Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  The man in the driver’s seat creased with laughter. “Jesus … Jesus … And I picked Gianluca Quattrocchi …”

  He started the engine. They drew away, in the opposite direction down the hill. The Golden Gate Bridge emerged in the distance. The car was headed for the Marina. He’d seen this road before, in Vertigo.

  “I’ve got to get back to the office. I’m enjoying myself too much here,” Kelly said. “You want to know the truth? There’s only one thing we’re sure of right now. There was a conspiracy to hype Inferno. Somehow, somewhere along the way, it turned murderous.”

  Costa shrugged and said, “Any way you look at it, one of three people has got to be at the heart of this case. Roberto Tonti, Dino Bonetti, or Simon Harvey. If they’d been cab drivers or office clerks, they’d have spent a couple of days in Bryant Street being sweated until they couldn’t sleep. Instead …”

  “Not going to happen, Nic. Tonti and Bonetti are Italian citizens. They insist Gianluca Quattrocchi is present if we so much as ask them the way to the bathroom.”

  “And Harvey?”

  “I leaned a little hard on Harvey right at the beginning. One hour later I’m getting calls from God down asking me why I’m wasting my time. There’s not a scrap of hard evidence linking them to the case and you know it.” Despite his words, Kelly still looked interested. “You think you can do better?”

  “I can try.”

  “How?”

  “By getting in their faces. The way I’d do if they were plain ordinary human beings like everyone else. When they don’t want it. Before they can call up a lawyer.”

  They had reached a bluff overlooking the bridge. Kelly pulled in.

  “Now, there’s something you don’t see often,” he muttered, pointing at the ocean.

  A long white, smoky finger of mist was working its way across the Bay ahead.

  “I’ll take you out there someday. We call that place ‘the slot.’ It runs from the bridge to Alcatraz. Windy as hell sometimes, and you don’t have a clue what’s going on until you’re in the middle of it.” He shook his head. “Fog? Now? I’d expect it from the west. And later. But hell. Welcome to summer in San Francisco.”

  He took off his jacket, removed the tan holster, and held it out, gun first, to Costa.

  “Expecting things to turn out like they should is something stupid people do. If you plan to go visiting, and I hope you do, I would like you to have this.”

  Costa didn’t reach for the weapon.

  “Men who work with me do so armed,” Kelly insisted. “I’ve lost three officers in my career and that’s three too many.”

  “It’s illegal for me to carry a weapon.”

  “I’ll look the other way. I know this city and I have my rules when dealing with it. We both understand there are still people out there with blood on their hands. I’d hazard a guess they’ll shed a little more to keep us from finding out what exactly has gone on here. This is not a negotiation, Nic. You take the gun or I drive you home and you stay there.” The handgun didn’t move. “Well?”

  Costa grasped the cold butt of the weapon, felt its familiar weight.

  Kelly turned on the radio and kept the volume low. Strains of Santana drifted into the car.

  “Oh,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “One more thing. That crossbow that killed Allan Prime. Unusual object.” He looked at Costa. “A Barnett Revolution. It’s a hunting crossbow, made for killing deer. Very powerful. Not generally available in Italy. It was bought used through eBay. Guy paid cash and met the seller in a parking lot in South San Francisco one month before Prime died. He wore a hat and sunglasses. That’s as good a description as we could get. My guess is it got shipped to Rome along with some of the equipment they took out for that event there, not that I can prove it.”

  “A month?”

  “None of this happened on the spur of the moment, did it? Now here’s one more interesting thing: we recovered three shells from Tom Black’s body. Two of them were ours. One wasn’t.”

  Kelly squinted at the bright horizon. “The shooter was in a parking lot across the street. I guess he must have been following you from when you came off the bridge. When he saw the roadblock, he pulled off, set up position, then popped one into Black as he walked towards us, and another through the windshield of a squad car just to make sure we returned fire. Clever guy. I’d put money he was the ghost in Vogel’s apartment, that he set up that meeting, shot them, and got panicked when you arrived.”

