by Jill Downie
“Why?”
“Because it makes life simpler.”
There was no disputing that statement, and Sydney had other, pressing questions she wanted to ask.
“Is it a coincidence that you were running past the Héritage Hotel just as a dagger was thrown onto our patio and that, woven into the rug on the floor of your castello, is the representation of violent death by a dagger, or a sword, with a decorated hilt?”
“Coincidence, perhaps — I think your husband is a bit of a dragon himself, no? Planned, perhaps. A warning, maybe.” Giulia was taking eggs out of the fridge as she spoke and, although Sydney could not see her face, her voice was calm and unconcerned. “I often run on the cliffs in that area, and many people know that. Your hotel is only about two or three miles from here to the east of us, around the point, and there are cliff paths all the way. I am — easily noticeable.”
“That’s true. So if it wasn’t you, Giulia, then who?”
With her back to Sydney, Giulia shrugged her powerful shoulders. “Someone is saying something — what they are saying I don’t know. But take care, Sydney, because whoever they are, they are killing anyone who stands in their way — or gets in their way.”
“Gets in the way of what?’
“Who knows? That, as you Americans say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
Even the sweet numbness brought on by the wine had not removed the image of Toni Albarosa, the haft of the dagger protruding from his chest. Sydney shuddered. “Let’s change the subject. What are you cooking? It smells delicious.”
“Frittata, this one with some carciofi — artichoke hearts. Something simple. It is how I live here.” Giulia’s smile was back, her mood sunny again.
“You are from Florence?”
“Yes. You know the city?”
“Not very well. I find it — well, gloomy, almost scary, in some way.”
“I can understand. A city of men, Firenze bizarra — Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi — men who had little time for women. It’s a city that turns its back on the stranger like you who passes in the street. Like mio castello, it hides pretty loggias, hidden courtyards, secret gardens behind ugly grey walls.”
It was in Giulia Vannoni’s grey Martello tower, on an island off the coast of France, sitting at a marble-topped table eating frittata and drinking Aperol, the honey-coloured aperitif of Florence, that Sydney Tremaine began to believe once more in happiness — as bizarre and unlikely a time and place as any, in which to believe in such a thing again.
“Come on now, Sydney!” Giulia sprang to her feet. “We go out on the town.”
“Is that possible?”
“Of course! You don’t know this place any better than you know Florence, do you?”
“But I think I should be getting back to the hotel.”
“The night has hardly begun, cara. Why not — how do you say it? — get hung for a sheep as lamb, no?”
“Oh, why not!”
Light-headed with wine and good companionship. Sydney threw caution out the Martello tower window. Go on, she thought, let Gil feel what I myself have felt, so many times.
“I am hardly dressed to go out on the town.”
“Here, anything goes. But I’ll lend you something that is more fun. You won’t be able to use my pants with that ballerina hip span of yours, but — let’s see.”
Giulia started up the circular staircase with her easy, powerful stride, and Sydney followed her. The staircase opened directly into a bedroom, as different as it could be from the lower level. The wider windows let in more natural light from outside, but that was not the only difference. The decor here was spare to the point of sterility, with a simply designed bed in a beechwood frame, a pristine white bedcover, a matching bedside table, chair, and dresser with the same clean lines. There were curved, sliding doors set into the wall, and a walled-off section of another wall presumably concealed a bathroom of some sort.
“This floor,” said Giulia, “was added by the Nazis when they occupied the island — I think there is one other tower like this. I had the floor strengthened, and the walls covered with the wood panels you see, more for warmth than for any other reason.”
“It’s so different from downstairs.” said Sydney.
“I sleep better in monastic surroundings,” Giulia replied, without a glimmer of humour in her voice or on her face. “In that city of mine you do not understand, it took until the fourteenth century for women to be allowed to read — unless they were nuns.” Before Sydney could think of an appropriate response, Giulia went over to the sliding doors and pulled them open.
