Dante's Numbers

1

Three days later Costa and Teresa Lupo sat at the door of the principal exhibition tent in the temporary canvas village erected by the Palace of Fine Arts, watching Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti strut around the area as if they owned it.

The question had been bothering him for days. He knew he had to ask.

“What’s the difference between a producer and a director?”

She stared at him and asked, “Are you serious?”

“Deadly. I was never addicted to movies like you. I just see the finished thing. Actors. Pictures. I’ve no idea what goes into it.”

“What was the difference between Caravaggio and Cardinal Del Monte?”

Costa frowned and replied, “One was an artist and the other was the man who made his art viable. By paying for it, or finding others to come up with the commissions.”

“One provides the art. The other provides the wherewithal. There. You answered your own question.”

He thought about that, and the nagging doubt that had been with him since the conversation with the Asian waitress in the diner.

“If you’d been Del Monte, would you have loved Caravaggio or resented him? So much talent in one human being, something you couldn’t hope to achieve yourself?”

“I think I’d feel lucky to have known a genius,” Teresa replied. “And a little jealous, too, from time to time.” She nodded at the two Italians. “You think Bonetti might resent Tonti in some way?”

Bonetti was striding past the huge marquee that was destined to house the audience for the premiere the following evening. Tonti was at his side, listening. Thirty years separated these men. One was in his prime: strong, both physically and personally. Tonti was dying; his face seemed bloodless. His walk had the slow, pained determination of an old man resenting his increasing infirmity.

“Directors win Oscars,” Costa said. “Producers don’t win anything.”

“The kind of money they make, they don’t need to. Someone like Bonetti dips his beak in everything. He’s Del Monte with a twist. He gets to sell the paintings he commissions and keep a share of them in perpetuity. What’s some stupid little statue next to that?”

Something, he thought. But perhaps not much. Dino Bonetti was a powerful, confident man. It seemed far-fetched to think he would be offended by any fleeting fame attached to cast or crew.

“The question you should really be asking,” she added, “is how much someone like Tonti resents his stars. I’ve read his biography. It’s full of bust-ups with his cast. For some people that’s a trademark. Tonti …” She frowned. “He treats his cast as if they’re just puppets. It’s a shame he’s so old. All this digital stuff they have nowadays … It can’t be long before real actors become irrelevant for directors. Just one more piece of software they can manipulate on-screen — so much more manageable than flesh and blood.”

Lukatmi was never far away from the story, Costa thought. The Italian director had been involved with the digital video company since the outset. The papers said that Tonti had even provided seed capital for its founding. Not that it was going to be worth much now. Lukatmi’s shares had entered meltdown after the death of Josh Jonah. In seventy-two hours the company had gone from star of the NASDAQ to one more discredited and busted dotcom. The very day that the news channels and papers devoted huge amounts of coverage to the deadly inferno in Martin Vogel’s SoMa apartment, twelve lawsuits had been filed in the courts in California and New York. Given the speed with which they appeared, it was clear lawyers had been hovering at the edge of the company for some time, just as Catherine Bianchi had predicted. All accused the dead Jonah and his partner Tom Black of everything from stock option irregularities to misuse of shareholder funds. The newspapers claimed the district attorney was mulling over a formal probe into the company for fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. The share price that had seemed so buoyant only four days before had fallen through the floor until, that morning, trading had been suspended amid expectations of an impending bankruptcy announcement. Predators — old-school companies, the ones Lukatmi treated with such contempt — were hovering, ready to snap up what few worthwhile pieces might be salvaged from the corporate corpse on the waterfront at Fort Mason.

It was a juicy story for the media, one bettered only by a more astonishing revelation: as well as being a corporate crook, Josh Jonah had turned out to be a real-life criminal, a man who’d been willing to murder a Hollywood movie star in a desperate attempt to save his company from collapse. The case was closed, or so Gianluca Quattrocchi, with Bryan Whitcombe in tow, had declared to the cameras. Gerald Kelly seemed somewhat muted in front of the press. But the arguments presented by Quattrocchi appeared solid: in spite of Costa’s protests, the evidence appeared to point to there being only two individuals in Martin Vogel’s apartment in SoMa. Forensic believed that Jonah had fatally wounded Vogel, who had returned one shot before he died. That had crippled the billionaire as he started to spread petrol around the apartment to destroy any evidence.

“I still think I heard a third person there,” Costa said quietly.

Teresa watched him; he was aware that he had, perhaps, protested this point too much.

“It was dark. You knew something was wrong. When people are under stress …”

“I know what I heard …”

“Enough! If you were sitting in Bryant Street now, which way would you be leaning? Be honest with yourself.”

Costa didn’t have a good answer for that. All the available facts suggested a failed murder attempt on Jonah’s part. Cell phone company records showed that, shortly before Costa’s arrival, the stricken man had tried to call his partner Tom Black from Vogel’s apartment, presumably seeking help. That was speculation, though. Black had disappeared completely the evening his partner died. Kelly had let it be known to Catherine Bianchi that he thought the man was out of the U.S. already. There were huge black holes in the Lukatmi accounts. The missing money could easily fund a covert flight from the country, enough to last a lifetime if Black was smart enough to keep his head down and choose the right, distant location.

Quattrocchi’s theory was, predictably, one the media was growing to love. Jonah and Black had hatched the plot to hype Inferno, employing Vogel as their legman. A phony passport recovered from the wreckage in the photographer’s apartment had a stamp proving he’d flown to Rome one week before Allan Prime died, and left the day after. The picture snapped in the cemetery clearly revealed Vogel to be the man who had stolen the almonds that had very nearly ended Maggie Flavier’s life. Josh Jonah and Tom Black had enough access to security arrangements to provide Vogel with the means by which Maggie might be poisoned. His job as a paparazzo had proved the perfect cover to follow her afterwards. Records in Rome showed that he had also managed to obtain media accreditation there using his forged passport, giving him the opportunity to enter the restricted area by the Casa del Cinema and replace the genuine death mask of Dante with the fake one taken from Allan Prime that morning. Quattrocchi’s team had, in what Falcone declared a rare moment of investigative competence, discovered that Vogel’s alias was in an address book belonging to Peter Jamieson, the actor who had died in the uniform of a Carabinieri officer at the Villa Borghese. It seemed a logical step to assume that Jonah had recruited the actor to scare Maggie Flavier, perhaps as a way of distracting the police from Allan Prime, perhaps calculating, too, that his act might provoke a violent response the unfortunate Jamieson had never expected.

The case remained open. Tom Black was still at large. There was still no sign of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes. Moreover, from the point of view of the state police, the genuine death mask of Dante was still missing, and causing considerable internal ructions with the museum authorities in Italy. But a kind of conclusion had been reached in terms of Allan Prime’s murder. As far as Quattrocchi was concerned, nothing else really mattered. Josh Jonah had used the cycle of Dante’s numbers as a code for his attacks on those associated with the production, knowing that this fed the idea the movie was either somehow cursed or stalked by vengeful Dante fanatics seeking to punish those associated with the perfidious Roberto Tonti. It was all a desperate publicity stunt, one engineered by Lukatmi. It had worked, too. Inferno was on every front page, every news bulletin.

The pace of the investigation — one which had hung on the assumption that yet one more attack lurked around the corner — had slackened as the principal focus moved to the financial mess inside Lukatmi. They were now one day away from Inferno’s world premiere. Once that had occurred without incident, the cast and crew would hand over security arrangements entirely to the private companies. For Costa and his colleagues, Italy would beckon.

Maggie Flavier had left innumerable messages imploring him to visit. He’d made a series of excuses, some genuine, some less so. In the hectic aftermath of the deaths of Jonah and the paparazzo Vogel, Costa had come to realize that he was beginning to miss Italy, miss Rome, with its familiar sights, the street sounds, the easy banter in cafés, the warm, comforting embrace of home. San Francisco was a beautiful, interesting, and cultured city, but it could never be his. Rome was part of his identity, and without it he felt a little lost, like Maggie Flavier attempting to find herself in the long-dead faces of the women in the paintings in the Legion of Honor. A movie was a temporary caravan, always waiting to disperse. If she came to Rome for some sequel, she would be there six, nine months, perhaps no more. And then …

Life was temporary, and its briefness only given meaning by some short, often clumsy attempt to find permanence within the shifting sands of one’s emotions. He knew that search would never leave him. He knew, too, that Maggie Flavier would struggle to feel the same way. She would seek as she did character after character, personality after personality, through the constant round of work.

“I can’t believe you’re not even up to an argument over this,” Teresa complained, jolting him back to the present.

“We could be home in a few days. I’d like that. Wouldn’t you?”

She screwed up her face in an awkward, gauche expression. “Not yet. Not till it’s over.”

“You just told me I was wrong to think there was more to this case than Gianluca Quattrocchi would have the media believe.”

“No. I merely said your supposition for the existence of a third party in Martin Vogel’s apartment was difficult to prove. I do wish cops would listen more carefully sometimes.” A familiar sly smile appeared. “May I remind you of some things we do know? One chief suspect is missing. Thanks to the gigantic amount of publicity this has generated, a stack of money has been thrown up in the air and no one knows where it’s going to fall. And you don’t have your precious mask.”

Two points he appreciated. The third puzzled him.

“What do you mean about the money?”

“You should talk to Catherine Bianchi more. She has a firm grasp of finance. How you go about backing companies like Lukatmi. She even seems to understand how to raise money for movies, as much as anyone outside the business can.”

He watched the private security guards working on the installation of CCTV cameras on the nearest tent. The place was bristling with the things. There were enough cameras to catch a squirrel sneezing. But the tempo of the investigation had changed. It felt … if not over, then at least more manageable, to some anyway.

There was a minor commotion. Roberto Tonti strode through the door of the tent, followed by Dino Bonetti speaking in low, confidential tones by his side. Bonetti didn’t look his usual bouncy, arrogant self. This was surely going to be the most extraordinary and potentially lucrative movie he had ever produced. The newspapers were talking about a posthumous Oscar nomination for Allan Prime. The industry rags were predicting that Inferno could be the first movie to break a two-hundred-million-dollar weekend gross at the box office when it went nationwide.

Perhaps it was the strain, but neither man looked like someone on the verge of breaking every entertainment industry record in the book.

2

The two brothers stood at the entrance to the main hall of the Lukatmi building. Bulky individuals in blue overalls appeared to be gutting the place. Furniture and phones and computer equipment were disappearing out of the door and into moving vans at an astonishing rate.

There was a supervisor by the entrance, his rank emphasised by the fact that he was so scrawny he couldn’t lift a thing except the clipboard in his hands. Hank Boynton tapped the man on the arm.

“Didn’t these guys own anything themselves?”

“Maybe a paper clip or two. But we’re taking them, too. This place stinks of rotten debt. I’ll have anything that’s not nailed down.”

