by Nan Lyons
“And when I die?” Max asked.
“I shall have you embalmed under contract to Fortes. You shall be scrubbed and dressed in a suit the color of foreskin. Then I will have you wrapped in see-through plastic, hermetically sealed, and dropped into the Thames as the largest used prophylactic in the world.”
Miss Beauchamp began coughing. “And when you die,” Achille continued, “I shall simply cable Rudolf Hess.”
“If you don’t mind,” Miss Beauchamp said, “I must excuse myself.”
“An appropriate, but impossible, goal,” Achille shouted after her.
“I keep wondering,” Natasha began, “what kind of person could have done such a thing.”
“Someone with flair, I should think,” Achille said. “Or at least someone who hated the Savoy. Talk about infamy, do you know they had to run across the street begging crumpets from the Strand Palace? It’s a scandale in the great tradition. As I understand it, the Savoy must replace its most venerable oven, to say nothing of replacing its most venerable cook.”
“Louis left the flat at about a quarter past six,” Natasha said. “He was off to shop at Covent Garden, and then to the Savoy.”
“Then, after the Royal Health Service recertifies the kitchen, then, mon Dieu, the Savoy must recertify its own reputation.”
“He usually arrived at the Savoy by seven-thirty. But this morning—my God”—she stopped for a moment—“was it only this morning? For some reason he never got to the market.”
“Ah,” Achille said, smiling, “the custards of Carême are curdling today.”
Max ignored him. “Then, the first thing we need to know is why Louis went directly to the Savoy.”
“Alimentary, my dear Ogden,” Achille said. “He went directly to the Savoy because either he was unable to go to the market or he never intended going.”
“Or, he was talked out of going,” Max said.
“That would be like talking the pip from an avocado,” Achille said.
“He’s right,” Natasha said to Max. “No one could have talked Louis out of going to the market.”
“Then perhaps he was knocked out as he left the flat,” Max said.
“And a little girl rolled him downhill to the Savoy?” Achille asked.
“They could have had a car,” Natasha said.
“But why take him to the Savoy to kill him?” Max asked. “Maybe someone did knock him on the head as he left the flat. But if they just wanted to rob him or even kill him, they would have done it right then and there.”
“You think someone intended to kill him that way … the way they did?” Natasha asked.
“May we adjourn this meeting of Cretins Against Crime?” Achille asked. “Surely all this did he, didn’t he, could he, would he is becoming tiresome.”
“Tiresome?” Natasha yelled. “Achille, someone murdered my father.”
“Your stepfather,” Max corrected.
“Your lover,” Achille gloated.
“You bastard,” Natasha said.
“I?” Achille asked. “I who have seen to every detail? Indeed, I who planned a most tasteful memorial service for what’s-his-name? I who even arranged for burial at St. Timothy’s, which is more difficult to get into than Claridge’s? I am even preparing a commemorative volume of Louis’ recipes to be published for all his friends.”
“A very, limited edition,” Max said.
“Too true. Perhaps we should distribute them among the sobbing throngs at his funeral.”
“That’ll shoot five copies,” Max said.
“What time is the service?” Natasha asked angrily.
“That is of no concern to you. You will not be here. I have you booked on a flight to Rome this evening. There is a suite reserved at the Grand. Nutti writes that the leftists have been agitating for a national shutdown of the pasta factories. I knew you would want to do a story for one of your dreary radical feminist rags. Moreover, I promised Nutti I would someday devote a feature to his superb lobster mousse. Stay in Rome until you’re due back here for the demonstration at Harrods.”
“Achille, are you crazy? What world are you in? I don’t want to go to Rome. Don’t you understand how I feel? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Yesterday at this time I was skinning oranges at Buckingham Palace. I don’t know any more who or what I am.”
“But I know precisely who and what you are. And what is best for you. Besides, I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to have the BBC cover the Harrods demonstration on Wednesday. All of Britain is agog to see the beautiful Natasha O’Brien and her Bombe Richelieu on the telly. Now, come give me a kiss and go bye-bye on the big silver bird.”
