The Rich Shall Inherit (77 page)

It was dark by the time he arrived back at the Villa Castelletto, and if he’d been cold before, now he was freezing. He needed a drink and he was starving. Fixing his usual ham and cheese on crusty bread, he lathered the sandwich with mustard and sent a silent prayer of thanks to Lieber for instructing the caretakers to keep the villa warm.

He ate standing at the kitchen table, sipping the red wine he liked, while his thoughts went back once more to Poppy. He was almost afraid to discover what had happened to her, and to Franco.

Finishing his sandwich, he grabbed the bottle of wine and carried it upstairs. The parrot blinked at him from his cage as he turned on the lamp, and Mike grinned at him. “Sorry, Luchay,” he said, “didn’t mean to startle you. I’ll bet you’re hungry too. Here you go.” He filled the parrot’s dish with seeds and then he laughed. Loneliness and the Villa Castelletto must be getting to him; he was talking to the parrot, just the way Poppy must have done.

He put a match to the fire that the caretaker had left ready in the grate, holding out his hands for a moment in the flames. Poppy’s collection of notebooks lay on the pretty little desk, waiting for him. He let the parrot out of his cage and it fluttered onto the back of his chair as he sat down and began to read. “Just like old times, Luchay, isn’t it?” Mike said.

1932, ITALY

Franco’s enemy had laid his plans well; it was no new territorial battle he was after, only the settling of an old score. Revenge sometimes had to wait a long time in their world, but simply because time had passed didn’t mean it was forgotten. An open sore remained open—until a death healed it.

It took the top men in the Malvasi Family just hours to find out who was the perpetrator of the deed, and just a few days to extract their own revenge. The body of the thin-faced, sharp-suited Dottore was found floating in the Bay of Naples, the puckered scar that ran from eye to mouth making his bloated face even more grotesque in death than it had been in life. He had been expelled from the Malvasi Family twenty years before for what Franco had judged as unnecessary violence. He had waited patiently for a chink in Franco’s armor. And he had finally found it.

The Dottore had had one of the servants at the villa in his pay for many years, he’d known all Franco’s moves. When he’d heard that Franco had gone away—alone—he’d known that, at long last, he had a chance. And when his spy had told him that the car was to meet Franco on the road outside Genoa, he had driven there, parking a mile away from the rendezvous point along the same road. He’d expected it to be difficult; he would have to shoot Franco as he drove by, but the rain had helped him. The Dottore had been forced to switch on his headlights in the heavy storm and, assuming it was his own car, Franco had slowed down. He’d been an easy target. The only miscalculation had been that he’d expected Franco to be in the passenger seat and that’s where he’d directed his bullets.

*  *  *

Franco had thought it was the end. Shattered glass flew into his face and a bullet grazed his head. He felt the burn of hot metal in his chest and heard Poppy cry out next to him. The car skidded across the rainslick road and, with blood streaming down his face and the terrible searing pain in his chest, he fought to stop it from turning over as it slid into the bank; it came to a stop with its front wheels in the ditch. The headlights of the waiting car had dipped and flickered as the engine was started, and Franco remembered hearing the tires squeal as it drove off. And then everything was silent and the night became even blacker as he slumped, unconscious, over the wheel.

He lost all concept of time, he had no idea whether minutes or even hours had passed. All he was aware of when he came to was the searing pain in his lungs and the warm blood trickling from his temple. And then he remembered Poppy.

“God, oh, God, what have I done to her?” he groaned, stretching out his hand to find her. He touched her arm; it was warm and he could feel the stickiness he knew was blood, but it was too dark to see anything. He fumbled desperately with the key in the ignition, willing it to turn, willing the lights to go on … the headlights beamed suddenly, illuminating the hedgerow, and the dashboard glowed green. He could see her—and he almost wished he couldn’t. She was half sitting, half lying in her seat, just as she had been when he’d woken her to tell her they were almost there. As she’d turned to speak to him, the bullets had raked the right side of her head and body. “Oh, my darling,” he groaned, touching her beautiful hair, matted with blood. He put his hand to her breast and felt the faint flutter of her heart … she was still alive, but she needed help, immediately.

