The Starlet Read online

  But then the buzz had become a roar and the paparazzi had appeared, grubby men in dark jackets and sweat-stained polo shirts, pouring down a small side street like ants racing a flood. So now, instead of contemplating lovely nuns and geranium-laced window ledges, Juliette was watching Mercy Talbot slip and sway twenty feet above a fountain. Mercy. It had to be Mercy. How much attention did this girl need anyway? Plenty. Juliette knew this from firsthand experience. Mercy Talbot and her mother had stayed at the Pinnacle for three months while their Malibu home was being rebuilt after a devastating fire. By the end of the first week, the staff had been ready to personally rent them another Malibu beach house. Hell, they’d buy them one if that’s what it took. But Mercy developed an attachment to the Pinnacle, and Juliette had to admit that, when assessed separately from her mother, Mercy was no more, or less, demanding than the typical guest. And there was something about her, a radiance, an incandescence, that made her impossible to resist. Unfortunately, no one ever got Mercy without getting her mother; Angie had recently taken to dyeing her hair platinum so they would be a “matched set.”

  So where was the dreaded Angie now, when she could actually be of use? Mercy was going to kill herself now if she wasn’t careful, or at least break something important. Surely she would climb down, surely someone would arrive to help her climb down. A bodyguard, a publicist, an adoring fan. Lord, Juliette thought. Wasn’t she supposed to be in rehab? Juliette was certain that a week before she left L.A. she had heard that Mercy was “doing well” in rehab.

  “Prego, prego, over here, over here, bella, bella, Mercy, Mercy, over here, no, no, bella, si, si, in the water, dive, Mercy, dive.”

  Juliette felt the unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation of panic spin a web within her chest. It was impossible that this young actress was going to be allowed to break her neck in the middle of the day in a Florentine fountain. Juliette scanned the crowd for that platimum head, for the man with the earpiece and the sunglasses. But she could see only paparazzi, the shifting, sweating, yelling, hooting paparazzi. At the table next to Juliette’s, two women snapped photos with their cell phones. Mercy’s foot slipped. She gripped the top of Neptune’s head, leaned forward, and closed her eyes. A hush fell, but it was not a helpful hush, not the pause in which everyone realizes things have gone too far and steps should be taken. Instead it was excited, anticipatory. Looking around her, Juliette realized the crowd expected Mercy to fall. They were, in fact, waiting for Mercy to fall.

  Furious, Juliette stood up and called out her name. Mercy straightened, took one hand off the water god’s crown, then the other. Juliette thought of a painting she had seen once of Saint Joan of Arc, moments before flames were kindled beneath her. Mercy’s face held the same glorious tension between surrender and soul-rattling fear. For one brief moment their eyes met, and without thinking, Juliette stepped over the café’s low hedge of potted geraniums and into the street. But it was too late.

  With a small hopeless shrug, Mercy dove.

  Juliette felt as if her heart actually stopped, though whether because of fear and horror or simple admiration, she could not say. It was a flawless dive, a thing of utter and miraculous beauty. Mercy’s small light body hit the murky water like a kingfisher, disappeared, and then the girl instantly emerged, pushing the hair out of her eyes and laughing. The cameras went wild.

  Grinding her teeth, Juliette pushed her way through the crowd until she was at the edge of the fountain. In just one minute the actress would stand, the white cotton shift she was wearing would be reduced to translucence, and fortunes would be made. Because Mercy was famous for eschewing undergarments of any sort.

  “Mercy,” Juliette yelled above the Italianate din with all the authority she could muster. The necessary irritation came naturally. “Mercy Talbot. Stop that right now.”

  The young woman’s head turned, her big, wet-lashed, golden eyes blinked once, twice, and she sat down suddenly in the water like a child in a tub. Juliette had no idea if Mercy had recognized her or if she was just responding to the authority in her voice, but frankly, it didn’t matter.

  “Now get out of that fountain this minute,” she snapped.

