Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  “Let me help you up,” he said, and offered her his hand.

  Maggie Flavier rolled over on the earth in front of him. Her face seemed strange. Taut, a little swollen. Her mouth flapped open as if out of control. Her lips were a vivid shade of red, and her green eyes stared up at him in terror.

  “Ow, ow, OW …” she screamed, and gripped her stomach in agony.

  The apple tumbled from her hand, half eaten. Costa bent down. Stupidly, automatically, he picked up the piece of fruit and sniffed it. A strange, unexpected aroma rose from the flesh. Almonds, he thought, and the word caused alarm, for reasons he couldn’t place.

  A physical tremor gripped her thin body. She stiffened. Her head jerked back, golden hair thrusting into the dank leaves and earth, then rolled sideways. A cry of pain and astonishment and anger emerged from her lips. Then a thin stream of bile began to trickle from her mouth onto the ground, her breathing became short and laboured, her body started to arch in harsh involuntary spasms.

  Someone was approaching, fast and deliberate.

  His hands held hers until the last moment. Then Costa rose, turning, saw the powerful, muscular shape of a man in a red-checked lumberjack shirt, with something black and threatening in his hand, closing on them.

  There wasn’t time to think anything through. He took one step forward and lashed out with his right fist, caught the intruder on the chin, punched hard again, was satisfied to see the corpulent frame start to fall backwards, the object in his hand tumbling into the dead leaves.

  It was a camera, a big black SLR.

  Costa blinked, felt hopeless, uncertain where his attention ought to lie.

  The man on the ground started swearing at him. Costa didn’t listen. He turned and looked at the stricken woman, crouched next to her again. Her eyes were starting to roll back under the lids. She seemed barely conscious. Her breathing appeared dreadfully fast and shallow. The convulsions had fallen into a terrifying regime, one that was slowing with each diminishing lungful of air.

  They trained a police officer for this kind of event. But that was on a different continent, in a different language.

  Whoever the man was, he wasn’t a threat. Not an obvious one at that moment.

  All the same, as the hulking figure in the red shirt retrieved his camera and began to scuttle away, firing off shots all the time, Costa took one quick step towards him, kicked hard at his arm as it held the camera, heard the snap of fracturing bone.

  There was a scream. The figure was on the ground again, still trying to scramble crab-like through the desiccated leaves covering the forest floor. Costa turned, stepped forward, and stood quite deliberately on his shattered limb for a moment, then waited for the cries of agony to subside a little.

  “Dove …” he began, then shook his head to clear it. “Where are we? I need to know the location. Now. Before this woman dies.”

  “You saw the sign,” the man in the red shirt spat at him, clutching his arm and the camera as if each was of equal value.

  “Where?” Costa bellowed, and lifted his foot again, eyeing the tortured, crooked arm.

  The photographer shrank back in fear. “Rob Hill Campground. Now leave me alone.”

  Nic was only dimly aware that the man was crawling off somewhere. And that the sound of the camera was there again, diminishing as the paparazzo retreated, like the chirp of some electronic bird fading into the lowering dark.

  Costa got down on the ground next to her, held her damp, sweating, twitching hand, leaned into her head, ignoring the foul smell rising from her agonies. He put his lips to her ear, then, not knowing whether she could hear, he began to murmur, over and over again, “Stay with me, stay with me, stay …”

  Her breathing seemed to stop for a moment. Her eyes opened. Maggie Flavier’s face was puffy and soaked in sweat and tears. But her right hand was jerking towards something. He looked into her eyes. They were calm, determined. As if she’d been here before.

  She was pointing at the bag. He picked it up and turned it upside down, emptying the contents onto the forest floor.

  The kit was there, with a red cross on the outside, and inside it were instructions and a primed syringe that looked like a pen. The drill he’d learned from the medical trainers flooded back. He tore open the pack, withdrew the needle, removed the cap, bent down, and in one sure, forceful move thrust the injector into her right thigh, through the fabric of her jeans.

  Maggie half screamed, half sighed, and her head fell back hard, hitting the ground.

