Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  Something snapped inside. I had lived like some cloistered monk, trying to get better at what I did, and then Danielle had come and shown me something closer to perfection than anything I had imagined, the beauty I had seen not just on her face, but in her eyes when we lay together a breath apart and whispered to each other.

  Folding my hands together I lowered my head, blind to everything except the memory of what we had done the night before, when we made love and then made love again. That at least had been no deception, that look I had seen in her eyes, when I was deep inside her and she did not want it to stop. No deception? She had no need to disguise a feeling that would not last! If I had learned anything it was that the only thing constant about Danielle was her incessant need to change. That tender, bittersweet request, that echo of a long farewell, that promise she made me give her to remember, whatever happened, that though she had never been in love with anyone, she was in love with me. In love with me! She had played me like the fool I was, made me her all too willing accomplice in what the world now thought the perfect murder. I did not know what I was going to do, only that I had to do something. I could not let it end like this. It hurt too much for that; because despite everything she had done, I was still in love with her. I hated her for that, hated that she had that kind of hold on me, hated that I could not shake free. There is a reason why we only kill the ones we love.

  For the next few weeks I went through all the hollow motions of my life. With a kind of manic energy I prepared for the next trial, and, according to Philip Conrad, who was again the court reporter, seemed to take an even greater pleasure in the give and take of the courtroom. I ignored everything but what I was doing. Tommy Lane called several times, but even though the messages he left said it was important, I told myself I would do it later and did not call him back. I had gone into hiding, from the world and from myself. The immediate moment occupied all my attention, and neither the past nor the future was allowed to intrude. I suppose that is what they mean when they say that work is the best therapy. There was certainly no time for idle, harmful thought, no time for old memories, in the middle of a jury trial in which the stakes were high and the evidence close. I lived on euphoria, the inner thrill that comes with the consciousness of doing something well, and doing it with all your powers. Instead of dreading the long, sleepless nights with my mind racing through all the possible things that might happen the next day in court, I started looking forward to all the vain imaginings, the invented spectacles of what might happen next in court. Some might think it private madness, but it gave me the only relief I knew from thoughts of Danielle and the awful, aching loneliness that kept tearing at my heart. The trial kept me going, and with every passing day drove what had happened farther back into the past. But, finally, the trial was over, and though there would soon be other cases and other trials, I knew I had to find out what had happened.

  I had heard nothing from Danielle after the morning she left San Francisco and walked out of my life. She had not written; she had not called. I assumed that she had gone back to New York and, as Rufus Wiley had told me, made the arrangements that gave her control over everything Nelson St. James had left to their son. But what she had done after that, where she might have gone, unless it was to visit her son in Europe, I did not know and had no way even to guess. I would not have known how to find her, or, when I thought about it, what I would do if I did.

  I did not know what I was going to do, and then, late one afternoon, a few days after that second trial was over, Tommy Lane called and for a brief moment I forgot about everything except how much he could make me laugh.

  “Jesus Christ!” he cried; “I call, and you don’t answer; I call again, and you don’t call back.” He was laughing hard, a piercing, high pitched cackle. “Jesus, I sound like some woman who let herself get laid on the first date: ‘You don’t write, you don’t call,’” he mimicked in a sing-song voice, the start of a manic dialogue in which he played not only both parts but the audience as well. “‘I would have called, but I never got your number – or your name!’ Oh, Christ, listen to me: I’m down here all alone and as soon as I have someone to talk to I can’t remember why I called. How are you? - Everything okay? I tried to reach you soon as I heard the verdict; tried to reach you before that, as soon as I found out….”

  The boyish enthusiasm had left his voice. Whatever he had to tell me, it was serious, and even disturbing.

  “What is it? What did you find out?”

  “What she’s been up to – your client, Danielle St. James. I started asking around, some of the people I got to know when I was investigating her husband. She’s been seeing someone. It’s not clear when it started, but at least six months before she killed St. James. Yeah, I know,” he added quickly; “you got her off. I’m glad you won, but only because it’s you; because she did it, murdered him out there on that yacht of his, and we both know it. I don’t know why she did it – this guy she’s seeing isn’t exactly poor!”

  “Who is he?” I asked, as a cold shiver ran up my spine.

  “An Italian, a Greek – I’m not sure. I don’t even know his name. One of those shadowy types; lives in different places; supposed to come from some old family; lots of money, almost never seen in public. People here with money want everyone to know it; over there they don’t want anyone to even know who they are. He has a yacht – like St. James – but he doesn’t go very far with it, just around the Mediterranean. That’s where they are now.”

  “Where?” I asked. “Where exactly?”

  CHAPTER Eighteen

  I watched out the window as the black Mercedes raced through the dark shadows of a tunnel and then followed the highway that ran close to the sea. Mount Pellegrino, rising straight up like Gibraltar, loomed in the distance, guarding the coastline and the narrow, fertile valley that twisted inland from the shore. I had not been able to sleep at all on the long plane ride from San Francisco to Paris and then from Paris to here. Perhaps that was the reason why my mind began to wander back to things I had learned in college and, or so I had thought, forgotten about as soon as I left. I began to imagine what Sicily must have looked like, a three-sided island a mile from Italy and in the middle of the sea, to the long line of invaders who had come to conquer and, having conquered, stayed. It had been the constant, unchanging motive for all the violence and all the wars, the forced impositions, the revolutions, the new religions, all the changes brought first by the Greeks and then the Romans, then the Arabs and the Normans: the haunting sheer beauty of the place. Like the face of a gorgeous woman, the face of a Helen, or the face of a Danielle, it had driven men out of their senses and made them crazy with ambition.

