Benito examined his nicotine stained fingers. “It has been quite a…task. It took us a long time to track you down. When your parents married we weren’t happy about our daughter, Anna, going to live so far away.”
Luca waited. Jabril had been confident that the reason for the estrangement between Luca’s mother and her family was not simply a matter of distance, but the fact that she’d wed a Somali.
“First we thought you’d perished with your parents. Then, years later, we learned you’d been spared, although no one knew where you were. It was only when we read the obituary of Il Principe and then of Catarina, God rest their dear souls, that we started to pull the threads together.”
Luca didn’t feel like rushing over and embracing them. He felt numb.
Agata looked round nosily. “The Leopoldos have given you a very good life. It’s all very comfortable, and you have some really lovely pieces. How very lucky you are to live in such lofty circles. You must be very grateful for this big bowl of cream.” Her voice was malicious.
“And you’re from Naples?” Crumpling his napkin into a tight ball, Luca ignored her remark.
Bernardo chipped in. “Indeed. We’re Neapolitan born and bred. The minute I left school, I joined Father in the business. Like you I’m married and you have cousins, a boy and a girl.” He scrolled on his mobile phone and Luca, with Tamsin craning over his shoulder, saw images of a boy and a girl in their late teens. “I’m seven years younger than Anna, your mother. And in between there’s Angeletta. She, too, is married, and lives near us with her daughter and husband—he’s the third partner in the business—so that’s your family complete. We hope to welcome you to our home and I promise it’ll be a wonderful reunion.”
Luca said, his tone quietly dangerous. “So why not write or call about this before turning up unannounced, springing this on me?” There was something about the smooth orchestration that disturbed him. “You can’t blame me for thinking it’s all rather…sudden.” He wondered if a threat loomed.
Before the Berios could answer, his cell phone rang. “Excuse me, I have to take this call.” He turned to Tamsin. “I’ll ask Mirella to bring a pot of coffee for our guests.” He left the room and hurried down the corridor to the study. Cool it, he told himself as he almost smashed his cell to the floor. He finished the call and then, thinking rapidly, rang Fabio. Given the priest’s almost Masonic connection with the situation and his close friendship with Salvatore and Catarina, if anyone could catalogue the unexpected development, it was he.
* * * *
Fabio took a deep breath. “I’ll be over right away.” He shut his breviary. Oh God, please no. I warned Salvatore and Catarina it was dynamite, that something like this could happen. What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. He hurried to the car and sat there for several minutes, his thoughts rewinding, his heart thumping with fear. As soon as he could, he’d embarked on the painstaking search for Luca’s Italian connections. There’d been very little to go on, as vital papers were destroyed in the blaze. All Jabril could remember was that Anna, a nurse, had got to know Dalmar, Luca’s father, in a hospital somewhere in Italy. Fabio painstakingly prepared a list of Italian hospitals and engaged with their human resources departments to find out if the couple had been on the payroll. Some responded, but most didn’t, even after reminders, and the enquiry yielded no clues. In parallel, he’d initiated a search of the marriage registers, but again drew a blank. Luca’s Somali relatives having been wiped out, Fabio almost abandoned hope of locating Luca’s Italian family when a chance meeting at a church-sponsored conference on immigrants and asylum seekers turned matters round. At the coffee break, Fabio fell into conversation with a fellow cleric from Naples and, in passing, mentioned his dilemma. The priest said that in his congregation was a couple whose daughter had married an African and it was common knowledge they’d disowned her. In fact, it was the incumbent’s predecessor who’d christened her as a baby. On return to Naples, he ran a check on the baptismal register. The name matched that of Luca’s mother. Thereafter, events moved swiftly. Salvatore and Catarina, presenting themselves as middle-class do-gooders rather than grandees, got in touch with the Berios. Just one abusive letter and a single vituperative phone call from the Berios established their resolve not to have anything to do with their half-African grandson.
In the secrecy of the confessional, Salvatore and Catarina revealed to Fabio that they’d decided to tell Luca his Italian grandparents were deceased, that he had no uncles or aunts since Anna was an only child. They feared that if Luca were ever to know the Berios had rejected him he’d find it hard to deal with and serious, permanent psychological repercussions would impact on an already deeply damaged individual. They entrusted the letter and the tape of the conversation, they’d surreptitiously recorded, into Fabio’s safekeeping.
There were introductions all round when Fabio, his expression full of watchful anxiety, arrived. The Berios eyes flickered between Fabio, Luca and Tamsin, and there was marked tension in the atmosphere.
“What do you know of any of this?“ Luca asked.
I cannot break the seal of the confessional. And I cannot lie. Fabio fudged. “I’m afraid much of the detail escapes me after all these years.” He perused the papers. “This seems authentic enough although I expect Luca will have his lawyer go over it.” And there was something about Luca’s chin that resembled that of Benito.
“We are family,” Agata insisted, jangling her bracelet even as she flared her nostrils. She glared at her husband and son as if willing them to say something, or she would.
Bright sun blazed through the windows and Tamsin got up to open the French windows.
Bernardo took a swig of coffee. “As you’re aware, the building industry is in crisis and we’re struggling to keep our heads above water.”
Luca knew what was coming, but played dumb. “What’s the relevance of that?”
“As the fattest cat in the family, we thought you’d loan us a sum to tide us over until we climb out of the recession.”
In Luca’s book, the Berios wanted a freebie. “Try the bank.”
Agata hissed. “They have refused.”
“Why would you think I won’t?”
“Family must stick together, family takes care of its own—”
Fabio exhaled a quickly stifled snort, but a tiny gesture of his hand was not lost on Luca.
“—Blood’s thicker than water,” she ground out.
Luca saw a gleam of light in her eyeballs.
