We'll Sleep When We're Old

by Pino Corrias

  “So you find the director. You take him away with you from his home in Varese. And while you’re there, you find the painting. Nice.”

  “The father and the mother, after the scandal unleashed by their son, had decided to drop out of sight. Move to the other side of the lake, in Switzerland. The Manzoni belonged to the mother’s family, in Milan, they wanted to cash out in a hurry. I was their golden parachute.”

  As he tells him the story, Oscar is wondering why the hell they’re talking about it. In the end, he asks, “Why are you so interested in it?”

  “Mere curiosity.”

  Oscar looks at his impassive face, his two-bit suit, the shoulders that are too broad for the mind to be sharp. He has nothing to fear. “If there’s nothing else. I’m afraid I have to crack the whip over a few screenwriters.”

  Ventura doesn’t move. He’s thinking whether he should venture so far as to ask him about the young Fabris’s fortune. So sizable that his law enforcement cousins over at the Financial Police sent him an entire dossier, with potential points of contact or banking connections with Martello’s assets. But he’s already pushed too far. So he sticks his hands in his pockets and decides to skip it. “I need to get going, too. But let’s stay in touch.”

  “Always at your service, commissario,” Oscar tells him, by which he means exactly the opposite.

  In Scalding Water

  In Paris, Andrea and Jacaranda are in a bathtub full of scalding hot water. They’re at the end of their fourth day together and finally at the beginning of something else. Oscar left at eight that evening in his Jaguar C-X17 with its Liquid Gold paint job, without a word as to whether he’d be coming back, or where he was going, or what had become of Angelina Casagrande, her acquisitions, or her airplane. And he’d said nothing about what was to become of them, or how many more days they were going to have to spend in Paris with their cell phones powered down. In other words, what was to become of the three-ring circus that he had set going. As he left, all he said was, “I’ll be in touch.” And the two of them, relieved at his departure, taking the tension with him as he left, hadn’t felt like asking anything else.

  This evening they indulged in an aperitif and dinner at Select.

  He tried to get a little closer to her, asking her, “Do you mind if I ask what’s tormenting you?”

  She answered him, with a confidence that almost verged on distraction, “I’m falling into the void. And there’s no one to catch me.”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  “Yes. Surrounded by hostile people.”

  “Even now?”

  “Yes,” she told him, but adding a hint of gentleness to the gaze with which she had just caressed him.

  Andrea returned the kindness with a smile and, before he had a chance to regret it, blurted out, “According to Sun Tzu—”

  “Who?”

  “A great Chinese philosopher, an expert on military strategies—”

  “And what does he say?”

  “That before you can know who your enemies are, you have to know who you are.”

  “Oh good Lord, I don’t know who I am.”

  Andrea was about to tell her, Well then, this is your chance to find out, but he realized that the whole thing sounded like idiotic lines out of a TV movie. And that she would just laugh in his face. Their evening together deserved better: “Shall we head home?”

  The quiet after the winds kicked up by Oscar Martello created a perimeter that took them in. And they filled that perimeter with a blast of flame of pure passion, and then with a bathtub full of hot water. But without excitement, without suspense, as if taking a bath together was just one of the possible options for the evening, available in the catalog. For that matter, they’d first met over an aquarium and now more water surrounded them and perhaps even protected them.

  “Tell me where you come from. Start from the beginning,” Andrea asks her.

  “From what beginning?”

  “The beginning of it all. Your story.”

  “It’s not that cheerful.”

  “I don’t like cheerful stories.”

  Not really sure where to begin, Jacaranda looks around at the empty bathroom and says, “My whole story is a story of homes being emptied. A story of moving. Do you feel like hearing it?”

  “Certainly I do.”

  “Then let’s start with my great-grandfather.”

  Andrea’s eyes open wide.

  Jacaranda almost starts laughing. “But I’ll keep it short.”