The contrast with the spare, colourless room was startling. Scarlets, silver, golds, echoes of the riches below dazzled Sydney’s eyes, cooled by the monochromes around her.
“I love clothes,” said Giulia. “I love Versace, Gucci. Sexy, dangerous. My leather jacket is Gucci and so are these. I’ll wear them tonight.” She pulled out a pair of jeans that glittered with dozens of tiny beaded squares, with fringes of silk scattered over the blue denim. “Long ago, there was a wise woman whose home was in the portico of Santissima Annunziata — a street woman, who sewed pretty patches on her clothes. I think of her surviving con eleganza when I wear these.”
“So Italian,” said Sydney, “and yet, didn’t an American once design for Gucci?”
“E vero. Such a small world — that can make things so dangerous.”
Giulia Vannoni retreated for a moment into a mood that appeared to have come out of nowhere. Her warning came back to Sydney. Someone is saying something — what they are saying, I don’t know.
She knows, she thought. Or she knows far more than she is telling me.
“Try this.” Giulia held out a slippery satin shirt in a luminous apple green. “This is Gucci also. It feels wonderful on the skin and is perfect with your colouring.” She pointed to the cubicle. “You can use my little bathroom, if you wish. And here —” From the dresser she pulled a pair of black spandex tights. “These’ll fit. Roll up the legs and your mules will go perfectly.”
The cubicle contained an updated version of a hip bath, a toilet, a small mirror, and a tiny hand basin. As she started to change into her new clothes, Sydney heard Giulia going down the iron staircase. By the time she came back into the bedroom, Giulia was waiting for her, wearing a blue and grey striped bustier with the bespangled jeans.
“Meravigliosa!”
“Grazie — you, too.”
As they returned to the floor below, Sydney’s attention was caught by a heraldic device she had not noticed before, hanging high up on the wall near the stairs in an area shielded from the brilliant light of the chandelier. It was a shield, divided into quarters, each with its own device. In the bottom right-hand quarter was a hand, the wrist encased in chain mail, holding a dagger — a dagger with an elaborately decorated hasp. Sydney stopped in her tracks.
“Giulia —”
Giulia Vannoni looked back up from below. Her glance followed Sydney’s eyes.
“You have a dagger very like the one that killed Toni on your family coat of arms — I presume that’s what this is.”
“Yes. The shield is on every bottle of olive oil we sell.”
“So, Giulia —” Sydney sat down on one of the iron steps. “— what’s going on? Is this some extremist group? Is it the Mafia? Is this an attack on your family and, if so, how does my husband fit into this?”
Giulia held out her hand. “Come,” she said. “I have something to give you.”
She pulled Sydney to her feet, then went over to a small desk near the kitchen area, took a key from the small purse she wore slung around her body, unlocked one of the drawers, and took out another key.
“Here,” she said, holding it out toward Sydney. This unlocks the door to my castello — and the gate. You don’t have a purse, but put it on that chain you have around your neck, and wear it under your shirt. If you ever need to, come here.”
“But why? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know the answer to your questions.” Briskly, Giulia unfastened the chain around Sydney’s neck. “Yes, it goes over the clasp. Good.”
“You said, come here. But where is here?”
“You take a taxi, and you ask to be driven to the tower on Icart Point. This tower is the farthest to the east, one of the few where the cliffs start to climb — he’ll know. And one other thing I will show you.”
Giulia took Sydney by the hand and led her toward the statue of the girl. She reached behind it and the black wall opened.
“Not magic,” said Giulia, laughing at Sydney’s startled face. “It’s a door, a second exit from this place. It leads to what was once a gun emplacement, connected to the tower by a tunnel. I’ll show you when we go out, but we won’t go down it now. We are not dressed for guerilla warfare.”
Outside, Giulia led the way around the curving wall of the tower and stopped.
“See?”
She pointed toward a flat metallic disc about three feet in circumference, set in concrete, that gleamed dully among the plants and grasses. “That can only be opened from the inside. It covers a circular dug-out area where they had a gun — the edge is serrated, very strong, so it was possible to close it off. They made it out of the turret ring of a French tank. But you have to be careful here, because all is not as it seems. Look.”
