Death of a Showgirl (8 page)

He let me take the index card from his fingers. I looked at the address and passed it back.

‘Let me know what you find out, won’t you?’

I made a non-committal grunt and let myself out of his office.

‘See you around,’ I said over my shoulder as I retraced my steps back to the reception and the lift.

The next morning I went round to Tony Vespa’s place. It was a small villa that didn’t seem finished. It was trying hard to be Beverley Hills, but the result was a suburban building site. The bare bricks were unrendered and what should have been grand columns outside the house were still just steel supports. I rang the doorbell and peered through the window: there was a woman in knickers putting a silk gown on her shoulders.

She opened the door and looked at me. The gown was just hanging loosely on her shoulders so that most of her front was on show. She stood there provocatively, slightly side on so that I could see everything she had.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, like she was used to trouble. Her accent sounded East European.

‘I’m looking for Tony.’

She stepped aside, raising her hand inside the room as if I should come in. The action pulled her robe wide apart so that she might as well have been topless.

I walked past her and smelt the chlorine on her skin. The house looked expensively furnished: long white sofas, a large TV on the wall, a square, glass table with antiques lined up: large pots and dented coins.

‘He’s by the pool,’ the woman said, walking towards me as she belted up the gown.

I looked out through the double doors of the room and heard a remote splash. Through a hedge at the end of the lawn I could see specks of light blue. I walked out and followed the sound, rounding the hedge and ducking under a curling wisteria. He was there in the pool, gently swimming up and down. His head popped up out of the pool each time he drew breath, and each time he came up I got closer to realising where I had seen him before. He was the same thug who had attacked me in Mori’s little caravan.

‘Vespa,’ I shouted.

He didn’t hear me, but just kept on pulling himself towards the far end. I walked down there and stood waiting for him. Eventually, he got to the end of the pool, his knuckles holding on to the smooth, curving stone as he saw my feet. He looked up and seemed briefly confused. He pulled his hand down over his face to clear his eyes of water and looked at me again. Then he pulled himself out, his huge frame spilling water in all directions. He walked over to one of the white loungers and towelled himself off.

‘You’re the guy I met in Mori’s dump, right?’

‘Right.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you.’

‘Did you follow me here from that shitty campsite?’

‘No. I’ve been all over since then and the road leads back to you.’

‘Does it?’ He threw the towel down and looked at me. He had a barrel chest with grey hair. ‘Drink?’

‘Sure.’

‘Basia,’ he shouted impatiently. ‘Basia.’

The woman came round the hedge and stared at him. There was animosity in the body language.

‘Bring us drinks.’

She walked off towards a bamboo bar at the other end of the pool.

‘Your wife?’ I asked.

He sneered. ‘My concubine. You know what they say about no Italians wanting to do the dirty jobs any more. Well, it’s true. She’s Bulgarian.’

‘I thought you were surrounded by attractive young women.’

He stared at me, still sneering. ‘Who told you that?’

‘That’s what I heard.’

‘Sit down.’ He jerked his chin towards a lounger. I sat on the edge, feeling precarious. ‘What are you after?’

‘I told you. I’m looking for a young girl who’s gone missing.’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘You were looking for the man who’s abducted her.’

‘Still am,’ he said.

‘In the pool?’

He stared at me and then shouted furiously over to the woman in the short gown. ‘Where are those drinks?’

She brought over two large glasses with straws. Vespa put his hand under her gown and grabbed one of her buttocks as she gave him his drink. She pulled his hand off, muttering to herself in a foreign language as she walked away.

‘I’m still training her,’ he said.

‘You make her sound like an animal.’

‘She is.’ He nodded, smiling unpleasantly. ‘So?’

I took a sip of the drink. It was a strong, fruity cocktail. I put it down and stared at Vespa. ‘Let me tell you what I know and you tell me where I go wrong, OK?’

He assented with a twist of his head.

‘Fabrizio Mori,’ I said slowly, watching his reaction, ‘is a blackmailer. He’s spent his life gathering dirt so someone would pay him to bury it. There’s enough dirt around that he’s made a decent living in the past. He’s found some more dirt and you’re working for the man who is being blackmailed by Mori.’

