“We’re just around the corner,” he said, beckoning her to the back of her apartment block.
They turned a corner and she saw the car.
The green Jaguar gleamed in the half shade, sleek and old and full of memories. She remembered the smell of the leather and the drive with Nic up into the heights beyond the Legion of Honor.
“What the hell is going on here?” she started to say, swinging around to look at the driver.
The sunglasses were back on. He’d dropped the big cardboard box. He was grinning at her. There was no one near, not a window overlooking this place.
He was getting something out of his pocket.
“It’s the final act,” the man who called himself John Ferguson said. Suddenly he was on her, strong arms around her neck, a hand pushing some cloth that stank of damp, corrosive chemical into her face.
She tried to struggle. Then she tried to breathe. Her arms flailed wildly, to no purpose. She could hear him laughing.
As she started to fall, she could just make out the sun, bright and wild in a pure blue Californian sky. The world started to turn dark. For one short moment the sun glittered high above her. Then the cloth came down once more. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. He held the thing over her mouth, choking her until she submitted and fell into the dark.
4
Once inside the house, Costa wasted fifteen seconds fumbling for a light switch, then he threw open the curtains on the long flat panes that covered the corner of the room abutting Lombard and Jones, revealing a view that, through ancient venetian blinds, took him back to Maggie Flavier’s apartment, watching Vertigo for the second time in a matter of days, both of them feeling the past tapping on their shoulders like some hungry ghost.
This wasn’t just the same building. It was the very room they’d seen in the movie, with its beautiful hillside vista out to Coit Tower and the ocean. The furniture had been carefully selected from the same era: a pale fabric sofa, long, low chairs of 1950s design. Even a small TV set with manual rotating dials and switches and a bulging, pop-eyed screen. An old-movie channel was playing on it: something black-and-white, the sound turned down as if the room needed to be inhabited by the cinema even when no one was present. It was a sanctuary, a kind of temple, and it was instantly obvious what was being worshipped here.
The walls were plastered with movie posters from floor to ceiling. All from the fifties to seventies. American, English, Italian …
Teresa went round them methodically, finger on the old paper, checking the names.
“Roberto Tonti worked on every one of these,” she murmured. “Whoever this man is, he knows his stuff. Tonti doesn’t even get a credit on the Vertigo poster, but it’s up there along with all the Italian horror flicks he directed. We have a fan here. The fan.”
“Rome.” Falcone was busily rooting through documents on the antique desk next to the TV. “He went there one week before Prime died and returned home the day after. Just like Martin Vogel and Jimmy Gaines. Look — plane tickets in the name of Michael Fitzwilliam, the bill for a hotel near Termini, cards for restaurants and bars. A receipt for a pair of sunglasses from Salvatore Ferragamo in the Via Condotti.” His grey eyebrows furrowed in bafflement. “Ferragamo don’t make men’s sunglasses, surely …”
“So we’ve found one more member of the tontine?” Catherine Bianchi asked.
“It would appear so. Ferragamo …”
“You’re right. They don’t make men’s sunglasses.” Peroni emerged from a spacious walk-in closet with something held almost tenderly across both outstretched arms. It was a set of women’s clothing fresh back from the cleaners, pressed and spotless inside plastic wrapping. A grey jacket with matching slacks. The same clothes they’d seen worn by the woman who handed a bouquet of flowers, with a gun inside, to Roberto Tonti on the stage by the Palace of Fine Arts. The same clothes apparently worn by the mysterious Carlotta Valdes when she appeared at the apartment of Allan Prime in the Via Giulia.
“He keeps his ladies’ things in the same cupboard as his men’s stuff. There’s makeup and a mirror. This is a bachelor apartment with a difference. Also, there’s this …”
He held up a photo of a man in hunting gear, his booted foot propped on a dead deer.
“When he’s not wearing lipstick, he likes to go shooting. There’s a locked firearms cabinet next door that could house a couple of rifles.”
“OK,” Catherine Bianchi said. “Now I am calling Kelly.”
From the bottom drawer of the desk, Falcone retrieved what appeared to be a plastic garbage bag wrapped with duct tape. He picked up a pair of scissors and cut the fastenings. From within he pulled out something swathed in white tissue paper.
As they watched, he unwrapped the death mask of Dante Alighieri.
The mask seemed very old and fragile, brilliantly lit by the bright Californian sunlight, a place Dante could never have guessed existed. Costa looked at the closed eyes, the face in peace after so much pain, the long, bent nose, the thin-lipped, intelligent mouth, and knew in an instant that it was genuine.
“This is our case, too,” Falcone said with obvious satisfaction. “Call Kelly. Tell him we need an immediate check to find out this individual’s real identity, and a discreet distribution of his description.”
He gave her the kind of look he gave policewomen in Rome, one she hadn’t seen before.
“I do not want to see this in the media. Not even on a police station wall. If this man can change identities so easily and convincingly, he’ll be gone the moment he hears.”
“Yes, sir …” she said caustically. “Anything else?”
Falcone ignored her. Teresa Lupo had returned from the kitchen.
“We need forensic,” she said. “ ‘Scottie’ may be finicky about his fancy clothes but his work gear is stuffed into one big pile in a basket just like any other bachelor slob.” She looked at them. “There are items in there with what I’d swear are bloodstains on them. And a pair of jeans that still smell of petrol. Martin Vogel’s apartment. There’s a lot here, Catherine …”
“OK, OK, OK. I’ll call …”
But she still didn’t. She looked at them.
“Who the hell is this nut? And how does he fit into the tontine?”
Costa walked over to look at the shelves in the corridor. There seemed nothing unusual among the collection of personal belongings. Souvenirs, from Mexico and Italy, some small pieces of pottery, a few photographs in cheap plastic frames. Everything was so ordinary. If you took away the posters and the incriminating evidence, this would simply be the apartment of a wealthy bachelor with a penchant for 1950s style.
He moved closer and picked up one of the photographs. It showed a tall, erect figure with a full head of dark hair, standing on the waterfront near Fort Point, beneath the grand span of the Golden Gate Bridge, squinting into the sun. He had his arm around a tall, spindly boy of perhaps ten or eleven. Neither was smiling. The man was a younger Roberto Tonti. The boy wore faded shorts, a cheap T-shirt. His hair needed cutting, his face was frozen in an expression of fear and anger.
There was a hook on the back of the frame. He unlocked it and took out the print. It was sufficiently recent to have a printed date still faintly visible on the rear: 8-24-87. Scribbled in thick, grey pencil, an adult hand had written a line Costa recognised …
Said the good Master: “Son, thou now beholdest
The souls of those whom anger overcame.”
The Inferno … “Does Roberto Tonti have children?” he asked Teresa.