A Festival Wife's blog

A chilly wind sweeping off San Lorenzo Bay the next to last day of the Festival seemed to send a stern message: Winter had held off as long as it could in deference to the gathered cineastes, film distributors and assorted merrymakers, and now needed to get on with its seasonal business. So the flannel sky and drop in temperature served to hasten exits from San Lorenzo of those attendees who had completed their film sales and home video buys, or seen all the movies they'd come to see.

At an afternoon luncheon for the visiting Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina (Sister City to San Lorenzo), I ran into Adam Jeffries, our friend from Variety, and he was an unhappy man.

Jeffries complained bitterly that Charles Mitchell had not called him even once after he'd given him that tip on Everest Entertainment and the Luxembourg tax deal. He was afraid Mitchell was ripping off his story about money-laundering in the movie business. I assured him that Mitchell was not even writing a story - without, of course, disclosing that I'd had a hand in suppressing it.

         And so I had, it seemed. The incident at the Licinian Baths, where Safta's henchman Ivan appeared to be stalking Count Rassi, looked like nothing else but a false alarm. I felt ridiculous, to say the least. No one was out to kill Rassi at all. This was simply my overactive imagination fed by Delfont's cloak-and-dagger, international-man-of-mystery nonsense.

         To set my mind at ease, and in hopes of settling accounts, I hurried over to the Old Port to talk to Safta ("Ari's the one to talk to about money"), and was surprised to find Slip 33 empty. The harbormaster's office informed me that Safta's yacht had weighed anchor hours ago.

Perhaps it was not actually the murderous Ivan I'd seen at the baths, as I assumed Safta's deadly assistant had shipped out with his master. In any case, it looked as if all threats had sailed with the tide, and that was good news. The bad news: there went any chance of my getting paid.

         I searched for Leticia that night, calling her mobile phone, trying her at her house, leaving messages and even canvassing the maids' quarters downstairs in the catacombs of the Medici Hotel. Her absence was odd because we were nearing the end of the festival; with the rooms emptying of festival types who could no longer justify extended stays on their expense accounts, she usually had more time for us to be together.

I tried to think of something I might have said, or done, but could think of no offense, no unkind word. We men stand impotent before such impenetrable mysteries and are left to howl at the moon in wolfpacks, or to drink alone in certain bars where lack of charm or sanitary conditions pose an effective barrier to trespass by the distaff race.

And so it was to the Little Medici bar that I repaired for a couple of stiff ones in the silent but respectful company of my fellow fools.

* * *

On the festival's last day, I awoke missing Leticia intensely and resolved to confront the situation directly and honestly. I had to set her straight about everything - Rassi, Angie, the whole kit and kaboodle.

I showered and shaved and checked my tuxedo that was hanging in the closet ready for the evening's gala, and then sat down on the balcony to consume the poached eggs and toast and the foreign newspapers that came with the room service tray.

I had barely glanced at the front page of Mitchell's newspaper after a few bites of toast, when I nearly choked. A center-column story dominated page one with Mitchell's byline under the headline:

"Arms Dealers Shooting For Box Office Hits"

The sub-headline was equally arch:

"Coming soon to a theater near you: Movies financed by the same people who brought you Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor and the Middle East."

The dateline was San Lorenzo and the article, uncovering a new "trend" in international film finance, keyed in on Everest Entertainment and Ari Safta's role in securing financing for movies from his brother Eddie, the international arms dealer.

Lacking sufficient facts to truly nail his subject, Mitchell had laced his story with tasty movie industry anecdotes, scary sound bites from his spook friends and stern warnings from government officials and international law enforcement experts regarding the dangers to world stability posed by the prospect of the merger of the global trade in arms with the entertainment industry.

He'd laid on lashings of local color, of course ("While the sun shines down upon the terrace of the Hotel Medici, festival ground zero, where the stars, directors and producers shmooze and pitch their latest movie projects, darker schemes are being hatched aboard sleek sea-going command posts docked at the resort town's Old Port...") in order to justify his continuing assignment to this crucial news event. A nice embellishment was the diagram tracing the flow of money from one little box to another; at one end was a box labeled "munitions manufacturers," at the other was "Hollywood" and in the middle was "Luxembourg Tax Deal" and "Safta Brothers."

