by Pino Corrias
“If I were you, I wouldn’t talk about betrayals.”
Andrea ignores him, turns toward Ventura. “Go ahead and tell him, Commissario. He still doesn’t know anything about your surprise.”
Oscar also turns to look at Ventura. “What surprise?”
Ventura wants to enjoy the sight of Oscar’s face, now that he has his full attention. “We at the police department make films of our own, sometimes. Little films. Maybe not as lovely as yours, but I assure you: gripping.”
Oscar pours himself a drink and waits. He feels his heart empty out and fill back up.
Ventura has breathed for a full pause. “I’m talking about a film with three blue plastic travel bags that travel to Paris and then on to Luxembourg.”
Oscar Martello allows the revelation to settle into the silence, amid the sage-green furnishings of his study. Then he throws both hands in the air and bursts out in a boisterous laugh, ha ha! “And that’s your plot twist? Not bad. Nice work, Commissario. I like it, I told you that you had talent.” He looks at Andrea, sizes up Milly, defies Ventura. “My fucking no-talent screenwriters always go the long way round. Or they take the most expensive route. I’m always telling them: You don’t have to knock down the Twin Towers to make your audience jump in its seats. It’s enough to just lift a stone and find a scorpion. Do I make myself clear?”
Ventura plays along: “So did I find one?”
“Sure you found one, Commissario. I put the scorpion there. I’m the producer, aren’t I?”
Andrea recognizes Oscar’s style when he slips into the role of the oracle. He tells him, “Give it a rest.”
But Oscar pays him no mind, he walks up and down, driven by his enormous self-regard and also by the alcohol, by the coke that has renewed its chemical cycle in his bloodstream and respiration. Up, up, all the way up to the brain.
“Okay, then, the producer sends his two characters to Paris. Each of them has a motive for going, the producer actually has two: launching a piece-of-shit movie and taking some cash out of this fucked-up country, hard-earned cash that the state wants to take away from him, not to build roads or hospitals, but to pay for hookers. Okay. The writer’s motive is the most banal: he wants to take a little trip, all expenses paid, and fuck the actress. The actress’s motive is the most complicated one. She wants to use the movie’s success and the clamor stirred by her disappearance to tell the world about her sad and stirring story. She wants to cleanse the shame of the abused minor. Unleash a full-blown scandal. Wipe away her remorse and perhaps even her shame. Punish the wicked producer. And, naturally, increase her fee for her next movie. The three stories would have all worked with a bang. No, what am I saying: a nuclear explosion!” He turns around, finds the vodka, hunts around for his glass, fills it up, takes a drink. “But that’s when things start to go horribly wrong. Instead of taking the stage, the actress goes into a tailspin because, like all losers, she’s terrified by the responsibilities that await her. And so, instead, she makes up her mind to take off with her fat friend. But you know how it works, right? Even if you run away, life chases you and nails you down. And so she winds up the way we know, bobbing in a canal full of lurid water. The writer had his adventure, he may even have fallen in love, he believes that he deserves a third act of a romantic comedy, with plenty of kisses and yummy snacks, but instead he finds himself in the crushingly tedious black and white of a film by Lars von Trier.
“While the producer, on the other hand, wins on all fronts: he’s launched his movie, he’s gotten rid of the actress, he’s safeguarded his money. And if there are any cops who might think of subpoenaing him, well, keep cool and keep your powder dry, guys, because the producer is rich and powerful, there’s no flagrante delicto, and the cop is going to have to climb over a wall of lawyers.”
Andrea watches him stroll back and forth—He’s dictating a screenplay. “Christ, your head’s coming unscrewed.”
Oscar ignores him. He raises his glass as if he were toasting his own birthday. “Am I right, Commissario?”
In the silence that ensues, the first thunderclap explodes in fury. And in a split second, the whole scene changes.
After the Thunder, the Rain
Out of the vast Roman sky the wind springs up. Black clouds descend from the north, swollen with water and muscles. Gusts of wind shake the tops of the maritime pines that rise high above the villas, shiver the streetlights. The temperature plummets. Women in plunging necklines and stiletto heels are the first on the terrace to take fright. The jasmine flowers fly off. So do the mini pastries, blown off their trays. Then the trays themselves.
