“Nobody thinks you’re a wimp. I don’t think you’re a wanker, or any of the other things,” I shouted back at him. “What happened to you with the car could have happened just as easily to me.”
“Oh no, it couldn’t,” he screamed back at me. “Clever clogs Brannigan would have phoned the police as soon as she found the car. Clever clogs Brannigan would have checked the car to see if there was anything in it there shouldn’t have been. Clever clogs Brannigan and the girls would never have got themselves banged up. Because the girls are smart, and I’m just a fucking stupid arsehole man that gets put up with because he’s marginally more fun than a vibrator.” He stopped suddenly, out of steam.
“I love you, Richard,” I said quietly. It’s not an expression I’m given to, but extreme circumstances demand extreme responses.
“Bollocks,” he shouted. “I’m a fucking convenience. You don’t know what love is. You never let anyone close enough. It’s all a fucking game to you, Brannigan. Like your fucking job. It’s all a game. Nothing ever gets you in here,” he added, thumping his chest like an opera buffa tenor.
He looked so ridiculous, I couldn’t help a smile twitching at the corners of my mouth. “This isn’t the time for this,” I said, trying to make my amusement look like conciliation. “I’d no idea you felt this bad about what happened, and it’s important that we sort it out. But we’re both tired, we’re both under a lot of pressure. Let’s leave it till we get home, okay? Now, let me do what I’ve got to do. I’ll see you back at Casa Nico later, okay?“
Richard shook his head. “You really are a piece of work, Brannigan. You think you can just sweep all this aside like that? Forget it. You can go back to Casa fucking Nico if you want. But I won’t be there.”
He turned on his heel and stormed back to the car. As he opened the door, he said, “You coming?”
I shook my head. He slammed the car door behind him, swung the car round and headed back down the valley. I watched him go, my stomach feeling hollow, my eyes suddenly swimming with tears. Impatiently, I blinked them away. I tried to convince myself that Richard would be back at Casa Nico once he’d calmed down.
In the meantime, I had work to do. Besides, now I needed a lift back down the valley.
18
NO WOMAN IS A HEROINE TO HER DENTIST. ALONG WITH MY phobia about tunnels goes my paralyzing fear of needles and drills. As a result, I knew I wasn’t going to have to rely on anything as crude as physical strength to beat the bodyguard. If Richard hadn’t pissed me off so much, I’d have explained it to him. But Watsons who scream at their Holmeses don’t get the inside track on methodology.
Picking up the bodyguard was a doddle. Any man who spends as much time as he obviously did on keeping his body in peak condition has to have a streak of vanity a mile wide. He fully expected that if an attractive foreign woman walked into a bar where he was drinking, he’d be the one she’d inevitably be drawn to. And in a country where the native women are so sexually constrained by religion, it’s equally inevitable that foreign women who walk into bars alone and with bare shoulders must be whores. My target thought it was his lucky night as soon as I settled on the bar stool next to him and smiled as I ordered a Peroni.
On the short walk to the bar, I’d come up with the cover story that I was a professional photographer, in Italy to take pictures for a coffee-table book of Italian church bell towers.
Gianni the bodyguard and his drinking companions fell for it hook, line and sinker, with much nudging in the ribs about women who liked big ones. I suppose they thought my Italian wasn’t up to mucky innuendo. By the time I’d finished my first beer, they were competing over who was going to buy the next one. By the time I’d finished my second, his heavy, muscular arm was draped over my naked shoulders and his equally heavy cologne had invaded my nostrils. The hardest part of the whole production number was hiding my revulsion. If there’s one thing I hate it’s hairy men, and this guy was covered like a shag pile carpet. Just the thought of his shoulders was enough to make me feel queasy.
I was on my fourth beer when I casually let slip that I was staying at Casa Nico and that I’d left my car down there while I walked up the valley. Immediately, Gianni volunteered to drive me back down. Then, of course, he suddenly remembered how terrible the cooking was at Casa Nico. Cue for nods of agreement from his buddies, coupled with nudges and winks acknowledging the cleverness of Gianni’s moves. Why, he asked innocently, didn’t I come back to the villa with him for some genuine Italian home cooking. His boss was away, and he was a dab hand with the spaghetti sauce. We could eat on the terrace like the rich folks do, and then, later, he could run me back down to the pensione.
I looked up adoringly at him and said how delightful it was to meet such hospitable people. We left a couple of minutes later, accompanied by whoops and grunts from his cronies. In the car, he put a proprietary paw on my knee between gear changes. I fought the urge to lean over and grip his balls so tight his eyes would pop from their sockets like shelled peas. He was the driver, after all, and I didn’t want to end up in the riverbed looking like spaghetti sauce.
As we approached the villa, he pulled a little black electronic box out of his tight jeans and punched a button. The gates swung open, the Alfa shot through and I got my first full frontal view of the Villa San Pietro. It was magnificent. A modern villa in the style of the traditional houses that front every fashionable resort in Italy. Immaculate pink stucco, green louvered shutters. And a satellite dish the size of a kid’s paddling pool. “Molto elegante,” I said softly.
“Good, huh?” Gianni said proudly, as if it were all his. The drive swung round the side of the house, past a tennis court and swimming pool and over to a separate, single-story building. As we drew near, Gianni hit the button on the box again and an up-and-over garage door opened before us. Inside the garage was the stretch limo, Turner’s Merc and a small green Fiat van. At the sight of Turner’s car, I started to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Gianni had said we’d have the place to ourselves. But Turner had come back to the villa with him in the afternoon, and his car was still here as proof positive that he hadn’t left. Maybe he’d nipped into Sestri for the evening in a taxi. Somehow, I didn’t think so. For the first time since I’d started this crazy expedition, I allowed a trickle of fear to creep in. Maybe I should have listened to Richard after all.
We got out of the car and Gianni folded me into a bear hug, his tongue thrusting between my teeth. It felt like my tonsils were being raped. “What happened to dinner?” I asked as soon as I could get my mouth clear. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t think about having fun when I’m hungry.”
Gianni chuckled. “Okay, okay. First the food, then the fun.” He leered and gestured with his thumb toward a door at the side of the garage. “That’s my apartment over there. But we’ll go over to the house to eat. My boss has better food and drink than me.”
We walked over to the house, his arm heavy across my shoulders. We crossed a marble patio, complete with built-in barbecue and pizza oven, and entered the kitchen through tall french windows. It was like a temple to the culinary arts. There was a freestanding butcher’s block in the middle of the floor, complete with a set of Sabatier knives in their slots. Above it hung a batterie de cuisine. On the blond wooden worktops, there was every conceivable kitchen machine from icecream maker to a full-sized Gaggia. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the walls, while pots of fresh basil, coriander and parsley lined a deep windowsill to the side. “He likes to cook,” Gianni said. “He likes me to cook too, when we have guests.”