“I hate to say it, Nat, but Achille is right. There’s nothing you can do here. You need some perspective.”
“Goddamn it, I don’t need perspective. I need time to cry. Why don’t you just tell me to go out, buy a new hat, and forget it all? Don’t you realize what I’ve been through? I was with Louis this morning. Only hours ago. Then the police station. Then I saw Hildegarde. And then, for the grand finale, I faint in the goddamn elevator and wake up in the arms of the man I divorced.”
“See,” Max said, “every cloud does have a silver lining.” He sat down next to her. “All crap aside, I know how you feel.”
Natasha began shaking her head, the tears falling freely. “No. No, you don’t. You don’t know anything about how I feel. You don’t know anything.” She looked up at him, the tears streaming down her face. “I never loved Louis.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Achille said. “How could you? He never loved you. Louis loved only his Frau. You both merely enacted, with consent of the law, your mutual Oedipal fantasies. You were very fortunate indeed to have the forbidden dream of every young girl come true.”
“Achille,” she whispered.
“Yes, my love?”
“Stop reading those penny dreadfuls.” Natasha blew her nose and then walked once around the room as Achille and Max watched her silently. “All these years I’ve dreaded the day I would meet Hildegarde. And I was right. If only she had let me …”
“Natasha, my darling,” Achille said, “the Pharaoh did not make blintzes for Moses.”
The telephone rang and Achille picked it up. “I told you no calls. Very well. Hello, darling doctor. And how is London’s leading necrophiliac today? Are you trying to sell me tickets to the proctologists’ ball? Well, then what? I? I have never been better. No, I haven’t forgotten. Of course, I’m certain. As a matter of fact, I began my diet this very morning.”
Natasha and Max left Achille’s office. They stood on Curzon Street in the low orange of a setting sun.
“Let’s at least have a cup of something,” Max said. “For old times?” She nodded. They crossed over to Shepherd’s Market and sat down at a table in front of a trattoria. Max ordered two espressos.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“You mean since dearth did us part? That’s a heavy question.”
“I mean, has it been very hard for you?”
“No.” He smiled. “It’s mainly been hard for you.”
“Millie!”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to tell you? You wake up one morning, look me in the eye while we’re taking a shower, and tell me you want a divorce. I rub your back and ask you why. You rub my back and tell me you don’t know why. We get dressed. We have coffee. You go to your office and I go to mine. I come home, the place is cleaned out, and you’re gone.”
“I only took what was mine.”
“You didn’t take me.”
“I took what was my property,” she said.
“None of it was your property. It was ours. You can’t divide ours into yours and mine. Ours is ours is ours.”
“No. Things is things is things. That’s all they were, Millie. Just things that have no meaning.”
“No meaning?” he asked. “Do you know I cried over the silverware? That was our silverware in the drawer. And all of a sudde
n I had half a set. Service for six. We didn’t each own six settings. We each owned twelve settings.”
“Millie, we never owned each other.”
“You did. You owned me, babe.”
“Maybe that was the problem. But I don’t own you any more.”
“No, you liberated us both. You got what you wanted and I got corn flakes and bananas, Cokes, Yankee Doodles, frozen strawberries, powdered soups, canned peas, and whipped margarine.”
“Millie, it’s a real sickness with you.”
“You know, in the six months since we stopped rubbing each other’s backs, I’ve tripled my use of plastic garbage bags.”
“You’ve been eating those, too?”
“I think that was our problem. Insufficient garbage.”
“We had plenty of garbage,” she said defensively.
“We had terrible garbage. Anyone who looked through our garbage would have thought we were living in Warsaw. We never had really good American garbage, Nat. We never had cardboard boxes, or tin cans, or even little cartons from the Chinese restaurant. It’s a good thing the CIA never looked through our garbage.”
“Not that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing with you about our garbage,” she said, getting up, “but someone rather dear to me was murdered this morning and I’m fleeing the country, you see. I have a plane to catch.”
