Dante's Numbers

1

Catherine Bianchi sat at the wheel of her Dodge minivan looking as if she were worried about her career. Falcone was by her side, Peroni and Teresa Lupo in the back. Ahead, like ancient aircraft hangars at a decayed military installation ranged along the Bay shoreline, rose Fort Mason. Three buildings were bright with recent paint. Above the central one, a good ten metres high, stood the waving, multiarmed logo of Lukatmi. Its neon flashed in the dazzling morning sun.

The American police captain took a deep breath. She muttered, “You guys are going to get me into real trouble, aren’t you?”

They had an appointment with Josh Jonah and Tom Black inside Lukatmi headquarters. If Bryant Street got to hear of it, there’d be plenty of awkward questions. It was difficult to see how interviewing the bosses of a digital media firm, albeit one heavily involved in financing Inferno, could possibly be justified given their tight and supposedly unbreakable orders: watch over the assembly of the exhibition, nothing more.

“You don’t have to join us if you don’t want,” Falcone told Catherine. “I do think we have the right to be here.”

That got him a fierce look in return.

“The Palace of Fine Arts, with all your precious stuff, is that way. There’s not a single thing in those Lukatmi buildings that concerns you, Leo. There’s nothing there but geeks and computers. We should be back where we’re supposed to be.” She seemed as exasperated as the rest of them. “Twiddling our thumbs and waiting to be told what to do next.”

Falcone leaned back in his seat and sighed. “What we do next is look for the money.”

Teresa Lupo realised she didn’t have the energy to engage in that particular argument again. The same circular bout of bitching had rumbled on all morning, in between the inquiries to the hospital and the calls from an infuriated Quattrocchi and an equally livid Gerald Kelly of the SFPD. It was now two days since the attack on Maggie Flavier. The temperature hadn’t cooled.

And yet Falcone stuck obstinately to his guns; somehow, somewhere, he insisted, this case was about nothing more than cash. Not a piece of poetry. Not an old movie. Money was at the root of everything. Maybe it was Josh Jonah and Tom Black protecting their investment. Maybe it was Roberto Tonti or Dino Bonetti trying to make sure the heavy mob who bankrolled Inferno got payback before they turned ugly. Or maybe it was the mob themselves doing just that. Those, as far as the inspector was concerned, were the only avenues worth exploring, not that they were supposed to.

Once the arguments began again, made yet more shrill by the howls of outrage from the Carabinieri and the suits in Bryant Street over Nic’s close involvement with the actress they were supposed to be protecting, no one even bothered to ask much about Maggie Flavier’s condition, which did nothing to calm Teresa Lupo’s temper. A severe anaphylactic shock was a truly terrible experience. If Nic hadn’t been there, it might have taken her life. Not that he was going to get much credit on that front. The media had fresher blood to excite its appetites.

She picked up that morning’s copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from the vehicle’s floor. They’d printed only one photo, of Nic bent over the stricken woman, stabbing the epinephrine pen into her thigh. It wasn’t the worst. Some of the less fussy rags had felt no such restraint. In spite of his broken arm — now the subject of a police investigation on the grounds of assault — the paparazzo had hung around long enough to capture a series of images of the actress being taken into the ambulance by paramedics, with Nic, face grim and eyes steely, holding her hand.

While Teresa fumed over the paper, Peroni studied a couple of the grosser tabloids. Splashed over the front pages, alongside the shots of a woman in the throes of a dreadful allergic reaction, they carried photos of Maggie Flavier. She sat close to Nic, propped against the silver form of a grey, ghostly tree, smiling, a look on her face no one could mistake. It was one step away from a kiss, and everyone who saw it would surely have wondered what came after.

“If she’d died,” Peroni pointed out, “they’d never have run these. Not for a day or two anyway. They’d call it ‘respect.’ ”

That was probably true, Teresa thought. Allan Prime had been treated like a lost genius for a short while after his murder. Then the reporters had started to find other stories. Of his financial wranglings, his debts, his association with known criminals. And the women. Young, too young sometimes. Often vulnerable. Sometimes paid off for their “troubles.” It took less than a week for the dead actor to tumble out of Hollywood heaven and into the gutter. Teresa had read enough about Maggie Flavier’s past, a very typical tale of broken love affairs, tussles with the law, and the occasional drug and booze bust, to understand that the young woman would doubtless have followed the same path had she wound up on a morgue table.

“OK,” Catherine Bianchi said. “I shouldn’t be telling you this but I will. Nic isn’t going to be charged over that guy’s broken arm. He might get yelled at. No — he will get yelled at. But that’s it. The SFPD doesn’t like that kind any more than you.”

“What do you know about him?” Falcone asked. “The photographer?”

“I can’t possibly tell you that, Leo. You shouldn’t even be asking.”

“What if he’s not just a photographer?” Peroni wondered. “What if he’s involved?”

The woman’s smart, dark face creased with fury. “We’re not idiots. Don’t presume you have some kind of monopoly over proper police procedure. We will investigate the man.” She swore under her breath. “Hell, we have investigated him. He’s a lowlife. He’s been accused of harassing five young actresses over the last two years. He’s a jerk and a creep and probably ought to get taken into some dark corner somewhere and taught a lesson he won’t forget. But he is not a murderer.”

The big man folded his arms and asked, “Where does he live?”

“You must be joking!”

“His name is Martin Vogel,” Falcone announced, taking a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “He has an apartment somewhere called SoMa. I have the address. An art district or something, I’m told. Good restaurants apparently.”

“What …” Catherine snarled. “Restaurants? What?”

“I thought we might go out for dinner somewhere.”

“Dinner? Screw dinner, Leo! Are you seriously thinking of approaching a witness who claims — with some justification — that he’s been assaulted by one of your own men? How the—”

“His name was in the paper. You have these things called phone books.”

“Visit that man and you are on your own,” she snapped. “God knows you’re pushing my limits already. Martin Vogel’s screaming that Nic attacked him. Some lawyer will be coming at us all for millions. Things are complicated enough already. I will not allow you to make them worse.”

Falcone tapped his fingers on the dashboard, thinking. Then he said, “Martin Vogel was in the right location, though, wasn’t he? Not an obvious place either.”

“He’s freelance camera scum,” she pointed out. “Jackals like Vogel will follow someone like Maggie Flavier for days, weeks, just to get one photograph. Don’t you have any idea how much he’ll get for those photos? Thousands, probably. Not bad for an evening’s work.”

“The Legion of Honor was on my list,” Teresa pointed out, ignoring the American policewoman and talking to Falcone. “The Vertigo list.”

He scowled. “Nothing happened at the Legion of Honor. It was a mile away in the woods. Stop clutching at straws, please.”

“But you said …” she protested. “About the car.”

“It was just an old car. Perhaps the company that sent it had a movie buff on the staff. Where’s the real link?”

“Carlotta Valdes!”

He had that foxy look in his eyes. One she both loved and hated, because it was both a rejection and a challenge.

He gazed out the window in the direction of the Lukatmi studios and said, “If we can understand who benefits, who feels cheated, and, ultimately, who loses … there lie the answers.”

“You’re a philistine,” Teresa announced. “And if you hope to understand the financing of modern movies, you’ll be here for years.” She waved a hand at the Lukatmi building. “I’ll bet you even they don’t understand it, and a stack of their money has already disappeared into Dino Bonetti’s pockets. I’m a pathologist. I look for traces. So should you.”

Falcone was unmoved. “You’ve no laboratory, no staff, no jurisdiction. Most of all you’ve no job. You’re nothing more than a tourist here. Don’t forget it.”

“As if I could! You remind me every hour on the hour. So tell me. How did someone know that Maggie was vulnerable like that? Could Lukatmi’s computers have told them she was allergic to almonds?”

“Any computer could have told them that,” Catherine Bianchi said. “She had some kind of attack at the Cannes film festival three years ago. All the papers covered it. That one wasn’t so severe, thankfully. But that’s why she carries that syringe all the time.” She eyed Teresa nervously. “You won’t tell anyone I gave you that lab report, will you? They’d fire me. They’d have every right.”

“Of course I won’t!”

“So? What did it tell you?”

“You have a forensic department. What did it tell them?”

“Nothing more than you read in that report. Just … facts.”

“And I’m supposed to give you more than that? Me? The tourist?”

All three of them stared at her in silence. And waited.

2

Captain Gerald Kelly loathed press conferences. Particularly, he had come to realise, those press conferences that involved a police chief from another country, one who loved the limelight and seemed incapable of going anywhere in public without the presence of a similarly media-obsessed Canadian professor who never knew when to shut up.

Kelly had looked at Leo Falcone’s odd pair of sidekicks while bawling them out the day before, one huge and old and ugly, the other slight and dark and handsome, and wished, with all his heart, that they had been on this case with him. Gerald Kelly had long ago learned to live with the nagging sense of doubt and uncertainty that went with everyday police work, so much that, at times, he came to regard these feelings almost as friends, ghosts on the shoulder reminding him to ask the impertinent, awkward, important questions he might otherwise have forgotten. On occasion the science people came up with tangible proof — a blood or semen stain, a fingerprint or a string of genetic code. But when science failed them, the answers almost always lay in lacunae, what was missing or unknown. Kelly had lived with that slippery reality for years, as had Falcone’s men, he was certain of it. Not so the artificially erudite Gianluca Quattrocchi, a man who seemed to harbour very few doubts about anything, himself most of all, shunning the interesting if difficult Falcone for the diminutive Bryan Whitcombe, who was constantly at his side, tossing out obscure and useless literary references at any opportunity.

If this strange, tangled, and seemingly impenetrable case went on much longer, Kelly decided, he’d tell Quattrocchi that he was bringing Falcone and his men on board, no matter how loudly the Carabinieri back in Rome howled. He could live with the squeals. This was San Francisco, not Italy. It was his call. The SFPD needed all the bright help they could get on this one, and Kelly’s instincts told him Leo Falcone and his men could provide it.

Kelly grunted an inaudible curse as the TV men swarmed forward, raising their cameras. Nic Costa, who was more than Falcone’s right-hand man, Kelly could sense that in the bond between them, was at that very moment the quarry of a thousand prying lenses. California’s dread legions of showbiz hacks and cameramen were seeking photos and interviews with Maggie Flavier. Second best would be the man who had saved her life, not long after he had seemingly entered it in a way half the male population of America envied as they pored over the photos in that morning’s papers. Maggie Flavier in her prime, Maggie Flavier in her agony. And gazing adoringly at some lowly Italian cop. This ravenous pack usually saved its activities for L.A.; now Kelly had them on his doorstep in San Francisco. It did nothing to improve his mood.

