Dante's Numbers

1

Allan Prime peered at the woman they’d sent from the studio, pinched his cheeks between finger and thumb the way he always did before makeup, then grumbled, “Run that past me again, will you?”

He couldn’t figure out whether she was Italian or not. Or how old, since most of her face was hidden behind a pair of large black plastic-rimmed sunglasses. Even — and this was something Prime normally got out of the way before anything else — whether she was pretty. He’d never seen this one at Cinecittà, and a part of him said he would have noticed, if only in order to ask himself the question: Should I?

She looked late twenties, a little nervous, in awe of him maybe. But she was dressed so much older, in a severe grey jacket with matching slacks and a prim white shirt, its soft crinkly collar high up on her neck. It was a look out of the movies, he decided. Old movies from back when it was still a crime to be skinny and anything less than elegant. Particularly her hair, a platinum blonde, dyed undoubtedly, pinned behind her taut, stiffly held head in a ponytail that, as she walked into the living room of his apartment, he’d noticed was curled into a tight apostrophe.

It was an effect he found strangely alluring until the connection came to him. Unsmiling, eyes hidden behind heavy shades that kept out the burning July morning, Miss Valdes — although the Spanish name didn’t fit at all — resembled one of those cool, aloof women he’d watched in the downtown theatres when he was a kid in New York, rapt before the silver screen. Like a cross between Kim Novak and Grace Kelly, the two full-bodied celluloid blondes he’d first fallen hotly in love with as he squirmed with adolescent lust in the shiny, sticky seats of Manhattan flea pits. He hadn’t encountered silent, fixated women like this in the business in three or four decades. The breed was extinct. Real bodies had given way to rake-thin models, exquisite coiffures to impromptu mussed-up messes. The species had moved on, and now he knew what kind of job it did these days.

It made death masks of people. Living people, in his case.

“Signor Harvey say …” she repeated in her slow, deliberate Italian accent, as if she were unsure he quite understood. Her voice was low and throaty and appealing. More Novak than Kelly, he thought.

“Harvey’s a drug-addled jerk. He never mentioned anything to me. We’ve got this opening ceremony tonight, in front of everyone from God down. The biggest and best movie of the decade and I get to do the honours.”

“It must be an honour to be in Signor Tonti’s masterpiece.”

Allan Prime took a deep breath. “Without me it’d be nothing. You ever watch Gordy’s Break?”

“I loved that movie,” she replied without hesitation, and he found himself liking the throaty, almost masculine croon in her voice.

“It was a pile of crap. If it wasn’t for me, the thing wouldn’t have made it outside the queer theatres.”

He truly hated that thing. The movie was the kind of violent fake art-house junk the Academy liked to smile on from time to time just to show it had a brain as well as a heart. He’d played a low-life hood in a homosexual relationship with a local priest who was knifed to death trying to save him. When the clamour petered out, and the golden statue was safely stored somewhere he didn’t have to look at it, Allan Prime decided to make movies for people, not for critics. One a year for almost three decades. Nothing that followed gave him another nomination.

The lack of Oscars never bothered Prime too much, most of the time. From the eighties on he’d become more and more bankable, a multimillion-dollar name who always brought in an army of female fans in love with his chiselled Mediterranean looks, trademark wavy dark hair, and that slow, semi-lascivious smile he liked to throw in somewhere along the line.

Except now. He’d tried, and every time he began to crease up for the famed smirk, Roberto Tonti had gone stiff in his director’s chair, thrown back his hoary aquiline head with its crown of grey hair like plumed feathers, and howled long and loud with fury.

“This is what I do,” Prime had complained one day, when the verbal abuse went too far. He was in costume, a long, grubby medieval gown, standing in front of a blue screen, pretending to deliver some obscure speech to a digitised dragon or some other monster out of a teenage horror fantasy, though he couldn’t see a thing except lights and cameras and Roberto Tonti thrashing around in his chair like some ancient, skeletal wraith.

“Not when you work for me,” Tonti screamed at him. “When you work for me, you …”—a stream of impenetrable Italian curses followed—“… you are mine. My puppet. My creature. Every day I put my finger up your scrawny, coked-up ass, Allan, and every day I wiggle a little harder till your stupid brain wakes up. Stop acting. Start being.”

Stop acting. Start being. Prime had lost count of the number of times he’d heard that. He still didn’t get it.

Tonti was seventy-three. He looked a hundred and fifty and was terminally ill, with a set of lungs that had been perforated by a lifetime’s tobacco. Maybe he’d be dead before the movie got its first showing in the U.S. They all knew that was a possibility. It added to the buzz Simon Harvey’s little army of evil PR geckos had been quietly building with their tame hacks.

Allan Prime had already thought through his performance in the director’s real-life funeral scene. He’d release one single tear, dab it away with a finger, not a handkerchief, showing he was a man of the people, unchanged by fame. Then, when no one could hear, he’d walk up to the casket and whisper, “Where’s that freaking finger now, huh?”

Or maybe the old bastard would live forever, long enough to dance on Prime’s own grave. There was something creepy, something abnormal about the man, which was, the rumours said, why he’d not sat at the helm of a movie for twenty years, frittering away his talent in the wasteland of TV until Inferno came along. Prime gulped a fat finger of single malt, then refilled his glass from the bottle on the table. It was early, but the movie was done, and he didn’t need to be out in public until the end of the day. The penthouse apartment atop one of the finest houses in the Via Giulia, set back from the busy Lungotevere with astonishing views over the river to St. Peter’s, had been Allan Prime’s principal home for almost a year. Tonight it was empty except for him and Miss Valdes.

“This is for publicity, right?” he asked.

“Sì,” the woman replied, and patted her briefcase like a lawyer sure it contained evidence. She had to be Italian. And the more he looked at her, the more Prime became convinced she wasn’t unattractive either, with her full, muscular figure — that always turned him on — and very perfect teeth behind a mouth blazingly outlined in carmine lipstick. “Mr. Harvey say we must have a copy of your face, because we cannot, for reasons of taste, mass-market a version of the real thing. It must be you.”

“I cut myself shaving this morning. Does that matter?”

“I can work with that.”

“Great,” he grumbled. “So where do you want me?”

