Dante's Numbers nc-7 Read online

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

  Nic Costa rather envied them.

  3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No beer?” Peroni grumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Anathema. Mania. Dementia,” Bodoni concurred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What did you say?” the officer asked.

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

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

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

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

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

  4

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re Beatrice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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