Death of a Showgirl (13 page)

‘Seems more than a job,’ she said, staring at me.

I looked back at the TV, not wanting to admit it was true. But I knew I was in this game because I had seen too many children lose their families and vice versa. And since I’d never had a family, I was on a mission to put others back together. I met hundreds of kids who had lost their parents, if they had ever had them. Or parents who had lost their kids because of the usual addictions and weaknesses. This job was my way of putting the pieces back together, of trying to reunite families before it was too late. Maybe that’s why this woman and I seemed to have a bond.

‘Where did they go?’ I asked her.

‘Rome.’ She was shaking her head. ‘Mori had put an idea in her head that she could be a showgirl. It became an obsession for her. She wanted to be on TV, to become a star. It got to the stage where she was prepared to sacrifice anything for that ambition.’

‘Including herself?’

She looked at me sharply. ‘She would never have committed suicide. Someone wanted her out of the way.’

I must have looked doubtful, because she started telling me about how her daughter had been scared in the days before her death. ‘She knew too much about certain men in positions of power. She was at all their little parties and when she didn’t get what she wanted, she threatened to expose their sordid world. And the next thing I knew, she was missing. I would rather,’ she had a sharp intake of breath, ‘know she were dead than have this. This uncertainty, this terror that any day the worst is still to come. I still can’t mourn her properly.’

I said nothing to contradict her. It was possible Anna had paid the price for threatening to spill some dirty beans. But it seemed just as likely that she had taken too much bad gear and gone the way of so many aspiring starlets before her. Someone may have just chucked her in the Tiber after an overdose.

‘Did Anna ever mention to you the people she was seeing in Rome? The jobs she was doing?’

She shook her head, staring at her feet. ‘We were barely speaking to each other back then. She knew what I thought of what she was doing with her life. And I knew what she thought of what I had done with mine.’ She looked up at me. ‘We had grown so far apart . . .’ She trailed off, her eyes losing focus as she stared at the wall opposite.

‘No names, no mention of anyone in particular?’

She shook her head slowly, her stare still lost in the distance. ‘I don’t see that I can really help you. It was so long ago.’

‘Mori’s still around. Whatever happened to your daughter might be about to repeat itself. I’m sorry to remind you of all this, but anything you can tell me . . . anything Anna told you, might be useful.’

She sat there motionless. I watched the wheat outside the window swaying in the breeze. It looked like a desert sand dune, changing shape and staying the same.

‘The last time I spoke to her,’ she said dreamily, ‘she told me she was going to be on television, that she had been assigned a role as one of the dancing troupe in one of those programmes. She was so excited, she thought she had finally made it. It was like the first time she managed to tie her shoelaces – an unbridled pride in what she could do. She wanted me to know that it had worked out, that her career was taking off. Said it like she had proved me wrong.’ She spoke with a weariness that suggested she never shared the excitement. ‘That was the last time I spoke to her.’

‘She didn’t say which programme?’

She shrugged. ‘She probably did, but I dismissed it all as another of her fantasies. She was good at talking herself up. It’s what she did when she had done talking herself down. She had no grip on reality. She lived in a fantasy world.’

That’s why she wanted to go on TV, I thought. That’s where fantasies came true, where everything was possible. TV has no grip on reality either, which is why it’s obsessed with reality, like it’s a medicine the industry needs to try to wean itself off the fake, the false, the fantastic. Only instead of reality curing television, reality is infected by TV, it becomes fake and false itself. It changes what’s normal. We begin to think something is only truly real if it’s been on television. That, I guessed, was why so many wounded girls with low self-esteem like Anna thought that an appearance would make their lives so much better, so much more real.

‘Mori took Anna away from me.’ She was speaking quietly, almost to herself. ‘He was the one that took her away.’ She said it as if he had done more than simply drive her to Rome.

‘He took away her dream too,’ I said. ‘He’s the reason she never got taken on as a showgirl by the studios.’

‘How?’

I didn’t want to tell her about the compromising images, about the career the two had forged together. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ I said weakly. ‘But it was his fault her dream never came true.’

‘And did he kill her?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘No motive. She had made him money in the past, and he probably thought she would in the future.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Who, then?’

‘It’s possible the station’s owner had something to do with it. Or someone in his organisation. Your daughter knew about a few financial scams he was running and was threatening to make it all public.’

‘Like what?’