She took off her oversized sunglasses. Miss Valdes was a looker and Allan Prime was suddenly aware something was starting to twitch down below. She had a large, strong face, quite heavy with makeup for this time of day, as if she didn’t just make masks, she liked wearing them herself. The voice, too, now that he thought about it, sounded artificial. Posed. As if she wasn’t speaking in her natural tongue. Not that this worried him. He was aware of a possibility in her eyes, and that was all he needed.

“On the bed, sir,” Miss Valdes suggested. “It would be best if you were naked. A true death mask is always taken from a naked man.”

“Not that I’m arguing, but why the hell is that?”

The corner of her scarlet mouth turned down in a gesture of meek surprise, one that seemed intoxicatingly Italian to him.

“We come into the world that way. And leave it, too. You’re an actor.”

He watched, rapt, as her fleshy, muscular tongue ran very deliberately over those scarlet lips.

“I believe you call it … being in character.”

He wondered how Roberto Tonti would direct a scene like this.

“Will it hurt?”

“Of course not!” She appeared visibly offended by the idea. “Who would wish to hurt a star?”

“You’d be surprised,” Prime grumbled. This curious woman would be truly amazed, if she only knew.

She smoothed down the front of her jacket, opened the briefcase, and peered into it with a professional, searching gaze before beginning to remove some items Allan Prime didn’t recognise.

“First a little … discomfort,” she declared. “Then …” That carmine smile again, one Allan Prime couldn’t stop staring at, although there was something about it that nagged him. Something familiar he couldn’t place. “Then we are free.”

Miss Valdes—Carlotta Valdes, he recalled the first name the doorman had used when he’d called up to announce her arrival — took out a pair of rubber gloves and slipped them onto her strong, powerful hands, like those of a nurse or a surgeon.

2

At five minutes past four, Nic Costa found himself standing outside a pale green wooden hut shaded by parched trees, just a short walk from the frenzied madness that was beginning to build in and around the nearby Casa del Cinema. The sight of this tiny place brought back far too many memories, some of them jogged by a newspaper clipping attached to the door, bearing the headline “ ‘Dei Piccoli,’ cinema da Guinness.” This was the world’s smallest movie theatre, built for children in 1934 during the grim Mussolini years, evidence that Italy was in love with film, with the idea of fantasy, of a life that was brighter and more colourful than reality, even in those difficult times. Or perhaps, it occurred to Costa now, with the perspective of adulthood shaping his childhood memories, because of them. This small oak cabin had just sixty-three seats, every one of them, he now felt sure, deeply uncomfortable for anyone over the age of ten. Not that his parents had ever complained. Once a week, until his eleventh birthday, his mother or father had brought him here. Together they had sat through a succession of films, some good, some bad, some Italian, some from other countries, America in particular.

It was a different time, a different world, both on the screen and in his head. Costa had never returned much to any cinema since those days. There had always seemed something more important to occupy his time: family and the slow loss of his parents; work and ambition; and, for comfort, the dark and enticing galleries and churches of his native city, which seemed to speak more directly to him as he grew older. Now he wondered what he’d missed. The movie playing was one he’d seen as a child, a popular Disney title prompting the familiar emotions those films always brought out in him: laughter and tears, fear and hope. Sometimes he’d left this place scarcely able to speak for the rawness of the feelings that the movie had, with cunning and ruthlessness, elicited from his young and fearful mind. Was this one reason why he had stayed away from the cinema for so long? That he feared the way it sought out the awkward, hidden corners of one’s life, good and bad, then magnified them in a way that could never be shirked, never be avoided? Some fear that he might be haunted by what he saw?

He had been a widower for six months, before the age of thirty, and the feelings of desolation and emptiness continued to reverberate in the distant corners of his consciousness. The world moved on. So many had said that, and in a way they’d been right. He had allowed work to consume him, because there was nothing else. There, Leo Falcone had been subtly kind in his own way, guiding Costa away from the difficult cases, and any involving violence and murder, towards more agreeable duties, those that embraced culture and the arts, milieux in which Costa felt comfortable and, occasionally, alive. This was why, on a hot July day, he was in the pleasant park of the Villa Borghese, not far from three hundred or more men and women assembled from all over the world for a historic premiere that would mark the revival of the career of one of Italy’s most distinguished and reclusive directors.

Costa had never seen a movie by Roberto Tonti until that afternoon, when, as a reward for their patient duties arranging property security for the exhibition associated with the production, the police and Carabinieri had been granted a private screening. He was still unclear exactly what he felt about the work of a man who was something of an enigmatic legend in his native country, though he had lived in America for many, many years. The movie was … undoubtedly impressive, though very long and extremely noisy. Costa found it difficult to recognise much in the way of humanity in all its evident and very impressive spectacle. His memories of studying Dante’s Divina Commedia in school told him the lengthy poem was a discourse on many things, among them the nature of human and divine love, an argument that seemed absent from the film he had sat through. Standing outside the little children’s cinema, it seemed to Costa that the Disney title it was now showing contained more of Dante’s original message than Tonti’s farrago of visual effects and overblown drama.

But he was there out of duty. The Carabinieri had been assigned to protect the famous actors involved in the year-long production at Cinecittà. The state police had been given a more mundane responsibility, that of safeguarding the historic objects assembled for an accompanying exhibition in the building next to the Casa del Cinema: documents and letters, photographs, and an extensive exhibition of original paintings depicting the civil war between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs which prompted Dante’s flight from Florence and brought about the perpetual exile in which he wrote his most famous work.

There was a photograph of the poet’s grave and the verse of his friend Bernardo Canaccio that included the line …

Parvi Florentia mater amoris.

Florence, mother of little love, a sharp reminder of how Dante had been abandoned by his native city. There was a picture, too, of the tomb the Florentines had built for him in 1829, out of a tardy sense of guilt. The organisers’ notes failed to disclose the truth of the matter, however: that his body remained in Ravenna. The ornate sepulchre in the Basilica di Santa Croce, built to honour the most exalted of poets, was empty. The poet remained an exile still, almost seven hundred years after his death.

