Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi was furious on several fronts. The screening had begun without his permission. Key pieces of evidence had been removed from the scene by the morgue monkeys of the state police, under the supervision of Teresa Lupo, a woman Quattrocchi had encountered, and been bested by, in the past, on more than one occasion. And now Leo Falcone had placed a team in Allan Prime’s home without consulting the Carabinieri, though the state police inspector knew full well that security for the film cast was not his responsibility and never would be.

  As a result Quattrocchi’s bull-like face appeared even more vexed than normal, and he found himself sweating profusely inside the fine wool uniform he had chosen for an occasion that was meant to be social and ceremonial, not business. He stood at the back of the projection room, temporarily speechless with fury, not least because his principal contact within the crew, the publicist Simon Harvey, appeared to have been spirited away by Falcone’s people, too. All he got in his place was the smug, beaming Dino Bonetti, a loathsome creature of dubious morality, and two young ponytailed Americans with, it seemed to him, a hazy grasp of the seriousness of the situation.

  While everyone else wore evening dress, the two young men had removed their jackets to reveal T-shirts bearing the name Lukatmi, with a logo showing some kind of oriental goddess, a buxom figure with skimpy clothing, a beguiling smile, and multiple arms, each holding a variety of different cameras — movie, still, phones, little webcams of the kind the Carabinieri used for CCTV — all linked into one end of a snaking cable pumping out a profusion of images into a starry sky.

  Quattrocchi peered more closely. There were faces within the stars, a galaxy of Hollywood notables — Monroe, Gable, Hepburn, James Stewart, their heads floating in the ether.

  “Note,” the skinny one identified by his shirt as Josh Jonah, Founder, Ideologist, Visioneer, ordered, “the absence of noise.”

  “I can hear you,” Quattrocchi snapped, to no avail.

  “If we were in an ordinary projectionist’s room,” Jonah continued, “we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation. There would be film rattling through the projector. Physical artefacts. Needless expense. Time and money thrown away without reason.”

  “I am an officer of the Carabinieri. Not an accountant.”

  “We’re all accountants in the end.” It was the other American, a big muscular man with a boyish face and a ponytail of long wavy dark hair. Quattrocchi peered at his T-shirt. It read, Tom Black, Founder, Architect, Corporate Conscience. Black seemed younger than his partner. A little less sure of himself, too. “In the sense that we pay for things. You’d like to get movies quicker, cheaper, easier, wouldn’t you?”

  “Right now,” Quattrocchi blurted out so loudly that he felt sure his voice had carried into the cinema beyond, with its audience of VIPs, “I would like to know where Allan Prime is, why we have a dead actor in the park out there, and what the hell is going on around here.” He glowered at their shirts. “Who is Lukatmi anyway? Some Indian god? And who the hell are you?”

  The two men looked at each other and Tom Black smiled.

  “That was kind of the positioning we were looking for. Three million dollars got blown there. Worth every penny,” he said.

  “We’re backers,” the skinny one boasted. “We’ve got money in this thing. Without us, this movie would never have got made.”

  “What—” Quattrocchi began to say.

  “Lukatmi’s got nothing to do with India,” the quieter American interrupted. “Lukatmi. ‘Look at me.’ It’s a philosophical statement about not hiding away, about being a part of the digital lifestream, a star in your own right, out there for everyone to see.”

  “Like YouTube,” Bonetti added, and Josh Jonah howled, “No, no, no, no, no! How many freaking times do I have to say this? YouTube is yesterday …”

  “When Google bought them …” Tom Black shook his head. His broad, young face was so sorrowful it looked as if someone had died. “… it was all over. They don’t understand the whole mash-up thing. The behemoth days are past.”

  “Lukatmi is just the medium, not the message,” Jonah added, taking over, clearly the boss. “Except for the paid-for content, we don’t own a damned thing. It’s not for us to dictate to human beings what they create or what they see. If you have a problem with that, don’t watch.”

