the world. I’d hate to be around if he got the chance to try. Now you go guard your old ‘junk.’ And stay out of trouble.”
“This analyst?” Falcone asked tentatively. “He’s a … friend? Nothing more?”
Catherine threw her head back and laughed. “He’s an imaginary friend. I made it all up just to see what happened. Companies like Lukatmi come and go. If they don’t have someone preparing a class somewhere, they’re probably out of business anyway.”
“Oh,” Falcone said softly, then put a finger to his cheek and fell silent.
“Can I drop you somewhere?” Catherine asked. “Such as the Palace of Fine Arts and that exhibition you’re supposed to be guarding?”
“We can walk,” Falcone answered. “We need the fresh air. But thank you.”
6
THE PARK HILL SANATORIUM WAS LOCATED IN AN old mansion on Buena Vista Avenue, opposite a quiet green space overlooking the city. Costa drove lazily through Haight-Ashbury to get there, then parked two blocks away on a steep hillside street. The staff entrance was around the corner. From the ground-floor hall, he could see that the front of the building was besieged by reporters and cameramen, the road choked with live TV broadcast vans. Baffled residents of this wealthy, calm suburb walked past shaking their heads, many with immaculately trimmed pedigreed dogs attached to long leads. This wasn’t the kind of scene owners or animals were used to witnessing. They probably preferred it on TV, beamed from somewhere else, distant, visible but out of reach. Costa felt grateful that Catherine Bianchi had called ahead to make arrangements for him to enter by a different door. Otherwise, he knew, he’d have been forced to run the gamut of the media mob.
Maggie had been transferred to Park Hill Sanatorium after several hours in the ER of a private hospital in the centre of the city. The corridors resembled those of a fine hotel, not any medical institution he’d entered. Vases of fresh flowers stood in every corner and alcove, piped music sang discreetly in the corridors. Smiling white-clad staff wandered around nonchalantly. He found it impossible to imagine anything more distant than this place from the chaos and crush of a Roman public hospital. The rich and famous lived differently. Somehow that thought had not occurred to him during the brief time he had known her. Beauty and fame apart, Maggie seemed … ordinary was the word that first occurred to him as he walked to her room, carrying a twenty-dollar bouquet of roses.
Yet he couldn’t get out of his head the image of her standing in front of the paintings in the Legion of Honor, choosing which one—which woman from the past, from someone else’s imagination—she would select for her next role. Maggie Flavier enjoyed being possessed in this way because for a few months or, in the case of Inferno, more, she no longer had to deal with the difficult task of defining her own identity. In the skin of others, she was free to escape the drudgery of everyday existence, the old, unanswerable questions: who am I, and why am I here?
The questions Costa asked himself every day. The ones that made him feel alive. He couldn’t begin to understand why she avoided them with such relentless deliberation. All he felt sure of was that she was aware of this act of self-deception, acutely, for every minute of the performance.
She was beneath the sheets of a large double bed, propped up on pillows next to a wall filled with flowers. The room was large and flooded with light; the window behind her opened onto a gorgeous vista of the skyline of downtown San Francisco and the ocean beyond. Simon Harvey sat on a chair by her side, holding her hand, staring into her tired green eyes with an expression that managed to combine both sympathy and some sense of ownership. Her hair was still blonde, though it now seemed dull and shapeless.
“Nic,” Maggie said, smiling warmly at his appearance.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t,” Maggie said quietly. “Simon’s an old friend. We did a movie together in the Caribbean. When was it …”
“Five years ago,” Harvey answered, releasing her hand, still not looking in Costa’s direction. The publicist seemed different in America—more at home, more powerful. In Rome he’d appeared a tangential, almost servile figure, running round the set at Cinecittà doing the bidding of anyone who called, Tonti or Bonetti or even Allan Prime. Here, in Maggie’s room, he didn’t look like the kind of man