by David Hewson
“There's a wounded man with a gun. I just came here to apologise. There was an incident. With the actress. Maggie Flavier. Maybe you read about it…”
The gun lowered a little. A flicker of recognition crossed the young cop's face. “That was you? You looked bigger in the papers.”
“Thanks…”
There were more people behind him. The cop swiveled nervously, waving the gun everywhere. Costa wanted to shout at him but it didn't seem a good idea.
He didn't need to anyway. Catherine Bianchi was marching down the corridor, police ID held high, Falcone behind her with a face like thunder. She was bellowing at the young cop to get his weapon down, in a voice that wasn't easy to ignore.
“Captain Bianchi…?” the cop faltered.
She was wearing a short cocktail dress with a scarlet silk scarf over her shoulders. The badge in her hand looked incongruous next to it.
She ignored him, stared at Costa, and asked, angrily, “What the hell is going on?”
“There's a wounded man inside with a gun,” Costa said quickly. “I urge—”
Caution, he was about to say, but the word stayed in his mouth. Someone was screaming, a high-pitched shriek of terror and pain. Inside Martin Vogel's apartment a light had appeared, a grim and familiar orange.
Costa scrabbled to his feet and raced down the corridor, away from the apartment.
Catherine Bianchi let out a piercing yell as a man stumbled out of the door, his body a bright, burning torch of flame from head to foot, leaping around like a victim of Saint Vitus's dance consumed by fire.
Costa snatched the fire extinguisher he'd seen earlier from the wall and ran towards the blazing figure.
“He's got a gun,” Catherine shouted, standing in the way, blocking any chance he had to move forward.
Sure enough, there was a weapon in the burning man's right hand, which now appeared blackened and useless, gripping the familiar black shape out of nothing more than fear.
Costa pushed her to one side and triggered the extinguisher.
A crowd was gathering. The spray doused the shrieking figure, which staggered and fell to the floor. His skin was black with soot, red with livid burns.
He was recognisable, just.
“Medics,” Costa said, dropping to his knees beside the man, wondering if there was much life left in him. Blood was beginning to seep through the scorched clothing. He was wounded, perhaps more than once. “They're coming. Hold still. It will be all right…”
A noise escaped the blackened lips, a long, painful groan that blew the stink of burnt petrol straight into Costa's face. It was the final breath. He knew it. So did Josh Jonah, dying in his arms.
They were around him now, looking, unable to speak.
Costa didn't wait. Two steps took him to the door to Vogel's apartment; he found the light switch, tried to take in what he saw.
The place was wrecked. There'd been a fight, a bloody one. Money—fifty-and one-hundred-dollar bills—was scattered across the table in the living room. A lot of money. Thousands, surely.
Falcone and Catherine Bianchi weren't far behind him.
“Let's put out a bulletin for Vogel,” she said, pulling out her radio. “Then we figure out how the hell I'm going to explain all this to Gerald Kelly and keep my job.”
Costa tried to take in what he was seeing. “I wouldn't make any hasty decisions. There were three people in here. I heard them.”
He walked on through the scattered mess on the floor, into the bedroom.
The smell he'd first noticed, that of blood, hung heavy in the air, mingling with the harsh chemical stench of petrol. There was something else, too…
A single naked bulb swung lazily over the bed as if someone had recently brushed against it. Martin Vogel didn't live in style. Or die that way either. The corpse was on the bare mattress. Vogel wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and the plaster cast on his arm. A gaping wound stood over his heart like a bloody rose poking its way out from the inside.
“You can hold the bulletin,” Costa said, mostly to himself.
The window was open, just a fraction. He walked to it. There was a fire escape outside. Someone could have escaped undetected.
Maybe they did kill each other—Vogel and Jonah. Or maybe it was meant to look that way.
Catherine Bianchi walked over to the table, picked up some of the notes and let them drop through her fingers. Costa watched Falcone biting his tongue, wanting to tell her not to touch a thing.