“The cops won’t like that,” Frank suggested.

“The cops are in Building Two, where all the accounting and e-mail stuff got kept. We’re just taking the dweeb items they used to mess around with while they were pretending they were Fox or something.”

“Computers …” Hank said.

“Workstations,” the man emphasised.

“I was gonna ask if you had one going cheap,” Frank intervened. “Not so interested now.”

“You guys want something? Or you just here to yank my chain?” he asked, and not nicely.

Hank pulled out an ID. “We’re safety officers here on an official visit. We’d like to check for fire hazards from any stray discarded ponytails left behind after the train wreck. You know the kind of thing. Just routine.”

The man eyed the card and said, “That thing expired a year ago. There’s laws about impersonating a city official. Isn’t there a bingo parlour or somewhere you two could go and while away the hours?”

Frank put his broad muscular arm around the little man’s shoulders and squeezed. “You know,” he confided, “I could say you’ll live long enough to feel old and useless one day. But maybe I’d be lying. We’re looking for a friend who quit the fire department for the joyous pastures of private enterprise. Jimmy Gaines. He did security here. We’d like to commiserate with him on the sad and premature loss of his stock options. Find him and we go away. Try to pretend we don’t even exist …”

He caught Hank’s eye, removed his arm from the supervisor, and said, “Slip me some skin, bro.”

Then the two of them grazed knuckles and made rapper-like noises.

Mr. Clipboard watched, looking worried.

“Folks keep going on about the young people these days,” Frank told him. “Why? It’s the old guys they got to worry about.”

The removals man walked into the front vestibule and yelled, “Is there anyone here called Gaines?”

To everyone’s relief, a sprightly upright figure in a dark uniform which contrasted vividly with his bright, bouncy grey hair emerged. He looked in their direction, then started to dance up and down with glee.

“The old days,” Jimmy Gaines squealed as he came to greet them. “It’s like the old days.” He hesitated. “Are they cleaning that engine good and proper yet? Like we used to?”

“Stop living in the past, you stupid old man,” Frank ordered. He watched the clipboard guy barking at his brutes to hurry up stripping the building. “What the hell are you supposed to be guarding anyway, Jimmy? This place is going to be bare in an hour or so.”

“Nothing,” Gaines replied cheerfully, setting up a brisk pace away from the vast hall that had once been home to Lukatmi. “Come around the corner. There’s a café. A real one. No ponytails. No geeks or people drinking crushed wheatgrass. If it was later and I didn’t have a uniform, I’d buy you a beer.”

“Coffee will do,” Hank said quietly.

“You look serious,” Gaines declared as he cut behind the building, heading for a small door with the sign of a coffee cup above the threshold.

“We need to give a nice Italian lady a present,” Frank said as the brothers struggled to keep up.

“Chocolates,” Gaines suggested. “I’m told they come with a guarantee.”

Hank caught up with him and placed his hand on Gaines’s arm. The man stopped and looked at them. They were alone now. No one could hear.

“We want to find her a better present than that, Jimmy. We want to hand her Tom Black.”

Jimmy Gaines gave them a hard stare. “And I thought this was a social call! Half of SFPD is looking for Black. I tried talking to them, but they looked so bored having an old fart like me wheezing away I gave up in the end. What makes you think you can find someone they can’t?”

“Because six, maybe nine months ago,” Frank said, “we saw you and Mr. Black out together. Him looking at you as if he had stars in his eyes and all manner of that fancy exploration gear you love in the back of your station wagon. You looked like good friends going somewhere remote. Two and two going together the way they do …”

“Hiking,” Jimmy Gaines snapped. “We both belong to the Sierra Club and a couple other things. You suggesting something else?”

“Not for a moment,” Hank insisted. “You always did love the wild side of life. The great outdoors.” The Boynton brothers liked Jimmy Gaines, mostly, though not so much they wanted to see him more than a couple of times a year. “I remember you reading Henry David Thoreau on those long, empty night shifts. Things like that stick in the memory.”

“If more people read Thoreau, we wouldn’t be in the shit we’re in now. The simple life and a little civil disobedience from time to time. You boys ever take a look at Walden like I told you to?”

“I’m allergic to poison oak and air that doesn’t have a little scent of gasoline in it,” Hank confessed. “Wild things don’t agree with me. Was Tom a Thoreau fan, too?”

“Damned right. Walden was his favourite book after I showed it to him. He isn’t a murderer either. Don’t care what those stupid cops say. That Jonah bastard … nothing would surprise me about him.”

“That’s what we heard,” Hank said, urging him on.

“Tom’s a decent human being. Just a little lost kid with too much brains and money and too little life. Didn’t have an old man. His mom was half crazy. Did you know that? Did you read that in the papers?”

“I guess we didn’t,” Frank replied.

“No. Kind of spoils the story, doesn’t it? So what do you really want?”

“We want to find him,” Frank replied. “We want to know the truth. If it’s what you think it is — and our Italian friend believes that, too — we’d maybe hope we can help get him off the hook. So where is he, Jimmy?”

Gaines shook with fury. He was fit and strong for his age. Sometimes, when much younger, he had been a touch free with his fists in a bar after work.

“I don’t know! Why would he tell me where he was going? I’m just an old security guard he used to talk to about the mountains and the woods. When he wanted some new place to go, usually. He liked being on his own. Poor kid thought he was soft on that actress for a while, not that that was ever going to go anywhere. She was a tease. Led him on. Tom never should have gotten mixed up with that Hollywood crowd in the first place.”

Hank and Frank looked at one another.

“We need you to talk to us about those places you showed him,” Hank said.

Gaines nodded in the direction of the great red bridge along the Bay and the wooded Marin headlands beyond.

“Why? You think he’s up there somewhere? Scared and hungry and him a billionaire only four days ago?”

Frank folded his arms. “I don’t think he’s in Acapulco. Do you?”

Jimmy Gaines swore. “It was Josh Jonah, all on his own, I swear it. Tom was just a starstruck idiot. Kid didn’t understand the first thing about money. He actually believed all that new-world crap Lukatmi used to spout.”

“We’re sorry, Jimmy,” Frank apologised. “Truth is, you can insure against anything these days except stupidity, can’t you?”

Gaines stared at them and asked, “Insurance? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what we’re talking about,” Frank replied. “Sorting this thing out once and for all. Please. Just tell us where to look.”

There was a short, unpleasant moment of laughter. Then …

“Oh, what the hell, this was my last day anyway. I guess I get to leave early. You two got good boots?” Gaines was stripping off his jacket. He was still a big man, all muscle under the cheap white security guard shirt.

Hank and Frank looked at each other.

“Just the old ones from the station,” Hank confessed.

“Better go get them. And something for poison oak. Where we’re headed, things bite.”

3

Costa and Teresa Lupo got two cups of foul coffee from the food truck, then headed for a bench by the lake in front of the Palace, listening to the ducks arguing, glad to be away from the ill-tempered crowd.

“Here’s something to think about,” Teresa declared as she sat down. “Josh Jonah told anyone willing to listen, including the papers, that fifty million dollars of Lukatmi money went into Inferno.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Well, it’s not there.”

“They’ve spent it, surely.”

“No. The SFPD can’t find any proof much Lukatmi money went into the movie in the first place. All they can track is a measly five million in the production accounts at Cinecittà. The rest of it doesn’t exist. Not in Rome anyway. They’ve located some odd currency movements out of Lukatmi, substantial ones into offshore accounts, in the Caribbean, South America, the Far East. But not to Rome. Not to anything that seems to go near any kind of movie production. They think that was just Josh Jonah thieving the bank to put something aside for a rainy day.”

Costa found himself wishing he understood the movie industry better. “If they didn’t have the money, how did the thing get finished? What did they pay people with?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Bonetti’s the lead producer and he refuses to discuss the matter with the Americans. He says it’s none of their business. Strictly speaking, it isn’t. Inferno got made by committee. A string of tiny production companies, all set up specifically for the purpose of funding the movie, all based in places where the accounting rules tend to be somewhat opaque. Cayman. Russia. Liechtenstein. Gibraltar. Even Uzbekistan.”

“The company was Italian,” Costa insisted. “I saw the notepaper. I saw the name on the posters. Roberto Tonti Productions.”

“Tonti put up half a million dollars to assemble a script, a cast, and a budget. That’s all. The real money came from ordinary investors, the mob, Lukatmi, God knows where else. We’ll never find out. Not unless the offshore-banking business suddenly decides to open itself up to public scrutiny.”

Costa struggled to make sense of this. “Someone must have paid the bills at Cinecittà. They couldn’t have worked for six, nine months or so without settling at least some of what was owed.”

She grinned. “Catherine says the SFPD have checked through the Carabinieri in Rome. The urgent bills were settled by all those little co-production companies. One from Liechtenstein would handle catering, say. One from Cayman would pick up special effects. I’d place a bet on that being how the mob money got there. They like these places. None of it came from Lukatmi direct, and the Lukatmi accounts show just that five million I told you about going into the production to pay two months’ studio fees at Cinecittà. Nothing more.” She paused. “And for that, they got exclusive world electronic distribution rights and stacks of publicity. Something that ought to have been worth, well, not fifty million dollars, but maybe twenty-five.”

Teresa had a habit of springing information on people this way, Costa thought.

“Why’s Catherine confiding all this to you and not Leo?” he asked.

“Because Leo, being Leo, is utterly fixated on this idea that the real story lies in that rotten money from the men in black suits. He’s not the world’s greatest listener, in case you never noticed. I am. Also I think Catherine likes stringing him along. He’s getting nowhere with her and it’s driving him crazy.”

“Ah.”

Costa had gathered this from watching the two of them together. He’d never seen Falcone fail to get something he wanted in the end. It was an interesting sight, and an experience the old man himself clearly found deeply frustrating.

“Enough of Leo,” Teresa went on. “Here’s something else … Josh Jonah hated old movies.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“He told everyone! In a million media interviews. Anything that wasn’t invented in this bright new century of ours simply didn’t matter to him. There are three long articles a couple of friends tracked down for me. In them he gets asked to name his favourite movies of all time. They’re all the same stupid, violent, computer-generated crap that passes for entertainment these days. Not a human emotion in any of them. No Citizen Kane. No Eisenstein. Nothing Italian. I doubt he’d even heard of Hitchcock.”

The director’s name conjured up the cartoon image of the man, in profile, lips protruding, and that funny old theme tune he’d heard so often on the late-night reruns put out by the more arcane Italian channels.

“If he’d never heard of Hitchcock, who invented Carlotta Valdes?” Costa asked.

“Who sent Maggie Flavier a green ’57 Jaguar?” Teresa shot back. “And told Martin Vogel to pick bitter almonds from a tree next to that fictional grave at Mission Dolores?”