The most famous Florentine object was, however, genuine. Hidden on a podium behind a rich blue curtain, due to be unveiled by the actor playing Dante before the premiere that evening, sat a small wooden case on a plinth. Inside, carefully posed against scarlet velvet, was the death mask of Dante Alighieri, cast in 1321 shortly after his last breath. That morning, Costa had found himself staring at these ancient features for so long that Gianni Peroni had walked over and nudged him back to life with the demand for a coffee and something to eat. The image still refused to quit his head: the ascetic face of a fifty-six-year-old man, a little gaunt, with sharp cheekbones, a prominent nose, and a mouth pinched tight with such deliberation that this mask, now grey and stained with age, seemed to emphasise I will speak no more.

Costa was uneasy about such a treasure being associated with the Hollywood spectacle that had invaded this quiet, beautiful hillside park in Rome. There had been a concerted and occasionally vitriolic campaign against the project in the literary circles of Rome and beyond. Rumours of sabotage and mysterious accidents on the film set had appeared regularly in the papers. The chatter in some of the gutter press suggested the production was “cursed” because of its impudent and disrespectful pillaging of Dante’s work, an idea that had a certain appeal to the superstitious nature of many Italians. The response of Roberto Tonti had been to rush to the TV cameras denying furiously that his return to the screen was anything but an art movie produced entirely in the exalted spirit of the original.

The more sophisticated newspapers detected the hand of a clever PR campaign in all this, something the production’s publicity director, Simon Harvey, had vigorously denied. Costa had watched the last press conference only the day before and come to the conclusion that he would never quite understand the movie industry. Simon Harvey was the last man he expected to be in charge of a production costing around a hundred and fifty million dollars, a good third over budget. Amiable, engaging, with a bouncing head of fair curly hair, Harvey appeared more like a perpetual fan than someone capable of dealing with the ravenous hordes of the world media. But Costa had seen him in private moments, too, when the PR director seemed calm and quick-thinking, though prone to brief explosions of anger.

The people Costa had met and worked with over the previous few weeks were, for the most part, charming, hardworking, and dedicated, but also, above all, obsessive. Nothing much mattered for them except the job in hand, Inferno. A war could have started, a bomb might have exploded in the centre of Rome. They would never have noticed. The world flickering on the screen was theirs. Nothing else existed.

Nic Costa rather envied them.

3

An hour after they had walked out from the private showing, blinking into the summer sun, Gianni Peroni’s outrage had still not lessened. The big cop stood next to Leo Falcone and Teresa Lupo, elaborating on a heartfelt rant about the injustice of it all. The world. Life. The job. The fact they were guarding ancient wooden boxes and old letters when they ought to be out there doing what they were paid for.

More than anything, though, it was the movie that got to him. Teresa had, with her customary guile, wangled a free ticket to the event, though she had nothing to do with the security operation the state police had in place. Early in their relationship, Peroni had realised the cinema was one of Teresa’s few pet obsessions outside work. Normally he managed to pretend an interest he failed to share. Today, that was impossible.

“Roberto Tonti is a genius, Gianni,” she declared. “A strange genius, but a genius all the same.”

“Please. I’m still half deaf after all that racket. I’ve got pictures running round my head I’d really rather not have there. And you’re telling me this is art?”

“All true art is difficult,” said a young, confident male voice from behind them. They turned to see a man of about thirty in the full dress uniform of a mounted Carabinieri officer, complete with flowing cloak, shiny black boots, and a sword at his waist. “The harder it is to peel an orange, the better it will taste.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Leo Falcone replied, and extended a hand which was grasped with alacrity. The Carabiniere had materialised unbidden and in silence, presumably fleeing the noisy and, it seemed to Peroni, increasingly ill-tempered scrum by the cinema. The officer was tall, good-looking in a theatrical, too-tanned way, with rather greasy hair that looked as if it might have seen pomade. The Carabinieri often seemed a little vain, the old cop thought, then cursed himself for such a stupid generalisation.

“Bodoni,” the man announced, before turning to Teresa and Peroni to shake their hands, too. “Please. Let me fetch you another drink. There is prosecco. Is this a problem on duty? I think not. It is like water. Also I have a horse, not a car. He can lead me home if necessary.”

“No beer?” Peroni grumbled.

“I doubt it.” The officer shook his head sadly. “Let me fetch something and then we may talk a little more. There is no work to be done here, surely. Besides …” He stood up very straight, inordinately proud of himself. “… my university degree was in Dante. All that education shall be of use at last.”

He departed towards the outdoor bar, leaving Peroni speechless, mouth flapping like a goldfish.

“I love the Carabinieri,” Teresa observed, just to provoke the two men. “They dress so beautifully. Such delicate manners. They fetch you drinks when you want one. They know Dante. And he’s got one of those lovely horses somewhere, too.”

Falcone stiffened. The inspector was in his best evening suit, something grey, probably from Armani as usual. After the screening, Teresa had elbowed Peroni and pointed out that the old fox had been speaking for quite a long time to a very elegant woman from the San Francisco Police Department. This entire exhibition would move on to America once the show at the Villa Borghese was over. The Californians had a team working on liaison to make sure every last precious historical item stayed safe and intact throughout. Teresa had added — her powers of intelligence-gathering never ceased to amaze him — that Leo’s on-off relationship with Raffaella Arcangelo was now going through an extended off phase, perhaps a permanent one. A replacement girlfriend seemed to be on the old inspector’s mind.

“I studied Dante at college for a while,” Falcone noted. “And Petrarch.”

“I read Batman, when I wasn’t rolling around in the gutter with drunks and thieves,” Peroni retorted. “But then, I always did prefer the quiet intellectual life.”

Teresa planted a kiss on his damaged cheek, which felt good.

“Well said,” she announced before beaming at the newly returned Carabiniere, who now held four flutes of sparkling wine in his long, well-manicured hands.

“As a rendition of La Divina Commedia,” Bodoni began, “I find the film admirable. Tonti follows Dante’s structure to the tee. Remember …”

The man had a professorial, slightly histrionic manner and a curious accent, one that almost sounded foreign. The Carabinieri had a habit of talking down to people. Peroni gritted his teeth, tried to ignore Teresa’s infuriatingly dazzling smile, and listened.

“… this is an analogy for the passage of life itself, from cradle to grave and beyond, written in the first example we have of terza rima. A three-line stanza using the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, et cetera, et cetera.”

Peroni downed half his glass in one gulp. “I got that much from the part where the horse-snake-dragon thing chomped someone to pieces.”

