Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  “And because I get paid a lot for it. That really is Rodin’s Thinker, by the way. One of the early casts.”

  It was almost empty inside. The gallery had such space, such light, such apparent modernity. It was nothing like Rome. All his favourite places there — the Doria Pamphilj, the Borghese — had more the feeling of palatial homes decorated with pictures. The Legion of Honor was cold and clean, organised and … dead. A memorial, Maggie told him, to the fallen American soldiers of the First World War.

  Faces lined the walls, portraits of men and women, some in the flush of youth, others in failing old age. Maggie seemed to know every last work in the place, every feature, every personality.

  “The cruelty of man,” she declared as she guided him to a fifteenth-century tapestry that depicted peasants trapping and killing rabbits with ferrets and dogs.

  “Presumably they were hungry.”

  “You’re a vegetarian! You’re supposed to disapprove.”

  “When someone’s hungry …”

  She harrumphed and took him to another canvas. It showed a young girl in poor country dress, seated by a grubby stone well. He looked at the notice next to it: Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher. Late nineteenth century.

  “Had you seen my movie debut, the Disney epic The Fairy Circle,” Maggie announced with mock pomposity, “you might have recognised this.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know that. Well, this was me.”

  It was impossible for him to imagine her as this lost, sullen creature. “How?”

  Her strong hands beat the front of her sweater.

  “Because I stole her!” Then, more thoughtfully, “Or she stole me. The hair. The surly, sad look. The determination. Which won the day in the end, naturally, since this was Disney.”

  He looked at this sophisticated blonde woman by his side and laughed.

  “Ridiculous, am I?” she demanded. “Watch.”

  She snatched the extensions out of her hair and thrust them into her bag. Then she did something with her hands, put her head down, shook it, as if getting rid of something bad.

  When she looked up at him, Nic felt briefly giddy, just as he had the day they first met.

  Costa switched his attention between her and the painting. There was the same life, the same identity in the fierce, hard stare, the set features, the reproach to the viewer as if to say: Can you see now?

  “Point taken. You’re a good actress.”

  A mild curse escaped her lips. She was back. Herself again in an instant. “No. I’m a good vampire of paintings. Or an easy vessel for some ghost. This is what I do. It’s what I learned, when my mother was down in L.A., doing whatever it took to get me auditions.” Her face turned stony for a moment. “So I came here. I studied these women on the walls. I imagined them into me. It’s not hard, not when you try. Whenever I needed them, they showed up. Look …”

  She led him to another pastoral canvas, this one more lyrical: a young shepherdess next to a brook, gazing wistfully out of the frame as her flock wandered in the background. French again, of the same period.

  “This was two years later. The Bride of Lammermoor. Walter Scott. Classic stuff. Here …”

  Another portrait. French again, but clearly earlier, from the romantic style and of a rather vapid-seeming aristocrat. He examined the notice: Hyacinthe Gabrielle Roland, later Marchioness Wellesley. It wasn’t easy to imagine the woman’s round, naive face, with its flush of curls and gullible stare, succumbing to Maggie’s talents.

  “I had to put on weight for that. You need puppy fat for Jane Austen. That took me, oh …” She placed a finger against her cheek. “… three weeks to hit the mark. You can’t hurry gorging. First time I got to take my clothes off.” She cleared her throat. “But at least it was art. Ha-ha.”

  The discomfort inside her was distant but discernible.

  “Why do you do this?”

  “Because I like it. Do you need another reason? Being someone else. It’s … distracting.”

  She was taking him to another canvas, one he knew he would dislike the moment he saw the familiar, neurotic swirls beginning to take shape as they approached.

  “This is me when I’m older,” she went on. “Maybe not a movie at all. Maybe me. Whoever that happens to be.”

  It was a woman in her late thirties, posed like a siren on a dreamy sea, her face tilted at an awkward angle towards a Mediterranean sky, her full body half clothed in a revealing, swirling dress that flowed over her flesh with the liquid sinuousness of the waves beneath. In the background nymphs and mythical creatures revelled in some impenetrable diversion. It was reminiscent, vaguely, of Raphael’s Galatea in the Farnesina.

