City of War (44 page)

There’s also the matter of the world’s most ill-tempered parrot, Bartholomew. Iron gates and tall hedges keep the curious away, but any fool breaking in would rather be arrested than have to deal with that bird. Bartholomew and I have a deal; he doesn’t peck out my eyes, and I don’t show him how the lawn mower works. To the best of my knowledge, he doesn’t have that agreement with anyone else, because he’s had some close calls.

When her husband, Roger, was alive, Veronique gave legendary parties attended by royalty, Hollywood stars and whomever she happened to run into on the street. Now, she lives with a scaled-down staff and relishes the occasional
visitor, mostly writers whom she invites to stay as long as they like.

The current artist-in-residence was a guy named Pappy Meecham from New Orleans, who was writing about his blues singer father. Veronique said he hadn’t gotten much work done because the days seemed to slip away while they played old records and drank absinthe. Part of me was jealous.

Archer immediately fell in love with Veronique and vice versa. They began chattering away like college roommates. Then Pappy poured her a glass of green liquid, and everyone forgot about me.

I made my way to the kitchen and left a note for Mallory with Veronique’s cook, Brigitte. I asked him to spend as much time as possible with Archer and maybe get Jannicke on the case too. And I apologized for adding to his burden since the shooting and then almost getting him killed. Lastly, I thanked him for his friendship. Something I don’t do as often as I should.

As I walked back to the taxi where Eddie and Jody were waiting, Archer came running up behind me. I turned, and she came into my arms. We strolled hand in hand across the lush grounds of Le Trésor and stopped next to a statue of David standing watch over a swimming pool where Cary and Audrey had frolicked. Her voice quivered as she looked up at me. “Rail, darling, I need you to come back.”

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. “That’s my plan too.”

“No, you have to listen to me. I don’t think I could bear losing you.” She buried her head in my chest, and I felt her melt against me.

I stroked her hair while she cried. Women had clung to me before, but this time something stirred that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. I’d had only one deep romantic relationship in my life, and when Sanrevelle died, I assumed my turn at bat was over. And frankly, I was okay with that. It gave me distance from untidy emotions. What I was feeling now
wasn’t supposed to happen. But it also wasn’t the time to try to sort it out.

I took Archer’s hand and led her gently back to the house. Veronique, wise to unspoken cues, met us at the door. She looked at me with her legendary smile. “Don’t worry one minute, Rail, I’ll take perfect care of her.”

Some film festival was in town, but I tipped a greasy guy in a stained suit a year’s salary and managed to get Jody installed in a small hotel just off the Croisette. By the time he hit the room, he was already planning which parties to crash. Eddie and I found an Internet café and printed the photographs of the artist on Kim’s flash drive. Then I mailed the drive to myself in London, and we caught a taxi to Mont-pellier Airport.

Coming in, we’d had to land at Nice to clear customs. It wasn’t an ideal situation for people trying to be invisible, but Eddie told the hangar manager we were on our way to Monte Carlo to break the bank. Someone looking for us might not buy it, but considering the number of visitors to Monaco and the Principality’s penchant for secrecy, it would take them a while to make sure.

Eddie was exhausted and concerned about flying any more hours, so we rented a silver Cirrus SR22, which I’m qualified to fly. It also has enough seat adjust to handle me, as well as a parachute in case I mistook the fuel dump switch for the landing gear. I’m the first to admit I’m not much of a pilot, so I could only imagine how tired Eddie was if he was willing to risk death to get some sleep.

I got us up. It was shaky, but my passenger snored through the whole thing—even when I momentarily lost sight of the Air France commuter ahead of me and had to listen to a ration of shit in gutter French from a controller.

The night was clear, and the first order of business for any bad pilot is to program the autopilot then don’t fuck with it—no matter what. I put us on a course for Bastia, which is about as far as you can get from Bonifacio and still be on Corsica. Word might eventually reach Bruzzi that we were
there, but maybe it wouldn’t get to him before we did.

So while Eddie slept, I flew. And thought about what I’d felt holding Archer.

