The Eden Inheritance (51 page)

He leaned forward, grinding the cigar butt out in the ashtray and smiting faintly as he contemplated grinding out Guy de Savigny just as ruthlessly and efficiently.

Ingrid was in the salon when Lilli came back downstairs – hovering, Lilli thought, and wondered if Ingrid had guessed that Otto had been talking to her about the matters which were weighing so heavily upon his mind.

‘You were with your father a long time,' she said non-committally, but her eyes were sharp, her expression guarded, and Lilli thought that she was right – Ingrid had known.

‘He's asking for Basil. Do you know where he is?'

‘In the kitchen, I believe. It's all right, I'll tell him.'

She left the room and Lilli heard her calling for Basil. Lilli stood uncertainly, chewing on a fingernail and feeling as if the whole of her body was churning along with her chaotic thoughts and emotions. A moment later Ingrid was back and this time she went straight to the point.

‘Your father has talked to you then.'

‘Yes.' Lilli had thought she could not bring herself to speak of what had passed between them, but quite suddenly, she could no longer bear not to. ‘You knew, I suppose, Ingrid, what he had to tell me?'

Ingrid nodded.

‘I knew, yes, but as I said before, it wasn't my place to say anything. I've been here a comparatively short time and I'm only on the periphery of what goes on. It really has nothing to do with me at all.'

Lilli opened her mouth to speak; closed it again. If it had not been for Ingrid's matter-of-fact confirmation of what her father had told her she would have been tempted even now to put it down to a fiction of a fevered drug-distorted imagination. Madrepora, island paradise, centre of a huge illicit operation. Madrepora, her beloved Madrepora, even more flawed than she had realised and her father a drug-trafficker and international criminal. It hurt – or it would hurt when the numbness began to wear off. But worst of all, at this moment, was the fact that Ingrid had known what she did not about Otto and about Madrepora. Lilli felt the betrayal like a knife thrust in her stomach and wrapped her arms around herself as if by doing so she could somehow ease the pain.

‘I can hardly believe it,' she said. ‘My father mixed up in something like this! It's terrible – terrible!'

Ingrid's face remained impassive.

‘Don't
you
think so?' Lilli flared. ‘How can you be so calm about it, Ingrid?'

‘My dear, it has been going on for a very long time.' Ingrid took a step towards her, extended a comforting hand which Lilli avoided with a quick impatient gesture.

‘That doesn't make it right. I've seen the harm drags can do. I've lived in the States for four years, remember.'

‘We are talking about cocaine here, Lilli, not heroin. You're half South American, you should know better than I that coca has been part of your culture for centuries.'

Lilli tightened her arms around her midriff. It was true, she knew, that the natives of the Andes had chewed the dried leaf since prehistoric times. She knew too that the Incas had regarded the plant as divine, adorning their temples of the sun with solid gold coca leaves, allowing only those with coca in their mouths to approach the altars, promising their followers that if coca was the last thing a man tasted on this earth then his place in heaven was assured. She knew that even today coca was the talisman placed under the cornerstone of new houses, the gift given by Peruvian Indians to the parents of a bride. But knowing made no difference to the instictive revulsion that filled her when she thought of the lives wrecked in the modern world by the curse of drugs. She thought of the young men and women so obsessed by the need for their next fix that nothing else mattered, blank staring eyes, ravaged bodies, suicides during nightmare trips, horrific murders, all manner of drug-related crimes, and shuddered. Her father – her beloved father – was contributing towards all that. Surely he must know, just as she did, the terrible harm he was doing? Her mind circled wildly, seeking to excuse him.

‘It's all their doing, I suppose – Fernando and Jorge. They have forced him to be a part of it. What did they threaten him with if he didn't co-operate? The loss of his home, I suppose. Bastards! But why did he give in to them? Why didn't he go home to Germany?'

