“When they …” Black added, before stopping awkwardly.
“If you don’t know about Maggie,” Jonah went on, “what the hell are you here for?”
He barked at a passing female employee to fetch him a coffee. Lukatmi didn’t look much like a new-age politically correct do-no-evil-to-anyone corporation to Peroni. He’d seen bosses in Italy treat women staff that way — and get their heads chewed off in return.
“Sorry,” Tom Black told them. “This is a bad time for us. Allan’s murder … The movie. How it got out onto the web … We’re working to make sure it can’t hit us again.”
“How did it happen in the first place?” Peroni asked.
Jonah stepped in to field the question. “In ways you people never could understand. Ask the SFPD tech team. It was no failure on our part. Not even on our network. Some dumb third-party supplier. Bryant Street and the Carabinieri have their names. We’ll wind up suing the shit out of them. Or taking their business.” His hand made a dismissive sweep through the cold office air. “That crap could have happened to anyone. Microsoft. Google. We were not to blame, and if anyone says so, they can talk to our lawyers.”
He took the coffee off the woman who brought it and didn’t even acknowledge her presence.
“Lukatmi is a busy corporation,” Jonah insisted. “All that old junk at the exhibition … that’s got nothing to do with us. We’re investors in Inferno. We have a fiduciary interest in its success. That does not extend to any crap you brought with you from Italy.” He glanced at his watch, theatrically. “Now if you don’t mind … I’ll have someone show you out.”
“What do the investors think?” Catherine Bianchi asked.
Josh Jonah’s face froze. “Our investors are looking at a return on their money of between sixty and a thousand percent, depending on when they came in,” he replied sharply. “How would you feel in that situation?”
“Nervous. That’s paper money. The only way you can get your hands on it is to sell now. If you do that, you lose on any upside that comes after. You guys are getting big. Maybe you’re the next Google …”
“Google …” Black sighed. “That comparison is getting so tired.”
“Why?” Catherine Bianchi demanded. “Because they’re not in the red?”
The two young men stayed silent.
“You’re buying yourselves Ferraris on dream dust,” she went on. “I talked to an analyst buddy. He told me you’re four, six quarters away from reporting anything close to a real profit. And even that’s just speculation.”
“Analysts …” Jonah mumbled, and scratched his head.
Black cleared his throat, like someone starting a lecture. “You can’t apply old-world economics to what we do. You can’t gauge our value on a spreadsheet. Those days are past. Those people are past.”
She wasn’t budging. “Even in the new world, you have shareholders, Tom. They’ll still want to recoup their investment at some point, and after the last crash, they know they can’t do that out of thin air.”
Peroni realised he was starting to like Catherine Bianchi a lot. She hadn’t mentioned a word of this before they went in.
“That’s your real fiduciary duty,” she persisted. “To the people who own your stock. That’s your legal duty. Unless you think the law’s just so …” She waved her hands, did a woozy hippie look. “… like twentieth century, man.”
“Your analyst buddy tell you anything else?” Jonah asked.
She walked up and stood very close to him. “He said there’s a bunch of shareholders looking at a class action right now. Seems they didn’t know about you investing their money in a movie. They claim it was unapproved and illegal to cut a deal like that from the funds you were raising to develop Lukatmi. When that lawsuit lands on your desk, your stock could go forty, sixty … maybe two hundred percent south. If that happens, anyone could stroll through the door and pick you up for a song. You’re walking a tightrope and I think you’re hoping Inferno will keep you upright. Maybe it will. Maybe not.”
Josh Jonah pointed to the exit. “You can walk there or I can get someone to walk you.”
With that he turned on his heel, and Tom Black, stuttering apologies, did the same. They watched the two men return to their gigantic executive fish tank overlooking the Bay.
The geek who’d been eating the pond weed sandwich showed them to the door without saying a single word. The day was a little warmer when they got outside.
“So that’s why you made captain,” Peroni declared, and shook Catherine’s hand.
Falcone was beaming like a teenager in love. “It’s nearly two. Time for a late lunch,” he announced. “Somewhere good. Fish, I think. Perhaps even a glass of wine. Then I have to call Nic.”
“That would be nice, Leo. But I have a police station to run.”
“Dinner then.”
She looked at him. Then she said, “You can be very importunate sometimes.”
Peroni watched in awe as the merest shadow of a blush rose on Falcone’s cheeks.
“It was just an idea. I’m on my own. You …”
“I have a million friends, some of whom think they’re more than that.” She wrinkled her nose. “OK — you’re on for dinner. But you behave. No wandering around SoMa. No getting near Martin Vogel. That’s the deal. Gerald Kelly is a good guy. He might do you a favour one day. If you don’t jerk his chain again. Agreed?”
“That’s the deal,” the inspector replied with a little too much enthusiasm, then glanced back at the Lukatmi building, with its vast multiarmed logo over the hall. “They’re desperate, aren’t they?”
“They’re a couple of naive kids drowning in so much money they can’t count it. They don’t know what’s around the corner. Of course they’re desperate. It doesn’t mean …”
She reached into her handbag and took out a band. Then she fastened back her hair. Catherine Bianchi looked more serious, more businesslike, that way. It was her office look, the signal that she was preparing to go back into the Greenwich Street Police Station and get on with the job.
“My dad worked in a repair shop. He taught me that mechanics matter. A lot sometimes. Arranging for Allan Prime to be abducted. Getting all that equipment into that little gallery where he died. Sure, these two geeks could point a camera in his face and put it on the web. But the physical part … finding that penniless actor and getting him to threaten Maggie in the park. Coming at her again here with a poisoned apple. I don’t see it, somehow.”
“Jonah could do it,” Peroni suggested.
“He’d like to think so. But then, he’d like to think he could run the world. I’d hate to be around if he got the chance to try. Now you go guard your old ‘junk.’ And stay out of trouble.”
“This analyst?” Falcone asked tentatively. “He’s a … friend? Nothing more?”
Catherine threw her head back and laughed. “He’s an imaginary friend. I made it all up just to see what happened. Companies like Lukatmi come and go. If they don’t have someone preparing a class somewhere, they’re probably out of business anyway.”
“Oh,” Falcone said softly, then put a finger to his cheek and fell silent.
“Can I drop you somewhere?” Catherine asked. “Such as the Palace of Fine Arts and that exhibition you’re supposed to be guarding?”
“We can walk,” Falcone answered. “We need the fresh air. But thank you.”
6
The Park Hill sanatorium was located in an old mansion on Buena Vista Avenue, opposite a quiet green space overlooking the city. Costa drove lazily through Haight-Ashbury to get there, then parked two blocks away on a steep hillside street. The staff entrance was around the corner. From the ground-floor hall, he could see that the front of the building was besieged by reporters and cameramen, the road choked with live TV broadcast vans. Baffled residents of this wealthy, calm suburb walked past shaking their heads, many with immaculately trimmed pedigreed dogs attached to long leads. This wasn’t the kind of scene owners or animals were used to witnessing. They probably preferred it on TV, beamed from somewhere else, distant, visible but out of reach. Costa felt grateful that Catherine Bianchi had called ahead to make arrangements for him to enter by a different door. Otherwise, he knew, he’d have been forced to run the gamut of the media mob.