A Festival Wife's blog

To get to Count Rassi's place isn't easy, nor is it obvious. Nothing about him was.

You had to find the right way, a certain street, one of several narrow passages winding up the hill behind the Medici above the Porto Vecchio. All the streets back there looked alike, cobbled and lacking sidewalks, lined with shops and restaurants carved cave-like under low lintels into the lopsided apartment houses of four and five stories all clinging desperately to one another at odd angles under the weight of centuries.

Most of the streets are cul-de-sacs. They lead to claustrophobic piazzas high on the ridge overlooking the bay, a bit of azure just barely visible over the lines of flapping laundry and red-tiled rooftops. Then you have to find your way back down again.

If you've taken the right street, it dead-ends at an arched doorway set in a stone wall with a wrought iron gate. No sign, no street number, nothing. Just a plain aluminum wall plate and a button that at night glows faintly greenish. Pushing the button rings a bell somewhere.  If you have an appointment the gate buzzes open. If you don't, then you have to telephone.

Through the gate and passing underneath the short, musty tunnel beneath the apartment building you emerge outside to discover an octagonal stone station house where an ancient attendant invites you to step into an enclosed gondola. The conveyance is an art deco melding of iron, oak and leaded vitrine with insets of stained glass. The attendant latches the door securely, murmuring comforting things in Italian. Prayers, one hopes.

At the sound of a buzzer, you swing out over empty space as the twisted steel cable hauls you across a steep-sided gorge. You look back at the attendant controlling the ride from his perch above the rocky palisade. You look forward at the receiving platform, also teetering on the lip of a jagged promontory. And you try not to look down at the awful distance below.

Installed in the 1930s, the original equipment still functions, a huge fly wheel humming and cast iron gears clanking as the gondola ferries as many as ten guests at a time across the chasm cut by the alpine stream that empties into the bay.

The ride takes less than five minutes yet is always dramatic, especially in the afternoon when the wind scoots up the gorge to toy with the gondola. By the time guests arrive at the little slate-roofed stone building on the far end, they either have plenty to talk about over lunch or else they're too nauseous to eat. Either way, merely getting to Count Rassi's is a memorable experience.

"This is perfectly absolutely perfect," was my director's excited comment as we crossed the gorge. "I want to use this location for my next movie. There's a fight scene, you see, a struggle between the hero and his twisted older brother. It could happen on this thing and then one goes over the side... Ba-dum! I need to talk to this Rassi character."

We'd arrived early because Rassi wanted to give the guest of honor the grand tour. They hit it off right away. Rassi showed the director around the sprawling pre-WWII house designed by Gropius. Fifteen-hundred tons of basalt blasted from the volcanic pinnacle to allow the lines of the house to appear as if they flowed from out of the living rock into the blue.

The soaring geometry of steel and glass, all angles and sky-filled spaces cantilevered bravely over the brooding chasm. Villa Il Cielo seemed deliberately designed to mock the houses of the Old Town crouched below in their stunted medieval welter. D'Annunzio is said to have pronounced the house "a finger pointing to the Future."

But for all its skyward reach, the great structure - celebrated in so many architectural books - failed to move me in the way it was intended. Instead, gazing down at those ancient buildings I could not help but think: they still were hives of life, abuzz with families, restaurants, café's and tourist trinket bazaars, while Rassi's villa, in silent splendor housed only Rassi.

The walls were hung with Futurists: Balla, Boccioni, Russolo and Severini, all originals. A library containing hundreds of vellum-bound books also featured a portrait of Grandfather Rassi by Salvador Dali. The salient features of long jaw and high forehead evidently ran in the family, but what appeared stalwart in the progenitor had devolved into saggy jowled poignancy in the descendant.

My friendship with Count Rassi began with a boxing movie featured in the Festival, back in the 1970s when I first started coming to San Lorenzo. Henry Dean Associates was hired to do the international press junket and I persuaded the producers to fly in Muhammad Ali for the premiere, figuring that would get us good headlines everywhere. I was right, of course, and the press conference was a jolly madhouse that literally put the movie on the European map (unfortunately, it was a forgettable loser at the box office).

