Chapter 13
The diamond was also used for some time as medical aid. One anecdote, written during the Dark Ages by St. Hildegarde, relates how a diamond held in the hand while making a sign of the cross would heal wounds and cure illnesses. Diamonds were also ingested in the hope of curing sickness. During the early Middle Ages, Pope Clement unsuccessfully used this treatment in a bid to aid his recovery.
—www.costellos.com.au
I
jumped up, throwing a five-pound note on the able. "Sorry," I said. "I have to go right now."
Grabbing my things, I headed out into the night. The rain was turned off for the moment, leaving the air damp and freezing, and I shivered as I headed to the car. My hands were burning with cold, and I made a mental note to buy some gloves before getting on the ferry tomorrow.
Rushing for the car, I paid no attention to a small dark, mud-splattered vehicle pulling into the car park until the window was rolled down and Luca was smiling at me. "You're safe!" he said. "Where are you going?"
For a moment, I floundered. "I didn't think you were coming."
"Well, here I am." He nodded. "Climb in," he said, cocking his head toward the passenger seat. "If we drive this, we will be less conspicuous."
I wasn't about to let him get me all tangled in this again. "No, Luca. The Romeo is right over there," I said. "I'll drive."
"Very well. I will park."
As calmly as I was able, I crossed the car park and opened the Romeo's driver-side door. Luca was parking by the lamppost, and I got in the car, started the engine and pretended to be waiting for him.
Just in case, I leaned over and checked the door locks. Good.
Seat belt, good.
Rain, starting to fall again a little—even better.
I backed out of the parking space, and spied Luca crossing the gravel lot with his head down. I put the car into first gear—
And peeled out. In the rearview mirror, I saw Luca run for his own car.
Good luck, buddy,
I thought, and pulled out onto the A-77.
He was behind me in moments. The roads were wet and dark once we pulled out from town a little way. I thought of my father, coaching me on the high mountain roads around San Francisco. My body settled into the seat, my limbs melding into the organic nature of the car around me, not a thing made of metal and glass, bolts and rubber, but an entity of breath and beauty, power and life.
We moved, the pair of us, into the night, like horse and rider dashing over the fields. The car hugged the road, smoothly, climbing and turning, responding without a quiver to my every command. We'd come to know each other, this little car and I, and in spite of my exhaustion, I felt a surge of exhilaration.
Admirably, Luca mostly stayed with me, lagging a little behind, then catching up. He cornered marvelously well, a driver who had some mountain time on him, I'd guess. That was generally how a person came by that clear sense of the center of the road.
Intriguing. I thought of him at the table, reading my palm. Thought of his kiss, so surprising and hot, delicious mouth and skilled, probing tongue. I thought of his hands in my hair, his thumbs on my face. A cradling gesture in which some tenderness lurked.
Minor royalty. What did that mean? I imagined him in a formal blue outfit, with a red sash, his hands in white gloves. And there was me, next to him, a gossamer vision in a ball gown in some giant, gilt-finished room.
The rational part of my brain threw a large stop sign up, and had to chuckle. How ridiculous!
Remember, said that rational side, he's a criminal. A criminal who had set me up and used me and landed me in more hot water than I'd encountered in a long time.
He flashed his lights at me. Once. Twice.
"Forget it, buster."
I sped up. Time to shake him. I stepped on the gas, hard, and headed around the bend. He clung for a little while, then started to slip behind, no match for the Romeo and me.
I had his headlights in view when they sailed crazily to the left, out of control, as I'd been earlier. I swore, and slammed on the brakes, pulling off to one side. Luca's car slammed to a stop against what appeared to be a boulder, hard enough I saw sparks fly out of the body. Maybe, I judged, a broken axle.
Good. I stepped on the gas, headed toward Ardrossan and the ferry in the morning.
But I had not driven even a kilometer before guilt began to eat at me. What if he'd been injured?
He deserved it
, argued a voice in my head.
Yes, but I'd witnessed the accident, and therefore shared some responsibility.
Not if he's chasing you with the intent of stealing the jewel again.
Sylvie
, said my mother's voice,
you know what you should be doing.
