The St. Tropez Lonely Hearts Club (12 page)

‘I suppose you think Khris Kane’s going to sign you up to make a record now that he doesn’t have Mina Corbain,’ she sneered.

Lara’s high-pitched, tinkly laugh irritated the crap out of Fabrizio, who merely smiled mysteriously as he fiddled with the clasp of her necklace.

While he fiddled with that, Lara fiddled with his zipper. God, this woman was insatiable. He’d serviced her twice already today: once in the morning, which was relatively easy as he had a morning ‘woody’, and Lara being half asleep liked the ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am’, and then after a liquid lunch on her boat when she’d dragged him to her cabin, not even giving him time to top up his tan on deck. She’d beckoned to him imperiously and he had followed her into the cool sanctuary of her stateroom, where she coaxed his reluctant member into suitable tumescence with a relatively reasonable blow job. Now she was hot for him again. Fabrizio felt like a male whore, but what choice did he have? Every time he complained to Maximus the fat man brought up the ogre of the money he owed to CRAP – the ex-girlfriends and the brats.

Lara had just started pulling down his pants when the doorbell rang. ‘Who the hell is that?’ she said crossly.

‘I’ll get it,’ Fabrizio said, extremely relieved, while hurriedly doing up his trousers. ‘Saved by the bell,’ he thought as he vaulted down the stairs.

A very pretty woman stood on the doorstep. Never mind that she wore a police uniform; she had tumbling red-gold curls, wide-apart green eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles on her pale un-tanned and un-Botoxed face. She was as different from all the women in the Eurotrash set he mixed with as Snow White is to the Wicked Stepmother.

‘I’m Lieutenant Gabrielle Poulpe,’ smiled the vision. ‘May I come in?’

Fabrizio bestowed on her one of his most dazzling smiles, and opened the door wider. ‘Of course, I recognised you from the other night, mademoiselle.’

‘Lieutenant,’ Gabrielle said quietly. ‘I’ll just take a few minutes of your time.’

Lara appeared, introductions were made, and Gabrielle asked if there was anyone they thought might have wished Mina Corbain any harm.

While Lara attempted to answer her question by insisting she had no idea, Fabrizio couldn’t help comparing the two women. They were both red-haired and green-eyed, but there the comparison stopped. While Lara was the wrong side of fifty, Gabrielle was the right side of thirty. Lara’s hair was tinted a vivid shade of bright ginger and back-combed to within an inch of its brittle life. Gabrielle’s natural auburn curls caught the dying rays of the sun and framed her pretty little face perfectly. She also seemed intelligent and totally without airs and affectations, while Lara constantly waved her hands in the air dramatically and spoke in that fake Euro accent.

Why must I try to make this woman marry me?
thought Fabrizio. I could be happy with the simple life and a simple girl like this Gabriella . . .
Gabrielle
.
Who are you kidding?
said his inner voice.
You just want to get a leg over cop-girl. In fact, you usually want to do that with every good-looking girl you meet.

‘True,’ said Fabrizio out loud, as both women looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh, I mean true that neither of us had ever met Mina before “that night”.’

‘Well, if you think of anything, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to call me day or night.’ Gabrielle handed Fabrizio her card, which Lara promptly snatched.

She wasn’t about to let Fabrizio have this one’s number, even if she was a cop. She knew her boy too well. He was a walking sex machine. She tried to slake his enormous sexual appetite by making herself available as often as she could, but she knew that he was ruled by his cock and that three or four times a day was not too difficult for a twenty-nine-year-old to achieve. As the front door closed, Lara pulled Fabrizio on to the sofa to score a hat trick.

The Second Party of the Season

Ostensibly the occasion was a party in honour of ‘Hollywood royalty’ hosted by Monty Goldman for the legendary producer Marvin Rheingold during his annual break in Saint-Tropez. Marvin, now in his early seventies, had been a major player in Tinseltown since he had made his name in Rome in the 1960s. He had imported American stars who had passed their sell-by date and featured them in a series of cheap but successful movies. Rome was known as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ then, and Marvin’s fortunes had flourished; shortly afterwards he had returned to his roots in Hollywood and churned out blockbuster after blockbuster, each one surpassing the last in revenue.