Bodoni nodded. “Good. It’s in the numbers that the secret lies, and in particular the number nine. Nine was, of course, regarded as the ‘angelic’ integer, since its sole root is three, representing the Trinity, which itself bears the sole root one, representing the Divine Being Himself, the Alpha and the Omega of everything.”

“Do you ever get to arrest people? Or does the horse do it?” Peroni demanded, aware that Teresa was kicking him in the shin.

Bodoni blinked, clearly puzzled, then continued. “Nine meant everything to Dante. It appears in the context of his beloved Beatrice throughout. Nine are the spheres of Heaven. Correspondingly — since symmetry is also fundamental—”

“Nine are the circles of Hell,” Peroni interrupted. “See? I was listening. Worse than that, I was watching.” He scowled at the glass and tipped it sideways to empty the rest of the warm, flat liquid on the concrete pavement outside the Casa del Cinema. It didn’t take a genius to understand that last part. The three-hour movie was divided into nine component segments, each lasting twenty minutes and prefaced with a title announcing its content, a string of salacious and suggestive headings—“The Wanton,” “The Gluttonous,” “The Violent”—that served as insufficient warning for the grisly scene to come. “It still looked like a bad horror movie to me. Very bad.”

“As it was meant to,” Teresa suggested. “That’s Roberto Tonti’s background. You remember those films from the 1970s?”

“Anathema. Mania. Dementia,” Bodoni concurred.

“Dyspepsia? Nausea …?” Peroni asked. “Has he made those yet? Or does the rubbish we just saw have an alternative title? All that … blood and noise.”

Bodoni mumbled something unintelligible. Peroni wondered if he’d hit home.

It was Teresa who answered. “Blood and noise and death are central to art, Gianni,” she insisted. “They remind us it’s impossible to savour the sweetness of life without being reminded of the proximity, and the certainty, of death. That’s at the heart of gialli. It’s why I love them. Some of them anyway.”

Peroni hated that word. Gialli. The yellows. To begin with, the term had simply referred to the cheap crime thrillers that had come out after the war in plain primrose jackets. Usually they were detective stories and private-eye tales, often imported from America. Later the term had spread to the movies, into a series of lurid and often extraordinarily violent films that had begun to appear from the sixties on. Gory, strange, supernatural tales through which Tonti had risen to prominence. Peroni knew enough of that kind of work to understand it would never be to his own taste. It was all too extreme and, to his mind, needless.

“I hardly think anyone in our line of work needs reminding of a lesson like that,” he complained, finding his thoughts shifting to Nic, poor Nic, still lost, still wandering listless and without any inner direction two seasons after the murder of his wife.

“We all do, Gianni,” Teresa responded, “because we all, in the end, forget.” She took his arm, a glint in her pale, smart eyes telling him she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Teresa’s hand felt warm in his. He squeezed it and said, very seriously, “Give me Bambi any time.” He and Falcone had ambled to the children’s cinema earlier and seen the poster there, then Peroni had mentioned it to Nic in passing, and had noted how interested he’d seemed.

“There’s a death in Bambi,” Teresa pointed out. “Without it there’d be no story.”

He did remember, and it was important. His own daughter had been in tears in the darkness when they went to see that movie, unable to see that her father was in much the same state.

“This is an interesting work also,” the Carabinieri officer, Bodoni, interjected. The man was, it seemed to Peroni, something of a movie bore, perhaps an understandable attribute for a person who spent his working day indolently riding the pleasant green spaces of the Villa Borghese park. The state police had officers in the vicinity, too, since it was unthinkable they should not venture where the Carabinieri went. A few were mounted, though rather less ostentatiously, while others patrolled the narrow lanes in a couple of tiny Smart cars specially selected for the job. It was all show, a duty Peroni would never, in a million years, countenance. Nothing ever happened up here on the hill overlooking the city, with views all the way to the distant dome of St. Peter’s and beyond. This wasn’t a job for a real cop. It was simply ceremonial window dressing for the tourists and the city authorities.

“You can go and watch it now if you like,” Falcone said, looking as if he were tiring of the man’s presence, too. “It’s showing in the little children’s cinema. We saw the poster when we were doing the rounds.”

“So did Maggie Flavier,” Teresa added. “Charming woman, for a star, and a perfect Beatrice, too. Beautiful yet distant, unreal somehow. I spoke to her and she didn’t look down her nose at me like the rest of them. She said she was going to try and sneak in there. Anything to get away from this nonsense. Apparently there’s some hiccup in tonight’s event. Allan Prime has gone missing. They don’t know who’s going to open the exhibition. The mayor’s here. A couple of ministers. Half the glitterati in Rome. And they still can’t decide who’s going to raise the curtain.”

“That’s show business,” Falcone agreed with a sage nod of his bald, aquiline head, and a quick stroke of his silver goatee.

“That’s overtime,” Peroni corrected. “That’s …”

He stopped. There was the most extraordinary expression on Bodoni’s very tanned and artificially handsome face. It was one of utter shock and concern, as if he’d just heard the most terrible news.

“What did you say?” the officer asked.

“There’s some argument going on about the ceremony,” Teresa explained. “Allan Prime, the actor who’s supposed to give the opening speech, hasn’t turned up. They don’t know who’ll take his place. The last I heard, it was going to be Tonti himself.”

“No, no …” he responded anxiously. “About Signora Flavier. She has left the event?”

“Only to go to the children’s cinema,” Falcone replied a little testily. “It’s still within the restricted area. As far as I’m aware. Personal security is the responsibility of the Carabinieri, isn’t it?”

“We just get to guard things,” Peroni grumbled.

But it was useless. The Carabinieri official had departed, in a distinct hurry, glittering sword slapping at his thigh.

4

Costa’s eyes stayed locked on the poster for Bambi, outside the Cinema dei Piccoli. An insane idea was growing in his head: perhaps there was an opportunity to spend a little time in the place itself, wedged in one of those uncomfortable tiny seats, away from everything. Before he could find the energy to thrust it aside, a soft female voice asked, in English, “Is this a queue for the movie?”

