Dante's Numbers (3 page)

C
OSTA'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.

“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.