by Tobias Jones
‘Is that the real audience or the fake one?’
He smiled slightly. ‘We’re realising their dreams,’ he repeated.
‘You’re realising your dreams. You’re getting rich while they sit there passively on the sofa, their eyeballs sprayed with ads.’
‘That’s a very cynical view of our creative industry.’
‘Creative.’ I repeated the word. ‘Creative cuts many ways.’
He looked at me and flashed a smile. ‘What is it you want exactly, Castagnetti?’
‘I’m not interested in your creativity, past or present. No interest in what went on in your empire in years gone by. All I want, Senator,’ I tried to put as much respect and solemnity in my voice as possible, ‘is to take a young girl home to her parents.’
‘Of course. Of course. I’m a parent myself, I can understand their anxiety. How can we help you?’
‘I need to know the next time Mori gets in touch. I need to pick up his trail.’
‘This Mori,’ he said, turning to his lawyer, ‘have you heard of him?’
The man shook his head, acting dumb.
‘Vespa had,’ I said quickly. ‘He was round at Mori’s place when I was there. He gave me a facial,’ I pointed to the bruising on my face. ‘If Mori gets in touch again, I want to know.’
‘You got a card?’
I passed over one of my dog-eared cards. He looked at it and then slapped it against the palm of his hand as if to check its authenticity. He passed it over to the lawyer.
‘We’ll do everything we can to help you, Castagnetti,’ he said, offering his hand. As we shook, he moved his arm hard towards the door, pushing my hand away from him as if to signal that my time was up.
‘Just one thing,’ I said. ‘This case I’m working on . . . it’s just a hunch, but something tells me it’s linked to another case from years ago. There was a young girl who went missing in the early nineties called Anna Sartori. Remember her?’
He looked over his shoulder as if interrogating his memory. He shook his head.
‘Anna Sartori,’ I said again.
He shifted his gaze slightly. ‘Rings a vague bell.’
‘She had been hustling with this Mori character. And then moved up in the world, servicing some of your business partners. She was about to get a go as a showgirl. What happened?’
Di Angelo frowned and rubbed his forehead with his thumb and fingers. ‘We have thousands of aspiring showgirls every year. I can’t remember all the ups and downs of each one’s career.’
‘I heard she was the squeeze of one of your main advertisers. Some yogurt magnate.’
‘Baroni?’ He smiled to himself. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Baroni. I remember now. He had got the hots for that bird. Really lost his head over her. Kept phoning me up to ask for her to get her break. You know, when a man who is pumping millions into your company makes a request, you have to listen. The guy was one of our largest advertisers.’
‘So you agreed to promote her onto one of your shows.’
‘Yeah. She was cute, had a nice smile, decent curves. I wanted to keep Baroni onside, so she was taken on.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We agreed to put her on one of the shows. You know, a bit of a female frame to the picture, something to keep us weak men amused.’ He smiled as if the lewd linked us all.
‘But she never went on screen. She was dumped.’
‘Yeah. That man, Mori, showed up with a box of snaps. Photos of the girl doing her stuff with half the A-listers of Rome. Even I learnt some stuff looking at those snaps.’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘We couldn’t have one of our showgirls, the public face of our channel, with that sort of profile.’
‘I thought they all had that sort of past.’
‘Sure they do,’ he said. ‘Sure they do. It’s just not all captured on film.’ Di Angelo chuckled to himself.
‘So Anna had a past and you didn’t like it. But she knew you had a past too.’
‘We all have a past,’ he said.
I watched him, wondering whether it was worth letting on what I thought must have happened to her. I couldn’t imagine someone like Anna giving up without a fight. She would have tried every trick in the book, and she knew them all. She knew her friend Chiara Biondi was being used by Tony Vespa and Mario Di Angelo to keep the head of Teleshare onside. In return for a few carnal pleasures, Giorgio Gregori was deliberately bumping up viewing figures and allowing Di Angelo to double and treble his ad rates. Sartori knew what was going on and must have used it as ammunition when the studio was threatening to offload her.
‘Not many people have got a past quite like yours. When you dumped her, Sartori threatened to make your cosy relationship with Teleshare public, make it known that your fantastic viewing figures were a fantasy, simply payback for the girls you used to serve up for Gregori.’
He looked at me with disappointment. There was none of the expected anger or defensiveness, only disappointment and, if anything, wry amusement.
‘You think, Detective, that I had something to do with her disappearance?’
‘Did you?’
‘Antonio,’ he said to his lawyer with a lethal grin, ‘you put too much hard stuff in the detective’s drink. It’s gone to his head.’
‘What happened to Anna Sartori?’ I asked.