He turned and found himself looking at a woman of about his own age and height. She was gazing back at him with curious, very bright green eyes, and seemed both interested and a little nervous. Something about her was familiar, though he was unsure what. Her chestnut hair was fashioned in a Peter Pan cut designed, with considerable forethought, to appear quite carefree. She wore a long dark blue evening dress that was revealing and low at the front, with a pearl necklace around her slender throat. Her pale face was somewhat tomboyish, though striking. Costa found himself unable to stop looking at her, then, realising the rudeness of his prolonged stare, apologised immediately.

“No problem,” she replied, laughing. Everything about her seemed too perfect: the hair, the dress, her white, white teeth, the delicate makeup and lipstick applied so precisely. “I’m used to it by now.”

The woman had “movie business” written all over her, though it took him a moment to realise that.

She returned his stare, still laughing. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?”

He closed his eyes and felt very stupid. In his mind’s eye he could see her twenty feet tall on the screen in the Casa del Cinema, wearing a flowing medieval robe, her hair long and fair and lustrous, an ethereal figure, the muse, the dead lover Dante sought in his journey through the Inferno.

“You’re Beatrice.”

The charming smile died. “Not quite,” she said. “That’s the part I played. My name is Maggie Flavier.” She waited. Nic Costa smiled blankly. “You still haven’t heard of me, have you?”

“No,” he confessed. “Except as Beatrice. Sorry.”

“Amazing.” He had no idea whether she was delighted or offended. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

Costa showed her his ID card. She merely glanced at it.

“Police,” she noted, puzzled, and nodded at a couple of distant Carabinieri on matching burnt umber mares, black capes flowing, gleaming swords by their sides. “One of them …”

“They’re Carabinieri,” he corrected her. “Military. We’re just civilians. Ordinary. Like everyone else.”

“Really?” She didn’t seem convinced by something. “The movie …”

Costa pointed to the Casa del Cinema. “The premiere is over there. This is just a little place. For children.”

She extended her arm out towards the wall and he caught a faint passing trace of some expensive scent.

“Posso leggere,” she said in easy Italian, pointing to the article about the cinema on the door, and then the poster for the cartoon, reading out a little of each to prove her boast.

“I meant this movie,” she added, now in English again. “A few minutes of peace and quiet, and a fairy tale, too.”

“I thought you were in the fairy-tale business already.”

“Lots of people think that.” She touched his arm gently, briefly. “You could join me. Two fugitives …” She nodded towards the crowd near the Casa del Cinema. “… from that circus.”

She seemed … desperate wasn’t quite the right word. But it wasn’t too far wrong. He did recognise Maggie Flavier, he realised. Or at least he could now match the image of her in life with that on the screen, in the public imagination. Maggie Flavier’s photo had been in the papers for years. She was a star, one who’d attracted a lot of publicity, not all of it good. The details eluded him. He was happy to leave it that way. The artificiality of the movie business made him uncomfortable. Being close to so many Americans, finding himself engulfed in such a tide of pretence and illusion, had affected Costa. He would have preferred something routine, something straightforward, such as simply walking the streets of Rome, looking for criminals. The seething ocean of intense emotion that was a gigantic movie production left him feeling a little stranded, a little too reflective. It was a relief to look Maggie Flavier in the eyes and see a young, attractive woman who simply wished to step outside this world for a moment, just as he did.

Costa spoke to the man in the ticket booth. His ID card did not impress. It was the presence of a famous Hollywood star that got the small wooden doors opened and the two of them ushered into the tiny dark hall where the movie was now showing to a small audience, their tiny heads reflected in the projector beam.

“Only for a little while,” he whispered into her ear as they sat down.

“Certo,” she murmured, in a passable impersonation of a gruff Roman accent, and briefly gripped his arm as she lowered herself into the small, hard seat.

He started to say, a little too loudly, “But you must be back for the …”

She glowered at him, eyes flaring with a touch of amused anger, until he fell silent and looked at the screen. Bambi was with his mother, fleeing the unseen hunters’ guns, racing through snow fields, terrified, shocked by this deadly intrusion. Finally the little fawn came to a halt, spindly legs deep in snow, suddenly aware that he was alone, and the larger, beloved figure of his mother was nowhere to be seen.

It never ceased to touch him, to break his heart to see the defenceless, fragile creature wandering the woods, lost and forlorn, in a series of lonely dissolves, searching, coming to realise with each solemn step that the quest was hopeless. This wasn’t just a movie for children. It was an allegory for life itself, the endless cycle from innocence to knowledge, birth to death, the constant search for renewal.

Perhaps this clandestine visit wasn’t such a good idea. Something about this tiny place made him feel sad and a little wretched. He glanced at the woman by his side and felt his heart rise towards his throat.

Maggie Flavier, who had seemed so quiet and self-assured when he’d met her outside the little wooden cinema, sat frozen in the tiny cinema chair, hand over her mouth, eyes glassy with tears and locked to the screen.

“I think …” Nic said, and took her hand, “… we should get out of here.”

Peroni watched the Carabiniere disappear into the crowd milling around the entrance to the Casa del Cinema. The mood there didn’t seem to be improving.

“Maybe they’ve realised people won’t like it,” Peroni mused. “Maybe there’s — how much? A hundred and fifty million dollars and some very mega reputations? — all about to go down the toilet.”

Teresa shot him a caustic look. “Stop being so bitchy. This is the biggest movie to be made at Cinecittà since Cleopatra. It won’t fail.”

“Cleopatra failed.”

“Those were different times. Roberto Tonti has a hit on his hands. You can feel it in the air.” She glanced at the crowds of evening suits and cocktail dresses gathered for the premiere. “Can’t you?”

“Possibly.” Falcone handed his untouched glass to a passing waiter. “The critics say it could be an unmitigated disaster, financially and artistically. Or a runaway success. Who cares?”

Peroni scanned the shifting crowd. Some of them cared, he thought. A lot. Then his eyes turned away from the milling crush of bodies and found the green open space of the park.

He was astonished to see a lone figure on a chestnut stallion, galloping across the expanse of verdant lawn leading away from the cinema complex. Bodoni of the Carabinieri didn’t look the fey, aesthetic intellectual he’d appeared earlier. He’d been transformed, the way an actor is when he first comes on stage.

This Bodoni looked like a soldier from another time. He charged across the dry, parched summer grass of the park of the Villa Borghese, down towards the Cinema dei Piccoli.

High in the officer’s hand was the familiar silhouette of a gun.

