Dante's Numbers (4 page)

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.

T
HEY 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 expression 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.”

Peroni shrugged and observed, “One lost piece of clay. One dead famous actor. Do you want to swap?”

“It's
ours
!”

“What's yours?” Teresa asked. “A practical joke?”

Slyly, without any of the men noticing, she had stolen the short black truncheon from the junior Carabiniere's belt. She now held it in her right hand and was quietly aiming a blow at the blood-smeared glass.

“Touch the evidence and I will have your job,” the senior Carabiniere said, more than a little fearful.

“And I'll have yours,” Falcone added.

“This is evidence, gentlemen,” Teresa replied. “But not of the kind you think.” She looked at each of them and smiled. “We're in the movie business now, remember? Do the words 'special effects' mean anything at all?”

The short baton slammed into the top of the glass cabinet. Teresa raked it round and round. When she had enough room to manoeuvre, she reached in and, to the curses of both Falcone and his Carabinieri counterparts, carefully lifted out the head and held it in her hands, turning the thing round, making approving noises.

Teresa ran one large pale finger along the ragged line of blood and tissue at the base and then, to Peroni's horror, put the gory tip to her mouth and licked it.

“Food colouring,” she said. “Fake blood. It's the wrong shade. Didn't you notice? Movie blood always is. Flesh and skin…it's all a joke.” The tissue at the ragged torn neckline came away in her fingers: cotton wool stained a livid red, stuck weakly to the base of the head with glue.

Her fingers picked at the blue latex cladding around the base of the neck and revealed perfect skin beneath, the colour and complexion of that of a store window dummy. Peroni laughed. He'd known something was wrong.

“But why?” she asked, puzzled, talking entirely to herself.

She turned the head again in her hands, looked into the bulbous eyes staring out of the slits made in the blue plastic. They were clearly artificial, not human at all. It was all legerdemain, and obvious once you learned how to look.

Then Teresa Lupo gazed more closely into the face and her dark, full eyebrows creased in bafflement. She pulled back the blue plastic around the lips to reveal a mouth set in an expression of pain and bewilderment. More plastic came away as she tore at the tight, enclosing film to show the face. There was a mask there. It had been crudely fastened to a store dummy's head to give it form. She removed sufficient film to allow her to lift the object beneath from the base. Then she held it up and rotated the thing in her fingers.

“Hair,” she said, nodding at the underside. “Whiskers.” Her fingers indicated a small stain on the interior, near the chin. “And that's real blood.”

She glanced at Falcone. “This is from a man, Leo,” Teresa Lupo insisted. “Allan Prime.”

The inspector stood there, a finger to his lips, thinking. The Carabinieri couple said nothing. More of their officers were pushing back the crowd now. Peroni could hear the whine of an ambulance siren working its way to the park.

Teresa placed the mask on the podium table and rotated the pale dummy's head in her hands, ripping back the remaining covering.

“There's something else,” she murmured.

The words emerged as she tore off the blue film. They were written in a flowing, artistic script across the top of the skull. It reminded Peroni of the huckster's props they found when they raided fake clairvoyants taking the gullible to the cleaners. They had objects like this, with each portion of the head marked out for its metaphysical leanings. In this case the message covered everything, from ear to ear, as if there were only a single lesson to be absorbed.

“‘
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate,'”
Teresa said, as if reciting from memory. “‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.'” She shook her head. “Damnation in the mind of a poet. That's what was written on the Gate of Hell when Dante entered.”

A noise made Peroni glance back at the crowd. Costa was striding toward them, looking pale but determined, a gun hanging loose in his hand. By his side was the actress from the movie, her eyes downcast and glassy.

Costa nodded at the dummy's head in Teresa Lupo's hands, and asked, “What happened?”

The pathologist told him before Falcone could object.

“And you?” Falcone demanded.

Maggie Flavier was staring at the mask, shocked, silent, her cheeks smeared with smudged mascara.

Costa glanced at her before he answered. Then he said, “It seemed as if someone was trying to attack Miss Flavier. Then…”

The senior Carabinieri man found his voice.

“This is
our
case.
Our
evidence. I have made a phone call to Maresciallo Quattrocchi, Falcone. He was called away briefly. Now he returns. You learn. This cannot—”

He fell abruptly silent as Costa lifted the handgun, pointed it at the fake head, and fired. The sound silenced them all. Maggie stifled a choking sob. There was nothing new there when the smoke and the racket had cleared. No damage. Not another fresh shard of shattered glass.

“Blanks,” Costa told the man. “This was his gun. I took it from his corpse while your men danced around it like schoolgirls. They've just shot dead a defenceless man who was taking part in some kind of a sick prank. Why not go investigate
that?”

“Th-this…” the officer stuttered.

“Enough,” Falcone interjected, and glanced at Costa. “Assemble a team,
Superintendente. Subito.”

Teresa was already on the phone, and standing guard over the objects on the podium table.

“Where does Allan Prime live?” Falcone asked.

The officer said nothing.

“I know,” Maggie Flavier said. “Do you think…?”

She didn't finish the sentence.

“You can tell us on the way,” Falcone said, then called for a car.