Vespa threw his chin in the air to tell me to go on.

‘I guess you’re working for the TV magnate and now respectable politician, Di Angelo. He’s the man you’ve always worked for, from what I hear. He’s being blackmailed by Mori and he wants you to put a stop to it.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is what Simona Biondi’s got to do with it.’

He looked at me, putting the straw of his drink in his mouth. He slurped deliberately loudly, as if defying me with his crude behaviour. Everything about him seemed vulgar. There was no veil cast over his lust, no disguise to his desires. But even that openness about his carnality seemed odd. It seemed like a front, only a pretence of honesty. It was the way he disguised something else.

‘What exactly does studio manager mean?’ I asked, losing patience with his insouciance.

‘Studio manager? I’m like a talent scout. I find the flesh, the skirt.’

‘All those showgirls who dance around but never speak?’

‘Yeah, something like that. It ruins the illusion if you let them talk. It’s fatal.’ He smiled to himself.

‘So you choose who goes on screen?’

He shook his head, smiling at my naivety. ‘No, no. That was the boss’s decision. Always his decision. He doesn’t mind what programme we make, what the budget is, what the location is. None of that ever concerns him. But he always wants to choose the showgirls. His talent, he always says, is choosing the talent.’

‘So you’re like a pimp?’

Vespa looked at me and sneered. ‘I introduce girls to him. That’s all. What they do after that is between them.’

‘But you serve them up to him, right?’

‘Something like that. He used to want a different girl every night. That was my job. To make sure they’re ready for him, as it were.’

‘And his favourites go on screen?’

He raised his shoulders slowly. ‘Some do, some don’t.’

‘What about Anna Sartori?’

‘Who?’ He had been towelling the back of his head, but suddenly stopped and looked at me.

‘Anna Sartori. She was a girl who had been hustling with Mori back in the early nineties. Got about a bit and then wanted a slice of stardom. She went to see Gianni Esposito on one of Di Angelo’s magazines, who sent her to you.’

‘Yeah, Sartori,’ he said, looking into the pool. ‘She was a little temptress. I remember her all right.’

‘So she came to see you and you sent her to Di Angelo?’

‘She would have gone to one of his parties. He used to throw these parties for his advertisers. The girls were like the sweeteners, if you see what I mean.’

‘At the Hotel del Fiume?’

He looked at me like he was surprised. ‘Yeah, sometimes. They happened all over the place. How do you know about the del Fiume parties.’

‘That’s my job. I’m an investigator.’

He looked at me briefly, as if he had a second of respect.

‘Sartori went missing. You remember that too?’

He went back to staring at the water, his round face catching the reflection of the sun and giving him shimmering glints on his skin.

‘Yeah, I remember.’

He didn’t say anything else. I watched his face but it was still, apart from those reflections dancing on his cheeks. He still had a thousand-yard stare, but whatever he was thinking, he seemed unlikely to share. We sat like that for a while, him staring at the water and me sucking on the straw of the cocktail.

‘Does the name Simona Biondi mean anything to you?’

He rocked the top of his head like he was weighing up the price of his information.

‘Mean anything?’

‘There was a Biondi years ago. Way back when we were just starting out. Really cute piece.’

I thought of Simona’s twitchy mother and struggled to imagine her as a beautiful girl. She didn’t seem the type. ‘When was this?’

‘Same time as Sartori. Early nineties.’

‘And you’re sure this woman was called Biondi?’

‘Sure. When you said you were looking for a girl called Biondi back at Mori’s dump I immediately thought of her.’

‘Why?’

‘She dropped out of the game suddenly. Stopped showing up to parties. You know, she made me look bad so I called her. I wanted to know why she was flunking out.’

‘Which was?’

‘She didn’t tell me. She just went off the radar. Some people did that. Just gave up on the whole circus.’

