Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  The near twin leaned forward on one elbow. “We've never had different environments. We were born around the corner on Beach Street sixty-one years ago. We've lived there all our lives. Before we retired…” He nodded across the road and added, though this was no surprise, “…we worked there, keeping every engine that came through that place spicker and spanner than any of those indolent young bloods know how to today.”

  Two large, identical hairy hands, one right, one left, extended her way, and their joint, booming voices announced in unison, “Hankenfrank.”

  Teresa blinked and asked, “Do you run to first names?”

  They sighed. Then the one with left-turning curls said, “I'm Hank Boynton.” And the other added, “In case you hadn't worked this out, I'm Frank.”

  “Oh…Teresa Lupo.”

  Their grips were warm and soft and, though mirrored, very much the same.

  “When did you retire?” she asked. “From over there?”

  “It's been thirty-three weeks, two days and…” Frank looked at his watch. “A few hundred minutes. That poor damned engine hasn't been properly cleaned since.”

  “And so we pass the time,” Hank declared with a flourish of his arm. “We read. We think. We talk with intriguing and exotic strangers in cafés. About DNA and… epigenetic modification.”

  “Do you read the same books?” she asked out of curiosity.

  They erupted in spontaneous, deafening laughter. When it had subsided and they'd wiped away the tears, still saying nothing, she persisted.

  “Well?”

  Hank flourished his hand and declared, “My specialty subjects are the history of this rich and wonderful city during and immediately after the gold rush in 1849—”

  “He stole it all from Herbert Asbury,” Frank cut in. “Blood-and-guts nonsense…”

  “—as well as the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, notably Hokusai, and, in literature, anything by or related to Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Note the recurrent theme,” Frank suggested. “Lowbrow posing as high. My…things are bebop, Edgar Allan Poe, the Impressionists, and American film noir from the 1940s on. These are lists in summary, you understand. The full catalogue is much more horrendous, on both our parts. We won't even breathe a word about philately.”

  “As I'd expect,” she declared, pleased with herself. “You choose opposites.”

  Hank gave her a humbling look and said, “Not really. It just gives us something different to talk about at night. There isn't a smart explanation for everything, you know. Some things just are.”

  “Good point. I forget that sometimes.”

  “So what do you want to know?” Hank asked. “A little bloodcurdling local history? Where to go to hear music, not Muzak? Two crumpled old men's advice on the last yuppie-free place to get a cold beer in the Marina?”

  The question made her feel pathetic. She had no good answer. The ticket to San Francisco had cost a fortune. It was bought on a whim without a thought as to why she had to come. The four of them worked together as a team now, or at least they had since Nic had arrived. She hated feeling excluded.

  “What I'd really like to know,” she murmured, half to herself, “is where I can find Carlotta Valdes.”

  Hank and Frank looked at one another briefly. Then Frank tapped his forefinger on his watch and declared, “If you've got ten minutes…”

  “…we can show you,” Hank added.

  THE LOCATION FOR THE INFERNO EXHIBITION had proved to be a visual delight so unexpected that, when he first saw it, Costa felt he ought to rub his eyes to make sure it was real. The Palace of Fine Arts was a purpose-built semi-ruin set by an artificial lake with fountains and swans. It was set a short distance inland from the beachfront that led to Fort Mason, home to Lukatmi, on one side, and on the other, after a long and pleasant walk by the ocean, to the Golden Gate Bridge. The exhibition was slowly being assembled during the day in a series of peaked Arabic tents which had been erected around the central construction, a high, dome-roofed rotunda open to the elements. The tents stretched in a curving line through the trees along the lakefront to a group of Romanesque colonnades on the northern side, close to a children's museum housed in a set of unremarkable low square blocks.

  For days the area had been overrun with workmen, security guards, uniformed police officers, and members of the Inferno cast and crew inspecting the temporary theatre, in the largest tent of all, that would be used for the movie's premiere. For Costa, the event had the feel of a travelling circus. The collection of rare objects—documents, letters, the manuscript from India, and, arranged in haste, an authentic replica of the original death mask—was arriving in San Francisco crate by crate. The mandate for Falcone's team was clear and limited: monitor the security arrangements before the opening to ensure they were satisfactory. Then, when the exhibition became public after the premiere, to hand over all responsibility entirely to the Americans and return to Rome. No one mentioned the missing death mask of Dante. The assumption was that this had now entered the global black market for stolen art and was probably long gone.

  Costa had soon grown tired of checking the security system set up by the American organisers. So he took the time to wander through the tents and the teams of individuals milling around delivery vans and crates, building the stage for the premiere, trying out lights and projection systems, playing with shiny and seemingly very expensive toys he could not begin to comprehend. He also, at Peroni's bidding, spent some time with the publicist, Simon Harvey. The man's purview appeared to run far beyond dealing with the media. Harvey had taken a keen interest in every aspect of the security arrangements, insisting that if another item went missing, or there was a second violent incident affecting the crew, it would be his job to deal with the fallout. It was Harvey's opinion that the replacement death mask would prove one of the most popular items in the show, for its macabre connotations. The man had even suggested that what the public really wanted to see was the actual death mask of Allan Prime, now sitting in the Carabinieri's labs in Rome.