  Her great-grandfather, back in the twenties, had sold the family’s two apartment houses, in Trieste, to buy German government bonds. “He’d done it just before the fall of the Weimar Republic, which turned those bonds into so much worthless paper. Just think, what fantastic timing.” Then guess what her grandfather did: “With the last few pennies of the family fortune, he bought a hat factory in Istria and a big house. You know what year? In 1939, just in time for the outbreak of World War Two. And when the war was over, all the borders were redrawn, with the Iron Curtain, and all property that belonged to Italians requisitioned by Yugoslavia under Tito. All lost.”

  Then it was her father’s turn. When she was eight, he vanished from the scene. “He left for Chile, chasing a woman painter, leaving us a note saying he was sorry.”

  “And you never saw him again?”

  “Never. Never saw him, never heard from him. Maybe he’s still alive somewhere, rich and happy. Maybe he’s dead.”

  “Aren’t you curious to find out?”

  “No. All I remember about him were his consequences. My mother crying and the apartment completely empty.”

  “Why empty?”

  “Completely empty like this apartment. Because when my father ran away, he left us penniless, and to survive my mother sold off all our furniture, one room at a time. And then she was so angry that she cut up all the clothing that my father had left in the closets, into strips. In the end, the apartment was empty, and the floors were littered with hundreds of these strips of fabric. I played with them for a whole month. When I ran, there was an echo.”

  The water in the tub emits flashing reflections. Jacaranda’s face is luminous, in spite of the shadow of her stories. Andrea has been yearning to kiss her since a time that now seems lost in the distant past, when what separated them was the blue and gold space of the aquarium at Milly’s house, in Sabaudia.

  At Select they drank Ricard until late, then his hand brushed hers, just like in an Éric Rohmer film, and she kissed him, and before long they were alone, back in the apartment, in front of the bathroom mirror, making love with their hands. She with her raspberry-red blouse completely unbuttoned, her skirt hiked up, her legs spread, one knee braced against the sink. He behind her. The two bodies clutching each other, reflected in the mirror. Their panting breath. Empty air around them.

  Jacaranda’s breasts rise half out of the water’s surface, as she goes on with her story. “One day we left for Deauville, on the French coast. My mother knew a guy I called Uncle Jean-Luc, the proprietor of a small hotel on the beach, with lots of empty rooms, but never one for me, I had to go off to boarding school, that was the deal they had made.”

  “Nice of them.”

  She smiles. “I told you it’s not a cheerful story.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was in a horrible boarding school in Strasbourg, run by sadistic nuns.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two years. One day my aunt Dora shows up. My salvation. Divorced. Cheerful. After all the men, she was ready and willing to be a mother. She owned a pharmacy that she’d hired someone to manage, so she had enough to live on. Professionally, she was a theatrical impresario. She talked my mother into letting me go back to Italy with her, first to Genoa, and then to Turin, and after that, to Rome.”

  “More moves.”

  “I never even managed to learn my way around the neighborhood.”

  “Poor thing. You were alone, friendless, without a homelan
d.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “You can laugh, but that’s what it was like. And it still is.”

  “What are you saying? You’re the fabulous star of No, I Won’t Surrender! All of Italy is worried sick about you. And in the meantime you’re having a high old time in a bathtub with your new gentleman friend.”

  This time she bursts out laughing.

  “I finally made you laugh.”

  “It’s just that I usually feel as empty as the houses of my life, as this apartment.”

  “Emptiness isn’t so bad really, if a person knows how to use it.”

  “Well, I’ve had enough of it. I wish I had a close female friend. I wish I had a man. I wish I had a child. Not this emptiness.”

  “You don’t have children to fill a void. All you need for that is a PlayStation.”

  Jacaranda gazes at him for a long while, with the expression of someone discarding one phrase after another. Then she picks the last one. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  “You’re in Paris.”

  “But I could be anywhere.”

  “Anywhere wouldn’t be the same thing.”

