Dante's Numbers Read Free Page B

insufficient warning for the grisly scene to come. “It still looked like a bad horror movie to me. Very bad.”
    “As it was meant to,” Teresa suggested. “That's Roberto Tonti's background. You remember those films from the 1970s?”
    “Anathema. Mania. Dementia ,” Bodoni concurred.
    “Dyspepsia? Nausea…?” Peroni asked. “Has he made those yet? Or does the rubbish we just saw have an alternative title? All that…blood and noise.”
    Bodoni mumbled something unintelligible. Peroni wondered if he'd hit home.
    It was Teresa who answered. “Blood and noise and death are central to art, Gianni,” she insisted. “They remind us it's impossible to savour the sweetness of life without being reminded of the proximity, and the certainty, of death. That's at the heart of gialli. It's why I love them. Some of them anyway.”
    Peroni hated that word. Gialli. The yellows. To begin with, the term had simply referred to the cheap crime thrillers that had come out after the war in plain primrose jackets. Usually they were detective stories and private-eye tales, often imported from America. Later the term had spread to the movies, into a series of lurid and often extraordinarily violent films that had begun to appear from the sixties on. Gory, strange, supernatural tales through which Tonti had risen to prominence. Peroni knew enough of that kind of work to understand it would never be to his own taste. It was all too extreme and, to his mind, needless.
    “I hardly think anyone in our line of work needs reminding of a lesson like that,” he complained, finding his thoughts shifting to Nic, poor Nic, still lost, still wandering listless and without any inner direction two seasons after the murder of his wife.
    “We all do, Gianni,” Teresa responded, “because we all, in the end, forget.” She took his arm, a glint in her pale, smart eyes telling him she knew exactly what he was thinking.
    Teresa's hand felt warm in his. He squeezed it and said, very seriously, “Give me Bambi any time.” He and Falcone had ambled to the children's cinema earlier and seen the poster there, then Peroni had mentioned it to Nic in passing, and had noted how interested he'd seemed.
    “There's a death in Bambi ,” Teresa pointed out. “Without it there'd be no story.”
    He did remember, and it was important. His own daughter had been in tears in the darkness when they went to see that movie, unable to see that her father was in much the same state.
    “This is an interesting work also,” the Carabinieri officer, Bodoni, interjected. The man was, it seemed to Peroni, something of a movie bore, perhaps an understandable attribute for a person who spent his working day indolently riding the pleasant green spaces of the Villa Borghese park. The state police had officers in the vicinity, too, since it was unthinkable they should not venture where the Carabinieri went. A few were mounted, though rather less ostentatiously, while others patrolled the narrow lanes in a couple of tiny Smart cars specially selected for the job. It was all show, a duty Peroni would never, in a million years, countenance. Nothing ever happened up here on the hill overlooking the city, with views all the way to the distant dome of St. Peter's and beyond. This wasn't a job for a real cop. It was simply ceremonial window dressing for the tourists and the city authorities.
    “You can go and watch it now if you like,” Falcone said, looking as if he were tiring of the man's presence, too. “It's showing in the little children's cinema. We saw the poster when we were doing the rounds.”
    “So did Maggie Flavier,” Teresa added. “Charming woman, for a star, and a perfect Beatrice, too. Beautiful yet distant, unreal somehow. I spoke to her and she didn't look down her nose at me like the rest of them. She said she was going to try and sneak in there. Anything to get away from this nonsense. Apparently there's some hiccup in tonight's event. Allan Prime has gone