by David Hewson
“Of course it's over. The Carabinieri said so. Those creeps from Lukatmi did it. Jonah. Black.”
“The Carabinieri are wrong. What if someone gets to Maggie first? Would you even care?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Where'd you get this crap?”
“Maggie told me. About you two. And the money.”
Harvey stared at him, remembering something. “Big deal. She tell you anything else? About what it was like? What she did?”
“No…”
“You've got all that ahead of you, friend. Nothing I can do will warn you off it, either. Listen. I am not a thief.”
“What else do you call it?”
“I call it looking after people who can't look after themselves. I call it keeping her alive, making sure the last movie she was ever going to get didn't fold beneath her. That's the truth. Maggie's career has been on the skids for years. Inferno was her only chance to keep her name up there. If it never even made it to the screen…” There was a distant look of resignation and regret on his face. “You weren't there. You can't begin to understand. Some of us put in years for that movie and there it was, ready to fall apart. No fairy godmothers on the horizon. Every thing was in hock. Our homes, our reputations. Everything.”
Costa waited.
“And if you tell anyone I said that, I'll call you a liar to your face,” Harvey rasped. “In a police station. On the witness stand. Anywhere. This is America. We've got lawyers who could free the Devil if he got found eating babies on Main Street. Give it up. You can't win. Not with me. Not with Maggie, either. You're way out of your league. Cut your losses.” He nodded at the door. “Now get out.”
“Best I know my place,” Costa said, not moving.
“If that's the way you want to see it.”
He took out the weapon again and lifted it. The barrel was inches from Harvey's throat.
“You're not listening to me,” Costa said. “Maggie knew nothing of all this. You made her a part of it. You put her in danger. Because of you, she nearly died.” The shadow of the weapon fell towards the window. “Whoever murdered Allan Prime is still out there. He murdered Martin Vogel and Josh Jonah. He shot Tom Black dead before the police could get to him.”
The blood drained from Harvey's face. “What the hell are you talking about? The cops shot Tom.”
“No. He was killed by a single bullet from a distant gunman. They've recovered the shell. They know what kind of rifle he used. A hunting weapon. Like the crossbow that killed Allan Prime.”
“This is not possible, not possible. The Maggie thing…it had to be an accident. I couldn't…” Harvey was shaking his head like a man on the brink.
“There are no accidents. None. Every time someone in this deal of yours dies, the rest of you get richer. I don't care what this madman does to you. But…if it's Maggie he finds this time…”
“Not going to happen, not going to happen.” Harvey's eyes were closed, screwed tight shut. “It's inconceivable…”
“If it does—it doesn't matter where or when—I will find you. I will walk up to your dinner table in whatever fancy restaurant in New York or Cannes or L.A., anywhere…” He nudged the barrel of the gun back towards Harvey's temple. “…and then in front of your Hollywood friends I will shoot you through the head.”
Costa lowered the weapon. He put it back in Gerald Kelly's leather holster. Then he turned towards the door.
A hand touched his arm.
“Don't go.”
Simon Harvey was slumped against the wall. He looked drained, lost, defeated.
Then he turned, picked up a bottle of Grey Goose from the cocktail cabinet by the window, poured himself a large glass, and said, “Sit down.”
IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO TURN OUT THIS way,” Harvey murmured, gripping the glass. “The whole thing was just something to get us through. Out of the mess.”
He sat on the sofa opposite Costa, staring at the mirror on the side wall, as if trying to convince himself. “Maggie wasn't the only one with everything to lose. Roberto's dying. There was never going to be another movie. I wasn't sure he'd live long enough to complete this one.”
“I didn't realise the movie business was so sentimental.”
