“Where’s Palakon?” I automatically ask.
“Ah,” the director sighs. “There’s that name again, Victor.”
“Where is he?” I’m gasping.
“We’ve been through this a hundred times,” the director says. “There is no Palakon. I’ve never heard that name.”
“That’s just too heavy for me to accept at this point.”
“Well, lighten up,” the director says. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“I want to go back,” I’m weeping. “I want to go home.”
“There’s always that possibility, Victor,” the director says. “Don’t discount it.”
“Why aren’t you paying attention to me anymore?” I ask. “You haven’t called in a week.”
“Plans are forming,” is all the director says.
“You haven’t called me in a week,” I shout. “What am I doing here?”
“How … shall I put this?” the director ponders.
“You’re thinking the project is unrealized,” I spit out, panicking. “Don’t you? That’s what you think. But it isn’t.”
“How shall I put this?” the director says again.
“Tactfully?” I whisper.
“Tactfully?”
“Yes.”
“Your role is over, Victor,” he says. “Don’t be shocked,” he says.
“Should I read this … as a warning?”
“No.” He considers something. “Just a long period of adjustment.”
“You mean … that I could be here until when? August? Next year?”
“Someone is going to extract you from this sooner or later,” the director says. “I’m just not sure exactly when.” He pauses. “Davide will watch over you and someone will be in touch shortly.”
“What about you?” I wail. “Why can’t you do anything? Call Palakon.”
“Victor,” the director says patiently, “I’m at a loss. I’m moving on to another project.”
“You can’t, you can’t,” I’m shouting. “You can’t leave me here.”
“Because I’m moving on, someone else will be brought in to oversee what your, um, future role might be.”
“This isn’t happening,” I murmur.
I start crying again.
Davide looks up from his computer game. He offers a moment of attention, a random smile.
“In the meantime …” The director trails off.
Before hanging up, the director says he will try to speed things along by putting me in contact with a war criminal “who might know what to do” with me, and then the director’s gone and I never speak to him again.
5
Occasionally I’m allowed out for a walk. Davide always makes a series of calls. We always take the service elevator down. Davide is always armed inconspicuously. On the walk he closely scrutinizes every stranger that passes by. Since it’s the off-season and there’s no one in town, I’m allowed to browse through the Prada men’s boutique on Via Montenapoleone. We have a drink at Café L’Atlantique on Viale Umbria. Later we share a plate of sushi at La Terrazza on Via Palestro. I have so many little theories. I’m still piecing together clues—there’s only a blueprint, there’s only an outline—and sometimes they come together, but only when I’m drinking from a cold, syrupy bottle of Sambuca. Davide has one big theory that explains everything. “I like the really cool way you express yourself, Davide,” I say. Looking down, I add, “I’m sorry.” He mentions something about Leonardo and The Last Supper and how cute the waitress is.
And in the late afternoon there’s a polluted sky above Milan and it gets dark rather rapidly and then Davide and I are wandering through the fog floating around us and while walking along the Via Sottocorno I notice a limousine idling by the curb and models with orange hair and frostbite-blue lipstick are moving toward a bank of lighted windows and I break away from Davide and run into Da Giacomo and I glimpse Stefano Gabbana and Tom Ford, who glances over at me and nods casually before Davide pulls me out of the restaurant. This outburst means it’s time to go back to the hotel.
6
Back in the room shaped like a beehive Davide tosses me a Playboy before he takes a shower. December’s Playmate and her favorite things: military insignia, weapon designs, visiting the Pentagon’s national command center. But I’m watching MTV and a segment about the Impersonators—the huge DreamWorks contract, an interview with the band, the new single “Nothing Happened” off their soon-to-be-released CD In the Presence of Nothing. I slowly move to a mirror and in it my face looks ghostly, transparent, a vacant stare reminds me of something, my hair is turning white. I can hear Davide taking a shower, jets of water splashing against tile, Davide whistling a pop hit from four years ago. When Davide opens the bathroom I’m huddling on the bed, wilted, half-asleep, sucking on a lozenge.
“You are still alive,” Davide says, but as he reads the line I can swear he places a subtle emphasis on the pronoun.
Davide’s naked, carelessly drying himself off in front of me. Huge biceps, coarse hair tufting out from his armpits, the cheeks of his ass are like melons, the muscles in his stomach push out his belly button. He notices me watching and smiles emphatically. I tell myself he’s here to ward off danger.
Once dressed, Davide is in a gray mood and barely tolerant of any despair emanating from where I’m writhing on the bed, and I’m crying endlessly and staring at him. He stares back, puzzled, low key. He starts watching a soft-core porn film, Japanese girls having sex on a foam-rubber mattress.
His cell phone rings.
Davide answers it, dulled out, eyes empty.
He speaks quickly in Italian. Then he listens. Then he speaks quickly again before clicking off.
“Someone’s coming,” Davide says. “To see us.”
I’m humming listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise.
7
A knock on the door.
Davide opens it.
A beautiful young girl enters the room. Davide and the girl embrace and chat amiably in Italian while I stare, dazed, from the bed. The girl is holding an envelope and in the envelope is a videocassette. Without being introduced, she hands it to me.