Franco staggered from the car, staring wildly around him into the night. His assassin might still be lurking by the side of the road, waiting to take aim. But all that mattered was getting help for Poppy. He stumbled determinedly into the night, clutching a handkerchief to the wound on his head, wheezing as the bullet burned in his lungs.

The Malvasi guards had been patrolling near the waiting car almost a mile away when they’d heard the sound of gunfire through the storm. They were in the car in a flash, driving through the rain without headlights toward the sound of shooting. It was a miracle they didn’t run Franco down as he loomed in front of the car in the middle of the road.

“Help,” he cried as they ran toward him, “help her. Please help her.”

The Sisters at the Ospedale Croce Rossa in Genoa were used to nursing all kinds of patients, and praying for them, too, but in their private chapel morning and night, they prayed extra hard for forgiveness for the crime boss Franco Malvasi and for the woman who’d been brought in with him, more dead than alive.

Franco had two bullet wounds in the head, but in both cases the bullets had just grazed the skull, shattering bone but not penetrating the brain. Nevertheless, it took skilled surgeons four hours to remove fragments of bone from the cerebrum, and another set of skilled men to remove the bullet from his left lung and attempt to repair the damage. Within days he was sitting up in his hospital bed, bandaged and weak, and asking after Poppy.

“She is gravely ill,” they told him, “only time and God will tell now.” A bullet had penetrated her brain on the right side—not deeply, but enough to do certain damage. Other bullets had penetrated her right arm and shoulder, but because she had been twisted onto her side, somehow she had protected her body with her arms and no vital organs had been damaged. There was a chance she would live, they said, but no one knew yet how badly damaged the brain was.

They wouldn’t allow him to see her. “She is too ill to know you are there,” they told him, “and you are too ill to go.” He ordered bodyguards outside her door, night and day, but they were dismissed by the Sisters.

“This hospital is a house of God,” they said sorrowfully, “we are saving lives, not killing them. There will be no guns and no violence in here.” But they made no attempt to remove the men outside Franco’s room; they understood the risk was too great.

When Franco was told two weeks later he could leave the hospital, Poppy still hadn’t opened her eyes; she hadn’t moved, she hadn’t spoken. He went to see her, clutching a gardenia in his hand. She was lying in bed, her head swathed in bandages. Her eyes were tightly shut and he could hear her breathing. It was strange, he could see her there before him, but yet she wasn’t there. Who knew where Poppy was in her dreams now? Placing the gardenia on her pillow, Franco kissed her gently and left her to her dreams.

He refused to leave the hospital until she awoke and he knew
she was all right. “But Signore,” they protested, “you can’t stay; we shall need your room …”

“Let me stay,” he said, “and I promise that next year your hospital will have a new wing with a hundred more rooms!”

It was three weeks before Poppy opened her eyes. He was sitting by her bedside and she gazed at him mistily. “Franco?” she asked. Her voice was faint and husky, but she’d recognized him.

Franco smiled at her. “It’ll be all right now, Poppy. You’ll see, everything will be all right. Soon you will be better. Then you can have whatever you want. Just tell me.”

She smiled. “Gardenias,” she said.

He filled her room with them until the Sisters protested that their overpowering scent was too much.

Poppy grew a little better day by day, but when the doctors told him it was going to take a long time—months, maybe even a year—he had her transferred by special ambulance to a private clinic in Naples.

He filled her suite with flowers, books, pretty nightdresses and robes, a silver mirror so she could check the progress of her poor shorn hair, shaved off when they operated; he gave her presents of all kinds and he went every day to see her, monitoring her progress personally with the doctors.

“There is some residual damage,” they told him, “but the Signora has been lucky; the bullet didn’t penetrate the part of the brain that affects movement, so there is no paralysis. But she will have some impairment of her memory … we don’t yet know how drastic. By the way, she has no memory whatsoever of the accident. She thinks that the car skidded in the rain—and that she was driving. It would be wiser not to disillusion her.”

Poppy made a quicker recovery than they had anticipated, and two months later they told her she could go home.

Franco sat by her bed, wishing he could keep her there, even if just another week. But it was time to let her go.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

She smiled at him, looking like a young girl with her new short hair. “I’ll go home,” she said simply.

