The St. Tropez Lonely Hearts Club (7 page)

But Fabrizio was becoming a real pain in the ass now. Content to draw on the already generous monthly allowance he was receiving from Lara, he was in no hurry to be pressured into wedlock. There were still too many female fish in the sea to sample – and what did he have to gain?

‘All right, all right, all
right
,’ Fabrizio drawled,
à la
Matthew McConaughey.

Maximus winced. He had tried to make Fabrizio stop attempting to emulate the American actor, but Fabrizio’s harem thought it cute.

‘Why are you still on about “the deal”?
Everythin’s okay
.’ Fabrizio continued, ramming home the caricature impression, which he knew irritated Maximus.

‘Look, Fabrizio,’ Maximus wheezed menacingly, ‘you may be “okay”, but Lara is not “okay” and I am
sicuramente
not “okay”. I expect this deal to be made by the end of the summer or you will start not feeling “okay”,
okay?
’

Fabrizio put on his ‘little boy lost’ bewildered look, which had served to diffuse many a difficult situation, but it had been overused on Maximus. ‘Chill. Everything’s cool. Kazakhstan
X Factor
definitely will go for me. I mean, I’ve seen some of the talentless nobodies – I’m a lock, bitch.’

‘Don’t call me bitch and don’t give me your “everything’s cool” shit! Kazakhstan is bullshit! It will never happen. Close the deal now before Lara finds out about CRAP!’

Fabrizio shuddered. CRAP – Carina, Raimunda, Alberto, Pietro – Fabrizio’s two ex-lovers and their two children, was an acronym used between Maximus and Fabrizio. He was only able to maintain them through Lara’s generosity. Maximus only mentioned CRAP when things became dire. Things must be very dire, thought Fabrizio, for it to be aired.

‘If I can only get the bitch to sober up,’ Fabrizio muttered. ‘She’s drunk morning, noon and night. Do you realise how hard it is for me to get . . . hard?’

‘Think of someone else,’ Max said dismissingly. ‘It always worked for me – or get the blue pill.’

‘Yeah, but you haven’t had to get it up since the last century,’ Fabrizio chortled, as Maximus’s phone started ringing. Fabrizio, sensing advantage, sauntered to the door. ‘See ya in Saint Trop, bitch.
Ciao
for now.’

‘
Merde
,’ snapped Maximus, picking up the phone. ‘
Ciao
, Maximus Gobbi.’ He smiled as he heard the girlish voice.

‘Oh,
ciao
, Maximus, it’s Contessa Carlotta Di Ponti here. I’ve been thinking about your suggestion and I think it’s a wonderful idea. I’d love to come to Saint-Tropez. It sounds divine for the summer. Do you think you could find me a house?’

‘Of course, Contessa –
ne vous inquiétez de rien
– I’ll take care of everything.’ Maximus covered the receiver and hissed to Fabrizio, who had stopped in his tracks when he heard a young female voice and was lurking, ears hawk-like, ‘Make the fucking Lara deal, now piss off!’

Maximus resumed his conversation after Fabrizio had strolled off. ‘Sì, sì, Contessa, what a pleasure to speak to you.’ He used his most honeyed tones. ‘When do you hope to come?’

‘Maybe early June would be good.’

As Max listened to Carlotta’s hopes for a fun-filled life in Saint-Tropez, his mind started churning. If Fabrizio couldn’t get Lara to commit to marry him, maybe he would look more enthusiastically towards the far younger and far more attractive Carlotta. He cast his mind back, visualising the petite raven-haired girl with the gypsy curls and innocent eyes. It would be a perfect match and one that Fabrizio surely couldn’t resist. Besides, her net worth had to be larger than Lara’s, and she had no pesky ex-husband to contend with.

Max chose his words carefully – he didn’t want to scare off the prey. ‘Now, there is just a tiny matter of my, eh, consideration?’

