Dante's Numbers

1

Nine days later they found themselves surrounded by a sea of storage boxes fighting for space inside a gigantic tent by the lake in front of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Home had become a small, two-storey rented house a short walk away. It was in the oddly named district of Cow Hollow, on a quiet corner on Greenwich Street, just a few blocks away from the police station of which Catherine Bianchi was captain, head of a dwindling team, slowly running down for the unit’s eventual closure at the end of the month.

Hundreds of chests and cases had been shipped by air from Italy over the preceding week. Item after item was being patiently lined up on serried lines of tables under the scrutiny of U.S. police, private security guards, and Leo Falcone, who was clearly torn between a duty he found tedious and a desire to impress the amiable but apparently unyielding Captain Bianchi.

There was, in Peroni’s words, an awful lot of stuff to unpack. Paintings, sketches, cartoons, letters, manuscripts, reviews, personal artefacts, mostly genuine, many of considerable value. Costa was, by now, used to the painstaking cycle of work that went into assembling any moving exhibition. He had worked several in his career. Each was different. This, set in a different country, to be housed in tents during the day, guarded at night in secure warehouses nearby, was more unusual than most.

“I’ll say one thing for you lot,” Teresa declared, watching Peroni hover over a set of eighteenth-century Florentine ceramics being unpacked by a pretty young woman from the museum in Milan. “You certainly know how to treat a woman. I blew almost two thousand euros getting myself here. And what happens when I arrive? You spend days unpacking all this junk at the speed of a maiden aunt. And as for him …” She nodded at Peroni, who was still, in spite of the weather, dressed in thin summer slacks and a polo shirt, though the temperature was distinctly nippy, even in the tent. “There ought to be a law against some people being allowed out of the country.”

“Your liberal tendencies are slipping.”

“I’m bored, Nic. And this is a very long way to come for that.”

She had a point. Gianluca Quattrocchi had swiftly seized control of all the key aspects of the investigation into Allan Prime’s murder, sharing what information he had only with the senior San Francisco Police Department homicide team that had been brought into the case. The local force had a direct interest: Prime had owned a home in the city, a palatial house in Pacific Heights, part of a small community of Hollywood professionals who preferred the bohemian atmosphere of northern California to the frenetic commercialism of Los Angeles. Maggie Flavier was a long-term resident, too, with an apartment in Nob Hill. Roberto Tonti lived in a grand white-painted mansion in the Marina, opposite the Palace of Fine Arts, where his film would now receive its world premiere. Inferno, it seemed, was a local, almost family, affair.

Falcone and his team had become outsiders in a crime which, in some ways, they had witnessed. Briefly interviewed by Quattrocchi’s surly plainclothes Carabinieri officers, they’d been left to take responsibility for the tasks they had originally been handed in Rome. This was strictly confined to ensuring the security of the remaining historic items for the Dante exhibition.

Costa was determined not to allow this to get under his skin. This was his first visit to America. San Francisco was a city of delights. The mundane work they had been left by Quattrocchi’s team was both straightforward and easily managed. Not that any of them felt entirely relaxed about the coming round of public events.

“You bore too easily,” he told Teresa. “There are at least ten items in this exhibition equivalent in value to that missing death mask. If we lose one more, Leo could be looking for another job.”

The inspector was with Catherine Bianchi again, finger on chin, listening to her as if she were the only person in the world.

“Try telling him that. Leo’s mind is elsewhere, not that it’s doing him any good. The man needs a case. A real one, not babysitting antiques. There’s a murder investigation here. It should be ours. Not that idiot Quattrocchi’s.”

Costa was inclined to agree. With the assistance of officers in the centro storico Questura, he had pieced together more information about Peter Jamieson, the bit-part actor who had seemingly attacked Maggie Flavier and died because of it. While the Carabinieri busily briefed the media and gathered together Dante experts and criminal profilers, Costa’s men had patiently tracked Jamieson’s movements the day he died. They could place him at a rehearsal for a play at the Teatro Agorà in Trastevere only forty-five minutes before he appeared outside the Casa del Cinema. Jamieson was a skilled horseman, and had performed stunts when acting work was hard to find. The uniform he wore when he rode at them outside the Cinema dei Piccoli was stolen from the Teatro Agorà, as was the stage gun loaded with blanks that had brought about his end. CCTV clearly showed him travelling by bus and tram directly from Trastevere to the Villa Borghese park shortly before the strange interlude that led to his death, in uniform and with no obvious possessions. It was inconceivable that he could have found the time to replace the real Dante mask with the fake one. Even if he had, someone else must have taken the genuine object away. The entire park area had been searched and no trace of the original found.

There the information ran out. Jamieson lived alone in an inexpensive apartment not far from Cinecittà, had few possessions and even fewer friends. There was nothing on his computer or mobile phone to indicate an e-mail correspondence with anyone inside Inferno, apart from his minor role as an extra. His agent described him as a strange, melodramatic individual prone to fantasies and deeply in debt. In other circumstances, the police would have assumed that he’d been acting alone. Only one unusual fact stood out: the day before he died, twenty thousand dollars had been deposited into his bank account through an Internet money wire service which hid the identity of the sender. Peter Jamieson, it seemed, had been hired for a single expensive performance, one he doubtless knew would cause trouble with the police. The money — perhaps a down payment on some promised balance — seemingly made it worthwhile. Had he behaved less rashly and dropped the gun in the children’s cinema, he would simply have been apprehended as a troublesome gate-crasher and probably released with a simple caution or a minor fine for public nuisance.

It seemed clear to Costa that only someone inside the exhibition or movie production teams could have exchanged the masks. Someone directly involved in the dreadful fate meted out to Allan Prime, given the verse scribbled on the dummy’s head and its link with the message on the floor of Farnesina. These facts, however, appeared to be of little interest to Gianluca Quattrocchi when Costa raised them after the much-delayed interviews he and Maggie gave to the Carabinieri shortly before flying to California. They were merely awkward, minor details in a larger conspiracy.

Costa’s second anxiety was more personal. Maggie Flavier had abruptly shaken off the attempts of the Carabinieri to dog her footsteps, and seemed very good at doing the same with the exasperated officer from Catherine Bianchi’s station who had been assigned to take care of her security here in San Francisco. She had also developed a habit of finding Costa, sometimes when he least expected it, rapidly discovering the address of the house on Greenwich Street and knocking on the door to invite him for a coffee or lunch, keen to talk of anything and everything except the movie business and the continuing furor around Inferno.

He was flattered. He was amused.

The large form of Gianni Peroni, Falcone and Catherine Bianchi at his side, brought him back down to earth.

“Are you two going to do anything?” Peroni wondered.

“I’m on holiday,” Teresa protested. “Also, apart from you, I try to stay away from old, dusty things.”

“Thanks. Soverintendente?”

“I was thinking.”

“About what?” Peroni asked.

“About the fact there’s not a lot more we can do here.”

Costa had spent two days going over the CCTV surveillance systems and the various alarm arrangements for both the exhibition and the storage areas. They were among the most thorough and technologically advanced he’d ever seen. There was so much in the way of surveillance hardware in the vicinity, he half wondered whether human beings were really needed.

Teresa looked Peroni up and down. He wasn’t shivering, quite.

“Why on earth are you wearing those flimsy clothes?”

“It’s California, isn’t it?” he complained. “In July.”

“ ‘The coldest winter I ever spent—’ ” Catherine Bianchi began.

“ ‘—was a summer in San Francisco,’ ” Peroni interrupted. “Mark Twain. If someone paid me every time I’ve heard that since we arrived …”

“Sorry,” she apologised.

“No problem. It’s a myth anyway.”

