Beautiful People (46 page)

    '"Choo choo!"

    "Cosmo!" exclaimed Orlando. "Sorry again," he added to Marco.

    "Is fine," the chef reassured him. "Has given me an idea, in fact." He strode over to the little boy, dropped to his muscular hunkers, and tickled Cosmo under the chin. "You like trains, huh?"

    Cosmo nodded.

    "Well, what you say I cook you train wheels pasta?"

    "Train wheels?" Cosmo's blue eyes glowed.

    "Come with me." Marco crooked his finger.

    Darcy, nibbling the last of the cheese, watched the two men and the children and felt rather choked. The big, awkward chef was so gentle with them. As was the blond boy, who seemed to handle the toddlers extremely well. He was, Darcy noticed—indeed, it was impossible not to notice—extraordinarily good-looking.

    She thought involuntarily of Emma; her description of her lost Orlando could almost fit this boy.

    She was distracted in her musings by a small explosion from the restaurant. "Train wheels, Orlando!" Cosmo yelped.

    Orlando! Darcy stared, electrified, at the blond boy. Could it be? She reached for a napkin and dabbed her mouth as she hurriedly stood up. She needed to get back to Emma at once.

    Cosmo rushing towards Orlando, unclenching his hand and spilling about fifteen small, round, spoked pieces of dry pasta out onto the small, square, sage-painted table.

    Marco appeared from the doorway. "Rotolline. That's Italian for wheels. I keep this pasta in the restaurant for when families come. Children usually like my menu, but sometimes we have…"—he rolled his brown eyes hugely at Cosmo and Hero—"children who prefer tinned pasta. Can you imagine that?"

    They looked guiltily back at him.

    "But even tinned-pasta eaters like train wheels with homemade tomato sauce," Marco told them.

    "I'd like them!" Cosmo gasped.

    But Hero shook her silver-fair head. Her pale brow was knotted, and there was a steely glint in her narrowed blue eyes. "Not me," she insisted. "I still like tinned best."

    Orlando, Darcy saw, looked tense. She felt tense herself. Her eyes slid to Marco. How would the impassioned chef, the champion of all things authentically Italian, take this philistine attack, albeit from a child who looked some distance under five?

    Marco's face, she saw, was expressionless. Then, as he continued to regard the indomitable, fair little figure, it became thoughtful. "Maybe I can do something," he said at last in a quiet voice. "Maybe, at the back of a cupboard in my kitchen, I have a tin of spaghetti… just maybe," he warned, raising a scarred finger as Hero began to exclaim and jump about in excitement.

    Darcy rose from the table. "Marco. I've got to go." There were other matters afoot than tinned pasta, after all. The excitement of being able to give Emma the good news about Orlando was enough to obliterate completely the thought of the painful run back to the villa. She moved off across the courtyard.

    "Come back tomorrow," Marco called after her. "I'm expecting some truffles."

    "Truffles!" Darcy exclaimed. "I've never had those!"

"Then you haven't lived," Marco said easily. "I'll see you tomorrow."

    Darcy did not move fast. It was obviously unwise on a full stomach. She floated, rather than walked, down the steep hill.

    Her mobile beeped. A text? From Christian? She dragged it out of her shorts pocket, feeling the cheese she had just eaten rising up her throat in sick excitement.

    Darcy raised her eyebrows. It wasn't exactly Romeo. But it had a certain visceral directness that gave her a charge. Besides, her interest in Christian wasn't in his abilities at literary composition anyway. It was much less complicated than that.

You shouldn't, Ken knew, judge a book by its cover. Nonetheless, he found it hard to shake from his memory the sighting of the two men near the playground. He had had enough experience of undesirables to recognise them when he saw them, and he felt increasingly strongly that the proximity of such people to small children was worrying. Drugs—albeit soft ones like cannabis—and kiddies were never a good combination.

    Particularly if, as had seemed likely, the men were going to the playground to meet one of the nannies. And not just any of the nannies either, but the nasty blonde in charge of the two children who had made such a strong impression on Ken at the airport. Who were, in fact—and the boy especially—the entire reason he was here.

    But what could he do about it, Ken asked himself. It was all very well having his suspicions, but he could hardly hang around the playground himself and order the men to stay away. Nor did there seem much point alerting the local police—wherever they were—as there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. Ken's hunch that, nonetheless, something was wrong, continued to preoccupy him.

    Eventually, in a flashbulb-like flash of inspiration, he realised that the answer lay in a combination of the balcony in his room, which overlooked the playground, and also in his own baggage. To be precise, in the black, padded zip case under a heap of creased clothes in the corner of the room. This contained the Leica and long lenses he had hoped never again to use, but which, as they were actually around his neck when he made the spur-of-the-moment decision to fly to Italy, he had been unable to avoid bringing with him.

    And thank God he had, Ken thought now. He could use them to survey the playground from his balcony. Because, while his roster of skills numbered neither cooking, nor dancing, nor playing the piano, nor even—he dolefully suspected—being a particularly nice or useful person, one thing Ken was supremely good at was watching—sometimes for hours or even days—other people's movements through the end of a long-lensed camera.