“What was it the Carabinieri's pet professor said?” she asked. “Next we'd get the Avaricious and the Prodigal?”
She shook her head and cast a brief glance at the bedroom, and then the corridor, where Josh Jonah's corpse lay like a burnt and bloodied human ember escaped from some recently extinguished bonfire.
“How do you tell which one was which?”
The stink of petrol drifting into the room from around Vogel's bed was becoming overpowering. It must have been in the carpet, the curtains, everywhere.
So Josh Jonah intended to set fire to the place and had been caught by his own misdeed, shot by the wounded Vogel. Costa's mind struggled with that idea. Jonah was ablaze when he died. If he'd been close to the petrol trail he'd been laying, that would have ignited, too. There was a gap in the scenario somewhere.
“I think we should get out of here until the fire people take a look,” he began to say. “This isn't a safe—”
Something hissed and fizzed in the corner and finally he managed to place the last unknown smell. It was one from childhood. Fireworks on the lawn of the house, bright, fiery lights in the sky. A fuse burning before the explosion.
In the corner of the room, safe on a chair above the fuel-stained carpet, sat an accordion-style jumping firecracker. A long length of cord had been attached so that it wound across the seat of the chair, lengthening the burn time. Most of it was now charred ash. Scarcely half a finger of untouched material remained, and that was getting rapidly eaten by the eager, hungry flame working its way to the small charge of powder that would take the incendiary and fling it into the room.
It was a perfect homemade time bomb and it was about to explode.
Costa shoved Catherine Bianchi back towards the door, bellowing at Falcone and the baffled young cop to join them.
Then the soft roaring gasp of the explosion hit.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER COSTA FOUND HIM self standing outside next to the engines and the emergency vehicles as they wound down their pumps and reported the entire building evacuated, without a single casualty.
Gerald Kelly had arrived, disturbed at dinner in formal dress, just like Falcone and his companion. The SFPD captain listened in quiet fury to a report from Catherine Bianchi and the firemen. After that he took the two Italians to one side to demand an explanation—any explanation—for Costa's presence in Martin Vogel's apartment.
“I came to apologise,” Costa said simply. “That was all.”
Falcone stood his ground. “I asked him to do this, Kelly. I thought it might help.”
“Oh, right. That's what you were doing. Helping.” He looked at them, desperation in his eyes. “Well? Did it?”
“This isn't our case,” Costa said, before his superior had the chance to intervene.
Kelly eyeballed him and stifled a single, dry laugh. “You guys really are something. I know it's not your case. If it was…what would you think? What would you do?”
Costa glanced at the narrow, badly lit street that fed back into the bright, busy district around Market Street.
“I'd be looking for a third man,” he said.
THREE DAYS LATER COSTA AND TERESA LUPO sat at the door of the principal exhibition tent in the temporary canvas village erected by the Palace of Fine Arts, watching Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti strut around the area as if they owned it.
The question had been bothering him for days. He knew he had to ask.
“What's the difference between a producer and a director?”
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She stared at him and asked, “Are you serious?”
“Deadly. I was never addicted to movies like you. I just see the finished thing. Actors. Pictures. I've no idea what goes into it.”
“What was the difference between Caravaggio and Cardinal Del Monte?”
Costa frowned and replied, “One was an artist and the other was the man who made his art viable. By paying for it, or finding others to come up with the commissions.”
“One provides the art. The other provides the wherewithal. There. You answered your own question.”
He thought about that, and the nagging doubt that had been with him since the conversation with the Asian waitress in the diner.
“If you'd been Del Monte, would you have loved Caravaggio or resented him? So much talent in one human being, something you couldn't hope to achieve yourself ?”
“I think I'd feel lucky to have known a genius,” Teresa replied. “And a little jealous, too, from time to time.” She nodded at the two Italians. “You think Bonetti might resent Tonti in some way?”
Bonetti was striding past the huge marquee that was destined to house the audience for the premiere the following evening. Tonti was at his side, listening. Thirty years separated these men. One was in his prime: strong, both physically and personally. Tonti was dying; his face seemed bloodless. His walk had the slow, pained determination of an old man resenting his increasing infirmity.
