Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  He felt happy. Lucky, too. And like her, he scarcely took any notice of the overblown cinematic fiction that had brought them there. Costa's thoughts turned, instead, to the events of the past few weeks, and the growing conviction that the roots of this genuine drama lay, somehow, in the fairy tales these people created for themselves.

  The conspiracy had sprouted from the ability of men like Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti to invent some fantastical story out of dust. Costa still failed to understand how that trick had come to shift from a desperate marketing ploy into a murderous actuality, but the seeds were there from the outset in the way those involved danced between one world, that of everyday life, and another in which fiction posed as fact.

  Maggie was an unwitting part of that fabrication. In ways he didn't wish to understand, it had damaged her.

  This dark, unsettling thought dogged him as the movie finally came to an end. Costa was about to nudge her gently awake as the lights came up. There was no need. Her head was off his shoulder even before the waves of applause began to ripple around the audience.

  By the time Roberto Tonti was striding onto the stage with Simon Harvey by his side, most of the audience was on its feet. In the way of things, Costa found himself following suit. Maggie rose next to him. He leaned down and asked her when the cast would join Tonti on the platform.

  She had to cup her hand to his ear to make herself heard over the din. “This is Roberto's moment. We were all told that. He's the director. We're just his puppets, remember?”

  It still seemed unfair, Costa thought, half listening to Harvey run through a fulsome tribute to Allan Prime, followed by a lengthy homily about Tonti's determination to see the project completed. The years of struggle, the script revisions, the financial difficulties, the threats, the tragic events of recent weeks. Above all, said Harvey, the fight for artistic and creative control, without which the movie in its present form could never have been conceived, least of all made.

  It was florid hyperbole delivered with a straight face. Within the space of the next thirty minutes, either Harvey would be making a statement to the SFPD incriminating Tonti in the conspiracy that had brought about at least four deaths, or Falcone would be handing over the audio evidence to justify his arrest and interrogation on those same charges. One way or another the riddle would be brought to some kind of resolution.

  Then Harvey stepped back. Awkwardly, with a pained, sick gait, which a cynical part of Costa's mind felt might be faintly theatrical, Tonti shuffled to the microphone. He stood there alone, listening, only half-smiling, to the wall of clapping hands, catcalls, and whistles of the crowd.

  It was tedious and artificial. Costa was becoming impatient, wishing for an end to this show. As he fought to stifle a yawn, something caught his attention.

  A woman was walking towards Roberto Tonti from the far side of the stage. In her hands she held a gigantic bouquet of roses, carnations, and bright, vivid orchids.

  Costa blinked, trying to convince himself this was not some flashback out of a dream, or a night in front of the TV in the house on Greenwich Street.

  She was of medium height and wore a severe grey jacket with matching slacks and a white shirt high up to her neck. Her build was full, almost stocky; her hair was perfect, dyed platinum blonde, unyielding, as if held by the strongest lacquer imaginable. As she turned to present the flowers to Tonti, Costa could see that the wig—it could be nothing else—was tied back into a tight, shining apostrophe above the somewhat thick form of her neck.

  In spite of the weather she wore a pair of black plastic Italian sunglasses, so large they effectively obscured her features. Yet Costa knew her. She was the character from Vertigo. Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster. Or rather a fake Madeleine who posed as the doomed wife Jimmy Stewart's Scottie came to love and hoped to save.

  It also occurred to him that she matched exactly the description of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes who had visited Allan Prime in the Via Giulia, ostensibly to create a death mask.

  He found himself fighting to get through the cordon around the stage. Maggie gasped as he clawed his way forward.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Stay where you are. Don't go near the stage.”

  He pressed forward and the large hand of a security guard shoved him hard in the chest. Costa fell backwards. He stumbled and found himself guided by Maggie back into a seat.

  “Nic,” she said, exasperated, “you can't go up there. Roberto owns that stage. No one's going to take it from him. Those bouncers wouldn't let God himself through unless He had a pass.”

