Dante's Numbers (6 page)

T
HE DOOR TO ALLAN PRIME'S APARTMENT OPENED almost the moment Falcone pushed the bell. Nic Costa felt as if he'd stumbled back through time. The woman who stood there might have been an actress herself. Adele Neri still looked several years short of forty and was as slender and cat-like as he recalled. She wore designer jeans and a skimpy white T-shirt. Her arresting face bore the cold, disengaged scowl of the Roman rich. She had a tan that spoke of a second home in Sicily and a heavy gold necklace around a slender neck that carried a few wrinkles he didn't recall from the case a few years before, when she had first come to the notice of the Questura. That had taken them to the Via Giulia, too, to a house not more than a dozen doors away, one that had been booby-trapped with a bomb by her mob boss husband, Emilio, as he tried to flee Rome. Adele Neri was an interesting woman who had led an interesting life.

“I thought I was past getting visits from the likes of you people,” she said, holding the door half open. “Do you have a warrant? Or some reason why I should let you into my home?”

“We were looking for Allan Prime,” Costa replied. “We thought he lived here.”

“He does. When he's around. But this is my house. All of it. Several more in the Via Giulia, too. Do you mean you didn't know?”

She gazed at Falcone, thin arms crossed, smiling. Costa recalled seeing the intelligence reports after Emilio's death. They said that Adele had taken over leadership of her husband's local clan for a while before selling on her interests to a larger, more serious mob and, if rumour was correct, removing herself from the murky world of Roman crime to enjoy her vast, illicitly inherited wealth.

“Inspector Falcone. The clever one.”

“Signora Neri,” Falcone said pleasantly, nodding. “What an unexpected delight.”

“Quite. So tell me. Why didn't you try to put me in jail? After Emilio got shot?”

“Because I didn't think it would stick,” Falcone replied, looking puzzled. “Isn't that obvious? I'm a practical man. I don't fight lost causes over trivia.” He got one foot over the threshold and tried to look around. “This is nothing to do with you. We merely wish to locate a lost Hollywood actor.”

“Join the club,” she sighed, then stepped back. “I'll let five of you in here and they'd best have no dirt on their shoes. This place rents for eight thousand dollars a week. For that, people don't expect muddy cop prints on the carpet.”

Costa issued some orders to the officers left outside, then began to prowl the vast, airy apartment. There was a spectacular view of the river and the busy Lungotevere through long windows, with a vista of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance, and by the external terrace a circular iron staircase to what he took to be a roof garden. To their left stood a large open kitchen with the kind of fittings only the rich could think about.

He sat down on a vast leather sofa. Falcone joined him and they waited. She wanted to make an entrance, a point. Adele Neri slipped briefly into the kitchen and came out with a glass of blood-orange juice, a
spremuta
freshly pressed, probably from one of the stalls in the Campo dei Fiori. The drink was almost the colour of her hair, which was now longer than he recalled, clipped bluntly against her swan-like neck. Emilio Neri had been one of the most important mob bosses in Rome until his past caught up with him. Adele, more than thirty years his junior, with a history in vice herself, had been complicit in his downfall, though how much of that was greed and how much hatred for her husband they had never been able to decide. The gang lord was dead, his empire shattered, soon to be disposed of by his guilty widow. One crime clan left the scene, another took its place. Life went on, as it always would. He'd felt happy about Neri's fate at the time. A man had died at Costa's hand in pursuit of the answers Adele Neri had held in her smart, beautiful head all along. He had never quite shaken off a misplaced sense of guilt over that particular outcome.

“Where's Allan Prime?” Falcone asked.

“You tell me. I was supposed to have lunch with him today, at noon. I came over, rang the bell. No one answered, so I let myself in. Then some people phoned from the studio. They said he hadn't turned up for the premiere either.” She took an elegant, studied sip of the scarlet drink. “This is my place. I can do what I damned well like.”

“You and Mr. Prime…” Costa asked.

“Landlady and tenant. Nothing more. He tried, naturally. He's the kind who does that anyway, just to see who'll rise to the bait. It's a form of insecurity, and insecure men have never interested me.”

“You have no idea where he might be?”

She made a gesture of ignorance with her skinny, tanned arms. “Why should I? He pays the rent. I indulge him with lunch from time to time. It's a kindness. He's like most actors. A lot less interesting than he thinks. A lot less intelligent too. But…” She gazed at them, thinking. “This isn't like him. He's a professional. He told me he was going to that premiere tonight. He moaned about it, naturally. Having to perform for free.” The woman laughed. “Allan's an
artist
, of course. Or so he'd like to pretend. All that razzmatazz is supposed to be beneath him.”

