Dante's Numbers (2 page)

A
T FIVE MINUTES PAST FOUR, NIC COSTA FOUND himself standing outside a pale green wooden hut shaded by parched trees, just a short walk from the frenzied madness that was beginning to build in and around the nearby Casa del Cinema. The sight of this tiny place brought back far too many memories, some of them jogged by a newspaper clipping attached to the door, bearing the headline
“ ‘Dei Piccoli,' cinema da Guinness.”
This was the world's smallest movie theatre, built for children in 1934 during the grim Mussolini years, evidence that Italy was in love with film, with the idea of fantasy, of a life that was brighter and more colourful than reality, even in those difficult times. Or perhaps, it occurred to Costa now, with the perspective of adulthood shaping his childhood memories, because of them. This small oak cabin had just sixty-three seats, every one of them, he now felt sure, deeply uncomfortable for anyone over the age of ten. Not that his parents had ever complained. Once a week, until his eleventh birthday, his mother or father had brought him here. Together they had sat through a succession of films, some good, some bad, some Italian, some from other countries, America in particular.

It was a different time, a different world, both on the screen and in his head. Costa had never returned much to any cinema since those days. There had always seemed something more important to occupy his time: family and the slow loss of his parents; work and ambition; and, for comfort, the dark and enticing galleries and churches of his native city, which seemed to speak more directly to him as he grew older. Now he wondered what he'd missed. The movie playing was one he'd seen as a child, a popular Disney title prompting the familiar emotions those films always brought out in him: laughter and tears, fear and hope. Sometimes he'd left this place scarcely able to speak for the rawness of the feelings that the movie had, with cunning and ruthlessness, elicited from his young and fearful mind. Was this one reason why he had stayed away from the cinema for so long? That he feared the way it sought out the awkward, hidden corners of one's life, good and bad, then magnified them in a way that could never be shirked, never be avoided? Some fear that he might be haunted by what he saw?

He had been a widower for six months, before the age of thirty, and the feelings of desolation and emptiness continued to reverberate in the distant corners of his consciousness.
The world moved on.
So many had said that, and in a way they'd been right. He had allowed work to consume him, because there was nothing else. There, Leo Falcone had been subtly kind in his own way, guiding Costa away from the difficult cases, and any involving violence and murder, towards more agreeable duties, those that embraced culture and the arts, milieux in which Costa felt comfortable and, occasionally, alive. This was why, on a hot July day, he was in the pleasant park of the Villa Borghese, not far from three hundred or more men and women assembled from all over the world for a historic premiere that would mark the revival of the career of one of Italy's most distinguished and reclusive directors.

Costa had never seen a movie by Roberto Tonti until that afternoon, when, as a reward for their patient duties arranging property security for the exhibition associated with the production, the police and Carabinieri had been granted a private screening. He was still unclear exactly what he felt about the work of a man who was something of an enigmatic legend in his native country, though he had lived in America for many, many years. The movie was… undoubtedly impressive, though very long and extremely noisy. Costa found it difficult to recognise much in the way of humanity in all its evident and very impressive spectacle. His memories of studying Dante's
Divina Commedia
in school told him the lengthy poem was a discourse on many things, among them the nature of human and divine love, an argument that seemed absent from the film he had sat through. Standing outside the little children's cinema, it seemed to Costa that the Disney title it was now showing contained more of Dante's original message than Tonti's farrago of visual effects and overblown drama.

But he was there out of duty. The Carabinieri had been assigned to protect the famous actors involved in the year-long production at Cinecittà. The state police had been given a more mundane responsibility, that of safeguarding the historic objects assembled for an accompanying exhibition in the building next to the Casa del Cinema: documents and letters, photographs and an extensive exhibition of original paintings depicting the civil war between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs which prompted Dante's flight from Florence and brought about the perpetual exile in which he wrote his most famous work.

There was a photograph of the poet's grave and the verse of his friend Bernardo Canaccio that included the line…

Parvi Florentia mater amoris.

Florence, mother of little love, a sharp reminder of how Dante had been abandoned by his native city. There was a picture, too, of the tomb the Florentines had built for him in 1829, out of a tardy sense of guilt. The organisers' notes failed to disclose the truth of the matter, however: that his body remained in Ravenna. The ornate sepulchre in the Basilica di Santa Croce, built to honour the most exalted of poets, was empty. The poet remained an exile still, almost seven hundred years after his death.

