by Pino Corrias
Andrea is next to her. He smells her perfume. He’s thinking of stepping away and instead he stays right there. He’s thinking about Oscar’s account of the savage blow jobs that Helga would give him, squatting down on the floor in front of him. And without even realizing he’s doing it, he brushes the back of her head with his fingers, feeling the shiver of a wave that dissolves all the tensions, warming his fingers and respiration. She flexes, as if struck by that current, lowers her head, and starts telling him in a low voice, “My first man was a bodyguard. He liked having his flesh burned while he was fucking me. He liked having his neck throttled with a belt until he almost suffocated. He liked taking me brutally, from behind.”
“And did he hurt you?”
“Yes, a lot.”
He presses his fingers a little harder and slides them down from the back of her head to her neck. He tells her, “Don’t move.” And then he continues descending, fingers running down the central line of her back, making her shiver in a way that arches her body like a rubber band being stretched, pushing out her hips, sheathed in the softest silk of her dress, which yields to the pressure of his fingers, revealing the point at which the thong begins and where it ends, where Andrea presses harder as she emits a little moan and spreads her legs to better accept that pressure, let it slip in deeper. She gets wet. She touches him. She sighs, exhales, murmurs, “Lift my skirt and fuck me.”
“What do you want?” she asks him over the phone now, and her voice is very different from what it was then.
A police car goes screaming past at top speed, heading across the piazza toward the Termini station. He has neither the time nor the inclination to take on Helga’s bad moods.
“I want to talk to Oscar. I want to know what happened to Jacaranda. She disappeared, he disappeared, I have newspapers calling me continuously, can someone tell me what the fuck is happening? Oscar can’t just disappear like this.”
“Sure he can. He’s always done it.”
“Is he there?”
“No.”
“Well, this time a woman is missing, for fuck’s sake. And she might be dead.”
“The police have already come to the house twice. Oscar screwed you, what did you expect? He told them everything.”
“Everything what?”
“The truth. That Jacaranda was in Paris with you. That the last person who saw her was you. That he has no idea of what happened between the two of you.”
Andrea feels the rage build up inside him in surging waves. “But I have a pretty good idea of what happened between Jacaranda and Oscar many years ago, tell him that.”
“And what should I tell him that he doesn’t already know?”
“That that’s a motive the size of a house.”
“A motive for what?”
“For hurting Jacaranda.”
“More than what your stupid Jacaranda already did to herself? And anyway you’re talking as if I give a damn about Oscar.”
“Don’t you?”
Helga answers him, icy and off-putting, “Get your friend to update you, when you see him. I’ve left him.”
His anger turns into frustration. “Why would you do that? Are you already done chewing the flesh off him?”
Helga absorbs Andrea’s venom in silence. Then she calmly says, “Fuck yourself. As for you and your friend, I don’t know what you did to that girl. But I hope they come and haul you both off by the balls.”
Andrea knows the calm that makes her imperturbable. “But do you seriously think that you’re out of this mess? If this thing goes sideways, it’ll run you over the same way it does all the rest of us. Do you understand that?”
Silence. He hears Helga breathing. He imagines her furious face, creased with tension, electric. Then he hears her issue her verdict: “If you want to screw Oscar over, go right ahead, I couldn’t give a fuck. But if you come after me and my girls, I’ll kill you. Don’t you ever call me again.”
The Quarrel, the Blood
When he’s in a bad mood, Oscar Martello detests all living beings of the vast Western world. He is willing to grudgingly concede the occasional exception to, say, those who do backbreaking menial labor, farmhands in large landholdings, steelworkers who man blast furnaces, orange harvesters in Rosarno who earn five euros a day, prostitutes working the beltway emergency lanes who get their asses slammed for ten euros, nurses assigned to wards full of the terminally ill, caregivers for senile old Alzheimer’s patients.
