by David Hewson
“If it’s a problem … forget it. They went to a lot of trouble to get this dress. They said it was important. But if they screwed up …” He shrugged.
“What am I supposed to be doing?”
“My name’s John,” he said, smiling pleasantly, and holding out his hand. “John Ferguson.”
She shook it. He had the strong grip of a workman.
“What am I doing today, Mr. Ferguson?”
“Marina Festival of Fifties Noir. Sponsored by the local organic supermarket, a bank branch, and an arts foundation. Opened by Miss Maggie Flavier. Fifteen minutes in public, a couple of smiles, and you’re done.” He peered at her. “You do know the Marina Odeon, don’t you?”
“Sorry. Movies are work, not leisure. Also, I never quite hit the Marina scene. It’s a ways from here.”
“Ah …”
“Noir?” she asked.
“We open with Touch of Evil and close with The Asphalt Jungle. Talk about doing things backwards, but I just fetch and carry. Programming’s someone else’s job.”
He put down the large cardboard dress box and extracted a slip of paper from his jeans pocket.
“According to my schedule you cut the ribbon for the opening at one-thirty, then we show the Welles film at two. You don’t need to stay after that, if you don’t want to. We have one reporter and one TV crew. No one else will be allowed inside. We got the message from your agent about not wanting too much press there.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “And if we get there quick, no one’s going to be outside either. The festival people would like to get a few words from you first for some DVD they’re putting together. Just a few questions …”
He nodded at the box. “It’s all for charity, you know. Gorgeous dress. I got the limo around the corner.”
“Why do I have to wear the dress?”
“Came from some society lady in Russian Hill. Of the period, or so they say.” He sighed and shrugged again. “I’m just the messenger here. I’m sorry. After all this awful stuff I read about in the papers, I understand if you don’t feel up to it. If you want to cancel, just say so. I can tell them … It’s no problem.”
“No, no …” Maggie hated letting her fans down. It seemed so selfish, given the money and acclaim she got in return for what, in truth, was a small amount of talent and a lot of luck.
She opened the box, took out the garment, and found herself wondering for a moment whether to believe what she had in her hands. The dress was a long, voluminous silk evening gown, low cut, the kind of thing glamorous women wore in old movies. It was a dark, incandescent green. The same green as the one in Vertigo. It was so beautiful she could scarcely take her eyes off it.
“What is this?”
“They said it’s a copy of one Janet Leigh wears in Touch of Evil.”
That was a film she did remember. The sight of Orson Welles’s fat, sweating face looming out of the Mexican darkness was hard to forget.
“I thought that was made in black-and-white.”
“Well, I guess the movie was. Not the clothes. What do I know? Don’t shoot the messenger, remember?”
She hesitated. The death of Simon Harvey and the dark succession of events that preceded it had exhausted her. She felt tired and uncertain about the trip to Barbados. Uncertain, too, about what might come afterwards …
She remembered Scottie’s nightmare from the movie, of falling into a deep, shapeless abyss. Vertigo. It wasn’t just fear of heights. Vertigo was fear of the unknown, too.
“We need to go, Miss Flavier,” the man insisted, gently. “If you want to. The limo can’t wait forever.”
One last appearance, and then some space. Some time to think about who she really was, what she really wanted …
“Do you want me to put it on now?” she asked, looking at the dress in her hands.
“Nah. There’s a dressing room at the theatre.”
He carried the box carefully in his arms, following her all the way down to the parking lot.
“We’re just around the corner,” he said, beckoning her to the back of her apartment block.
They turned a corner and she saw the car.
The green Jaguar gleamed in the half shade, sleek and old and full of memories. She remembered the smell of the leather and the drive with Nic up into the heights beyond the Legion of Honor.
“What the hell is going on here?” she started to say, swinging around to look at the driver.
The sunglasses were back on. He’d dropped the big cardboard box. He was grinning at her. There was no one near, not a window overlooking this place.
He was getting something out of his pocket.
