Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Peroni shrugged and observed, “One lost piece of clay. One dead famous actor. Do you want to swap?”

  “It’s ours!”

  “What’s yours?” Teresa asked. “A practical joke?”

  Slyly, without any of the men noticing, she had stolen the short black truncheon from the junior Carabiniere’s belt. She now held it in her right hand and was quietly aiming a blow at the blood-smeared glass.

  “Touch the evidence and I will have your job,” the senior Carabiniere said, more than a little fearful.

  “And I’ll have yours,” Falcone added.

  “This is evidence, gentlemen,” Teresa replied. “But not of the kind you think.” She looked at each of them and smiled. “We’re in the movie business now, remember? Do the words ‘special effects’ mean anything at all?”

  The short baton slammed into the top of the glass cabinet. Teresa raked it round and round. When she had enough room to manoeuvre, she reached in and, to the curses of both Falcone and his Carabinieri counterparts, carefully lifted out the head and held it in her hands, turning the thing round, making approving noises.

  Teresa ran one large pale finger along the ragged line of blood and tissue at the base and then, to Peroni’s horror, put the gory tip to her mouth and licked it.

  “Food colouring,” she said. “Fake blood. It’s the wrong shade. Didn’t you notice? Movie blood always is. Flesh and skin … it’s all a joke.” The tissue at the ragged torn neckline came away in her fingers: cotton wool stained a livid red, stuck weakly to the base of the head with glue.

  Her fingers picked at the blue latex cladding around the base of the neck and revealed perfect skin beneath, the colour and complexion of that of a store window dummy. Peroni laughed. He’d known something was wrong.

  “But why?” she asked, puzzled, talking entirely to herself.

  She turned the head again in her hands, looked into the bulbous eyes staring out of the slits made in the blue plastic. They were clearly artificial, not human at all. It was all legerdemain, and obvious once you learned how to look.

  Then Teresa Lupo gazed more closely into the face and her dark, full eyebrows creased in bafflement. She pulled back the blue plastic around the lips to reveal a mouth set in an expression of pain and bewilderment. More plastic came away as she tore at the tight, enclosing film to show the face. There was a mask there. It had been crudely fastened to a store dummy’s head to give it form. She removed sufficient film to allow her to lift the object beneath from the base. Then she held it up and rotated the thing in her fingers.

  “Hair,” she said, nodding at the underside. “Whiskers.” Her fingers indicated a small stain on the interior, near the chin. “And that’s real blood.”

  She glanced at Falcone. “This is from a man, Leo,” Teresa Lupo insisted. “Allan Prime.”

  The inspector stood there, a finger to his lips, thinking. The Carabinieri couple said nothing. More of their officers were pushing back the crowd now. Peroni could hear the whine of an ambulance siren working its way to the park.

  Teresa placed the mask on the podium table and rotated the pale dummy’s head in her hands, ripping back the remaining covering.

  “There’s something else,” she murmured.

  The words emerged as she tore off the blue film. They were written in a flowing, artistic script across the top of the skull. It reminded Peroni of the huckster’s props they found when they raided fake clairvoyants taking the gullible to the cleaners. They had objects like this, with each portion of the head marked out for its metaphysical leanings. In this case the message covered everything, from ear to ear, as if there were only a single lesson to be absorbed.

  “ ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,’ ” Teresa said, as if reciting from memory. “ ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ ” She shook her head. “Damnation in the mind of a poet. That’s what was written on the Gate of Hell when Dante entered.”

  A noise made Peroni glance back at the crowd. Costa was striding toward them, looking pale but determined, a gun hanging loose in his hand. By his side was the actress from the movie, her eyes downcast and glassy.

  Costa nodded at the dummy’s head in Teresa Lupo’s hands, and asked, “What happened?”

  The pathologist told him before Falcone could object.

  “And you?” Falcone demanded.

  Maggie Flavier was staring at the mask, shocked, silent, her cheeks smeared with smudged mascara.

