The Charmers (27 page)

I lunged at that small stage, took the two steps up in a single leap. Fear gave me a weird strength, an energy I did not know I still possessed. The horror of Verity up there, with the embalmed donkey heads on either side of her hit me, and I knew it was what the Boss intended for her too. He wanted to make his collection complete with the young blonde. He would place her in the center, all three wearing their halos, maybe even the emeralds. It was the way some very rich men paid to have rare paintings, Leonardos or Raphaels, stolen from the walls of museums so they might place them in their own secret “museum,” a special place nobody had access to but themselves. And where they went to gloat alone over their stolen beauty.

I knew that place would be the Boss's bunker, and that Verity was destined to be displayed there, his ultimate trophy, on that wall and I did not know if I could save her. Nor did I know what was going to happen to me. I heard the Boss laughing as I ran toward her.

“Mirabella,” she said, her voice a whisper. I saw that her eyes were dry as though she could shed no tears. I also saw fear in them. I gripped her hand in my gloved one. The sapphire sparkled in the strong light. Between the two of us we were at that moment worth a small fortune in jewels. And we would have given it up, everything, just to be free.

Quite suddenly all the adrenaline that had given me my fake strength drained from me. My knees gave way and I sank to the floor, resting my head on Verity's bare feet. They were so cold I feared the worst, yet I could feel a pulse beating, slowly, steadily.

She said, in a whisper, so soft she barely moved her lips, “Thank you.”

I heard the Boss coming toward us, that solid tread of his, the sheer size of the man, a giant in the world of business, a physical giant in real life. He could crush each one of us with a single blow of his fist, and I was sure he had done that many times in his past.

“Well, well, my girls together. How lovely this is. I'll tell you what I propose we do first, before…” He paused for a moment, laughing softly, as though at a good joke, “Before ‘everything else.' I think we should have tea. I ordered it specially. After that accident with the wine, I think a nice hot cup of tea is what any good English girl, like Verity, would need. Isn't that what Brits always say when in difficulty in wartime with bombs flying all around? ‘Why don't we all have a nice cup of tea?'”

He laughed again at his own joke. I saw him take Verity's hand, very gently in his own large one. Then he turned to me, still on the floor at her feet, and said, “Come, my dear, we shall talk this over together. And then I'll tell you my plans for you.” He freed Verity and helped her out of bed.

And that's how it was, with the three of us seated demurely around a table with a white linen cloth, with silver teapots and jugs and Limoges porcelain cups and plates of cookies and English jam tarts, stirring sugar round and round with silver spoons, afraid to drink that tea for what it might contain, when the door burst open. And Chad and the Colonel and a squad of uniformed cops came running toward us.

“Verity, it's the cavalry,” I said.

 

54

The Boss

The Boss realized his mistake; a classic error. He had left the door unlocked. He did not wait for the cavalry. His own secret exit, hidden behind the paneling that held a Matisse of which he was particularly fond. Electronics fanatic that he was, it opened to the press of a finger, revealing a steep flight of wooden stairs, leading it seemed into nowhere but darkness. He had designed those stairs himself, used them many times for secret getaways, some as trivial as escaping unwanted guests or social obligations. But this getaway was serious and he knew it would be for good.

A touch of another switch revealed a small square room at the foot of the stairs. There was no furniture, only a stack of paintings leaning against the wall. He stopped for a second and looked at them, picked out the Turner, put it under his arm, and walked to the door that opened onto a wooden walkway, leading to a stone jetty and the sea.

His Riva was moored alongside the jetty. He clambered down the iron ladder and jumped into it. The boat rocked, almost sending him into the water, but still he clung onto the painting. He steadied himself, then took up his position behind the wheel, the captain as always, only this time there was no captain's cap trimmed with gold flaunting his position. And there was no one to notice, to admire. The Boss was, finally, alone.

The powerful engines roared at his touch, loud enough certainly to attract attention. He checked his watch. He reckoned he had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before his hunters realized this was the logical place from which he would run.

