The Rich Shall Inherit (74 page)

1931, ITALY

Every time the bulletproof Mercedes limousine swept through the massive iron gates and he heard them clang shut behind him, Franco was reminded that he lived in a prison. But he didn’t mind the isolation anymore; in a way, he almost preferred his solitude.

He had long since discovered that the only way to escape from his prison was through the mind. After the last meetings had finished and the final decisions of the day had been made, he would dine, always alone, at the long refectory table lit by priceless silver candelabra, eating meagerly from delicate china and drinking a single glass of fine wine from a beautiful Lalique glass. Then he would cross the hall to the library and close the doors softly behind him, shutting out at last the brutish faces of the guards, and all the tension and the responsibility. He was alone with his fine books, his old master paintings, and his memories.

Sometimes he would wander the vast beautiful room, looking at his collection of paintings, or he’d leaf through one or another of his fascinating collection of rare books, and sometimes he’d just sit in his usual deep chair, turn down the lamp, light a cigarette, and remember the way life used to be, when he was a happy man.

Tonight was different. He’d eaten slowly, even poured himself a second glass of wine in order to extend the pleasure of anticipation a little longer, putting off the delicious moment when he could view his latest—and most precious—acquisition.

At last, he drained the drops from his wineglass and, his heart pounding with excitement, he walked slowly across the hall into
his sanctuary. It was a hot night and the library’s tall windows were thrown open to catch the breeze. He could hear the footsteps of the guards patrolling outside as he turned off the lamps, all except the one beside a large easel holding a painting, still covered by a dustcloth. He lit another cigarette and sank into his chair, staring somberly at the shrouded painting. He hadn’t seen it in years, he’d just known he wanted it, at whatever cost, and he’d instructed his agent to outbid all others at the auction.

Crushing out his cigarette, he walked to the easel and with a trembling hand removed the cloth. He gazed at the portrait of Poppy with tears in his eyes; it was Poppy as he’d first known her, and Sargent had captured all of youth’s luminous arrogance and fears in her vivid face. He seemed to have caught the nuances of a young animal eager to be let off the leash, and yet afraid of the freedom. And there were the scars of experience, too, in the wary insolence of the eyes and the challenging smile. Poppy was wearing an ice-gray satin gown, sashed in pink, and there was the famous rope of pearls at her neck and diamond stars sparkling in her red hair, and in her hand she held a single white gardenia.

Franco sank back into his chair with a sigh of pleasure. After almost twenty-five years, he was alone again with Poppy.

In an effort to exorcise her loneliness, Poppy had become a world traveler; she had traveled on liners and on trains, on cargo boats and Nile steamers, mules and camels. There was hardly a country left she hadn’t seen, or a ruin or historic monument she hadn’t visited. And always alone.

She was the mysterious, elegant woman traveling first class on the liner Il
e de France
on her way to New York; she was the beautiful, aloof stranger dining alone on the Orient Express on her way to Istanbul; she was the slender, wary-eyed chic woman who spoke to no one on the river cruise from Cairo to Luxor; she was one of the only women who braved India’s fierce daytime heat to view the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal in sunlight, and again, alone, by moonlight. She was the only woman aboard the freighter from Calcutta to Rangoon, and she was the only woman in the bar at Raffles Hotel in Singapore. She was asked to dine, to dance, to drink, in Hong Kong, Delhi, Vienna, Buenos Aires, and on top of a mountain in Bolivia, as well as many places in between. She accepted no invitations. She spoke only to the guides, or to the chambermaids, stewards, and waiters in whatever
ship or hotel she was staying. She was running away from the world, and herself. And she wasn’t succeeding.

It had been four years since she’d seen Angel, and for four years she’d been trying to forget. After she’d left Angel, she’d returned to her anonymous palatial suite at her hotel in San Francisco, wishing she could die. Angel had laid the guilt and the blame for the disasters that had happened to the Konstant family on her, and she’d finally accepted it. Rogan was her fault, too, as well as the poor child she had decided to abandon even before it was born. Bitterly unhappy and uncertain what to do, she’d wandered aimlessly south through California to Los Angeles, where she took a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and for a week she stayed inside it, thinking.

