“I guess we didn’t,” Frank replied.
“No. Kind of spoils the story, doesn’t it? So what do you really want?”
“We want to find him,” Frank replied. “We want to know the truth. If it’s what you think it is — and our Italian friend believes that, too — we’d maybe hope we can help get him off the hook. So where is he, Jimmy?”
Gaines shook with fury. He was fit and strong for his age. Sometimes, when much younger, he had been a touch free with his fists in a bar after work.
“I don’t know! Why would he tell me where he was going? I’m just an old security guard he used to talk to about the mountains and the woods. When he wanted some new place to go, usually. He liked being on his own. Poor kid thought he was soft on that actress for a while, not that that was ever going to go anywhere. She was a tease. Led him on. Tom never should have gotten mixed up with that Hollywood crowd in the first place.”
Hank and Frank looked at one another.
“We need you to talk to us about those places you showed him,” Hank said.
Gaines nodded in the direction of the great red bridge along the Bay and the wooded Marin headlands beyond.
“Why? You think he’s up there somewhere? Scared and hungry and him a billionaire only four days ago?”
Frank folded his arms. “I don’t think he’s in Acapulco. Do you?”
Jimmy Gaines swore. “It was Josh Jonah, all on his own, I swear it. Tom was just a starstruck idiot. Kid didn’t understand the first thing about money. He actually believed all that new-world crap Lukatmi used to spout.”
“We’re sorry, Jimmy,” Frank apologised. “Truth is, you can insure against anything these days except stupidity, can’t you?”
Gaines stared at them and asked, “Insurance? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what we’re talking about,” Frank replied. “Sorting this thing out once and for all. Please. Just tell us where to look.”
There was a short, unpleasant moment of laughter. Then …
“Oh, what the hell, this was my last day anyway. I guess I get to leave early. You two got good boots?” Gaines was stripping off his jacket. He was still a big man, all muscle under the cheap white security guard shirt.
Hank and Frank looked at each other.
“Just the old ones from the station,” Hank confessed.
“Better go get them. And something for poison oak. Where we’re headed, things bite.”
3
Costa and Teresa Lupo got two cups of foul coffee from the food truck, then headed for a bench by the lake in front of the Palace, listening to the ducks arguing, glad to be away from the ill-tempered crowd.
“Here’s something to think about,” Teresa declared as she sat down. “Josh Jonah told anyone willing to listen, including the papers, that fifty million dollars of Lukatmi money went into Inferno.”
“I know that.”
“Good. Well, it’s not there.”
“They’ve spent it, surely.”
“No. The SFPD can’t find any proof much Lukatmi money went into the movie in the first place. All they can track is a measly five million in the production accounts at Cinecittà. The rest of it doesn’t exist. Not in Rome anyway. They’ve located some odd currency movements out of Lukatmi, substantial ones into offshore accounts, in the Caribbean, South America, the Far East. But not to Rome. Not to anything that seems to go near any kind of movie production. They think that was just Josh Jonah thieving the bank to put something aside for a rainy day.”
Costa found himself wishing he understood the movie industry better. “If they didn’t have the money, how did the thing get finished? What did they pay people with?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Bonetti’s the lead producer and he refuses to discuss the matter with the Americans. He says it’s none of their business. Strictly speaking, it isn’t. Inferno got made by committee. A string of tiny production companies, all set up specifically for the purpose of funding the movie, all based in places where the accounting rules tend to be somewhat opaque. Cayman. Russia. Liechtenstein. Gibraltar. Even Uzbekistan.”
“The company was Italian,” Costa insisted. “I saw the notepaper. I saw the name on the posters. Roberto Tonti Productions.”
“Tonti put up half a million dollars to assemble a script, a cast, and a budget. That’s all. The real money came from ordinary investors, the mob, Lukatmi, God knows where else. We’ll never find out. Not unless the offshore-banking business suddenly decides to open itself up to public scrutiny.”
Costa struggled to make sense of this. “Someone must have paid the bills at Cinecittà. They couldn’t have worked for six, nine months or so without settling at least some of what was owed.”
She grinned. “Catherine says the SFPD have checked through the Carabinieri in Rome. The urgent bills were settled by all those little co-production companies. One from Liechtenstein would handle catering, say. One from Cayman would pick up special effects. I’d place a bet on that being how the mob money got there. They like these places. None of it came from Lukatmi direct, and the Lukatmi accounts show just that five million I told you about going into the production to pay two months’ studio fees at Cinecittà. Nothing more.” She paused. “And for that, they got exclusive world electronic distribution rights and stacks of publicity. Something that ought to have been worth, well, not fifty million dollars, but maybe twenty-five.”
Teresa had a habit of springing information on people this way, Costa thought.
“Why’s Catherine confiding all this to you and not Leo?” he asked.
“Because Leo, being Leo, is utterly fixated on this idea that the real story lies in that rotten money from the men in black suits. He’s not the world’s greatest listener, in case you never noticed. I am. Also I think Catherine likes stringing him along. He’s getting nowhere with her and it’s driving him crazy.”
“Ah.”
Costa had gathered this from watching the two of them together. He’d never seen Falcone fail to get something he wanted in the end. It was an interesting sight, and an experience the old man himself clearly found deeply frustrating.
“Enough of Leo,” Teresa went on. “Here’s something else … Josh Jonah hated old movies.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“He told everyone! In a million media interviews. Anything that wasn’t invented in this bright new century of ours simply didn’t matter to him. There are three long articles a couple of friends tracked down for me. In them he gets asked to name his favourite movies of all time. They’re all the same stupid, violent, computer-generated crap that passes for entertainment these days. Not a human emotion in any of them. No Citizen Kane. No Eisenstein. Nothing Italian. I doubt he’d even heard of Hitchcock.”
The director’s name conjured up the cartoon image of the man, in profile, lips protruding, and that funny old theme tune he’d heard so often on the late-night reruns put out by the more arcane Italian channels.
“If he’d never heard of Hitchcock, who invented Carlotta Valdes?” Costa asked.
“Who sent Maggie Flavier a green ’57 Jaguar?” Teresa shot back. “And told Martin Vogel to pick bitter almonds from a tree next to that fictional grave at Mission Dolores?”
She turned around and pointed to the huge white mansion across the road that was the home of Roberto Tonti. “He knows all about Hitchcock. So does Bonetti. His first movie in Italy was a cheap Hitchcock knockoff. Simon Harvey knows, too. Maybe there’s a movie fan among those mobsters Bonetti tapped for cash.”
“The Carabinieri say it’s over.”