Supposition and guesswork were dangerous friends. In Hitchcock’s movie, the tragic detective Scottie had toyed with them and lost everything in the end.
Costa’s rented Ford kept nosing aimlessly over the city, from the tourist dives of Fisherman’s Wharf to backstreets and rich residential areas, and semi-abandoned industrial districts that looked as if they hadn’t changed in years. He knew what he half hoped to see. An old green Jaguar with a blonde woman at the wheel, pulling into a dark corner, a dusty dead end where he might meet her and find some answers.
Somewhere along the way, he wasn’t sure exactly, he stopped in a gleaming 1950s diner. A young Asian girl in a white hat and anachronistic smock served him a weak milky coffee. She wore a badge that said The Philippines and a broad toothy smile. San Francisco seemed possessed of multiple personalities, all of them jumbled up together, one running into the many.
He looked at his watch. It was close to seven. A decent enough time to call. He phoned the Park Hill Sanatorium and waited as a woman who sounded like the smartest of hotel receptionists put him on hold.
“Miss Flavier discharged herself an hour ago,” she reported after a long wait.
“You mean she’s OK.”
“We can’t discuss a patient’s condition, sir. You appreciate that.”
“Where did she go? Who with?”
“I really can’t add to what I’ve said. Good night.”
The line went dead. Costa realised he didn’t know where Maggie lived. An apartment somewhere on Nob Hill. That was all she’d told him.
He called the agent and got an answering machine. He tried Falcone. The inspector listened to him, then said, “If Maggie Flavier wants to go home, it’s none of your business.”
“She nearly died …”
“It was an allergic reaction. One she’s had before. If she was really ill, they would never have let her leave the hospital. She’ll have security. Relax.”
“I don’t even know where she lives. Can you find that out?”
“Yes. I can.”
Then nothing.
“Leo …”
“Leave it. You’re fortunate the police haven’t charged you with assault over that photographer. Don’t tempt fate.”
He could feel his temper rising. “You asked me to go and apologise to the man.”
“So why didn’t you?”
He wasn’t in, Costa told him. No one was around. The place looked deserted. But that was three hours before.
“Then try again. That’s what we do, isn’t it? No more phone calls, Nic. I’m off-duty.”
“Yes … sir.”
Costa cut the call and uttered a short, meaningful Roman curse.
The Filipino waitress was beaming at him. She had a plate in her hands.
“Here you go. Veggie burger and fries,” she said, and the sight of it dispelled his appetite for good.
He gazed at the shining chrome and, plastered on the walls throughout the diner, posters for movies and stars he’d long forgotten. Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Cinema attempted to define modern life through allegory and mystery, in much the same way Dante sought to define his own medieval world. Fundamentally, they were looking for the same unreachable goals: happiness, peace, and a few good answers.
Then a familiar voice came over from the TV in the corner.
He picked up his glass of plain water and sat in the steel seat directly beneath the screen. Roberto Tonti was on some news interview program. It seemed to be live. A long clip from the movie — Allan Prime as Dante, spellbound as Maggie, ethereal, otherworldly, strode through a nightmare universe of monsters and flame.
The waitress stopped work and watched it with him.
“Who’s the boring guy?” she asked. “What’s he got to do with big stars like that?”
He told her the director’s name. She looked puzzled.
“Never heard of him. He looks sick. Oughta be in the hospital.”
“He directed the movie. It’s his show.”
“No, it’s not. I don’t go to the movies to see guys like that. I wanna see stars. Don’t you?”
“They’re just people. Like you and me.”
She stared at him, then burst out laughing.
“Not like me, mister. Not in a million years.” Her eyes shone with amusement. “No offence but … not like you either.”
9
They had spent more than an hour wandering around Mission Dolores. She couldn’t have hoped for better guides. Hank and Frank were in love with their city. They seemed to know every last corner. For Teresa Lupo, who had no fondness for religion, the mission was a revelation. In Rome, the Church was omnipresent, and seemed to have been that way forever. Seated in the small adobe chapel of Mission Dolores, she was, for the first time in her life, conscious of a world that existed before God, at least the one she’d grown up with. This had been a different, virgin environment, one conquered by a foreign host bringing what it saw as enlightenment and civilisation, just two hundred and fifty years before, at a time when Rome regarded itself as the modern capital of a civilised, fixed universe in which everything was labelled, recognised, and known. In Italy, history seemed either distant or a part of the living present. Here the past existed just out of reach, tantalisingly near yet untouchable, alive yet gone, too.
The place fascinated her so much that she forgot, for a while, why they’d gone there. Then Frank asked, “So you really want to see Carlotta’s grave?”
“Oh. Of course.”
They walked outside. It was getting cold and late. She wondered how much longer they could stay here. How much she could put off going back to Greenwich Street and admitting she had nothing to report, or suggest. A green car, some locations, a few possible coincidences … it added up to nothing and she knew it.
The cemetery was beautiful, hushed and peaceful, filled with roses, bold spikes of yellow cannas, and flowers she couldn’t identify.
The statues of dead monks ranged across the graveyard, pensive heads bowed over their own tombs, the long foreign grass rising up to their frozen grey waists. Misshapen conifers rose among the forest of headstones against the white adobe walls where two unequal towers, like decorations on a wedding cake, pointed to a fading blue sky above floods of purple and red bougainvillea tumbling down from the roofline.
The names on the graves seemed to come from everywhere: Spain and Ireland, England and the east coast of America. Some tombs were grand, most modest. Death and the relentless maritime climate were slowly reducing them all to crumbling stone.
She wandered through a grove of roses and came upon a small dome-shaped reed hut, recently erected. A sign said it was designed to show the original kind of dwelling place used by the Ohlone, the indigenous people of the area before colonisation. She closed her eyes, thought of the scene in the movie: Scottie, in a brown suit and a 1950s gentleman’s hat, skulking by the overhang of the mission walls, watching from the shadow of a sprawling tomb, furtively spying on Madeleine as she gazed down at a grave, a curious bouquet of roses in her hand.
“She knew you were there all along, Scottie,” Teresa murmured.
“That she did,” Frank agreed.
“You like the movie, too?” she asked.
His eyes clouded over with doubt. “It’s not easy to forget and I don’t know why. Or what it means, if it means anything, or needs to. There’s something …” He chose his words carefully. She noticed how Hank watched him, a quiet look of admiration in his near-identical face. “… there’s something not quite right about it. Something … obsessive. The way everyone seems to be watching that woman. Not just Scottie. The camera, too. Us. The audience. It’s unnatural and it’s supposed to be that way. The thing draws you in, and if you think about it, that makes you uncomfortable.”