Then something else intervened. A large silver circular shape flashed across his vision and dashed against the Carabiniere’s head. Maggie Flavier had a film can and she was using it, along with some pretty colorful language, too.
The weapon turned toward Costa’s chest. The barrel barked, the black shape jumped in the man’s hand.
The woman struck again, hard, with such force the firearm fell back, still in their attacker’s grip. The boy wriggled free and fled the moment his small feet touched the floor. Costa closed in, seized the man’s forearm, forced it back hard, sending the weapon upwards into one of the hot overhead lights in the low wooden ceiling.
There was another scream. Pain. Heat on skin. The handgun tumbled to the floor. The Carabiniere turned and stumbled out of Costa’s grip, was free again, was scrabbling, half crouching, towards the gun, too close to it for anyone to intervene.
“Run!” Costa ordered, unable to understand why he was still standing, why he could feel no pain.
She didn’t move.
“No. Are you hurt?”
“Run!”
“I don’t need to. Can’t you see?”
He could, and he didn’t understand how he knew she was correct, but she was. The individual in the Carabinieri uniform, now stained with dirt and dust from the floor of the Cinema dei Piccoli, wouldn’t come back to them. It was written in his defeated, puzzled, enraged face. As if his part was over.
“Drop your weapon,” Costa barked. “Drop your weapon now.”
It was useless. The man retrieved the gun, then laughed and half fell, half ran out the door, out into a warm golden Roman evening.
Maggie Flavier started to follow. Costa put out a hand to prevent her.
“That was a mistake,” he said.
He knew what happened when wild men flailed around with weapons in public, particularly in a protected, special place, full of officers determined to guard those in their care.
From beyond the door of the tiny wooden cinema came voices, loud and furious, shouts and cries, bellowed orders, all the words he dreaded to hear since he knew what they might mean, because he’d been through this kind of tense, standoff situation in training, and knew how easily it could go wrong.
“What’s happening?” the American woman asked, and started to brush past him.
“No!” Costa commanded, with more certainty than he’d used in many a long month.
He stepped in front of her and stared into the woman’s foreign yet familiar face.
“You never walk towards the line of fire,” Costa said, his finger in front of her face, like a teacher determined to deliver a lesson that had to be learned. “Never …”
He was shocked to see that, for the first time, there seemed to be a hint of real fear in her face, and to know that he was the cause, not the madman who had attacked them for no apparent reason.
Outside, the shouting ended and the staccato sound of gunfire began.
5
They heard it from the Casa del Cinema. The volley of pistol shots sounded so loud and insistent it sent every grey, excitable pigeon in the park fleeing into the radiant evening sky.
“Nic’s there somewhere,” Peroni said instantly, alarmed.
Falcone’s and Teresa’s eyes were on the podium. Peroni couldn’t believe their attention was anywhere but the source of that awful, familiar sound.
“It’s the Carabinieri’s job,” Falcone answered. “Nic can take care of himself.”
“To hell with the Carabinieri! I’m—”
Peroni fell silent. The dark blue uniforms of their rivals seemed to be everywhere. Officers were shouting, yelling into radios, looking panicked.
On the podium Roberto Tonti, with a gaggle of puzzled, half-frightened politicians and minor actors around him, was droning on about the movie and its importance, about Dante and a poet’s vision of Hell, all as if he’d never noticed a thing. The tall, stooped director looked every inch of his seventy years. His head of grey swept-back hair seemed the creation of a makeup department. His skin was bloodless and pale, his cheeks hollow, his entire demeanour gaunt. Peroni knew the rumours; that the man was desperately sick. Perhaps this explained Tonti’s obsessive need to continue with the seemingly interminable speech as the commotion swirled around them.
“… for nine is the angelic number,” Tonti droned on, echoing the words of the strange Carabiniere they’d met earlier. “This you shall see in the work, in its structure, in its division of the episodes of life. I give you …”
The movie director tugged on the braided rope by the side of the curtain. The velvet opened.
“… the creator. The source. The fountainhead.”
The casket came into full view. Peroni blinked to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Someone in the crowd released a short, pained cry. The woman next to him, some half-familiar Roman model from the magazines, elegant in a silk gown and jewels, raised her gloved fingers to her lips, her mouth open, her eyes wide with shock.
The Carabinieri became frantic. They didn’t know where to look — towards the children’s cinema and the sound of shooting, or at the platform, where Tonti was now walking stiffly away from the thing he had revealed, an expression of utter distaste on his cold, sallow face, as if he resented the obvious fact that it had somehow stolen his thunder.
Falcone was pushing his way through the crowd, elbowing past black-suited men with pale faces and shrieking female guests.
Teresa, predictably, was right on his heels.
“Oh well,” Peroni grumbled, and followed right behind, forcing his big, bulky body through the sea of silk and fine dark jackets, apologising as he went.
By the time he reached the small stage outside the entrance to the Casa del Cinema, the area around the exhibit case was empty save for Falcone and the pathologist who stood on either side of the cabinet staring at what lay within, bloody and shocking behind the smeared glass. Peroni felt somewhat proud of himself. There’d been a time when all this would have made him feel a little sick.
He studied the object. It appeared to be a severed head covered in some kind of thin blue plastic, which had been slashed to allow the eyes and mouth to be visible. The material enclosing most of what stood in place of Dante’s death mask was pulled painfully tight — so much so that it was easy to see the features of the face that lay beneath. It was an image that had been everywhere in Rome for weeks, that of Allan Prime. This was the face of the new Dante, visible on all the posters, all the promotional material that had appeared on walls and billboards, subway trains and buses. Now it had replaced the death mask of the poet himself. Sealed inside the case by reams of ugly black duct tape, it was some kind of cruel, ironic statement, Peroni guessed. Close up, it also looked not quite real — if the word could be applied to such a situation.
Two senior Carabinieri officers materialised at Falcone’s side. He ignored them.
“This is ours,” the older one declared. “We’re responsible for the safety of the cast.”
Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose in surprise. He didn’t say a thing.
“Don’t get fresh with me,” the officer went on, instantly irate. “You were supposed to be looking after the mask.”
Peroni shrugged and observed, “One lost piece of clay. One dead famous actor. Do you want to swap?”
“It’s ours!”
“What’s yours?” Teresa asked. “A practical joke?”
Slyly, without any of the men noticing, she had stolen the short black truncheon from the junior Carabiniere’s belt. She now held it in her right hand and was quietly aiming a blow at the blood-smeared glass.
“Touch the evidence and I will have your job,” the senior Carabiniere said, more than a little fearful.