  He looked at Costa. “That makes two occasions when he could have had you in his sights. Consider yourself damned lucky. And don’t lose that gun.”

  “Anything else I should know?” Costa asked.

  “Here’s the last remaining fact I have. We have the bullets and we have spent shells from the Embarcadero. They’re from a.243 Winchester. Whoever he is, he had a long-range hunting rifle.” Gerald Kelly winced. “The kind you use for shooting deer. Which is not my idea of sport, though it’s a little bit more humane than a crossbow, I guess.”

  4

  Hank had a pair of half-moon glasses for sitting at the computer. Frank, similarly afflicted, preferred a pair of modern square plastic frames. Both men squinted at Barkev’s Mac and made baffling complimentary remarks on its newness and speed. These things seemed important in San Francisco. The average pair of sixty-year-old Roman twins newly out of the fire department would probably have struggled to do much more than send an e-mail. The Boynton brothers sailed through a sea of information sources in front of them with a speed and ease that reminded her of Silvio Di Capua back in Rome, a thought that gave her a pang of homesickness.

  Finally Hank found the page he wanted, and once they’d read it, Teresa said, “One more coincidence. It has to be. We’re talking nearly four hundred years ago.”

  “Let’s see.” His fat fingers clattered across Barkev’s pristine keyboard. “Yep. It’s a coincidence. Lorenzo di Tonti. Born in Naples. Got into trouble there. Moved to Paris. Died penniless.”

  “Offspring?” Frank asked.

  “Two,” his brother replied, placing a large finger directly on the screen.

  Teresa scanned the article next to a black-and-white portrait of a man with long, flowing black hair and elegant nobleman’s clothes.

  “So Roberto Tonti can’t be related,” she declared when she skimmed to the end.

  His fingers ran over the keyboard again.

  “Seems not. Even the name changes. Lorenzo became de Tonti when he moved to Paris. Both sons wound up over here. One died penniless of yellow fever in Alabama. The second helped found Detroit and died in disgrace. Was calling himself de Tonty by then. They didn’t have a lot of luck, these guys, did they? Mind you, all that from an argument in Naples. Interesting lives. Makes me feel quite small.”

  “So,” she repeated, “Roberto Tonti the movie director can in no way be a descendant of Lorenzo di Tonti the dubious seventeenth-century banker.”

  “Right,” Hank said. “But does that matter? Use your imagination. Roberto certainly does. It’s his job. Lorenzo invented the tontine that’s named after him. Who doesn’t Google themselves these days? How many other people have surnames describing an idea that’s killed a good number of idiots over the years?”

  Tontine.

  She vaguely knew what the word meant. It reminded her of old stories of tortuous conspiracies and unbelievably clever detectives. All the kinds of things real-life law enforcement agencies never met in the mundane world of hard, cruel fact.

  “I’ve got to be honest.” Hank looked uncomfortable. “I looked up Tonti a few days ago. Type in ‘Tonti’ and pretty soon you get to ‘tontine.’ I apologise for not mentioning any of this earlier. It seemed irrelevant. I thought the same about tontines, too. Maybe I was wrong.”

  She went through another page he’d found, feeling a welcome mild rush of excitement and possibility.

  Teresa dimly recalled a tontine as an agreement between a group of individuals to share some
kind of bounty, usually a crooked one, leaving the illicit prize to the last surviving member of the circle. This proved fundamentally wrong in many respects. Lorenzo di Tonti, the man who shared Roberto’s name — though not, it would seem, his blood — hadn’t set out to make his fortune creating a secret profit-sharing scheme for criminals. He was an ambitious banker trying to establish a new form of investment vehicle of general benefit to those who had the wherewithal to take part in it.