Kelly had seen enough of show business to understand that when stars and the movie trade came into play, every key aspect of an investigation had to be approved by the tin gods above him. Slowly, ineluctably, this homicide investigation was starting to follow the familiar path from a tight, well-ordered police case to a public circus, one played out daily in the papers and on the TV. He had seen this happen often enough to know there was no way of turning back the clock.

The conference room was packed. Standing room only. The event was, naturally, going out live, through the networks, and, he saw to his amazement, over the web, too. The crew at the very front wore bomber jackets bearing the logo of Lukatmi.

“Wait a minute,” Kelly whispered to the police public affairs officer who was watching her minions trying to keep some kind of order in a rabble of more than a hundred assorted newspaper, TV, radio, and web hacks. “Josh Jonah’s got himself a TV station now?”

“Since last month,” the woman whispered back. “Don’t you read the news?”

“Only the stuff that matters. Who the hell let his ponytails in here? And why are they sitting up front like they own the place?”

“I did. How am I supposed to keep them out? They’re media. They’ve got an audience bigger than ten local news stations. Besides, Lukatmi is backing that movie. They’re using this footage for some program on the ‘making of …’ or something.”

Kelly stared at the woman in disbelief. “This is a homicide investigation. Not a reality show.”

“You have your job. I have mine. We both report to the commissioner’s office. You want to sort this out there?”

“Listen—”

“No, you listen. Josh Jonah and Tom Black have been on all the networks, prime-time nationwide TV, telling the world what great pals they were with Allan Prime. They’ve delivered flowers by the truckload to Maggie Flavier. How do you think it’s going to look if we throw their TV crew onto the street?”

“I don’t care about how it looks …” Kelly was aware his voice was rising. The lights came up just then and he found himself stared at by a multitude of faces in a sea of shining artificial suns. “And frankly,” he muttered, “I am starting to care even less with every passing minute.”

“That’s your problem,” the public affairs woman snapped, then thrust an envelope at him. “They asked me to give you that.”

“Who?”

She looked a little guilty. “The commissioner’s office. After Bonetti and the Lukatmi people got in there. Via the mayor’s office, I ought to add. The governor’s been on the line, too.”

Kelly blinked. The public affairs woman added something he didn’t quite catch, then waded into the audience, trying to instill some order. Gerald Kelly fervently wished he were anywhere else on the planet but in this room, with these people, knowing that, in between the crap and the prurience, there’d be a few good, decent, old-fashioned reporters who knew how to ask good, decent, old-fashioned questions. Ones he couldn’t begin to answer.

He didn’t have the time to look at the sheet of paper the infobabe had handed him. The room had exploded in a frenzy. The media was hungry and demanding to be fed. Besides, the first question was prearranged: some guy from the Examiner, primed to ask the obvious. Was there any proven connection with Allan Prime’s death? Kelly liked to seed the openers. It gave him a slim chance to keep a handle on things. Normally.

“Any connection is supposition at this moment …” he began, after the plant rose to his mark. He faltered. He was astonished to see Gianluca Quattrocchi reaching over to take the mike from him, talking in his florid English, saying the exact opposite. Kelly sat, dumbstruck, listening to the stuck-up Italian blathering on about poetry and motivation and the damned movie that seemed to overshadow one bloody murder and now a near-fatality, too.

As he reached some obscure point about the relationship between the crimes and the cycle inside the book, the pompous Carabinieri man fell silent. He gestured to the Canadian at his side to finish the answer.

“The links are implicit, obvious, and ominous,” Whitcombe announced, in his weedy, professorial voice. “In Dante’s Hell, the punishment fits the crime. Allan Prime died in the second circle, that of the wanton. He was led to his death by a woman, and the publicity we have since seen seems to indicate that Prime’s private life merited this description. The third circle is that of the gluttonous. Ergo …”

Kelly muttered to Quattrocchi, “Ergo what? Maggie Flavier was eating an apple. This is not what we agreed.”

“Listen, please,” the Italian replied, shushing him, almost politely, “the man is a genius.”

“He’s a frigging …” Kelly began, and then shut up.

The PR woman was actually pointing at him from the audience, her long finger erect in the bright lights of the camera, then running across her upper lip, as if to say “Zip it.”

In the front row, McGuire, the crime reporter for the Chronicle, had started to snigger.

Kelly picked up the envelope the infobabe had given him, ripped it open, and read the contents with growing disbelief.

3

Teresa Lupo wished the American policewoman hadn’t asked about Maggie Flavier’s poisoning. Teresa hated imprecision more than anything.

So she simply said, “The poor woman met her wicked stepmother. Or stepfather. Who knows? Unless your people find the man who gave her that poisoned apple.”

“Mobile caterers …” Catherine Bianchi sighed. “They’re minimum-wage businesses. What do you expect?”

“Not much. The thing is …” She felt as if she were trying to analyse a scene from a movie, one that had been ripped out of context. Without knowledge of what preceded the event, she couldn’t begin to pull some logic out of what might follow. “… it’s a very strange way to try to murder someone. If that’s what it was. Particularly given the way they killed Allan Prime. A crossbow bolt through the skull. A poisoned apple given to someone with a food allergy. It doesn’t even sound like the same person to me. What they did to Maggie was horrifying. But …”

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. “If I were a betting person, I’d lay money against her being badly affected by a cruel stunt like that, much less killed. She spends most of her time near lots of people. She knows she has that allergy and she’s prepared to deal with it. Yes, she was at risk in the woods, alone with Nic. But who could have predicted she’d be there? The chances of her dying should have been quite slim.”

Falcone finally took his attention away from the Lukatmi building. “You mean they weren’t trying to kill her?”

“I don’t know what I mean. I just think it was a very odd way to go about it if that’s what they wanted. Perhaps they just planned to hurt her. They certainly managed that.”

She tried to put the problem succinctly. “What bothers me most of all is the style. Allan Prime had no chance of survival whatsoever. He died from violence of the most extreme sort, the kind of brute force we see ten, twenty times a year because that’s the way the human race tends to go about eliminating one another. It’s quick. It’s easy. You don’t have to do much in the way of preparation. But poisoning … it’s rare. And tricky. I’ve only dealt with one case of willful poisoning in my entire career and that worked only because the victim was dying from heart disease already. Why now? Why here of all places?” One more thing bothered her. “Do they grow almonds in California?”

“Of course,” Catherine answered. “Millions of them. Merced County. About an hour south. I go at the end of February, when the blossom’s out. You can do a tour. It’s beautiful.”

“Farmed almonds? For sale?”

“Sure. But you don’t need to go out and buy almonds to get almond essence. It’s on sale in any grocery store.”

“Not this kind,” Teresa answered, wishing she had her lab and Silvio Di Capua. “Whatever was injected into that apple was homemade. There were traces of fibre. You don’t get that in essence. Also, there was a small but noticeable amount of prussic acid.”

That silenced them.

“Cyanide,” she explained.

“Cyanide smells of almonds,” Peroni pointed out.

“Or almonds smell of cyanide, whichever way you want to look at it. The native wild almond contains a substance that transforms into hydrogen cyanide when the flesh is crushed or bruised. Domesticated varieties have had that mostly bred out of them, though they retain the smell. That’s not what Maggie Flavier got. She was poisoned with the crushed fruit of a wild bitter almond. You can still buy bitter-almond essence in Rome. We use it, very carefully, in cooking. But it’s banned in the U.S., except in medicine, which is why I guess he had to make it himself.”

“So she had cyanide poisoning, too?” Catherine asked, bewildered. “And you still think they weren’t trying to kill her?”

“Not with cyanide. It was a minute amount. You can get exactly the same effect using standard almond essence from a grocery store. It was the allergic reaction that put Maggie in hospital. There wasn’t enough cyanide there to do much of anything. I don’t get it.”

Falcone yawned. Details that went nowhere always bored him.

The clock on the dashboard ticked over to one-fifteen. They were due inside Lukatmi.

“That supermarket over there,” he said, reaching into his wallet and pulling out a fifty-dollar bill. “We need some shopping.”

Teresa took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. “Are you going to do this to me every time there’s someone interesting to talk to?”

“We scarcely have reason to be in that place,” Peroni said apologetically. “You certainly don’t.”

“So I’m supposed to shop? While you question the Lukatmi guys?”

“A suggestion only,” Falcone cut in. “I would never presume to give you orders. It would be impertinent. And also …” He mulled over the words. “… somewhat counterproductive. You fare best left on your own. Think about old films and bitter almonds, please. Just do it out of my earshot.”

Muttering something obscene in which the phrase “stinking cops” was one of the milder rebukes, she got out of the car, slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.

It was a bright, cold summer day. The chill of the strong sea breeze soon began to make her teeth ache. She thought of walking out to Fort Point, a mile or so towards the bridge, and trying to find the exact location for the haunting scene in which Jimmy Stewart rescued Kim Novak from the ocean. Much, it seemed to her, as Nic had apparently saved the stricken Maggie Flavier. Life imitating art. Quattrocchi believed that was happening. So did she, but in a different way. While Leo Falcone …

Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she was right. But she was certain they were wrong, at least in part.

She walked back towards the Marina, thinking. Naturally, she’d keyed their number into her phone, under the single name HankenFrank.

“Pronto!” said a voice on the other end.

“What the hell are you doing talking Italian, Frank?”

“What the hell are you doing being ignorant of caller ID?” the voice on the other end demanded. “And how did you know it was me, not zygote two?”

“Because you sound different, even if you don’t know it. Can I buy you two coffee?”

“Only if you have some interesting questions with which to entertain us.”

“That,” Teresa said, pocketing Falcone’s fifty-dollar bill, “I can guarantee.”

4

Bryan Whitcombe was droning on about poetry again, things a homicide cop could never, Gerald Kelly felt, be expected to understand or take seriously. About how the fourth circle was to do with the avaricious and the prodigal. About how they should expect, given the rigid adherence to the subject matter of the structure of Inferno, that any next intended victim should somehow have fallen guilty to these sins.

“That narrows it down in the movie business,” Kelly muttered. He didn’t mind that a couple of people in the front row got to hear, the furious-looking public affairs woman among them.

Someone put up their hand and asked the kind of obvious question hacks always wanted to bring up: “And after that?”