‘Of course I understand.’ Carlotta hadn’t been around the Buenos Aires business world without wising up to their cunning ways. Besides, she had more money than she could ever use, and if a little extra would buy her some fun – why not? ‘I will tell my secretary Amelia and she will take care of all your needs.’

‘It’s a pleasure, Contessa – an enormous pleasure. I promise I shall make your dreams come true. I am always at your service, and I shall take care of everything – absolutely everything!’

‘Amelia! Please give Monsieur Gobbi your email,’ Maximus heard her call. ‘Goodbye, Monsieur Gobbi – see you in Saint-Tropez. I shall send you my arrival dates.’

‘I shall meet you at Nice Airport,’ he said with a great big smile on his great big face. Maximus leaned back and smiled. This could be what his American friends called a ‘slam dunk’, and it had come not a moment too soon.

Sénéquier Café and Bar, Saint-Tropez, May 2015

‘Maximus,
Maximus!
’ Lara Meyer blubbered down her cell phone. At eleven a.m. she was already on her third vodka-on-the-rocks with a slice of orange, telling anyone who asked that it was just water.

‘Lara,
cara
, calm down. I spoke to Fabrizio. He is in Paris for the next few days, taking singing lessons . . . ’

‘Singing lessons?
Singing lessons?
’ she shrieked into the receiver, making more than one head at the charming café turn. ‘
Who is she?
’

‘He
told
you he was in Paris, with me.’

‘Oh, yes . . . ’ A faint memory emerged from her alcoholic mist.

‘Go home now, Lara, get some rest. You need it.’

‘I just got up, idiot.’ Lara’s voice was suddenly cold as ice. ‘I’m not talking about his singing lessons, you moron. He’s with another girl, I can sense it – I can feel it. The slut is kissing him, I can feel it,’ she slurred, her fury subsiding as quickly as it rose. ‘Besides, he doesn’t want me, he only wants my money. I’m too . . . too . . .’ The word ‘old’ stuck in her throat, so she gulped another slug of Grey Goose and slid further down in her chair, revealing a beautifully manicured lady garden, thanks to the fact that she wore no underwear.

Lara was perched under the shaded part of the terrace of the Sénéquier Café and Bar on the front of the bustling port of Saint-Tropez. It was a perfect early summer day; the big white yachts were still being hosed down by the good-looking young deck hands to prepare for their voyages, and sloppily dressed tourists wandered by drinking in all the glamour and hoping some of it would rub off on them. A few glanced at the red-headed woman, wearing a short, unsuitable floral play-dress and comedy earrings, sprawled in a chair. Black shades could not hide the classic Slavic cheekbones of a world-famous celebrity and the notorious ex-wife of the infamous tycoon Jonathan Meyer.

Often known as the ‘Siberian siren’ (and, to some people, the ‘Slavic slut’), Lara’s glory days were far behind her. However, she still commanded attention in the Eurotrash set and with readers of celebrity magazines. But today she wasn’t in the mood to take ‘selfies’ with her fans and brusquely got rid of a couple with a dismissive wave.

Aware of the tourists’ curious glances, a young waiter threw a white napkin over her nether regions as Lara sank even further into her seat, holding the vodka glass up to shield her face. ‘So,’ she whispered, ‘if he wasn’t with someone else, where the hell was he?’

‘Lara, calm down. He was just with me in Paris on his way to his singing lessons and I promise there was no slut, stupid or otherwise. I have a tail on him all the time.’ Maximus had been getting an extra stipend from Lara for a private detective service, one so discreet it was like a phantom, which in fact it was.

‘So, where are those photos you promised?’

‘What? They didn’t send them yet?
Merde
, those idiots! I will demand they send them immediately or else I promise you they will be fired!’ Firing was Maximus’s best expedient for getting out of a ruse – and he always knew how to end a con before it backfired. ‘But, my dear, there is nothing incriminating in them.’

