She reached over into the backseat and retrieved an odd-looking bouquet.
Pink roses set among blue violets, tied inside a star-shaped arrangement of white lace.
“That’s the strangest bouquet I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They look so … old-fashioned.”
Maggie shot him a pitying glance, then threw them on the rear seat.
“Flowers are flowers. Beautiful whatever … Why don’t men understand such a simple idea?”
He leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes, enjoying the cool breeze, with the tang of the nearby ocean, and the peace of the Presidio.
“It’s genetic,” Costa murmured over the burbling lowing of the engine. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. To see a secret. Where this all comes from. Where I come from.”
He recalled the file he’d examined, guiltily, in the Questura before catching the plane.
“I thought you came from Paris?”
“When I was a child. But when I got older, became …” A coldness entered her voice. “… saleable, my mother moved me here. Not L.A. That was too … nouveau riche for her. We spent a year living off fast food and flying down to studios for auditions. The week I finally got a part was the week they told her she had a spot on her lungs that would kill her in a couple of years. All that smoking while she sat outside auditions. Was it worth it?”
“What was the part?”
“I doubt it reached Italy. Big here for a while, though. It was a corny TV comedy, L’Amour L.A. Sort of The Partridge Family but with foreigners. I was Françoise …” She glanced upwards, as if trying to recall something that was once important. “… the rebellious teenage daughter of a handsome French widower pursuing an on-off relationship with an ordinary Californian divorced mom. Ran for three seasons. Made me. Killed everyone else. My catchphrase — and I had to deliver this in a really stupid French accent — was, ‘But ’oo can blame Françoise?’ Usually uttered after I’d done something really bad. Ring a bell?”
“I think you’re right. It didn’t reach Italy.”
She smiled at the view. It was hard for him to believe they could have moved from the city so quickly. Everything was so lush and quiet and beautiful.
“Why did I come the scenic route, not the easy one?” She sighed, slapping her forehead. “Oh, right.” She pointed at him. “Because of you.”
“San Francisco …” he said, returning to the subject.
“This is where I come from,” she said, serious all of a sudden. “The real me. Not the child. I grew up juggling movie parts, smiling for the camera, even learning to act sometimes. Watching my mother waste away to nothing. I was born here. I guess I’ll die here, too. Not that I like that idea. I don’t want to die. Not ever.”
She pumped the pedal so that the spirited engine dropped a gear and the car lurched forward into the darkness of a eucalyptus glade.
Their route through the Presidio and beyond ran up and down, steadily climbing along empty narrow roads that belonged in deep, isolated countryside, not on the edge of a great city. Costa found himself trying to crook his neck so that he could see in the mirror, glancing back through the Jaguar’s rear window from time to time.
They were not alone. In the distance, briefly glimpsed as the ancient Jaguar wound its way through the forest of the Presidio, then on into Lincoln Park, past solitary golfers swinging clubs in the golden sun of late afternoon, Costa could see the same car following them, a yellow sedan, maintaining a constant distance, dogging their tracks.
7
While Teresa Lupo tried to watch her new Hitchcock DVD, Falcone and Peroni bickered in the kitchen over whose turn it was to provide dinner.
“I cooked yesterday, Leo,” Peroni complained. “And the day before.”
Falcone remained adamant. “I told you. If you want me to get food, I will. But in the way I choose.”
“I am not eating that fried chicken crap again! How fat do you want me to get?”
“I like the fried chicken. It’s different. You can’t get it like that in Rome. Or we could have pizza. Or Thai. Or Chinese. Or …”
“Just cook some pasta, put the damned sauce on it, then grate some cheese,” the big man yelled. “Have you never, ever cooked for yourself before?”
“No …” The inspector sounded dejected. “What’s the point if there’s only one of you?”
“There are three of us now. And I happen to be as hungry as a horse.”
This was impossible. Teresa turned up the volume on the huge flat-screen TV and bellowed, “Shut up, the pair of you, and come and look at this.”
There must have been something in her voice, because for once it worked. Or perhaps they were just taking a break between rounds. The two men came and sat meekly on either side of her on the deep, soft sofa. Teresa worked the buttons, keying to the scenes so conveniently tagged on the DVD.
“Here’s Carlotta Valdes,” she said, and showed them the scene in the graveyard of Mission Dolores. “Or rather the headstone.”
“Where is this?” Falcone asked. “Mexico?”
“The original location is about a fifteen-minute cab drive over there.” She pointed back towards the city. “Mission Dolores was one of the Spanish missionary outposts set up in the eighteenth century when California was being colonised. It’s still there.”
The two men glanced at each other, their faces full of puzzlement and surprise.
“Rome doesn’t hold the copyright on history,” she reminded them. “Other people have their own bits, too.”
“So Carlotta Valdes is buried in some old missionary cemetery in the middle of San Francisco?” Peroni asked.
“No. It’s not the middle exactly. And she was never buried there. It was a fake grave and headstone they made for the movie.”
“What was she like?” he added. “The character, I mean?”
“Impossible to say. All you see is a painting of her, and a brief glimpse of someone in a dream. Hitchcock had the canvas made. Like he did the headstone. Which now, by the way …” She waved towards the window. “… is sitting in the garden behind some crazy little cinema three blocks or so over there.”
Falcone looked uninterested. “People choose false names in all sorts of ways. Newspapers. Phone books. Perhaps the woman was a movie fan. It hardly proves anything.”
“Movie obsessive,” Teresa insisted.
“Movie obsessive. So what?”
“So it’s interesting! Quattrocchi thinks this is all to do with Dante. You think it’s about the mob getting restless over their investment in Inferno. What if you’re both wrong? What if …?” She stopped. She knew it sounded ridiculous. Then she said, “What if it’s to do with an old movie somehow?”
They both tried not to laugh.
“Teresa,” Falcone replied, placing a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, “it’s no more likely someone would kill over a piece of cinema than they would over a piece of poetry. Adele Neri told us all we needed to know. There’s black money, from the Sicilians or someone, in this thing, and they’re determined they’ll get it back, with interest, one way or another. Or leave a reminder that they don’t like being squeezed.”
She stared at him. Then she said, in a deliberately censorious tone, “You are becoming shockingly literal in your dotage, Leo. Keep quiet, watch and listen. Please.”