Impulse (30 page)

Dominick merely nodded to Coco and followed Merkel from the room. He allowed Merkel to remain as he sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. “Dominick here, Marcus. Tell me what happened.”

He listened, saying nothing, for a good five minutes. Finally, “I’m glad you survived it. There’s nothing to be done about the rest of it at the moment. Come home. We’ll decide what’s to be done when you get here.”

Dominick fell silent again, listening intently. “You’re right, of course. We’ll go into it when you’ve returned. Oh, by the way, my boy, our Rafaella just had a very close call.”

Even Merkel could hear Marcus shout, “That
brain-defective woman! What did she get herself into this time?”

Dominick chuckled, but Merkel, tuned to his boss’s every expression, his most subtle body language, saw that the chuckle didn’t mean what it was supposed to.

“She had a run-in with a boa constrictor, Marcus. Link was with her, of course, not with her knowledge, and he killed the snake. She is rather upset, as you can imagine.” He paused, listening. “Yes, I’ll keep Link with her. Don’t worry. Come home.”

Dominick gently laid the phone back into its cradle. He said, not looking up, “Bertrand never intended to pay up, and there were no arms. It was all an elaborate setup, a ruse, to kill Marcus and make me look like an ineffectual fool, a buffoon, a weakling. ‘The king is dead, or very nearly dead’—those were Bertrand’s dying words. But at least we have a lead on
Bathsheba
, this group or organization or man or whatever the hell it is.”

Over dinner, Dominick calmly told everyone in general terms what had happened in Marseilles. When he began speaking, he glanced at Rafaella, and she knew that he was assessing the wisdom of speaking so frankly in front of her. To her relief and chagrin, it appeared he decided she could either be trusted or it didn’t matter. It was the latter, she had no doubt, and she imagined he saw her only as a woman who was bright enough to be the recorder of his glorious life, and a woman, any woman, could be controlled. She accepted it; it didn’t matter. Only knowing what had happened to Marcus mattered. She forgot the boa constrictor that had nearly caved in her ribs and clutched her fork so tightly her knuckles showed white. “How did this Jack Bertrand try to kill him, Dominick? Marcus isn’t stupid.”

“He tried to kill him stupidly. He sent over a girl whose responsibility it was to get Marcus into bed. And when Marcus was otherwise occupied, Jack would creep in and cut his throat for him.”

“I take it, then, that Marcus refused to do as expected?”

“Marcus isn’t indiscriminate in whom he takes to bed, nor is he a pedophile. He told me the girl was fifteen years old.”

Dominick looked as if he would say more, then abruptly stopped. He took a chilled shrimp and forked it into his mouth. He chewed slowly. “I would just
add, Rafaella, that this arms deal was all aboveboard. There was an end-user certificate. It’s just that these arms weren’t going to Nigeria as the French believed. They were going to a group of rebels in East Africa, to fight the communist-backed dictator there. Since this group is off-limits, we had to bend the rules a bit to get the arms to the rebels.”

And goats sing opera, Rafaella wanted to say, but kept both her mouth and her expression closed. Dominick continued, saying, “We haven’t yet spoken of my profession. I admit I’m an arms dealer, but I deal openly, Rafaella, despite what you might have read or what you might have heard. I’m not an outlaw; I’m not a criminal; I’m not a man who supplies terrorists with weapons to kill innocent people; I’m not in the black market. Sometimes I am forced to stray into the gray market, but not often. This time was the first in quite a while that I was prepared to bend the rules. I never send arms to our country’s enemies—not to Qaddafi, nor to Saddam, not to North Korea. I have dealt often with the CIA in the past, but unfortunately that can’t be included in our book. An arms dealer would never admit working with your government or he’d be thought a fool or a braggart. He’d be laughed out of the country by his peers.”

“We are out of the country,” Coco said.

“You jest,” Dominick said, but he didn’t smile. “Nor, I might add, would our government be pleased with such an admission.”

“What were you sending to the rebels in East Africa?” Rafaella asked.

Dominick fanned his hands in front of him. “Lord knows they need everything. I’d made a deal for a large shipment of mines, primarily. The mines are very useful to the rebels, given the desert terrain in their country.”

