Let's Murder Father

A TALE FOR MIDNIGHT (354 pp.)--Frederic Prokosch--Little, Brown ($3.95).

Beautiful Beatrice Cenci, daughter of one of Rome's proudest 16th century families, had just taken her first lover. The scene: a heap of empty sacks in the wine cellar. The man: her father's steward. "Time passed. She heard the drops clicking rhythmically from a spigot. The smell of wine, the scent of burlap, the pungent scent of Olimpio--they wove a dark separate world, safe, secret, profound." How profound or how secret Beatrice's new world really was is something for historians to argue about. But safe it clearly was not. Less than two years later, while a great crowd of Romans looked on, she laid her lovely head on a chopping block, and it was lopped off with a single stroke of the executioner's ax.

Beatrice was not beheaded for her affair with Olimpio, but for the murder of her wealthy father, Francesco. Just before, her stepmother's head had tumbled from the same block. And just after, her brother Giacomo, already tortured with red-hot pincers, had his head smashed with an iron hammer, his throat slit, and his body quartered. Lover Olimpio, who had actually polished off Francesco with the help of a hired assassin, was not there that day. He had been murdered not long before.

Rotter's Rotter. The Cenci story has fascinated writers for more than three centuries. Plays, poems, novels and histories have dealt with its dark and bloody theme, and still, as in Frederic Prokosch's new novel, A Tale for Midnight, it has a surefire appeal that does not suffer from retelling. Author Prokosch has a hankering for the exotic and the violent (Night of the Poor, The Seven Who Fled). In the Cenci tale, he has contented himself with sticking pretty close to the facts. But he has given them a rich setting of sounds and smells and the look of 16th century Italy that make A Tale for Midnight one of the most sensuous novels to appear in many seasons.

Some would say that Francesco Cenci richly deserved to die. Taking his wife and daughter from their palace in Rome, he had shut them up in the lonely castle of La Petrella on the Naples road. There they remained for months, imprisoned vic tims of Cenci's brutality and suspicions. By any standards, Cenci was a rotter's rotter. Gross and vulgar as he was rich, he had been convicted of sodomy in the papal courts and paid the enormous fine of 100,000 scudi. His debaucheries were the talk of a Rome that was no stranger to excesses.

Revealing Rack. Lucrezia, his second wife, was running to fat, dull and fearful, a natural target for his abuse. Not Beatrice. As the papal prosecutor pieced it together, she decided to kill her father and persuaded mother Lucrezia and brother Giacomo to cooperate. Big, powerful Olimpio agreed to do the killing for his mistress and a messy job it was. The family explanation that Cenci had fallen to his death through a rickety balcony was too easily disproved, and even Pope Clement VIII refused to temper justice with mercy. Beatrice, Lucrezia and Giacomo all confessed, though modern justice might question the worth of confessions extracted by torture on the rack.

Novelist Prokosch takes no sides, is almost astringent in telling the historic tale. His Beatrice is a cool customer, victimized by her father but with a calculating streak that makes her something less than lovable. Her affair with Olimpio is described not as a great love but as a product of tawdry circumstance that came in handy when she decided on murder. Most historical novelists would wallow in the Cenci story. Prokosch moves around it with the kind of detachment that makes it as believable as it is readable.

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