Rassi, as it turned out, was a great fan of Ali. He called me out of the blue to say he would be honored to have the premiere party for the movie at his home, and he would not charge anything. All he asked was that a donation be made by the producers to a charity of Ali's choice.

The producers, of course, were thrilled, and the party was the peak social event of the Festival that year, with every celebrity and VIP creating a stellar scene. With Ali at his table all night, Rassi was in heaven. I arranged for Ali to have a private lunch the next day with Rassi at the Tre Fiori, just the two of them talking for hours. Rassi told me it was one of the high points of his entire life.

"That man is one of history's true heroes," he said.

Before leaving San Lorenzo, Ali gave Rassi a signed boxing glove, a trophy that always sat on a pedestal under a glass case in Rassi's library. After that, while we'd had a very formal, nodding acquaintance before, Rassi and I discovered a common bond: boxing.

I tried a little boxing when I was at school and I quickly discovered that I was not cut out for the sport. The reasons were not for a lack of athleticism. To look at me now - my girth and pace have expanded and slowed respectively with age - you would not guess, but I was a very fit young man in my time, fast on my feet and quick with my hands. Punching was no problem; I learned to punch pretty hard for a teenager, with a particular knack for the powerhouse right. I was not afraid of taking punches, either. And I loved the theory of boxing, the feint-and-jab strategy of it, the psychological aspect in which you are physically and mentally pitted against your opponent, and he versus you. People who dismiss boxing as a dumb brute force effort completely misunderstand that what every good fighter brings forward as his essential weapon is not his fists, but an intellectual discipline of the highest order.

Rassi, too, had taken up boxing in the patrician Swiss prep school he'd attended and then later he'd gone a few rounds in college in Rome. His bulk was an advantage in a country famous for light-to-middle-weights. He'd actually been pretty good, I heard from others who had known him then, and he was considered to be a contender for the Italian Olympic team. I am guessing that he was the kind of guy who, unlike me, probably relished solitary nature of being a boxer. He failed to make the final cut, though, and left the ring behind, taking with him only the crooked nose for a souvenir, a habit of weekly workouts on the heavy bag in the Hotel Medici gym, and a fan's gusto for the sport.

When we used to discuss boxing, which was often in the early years of our friendship and before the sport lost its appeal for both of us, Rassi liked to talk about the great Italian fighters like Diulo Loi, a great Italian welterweight of the 1950's from Trieste. He also grew up watching Nino Benvenuti, the son of a Trieste fisherman who fought past a young Cassius Clay at the 1960 Rome Olympics to capture the Best Boxer Trophy. In 1965, Benvenuti beat the great Sandro Mazzinghi for the middleweight title of Europe, making him a hero to young Italian guys like Rassi.

"If you must do something with your hands, there are worse ways to put them to use," Rassi told me. I thought, at the time, it was an uncharacteristically charitable remark for someone known only as a rich playboy.

In the mid-90s, we lost track of boxing entirely and it faded from our conversation, leaving us with only polite formalities to speak of, but a kind of friendship, nonetheless.  I have found that women are often confused by this phenomenon, where male friendships are sustained over long periods of time on a bedrock of tacit understanding.  But I have long given up on worrying what women think, particularly when it comes to friendship. Or boxing.

While my director was perusing the plastic-sheathed first editions, Rassi took me outside onto the deck. He lit a Pall Mall and got to the point, in his roundabout way.

"I want to ask you a favor, if I may?" he said. "Actually I'd like your opinion on two things. First of all, Arthur Delfont. What do think of him?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I've invested in a production fund that he and some other investors have put together and, well -"

I remembered the comment at the meeting, the reference to "private investors," and "that local guy - duke, prince whatever." Here he was, I sadly concluded. Whatever.

"How much?" I asked.

"Not much. Two million. It's a Stallone movie, very big budget but I am providing seed money. I guess I just want to be sure I've done the right thing."

"I think you'll have a good time, Pete." Two million was probably peanuts to Rassi.

"They tell me Variety is writing something. Will they mention me?"

"Your name didn't come up."

"Good. I hate publicity. Besides, I want it to be a surprise. Which brings me to the second thing. This is very, ah - delicate. You understand?"

I made reassuring noises of a trustworthy nature.