They sat on the wall outside the Cinema dei Piccoli.

Maggie looked a little shamefaced. “I’m sorry I went all boo-hoo. Bag of nerves, really. You’re lucky I didn’t throw up. I’m always like this at premieres. I took three months off after Inferno and it feels as if it never happened. Now I just have to do it all over again. Be someone else, somewhere else. Oh, and you dropped this in your rush to bundle me out of there …”

His battered leather wallet was in her hands, open to show the photo there. Emily, two months before she died, bright-eyed in the sun, her golden hair gleaming. It had been taken on the day they took a picnic to the gardens on the Palatine.

“No need to explain,” Costa said, glancing at the picture, then taking it gently from her. “I don’t know why films do that. It’s not as if they’re real.”

Her green eyes flashed at him. “Define ‘real.’ Bambi’s a bitch. Disney knew how to twist your emotions. It’s a scary talent, real enough for me.” She stared at the grass at their feet. “They all have it.”

“Who?”

“Movies and the people who make them. We exist to screw around with your heads. To do things you’d like to do yourself but lack the courage. Or the common sense. It’s a small gift but a rare one, thank God. Beats waiting on tables, though.” She hesitated. “Your wife’s lovely.”

“Yes,” he replied automatically. “She was.”

He was distracted, watching what was coming their way from the gathering by the cinema complex, trying to make sense of this strange, unexpected sight. He knew what the park Carabinieri were like. They were indolent toy soldiers. Usually.

The woman with the Peter Pan haircut who sat next to him looked like a child who’d been placed inside her shimmering blue evening dress on someone’s orders, someone who’d created her for a ceremony, or another hidden purpose. She held a damp tissue in her pale slender fingers. Her makeup had run a little from the tears.

“Did something happen back there?” he said, and nodded in the direction of the gathering. “At the premiere?”

He could hear the distant clatter of hooves as the horse galloped towards them with a strange, stiff figure on its back. Maggie Flavier squinted into the sunlight and replied, “I don’t think so. Although Allan Prime hadn’t shown up to make his speech, for some reason. That’s unusual. Allan’s normally completely reliable.” She registered the movement ahead of them, and narrowed her eyes further.

Costa stood up and said, “Go inside, please. Now.”

“Why?”

He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like the sight of a Carabiniere in full dress uniform storming madly across this normally peaceful park in their direction.

The rider was getting closer. Maggie rose to stand next to Nic. Her arm went immediately through his, out of fear or some need for closeness, he was unsure which. Briefly, Costa wanted to laugh. There was something so theatrical about this woman, as if the entire world were a drama and she one more member of the cast.

“Let me deal with it,” Costa insisted, and took one step forward so that he was in front of her, confronting the racing horse that now made a sound like an insistent drumroll, or the rattle of some strange weapon, as it flew closer. The man’s insane dash across the green grass of the Villa Borghese seemed to have only one point of focus, and it was them.

The officer pointed his weapon in the air and fired. From somewhere nearby a dog began to bark maniacally.

As Costa watched, the uniformed man leaned forward in the saddle, as if preparing for one final assault.

Nic felt as if he’d walked unbidden onto some movie set, one with a script he couldn’t begin to fathom. The Carabiniere was in a crouch, racing furiously to close the distance that separated them. The sight reminded Costa of some old movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade maybe. Something that began as a show of bravado and ended in a shocking, unforeseen tide of bloodshed.

“Who the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

“Here’s an idea. Let’s not find out.”

He grabbed her slender arm, both tugging and pushing her towards the closed wooden door of the tiny cinema. Seconds later, there was a thunderstorm of desperate hooves behind them and the rhythmic beat of the animal’s angry snorts. He shoved the American inside, protesting still.

“Don’t cops here carry guns?” she demanded, squirming out of his arms as he pushed and kicked a way in, opening up the black interior in which the movie still flickered over a handful of small heads.

“To go to the cinema?” Costa asked, bewildered. “Please …”

“Maggie! Maggie!”

The Carabiniere was screaming for her as he fought to control the horse. Costa had seen enough cowboy films to know what came next. He’d dismount. He’d come for them.

“Who is this guy?” she pleaded, struggling against him.

“Your biggest fan?” Costa wondered, before he snarled at the attendant to call for the police.

Of course he didn’t carry a gun, Costa thought. Or even a radio. They were there for what was supposed to be a pleasant social event, and to watch lazily as someone unveiled a seven-hundred-year-old death mask. Not to encounter some crazed Carabiniere who rode like John Wayne, and seemed able to handle a weapon just as efficiently.

There was a fire exit sign on the far side. He found the light switches and turned the black interior of the cinema into a sea of yellow illumination. No more than seven kids sat in the tiny seats in front of him, each turning to blink at him resentfully.

“Go out the other side,” Costa yelled at them.

No one moved.

“Bambi’s not finished,” objected a small boy with a head of black choirboy hair. He could have been no more than five or six and didn’t look as if anything would move him.

Maggie Flavier was strong. She fought as Costa dragged her over to the projection room, a place he’d visited once, when he was a child, in the company of his father. Then he kicked open the little wooden door, saw there was no one inside, and thrust her into the cubicle, ordering her to keep quiet, then shutting the door to keep her from view.

When he turned, he found daylight streaming through the entrance again. The Carabiniere walked in, the black gun in his right hand, held at an angle, ready for use.

Costa stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

“There are children here, Officer,” he said calmly. “What do you want?”

“I’m not an officer, you idiot,” the man in the uniform said without emotion. “Where is she?”

“Put down the gun. Then we talk.”

“I don’t wanna talk.”

His accent was odd. Roman, yet foreign, too, as if he came from somewhere else.

“Put down—”

The man moved swiftly, with an athlete’s speed and determination. In an instant the Carabiniere had snatched the small complaining child from the nearest seat, wrapped his arm round the boy’s chest, and thrust the weapon’s blunt nose tight against his temple. The young eyes beneath the choirboy cut filled with tears and a fearful astonishment.

“Where is she?”

Costa thought he heard voices outside. The cinema attendant must have got someone’s attention. What that meant when this lunatic had a child in his grip …

“Let go of the child—” he began.

“I’m here,” Maggie Flavier said, opening the door of the projection room. “What do you want?”

