Dante's Numbers Read Free Page A

it.” The officer shook his head sadly. “Let me fetch something and then we may talk a little more. There is no work to be done here, surely. Besides…” He stood up very straight, inordinately proud of himself. “…my university degree was in Dante. All that education shall be of use at last.”
    He departed towards the outdoor bar, leaving Peroni speechless, mouth flapping like a goldfish.
    “I love the Carabinieri,” Teresa observed, just to provoke the two men. “They dress so beautifully. Such delicate manners. They fetch you drinks when you want one. They know Dante. And he's got one of those lovely horses somewhere, too.”
    Falcone stiffened. The inspector was in his best evening suit, something grey, probably from Armani as usual. After the screening, Teresa had elbowed Peroni and pointed out that the old fox had been speaking for quite a long time to a very elegant woman from the San Francisco Police Department. This entire exhibition would move on to America once the show at the Villa Borghese was over. The Californians had a team working on liaison to make sure every last precious historical item stayed safe and intact throughout. Teresa had added—her powers of intelligence-gathering never ceased to amaze him—that Leo's on-off relationship with Raffaella Arcangelo was now going through an extended off phase, perhaps a permanent one. A replacement girlfriend seemed to be on the old inspector's mind.
    “I studied Dante at college for a while,” Falcone noted. “And Petrarch.”
    “I read Batman, when I wasn't rolling around in the gutter with drunks and thieves,” Peroni retorted. “But then, I always did prefer the quiet intellectual life.”
    Teresa planted a kiss on his damaged cheek, which felt good.
    “Well said,” she announced before beaming at the newly returned Carabiniere, who now held four flutes of sparkling wine in his long, well-manicured hands.
    “As a rendition of La Divina Commedia ,” Bodoni began, “I find the film admirable. Tonti follows Dante's structure to the tee. Remember…”
    The man had a professorial, slightly histrionic manner and a curious accent, one that almost sounded foreign. The Carabinieri had a habit of talking down to people. Peroni gritted his teeth, tried to ignore Teresa's infuriatingly dazzling smile, and listened.
    “… this is an analogy for the passage of life itself, from cradle to grave and beyond, written in the first example we have of terza rima. A three-line stanza using the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, et cetera. , et cetera.”
    Peroni downed half his glass in one gulp. “I got that much from the part where the horse-snake-dragon thing chomped someone to pieces.”
    Bodoni nodded. “Good. It's in the numbers that the secret lies, and in particular the number nine. Nine was, of course, regarded as the ‘angelic' integer, since its sole root is three, representing the Trinity, which itself bears the sole root one, representing the Divine Being Himself, the Alpha and the Omega of everything.”
    “Do you ever get to arrest people? Or does the horse do it?” Peroni demanded, aware that Teresa was kicking him in the shin.
    Bodoni blinked, clearly puzzled, then continued. “Nine meant everything to Dante. It appears in the context of his beloved Beatrice throughout. Nine are the spheres of Heaven. Correspondingly—since symmetry is also fundamental—”
    “Nine are the circles of Hell,” Peroni interrupted. “See? I was listening. Worse than that, I was watching.” He scowled at the glass and tipped it sideways to empty the rest of the warm, flat liquid on the concrete pavement outside the Casa del Cinema. It didn't take a genius to understand that last part. The three-hour movie was divided into nine component segments, each lasting twenty minutes and prefaced with a title announcing its content, a string of salacious and suggestive headings—”The Wanton,” “The Gluttonous,” “The Violent”—that served as