Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  Peroni thought about this. Harvey had no idea how these matters worked. The probability was that the Carabinieri would get the investigation in any case, however hard Falcone tried to steal the job. The men from the military had been given cast and crew security from the beginning. Murder or no murder, this was their call.

  “Why would you want to give me a deal like that?”

  The American nodded in the direction of the dark blue uniforms. “Because I've had a bellyful of those stuck-up bastards for the past few months and they won't cut me a deal on anything. Is that good enough?”

  Peroni discreetly eyed the opposition. Some boss figure had emerged and was now bravely taking on the police forensic team, not even blinking at Teresa's increasingly desperate attempts to shout him down. There was strength in numbers, particularly when it came backed up by medals and rank. It was definitely time to leave.

  “You must have seen that film a million times,” Peroni observed.

  “A million times is not enough,” Harvey replied. “Roberto Tonti's a genius. I'd watch it a million times more if I could. Inferno is the finest piece of cinema I've ever worked on. I doubt I'll ever have the privilege to get my name attached to anything better. What's your point?”

  “My point, Signor Harvey, is I'm willing to let you have your little show. Provided you can help us get out of here the moment my colleagues are ready.”

  “It's done,” Harvey said immediately. “You have my word.”

  “And I want someone to come along with us. Someone from the studio. Bonetti, Tonti…”

  The man waved his hand in front of Peroni's face. “Don't even think about it. They don't do menial.”

  “In that case, you. Seen inside many police stations?”

  Harvey's pleasant demeanour failed him for a moment. “Can't say I have. Is this relevant?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what am I supposed to talk about? Dante? I've got a degree in classics.” Harvey caught Peroni's eye and nodded at the fake severed head. “That… thing. It's about Dante, you know. The line they wrote on the skull… ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.'”

  Teresa had what she wanted. He could see the boxes and bags ready to go. The pathologist took a break from bawling out an entire line of Carabinieri officers to issue a sly nod in his direction.

  Harvey wriggled, a little nervous. “You know something, Officer Peroni? We've been getting strange anonymous e-mails. For months. It happens a lot when you're making a movie. I never thought too much about it.”

  “Strange?”

  “They quoted that line, always. And they said…” Harvey tugged at his long hair. “… they said we were living in limbo. I never took it literally.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The American grimaced. “I mean literally. The way it appears in Dante.” He sighed. “Limbo is the first circle of Hell. The place the story begins.”

  Just the mention of the film revived some memories Gianni Peroni hoped had been lost. Things seemed to be happening from the very opening moment in Tonti's version of the tale. Not good things either.

  “And then?” Peroni asked. “After limbo?”

  “Then you're on the road to Hell.”

  THE DOOR TO ALLAN PRIME'S APARTMENT OPENED almost the moment Falcone pushed the bell. Nic Costa felt as if he'd stumbled back through time. The woman who stood there might have been an actress herself. Adele Neri still looked several years short of forty and was as slender and cat-like as he recalled. She wore designer jeans and a skimpy white T-shirt. Her arresting face bore the cold, disengaged scowl of the Roman rich. She had a tan that spoke of a second home in Sicily and a heavy gold necklace around a slender neck that carried a few wrinkles he didn't recall from the case a few years before, when she had first come to the notice of the Questura. That had taken them to the Via Giulia, too, to a house not more than a dozen doors away, one that had been booby-trapped with a bomb by her mob boss husband, Emilio, as he tried to flee Rome. Adele Neri was an interesting woman who had led an interesting life.

  “I thought I was past getting visits from the likes of you people,” she said, holding the door half open. “Do you have a warrant? Or some reason why I should let you into my home?”

  “We were looking for Allan Prime,” Costa replied. “We thought he lived here.”

  “He does. When he's around. But this is my house. All of it. Several more in the Via Giulia, too. Do you mean you didn't know?”