Even though Amarante talked about it all the time, in my first eighteen years of life, I had never seen Brazil. So when I took my mother home to bury her, I didn’t know what to expect. Nobody could have prepared me for the two hundred “cousins” who showed up with their extended families and stood ten deep outside the church.

I was astonished at so much wailing and fainting until my Uncle Santos, Amarante’s youngest brother, explained that most of the crowd had never met her. “They just know she had lots of money, so they’re practicing the mantra of the favellas that maybe if you cry loud enough, some of it will fall on you.”

Lord Black was in Sydney mired in some merger or union negotiation or deep-sea fishing or squiring a new girlfriend to the opera, so he couldn’t make it. It was the only time I ever had an angry thought about him. But when I cooled off, I came to my senses. She wasn’t his wife anymore, and she’d left
him.

The priest asked me if I wanted to say something at the service. I told him no. What I didn’t tell him was that Amarante and I had already covered everything on the trip down. Me in first class, her on dry ice. It was the first time since she started drinking that we’d had a conversation where she stayed put until it was over. She was a terrific lady in a lot of ways and extremely talented, but she wasn’t someone who was interested in other people’s problems. Mostly, if you weren’t talking about her, you were doing it to an empty room.

As we left the cemetery, Santos steered me to his car. He was a highly respected businessman and a Brazilian senator, but he’d run afoul of the generals in charge, so he was spending most of his time at his villa on the coast. He suggested I come with him. I wasn’t really interested, but then
he pointed out the rough-looking intelligence officers in bad suits conspicuously taking pictures of the crowd, and he explained that sooner or later, they’d get around to “interviewing” me.

Like the Sistine Chapel, Ubatuba is one of those places photographs can’t capture. It’s both a mood and a place. Miles of pristine beach with hundreds of inlets, each more stunning than the next. White sand, black sand, rough water, serene lagoons—whatever you could imagine. And because the rich had bought up the land for miles, there wasn’t anybody, anywhere, except an occasional fisherman in an ancient dory.

The deeply palmed red hills ran straight up from the sand, and it was on these that the owners built their oceanfront getaways. Santos’s place was two stories of Phillip Johnson glass and steel with 360° views and a long, twisting sandstone driveway that must have taken hundreds of campesinos months to lay.

Santos landed his Cessna on a tiny dirt airstrip carved out of the rain forest, and immediately two dozen locals surrounded the plane, shouting instructions to one another in a patois I didn’t understand while they unloaded the supplies we’d brought into a caravan of ancient Volkswagen Beetles. My uncle and I squeezed into the last car, and the convoy wheezed and coughed its way along a rutted trail barely wide enough for a bicycle, then labored up the steep drive at a pace half the speed I could have walked it.

The next morning, Santos went back to São Paulo to attend a board meeting, so before breakfast, I dressed in swim trunks, slung a towel over my shoulders and hiked down to the beach. I swam up and down the coast until I was exhausted, then bodysurfed in. I felt good for the first time since my mother’s death. Alive…and hungry.

As I started back to the house, I saw two figures on the empty beach walking in my direction. When they got closer, I could see they were young women in their early twen
ties, wearing nothing but high-hipped thongs. They walked easily, engaged in conversation, unashamedly topless.

I’d been all over the world and was recently no longer a virgin, but I still wasn’t used to women with their breasts right out there for everybody to stare at. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. In France, you had to be careful because of all the grandmothers—but Spain and Italy, unbelievable.

Brazilian women tend toward the exquisite anyway, and some simply can’t be described. These two were beyond anything I had ever seen—anywhere. When they got closer, I noticed that, in addition to her thong, the taller of the two was wearing a small, white seashell around her neck on a piece of rawhide, something that had the dual effect of accentuating her tan and drawing your eyes right to where you were trying to keep them from focusing.

She smiled at me with the whitest teeth I had ever seen and said,
“Americano.”

I grinned back and asked in Portuguese,
“Como?”