She turned around and pointed to the huge white mansion across the road that was the home of Roberto Tonti. “He knows all about Hitchcock. So does Bonetti. His first movie in Italy was a cheap Hitchcock knockoff. Simon Harvey knows, too. Maybe there’s a movie fan among those mobsters Bonetti tapped for cash.”

“The Carabinieri say it’s over.”

“We can argue about whether this was all about Dante. Or a bunch of Sicilian money from some people who were starting to feel they’ve been taken for a ride. Or a movie an old English movie director made here—here—half a century ago. But there’s one thing even Leo can’t argue about …” Teresa watched him, waiting.

“Josh Jonah didn’t know about any of these things,” Costa said.

“He could — and probably did — fix that awful snuff movie that made Lukatmi so much money when Allan Prime died. But that’s about it,” she agreed. “Whoever started this circus is still out there. Maybe they’re going to go quiet now the SFPD want to lay the blame at the door of a dead computer billionaire. Maybe they feel the publicity they’ve got is enough. Maybe not.”

She looked at him. “So what are you going to do now? Every case is unpacked. Every item accounted for.” She nodded towards the tents. “You’re surely not needed in there and you know it.”

He’d been warned to steer clear of Maggie Flavier, by both Gerald Kelly and Falcone, who was concerned that whatever little cooperation they could still count on from the SFPD was about to disappear.

“I’m supposed to behave myself.”

“Call her, Nic. Go and see her. No one’s going to miss you. Even Leo and Peroni don’t feel the need to hang around this place. Why should you?”

He hadn’t been able to get Maggie out of his head for days. That was why he had hesitated.

Teresa reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his phone, and dangled her fingers over the buttons.

“Don’t make me do this for you,” she warned.

4

It was almost three in the afternoon by the time Jimmy Gaines parked his station wagon in the Muir Woods visitor centre and pointed them up the hiking route signposted as Ocean View Trail.

“You ever watched Vertigo, Jimmy?” Hank said as he tied on his old fireman’s boots.

“Couple of times.”

“Some of it was shot here. They give her a famous line. ‘I don’t like it … knowing I have to die.’ ”

“One more folk myth,” Frank cut in. “Hitch shot that somewhere else.”

The two men turned and looked at him.

“You sure of that?” Jimmy Gaines asked. “All them big sequoias. I’d assumed …”

“It’s the movies,” Frank insisted. “I’ve been reading up on things. The buffs call that part ‘the Muir Woods sequence.’ But it wasn’t even filmed here. It was shot at Big Basin, eighty miles south. Hitch liked the light better, apparently.” He watched Gaines pulling on a backpack with three water bottles strapped to the outside. “Did Tom Black like Vertigo, too?”

Gaines heaved more gear out of the car. “Not that I know. He never talked about movies much. Just books. Thoreau, Walden. All that stuff Tom used to spout to the press about how we could build a different world, one in tune with nature, with no real government and some kind of weird pacifism when it came to dealing with authority … it all came from Thoreau. That old nut wasn’t just a tree hugger, you know. He was an anarchist, too.”

He stared into the forest of gigantic redwoods ahead of them. “I never much liked to talk to Tom about that. He was so young and naive, there wasn’t much point. Josh Jonah was the opposite, except when he wanted to appear that way to keep Tom happy. Josh liked movies where people died. We had a brief conversation once about The Matrix. When I told him I couldn’t figure which way was up, he looked at me like I was brain-dead. We didn’t talk movies or much else ever again.” He stopped and scratched his grey mop of hair. “Why are we talking about Hitchcock?”

“It’s just some crazy theory our Italian friend has. You know what Europeans are like.”

“Not really.”

They steered clear of poison oak and listened in silence as Jimmy Gaines talked as they walked, mostly to himself, about the forest around, the redwoods and tan oak, the madrone and Douglas fir.

Frank Boynton caught his brother’s eye after half an hour and knew they were both thinking the same thing. Or rather two things. This didn’t seem the kind of place a fugitive would hide. The Muir Woods were popular. At weekends and on holidays, it could be difficult to find a space in any of the parking lots dotted around the park.

And Jimmy Gaines looked like a man who knew where he was going.

After a while he diverted them onto a side path deep in the thickest part of the wood. Frank glanced at the sign at the fork: they were on the Lost Trail.

It seemed well named. They began to descend through deep, solitary tracts of fir that merged into deeper, thicker forest. The sun was so scarce the temperature felt as if the season had changed. For some reason, that line of Kim Novak’s refused to leave Frank Boynton’s head.

After what seemed like an hour of punishment, Jimmy Gaines led them off the barely visible path and directly into the deep forest. Here there was no discernible track at all. They stumbled down a steep mossy bank, further and further into the dense thickets where the massive redwoods stood over them like ancient giants. Gaines’s eyes flickered constantly between the dim path ahead and a small GPS unit in his hand.

“They got animals here?” Frank asked.

“Chipmunk and deer mainly,” Gaines said without turning round. “Snakes. Lots of snakes. Don’t believe the stories you hear about mountain lions. They’re close but not that close. Too smart to come near humans mostly. We got ticks that carry Lyme disease. Rat shit with hantavirus. Some of them mosquitoes might have West Nile Virus, too.” He stopped and watched them standing there, uncertain where to put their feet. “It’s dangerous in the wild woods. I figured you knew that.”

Gaines removed his backpack, pulled out the water bottles, and handed two over. The Boynton brothers gulped greedily.

“Doesn’t feel like we’re wandering around aimlessly,” Frank said. “If I’m being honest.”

Gaines shook his head. “You boys always were too clever for your own good, weren’t you? Too greedy, too. You just had to know what was going on.” He swigged at his own water bottle and eyed the redwoods around them. “I remember one time when there was a fire in some little baker’s on Union. You two weren’t even on duty. Didn’t stop you coming around and watching, telling us what we were doing wrong while you stood there looking all know-it-all from the sidelines.”

He opened up the backpack and took out a large handgun, old, with a revolving chamber. A Colt maybe, Frank thought. He was never great at weapons.

The Boynton brothers’ former colleague from the San Francisco Fire Department pointed the barrel in their direction and said, “Tom and I are a little more than friends, if you really want to know. I never had a son. Never had a wife either. Just like you two.” He leaned forward and grinned, a little bashfully. “Didn’t you ever wonder?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “But we didn’t think it was any of our business. Still isn’t. What’s with the gun, Jimmy? We’ve known each other thirty years. You don’t need that.”

There was a noise from behind them. Frank Boynton didn’t turn to look. He refused to take his eyes off Jimmy Gaines and the weapon in his hands.

A dishevelled figure stumbled down through the high ferns of the bank by their side. The newcomer looked like some street bum who’d been homeless for a long time, not a fugitive ex-billionaire who’d only a few days before kept the company of movie stars.

“Hello, son,” Frank said, extending his hand. “My brother and I are here to help.”

The young man turned and stared at Jimmy Gaines, fear and desperation in his eyes. And deference, too. Maybe Jimmy bossed him around in the open air the way Josh Jonah had inside Lukatmi’s grim brick fortress by the water.

“You got food?” was all Tom Black asked.

Gaines threw him the backpack. “I showed you how to find things to eat in the woods,” he said, sounding cross. “I can’t be here for you all the time, Tom. That would just make them suspicious.”

“Can’t stay here forever, either,” Hank cut in. “Sooner or later you’ve got to come out.”

The young man ripped into a pack of trail mix, poured some into his throat, and looked at them unpleasantly, as if they weren’t quite real.

“What if we could make it sooner?” Frank added. “What if we could make it safe?”

Black glanced at Jimmy Gaines, seeking guidance.

“Take their phones and throw them in the forest,” Gaines ordered. With his left hand he retrieved some rope out of the backpack. “Then tie them up good and tight.”

5

The Brocklebank building was old and elegant and hauntingly familiar. Costa parked outside the grand entrance and talked his way past the uniformed concierge at the door. There was money on Nob Hill. History, too. The connection came to him as he stood in the elevator, waiting for it to rise to the third floor, where Maggie’s apartment was situated.

In the movie, Madeleine Elster had lived in this same block. The detective Scottie had watched her leave the forecourt in a green Jaguar, identical to the one some unknown stranger had briefly loaned Maggie Flavier.

He went through a cursory ID check when he reached the floor — the movie company’s security men were all flash suits and earpieces and very little in the way of brains — and then she let him in.

Maggie looked as if she’d come straight from the shower. She was wearing a bright emerald silk robe and nothing else. Her blonde hair was newly dried and seemed to have recovered its gleaming sheen. It was still short, without the extensions that had caused his heart to skip a beat at the Palace of Fine Arts. She looked incredibly well, as if she’d never suffered a day’s illness in her life.

“I wish you’d come when I asked,” she said. “No need to explain. Help yourself to a drink, will you?” She pointed at the kitchen. “I’ve got a vodka. I need to get dressed.”

He watched her walk into the bedroom and close the door. Then he found some Pellegrino in the refrigerator, returned with it, and stood in front of a marble fireplace and the largest TV screen he’d ever seen. The place wasn’t as big as he’d expected. A part of him said movie stars needed to live somewhere special, somewhere different. From what he could see, there was just the one living room, a kitchen, the bedroom on the inner side of the building, away from the noise of the street, and a shining stone-and-steel bathroom next to it.

When she returned, she was wearing a short pleated skirt, the kind he associated with teenage cheerleaders at sports matches, and a polo shirt with the number seven on the front. No makeup, no pretence, no borrowed character from an old museum canvas. She looked little more than twenty.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“Forever. My mother found it not long after we came from Paris. We rented back then. Not that she could afford it. There were … standards to be maintained. If you read the bios, they’ll tell you she spent our last thousand dollars trying to find me a break. That’s not quite true. Not quite.”

“So that’s … what? Ten, fifteen years ago?”

“Seventeen years in October. I remember how warm and sunny it was when we arrived. I thought San Francisco would always be like that. You should come in the autumn. It’s beautiful. Different. What you’d expect of the summer.”

“You don’t know how she found it?”

She shook her head and ran her fingers through the ragged blonde locks. “No. Why should I? It was a good choice. When she was gone and I had the money, I bought the apartment. It’s just a one-bedroom bachelor-girl pad. I’m not here more than two or three months of the year anyway.”

“And when you’re travelling?”

“Then the agency rents it. I hate the idea of an empty home. A place should be lived in. Why are you asking all this?”

“I’ve seen it before. This apartment block. It was in a movie.”

“It was?” she asked, wide-eyed, curious.

“Vertigo. Hitchcock.”

Maggie closed her eyes and fought to concentrate. Then she opened them, picked up her glass from the table, and gulped at it.

“No. I don’t think I’ve seen it. Hitchcock isn’t really that fashionable these days, to be honest with you.”

“The woman in it lived here. She died. In the end.”

