“Yes,” he replied automatically. “She was.”
He was distracted, watching what was coming their way from the gathering by the cinema complex, trying to make sense of this strange, unexpected sight. He knew what the park Carabinieri were like. They were indolent toy soldiers. Usually.
The woman with the Peter Pan haircut who sat next to him looked like a child who’d been placed inside her shimmering blue evening dress on someone’s orders, someone who’d created her for a ceremony, or another hidden purpose. She held a damp tissue in her pale slender fingers. Her makeup had run a little from the tears.
“Did something happen back there?” he said, and nodded in the direction of the gathering. “At the premiere?”
He could hear the distant clatter of hooves as the horse galloped towards them with a strange, stiff figure on its back. Maggie Flavier squinted into the sunlight and replied, “I don’t think so. Although Allan Prime hadn’t shown up to make his speech, for some reason. That’s unusual. Allan’s normally completely reliable.” She registered the movement ahead of them, and narrowed her eyes further.
Costa stood up and said, “Go inside, please. Now.”
“Why?”
He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like the sight of a Carabiniere in full dress uniform storming madly across this normally peaceful park in their direction.
The rider was getting closer. Maggie rose to stand next to Nic. Her arm went immediately through his, out of fear or some need for closeness, he was unsure which. Briefly, Costa wanted to laugh. There was something so theatrical about this woman, as if the entire world were a drama and she one more member of the cast.
“Let me deal with it,” Costa insisted, and took one step forward so that he was in front of her, confronting the racing horse that now made a sound like an insistent drumroll, or the rattle of some strange weapon, as it flew closer. The man’s insane dash across the green grass of the Villa Borghese seemed to have only one point of focus, and it was them.
The officer pointed his weapon in the air and fired. From somewhere nearby a dog began to bark maniacally.
As Costa watched, the uniformed man leaned forward in the saddle, as if preparing for one final assault.
Nic felt as if he’d walked unbidden onto some movie set, one with a script he couldn’t begin to fathom. The Carabiniere was in a crouch, racing furiously to close the distance that separated them. The sight reminded Costa of some old movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade maybe. Something that began as a show of bravado and ended in a shocking, unforeseen tide of bloodshed.
“Who the hell is that?” Maggie asked.
“Here’s an idea. Let’s not find out.”
He grabbed her slender arm, both tugging and pushing her towards the closed wooden door of the tiny cinema. Seconds later, there was a thunderstorm of desperate hooves behind them and the rhythmic beat of the animal’s angry snorts. He shoved the American inside, protesting still.
“Don’t cops here carry guns?” she demanded, squirming out of his arms as he pushed and kicked a way in, opening up the black interior in which the movie still flickered over a handful of small heads.
“To go to the cinema?” Costa asked, bewildered. “Please …”
“Maggie! Maggie!”
The Carabiniere was screaming for her as he fought to control the horse. Costa had seen enough cowboy films to know what came next. He’d dismount. He’d come for them.
“Who is this guy?” she pleaded, struggling against him.
“Your biggest fan?” Costa wondered, before he snarled at the attendant to call for the police.
Of course he didn’t carry a gun, Costa thought. Or even a radio. They were there for what was supposed to be a pleasant social event, and to watch lazily as someone unveiled a seven-hundred-year-old death mask. Not to encounter some crazed Carabiniere who rode like John Wayne, and seemed able to handle a weapon just as efficiently.
There was a fire exit sign on the far side. He found the light switches and turned the black interior of the cinema into a sea of yellow illumination. No more than seven kids sat in the tiny seats in front of him, each turning to blink at him resentfully.
“Go out the other side,” Costa yelled at them.
No one moved.
“Bambi’s not finished,” objected a small boy with a head of black choirboy hair. He could have been no more than five or six and didn’t look as if anything would move him.
Maggie Flavier was strong. She fought as Costa dragged her over to the projection room, a place he’d visited once, when he was a child, in the company of his father. Then he kicked open the little wooden door, saw there was no one inside, and thrust her into the cubicle, ordering her to keep quiet, then shutting the door to keep her from view.
When he turned, he found daylight streaming through the entrance again. The Carabiniere walked in, the black gun in his right hand, held at an angle, ready for use.
Costa stepped in front of him, blocking his way.
“There are children here, Officer,” he said calmly. “What do you want?”
“I’m not an officer, you idiot,” the man in the uniform said without emotion. “Where is she?”
“Put down the gun. Then we talk.”
“I don’t wanna talk.”
His accent was odd. Roman, yet foreign, too, as if he came from somewhere else.
“Put down—”
The man moved swiftly, with an athlete’s speed and determination. In an instant the Carabiniere had snatched the small complaining child from the nearest seat, wrapped his arm round the boy’s chest, and thrust the weapon’s blunt nose tight against his temple. The young eyes beneath the choirboy cut filled with tears and a fearful astonishment.
“Where is she?”
Costa thought he heard voices outside. The cinema attendant must have got someone’s attention. What that meant when this lunatic had a child in his grip …
“Let go of the child—” he began.
“I’m here,” Maggie Flavier said, opening the door of the projection room. “What do you want?”
She stood silhouetted in the cubicle entrance, something trailing from her left hand, something Costa couldn’t quite see.
The figure in the uniform twisted to look in her direction. He didn’t relax his hold on the child for a moment.
“I want you,” he replied, as if the question were idiotic. “Doesn’t everyone? I want—”
Perhaps it was an actor’s talent, but somehow Costa knew she was about to do something.
“To hell with everyone,” Maggie Flavier declared, and tugged on whatever she held in her fingers.
It was film. Costa could hear noises coming from the projection room, frames of movie rattling, jamming, trapped and tangled inside the machine that gave them life. The showing of Bambi had somehow frozen on a single frame. She must have done that. She had to be in control.
Maggie Flavier yanked hard on the snaking trail of celluloid and something snapped, came free.
The Carabiniere stared at her, curious, angry, uncertain what to do next.
Bright, piercing white light, as brilliant as a painter’s vision of Heaven, spilled into the room as the film fell free in the projector gate.
The boy in the uniformed man’s arms squirmed and shrieked. The Carabiniere swore, a foul English curse, and tried to shield his eyes. Costa, careful to keep his eyes from the projector’s beam, struck a heavy, hard blow into the man’s stomach, unable, he knew, to reach the weapon, yet intent, still, on getting the child free. He punched again. There was a cry of pain and fury. His left hand closed on the child’s back, his right struggled to pull the hostage free.