Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  The volume of this outburst caused the Carabinieri man newly returned with the coffees to tremble with shock and spill the hot liquid, cursing quietly under his breath.

  “Works for me,” Costa murmured with an admiring nod.

  “We fly out in two days,” Falcone announced. “I have reservations already. You must fly economy, I'm afraid. Budgetary restraints. Now go home and pack, both of you.”

  Teresa danced a little dance, sang a short burst of “America” from West Side Story, and twirled around on her large feet with an unexpected grace.

  Then she checked herself and prodded the inspector's chest. “When you said ‘we'…”

  “Happily, the financial affairs of the forensic department are none of my business,” Falcone declared, and began walking off, turning only to add, “Since there is no death on our files, I doubt even you can persuade someone upstairs to foot the bill for that. Of course, if you have vacation owing and the money for a ticket…”

  “I have to pay my own way?” she shrieked.

  “Perhaps we can fit you in at the accommodation Catherine is arranging,” Falcone added, barely pausing. “The choice—and the expense—are both yours.”

  Costa watched the two of them walk into the street bickering, both understanding neither would change his or her position, and that Teresa would be on that flight, even if she had to buy the ticket herself.

  Maggie Flavier took a coffee from the silent Carabiniere's hands and passed it over to him. “Will they find who did this?”

  “They'll try.” He didn't want to pry. He knew he had to. “Was Allan Prime a friend of yours? A good friend?”

  “No,” she answered with a shrug. “He was just a man I worked with. He tried his…charms, if you can call them that. Welcome to acting.” She stared at him and he knew: she had been crying, and was now allowing him to see, to understand. “It's a solitary business. Being other people. The really odd part is you get to be alone in the presence of millions.”

  “I can imagine,” he said.

  She looked at him with a sharp, engaged interest that made him feel deeply uneasy.

  “Can you?” she asked.

  NINE DAYS LATER THEY FOUND THEMSELVES surrounded by a sea of storage boxes fighting for space inside a gigantic tent by the lake in front of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Home had become a small, two-storey rented house a short walk away. It was in the oddly named district of Cow Hollow, on a quiet corner on Greenwich Street, just a few blocks away from the police station of which Catherine Bianchi was captain, head of a dwindling team, slowly running down for the unit's eventual closure at the end of the month.

  Hundreds of chests and cases had been shipped by air from Italy over the preceding week. Item after item was being patiently lined up on serried lines of tables under the scrutiny of U.S. police, private security guards, and Leo Falcone, who was clearly torn between a duty he found tedious and a desire to impress the amiable but apparently unyielding Captain Bianchi.

  There was, in Peroni's words, an awful lot of stuff to unpack. Paintings, sketches, cartoons, letters, manuscripts, reviews, personal artefacts, mostly genuine, many of considerable value. Costa was, by now, used to the painstaking cycle of work that went into assembling any moving exhibition. He had worked several in his career. Each was different. This, set in a different country, to be housed in tents during the day, guarded at night in secure warehouses nearby, was more unusual than most.

  “I'll say one thing for you lot,” Teresa declared, watching Peroni hover over a set of eighteenth-century Florentine ceramics being unpacked by a pretty young woman from the museum in Milan. “You certainly know how to treat a woman. I blew almost two thousand euros getting myself here. And what happens when I arrive? You spend days unpacking all this junk at the speed of a maiden aunt. And as for him…” She nodded at Peroni, who was still, in spite of the weather, dressed in thin summer slacks and a polo shirt, though the temperature was distinctly nippy, even in the tent. “There ought to be a law against some people being allowed out of the country.”

  “Your liberal tendencies are slipping.”

  “I'm bored, Nic. And this is a very long way to come for that.”