He looked away for a moment, dragged hard on his Pall Mall, and seemed embarrassed yet eager, like a little boy divulging some prank.

"You are very good friends with Nora Callaway. You know her well."

"I know her," I said. "She's a very good reporter."

"And you talk to her frequently?"

"We are friends, we talk. Sure."

"Has she ever - did she by chance - say anything to you about me?"

"She told me the other day you ran into each other in Rome."

"She did? Ah, she did. Well, what did she tell you about that?"

"She said she enjoyed herself."

"Well, that's good. Very good. You know, I happened to be in Rome, just by chance, you see. And we ran into other on the street. Just like that. It seemed, somehow - I don't know how to say it exactly - ordained? Like fate or something. Has anything like that ever happened to you, Henry?"

I had a terrible feeling where this was going, and I simply nodded. Nothing could be said to dissuade the guy from the authenticity of his experience.

"I asked Nora to lunch. Just for fun, you understand. And, well, we had a good time. It was something I'd been wanting to do. Thinking of doing for some time. Anyway - " He cleared his throat and looked into the distance. "I gathered that she is thinking of, well - of leaving her husband."

"Did she say that?"

"Well, no, no. Not exactly. Not in so many words. Well, in fact, not at all. She said nothing about her husband. Nothing really. You see, it was just a feeling I had, actually. A distinct feeling I get. But not just from talking to her. Do you know him? The husband?"

I said that I had met "the husband" once. I had met him on the single occasion that he had come to San Lorenzo many years before. He arrived a few days after the festival began, taking Nora by surprise. She feigned delight and carefully avoided Charles Mitchell, the reporter who was her clandestine amour.

The husband happened to be strolling one afternoon in the square while Nora was at a screening. Coming upon the stand where the paparazzi photos of the premieres were displayed for sale, he saw the shot of his wife ascending the red carpet on the arm of another man. He purchased the photo and presented it to her "without comment," as she related the story to me. She could see he was disturbed but much too European to accuse her of anything.

Luckily for Nora, she was able to explain it to him, since on that particular opening night it was I leading her up the red carpet. Charles had been detained due to a last minute emergency call from his editor, and I'd stepped in as her escort. The photo showed Nora and I looking very stylish indeed, but after Nora's explanation to her husband and a subsequent introduction, I was evidently not considered competition and we ended up having a jolly dinner, the three of us.

I had played the beard. But such a photo, featuring a younger, more handsome man, might not be explainable a second time. The paparazzi were relentless and had to make a living. So, at Charles's request I went to have a word with Topo. Since then, under an arrangement he negotiated with the other shutterbugs, no opening night photographs of the couple were taken by anyone other than Topo, This was the very same ritual my director had witnessed and marveled at. The resulting portraits went into Topo's private collection, viewable only by Charles and his festival wife.

I told Rassi this story - omitting the whole business involving Charles - as a sort of cautionary tale. Nora had a jealous husband! But he ignored the message.

"Yes, well, I have friends in Rome who know him. They say he is very successful, the husband. But -" Rassi tossed his cigarette into the gorge and watched its red light tumble out of sight. "Do you think he reads her articles?"

It was an odd question. I didn't really know, and wondered what he was getting at.

"Because if he did read her articles all the time like I do, well, he would know."

"Know what?"

Rassi was silent for a moment. "That she is writing to me. That she is writing about me. I'll show you."

Going inside to his desk he opened a drawer, taking out a folder containing a sheaf of her articles.

"I read her articles on the Internet," said Rassi. "It's wonderful, the Internet. It opens the whole world to you."

Indeed, he had downloaded dozens of pieces she'd written, something that had been inaccessible to him before the invention of the World Wide Web. He'd done a search with one of those so-called search-engines and come up with every article carrying a Nora Callaway byline for the past decade.

He began pointing out references to San Lorenzo in interviews that Nora did with certain film stars, mentions of the San Lorenzo Festival in opinion pieces that seemed tossed in gratuitously, even a description of lunch at Rassi's from ten years before:

 "Count Pietro Rassi's luncheons are the peak event of the Festival attended by all the stars and presided over by the handsome and distinguished Count himself, carrying on the family legacy. His house, perched upon the highest point in town, is a romantic's reverie. From its aerie Rassi's house appears ready to leap from the rock and fly away into the sun, into some bright future. It is a special place to encourage the young filmmaker or anyone wishing to chuck reality and go with a dream."

