Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  “I’d think you’d be fine.”

  “What I meant was …”

  Another edgy shot of vodka disappeared. She was coughing hard, her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wide open again with astonishment. His mind began to race, recalling her terrible collapse in the park.

  Maggie fell back on the sofa behind them. He was beside her instantly.

  “Damned drink,” she swore, still struggling to speak. “Went down the wrong way. Must break that vodka habit. Tomorrow. Definitely. Wait, I forgot something, Nic. Dino Bonetti! That movie! Vertigo!”

  “What?”

  “The first time he came here. He told me to watch it. He recognised the location.” She looked at him. “Now you’re saying the same thing. What’s going on here?”

  Costa told her a little of Teresa’s ideas, and how the woman who had first approached Allan Prime had introduced herself as a character in the movie.

  She sat on the sofa, bare, slender legs tucked beneath her. “Well, I guess it’s time I followed everyone’s advice. Will you watch it with me?” She closed her eyes and looked exhausted. “I’ve been on my own so much since all this craziness began.”

  “Where’s the movie?” he asked.

  She picked up the phone, called someone, and ordered a DVD. “It’ll be an hour or so. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “I can order some food, too.”

  He got up. Costa knew he needed activity, something that would take his mind off Dante Alighieri and Alfred Hitchcock, Dino Bonetti and the shattered corpse of Josh Jonah, prone on the floor of a run-down SoMa apartment block.

  Maggie followed him and watched as he rifled through the kitchen drawers and cabinets.

  “You have food,” he said. “That’s a start.”

  “Old food. One of the rental people must have left it.”

  He found a small envelope of dried porcini, a packet of arborio rice, a couple of shallots in the vegetable rack along with a chunk of Parmesan wrapped in foil. Five minutes later he had the makings of a risotto. It felt good to cook again. It felt even better to have Maggie Flavier leaning on the threshold of the door, looking at him as if she’d never seen anything like this in her life.

  “Any wine recommendations?” she asked, nodding at the floor-length chilled cabinet filled with bottles that looked a lot more expensive than anything he usually drank.

  “I’ll leave that to you.”

  She opened the glass door, peered inside, and pulled out a bottle. “I bought this in Rome. Is it any good?”

  He looked at the 2004 Terredora Greco di Tufo and said, “It’ll do. Can I leave you to set the table?”

  “Men!” she exclaimed, and went to the kitchen drawers, where she removed a tablecloth and place settings.

  “After that …” he shouted through the open door, “… we need some cheese grated.”

  It wasn’t the best risotto Costa had ever made. But he didn’t want someone else’s food. Not with her.

  They ate and talked. Towards the end she looked at him and asked, “Did you used to cook? For Emily?”

  He had to force himself to remember. There was now a distance between the present and the past. Perhaps it was San Francisco. Perhaps it was Maggie Flavier. Or both. But he could now see the winter’s nightmare with some perspective, could stand back from it and feel apart from the pain and despair it had brought.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes she did. Emily wasn’t a vegetarian. If I was working nights, I’d come home occasionally and I could smell steak in the kitchen.” He looked at her. “Or bacon and eggs.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Of course not. It was her home, too.” He could picture the two of them together, inside the house near the Appian Way. “It used to smell good, if I’m honest. If I ate meat …” He shrugged. “But I don’t. And I didn’t like the smoking much. She went outside for that.”

  Maggie held up her hands. “I won’t smoke inside either. Promise.”

  “It’s your home,” he said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s just somewhere I live from time to time. Did you think about it? Being together? Did you ever … question whether it was right?”

  “Not once. Not for a second,” he said immediately. “We had arguments. We saw things different ways. None of that mattered. I can’t explain. It happened.” A flash of recollection, of a cold, hard winter’s day by the mausoleum of Augustus, ran through his head. “Then it was over.”

  She reached out and touched the back of his hand.

