The Takeover (26 page)

‘What a suggestion,’ said Lauro. ‘How could I leave my wife alone on a honeymoon cruise, Maggie, are you crazy?’

‘Well, now that you’re here, Lauro, may I have a word with you?’ Maggie said.

‘Go ahead,’ said Lauro, refilling all three glasses with the champagne that Maggie had ordered for the party.

‘Well, it’s business, Lauro. Betty must, of course, get used to business practice, and as you are my confidant and secretary I must speak to you alone. If Betty will give us half an hour. I’m sure there’s some shopping she wants to do. The boutiques of Lausanne are charming; she can get some ideas for her boutique in Rome, don’t you think?’

Betty said, ‘Just what I was thinking myself,’ and put down her glass with a sharp tinkle.

Lauro considered the matter importantly, with his lips pouted together. Then he said, ‘Yes, I think Maggie is in the right. Come back in half an hour, Betty, all right?’

‘Fine,’ she said brightly, ‘lovely.’

They watched her as she passed through the lane of little tables to the vestibule, and out of the swing doors, in her cream and brown linen suit.

‘Are you happy?’ said Maggie to Lauro.

‘Of course,’ said Lauro. ‘Betty is a wonderful wife. She’s beautiful and also intelligent. We Italians, you know, like women to be women, and to be shapely.’

‘I often think Italian girls are very mature in their appearance,’ Maggie said, ‘a little over-full, but it’s a matter of taste.’

‘I won’t hear a word against Italian girls,’ said Lauro, ‘and especially my wife.’

‘You’re perfectly right,’ Maggie said in hasty conciliation. ‘I only meant that maybe the trouble is that they have their Confirmation too early. In the Anglo-Saxon countries they aren’t confirmed till they’re fourteen.’ She waved the subject vaguely aside. ‘It’s a matter of national custom, that’s all. I’m sure I’m not bigoted. Well, Lauro, I’ve got something really serious to discuss with you. It’s serious and it’s private, and I can’t thank you enough for breaking off your mass-honeymoon for me, Lauro.’

‘It was a very lovely and very expensive, exclusive honeymoon cruise,’ said Lauro. ‘Today we were to go on donkey-back into the mountains.’

‘All on donkeys together, twenty-one
sposi
!’ marvelled Maggie.

Lauro looked sour.

‘But Lauro, I’m in trouble, darling,’ Maggie said. ‘I really am.’

Lauro cheered up. ‘What’s your problem?’ he said.

‘I see in the newspapers,’ said Maggie, ‘that a lot of people are getting kidnapped. In Italy it’s becoming a national sport. Every day there’s someone new. Where are all the millions going to?’

‘
It’s a criminal affair,’ Lauro said, ‘mainly run by the Mafia but there are independent gangs, maybe political, I don’t know. Why don’t you keep your bodyguard? What happened to your gorilla?’

‘I can’t afford a bodyguard. I’m broke,’ said Maggie.

Lauro laughed. ‘If that were true why would you be afraid of being kidnapped?’

‘When it’s known that Coco de Renault has disappeared completely with all my holdings, all my real estate, all my trusts, all my capital, I won’t have to fear being kidnapped.’

‘What are you talking about, Maggie?’ Lauro said. ‘You ask about kidnaps, then you tell me this story of de Renault. I think you try to make out you’re poor because you’re afraid. But no one will believe you, Maggie. You have to take care. It’s not nice to be kidnapped. Sometimes the victim never comes home. Remember how they cut off young Getty’s ear. They keep you in a dungeon for weeks.’

‘Coco has disappeared. I’ve tried to trace him. I’ve had private detectives and my lawyers trying to trace him. They say he’s somewhere in the Argentine; that’s all the news I can get. I’m not sure if they’re right or wrong. Maybe the investigators can’t be bothered any more. In the meantime, the detectives have to be paid, lawyers’ fees have to be paid.’

‘And the police?’

‘Which police? He belongs to no country. Then if I make a scandal, the tax people will start nosing into my affairs, that’s all. I want to kidnap Coco, that’s what I want to do. I want to extort my money out of him. At least I might get a part of it, something. I want to kidnap Coco de Renault.’

Lauro said, ‘It’s a criminal offence, kidnapping.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Maggie said. ‘I know. Why shouldn’t I be a criminal? Everyone else is.’

‘Maggie, your husband—’

‘He’ll never know,’ said Maggie.

Lauro sat back in a worldly way with an unworldly expression. ‘You’re a wonderful woman, Maggie. What’s in it for me?’

