Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  “So this guy of yours…” Frank went on. “Quattrocchi…the snooty one we saw on the TV…”

  “He's Carabinieri,” she declared from the rear seat. “Not one of ours.”

  Hank, who was at the wheel with his brother next to him, eased the old car into a parking spot, then leaned back to look at her. “A cop's a cop.”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “They're not cops,” Hank pointed out.

  “Neither are the Carabinieri!”

  “Yeah, well, they look that way to the SFPD and that's what matters.”

  “Hank,” she said, taking his hand over the seat back and looking into his large, watery blue eyes. “Try and understand. You're not reading a book now. This is not Sherlock Holmes versus Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Real life isn't fiction. It's all much more complicated and ragged at the edges. There are rarely neat symmetrical resolutions. People like me, the police, the Carabinieri…we just blunder around in the dark, hopefully with a little skill, creativity, and luck, praying there's light somewhere around the corner. But don't quote me on that. Ever. It's supposed to be a secret.”

  Frank let out a warm, throaty chuckle. “Worst one you people have. We read newspapers, too, you know. If it wasn't for the scientists …”

  “Science isn't everything. Trust me. I know. Did you ever read of someone getting murdered over poetry?”

  “This is America. You need a reason to get killed?”

  “But poetry?”

  Hank perked up and punched his brother playfully on the arm. “On the other hand, this isn't our case, is it? The whole thing began in Rome. In Europe. Maybe that's where it all comes from. And in Europe…”

  “In Europe we don't murder people over poetry either.”

  With his fondness for Victorian fiction, Hank relished the Dante story for the same reason Quattrocchi and the media did. It was colourful. It engaged the imagination. It told people that this involved more than low cunning, naked violence, and one instance of vicious, heartless homicide. There was, as Quattroc chi was trying to say, reassurance in the idea that some intellectual puzzle lay behind everything, a riddle waiting to be solved. This put an attractive skin on something ugly and old and familiar—simple, brutal violence. Which was all very well for a book, or someone who couldn't face up to reality…

  Frank was looking at her, full of sincere curiosity. “What do you murder people over back home?”

  “The usual. Jealousy. Rage. We're not a different race; we just talk a different language. People everywhere kill each other for the same reasons they always have. We make the same mistakes, over and over again. It's always something personal. A slight, an offence, even another crime, against ourselves or someone we love or feel responsible for. As a species we're selfish, vengeful creatures at heart. When something hurts us, we like to hurt back.”

  “Lots of people love Dante,” Hank pointed out. “Some of them feel hurt by that movie.”

  Frank looked dubious. “But not many murderers, surely. And didn't I read somewhere that usually it's people you know? Family. Friends. Some guy around the corner. Those are the ones you need to worry about.”

  “Usually,” she murmured. “Whatever that means.”

  “It's a ridiculous theory,” Hank announced. “This stuck-up Quattrocchi guy's a professional. How can he believe such garbage?”

  “For the same reason you believed it,” Frank said. “It sounds fun, and he's got that tame little Canadian monkey at his elbow reminding him of that fact. It doesn't mean he's a bad cop.”

  Teresa bristled and pointed the wagging finger at them. “He's not a cop. And if he was, he wouldn't be a good one. Real cops are honest. They're honest with themselves, sometimes to the point of self-loathing.” She thought of Peroni, Nic, and Falcone, and the way they couldn't ever really let go of anything until they'd shaken the thing into its component parts, however messy and painful that might be. “It's not a talent to be envied or coveted. Honesty's painful. But without it…what have you got?”

  A curious sideways glance passed between the two of them, Hank in the driving seat, Frank next to him. It was a look of self-knowledge, of something fresh and different and challenging occurring between two people who knew each other better, surely, than most men knew their wives.

  She stared into their nearly identical faces and asked, “Is there anything you two have been wanting to say to each other?”

  “Yes,” Hank and Frank said simultaneously, then fell silent.

  “OK,” she said after a while, pointing at Frank. “You first.”