  “I never much liked Dalí,” Costa admitted. “He doesn’t seem to like the people he paints.”

  “Agreed. She looks like a bad actress being forced to smile for the audience. If I’m still getting paid for that when I turn forty, I’ll be happy.”

  “So this is where you come for inspiration?”

  “No. I told you. I come here to possess, or to be possessed. By a dead girl in a French painting. Or a forgotten English aristocrat. Anyone, as long as it works.”

  She leaned towards him, as if he were a child. “You don’t honestly think they go to the movies to see me, do you?”

  “Where’s Beatrice?” he asked, avoiding the question.

  Without a word she took him to another canvas. He stood in front of the work and felt, finally, at home.

  “Dante came before Raphael, remember,” Maggie whispered. “So what do you expect?”

  It took him back to Italy in an instant. The simple beauty, the placid tempera colours, the classical, relaxed posture of the figures: a winged Cupid with his bow, a young woman, in long medieval robes, reclining opposite him, staring at his tender face, in anticipation, perhaps in fear. They were in the kind of garden that might have been found in many a canvas adorning the walls of the museums of Florence: thick with trees, dark in places, shot through with light in others. In the distance three muses turned around each other, dancing.

  The centuries passed, some ideas stayed the same. Costa leaned down and looked to see its origins. Maggie was right: Pre-Raphaelite, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, from 1877 but fired directly by the Renaissance, and Botticelli in particular.

  He turned to Maggie Flavier, now blonde, looking much, as she had first said, like an attractive young waitress from a 1950s TV show. When she wore the guise of Beatrice on the screen, under the directorial control of Roberto Tonti, she was someone different entirely: this woman from another time, a different now pretending to be a different then.

  “I knew you’d ask,” she said as she retrieved some ribbons out of her bag. Costa watched as she wound the coloured strands through her hair, loosely styling them, after a fashion, in the manner of the braids on the figure in the painting. He could see her Beatrice still, beneath the dyed blonde tresses, beneath the tan she’d acquired somewhere along the way.

  “You were perfect,” he whispered.

  “I am perfect,” she corrected him. “When I want to be.”

  He looked at the nameplate: Love and the Maiden, 1877.

  “I have nothing else to show you here,” she said. “But there’s a view. If we wait long enough, we could see the best sunset in the world. Well, in San Francisco anyway. I used to love it when I caught the bus, waiting for my mother to get back from the studios, wondering what she’d say.”

  “Where?”

  “Through the woods,” she murmured, her green eyes never leaving his face for a moment. “Where else?”

  9

  It was a short drive. They stopped in a deserted car park next to a stand of eucalyptus. Nearby there was a group of picnic tables and a site for tents alongside a campfire pit. He’d almost forgotten about the yellow car he’d seen on the way to the Legion of Honor. No one seemed to have followed them, though it was impossible to be certain in the narrow, winding pathways they drove along, the old g
reen Jaguar swaying on its ancient suspension as if it were some ageing vessel navigating a rolling hilltop sea.

  They got out and the smell of the trees — strong and medicinal — was everywhere. The grey trunks, shedding bark like bad skin, ranged around them, disappearing into the hazy blue distance. He’d read the signs on the Presidio when he’d walked in the lower reaches. The forest was the creation of man, not nature, planted by the military who had once occupied this narrow stretch of territory to the north of the city. He liked this idea, the notion of a land that was made, not simply inherited. To him it seemed novel.

  “Down there,” Maggie said, pointing, “lie Baker Beach and the Pacific Ocean. Call this a city? Four miles behind us there’s Union Square and Market and all that crap. Here.” She made a circle around herself, eyes closed, smiling, face pointed to the sky. “Here is peace and paradise. I used to spend the night here sometimes when my mother didn’t come back from L.A. It’s a world.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Do you know something worthwhile that isn’t?”

