Dante's Numbers (19 page)

T
HE 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.

Maggie had been transferred to Park Hill Sanatorium after several hours in the ER of a private hospital in the centre of the city. The corridors resembled those of a fine hotel, not any medical institution he'd entered. Vases of fresh flowers stood in every corner and alcove, piped music sang discreetly in the corridors. Smiling white-clad staff wandered around nonchalantly. He found it impossible to imagine anything more distant than this place from the chaos and crush of a Roman public hospital. The rich and famous lived differently. Somehow that thought had not occurred to him during the brief time he had known her. Beauty and fame apart, Maggie seemed
… ordinary
was the word that first occurred to him as he walked to her room, carrying a twenty-dollar bouquet of roses.

Yet he couldn't get out of his head the image of her standing in front of the paintings in the Legion of Honor, choosing which one—which woman from the past, from someone else's imagination—she would select for her next role. Maggie Flavier enjoyed being possessed in this way because for a few months or, in the case of
Inferno
, more, she no longer had to deal with the difficult task of defining her own identity. In the skin of others, she was free to escape the drudgery of everyday existence, the old, unanswerable questions: who am I, and why am I here?

The questions Costa asked himself every day. The ones that made him feel alive. He couldn't begin to understand why she avoided them with such relentless deliberation. All he felt sure of was that she was aware of this act of self-deception, acutely, for every minute of the performance.

She was beneath the sheets of a large double bed, propped up on pillows next to a wall filled with flowers. The room was large and flooded with light; the window behind her opened onto a gorgeous vista of the skyline of downtown San Francisco and the ocean beyond. Simon Harvey sat on a chair by her side, holding her hand, staring into her tired green eyes with an expression that managed to combine both sympathy and some sense of ownership. Her hair was still blonde, though it now seemed dull and shapeless.

“Nic,” Maggie said, smiling warmly at his appearance.

“I didn't mean to interrupt.”

“You didn't,” Maggie said quietly. “Simon's an old friend. We did a movie together in the Caribbean. When was it…”

“Five years ago,” Harvey answered, releasing her hand, still not looking in Costa's direction. The publicist seemed different in America—more at home, more powerful. In Rome he'd appeared a tangential, almost servile figure, running round the set at Cinecittà doing the bidding of anyone who called, Tonti or Bonetti or even Allan Prime. Here, in Maggie's room, he didn't look like the kind of man to take orders. “Piece of derivative pirate crap posing as art-house. It bombed. At least we got paid. Not everyone did.”

Harvey stood. He seemed bigger somehow in the bright, hard California light streaming through the long windows.

“I don't know whether I should shake you by the hand or punch you in the mouth. If it wasn't for you, Maggie might not be alive. And she might not have gotten into this situation to begin with. What do you think?”

“I wouldn't advise the second. It would be impolite, and I can't imagine anyone in the publicity business would want that.”

“You're a smart-ass, Costa. Maybe you can get away with that in Rome. You won't get away with it here. Remember that when you need me.”

“Simon,” Maggie protested, “will you stop being so rude? I told you a million times—it was
my
idea to play hooky from all that tedium at the exhibition. If you want to blame someone, blame me.”

“I do. And him. The pair of you.” He extended his hand to Costa. “But Maggie's alive and I'm grateful for that. And now the two of you are all over the papers. So I have a professional interest, too.”

His grip was firm and powerful.

“Not in me you don't,” Costa said.

“Please,” Maggie implored him. “Sit down, Nic. Hear Simon out.” She looked at him and Costa couldn't interpret what was in her eyes. Dependence? Fear? “He's my publicist, too. Not just the movie's. My advisor. I need you to listen to him.”

Costa sat down on the end of the bed and said, “But first I need you to tell me how you are. That's why I came here.”

The actress leaned back against the pillows. Her face fell into the shadow cast by the long drapes.

“I'm exhausted, my head hurts, I'm full of dope and glucose. I've had worse hangovers.” A scowl creased her half-hidden face. “It was an allergy, that's all. All I needed was a shot—and thanks to you, that happened—and I'll be fine. They say I can leave here soon. The premiere's next Thursday. I'll be fine for that.”

“Why the rush?”

“What kind of business do you think this is?” Harvey demanded. “Get up at ten, work for an hour, then go home and party? Celebrity never stops. Not for weekends. Not for sickness. Not for anything.”

“I understand that.”

Maggie shook her head. “No, you don't. No one can. Not until it happens.”

“You don't even escape it when you're dead,” Harvey said. “Josh Jonah's people are looking at outtake footage of Allan Prime right now, seeing what they can CGI for the sequel. That's going to be an interesting one for the money men. Who gets the fee?”

“What?” Costa was unable to comprehend what he was saying.

“There's going to be a second
Inferno
,” Maggie told him. “They'll work up Allan's outtakes on computers.”

“God knows what the storyline's going to be,” Harvey barked with mirthless laughter. “How many circles can Hell have? Mind you, Roberto didn't bother so much with that for the original. Why worry now? After what's happened, all the publicity, the interest
…Inferno's
no longer just a movie. It's becoming an obsession. And that could mean a franchise. A brand. Like Sony or McDonald's or Leonardo da Vinci. They could get eight years, maybe even a decade out of this. With or without Tonti. Or any of us. When something's this big, no one's indispensable.”