The American policewoman laughed. Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was in plainclothes, a dark blue jacket beneath an overcoat most Romans would have chosen for autumn. Her long hennaed hair was loose around her face. With her bright eyes and dark, constantly engaged features, she appeared more relaxed, more certain of herself, than she had seemed in Italy. A fitting match for the elegant, upright Roman inspector, with his tanned, gaunt face and silver goatee, and love for expensive clothes. A fitting match in Falcone’s mind at least.

“It’s not a myth, Gianni. I grew up in San Francisco. This is what summer’s like. You should come back in September.” Catherine glanced at his polo shirt. “Then you’d be dressed for the weather.”

“I wasn’t talking about the weather. I was talking about Mark Twain.”

They all looked at him. Everyone seemed to throw this quote at visitors the moment the subject of the climate came up.

“It’s a myth,” Peroni insisted. “Twain never really said that. I looked it up. I Googled it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do out here?”

“You’re kidding me.” Catherine Bianchi looked astonished.

“A myth people take for granted,” Peroni added. “Like killing people over poetry, perhaps.” He stared at Falcone. “So are you going to tell us, Leo? Or do we just pretend to be museum guards for the duration in the hope that some miraculous revelation will put us back in charge? Or even help us find that stupid death mask?”

Falcone bristled. “The mask of a legend like Dante Alighieri is anything but stupid.”

“Don’t be so pompous,” Teresa scolded him. “It’s a piece of clay depicting a man who died seven centuries ago. You’re chasing moonbeams if you think you’re going to get it back, and you know it. There’s a market for art that can’t be sold in public. It’s a black hole. They disappear down it, and unless we recover them very quickly, the odds are they will never reappear again, not in our lifetime.” She stared hard at him. “We’re not really here for that, are we, Leo?”

“I suspect we won’t see the mask again,” he agreed.

“Here’s something else,” she added. “The Carabinieri’s fantasies. Is it possible some bunch of nutcases will travel the world going to great lengths to murder a well-known actor simply out of revenge for a movie they despise?”

Catherine Bianchi said, “This is California. I’ve known people to kill someone over a can of Bud and a hot dog.”

“That makes more sense, doesn’t it?” Teresa responded. “It’s instant fury, not premeditated murder. Human emotions like that are real. Poetry. History. Art. Much as I love them … they’re not. Not in the same way. Quattrocchi has his reasons for showboating like this. He likes the movie business. It’s glamorous. These people flatter him. Also these fairy tales deflect attention from the pathetic way he handled the case in Rome. But as an answer …” She shrugged.

“So where do you look?”

“This is a project with more than a hundred and fifty million dollars floating around inside it,” Costa said. “At least some of which seems to have come from criminal sources.”

“That is a distinct possibility,” Falcone concurred. “But I would be grateful if we didn’t trouble Quattrocchi and his men with this thought. They’re busy enough already. When we meet …” He glanced at his watch. “… and we must be going soon, we’re there to listen and nothing else. Catherine? Agreed?”

“I’m an officer of the SFPD,” she answered, astonished. “Not one of you.”

“Of course you’re one of us!” Falcone insisted with heat. “Think of it. You’re snubbed by those men from downtown, since they regard a homicide as above you. Your station will close at the end of the month out of … what?”

“Centralisation,” she hissed. “Rationalisation. Putting good officers behind desks downtown, in front of computers, instead of out on the street where they’re supposed to be.”

Peroni chuckled and muttered, “We are in the same business.”

Falcone pointed at Costa and told him to stay with the exhibition. From the look on his face, it was clear there was no point in objecting.

“I don’t want anything else disappearing,” the inspector insisted. “There are thirteen incunabula, a good number of rare books, and what’s supposedly the finest copy of the original manuscript of the work in existence, from Mumbai of all places. The Indians will have our hide if that goes. Make sure it doesn’t happen, Nic.”

“And me?” Teresa wondered.

“How you spend your holiday is your business. If you happen to be passing a store, could you kindly buy some decent coffee? That stuff in the house is disgusting.”

She took a deep breath and glared at him. “So what am I supposed to do with my brain? I was on holiday when we were in Venice, if you remember …”

“Venice was a different place.”

“Damned right. I saved your life there.”

“Grazie mille,” Falcone said nonchalantly. “We must get this out of the way because I don’t wish to keep repeating it. You are here of your own volition, on your own time. You’re a pathologist. We’re not investigating a murder. Nor will we ever be allowed the opportunity. It’s hard enough for me to argue a way in to eavesdrop on the investigation. I cannot do that for you. I won’t waste my breath trying.”

A chill wind engulfed them at that moment, and it wasn’t simply the lively sea breeze gusting in from the nearby shoreline.

The Palace of Fine Arts was a beautiful, quiet spot. Not what Costa had expected of the city of San Francisco, any more than was Cow Hollow, the small district neighbouring the Marina and the houses of the rich and famous, Roberto Tonti among them. They had landed in a quiet, genteel oasis of affluence tacked to the side of the larger grey urban metropolis from which the Carabinieri team and the local officers Catherine Bianchi simply referred to as “downtown” were running the investigation. And keeping their cards very close to their besuited chests.

2

To Gianni Peroni’s mildly jaundiced eye it seemed as if Maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi and Captain Gerald Kelly, his counterpart in the SFPD Homicide Detail, might have been made from the same mould, one customarily used to turn out military action figures for reclusive adolescent boys. Both men were of similar age — late forties — similar heavy build, and possessed the same kind of sullen, heavy, clean-shaven face, that of a boxer or field sergeant perhaps, or some burly priest with a taste for communion wine. Now both sat with their respective teams, three officers each, all male, behind facing tables in the largest room the modest Greenwich Street Police Station could offer, which wasn’t very large at all. But at least the American threw Quattrocchi the occasional doubtful look from time to time when the Carabinieri man’s language got a little too over the top. There might be hope there, Peroni thought. If only they had the chance to speak frankly …

Falcone, Peroni, and Catherine Bianchi were perched on the end like bystanders. It was chilly outside but this overcrowded chamber at the rear of the little station was stifling and beginning to fill with the musky odour of men in business clothes. Peroni wondered, briefly, how much of his life had been passed in meetings, and atmospheres, such as this, then reminded himself that for once there was a variation from the norm.

Quattrocchi had found himself an expert. Or rather the expert, if the Carabinieri were to be believed. Professor Bryan Whitcombe had flown from Toronto, where he divided his time between teaching Dante and writing about the man and his work, to join the team Quattrocchi and Kelly had assembled inside the Hall of Justice. The purpose, Quattrocchi had let it be known in a fulsome round of newspaper and television interviews, was to gain precious insight into the mentality and intent of the Dante-fixated murderers of Allan Prime, killers who might now be stalking remaining members of the Inferno cast and crew right here in San Francisco. The media, naturally, loved this story, and had come to adore the handsomely uniformed, English-speaking Carabinieri maresciallo, a man who seemed like an actor himself and was only too happy to play up for the cameras on any occasion.

Peroni and the others had watched Quattrocchi introduce Bryan Whitcombe on the TV the previous night. The man was thirty-five, according to his personal web site, though his manner spoke of someone much older. He was extremely short and slender, bird-like in appearance, with darting, expressive hands and a pinched, pale academic’s face half hidden by enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. His curly dark brown hair seemed to shoot straight out of his scalp in any direction it fancied, in the manner of a 1970s rock musician. Whitcombe clearly enjoyed the attention and the cameras as much as his Italian patron, frequently stuttering off into academic dissertations, often peppered with obscure quotes in medieval Florentine, and never tiring of dealing with the most basic and idiotic of questions.

“He wants his own show,” Teresa had observed perceptively. The professor also seemed extremely well informed about the case, given that he’d only been in San Francisco a day. The TV reported that the Dante expert had been following the story since the dreadful night of Prime’s death in Rome, and had been taken onto the team after the Carabinieri had identified him as one of the world’s leading authorities on the interpretation of The Divine Comedy.

