Having deliberately raised Philippe’s greatest fear, Bianca shuddered visibly, as if this really were now her greatest fear too, and waited calmly to see if it would have the desired effect. Philippe’s fear was already so pronounced that he refused to get out of bed to go to the bathroom until the guards, nurses and helpers had looked behind each curtain and door to see that no gunman was lurking there.
As Bianca had hoped he would, Philippe immediately panicked. What added to the effect was that, in his drugged state, he had not taken in the news from the day before. ‘How did they kill Boris Budokovsky?’ he asked, his eyes pools of horror.
‘They smashed through the front door of his house. It was backed with reinforced steel, but they still got through. Don’t ask me how. For the first time in years, I’m thinking that maybe you were right about those people. Maybe we are in greater danger than I thought. I’m now beginning to wonder whether I was wrong to dismiss your mania for security. Maybe you had a better estimation of the danger than I did, darling.’
Bianca rose from the sofa where she had been sitting and moved to sit on the bed beside Philippe. ‘You know, darling, I can now see why you’ve taken the precautions you have. I always thought it was faintly ridiculous that you can’t even go ten paces without everyone checking behind doors and curtains and sofas,’ she said, gradually lowering her voice so that the surveillance equipment could not pick up what she was saying, ‘but now I understand and want us to have our own secret code in case assassins ever break into this apartment. I only hope to God you’ll remember it, though. Look, if you’re barricaded in a room, and I say that you can leave, don’t take my word for it unless the titanium shutters are up. If the titanium shutters are down, it’s a signal that the hitmen have got me and are using me to entice you out of safety into danger. Will you remember?’
‘Of course I’ll remember,’ Philippe said irritably. ‘I may be a wreck, but my mind is still clear as a bell. At least, it is when I’m not doped up on those tablets.’
‘OK, darling, just as long as you remember. The shutters are the key. If they’re down, stay inside. The Russians have got me. OK?’
Philippe took her hand in his and haltingly but lovingly brought it up to his lips. ‘You really are unique. Always thinking of everything.’
Bianca felt the blood rush to her head, as she turned puce. She did not trust herself to reply. Never before had she been so conflicted about a course of action upon which she was determined, but she couldn’t see an alternative to remaining a prisoner of her marriage. Mercifully, Philippe brought the encounter to an end. ‘Now I must sleep. I’m tired,’ he said, and Bianca let out an actual sigh of relief.
Having heightened Philippe’s fear, and got across the message concerning the code of the shutters, Bianca then waited until early the next week to implement the next stage of her plan.
An opportunity presented itself to her when she noticed Frank standing outside on the balcony having a cigarette. It was a Wednesday afternoon. The sun was shining brightly, and he was staring at the majestic and dramatic beauty of the mountains in the distance. Bianca, seizing the opportunity to arrange a meeting outside the range of the auditory monitors, joined him outside.
‘So, Frank. Are you happy you came?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘But you miss your family.’
He looked at her, smiled bravely but hollowly, and nodded.
‘You’ve fitted in so well that, if you keep going at the rate you are, maybe we can fly your family over at the beginning of the kids’ summer holidays. Are those still in June? They were in the days when my kids went to school.’
‘Oh, Madame, would you?’ Frank said, more convinced than ever that she was the living embodiment of an angel.
‘Well, my New York assistant is bringing the Lear over with some stuff from our Fifth Avenue apartment around then, so I don’t see why we can’t dovetail arrangements and have your family along as well.’
‘It would mean the world to us,’ Frank said.
‘Let’s see how it goes, Frank,’ she said lightly. ‘Tomorrow is your day off, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you’d like, I’ll meet you in Enrico’s - it’s a shop that sells toys and souvenirs near the Casino - and we can get a few trinkets for you to send to your children by way of a “hello” present from me. They’ll feel much better about coming here if they think of Monsieur and myself as kindly grandparents instead of dreadful employers who’ve stolen their father from them. I suggest we meet at, say, eleven-thirty tomorrow morning?’