Giulia picked up a stone and threw it. The stone disappeared.
“Trenches. Overgrown trenches.”
“Esattamente. The stone walls are covered with flowers and plants, almost two feet of them in places.”
Sydney walked forward. Close up, it was comparatively easy to see the opening of the trench nearest to her, in spite of about two feet of ivy, ferns, and a small plant that looked like a miniature cream-coloured lupin. A cultivated rose from the garden of the original house on the property had gone wild, covering the native growth with deep pink double petals, now past their prime. A flash of movement overhead made her look up to see a wraithlike white bird flying silently overhead, its long legs trailing behind its body.
“Heron,” said Giulia. “You don’t see them too often. Like a ghost bird, no?”
A line of poetry that Gil once quoted to her floated into Sydney’s mind. The sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. His beautiful voice that could caress as well as castigate. She’d forgotten she had been wooed by more than the money. She had loved him once. Hadn’t she?
“But now, we can forget about all this.”
“Where are we going?” Sydney asked.
“You like jazz? That’s where we go — and to give you another surprise, I think. Avanti!”
It smelled right. It smelled like the boîtes on the Left Bank she had loved when she danced with the Paris Opera Ballet, the bistros and clubs of Milan when she guested at La Scala, a blend of smoke from Gitanes and Camel cigarettes, the vinous bouquet of wine and the dark golden aroma of cognac and whisky, the faint but sharp undertone of humanity: a tinge of sweat, threads of perfume. A gust of nostalgia for her lost dancing days engulfed Sydney as she and Giulia Vannoni went down the steps beneath an illuminated sign that read “Le Grand Saracen.” Drifting up from below came the sound of music — bass, drums, but mostly piano. The tune was a standard: Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.”
The room they entered was dimly lit, with a cavelike quality suggesting both a return to the womb and something faintly sinister. There was nothing remarkable about the decor, which mostly consisted of a variety of posters from art exhibitions, jazz concerts, and stage shows against dark walls. As they entered, the music ceased, and there was a smattering of applause. The place looked full.
“Well, look who’s here! Giulia Vannoni, la bella donna senza pietà!”
The speaker was a dark-haired woman about the same height as Giulia, but of a different build, slender to the point of almost emaciation. She was dressed in the de rigeur black of the avant-garde, with a pair of huge earrings not unlike the chandelier in Giulia’s castello, kohl-rimmed eyes and a slash of carmine on her long, thin mouth.
“Saluto, Deb. Meet Sydney.”
The two women shook hands, the dark-haired woman frankly appraising Giulia’s companion.
“Oh, yes, now I’ve got it — you’re the wife of —”
“I’m Sydney Tremaine.”
“Okay.” The dark-haired woman smiled, as if she understood the subtext. “I’m Deborah Duchemin. Welcome to the Grand Saracen. Let’s find you a table before they start playing again. Giulia drinks red wine — and you?”
“The same.”
Sydney watched Deborah Duchemin leave. “Why did she call you the pitiless beautiful woman?”
“Oh.” Giulia pulled off her heavy jacket, and around them, heads turned.
The clientele was a mix of very young men and women — a tube top, singlet, and jeans crowd — and a fair number of middle-aged couples still clinging in garments and ponytails to their golden hippie age. A couple of men in business suits seemed to have wandered in after a long day at the office. There were other women on their own or in groups, particularly among the younger set, but no one greeted Giulia, or even acknowledged her presence. She may have been recognized, but she clearly was not a local.
“She wants us to be — what do you Americans say? — an item.”
“And you’re not interested?”
“Of course. But Deb is a complicated woman — capricciosa. She is not for me.”
As Sydney turned round to put the art director’s jacket over the back of her chair, she glanced toward the little platform on which the jazz group was reassembling. There was a bass player, percussionist, pianist. Through the mists of cigarette smoke the pianist looked vaguely familiar.