I gave her a brief outline of Di Angelo’s involvement with the inflated viewing figures and the inflated invoices. She shook her head as I was talking. ‘He’ll be at home in the Senate.’

‘There’s no evidence he was involved with Anna’s disappearance. He’s a major political player. People like that don’t get dragged into investigations, or if they do they’ll make out they’re victims of a political conspiracy. And he’s not just a politician, he’s still got that TV station behind him. It’s like he’s holding a nuclear weapon and his enemies have only water pistols. He can aim just where he wants. He’s as close as this country comes to an untouchable.’

She looked at me, shaking her head with an aggrieved smile on her face.

‘I’m afraid,’ I said slowly, ‘that it’s unlikely you’ll ever get a satisfactory answer to what happened to Anna. I keep asking questions, but the answer never seems to get any closer.’

Her face betrayed despair. She looked pained and angry at the same time as she looked up at me. ‘Grieving parents always say they never give up. That they’ll keep fighting. That’s what you always hear them say.’ She stared at the table and shook her head. ‘I can’t keep fighting any more. There’s no point. I’m no closer to knowing where my Anna is, or who put her there.’

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything I could say.

‘And sometimes,’ her voice was faltering slightly, ‘sometimes I think it’s my fault. I didn’t give her everything in life, I didn’t make her life here happy or loving. She left and went to Rome because she hated it here. She hated me too, I think.’

‘Why would she hate you?’ I asked, trying to reason her out of her melancholy.

‘She had good reason.’

‘Every daughter argues with her mother. That’s normal.’

‘This wasn’t normal. And it was my fault.’

I kept quiet, expecting her to explain.

She looked up at me, wanting to make eye contact before starting some sort of confession. ‘Her childhood wasn’t normal.’ She shut her eyes wearily as she drew breath. ‘There was a lot of poverty in the mountains in the seventies. Not much work and even less charity. I had no family and no income and a daughter to feed. A young woman in those conditions is prey to wolves, and there are plenty of those around these parts.’ She looked at me again, briefly, to show that she knew what she was saying, and to check that I knew too. ‘You never realise what you’ve become until hindsight shows you. You don’t know until it’s too late that a one-off will become a habit, or that you’ve got a reputation instead of a name.’

She was talking in code, but I thought I understood. And she was using words almost identical to Chiara Biondi to explain how she had slipped into the same profession.

‘It started with one married man who propositioned me one day. Said we could keep everything discreet. He would come here after Anna was in bed – she was just a baby – and would leave me elaborate presents. I told him we needed food not flowers, and he started saying he didn’t have the time to do the shopping, but that he wanted to look after us, so he would leave us some money.’ She shrugged, staring at the table again. ‘And before I knew it I was being paid. It seemed like a kindness at first. Someone who cared for us. It was only afterwards that I realised what was going on, when he had stopped coming and the money dried up. I still see him around occasionally, walking arm in arm with his wife as he pushes the grandchildren in a pram.

‘We needed the money, and so there were others after that. People began to know who I was and what I did. They knew I was desperate and vice versa. And as she was growing up, Anna realised what was happening. At school one day some children started bullying her and she came home crying, saying her friends had been saying horrible things about me. I tried to reassure her that I was still her mother, that she was my precious daughter, but even at that age she knew that she was the daughter of the village whore.’

Her language had taken on a tone of self-disgust. She blamed herself and her lifestyle for forcing Anna away, and even blamed herself for everything that happened afterwards.

‘And what about Anna’s father?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘He was just some boy who was here on holiday one summer. That was long before I needed the money, before . . . before all that.’

‘Which summer?’

She looked up to the window behind me. ‘Well, Anna was born in 1975, that spring, so it must have been the summer of 1974. He left me his address and we thought we would stay in touch, see each other again. But then I wrote to him that autumn, to tell him I was expecting, and all I got back was a letter from his lawyer.’

‘What did it say?’

‘That his client recognised no responsibilities or obligations and that I wasn’t to repeat slanderous allegations about him. After that letter I forgot all about him. I thought I would rather raise a child myself than go through the courts.’

‘Why? Surely it might have been a help?’

‘The courts can’t make a man love his child. If he wanted nothing to do with her, I wanted nothing to do with him.’

‘Have you still got that letter?’

‘I threw it in the bin.’

I didn’t even know myself why I was interested. I was curious, I suppose, nothing more. I was clutching at straws and hoping that one of the straws might lead to something solid.

