My own task there, that late morning, was economic, to try and find a job, or at least to make some money. I had taken with me my copy of our family crest, the only thing I owned which could be worth something.
There were two street peddlers already at work in the Piazzetta: Sachin, our former driver/tour guide, and a Lebanese sunglasses dealer named Joe. Sachin was kicking a cardboard box that lay on the dock like a soccer ball. The cargo boat had just come in from Madras.
“Look what the fuck they sent me!” he yelled.
Sachin had a degree in electronic engineering, but in Calcutta he could only find a job as a driver/tour guide. Thus he had decided to come to Italy with me and become a street vendor.
“I was expecting Ray-Bans or trendy, summery wraparounds,” he said, pointing to a box. “And look what they sent me!”
I looked inside. A pile of green military trousers lay neatly folded beneath a layer of cedar mothballs.
“How can I sell Indian army uniforms at the beach?”
“Pretend they’re wraparounds.”
“As always, you’re completely useless, Rosso.”
“Or just return them,” I said, pointing to the mailer sticking out from the box. “You have the receipt.”
“That’s not the receipt.”
As he kneeled to reach for the sealed envelope, the light in his eyes changed. He suddenly turned calm, like a follower inside a Hindu temple the moment before the goddess Kali appears.
“Will you?” he asked, handing the sealed envelope to me.
I tore it open and began reading: “ ‘Dear Mr. Sachin Asghar…we enjoyed your charming manuscript, The Venus with the Singing Nipples…’ ” I burst out laughing. “The who with the what?”
Sachin did his thing—held his breath and looked up as if something was about to crash on his head. The sun was hot. The sea was white and flat and luminous.
“ ‘But…,’ ” I continued reading.
“But?”
“ ‘But unfortunately it doesn’t fit our editorial list.’ ”
Sachin kicked the box again. He knew that sentence by heart.
“The Venus with the Singing Nipples,” I said. I’d never heard the like.
I gazed at the glittering sea with a mix of envy, admiration, and despair. For the past five years, I had been trying to write a novel about my car accident, while now the engineer/driver/tour guide/vendor had written a book in a single month. Sachin had gained the ability to write from the Maestro, while I seemed to have absorbed only the peculiar habit of sniffing cologne.
“Where did you get the idea,” I asked, “for a book? To write a book?”
“Do you remember when Chloé, the journalist, asked the Maestro why he had never married?” said Sachin. “I decided to write a book about that. About how you find a wife.”
The perfect opposite of what I’d absorbed from that night in Calcutta.
“Right,” I said. “The journalist. Wasn’t she from around here?”
“Chloé, of course. We’re seeing her tonight.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Somehow—again totally unlike me—Sachin recovered immediately from the rejection. He stuck two fingers, his thumb and middle finger, under his tongue and whistled to the other vendor on the promenade, Joe the Lebanese.
“Hey, come here! I’ll give you two of these in exchange for three Ray-Bans.”
Joe walked over and looked at the merchandise.
“Two uniforms of the Indian army? No thanks, man.”
“Army uniforms aren’t the most obvious seaside attire,” I conceded.
“Sachin is capable of selling almost anything,” said Joe. “The only thing he can’t sell is his book.”
“Shut the fuck up, guys!” whispered Sachin. “Virginia and Ginevra are here. Look.”
A long, silent, midnight-blue Maserati had pulled over by the promenade. No other car was ever allowed inside the Piazzetta of Portofino. When the sixteen-year-old twins stepped out of the vehicle, I felt as if my past had just driven into my present. As in a photo from the 1920s, Virginia and Ginevra were dressed in matching sailor suits alla marinara, summer-style uniforms with blue stripes on white. They belonged to Italy’s richest family and their summer residence was Portofino’s most beautiful villa, but to me they were only the younger sisters of my lost Marinella. Especially Virginia resembled her so closely: the delicate white line of her neck, her grace, the coils of hair that spread across her shoulders like snakes of gold. I looked at the horizon. I looked at the stupid uniforms. I did not look at them in the hope they didn’t see me.
They walked on the Piazzetta, carefully observed by their nanny’s severe eyes peering out at them from the car. Because they belonged to Italy’s royalty, they were subject to certain strict rules. During the school year they weren’t allowed to go out at night, but in the summer at the seaside, their curfew was eleven. They came all the way to where we stood. My heart was in my throat. Fortunately, around the time of the accident, the press had very few photographs of the eighteen-year-old who was in the car with Marinella. So I was fairly sure people didn’t know who I was. With the twins it was different. I had been to their house, I had dated their sister, I had even met them, although they were children and perhaps didn’t remember.
“Go ahead, you ask!” Ginevra elbowed Virginia. Thankfully they didn’t recognize me.
Virginia stepped forward. She took a deep breath, as if she was about to say something important. She whispered, “Tonight we’re going clubbing at the Covo…Do you have some cool wraparounds?”
“Wraparounds are out of fashion this year on the Riviera,” said Sachin, lowering his high-pitched voice to a professorial tone.
“And what’s in ‘fashion’ this year…machine guns?” Joe laughed, pointing at the military uniforms.
