Amazing Disgrace (26 page)

Over the weekend I find I am, after all, not remotely
dismayed
at losing the second Cleat contract and having signed up for Nanty’s company instead. The truth is, I rather like the fellow – a first for me when ghosting someone’s
autobiography
. He feels honest in a way none of the others have, Millie Cleat least of all. Nanty seems to maintain an endearing
surprise
at the way the cosmic lottery has plucked his number out of the hat; and although he is streetwise he is not at all worldly wise. By contrast there is something hard and opaque about Millie. I shall never know to what extent she believed in herself briefly as Queen Neptunia. The ‘aquariarm’, the claque of courtiers reverently spouting drivel, the picture of The Face bathed in hallowed light: was that the sudden, naïve awakening of a long-comatose soul? The discovery of a spirituality remarkably in tune with the Age of Aquarius and beyond? Or was it merely a convenient platform designed to keep her in the limelight, an ambition her own husband Clifford had dismally predicted?  

Speaking as the woman’s biographer, I honestly can’t say which of these alternatives describes Millie’s intentions. Maybe she inhabits that middle state peculiar to ‘
personalities
’, which is neither quite artless nor quite steely. Armed with a certain charm or ability, such people treat everything as a try-on. They sniff the prevailing wind, pick a direction and sail. If they find the going favourable they scud along; if not, they put about and try a different tack. But no matter how often they change course before the fickle winds of public approbation, they never lose face. No setback is too damaging to be beyond repair. Like successful politicians, they have the hides of rhinoceroses. And like politicians, they have the
further
enabling disability of proceeding as though they will never be held accountable for anything they have said or done in the past, or for any ideological position they ever took. This is because they live in a sociopath’s world where each day starts with a clean slate. Nothing they did yesterday has
anything
to do with them. This attitude amounts to a conspiracy
that is successfully dependent on the public’s gnatlike memory span and general credulousness. After all, these days you need not even be a ‘personality’ in your own right: merely
resembling
one is good enough. People who know perfectly well that the Queen’s double is not actually Mrs Elizabeth Windsor will still turn out in droves to cheer her, just as people who know that Elvis Presley is dead as mutton will scream hysterically at a lookalike from Tulsa or Tulse Hill. It is this determined
fantasy
that makes possible the public fortunes of the averagely untalented. True, Millie is exceptional by virtue of her prowess as a sailorette; but she is also typical in her yearning for
continued
limelight and the gratifying shenanigans it entails.  

By standards such as these Nanty Riah, the bald man in his thirties who dons a wig and turns into Brill to the adoring screams of the faithful half his age, is strangely genuine even though he, too, hankers for respectability and a knighthood. Underneath it all the boy from Harpenden is in some way indifferent to the fuss. He remains hotly devoted to his
retarded
sister and even to his wife, more or less. So it is not too hard to talk myself into almost looking forward to nailing him to the page. He will not find Samper unsympathetic even though I may be properly acid from time to time. He has, after all, chosen to live among the bubbles that continuously dance and burst above the slow, odorous churning of the public wash. It would be hypocritical of me to pretend I haven’t, too.  

On Monday morning I drive down to restock the larder and pay a call on Signor Benedetti. Camaiore exemplifies the
general
rule that first thing Monday mornings is not a good time for shopping in Italy. Most food shops blearily drag their
shutters
open at around eight, but plenty of other shops won’t do so until about four-thirty in the afternoon. I suppose it’s not unreasonable when you consider they were open to all hours on Saturday evening, but it’s still an incitement to apoplexy when you need a reading lamp or a sofa in a hurry. Estate agents like Benedetti seem to open or not, according to whim, although with the vanishing of the summer
hajjis
there’s little
incentive to be punctual. Not a lot of people house-hunt in November. To my surprise, though, I find him in his office on the Corso reading
Il Tirreno
, that fascinating source of local stories concerning such things as the discovery on Saturday of an apartment in Viareggio full of Brazilian transvestites, many of them dwarves. From the neatly pomaded strands of the tangled web on his head to the single highly polished shoe cap visible to one side of his desk, Benedetti appears his usual spruce self. On my entry he folds his newspaper and civilly lays it aside with no outward sign of the displeasure he is undoubtedly feeling. We have long played a game of cloaking our mutual dislike in heavy folds of conversational brocade.  