  The crowd was still on its feet, whooping and cheering.

  “There's something wrong,” he muttered, and dragged out his Rome police ID.

  She gazed at the plastic card in his fingers and said, “Well, that's going to work, isn't it? For pity's sake, what's the matter?”

  He struggled to his feet and wondered, for a moment, whether he was going mad. The woman was gone. Roberto Tonti stood on the stage, with Simon Harvey a few feet behind him. The ailing director held the gigantic bouquet and waved and nodded to the joyful, over-the-top roar of the crowd.

  “Five minutes of this,” Maggie whispered into his ear, “and we're out of here. I promise.”

  He prayed more than anything she would be proved right.

  The tall, gaunt figure on the stage mouthed something into the microphone. Costa knew what it was. A single word in Italian, an exhortation, a command.

  Silenzio.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, IN A LAND FAR AWAY …” Roberto Tonti began.

  He clutched the bouquet to his emaciated chest, then he removed his sunglasses and tried to squint at the audience beyond the blazing floodlights.

  “You come to me for stories.” The old man's voice sounded distant and hollow and sick. “Children begging for gifts. Did you get them?” The noise of the audience diminished slightly. Tonti waited. He took hold of the microphone and, in his hoarse, weak voice, tried his best to bellow, “Did you get them?”

  The strained sound of his words, the accent half American, half Italian, carried into the night with a deafening clarity. The space inside the tent turned abruptly silent.

  “Did you appreciate the cost?” he croaked. “Allan Prime. A wretched actor. A weak man. Nothing to be missed. He died. Why not? Where's the loss?” He spat out his words. “See what I must work with? See how I make something precious out of clay? What do you want of me? What else do you expect?”

  Maggie murmured in Nic's ear, “I can't take this anymore…”

  She slipped away from him, and still he couldn't tear his eyes from the stage.

  Simon Harvey stepped towards the director. Tonti stopped him with a single magisterial glance.

  A low murmur of disquiet and astonishment began to rise up from the crowd.

  Tonti reached into the bouquet of flowers and withdrew something that stilled every voice in the room. A small black handgun emerged from the orchids and the bloodred roses. He cast away the bouquet, held the weapon high for the benefit of the camera rigs hovering over the stage, wandering around him like robotic eyes, fixated on a single subject.

  “Watch me,” he said to the giant, peering lenses. “Focus, always, always.”

  Costa scanned around the crowd. Gerald Kelly was at the edge of the platform with a group of uniformed officers, holding them back for the moment.

  Tonti's skinny, weak arms waved, as if beseeching them for something, some kind of understanding.

  “Listen to me. Listen! This once I tell you the truth. Some impertinent hack once asked Fellini…” The tip of the black barrel caressed his cheek, like a thoughtful finger. “ ‘Che cosa fai?' What do you do?”

  “Enough, Roberto…” Harvey said, and took another step closer. The gun drifted his way. The publicist froze.

  “Fellini answers… ‘Sono un gran bugiardo.' I am a big liar. Pinocchio writ large. See my nose! See my nose!”

  Tonti was clutching h
is own face, laughing, and the movement brought about a spasmodic cough that briefly gripped his frail frame.

  “Fellini, Hitchcock, Rossellini…Tonti, too. This is what you demand of our calling. That we are liars, all, and the more distance we put between your dreams and the miserable mundanity of your sad little lives, the better we lie, the happier you are.”

  The man's voice was cracking with emotion, and it was impossible to say whether it was anger or grief or some deep-rooted sense of fear.

  “Mea culpa. Mea culpa.”

  His hands fell to his sides, and he bowed low before the audience.

  “I am the director. All you have seen of late, on screen and off, is my creation. From Allan Prime dead in the Farnesina to some pretty little clotheshorse choking for life from a poisoned apple. This is my doing, my direction. Listen to me now…”

  He coughed again, and it was raw and dry and rasping.

