by Charles Fox
The clerk had promised to call me if there was a phone call. I lay on my bed all day, reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell had walked the streets of Barcelona, gathering his impressions, a marked contrast to me lying here in a hotel room, waiting for the story to come to me. It’s odd the books one reads at times of uncertainty. I waved to the clerk when I went downstairs for dinner. He shrugged, made a long face. I, too, had pretty much lost hope. And then on the third day, in the morning, there was a knock at my door, and there stood the clerk, a delighted smile on his face.
“She is calling,” he announced.
I followed him downstairs to the phone box by the revolving door. Martine Zacher’s voice sounded a little tense, German, but oddly dolorous. She said, “Mr. Fox, we like your letter. We would like to make some work with you. Can we meet at your hotel?”
* * *
They strode through the revolving doors, dark-haired beauties in tight denim pants, jackets turned up at the cuffs and collars, black boots with pointed toes and stacked heels. The desk clerk popped out of his cage. I invited them up to my room. They suggested that we go back to their apartment. Evidently they had wanted to get a look at me before they decided if it was reasonable to take me home.
We took a taxi. I paid. Back to the apartment with the gouged eye socket for a doorbell. Up the stairs into a small, neat apartment with white walls, white sofa, white marble coffee table, white azalea blossoms floating in a silver bowl. A crystal hung on a silver thread in the window. I peered through it, at what I realized were the roofs of the Vatican. Martine offered me a seat on the sofa beside her. Jutta sat opposite.
It was extraordinary to be in the presence of these women, mirror images, dark eyes watching you, amused. The duplication compounded the beauty into fascination. You couldn’t take your eyes off them. Until I knew them well enough to look longer, more directly, it was like being watched by a four-eyed creature.
So close in appearance, the difference between them was only in attitude. Martine was soft, with an air of apology. Jutta said little and watched, straight-faced, as though even a smile was some sign of weakness.
“True magazine would like to buy your story,” I told them. They immediately brightened, glancing at each other.
Martine said, “How much?”
Surely the magazine’s budget would never be enough to meet their expectations, elevated by their association with the Getty millions.
I thought of a number the magazine’s budget might support and then converted it to lire to make it sound as large as possible. “Half a million lire.”
Martine said at once, “Six hundred dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Cash?”
“Yes, of course.”
She looked at her sister and then back at me. “Okay.”
They were broke.
* * *
Back at the hotel, the clerk handed me my money from the safe and, struggling to contain himself, watched me count out the bills. I said quietly, “I can’t talk now, they’re waiting.” He grinned and nodded.
“Capisco.” From his cage he gave me a wink. “You have a good night.”
The twins were waiting. At the sight of the money they brightened, looking to each other, smiling cautiously, shyly. I was about to ask them how they had come to Rome in the first place when Martine, folding her hands across her knees, announced, “We must go and see Marcello Crisi. He’s a painter. He’s Paul’s best friend. He was living with Paul the last days.”
When we had finished our tea, we went downstairs together and took a taxi across the river into narrow streets between the ancient city wall and the Tiber. Trastevere. The taxi stopped on Vicolo del Canale outside number 26, a squat, square building, set back from the road, probably a converted machine-gun nest left over from World War II, a pillbox as they were called. A small man in his early thirties came to the door—compact, pale for a Roman, tidy for a painter. He and the twins engaged in a round of kissing cheeks. We went into a large, open room furnished with a plain worktable splattered with paint.
Marcello worked as we spoke. He was drawing, or rather painting, imaginary desert landscapes with a few strokes of his brush—the outline of a hill, cactus plants, a rock here and there, a bird in flight. “I met him in Positano,” he began, “a summer place near Naples. He could speak Italian almost perfectly—sometimes he could even speak dialect. He was very intelligent. He could also speak German and French. He’s sixteen going on forty.
“In Positano he had long hair. He was playing the hippie, but only for a short time. After, he changed a lot. When he came back to Rome, he was looking for an apartment, a place to be alone. He wanted to get away from the home, to be by himself. He asked me if he could stay here for the time he was looking. The first month there was another boy, Philip, so we were three. The problems of one were the problems of three. It was nice. Paul moved in at the end of the summer in ’72—September or October. In the beginning he painted a lot—like, the whole winter.
“He was good. I’ve seen other painters painting for a long time, using the same techniques as he did. He didn’t like figurative painting. He liked compositions of forms and color. I think he had the advantage not to be conventional and follow a straight line. When he wanted to get a certain effect in his paintings he was using spray.
“We made an exhibition. It started like a joke. ‘Let’s make a show of our paintings.’ We divided the room. I had maybe twenty paintings and he had maybe fifteen.
“He surprised me. I thought he wouldn’t manage it, because to make a show you have to prepare for months. There’s a lot of work, which even for me is hard. You really have to concentrate on it. He did everything—even the physical work. We needed to renew the place—make the walls new. And he really worked and got into it. He even surprised his mother, Gail. She wouldn’t believe it until a week before the showing, but as soon as she saw everything was ready, she came here maybe twenty times. She invited a lot of people. I think Paul sent his grandfather an invitation to the showing—not pretending that he would come here for the show but just letting him know. We weren’t expecting many people, but we had 350 in this place.
