Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  The priest followed, looked over her shoulder, and said, “The gardener told me to chop that tree down two years ago. He said it’s dying. Too old.”

  She peered at the figure in the picture. The man was holding a supermarket bag that, from its bulging shape, appeared to contain a good collection of nuts. He was arguing with the Mexican woman she’d seen earlier.

  “I told them all, ‘It’s a tree,’ ” the priest went on. “ ‘Not a human being. The thing is insensate. It feels no pain, has no consciousness of its impending end, or its present feeble state. We can wait a little while,’ I say. Not thinking …” His glassy eyes stared into hers. “I’ve been here thirteen years, Ms. Lupo. We’ve never had a single person take something from the cemetery. Not something supposedly edible anyway. Now two in a matter of weeks.”

  “It’s not edible. It’s a bitter almond. Poisonous in quantity.”

  He looked shocked. “That’s why the man took those nuts? Because they’re poisonous?”

  “Someone with a little knowledge might know, I imagine. Most people would simply see an almond tree …”

  Its gnarled, failing form stood next to the patch of ground where the imaginary Carlotta Valdes’s grave had been created for the film, and stayed, for a few uncertain years, in real life, too, until someone deemed it unsuitable for a real cemetery. It was a link, one that, like the rest, seemed to lead into some opaque and unrelenting San Franciscan fog.

  “Do you know this man?” the priest asked.

  She gave him back the photograph. “He’s wearing sunglasses, Father. And he’s turned away from the camera …”

  He took the snapshot from her. “I’m sorry. I gave you the wrong one. Here. There’s a better picture.”

  Father Gammon scrabbled again in his clothes. A crumpled packet of cigarettes fell to the floor. He apologised and looked a little guilty, then picked them up. In his other hand was a new photo.

  This was clear and distinct, even in the fusty yellow light of the electric altar candles.

  “Do you know him now?”

  “I believe so,” she answered. “Will you excuse me, please?”

  Falcone was furious at being interrupted halfway through what sounded like a nervous dinner with Catherine Bianchi. But not for long.

  12

  Costa pushed the door as far as it would go. It was pitch black in the apartment.

  There was a smell, though. Something familiar: the harsh odour of a spent weapon and behind it the faint tang of blood. From a tinny radio in a room beyond the entrance came the sound of music. Tannhäuser. He thought of the burly photographer squealing as he stood on his shattered arm. The man hadn’t looked like an opera fan.

  He stopped and listened. Not a sound except the music, but that was so full and insistent … Costa found the wall inside the entrance, making sure he stayed inside the shadow as much as possible. It wasn’t a good idea to be a silhouette in a doorway. He couldn’t see a thing. Then, in the middle of a line, the music stopped abruptly.

  “Police,” he said quietly into the dark.

  All he could hear was his own voice in the dark of an apartment where the smell of spent ammunition was so strong it seemed like the mark of some murderous feral cat.

  When it came, the racket made him jump. The electronic wail of the mobile phone cut through the black interior of Vogel’s apartment like the scream of a child.

  It was the tone he’d set for Falcone. Costa swore, ducking further back into the pool of gloom by the door, desperate to avoid becoming an easy target.

  He yanked the phone out of his pocket and killed the call.

  There’d been another noise, though. Someone moving in the blackness ahead of him. A new smell, too, one he couldn’t place.

  Costa stared at the bright blue screen in his hand, got Falcone’s number, and texted four words, URGT VOGEL APT NOW.

  Then he threw the phone across to the other side of the room and pressed back against the wall. The ring tone went off seconds after. The space in front of him was briefly filled by sound, the bellowing roar of gunfire fighting to escape the confined space that enclosed it.

  He froze where he was, cold and sweating. Someone was scrabbling around on the floor, maybe three or four strides to the right, struggling to say something. The unseen figure’s breathing was laboured, words unintelligible. He sounded sick or wounded, in some kind of trouble. But he was a man with a gun. The strong, noxious smell was beginning to overwhelm everything.

