Read The Orpheus Deception Online
Authors: David Stone
The Orpheus Deception (47 page)
“You look younger than I expected,” she said.
“So do you.”
Antonia laughed.
“I have to show my card just to get a prosecco. I’m actually thirty-three. Nobody believes me. I suppose time will fix that. I’m looking forward to showing you the villa. I know the history is a little odd, but I think you’ll like it very much. And the sellers are
—come se dice?—ardènte.”
—come se dice?—ardènte.”
“Motivated?”
“Yes!
Motivadissima!
Your Italian is very good. Have you been very much in Italy?”
Motivadissima!
Your Italian is very good. Have you been very much in Italy?”
“I was here last year, in Tuscany. We stayed in a villa near Arezzo, and then went to Florence, Lucca, San Gimigniano—”
“All those towers! Such a silly place. Did you like Florence?”
“I drove. Got there on a Saturday evening. Got lost. Panicked.”
“Yes. Me too. I never try to drive in Florence. Where did you stay?”
“At the Lucchese.”
“Near the Uffizi. My God. Did you hear what happened there just a while ago? People were shot. Two men and a
professori,
of
psicologìa,
she was shot there too.”
professori,
of
psicologìa,
she was shot there too.”
“Oh no—killed?”
“No. She is in
. . . una chioma?”
. . . una chioma?”
“A coma?”
“Yes. They say it was terrorists. The woman was from an old family, aristocrats. The Vasaris. Very wealthy. The Carabinieri are very angry. They have one man”—here she gave Nikki a significant look— “a Serb, of course—they are as bad as the Slovenians—and he is being questioned. But that was in Florence. We have little crime up here, except for the docks in Trieste, where there are too many foreigners. What do you do, in America?”
“I work with an IT company?”
“Eye-Tee?”
“Information Technology. Computers, that sort of thing.”
“You must be very good,” she said, accelerating around a curving ramp and powering onto a road marked SS14. The sea along their right was just visible under a bank of wet fog. Winter was in the air, and it looked like a rainstorm was coming in from the mountains. The coastal plain here was flat and level, and Antonia had the Alfa up to two hundred kilometers in thirty seconds.
“Very good? I suppose so,” she said, thinking about the way the AD of RA’s scent had stayed in her mind on the long Alitalia flight from D.C. to Milan. He had booked her in first class and handed her a black Amex card with a fictitious corporate ID under the name NIKKI TURRIN.
Then he had kissed her good-bye, his damaged face visibly moved and filled with sudden anxiety. She had kissed him back, on his scarred cheek, partly to stop him from changing his mind and partly because when she was in close like that it was all about how he smelled and his warmth and how strong and sweet he was and there was nothing about the damage.
“We have a good company,” said Nikki, watching the sea on her right.
“You must, to be able to look at a million-euro villa.”
“My family has some money. They may help.”
Her family had about as much money as Nikki did, which was nowhere near enough to buy a cottage on the Chesapeake let alone a villa in Muggia. Nikki felt guilty, leading the agent on, but then that’s what they meant by
covert
and
clandestine.
She realized she was now a kind of spy, and felt a combination of shame and exhilaration at the idea. Antonia seemed to find the explanation sufficient and did not press her again.
covert
and
clandestine.
She realized she was now a kind of spy, and felt a combination of shame and exhilaration at the idea. Antonia seemed to find the explanation sufficient and did not press her again.
The traffic, which had been light all the way from Monfalcone, began to get heavier as they passed through the outskirts of Trieste and into an industrial area near the docks. Antonia found an off-ramp and got onto the Via Flavia, racing past the dockyards and the factories toward the port of Muggia. The air smelled of smoke and traffic but, up ahead, soft-green hills rose gently upward, and, as the Alfa climbed into the tangled streets above the little harbor, Nikki could see how pretty the town would be in the high season. The hills were heavily treed and here and there they passed an olive grove or an orchard.