I thought about the dates in my head and it figured. I still struggled to imagine Simona’s mother as a showgirl. She seemed too old, too fragile. And she had a career of her own anyway as a doctor. It was just about conceivable that she had been a showgirl, but I didn’t really buy it. She must be in her mid-fifties now, meaning she was in her thirties back then, already a married woman and a mother. She was the wrong side of the hill as far as showbiz was concerned.

‘You got a photo of her?’

He raised his eyebrows as if I were asking the impossible. ‘I used to get hundreds of portfolios a week. Managers from all over the country sending me arty snaps of provincial girls in bikinis. They all looked the same after a while: all with their dim, desperate smiles, their coy way of being erotic and chaste at the same time. I chucked most of them in the bin.’

‘And the ones you took on? Like Biondi?’

‘I used to have to compile albums for the boss. He’d like to see snaps of them before getting them involved in his parties. Like I said, he chose them personally. “That one. Get me that one”,’ he growled. He bounced his index finger aggressively down onto the lounger, imitating his lecherous boss picking out girls like sweets in a shop.

‘You still got those albums?’

‘What difference does a photo make?’

‘I want to check we’re talking about the same person. Simona’s mother hardly fits the description of . . .’ I tried to remember what he had said, ‘a cute piece.’

We downed the dregs of our cocktails and stood up. He pulled on a towelling bathrobe and waddled in front of me back towards the house. We went in through the double doors and up a wide stone staircase.

At the end of the corridor was a door leading into a narrow room. Vespa had to turn sideways to get past boxes on the floor. The shelves were all sagging under the weight of files. He turned and faced me, raising both his hands to the chaos all around. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get some clothes on.’ He squeezed past me and walked back down the corridor.

‘Any filing system?’ I shouted after him.

‘The system’s always been to throw things in and shut the door.’ He disappeared into a bedroom.

I sat down on one of the cardboard boxes and looked at the chaos. There were shoeboxes and plastic pallets and box files. I peeked into the box nearest me and saw jiffy bags and A4 envelopes. I opened one of the envelopes and half a dozen shots of a girl in a bikini fell out. There was a covering letter from some talent agency in Naples. I went through them slowly, seeing more and more photos with varying degrees of eroticism: a girl lying on the beach as the waves lapped at her thighs, another eating an ice cream or emerging from a pool in a tight white T-shirt or cuddling a little kitten. They were all attractive but all strangely similar.

It took another half an hour before I found an album of photographs dated April 1992. I flicked through them but didn’t find what I had been looking for. There were no snaps of Simona’s twitchy mother. What there were, were intimate shots of Chiara, her sister: pictures of her reclining on a bed in underwear, her legs provocatively apart. There were other shots of her: ones of her backside, of her topless. They were the same sort of poses as all the others, but because I knew her, and liked her, it felt strange. She only looked seventeen or eighteen.

‘This the girl?’ I shouted down the corridor.

A door opened and Vespa walked out, still doing up his belt. ‘Eh?’

‘This the Biondi you’re talking about?’

He took the folder from my hand and looked at it. ‘That’s her.’ He nodded at a distant memory. ‘That’s the girl. Cute, huh? A lot of people liked her, that’s why I was miffed when she quit.’

‘And you never found out why she dropped out of the game?’

‘Didn’t try too hard to find out, to be honest. There’s never been any shortage of girls wanting to get involved. Finding a replacement was like finding sand on the beach.’

‘You ever wonder what happened to her?’

‘I guessed.’

‘And?’

‘I just supposed she was pregnant. I never checked it out, but it was sort of an occupational hazard in their line.’ He laughed nastily.

‘Mind if I take this?’

He held out his palm to say I was welcome to it. We walked down the stairs together, him shouting for a drink as he straightened his hair with the flat of his hand. I left him there in the corridor, the little man commanding his domestic slave.

I drove back round to the Biondi pad and pulled up on the pavement outside their forbidding gate. I rang the intercom and they buzzed me in hurriedly. As soon as I got to the door, they pulled me inside, eager for information. The mother‚ Giovanna‚ had tried to disguise the alcohol on her breath with too much perfume and was fretting around me with questions. Her husband was impatient, almost swatting his wife away as he led me back into their living room.

