Dante's Numbers (35 page)

T
HEY WATCHED THE MOVIE FROM THE DARKness of the VIP seats at the front. Not long after the start he felt her head slip onto his shoulder, her hair fall against his neck. Costa turned his head a degree or two and stole a glimpse at Maggie Flavier. On the screen she stood five metres high, the ethereal beauty Beatrice, Dante's dead muse, offering hope as the poet faced the horrors and travails of Hell's circles, just as the idea of the unworldly Madeleine Elster had appeared to bring solace to the lost and fearful Scottie. For most of the movie, the real woman behind Beatrice was fast asleep against him, mouth slightly ajar, at peace. He scarcely dared breathe for fear of waking her. However loud the commotion on the screen, she seemed oblivious to it all, slumbering by his side like a child lost in a world of her own.

He felt happy. Lucky, too. And like her, he scarcely took any notice of the overblown cinematic fiction that had brought them there. Costa's thoughts turned, instead, to the events of the past few weeks, and the growing conviction that the roots of this genuine drama lay, somehow, in the fairy tales these people created for themselves.

The conspiracy had sprouted from the ability of men like Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti to invent some fantastical story out of dust. Costa still failed to understand how that trick had come to shift from a desperate marketing ploy into a murderous actuality, but the seeds were there from the outset in the way those involved danced between one world, that of everyday life, and another in which fiction posed as fact.

Maggie was an unwitting part of that fabrication. In ways he didn't wish to understand, it had damaged her.

This dark, unsettling thought dogged him as the movie finally came to an end. Costa was about to nudge her gently awake as the lights came up. There was no need. Her head was off his shoulder even before the waves of applause began to ripple around the audience.

By the time Roberto Tonti was striding onto the stage with Simon Harvey by his side, most of the audience was on its feet. In the way of things, Costa found himself following suit. Maggie rose next to him. He leaned down and asked her when the cast would join Tonti on the platform.

She had to cup her hand to his ear to make herself heard over the din. “This is Roberto's moment. We were all told that. He's the director. We're just his puppets, remember?”

It still seemed unfair, Costa thought, half listening to Harvey run through a fulsome tribute to Allan Prime, followed by a lengthy homily about Tonti's determination to see the project completed. The years of struggle, the script revisions, the financial difficulties, the threats, the tragic events of recent weeks. Above all, said Harvey, the fight for artistic and creative control, without which the movie in its present form could never have been conceived, least of all made.

It was florid hyperbole delivered with a straight face. Within the space of the next thirty minutes, either Harvey would be making a statement to the SFPD incriminating Tonti in the conspiracy that had brought about at least four deaths, or Falcone would be handing over the audio evidence to justify his arrest and interrogation on those same charges. One way or another the riddle would be brought to some kind of resolution.

Then Harvey stepped back. Awkwardly, with a pained, sick gait, which a cynical part of Costa's mind felt might be faintly theatrical, Tonti shuffled to the microphone. He stood there alone, listening, only half-smiling, to the wall of clapping hands, catcalls, and whistles of the crowd.

It was tedious and artificial. Costa was becoming impatient, wishing for an end to this show. As he fought to stifle a yawn, something caught his attention.

A woman was walking towards Roberto Tonti from the far side of the stage. In her hands she held a gigantic bouquet of roses, carnations, and bright, vivid orchids.

Costa blinked, trying to convince himself this was not some flashback out of a dream, or a night in front of the TV in the house on Greenwich Street.

She was of medium height and wore a severe grey jacket with matching slacks and a white shirt high up to her neck. Her build was full, almost stocky; her hair was perfect, dyed platinum blonde, unyielding, as if held by the strongest lacquer imaginable. As she turned to present the flowers to Tonti, Costa could see that the wig—it could be nothing else—was tied back into a tight, shining apostrophe above the somewhat thick form of her neck.

In spite of the weather she wore a pair of black plastic Italian sunglasses, so large they effectively obscured her features. Yet Costa knew her. She was the character from
Vertigo.
Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster. Or rather a fake Madeleine who posed as the doomed wife Jimmy Stewart's Scottie came to love and hoped to save.

It also occurred to him that she matched exactly the description of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes who had visited Allan Prime in the Via Giulia, ostensibly to create a death mask.

He found himself fighting to get through the cordon around the stage. Maggie gasped as he clawed his way forward.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Stay where you are. Don't go near the stage.”

He pressed forward and the large hand of a security guard shoved him hard in the chest. Costa fell backwards. He stumbled and found himself guided by Maggie back into a seat.

“Nic,” she said, exasperated, “you can't go up there. Roberto owns that stage. No one's going to take it from him. Those bouncers wouldn't let God himself through unless He had a pass.”

The crowd was still on its feet, whooping and cheering.

“There's something wrong,” he muttered, and dragged out his Rome police ID.

She gazed at the plastic card in his fingers and said, “Well, that's going to work, isn't it? For pity's sake, what's the matter?”

He struggled to his feet and wondered, for a moment, whether he was going mad. The woman was gone. Roberto Tonti stood on the stage, with Simon Harvey a few feet behind him. The ailing director held the gigantic bouquet and waved and nodded to the joyful, over-the-top roar of the crowd.

