Maggie stood as still as one of the stone statues, behind a bright burst of bougainvillea. She studied the cruel, bull-like features, the barrel chest, the dark robes. The setting sun was behind him, casting a blue shadow across his eyes. He held an enormous white Persian cat against his chest.
She slid her hand into her pocket, felt the security of the small pistol, and stepped out from behind the wall of pink flowers.
At the sound of her footstep on the stony path, he turned and shaded his eyes against the bright falling sun. “Who’s there?”
“Magdalena O’Shea.”
Orsini’s nod was fatalistic. “I’ve been expecting you.”
She walked toward him, and then stopped. They stood staring at each other, five feet apart.
“Have you come here to kill me, Magdalena?”
“I’ve come to look into your damned eyes,” she told him quietly. “To hear you say the words. To find justice for my husband.” She took a shuddering breath. “I’ve come to stop you.”
“Your husband couldn’t stop me. No one can. Not Sugarman, not Gideon. Certainly not you.”
“I will stop you,” she said. “You ordered the murder of my husband, you filthy monster. You’re responsible for the death of my best friend. You tried to kill my son.” The words scraped from her mouth. “I loved them. Why? Why did Fee and Johnny have to die?”
Coal-black eyes stared into hers. He stroked the cat with thick, sun-browned fingers. A heavy gold ring flashed in the light.
And in her memory—a ring, flashing blue.
“You dare to stand here, Magdalena, so righteous. So innocent. But you told Sofia to leave me, didn’t you? To take my boy—my son—and run. Sofia left me because of you. And then you tried to take my son away from me!”
Maggie felt the rage crawl up her throat. She backed away from him as the horror threatened to choke her. “You’re twisting the truth,” she whispered. “You don’t even know how awful you are. Fee left you to protect Tommy.”
“The truth?” He lifted his face toward the orange sun. “The truth is that I wanted Fee found, Magdalena. I wanted my wife and my son to come home. I did not want her to die.”
“Liar. She loved you once, Victor. What happened to you?”
He turned to study the rosebushes that spilled across the path. “I confused love with possession. And I never told her the truth about my family,” he murmured, reaching out to touch a rose that shimmered with fire in the dying light. “Even so, Sofia called me her ‘Bright Angel.’ Because somehow she knew that, like Lucifer, I’d fallen to earth with my wings on fire.”
Maggie’s eyes were locked on his thick fingers, caressing the rose petals. “You gave Fee your mother’s sapphire ring,” she said.
A flash of blue. Where had she seen it? On Fee’s finger? No. Dane’s hand. It was Dane who murdered Fee and took her ring…
Orsini turned back to her. “I loved her, in my way.”
“Given the choice,” she said, “men like you will always choose power over love.”
He shrugged. “I thought Sofia could save me. But no one could.”
“Save you from what?”
“The sins of the father. They said my father was a random mugging victim, but the truth is, he took his own life. At the end of the day, he could not live with his guilt.” He looked down at the cat held against his chest, and spoke as if to himself. “I thought for years that I could make amends.”
“Then why did my husband have to die? You had no reason to hurt him.”
“I had the best reason of all. His death would hurt you.” He shrugged. “But that is not what happened. Your husband suspected that my father collaborated with the Nazis, stole priceless art and music during the war. And that I used those stolen treasures to finance my operations. Of course, I wanted him stopped. Johnny O’Shea was getting too close to finding me. I could not allow him to expose the truth about my past.”
“You bastard.”
“But I did not order his death.”
Maggie inhaled, stunned by his words. He’s lying. And yet…
Orsini smiled. “The sea, and the storm, took care of that. Or so I was told…” He shook his head at the strange vagaries of fate. “Your husband was doing you a favor, searching for your godson. But what he found was leading him directly to me. To my secrets.”
“I don’t give a damn about your filthy secrets.”
“Perhaps you should.”
“What does that mean?”
Orsini stroked the Persian cat held against his chest. “At the end, Sofia discovered my secrets,” he said. “You were her dearest friend, she sent you letters all the time. Did she tell you what she found? Did she send you the manuscript of sheet music that she stole from me? Or tell you where she’d hidden it?”