He was well prepared. A man like him had to be ready for anything. You learned that young and it was a habit that never left you. A suitcase stashed under the backseat contained enough clothing to see him through a week or two. There were even a couple of pairs of the Lobbs. He could not manage without those shoes and saw no reason why he should have to.

When he was about a mile offshore, he stopped the boat and stood looking back at his own house, the Villa Mara, lit as though for a party. He could almost hear those police dogs yelping in excitement, and he could certainly see the torches held by the cops, maybe even by that bastard Chad Prescott. Or even worse, the fuckin' Colonel.

He stood for a long time, looking at his past. It was not easy to give it all up. The prestige, the celebrity status, the acclaim. The women. The power. Everything he had worked for. He hated all the intruders with a force that was almost physical in its energy. It took him only a minute, sixty perfect seconds, to set the battery that would start the timer that would blow his past and everybody involved in it into eternity. There would be nobody left to come searching for him, no Chad, no Colonel, no woman wondering where he was, no walls left holding the Matisses and Picassos. He had the only painting that mattered in the boat with him. The Turner landscape, shrink-wrapped and weatherproofed, exactly, though of course he did not know that, the way it had arrived in Iron Man Matthews's own hands, many years before.

The Riva purred down the coastline, heading for a small cove he knew well and had made his own. He used no lights, not even the starboard and port markers. He saw no other craft, no lights except for those dotted along the shore, marking homes or small coastal communities. When his instruments indicated he was close to his destination, he killed the engines.

The Riva rocked on the swell. The silence was total. In the darkness, the sky seemed to lower itself over him, pressing in a fine mist that immediately coated everything. Steadying himself, he stripped off all his clothing, stood, naked for a moment, then threw the garments into the sea. He watched until they disappeared. His old self had just died. The new self would begin.

Half an hour later, a man, slightly stooped, with too-long gray hair, wearing rimless glasses, a well-worn Panama hat with a brown band around it, an expensive blue short-sleeved shirt, khakis, and a pair of John Lobb loafers, docked at a small fishing jetty. Beyond the jetty was an asphalt airstrip, well-known to drug smugglers flying in under the radar from various points in South America. A large barnlike structure with a corrugated metal roof housed several small but powerful aircraft, many of which were capable of long-haul flights without refueling. Such as the flight to Columbia, where the Boss owned property. Under another name, of course. Another identity.

He grabbed his suitcase and boarded his expensive plane with its cream leather upholstery and its top-of-the-line equipment. He settled into the pilot's seat and checked the briefcase containing his papers: a passport with a foreign name, scattered with stamps from various cities around the world, and a photo of the man he had become. It would not have done to have a brand-new passport, though he did not expect to encounter any immigration officials, not where he was going to land, and flying under the radar as he would. Still, it had become a lifelong habit to be prepared for any eventuality. Any emergency.

He had flown planes since he was twenty years old, been taught by a Russian pilot who flew an ancient propeller plane back and forth to tourist locations in the Crimean resorts. After that, when he'd started on his upward climb, he'd had a professional teach him all over again and afterward he had always chosen to pilot his own aircraft. It had been, he told himself now, facing the long journey ahead, a good decision.

He filed no flight plan, skimming the French coast under the radar, then soaring high above the clouds, away from the commercial jet routes, away from the world that knew him as the Boss.

He was smiling as he left all that behind, though he did still regret not making Mirabella his own woman. Still, there was always time for that. Maybe later. In some new life.

It was then he remembered the painting, the Turner landscape, the cause of all his troubles in the first place. He'd left it in the boat. He'd lusted after that painting, a man in heat for it. And he'd lost everything because of it.

The smile disappeared. And then the plane's engine began to stutter. The plane shook, wiggled its wings from side to side.

The Boss groaned. No problem, he told himself. Nothing I can't take care of. I always can. Can't I?