  “That stupid fire engine is as clean as it ever was,” he blurted out. “And we both damned well know it.”

  Hank coughed and stared out the window. “Not quite as clean…” he muttered.

  “Clean enough. Why don't we get off those guys' backs? It's their job now. Not ours.”

  Hank cleared his throat again, then turned to look at him. “I've been trying to say that to you for months. I thought… maybe you'd have been offended. You started the whole thing. I wondered what we'd have without it.”

  “I know I started it. And maybe I would have been upset. Stupid of me.”

  Teresa Lupo was briefly speechless. For the first time, she finally saw them as two individuals, no longer the single identity HankenFrank she had first met the day before. Their vivid mirror personalities, their almost exact physical resemblance, the near-identical clothes they wore… these visual cues had thrown her. It was a movie director's trick, one worthy of Hitchcock. The eye saw what it wanted to see. Just as Gianluca Quattrocchi and Professor Bryan Whitcombe looked at the events surrounding Inferno and beheld nothing but Dante, she had been fooled into thinking that Hank and Frank both thought and behaved as one. And in some ways, so had they.

  “You know, I would love to show you two around Rome sometime. Will you come?”

  “That's a date,” Frank replied, his voice a little cut up. To distract her—and Hank—from noticing, he turned and glanced at the church. It appeared to be divided into two parts, one relatively modern and grand, the second white, adobe-style, and visibly older than anything she had ever seen in America. “So why are we here?”

  “To blunder creatively. And to see where Carlotta Valdes was really buried, before your friend on Chestnut Street stole her headstone. I want to see what's become of the grave of a ghost.”

  MARTIN VOGEL WASN'T AT HOME. SO COSTA drove around the city, meandering through the long, grey urban streets, up and down hills that seemed too steep for the automobile, dodging buses and cable cars, getting lost from time to time, then always finding something—the stretched silhouette of the Bay Bridge, the upright outline of Coit Tower, the Transamerica pyramid, the line of the ocean—that could give him some bearings. The previous night he'd sat alone until three watching the movie he'd found lying on the coffee table next to the TV. Teresa had mentioned it briefly and received a fierce look from Falcone when she tried to expand on her theory that it might somehow have something to tell them.

  Now, as he cruised the city a day later, thinking of Maggie and a case that was not just baffling but also off-limits, he found it impossible to shake the memories of the movie from his head. It wasn't just that so many of the locations—the Legion of Honor, the Palace of Fine Arts, the same mundane landscape of small stores and offices—were places he'd visited with her. There was an atmosphere to the film, a sense of motion without obvious progress, yet with a hidden direction just out of reach, that was beginning to haunt him.

  Teresa had every right to be intrigued. There were obvious links. The car some stranger had loaned Maggie was the same model and colour of that driven by the principal female character in the movie. Costa had tried to find the vehicle but the studio security people said it had been taken away the morning after she'd been poisoned. Not by the police either. The Jaguar had disappeared, and when he phoned her agent, who seemed both fascinated and appalled by the fact her client had been pictured in the pap
ers gazing adoringly at a mere Roman cop, he'd discovered there was no paperwork, no trace of where it had come from or gone. Only a phone number, which turned out to be fake.

  Something else bothered him. He was never good at flowers. But he was certain the oddly old-fashioned bouquet on the rear seat of the Jaguar had been a copy of the ones in the movie, held by the dead Carlotta Valdes in a painting and Madeleine Elster in real life. Not that it was the real Madeleine Elster. Or real life, for that matter.

  Everything about this case seemed steeped in the cinema. Roberto Tonti, Teresa said, had learned his craft in the em ploy of Hitchcock as the director was making Vertigo in San Francisco. Everyone from Dino Bonetti to Simon Harvey, and even the young men in control of Lukatmi, had some kind of obsession with the moving image. A dependence—financial, perhaps, or something more personal—gripped them all.

  He recalled Rome and a strange young actor dressed as a Carabinieri horseman, running through a performance that would lead to his death. And the end of Allan Prime, in the beautiful little Villa Farnesina. The links to Dante were everywhere, in the deadly cycle of numbers, the written warnings. The evidence.