Mitchell had heeded my wishes regarding Count Rassi. Nowhere was he mentioned. What he'd done, though, was actually worse, much worse. Instead of mentioning Rassi by name, Mitchell alluded several times in the piece to a deal involving a well-known director that was "widely-reported during the festival in the industry trades" which had fallen through.

"Sources close to the deal say that the financier pulled out of the deal when he learned of the producers' connections to the arms trade, causing the deal to collapse. When contacted, the financier declined to describe the reasons for his withdrawal from the project, but confirmed that he was aware of allegations concerning Safta's involvement in the arms trade.

The financier could only be Rassi. Anyone reading between the lines could easily surmise that Rassi had spilled the beans and was Mitchell's primary source for the article.

One other small bit of information, detectable only by reading further between the lines, lay embedded in Mitchell's piece. It was unlikely that anyone but I and one other person could ever manage to pick it up, the one oddly phrased sentence that gave away the author's true message:

"While business is what lures many who come to San Lorenzo, the venerable festival continues to attract regulars for whom love of cinema, the beauty of the coastal town and the company of like-minded cinema-goers from all over the world, from Antigua to Zanzibar, will always be foremost."

 That one tell-tale phrase: "from Antigua to Zanzibar" could only have been addressed to Nora Callaway. It was their code phrase, a smoke signal sent up by Charles to say he was thinking of her, that he was writing for his one true reader, that his love for her was bigger than this little seaside Italian town where they knew every street-corner, every boutique, every pizzeria, and had exhausted every novelty including each other, in the rooms to which they returned year after year.

It was his way of declaring that their love would thrive elsewhere, anywhere, if only they might some day slip their mundane shackles. To prove his love he was delivering a blood sacrifice in black and white on newsprint, pulling the trigger on his victim expressly for her, for his article sealed Rassi's fate.

It was an unnecessary cruelty. Mitchell had had plenty of time to kill the piece, as I'd asked him to, and as he had allowed me to believe that he would. Yet, the son of a bitch let the story run, knowing full well, even as we'd made our pact, that it was going into print.

Was this the first time a journalist had lied to me? Not by a long shot. Coming from Mitchell, however, it was a shock.

"You're just being an old fuddy-duddy, Henry."

 "It finishes our friendship," I told Nora as she munched croissants and jam on the balcony of her room. She had invited me to her room for coffee and to sort things out. I was upset by Mitchell's betrayal and Nora was the only one I could discuss it with. To my annoyance, though, I found that she had not read the article and did not seem to share my concerns. Indeed, she took Charles' side.

"He lied to me, Nora."

"If he had already filed the story," she argued, "he couldn't really withdraw it, could he? I mean, he had already sold his editor on the story, so what could he say?"

I countered that he had no basis for doing the story, and that his information came from shady sources.

"It's the movie business, darling. They're all shady. At least he left Rassi out of it. You should be pleased about that."

"Any half-wit reading the story can tell it's Rassi he's talking about, for God's sake. Charles betrayed my trust, and you as a journalist -"

"Darling, that's what we do," she said brightly, "Betray people."

She met my gaze for a moment, then looked away and started to cry, softly.

I stared out across the bay to the crowds thronging the beach, packs of them moving up the Passagia in their pastel sun hats and bagsful of knick-knacks and souvenirs: "My dad went to the San Lorenzo Film Festival and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Any one of them could have told me the same thing: never trust a reporter. But beyond that simple cliché, within the heart of our circle of confession, betrayal went even deeper; in big lies and small half-truths, lives lived in a web of compromise, it was ourselves we were constantly betraying. That's why Nora wept.

No more than a momentary pang, however, as she was soon explaining to me that she was accompanying Rassi to the Festival's closing night ceremonies. "And afterwards -" she was saying now. "You're not listening to me, Henry."

"I'm sorry?"

"Afterwards, guess what. We're skipping the gala and he's cooking me supper. Up at the villa. Gave the chef the night off. Molto intimo. He still wants to do the movie, you know."

"Smitten by the movie business. And something else."

