She moved closer. “Like it went wrong for Scottie? They said he was a good cop. Then along comes a woman who isn’t what she seems …”
“You could put it that way.”
“Nic.” Her green eyes shone with bright intelligence. “I was really asking about the movie. What does that mean?”
“Next to a murder investigation? Nothing.”
She sighed, disappointed. “What I wanted was for you to tell me about Scottie. About Madeleine. The woman he thought he loved, the woman who didn’t really exist. Then that sad little thing who did exist, who pretended she was Madeleine just because that was what Scottie wanted. That could make him happy, so that he would love her in return.”
“I don’t know what it’s about,” Costa confessed. “It’s supposed to be enigmatic. Art’s not there to give you answers, not always. Sometimes it’s enough simply to ask a question.”
“What question?”
He thought about Scottie and the way he looked at the woman he believed to be Madeleine Elster. How he’d undressed her while she was unconscious after rescuing her at Fort Point. How he waited expectantly by his own bed until she woke, naked, beneath his sheets.
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Scottie can’t extricate himself from his desire for Madeleine, even though a part of him knows it’s not real. The way he’s always following her, watching, thinking. Hoping. It’s the pursuit of some hopeless fantasy. Like …”
He felt cold. He felt stupid. He felt more awake—more alive—than at any time since Emily had died.
“It’s like Dante’s Inferno,” he said, and could feel the revelation rising inside him. “Scottie and Madeleine Elster. Dante and Beatrice. It’s the same story, the same pilgrimage, looking for something important, the most important thing there can be. The big answer. A reason for living.”
Costa shook his head and laughed. “Why couldn’t I see this before? Vertigo is Inferno. It’s just a different way of looking at the same question. Scottie … Dante … they’re both just Everyman looking for something that makes him whole. Some reason to live.”
“ ‘I don’t like it … knowing I have to die,’ ” Maggie Flavier said, quoting from the movie in the same quiet, lost voice, one so accurate she might have been the woman they’d just watched on the screen.
“Do you know what Simon told me once?” she asked in a whisper. “When I asked him what Inferno was really about? Not Tonti’s movie. The poem.”
“What?”
“He said it was about knowing you never got to see the truth, to get a glimpse of God, until you’re dead. That everything up to that point is just some kind of preparation, a bunch of beginnings. You live in order to die. One gives meaning to the other. Black and white. Yin and yang. Being and not being.” She snatched at the glass. “But none of it’s up to us, is it?” she asked, and there was a quiet note of bitterness in her voice. “That’s for God, and if we play that role, we lose everything. Scottie tried to make the woman he wanted out of nobody. He tried to play God. In the end, that killed her. A man’s just a man. A woman can only be what she is.”
“What did you say? When he told you that?”
“I damn near slapped his face and told him not to be so stupid. I don’t believe in anything except here and now. Don’t ask me to trade that for some kind of hidden grace I only get when I’m dead. Don’t ever do that.”
The blonde hair extensions he’d seen at the Palace of Fine Arts were there on a low coffee table. She picked them up and held them to her head. There was a movement in her eye, an expression she had somehow picked up from that photo in his wallet, something else he couldn’t define because, unlike her, he’d never consciously noticed …
Instantly the associations rose for him, ones that were both warm and worrying.
She wasn’t Emily. She could pretend to be, though. If he wanted.
“I’m just like the woman in the movie, aren’t I? I can be anything you like. That’s what I do.”
He felt uneasy; he wondered whether it was time to leave, whether that was even possible.
“Is that what you’d like, Nic? Would it make things easier?”
“I want you to be you.”
She threw the false hair onto the table, brusquely, as if she hated the things. “That’s very noble. What if I don’t know who