I stare at it dumbly, then Davide impatiently yanks it out of my hand and slips it into the VCR beneath the television set.
Davide and the girl move over to another room in the suite as the tape starts playing.
8
It’s an episode of “60 Minutes” but without the sound.
Dan Rather introduces a segment. Behind him a mock-up of a magazine story. My father’s face. And below that, half in shadow, is my face.
Azaleas. At the home of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman. A dinner party for Samuel Johnson. A fund-raiser for his presidential bid. The guests: Ruth Hotte and Ed Huling and Deborah Gore Dean and Barbara Raskin and Deborah Tannen and Donna Shalala and Hillary Clinton and Muffy Jeepson Stout. There’s Ben Bradlee and Bill Seidman and Malcolm Endicott Peabody. There’s Clayton Fritcheys and Brice Clagett and Ed Burling and Sam Nunn. There’s Marisa Tomei and Kara Kennedy and Warren Christopher and Katharine Graham and Esther Coopersmith.
And Dad’s standing with a woman in her mid-forties wearing a Bill Blass cocktail dress. I glimpse her only briefly.
Now Dan Rather’s interviewing my father in his office.
Dad has obviously had a face-lift and his upper-lip-to-nose area has been shortened, droopy lids have been lifted and his teeth are bleached. He’s laughing, relaxed.
Then a series of photos flash by. Dad with Mort Zuckerman. Dad with Shelby Bryan. Dad with Strom Thurmond. Dad with Andrea Mitchell.
Suddenly: file footage. An interview with my mother from the mid-1980s. A clip of my father and mother at the White House, standing with Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Dan Rather interviewing my father again.
A montage: Brooks Brothers, Ann Taylor, Tommy Hilfiger.
And then I’m walking along Dupont Circle being interviewed by Dan Rather.
> This is suddenly intercut with footage that the “Entertainment Tonight” crew shot last fall of me working out with Reed at his gym.
Various shots from my portfolio: Versace, CK One, an outtake from Madonna’s Sex. Paparazzi shots of me leaving a nightclub called Crush. A shot of me leaving the Jockey Club.
I’m being interviewed by Dan Rather downstairs at Red Sage.
I’m laughing, relaxed, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. I’m dressed preppily in a Brooks Brothers suit. I’m nodding at everything that is being asked of me.
Dan Rather shows me a photo from a Vogue layout where I’m wearing Calvin Klein boxer-briefs and painting Christy Turlington’s toe-nails. Dan Rather is gesturing, making comments about my physical attractiveness.
I keep nodding my head as if ashamed.
And then: a photo of Chloe Byrnes, followed by various magazine covers.
A shot of Hôtel Costes in Paris.
A montage of her funeral in New York.
I’m sitting in the front row, crying, Alison Poole and Baxter Priestly both offering comfort.
Interviews with Fred Thompson and then Grover Norquist and then Peter Mandelson.
Shots of me walking through Washington Square Park.
Dad again. He’s walking out of the Palm with that woman in her mid-forties, dark hair, pretty but also plain enough not to be intimidating. They’re holding hands.
Outside the Bombay Club she’s there again, kissing him lightly on the cheek.
I recognize this woman.
This woman is Lorrie Wallace.
The Englishwoman who ran into me on the QE2.
The woman married to Stephen Wallace.
The woman who wanted me to go to England.
The woman who recognized Marina.
I lunge for the TV, trying to turn up the volume while Lorrie Wallace is being interviewed. But there’s no sound, just static.
Finally Dad and Lorrie Wallace at Carol Laxalt’s annual Christmas party. Dad’s standing by a poinsettia. He’s shaking John Warner’s hand.
And in the background, sipping punch from a tiny glass cup, is F. Fred Palakon, a giant Christmas tree twinkling behind him.
I hold a hand over my mouth to stop the screaming.
9
I’m calling my sister again. It rings three, four, five times.
She picks up.
“Sally?” I’m breathing hard, my voice tight.
“Who is this?” she asks suspiciously.
“It’s me,” I gasp. “It’s Victor.”
“Uh-huh,” she says dubiously. “I’d really prefer it—whoever this is—if you would stop calling.”
“Sally, it’s really me, please—” I gasp.
“It’s for you,” I hear her say.
The sound of the phone being passed to someone else.
“Hello?” a voice asks.
I don’t say anything, just listen intently.
“Hello?” the voice asks again. “This is Victor Johnson,” the voice says. “Who is this?”
Silence.
“It’d be really cool if you stopped bothering my sister,” the voice says. “Okay?”
Silence.
“Goodbye,” the voice says.
A click.
I’m disconnected.
10
Davide wants some privacy. He hands me a sweater, suggesting I go for another walk. The girl is smoking a cigarette, sitting naked on a plush tan couch. She glances over at me, waiting. Numb, I comply.
At the door, standing in the hallway, I ask Davide, “How do you know I’ll come back?”
“I trust you,” he says, smiling, urging me out.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because,” he says, gesturing, still smiling, “you have no place to go.”
