A Festival Wife's blog

Turn left and three streets up from the end of the Passagia, the Licinian Baths are tucked into the face of the mountainside where the Romans widened a natural crevice in the living rock, allowing the hot mineral springs to flow from the beating heart of the earth into granite-lined pools.    

Named after the Emperor Licinius, a 4th Century soak enthusiast who erected elaborate bathhouses around the empire, the original stone pools are still there, worn smooth by antiquity's bunions. The baths of San Lorenzo sit beneath the  vaulted ceilings of a Romanesque building put up by the municipality in the 1880's with separate entrances for women to the left and men to the right. Visitors of both sexes may avail themselves of the healthful benefits of the sulfur-rich waters on alternate days. Wednesday was reserved for men-only.

I gained entrance for the equivalent of a quid to the dank, dusky interior of the men's baths where a sulfurous pungency stings the nostrils. Mingled with the sharp, sweet smell of eucalyptus, it is not entirely unpleasant but acrid enough to cause me to cough several times as I entered the changing room. A small, compact young man, nude but for a towel around his shoulders, glanced up at the sound. For a fearful moment I thought he was Ivan, Ari Safta's Serbian hitman, but the resemblance was only fleeting and I was relieved to see I was mistaken.

I handed over a few lira to the old bald guy who always seemed to be on duty. Crenellated as a Doric column with wrinkles rippling from the neckline of his t-shirt to the top of his freckled pate, he has been there at least since the Punic Wars. He handed me a towel, a sort of loincloth, a pair of green plastic slippers and a steel locker key attached to a safety pin.

I had come here once a long time ago with Rassi. It was his custom on Wednesday mornings to have an early workout at the Medici gym and afterwards take the waters. It was like him to be at once very futuristic in his outlook - the Internet, wireless, etcetera - and at the same time, atavistic in his attachment to things ancient and traditional. He was every bit the Euro-past and the Euro-future.

Was Count Rassi inside? I asked. The old guy never spoke, as far as I could remember. Just pointed, nodded, shook his head laterally, shrugged or otherwise communicated via hand gestures. This time he nodded. I quickly undressed, donned the loincloth and pushed through the door to a corridor leading to the baths.

A row of small chambers lined the corridor, each one containing a massage table upon which, one after another, masseurs pummeled and kneaded their victims. They offered a ferocious style of massage here, applied mostly by Russians or Czechs. Amidst the slapping of calloused hands against flesh I peered into the rooms searching for Rassi. I hoped I had arrived in time. Every shadow held the lurking figure of the terrible Ivan. I thought to myself: Ivan the Terrible, and smiled through my nervousness.

I jumped when somebody touched my shoulder. Bloody hell, I swore, finding the old guy standing there holding my locker key. I had left it in the locker. I took it from him, expressed my gratitude, turned to go, and felt the tapping on my elbow again. He pointed to the key, and then pointed to my loincloth. I was supposed to affix the key to my loincloth with the safety pin. I performed this little task and turned to go once more, but he again tapped my elbow and this time pointed at my wrist. I'd left my watch on, the Tag Heuer that Angie had given me. The waters would ruin it.

I caught sight of Ivan through the porthole window as I followed the hoary attendant back through the corridor to the locker room. As we reached the door Ivan was doffing his shirt, tossing towel around his neck, leaning over to untie his shoes.

I halted, waved the old guy on and gestured to never mind about the watch. He waggled his furrowed brow at me to say that I was crazy and went on into the changing room. I hurried back through the corridor, turned a corner and entered the pool room.

Pentangular shaped, each outside corner of the room held a cold pool. Three pools formed the center, each one hotter than the other, with a fountain in the center sculpted from the mineral-encrusted stalagmite of living rock, out of which pulsed the mineral spring in a misty cloud. Except for a few bulbs burning in wall sconces, the room's illumination came from a colored glass cupola in the ceiling above, filtering sunlight down into a warm sepia-tint glow. A couple of dozen men at most were basking in the waters, with the majority of heads bobbing around in the lukewarm and medium pools.

Danger was the last thing you might imagine in this place.

I found Rassi steeping in the third pool, the hottest, reclining with his head against the wall closest to the source of the spring, eyes closed in thermal meditation. To get to him I would be forced to wade into the waters. I figured I could withstand a nasty scalding I popped in quickly, gave him the word, and popped right out.

There was no time to waste, either. With the killer Bosnian approaching, Rassi must be warned. I had no choice but to plunge in, holding my left hand over my head to save my watch from getting wet. Volcanic waters direct from the Earth's molten core flayed my skin until I was not much more in mind, body and spirit than a bloody boiled potato.

