Dante's Numbers (22 page)

T
HE LATER THE HOUR, THE MORE UNCOMFORTable Hank and Frank became. Churches really didn't suit them and the bar was calling. Finally, just before eight, she lost patience and sent them on their way. She could ride a bus home. One went from the street outside all the way down to the waterfront at the Marina. She liked buses. They put you in touch with people.

Predictably, the priest appeared moments after the two brothers departed. She took one look at the man in the familiar black frock and felt her heart sink. He had a long pale face, pockmarked cheeks sagging with age. His eyes were sad and rheumy, as if they'd seen rather too much. A drink with the twins might be welcome relief after a little time in the gloom of Mission Dolores. She was glad she'd made a note of their favourite bar.

Then she told him who she was and where she came from. The priest opened his mouth and her opinion changed instantly. His voice did not match his appearance in the slightest. It was bright and young and engaged, as if some lively inner spirit was trapped inside an older, more fragile frame. The
parroco
introduced himself as Dermot Gammon, originally from Boston, but a resident of Rome for several years before returning to the U.S. and ending up in San Francisco.

“Where do you live?” he asked her.

“Off Tritone. The Via Crispi.”

He rubbed his hands together and a beatific expression put fresh light in his eyes. A comprehensive list of local stores and restaurants and wine bars streamed from his lips.

“You know Rome well,” she said sincerely.

They spent a few happy minutes discussing her home city. Finally the priest asked her why she was there. She told him a little about the case and the movie, then said, “They told me you had a photograph. Of the man they found stealing something in the cemetery.”

His long, sad face fell into a frown. “A bag full of almonds. The ladies…” He sighed. “Sometimes their desire to protect this place goes to extremes. We exist to cater to souls, not bricks and mortar. They saw the man, they took some photos. I showed them to the police. Our local captain was not, I have to say, terribly interested or impressed.” He edged forward, as if making some statement in confession. “Which pleased me greatly. I don't wish to see the mission in the newspapers. Only for births and marriages and deaths, and a few charitable occasions. Certainly not as part of something as serious as this dreadful investigation you mentioned. Am I making myself clear?”

“I'll be discreet. I promise. Besides, it's probably nothing. I'm shooting arrows in the dark, hoping one will land somewhere sunny.”

“That's work for a priest. Not a scientist.”

“I wouldn't presume to teach you your job, Father. Science and religion aren't enemies.”

“Really?” He didn't look convinced. “I must disagree. Nothing wonderful that I recall of Rome has to do with science.”

“Not the Sistine Chapel? Michelangelo thought himself more an architect than a painter. And Bernini. Those statues. How could he
create
them without knowing anatomy?”

“I was always a Caravaggio man myself. I like real human beings, frail men and women, not make-believe perfect ones. With out the fallible…” The priest opened his hands and looked around the dark interior of the mission. “…I'm out of a job.”

“Without mysteries we both are. Please, Father. The photographs. Just to satisfy my curiosity.”

He excused himself for a few minutes. When he came back, he sat down by her side and retrieved a snapshot from the inside of his gown. It was too dark to see much of it, so she went and stood beneath the electric candles close to the altar.

The priest followed, looked over her shoulder, and said, “The gardener told me to chop that tree down two years ago. He said it's dying. Too old.”

She peered at the figure in the picture. The man was holding a supermarket bag that, from its bulging shape, appeared to contain a good collection of nuts. He was arguing with the Mexican woman she'd seen earlier.

“I told them all, ‘It's a tree,'” the priest went on. “ ‘Not a human being. The thing is insensate. It feels no pain, has no consciousness of its impending end, or its present feeble state. We can wait a little while,' I say. Not thinking…” His glassy eyes stared into hers. “I've been here thirteen years, Ms. Lupo. We've never had a single person take something from the cemetery. Not something supposedly edible anyway. Now two in a matter of weeks.”

“It's not edible. It's a bitter almond. Poisonous in quantity.”

He looked shocked. “That's why the man took those nuts? Because they're poisonous?”

“Someone with a little knowledge might know, I imagine. Most people would simply see an almond tree…”

Its gnarled, failing form stood next to the patch of ground where the imaginary Carlotta Valdes's grave had been created for the film, and stayed, for a few uncertain years, in real life, too, until someone deemed it unsuitable for a real cemetery. It was a link, one that, like the rest, seemed to lead into some opaque and unrelenting San Franciscan fog.

“Do you know this man?” the priest asked.

She gave him back the photograph. “He's wearing sunglasses, Father. And he's turned away from the camera…”

He took the snapshot from her. “I'm sorry. I gave you the wrong one. Here. There's a better picture.”

