Swindlers (30 page)

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.

“But it wasn’t a lie,” she insisted, “when I
told you I loved you. That was always the truth.”

My resolve began to weaken; all my clarity of
purpose disappeared. I could not trust her, but I could not hate
her, and revenge, if I could have had it, seemed suddenly stale and
stupid and enormously cruel. I began to notice things, small things
I had not noticed at first. Her hair was a different color, or
rather a different, lighter shade, cut much closer than it had been
before. There was something else, something that at first I could
not quite grasp; something that worked even more of a change. Then
it hit me.

“Your eyes! – They’re not the same
color.”

In the middle of the dance floor, less than a
foot apart, I watched in amazement as she tossed her head back and
laughed.

“I was Justine when you first knew me, and
then I was Danielle. And now….”

The color had changed, but her eyes were
still capable of that strange combination of open defiance and
wistful regret, as if she were proud of what she had done but
wishing she could have done – what? Perhaps she did not know,
except that once she had made a change, she could not go back.

“And now,” I said, ready to finish for her.
“Now you’re Gabriella?”

She raised her chin in an attitude of
formality. Her eyes became distant and remote, banishing, as it
seemed forever, anything that had happened between us. Whether she
had really loved me, whether that had been true, it had become,
like everything else, part of a replaceable past.

“Yes, Gabriella – Gabriella Orsini.”

She said it as if she were just getting used
to it, a line in a new part she was learning to play. She seemed to
test the inflection, looking for just the right ring. She moved her
lips a silent, second time, making certain of the effect.

It was so unexpected - I was so stunned by
her easy assumption of a wholly new identity - that it took a
moment before I understood the full significance of what she had
done.

“You’re – married! You married Orsini
already?” I could not conceal my anger, the sense of outrage at
what she had done. If I had had a knife I might have used it;
instead I fixed her with a piercing stare. “That was the reason you
killed him, - the reason you wouldn’t talk about: You were in love
with someone else!”

The couples closest to us on the dance floor
looked to see what the trouble was. Danielle darted a worried
glance at the table where her friends were watching with puzzled
faces. I pulled her closer and held her tight, forcing her to pay
attention.

“You murdered him – Why? – Because Orsini was
not rich enough: you had to have Nelson’s money too!”

“No, that’s not….” She shook her head, afraid
to finish what she had started to say. “You don’t understand; you
don’t understand anything,” she said, throwing me a look that
seemed a warning, though a warning about what I could not have
guessed. “I didn’t lie to you – about what I felt; about you and
me!”

“That’s right!” I replied with an angry,
caustic laugh. “You loved me so much the first thing you did –
after you got your hands on everything St. James ever owned – was
to run off to Europe and marry someone else, the man you had been
seeing for months before you committed murder!”

I looked around, across the dance floor, to
the table where Danielle – Gabriella! – had been dining with a half
dozen well-dressed and obviously well-heeled Europeans. The women
had long noses and too much make-up and affected an air of
indifference; the men had hooded eyes and jaded mouths and the look
of easy tolerance by which money and experience conceal arrogance.
They were exactly the kind of crowd I would have expected to see
her with when she had been married to Nelson St. James. Other than
speaking a different language, they could have been the same people
I had been with the weekend we sailed down the coast of California
on the Blue Zephyr. Change the color of her hair, change the color
of her eyes, change her name, change the name of her husband,
change the place she lived or the yacht she sailed on, it was not
change at all – it was endless repetition, like the constant
itching of an old wound, one that would never heal: the illusion
that life was full of chances and that if only you kept trying, you
would finally have it all.

“How did you know where to find me?” she
asked as the music came to an end. “Never mind; it doesn’t matter.
You shouldn’t have come. You should have left things the way they
were.”

She smiled at me as, along with the others,
we applauded the orchestra, but only because we were being watched.
We walked toward her table, but before we got there, she turned
and, loud enough so that her friends could hear, told me how glad
she was that I was here, in Palermo, and how anxious she knew her
husband, “Niccolo,” would be to see me.

“Tomorrow, then, at lunch,” she added, as she
extended her hand and wished me a formal, and quite final,
good-night.

CHAPTER
Nineteen

The motor launch was waiting at the bottom of
the seaside steps behind the Villa Igeia. Under a broiling mid-day
sun, the far horizon lost in a choking haze, the sea had become a
smooth metallic mirror. The light was unendurable; the air heavy,
still, and ominous. There were boats all around, the marina full of
them, but there was no movement anywhere. They might have all been
abandoned, their owners fled to safer places, afraid the sea itself
might catch on fire, for all the life you could see in them. It was
silent, quiet as death, the only sound the muffled echo of the
motor as the launch cut through the glass water, heading straight
for the blinding black hull of the Midnight Sun.

I put on dark glasses and leaned back in the
leather seat, remembering the last launch I had seen, the one that
had taken Danielle and her husband from the Blue Zephyr to Santa
Barbara the morning they left on their way to New York. I could
still see her, the moment she turned around to take one last look,
and I could still feel the hope, the sense of excitement, at the
thought that she might be trying to catch one last glimpse of me. I
remembered everything that happened that weekend, and nothing so
much as how the meaning of everything had changed. What had seemed
a harmless flirtation had been in reality the beginning of a
heartless, lethal seduction. Or had it? Had I been invited along
because Nelson St. James thought he might soon need a lawyer, or
because Danielle had already decided she was going to kill him and
might need me to defend her? Had I been invited because Danielle
wanted to show me what I had missed seeing years earlier in
Justine, a final end to a schoolgirl fantasy; and then, only later,
after she had done what she did, came to me because, having known
me all those years before, she thought she could trust me? The
questions were endless, and even if she had wanted to tell the
truth, I was not sure Danielle could have done much more than guess
at the answers. There may not have been a reason for anything that
happened. There frequently is not one, when all we are doing is
reacting to events. It is only afterward, when it is all over, that
it seems to make sense.

A steward in a white jacket and Bermuda
shorts was waiting for me when I climbed up a three step ladder
from the motor launch to the deck of the Midnight Sun. There was no
word of greeting; nothing but a dumb, acquiescent look, as of one
who knows his narrow function and not much else besides. For all
the chattering he must have done with members of his own race and
language, he remained silent and inscrutable as he led me up a
flight of stairs to the upper deck where, under a dark blue canopy,
a table had been set for lunch. There were, oddly enough, only two
chairs.