  “I could feel something. Your sadness. Outside that little children’s cinema. Before we went inside. Before I even knew who you were. It was like something tangible.”

  “Not good for a police officer.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m freaky Maggie Flavier. I see things other people don’t. Lucky them.”

  He got up and started to take the plates.

  “No,” she insisted. “You cooked. I load the dishwasher. Sit. Make yourself comfortable.”

  She went back into the kitchen. He walked to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, wondering what he saw, what he felt.

  When he returned, she was tipping the video deliveryman at the door. After that she put the disc in some machine by the fireplace and turned the TV on. They sat next to each other, opposite the gigantic screen. She picked up a couple of remotes. The curtains on the apartment closed themselves slowly; the light fell.

  The black-and-white credits ran: the logo of the Paramount peak, the awkward, jarring music he had come to associate with the movie. Then a brutal close-up of a woman, zooming into her eye with a cruel, unforgiving honesty, monochrome turning to bloodred, a swirling vortex spinning out from the black, unseeing pupil.

  He felt cold. He felt lost and he’d no idea why.

  6

  It got cold quickly in the woods. At least, Frank Boynton assumed the way he felt was due to the temperature of the out-of-the-way patch of the sequoia forest, not some innate primeval sense of dread on his part. He’d read more noir books than he could count, watched the entire school of movies in the genre. He’d thought he understood a little about fear from all that dedicated study, but now he realised he was wrong. There was a world of difference between theory and practice. Reality was a lot less complicated. It also seemed to happen a lot more quickly. He could almost feel the minutes slipping away from them.

  So he sat there in silence, thinking, seated on the damp, cold ground, his hands tied behind his back, the two brothers bound together so securely there really wasn’t much point in contemplating escape. He couldn’t run as well as either of their captors even if it was a level playing field, without ropes, without a slippery dark forest where the light was fading and he hadn’t a clue which way to turn.

  The Muir Woods weren’t the overrun tourist destination he’d believed, not in this part anyway. Here, the woods felt vast and timeless and desolate, an army of identical redwood monoliths stretching towards a darkening sky in every unfathomable direction. A place where a man could lie dead for months and maybe never be found.

  Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black had gone off to a small clearing. They’d been there a long time, talking out of earshot. Making a phone call or two. Frank could hear the distant electronic beep of a phone and envied the way it communicated so easily, so swiftly with the outside world.

  If he could just find his own …

  They’d be dead by the time anyone came. The idea of rescue was one confined to the pages of fiction. In the real world there was no escape, except perhaps through meek, obedient submission. The brothers had told Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black what they knew: an Italian woman they both liked believed Tom was innocent and might be able to help if only he’d get in touch. Then she’d pass him on to a friendly cop who, for once, didn’t come with a bunch of preconceptions about presumed guilt. Frank had taken the lead, as he usually did in such situations, offering to make the call, promising he’d do nothing to compromise
their location, or Jimmy Gaines’s identity.

  They’d listened, then left. Something in the way they walked hadn’t filled him with optimism.

  Frank wriggled, trying to get a little more comfortable. He wished he could look at his brother eye-to-eye. He wished he could understand what might be going on in Hank’s head. Closeness could make you deaf and blind to things that sensitive, observant people spotted instantly. Over the decades, their relationship had settled into an easy, unspoken rhythm. Frank was the practical one, the right-brainer, as Teresa Lupo had so cannily noticed. Frank handled the money and the day-to-day problems of keeping the house in the Marina going: bills and taxes, repairs and improvements. Hank was the dreamer, the would-be poet, more interested in the San Francisco of yesterday than now, more obsessed with the cerebral puzzles of Conan Doyle than the gutter reality of Dashiell Hammett that Frank preferred. Neither had much real preparation for their present quandary. Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade were myths, ghostly actors in tales that chose entertainment over mundane, prosaic reality.