"Me, you mean?" she laughed and brushed croissant crumbs from her terrycloth robe. "Look, your director needs to make another picture before he drops dead."

"He's keeping busy," I said and told her about the Lavender Twins. She thought it was hilarious. "That's perfect," she said, "I'll write that up as a blind item for the tabloids. In purple prose."

"Your director needs to work," Nora said, getting serious again. "I need the money. Everything depends upon it. And if Rassi has a crush on me, well -" she shrugged and grinned. "Maybe I'll go off with him instead of Charles."

She was joking again, of course. I knew it when she picked up the newspaper I'd brought her with the piece Charles had written. She was not so much reading his article as scanning it for something. She found it and smiled, and first looked up at me, then away, far out across the bay to Antigua and Zanzibar.

 "So, are we going to the Frears screening?" We had discussed the day before catching the 11:00 AM screening of the new Stephen Frears film at the Tremontane Theater.

"Yes, but please don't be angry if I meet you there. Charles will be here any moment. For a coffee."

"You've just had coffee."

"Yes, but -"she pouted, "I haven't had my sweet."

It was the last laugh Nora and I ever had, but it was a good one.

* * *

I pieced together the chain of events that occurred next that morning only days after the accident, at the behest of the police who were compiling the details for the inquest.

After leaving Nora, I took my favorite route to the Castello, the winding narrow street that led through the Old Town and crossing the mercato. I always find the hubbub of the place, the colors and aromas, strangely soothing. Sometimes will go there, when there is time, to wander among the long tables pyramided with potatoes and cabbages, tomatoes and onions, admiring the infinite variety of formaggio, begging tastes of salami, bantering with the kerchiefed peasant woman who always pops a strawberry into my mouth from her red-stained calloused fingers.

I bumped into Rassi at one stall. He was sniffing melons. He had a nylon mesh shopping bag slung from his arm full of berries, cheeses wrapped in white paper, breads of all shapes and sizes stuffed in newspaper cones, assorted leafy things, and he looked frighteningly happy, even more so when he spotted me. It was as if the punch in the nose at Tre Fiori had erased his memory and been replaced by the recollection of a rare and precious gift.

"Cook's day off," he beamed, and explained that he had invited Nora for supper after the closing night ceremony.

I asked if he'd seen the newspaper with Charles Mitchell's article. He made the Italian gesture of unconcern and said, "At least he spelled my name right, eh?"

For a moment I was befuddled. I thought: wait a minute - Rassi's name isn't in the piece. Then I got it. That was Rassi's point, his idea of a joke. He should have been very worried. Instead, he was amused.

"Why don't you join us tonight, after the ceremony, Nora and I?" he said.

I thought for a moment that perhaps I might. I was curious as to how it would go between them, and at the same time felt he was asking for a chaperone. Too many misunderstandings, too many misinterpretations had piled up, like the mountain of melons on the vendor's table behind Rassi... surely they would topple over and someone would get hurt.

I declined his invitation on the work-related excuse that the Festival President required my presence. In truth, I had my own plans for the evening following the closing night ceremony. Leticia had consented to meet me, finally, after a painful phone conversation. I wasn't sure, exactly, how this reconciliation was to be accomplished. But with the festival drawing to a close, the matter needed to be addressed or I'd never be able to return again - certainly not to the Medici.

"That's okay," Rassi said. "But if you change your mind, come anyway. And bring her along."

"Who?"

"You know who - the woman you've been seeing all these years. Leticia - I knew her father. A wonderful man. You should marry her, Henry."

We had strolled from the mercato down the hill past the Medici and on to the elbow in the rocky point that stretched out into the bay beyond the hotel. Had he taken his cable car, he'd have been home by now. He was used to coming down here, though, to the beginning of the goat trail where Rassi would trek with his bag of groceries up to the Villa Il Cielo. But of course, he never, ever used the cable car.

He paused before starting his hike and gazed out at the bay. "Look, the tide is out," he said to me. "Come, I'll show you something."

