Dante's Numbers

by David Hewson

  “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. Every thing 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.

  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.

  Then she opened her eyes, knowing what she'd see. John Ferguson, whoever he was, sat opposite, his arms leaning easily on a chair back, watching her squirm as she tried to force herself upright on the stiff mattress. It took one look at herself to confirm what she suspected. She was now wearing the strange green dress and nothing else. He must have stripped her while she was unconscious, then put on the old silk garment.

  She tried to move but something stopped her and it hurt. Rough brown rope, the kind construction people used, gripped both her wrists. He'd tied her to the iron bed-head, loose enough to let her move a little, but not much. Not enough to get off the bed entirely.

  He had an expression on his face that suggested he knew the panic that was running through her head, and a part of him liked it. But there was some uncertainty there, too.

  “I told you it was a nice dress.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt, took one out, the last one, lit it, scrunched up the pack, and threw it on the floor. The smoke rose into the blades of a rotating ceiling fan performing lazy turns above them.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Where the hell am I?”

  “You had an engagement. Don't you remember? Booze and boyfriends getting to the old grey cells now?”

  “There'll be people here soon. Just let me go now and I'll forget this ever happened.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment as if he despaired of her.

  “That's what I love about movie people. You're all so damned wrapped up in yourselves you never check stuff out, do you? Someone calls and says”—he put on a high-pitched girl's voice, like Shirley Temple on drugs—” ‘Miss Flavier. Oh, Miss Flavier. We love you so much you just got to come open our little noir festival in some flea-pit movie theatre you wouldn't normally'”—the real voice came back—”‘deign to set foot inside.' And you don't even think to check it out.”

  He flicked a finger at the face of his watch.

  “Why I say, I say…” She recognised the new voice. It was a cartoon character, fake Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. “… I say, boy… festival folk don't turn up till four in the afternoon. Till then ain't nobody here but us chickens.”

  He leaned forward. “I hope you enjoy my voices, Maggie. I've been working on them for a while. All my life, if I'm being candid.”

  She hitched herself up on the bed, knees together beneath the sheets, taking the rope as far as it could go before the harsh hemp began to bite into her skin, and said, “Your voices are very good.”

  “We have scarcely scratched the surface, dahling…” he groaned lasciviously.

  She recognised this new look. It was one she'd known since she was a pretty little teenager. He was staring at her as if she were meat.

  “Here's a question,” he continued. “You wake up stark naked except for that dress and you realise some guy you don't even know put it on you. At least there is a dress. Not like Madeleine, huh? There she was all… bare… in Scottie's apartment… nice apartment by the way, play your cards right and one day maybe you get to see it. Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Why didn't Madeleine scream? Some complete stranger takes her home, puts her in his bed, takes her clothes off…”

  She didn't rise to the bait. This flustered him.

  “I mean he must have looked, didn't he? Maybe more than just looked. How would you know? If you were out cold like that?” A pink flush briefly stained his cheeks. “How would you know… If…if…he'd d-d-done the real thing. All the way. You must know, right? You'd feel something. I guess.”

  She still didn't say anything.

  “But what about if he just kind of…fiddled around?” He sniggered. “Got some touchy feely in there.” He shook his head, laughing out loud now. “You ever think of that? Jimmy Stewart perving all over Kim Novak while she was out like a light and him all hot fingers, runny, runny…” He was licking his hands, slobbering all over them. “…runny…runny. And she never even knows.”

  He stiffened up on the chair and stopped laughing.

  “Or does she?”

  John Ferguson, which was, she now recalled, the real name of the character Jimmy Stewart played, leaned forward and screamed at her, “Does she?”

  “They were actors. None of it was real.”

  His face, which had seemed so ordinary, wrinkled with hate and disgust.

  “Now who's being naive, Miss Flavier? You of all people. Telling me a little of the story never makes its way into real life. Truly, I am shocked.” It was a new voice, that of a doctor or a prim schoolteacher.

  Beside the bed there was some kind of storage cabinet. On it stood film cans lined up like books next to a small office desk with a phone on it, a cheap chair, and not much else. A dusty window almost opaque with cobwebs. A door opposite that led… she had no idea where. They had to be in the movie theatre. But even so, she could only picture one part of it in her head: the big white bell tower looming over Chestnut.

