by Neil Russell
Lord Black was in Sydney mired in some merger or union negotiation or deep-sea fishing or squiring a new girlfriend to the opera, so he couldn’t make it. It was the only time I ever had an angry thought about him. But when I cooled off, I came to my senses. She wasn’t his wife anymore, and she’d left him.
The priest asked me if I wanted to say something at the service. I told him no. What I didn’t tell him was that Amarante and I had already covered everything on the trip down. Me in first class, her on dry ice. It was the first time since she started drinking that we’d had a conversation where she stayed put until it was over. She was a terrific lady in a lot of ways and extremely talented, but she wasn’t someone who was interested in other people’s problems. Mostly, if you weren’t talking about her, you were doing it to an empty room.
As we left the cemetery, Santos steered me to his car. He was a highly respected businessman and a Brazilian senator, but he’d run afoul of the generals in charge, so he was spending most of his time at his villa on the coast. He suggested I come with him. I wasn’t really interested, but then he pointed out the rough-looking intelligence officers in bad suits conspicuously taking pictures of the crowd, and he explained that sooner or later, they’d get around to “interviewing” me.
Like the Sistine Chapel, Ubatuba is one of those places photographs can’t capture. It’s both a mood and a place. Miles of pristine beach with hundreds of inlets, each more stunning than the next. White sand, black sand, rough water, serene lagoons—whatever you could imagine. And because the rich had bought up the land for miles, there wasn’t anybody, anywhere, except an occasional fisherman in an ancient dory.
The deeply palmed red hills ran straight up from the sand, and it was on these that the owners built their oceanfront getaways. Santos’s place was two stories of Phillip Johnson glass and steel with 360° views and a long, twisting sandstone driveway that must have taken hundreds of campesinos months to lay.
Santos landed his Cessna on a tiny dirt airstrip carved out of the rain forest, and immediately two dozen locals surrounded the plane, shouting instructions to one another in a patois I didn’t understand while they unloaded the supplies we’d brought into a caravan of ancient Volkswagen Beetles. My uncle and I squeezed into the last car, and the convoy wheezed and coughed its way along a rutted trail barely wide enough for a bicycle, then labored up the steep drive at a pace half the speed I could have walked it.
The next morning, Santos went back to São Paulo to attend a board meeting, so before breakfast, I dressed in swim trunks, slung a towel over my shoulders and hiked down to the beach. I swam up and down the coast until I was exhausted, then bodysurfed in. I felt good for the first time since my mother’s death. Alive…and hungry.
As I started back to the house, I saw two figures on the empty beach walking in my direction. When they got closer, I could see they were young women in their early twen ties, wearing nothing but high-hipped thongs. They walked easily, engaged in conversation, unashamedly topless.
I’d been all over the world and was recently no longer a virgin, but I still wasn’t used to women with their breasts right out there for everybody to stare at. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. In France, you had to be careful because of all the grandmothers—but Spain and Italy, unbelievable.
Brazilian women tend toward the exquisite anyway, and some simply can’t be described. These two were beyond anything I had ever seen—anywhere. When they got closer, I noticed that, in addition to her thong, the taller of the two was wearing a small, white seashell around her neck on a piece of rawhide, something that had the dual effect of accentuating her tan and drawing your eyes right to where you were trying to keep them from focusing.
She smiled at me with the whitest teeth I had ever seen and said, “Americano.”
I grinned back and asked in Portuguese, “Como?”
With a long, perfectly formed finger, she pointed to her eye. “Olhos. Azul.” Then in heavily accented English, “Eyes. Blue. And big, big tall. My English pretty damn fucking good, no?” Then she threw back her head and laughed. Her sun-bleached hair hung down her back, almost to her waist, accentuating her own height, which had to be close to six feet.
“Pretty damn good,” I repeated, hoping she didn’t notice the catch in my throat or the growing tent in my swimsuit. She gestured for me to drop my towel, then took my hand and led me, running, into the water. We laughed and splashed and dunked each other for a while, and then she came into my arms. Sometimes everything just fits. No uncertainty, no false starts. She kissed me, and I knew. And I knew she knew too.