The first fat drops begin to fall. What follows is a sudden, massive microburst that floods the already overloaded tables and washes over the gelato. In an instant all the candles are blown out. Now the guests rush inside, screaming and shouting, knocking over waiters who are trying to save vases, bottles, and glasses that fly away into the night. A woman has just slipped and fallen, cutting her hands on the glass. No one stops to help her. She struggles to get to her feet. She’s drenched, bleeding, and sobbing.
The cypresses and the olive trees in the garden below wave and toss furiously, pushed by the wind that’s shaking them with grim and forceful rage. More thunderclaps explode. The iron fretwork lamps fly away, along with the cushions, the canvas hangings of the gazebos. The water pours down, forming streams, and then a river in spate rushes across the terrace, overrunning everything, even the French doors leading into the living rooms. One of the doors slams and shatters into shards.
The hurricane thrashes down, lashing the streets, ripping branches off the trees, causing manholes and storm drains to overflow, overturning automobiles. The traffic lights stop working. Sirens wail, and so do burglar alarms. Via Marmorata becomes a river. Piazza Sant’Anselmo, an overbrimming lake. The wind whips and pursues everything. Sheet metal, terra-cotta tiles, and antennae fly off the roofs. Cornices tumble into the streets below. The underpasses fill up like tin basins under some giant spigot, traffic on the overpasses grinds to a halt due to multivehicle, chain-reaction pileups. Garbage bobs everywhere, choking the outskirts of town, from Torrevecchia to Cinecittà. Cascades of water gush down from the roofs, from the walls, from the bridges, but this is no cleansing water; if anything, it tears and rends, it devastates.
Seen from above—from the four windows of the tower study where Oscar Martello still reigns on high—Rome is an expanse of gleaming scales pelted with rain, besieged by rumbling thunder and windspouts. The blue lights of the ambulances, the fire trucks, the police squad cars, flash here and there and don’t seem like announcements of impending rescue so much as warnings of shipwreck.
Oscar Martello follows and memorizes his party with an unperturbed expression, as it collapses into catastrophe—and along with his party, perhaps, his life—in this apocalyptic sequence of torn flowers, bent shrubs, overturned chairs, guests and napkins flying away.
At his side, Andrea Serrano experiences a growing sense of anxiety in the face of that burst of meteorological fury, as he thinks that perhaps it is Jacaranda shaking off this ridiculous party. She who, from the world of death, flips over the real world after doing nothing but take it all while she was still alive.
Then it ends.
Just as quick as it came, the cloudburst moves on and peace returns. In a few minutes the dark sky shreds the clouds into fragments, the rain ceases, and the wind becomes a gentler, softer swell, and glowing stars once again shine overhead.
Now, in the new silence that spreads, it is easy to make out all the noises arriving from different distances: the car horns, the blaring alarms. And over them all, the sound of water that continues restlessly, flowing, dripping.
From the living rooms, human voices can now be heard, many of them complaining, some even calling piteously for help. Life recovers from the shock that has just blasted it.
Andrea goes back and sits down in an armchair. Milly hasn’t moved. With every flash of lightning she shut her
eyes, immobilized by the thunderstorm; they have terrified her ever since her years in the orphanage. Now she has started drinking everything she can find again and chomping on chocolates to slake her nerves.
Raul Ventura’s cell phone rings: because of the natural catastrophe, there’s an all-hands emergency meeting at police headquarters. There is a vague interlude. Then the final reckoning will come.
The Scandal Comes Flying
It comes into the nation’s homes with the morning news reports. It brings with it, as its dowry, the corpse of Jacaranda, accelerating the stratospheric success of her movie No, I Won’t Surrender!, already leading the rankings with its €9 million of ticket sales. For good measure, it also brings revelations concerning the tax evasions of the great producer Oscar Martello, with his undeclared funds hidden in cash in Paris, London, and Luxembourg, along with the money of Donna Angelina Casagrande and her various nonprofits.
Banner headlines scream “Money Without Shame.” “Filthy Rich Scoundrels!” blares the TV news. Money that instead of flowing to the needy in Africa, circles the globe to wind up in certain horrible tenements in Pomezia, Torvaianica, Marina di Ardea, and from there to Palma de Mallorca, Formentera, and points north, coming to rest in the now-sanitized safes of Swiss and Luxembourgian banks.