Falcone had cleared his throat at that point and revealed something the TV station hadn’t. Thanks to Catherine Bianchi, the inspector knew Whitcombe had approached Quattrocchi personally to offer his assistance after seeing the Carabinieri officer on CNN the morning following Prime’s murder.

“Toronto is six hours behind Rome,” Falcone added. “He must watch television in the early hours.”

Seeing Whitcombe in the flesh now, Peroni didn’t doubt it. The little man had the nervous energy of a squirrel.

Gianluca Quattrocchi made the nature of the meeting clear from the outset.

“You’re here to listen,” he told Falcone and Peroni as they arrived. “Not talk. I have a duty to share with you any information I feel may enable you to carry out your guard duties professionally. Nothing more. This is an ongoing murder investigation. The less chatter, the better. Professor?”

Whitcombe nodded as if in approval and added, in an oddly nasal accent that was not quite English and not quite American, “I have examined the notes and they support the thesis that these people are intelligent, informed, and knowledgeable in their subject. They know Dante—”

“These people?” Peroni interrupted. “I know you think the man shot dead in the park was one of them. What makes you think there were ever more than two, one of them dead?”

“Because I am assuming we’re dealing with normal human beings,” Quattrocchi said with a sigh. “Not Superman. Now will you kindly sit and listen without interrupting?”

Peroni shrugged and caught Falcone’s eye. Catherine Bianchi scratched her ear and smiled down at the table.

“These people,” Whitcombe emphasised, “clearly know and appreciate the subject matter. They understand this is a cycle, with form, direction, and purpose. I must assure you my opinion is this: they will regard their work as only begun, not even half finished. There are nine circles of Hell, and their notes indicate only two have passed.…”

Falcone raised a finger. “I’m sorry. This is my first and last question. Why would anyone kill another human being over a movie, even some so-called blockbuster that half the world seems to be panting to see? What does it matter?”

Quattrocchi began swearing again. The academic bristled, then adjusted his glasses.

“No, no, please,” Whitcombe continued. “Let me handle this.” He fixed Falcone with a glare, one Peroni found more daunting than he might have expected. “If I were the killing kind, Ispettore, I would murder over this. With as much brutality as I could muster. It’s blasphemy.”

“Not according to any dictionary I know,” Peroni objected. “If Roberto Tonti is insulting anything — and he’s adamant he’s not — it’s some ancient piece of poetry. Not the Church.”

“For anyone who admires Dante,” Whitcombe emphasised, “this is blasphemy. I sat through that drivel a week ago. They flew a group of experts to London hoping we would gild their vile nonsense with praise.” His small fist thumped the table. “Not a man or woman among us would say anything but the truth. It’s rubbish. Like defacing the Sistine Chapel.” He turned and glanced at Kelly and his men. “Or painting the Golden Gate Bridge black.”

“Neither of which is worth killing for either,” Peroni observed mildly.

Catherine Bianchi’s light fingers caught his arm, and he found himself looking into her bright, attractive face.

“Remember what I said, Gianni. This is America. A Bud and a hot dog. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

“Let’s get to the point,” Kelly cut in brusquely. “This is all we have. If it’s not some lunatics offended by what’s up there on the screen, what else could it be?”

Falcone frowned at Peroni, who was about to open his mouth.

“In the absence of any better suggestions,” Kelly continued, “we’ve got to run with what we have, and for the life of me this does sound convincing. I watched that movie. The thing’s creepy and obsessive. Just the kind of crap that can push the buttons of any number of screwballs out there.”

“Someone hijacked that computer system,” Falcone suggested. “Someone made Allan Prime’s death an international event. That’s evidence, isn’t it? Not poetry.”

One of Kelly’s men leaned forward and said, “It’s evidence that confirms there’s probably a link in this geographical area, sir. Nothing more. They didn’t hijack Lukatmi, by the way. They simply hacked into the DNS servers so that particular stream got pointed to some place they were hosting it in Russia, not that we’ll ever discover much from them.”

Peroni felt his head start to thrum. “How many people could pull off that kind of trick?” he asked. “Surely it’s got to be someone from the company? Or someone Lukatmi fired?”

The men from Bryant Street looked at one another as if these were the most idiotic questions they’d ever heard.

“This is San Francisco,” Gerald Kelly said with a shrug of his big shoulders. He looked a little apologetic. “Ninety percent of the world’s geek population lives between here and San Jose. These people don’t breed or have girlfriends. Their principal romantic relationship is with their iPhone. They barely eat or talk. They spend their time frigging around with their little laptops, earning a living one moment and destroying someone else’s the next. Any big-name start-up like Lukatmi gets hackers going for its throat the moment someone picks up the Wall Street Journal and reads they’ve got seed capital. It’s part of the game.” He stared hard at Peroni to make his point. “We can give you more detail later if you want it.”

“No clarification needed.” Gianluca Quattrocchi was intent on reclaiming the conversation. “This is none of their concern. We are naturally investigating employees and ex-employees in both Lukatmi and Tonti’s own production company. That’s all you need to know. That’s more than you need to know.”

“Maybe,” Kelly agreed. “But understand this. Any one of a million pathetic nerds out there could have hacked into that system. Whoever it was could have done it on their laptop sitting in a Starbucks downtown sipping their double-foam latte while that poor bastard was breathing his last in Rome. This stuff is global.”

One of the younger American officers jumped in. “We have experts in the FBI trawling the web spoor.”

“The what?” Peroni asked.

“Any traces they’ve left in their wake on the Net,” the officer explained. “We’ve gotten officers down at Bryant Street working this. There are other agencies involved, too, in the U.S. and in Rome …”

“Enough,” Quattrocchi barked.

Falcone stifled a laugh and glanced briefly at the ceiling.

“How many officers do you have knocking on doors, staring in people’s faces, and seeing if they look guilty?” Peroni asked.

The Carabinieri glanced at their watches. Gerald Kelly wriggled in his seat.

“Listen,” the SFPD captain responded, “we all came up that way. Those of us over the age of thirty-five. Go head-to-head, yell at people, watch what happens. Let me tell you guys. First, even if we did have a face to yell at, those days are over. In this town there’d be a lawyer in the way before you got to the second sentence. Or the civil rights people if their name’s unpronounceable. Those days are past. Intelligence, analysts, profiling …” He patted Whitcombe’s arm. “Expert insight based upon years of knowledge … welcome to the future.”

Peroni nodded and leaned forward. “And when you find them, will you have anyone left who still knows how to bring them in?”

“You just watch,” Kelly replied with no small amount of menace. “We called this meeting to tell you the direction this investigation is heading. If those of you working the exhibition team see any suspicious individuals or come across any possible evidence, however small, we expect to hear of it, immediately. Your job is to keep those museum exhibits all together in one place. I suggest this time you get it right. It shouldn’t be too hard, should it?” He pointed at Falcone. “And stop that young cop of yours from hanging around with Maggie Flavier. She’s under our protection. Not yours.”

“Miss Flavier goes where she wishes,” Falcone answered mildly. “You know that as well as we do. Speak to her. Put her in protective custody if you like. The media will love that.”

“Falcone …” the Carabinieri officer warned.

“What?”

“Do not get in our way. One more question. Then we go.”

“I doubt our paths will cross much, Maresciallo. I will be happy to comply with your wishes.”

“And the question?” the man in the smart uniform added.

Falcone screwed up his face. “You haven’t found anywhere that sells decent coffee, have you? The stuff we have in our house is simply disgusting.”

“Good day,” Quattrocchi snorted, and stood up.

The tiny room emptied in a flash. Catherine Bianchi opened every window, letting in some welcome fresh air. Peroni was pleased to notice that he could detect the scent of the ocean. Did the Pacific smell different from the Mediterranean? He thought so.

