Dante's Numbers (7 page)

“I need my scientific officers to see what's happening,” Quattrocchi told him.

The American winced, as if afflicted by a momentary pain. “Tell them to find a computer and tune in to Lukatmi,” he answered glumly. “These bastards are putting it out to the public, too. Through us. We can stop them, but the only quick way would mean we lose the stream here, too…”

“Touch nothing!” Quattrocchi roared. He pointed through into the cinema, where Prime was screaming on the screen again. The small, deadly spear had moved closer to its destination. “If we lose that, we lose him.”

Josh Jonah walked up to the machine and peered calmly at the monitor. “I can read off the URL,” he said. “Are you ready?”

O
NE KILOMETRE AWAY, IN THE FORENSIC LAB of the
centro storico
Questura, the same word was puzzling another law enforcement officer, though one from a very different agency.

“Url? What's a URL?” Peroni asked.

He thought they were in Teresa Lupo's morgue to stare at the head of a store window dummy and the curious death mask that had been attached to it. And to talk to Simon Harvey. At the age of fifty-one, with an understanding of the cinema industry which extended to no more than a few security duties at the Cinecittà studios over the years, Peroni felt it was time to become better acquainted with the working methods and mores of the movie business, such as they were. He had an inexplicable feeling they might come in useful, and that Simon Harvey was a man who could impart much worthwhile information on the subject if he felt so minded.

No one answered his question. Harvey and Silvio Di Capua had exchanged a brief conversation, and the whole game plan seemed to disappear in smoke. While Teresa and her two young white-coated trainee assistants played halfheartedly with the head and mask—finding no new information—Di Capua and Harvey had gone over to the nearest computer and started hammering the keys, staring at the gigantic monitor as it flipped through image after image.

“Will someone please tell me what a URL is?” Peroni asked again.

“Universal resource locator,” Di Capua grumbled. “What I'm typing. Any the wiser?”

“No. Enlighten me. How is this helping exactly?”

“Gianni,” Teresa said. “If I'd been allowed to set up some kind of a crime scene on that stage… If we were in control in any shape or form…” She opened her hands in a gesture of despair. “We have nothing to work with. Nowhere to begin. If staring at a computer helps, I'm all for it. What else is there?”

“This is my fault,” Harvey apologised. “I didn't mean to start an argument. It was only a suggestion.”

The suggestion being, Teresa explained patiently, that they use the strange, unexplained Internet service owned by two American geeks who'd helped finance
Inferno
to try to find out what people at large were saying about Allan Prime.

“Think of it this way,” Harvey went on. “Would you like to be able to tune in to every TV newscast around the world that was covering Allan right now? Every little net TV channel, every vid-cast, too?”

Peroni shook his big, grizzled head. “Every what?”

“If it gave us a clue…” Di Capua said. “I'd take anything. This thing…” He blinked, incredulous at the flashing series of moving pictures on the monitor. “… is unbelievable. I never realised…”

“They bring stuff online before announcing it,” Harvey said. “It's all part of the hype. You never know what they'll turn up with next. You just have to tune in to check.”

Teresa had her head bent towards the screen. Peroni felt like an unwanted intruder from a different century.

“How the hell do they do it?” Di Capua asked, still in a state of awe.

Harvey sighed. “I don't really understand it myself. From what they said, it's a mixture of reading keywords, transcribing speech, recognising faces…All the TV stations are now online and streaming. Add to that new video material. Blogs. Small web stations. I guess they have some way of consuming it all as it appears, reading it, then serving everything up. Google for video and audio, only ten times bigger, ten times faster, and deadly accurate. That's why they're worth a billion or so each.”

Peroni cleared his throat. “This is
so
interesting. Is anyone going to find something for me to look at?”

Teresa stepped back and gestured at the screen. “Take your pick.”

What enthusiasm he had left swiftly dissipated. The monitor was crammed with moving pictures the size of postage stamps, each with odd graphs and a geographical location.

“Allan Prime's a star,” Di Capua observed. “When someone like him disappears, it's a big story.”

Peroni leaned forward and found himself wishing he could rewind the clock to enter a simpler, more straightforward universe. Each postage-stamp video represented a TV channel, usually news, seemingly issuing some kind of bulletin about the Prime story. The BBC in London. CBS in New York. A channel in Russia. Somewhere in Japan, Australia, the Philippines… “This can't all be live…”

Harvey nodded. “Pretty much. With Lukatmi, if it's going out real time, it's being relayed by them that way. With maybe a few seconds' delay, that's all.”

