Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Harvey nodded. “Pretty much. With Lukatmi, if it’s going out real time, it’s being relayed by them that way. With maybe a few seconds’ delay, that’s all.”

  Peroni felt he could soon start to lose his temper. “This is of no use to me whatsoever. How many channels are there, for pity’s sake?”

  Di Capua hammered some keys and said, “More than four hundred sources have run a story on Prime in the last hour.”

  Peroni watched as the monitor cleared again, then very slowly came back to life, painting a set of new tiny videos on the screen at a snail’s pace.

  When the images returned, they were all the ones Peroni expected. Local and national news channels, familiar presenters reading from their scripts, all with images of the missing actor and shots from the park and the production of Inferno. A counter by the side of the screen was some kind of popularity meter. The audience seemed to be running at seven figures and rising, most of them for a single video channel, one that was blacked out at that moment.

  “Why can’t we watch the one that’s top of the list?”

  “It won’t load for some reason,” Di Capua said, trying something with the keyboard. “Too many people watching it, I imagine. Or maybe their fancy computer system can’t cope.”

  “I want to see it …” Peroni began, and then fell quiet. Teresa’s deputy had made the black window occupy the full screen of the path lab monitor. As he watched, the empty space filled, line by line, with a real moving image.

  They all crowded round to see. It was a man in fear for his life, trapped inside some cruel and ancient cast-iron head restraint. The digital stopwatch imprinted by his neckline turned from 28:31 to 28:30, and the seconds kept on ticking. Allan Prime’s eyes were as large as any man’s Peroni had ever seen. He looked ready to die of fright even before the bright, shining spear with the blood-soaked tip reached his head, which surely would happen soon. Within less than thirty minutes or so, this strangely hypnotic little movie, the most personal Prime had ever made surely, seemed to be saying.

  Teresa leaned over Di Capua and said, “Get me more detail.”

  Harvey’s eyes were glazed, filling with tears. Peroni looked at him and said, “You don’t have to watch this. Why not go and sit somewhere else? I’ll come for you when there’s news.”

  “I’ve got to watch it,” the movie man croaked, then dragged up a chair.

  There was no caption. Only the image of the terrified actor, the time ticking away, and, by the side of the video, the digital thermometer that was the popularity counter. It was now flashing red. Peroni stared at it. Allan Prime’s dying moments seemed to be the most sought-after thing in the world at that instant. A real-life drama being watched by a global audience that was growing into the tens of millions and swelling by the second.

  He pressed a finger against the screen and indicated the area behind Prime’s quaking head. “There’s something there, Silvio. Can you bring it up?”

  The pathologist’s hands raced across the keyboard. Prime’s features began to bleach out. From the dark background it was now possible to make out some kind of shape. Di Capua tweaked the machine. It was a painting, strange and old and, Peroni thought, possibly familiar.

  “Get that to the art people straightaway,” he ordered.

  Teresa was staring at him. He knew what she was thinking.

  “Has Nic got one of those new video phones?” he asked.

  “You all have them,” she said, and folded her arms. “Even you if you bothered to look.”

  “I deal in people, not gadgets,” Peroni replied, then called Costa on the fancy new handset the department had issued to everyone only a few months earlier.

  “Silvio,” he said, listening to the ring tone.

  “Yeah?” the young pathologist answered absentmindedly, still punching away at the keyboard, trying to improve any recognisable detail in the swimming sea of pixelated murk that now filled the screen.

  “Best give me the URL, please.”

  6

  They went back to the Lancia in the Via Giulia. The forensic team would go through the clay dust and any other evidence they might find in the apartment Adele Neri had rented Allan Prime. It felt better to be outside. Something about the information they had gleaned from Neri’s widow depressed Costa. The movie world was not all glitter. Allan Prime, along with the producer Dino Bonetti, kept the company of mobsters and thieves. Costa wondered why he was surprised. There had been plenty of scandals in Italian show business over the years. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to discover they spilled over into something as important and lucrative as the comeback blockbuster for one of the country’s most reclusive directors.

