The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (23 page)

Chapter 30

Berlin, last October

My conscience was overruled and my curiosity got the better of me. I was reading Marco’s diary. I should have returned it; that would have been the honourable thing to do. But then I thought how desperate Silvio must have been to try to get the diary into my hands. First he had stolen from his employer and then he had accosted Bea in the street. He might have ended up without a job. And with a black eye, had he got any closer to Bea in that dark alleyway.

Silvio wanted me to know something important.

For that reason – at least, that’s the reason I settled on – I continued to read Marco’s essay for his shrink. It was slow work. It was written entirely in Italian and I wanted to make sure I got every nuance. If I was going to break so many rules about trust, then I wanted at least to get the translation right.

The date at the beginning of the account was February 2001 but I knew that, since I had been working at the hospital in 1999, the accident must have occurred earlier that year. Was this Marco’s account of it? Turned out it was much more than that.

1st February 2001,

Venice

My name is Marco Donato. I was born in this city twenty-two years ago. I didn’t have a silver spoon in my mouth – there’s no way you could ever consider my family to be nobility – but I was born to all the privileges that money can bring. My grandfather had built a very successful cruise line. My father was presiding over a big upturn in the family’s fortunes. I was blessed in so many ways. I would never want for anything. I had a wealthy father and a beautiful mother. It was as though I was the child in the fairy tale, born to the king and queen. I was their only child.

As I grew older, it was obvious that my advantages weren’t just material. I was always good-looking. My nurse told me she could hardly walk down the street when she had me in a pram, for all the old ladies and young wives who wanted to get a good look at me. I liked the attention, she said, and I would always reserve my biggest beams for the pretty girls. I was flirting before I could talk. What’s that saying? Smile and the world will smile with you? I had no idea there was any other facial expression. Everyone smiled at me.

Later, at school, I was popular. The girls wanted to be with me. The boys wanted to be me. I found schoolwork easy and my teachers were kind. The only shadow in my life was that, as I went into my teens, my parents’ marriage began to falter. They were both busy with their love lives, so they left me to run pretty wild. I went to high school in the States but during the vacations I was back in Venice and I was allowed to throw parties at the palazzo. There’s no teenager more popular than one who has a place where his friends can hang out without being nagged about smoking and homework. A teenager with a palazzo at his disposal is really something else.

As it was, my friends came from similar backgrounds. They were as privileged as me. We were arrogant with it. We scorned those who had less than us, never for a moment considering the origins of our own wealth. We acted as though we had earned the right to swagger around Venice, ordering people about like we were worthy of their respect and deference. I am eternally grateful that Silvio seems to have forgiven me for being a teenage prick. I don’t know what I would have done without him and yet, before my accident, I treated him with less kindness than I treated the family dog. If Silvio ever thinks I got my comeuppance, he doesn’t show it. He’s always been a better man than I.

It was in the summer of 1999 that I made the fateful trip. Gianni, my oldest friend, was about to go to the States to study at Stanford for four years. We had to give him a proper send-off so we decided on a boys’ weekend.

There was a definite fin de siècle buzz in the air that summer. It was as though everyone was determined to live large just in case the doom-mongers were right and New Year’s Eve saw the earth explode in a giant fireball just because the computers couldn’t handle a date change. I arranged to meet my friends in Berlin. We had heard that the scene there had to be seen to be believed. The underground clubs were legendary. Not that we were going to be staying anywhere grungy; we booked into the Hotel Adlon, which had recently reopened. We may have liked to think of ourselves as wild and crazy, but we all appreciated clean sheets and American-style sanitaryware.

There were five of us on that German jaunt. Me and my best buddies. Gianni had scoped out the nightlife. He was a great fixer. He knew everyone worth knowing. With Gianni as part of our gang, we knew we’d have no trouble getting in anywhere we wanted to go. There wasn’t a door on earth that was closed to that guy. We had the world at our feet. If only we’d deserved it.

I’m sure you understand what a gang of young men can be like. Individually, we were all perfect young gentlemen, our mothers’ darlings, future members of the European establishment. But when we were together and far away from the influence of Venetian high society, we were feral. We were the kind of baying idiots you would cross the street to avoid. With our arrogant swagger and our awful manners, we were a perfect advert in favour of the heavy taxation of inherited wealth.

When we got to Berlin, we didn’t waste any time getting into the party spirit. We met in Gianni’s suite at the Adlon – of course he had scored a free upgrade by flirting with the girl on the desk – and opened a few bottles of Cristal. It’s not that we were connoisseurs, simply that Cristal was the most expensive thing on the wine list. We got through a couple of magnums in an hour.

We were drunk even before we headed to the first club.

We had a packed itinerary of debauchery to follow. Gianni had things organised. He knew where to find the best music, the best girls, the best drugs. We ate at the city’s finest restaurant, then travelled by limousine to a rough part of town where we danced ourselves into a frenzy in an old beer cellar. We threw our money around. We made ourselves very unpopular with a lot of poor young German guys. How could they possibly compete?

It was around midnight that we went to a place called the Boom Boom. Gianni said it was the hottest place to go. It was a relatively new opening but it was based on a club of the same name that had been popular during the Weimar years. It was well-known for its exotic transvestite cabaret and also for its amateur night, which was the real draw for us that evening. We wanted to see people make fools of themselves. Perhaps, when we were drunk enough, we might even make fools of ourselves.

We took a table right next to the stage and ordered the most expensive wine in the place. The waiter brought us a bottle of barely drinkable fizz. We still had to work out that the most expensive was by no means necessarily the best. Still, we were so drunk that anything better would have been wasted.

