark? What bookmark? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Teresa harrumphed, folded her arms and stared at Falcone.

  ‘I’m not sure, either,’ she declared. ‘I merely give you some facts. The Brotherhood of the Owls is a scientific academy of like-minded men founded by the supporters of Galileo around the time of his trial, one which made him a member, not that he asked for it, or perhaps even appreciated the honour.’

  ‘So,’ Peroni asked, trying to understand, ‘they would be on Galileo’s side? Malise Gabriel’s side?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Teresa continued. ‘The Brotherhood was formed to try to persuade the Vatican there was a middle way in dealing with Galileo. That the Church and science could live happily alongside one another, agreeing on occasion to disagree. They wanted to say we should leave science to the scientists and religion to the Church.’

  She looked at each of them in turn.

  ‘They were fools. The Pope wasn’t interested in common ground. He did as he pleased, and Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest, simply for telling the truth.’

  Peroni ordered some meat and an extra plate of vegetables for Nic. And more water. It was getting hotter in the little restaurant.

  ‘I still don’t see the bookmark . . .’ Falcone began, fishing as always.

  ‘This is what Malise Gabriel was writing about in his book,’ Teresa explained. ‘All the Gods are Dead was a concerted argument for the idea that science could and should investigate and, if need be, destroy, anything in its path, however painful, however awkward, whatever the damage. The quest for knowledge was everything, and could accept no boundaries. The position of the Church was that unbridled curiosity was none of Galileo’s business, and it would take his life if he insisted it was. The Confraternita delle Civette, on the other hand, held that science and religion were separate fields, which could on occasion overlap, but without the need for conflict. Malise Gabriel kicked life back into one of the biggest and most bitter scientific debates there’s ever been. Without him we might never have had Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould going head to head the way they did. Gabriel was a wrecked genius, one rather more tragic than Galileo by the sound of it. But the odd thing is he ended up in the territory of . . .’

  She put down her knife and fork, unhappy with something.

  ‘I was about to say the territory of the enemy. But the Confraternita aren’t that. They’re just not as extreme as he is. They were always intent on reconciling science and religion. Not raising one to the heights and destroying the other. Odd place for him to fetch up. The middle ground. Not much room for that kind of thinking these days. We tend to be one thing or the other. I was amazed somebody had revived the old beast, to be honest with you.’

  They went quiet. Then Agata said, ‘I remember some of that. Galileo stayed at the Palazzo Madama for a while, as Caravaggio had earlier. Science and religion weren’t enemies. Galileo believed he was pursuing knowledge in order to become closer to God. He wasn’t an atheist, like this man Gabriel.’

  ‘Given how things turned out, does that really make a difference?’ Teresa asked. ‘Truth is truth, whether you believe in a god or not. The earth isn’t flat. The sun doesn’t revolve around us and never has. People die and that’s it.’

  They looked at one another, wondering who would have the courage to protest. It was Agata who spoke.

  ‘You don’t know about that final point,’ she said quietly. ‘No one does.’

  ‘Come and spend a day with me some time,’ the pathologist shot back. ‘See what you think then.’

  Agata Graziano put down her knife and fork.

  ‘I’m out of my depth in these things. Why are we here? That poor girl in the street . . . her father died. Whether he was controversial, or a man who got into some scandal, what’s it matter? Malise Gabriel was still with his wife and family twenty years later. He surely loved them. There, at least, he must have found something he could believe in.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Falcone agreed.

  ‘The photograph . . .’ Costa began.

  Peroni and Falcone began coughing simultaneously, glaring at him from across the table.

  Agata watched them, then got up, saying, ‘Excuse me. I need a breath of fresh air.’

  They were silent as she walked out, then Peroni nudged Costa’s elbow and murmured, ‘Go and have a word, will you?’

  ‘And say what? Sorry we insulted your faith and everything you believe in?’

  ‘Tell her the sweets are fantastic. That usually works with women.’

  Teresa groaned and let her large head fall into her equally large hands. Falcone was holding his wine glass up to the light, muttering noises full of approval and a genuine surprise.

  August, Costa thought.

  FIVE

  Agata was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, looking tired. A pretty young woman in her early thirties, doubtless worried about the job she’d start tomorrow, the first real employment she’d ever had. It was thoughtless of Falcone to invite her out, especially on dubious pretences. He’d clearly briefed Teresa fully before the meal, and was fishing for more information about Malise Gabriel and his background in the Confraternita delle Civette.

  ‘It’s stifling in there,’ Costa said as he joined her.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked with a touch of anger. ‘Why am I here? If you wish to have meals to discuss your cases, do so. But please tell Leo to leave me out of them. I saw enough of the world you live in two nights ago. I don’t want to meet it again. Not for a long time.’

  He glanced at the piazza, and the Cenci building opposite.

  ‘It’s still there, though. “And yet it moves”.’

  It was a very strange thing for someone to write on a bookmark.

  ‘You dragged me into one of your cases once before. I don’t want it to happen again.’

  He took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t recall that you needed much dragging. Nor is this my case. Or any case as far as I’m aware. Leo’s just . . . being inquisitive. He’s interested in this man. And that message. These strange institutions. I can understand why he’d want to know more. Can’t you?’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘I’ll let him know. Sorry. Can I walk you home?’

  ‘No,’ she murmured, looking down the street towards the Via Arenula and the way back. ‘Tell them thank you for the meal.’

  ‘Can I . . . come by some time? To see how the job’s going? I am on holiday.’

  ‘You’re at a loose end?’ she said with a welcome smile.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  She took out her little phone and waved it at him. Agata was very well dressed for a hot Sunday night: grey slacks, a cream
shirt, a necklace. Her curly black hair was no longer unruly, and once again her petite, dark face wore make-up. She looked beautiful and he wished this were the time to tell her so, though he felt scruffy and realized why both Falcone and Peroni had cast caustic glances at his oil-stained suit earlier.

  ‘Call first, Nic. You promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  She was gone so quickly there wasn’t time even for a friendly embrace. He watched her disappear back into the ghetto, the way Robert Gabriel had presumably taken when he fled after his father’s death. It seemed a distant and unreal event on a beautiful, lazy evening like this.

  The rest of them tumbled noisily out of the door, Falcone and Peroni fighting each other for the privilege of picking up the bill.

  ‘Was it something I said?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ Costa demanded abruptly. ‘She’s still a Catholic, you know.’

  ‘The truth hurts, I imagine. I still can’t believe what Ratzinger did. He tried to come back not long ago. The academic staff put a stop to that one. Wouldn’t even let him through the door.’

  ‘Well, there’s freedom of expression for you,’ he snapped. ‘None of this was Agata’s fault, was it?’

  Teresa’s broad, intelligent face fell.

  ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry, Nic. I never meant to offend her. Anything but. It’s this awful heat. She doesn’t look like a nun any more. I thought . . .’

  She shrugged and looked very sorry.

  ‘She never was a nun,’ Costa pointed out. ‘And who cares about a speech from twenty years ago?’

  ‘When it tries to belittle the persecution of a brilliant man for telling the truth, I care. We all should,’ she insisted. Then she paused and asked, ‘Did we learn anything tonight? Really?’