Dante's Numbers (23 page)

A
N HOUR AND A HALF LATER COSTA FOUND HIM self standing outside next to the engines and the emergency vehicles as they wound down their pumps and reported the entire building evacuated, without a single casualty.

Gerald Kelly had arrived, disturbed at dinner in formal dress, just like Falcone and his companion. The SFPD captain listened in quiet fury to a report from Catherine Bianchi and the firemen. After that he took the two Italians to one side to demand an explanation—any explanation—for Costa's presence in Martin Vogel's apartment.

“I came to apologise,” Costa said simply. “That was all.”

Falcone stood his ground. “I asked him to do this, Kelly. I thought it might help.”

“Oh, right. That's what you were doing. Helping.” He looked at them, desperation in his eyes. “Well? Did it?”

“This isn't our case,” Costa said, before his superior had the chance to intervene.

Kelly eyeballed him and stifled a single, dry laugh. “You guys really are something. I know it's not your case. If it was…what would you think? What would you do?”

Costa glanced at the narrow, badly lit street that fed back into the bright, busy district around Market Street.

“I'd be looking for a third man,” he said.

T
HREE DAYS LATER COSTA AND TERESA LUPO sat at the door of the principal exhibition tent in the temporary canvas village erected by the Palace of Fine Arts, watching Roberto Tonti and Dino Bonetti strut around the area as if they owned it.

The question had been bothering him for days. He knew he had to ask.

“What's the difference between a producer and a director?”

She stared at him and asked, “Are you serious?”

“Deadly. I was never addicted to movies like you. I just see the finished thing. Actors. Pictures. I've no idea what goes into it.”

“What was the difference between Caravaggio and Cardinal Del Monte?”

Costa frowned and replied, “One was an artist and the other was the man who made his art viable. By paying for it, or finding others to come up with the commissions.”

“One provides the art. The other provides the wherewithal. There. You answered your own question.”

He thought about that, and the nagging doubt that had been with him since the conversation with the Asian waitress in the diner.

“If you'd been Del Monte, would you have loved Caravaggio or resented him? So much talent in one human being, something you couldn't hope to achieve yourself ?”

“I think I'd feel lucky to have known a genius,” Teresa replied. “And a little jealous, too, from time to time.” She nodded at the two Italians. “You think Bonetti might resent Tonti in some way?”

Bonetti was striding past the huge marquee that was destined to house the audience for the premiere the following evening. Tonti was at his side, listening. Thirty years separated these men. One was in his prime: strong, both physically and personally. Tonti was dying; his face seemed bloodless. His walk had the slow, pained determination of an old man resenting his increasing infirmity.

“Directors win Oscars,” Costa said. “Producers don't win anything.”

“The kind of money they make, they don't need to. Someone like Bonetti dips his beak in everything. He's Del Monte with a twist. He gets to sell the paintings he commissions and keep a share of them in perpetuity. What's some stupid little statue next to that?”

Something, he thought. But perhaps not much. Dino Bonetti was a powerful, confident man. It seemed far-fetched to think he would be offended by any fleeting fame attached to cast or crew.

“The question you should really be asking,” she added, “is how much someone like Tonti resents his stars. I've read his biography. It's full of bust-ups with his cast. For some people that's a trademark. Tonti…” She frowned. “He treats his cast as if they're just puppets. It's a shame he's so old. All this digital stuff they have nowadays…It can't be long before real actors become irrelevant for directors. Just one more piece of software they can manipulate on-screen—so much more manageable than flesh and blood.”

Lukatmi was never far away from the story, Costa thought. The Italian director had been involved with the digital video company since the outset. The papers said that Tonti had even provided seed capital for its founding. Not that it was going to be worth much now. Lukatmi's shares had entered meltdown after the death of Josh Jonah. In seventy-two hours the company had gone from star of the NASDAQ to one more discredited and busted dotcom. The very day that the news channels and papers devoted huge amounts of coverage to the deadly inferno in Martin Vogel's SoMa apartment, twelve lawsuits had been filed in the courts in California and New York. Given the speed with which they appeared, it was clear lawyers had been hovering at the edge of the company for some time, just as Catherine Bianchi had predicted. All accused the dead Jonah and his partner Tom Black of everything from stock option irregularities to misuse of shareholder funds. The newspapers claimed the district attorney was mulling over a formal probe into the company for fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. The share price that had seemed so buoyant only four days before had fallen through the floor until, that morning, trading had been suspended amid expectations of an impending bankruptcy announcement. Predators— old-school companies, the ones Lukatmi treated with such contempt—were hovering, ready to snap up what few worthwhile pieces might be salvaged from the corporate corpse on the waterfront at Fort Mason.

It was a juicy story for the media, one bettered only by a more astonishing revelation: as well as being a corporate crook, Josh Jonah had turned out to be a real-life criminal, a man who'd been willing to murder a Hollywood movie star in a desperate attempt to save his company from collapse. The case was closed, or so Gianluca Quattrocchi, with Bryan Whitcombe in tow, had declared to the cameras. Gerald Kelly seemed somewhat muted in front of the press. But the arguments presented by Quattroc chi appeared solid: in spite of Costa's protests, the evidence appeared to point to there being only two individuals in Martin Vogel's apartment in SoMa. Forensic believed that Jonah had fatally wounded Vogel, who had returned one shot before he died. That had crippled the billionaire as he started to spread petrol around the apartment to destroy any evidence.

“I still think I heard a third person there,” Costa said quietly.

Teresa watched him; he was aware that he had, perhaps, protested this point too much.

“It was dark. You knew something was wrong. When people are under stress…”

“I know what I heard…”

“Enough! If you were sitting in Bryant Street now, which way would you be leaning? Be honest with yourself.”

