Scott was curious to find out who owned the coastal villa Helen had described to him, and his secretary told him that the register of property owners, known as the Catasto, would be held in the local council offices of the area – in this case, Anzio. He would be able to request information on the current owners, and perhaps former ones too.
As soon as he had a free morning, Scott rode out to Anzio, taking his camera and the binoculars he’d been given for Christmas. Perhaps he would find a use for them after all. He sat for long hours in a queue at the council offices before being allowed to submit his request for information on the Villa Armonioso. He was told the answer would be ready that afternoon, around five. Immediately afterwards, he headed out of town, past the port and onto the coast road. In fact, the road was some way inland from the sea, separated from it by sand dunes and the occasional building. He stopped to ask directions at an isolated roadside bar and the bartender said there was a turn-off for Villa Armonioso another half a mile further on.
It was exactly as Helen had described. He drove part way down the track past the turn-off but stopped when he saw barbed wire and security guards up ahead. The grounds of the villa were full of palm trees and lush undergrowth, but he could just see the glint of a swimming pool and, beyond the house, the blue of the ocean. When he glanced further along the coast, he could make out an old tower on a headland. This had to be the place where Luigi had brought Helen.
Scott looped back to the main road and hunted for a spot to hide his Vespa. Eventually he found an abandoned shed and slipped it inside, then scrambled over the sand dunes on foot until he reached the shore, about a hundred yards away from the villa. He found a place to sit, just behind a clump of green bushes with tiny yellow flowers on top, and took out his binoculars. Two guards were patrolling the barbed wire fence, and they had a couple of Alsatians on leashes, which was alarming. He’d claim to be a birdwatcher if they spotted the glint of his binoculars and came over, but he would be hard pressed if they asked him which birds he was looking for.
A black car pulled in through the gates and Scott used the binoculars to read the number plate and note it down. That car stayed twenty minutes and, as it left, two more pulled in. They were expensive cars; clearly their owners had money. At one stage there were six cars in the forecourt; the traffic was constant. It was obvious to any bystander that there was something illicit taking place. Why didn’t the police keep watch here? If they raided the villa, they would surely find a lucrative haul. He pictured Helen coming there at night with Luigi and the huge risk she had taken amongst those Mafioso types. Her vulnerability was terrifying.
At five o’clock he rode back to the council office and waited in another long queue before being handed a slip of paper stating that the owner of the Villa Armonioso was a company called Costruzioni Torre Astura. He sighed. That was no help at all. He’d been hoping for a name, a person. Now he would have to try to find out who owned this construction company and what it did. Why had he ever thought the trail would be easy to follow? Of course it wouldn’t.
Scott spent Easter weekend in his office working on his article about the drugs trade in Rome. He decided to write about Helen but without naming her or giving any details that could identify her: the piece needed an innocent but anonymous victim to demonstrate the evils of the business. He laboured over his description of her drugged to delirium amongst ruthless drug barons: ‘like an angel in a school nativity play, but in her veins a poison has taken hold’. He described her in the doctor’s surgery: her brittle thinness, the fear in her pretty blue eyes, the way she gripped his hand so tightly it hurt as the doctor administered the injection. He wrote and revised, crossing out unnecessary words and searching for the perfect adjectives in an attempt to convey the pathos of the scene.
On Easter Sunday morning, he got a call from his editor’s office in Milwaukee.
‘The boss says the Sunday Times in London has a front-page story with pictures of Liz and Richard on vacation in Santo Stefano. He wants you to go there.’
‘Oh, crap!’ Scott swore. ‘What time is it for you? Why isn’t the boss in bed?’
‘It’s three in the morning here. He got wind of the piece yesterday and we’ve been trying to reach you ever since.’
Scott remembered that he had unplugged the phone in his pensione a few days earlier after a tearful call from Rosalia. He must have forgotten to plug it back in again.
‘Phone’s out of order,’ he lied. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up and get back to you later.’
His drugs story would have to wait. Where the heck was Santo Stefano anyway? He called an old college friend in London and asked him to read out the Sunday Times article, but it didn’t have much information. Liz and Dick had rented a villa under false names and tried to remain incognito, but they’d been spotted sunbathing on some rocks, feeding each other segments of orange, and now every photographer and journalist in Italy and beyond had arrived on the tiny island. There was a large photograph showing her in a bikini and him in bathing trunks. The story read that they were currently under siege, holed up in the villa with press on all sides, calling to try to tempt them out. Scott sighed. He wouldn’t get any exclusives by hanging out with a horde of paparazzi.
He jumped on his Vespa and sped across town to Gianni’s home. Although he was eating Easter Sunday lunch with his family, Gianni immediately agreed to leave for Santo Stefano. Scott went home and plugged in his phone to wait for news but it was the following day before Gianni called to say that Elizabeth Taylor had left the island and was heading back to Rome without Richard. No one knew why. Scott decided to go and wait outside her villa on Via Appia Antica with his own camera, reckoning he might get an exclusive with all the regular paparazzi out of town. He parked just along from the entrance gates but saw straight away that he had miscalculated because the place was crawling with photographers. They were perched in the trees, lining the pavements and lounging in cars with their feet up on the steering wheel.