  She had a point. Gianluca Quattrocchi had swiftly seized control of all the key aspects of the investigation into Allan Prime's murder, sharing what information he had only with the senior San Francisco Police Department homicide team that had been brought into the case. The local force had a direct interest: Prime had owned a home in the city, a palatial house in Pacific Heights, part of a small community of Hollywood professionals who preferred the bohemian atmosphere of northern California to the frenetic commercialism of Los Angeles. Maggie Flavier was a long-term resident, too, with an apartment in Nob Hill. Roberto Tonti lived in a grand white-painted mansion in the Marina, opposite the Palace of Fine Arts, where his film would now receive its world premiere. Inferno, it seemed, was a local, almost family, affair.

  Falcone and his team had become outsiders in a crime which, in some ways, they had witnessed. Briefly interviewed by Quattroc chi's surly plainclothes Carabinieri officers, they'd been left to take responsibility for the tasks they had originally been handed in Rome. This was strictly confined to ensuring the security of the remaining historic items for the Dante exhibition.

  Costa was determined not to allow this to get under his skin. This was his first visit to America. San Francisco was a city of delights. The mundane work they had been left by Quattrocchi's team was both straightforward and easily managed. Not that any of them felt entirely relaxed about the coming round of public events.

  “You bore too easily,” he told Teresa. “There are at least ten items in this exhibition equivalent in value to that missing death mask. If we lose one more, Leo could be looking for another job.”

  The inspector was with Catherine Bianchi again, finger on chin, listening to her as if she were the only person in the world.

  “Try telling him that. Leo's mind is elsewhere, not that it's doing him any good. The man needs a case. A real one, not baby sitting antiques. There's a murder investigation here. It should be ours. Not that idiot Quattrocchi's.”

  Costa was inclined to agree. With the assistance of officers in the centro storico Questura, he had pieced together more information about Peter Jamieson, the bit-part actor who had seemingly attacked Maggie Flavier and died because of it. While the Carabinieri busily briefed the media and gathered together Dante experts and criminal profilers, Costa's men had patiently tracked Jamieson's movements the day he died. They could place him at a rehearsal for a play at the Teatro Agorà in Trastevere only forty-five minutes before he appeared outside the Casa del Cinema. Jamieson was a skilled horseman, and had performed stunts when acting work was hard to find. The uniform he wore when he rode at them outside the Cinema dei Piccoli was stolen from the Teatro Agorà, as was the stage gun loaded with blanks that had brought about his end. CCTV clearly showed him travelling by bus and tram directly from Trastevere to the Villa Borghese park shortly before the strange interlude that led to his death, in uniform and with no obvious possessions. It was inconceivable that he could have found the time to replace the real Dante mask with the fake one. Even if he had, someone else must have taken the genuine object away. The entire park area had been searched and no trace of the original found.

  There the information ran out. Jamieson lived alone in an inexpensive apartment not far from Cinecittà, had few possessions and even fewer friends. There was nothing on his computer or mobile phone to indicate an e-mail correspondence with anyone inside Inferno, apart from his minor role as an extra. His agent described him as a strange, melodramatic individual prone to fantasies and deeply in debt. In other circumstances, the police would have assumed that he'd been acting alone. Only one unusual fact stood out: the day before he died, twenty thousand dollars had been deposited into his bank account through an Internet money wire service which hid the identity of the sender. Peter Jamieson, it seemed, had been
hired for a single expensive performance, one he doubtless knew would cause trouble with the police. The money—perhaps a down payment on some promised balance—seemingly made it worthwhile. Had he behaved less rashly and dropped the gun in the children's cinema, he would simply have been apprehended as a troublesome gate-crasher and probably released with a simple caution or a minor fine for public nuisance.

  It seemed clear to Costa that only someone inside the exhibition or movie production teams could have exchanged the masks. Someone directly involved in the dreadful fate meted out to Allan Prime, given the verse scribbled on the dummy's head and its link with the message on the floor of Farnesina. These facts, however, appeared to be of little interest to Gianluca Quattrocchi when Costa raised them after the much-delayed interviews he and Maggie gave to the Carabinieri shortly before flying to California. They were merely awkward, minor details in a larger conspiracy.

