Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  Two points he appreciated. The third puzzled him.

  “What do you mean about the money?”

  “You should talk to Catherine Bianchi more. She has a firm grasp of finance. How you go about backing companies like Lukatmi. She even seems to understand how to raise money for movies, as much as anyone outside the business can.”

  He watched the private security guards working on the installation of CCTV cameras on the nearest tent. The place was bristling with the things. There were enough cameras to catch a squirrel sneezing. But the tempo of the investigation had changed. It felt…if not over, then at least more manageable, to some anyway.

  There was a minor commotion. Roberto Tonti strode through the door of the tent, followed by Dino Bonetti speaking in low, confidential tones by his side. Bonetti didn't look his usual bouncy, arrogant self. This was surely going to be the most extraordinary and potentially lucrative movie he had ever produced. The newspapers were talking about a posthumous Oscar nomination for Allan Prime. The industry rags were predicting that Inferno could be the first movie to break a two-hundred-million-dollar weekend gross at the box office when it went nationwide.

  Perhaps it was the strain, but neither man looked like someone on the verge of breaking every entertainment industry record in the book.

  THE TWO BROTHERS STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE to the main hall of the Lukatmi building. Bulky individuals in blue overalls appeared to be gutting the place. Furniture and phones and computer equipment were disappearing out of the door and into moving vans at an astonishing rate.

  There was a supervisor by the entrance, his rank emphasised by the fact that he was so scrawny he couldn't lift a thing except the clipboard in his hands. Hank Boynton tapped the man on the arm.

  “Didn't these guys own anything themselves?”

  “Maybe a paper clip or two. But we're taking them, too. This place stinks of rotten debt. I'll have anything that's not nailed down.”

  “The cops won't like that,” Frank suggested.

  “The cops are in Building Two, where all the accounting and e-mail stuff got kept. We're just taking the dweeb items they used to mess around with while they were pretending they were Fox or something.”

  “Computers…” Hank said.

  “Workstations,” the man emphasised.

  “I was gonna ask if you had one going cheap,” Frank intervened. “Not so interested now.”

  “You guys want something? Or you just here to yank my chain?” he asked, and not nicely.

  Hank pulled out an ID. “We're safety officers here on an official visit. We'd like to check for fire hazards from any stray discarded ponytails left behind after the train wreck. You know the kind of thing. Just routine.”

  The man eyed the card and said, “That thing expired a year ago. There's laws about impersonating a city official. Isn't there a bingo parlour or somewhere you two could go and while away the hours?”

  Frank put his broad muscular arm around the little man's shoulders and squeezed. “You know,” he confided, “I could say you'll live long enough to feel old and useless one day. But maybe I'd be lying. We're looking for a friend who quit the fire department for the joyous pastures of private enterprise. Jimmy Gaines. He did security here. We'd like to commiserate with him on the sad and premature loss of his stock options. Find him and we go away. Try to pretend we don't even exist…”

  He caught Hank's eye, removed his arm from the supervisor, and said, “Slip me some skin, bro.”

  Then the two of them grazed knuckles and made rapper-like noises.

  Mr. Clipboard watched, looking worried.

  “Folks keep going on about the young people these days,” Frank told him. “Why? It's the old guys they got to worry about.”

  The removals man walked into the front vestibule and yelled, “Is there anyone here called Gaines?”

  To everyone's relief, a sprightly upright figure in a dark uniform which contrasted vividly with his bright, bouncy grey hair emerged. He looked in their direction, then started to dance up and down with glee.

  “The old days,” Jimmy Gaines squealed as he came to greet them. “It's like the old days.” He hesitated. “Are they cleaning that engine good and proper yet? Like we used to?”

  “Stop living in the past, you stupid old man,” Frank ordered. He watched the clipboard guy barking at his brutes to hurry up stripping the building. “What the hell are you supposed to be guarding anyway, Jimmy? This place is going to be bare in an hour or so.”