Father Gammon scrabbled again in his clothes. A crumpled packet of cigarettes fell to the floor. He apologised and looked a little guilty, then picked them up. In his other hand was a new photo.

This was clear and distinct, even in the fusty yellow light of the electric altar candles.

“Do you know him now?”

“I believe so,” she answered. “Will you excuse me, please?”

Falcone was furious at being interrupted halfway through what sounded like a nervous dinner with Catherine Bianchi. But not for long.

C
OSTA PUSHED THE DOOR AS FAR AS IT WOULD go. It was pitch black in the apartment.

There was a smell, though. Something familiar: the harsh odour of a spent weapon and behind it the faint tang of blood. From a tinny radio in a room beyond the entrance came the sound of music.
Tannhäuser.
He thought of the burly photographer squealing as he stood on his shattered arm. The man hadn't looked like an opera fan.

He stopped and listened. Not a sound except the music, but that was so full and insistent… Costa found the wall inside the entrance, making sure he stayed inside the shadow as much as possible. It wasn't a good idea to be a silhouette in a doorway. He couldn't see a thing. Then, in the middle of a line, the music stopped abruptly.

“Police,” he said quietly into the dark.

All he could hear was his own voice in the dark of an apartment where the smell of spent ammunition was so strong it seemed like the mark of some murderous feral cat.

When it came, the racket made him jump. The electronic wail of the mobile phone cut through the black interior of Vogel's apartment like the scream of a child.

It was the tone he'd set for Falcone. Costa swore, ducking further back into the pool of gloom by the door, desperate to avoid becoming an easy target.

He yanked the phone out of his pocket and killed the call.

There'd been another noise, though. Someone moving in the blackness ahead of him. A new smell, too, one he couldn't place.

Costa stared at the bright blue screen in his hand, got Falcone's number, and texted four words,
URGT VOGEL APT NOW.

Then he threw the phone across to the other side of the room and pressed back against the wall. The ring tone went off seconds after. The space in front of him was briefly filled by sound, the bellowing roar of gunfire fighting to escape the confined space that enclosed it.

He froze where he was, cold and sweating. Someone was scrabbling around on the floor, maybe three or four strides to the right, struggling to say something. The unseen figure's breathing was laboured, words unintelligible. He sounded sick or wounded, in some kind of trouble. But he was a man with a gun. The strong, noxious smell was beginning to overwhelm everything.

Finally he worked out what it was. Petrol.

Down the corridor someone screamed. The baby was wailing again. Lights were coming on, voices were rising.

He wanted to kick himself. They'd called the police
before.
The woman had let him in immediately, not because she thought he was a pizza deliveryman, but because she thought he was the police. The gunfire had started before he'd blundered onto the scene. That was why everything was so quiet, so deserted. Sane people stayed out of the way.

As he moved a fraction further into the room, Costa stumbled, found his fingers encountering the familiar hard metal frame of a photographer's tripod. He pushed it over, heard it clatter.

There was no shooting this time. He fell to the floor, rolling, turning, turning, out into the corridor, scrabbling on hands and knees to get out of the deadly frame of the doorway.

Breathless and sweating, but outside the apartment, finally, he heard nothing more. As he started to scramble upright, he found himself staring into the barrel of a gun. The man who held it was black, stocky, and wore the uniform of an SFPD cop. He looked terrified. The weapon trembled in his hands.

“I'm a police officer,” Costa said, slowly, carefully raising his hands. “My ID's in my jacket pocket.”

The gun was sweaty in the young cop's grip. He passed it from one hand to the other, then back, the barrel staying straight in Costa's face. He nodded at the open doorway. “You gonna tell me what I might find in there? And why you was looking?”

“There's a wounded man with a gun. I just came here to apologise. There was an incident. With the actress. Maggie Flavier. Maybe you read about it…”

The gun lowered a little. A flicker of recognition crossed the young cop's face. “That was you? You looked bigger in the papers.”

“Thanks…”

There were more people behind him. The cop swiveled nervously, waving the gun everywhere. Costa wanted to shout at him but it didn't seem a good idea.

He didn't need to anyway. Catherine Bianchi was marching down the corridor, police ID held high, Falcone behind her with a face like thunder. She was bellowing at the young cop to get his weapon down, in a voice that wasn't easy to ignore.

“Captain Bianchi…?” the cop faltered.

She was wearing a short cocktail dress with a scarlet silk scarf over her shoulders. The badge in her hand looked incongruous next to it.

She ignored him, stared at Costa, and asked, angrily, “What the hell is going on?”