‘Anna used to say that one day she would track down her father and make him proud of her. Make him realise his mistake in abandoning her. That was her dream.’ Her voice was faltering again. ‘That was all she wanted: for her father to look at her and love her. Even when she was grown up that was what she longed for. And she really thought it would happen. She didn’t realise that maybe that letter said all there was to say: that he wanted nothing to do with her. She still had this innocent idea that she could melt his heart. I think she spent her short life desperately trying to melt men’s hearts. That’s all she cared about, and she perhaps never realised, until it was too late, how callous they can be.’

‘Who was her father?’

‘He was called Fausto. Like I said, he was a law student who came here on holiday one summer.’

‘Fausto?’

She nodded, and the nod slowly turned into a disdainful shake of her grey head.

‘Not Fausto Biondi?’

‘How do you know that?’

I stood up quickly. She was watching me from the sofa, confused now.

‘What does it matter who her father was? He was never a part of her life.’ She was shuffling behind me now as I got up to leave.

‘Biondi,’ I said, standing in front of her now, ‘is the man who hired me. It’s his eighteen-year-old daughter, Simona, who’s gone missing.’

She looked at me, frowning in incomprehension. ‘Biondi?’

‘I’ve got to get back to Rome.’ I was in a hurry now, knowing that I’d finally found the link between the two stories. ‘Give me your number.’

She found a scrap of paper and a pen and slowly wrote down her number. I looked at it, thanked her and let myself out. I turned the key in the car and sped off towards the capital.

‘Any news?’ Biondi asked urgently when I announced myself at the intercom.

‘Plenty.’

‘What?’

‘Let me in.’

The gate swung open and I saw the front door of the villa open. Biondi was standing there with his hands on his hips, staring at me like a disappointed sports coach watching failing athletes.

‘What’s happened?’ he barked.

I looked at him and walked into the house. ‘Where can we talk?’

He led me through a passageway under the stairs that led to a sunny room overlooking a little garden.

‘What’s the news? Where’s Simona?’

‘The news is that she’s not your daughter,’ I said slowly. ‘She’s Chiara’s child. You and your wife adopted her to stave off a scandal. But she’s Chiara’s girl.’

Biondi was staring at the seagrass matting of the conservatory floor. He looked confused, his frown so genuine that I wondered what happens to secrets when they’re buried that long. Maybe they become secrets even to the person who keeps them, and when they finally come up for air, that person is suddenly surprised by the hidden truth.

‘Chiara’s daughter,’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Yes, technically she is.’

‘Technically?’

‘But she’s always been our child.’

‘Grandchild.’

He looked up from the floor and fixed his eyes on me. ‘What does it matter to you? Daughter, granddaughter – she’s missing. She’s in danger, abducted by some man we’ve never met. We want her back. I hired you to find her, not to nose around in our family’s past.’

‘Never met?’

‘What?’

‘You said “some man we’ve never met”. She’s with someone called Fabrizio Mori.’ I passed him the snap of Mori. ‘Remember him?’

He stared at the photo as if it were bringing back bad memories. He didn’t say anything.

‘Tell me how you met him.’

He passed back the photo, looking at me and dropping his head like he had given in. ‘I made a mistake in my youth. A moment of madness. I had only been married for a year.’ He picked up a petite watering can and started watering the plants on the windowsills. ‘I was on holiday in the mountains with a couple of friends. We were in our early twenties, we were carefree. We just wanted some fun.’

‘And you found it?’

He put down the watering can, looked at me and then sat down. He motioned to the cane armchair next to him. His head was thrown back and he was looking at the glass ceiling, talking quietly. ‘There was a girl there who had a house. Her parents were away, or dead, I can’t remember. She had the house to herself and had a few friends staying. We just drank, and played cards and guitars and partied. It was just a few days of fun.’

‘This was when? Back in the seventies?’

‘Right. Didn’t think anything more about it. I got a letter from the girl once saying she was pregnant. I thought it was a wind-up.’ He exhaled derisively at his own dishonesty. ‘Or maybe I didn’t, I don’t know. I got a lawyer friend to write a stiff letter and never heard from her again. That was that, as far as I was concerned.’

‘Until Mori showed up?’

He looked up at me. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘You hired me. It’s my job.’