‘Signor Samper!’ He shakes his draperies out first and a few conventional moths flutter weakly in the bitter light cast by the computer monitor on his desk. ‘I was only just thinking this newspaper was not doing quite enough to raise my spirits this Monday morning and that exactly the right thing was lacking and lo!, in through the door you walk to personify my missing pleasure.’ His smile, which resembles that of a weasel sizing up a baby rabbit, suggests the phrase ‘Get out of that one,
clever-clogs
.’

‘
Ingegnere
!’ I exclaim. ‘Preoccupied as my head was with the banal reflections peculiar to Monday mornings, my feet evidently retained more sense because they have led me through the one door in Camaiore where they knew such thoughts would at once be salved and cheered.’ Not too bad an effort, I think, closing the door behind me. This baby bunny punches above its weight. I glance ostentatiously around the well-appointed office, which is entirely empty of other people. It is a pretty undercroft, barrel-vaulted with old but recently sandblasted mezzane, very pink, with fresh white walls in which a few pieces of ancient stonework have been allowed to stand forth. At a guess, the town house of which this is the ground floor is seventeenth century, maybe slightly older. I have to admit that Benedetti has created an office that is surprisingly tasteful. There are the inevitable desks with
computer terminals for his absent assistants: teenaged shysters who generally wear slightly too-large Armani suits and always have a mobile phone plugged into one ear. There are the
equally
inevitable grey filing cabinets that bespeak active commerce. There are three of those steel and black-leather designer
armchairs
like the one in Benjy Birnbaum’s consulting suite. There are tasteful lights to illuminate the brick vaulting from below, and a coconut sapling is sprouting in one corner from an unhusked nut in a terracotta pot. It is a perfect set for
dramatic
acts of conveyancing, but just at this moment the stage is empty.  

‘So how is business?’ I innocently ask. ‘Frankly,
ingegnere
, I’m surprised you ever manage to sell your houses because any prospective client, once having glimpsed these superlative premises, could scarcely covet any building other than this.’  

Benedetti, having risen punctiliously to his feet, makes an elegantly dismissive gesture with one hand. The rosy light reflected by the naked brickwork overhead cruelly picks up the pink of scalp gleaming amid the skeins of his web. I give it another year and then he’ll have to admit defeat and go for a toupee. The old warp and weft are fast disappearing and soon only an unabashed rug will suffice.  

‘You are your customary kind self to enquire,’ he says. ‘This is, of course, early Monday morning so naturally things appear slow. But in general, I’m happy to say, business becomes steadily more propitious. True, the economic climate is gloomy, and investors everywhere are maybe not as
sanguine
as they were a few years ago, but – yes – I dare say that sanguine is the overall mood of my modest enterprise. I can’t, of course, speak for my competitors; but from the perspective of this office enough people, both from within Italy and from outside, seem to want to move to Versilia to keep my humble affairs here afloat. Discreetly so, but definitely afloat, the blessed Madonna be thanked.’  

‘I hadn’t realized she took such an interest in real estate.’

‘That British humour of yours, Signor Samper!’ he wags an
admonitory finger while smiling his rodent smile. In the usual manner of our conversations the initial brocade is beginning to wear thin.  

‘Since you so courteously indulge it,
ingegnere
, might you humour me further by explaining how I have just found
this
lying outside the back door of my neighbour’s house?’

He studies the muddy, snail-trailed card I hand him as though it were a mystifying artefact lately unearthed in
Pompeii
.  

‘It would appear to be one of our own cards,’ he concludes cautiously.  

‘My very own impression,’ I agree. ‘Unless of course an unscrupulous rival is counterfeiting them for his own arcane purposes. Call me credulous if you will, but I find myself assuming this to be the genuine article. In which case I further wonder how it came to be up at Le Roccie, given that on the last occasion we met I distinctly remember having told you my neighbour’s house is not for sale. Of course, my memory is not infallible.’  

‘No, signore, your memory is as excellent as ever. “A gem” is how I describe it whenever you are mentioned. “Signor
Samper
is blessed with a veritable gem of a memory.” I can only hazard that I must have dropped this card on that occasion and it has lain there unnoticed ever since.’  

‘It hasn’t.’  

‘A hasty conclusion, surely, signore? A small puff of wind, the activities of a mouse – anything might just now have brought it out of hiding.’  

‘Have you been up to that house since the summer?’ I ask point-blank.  

‘No,’ he answers, equally so. For an instant we stare at each other through the holes in the brocade.  

‘Then it is indeed mysterious,’ I’m reduced to saying lamely. Damn.  