Catherine Bianchi looked at Falcone and said, “Gerald Kelly is a good man. He’s only swallowing that bullshit because he’s got nothing else to work with.”

“I believe you,” Falcone insisted.

“So do you intend to tell him anything? You guys go home when this is over. I’ve got to keep a career, and it just might wind up on Bryant Street once they close up this place.”

“I can’t think without coffee,” Falcone complained. “Real coffee. Not with chocolate in it. Or cinnamon. Or anything else. Just coffee.”

She looked at Peroni, and he wished she hadn’t.

“There’s a store around the corner,” she said. “They take orders. Not me.”

Then she walked out of the room.

Falcone watched her go, quite speechless. Peroni found himself a little misty-eyed with mirth.

“They do things differently here, Leo,” he said quietly. “Best remember.”

3

Teresa Lupo knew she would end up gravitating to Chestnut Street. The house on Greenwich was comfortable and pretty and … boring. One neighbourhood store on the corner. A couple of bars and restaurants a block along. That was it. She hankered for noise and people and the bustle she associated with Rome. More than anything, she craved intellectual activity. Chestnut provided the first three, and perhaps the fourth, if she was lucky, though she felt sure that, by the time this self-assigned trip was over, she’d know every last bookstore, delicatessen, restaurant, and café there as well as any back home.

At three o’clock on this chill San Francisco afternoon she found herself in a small and spotless café trying to summon the energy to walk along to the stores. Distances in this city were deceptive. From the nearby waterfront the Golden Gate Bridge itself seemed not much more than a stroll. She’d checked on the map she’d bought. The truth: it was a long, long haul, past West Bluff, Crissy Field, then Fort Point, and on to the bridge’s great arching span, thrusting out like some metal giant’s arm, reaching over the water. San Francisco was deceptive, a metropolis posing as a set of villages, or a set of villages posing as a metropolis, she wasn’t quite sure which. Perhaps if she went downtown … But the Marina and Cow Hollow were comfortable, and given that she seemed to be expected to fall into some kind of mental torpor while the men got on with being jumped-up museum guards, there was, perhaps, no better place to be.

The café owner was Armenian. His list of Italian “specialities” contained several items which Teresa not only failed to identify, but also found quite difficult to categorise. The coffee was fine, though: a strong macchiato, from a proper Italian machine, good enough for her to ask him to grind some to keep Falcone happy. Though why she did that …

A long, low, and somewhat scatological Roman curse escaped her lips.

One of two men seated at the next table shook his head and said, “Tut, tut. We are shocked.”

She hadn’t really noticed them before, and now she realised that was odd. The pair appeared to be at the latter end of middle age, average height, dressed in the same fawn slacks and matching brown shirts with military-style pockets. Each had a good head of greying brown hair receding at the front, leaving them with prominent widow’s peaks. Their broad, friendly faces were tanned and adorned with walrus moustaches that nestled beneath florid, bulbous noses that spoke of beer and a bachelor lifestyle. They had the same eyes, too: deep set, dark, yet twinkling with intelligence and, perhaps, mischief.

“I’m sorry,” she apologised. “I didn’t realise anyone here would speak Italian.”

“We don’t,” the second one said. “A curse is a curse in any language. It’s the intonation.”

“The force and the manner of speech,” the other added.

“Observation is everything,” his counterpart continued, then dashed a vicious look across the street. Teresa’s own powers in this field were clearly on the wane. Both men were staring, with some degree of malevolence, at the fire station opposite. The doors were open, revealing the largest fire engine she had ever seen, a gigantic monster of gleaming red paint and mirror-like chrome that looked eager to burst upon the world seeking some blaze to extinguish merely by the force of its looming, glittering presence.

A young fireman, handsome in heavy industrial trousers, suspenders over a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, was sweating over the front of the machine with a bucket, a sponge, and a chamois cloth, making it sparkle even more.

“That spot’s on the fender still, I’ll wager,” the first one declared. “Dirt on the front left mudguard. Tire walls grimy as hell.”

“Not that he’ll notice,” the other chipped in. “Sloppy, slutty, careless, or perhaps uncaring. Who knows?”

Both sets of beady eyes turned on her.

“Do you agree?” they seemed to say in unison.

“It seems a very shiny fire engine to me.”

“Surface shine, nothing more,” the first announced. His voice had a firmness, both of opinion and tone, that she was coming to associate with San Francisco. She liked it. “That’s all anyone requires for the twenty-first century. People don’t notice detail anymore. What you don’t see is what you don’t get. The powers of observation wane everywhere. And as for deduction …”

“Who said deduction was dead?” she objected.

Their eyebrows rose and the other said, simply, “We did.”

It was a challenge and she never ducked one of those. Teresa Lupo looked at the two of them and was relieved that someone was, albeit in ignorance, asking her to exercise a little professional judgment.

“You’re identical twins,” she said.

They peered at her wearing the same dubious expression, then picked up their coffee mugs, each with a different hand, and took a long swig.

“Fruits of the same zygote?” the nearer commented. “That’s quite a far-reaching conjecture. A similarity of features suggests relationship, I’ll agree. Little more.”

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s more than that. You share the same facial features. The same build, hair colour, and a shortness of breath that would indicate some inherited tendency towards asthma. Also, hardly anyone but a scientist or an identical twin would know the word ‘zygote.’ Most people think babies come straight from the embryo.”

“So,” the further one said pleasantly, “you surmise we share the same DNA and fingerprints?”

“Oh no. You can cut out the trick questions. The DNA is identical at birth. Fine details such as fingerprints … individual.”

“A doctor?” the same man asked.

“Once. A criminal pathologist now.”

The other one raised his coffee mug in salute, and was followed by the second.

“Any more?” the first wondered.

“You’re mirror twins.” She pointed to the one who had just spoken. “You’re right-handed. You part your hair on that side and it curls clockwise at the crown. He …” She indicated the second, who was listening intently, fist beneath chin, a posture his brother adopted the moment he saw it. “… is the opposite in every respect.”

They applauded. The Armenian barista, who had been eavesdropping avidly, came over with free cake by way of a prize.

“One other thing,” she went on. “Don’t take the DNA thing for granted either. If one of you is thinking you can get away with something by blaming it on the other, I’ve got news. DNA changes. It’s called epigenetic modification. You start off the same, but DNA’s plastic. Different environments change it over the decades. I’d know.”

The near twin leaned forward on one elbow. “We’ve never had different environments. We were born around the corner on Beach Street sixty-one years ago. We’ve lived there all our lives. Before we retired …” He nodded across the road and added, though this was no surprise, “… we worked there, keeping every engine that came through that place spicker and spanner than any of those indolent young bloods know how to today.”

Two large, identical hairy hands, one right, one left, extended her way, and their joint, booming voices announced in unison, “Hankenfrank.”

Teresa blinked and asked, “Do you run to first names?”

They sighed. Then the one with left-turning curls said, “I’m Hank Boynton.” And the other added, “In case you hadn’t worked this out, I’m Frank.”

“Oh … Teresa Lupo.”

Their grips were warm and soft and, though mirrored, very much the same.

“When did you retire?” she asked. “From over there?”

“It’s been thirty-three weeks, two days and …” Frank looked at his watch. “A few hundred minutes. That poor damned engine hasn’t been properly cleaned since.”

“And so we pass the time,” Hank declared with a flourish of his arm. “We read. We think. We talk with intriguing and exotic strangers in cafés. About DNA and … epigenetic modification.”

“Do you read the same books?” she asked out of curiosity.

They erupted in spontaneous, deafening laughter. When it had subsided and they’d wiped away the tears, still saying nothing, she persisted.

“Well?”

Hank flourished his hand and declared, “My specialty subjects are the history of this rich and wonderful city during and immediately after the gold rush in 1849—”

“He stole it all from Herbert Asbury,” Frank cut in. “Blood-and-guts nonsense …”

“—as well as the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, notably Hokusai, and, in literature, anything by or related to Sherlock Holmes.”

