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 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.
7
Across town, in the control van maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi had positioned outside the Casa del Cinema, there was excitement and amusement.
Quattrocchi put down the mike and, with the same coded instruction to Morello that he had used earlier, ordered an end to the eavesdropping. Then he closed his eyes and pictured the layout of his native city, the place where he’d grown up, where he felt he knew every brick and alley, every corner and battered statue. Falcone and his team were in the one-way streets of the Via Giulia, trapped in the sixteenth-century warren that had once been created as a wealthy suburb for the Vatican across the river, a little way along from Trastevere itself.
Quattrocchi had ordered officers and cars to all of the key crossings in the centre of the city, a trick he had developed and perfected in the past. The Tiber would once more be his ally.
“Close the Mazzini,” he ordered. “And the Vittorio Emanuele. There will be only one easy way left to the Via della Lungara then. We go south to the Garibaldi. Falcone will never reach there. Not till sometime tomorrow.”
This was a Carabinieri case and it would stay that way.
8
It was the smallest camera Allan Prime had ever worked with. The device hung in front of his face, dangling from a flickering light in the ceiling, a wire trailing off somewhere to the computer he’d seen on the way in. Prime never did understand technology. It was tedious, even now. Nothing had ever really mattered except the monocular glass eye that watched him, never blinking, never ceasing to pay attention. In his head it had always been there. Even in the dim, dark, noisome movie theatres of Manhattan when he was a sweaty teenager dreaming of stardom, determined to achieve it, whatever the cost.
Whatever the cost.
The idea provided some amusement in his present odd predicament. He wanted to laugh even as sobs came rippling up from his body, physical reactions, tricks of the trade, not conscious, personal responses. He was able to divide the self from acting. That was always the first deceit. And this was acting. He kept reminding himself of that. This whole exercise, once complete, would be an end to things. A wiping out of all debts, financial and otherwise, with a considerable prize in private, too.
It hadn’t been the decent lunch and a little afternoon delight he’d been hoping for following Miss Valdes’s work on the clay mask. She had turned somewhat coy, to his surprise. Long term, though, maybe it was for the better. Hide away for the day. Miss the premiere, stoke up some publicity. Then let her put him in some weird, sadomasochistic rig set up in a tiny museum that had been closed for renovation. The camera came out. A fake kidnapping, an act of terror played out in front of millions. A world-famous star in a one-man show that would make headlines everywhere. Hell, she sold it so well Allan Prime thought for a moment he would have paid to be in the thing. This one stupid prank would set up queues outside movie theatres everywhere, sell millions of pieces of merchandise, bring a flood tide of money into the coffers of Inferno, a cut of which, after producer fees, would come his way. And the rest …
The performance was what really mattered, though. It was always about the performance.
So he had allowed himself to be strapped into the black metal frame, worked with her to perfect the focus on the tiny, bug-eyed camera, and sat patiently while she faked the spear thrust into his skull — plastic point, stage blood — that was used for the opening sequence.
He’d done this kind of thing a million times and, given the swift, smooth professional way she went about her business, he assumed Carlotta Valdes — or whoever she really was — had too.
After that, she actually called “Action” and he was on, moaning and writhing for the tiny white light that sat blinking on top of the camera, unwilling, and unable, to focus on anything but the tiny lens for the next sixty minutes, an hour which, Carlotta promised, would make him the biggest, most talked-about star in the world.
And then the cops would come. Rescue him. One more piece of deceit, of acting, was required to explain his abduction. This was, Prime thought, a piece of cake. He was used to faking it for millions. By comparison, fooling a few dumb Italian cops would be child’s play.