"You look very silly," was how he greeted me through half-closed eyes. "To whom are you waving?"

"You have to get out of here now, right this minute, Pete, and I'm serious."

"First you punch me in my nose," he said, "now you want to kick me out of my bath when I've only just got here. I don't understand you, Henry."

I said I was very sorry for everything, especially for socking him in the nose the night before at the Tre Fiori. But I quickly explained to him that Safta was extremely pissed off now that Rassi had pulled out of the deal and that he had sent somebody to kill him.

"He wants you dead, Pete. And the guy who's going to do it is here now."

"Rubbish," Rassi laughed.

"I mean here, in the baths."

"You think I am frightened of Ari Safta? Well, I am ready for him." He held up his right fist. "It's still pretty good, eh?"

I confessed he could pack a wallop, but fists would be no defense against the sharp steel Ari Safta's henchman was carrying. Rassi was unconcerned.

"I have been thinking, Henry. Thinking a lot, which is why I like to come here. You said some things last night. Maybe they were said in haste. I have to believe that. You don't know my full history. That is not your fault. My history is not completely known by many people. I have decided that you should be among the ones who know."

In addition to tiring of holding my hand over my head to keep my watch dry, my scalded corpus was about ready for re-upholstery and on top of it all I was anxious, to say the least, that Ivan and his knife would find us. But Rassi was unflappable and un-moveable. So I rested my arm and my watch on the pool's stone rim, keeping an eye out while Rassi talked.

First, he confirmed what I guessed: he had called Jeffries right after our calamitous dinner and tipped him to the fact that he was pulling out of the deal. That was how the story came out in Variety, on the new Website they'd put up. That's where Nora and Charles had seen it, and probably Safta as well.

Next, he declared that even if he was pulling his money out of the Everest group, he still intended to produce a movie - maybe the same boxing movie with the same director - "our director friend," he called him.

"But I first have to talk about it with Nora," he said. "You see, I know that what you said last night was not true. Nora is not in love with our director friend. I believe she is in love with me and she would leave her husband at the right time, but we will see about that soon."

"You've discussed this with Nora?"

"Not yet, but I will. I know because I read a story she wrote last night on the Internet. Everything was quite clear."

It must have been the article on the new Catherine Breillat film that she had screened two days before - she had told me that she and Charles had disagreed about its meaning, that it was not so much a repetition of Breillat's porno obsession as in "Baise Moi" but really a paean to true love, and that Nora was going to set her love straight in her next piece.  Again, a love note to Charles had been intercepted and misinterpreted by Rassi.

"I will invite her to the closing night of the festival and we will talk then. But that is not why you wanted me to pull out of the deal. You wanted me out because you were concerned that I would be embarrassed by disclosures regarding my finances, correct?"

"Sure, Pete," I said, the sweat rolling down my forehead. "Can we just get the hell out of here before -"

"I am not going anywhere until you have heard my story."

A fresh eruption of the mineral spring sent a geyser of steaming water out of the rock wall, wrapping Pietro Rassi and me in a sulphurous mist as we retreated into the hot waters of the Licinian Baths. The San Lorenzo Film Festival seemed suddenly far away as Rassi related the crucial details of his life - a life upon which so many troubled lives had come to rely - and I hoped the billowing clouds of steam might conceal us from the killer who was at that very moment stalking Rassi. 

                                                                                   * * *

As a boy, Pietro Rassi eagerly looked forward to visiting his grandfather in San Lorenzo, where he was free to gambol in the narrow streets and on the beach with the kids from the village. It was a welcome change from the big rambling apartment off the Piazza Navona in Rome where the boy was raised by servants and attended an exclusive private school nearby. Young Pietro's father was absent most of the time and his mother rarely emerged from her room, tended by the servants on her perpetual sickbed.

Life was more exciting in San Lorenzo. The elder Rassi would often take his grandson to construction sites where the workers played with the boy and let him dig in the dirt with a child-sized shovel side by side with the crews.

He was sent away after his father's death to an elite Swiss school where, lodging with other rich and neglected boys from troubled mansions and dynasties, he was able to escape the loneliness that had shrouded his life until that point. In the clean altitudes of the Alps he emerged from the shadows of his parents' inattention into the light of the Swiss mountains and the bright cascade an awakening intellect.

Rassi was a bright, industrious boy with a talent for mathematics and a thirst for reading; teachers went out of their way to introduce him to music, art, and a world of culture that he quickly made his own.=

When he wasn't in the library, he was on the field or in the gym, for he had also discovered his athletic abilities and excelled in skiing, swimming and especially boxing. One afternoon as he was jogging the track surrounding the football field, he noticed a man observing him. From that first day, the man was always there, standing, watching. He had never seen him before, but the man seemed to know him.