Towering high above the other 90 percent, ranking even a little higher than film critics, is Helga, when they fight. The other night she found him drunk and flying high on coke, when they were supposed to be getting ready to leave for a gala banquet held by the Friends of the Museum, €10,000 a table. She’d paid for a table that seated eight, and among their guests would be the Argentine ambassador with his wife and teenage son, a personal apotheosis for Helga, who’d come up from the dust of the Buenos Aires barrio.
Oscar screamed at her, “I have other things on my mind, you bitch. There’s an actress who hates me and has gone missing, and I have no idea what the fuck she’s up to. There’s a piece-of-shit movie that I’m trying to save. There’s a goddamned cop who’s buzzing around me, I don’t know if you’ve noticed? He dropped by to get a whiff of the prey. And the prey would be me.”
Helga raised both hands to stop him. “I don’t want to know anything about your dealings.”
Oscar was sweating. The cocaine was accelerating his gestures, the alcohol was slowing them down, and the contrast between the two left him swaying. He had to brace himself against whatever sofa came to hand because his head was spinning at warp speed. “Ah, you don’t want to know anything about them? Too bad that you live off my dealings, you good-for-nothing hobo cocksucker.”
She too was swerving. But she did it by standing perfectly still, trying to choke back the waves of hatred she was feeling for Oscar, for his wrecked face, his bullying, the smell of him. “You’re nothing but a pathetic fucking drug addict and drunk, a miserable, hopeless son of a bitch.”
“Look who’s talking. The crazy woman is talking!”
“I was certainly crazy to get hooked up with someone like you.”
“Then go see a psychiatrist, but pay him by turning tricks. You want to donate to the museum? Pay for it with blow jobs. Sooner than go there with you, I’d cut my dick off.”
She remained impassive. “For all the good it does you, cojón.”
He smacked her with the back of his hand, but with the hand armed with a ring, the old twenty-buck skull on his pinky, and it opened a slashing cut across her cheekbone. Three large drops of blood spattered her white linen blouse. She screamed, staggered backward. And as she staggered backward, she hurled at him his precious humidor of Cuban cigars, and the box glanced off his shoulder and then smashed against the Plexiglas front of the Manzoni. The Manzoni shook but remained in place. Oscar started shouting. Two of the three Filipino houseboys appeared in the living room doorway, then softly vanished, leaving the masters to settle their own disagreements.
Oscar was ranting. Helga was bleeding. And in the meantime she was threatening him with the metal poker that she’d found next to the red marble fireplace, holding him at bay: “You bastard. You swine. If you touch me again, I’ll run you through the heart with this.”
He stood there, nonplussed. She left the living room and went to take shelter in the most sacred precinct of the house, the room where the little girls slept, a place he’d never violate.
She locked herself in.
This morning she was ready to leave him, “but once and for all, you filthy hijo de puta.” She succeeded around eight o’clock, holding Oscar at bay—in underwear and bathrobe, still stunned by his sleepless night and drunken binge—and holding the two little girls by their hands, the two little angels Cleo and Zoe, who, as she glared daggers at him were dutifully waving ciao ciao papi, their faces lit up with their smiles so gleeful, so utterly defiant, that they forced him in place,
forbidding him to seize their mother by the throat and kick her savagely in the gut.
“Don’t use the girls as a shield, you damned Argentine slut,” he snarled at her, while two giant pistons hammered away at his temples.
Helga burst out laughing right in his face. “I’m taking the girls to the amusement park, isn’t that right, girls?”
“Ye-e-esss!” Cleo and Zoe replied in chorus, following their mother out the door and into the metallic-finish Porsche Cayenne parked in the courtyard, which then screeched out in an expensive cloud of rubber smoke.
Andrea’s phone call arrives in those very same minutes, catching her already stuck in traffic around the Pyramid of Cestius, still seething with adrenaline. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about him; he doesn’t have the guts, or the money, to afford a woman like her.