Maggie raised her drink in a kind of toast. “Women in movies often do. You should congratulate me, by the way. Dino Bonetti came by earlier. He offered me the part of Beatrice in the sequel.”

“Did you agree?”

“What, on a social visit? I don’t think so. All that stuff goes through Simon and then my agent.”

“Do they take a cut?”

She laughed, exasperated. “This is show business, Nic. Everybody takes a cut of everything. I feed thousands …”

“How much?”

She hesitated. “You’re very curious. I don’t know. I don’t really want to. They put together some deal, I sign it when I’m told. Money goes in the bank.” Her eyes darkened. “At least it’s supposed to. Apparently, I’m missing something from Inferno. My accountant was whining about something or other. It’s no big deal. I’m …” She threw a hand around the room. “… rich, aren’t I? After the first couple of million, you stop counting. Any problems, I guess I can still do a hair ad. I’m not proud.” She hesitated. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“There’s money missing in the production company accounts. A lot of money. And you haven’t been paid?”

“Not everything. It’s not the first time. Sometimes it takes months. They wait for the exchange rates to get better or something. That’s why I didn’t want to waste any time talking to Dino when he started pressing me to sign a new contract. Why should I? They can’t screw me out of what they owe me for Inferno. It looks like it’s going to be the biggest-grossing movie I’ve ever made. I’ll get what I’m owed.” She glanced at the window. “I want to live to enjoy it, too. Are we all still supposed to be on someone’s hit list?”

He tried to sound convincing. And convinced. “I don’t think so. Still, it makes sense to be careful.”

“No rides through the Presidio? No visits to strange art galleries?”

“Not for the moment.”

She stood a little closer. Her perfume was subtle and mesmerising. Close up, she didn’t look so young, and he liked that.

“I have to do the premiere tomorrow. Then launch some old movie festival in the city over the weekend. After that …” The glass bobbed up and down, a touch nervously. “I have a villa for three weeks in Barbados. No one but me. Private estate. Nearest house half a mile away. Is that safe enough for you?”

“I’d think you’d be fine.”

“What I meant was …”

Another edgy shot of vodka disappeared. She was coughing hard, her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wide open again with astonishment. His mind began to race, recalling her terrible collapse in the park.

Maggie fell back on the sofa behind them. He was beside her instantly.

“Damned drink,” she swore, still struggling to speak. “Went down the wrong way. Must break that vodka habit. Tomorrow. Definitely. Wait, I forgot something, Nic. Dino Bonetti! That movie! Vertigo!”

“What?”

“The first time he came here. He told me to watch it. He recognised the location.” She looked at him. “Now you’re saying the same thing. What’s going on here?”

Costa told her a little of Teresa’s ideas, and how the woman who had first approached Allan Prime had introduced herself as a character in the movie.

She sat on the sofa, bare, slender legs tucked beneath her. “Well, I guess it’s time I followed everyone’s advice. Will you watch it with me?” She closed her eyes and looked exhausted. “I’ve been on my own so much since all this craziness began.”

“Where’s the movie?” he asked.

She picked up the phone, called someone, and ordered a DVD. “It’ll be an hour or so. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“I can order some food, too.”

He got up. Costa knew he needed activity, something that would take his mind off Dante Alighieri and Alfred Hitchcock, Dino Bonetti and the shattered corpse of Josh Jonah, prone on the floor of a run-down SoMa apartment block.

Maggie followed him and watched as he rifled through the kitchen drawers and cabinets.

“You have food,” he said. “That’s a start.”

“Old food. One of the rental people must have left it.”

He found a small envelope of dried porcini, a packet of arborio rice, a couple of shallots in the vegetable rack along with a chunk of Parmesan wrapped in foil. Five minutes later he had the makings of a risotto. It felt good to cook again. It felt even better to have Maggie Flavier leaning on the threshold of the door, looking at him as if she’d never seen anything like this in her life.

“Any wine recommendations?” she asked, nodding at the floor-length chilled cabinet filled with bottles that looked a lot more expensive than anything he usually drank.

“I’ll leave that to you.”

She opened the glass door, peered inside, and pulled out a bottle. “I bought this in Rome. Is it any good?”

He looked at the 2004 Terredora Greco di Tufo and said, “It’ll do. Can I leave you to set the table?”

“Men!” she exclaimed, and went to the kitchen drawers, where she removed a tablecloth and place settings.

“After that …” he shouted through the open door, “… we need some cheese grated.”

It wasn’t the best risotto Costa had ever made. But he didn’t want someone else’s food. Not with her.

They ate and talked. Towards the end she looked at him and asked, “Did you used to cook? For Emily?”

He had to force himself to remember. There was now a distance between the present and the past. Perhaps it was San Francisco. Perhaps it was Maggie Flavier. Or both. But he could now see the winter’s nightmare with some perspective, could stand back from it and feel apart from the pain and despair it had brought.

“Sometimes. Sometimes she did. Emily wasn’t a vegetarian. If I was working nights, I’d come home occasionally and I could smell steak in the kitchen.” He looked at her. “Or bacon and eggs.”

“Were you upset?”

“Of course not. It was her home, too.” He could picture the two of them together, inside the house near the Appian Way. “It used to smell good, if I’m honest. If I ate meat …” He shrugged. “But I don’t. And I didn’t like the smoking much. She went outside for that.”

Maggie held up her hands. “I won’t smoke inside either. Promise.”

“It’s your home,” he said.

“No, it’s not. It’s just somewhere I live from time to time. Did you think about it? Being together? Did you ever … question whether it was right?”

“Not once. Not for a second,” he said immediately. “We had arguments. We saw things different ways. None of that mattered. I can’t explain. It happened.” A flash of recollection, of a cold, hard winter’s day by the mausoleum of Augustus, ran through his head. “Then it was over.”

She reached out and touched the back of his hand.

“I could feel something. Your sadness. Outside that little children’s cinema. Before we went inside. Before I even knew who you were. It was like something tangible.”

“Not good for a police officer.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m freaky Maggie Flavier. I see things other people don’t. Lucky them.”

He got up and started to take the plates.

“No,” she insisted. “You cooked. I load the dishwasher. Sit. Make yourself comfortable.”

She went back into the kitchen. He walked to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, wondering what he saw, what he felt.

When he returned, she was tipping the video deliveryman at the door. After that she put the disc in some machine by the fireplace and turned the TV on. They sat next to each other, opposite the gigantic screen. She picked up a couple of remotes. The curtains on the apartment closed themselves slowly; the light fell.

The black-and-white credits ran: the logo of the Paramount peak, the awkward, jarring music he had come to associate with the movie. Then a brutal close-up of a woman, zooming into her eye with a cruel, unforgiving honesty, monochrome turning to bloodred, a swirling vortex spinning out from the black, unseeing pupil.

He felt cold. He felt lost and he’d no idea why.

6

It got cold quickly in the woods. At least, Frank Boynton assumed the way he felt was due to the temperature of the out-of-the-way patch of the sequoia forest, not some innate primeval sense of dread on his part. He’d read more noir books than he could count, watched the entire school of movies in the genre. He’d thought he understood a little about fear from all that dedicated study, but now he realised he was wrong. There was a world of difference between theory and practice. Reality was a lot less complicated. It also seemed to happen a lot more quickly. He could almost feel the minutes slipping away from them.

So he sat there in silence, thinking, seated on the damp, cold ground, his hands tied behind his back, the two brothers bound together so securely there really wasn’t much point in contemplating escape. He couldn’t run as well as either of their captors even if it was a level playing field, without ropes, without a slippery dark forest where the light was fading and he hadn’t a clue which way to turn.

The Muir Woods weren’t the overrun tourist destination he’d believed, not in this part anyway. Here, the woods felt vast and timeless and desolate, an army of identical redwood monoliths stretching towards a darkening sky in every unfathomable direction. A place where a man could lie dead for months and maybe never be found.

Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black had gone off to a small clearing. They’d been there a long time, talking out of earshot. Making a phone call or two. Frank could hear the distant electronic beep of a phone and envied the way it communicated so easily, so swiftly with the outside world.

If he could just find his own …

They’d be dead by the time anyone came. The idea of rescue was one confined to the pages of fiction. In the real world there was no escape, except perhaps through meek, obedient submission. The brothers had told Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black what they knew: an Italian woman they both liked believed Tom was innocent and might be able to help if only he’d get in touch. Then she’d pass him on to a friendly cop who, for once, didn’t come with a bunch of preconceptions about presumed guilt. Frank had taken the lead, as he usually did in such situations, offering to make the call, promising he’d do nothing to compromise their location, or Jimmy Gaines’s identity.

They’d listened, then left. Something in the way they walked hadn’t filled him with optimism.

Frank wriggled, trying to get a little more comfortable. He wished he could look at his brother eye-to-eye. He wished he could understand what might be going on in Hank’s head. Closeness could make you deaf and blind to things that sensitive, observant people spotted instantly. Over the decades, their relationship had settled into an easy, unspoken rhythm. Frank was the practical one, the right-brainer, as Teresa Lupo had so cannily noticed. Frank handled the money and the day-to-day problems of keeping the house in the Marina going: bills and taxes, repairs and improvements. Hank was the dreamer, the would-be poet, more interested in the San Francisco of yesterday than now, more obsessed with the cerebral puzzles of Conan Doyle than the gutter reality of Dashiell Hammett that Frank preferred. Neither had much real preparation for their present quandary. Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade were myths, ghostly actors in tales that chose entertainment over mundane, prosaic reality.

There weren’t any favorable ends when it came to men with guns. Not in the Muir Woods. Not anywhere. Jimmy Gaines, when he wanted, would simply walk over and pop them, one after the other, straight in the head as they sat, tied together in a place that stank of moss and rotting vegetation. A jerk of the trigger was all it took. He’d been thinking of Jimmy a lot in the hour or so since Tom Black had appeared from behind the sequoias, like a lost forest creature in search of salvation. Jimmy Gaines taking them to bars where they didn’t really feel comfortable. Jimmy Gaines swinging hard and viciously at a stranger who’d said the wrong thing, thought the wrong thought, looked the wrong way.

Like the idiots they were, he and Hank had walked straight up to him at Lukatmi based on that single sighting of Gaines with Tom Black weeks before, when they had, now Frank thought of it, seemed the very best of friends. That was the trouble with the Marina. It was a community, a little village full of smart, engaged, occasionally difficult people, all living on top of one another. It was hard to keep secrets. Jimmy Gaines, a solitary bachelor who quietly declined to go to some of the bars the other guys did after duty, had never really kept his. People were simply too polite — too uninterested, frankly — to mention it. So when a secret became big, became important, a man just passed it by like all the others. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt. It bred a quiet, polite ignorance, a glance away at an awkward, embarrassing moment, a cough in the fist, then, after a suitable pause, a quick smile while glancing at the ground and formulating a rapid change of subject.