“Why were you sleeping with Louis again?”
“I’m sorry, Millie. But now’s not the time for that. I need a friend, not an ex-husband.”
“I don’t want to be an ex-husband.”
She smiled and put her hand on his. “The only alternative is friend.”
“All right, friend. But only because I feel sorry for you.”
“Me, too.”
“How can I help?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I really wish you could.”
“Let me take you to the airport.”
“No.”
“When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know. Catch the show at Harrods next week.”
“Nat, I’m really sorry.”
“Darling, haven’t you been reading your candy wrappers? Being in love means never having to say you’re sorry. Ciao, Big M.”
Fitipaldi, Montebianco e Toscapetti
Relazioni Pubbliche / Pubblicità / Pubblicitario
in Englich
Roma, 11 Sett
EGUAL PAY FOR EGUAL PASTA
Today came to Rome a new champion for egual rights for women. Natasha O’Brien, the American artist of food, flied in especially to meet with the workers in the Maladente Macaroni Factory. She was wore a tomato-coloured dress and bright zucchini colour shoes. A woman of good beauty, she flied especially from London when she learned that the ziti division of MMF was getting a rise in pay but the all-women spaghetinni section got no rise.
Aldo Maladente spoke to reporters from his home near Verona. He told them it was all a lie.
Mss. O’Brien (who is not the daughter of the great Pat O’Brien) spoke to the women who marched outside the factory. “Basta il pasta” (Stop the macaroni), they called for over 18 hours. Joining in the marching, Mss. O’Brien said over international satellite televisione that she was “Goddamn mad” and that she sported the cause of the spaghetinni workers. “Why they should get less lire?” she asked. “It’s as hard to make spaghetinni as it to make the ziti.”
Aldo Maladente spoke to reporters from his home near Verona. He told them ziti was harder.
Stella Fubini, leader of the striking spaghetinni workers, said that it was harder to make spaghetinni because it was more fragile than “the fat pig ziti.” Fubini urged all Italian women to stop serving pasta for 49 hours (two days). She reminded all Italian women that in China they live without pasta and the Cultural Revolution was a successful because the workers fought against fascist regimes by eating only rice.
Mss. O’Brien told how pasta came from China in Marco Polo to Italy. Fubini told the crowd that ziti did not come from China but was a product of the fascists to see that men had more pay than the women. Everybody cheered. Fubini told that the flag of Italy (red, white and green) was red for tomatoes, white for garlic, and green for peppers. “We do not need pasta to be great,” she said. “The people of Italy should unite under their peppers until the fascist rats give us the same pay they give the men for ziti.”
Mss. O’Brien said she would come back again, and she said she would in person make a telephone call to the factory owner.
Aldo Maladente spoke to reporters from his home near Verona. He said “yankee go home.”
—31—
Chapter 7
Natasha gazed across the Piazza Navona from her table at Tre Scalini. The waters from the Bernini fountains, and the cool breeze that insinuated its way through the streets from the Tiber, contributed to her sense of well-being. And isolation. London was the distant planet of Tuesday. She was on Thursday.
The tourists, like a swarm of maggots following a well-worn path, were nearly all gone. Rome again belonged to the Italians. And to the Germans, whose year-round presence constituted a peacetime occupation.
“Ouch!” Natasha turned from the fountains and faced Nutti Fenegretti, whose grip on her hand had tightened.
“Scusi, cara,” he said, raising her hand to his lips. “But I cannot bear to share you, even with the great Bernini.”
Natasha smiled. She looked across the table at Nutti and squeezed his hand as tightly as she could.
“Più, più, più,” he whispered, encouraging her.
She smiled again. It was impossible not to smile at Nutti. He was a small man, about five foot three, with a thick head of black curly hair, a thick black mustache, and the shadow of a very heavy beard over his dark skin. Although in his fifties, Nutti was lean and muscular. He wore a tight-fitting tan suit, and the collar of his open dark-green shirt lay flat over the lapels of his jacket. A mass of dark curly hair pushed out from the neck of his shirt. The thing that made Nutti comical was that he had no eyebrows. He had lost them years ago in a pizza oven in Ferrara.
