Finally he was lying down soaking on the bed. Sweating . . . spinning . . . repeating . . . half awake . . . half dreaming . . . Her in his head . . . Sky . . . the procession . . . that mask and headdress. Then up there on that stage . . . surrounded by them . . . baying . . . pointing . . . drumbeats thumping. Mixed in with the boat . . . swimming naked . . . gently rocking . . . And Isabella . . . her smiling . . . cathedral candles flickering . . . Mallorca . . . his mother . . . and then what Isabella had said –
His eyes flashed open and he sat bolt upright on the bed as the first light of dawn was creeping in through the gap in the curtains. He half fell onto the floor and stumbled for the desk and grabbed the notepad and pen and quickly scribbled the word down.
No question, he was sure of it now.
He’d heard that name before.
30
Frankie woke to the sound of ringing. Was it just in his head? He couldn’t tell. He groaned, as he opened his eyes, and was met by a pristine white wall and translucent curtains shifting in the breeze. Where the hell was he? Oh shit, yeah, the hotel in Ibiza. A block of bright sunlight blazed on the ochre-tiled floor.
He started to turn his head, but grunted in pain, his neck aching. Rolling carefully onto his back, he opened his eyes again and saw that the room had started spinning. No, not the room. Just the fan. Bloody hell. It was like the beginning of Apocalypse Now. But who did that make him? The drugged-up poor sod who’d been given the mission of bringing Colonel Kurtz back from the jungle? Yeah, that felt about right. The poor schmuck who’d just been thrown into the thick of it without being given the full picture at all.
The ringing. It was his phone. He snatched it off the bedside table, moving away from the half-chewed pizza slice next to it, with a bite taken out of it – his? He didn’t remember getting back here at all.
‘Yeah, what?’ he said, hitting answer.
‘And a very good morning to you too.’
Mackenzie Grew. ‘Bloody hell. What time is it?’ Frankie said. His heartbeat spiked. Where the hell was his watch? But then he saw it on the floor, along with his pants, trousers, shirt, jacket and – bollocks – his snapped credit card. How the hell had that happened? All of it strewn across the suite like the fallout from a plane crash.
‘Luckily for you, not wakey, wakey, rise ’n’ shine time. That’s going to be tomorrow morning. At five a.m., to be precise.’
‘What? Why?’ There was no point in even trying to kid him. Frankie didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Was it something they’d discussed last night?
‘Duke, Little T and them Russians. That’s when we’re picking them up. We just got the call from Jeremy. We’ve got their address.’
Jeremy . . . oh God, yes, now he really felt sick. The room started spinning doubly. For real. Because, bloody hell, all that, it had really happened up on that stage, with all those people watching. Christ alive. With the whole crowd ogling, for God’s sake.
‘Some old country pad over the other side of the island,’ Grew said. ‘Built like a fortress. Used to be bloody owned by Denholm Elliott, I heard. A man after my own heart in more than one way. Anyway, the plan is to hit the bastards early and hit them hard.’
‘Hit them?’ Frankie sat up.
‘Yeah, but don’t you worry, we’re going to have lots of backup. Everything’ll be fine, so long as we play it right.’
The Russians. Little T. Duke. Jesús. Jeremy. Yet another of Riley’s bloody turf wars that Frankie had somehow got himself embroiled in. He noticed the pad on the floor with just the one word written on it. He snatched it up but even the letters looked drunk – that didn’t stop his heart thumping hard, there was a name.
‘And how are you feeling this morning, young d’Artagnan?’
‘D’ar what?’
‘Tagnan. That’s what Bob reckons we were last night, the Three bloody Musketeers . . .’
‘Making him bloody Porthos,’ Frankie said.
Grew said something he didn’t catch.
‘You what?’
‘Nothing, I wasn’t talking to you.’
Another muffled voice at the end of the phone. Sounded like Grew had company. The Spanish lad in the black leather codpiece.
‘And what about today?’ Frankie felt his stomach twist and he gritted his teeth, trying not to spew.
‘I thought we’d take in a few sights,’ Grew said. ‘Maybe run a marathon or two.’
