The car lost traction. The passenger side hit the retaining wall. The Ferrari rolled onto its side, slid along the top of the wall, then flipped over into space. It still carried enough forward speed so that it didn’t begin to fall immediately. Instead, it arched out away from the cliff, nose forward, rolling gracefully around its front-to-rear axis like an artillery shell. Its trajectory gradually began to fall into a sickening plunge. It bounced once off the sheer slope of the mountain. Its gas tank ignited. Then, as a fireball trailing a line of black smoke, it plunged into the continuation of the downhill road that it had just left. Instantly, a puddle of fire shot out in all directions.
By some mercy, it landed in a gap of what was normally bumper-to-bumper traffic. Cars collided with one another as they screeched to a stop at the edge of the flames. A motorbike managed to dodge the devastation. The firemen who put out the flames could be thankful that no one had been hurt or killed.
Except for the driver, who was not on the scene. Apparently, he or she had been thrown out of the car somewhere in its flight path. The rescuers went back up to the first hairpin turn, where the barricade was smashed and streaked with bright red paint. They stepped through the debris of broken glass and twisted trim that had peeled off the car before it went over the wall. Ten feet below, stretched out in a grassy tuft that was one of the few breaks in the cliff face, they saw Jennifer. From where they were, they could see that she was unmarked but most likely dead. But when they went over the top with ropes and a litter, they found her alive. She was unconscious, and her eyes didn’t respond to light, but there was a pulse in her neck and a breathy froth on her lips. The medics ministered to her on the spot, then hauled
her motionless form up into a waiting ambulance and rushed her off to the hospital. Within minutes, she was strapped into the litter of a helicopter and on her way to a trauma unit in Naples.
Padraig, whom she had left less than two hours earlier, was on the phone arguing with one of his agents when the policeman knocked on his door.
“She could handle those turns,” he told the officers in the police car. “She’s a great driver.”
“Perhaps too much car,” an officer suggested.
“Horse shit,” Padraig snapped.
The officer shrugged.
They had no idea why she lost control, but it was clear that the car had entered the turn with far too much speed. The Positano switchbacks demanded nearly a full stop. The Ferrari must have been doing eighty kilometers an hour. What they did know was that she wasn’t wearing her seat belt, because otherwise she never could have left the car. They assumed that she was thrown out as the car flipped from the top of the wall, probably after the drag of the collision had reduced the speed. A clump of bushes had broken her fall, and the bit of turf had cushioned her landing. She was lucky, if you could say that about someone in a coma.
While being flown up to Naples, Padraig learned the seriousness of her injuries. A concussion, but much too soon to tell how severe. “These things,” the Italian doctor tried to explain in an unfamiliar language, “are hard to guess. Sometimes … nothing. The next day like nothing happened at all. But sometimes … not so good, no! The X rays will show us something.”
She had broken a shoulder, a collarbone, and two ribs, all on her right side, probably from the impact of landing. Her left leg was fractured in several places, most likely breaking as it dragged out of the car. There was a bump and a contusion on the right side of her face. “All not important,” the doctor said. “Time, of course, but all will mend. The danger is the head,” he went on, pointing to his own. “And here,” as he ran his hand up and down Padraig’s spine.
“Her spine? Is she paralyzed?”
The doctor waved away the suggestion. “No … no. We know nothing yet. First she wakes up. Then we see about the rest.”
Padraig couldn’t believe the sight at the hospital. She was on a canvas rack instead of a bed. A ribbed plastic tube was stuffed into her mouth and flexed in rhythm with the rise and fall of her chest. A bottle of fluid dripped into her arm. The wall above this apparatus looked like the control room of a television station. There were half a dozen monitors beeping, blinking, and drawing bumpy traces.
“Sweet Jesus” was his only comment.
Doctors and nurses were rushing in and out, all happy to talk with the great film star and offer him reassurances. “She’s doing as well as can be expected” was the common English phrase that told him absolutely nothing.