For over an hour they discussed Louis. Nutti cried openly, recounting how he first met Louis in Vienna, how Louis got him a job at the Rot Schinken. Nutti lived in Vienna for six months, staying with Louis and Hildegarde as often as he was thrown out of his rooming house for not paying his rent. He would spend all his money on custom-made clothes. Natasha remembered Hildegarde’s shock, when doing his laundry, to find that his underwear was handmade.
By the time Louis left Vienna, Nutti was already in Paris and helped Louis find work there, then in Brussels, and, eventually, in Brighton. Nutti had always been Her Uncle, someone who periodically turned up drunk, or else sent an extravagant gift whenever he felt like declaring a holiday. Natasha had seen him often through the years, each time growing more uneasy that Nutti would someday verbalize the thoughts she could read in his eyes.
“Come with me now,” he said, looking at his watch. “I shall make you forget everything.”
Natasha looked down at his plate. The scaloppine was untouched. “You haven’t eaten a thing,” she said. “And I’ve been gorging myself.”
“You think I would eat here?” he asked. “Nutti eats only what Nutti cooks. I do not eat from Giuseppe’s kitchen.”
“Then why did you order?”
“If I did not order he would think I was not hungry. Now he will know.” Nutti looked at her and smiled. He waved his hand across the untouched cannelloni, scaloppine, peppers, and the mushroom salad. “His especialties.”
Natasha laughed. “You’re crazy.”
“I am only crazy for you.” He looked at his watch. “Come with me, Natasha. I will make glorious love to you.”
“More Pellegrino, please,” she said, raising her glass. He looked at her as he began pouring.
“Our bodies were meant to be together. I am fantastico in bed. You will love touching me. Those slender hands of yours …” He took her hand and began kissing her fin
gers. “I long to have them moving down my stomach.”
“Nutti,” she began.
“I will kiss your nipples as the sun kisses the ripening pomodoro.”
“I want dessert.”
“You do not need dessert. Your dessert shall be the moment of ecstasy when I am between your silken thighs and I enter your body.”
“That wasn’t what I had in mind. I want a Tartuffo.”
“I am better than Tartuffo,” he said, slamming his hand on the table. “You talk of gelati when I offer you magic.” He looked at his watch. “I am starving. Come with me. And then, after I have been deep, deep inside you and your hands are weak from clutching at my back, begging me to stop, then, I will feed you spumoni from my fingers.”
She put her hand under the table and rested it on his knee. “Domani, Nutti,” she said. “After you have eaten, and when I am hungry.”
“But tomorrow I am not working.”
“Then we’ll have the whole day.”
He looked at her and shrugged his shoulders. “You are giving up the chance of our lifetimes,” he said, glancing at his watch again.
“Domani, Nutti,” she said. “Per piacere.”
“Then tomorrow you shall eat nothing. I will make love to you six times. Antipasto, zuppa, pasta, pesce, carne, and il dolce. It will be the most glorious experience of your life. And then, afterward, I shall cook my Aragosta for you. You will take notes for Achille.”
“On which dish?”
“On which you like the most,” he said, smiling as he got up. “Domani, il miracolo.” He kissed her hand. “I must go to my mistress, la cucina. Otherwise half of Dusseldorf will go hungry. We shall begin at noon tomorrow. Before lunch.”
Natasha smiled. “Your place or mine?”
“Mine, of course. The cook does not fry eggs in the hen house.” He snapped his fingers and the waiter brought him the check. Nutti signed it, waved his arm across the uneaten food, smiled, and said, “l miei complimenti al Maestro.” He bent down to kiss Natasha, slipped his hand quickly from one breast to the other, shouted “Ciao,” and left.
The waiter came over to clear the table. “Dolci? Frutta?” he asked.