  Costa's second anxiety was more personal. Maggie Flavier had abruptly shaken off the attempts of the Carabinieri to dog her footsteps, and seemed very good at doing the same with the exasperated officer from Catherine Bianchi's station who had been assigned to take care of her security here in San Francisco. She had also developed a habit of finding Costa, sometimes when he least expected it, rapidly discovering the address of the house on Greenwich Street and knocking on the door to invite him for a coffee or lunch, keen to talk of anything and everything except the movie business and the continuing furor around Inferno.

  He was flattered. He was amused.

  The large form of Gianni Peroni, Falcone and Catherine Bianchi at his side, brought him back down to earth.

  “Are you two going to do anything?” Peroni wondered.

  “I'm on holiday,” Teresa protested. “Also, apart from you, I try to stay away from old, dusty things.”

  “Thanks. Soverintendente?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “About what?” Peroni asked.

  “About the fact there's not a lot more we can do here.”

  Costa had spent two days going over the CCTV surveillance systems and the various alarm arrangements for both the exhibition and the storage areas. They were among the most thorough and technologically advanced he'd ever seen. There was so much in the way of surveillance hardware in the vicinity, he half wondered whether human beings were really needed.

  Teresa looked Peroni up and down. He wasn't shivering, quite.

  “Why on earth are you wearing those flimsy clothes?”

  “It's California, isn't it?” he complained. “In July.”

  “‘The coldest winter I ever spent—'” Catherine Bianchi began.

  “‘—was a summer in San Francisco,'” Peroni interrupted. “Mark Twain. If someone paid me every time I've heard that since we arrived…”

  “Sorry,” she apologised.

  “No problem. It's a myth anyway.”

  The American policewoman laughed. Falcone couldn't take his eyes off her. She was in plainclothes, a dark blue jacket be neath an overcoat most Romans would have chosen for au tumn. Her long hennaed hair was loose around her face. With her bright eyes and dark, constantly engaged features, she appeared more relaxed, more certain of herself, than she had seemed in Italy. A fitting match for the elegant, upright Roman inspector, with his tanned, gaunt face and silver goatee, and love for expensive clothes. A fitting match in Falcone's mind at least.

  “It's not a myth, Gianni. I grew up in San Francisco. This is what summer's like. You should come back in September.” Catherine glanced at his polo shirt. “Then you'd be dressed for the weather.”

  “I wasn't talking about the weather. I was talking about Mark Twain.”

  They all looked at him. Everyone seemed to throw this quote at visitors the moment the subject of the climate came up.

  “It's a myth,” Peroni insisted. “Twain never really said that. I looked it up. I Googled it. Isn't that what you're supposed to do out here?”

  “You're kidding me.” Catherine Bianchi looked astonished.

  “A myth people take for granted,” Peroni added. “Like killing people over poetry, perhaps.” He stared at Falcone. “So are you going to tell us, Leo? Or do we just pretend to be museum guards for the duration in the hope that some miraculous revelation will put us back in charge? Or even help us find that stupid death mask?”

  Falcone bristled. “The mask of a legend like Dante Alighieri is anything but stupid.”

  “Don't be so pompous,” Teresa scolded him. “It's a piece of clay depicting a man who died seven centuries ago. You're chasing moonbeams if you think you're going to get it back, and you know it. There's a market for art that can't be sold in public. It's a black hole. They disappear down it, and unless we recover them very quickly, the odds are they will never reappear again, not in our lifetime.” She stared hard at him. “We're not really here for that, are we, Leo?”

  “I suspect we won't see the mask again,” he agreed.

  “Here's something else,” she added. “The Carabinieri's fantasies. Is it possible some bunch of nutcases will travel the world going to great lengths to murder a well-known actor simply out of revenge for a movie they despise?”

  Catherine Bianchi said, “This is California. I've known people to kill someone over a can of Bud and a hot dog.”

  “That makes more sense, doesn't it?” Teresa responded. “It's instant fury, not premeditated murder. Human emotions like that are real. Poetry. History. Art. Much as I love them… they're not. Not in the same way. Quattrocchi has his reasons for showboating like this. He likes the movie business. It's glamorous. These people flatter him. Also these fairy tales deflect attention from the pathetic way he handled the case in Rome. But as an answer…” She shrugged.