The most famous Florentine object was, however, genuine. Hidden on a podium behind a rich blue curtain, due to be unveiled by the actor playing Dante before the premiere that evening, sat a small wooden case on a plinth. Inside, carefully posed against scarlet velvet, was the death mask of Dante Alighieri, cast in 1321 shortly after his last breath. That morning, Costa had found himself staring at these ancient features for so long that Gianni Peroni had walked over and nudged him back to life with the demand for a coffee and something to eat. The image still refused to quit his head: the ascetic face of a fifty-six-year-old man, a little gaunt, with sharp cheekbones, a prominent nose, and a mouth pinched tight with such deliberation that this mask, now grey and stained with age, seemed to emphasise
I will speak no more.

Costa was uneasy about such a treasure being associated with the Hollywood spectacle that had invaded this quiet, beautiful hillside park in Rome. There had been a concerted and occasionally vitriolic campaign against the project in the literary circles of Rome and beyond. Rumours of sabotage and mysterious accidents on the film set had appeared regularly in the papers. The chatter in some of the gutter press suggested the production was “cursed” because of its impudent and disrespectful pillaging of Dante's work, an idea that had a certain appeal to the superstitious nature of many Italians. The response of Roberto Tonti had been to rush to the TV cameras denying furiously that his return to the screen was anything but an art movie produced entirely in the exalted spirit of the original.

The more sophisticated newspapers detected the hand of a clever PR campaign in all this, something the production's publicity director, Simon Harvey, had vigorously denied. Costa had watched the last press conference only the day before and come to the conclusion that he would never quite understand the movie industry. Simon Harvey was the last man he expected to be in charge of a production costing around a hundred and fifty million dollars, a good third over budget. Amiable, engaging, with a bouncing head of fair curly hair, Harvey appeared more like a perpetual fan than someone capable of dealing with the ravenous hordes of the world media. But Costa had seen him in private moments, too, when the PR director seemed calm and quick-thinking, though prone to brief explosions of anger.

The people Costa had met and worked with over the previous few weeks were, for the most part, charming, hardworking, and dedicated, but also, above all, obsessive. Nothing much mattered for them except the job in hand,
Inferno.
A war could have started, a bomb might have exploded in the centre of Rome. They would never have noticed. The world flickering on the screen was theirs. Nothing else existed.

Nic Costa rather envied them.

A
N HOUR AFTER THEY HAD WALKED OUT FROM the private showing, blinking into the summer sun, Gianni Peroni's outrage had still not lessened. The big cop stood next to Leo Falcone and Teresa Lupo, elaborating on a heartfelt rant about the injustice of it all. The world. Life. The job. The fact they were guarding ancient wooden boxes and old letters when they ought to be out there doing what they were paid for.

More than anything, though, it was the movie that got to him. Teresa had, with her customary guile, wangled a free ticket to the event, though she had nothing to do with the security operation the state police had in place. Early in their relationship, Peroni had realised the cinema was one of Teresa's few pet obsessions outside work. Normally he managed to pretend an interest he failed to share. Today, that was impossible.

“Roberto Tonti is a genius, Gianni,” she declared. “A strange genius, but a genius all the same.”

“Please. I'm still half deaf after all that racket. I've got pictures running round my head I'd really rather not have there. And you're telling me this is
art?”

“All true art is difficult,” said a young, confident male voice from behind them. They turned to see a man of about thirty in the full dress uniform of a mounted Carabinieri officer, complete with flowing cloak, shiny black boots, and a sword at his waist. “The harder it is to peel an orange, the better it will taste.”

“I don't believe we've met,” Leo Falcone replied, and extended a hand which was grasped with alacrity. The Carabiniere had materialised unbidden and in silence, presumably fleeing the noisy and, it seemed to Peroni, increasingly ill-tempered scrum by the cinema. The officer was tall, good-looking in a theatrical, too-tanned way, with rather greasy hair that looked as if it might have seen pomade. The Carabinieri often seemed a little vain, the old cop thought, then cursed himself for such a stupid generalisation.