“Don't patronise me!” Harvey screeched. “I've worked with these people for years. They're more to me than a paycheck. Even Roberto. Sure, he can be an asshole. They all can. But he's an artist, too, one of the last. The people he worked with— Hitchcock, Rossellini, De Sica. We don't see men like them anymore. Those days, when it was all about film, nothing but film, they're over. When I looked at Roberto…”
His bleak eyes never left Costa's face. “You won't understand, Nic. I grew up with all those movies from the fifties. Roberto lived them. You could talk to him, about how Hitchcock would chase the light he wanted, how Rossellini could coax a performance from some two-bit actress who didn't have the talent to speak her own name. Inferno was always going to be his last movie, and when he dies, that piece of history dies with him.” He gulped more vodka.
“When he dies, all we'll have left are kids who think you can direct a movie with a computer and a mouse. Maybe Inferno's a piece of shit. But there's still some art in there somewhere. I see it, even if no one else does.”
Outside, the fog shrouded the Bay. Costa couldn't even see the cops by the gate anymore.
“It wasn't supposed to happen,” Harvey said flatly.
“But it did. Maybe it will again.”
“No. It won't. I guarantee that. I'll make sure of it. This has gone far enough.”
“You need to make a statement.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, waving Costa down. “And in return…?”
“I can't negotiate on behalf of the SFPD. You need to talk to them direct.”
“Fine. But only after the premiere. Not before. Roberto's owed his moment. Maggie, too. We all are.”
“Whose idea was it?” Costa asked.
“I said after—”
“I know. But I want to hear it. Just for me.”
“Just for you.” Harvey shook his head, bitterly amused by some internal thought. “Do you have any idea how long I've wanted to tell someone this?”
“I'm starting to,” Costa said honestly.
“I don't even really know when it started. I was drunk at the time. I figured Inferno was dead. We'd been everywhere. Dino had begged every last penny he could out of his mob friends, and they were starting to get ugly, thinking the whole thing was about to turn into a train wreck. Maybe it was him, maybe Roberto. Maybe both. I don't even know. I just woke up one morning and the money was there. We got the movie, and maybe down the line we got paid, too.”
Harvey scowled at the glass and put it on the table in front of him, half finished. “How do you say no to something like that? We all knew Roberto was sick. He told us he was rolling in his fee as collateral, knowing full well he'd never live to collect it. Lukatmi was going to go sky high. Instant profit for all of us the moment he croaked, even if the movie bombed.”
“Whose names were on the contract?”
Harvey stared at him as if it were an idiotic question. “What contract? What do you think this was? A corporation? Some listing on the New York Stock Exchange? It was just some grubby little deal to breathe life back into a dying movie. These things happen all the time—”
“Who…?”
“I didn't know all the names. I didn't want to. Allan put in the balance of his fee. That took a little persuading but Dino offered to sort out a few personal issues he had somewhere. What's a producer for? I waived what I was owed. Same with Dino. Josh and Tom put in some special form of Lukatmi stock and a little cash just to keep the wheels turning. Those of us on the movie side thought that would turn out to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. How dumb can you get, huh? We thought we were robbing the geeks when the truth is it was the other way round. Robbing murderous geeks, too…”
He cleared his throat then, looked at
Costa. “And now you're telling me that's not the case? That Black and Josh didn't do it?”
“I don't think so. Do you know anyone who hunts?”
“In the movie business? Are you kidding?”
“What about the people you used?”
“I made damned sure I stayed clear of that side of things. Fraud's as far as I was prepared to go. Dino handled the rough stuff. He seemed comfortable with it. He had the contacts. Tom and Josh knew some guy from Lukatmi who came in as crew. All I did was get Martin Vogel on board. That creep would screw his mother for five bucks. The only other thing I handled was Maggie. I gave her a few drinks and talked her into signing her cut away into some fictitious offshore production company. She didn't have a clue what she was doing. Money's never been her thing. I had her name on the paper before her agent knew anything about it. Nothing anyone could do after that.”
His phone rang. Harvey took it out of his pocket, looked at the number, then turned the thing off.