He spun round quickly, staring at me. His face was stern now, almost unrecognisable from the fun-loving, boyish rogue he had been a few minutes before. Now his eyelids were low, like he was tired of the world and of me. ‘I’m used to gossip and allegations,’ he said. ‘Happens all the time in this country where the imagination runs wild. Especially because people like to think that they would be just as successful as me if only they weren’t honest. They put my success down to dishonesty because it makes their failure easier to live with. It happens all the time. It reassures them that their jinxed lives are down to their saintly morality, rather than their dull, boring, predictable, bourgeois provincialism. You remember what Andreotti said once? “Apart from the Punic wars, I’ve been accused of everything.” Well, it’s the same with me, Detective. I’ve been accused of just about everything. Every week there’s a new investigation into some part of my business. Isn’t that right, Antonio?’ He bounced his head at the lawyer. ‘He works an eighteen-hour day every day just to defend me from accusation and insinuation. And he costs a lot more than your three hundred a day. So nothing surprises me any more. I’m used to it. I’m used to incompetent investigators seeing me as a scalp. You want to know what happened to Anna Sartori? She probably committed suicide because she couldn’t make it as a star. End of story.’
‘End of scandal, you mean?’
He put his chin on his shoulder like he was praying for patience. ‘If you find out what happened to her, let me know. Because then I can make it public and people like you might stop trying to pin every crime on my person.’ He looked at me briefly. ‘Now get out.’
The lawyer stood up, ready to usher me through the door in case I didn’t make my own way.
‘Let me know when Mori gets in touch,’ I said. I didn’t hold out much hope.
I walked the couple of blocks back to the car. I was feeling melancholic. I leant over the balustrades of the river and watched the grey-brown water flowing slowly to the sea. There were a few boats down there, the water lapping at their hulls and making a gentle slapping noise. A few gulls swept down on invisible fish.
The drive to Baroni’s house was slow. The roads were full of flash, static cars. The noise of horns and radios and shouted insults was part of the soundtrack of the capital, and I sat there with the window down, getting so used to the noise it was almost hypnotic. I pulled up outside Baroni’s address. I was surprised to see a dull block of flats. I had assumed an industrialist would have had a large villa, but this block looked, as they say, popular: there were football flags and laundry flapping from balconies, rusty bikes hanging on the railings, their wheels badly bent from hooligans having used t
hem as a trampoline.
‘Who is it?’ said a gravelly voice at the citofono.
‘Castagnetti.’
‘Who?’ The voice sounded impatient, even aggressive.
‘I’m a private detective. Is that Mr Baroni?’
‘It is.’
‘Could I ask you a couple of questions?’
‘About what?’
‘Anna Sartori.’
The line went quiet.
‘Dottore?’ I said deferentially, not sure he was still there.
‘I’ll come down.’
A few minutes later I heard the gate click. I looked up and saw an elderly man who was pressing the gate-release button from inside the palazzo. He was a smallish, thin man wearing a tie and a V-neck red sweater. He looked fit but tired. His hair was jet black, probably dyed, I thought. He must have been in his sixties. He walked towards me slowly, looking left and right as if checking who else was around before opening the outer gate and looking at me with real intent.
‘Let’s walk,’ was all he said.
We crossed the road and went into a small park. It was dusk, but the park was still noisy with the shrieks of young children. We stood side by side watching a young woman pushing a child on a swing.
‘A private detective, eh?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who hired you?’ His voice was strong and stern, the sort of voice that was used to cutting to the chase.
‘It’s just personal interest.’
‘That so?’
‘That’s right.’
We watched a young toddler being helped up the steps of a slide by her grandfather.
‘Why now?’
‘New facts are emerging.’
‘Like what?’
I shrugged, not wanting to give him everything up front. I needed chips to bargain with.
‘Like what?’ he repeated, louder this time.
‘Like what was happening to her in the weeks before she went missing.’ We hadn’t even said her name. I had only mentioned it once on the intercom.
‘Go on.’
‘I heard you knew her quite well.’
He turned to look at me, moving his whole torso as if his neck were too stiff to rotate just his head. His lips were pursed, like he was about to defend himself.
‘Sure. I knew her, knew her well enough.’
He was still talking in code. I let him know I had broken it.
‘I heard you were lovers.’
‘You heard? What do you know about what we were?’
‘The way I heard it, it was quite a love story.’
He said nothing but stared straight ahead, watching the children chasing each other underneath the steps of the slide.
‘Sit down,’ he said, motioning towards a bench facing the park. We sat side by side, staring ahead.
‘How do you know? Who told you?’
‘One of Anna’s friends. And Di Angelo confirmed it.’
‘Di Angelo? You’ve spoken to him?’
‘Briefly.’
Baroni looked at me now, like he could take me more seriously if Di Angelo had seen me.
‘You married?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Marriage is an odd thing. You promise to spend the rest of your life with someone at an age when you don’t even know what love is. And chances are you spend the rest of your life falling in love with other people and trying not to hurt your wife. That’s all love is in the end – the hope that you will avoid hurting someone.’
‘Did your wife know about Anna?’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shrug. ‘My wife never knew. Or maybe she did, but she never let me know she knew. When you’ve been married forty-odd years there are plenty of secrets and this was one of ours. I’m sure she’s got hers.’
‘What happened to fidelity?’
‘Fidelity?’ He chuckled, as though such a naïve question didn’t deserve a reply. Then he paused and thought, and gave me one. ‘Fidelity is like an ice cube. It’ll survive in the freezer, but will disappear in the sun.’
‘So Anna was your sun? Or one of them?’
‘Nobody wants to live their life in a freezer.’
