Rancid Pansies (12 page)

Among the many grim things about living in a hotel is the lack of a telephone of one’s own. In terms of cost, hotel phones are like restaurant wines: simply the proprietor’s way of hastening his early retirement to the Virgin Islands. Mobile phones,
especially
abroad, are equally ruinous. Nevertheless, a mobile phone is what I am using to keep in touch with the
indispensable
Frankie. He calls me as I am leaving the office in the Comune where I have just received their gracious permission to engage a bulldozer to search the ruins of my house for my buried personal effects. I am now on my way to the offices of the Forestale, where I need to obtain yet another
permesso
, when I answer my mobile on the steps outside. A fusillade of coughs identifies the caller.

‘Do you know who I mean by Leo Wolstenholme?’ asks Frankie eventually.

‘No. Who’s he?’

‘It’s a she. Leonora. Pretty famous here in the UK. Lots of tabloid interest in her various affairs, a boob operation that went wrong, etcetera, but best known as a regular presenter of
Global Eyeball.
No?’

‘No.’

‘TV investigative series a bit like
Panorama
used to be but much less political,
harrucka-rucka-rucka errgh
, as befits the twenty-first century. Long on personalities and short on theory. They’re doing a series of occasional programmes about sports heroes and the economics of commercial endorsement. Quite good, actually. I saw one they did about that golfer, Justin McPeach. Now
there’s
a shit, incidentally. You did well not to write about him. What Wolstenholme wants is for you to take part in a programme about Millie Cleat.’

‘Oh Christ, Frankie, not
her
again? I’m still relishing her demise.’

‘I’m afraid you’re considered as the world’s leading Millie expert, Gerry. Just about everything anyone knows about her comes from your book. And now the film rights have been bought she’ll go on being news for quite a time yet, at least until someone still older and missing more limbs breaks her records. Trust me, Gerry, you should do this interview. Leo’s very popular and it’ll help the book. And talking of which’ – here he interrupts himself with another coughing fit so explosive that the tinny clacking the mobile makes as I hold it safely away from my ear actually causes a passing shopper to glance up in surprise – ‘Champions want to bring out a new edition of
Millie!
and they want an Afterword from you to take in her death and the investigation in Sydney. They also want you to concoct some kind of summing up. Her legacy, and all that. It needn’t be long: fifteen hundred words at the most.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Frankie.’ But I’ll do it, and we both know I will. If I’m going to be buying a house shortly I shall need all the dosh I can earn. Movie deal or no, the book’s an important part of my exchequer for as long as it can be made to last. A new edition’s like a re-tread tyre. One takes
something
that’s basically clapped-out and with judicious tweaking ekes out some more mileage. In the meantime I suppose I shall have to take part in this TV thing for much the same reason. According to Frankie this Leo creature is still ‘putting it all together’, doing preliminary research and getting some ‘core interviews’ lined up. Thanks to my brief long-ago stint in
television
I know this means that a team of baby research
assistants
and PR flackettes with names like Sappho and Poppy will be doing it for her in their slangy posh-cockney drawls. Frankie tells me Leo’s quite happy to fly out and interview me here if I’m not planning on being in London. I tell him to relay the proviso that they may have to do it in snatches while a bulldozer turns up precious relics from my former home.

‘She’ll love that. She’s got an Action Woman reputation to
keep up. She doesn’t like studios, they’re too tame. She’s always on location. The more shells whistling overhead and pillars of oily smoke in the background the better. I realise you won’t be providing those, but how many authors does she film pulling chests of drawers full of their underwear out of a
Tuscan
landslide? Knocks studio shots of talking heads for six, ditto tubby old ex-pats wearing panama hats slumped in a deck chair, maundering on about I Zingari and their cricketing heydays.’

‘Oh, and Frankie,’ I say before he can ring off or a
pulmonary
seizure supervene, ‘I need a contact number for Marta. She’s supposed to be in London at the moment
working
with the awful Sue Donimus. No doubt in Voynovia they’re still using pigeon post but after last year in the States she may actually have a mobile by now. Might you see what you can do, please?’