  If she could just get to the door, fight him off long enough…

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He shook his head as if that was a way of changing something, whichever character possessed him.

  The voice altered again.

  “You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking…you talking to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?”

  Taxi Driver.

  “I don't know who I'm talking to but I don't think it's John Ferguson,” she said quietly. “Or Travis Bickle.”

  His head went from side to side in that crazy fashion again. He blubbed his fingers against his lips and made a stupid, childlike noise.

  “Yeah. That's the problem. You don't know, Maggie. And you should. Because knowing means you get to answer the conundrum.”

  “The conundrum?”

  “You know. The conundrum.”

  She stared at him, baffled. He sighed as if she were a stupid child.

  “The fuck-you-kill-you conundrum,” he said, wearily.

  Maggie Flavier's mind closed in on itself, refused to function.

  “You do know what that is, don't you?” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said softly.

  “Fuck you then kill you? Fuck you or kill you.” He placed a finger on his lips, hamming a pensive pose. “Kill you then fuck you, even?” He giggled. “Though if I'm honest, the fuck-you part is a little moot. Let's face it: whatever way things work out, that's gonna happen.”

  He leaned forward, looked very sincere, and added, “I've been waiting a very long time for that, Maggie. Keeping myself… pure. While you got banged by anything that grabbed your fancy.”

  There had to be a weapon somewhere. Or something she could use. A kitchen knife. A ballpoint pen. Anything she could stab him with when he came close.

  “Who…” she asked, very slowly, “…are…you?”

  “Like you want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He shrugged, got up, walked over to the little desk, rudely swept away a pile of papers from the surface, and then scrabbled around until he found what he wanted. Then he came back, sat down again, eyed her once more. Maybe not quite so hungrily. Not quite.

  “My name…my real name,” he said quietly, “is”—the voice became liltingly Irish now—”Michael Fitzwilliam. ‘Fitz' in the Gaelic sense, meaning bastard, sans père for you froggies, illegitimate, mongrel, wrong side of the blanket, born out of wedlock, or even love child, if you happen to be of a humorous or gullible disposition.”

  She found it hard to breathe. She was remembering something from
a very long time ago.

  “Sure and the name has jogged a little memory now, I'm thinking.”

  It was a terrible Irish accent and meant to be.

  He had something in his hand. She didn't want to see it. But there was nowhere to run, and she felt hot and tired and weak beneath the old dress that was tight in the wrong places.

  Michael Fitzwilliam—Mickey, hadn't they called him that?— threw a piece of fabric on the bed and she couldn't not look at it, couldn't take her eyes away.

  Notre Dame des Victoires was on Pine Street, four blocks from the Brocklebank Apartments, though that wasn't why her mother chose the school. It was the only one in the city that offered daily classes in French conversation and writing.

  She stared at the school badge, faded with age, pinched between his fingers. A white fleur-de-lis inside an oval shield with a red and blue crown at the centre. She thought of the name Mickey Fitzwilliam again. Now the memory had a face attached to it, that of a sad, lonely, unexceptional child, one who bragged constantly of his famous father yet always refused to name him.

  “I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

  His head lolled around his shoulders, his eyes rolled in their sockets, a bad comic actor's “come again?” routine.

  “Is that it? ‘I'm so sorry.' Me, the poor little bastard you all laughed at, teased, and fucked with. No dad. No money. Just a drunk for a mom and a…”

  She could hear it before he even spoke, rattling around her head from across the years.

  “… a st-st-st-st-st-stutter…”

  Mickey Fitzwilliam, who so wanted to be the same as the rest of them and never could. She'd made sure of that.

  “I'm sorry,” she said again.

  “You will be. You've got to be. Really sorry, Maggie. Not acting sorry. I know the difference. I had a director for an old man, and in between times when he was pretending I didn't exist, I got to watch him and learn. Got to know how he worked. Got to learn your tricks over the years. Can't fool Roberto Tonti's kid now, can you? Not some two-bit actress who got where she is by handing out a quick fuck on the casting couch to any wrinkled old producer who demanded one.”