Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  Eventually she drew a bath, pouring a spoonful of floral bath oil under the fast tap. Above the ceramic tiles beside the tub, an enormous mirror fogged at its corners, but enough of it remained clear for her to observe herself stepping into the steaming water. She was twenty-seven and, although she had often been told she was beautiful, she knew her imperfections. What was beauty anyway, but a moment in time? She wondered for how much longer it would linger. Actually, she was further along in her career than she’d expected to be at this age, and she had settled into a relationship that seemed to have the potential to ripen rather than dissolve or explode, as past loves had done. So what was it she found so disturbing and unnerving in such quiet moments? Time, Isabella supposed. In her mother’s generation, a woman of her age would not have been thought young. She closed her eyes as she played with such thoughts. She was certain that Philip would call soon, yet wondered when.

  After she had toweled off, she stretched herself across the large, high bed, naked beneath a light blanket.

  A moment later she found the remote and turned on the television, surfing channels in search of one in English. She had already raced past Sky when she realized that the face on the screen was familiar and returned to it. The interviewer, with elegant Caribbean diction, was finishing her question, but the camera had already zoomed by her to focus on the actor whose new film was under discussion. The sight of Ty’s debilitating smile reminded her of their impulsive kiss less than a week ago.

  “In those days,” Ty was saying, “I couldn’t get recognized standing on Sunset Boulevard beneath a billboard for my new film, with a triple-life-size picture of me on it.”

  “I find that difficult to believe,” the interviewer prodded.

  “As did I,” Ty told her.

  Isabella laughed.

  “So much of everything is luck,” he continued. “All you can do is to follow what you love and hope you’re good at it and pray it comes out well in the end.”

  When the interview was done, Isabella cast off the cover, threw her legs over the bedside, and walked to the armoire, where, with her usual mixture of calculation and impulse, she retrieved the elements of her day’s costume, the first of which, she decided, would be a large square scarf in vibrant green and golden hues. One shade of its many greens matched her eyes, and the silk fluttered in the draft.

  When her mobile rang, Isabella took several deep breaths and settled back onto her bed before answering it. When she did, she heard Philip’s voice, astonishingly clear above the noise of the metropolis.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just finishing up in Geneva,” Philip lied. “My plane arrives at Fiumicino at two-seventeen. I’ve arranged a car. Where shall I have it take me?”

  “Here, of course,” Isabella said.

  “Shall I grab lunch on the way or—”

  “Probably so,” Isabella answered. “I’ll be in the shop all day, seeing to things, frantic, but back as soon as I can be. Right now I don’t have any notion when that will be. Call me on my mobile after you’ve arrived. By then I should have a better idea.”

  “Certainly, darling. Now as to this evening, what exactly is the plan?”

  Isabella smiled to herself. It was so like him. People were planners or they weren’t, and Philip, much like her godfather, had never demonstrated either a taste or an aptitude for spontaneity. “The reception is from six to eight,” she replied. “You’ll be front row center when the curtain goes up. Safe to say we’ll be out of there by nine. Then we’re going to dinner at Due Ladroni.”

  “Delightful, we’re in sync,” Philip said. “That’s all I need to know. Can I bring you anything?”

  “Just yourself,” Isabella told him, “rested and ready.”

  “I’ve got to tell you,” Philip said, “things look very promising here.”

  To Isabella’s ear it sounded as if he had rehearsed the line. “That’s brilliant. I’m so glad.”

  “Although I’ll have to put a Geneva address on my business card, because that’s where the firm is headquartered, I’ll have a lot of free rein. These days one can work from anywhere. . . .”

  As he spoke, a thin FedEx envelope was slid under Isabella’s door. She walked toward it, pressing the phone to her right ear.

  “Rome or Spain or anywhere,” Philip was saying. “We’ll have more time together. Plus, I’ll be making money, not disarming weapons. Altogether more agreeable, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would,” Isabella replied while with her free hand she scooped up the overnight letter and pulled the tab that ripped it open at its top. Inside she found a heavy white envelope addressed to her and inside that an invitation.

