Death of a Showgirl (6 page)

‘Where do you reckon he’s heading?’ the man asked me. He looked lost, like the kind of man who wasn’t used to asking advice and felt a fool for doing so.

‘I expect he’s heading straight for the person who hired you.’

He nodded to say that he understood.

‘You want to tell me who that is?’

‘He’s a very private man.’

‘You mean he’s got a hyperactive private life.’

He smiled slightly, a leery kind of smile. ‘Yeah, he likes his private life.’

‘And what were you supposed to do when you found Mori?’

‘Bring him in.’

It was the kind of phrase that could cover a range of solutions.

I went over to the kitchen corner and found a large pan. I threw some of the rags from the chest in it.

‘Give me your lighter,’ I said.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Give.’

He passed over a heavy silver lighter. The flame was high and the rags took quickly. I began feeding in the photos, one after the other. Images of bare flesh wrinkled and turned black. Moments of passion turned into ashes. It stank bad, but it felt good.

‘What are you doing?’ he said again. ‘That stuff is worth a fortune.’

‘You want to go into the same game as Mori?’

‘I’d play it better.’ He picked up one of the snaps and turned it sideways. ‘Look, that guy’s in parliament. Think what he would pay you to do what you’re doing now.’

‘I like doing it for free.’

He threw it in the pan with the others. ‘Just seems like a waste, that’s all. There are more secrets here than in the Vatican.’

I looked at each snap as I threw it into the fire. The photos kept curling black as they burnt to nothing.

‘It’s been a pleasure,’ I said to the man. ‘See you around.’

‘Where you going? Where’s Mori?’

‘I’ve no idea. I’m not looking for him. I’m after Simona Biondi.’ I walked off and squeezed back out of the broken window. The campsite was the same as before, only busier. I could see people in flip-flops heading off to the beach. The sun was up high and there were tiny lizards darting between the stones. I could smell a rich sauce that someone was already simmering for lunch. I realised I hadn’t eaten for a long time and could feel my stomach tightening around nothing. I got in the car and went to look for some food.

I made a few phone calls as I sat in the restaurant waiting for the bill. It was one of those places that looked down at heel, but only because it hadn’t been done up for a few decades. The food was perfect and the place was full of customers noisily talking to old friends across the tables. I needed to find out where Filippo Marinelli was living. I called in a favour from a low-ranking carabiniere who put me in touch with someone else and by the time they had brought the bill – it seemed wrong it was so low – I had an address.

I headed back to Rome. I drove with the window down, feeling the warm air gusting in like a wide-angle hairdryer. The fields round here were dotted with ancient ruins, stones that had stood there for thousands of years. There were sheep huddling in the shade of ancient Roman walls, weeds growing out of long-lost settlements. Rome always felt like this to me: a place where the grandeur of an empire had slipped away centuries ago, but one that still retained hints of that lost magnificence. Even meandering livestock lived in the shadow of that great civilisation and we moderns somehow knew we could never emulate, let alone surpass, it. That was what it was like here: it was a constant reminder of past glories and present inadequacies.

I came to a smart suburb where the shops were shaded by large trees. I could hear the clatter of cutlery as a waiter cleared the outside tables of a restaurant that had bright orange tablecloths. It was clearly an elegant suburb: even the pharmacy, I saw through the window, had long, leather sofas for its waiting customers.

Marinelli’s house was just round the corner from the chic shops. The villa looked large and immaculate. There were stone balconies outside every window with ornate, slightly convex iron railings covered with wisteria. There was a convertible BMW in the drive parked between large, stone sculptures of eagles.

I rang the buzzer.

‘Who is it?’

‘My name’s Castagnetti. I’m a private investigator.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions.’

‘About what?’

‘It’s a delicate subject. A girl has gone missing.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Can we talk face to face?’

I heard a click and then saw the large gate sliding back. As soon as it did so, two large Alsatians ran towards me, stopping a metre in front of me and lowering their heads to bark madly as they bared their wet, yellow teeth.

A man appeared at the door of the villa fifty metres away and shouted aggressively at the dogs. They ignored him, continuing to snarl at me, until he shouted again and they slowly retreated, occasionally turning round to offer a half-hearted bark to register their protest at my intrusion.

The man was walking towards me now. He looked about fifty and had salt and pepper hair. He looked fit, wearing trainers and shorts and a black Lacoste top. He was tanned and good-looking.

‘Sorry about the dogs. They’re not very hospitable.’ He pointed towards me. ‘They didn’t do that, did they?’

‘What?’

‘You’re limping.’

‘No, that’s an old injury.’ We shook hands. ‘I’m Castagnetti.’

‘Marinelli. Come in.’

