“You are a reporter, aren’t you? Again, ask Mr. Giovanni or Marcus. I’ll just say that he wasn’t a nice man. He was also something of a free-lancer until this thing.” Merkel shrugged. “Ask Marcus,” he said again, gave her a small salute, and went back into the house.
Rafaella was on her way to bed when Coco stopped her in the second-floor hallway. “Are you truly all right, Rafaella?”
“Shaky still, but that’s understandable. I’m okay, Coco.”
Coco paused a moment, then seemed to make up her mind about something. “Come with me out onto the balcony. It’s private there.”
Rafaella dutifully followed her to the balcony through a wide set of glass French doors at the south end of the hall. The iron railing could scarcely be seen through the tangled mass of bright red and purple bougainvillea. The night was calm, the air perfumed with the scents from the hibiscus, roses, and frangipani. Rafaella took a deep breath, turned, and smiled inquiringly at Coco.
“Just plow forward, Coco. Get it off your chest, whatever it is. My phenomenal bout with the killer boa? Marcus almost getting his throat cut in Marseilles? The book? What?”
“All right. It’s gone too far, Rafaella. Much too far. Someone took the boa from its preserve, brought it down from the middle ridge in a cage, and probably waited to release the snake when you were seen coming.”
Rafaella, still not immune from the experience, felt a tremor of fear race through her. “Yes,” she said, “the cage. It does give me pause, I assure you. But it isn’t a very reliable method of killing somebody, Coco. Who would be sure the stupid snake would decide to come after me? It could have simply napped while a dozen people strolled along that path. Why me? It’s all a very iffy proposition.”
Coco shrugged, but she looked worried, very worried. “Listen, for whatever reason, the boa went after you. If Link hadn’t been close by, you would have been killed, the life literally squeezed out of you. Tell me this. What if the snake hadn’t gotten you, what if that huge monster had just been lying on the path in front of you or dangling from a branch? How would you have felt?”
“Petrified. Scared out of my skin. I probably would have screamed my head off and run all the way to Antigua, all the way to the airport.”
“That’s what I think you should do. Leave, Rafaella. Tomorrow.” Coco paused a moment, drawing her beautifully arched brows together. “We’ve all assumed that the shot on the beach was intended for Marcus. We’ve assumed the helicopter crash was intended for Marcus as well, as a warning. Maybe both things were intended for you, Rafaella. Maybe someone doesn’t want you here.”
Coco had a point, and Rafaella wasn’t indifferent to it. She listened, then said simply, “Why, Coco? I’m just here to write a book, nothing more, nothing less, nothing remotely threatening to anyone. I repeat, who? Why?”
Coco said very slowly, not looking at Rafaella, but staring inland, toward the high middle ridge where the boa had lived, “I’m not an alarmist, not at all. I’ve thought about this a lot, quite a bit, in fact, even before the snake incident today. And I think it’s DeLorio. I think he’s jealous of you and he’s afraid, afraid that his father will come to value you more than he does his only son. He didn’t want to leave before you arrived here, but his father ordered him to Miami. It’s the same thing with Marcus, you know. The other times, both of you were together. This time you happened to be alone. I would have suspected Paula—for obvious reasons. She loathes you and wants nothing more than to see you hurt or off the island for good. But Paula doesn’t seem to me to have the smarts for such planning. I could be wrong, who knows? The bottom line, however, is the same. I think you should just put off writing the biography for a little while. There are other things going on, things that could also harm you.”
“Like Bathsheba?”
It had grown quite dark, and Rafaella wished she could see Coco’s expression more clearly. Coco wasn’t surprised, because Dominick had mentioned Bathsheba at dinner, but she stiffened nonetheless.
“What do you know about Bathsheba?”
“Just the name, that’s all Dominick said at dinner.”
“Well, just forget it. It’s not important to you—forget Bathsheba and think about all this. I’ll see you in the morning, Rafaella.” She stopped, turned, and said, a smile on her face, “You’re stubborn, but I am very fond of you and I don’t want to see you hurt.”
