by Jill Downie
“Christ almighty, not another rewrite.”
“No, no. In a way, this will interfere less with your original work.”
“This? In what way can any change interfere less? At least, I presume that’s what this is about — another change.”
“No, Gil — you know, and I know, that we’re both fortunate to have Mario Bianchi on board for this project. The man’s a genius, with an instinctive sense of what works on the screen.” Monty Lord gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “When he says ‘jump’ — creatively, that is — I say ‘how high?’”
“Do you? I don’t. And it makes no difference who’s on board, as you put it, if the ship’s the frigging Titanic! We should all be jumping, or looking for bloody lifeboats.”
The tone of saintly patience left Monty Lord’s voice and it became undisguisedly unpleasant. “You can sink a project by talking like this — is that what you really want, Gilbert?”
“I’m beginning to think I do, Monty — I mean, hell, what’s left of my work?”
“Everything. Never doubt it. This is Rastrellamento by the incomparable Gilbert Ensor. But it became clear to Mario when he started shooting the scenes between Clifford and Vittoria that the movie needs another deus ex machina, as it were.”
“As what were? Why doesn’t Mario have the balls to tell me this himself?”
“Look, Gilbert —” Monty Lord took Gil by the elbow and guided him to a nearby sofa. “— I’m going to have to share this with you, I should have done before. In confidence, this is a very fragile man.”
“I’m a very fragile man, for God’s sake!”
“You’re not fighting a serious drug habit and you’re not under the permanent care of a psychiatrist, are you?”
“Is Mario — Jesus Christ!”
Monty Lord sighed. “We’ve both paid the price for my choice, I grant you. But I must tell you I agree with the changes to the script. They have made this a stronger movie without compromising the integrity of your original vision.”
“Bullshit, Monty. And, may I add — bollocks.”
“I don’t think so, Gilbert. I think what we have here is a rare cross between an art-house movie and a blockbuster. I’ve been in this business in Italy and the States for years, and never have I been so excited about the creative and the financial aspects of a project. Need I remind you that you will make ten percent of the gross — besides that humongous fee we paid for the rights to Rastrellamento?”
Greed, thought Monty Lord. Appeal to “what’s in it for me?” and even this so-called creative genius becomes a mere mercenary. Just like me.
“Deus ex machina, you said. Will Tom Byers be rescued by his guardian angel, flown in on wires?”
Monty Lord laughed. “Perhaps in the sequel? No, seriously, Mario has dreamed up another character who will interract with the two principal groups: a schoolteacher, not originally from the village. An outsider who observes the unfolding drama and finds himself drawn into the web of events.”
“Jesus wept! Shambolic — it’s a fucking farce, that’s what it is. An utter shambles!”
In an instant, the mercenary was replaced by the writer, and Monty Lord realized he was in for the all too familiar scene of Gilbert Ensor in a rage. Only this time, Sydney Tremaine was not here to control her husband. All he could do now, as producer, was resort to the use of legal ultimatum. Raising his voice above the noisome stream of continuous obscenities that poured from Gilbert Ensor’s lips he shouted, “Need I remind you, Ensor, that under the terms of the contract I don’t have to get your permission for this kind of change? None of your original characters have been removed, as per our agreement. The teacher is in — get me?”
“You Yankee swine! We’ll see what my lawyer has to say about that! We’ll see what difference it makes to ‘as per our agreement’ when it turns out the director is a junkie and should be in the nuthouse! We’ll see!”
“If you want to waste your time and money, feel free, Gilbert, but directors with a drug problem are a dime a dozen — really good directors with a drug problem are as rare as rubies.”
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
The biblical echoes of Monty Lord’s choice of simile reminded Gil of his missing wife. Sydney’s show of independence was new in their relationship — oh, she fought with him, but in the end it was all sound and fury and signified nothing. Her unexplained absence had shaken him, and now Mario Bianchi was at it again.
“Tell Mario I’ll fight this one — no, I’ll tell him myself,” he said, and burst into noisy sobs.
Not a pretty sight, thought Monty Lord, as he surveyed the blubbering figure beside him on the sofa. He stood up. “I’ll see myself out,” he said.
As the door closed behind him, Monty Lord heard a scream from inside.
“Sydney!”
Like Marlon Brando screaming “Stella!” thought Monty. As theatrical. As desperate.
As he left the hotel, a taxi drew up. Inside he saw the red hair and Dresden profile of Sydney Tremaine, returning home from her night on the town.
“Well, what do you think, Guv?”
“Think?”
Moretti looked up as if he had been miles away, thought Liz Falla. In fact, he had been years away.
He couldn’t go back, either.
Dan Mahy’s words kept running over and over in his head. Drip, drip, drip. That and “Maladetta Maremma.” All he knew about the Maremma was that it was an area in Italy where the marshes had been drained, but more than that he didn’t know.
“Does any of this have anything to do with the death of Toni Albarosa? A place like this sometimes has trouble with prowlers, doesn’t it?”
“True. But two things are interesting about these reports. First, there’s the business with Dan Mahy. I’m not sure I’d have seen that as significant if I’d not just spoken to him. Let’s go over what we have.”