The publicist took Maggie's hand again. “And she—my friend and my client—is going to be a part of that brand. I'm going to make sure of that. A precious and important part. If we handle this story about the two of you right, it works in everyone's favour. Maggie's. Yours. The movie's—”

“I am not your client,” Costa interrupted, suddenly angry. “I am not in your business.”

“You are now,” Harvey retorted. “Don't you get it? The moment those pictures of you two appeared in the papers, you lost everything you ever had. Your privacy. Your identity. Your
soul.
It's all out there…” He pointed to the window. “You've just become the livelihood of people you wouldn't wish on a dog. They feed their kids off you, they take their wives and their mistresses out to dinner on what you make for them. Break that deal…”

“There is no deal. This has nothing to do with me.”

“As if you have a choice! It's too late for that. You're part of the story. Screw with my client's ability to fulfill her potential and”—Harvey bunched a fist and shook it in Costa's face—”you will answer to me.
Capisce
, Soverintendente?”

“An intelligent man spends a year in Rome,” Costa observed without emotion, “and still your accent sounds like that of a bad actor in a cheap gangster movie.”

“Don't push me…”

“Will you both shut up!
Will you…?”

She had her hands to her ears. Her face spoke of pain and fatigue. Costa felt something elemental tug at his heart, an emotion he hadn't known since Emily was alive. Guilt mingled with a deep, intense sense of misgiving about what might lie ahead.

“I was beginning to feel better until you two started screaming at each other,” she moaned, real tears in her eyes. “What the hell gave you the right to walk in here and start bawling each other out like a couple of teenagers?”

“Nothing,” Costa answered, and placed the bouquet of roses on the bed. It suddenly seemed insignificant next to the gigantic displays of orchids and garish, gigantic blooms he couldn't begin to name ranged against the wall.

“Is this what you want?” he asked softly. “Another year with Roberto Tonti? Another year of being someone else?”

She turned to Harvey, squeezed his hand, and said, “Leave this to me, Simon.”

The American left without a word, just a single threatening glance in Costa's direction.

Maggie beckoned to Nic to take the empty seat. She held his hand, looked into his face. He wanted to ask himself who it was that he saw before him. Her? Or someone else, someone stolen from a painting?

Costa felt oddly, reluctantly detached. As if someone were watching, directing this scene, one that was happening in some place that was apart from all that he regarded as reality.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, looking so pale, so frail and fallible and human, eyes moist with fatigue and emotion.

“There's nothing for you to be sorry about, Maggie. Just rest. Take your time. Think things through.”

She laughed through her tears. “Time. I don't have any, Nic. I never have any. There are a million actresses out there screaming to take my place, most of them younger, smarter, better than me. Dino Bonetti wants to make this sequel. There's a lot of money at stake. I have to sign now, to commit. Otherwise…” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her dressing gown. “Let's face it. Nobody knows who the hell Beatrice is anyway. All she does is stand there looking transcendental, promising Dante they'll be together one day, if only he lives a good life. Any actress in a blonde wig could play her. I'm thirty-one years old. If it wasn't for all this publicity, they wouldn't even be offering me the part. I'll be thirty-four, thirty-five before the movie even appears. In this profession that's ancient. I can't say no.”

Her eyes stared into his. “Also…” She hesitated. “I'd be in Rome, too. For the filming. I thought…you might like that idea.”

“I'd like that very much,” he answered honestly.

She reached down and took the modest bouquet of roses, smelled them, and said, “These are the nicest flowers anyone's ever given me.”

“The ones in Rome…” he said, and that instant a picture entered his head, of the two of them walking through the Campo dei Fiori, hand in hand, past the flower stalls, with not a single photographer in sight.

“Tell me about it, Nic,” she urged. “About you. About where you live. Your family. About who you are.”

He held her hand in a room that seemed like a suite in a hotel he could never hope to afford, staring down towards the city and the distant blue Pacific Ocean, and he told her. Nic Costa talked, as much to himself as to her. Of a quiet, difficult child taking lone bicycle rides on the Appian Way, of grapes and wine, of the countryside and the ruins, the tombs and the churches, the simple, modest rural life that his family had enjoyed as he grew up, watching their close-knit love for each other fall apart through sickness and age, however much he tried to hold back time, however hard he fought to paper over the cracks.

Some things were inevitable, even for the young.

He'd no idea how long he spoke, only that she never said a word. When he was finished, his own eyes were stinging from tears. He felt as if some immense inner burden had lifted from him, one so heavy, familiar, and persistent he had long ago ceased to notice its presence.

She was sound asleep against the pillows, her mouth open, snoring softly.

Costa picked up the roses from the coverlet and placed them next to the bed. Then he let himself out of the room.

The staff were no strangers to celebrity. They guided him back to the side entrance, where he strode out into the bright, cold July sun.

A sea of bodies surrounded him immediately. Reporters jabbed mikes in his face. Photographers with cameras roared his name.

They followed him down the street. Across the road stood Simon Harvey. As Costa passed, Harvey tipped an imaginary hat and smiled sarcastically. This was his work, Costa realized. A publicist's way of saying, “Do as I say or pay the price.”

Costa said nothing, simply smiled for the cameras and tried to look as pleasant and as baffled as he could.

When he reached the car, he drove down the hill into Haight-Ashbury, found the nearest empty café, and ordered a coffee. It was nearly four in the afternoon. He'd achieved nothing all day.