  “No man gets a better final scene than this. Better than any I gave any of these two-bit hacks. See…”

  He indicated the cameras, following his every moment. “See! This is the last of Roberto Tonti. Greater than any of you. Any of them.”

  Kelly had nodded to his men. They were starting to make their way onto the stage. Tonti knew what was coming, surely.

  “Not Dante Alighieri, though,” the old man added. “Listen to me, children. Listen to the final words of Inferno, that I never gave you on the screen, for they are beyond your comprehension.”

  He drew himself up, closed his eyes, and began to recite, slowly, in a sonorous, theatrical tone.

  “The Guide and I into that hidden road

  Now entered, to return to the bright world;

  And without care of having any rest

  We mounted up, he first and I the second,

  Till I beheld through a round aperture

  Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

  Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

  Roberto Tonti paused and gazed at the rapt, still, silent crowd in front of him.

  He was shaking with laughter, and his eyes, now open and dark and alert, glistened with moisture as they fixed on the camera lenses ravenously following his every move.

  “‘Through a round aperture… to rebehold the stars,'” Roberto Tonti repeated, and swept his arm along the rows of glitterati and celebrities before him. “Such as they are.”

  Simon Harvey was getting closer, hands out, pleading for the gun.

  “Yet,” Tonti continued, “each and every story deserves a twist, some small epiphany at its close.”

  Without warning he swung to face Harvey. The publicist froze, looked at the director, and asked, “Roberto?”

  “Traitor.”

  The word, the final key in the ninth circle, the last of Dante's Numbers, came out in a flat, unemotional tone.

  He began to fire, repeatedly, deliberately, into the torso of the flailing, tumbling publicist.

  A woman screamed behind Costa.

  When the gun clicked on empty, Roberto Tonti stopped and took one last disgusted glance at the shattered body on the stage.

  Then, seizing the microphone, he gazed up at the cameras.

  In a calm, disinterested voice, he ordered, “And…cut.”

  IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING. THE WEATHER WAS warmer. August beckoned. Costa woke in Maggie Flavier's apartment, then drove to Greenwich Street to help the rest of them pack. Their flight home would be late that afternoon. He would travel to Barbados the following Monday. There were still some private business events on Maggie's calendar. The job never seemed to disappear completely. Simon Harvey's death continued to stand between them like some unspoken obstacle. Perhaps time would deal with that, time and a move to a different place, one with no connections, no memories. He was unsure.

  But at least the case appeared to be, if not closed, at least partly resolved, probably as much as it ever would be. Roberto Tonti had scarcely ceased speaking to Gerald Kelly and his team since he was taken into custody. The SFPD had passed on the details to Falcone, since Gianluca Quattrocchi had been recalled to Rome with his officers to face an internal inquiry. Quattrocchi's private approach on the night of the premiere was only one of the revelations the director was now minded to disclose. He had also confessed to being the originator of the tontine scheme to save the troubled movie in Rome, and to diverting Harvey's secret publicity scam about fictitious threats to the production into a real and murderous conspiracy. His motive, he said with no apparent shame, was purely selfish. Inferno was by no means a guaranteed success, even with Harvey's incessant hype. Something else was needed and, as Tonti knew this was the last movie he would ever make, he was prepared to go to any lengths in order to find it.

  He had named Josh Jonah, the photographer Martin Vogel, and the Lukatmi security guard Jimmy Gaines as the principals in the plot to murder Allan Prime. Vogel had arranged the poison for Maggie Flavier. Jonah had then approached the photographer after being blackmailed over his involvement in the plot. Tonti had promised them Prime would be the only victim. He had hoped that would be the case, and that the halfhearted attempt on Maggie Flavier's life, which he had not expected to be successful, would merely gain yet more publicity to keep the movie in the headlines. The deaths of Jonah and Vogel he regarded as accidental, if fortuitous. He claimed to have shot Tom Black—who had never understood the true nature of the scheme—himself, from a viewpoint near the Embarcadero, and then disposed of the weapon.