“It’s the final act,” the man who called himself John Ferguson said. Suddenly he was on her, strong arms around her neck, a hand pushing some cloth that stank of damp, corrosive chemical into her face.
She tried to struggle. Then she tried to breathe. Her arms flailed wildly, to no purpose. She could hear him laughing.
As she started to fall, she could just make out the sun, bright and wild in a pure blue Californian sky. The world started to turn dark. For one short moment the sun glittered high above her. Then the cloth came down once more. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. He held the thing over her mouth, choking her until she submitted and fell into the dark.
4
Once inside the house, Costa wasted fifteen seconds fumbling for a light switch, then he threw open the curtains on the long flat panes that covered the corner of the room abutting Lombard and Jones, revealing a view that, through ancient venetian blinds, took him back to Maggie Flavier’s apartment, watching Vertigo for the second time in a matter of days, both of them feeling the past tapping on their shoulders like some hungry ghost.
This wasn’t just the same building. It was the very room they’d seen in the movie, with its beautiful hillside vista out to Coit Tower and the ocean. The furniture had been carefully selected from the same era: a pale fabric sofa, long, low chairs of 1950s design. Even a small TV set with manual rotating dials and switches and a bulging, pop-eyed screen. An old-movie channel was playing on it: something black-and-white, the sound turned down as if the room needed to be inhabited by the cinema even when no one was present. It was a sanctuary, a kind of temple, and it was instantly obvious what was being worshipped here.
The walls were plastered with movie posters from floor to ceiling. All from the fifties to seventies. American, English, Italian …
Teresa went round them methodically, finger on the old paper, checking the names.
“Roberto Tonti worked on every one of these,” she murmured. “Whoever this man is, he knows his stuff. Tonti doesn’t even get a credit on the Vertigo poster, but it’s up there along with all the Italian horror flicks he directed. We have a fan here. The fan.”
“Rome.” Falcone was busily rooting through documents on the antique desk next to the TV. “He went there one week before Prime died and returned home the day after. Just like Martin Vogel and Jimmy Gaines. Look — plane tickets in the name of Michael Fitzwilliam, the bill for a hotel near Termini, cards for restaurants and bars. A receipt for a pair of sunglasses from Salvatore Ferragamo in the Via Condotti.” His grey eyebrows furrowed in bafflement. “Ferragamo don’t make men’s sunglasses, surely …”
“So we’ve found one more member of the tontine?” Catherine Bianchi asked.
“It would appear so. Ferragamo …”
“You’re right. They don’t make men’s sunglasses.” Peroni emerged from a spacious walk-in closet with something held almost tenderly across both outstretched arms. It was a set of women’s clothing fresh back from the cleaners, pressed and spotless inside plastic wrapping. A grey jacket with matching slacks. The same clothes they’d seen worn by the woman who handed a bouquet of flowers, with a gun inside, to Roberto Tonti on the stage by the Palace of Fine Arts. The same clothes apparently worn by the mysterious Carlotta Valdes when she appeared at the apartment of Allan Prime in the Via Giulia.
“He keeps his ladies’ things in the same cupboard as his men’s stuff. There’s makeup and a mirror. This is a bachelor apartment with a difference. Also, there’s this …”
He held up a photo of a man in hunting gear, his booted foot propped on a dead deer.
“When he’s not wearing lipstick, he likes to go shooting. There’s a locked firearms cabinet next door that could house a couple of rifles.”
“OK,” Catherine Bianchi said. “Now I am calling Kelly.”
From the bottom drawer of the desk, Falcone retrieved what appeared to be a plastic garbage bag wrapped with duct tape. He picked up a pair of scissors and cut the fastenings. From within he pulled out something swathed in white tissue paper.
As they watched, he unwrapped the death mask of Dante Alighieri.
The mask seemed very old and fragile, brilliantly lit by the bright Californian sunlight, a place Dante could never have guessed existed. Costa looked at the closed eyes, the face in peace after so much pain, the long, bent nose, the thin-lipped, intelligent mouth, and knew in an instant that it was genuine.