Peroni felt he could soon start to lose his temper. “This is of no use to me whatsoever. How many channels are there, for pity's sake?”

Di Capua hammered some keys and said, “More than four hundred sources have run a story on Prime in the last hour.”

Peroni watched as the monitor cleared again, then very slowly came back to life, painting a set of new tiny videos on the screen at a snail's pace.

When the images returned, they were all the ones Peroni expected. Local and national news channels, familiar presenters reading from their scripts, all with images of the missing actor and shots from the park and the production of
Inferno. A
counter by the side of the screen was some kind of popularity meter. The audience seemed to be running at seven figures and rising, most of them for a single video channel, one that was blacked out at that moment.

“Why can't we watch the one that's top of the list?”

“It won't load for some reason,” Di Capua said, trying something with the keyboard. “Too many people watching it, I imagine. Or maybe their fancy computer system can't cope.”

“I want to see it…” Peroni began, and then fell quiet. Teresa's deputy had made the black window occupy the full screen of the path lab monitor. As he watched, the empty space filled, line by line, with a real moving image.

They all crowded round to see. It was a man in fear for his life, trapped inside some cruel and ancient cast-iron head restraint. The digital stopwatch imprinted by his neckline turned from
28:31
to
28:30
, and the seconds kept on ticking. Allan Prime's eyes were as large as any man's Peroni had ever seen. He looked ready to die of fright even before the bright, shining spear with the blood-soaked tip reached his head, which surely would happen soon. Within less than thirty minutes or so, this strangely hypnotic little movie, the most personal Prime had ever made surely, seemed to be saying.

Teresa leaned over Di Capua and said, “Get me more detail.”

Harvey's eyes were glazed, filling with tears. Peroni looked at him and said, “You don't have to watch this. Why not go and sit somewhere else? I'll come for you when there's news.”

“I've got to watch it,” the movie man croaked, then dragged up a chair.

There was no caption. Only the image of the terrified actor, the time ticking away, and, by the side of the video, the digital thermometer that was the popularity counter. It was now flashing red. Peroni stared at it. Allan Prime's dying moments seemed to be the most sought-after thing in the world at that instant. A real-life drama being watched by a global audience that was growing into the tens of millions and swelling by the second.

He pressed a finger against the screen and indicated the area behind Prime's quaking head. “There's something there, Silvio. Can you bring it up?”

The pathologist's hands raced across the keyboard. Prime's features began to bleach out. From the dark background it was now possible to make out some kind of shape. Di Capua tweaked the machine. It was a painting, strange and old and, Peroni thought, possibly familiar.

“Get that to the art people straightaway,” he ordered.

Teresa was staring at him. He knew what she was thinking.

“Has Nic got one of those new video phones?” he asked.

“You all have them,” she said, and folded her arms. “Even you if you bothered to look.”

“I deal in people, not gadgets,” Peroni replied, then called Costa on the fancy new handset the department had issued to everyone only a few months earlier.

“Silvio,” he said, listening to the ring tone.

“Yeah?” the young pathologist answered absent-mindedly, still punching away at the keyboard, trying to improve any recognisable detail in the swimming sea of pixelated murk that now filled the screen.

“Best give me the URL, please.”

T
HEY WENT BACK TO THE LANCIA IN THE VIA Giulia. The forensic team would go through the clay dust and any other evidence they might find in the apartment Adele Neri had rented Allan Prime. It felt better to be outside. Something about the information they had gleaned from Neri's widow depressed Costa. The movie world was not all glitter. Allan Prime, along with the producer Dino Bonetti, kept the company of mobsters and thieves. Costa wondered why he was surprised. There had been plenty of scandals in Italian show business over the years. It shouldn't have come as a shock to discover they spilled over into something as important and lucrative as the comeback blockbuster for one of the country's most reclusive directors.

Maggie Flavier came and stood next to him by the wall beneath the Lungotevere. The traffic made a dull, physical sound through the stone that separated them from the busy road and the river beyond. She was smoking and had the sweet smell of Campari on her breath, a lightness that might have been the onset of drink in her eyes.

She smiled at him and said, “We all lead different lives. What's yours?”

“Being a police officer. It's enough.”

She drew hard on the cigarette, then tossed it to the ground and stamped out the embers with her shiny, expensive-looking evening shoe.

“In my line of work you become more conscious of words,” she said quietly. “You used the past tense when you talked about your wife…”

He nodded. He liked her directness. Perhaps it was an actor's trick. Perhaps not.