In the early evening, Jennifer and all her life-support hardware were unplugged from the wall and rolled into a nearby room. Padraig could recognize the doughnut shapes of CAT scans and MRI equipment. But he saw no signs of life from Jennifer as she was passed from one technician to another.
It was nearly midnight when he got his first informed assessment of her situation. A concussion, and a sizable clot pressing against her brain. “The clot seems to be dissipating,” a very young doctor told him in flawless English. “And there is no indication of brain swelling. So, for the moment, there is no reason to open her skull.”
The shock effects of the trauma were abating, another very good sign. No spinal or neck injury had been detected, and nervous response was “appropriate, considering her condition.” The next day or so would be critical, but the doctor personally judged that, barring a setback, Jennifer would survive.
There would certainly be residual damage. Memory, speech, perhaps balance and movement. It could be permanent in some areas, but far more likely temporary. “We’ll bring her back, let her bones heal, and then get her into therapy.”
As soon as O’Connell left the trauma unit, he ran into a wall
of reporters pushing cameras and microphones into his face. “I’ve just had a reassuring report from the doctors,” he said into one of the mikes, “but you’re much better off hearing it from them.” He ignored the shouted questions about whether his marriage was failing, had she been rushing to meet another man, or had they had an argument. The tabloid bastards had no taste at all.
The hospital officials had set him up in a hotel across from the hospital in a decent suite that smelled of disinfectant and came up short on the air-conditioning. The light on the telephone was blinking urgently as he closed the door behind him. It was Catherine calling from New York, where an evening news reporter had just informed her.
“Oh, good Lord, you’ll have to forgive me, Catherine. I should have called you. But it’s been hectic, and I didn’t have any information to pass on to you.”
“She’s alive?” Catherine asked hopefully.
“Yes, thank God. And according to the doctor I just spoke with, nearly out of serious danger.” He repeated the prognosis, not pulling any punches on the need for a long recovery and the possibility of lasting damage.
“I’m on the nine o’clock flight to Rome,” Catherine said.
They were together at the hospital in Naples from the moment Catherine was delivered onto the roof by helicopter. Jennifer regained consciousness that night, completely bewildered to find herself in a trauma suite, and at a loss for any explanation of how she might have gotten there.
“Perfectly normal,” the doctor told them. “Short-term memory always takes a while. Frankly, I’m very encouraged that she even recognized you.”
By morning she was remembering. “Oh God, Padraig, did I damage the car? Can it be fixed?”
“I’ll buy you another,” he assured her.
By noon everything had returned. “Who’s filling my job?” she asked her sister. Catherine cried at the absurdity of the question.
The next day Jennifer was cut free from all the monitors and
moved to a penthouse room with its own nursing staff. The day after, she was brought to surgery for several hours of procedures that pinned her collarbone and shoulder back together and used screws and plates to reassemble her leg. When she returned to her room, her leg was suspended and encased in plaster, and her right arm was cantilevered straight out from her body.
Padraig walked around her bed, taking her in from every angle. “I’m trying to figure out how we might make love,” he explained, bringing tears of laughter to her eyes.
But then she became serious. “Padraig, I remember everything. Well, almost everything. It was the brakes. They didn’t work at all. They went to the floor, and when I tried to pump them, they hardly came back.”
“I knew it was nothing that you did,” he said.
“But why would they just … fail. We never noticed a problem, and the car wasn’t even being used.”
“Could be any number of reasons, but you can rest assured that the people at Ferrari are going to get a good piece of my mind.”
That night, while they were having dinner in the back corner of a restaurant, Catherine brought up the difficult subject of Jennifer’s recovery. “I know it’s your call, Padraig, but I think it might be best if we brought her back to New York.”
He set down his fork and folded his hands.
She went on, “I’d like to get her to the New York doctors. There are special hospitals for orthopedic surgery, and I’d like her to be looked at by the best before everything heals. We shouldn’t wait until it’s all over before we find out that she can’t move an arm or that her knee doesn’t work. And then some of the best physical therapy centers are in the New York area.”
He nodded but still said nothing.