When Marcus saw Rafaella the following evening at nine o’clock, alone on the east lawn, he was so relieved to actually see that she was still in one piece that he bellowed, “Why the hell can’t you be more careful? What were you doing, hiking up in the middle ridge by yourself, trying to be the macha of the month? However could you attract a boa? Did you open its cage? You drive me crazy, you know that?”
He knew very well, of course, where the boa had been. Rafaella just smiled at him, a very sweet smile that should have put him instantly on red alert. She walked toward him, stopping a half-foot away. “Welcome home, Marcus.”
Without warning, she grabbed his arm, gained the leverage she needed, and sent him flying onto the grass on his back. He just stared at her, arms and legs sprawled. “You know, you’re going to do that to me one too many times and I’ll get you, but good.”
“You and who else?” She gave him a crazed smile.
“Just me.”
“Yeah? How?”
“You want specificity, huh? I think I’ll tie you down and make love to you until you’re silly. That should keep me relatively safe.”
She didn’t say anything to that, just stared down at him, her legs spread, her hands on her hips. She was wearing a wraparound denim skirt and a pale pink blouse.
It was her turn now. He was lying there, safe and fit and quite well, and he’d come close to death, and she realized how frightened she’d been, and yelled at him, “Just what did you get yourself into in Marseilles? How could that Jack Bertrand possibly have thought that you’d go to bed with a fifteen-year-old girl? You must have given some indication that it would be just fine with you, you jerk. So then he tried to kill you. Weren’t you being at all careful? I told you—several times, in fact—to watch yourself and look wh—”
In the next instant Rafaella was on her back, Marcus straddling her, his knees on either side of her chest. She was winded, but quite unhurt. He quickly grabbed her wrists when he saw the counterattack plan in her eyes, and pinned them over her head.
“Are we even now?”
“How’d you do that? It was faster than you usually are. Have you been practicing? Come on, let me up now—and no, we’re not even.”
“I guess I’ll have to. I see three of Dominick’s men all staring at us, their guns slack, grinning like fools. I would just as soon kiss your face off and make love to you until both our feet get numb, but…”
“Feet get numb? What kind of a pervert are you, anyway?”
He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. “The kind of pervert who doesn’t leave undershorts in the deep end of the swimming pool for just anyone to find.”
She closed her eyes at that remark. She’d forgotten all about her panties. “Oh, dear, no one’s said anything. Do you think they’re still in the pool?”
He ducked his head again and nipped her nose. “You wanna go check it out tonight, late, after everyone’s gone to bed?”
It was Rafaella’s turn, and she executed her move quickly and efficiently, pulling him to his side, rolling the opposite way and onto her feet, smiling down at him.
“How about midnight, Ms. Holland? I really have quite a bit more to say to you.”
She looked down at him, just sprawled there. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him—his mouth in particular, that easy wit of his that flowed from it. She shouldn’t lie to herself. She’d missed all of him like crazy. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll think you’re too easy? That I won’t respect you in the light of dawn?”
“I won’t be easy. You’ll have to pull off your fi
nest tricks to get me going properly. What do you say, Ms. Holland?”
“I do have quite a bit more to say to you too.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll probably come to a bad end. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Devlin—or whatever your name is—I really do want to speak to you in private. About Bathsheba.”
That removed the sexual gleam from his eye in a flash. He said carefully, “What do you know about that?”
“Dominick told us at dinner what had happened, and he mentioned it. I want to know, Marcus. I want to know everything and I won’t be put off.”
He said nothing as he came up to his feet and brushed off his slacks.
“Well?”
“Your belligerence doesn’t move me, Ms. Holland. I’ve got to see Dominick now. I’ll meet you at midnight by the pool. Oh yes, I do want to know why you’re a Forty-niner fan and not an avid Patriots fan. You do live in Boston, not San Francisco.”
“I won’t tell you,” Rafaella said to herself as she watched him stride away from her.