Whitcombe launched into the list. The fifth circle, the irascible. The sixth, the heresiarch, which he defined as the leader of some dissenting movement. Then the seventh, the violent. The fraudulent and the malicious, the eighth. Finally the last, the traitors.

“And after that?” the same reporter asked.

Kelly snatched the microphone and barked, “After that, there’s not a living soul left in the whole of California. Gentlemen. Ladies. I leave you with our Italian friends and their pet professor. Some of us have work to do.”

He stalked out and went straight to his office three floors above. The conference was still going on. Quattrocchi and Whitcombe were fielding questions. The harpy from public affairs had press-ganged poor, meek Cy Fielding, one of Kelly’s oldest and softest detectives, onto the podium in his place. Not that anyone seemed remotely interested in what the man might say.

Kelly looked at the letter from the commissioner’s office again and swore. The phone on his desk rang.

“Yes!” he yelled into it.

It was Sheldon from the commissioner’s office, all sweetness and sympathy.

“Calm down. We would have told you beforehand, but you weren’t around.”

“That’s because I was out doing my job. Believe it or not, murderers rarely walk into the office on their own or turn up as attachments in an e-mail.”

Kelly hit the keyboard on his computer and brought up the video of the press conference. It was live on the screen in front of him in an instant, naturally. Geeks ran the SFPD. Like they ran the world. At that moment just about every police officer inside a station in San Francisco was doubtless watching this piece of vaudeville instead of walking the street looking for bad guys.

“When a big movie company wants to drop a million dollars on the table as a reward for finding the bastards who butchered one of their stars and tried to kill another, we listen,” Sheldon said calmly. “We have no choice. These people have clout. Especially Quattrocchi. You have to work with them.”

“A million-dollar reward,” Kelly spat back at the phone. He put on an accent he thought came close to Quattrocchi’s dainty English. “For information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone threatening the life or security of any cast members or associates of Roberto Tonti’s Inferno. Jesus. Hollywood’s writing the script for us now. Don’t you see that? They’re turning this into a freak show.”

“Enough—”

“No. Not enough. I won’t shut up. You’ve just taken away half my manpower. Maybe more. ’Cause now we have to field the phones listening to kooks who think their neighbour’s a star-killer.”

“Enough!”

That was loud, and Sheldon didn’t normally do loud. So, reluctantly, Kelly kept quiet.

“I say this once and once only, Gerry. You’re too damned good to throw away your career over this. And it could happen. Believe me.”

“Someone murdered Allan Prime. Maybe they tried to murder Maggie Flavier. We are not dealing with an episode of Columbo here.”

“Maybe?”

“You heard me.”

“That’s your problem. These guys have got money. They’ve got clout. They’ve got the ear of the governor, the mayor, and God almighty for all I know. Deal with it, Kelly. Otherwise, these guys will eat you alive.”

Captain Gerald Kelly slammed down the phone, then rolled his executive chair around and stared out the window.

The worst thing was, Sheldon had a point.

5

“Ponytails,” Catherine Bianchi grumbled as they walked through the wide central hall of Lukatmi Building Number One. Three galleries ranged around the sides, each housing cubicles lit by the glow from ranks and ranks of computer screens. In the centre of the hall were scattered vast soft sofas in bright primary colours, pinball and foosball machines, places to eat and drink coffee. The staff, all around twenty-five, rarely more, wore jeans and T-shirts and either lolled in the play area or dashed about looking deeply serious, often tapping away at tiny handheld computers. To Peroni, it seemed like a kindergarten for people who would never grow up. Except for the flashing sports-style scoreboard at the end of the vast interior, set against a window overlooking San Francisco Bay, with a rough grey chunk of Alcatraz, a lump of uninviting rock and slab-like buildings, intruding into the corner.

High above the office the electronic scoreboard displayed the Lukatmi stock price in a running ticker alongside a host of other tech industry giants: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo.

A skinny individual with greasy shoulder-length hair had been deputed to meet them when they arrived. He said very little and did so eating a sandwich that looked as if it were stuffed with pond weed. When he saw what had caught Peroni’s attention, he tapped the big Italian cop on the shoulder and nodded at the scoreboard.

“Watch the totals. Dinosaurs down five percent average over the year. Lukatmi …”

The numbers kept on flickering. There was a big “up” arrow next to the symbol that had the multiarmed logo by its side.

“Sixty percent and rising.”

Catherine Bianchi eyed him and said, “The dinosaurs have still got more money than you. They could buy out Lukatmi tomorrow if they wanted. Or invent something that kills you stone dead overnight. Beware old people. They don’t harbour grudges, they nurture them.”

The geek shrugged. “You know, lady, when you’re living inside the e-conomy you soon get to realise there are some things people outside, old people in particular, never ever come to comprehend.”

“Does that mean you’re up for sale or not?” Falcone asked.

“I code,” he replied, after a bite of pond weed. “Nothing else. My old man told me anything’s for sale if the price is right. But I earn more in one year than he ever got in a lifetime. So who do you think I should listen to?”

“Perry Como,” Peroni suggested. “ ‘Hot Diggity, Dog Ziggity Boom.’ ”

Their guide looked bewildered for a moment, then pointed. “Josh’s and Tom’s offices are over there. I will leave you three now before whatever time machine you own drags me back to the Ice Age, too.”

The big cop watched him leave.

“What’s the kid’s beef? Pierino Como was a fine Italian American.”

“The kid belongs to a superior race,” Catherine guessed, then held out her hand to Josh Jonah and Tom Black. Both were approaching, Black a foot or two behind his partner.

Neither looked welcoming.

“What’s this about?” Jonah wanted to know.

“Security,” she said, promptly. “Yours. Ours. The movie. The people.” She smiled. “And the stuff. You do understand the stuff is important, too, don’t you, Josh? My Italian friends have lost a very important museum exhibit already. They don’t want to lose any more.”

Peroni considered this strange couple. Skinny, moody, arrogant, with his long, carefully coiffured fair hair, Jonah seemed to be just the type who’d be running a company like Lukatmi. Student on the outside, shark on the in. Tom Black, though … he wasn’t so sure. They’d run through some profiles before arriving. The two of them had met at college, Stanford. Black was the coding genius, Jonah the business visionary. A complementary mix, left side of brain meets right side, or so the glowing profiles claimed. Untold wealth ensued. But did that mean they liked one another? Peroni saw no sign of it. These two men had just turned twenty-three and were, at that moment, worth more than a billion dollars each, with much, much more in prospect if they managed to “grow the company,” as the papers put it, or sell the business on a high. Not that it seemed to be making them happy just at the moment.

“How’s Maggie?” Tom Black asked.

“We know no more about Miss Flavier than you’ve seen on TV,” Falcone told him.

“Don’t give me that,” Jonah moaned. “That was your guy with her.”

“When they …” Black added, before stopping awkwardly.

“If you don’t know about Maggie,” Jonah went on, “what the hell are you here for?”

He barked at a passing female employee to fetch him a coffee. Lukatmi didn’t look much like a new-age politically correct do-no-evil-to-anyone corporation to Peroni. He’d seen bosses in Italy treat women staff that way — and get their heads chewed off in return.

“Sorry,” Tom Black told them. “This is a bad time for us. Allan’s murder … The movie. How it got out onto the web … We’re working to make sure it can’t hit us again.”

“How did it happen in the first place?” Peroni asked.

Jonah stepped in to field the question. “In ways you people never could understand. Ask the SFPD tech team. It was no failure on our part. Not even on our network. Some dumb third-party supplier. Bryant Street and the Carabinieri have their names. We’ll wind up suing the shit out of them. Or taking their business.” His hand made a dismissive sweep through the cold office air. “That crap could have happened to anyone. Microsoft. Google. We were not to blame, and if anyone says so, they can talk to our lawyers.”

He took the coffee off the woman who brought it and didn’t even acknowledge her presence.

“Lukatmi is a busy corporation,” Jonah insisted. “All that old junk at the exhibition … that’s got nothing to do with us. We’re investors in Inferno. We have a fiduciary interest in its success. That does not extend to any crap you brought with you from Italy.” He glanced at his watch, theatrically. “Now if you don’t mind … I’ll have someone show you out.”

“What do the investors think?” Catherine Bianchi asked.

Josh Jonah’s face froze. “Our investors are looking at a return on their money of between sixty and a thousand percent, depending on when they came in,” he replied sharply. “How would you feel in that situation?”

“Nervous. That’s paper money. The only way you can get your hands on it is to sell now. If you do that, you lose on any upside that comes after. You guys are getting big. Maybe you’re the next Google …”

“Google …” Black sighed. “That comparison is getting so tired.”

“Why?” Catherine Bianchi demanded. “Because they’re not in the red?”

The two young men stayed silent.

“You’re buying yourselves Ferraris on dream dust,” she went on. “I talked to an analyst buddy. He told me you’re four, six quarters away from reporting anything close to a real profit. And even that’s just speculation.”

“Analysts …” Jonah mumbled, and scratched his head.

Black cleared his throat, like someone starting a lecture. “You can’t apply old-world economics to what we do. You can’t gauge our value on a spreadsheet. Those days are past. Those people are past.”

She wasn’t budging. “Even in the new world, you have shareholders, Tom. They’ll still want to recoup their investment at some point, and after the last crash, they know they can’t do that out of thin air.”

Peroni realised he was starting to like Catherine Bianchi a lot. She hadn’t mentioned a word of this before they went in.

“That’s your real fiduciary duty,” she persisted. “To the people who own your stock. That’s your legal duty. Unless you think the law’s just so …” She waved her hands, did a woozy hippie look. “… like twentieth century, man.”

“Your analyst buddy tell you anything else?” Jonah asked.

She walked up and stood very close to him. “He said there’s a bunch of shareholders looking at a class action right now. Seems they didn’t know about you investing their money in a movie. They claim it was unapproved and illegal to cut a deal like that from the funds you were raising to develop Lukatmi. When that lawsuit lands on your desk, your stock could go forty, sixty … maybe two hundred percent south. If that happens, anyone could stroll through the door and pick you up for a song. You’re walking a tightrope and I think you’re hoping Inferno will keep you upright. Maybe it will. Maybe not.”

Josh Jonah pointed to the exit. “You can walk there or I can get someone to walk you.”

With that he turned on his heel, and Tom Black, stuttering apologies, did the same. They watched the two men return to their gigantic executive fish tank overlooking the Bay.