Experienced journalists would recognize it as "color," an adjectival word salad tossed in to round out an assignment. But in fact it described her first visit to Rassi's and the luncheon where she and Charles had first met. "Chuck" was her secret nickname for Charles. "To chuck reality and go with a dream" referred to the illicit couple's escape fantasies, their annual musings on ditching their respective mates and running off to the far ends of the earth. The article marked the first of their coded messages to one another, the little signals they sent one another through the articles they wrote for their publications. I knew that for a fact because Charles himself had showed it to me.

Ignorant of all this, Rassi looked at me with his eyes moist, making his hound-dog face even more sad and pathetic.

"All these years, Henry, I have been looking, searching for someone, someone who would appreciate this place, its history and what it means. And you seem here it is. She knows. She understands. From the very first time she ever came here. And about five years ago, I began to notice her, and to read her writing, and now -"

Across the room my director cradled in his hands a doeskin-bound volume of de Lautreamont from Rassi's section of rare erotica.

"Look, just look at this stuff!" he exclaimed. "Absolute fucking treasures!"

"I've wasted so much time with so many women," Rassi was saying with the goofy exasperation of religious convert. "Yet every year she's been here, right here at my table. Was I so blind never to notice? All these years, can you believe it?"

He went to the bar and poured himself a shot of Jack Daniels. Rassi was once of those very modern Europeans who liked his liquor American and straight. He poured one for me as an afterthought, and I was grateful. I needed it.

"This investment I've made - you see, I want to show her I can be part of her world, too. I'm a movie producer now, Henry. She will be very surprised when I tell her that."

"Very surprised," I agreed.

"I'm in love with her," he confessed. "But I don't want to be a fool, Henry. It would be foolish to say anything to her, to appear in any way - ridiculous. Can you tell me, Henry, if she is, well - seeing someone?"

I downed my whisky in one gulp, too dumbfounded at the enormity of his absurd mistake to answer. Rassi saw my hesitation.

"Ah - you know the answer but cannot tell me. That's okay, Henry. Perhaps my question is indiscreet," he sighed. "In any case I would like to know this now because Nora is coming to lunch today, of course."

I promised Rassi that I would do my best to inquire very discreetly and report back to him.

"Before the luncheon is ended, please," he insisted. "Because, you see, before she leaves... I am going to ask Nora to marry me."

The buzzer sounded, signaling the arrival of Rassi's first guests.

* * *

Seated at our table, next to my ex-wife Angie and across from Rassi, was a famous woman novelist whose early work was being mined for the movies. A genteel American in her seventies, she was enjoying her newly revived career and pretending not to be shocked by the way her literary masterpieces were transformed on the big screen, one after another, into the crassest of pop amusements. She was either a good sport or a greedy old bag whose life's work wasn't worth as much to her as a fat check and public adulation, and didn't give a hoot what anybody said or thought about it.

"That cable car sure is a spectacular way to come home each day," she said to Rassi. "Still, you must get tired of it, coming back and forth, back and forth...?"

Rassi smiled politely. "Please, Senora," he said. "Have you tried the tomato and basil? It all comes from my garden."

"Your garden is absolutely marvelous," Nora said, perched at Rassi's elbow. He beamed, partly at Nora's adulation, but also at having been rescued from having to explain about the cable car.

In fact, Rassi had gone across in the cable car once when he was five and never again. The story was that his father had been feuding for years with his grandfather over some family matter. Since he was born, Rassi's parents had been living in Rome. Reconciliation eventually brought about a Rassi family reunion at San Lorenzo.

Arriving at Villa Il Cielo for the first time, the young boy was frightened of the noisy monstrous machinery and refused to get on the gondola. Screaming and in tears, he was hauled on board by his father. Halfway across the gap, the contraption went into one of its frequent stalls. While the mechanics worked and the boy and his parents were stuck high over the gorge, a wind came up and rocked the gondola. Pietro was sick and passed out. The child finally arrived at the other side but obstinately refused to return. Following some psychological precept of that age, his father forced him to go back across, over and over again for hours as a cure.