All of which led them to the Muir Woods while a line from an old movie kept running and running and running round his head like some loose carnivore circling the big, dark forest of his imagination.

I don’t like it … knowing I have to die.

Hank’s elbow nudged him in the ribs. He felt his brother’s bristly cheek rub up against his.

“How are you doing?”

“Never felt better.”

“This is my fault. Sorry.”

“No need to apologise. We are jointly responsible for our own stupidity.”

Hank cleared his throat. “May I remind you I am the junior here?”

Frank so wished he could look his brother full in the face at that moment. “By seven minutes, if you recall,” he pointed out, thinking it was a long time since they’d had this conversation. Maybe five decades or so.

“Seven minutes, seven years. It doesn’t matter. It still makes me younger. Still makes you the old one. The serious one. The one who does things the way you do ’cause you think that’s what’s expected.”

They never argued. If there was cause for complaint, they simply fell into silence and waited till the cloud lifted. It had worked this way for almost sixty years, since they learned to speak.

“So what?” Frank asked.

“So we’re clever and stupid in different ways. Normally, I’d say you were the cleverer and me the stupider. But this isn’t normal, is it?”

Tom Black and Jimmy Gaines were on the phone again. Frank was glad of that. They weren’t taking any notice of the two old men they’d tied up next to a redwood tree.

“I am inclined to concur,” he said. “Your point being?”

Hank shuffled round a little. They could just about catch the corner of each other’s eye.

“The point being,” Hank went on, “whether this is a left-brain or right-brain situation. Whether it’s one best handled by me.” The nudge in the ribs again. “Or by you. And you think it’s you. Because you’re like that. No offence, brother. You are. That’s fine.”

“Hank,” Frank said very calmly, “this could be difficult. We might have a lot of talking to do. Talking’s something best left to me. We’ve always worked that way.”

“There you are wrong, brother.” There was anger and determination in that lone, bright eye. “This is not about talking at all. Did they look remotely interested when you offered to call Teresa? Well, did they?”

Frank thought about that. He’d been a little scared when Jimmy Gaines had demanded the Italian pathologist’s number. He just wanted to give the man anything he could if it kept that big old gun out of their faces.

Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black never asked them to do a damned thing once they had Frank’s address book.

“No. They didn’t.”

“Another thing,” Hank added. “I can hear better than you these days. They weren’t talking about Teresa. They kept using that cop’s name, the one whose number she gave us. Costa. Seemed like Black knew who he was already.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it isn’t. That Italian cop doesn’t know us from Adam.”

Frank felt scared again. Very.

“Listen to me, Frank. I don’t know who they’ve called already but pretty soon they’re going to call the Costa guy. Then Tom’s going to go to see him and cut some kind of a deal. You know the routine. You read it a million times in all that stupid pulp fiction of yours: ‘I didn’t know what was going on, Officer. I just got scared and ran away. I got your number sometime. You seemed a nice, gullible guy.’ ” He took a deep, wheezy breath. “Whatever. And then …”

Hank’s single eye peered at him. Frank marvelled at the fact he’d learned more new stuff about his twin brother this last week than at any time in the last twenty years.

“Then it’s just Jimmy Gaines and us,” Frank replied. “And us knowing that was all a pile of crap, and that he was in there with them, too, which Costa won’t get told because Jimmy Gaines doesn’t want to go to jail, not for anybody.”

“You old guys,” Hank muttered with some sly amusement. “You get there in the end. Just listen to your little brother and do what he says.”

“OK,” Frank said, and was amazed how odd the concession sounded.

“Good. They’re working out their story. Their plan. Pretty soon Tom Black’s going to make that final call, then he’s going to get out of here. After that, Jimmy Gaines is going to walk over, say a brief apology, and blow our brains out.” He sighed. “Or so he’d like to think.”

Frank Boynton watched his brother’s lone eye wink the way it did when they were children.

“Good thing the stupid, head-in-the-clouds kid brother had the gumption to bring a knife, huh?” Hank asked lightly.

After that, Frank didn’t say a word. He stayed still and silent, hustling up a little closer to his brother so that the two men locked in conversation by the trees didn’t get suspicious about what Hank was doing with his hands.

A little while later they heard Tom Black make one more call, and the name Costa came into that. It didn’t last long. Then he left without once looking back.

Jimmy Gaines stayed by the big redwood and lit a cigarette. He smoked it slowly.

At least he seemed a little reluctant. Frank Boynton gave him that.

7

Vertigo lasted just over two hours. They watched in silence, Costa upright, Maggie reclining, her head on his shoulder, hair brushing against his cheek, sweet and soft and full of memories of another. They had nothing to say, nothing to share except the same sense of fearful wonder watching what was taking place on the screen, a fairy tale for adults imagined long before they were born.

The day started to die beyond the curtains. The lights in the streets and adjoining buildings began to wake for the evening. He scarcely noticed much except the movie and the presence of the woman by his side, so close she was almost part of him, and equally rapt in the strange, disjointed narrative playing out in front of them, one which meshed with their identities and the city beyond.

Maggie let out a sharp, momentary gasp at the scene outside the Brocklebank, with the green Jaguar pulling away, Kim Novak at the wheel, made blonde by Hitchcock. Some parts made her shiver against him: Madeleine falling into the Bay at Fort Point, not far from the Marina, and Scottie rescuing her, an act which was to establish the bond between them; again when she was wandering among the giant redwoods, lost, uncertain of her own identity; Madeleine in the Legion of Honor, staring up at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, seeming to believe this long-dead woman somehow possessed her own identity, in her hands a bouquet identical both to the one in the painting and to that left in Maggie’s borrowed car.

Most of all she seemed affected by what happened at the old white adobe bell tower of San Juan Bautista, erect in a blue sky like some biblical monument to a warped sense of justice, the place where the real Madeleine fell to her death, and where the woman who usurped her identity — and Scottie’s love — followed in the cryptic, cruel finale.

Her eyes were wide with shock at that final act. Unable to leave the screen. Together they watched Jimmy Stewart, tense and tragic, frozen in the open arch high above the mission courtyard, his own vertigo cured, but at a shocking price: the life of the female icon — not a real woman — whom he’d come to love, obsessively, with the same voyeuristic single-mindedness with which Hitchcock himself pursued her through the all-seeing eye of the camera.

When the credits rolled, she got up anxiously and took her glass into the kitchen. She hadn’t touched it for the entire duration of the movie. Maggie returned with a fresh cocktail, full of ice and lime and booze, in her left hand, and a glass of wine for him in her right.

“I need a drink after that,” she announced, and sat down, putting just a little distance between them. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I need.” He didn’t reach for the wine.

Maggie gulped at the vodka, let her head drift back onto the sofa, breathing deeply, as if to calm herself.

“What does it mean?” she asked, her green eyes suddenly alive with interest.

That question had never left him from the moment the spectral figure of Madeleine Elster walked across the screen, through a world that seemed so like the one they now inhabited.

“Perhaps it’s what Teresa said all along. Someone, somewhere is using the movie as a template for what they’re doing. A riddle, a reminder, a taunt … The way the Carabinieri think that Dante is being used. Maybe they’re both right.”

There was a half smile on her face, and an expectant look. Costa knew he hadn’t said enough.

“There’s nothing here that could possibly interest the SFPD. I’m a cop like them. We don’t think along these lines. We don’t watch movies for inspiration. Or read books of poetry. We do something real, something concrete and direct. It’s all we know. If a case gets inside your head, that’s usually when it all starts to go wrong.”

There was another problem, though he didn’t want to say it. There had to be more. Some link, some individual inside Inferno who was the catalyst. Whether what had happened was a simulacrum of The Divine Comedy or Vertigo—or both — some event, some conversation, perhaps recent, perhaps long forgotten, must have given life to the dark, convoluted story that began in the park of the Villa Borghese.

She moved closer. “Like it went wrong for Scottie? They said he was a good cop. Then along comes a woman who isn’t what she seems …”

“You could put it that way.”

“Nic.” Her green eyes shone with bright intelligence. “I was really asking about the movie. What does that mean?”

“Next to a murder investigation? Nothing.”

She sighed, disappointed. “What I wanted was for you to tell me about Scottie. About Madeleine. The woman he thought he loved, the woman who didn’t really exist. Then that sad little thing who did exist, who pretended she was Madeleine just because that was what Scottie wanted. That could make him happy, so that he would love her in return.”

“I don’t know what it’s about,” Costa confessed. “It’s supposed to be enigmatic. Art’s not there to give you answers, not always. Sometimes it’s enough simply to ask a question.”

“What question?”

He thought about Scottie and the way he looked at the woman he believed to be Madeleine Elster. How he’d undressed her while she was unconscious after rescuing her at Fort Point. How he waited expectantly by his own bed until she woke, naked, beneath his sheets.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Scottie can’t extricate himself from his desire for Madeleine, even though a part of him knows it’s not real. The way he’s always following her, watching, thinking. Hoping. It’s the pursuit of some hopeless fantasy. Like …”

He felt cold. He felt stupid. He felt more awake — more alive — than at any time since Emily had died.

“It’s like Dante’s Inferno,” he said, and could feel the revelation rising inside him. “Scottie and Madeleine Elster. Dante and Beatrice. It’s the same story, the same pilgrimage, looking for something important, the most important thing there can be. The big answer. A reason for living.”

Costa shook his head and laughed. “Why couldn’t I see this before? Vertigo is Inferno. It’s just a different way of looking at the same question. Scottie … Dante … they’re both just Everyman looking for something that makes him whole. Some reason to live.”

“ ‘I don’t like it … knowing I have to die,’ ” Maggie Flavier said, quoting from the movie in the same quiet, lost voice, one so accurate she might have been the woman they’d just watched on the screen.

“Do you know what Simon told me once?” she asked in a whisper. “When I asked him what Inferno was really about? Not Tonti’s movie. The poem.”

“What?”

“He said it was about knowing you never got to see the truth, to get a glimpse of God, until you’re dead. That everything up to that point is just some kind of preparation, a bunch of beginnings. You live in order to die. One gives meaning to the other. Black and white. Yin and yang. Being and not being.” She snatched at the glass. “But none of it’s up to us, is it?” she asked, and there was a quiet note of bitterness in her voice. “That’s for God, and if we play that role, we lose everything. Scottie tried to make the woman he wanted out of nobody. He tried to play God. In the end, that killed her. A man’s just a man. A woman can only be what she is.”

“What did you say? When he told you that?”

“I damn near slapped his face and told him not to be so stupid. I don’t believe in anything except here and now. Don’t ask me to trade that for some kind of hidden grace I only get when I’m dead. Don’t ever do that.”

The blonde hair extensions he’d seen at the Palace of Fine Arts were there on a low coffee table. She picked them up and held them to her head. There was a movement in her eye, an expression she had somehow picked up from that photo in his wallet, something else he couldn’t define because, unlike her, he’d never consciously noticed …

Instantly the associations rose for him, ones that were both warm and worrying.