The place was immaculate but sterile. It felt like it wasn’t lived in, as if there were more money than warmth here. It reminded me of the Biondi pad. Every surface was shiny: the hall floor was a dark, polished wood, the walls had large mirrors, the hall table was a long slab of granite.

‘Coffee?’ he asked.

We walked into the kitchen and he put the two halves of the hour-glass of metal together.

‘You want to tell me what this is all about?’ He stared at me. There was something about his manner that was direct and honest, like he wanted everything out in the open. I don’t know why but I liked him.

‘Like I said, I’m an investigator. I’ve been hired by two distraught parents to look for their young daughter.’

He nodded as he took a cloth and wiped up a few fallen coffee grounds. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘The man who abducted her is someone you’ve . . .’ I paused, trying to think of the tactful way to say it, ‘had trouble with in the past.’

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Who?’

‘Fabrizio Mori.’

His eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly. ‘Mori, eh?’ He lit the gas under the coffee maker and opened a cupboard door to pull out two little white cups. ‘I don’t really see how I can help you. That was a long time ago.’

‘I haven’t got much else to go on.’ I held his stare. ‘I’m contacting anyone who might be able to help me find that girl.’

He nodded. ‘How old is she?’

‘Only eighteen.’

‘And she’s definitely with Mori?’

‘Seems that way.’

He smiled as if he were in pain. ‘He always was a piece of shit. If I hadn’t taken him on he would still be snapping away, blackmailing anyone with a secret this side of Istanbul. He was the worst sort of hustler.’

‘I heard you were one of his victims.’

He nodded. ‘I was playing for Roma at the time.’ He glazed over, as if he were either bored or nostalgic. ‘I had just broken into the first team and had scored a couple of goals. When that happens, you find that every time you go out there’s a queue of women wanting to throw themselves at you.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘My marriage was over by then anyway. My wife had had a fling with one of my team-mates, a guy from the same part of France as her. Everyone knew about it. So one night I went out and met a girl. She was uninhibited, but like I said, when you’re a footballer, you don’t meet girls who aren’t. She was forward, and we ended up, you know . . .’

Behind him I could see a huge plasma screen on the wall. He looked like the kind of bachelor who had remote controls for company. The coffee roared its arrival and he poured it out. He took the cups on their little saucers over to a kitchen island and motioned me to sit down on one of the designer stools. It had a small black leather seat and a tiny leather backrest. There was a circle of metal towards the bottom to rest your feet on. It felt like balancing on a toothpick.

‘Then what happened?’

‘A few weeks later I got a call from a friend of mine. I thought he was a friend. A guy who used to work on one of those glossy mags about the rich and famous. He’d run a couple of decent stories about me in the past, you know, photo shoots of me at home playing the happy family man, touting me as a future captain of his country. You know, really puffing me up. He and I had had a couple of drinks now and then.’ He spooned some sugar into his cup and stirred it slowly, looking at the brown liquid before knocking it back. ‘So he phoned me up and said he wanted to warn me of something they had got hold of. Some photographer was touting around photos of me doing lines of coke with a topless girl. He said he thought I should know and did I want him to put me in touch with the photographer. He suggested I could make a higher bid for the snaps to keep them out of the public domain.’

‘And?’

‘I got the photographer’s name and took it to the police.’

‘That was brave.’

‘My marriage was over anyway, and everyone else I knew was doing similar things. I underestimated the hypocrisy. I was sacked and dropped down the leagues.’

‘And Mori did time?’

‘A bit. He had made enough money to make it worthwhile, from what I heard.’

‘Not from what I’ve seen.’

He looked up at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s living in a caravan site a two-hour bus ride out of town.’

‘Like I said, this was twenty years ago. I’m sure he’s spent it since then.’

A young woman came into the kitchen looking like she had just got out of bed. She was wearing a thin cotton nightgown so you could see the silhouette of her perfect figure against the light.

‘My daughter,’ Marinelli said under his breath.

She ignored us, but must have been aware of our presence since she put a hand self-consciously into her slept-on hair. She made some toast and opened the fridge to get some butter. She took out the milk and poured herself a large glass, and then put the lot on a tray and left.

‘I barely saw her as a child,’ Marinelli said wistfully. ‘It’s like we’re living in this house as strangers, not sure how to treat each other. I think she sees me as a cheap hotel.’

‘All children do.’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘It’s just I’m not used to it. Her mother left soon after the scandal, they went home. I took a job out there coaching when I retired, you know, to be close to her, but she doesn’t even remember it.’ He stared at the wall. ‘You can hardly blame her. I came back here after a year as my mother was dying. In the space of a few years I lost everything.’ He stared at me with a grim, embittered expression. ‘Career, wife, daughter, mother.’

‘And it was Mori that took it from you.’