The way he says this is so charming I just nod and actually thank him.
“Thank you,” I say to Davide.
Behind him the girl walks toward the bed. She stops, twisting her muscular body, and whispers something urgently in Italian to Davide. Davide closes the door. I hear him lock it.
11
I take the service elevator down to the lobby and outside it’s night and the streets are wet and water drips down the facades of the buildings I pass but it’s not raining. A taxi cruises by. I step out of the way of fast-skating Rollerbladers. And I’m still feeling filmed. How many warnings had I ignored?
12
Back at the hotel, an hour later. I take the service elevator up to my floor. I move slowly down the empty hallway. At my room, I pull out a key, knocking first.
There’s no answer.
The key slips into the lock.
I push the door open.
Davide lies naked in a pile in the bathroom. No specific visible wound, but his skin is broken in so many places I can’t tell what happened to him. The floor beneath Davide is washed over with blood, dotted with smashed hotel china. Dramatic lightning from outside. There’s no sign of the girl. Blaming myself, I walk downstairs to the bar.
13
In a nearby room in the Principe di Savoia a propmaster is loading a 9mm mini-Uzi.
14
Sinead O’Connor was singing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” and it was either 11:00 or 1:00 or maybe it was 3:15 and we were all lying around Gianni’s pool in the big house on Ocean Drive and there were about twenty of us and everyone was talking into a cell phone and doing dope and I had just met Chloe earlier that week. She was lying on a chaise longue, burning under the sun, and her lips were puffy from collagen injections and my skull was on fire from a hangover caused by a dozen mango daiquiris and I was carefully eyeing the forty-carat diamond she was wearing, and the lemonade I was drinking stung my mouth and everyone was saying “So what?” and there had been a cockroach sighting earlier and people were basically becoming unglued. There were boys everywhere—slim, full-lipped, big-bulged, sucking in their cheeks—and there were also a couple of rock stars and a teenage gay guy from Palestine bragging about a really cool stone-throwing he’d attended in Hebron. All of this under a calm gumball-blue sky.
And Sinead O’Connor was singing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” and a girl lying across from me was positioned in such a way that I could see her anus and she would reach under her bikini bottom and scratch it, then bring her fingers to her face and lightly smell them. On a huge Bang & Olufsen TV that had been wheeled out, an episode of “The X-Files” was playing where someone’s dog had been eaten by a sea serpent and for some reason everyone was reading a book called The Amityville Horror and tired from last night’s premiere for a new movie called Autopsy 18—the guy hunched over the Ouija board, the girl just back from Madonna’s baby shower, the kid playing with a cobra he’d bought with a stolen credit card. A big murder trial was going on that week in which the defense team convinced me that the victim—a seven-year-old girl fatally beaten by her drunken father—was actually guilty of her own death. Mermaids had been spotted during a swim before dawn.
“Could you kill somebody?” I heard a voice ask.
A moment passed before another voice answered, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Oh, so what?” someone else moaned.
Someone walked by with a panting wolf on a leash.
And Sinead O’Connor was singing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” and I had spent part of the morning trimming my pubic hair and everyone was checking various gossip columns to see if they had made it but they were basically one-shots and it was never going to happen for any of them and there was a Rauschenberg in the bathroom and a Picasso in the pantry and the guy I had slept with the night before—a boy who looked like Paul Newman at twenty—started talking about a friend who had been murdered in Maui last week and then everyone around the pool joined in and I couldn’t follow the conversation. A tiny rift with a drug dealer? An irate exporter/importer? A run-in with a cannibal? Who knew? Was his death bad? He had been lowered into a barrel of hungry insects. A poll was taken. On a scale of 1 to 10—being
lowered into a barrel of hungry insects? Opinions were offered. I thought I was going to faint. This conversation was the only indication that anyone here knew anybody else. I lit a cigarette I bummed from River Phoenix. I was just becoming famous and my whole relationship to the world was about to change.
And Sinead O’Connor was singing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” and someone tossed Pergola the keys to one of the Mercedes parked in the garage and it was just too hot out and a jet flew overhead and I jealously studied Bruce Rhinebeck’s face smirking at me from the cover of a magazine and the guy I’d slept with the night before whispered to me “You’re a piece of shit” and there was my “stunned disbelief” and me saying “So what?” and I was so tan my nipples had changed color and I looked down at my muscled body admiringly but a fly was dozing on my thigh and when I brushed it away it came back, hovering. A Brazilian boy asked me how I got my abs that cubed and I was so flattered I had to concentrate very seriously in order to answer him.
An injured bat had crawled out from beneath a chaise longue and it was chirping and flapping its wings uselessly and a few of the teenage boys stood around it silently. The bat rolled over, upended, and when one of the boys kicked it, the bat screamed. Someone struck it with a branch, and a puff of dust flew off its skin. Light was flickering across the water in the vast pool and I was watching everything through binoculars. A servant brought me a piece of birthday cake and a can of Hawaiian Punch as I had requested. The bat was wriggling on the ground next to a discarded cell phone. Its spine was broken and it tried to bite anyone who got near it. The boys continued torturing it. Someone brought out a fork.