Angelina Casagrande clings firmly to her pedestal. She weeps through lawyers and says she knew nothing, couldn’t have imagined. And in the first few hours of the scandal she is protected in the soft, yielding arms of the Vatican, in a secret house on Via della Conciliazione, no media pillory for her.
With Oscar, it’s quite another tune. Paparazzi with video cameras lay siege to his villa. The TV news reports carry in heavy rotation the sequences of his black Jaguar emerging from the villa, escorted by squad cars, and traveling toward the depositions with the magistrates, the aforementioned Martello, Oscar, present here today, born in Serravalle Scrivia, producer by profession, who when questioned responds, et cetera. There is talk of tax evasion, fraud, export of capital funds, swindling, trafficking in artworks. There is talk of thirty million euros. Then fifty. Then a hundred. There is talk of the fact that Oscar denies all charges, heaves deep sighs, spits, loses his temper, because he is responsible for so much money invested and pays so much in taxes that they ought to thank him instead of tormenting him like that. Why don’t they give a thought to all the jobs he creates and what would become of all the actors and actresses and directors and screenwriters that he tucks in every night, slipping under their sweaty pillows a ration of large and a smattering of human dignity? “The dignity that comes with a job and a salary, do I make myself clear?”
But the magistrates scoff cynically at that banal rhetoric of the good-hearted millionaire; they want other explanations; for example, what was the nature of his relations with the poor, deceased Jacaranda Rizzi, “named Maria by her parents,” whether he too had abused her when she was still a minor, whether he’d sold her, whether he’d blackmailed her, and with what psychological violence, and for how many years. Because it is from that first act that all the other acts descended, her complete anomie; that is, if Oscar Martello even knew the meaning of the word “anomie.” And subordinate to those questions, they’d like to know the source of the money found in the three blue plastic travel bags, and for that matter of a fiberglass Bonalumi worth £380,000, a Castellani worth £500,000, and a tree by Penone worth £265,000, all purchased last year at the London Italian Sale, and documented in photographs taken by Commissario Ventura. Paid for with what money, earned when and how? From some offshore source? Or a numbered bank account? Or some other piece of clandestine banking?
He looks at them, smiles, and says, “I don’t remember.”
“Really?”
“Really. I buy so damned much stuff. Can I smoke?” Deep down, he still assumes his back is covered by the incredible success of No, I Won’t Surrender!, which is now teetering vertiginously close to the all-time box office record, €21 million last week and then almost €30 million the week after that, everyone rushing to see Jacaranda’s gold. And adding the price of the ticket to Oscar Martello’s swag, though of course it no longer belongs to Oscar Martello, since all of it is under seal of confiscation by the investigators of the Italian tax office, damn them, who nailed down the perimeter all around Anvil Film, driving one stake in at a time, and now they’re erecting one bar at a time to cage it all in, gnaw every last scrap of the booty, and hand over whatever crumbs remain to Helga’s gleaming white teeth.
Donna Angelina Casagrande, the queen of flowers and of negroes in Central Africa, of Roman nights and of little orphans suffering from malaria, reappears, heartbroken and already quite distant from the abominations of Oscar and his filthy mud. When she sits down to talk with the investigators—lips and tits sagging, no high heels, a cunning little Hermès in virginal white—she already sings like a bird at the first interview. And she blames everything on her unfaithful functionaries and, of course, on Oscar; he’s the demon in this story, who, by promising that he’d double her revenue for laudable charities, subjugated her for deplorably evil purposes with his black soul and his morbid sex appeal, even going so far as to undermine her virtue, elderly and now defenseless woman though she is: “As God is my witness.” And along with God, a great many others are her witnesses, witnesses to her guiltlessness and, more important, to her pure, good heart, among them the usual bankers, lobster eaters all, plus a couple of ambassadors with noble blood and rotten hearts, as well as Undersecretary Neri and certain old matrons of the Roman aristocracy, they too willing and ready to vouch for her virtues of blameless altruism, exercised in more than a half century of honored service on Roman terraces, sofas and couches of social occasions, and sacristies of the highest Vatican hierarchies. And “Vatican” is the extra whisper of penicillin that already sterilizes the entire deposition room at the first breath, transforming a sordid confession into an immaculate repentance, “that is, if I have anything to repent, save perhaps for my excessively trusting heart.”