His grandfather eventually rescued him and allowed the boy to descend by an alternate route. Along a narrow footpath chiseled into the cliffs that had served the villa's construction crew, servants carried young Rassi down on their backs.

That path, no wider than a goat trail, became Rassi's sole route to and from his house for the rest of his life. His excuse, whenever he needed one, was force of habit; a former boxer had to stay in training. It took about him about fifteen minutes to jog down from Villa Il Cielo, emerging along the spine of rock that formed the rocky point extending just past the Medici. If he needed to take a car, his Ferrari was parked and waiting for him in the hotel garage.

San Lorenzo cognoscenti knew the story and it was not a secret that Rassi avoided the cable car. But he did not advertise the fact, either. His guests would have been less than encouraged to cross the perilous gorge on the wobbly old conveyance if they knew that their host was afraid to make the trip by the same means.

 

* * *

 

Luncheon was served from an abundant buffet of local delicacies, a cornucopia of home-made pates, rustic cheeses and wild game sausage to ingeniously prepared fish stuffed with herbed rice. But before the coffee, Nora announced, "I am sorry but I have an interview scheduled with a really famous director."

She stood up and offered her hand to the guest of honor who also stood up from the table and grinned back at her.

"Will you excuse us, please?" he said with a nod to Rassi and a flourish to the rest of us.

Rassi watched them walk away, she stealing a pastry from the desert trolley on the one hand and taking his arm on the other as they crossed the sun-dappled terraced gardens. He was looking for his moment with her. Now it was postponed.

Half an hour later, I was listening to Rassi explain to the woman from the London Sunday Times sitting next to me why he believed the Internet would solve the problems of the world.

"I've been reading a book somebody wrote about the betrayal of Futurism in the Thirties," he was saying. "My grandfather, who was a friend of all the important artists of his time, would have seen the Internet, broadband and wireless, all of these new technologies he would have seen as a unifying force for humanity and for Europe. My grandfather believed in a unified Europe. A single currency, the Euro, is a realization of one of his dearest dreams. He was a man before his time."

"But wasn't he a -"

One of the staff appeared at Rassi's shoulder, looking worried. There was a problem, he said, with the cable car. Some guests were going across and got stuck midway. Rassi excused himself, leaving the Sunday Times without an answer.

Angie jumped in, telling the Sunday Times, "Rassi's grandfather chummed it up with the Nazis, if you really want to know. I mean, why do you think there are so few Jews in San Lorenzo? The partisans had the old man on their bloody hit list, for God's sakes."

One of the Italians at the table, an older man with history written in the lines of his face, nodded at Angie.

"Actually," he said, "Count Rassi's grandfather was friendly to the local Gestapo chief. He and his staff took up quarters here at Villa Il Cielo at Rassi's invitation. From this place here where we are sitting now, the Fascists ruled the coast. You see over there in the rocks, just above the house? A German gun emplacement commanded the entire harbor."

"There you have it," said Angie, the Rassi family's wartime complicity an open and shut case. She got a piece of paper and a pen from her purse and began taking notes.

"Did the Nazis pay Rassi or what?"

"Oh, no," said the old man. "Rassi enjoyed the arrangement. He always liked to be with the powerful people. He did everything to please them. You see how the cable car is broken down? The engineers who built it were beaten - beaten to death sometimes - whenever the Nazi commandant was inconvenienced. Rassi had ordered it. It's true."

I could see Angie's documentary taking shape. I excused myself and walked across the lawn, running into Delfont. I hadn't expected him to be here.

"What's your angle, Artie?"

"I'm sorry?"

"With Rassi - what are you trying to do?"

"I came with Angie. Did you see her?"

"Sure. But here you've got Rassi investing in your movie, on the hook for two million. He's never going to get that back, and you know it."

Delfont shook his head, dismissing any notion of scamming Rassi.

"Henry, we're going to make movies. It's really for real, old bean. Trust me - your man Rassi will get his money back tenfold!"

He grinned and walked away, leaving me with a nagging feeling that Rassi's loss would involve more than money.

