Marcus could already see the marquee: Horatius at the Bridge.
He could have worked on his idea in his pensione but he needed to be on the streets, surrounded by Romans, absorbing the history bestowed by countless generations of their ancestors. Every day, he’d headed to the café at the end of Via Veneto with the view of the Triton Fountain. Hollywood was going to eat this up!
But now it was October and Marcus had nothing to show for his summer. No returned passport, no evidence that Emilio Conti was responsible, no solution to smuggling out his locked funds, no way to track Oliver down, and no screenplay—just a notebook filled with half-baked ideas, clichéd situations, and cardboard characters mouthing corny dialogue stuffed with “thee,” “thou,” and “thy.”
Lunchtime customers began to fill the café. It was almost one o’clock. If his lunch date was the reliable type, he ought to be showing up right about now. However, a host of adjectives could be used to describe his guest, but “reliable” wouldn’t make the top one hundred.
The waiter, Adriano, delivered Marcus’s prosecco and asked if he was ready to order. Marcus told him he was waiting for someone. “Let’s wait till one-thirty.”
“Certamente,” Adriano said with a slight nod, and stared at a figure across the other side of the piazza.
“You’ve got whiskey back there, haven’t you?” Marcus asked. “Make it a double. American if you have any. On the rocks. Wait five minutes, then bring another.”
“Si, signore.”
Marcus rose to his feet. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Errol Flynn broke into the smile that had been setting hearts and groins aflame for twenty years. But the face that went with it was no longer a roguishly devil-may-care study in handsomeness.
He hadn’t seen the Aussie swashbuckler since his trial during the war so he had been taken aback the previous week when Errol had telephoned to say he’d filmed a movie called Crossed Swords at Cinecittà last year, and that he was back for the premiere and wanted Marcus’s services.
He’d produced this picture through Errol Flynn Productions. They’d made three movies, “but if this one bombs too, it’ll be the last, so I’m going all out in the publicity department.”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, ol’ matey!” He flopped down into a chair, tossing his white Panama hat and dark glasses onto the table. Adriano approached with a filled tumbler. Errol sniffed it. “Wild Turkey?” He let out a whoop.
Errol’s face used to glow with the vitality of a persona that only a forty-foot-wide screen could contain, but now it sagged at the edges. Blotches and wrinkles crisscrossed his forehead and cheeks, and early signs of a drinker’s nose were surfacing. At forty-five, he was three years younger than Marcus, but looked ten years older.
A controlled environment like a soundstage, with lighting, camera, and makeup professionals, could hide flaws, but Errol wanted candid shots out and about on the streets.
He downed Adriano’s whiskey. “What interesting setting have you come up with?”
“Did you see Roman Holiday?” Marcus asked.
“Yep.”
“Remember when Gregory Peck takes Audrey Hepburn to a big stone mask?”
“That was a real cute scene.”
“They filmed it at Bocca della Verità. It means ‘Mouth of Truth,’ so I thought—”
“Going for the irony angle, huh?”
Bocca della Verità sat inside an alcove that would protect Errol from the harshness of direct sunlight, but Errol didn’t need to know that. “It’s over near the Circus Maximus. We could walk, but if there’s a chance you could be recognized—”
Errol picked up his hat and sunglasses. “Haven’t you been around enough movie stars to know that we can turn it on and off at will?”
* * *
Bocca della Verità stood inside a brown-brick building of seven arches topped by a seven-story bell tower. The mid-afternoon sun slanted through the iron grillwork, casting planks of light on the stone floor.
Marcus looked through his camera’s viewfinder. “Stick your hand in the mouth and declare a truth. If you’re lying, the beast inside will bite it off.”
Errol inserted his hand into the mask’s cool marble mouth. “I declare that of all the hundreds of women I have slept with, I don’t regret a single one.”
Marcus started snapping rapid-fire. “Not even the two who accused you of rape?”
“Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!” He sounded like Robin Hood. “And as proof, I shall withdraw my hand unscathed!”