“Directors win Oscars,” Costa said. “Producers don't win anything.”
“The kind of money they make, they don't need to. Someone like Bonetti dips his beak in everything. He's Del Monte with a twist. He gets to sell the paintings he commissions and keep a share of them in perpetuity. What's some stupid little statue next to that?”
Something, he thought. But perhaps not much. Dino Bonetti was a powerful, confident man. It seemed far-fetched to think he would be offended by any fleeting fame attached to cast or crew.
“The question you should really be asking,” she added, “is how much someone like Tonti resents his stars. I've read his biography. It's full of bust-ups with his cast. For some people that's a trademark. Tonti…” She frowned. “He treats his cast as if they're just puppets. It's a shame he's so old. All this digital stuff they have nowadays…It can't be long before real actors become irrelevant for directors. Just one more piece of software they can manipulate on-screen—so much more manageable than flesh and blood.”
Lukatmi was never far away from the story, Costa thought. The Italian director had been involved with the digital video company since the outset. The papers said that Tonti had even provided seed capital for its founding. Not that it was going to be worth much now. Lukatmi's shares had entered meltdown after the death of Josh Jonah. In seventy-two hours the company had gone from star of the NASDAQ to one more discredited and busted dotcom. The very day that the news channels and papers devoted huge amounts of coverage to the deadly inferno in Martin Vogel's SoMa apartment, twelve lawsuits had been filed in the courts in California and New York. Given the speed with which they appeared, it was clear lawyers had been hovering at the edge of the company for some time, just as Catherine Bianchi had predicted. All accused the dead Jonah and his partner Tom Black of everything from stock option irregularities to misuse of shareholder funds. The newspapers claimed the district attorney was mulling over a formal probe into the company for fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. The share price that had seemed so buoyant only four days before had fallen through the floor until, that morning, trading had been suspended amid expectations of an impending bankruptcy announcement. Predators— old-school companies, the ones Lukatmi treated with such contempt—were hovering, ready to snap up what few worthwhile pieces might be salvaged from the corporate corpse on the waterfront at Fort Mason.
It was a juicy story for the media, one bettered only by a more astonishing revelation: as well as being a corporate crook, Josh Jonah had turned out to be a real-life criminal, a man who'd been willing to murder a Hollywood movie star in a desperate attempt to save his company from collapse. The case was closed, or so Gianluca Quattrocchi, with Bryan Whitcombe in tow, had declared to the cameras. Gerald Kelly seemed somewhat muted in front of the press. But the arguments presented by Quattroc chi appeared solid: in spite of Costa's protests, the evidence appeared to point to there being only two individuals in Martin Vogel's apartment in SoMa. Forensic believed that Jonah had fatally wounded Vogel, who had returned one shot before he died. That had crippled the billionaire as he started to spread petrol around the apartment to destroy any evidence.
“I still think I heard a third person there,” Costa said quietly.
Teresa watched him; he was aware that he had, perhaps, protested this point too much.
“It was dark. You knew something was wrong. When people are under stress…”
“I know what I heard…”
“Enough! If you were sitting in Bryant Street now, which way would you be leaning? Be honest with yourself.”
Costa didn't have a good answer for that. All the available facts suggested a failed murder attempt on Jonah's part. Cell phone company records showed that, shortly before Costa's arrival, the stricken man had tried to call his partner Tom Black from Vogel's apartment, presumably seeking help. That was speculation, though. Black had disappeared completely the evening his partner died. Kelly had let it be known to Catherine Bianchi that he thought the man was out of the U.S. already. There were huge black holes in the Lukatmi accounts. The missing money could easily fund a covert flight from the country, enough to last a lifetime if Black was smart enough to keep his head down and choose the right, distant location.