  She gazed at Falcone, thin arms crossed, smiling. Costa recalled seeing the intelligence reports after Emilio's death. They said that Adele had taken over leadership of her husband's local clan for a while before selling on her interests to a larger, more serious mob and, if rumour was correct, removing herself from the murky world of Roman crime to enjoy her vast, illicitly inherited wealth.

  “Inspector Falcone. The clever one.”

  “Signora Neri,” Falcone said pleasantly, nodding. “What an unexpected delight.”

  “Quite. So tell me. Why didn't you try to put me in jail? After Emilio got shot?”

  “Because I didn't think it would stick,” Falcone replied, looking puzzled. “Isn't that obvious? I'm a practical man. I don't fight lost causes over trivia.” He got one foot over the threshold and tried to look around. “This is nothing to do with you. We merely wish to locate a lost Hollywood actor.”

  “Join the club,” she sighed, then stepped back. “I'll let five of you in here and they'd best have no dirt on their shoes. This place rents for eight thousand dollars a week. For that, people don't expect muddy cop prints on the carpet.”

  Costa issued some orders to the officers left outside, then began to prowl the vast, airy apartment. There was a spectacular view of the river and the busy Lungotevere through long windows, with a vista of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance, and by the external terrace a circular iron staircase to what he took to be a roof garden. To their left stood a large open kitchen with the kind of fittings only the rich could think about.

  He sat down on a vast leather sofa. Falcone joined him and they waited. She wanted to make an entrance, a point. Adele Neri slipped briefly into the kitchen and came out with a glass of blood-orange juice, a spremuta freshly pressed, probably from one of the stalls in the Campo dei Fiori. The drink was almost the colour of her hair, which was now longer than he recalled, clipped bluntly against her swan-like neck. Emilio Neri had been one of the most important mob bosses in Rome until his past caught up with him. Adele, more than thirty years his junior, with a history in vice herself, had been complicit in his downfall, though how much of that was greed and how much hatred for her husband they had never been able to decide. The gang lord was dead, his empire shattered, soon to be disposed of by his guilty widow. One crime clan left the scene, another took its place. Life went on, as it always would. He'd felt happy about Neri's fate at the time. A man had died at Costa's hand in pursuit of the answers Adele Neri had held in her smart, beautiful head all along. He had never quite shaken off a misplaced sense of guilt over that particular outcome.

  “Where's Allan Prime?” Falcone asked.

  “You tell me. I was supposed to have lunch with him today, at noon. I came over, rang the bell. No one answered, so I let myself in. Then some people phoned from the studio. They said he hadn't turned up for the premiere either.” She took an elegant, studied sip of the scarlet drink. “This is my place. I can do what I damned well like.”

  “You and Mr. Prime…” Costa asked.

  “Landlady and tenant. Nothing more. He tried, naturally. He's the kind who does that anyway, just to see who'll rise to the bait. It's a form of insecurity, and insecure men have never interested me.”

  “You have no idea where he might be?”

  She made a gesture of ignorance with her skinny, tanned arms. “Why should I? He pays the rent. I indulge him with lunch from time to time. It's a kindness. He's like most actors. A lot less interesting than he thinks. A lot less intelligent too. But�
��” She gazed at them, thinking. “This isn't like him. He's a professional. He told me he was going to that premiere tonight. He moaned about it, naturally. Having to perform for free.” The woman laughed. “Allan's an artist, of course. Or so he'd like to pretend. All that razzmatazz is supposed to be beneath him.”

  “Girlfriends—” Falcone began.

  “Don't know, don't care,” Adele interrupted. “He had women here. What do you expect? He had a few parties early on, and I had to get someone to speak to him about that. There are some nice old people living in the other apartments. They don't like movie types wandering around with white powder dripping from their noses. It's not that kind of neighbourhood. Also…”

  She stopped. There was something on her mind, and she was unsure whether to share it with the police, Costa thought.

  “Also what?” he asked.

  “Why should I tell you people anything? What do I get in return?”

  The inspector frowned. “Some help in finding your tenant, perhaps. Does he owe you money?”

