The Affair (31 page)

Diana felt herself losing her temper, as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff as the grass gave way beneath her feet. ‘If you want to get married, you should try going out with single men. Stay away from Ernesto!’

‘But I like him,’ she whined through her tears.

‘You stupid, thoughtless girl!’ Diana was shouting now, vaguely aware that other customers in the bar had stopped to listen. ‘Does it mean nothing to you that people will get hurt because of your actions? Is it all a game? Is it just sex you’re after? I’m sure there are plenty of men here who would give you just sex, if that’s the kind of girl you are.’ She was being cruel now, and reined herself in. ‘Look, I’m sorry but please don’t go out with Ernesto. I’ve met his wife and she’s a decent woman. She doesn’t deserve this.’

Helen laid her head on her arms and sobbed. Diana stood up and scraped her chair back. She should comfort her. It wasn’t Helen she was angry with, but Ernesto. He must have gone straight out on the prowl after leaving her room the previous evening. And he knew Helen was a friend of hers, so why did he target her? The suspicion entered her head that he was trying to hurt her as revenge for ending the affair.

She considered again whether she should comfort Helen but she didn’t have the patience. She was too cross. Besides, she wanted Helen to take her seriously and stay away from Ernesto, so she picked up her bag and walked out of the bar without another word. The other customers watched her go.

All afternoon, Diana felt bad about their falling out. Helen was an innocent and would have been childishly delighted when Ernesto made a play for her. He was the villain. Diana hoped he hadn’t taken advantage of her already. Surely he didn’t work quite so fast? She frowned. Of course, Helen had mentioned something about Easter as well. If he had targeted her back then, he really was a louse.

The argument preyed on her mind so at five o’clock she went to the makeup department to apologise but the Italian women there told her that Helen had left earlier. Diana hurried towards the main gate to ask the guard on the gate if a car had picked her up yet. If not, she’d invite Helen for dinner that evening so they could talk it through. She should confess about her own affair with Ernesto so that Helen understood why she had snapped.

‘
Sta in quel bar di là
,’ the guard told her, pointing to a seedy-looking place down the street.

Diana walked down the dusty main road, past a lone
paparazzo
and some waste ground where a few goats were grazing, and when she reached the bar she saw Helen sitting inside with the Italian man called Luigi. Diana hesitated. She had never liked the look of him and decided not to interrupt them. She’d explain everything to Helen on her return from Torre Astura. They could make things up then.

Every evening, Scott replaced one batch of papers in the office cubbyhole and took out another. The author had done his homework and the picture that was emerging was disturbing. The papers explained that in 1955 two Sicilian Mafia bosses, Gaetano Galatolo and Nicola D’Alessandro, were killed in a dispute over protection rackets, and since then the balance of power in what was known as ‘Cosa Nostra’ had been shifting towards Michele Cavataio, a much-feared gangster nicknamed the Cobra. They said that Rome was the centre of European heroin trafficking, with opium arriving from North Africa or the Middle East and being processed in labs around Italy then smuggled out to the US or the rest of Europe. Cavataio had multiple contacts in Rome where he bought the allegiance of government ministers, judges and anyone else he needed. There were different levels of people working for him, and Don Ghianciamina was near the top. There was a photograph of him, corpulent and silver-haired, with half-moon glasses on his nose.

Scott got excited. This was the first document that would help him to tie the Ghianciaminas into his drugs exposé. So far all he had was a young girl who had dabbled in heroin, a man who drove drugs up from the south of Italy and left them in a garage, and a dealer who worked in the bars and clubs round the Via Veneto. If he could implicate someone higher up the chain and round out his piece with this extra information that had dropped into his lap, then it could be genuinely good journalism. This could be the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece his father wanted him to write – and it could cause trouble for the Ghianciaminas as well, so Scott would have his revenge.

Suddenly he wondered whether Don Ghianciamina or his son Alessandro had been amongst the men Helen had met at the villa on the coast. From the fancy cars he spotted there, it appeared to be the top people who came and went. It would be wonderful if she could identify them.

At seven o’clock, the hour when many Romans went home after work before heading out for the evening, Scott decided to drive to Helen’s place. The
padrona
wasn’t sitting in the courtyard and he wasn’t sure which room was Helen’s, so Scott knocked on the first door. It was opened by an Italian woman with a baby on her hip.

‘
Sí?
’

‘
Una ragazza inglese. Con i capelli biondi. Dove abita
?’ Scott asked.

The woman stepped outside and pointed to an apartment on the next floor and two doors along.

‘
Grazie.
’

‘
Prego.
’ She remained outside and watched as he ascended.

He knocked on the door and waited. He could hear movement inside but there was no reply so he knocked again and at last Helen opened the door a crack. She held up a hand to shield her face from the light but he could see she had been crying.

‘Are you alright? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I’m OK.’ She was breathing in huge gasps and seemed extremely distressed.

‘You don’t look OK. Why don’t I buy you a drink and you can tell me about it?’

She blew her nose noisily into a crumpled handkerchief. ‘You can’t help. Forget about it.’

Scott held out his arm, wanting to give her a hug, but she pulled away. ‘Why not dinner? Maybe I could cheer you up. I’ll tell you my best jokes.’

‘I can’t. Why are you even asking me? You don’t fancy me and I don’t want your pity.’ Tears were rolling steadily down her cheeks.