“She wrote that she took a rare violin concerto that belonged to you.”
“Stole from me. The most amazing musical discovery in the last two hundred years. It will turn the music world upside down.”
Her eyes were locked on his. “A Holy Grail of music…”
He smiled coldly at her. “I wanted you to come to France,” he admitted. “I thought that you would know where the score was. Or lead me to it.”
She shook her head. “I know Fee took the concerto from you before Zach had a chance to authenticate it. But no, I have no idea where it is. It may stay lost forever.”
“I must have it. It was to be the find of the century, the signature piece for my sister. And the road to my own redemption. To return something beautiful that was lost. To replace ugliness with glory…”
“Your sister was Bianca Farnese.”
His head came up sharply.
“I know what happened in Ravello, Victor. Your sister was a brilliant violinist. She didn’t deserve to die.”
He shook his bull’s head slowly. “No. But I will have my revenge. On all of you.” He gazed blindly toward the sky. “Do you know the best way to hurt someone, Magdalena?”
She stared at him, sickened.
“Take away the person they love the most. You have taken away everything else that mattered to me. My art. Gideon. My wife. My son.” Black eyes burned into hers. “I know about your colonel, Magdalena. Imagine how he would suffer if he loses you. How your son would suffer.”
“Murderer,” she whispered. “I hope you rot in hell.”
“I do not deny that I am ruthless. But I am not amoral. I am a once-moral man, at war.”
She saw the glint of black metal appear over the cat’s fur, pointing at her heart.
She held out her hands.
Suddenly, tumbling into the air, the monastery chimes rang out from the chapel bell tower.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL. JULY 12
“Ravello.”
In the flickering light of the ER, the Admiral looked down at his veined hands. “It all went wrong when Orsini’s sister was killed in that damned CIA operation in Italy. Bianca Farnese wasn’t supposed to die at that concert in Ravello, Sugar. The front-running Italian candidate for Prime Minister wanted to meet her, wanted to hear her perform. He was a charismatic Communist. And we wanted to shut him down. So we used her performance to get him to Ravello. The Communist and the US Ambassador to Italy, together in the front row. It was perfect. A win-win for us.”
“Until the bomb went off at the wrong time,” said Sugarman, suddenly understanding.
The Admiral nodded. “The Tartini was supposed to be the signal. Somehow we blew it and in a split second we took away the one person in all the world that Orsini cared about. And then all of a sudden he was coming after us, Sugar. With our own damned money.” The silver head shook wearily. “He blamed us, of course. Began to sell his art to private collectors, amassed a fortune to finance his own acts of terror. Against us. The ultimate act of revenge. I couldn’t do anything without incriminating the agency. Or myself.”
“Because Orsini blamed you. He would never have done business
with you, would he, Admiral? He wanted to take you down.”
The old man turned away to stare out the window.
“Right. But you needed him, didn’t you, to do your dirty work for you.” Sugarman snapped his fingers. “Enter Vanessa Durand. You had her in your pocket.”
The Admiral’s eyebrows were coal slashes on the pale forehead. “I was close, Sugar. The wind was at my back, I was almost past the three-mile limit. If it hadn’t been for…”
Sugarman smiled. “Yeah. Beckett. And a valiant concert pianist.”
“Listen to me, Sugar. I still have access to millions of dollars in secret Cayman accounts. There’s still time for damage control.”
“That ship has sailed, Admiral. I put the proof in The Man’s hand myself, just hours ago.”
The fire went out of the bright blue eyes, extinguished like a flame in a sudden wind. “You threw me overboard, Sugar?” The parchment skin was bone-white on the shocked face. “Good God, man, why?”
“Because of Sofia Orsini. Sofia needed help when she ran from Orsini. She’d become friendly with Vanessa Durand, Victor’s art dealer. Fee turned to her friend, a woman she trusted.” Sugarman’s dark eyes flashed with pain. “But Vanessa told you that, didn’t she?”
“No.”