  “Nothing,” Gaines replied cheerfully, setting up a brisk pace away from the vast hall that had once been home to Lukatmi. “Come around the corner. There's a café. A real one. No ponytails. No geeks or people drinking crushed wheatgrass. If it was later and I didn't have a uniform, I'd buy you a beer.”

  “Coffee will do,” Hank said quietly.

  “You look serious,” Gaines declared as he cut behind the building, heading for a small door with the sign of a coffee cup above the threshold.

  “We need to give a nice Italian lady a present,” Frank said as the brothers struggled to keep up.

  “Chocolates,” Gaines suggested. “I'm told they come with a guarantee.”

  Hank caught up with him and placed his hand on Gaines's arm. The man stopped and looked at them. They were alone now. No one could hear.

  “We want to find her a better present than that, Jimmy. We want to hand her Tom Black.”

  Jimmy Gaines gave them a hard stare. “And I thought this was a social call! Half of SFPD is looking for Black. I tried talking to them, but they looked so bored having an old fart like me wheezing away I gave up in the end. What makes you think you can find someone they can't?”

  “Because six, maybe nine months ago,” Frank said, “we saw you and Mr. Black out together. Him looking at you as if he had stars in his eyes and all manner of that fancy exploration gear you love in the back of your station wagon. You looked like good friends going somewhere remote. Two and two going together the way they do…”

  “Hiking,” Jimmy Gaines snapped. “We both belong to the Sierra Club and a couple other things. You suggesting something else?”

  “Not for a moment,” Hank insisted. “You always did love the wild side of life. The great outdoors.” The Boynton brothers liked Jimmy Gaines, mostly, though not so much they wanted to see him more than a couple of times a year. “I remember you reading Henry David Thoreau on those long, empty night shifts. Things like that stick in the memory.”

  “If more people read Thoreau, we wouldn't be in the shit we're in now. The simple life and a little civil disobedience from time to time. You boys ever take a look at Walden like I told you to?”

  “I'm allergic to poison oak and air that doesn't have a little scent of gasoline in it,” Hank confessed. “Wild things don't agree with me. Was Tom a Thoreau fan, too?”

  “Damned right. Walden was his favourite book after I showed it to him. He isn't a murderer either. Don't care what those stupid cops say. That Jonah bastard…nothing would surprise me about him.”

  “That's what we heard,” Hank said, urging him on.

  “Tom's a decent human being. Just a little lost kid with too much brains and money and too little life. Didn't have an old man. His mom was half crazy. Did you know that? Did you read that in the papers?”

  “I guess we didn't,” Frank replied.

  “No. Kind of spoils the story, doesn't it? So what do you really want?”

  “We want to find him,” Frank replied. “We want to know the truth. If it's what you think it is—and our Italian friend believes that, too—we'd maybe hope we can help get him off the hook. So where is he, Jimmy?”

  Gaines shook with fury. He was fit and strong for his age. Sometimes, when much younger, he had been a touch free with his fists in a bar after work.

  “I don't know! Why would he tell me where he was going? I'm just an old security guard he used to talk to about the mountains and the woods. When he wanted some new place to go, usually. He like
d being on his own. Poor kid thought he was soft on that actress for a while, not that that was ever going to go anywhere. She was a tease. Led him on. Tom never should have gotten mixed up with that Hollywood crowd in the first place.”

  Hank and Frank looked at one another.

  “We need you to talk to us about those places you showed him,” Hank said.

  Gaines nodded in the direction of the great red bridge along the Bay and the wooded Marin headlands beyond.

  “Why? You think he's up there somewhere? Scared and hungry and him a billionaire only four days ago?”

  Frank folded his arms. “I don't think he's in Acapulco. Do you?”

  Jimmy Gaines swore. “It was Josh Jonah, all on his own, I swear it. Tom was just a starstruck idiot. Kid didn't understand the first thing about money. He actually believed all that new-world crap Lukatmi used to spout.”

  “We're sorry, Jimmy,” Frank apologised. “Truth is, you can insure against anything these days except stupidity, can't you?”