  “Well, isn’t that thoughtful!” She sighed.

  “What? What are you talking about?” Philip asked.

  She let the phone drop for a second onto the seat of a chair. By the time she picked it up, she’d collected her thoughts. “Sorry,” she said. “It was nothing at all, really, just an old friend writing to wish me luck.”

  “That’s nice,” Philip said abstractedly.

  “It is,” Isabella agreed. “I mean, it’s sweet.”

  As soon as she hung up, Isabella studied the card with the intricate lion-and-unicorn seal engraved in red at the top. She wondered if Ty understood that for an English girl it amounted to a summons. It was kind of him, she thought, but brazen, too, for he knew she was involved with Philip. The invitation was addressed to her alone, not to her and Philip, nor to her and a guest—and, even more disturbing, it was on the shortest possible notice. The royal premiere was scheduled for the very next night. She assumed that the event must have come together with unusual speed, for Ty had not mentioned it aboard Surpass. Indeed, as she recollected, he had longed for nothing so much as his return home to his new house to rest. Isabella knew that she was expected to remain in Rome for at least the next several days. There would be customers, many in town for the opening, who would wish to consult her about setting certain gems in her new designs. Her employers at Guardi, who ordinarily gave her wide latitude, would take a dim view of her abandoning the firm at the very moment it was poised to profit from her work. And she already had an appointment the following afternoon with Sheik al-Awad, a relatively new client from Abu Dhabi who had attended Ian’s party for her aboard Surpass and expressed unusual enthusiasm for her work, hinting that he thought several of her designs worth setting with important stones. To leave a man of his wealth and inclination stranded at the Hotel de Russie, even for the Queen of England, would almost certainly cost Isabella her job.

  She placed the invitation on a table and returned to her bedroom to dress. By the time she was ready to set off, a solution had come to her. Work had to come first. Nor could she risk irritating Philip by abandoning him so soon after his arrival. He would instinctively feel that it was Ty Hunter, not the sovereign, to whom she was granting precedence. She would reply to the invitation the next morning, with demonstrable regret. By then it would be too late for her to travel to London in time for the performance. She would claim to have found the invitation only late in the evening, after her return from work and the debut of her new collection and a dinner that followed, when all the palace offices would have been shut tight. She would have loved nothing more, she would say, then beg forgiveness and be granted it, for neither Ty nor the palace could expect her to turn her life around in a matter of hours. And for the time being, until it was in the past and she could use the episode to prove her devotion to him rather than risk arousing his jealousy, she would not breathe a word of it to Philip.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was, Isabella understood, more than one Rome. There was the ancient city of seven hills founded along the Tiber River by Romulus after he had slain his twin, Remus, more than two thousand seven hundred years ago. Then there was Ancient Rome, a republic that became an empi
re, the site of the Aqueduct, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla and the Forum. Later still there was the Rome of the early Christians and the rising Church, medieval Rome in its deceptive sleep, after which had come the Rome of the Renaissance—Michelangelo’s, Bernini’s, Raphael’s, Bramante’s and Cellini’s Rome—the city whose streets were glorified by a reawakening of classical ideas transmitted through the genius of such artists and financed by wealth from every point in Christendom as its owners sought proximity to and the favor of the Holy See.

  Guardi’s flagship was of the latter period, a marble-and-stucco palazzo that had been refurbished several times over the centuries, including twice in the fifty-five years since Guardi had taken possession of it. The latest streamlining, only a few years old, had left the building with a pointedly unembellished, almost monastic air, despite its high frescoed ceilings and ornately plastered walls.

  Isabella entered by a side door that led to a sleek vestibule decorated in quilted lilac suede, from which an elevator rose on the right. To the left lay the sales floor, which wrapped around a geranium-filled courtyard garden on three sides. Beyond them Isabella could see that the staff had nearly completed its morning ritual of removing the leather-and-felt trays of jewelry from the underground vault and arranging their contents in their assigned showcases and vitrines.