The show began. We were in high spirits, but even mob-handed, when it came to heckling we were no match for the club’s experienced master of ceremonies. Or perhaps I should say ‘mistress’. The transvestite, who was at least seven feet tall in her heels, with her blonde hair piled up on her head like Marge Simpson, got so fed up of Gianni’s howling that she pulled him up onto the stage and demanded that he dance with her. Gianni joined in the fun. It was comical but good-natured. Gianni had a good sense of humour. We all did. We were young, we were good-looking and we were very very rich. What was there to be unhappy about? Gianni was even persuaded to sing a duet with the enormous trannie. Together they murdered ‘Everything I Do’ to the delight of everyone present. It was a terrible rendition of a terrible song.

But there were other people at the club who took their music seriously. When the tuneless duet was finished, a girl took the stage. We’d seen some strange-looking creatures that night and, as far as we were concerned, this girl was no exception. She was by no means a traditional beauty. She was wearing the kind of outfit you would have expected to see in a lap-dancing club and her hair, which she wore in spikes, was dyed a lurid green. She was small and almost spherical in shape. The boys at once started to comment on what her figure was lacking. It didn’t seem to bother the girl, though she must have heard every word. She walked on to that stage with the confidence of a true professional and even blew kisses in Gianni’s direction. But there was one other thing. The girl must have been born with a cleft-lip; she had a lurid scar right in the middle of her face. A slash from nose to lip like a vicious duelling scar. There was a little notch where her Cupid’s bow should have been.

It makes me feel ill now to think about what happened next. We started howling and barking. Gianni even threw a couple of French fries at the stage but the girl didn’t flinch and, in any case, the mistress of ceremonies soon slapped us down again. The club grew quiet. The rest of the punters were waiting respectfully for the girl to begin her act. Perhaps they’d seen her before and they knew what was coming.

As soon as the girl opened her mouth, it was obvious where her confidence came from. Her curious – some would say, Hell, we did say – ugly appearance belied a beautiful voice. Even Gianni shut up and listened as she sang.

The song she chose was ‘Song to the Siren’. She accompanied herself on the piano. I didn’t know the Tim Buckley tune at all until that night but I was immediately captivated by its lilting tune and mournful lyrics. The audience was held spellbound by this siren indeed. And as she sang, she seemed suddenly beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

The song finished. We applauded. And then we barked some more. I would like to say that the girl’s enormous talent for singing made me continue to overlook her packaging now that the song was over, but it didn’t. Not yet. And when Gianni dared me to chat her up, I can’t say I relished the prospect.

We had this game. I’m not proud of it. We called it ‘pig hunting’. In Italy, of course, hunting boar is a popular pastime. We took the metaphor into the clubs. Our wild pigs were the girls we didn’t consider to be attractive in the least.

Gianni slapped a hundred Deutschmarks on the table. Each of the other guys followed suit, so that my prize, should I undertake the mission they had chosen for me, would be half a grand. It wasn’t as though any of us needed the money, but the cash somehow showed the seriousness of the bet. It made the challenge real.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

I got up from the table to a round of applause. I was frustrated with my friends for that. They must have known they were making it more difficult for me by giving me such a send-off. I would have thought it was immediately obvious to my ‘target’ that something was afoot and I didn’t expect her to be especially welcoming when I arrived at her table with half a bottle of champagne. But to my surprise she smiled broadly and invited me to sit down with her and her friends, who gave me a curt hello and returned to their conversation. They seemed to know I was a dick, even if she didn’t. I poured the champagne.

‘That stuff is terrible,’ she said, looking at the label as she pushed her glass away. ‘Now, what can I do for you, young man?’

With that she immediately put me on the back foot. Young man? It was both charming and quietly patronising. She must have been about the same age as me.

‘I just wanted to congratulate you on your performance,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a beautiful singing voice.’

‘Thank you.’ She accepted my praise as though it was sincere, which I suppose, in a way, it was. She did have a beautiful singing voice. I wasn’t lying. But now she was looking at me expectantly. ‘Carry on,’ she said.

‘And I like your hair,’ I said.

‘I do it myself.’

‘I thought so,’ I blurted out. This made her throw her head back and laugh.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment, coming as it does from a boy who still lets his mother buy his clothes.’

It was true that, compared to her friends in their creative and exotic threads, I was dressed rather squarely for the Boom Boom. We may have thought of ourselves as rebels, but we couldn’t shake the Italian urge for elegance.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

I thought about lying but I didn’t really have the energy to keep up any kind of pretence. I was too drunk. I told her the truth. ‘Marco Donato.’

‘Silke,’ she said. ‘Silke Fischer.’

It sounded like ‘Silky’ and for some reason, it made me think of a seal, slipping through the water.

She held out my hand and we shook. I noticed at once how smooth her skin was. Her fingernails were painted a deep blood-red. She had the most elegant hands. I found myself wondering if she paid them special attention because her face . . . Her face.

I looked at her. I was trying so hard not to look at her lip that I stared deep into her eyes instead. Perhaps that was when I started to fall for her. Her eyes were dark and compelling. Hypnotic. A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth as though she could tell she was drawing me in.

‘Your friends are calling you,’ she said. ‘They want their terrible champagne back.’

She pretty much shooed me away.

When I got back to the table, I was greeted like a hero with much backslapping and congratulation. I had only poured the girl a drink. You would think I had persuaded her to strip in the middle of the club. As the boys marvelled at my smooth-tongued abilities as a chat-up artist, I was glad to see that Silke already had her back to me. She could not see how I was being lauded at her expense. She was too busy talking to the friends she had arrived with, who suddenly seemed very sophisticated and grown-up compared to my crowd of overgrown schoolkids. I was sure she must have thought me an idiot. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have cared, but there was something about the way she had smiled at me, as though she saw a kindred spirit beneath all the bravura.