  Maggie Flavier came and stood next to him by the wall beneath the Lungotevere. The traffic made a dull, physical sound through the stone that separated them from the busy road and the river beyond. She was smoking and had the sweet smell of Campari on her breath, a lightness that might have been the onset of drink in her eyes.

  She smiled at him and said, “We all lead different lives. What’s yours?”

  “Being a police officer. It’s enough.”

  She drew hard on the cigarette, then tossed it to the ground and stamped out the embers with her shiny, expensive-looking evening shoe.

  “In my line of work you become more conscious of words,” she said quietly. “You used the past tense when you talked about your wife …”

  He nodded. He liked her directness. Perhaps it was an actor’s trick. Perhaps not.

  “She died six months ago.” He thought of the mausoleum of Augustus, less than ten minutes away on foot, and the terrible events of the previous December.

  “I’m sorry. Was it unexpected?”

  “You could say that.”

  She breathed in deeply, quickly. “I don’t know what to say. I felt something, that’s all.”

  “ ‘Sorry’ is just fine.” There isn’t a lot else, he thought. People died all the time. Those who survived got on with their lives.

  She turned to look at the building housing Prime’s apartment, now surrounded by blue police cars, with only a handful of Carabinieri vehicles in the street.

  “Do you know where Allan is yet? Is he OK?” she asked.

  “He was fine when he left here this morning.” His eyes rested on Falcone, serious and intent by the door, busy on the phone. “Perhaps he’s just gone walkabout.”

  She shook her head. “When he’s due to open the premiere for the biggest movie of the summer? I don’t think so …”

  The thought wouldn’t leave Costa’s head. “Could this all be some publicity stunt?”

  She stared at him in disbelief. He caught the bittersweet aroma of Campari again.

  “Someone died, Nic. The premiere’s been cancelled. A publicity stunt?”

  “The man who attacked you was an actor. His name was Peter Jamieson. He was an extra on the set of Inferno. Did you know him?”

  Maggie Flavier didn’t blink. “A movie set’s like a football crowd. The only people I see are the ones I’m playing a scene with. I don’t even notice Tonti. Just hear him. You couldn’t miss that.” She gazed directly into his eyes, to make the point. “I didn’t recognise that poor man. I’ve never heard of someone named Jamieson. If I had, I would tell you. I may be an actor, but I’m a very bad liar.”

  His phone rang. It was Peroni, excited, trying to explain something he clearly didn’t understand himself. Nic heard Teresa snatch the thing from him at the other end.

  “Nic,” she said anxiously. “Don’t ask, just listen. Allan Prime is captive somewhere and it’s being broadcast on the web. He’s in danger. It looks bad. We need you to see the pictures and tell us if you recognise anything.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Live pictures,” she emphasised, then told him how to find the Lukatmi page.

  Costa had to cut the call to try to get the web on his phone. When he did, and keyed in the address she gave him, all he got was a blank page and a message sayin
g that service was unavailable. He called Teresa back. There was a brief exchange between her and someone who sounded like Silvio Di Capua.

  “Nic, forget that idea,” she ordered. “Silvio says the network must be breaking up under the strain. Everyone’s watching this poor bastard trying to stay alive. Listen. It’s possible there’s a hint about where he might be. The background to the picture is blurry, but it seems to contain some kind of painting. We think we’ve captured some of it. We’re trying to circulate it to the art people here to get their opinion, but they’re all out taking tea with their maiden aunts or something. Look at it for us. Please.”

  A beep told him there was an incoming e-mail. Costa opened it, looked, thought for a moment, then told her, “It’s just smudge and ink. I’m seeing it on a phone. Tell Silvio to get more detail and blow the thing up until it’s breaking.”

  There were curses and shouts on the end of the line. Two more images arrived on Nic’s phone, each little better than the first. Falcone came over. Costa told him what was happening, while Maggie stood by his shoulder, trying to peek at what was on the phone. It was impossible to recognise anything on the tiny, pixelated screen.