  Her ufficio was located at the far end of the design studio on the fourth floor. As she made her way toward it, she stopped at several desks to view the sketch pads and computer screens of the staff of six over which she had recently come to preside. The artists, three men and three women, were all young and thinking ahead, by at least a season, trying to intuit what balance of opulence and restraint would come into fashion and sell. For the moment Isabella found herself unable to focus on anything but the evening ahead, the reviews that would or perhaps wouldn’t appear in the next day’s papers, sales that might or might not be made. Imagining the trajectory of her career paralyzed her, and she had long ago learned that the only thing that could dispel anxiety was work.

  She took a cappuccino from her assistant, Balthasar, seated herself at her desk, scanned the e-mails in her business account, flipped through her actual post, listened to her voice mail, and was yet again reviewing the catalog for that evening’s debut when she decided to pay an unscheduled visit to the workshop on the floor below.

  It was a large, bright room that, as always, both elated and humbled her. Twenty-six men and seven women were employed there, not one of whom stirred, much less looked up, when Isabella arrived. Though they were subject to constant video surveillance, Isabella understood that it was not fear but pride that kept them so obsessively focused on their work.

  The polishing department was at the forefront of the shop, presided over by a jowly Sicilian with long, straight black hair, black eyes and a whiskey-reddened face. He and two younger men worked at wheels fitted with buffs of chamois, muslin, felt and satin, holding each just-fabricated or repaired piece of jewelry at the right angle to the right buff for the right amount of time to remove any lingering imperfections and bring up the natural luster of the metal. On a smooth white cloth beside a shallow vat of alcohol and the hot, soapy tubs in which just-polished pieces were given a final bath before being displayed or delivered, three rows of Isabella’s glistening creations lay drying.

  Beyond the polishing department, the room divided, with bench jewelers, including goldsmiths and stone setters, on the left and a state-of-the-art model-making shop and casting room on the right, each facing inward so that natural light fell from the high, arched windows over the jewelers’ shoulders and onto their benches. In the center of the room, partitioned off by a half wall and a step above the workshop’s level, sat its foreman’s office. The half wall had been painted in Guardi’s trademark lilac and was topped by a white marble counter across which works-in-progress regularly flowed. Isabella nodded to the foreman as she passed, noticing that one of her bracelets and several pairs of her earrings were even then awaiting his fastidious inspection.

  Although in many modern workshops the lines between jewelers of various skills had lately begun to blur, at Guardi the traditional divisions endured. Stone setters, ranked by experience, were at the top of the hierarchy and sat beside one another at the far end of the room. Goldsmiths were similarly grouped, with the brazing furnace nearby. Between the two sat a pair of enamelists, both young Italian women of Isabella’s age. All wore matching slate blue aprons.

  The model maker’s lair, essentially an outpost of the design studio above it, was more pristine and quiet, for the sculpture there was done mostly in wax. Today its employees were working on special-order pieces unrelated to Isabella’s collection.

  Careful not to disturb him, Isabella approached one of the senior stone setters as he finished the diamond pavé on a pin for that evening’s debut. “Buongiorno, Jacopo,” she said.

  “Buongiorno,” replied the jeweler, whose hands as they gripped the miniature trapeze in flight were unusually steady for someone of his age. “I love this piece,” he said familiarly. “It makes me laugh.”

  “Then it’s worth it,” Isabella gushed.

  “You have a good eye,” Jacopo told her, “but more important you bring a sense of play to your work. That’s what makes the difference.”

  Isabella smiled at him. Her maternal grandfather had been a master jeweler, had worked for decades in a famous trade shop in the shadow of the London Silver Vaults and then, for a few years before he’d succumbed to emphysema, had his own bench in a smaller operation in Golders Green, closer to his home. She thought of him as she watched Jacopo. He was a man of craft, not fashion, who had valued quality in workmanship above all else. What his hands had made was tangible and beautiful and easy to call his own. To see her celebrated for a few whimsical sketches, no matter how voguish, then marketed as a brand, would have perplexed him. He would have been happy for her, of course, but wouldn’t he have wondered and worried, too? Why hadn’t she bothered to get the basics down?