  Still he held the pen there firmly, and kept his left hand in her hair. After ten seconds, as gently as he could, he eased the needle out of her flesh before checking that the drug had been dispensed. Then he threw the thing into the spent dry leaves.

  She was sobbing. He cradled her in his arms, making comforting, wordless sounds, grappling for the phone, fighting to find the right language to use in this strange, foreign country.

  From somewhere, finally, the words came.

  He dialled 911, waited an agonisingly long time, then said, knowing the name would make a difference, not caring about whether that was right or wrong or just plain stupid, “I need an ambulance at the Rob Hill Campground, near the Legion of Honor, now. I have an actress here, Maggie Flavier. She’s in anaphylactic shock and we need a paramedic team immediately. I’ve given her …” The words danced elusively in his head until he snatched up the discarded syringe package and examined the label. “… epinephrine. It’s serious. She needs oxygen and immediate transfer to hospital.”

  The line went quiet.

  Then a distant male voice asked, “You mean the Maggie Flavier?”

  “I do,” Costa answered calmly, and tried to remember something, anything about CPR.

  PART 4

  1

  Catherine Bianchi sat at the wheel of her Dodge minivan looking as if she were worried about her career. Falcone was by her side, Peroni and Teresa Lupo in the back. Ahead, like ancient aircraft hangars at a decayed military installation ranged along the Bay shoreline, rose Fort Mason. Three buildings were bright with recent paint. Above the central one, a good ten metres high, stood the waving, multiarmed logo of Lukatmi. Its neon flashed in the dazzling morning sun.

  The American police captain took a deep breath. She muttered, “You guys are going to get me into real trouble, aren’t you?”

  They had an appointment with Josh Jonah and Tom Black inside Lukatmi headquarters. If Bryant Street got to hear of it, there’d be plenty of awkward questions. It was difficult to see how interviewing the bosses of a digital media firm, albeit one heavily involved in financing Inferno, could possibly be justified given their tight and supposedly unbreakable orders: watch over the assembly of the exhibition, nothing more.

  “You don’t have to join us if you don’t want,” Falcone told Catherine. “I do think we have the right to be here.”

  That got him a fierce look in return.

  “The Palace of Fine Arts, with all your precious stuff, is that way. There’s not a single thing in those Lukatmi buildings that concerns you, Leo. There’s nothing there but geeks and computers. We should be back where we’re supposed to be.” She seemed as exasperated as the rest of them. “Twiddling our thumbs and waiting to be told what to do next.”

  Falcone leaned back in his seat and sighed. “What we do next is look for the money.”

  Teresa Lupo realised she didn’t have the energy to engage in that particular argument again. The same circular bout of bitching had rumbled on all morning, in between the inquiries to the hospital and the calls from an infuriated Quattrocchi and an equally livid Gerald Kelly of the SFPD. It was now two days since the attack on Maggie Flavier. The temperature hadn’t cooled.

  And yet Falcone stuck obstinately to his guns; somehow, somewhere, he insisted, this case was about nothing more than cash. Not a piece of poetry. Not an old movie. Money was at the root of everything. Maybe it was Josh Jonah and Tom Black protecting their investment. Maybe it was Roberto T
onti or Dino Bonetti trying to make sure the heavy mob who bankrolled Inferno got payback before they turned ugly. Or maybe it was the mob themselves doing just that. Those, as far as the inspector was concerned, were the only avenues worth exploring, not that they were supposed to.

  Once the arguments began again, made yet more shrill by the howls of outrage from the Carabinieri and the suits in Bryant Street over Nic’s close involvement with the actress they were supposed to be protecting, no one even bothered to ask much about Maggie Flavier’s condition, which did nothing to calm Teresa Lupo’s temper. A severe anaphylactic shock was a truly terrible experience. If Nic hadn’t been there, it might have taken her life. Not that he was going to get much credit on that front. The media had fresher blood to excite its appetites.