  Costa had listened to the American and said nothing. It seemed a cruel thing to think, let alone say. Yet he had to acknowledge that the idea contained some truth. Actors of the stature of Prime—and the beauty of Maggie Flavier—were no longer fully in control of their own lives, or deaths. In return for fame and wealth, they surrendered their identities to the masses, who would dissect, reshape, and play with them as they saw fit. Celebrity came at a terrible price, he felt, one that was made acceptable to those it affected only through their own ability to pretend they were unable to see its costs.

  Costa was, however, sanguine about the security arrangements. The only way the original death mask could have been switched for the fake severed head of Prime was by someone on the inside, probably within the two hundred or more individuals who worked for the exhibition companies, the caterers, the crew, and the various arms of the production company: publicity, accounts, still and movie photographers, makeup artists, and a variety of hangers-on who appeared to fulfill no particular function at all. These people seemed even more numerous in San Francisco. But the items on show were to be heavily guarded and under constant CCTV surveillance.

  It was difficult to see what more could be done. If some improvements were advisable, Costa felt sure that he would be the last person who could bring them about. An expensive private security company had been brought in to deal with the handling of the exhibits from the moment they arrived by truck, and to provide personal security for key members of cast and crew. Catherine Bianchi's dwindling band of officers from the Greenwich Street Police Station was being sidelined, too. Only one, a sullen young man named Miller, with bright blond hair and a curt, sharp tongue, remained at the Palace, and he seemed to take little interest in proceedings. Like the Italians of the state police, the local cops were spectators, ghosts walking in the shadows of the men of the Carabinieri and Bryant Street.

  This he found deeply vexing.
After checking the arrangements once more, he spent a pleasant few minutes peering at a rare Venetian incunabulum of the Comedy.

  “Incunabulum,” Miller grunted. “Sounds like witchcraft.”

  “You're thinking of ‘incubus,'” Costa replied. “Incunabula are just very early printed books. Before 1501.”

  “So why don't they call them ‘very early printed books'?” the young cop shot back.

  “For the same reason people call this the Palace of Fine Arts, even though it's a pointless folly made out of plaster and chicken wire. It makes life more interesting.”

  “You clearly don't have to deal with the kind of shit we do if you've got nothing better to do than learn stuff like that.”

  “I didn't know until now,” Costa replied, indicating the exhibit case. “I just read the label. The same goes for the chicken wire. It's all there if you take the time to look.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “No worry,” Costa said pleasantly. “Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you something that's sitting right beneath your nose. It happens to us all. If you ever visit Italy, come and see me. You can return the favour.”

  It had happened in Rome, with Emily, experiencing the city through different eyes. Perspective was good, as a cop—and as a human being.

  He walked outside to see Simon Harvey, Dino Bonetti, and Roberto Tonti engaged in a huddled conversation beneath the dome of the rotunda. Costa went over, watched as they became silent, noting his approach.

  “Something you need, Officer?” Harvey asked.

  “Introductions. I've seen these two gentlemen in Rome and now here. We've never met.” He extended his hand. Tonti simply stared at it. “Soverintendente Costa,” he added. “If there is ever anything…”

  “Such as?” Tonti asked.

  “I don't know. You tell me.”

  Close up, the director looked even more grey and sick. He sighed. “What matters lies with Quattrocchi and Kelly. These security guards who are eating into what's left of our promotion budget take care of the day-to-day work. Everything else is irrelevant. Including the state police of Rome.”

  “Yet you have the SFPD outside your own house, sir,” Costa remarked, nodding at the three-storey white mansion, with gold crests and handsome bowed windows, across the street from the palace. “Not a private company.”

  “I am an exception,” Tonti replied, his expression hidden behind the dark sunglasses. “They regard me as a local celebrity, to be protected. Besides, who would want to end the life of an old man when nature is doing that for them?”

  “I'm sorry to hear of your illness,” Costa said.

  “Why? You don't know me.”

  “To have spent so long without directing anything. It must be…”

  The glasses came off and Costa fell silent. Two grey, watery eyes, physically weak yet full of some unspent intellectual power, stared at him.

  “Must be what?”

  “Frustrating.”

  “You know nothing about this industry, young man. It's the invisible people like me who make it work. Over the past twenty years I've written, produced, developed TV series…”

  “Is that why you came here? TV?”

  “I came here for freedom,” the old director snapped. “For money. For life. Compared to this, Rome is a village. Cinecittà is a peasant's pigsty compared to Hollywood. I would have made Inferno there if it weren't for…” Tonti stopped. His gaunt cheeks were bloodless. His breath seemed laboured.

  “For what?” Costa asked.

  Bonetti laughed and nudged the director with his elbow. “If it weren't for the money, Roberto. Hollywood didn't want to give it to you. Italy did. And your generous friends at Lukatmi. Tell the policeman the truth. More importantly, tell it to yourself.”

  “Dante was Italian. It could be made nowhere else.” Tonti rubbed his eyes, then returned the sunglasses to his face. “I could have made it here if I'd wanted.”