He extracted it with his fingers bunched like dead twigs. “Egads! I shall never play Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ again!”
“This light’s a bit low.” Marcus replaced the used roll with a fresh one. “Let’s try it with a flash.”
Errol stuck his hand back inside the mouth. “It’s cold and clammy in there. I wouldn’t be surprised if some vicious scorpion was lurking—”
“There aren’t any scorpions in Italy. Emote now; chat later.”
Errol pulled a series of faces as Marcus clicked photo after photo, his flashbulb filling the nook with blinding light. He wasn’t quite done when he heard a Midwest twang.
“Girls! Look! Errol Flynn in the ever-loving flesh!”
Errol yelled, “RUN!”
A huddle of women in elastic-waisted skirts shrieked as Marcus and Errol raced along the length of the Circus Maximus, veered hard left, and made for the Colosseum. Dodging four lanes of traffic, they shot inside the first archway and ducked around the corner.
Marcus pressed his back against the crumbling stone. “So much for turning it on and off.”
“Sometimes it turns on by itself,” Errol laughed. “But what’s a guy to do when he hears the menopausal cries of the relentlessly frustrated?” He headed through the inner row of archways and gripped the metal railing. “You never did tell me what you’re doing here.”
Marcus took him through a truncated version of his run-in with the Fratelli di Conti over Metropolitana and how he was stuck in Rome until his passport reappeared.
“You want to go back to LA?” Errol asked.
What an odd question. “It’s where my roots are. Kathryn and Gwendolyn, the Garden of Allah, everything.”
“Hanging onto your past?” Errol winced as he turned back to the Colosseum’s floor. “I’ve been holding onto mine for more years than I should’ve. When people see me, I feel like I have to give them Mister Movie Star; otherwise, they’ll walk away disappointed. You know where it’s gotten me? Crossed Swords, where I’m still playing the same old swashbuckler.” He clamped a firm hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “If there’s anything from your past that’s holding you back, let go of it.”
Marcus had only ever seen the Errol Flynn that needed to be at the center of every party. This older and wiser but sadder version was hard to digest.
“What would you have said with your hand in Bocca della Verità?” Errol asked.
The answer came to Marcus without hesitation. “That I don’t want to leave Rome until I’ve had a chance to say a proper goodbye to someone.”
“Then do that.”
“It won’t solve my passport situation.”
“They can’t hold onto it indefinitely. But holding onto our past forever can grind a chap to dust. You need to track down—what’s his name?”
“Oliver.”
“You need to say your final goodbyes.”
“Easier said than done. He joined the church, so he could be anywhere.”
“But the Vatican must know where he is.”
Marcus threw him a skeptical eye. “You got the Pope’s phone number?”
“No, but Trevor Bergin played my wise-cracking sidekick in Crossed Swords, and let me tell you, ol’ Trevor was a busy lad during filming. By the time we had our movie in the can, he’d burned through five guys, three of whom were in the church. Surely one of them will know somebody who knows somebody.”
“Melody Hope told me he’s in Greece filming The Grief of Achilles.”
“He got back yesterday and lives five minutes from here. He’s probably still unpacking.”
* * *
Errol was right—Trevor was still unpacking, but it wasn’t Trevor doing it. It was the ancient valet Trevor had brought back from Greece. Marcus and Errol barely understood his broken Italian but were able to get out of him that Trevor was at his favorite bistro.
Café de Paris consumed the sidewalk with two rows of tables, each covered in their signature peach tablecloth and placed under an awning to shelter its customers from the vagaries of the weather. Trevor Bergin sat by himself, drizzling olive oil over four large slices of bread.
He yelped when he saw Marcus beside Errol. “More champagne!” he called to the waiter. “And more bread!” He turned to Marcus. “This place has gotten a bit cliché since King Farouk made it his home away from home, but their bread is the best in town.”
Trevor was still head-turningly handsome but his camera-ready jawline had softened and his dark brown hair was now flecked with silver. Though creased around the edges, his eyes remained clear and bright.