The geek who’d been eating the pond weed sandwich showed them to the door without saying a single word. The day was a little warmer when they got outside.

“So that’s why you made captain,” Peroni declared, and shook Catherine’s hand.

Falcone was beaming like a teenager in love. “It’s nearly two. Time for a late lunch,” he announced. “Somewhere good. Fish, I think. Perhaps even a glass of wine. Then I have to call Nic.”

“That would be nice, Leo. But I have a police station to run.”

“Dinner then.”

She looked at him. Then she said, “You can be very importunate sometimes.”

Peroni watched in awe as the merest shadow of a blush rose on Falcone’s cheeks.

“It was just an idea. I’m on my own. You …”

“I have a million friends, some of whom think they’re more than that.” She wrinkled her nose. “OK — you’re on for dinner. But you behave. No wandering around SoMa. No getting near Martin Vogel. That’s the deal. Gerald Kelly is a good guy. He might do you a favour one day. If you don’t jerk his chain again. Agreed?”

“That’s the deal,” the inspector replied with a little too much enthusiasm, then glanced back at the Lukatmi building, with its vast multiarmed logo over the hall. “They’re desperate, aren’t they?”

“They’re a couple of naive kids drowning in so much money they can’t count it. They don’t know what’s around the corner. Of course they’re desperate. It doesn’t mean …”

She reached into her handbag and took out a band. Then she fastened back her hair. Catherine Bianchi looked more serious, more businesslike, that way. It was her office look, the signal that she was preparing to go back into the Greenwich Street Police Station and get on with the job.

“My dad worked in a repair shop. He taught me that mechanics matter. A lot sometimes. Arranging for Allan Prime to be abducted. Getting all that equipment into that little gallery where he died. Sure, these two geeks could point a camera in his face and put it on the web. But the physical part … finding that penniless actor and getting him to threaten Maggie in the park. Coming at her again here with a poisoned apple. I don’t see it, somehow.”

“Jonah could do it,” Peroni suggested.

“He’d like to think so. But then, he’d like to think he could run the world. I’d hate to be around if he got the chance to try. Now you go guard your old ‘junk.’ And stay out of trouble.”

“This analyst?” Falcone asked tentatively. “He’s a … friend? Nothing more?”

Catherine threw her head back and laughed. “He’s an imaginary friend. I made it all up just to see what happened. Companies like Lukatmi come and go. If they don’t have someone preparing a class somewhere, they’re probably out of business anyway.”

“Oh,” Falcone said softly, then put a finger to his cheek and fell silent.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” Catherine asked. “Such as the Palace of Fine Arts and that exhibition you’re supposed to be guarding?”

“We can walk,” Falcone answered. “We need the fresh air. But thank you.”

6

The Park Hill sanatorium was located in an old mansion on Buena Vista Avenue, opposite a quiet green space overlooking the city. Costa drove lazily through Haight-Ashbury to get there, then parked two blocks away on a steep hillside street. The staff entrance was around the corner. From the ground-floor hall, he could see that the front of the building was besieged by reporters and cameramen, the road choked with live TV broadcast vans. Baffled residents of this wealthy, calm suburb walked past shaking their heads, many with immaculately trimmed pedigreed dogs attached to long leads. This wasn’t the kind of scene owners or animals were used to witnessing. They probably preferred it on TV, beamed from somewhere else, distant, visible but out of reach. Costa felt grateful that Catherine Bianchi had called ahead to make arrangements for him to enter by a different door. Otherwise, he knew, he’d have been forced to run the gamut of the media mob.

Maggie had been transferred to Park Hill Sanatorium after several hours in the ER of a private hospital in the centre of the city. The corridors resembled those of a fine hotel, not any medical institution he’d entered. Vases of fresh flowers stood in every corner and alcove, piped music sang discreetly in the corridors. Smiling white-clad staff wandered around nonchalantly. He found it impossible to imagine anything more distant than this place from the chaos and crush of a Roman public hospital. The rich and famous lived differently. Somehow that thought had not occurred to him during the brief time he had known her. Beauty and fame apart, Maggie seemed … ordinary was the word that first occurred to him as he walked to her room, carrying a twenty-dollar bouquet of roses.

Yet he couldn’t get out of his head the image of her standing in front of the paintings in the Legion of Honor, choosing which one — which woman from the past, from someone else’s imagination — she would select for her next role. Maggie Flavier enjoyed being possessed in this way because for a few months or, in the case of Inferno, more, she no longer had to deal with the difficult task of defining her own identity. In the skin of others, she was free to escape the drudgery of everyday existence, the old, unanswerable questions: who am I, and why am I here?

The questions Costa asked himself every day. The ones that made him feel alive. He couldn’t begin to understand why she avoided them with such relentless deliberation. All he felt sure of was that she was aware of this act of self-deception, acutely, for every minute of the performance.

She was beneath the sheets of a large double bed, propped up on pillows next to a wall filled with flowers. The room was large and flooded with light; the window behind her opened onto a gorgeous vista of the skyline of downtown San Francisco and the ocean beyond. Simon Harvey sat on a chair by her side, holding her hand, staring into her tired green eyes with an expression that managed to combine both sympathy and some sense of ownership. Her hair was still blonde, though it now seemed dull and shapeless.

“Nic,” Maggie said, smiling warmly at his appearance.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You didn’t,” Maggie said quietly. “Simon’s an old friend. We did a movie together in the Caribbean. When was it …”

“Five years ago,” Harvey answered, releasing her hand, still not looking in Costa’s direction. The publicist seemed different in America — more at home, more powerful. In Rome he’d appeared a tangential, almost servile figure, running round the set at Cinecittà doing the bidding of anyone who called, Tonti or Bonetti or even Allan Prime. Here, in Maggie’s room, he didn’t look like the kind of man to take orders. “Piece of derivative pirate crap posing as art-house. It bombed. At least we got paid. Not everyone did.”

Harvey stood. He seemed bigger somehow in the bright, hard California light streaming through the long windows.

“I don’t know whether I should shake you by the hand or punch you in the mouth. If it wasn’t for you, Maggie might not be alive. And she might not have gotten into this situation to begin with. What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t advise the second. It would be impolite, and I can’t imagine anyone in the publicity business would want that.”

“You’re a smart-ass, Costa. Maybe you can get away with that in Rome. You won’t get away with it here. Remember that when you need me.”

“Simon,” Maggie protested, “will you stop being so rude? I told you a million times — it was my idea to play hooky from all that tedium at the exhibition. If you want to blame someone, blame me.”

“I do. And him. The pair of you.” He extended his hand to Costa. “But Maggie’s alive and I’m grateful for that. And now the two of you are all over the papers. So I have a professional interest, too.”

His grip was firm and powerful.

“Not in me you don’t,” Costa said.

“Please,” Maggie implored him. “Sit down, Nic. Hear Simon out.” She looked at him and Costa couldn’t interpret what was in her eyes. Dependence? Fear? “He’s my publicist, too. Not just the movie’s. My advisor. I need you to listen to him.”

Costa sat down on the end of the bed and said, “But first I need you to tell me how you are. That’s why I came here.”

The actress leaned back against the pillows. Her face fell into the shadow cast by the long drapes.

“I’m exhausted, my head hurts, I’m full of dope and glucose. I’ve had worse hangovers.” A scowl creased her half-hidden face. “It was an allergy, that’s all. All I needed was a shot — and thanks to you, that happened — and I’ll be fine. They say I can leave here soon. The premiere’s next Thursday. I’ll be fine for that.”

“Why the rush?”

“What kind of business do you think this is?” Harvey demanded. “Get up at ten, work for an hour, then go home and party? Celebrity never stops. Not for weekends. Not for sickness. Not for anything.”

“I understand that.”

Maggie shook her head. “No, you don’t. No one can. Not until it happens.”

“You don’t even escape it when you’re dead,” Harvey said. “Josh Jonah’s people are looking at outtake footage of Allan Prime right now, seeing what they can CGI for the sequel. That’s going to be an interesting one for the money men. Who gets the fee?”

“What?” Costa was unable to comprehend what he was saying.

“There’s going to be a second Inferno,” Maggie told him. “They’ll work up Allan’s outtakes on computers.”

“God knows what the story line’s going to be,” Harvey barked with mirthless laughter. “How many circles can Hell have? Mind you, Roberto didn’t bother so much with that for the original. Why worry now? After what’s happened, all the publicity, the interest … Inferno’s no longer just a movie. It’s becoming an obsession. And that could mean a franchise. A brand. Like Sony or McDonald’s or Leonardo da Vinci. They could get eight years, maybe even a decade out of this. With or without Tonti. Or any of us. When something’s this big, no one’s indispensable.”

The publicist took Maggie’s hand again. “And she — my friend and my client — is going to be a part of that brand. I’m going to make sure of that. A precious and important part. If we handle this story about the two of you right, it works in everyone’s favour. Maggie’s. Yours. The movie’s—”

“I am not your client,” Costa interrupted, suddenly angry. “I am not in your business.”

“You are now,” Harvey retorted. “Don’t you get it? The moment those pictures of you two appeared in the papers, you lost everything you ever had. Your privacy. Your identity. Your soul. It’s all out there …” He pointed to the window. “You’ve just become the livelihood of people you wouldn’t wish on a dog. They feed their kids off you, they take their wives and their mistresses out to dinner on what you make for them. Break that deal …”

“There is no deal. This has nothing to do with me.”

“As if you have a choice! It’s too late for that. You’re part of the story. Screw with my client’s ability to fulfill her potential and”—Harvey bunched a fist and shook it in Costa’s face—“you will answer to me. Capisce, Soverintendente?”

“An intelligent man spends a year in Rome,” Costa observed without emotion, “and still your accent sounds like that of a bad actor in a cheap gangster movie.”

“Don’t push me …”

“Will you both shut up! Will you …?”

She had her hands to her ears. Her face spoke of pain and fatigue. Costa felt something elemental tug at his heart, an emotion he hadn’t known since Emily was alive. Guilt mingled with a deep, intense sense of misgiving about what might lie ahead.

“I was beginning to feel better until you two started screaming at each other,” she moaned, real tears in her eyes. “What the hell gave you the right to walk in here and start bawling each other out like a couple of teenagers?”

“Nothing,” Costa answered, and placed the bouquet of roses on the bed. It suddenly seemed insignificant next to the gigantic displays of orchids and garish, gigantic blooms he couldn’t begin to name ranged against the wall.