“Girlfriends—” Falcone began.

“Don't know, don't care,” Adele interrupted. “He had women here. What do you expect? He had a few parties early on, and I had to get someone to speak to him about that. There are some nice old people living in the other apartments. They don't like movie types wandering around with white powder dripping from their noses. It's not that kind of neighbourhood. Also…”

She stopped. There was something on her mind, and she was unsure whether to share it with the police, Costa thought.

“Also what?” he asked.

“Why should I tell you people anything? What do I get in return?”

The inspector frowned. “Some help in finding your tenant, perhaps. Does he owe you money?”

“Three months outstanding. Show business people never pay on time. They think we should be grateful they're here at all. That we should put up a plaque on the wall when they're gone.”

“ Twenty-four thousand dollars,” Falcone observed. “A lot of money.”

“Don't insult me. I spend more than that in one day when I go to Milan. I'll tell you one thing though. For free. Prime and his cronies had interesting friends. I came to one of his parties. Him and that evil bastard Bonetti. The company they kept.” She smiled. “It was like the old days. When my husband was alive. The same dark suits. The same accents bred in cow shit. A bunch of surly sons of bitches from the south who think they own you. That kind never changes. They just put their money in different places. Legitimate places. And movies, too, not that they're the same thing.”

“You seem to know about the movie business.”

“I've made my contribution. Shits like Bonetti know how to screw you. ‘It's only a million. Think of the tax write-off. If the worst comes to the worst, you get your money back anyway.' Then…” She clapped her skeletal hands. The loud noise rang round the room like a gunshot. “It's gone, and Bonetti or one of his creatures is phoning from L.A., full of apologies, promising that maybe a little of it will come back one day. After everyone else has taken their cut.” Adele Neri leaned forward and her sharp eyes held them. “Allan moves in dangerous circles and he doesn't even know it. I told him, but he isn't the kind of man who listens to anyone else. A woman least of all. That's the truth. You don't honestly think I'd be sitting here waiting for the doorbell to ring if I'd done something, do you?”

“Do you read Dante, Signora Neri?” Falcone asked.

The unexpected question amused her. Adele Neri looked human, warm and attractive and perhaps even a pleasure to know at that moment.

“Dante?” she asked, amazed. “I'll go see the movie sometime. Preferably when Allan gets me some free tickets. But reading?” She finished what remained of the
spremuta.
“I'm the merry widow now, Falcone. I shop, I spend, I travel, and when I feel like it, when I see something that interests me, I take a little pleasure. Life's too enjoyable for books. Why leave this world for someone else's? Reading…” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “…is for people without lives. No. I know no more of Dante than you.”

“Actually, I know quite a lot,” Falcone replied almost apologetically. “Not that it matters.”

“It doesn't?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because I find it hard to believe that anyone would commit much of a crime over poetry. However much they might wish us to think otherwise.”

“You really think something's happened to Allan?”

“He's missing. We have some very strange evidence. One man is dead. Perhaps there's no connection. Perhaps…”

She cut the air with her hand and said, “This does not involve me. If you want to talk any more, we need to do this with a lawyer around.”

Taccone, the old soverintendente Falcone liked to use, had returned from looking around the apartment and stood waiting for the inspector to fall silent.

“You need to see this,” he told them.

The two men got up and followed him into what appeared to be the master bedroom. Adele Neri came in behind them. Somewhere along the way she'd picked up a packet of cigarettes and was quickly lighting one.

“What is it?” Falcone asked Taccone.

Costa walked forward to stand a short distance from the bed. He looked at Adele Neri and asked, “Didn't you come in here?”

“Why would I want to sneak around his bedroom?”

“Call in forensic,” Falcone ordered. “Let's not touch anything. Did you find any signs of violence?”

Taccone shook his head. “We didn't find anything. Except this.”

The bed was covered with a green plastic ground sheet of the kind used by campers. The shape of a man's body was still visible on it, set deep enough to imprint itself on the mattress below. Around the outline of the upper torso there was a faint sprinkling of pale grey powder which grew heavier around the head.

Taccone reached down and, using a handkerchief, picked up the handle of a brown bucket that had been hidden on the far side of the bed.

“It looks like clay or something,” he said.

Costa's phone was ringing. The doorman who had been on duty that morning had gone home at lunchtime. It had taken a while to trace him. Costa listened to what the officer who'd finally found the man, in a Campo dei Fiori café, had to say. Then he asked to be passed to the
agente
who had handled the second inquiry.