 

55

Verity

I'm a miracle, or at least that's what Mirabella tells me. I certainly don't feel much like a miracle, certainly nothing as grand as that. What I do feel is alive. If anyone had been intended for the other world, whatever that might be, it was me. I escaped that fate thanks to Chad and the Colonel, who I shall now call “my Colonel,” and of course to my friend Mirabella's determination to save me, and to both Chad and the Colonel's own instincts about “the super man” himself. The Boss. The Colonel said even the police dogs, the German shepherds, bristled and sniffed and growled when out searching for him. A good dog knows a bad guy, my Colonel told me. I knew he was right.

When I was in that terrible room with the donkeys' heads skewered to the wall next to me, the intense light trained on my face, blinding me, too weak to so much as voice a protest or even to scream, I'd thought there was no way out. I'd waited for that burst of strength, the energy surge that would make me leap from my lofty place; waited to find “myself” in all the destruction heaped upon me, but it had taken my friends to save me.

How can I ever thank you, I asked Mirabella later, when it was all over and done with and the Boss was gone.

“Thank me?” she'd said, astonished. “Why, if you had not met me on that Paris-to-Nice train you never would have gone through all this. You never would have suffered…”

She'd burst into tears. My Mirabella. The brave one who never cried, except at weddings, as she told me, once again, when I passed her the tissues. And only then it was because it was not her own.

You can throw all the arrows fate can conjure up at Mirabella and she stands tall and strong and figures the way out, saves you from the certain hell that awaits if she doesn't. Now, that's a person you call a friend.

I'm sitting here, on the terrace of the Villa Romantica, where I never expected to be again, reluctantly tasting Mirabella's latest concoction. A vermouth-cassis she calls it. It's sort of reddish and clinking with ice cubes and tastes I think vaguely of paint remover, but I'm polite and I say thank you and sip obediently. I think maybe she got the proportions wrong, or used the wrong liquor. Ah well, she can't be good at everything. I think I shall tell her in the future to stick with champagne.

I'm not sure I'll ever get over the bizarre events that took place in the Villa Mara. Chad tells me it will leave an emotional scar, and Chad should know because he's a doctor. He's dealt with kids who have lost half their faces; he's put them back together as best he could, and he tells me that after a while they smile again, they talk and laugh and behave just like regular kids. Trauma is internal as well as external. Just look at Mirabella's hands, which finally, she has left bare. No more gloves. No more hiding the scars. But that is her story to tell, not mine.

Mine is very simple. I came here, to the villa, running away from a ruin of a life, not knowing what I wanted, believing I had lost everything that mattered, my husband, my home, my small amount of savings, my very identity. Mirabella took me in hand, she picked me up from the lowly place I had fallen, she saved my life in the car crash, she saved me again and again, ultimately from the Boss. An evil man.

I ask over and over how I could have imagined I was falling in love with him. I remind myself he was good looking, in that dashing, big man, important person, richer-than-thou way. I remembered the thrill of being on the Boss's arm, a woman to be reckoned with. Nobody would dismiss you or turn you away. Now, coming out at the other end of the story, with the truth known to the world, the Boss's reputation gone, his entire secret life exposed, my own story a media scandal that I'm lucky to have survived. I am thankful there are no more TV journalists with cameras, no more celebrity hunters thrusting cell phones in my face. I am anonymous again, and that is exactly how I want it.

Actually, that's not quite true. I'm sitting here, on the Villa Romantica terrace sipping Mirabella's awful concoction, waiting for “exactly” how I want it. Or rather “who” I want. I need to see him striding toward me, his cap, as always, clutched in his hand, his uniform immaculate, the gold stars shining on his epaulettes, his eyes alight with that special gleam that means “love.” Anyone who has seen it knows exactly what I mean. It can light even an ordinary face, and in a man it's irresistible.

I am wearing a simple white cotton skirt that flares out from a narrow waist, tied with a black ribbon, fastened with a neat bow. I never thought I was a “bow” kind of girl but Mirabella informed me that I was. It was she who helped me choose this outfit on a recent shopping trip to Cannes, necessary because I've lost so much weight and am too skinny for my old clothes.