“Is this what you want?” he asked softly. “Another year with Roberto Tonti? Another year of being someone else?”

She turned to Harvey, squeezed his hand, and said, “Leave this to me, Simon.”

The American left without a word, just a single threatening glance in Costa’s direction.

Maggie beckoned to Nic to take the empty seat. She held his hand, looked into his face. He wanted to ask himself who it was that he saw before him. Her? Or someone else, someone stolen from a painting?

Costa felt oddly, reluctantly detached. As if someone were watching, directing this scene, one that was happening in some place that was apart from all that he regarded as reality.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking so pale, so frail and fallible and human, eyes moist with fatigue and emotion.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about, Maggie. Just rest. Take your time. Think things through.”

She laughed through her tears. “Time. I don’t have any, Nic. I never have any. There are a million actresses out there screaming to take my place, most of them younger, smarter, better than me. Dino Bonetti wants to make this sequel. There’s a lot of money at stake. I have to sign now, to commit. Otherwise …” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her dressing gown. “Let’s face it. Nobody knows who the hell Beatrice is anyway. All she does is stand there looking transcendental, promising Dante they’ll be together one day, if only he lives a good life. Any actress in a blonde wig could play her. I’m thirty-one years old. If it wasn’t for all this publicity, they wouldn’t even be offering me the part. I’ll be thirty-four, thirty-five before the movie even appears. In this profession that’s ancient. I can’t say no.”

Her eyes stared into his. “Also …” She hesitated. “I’d be in Rome, too. For the filming. I thought … you might like that idea.”

“I’d like that very much,” he answered honestly.

She reached down and took the modest bouquet of roses, smelled them, and said, “These are the nicest flowers anyone’s ever given me.”

“The ones in Rome …” he said, and that instant a picture entered his head, of the two of them walking through the Campo dei Fiori, hand in hand, past the flower stalls, with not a single photographer in sight.

“Tell me about it, Nic,” she urged. “About you. About where you live. Your family. About who you are.”

He held her hand in a room that seemed like a suite in a hotel he could never hope to afford, staring down towards the city and the distant blue Pacific Ocean, and he told her. Nic Costa talked, as much to himself as to her. Of a quiet, difficult child taking lone bicycle rides on the Appian Way, of grapes and wine, of the countryside and the ruins, the tombs and the churches, the simple, modest rural life that his family had enjoyed as he grew up, watching their close-knit love for each other fall apart through sickness and age, however much he tried to hold back time, however hard he fought to paper over the cracks.

Some things were inevitable, even for the young.

He’d no idea how long he spoke, only that she never said a word. When he was finished, his own eyes were stinging from tears. He felt as if some immense inner burden had lifted from him, one so heavy, familiar, and persistent he had long ago ceased to notice its presence.

She was sound asleep against the pillows, her mouth open, snoring softly.

Costa picked up the roses from the coverlet and placed them next to the bed. Then he let himself out of the room.

The staff were no strangers to celebrity. They guided him back to the side entrance, where he strode out into the bright, cold July sun.

A sea of bodies surrounded him immediately. Reporters jabbed mikes in his face. Photographers with cameras roared his name.

They followed him down the street. Across the road stood Simon Harvey. As Costa passed, Harvey tipped an imaginary hat and smiled sarcastically. This was his work, Costa realized. A publicist’s way of saying, “Do as I say or pay the price.”

Costa said nothing, simply smiled for the cameras and tried to look as pleasant and as baffled as he could.

When he reached the car, he drove down the hill into Haight-Ashbury, found the nearest empty café, and ordered a coffee. It was nearly four in the afternoon. He’d achieved nothing all day.

His phone rang.

“How is she?” Falcone asked.

“Recovering.”

“Good. You should find that photographer you hit and apologise.”

“I am so very much in the mood for that right now.”

“Excellent. I’ll give you the address.”

7

Teresa Lupo recognised the place the moment HankenFrank’s ancient Buick pulled up outside. Mission Dolores had changed very little in the fifty years since Hitchcock chose the church for a short but significant role in his movie. Not that the twins seemed much interested in that idea. All the way from Cow Hollow they talked of Dante and his numbers. Nothing else.

“So this guy of yours …” Frank went on. “Quattrocchi … the snooty one we saw on the TV …”

“He’s Carabinieri,” she declared from the rear seat. “Not one of ours.”

Hank, who was at the wheel with his brother next to him, eased the old car into a parking spot, then leaned back to look at her. “A cop’s a cop.”

“What about the FBI?”

“They’re not cops,” Hank pointed out.

“Neither are the Carabinieri!”

“Yeah, well, they look that way to the SFPD and that’s what matters.”

“Hank,” she said, taking his hand over the seat back and looking into his large, watery blue eyes. “Try and understand. You’re not reading a book now. This is not Sherlock Holmes versus Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Real life isn’t fiction. It’s all much more complicated and ragged at the edges. There are rarely neat symmetrical resolutions. People like me, the police, the Carabinieri … we just blunder around in the dark, hopefully with a little skill, creativity, and luck, praying there’s light somewhere around the corner. But don’t quote me on that. Ever. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Frank let out a warm, throaty chuckle. “Worst one you people have. We read newspapers, too, you know. If it wasn’t for the scientists …”

“Science isn’t everything. Trust me. I know. Did you ever read of someone getting murdered over poetry?”

“This is America. You need a reason to get killed?”

“But poetry?”

Hank perked up and punched his brother playfully on the arm. “On the other hand, this isn’t our case, is it? The whole thing began in Rome. In Europe. Maybe that’s where it all comes from. And in Europe …”

“In Europe we don’t murder people over poetry either.”

With his fondness for Victorian fiction, Hank relished the Dante story for the same reason Quattrocchi and the media did. It was colourful. It engaged the imagination. It told people that this involved more than low cunning, naked violence, and one instance of vicious, heartless homicide. There was, as Quattrocchi was trying to say, reassurance in the idea that some intellectual puzzle lay behind everything, a riddle waiting to be solved. This put an attractive skin on something ugly and old and familiar — simple, brutal violence. Which was all very well for a book, or someone who couldn’t face up to reality …

Frank was looking at her, full of sincere curiosity. “What do you murder people over back home?”

“The usual. Jealousy. Rage. We’re not a different race; we just talk a different language. People everywhere kill each other for the same reasons they always have. We make the same mistakes, over and over again. It’s always something personal. A slight, an offence, even another crime, against ourselves or someone we love or feel responsible for. As a species we’re selfish, vengeful creatures at heart. When something hurts us, we like to hurt back.”

“Lots of people love Dante,” Hank pointed out. “Some of them feel hurt by that movie.”

Frank looked dubious. “But not many murderers, surely. And didn’t I read somewhere that usually it’s people you know? Family. Friends. Some guy around the corner. Those are the ones you need to worry about.”

“Usually,” she murmured. “Whatever that means.”

“It’s a ridiculous theory,” Hank announced. “This stuck-up Quattrocchi guy’s a professional. How can he believe such garbage?”

“For the same reason you believed it,” Frank said. “It sounds fun, and he’s got that tame little Canadian monkey at his elbow reminding him of that fact. It doesn’t mean he’s a bad cop.”

Teresa bristled and pointed the wagging finger at them. “He’s not a cop. And if he was, he wouldn’t be a good one. Real cops are honest. They’re honest with themselves, sometimes to the point of self-loathing.” She thought of Peroni, Nic, and Falcone, and the way they couldn’t ever really let go of anything until they’d shaken the thing into its component parts, however messy and painful that might be. “It’s not a talent to be envied or coveted. Honesty’s painful. But without it … what have you got?”

A curious sideways glance passed between the two of them, Hank in the driving seat, Frank next to him. It was a look of self-knowledge, of something fresh and different and challenging occurring between two people who knew each other better, surely, than most men knew their wives.

She stared into their nearly identical faces and asked, “Is there anything you two have been wanting to say to each other?”

“Yes,” Hank and Frank said simultaneously, then fell silent.

“OK,” she said after a while, pointing at Frank. “You first.”

“That stupid fire engine is as clean as it ever was,” he blurted out. “And we both damned well know it.”

Hank coughed and stared out the window. “Not quite as clean …” he muttered.

“Clean enough. Why don’t we get off those guys’ backs? It’s their job now. Not ours.”

Hank cleared his throat again, then turned to look at him. “I’ve been trying to say that to you for months. I thought … maybe you’d have been offended. You started the whole thing. I wondered what we’d have without it.”

“I know I started it. And maybe I would have been upset. Stupid of me.”

Teresa Lupo was briefly speechless. For the first time, she finally saw them as two individuals, no longer the single identity HankenFrank she had first met the day before. Their vivid mirror personalities, their almost exact physical resemblance, the near-identical clothes they wore … these visual cues had thrown her. It was a movie director’s trick, one worthy of Hitchcock. The eye saw what it wanted to see. Just as Gianluca Quattrocchi and Professor Bryan Whitcombe looked at the events surrounding Inferno and beheld nothing but Dante, she had been fooled into thinking that Hank and Frank both thought and behaved as one. And in some ways, so had they.

“You know, I would love to show you two around Rome sometime. Will you come?”

“That’s a date,” Frank replied, his voice a little cut up. To distract her — and Hank — from noticing, he turned and glanced at the church. It appeared to be divided into two parts, one relatively modern and grand, the second white, adobe-style, and visibly older than anything she had ever seen in America. “So why are we here?”

“To blunder creatively. And to see where Carlotta Valdes was really buried, before your friend on Chestnut Street stole her headstone. I want to see what’s become of the grave of a ghost.”

8

Martin Vogel wasn’t at home. So Costa drove around the city, meandering through the long, grey urban streets, up and down hills that seemed too steep for the automobile, dodging buses and cable cars, getting lost from time to time, then always finding something — the stretched silhouette of the Bay Bridge, the upright outline of Coit Tower, the Transamerica pyramid, the line of the ocean — that could give him some bearings. The previous night he’d sat alone until three watching the movie he’d found lying on the coffee table next to the TV. Teresa had mentioned it briefly and received a fierce look from Falcone when she tried to expand on her theory that it might somehow have something to tell them.

Now, as he cruised the city a day later, thinking of Maggie and a case that was not just baffling but also off-limits, he found it impossible to shake the memories of the movie from his head. It wasn’t just that so many of the locations — the Legion of Honor, the Palace of Fine Arts, the same mundane landscape of small stores and offices — were places he’d visited with her. There was an atmosphere to the film, a sense of motion without obvious progress, yet with a hidden direction just out of reach, that was beginning to haunt him.

