Divas

by Rebecca Chance

  ‘First of all, I told you before when you came here at the crack of dawn this morning that it’s Mrs Myers, not Mrs Fitzgerald, ’ Suzanne was correcting them.

  ‘It was nine a.m., ’ the lead cop muttered hopelessly. ‘Not exactly the crack of—’

  ‘Oh boy, I know who you are!’ exclaimed the second cop. Balding, sallow-faced, his leather jacket stretching over a larger stomach than it had been made for, he nudged his colleague in the ribs. ‘Jerry, you know who this is? It’s Suzanne Myers!’

  ‘Jeez, the Sunsilk girl?’ Jerry asked. ‘No kidding! I thought I’d seen you before somewhere—’

  ‘In your dreams!’ the balding cop sniggered. ‘That’s where you’ve seen her!’

  Jerry cleared his throat.

  ‘Look, Mrs Myers, we do need to see your daughter. Like I said this morning, we’ve received a tip-off that she’s left the jurisdiction. Which means that she’s skipped bail, which is an arrestable offence. If we could just make sure she really is here, we’ll leave you in peace—’

  ‘We don’t even both have to go in, if she’s sick, ’ the balding one volunteered. ‘Just one of us, if he gets a good look at her face. Five minutes, tops.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about this, ma’am, ’ Jerry said unhappily. ‘But we got our job to do. Like Detective Garcia says, five minutes is all it’d take. Or we’ll be back in the morning with a search warrant.’

  Evie and India sneaked back down the corridor, into Lola’s bedroom, Evie climbing under the covers.

  ‘How do I look?’ she asked.

  India squinted at her face.

  ‘Horrible, ’ she said cheerfully. India dabbed her fingers in a glass of water standing on the bedside table, and ran them quickly through the locks of Evie’s hair hanging round her face. ‘Nice and limp, ’ she said with satisfaction. ‘OK, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.’

  Nipping across the room, she drew the heavy curtains, plunging the room into near-total darkness; the only light was a lamp across the room, on the dressing table, and India sat down in an armchair next to it, picking up a book. Footsteps were coming down the corridor, and the next thing they heard was a tap on the closed bedroom door.

  ‘India? How is she?’ Suzanne’s voice came. ‘The policemen are here again, and they insist on seeing her – it’s too upsetting—’

  ‘Come in!’ India called quietly.

  As the door swung open, India was putting down her book and rising from her armchair, haloed from behind by the glow of the lamp, the picture of a nurse watching quietly over her patient.

  ‘She’s been sleeping, ’ India said. ‘I think the antihistamines finally kicked in and knocked her out, thank goodness.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Jerry, half-concealed behind Suzanne, asked anxiously. ‘I didn’t realise she was, y’know, sick. She infectious?’

  ‘We hope not, ’ Suzanne sighed. ‘She’s very sensitive. Ever since she was a little girl, she’s been highly prone to catch anything that’s going round, poor child. We’ll call the doctor if she’s no better in the morning, ’ Suzanne said.

  Evie decided this was her cue.

  ‘Mummy?’ she said in the croaky voice of someone just woken from sleep, turning over in bed. She put a hand up to shield her eyes from the light, careful not to touch her face. ‘Mummy, is that you?’

  ‘Darling!’ Suzanne rushed over to her bedside. ‘You’re awake! Oh God, we woke you up!’ She darted a furious look at Jerry over her shoulder.

  ‘My face hurts, ’ Evie whined in her best English accent. ‘And my head.’

  ‘Is it any better than before?’ Suzanne rested her hand on Evie’s limp golden curls. ‘Oh dear, you’re all sweaty—’

  ‘Hot, ’ Evie croaked.

  ‘I wonder if we should call the doctor now—’

  ‘I just want to sleep, Mummy, ’ Evie said fretfully. ‘Who are these people?’

  Sitting up, she looked over at Jerry. And as he got a good look at her face, he recoiled with an audible gasp.

  ‘Jeez, is she OK?’ he exclaimed. ‘She looks terrible!’