With a long, perfectly formed finger, she pointed to her eye.
“Olhos. Azul.”
Then in heavily accented English, “Eyes. Blue. And big, big tall. My English pretty damn fucking good, no?” Then she threw back her head and laughed. Her sun-bleached hair hung down her back, almost to her waist, accentuating her own height, which had to be close to six feet.

“Pretty damn good,” I repeated, hoping she didn’t notice the catch in my throat or the growing tent in my swimsuit. She gestured for me to drop my towel, then took my hand and led me, running, into the water. We laughed and splashed and dunked each other for a while, and then she came into my arms. Sometimes everything just fits. No uncertainty, no false starts. She kissed me, and I knew. And I knew she knew too.

When we came out of the water, her cousin was well down the beach. I gestured that I was hungry, and she led me to
the tree line where an oyster fisherman had set up shop on top of an old barrel in the shade of some giant palms. While he shucked, we squeezed freshly quartered tangerines over the prize and wolfed them down. He also poured us martelinho glasses of milky liquid from an unlabeled bottle. My first cachaça…actually, my first several.

Sanrevelle Adriana Marcelino Carvalho—which she went to great lengths to make sure I pronounced correctly. And after Santos called and said he was flying down to Puerto Alegre for a couple of weeks to attend to a business emergency, I told the servants I’d be having a guest, and she came to stay with me.

Sanrevelle was twenty-three, and the week before, her fiancé, Carlos, had announced he was breaking their engagement to marry her cousin. So she and her sister, Sophia, had headed to Ubatuba to lie in the sun and bake the hurt and anger out of her system.

She was a classical pianist with little-girl dreams of touring the world. But after sixteen years of study with the best teachers in South America and two years in France with a virtuoso who was less interested in her adagio than getting in her pants, she’d taken a long, hard look at her talent and come to the conclusion that she was never going to be great. And so she packed her bags, ground out a cigarette on the Frenchman’s Bösendorfer and caught a plane home.

And now the replacement dream was gone too.

Ordinarily, five years is a big gap, especially when the woman is twenty-three and the guy is just out of high school. But this was Brazil, not Beverly Hills, and despite what we both felt, we told ourselves we just wanted a fling, not a future.

At least once, everyone should have two weeks of nothing but good food, good weather, no clothes and shameless sex. You’re a long time growing old, and this is a memory you deserve.

It’s even better if you have a big house with lots of odd-shaped furniture.

A day after Sanrevelle came to stay, we gave up all pretense of getting dressed—except for the seashell around her neck—and Miss Sheltered Upbringing was showing me things I couldn’t have dreamed of—and I’d been reading
Penthouse Letters
since I was twelve.

My personal favorite was where one of us played the piano while the other knelt in front of the bench. When the music stops, so does everything else. It didn’t take long to figure out that your only chance of not getting lost in the moment was to play really fast, so we named this sweet torture Beethoven on Fire. I can now play a mean “Chop-sticks” bathed in sweat.

During one break, I taught her “Christmas Always Breaks My Heart,” which, when she sang it, took my breath away. Almost as much as the pianist.

Eddie stirred, then came awake. He looked at the autopilot and then at the GPS. “Not bad,” he said. “The frogs don’t know shit about maintaining electronics, but this thing’s new enough they didn’t have time to fuck it up. Want me to drive for a while?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

37

Cognac and Legionnaires

Everything looks better from the air, and Corsica looks better than most. Then you have to land. The scenery is breathtaking, the towns picturesque, but a couple of thousand years of conquerors, despots, corrupt politicians, violent criminals—and the French—have poisoned the populace into a dark, brooding people with the personality of a collection agency. It also doesn’t help that terrorism can be just around any corner. But you’ve got to give the Corsicans props for equality. They don’t like each other any more than they do anybody else.

It was a fight to get the plane hangared, a fight to rent a car and a fight to get directions that turned out to be wrong anyway. Our car, a wheezing Citroën with a seat adjustment range that would have cramped Napoleon, finally got us into Bastia. But I wanted privacy as well as a good night’s sleep, and French hotel registries are too easily accessed. So tired as we were, we pushed on until we found the Maison de Casatorra, a bed-and-breakfast south of Borgo with sweeping views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.