by David Hewson
“I think you’re right. It didn’t reach Italy.”
She smiled at the view. It was hard for him to believe they could have moved from the city so quickly. Everything was so lush and quiet and beautiful.
“Why did I come the scenic route, not the easy one?” She sighed, slapping her forehead. “Oh, right.” She pointed at him. “Because of you.”
“San Francisco …” he said, returning to the subject.
“This is where I come from,” she said, serious all of a sudden. “The real me. Not the child. I grew up juggling movie parts, smiling for the camera, even learning to act sometimes. Watching my mother waste away to nothing. I was born here. I guess I’ll die here, too. Not that I like that idea. I don’t want to die. Not ever.”
She pumped the pedal so that the spirited engine dropped a gear and the car lurched forward into the darkness of a eucalyptus glade.
Their route through the Presidio and beyond ran up and down, steadily climbing along empty narrow roads that belonged in deep, isolated countryside, not on the edge of a great city. Costa found himself trying to crook his neck so that he could see in the mirror, glancing back through the Jaguar’s rear window from time to time.
They were not alone. In the distance, briefly glimpsed as the ancient Jaguar wound its way through the forest of the Presidio, then on into Lincoln Park, past solitary golfers swinging clubs in the golden sun of late afternoon, Costa could see the same car following them, a yellow sedan, maintaining a constant distance, dogging their tracks.
7
While Teresa Lupo tried to watch her new Hitchcock DVD, Falcone and Peroni bickered in the kitchen over whose turn it was to provide dinner.
“I cooked yesterday, Leo,” Peroni complained. “And the day before.”
Falcone remained adamant. “I told you. If you want me to get food, I will. But in the way I choose.”
“I am not eating that fried chicken crap again! How fat do you want me to get?”
“I like the fried chicken. It’s different. You can’t get it like that in Rome. Or we could have pizza. Or Thai. Or Chinese. Or …”
“Just cook some pasta, put the damned sauce on it, then grate some cheese,” the big man yelled. “Have you never, ever cooked for yourself before?”
“No …” The inspector sounded dejected. “What’s the point if there’s only one of you?”
“There are three of us now. And I happen to be as hungry as a horse.”
This was impossible. Teresa turned up the volume on the huge flat-screen TV and bellowed, “Shut up, the pair of you, and come and look at this.”
There must have been something in her voice, because for once it worked. Or perhaps they were just taking a break between rounds. The two men came and sat meekly on either side of her on the deep, soft sofa. Teresa worked the buttons, keying to the scenes so conveniently tagged on the DVD.
“Here’s Carlotta Valdes,” she said, and showed them the scene in the graveyard of Mission Dolores. “Or rather the headstone.”
“Where is this?” Falcone asked. “Mexico?”
“The original location is about a fifteen-minute cab drive over there.” She pointed back towards the city. “Mission Dolores was one of the Spanish missionary outposts set up in the eighteenth century when California was being colonised. It’s still there.”
The two men glanced at each other, their faces full of puzzlement and surprise.
“Rome doesn’t hold the copyright on history,” she reminded them. “Other people have their own bits, too.”
“So Carlotta Valdes is buried in some old missionary cemetery in the middle of San Francisco?” Peroni asked.
“No. It’s not the middle exactly. And she was never buried there. It was a fake grave and headstone they made for the movie.”
“What was she like?” he added. “The character, I mean?”
“Impossible to say. All you see is a painting of her, and a brief glimpse of someone in a dream. Hitchcock had the canvas made. Like he did the headstone. Which now, by the way …” She waved towards the window. “… is sitting in the garden behind some crazy little cinema three blocks or so over there.”
Falcone looked uninterested. “People choose false names in all sorts of ways. Newspapers. Phone books. Perhaps the woman was a movie fan. It hardly proves anything.”
“Movie obsessive,” Teresa insisted.
“Movie obsessive. So what?”