“So do you have something hot or not?” asked Ginevra impatiently. “We don’t want to look like two schoolgirls at the Covo.”
My miniature Indian friend proudly picked up one of the uniforms, unfolded it in the air, and launched into some sort of ballet, looking like a cross between a torero and a valet directing traffic in a car park. He concluded his show by throwing the jacket’s uniform in the sky. The ranks shone on the brass emblem.
“You’re not going to look like schoolgirls in one of these.”
“We’re not going to a military parade!” said Ginevra, bursting into laughter. “And at the Covo it’s hot.”
“At the Covo there’s a swimming pool.” Sachin resumed his professorial tone. “Underneath you only wear your bikini.”
“Hard to find something this cool, even at a flea market,” Virginia murmured, playing with a roll of bills in her pocket. Then a look of suspicion came over her face as she examined the trousers. “But the pants have a tear!”
“They were torn by dynamite.”
“Real dynamite?” asked Virginia, handing him two one-hundred-euro bills.
That was my life. Outlandish. Haunted. Selling whatever you can sell in the most beautiful pocket of the world hoping that lovely teenagers don’t recognize you.
The young twins left holding two army uniforms, and Joe patted Sachin on the back and all the bystanders stood up and applauded as if they were at the opera.
achin,” I said, my voice small. “Do you think you can sell this?”
He and Joe stopped laughing, perhaps because of the sound of my voice, and looked at me.
“What is it?”
“My family crest.”
I was following in the footsteps of my father, who had sold our noble title to a banker with aristocratic ambitions. Anyway, I told myself, we had copies of the family crest in every other room of the house.
“To sell something,” Sachin said, “we need a good story.” He held up the frame and looked at the five burgund
y stripes glinting beneath the glass against the background of gold. “Do we have one?”
I told him what I knew. Apparently we descend from an old princely family from the eleventh century. In the year 1010 an unknown soldier, my ancestor, had killed two mercenaries who were raping a woman, and Emperor Otto the First wanted to knight him. “What is your family crest?” asked the emperor. “This,” answered the soldier, my ancestor, wiping his five bloodied fingers on his golden shield. And our crest became five burgundy stripes on a background of gold.
“It’s a good story,” said Sachin. “How much do you want to sell it for?”
“It’s a copy,” I said. “If we get a couple hundred euro it’s a lot.”
“I’ll get you more than that.”
At around three o’clock the first ferryboat of the afternoon arrived and a herd of sleepy tourists started to trot around Portofino. Some sat down at Puni to enjoy the view, some grabbed a gelato at Il Molo, and an elderly couple came toward us when they realized that all the other stores were closed for the siesta. The couple was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The man, Larry, wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of the Colosseum, and his wife, Liza, was in a flowery Chanel dress with cute knotted shoulder ties. He had the fixed gaze of a tough guy; she looked naive.
“How much are those?” Liza pointed to a pair of fake Prada sunglasses lying on the sheets at Joe’s feet. She did not seemed interested in Sachin’s military uniforms.
“Eighty-six euros,” said Joe.
“And those?”
“The Ray-Bans are sixty-five, but for you I can make it sixty.”
Liza touched the pearls on her wrinkled neck and continued to look around, hoping that Joe would lower the price further before she began negotiating. She was not as naive as she seemed to be.
“And what’s that?” she asked, pointing to the frame.
“This is a crest from the eleventh century,” said Sachin.
The elderly woman looked at the frame closer.
“What are those red stripes?”
“It was the year 1010…” Sachin began to deliver his own rendition of the story I had told him. He more than tripled the number of mercenaries my ancestor had allegedly killed before he got to the punchline. “…and the princely crest became five burgundy stripes on a background of gold.”
The woman smiled, mesmerized. “This is quite something, Larry, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said Larry, who was checking out a passerby in her micro bikini and was paying no attention. To keep up the conversation he added, “How much is it?”
“Oh, this is not for sale.”
“What do you mean?” asked Liza, looking at Sachin.
I was confused too.
“My friend Rosso here,” said Sachin turning to me, “is the executor of a will and is taking the crest to an appraiser. He has received offers from various collectors and from one museum.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I whispered. I was even more confused.
“Easy, we can appraise it here and now,” said Larry smiling.
“Not possible,” said the miniature Indian.
There was a moment of silence, as if he had guessed the two words that Larry most detested. “Not possible” was not part of his DNA. He specified that he had started a hardware store in Tulsa, which was now the second largest in Oklahoma.
“Can you provide additional background about your family?” asked Sachin formally.
“Of course I can. Why?” asked Larry, flattered.
“According to the will, the crest may only be sold to ‘a noble person,’ defined as a person either of aristocratic descent or showing qualities of high moral character, such as courage, generosity, or honor. Do you think you may qualify?”
The copy of the crest was sold for 3,600 euros. The elderly couple rushed back to their hotel in Santa Margherita to gather the rest of the cash in fear that the price would continue to rise. My miniature friend was a hell of a rainmaker. We ended up splitting it 60 percent to Sachin and 40 percent to me on the basis that he had taught me “how to street sell.”
he unspoken code among unlicensed street vendors on the Piazzetta of Portofino is the same as it is everywhere: the first one to see the police is sworn to warn the others, so that everything is quickly put away before the police see it. That evening, at around six, the warning came and the air was suddenly filled with mysterious signs.