As they climbed up the twisting roads in Antonia’s agile sports car, the private yards turned into estates and the little homes into villas. Antonia braked hard into a right turn marked SALINA MUGGIA VECCHIA and traveled down a long winding road covered with terra-cotta shards until they came to a stop in a large, secluded parking area in front of a massive iron gate, intricately worked, set between two tall stone pillars, each pillar supporting a bronze statue of some sort of raptor, wings outstretched, talons extended. Antonia set the brake, glanced over at Nikki, rolled her eyes theatrically.
“Slovenians love their stupid eagles. If you buy the place, we can get some marble urns and put some flowers there. Come on, I have the keys.”
They got out, Nikki feeling a dizzying sense of unreality as she stood in front of the same gate that she had seen in an enlargement of the video. It had been barely visible in the distance beyond the pool, a purely theoretical locus somewhere out there in the wider world. Now it was right in front of her, and it was the scene of a multiple murder.
She felt her throat tightening. She was a long way from Pittsburgh.
“Nikki, are you okay? You look cold.”
Nikki nodded, pulling her cashmere scarf
—his
cashmere scarf— around her shoulders. “I am, a little. The wind is stronger up here.”
—his
cashmere scarf— around her shoulders. “I am, a little. The wind is stronger up here.”
Antonia used a large brass key to work the lock in a box by the gate. The gate swung slowly back on electric motors, shrieking like gulls. They got back in the Alfa and followed the drive as it curved around and up through an avenue of small evergreens. Beyond the curve of the lane they could see the villa at the crest of the hill, a sprawling neo-Romanesque monstrosity, with meaningless turrets and gables and domes stuck on at random intervals across the roofline. The lawn had run to seed, and the place had a general air of ruin and decay. Antonia made no excuses for it as she pulled the Alfa to a stop under the entrance portico, the tires crunching in the terra-cotta gravel.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, as they got out. “The place is a disaster. But, really, it isn’t. Under the stuck-ons, it has good bones. Two weeks and a good carpenter could have the place smoothed out very nicely. Come, let me show you inside—all the furniture is gone; of course, it was terrible stuff—so you can see the place as an empty canvas.”
She dragged one of the heavy double doors open and waved Nikki inside, searching for a light switch, as they stood in the great, gloomy hall before a set of curving stairs that rose up in a helix toward the second floor. The front hall had been inlaid with black-and-white marble in a herringbone pattern. Open doors on either side led to a large reception hall on the one hand and what looked like a wood-paneled study on the other. Antonia was right; the vulgarity was all on the outside. She followed her through the rooms and out into large open space at the back of the villa, the kitchen and the dining area, and a wall of leaded glass that overlooked the deck and the pool itself.
“See,” said Antonia, spreading her arms out. “You can see the bay from here. Isn’t it splendid, Nikki?”
“Yes it is,” said Nikki, seeing only the half-naked girls and the beefy men choking and dying in agony in the water and on the marble decking.
“Are you not well, Nikki?” asked Antonia, coming close and putting a hand on Nikki’s forearm. Nikki put her hand on top of Antonia’s. Her skin was warm, and she smelled of lemon soap.
“I think I’m a bit tired from the flight.”
“Of course. I should have taken you to lunch first. We can go now, if you like. And come back tomorrow. I have a wonderful room for you at Stella, right on the water. And my mother has invited you for dinner tonight. You will come, won’t you? She wants to hear all about your family. She thinks we may be related. Of course, she thinks everybody in Friuli is related to everybody else. But, you will come?”
“Yes. I will. But let’s do a quick look around now. Then, after lunch, maybe we can come back?”
“Certainly. Let me make a call. I can get us a table at Stella for lunch, if I call now.”
She flipped her cell phone open, frowned.
“My battery’s low. I have a car charger. I’ll plug it in and call from there. I’ll be right back. You go look at the view.”