“Bodoni,” the man announced, before turning to Teresa and Peroni to shake their hands, too. “Please. Let me fetch you another drink. There is
prosecco.
Is this a problem on duty? I think not. It is like water. Also I have a horse, not a car. He can lead me home if necessary.”

“No beer?” Peroni grumbled.

“I doubt it.” The officer shook his head sadly. “Let me fetch something and then we may talk a little more. There is no work to be done here, surely. Besides…” He stood up very straight, inordinately proud of himself. “…my university degree was in Dante. All that education shall be of use at last.”

He departed towards the outdoor bar, leaving Peroni speechless, mouth flapping like a goldfish.

“I love the Carabinieri,” Teresa observed, just to provoke the two men. “They dress so beautifully. Such delicate manners. They fetch you drinks when you want one. They know Dante.
And
he's got one of those lovely horses somewhere, too.”

Falcone stiffened. The inspector was in his best evening suit, something grey, probably from Armani as usual. After the screening, Teresa had elbowed Peroni and pointed out that the old fox had been speaking for quite a long time to a very elegant woman from the San Francisco Police Department. This entire exhibition would move on to America once the show at the Villa Borghese was over. The Californians had a team working on liaison to make sure every last precious historical item stayed safe and intact throughout. Teresa had added—her powers of intelligence-gathering never ceased to amaze him—that Leo's on-off relationship with Raffaella Arcangelo was now going through an extended off phase, perhaps a permanent one. A replacement girlfriend seemed to be on the old inspector's mind.

“I studied Dante at college for a while,” Falcone noted. “And Petrarch.”

“I read Batman, when I wasn't rolling around in the gutter with drunks and thieves,” Peroni retorted. “But then, I always did prefer the quiet intellectual life.”

Teresa planted a kiss on his damaged cheek, which felt good.

“Well said,” she announced before beaming at the newly returned Carabiniere, who now held four flutes of sparkling wine in his long, well-manicured hands.

“As a rendition of
La Divina Commedia
,” Bodoni began, “I find the film admirable. Tonti follows Dante's structure to the tee. Remember…”

The man had a professorial, slightly histrionic manner and a curious accent, one that almost sounded foreign. The Carabinieri had a habit of talking down to people. Peroni gritted his teeth, tried to ignore Teresa's infuriatingly dazzling smile, and listened.

“… this is an analogy for the passage of life itself, from cradle to grave and beyond, written in the first example we have
of terza
rima.
A three-line stanza using the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, et
cetera.
, et
cetera.”

Peroni downed half his glass in one gulp. “I got that much from the part where the horse-snake-dragon thing chomped someone to pieces.”

Bodoni nodded. “Good. It's in the numbers that the secret lies, and in particular the number nine. Nine was, of course, regarded as the ‘angelic' integer, since its sole root is three, representing the Trinity, which itself bears the sole root one, representing the Divine Being Himself, the Alpha and the Omega of everything.”

“Do you ever get to arrest people? Or does the horse do it?” Peroni demanded, aware that Teresa was kicking him in the shin.

Bodoni blinked, clearly puzzled, then continued. “Nine meant everything to Dante. It appears in the context of his beloved Beatrice throughout. Nine are the spheres of Heaven. Correspondingly—since symmetry is also fundamental—”

“Nine are the circles of Hell,” Peroni interrupted. “See? I was listening. Worse than that, I was watching.” He scowled at the glass and tipped it sideways to empty the rest of the warm, flat liquid on the concrete pavement outside the Casa del Cinema. It didn't take a genius to understand that last part. The three-hour movie was divided into nine component segments, each lasting twenty minutes and prefaced with a title announcing its content, a string of salacious and suggestive headings—”The Wanton,” “The Gluttonous,” “The Violent”—that served as insufficient warning for the grisly scene to come. “It still looked like a bad horror movie to me.
Very
bad.”

“As it was meant to,” Teresa suggested. “That's Roberto Tonti's background. You remember those films from the 1970s?”

“Anathema. Mania. Dementia
,” Bodoni concurred.

“Dyspepsia? Nausea…?”
Peroni asked. “Has he made those yet? Or does the rubbish we just saw have an alternative title? All that…blood and noise.”

