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Maren Lund, CEO of Nordic Light Studios in Copenhagen, is hosting an after-party following the European Film Awards. Private event. Off the record. Every journalist in Italy knows it is happening and is currently stationed in hotels along the Amalfi Coast pretending to be on holiday.

Forty guests. All industry. Actors, directors, producers, agents. The guest list is essentially the European film industry at dinner. The venue is a villa in Ravello, sixteenth-century, renovated in the eighties, available for private rental since the owner went bankrupt. Fashion bankrupt, Nadia clarifies. He built an empire on surfaces and forgot about the numbers underneath.

Maren has received a threat. A scan of a handwritten note on plain paper. Leo Marchetti will not leave this party the way he arrived. You were warned. The note arrived three days ago. Marchetti is the most awarded living director in European cinema. He is also someone whose past Rowan Sharp knows about because Rowan has read a screenplay that does not exist, will never be produced, and circulates as a PDF among people who know each other well enough to share it and not well enough to trust each other.

Vantage is hired for reputation risk management. The fee is the kind of number that makes the job either very important or very paranoid. In Nadia’s experience, the fee usually turns out to be both.