“Then there’s her job. I’m sure the faster she gets back to work, the better.” A pause, and then she asked, “I hope you agree?”
“I’d see more of her in California. Hell, I’d see more of her here in Italy if this commercial thing turns into a campaign.”
“Do you really know where you’ll be working?” Catherine challenged.
He bowed his head. “No, I suppose not. The movie is hanging fire, and even when it gets the green light, who knows where we’ll go for locations. But I am toying with this production company, and that means I’ll be in California, at least for the near term.”
She played her ace. “I’d be very interested in hearing more about your production company. It might be the perfect application of our satellites. But, of course, I’m in New York.”
He smiled and tipped his head in a gesture of congratulations. “My, but you do play hardball.”
“It’s not hardball when it’s good for everyone,” Catherine answered. “Jennifer gets the best doctors, I get an education in movie production, and you may even end up with a backer.”
“Then I guess it’s New York … for Jennifer’s sake, of course.”
Catherine nodded to the waiter. She thought she might enjoy another glass of wine.
PETER HADN’T been sure of his motives when he had hired security agents to keep tabs on the honeymooners in Italy. He had told himself that it was a simple business precaution. You didn’t let a major shareholder in an important company wander around Europe without protection. Too frequently, they became targets for kidnap and extortion schemes. But, if pressed, he would have admitted that it was more than that.
It was Padraig O’Connell. His sudden interest in Jennifer simply didn’t ring true, and their whirlwind romance was almost adolescent in character, nothing like O’Connell’s typical romances. In past times, an out-of-work prince who found himself short of spending money was expected to hook up with an heiress in need of a title. So why, in today’s market, wouldn’t an out-of-work actor go after a woman with a space-industry fortune who happened to be in need of love? Peter simply didn’t trust the man and, probably for that reason, disliked him intensely.
There was another reason, and this was something that he didn’t allow himself to think, much less admit. He had long been in love with Jennifer. Why, he couldn’t say. Her low profile matched his preference for anonymity, so there was a level of compatibility. Her scientific interests were like his. Her athleticism made her a good fit for his recreational preferences. But, of course, none of those things explained his feelings. At best, they explained why he would have asked her to join him at road rallies or invited her to join his crew in a blue-water yacht race.
He had first suspected his feelings when she had fought him tooth and nail over personnel cuts in her department. As she argued, he realized that she didn’t give a damn about the loss of status entailed in having her responsibilities trimmed. Nor was she trying to save her budget. It was the people who worked with her that she was defending. She had needed them once, and she would need them again. She wouldn’t allow them to be mothballed just because the focus of her work had shifted.
Then, in the yacht race, he had watched her pitch in with all her might, not embarrassed to ask the dumb questions and with no fear of appearing foolish. He had decided that she was unusual in his business-mogul fraternity; unpretentious and basically honest. He knew that he wanted to know her better than their office relationship would allow.
His feelings were tentative and impossible to explain. By all odds, he should have gravitated toward Catherine, who was the perfect complement to his own weaknesses. She was daring where he was conservative, outgoing where he was introverted, forceful where he was reserved. He was dazzled by her energy and enthralled with her beauty. Her judgment at times was uncanny, almost as if she had foreknowledge of future events. And her vision, like her father’s, was enormous. It was Catherine who had taken a high-technology venture in the old and tired telephone business and turned it into a new era of communications. It was Catherine who had taken an invisible business and made it into the showstopper at Cannes. But, irrationally, he felt no magnetic attraction to Catherine. If what he was experiencing was love, then he was in love with Jennifer.
But as quickly as he had recognized the feelings, he had purged them. He was, as he had always realized, the pivot on which the two sisters balanced. They were very different people, not entirely compatible. If he moved toward either one of them, he would upset the delicate scale that was the soul of the company.