  Supposition and guesswork were dangerous friends. In Hitchcock's movie, the tragic detective Scottie had toyed with them and lost everything in the end.

  Costa's rented Ford kept nosing aimlessly over the city, from the tourist dives of Fisherman's Wharf to backstreets and rich residential areas, and semi-abandoned industrial districts that looked as if they hadn't changed in years. He knew what he half hoped to see. An old green Jaguar with a blonde woman at the wheel, pulling into a dark corner, a dusty dead end where he might meet her and find some answers.

  Somewhere along the way, he wasn't sure exactly, he stopped in a gleaming 1950s diner. A young Asian girl in a white hat and anachronistic smock served him a weak milky coffee. She wore a badge that said The Philippines and a broad toothy smile. San Francisco seemed possessed of multiple personalities, all of them jumbled up together, one running into the many.

  He looked at his watch. It was close to seven. A decent enough time to call. He phoned the Park Hill Sanatorium and waited as a woman who sounded like the smartest of hotel receptionists put him on hold.

  “Miss Flavier discharged herself an hour ago,” she reported after a long wait.

  “You mean she's OK.”

  “We can't discuss a patient's condition, sir. You appreciate that.”

  “Where did she go? Who with?”

  “I really can't add to what I've said. Good night.”

  The line went dead. Costa realised he didn't know where Maggie lived. An apartment somewhere on Nob Hill. That was all she'd told him.

  He called the agent and got an answering machine. He tried Falcone. The inspector listened to him, then said, “If Maggie Flavier wants to go home, it's none of your business.”

  “She nearly died…”

  “It was an allergic reaction. One she's had before. If she was really ill, they would never have let her leave the hospital. She'll have security. Relax.”

  “I don't even know where she lives. Can you find that out?”

  “Yes. I can.”

  Then nothing.

  “Leo…”

  “Leave it. You're fortunate the police haven't charged you with assault over that photographer. Don't tempt fate.”

  He could feel his temper rising. “You asked me to go and apologise to the man.”

  “So why didn't you?”

  He wasn't in, Costa told him. No one was around. The place looked deserted. But that was three hours before.

  “Then try again. That's what we do, isn't it? No more phone calls, Nic. I'm off-duty.”

  “Yes… sir.”

  Costa cut the call and uttered a short, meaningful Roman curse.

  The Filipino waitress was beaming at him. She had a plate in her hands.

  “Here you go. Veggie burger and fries,” she said, and the sight of it dispelled his appetite for good.

  He gazed at the shining chrome and, plastered on the walls throughout the diner, posters for movies and stars he'd long forgotten. Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Cinema attempted to define modern life through allegory and mystery, in much the same way Dante sought to define his own medieval world. Fundamentally, they were looking for the same unreachable goals: happiness, peace, and a few good answers.

  Then a familiar voice came over from the TV in the corner.

  He picked up his glass of plain water and sat in the steel seat directly beneath the screen. Roberto Tonti was on some news interview program. It seemed to be live. A long clip from the movie—Allan Prime as Dante, spellbound as Maggie, ethereal, otherworldly, strode through a nightmare universe of monsters and flame.

  The waitress stopped work and watched it with him.

  “Who's the boring guy?” she asked. “What's he got to do with big stars like that?”

  He told her the director's name. She looked puzzled.

  “Never heard of him. He looks sick. Oughta be in the hospital.”

  “He directed the movie. It's his show.”

  “No, it's not. I don't go to the movies to see guys like that. I wanna see stars. Don't you?”

  “They're just people. Like you and me.”

  She stared at him, then burst out laughing.

  “Not like me, mister. Not in a million years.” Her eyes shone with amusement. “No offence but…not like you either.”

