Dante's Numbers by David Hewson

she wanted. He could see the boxes and bags ready to go. The pathologist took a break from bawling out an entire line of Carabinieri officers to issue a sly nod in his direction.
    Harvey wriggled, a little nervous. “You know something, Officer Peroni? We've been getting strange anonymous e-mails. For months. It happens a lot when you're making a movie. I never thought too much about it.”
    “Strange?”
    “They quoted that line, always. And they said…” Harvey tugged at his long hair. “… they said we were living in limbo. I never took it literally.”
    “What do you mean?”
    The American grimaced. “I mean literally. The way it appears in Dante.” He sighed. “Limbo is the first circle of Hell. The place the story begins.”
    Just the mention of the film revived some memories Gianni Peroni hoped had been lost. Things seemed to be happening from the very opening moment in Tonti's version of the tale. Not good things either.
    “And then?” Peroni asked. “After limbo?”
    “Then you're on the road to Hell.”

T HE DOOR TO ALLAN PRIME'S APARTMENT OPENED almost the moment Falcone pushed the bell. Nic Costa felt as if he'd stumbled back through time. The woman who stood there might have been an actress herself. Adele Neri still looked several years short of forty and was as slender and cat-like as he recalled. She wore designer jeans and a skimpy white T-shirt. Her arresting face bore the cold, disengaged scowl of the Roman rich. She had a tan that spoke of a second home in Sicily and a heavy gold necklace around a slender neck that carried a few wrinkles he didn't recall from the case a few years before, when she had first come to the notice of the Questura. That had taken them to the Via Giulia, too, to a house not more than a dozen doors away, one that had been booby-trapped with a bomb by her mob boss husband, Emilio, as he tried to flee Rome. Adele Neri was an interesting woman who had led an interesting life.
    “I thought I was past getting visits from the likes of you people,” she said, holding the door half open. “Do you have a warrant? Or some reason why I should let you into my home?”
    “We were looking for Allan Prime,” Costa replied. “We thought he lived here.”
    “He does. When he's around. But this is my house. All of it. Several more in the Via Giulia, too. Do you mean you didn't know?”
    She gazed at Falcone, thin arms crossed, smiling. Costa recalled seeing the intelligence reports after Emilio's death. They said that Adele had taken over leadership of her husband's local clan for a while before selling on her interests to a larger, more serious mob and, if rumour was correct, removing herself from the murky world of Roman crime to enjoy her vast, illicitly inherited wealth.
    “Inspector Falcone. The clever one.”
    “Signora Neri,” Falcone said pleasantly, nodding. “What an unexpected delight.”
    “Quite. So tell me. Why didn't you try to put me in jail? After Emilio got shot?”
    “Because I didn't think it would stick,” Falcone replied, looking puzzled. “Isn't that obvious? I'm a practical man. I don't fight lost causes over trivia.” He got one foot over the threshold and tried to look around. “This is nothing to do with you. We merely wish to locate a lost Hollywood actor.”
    “Join the club,” she sighed, then stepped back. “I'll let five of you in here and they'd best have no dirt on their shoes. This place rents for eight thousand dollars a week. For that, people don't expect muddy cop prints on the carpet.”
    Costa issued some orders to the officers left outside, then began to prowl the vast, airy apartment. There was a spectacular view of the river and the busy Lungotevere through long windows, with a vista of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance, and by the external terrace a circular iron staircase to what he took to be a roof garden. To their left stood a large open kitchen with the kind of fittings only the rich could think about.
    He sat