In response to a question, Andrea Serrano replies that he knows nothing about Oscar’s money or about any blue plastic travel bags, or any of the other illicit traffics he’s accused of. He really did think he was saving a film out of friendship and undertaking that trip because, quite simply, he didn’t have much else to do and Paris was more amusing than the boredom of Rome. Is that it?
“That’s it.” And that it’s the truth that Jacaranda Rizzi touched his heart in a way not even he expected, even though as far as the magistrate who watches him from behind a pair of tinted eyeglasses, sucking on a menthol cough drop, is concerned, Andrea’s heart is of absolutely no interest; what he wants to know is how Oscar paid him and his other employees. “But I’m not Oscar Martello’s accountant, I’m not a money smuggler, I’m not a financial professional of any kind!” Andrea states brusquely. “I write screenplays for television,” he adds, as if that circumstance added some significant weight to his claims of innocence.
“Ah, that claptrap!” was the brief reply of the magistrate who ultimately decided to find him believable and inoffensive, in part thanks to that detail, and therefore no longer subject to incarceration. “Just make sure we can get in touch with you. Get hold of the invoices. And don’t even think of trying to travel.”
No sarcasm for Oscar Martello, but instead a substantial list of articles and clauses from the penal code, seeing that the evidence against him included photographs and stakeouts by officers of the law, wiretaps, accounting gaps, eyewitness testimony, as well as a shameless flaunting of wealth and success as vast as the envy aroused. All were matters that conspired to throw open for him the gates of Regina Coeli prison, and a cell at the far end of the second wing, white walls to suffocate him, to make him spit due to rattled nerves and general disgust, as in the bad old days of Serravalle Scrivia, given that by now he’s accustomed only to raw fish, warm bread, and gleaming white linen napkins. And instead here he is, imprisoned behind filthy walls, walls that are
indifferent to his ravings, walls that are accustomed to drinking in time in silence and spewing it back out as an exceedingly slow, fine gearing that wrings the convict’s neck, depriving him of oxygen a millimeter at a time.
A detention that was clamorous in many ways, considering the legal talent deployed, and the barefaced resistance of the prisoner, who continued to send out messages of indignant innocence to the free world, arousing in the rest of La Dolce Roma the sneer of an obscene curiosity that galloped from mouth to mouth, from one conjecture to the next: “What does that old pig eat behind bars, lobster linguine?” “Does he do his hour out in the prison yard?” “Do you think he bought a high-impact asshole protector?” All of them calculating how soon and how brutally Anvil Film would collapse into a thousand pieces, and how much energy that would free in the airless atmosphere of Italian cinema, and whether that energy would take the form of life-giving oxygen or poisonous radiation, and how many producers would battle for the spoils, lumbering off to digest them in blessed peace.
Milly Gallo Bautista organized in that same period receptions at her villa in Sabaudia to celebrate the awesome event of his detention, and wept by night in memory of her grief and mourning, while the two gravediggers War & Peace had promptly collected the second installment of their contract in record time, before scampering over to the other side of the barricades. And on the other side of the barricades, they found none other than Attilio Fabris, who had just taken his seat, finally cured of his bruises, but not of the bruised feelings over the humiliations undergone. And in fact he had hired them to write something injurious against Martello—a shameless, sarcastic version of Jacaranda’s farewell note, clicked on 11.5 million times, and transcribed and published by all the papers—and what with great brainstorming and much erasure and rewriting, what finally emerged was a long rambling rant in the first-person singular, delivered by an actor who, from the shadows, fondling a blow-up doll, might perfectly well have been the despised producer himself, the same bandit face, cut by the line between blackness and light, chewing on the stub of a smoking Cohiba, spitting and hacking and, meanwhile, reciting his own eulogy, it too a hundred seconds long, entitled “An Oscar-Worthy Monologue.” It began, amid much coughing, with these words: “I steal and I make films. I sideline half of the production budget, I invoice in London, I conceal in Luxembourg, I spend in Rome. I stir the pond muck of life and I stir the economy, I don’t know if I make myself clear.”