“Five minutes of this,” Maggie whispered into his ear, “and we're out of here. I promise.”

He prayed more than anything she would be proved right.

The tall, gaunt figure on the stage mouthed something into the microphone. Costa knew what it was. A single word in Italian, an exhortation, a command.

Silenzio.

O
NCE UPON A TIME, IN A LAND FAR AWAY …” Roberto Tonti began.

He clutched the bouquet to his emaciated chest, then he removed his sunglasses and tried to squint at the audience beyond the blazing floodlights.

“You come to me for stories.” The old man's voice sounded distant and hollow and sick. “Children begging for gifts. Did you get them?” The noise of the audience diminished slightly. Tonti waited. He took hold of the microphone and, in his hoarse, weak voice, tried his best to bellow,
“Did you get them?”

The strained sound of his words, the accent half American, half Italian, carried into the night with a deafening clarity. The space inside the tent turned abruptly silent.

“Did you appreciate the cost?” he croaked. “Allan Prime. A wretched actor. A weak man. Nothing to be missed. He died. Why not? Where's the loss?” He spat out his words. “See what I must work with? See how I make something precious out of clay? What do you want of me? What else do you expect?”

Maggie murmured in Nic's ear, “I can't take this anymore…”

She slipped away from him, and still he couldn't tear his eyes from the stage.

Simon Harvey stepped towards the director. Tonti stopped him with a single magisterial glance.

A low murmur of disquiet and astonishment began to rise up from the crowd.

Tonti reached into the bouquet of flowers and withdrew something that stilled every voice in the room. A small black handgun emerged from the orchids and the bloodred roses. He cast away the bouquet, held the weapon high for the benefit of the camera rigs hovering over the stage, wandering around him like robotic eyes, fixated on a single subject.

“Watch me,” he said to the giant, peering lenses. “Focus, always, always.”

Costa scanned around the crowd. Gerald Kelly was at the edge of the platform with a group of uniformed officers, holding them back for the moment.

Tonti's skinny, weak arms waved, as if beseeching them for something, some kind of understanding.

“Listen to me. Listen! This once I tell you the truth. Some impertinent hack once asked Fellini…” The tip of the black barrel caressed his cheek, like a thoughtful finger. “
‘Che cosa fai?'
What do you do?”

“Enough, Roberto…” Harvey said, and took another step closer. The gun drifted his way. The publicist froze.

“Fellini answers
… ‘Sono un gran bugiardo.'
I am a big liar. Pinocchio writ large. See my nose! See my nose!”

Tonti was clutching his own face, laughing, and the movement brought about a spasmodic cough that briefly gripped his frail frame.

“Fellini, Hitchcock, Rossellini…Tonti, too. This is what you demand of our calling. That we are liars, all, and the more distance we put between your dreams and the miserable mundanity of your sad little lives, the better we lie, the happier you are.”

The man's voice was cracking with emotion, and it was impossible to say whether it was anger or grief or some deep-rooted sense of fear.

“Mea culpa. Mea culpa.”

His hands fell to his sides, and he bowed low before the audience.

“I am the director. All you have seen of late, on screen and off, is my creation. From Allan Prime dead in the Farnesina to some pretty little clotheshorse choking for life from a poisoned apple. This is my doing, my direction. Listen to me now…”

He coughed again, and it was raw and dry and rasping.

“No man gets a better final scene than this. Better than any I gave any of these two-bit hacks. See…”

He indicated the cameras, following his every moment. “See! This is the last of Roberto Tonti. Greater than any of you. Any of them.”

Kelly had nodded to his men. They were starting to make their way onto the stage. Tonti knew what was coming, surely.

“Not Dante Alighieri, though,” the old man added. “Listen to me, children. Listen to the final words of
Inferno
, that I never gave you on the screen, for they are beyond your comprehension.”

He drew himself up, closed his eyes, and began to recite, slowly, in a sonorous, theatrical tone.

“The Guide and I into that hidden road

Now entered, to return to the bright world;

And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second
,

Till I beheld through a round aperture

Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

Roberto Tonti paused and gazed at the rapt, still, silent crowd in front of him.

He was shaking with laughter, and his eyes, now open and dark and alert, glistened with moisture as they fixed on the camera lenses ravenously following his every move.

“‘Through a round aperture… to rebehold the stars,'” Roberto Tonti repeated, and swept his arm along the rows of glitterati and celebrities before him. “Such as they are.”

Simon Harvey was getting closer, hands out, pleading for the gun.

“Yet,” Tonti continued, “each and every story deserves a twist, some small epiphany at its close.”

Without warning he swung to face Harvey. The publicist froze, looked at the director, and asked, “Roberto?”

“Traitor.”

The word, the final key in the ninth circle, the last of Dante's Numbers, came out in a flat, unemotional tone.

He began to fire, repeatedly, deliberately, into the torso of the flailing, tumbling publicist.

A woman screamed behind Costa.

When the gun clicked on empty, Roberto Tonti stopped and took one last disgusted glance at the shattered body on the stage.

Then, seizing the microphone, he gazed up at the cameras.

In a calm, disinterested voice, he ordered, “And
…cut.”