  Quattrocchi suddenly realised he’d read about these people in the newspapers. They’d found some loophole that allowed them to be absolved of any legal responsibility for what was, on the surface, carried by their network. They were, if he understood this correctly, like a dating agency. Their computers put someone wanting something in touch with someone offering it. The relationship was consummated in a way that had, so far, allowed them to escape the attentions of the law, on the simple grounds that they never published anything directly themselves. If the material that people found on Lukatmi turned out to be copyrighted, blasphemous, or, with very few restrictions, pornographic, they weren’t to blame. It was anarchy with a listing on NASDAQ. Millions and millions of people had flocked to their site since it had gone live less than a year before. The two founders had become paper billionaires as staid investment houses and international banks poured vast sums of money into a company that seemed to be little more than two geeks with a big and possibly dubious idea.

  One thing still puzzled him. “What on earth has all this got to do with the movie business?”

  “Everything,” said Bonetti. “This is a revolution. Like when silent movies got sound, when black-and-white turned to colour. It means we can finally reach people direct, any way we want, without getting screwed by the distributors or anyone else.” He cast a sour glance at the Americans. They saw it, as the Italian producer intended. “Except them.”

  Quattrocchi massaged his temples. There was a persistent, low ache there and had been ever since the shooting. An internal investigation team was now overseeing that, following the procedures after the deaths of civilians at the hands of a Carabinieri team. He wasn’t looking forward to having to face the investigators. He’d been absent from the Casa del Cinema when the killing took place on highly spurious grounds, a call of a personal nature. That was one more secret to keep under wraps.

  “Who’d want to watch a movie on a phone?” he demanded, unable to take his eyes off the screen beyond the room. It seemed to be on fire. The flames of Hell licked everywhere, and through them burst the faces of grinning, leering demons, their green and purple mouths babbling profanities and obscenities at the stricken, cowering figure of Dante, who shrank back at the horrific sight, the beautiful Beatrice at his side.

  “Millions of suckers everywhere,” Bonetti crowed. “A dollar a clip. A monthly subscription for twenty. And then they go to see it in the theatre anyway. And buy the DVD. Then the director’s edition. Then the collector’s …” The Italian producer’s fleshy face beamed. “It’s a dream. You sell the same old junk over and over again.”

  “With absolute efficiency,” the skinny one, Josh Jonah, emphasised. “Not a wasted piece of celluloid. Not a single cassette or DVD in inventory. And this”—he patted the silver box streaming light into the theatre beyond—“is ours. Every last piece gets streamed straight here for less money than it costs to produce a single cinema print. The crap the masses turn out gets fed from PC to PC for free. The people that junk brings in become the movie audience of the future, and we serve them direct, same price they’d pay in a theatre, but at a fraction of the delivery cost.” He clicked his fingers. “Voilà. Big money.”

  “Big money,” Bonetti insisted.

  Quattrocchi shook his head and grumbled, “So much for art. Also …”

  This had bothered him all along. The picture on the screen didn’t look right. It wasn’t as sharp, as detailed, as engaging, as he’d expect of a movie like this. It felt wrong, however smart the toys these kids used to fool Bonetti and anyone else throwing their hats into this particular ring.

  He stopped, unable to
believe what he was seeing.

  “What on earth is that?”

  The scene was dissolving in front of their eyes. The flames faded. The faces of the demons, Dante shrinking in terror before them, now gave way to something else. Quattrocchi had seen Roberto Tonti’s movie that afternoon, at the private screening. He knew for sure that what was now emerging on the screen in front of a selected audience of some two hundred international VIPs, politicians, and hangers-on had never been there before.

  It was Dante again, still terrified, his face frozen in dread. Or rather, it was Allan Prime. In close-up, grainy, as if from some CCTV camera.

  An open-faced black metal mask, ancient, medieval looking, enclosed his head, one band gripping his mouth. Behind its bars, the man’s horrified features seemed exaggerated. His eyes were locked and rigid with terror.

