“So everyone understood that he . . .” Juliette found she couldn’t even say the words. The sound of the shots filled her head, the bloody eruption of Frank’s hand, Usher falling back with a horrible yell.
“Was acting in self-defense. Or yours and Mercy’s defense. The important thing, I’ve found,” he said, leaning his head back and looking at the ceiling, “is clearing things up before anyone enters anything into a computer. Truth is a fluid state until some bureaucrat hits the save button.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Juliette said. “No, really,” she answered his raised eyebrow. “You didn’t have to do that, didn’t have to get involved.”
“I don’t know that I did much beside drive him home,” O’Connor said with a sigh. “Devlin seemed to have things under control when I got there. But it was the least I could do. I owe the man. Without him, I never would have found you.” Lifting her hand to his lips, he gave her his famously wicked grin.
Juliette couldn’t help but laugh.
“Are you ever serious, I wonder?” she asked, though she did not withdraw her hand. “Or do you save that for the camera?”
Michael sat up and returned her hand to her. “If I chose this particular moment to be serious, Juliette,” he said, “I believe it would break my heart.” Before she could answer, he stood. “In the chapel,” he said again. “And now, I’m needed in makeup. Though I am beginning to understand how those poor bastards felt on Apocalypse Now.”
Juliette found Devlin in the chapel, sitting in the front row, looking up at the crucified Christ, the shining eyes rolling heavenward, the blood still dripping vividly from the figure’s side and hands and circle of thorns.
“Only the Mexicans outdo the Italians when it comes to the blood and gore,” Juliette said, sitting down next to him. “Although I don’t know—where do ancient Irish crucifixions stand in terms of ghastliness?”
“There aren’t any,” Devlin said flatly, his eyes still on the altar. “All our cathedrals and abbeys were destroyed by the British.” As Juliette tried to come up with a response to this, he sighed. “It’s very peaceful in here,” he said. “Very quiet. A good place to contemplate the sins one shares only with the Almighty.”
“Yes,” she said, inhaling the dark sacred smell of cool stone, old dry wood, and resin. If she closed her eyes, she could find a note of incense—when she was a child, a priest came to Cerreta on Sundays to say mass for the few families that still lived on the property, heard confessions once a month. Because the chapel was so small, Juliette was expected to sit perfectly still; she remembered secretly carving grooves into the layers of wax that had built up on the short pews to keep herself from twitching in boredom, how the wax had collected, dark and sticky, beneath her nails. “I haven’t spent any time in here for years,” she said.
They sat in silence for several long minutes. Juliette stole a few looks at Devlin’s profile. There was nothing to see but the face she had known for so long, lost in thought but still as familiar to her as her own. More so, since she looked at it all day long back at the Pinnacle. He seemed so distant, so quiet and solemn, so unlike Dev that guilt rose inside her like nausea. He was probably furious with her, and he had every right to be. First she left with little explanation and no promise of return, and then she dragged him into a situation from which he literally had to shoot his way out. She had to do something to fix things; although she had no idea what sort of relationship they would have, could have after all this, she couldn’t bear the thought of him hating her.
“I’m going to come back with you to L.A.,” she said abruptly, although she had not had this thought, or even an inkling of this thought, in the seconds before she spoke. “I just need to tie up a few ends here; we could go by the end of the week. I mean, if you want. To wait.”
“I’m leaving tonight,” he said quietly. “I’m flying out of Rome first thing tomorrow, so I’ll spend the night there.”
“Oh,” Juliette said. “Well. Okay. Do I have time to pack?”
“There’s no reason for you to rush back,” he said in a quiet, steady voice, his eyes still on the altar. “Corporate is actually looking for some help opening the new hotel in Paris. In all the excitement, I forgot to mention it.”
Still he did not look at her. Juliette’s neck and shoulders tightened and she felt as if the temperature in the chapel had dropped twenty degrees.
“You’re going to Paris?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Not me. I was thinking of you. It seems like a good opportunity for you.”