  THEY HAD SPENT MORE THAN AN HOUR WANdering around Mission Dolores. She couldn't have hoped for better guides. Hank and Frank were in love with their city. They seemed to know every last corner. For Teresa Lupo, who had no fondness for religion, the mission was a revelation. In Rome, the Church was omnipresent, and seemed to have been that way forever. Seated in the small adobe chapel of Mission Dolores, she was, for the first time in her life, conscious of a world that existed before God, at least the one she'd grown up with. This had been a different, virgin environment, one conquered by a foreign host bringing what it saw as enlightenment and civilisation, just two hundred and fifty years before, at a time when Rome regarded itself as the modern capital of a civilised, fixed universe in which everything was labelled, recognised, and known. In Italy, history seemed either distant or a part of the living present. Here the past existed just out of reach, tantalisingly near yet untouchable, alive yet gone, too.

  The place fascinated her so much that she forgot, for a while, why they'd gone there. Then Frank asked, “So you really want to see Carlotta's grave?”

  Oh. Of course.”

  They walked outside. It was getting cold and late. She wondered how much longer they could stay here. How much she could put off going back to Greenwich Street and admitting she had nothing to report, or suggest. A green car, some locations, a few possible coincidences…it added up to nothing and she knew it.

  The cemetery was beautiful, hushed and peaceful, filled with roses, bold spikes of yellow cannas, and flowers she couldn't identify.

  The statues of dead monks ranged across the graveyard, pensive heads bowed over their own tombs, the long foreign grass rising up to their frozen grey waists. Misshapen conifers rose among the forest of headstones against the white adobe walls where two unequal towers, like decorations on a wedding cake, pointed to a fading blue sky above floods of purple and red bougainvillea tumbling down from the roofline.

  The names on the graves seemed to come from everywhere: Spain and Ireland, England and the east coast of America. Some tombs were grand, most modest. Death and the relentless maritime climate were slowly reducing them all to crumbling stone.

  She wandered through a grove of roses and came upon a small dome-shaped reed hut, recently erected. A sign said it was designed to show the original kind of dwelling place used by the Ohlone, the indigenous people of the area before colonisation. She closed her eyes, thought of the scene in the movie: Scottie, in a brown suit and a 1950s gentleman's hat, skulking by the overhang of the mission wall
s, watching from the shadow of a sprawling tomb, furtively spying on Madeleine as she gazed down at a grave, a curious bouquet of roses in her hand.

  “She knew you were there all along, Scottie,” Teresa murmured.

  “That she did,” Frank agreed.

  “You like the movie, too?” she asked.

  His eyes clouded over with doubt. “It's not easy to forget and I don't know why. Or what it means, if it means anything, or needs to. There's something…” He chose his words carefully. She noticed how Hank watched him, a quiet look of admiration in his near-identical face. “… there's something not quite right about it. Something… obsessive. The way everyone seems to be watching that woman. Not just Scottie. The camera, too. Us. The audience. It's unnatural and it's supposed to be that way. The thing draws you in, and if you think about it, that makes you uncomfortable.”

  “It's voyeuristic,” she suggested.

  He grinned. “The very word! You know, for a foreigner, you're very good with English.”

  She shrugged. “I've got the time. I'm off the case. Just another tourist. Words are all I have.”

  Teresa put out her hand and touched the dry reeds of the Ohlone structure. “It was here, wasn't it? Carlotta's gravestone? Before they moved it to that little cinema in the Marina?”

  “If they moved it to that little cinema in the Marina,” Frank cautioned. “You heard that guy. His uncle was a rogue. Movie crews always are. Do you know no one has any idea where the painting went? The one of Carlotta? It'd be worth a fortune now. They think it just got scrapped. Thrown out with the junk. One more prop. That was Hitch. Finish one movie, get on with the next. Never look back. Only the present matters. Do you think people like Roberto Tonti treat the job that way?”

  “Not for a moment. They've got egos the size of a whale. They're interested in their legacy.”

  “Which is nothing more and nothing less than the movies they leave behind,” Frank insisted. “I think Hitch got it right.”

  His brother intervened. “It was actually a little to the left.” Hank pointed to a rough patch where a few low flowers were struggling to flourish in the dry earth. “They couldn't use somewhere there was a real grave, for sure.”