The near twin leaned forward on one elbow. “We’ve never had different environments. We were born around the corner on Beach Street sixty-one years ago. We’ve lived there all our lives. Before we retired …” He nodded across the road and added, though this was no surprise, “… we worked there, keeping every engine that came through that place spicker and spanner than any of those indolent young bloods know how to today.”
Two large, identical hairy hands, one right, one left, extended her way, and their joint, booming voices announced in unison, “Hankenfrank.”
Teresa blinked and asked, “Do you run to first names?”
They sighed. Then the one with left-turning curls said, “I’m Hank Boynton.” And the other added, “In case you hadn’t worked this out, I’m Frank.”
“Oh … Teresa Lupo.”
Their grips were warm and soft and, though mirrored, very much the same.
“When did you retire?” she asked. “From over there?”
“It’s been thirty-three weeks, two days and …” Frank looked at his watch. “A few hundred minutes. That poor damned engine hasn’t been properly cleaned since.”
“And so we pass the time,” Hank declared with a flourish of his arm. “We read. We think. We talk with intriguing and exotic strangers in cafés. About DNA and … epigenetic modification.”
“Do you read the same books?” she asked out of curiosity.
They erupted in spontaneous, deafening laughter. When it had subsided and they’d wiped away the tears, still saying nothing, she persisted.
“Well?”
Hank flourished his hand and declared, “My specialty subjects are the history of this rich and wonderful city during and immediately after the gold rush in 1849—”
“He stole it all from Herbert Asbury,” Frank cut in. “Blood-and-guts nonsense …”
“—as well as the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, notably Hokusai, and, in literature, anything by or related to Sherlock Holmes.”
“Note the recurrent theme,” Frank suggested. “Lowbrow posing as high. My … things are bebop, Edgar Allan Poe, the Impressionists, and American film noir from the 1940s on. These are lists in summary, you understand. The full catalogue is much more horrendous, on both our parts. We won’t even breathe a word about philately.”
“As I’d expect,” she declared, pleased with herself. “You choose opposites.”
Hank gave her a humbling look and said, “Not really. It just gives us something different to talk about at night. There isn’t a smart explanation for everything, you know. Some things just are.”
“Good point. I forget that sometimes.”
“So what do you want to know?” Hank asked. “A little bloodcurdling local history? Where to go to hear music, not Muzak? Two crumpled old men’s advice on the last yuppie-free place to get a cold beer in the Marina?”
The question made her feel pathetic. She had no good answer. The ticket to San Francisco had cost a fortune. It was bought on a whim without a thought as to why she had to come. The four of them worked together as a team now, or at least they had since Nic had arrived. She hated feeling excluded.
“What I’d really like to know,” she murmured, half to herself, “is where I can find Carlotta Valdes.”
Hank and Frank looked at one another briefly. Then Frank tapped his forefinger on his watch and declared, “If you’ve got ten minutes …”
“… we can show you,” Hank added.
4
The location for the Inferno exhibition had proved to be a visual delight so unexpected that, when he first saw it, Costa felt he ought to rub his eyes to make sure it was real. The Palace of Fine Arts was a purpose-built semi-ruin set by an artificial lake with fountains and swans. It was set a short distance inland from the beachfront that led to Fort Mason, home to Lukatmi, on one side, and on the other, after a long and pleasant walk by the ocean, to the Golden Gate Bridge. The exhibition was slowly being assembled during the day in a series of peaked Arabic tents which had been erected around the central construction, a high, dome-roofed rotunda open to the elements. The tents stretched in a curving line through the trees along the lakefront to a group of Romanesque colonnades on the northern side, close to a children’s museum housed in a set of unremarkable low square blocks.
For days the area had been overrun with workmen, security guards, uniformed police officers, and members of the Inferno cast and crew inspecting the temporary theatre, in the largest tent of all, that would be used for the movie’s premiere. For Costa, the event had the feel of a travelling circus. The collection of rare objects — documents, letters, the manuscript from India, and, arranged in haste, an authentic replica of the original death mask — was arriving in San Francisco crate by crate. The mandate for Falcone’s team was clear and limited: monitor the security arrangements before the opening to ensure they were satisfactory. Then, when the exhibition became public after the premiere, to hand over all responsibility entirely to the Americans and return to Rome. No one mentioned the missing death mask of Dante. The assumption was that this had now entered the global black market for stolen art and was probably long gone.
Costa had soon grown tired of checking the security system set up by the American organisers. So he took the time to wander through the tents and the teams of individuals milling around delivery vans and crates, building the stage for the premiere, trying out lights and projection systems, playing with shiny and seemingly very expensive toys he could not begin to comprehend. He also, at Peroni’s bidding, spent some time with the publicist, Simon Harvey. The man’s purview appeared to run far beyond dealing with the media. Harvey had taken a keen interest in every aspect of the security arrangements, insisting that if another item went missing, or there was a second violent incident affecting the crew, it would be his job to deal with the fallout. It was Harvey’s opinion that the replacement death mask would prove one of the most popular items in the show, for its macabre connotations. The man had even suggested that what the public really wanted to see was the actual death mask of Allan Prime, now sitting in the Carabinieri’s labs in Rome.
Costa had listened to the American and said nothing. It seemed a cruel thing to think, let alone say. Yet he had to acknowledge that the idea contained some truth. Actors of the stature of Prime — and the beauty of Maggie Flavier — were no longer fully in control of their own lives, or deaths. In return for fame and wealth, they surrendered their identities to the masses, who would dissect, reshape, and play with them as they saw fit. Celebrity came at a terrible price, he felt, one that was made acceptable to those it affected only through their own ability to pretend they were unable to see its costs.
Costa was, however, sanguine about the security arrangements. The only way the original death mask could have been switched for the fake severed head of Prime was by someone on the inside, probably within the two hundred or more individuals who worked for the exhibition companies, the caterers, the crew, and the various arms of the production company: publicity, accounts, still and movie photographers, makeup artists, and a variety of hangers-on who appeared to fulfill no particular function at all. These people seemed even more numerous in San Francisco. But the items on show were to be heavily guarded and under constant CCTV surveillance.
It was difficult to see what more could be done. If some improvements were advisable, Costa felt sure that he would be the last person who could bring them about. An expensive private security company had been brought in to deal with the handling of the exhibits from the moment they arrived by truck, and to provide personal security for key members of cast and crew. Catherine Bianchi’s dwindling band of officers from the Greenwich Street Police Station was being sidelined, too. Only one, a sullen young man named Miller, with bright blond hair and a curt, sharp tongue, remained at the Palace, and he seemed to take little interest in proceedings. Like the Italians of the state police, the local cops were spectators, ghosts walking in the shadows of the men of the Carabinieri and Bryant Street.