“Note the recurrent theme,” Frank suggested. “Lowbrow posing as high. My … things are bebop, Edgar Allan Poe, the Impressionists, and American film noir from the 1940s on. These are lists in summary, you understand. The full catalogue is much more horrendous, on both our parts. We won’t even breathe a word about philately.”

“As I’d expect,” she declared, pleased with herself. “You choose opposites.”

Hank gave her a humbling look and said, “Not really. It just gives us something different to talk about at night. There isn’t a smart explanation for everything, you know. Some things just are.”

“Good point. I forget that sometimes.”

“So what do you want to know?” Hank asked. “A little bloodcurdling local history? Where to go to hear music, not Muzak? Two crumpled old men’s advice on the last yuppie-free place to get a cold beer in the Marina?”

The question made her feel pathetic. She had no good answer. The ticket to San Francisco had cost a fortune. It was bought on a whim without a thought as to why she had to come. The four of them worked together as a team now, or at least they had since Nic had arrived. She hated feeling excluded.

“What I’d really like to know,” she murmured, half to herself, “is where I can find Carlotta Valdes.”

Hank and Frank looked at one another briefly. Then Frank tapped his forefinger on his watch and declared, “If you’ve got ten minutes …”

“… we can show you,” Hank added.

4

The location for the Inferno exhibition had proved to be a visual delight so unexpected that, when he first saw it, Costa felt he ought to rub his eyes to make sure it was real. The Palace of Fine Arts was a purpose-built semi-ruin set by an artificial lake with fountains and swans. It was set a short distance inland from the beachfront that led to Fort Mason, home to Lukatmi, on one side, and on the other, after a long and pleasant walk by the ocean, to the Golden Gate Bridge. The exhibition was slowly being assembled during the day in a series of peaked Arabic tents which had been erected around the central construction, a high, dome-roofed rotunda open to the elements. The tents stretched in a curving line through the trees along the lakefront to a group of Romanesque colonnades on the northern side, close to a children’s museum housed in a set of unremarkable low square blocks.

For days the area had been overrun with workmen, security guards, uniformed police officers, and members of the Inferno cast and crew inspecting the temporary theatre, in the largest tent of all, that would be used for the movie’s premiere. For Costa, the event had the feel of a travelling circus. The collection of rare objects — documents, letters, the manuscript from India, and, arranged in haste, an authentic replica of the original death mask — was arriving in San Francisco crate by crate. The mandate for Falcone’s team was clear and limited: monitor the security arrangements before the opening to ensure they were satisfactory. Then, when the exhibition became public after the premiere, to hand over all responsibility entirely to the Americans and return to Rome. No one mentioned the missing death mask of Dante. The assumption was that this had now entered the global black market for stolen art and was probably long gone.

Costa had soon grown tired of checking the security system set up by the American organisers. So he took the time to wander through the tents and the teams of individuals milling around delivery vans and crates, building the stage for the premiere, trying out lights and projection systems, playing with shiny and seemingly very expensive toys he could not begin to comprehend. He also, at Peroni’s bidding, spent some time with the publicist, Simon Harvey. The man’s purview appeared to run far beyond dealing with the media. Harvey had taken a keen interest in every aspect of the security arrangements, insisting that if another item went missing, or there was a second violent incident affecting the crew, it would be his job to deal with the fallout. It was Harvey’s opinion that the replacement death mask would prove one of the most popular items in the show, for its macabre connotations. The man had even suggested that what the public really wanted to see was the actual death mask of Allan Prime, now sitting in the Carabinieri’s labs in Rome.

Costa had listened to the American and said nothing. It seemed a cruel thing to think, let alone say. Yet he had to acknowledge that the idea contained some truth. Actors of the stature of Prime — and the beauty of Maggie Flavier — were no longer fully in control of their own lives, or deaths. In return for fame and wealth, they surrendered their identities to the masses, who would dissect, reshape, and play with them as they saw fit. Celebrity came at a terrible price, he felt, one that was made acceptable to those it affected only through their own ability to pretend they were unable to see its costs.

Costa was, however, sanguine about the security arrangements. The only way the original death mask could have been switched for the fake severed head of Prime was by someone on the inside, probably within the two hundred or more individuals who worked for the exhibition companies, the caterers, the crew, and the various arms of the production company: publicity, accounts, still and movie photographers, makeup artists, and a variety of hangers-on who appeared to fulfill no particular function at all. These people seemed even more numerous in San Francisco. But the items on show were to be heavily guarded and under constant CCTV surveillance.

It was difficult to see what more could be done. If some improvements were advisable, Costa felt sure that he would be the last person who could bring them about. An expensive private security company had been brought in to deal with the handling of the exhibits from the moment they arrived by truck, and to provide personal security for key members of cast and crew. Catherine Bianchi’s dwindling band of officers from the Greenwich Street Police Station was being sidelined, too. Only one, a sullen young man named Miller, with bright blond hair and a curt, sharp tongue, remained at the Palace, and he seemed to take little interest in proceedings. Like the Italians of the state police, the local cops were spectators, ghosts walking in the shadows of the men of the Carabinieri and Bryant Street.

This he found deeply vexing. After checking the arrangements once more, he spent a pleasant few minutes peering at a rare Venetian incunabulum of the Comedy.

“Incunabulum,” Miller grunted. “Sounds like witchcraft.”

“You’re thinking of ‘incubus,’ ” Costa replied. “Incunabula are just very early printed books. Before 1501.”

“So why don’t they call them ‘very early printed books’?” the young cop shot back.

“For the same reason people call this the Palace of Fine Arts, even though it’s a pointless folly made out of plaster and chicken wire. It makes life more interesting.”

“You clearly don’t have to deal with the kind of shit we do if you’ve got nothing better to do than learn stuff like that.”

“I didn’t know until now,” Costa replied, indicating the exhibit case. “I just read the label. The same goes for the chicken wire. It’s all there if you take the time to look.”

“Yeah, well …”

“No worry,” Costa said pleasantly. “Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you something that’s sitting right beneath your nose. It happens to us all. If you ever visit Italy, come and see me. You can return the favour.”

It had happened in Rome, with Emily, experiencing the city through different eyes. Perspective was good, as a cop — and as a human being.

He walked outside to see Simon Harvey, Dino Bonetti, and Roberto Tonti engaged in a huddled conversation beneath the dome of the rotunda. Costa went over, watched as they became silent, noting his approach.

“Something you need, Officer?” Harvey asked.

“Introductions. I’ve seen these two gentlemen in Rome and now here. We’ve never met.” He extended his hand. Tonti simply stared at it. “Soverintendente Costa,” he added. “If there is ever anything …”

“Such as?” Tonti asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Close up, the director looked even more grey and sick. He sighed. “What matters lies with Quattrocchi and Kelly. These security guards who are eating into what’s left of our promotion budget take care of the day-to-day work. Everything else is irrelevant. Including the state police of Rome.”

“Yet you have the SFPD outside your own house, sir,” Costa remarked, nodding at the three-storey white mansion, with gold crests and handsome bowed windows, across the street from the palace. “Not a private company.”

“I am an exception,” Tonti replied, his expression hidden behind the dark sunglasses. “They regard me as a local celebrity, to be protected. Besides, who would want to end the life of an old man when nature is doing that for them?”

“I’m sorry to hear of your illness,” Costa said.

“Why? You don’t know me.”

“To have spent so long without directing anything. It must be …”

The glasses came off and Costa fell silent. Two grey, watery eyes, physically weak yet full of some unspent intellectual power, stared at him.

“Must be what?”

“Frustrating.”