  “Bigger, brighter, louder,” he ordered.

  They waited. One more e-mail arrived.

  He looked at it and thought of a bright day the previous autumn when he and Emily had bought ice cream from the little café near the Piazza Trilussa, then gone on a long stroll to the Gianicolo, past the house that was supposed to belong to Raphael’s mistress, La Fornarina, through the still-quiet part of Trastevere the American tourists rarely found.

  The image was cruelly disfigured by both Silvio Di Capua’s digital surgery and the distorting electronic medium through which it had been relayed. But he recognised those lovely features all the same, and could picture the figure beneath the face, half naked, racing her scallop shell chariot over the surf, surrounded by lascivious nymphs and satyrs.

  “This is from a painting called Galatea,” he said with absolute certainty. “It’s in the Villa Farnesina in the Via della Lungara in Trastevere. It’s just a small museum and art gallery, not well known. Quite deserted at night, and in secluded grounds.” He thought of the way there across the river. It was perhaps four minutes if they crossed the Mazzini bridge.

  “Four cars,” Falcone ordered, walking back to his Lancia. “Leave Miss Flavier under guard here.” He opened the driver’s door and beckoned for Catherine Bianchi to move. “In the passenger seat, please,” Falcone ordered. She obeyed immediately. Costa followed.

  From somewhere came the wail of a siren. Falcone looked surprised, and more than a little cross. More so when it became apparent from the timbre that it was the sound of the Carabinieri.

  7

  Across town, in the control van maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi had positioned outside the Casa del Cinema, there was excitement and amusement.

  Quattrocchi put down the mike and, with the same coded instruction to Morello that he had used earlier, ordered an end to the eavesdropping. Then he closed his eyes and pictured the layout of his native city, the place where he’d grown up, where he felt he knew every brick and alley, every corner and battered statue. Falcone and his team were in the one-way streets of the Via Giulia, trapped in the sixteenth-century warren that had once been created as a wealthy suburb for the Vatican across the river, a little way along from Trastevere itself.

  Quattrocchi had ordered officers and cars to all of the key crossings in the centre of the city, a trick he had developed and perfected in the past. The Tiber would once more be his ally.

  “Close the Mazzini,” he ordered. “And the Vittorio Emanuele. There will be only one easy way left to the Via della Lungara then. We go south to the Garibaldi. Falcone will never reach there. Not till sometime tomorrow.”

  This was a Carabinieri case and it would stay that way.

  8

  It was the smallest camera Allan Prime had ever worked with. The device hung in front of his face, dangling from a flickering light in the ceiling, a wire trailing off somewhere to the computer he’d seen on the way in. Prime never did understand technology. It was tedious, even now. Nothing had ever really mattered except the monocular glass eye that watched him, never blinking, never ceasing to pay attention. In his head it had always been there. Even in the dim, dark, noisome movie theatres of Manhattan when he was a sweaty teenager dreaming of stardom, determined to achieve it, whatever the cost.

  Whatever the cost.

  The idea provided some amusement in his present odd predicament. He wanted to laugh even as sobs came rippling up from his body, physical reactions, tricks of the trade, not conscious, personal responses. He was able to divide the self from acting. That was always the first deceit. And this was acting. He kept reminding himself of that. This whole exercise, once complete, would be an end to things. A wiping out of all debts, financial and otherwise, with a considerable prize in private, too.

  It hadn’t been the decent lunch and a little afternoon delight he’d been hoping for following Miss Valdes’s work on the clay mask. She had turned somewhat coy, to his surprise. Long term, though, maybe it was for the better. Hide away for the day. Miss the premiere, stoke up some publicity. Then let her put him in some weird, sadomasochistic rig set up in a tiny museum that had been closed for renovation. The camera came out. A fake kidnapping, an act of terror played out in front of millions. A world-famous star in a one-man show that would make headlines everywhere. Hell, she sold it so well Allan Prime thought for a moment he would have paid to be in the thing. This one stupid prank would set up queues outside movie theatres everywhere, sell millions of pieces of merchandise, bring a flood tide of money into the coffers of Inferno, a cut of which, after producer fees, would come his way. And the rest …

  The performance was what really mattered, though. It was always about the performance.