  Gaines stared at them and asked, “Insurance? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what we're talking about,” Frank replied. “Sorting this thing out once and for all. Please. Just tell us where to look.”

  There was a short, unpleasant moment of laughter. Then…

  “Oh, what the hell, this was my last day anyway. I guess I get to leave early. You two got good boots?” Gaines was stripping off his jacket. He was still a big man, all muscle under the cheap white security guard shirt.

  Hank and Frank looked at each other.

  “Just the old ones from the station,” Hank confessed.

  “Better go get them. And something for poison oak. Where we're headed, things bite.”

  COSTA AND TERESA LUPO GOT TWO CUPS OF foul coffee from the food truck, then headed for a bench by the lake in front of the Palace, listening to the ducks arguing, glad to be away from the ill-tempered crowd.

  “Here's something to think about,” Teresa declared as she sat down. “Josh Jonah told anyone willing to listen, including the papers, that fifty million dollars of Lukatmi money went into Inferno.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. Well, it's not there.”

  “They've spent it, surely.”

  “No. The SFPD can't find any proof much Lukatmi money went into the movie in the first place. All they can track is a measly five million in the production accounts at Cinecittà. The rest of it doesn't exist. Not in Rome anyway. They've located some odd currency movements out of Lukatmi, substantial ones into offshore accounts, in the Caribbean, South America, the Far East. But not to Rome. Not to anything that seems to go near any kind of movie production. They think that was just Josh Jonah thieving the bank to put something aside for a rainy day.”

  Costa found himself wishing he understood the movie industry better. “If they didn't have the money, how did the thing get finished? What did they pay people with?”

  She shrugged. “I don't know. Bonetti's the lead producer and he refuses to discuss the matter with the Americans. He says it's none of their business. Strictly speaking, it isn't. Inferno got made by committee. A string of tiny production companies, all set up specifically for the purpose of funding the movie, all based in places where the accounting rules tend to be somewhat opaque. Cayman. Russia. Liechtenstein. Gibraltar. Even Uzbekistan.”

  “The company was Italian,” Costa insisted. “I saw the notepaper. I saw the name on the posters. Roberto Tonti Productions.”

  “Tonti put up half a million dollars to assemble a script, a cast, and a budget. That's all. The real money came from ordinary investors, the mob, Lukatmi, God knows where else. We'll never find out. Not unless the offshore-banking business suddenly decides to open itself up to public scrutiny.”

  Costa struggled to make sense of this. “Someone must have paid the bills at Cinecittà. They couldn't have worked for six, nine months or so without settling at least some of what was owed.”

  She grinned. “Catherine says the SFPD have checked through the Carabinieri in Rome. The urgent bills were settled by all those little co-production companies. One from Liechtenstein would handle catering, say. One from Cayman would pick up special effects. I'd place a bet on that being how the mob money got there. They like these places. None of it came from Lukatmi direct, and the Lukatmi accounts show just that five million I told you about going into the production to pay two months' studio fees at Cinecittà. Nothing more.” She paused. “And for that, they got exclusive world electronic distribution rights and stacks of publicity. Something that ought to have been worth, well, not fifty million dollars, but maybe twenty-five.”

  Teresa had a habit of springing information on people this way, Costa thought.

  “Why's Catherine confiding all this to you and not Leo?” he asked.

  “Because Leo, being Leo, is utterly fixated on this idea that the real story lies in that rotten money from the men in black suits. He's not the world's greatest listener, in case you never noticed. I am. Also I think Catherine likes stringing him along. He's getting nowhere with her and it's driving him crazy.”

  “Ah.”

  Costa had gathered this from watching the two of them together. He'd never seen Falcone fail to get something he wanted in the end. It was an interesting sight, and an experience the old man himself clearly found deeply frustrating.

