Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  He took his hand off her knee, then mumbled, “We don't even have to do it till after we're married. I'd like that. It would be the right thing. In the circumstances.”

  “In the circumstances…” she echoed, cursing herself for letting a little of her fury show, glad he didn't notice. “I can't kiss you if my hands are tied, Michael. Can I call you Michael? Is that OK?”

  “If you like.”

  He looked at her, mouth open, a little idiotic. Then he went back to the chair, scrabbled on the floor, came back with the knife, and sat next to her on the bed.

  “The reason I never messed with girls is my old man told me. They screw with you. They fuck your head. They gobble up your whole life, until one day there's nothing left.”

  “Some girls. Not all.” She held out her hands. “It depends how you treat them.”

  “Yeah.”

  He reached over and sawed through the loop of rope on her left wrist, then her right.

  “I didn't tie them tight, you know. I didn't want to hurt you. Not ever.”

  “I realise that.”

  She took his right hand, the one with the blade, slipped forward, angled her body against his, heard his breathing catch, turn short and excited.

  “Are you going to hold a knife even when you kiss me, Michael?” she crooned.

  “Oh…”

  He looked at the thing, shamefaced, then released it. She heard it clatter on the floor, and then, before he could even look at her again, Maggie Flavier was on her feet, trying desperately to remember some of the things she'd learned in the few self-defence classes she'd taken a couple of years before.

  But her mind was a blank, so she did what came naturally. She jerked back her arm and elbowed him so hard in the face that the blow sent something electric running up and down her funny bone, and she screamed.

  Mickey Fitzwilliam crumpled, clutching at his nose. Blood leaked out between his fingers. He was moaning and whimpering like a child.

  She didn't wait. She ran to the door, jerked on the handle. The door didn't budge. There was an old-fashioned key in the lock. In her mind's eye she was already rushing outside, into the bright, safe world, screaming at the top of her lungs for all her life was worth.

  The trouble was the key wouldn't turn.

  He was curled on the floor near the bed, snarling at her, a different Mickey again, the one who'd been there when she regained consciousness. The one who snatched her, stripped her, put her inside someone else's old dress, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.

  He didn't care that snot and blood were pouring down over his lips, dripping off his chin.

  “Guess that solves our conundrum,” he said in a nasal slur.

  HE WAS STAGGERING TO HIS FEET, STUMBLING toward a glass cabinet on the wall. It was marked In Case of Fire and contained an axe, set diagonally against black fabric, like some kind of museum exhibit.

  Mickey Fitzwilliam smashed his fist through the glass. Blood shot out from his fingers as the pane shattered. He didn't seem to notice.

  Praying to any god who might save her, Maggie scrabbled at the key. It finally turned. The door opened and she dashed through. It was pitch dark. Her hand flailed against the wall, her fingers somehow found a switch. A dazzling light burst on her from a single bulb that dangled from a wire not more than a hand's width from her face, momentarily blinding her.

  Escape had taken her into a small, square room entirely without windows or furniture, nothing but plain whitewashed brick. A rickety-looking wooden staircase rose against the white, dusty wall opposite. A dark corridor led off to the right, maybe to nowhere.

  A picture came into her mind's eye, one kept there from the times she'd driven down Chestnut on the way to the shops or Roberto Tonti's grand mansion opposite the Palace of Fine Arts.

  She knew where she was instantly. Inside the fake bell tower of the Marina Odeon, the one pretending to be the campanario of San Juan Bautista.

  Breathless, trying to think straight, she ripped the key out of the lock and slammed the old wooden door shut, enclosing herself in the tiny room. Hand shaking, fingers fumbling, she got the key into the lock on her side of the door and managed to turn it. She pressed her cheek to the edge of the doorframe and whispered, “Michael, Michael…”

  There was no reply.

  “You're sick,” she said deliberately. “Let me help you.”

  Was she serious? Was she acting? She'd no idea.

  “I can help. There are doctors…”

  Silence. She tried to catch her breath. She looked up the narrow wooden staircase winding up the interior of the fake bell tower.

  Face against the wood, trying to sound calm and in control, she said, “Talk to me, Michael. Please…”

  The axe blade crashed through the flimsy old timber, inches from her face. She shrieked. The sharp, gleaming metal withdrew, and he began battering again, repeatedly, maniacally, tearing a ragged hole through the panel, sending splinters and dust everywhere.

  She retreated to the other side of the tiny chamber, staring at the growing breach he was tearing in the last barrier of defence she possessed. The world was closing in on her and it was one that seemed to be composed entirely of clips from movies, half-remembered lines of dialogue, flashes of recognition that veered between fact and fiction.

  The next thing she knew, she was stumbling down the dark little corridor, praying there might be some way out at its end. She had plunged into darkness. Her fingers crawled along the damp plaster, seeking a switch. Finally they found one; she flipped it and felt a raw, painful scream leap into her throat.

