by Tobias Jones
‘The girl I’m looking for is his daughter,’ I said abruptly.
She put down her cup and laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she shook her head, ‘Giorgio doesn’t have a daughter.’
‘I believe he does. I need to talk to him.’
She stared at me, still trying to work out if I was serious. I took out my photograph of Simona and passed it across the polished table. ‘This is the girl.’
‘He doesn’t have a daughter,’ she frowned, still sceptical.
‘I don’t think he knows he has one. I need to talk to him. He deserves to know.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
I nodded. She picked up the snap of Simona again and looked at it, staring at the face with a confused smile. When she turned her gaze on me she looked changed, like something had been lit inside her.
‘She’s very beautiful.’
‘So is her mother.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I would rather talk to your brother. Your niece,’ I leant on the word so that she listened, ‘could be in danger.’
She got up and went down a corridor. I heard her knock gently on a door. As it opened, I could hear the old man coughing repeatedly, groaning as he failed to dislodge the obstructions in his lungs.
A few minutes later she came back. ‘He’s weak but he’s still cantankerous.’ She smiled apologetically.
We walked down the corridor together and again she gave a deferential knock before going in.
‘This is the gentleman,’ she said, motioning towards me.
I looked at the double bed where Gregori was propped upright. He was thin and drawn. His face was grey and his lower lip was wobbling like he couldn’t control it. He was wearing pyjamas that looked like a pinstripe suit. He was an invalid but he still meant business. His eyes were stern, staring at me as though he would give no quarter.
‘All right,’ he said abruptly to his sister, nodding her out of the room. ‘What’s this about?’ He looked at me through wiry eyebrows.
There was nowhere to sit, so I stood at the corner of his bed.
‘A young girl’s gone missing,’ I said. ‘She’s only eighteen. I’ve been hired by her family to find her.’
He was still staring at me, his jaw juddering involuntarily. ‘And?’
‘I need your help.’
He started coughing, his whole, frail body folding as he tried to clear his throat. I watched him and waited for him to finish. He spat into a blue handkerchief. I took out the snap of Simona and passed it over. He looked up at me before snatching it from me in his thin, grey fingers. He stared at the page from the magazine. There was no emotion on his face. He passed it back to me with a nonplussed shrug.
‘Never seen her,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in this cursed bed for months. I can’t help you.’ He stared at the far wall as if the interview were ended. But then he started coughing again.
‘Can I get you some water?’ I asked.
He seemed irritated and shook his head. ‘Cigarettes were a weakness of mine. And we all pay for our weaknesses in the end.’
‘I heard you had another weakness. You might be about to pay for that too.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Young girls.’
He sneered. ‘You think I’m responsible for the disappearance of that girl?’
‘I think you’re responsible for her appearance.’
He frowned, like he couldn’t follow. ‘I’ve never been married. I had little histories with women. Little romances now and again.’
‘Not much romance from what I heard.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I heard that Tony Vespa used to send you girls. Why would he do that?’
‘No one ever sent me girls. They came to me.’ He tried to push himself upright with a weak arm. ‘I’ve always been fortunate with women.’ He said it like there was still a chance he would be again.
I offered him my most derisive smile. ‘They were sent. They were call girls. Why would Vespa pick up your brothel bill?’
‘I’ve never heard of this Vespa,’ he said dismissively.
‘Di Angelo?’
‘He runs a TV studio. I was in the industry. We knew each other. So?’
‘And his studio used to send girls your way.’
‘I told you, I’ve never paid for a woman in my life.’
‘Right. Someone else picked up the bill. This girl,’ I held up the snap again, ‘she’s your daughter.’
Nothing changed. He still stared at me as his chin bounced up and down. I waited for him to say something, to show some disbelief or curiosity, but he just stared at me.
‘The mother of this girl is one of the escorts Vespa used to send your way. Her name was Chiara Biondi.’
He smiled like he wanted to show he was still smart. ‘Bull.’
I passed the snap over again. ‘Your daughter,’ I said. ‘You got any other kids?’
‘I haven’t got any kids.’
‘Then she’s your only child. By the looks of you, you’ll be heading into eternity pretty soon. But she,’ I pointed at the photo, ‘she might get there before you if you don’t help me. She’s eighteen, an innocent young girl. She’s your daughter and you can save her if you answer a couple of questions.’
He was staring at the photo differently now. Staring at it longingly as if it was his last hope of happiness, as if there was something left that might complete his life before he checked out.
‘She’s been abducted,’ I said quietly, ‘by a petty crook who likes to squeeze cash out of people with secrets to hide. My guess is he’s headed either here or, more likely, to Di Angelo.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s the living evidence of what went on back in the nineties.’
His eyes were glazed over, like he was trying to remember.
‘Di Angelo’s in politics now,’ I reminded him. ‘He’s gone clean, or pretended to. My guess is that he would rather lose the girl than his career.’
Gregori was still looking at the photograph.
‘That’s your daughter. She’s in danger. Don’t you want to meet her before you die?’ He was still staring at the photograph with a look of incomprehension. ‘Why don’t you tell me what went on?’