    Surviving as a paparazzo had demanded that he was, and, while Ken, in turning his back on his former business, now regretted the years he had spent hiding in people's bushes or crouching down by their cars, he could now see a way to turn those questionable abilities to good use. Possibly even atone for the sins of the past.

    Stealthily, swiftly, he set up his camera in the corner of the balcony where it would least likely be noticed by those from below. He pulled the rickety chair from the bedroom outside and positioned it behind the lens. He sat down, twisted the lens, and got the playground gate in focus. He was immediately filled with a sense of satisfaction. Whatever happened now, if those men turned up, if they met one of the nannies and nefarious business was afoot, he would capture it all on film.

    Ken was, in accordance with general paparazzi law, expecting to have to wait some time before anything occurred. There was also the possibility that it never would, that the men he had seen had been a one-off. His instincts, however, which were rarely wrong, told him otherwise.

    Having armed himself with some bottles of ice-cold lager from one of the shops in the square and a salami sandwich the length and breadth of his forearm, he settled down and prepared to wait.

Mitch Masterson, in his L.A. office, was chewing anxiously on his third jelly doughnut of the morning. But the sweet, chewy dough, while it plugged the ever-present hole in his stomach, could do nothing about the gap in his soul. That his spirits were lower than they had been when he was the least successful agent on the company's books seemed ironic as now, along with Greg Cucarachi, he was almost at the top of the pecking order with two of his actresses in the new Jack Saint movie.

    As Mitch finished his doughnut, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Cucarachi trying the door of his office. He had started to close it, even contemplated locking it, to avoid the daily torture from his co-worker that he knew was coming now.

    Greg rattled the door open with a flourish. "Good morning, Mitchell!" he exclaimed. "And how are you today on this bright and beautiful Hollywood morning?"

    "I'm fine," Mitch grunted.

    "Belle learnt her lines yet?" Cucarachi asked in mock-concern. "I do hope so. I hear Jack's getting pretty pissed at her. Some of the cast are asking whether she can actually read…"

    "She can read alright," Mitch snapped. No one who had seen Belle grab her contract and devour it with her eyes could doubt that. That she hadn't shown the same alacrity in learning her part for the film was, Mitch knew from Saint's frequent irate phone calls, becoming almost as much of an on-set issue as Darcy's weight.

"Arlington Shorthouse isn't very happy," Greg added gleefully.

    "Yeah." He'd had Arlington on to him all the previous afternoon. It had not been a pleasant conversation, and, together with those from Jack Saint, had made Mitch almost long for the days when the only phone calls he received were from producer's assistants on obscure Latino soap operas.

    "You know," Mitch said now, as inspiration struck him, "I'm kinda wondering if Belle's, um, issues haven't got something to do with your client Christian Harlow. Whether the influence he's exerting on my client, Belle Murphy is, shall we say…"—Mitch put his head mock-questioningly on one side and drummed his fat fingers lightly on his desk—"entirely a good one."

    Ha! Take that, Cucarachi.

    Greg, however, was ready. "Interesting," he mused, stroking his long nose. "An interesting thought." He looked up and smiled. "Perhaps you'd prefer it if my client Christian Harlow—who, incidentally, knows all his lines backwards—transferred his interest back to your client Darcy Prince?"

    A pang of murderous fury went through Mitch. The bastard.

    "Catch you later!" Greg sang, swinging Mitch's door shut with a bang that made the walls rattle.

"I mean, Jack's, like, just so unreasonable," Belle stormed as they climbed into the Ferrari at Christian's villa. "He's bullying me. He's a mistletoe…no, misanthrope—that's hatred of women, isn't it?"

    "I wouldn't know," Christian said wearily, fumbling for the ignition. But while he did not know the word Belle was searching for, he knew the sentiment behind it. Getting back with this particular woman had been one big mistake.

    Jesus, had he got it wrong. He'd jumped back into bed with Belle believing her star to be once more on the rise, only to find her addled by self-importance and, Christian suspected, whatever drink she could get hold of. He felt he almost preferred her on the skids; she'd been clingy, sure, but at least she hadn't imagined she was Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, and Elizabeth Taylor all rolled into one.

    The fact she couldn't be bothered to learn her lines was the most dangerous aspect, however; the entire set knew she and he were together, and Christian found himself obliged to mount a charm offensive of spectacular proportions on the director to avoid becoming tarred with the same brush.

    He'd even bought Saint a present the other day: one of those little, red Vespa scooters. There'd been a discussion about Italian scooters during a break in filming; Saint had described them as design classics. Christian, whose idea of a design classic was a yacht with two helicopters and a submarine and felt scooters were for losers, nonetheless wasted no time moving heaven and earth to get one for Saint—or obliging his agent, from the distance of America—to move heaven and earth to save him the trouble.

    "That bastard Saint's making my life a misery," Belle butted in. "He's victimizing me. He hates women."

    "No, he doesn't," Christian snapped. "He just doesn't like people who turn up six hours late on set without knowing their part. It costs money, that sort of thing. The schedule's pretty tight."