  Ahead of her was a naked man. One part of her panicking mind could recognise and name him, although he looked so different, so altered. Dino Bonetti was trapped upright in some kind of tall glass cabinet, the kind they had in restaurants for desserts and ice cream. The producer was still alive, barely, moving a little, mumbling wordlessly. At his feet was a round paper object the size and shape of a football. It seemed to be spewing a constant stream of yellow and black shapes that flew in and out, only to find themselves cornered in the cabinet alongside Bonetti. A cloud of furious wasps buzzed around him, crawling across his florid, swollen face as if feeding, pulsing thick, like a living carpet, on his chest.

  His fist banged weakly on the padlocked glass. He could see her, just. There was a putrid, vile smell leaking from somewhere. She edged back, towards the foot of the tower.

  As she stumbled against the door joist, there was a brutal, vicious crack. Mickey Fitzwilliam was through, his face a rictus of amused savagery, so close she could feel the spittle from his mouth fall like hot rain on her skin as he leered crazily through the gap.

  There was nowhere else to go. She stumbled towards the staircase, knowing somehow what role he would choose next: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a performance twice removed, an actor mimicking something else from the real-unreal world of show business.

  “ ‘Here's J-J-Johnny!'” Mickey Fitzwilliam screamed.

  AT THE END OF HIS LONG RUN TO THE MOVIE theatre, Costa found the front door locked and not a light on anywhere. He opened a low wooden gate and worked his way to the back of the building.

  There was no obvious entry point at ground level, only rough plaster walls and the white tower rising three storeys or more into a cloudless sky. Close by—this he hardly dared look at— stood an old cemetery headstone over a grave marked out by pansies and daisies. A grey urn was positioned before it, filled with red roses. A green sash was wrapped around the stems.

  Out of breath, lost for a way inside, he heard a scream, then another.

  Then he heard Maggie's voice. A man's name, over and over again.

  Michael, Michael, Michael…

  He knew in an instant where she was: behind the fake adobe wall, just a few short steps away, trapped with the man who'd covered the walls of his bedroom with two decades of her portraits.

  Next to the base of the tower was a small window so grubby and littered with cobwebs it was opaque. H
e searched the trash-filled backyard until he came across an old, discarded sink, hefted it in his arms, stumbled through the rusting junk back to the building, then, with a desperate lurch, threw the thing through the glass. It landed on the far side with a muffled crash. Picking up some rusty piping, Costa roughed out a gap through the shards of glass remaining, wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief, reached inside and pulled himself through. He found himself spread-eagled across an old office desk, reached ahead, gripped the edge of the wood and dragged himself forward until he was mostly free of the spikes and scattered glass.

  There was a bed in there, the sickly sweet smell of sweat, and a misshapen red puddle on the grimy floor.

  Some second sense made him turn. A man stood in a doorway at what appeared to be the foot of the stairs of the tower. He had a bloodied face and hands and wore an expression of surprise and contempt.

  His right arm held a long, fireman's axe, which, as Costa scrambled from the desk, began to fly, turning, turning, turning, towards him through the air.

  Costa found himself dropping like a sack onto the hard concrete floor. Bells chimed, pain flooded into his temples. Maggie was there, somewhere beyond his assailant, screaming. He'd landed on his right shoulder, which hurt like hell. Maybe something was broken. After a brief, sickening moment of blackness, Costa found himself amidst a sea of shattered glass trying weakly to recover the gun from Gerald Kelly's leather holster inside his jacket. He rolled and came face-to-face with the axe. The blade had driven itself deep into the wood less than an arm's length away from his head. The fall, painful as it was, had saved him.

  When he got half upright, onto a single knee, gun in hand, with a clear view back towards the tower, he was alone.

  Costa staggered towards the tower, his head throbbing, his body convulsed in a single painful ache.

  “Police!” he bellowed, stumbling through with the kind of unguarded, careless bravado that would have got him screamed at in the state police academy in Flaminio. “Police!”

  Laughter drifted unseen down the rickety staircase.

  Maggie cried in an echoing scream, “What do you want?”

  There was a noise to one side, down a gloomy corridor, a sound like someone rapping on glass. Costa glanced that way automatically, seeking its source. What he saw sent his mind reeling. At the end of the narrow passage, illuminated by a single swinging bulb, stood an upright glass cabinet. Inside, a naked man was banging weakly against the glass door. Around the trapped man's bloated, livid body swarmed a thick, angry cloud of buzzing insects.

  “No time,” Costa murmured, and pointed the gun at the cabinet. He heard a thin frightened screech from the figure locked inside, then saw him fall, shrieking, arms clasped around his head, to the cabinet floor.

  Costa fired twice. The cabinet exploded. Glass, wasps, and finally the bloodied, torn husk of a human being tumbled outwards, into the hot, fetid air.

  Costa couldn't wait to see any more. Maggie had gone ominously silent. Trying to take the stairs two steps at a time, he stumbled and fell, splinters tearing at his fingers, the pain ricocheting through his shoulder. The gun slipped rattling from his grasp. Back at the bottom again, he recovered the weapon and scrabbled up the staircase.

  “What do I want?”

  Not Maggie's voice. A man's voice this time.

  Costa staggered ever upward, round and round the twisting corners of the staircase, until, panting, exhausted, he reached some bright, sunny platform, clinging onto the banister for support, aware that, once again, he wasn't alone.

