Dante's Numbers (18 page)

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

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

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

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

“And after that?” the same reporter asked.

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

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

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

“Yes!” he yelled into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Enough—”

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

“Enough!”

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

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

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

“Maybe?”

“You heard me.”

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

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

The worst thing was, Sheldon had a point.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sixty percent and rising.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The big cop watched him leave.

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

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

Neither looked welcoming.

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

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

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

“How's Maggie?” Tom Black asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two young men stayed silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dinner then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jonah could do it,” Peroni suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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