‘So?’ he said.

‘It seems that Simona is with a man.’

Giovanna sighed as if her daughter was already done for. ‘A man,’ she squawked.

‘He’s called Fabrizio Mori. Ever heard of him?’

They looked at each other briefly. It was the first time I had seen them exchange anything more than harsh words.

‘You know him?’ I asked.

‘No, never heard of him,’ Biondi said quickly. ‘Who is he?’

His expression of ignorance was unconvincing, but I let it go.

‘He’s a hustler. I don’t think they’re romantically involved.’

‘Then what does he want with her?’

‘He seems set on making money.’

Giovanna put two palms to her cheeks and pressed them against her face. She was guessing, I assumed, that I meant prostitution.

‘Not that,’ I said, looking at her. ‘That’s not part of his plan.’

‘Where is he holding her?’ Biondi asked angrily.

‘I don’t know. And he doesn’t appear to be holding her as such. She’s with him of her own volition.’

Biondi frowned, pulling his head backwards as if he didn’t believe it.

‘Witnesses I’ve spoken to seem to think he’s not holding her against her will. They checked into a hotel a couple of nights ago. They had checked out by the time I got there.’

‘A hotel,’ the mother said, staring at the ceiling. She got up and walked towards the drinks cabinet, removing a glass stopper before pouring a generous shot of something. ‘Drink?’ She looked over to me.

‘Sure.’

She brought me over a glass and I could see that her hands were shaking, making the ice rattle in her glass. I looked at her closely as she passed it to me: her skin looked pasty and her lipstick only made her seem somehow sadder, as if any brightness were put on.

‘What do you know about this man she’s with?’ the father asked gruffly.

My hesitation gave the game away.

‘What?’ Biondi insisted.

‘He’s a photographer. Middle-aged.’

‘Dangerous?’

‘I don’t think so. But certainly not the best company to keep.’

‘Why not?’

I took a sip of the drink and wondered what to say. I looked up at Biondi and he was staring at me intently. ‘He’s done time for extortion,’ I said quietly. ‘He likes taking photos that embarrass people.’

‘And he’s taking snaps of Simona? Is that it?’

‘I think she is the snap.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ I looked at both of them in case they could enlighten me, but they just stared back. ‘I’ve got an idea that she is the evidence, or that she knows something about someone’s wrong-doing. That’s the only explanation I can come up with: that he’s using her for another shake down.’

Biondi growled and looked at the floor. His wife’s face looked thin and drawn as she stared at her empty tumbler.

‘Did Simona need money?’ I asked.

‘Not at all. Why?’

‘I’m only trying to understand why she would willingly go along with a man like Mori.’

They said nothing. We stood there like that in silence for a while. There was something heavy and tense about the silence, as though the couple’s arguments were still echoing off the walls. I began to think that Mori might have been Simona’s only ticket out of here and that she had taken a ride with him just to escape. Plenty of young girls go along with inappropriate older men just to break a bond with their parents. And there are plenty of older men around to help them make that break. I began to wonder whether it was just an unorthodox romance, a young girl’s fling. Sometimes that’s the only way an apparently perfect teenager can escape being perfect.

I walked towards the drinks trolley and put my glass back.

‘Where are you going?’ Biondi barked.

‘To talk to Chiara.’

‘Why? How can she help you? What’s she got to do with this?’ There was something in the way he said it that sounded wrong, like he knew how she could help me and wanted to know if I knew. It riled me. I was supposed to bring them anything I had, and yet it seemed as if they wouldn’t give me anything back; as if they were holding out on me, not telling me the whole story.

‘Information needs to travel both ways,’ I said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I need you to be more open with me, tell me more about Simona and her life.’

He put his palms out as if he would lay out everything on a plate. ‘Anything you need to know, just ask. Anything.’

We stared at each other briefly and I sensed, instinctively, that he would have rather dropped the invisible plate than give it to me.

‘I need to talk to Chiara,’ I said.

‘What on earth for?’

‘She might be able to help.’

‘I don’t see how,’ he said with the impatience of a man who was losing his grip on a lie.