“You know nothing about this industry, young man. It’s the invisible people like me who make it work. Over the past twenty years I’ve written, produced, developed TV series …”

“Is that why you came here? TV?”

“I came here for freedom,” the old director snapped. “For money. For life. Compared to this, Rome is a village. Cinecittà is a peasant’s pigsty compared to Hollywood. I would have made Inferno there if it weren’t for …” Tonti stopped. His gaunt cheeks were bloodless. His breath seemed laboured.

“For what?” Costa asked.

Bonetti laughed and nudged the director with his elbow. “If it weren’t for the money, Roberto. Hollywood didn’t want to give it to you. Italy did. And your generous friends at Lukatmi. Tell the policeman the truth. More importantly, tell it to yourself.”

“Dante was Italian. It could be made nowhere else.” Tonti rubbed his eyes, then returned the sunglasses to his face. “I could have made it here if I’d wanted.”

“Of course you could!’ Bonetti declared. “Inferno is the kind of project Hollywood adores. The pinnacle of commercial art …”

“Popular. Popular art,” Tonti screeched. “How many times do I have to say this?”

“Popular,” the producer corrected himself. “Like me.”

“Still, a hundred and fifty million dollars,” Costa wondered. “So much money to reclaim before any of your backers makes a penny profit. Even with all this … unwanted publicity. That’s a mountain to climb. Isn’t it?”

Tonti waved him away with a feeble, bloodless hand. “My movie is made. Those who matter have been paid. The rest is meaningless.”

“Money is best left to those of us who understand it,” Bonetti muttered, scowling. “Why are you wasting our time, Soverintendente? Do you have nothing better to do? No idea where to find this mask of yours?”

“I—”

“Perhaps one of your own stole it. Have you thought of that? Who had better opportunity? You’re as rotten as the rest of us. Don’t pretend otherwise. At least with us they get entertainment. And from you?”

“Very little, sir. But at least we never promise any.” He looked Bonetti straight in the eye. “Adele Neri told me you invited some of her late husband’s friends to dine in Allan Prime’s apartment.”

“What friends?” Bonetti snarled. “What are you talking about?”

“Emilio Neri was a capo in Rome until he was murdered. I’m talking about criminal friends. Perhaps from the Mafia or the Camorra. Or the Russians or the Serbs. We live in international times. If you knew Neri’s friends, then some might assume …”

Harvey was coughing into his fist. Roberto Tonti, in his dark suit, behind his black sunglasses, was stiff and silent, like an arthritic crow waiting for something to happen.

“I am a congenial man in a congenial business,” Bonetti said bluntly. “When you wish to raise money for a creative enterprise, you meet all kinds. Our little business is merely the world writ large. You should get out more, Costa. It might make you less of a pain in the ass.”

Costa leaned forward and touched the director’s thin, weak arm, and said, “Should you need any help … I know that breed of people better than you.”

The man shrank back, murmuring a succession of bitter Roman curses, then finished — Costa was not quite sure he heard this — with the low, mumbled words, in Italian, “I doubt that.”

It was enough. Costa walked to the mobile van set up by the caterers, thinking that even a poor cup of coffee that had been stewing in an urn for hours might help take away the taste of that encounter. Bonetti dealt with crooks. At least some of the money — perhaps a large part — that paid for the production of Inferno surely came from criminal sources. Roberto Tonti appeared not to care less whether they got their investment back, although he seemed to be aware that this nonchalance carried with it some risk. All useful intelligence … if they had been working on a murder case.

Costa got a coffee, closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and took a swig. It was as disgusting as he expected.

When he turned, she was there, smiling, bright-eyed in a white sweater and blue jeans, looking younger than ever.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

His mouth felt dry. His head was spinning. Maggie Flavier had become a different woman. Her hair was fuller, longer, and had lost its chestnut hue. It was no longer an expensive, straggly impersonation of an English page boy’s. Through some process he could not begin to comprehend, it had become a pure golden shade of yellow, and had straightened into a serious, slightly old-fashioned cut falling down to her shoulders. She was changed. No, he corrected himself. She was transformed, almost into someone else altogether.

What took his breath away were the memories, the connections. Maggie’s hair vividly resembled that of Emily in the photograph in his wallet the actress had briefly seen in the Cinema dei Piccoli. The similarity both shocked and fascinated him. She didn’t look like his late wife. Her eyes were a different colour, her neck more slender, her skin a subtle shade darker, and her face possessed a more classical, timeless beauty. All the same …

“I hate it,” Maggie said, reading his mind. “But I have no choice. I’m testing for some new part. Some 1950s mystery. I’m a waitress in a diner.”

“You look beautiful,” he said, without thinking.

She blushed, and seemed even younger. “Please …”

“No,” he said, laughing, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. It was just such a … surprise. How do you do this? Where does it come from?”

“Fake,” she replied, and put one hand up to her long, soft locks, then tugged out a length with her fingers. “Everything’s fake that’s not flesh and blood, and there may come a time when I can’t even say that.”

The familiarity between them was strange, and had been from the start. It was as if there had never been a point of introduction, a border that was crossed between their being strangers and their being … friends.

“Now look what you’ve made me do,” she complained, holding up the hank of golden hair. “I can’t put it back myself. Nic?”

She turned. He found himself staring at the back of her neck, which bore the lightest olive tan, so dissimilar to the pale northern skin of Emily. They weren’t alike. Apart from the single physical resemblance, and the same directness and utter lack of self-consciousness.

He took the bunch of hair and found some way to pin it back in place. His hands shook.

She noticed but didn’t mention it.

“I can show you,” Maggie said, turning to face him.

“Show me what?”

“Where it comes from. If you like.” She moved closer and whispered, “If we can shake off the goons. I want to get away from this place. I need to. I feel like a dummy in a shop window. Please …”

She turned to the man working behind the counter of the catering van and asked, “Do you have any fruit?”

It took a moment but from somewhere a shiny red apple appeared. She took it, rubbing the skin against her sweater, and made as if to eat, then stopped.

“Food is one of life’s great pleasures,” Maggie said, her green eyes holding Costa. She held up the apple. “I’ll eat this on the way. So? Do you want to see a secret or not?”

5

Hankenfrank — somehow she thought of them as a single entity — led her across Chestnut, past the fire station — where a few gruff words were exchanged with the poor young officer who was unlucky enough to be cleaning the engine — then down the street towards the stores a few blocks away. As they walked, Teresa saw a building rise in her vision ahead and knew somehow that this had to be their destination.

An old and probably defunct neon sign on the side read Marina Odeon. It was attached to a grimy bell tower that rose three storeys above the low line of houses and shops on the street. Like the building itself, the tower was clad in rough white adobe plaster.

It was a cinema. More than that, it was somehow familiar, in a way that was nagging her, exactly as the name of Carlotta Valdes had.

The two men in identical brown clothing got to the entrance. Hank hammered on the shuttered ticket booth. Frank stood stock-still and yelled, “Anyone home?”

She caught up with them.

“What do you mean, is there anyone at home?” she demanded. “The place is derelict.”

“Derelict?” Hank objected vociferously. “Derelict? This is San Francisco. Dereliction is a trait of character, not a notice of death. This old Odeon’s just a little careworn. That’s all.”

“It’s a dump,” Frank added. “The young guy who’s got it inherited the thing from his uncle or something. He opens it up when he feels like, so he can show ancient movies to ancient people like us. Good old movies, in wide-screen Technicolor, with just a couple of speakers for sound, not some goddamned rock band’s racket machine like you get in the new theatres.”

“Is the popcorn good?” she asked.

“We are not children,” Hank pronounced, folding his strong arms. “But yes. It is. Do you want to see Carlotta Valdes or not?”

“I do! I do! And I want to know about this place. I’ve seen it before.”

Frank shook his head. His walrus moustache bristled with the pride of superior knowledge.