Barrel-chested and bald, always wearing his signature Saint-Tropez look of a loudly patterned Versace shirt open halfway down his chest and creased white linen pants, Marvin was now intent on making serious movies. He had just finished an artsy black and white film of
Richard the Third
starring Sir Kenneth Branagh, and was now in pre-production for a new version of
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the Tennessee Williams classic.

There were a few celebrities at Monty Goldman’s soirée, as well as several skimpily clad teenage Russian hookers and the usual Saint-Tropez party people.

The good-looking waiters and waitresses – none older than twenty-five and mostly out-of-work actors, actresses and singers – were attired in Greek-themed white togas in which their lithe bodies were displayed to full advantage for the delectation of the guests.

They passed Mediterranean delicacies of tiny tomatoes stuffed with foie gras and massive bowls of Beluga caviar while the throng idly watched a dozen gorgeous showgirls, imported from Paris, gyrate around silver poles that had been installed over the glass dance floor that covered the pool. Underneath, thousands of silver stars shimmered in the turquoise water, and six expert swimmers dressed as mermaids complete with tails gyrated like Esther Williams.

‘So tacky,’ remarked Lara as she and Fabrizio entered the enormous, stiffly formal white and silver art-deco living room. ‘This is completely inappropriate for the Saint-Tropez lifestyle.’ She looked irritably around as they stood in line to greet their host, Monty Goldman. A self-made British billionaire and ex-barrow boy, he had worked his way up from selling fruit from a stand on Church Street to the largely Muslim population of Edgware Road and its environs, to running a secondhand clothes boutique in Marylebone High Street. As several down-on-their-luck actresses lived nearby, he started bringing in some of their finery from their glory days in the 1940s, fifties and sixties. Monty paid them a pittance for these beautifully constructed clothes and elegant costume jewellery, then managed to sell them for a hefty profit to an upmarket vintage boutique in Notting Hill, often featured in
Vogue
and
Tatler
and frequented by young trendsetters of the 1970s and eighties.

By the late 1980s there was a huge market for the elegant clothes of past eras, and with well-placed ads in
The Lady
and the back pages of fashion magazines, Monty’s business boomed. Every young model and actress worth her salt shopped there, as did the stylists, a new phenomenon that no young starlet could live without.

Monty sold his business for a fortune in 1994, then joined forces with one of the canniest top retailers of the day, Nate Kowalski. Nate the Greek, so known because of his Peloponnesian heritage, had a fantastically successful string of shops and boutiques throughout the UK and US. Looking to branch out into Asia and the Middle East, Monty seemed the top man for the job, and within a few years the two partners had become bosom buddies and regularly featured in the
Sunday Times
Rich List.

Monty stood in his mirror-covered foyer to greet his guests, stocky and mahogany-faced, his thinning thatch artfully combed to cover an incipient bald patch. By his side stood his faithful trophy wife of twelve years, Chantelle.

Impossibly thin after four children, she spent three hours a day honing her taut, tummy-tucked body in the vain expectation that Monty wouldn’t dump her for a younger model, as he had done to wives number one and two. But Monty already had his eye on wife number four as he surveyed the throng of expensively dressed and bejewelled guests who were clustering around and admiring his novelty bars. In two clear acrylic coffins, young girls wearing fishnets, suspender belts, corsets, masks and jewelled nipple guards writhed in simulated ecstasy, while the shirtless bartenders nonchalantly mixed exotic drinks and poured vintage wines and champagne on the mirrored bar tops.

Carlotta had gone shopping with Maximus, who had taken her to Dior on the Rue François Sibilli, the main shopping street in Saint-Tropez. He had insisted that she buy a spectacular full-length gown for the evening.

‘A bargain at twenty-five thousand euros,’ he persisted, winking at the manager, who would have to turn over 10 per cent to him, ‘and because it’s couture and fresh from the A/W collection, no one will have anything like it.’ It was indeed a fairy-tale dress that, despite having seven inches cropped off the length, fitted Carlotta’s petite figure to perfection.