“Is that — ? No, it can’t be. Can it?”
“It can. That’s the surprise. I recognized him when I saw him this morning. The group is called Les Fénions — which is, so I’m told, island French for do-nothings. La dolce far niente, no? Sometimes they have a sax player. The policeman plays piano. Interesting, don’t you think? The same man and yet one must be so different from the other.”
Sydney looked again. The policeman was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. She could see a jacket and tie hanging over his chair, and she wondered if he’d come there straight from work. Bent over the keys, a slight smile on his lips, he seemed absorbed in what he was doing as if he were on his own. On a desert island. At this moment, the drums and bass were listening to him as he set up the melody of another Cole Porter standard, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” with a pure simple sound that gradually began to swing as the other players took up the harmony and rhythm. As the notes became more intricate, the piano player’s body moved slightly, his hands flying over the keys swiftly and surely, free and yet in control. The buzz of conversation quietened.
When the piece came to an end, the pianist turned to acknowledge the applause with the other players. For a moment he looked almost startled. Then he grinned and reached up for a glass that stood on top of the piano.
“Bello, no?” said Giulia.
“It’s an interesting face,” agreed Sydney. “Lean, and just a tad mean. The camera would love him, I think.”
“Deb tells me he has an interest in the club, and the restaurant upstairs. His father owned them.”
“I heard him speaking Italian this morning.”
“His father was Italian, his mother a Guernsey woman. She rescued him or something, I don’t know. Something to do with the war.”
“It sounds romantic,” said Sydney. The piano player looked up from his keyboard, and at that moment he saw her.
“I think he’s seen me,” she said. “And he’s looking more than a tad mean right now. He’s coming over.”
Detective Inspector Moretti was heading across the room, briefly sidetracked from time to time by friends and well-wishers at intervening tables.
“Ms. Vannoni — Mrs. Ensor —” Moretti turned to Sydney.
&
nbsp; “Tremaine,” said Sydney. “Sydney Tremaine.”
“Ms. Tremaine,” said the piano player. Her correction seemed to have annoyed him further. “Your husband has reported you as missing.”
“I’m off-duty, Detective Inspector. Aren’t you? I’m Ms. Tremaine when I’m off-duty, so do I call you Detective Inspector when you’re supposedly off-duty?” I’m already slightly drunk, Sydney thought.
“It doesn’t matter to me. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you. Now I do. He is missing me, but I am not missing him. You can call off the search parties, Detective Inspector Moretti.”
Moretti said nothing more. As he turned to leave, Giulia put a hand on his arm.
“Do you take requests?”
“It depends on the request,” he answered.
“‘Mack the Knife,’” suggested Giulia Vannoni.
Her smile challenged him.
He did not respond, but for a moment Sydney thought the piano player would become the policeman, as his expression moved from annoyed to thunderous. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but instead he shrugged off her hand that still held his sleeve, turned away, and went back to the tiny stage. She watched as he said something to the other musicians, sat down at the piano, and started to play.
Why can’t you behave — oh why can’t you behave?
Opposite her, Giulia started to laugh.
“The policeman has a sense of humour. Is there a message for us, do you think?”
“Perhaps he thinks the message was for him. Or maybe it’s just Cole Porter night,” said Sydney.
But Giulia’s flippant request disconcerted her. Was there a message for her, let alone for the policeman-piano-player? Was she being a complete fool? Possibly. In her experience, the only way to blind yourself to sense and sensibility was to get drunk, and it seemed she was not yet drunk enough. She reached across the table for the bottle of wine.
* * *
Moretti saw them laughing as they left, arm in arm, and his anger returned. The clear night sky outside the club, the sound of halyards clinking against the masts of the hundreds of boats in the Albert and Victoria marinas, the clean bite of the air usually enhanced the tranquility of mind he found in the smoke-filled, half-lit womb of the jazz club. This time he had taken his preferred escape route, only to find reality there ahead of him.