On weekends, the boys were allowed to visit the village and spend their allowances on sweets and hot cocoa and ice cream. There was a little café where they would always go. On this particular weekend, the same man was there, waiting for him. He sat down next to young Rassi and began to talk to him. He was very correct and polite, speaking Italian with the familiar accent of someone from Rome.

The man said he was indeed from Rome, but had also lived in San Lorenzo for a little while, too. And since the war he had lived in this village nearby the Swiss school. He said he had worked for Rassi's grandfather, that he had known Giuseppe Rassi very well. When he heard that the grandson was here in the school, he had to come by to say hello. He bought the boy a hot cocoa and they talked about their favorite things in San Lorenzo.

"It was a place that had become enshrined for me, in a way, a memory of fun and fantasy," Rassi said. "It was the place where I went in my mind to find happiness."

I thought of Charles and Nora and the places they visited in their imaginations seeking happiness - from Antigua to Zanzibar - when across the clouded room, I caught a sudden glimpse of Ivan, the man sent to kill Rassi, wading into the lukewarm pool and looking around. He had not yet spotted us.

"Perhaps we can finish your story later?" I suggested, but Rassi was just getting started.

"The next weekend the man brought his own son David," Rassi continued. David was Rassi's age. He was going to the village school and it seems they were studying many of the same things. Together they went for a walk around the village before Rassi had to return to his school.

While his classmates saw their parents on weekend visits, Rassi received no visits from anybody, so this man - whose name was Judah Halevi - became a welcome figure in his life.

Halevi obtained permission from Rassi's school for him to visit their home for dinner and overnight stays. Weekends with the family became a regular occasion, meeting every Saturday morning and taking walks around the village, hikes into the hills, a tastier dinner than anything served at the school dining room, and then Rassi would stay overnight. He and David Halevi would talk long into the morning about the books they were reading, their memories of San Lorenzo, and their dreams for the future.

Except for the dull summer months he spent with his mother in Rome, the Halevi's became the only real family he had during the three years he was away at school. One day, Judah Halevi told Rassi about a book he had, a very important book concerning his family that he would show him, but first he had to promise not tell anyone about it. The promise was duly given.

The next weekend, after supper with the family, Halevi brought out a leather-bound ledger. Recorded in its pages were names and numbers - the complete record of property signed over by the Jews of San Lorenzo to Giuseppe Rassi. The book contained nearly two hundred names. Some were employees of the now-defunct Rassi Construction Company, some were simply San Lorenzo Jews who had hurriedly signed over their house deeds and business accounts to Giuseppe Rassi in return for a slip of paper, a receipt that some survivors of those terrible years retained, and others had misplaced. Others had not survived the Nazi terror. Still more were unaccounted for in the postwar confusion.

What was beyond doubt was the fact that in a certain Swiss bank, co-mingled in multiple accounts with the Rassi Construction Company's own assets and owed to the people whose names were recorded in Halevi's leather-bound ledger - was a sizable fortune.

"Of course," said Rassi, "to make sense of this would not be easy. It would take time to sort everything out, maybe years and years. Someone needed to trace the titles of houses, stores and plots of land and restore the property to their rightful owners. Someone needed to track down the people who were alive, confirm the deaths of the deceased, contact the potential heirs and evaluate their claims. Who could do this - the banks? No, they would drag their feet, happy to be collecting interest on these old accounts and confiscating them when they went unclaimed. Lawyers? Who had the money to pay them? When I understood what this man was telling me, I wished I could snap my fingers and put things right. But it would take money to hire accountants and press claims in court. My family was, to be honest, quite broke at that time. My father had ruined us, you know."

Rassi refreshed himself with a splash of hot water, eyes closed, his face dripping. He could not see Ivan shifting from the lukewarm pool to the cold bath, preparing himself for the next hottest pool. I watched him gingerly test the water, pull his foot out and try again. For a muscular killer, he was behaving in an inordinately prissy manner when it came to getting his tootsies toasted. I had no doubt, even so, that his innate violence would overcome any delicacy when business was to be done.

Again I tried to suggest we move on and continue telling his tale elsewhere. Rassi ignored me; he was bent on the recital of his life and deeds, his Latinate soul engaged unswervingly in the primal act of confession.

Halevi told him that they had approached a few attorneys and found one or two who had agreed to take on the case for a percentage of what they regained. But who could trust that in the end they wouldn't take the biggest part of the money, claiming compensation for time and expenses, and return only a fraction of what was due? They did not want the funds to be whittled away in court battles dragging on year after year, which everyone knows is the true business of lawyers. So they backed away from this idea, pondering other courses of action.