“You don’t want me to come back?” she asked, the words almost choking her. “You don’t want me to come back at all?”
“They’d only need you for a month or so,” he said, still not looking at her. “It would be temporary. It would be Paris. Where, I believe, Michael’s shooting his next film. I mean, unless you’re planning to stay on here. Which would make sense.”
“Is that why you don’t want me to come back? Because of Michael? Because if that’s the case, then you need to know—”
“That’s not the case,” he said.
“Then what?” she asked. The distance in his voice made her feel desperate. Two minutes ago, she hadn’t even thought of returning to Los Angeles; now it seemed she could never be happy unless she went this very minute, unless she could reassure herself that nothing had changed, or at least nothing important. “Are you angry that I got you involved in all this? Because I really am sorry, though I don’t know what we would have done—”
“I’m not angry,” he said, cutting her off in the same quiet voice. “I’m just . . .” He paused, and finally looked at her. “I’m just not sure where we go from here.”
“You mean what happened in Siena? Well, you don’t have to worry, I mean if you’re worried. I don’t expect you to . . .” Juliette stammered.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” he said. “That we can deal with, or not, as we choose. I’m more concerned about what happened after. In the woods.”
He paused, waiting for her to speak.
“What were you thinking when I shot Usher?” he asked when she did not. “When I shot those other men?”
Juliette swallowed hard. From the moment she saw Devlin sitting in the chapel, what had happened in the woods had become simply impossible. Or like something that had happened years before, to another person.
“I thought you did it because you had to,” she said automatically, banishing the image of him firing the gun, how horrible it had been, the shocking violence of it, the noise and blood. “You did it to keep Mercy from killing Usher, which she probably would have, if only accidentally. And to keep those guys from killing us. I don’t think you should feel bad about it. I mean, it must be awful to shoot someone, but there was nothing else you could have done. And no one died.”
Devlin surveyed her with a coolness that unnerved her.
“I don’t feel bad about it. It didn’t bother me in the least,” he said. “I’m glad the shots were clean, but if they hadn’t been, I would have been fine with that, too. I was, as I told you, protecting my interests.”
“Well,” Juliette said, refusing to understand what it was he was trying to tell her, “you wound up saving Usher’s life. Even if Mercy hadn’t killed him, those other two would have. But it’s over now, so there’s no reason to dwell on it.”
Devlin sighed and rubbed his brow with one hand. “That’s not the point, J.”
“You did what you had to do,” Juliette said. “I get it.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Because you’re sitting there already pretending that it didn’t happen. Or that some other version of it happened.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. It’s what you do. I saw your face when I shot Usher. You looked at me as if you didn’t know who I was. You looked at me as if you were afraid I’d shoot you next.”
Juliette felt her mouth go dry. Devlin’s voice was steady, his face unreadable, and t
hat had been exactly what she had thought. “I didn’t think you would shoot me, Dev. I was just totally freaked out. Guns were going off, people were falling down and screaming. It wasn’t like it looks in the movies. It was kind of awful.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “I know. You said there were times when you don’t even know me.”
“I said that because I was angry—”
“You said that because it’s true.”
There was a long silence.
“I know what people say about me back in L.A., the rumors of my dark and dangerous past. Hell, I encourage them.” He shrugged. “Women like it, the big suits like it, and it’s good for business. It’s not all rumor, J. But it’s not glamorous, either. I meant what I said to Mercy. There are things that, once you’ve done them, make happiness difficult. Not impossible, as it turns out, but difficult.”
“Dev,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.
“No,” he said, jerking his arm away as if he had been stung. “Good Lord, J. I don’t need that, I don’t need you to heal me. I just don’t want to ever see that look on your face again.”
“You won’t,” she said, desperately wishing she could end this conversation, roll back time, and erase the scene in the woods so they could be who they had been together just twenty-four hours ago. “That’s what I’ve been saying. It happened. It’s over and I don’t need to think about it anymore.”