  She picked up that morning’s copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from the vehicle’s floor. They’d printed only one photo, of Nic bent over the stricken woman, stabbing the epinephrine pen into her thigh. It wasn’t the worst. Some of the less fussy rags had felt no such restraint. In spite of his broken arm — now the subject of a police investigation on the grounds of assault — the paparazzo had hung around long enough to capture a series of images of the actress being taken into the ambulance by paramedics, with Nic, face grim and eyes steely, holding her hand.

  While Teresa fumed over the paper, Peroni studied a couple of the grosser tabloids. Splashed over the front pages, alongside the shots of a woman in the throes of a dreadful allergic reaction, they carried photos of Maggie Flavier. She sat close to Nic, propped against the silver form of a grey, ghostly tree, smiling, a look on her face no one could mistake. It was one step away from a kiss, and everyone who saw it would surely have wondered what came after.

  “If she’d died,” Peroni pointed out, “they’d never have run these. Not for a day or two anyway. They’d call it ‘respect.’ ”

  That was probably true, Teresa thought. Allan Prime had been treated like a lost genius for a short while after his murder. Then the reporters had started to find other stories. Of his financial wranglings, his debts, his association with known criminals. And the women. Young, too young sometimes. Often vulnerable. Sometimes paid off for their “troubles.” It took less than a week for the dead actor to tumble out of Hollywood heaven and into the gutter. Teresa had read enough about Maggie Flavier’s past, a very typical tale of broken love affairs, tussles with the law, and the occasional drug and booze bust, to understand that the young woman would doubtless have followed the same path had she wound up on a morgue table.

  “OK,” Catherine Bianchi said. “I shouldn’t be telling you this but I will. Nic isn’t going to be charged over that guy’s broken arm. He might get yelled at. No — he will get yelled at. But that’s it. The SFPD doesn’t like that kind any more than you.”

  “What do you know about him?” Falcone asked. “The photographer?”

  “I can’t possibly tell you that, Leo. You shouldn’t even be asking.”

  “What if he’s not just a photographer?” Peroni wondered. “What if he’s involved?”

  The woman’s smart, dark face creased with fury. “We’re not idiots. Don’t presume you have some kind of monopoly over proper police procedure. We will investigate the man.” She swore under her breath. “Hell, we have investigated him. He’s a lowlife. He’s been accused of harassing five young actresses over the last two years. He’s a jerk and a creep and probably ought to get taken into some dark corner somewhere and taught a lesson he won’t forget. But he is not a murderer.”

  The big man folded his arms and asked, “Where does he live?”

  “You must be joking!”

  “His name is Martin Vogel,” Falcone announced, taking a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “He has an apartment somewhere called SoMa. I have the address. An art district or something, I’m told. Good restaurants apparently.”

  “What …” Catherine snarled. “Restaurants? What?”

  “I thought we might go out for dinner somewhere.”

  “Dinner? Screw dinner, Leo! Are you seriously thinking of approaching a witness who claims — with some justification — that he’s been assaulted by one of your own men? How the—”

  “His name was in the paper. You have these things called phone books.”

  “Visit that man and you are on your own,” she snapped. “God knows you’re pushing my limits already. Martin Vogel’s screaming that Nic attacked him. Some lawyer will be coming at us all for millions. Things are complicated enough already. I will not allow you to make them worse.”

  Falcone tapped his fingers on the dashboard, thinking. Then he said, “Martin Vogel was in the right location, though, wasn’t he? Not an obvious place either.”

  “He’s freelance camera scum,” she pointed out. “Jackals like Vogel will follow someone like Maggie Flavier for days, weeks, just to get one photograph. Don’t you have any idea how much he’ll get for those photos? Thousands, probably. Not bad for an evening’s work.”

  “The Legion of Honor was on my list,” Teresa pointed out, ignoring the American policewoman and talking to Falcone. “The Vertigo list.”

  He scowled. “Nothing happened at the Legion of Honor. It was a mile away in the woods. Stop clutching at straws, please.”

  “But you said …” she protested. “About the car.”

  “It was just an old car. Perhaps the company that sent it had a movie buff on the staff. Where’s the real link?”

