David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘Why are you saying these awful things?’ she asked in a voice that was beginning to break. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please. Haven’t I been through enough?’

Her arm came up to her face, wiping away the tears. She was the teenager once more, the damaged innocent pleading for understanding, for mercy.

‘You tried not to lie, I guess,’ he said.

‘I told you the truth !’

He pushed the passport closer to her.

‘Look at the picture,’ he ordered. ‘Look at it and tell me that’s your brother. Lie to me now, Mina. I want to see what that looks like.’

She was thinking, he guessed. Scheming. Wondering what avenues were left to her now. There were none. None he could think of anyway.

Mina snatched the passport, got up and stumbled to the bright windows, staring at the palm trees moving in the placid breeze. The years had fallen from her. This was the girl he first saw, beneath the street lamps of the Via Beatrice Cenci and later, lovingly feeding the cats in the ruins where Julius Caesar had lost his life. Young, bright, pure.

She was crying, half-sobbing, clutching the document to her, unopened. Then she tucked it beneath her arm and rubbed her eyes with the back of her fists, trying to recover her composure.

‘I can’t believe you’re saying all this. .’

‘Look at the photograph!’

She wiped her face once more then opened the pages of the familiar red document and stared at it.

Costa got up and walked to stand by her side, peering into her face.

‘Is that your brother Robert?’

‘I didn’t do this,’ Mina Gabriel cried. ‘Any of it. Robert must have. .’

She looked up at him, her glassy eyes full of fear.

‘Please, Nic. Believe me. You. Of all people.’

‘Sorry,’ he said simply. ‘It doesn’t work.’

‘But. .’

‘If I’m honest,’ he added, ‘I’m not sure it ever did.’

She placed her palm on his chest, held it there and asked, ‘What do you want?’

He glanced out of the window. September in Rome. Heat, lethargy, people too tired, too lazy or too honest to wish to witness the deceit that lay beneath the city’s radiant facade.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

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.’