  “Three months outstanding. Show business people never pay on time. They think we should be grateful they're here at all. That we should put up a plaque on the wall when they're gone.”

  “ Twenty-four thousand dollars,” Falcone observed. “A lot of money.”

  “Don't insult me. I spend more than that in one day when I go to Milan. I'll tell you one thing though. For free. Prime and his cronies had interesting friends. I came to one of his parties. Him and that evil bastard Bonetti. The company they kept.” She smiled. “It was like the old days. When my husband was alive. The same dark suits. The same accents bred in cow shit. A bunch of surly sons of bitches from the south who think they own you. That kind never changes. They just put their money in different places. Legitimate places. And movies, too, not that they're the same thing.”

  “You seem to know about the movie business.”

  “I've made my contribution. Shits like Bonetti know how to screw you. ‘It's only a million. Think of the tax write-off. If the worst comes to the worst, you get your money back anyway.' Then…” She clapped her skeletal hands. The loud noise rang round the room like a gunshot. “It's gone, and Bonetti or one of his creatures is phoning from L.A., full of apologies, promising that maybe a little of it will come back one day. After everyone else has taken their cut.” Adele Neri leaned forward and her sharp eyes held them. “Allan moves in dangerous circles and he doesn't even know it. I told him, but he isn't the kind of man who listens to anyone else. A woman least of all. That's the truth. You don't honestly think I'd be sitting here waiting for the doorbell to ring if I'd done something, do you?”

  “Do you read Dante, Signora Neri?” Falcone asked.

  The unexpected question amused her. Adele Neri looked human, warm and attractive and perhaps even a pleasure to know at that moment.

  “Dante?” she asked, amazed. “I'll go see the movie sometime. Preferably when Allan gets me some free tickets. But reading?” She finished what remained of the spremuta. “I'm the merry widow now, Falcone. I shop, I spend, I travel, and when I feel like it, when I see something that interests me, I take a little pleasure. Life's too enjoyable for books. Why leave this world for someone else's? Reading…” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “…is for people without lives. No. I know no more of Dante than you.”

  “Actually, I know quite a lot,” Falcone replied almost apologetically. “Not that it matters.”

  “It doesn't?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Because I find it hard to believe that anyone would commit much of a crime over poetry. However much they might wish us to think otherwise.”

  “You really think something's happened to Allan?”

  “He's missing. We have some very strange evidence. One man is dead. Perhaps there's no connection. Perhaps…”

  She cut the air with her hand and said, “This does not involve me. If you want to talk any more, we need to do this with a lawyer around.”

  Taccone, the old soverintendente Falcone liked to use, had returned from looking around the apartment and stood waiting for the inspector to fall silent.

  “You need to see this,” he told them.

  The two men got up and followed him into what appeared to be the master bedroom. Adele Neri came in behind them. Somewhere along the way she'd picked up a packet of cigarettes and was quickly lighting one.

  “What is it?” Falcone asked Taccone.

  Costa walked forward to stand a short distance from the bed. He looked at Adele Neri and asked, “Didn't you come in here?”

  “Why would I want to sneak around his bedroom?”

  “Call in forensic,” Falcone ordered. “Let's not touch anything. Did you find any signs of violence?”

  Taccone shook his head. “We didn't find anything. Except this.”

  The bed was covered with a green plastic ground sheet of the kind used by campers. The shape of a man's body was still visible on it, set deep enough to imprint itself on the mattress below. Around the outline of the upper torso there was a faint sprinkling of pale grey powder which grew heavier around the head.

  Taccone reached down and, using a handkerchief, picked up the handle of a brown bucket that had been hidden on the far side of the bed.

  “It looks like clay or something,” he said.

  Costa's phone was ringing. The doorman who had been on duty that morning had gone home at lunchtime. It had taken a while to trace him. Costa listened to what the officer who'd finally found the man, in a Campo dei Fiori café, had to say. Then he asked to be passed to the agente who had handled the second inquiry.

  “Seal off this room,” Falcone ordered. “Assume we have a murder scene.”