“This is our case, too,” Falcone said with obvious satisfaction. “Call Kelly. Tell him we need an immediate check to find out this individual’s real identity, and a discreet distribution of his description.”
He gave her the kind of look he gave policewomen in Rome, one she hadn’t seen before.
“I do not want to see this in the media. Not even on a police station wall. If this man can change identities so easily and convincingly, he’ll be gone the moment he hears.”
“Yes, sir …” she said caustically. “Anything else?”
Falcone ignored her. Teresa Lupo had returned from the kitchen.
“We need forensic,” she said. “ ‘Scottie’ may be finicky about his fancy clothes but his work gear is stuffed into one big pile in a basket just like any other bachelor slob.” She looked at them. “There are items in there with what I’d swear are bloodstains on them. And a pair of jeans that still smell of petrol. Martin Vogel’s apartment. There’s a lot here, Catherine …”
“OK, OK, OK. I’ll call …”
But she still didn’t. She looked at them.
“Who the hell is this nut? And how does he fit into the tontine?”
Costa walked over to look at the shelves in the corridor. There seemed nothing unusual among the collection of personal belongings. Souvenirs, from Mexico and Italy, some small pieces of pottery, a few photographs in cheap plastic frames. Everything was so ordinary. If you took away the posters and the incriminating evidence, this would simply be the apartment of a wealthy bachelor with a penchant for 1950s style.
He moved closer and picked up one of the photographs. It showed a tall, erect figure with a full head of dark hair, standing on the waterfront near Fort Point, beneath the grand span of the Golden Gate Bridge, squinting into the sun. He had his arm around a tall, spindly boy of perhaps ten or eleven. Neither was smiling. The man was a younger Roberto Tonti. The boy wore faded shorts, a cheap T-shirt. His hair needed cutting, his face was frozen in an expression of fear and anger.
There was a hook on the back of the frame. He unlocked it and took out the print. It was sufficiently recent to have a printed date still faintly visible on the rear: 8-24-87. Scribbled in thick, grey pencil, an adult hand had written a line Costa recognised …
Said the good Master: “Son, thou now beholdest
The souls of those whom anger overcame.”
The Inferno … “Does Roberto Tonti have children?” he asked Teresa.
“Only married once. Without issue, as they say.”
“That we know of, anyway,” Peroni said, studying the photo. “That’s a man and his son. Take it from me. They don’t see each other much. They don’t like each other much. But the same blood’s there and they both know it. You can see it in their faces.”
Costa thought he could make out some slight physical resemblance in the two narrow, lost faces.
“Scottie … Ferguson,” Peroni went on. “Whoever lives here is Roberto Tonti junior, living and working under another name just a mile or so from his father. He must be thirty or more by now.”
Catherine Bianchi was finally starting to punch the buttons on her phone. She looked up at them, excited, maybe a little anxious, too.
“Better not touch anything else, folks. I’ll be collecting unemployment if they realise I had this guy under my nose all along and never even noticed.”
Costa replaced the photograph. “No one would have noticed. That was the point. He was just one more extra in his father’s scheme.”
A player who, like the others, ceased to discern the line between what was real and what was invented. Everything in the apartment — the posters, the photos, the movies on the TV, the frantic scribbling on the walls — spoke of obsession. A compulsion that had prompted this man to take at least two false identities, one of them the name of Jimmy Stewart’s character in an old movie in which his father had been a minor technician, to buy an old green Jaguar and lend it to an actress in the hope of … what?
He thought of the mythical Scottie dogging Madeleine through the San Francisco of five decades before, peering at her compulsively through the windshield of his car as his curiosity turned to an irresistible desire, until the moment she fell in the ocean and then woke naked beneath the sheets in a scene meant to take place in the bedroom of this very apartment.
Some memory tweaked an anxious nerve. In Vertigo, Scottie had watched the sleeping, naked Madeleine avidly from the sofa in the living room, through an open door. The real door was closed.