With a sigh, I turned around. If he bled to death out there, I'd never forgive myself.
The car was exactly where I'd left it, the headlights aimed crazily toward the sea, illuminating the falling rain. With a sense of dread, I suddenly wondered if he'd been killed.
Sliding the Spider into a narrow spot next to the dark blue—Audi? Fiat?—I jumped out of the car. Rain immediately soaked my hair and face and shoulders, and the crash of the sea against some rocks lent a sense of dark drama to the scene. The car engine made no sound, but as I came closer, I could hear it ticking as it cooled. Though the window, I saw Luca's head, still resting against the driver window.
"Luca!" I cried, and yanked open the door. He tumbled out sideways, and his limp body would have fallen into the mud at my feet if I hadn't caught him. I grunted, catching the dead weight of his shoulders on the strength of my thighs.
His face was smeared with blood, but it was unclear whether it was from the earlier wound, which had lost its bandage, or some other injury I couldn't see.
"Luca?" I said more gently. Rain washed the gore away from those lovely cheekbones. His eyelids quivered. I touched his neck, feeling for a pulse, and found it. Not dead, then.
"Luca?" I lightly slapped his face. "Luca, come on, you have to wake up."
He came to with a shuddering, flailing gasp. I caught him before he threw himself by accident over the cliff. "Take it easy!"
He fell on his knees, choked, grasped my wrist. "What happened?"
"You wrecked the car."
Wincing, he looked at the car. Then at the sea. Then me. "You came back."
I nodded, let go of a breath. "Don't ask me why."
"It does not matter," he said. "Thank you."
The car—I could see it was an Audi now—was smoking and obviously not drivable. One of the wheels was cocked at a bad angle.
"What now?" Luca said.
"Let's go. I'll give you a lift to Ardrossan, but then you're on your own."
He nodded, still bent over. "Thank you."
"No argument? Nothing?" I didn't trust him for a second.
He turned away from me, and without drama, vomited. He held up a hand. "I am not feeling well."
I scowled. Didn't vomiting like that mean something? I couldn't remember. "You might have a concussion, but I'll be damned if I know how to check."
"I will be all right," he said, and made his way heavily toward the Spider. "Some day I would like to again have dry clothes."
"Ditto. Let's get out of here."
In the car, I had a moment of foreboding. He put his head back against the seat, and it showed his throat, the elegant cut of his mouth. Even through the damp, I could smell him, a phenomenon so odd I didn't know what to do with it.
He reached out with one hand and captured mine. "Why did you run from me, Sylvie?"
"I don't want to be part of this anymore."
He nodded. One eye slammed closed, as if he had a stabbing pain. "I see."
For a moment, what I wanted to do was smooth a hand over his brow, brush his hair away from his face. My fingers knew how thin the flesh on his cheekbones would feel, how arched and strong the bridge of his nose. There were prickles of dark hair showing across his upper lip, and across his chin, and I imagined what that roughness would feel like across my throat, over the delicate skin of my breasts.
Get a grip.
He was just another in a long line of men I'd label Big Mistakes. Hadn't I had enough of this sort?
Grimly, I started the car. All I had to do was ignore the lure of Luca for another hour or two, and then we'd part company for good. No freaking way I was going to head down the road to a fresh broken heart.
And a little voice, the cynical observer, knew none of this was about Luca anyway. It was all about Paul.
It was always about Paul.
* * *
Luca fell asleep, and in the darkness, I drove, thinking again of the summer I spent in Paris after my father fell apart.
After picking me up at the airport, Paul took me home to the apartment he kept in the Marais, that section of Paris left untouched by Napoleon's sweeping modernizations. The rooms I knew so well—for we had stayed there often—took up half the fourth floor, and all of the fifth, in an old building, with rooms tucked under the ribs of the old beams. The dormers looked out to a secret courtyard full of roses that were tended by a fierce woman who rarely spoke.
It was a place I had loved from the first moment I'd stepped within, and "my" room, the guest room that opened onto the roofs of Paris, was my favorite of all. When I lay in the bed to read the afternoons away, pigeons cooed along the edges of the roof, and sometimes a giant gray cat wandered in through the windows, sleepy from his hunting. He'd sleep on my knees, purring if I even moved a toe. I never did find out who actually owned him.