  There was utter silence in the projection room and in the theatre beyond. Then, nervously, someone in the crowd laughed, and another coughed. A voice rose. Quattrocchi recognised it: the furious, coarse bark of Roberto Tonti complaining about something yet again.

  Josh Jonah wiped his skeletal forearm over his eyes. “Was this an outtake or something?” he asked no one in particular. “I don’t recall seeing it. Tom. Tom?”

  The other American was staring at his silver machine, punching keys, watching numbers fly up on the monitor.

  “This isn’t coming from us.” Sweat was starting to make dark, damp stains across his burly chest. He looked almost as frightened as Allan Prime. Or Dante. Whichever, Quattrocchi thought. “I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

  “Cut it,” Jonah ordered. “Stop the frigging thing. If someone else has got hold of the stream …”

  “Sure …”

  “No,” Quattrocchi ordered, and found he had to drag the American away from his strange projector.

  They both stared at him. Bonetti, too, though there was no expression Quattrocchi could read on the producer’s dark, lined face.

  “This isn’t part of the show,” Josh Jonah stated firmly. “It’s not supposed to be up there.”

  “Yes, it is. Your star’s missing. Someone has taken control of your toy. What if they’re trying to tell us where he is? Or why? Or …”

  He was about to say Or both.

  But the words never reached his lips. Two things had happened on the screen. In the right-hand corner a digital stopwatch appeared, counting down from the hour. 59:59, 59:58, 59:57 …

  As it ticked away, an object entered from centre left, first in a sudden movement that darted in so quickly he was unable to see what had happened, only the result, that it had inflicted yet more pain and fright on the trapped man struggling on the screen in front of them, and that blood was now welling from some fresh wound that had appeared on Allan Prime’s left temple.

  The image vanished. After a long break the picture resumed. A narrow, deadly spear, the shaft as shiny as a mirror save for the bloodied tip which had just stabbed the trapped man’s face, had slowly emerged, sharp and threatening, aimed directly at Prime’s temple.

  The stopwatch flicked over from 58:00 to 57:59. The spear moved on a notch towards Allan Prime’s head, as if attached to some machine that would edge it forward, minute by minute, until it drove into the actor’s skull.

  Quattrocchi stared at this gigantic, real-life depiction of a captive man waiting to die. There were hints to be found in this sight, surely. Clues, keys to unlock the conundrum. Otherwise why broadcast it at all? Simply to be cruel? Behind the head, he could just make out some shapes in the darkness, paintings perhaps, images, ones that might have been familiar had he possessed some way to illuminate the scene.

  Beyond the projection room, out in the cinema, Tonti ceased roaring. Someone moaned. Another voice cried out in outrage. A woman screamed.

  Bonetti threw open the door and bellowed at an attendant, “Clear the room, man! Everyone!”

  Then he returned and stared at Quattrocchi, shocked, finally, babbling, “Find him, for God’s sake. Find him!”

  “But where?” Quattrocchi asked, to himself mostly, as he held down the shortcut key for headquarters on his phone, praying that there was someone there who was good at riddles.

  He got through. The wrong man answered. Morello. A good officer. Not a bright man. Not the one Quattrocchi hoped for, and there was no time to locate others. He had to work with what he had.

  “Are we listening to our friends?” Quattrocchi asked.

  There was silence on the line. The Carabinieri weren’t supposed to eavesdrop on the police. And vice versa. But it happened. In both directions.

  “We can be. Are we listening for anything in particular?”

  “I would like to be informed of any mention of the actor Allan Prime, from any source whatsoever.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good,” Quattrocchi said, then got himself put through to forensic.

  While waiting he caught the attention of Tom Black. The young American stood back from his silver machine, staring at the flashing monitor with concern.

  “I need my scientific officers to see what’s happening,” Quattrocchi told him.

  The American winced, as if afflicted by a momentary pain. “Tell them to find a computer and tune in to Lukatmi,” he answered glumly. “These bastards are putting it out to the public, too. Through us. We can stop them, but the only quick way would mean we lose the stream here, too …”

  “Touch nothing!” Quattrocchi roared. He pointed through into the cinema, where Prime was screaming on the screen again. The small, deadly spear had moved closer to its destination. “If we lose that, we lose him.”