He nodded regretfully, as if he would rather have lost Simona than face his dishonest past. ‘Mori rolled up here in ninety-one. He asked for an appointment with me in my office. I thought he was just another client, but as he sat there talking I could see my whole life slipping away. Until that moment I had almost forgotten that girl existed. I had never heard of her, never even knew her name. I had my own life here, my own wife and daughter and . . . I didn’t want all that disturbed by a complete stranger. Everything I had worked hard for was about to dissolve: respectability, social standing, marital status. Here was this disreputable rogue who knew he had something over me, who knew he could hold me to ransom.’

‘What was the ransom?’

‘He never called it that. He simply said Anna needed specialist medical care. He came out with some mystery illness and said she could be cured if she had the funds to fly to America. We both knew it was bull, but I went along with it. I wrote him out a large cheque there and then.’

‘And he came back for more?’

‘Sure. I remember the terror of those months. Every time I went into the office I dreaded the mention of his name. My secretary would say that Fabrizio Mori had made an appointment and I would want to hide under the desk. It wasn’t just that I knew I would be a few hundred thousand lire poorer at the end of the day. It was the constant fear that my family life would be ruined, that he could take away from me everything I held dear. And he did it all with a smile and fake charm. There were never any threats or raised voices. He had this veneer of friendliness, and that was worse. He made out he was my friend, doing me a favour. And yet, underneath it all, there was always menace. There was always the perceptible sense that, if I didn’t give him what he wanted, he would willingly stop being my friend.’

‘How long did it go on for?’

‘For months and months. He was coming in every week or so. Taking chunks of my life savings or my inheritance each time. He had a complete hold over me. I didn’t realise it at the time, but he was my master. He controlled my destiny. I felt I had to give him whatever he wanted. Every time there was another story: Anna was recovering but needed one more round of treatment. She was stranded in New York and needed the money for a flight home. She needed to buy certain medicines that were available only in London. It was all a charade.’ He was shaking his head, smiling ruefully at the mistakes of his youth. ‘I knew it was a charade. He knew it was. But we went along with it.’

‘What happened in the end?’

‘My secretary realised what was going on. She’s still with me, bless her. A loyal, loyal employee. She recognised him for what he was and had the courage to confront me. Told me that that man had no business in our office and that whatever power he had over me was imaginary. I’m embarrassed to say I broke down. Told her everything. It was as if a spell was broken.’

‘What about Mori?’

‘I took away his only hold over me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I decided to stop keeping Anna secret. I told him to bring her round to my office. He started saying she was having chemo in the States but by then the game was over. The next day she was ringing the doorbell to the flat we used to live in. I went down to see her and . . .’ He was looking at me with unfocused eyes like he was recalling a distant image. ‘I saw her and she was so beautiful and young, she was smiling at me as if the only thing she wanted in the entire world was to be loved. And I took her in my arms and held her. And we both cried a bit. I realised all at once the terrible, terrible mistake I had made. I had shunned her all her life and here she was, desperate just to be held by her own father.’

‘You invited Anna inside?’

‘I did. We walked in together, arm in arm. She was so happy, she was almost dancing up the drive.’

‘And you?’

‘I felt relieved in some way. When you’ve kept a secret for so long, you’re almost relieved when it’s over. I was shot of Mori who had been draining me of money. And I had met my daughter. It felt like I was finally being honest, like I was reconciled to everything in the past.’

‘And you thought your wife would be too?’

‘She wasn’t there that day. Anna and I were alone and just talked for hours. Talked about her life and mine. About everything, really. She was so young and pretty and she didn’t seem to have any recriminations about the fact that I had abandoned her mother. We were curled up together on the sofa, strangers who were immediately intimate.’ He was staring out of the window now, remembering it all. ‘She left that afternoon and I begged her to come round the next day, which of course she did. From then on she was always here, she spent most of her time here. It was her home.’

‘And your wife and daughter, how did they feel about it all?’

He moved the top of his head from side to side. ‘Giovanna was . . .’ he paused, ‘shocked. Shocked and angry. I had betrayed her. So . . . yes, it was a shock. She took a long time to adjust.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘She and Anna became good friends almost immediately. It was like they had a sibling bond from the start.’

‘She didn’t feel usurped?’

‘What do you mean, “usurped”?’ he asked angrily.

‘I mean, she was an only daughter, her daddy’s special girl. And suddenly, just as she’s at a vulnerable age, a rival rolls up for her daddy’s love.’

He shook his head. ‘They were great friends.’