She wasn’t Emily. She could pretend to be, though. If he wanted.

“I’m just like the woman in the movie, aren’t I? I can be anything you like. That’s what I do.”

He felt uneasy; he wondered whether it was time to leave, whether that was even possible.

“Is that what you’d like, Nic? Would it make things easier?”

“I want you to be you.”

She threw the false hair onto the table, brusquely, as if she hated the things. “That’s very noble. What if I don’t know who I am?”

“Then it’s time to find out.”

“Doing what? Commercials? Too cheap. Theatre? I’m not good enough. Get them to revive L’Amour L.A. so I can stare into the camera one more time and say, ‘But ’oo can blame Françoise?’ ”

Her eyes were glassy. This was a conversation she both needed and feared. “Or become one more suburban housewife who used to be something. Getting pointed at in supermarkets while I buy the diapers. Getting pitied. I don’t think so.”

“Doing whatever you want.”

She took a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, “The only thing I want right now is you. I’ve wanted that ever since the moment I saw you in the park, Nic, looking lost and so sad, not knowing who the hell I was and still wanting to help me, protect me, in spite of all that pain you had inside. That’s never happened before. Something so selfless. Not anything like it. And I’ve seen them all, Nic. The filthy rich, the astonishingly beautiful.” She pushed away the glass on the table. “I’ve been drunk on this shallow little existence since I was thirteen years old. It was only when I got to know you I realised I might as well have been dead all that time. Or a creature from someone’s imagination. Like that woman who pretended to be Madeleine Elster.”

It had to be said. He couldn’t avoid it. “I’m just a Roman police officer. I do what I do in the place that I know. That won’t change. Not ever. That’s me.”

“I know,” she replied, still staring at him. “But that’s not what scares you. I scare you. What you think I am. Some being from a different planet. Out of your reach.”

He felt the need for a drink and reached for the glass of Greco di Tufo. It tasted warm and a little too complex. There were cheaper wines he preferred. Cheaper places than this luxurious apartment in a city where he didn’t belong. He’d lost track of time. He’d no idea where any of his team were, or whether they’d simply given up on him.

“I was never much interested in anything that couldn’t last,” he said, and found he couldn’t look at her when he spoke those words.

“Because of what I am?” she asked. “Some perfect untouchable movie star? Listen to the truth.” She lifted her hands to her face. “This is an accident and maybe not a lucky one. I’m the most flawed, most damaged human being you’re likely to find. I’ve been off the rails more times than you could imagine. I’ve woken up in the wrong place, the wrong bed, so often I don’t even have to blot out the memories anymore, there are so many they do that for themselves. I’m weak and pathetic and stupid. Someone can even poison me with an apple. Remember? Without you I might be dead.”

“I remember.”

She got on her knees on the sofa next to him and hitched up her skirt. “Does this look like perfection to you?” she demanded.

The mark of the hypodermic pen was still livid on her thigh, darkening purple at its centre, yellow at the rim.

“If I was naked on a set, with a million men pointing lights and cameras at my body, they could cover that with makeup. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

She took his head in her hands. Her eyes were wide and guileless, her fingers felt like fire on his skin. “I bruise, I bleed. I weep. I ache … I need. Just like you.”

His fingers reached and touched the mark on her leg. Her skin felt soft and warm, like Emily’s, like anyone’s.

She leaned forward, took his head more firmly, pulled it towards her.

Her breath was hot and damp in his ear. “You can kiss it better if you want, Nic.”

His hand spread over her leg without a single, deliberate thought.

“Please,” she whispered.

Costa bent down and brushed his lips gently against the mark, then let his tongue touch the warm flesh. She tasted of something sweet: soap and perfume. His fingers ran around her torso and felt the taut, nervous strength there.

Then he got off the sofa, picked her up in his arms, and carried her into the bedroom. Her frantic kisses covered his neck, his face; her hands worked at his shoulders. Gently he placed her slender frame on the soft white cotton coverlet. She looked at him, pleading in silence, unmoving, arms raised.

He removed her shirt with a slow, deliberate patience. She was naked beneath. Her hands tore anxiously at his clothes. In the shadows of her bedroom they found each other, not seeing anything else, not caring.

There hadn’t been many women in his life, and all of them had mattered. But not like this. Maggie Flavier sought something in him he’d never been asked for before, in ways that were utterly new to him.

He lost count of the times they struggled with each other in the half darkness on a bed so gigantic he couldn’t hear it creak, however physical their efforts. There would never be a time, he thought, when he could forget these moments, the sight of her sighing beneath him. The gentle curves of her legs with their moist dark triangle at the apex, the dark corona of the areola of her breast as she arched above him, straining with a gentle insistence, seeking to prolong the sweetness between them.

Eventually Costa rolled to one side, closed his eyes, threw back his head against the deep pillow, and laughed.

She was on her elbow at his side when he looked again, poking at him with a long fingernail. “So it’s funny, is it?”

“No. It’s ridiculous.”

“I like the ridiculous. I feel at home there. So will you, one day.” She rolled over and looked at the bedside clock. “It’s nearly ten. What do we do now?” She ran a finger down his navel to his thigh. “Chess?”

“I haven’t played chess in years …” he began to say.

The phone rang from somewhere.

His jacket was strewn on the floor with all his other clothes. He struggled to find it.

“Oh God,” she groaned. “You really are a cop, aren’t you? I suppose I should be glad this didn’t happen ten minutes ago.”

“Or ten minutes before. Or ten minutes before that.”

Costa picked up the phone, sat down on the bed, and said, without thinking, “Pronto.”

“What?” asked a young, uncertain voice on the other end. “Who is this?”

“I’m sorry. My name is Nic Costa. I’m Italian. I wasn’t …” He glanced at Maggie, who sat upright with her arms folded, watching him with an expression of mock anger. At least he thought it was mock. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Please start, Mr. Costa. I need your help.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Tom Black and someone wants to kill me. Be at the viewing platform above Fort Point. Eleven, on the dot. Be alone and for God’s sake tell no one or I’m as good as dead.”

The call ended abruptly. Costa hit redial. The number was withheld.

“Who was it?” Maggie asked.

“He said he was Tom Black. Wants to meet me. The viewing platform above Fort Point.”

He’d glimpsed the old brick fortress when they’d been sightseeing. The building was half hidden beneath the city footings of the Golden Gate Bridge, like some ancient toy castle discarded by a lost race of giants. It was there that Scottie had fished the supposedly suicidal Madeleine Elster out of San Francisco Bay. The spot seemed so remote and shut off by the great red iron structure above, he’d no idea how it could be reached.

“How do I get there?”

“You don’t,” she said very severely. “You tell the police and let them do it. This isn’t Rome. This isn’t your investigation.”

“I know that. Tom Black’s no idiot. He won’t give himself up if he sees the police there. He’s scared and he wants to talk. With me for some reason.”

“Nic …”

“If he disappears this time, we may never see him again.”

She swore and gave him an evil look. Then she said, “Get on 101 as if you want to go over the bridge. Just before you do, there’s a turnoff to the right with a parking lot.”

“How public is it?”

“You’re right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. There’ll be traffic.” She hunched her arms around herself. Naked, she seemed smaller somehow, and vulnerable. “But not much if you turn off the road, I guess.”

She took his hand. “Nic — don’t go. Stay here with me. We can drink wine and play chess. Leave this to someone else.”

“Who?”

“Anyone. I don’t care.”

He couldn’t read the expression on her face.

The hot, human scent of sex hung around them, along with that sense of both embarrassment and elation he’d come to recognise when life took a turn like this. Something had changed in a subtle and mysterious way. The barriers were tumbling down, like leaves caught in an autumn storm. A part of him, he knew, wanted to run.

Costa gripped her fingers, then kissed her damp forehead.

“Stay here, Maggie. I’ll call,” he promised.

8

Jimmy Gaines smoked three cigarettes by the redwood tree, none of them quickly. As darkness fell, a waxy yellow half-moon began to emerge above the forest, and the dense wilderness became drowned in a cacophony of new sounds: birds and animals, insects and distant wild calls Frank Boynton couldn’t begin to name. He and his brother watched everything like hawks. More than anything, they sought to measure every breath of the man by the tree. Or perhaps, he reflected, they were simply counting away their own.

Without Gaines noticing, the two had talked together in low tones, about the lay of the land and the limited possibilities ahead of them. Somewhere at their backs they could hear motor vehicles passing through Muir Woods. Not many. This was a deserted part of the forest, and their number had diminished as day turned to night. But there was a road somewhere back there up the slope. Both men were sure of that.

In the opposite direction, downhill, beyond the sequoia trees looming opposite their captor, was, Hank said, a steep, sheer drop, one he’d seen as they arrived. Frank had never noticed. He’d been too worried by that stage to take much notice of anything except Jimmy Gaines. Now, though, thanks to his brother’s acuity, he could tell the drop was there by the way the just-visible foliage faded to nothing in the mid-distance, and from the faint sound of running water somewhere distant and below. There was a creek maybe. It was difficult to tell. Even more difficult as dusk gave way to the pale sheen of the moon, which made the area beneath the high, dense tree cover seem even blacker than before.

Neither man felt at home in the forest. All they had between them were two small flashlights and some vague idea of where the road might be. That would have to be enough. If they could escape Jimmy Gaines and his old black gun, they would head uphill, back towards the Lost Trail, then try to find headlights that might lead them back to the city and civilisation.

If …

Jimmy Gaines threw his last cigarette into the black void ahead of him, where it vanished like a firefly on speed. Then he came tearing towards them, swearing and stomping his big boots on the damp, mossy ground.

“Why can’t you keep your noses out of things that don’t concern you?” the old fireman demanded.

The gun was in his right hand. Hank had cut both their sets of ropes and left them there so Gaines wouldn’t see what had happened. Frank wondered whether that mattered so much. A gun was a gun.

“We’re sorry, Jimmy,” Frank said. “We didn’t know.”

“But you still came looking!”

“Blame me.” Frank nodded at his brother. “Not him. He’s not very bright. Besides, it was always me who got to you. You don’t need to bring Hank into this.”

“Hank, Frank, Tweedledee, Tweedledum …” The gun was getting higher and starting to look more purposeful. “You’re both the same. What business of yours is it, anyway, what Tom and me get up to? He’s a good guy. It was Josh who got him into all this shit. Josh and them.”

“What shit?” Hank asked.

The gun rose and pointed at his head.

“There you go again,” Gaines moaned. “Mouth on overdrive. I suppose you think I might as well tell you now it doesn’t matter. All this movie shit. Those bastards from Hollywood who ate those two kids up and spat them out. They were doing OK when they just stuck to being computer geeks. Somebody would’ve come along and bought the company when the money ran out. They didn’t need to move in those damned circles …”

The weapon wavered.