‘His home there had been destroyed,' Ingrid said. She did not add the other things she knew, that after the war Otto had been a hunted man, a war criminal rather than simply an officer of the German army who had served the Fatherland from a sense of patriotism, nor that Otto had been a willing partner in an enterprise which had made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. There was no point in upsetting Lilli any more, no point in completely destroying her illusions about the man they both adored and whom Ingrid was willing to accept for what he was because he was, to her, her dearest love, whatever he had done. But she could not resist a dig all the same at Magdalene, the woman who had stolen the best years of Otto's life from her and whom Lilli so closely resembled.

‘There was your mother to consider, of course,' she said, her face still smooth, only her eyes, hard and blue, revealing the malice in her heart. ‘She was Vicente Cordoba's daughter, remember – and Vicente Cordoba was as guilty as any of them.‘

Lilli blinked. Grandfather Vicente had died when she was a child but she remembered him clearly as a distinguished old gentleman and respected member of the community.

‘Grandfather Vicente was a politician!' she objected.

The corners of Ingrid's mouth lifted in a humourless smile which, for all her efforts to conceal her true feelings, closely resembled a sneer.

‘Yes, he was, but he was also as corrupt as they come. How do you think your father came to be allowed to acquire Madrepora and no questions asked? How do you think drug-traffickers manage to carry on their business if they don't have at least some of the most influential of those in authority on their side? Vicente Cordoba had a finger in more crooked pies than you could care to name, and Magdalene – your mother – was his daughter. Your father, more fool he, worshipped her. She would never have cut herself off from her father or left this part of the world and he would never have left her.'

Lilli's confusion and shock began to turn to resentment and anger to hear her mother spoken of in this way.

‘You can't blame my mother for this. She died when I was five years old!'

Ingrid's mouth hardened.

‘Yes, she did. And have you ever asked yourself how she died?'

‘I know how she died!' Lilli snapped, unable to take any more of Ingrid's smug inside knowledge. ‘That is something I do know. Daddy told me long ago. She died because of Jorge.'

An expression that might almost have been satisfaction flittered across Ingrid's face.

‘In that case, my dear, you must also know why your father is so anxious that the same thing should not happen to you.'

‘He need not worry on that score,' Lilli retorted. ‘I might have been involved with Jorge once, but I have no intention of killing. myself because of him.'

For a brief moment Ingrid looked uncertain. The indecision was there, written all over her smooth face, but Lilli was too upset to notice it.

‘I see,' she said after a moment. ‘Perhaps your father has not told you quite everything, Lilli. I hope he will. Then perhaps you will realise just why he wants you to leave Madrepora and never return. Oh – don't look like that. I'm quite sure you will be well taken care of wherever you decide to make your life. Your father has made certain of that. I only hope I am as well provided for, but if not, well, I suppose I have had more than I might once have ever dared hope for – some time with your father. It hasn't been enough. It could never be that, and it has been curtailed most cruelly. But for all that, I must be grateful for what little I was allowed.'

Her blue eyes were suddenly full of tears. She half smiled, raised a hand to urge Lilli to say no more, turned and left the salon.

Lilli stood for a moment looking after her, a germ of pity sparking momentarily. She did not like Ingrid, but her anguish at the prospect of losing him was very real. It would have touched a heart harder than Lilli's, and Lilli, raw and bleeding herself, could not help but be affected by it.

What would Ingrid do after Otto's death? she wondered. Had Otto told her, too, to leave Madrepora, or did he consider it would be safe enough for her to remain? Lilli couldn't imagine that she would stay on though. With Otto gone there would be nothing left for her here and she had family at home in Germany. As for the remark she had made about being provided for, what had she meant by that? Had Otto told her, as he had told Lilli, about the fortune stashed away for her in a Swiss bank account? Was none of it to go to Ingrid, his wife?

As far as I am concerned she can have it all! Lilli thought. If it came from drug-trafficking I don't want a penny of it! I'd sooner starve!

But it wouldn't come to that. She had her job in New York which paid enough for her to get by on – and she had the treasures.