‘You really don’t need to, Madame,’ Frank said gratefully.
‘But I do, Frank, I do. Unless I invent little projects to get me out of this apartment for short spells, I’d go crazy. Believe me, you’ll be doing me as much of a favour as it appears I’m doing for you.’
‘Put like that, Madame, how can I refuse?’
‘Eleven-thirty, then. You can’t miss it. Enrico’s. If you get lost, just ask anyone local and they’ll direct you…oh, silly me, of course you can’t do that. You don’t speak French or Spanish. Well, not to worry. You won’t get lost, but if you do, ring Erhud and ask him to direct you.’
Having successfully set the stage for the next act of the drama that only she knew was coming, Bianca slipped back inside.
The following morning, as she was being driven to Enrico’s, Bianca had a stern talk with herself about pulling herself together. She was actually growing nervous.
By the time she walked into Enrico’s, however, she was feeling more composed and gave no indication of being anything but upbeat and normal, as she greeted Frank, who was already standing inside. ‘Choose anything you want for the kids,’ she said graciously. ‘Shall we say, at least three different presents for each child? Come on. Choose. Choose.’
‘I’ll get a wire basket.’
‘You know, Frank,’ Bianca said, as Frank looked around silently, ‘it occurs to me when I look at those toy firemen over there: maybe you can help me with a problem I’ve been having with Erhud. He refuses to accept that the security in the apartment is a fire hazard and that it’s endangering all our lives. I’ve tried to speak to him, but you know what some men are like. If an opinion or a warning comes from a woman, they dismiss it out of hand. Not, I hasten to add, that I’m asking you to have a word with him on my behalf. That course of action would be wholly inappropriate. No, what I was wondering is…could you help me highlight the problem with a demonstration?’
‘I’ll help in any way I can, Madame.’
‘That’s good of you, Frank. Tomorrow at six in the evening, in case you don’t know, is the start of our Sabbath. I’m giving all the guards the day off from then. They deserve it, and frankly, we can’t have the demonstration, if they’re there monitoring all our activities.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘At six-thirty tomorrow evening…make sure none of the guards is around…go into the control room and turn off the monitors in the living room and all the other rooms downstairs in the apartment. Do not turn off the monitors upstairs in the bedrooms or in the passages and, under no circumstances, turn off the monitors recording the sound in the bathrooms. The only place we’re concerned about is downstairs. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Good. When you’ve switched off the surveillance and recording equipment downstairs, go into Monsieur’s study and set the transparent burgundy part of the curtain alight. Unlike the heavy green damask sides, it’s not fireproofed to EU standards. I bought it in India last year and it will go up in flames pretty swiftly. There are matches on the desk if you need them, but since you’re a smoker, I shouldn’t think you’ll have a problem finding a light. Wait until the curtain is really blazing…by which time the smoke alarms will presumably be ringing…then rush upstairs and tell me that the apartment is on fire. That’s all you need to do. Do you think you can do it?’
‘Sure thing. It doesn’t so
und difficult.’
‘It will be extremely easy, as long as you do exactly as you’re told. No more. No less. It’s supremely important that you leave the surveillance equipment and cameras on everywhere except downstairs. But you must knock out the whole of the downstairs floor, otherwise a recording will be made of you setting the curtain on fire, and that will get us both into trouble.’
‘I’ve got it, Madame. I was a Mountie, you know. I’m used to taking orders and carrying them through to the letter. It’s an honour to do anything that will assist Monsieur and yourself.’
‘You’re a good boy, Frank. You will have our undying gratitude.’
Having clicked the main piece of the puzzle into place, Bianca felt that she had just done a disagreeable job well. ‘Well, we’d better be getting back,’ she said.
