by Tobias Jones
‘She said,’ the old man began slowly, ‘that if they had dirt on her, she had plenty on them.’
‘On the studio?’
‘Right.’
He was still staring at the young boy with the ball. ‘The channel used to sort out girls for the head of Teleshare.’
‘So I heard.’
‘Anna knew all about it and she wasn’t daft. She knew that it meant Teleshare was inflating viewing figures. And she knew why they were doing it. If you’ve got an extra million viewers you can charge much more for advertising. The viewing figures dictate the cost of ad space. Laying on girls for that monster was an easy way to increase revenue.’
‘Didn’t that increase your costs? You were one of the major advertisers on the channel.’
‘That’s why Anna came to me. She was smart. She thought I would be appalled about overpaying and would fight her corner.’
There was something in the way he said it that sounded strange. It sounded like he wasn’t appalled, like he wasn’t going to fight her corner. I could understand him possibly not sticking up for a young girl, but I was sure any hard-nosed businessman would stick up for his business. If he was being overcharged for advertising to reach phantom viewers he would have fought back. It sounded as though he didn’t fight at all.
‘Why weren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Appalled.’
He must have realised he had let slip something. He didn’t reply but just sat there staring into space.
‘You weren’t incensed that the channel had invented tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers to inflate your costs?’
He turned round to look at me, defiance etched in the deep lines of his face. ‘I probably was appalled. I don’t remember.’
He sat there with both palms on his knees now, leaning forward. He looked more animated, more anxious, than he had been so far.
‘Why weren’t you appalled at being overcharged for advertising?’
‘Let it go,’ he said.
If he had been younger I would have put my knuckles through his teeth. Instead I decided to put them through his marriage.
‘Your wife at home?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I believe in honesty. Give me the truth or I’ll give it to her.’
He turned round very slowly. ‘Leave her out of this.’
I stood up. ‘I’m going to have a chat with your wife.’
‘Sit down,’ he barked. He took a deep breath and I listened to him exhaling angrily. He was still leaning forward, but his chin was on his left shoulder so that he was addressing my feet.
‘I knew exactly what was going on. All of us knew. Di Angelo didn’t have one point three million viewers, or whatever they said it was back then. It was impossible. For the crap he broadcast he was lucky to get half that. And we all knew Teleshare was in his pocket.’ The words were coming fast, like he wanted to get the confession out quickly. ‘I was overpaying because I was getting a rebate. That was what he called it. “A rebate”.’
He looked up at me sheepishly to check I had understood. I got it all right. It was an old ploy: inflate invoices to a company that can then reduce its profits and tax liabilities. And the person in the company who pays the inflated invoices then gets a cash rebate back. It normally goes in their pocket rather than the company coffers. It suits everyone except the company’s shareholders but they never know about it anyway. It was as if everything was being inflated: viewing figures, invoices, reputations. It would have only taken a pointed object to deflate the lot and Anna Sartori had been sharpening her claws.
‘So what did you tell Anna?’
‘I told her I would help her.’ He was breathing deeply now, holding his forehead in his right hand.
‘And what did you actually do?’
‘I phoned Di Angelo. I told him that Anna knew about everything and that she was flapping at the mouth. I told him that he needed to deal with the situation.’
‘What does that mean? “Deal with the situation”?’
‘I expected him to come to an agreement with her. Offer her money, give her back her place on the chorus line. I don’t know. That was his job. I expected him to come to a solution.’
‘What was his suggestion?’
‘He told me to send Anna round to the Hotel del Fiume. He assured me he would sort everything out.’
‘So you arranged for Anna to see Di Angelo?’
‘I don’t know if she saw him, or who she saw. That was just where she was headed.’
I sat with my shoulders against the back of the bench, staring at the skyline. Baroni had effectively sent his lover to an appointment, after which she had never been seen again. He had warned Di Angelo about her desire for revenge and, it seemed, Di Angelo – or one of his cronies – had struck first.
‘I had no idea that was going to happen to her,’ he said slowly. ‘We were very close. I was very fond of her. Very fond.’
‘But you fed her to the lions.’
‘I thought they might give her back her place in the studio. That they would give her some money. I thought something good would come out of it. I never, never for one minute . . . There’s not one day I haven’t mourned her.’ He was talking fast now. ‘Not one day that I haven’t had to carry around this terrible weight of what happened.’
‘What did happen?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I only know she went missing. Wasn’t seen again. And from that day I never again gave any money to Di Angelo’s mob. I cancelled all advertising contracts with his studio.’
‘You never confronted him about Anna?’
‘I tried. I asked him, the same as the police and the journalists and everyone else. He just smiled and shrugged and insisted it was nothing to do with him.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘I didn’t know what to believe any more.’
We sat like that for a few minutes. My guess, at least, had been right. Sartori wouldn’t be ousted without a fight, and she knew enough secrets to put the wind up the studio’s bosses. I hadn’t known about the inflated invoices, but that was almost standard practice in the TV industry.