Lilli let her eye run around the salon over the items her father had always referred to as her ‘treasures' – the silver candlesticks, the little Louis XIV clock, the bronze statuette of Ceres, the triptych, and a fierce determination filled her. They were the only things she would take with her when she left the island, the only things untainted by her father's revelations. They had been his before all this tawdry criminality began, they were the things he loved most. Tears pricked her eyes as she thought of the loving way he handled them, the way his eyes lingered on them, enjoying their beauty, even in the midst of a conversation. As long as she had the treasures the rest of it mattered not a jot. They would be her insurance just as they had been his, comforting in the unspoken guarantee that any one of them would, at auction, fetch enough to see her through the most dire need.

But she could not imagine ever parting with a single one of them. They meant far too much to her. Lilli crossed to the triptych, gazing at its glowing colours until the tears in her eyes blurred the beautiful images, and longing for the innocence of long-gone happier times to somehow reach out across the years and ease her present pain.

F
ROM THE TIME
she had been a little girl, when something was troubling her Lilli went to the beach. In those days, of course, the problems had been childish ones and the moments of anxiety and depression which accompanied them as unexpected as a summer storm and as brief. Many times Lilli had cried her frustrations and woes into the silky-soft sand, and the breeze from the sea had dried her tears. It was impossible, she had thought then, to be unhappy for very long with the sound of the ocean beating in her ears like some great pulse which shared its life force with her, with the sun warming her skin and the perfume of the island entering her very soul with every breath. She had gone there when her mother had died and thought she heard the low, lilting voice in the whispering palms: ‘Don't be sad, little one. I'm here. I'm always here.' The only time she had not sought refuge on the beach was after the terrible déb‚cle of her father discovering her with Jorge – the memory of being there with him had been too recent and too painful. But now Lilli changed into a swimsuit and matching overskirt and escaped from the villa where the walls, heavy with unwelcome revelations and impending death, seemed to be closing in on her.

As she followed the path to the beach she felt a moment's guilt for her selfish desire to be alone. Perhaps she should have remained at the villa in case her father wanted her – but he was sleeping, she knew. Certainly she should, if she was going anywhere, be going to see Josie, her friend, without whose letter she would not be here now. Josie would know she had arrived on Madrepora and would be expecting her – Lilli could imagine her sitting at the door of her shack, the baby on her knee, watching the track and exacting to see Lilli come walking down it. But close as the two girls remained, Lilli could not face talking to Josie just now. Her need for solitude and the comfort of the beach from which, if her lather had his way, she would soon be exiled, was too great.

At the edge of the sand Lilli slipped off her deck shoes and carried them until she reached a shady corner beneath a tall swaying palm. Then she tossed mem down and sat down beside them, spreading her knees beneath the bright print of her skirt and staring out over the creamy breakers to the distant horizon where sea met sky in a soft haze of perfect azure.

The first shock of her father's revelations was beginning to dull now – how quickly the human mind can come to accept the unacceptable! – and so many things which had puzzled her without causing her a moment's real consternation were falling into place like the pieces of a jigsaw.

Why, she wondered, had she never really questioned Jorge and Uncle Fernando's frequent visits to the island? Why had she never stopped to realise that the legitimate exports of batique cloth wear and bananas and her father's dabbling in the trading of rare stamps could not possibly keep them in the lifestyle which she had come to take for granted? And why had she, Lilli the rebel, obeyed her father when he had forbidden her to go to the north-east corner of the island? Was it because she had known instinctively that to do so would be to break the spell of her Garden of Eden; that to visit that one forbidden place would be the equivalent of tasting the forbidden fruit?

But the blinkers had been taken from her eyes now and Lilli could see the forms of all those she loved exposed in their nakedness. Not only Jorge and Uncle Fernando, but also Daddy and Grandfather Vicente; Ingrid, who was prepared to make excuses for any evil provided it meant she could be with the man she loved; even Mama …

As Lilli thought of her a frown creased her forehead and she lifted a hand to smooth it out. What had Ingrid meant when she had said Lilli did not know everything about her death? Hadn't she seen her with her own eyes lying on the floor of the salon in a pool of blood? And hadn't Daddy told her that her mother had taken her own life because of the way Jorge had treated her?