He didn’t say anything. I could hear the soporific tick-tock of an old grandfather clock in the corner. His breathing was slow now, like he was preparing a final confession.
‘I know what it looks like to you,’ he said slowly, fixing me with his yellowy eyes. ‘You use words like corruption and call girl. Words that make me sound like some sort of gangster.’ He drew breath noisily. ‘It was never like that.’
‘Tell me what it was like.’
He pushed his head back into the pillow and looked at the ceiling. ‘In the late eighties there were hundreds of private TV stations.’ His voice was almost a whisper and I had to lean close to hear properly. ‘Every local businessman wanted his own channel. It didn’t take much. All you needed was a room, a girl with a nice smile and a big bosom, and a cameraman. Everyone was trying it. The only problem was that they needed income, and the only way to get that was advertising. And no advertisers would buy space if they didn’t know how many eyeballs were watching their ad. With a newspaper you know, more or less, your readership. You know how many copies you’ve sold. But advertisers felt that television was just sending images up into the dark sky and they had no idea which households were picking them up. The private TV stations needed advertisers and advertisers needed to know viewing figures.’
‘So?’
‘I set up a company to suit them both. It measured the viewing figures in order that the stations could present clear data, and advertisers could evaluate whether it was worth buying advertising space on any of these channels.’
‘How?’
He rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me. ‘How what? How did we measure it? We gave a couple of hundred households little set-top boxes that measure
d their viewing habits. We amplified that sample to get an idea of national viewing. It gave us, and the advertisers, an accurate reflection of what programmes were popular and what not.’
‘Accurate?’
‘It was an estimate of course. We were merely elaborating a sample, so there’s always a margin of error. But it was clearer than anything they had had in the past.’ Something caught in his throat and he started rasping. He pushed himself up on his elbows and spat into the handkerchief again. ‘The advertisers wanted accuracy and were always lobbying me to expand the sample. If you have a few hundred households as a sample, the margin of error is fairly high, but if you have a few thousand, it’s greatly reduced. I explained that there were cost implications. Back in the late eighties those set-top boxes cost hundreds of thousands of lire. But we slowly amplified the sample.’
‘And made it more accurate?’
He stared at the ceiling and smiled slightly. ‘Accurate.’ He said it dismissively. ‘What’s accurate? We certainly let the advertisers know exactly what our sample was watching.’
‘But?’
‘What has any of this got to do with this missing girl?’ He still had the photograph between his fingers.
‘Why wasn’t it accurate?’
His breathing sounded laboured. Each time his chest rose it gurgled like static on an old radio. ‘We fudged,’ he said softly, ‘the sample. Our staff were spending hours going through the demographics, trying to find the right balance within our sample. You know,’ he coughed, ‘an old woman, a young woman, a rich man, a poor man. All that stuff. It was taking months and months to get a balanced sample, and even then there was no knowing whether it was really balanced.’ He paused, looking again at the ceiling. I followed his gaze and saw the yellow stains of nicotine. ‘Di Angelo came to me saying they had done some market research years ago and had all sorts of demographics that might save us time.’
‘He had his own, prepared sample of people?’
He nodded. ‘He was suggesting who we should involve. It saved us time and I had no reason to doubt the market research. At least, not until the figures started coming in. As soon as the enlarged sample was up and running, Di Angelo’s studios were recording magnificent ratings. Stuff he could only have dreamt of a few weeks or months before.’
‘You had given these set-top boxes to his best friends?’
‘Something like that. They must have left their TVs on his station all day and all night. Back then he was only a small player, one of hundreds of aspiring media players. He struggled to get to one per cent most of the time. And suddenly he was recording two, three, four per cent. Across the nation. At night it got close to double figures. Crazy results.’
‘So you were accurately recording what people were watching. It’s just that the people you were gathering data from were Di Angelo plants?’
‘Some of them. I was very uncomfortable. I arranged a meeting with him and he admitted it all. He shrugged his shoulders and said sorry, said he had had to do it to build his business. I was astonished at how up front he was about his dishonesty. That was what really struck me. Never denied it. I complained that he had damaged my reputation, that I was compromised, but he was convinced no one would ever know. He said we were now allies,’ he paused to catch his breath, ‘which meant I was in his large pocket.’
Gregori was shaking his head on the pillow, moving his hairy ears from one side to the other. ‘He was all charm, said he was desperate to make it up to me. He offered me money. A lot of money. I said that would only compromise me further.’
‘So?’
‘I walked out. I felt my career was over. Someone would find out about it. I was supposed to be some sort of referee but I had been bought by one of the players. I wanted to go public, to say what had happened.’ He sighed heavily.
‘But you didn’t.’
He looked at me, sensing my disapproval.
‘And then one evening I was sitting here on my own. I had just got back from dinner somewhere. The doorbell went and there was a young woman standing there.’ He closed his eyes and frowned slightly. ‘She was very young and beautiful. She asked if she could come in, asked if there was anything she could do. Said it in such a way that didn’t leave much doubt about what was on offer.’
‘And you knew she was sent by Di Angelo?’