Costa didn't have a good answer for that. All the available facts suggested a failed murder attempt on Jonah's part. Cell phone company records showed that, shortly before Costa's arrival, the stricken man had tried to call his partner Tom Black from Vogel's apartment, presumably seeking help. That was speculation, though. Black had disappeared completely the evening his partner died. Kelly had let it be known to Catherine Bianchi that he thought the man was out of the U.S. already. There were huge black holes in the Lukatmi accounts. The missing money could easily fund a covert flight from the country, enough to last a lifetime if Black was smart enough to keep his head down and choose the right, distant location.

Quattrocchi's theory was, predictably, one the media was growing to love. Jonah and Black had hatched the plot to hype
Inferno
, employing Vogel as their legman. A phony passport recovered from the wreckage in the photographer's apartment had a stamp proving he'd flown to Rome one week before Allan Prime died, and left the day after. The picture snapped in the cemetery clearly revealed Vogel to be the man who had stolen the almonds that had very nearly ended Maggie Flavier's life. Josh Jonah and Tom Black had enough access to security arrangements to provide Vogel with the means by which Maggie might be poisoned. His job as a paparazzo had proved the perfect cover to follow her afterwards. Records in Rome showed that he had also managed to obtain media accreditation there using his forged passport, giving him the opportunity to enter the restricted area by the Casa del Cinema and replace the genuine death mask of Dante with the fake one taken from Allan Prime that morning. Quattrocchi's team had, in what Falcone declared a rare moment of investigative competence, discovered that Vogel's alias was in an address book belonging to Peter Jamieson, the actor who had died in the uniform of a Carabinieri officer at the Villa Borghese. It seemed a logical step to assume that Jonah had recruited the actor to scare Maggie Flavier, perhaps as a way of distracting the police from Allan Prime, perhaps calculating, too, that his act might provoke a violent response the unfortunate Jamieson had never expected.

The case remained open. Tom Black was still at large. There was still no sign of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes. Moreover, from the point of view of the state police, the genuine death mask of Dante was still missing, and causing considerable internal ructions with the museum authorities in Italy. But a kind of conclusion had been reached in terms of Allan Prime's murder. As far as Quattrocchi was concerned, nothing else really mattered. Josh Jonah had used the cycle of Dante's numbers as a code for his attacks on those associated with the production, knowing that this fed the idea the movie was either somehow cursed or stalked by vengeful Dante fanatics seeking to punish those associated with the perfidious Roberto Tonti. It was all a desperate publicity stunt, one engineered by Lukatmi. It had worked, too.
Inferno
was on every front page, every news bulletin.

The pace of the investigation—one which had hung on the assumption that yet one more attack lurked around the corner-had slackened as the principal focus moved to the financial mess inside Lukatmi. They were now one day away from
Inferno'
s world premiere. Once that had occurred without incident, the cast and crew would hand over security arrangements entirely to the private companies. For Costa and his colleagues, Italy would beckon.

Maggie Flavier had left innumerable messages imploring him to visit. He'd made a series of excuses, some genuine, some less so. In the hectic aftermath of the deaths of Jonah and the paparazzo Vogel, Costa had come to realize that he was beginning to miss Italy, miss Rome, with its familiar sights, the street sounds, the easy banter in cafés, the warm, comforting embrace of home. San Francisco was a beautiful, interesting, and cultured city, but it could never be his. Rome was part of his identity, and without it he felt a little lost, like Maggie Flavier attempting to find herself in the long-dead faces of the women in the paintings in the Legion of Honor. A movie was a temporary caravan, always waiting to disperse. If she came to Rome for some sequel, she would be there six, nine months, perhaps no more. And then…

Life was temporary, and its briefness only given meaning by some short, often clumsy attempt to find permanence within the shifting sands of one's emotions. He knew that search would never leave him. He knew, too, that Maggie Flavier would struggle to feel the same way. She would seek as she did character after character, personality after personality, through the constant round of work.

“I can't believe you're not even up to an argument over this,” Teresa complained, jolting him back to the present.

“We could be home in a few days. I'd like that. Wouldn't you?”

She screwed up her face in an awkward, gauche expression. “Not yet. Not till it's over.”

“You just told me I was wrong to think there was more to this case than Gianluca Quattrocchi would have the media believe.”

“No. I merely said your supposition for the existence of a third party in Martin Vogel's apartment was difficult to prove. I do wish cops would listen more carefully sometimes.” A familiar sly smile appeared. “May I remind you of some things we do know? One chief suspect is missing. Thanks to the gigantic amount of publicity this has generated, a stack of money has been thrown up in the air and no one knows where it's going to fall. And you don't have your precious mask.”

Two points he appreciated. The third puzzled him.

“What do you mean about the money?”

“You should talk to Catherine Bianchi more. She has a firm grasp of finance. How you go about backing companies like Lukatmi. She even seems to understand how to raise money for movies, as much as anyone outside the business can.”

He watched the private security guards working on the installation of CCTV cameras on the nearest tent. The place was bristling with the things. There were enough cameras to catch a squirrel sneezing. But the tempo of the investigation had changed. It felt…if not over, then at least more manageable, to some anyway.

There was a minor commotion. Roberto Tonti strode through the door of the tent, followed by Dino Bonetti speaking in low, confidential tones by his side. Bonetti didn't look his usual bouncy, arrogant self. This was surely going to be the most extraordinary and potentially lucrative movie he had ever produced. The newspapers were talking about a posthumous Oscar nomination for Allan Prime. The industry rags were predicting that
Inferno
could be the first movie to break a two-hundred-million-dollar weekend gross at the box office when it went nationwide.

Perhaps it was the strain, but neither man looked like someone on the verge of breaking every entertainment industry record in the book.