Rafaella didn’t ask which country in East Africa. He’d have to step up his lying, and for some reason
she didn’t want to admit, she didn’t want him to, not so blatantly. She was too worried about Marcus, blast his careless eyes.

“I’ll teach you about the white arms market, Rafaella,” Dominick said. “So few people know anything about it, except the feds, of course.”

“I’d like that,” she said. She’d read a good bit about arms dealing before she’d left the United States. There wasn’t much to be found, as Dominick had just said. As to the black market, even less was known. Many of the major players were recognized, of course, but not much else. And of all the major players, least was known about Dominick Giovanni. She wished she could have spoken to someone in the know at the CIA. That or the U.S. Customs Service.

She sought out Merkel after dinner, drawing him outside on the veranda. “Please tell me more about this
Bathsheba
thing. What does it mean?”

Merkel didn’t know what to say, so he tried backing off. “Look, Rafaella, I can’t talk to you about Mr. Giovanni’s business. He wouldn’t like me talking, and he wouldn’t like you asking. You’ve got to ask him or Marcus.”

She’d ask Marcus. Oddly enough, very suddenly, she was afraid to ask Dominick. “So tell me about this now-deceased Jack Bertrand.”

“You
are
a reporter, aren’t you? Again, ask Mr. Giovanni or Marcus. I’ll just say that he wasn’t a nice man. He was also something of a free-lancer until this thing.” Merkel shrugged. “Ask Marcus,” he said again, gave her a small salute, and went back into the house.

Rafaella was on her way to bed when Coco stopped her in the second-floor hallway. “Are you truly all right, Rafaella?”

“Shaky still, but that’s understandable. I’m okay, Coco.”

Coco paused a moment, then seemed to make up
her mind about something. “Come with me out onto the balcony. It’s private there.”

Rafaella dutifully followed her to the balcony through a wide set of glass French doors at the south end of the hall. The iron railing could scarcely be seen through the tangled mass of bright red and purple bougainvillea. The night was calm, the air perfumed with the scents from the hibiscus, roses, and frangipani. Rafaella took a deep breath, turned, and smiled inquiringly at Coco.

“Just plow forward, Coco. Get it off your chest, whatever it is. My phenomenal bout with the killer boa? Marcus almost getting his throat cut in Marseilles? The book? What?”

“All right. It’s gone too far, Rafaella. Much too far. Someone took the boa from its preserve, brought it down from the middle ridge in a cage, and probably waited to release the snake when you were seen coming.”

Rafaella, still not immune from the experience, felt a tremor of fear race through her. “Yes,” she said, “the cage. It does give me pause, I assure you. But it isn’t a very reliable method of killing somebody, Coco. Who would be sure the stupid snake would decide to come after me? It could have simply napped while a dozen people strolled along that path. Why me? It’s all a very iffy proposition.”

Coco shrugged, but she looked worried, very worried. “Listen, for whatever reason, the boa went after you. If Link hadn’t been close by, you would have been killed, the life literally squeezed out of you. Tell me this. What if the snake hadn’t gotten you, what if that huge monster had just been lying on the path in front of you or dangling from a branch? How would you have felt?”

“Petrified. Scared out of my skin. I probably would have screamed my head off and run all the way to Antigua, all the way to the airport.”

“That’s what I think you should do. Leave, Rafaella. Tomorrow.” Coco paused a moment, drawing her beautifully arched brows together. “We’ve all assumed that the shot on the beach was intended for Marcus. We’ve assumed the helicopter crash was intended for Marcus as well, as a warning. Maybe both things were intended for you, Rafaella. Maybe someone doesn’t want you here.”

Coco had a point, and Rafaella wasn’t indifferent to it. She listened, then said simply, “Why, Coco? I’m just here to write a book, nothing more, nothing less, nothing remotely threatening to anyone. I repeat, who? Why?”

Coco said very slowly, not looking at Rafaella, but staring inland, toward the high middle ridge where the boa had lived, “I’m not an alarmist, not at all. I’ve thought about this a lot, quite a bit, in fact, even before the snake incident today. And I think it’s DeLorio. I think he’s jealous of you and he’s afraid, afraid that his father will come to value you more than he does his only son. He didn’t want to leave before you arrived here, but his father ordered him to Miami. It’s the same thing with Marcus, you know. The other times, both of you were together. This time you happened to be alone. I would have suspected Paula—for obvious reasons. She loathes you and wants nothing more than to see you hurt or off the island for good. But Paula doesn’t seem to me to have the smarts for such planning. I could be wrong, who knows? The bottom line, however, is the same. I think you should just put off writing the biography for a little while. There are other things going on, things that could also harm you.”

