“Guess that solves our conundrum,” he said in a nasal slur.
9
He was staggering to his feet, stumbling toward a glass cabinet on the wall. It was marked In Case of Fire and contained an axe, set diagonally against black fabric, like some kind of museum exhibit.
Mickey Fitzwilliam smashed his fist through the glass. Blood shot out from his fingers as the pane shattered. He didn’t seem to notice.
Praying to any god who might save her, Maggie scrabbled at the key. It finally turned. The door opened and she dashed through. It was pitch dark. Her hand flailed against the wall, her fingers somehow found a switch. A dazzling light burst on her from a single bulb that dangled from a wire not more than a hand’s width from her face, momentarily blinding her.
Escape had taken her into a small, square room entirely without windows or furniture, nothing but plain whitewashed brick. A rickety-looking wooden staircase rose against the white, dusty wall opposite. A dark corridor led off to the right, maybe to nowhere.
A picture came into her mind’s eye, one kept there from the times she’d driven down Chestnut on the way to the shops or Roberto Tonti’s grand mansion opposite the Palace of Fine Arts.
She knew where she was instantly. Inside the fake bell tower of the Marina Odeon, the one pretending to be the campanario of San Juan Bautista.
Breathless, trying to think straight, she ripped the key out of the lock and slammed the old wooden door shut, enclosing herself in the tiny room. Hand shaking, fingers fumbling, she got the key into the lock on her side of the door and managed to turn it. She pressed her cheek to the edge of the door frame and whispered, “Michael, Michael …”
There was no reply.
“You’re sick,” she said deliberately. “Let me help you.”
Was she serious? Was she acting? She’d no idea.
“I can help. There are doctors …”
Silence. She tried to catch her breath. She looked up the narrow wooden staircase winding up the interior of the fake bell tower.
Face against the wood, trying to sound calm and in control, she said, “Talk to me, Michael. Please …”
The axe blade crashed through the flimsy old timber, inches from her face. She shrieked. The sharp, gleaming metal withdrew, and he began battering again, repeatedly, maniacally, tearing a ragged hole through the panel, sending splinters and dust everywhere.
She retreated to the other side of the tiny chamber, staring at the growing breach he was tearing in the last barrier of defence she possessed. The world was closing in on her and it was one that seemed to be composed entirely of clips from movies, half-remembered lines of dialogue, flashes of recognition that veered between fact and fiction.
The next thing she knew, she was stumbling down the dark little corridor, praying there might be some way out at its end. She had plunged into darkness. Her fingers crawled along the damp plaster, seeking a switch. Finally they found one; she flipped it and felt a raw, painful scream leap into her throat.
Ahead of her was a naked man. One part of her panicking mind could recognise and name him, although he looked so different, so altered. Dino Bonetti was trapped upright in some kind of tall glass cabinet, the kind they had in restaurants for desserts and ice cream. The producer was still alive, barely, moving a little, mumbling wordlessly. At his feet was a round paper object the size and shape of a football. It seemed to be spewing a constant stream of yellow and black shapes that flew in and out, only to find themselves cornered in the cabinet alongside Bonetti. A cloud of furious wasps buzzed around him, crawling across his florid, swollen face as if feeding, pulsing thick, like a living carpet, on his chest.
His fist banged weakly on the padlocked glass. He could see her, just. There was a putrid, vile smell leaking from somewhere. She edged back, towards the foot of the tower.
As she stumbled against the door joist, there was a brutal, vicious crack. Mickey Fitzwilliam was through, his face a rictus of amused savagery, so close she could feel the spittle from his mouth fall like hot rain on her skin as he leered crazily through the gap.
There was nowhere else to go. She stumbled towards the staircase, knowing somehow what role he would choose next: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a performance twice removed, an actor mimicking something else from the real-unreal world of show business.
“ ‘Here’s J-J-Johnny!’ ” Mickey Fitzwilliam screamed.
10
At the end of his long run to the movie theatre, Costa found the front door locked and not a light on anywhere. He opened a low wooden gate and worked his way to the back of the building.
There was no obvious entry point at ground level, only rough plaster walls and the white tower rising three storeys or more into a cloudless sky. Close by — this he hardly dared look at — stood an old cemetery headstone over a grave marked out by pansies and daisies. A grey urn was positioned before it, filled with red roses. A green sash was wrapped around the stems.
Out of breath, lost for a way inside, he heard a scream, then another.
Then he heard Maggie’s voice. A man’s name, over and over again.
Michael, Michael, Michael …
He knew in an instant where she was: behind the fake adobe wall, just a few short steps away, trapped with the man who’d covered the walls of his bedroom with two decades of her portraits.
Next to the base of the tower was a small window so grubby and littered with cobwebs it was opaque. He searched the trash-filled backyard until he came across an old, discarded sink, hefted it in his arms, stumbled through the rusting junk back to the building, then, with a desperate lurch, threw the thing through the glass. It landed on the far side with a muffled crash. Picking up some rusty piping, Costa roughed out a gap through the shards of glass remaining, wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief, reached inside and pulled himself through. He found himself spread-eagled across an old office desk, reached ahead, gripped the edge of the wood, and dragged himself forward until he was mostly free of the spikes and scattered glass.
There was a bed in there, the sickly sweet smell of sweat, and a misshapen red puddle on the grimy floor.
Some second sense made him turn. A man stood in a doorway at what appeared to be the foot of the stairs of the tower. He had a bloodied face and hands and wore an expression of surprise and contempt.
His right arm held a long, fireman’s axe, which, as Costa scrambled from the desk, began to fly, turning, turning, turning, towards him through the air.
Costa found himself dropping like a sack onto the hard concrete floor. Bells chimed, pain flooded into his temples. Maggie was there, somewhere beyond his assailant, screaming. He’d landed on his right shoulder, which hurt like hell. Maybe something was broken. After a brief, sickening moment of blackness, Costa found himself amidst a sea of shattered glass trying weakly to recover the gun from Gerald Kelly’s leather holster inside his jacket. He rolled and came face-to-face with the axe. The blade had driven itself deep into the wood less than an arm’s length away from his head. The fall, painful as it was, had saved him.
When he got half upright, onto a single knee, gun in hand, with a clear view back towards the tower, he was alone.
Costa staggered towards the tower, his head throbbing, his body convulsed in a single painful ache.
“Police!” he bellowed, stumbling through with the kind of unguarded, careless bravado that would have got him screamed at in the state police academy in Flaminio. “Police!”
Laughter drifted unseen down the rickety staircase.