“Yes, you do.” He stood, practically knocking down the pew in front of him, his voice harsh and frightening in the musty silence of the chapel. “You do need to think about it,” he said more calmly. “Before you come back. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not ashamed of my past, but it is real. I’ve always wondered why you’ve never asked about it, about where all the rumors come from. Women usually do.”
Juliette looked at him, genuinely surprised.
“I didn’t care where the rumors came from,” she said. “And I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it. That’s one of the things I love best about you. You don’t need to talk about everything. You accept things the way they are and just do what needs to be done.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling a bit and looked like Dev again. “Go to Paris, J.,” he said softly. “Or stay here. Sort out what you need to sort out. Come back when it isn’t some sort of grand gesture. I’m past the point in my life where I appreciate them.”
Chapter Eighteen
IT WAS AMAZING, REALLY, how quickly and efficiently the shoot wrapped up after Bill Becker arrived. He seemed to bring what was left of Hollywood with him, and not just the macrobiotic chef and three personal assistants, who immediately set up what looked like a technological command center in the library. Computers, flat-screens, consoles—Gabe took one look at what had once been a rather stately and certainly historical room, and did a complete about face.
“Now we’re fucking NASA? He’s here for three days? It looks like he’s got federal funding. No,” he said, waving away Juliette’s assurances, “it doesn’t matter. God only knows what the end result of this experiment will be but there’s no point worrying about it now.”
Carson walked around white-faced but smiling. She had spent two long hours holed up with Becker on the day that he arrived—his profanity, much of it so choked with anger it was incomprehensible, slammed through the windows and ricocheted around the courtyard like gunfire. Whoever could, fled to their respective domiciles and sat hunched on their beds quietly gossiping and making dire predictions like kids at camp. Those crew members who were taking down the various sets did so in cautious silence and clouds of cigarette smoke.
But after he saw footage, Becker’s demeanor changed. He became so amiable it was as if he had been replaced by a different man. Juliette watched with bitter amusement as he introduced himself to the staff and the interns, wearing a retro-striped button-down shirt that he could have lifted from Tony Soprano. Slapping backs and kissing cheeks, he moved his enormous bulk with surprising grace, greeting cast and crew like a newly elected president at a victory party. Still shaken by Dev’s abrupt departure and shocked anew at the way in which filmmakers could put the concerns of their industry above life, death, and just about everything in between, Juliette had gone out of her way to avoid greeting Becker, a man she had never liked. Yet speaking with her seemed to be high on his agenda, and when he caught up with her, as she was rearranging one of the garden sheds in a field far behind the villa, he embraced her like a long-lost uncle.
“I knew as soon as I heard your name that this would be the best decision I ever made,” Becker announced. Except for the uncharacteristic sheen of sweat on his face and increasingly visible scalp, he could have been standing in the lobby of the Pinnacle, rather than in a dusty little hut, rank with the smell of pig fodder and fertilizer. “Fate, I said, fate sent you to me when I needed you most.”
“Yes, well,” Juliette said, extricating herself awkwardly from his embrace. “It’s all been rather harrowing for everyone. Particularly Mercy.”
Becker gave her a knowing look, rummaged in his pocket, and produced his cigar. “Ah, yes, poor Angie. Such a tragedy. Losing a parent, any parent, is always difficult. But you know, I think Mercy will not only survive her loss, she’ll emerge even stronger and more focused. Already she strikes me as more mature.” He lit his cigar and peered at her through the smoke. “Death has a way of clarifying things, don’t you think, Ms. Greyson?”
Juliette shook her head. As always happened when she was in the presence of this man, she was torn between disgust and admiration—Becker was the coldest, most callous person she had ever met, and considering the city in which she worked, that was saying something. But he had a way of speaking unspeakable truths with such utter lack of apology that she couldn’t help feeling envy, even respect. Having survived his own rather notorious fall, Becker seemed unafraid of consequence or opinion; his worldview was not hers, not by a long shot, but at least he had one, and stuck by it.