Teresa had every right to be intrigued. There were obvious links. The car some stranger had loaned Maggie was the same model and colour of that driven by the principal female character in the movie. Costa had tried to find the vehicle but the studio security people said it had been taken away the morning after she’d been poisoned. Not by the police either. The Jaguar had disappeared, and when he phoned her agent, who seemed both fascinated and appalled by the fact her client had been pictured in the papers gazing adoringly at a mere Roman cop, he’d discovered there was no paperwork, no trace of where it had come from or gone. Only a phone number, which turned out to be fake.

Something else bothered him. He was never good at flowers. But he was certain the oddly old-fashioned bouquet on the rear seat of the Jaguar had been a copy of the ones in the movie, held by the dead Carlotta Valdes in a painting and Madeleine Elster in real life. Not that it was the real Madeleine Elster. Or real life, for that matter.

Everything about this case seemed steeped in the cinema. Roberto Tonti, Teresa said, had learned his craft in the employ of Hitchcock as the director was making Vertigo in San Francisco. Everyone from Dino Bonetti to Simon Harvey, and even the young men in control of Lukatmi, had some kind of obsession with the moving image. A dependence — financial, perhaps, or something more personal — gripped them all.

He recalled Rome and a strange young actor dressed as a Carabinieri horseman, running through a performance that would lead to his death. And the end of Allan Prime, in the beautiful little Villa Farnesina. The links to Dante were everywhere, in the deadly cycle of numbers, the written warnings. The evidence.

Supposition and guesswork were dangerous friends. In Hitchcock’s movie, the tragic detective Scottie had toyed with them and lost everything in the end.

Costa’s rented Ford kept nosing aimlessly over the city, from the tourist dives of Fisherman’s Wharf to backstreets and rich residential areas, and semi-abandoned industrial districts that looked as if they hadn’t changed in years. He knew what he half hoped to see. An old green Jaguar with a blonde woman at the wheel, pulling into a dark corner, a dusty dead end where he might meet her and find some answers.

Somewhere along the way, he wasn’t sure exactly, he stopped in a gleaming 1950s diner. A young Asian girl in a white hat and anachronistic smock served him a weak milky coffee. She wore a badge that said The Philippines and a broad toothy smile. San Francisco seemed possessed of multiple personalities, all of them jumbled up together, one running into the many.

He looked at his watch. It was close to seven. A decent enough time to call. He phoned the Park Hill Sanatorium and waited as a woman who sounded like the smartest of hotel receptionists put him on hold.

“Miss Flavier discharged herself an hour ago,” she reported after a long wait.

“You mean she’s OK.”

“We can’t discuss a patient’s condition, sir. You appreciate that.”

“Where did she go? Who with?”

“I really can’t add to what I’ve said. Good night.”

The line went dead. Costa realised he didn’t know where Maggie lived. An apartment somewhere on Nob Hill. That was all she’d told him.

He called the agent and got an answering machine. He tried Falcone. The inspector listened to him, then said, “If Maggie Flavier wants to go home, it’s none of your business.”

“She nearly died …”

“It was an allergic reaction. One she’s had before. If she was really ill, they would never have let her leave the hospital. She’ll have security. Relax.”

“I don’t even know where she lives. Can you find that out?”

“Yes. I can.”

Then nothing.

“Leo …”

“Leave it. You’re fortunate the police haven’t charged you with assault over that photographer. Don’t tempt fate.”

He could feel his temper rising. “You asked me to go and apologise to the man.”

“So why didn’t you?”

He wasn’t in, Costa told him. No one was around. The place looked deserted. But that was three hours before.

“Then try again. That’s what we do, isn’t it? No more phone calls, Nic. I’m off-duty.”

“Yes … sir.”

Costa cut the call and uttered a short, meaningful Roman curse.

The Filipino waitress was beaming at him. She had a plate in her hands.

“Here you go. Veggie burger and fries,” she said, and the sight of it dispelled his appetite for good.

He gazed at the shining chrome and, plastered on the walls throughout the diner, posters for movies and stars he’d long forgotten. Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Cinema attempted to define modern life through allegory and mystery, in much the same way Dante sought to define his own medieval world. Fundamentally, they were looking for the same unreachable goals: happiness, peace, and a few good answers.

Then a familiar voice came over from the TV in the corner.

He picked up his glass of plain water and sat in the steel seat directly beneath the screen. Roberto Tonti was on some news interview program. It seemed to be live. A long clip from the movie — Allan Prime as Dante, spellbound as Maggie, ethereal, otherworldly, strode through a nightmare universe of monsters and flame.

The waitress stopped work and watched it with him.

“Who’s the boring guy?” she asked. “What’s he got to do with big stars like that?”

He told her the director’s name. She looked puzzled.

“Never heard of him. He looks sick. Oughta be in the hospital.”

“He directed the movie. It’s his show.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t go to the movies to see guys like that. I wanna see stars. Don’t you?”

“They’re just people. Like you and me.”

She stared at him, then burst out laughing.

“Not like me, mister. Not in a million years.” Her eyes shone with amusement. “No offence but … not like you either.”

9

They had spent more than an hour wandering around Mission Dolores. She couldn’t have hoped for better guides. Hank and Frank were in love with their city. They seemed to know every last corner. For Teresa Lupo, who had no fondness for religion, the mission was a revelation. In Rome, the Church was omnipresent, and seemed to have been that way forever. Seated in the small adobe chapel of Mission Dolores, she was, for the first time in her life, conscious of a world that existed before God, at least the one she’d grown up with. This had been a different, virgin environment, one conquered by a foreign host bringing what it saw as enlightenment and civilisation, just two hundred and fifty years before, at a time when Rome regarded itself as the modern capital of a civilised, fixed universe in which everything was labelled, recognised, and known. In Italy, history seemed either distant or a part of the living present. Here the past existed just out of reach, tantalisingly near yet untouchable, alive yet gone, too.

The place fascinated her so much that she forgot, for a while, why they’d gone there. Then Frank asked, “So you really want to see Carlotta’s grave?”

“Oh. Of course.”

They walked outside. It was getting cold and late. She wondered how much longer they could stay here. How much she could put off going back to Greenwich Street and admitting she had nothing to report, or suggest. A green car, some locations, a few possible coincidences … it added up to nothing and she knew it.

The cemetery was beautiful, hushed and peaceful, filled with roses, bold spikes of yellow cannas, and flowers she couldn’t identify.

The statues of dead monks ranged across the graveyard, pensive heads bowed over their own tombs, the long foreign grass rising up to their frozen grey waists. Misshapen conifers rose among the forest of headstones against the white adobe walls where two unequal towers, like decorations on a wedding cake, pointed to a fading blue sky above floods of purple and red bougainvillea tumbling down from the roofline.

The names on the graves seemed to come from everywhere: Spain and Ireland, England and the east coast of America. Some tombs were grand, most modest. Death and the relentless maritime climate were slowly reducing them all to crumbling stone.

She wandered through a grove of roses and came upon a small dome-shaped reed hut, recently erected. A sign said it was designed to show the original kind of dwelling place used by the Ohlone, the indigenous people of the area before colonisation. She closed her eyes, thought of the scene in the movie: Scottie, in a brown suit and a 1950s gentleman’s hat, skulking by the overhang of the mission walls, watching from the shadow of a sprawling tomb, furtively spying on Madeleine as she gazed down at a grave, a curious bouquet of roses in her hand.

“She knew you were there all along, Scottie,” Teresa murmured.

“That she did,” Frank agreed.

“You like the movie, too?” she asked.

His eyes clouded over with doubt. “It’s not easy to forget and I don’t know why. Or what it means, if it means anything, or needs to. There’s something …” He chose his words carefully. She noticed how Hank watched him, a quiet look of admiration in his near-identical face. “… there’s something not quite right about it. Something … obsessive. The way everyone seems to be watching that woman. Not just Scottie. The camera, too. Us. The audience. It’s unnatural and it’s supposed to be that way. The thing draws you in, and if you think about it, that makes you uncomfortable.”

“It’s voyeuristic,” she suggested.

He grinned. “The very word! You know, for a foreigner, you’re very good with English.”

She shrugged. “I’ve got the time. I’m off the case. Just another tourist. Words are all I have.”

Teresa put out her hand and touched the dry reeds of the Ohlone structure. “It was here, wasn’t it? Carlotta’s gravestone? Before they moved it to that little cinema in the Marina?”

“If they moved it to that little cinema in the Marina,” Frank cautioned. “You heard that guy. His uncle was a rogue. Movie crews always are. Do you know no one has any idea where the painting went? The one of Carlotta? It’d be worth a fortune now. They think it just got scrapped. Thrown out with the junk. One more prop. That was Hitch. Finish one movie, get on with the next. Never look back. Only the present matters. Do you think people like Roberto Tonti treat the job that way?”

“Not for a moment. They’ve got egos the size of a whale. They’re interested in their legacy.”

“Which is nothing more and nothing less than the movies they leave behind,” Frank insisted. “I think Hitch got it right.”

His brother intervened. “It was actually a little to the left.” Hank pointed to a rough patch where a few low flowers were struggling to flourish in the dry earth. “They couldn’t use somewhere there was a real grave, for sure.”

“You saw it?” she asked them. “When it was here?”

“We were kids,” Hank replied. “It was fun to go somewhere movie stars had been. To stand on the same spot. Like touching the hem of God. Not that we would have put it that way back then.” He nodded at the mission. “Much more fun than that place, anyway.”

“The funny thing is,” Frank went on, “they left that fake gravestone there for a while. It was a tourist attraction. The mission needed the money. You can’t blame them. Then …” He glanced back at the little chapel again. “… someone said it was disrespectful. An insult to the real dead people here.”

“As if they’re going to complain,” Hank added. “No one’s been buried here in years.”

“Does that matter?” she wondered.

Frank shuffled, uncomfortable. “When you’re dead you’re dead. Only fools and children believe in ghosts.”

She felt the same way, usually. “That’s what Scottie thought. Was he right?”

Frank nodded earnestly. “Yes. He was bang on the money, even if it did cost him. Is there anything else you need to see? Churches give me the creeps, to be honest with you. Also, if we’re in time, we can hit the happy hour at a little bar we know …”

“No. I don’t think so …” she began, and then her eye caught the tree.