‘Maximus,
Maximusssshh!
’ Lara stared at her cell phone. ‘Are you still there . . .? What was I saying?’ Lara’s short skirt was riding up to her waist now as she slid down almost horizontally.

Realising she was almost completely exposed, she pulled down her skirt, no mean feat holding a glass of vodka, and suddenly her vision gained a new perspective – she’d never noticed the ceiling at Sénéquier before. It was a nice ceiling, freshly painted white. She dropped her cell phone and gazed, in mesmerised admiration, at a fat bumblebee lazily circumventing the ceiling.

‘Madame.’ A waiter – whose pity had clearly overwhelmed his Gallic sensibility for
laissez faire
– sidled up, picked up her phone, and suggested maybe he could help hoist her back up to a sitting position.

‘I’m just resting,’ Lara replied curtly, then wailed piteously to the bumblebee on the ceiling, ‘Oh, what am I to do?’

‘Madame?’ The waiter was confused that this famous socialite seemed to be engaging in conversation with him, although she wasn’t looking at him. He bent closer, staring, fascinated by her artificially enhanced features. Face job, nose job, boob job, nail and hair extensions and, underneath the shades that had slipped halfway down her face, weird turquoise contact lenses . . .
which part of her was real?
he wondered.

His colleagues behind the bar sniggered. This had happened to all of them at one time or another – François, the rookie waiter, was about to get hooked into an endless conversation about Lara’s love trouble with Fabrizio. An hour wasted just for taking pity on the poor creature. Tips would be lost due to the unenviable task of dragging Lara back to her flat on Rue des Ponches.

A deep voice from her phone suddenly boomed, ‘LARA? LARA! ARE YOU STILL THERE?’ Maximus’s voice reverberated off the rafters of Sénéquier, chasing the bumblebee away and startling Lara out of her reverie. She pressed the ‘end call’ button in a daze and her focus was suddenly wrenched back to her phone, which started ringing almost immediately.

‘Who on earth is calling me at this time of day?’ she snapped at a surprised François. ‘Don’t they know it’s impolite to call before noon? And what happened to Maximus? Wasn’t I just talking to him?’ Lara’s eyes swam in and out of focus.

François picked up the phone and handed it to Lara. She mumbled, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and then, overwhelmed, blacked out and almost fell to the floor. François caught her just in time.

François wasn’t as stupid as some people thought. He knew all the gossip about the trampy Lara Meyer: a rich bitch who drank like a fish and, when in her cups, stupid as a sheep about men, especially her gigolo, Fabrizio Bricconni.

‘I’ll take her home,’ he insisted as the manager, Jean-Robert, came rushing over to see what was going on. ‘I know where she lives.’ He avoided the eyes of several British and German tourists gaping at this staple of the celebrity magazines passed out cold.

He took the spare key to Lara’s third-floor apartment from a hook behind the restaurant’s bar, then hoisted her none-too-slender frame further on to his young shoulders like a sack of coal and quickly jogged a few streets away to where she lived, while Lara’s red head bounced up and down against his back. He entered the dark, stuffy apartment, strewn with the detritus of Lara and Fabrizio’s chaotic existence – empty vodka bottles, magazines, clothes, shoes, underwear – and none too gently lowered her on to the unmade bed.

He stared at the stucco walls, where photographs and yellowing newspaper clippings were framed higgledy-piggledy. The tarnished silver frames cluttered every dusty surface. This poor cow was famous, thought François, but she had certainly seen better days. He was fascinated by the front page of a New York tabloid, which showed Lara, her then husband, Jonathan Meyer, and a beautiful teenaged blonde slugging it out on the slopes of Saint Moritz. ‘Can Divorce Be Far Behind?’ shrieked the tabloid. Another cover picture on
People
magazine, in colour, featured a much younger and more beautiful Lara in a gorgeous wedding gown, exchanging vows with Jonathan Meyer. ‘Inside the Golden Couple’s fabulous wedding’, the banner headline shrieked. ‘Tycoon Weds Glamour Model’.