It was crucial, first and foremost, to gain the cooperation of the Rassi family. The Rassi fortunes were mixed up with everything else. Separating them would require intricate financial surgery, as well as resuscitation for the assets that had been lying comatose in dozens of inactive accounts. It had to be a joint effort; any opposition from the Rassi side would sink the entire effort and all would be lost.

Halevi was a trained accountant, however, and fully capable of sorting out the numbers. His proposition to young Pietro Rassi, the sixteen-year old heir to the entire Rassi estate, was this: if he would agree to uphold the promise to give everything back fairly, the promise made by his grandfather when he took on the Jews' property during the war for safekeeping, then Halevi would work with Pietro to piece together the great puzzle.

This would be no pure act of charity on Rassi's part. Coinciding with the repayment of everything owed - hopefully with some interest -to the displaced Jews of San Lorenzo, Rassi would also be rebuilding his own family's fortune with Halevi's assistance. Halevi would serve as Rassi's teacher, introduce him to the methods of high finance and investment banking, show him how the cycles of world markets turned, how to decode the fluctuations of currencies, how regional politics and global weather patterns factored into the equation, how the price of tin in Bolivia affected the stock market in Tokyo. While making Rassi honest, Halevi would also make Rassi rich.

The vision appealed to Rassi's sense of himself, which had been shaken by the teasing by his classmates about his lack of a father. And when he understood what lay at the center of the cloud of scandal that surrounded his father's demise, he saw no other way to cleanse himself from the stain of his father's crime. He agreed to Halevi's proposition and in this way, at an age when most young men are thinking no further than football games and teenage flirtations, Rassi was setting forth on his life's work.

Halevi guided him in his studies when he entered the University, picking out the best courses in economics and calculus, making sure that the professors were foremost in their fields. At the same time, Rassi and the elder Halevi together pored over Red Cross refugee documents, traveled around Europe tracing nearly all of San Lorenzo's wartime diaspora.

They worked out precisely the amounts given over to Giuseppe Rassi, and by whom, cleaned up the debts incurred by Rassi's father, tracked all of the accounts set up by the old man, and invested whatever assets they uncovered in a series of maneuvers that later proved to be brilliant.

Catching the rising tide of the economy from its nadir in the early Seventies, riding out the boom and bust of the Eighties, and managing with enormous cash reserves to capture the great bull market of the Nineties, Halevi and Rassi created a great financial fund, paying out dividends to those who had "invested" during wartime, cresting over the years into the new Millennium.

The fund lifted its beneficiaries out of economic precariousness into a very comfortable life. With the benefits of the fund, however, came responsibilities. It was an essential condition of inclusion in the fund that no one receiving checks should spend the money in an extravagant or flashy way; no one bought fancy cars or expensive houses. Instead, children were sent to good schools, mortgages were paid off, medical expenses covered, businesses purchased, family trusts set up to secure the well-being of generations to come.

If Europe in the latter half of the 20th Century was the story of transcending the Europe of the first half, then Rassi was its living incarnation. The Count had acted nobly, earning his inherited title. All of the rumors, all of my preconceptions were swept aside, in my mind. I truly admired him at that moment.

"So you are a hero," I said to him, slightly in awe.

"I would not say that," Rassi demurred. "I prefer to say simply that I am a businessman who successfully manages other people's money."

Rassi did not say how much he had personally garnered from managing the fund, but I knew how he lived and it was in the manner of someone who never had to worry about money. One particularly important aspect of his wealth was that it had allowed Rassi to re-purchase Villa Il Cielo, which had fallen into sad disrepair under absentee owners. He was able to restore it to its former glory. All of the authentic architectural details, stripped by vandals after the war, were painstakingly researched and redone by craftsmen, many of them elderly workmen who had created the original paneling, etched glass and stonemasonry. The original landscaping was restored. Even the cable car machinery was put back in order, as best as could be expected.

Meanwhile, other changes were happening in the village below.

"I took a different course," David Halevi said to Angie later during the interviews for her documentary. He confirmed for us the facts of Rassi's story, as did others that Leticia led us to, including her cousin Lorenzo who had bought his business with his share of the fund.

David Halevi's personal story - how the elder Halevi pushed young Rassi as if he were his own blood, while neglecting to notice at the same time how his son David was pursuing a divergent road - was edited out of the final version of Angie's documentary because it was a tangent that detracted from the film's narrative thrust. But this part of the story was crucial to what happened later.