  Josh Jonah walked up to the machine and peered calmly at the monitor. “I can read off the URL,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  5

  One kilometre away, in the forensic lab of the centro storico Questura, the same word was puzzling another law enforcement officer, though one from a very different agency.

  “Url? What’s a URL?” Peroni asked.

  He thought they were in Teresa Lupo’s morgue to stare at the head of a store window dummy and the curious death mask that had been attached to it. And to talk to Simon Harvey. At the age of fifty-one, with an understanding of the cinema industry which extended to no more than a few security duties at the Cinecittà studios over the years, Peroni felt it was time to become better acquainted with the working methods and mores of the movie business, such as they were. He had an inexplicable feeling they might come in useful, and that Simon Harvey was a man who could impart much worthwhile information on the subject if he felt so minded.

  No one answered his question. Harvey and Silvio Di Capua had exchanged a brief conversation, and the whole game plan seemed to disappear in smoke. While Teresa and her two young white-coated trainee assistants played halfheartedly with the head and mask — finding no new information — Di Capua and Harvey had gone over to the nearest computer and started hammering the keys, staring at the gigantic monitor as it flipped through image after image.

  “Will someone please tell me what a URL is?” Peroni asked again.

  “Universal resource locator,” Di Capua grumbled. “What I’m typing. Any the wiser?”

  “No. Enlighten me. How is this helping exactly?”

  “Gianni,” Teresa said. “If I’d been allowed to set up some kind of a crime scene on that stage … If we were in control in any shape or form …” She opened her hands in a gesture of despair. “We have nothing to work with. Nowhere to begin. If staring at a computer helps, I’m all for it. What else is there?”

  “This is my fault,” Harvey apologised. “I didn’t mean to start an argument. It was only a suggestion.”

  The suggestion being, Teresa explained patiently, that they use the strange, unexplained Internet service owned by two American geeks who’d helped finance Inferno to try to find out what people at large were saying about Allan Prime.

  “Think of it this way,” Harvey went on. “Would you like to be able to tune
in to every TV newscast around the world that was covering Allan right now? Every little net TV channel, every vidcast, too?”

  Peroni shook his big, grizzled head. “Every what?”

  “If it gave us a clue …” Di Capua said. “I’d take anything. This thing …” He blinked, incredulous at the flashing series of moving pictures on the monitor. “… is unbelievable. I never realised …”

  “They bring stuff online before announcing it,” Harvey said. “It’s all part of the hype. You never know what they’ll turn up with next. You just have to tune in to check.”

  Teresa had her head bent towards the screen. Peroni felt like an unwanted intruder from a different century.

  “How the hell do they do it?” Di Capua asked, still in a state of awe.

  Harvey sighed. “I don’t really understand it myself. From what they said, it’s a mixture of reading keywords, transcribing speech, recognising faces … All the TV stations are now online and streaming. Add to that new video material. Blogs. Small web stations. I guess they have some way of consuming it all as it appears, reading it, then serving everything up. Google for video and audio, only ten times bigger, ten times faster, and deadly accurate. That’s why they’re worth a billion or so each.”

  Peroni cleared his throat. “This is so interesting. Is anyone going to find something for me to look at?”

  Teresa stepped back and gestured at the screen. “Take your pick.”

  What enthusiasm he had left swiftly dissipated. The monitor was crammed with moving pictures the size of postage stamps, each with odd graphs and a geographical location.

  “Allan Prime’s a star,” Di Capua observed. “When someone like him disappears, it’s a big story.”

  Peroni leaned forward and found himself wishing he could rewind the clock to enter a simpler, more straightforward universe. Each postage-stamp video represented a TV channel, usually news, seemingly issuing some kind of bulletin about the Prime story. The BBC in London. CBS in New York. A channel in Russia. Somewhere in Japan, Australia, the Philippines … “This can’t all be live …”