Costa was uneasy about such a treasure being associated with the Hollywood spectacle that had invaded this quiet, beautiful hillside park in Rome. There had been a concerted and occasionally vitriolic campaign against the project in the literary circles of Rome and beyond. Rumours of sabotage and mysterious accidents on the film set had appeared regularly in the papers. The chatter in some of the gutter press suggested the production was “cursed” because of its impudent and disrespectful pillaging of Dante’s work, an idea that had a certain appeal to the superstitious nature of many Italians. The response of Roberto Tonti had been to rush to the TV cameras denying furiously that his return to the screen was anything but an art movie produced entirely in the exalted spirit of the original.
The more sophisticated newspapers detected the hand of a clever PR campaign in all this, something the production’s publicity director, Simon Harvey, had vigorously denied. Costa had watched the last press conference only the day before and come to the conclusion that he would never quite understand the movie industry. Simon Harvey was the last man he expected to be in charge of a production costing around a hundred and fifty million dollars, a good third over budget. Amiable, engaging, with a bouncing head of fair curly hair, Harvey appeared more like a perpetual fan than someone capable of dealing with the ravenous hordes of the world media. But Costa had seen him in private moments, too, when the PR director seemed calm and quick-thinking, though prone to brief explosions of anger.
The people Costa had met and worked with over the previous few weeks were, for the most part, charming, hardworking, and dedicated, but also, above all, obsessive. Nothing much mattered for them except the job in hand, Inferno. A war could have started, a bomb might have exploded in the centre of Rome. They would never have noticed. The world flickering on the screen was theirs. Nothing else existed.
Nic Costa rather envied them.
3
An hour after they had walked out from the private showing, blinking into the summer sun, Gianni Peroni’s outrage had still not lessened. The big cop stood next to Leo Falcone and Teresa Lupo, elaborating on a heartfelt rant about the injustice of it all. The world. Life. The job. The fact they were guarding ancient wooden boxes and old letters when they ought to be out there doing what they were paid for.
More than anything, though, it was the movie that got to him. Teresa had, with her customary guile, wangled a free ticket to the event, though she had nothing to do with the security operation the state police had in place. Early in their relationship, Peroni had realised the cinema was one of Teresa’s few pet obsessions outside work. Normally he managed to pretend an interest he failed to share. Today, that was impossible.
“Roberto Tonti is a genius, Gianni,” she declared. “A strange genius, but a genius all the same.”
“Please. I’m still half deaf after all that racket. I’ve got pictures running round my head I’d really rather not have there. And you’re telling me this is art?”
“All true art is difficult,” said a young, confident male voice from behind them. They turned to see a man of about thirty in the full dress uniform of a mounted Carabinieri officer, complete with flowing cloak, shiny black boots, and a sword at his waist. “The harder it is to peel an orange, the better it will taste.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Leo Falcone replied, and extended a hand which was grasped with alacrity. The Carabiniere had materialised unbidden and in silence, presumably fleeing the noisy and, it seemed to Peroni, increasingly ill-tempered scrum by the cinema. The officer was tall, good-looking in a theatrical, too-tanned way, with rather greasy hair that looked as if it might have seen pomade. The Carabinieri often seemed a little vain, the old cop thought, then cursed himself for such a stupid generalisation.
“Bodoni,” the man announced, before turning to Teresa and Peroni to shake their hands, too. “Please. Let me fetch you another drink. There is prosecco. Is this a problem on duty? I think not. It is like water. Also I have a horse, not a car. He can lead me home if necessary.”
“No beer?” Peroni grumbled.
“I doubt it.” The officer shook his head sadly. “Let me fetch something and then we may talk a little more. There is no work to be done here, surely. Besides …” He stood up very straight, inordinately proud of himself. “… my university degree was in Dante. All that education shall be of use at last.”
He departed towards the outdoor bar, leaving Peroni speechless, mouth flapping like a goldfish.
“I love the Carabinieri,” Teresa observed, just to provoke the two men. “They dress so beautifully. Such delicate manners. They fetch you drinks when you want one. They know Dante. And he’s got one of those lovely horses somewhere, too.”
Falcone stiffened. The inspector was in his best evening suit, something grey, probably from Armani as usual. After the screening, Teresa had elbowed Peroni and pointed out that the old fox had been speaking for quite a long time to a very elegant woman from the San Francisco Police Department. This entire exhibition would move on to America once the show at the Villa Borghese was over. The Californians had a team working on liaison to make sure every last precious historical item stayed safe and intact throughout. Teresa had added — her powers of intelligence-gathering never ceased to amaze him — that Leo’s on-off relationship with Raffaella Arcangelo was now going through an extended off phase, perhaps a permanent one. A replacement girlfriend seemed to be on the old inspector’s mind.
“I studied Dante at college for a while,” Falcone noted. “And Petrarch.”
“I read Batman, when I wasn’t rolling around in the gutter with drunks and thieves,” Peroni retorted. “But then, I always did prefer the quiet intellectual life.”
Teresa planted a kiss on his damaged cheek, which felt good.
“Well said,” she announced before beaming at the newly returned Carabiniere, who now held four flutes of sparkling wine in his long, well-manicured hands.
“As a rendition of La Divina Commedia,” Bodoni began, “I find the film admirable. Tonti follows Dante’s structure to the tee. Remember …”
The man had a professorial, slightly histrionic manner and a curious accent, one that almost sounded foreign. The Carabinieri had a habit of talking down to people. Peroni gritted his teeth, tried to ignore Teresa’s infuriatingly dazzling smile, and listened.
“… this is an analogy for the passage of life itself, from cradle to grave and beyond, written in the first example we have of terza rima. A three-line stanza using the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, et cetera, et cetera.”
Peroni downed half his glass in one gulp. “I got that much from the part where the horse-snake-dragon thing chomped someone to pieces.”
Bodoni nodded. “Good. It’s in the numbers that the secret lies, and in particular the number nine. Nine was, of course, regarded as the ‘angelic’ integer, since its sole root is three, representing the Trinity, which itself bears the sole root one, representing the Divine Being Himself, the Alpha and the Omega of everything.”
“Do you ever get to arrest people? Or does the horse do it?” Peroni demanded, aware that Teresa was kicking him in the shin.
Bodoni blinked, clearly puzzled, then continued. “Nine meant everything to Dante. It appears in the context of his beloved Beatrice throughout. Nine are the spheres of Heaven. Correspondingly — since symmetry is also fundamental—”