“Enough, Roberto …” Harvey said, and took another step closer. The gun drifted his way. The publicist froze.
“Fellini answers … ‘Sono un gran bugiardo.’ I am a big liar. Pinocchio writ large. See my nose! See my nose!”
Tonti was clutching his own face, laughing, and the movement brought about a spasmodic cough that briefly gripped his frail frame.
“Fellini, Hitchcock, Rossellini … Tonti, too. This is what you demand of our calling. That we are liars, all, and the more distance we put between your dreams and the miserable mundanity of your sad little lives, the better we lie, the happier you are.”
The man’s voice was cracking with emotion, and it was impossible to say whether it was anger or grief or some deep-rooted sense of fear.
“Mea culpa. Mea culpa.”
His hands fell to his sides, and he bowed low before the audience.
“I am the director. All you have seen of late, on screen and off, is my creation. From Allan Prime dead in the Farnesina to some pretty little clotheshorse choking for life from a poisoned apple. This is my doing, my direction. Listen to me now …”
He coughed again, and it was raw and dry and rasping.
“No man gets a better final scene than this. Better than any I gave any of these two-bit hacks. See …”
He indicated the cameras, following his every moment. “See! This is the last of Roberto Tonti. Greater than any of you. Any of them.”
Kelly had nodded to his men. They were starting to make their way onto the stage. Tonti knew what was coming, surely.
“Not Dante Alighieri, though,” the old man added. “Listen to me, children. Listen to the final words of Inferno, that I never gave you on the screen, for they are beyond your comprehension.”
He drew himself up, closed his eyes, and began to recite, slowly, in a sonorous, theatrical tone.
Roberto Tonti paused and gazed at the rapt, still, silent crowd in front of him.
He was shaking with laughter, and his eyes, now open and dark and alert, glistened with moisture as they fixed on the camera lenses ravenously following his every move.
“ ‘Through a round aperture … to rebehold the stars,’ ” Roberto Tonti repeated, and swept his arm along the rows of glitterati and celebrities before him. “Such as they are.”
Simon Harvey was getting closer, hands out, pleading for the gun.
“Yet,” Tonti continued, “each and every story deserves a twist, some small epiphany at its close.”
Without warning he swung to face Harvey. The publicist froze, looked at the director, and asked, “Roberto?”
“Traitor.”
The word, the final key in the ninth circle, the last of Dante’s Numbers, came out in a flat, unemotional tone.
He began to fire, repeatedly, deliberately, into the torso of the flailing, tumbling publicist.
A woman screamed behind Costa.
When the gun clicked on empty, Roberto Tonti stopped and took one last disgusted glance at the shattered body on the stage.
Then, seizing the microphone, he gazed up at the cameras.
In a calm, disinterested voice, he ordered, “And … cut.”
PART 7
1
It was Saturday morning. The weather was warmer. August beckoned. Costa woke in Maggie Flavier’s apartment, then drove to Greenwich Street to help the rest of them pack. Their flight home would be late that afternoon. He would travel to Barbados the following Monday. There were still some private business events on Maggie’s calendar. The job never seemed to disappear completely. Simon Harvey’s death continued to stand between them like some unspoken obstacle. Perhaps time would deal with that, time and a move to a different place, one with no connections, no memories. He was unsure.
But at least the case appeared to be, if not closed, at least partly resolved, probably as much as it ever would be. Roberto Tonti had scarcely ceased speaking to Gerald Kelly and his team since he was taken into custody. The SFPD had passed on the details to Falcone, since Gianluca Quattrocchi had been recalled to Rome with his officers to face an internal inquiry. Quattrocchi’s private approach on the night of the premiere was only one of the revelations the director was now minded to disclose. He had also confessed to being the originator of the tontine scheme to save the troubled movie in Rome, and to diverting Harvey’s secret publicity scam about fictitious threats to the production into a real and murderous conspiracy. His motive, he said with no apparent shame, was purely selfish. Inferno was by no means a guaranteed success, even with Harvey’s incessant hype. Something else was needed and, as Tonti knew this was the last movie he would ever make, he was prepared to go to any lengths in order to find it.
He had named Josh Jonah, the photographer Martin Vogel, and the Lukatmi security guard Jimmy Gaines as the principals in the plot to murder Allan Prime. Vogel had arranged the poison for Maggie Flavier. Jonah had then approached the photographer after being blackmailed over his involvement in the plot. Tonti had promised them Prime would be the only victim. He had hoped that would be the case, and that the halfhearted attempt on Maggie Flavier’s life, which he had not expected to be successful, would merely gain yet more publicity to keep the movie in the headlines. The deaths of Jonah and Vogel he regarded as accidental, if fortuitous. He claimed to have shot Tom Black — who had never understood the true nature of the scheme — himself, from a viewpoint near the Embarcadero, and then disposed of the weapon.
Dino Bonetti’s role remained unclear. The producer had disappeared the night of the premiere and was now the subject of arrest warrants for fraud and attempted murder. Tonti, however, steadfastly refused to discuss his involvement in the conspiracy, dismissing it as minor. The credit, as he saw it, was to be his.
In spite of the man’s age and frailty, he remained in custody, though Kelly was minded to waive any objections to bail provided Tonti surrendered his passport and reported to the police on a daily basis. The medical reports indicated that he had, at most, a few months to live, and would never face trial. There was no question, either, that the man would wish to flee to Italy, in spite of Gianluca Quattrocchi’s promises. The truth, Kelly felt, was that Roberto Tonti had achieved what he wanted.
The SFPD phone lines had burned with calls from TV networks and newspapers pleading with Tonti to go on air or give lengthy press interviews. From the major newspapers to the prime-time celebrity shows, he was, suddenly, in demand. This, it seemed, was worth a succession of lives, none of which the dying man deemed of any great value. Only his own reputation, his legacy, mattered, and by force of circumstance, that would always be tied to a single movie, Roberto Tonti’s Inferno.
Hank and Frank Boynton had been round for breakfast when Falcone returned from Bryant Street to brief them on what he’d heard from Gerald Kelly. All of them at the table — the Boyntons, Teresa, Peroni, and Costa — listened intently, and then the Italians stayed silent.
Hank, however, raised a forefinger and said, by way of objection, “But just a minute—”
“Not now, Hank,” Teresa stopped him, mid-sentence. “We’re finished here.”