“There's a wounded man inside with a gun,” Costa said quickly. “I urge—”

Caution
, he was about to say, but the word stayed in his mouth. Someone was screaming, a high-pitched shriek of terror and pain. Inside Martin Vogel's apartment a light had appeared, a grim and familiar orange.

Costa scrabbled to his feet and raced down the corridor, away from the apartment.

Catherine Bianchi let out a piercing yell as a man stumbled out of the door, his body a bright, burning torch of flame from head to foot, leaping around like a victim of Saint Vitus's dance consumed by fire.

Costa snatched the fire extinguisher he'd seen earlier from the wall and ran towards the blazing figure.

“He's got a gun,” Catherine shouted, standing in the way, blocking any chance he had to move forward.

Sure enough, there was a weapon in the burning man's right hand, which now appeared blackened and useless, gripping the familiar black shape out of nothing more than fear.

Costa pushed her to one side and triggered the extinguisher.

A crowd was gathering. The spray doused the shrieking figure, which staggered and fell to the floor. His skin was black with soot, red with livid burns.

He was recognisable, just.

“Medics,” Costa said, dropping to his knees beside the man, wondering if there was much life left in him. Blood was beginning to seep through the scorched clothing. He was wounded, perhaps more than once. “They're coming. Hold still. It will be all right…”

A noise escaped the blackened lips, a long, painful groan that blew the stink of burnt petrol straight into Costa's face. It was the final breath. He knew it. So did Josh Jonah, dying in his arms.

They were around him now, looking, unable to speak.

Costa didn't wait. Two steps took him to the door to Vogel's apartment; he found the light switch, tried to take in what he saw.

The place was wrecked. There'd been a fight, a bloody one. Money—fifty-and one-hundred-dollar bills—was scattered across the table in the living room. A lot of money. Thousands, surely.

Falcone and Catherine Bianchi weren't far behind him.

“Let's put out a bulletin for Vogel,” she said, pulling out her radio. “Then we figure out how the hell I'm going to explain all this to Gerald Kelly and keep my job.”

Costa tried to take in what he was seeing. “I wouldn't make any hasty decisions. There were three people in here. I heard them.”

He walked on through the scattered mess on the floor, into the bedroom.

The smell he'd first noticed, that of blood, hung heavy in the air, mingling with the harsh chemical stench of petrol. There was something else, too…

A single naked bulb swung lazily over the bed as if someone had recently brushed against it. Martin Vogel didn't live in style. Or die that way either. The corpse was on the bare mattress. Vogel wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and the plaster cast on his arm. A gaping wound stood over his heart like a bloody rose poking its way out from the inside.

“You can hold the bulletin,” Costa said, mostly to himself.

The window was open, just a fraction. He walked to it. There was a fire escape outside. Someone could have escaped undetected.

Maybe they did kill each other—Vogel and Jonah. Or maybe it was meant to look that way.

Catherine Bianchi walked over to the table, picked up some of the notes and let them drop through her fingers. Costa watched Falcone biting his tongue, wanting to tell her not to touch a thing.

“What was it the Carabinieri's pet professor said?” she asked. “Next we'd get the Avaricious and the Prodigal?”

She shook her head and cast a brief glance at the bedroom, and then the corridor, where Josh Jonah's corpse lay like a burnt and bloodied human ember escaped from some recently extinguished bonfire.

“How do you tell which one was which?”

The stink of petrol drifting into the room from around Vogel's bed was becoming overpowering. It must have been in the carpet, the curtains, everywhere.

So Josh Jonah intended to set fire to the place and had been caught by his own misdeed, shot by the wounded Vogel. Costa's mind struggled with that idea. Jonah was ablaze when he died. If he'd been close to the petrol trail he'd been laying, that would have ignited, too. There was a gap in the scenario somewhere.

“I think we should get out of here until the fire people take a look,” he began to say. “This isn't a safe—”

Something hissed and fizzed in the corner and finally he managed to place the last unknown smell. It was one from childhood. Fireworks on the lawn of the house, bright, fiery lights in the sky. A fuse burning before the explosion.

In the corner of the room, safe on a chair above the fuel-stained carpet, sat an accordion-style jumping firecracker. A long length of cord had been attached so that it wound across the seat of the chair, lengthening the burn time. Most of it was now charred ash. Scarcely half a finger of untouched material remained, and that was getting rapidly eaten by the eager, hungry flame working its way to the small charge of powder that would take the incendiary and fling it into the room.

It was a perfect homemade time bomb and it was about to explode.

Costa shoved Catherine Bianchi back towards the door, bellowing at Falcone and the baffled young cop to join them.

Then the soft roaring gasp of the explosion hit.