Returning to the apartment in time for lunch, Bianca played the dutiful wife as only she could. She took the meal with Philippe in his bedroom, eating off a mahogany trolley which she had specially commissioned from the Belgravia-based London furniture-maker David Linley, nephew of Queen Elizabeth II and son of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, who had taken those photographs of her all those years ago and which were still displayed in every Calorblanco building. As she ate, she recalled with wry satisfaction the Duchess of Oldenburg telling her that the Queen of England often ate her dinner alone in the palace off a plastic standing-tray while looking at television. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘Her Majesty might not care about quality, but I do, and I see no point in having the means to live elegantly, then turning around and living inelegantly.’
As soon as the meal was finished, and Agatha had left the bedroom to take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen, Bianca got up from the sofa where she had been sitting and headed for the bathroom. The time had come to click the next piece of the puzzle into place.
Making sure she was leaving a photographic and auditory trail that would establish her movements and actions as having been ordinary and innocent, she used the lavatory noisily enough for the monitors to pick it up. Having finished, she turned on the taps to wash her hands. ‘You know, Philippe,’ she said over the sound of running water, ‘I’ve been thinking. I really overreacted the other day about Boris Budokovsky’s death. Maybe you’re right when you say we shouldn’t have the guards working on the Sabbath anymore. It makes sense not only on practical grounds but on religious ones as well.’
She then turned off the taps and headed back into the bedroom.
Knowing that Philippe would ask her what it was she had been saying, she positioned herself so that her head would block out the monitor’s view of him by leaning in to kiss him.
‘What were you saying?’ he rasped, the disease increasingly affecting his powers of speech.
By way of response, Bianca kissed him on the ear and whispered: ‘It wasn’t important, darling.’
‘You know,’ she continued, cleverly playing to both Philippe and the monitor, ‘as you get older, I can see your Orthodox upbringing reasserting itself. That’s lovely. It must be such a comfort to know that our religion gives one something to cling to in times of need.’
Philippe, used to his wife’s sudden changes of subject, nodded in agreement just as Agatha came back into the room.
‘Ah, Agatha, Bianca said, ‘could you please get me a… Actually, don’t bother. I’ll go myself. I may as well. I have to have a word with Erhud.’
Without further ado, she headed downstairs to the head of security’s station. When she reached it, the door was already open, which was hardly surprising, for he knew from monitoring the conversation that Bianca was coming down to see him. ‘What would you say if I told you that Monsieur has just decreed that all of you are to have the Sabbath off from now on? Amazing, no?’
‘People become more religious as they near the end,’ Erhud said. ‘I’ve seen it with my own father and his father before him.’
‘There really isn’t any danger, is there?’
‘Truth be told, Madame, I don’t think there ever was. In all the time I’ve been here, there has never been an incident. Not, of course, that you can use the past to predict the future when you’re talking about security matters. The unexpected is the one thing you must always calculate for.’
‘I think we’re as one on this issue, Erhud. Since there’s no real danger, we may as well humour Monsieur. Tell your men not to worry. Your salaries remain the same whether you work on the Sabbath or not. But from now on, though, you’re all off from six o’clock every Friday evening till six o’clock every Saturday evening.’
‘I’m grateful,’ said Erhud, who was the child of an Orthodox family and who knew the strict interdict against working on the Sabbath.
Indeed, Erhud’s parents had never driven a car on the Sabbath, nor had they turned on or off electric lights. They had cooked no food. Washed no dishes. Heated no water.
That crucial part of the puzzle locked into place, Bianca departed from the security station with her stomach in knots. She was as nervous as she had been just before Ferdie’s death. Despite this, she still enjoyed a surge of satisfaction at having successfully accomplished such a complex and crucial task.
Unsurprisingly, that night Bianca could not get to sleep at all. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep,’ she kept on telling herself, as she lay in the bed waiting for the one thing that eluded her. ‘I cannot be tired tomorrow. I’ve got to be well rested. And to look it too.’ So, at one o’clock, in desperation she got up and took two Temazepam tablets, knowing that their effect would last only four hours, after which the drug would wear off without leaving her with a hangover, the way many other sleeping tablets did.