At the end of that week she’d telephoned her lawyers in Paris and told them to put the house and contents of Numéro Seize, rue des Arbres, up for sale. She’d wanted to keep nothing. Then she telephoned the detectives who had been searching fruitlessly for so long for Rogan, and asked them to find out everything they could about the Baronessa Angel Rinardi’s two daughters, telling them there was a rumor that one of them had been adopted at birth—and she needed to know which one. She had to know her own daughter, no matter how long it took. She didn’t want to take her away from Angel, but she needed to meet her, because one day she intended to leave her her fortune. It would be all she had ever done for her.

Los Angeles was a young, growing city and the warm sunshine and sweet, orange blossom-laden air had beguiled her. She’d bought a car so that she could drive herself around its wide, flat valleys and the sudden ranges of hills, admiring the opulent estates and lavish white mansions of the stars of the flourishing movie industry, Pickfair and Greystone and the new forty-four-room Greenacres just being built at a cost of two million dollars by Harold Lloyd. They’d looked so beautiful, sparkling in the California sun, as though promising that the lives of those who lived in them would be pleasant and tranquil and easy, and suddenly Poppy had been tempted to buy land and build one herself. Why not, she thought suddenly, after all, she was a rich woman, she could afford it; she could afford anything she wanted, now. She knew she couldn’t bear to go home to Montespan and thought maybe she would find the peace she was seeking here in California.

She had bought a five-acre plot atop a hill at Beverly Drive
north of Sunset Boulevard and commissioned an architect to build her a Spanish-style hacienda, which bore a strong resemblance to the Konstant House. The urge to buy more land took hold of her, and remembering Franco’s advice, she skirted the periphery of the growing city, buying tracts of land that nobody wanted yet on Wilshire and Sunset, and Santa Monica; and she ventured even farther, buying useless scrubland in the San Fernando Valley, miles from anywhere. Then she instructed her agents to negotiate to buy the old Mallory House and as much of the surrounding land as the Konstants would sell. She intended to buy back her inheritance so that one day it would belong to her children.

Aching with loneliness, she embarked on a flurry of spending. She bought antiques and paintings for the house that was still only a blueprint in an architect’s office; she bought whole groves of transplanted palm trees to line its yet unmarked driveway and hundreds of exotic shrubs and plants to landscape its future gardens. She bought a carved stone fountain for its courtyard and planned a turquoise-blue swimming pool enclosed by a clipped green yew hedge. And as she tossed and turned in bed at night she’d dreamed that one day, Rogan and her daughter would come to find her and she would say to them, “See, here is your home, it’s been waiting for you all these years. This is all yours, and this, and this … all you have to do is to say you forgive me.”

When the report came back from the detective, she’d opened it eagerly. Maybe now she would know the truth. They had been in touch with agents in Italy, they told her, where both young women were currently residing at the Villa d’Oro. Records had been searched and showed that they were twins, born on May 5, 1899, and baptized two months later at the Chapel at the Villa d’Oro. There was no evidence at all that they were anything other than twin sisters.

Poppy had drawn the curtains in her bright, cheerful, sunny suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and cried into the darkness. When there were no more tears left, she had called the maid to pack her things and taken the train to Chicago and on to New York; her plan of a home in Beverly Hills was useless, she had no children to enjoy it. She was going home to Montespan. On the three-day train journey she asked herself why. First Franco had gone, then Rogan, then Netta … even the Joliots had finally retired and there was a new housekeeper in charge, who was looking after Luchay … without them Montespan was not a home anymore.
There was no one left to welcome her with open arms. Only Luchay, and Luchay was no longer enough to ease her pain and make her forget. Then on an impulse she canceled her passage on the liner from New York to France and took one to Argentina instead.