“Like
Bathsheba?”

It had grown quite dark, and Rafaella wished she could see Coco’s expression more clearly. Coco wasn’t surprised, because Dominick had mentioned
Bathsheba
at dinner, but she stiffened nonetheless.

“What do you know about
Bathsheba
?”

“Just the name, that’s all Dominick said at dinner.”

“Well, just forget it. It’s not important to you—forget
Bathsheba
and think about all this. I’ll see you in the morning, Rafaella.” She stopped, turned, and said, a smile on her face, “You’re stubborn, but I am very fond of you and I don’t want to see you hurt.”

When Marcus saw Rafaella the following evening at nine o’clock, alone on the east lawn, he was so relieved to actually see that she was still in one piece that he bellowed, “Why the hell can’t you be more careful? What were you doing, hiking up in the middle ridge by yourself, trying to be the macha of the month? However could you attract a boa? Did you open its cage? You drive me crazy, you know that?”

He knew very well, of course, where the boa had been. Rafaella just smiled at him, a very sweet smile that should have put him instantly on red alert. She walked toward him, stopping a half-foot away. “Welcome home, Marcus.”

Without warning, she grabbed his arm, gained the leverage she needed, and sent him flying onto the grass on his back. He just stared at her, arms and legs sprawled. “You know, you’re going to do that to me one too many times and I’ll get you, but good.”

“You and who else?” She gave him a crazed smile.

“Just me.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You want specificity, huh? I think I’ll tie you down and make love to you until you’re silly. That should keep me relatively safe.”

She didn’t say anything to that, just stared down at him, her legs spread, her hands on her hips. She was wearing a wraparound denim skirt and a pale pink blouse.

It was her turn now. He was lying there, safe and fit and quite well, and he’d come close to death, and
she realized how frightened she’d been, and yelled at him, “Just what did you get yourself into in Marseilles? How could that Jack Bertrand possibly have thought that you’d go to bed with a fifteen-year-old girl? You must have given some indication that it would be just fine with you, you jerk. So then he tried to kill you. Weren’t you being at all careful? I told you—several times, in fact—to watch yourself and look wh—”

In the next instant Rafaella was on her back, Marcus straddling her, his knees on either side of her chest. She was winded, but quite unhurt. He quickly grabbed her wrists when he saw the counterattack plan in her eyes, and pinned them over her head.

“Are we even now?”

“How’d you do that? It was faster than you usually are. Have you been practicing? Come on, let me up now—and no, we’re not even.”

“I guess I’ll have to. I see three of Dominick’s men all staring at us, their guns slack, grinning like fools. I would just as soon kiss your face off and make love to you until both our feet get numb, but…”

“Feet get numb? What kind of a pervert are you, anyway?”

He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. “The kind of pervert who doesn’t leave undershorts in the deep end of the swimming pool for just anyone to find.”

She closed her eyes at that remark. She’d forgotten all about her panties. “Oh, dear, no one’s said anything. Do you think they’re still in the pool?”

He ducked his head again and nipped her nose. “You wanna go check it out tonight, late, after everyone’s gone to bed?”

It was Rafaella’s turn, and she executed her move quickly and efficiently, pulling him to his side, rolling the opposite way and onto her feet, smiling down at him.

“How about midnight, Ms. Holland? I really have quite a bit more to say to you.”

She looked down at him, just sprawled there. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him—his mouth in particular, that easy wit of his that flowed from it. She shouldn’t lie to herself. She’d missed all of him like crazy. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll think you’re too easy? That I won’t respect you in the light of dawn?”

“I won’t be easy. You’ll have to pull off your finest tricks to get me going properly. What do you say, Ms. Holland?”

“I do have quite a bit more to say to you too.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll probably come to a bad end. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Devlin—or whatever your name is—I really do want to speak to you in private. About
Bathsheba.
”