When we came out of the water, her cousin was well down the beach. I gestured that I was hungry, and she led me to the tree line where an oyster fisherman had set up shop on top of an old barrel in the shade of some giant palms. While he shucked, we squeezed freshly quartered tangerines over the prize and wolfed them down. He also poured us martelinho glasses of milky liquid from an unlabeled bottle. My first cachaça…actually, my first several.
Sanrevelle Adriana Marcelino Carvalho—which she went to great lengths to make sure I pronounced correctly. And after Santos called and said he was flying down to Puerto Alegre for a couple of weeks to attend to a business emergency, I told the servants I’d be having a guest, and she came to stay with me.
Sanrevelle was twenty-three, and the week before, her fiancé, Carlos, had announced he was breaking their engagement to marry her cousin. So she and her sister, Sophia, had headed to Ubatuba to lie in the sun and bake the hurt and anger out of her system.
She was a classical pianist with little-girl dreams of touring the world. But after sixteen years of study with the best teachers in South America and two years in France with a virtuoso who was less interested in her adagio than getting in her pants, she’d taken a long, hard look at her talent and come to the conclusion that she was never going to be great. And so she packed her bags, ground out a cigarette on the Frenchman’s Bösendorfer and caught a plane home.
And now the replacement dream was gone too.
Ordinarily, five years is a big gap, especially when the woman is twenty-three and the guy is just out of high school. But this was Brazil, not Beverly Hills, and despite what we both felt, we told ourselves we just wanted a fling, not a future.
At least once, everyone should have two weeks of nothing but good food, good weather, no clothes and shameless sex. You’re a long time growing old, and this is a memory you deserve.
It’s even better if you have a big house with lots of odd-shaped furniture.
A day after Sanrevelle came to stay, we gave up all pretense of getting dressed—except for the seashell around her neck—and Miss Sheltered Upbringing was showing me things I couldn’t have dreamed of—and I’d been reading Penthouse Letters since I was twelve.
My personal favorite was where one of us played the piano while the other knelt in front of the bench. When the music stops, so does everything else. It didn’t take long to figure out that your only chance of not getting lost in the moment was to play really fast, so we named this sweet torture Beethoven on Fire. I can now play a mean “Chop-sticks” bathed in sweat.
During one break, I taught her “Christmas Always Breaks My Heart,” which, when she sang it, took my breath away. Almost as much as the pianist.
Eddie stirred, then came awake. He looked at the autopilot and then at the GPS. “Not bad,” he said. “The frogs don’t know shit about maintaining electronics, but this thing’s new enough they didn’t have time to fuck it up. Want me to drive for a while?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
37
Cognac and Legionnaires
Everything looks better from the air, and Corsica looks better than most. Then you have to land. The scenery is breathtaking, the towns picturesque, but a couple of thousand years of conquerors, despots, corrupt politicians, violent criminals—and the French—have poisoned the populace into a dark, brooding people with the personality of a collection ag
ency. It also doesn’t help that terrorism can be just around any corner. But you’ve got to give the Corsicans props for equality. They don’t like each other any more than they do anybody else.
It was a fight to get the plane hangared, a fight to rent a car and a fight to get directions that turned out to be wrong anyway. Our car, a wheezing Citroën with a seat adjustment range that would have cramped Napoleon, finally got us into Bastia. But I wanted privacy as well as a good night’s sleep, and French hotel registries are too easily accessed. So tired as we were, we pushed on until we found the Maison de Casatorra, a bed-and-breakfast south of Borgo with sweeping views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The innkeeper was actually almost friendly, but not until he gave us a lecture on American foreign policy and what a fool Reagan was. The guy seemed to have memorized the Democratic talking points from the 1984 election, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him the Gipper was dead.
But if the civics lesson was the price of admission for the comfortable sea view rooms and the extraordinary food, it was worth it. The Maison’s dining room was twenty-six-year-old Paolo Adianio’s first kitchen, and since we were the only guests in the hotel—and Americans—he laid it on.