“She died six months ago.” He thought of the mausoleum of Augustus, less than ten minutes away on foot, and the terrible events of the previous December.

“I'm sorry. Was it unexpected?”

“You could say that.”

She breathed in deeply, quickly. “I don't know what to say. I felt something, that's all.”

“‘Sorry' is just fine.” There isn't a lot else, he thought. People died all the time. Those who survived got on with their lives.

She turned to look at the building housing Prime's apartment, now surrounded by blue police cars, with only a handful of Carabinieri vehicles in the street.

“Do you know where Allan is yet? Is he OK?” she asked.

“He was fine when he left here this morning.” His eyes rested on Falcone, serious and intent by the door, busy on the phone. “Perhaps he's just gone walkabout.”

She shook her head. “When he's due to open the premiere for the biggest movie of the summer? I don't think so…”

The thought wouldn't leave Costa's head. “Could this all be some publicity stunt?”

She stared at him in disbelief. He caught the bittersweet aroma of Campari again.

“Someone died, Nic. The premiere's been cancelled. A publicity stunt?”

“The man who attacked you was an actor. His name was Peter Jamieson. He was an extra on the set of
Inferno.
Did you know him?”

Maggie Flavier didn't blink. “A movie set's like a football crowd. The only people I see are the ones I'm playing a scene with. I don't even notice Tonti. Just hear him. You couldn't miss that.” She gazed directly into his eyes, to make the point. “I didn't recognise that poor man. I've never heard of someone named Jamieson. If I had, I would tell you. I may be an actor, but I'm a very bad liar.”

His phone rang. It was Peroni, excited, trying to explain something he clearly didn't understand himself. Nic heard Teresa snatch the thing from him at the other end.

“Nic,” she said anxiously. “Don't ask, just listen. Allan Prime is captive somewhere and it's being broadcast on the web. He's in danger. It looks bad. We need you to see the pictures and tell us if you recognise anything.”

“Pictures?”

“Live
pictures,” she emphasised, then told him how to find the Lukatmi page.

Costa had to cut the call to try to get the web on his phone. When he did, and keyed in the address she gave him, all he got was a blank page and a message saying that service was unavailable. He called Teresa back. There was a brief exchange between her and someone who sounded like Silvio Di Capua.

“Nic, forget that idea,” she ordered. “Silvio says the network must be breaking up under the strain. Everyone's watching this poor bastard trying to stay alive. Listen. It's possible there's a hint about where he might be. The background to the picture is blurry but it seems to contain some kind of painting. We think we've captured some of it. We're trying to circulate it to the art people here to get their opinion, but they're all out taking tea with their maiden aunts or something. Look at it for us. Please.”

A beep told him there was an incoming e-mail. Costa opened it, looked, thought for a moment, then told her, “It's just smudge and ink. I'm seeing it on a phone. Tell Silvio to get more detail and blow the thing up until it's breaking.”

There were curses and shouts on the end of the line. Two more images arrived on Nic's phone, each little better than the first. Falcone came over. Costa told him what was happening, while Maggie stood by his shoulder, trying to peek at what was on the phone. It was impossible to recognise anything on the tiny, pixelated screen.

“Bigger, brighter, louder,” he ordered.

They waited. One more e-mail arrived.

He looked at it and thought of a bright autumn day the previous autumn when he and Emily had bought ice cream from the little café near the Piazza Trilussa, then gone on a long stroll to the Gianicolo, past the house that was supposed to belong to Raphael's mistress, La Fornarina, through the still-quiet part of Trastevere the American tourists rarely found.

The image was cruelly disfigured by both Silvio Di Capua's digital surgery and the distorting electronic medium through which it had been relayed. But he recognised those lovely features all the same, and could picture the figure beneath the face, half naked, racing her scallop shell chariot over the surf, surrounded by lascivious nymphs and satyrs.

“This is from a painting called
Galatea
,” he said with absolute certainty. “It's in the Villa Farnesina in the Via della Lungara in Trastevere. It's just a small museum and art gallery, not well known. Quite deserted at night, and in secluded grounds.” He thought of the way there across the river. It was perhaps four minutes if they crossed the Mazzini bridge.

“Four cars,” Falcone ordered, walking back to his Lancia. “Leave Miss Flavier under guard here.” He opened the driver's door and beckoned for Catherine Bianchi to move. “In the passenger seat, please,” Falcone ordered. She obeyed immediately. Costa followed.

From somewhere came the wail of a siren. Falcone looked surprised, and more than a little cross. More so when it became apparent from the timbre that it was the sound of the Carabinieri.