The movie business was weird sometimes. It ran in uncertain directions, was diverted by fate and circumstance and, on occasion, pure luck, both good and bad. The debts were worth losing. So was the rape complaint still hanging over him from that weekend in Rimini three months before. What the dark suits behind Dino Bonetti surely promised — he assumed Carlotta came from them, though she never said — was a fresh start, a vast private payoff, and a mountain of free publicity and global sympathy that would make him bigger even than Inferno itself. Plus the fringe benefits only a few — Carlotta among them — understood.
The unseen clock tick-tocked once more. The device to his left moved another notch towards his face. It would stop, she said, when the rubber tip reached his cheek, before the supposedly razor-sharp blade bent beneath the pressure, revealing the legerdemain, exposing the lie. That couldn’t be long now. He felt he’d been trapped in the rig for hours. It was starting to become painful. He couldn’t wait for this scene to be over, for the cameras to die, and for her next trick: his astonishing, headline-grabbing rescue.
Prime was wondering how he could vary the act, too. Sixty minutes of writhing and yelling would be boring. He’d be marked, rated, critiqued on this performance, just as on every other.
So he stopped crying, made an effort to appear to be a man struggling to recover some inner resolve and strength. Then, trying to find some way round the awkward iron bar over his mouth, he began to bellow, as loudly as his lungs allowed.
“Carlotta,” he cried, not minding he was yelling out her name to millions, since it could only be a sham, like everything else. “CARLOTTA!”
There was no reply. None at all. Not a footstep, not a breath, not the slightest of responses. In some chilling, inexplicable way, Allan Prime came to understand at that moment that he was alone in the small, dark museum to which she had taken him in the early evening after eating ice cream together in a secluded corner of the Gianicolo.
And something else. He remembered where he’d heard her name before, and the recollection made his blood run cold.
Carlotta Valdes was a ghost from the past — vengeful, vicious.
The unseen clock must have ticked again somewhere. The invisible device to his left lurched another ratchet, ever closer. As it did so, it made a heavy, certain clunk, quite unlike that of a stage prop, which would have been cheap, throwaway stuff, its own soft, revealing sounds covered by the insertion of a Foley track dubbing menace and the hard clash of metal to lend a little verisimilitude to flimsy reality.
This is for real, Allan Prime realized.
Real as pain. Or blood. Life. Or death.
A warm, free flow of stinging liquid was spreading around his crotch. He stared at the bug-eyed camera and began to plead and scream for help, for release, with more conviction than he’d ever possessed in his life.
Somewhere at the back of his head he heard Roberto Tonti’s disembodied voice.
Stop acting. Start being.
It sounded as if the vicious old bastard was laughing.
9
Falcone screamed out of the open Lancia window, not at anyone in particular, but the world in general. They hadn’t moved more than fifty metres in the Via Giulia, and traffic was backing up in every side road around. Sirens blaring, lights flashing, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. These were medieval cobbled streets, made for pedestrians and horses and carriages. There was nowhere left for the civilian cars stranded in them to move to allow another vehicle past. They were trapped in a sea of overheating metal.
Costa called the control room and asked what was happening. He looked at Falcone.
“The Carabinieri have thrown up roadblocks on the bridges. They won’t even let pedestrians across.”
“I will crucify those stuck-up bastards for this—”
“They think it’s their case,” Costa pointed out. Then, before his superior exploded, he added, “We can get there across the footbridge. The Ponte Sisto. Go over, turn right, and find the Via della Lungara. It’s the long way round—”
“How long will it take?” Catherine Bianchi wanted to know.
But Costa was getting out of the car already, signalling to two of the younger men in the vehicle behind to come with him. “That depends how fast you can run.”
He began to backtrack along the Via Giulia, towards the shallow uphill slope that led to the Lungotevere and the old footbridge crossing, setting up a steady pace, aware he’d be well ahead of any of the men behind him. Since Emily had died, Costa had got back into running, spending long hours pounding the stones of the Appian Way near his home. It helped, a lot sometimes.
He was at full pace by the time he got to the bridge, pushing past the importunate beggars and their dogs, the hawkers with their bags and counterfeit DVDs. On the Trastevere side, he had to leap across the hoods of the cars which were so tightly and angrily backed up along the river they didn’t leave space for a pedestrian to get through. Costa ignored the howls of outraged drivers. He was sprinting through the Piazza Trilussa, turning in towards the Via della Lungara.
There were Carabinieri everywhere, but no barriers within the road itself yet. They were still getting into position, leaving some movement in the area to allow senior officers to decide their tactics.
Costa pulled out his police ID, held it high, and kept on running. The sight of him took them by surprise so much he managed to get through the gates of the Farnesina and into the beautiful, secluded garden before anyone stopped him.
Finally a large, gruff minion stuck out his arm and immediately launched into the customary litany of excuses that were trotted out, on both sides, when some conflict occurred in public.
“I don’t have time for this and nor do you,” Costa interrupted him. “Look at the card, see my rank, and tell your superior officer. I know the Farnesina. It’s got a history he needs to understand. If you don’t take me to him now, I will make damned sure afterwards he gets to understand you kept me away.” Costa pointed at the small, elegant villa that had been built five centuries before on the orders of some wealthy Roman noble as a salon for artists and gamblers and beautiful, occasionally dubious women. “There are things he needs to appreciate.”
“Get lost,” the idiot said, waving him away. “This is nothing to do with you.”
A large, ruddy-faced man in an immaculate uniform swept past. Costa was never good at Carabinieri ranks, but something in the officer’s face spoke of seniority.
“Sir, sir …”
He ran into the individual’s path, waving his police ID. The man looked at him as if this were an act of the utmost impertinence. Costa could see his own colleagues, who had followed him from the Via Giulia, being apprehended at the villa gates, along with a furious Catherine Bianchi.
“My name is Maresciallo Gianluca Quattrocchi. This crime scene is in our possession. Go away.”
“I know this building,” Costa insisted. “Do you?”
“When I wish the opinion of civilians, I will ask for it. Now stand aside …”
Two sets of strong arms pulled Costa away. Quattrocchi marched forward, flanked on either side by half a dozen uniformed officers. An elderly civilian was unlocking the doors, seemingly shaken by the fuss.
“It’s all about illusion,” Costa yelled. “Trompe-l’oeil. A trick of the eye. What you see is not what’s real!”
Just like the movies, he thought, as he watched the group of men stomp towards the villa’s elegant entrance. Under the harsh white floods, the building looked like a sketch from Piranesi scribbled into life with the crayons of a giant.