The conversation flowed from the impossible beauty of the Greeks, the temptations of love scenes with Gina Lollobrigida, and arrangements for the Crossed Swords premiere, to Melody Hope’s post-Hollywood career.
“I can’t believe you’re Lo Scattino Americano!” Trevor told Marcus. “Wait till I get my hands on that La Speranza minx—I’m going to give her such a hiding, keeping you all to herself. And what about Oliver? How’s he doing?”
“That’s where you come in,” Marcus said.
“Look out!” Trevor whispered. “Speak of the devil.”
A pack of scattini gathered around the front of the café, checking their cameras and twisting their zoom lenses as a midnight-blue Bentley pulled up. The rotund figure of King Farouk lumbered out of the car as the scattini clicked as rapidly as their cameras would allow.
Trevor said, “He could teach Hollywood stars a thing or two about seeking attention.”
“Farouk! Farouk!”
The banished king adjusted the tassel on his fez and strode past the scattini mosquitos and gaping diners without waiting for the quartet of pretty starlets who exited the car behind him.
Marcus knew that today’s nameless hanger-on could be tomorrow’s Gina Lollobrigida. The subjects of his photos had largely come to him. Lo Scattino Americano had happened with such little effort that he almost felt guilty that he’d never had to jostle and shove like those guys.
Am I hanging onto my past? His first reaction was to reject Errol’s proposition. Screenwriting is what I do. Screenwriter is who I am.
Some screenplays took longer than others, but Horatius at the Bridge wasn’t gelling at all. Meanwhile, every time he lifted his camera to take a shot, somebody laid out good money. Maybe I’m not that person anymore.
“FAROUK!” a scattino shrieked.
When he heard the voice, Marcus shot to his feet and stormed through the pack at the front of the restaurant. He throttled Emilio Conti by the collar and threw the guy against a telephone pole.
“You little shit!”
Conti blinked at him, panting hard.
“MY PASSPORT! I don’t know how you did it, or what strings you pulled, but I want my passport back and I want it now.”
Conti shoved Marcus in the chest. “I know about your passport,” he jeered, “but you are crazy if you think I am guilty.”
“Don’t bullshit me, you little prick.”
Conti’s face reddened. He pulled at the hem of his jacket to straighten the creases, then gripped Marcus by the elbow and tugged him away from the scattini pack. They were almost nose-to-nose now. Marcus could feel the guy’s breath on his skin. “Do you know why I hate you so much, Signore Scattino Americano?”
Marcus expected contempt and scorn in the guy’s eyes, and he could see it lurking there, but behind a sheer screen of something else. Envy? Resentment? “Because I can leave and you think you can’t?”
“I am desperate to get away from the Conti name and everything about it,” he half-shouted. “I am so sick of Roma. Everything is old. The ruins and the dust. I want to go to America where everything is new and a man can be more than the accidental baby brother of the miraculous Conti triplets.”
The photos Marcus had taken in that backstreets queer bar were sandwiched between the pre-war Italian romance novels Signora Scatena stored on the bookshelf in his room. “Remember that day we fought in front of the American Express office?” Marcus asked. “I followed you to a bar, somewhere north of the city in the back streets—”
Emilio’s face flushed in pink blotches. “YOU WHAT?”
“I wasn’t snooping, honest. I was just—I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, I saw you meet up with a red-haired guy—”
“You FOLLOWED me?”
“It’s okay!” Marcus held out his hands to pacify him, but Conti brushed them aside and shoved Marcus in the chest again.
“Let me tell you Signore Americano. I know why your passport was taken. All the scattini are talking about it.”
He was so red-faced furious that Marcus wasn’t sure he could believe anything that was about to come out of his mouth, but he had to ask. “Talking about what?”
“Those photographs of Ava Gardner? Frank Sinatra learned you took them and he make some telephone calls. Mafioso. Good luck getting your passport back. And if you tell anyone about that bar—” He broke into a string of Italian cussing.