  Startled, Mercy obediently began to rise. “No,” Juliette yelped, suddenly seeing what she knew she would see, which was pretty much everything. “Wait, wait, I’ll come to you.” Slipping off her shoes, she grabbed the only thing she had handy—a tablecloth she had bought that morning—and, over the protests of the men around her, waded into the fountain. Shielding Mercy with her body, she wrapped the young, dripping-wet woman up in ten feet and $300 worth of hand-woven Florentine linen.

  “Andare a casa,” she snapped at the photographers as they crowded around her, pushing their cameras literally into Mercy’s face. “Go home to your mothers and tell them what you have been doing. Shame on you. Vergognati, vergognati!”

  “I do know you,” Mercy said happily, as if they were two friends meeting on the street. “You work at the Pinnacle, right? I thought that was you. I have a photographic memory. Or I do sometimes. Juliette, right? How weird. This is Italy, you know.”

  Juliette nodded, trying to get her own shoes on, gathering up her parcels, and already greatly regretting her actions.

  “Did you see me dive?” Mercy said hopefully, looking around, smiling now as if there were nothing unusual about being steered through a crowd of photographers while wearing a tablecloth and no shoes. “I thought I was going to die. Seriously. I never in a million years thought it would work, though I read in a book about someone doing it, diving into a fountain. I think it was a book. Maybe it was a movie. I hope they got it—the dive, I mean—but probably they just wanted more pictures of my tits.”

  “Yes,” Juliette said. “Undoubtedly. Now just shut up for one second and let’s see how we get out of here. Do you have a car?”

  “I don’t feel so well,” Mercy said suddenly, and without further comment she leaned over and vomited on the pavement right in front of Juliette’s feet. “I really want to lie down now,” she murmured, leaning heavily onto Juliette’s shoulder and giving every indication of doing just that.

  “Jesus,” Juliette said, digging her fingers into the girl’s alarmingly thin arm and steering her toward a main street where she could see salvation in the form of many taxis. “Jesus.” Hollywood had indeed gone global; ten thousand miles away from L.A., and it was like she had never left.

  In the cab, Mercy began to shake uncontrollably and ignore Juliette’s questions. She was staying at the Medici, she finally admitted after the cab had driven aimlessly for twenty minutes, but she didn’t want to go back there, if she had to go back there she would kill herself. Her mother and the director were still in Rome. They were both looking for her, she supposed, but she had thrown her phone into the Arno and if she had to see either of them right now she would kill herself. “I mean if they don’t kill me first,” she said, “if they don’t literally suck the blood right out of my veins and then sell it on eBay.” She didn’t remember really what had happened over the past couple of days, or where she had been, and she didn’t think it was anyone’s business, and if Juliette kept bugging her, she would kill herself. She didn’t know what she had taken, thought maybe some meth, probably some Oxy, definitely some coke, and Juliette could smell the alcohol rising through her pores. “Don’t make me go back,” Mercy said over and over. “I’ll die if I have to go back.”

  She began thumping her head against the window, so Juliette rolled it down. Mercy wouldn’t explain what she meant and Juliette could not imagine that she was referring to the Medici, which was a perfectly lovely hotel. Mercy, however, was becoming slightly blue around the lips and genuinely hysterical, so Juliette rolled the window back up and called the hotel, hoping to get some answers and, with luck, find out where the private entrance was. While Juliette was dialing, Mercy began pawing at the front of her dress and miraculously produced a vial of pills, two of which she quickly swallowed. Juliette grabbed the bottle ou
t of her hand and shoved it deep into her purse. Mercy’s shaking subsided and she leaned against the window of the cab, one pale thin hand absentmindedly stroking the hair of the driver, who smiled into the rearview mirror as if such things were a natural part of his job.

  As it turned out, Juliette knew the assistant general manager of the Medici, a guy named St. John with whom she had worked years ago in L.A. Juliette was amused to note that since she had seen him last, St. John had developed the vaguely snooty accent preferred by many hoteliers and which Juliette’s boss, Eamonn Devlin, commonly referred to as Piano Bar Continental. St. John had some answers but was not at all willing to tell her about their private entrance because he did not want Mercy Talbot anywhere near his hotel. She had been there three nights, he said, and they had had to resuscitate her twice, and, as they had told her this morning, they regretted the fact that they would no longer be able to accommodate her—the hotel was now fully booked. “Naturally, she is distraught over the recent tragedy, as are we all,” St. John said, “but I am afraid there is nothing we can do. I have taken the liberty of booking her at the Ritz.”