  “So where do you look?”

  “This is a project with more than a hundred and fifty million dollars floating around inside it,” Costa said. “At least some of which seems to have come from criminal sources.”

  “That is a distinct possibility,” Falcone concurred. “But I would be grateful if we didn't trouble Quattrocchi and his men with this thought. They're busy enough already. When we meet…” He glanced at his watch. “…and we must be going soon, we're there to listen and nothing else. Catherine? Agreed?”

  “I'm an officer of the SFPD,” she answered, astonished. “Not one of you.”

  “Of course you're one of us!” Falcone insisted with heat. “Think of it. You're snubbed by those men from downtown, since they regard a homicide as above you. Your station will close at the end of the month out of…what?”

  “Centralisation,” she hissed. “Rationalisation. Putting good officers behind desks downtown, in front of computers, instead of out on the street where they're supposed to be.”

  Peroni chuckled and muttered, “We are in the same business.”

  Falcone pointed at Costa and told him to stay with the exhibition. From the look on his face, it was clear there was no point in objecting.

  “I don't want anything else disappearing,” the inspector insisted. “There are thirteen incunabula, a good number of rare books, and what's supposedly the finest copy of the original manuscript of the work in existence, from Mumbai of all places. The Indians will have our hide if that goes. Make sure it doesn't happen, Nic.”

  “And me?” Teresa wondered.

  “How you spend your holiday is your business. If you happen to be passing a store, could you kindly buy some decent coffee? That stuff in the house is disgusting.”

  She took a deep breath and glared at him. “So what am I supposed to do with my brain? I was on holiday when we were in Venice, if you remember…”

  “Venice was a different place.”

  “Damned right. I saved your life there.”

  “Grazie mille,” Falcone said nonchalantly. “We must get this out of the way because I don't wish to keep repeating it. You are here of your own volition, on your own time. You're a pathologist. We're not investigating a murder. Nor will we ever be allowed the opportunit
y. It's hard enough for me to argue a way in to eavesdrop on the investigation. I cannot do that for you. I won't waste my breath trying.”

  A chill wind engulfed them at that moment, and it wasn't simply the lively sea breeze gusting in from the nearby shoreline.

  The Palace of Fine Arts was a beautiful, quiet spot. Not what Costa had expected of the city of San Francisco, any more than was Cow Hollow, the small district neighbouring the Marina and the houses of the rich and famous, Roberto Tonti among them. They had landed in a quiet, genteel oasis of affluence tacked to the side of the larger grey urban metropolis from which the Carabinieri team and the local officers Catherine Bianchi simply referred to as “downtown” were running the investigation. And keeping their cards very close to their besuited chests.

  TO GIANNI PERONI'S MILDLY JAUNDICED EYE it seemed as if Maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi and Captain Gerald Kelly, his counterpart in the SFPD Homicide Detail, might have been made from the same mould, one customarily used to turn out military action figures for reclusive adolescent boys. Both men were of similar age—late forties-similar heavy build, and possessed the same kind of sullen, heavy, clean-shaven face, that of a boxer or field sergeant perhaps, or some burly priest with a taste for communion wine. Now both sat with their respective teams, three officers each, all male, behind facing tables in the largest room the modest Greenwich Street Police Station could offer, which wasn't very large at all. But at least the American threw Quattrocchi the occasional doubtful look from time to time when the Carabinieri man's language got a little too over the top. There might be hope there, Peroni thought. If only they had the chance to speak frankly…

  Falcone, Peroni, and Catherine Bianchi were perched on the end like bystanders. It was chilly outside but this overcrowded chamber at the rear of the little station was stifling and beginning to fill with the musky odour of men in business clothes. Peroni wondered, briefly, how much of his life had been passed in meetings, and atmospheres, such as this, then reminded himself that for once there was a variation from the norm.