  Costa glanced at her before he answered. Then he said, “It seemed as if someone was trying to attack Miss Flavier. Then …”

  The senior Carabinieri man found his voice.

  “This is our case. Our evidence. I have made a phone call to maresciallo Quattrocchi, Falcone. He was called away briefly. Now he returns. You learn. This cannot—”

  He fell abruptly silent as Costa lifted the handgun, pointed it at the fake head, and fired. The sound silenced them all. Maggie stifled a choking sob. There was nothing new there when the smoke and the racket had cleared. No damage. Not another fresh shard of shattered glass.

  “Blanks,” Costa told the man. “This was his gun. I took it from his corpse while your men danced around it like schoolgirls. They’ve just shot dead a defenceless man who was taking part in some kind of a sick prank. Why not go investigate that?”

  “Th-this …” the officer stuttered.

  “Enough,” Falcone interjected, and glanced at Costa. “Assemble a team, Soverintendente. Subito.”

  Teresa was already on the phone, and standing guard over the objects on the podium table.

  “Where does Allan Prime live?” Falcone asked.

  The officer said nothing.

  “I know,” Maggie Flavier said. “Do you think …?”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You can tell us on the way,” Falcone said, then called for a car.

  PART 2

  1

  They sat in the back of the Lancia, with a plainclothes female driver at the wheel.

  “Sir,” Costa said, as they slowly negotiated the bickering snarl of vehicles arguing for space in the Piazza Venezia. “Miss Flavier … I don’t understand why she should be here.”

  The woman by his side gave him a puzzled look but for once remained silent.

  Falcone sighed, then turned round from the passenger seat and extended his long tanned hand. Maggie Flavier took it. She was more composed now and had wiped away the stray makeup from her face. She looked younger, more ordinary. Prettier, Costa realized.

  “My name is Leo Falcone. I’m an inspector. His inspector.”

  “Nice to meet you. Why am I here?”

  The inspector gave her his most gracious and charming of smiles. “For reasons that are both practical and political. You were the victim of some strange kind of attack. Perhaps a joke. But a very poor one, it seems to me. Allan Prime … Maybe it was a joke in his case, too. I don’t know and I would like to. One man is dead. Prime is missing. The Carabinieri, meanwhile, are wandering around preening themselves while trying to work out which day it is. We have no need of further complications. Would you rather they were in charge of your safety? Or us? The choice is yours, naturally.”

  “My safety?”

  “Just in case.”

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “I was supposed to be at a movie premiere tonight. People shooting blanks. Fake death masks.” Her bright, animated face fell. “Someone getting killed.” She looked at Costa. “Why would they shoot him? The uniformed man on the horse?”

  “Because they thought he was dangerous. They didn’t know any better. Whoever he was …”

  “Not Carabinieri, that’s for sure,” Falcone intervened.

  “Whoever he was,” Costa continued, “this is now a real case and it’s not ours.” He caught the dismay in the inspector’s eye. “I’m sorry. That’s a fact, sir. The Carabinieri were given the job of security tonight. Also, there’s the question of jurisdiction. Allan Prime is an America
n citizen. If he’s missing, someone has to inform the U.S. Embassy and allow them a role in the investigation. We all know the rules when a foreign citizen’s involved. We can’t just drive away with a key witness and hope it’s all ours. I should never have left the scene in the first place, or taken that weapon.”

  The car came to a halt in the traffic in Vittorio Emanuele. He didn’t understand why they were taking this route. There were quicker ways through the tangle of alleys behind the Campo dei Fiori. A good police driver should have known about them.

  The woman at the wheel turned and smiled at them. “The U.S. authorities are involved already,” she said. “So don’t worry about that. Captain Catherine Bianchi. San Francisco Police Department. Is there a better route than this? I don’t drive much in Rome usually. I lack the balls.”

  She was about forty, slim, with a pleasant, bright face, Italian-looking, he would have said until he looked at her hair. That was straight and coal-coloured, with a henna sheen, tied back behind her head in a severe way that would have been rare on a Roman woman. She spoke good Italian, though with an American inflection. This was the woman he’d heard about, the one who’d caught Falcone’s eye.