Maybe that was why he despised Padraig. The man had stepped into Jennifer’s life and waltzed off with her, winning in
a week what Peter knew he could never win, shattering his secret hopes. And perhaps it was this dislike that made him fear for Jennifer’s safety: The man had everything to gain from Jennifer’s death. Or maybe it had been simply a prudent business decision. But regardless, he had hired security people to shadow the couple in Italy, with the instruction that if anything happened to either one, it better happen to Padraig. They had failed in their assignment.
He vanished from the office on a Friday, and without sharing his plans with anyone, he caught an evening flight to Naples. The next day he was with his Italian detectives, walking downhill to the switchback where Jennifer’s car had launched itself into space.
They leaned forward across the temporary barrier and looked down the vertical face of the cliff. The fall took Peter’s breath away. To his right, clinging to the stone wall, was the Hotel San Pietro where they had stayed. To his left, he saw the rooftops of Positano, tiny squares of clay tiles hundreds of feet below. The people in the streets seemed like ants. Directly below, the sea was lapping up on a minute stone beach.
The road wound like a snake, cut into the cliff for its short, straight runs, with the tight switchback turns built out from the mountain. From the top, it seemed like a meandering ledge. The odds of Jennifer’s car landing precisely on the road were small.
Directly below them was the short, grassy ledge where Jennifer had landed. It was no more than twenty feet long, perhaps ten feet wide, and an infinitesimal target even for someone intentionally jumping from the barrier. There were lengths of the police’s crime-scene tape still wrapped around one of the bushes.
They went to the garage where the car had been parked. A parking attendant rushed over and challenged them. “Pretty good,” Peter observed. “It doesn’t look as if some kook could have just wandered in.”
The security officer suddenly realized that Peter’s interest was more than academic. “You think someone was out to get her.”
“You’re the detective. You were on the scene. What do you
suspect?” Then he barked off a series of orders in drill-sergeant phrases. He wanted to know the complete history of the car from the time it started down the factory production line. He wanted a minute-by-minute account of the week it had spent parked in the San Pietro garage. He wanted things that might have affected the braking system listed in order of priority, with the factory’s experience for each possibility. He wanted anyone who had ever touched the car interviewed. And he wanted the duty logs of all the officers who had been maintaining watch over Padraig and Jennifer.
Most of all, he wanted to know why Jennifer had been in the car instead of Padraig O’Connell. “It was supposed to be Padraig,” the security officer apologized.
“Then how did it end up being Jennifer?” he demanded.
Jennifer was still in her casts when Peter wandered into Catherine’s office. He dropped a file folder on the coffee table and walked past her desk to the wine closet.
“So early,” she said, glancing at her watch.
“You’re going to want a drink, too,” he answered. He crossed back past her desk, a bottle of Chablis in one hand and two glasses in the other. He set the glasses down next to his papers and began working with the corkscrew.
Catherine sensed a crisis. “Hold my calls,” she said into her intercom, then came out from behind her desk to join him. She waited patiently while he twisted and pulled and poured for the two of them.
“Here’s to Jennifer,” he said. “May her recovery be swift and complete.”
They drank. Catherine waited.
“And here’s to Padraig Aloysius O’Connell, who came to within a hair’s breadth of being your partner and my boss.”
He drank again, but Catherine still waited.
“Do you know how close he came?” Peter said, settling down into the sofa.
She nodded. “I think about it every day.”
“What were the odds of her unbuckling the seat belt? I know I never would have thought of that. And the chances of her tumbling out of the car just as it crossed the wall, and then landing in the one flat grassy spot on the whole godforsaken Amalfi Coast.”
“Don’t remind me,” she answered.
“But here’s the real long shot. What are the chances that the first guy on the scene happened to be an expert in emergency medicine? Do you know how many guys there are like that in Italy? And then the odds of getting to a hospital where the doctor was humble enough to know that he was in over his head, and rushed her to a real trauma center? By the way, there are only a half dozen of them in the south half of the country. And then, in Naples, a young genius who’s just finished a residency in head injuries was on hand. Bet you won’t find guys like him falling out of closets all over Italy.”
Peter finished his drink and poured himself a refill. “I’m probably not too far wrong when I guess that there was only one chance in a hundred of Jennifer living once those brakes failed.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said, still not knowing where his monologue was heading.