“No, you haven’t. You just think you have. In spite of appearances, this is not San Juan Bautista. That’s ninety miles south, and you won’t find the bell tower there either. That was a lie as well. We’re dealing with the movies, Teresa. Remember? Everything worthwhile usually turns out to be an invention. You don’t sit in those hard, bald seats for the truth.”

She stared at the stumpy white tower. It was all coming back. An old, old film, one she’d loved when she was a teenager, juggling dreams of getting a job in Cinecittà, following in the footsteps of the greats: Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini. Even Roberto Tonti, for one brief teenage summer spent spellbound by a horror flick mired in gore.

The title of the movie eluded her but she could picture it now and it was here. In San Francisco, an earlier incarnation of the city but one still recognisable. Some sights — the Palace of Fine Arts, the city streets, the view towards Fort Point and the Golden Gate Bridge — were scarcely changed. The colours were the same: the bright, sharp sun, piercing, relentless.

The name danced in the shadows at the back of her head.

“There’s no one around,” Frank announced. “They won’t mind if we walk around the back. Hell, if they didn’t want visitors, they wouldn’t have something like that in the garden, now would they?”

There was a particular colour that mattered, Teresa recalled, in a way she never quite understood. It was a dark yet vivid green, the colour of a vehicle, and of a woman’s flowing, elegant evening dress, all somehow iconic of a lost and deadly desire.

“Garden?”

They were already pushing their way through a battered wooden gate by the tower side of the cinema. She looked up and got a momentary fearful ache in her stomach. That was a memory, too. Of a man staring down from just such a campanile as this, his face creased in misery, as if all the cares and tragedies in the history of the world had fallen on his shoulders at that moment.

“Here it is,” one of the two brothers — she couldn’t see which — was shouting. “There’s a donation box. We could put something in it.”

Even for her, a Roman pathologist well used to stepping off the straight and narrow, this seemed strange. To be following two complete strangers, eccentric old firemen, well read, self-educated probably, into an unkempt backyard — it was no garden, not in her judgment — of an odd little rotting cinema in a lazy, sunny suburb of San Francisco called the Marina.

“Just like I remembered,” Frank said. She recognised his voice this time. It was a little higher, exactly half a tone. Mirror twins. Identical in most ways. Differently similar in others.

Teresa Lupo walked through what looked like a small junkyard, with an old white sink stained with rust, an abandoned refrigerator, and a snake-like morass of ancient piping, and found herself in a patch of open ground a few metres out of the shadow of the bell tower above them. Pansies and miniature dahlias ran around the border of a bed of pale marble chips and gravel. A grey stone urn stood in the centre, filled with fresh scarlet roses. A green silk sash — the colour sent a shiver through her, it was so accurate, so familiar — was wrapped around the neck of the vase, new and shiny.

She stared at the headstone that stood over what could only have been a fake grave and felt her head might explode.

The inscription, worn by the years and only just visible, read, Carlotta Valdes, born December 3, 1831, died March 5, 1857.

“You’re supposed to pay a couple of dollars to see that,” said a man’s voice from behind.

She must have jumped. She wasn’t sure. This all seemed so curious: real, yet dreamlike, too.

“Sorry,” she stuttered.

There was concern all over his young face. He was pleasant looking, in his early thirties, wearing workman’s overalls, and sturdily built.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He smiled at them apologetically. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s our fault,” Hank said, taking out a ten-dollar bill. “Blame us. The lady came all the way from Rome to see this. There was no one in, but the gate was open.”

“You mean Rome, Italy?” the young man asked, amazed.

“There are others?” she wondered.

“Oh yeah,” he answered, nodding. He had a vigorous, simple demeanour, like that of a farmer. “Georgia, for one. Not that I’ve been there either. You came all this way to see that?”

“Not really.” Not at all, now that she thought about it. “I just wanted to put a name to a memory.”

She looked at the tower again. “It was in Vertigo, wasn’t it? Hitchcock. Nineteen fifty …”

“Shot in ’57,” Frank said, tapping his right temple. “Released the following year.”

“Sounds right,” the man in the overalls agreed. “I’m not a movie fan, to be honest with you. I just inherited all this stuff. If it keeps people happy and doesn’t cost a fortune, it can stay for all I care. I work construction for a living and it doesn’t get in the way. Besides, the last thing Chestnut needs is another yuppie bar. My uncle was a good old guy. He claimed he was a carpenter on the set, hand-picked by Hitchcock. That’s why we got to pick up a couple of props. Then he got the movie theatre when it went bust, built that stupid bell tower on it … Unique selling point, he always said. He was right about the unique part. I keep a few flowers on that fake grave there for any fans who turn up. Caught three this week, not including you.”

He leaned forward and, in a stage whisper, added, “Tell you the truth. My uncle was a terrible liar. I reckon the whole thing’s a fake. But what the hell. It’s the movies. Does it matter?”

“Are you showing it again soon?” Teresa asked hopefully.

“Vertigo? I only open the place up when someone comes up with the money. Too expensive to keep it open every day. We’ve got a little festival of fifties noir coming soon. John Huston. Nicholas Ray. Billy Wilder, Sam Fuller, Fritz Lang. Some bank is backing it, with a little help from the arts people. Those arts guys produce the program. They love this place for some reason. I just smile and hand over the keys.”

“I shall be here every night,” Frank insisted, then elbowed his brother. “He can go slurp beer and fart alongside his bar buddies.”

“Great.” The young man hesitated. He shooed away a couple of wasps buzzing around the place. “Damned yellow jackets. I came around ’cause one of the arts guys thought we had a nest somewhere. Guess he’s right. Anything else I can help you with?”

“I really need to see Vertigo right now,” Teresa said hopefully. “Tonight, if possible. Maybe a DVD. Or …”

Lukatmi, she thought suddenly.

“… I could download it off the web or something?”

Frank put the forefingers of his two hands together to form a cross, then pointed it in her direction, hissing all the time, like someone chasing down a vampire. “Jimmy Stewart would be turning in his grave.”

“I rather doubt that, sir,” the young man said very seriously, and removed the ten-dollar bill from Hank’s fingers. “I don’t know much about the movie business, but I’m guessing he’d rather be watched than ignored. No idea about all that Internet stuff. But there’s a Blockbuster down the street, if that’s any use.”

6

The private security men were easily shaken off. Maggie led Costa around the rear of the Palace, past the children’s museum, to a parking lot where she climbed into a dark green vintage Jaguar, then fired up the throaty engine with visible enthusiasm. He got into the passenger seat and felt himself sinking into soft, ancient leather.

“What kind of car’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a Betsy. That’s my name for her anyway. She’s a loan from some company trying to sell something or other. I dunno. Corporate bonds. Doughnuts. Who cares? She turned up yesterday morning. My agent said I can keep her for a week as long as I do a photo shoot at the end. It’s all by way of thanks for some romantic slush that came out a couple of months ago called On a Butterfly’s Wing. The boss liked me, apparently. Did you see it?”

“No.”

“Ever hear of it?”

“Vaguely …”

She slapped the leather steering wheel and giggled in disbelief. “You are the world’s worst liar, Nic. Here I am chauffeuring some foreigner around my hometown and he’s never even seen my movies. Will someone please explain to me why? Where’s the adulation? What’s my ego supposed to survive on?”

“It’s nothing personal. I just don’t go to the cinema much.”

She crossed the busy highway leading to the Golden Gate Bridge, then pulled off to enter the pleasant open space of the Presidio. Soon they began to climb uphill, winding through a network of narrow, empty roads, past a cemetery and both modest and palatial homes, mostly set against a backdrop of lush forest.

The windows were down. The ancient engine growled and roared as the vehicle tackled the steep inclines. Costa felt as if he’d stepped back fifty years into the frame of some old movie.

“Some stranger lent you this car? It must be worth a fortune.”

