Burnt Sienna

by David Morrell

  “Prove it! Where’s the new sketch?”

  “On the floor next to the settee. One of your guards is standing on it. I’m afraid it got a little smeared from my blood spattering over it.”

  The guard who was standing on the sketch stepped away. Frowning at the blood and boot marks on it, Bellasar picked up the wrinkled page. “I’ve seen all the sketches you did of her. If this is the same as …” His voice faltered when he looked at it.

  Malone had sketched it two days previously, when his obsession with Sienna had compelled him to depict an idealized version of her beauty.

  Bellasar’s mouth opened as if he wanted to say something. When he finally managed to get the words out, his voice was a whisper. “It’s stunning.”

  “Yeah, with the boot marks and the blood. I can’t wait to see it framed.”

  Bellasar gazed at it, awestruck. “Breathtaking.” At last, he lowered it. “… Apparently, I was mistaken.”

  “That makes my face feel a whole lot better.”

  “I’ll send for a doctor.”

  “While you’re being so kindhearted, how about telling your goons to take their hands off me?”

  Bellasar gave him a warning look. When he nodded to his men, it was as if he had pressed a switch — they instantly let Malone go.

  Malone wiped more blood from his mouth. Glancing past Bellasar, he saw Sienna in the doorway. She seemed even more dazed.

  Bellasar noticed her. “There’s nothing to worry about, my dear. You’ll be able to pose tomorrow.”

  Sienna didn’t respond. The dark of her eyes was huge, her expression listless. Malone wondered if she’d been drugged.

  6

  Outside on the harshly lit terrace, the two Russians waited. As Bellasar went to speak to them, Malone made another attempt to memorize their faces. Then, knowing he couldn’t keep staring at them, he did what he wanted to do more than anything — to look at Sienna, to try to get a sense of what had happened in Istanbul, of what she was thinking and feeling. Something sank within him when she turned away. He couldn’t tell if it was from fear or because she was horrified by the injuries to his face. But in that case, if she had any regard for him, wouldn’t she have given him a look of sympathy?

  Not if she was afraid of Bellasar’s reaction.

  When Bellasar came back from speaking to the Russians, he, Sienna, and Malone went through the terrace doors into the château. They were followed by three bodyguards.

  As the group climbed the curving staircase, Bellasar said, “From now on, if you intend to work at night, ask a guard to escort you.”

  “You make it sound like I’m a prisoner.”

  With no reply, Bellasar led Sienna up to the final level. Two of the bodyguards went with them. A third stayed with Malone.

  Bellasar’s voice echoed faintly from above. “No, my dear, I’m not finished talking with you.”

  Malone’s stomach squirmed, but with the guard watching him, he forced himself to look as if he didn’t care about what he’d heard. Then a heavyset man holding a medical bag came up the stairs, and Malone had something to distract him.

  The doctor made the repairs in Malone’s room, washing off the blood, then applying sharp-smelling disinfectant to the gashes. The one caused by the flashlight blow to Malone’s cheek required five stitches. The mangled lips, the doctor concluded, would mend on their own. “Keep the stitches dry.” The doctor’s English was heavily accented. “Take two of these pills every six hours. They’ll relieve the pain. I’ll come back to examine you tomorrow.”

  A guard was in the hallway when the doctor left. Malone closed and locked the door, yanked off his bloody clothes, and threw them into a hamper. Mindful of what the doctor had said about keeping the stitches dry, he leaned his head back from the shower spray when he turned on the faucets. The steaming water rinsed the blood from his chest, arms, and hands, but no matter how hard he scoured his body, he couldn’t feel clean.

  The bastard, he kept saying to himself. His anger was balanced by apprehension. The situation was out of control.

  Toweling himself roughly, he risked a glance at the bathroom mirror and was startled by how ravaged his mouth and cheek were. Initially, trauma had numbed the injuries, but now pain overtook them. Even so, he couldn’t risk swallowing the pills the doctor had given him. He had no idea what they were or how strong. Bellasar might have told the doctor to drug him. I’ve got to think clearly.

  After putting on boxer shorts and a T-shirt, Malone picked up a small sketch pad he always kept on his bedside table. He sat against the headboard, closed his eyes to focus his memory, then opened them and started drawing the face of the Russian he had seen the morning he’d arrived and again tonight. Oval face, deep eyes, high forehead. Concentrating to remember whether the man’s jaw was pronounced or shallow, whether his eyebrows were arched or straight, Malone drew hurriedly. As the likeness took shape, he refined it, recalling more details, making it more vivid. Finally satisfied after twenty minutes and three attempts, he set the drawing aside and began to sketch the other Russian, the tall, stocky man with thick eyebrows and blocky features. This one took longer. It wasn’t until a half hour later that Malone was satisfied.

  Immediately he turned it and the first sketch upside down so he wouldn’t be tempted to look at them. Beginning the process anew, searching his memory, using shortcuts that the process of doing the first sketch had taught him, he was able to produce another likeness of the first Russian much quicker, in less than ten minutes. He did the same with a new sketch of the second Russian. He compared these sketches with the previous ones and assured himself that they were more or less identical, that his memory wasn’t straying. He went through the process again. And again. Each version took less time, and each was the same as the others.

