Costa told her a little of Teresa’s ideas, and how the woman who had first approached Allan Prime had introduced herself as a character in the movie.
She sat on the sofa, bare, slender legs tucked beneath her. “Well, I guess it’s time I followed everyone’s advice. Will you watch it with me?” She closed her eyes and looked exhausted. “I’ve been on my own so much since all this craziness began.”
“Where’s the movie?” he asked.
She picked up the phone, called someone, and ordered a DVD. “It’ll be an hour or so. Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“I can order some food, too.”
He got up. Costa knew he needed activity, something that would take his mind off Dante Alighieri and Alfred Hitchcock, Dino Bonetti and the shattered corpse of Josh Jonah, prone on the floor of a run-down SoMa apartment block.
Maggie followed him and watched as he rifled through the kitchen drawers and cabinets.
“You have food,” he said. “That’s a start.”
“Old food. One of the rental people must have left it.”
He found a small envelope of dried porcini, a packet of arborio rice, a couple of shallots in the vegetable rack along with a chunk of Parmesan wrapped in foil. Five minutes later he had the makings of a risotto. It felt good to cook again. It felt even better to have Maggie Flavier leaning on the threshold of the door, looking at him as if she’d never seen anything like this in her life.
“Any wine recommendations?” she asked, nodding at the floor-length chilled cabinet filled with bottles that looked a lot more expensive than anything he usually drank.
“I’ll leave that to you.”
She opened the glass door, peered inside, and pulled out a bottle. “I bought this in Rome. Is it any good?”
He looked at the 2004 Terredora Greco di Tufo and said, “It’ll do. Can I leave you to set the table?”
“Men!” she exclaimed, and went to the kitchen drawers, where she removed a tablecloth and place settings.
“After that …” he shouted through the open door, “… we need some cheese grated.”
It wasn’t the best risotto Costa had ever made. But he didn’t want someone else’s food. Not with her.
They ate and talked. Towards the end she looked at him and asked, “Did you used to cook? For Emily?”
He had to force himself to remember. There was now a distance between the present and the past. Perhaps it was San Francisco. Perhaps it was Maggie Flavier. Or both. But he could now see the winter’s nightmare with some perspective, could stand back from it and feel apart from the pain and despair it had brought.
“Sometimes. Sometimes she did. Emily wasn’t a vegetarian. If I was working nights, I’d come home occasionally and I could smell steak in the kitchen.” He looked at her. “Or bacon and eggs.”
“Were you upset?”
“Of course not. It was her home, too.” He could picture the two of them together, inside the house near the Appian Way. “It used to smell good, if I’m honest. If I ate meat …” He shrugged. “But I don’t. And I didn’t like the smoking much. She went outside for that.”
Maggie held up her hands. “I won’t smoke inside either. Promise.”
“It’s your home,” he said.
“No, it’s not. It’s just somewhere I live from time to time. Did you think about it? Being together? Did you ever … question whether it was right?”
“Not once. Not for a second,” he said immediately. “We had arguments. We saw things different ways. None of that mattered. I can’t explain. It happened.” A flash of recollection, of a cold, hard winter’s day by the mausoleum of Augustus, ran through his head. “Then it was over.”
She reached out and touched the back of his hand.
“I could feel something. Your sadness. Outside that little children’s cinema. Before we went inside. Before I even knew who you were. It was like something tangible.”
“Not good for a police officer.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m freaky Maggie Flavier. I see things other people don’t. Lucky them.”
He got up and started to take the plates.
“No,” she insisted. “You cooked. I load the dishwasher. Sit. Make yourself comfortable.”
She went back into the kitchen. He walked to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, wondering what he saw, what he felt.
When he returned, she was tipping the video deliveryman at the door. After that she put the disc in some machine by the fireplace and turned the TV on. They sat next to each other, opposite the gigantic screen. She picked up a couple of remotes. The curtains on the apartment closed themselves slowly; the light fell.
The black-and-white credits ran: the logo of the Paramount peak, the awkward, jarring music he had come to associate with the movie. Then a brutal close-up of a woman, zooming into her eye with a cruel, unforgiving honesty, monochrome turning to bloodred, a swirling vortex spinning out from the black, unseeing pupil.
He felt cold. He felt lost and he’d no idea why.
6
It got cold quickly in the woods. At least, Frank Boynton assumed the way he felt was due to the temperature of the out-of-the-way patch of the sequoia forest, not some innate primeval sense of dread on his part. He’d read more noir books than he could count, watched the entire school of movies in the genre. He’d thought he understood a little about fear from all that dedicated study, but now he realised he was wrong. There was a world of difference between theory and practice. Reality was a lot less complicated. It also seemed to happen a lot more quickly. He could almost feel the minutes slipping away from them.
So he sat there in silence, thinking, seated on the damp, cold ground, his hands tied behind his back, the two brothers bound together so securely there really wasn’t much point in contemplating escape. He couldn’t run as well as either of their captors even if it was a level playing field, without ropes, without a slippery dark forest where the light was fading and he hadn’t a clue which way to turn.
The Muir Woods weren’t the overrun tourist destination he’d believed, not in this part anyway. Here, the woods felt vast and timeless and desolate, an army of identical redwood monoliths stretching towards a darkening sky in every unfathomable direction. A place where a man could lie dead for months and maybe never be found.
Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black had gone off to a small clearing. They’d been there a long time, talking out of earshot. Making a phone call or two. Frank could hear the distant electronic beep of a phone and envied the way it communicated so easily, so swiftly with the outside world.
If he could just find his own …
They’d be dead by the time anyone came. The idea of rescue was one confined to the pages of fiction. In the real world there was no escape, except perhaps through meek, obedient submission. The brothers had told Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black what they knew: an Italian woman they both liked believed Tom was innocent and might be able to help if only he’d get in touch. Then she’d pass him on to a friendly cop who, for once, didn’t come with a bunch of preconceptions about presumed guilt. Frank had taken the lead, as he usually did in such situations, offering to make the call, promising he’d do nothing to compromise their location, or Jimmy Gaines’s identity.
They’d listened, then left. Something in the way they walked hadn’t filled him with optimism.
Frank wriggled, trying to get a little more comfortable. He wished he could look at his brother eye-to-eye. He wished he could understand what might be going on in Hank’s head. Closeness could make you deaf and blind to things that sensitive, observant people spotted instantly. Over the decades, their relationship had settled into an easy, unspoken rhythm. Frank was the practical one, the right-brainer, as Teresa Lupo had so cannily noticed. Frank handled the money and the day-to-day problems of keeping the house in the Marina going: bills and taxes, repairs and improvements. Hank was the dreamer, the would-be poet, more interested in the San Francisco of yesterday than now, more obsessed with the cerebral puzzles of Conan Doyle than the gutter reality of Dashiell Hammett that Frank preferred. Neither had much real preparation for their present quandary. Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade were myths, ghostly actors in tales that chose entertainment over mundane, prosaic reality.