“Seal off this room,” Falcone ordered. “Assume we have a murder scene.”

“We don't,” Costa said simply. “There's no CCTV in this building, but we've found one of the staff who was on duty. There are details in the visitors' book.”

He looked at Adele Neri and asked, “Is the name Carlotta Valdes familiar?”

She drew on the cigarette and shook her head. “No. Spanish?”

“A woman calling herself that arrived to see Allan Prime at eight-thirty this morning. They left together around ten. Mr. Prime looked very happy, apparently. Expectant even.”

Falcone shook his head in bafflement, lost for words for a moment, as if the investigation were slipping away from them before it had even begun.

“A man
is
dead,” Costa reminded him.

“His death is the Carabinieri's problem, as you have made very clear.”

“Also…”

“Also the death mask we were supposed to protect is missing,” Falcone went on. “I am aware of that. It may be all we have. A case of art theft.”

Costa struggled to see some sense in the situation. It was impossible to guess precisely what kind of case they had on their hands. The loss of a precious historic object? Or something altogether darker and more personal?

“The man who was killed in the park,” he persisted, regardless of Falcone's growing exasperation. “He's been identified. We were told by the Carabinieri as a matter of course, at the same time they put in a formal request for an interview. I need to report to them with Signora Flavier.”

“Well?” Falcone asked.

“His name was Peter Jamieson. He was an actor, originally from Los Angeles. The man moved to Rome a decade ago, principally playing bit parts, Americans for cheap TV productions at Cinecittà.”

“Tell me. Did he have a part in
Inferno?”
Falcone looked ready to explode.

“Nonspeaking. Barely visible. There's no reason why anyone from the cast should have recognised him at all.”

The inspector pointed a bony finger in Costa's face, as if he'd found the guilty party already.

“If this is some kind of publicity stunt gone wrong, I will put every last one of those painted puppets in jail.”

“If…” Costa repeated, and found himself staring again at the powder on the bed, and the silhouette of Allan Prime's head outlined there.

M
ARESCIALLO GIANLUCA QUATTROCCHI WAS furious on several fronts. The screening had begun without his permission. Key pieces of evidence had been removed from the scene by the morgue monkeys of the state police, under the supervision of Teresa Lupo, a woman Quattrocchi had encountered, and been bested by, in the past, on more than one occasion. And now Leo Falcone had placed a team in Allan Prime's home without consulting the Carabinieri, though the state police inspector knew full well that security for the film cast was not his responsibility and never would be.

As a result Quattrocchi's bull-like face appeared even more vexed than normal, and he found himself sweating profusely inside the fine wool uniform he had chosen for an occasion that was meant to be social and ceremonial, not business. He stood at the back of the projection room, temporarily speechless with fury, not least because his principal contact within the crew, the publicist Simon Harvey, appeared to have been spirited away by Falcone's people, too. All he got in his place was the smug, beaming Dino Bonetti, a loathsome creature of dubious morality, and two young ponytailed Americans with, it seemed to him, a hazy grasp of the seriousness of the situation.

While everyone else wore evening dress, the two young men had removed their jackets to reveal T-shirts bearing the name
Lukatmi
, with a logo showing some kind of oriental goddess, a buxom figure with skimpy clothing, a beguiling smile, and multiple arms, each holding a variety of different cameras—movie, still, phones, little webcams of the kind the Carabinieri used for CCTV—all linked into one end of a snaking cable pumping out a profusion of images into a starry sky.

Quattrocchi peered more closely. There were faces within the stars, a galaxy of Hollywood notables—Monroe, Gable, Hepburn, James Stewart, their heads floating in the ether.

“Note,” the skinny one identified by his shirt
as Josh Jonah, Founder, Ideologist., Visioneer
, ordered, “the absence of noise.”

“I can hear
you
,” Quattrocchi snapped, to no avail.

“If we were in an ordinary projectionist's room,” Jonah continued, “we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. There would be film rattling through the projector. Physical artefacts. Need less expense. Time and money thrown away without reason.”

“I am an officer of the Carabinieri. Not an accountant.”

“We're all accountants in the end.” It was the other Ameri can, a big muscular man with a boyish face and a ponytail of long wavy dark hair. Quattrocchi peered at his T-shirt. It read,
Tom Black, Founder, Architect, Corporate Conscience.
Black seemed younger than his partner. A little less sure of himself, too. “In the sense that we pay for things. You'd like to get movies quicker, cheaper, easier, wouldn't you?”