‘Do you remember where Anna was from?’ I asked.
‘Sure. She used to talk about it all the time. Pretended she hated the place, but was proud of it at the same time. A bit like her self-esteem: one minute you thought she despised herself, and at other times she was proud of herself, strong, you know.’
‘What was it called?’
‘What?’
‘The village she was from?’
‘Visso.’
I stood up and shook his hand. He looked at me briefly before going back to staring into the distance.
Back in the hotel, I took out my old atlas of the peninsula. It was to the north-east of the capital, in a remote part of Le Marche. I looked at the map and saw that the roads around Visso were mostly thin, meandering lines between large green patches and steep slopes. It looked like it was way up in forested mountains.
I got up early the next day, but the drive was still slow and hot. It took me over an hour to escape the city and another to find the right road heading out east. I stopped in an Autogrill and got a piadina and a coffee. The people at the bar were arguing about the football transfer market and whether Lazio needed a new left-sided player.
I felt tired. I had been at it non-stop and just needed to sleep for a few days. Through the haze I could see the blurry outline of the mountains getting slowly closer. The road criss-crossed a river, following it along one bank and then the other. As it became narrower the road entered tunnels open on one side, so that you could see the river through the vertical concrete pillars. There was hardly any other traffic and it was a relief to be in the wilderness after the crowded chaos of the capital.
Eventually, I got close to the village. The road bent back on itself again and again as it zigzagged up towards an ever-receding summit. There were stacks of drying wood
by the roadside and lonely houses in the distance.
The village wasn’t much more than a couple of hundred houses huddling close to the small square. There was one shop and a bar and that was it. It felt like the kind of place a stranger would stick out.
‘Salve!’ I shouted at the barman as I walked in. ‘Grappa, please.’
‘Subito.’
I looked around at a couple of ruddy faces that were staring at me from a table in the corner.
‘Morning,’ I said in their direction. They nodded almost imperceptibly, like they blamed me for disturbing their slumber.
‘Prego.’ The barman put a thin glass on the chrome bar. I raised it off the bar and held it towards him, in a silent salute, and sank it. The liquid burnt pleasantly as the poison sank into my stomach.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said quietly. ‘The mother of Anna Sartori.’
‘Anna Sartori?’ He frowned, his grey eyebrows coming low over his eyes.
‘She went missing in Rome back in the early nineties.’
He started nodding slowly as though it were coming back to him. ‘Anna Sartori. I know. It was a big story twenty years ago. Used to have all sorts poking around here.’
‘Does her mother still live in the village?’
‘She used to live down in that house on the main road. Haven’t seen her for years.’
‘Which house?’
He described where it was, just next to the main road back down the hillside. I slapped a few coins on the counter and got back in the car. I could see the house from up here, just as he had described it: a grey place by the slip road that led to the hairpins. I zigzagged back down, wondering what I would find.
The place looked unkempt and eccentric from the outside. There were three or four cats crawling between broken terracotta pots. A vegetable patch was untended, only the conical bamboo poles for beans were still standing, tied together at the top by a piece of fraying twine. There were the dried remnants of last year’s tomato plants. I walked around the back, but there wasn’t much there, only a few metres of concrete before a fence dividing the property from a large field of wheat.
‘Anyone around?’ I shouted.
The front door had frosted glass and flattened steel slats. I couldn’t see a doorbell. I tried to knock on the glass but my fist wouldn’t fit between the grey slats. The door was open so I walked in, asking again if anyone was around. I heard the sound of a television, of a presenter’s voice floating above the eager applause of his audience. I followed the sound and saw, at the end of a corridor, a woman sitting on a sofa.
‘Permesso,’ I shouted loudly.
She turned and saw me, leant on the arm of the sofa and pushed herself up. She was a short, round woman, the sort who didn’t care for her appearance. Her hair was unbrushed and grey, and she was wearing an apron over her floral dress. The pattern looked the same as the throws on the sofa.
‘What are you after?’ she said with the blunt suspicion of the countryside.
‘Are you the mother of Anna Sartori?’ I asked.
She looked at me with stern eyes like I was trespassing on private grief. She nodded.
I introduced myself, told her my name and my profession. She just stared at me, her suspicion growing as I spoke. ‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’
‘Why?’
‘A young girl has gone missing in Rome. Her parents have hired me to look for her. It seems she’s involved with the same crowd as your daughter was a few years back.’
‘What crowd was that?’ She stared at me without moving. A cat came in and nuzzled her ankle, its tail curling round her thick calf. Her hands were on her hips like she was reluctant to give me any access to her life.
‘Fabrizio Mori.’
Her face tensed up as she looked at the mouldy wall beside her. ‘Mori,’ she repeated.
‘The girl he’s got is only eighteen. She might be in danger and anything you can tell me about him, and about your daughter, might help me find her.’
She stared at me, trying to weigh up if it was worth it. Eventually, she offered me a coffee, a sign she was content for me to be there.