“We sold some pictures. We were completely disorganized. A painter and a curator are completely different. He got drunk and I did too, so did Philip. Since everyone was drunk, nobody was taking care of selling paintings. So you can imagine how it was, and everybody wanted to shake your hand or say something to you. We were very proud. We spent the whole evening just talking. The first day I sold one or two paintings and he sold three or four. We sold more the next day when there was no showing, because the really interested ones came back. I think, if someone was there who could have taken care of selling, we would have sold a lot. But it was a nice experience. We spoke about this—at least he learned that when you do something, people recognize what you have done.
“Paul liked painting, but it was too quiet for his character. He painted a lot, he made sculptures, he was talking about making films, just to see what it looked like.”
I asked about money and Marcello answered, “Paul never spoke of his grandfather’s money. A couple of times when he saw his grandfather’s picture in the paper, he was speaking about him as if he was a very far person, as if he had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t proud showing his grandfather like this. Only one time he was really proud. There was a picture of his grandfather because of the museum in California. I think his grandfather got a new painting—I think a Titian. Paul showed us and he was proud. Other than that, nothing.
“Sometimes Paul traded paintings with the people who owned the Botticelli, a restaurant in Trastevere. They made an agreement that he could eat there and pay them with paintings. He was going there practically every day. After dinner they asked, ‘Do you want to go dancing?’ and so he spent a lot of time with them. They were treating him a little like the young one. They knew he was intelligent. They knew who he was. Often we spoke about this. I told him to be
careful, not to go with people he didn’t know. The owners of the Botticelli restaurant, they are not malavita, they are not criminals. But you never know who they know, who their friends are, and who the friends of the friends are. As long as he was with the owners, nothing would happen. They would even protect him. The safest place in all Rome is Trastevere if you live there. They will never steal your car or from your apartment. If anyone stole the radio from my car, if I had one, I would get it back in one hour. I would give maybe five thousand lire, because the one who stole it needed money.
“Everything was fun for Paul. They’d go to different places and he talked about the people there. He got excited to meet these people and sit at their table, to have eaten with them. He was a little scared. He thought he knew what he was doing, but Paul didn’t realize how dangerous it could be.
“He got a bit fed up with them in the end. He met other people more interesting.
Something happened which made him change his mind completely about going out with this crowd. He realized that all these people just pretended to like him, to make him favors because of who he was. He was with a girl one evening and one of them came up to him and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ Paul said, ‘We? What am I going to do? I’m with a girl.’ The guy slammed the car door and went away. Since that moment Paul said, ‘What stupid people they are.’”
Marcello laid the painting aside. It had taken him no more than ten minutes. “I paint these pictures,” he went on, “Paul signs them. They know his name.” He didn’t smile. He was beginning another painting. It was, I could see, like printing money.
Marcello was a confusing character. So easily, blithely confessing that the two of them conspired in petty fraud, he seemed too dignified and serious an individual for such things. Perhaps it was Paul’s very absence that made him this way. It hung over everyone I met in that small world. The larger world was entertained, but here on the inside, it was very different.
“If he can get to his money, he will be a rich man,” Marcello went on. “Very rich. He will do great things for his generation.” He shrugged. “That is what I believe.”
Marcello shuffled papers on his desk. Evidently, the interview was over. I thanked him. He barely looked up.
The twins and I stepped out of the studio onto cobblestones worn by centuries of passing feet.
The Trastevere was begun by Roman citizens, castoffs, petty thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes. Ejected from within the ancient walls, they had congregated in the shadow of these same walls for protection against marauders, other bandits, invading armies. So the tradition of petty criminals was an ancient one. Malavita, as Marcello had called them, had been here for a long time, and evidently they still were.
The picture Marcello had painted of this young man left large unanswered questions. On the one hand here was a sympathetic youth, apparently uninterested in the family fortune, on the other, all his talk of films, creating a need for money. Above all I found Marcello’s words haunting me. He will do great things for his generation, I believe, if he can reach his money. I found myself wanting to believe the same, but what did it say about Paul that these two were such good friends? Was Marcello aiding and abetting Paul in a much larger fraud? Paul was somewhere with someone at this moment, but where and with whom?
A chance encounter with a street artist in a seaside town two hours from Rome had led Paul to fall among thieves.