“But you know what has even longer odds?”
She gave no indication of trying to guess.
“The chances of the brakes on a Ferrari failing. The odds against that are astronomical. You see, they put in redundant braking systems, right down to double pads hovering around the disks. A drop of pressure in one system and the other takes over. So, even if, by some freak accident, a stone had cut a brake line or punctured a master cylinder, the brakes still should have worked. All Jennifer would have noticed was a dummy light on the dash, telling her to bring the car in for service at her earliest convenience. Oh, and the brakes are holed out and vented. They routinely run twenty or thirty hours on the racing circuits without overheating. They never could have overheated in the half
mile between her hotel and the spot where she went over the wall.”
“Where did you get all this?”
“Right from the horse’s mouth. The Ferrari people. Until now they have never had a total brake failure on that particular model. And then I checked it with their competitors at Porsche. They figure it’s about the same as the odds of all the engines on a jetliner conking out at the same time.”
“Exactly what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Jennifer’s accident wasn’t an accident. Somebody fucked up the brakes intentionally.” He tossed down the second glass.
“So,” he went on, “I put a few of our security people on to the case. I’ve been getting their reports in dribs and drabs, but today they sent it to me all together in one report.” He opened the file folder. “I think you ought to read this and then lock it away. This isn’t the kind of thing we’d want getting out.”
“What does it say?” Catherine demanded without reaching for the document.
Peter leaned back. “The car was inspected by a Ferrari dealer in Italy as soon as it was shipped in from Ireland. There was nothing wrong with it, so they gave it a tune-up, changed the fluids, and rebalanced the tires. That was the condition it was in when O’Connell picked it up and drove to the airport to fetch Jennifer.
“They drove from Rome to Positano, and as far as Jennifer remembers, the car performed flawlessly. She said there were dozens of occasions when she braked down from better than a hundred miles an hour without any hint of trouble. And then it went into the garage at the Hotel San Pietro. It’s a limited-access garage, patrolled by private security people.
“Now here’s the kicker. First thing the morning of the accident, Padraig O’Connell calls down to the garage attendant and says that someone is coming in to work on his car. A few minutes later a man in a white uniform with the Ferrari emblem
on his back comes in, goes to the car, and lifts off the engine cover. One of the security men wanders over, hoping to get a glimpse at a Ferrari engine. But the mechanic isn’t at all gracious. He doesn’t want to talk about the car and says he has only a few minutes to make a few simple adjustments. He works for a short while, then closes everything up, packs up his tool kit, and leaves. Less than an hour later, Jennifer comes down from her apartment, gets in the car, and drives away. The first time she needs the brakes, there aren’t any.”
“Your detectives checked with Ferrari,” Catherine assumed.
“Of course. Ferrari mechanics don’t make house calls unless the car isn’t working. They never dispatched anyone to the Hotel San Pietro.”
“They’re absolutely sure it was Padraig who phoned the garage?”
“They’re sure they recognized his voice. You don’t get to hear many Irish brogues in Positano.”
“Had he signed the nuptial agreement you drafted?”
“His lawyers told me they had advised him against it. They’re still waiting for his reply.”
Catherine was quiet for a moment. “I can’t believe this,” she finally said. “I was with him at the hospital while Jennifer was still critical. His fear and concern were obvious.”
“He’s a paid actor,” Peter said.
Now it was Catherine who poured herself another drink. “Can I ask what you plan to do with this?” She touched her fingertip to the detectives’ report.
“As president of the company, I should share this information immediately with you, Jennifer, and the board. But I’m not sure that I can go to Jennifer at the hospital and just drop this on her.”
“No, please don’t do that.”
“Then I thought that maybe the best approach was to go to O’Connell. I could have the detectives call on him and lay out their case. Once he saw the evidence, he might agree to a quiet
divorce in exchange for our dropping the matter.”
“And what would he say to Jennifer? That he never loved her? That all he ever wanted was her money?”