looked at each of them and smiled. “We’re in the movie business now, remember? Do the words ‘special effects’ mean anything at all?”
The short baton slammed into the top of the glass cabinet. Teresa raked it round and round. When she had enough room to manoeuvre, she reached in and, to the curses of both Falcone and his Carabinieri counterparts, carefully lifted out the head and held it in her hands, turning the thing round, making approving noises.
Teresa ran one large pale finger along the ragged line of blood and tissue at the base and then, to Peroni’s horror, put the gory tip to her mouth and licked it.
“Food colouring,” she said. “Fake blood. It’s the wrong shade. Didn’t you notice? Movie blood always is. Flesh and skin … it’s all a joke.” The tissue at the ragged torn neckline came away in her fingers: cotton wool stained a livid red, stuck weakly to the base of the head with glue.
Her fingers picked at the blue latex cladding around the base of the neck and revealed perfect skin beneath, the colour and complexion of that of a store window dummy. Peroni laughed. He’d known something was wrong.
“But why?” she asked, puzzled, talking entirely to herself.
She turned the head again in her hands, looked into the bulbous eyes staring out of the slits made in the blue plastic. They were clearly artificial, not human at all. It was all legerdemain, and obvious once you learned how to look.
Then Teresa Lupo gazed more closely into the face and her dark, full eyebrows creased in bafflement. She pulled back the blue plastic around the lips to reveal a mouth set in an expression of pain and bewilderment. More plastic came away as she tore at the tight, enclosing film to show the face. There was a mask there. It had been crudely fastened to a store dummy’s head to give it form. She removed sufficient film to allow her to lift the object beneath from the base. Then she held it up and rotated the thing in her fingers.
“Hair,” she said, nodding at the underside. “Whiskers.” Her fingers indicated a small stain on the interior, near the chin. “And that’s real blood.”
She glanced at Falcone. “This is from a man, Leo,” Teresa Lupo insisted. “Allan Prime.”
The inspector stood there, a finger to his lips, thinking. The Carabinieri couple said nothing. More of their officers were pushing back the crowd now. Peroni could hear the whine of an ambulance siren working its way to the park.
Teresa placed the mask on the podium table and rotated the pale dummy’s head in her hands, ripping back the remaining covering.
“There’s something else,” she murmured.
The words emerged as she tore off the blue film. They were written in a flowing, artistic script across the top of the skull. It reminded Peroni of the huckster’s props they found when they raided fake clairvoyants taking the gullible to the cleaners. They had objects like this, with each portion of the head marked out for its metaphysical leanings. In this case the message covered everything, from ear to ear, as if there were only a single lesson to be absorbed.
“ ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,’ ” Teresa said, as if reciting from memory. “ ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ ” She shook her head. “Damnation in the mind of a poet. That’s what was written on the Gate of Hell when Dante entered.”
A noise made Peroni glance back at the crowd. Costa was striding toward them, looking pale but determined, a gun hanging loose in his hand. By his side was the actress from the movie, her eyes downcast and glassy.
Costa nodded at the dummy’s head in Teresa Lupo’s hands, and asked, “What happened?”
The pathologist told him before Falcone could object.
“And you?” Falcone demanded.
Maggie Flavier was staring at the mask, shocked, silent, her cheeks smeared with smudged mascara.
Costa glanced at her before he answered. Then he said, “It seemed as if someone was trying to attack Miss Flavier. Then …”
The senior Carabinieri man found his voice.
“This is our case. Our evidence. I have made a phone call to Maresciallo Quattrocchi, Falcone. He was called away briefly. Now he returns. You learn. This cannot—”
He fell abruptly silent as Costa lifted the handgun, pointed it at the fake head, and fired. The sound silenced them all. Maggie stifled a choking sob. There was nothing new there when the smoke and the racket had cleared. No damage. Not another fresh shard of