‘I wish I wasn’t so short,’ she said.

‘You are deliciously petite,’ said Max, as Carlotta twirled in front of the three-way mirror, while the seamstress struggled to pin up the hem. ‘The models today are all beanstalks, some even quite ugly. You are a divine package.’

‘You don’t think it’s a bit too brash?’ she asked.

‘My dear, you are gorgeous. It is a “look at me” dress, so everyone will look at you tonight, and so they should.’

‘Well . . .’ Carlotta surveyed the deep, somewhat revealing décolleté on the pale pink chiffon, which was sprinkled with a million glittering paillettes. ‘I hope I won’t be too overdressed.’

Max snorted with laughter, ‘My dear, just you wait to see what Lara will be wearing, and that old crone Sophie will pull out all the stops for this party – mark my words.’

‘Oh, I don’t think Sophie’s a crone. She’s beautiful and actually very nice, and has been sweet to me.’

Max snorted again but decided not to bad-mouth Sophie to Carlotta. He had made a couple of attempts to get Fabrizio and Carlotta together, but each time his plans had been thwarted by Lara, who could immediately smell a rat if it came anywhere near what she perceived to be her property. And her property was Fabrizio, even though he was out of her sight in the early mornings and late at night. But when they were home or in public, he belonged to her and her only.

When Carlotta entered Monty Goldman’s villa on the proud arm of Maximus Gobbi, the blasé crowd stared slightly longer than the usual millisecond. Her dress made her look like a modern-day ‘Cinderella at the Ball’, and with her jet-black hair framing her oval face in cascading ringlets, and a stunning seventy-carat diamond necklace from the Di Ponti estate around her neck, she was as beautiful, if not more so, than any of the models and starlets in the room.

Everyone looked up as the model
du jour
Zarina Jacobs arrived with her pop-star girlfriend Sin in tow. They called each other ‘wifey’, although Zarina claimed in publicity to still be a virgin. Nineteen-year-old Zarina was chatty and full of coke. She demanded ‘cuddlezzz!’ in a high-pitched shriek from all who came into her orbit or, if she didn’t like them, stuck her tongue in their ears. She threw her arms around Monty Goldman, almost losing her beaded halterneck-top in the process.

‘Uncle Monty!’ she screamed. ‘Can I borrow your heli to get to the airport tomorrow?’

‘Of course, sweetie,’ said Monty smoothly. ‘Anything for you, babes.’ Then he bent down to whisper in her ear, ‘Tell me, sweetie – she’s your latest girlfriend, right?’

Zarina nodded enthusiastically, then wrapped her lips around Sin’s half-exposed breast, her tongue darting like a small adder.

Even Monty was staggered by this show of affection. He recovered and asked, ‘So what are you? Bisexual? Homosexual?’

‘No, babes, I’m trisexual . . .’ She paused a moment, letting it sink in. ‘I’ll
try
anything! Maybe even you one day, Uncle Monty!’ She bit his earlobe and he blushed while she screamed with laughter.

Monty could never resist a celebrity, and Zarina was the hottest cover girl in the world right now. Who cared if she had a little cocaine problem and preferred girls? She was young – she’d get over it.

One who had got over it was Chloe Kensington, the supermodel of yesterday. Still on top form in spite of the young upstarts trying to kick her off her throne, at thirty-eight she still had the cheekbones and the cheeky charm that had been entrancing snappers since she was discovered in a supermarket at age fourteen. Although she’d been nicknamed Chloe Cokehead, she was now clean and happily married to a plastic surgeon. It was rumoured that it was he who kept those famous cheekbones looking razor sharp and the full, kissable lips plumped to perfection, but Chloe always denied ever having any ‘work’ done.

‘I eat whatever I want, whenever I want!’ both Zarina and Chloe told the press, although in truth their basic diet was cigarettes, champagne and coke, with the occasional low-carb, gluten-free organic rice and prawn dish, or a large kale or mâche salad without dressing.