  So he had allowed himself to be strapped into the black metal frame, worked with her to perfect the focus on the tiny, bug-eyed camera, and sat patiently while she faked the spear thrust into his skull — plastic point, stage blood — that was used for the opening sequence.

  He’d done this kind of thing a million times and, given the swift, smooth professional way she went about her business, he assumed Carlotta Valdes — or whoever she really was — had too.

  After that, she actually called “Action” and he was on, moaning and writhing for the tiny white light that sat blinking on top of the camera, unwilling, and unable, to focus on anything but the tiny lens for the next sixty minutes, an hour which, Carlotta promised, would make him the biggest, most talked-about star in the world.

  And then the cops would come. Rescue him. One more piece of deceit, of acting, was required to explain his abduction. This was, Prime thought, a piece of cake. He was used to faking it for millions. By comparison, fooling a few dumb Italian cops would be child’s play.

  The movie business was weird sometimes. It ran in uncertain directions, was diverted by fate and circumstance and, on occasion, pure luck, both good and bad. The debts were worth losing. So was the rape complaint still hanging over him from that weekend in Rimini three months before. What the dark suits behind Dino Bonetti surely promised — he assumed Carlotta came from them, though she never said — was a fresh start, a vast private payoff, and a mountain of free publicity and global sympathy that would make him bigger even than Inferno itself. Plus the fringe benefits only a few — Carlotta among them — understood.

  The unseen clock tick-tocked once more. The device to his left moved another notch towards his face. It would stop, she said, when the rubber tip reached his cheek, before the supposedly razor-sharp blade bent beneath the pressure, revealing the legerdemain, exposing the lie. That couldn’t be long now. He felt he’d been trapped in the rig for hours. It was starting to become painful. He couldn’t wait for this scene to be over, for the cameras to die, and for her next trick: his astonishing, headline-grabbing rescue.

  Prime was wonderin
g how he could vary the act, too. Sixty minutes of writhing and yelling would be boring. He’d be marked, rated, critiqued on this performance, just as on every other.

  So he stopped crying, made an effort to appear to be a man struggling to recover some inner resolve and strength. Then, trying to find some way round the awkward iron bar over his mouth, he began to bellow, as loudly as his lungs allowed.

  “Carlotta,” he cried, not minding he was yelling out her name to millions, since it could only be a sham, like everything else. “CARLOTTA!”

  There was no reply. None at all. Not a footstep, not a breath, not the slightest of responses. In some chilling, inexplicable way, Allan Prime came to understand at that moment that he was alone in the small, dark museum to which she had taken him in the early evening after eating ice cream together in a secluded corner of the Gianicolo.

  And something else. He remembered where he’d heard her name before, and the recollection made his blood run cold.

  Carlotta Valdes was a ghost from the past — vengeful, vicious.

  The unseen clock must have ticked again somewhere. The invisible device to his left lurched another ratchet, ever closer. As it did so, it made a heavy, certain clunk, quite unlike that of a stage prop, which would have been cheap, throwaway stuff, its own soft, revealing sounds covered by the insertion of a Foley track dubbing menace and the hard clash of metal to lend a little verisimilitude to flimsy reality.

  This is for real, Allan Prime realized.

  Real as pain. Or blood. Life. Or death.

  A warm, free flow of stinging liquid was spreading around his crotch. He stared at the bug-eyed camera and began to plead and scream for help, for release, with more conviction than he’d ever possessed in his life.

  Somewhere at the back of his head he heard Roberto Tonti’s disembodied voice.

  Stop acting. Start being.

  It sounded as if the vicious old bastard was laughing.