“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.
4
Maresciallo 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. Needless 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 American, 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?”