“That’s what I said. And yes, I guess it must be worth a fortune.”

“Isn’t that odd?”

“This life is odd. Haven’t you figured that out yet? I get given stuff all the time. I could have had three new kitchens last year if I wanted. And a condo in Orlando. Yuck. It’s business, not kindness. People hope the stardust will rub off and leave a little money behind. Occasionally it’s some kind of trick from some sleazeball who figures it’s the price of a date with a movie star. If that’s what I am …”

“I will watch every movie you’ve ever made,” he promised fervently. “When I have the time.”

That amused her, though in his heart he meant it.

“No need. Most of them are junk. No one’s called about Betsy yet, mind, so perhaps I’ll be spared that particular ordeal. What would you do? Send her back?”

He patted the upholstery and ran a finger along the gleaming polished burl walnut of the dashboard. “I’d still wonder why he really did it.”

She burst out laughing. “God, Nic. Don’t you ever relax? I checked. This is a Jaguar Mark Eight. She was made in 1957. Only in production for two years. Allow me one indulgence, please. It came with these, too. I should have put them in water but I forgot. I’m not house-trained. Not really.”

She reached over into the backseat and retrieved an odd-looking bouquet.

Pink roses set among blue violets, tied inside a star-shaped arrangement of white lace.

“That’s the strangest bouquet I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They look so … old-fashioned.”

Maggie shot him a pitying glance, then threw them on the rear seat.

“Flowers are flowers. Beautiful whatever … Why don’t men understand such a simple idea?”

He leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes, enjoying the cool breeze, with the tang of the nearby ocean, and the peace of the Presidio.

“It’s genetic,” Costa murmured over the burbling lowing of the engine. “Where are we going?”

“I told you. To see a secret. Where this all comes from. Where I come from.”

He recalled the file he’d examined, guiltily, in the Questura before catching the plane.

“I thought you came from Paris?”

“When I was a child. But when I got older, became …” A coldness entered her voice. “… saleable, my mother moved me here. Not L.A. That was too … nouveau riche for her. We spent a year living off fast food and flying down to studios for auditions. The week I finally got a part was the week they told her she had a spot on her lungs that would kill her in a couple of years. All that smoking while she sat outside auditions. Was it worth it?”

“What was the part?”

“I doubt it reached Italy. Big here for a while, though. It was a corny TV comedy, L’Amour L.A. Sort of The Partridge Family but with foreigners. I was Françoise …” She glanced upwards, as if trying to recall something that was once important. “… the rebellious teenage daughter of a handsome French widower pursuing an on-off relationship with an ordinary Californian divorced mom. Ran for three seasons. Made me. Killed everyone else. My catchphrase — and I had to deliver this in a really stupid French accent — was, ‘But ’oo can blame Françoise?’ Usually uttered after I’d done something really bad. Ring a bell?”

“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 she 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.

“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 green 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.

“Let me help you up,” he said, and offered her his hand.

Maggie Flavier rolled over on the earth in front of him. Her face seemed strange. Taut, a little swollen. Her mouth flapped open as if out of control. Her lips were a vivid shade of red, and her green eyes stared up at him in terror.

“Ow, ow, OW …” she screamed, and gripped her stomach in agony.

The apple tumbled from her hand, half eaten. Costa bent down. Stupidly, automatically, he picked up the piece of fruit and sniffed it. A strange, unexpected aroma rose from the flesh. Almonds, he thought, and the word caused alarm, for reasons he couldn’t place.

A physical tremor gripped her thin body. She stiffened. Her head jerked back, golden hair thrusting into the dank leaves and earth, then rolled sideways. A cry of pain and astonishment and anger emerged from her lips. Then a thin stream of bile began to trickle from her mouth onto the ground, her breathing became short and laboured, her body started to arch in harsh involuntary spasms.

Someone was approaching, fast and deliberate.

His hands held hers until the last moment. Then Costa rose, turning, saw the powerful, muscular shape of a man in a red-checked lumberjack shirt, with something black and threatening in his hand, closing on them.

There wasn’t time to think anything through. He took one step forward and lashed out with his right fist, caught the intruder on the chin, punched hard again, was satisfied to see the corpulent frame start to fall backwards, the object in his hand tumbling into the dead leaves.

It was a camera, a big black SLR.

Costa blinked, felt hopeless, uncertain where his attention ought to lie.

The man on the ground started swearing at him. Costa didn’t listen. He turned and looked at the stricken woman, crouched next to her again. Her eyes were starting to roll back under the lids. She seemed barely conscious. Her breathing appeared dreadfully fast and shallow. The convulsions had fallen into a terrifying regime, one that was slowing with each diminishing lungful of air.

They trained a police officer for this kind of event. But that was on a different continent, in a different language.

Whoever the man was, he wasn’t a threat. Not an obvious one at that moment.

All the same, as the hulking figure in the red shirt retrieved his camera and began to scuttle away, firing off shots all the time, Costa took one quick step towards him, kicked hard at his arm as it held the camera, heard the snap of fracturing bone.

There was a scream. The figure was on the ground again, still trying to scramble crab-like through the desiccated leaves covering the forest floor. Costa turned, stepped forward, and stood quite deliberately on his shattered limb for a moment, then waited for the cries of agony to subside a little.

“Dove …” he began, then shook his head to clear it. “Where are we? I need to know the location. Now. Before this woman dies.”

“You saw the sign,” the man in the red shirt spat at him, clutching his arm and the camera as if each was of equal value.

“Where?” Costa bellowed, and lifted his foot again, eyeing the tortured, crooked arm.

The photographer shrank back in fear. “Rob Hill Campground. Now leave me alone.”

Nic was only dimly aware that the man was crawling off somewhere. And that the sound of the camera was there again, diminishing as the paparazzo retreated, like the chirp of some electronic bird fading into the lowering dark.

Costa got down on the ground next to her, held her damp, sweating, twitching hand, leaned into her head, ignoring the foul smell rising from her agonies. He put his lips to her ear, then, not knowing whether she could hear, he began to murmur, over and over again, “Stay with me, stay with me, stay …”

Her breathing seemed to stop for a moment. Her eyes opened. Maggie Flavier’s face was puffy and soaked in sweat and tears. But her right hand was jerking towards something. He looked into her eyes. They were calm, determined. As if she’d been here before.

She was pointing at the bag. He picked it up and turned it upside down, emptying the contents onto the forest floor.

The kit was there, with a red cross on the outside, and inside it were instructions and a primed syringe that looked like a pen. The drill he’d learned from the medical trainers flooded back. He tore open the pack, withdrew the needle, removed the cap, bent down, and in one sure, forceful move thrust the injector into her right thigh, through the fabric of her jeans.

Maggie half screamed, half sighed, and her head fell back hard, hitting the ground.

Still he held the pen there firmly, and kept his left hand in her hair. After ten seconds, as gently as he could, he eased the needle out of her flesh before checking that the drug had been dispensed. Then he threw the thing into the spent dry leaves.

She was sobbing. He cradled her in his arms, making comforting, wordless sounds, grappling for the phone, fighting to find the right language to use in this strange, foreign country.

From somewhere, finally, the words came.

He dialled 911, waited an agonisingly long time, then said, knowing the name would make a difference, not caring about whether that was right or wrong or just plain stupid, “I need an ambulance at the Rob Hill Campground, near the Legion of Honor, now. I have an actress here, Maggie Flavier. She’s in anaphylactic shock and we need a paramedic team immediately. I’ve given her …” The words danced elusively in his head until he snatched up the discarded syringe package and examined the label. “… epinephrine. It’s serious. She needs oxygen and immediate transfer to hospital.”

The line went quiet.

Then a distant male voice asked, “You mean the Maggie Flavier?”

“I do,” Costa answered calmly, and tried to remember something, anything about CPR.