Read Online Dante's Numbers by David Hewson - Free Book Online

found one of the staff who was on duty. There are details in the visitors' book.”
    He looked at Adele Neri and asked, “Is the name Carlotta Valdes familiar?”
    She drew on the cigarette and shook her head. “No. Spanish?”
    “A woman calling herself that arrived to see Allan Prime at eight-thirty this morning. They left together around ten. Mr. Prime looked very happy, apparently. Expectant even.”
    Falcone shook his head in bafflement, lost for words for a moment, as if the investigation were slipping away from them before it had even begun.
    “A man is dead,” Costa reminded him.
    “His death is the Carabinieri's problem, as you have made very clear.”
    “Also…”
    “Also the death mask we were supposed to protect is missing,” Falcone went on. “I am aware of that. It may be all we have. A case of art theft.”
    Costa struggled to see some sense in the situation. It was impossible to guess precisely what kind of case they had on their hands. The loss of a precious historic object? Or something altogether darker and more personal?
    “The man who was killed in the park,” he persisted, regardless of Falcone's growing exasperation. “He's been identified. We were told by the Carabinieri as a matter of course, at the same time they put in a formal request for an interview. I need to report to them with Signora Flavier.”
    “Well?” Falcone asked.
    “His name was Peter Jamieson. He was an actor, originally from Los Angeles. The man moved to Rome a decade ago, principally playing bit parts, Americans for cheap TV productions at Cinecittà.”
    “Tell me. Did he have a part in Inferno?” Falcone looked ready to explode.
    “Nonspeaking. Barely visible. There's no reason why anyone from the cast should have recognised him at all.”
    The inspector pointed a bony finger in Costa's face, as if he'd found the guilty party already.
    “If this is some kind of publicity stunt gone wrong, I will put every last one of those painted puppets in jail.”
    “If…” Costa repeated, and found himself staring again at the powder on the bed, and the silhouette of Allan Prime's head outlined there.

M ARESCIALLO GIANLUCA QUATTROCCHI WAS furious on several fronts. The screening had begun without his permission. Key pieces of evidence had been removed from the scene by the morgue monkeys of the state police, under the supervision of Teresa Lupo, a woman Quattrocchi had encountered, and been bested by, in the past, on more than one occasion. And now Leo Falcone had placed a team in Allan Prime's home without consulting the Carabinieri, though the state police inspector knew full well that security for the film cast was not his responsibility and never would be.
    As a result Quattrocchi's bull-like face appeared even more vexed than normal, and he found himself sweating profusely inside the fine wool uniform he had chosen for an occasion that was meant to be social and ceremonial, not business. He stood at the back of the projection room, temporarily speechless with fury, not least because his principal contact within the crew, the publicist Simon Harvey, appeared to have been spirited away by Falcone's people, too. All he got in his place was the smug, beaming Dino Bonetti, a loathsome creature of dubious morality, and two young ponytailed Americans with, it seemed to him, a hazy grasp of the seriousness of the situation.
    While everyone else wore evening dress, the two young men had removed their jackets to reveal T-shirts bearing the name Lukatmi , with a logo showing some kind of oriental goddess, a buxom figure with skimpy clothing, a beguiling smile, and multiple arms, each holding a variety of different cameras—movie, still, phones, little webcams of the kind the Carabinieri used for CCTV—all linked into one end of a snaking cable pumping out a profusion of images into a starry sky.
    Quattrocchi peered more closely. There were faces within the stars, a galaxy of Hollywood notables—Monroe, Gable, Hepburn,