  The driver gestured toward a small concrete monument on the side of the road.

  “This is where Falcone was killed, where the Mafia blew up his car. That’s when everything started to change, after they killed the judge; that’s when everyone had had enough.” A cap pulled low over his eyes, the driver glanced in the rearview mirror. “Falcone,” he repeated with respect. “He had no fear. They killed him – But you know what? – They couldn’t kill his example.”

  We drove in silence for a few minutes before he again glanced in the mirror.

  “You’re American – yes? Have you been here before?”

  “No, my first trip.”

  “Business, or vacation?”

  “Neither one, really; I’m just here,” I said, staring out the window, wondering now why I had come.

  We reached the outskirts of Palermo and the driver turned off the highway and started down a city street jammed with cars. Honking the horn, swearing under his breath, he inched along until, twenty minutes and a few miles later we reached the open gates of the hotel.

  “The best we’ve got,” said the driver with pride. “You heard about it in America? Someone recommended it?” he asked, as pulled to a stop at the bottom of the front steps. I paid him and took my bag.

  “There’s a marina just around the oth
er side, isn’t there?” I asked him. “Some people I know keep a boat there.”

  The Hotel Villa Igeia had the look of a Moorish castle, with sand colored walls and a flat, crenellated roof. It had been built, as I later learned, as a seaside villa for the only daughter of an Italian nobleman, a private sanatorium in which, it was hoped, the ocean air and quite surroundings would remedy the chronic ill-health which all the science of some of Europe’s most famous physicians had been unable to cure. Whether her health improved, or she died an early death from an undiagnosed disease, remained hidden behind a veil of obscurity, subject, like much of Sicilian history, to interpretation and doubt.

  Sometime near the end of the 19th century, the villa was turned into a hotel and quickly became a favorite gathering place for European royalty. A century later their photographs, as large as life-size paintings, decorated at discreet intervals the long and elegant corridors that ran the length and breadth of the hotel. Kings and queens of countries still famous, kings and queens of countries that no longer exist, came here, to the Hotel Villa Igeia, to take the sun in the warmth of a Sicilian spring or winter, oblivious, or so it seemed from the world-weary look caught on their faces, to how near they were to Armageddon, the Great War, the first world war, that would sweep many of them off their thrones, and in the case of some of them, like the Russian Czar, into their graves.

  It seemed to me, as I glanced at their photographs on the way to my fourth floor room, that even though they could not know that war was coming, they had a sense that they were all living in a vanishing age, that the world was changing and there was nothing they could do about it, that no one could. The forces at work, the machinery of modern life, had gotten too big, too powerful, for that. Or perhaps I was only seeing in their faces what I myself had started to feel: that I was caught in a downward spiral, playing a part written by someone else that I did not yet quite understand.

  His back bent with age, the porter opened the curtains and pushed the blue wooden shutters back inside the window casement.

  “One of our finest rooms,” he said, gesturing toward the palm lined gardens below and to the marina just beyond. A yacht, the size of the Blue Zephyr, and close enough to be its twin, but painted black instead of white, lay anchored a couple hundred meters outside the breakwater of the small harbor. There was nothing else even half its length.

  “The Midnight Sun,” explained the porter. “The owner keeps a suite here.”

  I gave him a tip, the same as I would have given in an American hotel. It was larger than the Sicilian custom and his aging eyes lit up with friendly gratitude.

  “Keeps a suite here – you mean all the time, whether he is here or not?”

  “Yes, of course; all the time. Señor Orsini is -”

  “Orsini – that’s the name of the owner?”

  I gazed out the window at the Midnight Sun, shining long and sleek and black as night. Several people, members of the crew probably, were moving about on deck. I glanced over my shoulder.

  “There’s a woman with him – a young woman, quite beautiful?”

  A look of quiet admiration and subdued enthusiasm for a woman impossible not to notice flickered at the wrinkled corners of the old man’s sad and gentle mouth.

  “Señor Orsini is seldom without her.”

  The porter finished showing me the room and then, alone, I tossed my jacket over a chair and kicked off my shoes. Leaning against the deep stucco casement I adjusted the focus on the small pair of binoculars I had brought with me until I could see quite clearly anyone who ventured out on the deck of the yacht. From time to time I put the glasses down and peered into the courtyard below. The tables had begun to fill up with men and women who had decided to have a drink outdoors and enjoy the weather. In the soft echo of Italian voices, I felt a comfortable stranger, come to a place I did not know, surrounded by a language I did not speak, but still somehow drawn to it, as if the scented Sicilian air itself carried the timeless promise of betrayal and revenge.