But Andrea’s right about one thing: she hasn’t yet finished chewing the flesh off Oscar. In fact, she hasn’t even gotten started. And so, while the little girls were singing in their car seats, she called the most respected and notoriously vicious divorce lawyer on the market, a woman who was callously abandoned by her own husband years and years ago, and who has only women on her unrivaled staff, all of them armed with legal codes and vaginas dentata. Helga arranged her first appointment, the one where they would lay out the topographic maps and charts to lay siege to the vast possessions of her soon-to-be ex-husband, Oscar Martello, the great juggler capable of making houses, apartments, land, companies, cash, even actresses, vanish into thin air, but not the traces of the young sluts that he still brings home and screws under the shelter of the conjugal roof. The divorce lawyer welcomed her phone call like that of an old long-lost friend, and in seven minutes of conversation, she comes straight to the point: “As far as your husband’s assets, we need only wait. Much publicity and great envy tend to awaken the curious. And awakening the curious is never a good thing, especially when the curious tend to have handcuffs well within reach.”
Helga focuses as the light turns green and the whole line of cars starts honking its horns: “In fact, some guy did come to interview Oscar. But he was looking into the case of that missing actress.”
“I doubt that very much. That was probably just his cover story.”
“What do you mean?”
“As far as I know, Commissario Ventura investigates money, not actresses.”
She smiles. “You don’t say.”
Having tucked that information away, Helga manages to get the phone number of that same Raul Ventura who just the other morning was eyeing her with trousers full of appreciative zeal. She gives her name to a well-mannered police headquarters staffer. Three minutes later, her call is returned: “Please hold, ma’am.” When she’s put through, she doesn’t even give him a chance to speak: “Commissario, maybe you and I can help each other out, what do you say?”
The News Comes In, Late in the Morning
The body found floating in the canal in Amsterdam is that of Jacaranda Rizzi, actress, star of the movie No, I Won’t Surrender! The autopsy report says that her death was due to an overdose of barbiturates and drowning.
Oscar Martello has just stepped out of the sauna in his personal bathroom when all his cell phones and landlines simultaneously begin to ring. One by one, he takes delivery of the details. He lays them out in a row, he memorizes them. Aside from a slight sense of tension, he feels nothing in particular. His only care is to steer the consequences, ensuring that they are favorable. He agrees to a couple of interviews then and there: “I cared for her dearly. She was one of my finest discoveries.” “Yes, of course, she was a fragile woman. And the world out there is mighty damned hard-edged, have you noticed?”
He issues instructions to War & Peace: “Kick up all the dust and tears that you can. I want the details of the whole story.” They’ve already got some juicy tidbits: Jacaranda was in Amsterdam with her agent, moving in a circle of vegan lesbians. They were doing meditation and bullshit like that. There was generalized muff-diving. Milly was trying to get her committed to rehab. They fought. Milly took a flight home while Jacaranda was left behind. Jacaranda was left behind is practically a piece of gallows humor. “Good work, you even write your own jokes. Anything else?”
“Nothing else for now,” Mirko Pace tells him over speakerphone. He asks, “And what about poor old brokenhearted Serrano, what do we do with him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Should we keep him out of it?”
Oscar thinks it over. Maybe bringing him into the case as the triggering cause of the suicide could turn into a good story, a new script, a new film. Technically speaking: a spin-off. Or not, too sad, too boooring.
“Let’s leave him out of it for the moment.”
“That’s fine with us.”
Oscar is mapping out the scene. “Suicide note?”
“The drowned woman? No, no suicide note.”
“Too bad.” He knows that people usually prefer suicides with an explanation, because at least then they know what to think.
Mirko is telling him, “Maybe we can post one to the web.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. There’s a guy with an archive of two thousand of them, and he’s put them all online.”
“What guy? Huh?” Oscar doesn’t understand what the fuck he’s talking about.
“A Dutch doctor who’s been studying suicide notes for the past twenty years, I’m not kidding.”
“Christ on a crutch, a Dutch doctor. How do you know that?”
“We’ve already used his archive once before.”
Oscar laughs. “Fuck, are you saying you need an archive to write a suicide note . . . Just take a look in the mirror: You must have some good reason to kill yourself, don’t you? Just use that.”