  “Quite a lot of things, to be honest.”

  “Did your wife feel the same way?” she asked nervously. “She was an FBI agent once. She must have …”

  He stayed silent, wondering.

  “It was in the papers,” Maggie said. “Sorry. I looked. I had to. None of us has secrets anymore, you know.”

  “You could have asked.”

  She shook her head. The blonde locks, exactly Emily’s colour, fluttered in the wind.

  “No. You don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to make you. All the same, I had to let you understand I know. Otherwise it would hang over us both. Me wondering whether to ask. You wondering whether to tell.”

  He gazed past the trees, trying to guess how far it was to the beach and what they might find there.

  “She wasn’t afraid of danger,” Maggie said simply. “That was what killed her. Didn’t it?”

  “No. A man killed her. A deranged man I should have stopped. But I didn’t. I was too slow. Too … indecisive. I thought …” This knowledge would never go away. “I thought I could negotiate some solution in which no one got hurt.”

  That failure almost nagged him more than anything. It was a curiously indeterminate kind of guilt.

  “So you want everything to be safe from now on. You want everyone close to you to wear some kind of armour that stops them from being touched by what’s bad.”

  “If I could find it …”

  She stood closer to him. “If you found that, Nic, they’d be someone else. Not who they really are.” She sighed. “Unless of course you’re in my business, in which case you have to be other people. God, I wish I could still use the word actress. Katharine Hepburn. Kim Novak. Bette Davis. It was good enough for them. I can’t stand in their shadow. But maybe one day.”

  “I promise to see one of your movies. Soon.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  The wind quickened. It ruffled her hair. For a moment she looked like the urchin, a very elegant and well-kempt one, he’d first seen in Rome. She took a deep breath of the clean, sweet air.

  “I love this place. The ocean. These trees. When I was a girl, I used to imagine I was a bird, a gull or something. That I could fly off this headland, over that beach, head west, on and on, free forever. Where do you think I’d wind up?”

  “Hawaii?”

  “Shame on you. Are all Italians bad at geography?”

  “This one is. I’ve never been out of Europe before. What do you expect?”

  “Better. Head that way, my boy …” Her long, strong, purposeful arm stretched out into the wind. “… and you will, after a very long journey, end up in Japan.”

  She bowed like a geisha and said, “Konbanwa,” then paused to enjoy his bafflement. “It means ‘good evening.’ I can do small talk in a million languages. Helps when you’re on tour.” The forest of slender, upright eucalyptus made a whispering sound, leaves rustling in the breeze. The scent seemed stronger. Night was on the way.

  “What did you do?” he asked. “When you camped here. As a girl.”

  A different expression on her face now, amused, mock angry. “On a warm San Francisco night …” she sang. He dimly recognised the song. “What do you think? I smoked pot. Fell into the sleeping bag of any passing stranger. The usual.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” It was true and had to be said. “I didn’t think it. For a moment.”

  “Why? You might be right.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “Oh.” She raised her finger in front of his face, in a way that Teresa Lupo might have done. “So you do believe in intuition. When it suits you. But you’re not far wrong.” The shadow he was coming to recognise flickered across her face. “That all came later. Do you really want to know what I did?”

  “If you want to tell me.”

  “I ran.”

  This was California, he reminded himself. “You jogged?”

  Her green eyes lit up with indignation. “Jogged? I ran. Like the wind. Not your kind of running. Peroni told me about that. Long-distance stuff. Marathons. I sprinted. Pushed myself until I could feel my heart ready to burst. And then …” She raised her shoulders in a gesture of self-deprecation. “… I curled up alone in my sleeping bag with a bunch of Twinkies, feeling alive, watching the moon until I fell asleep. All alone. I liked it that way. I still do.”

  A part of him wanted to touch her. A part of him wanted to resist.

  “I’ll count to five. Give you a start.” She nodded across the campsite. “There’s an information sign with a map a hundred yards over there. I’ll still beat you to it.”