* * *
I saw the twins again the following day. Martine did the talking. I asked how they had come to Rome. She backtracked. “Jutta and I left our home in Cassel and went to Berlin. In Berlin we were completely involved in political things. I worked in a factory and was a Communist. After work I was in groups and made posters all the time. I started living with an anarchist, and that made me a black sheep with the Party. I got a job in a film as director’s assistant and there I met Rolf, my ex-husband. He had a leading part in the film. I fell completely in love with him. He said, ‘I am going to Rome. Do you want to come with me?’ And I did. I was already pregnant. The Italian police put Rolf in prison for three days because they found political books in his car. They were looking for members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The day the baby was born, Jutta came to the hospital because she had dreamed I needed her and Rolf wasn’t there; he didn’t care what was going on with the baby. Afterwards he came to me and said, ‘That’s your trip. Good-bye.’ I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t take the responsibility. So I phoned my mother and she said, ‘I’ll take the baby for the time that you can’t do it, but see you find a job.’ My parents wanted me to stay in Cassel, but I said I couldn’t do that. I wanted to go back to Rome. Jutta said we had agents there and we could work there. I just wanted to get out of the situation. I didn’t want to see anybody. Out, out, out. I got back to Rome but we had no money. At first we slept in Jutta’s VW. Then a little gangster gave us a basement where we could go, but it was cold there and we got very, very sick. We didn’t have anything to eat. Some drugs.”
Martine broke off and started toward the kitchen. “I’ll go and help Jutta with the tea.” There, I heard her speak in German with her sister. When they returned and we were drinking our tea, Martine began her story once again but now came something entirely unexpected.
“After we met Paul, we went to live with him and his friend Marcello in Trastevere.” She paused. “I never told the story. It’s difficult. It was so dangerous to tell it. It doesn’t have to do with anybody else. When we moved into Marcello’s house, all these people kept coming, and we went to restaurants—the Botticelli, a lot of gangsters, you know, from the south and Milano, they came with coke. I’m sure they had other business too, but I only knew them with big coke business. The men were well dressed. They have big cars. They spend a lot of money on those things. Every day they have new things on. They were young and old. They were quite fucked-up with the coke. It’s not like heroin. But they were interesting. I just loved it, going out with them. I like adventure, you know. They behaved nicely. Incredible. Like jewels. Not intelligent, but funny. They made jokes, but I don’t think they meant to be funny. There was one who had lots of trouble with the police, and he showed all his marks and all his pistols and I liked to talk with them about having a pistol. There was Ciambellone and another, Walter. He loved us very much. We painted; he bought our pictures. One time we went to a restaurant with them and there were these two whores at the table. We ate with them and the men treated us very, very nicely, making all these compliments. Then one of these whores got really pissed off and she stood up and she screamed that they were never nice to her. She said they would cut our faces. Ciambellone got furious. He stood up and almost pushed over the whole table. And then he threw the two whores out. He was their pimp.
“The gangsters, they never touched us, they respected us completely. It went round that we were twins, completely free, like women they had never met, and we talked with them about our plans about the movie we wanted to do. We wanted to make a film, not about these people, about the little boys—they are called scippo, that means to take things away, little thieves—these boys that go up in the street on motorbikes and they take the handbags away. We were looking for a little bit of money to start off to get a camera and some film, half a million lire, less than a thousand dollars.
“I never told this story before.
“One night Paul phoned us and said Ciambellone said he wanted to give us money to produce our film. We took a taxi to the address he gave us in the Trastevere. An old, old house. We came into this one squalid little room with a bathroom and a kitchen. There was a red bed inside and a big carpet, like a bordello. There were all these men. And Paul. I knew them so well and I never had an idea anything could happen. There was a projector and they were showing porno films.
“They sent Paul away. He said he would come back in an hour. He wanted to buy blue jeans or something. We went with Ciambellone and this other man, Roberto, into the kitchen. Ciambellone gave me the money. Half a mill
ion lire. I said, ‘Now we must go, we have a job we must do, these pictures.’ They said, ‘No, no, stay a little bit here, now we drink Champagne because you’re going to make this film.’ ‘Okay, but in ten minutes we’re going.’ Then we drank Champagne and we had a lot of coke. Then they said, ‘Now we are seeing porno films.’
“This went on and on, then we had to sit on the bed, and then they took all their clothes off and were sitting in underpants and smoking and playing with themselves. They were quite out of their minds. We tried to get out. I went to the door. They had locked it. They were taking more and more drugs and everything got more and more violent.
“One of them tried to touch me, and I pushed him away and so he slapped me in my face. I appealed to Ciambellone. That started a fight between them; they were shouting and about eight of them split into two groups. There were about four or five others just snorting and watching and laughing. Both groups wanted us.
“Ciambellone wanted Jutta. He wanted her to take off her clothes. The bodyguard and the old man were touching me. The old man was fat, just awful and lecherous, but strong, very strong. You knew there was no joke with him. We tried to fight them, but I was so tired, so heavy. I was really frightened. I got the money from my bag and gave it to Ciambellone, but he put it back in my bag. Ciambellone had taken a lot of speed, maybe fifteen pills and all that snorting. They were losing their minds.
“Then Ciambellone took his knife out and said they must tie us up. So they got their belts and things and tied me and Jutta up on the bed. Our legs and hands … Then Ciambellone came with injections and Jutta said, ‘No, no.’ Ciambellone said he wanted to marry her and he said that he knew he never would get her and the only way is the violent way, and that they are used to getting everything by violence. If they don’t get it in another way, they just take what they want.
