Angela heard her own voice murmuring, ‘Then it was true, Fefe was telling the truth. They suspended his medication.’
‘Yes, Santo told me, he heard Dall’Oglio ordering the suspension. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s irrelevant, I mean, some time has passed, and the cure had been resumed. But I had to tell you, I couldn’t. ’
Angela touched his face. ‘What can it matter now, Marco? It’s not your fault. You loved him.’
She managed to hug him, as though he was the one in need of consolation.
She walked away, leaving him standing there, a wreck washed up among the tombstones.
As he left the Certosa cemetery, along Via Andrea Costa, Pierre couldn’t get Montroni’s expression out of his mind. It frightened him. It was ice, that was it, it reminded him of ice, a little cube of it sliding along your spine. No one had ever looked at him like that before. Shit! The fucker knew. He knew about him and Angela, he had read it in his eyes. But how the hell had he managed to find out? And yet he was sure of it, he would have put his hand in the fire. It wasn’t the expression of someone wondering why he was looking at his wife. It was the expression of someone who knew, and knew why.
Montroni could go fuck himself. His brother-in-law was dead and the fucker was worried about being cuckolded!
Poor Fefe. And poor Angela. The world was collapsing on top of her. A brother who had killed himself and a husband who might have discovered her betrayal. She was in the shit. She was finished. And there was nothing he could do about it.
He clenched his fists on the handlebars, anger and tension swelled his muscles, he regained control, a car sounded its horn, drunkard!
He pedalled harder, head down, like Coppi, he wanted to tire himself out, get home exhausted and throw himself on the bed and go to sleep. To sleep, that was the only thing. To be unconscious. Not to think. That was all he wanted. His problems were laughable in comparison with Angela’s. But he was going off the rails as well. On the home straight, he instinctively tried the brakes. As though he had to slow down on the brink of the abyss.
Chapter 23
Cannes, 2 June
The Municipal Casino was a blaze of artificial lights.
Cary was wearing a blue tuxedo. Blacker than black. The effect of the artificial light. The first person to have noticed it had been the most stylish man in the world (along with Cary and Fred Astaire), a man whose subject Cary had once been.
The Duke of Windsor. The former sovereign of the British Empire, under the name of Edward VIII. Someone who had really retired.
Cary, on the other hand, had not succeeded in abdicating. He didn’t really want to. Now he knew. He smiled.
Relaxed. As always, when he worked with Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitch.
During the shoots for Suspicion and Notorious, Cary turned up whistling on set.
His understanding with Hitch was perfect. Telepathic. It would be this time, too.
He was back.
Once Cary, reading an interview with Hitch, had burst out laughing at the sentence, ‘Do you think I would have chosen to look like this? I would have preferred to have played a leading man in life. I would have been Cary Grant.’
No, Hitch. Right now you’d be Archibald Alexander Leach. Cary Grant isn’t born. Cary Grant becomes himself. Cary Grant is a gift to the world. I’m back.
Hitch was by his side. That famous profile, the prominent paunch, the bald head. A face abrim with sarcasm, every cubic centimetre of the body intent on digesting its dinner. Hitch was a slow, anthropomorphic stomach. The sarcasm was hydrochloric acid, the imagination a play of enzymes, Hitch digested the life forms around him, the proteins and vitamins that made up the corpus of his works.
Then there was Grace. A dark-blue evening dress, blacker than black.
Cary had met her a few days previously. He had admired her at a distance, now he was admiring her from close up. Concentrated, but without forfeiting lightness. Provocative without being aggressive. Beautiful and blonde without being showy. Beautiful and blonde.
A sensation of déjà vu. Just for a moment.
He couldn’t wait to start filming.
Three backs turned towards the casino bar, three smiles, six eyes, human diversity beginning to swarm.
Nine p.m. Hands at ninety degrees.
Bowing at the same angle, the liveried porters greeted the entrance of the imperial court.
At the front, six girls of about twenty, décolletées and slits up their skirts that seemed to meet in the middle, catwalk strolls despite the needle-thin stilts beneath their heels. Dozens of male eyes swept through the hall to settle on the prettiest. Not Mr Hitchcock’s, which were held by summer fruits and crème chantilly. Nor Mr Grant’s, or perhaps surreptitiously so as not to offend Grace Kelly.
The same number of ladies, although these ones were striking because of their jewellery alone, followed the trailblazers with less boldness in their gate.
Immediately behind them, five elegant young men, pinstripes, hats and cigars, walked five different pedigree breeds on leads. A champagne-coloured Afghan hound, a Dalmatian, a charcoal-black Great Dane the size of a calf, a Dobermann called Anubi and a restless Labrador.
The rules of the casino forbade the presence of dogs. And the moment they had crossed the threshold another group in turn took charge of them, some servants paid specifically to dedicate themselves to their piss. It would have been wiser and more economical to let them run about the park du Château de Torenc, but the emperor did not hold this opinion.
Once the cynophile squad had passed, four bodyguards standing side by side barely got through the door. Masked by their backs, three eccentric men stepped forward, deep in conversation. The ones with the blue tights and the orchids in their buttonholes were the emperor’s special advisers. In their midst, Bao Dai distributed waves, smiles and 100-franc notes. His Korean jacket gave him the air of a serious statesman, like Nehru, but juxtaposed with the purple cachecol that burgeoned forth from beneath the top buttons it looked more like the latest discovery of a Parisian flâneur.
Apart from the dogs, apart from the trio, the series was then repeated symmetrically: imposing gorillas, elegant young men, ladies in jewels, half-naked models. The moment the door of the casino swallowed up the last marble posterior, twenty different car doors, all belonging to the emperor’s collection, slammed in unison and the drivers switched on the engines.
Spoken phrases, quiet gossip, inexpressible thoughts and eloquent expressions seethed around the courtyard like oil in a pan. Every evening, Emperor Bao Dai tried to catch one phrase from the crowd, helped by his special advisers Azzoni and Mariani. He was delighted by all this attention, but he took even greater pleasure in replying to spiteful comments.
A man of about forty, still slobbering over a girl’s tanned legs, spoke just a little too loudly as he turned to his friend. ‘Pretty girls, Henri, but all of them whores.’
Mariani jabbed his elbow into the emperor’s ribs. Almost everyone had heard the appraisal. The news reached the others a second later.
Bao Dai stopped, spread his arms, and aimed the long slits of his eyes at the man who had spoken. Bao Dai tilted his head to one side and raised his chin. Bao Dai said, ‘You are mistaken, Monsieur.’ A nod caressed the ladies in his entourage. ‘These women you see, my friend, are not whores.’ His hand struck his chest. ‘I am the whore.’