She returned to the house and was told by Link that Marcus was indeed closeted with Mr. Giovanni. She nodded and made her way upstairs to her room. She pulled her mother’s second journal out of the pile of books on the mantel and lay down on her bed.
She’d been rereading the journals, out of order, given her mood at any particular time. She opened the journal to March 2000, nearly one year ago today. But she read only a bit about the visit her mother had made with Charles to England and the god-awful fight Charles had had with Susan when they returned. Money, Margaret had written, damned lousy stuff. If people don’t have it, they’ll do anything to get it. If they’ve got it, they’ll do about anything to keep it or get even more. Rafaella closed the journal and thought instead about her two-hour interview with her father that afternoon.
He’d been, understandably, on edge. Withdrawn, somewhat absent. She’d offered to leave him, but he’d insisted that they keep on with it. And so she’d asked him about his years in Chicago. He’d raised a thin eyebrow. “What do you know about Chicago?”
“You forget, Dominick, I think I have every newspaper and magazine clipping ever done on you. I remember this one article that referred to you as a crime boss second only to Carlo Carlucci in Chicago. He’s not exactly a household name, but still, as a reporter, I’d heard of him. But that was after you’d married his daughter, I believe.” She kept her voice even, emotionless. She couldn’t let him sense that she was more than an ardent worshiper at his shrine, couldn’t let him feel her contempt for him.
“That was a very long time ago,” Dominick said finally, his voice remote. “A very long time ago. Did you know that old man Carlucci is still alive and still living in Chicago? He has this penthouse on the thirty-second floor of a building just off Michigan Avenue. He doesn’t have much active control anymore, but oddly enough, no one’s tried to bump him off. He’s evidently beloved for his fairness to his fellowman.” This was said with such bewildered derision that Rafaella didn’t know how to respond, so she simply waited for him to continue.
“I met him when I was twenty-eight years old and fresh from San Francisco—”
He made it sound as if he’d been fresh from college, when actually he was just fresh from San Francisco, the SFPD hot on his trail, she thought, but again, she merely waited.
“I was very young—”
“You were twenty-eight.”
His head whipped up and he stared at her, growing anger darkening his eyes to the same shade of gray hers reached when she was caught in emotion. She stared back at her father and said deliberately, “I’m almost twenty-six and am old enough to accept the consequences of my behavior.”
His entire body eased in the next moment. “You’re right, of course. I was a grown man. I knew what I was doing, and if what I did was unwise, well, there it is. I went into legitimate business. My businesses have always been legitimate. I bought a restaurant and immediately ran into trouble. I needed a liquor license and for some unknown reason the city wouldn’t give me one. Well, things like this are the same all over, so I simply made inquiries as to whose palm had to be greased. It was Carlucci’s, only his palm was immense, and the palm could turn into a fist on a whim.
“I met Sylvia, his daughter, quite by accident. She came into my restaurant one evening with another man, a creep who looked like a bodyguard.”
“What was the name of your restaurant?” When he just looked at her, Rafaella added, “A book that has specifics is more interesting. It makes it more real, you see, less generic.”
“I changed the name from The Golden Ball to The Golden Bull.”
Rafaella just arched an eyebrow at him.
He grinned. “Yeah, I know. I was real macho in those days, and full of myself. Hell, I was young, with my life ahead of me, and I thought I could do anything.” He paused a moment and his eyes faded with memories. Rafaella just waited until he’d shaken them off.
“I met Sylvia. It was in 1962, in November. The weather in Chicago was already too miserable for humans.” He unconsciously rubbed his arms. “I hate the cold, always have. She was really quite lovely then. Not at all innocent, of course, but who cared? We married in February, her old man decided he liked my zeal, my ambition, and things began to go well. The Golden Bull became well-known, and my other ventures prospered as well.”
“Such as?”
Dominick waved his hand vaguely. “Just branching out into other areas—like oil and food markets and shoe stores—things like that, legitimate things.”
Did he honestly believe that she’d take any of this seriously? “Tell me about your marriage.”