Bodoni mumbled something unintelligible. Peroni wondered if he'd hit home.

It was Teresa who answered. “Blood and noise and death are central to art, Gianni,” she insisted. “They remind us it's impossible to savour the sweetness of life without being reminded of the proximity, and the certainty, of death. That's at the heart of
gialli.
It's why I love them. Some of them anyway.”

Peroni hated that word.
Gialli. The yellows.
To begin with, the term had simply referred to the cheap crime thrillers that had come out after the war in plain primrose jackets. Usually they were detective stories and private-eye tales, often imported from America. Later the term had spread to the movies, into a series of lurid and often extraordinarily violent films that had begun to appear from the sixties on. Gory, strange, supernatural tales through which Tonti had risen to prominence. Peroni knew enough of that kind of work to understand it would never be to his own taste. It was all too extreme and, to his mind, needless.

“I hardly think anyone in our line of work needs reminding of a lesson like that,” he complained, finding his thoughts shifting to Nic, poor Nic, still lost, still wandering listless and without any inner direction two seasons after the murder of his wife.

“We all do, Gianni,” Teresa responded, “because we all, in the end, forget.” She took his arm, a glint in her pale, smart eyes telling him she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Teresa's hand felt warm in his. He squeezed it and said, very seriously, “Give me
Bambi
any time.” He and Falcone had ambled to the children's cinema earlier and seen the poster there, then Peroni had mentioned it to Nic in passing, and had noted how interested he'd seemed.

“There's a death in
Bambi
,” Teresa pointed out. “Without it there'd be no story.”

He did remember, and it was important. His own daughter had been in tears in the darkness when they went to see that movie, unable to see that her father was in much the same state.

“This is an interesting work also,” the Carabinieri officer, Bodoni, interjected. The man was, it seemed to Peroni, something of a movie bore, perhaps an understandable attribute for a person who spent his working day indolently riding the pleasant green spaces of the Villa Borghese park. The state police had officers in the vicinity, too, since it was unthinkable they should not venture where the Carabinieri went. A few were mounted, though rather less ostentatiously, while others patrolled the narrow lanes in a couple of tiny Smart cars specially selected for the job. It was all show, a duty Peroni would never, in a million years, countenance. Nothing ever happened up here on the hill overlooking the city, with views all the way to the distant dome of St. Peter's and beyond. This wasn't a job for a real cop. It was simply ceremonial window dressing for the tourists and the city authorities.

“You can go and watch it now if you like,” Falcone said, looking as if he were tiring of the man's presence, too. “It's showing in the little children's cinema. We saw the poster when we were doing the rounds.”

“So did Maggie Flavier,” Teresa added. “Charming woman, for a star, and a perfect Beatrice, too. Beautiful yet distant, unreal somehow. I spoke to her and she didn't look down her nose at me like the rest of them. She said she was going to try and sneak in there. Anything to get away from this nonsense. Apparently there's some hiccup in tonight's event. Allan Prime has gone missing. They don't know who's going to open the exhibition. The mayor's here. A couple of ministers. Half the glitterati in Rome. And they still can't decide who's going to raise the curtain.”

“That's show business,” Falcone agreed with a sage nod of his bald, aquiline head, and a quick stroke of his silver goatee.

“That's
overtime
,” Peroni corrected. “That's…”

He stopped. There was the most extraordinary expression on Bodoni's very tanned and artificially handsome face. It was one of utter shock and concern, as if he'd just heard the most terrible news.

“What did you say?” the officer asked.

“There's some argument going on about the ceremony,” Teresa explained. “Allan Prime, the actor who's supposed to give the opening speech, hasn't turned up. They don't know who'll take his place. The last I heard, it was going to be Tonti himself.”

“No, no…” he responded anxiously. “About Signora Flavier. She has left the event?”

“Only to go to the children's cinema,” Falcone replied a little testily. “It's still within the restricted area. As far as I'm aware. Personal security is the responsibility of the Carabinieri, isn't it?”

“We just get to guard
things
,” Peroni grumbled.

But it was useless. The Carabinieri official had departed, in a distinct hurry, glittering sword slapping at his thigh.