  “Wait,” Juliette said. “What recent tragedy?”

  There was a pause of almost audible disbelief.

  “Surely you must know: Lloyd Watson overdosed last week,” St. John said. “Where on earth have you been? He and Ms. Talbot were shooting a film in Rome and apparently he pulled a Heath Ledger. He’s dead.”

  Juliette was shocked. Lloyd Watson was a young actor with a string of indie hits and film festival awards. Handsome and affable, he had recently had a baby with a former costar. The two did not marry but they seemed friendly enough. There had been rumors of drug abuse, but the birth of his son had sent Watson into rehab, where he had, supposedly, cleaned up his act.

  “I didn’t know,” Juliette said. “I’m on vacation. Jesus, that’s terrible. Jesus. What was he? Like twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-seven, and Ms. Talbot seems to have been quite . . . affected.”

  Filming of their movie, St. John said, was postponed indefinitely while the producers tried to replace Watson, but they were reluctant to let Mercy go, for obvious reasons. This left Mercy trapped in Rome with her mother and nothing much to do. So she had fled to Florence, where she had proceeded to host nightly parties with guests of rapidly declining social and economic status.

  “I thought she was in rehab,” Juliette said, a bit desperately, glancing at the slight figure now slumped beside her. “When I left L.A. she was in rehab.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “At Resurrection. But”—St. John’s voice dipped to a more gossipy and American intonation—“you know that place. Too many loony stars to keep track of. Apparently she escaped. Or she left to do this film. Either way, it didn’t work. I mean really didn’t work. Though”—he caught himself so quickly, Juliette assumed a supervisor had walked by—“no doubt Mr. Watson’s death was quite a shock. We have been in contact with Mrs. Talbot,” he continued, back in professional mode. “She is flying in this afternoon. If you like, you can pick up Miss Talbot’s bags at the front desk, or we can send them to the Ritz. Please give her our kind regards and tell her we hope to see her again . . . as soon as her health permits.”

  He hung up just as the cab pulled in front of the hotel. For a moment Juliette was tempted to just push Mercy out of the cab and dump her on the steps; she was on holiday, for chrissake, she didn’t want to have to deal with a junkie starlet on a bender. Beside her in the cab, Mercy had either fallen asleep or passed out. Her hands, which lay palms-up on her lap, were still shaking. God, she was thin, Juliette thought, looking at the childlike wrists, the bony bruised knees. How these women remained so thin without collapsing more often was one of the great mysteries of Hollywood. What was wrong with the movie business, that it consumed so many of its young? “Too much money, too many neuroses, and an overreliance on the service industry,” Devlin had once remarked as they waited for paramedics to arrive at the Pinnacle. “Also, I believe it is physically impossible to get through a press junket sober.”

  But you couldn’t blame the entertainment industry for everything. Juliette, who grew up in Connecticut, remembered when her own knees had looked like Mercy’s. When she had been Mercy’s age, Juliette had known very well what it was like to pass out in a cab, to try to piece together the shards of a lost day or night or week. She knew the endless spine-rattling cycle of fear and thirst and shame and desire. Just thinking about it made her scalp tighten, her heart flop like something torn loose. Although it had been years since she had reached for a bottle or a line, she could feel it all again, that primal, propelling need to feel better, some way, any way, the fierce and dedicated hopelessness of it all.

  Sighing, she sent the driver in to collect Mercy’s things.