 

* * *

 

Nora was on the gondola overlooking the gorge for more than an hour with my director. Guests waited while mechanics from the village toiled over the ancient machinery. Champagne was poured. Rassi stood by supervising the repair and watching impatiently.

The sound of Nora's laughter occasionally drifted along on the warm air currents, causing Rassi to gaze across the gorge at the two of them in the gondola. They seemed to be having an excellent time. My director was talking animatedly, waving his arms in the air as if acting out scenes from his movies.

"You don't have to tell me," Rassi said to me miserably. "I should have known."

"What?"

"Well, evidently they are, shall we say - involved?"

"You mean Nora and - ?"

"She likes talented people. I can understand that. Me - I have no talent, only money. But a famous director like him - well, why not."

Jeffries interrupted us. He'd had his lunch and was ready to do the interview with the Great Director. I pointed to the stranded gondola. We would have to reschedule. I introduced him to Rassi who politely shook hands and told Jeffries that he read Variety all the time but was puzzled sometimes by things he read.

"For example, when I read about somebody that you say ankled - somebody ankled the studio, for example - what on earth does that mean?"

Jeffries explained that it was "slanguage," a hangover from the days when Variety was a vaudeville gazette using showbiz terms that were now part of a dialect extinct everywhere but in the pages of Variety. "Ankled" means something between "fired" or "quit" but in any case, when someone leaves a job and no one wants to say for the record exactly why.

Rassi thanked Jeffries for the explanation.

"Quite a place you have here, Count," Jeffries said.

"Please, feel free to look around," said Rassi, waving in the direction of the house. Jeffries wandered away. Rassi turned his attention back to Nora and her companion in the gondola.

"You're right but you're wrong," I said, "You shouldn't jump to conclusions."

Rassi looked at me as if I had somehow betrayed him. I felt sorry for the guy but at the same time I was annoyed. It was the same irritation I used to feel when a client with a bad film blamed me for poor reviews. Baby, it just ain't my fault, as Myra Kilgore liked to say.

Charles approached us at that moment looking equally vexed.

"I thought you promised I'd have the exclusive interview on that old lecher?" Charles needled.

"You do. For North American press."

"Well, what's she doing with him?"

 "She's got the exclusive for Europe."

"Henry, you've been in this business too long," Charles groaned. "What do you think, Pete?"

"I think," said Rassi, "Henry will outlast us all. He will write our epitaphs. Excuse me, please."

When the Count was out of sight, Charles swore at him.

"Rassi and his fucking cable car. Every year it gets stuck. He's got money. He could buy new equipment. He could put in a fucking bridge, for crissakes. Look at him over there in his silk suit, must've cost a couple lira. He's in the currency market. Did you know the bastard makes a fortune shorting the Euro?"

"Did you tell Nora?"

"Tell Nora what?"

"What you said you were going to do the other night. The big breakup."

"Well, I was going to, but now -"

"You're chickening out."

"I'm not chickening out. I'll tell her tomorrow after the Luc Besson screening."

"Why not tonight?" I said.

"You're sick of us, aren't you," said Charles. "Look, it's our mess. Why don't you go see a movie, Henry. They have happy endings."

The longer Charles strung out this comedy, the more likely it would turn into melodrama. How could I have known it would end as a tragedy? All I knew then, in the festival's early days, was that somebody was bound to be hurt in the end, and I said so.

"I hear you," he said. "But tonight's the Bertolucci screening and I know she wants to see the Besson tomorrow morning for some piece she's doing on him. So, tomorrow after the Besson. Over coffee."

The machinery suddenly clanged into motion, delivering Nora and the guest of honor to the far side of the gorge and clanking back to retrieve the others from the luncheon at Rassi's, which was now over.

Charles took the goat trail down, rather than run into Nora or the Great Director and to have to engage either one.

 

* * *

 

She was waiting for me alone when I stepped from the gondola. I expected a lashing; she'd been stuck with the old bastard on the gondola for all that time. Instead, Nora drew me aside, placed a firm kiss on my lips.

"Thank you, thank you," she said. "You've given me my story."

I thought she was kidding me, but she took my arm as we headed down through the Old Town, saying, "He is truly amazing, your director. For once, the festival chose the right guest of honor."

