mega reputations?—all about to go down the toilet.”
Teresa shot him a caustic look. “Stop being so bitchy. This is the biggest movie to be made at Cinecittà since Cleopatra. It won’t fail.”
“Cleopatra failed.”
“Those were different times. Roberto Tonti has a hit on his hands. You can feel it in the air.” She glanced at the crowds of evening suits and cocktail dresses gathered for the premiere. “Can’t you?”
“Possibly.” Falcone handed his untouched glass to a passing waiter. “The critics say it could be an unmitigated disaster, financially and artistically. Or a runaway success. Who cares?”
Peroni scanned the shifting crowd. Some of them cared, he thought. A lot. Then his eyes turned away from the milling crush of bodies and found the green open space of the park.
He was astonished to see a lone figure on a chestnut stallion, galloping across the expanse of verdant lawn leading away from the cinema complex. Bodoni of the Carabinieri didn’t look the fey, aesthetic intellectual he’d appeared earlier. He’d been transformed, the way an actor is when he first comes on stage.
This Bodoni looked like a soldier from another time. He charged across the dry, parched summer grass of the park of the Villa Borghese, down towards the Cinema dei Piccoli.
High in the officer’s hand was the familiar silhouette of a gun.
THEY SAT ON the wall outside the Cinema dei Piccoli.
Maggie looked a little shamefaced. “I’m sorry I went all boo-hoo. Bag of nerves, really. You’re lucky I didn’t throw up. I’m always like this at premieres. I took three months off after Inferno and it feels as if it never happened. Now I just have to do it all over again. Be someone else, somewhere else. Oh, and you dropped this in your rush to bundle me out of there …”
His battered leather wallet was in her hands, open to show the photo there. Emily, two months before she died, bright-eyed in the sun, her golden hair gleaming. It had been taken on the day they took a picnic to the gardens on the Palatine.
“No need to explain,” Costa said, glancing at the picture, then taking it gently from her. “I don’t know why films do that. It’s not as if they’re real.”
Her green eyes flashed at him. “Define ‘real.’ Bambi’s a bitch. Disney knew how to twist your emotions. It’s a scary talent, real enough for me.” She stared at the grass at their feet. “They all have it.”
“Who?”
“Movies and the people who make them. We exist to screw around with your heads. To do things you’d like to do yourself but lack the courage. Or the common sense. It’s a small gift but a rare one, thank God. Beats waiting on tables, though.” She hesitated. “Your wife’s lovely.”
“Yes,” he replied automatically. “She was.”
He was distracted, watching what was coming their way from the gathering by the cinema complex, trying to make sense of this strange, unexpected sight. He knew what the park Carabinieri were like. They were indolent toy soldiers. Usually.
The woman with the Peter Pan haircut who sat next to him looked like a child who’d been placed inside her shimmering blue evening dress on someone’s orders, someone who’d created her for a ceremony, or another hidden purpose. She held a damp tissue in her pale slender fingers. Her makeup had run a little from the tears.
“Did something happen back there?” he said, and nodded in the direction of the gathering. “At the premiere?”
He could hear the distant clatter of hooves as the horse galloped towards them with a strange, stiff figure on its back. Maggie Flavier squinted into the sunlight and replied, “I don’t think so. Although Allan Prime hadn’t shown up to make his speech, for some reason. That’s unusual. Allan’s normally completely reliable.” She registered the movement ahead of them, and narrowed her eyes further.
Costa stood up and said, “Go inside, please. Now.”
“Why?”
He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like the sight of a Carabiniere in full dress uniform storming madly across this normally peaceful park in their direction.
The rider was getting closer. Maggie rose to stand next to Nic. Her arm went immediately through his, out of fear or some need for closeness, he was unsure which. Briefly, Costa wanted to laugh. There was something so theatrical about this woman, as if the entire world were a drama and she one more member of the cast.
“Let me deal with it,” Costa insisted, and took one step forward so that he was in front of her, confronting the