  ‘We think it’s an allergic reaction, Detective, ’ Suzanne explained, managing successfully to keep the triumph out of her voice. ‘Lola has always been sensitive. And you can imagine, with what she’s been going through at the moment—’

  ‘Um, sure. Yeah. Tricky time, ’ he mumbled, still staring at Evie’s face.

  India had done wonders. Not just the skin of Evie’s face, but her neck, and the part of her cleavage that could be seen above the neckline of Lola’s silk pyjama top, was a series of pink welts, made from Benefit liquid blusher mixed into skin mattifying cream, which had dried into a dull, chalky paste.

  From a distance, it was very effective. But the paste was a little grainy, and India had worried about it beginning to break away round its edges as Evie moved, leaving tell-tale pink crumbs on the sheets. Evie’s instructions had been to sit up once, slowly and carefully, and stay propped up against the pillows until – hopefully – the cops left again, satisfied. For extra effect, India had dabbed dark blue eyeshadow circles under Evie’s eyes to make her look haggard. Staring plaintively at the detective now, Evie read nothing but concern in his eyes: certainly no doubt that she wasn’t Lola Fitzgerald.

  ‘Can I go back to sleep now, Mummy?’ she asked plaintively. ‘I’m so tired!’

  ‘Uh, sure you can, ’ Jerry mumbled, waving a hand at Suzanne, who crossed the room to Evie’s side. ‘Get better soon, Miss Fitzgerald! Sorry to disturb you when you’re not feeling well.’

  Suzanne saw the cops out and then rushed back down the corridor excitedly.

  ‘They’ve gone!’ she said excitedly. ‘It worked!’

  ‘Oh, thank fuck, ’ Evie said, rubbing furiously at her face and neck. ‘This stuff is so itchy, it’s been driving me crazy! Nice job, India, ’ she added. ‘Did you see his face when he caught sight of me?’

  ‘He actually backed away, ’ India said complacently. ‘It was perfect.’

  ‘This won’t hold them for ever, though, ’ Suzanne said, crossing the room and throwing open the curtains again. She stared out, at the first shadows of dusk falling gently over Central Park. ‘He’ll go back and say he saw you in a darkened room, with stuff all over your face. And that’ll make them wonder. Don’t forget, they’ve got an idea Lola has a double, because they suspect she’s travelling on Evie’s passport.’

  ‘How on earth is she going to get back into the country, with them watching the airports?’ India asked.

  ‘Fly to Canada, hire a car and drive down to New York?’ Evie suggested. ‘They don’t check the Canadian border half as much as they should.’

  ‘With her own driving licence and credit cards?’ India said gloomily. ‘They’re probably running checks on the cards – they’ll spot her as soon as she tries to use one.’

  ‘She said she had a plan, ’ Suzanne said quietly, still staring over the darkening park. ‘I just hope to God it works . . .’

  Apart from a week or so when the variations in the dates of summer time mean that the United States and Continental Europe aren’t evenly synchronised, the European mainland is always six hours later than the east coast of America. So, at six-thirty in Manhattan, as her mother stared into Central Park and prayed for her safety, Lola Fitzgerald was sitting in a first-class seat on the night train from Rome to Milan, at twelve-thirty a.m., doing her best to get some sleep.

  Everything depended on this final gamble. If they arrested her on her return to the US, Evie would be implicated too. No one would believe that Lola had somehow managed to steal Evie’s passport. Evie, as well as Lola, would be arrested. And if Lola protested that she had only jumped bail and gone to Italy to track down Joe Scutellaro and make him tell the truth – well, not only would the Van der Veers have to pay a cool $5 million for her bail costs, but she would have to admit that she had bribed Scutellaro.

  Right now, the plan was for Scutellaro to break down on the st
and, to admit that Carin Fitzgerald had put so much pressure on him to lie that he had gone along with it at the grand jury hearing, but that now, with Lola herself directly before his eyes, sitting at the defendant’s table, he was unable to keep perjuring himself to frame an innocent woman. It would be plausible, dramatic and, after all, mostly true; the only lie would be why he had changed his story, and George Goldman was confident that no court would be able to trace the payment that Lola had already made to Joe Scutellaro, nor the one that would be made after the successful outcome of her trial.