Quattrocchi's theory was, predictably, one the media was growing to love. Jonah and Black had hatched the plot to hype Inferno, employing Vogel as their legman. A phony passport recovered from the wreckage in the photographer's apartment had a stamp proving he'd flown to Rome one week before Allan Prime died, and left the day after. The picture snapped in the cemetery clearly revealed Vogel to be the man who had stolen the almonds that had very nearly ended Maggie Flavier's life. Josh Jonah and Tom Black had enough access to security arrangements to provide Vogel with the means by which Maggie might be poisoned. His job as a paparazzo had proved the perfect cover to follow her afterwards. Records in Rome showed that he had also managed to obtain media accreditation there using his forged passport, giving him the opportunity to enter the restricted area by the Casa del Cinema and replace the genuine death mask of Dante with the fake one taken from Allan Prime that morning. Quattrocchi's team had, in what Falcone declared a rare moment of investigative competence, discovered that Vogel's alias was in an address book belonging to Peter Jamieson, the actor who had died in the uniform of a Carabinieri officer at the Villa Borghese. It seemed a logical step to assume that Jonah had recruited the actor to scare Maggie Flavier, perhaps as a way of distracting the police from Allan Prime, perhaps calculating, too, that his act might provoke a violent response the unfortunate Jamieson had never expected.
The case remained open. Tom Black was still at large. There was still no sign of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes. Moreover, from the point of view of the state police, the genuine death mask of Dante was still missing, and causing considerable internal ructions with the museum authorities in Italy. But a kind of conclusion had been reached in terms of Allan Prime's murder. As far as Quattrocchi was concerned, nothing else really mattered. Josh Jonah had used the cycle of Dante's numbers as a code for his attacks on those associated with the production, knowing that this fed the idea the movie was either somehow cursed or stalked by vengeful Dante fanatics seeking to punish those associated with the perfidious Roberto Tonti. It was all a desperate publicity stunt, one engineered by Lukatmi. It had worked, too. Inferno was on every front page, every news bulletin.
The pace of the investigation—one which had hung on the assumption that yet one more attack lurked around the corner-had slackened as the principal focus moved to the fin
ancial mess inside Lukatmi. They were now one day away from Inferno's world premiere. Once that had occurred without incident, the cast and crew would hand over security arrangements entirely to the private companies. For Costa and his colleagues, Italy would beckon.
Maggie Flavier had left innumerable messages imploring him to visit. He'd made a series of excuses, some genuine, some less so. In the hectic aftermath of the deaths of Jonah and the paparazzo Vogel, Costa had come to realize that he was beginning to miss Italy, miss Rome, with its familiar sights, the street sounds, the easy banter in cafés, the warm, comforting embrace of home. San Francisco was a beautiful, interesting, and cultured city, but it could never be his. Rome was part of his identity, and without it he felt a little lost, like Maggie Flavier attempting to find herself in the long-dead faces of the women in the paintings in the Legion of Honor. A movie was a temporary caravan, always waiting to disperse. If she came to Rome for some sequel, she would be there six, nine months, perhaps no more. And then…
Life was temporary, and its briefness only given meaning by some short, often clumsy attempt to find permanence within the shifting sands of one's emotions. He knew that search would never leave him. He knew, too, that Maggie Flavier would struggle to feel the same way. She would seek as she did character after character, personality after personality, through the constant round of work.
“I can't believe you're not even up to an argument over this,” Teresa complained, jolting him back to the present.
“We could be home in a few days. I'd like that. Wouldn't you?”
She screwed up her face in an awkward, gauche expression. “Not yet. Not till it's over.”
“You just told me I was wrong to think there was more to this case than Gianluca Quattrocchi would have the media believe.”
“No. I merely said your supposition for the existence of a third party in Martin Vogel's apartment was difficult to prove. I do wish cops would listen more carefully sometimes.” A familiar sly smile appeared. “May I remind you of some things we do know? One chief suspect is missing. Thanks to the gigantic amount of publicity this has generated, a stack of money has been thrown up in the air and no one knows where it's going to fall. And you don't have your precious mask.”
