Dante's Numbers nc-7 Read online

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  “Cleopatra failed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

  They sat on the wall outside the Cinema dei Piccoli.

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

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

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

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

  “Who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Who the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

  “Here’s an idea. Let’s not find out.”

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

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

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

  “Maggie! Maggie!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No one moved.

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

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

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

  Costa stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

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

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

  “Put down the gun. Then we talk.”

  “I don’t wanna talk.”

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

  “Put down—”

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

  “Where is she?”

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

  “Let go of the child—” he began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She didn’t move.

  “No. Are you hurt?”

  “Run!”

  “I don’t need to. Can’t you see?”

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

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

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

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

  “That was a mistake,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5

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

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

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

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

  “To hell with the Carabinieri! I’m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Teresa, predictably, was right on his heels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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