  ‘Once a case is over, that’s it, ’ George had explained to Lola. ‘The DA’s office is always more strained and has way fewer resources than private attorneys. No way they’ll put their forensic accountants on the job of tracing a payment that happens after a trial. He’s got nothing to worry about.’

  So it was absolutely crucial that she manage to get herself back to New York, up into the apartment at the Plaza, before the police came back and discovered their deception. With all of this on her mind, Lola had been sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the rocking movement of the train was more lulling than she had expected. With her pashmina rolled up to support her neck, her seat tilted back, she went out like a light for five hours straight as the train sped up the backbone of Italy. Florence, Bologna, Modena, all flickered past, their white-on-blue station signs illuminated briefly in the glare of sodium lights before disappearing into the dark Italian night.

  She only awoke because the conductor was walking down the carriage calling: ‘Milano! Milano Centrale!’ so loudly that her eyes snapped open, blinking in the pale morning light, and instinctively she grabbed at her pashmina and the bag which she had wedged behind her back as she slept, to ensure no one could steal it.

  Trying not to breathe in too much diesel from the huge train engines, she made her way to the central part of the station, where the platforms met the concourse and gigantic buffers held each engine at a stop. There she drank an espresso at the bar, checked the timetables, and under an hour later she was jumping down off the local train at the station for Lake Como, dawn breaking overhead in a delicate explosion of pinks and blues and gold. There were still clouds overhead, but in a few hours the sun would have burned away the haze and be gleaming down over the lake.

  There were taxis outside the station, and she hesitated, wondering whether to take one. A woman behind her, who had also got off the local, was doing much the same. She was the classic badly dressed tourist, in a big floral dress with a dropped waist that did nothing for her tall lumpy figure, and Birkenstock sandals worn over socks. The straw hat, pulled low over her face despite the early hour, was the final touch; only tourists ever bought the straw hats that were sold at every Italian market. Italians had no prejudice against exposing their faces to the sun.

  In the distance, Lola could see the lake for which Como was famous, glittering already in the early-morning sun. She had been on the lake before, visiting friends, staying in a suite at the five-star Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio. Always, of course, they had taken speedboats, private launches, to whisk them wherever on the lake they wanted to go, swimming, picnicking, once even to a party at George Clooney’s villa, though the film star had barely shown his face, much to the disappointment of the jeunesse dorée, the golden young people who had been invited to party with him. And though she had always been on a private launch, you couldn’t help noticing the hydrofoils and the ferries that took the common folk back and forth across the lake.

  That’s what I’ll do, she thought. I’ll take a boat to Bellagio. Watch the sun come up.

  So she walked past the taxi rank, crossing the street, in the direction of the lake. It was easy to find her way down to the marina; she bought a ticket and walked down the pier to board the ferry, taking a seat right at the back, in the open air, where the view was already stunning.

  She was pretty much alone, this early in the morning. The woman from the station boarded – Lola couldn’t help noticing her, in that drab frock and wide-brimmed hat. A typical tourist, she fished in her bag for her camera and took some photographs of Como behind them, the beautiful panorama of the town stretching round the little marina. And then she went back inside and sat down in the cabin, leaving Lola the outside deck quite to herself.

  The faint mist still hanging over the lake was like a delicate veil, pulling back slowly, its edges fading and drifting downwards as the gradually strengthening rays of the sun dissolved it away. Lola twisted in her seat to watch the pretty town of Como receding slowly as the ferry puttered away, its pale pink and white buildings, which curved in welcome round the bay, fading in the distance as the ferry picked up speed. The villages on the lake passed, one by one, each a cluster of cream and pink and ochre houses around a white-painted pier. Beautiful white villas, with terraces over the water, and paths leading down to their private jetties, each set in its own grand hillside site, slipped by, most with their turquoise or emerald shutters still drawn, their occupants not yet awake at this hour. A cluster of swans swam beside the ferry as they pulled out of Varenna, circling in its wake. Seagulls cried overhead, swooping and ducking in whirls of activity, and a shoal of ducks gathered at the shore, an old lady standing there, leaning on an umbrella she was using as a walking stick, throwing stale bread to them and shooing away the seagulls that came flying down to claim some of the food.