  Chapter Two

  ALTHOUGH SHE KNEW IT was probably not a good idea, Juliette took Mercy to Cerreta. About an hour from Florence and just north of Siena, Cerreta was a two-hundred-acre farm estate that had been owned by Juliette’s family, on her mother’s side, for centuries. What had begun as a single tower from which the Delfino family could survey and protect their land was now a true castello, complete with a villa and a group of farmhouses, aproned by olive groves, vineyards, and green fields. High on a hill surrounded by woods, it was invisible from any road save the one that led to it. Even then it took five bumpy, oil-pan-thumping minutes through forest, field, and pasture before the bell tower and villa of lovely mottled gold stone appeared, etched against woods and sky like a medieval painting. Over the years, it had moved through the generations until, beset by debt and disrepair, it had come to rest in the hands of Juliette and her cousin Gabriel Delfino.

  Gabriel had lived there for almost ten years. Both only children, he and Juliette had been, once upon a time, as close as brother and sister; now they rarely saw each other, and geography was not the only divide. Though Gabriel was stockier and darker than Juliette, who had her father’s red hair and fair skin, they were clearly related. When they argued, Gabe’s hazel eyes went as green as his cousin’s and their faces mirrored each other with stubbornness as much as bone structure. And when they argued, which was often, it was almost always about Cerreta. Over the years, Juliette had suggested they sell off some of the land and turn the castello into a Tuscan resort, a haven for the quietly rich or successful artists. At such times, Gabriel told her that when she had spent more than fifteen minutes of her adult life on the property, he would take her opinion under advisement; until then she could shut the hell up.

  It was an effective argument. Juliette didn’t like to think much about Cerreta. Even the sound of its name—Cher-ta—seemed sad to her, a word that one should sigh rather than say. The hills, the woods, the castello, the drowsy smell of lavender, rosemary, and burning wood, were all too closely tied in her mind with things she’d rather forget. For centuries Cerreta had endured without her; without her it could guard its hillside for a few more years. Meanwhile, her marriage, her divorce, her survival from her divorce, and, of course, the Pinnacle, took priority. So slowly but surely Gabe did exactly what he wanted. Which was to restore the farm and create a self-sustaining Eden, free of serpent and judgmental deity. Over the years, he had sent Juliette endless photos and emails about the gray-water and black-water reclamation systems he had installed, the organic garden he had planted, the regionally significant breeds of pigs and sheep he was single-handedly saving from extinction, the state of the olive harvest.

  Receiving them, Juliette could not hit delete fast enough. Slopping pigs and harvesting olives, even under the Tuscan sun, was not what she envisioned for her future, and she could not understand how Gabriel lived among the ghosts. Yet, when her life in Los Angeles seemed battered beyond recognition, when she could not imagine what she was supposed to do next, she had gotten on a plane and come to Cerreta. Found her cousin tanner, balder, healthier than she had ever seen him, running a not-quite-profitable bed-and-breakfast and, with the aid of a small internat
ional group of students, something approaching a farm and winery. As a peace offering, she handed him the money she had gotten for the house she had bought with her husband—first ex, now dead—to pay off the back taxes on the land. For almost three weeks, she had slept and read and walked, had tended the vineyard and slopped the pigs, eaten enormous quantities of imperfectly formed but delicious organic produce, brushed up on her Italian, and watched, amused, as her cousin and his interns worked the land and each other with the same casual pleasure.

  Now, bumping up the road to the castello, Juliette looked at the still-trembling and occasionally twitching form of Mercy Talbot, the perfect embodiment of everything that Cerreta was not. Gabriel, she thought matter-of-factly, is going to kill me.

  But first he had to help her get Mercy out of the car. Transferring the starlet’s semi-inert body from the taxi to the car that Juliette had parked outside Florence had been hard enough, even with the taxi driver’s help. Pulling into the courtyard of the castello, Juliette was grateful to see it was empty—the last thing she needed was a bunch of twenty-year-old farmworkers and their digital cameras. She could hear the sounds of laughter and guitar music coming from the other side of the villa, where, she assumed, dinner had been cleared away. As she attempted to drag Mercy’s dead weight from the backseat, Gabriel ambled out from the villa, his round glasses glinting in the dying light. When he saw Juliette’s arms were full of something, he headed over to help her. When he saw that something was actually a young woman, he headed over faster.