  When he was confident that his memory had been so reinforced that he’d be able to produce a sketch of either man at will, he folded each eight-by-ten-inch piece of paper into one-inch strips so the sheets resembled accordions. He opened each accordion enough so it could stand upright in the bathroom sink. He struck a match and lit the top of each accordion, watching the flame burn down to the bottom. The accordion shape caused the page to burn evenly and completely. Equally important, it resulted in almost no smoke. The trick was something he had learned in an otherwise-long-forgotten high school physics class. Who says education’s wasted on the young? he thought as he washed the ashes down the sink. He would have torn the pages into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, but he couldn’t be sure that some of the pieces wouldn’t drift back up later, as toilet paper sometimes did, and be discovered when the maid came in to clean the room. She might have instructions to tell Bellasar about anything unusual that she found, and if Bellasar ever learned that Malone had sketched the Russians, that would be all the evidence Bellasar would need.

  His lips and cheekbone throbbed as he opened the window to make sure every slight trace of smoke dispersed. Satisfying himself that everything was in order, he shut off the light and crawled into bed. The time was almost 5:00 A.M.

  But he didn’t sleep.

  | Go to Contents |

  SIX

  1

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “I missed you at breakfast,” Malone said.

  At the entrance to the sunroom, Sienna looked down at her feet. “I wasn’t hungry.”

  Although her movements weren’t as listless as the night before, she still didn’t seem alert. Her face was puffy. Her skin was pale. Her eyes had slight hollows beneath them. Perhaps because she knew she didn’t appear at her best, she kept her gaze slightly away from him. Or perhaps she wanted to avoid seeing what had been done to him.

  “How bad does it hurt?” She still didn’t look at his face.

  “I’d give you a stiff-upper-lip attitude, but my upper lip is too mashed.” It was a weak attempt at humor, but at the moment, weary from a sleepless night and afraid of how she was going to react t
o what he planned to tell her, he couldn’t think of anything else. Worse, how was he going to appeal to her if she wouldn’t even look at him? The gash on his cheek had swollen. His mouth was scabbed. It was a wonder she didn’t run from him in horror.

  “And you?” he asked softly. “How are you?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “How was Istanbul?”

  “Humid. Crowded.”

  “What I meant was —”

  “I know what you meant. I think we should talk about something else.” She wore sandals and a loose ankle-length skirt of beige linen. The pullover top was ecru. Her hands fidgeted with its hem, then suddenly let go as footsteps outside made her spin. She didn’t relax when she saw that it was only a servant going past. “We have to get started.”

  Something in her eyes reminded him of an animal that had been disciplined so much its spirit was broken. “Derek changed his mind,” she said. “He wants me to pose only partially nude.”

  Bellasar’s sudden change in plans puzzled Malone, but he was too preoccupied to consider the implications. It was as if he and Sienna hadn’t spent weeks together, as if there were a million miles between them.

  “Where do you want me?” she asked.

  This wasn’t how he had imagined their reunion. He had assumed that she would be communicative, that she would leave him an opening. Instead, he had the nervous feeling that they were opposed. “Over there. Against the wall. With the sunlight on you.”

  She did what she was told.

  But something about the way she moved made him straighten. “Wait a second. Are you limping?”

  “What?” She sounded as if she’d been caught doing something wrong.

  “You’re limping.”

  “No.”

  “Sure you are. You look like you’re in pain.”

  “It’s nothing. My legs got cramped from sitting too long on the plane yesterday.”

  “I don’t believe you. Come back this way. Walk toward me.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s just a —”

  “Walk toward me.”

  She didn’t move.

  Malone approached her, studying her. “What’s happened?”

  She looked away.

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  Malone felt a terrible urgency. He had always been careful about what he said in the sunroom, assuming that Bellasar had microphones hidden there. A couple of times, he had pushed the boundary, hence Bellasar’s sudden appearances to assert his authority. But now as events spiraled out of control, Malone knew that no matter how guarded Sienna was being with him, he had to take the risk.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She looked puzzled, as if she had braced herself to keep resisting and hadn’t expected him to back off.

  “If you’re not hurt, we can get to work. Your husband won’t like it if we waste time. In fact, I’ve already decided on the pose I want. We can skip doing further sketches. I’m going to start painting right away.”

  As he spoke, he took her arm and guided her toward the back of the sunroom.

  “What are you —”

  But he cut her off. “I need to get some supplies from the storage room. Wait out here. I’ll just be a minute.”

  In contradiction to what he said, however, he took Sienna with him.

  Through a door in back — into the storage room.