“So it’s interesting! Quattrocchi thinks this is all to do with Dante. You think it’s about the mob getting restless over their investment in Inferno. What if you’re both wrong? What if …?” She stopped. She knew it sounded ridiculous. Then she said, “What if it’s to do with an old movie somehow?”
They both tried not to laugh.
“Teresa,” Falcone replied, placing a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, “it’s no more likely someone would kill over a piece of cinema than they would over a piece of poetry. Adele Neri told us all we needed to know. There’s black money, from the Sicilians or someone, in this thing, and they’re determined they’ll get it back, with interest, one way or another. Or leave a reminder that they don’t like being squeezed.”
She stared at him. Then she said, in a deliberately censorious tone, “You are becoming shockingly literal in your dotage, Leo. Keep quiet, watch and listen. Please.”
They did, and they stayed silent, too, as she showed them, by flicking through Hitchcock’s eerie masterpiece, places they now knew — the Palace of Fine Arts, the waterfront at Crissy Field leading to Fort Point, beneath the great bridge, and so many of the narrow downtown alleys through which they’d wandered in delight, jet-lagged, when they’d arrived and had a little time for rubbernecking.
“In short,” Falcone summed up, “this movie covers many of the locations we’ve seen, and a few that appear to have connections to Roberto Tonti, or his cast, his crew, and his movie.”
“That and the rest,” Teresa went on. She announced, “Tonti worked on Vertigo.”
She watched their faces. They didn’t seem surprised, or interested.
“He was a second cameraman! In America illegally, trying to pick up experience. It’s in his biography. Tonti didn’t know a thing about directing until he came and saw Hitchcock at work here, in San Francisco, in the autumn of 1957. If you look at the movies that made him famous in the seventies, the influence is obvious. Vertigo made Roberto Tonti. This city left its mark on him.”
The pair of them folded their arms, an identical indication of boredom that would have made HankenFrank proud.
“Also,” she added desperately, “he came back and got married when his career in Italy began to hit a brick wall.”
Falcone’s tan face creased in a scowl. “It didn’t work, did it? What’s the man done for two decades? How’s he managed to live?”
That question had also occurred to her.
“It’s all listed on the Internet. Directing commercials. Developing TV programs. Jobbing work. Lecturing. Writing. Consulting. There are always crumbs to be picked up if you once had a name.”
“And then,” Peroni ventured, “he bounces back from the dead and picks up one of the biggest jobs around. One hundred and fifty million dollars and rising. How does that happen? Why didn’t they give it to Spielberg or someone?”
“Because,” Falcone suggested, “of the risk. It’s a movie based on an obscure literary masterpiece everyone’s heard of and no one’s read. That’s why the mobsters who put up the money are getting worried.”
She wriggled on the comfy sofa. It had to come out, however much she hated the idea. But the revelation she was about to make obscured her principal point.
“You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” Falcone noted.
“Don’t get fooled by the obvious,” she warned them. “I got the office to do some discreet checking. No footprints back to us. That I promise.”
Falcone cleared his throat and gave her a filthy look.
She pulled out the sheets she
’d printed on the little ink-jet that came with the apartment. Her assistant, Silvio Di Capua, had risked no small degree of internal conflict by calling in some favours from the anti-Mafia people in the DIA and asking them to run a few names through their system. Somehow what he’d found came as no surprise to her. Still, it didn’t mean it was relevant.
“Tonti got married thirty-two years ago, here. His wife was Eleanor Sardi. Born and bred in San Francisco. Daughter of the Mafia capo for northern California at the time. There have been a few … corporate takeovers since then. But Roberto Tonti knows the mob. Probably better than he knows Dante. The dark suits run in the family.”
“Family. So that’s how Bonetti raked in the emergency financing when he needed it,” Falcone declared, suddenly animated.
Peroni looked puzzled. “Why wouldn’t Tonti get the money himself?”
“Because he’s a director,” Teresa pointed out. “Money’s beneath him. Supposedly. Producers find money. Directors direct.”