He looked upwards and sighed. ‘I took it from myself. I threw it away.’ He was shaking his head. ‘That’s what everyone does in their twenties – with money, with love, with whatever. Only most people that age don’t have everything: the children possibly, but not the beautiful wife and certainly not the money. A footballer does, he has it all in his teens if he’s lucky, and it’s all over so soon. I just didn’t know what I had. I threw it away.’

‘Mori played his part.’

Marinelli stared at me and realised I was trying to provoke him. He nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, he was a cunning bastard too. The girl I was with that night, well . . .’ He was looking at the floor, frowning slightly. ‘She went missing soon afterwards.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘She went missing,’ he said it louder, like I was stupid. ‘Anna Sartori was her name. It was all over the papers back in the early nineties. It became quite a story for a while. You know, “nubile escort goes missing”. It kind of spooks me now, to think about it.’

‘And? What happened?’

‘That was it. She was never found.’

We sat there in silence for a while. He was staring at the floor, nodding slowly as if he were rerunning his past in his head.

‘And you think Mori was responsible?’

He shrugged without moving his gaze from the matt beige tiles. ‘As far as I was concerned, he was capable of anything.’

‘But if he was making money from honey traps, why dispose of the honey?’

Marinelli shrugged again. ‘They probably fell out. She might have wanted to testify against him. Maybe she knew too many secrets.’

‘What was she like, this Anna Sartori?’

‘I liked her. She was beautiful, cute. I had no idea she was part of a blackmail scam. And, in a strange way, I don’t think she really knew what was going on. When he started asking me for money, I assumed she had been in on the racket with him. And when I ran into her in a club a few months later, I confronted her and told her what I thought of her. I insulted her pretty colourfully and she didn’t get it. She looked all confused. It turns out she didn’t really understand what was going on herself.’

I frowned. It seemed improbable. He saw my doubt and explained, closing his eyes as he did so.

‘Those kind of parties didn’t have many rules. There could be a couple making out on the sofa next to you. Someone would pull out a bag of cash or gear. It didn’t even seem unusual to me after a while. With all the strobe lights you wouldn’t notice someone taking a flash photo. You wouldn’t think twice about a topless girl sitting next to you. That’s what it was like.’

‘So this girl didn’t know someone was snapping away?’

He put his chin to one side. ‘She knew him, knew that he was taking photos. But she thought it was to promote her, to get her into the papers. That’s what all those girls cared about. They would have done anything, anything to get their left ankle in one of those magazines. So she was free and easy, happy to let Mori snap away as she thought that was the way to the big time. She had no idea he was taking photos that people were buying to keep out of magazines. It was the opposite of what she thought was going on. She never thought they were being used for extortion.’

‘And you believed her?’

‘Yeah, I did. She was furious when she found out. She thought she was putting herself about to get in the papers, to make a name for herself. And actually, she was just there as bait for a shakedown. She was more innocent than that. I know it sounds strange, but she was like a young girl in an adult world. Even the longing to be a showgirl on TV was girlish. She was determined to make it. Determined to be famous, for whatever reason. She would have done anything to fulfil that dream, even all sorts of “adult” things. And she did. Only she didn’t know he was snapping it all, making a record of how low she would go and with who. He was using her to make money. Most of those girls demean themselves in the hope of stardom, but don’t realise that’s all stardom is: it’s performing in private. She was never going to make it. He let her think she was getting close, so she would keep on playing his game until, in the end, it was game over.’

‘You got a photo of her?’

He laughed bitterly. Given the context it was the wrong thing to ask. ‘You could find her face in the papers from around that time.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She was beautiful: thick dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. Everything about her was passionate.’

While he was reminiscing about an old flame that had burnt him, I felt a rising urgency about Simona’s well-being. I still had no leads on Mori, but I felt I was getting closer to him, beginning to understand who he was and how he worked. He used murky photographs like chips in a casino, chucking them around until the gamble paid off and someone turned them into a stack of cash. It was a dirty business, the kind of work that would make him a lot of money and even more enemies. I had assumed until now that Mori was up to his old tricks, making money out of people’s weaknesses by using beautiful women as bait. I couldn’t work out what he wanted with young Simona, but I guessed, unlikely as it seemed, that she was the new honey in the trap. She was the lure. Her parents and sister thought that she wasn’t that sort, but parents always think that of their children. If she was desperate to become a starlet, like Anna Sartori, she might have been prepared to play the part Mori wanted. And the fact that the thug in his caravan was after Mori too made me think that he was trying to squeeze cash from someone who had a secret to hide. Someone who had, presumably, hired the thug. It had appeared sordid, but not particularly dangerous. But if one of Mori’s girls had gone missing in the past, the stakes were suddenly higher.