The Girl Behind the Mask (5 page)

‘Does he, you know . . . does he go down on you?’ the first girl asked.

‘He’s a chef,’ said her friend. ‘He’ll eat anything.’

Having asked for the bill, Nick returned his attention to me. He cocked his head to one side and I had the feeling I was being appraised. I also had the feeling that I’d passed. That was perhaps confirmed when Nick gently probed for information about my living situation back in London. I told him I was staying with a friend, which was the truth. I had been staying with a friend in the six weeks since Steven and I fell apart. I hated to admit even to myself that the situation showed no sign of changing.

After dinner, Nick insisted on walking me back to my apartment. He offered his arm as we weaved along the narrow
fondamente
.

‘It’s quite icy underfoot,’ was his excuse.

I was grateful for the support.

When we reached the apartment, Nick hovered as I tried to open the door myself, but in the end had to lend his physical assistance. I provided the magic swearwords. When the door swung open, I sensed he was waiting for me to invite him in. I didn’t. Though Nick didn’t seem like the kind of man who would ever pull rank, technically he was my superior. Inviting him in would be a bad idea and not just because we had to work together. I’d known him for such a short time I couldn’t really call him a friend. I was vulnerable. I’d had half a bottle of wine. At best I would end up boring him with my love-life woes. At worst . . .

‘Got to be on form for my meeting with Marco Donato,’ I told him.

‘Of course,’ said Nick, kissing me lightly on both cheeks, Italian-style. ‘The man of mystery. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I watched him go. When I got upstairs, however, I began to think perhaps it would have been nice to have company for a little longer. Was it arrogant of me to have thought Nick wanted anything more than a coffee? Perhaps he just wanted some company too. I took off my coat and stood in the middle of the apartment’s dingy hallway, feeling my mood come back down. This was, after all, the worst part of the day. Alone at last. Absolutely alone. And in Venice, too. Steven had always said he would take me to Venice . . .

Chapter 6

I undressed quickly and slipped under the covers of the creaky old four-poster. It was cold that night so I pulled the curtains around the bed, creating for myself a red velvet cave. Thanks to the wine, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow – and found myself dreaming of Steven again.

It was so vivid. This time he was in the room in Venice with me. He was standing by the window. The moonlight threw shadows across his face, enhancing the high cheekbones and strong jaw that made every woman look twice. His eyes were dark and almost unreadable. Frighteningly so. I hesitated by the door until he beckoned me over. He reached out to touch my face. I stepped towards him, looking into his black eyes for an answer. He closed them as though to shut me out, but at the same time he started to kiss me.

The kiss quickly became passionate. We were so hungry for each other – starved for love after our time apart – that now our appetites had been aroused again, there could be no holding back. As he probed my mouth with his tongue, Steven’s hands roamed the curves of my body. I did not protest as his hands moved beneath my clothes. Within moments I was helping him to unfasten the buttons on the back of my dress. As I lifted my arms to pull the dress off over my head, he was already kissing my gently rounded stomach. His tongue traced the edge of my black silk knickers. His fingers sought out the clasp of the lace-trimmed bra that flattered my bosom so well. He’d picked it out for exactly that reason. I remembered how proud and excited I’d been when he told me how he’d gone into Agent Provocateur and got hard while he chose those scraps of lingerie and imagined how I would look in them. Now he changed his mind about letting my breasts free and instead pushed the lace cups down so that my nipples spilled over the top. He’d told me before that sometimes he liked to see me half-dressed. He found it erotic to imagine me caught out and fucked quickly with no ceremony.

While Steven devoured my breasts with kisses, I worked at getting him out of his own clothes. I was desperate to feel his bare skin upon mine. When he was naked and I was in nothing but my bra, he pushed me down onto the bed. I pressed my body against his, luxuriating in the feel of his brown skin against my belly and my thighs. I breathed in his warm scent. He murmured words of love in my ear. Steven filled all of my senses.