“Where’s this wife now?” Falcone demanded.
“It hasn’t made the newspapers for some reason, but they separated nine months ago, not long after Inferno got a lot of bad publicity saying it was in trouble over financing. She’s living in Sardinia. In a very well-guarded villa on the Costa Smeralda. Doesn’t go out much. Her father died years ago. His clan’s now part of some Sicilian conglomerate.”
She saw that familiar glint in Falcone’s sharp eyes.
“The wife’s hostage for the mob money that went in to rescue the movie,” the inspector surmised. “Either Tonti comes up with the goods, or she pays the price. That gives him a great motive for making sure Inferno grabs all the publicity — good or bad — he can find.”
“You could say that about Dino Bonetti,” Peroni pointed out. “If he tapped Tonti’s mob relatives for money. Also, remember Emilio Neri’s lovely widow said he was the one mixing with the crooks at Prime’s place. Not Tonti.”
“You could say that about Simon Harvey, too,” Teresa added.
“He’s just the publicist!” Falcone cried.
She picked out another piece of paper that Silvio had found. “Harvey’s a substantial investor in Inferno. He took a profit share instead of a full fee. It’s all in Variety. And he’s a scholar, of both literature and the cinema. Someone who’s familiar with Dante and Hitchcock. Don’t forget those two odd little geeks, Josh Jonah and Tom Black, either. They’ve put in a stash of money too, which, contrary to popular opinion, they can’t afford. There are lawyers hovering around Lukatmi trying to screw them for breach of copyright, inciting racial hatred, suicide … you name it. And where exactly do they come from? Just over the road. A two-minute walk from Roberto Tonti’s mansion. If you want to go down that path …”
“I still don’t like the way the video of Prime got onto that site,” Peroni complained. “It’s all very well for Gerald Kelly to claim there’s a geek on every corner here. It can’t be that easy. Also, think of the publicity. The publicity they’re all getting. Every last one of them, even Maggie Flavier. It has to be worth millions. They could all be in it together.”
Falcone looked cross. “Oh, for pity’s sake. You’re starting to sound like Gianluca Quattrocchi, both of you. There may well be an attempt to make everything that’s happening appear complex. That doesn’t mean it is. Two men are dead, a fortune hangs in the balance, and everything depends on Roberto Tonti’s movie being a success, which it might not be on its own merits. The more we lose sight of those basic facts, the further we are from some resolution.”
“It’s not our case, though, is it?” she reminded him. “You didn’t even know this stuff about Tonti and his marital background, Leo. Don’t play games. You’re desperate. Best admit it.”
To her astonishment he allowed himself a brief, childlike grin.
“Touché,” the inspector murmured. “But … I hear things.”
“From Catherine?” she asked outright.
“Possibly.”
“Is telling you stuff her way of diverting the conversation from all these pathetic invitations to dinner?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Falcone complained.
“Dammit, Leo. I’m not giving dating lessons here, too. I told you before. This is California. Not some middle-aged playboy’s cocktail shack on the Via Veneto.”
“I know for a fact that we are no more and no less in the dark than Quattrocchi and Gerald Kelly,” Falcone insisted, trying to steer the conversation somewhere else. “It’s a level playing field.”
“Not exactly,” Peroni snapped. “They’ve got weapons.”
That had been a source of discontent from the outset. The rules of their security assignment precluded their carrying guns. Costa liked that idea. Peroni wasn’t so sure. Falcone was of much the same opinion.
“Does anyone want to hear about this movie I found?” Teresa cried, before the gun debate could start again.
“A summary in no more than three sentences,” Falcone ordered.
She shook her fist in mock fury. “You have to watch it. I don’t want to spoil things for you.”
The two men made a show of looking at their watches.
“It’s a work of art. This is ridiculous …” She’d only managed to flick through the DVD before they came home bickering about dinner. Most of what she did know was dimly remembered from two decades before.