‘I was thinking we wouldn’t.’
Grew laughed. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? I always did wonder what a lad your age was doing giving up so many of the good things in life. But it’s obvious now, you’ve got no bloody brakes.’
‘As I think I remember pointing out last night, I was spiked.’
‘Accidentally.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘Oh, come on, you two boys had yourselves a right royal time.’
Got themselves a right royal kicking, more like. Oh yeah – Frankie got up and studied his black eye in the mirror – he remembered that an’ all. But, Jesús, he remembered him too.
‘I thought he hated me,’ he said.
‘Nah, he’s like that with everyone when he first meets them. Aloof, I think’s the right word. I reckon it’s cos he’s so rich.’
Rich? Oh, yeah. Minted. Him and Jeremy, both.
‘So what’s the story with him? What’s he been doing in London?’
‘Just learning the ropes, really. Kind of like a foreign exchange student, I suppose. Forging closer European ties, only with knuckledusters and guns.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m going to be taking it easy today, all right?’ Frankie said, pulling out his passport from his case and already gathering up his clothes. ‘Probably just sleep this off then maybe hit the beach.’
More muffled voices Grew’s end. Frankie smiled,
‘I’ll catch you later,’ Grew said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’
Someone, more like.
The second he hung up, Frankie put in a call to the Ambassador. Luckily Xandra answered. He got her to go upstairs toot sweet.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it, through in the living room,’ he said, covering the phone as he threw up in the toilet again.
‘Are you all right there?’ Xandra’s voice came back.
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Food poisoning?’
‘Yeah, a dodgy burger.’ He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth – that he’d just fallen off the wagon with a resounding thud. She’d been so brilliant about him getting on it in the first place. He felt shit about letting her down.
‘Gross. OK, I’m here,’ she said. ‘And in the desk drawer, you say?’
‘Right. The er . . .’ He tried to visualize it. Which drawer had it been? ‘I think it might be bottom right, or bottom left. The folder you’re looking for, it’s blue with elastic bands round it.’ He could hear her opening and shutting the drawers.
‘Top right, actually,’ she said.
Frankie pushed himself up off the porcelain and flushed it, walking back out of the bathroom and doing his best to avoid his minging reflection.
‘Good, that’s the postcards, yeah? Have a flip through them. It’s one from my mum to my dad. There’s about twenty of them in all, mostly from Italy and Sicily. But the one I need you to find has a picture of a church on it and a donkey standing outside it.’
‘A donkey?’
‘Don’t ask.’ His mum had told him some hokey story about there being a religious tradition out there to push a live donkey off the top of a church.
He slid open the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. Christ on a bike, it was shaping up already into another suffocatingly hot day.
‘Ah, yeah. Here we go. I think I got it. Ha ha, very funny. Seems like your mammy had a bit of a naughty sense of humour, hey?’
Oh, yeah, there’d been a reference to the donkey’s undercarriage, hadn’t there? ‘Right, but it’s not her views on male anatomy I’
m interested in. It’s the name. The name of the family in Sicily she was staying with.’
‘Va . . . vak something . . .’
‘Just spell it out.’ Frankie was already staring at the pad.
‘V-A-C-C-A-R-O,’ Xandra said.
‘Vaccaro,’ Frankie said quietly to himself, aping the way Isabella had said it when she’d told him about the family she worked for who owned the Al Duomo restaurant, and a bunch of other establishments on Mallorca besides.
‘Why?’ Xandra asked. ‘Why’s it so important?’
‘Just some old family business that needs sorting.’
No way on earth could that name be a coincidence, could it? That the name of the family of Sicilian relatives his mum had used to go stay with was the same as the people who owned the only Sicilian restaurant in the street she’d sent a postcard from. If she had sent it, of course, and he’d still got no proof of that.
‘OK, right. Now listen,’ he said. ‘You speak a bit of the dago lingo, yeah?’
‘If, by which, you mean do I speak Spanish, then yes. But only to GCSE standard and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that it’s probably rusty as fuck.’