"You're doing an actual story on him?"

"Major story. His new project. It's all going to be shot in digital. Very low budget and improvisational. No script. Hand-held camera. Location sound. Available light. A cast of unknowns. Very edgy and daring, like those Danish directors."

"Von Trier, Vinterberg -"

"He may even give me a part," she giggled. "Do you know he actually saw me on stage in a Stoppard play I did in the West End when I was seventeen. Isn't that amazing? And he wants to shoot here. He's asked Rassi to use the villa as a location. Oh, I would like to act again. Just to see if I‘ve still got it. He's going to have me read for the part. Tonight."

The old seducer at work.

"You're not going to write about that?" I asked, a little worried that this would all come to bad end and then her article would embarrass everybody.

"Of course not. It would appear to be a conflict of interest."

"What will you write?"

"At sixty-eight, the master director comes to San Lorenzo with a youthful outlook," she ran on, composing her piece as she spoke. "Leaping boldly into the future but informed by the past, guided by a wealth of experience. That's what it is. A wealth of past experience guiding futuristic technology. Something like that. Anyway, it's what sets him apart from the naf crowd who are doing it. And doing it badly. Don't you see? It's perfect. Sexy, too. I mean, look who he's been with."

"That was the tedious part, remember?"

"Exactly. But not when you look at it as part of the whole. I understand him now, Henry. He's vital. A life force. His passion for the work is his passion for life, for love. It's the innocence I was looking for, don't you see?"

I smiled and said nothing but she knew I saw through her. This was the game we played as publicist and journalist and why question it? What harm were we doing?

"It's bullshit and I know it," she grimaced. "But my editor doesn't. Oh, Henry -" She looked at me with big tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

"I need to keep coming up with these ridiculous articles or I won't keep the San Lorenzo assignment. My editor will assign somebody else. And then -"

She fell into my arms and wept.

"I can never leave my husband. But I can't bear to lose Charles. I have to keep coming back here. Without San Lorenzo, without Charles, my life is just not - complete. He is what keeps me writing, Henry."

"So much for your reputation as a hard-assed journalist," I soothed, "weeping on a publicist's shoulder."

"Yeah, my hard-assed cynical journalist thing." She looked up and wiped her eyes. The mascara smeared across her cheek made her more endearing.

"Trouble is," she sniffled, "the whole cynical journalist thing doesn't work unless I have somebody to share it with. Fabrizio never reads my stuff. Charles reads every word. Twice. And then he argues with it. Maybe that's love, maybe it's not. But Charles gets me, Henry. He totally gets me."

 

* * *

 

From the balcony of my room at the Medici that night, I breathed the wind blowing onshore, carrying on its warm currents spicy hints of Africa. Leticia had gone and I was alone, or thought I was until I heard the sound of a window being unlatched and sliding upward in its sash with a scraping noise.

I glanced over to see the lights still on in my director's room. At that moment, a slender white leg extended through the side window, and I saw a woman climb precariously out onto the marble balustrade, vaulting nimbly onto the balcony.

I watched and realized that it was Nora, laughing naughtily as my director pounded on the locked doors. After a moment, she said something to him. After another pause, she unlatched the door from outside allowing him to join her in the open air.

As if in a scene from one of his movies, I could see him lean toward her face to kiss her. She laughed and pushed him away. They stood there, outlined against the sky and then withdrew, leaving the curtains billowing in the breeze.

I turned to go inside, but noticed once again a small light on the cliffside to the right of the hotel. There was the distinct form of a man poised on the rocky promontory holding a flashlight to guide his way.

It was Rassi, standing on a point in the goat trail coming down from his villa. He was gazing up at the fifth floor of the hotel. I hoped he had seen nothing, because if he fell out of love with Nora, he would pull out of the Everest deal, and that would be the end of the $10K that Artie Delfont had promised me.

But Rassi could not possibly have missed the little interlude on the director's balcony and in the blinking light of his flashlight I read a sort of code that spelled nothing but trouble for an old publicist past his prime, and in over his head.

NEXT WEEK: CHAPTER 5 - THE DIRTY DEAL GOES WRONG

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