For the first few weeks, I withdrew into the deep, soft splendor of my bed, and ate whatever the housekeeper, Brigitte, a thin, sharp older woman, brought to tempt me: little cakes from her oven, cheeses as ripe as noon, eggs shirred and stirred and scrambled and fried, rich cream soups. I would emerge and eat, then dive back into my cocoon again.
My father called, dutifully, every day. He apologized, over and over and over, until I wearied of it and told him to stop or I would not talk to him anymore. I heard Paul reprimand him, as well, a gruff order to pull himself into some reasonable shape.
Finally, when I'd rested a little, Paul pried me out of the room beneath the dormers, and we began a regime that would last the summer. Mornings, rain or shine, we wandered out to a tiny open café no larger than a matchbox. The counter was black with age, the proprietor a ruddy-faced man with a thick mustache. The customers were an assortment of people from the neighborhood, a white-haired old gentleman who looked as frail as spun glass and his tiny, wizened wife; a pair of men who were obviously gay; a pretty career girl with long legs and an impressive bust who brooked no flirtation.
In that little café, we drank café crèmes and ate chocolate croissants carried from the bakery. As I sat at the tiny bar and listened to the flow of French around me, I watched the vendors set up their produce—plump blueberries and strawberries as big as my hand, piles of spinach leaves and fresh mushrooms. "Why does it all look so much more delicious here?" I asked Paul.
He lifted one elegant shoulder. "It is Paris. Everything is more beautiful here."
"The women are beautiful," I said, "but not as beautiful as in Rio."
When Paul laughed and repeated my English words to the others in French, they laughed with him. I did not look at them, did not care about their opinion. These women were thin and dashing, it was true, but the women in Rio—
"The women in Rio have more passion," I said, in French.
"Ah, no, cherie," said Paul. "There are no more passionate people in the world than the French."
I shrugged. "It does not concern me. Passion is for fools."
Paul looked at me for a long moment. "My poor Sylvie," he said at last, and brushed my cheek with his fingers. "You have been wounded young. As was I."
"You were?"
He inclined his head, straightened. "A story for another day, no? Let's find our pleasure for today."
In the afternoons, we would take in a museum or walk in a park or through some neighborhood or another.
As the weeks ambled by, all in the same easy rhythm, it seemed there was nothing for Paul to do but ferry me to museums, to old houses, to little shops where he bought me baubles and scarves and toys. I had not played tourist in France, and he took delight in showing those sights to me—we went on field trips to Versailles, to Giverny to see Monet's gardens, to Normandy, where soldiers had come ashore, one of them my grandfather, so long ago.
Or so it seemed to me. Paul was amused. "Ancient history, no?"
"It is a long time ago," I said.
He stood on the beach and looked down the long, once-bloodied stretch of it. "When I was a boy, they still spoke of the war all the time. In every village church were the names of the men who had died. In every square was a plaque telling the story of some villager who had been in the Resistance and been killed by firing squad."
"How sad!" I cried.
"If we do not remember what such a war costs," he said, touching my nose, "we are doomed to repeat it, no?"
The only flaw in the ointment that lazy, healing summer was Mariette, Paul's mistress, a woman as sharp-limbed as a grasshopper, with enormous dark eyes and yards of dark hair. She wore scarves artfully, carelessly draped around her neck or shoulders, and smoked cigarettes ceaselessly. Had I been a few years younger, she could have fussed over me, done my nails and hair, bought me training bras. As it was, I was emerging—too quickly—into my womanhood, and my tall leggy body was more from my American father than my French-Scottish mother.
Mariette did not like my living in the apartment. She pouted and protested. She said it was unseemly.
I tried to woo her. It wasn't as if I didn't know how to do it. My father had had, by then, a dozen or so mistresses. It made my life easier if I worked my way into their favor. Sometimes I asked to brush their hair or wished aloud to be as pretty as they were, as well-developed.
Mariette could not be wooed. She was threatened and jealous and made my life miserable in dozens of tiny ways.