  “We don't,” Costa said simply. “There's no CCTV in this building, but we've found one of the staff who was on duty. There are details in the visitors' book.”

  He looked at Adele Neri and asked, “Is the name Carlotta Valdes familiar?”

  She drew on the cigarette and shook her head. “No. Spanish?”

  “A woman calling herself that arrived to see Allan Prime at eight-thirty this morning. They left together around ten. Mr. Prime looked very happy, apparently. Expectant even.”

  Falcone shook his head in bafflement, lost for words for a moment, as if the investigation were slipping away from them before it had even begun.

  “A man is dead,” Costa reminded him.

  “His death is the Carabinieri's problem, as you have made very clear.”

  “Also…”

  “Also the death mask we were supposed to protect is missing,” Falcone went on. “I am aware of that. It may be all we have. A case of art theft.”

  Costa struggled to see some sense in the situation. It was impossible to guess precisely what kind of case they had on their hands. The loss of a precious historic object? Or something altogether darker and more personal?

  “The man who was killed in the park,” he persisted, regardless of Falcone's growing exasperation. “He's been identified. We were told by the Carabinieri as a matter of course, at the same time they put in a formal request for an interview. I need to report to them with Signora Flavier.”

  “Well?” Falcone asked.

  “His name was Peter Jamieson. He was an actor, originally from Los Angeles. The man moved to Rome a decade ago, principally playing bit parts, Americans for cheap TV productions at Cinecittà.”

  “Tell me. Did he have a part in Inferno?” Falcone looked ready to explode.

  “Nonspeaking. Barely visible. There's no reason why anyone from the cast should have recognised him at all.”

  The inspector pointed a bony finger in Costa's face, as if he'd found the guilty party already.

  “If this is some kind of publicity stunt gone wrong, I will put every last one of those painted puppets in jail.”

  “If…” Costa repeated, and found himself staring again at the powder on the bed, and the silhouette of Allan Prime's head outlined there.

  MARESCIALLO G
IANLUCA QUATTROCCHI WAS furious on several fronts. The screening had begun without his permission. Key pieces of evidence had been removed from the scene by the morgue monkeys of the state police, under the supervision of Teresa Lupo, a woman Quattrocchi had encountered, and been bested by, in the past, on more than one occasion. And now Leo Falcone had placed a team in Allan Prime's home without consulting the Carabinieri, though the state police inspector knew full well that security for the film cast was not his responsibility and never would be.

  As a result Quattrocchi's bull-like face appeared even more vexed than normal, and he found himself sweating profusely inside the fine wool uniform he had chosen for an occasion that was meant to be social and ceremonial, not business. He stood at the back of the projection room, temporarily speechless with fury, not least because his principal contact within the crew, the publicist Simon Harvey, appeared to have been spirited away by Falcone's people, too. All he got in his place was the smug, beaming Dino Bonetti, a loathsome creature of dubious morality, and two young ponytailed Americans with, it seemed to him, a hazy grasp of the seriousness of the situation.

  While everyone else wore evening dress, the two young men had removed their jackets to reveal T-shirts bearing the name Lukatmi, with a logo showing some kind of oriental goddess, a buxom figure with skimpy clothing, a beguiling smile, and multiple arms, each holding a variety of different cameras—movie, still, phones, little webcams of the kind the Carabinieri used for CCTV—all linked into one end of a snaking cable pumping out a profusion of images into a starry sky.

  Quattrocchi peered more closely. There were faces within the stars, a galaxy of Hollywood notables—Monroe, Gable, Hepburn, James Stewart, their heads floating in the ether.

  “Note,” the skinny one identified by his shirt as Josh Jonah, Founder, Ideologist., Visioneer, ordered, “the absence of noise.”

  “I can hear you,” Quattrocchi snapped, to no avail.

  “If we were in an ordinary projectionist's room,” Jonah continued, “we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. There would be film rattling through the projector. Physical artefacts. Need less expense. Time and money thrown away without reason.”