“Yes. Vanessa worked for you, she told you about Fee, and you got word to Orsini.” Rage burned in his voice. “You told Orsini where Sofia was hiding. You’re the monster responsible for her death.”
“I couldn’t let that journal fall into anyone else’s hands.”
Sugarman was moving toward the door. He stopped, stiffened. “Johnny O’Shea…” he said. “You thought Johnny O’Shea was going to find the truth. Not about Orsini. About you. You arranged for Vanessa, your agent, to send him to that art curator in Hyères. Arranged for the curator to tell Johnny that Orsini was hiding on a yacht in the Porquerolles. Arranged for a bomb on a sleek white sailboat.”
“You’re navigating through murky moral waters, Sugar. That art dealer in Hyères is long gone. You can’t prove any of it.” The Admiral turned away to stare out over the black treetops. “And by the way, Sugar. That phone call you insist Orsini made to his Skull and Bones friend at Yale, asking for help? He made two phone calls that night. To two of us, not just one. There’s someone else out there who knows the truth about Orsini, Sugar. Someone else knows about the money, the art. It’s not over.”
“Then I’ll just have to keep looking for that other person, won’t I, Admiral?”
Through the open window, Sugarman could smell the magnolia blossoms and hear the soft fluttering as a fresh wind rocked the narrow branches.
“When the bough breaks…” said Sugarman. Then he closed the door softly behind him.
* * *
The chimes of Saint Paul de Mausole’s monastery bells echoed over the shifting shadows in the hidden garden, calling the monks to Evensong.
Chimes. Maggie raised her head, listening. And froze. In that instant, the answers tore into her, like a knife stabbing through fog. Finally, the last pieces of her nightmare’s puzzle fell into place. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to see the stormy, windswept beach of her dream. She was sitting at the grand piano, her scarf like a banner in the wind, and she raised her head to listen. And heard…what?
A telephone, ringing loudly, endlessly, in the darkness. And—chimes! The echo of church chimes. A monastery? No. A convent.
The final message from her husband, written in his calendar. Begin at the beginning, CFSMC. She thought of the last letter from Sofia, then the phone call from an unidentified woman. Sofia had sought refuge in the Convent of the Fog. CF? Suddenly she saw it all, like finding the last pages of a long lost concerto. She had to get to the island, to the convent. Had to leave now, before Orsini realized…
She spun away from the man with the gun.
“Not so fast, Magdalena.”
Orsini’s hand moved and the white cat growled in his arms. She heard the faint click of a hammer being cocked on his gun.
“You have taken my son from me,” said Orsini. “Where is Tommy, damn you? What have you done with my son?”
“Your son is safe.”
“Return him to me.”
“It’s too late, Victor. Gideon will testify against you. So will Celeste LaMartine.”
“Gideon is alive?” For just an instant, the dark eyes gleamed at her with a strange light. Then the eyes hooded and the barrel shoulders shrugged. “It no longer matters. And Celeste would never turn against me.”
“You’ve destroyed her life with Gideon, you shot the man she loves.” cried Maggie. “She must hate you now. Almost as much as I do.”
The barrel of Orsini’s gun moved back and forth. “Let us finish this little drama, then.”
Maggie stood straight and still in the hot, pulsing light. She stared at the man who was responsible for the deaths of her husband and her best friend. Wasn’t he? Oh God.
Very slowly Maggie drew the revolver from the pocket of her jeans until it was aimed at Victor Orsini’s chest. “I will not let my life be shattered again,” she told him.
His thick fingers gripped the huge cat firmly against his heart. “You won’t shoot,” he said to her.
The small pistol was shaking in her hand. High on the silver monastery wall a blue shutter shifted, swung slowly open. Somewhere behind her she could hear the low drone of bees in the poppies and the late-day song of the cicadas. She felt the hot white light of the spinning sun wash across her face.
The bright day is done...
She stared into the terrible black hole of Orsini’s gun. She couldn’t breathe.
Shoot him, her mind screamed. Just aim past the cat and shoot!