There were two cats on the kitchen table, both licking at an unfinished meal. She ignored them and went over to the sink where there was a stack of plates that looked like something from a cartoon: a column of white ceramics bending left and right as it rose far above the level of the taps. She found the macchinetta for a coffee, unscrewed it and started rinsing it out. The whole place felt as if she had let it go, like she couldn’t be bothered to tidy or clean any more. When the coffee was ready and she opened the fridge to get some milk, there was almost nothing in there. It was refrigerating only air, the illuminated white insides a reminder of her poverty.
‘Have you got children?’ she asked, passing me a small, chipped cup of coffee.
I shook my head.
‘Anna was my only child.’
I nodded slowly to show that I understood grief. I had lost my parents before I was in double figures, so I knew all about it.
‘Nothing you can do,’ she said, ‘will be of any help to Anna or me.’
‘It might stop it happening to someone else.’
‘It? What’s “it”?’
I could tell this was going to be difficult. She was spiky and suspicious, not keen for an outsider to barge into her house and start asking questions.
‘The disappearance.’
‘Her disappearance?’ she said quickly. ‘Anna’s dead.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘Only it’s even worse than that because they’ve never let me have the body. You can’t mourn properly if you don’t even know, with that terrible certainty, that she really is dead. You know it, but you dread it, and avoid it. Even now, I sometimes find myself still hoping she might just be in South America or Paris, happily living her life surrounded by lots of children.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘What?’
‘You said they’ve never let you have the body. Who do you blame?’
She looked at me defensively as if she realised she had already said too much. She pretended to be distracted, looking at her hands and wiping them on her apron. She bent down to pick up the cat that was still mewing at her ankles, turning it over like a baby to stroke its soft, downy stomach. I looked at her face: she had the wrinkles of a lifelong smoker and grieving mother. But there were still hints of the beauty she had passed on to Anna: dark eyes, high, round cheeks. When she looked up at me, she realised I was waiting for an answer.
‘“They”?’ I said. ‘Who’s “they”?’
‘I don’t know. I know nothing more about it than you do. I read afterwards that she was involved with that TV studio, that she had got involved with little parties where she had met powerful people. That maybe she knew too much.’
‘Did the authorities speak to you?’
She shrugged like she was unimpressed. ‘They came here once. Asked a couple of questions and left. Everything I’ve found out about the investigation I’ve had to beg for. They never shared any information with me and I can’t afford to retain a lawyer to badger them. After those first few months, the only scraps of information I got were from journalists.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘I told you,’ she sounded impatient. ‘Anna was involved in parties and the like. That she must have discovered something.’
I looked round the room. There was cat hair on all the cushions and an ashtray overflowing with stubs. There seemed to be a film of dust everywhere except on a photograph of a young, dark-haired girl missing her two front teeth.
‘Is that Anna?’
‘It is.’ She went over and picked up the frame and passed it over.
It was strange: even in that image of an innocent child, there was something melancholic, something that suggested she knew she was an underdog and would have to fight for her future.
‘Let me show you her room,’ the woman sa
id. I watched her walking slowly, shuffling her slippers along the floor as if she lacked the energy to pick up her feet. I wondered how she made ends meet.
She led me into a small bedroom with the blinds down. She flicked on the light and I saw a room frozen in time. It looked like something from the late eighties: posters of Patrick Swayze and Bruce Willis, photos of friends with big hair and big shoulder pads. There was a satchel, brightly coloured notebooks with schoolgirl doodles, a few cassettes.
‘I’ve still got all her clothes,’ the woman said, walking past me with the cat and opening a wardrobe.
I looked at the dresses, the stonewashed shorts and the denim jacket.
‘I just can’t get rid of them,’ the woman said, her voice beginning to give way. ‘It would be like giving up on her.’ She sighed heavily. ‘I tried not to clean it for years, just to keep her smell, but even that has gone now. The cats come in and sleep on her bed and . . . there’s nothing left of her here. No trace at all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said slowly. I looked around, not wanting to rush the questioning. It seemed like something from a museum – a snapshot of what used to be fashionable a couple of decades ago.
‘How did she meet Mori?’
The woman’s eyes glazed over like she was looking far into the past. ‘He’s from a village the other side of the river. There’s not much social life round here and the youngsters all meet up in local bars and clubs. They had friends in common. He said he thought she could become a model,’ she shook her head in dismay.
‘I heard she was very beautiful.’
‘She was.’ She nodded. ‘Very beautiful. But she was naïve. She didn’t realise that a man with a camera might have other motives.’
‘What motives did he have?’
She gave me a weary look. ‘The usual. He wanted to charm her, seduce her.’
‘Was he much older?’
‘A few years. She was sixteen when they met and he was in his early twenties. Not much difference, but that’s light years at that age. She was an innocent and he was like a snake in the grass. The first time I saw him I knew he was trouble. He picked her up from here and didn’t even come in and introduce himself. So I went out, wanting to have a look at him, and it was obvious to me he was up to no good. He was charming, all signora this and signora that, but I saw through him.’