  Teresa read the details and tried to recall what little she knew about investing for the future. Money was never one of her strong points, which was probably why the true tontine appeared eminently sensible. Each member made a contribution to the fund. The total was then invested in legitimate enterprises. Any dividends from those holdings were shared equally among the members of the scheme, until the penultimate one died, at which point the entire sum, dividends and capital, fell to the ownership of the last in the group.

  The only flaw she could see was the obvious one: there was a substantial incentive on the part of tontine members to murder one another in order to ensure they claimed the richest prize. According to the documents Hank found, this had happened, and not just in fiction either. Tontines were made illegal in most countries by the nineteenth century, and passed on as fodder for novelists.

  “Fine …” she said quietly. “The connection being?”

  Hank found another article, one from the Financial Times the previous year.

  “I remembered this one because it made me think. Take a look.”

  It was a long and very serious piece about the nature of life insurance.

  “You see the author’s point?” Hank said. “If you leave out the temptation-to-murder part, what old Lorenzo actually invented was the very first pension scheme. The only difference is he didn’t let newcomers in, so that big final payout remained. In practical terms it’s not much different from what happens today.” He nodded at his brother. “We get a fire department pension. The pot for that depends on the stock market or something magical, I guess. When one of our colleagues bites the dust, that’s one less mouth to feed. We all profit from each other’s deaths. We always have. Lorenzo just said all that out loud, and put it in a way that tempted a few people to bring on some of those deaths a little earlier than might otherwise have happened.”

  “So there was a tontine,” Teresa suggested. “And the people who were trying to hype Inferno were all in it.”

  “That’s a possibility. Plus Josh Jonah and Tom Black, and Jimmy Gaines. Jimmy wasn’t the most sophisticated of creatures. I doubt anyone could have sold him on a tontine. But if they said it was some kind of fancy insurance, one that might give him and Tom Black a tidy return each …?”

  “What did Jimmy Gaines have to put into a movie?” Frank asked.

  Hank shrugged. “A little muscle, maybe, like that photographer guy. What you have is what you contribute. And what you take out is …”

  There he was struggling. Frank looked sceptical.

  “Imagine this is true,” he said. “Why would they do it? They’re making a movie. What these people need is money. Money pays people. You don’t pay people, you don’t get the job done.”

  “They didn’t pay people,” Teresa interjected. “That’s the point. The money wasn’t there. Nic told me Maggie is still owed most of her salary. Lots of other people, too.”

  “I still don’t see it …” Frank sighed.

  But she did. Or at least she thought she might.

  “Imagine you’re Allan Prime. They come to you. The movie’s nearly finished. You’ve been working for six months, but the big reward is still down the line, when it comes out. They say there’s no money left to pay you what’s owed. But if you’re willing to exchange your fee for something else …”

  “Insurance?” Hank suggested.

  Frank shook his big, tired head. “Prime would tell them to take a hike! It’s the movie business. Getting paid’s the first thing any of them would want.”

  “But if you won’t get paid anyway?” she persisted. “If they say you take this deal or the whole thing collapses? And everything with it? The merchandise cut, the residuals from the TV and DVD rights, the cosy promotional tour around the world? If there’s no movie, Allan Prime loses a lot more than his fee. He loses everything that might come after.”

  Frank still wasn’t happy. “I still don’t see how someone like Jimmy would get mixed up in something like that. What the hell would he know about the movie business?”

  Barkev came in with some more coffee. Teresa gulped hers down quickly.

  “They weren’t dealing with the movie business,” she said resolutely after Barkev left the room.

  The two brothers watched her and didn’t utter a word.

  “The movie people were dealing with Lukatmi. Don’t you see? We’ve been asking the wrong question all along. When Roberto Tonti needed real money, he went to the mob. They stumped up enough to keep the production alive, barely, but it still couldn’t be finished. We’re pretty sure of that. Dino Bonetti has been taking finance from criminals for years. You don’t need to be a genius to understand they’ll certainly be expecting their return. Lukatmi was different. They came in later, when Tonti saw the whole project collapsing. Everyone’s turned him down. He’s desperate. And Lukatmi turn up offering …”

  What? It was clear there was precious little money behind the doors of their hangars at Fort Mason by that stage. Josh Jonah and Tom Black hadn’t bailed out Inferno. They didn’t have the cash.