She stood silhouetted in the cubicle entrance, something trailing from her left hand, something Costa couldn’t quite see.

The figure in the uniform twisted to look in her direction. He didn’t relax his hold on the child for a moment.

“I want you,” he replied, as if the question were idiotic. “Doesn’t everyone? I want—”

Perhaps it was an actor’s talent, but somehow Costa knew she was about to do something.

“To hell with everyone,” Maggie Flavier declared, and tugged on whatever she held in her fingers.

It was film. Costa could hear noises coming from the projection room, frames of movie rattling, jamming, trapped and tangled inside the machine that gave them life. The showing of Bambi had somehow frozen on a single frame. She must have done that. She had to be in control.

Maggie Flavier yanked hard on the snaking trail of celluloid and something snapped, came free.

The Carabiniere stared at her, curious, angry, uncertain what to do next.

Bright, piercing white light, as brilliant as a painter’s vision of Heaven, spilled into the room as the film fell free in the projector gate.

The boy in the uniformed man’s arms squirmed and shrieked. The Carabiniere swore, a foul English curse, and tried to shield his eyes. Costa, careful to keep his eyes from the projector’s beam, struck a heavy, hard blow into the man’s stomach, unable, he knew, to reach the weapon, yet intent, still, on getting the child free. He punched again. There was a cry of pain and fury. His left hand closed on the child’s back, his right struggled to pull the hostage free.

Then something else intervened. A large silver circular shape flashed across his vision and dashed against the Carabiniere’s head. Maggie Flavier had a film can and she was using it, along with some pretty colorful language, too.

The weapon turned toward Costa’s chest. The barrel barked, the black shape jumped in the man’s hand.

The woman struck again, hard, with such force the firearm fell back, still in their attacker’s grip. The boy wriggled free and fled the moment his small feet touched the floor. Costa closed in, seized the man’s forearm, forced it back hard, sending the weapon upwards into one of the hot overhead lights in the low wooden ceiling.

There was another scream. Pain. Heat on skin. The handgun tumbled to the floor. The Carabiniere turned and stumbled out of Costa’s grip, was free again, was scrabbling, half crouching, towards the gun, too close to it for anyone to intervene.

“Run!” Costa ordered, unable to understand why he was still standing, why he could feel no pain.

She didn’t move.

“No. Are you hurt?”

“Run!”

“I don’t need to. Can’t you see?”

He could, and he didn’t understand how he knew she was correct, but she was. The individual in the Carabinieri uniform, now stained with dirt and dust from the floor of the Cinema dei Piccoli, wouldn’t come back to them. It was written in his defeated, puzzled, enraged face. As if his part was over.

“Drop your weapon,” Costa barked. “Drop your weapon now.”

It was useless. The man retrieved the gun, then laughed and half fell, half ran out the door, out into a warm golden Roman evening.

Maggie Flavier started to follow. Costa put out a hand to prevent her.

“That was a mistake,” he said.

He knew what happened when wild men flailed around with weapons in public, particularly in a protected, special place, full of officers determined to guard those in their care.

From beyond the door of the tiny wooden cinema came voices, loud and furious, shouts and cries, bellowed orders, all the words he dreaded to hear since he knew what they might mean, because he’d been through this kind of tense, standoff situation in training, and knew how easily it could go wrong.

“What’s happening?” the American woman asked, and started to brush past him.

“No!” Costa commanded, with more certainty than he’d used in many a long month.

He stepped in front of her and stared into the woman’s foreign yet familiar face.

“You never walk towards the line of fire,” Costa said, his finger in front of her face, like a teacher determined to deliver a lesson that had to be learned. “Never …”

He was shocked to see that, for the first time, there seemed to be a hint of real fear in her face, and to know that he was the cause, not the madman who had attacked them for no apparent reason.

Outside, the shouting ended and the staccato sound of gunfire began.

5

They heard it from the Casa del Cinema. The volley of pistol shots sounded so loud and insistent it sent every grey, excitable pigeon in the park fleeing into the radiant evening sky.

“Nic’s there somewhere,” Peroni said instantly, alarmed.

Falcone’s and Teresa’s eyes were on the podium. Peroni couldn’t believe their attention was anywhere but the source of that awful, familiar sound.

“It’s the Carabinieri’s job,” Falcone answered. “Nic can take care of himself.”

“To hell with the Carabinieri! I’m—”

Peroni fell silent. The dark blue uniforms of their rivals seemed to be everywhere. Officers were shouting, yelling into radios, looking panicked.

On the podium Roberto Tonti, with a gaggle of puzzled, half-frightened politicians and minor actors around him, was droning on about the movie and its importance, about Dante and a poet’s vision of Hell, all as if he’d never noticed a thing. The tall, stooped director looked every inch of his seventy years. His head of grey swept-back hair seemed the creation of a makeup department. His skin was bloodless and pale, his cheeks hollow, his entire demeanour gaunt. Peroni knew the rumours; that the man was desperately sick. Perhaps this explained Tonti’s obsessive need to continue with the seemingly interminable speech as the commotion swirled around them.

“… for nine is the angelic number,” Tonti droned on, echoing the words of the strange Carabiniere they’d met earlier. “This you shall see in the work, in its structure, in its division of the episodes of life. I give you …”

The movie director tugged on the braided rope by the side of the curtain. The velvet opened.

“… the creator. The source. The fountainhead.”

The casket came into full view. Peroni blinked to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Someone in the crowd released a short, pained cry. The woman next to him, some half-familiar Roman model from the magazines, elegant in a silk gown and jewels, raised her gloved fingers to her lips, her mouth open, her eyes wide with shock.

The Carabinieri became frantic. They didn’t know where to look — towards the children’s cinema and the sound of shooting, or at the platform, where Tonti was now walking stiffly away from the thing he had revealed, an expression of utter distaste on his cold, sallow face, as if he resented the obvious fact that it had somehow stolen his thunder.

Falcone was pushing his way through the crowd, elbowing past black-suited men with pale faces and shrieking female guests.

Teresa, predictably, was right on his heels.

“Oh well,” Peroni grumbled, and followed right behind, forcing his big, bulky body through the sea of silk and fine dark jackets, apologising as he went.