  Dino Bonetti's role remained unclear. The producer had disappeared the night of the premiere and was now the subject of arrest warrants for fraud and attempted murder. Tonti, however, steadfastly refused to discuss his involvement in the conspiracy, dismissing it as minor. The credit, as he saw it, was to be his.

  In spite of the man's age and frailty, he remained in custody, though Kelly was minded to waive any objections to bail provided Tonti surrendered his passport and reported to the police on a daily basis. The medical reports indicated that he had, at most, a few months to live, and would never face trial. There was no question, either, that the man would wish to flee to Italy, in spite of Gianluca Quattrocchi's promises. The truth, Kelly felt, was that Roberto Tonti had achieved what he wanted.

  The SFPD phone lines had burned with calls from TV networks and newspapers pleading with Tonti to go on air or give lengthy press interviews. From the major newspapers to the prime-time celebrity shows, he was, suddenly, in demand. This, it seemed, was worth a succession of lives, none of which the dying man deemed of any great value. Only his own reputation, his legacy, mattered, and by force of circumstance, that would always be tied to a single movie, Roberto Tonti's Inferno.

  Hank and Frank Boynton had been round for breakfast when Falcone returned from Bryant Street to brief them on what he'd heard from Gerald Kelly. All of them at the table—the Boyntons, Teresa, Peroni, and Costa—listened intently, and then the Italians stayed silent.

  Hank, however, raised a forefinger and said, by way of objection, “But just a minute—”

  “Not now, Hank,” Teresa stopped him, mid-sentence. “We're finished here.”

  “But—”

  “Not now.”

  “The movie business,” Frank grumbled. “He couldn't take being behind that camera all his life, watching others get the fame. What was that line from Dante he spouted after he killed that poor bastard in front of everyone?”

  “ ‘Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars,'” Costa said.

  “Envy. Greed. This insane craving for fame.” Frank Boynton shook his head then got up from the table. “Come on, brother. These people have things to do.” He looked at Teresa. “That invitation to Rome still stands?”

  “Whenever you boys want it.”

  “Good. Have a safe journey home. All of you.”

  They watched the two men leave. Ten minutes later Catherine Bianchi arrived and offered them one last drive round the city before a farewell lunch in the Marina.

  COSTA A
LMOST FELL ASLEEP IN THE MINIVAN as it wound through a city landscape he felt he now knew well. The views across to Marin County, the great bridge, the hulking island of Alcatraz…It would be hard to shake San Francisco from the memory for many reasons, good and bad. Then he remembered he had something to return. It was sitting in a plastic grocery bag he'd brought along for the purpose. When they stopped at a light, he reached forward and placed it on the console between the front seats.

  “That belongs to Gerald Kelly. Tell him thanks but I didn't need it.”

  Catherine Bianchi took a look at the handgun in its leather holster. “Lucky you.”

  Her dark eyes wandered to the tall lean figure in the passenger seat. Something had changed between these two. Falcone sat next to her looking relaxed and perhaps a little bored. He was no longer the ardent pursuer and had already talked wistfully that morning of work back in Rome. Yet, as his eagerness waned, Catherine Bianchi's, it seemed to Costa, was beginning to surface, rather too late in the day.

  “Is everything good?” she asked with a brittle, edgy ease.

  The question was principally aimed at the man next to her. He scarcely seemed to notice.

  They were travelling along Union towards Russian Hill, trying to make a left turn, when, after her third attempt to start a conversation, Catherine finally lost patience.

  “Listen,” she snapped. “I may never see any of you guys again. Ever. And all you can do is sit there moping. What the hell is the matter now? What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Falcone remarked, turning to look at her.

  “Then why are you… all of you…”

  She muttered something beneath her breath, then added, “You might at least look a little grateful this mess is over. That someone's in custody, admitting to the whole damned thing. Loose ends all tied up. Case closed.” She glanced at Falcone. “Tickets home all booked.”