  “For me it would.” Her distance is a rubber band that stretches out and narrows down.

  Andrea searches for a handhold to bring her back to where she was. “You’re here to complete a movie that keeps going after the final cut. I told you that. And I’m here to help you. We even went up the Eiffel Tower, remember?” He feels pathetic, he can’t think of anything better.

  She notices, and decides not to pile on. “Right. We’re all toy soldiers in the hands of Oscar Martello.”

  “Why do you hate Oscar? I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a bully, a megalomaniac, an ignorant oaf, conceited, and filthy rich, why do you hate him so much?”

  She’s lost in thought, gazing into the water surrounding them. Then she looks up at him again. “And why on earth are you his friend?”

  Yeah, come to think of it, why is he? Out of convenience? Out of self-interest? Because he admires him? Because he’d like to be like him, or for the opposite reason, because he wants to be completely unlike him and be as far from him as can be, while still remaining close to him?

  Among all the possible answers, he chooses the simplest one: “Because we work well together. He pays regularly. Sometimes, we even have fun. He’s one of the very few people who understands film and television.”

  “Television is shit. And film is this stuff here.”

  “Well, he wallows in it, the others live off it. Including me and you, it seems to me.”

  “It’s one thing to do it to make a living. It’s quite another thing to live so you can do it. And anyway, you never answered my question, how can you stand to be such a close friend of his?”

  “Well, you didn’t answer me either, why do you hate him so much?”

  Once again, the lost look, as if the question had caught her off guard. “Because he’s a bad man.”

  “Maybe. But above all, he’s a desperate man.”

  “Is that why you’re his friend?”

  “That’s one reason.”

  Deep down, it strikes him as an acceptable reply. Surprisingly, she agrees. “Yes, desperate is the right word. But not for the reasons you have in mind.”

  Oscar, the Top Hat, the Yacht

  Oscar Martello is a great deal more than just a magician with a top hat that he knows how to pull rabbits out of. He’s all three things at once, including the rabbit. And since it’s a routine he’s been pulling off for years, he thinks he no longer needs to worry about the audience that’s watching him and which, over time, has learned to recognize his tricks.

  He left the apartment on Rue Liancourt and picked up his Jaguar from the basement garage. From that moment on, his movements were tracked by a satellite homing device installed in the car by Raul Ventura’s men, with a warrant from the district attorney’s office in Rome and the approval of the French authorities.

  First stop: the parking facilities of the Hotel George V, where Oscar had taken a suite for the night. The next morning, he was tracked through 215 miles of French countryside, until he reached the town of Dudelange, just over the boundary of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

  Video cameras monitoring the border zoomed in on the tail of his car as it entered the country. And, four hours later, the front of the Jaguar as it left.

  In those four hours, a couple of men from Interpol have photographed him walking into the BNP Paribas branch office at 50 Avenue J.-F. Kennedy with three blue plastic travel bags, which he’d just unloaded from the car trunk. Then they followed him, photographing him all the while, to the tables of the Restaurant Clairefontaine, where he ate lunch with a high functionary of the bank who showed up ten minutes later, white-haired, tall, and thin, wearing an impeccable pin-striped suit. At the exit, the two men went their separate ways. Oscar Martello went into a mansion midway between Grand Rue and the Place d’Armes, a well-known first-class bordello. He emerged an hour and a half later in the company of a blond woman who drove him to the Brussels international airport, where Martello boarded a flight for Rome, just in time to take part in the movie’s premiere. The blond and the Jaguar continued toward Paris. The Jaguar went back to the garage it had left that morning, in Denfert-Rochereau. The blond vanished in foot traffic.

  As he was reading the last page of the report, Raul Ventura experienced the usual dizzying vertigo of someone looking down on the men and women scurrying far below, in the anthill of the real world, with their trajectories that seem so random, so messy, but which all have a purpose. His task now was to reconstruct the trajectories of Oscar Martello. Photograph him with his money: one step after another, until he reached the end of the path.