‘Ten per cent,’ said Maggie.

‘Twenty,’ said Lauro.

‘Including the expenses and the pay-offs, though,’ Maggie said.

‘No, no,’ said Lauro. ‘There’s a big risk for those poor people who do the actual work. They risk a life’s imprisonment if they don’t get shot by the police. Then they have to find the people to do the first part, take the prisoner; then they have to find the good hiding places; they have to find the family and make the telephone calls, and they have to feed the man.’

‘All right, thirty per cent inclusive,’ Maggie said.

‘Who is the family?’

‘An American wife, rather ancient-looking, living here in Lausanne. I’ve seen her at a distance, poor dreary soul.  The investigators say she swears she hasn’t seen him for five months, but they don’t believe her; neither do I.’

‘You think he’ll visit her one day?’

‘I don’t know. I think he’s probably changed his appearance by plastic surgery. The reason I think so is that he’s done it twice before.’

‘He’ll never come back to Switzerland,’ Lauro said. ‘If he’s now a millionaire in the Argentine, why should he want to see an old wife?’

‘There’s a daughter at college in America,’ said Maggie. ‘She’ll be home with her mother this summer. I think he might want to see the daughter.’

‘You would have to demand a very large ransom,’ said Lauro, ‘to make it worth your while.’

‘I’ll demand a large ransom,’ Maggie said. ‘After all, it’s my money, isn’t it?’

‘My contacts don’t run to the Mafia,’ Lauro said. ‘I’m not in touch with the underworld at all.’

‘Oh, come,’ said Maggie, ‘don’t exaggerate, Lauro.’

‘I know very few,’ Lauro said.

‘If I sell my big ruby pendant,’ said Maggie, ‘I can offer to those very few friends of yours a good sum in advance. My ruby is one of the few things that haven’t yet been stolen. I’ve had some jewellery stolen from the villa and I think Mary has probably lost hers in that job at the Banco di Santo Spirito the other day.’ She was crying now.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ said Lauro, ‘but somehow I believe you, or you wouldn’t have torn me away from my bride and my honeymoon.’ He, too, had tears in his eyes at the thought of his lost paradise as it now existed in his head, if not in fact.

‘Betty will be back soon. Can you get rid of her for the afternoon? She can use my car,’ Maggie said.

‘I suppose so,’ Lauro said. ‘I get rid of her and I take you up to bed. Isn’t that your idea?’

‘It’s usually your idea,’ said Maggie, ‘isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ Lauro said.

Dusk had fallen when Maggie arrived two days later at the Villa Tullio. Berto was not expecting her; he had heard no word from her and had been unable to find her at any of the Swiss hotels she usually stayed at. Berto was worried; he could not quite understand why she had needed money. He made arrangements for the money to reach her, but afterwards, when he had tried to reach her by telephone at Lausanne, she had just left the hotel.

Mary also had tried to reach her, overjoyed that her safety-box, being one of those set high in the wall of the bank-vault, had escaped the gang’s frenzied operation. Mary had telephoned to Berto in the Veneto. ‘I’m worried about Maggie. Where is she?’

‘I don’t know’ Berto said. ‘She’s left Lausanne, and I can’t find her anywhere else. I’m worried, too. Have you seen this morning’s paper? Another kidnapping.’

‘Oh, Berto, darling, don’t worry,’ Mary said. ‘Would you like me to come and keep you company?’

‘No, my dear, don’t think of it.’

The chauffeur who drove Maggie home to the Villa Tullio that night was thoroughly puzzled. The Marchesa had dressed herself up so peculiarly. She had gone to a flea-market in a small town on the way home, all on an impulse while he waited in the car-park. This chauffeur had long been in Berto’s service and had very few original thoughts about Maggie. He respected her considerably because she was Berto’s wife and hence the Marchesa, and he felt it natural that she should have illogical impulses. He had taken her all over Switzerland on a mystifying route, not consequentially, not economically planned; first the Zürich area, then the Geneva area, then Zug, then Lausanne. To him, it was all a great
non sequitur
but Maggie was always careful to see that he had good rooms and ate well and was comfortable, as a lady should. It had not caused him to quibble in his thoughts when Lauro and his bride turned up at Lausanne, that Lauro at Maggie’s request had then sent him on a trip around the valleys and up the mountains on a sight-seeing tour with Betty for the whole afternoon, from twelve-thirty to six-thirty. The chauffeur had lunched at pretty little Caux, high up on a mountain path, Betty sitting at one table, he at another, despite the girl’s invitation to sit at the table with her. Betty had marvelled at the little chalets, and the chauffeur had agreed with a totally unscientific will to please. ‘My husband, my poor husband,’ Betty had said, ‘is busy with that Marchesa all the afternoon and he’s on his honeymoon.’ The chauffeur merely said that such was life. ‘Her houses at Nemi are built on my land,’ said Betty. ‘They’re
abusivo;
she has to pull down those houses or else pay us. That’s what they have to discuss, and believe me—’