Orsini stepped closer, looking into her eyes. “If you kill me,” he whispered. “you will never know the truth about Sofia. Or what really happened to your husband the night he died.” He smiled. “Don’t you want to know the truth?”
“More than anything,” she whispered.
Orsini moved, flinging the cat toward the bushes. A flare of sunlight on gun metal.
A shot, shattering the stillness.
A frozen moment of silence.
Maggie closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.
A second later, three more gunshots, crashing like cymbals through the dying light while the chimes rang and rang above her head.
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
BRITTANY, THE CONVENT OF THE FOG. LATE DAY, JULY 13
The old iron gate was locked.
Maggie pressed the bell a second time, peering through the black bars into the sixth-century Benedictine convent. Couvent de la Brume. The Convent of the Fog, abbreviated, in her husband’s calendar, as “CF.”
Go back to the beginning, he’d written.
On the far side of the ancient cloister, a blue door set deep within the stone wall opened. Maggie caught her breath. A nun, almost wider than she was tall, stepped into the mist-wreathed garden.
Maggie still could not wrap her mind around everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. The French Surete detectives had released her in Saint-Rémy at dawn, after two phone calls from Simon Sugarman and a third call from a man they referred to only as “Sir.” It had not been her bullet—found embedded in the monastery’s stone wall—that killed Orsini. He had been shot twice by Celeste LaMartine, from behind a blue-shuttered window high on the monastery wall. One of the bullets had found his heart.
Once released, Maggie had gone immediately to the airport. Now, hours later, she stood at the high iron bars, the fingers of fog cool against her cheek, waiting for the nun to unlock the gate. In the distance, she could hear the muffled thunder of waves pounding against the rocks.
So much of her time with Orsini was still a blur. But she could remember the flash as his arm moved. He had fired first, his shot wide. Deliberately? She would never know. And then, terrified, she had looked into the menacing black barrel of his gun, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger of the smal
l pistol. She still had no idea if she’d fired in self-defense or because she wanted justice for her husband and her best friend. Oh, yes, she had aimed at his heart and fired.
Hadn’t she? Or had she aimed at the stone wall behind him?
She closed her eyes and heard Orsini’s shot, felt the release of her own bullet, and then heard two more shots, apparently fired by Celeste. But she had heard five gunshots, hadn’t she? Who had fired the final bullet?
The nun approached her, holding a huge iron key, her eyes questioning. “Welcome, Madame O’Shea. I trust there is a good reason why you have insisted that I break our vow of silence?”
“The most important reason of all, Sister. I must speak with Soeur Marie Clair.”
The rest of her husband’s note, scribbled in his calendar… CFSMC. Convent of the Fog, Soeur Marie Clair. The sister who, according to Fee’s last letter, had hidden Fee and Tommy for days in the convent. The same woman who had called Maggie late one night, to tell her that Fee was dead.
The loud ringing of the telephone. And then, when Maggie had answered, she’d heard the convent’s chimes in the background, drowning out the woman’s voice.
The ringing phone, the chimes of her nightmare.
The nun hesitated, then unlocked the huge gate, swung it open, gestured for her to enter. “Soeur Marie Clair is no longer with us.”
Maggie stepped inside the gate and gazed down at the nun. “Where can I reach her?”
The nun shook her head. “She died last October of pneumonia.”
Maggie reached out, grasped the nun’s arm. “Just—tell me, please. Is Marie Clair the same sister who found the body of my friend, Sofia Orsini, in the chapel on the cliffs last fall?”
The nun stiffened, then sank down next to her on the hard bench. “Who are you?”
“Magdalena O’Shea. Sofia Orsini’s best friend. Her son’s godmother.”
Maggie watched the nun’s skin pale beneath the white wimple.
“Magdalena,” repeated the nun.
“Yes.”
The nun touched Maggie’s arm, leaned closer. “Soeur Marie Clair was an excellent nurse,” she began. “She befriended your friend, Sofia, and her little boy from the moment they showed up at the convent gate. She is the one who found Madame Orsini on the floor of the cliff chapel.”
The Lost Concerto Page 36