Antonia walked quickly off down the hall toward the front section and the main doors. Nikki’s heart began to beat a little faster. She had the little HazMat kit in her purse. And the pool—the focus of all her analytical attention for days now, the entire point of this mission—was just beyond the glass doors on the far side of the dining room. She drew a breath, stiffened, and walked across the inlaid-wood flooring, her heels striking hard and the sound echoing off the bare walls. The place smelled of cigar smoke and funeral flowers and would have to be aired out before . . . She smiled at that. She wasn’t going to
buy
the place. She was here to do a job.
buy
the place. She was here to do a job.
The deck curved around the entire back of the villa, a shell-shaped cascade of semicircular levels covered in pale pink marble. A small Romanesque temple, with what looked like a bar and a stove, had been built at the shallow end of the pool. The pool itself was very large, mainly square, but with a broad, curving edge at the deep end. The pool had been drained, and scrubbed until the tiles gleamed. It was deep, and the walls were straight and high. Empty, it looked like a large pen designed to cage bears. The bottom of the pool, in which a small puddle of water remained, a few dead leaves floating in it, had an inlaid pattern done in tiny squares of dark malachite and pale turquoise and lapis lazuli—a massive shark, with a muscular curve to its body and a flat, sinister head.
It was very well done and looked almost alive, seeming to quiver with terrible life, as Nikki stood at the edge of the pool and looked down at it. She looked back toward the glass doors. There was no sign of Antonia.
Do it now, Nikki. Don’t wait.
She took the little HazMat kit from her handbag and knelt by the edge of the pool, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. Her heart was hammering against the side of her ribs. The kit contained a series of cotton swabs and some sterile vials, along with a few small plastic bottles and a rasp. Working quickly, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, she worked her way along the edge of the pool, covering those areas where she remembered seeing people die, dying right on the marble squares under her feet. In a few minutes, she had filled several vials and had a bottleful of scrapings. She stood up and looked back at the house again.
Where was Antonia?
She looked at the pool again. A ladder had been lowered into the deep end, left there by the workmen who had cleaned the pool. She did not want to go down into the pool; not at all. She walked over to it, slipped off her shoes, and climbed down into the pool anyway. It was deeper than she thought, almost fifteen feet at the deepest. By the time she reached the bottom the sky had been reduced to a square of gray cloud framed in white tiles. She bent down and ran the tip of a swab over the malachite mosaic around the shark’s snout and dipped a vial into the standing water near the drain. Her feet were damp and her knees ached from kneeling. If Antonia came to the edge and asked her what she was doing, she would say she was—
“What are you doing?”
Nikki looked up. A small boy, with a pinched, narrow face and long shaggy hair, was standing at the edge of the pool, staring down at her. He was wearing a wrinkled gray silk suit. With a vest. The outfit looked ridiculous on the boy, who could not have been more than nine or ten. The boy’s expression was sullen, and his dark brown eyes had no light in them.
“I’m checking out the pool,” she said, with an edge. “Who are you?”
The boy shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets, and began to walk along the edge of the pool. Nikki glanced at the ladder, feeling suddenly vulnerable. She looked down to what she had thought of as the shallow end of the pool. The edge was at least ten feet off the bottom. Essentially, she was in a bear pit. She walked quickly over to the ladder and put her hand on it. The boy was standing next to it, but he had his back turned to her, his attention somewhere else.
“She is in the pool, Father.”
A voice, in the distance, coming closer, an old man’s voice.
“I know, I know.”
Nikki began to climb up the ladder, looked up and saw that an old man was now standing beside the little boy, his hand resting on the boy’s head, a stiletto of a man with an air of dissipated elegance, blue-lipped, of indeterminate age, wearing a beautifully tailored gray silk suit. His face was like a skull and his lidded eyes had a pale glitter.
“You are the lady from America?” he said, in a voice like a dry branch scraping against a window in the dead of winter.
“Yes. I . . . I was checking the pool out.”
The boy found this amusing. He was missing teeth in the front of his mouth. His laugh was high and sharp, a yelp, like a jackal or a fox. The old man smiled down at her, and patted the boy’s cheek, letting his fingertips slide along the boy’s skin in a way that seemed more sensual than paternal.
Nikki found that she disliked him extremely.
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