  “Too old … too tired …”

  “Get running, damn you!”

  He turned, not quite thinking right, and happy with that idea, the release of sanity, the embrace of something less rational. He could see the sign she spoke of in the shade where the trees became denser.

  Costa didn’t move as quickly as he could. He felt a little giddy. He wanted her to win, wanted her to overtake him, laughing, childlike, racing in front of him. And then …

  He didn’t know. San Francisco was a million miles from home. None of the old rules — the old cares, the old burdens — existed here. He was free of them, for a while anyway.

  When he got to the sign, he wasn’t even out of breath.

  “Maggie …” he said as he turned.

  There was no one there. Just a forest of grey trees standing like petrified soldiers, unmoving except for the dark fluttering diamonds of leaves, rippling their aroma into the land breeze that was running through the forest, down to the ocean.

  He stood and thought, realising, with the old head he used in Rome, that he’d acted like a fool. Then, in the distance, where the light was failing, he saw a figure flit through the grey trunks.

  It was a man, heavily built, carrying something low in his right hand. Something black and made of metal.

  “Maggie!” Costa yelled again.

  There was the faint echo of her laughter from somewhere. A shape in a white sweater slipped through the glade ahead to the right, not far from the man he’d seen. Not far at all.

  Costa raced towards her, at full speed this time, half tripping over the rotting branches and the carpet of crisp dry leaves at his feet, bellowing into the thin night air, summoning up all the threat and force he could muster.

  A voice wasn’t much against a weapon but it was something. In the distance, a little down the hill, just off the road, stood the yellow car he’d seen earlier. Trying to stifle the fury he felt with himself, he ploughed on, half stumbling into a crater full of ferns and moss and trash, fighting to keep his balance, yelling all the time.

  He didn’t catch sight of the man anywhere. But the third time he called he heard her laugh again, a calm, musical sound, followed by a mild French curse directed at his masculinity.

  “This is not a game!” he roared.

 
A flock of birds rose unseen in a noisy, squawking gaggle. The suddenness and the sheer physical noise of their presence made him jump.

  “Not a game …” he whispered to himself, trying to still his thoughts.

  Something white emerged briefly from behind a silvery trunk ten steps or so to his right.

  He didn’t say anything. He walked straight there. When he was close, she stuck out a foot to make sure he saw.

  Costa rounded the tree and found her. She was smiling, looking like a guilty schoolgirl. The apple she’d gotten from the catering van in the car park at the Palace of Fine Arts was in her hand.

  “We’re going,” he said, and took her arm, more roughly than he’d intended.

  “Why? What’s the rush? Oh, come on, Nic. Loosen up. Help me. Just a little. This is new to me, too, you know. I’m starting to feel like I’m fourteen again. Only this time, I’m happy.”

  “There’s someone here,” he warned, glancing around, seeing nothing.

  “What? A Peeping Tom? Who cares? I don’t. I’ve had those since forever.”

  “Well, I haven’t.” He reached for her arm. She stepped back, away from him. “I’m taking you home. You’re supposed to have security.”

  “Not from you, mister! You know, I could lose patience with all this. I don’t usually have to beg.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was still scanning the grey trees for the lone individual who was surely stalking them. “Let’s go back to the city. We can find a restaurant. Have dinner.”

  “I don’t need dinner, thank you very much.” She waved the apple in his face. “I have this. Got it myself.” She took a huge, greedy bite of the fruit and screwed up her face as if it wasn’t so good. “I don’t need anything from anyone. Ever.”

  “Fine. So can we go? Please?”

  She didn’t say another word. But she moved, striding in front of him, long steps, trying to make a point. In other circumstances he might have laughed. There was a theatrical quality to her petulance. It was a performance, one that was deliberately comic.

  They were just a couple of steps from the car when she fell. Costa rushed to her side. The ground was treacherous: leaves covered potholes, snarled roots of the stiff military trees lurked hidden, waiting to trip the unwary.