“To Montespan?”

“Montespan? Why of course not, to the Villa Castelletto.” She frowned, puzzled. “Isn’t that our home, Franco?”

He nodded gravely. “I suppose so.”

“I always think of it as my home,” she said, bewildered, “but then, I’m so confused about so many things these days.”

“It’s yours, Poppy,” he said, “whatever you want is yours.”

Her guileless blue eyes were suddenly shrewd again. “You?” she said softly.

He smiled. “That’s the only thing I must deny you.”

“Then it’s good-bye again, Franco.”

“This time it’s good-bye.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “I must go to Montespan first,” she cried, “to get Luchay. Poor, poor darling, how could I have forgotten him! And to see if Rogan has returned.”

“Rogan?”

Her eyes narrowed and she looked at him slyly. “What?” she murmured vaguely. “Poor Luchay, he must be so lonely. I hate being lonely. I’ll fetch him and then we’ll go back to the villa, for good.” She smiled sweetly at him. “There’s something so satisfying about those words Franco, ‘for good, forever …’”

He gazed at her sadly; one moment she was his old Poppy, the next she was like an elusive piece of quicksilver as the thoughts and memories slid through her brain and scattered from her grasp. God forgive me, he said silently, for what I have done to her.

1932, FRANCE

Angel was sitting in the garden at the Villa d’Oro when she read the newspaper headline:
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON FRANCO MALVASI, CRIME CHIEF
. But it was the final words of the report that riveted her attention.
Malvasi was with a female companion who was seriously injured in the hail of bullets. She has been identified as the Signora Poppy Mallory.

The newspaper rustled to the grass as an image of Poppy’s body, riddled with bullets, came to her mind, and she buried her face in her hands, overcome by pity and sadness. Why had Poppy been with a man like that? Everyone knew about him, everyone knew what he was …. “Oh, Poppy, Poppy,” she groaned. “We had so much, how could it all have come to this?”

Impulsively she got to her feet; she must go to her, she couldn’t just let her lie there, alone and maybe dying … after all, they’d loved each other like sisters once … Snatching up the newspaper she saw that Poppy was in the Croce Rossa Hospital in Genoa … she would go there right away.

“Mama? What are you doing out here, all alone?” her daughter Helena called to her from across the lawn, and Angel lifted her arm automatically in response. Sometimes Helena’s voice sounded almost normal; she lip-read very well and if she could see a person, she always understood what they were saying, but as she’d grown older, her childhood memory of sound had diminished and now, at thirty-three, most of her words were just approximations of the correct vocal patterns. Now only Angel and Maria-Cristina could really understand what Helena was saying, and her frustration when they took her out shopping or
for lunch made her childishly angry and tearful. Because she was so beautiful, tall and blond with heavenly blue eyes—deep as blue grottoes and beguilingly innocent—people would turn to stare at her, aiming sidelong glances of sympathy at her mother.

The trouble was that Helena had the mentality of a child; Angel’s determination to protect her from the hurtful scorn of being different from other children had not only isolated her, it had retarded her. Helena had never gone to school like Maria-Cristina; she’d stayed home by her mother’s side and for years Angel had kept up the pretense that there was nothing wrong. She’d smiled when people stared at Helena, puzzled, explaining that she was a very shy child; she’d answered the questions that Helena didn’t hear; as a child she’d never allowed her to go to parties, and later to grown-up dances, saying she was too “fragile.” She had refused to allow Helena to grow up. When they’d finally left Felipe and Aleksandr and returned to California, twelve-year-old Helena had been as dependent as a child of six.

At the Santa Vittoria ranch, Rosalia had noticed what was happening and she’d warned Angel about it. She’d thought, sympathetically, it was because Angel had lost her son that had made her so superprotective. Helena had grown from a sweet child into a childish young woman, still isolated from any normal life, but happy and cosseted within her own small world, where everybody understood her and everybody loved her. After all, she knew nothing else. She had the innocence of a child, but she also had the face and body of a lovely young woman. She never even met anyone outside the Abrego/Konstant family circle and friends, other than the doctors and specialists to whom she continued to go for treatment, and Angel was to blame herself forever afterward for not even noticing what was happening to her.