  “Enough of Leo,” Teresa went on. “Here's something else… Josh Jonah hated old movies.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “He told everyone! In a million media interviews. Anything that wasn't invented in this bright new century of ours simply didn't matter to him. There are three long articles a couple of friends tracked down for me. In them he gets asked to name his favourite movies of all time. They're all the same stupid, violent, computer-generated crap that passes for entertainment these days. Not a human emotion in any of them. No Citizen-Kane. No Eisenstein. Nothing Italian. I doubt he'd even heard of Hitchcock.”

  The director's name conjured up the cartoon image of the man, in profile, lips protruding, and that funny old theme tune he'd heard so often on the late-night reruns put out by the more arcane Italian channels.

  “If he'd never heard of Hitchcock, who invented Carlotta Valdes?” Costa asked.

  “Who sent Maggie Flavier a green ‘57 Jaguar?” Teresa shot back. “And told Martin Vogel to pick bitter almonds from a tree next to that fictional grave at Mission Dolores?”

  She turned around and pointed to the huge white mansion across the road that was the home of Roberto Tonti. “He knows all about Hitchcock. So does Bonetti. His first movie in Italy was a cheap Hitchcock knockoff. Simon Harvey knows, too. Maybe there's a movie fan among those mobsters Bonetti tapped for cash.”

  “The Carabinieri say it's over.”

  “We can argue about whether this was all about Dante. Or a bunch of Sicilian money from some people who were starting to feel they've been taken for a ride. Or a movie an old English movie director made here—here—half a century ago. But there's one thing even Leo can't argue about…” Teresa watched him, waiting.

  “Josh Jonah didn't know about any of these things,” Costa said.

  “He could—and probably did—fix that awful snuff movie that made Lukatmi so much money when Allan Prime died. But that's about it,” she agreed. “Whoever started this circus is still out there. Maybe they're going to go quiet now the SFPD want to lay the blame at the door of a dead computer billionaire. Maybe they feel the publicity they've got is enough. Maybe not.”

  She looked at him. “So what are you going to do now? Every case is unpacked. Every item accounted for.” She nodded towards the tents. “You're surely not needed in there and you know it.”

  He'd been warned to steer clear of Maggie Flavier, by both Gerald Kelly and Falcone, who was concerned that whatever little cooperation they could still count on from the SFPD was about to disappear.

  “I'm supposed to behave myself.”
<
br />   “Call her, Nic. Go and see her. No one's going to miss you. Even Leo and Peroni don't feel the need to hang around this place. Why should you?”

  He hadn't been able to get Maggie out of his head for days. That was why he had hesitated.

  Teresa reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his phone, and dangled her fingers over the buttons.

  “Don't make me do this for you,” she warned.

  IT WAS ALMOST THREE IN THE AFTERNOON BY the time Jimmy Gaines parked his station wagon in the Muir Woods visitor centre and pointed them up the hiking route signposted as Ocean View Trail.

  “You ever watched Vertigo, Jimmy?” Hank said as he tied on his old fireman's boots.

  “Couple of times.”

  “Some of it was shot here. They give her a famous line. ‘I don't like it…knowing I have to die.'”

  “One more folk myth,” Frank cut in. “Hitch shot that somewhere else.”

  The two men turned and looked at him.

  “You sure of that?” Jimmy Gaines asked. “All them big sequoias. I'd assumed…”

  “It's the movies,” Frank insisted. “I've been reading up on things. The buffs call that part ‘the Muir Woods sequence.' But it wasn't even filmed here. It was shot at Big Basin, eighty miles south. Hitch liked the light better, apparently.” He watched Gaines pulling on a backpack with three water bottles strapped to the outside. “Did Tom Black like Vertigo, too?”

  Gaines heaved more gear out of the car. “Not that I know. He never talked about movies much. Just books. Thoreau, Walden. All that stuff Tom used to spout to the press about how we could build a different world, one in tune with nature, with no real government and some kind of weird pacifism when it came to dealing with authority…it all came from Thoreau. That old nut wasn't just a tree hugger, you know. He was an anarchist, too.”