  Maggie crouched in the far corner, clad in an old-fashioned dress the colour of an emerald. Above her stood the bloodied man, a knife in his hand, his face twisted with pain and fury.

  “Put down the knife,” Costa snarled. “Stand away from her. Do as I say and no one will get hurt.”

  The man across the room didn't even seem to hear him.

  “What do I want?” he asked again. “To be happy, Maggie. Is that so freaking much, huh?”

  The blade was high over her, frozen, gleaming. A spiralling swarm of wasps rising from below was beginning to work its way into the room.

  “You're sick, Michael. I'm sorry, so sorry. Please, please, listen to me…” She was weeping, choking, and there was more than fear in her voice, Costa thought; there was regret there, some kind of recrimination and self-hate. “Let me help. Let me help you…”

  Costa snatched a frenzied glance around him. Ahead was a single arch the height of the room, open to the blue sky, with a ledge outside so narrow only a bird could stand on it.

  “How can you possibly help me?” the man with the knife demanded.

  Maggie, crouched in the grime on the floor, knees bunched before her, arms around them, was a tight, terrified ball of misery.

  “I'll do whatever's needed,” she said in a low, weak voice. “Whatever…”

  Costa raised his gun. He aimed straight through the shaft of bright sun that separated them. A cloud of yellow and black insects danced in the dusty golden air.

  “Move away from her,” he ordered. “Do as I say.”

  “He's sick…” Maggie whispered. “Please, Nic, can't you see he's…”

  A voice came into Costa's head, and it was Emily's, repeating the words she'd uttered moments before his hesitation ended her life by the side of a crumbling monument that stank of cats and the homeless, a rank, pungent stink that would never leave him.

  “Don't beg,” he said, so quietly he knew this was for himself, not her. “Never beg. It's the worst thing you can do. The worst…”

  The knife didn't move. The weapon in Costa's grip didn't waver, not even when something small and dry crawled across his extended hand, paused, and thrust its sting into the soft, taut flesh between his index finger and thumb as he gripped the gun.

  A hot, sharp spike of pain that he barely noticed.

  The man ahead moved, just a fraction, turning to look at Costa, something new, a look of doubt maybe, in his eyes. Another vicious yellow and black creature crawled across Costa's forehead, stabbed its poison into him, got crushed in an instant as he swept its carapace into his skin with the back of his hand.

  “You know…” The voice didn't match the tortured face of the figure with the knife. It was anonymous, anybody's, nobody's. It drifted dreamily around the bell tower. “I was thinking…”

  Costa's first bullet struck him in the left arm, near the elbow. The shattered limb jerked like that of a rag doll. The jumping man screamed. So did Maggie Flavier.

  The second shot flung his body hard against the rotting wall and, for a moment, Costa didn't know where he'd hit him. So he kept on firing, jerking on the sweaty trigger constantly, desperate to empty the weapon into this husk of a man as the pained shape jerked and shrieked across the room until he came to block the searing California sun at the long bright archway, still upright, just, still holding the knife.

  “He's sick…“ Maggie screeched through her hands, beseeching someone, him, the wounded man.

  Costa scarcely heard her. All he heard at that moment was his dead wife's voice and the buzzing of a million tiny wings.

  “Drop the knife.”

  It was spoken quietly, calmly, and he didn't wait for a re action.

  He pointed the gun across the room, dead straight, hand steady, and pulled the trigger. The shot caught the man who called himself John Ferguson in one life, and Carlotta Valdes in another, full in the chest. The impact blew him out of the tower, backwards into the unforgiving brilliance of the day.

  The room went quiet. He could hear her weeping and knew, in a sudden revelatory instant, there would never be anything he could say to heal the hurt.

  Costa crossed the room. He walked out onto the narrow ledge three storeys above the tiny garden that sat among the junk and debris in the shadow of the bell tower of the Marina Odeon.

  Heights didn't scare him. Nothing scared him much anymore. Only the big unknowable things, life and closeness and the fragile bond of f
amily. He stood in the high open arch of the counterfeit campanario of an imaginary Spanish mission house and peered down over the dizzying, exposed edge.

  Below, on the bright grass, next to a shattered grey urn strewn with scarlet roses, a broken body lay exposed before the headstone of Carlotta Valdes, like a corpse that had worked its way out of the grave below.

  About the Author

  A former staff writer on The Times, David Hewson lives in Kent, where he is at work on the eighth Nic Costa crime novel. Dante's Numbers is the seventh novel in a crime series which began with the acclaimed A Season for the Dead, set in Rome and featuring Detective Nic Costa.

  DANTE'SS NUMBERS

  A Delacorte Press Book / April 2009

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2008 by David Hewson

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,

  and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hewson, David, 1953-

  Dante's numbers / David Hewson

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33830-7

  1. Costa, Nic (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Italy—Rome—

  Fiction. 3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. 4. Motion picture actors and actresses—

  Crimes against—Fiction. 5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 6. Dante

  Alighieri, 1265-1321—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6058.E96D36 2009

  823′.914—dc22

  2008030756

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page