‘H’m. Someone else I thought you never wanted to see again.’

‘Unfortunately she’s got something I want.’

‘I’d rather not know.’

‘No, it’s an almost impossible ambition. I want her silence.’

Hours pass, during which I succeed in obtaining my
permesso
from the office of the Forestale. Faintly incredulous, I’m beginning to wonder whether Benedetti may not after all be putting in a word for me in various quarters. Generally
speaking
, the norm when applying for even the most trivial piece of paper in an Italian bureaucrat’s office is that after queuing for an hour one will be sent smartly away for not having brought one or more of the following: a notarised copy of one’s late mother’s birth certificate, one’s passport, one’s
permesso di
soggiorno
,
one’s medical records translated into Italian by a
certified
translator, one’s
codice fiscale
, half a dozen passport photos, a sheet of
carta bollata
(from the nearest newsstand), one’s inside leg measurement as taken not more than three months ago and duly attested by the Carabinieri, and anything else the bureaucrat can think up on the spur of the moment. In
the good old days before the ‘Clean Hands’ initiative of the Nineties that tried to do away with the bribery of officials, the only known way of getting anything out of chronically
underpaid
Italian bureaucrats was to turn up with a
mazzetta
: a ‘bunch’ of banknotes or similar. I found a bottle of Chivas Regal would generally ensure the processing was over in a medium jiffy. True, they would still require you to return in three months to collect the relevant
permesso
(‘Alas, the dossier has to go to Rome, signore, and you know what Rome is like’ – hands spread in an expressive gesture of amused
resignation
), but at least the worst was over. In this brave new
post-Chivas
Regal era, though, bureaucrats are still underpaid and there’s no knowing what vital document you may have left behind. (‘But naturally, signor Samper, we require a notarised copy of your parents’ marriage certificate.’ ‘In order to be
connected
to the town’s
sewerage
system?’ ‘Of course, signore. It is the law.’ And that’s another hour’s waiting down the chute.) All of which explains why native supplicants in Italian government offices wisely come armed with bulging portmanteaus
containing
every conceivable document detailing their family’s history and activities back through several generations. Even so, the chances are they’ll be sent away again for forgetting to bring a post office counterfoil proving they have already paid €31.83 for the
permesso
they’re still months away from getting.

So the effortless speed with which I have just cleared the bureaucratic hurdles required before I can go digging in the remains of my own home makes me wonder if the weasel’s paw may not be behind this. Over the years I have deduced that Benedetti is very well connected in this town. I imagine it’s impossible to be an estate agent in a place this size without being in touch with the movers and shakers, not to mention the makers and shovers. After all, he was probably at school with half the town council, if not the mayor himself. Come to that, I dare say I am myself not wholly without friends in the sort of places that count; so maybe our humiliating plot can be made to prosper long enough to see Samper once again
ensconced in a suitable house, with grounds spacious enough to sing in and a kitchen designed for radical creativity. Cheered by the thought, I ring up a bulldozer man of my acquaintance and book his services in three weeks’ time, which is the earliest he can manage.

And finally, now armed with her mobile number, I call up Marta in London from a bar where for old times’ sake I am cautiously sipping a Fernet-Branca.

‘Gerree!’ comes that familiar cry that only a little over a year ago used to make my blood run cold practically daily.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting a work of high art?’

‘Not so.’ She giggles. ‘I am eating my lunch in the nude here.’

Oh God. ‘You’re fading, Marta. I didn’t catch that?’ ‘… in Danubya. Danubya’s a new Voynovian ristoran. The first in London, it opens only last year. The
shonka
is
mm!
but not so good as ours from home. The manager and chef they are city men from Voynograd and do not understand country food so well. Do you remember
mavlisi
?’