Biondi looked to me like the sort of solipsist who wouldn’t even know if he had upset someone else. He was happy with his lot and wouldn’t have understood why some other people weren’t.

‘What’s any of this got to do with Simona’s disappearance?’

‘I told you before, she’s with Mori,’ I said impatiently. ‘I’m trying to work out who he is. And what he wants with her.’

‘And?’

‘If he’s successfully touched you for money in the past, it’s quite possible he sees you as his cash till in the future. He may be wanting a real ransom this time.’

I looked at Biondi. I wondered whether Mori had already contacted him for money to return Simona. It seemed unlikely – I thought it more likely Mori was heading to Di Angelo – but it wasn’t impossible.

‘Has he been in touch with you?’

Biondi shook his head. ‘Why would Mori be interested in Simona?’

I watched him closely again, trying to work out how deep he had buried another of his secrets. His face exuded a sort of arrogance that seemed to eclipse any self-knowledge.

‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that Mori’s interested in her parentage.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Simona’s existence proves something. Proves that Mario Di Angelo was making millions out of fiddling viewing figures.’

Biondi put his head backwards, like he thought I was talking rubbish. He looked at me down the length of his thin nose trying to figure out what I was saying.

‘It might have helped if you’d told me at the outset that you weren’t her real parents.’

He shut his eyes, still trying to keep out the past. ‘I had no idea it was of any consequence. She was missing. It didn’t seem important who her real parents were.’ As he was talking, he seemed to be convincing himself of something. ‘We’re her parents,’ he said weakly.

We sat like that for a minute or two in silence. We could hear the traffic outside and the loud radio of workmen on some scaffolding.

‘We did it for the best,’ he said in a faraway voice. He sounded softer, and sadder now. ‘Poor Chiara. She was only eighteen. It would have been a life sentence to expect her to bring up a young child on her own. She would never have had a life of her own, let alone a family. She made a mistake. We didn’t want her to pay for it for ever.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe we made a mistake too. But when you’ve lied once, you have to keep lying, and it gets bigger and larger until there’s nothing you can do but let it take on a life of its own. We thought we were doing the best for Simona. Giving her a loving family life instead of leaving her with a young, single mother who barely knew how to lay the table, let alone bring up a daughter. The only mistake we made was loving her too much.’

‘And lying to her,’ I said.

He turned quickly and stared at me. ‘Sometimes loving someone means you have to lie to them. That’s the way to protect them.’

‘No one needs protection from the truth.’

‘Of course they do. Everyone does.’

We slipped back into resentful silence. He was beginning to seem like a pathological liar, someone who couldn’t tell the truth to his wife or granddaughter, let alone an investigator. But he said something that made sense in a strange way: he had abandoned one daughter and suddenly had the chance to adopt another. It was as if he could make up for the mistakes of the past rather than repeat them. It was a chance for redemption, he said. To do the right thing. It still seemed like just another deception to me, but I could see how it might have made sense to him somehow. From having been neglectful, he became overprotective.

‘Especially because,’ he swallowed hard, ‘that year Anna went missing. I was just getting to know her and suddenly she was gone. I had a few months with her, only a few months.’

He was full of self-pity. It sounded like he felt more sorry for himself than for Anna Sartori.

‘What happened to her?’ I asked bluntly.

‘To Anna?’ He shrugged, shaking his head slowly, his gaze fixed in the distance. ‘Mori happened to her. He dragged her round the clubs and society soirées, using her to ensnare unwitting, weak men. Then he blackmailed them the way he had blackmailed me. That’s what he did, all he knew how to do. She didn’t know what was going on at first. She thought she had to put herself about to get her photograph in those silly magazines. She didn’t realise he was getting paid to keep her out of them. She threatened to go public, denounce him for extortion, so he dealt with her.’ He rolled his head onto one shoulder and looked at me.

It sounded improbable. Mori had already been denounced for extortion. Biondi probably only wanted to believe he was involved because he held a grudge against the hustler who had taken so much of his money.

‘That’s why I’m worried for Simona,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s as if history is repeating itself. First Anna and now Simona.’

‘I’ll find her,’ I said, standing up. ‘I don’t think Mori’s a murderer. And I think he needs Simona alive.’

Biondi just nodded, bringing his shoes under his knees and pushing himself out of his chair. We walked to the door in silence.

As he held it open for me, he just nodded like there was nothing more to say.