What was it Catherine Bianchi said? In California, almonds flowered at the end of February. That would mean they would bear fruit during the summer.

Next to the place where the grave of the fictional Carlotta Valdes had once stood was an old, crooked almond tree, little more than the height of a man. Its leaves fluttered weakly in the early evening breeze; its feeble, arthritic branches were black with age and dead fungi. On each, visible, still a little green from their newness, stood lines of nuts in their velvet, furry shells.

She took two steps towards the tree, reached up, and tugged one from the nearest branch.

“You’re going to get us in trouble,” Hank warned.

“Perish the thought …”

Teresa crouched down and found a stone. Then she placed the nut on its surface and cracked the shell open with a rock. There was a loud bang that ricocheted around the walls of the tiny graveyard. She studied the shards of the inner fruit, white and mashed against the stone.

There was no lab in San Francisco she could use. So she picked up the largest piece and put it in her mouth.

Even before she got to her feet, she was coughing. It was painful. Someone — she couldn’t see who — was thumping her on the back. There was a new voice, a woman’s voice.

With no grace whatsoever, she spat out every last piece of the almond she could. Even so, the taste lingered.

It was the most bitter thing she’d ever known.

“What are you doing? What are you doing?” The face of a severe, dark-skinned Mexican-looking woman hove into view and began castigating her.

“It was …” She started coughing, gagging for breath.

Another woman, a nun, with a blue headdress, arrived, carrying a plastic cup with water in it. Teresa drank greedily and found herself spitting out more pieces of almond.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and found herself coughing again.

“Why did you do that?” the nun asked. “This is a cemetery. Not an orchard.”

“I was curious. The fruit was very … harsh.”

The two women were silent.

“It’s a bitter almond,” Teresa asked, “isn’t it?”

The nun crossed her arms in anger. “They say the first priests planted it. Two hundred and fifty years ago. Do we need to put up a sign saying ‘Don’t steal the almonds’?”

The Mexican woman touched the branches. “It’s dying. We feed it. We try to care for it. Nothing helps.” She shook her head. Her eyes were sad. “Perhaps it’s for the best. If people keep coming here and taking away what’s not theirs …”

Teresa felt her heart skip a beat and prayed it wasn’t a side effect of the bitter nut she’d just eaten. “Someone else ate the almonds?”

“A man,” the Mexican woman said. “And he had a bag! He took many, and wouldn’t give them back when we caught him.”

Hank and Frank were looking at her and licking their lips in anticipation.

“This man,” Teresa asked, “do you know who he is? I really need to know.”

The nun took the plastic cup and gave her a withering look. “We don’t know his name. We told the police, of course. This is a nice neighbourhood. We don’t want people coming in and stealing things. The police said we were wasting their time. There are worse crimes in this city than stealing almonds from a graveyard.”

The Mexican woman waved her fist in the air. “But we had a photograph! A photograph!”

Teresa wanted to laugh. She still felt giddy. The nasty taste wouldn’t go away. “Can I see it?”

The two women stared at her and said nothing.

“Please. It may be important.”

“The parroco has it,” the Mexican woman said. “The pastor. He is out for a little while.”

“Then I’ll wait.”

“Not here,” the nun ordered. “In the basilica, please.” She patted the trunk of the withering almond tree. “Out of the way of temptation.”

10

Martin Vogel’s apartment was past Union Square, the department stores and gift shops, the cable cars and the constant presence of street people pestering for money. It lay in a nondescript commercial building down a dark, dank lane. SoMa, Nic learned from the guidebooks, was a trendy part of the city, up and coming, aspiring to be cultural, in much the same way as Testaccio in Rome. In parts it had the same tough, rough, urban aspect, too.

He found a discreet, half-hidden set of nameplates by a set of side doors. One, number 213, which he took to mean the second floor, had the scrawled name Vogel by it.

His finger lurked over the bell push for a moment. Then Costa chose another name, a few doors along, pressed the button, and waited.

A woman’s voice, taut, angry, and hurried, barked out of the speaker.

“Pizz—” he began to say.

“Jesus Christ!” the woman screeched.

The buzzer on the lock bleated. He pushed the door open and found himself inside a spare, cool atrium that smelled of bleach.

Without thinking, he patted his jacket. There was no gun there. He was just another civilian.

He walked upstairs, trying to think of what he’d say. He hadn’t just broken the photographer’s arm. He’d stood on it. This didn’t worry him any more now than when it had happened. Vogel had been stalking them for reward and the paparazzo had been determined to get out of there without helping once he had his pictures. Costa had needed to know where they were, to extract from him the exact location so that an ambulance could find them. Costa felt he’d had little alternative.

There was a sound from the floor above. A dog barking. A woman’s cry. Music. From somewhere the shriek of a baby. There was the smell of stale food and rotten trash. Down the stairwell fell the noise of people arguing several floors up.

When he got to the top of the staircase, he found himself in near darkness. Two of the strip lights in the corridor ceiling had failed. A third flickered sickly, on and off.

The baby wailed again, its cries echoing off the walls so much he had no idea from which direction the sound came.

Each door had a little light behind the bell push. The nearest read 256. He walked along. The next read 257.

The wrong side, and the wrong direction. It was turning out to be one of those days.

He wondered whether this was a good idea at all. Then he thought about what Falcone would say if he came back and admitted he’d pulled out at the last moment. The good mood that the presence of Catherine Bianchi instilled in the inspector was, like most things surrounding Falcone, transient. The inspector’s private life consisted of a series of short, intense relationships followed by periods of mute, surly celibacy. The pattern was well established now. Costa didn’t want to bounce it out of phase prematurely.

He recrossed the stairwell and strode down the opposite corridor. Only one light was out here. As he walked, the sounds of the apartment block receded. There were no crying babies in this part of the building, no angry voices.

Costa reached the door of apartment 213. It was ajar, just a finger’s width, enough to let a shaft of orange artificial light stumble through and fall on the tiled floor of the apartment in an eccentric shape.

Decisions, he thought.

He edged his foot forward until it reached the cheap painted wood that was supposed to keep Martin Vogel safe from the world beyond. The door moved steadily inwards at his touch, on hinges that needed a touch of oil.

11

The later the hour, the more uncomfortable Hank and Frank became. Churches really didn’t suit them and the bar was calling. Finally, just before eight, she lost patience and sent them on their way. She could ride a bus home. One went from the street outside all the way down to the waterfront at the Marina. She liked buses. They put you in touch with people.

Predictably, the priest appeared moments after the two brothers departed. She took one look at the man in the familiar black frock and felt her heart sink. He had a long pale face, pockmarked cheeks sagging with age. His eyes were sad and rheumy, as if they’d seen rather too much. A drink with the twins might be welcome relief after a little time in the gloom of Mission Dolores. She was glad she’d made a note of their favourite bar.

Then she told him who she was and where she came from. The priest opened his mouth and her opinion changed instantly. His voice did not match his appearance in the slightest. It was bright and young and engaged, as if some lively inner spirit was trapped inside an older, more fragile frame. The parroco introduced himself as Dermot Gammon, originally from Boston, but a resident of Rome for several years before returning to the U.S. and ending up in San Francisco.

“Where do you live?” he asked her.

“Off Tritone. The Via Crispi.”

He rubbed his hands together and a beatific expression put fresh light in his eyes. A comprehensive list of local stores and restaurants and wine bars streamed from his lips.

“You know Rome well,” she said sincerely.

They spent a few happy minutes discussing her home city. Finally the priest asked her why she was there. She told him a little about the case and the movie, then said, “They told me you had a photograph. Of the man they found stealing something in the cemetery.”

His long, sad face fell into a frown. “A bag full of almonds. The ladies …” He sighed. “Sometimes their desire to protect this place goes to extremes. We exist to cater to souls, not bricks and mortar. They saw the man, they took some photos. I showed them to the police. Our local captain was not, I have to say, terribly interested or impressed.” He edged forward, as if making some statement in confession. “Which pleased me greatly. I don’t wish to see the mission in the newspapers. Only for births and marriages and deaths, and a few charitable occasions. Certainly not as part of something as serious as this dreadful investigation you mentioned. Am I making myself clear?”

“I’ll be discreet. I promise. Besides, it’s probably nothing. I’m shooting arrows in the dark, hoping one will land somewhere sunny.”

“That’s work for a priest. Not a scientist.”

“I wouldn’t presume to teach you your job, Father. Science and religion aren’t enemies.”

“Really?” He didn’t look convinced. “I must disagree. Nothing wonderful that I recall of Rome has to do with science.”

“Not the Sistine Chapel? Michelangelo thought himself more an architect than a painter. And Bernini. Those statues. How could he create them without knowing anatomy?”

“I was always a Caravaggio man myself. I like real human beings, frail men and women, not make-believe perfect ones. Without the fallible …” The priest opened his hands and looked around the dark interior of the mission. “… I’m out of a job.”

“Without mysteries we both are. Please, Father. The photographs. Just to satisfy my curiosity.”

He excused himself for a few minutes. When he came back, he sat down by her side and retrieved a snapshot from the inside of his gown. It was too dark to see much of it, so she went and stood beneath the electric candles close to the altar.

The priest followed, looked over her shoulder, and said, “The gardener told me to chop that tree down two years ago. He said it’s dying. Too old.”

She peered at the figure in the picture. The man was holding a supermarket bag that, from its bulging shape, appeared to contain a good collection of nuts. He was arguing with the Mexican woman she’d seen earlier.

“I told them all, ‘It’s a tree,’ ” the priest went on. “ ‘Not a human being. The thing is insensate. It feels no pain, has no consciousness of its impending end, or its present feeble state. We can wait a little while,’ I say. Not thinking …” His glassy eyes stared into hers. “I’ve been here thirteen years, Ms. Lupo. We’ve never had a single person take something from the cemetery. Not something supposedly edible anyway. Now two in a matter of weeks.”

“It’s not edible. It’s a bitter almond. Poisonous in quantity.”

He looked shocked. “That’s why the man took those nuts? Because they’re poisonous?”

“Someone with a little knowledge might know, I imagine. Most people would simply see an almond tree …”

Its gnarled, failing form stood next to the patch of ground where the imaginary Carlotta Valdes’s grave had been created for the film, and stayed, for a few uncertain years, in real life, too, until someone deemed it unsuitable for a real cemetery. It was a link, one that, like the rest, seemed to lead into some opaque and unrelenting San Franciscan fog.