She closed her eyes and in that moment could picture where she first saw it, on the screen of the dusty little cinema in the corner of the Campo dei Fiori, on the arm of a hirsute Milanese economics student with exquisite manners and dreadful taste in clothes.
“John Ferguson, a police officer known to everyone as Scottie, afflicted by vertigo, off duty after a terrible fall that killed his partner, agrees to tail Madeleine Elster, the wife of a former acquaintance who believes she is acting oddly, possibly suicidal, and possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, an ancestor. The cop falls in love with the woman, who appears to kill herself. He has a breakdown, and afterwards meets another woman whom he rebuilds in her image, only to discover that she was the original Madeleine Elster he met, taking part in a complex murder plot to kill the villain’s true wife. In the end he loses her, too.” She clapped her hands. “There!”
“That was four sentences. And what’s this got to do with Dante?” Peroni asked.
“Nothing! Everything!” she screeched. “I don’t know. You work it out. I’m on holiday, aren’t I? The woman whose spirit was supposed to possess the victim was named Carlotta Valdes. The story played itself out here, in San Francisco, and Roberto Tonti worked on the film. I do not believe in coincidences.”
“I’m not in the mood for a movie,” Peroni grumbled. “I’m hungry.”
Falcone took out a coin and said, “Heads it’s chicken, tails it’s pizza.”
Peroni’s large scarred head fell into his hands and he groaned.
“Chicken it is,” Falcone declared, after briefly flipping the coin and letting no one see the outcome. “I’ll go.”
Teresa swore bitterly beneath her breath, then passed them a piece of paper with her scribbled handwriting visible on it.
“This is a list of real-life locations from the film. My prediction is that if something happens, it will happen close to one of these. We are being led down a merry little path, gentlemen. But not the one you think.”
She skipped through the chapter points she’d set on the DVD. A bouquet of pink roses, set with blue violets in a star-shaped lace bouquet, came on the screen. Then the camera panned up to the painting of a serious, intense Hispanic woman in Victorian dress, dark eyes staring directly out of the canvas. In her hands sat an identical bunch of flowers.
“Meet Carlotta Valdes. This scene was shot in an art gallery called the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, which you will find on my list. Also …”
She switched to a new scene, one of several hypnotic, dreamlike sequences in which Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie followed the troubled Madeleine as s
he drove apparently aimlessly across the city, along narrow urban streets, quieter neighbourhoods, and then through endless, dark, unidentified woodland.
The two men became quiet. Falcone reached for the remote control and paused the playback. He pointed to the dark metallic green car frozen as it wound its way downhill, somewhere, it seemed, near the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I saw one just like that this morning. Maggie Flavier was getting into it.”
He scratched his narrow jutting chin.
“Where’s Nic gone?” he asked.
8
They pulled up outside a building that seemed like a mirage emerging from the faint Bay mist. Flat grey lines of weathered stone, perfectly placed columns, an American version of a distorted Palladian dream transplanted from some country estate in the Veneto to a green Californian hilltop running down towards the Bay and the great red bridge below. The two of them got out of the Jaguar. Costa stopped and stared and smiled.
“I know this place …”
“You’ve been to Paris. I was a child there. I knew it, too. The home of the French Legion of Honour opposite the Quai d’Orsay. This is a copy. San Francisco always did look to Europe, you know. Why do you think Tonti is so at home here? The pace of life. Buildings like the Palace of Fine Arts …”
“Piranesi should have drawn that.”
Her sharp, incisive eyes peered at him. “Why are you a police officer? Not an artist or something?”
Costa shrugged. “I can’t paint.”
“Does that bother you?”
It seemed an odd question. “No.”
“It would annoy the hell out of me. I’d try.”
“I did. That’s why I know I can’t do it. What else should I be? Why are you an actress?”
“Because it lets me be other people, silly.”
She took his arm and dragged him past a large, familiar statue, towards the entrance.