“Right now,” Quattrocchi blurted out so loudly that he felt sure his voice had carried into the cinema beyond, with its audience of VIPs, “I would like to know where Allan Prime is, why we have a dead actor in the park out there, and what the hell is going on around here.” He glowered at their shirts. “Who is Lukatmi anyway? Some Indian god? And who the hell are you?”

The two men looked at each other and Tom Black smiled.

“That was kind of the positioning we were looking for. Three million dollars got blown there. Worth every penny,” he said.

“We're backers,” the skinny one boasted. “We've got money in this thing. Without us, this movie would never have got made.”

“What—” Quattrocchi began to say.

“Lukatmi's got nothing to do with India,” the quieter Ameri can interrupted. “Lukatmi. ‘Look at me.' It's a philosophical statement about not hiding away, about being a part of the digital lifestream, a star in your own right, out there for everyone to see.”

“Like YouTube,” Bonetti added, and Josh Jonah howled, “No, no, no, no,
no!
How many freaking times do I have to say this? YouTube
is yesterday…
“

“When Google bought them…” Tom Black shook his head. His broad, young face was so sorrowful it looked as if someone had died. “…it was all over. They don't understand the whole mash-up thing. The behemoth days are past.”

“Lukatmi is just the medium, not the message,” Jonah added, taking over, clearly the boss. “Except for the paid-for content, we don't own a damned thing. It's not for us to dictate to human beings what they create or what they see. If you have a problem with that, don't watch.”

Quattrocchi suddenly realised he'd read about these people in the newspapers. They'd found some loophole that allowed them to be absolved of any legal responsibility for what was, on the surface, carried by their network. They were, if he understood this correctly, like a dating agency. Their computers put someone wanting something in touch with someone offering it. The relationship was consummated in a way that had, so far, allowed them to escape the attentions of the law, on the simple grounds that they never published anything directly themselves. If the material that people found on Lukatmi turned out to be copyrighted, blasphemous, or, with very few restrictions, pornographic, they weren't to blame. It was anarchy with a listing on NASDAQ. Millions and millions of people had flocked to their site since it had gone live less than a year before. The two founders had become paper billionaires as staid investment houses and international banks poured vast sums of money into a company that seemed to be little more than two geeks with a big and possibly dubious idea.

One thing still puzzled him. “What on earth has all this got to do with the movie business?”

“Everything,” said Bonetti. “This is a revolution. Like when silent movies got sound, when black-and-white turned to colour. It means we can finally reach people direct, any way we want, without getting screwed by the distributors or anyone else.” He cast a sour glance at the Americans. They saw it, as the Italian producer intended. “Except them.”

Quattrocchi massaged his temples. There was a persistent, low ache there and had been ever since the shooting. An internal investigation team was now overseeing that, following the procedures after the deaths of civilians at the hands of a Carabinieri team. He wasn't looking forward to having to face the investigators. He'd been absent from the Casa del Cinema when the killing took place on highly spurious grounds, a call of a personal nature. That was one more secret to keep under wraps.

“Who'd want to watch a movie on a phone?” he demanded, unable to take his eyes off the screen beyond the room. It seemed to be on fire. The flames of Hell licked everywhere, and through them burst the faces of grinning, leering demons, their green and purple mouths babbling profanities and obscenities at the stricken, cowering figure of Dante, who shrank back at the horrific sight, the beautiful Beatrice at his side.

“Millions of suckers everywhere,” Bonetti crowed. “A dollar a clip. A monthly subscription for twenty. And then they go to see it in the theatre anyway. And buy the DVD. Then the director's edition. Then the collector's…” The Italian producer's fleshy face beamed. “It's a dream. You sell the same old junk over and over again.”

“With absolute efficiency,” the skinny one, Josh Jonah, emphasised. “Not a wasted piece of celluloid. Not a single cassette or DVD in inventory. And this”—he patted the silver box streaming light into the theatre beyond—”is ours. Every last piece gets streamed straight here for less money than it costs to produce a single cinema print. The crap the masses turn out gets fed from PC to PC for free. The people that junk brings in become the movie audience of the future, and we serve them direct, same price they'd pay in a theatre, but at a fraction of the delivery cost.” He clicked his fingers. “Voilà. Big money.”

“Big money,” Bonetti insisted.

Quattrocchi shook his head and grumbled, “So much for art. Also…”

This had bothered him all along. The picture on the screen didn't look right. It wasn't as sharp, as detailed, as engaging, as he'd expect of a movie like this. It felt wrong, however smart the toys these kids used to fool Bonetti and anyone else throwing their hats into this particular ring.