“Before we married, Sylvia told me she wanted a dozen kids. After we married, she didn’t get pregnant. For a very long time. I was patient with her, Lord knows. I liked her father…”
Ha! You were scared to death of her father.
“Then she finally got pregnant in 1975 with DeLorio. I was thrilled. I wanted many children, many sons.”
“Just sons?”
“Oh, no, of course not. I would have loved daughters, lots of them.”
She stared at him, unable to tell him that he was a liar. But oh how she wanted to.
“Boys first, that’s all I asked, boys to follow in my footsteps, and I would have trained them and they would have been successes, my successes.” He paused a moment, staring beyond Rafaella’s shoulder. Then he shrugged. “After DeLorio was born, she began being openly unfaithful to me. It was then that, to get revenge, I suppose, I began to sleep with other women. We spoke of this before, Rafaella. In any event, I have never divorced her, as you know. Also, I never see her. Nor does DeLorio. He knows the sort of woman she is.”
Rafaella was jerked away from those memories by the shouts from her open French doors that gave onto her balcony. Men shouting. An intruder?
She jumped from her chair and raced out onto the balcony. It was very dark tonight, but she saw the jerking beams from flashlights.
Then she heard DeLorio’s voice, cold and furious. “Stop it, you idiots! It’s me—put down those guns!”
She heard Dominick, his voice sharp, worried. “What are you doing back here? Did something go wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. I left Paula there to do some shopping and flew back to St. John’s. I took a helicopter to the resort and a motor scooter over the ridge home.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I would have sent someone for you.”
DeLorio didn’t answer.
And Rafaella knew the answer at that moment. DeLorio hadn’t called because he feared his father wouldn’t have wanted him to come home. She felt fury at Dominick and a wave of pity for his only son. But then, there’d been the worry in Dominick’s voice.
DeLorio mumbled something, then yawned loudly. “I’m tired, sir. I think I’ll go upstairs.”
Then there was silence. Rafaella turned away from the balcony and closed the French doors. She went to bed fully dressed because she planned to go to t
he swimming pool at midnight. To see Marcus. She told herself she just wanted to talk to him, to find out what all the secrecy was about. She needed to know.
She didn’t sleep. She just stared at the digital clock on the bedside table. When it was five minutes to midnight, she left her room and as quietly as possible made her way downstairs and outside. She was stopped by one of the men and identified herself. Everyone would know that she was meeting Marcus.
It couldn’t be helped.
He was waiting for her down by the deep end, near the diving board. “Good evening, Ms. Holland,” he said, giving her a grin. “Yes, I know, you needn’t say anything. Every man in the compound knows that we’re meeting out here. And no, I don’t see your panties. And no, I don’t plan to let you seduce me, even though I know that’s what you came out here for. Let’s just sit over there on the recliners and talk. All right?”
“You’ve said about everything,” she said, and with a sigh sat down.
“We can hold hands.”
She slipped her hand into his. He kept both their hands between them.
“Now, tell me about the snake.”
“You’ve already heard everything. It’s already reached tall-snake-tale proportions.”
“The sucker attacked you?”
“Yes. It was horrible.”
“What I find interesting about the whole thing is that whoever put that snake there also knew that Link was keeping an eye on you. So, no matter that the snake would try to squeeze the life out of you, Link would save you.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said slowly. “You’re probably right. Then it was just another warning—Coco was probably on target.”
“About what?”
“The other accidents. Maybe I was the target all along, not you.”
“I’ve thought of it, and it’s possible, so I want you to leave the island tomorrow.”
“No way.”
He sighed. “I know you must have been terrified.”
“I was, but I’m not a coward. Well, so I am, but it doesn’t matter. I want to know who’s behind this, Marcus, and I’m not about to be forced away. The thing is to go ahead and be scared witless, but regardless, you just don’t give up, turn tail, and run. I won’t do it. Now, tell me about Marseilles and this fifteen-year-old girl of yours.”
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