‘I’ve never pitied you!’ he protested. ‘I like you. We’re friends. I’d like to spend the evening with you.’

‘I’m sorry, I have to go now.’ She tried to shut the door but he stuck out his hand to stop her.

‘Helen, this isn’t anything to do with drugs, is it? You haven’t started taking them again, have you?’

She began to cry even harder. ‘I had no choice. I couldn’t afford any more of those vitamin shots and I feel awful when I don’t have them. There’s nothing else I can do if I want to keep my job.’ Her words were almost incoherent.

‘But I thought you were only going to need one or two vitamin shots. Why did you keep going back? They cost a fortune!’

‘I needed them. I suppose I’m weak, but I couldn’t manage without them – and now I can’t afford them any more.’

‘That’s crazy! We’ll go back to the doctor and make him help you. Or we’ll find another doctor. Don’t give up, Helen. I’m on your side. I promise we’ll solve this. Why don’t you let me come in?’

She grabbed the door in panic. ‘No, you can’t. It’s not a good time. Please go, Scott. I can’t come out with you and that’s all there is to it.’

She tried to close the door again but still Scott held on. He couldn’t leave her like this. Besides, she might be his only way of linking the Ghianciaminas to his drugs story and he had to persuade her to cooperate. He improvised as he went along.

‘Listen, I’m going to tell you the truth, Helen, but you’ll have to keep this to yourself. I actually work for the CIA. We’re trying to crack down on the drug shipments coming back to the US by catching the big dealers and I really need you to look at a couple of pictures and tell me if you saw any of these people at the Villa Armonioso.’

She stopped crying and stared at him wide-eyed. ‘Are you really in the CIA? Do you have a badge?’

‘I didn’t bring it with me because I’m working undercover. This is very important. You could be saving a lot of other young people from going through what you have. You could even save their lives.’

Would she really be gullible enough to buy it? She stared at him, making up her mind. ‘You told me you were a writer.’

‘Yeah, that’s my cover story. It’s a mark of how much I trust you that I’m telling you now. Please will you look at the pictures for me?’

‘I was pretty stoned so I’m not sure how much I remember. They were old, you know. Like, forty or something.’

‘Does this face seem familiar?’ He handed over the newspaper photo of Don Ghianciamina.

She stared at it, then shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think there was anyone
that
old.’

Scott took it back and handed her his snap of Alessandro.

She peered at it for a while. ‘Yes, he might have been there. I’m not positive, but I remember thinking he had lizard eyes.’

‘He does. You’re right. That really helps.’

She sniffed hard, as if she might start crying again.

‘Do you want me to take you back to the vitamin doctor for another shot? I’ll pay.’

‘No, I’d rather go on my own.’

Scott took out his wallet and peeled off some notes. ‘You sure? This is enough for one more, just to keep you going, but I’m going to talk to that doctor and find out why you aren’t better yet. I’m sure there’s something else we can try. Don’t give up hope, will you?’

She hung her head.

He put his fingers under her chin and lifted it gently. ‘I’m not going to leave until you convince me you’re OK.’

She nodded very slightly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

Scott kissed her cheek and let her close the door but he stood there a few moments longer. It felt wrong to leave her in that state but he didn’t know what else to do. He wished he had met her friend Diana. Maybe she would talk more readily to another girl.

At last he turned and walked slowly down the stairs again. The woman with the baby gave him an indignant look, as if it were he who had made Helen cry.

During the drive to Torre Astura, Diana opened the car window and let the hot, dusty breeze blow over her, not caring about the mess it made of her hair. It didn’t matter what she looked like any more. There was no one to care. In her head, she kept rerunning all the lies Ernesto had told her: his mother’s shingles, the stories about his sister’s children (she now assumed he had been talking about his own) … and the biggest lie of all – that he loved her. She realised she hadn’t known him. She’d seen him as one person whereas he was someone else entirely, someone she couldn’t fathom. Why would you try to break up a person’s marriage when you had no intention of marrying them yourself? To her, it made no sense. She supposed that it meant she hadn’t truly loved him. She had been in love with a fantasy, an invention that didn’t exist.

The journey took an hour and a half, through fields and across rivers, until eventually they pulled up at some gates set in a fenced-off area. She showed her studio pass to a security guard and was driven into the lot.

Straight away, Diana saw the Alexandria set along the waterfront and she caught her breath. It was so much better than the one she’d seen at Pinewood the previous year, with the turquoise Mediterranean forming a backdrop and white sun bleaching the imitation buildings. The Serapeum was magnificent, with several flights of wide steps leading up to the colonnaded frontage. Hawk-headed sphinxes sat on pedestals and giant sculptures of Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III greeted boats that moored at the C-shaped jetty. To the side was the black pyramid of Cleopatra’s mausoleum, still under construction. It wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was rather good.

Leaving her overnight bag in the car, she walked down to the jetty, where carpenters were at work on a Roman battleship. The rigging of the sails, the eyelets through which oars protruded, the curved helm – all seemed to follow the advice she had given. There were a few issues to correct: the moorings to which it was tied were wrong, and some of the little craft anchored in the water, which would have transported goods to shore, were too modern-looking. Some fishing pots sitting on the jetty were Greek in style rather than Egyptian but that was plausible. She sat on the edge of the jetty, dangling her feet over the water, and took out her notebook.