For the first time, however, the Temazepam, which had previously guaranteed her a sound sleep, did not work. At two o’clock, she was still wide-awake, her mind racing. In desperation, she reached in the dark for the phial, which had once belonged to the eighteenth-century Regent Anna of Russia, and downed a third tablet with a glass of Evian water from the beside table, making sure not to turn on the light and thereby leave too distinct a record of the fact that, on a night that was meant to be just another ordinary one, she had been so perturbed that she had been unable to sleep.
The third Temazepam did the trick. Bianca drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep, and - as ever - the effect had worn off four hours later, so she was wide-awake by seven o’clock.
Mindful of the necessity to appear as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, she lay in bed as though she were still asleep, resolute about not getting up before her usual time. Now that it was morning, she found it easier to sleep naturally than she had during the night, and she drifted in and out of a fitful sleep punctuated by extreme anxiety until, just as she was due to be awakened, she had the most golden dream about walking through the rooms of Sintra, showing them to her houseguests: the Queen of England and the Duchess of Oldenburg.
This magical dream was interrupted by the maid bringing in her breakfast at the appointed hour. Having been fast asleep, she now felt more tired than she had two hours before. This time she did not need to fake tiredness when she said: ‘God, is it morning already? I could’ve slept for another two hours.’
‘Would Madame like me to bring another tray later?’
‘No,’ she said, yawning mightily, ‘it’s all right. Now that I’m awake, I may as well get up.’
The countdown to eternity had begun.
At six sharp that evening, the nurses changed shift. Erhud and the guards, thrilled to be let off duty to enjoy the unexpected delights of the principality, left en masse in two minutes flat. Ten minutes later Alvaro and the night nurse, who had been on duty that day while Agatha went to the doctor, ambled out into the street on their way home.
Upstairs, Frank, who was meant to be on duty, and Agatha, who but for her doctor’s appointment would have been off, were sitting with Philippe, while Bianca sat watching television in the living room. For the first time since Philippe had moved into it, the apartment w
as not crawling with security guards; and to Bianca, this created the oddest sensation. It was as if she could literally feel the atmosphere lighten. There was now space where previously the guards’ presence had been an oppressive weight.
‘Livings things, even when invisible, take up space,’ Bianca reflected at this most telling of times. ‘They make themselves felt, which has frankly been one of the burdens of having to exist in a cramped environment like this.’
At twenty past six, she rose with her customary elegance from the chair where she had been sitting and left the living room, walking unhurriedly upstairs to Philippe’s bedroom, as if this were just another evening and she were a dutiful and loving wife about to minister to her infirm billionaire husband. When she reached his bedroom, Agatha was sitting with him, while they looked at television.
Frank was nowhere to be seen.
‘Hello, darling,’ Bianca said sweetly. ‘I was feeling lonely downstairs all on my own and thought I’d come up here and watch TV with you. What are you looking at?’
‘A video of The Third Man,’ Agatha said.
‘Not that old movie,’ Bianca said good-naturedly. ‘It’s so creepy.’
Philippe patted the bed beside him. ‘Come and sit here with me,’ he said softly, his cow eyes suffused with love.
‘Only if we look at something more contemporary,’ she said playfully.
Philippe waved his hand to indicate to Agatha that she should take the video out.
‘What would you like to see, Madame?’ she asked.
‘What is there?’
‘We have a Kiss Before Dying…’
‘Nothing deadly, thank you.’
‘There’s Amistad…it’s about slavery…’
‘That’s even worse than death, Agatha.’
‘And Armageddon. It’s an adventure movie with Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler.’
‘Let’s have Armageddon, Agatha, and I really hope it is an adventure story.’
Agatha pushed the videocassette into the machine.
‘Fast forward through the trailers please,’ Bianca said in her most patrician manner. ‘We can do without the Coming Attractions. Sitting through those was bad enough in the days when you had to go to a theatre to see a film.’
Empress Bianca Page 47
