Dante's Numbers by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Costa, Police Procedural, Police - Italy - Rome, Italy, Mystery & Detective, Murder - Investigation, Police, Motion picture actors and actresses - Crimes against, Political, Crimes against, Fiction, Nic (Fictitious character), Rome, Mystery fiction, Rome (Italy), Crime, Suspense, Dante Alighieri, Murder, General, Motion picture actors and actresses
ISBN: 9780385341486
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-03-24T07:49:45.220535+00:00

9

THEY HAD SPENT MORE THAN AN HOUR WANDERING around Mission Dolores. She couldn’t have hoped for better guides. Hank and Frank were in love with their city. They seemed to know every last corner. For Teresa Lupo, who had no fondness for religion, the mission was a revelation. In Rome, the Church was omnipresent, and seemed to have been that way forever. Seated in the small adobe chapel of Mission Dolores, she was, for the first time in her life, conscious of a world that existed before God, at least the one she’d grown up with. This had been a different, virgin environment, one conquered by a foreign host bringing what it saw as enlightenment and civilisation, just two hundred and fifty years before, at a time when Rome regarded itself as the modern capital of a civilised, fixed universe in which everything was labelled, recognised, and known. In Italy, history seemed either distant or a part of the living present. Here the past existed just out of reach, tantalisingly near yet untouchable, alive yet gone, too.

The place fascinated her so much that she forgot, for a while, why they’d gone there. Then Frank asked, “So you really want to see Carlotta’s grave?”

“Oh. Of course.”

They walked outside. It was getting cold and late. She wondered how much longer they could stay here. How much she could put off going back to Greenwich Street and admitting she had nothing to report, or suggest. A green car, some locations, a few possible coincidences … it added up to nothing and she knew it.

The cemetery was beautiful, hushed and peaceful, filled with roses, bold spikes of yellow cannas, and flowers she couldn’t identify.

The statues of dead monks ranged across the graveyard, pensive heads bowed over their own tombs, the long foreign grass rising up to their frozen grey waists. Misshapen conifers rose among the forest of headstones against the white adobe walls where two unequal towers, like decorations on a wedding cake, pointed to a fading blue sky above floods of purple and red bougainvillea tumbling down from the roofline.

The names on the graves seemed to come from everywhere: Spain and Ireland, England and the east coast of America. Some tombs were grand, most modest. Death and the relentless maritime climate were slowly reducing them all to crumbling stone.

She wandered through a grove of roses and came upon a small dome-shaped reed hut, recently erected. A sign said it was designed to show the original kind of dwelling place used by the Ohlone, the indigenous people of the area before colonisation. She closed her eyes, thought of the scene in the movie: Scottie, in a brown suit and a 1950s gentleman’s hat, skulking by the overhang of the mission walls, watching from the shadow of a sprawling tomb, furtively spying on Madeleine as she gazed down at a grave, a curious bouquet of roses in her hand.

“She knew you were there all along, Scottie,” Teresa murmured.

“That she did,” Frank agreed.

“You like the movie, too?” she asked.

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