“Some things, Mr. Becker,” she said gravely. “Other things just become even more . . . tangled.”
“But that’s what makes life interesting,” he said. “The untangling. Some of us,” he added with a knowing squint, “can make that our life’s work. Anyway”—he jabbed the cigar back in his mouth—“it’s going to be one helluva movie. And that’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Create a little lasting beauty in this chaotic and indifferent world?”
He stepped out of the shed and squinted into the sunlight. “And if that bastard Golonski fucks it up in the editing room, I will kill him myself.”
Whether it was Becker’s presence or just everyone’s desire to finally be done with the film, the few scenes that still had to be shot proceeded like clockwork, without incident. O’Connor was the very model of a movie star, cracking jokes with the crew and teasing Mercy as if he were her older brother. Mercy, meanwhile, was prompt, professional, and subdued; she also appeared, for the first time in a long time, to be totally sober.
“She’s not, of course,” said Gabe, when Juliette made this observation to him while the two oversaw the creation of Cerreta gift baskets that Carson had ordered for the principal cast and crew. “Frankly, at this point she couldn’t just quit and expect to finish things; she’d be too far gone into withdrawal. But she does seem to have found some level of mood maintenance, which is probably worse for her in the long run than the DTs.”
“What are you talking about?” Juliette was exasperated. “Look at her, she’s functioning, she’s lucid, she’s sleeping. I wish I could say the same thing. Considering everything that’s happened, it’s a fucking miracle.”
Gabe shook his head and repositioned a bottle of olive oil.
“Miracles like that you pay for on the back end,” he said. “She’ll start thinking she can control her disease and all the craziness will start again, only this time worse.”
“Or maybe she’s actually taking everything she’s learned seriously.”
A look of doubt passed over
Gabe’s face, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he caught himself, took a deep breath, and said, “Maybe. Maybe you’re right.”
Those four words took such an obvious physical effort that the two of them burst out laughing.
“She wants to stay here,” Juliette said finally, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
Gabe nodded, fanned out packages of sliced salami as if they were playing cards. “I know,” he said quietly.
“And?” Juliette looked at her cousin curiously.
“I told her I don’t have your talent for caregiving. Or your tolerance for backsliding.”
Now it was Juliette’s turn to shake her head. “You are so full of it. You’d walk barefoot over broken glass for her if she asked.”
Gabe shrugged. “I know. Which is why I need rules. Without rules, I would run amok. Just like Mercy. Which is why maybe I can help her.”
Juliette turned his words over in her head for the rest of the day. In a way, she and Gabe had chosen similar methods to cope with life—he had the orderliness of his program and the unending cycle of work on the farm, she had the Pinnacle, with its caste system, its code of silent knowledge, and the ceaseless demands of the service industry. Neither she nor her cousin did well with idleness. But as for rules, well, the few rules Juliette had—don’t fall in love with an actor, don’t sleep with Devlin, don’t talk about the past, don’t go back to Cerreta—she had not simply broken, she had shattered.
She had come to Italy to find the slim living spine of things, to cut away the dead and dying branches of her life in the hopes of discovering whatever was still green and vital in her. But she hadn’t expected to be stripped down to the root, to discover that the weight she carried was almost entirely of her own creation. Something inside her brain lifted like a low-hanging bank of clouds, revealing a wider, a limitless, sky.
So when she went to O’Connor’s room to bring him more towels, when he opened the door bare-chested, his hair wet from the shower and the smell of soap still rich in the air, she allowed herself to consider the possibility of doing something simply because she wanted to do it. She did not trust O’Connor like she did Devlin, but with low expectations came a certain measure of freedom. Loving Devlin, she realized now, would be a delicate and complicated endeavor. He was not simply a rock amid stormy seas, he was the sea as well. Compared with Devlin’s, O’Connor’s needs were simple. He was content with her simply showing up.
The Starlet Page 30