  Frank — practical, logical, rational Frank — got there first, naturally.

  “I know what I’d do. I’d go quietly to all the people I owe money, not just the big guys like Allan Prime. I’d say, skip your salary and we’ll give you something else. Something that might be worth a whole lot more than some risky horror flick if you play along.”

  She wanted to pinch herself. It was so obvious.

  “This wasn’t about investing in a movie,” Teresa said. “It was about cutting your losses. About keeping Inferno alive and getting a chunk of the next big dotcom float coming round the corner. One that could make you richer than you could ever dream of, even in Hollywood. Josh Jonah and Tom Black were paper billionaires. Allan Prime couldn’t even contemplate money like that, and he was a huge movie star. So you put together a secret little scheme to hype Inferno to the heavens and make Lukatmi even more lucrative at the same time.”

  Frank was scribbling down some notes. “Whatever paperwork’s involved is squirreled away in one of these funny-money places in the Caribbean,” he said. “A limited number of members with the payout based on status. Obviously it can’t be equal. Allan Prime’s going to expect a whole lot more than poor little Jimmy Gaines, that’s for sure. Martin Vogel thought his efforts merited a bigger cut and started blackmailing Josh Jonah. But it’s still a fund. A secret one. It has to be. You can’t invite in more members, or you go to jail. You get it?”

  Not quite yet, she thought.

  “It’s a tontine by default as much as by design,” Frank explained. “When the numbers start to fall because people are dying, where else can the money go except to the original members? Tonti could have sold the whole thing to these people without saying the word ‘tontine’ once. It was exactly what he said it was. What Jimmy got told. Insurance.”

  Hank put down his coffee cup. He had a sour expression on his face. “This world sickens me. All these people screwing one another. Jonah and Black thinking they were robbing the movie crowd so’s they could keep their tin-pot company afloat. The movie people kidding themselves they’d all get rich on some dumb kids’ dotcom dream. Yuck …”

  He looked at the door and yelled, “Barkev! I need a beer!”

  The dark face appeared. “Hank,” the man said, “this is a café. If you want a beer, go find a bar.”

  “That I shall. Someone going to join me?”

  Teresa stared at him in astonishment. “We are about to get some insight into this case, fin
ally, and you want to go to a bar?”

  “You can think of a better time? What’s there left to talk about? Half these people are dead. Josh and Tom and Jimmy. That photographer. Allan Prime. Anyone else who’s involved … why would they do anything now? What for? The money’s gone. Lukatmi’s worthless. Their grubby little deal won’t get them a penny. That’s as much justice as any of us can expect.”

  She caught his arm. “You’re missing the point. This is offshore. It can’t be part of Lukatmi anymore, otherwise they’d be able to find it. From what Catherine Bianchi told me, even the federal people think they’ll never trace where the company’s assets really ended up.” She needed to get this clear in her own head, too. “That part of things is not dead. It’s very much alive, out there somewhere. Just reversed. Lukatmi’s the turkey and Inferno’s the golden goose. One that’s in the names of a diminishing group of people, who, between them, now own a chunk of the biggest movie in decades.”

  “Do the math,” Frank suggested. “Say there’s four of them still alive. One dies. Your share just went from …” He paused to do the sums in his head. “Twenty-five percent to thirty-three.”

  “Two left and you just doubled your money,” Teresa added, pulling out her phone. “Winner takes all. It’s worth killing for now more than it ever was.”

  5

  The call came through as Kelly was driving him through the foot of the Presidio. Costa got dropped off on Chestnut and met Teresa and the Boynton brothers in a tiny café he’d never even noticed before. Outside the grubby windows the light was changing. Fog was reaching the city, bringing with it a filmy haze that dimmed the bright blue sky.