‘There’s something else I need you to do then, but first I need you to go get my spare credit card from where I’ve hidden it under the sink.’
‘The sink . . . right . . . then what?’
‘I want you to book me a flight.’
31
‘Is everything OK, sir?’ asked the stern-looking, uniformed woman at immigration control.
No, it’s bloody not. The provinces of my body are bloody revolting: heart thumping, liver swelling, kidneys aching, lungs wheezing, stomach churning, brain pounding, eye throbbing, breath stinking. Oh yes, I have indeed had better days.
‘Yeah, fine,’ Frankie said out loud. No point bitching here of all places. It never got you anywhere at airports, messing with the man. Or woman, as it were.
‘And your reason for visiting?’
Oh. My. God. It had to be his black eye. Because this was hardly the bleedin’ United States. When was the last time a pasty young bloke like him had been asked something like this visiting Mallorca? When the only honest answer was, To get laid and get pissed.
‘To visit some relatives,’ he said.
The woman smiled. Good enough answer, or so it seemed. She closed his passport and handed it back. ‘Have a nice stay,’ she said.
‘Sure.’ On that note, only time would tell. But one thing was for certain, he already had his tail up, because right there in the hotel reception back in Ibiza, there’d been a phone directory. For the whole Balearics too, not just there. And in the whole of the four islands – being Ibiza, Mallorca, Minorca and Formentera, there’d been only ten listings for Vaccaro. And all of them in Mallorca, meaning just the one family? And maybe the same family his mum was related to? Well, that’s what he was about to find out.
He’d debated hard about whether to call Isabella to let her know what he was about but decided against it. For one thing, he wasn’t even sure if he knew what he was about himself. This hunch of his, it could be completely wrong and he might just be about to make a total tit of himself. What’s more, with someone seriously potente and influente. That was the other reason he didn’t want to get Isabella involved, the last thing he wanted was to get her in trouble. Certainly not with the kind of badass the boss of this Vaccaro family was likely to be.
He bought himself a pair of black Ray-Bans and ordered a cab straight from the airport. The cabby was a sports nut, an immigrant, Brazilian. He spoke good English and started banging on about how England might win the Euros, but Brazil were odds on already for the next World Cup. And how awful it was about Brazilian Ayrton Senna dying the year before last. He reckoned some local kid called Nadal was going to be the best sports star this island had ever seen, having watched him recently at a local tennis tournament.
The names and the words all blurred into one for Frankie, as they left the sprawl of Palma and the coastal resorts behind and climbed up north into the hills. He wasn’t in the mood for talking, it was all he could manage not to be sick. He had his nose to the window like a dog.
Of all the days in all his life, this had to be the worst to be hungover. Snap, snap, come on. He needed his brain to be firing on all cylinders. Not stalling like this. He made himself start all over again. For the tenth time since he’d set out that morning from the hotel to the airport. Think, come on. Think this through logically. No bloody point trying to meet this Señor Vaccaro and parlay with him if he couldn’t even do that.
Step one, the postcard. It had been sent to him by name. By someone who knew him. They knew where he lived and the handwriting looked like his mother’s. Maybe the lipstick could have been hers too. Step two, the location the card had been sent from. It was a road with one foreign restaurant in it, a Sicilian one, with an owner who had the same surname as the relatives Frankie’s mother had used to stay with. Step three, the reason the card got sent. Yeah, here’s where it got blurry, where it all started falling apart. Because why would she have come here to Mallorca?
Frankie dozed on and off, with the cabby still gamely rattling off his patter of famous sights and visitors to the island, Chopin and Michael Douglas as they drove through Valldemossa, Boris Becker and Jeffrey Archer as they crested the peak of the Tramuntana mountain range. Until, finally, he found himself snagged awake again by the mention of Robert Graves, and he saw the sign for Deià out of the window at the side of the winding hillside road.
‘Les Roques is quite something,’ said the cabby. ‘Very expensive.’
‘Yeah. So I hear.’
‘I have taken many famous people to it. And, look, look, right there now . . .’ He started tapping frantically at the window. ‘. . . your Mr James Bond himself. I had the privilege of delivering him here to the hotel from the airport only three days ago.’