  The inspector outlined a faster route to the Via Giulia, with a degree of patience he would never have used on one of his officers.

  “Can I hit the siren?” Captain Catherine Bianchi asked.

  “No,” Falcone replied. “That will just give them warning.”

  “Give who warning?” Maggie Flavier asked.

  “The Carabinieri, of course,” he answered.

  Costa looked out the window, at the swarming people and the tangled cars, the familiar crush of humanity in his native city.

  He understood why Maggie Flavier was in the car. A man had died in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. Some strange, gruesome caricature of a human head had been substituted for the precious death mask of Dante which they were supposed to be guarding. A world-famous actor was missing, and his co-star had been the victim of an attack that seemed to be some kind of prank.

  There were crimes here, perhaps serious, perhaps less so. Leo Falcone had clearly had no desire to try to go near the shooting. It would have been pointless. The man who attacked them had been killed by the Carabinieri. Only they could investigate themselves. What Falcone was quietly attempting to do was position himself to steal any broader case concerning the death mask and, more important, the fate of Allan Prime. The two principal national law-enforcement agencies in Italy usually managed to avoid turf wars over who handled what. In theory they were equals, one civilian, one military, both capable of handling serious crimes. Often the decision about which organisation handled a case came down to the simplest of questions: Who got there first?

  “We will have to offer them a statement,” Costa insisted. “Miss Flavier and I. We were witnesses.”

  “There’s no hurry,” the inspector observed. “Neither of you knows this man, do you? Nor did you see how he died. It’s better that Miss Flavier remains in our company. For her own sake.”

  “Absolutely,” the American policewoman insisted from the front seat. “No question about it.”

  Maggie Flavier leaned back in the deep leather of Falcone’s Lancia, flung her arms behind her head, and sighed, “I love Italy.”

  She gazed at Costa, smiling wanly, resigned. He found himself briefly mesmerised by her actor’s skill, the ability she possessed to turn her gaze upon someone, seize his attention, to look at him with her bright green eyes and hold his interest, make him wonder what came next. This was the way she stared into the camera lens. For reasons he couldn’t quite pinpoint, he found that thought vaguely disturbing.

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Here I am being kidnapped by two charming Roman cops. And why? So you can steal some case you don’t understand right from under the noses of the opposition.”

  At the wheel of the Lancia as they negotiated the narrow, choked lanes of the centro storico, Catherine Bianchi chuckled and said, “You got it.”

  Costa didn’t laugh, however. Nor did Leo Falcone. The inspector was on his mobile phone, engaged in a long, low discussion he clearly didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  They rounded one more corner, past a house, Costa recalled, that was once supposed to have belonged to the mistress of a Borgia pope, Alexander VI. An image flashed through his head: Bartolomeo Veneziano’s subtly erotic portrait of Alexander’s bewitching daughter Lucrezia, ginger hair braided, a single breast bared, catching the artist’s eye with an unsmiling sideways glance, just exactly as Maggie Flavier regarded Roberto Tonti’s camera, and through it the prurient world at large. It was a strange memory, yet apposite. Lucrezia, like Beatrice, the character Maggie played in Tonti’s movie, was an enigma, never quite fully understood.

  The Lancia turned into the Via Giulia, one of the smartest streets in Rome, a place of palatial apartments and expensive antiques stores. A sea of blue state police cars stood motionless ahead of them. There were dark blue vans of the Carabinieri in among them. Traffic was backed up on the Lungotevere by the river which ran above the street. A battle was looming.

  Maggie nodded at a house in the centre of the tangle of the vehicles. “It’s that one there.”

  “You know it well?” Costa asked.

  “Allan threw parties,” she said with a shrug. “A lot.” She looked at him, her smile gone. “Everyone likes a party from time to time, don’t they?” She paused and looked, for a moment, very vulnerable.