  His little stroke of luck—after months of sleuthing in the shadows for tax evasion, clandestine funds, money laundering, and aggravated fraud—is that now he can do it under the simplest of covers, pretending that he’s interested in another trajectory, namely the film industry that operates in broad daylight, or rather, in the light of the Internet.

  To follow the developments of No, I Won’t Surrender!, one need only tap on any of the websites that pulsate with news about Jacaranda Rizzi, all of them agog at the coincidence of the movie appearing on screens across the nation and the star disappearing from circulation. The articles yammer on about Mafia, threats, perhaps kidnappings. The uproar even spreads to the print media, which are slower on the uptake, more circumstantial, but also somewhat less naive, never forgetting to point out in their coverage the possibility of a publicity stunt by “that devil Oscar Martello, a producer of many hit movies.”

  Without this general groundswell of excitement, without this state of fibrillation over the major film premiere, Raul Ventura would never have been able to get close to Oscar Martello without arousing his suspicions and endangering the investigation, and his team. Now he’s even set foot in his home, he’s met him in person. He saw with his own eyes how far he’s come and how he feels: cunning and well protected. But also so high up, on tiptoe atop his narcissism, that just a single false step will send him plunging headfirst to the ground. Or at least so Ventura hopes: that’s why he’s there.

  The preview screening at the Cinema Adriano was an orgy of bare backs, photographers, and crumpled paper sailing across the red carpet on account of the street sweeper strike and the sirocco wind that had sprung up. The general wave of apprehension for the fate of the leading lady warmed up the embraces and air-kisses of the entire community, but without ever interrupting the sequence of selfies. At the end of the projection, applause. With Oscar in a black suit, walking through the audience to savor his triumph, the handshakes, the white teeth bared in smiles, and more hugs from Attilio Fabris, Helga, and Angelina Casagrande, even a hug from one of the seven kings of Rome, Marietto, hairdresser to the stars, who told Oscar, “Beautiful! I would have made Jacaranda a little more sluttish, a bit more of a woman, you get me, a little more of a hottie, not with the tight
curly hair of a schoolgirl, but with the impressive ringlets of a horny female cabinet minister, even if she is a Mother Courage type. Bravo, my compliments, fine movie. If perhaps a tad slow.”

  Oscar let Marietto walk away, then locked arms with Angelina. “Since when are fucking hairdressers allowed to be film critics?”

  Angelina grabbed his wrist. “Well, they just don’t have the social classes they used to, my dear one. In my day, hairdressers talked about who was cheating on who and the cooks stayed in the kitchen.”

  They laughed. “I adore you, my love, ha ha!”

  The next day, Oscar invited ten or so journalists to Fiumicino, to eat raw tuna aboard his €10 million eighty-foot Magnum Marine, showing them all the plaque on the stern that states: “The fastest high-performance luxury yacht in its class in the world.” “Fifty-two knots, there’s nothing faster! Like its owner, do I make myself clear?” He greeted them wearing a faded grapefruit-colored linen suit and a midnight blue T-shirt, with cell phones chirping, answered promptly by two skinny black-clad assistants from Anvil Film who lived in the constant terror of being fired, and the equally constant terror of being rehired the next day.

  Once the troupe of journalists had excited itself sufficiently thanks to the chilled white wine, the alcohol-charged mint mojitos, and the pitch and roll of that gleaming white, highly finished floating piece of patrimony, Oscar started reeling off groundless claims about the movie, the plot, its importance as a piece of civil protest, the extraordinary gifts of the director (“the great, great Attilio Fabris, who is unfortunately still at home sick, but you can certainly call him, anytime you like, and in the meantime he sends you all his fondest best wishes”), and naturally the magnificent Jacaranda Rizzi in the role of a woman strong enough to stand up to the Mafia, “a woman that we’d all want as a friend, a sister, a bride, and whom as you well know we’re trying to protect from obscure threats.”