‘I didn’t ask and frankly I didn’t care at that point. I took her in, gave her a drink.’ He rolled his head to look at me again. ‘I thought it would never happen again.’
‘But?’
‘It just went on. I never even spoke to Di Angelo, but girls would come round here, or I would get invited to parties that were unlike anything I had ever seen before. Wild, extraordinary parties. There were Cubans, Brazilians, Russians, the lot. I became,’ he closed his eyes, ‘someone different. I was cruel with them. I felt like I owned them.’
‘Whereas it was Di Angelo that owned you?’
He gave a tired nod. ‘As the company got bigger, we kept increasing the sample. And each time someone from his station would subtly suggest the precise people that should be included. I just went along with it.’
‘And his viewing figures kept rising?’
‘Of course. Double figures by then were normal. In terms of percentages, he was in the teens and twenties. This was a man who had been delivering freesheets door to door only ten years earlier. And now he was charging advertisers billions and billions of lire per minute of airtime. He had found the perfect formula to print money. And more than that, he was always surrounded by hundreds of young women who were desperate to get on screen and who were prepared to do anything to get there.’
‘And Chiara Biondi was one of those girls who was sent your way?’
He nodded. ‘Chiara. That’s right.’
We sat like that for a minute. The whole thing was clear now. Chiara Biondi was one of the young girls who had kept Gregori sweet. He was sent girls in return for bumping up Di Angelo’s viewing figures. No one had ever known about it. And now Di Angelo had reinvented himself as a politician, the sort of red-blooded man that the parliament of a red-blooded country needed. He had presented himself as an honest Joe, the sort of straight-talking businessman who would clean up the corrupt habits of politics. But this was the kind of scandal that could blast a big hole in his new career. Mori, the paparazzo, knew about the story from Anna Sartori, and when he saw Simona’s photo in the magazine he knew he had living evidence of the deal between Di Angelo and Gregori’s Teleshare. She was the walking proof that Di Angelo had made millions from being a high-end pimp.
‘How do I know she’s mine?’ Gregori asked.
‘They can test for these things now.’
‘There might not be time for that.’ He looked around his dishevelled bed as if to say that he was on the home straight.
‘You could take her mother’s word for it.’
‘I don’t know what that’s worth.’
‘I do. And, with respect, she really didn’t want her daughter to be yours.’
‘That so?’ He closed his eyes briefly. ‘I haven’t always been a good man. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve only realised how many since I’ve been immobilised here in bed. Death focuses the mind that way. That period was an aberration, a time when I was prepared to play his game to get the rewards. I didn’t know how dirty the game was, or how fleeting those rewards.’
‘Something good might have come out of it,’ I said, wanting to nudge him back towards Simona.
‘Will you bring her here?’ he said.
‘Simona?’ I looked at him, surprised by his apparent sentimentality.
He nodded. ‘My one regret in life is not having any children. And now I’m confined to this bed you come and tell me I have a daughter. I might be in a position to make amends for what I’ve done.’
‘Not if she doesn’t make it.’
‘You really think she’s in danger?’
‘Sure. I need your help.’
&nbs
p; ‘There’s nothing I can do. Look at me.’
‘I need you to make a phone call. Call Di Angelo, tell him to meet me.’
He was frowning now, weighing up the chances, I guessed, of even getting through to the senator. His chest rose slowly, sounding like a draining plughole. He was breathing heavily, as if our conversation had exhausted him. I looked around the room as I listened to his wheezy breaths. There were small pots of pills lined up on his bedside table. On the opposite wall the curtains were being gently sucked out of the window by the wind.
‘Pass me that phone.’ He pointed at a cordless standing upright in its cradle. He gave orders like he was used to being obeyed. ‘And that book.’
I handed them both over and he groaned as he fingered through the leather book, looking for a number. He dialled like an old man, using his index finger instead of his thumb as he held the handset at arm’s length to see the numbers. He listened, then hung up again.
‘“Non-existent number” it said. I’ll try another.’
He dialled again and this time I heard the phone ringing the other end. A woman’s voice answered.
‘I need to speak to Di Angelo,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s Giorgio Gregori.’
Something was said and he was put on hold. Eventually, he was asked to leave a message.
‘Tell him,’ he shut his eyes as if it would add emphasis to his words, ‘tell him Giorgio Gregori called. It’s very important that he allows . . .’ he put his hand over the mouthpiece, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Castagnetti.’
‘. . . that he allows a private investigator called Castagnetti to see him. It’s urgent. It’s my dying wish,’ he said melodramatically.
He hung up and looked at me. ‘It used to be that he would call me every day. Now he’s gone so high up in the world, he wouldn’t even take calls from his mother.’
‘What was he like back then?’
‘Di Angelo?’ He smiled. ‘He was like a boy, a young boy who wanted to be loved by everyone. He was a back-slapping sort, always trying to make friends, telling jokes, oiling the wheels. He was absurdly generous, giving presents to everyone and to their wives and their mistresses. If someone was in hospital, he would send a huge bouquet of flowers. He was constantly trying to make a gesture, a gift, a statement, that marked him out as some sort of benevolent patron.’