‘Is she here?’

‘She’s at home.’

‘Where’s that?’

He sighed as though it were a waste of time. ‘It’s just round the corner. It’s number 67 on the street behind this one, the one that runs parallel to the main road out there.’ He flicked his thumb at the heavy traffic outside.

I nodded, studying his face. I was still trying to work out why a man who was apparently desperate to find his missing daughter would hold back information from the detective he had hired to find her. It didn’t make sense. I guessed the search had led somewhere he didn’t want it to go.

He must have picked up on my suspicion, because he became uncharacteristically friendly, putting a hand on my arm as we walked to the front door like we were old mates. It felt wrong and only made me more sure he was keeping something back.

I walked round the back of the Biondi villa to number 67 on the street behind. I found a buzzer with Biondi-Malaguzzi on it and held it down.

‘Chi è?’ asked an uncertain male voice.

‘Castagnetti. I’m looking for Chiara.’

I heard him summon Chiara to the intercom. ‘Sì?’

‘Chiara? It’s Castagnetti. The private detective hired by your parents.’

‘Yes?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Now?’

I told her it was important and she buzzed me in. ‘Fifth floor,’ she said.

I took the lift there and she was standing in the doorway in an apron. The smell of the evening’s dinner was still in the air.

‘Any news?’

‘Some. Most of it unexpected.’

‘Like?’

‘Can we talk in private?’

She put her hands behind her back to untie the cords and pulled the apron over her head. She put it on a hook on the back of the kitchen door and introduced me to her husband, a tidy sort of man who had a dishcloth in his hand and was putting away the plates. She led me through a sitting room where two young boys were watching television and into a small office. Her fingers, nails varnished, held the door open for me, before shutting it behind us. It felt like an admission that there were secrets to spill.

She spun the office chair round and sat down, crossing her elegant legs. I sat in the red armchair opposite her.

‘You used to work for Tony Vespa at the Di Angelo studios.’

Her face was rigid. ‘I thought you were looking for Simona.’

‘I am. And the search has led me here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Vespa tells me you quit working for him and for the studio. He told me you dropped out of the game.’ I paused to let her finish the story, but the secret was so buried she seemed unable to say it.

She was staring at the bookshelf behind me, her head tilted back like she was scared of the way the past was rushing back towards her. She took deep breaths, her chest rising and falling as she sighed loudly.

‘It was so long ago.’ Her eyes were glazed over as if she were about to fall asleep. ‘We didn’t even understand what was going on.’

‘We?’

‘Anna and me.’

‘Anna Sartori?’

‘Right.’

‘How did you know her?’

‘She showed up here one day. Not here, at my parents. She was the daughter of a friend of my father’s from the countryside. She came to see us as she’d moved to Rome and didn’t have many friends. We immediately became close. She was like the older sister I’d never had. She was wild, a real hell raiser, and I just got taken along for the ride.’ She was still focused on one spot of the wall behind me and as she spoke she stared at it as if it were a window on the past. ‘Anna and I would go out to parties that went on until midday the following day. The sort of parties where there was everything. Amazing food, a pool, endless drinks, any stimulants you needed, if you know what I mean. It was like everything was allowed. It was another world. I had only just left school. I don’t think I had ever had more than a sip of wine in my life, and suddenly I was at these parties where people were . . .’ She shook her head.

‘What?’

She shrugged. ‘When you’re young, you think there are certain things you’ll never do. But then you start making little compromises, giving in to tiny temptations, until you’re doing all the things you thought you were going to avoid. The whole process is imperceptible. You just get used to being around rich, older men who are charming and generous. You get used to seeing people doing drugs, to going to parties where anything goes, you get used to being tipsy, to swimming naked with strangers, to being touched at sunrise when you’re too tired or wired to object.’

She suddenly turned her gaze on me, like she was anticipating criticism. She still looked so young it was hard to think it must have been twenty years ago.

‘I was so innocent, I barely understood what was happening. And then, when I understood it, I realised I just wasn’t innocent any more. And you never get that back. It’s gone for ever.’ She was talking in a kind of code, but it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. ‘I thought I was about to have it all that year, and instead I lost everything. I lost Anna, I lost myself.’