I followed him, hop-scotching over the rocks and kelp clumps to a small inlet where three small boys were poking a stick into a crevice. They had cornered a crab and were gleefully bedeviling the hapless crustacean it as it fought off its attackers with futile claws. Rassi quietly admonished the boys, telling them not to hurt the creature. Giggling at one another, the little torturers moved on to other pools to perfect their technique.

"I used to come here when I was their age," Rassi said. "There was a big crab who lived in the rocks, bigger than this one, and I would come and feed it crumbs of bread every day, sometimes with my grandfather. I spent many happy hours here. As a boy I'm afraid I was a bit of a dreamer. Later I learned to be more practical."

"What were your dreams. Pete - when you were a boy?" I wanted to know.

"The future," he said. "My grandfather always talked about the future. He told me that the future would be wonderful, a new age with machines doing all the work, that everyone would be rich, so we could leave the past behind, all those terrible wars, and all of Europe would be one big country - like America, only better - and everybody would be happy. I used to sit here, on these rocks, and imagine the world in a new age like that. I don't know..." He laughed a little. "You must think I was a very silly sort of boy, a - what do they say - airhead?"

I said I didn't know about machines doing all the work, although computers had taken us pretty far - maybe too far - but the rest of it was not a bad thing to wish for, either as a boy or a grown-up.

"Nora says the same thing," he said, shooting a glance in the direction of the hotel and I followed his line of sight directly to her fifth floor hotel room where the curtains were drawn and she was probably at this very moment making love with Charles.

"You're sure you won't join us tonight?"

I thanked Rassi for the invitation, still wondering how he knew about Leticia and me. But then he knew San Lorenzo deeply, his knowledge extending backward and forward in time, invested in its citizenry in a way that made him seem bigger than life. Indeed, he was the very soul of the place. So I inwardly cringed at the monumental disappointment that Nora was about to serve upon him.

 "It is I who have to thank you, Henry. You've been a good friend. And you can still punch."

I felt miserable, sure, but summoned a smile in return. He took it for an invitation to impart a confidence:

"Her life is empty, Henry. Nora needs a little romance. Adventure, travel to exotic places.  I have a house in the Caribbean on an island not far from Antigua that I seldom use, but now, with the Internet to keep us in touch with the world, we can go anywhere we choose. I think I can make her life something special. Do you think I am right?"

I nodded. I silently hoped he did not have a place in Zanzibar.

"And I am going to tell her this tonight. And, well -" he said, picking up his marketing catch-alls and looking up at his villa jutting out over the cliffs above us, "It may not be too late, you know, to start a family."

The wider his hound-dog face smiled, the worse I felt. But still I said nothing. Perhaps I should have. If what happened subsequently is in any way my fault, I am sorry indeed. It is a hard thing to confront someone's illusion with someone else's reality.

I wished Rassi luck as he started up the trail to his villa and I hurried off to the Castello to catch the Frears screening. What else could I do?

I ran into Charles and Nora going into the theater. They sat down in separate seats, as usual, with Nora taking a seat next to mine. Due to projector problems, the screening started late. In the dark, she pressed my hand and shot me a glance that said everything was just fine. Then the film broke. Typical San Lorenzo stuff.

While they were repairing the film, I noticed Charles leaving. Nora remained seated, still maintaining the fiction. I went out to the men's room and returned to find the re-spliced film finally running and Nora's seat empty. I knew that they had gone together, somewhere. For coffee - that would have been his excuse. I could barely keep my mind on the movie, which was not bad, for Stephen Frears, although nothing will ever top "The Hit" in my opinion, except perhaps "The Grifters."

                                                                                     * * *

In black tie I headed up the deserted street just as dusk was gathering in the corners of the sky and the streetlamps were coming on. I had decided to take Rassi up on his invitation after all. Perhaps the Nora's rejection would be softened somewhat by the presence of a guest. And if the blow were truly devastating, and he chose to stay home and mope, what would happen to the Prix Rassi, always presented on stage each year to some deserving new filmmaker by the Count himself? 

My ulterior motive, however, was to get Rassi to speak to Angie, at least off the record. I'd come to the realization that without the facts, her documentary film could turn out to be a travesty, a serious libel against someone who had actually committed himself to humanitarian acts. I was sure he would want to avoid anything that put a spotlight on what he and his grandfather had done. Yet, he would at least want the family name to be cleared of any wrongdoing.

