“I don’t even really know when it started. I was drunk at the time. I figured Inferno was dead. We’d been everywhere. Dino had begged every last penny he could out of his mob friends, and they were starting to get ugly, thinking the whole thing was about to turn into a train wreck. Maybe it was him, maybe Roberto. Maybe both. I don’t even know. I just woke up one morning and the money was there. We got the movie, and maybe down the line we got paid, too.”
Harvey scowled at the glass and put it on the table in front of him, half finished. “How do you say no to something like that? We all knew Roberto was sick. He told us he was rolling in his fee as collateral, knowing full well he’d never live to collect it. Lukatmi was going to go sky high. Instant profit for all of us the moment he croaked, even if the movie bombed.”
“Whose names were on the contract?”
Harvey stared at him as if it were an idiotic question. “What contract? What do you think this was? A corporation? Some listing on the New York Stock Exchange? It was just some grubby little deal to breathe life back into a dying movie. These things happen all the time—”
“Who …?”
“I didn’t know all the names. I didn’t want to. Allan put in the balance of his fee. That took a little persuading, but Dino offered to sort out a few personal issues he had somewhere. What’s a producer for? I waived what I was owed. Same with Dino. Josh and Tom put in some special form of Lukatmi stock and a little cash just to keep the wheels turning. Those of us on the movie side thought that would turn out to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. How dumb can you get, huh? We thought we were robbing the geeks when the truth is it was the other way round. Robbing murderous geeks, too …”
He cleared his throat then, looked at Costa. “And now you’re telling me that’s not the case? That Black and Josh didn’t do it?”
“I don’t think so. Do you know anyone who hunts?”
“In the movie business? Are you kidding?”
“What about the people you used?”
“I made damned sure I stayed clear of that side of things. Fraud’s as far as I was prepared to go. Dino handled the rough stuff. He seemed comfortable with it. He had the contacts. Tom and Josh knew some guy from Lukatmi who came in as crew. All I did was get Martin Vogel on board. That creep would screw his mother for five bucks. The only other thing I handled was Maggie. I gave her a few drinks and talked her into signing her cut away into some fictitious offshore production company. She didn’t have a clue what she was doing. Money’s never been her thing. I had her name on the paper before her agent knew anything about it. Nothing anyone could do after that.”
His phone rang. Harvey took it out of his pocket, looked at the number, then turned the thing off.
“She wasn’t going to get robbed, either. I’d never let that happen to her. All of us figured we’d get what we were owed at the very least. Maybe more, if Lukatmi’s stock went through the roof. Dino handled the money and contract side of things. He could do that better than anyone. I didn’t understand a word of what he was doing. All any of us cared about was the fact this gave us a chance to make Inferno happen.”
He looked at his watch and shrugged. “I’ve got to get dressed soon. Really.”
“Who put it all together?” Costa pressed.
“We just did what we’d been doing all along. I’d been hyping Inferno from the start. Would the academic community be pissed off by it? Was the thing cursed? The media loved all that crap. The story had legs. So we decided to build on it. This idea that someone was stalking the movie and leaving clues straight out of Dante. We forged a few e-mails.” He stiffened. “Someone hired that guy to wear a Carabinieri uniform and create some kind of incident the day of the premiere in Rome. No one was supposed to get shot.”
“Allan Prime …”
“I damned near told you all this then. But that would have killed the movie stone dead. All I knew was that Tom and Josh had cooked up something to get us some publicity. They never told me what. I don’t know about the others. Afterwards …”
He fell silent.
“What?” Costa asked.
“I thought the rest of them didn’t understand it, either. Allan was supposed to disappear for a while, get that death mask nonsense made, then put on that little show in front of the camera as a stunt and get rescued by the cops. They were going to portray it as some kind of warped attack. Allan was in on the plan. They told him all about it. That’s what they said. They had no idea why he got killed. They thought maybe something went wrong …”
“He was murdered, deliberately, in cold blood, in front of millions of people. It almost kept Lukatmi alive.”
“Josh said it was never meant to happen. That’s all I can tell you.”
Harvey tapped his watch. “When the premiere’s over, come and see me and I will make a statement. I’ll want a lawyer there. This has gone far enough already. I don’t want anything else on my conscience. Besides …” He caught his own reflection in the mirror and the traces of a smile creased his face. “… it’s a hell of a story, isn’t it? Biggest I’ve ever spun. Could make a movie someday.”
Something was still missing.
“There was a woman involved,” Costa said. “She went to Prime’s apartment the morning he died. She made the mask. She left with him.”
Harvey waved away the idea with his hand. “I don’t know about any woman. Except for Maggie, and she didn’t know the first thing about what was going on. Can’t help you there.”
Costa kept his eyes on him and said, “The woman called herself Carlotta Valdes.”
Simon Harvey blanched. He said, “What?”
“Carlotta Valdes? Do you know the name?”
“Of course I do! Vertigo. It was shot right here. Roberto worked on it. He’s talked about it, often.”
“What do you think it means? That the woman used Carlotta Valdes’s name?” Costa asked.
“That some punk in this nightmare still has good taste in movies.”
9
The security cordon ran from 101 all the way down to the waterfront stretch of Marina Boulevard. Bright red barriers and yellow tape blocked off all the normal entry routes. Photographers and TV camera crew who hadn’t managed to beg media accreditation wandered the perimeter like mangy starving lions. Uniformed SFPD officers stood at the two entry checkpoints, ruthlessly checking the credentials of the lines of men in evening suits and women wearing elegant, stunningly expensive dresses. Once they were approved, the guests were then forced to walk through a portable airport-style metal detector to check for weapons, an unusual addition to such an event, Costa thought, and one that clearly engaged the attention of the photographers. All stood shivering in the chilly mist.
The queue of expensively clad bodies was steadily working through the system. Costa walked round the entire enclosed area once, then stopped by the lake that fronted the main structure of the Palace. Even this close, he could only just make out the domed roof of the structure across the water. Soon that would be gone. Inferno would be launched, appropriately enough, in a miasma of San Francisco fog. He wondered if the grey cloud might even seep into the gigantic tent erected for the private screening, and if it did whether those at the rear of the seats would have much of a view. Perhaps that wasn’t the point. This was an occasion to be seen at more than anything. The lines of sleek dark limousines drawing up by the checkpoints contained more than a few faces he had come to recognise from the TV since he’d arrived in San Francisco, politicians and media figures, actors and celebrities, a constant stream of beautiful women on the arms of men in impeccable evening dress.