Suddenly she did not know whom to trust. Until she discovered what and whom Henning was running from, she would keep all truths to herself. As Iris had said, it was safer that way. ‘I fell,’ she said simply. ‘Thank you for lunch, Iris, but now I must go.’
She rose and left the rich panelled room, holding her shoulders back and her head high, bracing her body against the shock of what she had just learnt. As she stepped outside the front door, she realised she didn’t know where she was going so she stood under the cover of one of the rounded awnings and breathed in the rainy air, trying to decide on her next move. Two men were walking across the slick square towards her, the man furthest from her holding a large black umbrella. They wore dark suits and the wrong shoes for this sort of weather. Stevie could not see their faces but as they passed her, the man closest to Stevie turned his face towards her. She started: Aristo. He stopped, also surprised to see her.
‘Bonjour,’ he said softly. He was holding a Gitane between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Bonjour,’ she replied. ‘Même le ciel pleure,’ she added with a small shrug, not knowing how much she should say in front of his companion.
‘Even the sky is weeping,’ he agreed, still staring at her.
Aristo’s companion glanced at his watch. ‘Nous allors être en retard, Aristo,’ he grumbled.
‘Je vais te rejoinder plus tard, Armand. I have unfinished business here.’
The man shrugged and left, taking his umbrella with him. Aristo made no move to step out of the rain and into the entrance where Stevie was sheltering. Searching his face, Stevie saw that pain had changed him. The sense of indestructibility that came with youth, and that had clothed the Aristo she had known aboard the Hercules, was gone.
‘Why don’t you come out of the rain?’ she said gently.
Aristo stepped under cover and pulled out his phone. ‘Je suis au Ritz, s’il vous plaît, Helena.’ Then he hung up and turned to Stevie. ‘Will you come with me?’
Stevie nodded. Of course she would. It seemed like it was the only thing in the world she could do. They stared out at the rain and the darkening streets in silence. Two minutes later, a navy blue Mercedes pulled up. A rather beautiful female chauffeur in a cap got out with an umbrella and opened the back door.
They crossed the streets of the city in the heavy car, Stevie cracking the window to catch the smell of soot and bread and newsprint and electricity—now mixed with rain—that was the scent of Paris. Aristo was silent and Stevie felt no need to talk. As they drove up the Champs-Élysées, she wondered what he wanted . . . They took a left turn just before the Arc de Triomphe, and stopped in front of a classic honey-stone Parisian building with a glossy black door. They got out and walked up three deserted flights of marble stairs to double doors. Aristo opened the doors and let Stevie pass into the flat without a word.
Inside was an enfilade of rooms, parquet floors, moulded ceilings, white-panelled walls, gathering dust. Stevie caught a glimpse of her reflection in a vast gilded mirror as they entered the sitting room, her face terribly pale, her eyes, lined with kohl, somehow too large. On the floor sat about twenty cardboard boxes, most still sealed, piled one upon the other. Aristo gestured to Stevie to sit on a pile and did the same himself.
‘I’m so sorry, Aristo,’ she murmured.
He did not reply but made a gesture with his hand. ‘We were to live here,’ he said finally. ‘She was to have had anything she wanted, and we would have been happy.’ He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a champagne bottle, Roederer. From an open box full of tissue paper, Aristo fished out a beautiful silver fish knife and slit open another box beside him. All the boxes were full of china and silver, Stevie realised, exquisite objects that had now become the detritus of lives unlived. The pile of cardboard was a monument.
From the second box, Aristo took two perfect crystal flutes, delicately etched with flowers. ‘If you don’t object,’ he murmured, removing the wire basket from the cork. ‘An uncle of mine used to say, “When you drink champagne, you drink the tears of the world.” I think it is appropriate, don’t you?’
Stevie nodded. ‘I do,’ she replied quietly.
Aristo’s eyes locked onto hers as he handed her a full glass. ‘You lost your lover too,’ he said simply, placing the beading bottle on the floor.
Stevie felt her whole body tremble, then settle. It was true. She nodded and accepted a cigarette, inclining her head slightly towards the flame burning on Aristo’s silver lighter.
‘Then we understand each other.’
He slipped the lighter back into his pocket and looked at her again, as if trying to make up his mind about something. Stevie was taken aback by the power of his stare. She had to remind herself that Aristo was only twenty-one . . . But then, Marlena had not been an ordinary woman either and she had chosen this boy. His strength should not have surprised her. Stevie surrendered and let him look, not repelling the attention but rather letting it move over her, see through her. As she sat, she found anger growing to replace the tree of sorrow and confusion. Anger first—irrationally?—at Henning, then fury at Skorpios, who had made everything die.
‘Are you sure it was your father?’ she asked carefully.
‘I know it was my father.’ Aristo drew sharply on his cigarette. ‘There is no doubt in anyone’s mind. And now all that is left for me is to do what is just.’
His words chilled her, but she could not fault him. For a father to do that to his son was to flout the laws of nature, of basic humanity. And both of them knew it was a wrong that would never be addressed in any court of law. In Aristo’s eyes, the murder of his bride was a crime beyond law.
‘He pushed me,’ Stevie said, staring at the unused fireplace with its ornate marble frame. ‘That afternoon at the corrida—you were there.’
‘I thought the gate broke, you lost your balance.’