What they had on the table in front of them at the Hospital Lane headquarters were three incidents at the Manoir Ste. Madeleine; two incidents had taken place within a month of each other in April, the third just after the arrival of the film crew. In the first, one of the live-in staff was making sure the fire was out in the marchesa’s sitting room at about eleven o’clock at night, when she saw someone peering through the window at her. She ran screaming from the room and, apart from her lurid description of the prowler’s eyes as “glowing like living coals” — which might well have been inspired by her task and not based on observation at all — she could not even be sure if the prowler was a man or a woman. She assumed it was a man.
In the third incident, the guard dogs in the grounds “set up a racket” at around midnight, according to one of the handlers. When he checked he found skid marks on the ground near the lodge, and thought he heard the sound of a motor in the distance, out on the road. There were signs that one of the locks had been tampered with. The security staff thought the tire tracks were made by a motorbike.
“A Ducati, perhaps?” suggested Liz Falla.
“They don’t say. But why, in this case, did the dogs bark? If it was Giulia Vannoni? They must have been familiar with the sound of her bike, I would think, let alone her presence. She’s a regular.”
“Maybe they always bark at night.”
“Except they didn’t, did they, when Albarosa bought it? Anyway, why would the marchesa’s niece need to creep around at night? She had a perfect right to be there. No need to draw attention to herself — even if she was on her way to kill someone. But it’s the second incident that’s really interesting.”
It appeared from the second report that the local station in St. Andrew had received a phone call from Toni Albarosa himself at about midnight. Sounding somewhat agitated, he’d said that one of the staff thought the prowler was back, and could someone come. The police officer who arrived on the scene made a search of the grounds where the intruder had been spotted, and found Dan Mahy, crouched down against the wall of one of the old
stables that now served as a garage. Toni Albarosa identified him, and vetoed the suggestion he should be taken in for questioning. In fact, he now seemed eager to dismiss the whole episode.
“The officers assumed it was because the prowler turned out to be Dan Mahy, who tends to hang around the place. But now I wonder,” said Moretti. “From the report it looks as if the old fellow told the officer he had met someone on the grounds — a friend, who wanted to hear about the old days.”
“The old days,” said Liz. “Keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Looks like your feeling about the old days is beginning to hold water, Guv.”
“Doesn’t it, though? And here’s the second thing that’s interesting — why did no one in the family mention any of this? I’m not thrilled this wasn’t brought to our attention by the St. Andrew’s people, but surely it must have occurred to at least one of the family that it might have some bearing on the death of Albarosa?”
“Right. It’s not so much they’re lying as they’re keeping their mouths shut. About something.”
“A conspiracy of silence. I think so. I’m going to take another look at the statements by the marchesa, her niece and her son in particular, because these incidents change the time frame of the investigation. And I have to talk to Gilbert Ensor about his novel — whether Rastrellamento had not only its time period rooted in historical fact, but its storyline.”
At this point they were interrupted by the arrival of a young constable almost hidden behind a mass of paper spat out by the computer about Mario Bianchi. Refusing his offer of help — “Don’t know what we’re looking for ourselves, PC Le Mesurier” — Moretti split the pile in two and handed one half to Liz Falla.
“Anything in Italian, throw it over to me. Unless you feel you can manage?”
Liz Falla smiled. “What are we not looking for then, Guv?”
“Anything that might give Mario Bianchi motivation to kill — not just Albarosa, but anyone in the two families. And anything that might link him in any way to events that took place during the war.”
So much of what we do is dull as ditchwater, thought Moretti. As boring as being the accountant, or lawyer, his parents had wanted him to be when he had graduated from university in London. Between his hands lay the life of a star in the creative firmament, and it would have made interesting reading in other circumstances. So far are we from the truth, he thought, that the key word for the search is “anything.”
“What about this, then?”
Liz Falla’s finger stopped suddenly in mid-page. “Fasciti. That’s ‘fascist,’ isn’t it? Read this, Guv.” She passed the sheet over to Moretti.
It was a report from about five years earlier in the Italian newspaper, Nazione, about the career of Mario Bianchi, which went into his background in more depth than the usual piece of journalistic puffery. The writer described what he called “the cultural roots of the Bianchi phenomenon,” attributing the film director’s writing ability and social conscience in large part to his father.
“This is what I was trying to remember, Falla,” said Moretti. “His father was Antonio Bianchi, a famous war correspondent for — here it is — Corriere della Sera. He’s probably best known for a book he wrote in secret, Il Giorni Avanti, which was published in 1944, saying that Hitler was evil and that Mussolini had corrupted the high ideals of fascism. He was shot to death about ten years after the war ended — says here no one was ever sure if it was murder or suicide. And look at this.”
Moretti held out a photograph of Mario Bianchi, apparently taken from some tabloid, with a short article beneath it in gigantic letters, studded with exclamations:
The Pressures of Genius! Young Mega-Director Mario Bianchi Picked Up in Drug Raid! Police Sources Reveal the Award-Winning Director in Possession of Heroin and Cocaine!
The same information, in more restrained print and tone, appeared in the Nazione, and a later excerpt told readers that Bianchi, a first offender, had been given probation, as long as he underwent treatment for his addiction.