He pronounced ‘James’ so oddly, that at first Frankie didn’t quite catch it. But looking out the window, as they drove past the tall guy in shorts and a pale-pink shirt with a white panama hat on who was walking into town, he recognized him right away. Pierce bloody Brosnan, no less.
‘Blimey,’ said Frankie.
He’d first watched him in GoldenEye last year. Pretty bloody good. Preferred him to that other fellah. What’s his name? Dalton? None of them a patch on Connery, mind. He was still the man. And the one Frankie had always imagined himself as when him and his brother had used to play spies as kids. Though Jack had always preferred playing the bad guys like Blofeld and Goldfinger. Quelle bloomin’ surprise.
‘A very nice man and very generous too,’ continued the cabby, fishing for a decent-sized tip.
‘Yeah, I bet he was.’
The cabby smiled at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘And you? You are famous British actor too also?’ He grinned, so much so that Frankie wasn’t sure if he was taking the piss. ‘Or a well-known DJ?’
‘Me, mate? Nah, I’m nobody, just a tourist.’
The cabby looked disappointed. No need. Frankie already had a bundle of readies rolled up ready to pay him with. He handed it over, asking him to wait for him back at that nice little shaded café they’d just passed in town.
They reached the spiked cast-iron hotel gates. Shit, they were locked and security cameras glared down at them from the pillars either side. Then the gates slowly slid open, revealing a long gravel driveway snaking up through the olive groves on the mountainside up ahead.
Les Roques itself came into view half a kilometre on, a large and ancient manor house, surrounded by an impressive collection of stone outbuildings and what looked like smaller accommodation blocks. The whole place was set in an oasis of luscious green gardens, with a mix of brown dirt fields, vineyards and olive groves climbing up the mountainside towards its rocky, barren summit.
The closer you got, the prettier – and posher – it all looked. All white stone arches and balconies, with bougainvillea and wisteria hanging down. Even f
rom the back of the cab as it pulled up in the palm-tree-shaped courtyard outside reception, the views down over the rooftops of the town and the glistening blue sea beyond took Frankie’s breath away. Christ, what he wouldn’t give to stay here for a few days. Just to get his shit back together and charge his batteries up.
‘May I take your luggage?’ a young, preppy-looking geezer dressed in pressed Ralph Lauren shorts and a matching polo shirt asked, opening the door for him.
Frankie got out. Crikey, this place even smelt expensive. All roses and God knew what else. He’d read in the plane on the way over here that the islands were all starved of water, but looking round here there was no sign of that.
‘Er, no. I’m just here to meet someone,’ he said.
‘A resident?’
OK. Right, here we go. He should have known this wasn’t going to be easy. This guy wasn’t just a porter, he was here to make sure that whatever other legit guests were staying here weren’t getting bothered by people who weren’t meant to be here at all, people like Frankie James. He wasn’t the only one either: a couple of other lads dressed in the same snazzy casual kit stood either side of the entrance. More like sentries than porters was the way that it looked.
The guy was still waiting for a reply.
No, I’m here to see Señor Vaccoro. Frankie nearly said it, but didn’t. Because already he instinctively knew that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. No easier than it would be to get a meeting with someone like Tommy Riley if someone connected hadn’t already vouched for you.
‘Yes,’ Frankie said, instead. ‘I’m here to meet Mr Brosnan. Mr Pierce Brosnan.’ He shot the guy his most confident smile. ‘I’m a journalist from England with the Sunday Times.’
Probably not his best move, but once a blagger, always a blagger, and it seemed to do the trick. The guy smiled and led him through the arched stone doorway into the courtyard reception beyond. He was offered a seat at an empty cast-iron table beside a tinkling fountain. Parakeets flitted between the lush leaves and branches of exotic-looking plants and shrubs. Classical music played from hidden speakers. No, strike that. It was only an actual bloody violinist, wasn’t it? Perched over there in the shade of a gnarled and ancient olive tree.
Double Kiss Page 20