Costa opened it and stepped over the threshold. The room was almost pitch black. Just the barest fringe of light seeped through what must have been a large window opposite, one blocked by heavy opaque blinds.
He found the switch and flipped it. In his astonishment he was scarcely aware that the others had followed and stood behind him, stunned, too, into silence.
This was the bedroom from the movie, copied with a precise and compulsive eye for detail. There was the same set of bureaus by the door, four small framed paintings on the facing wall, a plaid chair in red and white and brown.
And the bed. A double bed with a high walnut veneer foot. The sheets and pillows were as crumpled as they had been when Madeleine Elster was woken from beneath them by a phone call, puzzled, but not entirely ashamed of her nakedness after being rescued by Scottie from the Bay. In his own mind Costa half believed he could smell the ocean at that moment, rising from the creased linen.
But it was the walls that worried him. They were covered in photographs. Not of Kim Novak or anything else from Vertigo. It was Maggie Flavier, everywhere, so altered in some that he barely recognised her until he found the courage to stare into the frozen eyes of the figure they depicted and see that same mixture of courage and fear and resignation he had recognised in her from the start.
Some were so old they must have predated her acting career. There was one in which she stood with a group of schoolgirls outside Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, not far from her home. Maggie was immediately recognisable even though she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Just another child among many, prettier, more striking than the rest, with a woman behind her, pale, sick-looking, a hand on her shoulder.
Costa turned away and forced himself to look at other photos. Maggie as a bright-faced girl on a farm, as a poverty-stricken teenager, as a rich young lady in an English mansion. And then the new images. The adult woman: her beauty strangely marred, as she moved through a series of roles that, seen in this cruel, linear fashion, in this gloomy private shrine, only underscored her fall from the innocence of childhood into a fragile, haunted maturity. No longer smiling, but looking now into the camera with a hatred that was sometimes pure and vitriolic, her face stared back at them from the walls. And her body, too, in some of the more lurid shots, blown up to display every open pore, every inch of her skin, its minor imperfections, the faint, discernible penumbra of
blonde hair rising above a posed, bare arm.
There was scarcely an inch of the room that wasn’t covered with her presence in one way or another. The photographs spanned, as far as he could make out, almost two decades, from child to woman. Costa couldn’t take it anymore. He turned away, trying to grasp the memory that lay just out of reach.
When he tried to call her, there was no answer. He phoned Sylvie Brewster, her agent.
“It’s Nic,” he said urgently. “Where’s Maggie’s appointment today? I need to know.”
“You mean you didn’t think to ask over breakfast?”
“Please …” he begged.
The woman put him on hold for a moment, then came back and told him. Costa knew already somehow, and what he’d do. There could be no more police standoffs. Because of the police, the actor Peter Jamieson had died outside the Cinema dei Piccoli. So, in a way he still didn’t fully understand, had Tom Black.
The rest were still in the bedroom. He could hear their quiet, low voices, Falcone’s more prominent, more commanding.
Kelly’s team from Bryant Street couldn’t be more than a few minutes away.
Without saying a word Costa walked over to the desk, found Catherine Bianchi’s bag, and took the keys to her Dodge. Quickly, silently, he walked through the open door and down the stairs.
The sun was brighter than ever. The builder was back at work. Costa slid into the driver’s seat and worked the unfamiliar automatic vehicle out into the road. As the minivan wound round the side streets back to Chestnut and the long straight drive to the Marina, his hand reached over into the passenger side, found the glove compartment, flicked it open, and fumbled inside.
Gerald Kelly’s gun was still there.
5
She woke beneath the wrinkled sheets of an uncomfortable old double bed pushed hard against the corner of a cramped office that smelled of damp and sweat. As she tried to clear the fumes of the drug from her nose and throat, choking and nauseated, Maggie Flavier felt at her own body automatically, fingers trembling, mind reeling. She ached. She felt … strange.