Paolo was from Civitavecchia, a ferry ride across to the Italian coast, and he was experimenting with putting Roman accents on traditional Corsican dishes. He called it Etruscan-Corse, and after the first bite of the first appetizer—sardines stuffed with brocciu and grilled in olive oil—I knew I had to get him to Beverly Hills as soon as possible. His food was as exceptional as that at Tacitus, and I needed someplace to go where I hadn’t bled on the tile.
Jackie had been right about the wine, though. And Paolo said he didn’t have the budget to improve the Maison’s cellar. Fortunately, there was plenty of Pietra, a local chestnut beer, which we followed with Corsican espresso and icy shots of Cedratine.
I had Paolo bring me a bottle of one of Bruzzi’s reds so I could see the label. Much to my disappointment, no hyena.
When I hit the bed, if it creaked, I didn’t hear it.
By the time Eddie found his feet and wandered down to the beach the next morning, I’d already pounded out a mile and a half in the chilly water, and whatever residue clinging to me from the night before was gone. I’m always amazed by the Med. Though it’s bordered by some of the most ecologically irresponsible nations on earth, sometimes it’s as pristine as Santa Barbara. Better yet, no sharks. Oh, they’re there, but they’re not particularly aggressive. The one time I did have to deal with one, I punched him in the nose, and he shot away like I was the town bully.
We had breakfast on the Maison’s terrace. Double-yolk eggs, Corsican ham and baguettes with fresh butter. Evi dently the money we’d spent on dinner and the tip we’d left the service staff had gotten everyone’s attention, because when we checked out, the owner didn’t mention politics once as he walked us to our car.
The night before, I’d shown Paolo the picture of the unknown artist, and he’d drawn a blank. Now as we put our overnight bags in the trunk of the Citroën, I handed it to the Maison’s owner. He shook his head no and thrust the picture back at me so fast that I almost asked him to take another look. Then I saw the man’s face. He wanted no part of whoever it was. I was also sure he wasn’t going to tell anyone about it. He was terrified.
Of a painter? What the fuck was this?
Corsica is the most mountainous island in the Med, and 70 percent is national park, so the best roads are along the coast. But like most of Europe, they haven’t grasped sign-age. Essentially, it’s we know where we’re going, so fuck you. Eddie drove while I pondered a map that only occasionally matched reality, and we regularly shouted at each other like we were married.
We entered the dramatic, cliff-clinging city of Bonifacio about an hour before sundown, and its electrifying splendor awed even the hard-bitten Eddie. “How in the hell can these people not see what they’ve got here?”
“Old World hardheads,” I said. “Americans get excoriated for ignoring tradition, but at least we don’t get bogged down with bullshit. Over here, if your great-grandfather had a hard-on for somebody, you have to piss in his salad. And if you try to break tradition, the enemy won’t talk to you anyway, plus you go on the shit list with the rest of your family.”
Eddie shook his head. “We could change all that with a couple of California developers. The only thing that slows them down is a grave. By the time the locals got back from lunch, they’d have these old buildings converted to condos and be running tract houses right up that fuckin’ mountain. Bingo, brand-new culture.”
Again I wanted to avoid a commercial hotel, and a bed-and-breakfast was out of the question, because someone as powerful as Bruzzi would be advised of every stranger who hit town. Having been to Corsica twice before, I knew there were homes for rent, mostly villas favored by wealthy French and Italians. The trick was finding someone who could show us one without turning on an air raid siren.
Because I’m so conspicuous, I sent Eddie into a bar next to a closed real estate office where we’d seen luxury rental property photographs in the window. Half an hour later, he came out with a well-dressed guy about thirty-five, who’d obviously had a couple of drinks and couldn’t have been more affable.
“Meet Julien Borreau,” Eddie said, smiling. “Property manager extraordinaire, and hell on a bottle of cognac.”