  “Carlotta Valdes!”

  He had that foxy look in his eyes. One she both loved and hated, because it was both a rejection and a challenge.

  He gazed out the window in the direction of the Lukatmi studios and said, “If we can understand who benefits, who feels cheated, and, ultimately, who loses … there lie the answers.”

  “You’re a philistine,” Teresa announced. “And if you hope to understand the financing of modern movies, you’ll be here for years.” She waved a hand at the Lukatmi building. “I’ll bet you even they don’t understand it, and a stack of their money has already disappeared into Dino Bonetti’s pockets. I’m a pathologist. I look for traces. So should you.”

  Falcone was unmoved. “You’ve no laboratory, no staff, no jurisdiction. Most of all you’ve no job. You’re nothing more than a tourist here. Don’t forget it.”

  “As if I could! You remind me every hour on the hour. So tell me. How did someone know that Maggie was vulnerable like that? Could Lukatmi’s computers have told them she was allergic to almonds?”

  “Any computer could have told them that,” Catherine Bianchi said. “She had some kind of attack at the Cannes film festival three years ago. All the papers covered it. That one wasn’t so severe, thankfully. But that’s why she carries that syringe all the time.” She eyed Teresa nervously. “You won’t tell anyone I gave you that lab report, will you? They’d fire me. They’d have every right.”

  “Of course I won’t!”

  “So? What did it tell you?”

  “You have a forensic department. What did it tell them?”

  “Nothing more than you read in that report. Just … facts.”

  “And I’m supposed to give you more than that? Me? The tourist?”

  All three of them stared at her in silence. And waited.

  2

  Captain Gerald Kelly loathed press conferences. Particularly, he had come to realise, those press conferences that involved a police chief from another country, one who loved the limelight and seemed incapable of going anywhere in public without the presence of a similarly media-obsessed Canadian professor who never knew when to shut up.

  Kelly had looked at Leo Falcone’s odd pair of sidekicks while bawling them out the day before, one huge and old and ugly, the other slight and dark and handsome, and wished, with all his heart, that they had been on this case with him. Gerald Kelly had long ago learned to live with the nagging sense of doubt and uncertainty that went with everyday police work, so much that, at times, he came to regard these feelings almost a
s friends, ghosts on the shoulder reminding him to ask the impertinent, awkward, important questions he might otherwise have forgotten. On occasion the science people came up with tangible proof — a blood or semen stain, a fingerprint or a string of genetic code. But when science failed them, the answers almost always lay in lacunae, what was missing or unknown. Kelly had lived with that slippery reality for years, as had Falcone’s men, he was certain of it. Not so the artificially erudite Gianluca Quattrocchi, a man who seemed to harbour very few doubts about anything, himself most of all, shunning the interesting if difficult Falcone for the diminutive Bryan Whitcombe, who was constantly at his side, tossing out obscure and useless literary references at any opportunity.

  If this strange, tangled, and seemingly impenetrable case went on much longer, Kelly decided, he’d tell Quattrocchi that he was bringing Falcone and his men on board, no matter how loudly the Carabinieri back in Rome howled. He could live with the squeals. This was San Francisco, not Italy. It was his call. The SFPD needed all the bright help they could get on this one, and Kelly’s instincts told him Leo Falcone and his men could provide it.

  Kelly grunted an inaudible curse as the TV men swarmed forward, raising their cameras. Nic Costa, who was more than Falcone’s right-hand man, Kelly could sense that in the bond between them, was at that very moment the quarry of a thousand prying lenses. California’s dread legions of showbiz hacks and cameramen were seeking photos and interviews with Maggie Flavier. Second best would be the man who had saved her life, not long after he had seemingly entered it in a way half the male population of America envied as they pored over the photos in that morning’s papers. Maggie Flavier in her prime, Maggie Flavier in her agony. And gazing adoringly at some lowly Italian cop. This ravenous pack usually saved its activities for L.A.; now Kelly had them on his doorstep in San Francisco. It did nothing to improve his mood.