A Nigerian vendor waved a rug in front of a café, Joe whistled, and all the street peddlers made a pretense of joining the ferry line with the other tourists. Then the police, the coast guard, passed by in their shiny ivory moccasins, fashionably holding their white caps beneath their arms, pretending to ignore what was going on.
“How did you get away with that?” I asked astonished.
“We dress the police head to toe,” said Sachin, winking at me. “They love to buy our Ray-Bans at half price.”
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
ere you and Rosso Fiorentino part of a gang back in Italy?” asked the prosecutor. A cold shiver went down my spine. “Why don’t you tell the jury about the Octopus Gang, Ms. Verdi?”
ROSSO FIORENTINO
July 4, 2006, Rapallo, Italy
hen Sachin and I finally arrived at Pozzetto Beach, it was ten o’clock in the evening. We had walked all the way from Portofino to Rapallo, a resort town nearby. The days were long this time of year, and the sun had just set. There was one red stripe of light left on the horizon. The beach was almost empty except for a group of boys sitting on a rock. They hovered shirtless over a map of the Riviera, planning their target for the evening. The sea was as flat as a lake.
“That’s Federico, the painter, our lucky charm,” said Sachin, pointing to a young boy with blond curls so neat they seemed to be sculpted in marble. “He paints like Giotto but is deaf like Beethoven.”
Sachin had only been in town for a month and already he knew everyone. Trying not to lag, I pointed to a guy who, from the distance, was larger than a cliff. “And that,” I said, “is Don Otto.”
“I know Don. Twenty-nine-year-old baker and still a virgin. He joined the gang because I fixed his oven. Good to have a big guy like him around.”
The engineer / tour guide / street peddler was all over the map.
“He makes the best focaccia in Rapallo,” I tried.
“Right, what the fuck else would he do? He never went to school,” said Sachin. Then slowly, almost deferentially, he aimed his index finger toward a highly chiseled face covered by a pair of Fila sunglasses. “Franz, on the other hand, next year he’s going to the University of Chicago for his master’s degree.”
“I know who Franz is,” I said, recognizing “the master of parties,” as we used to call him back then. Franz could make or break a party; he decided who would be invited and who wouldn’t. Furthermore, he dated the woman we all wanted: Marinella. Flashes of tuxedos, sherry glasses, tulip-shaped swimming pools, and the rest of my misspent youth assaulted my mind. Franz, like the twins, was a figure from my past I had managed to steer clear of, until now. “And her?” I asked.
A girl in a white-and-blue-striped T-shirt was standing up on a rock giving orders. At regular intervals, she threw a Swiss Army knife in the air and artfully caught it by its handle. The blade danced in the dusk. She held a large, oily slice of focaccia with her other hand. Her green eyes glinted like a lizard’s in the fading sun.
“Isn’t that the journalist?” I asked. “When did she start playing with knives?”
“Chloé is like a Ferrari. She changes gears fast.”
The rest of the gang joined Sachin and me at the water’s edge.
“A swim to warm up for the mission!” Chloé announced. She cheerfully removed her striped T-shirt to reveal an orange bikini and took a last bite of focaccia. I imagined her
bikini was happy covering her beautiful breasts.
It was the beginning of summer and the water was still cold. We dared each other to outswim each other. As in my party days, Franz took the lead. Don Otto, the baker, slapped at the waves as if they were pans of focaccia, while Federico, the blond fourteen-year-old painter, struggled with two inflatable water wings. I tried to swim calmly. Now and then I saw a white jellyfish floating ominously in the depths. I didn’t want to be part of a gang.
When we returned to shore we dried ourselves, feeling the cool evening air on our goose-bumped arms. The last streak of sunlight had vanished, leaving the sky an intense and darkening blue. They went over the plan again.
“The target is Eugene, a six-year-old Labrador,” said Franz. He always knew precisely the habits of important people. “It belongs to Kiki, the patriarch’s third child. His favorite hobby is to burn Eugene’s tail. So we’re actually doing the dog a favor. Don’t think of it as kidnapping a family dog. We’re rescuing him.”
“For ransom,” Chloé muttered.
“Why are we kidnapping a dog?” I asked.
“For Franz and me, to pay for law school in Chicago,” Chloé said. “For the rest of us, to pay the rent.” I could see then that she, like the twins, didn’t recognize me. I was officially a phantom in my own life.
Franz, on the other hand, knew very well who I was, but pretended not to. From his dark eyelashes and never-ending cheekbones, there glowed the light of someone who makes it big in life, a light so strong that even Chloé had to look away and study her nails. Years ago, however, I had managed to steal Marinella away from him. If Franz had been the companion of my misspent youth, and once upon a time the master of parties, now he was on his way to the University of Chicago to become the next big-shot lawyer. He seemed to do everything well.
Something Great and Beautiful Page 3