Julien shook my hand through the car window. “Mr. Buffalo said you want to do some fishing and you’re interested in a place that is very nice and very private.” He appraised the battered Citroën. “Are you sure you can afford it?”
He had pronounced Eddie’s name “BOOF-a-loo,” and even though his speech was slightly slurred from drinking, his accent was mainland. A transplant.
I laughed. “It was either this or a Fiat with no hood. How’d you end up on Corsica, Julien?”
He grinned. “Every time I open my mouth, it gives me away, doesn’t it? Started out as a thief. In Paris. Got pinched and did a turn in the Legion. Mustered out here. Everybody’s so fuckin’ busy being suspicious, you keep your nose clean you can make a good living dealing with the foreigners the locals won’t talk to. Bother you?”
Not only didn’t it bother me, I had to give Eddie an A. In a country of socialist xenophobes, he’d managed to find a friendly, if slightly tipsy, former criminal—maybe retired, maybe not—who was only interested in money. And being Parisian, he probably wasn’t wired to Bruzzi. “Julien,” I said, “we’re in your capable hands.”
He turned and went into his darkened office. A few moments later, he was back with a set of keys and got in next to me. Eddie sat behind him. He directed us along the coast road, and with the sun now all but set, Bonifacio’s skyline was dark except for a few random lights. As we passed a burned-out building on the beach, I asked, “Qu’est-ce que ça?”
Julien seemed to have to decide how to answer. Finally, he shook his head. “L’Hotel Eden. Forty-six lives. What is it you Americans say? Poof?”
“Poof?”
“Yes. A bomb. Three bombs, actually. The wedding of Lazzaro Santagatta. The most popular Nationalist leader. The police say it was terrorists, but everybody knows it was the man who owned the hotel. The one who invited Santagatta to have his party there. Gaetano Bruzzi.”
I played dumb. “Why would anybody blow up his own property?”
“Cafoni,” Julien half-whispered, half-spit. “Mafia. What the fuck do they care about anything except keeping things the way they are? Divided. Vendettas everywhere. An independent Corsica would bring Corsican prosecutors…Corsican judges. And so they support everyone…and then they kill the ones who become too powerful.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “And they kill the people who get in the way.”
I knew that tone. Whatever the sadness was in this man, it was deep and raw. I changed the subject. “I thought Les Executeurs were who everybody was afraid of.”
Julien became immediately suspicious. “How do you know Les Executeurs
?”
“My lawyer told me to be careful of them. That they are dangerous. And they like to cut people.”
The Frenchman relaxed. “Your lawyer is stupid. They are fantoche…puppets. Here, there is only Bruzzi.”
“Sounds like you don’t much care for him.”
He waved his hand. “I neither care nor don’t care. I just earn a living.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Eddie looking back at me. He slowly raised his forefinger and drew it across his throat.
Two miles out of town, Julien directed me off the main highway onto a narrow lane. As soon as we turned, overhead lights came on, and we twisted through thick woods until we were stopped by an eight-foot, wrought-iron gate supported on a pair of gray stone columns topped with copper eagles. Julien jumped out and dialed a code into the keypad affixed to the left column. The barriers parted, and instantly, more lights came on, showing a winding cobblestone drive leading upward at a steep angle.
Like its in-town brethren, the three-story stone house was cut into the mountain, only this one sat alone surrounded by trees. Unless someone down below was standing on his roof with a pair of binoculars and had just the right angle, it would be impossible to know anyone was here. I parked in the circular drive, and Julien went inside and started turning on lights.
The interior was also stone. Fifteen-foot ceilings, walk-in fireplaces and tall French doors off every room leading onto a wide veranda overlooking the coast. There was even an indoor-outdoor swimming pool and a full exercise room.
“Not too fuckin’ bad,” said Eddie as he headed toward the ebony bar. “Cognac, Julien?”
“Absolutely,” Julien answered, “then I want to show you something.”
Snifters of Paradis Extra in hand, we followed Julien across the courtyard to a stone stairway leading down the cliff. A motion sensor turned on lights built into the steps, and we descended.