‘What was she like?’
He sighed heavily. ‘She was beautiful. Very beautiful.’ I turned to look at him and his stare shifted to the distance. ‘You’ve seen the photos of her?’ He looked mildly pained, as if an old wound was making him wince. ‘And her beauty wasn’t just her youth.
‘There was an innocence about her. Don’t get me wrong, I knew she was a pro. She knew men, there’s no doubt she knew exactly what she was doing physically, if you see what I mean. She was an expert there. But she was like a young girl too. Always wanting ice cream, or to go to the seaside, or insisting we stop to look at dolls in a children’s shop.’
This time he shook his head, smiling. ‘She was a beautiful, simple girl. She was barely more than a child, really. She had that childish spontaneity, wanting to do silly things on the spur of the moment. She would go all soppy when she saw an animal in the street. Would always want to stop and pat the puppy and talk to the owners about what it was called and so on. She was like that, like a little girl. I heard she had never known her father and, well, I think she liked me because I was gentle with her, I treated her like a daughter. She used to want me to read to her in bed, read her stories and so on.’ He shook his head again, laughing quietly like he had wanted to do other things in bed. ‘But really she was quite a sad little girl. She constantly felt that the real action was elsewhere, that she was missing out on something, she was in the wrong place. So she was restless, suddenly leaving on a whim or rolling up on another. She couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, before getting bored.’
‘I heard she was pretty single-minded.’
He looked at me and then shifted focus, so that he seemed to be looking through me and into the distant past. ‘The only thing she was focused on was getting on screen. It was an obsession for her. It’s all she could talk about sometimes. When she was feeling optimistic, she would describe what her life would be like when she was a diva, the demands she would make on her staff. She used to joke that I would be her chauffeur when she was a star. It was a part she practised for years, a part that made her feel fulfilled: one day, she thought, she would be recognised in the street, would offer her fingers for people to kiss. She used to act it all out for me. I found it embarrassing, rather silly to be honest. But it was her driving ambition, to become this acknowledged beauty, this recognisable icon. She would prance around the bedroom pretending to be carrying large bags from expensive shops – no, she said I would be carrying her bags – and would be phoning her famous friends, calling the other stars by their first names and inviting them to lunch.’
‘Was it ever likely to happen?’
He shrugged. ‘I did my best. I spoke to the people at the station. I was a big investor into their operation and they listened to me. And Anna would do anything asked of her. She wanted to go places, and she could be quite a cat when she needed to be. She had claws all right. I met her at one of the parties the TV station used to throw for advertisers and she didn’t seem all that innocent there, I can say that much.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She was using her charms.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She was flirting, giggling, imploring. She wanted to get on TV. That’s what all those girls cared about. That’s why they did what they did.’
‘Which was?’
‘What do you think? They were there to oil the wheels of business. We all knew that. Di Angelo used to lay them on by the coach load. And they, poor things, thought they were just a step away from the big time.’
‘I thought she was about to get her break, to get into one of the chorus lines.’
‘Yeah,’ he chortled derisively. ‘She pushed real hard for that. Went on and on at me. Made me go and talk to Di Angelo every week. She wanted me to threaten t
o pull our advertising from his channel unless she got her break.’
‘Did you?’
‘What?’
‘Threaten to pull your advertising?’
‘I liked her. I did what I could for her and that meant she liked me. Di Angelo even promised to put her forward, but then his promises were like raw spaghetti. Easily broken.’
‘But she thought she was about to be taken on?’
‘That was the way Di Angelo always played it. “Your big break is just round the corner” and all that. She thought she had been chosen to replace some girl.’ He shrugged. ‘Came to see me all ecstatic, hugging me, kissing me, thanking me for getting her her big break. She was about to be offered a contract. Everything she had ever wanted was about to come true. After all the demeaning parties, all the broken promises. It never happened.’
‘Because Mori turned up with prints of her past?’
‘Right,’ he looked at me, surprised how much I knew. ‘This guy from her past had turned up with all sorts of snaps. Intimate stuff. That’s what she told me. Came to me distraught saying that the studio manager had told her it wouldn’t have suited the image of the channel. You know, behind the scenes it was all sordid orgies, but the public image was one of healthy families watching innocent game shows.’
‘So she never got her break?’
He shook his head. ‘And it broke her. She had done so much to get that far, and then at the last minute it had all been snatched away from her. She was white with anger when she came into my office. That’s when I really saw those claws. Said she would get revenge on everyone, would bring down the whole empire.’
‘How was she going to do that?’
‘She was smart. Childish but smart. She wanted to go public with the links between Di Angelo’s studio and Teleshare. Told me she had proof that the viewing figures were being fiddled. She was feeling vengeful. But she was trying to take revenge on people who were stronger than her. So she got hurt.’
‘Di Angelo?’
Baroni threw his hands out in front of him, as if to say that he didn’t know. A child’s ball had rolled under our bench and a little boy ran towards us, pausing at the sight of us. I reached under and got the green sponge ball and threw it towards him. He put his hands eagerly together, trying to catch it, but it bounced off his chest and back towards me. I threw it again and this time he caught it.