“She wasn't going to get robbed, either. I'd never let that happen to her. All of us figured we'd get what we were owed at the very least. Maybe more, if Lukatmi's stock went through the roof. Dino handled the money and contract side of things. He could do that better than anyone. I didn't understand a word of what he was doing. All any of us cared about was the fact this gave us a chance to make Inferno happen.”
He looked at his watch and shrugged. “I've got to get dressed soon. Really.”
“Who put it all together?” Costa pressed.
“We just did what we'd been doing all along. I'd been hyping Inferno from the start. Would the academic community be pissed off by it? Was the thing cursed? The media loved all that crap. The story had legs. So we decided to build on it. This idea that someone was stalking the movie and leaving clues straight out of Dante. We forged a few e-mails.” He stiffened. “Someone hired that guy to wear a Carabinieri uniform and create some kind of incident the day of the premiere in Rome. No one was supposed to get shot.”
“Allan Prime…”
‘I damned near told you all this then. But that would have killed the movie stone dead. All I knew was that Tom and Josh had cooked up something to get us some publicity. They never told me what. I don't know about the others. Afterwards…”
He fell silent.
“What?” Costa asked.
“I thought the rest of them didn't understand it, either. Allan was supposed to disappear for a while, get that death mask nonsense made, then put on that little show in front of the camera as a stunt and get rescued by the cops. They were going to portray it as some kind of warped attack. Allan was in on the plan. They told him all about it. That's what they said. They had no idea why he got killed. They thought maybe something went wrong…”
“He was murdered, deliberately, in cold blood, in front of millions of people. It almost kept Lukatmi alive.”
“Josh said it was never meant to happen. That's all I can tell you.”
Harvey tapped his watch. “When the premiere's over, come and see me and I will make a statement. I'll want a lawyer there. This has gone far enough already. I don't want anything else on my conscience. Besides…” He caught his own reflection in the mirror and the traces of a smile creased his face. “… it's a hell of a story, isn't it? Biggest I've ever spun. Could make a movie someday.”
Something was still missing.
“There was a woman involved,” Costa said. “She went to Prime's apartment the morning he died. She made the mask. She left with him.”
Harvey waved away the idea with his hand. “I don't know about any woman. Except for Maggie, and she didn't know the first thing about what was going on. Can't help you there.”
Costa kept his eyes on him and said, “The woman called herself Carlotta Valdes.”
Simon Harvey blanched. He said, “What?”
“Carlotta Valdes? Do you know the name?”
“Of course I do! Vertigo. It was shot right here. Roberto worked on it. He's talked about it, often.”
“What do you think it means? That the woman used Carlotta Valdes's name?” Costa asked.
“That some punk in this nightmare still has good taste in movies.”
THE SECURITY CORDON RAN FROM 101 ALL THE way down to the waterfront stretch of Marina Boulevard. Bright red barriers and yellow tape blocked off all the normal entry routes. Photographers and TV camera crew who hadn't managed to beg media accreditation wandered the perimeter like mangy starving lions. Uniformed SFPD officers stood at the two entry checkpoints, ruthlessly checking the credentials of the lines of men in evening suits and women wearing elegant, stunningly expensive dresses. Once they were approved, the guests were then forced to walk through a portable airport-style metal detector to check for weapons, an unusual addition to such an event, Costa thought, and one that clearly engaged the attention of the photographers. All stood shivering in the chilly mist.
The queue of expensively clad bodies was steadily working through the system. Costa walked round the entire enclosed area once, then stopped by the lake that fronted the main structure of the Palace. Even this close, he could only just make out the domed roof of the structure across the water. Soon that would be gone. Inferno would be launched, appropriately enough, in a miasma of San Francisco fog. He wondered if the grey cloud might even seep into the gigantic tent erected for the private screening, and if it did whether those at the rear of the seats would have much of a view. Perhaps that wasn't the point. This was an occasion to be seen at more than anything. The lines of sleek dark limousines drawing up by the checkpoints contained more than a few faces he had come to recognise from the TV since he'd arrived in San Francisco, politicians and media figures, actors and celebrities, a constant stream of beautiful women on the arms of men in impeccable evening dress.