He stopped, unable to believe what he was seeing.

“What on earth is that?”

The scene was dissolving in front of their eyes. The flames faded. The faces of the demons, Dante shrinking in terror before them, now gave way to something else. Quattrocchi had seen Roberto Tonti's movie that afternoon, at the private screening. He knew for sure that what was now emerging on the screen in front of a selected audience of some two hundred international VIPs, politicians, and hangers-on had never been there before.

It was Dante again, still terrified, his face frozen in dread. Or rather, it was Allan Prime. In close-up, grainy, as if from some CCTV camera.

An open-faced black metal mask, ancient, medieval looking, enclosed his head, one band gripping his mouth. Behind its bars, the man's horrified features seemed exaggerated. His eyes were locked and rigid with terror.

There was utter silence in the projection room and in the theatre beyond. Then, nervously, someone in the crowd laughed, and another coughed. A voice rose. Quattrocchi recognised it: the furious, coarse bark of Roberto Tonti complaining about something yet again.

Josh Jonah wiped his skeletal forearm over his eyes. “Was this an outtake or something?” he asked no one in particular. “I don't recall seeing it. Tom.
Tom?”

The other American was staring at his silver machine, punching keys, watching numbers fly up on the monitor.

“This isn't coming from us.” Sweat was starting to make dark, damp stains across his burly chest. He looked almost as frightened as Allan Prime. Or Dante. Whichever, Quattrocchi thought. “I don't know where it's coming from.”

“Cut it,” Jonah ordered. “Stop the frigging thing. If someone else has got hold of the stream…”

“Sure…”

“No,” Quattrocchi ordered, and found he had to drag the American away from his strange projector.

They both stared at him. Bonetti, too, though there was no expression Quattrocchi could read on the producer's dark, lined face.

“This isn't part of the show,” Josh Jonah stated firmly. “It's not supposed to be up there.”

“Yes, it is. Your star's missing. Someone has taken control of your toy. What if they're trying to tell us where he is? Or why? Or…”

He was about to say
Or both.

But the words never reached his lips. Two things had happened on the screen. In the right-hand corner a digital stopwatch appeared, counting down from the hour.
59:59, 59:58, 59:57…

As it ticked away, an object entered from centre left, first in a sudden movement that darted in so quickly he was unable to see what had happened, only the result, that it had inflicted yet more pain and fright on the trapped man struggling on the screen in front of them, and that blood was now welling from some fresh wound that had appeared on Allan Prime's left temple.

The image vanished. After a long break the picture resumed. A narrow, deadly spear, the shaft as shiny as a mirror save for the bloodied tip which had just stabbed the trapped man's face, had slowly emerged, sharp and threatening, aimed directly at Prime's temple.

The stopwatch flicked over from
58:00
to
57:59.
The spear moved on a notch towards Allan Prime's head, as if attached to some machine that would edge it forward, minute by minute, until it drove into the actor's skull.

Quattrocchi stared at this gigantic, real-life depiction of a captive man waiting to die. There were hints to be found in this sight, surely. Clues, keys to unlock the conundrum. Otherwise why broadcast it at all? Simply to be cruel? Behind the head, he could just make out some shapes in the darkness, paintings perhaps, images, ones that might have been familiar had he possessed some way to illuminate the scene.

Beyond the projection room, out in the cinema, Tonti ceased roaring. Someone moaned. Another voice cried out in outrage. A woman screamed.

Bonetti threw open the door and bellowed at an attendant, “Clear the room, man! Everyone!”

Then he returned and stared at Quattrocchi, shocked, finally, babbling, “Find him, for God's sake.
Find him!”

“But where?” Quattrocchi asked, to himself mostly, as he held down the shortcut key for headquarters on his phone, praying that there was someone there who was good at riddles.

He got through. The wrong man answered. Morello. A good officer. Not a bright man. Not the one Quattrocchi hoped for, and there was no time to locate others. He had to work with what he had.

“Are we listening to our friends?” Quattrocchi asked.

There was silence on the line. The Carabinieri weren't supposed to eavesdrop on the police. And vice versa. But it happened. In both directions.

“We can be. Are we listening for anything in particular?”

“I would like to be informed of any mention of the actor Allan Prime, from any source whatsoever.”

“Of course.”

“Good,” Quattrocchi said, then got himself put through to forensic.

While waiting he caught the attention of Tom Black. The young American stood back from his silver machine, staring at the flashing monitor with concern.