Peroni laughed.
“I’m not sure it’s a possibility I can ignore,” Falcone went on, then pointed a commanding finger at Costa.
“Your English is good.” He peered at Peroni. “What about yours?”
“Mine? Mine?” the big man replied, aghast. “I spent six months on assignment with the Metropolitan Police in London, eating nothing but pies and fried potato. In some place called …” He thought about this. “The Elephant and Castle.”
“A bar?” Teresa asked.
“No,” he replied, outraged. “A place.”
“How long ago?” Falcone demanded.
Peroni shrugged. “Fifteen, twenty years … They were first-class police officers. And also good …” He searched for the word. “… blokes.”
“Your English, Gianni,” Teresa wanted to know. “How is it?”
Peroni drew himself up and looked officious.
“Ecco!” he declared, stabbing a finger straight into Costa’s face. With his scarred and beaten-up face, he suddenly seemed remarkably threatening. “Consider yourself well and truly nicked, sonny,” he roared in a thuggish London accent that Costa thought comprehensible — just.
The volume of this outburst caused the Carabinieri man newly returned with the coffees to tremble with shock and spill the hot liquid, cursing quietly under his breath.
“Works for me,” Costa murmured with an admiring nod.
“We fly out in two days,” Falcone announced. “I have reservations already. You must fly economy, I’m afraid. Budgetary restraints. Now go home and pack, both of you.”
Teresa danced a little dance, sang a short burst of “America” from West Side Story, and twirled around on her large feet with an unexpected grace.
Then she checked herself and prodded the inspector’s chest. “When you said ‘we’ …”
“Happily, the financial affairs of the forensic department are none of my business,” Falcone declared, and began walking off, turning only to add, “Since there is no death on our files, I doubt even you can persuade someone upstairs to foot the bill for that. Of course, if you have vacation owing and the money for a ticket …”
“I have to pay my own way?” she shrieked.
“Perhaps we can fit you in at the accommodation Catherine is arranging,” Falcone added, barely pausing. “The choice — and the expense — are both yours.”
Costa watched the two of them walk into the street bickering, both understanding neither would change his or her position, and that Teresa would be on that flight, even if she had to buy the ticket herself.
Maggie Flavier took a coffee from the silent Carabiniere’s hands and passed it over to him. “Will they find who did this?”
“They’ll try.” He didn’t want to pry. He knew he had to. “Was Allan Prime a friend of yours? A good friend?”
“No,” she answered with a shrug. “He was just a man I worked with. He tried his … charms, if you can call them that. Welcome to acting.” She stared at him and he knew: she had been crying, and was now allowing him to see, to understand. “It’s a solitary business. Being other people. The really odd part is you get to be alone in the presence of millions.”
“I can imagine,” he said.
She looked at him with a sharp, engaged interest that made him feel deeply uneasy.
“Can you?” she asked.
PART 3
1
Nine days later they found themselves surrounded by a sea of storage boxes fighting for space inside a gigantic tent by the lake in front of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Home had become a small, two-storey rented house a short walk away. It was in the oddly named district of Cow Hollow, on a quiet corner on Greenwich Street, just a few blocks away from the police station of which Catherine Bianchi was captain, head of a dwindling team, slowly running down for the unit’s eventual closure at the end of the month.
Hundreds of chests and cases had been shipped by air from Italy over the preceding week. Item after item was being patiently lined up on serried lines of tables under the scrutiny of U.S. police, private security guards, and Leo Falcone, who was clearly torn between a duty he found tedious and a desire to impress the amiable but apparently unyielding Captain Bianchi.
There was, in Peroni’s words, an awful lot of stuff to unpack. Paintings, sketches, cartoons, letters, manuscripts, reviews, personal artefacts, mostly genuine, many of considerable value. Costa was, by now, used to the painstaking cycle of work that went into assembling any moving exhibition. He had worked several in his career. Each was different. This, set in a different country, to be housed in tents during the day, guarded at night in secure warehouses nearby, was more unusual than most.
“I’ll say one thing for you lot,” Teresa declared, watching Peroni hover over a set of eighteenth-century Florentine ceramics being unpacked by a pretty young woman from the museum in Milan. “You certainly know how to treat a woman. I blew almost two thousand euros getting myself here. And what happens when I arrive? You spend days unpacking all this junk at the speed of a maiden aunt. And as for him …” She nodded at Peroni, who was still, in spite of the weather, dressed in thin summer slacks and a polo shirt, though the temperature was distinctly nippy, even in the tent. “There ought to be a law against some people being allowed out of the country.”
“Your liberal tendencies are slipping.”
“I’m bored, Nic. And this is a very long way to come for that.”
She had a point. Gianluca Quattrocchi had swiftly seized control of all the key aspects of the investigation into Allan Prime’s murder, sharing what information he had only with the senior San Francisco Police Department homicide team that had been brought into the case. The local force had a direct interest: Prime had owned a home in the city, a palatial house in Pacific Heights, part of a small community of Hollywood professionals who preferred the bohemian atmosphere of northern California to the frenetic commercialism of Los Angeles. Maggie Flavier was a long-term resident, too, with an apartment in Nob Hill. Roberto Tonti lived in a grand white-painted mansion in the Marina, opposite the Palace of Fine Arts, where his film would now receive its world premiere. Inferno, it seemed, was a local, almost family, affair.
Falcone and his team had become outsiders in a crime which, in some ways, they had witnessed. Briefly interviewed by Quattrocchi’s surly plainclothes Carabinieri officers, they’d been left to take responsibility for the tasks they had originally been handed in Rome. This was strictly confined to ensuring the security of the remaining historic items for the Dante exhibition.
Costa was determined not to allow this to get under his skin. This was his first visit to America. San Francisco was a city of delights. The mundane work they had been left by Quattrocchi’s team was both straightforward and easily managed. Not that any of them felt entirely relaxed about the coming round of public events.
“You bore too easily,” he told Teresa. “There are at least ten items in this exhibition equivalent in value to that missing death mask. If we lose one more, Leo could be looking for another job.”
The inspector was with Catherine Bianchi again, finger on chin, listening to her as if she were the only person in the world.
“Try telling him that. Leo’s mind is elsewhere, not that it’s doing him any good. The man needs a case. A real one, not babysitting antiques. There’s a murder investigation here. It should be ours. Not that idiot Quattrocchi’s.”