The Swiss jeweler who sheltered the Halevi family during the Nazi occupation had noticed young David's curiosity in the jeweler's workshop. He had shown him how to fashion things out of silver and gold. It turned out that David had a talent for drawing and design that flowered under the tutelage of the Swiss master craftsmen.

This odd, but serendipitous dual mentoring was an ironic outcome of the confusion of a war that had destroyed vast numbers of lives. Now, in this case of Jew teaching Gentile and Gentile teaching Jew, multiple lives were reconstructed in ways no one could have predicted.

At first, David Halevi had resented the attention his father was paying to the other boy. But that resentment was set aside when Rassi helped him to establish his own jewelry business, helping him buy a building on the main tourist street in San Lorenzo's Old Town, and making sure that he had enough money to launch the business in the early years. It became a great success and they grew to be close friends.

"I was best man at David's wedding," said Rassi. "We wept together at his father's funeral. He had been as much a father to me as he had been to his own son. Afterward, we decided to form a partnership in order to continue his work but in a different manner."

Ivan was now emerging from the second hot pool and moving to the cold bath. I was desperate for Rassi to finish his story, because the young man of murderous intent would be upon us any moment. Rassi, in his laconic manner, would not be rushed.

"You have to understand, okay?" Rassi said, trying to command my attention, "With David Halevi I was in complete agreement about the business, how to conduct the fund. We were of the same mind, he and I. We knew what we were going to do and what the financial objectives were."

They had reached a point several years ago where the original fund had served its purpose to the satisfaction of all.  Rassi and his partner then embarked on the task of converting the fund into a pure investment vehicle open to anyone.

The revitalized fund allowed many of the original members to exit, if they wished, with a final disbursement. Those who wanted to re-invest in the new fund could do so, but at a higher level of risk. The new fund required putting the money to work for a higher rate of return in hedge funds, junk bonds, short-term currency bets, investing in all of the new technologies including the Internet and wireless broadband and even - yes, for the first time, the movie business - although we know now that Halevi, Rassi's equal partner in the fund, had not agreed to the latter move.

"I regarded the fund still, essentially, as money dedicated to a higher purpose and Pietro seemed to be forgetting that," Halevi told Angie, with some notes of the childhood resentment creeping into his voice. "The money was there because of people who had been wronged. That needed to be respected. I did not see my partner's investment in movies as respectful of their memory. We all know what the movie business is about. And then when I heard who his partners were, well..."

So that was the heated argument we had overheard on the day we ran into Rassi at Halevi's shop. In the later inquest, some questions were asked and some theories advanced concerning the partnership between Rassi and Halevi; Halevi had much to gain from any accident that might befall his partner. But this line of inquiry - accompanied by some anti-Semitic whisperings - was wide of the mark. Greater evidence pointed in another direction, particularly one that was right now approaching the edge of the hot pool in the Licinian Baths in which Rassi and I were standing.

Ivan touched the water with a toe, drew back his foot and gazed through the steam at us with his reptilian eyes. He slithered down and inserted a foot in the water as far as the ankle, once again withdrawing with a pained frown.

While Rassi continued talking, describing how he intended to widen his investment in the entertainment business and why, I was thinking: perhaps we were safe. Ivan's Balkan hide, for all of its vaunted toughness, couldn't take the heat!

But then I was alarmed to see our executioner balanced on the rim of the pool, his legs immersed up to the knee, the loincloth gathered at his crotch to reveal a glint of metal against the pinkish patch of his hip: his locker key or the knife? He was on the verge of slipping all the way into the pool.

"If you don't come out of here with me right now," I sputtered to Rassi. "I'm going to go and call the police myself."

 Rassi glanced at Ivan and shrugged. He seemed to believe himself shielded by some higher power: God protected the Count and the nobleman protected his retainers from his hilltop castle. But in fact he was naked to the skin and literally up to his neck in hot water, and here I was - the only thing standing between him and a sharp blade in the ribs!

Panicked, I began wading furiously to the other side of the pool in hopes of summoning help. Halfway, my feet slipped on the slick rock bottom and I went under, gasping, hyperventilating, water choking my lungs.

I thought: this is it - a heart attack. Suddenly the old bath attendant was hauling me up by the arm and out of the pool. Like a beached halibut I was plopped down on the stone floor and he was pointing at my watch, holding his wrist up to his ear - was my watch still working?

It was and just as miraculously, Ivan was gone, the little hitman utterly vanished from the room. Rassi was now bending over me, his mournful doggy face lined with concern.

"I think you need a little rest," he said, "and perhaps to stop drinking for a few days, Henry."

I had survived and so had Rassi. But was it a stay of execution - or only a reprieve?

NEXT WEEK: THE LAST BLOODY REEL

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