Mirko Pace laughs, even though he’s not sure he’s understood.
Oscar ends the phone call. The large eye painted by Cristiano Pintaldi, which is of course Naomi Campbell’s left eye, stares at him from the middle of the wall running along next to his bed, on Helga’s side. But now there’s no more “Helga’s side of the bed.” That’s a revelation that catches him off guard, freezes him in place for one long instant, and finally stirs him back into action. He picks up the phone, and after a blackout lasting many days, he calls Andrea Serrano.
Who answers by barking into the phone, “It’s about time, you son of a bitch. It’s about time!”
But he is Oscar Martello, and he knows when to turn more tractable than a babysitter: “You can’t begin to imagine how sorry I am, Andrea, this is just a terrible thing. Until this morning, I didn’t want to believe it, I swear to you. But weren’t you two doing well together? When I was there you looked even—dare I say it?—happy. I didn’t understand why she dumped you either.” The silence that follows means that he hasn’t gone too far, and that Andrea’s sharp edges have vanished in a puff of mist.
Even still, Andrea tries to insist on his point: “You and I need to talk.”
“Sure, why not. We’ll talk. But in the meantime, let’s think about Jacaranda, let’s not just file her away as if we never cared about her. After all, the two of you were together for the last few days of her life, weren’t you?”
Oscar doesn’t even really have to try. Reshuffling the cards on the table is a specialty of his. While Andrea, who’s still navigating through the fog, can’t even formulate a reply: “All I want is to—”
“I know what you want, Andrea. We all want the same thing: to honor Jacaranda’s memory the way she deserves. And I’ll see to it.”
“I want to know what happened.”
“We’ll reconstruct events. Everything, trust me. The only reason I didn’t call you is that bitch Helga left me. They all leave me eventually, damn it. She left because she claims I beat her, but it isn’t true, I swear to you, I spoke brusquely, I was under pressure, everyone’s piling on, and when she’s not the center of attention, she makes up stories, she invents sheer bullshit so that she can be in the spo
tlight, she and she alone, she drives me crazy, you know what she’s like, don’t you?” As he rattles on, he senses that talking about it is doing him good, it’s reducing the pressure oppressing his heart, his respiration. “She left and took the little girls with her, my two tiny angels,” he’s saying, and as he says it, he can also sense that between his heart and his respiration, between his respiration and his two tiny angels, between his two tiny angels and that tremendous slut Helga, suddenly as if generated automatically by his anxiety, Angelina Casagrande has poked her head up, along with their accounting of travel and good deeds, their far-distant banks, their secrets, too close. He needs to hang up on Andrea, whom he’s just quieted down, and take care of her. “Hey, maybe I’ll swing by and see you soon. We can take all the time we need to talk. But do me a favor and stay holed up at home until you and I get a chance to talk. And steer clear of journalists, understood?”
And then he called Angelina. He heard her steaming, and already steaming on the phone, with all the eavesdroppers listening in, isn’t a good idea, so he told her, “I’m taking care of everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?” the stupid woman asked him, but in the tone of a hyena.
“We need to talk about it face to face.”
“Is that your work, the actress who killed herself?”
“Hey, I said we need to talk about it face to face.”
“Too bad she didn’t do it in Paris. The French police are relentless.”
He heard her breathe. “Take it easy,” he told her.
Then she said, “I’m going to see my masseuse at De Russie. I need to relax for an hour.”
“Good for you.”
“Then you call me. Call me and we’ll get together.”
“All right. Now get going.”
As always, someone else’s weakness strengthens him, feeds his resources until at last Angelina’s anxiety has swept away his own.
Oscar is pumped up again; he calls Giovanni Cotta—known as “Rat Face” because of his pointy little nose and mouth—the most important Italian film distributor. “Starting tonight and until this weekend you have to find me seven hundred movie houses to run the film. And I don’t want to hear excuses, or reasons why, do I make myself clear? Seven hundred. Evict whatever you want. Toss some of that American crap in the toilet. And thanks for the condolences.”