He kissed me again, while his fingers tiptoed down to the place where my legs came together. He found my clitoris and stroked it carefully. I moved my pelvis to meet his hand, willing his fingers to stray inside. I knew I was already wet. Steven smiled broadly when he felt it too. He kept his eyes fixed on mine as he dropped his head to my breast and bit down hard upon my nipple. The shot of pain made it all the more delicious when he soothed it away with his tongue. All the while, he finger-fucked me, lubricating my swollen clit with my own love juice.

When the teasing of Steven’s fingers became too much to bear, I begged him to enter me. I knew he was ready. I could already feel his penis pressing hard against my thigh. All I wanted now was to have him inside me properly. Filling me. I wriggled my hand down between our warm bodies and sought out his familiar erection.

I guided Steven towards my longing vagina. Our eyes remained locked as he gently pushed into me and began to move carefully and slowly. With each stroke I felt myself opening up to him, pulling him deeper. He never took his eyes off mine, as though our minds were making love as well as our bodies. I abandoned myself to the sensations he aroused in me, feeling an orgasm build inside me like the unfurling of a flower towards the sun. As Steven came, he begged me to hold him more tightly. He called out my name. I called out his in reply. In ecstasy. And in love.

But calling out Steven’s name woke me from my dream. I sat up in bed and pulled the covers closer around me.

‘Way too much wine,’ was what I told myself. I lay back on my pillow again and put a cold hand to my forehead.

The monkeys on the bedposts seemed to be laughing. They looked at me in definite amusement. I wondered who had slept under their watchful gaze before.

Chapter 7

Tuesday morning. The day of my first appointment at the Donato family library. I was awake early; I had yet to get used to the bells and how surprisingly noisy this city of waterways could be. At six o’clock, a water-taxi idled right beneath my window for what seemed like an hour, thoughtless as any London cabbie running his diesel engine while he waited for his fare to arrive. Giving up on silence, I got out of bed and shrugged on the huge woolly sweater that was a permanent feature of my wardrobe from October to April back home in England.

Of course, I would dress more carefully for my visit to the library later on. More specifically, I would be dressing carefully for my first meeting with the library’s owner.

Marco Donato was, as my new colleagues had suggested, something of an enigma. An Internet search of his name threw up two different men. The first was Marco Donato Senior, who had made his money in shipping. The Donato family had run a popular cruise line in the 1950s, sailing out of Venice to points all over the Mediterranean. There were several pictures of Marco Senior on his ships, dining with the huge Italian celebrities of the time. I discovered that a relatively famous movie had been filmed on one of the boats, and Marco Senior had subsequently left his wife for the female star. Only to go straight back to her when he realised the star couldn’t cook anywhere near as well as his long-suffering missus . . .

I liked the look of this first Marco. He had an easy charm about him that was doubtless born of necessity. His Wikipedia entry explained that his beginnings had been humble. Having struggled through a childhood of appalling deprivation, young Marco had given everything to succeed in the world, making his first investments with the money he saved from tips earned while working as a waiter. First of all, he bought a single water-taxi. Then another. Then a fleet. Twenty years later, he owned one of the biggest oceangoing liners in the world. He kept the first water-taxi, however, and would ride out in it on a Sunday morning. The modest boat was always as smartly turned out as a billionaire’s Riva, all gleaming brass and polished wood.

The second Marco Donato – the one who’d been writing to me – was this dashing entrepreneur’s grandson.

There’s an old saying: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, which refers to the idea that it takes three generations to make, consolidate and then squander a fortune. Marco Donato Junior certainly seemed to be doing his best to prove the adage true. His grandfather had made the family fortune. His father had diversified the family’s interests and begun to invest in the trappings of class: the houses, the library, and the right education for his son. But Marco Donato Junior was a playboy through and through. Most of the photographs I found in my online search for him were from the mid to late 1990s and the majority of them seemed to have been taken in nightclubs.

Marco Donato Junior was the ultimate gilded youth. Where the grandfather’s character and ambition had been born of hardship, the grandson was definitely a product of pure privilege. You could see it in his face. He was handsome as any Michelangelo statue, with sculpted cheekbones and seductive dark eyes beneath a mop of softly curling black hair. His lips were full and sensuous. His habitual expression was a cat-that-got-the-cream grin.

