a digitised dragon or some other monster out of a teenage horror fantasy, though he couldn’t see a thing except lights and cameras and Roberto Tonti thrashing around in his chair like some ancient, skeletal wraith.

“Not when you work for me,” Tonti screamed at him. “When you work for me, you …”—a stream of impenetrable Italian curses followed—“… you are mine. My puppet. My creature. Every day I put my finger up your scrawny, coked-up ass, Allan, and every day I wiggle a little harder till your stupid brain wakes up. Stop acting. Start being.”

Stop acting. Start being. Prime had lost count of the number of times he’d heard that. He still didn’t get it.

Tonti was seventy-three. He looked a hundred and fifty and was terminally ill, with a set of lungs that had been perforated by a lifetime’s tobacco. Maybe he’d be dead before the movie got its first showing in the U.S. They all knew that was a possibility. It added to the buzz Simon Harvey’s little army of evil PR geckos had been quietly building with their tame hacks.

Allan Prime had already thought through his performance in the director’s real-life funeral scene. He’d release one single tear, dab it away with a finger, not a handkerchief, showing he was a man of the people, unchanged by fame. Then, when no one could hear, he’d walk up to the casket and whisper, “Where’s that freaking finger now, huh?”

Or maybe the old bastard would live forever, long enough to dance on Prime’s own grave. There was something creepy, something abnormal about the man, which was, the rumours said, why he’d not sat at the helm of a movie for twenty years, frittering away his talent in the wasteland of TV until Inferno came along. Prime gulped a fat finger of single malt, then refilled his glass from the bottle on the table. It was early, but the movie was done, and he didn’t need to be out in public until the end of the day. The penthouse apartment atop one of the finest houses in the Via Giulia, set back from the busy Lungotevere with astonishing views over the river to St. Peter’s, had been Allan Prime’s principal home for almost a year. Tonight it was empty except for him and Miss Valdes.

“This is for publicity, right?” he asked.

“Sì,” the woman replied, and patted her briefcase like a lawyer sure it contained evidence. She had to be Italian. And the more he looked at her, the more Prime became convinced she wasn’t unattractive either, with her full, muscular figure—that always turned him on—and very perfect teeth behind a mouth blazingly outlined in carmine lipstick. “Mr. Harvey say we must have a copy of your face, because we cannot, for reasons of taste, mass-market a version of the real thing. It must be you.”

“I cut myself shaving this morning. Does that matter?”

“I can work with that.”

“Great,” he grumbled. “So where do you want me?”

She took off her oversized sunglasses. Miss Valdes was a looker and Allan Prime was suddenly aware something was starting to twitch down below. She had a large, strong face, quite heavy with makeup for this time of day, as if she didn’t just make masks, she liked wearing them herself. The voice, too, now that he thought about it, sounded artificial. Posed. As if she wasn’t speaking in her natural tongue. Not that this worried him. He was aware of a possibility in her eyes, and that was all he needed.

“On the bed, sir,” Miss Valdes suggested. “It would be best if you were naked. A true death mask is always taken from a naked man.”

“Not that I’m arguing, but why the hell is that?”

The corner of her scarlet mouth turned down in a gesture of meek surprise, one that seemed intoxicatingly Italian to him.

“We come into the world that way. And leave it, too. You’re an actor.”

He watched, rapt, as her fleshy, muscular tongue ran very deliberately over those scarlet lips.

“I believe you call it … being in character.”

He wondered how Roberto Tonti would direct a scene like this.

“Will it hurt?”

“Of course not!” She appeared visibly offended by the idea. “Who would wish to hurt a star?”

“You’d be surprised,” Prime grumbled. This curious woman would be truly amazed, if she only knew.

She smoothed down the front of her jacket, opened the briefcase, and peered into it with a professional, searching gaze before beginning to remove some items Allan Prime didn’t recognise.

“First a little … discomfort,”