I was nearly at Rassi's when I saw The Worm - the terrible Ivan - coming down the street towards me. I wondered if Safta had sailed back into port and was meeting with Rassi. Perhaps I'd have a chance of getting my money after all.

"Ivan!" I called to him. He saw me and kept going as if eager to get away from something.

"Stop, wait!" I called out, stepping towards him as he neared. He must have thought I was trying to block his way. The bright sheen of the streetlamp was in his hand as he came at me with a feral sound, and then I recognized in his fist the shining blade of his knife.

I instinctively sidestepped, allowing him to lunge right past my left shoulder. Misjudging the angle of his attack put him off balance as he was forced to brake his downhill movement in order to whirl around and come at me again. This was a mistake on his part, as I now held the higher ground. He came at me with an upward thrust and it happened without thinking, all in a blur, I was able to deflect his knife thrust with my left and drill a right uppercut into his left jaw. The blow stunned him for a moment, and I was relieved to hear the clang of his knife on the cobbles.

He came at me again. Grappling in his wiry embrace, I could smell his coppery breath as I brought up my knee, catching him square in his privates and dropping the former auto-mechanic-turned-war-criminal flat on the stone street where I left him dazedly working his pale lips into a waxy grimace.

When I got to the top of the street I heard the buzzer sound from the opposite side of the gorge. Someone was coming across in the old cable car. I was shocked to see Rassi inside, elegant in his black tie for closing night, a look of sheer determination masking his terror as he made his way over the gorge. This was something he had not done since the terrifying crossing with his father when he was a child.

His hands gripped the sides of the gondola so tightly that when it drew close, perhaps only two meters from the station, I could see the purple veins on the back of his white hands popping out.

That's when I heard the awful sound of the machinery grinding suddenly to a halt, the whine of the flywheel coming loose, the sharp ping of the cable snapping. The gondola hovered in space for a surreal second before plummeting straight down 900 feet, bouncing once against the rocky side of the chasm, landing with a clanging crash that echoed and hummed from the depths like a diabolical bell for an unbearable stretch of time, until the security guard on the opposite side shut off the motors and the air was still but for the mocking tinkle of the stream below.

* * *

The rest I learned from Leticia, who learned the details from her sources among the Medici staff:

Rassi had called the Medici looking for Nora, to say he might be coming by a bit early to pick her up. The concierge told him the news: Nora Callaway had just checked out and was on her way down in the elevator to catch a taxi to the airport. No, the taxi had not yet arrived. There was some delay as most taxis were already booked for the closing night ceremonies at the Castello. Would he like to hold and be put on the phone with her when she reached the lobby?

Perhaps he hoped to catch her in time. Perhaps he believed he could sway her with the confession of his love for her. And then there must have been a call from somebody else luring him out of his house at that precise time. Safta...?

Whatever his motive and whatever the circumstance, Rassi evidently was in too much of a rush to go by foot down the goat trail. For the first time since he was a boy, he took the gondola right across. Was the measure of his desire for Nora his willingness to overcome the terrors of traveling over that brief but fearsome divide? Or had something else persuaded him to take that fatal ride?

At the inquest where I was first questioned as a suspect, ten witnesses testified that I'd assaulted the deceased in the Tre Fiori two nights before his murder. Unrelated to that incident was the testimony of various engineers that the hastily made splice, improvised a few days before during the benefit luncheon, had failed.

"The failure of the cable could have occurred at any time," said one report of an investigating engineer. But the finding also stated that a certain amount of unusual stress had contributed to the break, stress caused by a momentary lock-up of the mechanism after a steel wrench - probably forgotten by one of the workmen from the repairs made during the benefit luncheon - had somehow been caught in the main gear. None of the workmen interviewed said they were missing any tools, however, which may or may not have been the case.