  Finally he worked out what it was. Petrol.

  Down the corridor someone screamed. The baby was wailing again. Lights were coming on, voices were rising.

  He wanted to kick himself. They’d called the police before. The woman had let him in immediately, not because she thought he was a pizza deliveryman, but because she thought he was the police. The gunfire had started before he’d blundered onto the scene. That was why everything was so quiet, so deserted. Sane people stayed out of the way.

  As he moved a fraction further into the room, Costa stumbled, found his fingers encountering the familiar hard metal frame of a photographer’s tripod. He pushed it over, heard it clatter.

  There was no shooting this time. He fell to the floor, rolling, turning, turning, out into the corridor, scrabbling on hands and knees to get out of the deadly frame of the doorway.

  Breathless and sweating, but outside the apartment, finally, he heard nothing more. As he started to scramble upright, he found himself staring into the barrel of a gun. The man who held it was black, stocky, and wore the uniform of an SFPD cop. He looked terrified. The weapon trembled in his hands.

  “I’m a police officer,” Costa said, slowly, carefully raising his hands. “My ID’s in my jacket pocket.”

  The gun was sweaty in the young cop’s grip. He passed it from one hand to the other, then back, the barrel staying straight in Costa’s face. He nodded at the open doorway. “You gonna tell me what I might find in there? And why you was looking?”

  “There’s a wounded man with a gun. I just came here to apologise. There was an incident. With the actress. Maggie Flavier. Maybe you read about it …”

  The gun lowered a little. A flicker of recognition crossed the young cop’s face. “That was you? You looked bigger in the papers.”

  “Thanks …”

  There were more people behind him. The cop swiveled nervously, waving the gun everywhere. Costa wanted to shout at him but it didn’t seem a good idea.

  He didn’t need to anyway. Catherine Bianchi was marching down the corridor, police ID held high, Falcone behind her with a face like thunder. She was bellowing at the young cop to get his weapon down, in a voice that wasn’t easy to ignore.

  “Captain Bianchi …?” the cop faltered.

  She was wearing a short cocktail dress with a scarlet silk scarf over her shoulders. The badge in her hand looked incongruous next to it.

  She ignored him, stared at Costa, and asked, angrily, “What the hell is going on?”

  “There’s a wounded man inside with a gun,” Costa said quickly. “I urge—”

  Caution, he was about to say, but the word stayed in his mouth. Someone was screaming, a high-pitched shriek of terror and pain. Inside Martin Vogel’s apartment a light had appeared, a grim and familiar orange.

  Costa scrabbled to his feet and raced down the corridor, away from the apartment.

  Catherine Bianchi let out a piercing yell as a man stumbled out of the door, his body a bright, burning torch of flame from head to foot, leaping around like a victim of Saint Vitus’s dance consumed by fire.

  Costa snatched the fire extinguisher he’d seen earlier from the wall and ran towards the blazing figure.

  “He’s got a gun,” Catherine shouted, standing in the way, blocking any chance he had to move forward.

  Sure enough, there was a weapon in the burning man’s right hand, which now appeared blackened and useless, gripping the familiar black shape out of nothing more than fear.

  Costa p
ushed her to one side and triggered the extinguisher.

  A crowd was gathering. The spray doused the shrieking figure, which staggered and fell to the floor. His skin was black with soot, red with livid burns.

  He was recognisable, just.

  “Medics,” Costa said, dropping to his knees beside the man, wondering if there was much life left in him. Blood was beginning to seep through the scorched clothing. He was wounded, perhaps more than once. “They’re coming. Hold still. It will be all right …”

  A noise escaped the blackened lips, a long, painful groan that blew the stink of burnt petrol straight into Costa’s face. It was the final breath. He knew it. So did Josh Jonah, dying in his arms.

  They were around him now, looking, unable to speak.

  Costa didn’t wait. Two steps took him to the door to Vogel’s apartment; he found the light switch, tried to take in what he saw.