“It’s got nothing to do with us,” Frank agreed mildly. “Our Italian lady said she could help Tom. That’s all. So we thought maybe …”

Gaines let out a despairing wheeze. “I don’t want to die in jail. I don’t deserve that. I was just looking for a little security when I retired. That and a little companionship.”

“We won’t tell them,” Frank insisted.

“We don’t even know what’s going on, do we?” Hank asked meekly. “We just thought we were doing your friend a favour, Jimmy. Hasn’t he gone to see our nice Italian lady?”

“Never mind where he’s gone. None of your business.”

“I couldn’t agree more there, Jimmy,” Frank said. “But she’s going to think it’s a little odd if Hank and I don’t turn up for our regular coffee tomorrow morning. She’s like us. Inquisitive.”

Gaines moved and a shaft of moonlight caught his face. It was taut, anxious, locked in something close to a snarl.

“As if I don’t know you two. Always the smart-asses. You wouldn’t tell someone what you were doing before you went out and did it. Not if you figured you’d get some brownie points at the end when you turned round and said, ‘Look at us. Look at the Boynton brothers. Look what clever bastards we are.’ ” He bent and leered in Frank’s face. “You didn’t tell her where you were going, did you? Or any of this stuff. Admit it. You were always lousy liars, both of you. Don’t try that on me. I’ve known you too long.”

“We didn’t tell her,” Frank agreed. “All the same … two and two.”

“Screw two and two. If Tom can get a few days free once he’s spoken to the police, that’s all we need. We’ll be gone. They say Laos is nice.” He grimaced. “If that jerk Jonah hadn’t locked up the money so tight, we’d be gone by now anyway.” He laughed, not pleasantly. “I owe you that, boys. You provided us with a way out. It’s a pity …”

The gun arced through the air, from Frank to Hank and back again. To give Jimmy his due, he didn’t look keen on any of this. “Tell you what. Let me do you one last favour. You choose who gets to go first.”

“Him,” Hank said promptly, nodding at his brother. “He got to come into this world seven minutes before me. Only right I get to even things up a little. After … we could talk.”

“What?” Frank bellowed with heartfelt outrage. “What? Because I’m seven minutes older?”

Hank screwed round trying to look at him. “It’s only fair. Given the circumstances and everything.”

Frank shuffled up against him, remembering not to disturb the loose ropes. “He’d have just killed me! And you want to talk to him?”

“Who else am I supposed to exchange my final words with?” Hank objected. “The frigging chipmunks?”

“Generally speaking, chipmunks are only active by day,” Gaines pointed out. “Too many predators at night. Also—”

“Shut up, Jimmy!” the Boynton brothers yelled in concert.

Gaines shuffled in his big forest boots. “Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to offer you a choice,” he said a little mournfully. “I mean, it’s not like I’m proud of this, you know. It’s just … needed.” The gun swung towards Frank, and Jimmy Gaines said, “Oh hell …”

It was the loudest noise Frank had ever heard. Like a sonic boom that rang throughout the forest. Unseen creatures skittered across on the ground around them, crashing through the leaves.

Hank had caught Jimmy Gaines’s shin hard with his foot as the weapon was coming round. More through luck than anything else, the gun was rising upwards, above them both, when the explosion came.

The recoil on the old handgun seemed tremendous, and the upward forty-five-degree angle pushed it all back into Gaines’s shoulder. The force bucked him away from them, onto the slight slope towards the redwood that had, until recently, been wreathed in his cigarette smoke. One stumbling step behind took over from another. Soon Gaines was running backwards downhill, arms flailing and cartwheeling through the air, old gun flying high into the moonlight, trying to stay upright, screaming and swearing until finally he toppled over.

The two brothers got up and watched, helpless. Momentum could be a terrible thing. He’d fallen past the lip of some projecting plateau in the forest floor and flipped over the edge like a tree trunk rolling downhill. In the gashes of light visible through the sequoia branches, they could see Jimmy Gaines’s body tumbling round and round on the moss and grass and rocks as the incline grew steeper and steeper, and the trees got more slender and scarce.

They stood together in silence. Then there was a long, solitary cry and Jimmy Gaines’s shape disappeared from sight altogether.

“Damn,” Hank muttered, and pulled out his little flashlight. The battery was low. The light was the colour of the wan moon above. Frank got his instead and ordered him to turn it off. They might need it later.

They held hands like children to make sure they didn’t lose their footings, stepping gingerly down the slope towards the place where Jimmy Gaines had vanished.

After a little while Frank put out an arm to keep his brother back. The incline was turning too sheer. There was no point and they both knew it. Jimmy Gaines lay somewhere below, a long way, close to the tinkling waters of the creek that they could now hear very clearly. Frank doubted even a skilled mountain rescue party could reach him quickly.

He pointed his little light back up the hill. They waited for a minute or two. Then there was the faint sound of some kind of vehicle and the flash of far-off headlights.

“You walk carefully, little brother,” Frank Boynton warned, still holding on to his arm. “This has been a very eventful day.”

A loud and repetitive electronic beep burst out of the lush undergrowth beneath the beam of his flashlight, one so unexpected it made Frank jump with a short spike of fear.

“My phone,” Hank said. “See? I told you there was a point to having different rings.”

Frank picked it up, looked at the caller ID. Then he said, “Pronto.”

9

There were no other vehicles in the parking lot by the bridge. Costa got out and walked to the edge of the bluff overlooking the Pacific. Fifty years before, somewhere below, a fictional Scottie had seen Madeleine Elster fall into the ocean and had dived in to save her, sealing his and her fate. The movie he’d watched with Maggie wouldn’t leave his head. Or what had happened after.

In the distance to the right there were lights in the Marina and Fort Mason, where the Lukatmi corporation was now a dismembered corpse. Further along, a vivid electric slur of illumination marked the tourist bars and restaurants of Fisherman’s Wharf. A few boats, some large, bobbed on the water. It was the noise that surprised him, rising into the starry sky, the gruff, smoke-stained roar of a constant throng of vehicles on the highway behind. Their fumes choked the sea breeze rising over the headland; their presence almost blotted out the beauty of the ocean.

The Mediterranean couldn’t compete with this scale. Maggie had been right that night she bit into the poisoned apple. In San Francisco the world felt bigger, so large one might travel it forever without setting foot on the same piece of earth twice. This idea appealed to her. Costa found it disconcerting. There was, and always would be, a conflict between two people like them, between his insistence on staring at a small, familiar place, seeking to know it — and by implication himself — better. And Maggie always fleeing, always looking to lose herself entirely in something vast and shapeless, to pull on any passing identity she could find before the next film, the next ghost, entered her life.

He climbed the steps of the viewing platform. Alcatraz stood like a beached fortress across the dappled water of the Bay. It was now two minutes past eleven. Tom Black was late. Perhaps he’d never show. Maggie was right about that, too. He should have called the SFPD.

All the same, he wished this were his case, not theirs, and, most of all, not the Carabinieri’s. So many opportunities had been lost through Gianluca Quattrocchi’s insistence that the core of the investigation lay within the cryptic poetry of Dante. The maresciallo had taken a wrong turning from the start. How did The Divine Comedy begin?

“ ‘For the straightforward pathway had been lost,’ ” Costa said quietly to himself.

Criminal cases, like lives, could so easily follow a false route, a deceptive fork in the road that seemed so attractive when it first emerged. Everything was an illusion.

His phone rang.

“Costa.”

“You’re alone.”

The voice was young, concerned, and American, mangled by the bellowing rumble of traffic behind it. He couldn’t be far away.

“Is that a question?”

“Not really.”

Tom Black sounded uncertain of himself, aware of that fact, desperate to hide it.

“Listen. There’s an unlocked bike at the back of the parking lot. Take it, then go to the pedestrian gate on the bridge. Buzz the security people. They’ll let anyone through with a bike. Ride across until I meet you. Don’t try to walk. They don’t allow pedestrians at night. You won’t even get past the gate.”

“We could just meet here.”

“I need to see you first. I need to make sure you’re alone.”

The line went dead.

Costa walked around the parking lot until he found the bike. He had the same unsettling feeling he’d had in Martin Vogel’s apartment: that he wasn’t alone. Maybe it was Tom Black watching him. But then …

He tried to shoo these thoughts from his head. The bike was an old road racer model, with lots of gears and even more rust. He wheeled it around the footpath and reached the gate. There was a button there, and a security camera. He hit the buzzer, a voice squawked something impenetrable from a hidden speaker, and then the barrier swung open on electric hinges.

Wondering how long it had been since he climbed on a bike, Costa got on the saddle and rode slowly onto the bridge, alongside the northbound traffic in the adjoining lane a few yards to his left. The noise grew so loud he could scarcely think straight. In the middle of the great span he paused. It was an extraordinary view. The entire southern side of the city was visible, and the communities on the far side of the Bay. The bridge was well lit. He could see all the way along the pedestrian footway to another closed gate at the Marin end.

He waited a good minute for the phone to ring.

“I’m in an old Ford wagon doing twenty in the southbound lane going back to the city. If I like what I see, I’ll slow up to a stop when I’m in the middle. Jump the barrier, cross the road, and get in the back. You with me?”

In the distance on the far side, he could just make out a vehicle being driven with the kind of caution one expected of the elderly. It was hugging the inside lane and getting passed by everything on the bridge.

“Where are we going?”

“For a drive and a talk. Yes or no?”

When the car got closer, Costa abandoned the bike, stepped over the low iron barrier, waited for a gap in the traffic, and crossed to the other side.

It was an old, battered station wagon and it slowed even further as the driver saw him. The thing was scarcely at walking pace by the time it got close. Costa began to run to match its speed. He found the handle, threw open the back door, and leapt in.

10

The vehicle stank of tobacco and age. It wasn’t the kind of transport he would previously have associated with Tom Black.

Physically, he was a big, powerful man. Costa looked at the man’s shaken, lost face in the mirror as they pulled away. He seemed different now Josh Jonah was gone. Uncertain of himself. Desperate. Black had to struggle with his shaking hands to take out the card to get them through the toll gates on the southern end of the bridge.

“What do you want?” Costa asked, then listened and found himself in fantasy land.

Tom Black had a list, one so ludicrous it was impossible to know how to begin the task of bringing him down to reality. He wanted immunity from prosecution. He wanted access to his frozen funds. A lawyer before being asked any questions by the police. A phone call to his mother in Colorado. Finally …

The figure in the front seat turned round and looked at Costa hopefully, with an ingenuous schoolkid’s hope in his eyes.

“I have a ticket for the premiere tomorrow. I want to be there.”

Costa shook his head and laughed, aware of the scared young eyes watching him.

“You find this funny?” Black demanded shrilly.