  There weren’t any favorable ends when it came to men with guns. Not in the Muir Woods. Not anywhere. Jimmy Gaines, when he wanted, would simply walk over and pop them, one after the other, straight in the head as they sat, tied together in a place that stank of moss and rotting vegetation. A jerk of the trigger was all it took. He’d been thinking of Jimmy a lot in the hour or so since Tom Black had appeared from behind the sequoias, like a lost forest creature in search of salvation. Jimmy Gaines taking them to bars where they didn’t really feel comfortable. Jimmy Gaines swinging hard and viciously at a stranger who’d said the wrong thing, thought the wrong thought, looked the wrong way.

  Like the idiots they were, he and Hank had walked straight up to him at Lukatmi based on that single sighting of Gaines with Tom Black weeks before, when they had, now Frank thought of it, seemed the very best of friends. That was the trouble with the Marina. It was a community, a little village full of smart, engaged, occasionally difficult people, all living on top of one another. It was hard to keep secrets. Jimmy Gaines, a solitary bachelor who quietly declined to go to some of the bars the other guys did after duty, had never really kept his. People were simply too polite — too uninterested, frankly — to mention it. So when a secret became big, became important, a man just passed it by like all the others. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt. It bred a quiet, polite ignorance, a glance away at an awkward, embarrassing moment, a cough in the fist, then, after a suitable pause, a quick smile while glancing at the ground and formulating a rapid change of subject.

  All of which led them to the Muir Woods while a line from an old movie kept running and running and running round his head like some loose carnivore circling the big, dark forest of his imagination.

  I don’t like it … knowing I have to die.

  Hank’s elbow nudged him in the ribs. He felt his brother’s bristly cheek rub up against his.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Never felt better.”

  “This is my fault. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologise. We are jointly responsible for our own stupidity.”

  Hank cleared his throat. “May I remind you I am the junior here?”

  Frank so wished he could look his brother full in the face at that moment. “By seven minutes, if you recall,” he pointed out, thinking it was a long time since they’d had this conversation. Maybe five decades or so.

  “Seven minutes, seven years. It doesn’t matter. It still makes me younger. Still makes you the old one. The serious one. The one who does things the way you do ’cause you think that’s what’s expected.”

  They never argued. If there was cause for complaint, they simply fell into silence and waited till the cloud lifted. It had worked this way for almost sixty years, since they learned to speak.

  “So what?” Frank asked.

  “So we’re clever and stupid in different ways. Normally, I’d say you were the cleverer and me the stupider. But this isn’t normal, is it?”

  Tom Black and Jimmy Gaines were on the phone again. Frank was glad of that. They weren’t taking any notice of the two old men they’d tied up next to a redwood tree.

  “I am inclined to concur,” he said. “Your point being?”

  Hank shuffled round a little. They could just about catch the corner of each other’s eye.

  “The point being,” Hank went on, “whether this is a left-brain or right-brain situation. Whether it’s one best handled by me.” The nudge in the ribs again. “Or by you. And you think it’s you. Because you’re like that. No offence, brother. You are. That’s fine.”

  “Hank,” Frank said very calmly, “this could be difficult. We might have a lot of talking to do. Talking’s something best left to me. We’ve always worked that way.”

  “There you are wrong, brother.” There was anger and determination in that lone, bright eye. “This is not about talking at all. Did they look remotely interested when you offered to call Teresa? Well, did they?”

  Frank thought about that. He’d been a little scared when Jimmy Gaines had demanded the Italian pathologist’s number. He just wanted to give the man anything he could if it kept that big old gun out of their faces.

  Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black never asked them to do a damned thing once they had Frank’s address book.

  “No. They didn’t.”

  “Another thing,” Hank added. “I can hear better than you these days. They weren’t talking about Teresa. They kept using that cop’s name, the one whose number she gave us. Costa. Seemed like Black knew who he was already.”

  “That’s good.”

  “No, it isn’t. That Italian cop doesn’t know us from Adam.”