Evening fell and as Scott waited, he chatted to some of the paparazzi and was told that Sybil Burton was having dinner with Walter Wanger at the Grand Hotel, where they were having ‘crisis talks’. He agreed to buy a picture of them emerging onto the Via Veneto together from another photographer.
At two in the morning, he was about to give up and head home when the gates opened and a car was driven out of the villa. The paparazzi began snapping away; Scott peered into the car as it passed and saw a shape on the back seat covered in blankets.
‘Is that her? Was she there the whole time? I thought she wasn’t back yet.’
‘Yes, that’s her,’ he was assured.
Scott jumped on his Vespa and followed the car through Rome until it pulled up outside a private hospital. He couldn’t get through the security gates but saw the figure covered in a blanket being led inside. Was she ill? No one was prepared to issue a statement.
Gianni arrived back in Rome the following day, but none of his contacts could find out why Elizabeth Taylor was in hospital, so Scott decided to call on Helen, to see if he could winkle any information from her.
She opened the door looking bright as a button, nothing like the frail creature he’d been writing about in his drugs story.
‘Wow! You look incredible!’ he said and she beamed. ‘How ’bout that dinner we talked about?’
‘Lovely!’ She seemed delighted. ‘Give me half an hour to get changed.’
Scott waited in a bar across the road until she reappeared in a knee-length polka-dot dress with a large bow at the waist. She had to sit side-saddle on the back of his Vespa as they drove to a nearby trattoria because her dress was too tight for her to straddle the bike.
‘How’s it going at Cinecittà?’ Scott asked as they drank cocktails and perused the menu. ‘Were you shooting today?’
‘No. We were supposed to be, but Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t make it so I’ve been sitting around doing nothing. It was deadly dull.’
‘Oh dear. Why wasn’t she there?’ Scott asked. ‘Did they tell you?’
‘I shouldn’t really say …’
‘Say what?’
‘Well …’ she hesitated, and he knew she was going to tell him. She didn’t have the ability to keep a secret. ‘So long as you don’t tell anyone else … Elizabeth and Richard were on holiday at the weekend and they had a big fight and he hit her.’
Scott was surprised. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, she’s got a black eye. Joe – that’s the director – came to talk to her makeup artist about how they’re going to cover it. They’ll have to wait for the swelling to go down first. Sometimes I think we’re going to be stuck making this film forever because it’s one delay after another. I was originally hired for ten and a half weeks and it looks as though it could be ten months by the time we finish.’
The waiter came to take their order and Scott asked for a bottle of Chianti. ‘Do you get to talk to Elizabeth Taylor much or is her makeup done in a separate place from everyone else’s?’
Helen slurped the last of her cocktail. ‘It’s usually done in her dressing suite, but I’ve met her loads of times. You wouldn’t believe how nice she is. Everyone likes her.’
Scott asked for her opinion of Richard Burton and Helen screwed up her nose. ‘I don’t think he’s a very nice person. First of all, he used to make fun of Elizabeth behind her back. And then when they broke up for a while in February he brought over that other girlfriend, Pat. That wasn’t very nice of him, was it?’
‘It’s not very nice to give her a black eye either,’ Scott commented.
Helen shrugged. ‘Men are like that sometimes. They like to show who’s boss.’
‘Hey!’ Scott laughed. ‘Don’t put me in that category. I never hit a girl in my life.’
Helen smiled at him. ‘You’re an angel. You saved my life. I don’t think you have a bad bone in your body.’
Scott felt embarrassed. She might be disillusioned if she found out he was writing about her. He hoped she would never see the story. ‘So the vitamin injections have worked, have they?’
Helen beamed. ‘That doctor is a miracle worker. I’ve got my energy back and I feel like myself again, you know? It’s strange to remember how different I was on drugs. Instead I’m a vitamin addict now!’
Scott made a mental note to ask the doctor for more information about his miracle cure. If it were that simple, why wasn’t every heroin addict prescribed it as a matter of course?
Scott was sitting on a long couchette with his back to the wall while Helen was in a chair opposite, but after they finished eating, she came round to sit beside him.
‘You are absolutely the nicest person I’ve met in Rome, apart from Diana,’ she said. ‘She’s the nicest woman and you’re the nicest man.’
She leaned up to kiss him but he turned his head so that she kissed his cheek alongside his mouth.
‘Sorry, Helen, but I’m not the right guy for you. I’m not nice enough to girls. Best if you and I are just friends.’
Helen smiled. ‘Yeah, I guessed that was the case after you told me about Rosalia. I’m not having much luck with men here. I thought there was someone last week but he hasn’t called since. I don’t suppose you could fix me up with a friend of yours, could you?’ She was staring at him, her pupils huge and black, and she’d never looked lovelier.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Scott promised. ‘It would have to be someone pretty special. Leave it with me.’