David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

Riggi called and listened as a quiet, uncertain voice asked, ‘Yes?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t answer the phone like that here. Makes you stand out. When are you going to learn? Try again.’

‘Who is this?’

‘Gino. Who d’ya think? Try again, you moron.’

‘ Pronto. ’

Riggi took another sweep of the crowd to make sure no one was watching.

‘I did not appreciate receiving that text from you earlier. Do not contact me again. I don’t care if it’s from a number I’ve got or not. They can still trace you. Do not call. When I need you, I’ll find you. Is that understood?’

‘I. . I. . I. .’

The boy always stuttered when he was scared.

Riggi cut in with a sharp, mocking tone, ‘I. . I. . I. . What are you? Some scared little girl or something?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘You’re wanted for murder. That’s what.’

The line went quiet. Then Robert Gabriel said, in a voice that, to Riggi’s surprise, seemed a little calmer, ‘They don’t think that. Not really.’

‘They don’t know what to think. This is a mess. All I know is you’re turning into a lot of trouble. Where are you gonna be around seven thirty? We need to talk.’

Another long and unexpected silence.

‘Can’t make seven thirty. Has to be eight.’

Riggi laughed. It was ridiculous.

‘Oh. I’m so sorry. Am I interrupting your social schedule here? Some moron on the run? Do I need to make an appointment to try and keep you out of jail?’

‘Can’t explain. Eight’s fine.’

‘Where?’

Riggi listened to him reel off the name of the meeting place and thought: I might have guessed. The kid didn’t have a single original idea in his head.

‘Eight then,’ he said. ‘Oh. By the way. You should buy yourself a paper. They’ve got some pictures of your sister. Big ones.’ Not a word. Funny how you could hear anger down the line, though. ‘You know something? She’s really hot. Thin girls. Gotta love them, huh? I can see your old man’s point. Who couldn’t?’

‘Eight,’ the young, scared voice repeated, and then the line went dead.

‘Children,’ Riggi murmured.

He didn’t want to go back to the Questura. This all felt bad. So he walked round the corner and bought himself a macchiato in Tazza d’Oro, weighing up his options as he sipped at the powerful little cup of coffee.

The problem with informers was always the same: ownership. As long as Robert Gabriel was his, Riggi could control him, filter the information he fed into the Questura in return for a steady flow of money. Gabriel was a timid little kid but he was no idiot and maybe a little trickier than Riggi had suspected. He knew this was a sport that was played in multiple directions. Not all the leads that Riggi had leaked into the system had proved accurate. A few, a significant few, were false to begin with, and had led the Questura’s narcotics team into blind alleys when they should, by all rights, have been closing down a case.

Riggi meant what he’d said to Falcone. It was easy for some stiff, middle-aged inspector in a suit to get pompous over rights and wrongs. In the street, surrounded by people who cared nothing for the law and everything for survival, the world was more grey, less inclined to divide itself into right and wrong, good and evil. This was a lesson Gino Riggi had learned for himself the hard way when he entered the Roman night on his own, in the tattered disguise of a street punk, looking for answers, finding all too often nothing but questions.

Survival.

That was what it came down to. Nothing else. The English kid was predictable, easy to master when he was just one more unknown face in a Trastevere bar whispering in the ear of an undercover cop. Minions like him helped keep the balance between two sides that had always been there, order and chaos, competing forces that needed to be kept in check, and on occasion learn to work together too. All that was now gone. Gabriel was out in plain sight, a name on the front pages, unidentifiable at the moment, it was true, but still known to those whose lives revolved around the bars and drug dens of the Campo and the back-street dives across the Tiber and beyond.

Robert Gabriel was vulnerable and that meant those who knew him were too.

Riggi walked outside and went to stand by the fountain in front of the Pantheon, with its fierce-toothed dolphins and sweating tourists trying to finish fast-melting ice creams. There he pulled out his list and found the number, one he rarely called, and never lightly.

‘Cakici,’ he said, holding the handset close to his mouth. ‘It’s your friend in blue.’

‘Which one?’ the Turk asked.

‘Yeah. Funny. Like you’re running over with them.’

A grunt. A curse. Then, ‘Maybe I should be. Real friends.’

‘Look, this is nothing to worry about.’

‘I don’t like seeing people I know in the papers. It could be embarrassing. For both of us.’

‘I was starting to think that way. Listen, we can handle this.’

A pause on the line.

‘“We”? Did I hear you say “we”?’

‘It’s in both our interests this goes no further.’

‘We have nothing in common.’

‘I. .’

‘Deal with this child,’ Cakici ordered. ‘Yourself.’

‘Listen to me.’

‘No. You listen to me. If your colleagues, your honest colleagues, find him first, what do you think will happen? How long will he keep his mouth shut? You expect me to go to prison on the word of an infant? No. Deal with this yourself. Or I shall deal with you.’

Then silence. Riggi looked at the nearest dolphin, its teeth bared in the bright sun, a snarl on its features, violence in its eyes. He patted its head. The stone was hot and grimy, rough to the touch, like the skin of a petrified corpse.

Death was everywhere in Rome if you looked for it. He wondered if Robert Gabriel appreciated that fact.

Towards the end of the afternoon Costa, Falcone and Peroni stood on the roof of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci waiting for the arrival of the building inspector Di Lauro. Teresa sat nearby, going through some documents, head down, absorbed. Some eighty police and forensic officers were now in bunny suits searching the floors below, sifting through dust and building debris for the most part, finding little they hadn’t picked up already.

Costa gazed at the Cenci palace on its little hill across the street. Now it was one more apartment block in Rome, of the kind the late Joanne Van Doren had hoped to create: doubtless full of elegant, private residences behind its stylish arched entrance. The vast bulk of the building was easier to appreciate from this height. Behind he could just make out the pink-washed wall of their private church, the place where the dismembered remains of Beatrice’s brother Giacomo had been interred, in the grave meant for his father. The place where a select band of mourners would, in little more than a week, assemble to mark the anniversary of the young woman’s execution by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

He turned round and realized that he could also see, beyond the rooftops running by the river towards the Via Giulia, the summit of the Casina delle Civette, surrounded by palms, little more than half a kilometre away. The tragedy may have possessed a foreign cast but it also owned one truly Roman characteristic. This case was local, interior, close. A family affair, or so it seemed.

They’d all watched the media coverage. In spite of denials from the Questura, the story continued to grow, to the extent that it was beginning to slip beyond Falcone’s reach, out into the public imagination. Mina Gabriel had been transformed into ‘the English Beatrice’. One of the later editions had even morphed her picture over Guido Reni’s supposed portrait creating a trompe l’oeil image that fused the past with the present. These were the dog days for hacks too, Costa reminded himself. There was little else to fill the pages, except this story of love and death and sexuality.