  The place was wrecked. There’d been a fight, a bloody one. Money — fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills — was scattered across the table in the living room. A lot of money. Thousands, surely.

  Falcone and Catherine Bianchi weren’t far behind him.

  “Let’s put out a bulletin for Vogel,” she said, pulling out her radio. “Then we figure out how the hell I’m going to explain all this to Gerald Kelly and keep my job.”

  Costa tried to take in what he was seeing. “I wouldn’t make any hasty decisions. There were three people in here. I heard them.”

  He walked on through the scattered mess on the floor, into the bedroom.

  The smell he’d first noticed, that of blood, hung heavy in the air, mingling with the harsh chemical stench of petrol. There was something else, too …

  A single naked bulb swung lazily over the bed as if someone had recently brushed against it. Martin Vogel didn’t live in style. Or die that way either. The corpse was on the bare mattress. Vogel wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and the plaster cast on his arm. A gaping wound stood over his heart like a bloody rose poking its way out from the inside.

  “You can hold the bulletin,” Costa said, mostly to himself.

  The window was open, just a fraction. He walked to it. There was a fire escape outside. Someone could have escaped undetected.

  Maybe they did kill each other — Vogel and Jonah. Or maybe it was meant to look that way.

  Catherine Bianchi walked over to the table, picked up some of the notes and let them drop through her fingers. Costa watched Falcone biting his tongue, wanting to tell her not to touch a thing.

  “What was it the Carabinieri’s pet professor said?” she asked. “Next we’d get the Avaricious and the Prodigal?”

  She shook her head and cast a brief glance at the bedroom, and then the corridor, where Josh Jonah’s corpse lay like a burnt and bloodied human ember escaped from some recently extinguished bonfire.

  “How do you tell which one was which?”

  The stink of petrol drifting into the room from around Vogel’s bed was becoming overpowering. It must have been in the carpet, the curtains, everywhere.

  So Josh Jonah intended to set fire to the place and had been caught by his own misdeed, shot by the wounded Vogel. Costa’s mind struggled with that idea. Jonah was ablaze when he died. If he’d been close to the petrol trail he’d been laying, that would have ignited, too. There was a gap in the scenario somewhere.

  “I think we should get out of here until the fire people take a look,” he began to say. “This isn’t a safe—”

  Something hissed and fizzed in the corner and finally he managed to place the last unknown smell. It was one from childhood. Fireworks on the lawn of the house, bright, fiery lights in the sky. A fuse burning before the explosion.

  In the corner of the room, safe on a chair above the fuel-stained carpet, sat an accordion-style jumping firecracker. A long length of cord had been attached so that it wound across the seat of the chair, lengthening the burn time. Most of it was now charred ash. Scarcely half a finger of untouched material remained, and that was getting rapidly eaten by the eager, hungry flame working its way to the small charge of powder that would take the incendiary and fling it into the room.

  It was a perfect homemade time bomb and it was about to explode.

  Costa shoved Catherine Bianchi back towards the door, bellowing at Falcone and the baffled young cop to join them.

  Then the soft roaring gasp of the explosion hit.

  13

  An hour and a half later Costa found himself standing outside next to the engines and the emergency vehicles as they wound down their pumps and reported the entire building evacuated, without a single casualty.

  Gerald Kelly had arrived, disturbed at dinner in formal dress, just like Falcone and his companion. The SFPD captain listened in quiet fury to a report from Catherine Bianchi and the firemen. After that he took the two Italians to one side to demand an explanation — any explanation — for Costa’s presence in Martin Vogel’s apartment.

  “I came to apologise,” Costa said simply. “That was all.”

  Falcone stood his ground. “I asked him to do this, Kelly. I thought it might help.”

  “Oh, right. That’s what you were doing. Helping.” He looked at them, desperation in his eyes. “Well? Did it?”

  “This isn’t our case,” Costa said, before his superior had the chance to intervene.