  “You don’t want me to come in, do you?” she said, and the question was asked of Falcone.

  The inspector seemed puzzled. “Would you rather stay here?”

  “If that’s OK.” She put a hand to her close-cropped hair, tousled it nervously, the way a child did. “You’ll think I’m crazy but I get a feeling for things sometimes. I’ve got one now. It’s not good. Don’t make me go in there. Not unless you know it’s all right. I need the bathroom. I need a drink.”

  “Soverintendente Costa,” Falcone ordered.

  “Sir.”

  “Find two women officers who can take Miss Flavier to the wine bar round the corner. Then you come with me.”

  2

  Gianni Peroni had enjoyed standoffs with the Carabinieri before. Just never over a dummy’s head with an apparently genuine death mask attached to it. He had four plainclothes state police officers with him to form a physical barrier between the evidence and the grumbling crowd of smart uniforms and surly faces getting angrier by the moment. The small police forensic crew had, meanwhile, gathered what passed for some of the strangest evidence Peroni had ever seen.

  What really took his breath away were the movie people. Roberto Tonti, storming at anyone within earshot, grey hair flying as his gaunt frame hobbled around the stage. The producer Dino Bonetti, who’d pass for a mob boss any day, stabbing his finger at anyone who’d listen, demanding that the evening proceed. And, more subtly, some quiet American publicity man backing the two of them up during the rare moments either paused for breath. Even the Carabinieri balked at the idea everything could go off as planned. While the arguments ensued, Teresa and her small team worked quietly and swiftly, placing items very quickly into evidence bags and containers, trying to stay out of the melee. Peroni hadn’t told her they didn’t have long. He hadn’t needed to.

  “There’s been a death,” Peroni pointed out when Tonti began threatening to call some politicians he knew. “And …” He gestured at the bloodied fake head. “… this. The entertainment is over, sir. Surely you appreciate what I’m talking about?”

  The publicist took him by the arm and requested a private word. Glad to have an excuse to escape the director’s furious bellows, Peroni ordered the plainclothesmen not to move an inch and went with the man to the back of the stage.

  He had seen Simon Harvey on their visits to Cinecittà to discuss arrangements for the exhibition. The American seemed professional, obsessed with the job as much as the rest of them, but, perhap
s, with some rare degree of perspective. Peroni recalled that, on one occasion, the man had even given them a brief lecture on Dante and the origins of Inferno, as if somehow needing to justify the intellectual rationale behind the movie. He’d even declared, “This will be art, promise.” This had struck him as odd and unnecessary at the time. But then the movie industry was rarely predictable, for ordinary human beings anyway. That day in the film studios he’d watched hideously disfigured ghouls sipping Coke, smoking cigarettes, and filling in crosswords during their time off camera. After that, he’d been glad to get out into the dull suburb surrounding the studio and breathe the fume-filled air.

  “Listen,” Harvey went on. “Forget about Roberto and Bonetti bawling you out. That’s how they work. The point is this. There’s big money at stake here. Italian money.”

  Peroni stared at the man, wondering what to make of this strange comment. “Italian money?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

  Harvey cast a backwards glance to make sure no one was listening. “Do I need to spell it out?”

  “For me you do.”

  The publicist placed a conspiratorial hand on Peroni’s arm. “You’re a cop,” he said with a sigh. “Please don’t act the innocent. And God knows it’s been in the papers anyway. Bonetti has all kind of friends. Government friends.” He winced. “Other … friends. There’s more than a hundred and fifty million dollars running on this horse. Money like that creates debts that need paying. This is your country … not mine, Officer. We both know there are people neither of us want to piss off, not for a three-hour private screening in front of a handful of self-important jerks in evening dress, anyway. All I ask is you give us a break. Then we’re done. It won’t get in the way. I’ll make sure. That’s a promise.”

  Peroni couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Someone’s been shot. They heard it. We all did. There’s also the question of a death mask which, in case you’ve forgotten, is not only a national treasure. It also seems to resemble your missing movie star.”