He looked ruefully at his own crumpled dark blue suit, bought from the usual discount store in Vittorio Emanuele, near the bridge to the Castel Sant'Angelo. Costa tightened his tie into a half-passable knot, which was as good as it got. When no one was looking, he stepped into a nearby flower bed, stole a red rose from one of the bushes there, and placed it in his lapel. Then he took out his Roman police ID card and, after the uniform on the gate checked with Gerald Kelly, made his way into the world premiere for Roberto Tonti's Inferno.
After a brief search he found Falcone, Peroni, and Teresa in the tent that housed the main historical exhibits from Florence. The three of them looked bored and out of sorts, yawning next to a set of glass cabinets displaying illuminated medieval manuscripts. Only a handful of visitors had wandered into the place. The rest were outside, with the stars and the free drinks. Com pared to those, some old documents seemed insufficient to warrant anyone's attention.
Falcone cleared his throat and said, though with precious little in the way of displeasure, “I was under the impression, Soverintendente, that you were off-duty today.”
“I am.” He flashed the envelope Maggie had sent to the house on Greenwich Street. “Someone sent me a ticket for the main event.”
“Lucky you,” Peroni observed.
“Thanks.”
“I meant,” the big man went on, “lucky you getting away, after all that nonsense last night. It would be nice if we knew where you were sometimes, Nic.”
Costa shrugged and apologised. “I hadn't really expected things to turn out the way they did. Also…” He wondered how much to tell them. “… I was hoping for a little gratitude from Gerald Kelly when I brought him Tom Black. It wasn't the fault of the SFPD that things went wrong.”
Not at all, he thought, remembering the hunting weapon, and its link to the crossbow that had killed Allan Prime.
Teresa reached up and did some more work on his tie. “If you're on a date, and I suspect you are, Nic, you really ought to take a little more time with your appearance.”
“Been busy,” he said, fighting shy of her hands.
They caught the unintentional note of satisfaction in his voice.
“Good
busy or idle busy?” Peroni asked suspiciously.
“Good.”
He left it at that.
Falcone looked at him and asked, “How good?”
There was no way to say it except simply.
“Possibly as good as we're likely to get. When the show's over, Simon Harvey wants to make a statement. He'll confess to being a part of a financial conspiracy to hype Inferno by making bogus threats to those involved, with their knowledge usually. They needed the money. They needed the movie to be a success. Also…”
“No details, not now,” Falcone said, suppressing a wry grin.
Teresa smiled. “Will he name anyone else, perchance?”
“Allan Prime. Josh Jonah. Tom Black. Dino Bonetti.” He paused. “And Roberto Tonti.”
“A tontine?” she asked.
“Effectively. Harvey says that Tonti made his illness one of the lures. It was obvious he wouldn't survive to pick up his share, so all the others believed that would give them an instant profit. In return, he was allowed to make his final movie.”
Falcone pointed a finger at him. “What did I say about details?” He glanced around. “Harvey's told you all this already? And you say he's willing to repeat it all?”
“After the premiere. He feels they're all owed their moment of glory. After that, though, he's had enough. He's a decent man.”
Peroni huffed and puffed and grumbled. “Now he's decent! And if he changes his mind?”
Costa pulled out the tiny MP3 player he'd bought from Walgreens on Chestnut on his way to Harvey's apartment. It had been tucked into his jacket pocket, set to record, throughout their conversation. The histrionics with the gun had been intended, in part, to make Harvey so nervous he might not notice its presence. For twenty dollars the thing did a good job; Nic had checked through the little earphones on the walk back to the Palace of Fine Arts. He still didn't quite recognise his own voice, particularly in those moments when he had the gun in his hands.
“If he changes his mind, then I just give this to Gerald Kelly and let nature take its course. The entire conversation is recorded, from beginning to end. I'm not sure how much of it will pass the evidence rules in America…”