He was tall and broad-shouldered. Obviously a keen sportsman. When he wasn’t being photographed in clubs, he was often pictured on a horse or with a racket in his hand. I couldn’t help noticing he had excellent biceps, which were showcased to perfection by his designer polo shirts, especially when he was resting an elbow on the windowsill of a soft-top sports car: another favourite pose.

Like his grandfather before him, this younger Marco seemed to enjoy the company of celebrities. He was frequently photographed alongside film stars and musicians. He was certainly never pictured alone. Those companions who weren’t bona fide celebrities still had a touch of stardust about them: invariably female, young and slim with enormous, sometimes awe-inspiring, breasts. He didn’t seem to discriminate with regard to nationality or colour. As long as they had the legs and the tits.

Marco Donato Junior clearly loved life and it seemed to love him right back.

Though the photographs of this Marco’s philandering grandfather had intrigued and amused me, I was surprised to find myself feeling slightly ruffled when I looked at these newer pictures. Every image seemed to tighten an invisible band around my heart.

Was I envious? Jealous? Perhaps. There was no rational reason for it. Good-looking but obviously far too pleased with himself, Marco Donato Junior was hardly my type. My overall impression was that he was an over-privileged boy with too much time on his hands. Likewise, I knew I wouldn’t have matched up to his feminine ideal. I’m slim but I have the figure of a boy. Much as I like my breasts, I know they’re never going to stop traffic. I certainly couldn’t compete with the groomed beauties of Donato’s world. I didn’t want to in any case. It shouldn’t have mattered in the least how Marco Donato conducted his private life. I didn’t need him to fancy me. I just wanted him to allow me access to his library. I didn’t really need to know anything about his personal life at all. But I couldn’t help delving further. I told myself it wasn’t prurient; it was the historian in me that made me want to know more. And Marco Donato Junior did have a certain mystery to him.

It was odd, given how gregarious the man had obviously been in his younger days, that he was so very secretive now. The photographs of the young Italian, louche and delicious as any dark-eyed stud in a Caravaggio painting, stopped around 1999. There was simply nothing after that. Nothing at all. No pictures. No gossip items. I wondered what had happened to make the playboy stop playing, but my searches on the Internet proved fruitless. There was no mention of a wife, who might have put her foot down about his partying. It was as though he had just vanished. From the party scene, at least. He was obviously still alive, since he was sending emails to my inbox. Well, someone using his name was.

That morning, I sent one more polite email to confirm I would be at the library at the appointed time.

I am very much looking forward to meeting you,

I concluded.

And I found I
was
very much looking forward to meeting him, to the extent that I put on make-up before leaving the house, as though I was heading out on a date rather than a library visit. I was not just casually interested, I was intrigued. Though I was barely conscious of the feeling at the time, seeing all those photographs of Marco Donato draped in beautiful women had made me want to experience what those girls must have felt in his orbit. A psychologist would have recognised my reaction at once. There is a little part of every woman that wants the man who has already been approved by the sisterhood. You would think that knowing a man had had so many partners would be off-putting, but in fact it can have quite the opposite result.

They call it the Casanova effect.

Chapter 8

The Palazzo Donato was a beautiful place – even by standards in Venice, where everything is astonishingly beautiful. Rising four proud storeys above the waterline, the house was built in the Byzantine style popular in the fifteenth century, when connections with the Near East were strong and influence flowed back and forth between Venice and Constantinople like the tide. The details round the extravagantly arched windows on the terracotta-coloured facade were picked out in fresh white paint. In front of the house was a well-scrubbed wooden deck, surrounded by the candy-striped mooring poles that littered the city. Tied to one of the poles, which were painted in the burgundy and yellow Donato colours, I recognised the old water-taxi that had been the first step in building the family fortune. It still looked well cared for. The wooden hull was recently varnished. The brass oarlocks shone as bright as gold.