Death of a Showgirl

by Tobias Jones

  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.

  ‘Who was the go-between who brokered the deal?’ I asked Marinelli, waking him up from his reverie.

  He smiled ruefully again. ‘A guy called Gianni Esposito.’

  ‘On what magazine?’

  He let out a dismissive sigh. ‘I can’t remember. No idea. One of the usuals.’

  ‘Ever heard of him since?’

  He shook his head. ‘He was tried along with Mori. Can’t remember what happened to him. Let off I think.’

  ‘Gianni Esposito,’ I said quietly. I committed the name to memory, wondering what role, if any, he had in this current case.

  We heard the front door open and shut. Marinelli stood up and went to the window. We heard the sound of a moped revving up outside. It grew fainter as he came back to the kitchen table and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Not a word,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘She won’t come back until after midnight and I’ve no idea where she is, who she’s with.’

  ‘Must worry you.’

  ‘Yeah, it does.’ It sounded like it made him more angry than worried.

  ‘Simona Biondi,’ I said slowly, ‘this girl I’m looking for, she hasn’t been seen since the day before yesterday. Her parents are very worried. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  He suddenly turned to me as if I had woken him up. He shook his head conclusively, quickly. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve never heard her name before?’

  He shook his head again, raising his palms as if to apologise for his ignorance.

  I stood up and thanked him for the coffee. He walked me to the door and held it open as the dogs reappeared and snarled. He stared at them angrily, picking up an umbrella from behind the door like it was the only way to let out all his frustration. They yelped pitifully as they retreated. He clicked open the gate for me and I exchanged his cold, perfect house for the hot chaos of the capital.

  I walked along the pavement above the Tiber, looking down at the light brown river and the oblique steps descending down to the banks. There were a few boats moored up there, rocking left and right in the breeze. I watched a few squawking gulls as they tried to snatch crumbs from the deck of a pleasure boat. One of the birds got what it wanted and soared up to the rooftops to enjoy its takings. I saw it alight on the top of one of the blocks of flats, disappearing amidst the forest of aerials and satellite dishes.

  I stood there, staring at the ugly receivers. Strange that they were the means by which synthetic dreams were captured, that it was those metallic tangles that brought the tinny laughter and forced applause into people’s lives. Next to them the white dishes were all facing upwards to the sky as if in admiration of a orbiting god. There was something beseeching about their angle, about that recipient, passive pose, like the viewers themselves, with their gaze cast up to the passing stars.

  Back in the city I checked into a hotel near Piazza del Popolo. It was an old-fashioned place, full of dark wood, antiquarian maps and quiet staff. I went up to my room in a slow lift and made some calls. It didn’t take long to discover that Gianni Esposito worked on a magazine called Desire. I called the publication and they told me that Esposito was in.


  I wrote down the address and went round there. It was a short walk outside the centre, where the streets became boulevards and the shops, rather than selling designer outfits, sold discount underwear and cheap suitcases. There were fading posters from some recent political campaign, the politicians’ large faces smiling at pedestrians. There were trite slogans written underneath, many of which had been doctored or defaced.

  I wondered to myself why I was chasing a story from twenty years ago instead of the current one. I had to follow any leads I found, and if I had none on Simona, then I would chase loose ends from back in the 1990s. I wasn’t sure if history was repeating itself, but I knew that as names came up I had to confront them, see what they could tell me about the past and what that might say about the present.

  The magazine’s offices were in a large block housing various other titles. The ground-floor reception had lime-green sofas and copies of the covers of various magazines from years gone by. There were photographs of couples on snowy mountains, smiling outrageously at something as they stared into the far distance; there were pictures of fashionably dressed children running along the beach holding hands, their feet splashing in the water. I looked for a cover of Desire and saw a woman on her hands and knees, showing her cleavage. It was someone I recognised from the TV, but I couldn’t place the programme. She looked young and seductive. The cat with nine lives, read the headline.

  The whole place exuded fantasy. This was what people aspired to: the laughter, the glamour of snowy peaks, feet splashing in a transparent sea, a beautiful wife with perfect teeth and voluptuous curves. On the far wall, in large letters, it said Sogni Group.

  The woman on the front desk, though, looked like a sourpuss. She was the wrong side of plump, her face was barely symmetrical and her short black hair made her look like the austere adult guardian of these childish fantasies.

  ‘I’m looking for Gianni Esposito,’ I said to her.

  She raised one eyebrow. ‘It’s press day today so he’ll be very tied up. Have you got an appointment?’