“Well, well,” said Liz. “It would certainly make him a likely candidate for blackmail. I wonder if that director, Mr. Lord, knew about it.”
“We’ll ask him. My feeling is that this kind of thing is so common he probably isn’t that concerned as long as Bianchi can do his job. And I suppose we didn’t pick it up here, because he doesn’t have a record.”
Moretti and Liz Falla ran through the rest of the information but, apart from a growing list of movie achievements and awards, and the fact that Bianchi had married quite recently, there was no further mention of drugs, or idealist fascist fathers.
“Interesting,” said Moretti. “If you look at the dates of his films, there appears to be a bit of a drought before Rastrellamento. Perhaps he was just writing, or enjoying his newly married state.”
Before Liz could respond, the telephone on the desk between them rang. Moretti picked it up and gave his name.
“Detective Inspector Moretti, this is the Marchese Paolo Vannoni. I am told you are in charge of the murder inquiry into the death of my son-in-law?”
The voice was cultured, the English heavily accented but fluent, a dry brittle quality to the tone, like sandpaper against wood.
“You are phoning from Florence?”
Moretti scribbled the marchese’s name on a piece of paper and held it out to Liz Falla, who raised her eyebrows and whistled noiselessly.
“Yes.”
“Would you prefer to speak in Italian?”
“It would be better, yes.” They switched languages. “Time is passing, Inspector, and I am told that no one has seen fit to keep the family informed as to how the inquiry is progressing. No explanations, no information as to when we can bury Toni. Nothing. What do you have — anything? A suspect, at least, I hope.”
As the language changed to Italian, the sandpaper changed to steel.
Moretti thought of Giulia Vannoni’s flippant request at the Grand Saracen, Sydney Ensor’s game-playing, the marchesa’s arrogance, both his and his partner’s feeling that something — God knows what — was being withheld. He counterattacked.
“Marchese, you cannot expect me to discuss our inquiries with you over the phone. This is a complicated business, since there is a possibility that your family and the Albarosa family have been targeted for some reason. And, sir, as to being kept informed, there have been incidents involving a prowler at the manor, and not one member of the family has seen fit to tell us about them.”
From the other end of the line came a rusty chuckle, suggesting years of disuse.
“Detective Inspector, forgive me. You should understand I am very much regretting my decision to encourage the making of Rastrellamento at the manor, and I am sure that Toni’s death and the previous events to which you refer are all connected to a wild and dissolute element in that unstable and corrupt world. Why you think the family has been targeted I cannot imagine. Nothing like this had ever happened until I gave permission.”
Let’s be conciliatory, thought Moretti, and see where this is leading — see why this distant, disconnected aristocrat picked up the phone to speak to me.
“You may be right, sir. But can you think why your son-in-law would be the target? I was under the impression that until the making of this film, he had not been part of that unstable and corrupt world, as you call it?”
“Detective Inspector Moretti —” the marchese too was sounding conciliatory, his tone almost confiding, “— Toni’s marriage to Anna was a great mistake, encouraged by my wife, in spite of my misgivings. It has caused a permanent rift between us. My daughter was crazy about him and, in fact, became pregnant by him. The family is a good one, so I gave my permission.”
“Would permission have been necessary in this day and age?”
“If Anna wanted to remain in the family and to receive her share of the property and inheritance, yes.”
“I see. Why, sir, did you give permission for the filming of Rastrellamento?”
> “Well — money, of course was one of them. Vannoni Vigneti e Boschetti is doing very well, but our way of life is increasingly expensive to maintain. The other reason was the talent of the director, Mario Bianchi. Which is ironic.”
“Ironic? How?”
“I feel he is a bad influence for my son, Gianfranco, who has no willpower and little backbone, and I regret it deeply if I have opened the wrong door — which I may have done. Mario has brought an unsavoury element along with him.”
This time, Moretti waited.
“Drugs.”
Droghe.
Across the desk, Liz Falla leaned forward in her chair.
“You are saying then, sir, that in your opinion this could be a drug killing?”
“Drug related, yes.”
“Do you have any evidence to support your theory?”
“It is the only one that makes sense. It is your job to find the evidence.”
“Why then use daggers?”
“Detective Inspector, I cannot see into the mind of some hop-headed addict.”
Moretti changed direction. “I understand you are close to your daughter, Anna. Yet you say the marriage distanced you from your wife. You never come here, I believe, and she rarely returns to Italy.”
The marchese was back to sandpaper and steel again. “What any of this has to do with Toni’s death I cannot think. All this is a waste of time, an unnecessary intrusion into people’s lives.”
“Nothing is private, Marchese, in a murder investigation, as I told your wife.”
Moretti expected anger, but now there was a sadness in the marchese’s voice.
“Life has not been kind to my daughter, Detective Inspector.”
“She has health, wealth, a renowned family, and two fine children, she tells me. Many would say she was fortunate.”
“In a world where beauty matters, she has none. In a world where fidelity is dismissed with a shrug, she fell in love and was betrayed. Again, and again, and again. If anyone wanted to see Toni Albarosa dead, it was me. I’m glad he is dead, but I didn’t kill him.”