“How else am I supposed to feel? You’re wanted for murder and more financial crimes than I can put a name to. Now you want me to make sure you have tickets for the cinema?”

“Lukatmi …”

“Lukatmi didn’t pay for that movie, Tom! That’s the point. Why don’t you just drop me off and I’ll find a cab home. This is a waste of time.”

They followed 101 off the bridge, cutting into the city past the Palace of Fine Arts, where the lights were still on in the exhibition tents, then on to Lombard, where the highway turned into a broad city street. Then Black turned down towards the waterfront, past the bars of Fisherman’s Wharf. It was just lazy driving, the kind you did when you wanted to think or convince yourself you could stay out of harm’s way forever.

“That ticket’s mine, man. I want to be there. It was part of the deal. I’m owed.”

They passed a parked police car on North Point Street. Costa watched the way its lights came on afterwards. Discreetly he turned his head to glance through the rear window and saw it move into the road.

“Who does this vehicle belong to, Tom?”

“I’m not bringing anyone else into this. Don’t even think of going there.”

“Is it stolen?”

Black turned round and looked at him like he was crazy. Then, to Costa’s dismay, he lifted his right hand and showed him something. It was a handgun. A black semiautomatic.

“This is stolen. That’s all you need to know.”

“You don’t look like a gun person to me. You don’t look like someone who could fix all this on your own, either. Who gave it to you? Is he following us?”

“Shut … up!”

Costa sat back. They were on the Embarcadero now. He liked this road. It led to the Ferry Building, a piece of architecture that had caught his eye the moment he first saw it. The tall clock tower reminded him of Europe.

“So what do you say?” Black persisted.

“Pull over, give me the gun, promise to tell the nice people in the San Francisco Police Department everything you know, and it’s possible I can keep you alive. Maybe even out of jail. I need to know who wants to kill you.”

The semiautomatic came up again.

Costa put up his hands and said, “Fine. We’re done here.”

They passed Lombard Street and another patrol car pulled out into the road. They were holding off, Costa thought. Waiting for orders.

“Pull the car over, Tom. I’m getting out.”

“I want …” He looked ready to crack.

The Ferry Building was approaching. There was no traffic coming in the opposite direction. Costa knew what that had to mean. Soon they could see it. A line of police vehicles straddled the road, blue and red lights flashing.

“You told them, you bastard!” Black yelled, and the weapon was up again, jerking wildly in his free hand.

“I didn’t tell them anything. Do you think they would have waited till now?”

“Then …?”

“What about the guy who gave you the gun? The one who set this up? Put that bike out for me? Did he follow us, too?”

“Got to know who to trust …” Black whimpered. “Got to know.”

Up the street uniformed men stood by the patrol cars. Costa snatched a look at the beautiful, illuminated clock tower and realised where he’d seen something like it before, where the architect must have got the idea. It was the Giralda in Seville, the Moorish tower attached to a Catholic cathedral that had consumed the mosque that went before. All generations pillaged what they inherited. Roberto Tonti had robbed from Dante. A murderer had somehow found inspiration in a film that was half a century old.

“Give me the gun and I will deal with this,” Costa ordered.

They were edging closer to the roadblock. Costa could hear Gerald Kelly’s voice booming through a bullhorn, all the commands Costa would expect of a situation like this.

Stop the car. Get out. Lie down.

“I’m dead,” Tom Black mumbled at the wheel.

“If you step out of that door with a gun in your hand, you will be.”

The vehicle rolled to a halt twenty yards from the police line. Costa couldn’t begin to guess the number of weapons that were trained on them by the dark figures crouched next to the line of vehicles blocking the street beneath the tower of the Ferry Building.

“If you’re in jail for a couple of years, what’s it matter? You’ll still be alive. Still got a future in front of you. Maybe there’s a lawyer who can get you off. Money talks. You’ll find some.”

Black turned round and stared at him. “That’s what Josh thought. He just wanted to pay off that blackmailing bastard Vogel once and for all.”

“See? That’s a start. Keep talking and you’d be amazed how popular you can get.”

“You don’t understand the first thing about what’s going on here, do you?”

“True. So tell me.”

He looked out the window, lost, forlorn. “Once you sign up with these people, you never get free. It’s a contract, right? A contract. Break it and you die.”

“Is that what happened with Allan Prime?”

“I don’t know what happened with Allan and neither did Josh. It was never supposed to end that way. It was just a deal. Don’t you see?”

The weapon was near, but not enough to snatch.

“Give me the gun, Tom. I’ll throw it out the window. Then we crawl out of here and go straight down on the ground, faces in the dirt, hands out, not moving a muscle until they tell us. That way we both stay alive.”

“Just like the movies,” Black mumbled sarcastically.

He was so close. One more minute with this man and he’d be there.

“What’s wrong with the movies?” Costa asked.

The man at the wheel stared at him with eyes that were dark, bleak, and full of self-loathing.

“They screw you up. They …” Costa could scarcely make out the words. “They screw everyone. Scottie. Me. I never thought this’d happen. Not when we went to Jones …”

He threw back his head, closed his eyes.

“Jones? Who …?” Costa was starting to ask.

The bullhorn burst into life again. This time it was loud and close enough to shake the vehicle.

“Get out of the car,” Gerald Kelly’s metallic voice bellowed.

Black leaned out of the open window, abruptly furious, waving the weapon around, screaming, “Shut up, shut up, shut up! Lemme think.”

Costa sat back and watched him subside. They had time. Getting the weapon off this scared young man might take an hour. More maybe. But it was achievable.

“We know about James Gaines,” Kelly shouted. “We need you to come in. You and your accomplice. Get out of the vehicle.”

Something changed in Tom Black’s demeanour. His face hardened. Costa’s spirits sank.

Black thrust his head out into the night. “What the hell have you done to Jimmy? This has nothing to do with him. Blame Josh and me. Not Jimmy.”

“Who’s Jimmy Gaines?” Costa asked.

He didn’t get a reply. Black was screaming into the street again.

“You bring Jimmy here! I wanna talk to him. This isn’t his doing. I want him free.”

Kelly didn’t come back on the bullhorn straightaway. That was odd.

“Let’s just get out of the car like they say,” Costa began. “This will be so much easier in someone’s office, where it’s warm and they have coffee and lawyers and people who can help you.”

“I can’t bring you Gaines,” Kelly said, and there was an edge to his voice even through the electronic medium of the bullhorn. “There was an accident. Let’s not have any more.”

Costa stiffened back into the old, uncomfortable seats of the station wagon and watched Black fumble at his phone, calling someone who didn’t answer, and that made the young man more furious than ever.

“An accident … an accident … what the hell does that mean?”

“If we talk to them …”

It was no use.

“Bring me Jimmy Gaines!” Black screeched out the window.

There was a pause. Then Gerald Kelly’s piercing, metallic voice said simply, “We can’t. He’s dead.”

Costa closed his eyes and wondered why words always had to give way to deeds. Why he couldn’t talk people out of things. It had cost Emily her life. It had almost robbed him of his sanity. He’d done everything he could to reason with Tom Black, and might have managed if Gerald Kelly — a good, intelligent police officer, Costa didn’t doubt that — hadn’t intervened with the wrong words at the wrong time.

He rolled over on the backseat and thrust himself deep down into the floor space. He could smell what was coming in the stink of sweat and fear and panic that was rolling off the man in the front.

The driver’s door opened and Black was out, screaming obscenities. Costa steeled himself for the sound. It didn’t come. Not immediately. Kelly was shouting. So was Tom Black. Then …

A single shot. One loose round begets a host.

When it began, he forced his fists into his ears to keep out the volley of gunfire enveloping this quiet, beautiful patch of the city outside the Ferry Building.

It was the same, always. In the grounds of the Villa Borghese as an actor posing as a Carabiniere was brought down because he didn’t understand how jumpy police officers get when they see what appears to be an armed individual intent on violence. In the grubby gardens surrounding the mausoleum of the emperor Augustus, where his wife died.

There was a short, high scream, then the shooting ended. It was replaced immediately by that angry, taut chorus of shouts that followed almost every act of violence he had witnessed. A part of him felt he could hear the life of Tom Black depart the world, a single human soul lost for eternity, for no good reason Costa could imagine. He had no such recollection of the moment of Emily’s death. That instant was black and bleak and empty and would always remain so.

Crushed facedown in the rear seat of the vehicle, hands now tight on his head, waiting, he was aware of them tearing at the doors, screaming at him, wondering themselves whether he was armed, too, and might take a life of their own.

Strange voices assaulted him, strong hands gripped his arms. Costa felt himself dragged from the backseat and flung facedown onto the ground. He thrust out his arms as they ordered. The gravel scraped his cheeks. A couple of them aimed kicks, one brutally painful, deep into his ribs. He grunted and didn’t move, not an inch. After a while the noise and the violence subsided. He heard Kelly’s voice say to another man, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

They used their feet to turn him.

Bloodied hands still up over his head, Costa opened his eyes to see the SFPD captain’s shape obscuring the grey stone tower of the Ferry Building.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” Kelly asked, shaking his head in amazement.

“I was trying to bring you a witness. I did my best. Sorry.”

To his surprise Kelly held out his hand and helped him upright. He had a strong grip. It hurt when it pushed the gravel further back into Costa’s torn palm. Cops stood over the body of Tom Black, looking at it, shaking their heads. Sirens were wailing somewhere along Market Street.

Kelly offered him a clean handkerchief. “There’s blood on your face. You might want to get it off.”

Costa wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. He felt detached from the situation, as if it were happening to someone else.

“Did he tell you anything?” Kelly asked.

He tried to remember. “I’d have to think about that.”

Kelly put an arm around his shoulder and walked him towards the terminal doors. A small crowd had gathered behind the barrier erected by Kelly’s men. The traffic was beginning to back up along the Embarcadero.

“Please,” Kelly said. “Think hard.”

“How did you know he was in the car?”

“Your pathologist called us. Some guys she knows were playing PI and got themselves kidnapped by this Gaines character. Seems he and Black were good friends. So good, Gaines thought he’d get Black out there to cut some deal with you, and then pop off these friends of hers in the meantime.” Kelly shrugged. “Didn’t work out that way. Afterwards, they called her. And she, being a sensible, helpful lady, called me.”

The SFPD captain scratched his grizzled head. “It never really occurred to me you might have got there first.”

“We keep trying to do you favours. It doesn’t buy us any credit, does it?”

“Not much.”

Nic Costa closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself back in Rome. It was impossible.

“Did you happen to witness Tom Black taking a shot at us?” Kelly asked out of nowhere.

“I was in the back of the car with my head in my hands. I didn’t see a thing.”

“Sensible man.” Kelly sighed. “I didn’t see Tom Black use his weapon,” the cop said. “In fact I’d say the first shot I heard took him down, and that didn’t come from us.”