  “You’re what makes the difference,” she told Jacopo, leaving him to move through the shop and thank the specialists who filed, soldered, hammered, twisted and straightened precious metals into treasures bearing Guardi’s imprimatur and now her own.

  No sooner had Isabella returned to her office than Balthasar interrupted her. “Lapo’s secretary just rang. He’s on his way,” Balthasar said. “I thought you’d like to know.”

  Lapo was the middle and most elegant of the three Guardi brothers, who still owned a majority stake in the firm. A relentless perfectionist, he was also the most demanding.

  “Could you gauge his mood from hers?”

  “I long ago gave up on that,” Balthasar replied. He was lanky, with a face from an ancient Roman coin and long and lovely hands that Isabella thought must have been formed already knowing how to draw.

  “You’re right,” she said, then heard the door of the elevator open and close in the distance. “Grazie, B.”

  “Not to worry,” Balthasar told her. “Truly, this collection cannot miss. Trust me: There’s no one harder to please than me—you know that. So if I love it . . .”

  “Ciao,” Lapo said, entering Isabella’s office as Balthasar nimbly withdrew.

  “Ciao,” Isabella replied.

  “Relax,” Lapo said. “I am the bearer of good news.”

  Isabella took a deep breath. “Stage fright.” She let it out. “What sort of good news?”

  “All in due course,” Lapo told her. “Come with me, will you?”

  The spine of the building was a circular staircase of travertine marble. Lapo ushered Isabella through the zigzag entry that led from the design studio to the frescoed gallery that surrounded the staircase on the fourth floor. Summer sunlight played on the stained-glass dome above. On the ground floor, the first shoppers of the day had begun to arrive. Lapo bounded down the stairs, indifferen
t to the workshop on the third floor, the executive offices on the second, the curtained salons that lined the first, and the retail activity at street level. At the base of the staircase, he hesitated as Isabella caught up with him, then, flashing his key card, beckoned her through the entry to the Guardi vault. In the anteroom two guards sat at opposing desks while, behind mirrored walls, others lingered in reserve. Isabella had heard the dueling rumors that Guardi’s security force was drawn from the ranks of the Swiss Guard that protected the Pope and Vatican or else from the Mafia itself in a form of high-end protection, but, as such things were not her concern, had immediately dismissed them from her consideration. Enfolded within Italy was layer upon layer of mystery she, as an Englishwoman, could appreciate yet never comprehend. She accepted that reality, believing that, while momentarily Roman, she should at least attempt to savor an elegant subterfuge that would have appalled her at home.

  Lapo brought his right eye toward the retinal scanner and waited for the gates of the vault to retract. When they had, he gestured for Isabella to precede him, and they walked together to a far corner of the cool room. With two separate keys, Lapo opened a deposit box high in the wall before them. From this he removed a long black steel carton, its old borders etched in gold leaf, and, from that, two long rectangular leather trays with fitted lids. He beckoned Isabella to take a seat opposite him at a small desk that had been built into a nearby alcove. The top of the desk was covered in cappuccino suede, and he settled the leather trays gently upon it. “What do you think?” he asked as he lifted the lid of the first.

  The gemstones inside were several times larger than Isabella had anticipated and, as Lapo held one after another up to the light, appeared saturated with Technicolor. An intense round fancy blue and an oval canary diamond must each have weighed more than ten or twelve carats. The matched pair of marquise-shaped red diamonds was a bit smaller, but by far the largest and deepest of that color she had ever seen, so vivid they reminded her of strawberries. Isabella studied each stone thoroughly through her loupe, holding it within the points of her tweezers, angling it gradually against the bright, even overhead light.