  Frank felt scared again. Very.

  “Listen to me, Frank. I don’t know who they’ve called already but pretty soon they’re going to call the Costa guy. Then Tom’s going to go to see him and cut some kind of a deal. You know the routine. You read it a million times in all that stupid pulp fiction of yours: ‘I didn’t know what was going on, Officer. I just got scared and ran away. I got your number sometime. You seemed a nice, gullible guy.’ ” He took a deep, wheezy breath. “Whatever. And then …”

  Hank’s single eye peered at him. Frank marvelled at the fact he’d learned more new stuff about his twin brother this last week than at any time in the last twenty years.

  “Then it’s just Jimmy Gaines and us,” Frank replied. “And us knowing that was all a pile of crap, and that he was in there with them, too, which Costa won’t get told because Jimmy Gaines doesn’t want to go to jail, not for anybody.”

  “You old guys,” Hank muttered with some sly amusement. “You get there in the end. Just listen to your little brother and do what he says.”

  “OK,” Frank said, and was amazed how odd the concession sounded.

  “Good. They’re working out their story. Their plan. Pretty soon Tom Black’s going to make that final call, then he’s going to get out of here. After that, Jimmy Gaines is going to walk over, say a brief apology, and blow our brains out.” He sighed. “Or so he’d like to think.”

  Frank Boynton watched his brother’s lone eye wink the way it did when they were children.

  “Good thing the stupid, head-in-the-clouds kid brother had the gumption to bring a knife, huh?” Hank asked lightly.

  After that, Frank didn’t say a word. He stayed still and silent, hustling up a little closer to his brother so that the two men locked in conversation by the trees didn’t get suspicious about what Hank was doing with his hands.

  A little while later they heard Tom Black make one more call, and the name Costa came into that. It didn’t last long. Then he left without once looking back.

  Jimmy Gaines stayed by the big redwood and lit a cigarette. He smoked it slowly.

  At least he seemed a little reluctant. Frank Boynton gave him that.

  7

  Vertigo lasted just over two hours. They watched in silence, Costa upright, Maggie reclini
ng, her head on his shoulder, hair brushing against his cheek, sweet and soft and full of memories of another. They had nothing to say, nothing to share except the same sense of fearful wonder watching what was taking place on the screen, a fairy tale for adults imagined long before they were born.

  The day started to die beyond the curtains. The lights in the streets and adjoining buildings began to wake for the evening. He scarcely noticed much except the movie and the presence of the woman by his side, so close she was almost part of him, and equally rapt in the strange, disjointed narrative playing out in front of them, one which meshed with their identities and the city beyond.

  Maggie let out a sharp, momentary gasp at the scene outside the Brocklebank, with the green Jaguar pulling away, Kim Novak at the wheel, made blonde by Hitchcock. Some parts made her shiver against him: Madeleine falling into the Bay at Fort Point, not far from the Marina, and Scottie rescuing her, an act which was to establish the bond between them; again when she was wandering among the giant redwoods, lost, uncertain of her own identity; Madeleine in the Legion of Honor, staring up at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, seeming to believe this long-dead woman somehow possessed her own identity, in her hands a bouquet identical both to the one in the painting and to that left in Maggie’s borrowed car.

  Most of all she seemed affected by what happened at the old white adobe bell tower of San Juan Bautista, erect in a blue sky like some biblical monument to a warped sense of justice, the place where the real Madeleine fell to her death, and where the woman who usurped her identity — and Scottie’s love — followed in the cryptic, cruel finale.

  Her eyes were wide with shock at that final act. Unable to leave the screen. Together they watched Jimmy Stewart, tense and tragic, frozen in the open arch high above the mission courtyard, his own vertigo cured, but at a shocking price: the life of the female icon — not a real woman — whom he’d come to love, obsessively, with the same voyeuristic single-mindedness with which Hitchcock himself pursued her through the all-seeing eye of the camera.