Her travels had filled in her time and they’d cost her a great deal of money. Where once she had been prudent, saving her money for Rogan’s inheritance, now she had spent lavishly. She had bought wonderful clothes that, carelessly, she had often left packed in steamer trunks in hotels around the world. She had bought rubies in Burma and emeralds in India and gold in Africa. And everywhere she went she had spied out the terrain, buying land shrewdly with an eye to the future. But wherever she went, whatever wonders of the world she saw, however much she spent, she never stopped thinking about Rogan and her daughter. She had no one to love, and no one who loved her.

It was while she was on a dilapidated little cargo boat, wallowing in the South China Sea, on her way from Manila to Singapore that she realized that there was only one person in the world who had truly known her, and who’d loved her despite all her faults and her flawed character.
If you ever need me
, he’d said, all those years ago,
just call me.
She remembered with a shiver Veronique and what had happened the last time she’d asked for his help. But this was different. All she wanted Franco to do was to find out about her daughter.

Three months later she was back at Montespan, surrounded by so many mementos and memories that she thought if it weren’t for Luchay, she would go mad. Her four years of world-traveling seemed to have vanished like a dream and her plan that had seemed so fine and reasonable in the middle of the South China Sea suddenly seemed fraught with uncertainty and even danger. Now at night she dreamed of Franco in his villa fortress in Naples, and of the moonlight glinting on the evil black machine guns. She had left him that night nearly twenty-five years ago because he’d frightened her into believing there was no way their love could survive if she stayed. Franco had inherited the mantle of his father and he’d accepted it, but he hadn’t wanted her to become a target of his enemies. How could she go to him now, after all these years? she wondered uncertainly. She had no idea of what his life was like now, or whether he even thought about her.

When she had ordered Numéro Seize to be sold she had told
Drouot, the auctioneers, to sell off all its contents; she had wanted to keep nothing. Though she’d refused to attend, she’d heard that the auction had caused quite a stir in Paris with buyers and press searching for a glimpse of the legendary Poppy, and the excitement had forced up the prices spectacularly, netting her another fortune.

Now she ran her eye down the list Drouot’s had sent her with the prices and the names of the purchasers, recognizing many of her old clients among them, touched that they had been willing to pay so generously for a memory of happy times spent at Numéro Seize. The sumptuous beds had gone for astonishing sums—people had even bought the satin sheets as souvenirs. And the fine antique pieces, the beautiful rugs, the silver and the china, all had brought far more than their worth. But it was her portrait by John Singer Sargent that had broken all records. It seemed everyone had wanted the painting of Paris’s most famous and beautiful madam. The bidding had been pushed up by an Italian agent who had been instructed to buy it at whatever cost, and it had sold for more than a hundred times its estimate. When she called Drouot to ask about it, they told her that it was well known that the agent in question acted for the Mafia chief Franco Malvasi.

Now Poppy knew she could ask him a favor.

1932, ITALY

Poppy had thought it all out carefully. Now she knew for certain what sort of man Franco was but she also knew that there was another side to him. The Franco she knew was the private man, caring, gentle, considerate, and
that
was the man she was about to appeal to now. Remembering the last time she’d gone to see him—the unanswered telephone messages, the frightened cab-drivers who wouldn’t take her to the villa, and the sinister bodyguards, she decided this time she would do it differently.

She drove herself down to the south of France and through Italy in her latest extravagance, the new de Courmont coupe. It was long and low and sleek and in her favorite bottle-green color with buff leather upholstery, and she was wearing a matching green felt hat pulled low over her red hair. She pressed her foot to the accelerator, feeling its powerful engine respond, and the miles soon sped away under her wheels.

It wasn’t until she reached Naples that she began to get nervous. She had never told Franco about Felipe and her daughter—though, of course, he knew she’d had a child. Franco had always said he knew everything about her; he’d told her that the first time they’d met. But she didn’t believe he knew she’d given the child to Angel. Maybe he’d think she’d deliberately deceived him all these years, when the truth was, she had been bound by her promise to Angel not to tell. And, of course, he had never known about Rogan, because when he’d left her, he’d severed all ties. She knew Franco had cut her from his life as though she never existed. But those weren’t the only things that were bothering her. She had been a young woman when they last met; what would Franco think of her now?