Do I ever? Marta once called these ‘national delicacies’ the Voynovian equivalent of Florentines, but having eaten them I can emphatically state that this description is far more
misleading
than helpful. True, both are pastry-based, but
thereafter
all similarity ends. One variety of
mavlisi
resembles testicles on the half-scrotum: a pigeon’s egg pickled in spearmint, nested in a milky jelly and cupped in a wrinkled shell of dough. Another kind is like a tiny jam tart spread with a mulch of capers ground up with lavender. A third is a
deep-fried
ball about the size of a marble stuffed with chillies, garlic and horseradish. It explodes in your mouth like a depth charge and leaves your head hanging by a hinge for the rest of the day.

‘My poor Gerree, you were so fast to eat them! There is a right way for eating
mavlisi
, very special and historic. The
mavlisi
of Danubya here are very
mm!
, as good almost as those of Mrszowski’s in Voynograd. When I eat them I have tears in my eyes.’

When I ate them even my underwear became damp, but I
assume she is talking about tears of homesickness in her
passionate
, Slavic way. Frankly, Marta’s a bit of a puzzle to me. Despite having had our misunderstandings in the past,
affording
both of us a fair old laugh from time to time, I can never quite disabuse myself of the apprehension that in her sly,
peasant
way she may be after my body. I know, I know – it sounds immodest. I’m hardly one of those men who delude themselves that they cause every woman they meet to go into a permanent state of rut, even though I’ve met no end of ladies who have been far from impervious to the urbane, artistic type. I must be a welcome change from business boys with boxer shorts and Boxster cars whose gift for music comes into its own on the terraces of Tottenham Hotspur. But I did give Marta a good deal of neighbourly help and generally took pity on her, and such things can be misinterpreted by romantically inclined girls. She was a stranger in a strange land who initially spoke no Italian and a brand of English that only I could understand. And frankly, no one could have been more sympathetic than I towards her drink problem and her weight problem and the fact that she comes from a family of millionaire racketeers based in the Carpathians – or wherever Voynovia is, I’ve still not looked it up in an atlas. As a Shropshire Samper whose family roots go back to Norman times it is hard not to view Marta as basically of gypsy stock. In a society like hers which surely sets great store by making upwardly mobile marriages, it’s impossible to overlook that someone like myself with a proper pedigree would represent a considerable catch.

Small wonder, then, that I’m a little nervous. As friends were kind enough to remark on my fiftieth birthday (although not Derek – failure noted), I could easily pass for forty, being blessed by good fortune with one of those enduringly trim physiques that seem never to get badly out of shape (unlike, for example, Derek’s). But poor Marta is really nothing but a great lump with hair that makes her look like Struwwelpeter’s sister. When in her cups she has a habit of leering suggestively and becoming
tactile
in a way that quite frankly rather puts 
the wind up one. Unfortunately I now need her connivance. The importance of her going along with the Diana story
outweighs
everything else.

‘The reason I’m calling,’ I tell her after an emboldening slug of Fernet-Branca, ‘is to say that I’m really worried about your

lovely house.’ ‘You are saying the ground is still moving, Gerree?’

‘No, no, nothing like that. Structurally, it’s fine.’ For a mildewy old barracks, that is. ‘I’m talking about the visitors up there. You must have noticed them when you were there after Christmas?’

‘Sure. Rubber knickers.’

I was forgetting her year in America. ‘But these people aren’t just rubberneckers, Marta. They’re pilgrims. It’s hard to explain over the phone. They are going to grow in number and soon they’ll make it impossible for you to work in peace. They’ll be up there all the time. And once they discover you were at my birthday party that night they won’t leave you alone, I promise you. They’ll be banging on your door in a constant stream. Believe me, Marta, your days of quietly working at your music up at Le Roccie are numbered.’

‘No, Gerree, I can’t believe this. Surely they just want to see the place where your house fell over. I would, if I am them.’

I’ll bet. ‘No, Marta, they want a lot more than that. You’ll have to come out and see for yourself. And it’s not just the value of your house as a retreat that is dropping. So is its
market
value, according to Benedetti.’

‘He is a
mustelje
, that man. A what do you say?’

‘Weasel. Of course he is. We’ve both known that for years. But he’s an expert weasel when it comes to local house prices. Look, will you come? I really think you should. Besides, I’ve a great favour to ask you and I can’t easily explain it over the phone.’