‘Without doubt. Except of course that anyone might carry one of our cards and drop it by chance. It is not in the interests
of my business to ration them. However …’ He goes into a thoughtful pose, tapping the card edgewise against the
manicured
nails of one hand.  

‘However?’  

‘However, it is conceivable that a
galoppino
, in the course of his researches, might have dropped such a card. These people often do carry an assortment of house agents’ cards, depending on which of us might be interested in a particular property. Yes, the more I consider it, the more likely it seems. I am, of course, as distressed as you about such promiscuous littering of that veritable paradise of yours up there in the mountains.’  

‘I am less concerned with litter,
ingegnere
, than with this impression everyone seems to share that my neighbour’s house is for sale. Once again I must ask, do you know anything I don’t about Marta? To be frank, I’m now seriously worried about her.’ A
galoppino
, I already knew, is a man who gallops about, nosing out likely and unlikely properties for sale and passing on the information for a cut of the sale price: in effect a sort of freelance estate agent working mostly for private buyers, although he will sometimes be employed by an official agency like Benedetti’s. It is perfectly possible that a
freebooting
galoppino
has been making his rounds even in a place as remote as ours, such is the demand for houses in this area.
Isolated
houses with a much-prized
vista mare
go at a premium, especially to those twice-a-year holidaymakers from
Wiesbaden
, Winchester and Willebroek.

‘Am I to understand, Signor Samper, that you have still heard nothing of the lady’s whereabouts?’  

‘You are.’

‘I’m naturally distressed that you are distressed. But as I told you before, I have no news of
la
Marta.’  

‘Since you last saw her at Pisa airport.’

‘Ah no, signore. If you examine that gemlike memory of yours, you will immediately recall that I said I saw somebody who
resembled
her at a distance. The more I think about it, the more I doubt it was the lady in question.’

‘Well,’ I say resignedly, ‘I’m baffled.’

‘While not presuming on the depth of your relationship with her, might I suggest that she gave me the impression of very much having a life of her own?’  

‘You mean, like being a prostitute?’ This is a goodly thrust, an exasperated reference to the canard Benedetti himself spread around some time ago, probably to curry favour with the local police and immigration officials but also from sheer malignant weaselry. But almost as soon as I’ve made this bitter remark I regret it. Benedetti quite properly lost a good deal of face over that incident, and that ought to have closed the
matter
with honour all square. Now, eager to make a debating point, I have unbalanced the ledger once more. I need to make immediate amends. Damn again.  

‘I apologize,
ingegnere
,’ I say pacifically, noting that the rodent glitter in his eyes has intensified. Ours is clearly not
destined
to be one of those deep and abiding friendships. ‘I spoke hastily and out of turn and I was wrong to do so. Please accept my sincere assurance that it is purely my worry for the lady that lends heat to my words.’ Enough, Samper. There’s no need to lick the man’s highly polished shoes.

‘I accept your apology, signore,’ Benedetti says stiffly. ‘I trust that if and when you hear news of your neighbour I shall be among the first you tell.’  

Mercifully, at this uneasy juncture one of the Armani boys comes whistling in to work, hair painstakingly tinted and
tousled
and with a considerable love bite visible on the very back of his neck. Yes, I’ve often wondered about
him
. Ritual
greetings
defuse the moment. I take my leave and head for my favourite bar for a much-needed espresso. Sometimes I emerge triumphant from these bouts with Benedetti but today I feel obscurely bested. I’m exhausted from cudgelling my brain into inventing florid insincerities in Italian, and I’ve learned absolutely nothing new. Maybe (I think as my caffeine
receptors
shift into overdrive), maybe that really
wasn’t
Marta he saw at Pisa airport all those months ago. Isn’t it more likely
that in time, blood being thicker than water, she simply repented of her apparent desire to distance herself from that evilly handsome helicopter pilot brother of hers and went off to see him and her newly married sister? And maybe got picked up by Interpol along with the rest of her nefarious clan? Maybe (for under the influence of a second espresso, which has caused my caffeine receptors to go to afterburners, both heart rate and imagination are now racing), maybe after all she has swapped the shaky career of a composer for a better paid life of crime, or else is simply living on the ill-gotten gains her father had apparently been stashing away for her and her
siblings
in numbered accounts around the world? Perhaps even at this moment Marta is sunning herself in Barbados after
extensive
cosmetic surgery, a Voynovian beach bunny with a string of taut-stomached paramours in tow who don white dinner jackets to escort her to casinos after dark …