Read Online Rocks, The by Peter Nichols - Free Book Online Page B

point, if they were still there, he was home.
    He wasn’t trying to seduce Luc’s little playmate. Not now anyway, but you never knew when you might meet one of them again—as he had, several times, in London, and by then, introductions and Mallorca behind them, he could find the situation marvelously well along.
    Luc was relieved. He knew April wanted to dance—she wanted to show off her shimmy and flick her golden feet between someone’s legs. None better than Dominick. They were made for each other. He didn’t give a toss if Dominick managed to get her phone number.
    Luc got up and wandered into the house, into the kitchen. A number of the caterers were washing the dishes, drying glasses in the scullery in back of the main kitchen. Montserrat was not in sight.
    “Like the dinner?” Bronwyn asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle of Laphroaig and three fingers in a large crystal glass in front of her, smoking a small cigar. She wore a generalissimo-sized chef’s jacket, heavily stained with food and wine, a linen napkin tied around her head like a bandanna.
    “Great,” said Luc. “Loved the blood orange sorbet.”
    “It was good, wasn’t it? Want a drink?”
    “Sure.” Luc got a glass, sat down, and poured himself a shot from Bronwyn’s bottle.
    “Down for long?” she asked.
    “A week maybe. If I can stick it out.”
    “Well, you’re a good boy, coming down for your mummy’s birthday. She’s very pleased.”
    “Hardly. I’m the fly in her Yves Saint Laurent body lotion.”
    “Don’t be silly. She loves you. She means well. She talks about you all the time.”
    “Yes, in terms of unfailing disappointment. Like a bad bet she can’t get over.”
    “Oh, rubbish. You know she loves you. You can hear it whenever she mentions your name. You may be forty-whatever-it-is but you’re still her little boy, you know. She says you’re coming down, and you can hear how much it means to her.”
    Luc drank half his glass. “Where’d you get the caterers?”
    “Which one?”
    He looked round again. “Not here now. The nose.”
    “Montserrat.”
    “That’s right. Montserrat.”
    “She worked in the kitchen at the Fonda when Javier was the cook. She’s a Llobet.”
    “What, as in Juan Llobet?”
    The name that loomed over Cala Marsopa like the permanently shuttered Llobet house hulking above the town on the road to the lighthouse, a severe, forbidding, Stalinist-era mansion that might have been designed for Lavrentiy Beria’s house parties that included assassinations. Juan Llobet, the reclusive billionaire, Barbary Coast smuggler in his criminal infancy before World War I, later Franco crony, banker to the Nacionalistas of the Spanish Civil War, Mallorca’s oligarchic Boo Radley; dead decades ago. Everyone coming into town drove along Carretera Juan Llobet, and most did some business, if just at the ATM, with Banco Llobet. At one point, Luc’s mother had known a Llobet, one of the old boy’s sons, who came to Cala Marsopa with his family every summer, but that association seemed to have faded years ago.
Montserrat
Llobet.
It didn’t surprise him. She was Mediterranean aristocracy, albeit from a dark, bent strain, like having Barbarossa for a grandfather.
    “Yes, sweetheart. Some offshoot of the family. She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? Good luck.”
    “No, you know, I was just curious. I was talking to her earlier. She seemed interesting. Studying at the University of Barcelona.”
    “Yeah, she’s interesting. Intelligent and ambitious. She sent Javier out of his mind.”
    “What’s she doing waiting tables here, then?”
    “Her father makes her work through the summers, even though he’s filthy rich. She’s good with food. Got a good work ethic. She’s into art history. She’ll probably end up running Christie’s in Madrid.”
    Luc saw Montserrat Llobet’s life unfolding like a spread in
Paris Match
. The yachts, the villas on Cap Ferrat, the gorgeous children—someone