She blinked and tears fell onto her cheeks. She ignored them and kept talking, the pitch of her voice a little higher now. ‘Anna was always being invited to parties. Every weekend there would be a different one.’

‘Organised by who?’

‘Usually the studio.’

‘Di Angelo?’

‘Right. We were even paid to go.’

‘Paid?’

‘We got an attendance fee from Vespa.’

‘Why?’

‘It was like an audition for being a showgirl, you had to dance for them, that sort of thing. We were like the chorus girls for the parties.’ She shook her head, smiling bitterly at the memory. ‘Anna was so desperate to make it on television she would have done anything.’

‘And did she?’

Chiara looked at me sharply, as if determined to defend the memory of her missing friend. ‘She had ambition, and she knew that the only way to get ahead was to play their game.’

‘And what game was that?’

She rolled her eyes, impatient with my questions. ‘Most of the people at these parties were advertisers. The kind of businessmen who bankrolled the studios by buying up airtime for their products. And they expected more than just an improvement in sales.’

‘Meaning?’

‘What do you think?’ There was a bitter exasperation in her voice. ‘We were there to service these cranky old men . . .’ Her voice trailed off again.

It sounded like Tony Vespa really was some kind of pimp, supplying girls to dance and flirt and sleep with advertisers who were paying huge sums into the studio’s coffers. The girls were so desperate to be on screen that they didn’t seem to mind crawling under the covers to get there.

‘Anna was so . . .’ she paused, looking absently at the floor, ‘so lost that she seemed ready to embrace anyone who could be a father to her. She didn’t just go upstairs at those parties because she was ambitious. I think she really needed to be embraced by an older man. It was the classic case of a young girl who looked for her father in other men. But they only wanted her body briefly and each time she was abandoned again she looked more desperately for someone who would really love her.’ She sighed heavily. ‘The tragedy is that she did meet someone who loved her and, just as she seemed about to find happiness, she disappeared.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Oh, some guy who had a yogurt empire,’ she laughed at how ridiculous it sounded. ‘He was one of the regular advertisers on the prime-time slots. They got really close for a while. She became his mistress, you know a fixed item, and he lobbied hard for her to get a run-out on screen. For a while, it looked like it was all going to work out for her, but then it just . . .’ she shrugged, ‘it just went wrong.’

‘You mean she went missing?’

Chiara nodded. ‘She was so close to everything she longed for. She had an older man who loved her. She was about to become a chorus girl on TV. And then . . .’ She raised her hands, throwing them in the air like a slow-motion explosion. ‘That was it. She was gone.’

I looked at her briefly. Her chest was shaking as her breathing became staccato.

‘You said,’ I spoke quietly, ‘that you lost yourself as well that year.’

She growled softly and reached for a packet of tissues on the desk behind her. ‘I was introduced to someone by Vespa. I had no idea who he was, but you could tell by the way Vespa was behaving that he was some big cheese.’

‘You remember his name?’

‘Hard to forget. Giorgio Gregori. Vespa told me it would be a big step in my career if I was good to him. That was always the phrase he used. “Be good to him”.’

‘Were you?’

She shut her eyes and her head rocked back as she exhaled in derision. ‘Good’s not the word. All I could think about was getting ahead. There were all these girls at these parties, all wanting the same thing: to make it on TV. This Gregori told me he could have a word with Di Angelo, said it would be real easy to get me on screen. We had a meal and lots to drink and then went back to his place. I knew what was coming but I was still shocked by it.’ She was whispering now. ‘He sat in an armchair and just gave me orders. Started insulting me, telling me I was a whore, that I was a dirty slut who needed to be straightened out. And I was,’ she looked at me now with an apologetic smile. ‘I knew I was being paid for this, that Vespa would be giving me a big envelope of cash when I got back to the studios. So I let him do what he wanted to me. He would pull my hair to get me where he wanted. He would slap me for being dirty, for doing what he wanted. He liked me to protest, so that he could hit me harder.’