  2

  It was small, damp, and faintly lit, crammed with painting supplies. There weren’t any windows.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Keep your voice down.” Malone shut the door, then guided her past easels and boxes toward a sink. He couldn’t be sure that the storage room wasn’t bugged. Given how cramped it was, Bellasar would probably have dismissed it as a place where conversations would be held. But just to make sure, Malone turned on the faucets, hoping that the sound of running water would obscure their voices. “I’m afraid there are microphones where we work.”

  “Microphones?” As the idea struck her, Sienna gripped the sink.

  “Tell me what he did to you.”

  “No. We have to get out of here. If Derek —”

  “I can help you.”

  “No one can help me.”

  “Please, let me try.”

  They stood frozen, staring at each other. Slowly, she raised a finger toward his ravaged face. She almost touched his mangled lips. She traced an imaginary line around the stitches on his swollen cheek.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Last night, when I saw what he’d done to you, I wanted to cry.”

  “But what did he do to you?”

  Her eyes misted. She shook her head from side to side. “You’ve seen what Derek can be like. Don’t get involved in this.”

  “I have to.”

  After the most poignant look anyone had ever given him, Sienna bent slowly. Her hands trembled as she raised her skirt, first past her ankles, then past her shins.

  Malone gaped at the bruises above her knees. Her thighs were a purple mass of them; they looked like beefsteak.

  “Jesus,” he murmured.

  In pain, she lowered the hem of her skirt back down to her ankles. Straightening, pulling the waistband slightly away from her body, she showed him where the angry-looking bruises continued to the top of her hips.

  “What the hell did he —”

  “The man Derek was meeting barely noticed me.” Sienna shuddered. “In fact, he couldn’t wait for me to leave. It was the first time that had ever happened. When Derek came back to our suite at three in the morning, he was furious. It was my fault, he said, that the negotiation had almost fallen through. He told me I was useless to him, that he could barely stand to look at me, that …”

  Malone touched her arm. “Easy. You don’t have to put yourself through it again.”

  “For the first time since I’ve known him, he made a fist to hit me. It was like I was back in Milan five years ago with the boyfriend who beat me up.” She flinched, as if seeing the fist again. “Then he looked shocked, realizing what he was doing. The one thing I thought I could always count on was that he’d never hurt me. All of a sudden, he started kicking me, the way he’d kick a football, the tips of his shoes coming at me. He chose a spot where the bruises wouldn’t show — above the hem of my dress. I tried to defend myself, to get behind a table, but he kept coming at me, kicking, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor. He wouldn’t stop. If it hadn’t been for Alex coming in, I’m afraid he might have —”

  “Where is Alex? Why didn’t he return with you and Derek?”

  “He stayed in Istanbul. Something to do with the negotiations. Some trick Derek has him up to as a way of putting pressure on the man he’s dealing with. He’s coming back this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?”

  Sienna frowned. “You make it sound important. Why?”

  “I have to explain something.”

  “No. If Derek doesn’t see some progress … I realize I look like hell, but this isn’t a photograph — it’s a portrait. You can fake it. You can make me look as beautiful as —”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Please. I don’t want to be kicked again. I don’t want —”

  “Don’t worry.” Malone’s voice hardened. “If I have anything to do about it, your husband’s never going to kick you again. No one is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I can get you out of here, will you go with me? Will you take the chance to escape?”

  And there it was. The words, so long restrained, were finally free. He couldn’t turn back. He held his breath, fearing her reaction. If he’d misjudged her, if she was uncontrollably dominated by Bellasar to the point where she could never imagine going against him, he had just guaranteed that he’d soon be dead. She would look at him in dismay. She would accuse him of having misjudged her. She would tell Bellasar.

  “Escape?” Sienna made
the word sound like nonsense. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Jesus, I made the wrong choice, Malone thought. I just threw my life away.

  “It isn’t possible to escape,” she said.

  “What?” Malone shook his head in confusion. If she was going to turn against him, this wasn’t what he had expected.

  “Don’t you think I’ve considered it? Don’t you think I would have done it if I could have found a way?”

  “You’ll come with me?”

  “How? Where? Even if we could get out of here, Derek would never rest until he found us. He’d use all his power and money, every resource at his disposal, to track us down.”

  But we wouldn’t be alone, Malone wanted to tell her. If we can get out of here, we’ll have all the help we could ever want. He didn’t dare say it. If she thought he was a spy, if she thought he had come here to use her …

  “We have to take the chance,” he said.

  “We can’t! Look, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to risk your life for me. Complete the portrait and leave.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’ve been taking care of myself since I was twelve. I survived what Derek did to me in Istanbul, and I’ll survive worse as long as he tolerates me. But I’ll never survive if he finds out I’ve betrayed him.”

  “Listen to me.” Malone hesitated. There wasn’t an easy way to say this. “He’s planning to have you killed.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been married three times before.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All of his wives were beautiful. But when they got to be around thirty and started to show signs of aging, they died in various accidents.”

  Sienna’s mouth opened, but she seemed to have lost the power of speech.

  “Before each accident, your husband hired a prominent artist to do a portrait of each woman — to memorialize her after death, to have a trophy, to make her beauty permanent. Now it’s your turn.”