David Hewson: The Fallen Angel

It was the last Saturday of August, just past midnight. Nic Costa sat on a low semi-circular stone bench midway across the Garibaldi bridge, listening to the Tiber murmur beneath him like some ancient spirit grumbling about the noise and dirt of the city.

To his left in Trastevere ran a steady stream of cars and crowded late-night buses taking people home to the suburbs, workers from the hotels and restaurants, diners and drinkers too tired or impoverished to stay in the city any more. On the opposite side of the river, where this portion of the road bore the name Lungotevere de’ Cenci, the traffic flowed towards the centre, more quietly at this time of night.

Rome was slowly, reluctantly, working its way towards sleep. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine himself at home in the countryside of the Appian Way, listening to nothing but the distant echo of insomniac owls. Then, from both sides of the river, came the familiar sound of the weekend: loud, slurring voices, English, German, American, some he couldn’t name. The many busy bars of Trastevere and the Campo dei Fiori were beginning to disgorge their customers onto the street and for the next few hours the uniformed police and Carabinieri who worked the graveyard shift would find themselves dealing with the aftermath of an alcohol culture that was utterly alien to them. Most Romans didn’t much like getting drunk. Excess of this nature was socially unacceptable, an embarrassment, though that night he’d had rather more wine than usual and didn’t regret it for a moment.

Further along the Tiber he could see a noisy bunch of young men and women stumbling across the ancient pedestrian bridge that joined Trastevere, near the Piazza Trilussa, with the centro storico . Costa wished he had the time and energy to walk there, then further still, until he could see the Castel Sant’Angelo illuminated like some squat stone drum left behind by the forgetful children of giants. Rome seemed magical, a fairy-tale city, on a drowsy evening such as this. And there were so many memories locked in these streets and lanes, the houses and churches and palaces around him. Good and bad, some fresh, some fading into the muted, resigned acceptance he had come to recognize as a sign of age.

‘May I ask again? What happened in Calabria?’ inquired the woman seated next to him.

There was nothing like a gelato in the open air after midnight. He was three days into his summer holiday, one forced on him by the state police’s insistent human resources department. Already he felt a little bored. Then along came unexpected company.

Costa licked his cone, bitter chocolate and fiery red pepper, thought for a moment and said, ‘It’s all been in the newspapers.’

‘The newspapers! Some of it. About you and Leo and the rest locking up a bunch of crooks and politicians then getting feted by Dario Sordi in the Quirinale Palace. Medals from the president of Italy.’

‘It was one medal,’ he pointed out. ‘A very small one.’

‘So why did you need a party to celebrate?’

It was a good question. He hadn’t. It was their colleagues in the Questura who’d arranged that evening’s private celebration at a famous restaurant near the Pantheon. It was there that, by accident, on his part at least, he had met the woman who was now by his side picking at a pistachio ice cream with mixed enthusiasm. Teresa Lupo had invited her without telling him, and winked at him like some old-fashioned comic as she arrived. He felt sure he’d blushed, and hoped no one had noticed. And then he’d scarcely talked to anyone else all evening.

‘It’s disconcerting,’ she continued. ‘I turn my back for one moment and suddenly everything’s changed.’

‘You’ve been gone for nearly two years, not a moment. Of course things are different.’

Her round brown eyes glittered beneath the single iron lamp above them.

‘So I see,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know what happened in Calabria. To Gianni and Teresa. To Leo.’ She hesitated. ‘To Nic Costa too. Him most of all.’

‘I laid to rest some ghosts,’ he said without thinking, and realized he was happy to hear those words escape his own lips. ‘Most of them really. But that’s a story for another time.’

She put her small hand on his arm and moved a little closer. He was unable to take his attention away from her dark, inquisitive face, which was even prettier than he remembered, bearing the signs of make-up and some personal attention which had never been there before.

‘I’m happy for you. Would you mind very much if. .?’

She took his arm and wound it around her shoulders. Then her head leaned against his and he felt her soft, curly black hair fall against his cheek.

He whispered, half to himself, ‘I remember the first time I saw you. It was in that little outpost of the Barberini where you kept your paintings. You were a nun.’

‘I was never a nun. I was a sister. I took simple vows, not solemn ones. How many times do I have to tell you this?’

‘Quite a lot, I imagine. Is that. . possible?’

He heard, and felt, her laughter.

‘I don’t see why not. I’ve only been back three weeks. There’s time. All the time in the world really.’

But there isn’t, Costa thought.

‘It was winter,’ he recalled. Bleak midwinter. The bleakest ever. He’d seen his wife, Emily, die before his eyes. That loss, and its cruel, invisible twin, the associated guilt over her murder, had almost broken his spirit. He’d wondered for a while if he would ever put that dark time behind him. It might have been impossible without this woman’s unexpected intervention. ‘You wore a long black shapeless dress with a crucifix round your neck. You carried your life around in plastic bags. There was nothing in your world except painting and the Church.’

‘Back then all of that was true.’

Emily’s loss still marked him, and always would. But it had become a familiar, background ache, a scar he had come to recognize and accept. The sight of her in those last moments, by the mausoleum of Augustus, in the grip of the man who would kill her, no longer haunted him. Time attenuated everything after a while.

Feeling a little giddy from the wine Falcone had ordered throughout the evening, he took away his arm, turned and peered into Agata’s eyes. She was still the woman he’d first met. Someone with the same intense curiosity, one which so often creased her high forehead with doubts and questions that this habit of fierce concentration had, with age, left the faintest of marks there, like scars of the intellect.

‘The last time we met was at the airport. You were going to Malta to work for some humanitarian organization. You weren’t a nun or a sister or whatever any more. Your life still seemed to be contained in plastic bags. You didn’t have art. I wasn’t sure you had the Church.’

‘You sound as if you were worried.’

‘Of course I was! You’d spent your entire life in a convent. You were going somewhere you didn’t know. To a life you didn’t understand.’

She folded her arms and glowered at him.

‘You’d lost your wife. And you were worried about me? Someone you barely knew? This constant selflessness of yours is ridiculous, Nic. You can’t worry about everyone. You have to lose that habit.’

‘I have lost it. As much as I want to, anyway.’

‘Well done. I didn’t abandon painting by the way. Or the Church either. The first is your fault. You told me to go and see that Caravaggio in the Co-Cathedral in Valletta. The Beheading of St John the Baptist .’

She edged further into his arms and placed her head on his shoulder.