“Expecting things to turn out like they should is something stupid people do. If you plan to go visiting, and I hope you do, I would like you to have this.”
Costa didn’t reach for the weapon.
“Men who work with me do so armed,” Kelly insisted. “I’ve lost three officers in my career and that’s three too many.”
“It’s illegal for me to carry a weapon.”
“I’ll look the other way. I know this city and I have my rules when dealing with it. We both understand there are still people out there with blood on their hands. I’d hazard a guess they’ll shed a little more to keep us from finding out what exactly has gone on here. This is not a negotiation, Nic. You take the gun or I drive you home and you stay there.” The handgun didn’t move. “Well?”
Costa grasped the cold butt of the weapon, felt its familiar weight.
Kelly turned on the radio and kept the volume low. Strains of Santana drifted into the car.
“Oh,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “One more thing. That crossbow that killed Allan Prime. Unusual object.” He looked at Costa. “A Barnett Revolution. It’s a hunting crossbow, made for killing deer. Very powerful. Not generally available in Italy. It was bought used through eBay. Guy paid cash and met the seller in a parking lot in South San Francisco one month before Prime died. He wore a hat and sunglasses. That’s as good a description as we could get. My guess is it got shipped to Rome along with some of the equipment they took out for that event there, not that I can prove it.”
“A month?”
“None of this happened on the spur of the moment, did it? Now here’s one more interesting thing: we recovered three shells from Tom Black’s body. Two of them were ours. One wasn’t.”
Kelly squinted at the bright horizon. “The shooter was in a parking lot across the street. I guess he must have been following you from when you came off the bridge. When he saw the roadblock, he pulled off, set up position, then popped one into Black as he walked towards us, and another through the windshield of a squad car just to make sure we returned fire. Clever guy. I’d put money he was the ghost in Vogel’s apartment, that he set up that meeting, shot them, and got panicked when you arrived.”
He looked at Costa. “That makes two occasions when he could have had you in his sights. Consider yourself damned lucky. And don’t lose that gun.”
“Anything else I should know?” Costa asked.
“Here’s the last remaining fact I have. We have the bullets and we have spent shells from the Embarcadero. They’re from a.243 Winchester. Whoever he is, he had a long-range hunting rifle.” Gerald Kelly winced. “The kind you use for shooting deer. Which is not my idea of sport, though it’s a little bit more humane than a crossbow, I guess.”
4
Hank had a pair of half-moon glasses for sitting at the computer. Frank, similarly afflicted, preferred a pair of modern square plastic frames. Both men squinted at Barkev’s Mac and made baffling complimentary remarks on its newness and speed. These things seemed important in San Francisco. The average pair of sixty-year-old Roman twins newly out of the fire department would probably have struggled to do much more than send an e-mail. The Boynton brothers sailed through a sea of information sources in front of them with a speed and ease that reminded her of Silvio Di Capua back in Rome, a thought that gave her a pang of homesickness.
Finally Hank found the page he wanted, and once they’d read it, Teresa said, “One more coincidence. It has to be. We’re talking nearly four hundred years ago.”
“Let’s see.” His fat fingers clattered across Barkev’s pristine keyboard. “Yep. It’s a coincidence. Lorenzo di Tonti. Born in Naples. Got into trouble there. Moved to Paris. Died penniless.”
“Offspring?” Frank asked.
“Two,” his brother replied, placing a large finger directly on the screen.
Teresa scanned the article next to a black-and-white portrait of a man with long, flowing black hair and elegant nobleman’s clothes.
“So Roberto Tonti can’t be related,” she declared when she skimmed to the end.
His fingers ran over the keyboard again.
“Seems not. Even the name changes. Lorenzo became de Tonti when he moved to Paris. Both sons wound up over here. One died penniless of yellow fever in Alabama. The second helped found Detroit and died in disgrace. Was calling himself de Tonty by then. They didn’t have a lot of luck, these guys, did they? Mind you, all that from an argument in Naples. Interesting lives. Makes me feel quite small.”
“So,” she repeated, “Roberto Tonti the movie director can in no way be a descendant of Lorenzo di Tonti the dubious seventeenth-century banker.”
“Right,” Hank said. “But does that matter? Use your imagination. Roberto certainly does. It’s his job. Lorenzo invented the tontine that’s named after him. Who doesn’t Google themselves these days? How many other people have surnames describing an idea that’s killed a good number of idiots over the years?”
Tontine.
She vaguely knew what the word meant. It reminded her of old stories of tortuous conspiracies and unbelievably clever detectives. All the kinds of things real-life law enforcement agencies never met in the mundane world of hard, cruel fact.
“I’ve got to be honest.” Hank looked uncomfortable. “I looked up Tonti a few days ago. Type in ‘Tonti’ and pretty soon you get to ‘tontine.’ I apologise for not mentioning any of this earlier. It seemed irrelevant. I thought the same about tontines, too. Maybe I was wrong.”
She went through another page he’d found, feeling a welcome mild rush of excitement and possibility.
Teresa dimly recalled a tontine as an agreement between a group of individuals to share some kind of bounty, usually a crooked one, leaving the illicit prize to the last surviving member of the circle. This proved fundamentally wrong in many respects. Lorenzo di Tonti, the man who shared Roberto’s name — though not, it would seem, his blood — hadn’t set out to make his fortune creating a secret profit-sharing scheme for criminals. He was an ambitious banker trying to establish a new form of investment vehicle of general benefit to those who had the wherewithal to take part in it.
Teresa read the details and tried to recall what little she knew about investing for the future. Money was never one of her strong points, which was probably why the true tontine appeared eminently sensible. Each member made a contribution to the fund. The total was then invested in legitimate enterprises. Any dividends from those holdings were shared equally among the members of the scheme, until the penultimate one died, at which point the entire sum, dividends and capital, fell to the ownership of the last in the group.
The only flaw she could see was the obvious one: there was a substantial incentive on the part of tontine members to murder one another in order to ensure they claimed the richest prize. According to the documents Hank found, this had happened, and not just in fiction either. Tontines were made illegal in most countries by the nineteenth century, and passed on as fodder for novelists.
“Fine …” she said quietly. “The connection being?”
Hank found another article, one from the Financial Times the previous year.
“I remembered this one because it made me think. Take a look.”
It was a long and very serious piece about the nature of life insurance.
“You see the author’s point?” Hank said. “If you leave out the temptation-to-murder part, what old Lorenzo actually invented was the very first pension scheme. The only difference is he didn’t let newcomers in, so that big final payout remained. In practical terms it’s not much different from what happens today.” He nodded at his brother. “We get a fire department pension. The pot for that depends on the stock market or something magical, I guess. When one of our colleagues bites the dust, that’s one less mouth to feed. We all profit from each other’s deaths. We always have. Lorenzo just said all that out loud, and put it in a way that tempted a few people to bring on some of those deaths a little earlier than might otherwise have happened.”