“Nine are the circles of Hell,” Peroni interrupted. “See? I was listening. Worse than that, I was watching.” He scowled at the glass and tipped it sideways to empty the rest of the warm, flat liquid on the concrete pavement outside the Casa del Cinema. It didn’t take a genius to understand that last part. The three-hour movie was divided into nine component segments, each lasting twenty minutes and prefaced with a title announcing its content, a string of salacious and suggestive headings—“The Wanton,” “The Gluttonous,” “The Violent”—that served as insufficient warning for the grisly scene to come. “It still looked like a bad horror movie to me. Very bad.”
“As it was meant to,” Teresa suggested. “That’s Roberto Tonti’s background. You remember those films from the 1970s?”
“Anathema. Mania. Dementia,” Bodoni concurred.
“Dyspepsia? Nausea …?” Peroni asked. “Has he made those yet? Or does the rubbish we just saw have an alternative title? All that … blood and noise.”
Bodoni mumbled something unintelligible. Peroni wondered if he’d hit home.
It was Teresa who answered. “Blood and noise and death are central to art, Gianni,” she insisted. “They remind us it’s impossible to savour the sweetness of life without being reminded of the proximity, and the certainty, of death. That’s at the heart of gialli. It’s why I love them. Some of them anyway.”
Peroni hated that word. Gialli. The yellows. To begin with, the term had simply referred to the cheap crime thrillers that had come out after the war in plain primrose jackets. Usually they were detective stories and private-eye tales, often imported from America. Later the term had spread to the movies, into a series of lurid and often extraordinarily violent films that had begun to appear from the sixties on. Gory, strange, supernatural tales through which Tonti had risen to prominence. Peroni knew enough of that kind of work to understand it would never be to his own taste. It was all too extreme and, to his mind, needless.
“I hardly think anyone in our line of work needs reminding of a lesson like that,” he complained, finding his thoughts shifting to Nic, poor Nic, still lost, still wandering listless and without any inner direction two seasons after the murder of his wife.
“We all do, Gianni,” Teresa responded, “because we all, in the end, forget.” She took his arm, a glint in her pale, smart eyes telling him she knew exactly what he was thinking.
Teresa’s hand felt warm in his. He squeezed it and said, very seriously, “Give me Bambi any time.” He and Falcone had ambled to the children’s cinema earlier and seen the poster there, then Peroni had mentioned it to Nic in passing, and had noted how interested he’d seemed.
“There’s a death in Bambi,” Teresa pointed out. “Without it there’d be no story.”
He did remember, and it was important. His own daughter had been in tears in the darkness when they went to see that movie, unable to see that her father was in much the same state.
“This is an interesting work also,” the Carabinieri officer, Bodoni, interjected. The man was, it seemed to Peroni, something of a movie bore, perhaps an understandable attribute for a person who spent his working day indolently riding the pleasant green spaces of the Villa Borghese park. The state police had officers in the vicinity, too, since it was unthinkable they should not venture where the Carabinieri went. A few were mounted, though rather less ostentatiously, while others patrolled the narrow lanes in a couple of tiny Smart cars specially selected for the job. It was all show, a duty Peroni would never, in a million years, countenance. Nothing ever happened up here on the hill overlooking the city, with views all the way to the distant dome of St. Peter’s and beyond. This wasn’t a job for a real cop. It was simply ceremonial window dressing for the tourists and the city authorities.
“You can go and watch it now if you like,” Falcone said, looking as if he were tiring of the man’s presence, too. “It’s showing in the little children’s cinema. We saw the poster when we were doing the rounds.”
“So did Maggie Flavier,” Teresa added. “Charming woman, for a star, and a perfect Beatrice, too. Beautiful yet distant, unreal somehow. I spoke to her and she didn’t look down her nose at me like the rest of them. She said she was going to try and sneak in there. Anything to get away from this nonsense. Apparently there’s some hiccup in tonight’s event. Allan Prime has gone missing. They don’t know who’s going to open the exhibition. The mayor’s here. A couple of ministers. Half the glitterati in Rome. And they still can’t decide who’s going to raise the curtain.”
“That’s show business,” Falcone agreed with a sage nod of his bald, aquiline head, and a quick stroke of his silver goatee.
“That’s overtime,” Peroni corrected. “That’s …”
He stopped. There was the most extraordinary expression on Bodoni’s very tanned and artificially handsome face. It was one of utter shock and concern, as if he’d just heard the most terrible news.
“What did you say?” the officer asked.
“There’s some argument going on about the ceremony,” Teresa explained. “Allan Prime, the actor who’s supposed to give the opening speech, hasn’t turned up. They don’t know who’ll take his place. The last I heard, it was going to be Tonti himself.”
“No, no …” he responded anxiously. “About Signora Flavier. She has left the event?”
“Only to go to the children’s cinema,” Falcone replied a little testily. “It’s still within the restricted area. As far as I’m aware. Personal security is the responsibility of the Carabinieri, isn’t it?”
“We just get to guard things,” Peroni grumbled.
But it was useless. The Carabinieri official had departed, in a distinct hurry, glittering sword slapping at his thigh.
4
Costa’s eyes stayed locked on the poster for Bambi, outside the Cinema dei Piccoli. An insane idea was growing in his head: perhaps there was an opportunity to spend a little time in the place itself, wedged in one of those uncomfortable tiny seats, away from everything. Before he could find the energy to thrust it aside, a soft female voice asked, in English, “Is this a queue for the movie?”
He turned and found himself looking at a woman of about his own age and height. She was gazing back at him with curious, very bright green eyes, and seemed both interested and a little nervous. Something about her was familiar, though he was unsure what. Her chestnut hair was fashioned in a Peter Pan cut designed, with considerable forethought, to appear quite carefree. She wore a long dark blue evening dress that was revealing and low at the front, with a pearl necklace around her slender throat. Her pale face was somewhat tomboyish, though striking. Costa found himself unable to stop looking at her, then, realising the rudeness of his prolonged stare, apologised immediately.
“No problem,” she replied, laughing. Everything about her seemed too perfect: the hair, the dress, her white, white teeth, the delicate makeup and lipstick applied so precisely. “I’m used to it by now.”
The woman had “movie business” written all over her, though it took him a moment to realise that.
She returned his stare, still laughing. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?”
He closed his eyes and felt very stupid. In his mind’s eye he could see her twenty feet tall on the screen in the Casa del Cinema, wearing a flowing medieval robe, her hair long and fair and lustrous, an ethereal figure, the muse, the dead lover Dante sought in his journey through the Inferno.