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, James Stewart, their heads floating in the ether.
“Note,” the skinny one identified by his shirt as Josh Jonah, Founder, Ideologist, Visioneer, ordered, “the absence of noise.”
“I can hear you,” Quattrocchi snapped, to no avail.
“If we were in an ordinary projectionist’s room,” Jonah continued, “we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation. There would be film rattling through the projector. Physical artefacts. Needless expense. Time and money thrown away without reason.”
“I am an officer of the Carabinieri. Not an accountant.”
“We’re all accountants in the end.” It was the other American, a big muscular man with a boyish face and a ponytail of long wavy dark hair. Quattrocchi peered at his T-shirt. It read, Tom Black, Founder, Architect, Corporate Conscience. Black seemed younger than his partner. A little less sure of himself, too. “In the sense that we pay for things. You’d like to get movies quicker, cheaper, easier, wouldn’t you?”
“Right now,” Quattrocchi blurted out so loudly that he felt sure his voice had carried into the cinema beyond, with its audience of VIPs, “I would like to know where Allan Prime is, why we have a dead actor in the park out there, and what the hell is going on around here.” He glowered at their shirts. “Who is Lukatmi anyway? Some Indian god? And who the hell are you?”
The two men looked at each other and Tom Black smiled.
“That was kind of the positioning we were looking for. Three million dollars got blown there. Worth every penny,” he said.
“We’re backers,” the skinny one boasted. “We’ve got money in this thing. Without us, this movie would never have got made.”
“What—” Quattrocchi began to say.
“Lukatmi’s got nothing to do with India,” the quieter American interrupted. “Lukatmi. ‘Look at me.’ It’s a philosophical statement about not hiding away, about being a part of the digital lifestream, a star in your own right, out there for everyone to see.”
“Like YouTube,” Bonetti added, and Josh Jonah howled, “No, no, no, no, no! How many freaking times do I have to say this? YouTube is yesterday …”
“When Google bought them …” Tom Black shook his head. His broad, young face was so sorrowful it looked as if someone had died. “… it was all over. They don’t understand the whole mash-up thing. The behemoth days are past.”
“Lukatmi is just the medium, not the message,” Jonah added, taking over, clearly the boss. “Except for the paid-for content, we don’t own a damned thing. It’s not for us to dictate to human beings what they create or what they see. If you have a problem with that, don’t watch.”
Quattrocchi suddenly realised he’d read about these people in the newspapers. They’d found some loophole that allowed them to be absolved of any legal responsibility for what was, on the surface, carried by their network. They were, if he understood this correctly, like a dating agency. Their computers put someone wanting something in touch with someone offering it. The relationship was consummated in a way that had, so far,