Stevie shook her head. ‘Your father reached out his hand. I thought he wanted to help me, but he shoved the gate open and pressed me backwards. He wanted to kill me too.’
Aristo stubbed out his cigarette on the corner of a cardboard box and looked at Stevie. For a long time he said nothing. When he spoke, his eyes were on the window. The raindrops lashing against the pane sounded like a snare drum.
‘I don’t think it was you he was trying to kill,’ he said finally. ‘He had no reason to.’
‘What do you mean?’ Stevie’s mind raced, and then in a flash of clarity she saw it. ‘He wanted to kill Henning, didn’t he?’ she asked.
Aristo reached for another cigarette.
‘He knew,’ Stevie cried. ‘He knew Henning would jump into the ring to save me, knew the bull would go for him. And I gave him the perfect opportunity, leaning against that little gate like a fool.’ She stared wildly at Aristo. ‘But why? Why would he want to do that?’
Aristo studied her for a moment. ‘You don’t know, Stevie?’
‘Know what?’ she replied quickly, her heart in her mouth.
‘Henning was a spy.’
Outside, an angry driver leant on his horn; the rain kept coming. Stevie suddenly felt sick. She had always known there was something mysterious about Henning, that there was more to the man than his job as a cataloguer of rare books—but Aristo’s revelation cast a shadow far blacker than she had ever expected. Her broken arm was aching and she rubbed her shoulder. It made perfect sense, of course. Men like Henning—with access, contacts and legitimate reasons for asking all sorts of questions—were often recruited to the secret service . . . Stevie assumed British, but it could have been any of them, and it didn’t really matter which . . . It explained his sudden appearances and disappearances, his encyclopaedic knowledge of guns, his seemingly endless and unorthodox list of ‘friends’, his evasiveness. But how had she, Stevie Duveen—experienced troubleshooter, assessor of risks, possessor of an unerring instinct— not seen it? She could never bind her life to that of a spy. The world of espionage was too full of darkness and deceptio
n. She had met too many spies to trust their kind. They were shifting waters and unknowable quantities and flashes of sunlight on glass. Not the sort of men you let into your heart.
Stevie turned away. Skorpios had obviously found out Henning’s secret; most likely he himself had been one of Henning’s targets. Men of his kind attracted that sort of attention, and governments always needed information on individuals of influence.
Leaning forward, Aristo said softly, ‘I want revenge and I want you to help me.’
Stevie examined the young man. ‘Why would you ask me?’
‘You have motive. And—’ he sought her eyes now ‘—Angelina told me about you, and what you did on the cruise ship. She said it was a secret, but that you do things . . . discreetly. She would never have told me, she said, if not for Marlena’s murder; it shifted the paradigm of promises. That’s how she put it to me.’
Stevie did not reply. Could she trust Aristo? Was he what he appeared to be? She had just learnt that she could no longer trust herself to know . . . Doubts swirled in her mind and the floor felt like it was falling away.
She took a deep, slow breath to steady herself then looked up: ‘Sangue lava sangue,’ she said softly. She had meant it as a question but her voice failed to find the motivation to rise at the end and it came out as a statement: Blood washes blood.
There was a long pause as the words hung in the air, irrevocable now that they had been spoken—set free—forcing the two of them to acknowledge what they were really saying.
It was Aristo who broke the silence. ‘I don’t want to kill my father, Stevie.’ He said it simply, lightly, as if it were the polite refusal of a small dessert. ‘When I was a boy, he used to call me into his study and read me passages from Machiavelli—and he always came back to the passage that asked: is it better to be loved or feared?’ Aristo shrugged and almost smiled. ‘Perhaps he was trying to explain why he couldn’t love me more.’
Stevie shut her eyes briefly in acknowledgment; she knew the passage.
Aristo went on. ‘You know, of course, Machiavelli’s answer: one would like to be both the one and the other, etcetera etcetera, but it is far safer to be feared than loved. To this end, my father is ruthless in his business deals, and prizes the reputation he has cultivated because of this. People fear him and this is the most important thing in the world to him. Isn’t that why he killed Marlena?’ Aristo’s foot, rubbing against the side of the cardboard box, was the only thing that gave away the tension burning inside the young man. ‘Stevie, the thing my father fears beyond anything in the world— and I include death here—is to be made ridiculous. This he could not bear. I want you to help me make his worst nightmare come true.’
Stevie noticed that, even when he stopped frowning, the furrow in Aristo’s brow left a permanent shadow across his forehead. Her heart suddenly leapt for him, the wounded boy, the mirror of her own sorrow. She could believe in that.
Stevie did not know who she was crying for anymore when she downed the last of the champagne: for Aristo and Marlena and their obliterated future; for Henning and his bravery and his terrible injuries; for Henning and his betrayal and the end of their love; for herself and the death of the hope which had grown in her foolish heart. She decided then that Skorpios would pay for what he had done. Whatever she might feel about Henning now, she owed him that much.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Sophie Edelstein, Rosie Garthwaite and Sam Swire for sharing their expertise with me. My brothers, Jason and Daniel, are always an inspiration, as are my parents, Michael and Manuela, who provide support, encouragement, and ideas—grazie! Fran Moore at Curtis Brown deserves another great big thankyou, as do Jane Palfreyman, Ann Lennox, Ali Lavau and the rest of the team at Allen & Unwin. Finally, a massive thankyou to my husband Nick, who always believes.
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