Marcus thought of Sinatra as a member of the Garden family: Kathryn, Gwendolyn, Doris, Arlene, Bogie and Bacall, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ava, Tallulah, Errol, Orson. They drifted in and out of each other’s lives as circumstances dictated, but he’d never thought one of them would turn on him.
He was still shaky when he reached the table and related to Trevor and Errol what Emilio had revealed.
“Personally, I like Frankie,” Errol said, “but I’ve always thought he wasn’t one to cross. Tough break, Adler.”
Trevor brought their conversation back. “We were talking about Oliver.”
“Did you know he joined the church?”
Trevor’s champagne glass halted midway to his mouth. “He’s a padre?”
“Or similar. I need someone inside the church, and a certain Australian told me that you might know someone who could track him down.”
Trevor confessed that Errol’s rumors were true, “but none of the beautiful choirboys I’ve been bedding would rank high enough to access that sort of information.”
First Conti, then Sinatra, now this. Marcus dropped his head into his hands, burning with a thirst that a hundred champagnes couldn’t quench.
He felt the tip of Trevor’s finger tap his wrist. “You don’t need to contact the Vatican.”
“No?”
Trevor placed the bottle of olive oil in front of Marcus with a flourish and rotated it until the oval label greeted him. It featured the smiling face of a monk in front of an olive tree laden with plump black olives. “Remind you of anyone?”
Marcus pushed his glasses onto his forehead so that he could inspect the picture more carefully. He let out a choked huff when he recognized the face.
“I think of Oliver every time I see it,” Trevor said, “and I didn’t even know he’d had a religious conversion. But this is where I’d start looking.”
Bottled at the Monastery of St Anthony of Padua, Tivoli, Italy.
Marcus knew the shape of that face, the curve of that smile, the spark in those eyes like they were his own.
All this time, he told the bottle, you’ve only been an hour’s drive away.
CHAPTER 28
Kathryn dropped her script onto her kitchen counter. “Can’t we just give Adelaide and Betty a duet and leave me out of it?”
Leo sighed. “You know why we can’t.”
“Because your stupid song is now our big finale.” Kathryn
regretted the insult as soon as she said it. She was being petulant and unprofessional, but her nerves were fraying. If they hadn’t been standing in her living room she might have staged a walk-out.
Less than a hundred feet from her window, a bunch of new residents had gathered around the diving board where someone was playing the new Dave Brubeck album. Kathryn longed to be out there listening to Jazz Goes to College instead of trapped inside reciting the same lyrics over and over with no indication that she’d ever be word perfect.
But it wasn’t only the lyrics that made her want to run away. It was being alone with Leo. Something had shifted since that night of the engagement rings.
Gwendolyn later pointed out that he hadn’t delivered an ultimatum. “It wasn’t like he said, ‘Marry me by the end of the year or I’m calling it quits.’”
“I’ve never thought of myself as the marrying kind,” Kathryn told her.
“But now?”
“I’m starting to wonder.”
Gwendolyn’s cracker snapped in two. “Where did that come from?”
It had come from Marcus’s most recent letter. She’d had to read it a second time to make sure she understood it right. Maybe I’m not a screenwriter anymore; maybe I’m a photographer. It’s possible Errol is right: I’m hanging onto my past longer than is healthy.
When Leo had turned up at the front door to her villa to rehearse his stupid song, Kathryn had noticed a lump in his coat pocket: the sort of suspiciously square bulge that a velvet-covered box might make.
Every time Leo’s attention was distracted elsewhere, her gaze jumped straight to it. Is it any wonder I can’t concentrate with that elephant in the room?
Leo opened her script to the finale. “Is there a line, or phrase, or combination of words that’s throwing you?” He read them out loud. “Sunbeam’s new Mixmaster. Mixes my Betty batter faster. It makes my baking more ambitious. ’Cause everything turns out so delicious.” He pushed his reading glasses onto his forehead. “What, exactly, is the problem?”
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