  By the time they docked at Bellagio, Lola felt as collected and as calm as she had ever been in her whole life. The hour-and-a-half aboard the ferry had been like a meditation, a clearing of all her doubts and fears. She had redone her make-up, and now she surveyed herself in the little mirror of her Guerlain compact, approving her work. She didn’t look like an international fugitive who had arrived in the country less than twenty-four hours ago, been attacked by a group of feral kids, had a long journey practically from one end of Italy to the other, and survived on a few hours of sleep snatched here and there. She looked, instead, like a Marie Laurencin painting: big dark eyes, full pink lips, pale, glowing skin, her blonde hair pulled back in a twist at the nape of her neck, oversized Dior sunglasses propped on the crown of her head, scented with roses from her Stella perfume.

  Lola was the last person off the ferry, but the openly appreciative stares of the captain and crew, the uniformed man waiting for her to walk down the wide gangplank, showed nothing but approval for her appearance. On dry land again, she headed up the main street of Bellagio village towards the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, where she got the doorman to call her a taxi. Above them, a helicopter buzzed noisily, flying over the lake to the hills beyond, like a huge dragonfly, so low she could almost see the markings on its undercarriage.

  ‘Villa Aurora, ’ she said to the driver as he pulled up.

  The doorman jumped to open the door for her, and the driver raised his eyebrows, impressed at her destination. The cab swung round the small turning circle outside the elegant frontage of the Villa Serbelloni, climbing the hill behind the village, describing a few steep curves descending on the far side before taking a narrow, unmarked turn and stopping just a hundred yards later in front of a high metal security gate set in a hedge so thick that it was quite impossible to know what lay beyond. There was no sign, nothing to indicate that this was indeed the Villa Aurora, but certainly all the cab drivers from here to Como knew how to find the entrance to one of the grandest and most expensive private residences on the whole of Lake Como.

  Lola was already climbing out of the car. Heart in her mouth, she walked up to the intercom button set in the wall next to the gate, pressing it. When it buzzed to life, she said clearly:

  ‘It’s Lola Fitzgerald. For Mr van der Veer.’

  Above her head, a security camera swivelled, angling down, getting a good view of her as she stood there, the fingers of her left hand in her jeans pocket, the index and middle fingers clamped so tightly together she could barely feel them any more.

  There was no answer. No request for her to repeat her na
me. Just a long, long silence, so prolonged that Lola began to fear that they would just make her stand out there while endless time passed, while the sun climbed higher in the blue sky, till she realised that she would never be admitted to Villa Aurora.

  And then, finally, just as she really was giving up hope, the gate mechanism whirred into motion. Her heart surging in excitement, she stepped back, hoping she hadn’t misheard.

  But no, it hadn’t been a mirage. The gates were sliding away from her, opening up.

  She was inside.

  Chapter 34

  ‘Mamma mia, ’ muttered the driver, who knew where Villa Aurora was, but clearly had never seen it before.

  This isn’t even the best part, Lola reflected. This is really only the back of the villa. The front gives onto the lake; these houses were all designed to be approached from the water.

  But even the rear of Villa Aurora was enough to take your breath away. As a hotel, it would have been superb; as a private residence, it was stunningly impressive, a Palladian villa. With its white marble colonnades, its high gracious windows, it was like something out of a fairy tale. The drive was immaculately groomed, the gravel glittering like mica in the sun, bordered by perfectly clipped hedges and miniature formal Italian gardens on each side. In the centre was a turning circle, its grass sleek with daily watering, and a huge marble fountain, in the centre the goddess Pomona, pouring out water into a marble basin as big as a bathtub, surrounded by attendant nymphs.

  The cab stopped in front of the wide marble staircase that led up to the main door, and the driver was already jumping out with alacrity to open the door for her. She tipped him well, for luck.

  A wrought-iron bell-pull hung beside the big carved door, and she tugged on it, hearing an old-fashioned bell clang dully somewhere deep within the villa. Eventually, she heard footsteps approaching, and not in any great hurry. One of the double doors swung open gradually, and beyond it stood Villa Aurora’s housekeeper, a middle-aged woman in a black dress, with nicely groomed hair and very good gold jewellery, staring at Lola with utter and absolute disapproval in her beady dark eyes.