By the time he reached the small stage outside the entrance to the Casa del Cinema, the area around the exhibit case was empty save for Falcone and the pathologist who stood on either side of the cabinet staring at what lay within, bloody and shocking behind the smeared glass. Peroni felt somewhat proud of himself. There’d been a time when all this would have made him feel a little sick.

He studied the object. It appeared to be a severed head covered in some kind of thin blue plastic, which had been slashed to allow the eyes and mouth to be visible. The material enclosing most of what stood in place of Dante’s death mask was pulled painfully tight — so much so that it was easy to see the features of the face that lay beneath. It was an image that had been everywhere in Rome for weeks, that of Allan Prime. This was the face of the new Dante, visible on all the posters, all the promotional material that had appeared on walls and billboards, subway trains and buses. Now it had replaced the death mask of the poet himself. Sealed inside the case by reams of ugly black duct tape, it was some kind of cruel, ironic statement, Peroni guessed. Close up, it also looked not quite real — if the word could be applied to such a situation.

Two senior Carabinieri officers materialised at Falcone’s side. He ignored them.

“This is ours,” the older one declared. “We’re responsible for the safety of the cast.”

Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose in surprise. He didn’t say a thing.

“Don’t get fresh with me,” the officer went on, instantly irate. “You were supposed to be looking after the mask.”

Peroni shrugged and observed, “One lost piece of clay. One dead famous actor. Do you want to swap?”

“It’s ours!”

“What’s yours?” Teresa asked. “A practical joke?”

Slyly, without any of the men noticing, she had stolen the short black truncheon from the junior Carabiniere’s belt. She now held it in her right hand and was quietly aiming a blow at the blood-smeared glass.

“Touch the evidence and I will have your job,” the senior Carabiniere said, more than a little fearful.

“And I’ll have yours,” Falcone added.

“This is evidence, gentlemen,” Teresa replied. “But not of the kind you think.” She looked at each of them and smiled. “We’re in the movie business now, remember? Do the words ‘special effects’ mean anything at all?”

The short baton slammed into the top of the glass cabinet. Teresa raked it round and round. When she had enough room to manoeuvre, she reached in and, to the curses of both Falcone and his Carabinieri counterparts, carefully lifted out the head and held it in her hands, turning the thing round, making approving noises.

Teresa ran one large pale finger along the ragged line of blood and tissue at the base and then, to Peroni’s horror, put the gory tip to her mouth and licked it.

“Food colouring,” she said. “Fake blood. It’s the wrong shade. Didn’t you notice? Movie blood always is. Flesh and skin … it’s all a joke.” The tissue at the ragged torn neckline came away in her fingers: cotton wool stained a livid red, stuck weakly to the base of the head with glue.

Her fingers picked at the blue latex cladding around the base of the neck and revealed perfect skin beneath, the colour and complexion of that of a store window dummy. Peroni laughed. He’d known something was wrong.

“But why?” she asked, puzzled, talking entirely to herself.

She turned the head again in her hands, looked into the bulbous eyes staring out of the slits made in the blue plastic. They were clearly artificial, not human at all. It was all legerdemain, and obvious once you learned how to look.

Then Teresa Lupo gazed more closely into the face and her dark, full eyebrows creased in bafflement. She pulled back the blue plastic around the lips to reveal a mouth set in an expression of pain and bewilderment. More plastic came away as she tore at the tight, enclosing film to show the face. There was a mask there. It had been crudely fastened to a store dummy’s head to give it form. She removed sufficient film to allow her to lift the object beneath from the base. Then she held it up and rotated the thing in her fingers.

“Hair,” she said, nodding at the underside. “Whiskers.” Her fingers indicated a small stain on the interior, near the chin. “And that’s real blood.”

She glanced at Falcone. “This is from a man, Leo,” Teresa Lupo insisted. “Allan Prime.”

The inspector stood there, a finger to his lips, thinking. The Carabinieri couple said nothing. More of their officers were pushing back the crowd now. Peroni could hear the whine of an ambulance siren working its way to the park.

Teresa placed the mask on the podium table and rotated the pale dummy’s head in her hands, ripping back the remaining covering.

“There’s something else,” she murmured.

The words emerged as she tore off the blue film. They were written in a flowing, artistic script across the top of the skull. It reminded Peroni of the huckster’s props they found when they raided fake clairvoyants taking the gullible to the cleaners. They had objects like this, with each portion of the head marked out for its metaphysical leanings. In this case the message covered everything, from ear to ear, as if there were only a single lesson to be absorbed.

“ ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,’ ” Teresa said, as if reciting from memory. “ ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ ” She shook her head. “Damnation in the mind of a poet. That’s what was written on the Gate of Hell when Dante entered.”

A noise made Peroni glance back at the crowd. Costa was striding toward them, looking pale but determined, a gun hanging loose in his hand. By his side was the actress from the movie, her eyes downcast and glassy.

Costa nodded at the dummy’s head in Teresa Lupo’s hands, and asked, “What happened?”

The pathologist told him before Falcone could object.

“And you?” Falcone demanded.

Maggie Flavier was staring at the mask, shocked, silent, her cheeks smeared with smudged mascara.

Costa glanced at her before he answered. Then he said, “It seemed as if someone was trying to attack Miss Flavier. Then …”

The senior Carabinieri man found his voice.

“This is our case. Our evidence. I have made a phone call to maresciallo Quattrocchi, Falcone. He was called away briefly. Now he returns. You learn. This cannot—”

He fell abruptly silent as Costa lifted the handgun, pointed it at the fake head, and fired. The sound silenced them all. Maggie stifled a choking sob. There was nothing new there when the smoke and the racket had cleared. No damage. Not another fresh shard of shattered glass.

“Blanks,” Costa told the man. “This was his gun. I took it from his corpse while your men danced around it like schoolgirls. They’ve just shot dead a defenceless man who was taking part in some kind of a sick prank. Why not go investigate that?”

“Th-this …” the officer stuttered.

“Enough,” Falcone interjected, and glanced at Costa. “Assemble a team, Soverintendente. Subito.”

Teresa was already on the phone, and standing guard over the objects on the podium table.

“Where does Allan Prime live?” Falcone asked.

The officer said nothing.

“I know,” Maggie Flavier said. “Do you think …?”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“You can tell us on the way,” Falcone said, then called for a car.