  I kept looking through the glasses, but I did not see Danielle. If she was on board, she was staying below. I did catch a brief glimpse of her new lover, the private and reclusive Señor Orsini, as he passed along the starboard side. Shirtless, wearing only sandals and tan shorts, he had jet black hair and a black mustache. He was about my age, or perhaps a few years older, as near as I could tell. His skin was burned the deep, rich color of mahogany, and he carried himself in the way of someone who lived his life, at least his daytime life, outdoors. Had he just come from Danielle – was he going there now, to the cabin they shared? She was there, all right; I was sure of it. The Midnight Sun was now the only home she had.

  The apartment in New York, the house in the Hampton; all the places they had – all the places Nelson St. James had owned – had been sold. Danielle, Nelson’s widow, the woman who had murdered him and gotten away with it, the woman who had committed, so they said, the perfect crime, had taken all the proceeds, along with all the other wealth her husband had accumulated during his long career as a financial genius and a brilliant swindler and left the country. According to the rumor circulating among some of her former friends in New York, she had gone to Europe to be closer to her son; gone to Europe to get away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi and the lying tongues of tabloid journalists who refused to believe that her husband’s death had been a suicide. Gone to Europe, according to another rumor circulating just below the surface of the first, to be with the man she really loved, a European of mysterious origin who could offer her protection and seclusion from the rabid scandalmongers who would not leave her in peace. No one knew exactly where she was, or precisely whom she was with; only that she was gone and would almost certainly never be back; gone, and for that reason, sure to be forgotten, a name no one would remember once her face was no longer seen on television.

  Forgotten by everyone but me. I lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling while I waited for the time to pass. More tired than I thought, I closed my eyes, remembering, or trying to remember, why I had come. To see her, see her one last time; to tell her that I knew what she had done; to see what she would say: whether she would try to explain it all away, invent another set of lies, or for once tell the truth and, with that, let me make a final break, walk away with no more doubts about whether there might have been something I could have done, something that would have made her stay. It was hopeless, pathetic, a search for reasons where none existed. Had it been anyone else instead of me, I would have called it madness and been absolutely certain that with that there was an end to explanation, because that fact alone explained everything. I would have been wrong, of course: madness is just the beginning of what there is to know.

  I woke with a start in almost perfect darkness. I jumped off the bed and went to the window. The Midnight Sun was still there, a dark silhouette against the eastern sky, broken by the running lights along the level of the deck. I checked my watch. It was nearly nine o’clock. If Danielle and Orsini were not have dinner on the yacht, they might be in the dining room downstairs.

  Showered and shaved, wearing a dark suit and tie, I rode the elevator to the ground floor. The head waiter, in white tie and tails, welcomed me with easy formality. The dining room, which doubled as the ballroom, was bathed in the brilliant golden light of crystal chandeliers. On a hardwood floor, polished to a gleaming iridescence, several couples moved to the slow rhythms of a small orchestra. A second waiter, on orders from the first, showed me to a table next to the windows that looked onto the palm lined courtyard and, beyond it, the moonlit sea. I ordered a glass of wine and then, moving methodically from one table to the next, I began to look around the crowded, palatial room. I did not see Danielle. The music stopped and the floor cleared and suddenly I found her, Danielle, sitting with a half dozen other people. She did not see me coming until I was standing right in front of her.

  And even then she did not seem to know me. I could not believe it; of all the things I had expected, imagined might
happen, the possibility that she would not recognize me had never entered my mind. But there it was: a blank look of incomprehension as she stared at a perfect stranger who for some reason seemed to know her. Then, suddenly, she knew. She jumped to her feet, her eyes wide with wonder and something close to fear.

  “What is it, Gabriella?” asked someone at her table.

  Gabriella? I looked to see who said it, and realized that the man I had seen earlier on the deck of the Midnight Sun, the man called Orsini, was not there. Danielle quickly recovered her composure. The color came back to her face and the quiet confidence to her eyes, though the smile that ran across her mouth still seemed brittle and forced.

  “This is an old friend of mine,” she said, as her gaze remained fixed on me. “Someone I haven’t seen in a very long time.”

  She did not tell the fashionable people with whom she was having dinner my name, much less stay to introduce us. Instead, she came around the table and took me by the hand, as if the reason I had come over was to ask her to dance.

  There was music and muffled noise all around us. My heart was pounding, blood rushed through my veins. The very nearness of her as she followed my lead, the sweet scent of her as I held her again in my arms, brought everything back: the deception, the betrayal, but more than anything, how much I still wanted her, how much I missed what I had in my ignorance once thought I had.

  “Gabriella? Someone called you Gabriella.”

  She did not reply. We kept dancing, swaying to the soft sound of the music, moving with the easy carelessness of lovers who can remember only each other. Holding her close, I forgot why I was there. I knew by heart everything I had wanted to say; I had rehearsed over and over again in my mind. How often had I seen it, the shattered ruins of that perfect, mannequin face, when I told her what I thought of her cunning treachery and criminal duplicity. Finally, I started to speak, to tell her, but my throat went dry and before I could start again on my long practiced invective, she whispered that she knew what I was thinking and that she did not blame me.