  Kelly eyeballed him and stifled a single, dry laugh. “You guys really are something. I know it’s not your case. If it was … what would you think? What would you do?”

  Costa glanced at the narrow, badly lit street that fed back into the bright, busy district around Market Street.

  “I’d be looking for a third man,” he said.

  PART 5

  1

  Three days later Costa and Teresa Lupo sat at the door of the principal exhibition tent in the temporary canvas village erected by the Palace of Fine Arts, watching Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti strut around the area as if they owned it.

  The question had been bothering him for days. He knew he had to ask.

  “What’s the difference between a producer and a director?”

  She stared at him and asked, “Are you serious?”

  “Deadly. I was never addicted to movies like you. I just see the finished thing. Actors. Pictures. I’ve no idea what goes into it.”

  “What was the difference between Caravaggio and Cardinal Del Monte?”

  Costa frowned and replied, “One was an artist and the other was the man who made his art viable. By paying for it, or finding others to come up with the commissions.”

  “One provides the art. The other provides the wherewithal. There. You answered your own question.”

  He thought about that, and the nagging doubt that had been with him since the conversation with the Asian waitress in the diner.

  “If you’d been Del Monte, would you have loved Caravaggio or resented him? So much talent in one human being, something you couldn’t hope to achieve yourself?”

  “I think I’d feel lucky to have known a genius,” Teresa replied. “And a little jealous, too, from time to time.” She nodded at the two Italians. “You think Bonetti might resent Tonti in some way?”

  Bonetti was striding past the huge marquee that was destined to house the audience for the premiere the following evening. Tonti was at his side, listening. Thirty years separated these men. One was in his prime: strong, both physically and personally. Tonti was dying; his face seemed bloodless. His walk had the slow, pained determination of an old man resenting his increasing infirmity.

  “Directors win Oscars,” Costa said. “Producers don’t win anything.”

  “The kind of money they make, they don’t need to. Someone like Bonetti dips his beak in everything. He’s Del Monte with a twist. He gets to sell the paintings he commissions and keep a share of them in perpetuity. What’s some stupid little statue next to that?”

  Something, he thought. But perhaps not much. Dino Bonetti was a powerful, confident man. It seemed
far-fetched to think he would be offended by any fleeting fame attached to cast or crew.

  “The question you should really be asking,” she added, “is how much someone like Tonti resents his stars. I’ve read his biography. It’s full of bust-ups with his cast. For some people that’s a trademark. Tonti …” She frowned. “He treats his cast as if they’re just puppets. It’s a shame he’s so old. All this digital stuff they have nowadays … It can’t be long before real actors become irrelevant for directors. Just one more piece of software they can manipulate on-screen — so much more manageable than flesh and blood.”

  Lukatmi was never far away from the story, Costa thought. The Italian director had been involved with the digital video company since the outset. The papers said that Tonti had even provided seed capital for its founding. Not that it was going to be worth much now. Lukatmi’s shares had entered meltdown after the death of Josh Jonah. In seventy-two hours the company had gone from star of the NASDAQ to one more discredited and busted dotcom. The very day that the news channels and papers devoted huge amounts of coverage to the deadly inferno in Martin Vogel’s SoMa apartment, twelve lawsuits had been filed in the courts in California and New York. Given the speed with which they appeared, it was clear lawyers had been hovering at the edge of the company for some time, just as Catherine Bianchi had predicted. All accused the dead Jonah and his partner Tom Black of everything from stock option irregularities to misuse of shareholder funds. The newspapers claimed the district attorney was mulling over a formal probe into the company for fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. The share price that had seemed so buoyant only four days before had fallen through the floor until, that morning, trading had been suspended amid expectations of an impending bankruptcy announcement. Predators — old-school companies, the ones Lukatmi treated with such contempt — were hovering, ready to snap up what few worthwhile pieces might be salvaged from the corporate corpse on the waterfront at Fort Mason.