She shook her fist in mock fury. “You have to watch it. I don’t want to spoil things for you.”
The two men made a show of looking at their watches.
“It’s a work of art. This is ridiculous …” She’d only managed to flick through the DVD before they came home bickering about dinner. Most of what she did know was dimly remembered from two decades before.
She closed her eyes and in that moment could picture where she first saw it, on the screen of the dusty little cinema in the corner of the Campo dei Fiori, on the arm of a hirsute Milanese economics student with exquisite manners and dreadful taste in clothes.
“John Ferguson, a police officer known to everyone as Scottie, afflicted by vertigo, off duty after a terrible fall that killed his partner, agrees to tail Madeleine Elster, the wife of a former acquaintance who believes she is acting oddly, possibly suicidal, and possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, an ancestor. The cop falls in love with the woman, who appears to kill herself. He has a breakdown, and afterwards meets another woman whom he rebuilds in her image, only to discover that she was the original Madeleine Elster he met, taking part in a complex murder plot to kill the villain’s true wife. In the end he loses her, too.” She clapped her hands. “There!”
“That was four sentences. And what’s this got to do with Dante?” Peroni asked.
“Nothing! Everything!” she screeched. “I don’t know. You work it out. I’m on holiday, aren’t I? The woman whose spirit was supposed to possess the victim was named Carlotta Valdes. The story played itself out here, in San Francisco, and Roberto Tonti worked on the film. I do not believe in coincidences.”
“I’m not in the mood for a movie,” Peroni grumbled. “I’m hungry.”
Falcone took out a coin and said, “Heads it’s chicken, tails it’s pizza.”
Peroni’s large scarred head fell into his hands and he groaned.
“Chicken it is,” Falcone declared, after briefly flipping the coin and letting no one see the outcome. “I’ll go.”
Teresa swore bitterly beneath her breath, then passed them a piece of paper with her scribbled handwriting visible on it.
“This is a list of real-life locations from the film. My prediction is that if something happens, it will happen close to one of these. We are being led down a merry little path, gentlemen. But not the one you think.”
She skipped through the chapter points she’d set on the DVD. A bouquet of pink roses, set with blue violets in a star-shaped lace bouquet, came on the screen. Then the camera panned up to the painting of a serious, intense Hispanic woman in Victorian dress, dark eyes staring directly out of the canvas. In her hands sat an identical bunch of flowers.
“Meet Carlotta Valdes. This scene was shot in an art gallery called the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, which you will find on my list. Also …”
She switched to a new scene, one of several hypnotic, dreamlike sequences in which Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie followed the troubled Madeleine as she drove apparently aimlessly across the city, along narrow urban streets, quieter neighbourhoods, and then through endless, dark, unidentified woodland.
The two men became quiet. Falcone reached for the remote control and paused the playback. He pointed to the dark metallic green car frozen as it wound its way downhill, somewhere, it seemed, near the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I saw one just like that this morning. Maggie Flavier was getting into it.”
He scratched his narrow jutting chin.
“Where’s Nic gone?” he asked.
8
They pulled up outside a building that seemed like a mirage emerging from the faint Bay mist. Flat grey lines of weathered stone, perfectly placed columns, an American version of a distorted Palladian dream transplanted from some country estate in the Veneto to a green Californian hilltop running down towards the Bay and the great red bridge below. The two of them got out of the Jaguar. Costa stopped and stared and smiled.
“I know this place …”
“You’ve been to Paris. I was a child there. I knew it, too. The home of the French Legion of Honour opposite the Quai d’Orsay. This is a copy. San Francisco always did look to Europe, you know. Why do you think Tonti is so at home here? The pace of life. Buildings like the Palace of Fine Arts …”
“Piranesi should have drawn that.”
Her sharp, incisive eyes peered at him. “Why are you a police officer? Not an artist or something?”
Costa shrugged. “I can’t paint.”
“Does that bother you?”
It seemed an odd question. “No.”
“It would annoy the hell out of me. I’d try.”
“I did. That’s why I know I can’t do it. What else should I be? Why are you an actress?”
“Because it lets me be other people, silly.”
She took his arm and dragged him past a large, familiar statue, towards the entrance.
“And because I get paid a lot for it. That really is Rodin’s Thinker, by the way. One of the early casts.”
It was almost empty inside. The gallery had such space, such light, such apparent modernity. It was nothing like Rome. All his favourite places there — the Doria Pamphilj, the Borghese — had more the feeling of palatial homes decorated with pictures. The Legion of Honor was cold and clean, organised and … dead. A memorial, Maggie told him, to the fallen American soldiers of the First World War.
Faces lined the walls, portraits of men and women, some in the flush of youth, others in failing old age. Maggie seemed to know every last work in the place, every feature, every personality.
“The cruelty of man,” she declared as she guided him to a fifteenth-century tapestry that depicted peasants trapping and killing rabbits with ferrets and dogs.
“Presumably they were hungry.”
“You’re a vegetarian! You’re supposed to disapprove.”
“When someone’s hungry …”
She harrumphed and took him to another canvas. It showed a young girl in poor country dress, seated by a grubby stone well. He looked at the notice next to it: Bouguereau, The Broken Pitcher. Late nineteenth century.
“Had you seen my movie debut, the Disney epic The Fairy Circle,” Maggie announced with mock pomposity, “you might have recognised this.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know that. Well, this was me.”
It was impossible for him to imagine her as this lost, sullen creature. “How?”
Her strong hands beat the front of her sweater.
“Because I stole her!” Then, more thoughtfully, “Or she stole me. The hair. The surly, sad look. The determination. Which won the day in the end, naturally, since this was Disney.”
He looked at this sophisticated blonde woman by his side and laughed.
“Ridiculous, am I?” she demanded. “Watch.”
She snatched the extensions out of her hair and thrust them into her bag. Then she did something with her hands, put her head down, shook it, as if getting rid of something bad.
When she looked up at him, Nic felt briefly giddy, just as he had the day they first met.
Costa switched his attention between her and the painting. There was the same life, the same identity in the fierce, hard stare, the set features, the reproach to the viewer as if to say: Can you see now?
“Point taken. You’re a good actress.”
A mild curse escaped her lips. She was back. Herself again in an instant. “No. I’m a good vampire of paintings. Or an easy vessel for some ghost. This is what I do. It’s what I learned, when my mother was down in L.A., doing whatever it took to get me auditions.” Her face turned stony for a moment. “So I came here. I studied these women on the walls. I imagined them into me. It’s not hard, not when you try. Whenever I needed them, they showed up. Look …”