In my own deposition I mentioned The Worm - Ivan the Terrible - and the fact that I'd seen him coming down from Rassi's just prior to the cable car's crash. My testimony was considered and ultimately disregarded; I was the only one who had seen Ivan. He was not there when the police arrived at the scene. An ordinary folding knife was found on the street but it proved nothing. I could not recall his last name (although later I did remember - Darko - and sent it to them, to no effect). Official requests to Safta to interview the youth were ignored. Charles Mitchell could have supplied useful information, but he was on assignment and unreachable, covering an outbreak of swine flu in Zanzibar, of all places.

In the end, it was officially judged an accident. It could have happened anytime to anyone. Only this time it happened to Rassi, two meters and an eternity short of his destination.

"Ba-dum," as my director said in a last phone conversation we had. He called me in London to collect some expense reimbursements involving lunches, dinners and many drinks with the Lavender Twins. "Ba-dum. Poor bastard."

* * *

The weather had turned once more and an unseasonably dry, tepid wind frisked the back of my neck as I stood on the balcony of the Medici Hotel on the last night of the Festival, watching the fairy lights of fishing boats and fancy yachts transiting the darkness over the bay.

Closing night ceremonies had gone off as scheduled. There was some discussion of canceling but so much had been invested, especially by the corporate sponsors, that instead of shutting down, they dedicated the evening to the late Count Rassi. The winners of Best Movie, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Cinematographer and Best European Newcomer all marched up to the stage one by one to accept the Medalia d"Oro. Desultory applause from the crowd greeted each short speech of thanks. The tragedy overshadowed the evening and nobody's heart was in it. So ended the 52nd Festivale Internazionale Cinema di San Lorenzo

From the sixth floor of the Medici on that last night I could see the white caps churned by the riotous breeze that seemed to kick up its heels with each passing moment, egged on by the chorus of gulls and terns. It was the tramontana, the French mistral, the foehn of the Swiss alps, the Santa Ana of Los Angeles - what region on earth hasn't a name for it?

I was thinking of Rassi and it came to me that that he must have known this wind all his life, from the time he was little boy, collecting shells on the beach, poking at sea urchins with a stick in the tide pools. Even at school, high in the Swiss alps, where it blew down off the lee slopes and faces of melting glaciers carrying the fecund scent of Pleistocene meadows.

And he must have felt its wild stirrings as he stood on the rocky point in the dark, watching the light in Nora's hotel room window year after year, much as he had been taught by Judah Halevi to watch the price of wheat futures and telecom stocks for fluctuations shaping the fortunes of Europe's New Age, and his own.

The 53rd Festivale Internazionale Cinema di San Lorenzo -already imperiled by a bitter political fight over the dismissal of the Festival President, and the indictment of the New Mayor for kickbacks and embezzlement - was canceled two weeks before it was to begin, one more victim of the attacks that came in September of that year in America.  There was talk of reviving it the following year but due to lack of funding, nothing ever came of it.

I was relieved, in a way, content to be living in the small village in the hills beyond San Lorenzo close to my favorite Piero della Francesca painting in the cathedral on the piazza. The Times travel section has not yet discovered it, so there are few tourists at Leticia's cousin's café. Here I sit at my customary table in the burnished light of the late Ligurian afternoons over a glass of red wine, perusing the boxing news in the London papers online, thanks to the cafe's free WiFi.

What you may have heard is also true: that I have, to everyone's surprise, including my own, very happily advanced Leticia's legal status from festival wife to wife year-round.

From my far flung sources I have heard that Charles and Nora are still seeing one another, carrying on their affair at one of the A-level film festivals: Cannes, perhaps, or maybe Venice or Berlin. You may run into them there, an attractive couple ascending the red carpet and pausing before the photographers for a portrait that no one will see. And someone next to you may point to them and ask: "Who are they?"

Who are they?

They are the ones whose hopes are borne by the wind that frolics in the empty rooms of Villa Il Cielo, the companion wind of human desire, illusion, and despair - like the punch-addled boxer in the movies who is past his prime, jogging faithfully alongside in quest of the big rematch that will never be.

So the comedy is re-enacted in the dark, played out on the wide screen of our dreams, this frantic, naïve reaching for the brilliant, shining denouement that has already, to scattered applause, come and gone.

THE END

"If you have enjoyed reading A Festival Wife, please address your comments, questions and offers of a free cocktail to the author at rexweiner@gmail.com”

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