  Of course you could!' Bonetti declared. “Inferno is the kind of project Hollywood adores. The pinnacle of commercial art…”

  “Popular. Popular art,” Tonti screeched. “How many times do I have to say this?”

  “Popular,” the producer corrected himself. “Like me.”

  “Still, a hundred and fifty million dollars,” Costa wondered. “So much money to reclaim before any of your backers makes a penny profit. Even with all this… unwanted publicity. That's a mountain to climb. Isn't it?”

  Tonti waved him away with a feeble, bloodless hand. “My movie is made. Those who matter have been paid. The rest is meaningless.”

  “Money is best left to those of us who understand it,” Bonetti muttered, scowling. “Why are you wasting our time, Soverintendente? Do you have nothing better to do? No idea where to find this mask of yours?”

  “I—“

  “Perhaps one of your own stole it. Have you thought of that? Who had better opportunity? You're as rotten as the rest of us. Don't pretend otherwise. At least with us they get entertainment. And from you?”

  “Very little, sir. But at least we never promise any.” He looked Bonetti straight in the eye. “Adele Neri told me you invited some of her late husband's friends to dine in Allan Prime's apartment.”

  “What friends?” Bonetti snarled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Emilio Neri was a capo in Rome until he was murdered. I'm talking about criminal friends. Perhaps from the Mafia or the Camorra. Or the Russians or the Serbs. We live in international times. If you knew Neri's friends, then some might assume …”

  Harvey was coughing into his fist. Roberto Tonti, in his dark suit, behind his black sunglasses, was stiff and silent, like an arthritic crow waiting for something to happen.

  “I am a congenial man in a congenial business,” Bonetti said bluntly. “When you wish to raise money for a creative enterprise, you meet all kinds. Our little business is merely the world writ large. You should get out more, Costa. It might make you less of a pain in the ass.”

  Costa leaned forward and touched the director's thin, weak arm, and said, “Should you need any help…I know that breed of people better than you.”

  The man shrank back, murmuring a succession of bitter Roman curses, then finished—Costa was not quite sure he heard this—with the low, mumbled words, in Italian, “I doubt that.”

  It was enough. Costa walked to the mobile van set up by the caterers, thinking that even a poor cup of coffee that had been stewing in an urn for hours might help take away the taste of that encounter. Bonetti dealt with crooks. At least some of the money—perhaps a large part—that paid for the production of Inferno surely came from criminal sources. Roberto Tonti appeared not to care less whether they got their investment back, although he seemed to be aware that this nonchalance carried with it some risk. All useful intelligence… if they had been working on a murder case.

  Costa got a coffee, closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and took a swig. It was as disgusting as he expected.

  When he turned, she was there, smiling, bright-eyed in a white sweater and blue jeans, looking younger than ever.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  His mouth felt dry. His head was spinning. Maggie Flavier had become a different woman. Her hair was fuller, longer, and had lost its chestnut hue. It was no longer an expensive, straggly impersonation of an English page boy's. Through some process he could not begin to comprehend, it had become a pure golden shade of yellow, and had straightened into a serious, slightly old-fashioned cut falling down to her shoulders. She was changed. No, he corrected himself. She was transformed, almost into someone else altogether.

  What took his breath away were the memories, the connections. Maggie's hair vividly resembled that of Emily in the photograph in his wallet the actress had briefly seen in the Cinema dei Piccoli. The similarity both shocked and fascinated him. She didn't look like his late wife. Her eyes were a different colour, her neck more slender, her skin a subtle shade darker, and her face p
ossessed a more classical, timeless beauty. All the same…

  “I hate it,” Maggie said, reading his mind. “But I have no choice. I'm testing for some new part. Some 1950s mystery. I'm a waitress in a diner.”

  “You look beautiful,” he said, without thinking.

  She blushed, and seemed even younger. “Please…”

  “No,” he said, laughing, shaking his head. “I'm sorry. It was just such a… surprise. How do you do this? Where does it come from?”

  “Fake,” she replied, and put one hand up to her long, soft locks, then tugged out a length with her fingers. “Everything's fake that's not flesh and blood, and there may come a time when I can't even say that.”

  The familiarity between them was strange, and had been from the start. It was as if there had never been a point of introduction, a border that was crossed between their being strangers and their being… friends.

  “Now look what you've made me do,” she complained, holding up the hank of golden hair. “I can't put it back myself. Nic?”

  She turned. He found himself staring at the back of her neck, which bore the lightest olive tan, so dissimilar to the pale northern skin of Emily. They weren't alike. Apart from the single physical resemblance, and the same directness and utter lack of self-consciousness.

  He took the bunch of hair and found some way to pin it back in place. His hands shook.

  She noticed but didn't mention it.

  “I can show you,” Maggie said, turning to face him.

  “Show me what?”

  “Where it comes from. If you like.” She moved closer and whispered, “If we can shake off the goons. I want to get away from this place. I need to. I feel like a dummy in a shop window. Please…”

  She turned to the man working behind the counter of the catering van and asked, “Do you have any fruit?”