The White Island by Stephen Armstrong

Author:Stephen Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448126712
Publisher: Black Swan

CHAPTER 9

The Faker

MARINA PHONED TO invite me to another party. This one was a launch. ‘It’s a new restaurant called La Diosa run by some Argentinians in the middle of the island,’ she said. ‘It should be pretty good. They’ve been working on the place over the winter and it’s supposed to be beautiful. Come by and pick me up from the gallery.’

Fortunately, the gallery wasn’t too hard to find. It faced the yacht club on a long, tree-lined boulevard fenced off to the seaward side by chandlers’ yards and to the shore side by expensive apartment blocks. By the time I arrived, Marina was in a bit of a flap. The local TV station was sending over a camera crew to do a piece on the gallery and she was nervous. She wanted a distraction to calm her down, so I tried to ask why she’d come to the island. Again. She seemed mildly put out and told me it was the sort of question you didn’t ask in Ibiza.

‘People come here for a reason,’ she said as she sorted aimlessly through the papers on her desk. ‘A few years ago there was a bit of a fuss when the Italian police arrived to arrest a fisherman who’d been living in Sant Rafael for the last seventeen years. It turned out he was a Mafia capo di capi on the run from Sicily for all sorts of crimes. They took him back to face trial.’ She laughed. ‘You know, one of the reasons people come here is because Ibicencos don’t ask questions and they don’t care what you do as long as they like you. They’ll never judge you. Almost all the villagers from Sant Rafael who could travel went over to Sicily to see him in prison. Some of them had never left the island before.’

During her club-owning years, Marina went on, she had employed a door team of two huge German bruisers and their Yugoslavian boss who kept tight control of the place for months. One night she was stopped on the way in to open up by a man in ordinary clothes who warned her that a police sniper was on the roof of the hotel opposite, keeping his gun trained on the three muscleboys. Before she could ask why, the man had disappeared. That night, her door team vanished.

Suddenly, from the street, there was a sharp crash and we both turned. A slim, attractive girl in her early twenties who was struggling with a heavy film camera had collided with the gallery door and for an instant seemed spread-eagled against the glass like a bluebottle on a car windscreen. She peeled herself clear and pushed her way in with a bony brown shoulder. Her name, she told us, was Pilar, and she was the TV crew.

As Pilar set up in the corner, Marina fussed about, clearly nervous, so I took the chance to potter around the gallery and eye up the art. It seemed like anyone who had placed brush on canvas was represented there in some form.

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