As she spoke the chauffeur pulled up at a cottage-weave shop and asked Betty if she would like to look round it. Betty spent some time there, buying embroidered place-mats and a shawl, then re-entered the car, into the back seat, daintily, with the door held open for her by Berto’s chauffeur.

The next day Maggie had gone to Geneva and dropped Betty at the airport to catch a plane for Rome. Then, with Lauro, she had gone to a newly constructed block of flats where there was no concierge but a press-button phone at the entrance. Lauro pressed a button but there was no answer. The big glass-fronted doors were locked. Maggie got back into the car and waited. Lauro walked up and down the little pathway with its tidy new plants on either side; he pressed the button again from time to time; he looked up at the windows; he looked at his watch.

Maggie, who seldom explained anything, had evidently felt it necessary to explain to the chauffeur that they were waiting for a dressmaker, very brilliant and not yet famous, whom she simply had to see. They had an appointment, she explained.

It was too bad, said the chauffeur, to keep the Marchesa waiting. They waited twenty more minutes before a Peugeot drew up. Three youngish men got out, very quickly, and made for the entrance where Lauro was waiting. The chauffeur had not been able to see their faces for they kept them quite averted from him. One of the men, saying something to Lauro, indicated vulgarly with his thumb the car where Maggie sat with the chauffeur and said something in French, which the chauffeur didn’t understand, but which sounded disapproving. Maybe the man had not wanted to be seen. At any rate one of the men had opened the door with a key, and Lauro was answering back, looking at his watch. Maggie then got out of the car with her charming smile and followed the four men into the building. That took up the rest of the morning. Maggie emerged without Lauro, and they were off, back to the Veneto, stopping for meals on the way, and then, unaccountably, at a little market-town where Maggie had spent an hour while the chauffeur waited in the carpark.

He had waited, which is to say he had taken an occasional walk around. From what he saw and what he heard, Maggie had no rendezvous with anyone this time. A rendezvous, although its purpose might escape Berto’s good chauffeur, might at least have been explicable. What was thoroughly inconsistent was that Maggie had stood there at a stall, innocently buying a heap of dreadful clothes; and they were plainly intended for herself for she held up these rags against her body to get a rough idea if they would fit. A worn-out long skirt of black cotton, a pair of soiled tennis shoes which she actually tried on there in the street, a once-pink head scarf, a cotton blouse, not second-hand but cheap, piped with white, and terrible. The chauffeur wandered back to the car and waited. Maggie appeared before long, with her sunniness intact, and her light-hearted walk, holding in her arms the bundle of these frightful garments, not even wrapped in a piece of paper.

The chauffeur took them from her and placed them carefully in the boot. All he said was, ‘The Marchesa should leave her handbag with me when she goes shopping. There are bad people about.’ Whereupon Maggie searched in her handbag, quite alarmed; but everything was all right. They drove on.

Towards dusk next day Maggie wanted to stop in Venice for a rest and a drink. She left the chauffeur at the quay and, hiring a water-taxi, directed it to a smart bar. Later she returned in a water-taxi and kept it waiting while she demanded of the chauffeur the old clothes from the back of the car. Wrapping them, for very shame, in a tartan car-rug, the chauffeur handed them over. Maggie redirected the taxi to the bar.

She returned looking so like a tramp that the chauffeur failed to recognize her at first. ‘Marchesa!’ he then exclaimed.

‘I changed in the ladies’ room,’ Maggie had said. ‘Did I give you a fright? I want to play a joke on my husband.’

Onward to the villa. It was dark as they approached. ‘The back entrance,’ Maggie ordered. ‘I have the key.’

The chauffeur, still puzzled, drove round the villa to the firmly locked and heavy back gate in the wall which led into the paddock, the orchard, the kitchen garden, and finally to the great back door.

‘Let me accompany the Marchesa,’ he said, fetching out his big electric torch. He had in mind those masked balls he had heard of, and felt a little guilty and low-class, lacking that sense of humour of the sophisticated. He decided to try to enter the spirit of the thing.