“Do you know this man?” the priest asked.

She gave him back the photograph. “He’s wearing sunglasses, Father. And he’s turned away from the camera …”

He took the snapshot from her. “I’m sorry. I gave you the wrong one. Here. There’s a better picture.”

Father Gammon scrabbled again in his clothes. A crumpled packet of cigarettes fell to the floor. He apologised and looked a little guilty, then picked them up. In his other hand was a new photo.

This was clear and distinct, even in the fusty yellow light of the electric altar candles.

“Do you know him now?”

“I believe so,” she answered. “Will you excuse me, please?”

Falcone was furious at being interrupted halfway through what sounded like a nervous dinner with Catherine Bianchi. But not for long.

12

Costa pushed the door as far as it would go. It was pitch black in the apartment.

There was a smell, though. Something familiar: the harsh odour of a spent weapon and behind it the faint tang of blood. From a tinny radio in a room beyond the entrance came the sound of music. Tannhäuser. He thought of the burly photographer squealing as he stood on his shattered arm. The man hadn’t looked like an opera fan.

He stopped and listened. Not a sound except the music, but that was so full and insistent … Costa found the wall inside the entrance, making sure he stayed inside the shadow as much as possible. It wasn’t a good idea to be a silhouette in a doorway. He couldn’t see a thing. Then, in the middle of a line, the music stopped abruptly.

“Police,” he said quietly into the dark.

All he could hear was his own voice in the dark of an apartment where the smell of spent ammunition was so strong it seemed like the mark of some murderous feral cat.

When it came, the racket made him jump. The electronic wail of the mobile phone cut through the black interior of Vogel’s apartment like the scream of a child.

It was the tone he’d set for Falcone. Costa swore, ducking further back into the pool of gloom by the door, desperate to avoid becoming an easy target.

He yanked the phone out of his pocket and killed the call.

There’d been another noise, though. Someone moving in the blackness ahead of him. A new smell, too, one he couldn’t place.

Costa stared at the bright blue screen in his hand, got Falcone’s number, and texted four words, URGT VOGEL APT NOW.

Then he threw the phone across to the other side of the room and pressed back against the wall. The ring tone went off seconds after. The space in front of him was briefly filled by sound, the bellowing roar of gunfire fighting to escape the confined space that enclosed it.

He froze where he was, cold and sweating. Someone was scrabbling around on the floor, maybe three or four strides to the right, struggling to say something. The unseen figure’s breathing was laboured, words unintelligible. He sounded sick or wounded, in some kind of trouble. But he was a man with a gun. The strong, noxious smell was beginning to overwhelm everything.

Finally he worked out what it was. Petrol.

Down the corridor someone screamed. The baby was wailing again. Lights were coming on, voices were rising.

He wanted to kick himself. They’d called the police before. The woman had let him in immediately, not because she thought he was a pizza deliveryman, but because she thought he was the police. The gunfire had started before he’d blundered onto the scene. That was why everything was so quiet, so deserted. Sane people stayed out of the way.

As he moved a fraction further into the room, Costa stumbled, found his fingers encountering the familiar hard metal frame of a photographer’s tripod. He pushed it over, heard it clatter.

There was no shooting this time. He fell to the floor, rolling, turning, turning, out into the corridor, scrabbling on hands and knees to get out of the deadly frame of the doorway.

Breathless and sweating, but outside the apartment, finally, he heard nothing more. As he started to scramble upright, he found himself staring into the barrel of a gun. The man who held it was black, stocky, and wore the uniform of an SFPD cop. He looked terrified. The weapon trembled in his hands.

“I’m a police officer,” Costa said, slowly, carefully raising his hands. “My ID’s in my jacket pocket.”

The gun was sweaty in the young cop’s grip. He passed it from one hand to the other, then back, the barrel staying straight in Costa’s face. He nodded at the open doorway. “You gonna tell me what I might find in there? And why you was looking?”

“There’s a wounded man with a gun. I just came here to apologise. There was an incident. With the actress. Maggie Flavier. Maybe you read about it …”

The gun lowered a little. A flicker of recognition crossed the young cop’s face. “That was you? You looked bigger in the papers.”

“Thanks …”

There were more people behind him. The cop swiveled nervously, waving the gun everywhere. Costa wanted to shout at him but it didn’t seem a good idea.

He didn’t need to anyway. Catherine Bianchi was marching down the corridor, police ID held high, Falcone behind her with a face like thunder. She was bellowing at the young cop to get his weapon down, in a voice that wasn’t easy to ignore.

“Captain Bianchi …?” the cop faltered.

She was wearing a short cocktail dress with a scarlet silk scarf over her shoulders. The badge in her hand looked incongruous next to it.

She ignored him, stared at Costa, and asked, angrily, “What the hell is going on?”

“There’s a wounded man inside with a gun,” Costa said quickly. “I urge—”

Caution, he was about to say, but the word stayed in his mouth. Someone was screaming, a high-pitched shriek of terror and pain. Inside Martin Vogel’s apartment a light had appeared, a grim and familiar orange.

Costa scrabbled to his feet and raced down the corridor, away from the apartment.

Catherine Bianchi let out a piercing yell as a man stumbled out of the door, his body a bright, burning torch of flame from head to foot, leaping around like a victim of Saint Vitus’s dance consumed by fire.

Costa snatched the fire extinguisher he’d seen earlier from the wall and ran towards the blazing figure.

“He’s got a gun,” Catherine shouted, standing in the way, blocking any chance he had to move forward.

Sure enough, there was a weapon in the burning man’s right hand, which now appeared blackened and useless, gripping the familiar black shape out of nothing more than fear.

Costa pushed her to one side and triggered the extinguisher.

A crowd was gathering. The spray doused the shrieking figure, which staggered and fell to the floor. His skin was black with soot, red with livid burns.

He was recognisable, just.

“Medics,” Costa said, dropping to his knees beside the man, wondering if there was much life left in him. Blood was beginning to seep through the scorched clothing. He was wounded, perhaps more than once. “They’re coming. Hold still. It will be all right …”

A noise escaped the blackened lips, a long, painful groan that blew the stink of burnt petrol straight into Costa’s face. It was the final breath. He knew it. So did Josh Jonah, dying in his arms.

They were around him now, looking, unable to speak.

Costa didn’t wait. Two steps took him to the door to Vogel’s apartment; he found the light switch, tried to take in what he saw.

The place was wrecked. There’d been a fight, a bloody one. Money — fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills — was scattered across the table in the living room. A lot of money. Thousands, surely.

Falcone and Catherine Bianchi weren’t far behind him.

“Let’s put out a bulletin for Vogel,” she said, pulling out her radio. “Then we figure out how the hell I’m going to explain all this to Gerald Kelly and keep my job.”

Costa tried to take in what he was seeing. “I wouldn’t make any hasty decisions. There were three people in here. I heard them.”

He walked on through the scattered mess on the floor, into the bedroom.

The smell he’d first noticed, that of blood, hung heavy in the air, mingling with the harsh chemical stench of petrol. There was something else, too …

A single naked bulb swung lazily over the bed as if someone had recently brushed against it. Martin Vogel didn’t live in style. Or die that way either. The corpse was on the bare mattress. Vogel wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and the plaster cast on his arm. A gaping wound stood over his heart like a bloody rose poking its way out from the inside.

“You can hold the bulletin,” Costa said, mostly to himself.

The window was open, just a fraction. He walked to it. There was a fire escape outside. Someone could have escaped undetected.

Maybe they did kill each other — Vogel and Jonah. Or maybe it was meant to look that way.

Catherine Bianchi walked over to the table, picked up some of the notes and let them drop through her fingers. Costa watched Falcone biting his tongue, wanting to tell her not to touch a thing.

“What was it the Carabinieri’s pet professor said?” she asked. “Next we’d get the Avaricious and the Prodigal?”

She shook her head and cast a brief glance at the bedroom, and then the corridor, where Josh Jonah’s corpse lay like a burnt and bloodied human ember escaped from some recently extinguished bonfire.

“How do you tell which one was which?”

The stink of petrol drifting into the room from around Vogel’s bed was becoming overpowering. It must have been in the carpet, the curtains, everywhere.

So Josh Jonah intended to set fire to the place and had been caught by his own misdeed, shot by the wounded Vogel. Costa’s mind struggled with that idea. Jonah was ablaze when he died. If he’d been close to the petrol trail he’d been laying, that would have ignited, too. There was a gap in the scenario somewhere.

“I think we should get out of here until the fire people take a look,” he began to say. “This isn’t a safe—”

Something hissed and fizzed in the corner and finally he managed to place the last unknown smell. It was one from childhood. Fireworks on the lawn of the house, bright, fiery lights in the sky. A fuse burning before the explosion.

In the corner of the room, safe on a chair above the fuel-stained carpet, sat an accordion-style jumping firecracker. A long length of cord had been attached so that it wound across the seat of the chair, lengthening the burn time. Most of it was now charred ash. Scarcely half a finger of untouched material remained, and that was getting rapidly eaten by the eager, hungry flame working its way to the small charge of powder that would take the incendiary and fling it into the room.

It was a perfect homemade time bomb and it was about to explode.

Costa shoved Catherine Bianchi back towards the door, bellowing at Falcone and the baffled young cop to join them.

Then the soft roaring gasp of the explosion hit.

13

An hour and a half later Costa found himself standing outside next to the engines and the emergency vehicles as they wound down their pumps and reported the entire building evacuated, without a single casualty.

Gerald Kelly had arrived, disturbed at dinner in formal dress, just like Falcone and his companion. The SFPD captain listened in quiet fury to a report from Catherine Bianchi and the firemen. After that he took the two Italians to one side to demand an explanation — any explanation — for Costa’s presence in Martin Vogel’s apartment.

“I came to apologise,” Costa said simply. “That was all.”

Falcone stood his ground. “I asked him to do this, Kelly. I thought it might help.”

“Oh, right. That’s what you were doing. Helping.” He looked at them, desperation in his eyes. “Well? Did it?”

“This isn’t our case,” Costa said, before his superior had the chance to intervene.

Kelly eyeballed him and stifled a single, dry laugh. “You guys really are something. I know it’s not your case. If it was … what would you think? What would you do?”

Costa glanced at the narrow, badly lit street that fed back into the bright, busy district around Market Street.

“I’d be looking for a third man,” he said.