“Darling—” Tamsin reached for his hand as his face paled. Blood…his bloodied parents, blood-soaked bed linen, blood pouring from beheaded corpses as they escaped into the bush. Shut that out, he grimly reminded himself. Do whatever it takes to get rid of them.
“How much?”
Agata jumped in, her voice thickening with greed.
“And if I don’t?”
There was silence. They’d obviously not considered that.
There was a strange, cunning expression in Agata’s eyes and her face was flushed and twisted with hate. “Then I’m sure the media will relish hearing how one of Italy’s patrician high-rollers refused to assist his vulnerable, aging grandparents.”
A sort of boiling rage bubbled up in Luca, mingled with a kind of relief. Rage because the Berios were thoroughly unprincipled, utterly insensitive to his suffering and to Anna’s tragic end. Relief, because it was just as well he’d never known them.
“Blackmail will bring you nothing, get you nowhere except the law courts. I intend to report this attempt to the police.”
Benito got up very fast and, standing over Agata, yelled at her. “You stupid old interfering cow. Now look what you’ve gone and done. I told you I’d take care of this.” Trembling slightly, he turned to Luca. “She has made a mistake.” Their carefully formulated plan wasn’t going to work now because of her. He kicked himself for not heeding Bernardo who’d been all for leaving her behind. It was his idea to bring her
, his idea her feminine presence would bring a kind of touchy-feely to the encounter. “Please sir, we will be very grateful for anything you can give us.”
Getting up, Luca went out of the room and returned with his checkbook. He wrote swiftly and, tearing a check out, showed it first to Tamsin, then to Fabio, before handing it to Benito. It was a quarter of what was demanded.
From his Olympian heights, Luca said steadily. “I’m giving this to you in memory of my parents. Now go, and keep away. If you ever set foot here again or seek to approach me directly or indirectly, I will not hesitate to bring down your business and you’ll find yourself spending a lifetime behind bars. Is that understood?”
Benito and Bernardo mumbled and nodded. Agata, sitting bolt upright, pulled herself up quickly and slapped her husband, then her son, across the cheek. She would have gone for Luca had he not caught her wrists in his hands.
As Tamsin and Fabio looked on, appalled, wild-eyed, she spat on Luca. “You are the prince of…darkness, a black devil.” She rounded on her menfolk and shrieked, her mouth dribbling. “You’ve made a pact with Satan.”
Ushering out the unhinged woman, now totally hysterical, Fabio walked back slowly, as if walking were difficult, mopping his brow. Having briefly questioned Benito, he’d learned that Anna and Dalmar had crossed the border to marry in Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland that explained the absence of records in Italy.
“Whew, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
They could still hear the wailing, the screaming stream of obscenities, as if she were possessed by an alien. Beau began barking. There was the sound of a car door aggressively slammed and a squeal as it shot off.
Tamsin’s eyes were fixed on Luca and his eyes never left Fabio. “Do you have anything to tell me?” he asked, a terrible, violent feeling in his heart.
“Let it go, darling,” Tamsin whispered. She slipped an arm round him.
Fabio rallied himself. “You were the apple of Salvatore and Catarina’s eyes. They doted on you and loved you dearly. I can’t stress that enough and you must know, if you don’t already, that first and foremost, they had your best interests at heart.”
“Are you keeping anything from me?”
Nervousness tightened Fabio’s throat. There was nowhere he could start. He stared at Luca through a long pulse of silence, then said in a quiet, neutral tone, “They must have had reasons. Very good reasons.”
There was no sound except the sweet singing of skylarks.
“The heavens won’t fall because they had their secrets.”
Luca’s expression changed, even as he saw the calculating flicker behind Fabio’s pale brown eyes, and he spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture of understanding and acceptance.
“And now I’ve nothing more to add except to commend to you some wise words of Shakespeare.” Fabio quoted softly from “The Tempest.” “Let us not burthen our remembrances, with a heaviness that’s gone…”
Chapter 8
“The usual?” Tamsin bellowed down the stairs.
“Sure, and don’t forget my swimming trunks.” Luca invariably left the packing to her. Several shirt changes, ties, socks, business suit, tuxedo, casual wear. Then his toilet bag, but not condoms, although she realized that wouldn’t stop him from having a bit on the side with the newest intern. Somehow, she sensed he wasn’t minded to. In twenty minutes flat, the case was locked. She had the routine down to perfection.
“It’s a flying visit because most of the staff are about to wing it on annual vacation. Few like to hang about in blistering New York in August, and who can blame them? We’re introducing new ID systems and protocols and it applies to everybody, even the Board, or rather, especially the Board, and since we want the procedure to run swiftly and smoothly we reckon it’s best done with all of us physically present, rather than virtually.”
He kissed her and, with an inward sigh, she laid her head against his chest, trying to stay cheerful as without him, she ached with loneliness, just measuring out the days in a place where nothing happened. Although, if they had a child, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day. Her heart clenched with a sudden, desperate need for that baby.
As Maurizio dropped him off at the Milan airport, work beckoned, and she shielded her eyes from the strong sunshine as she dawdled to the blessed, cool, still interior of the workshop, to involve herself in a special presentation piece—a custom-designed stamp album from colleagues to a much-loved retiree boss.
The picture windows gave on to the multi-layered herb garden, a sunny, aromatic spot of personal discovery. Some genius had woven a pattern of random elements into the formality of nature, and she loved being so close to this living, thriving space. Indulging herself in a diversion, she sketched thyme that was attracting honeybees, and pink flowering oregano. Bushy basil stood ready, begging to be transformed into pesto sauce, whilst lemon verbena beckoned to be harvested for refreshing iced tea and to impart that distinct flavor to cakes and ice cream. Dill, incompatible with the bronze-leaved fennel boasting tiny yellow flowers, was at the end of a row that featured brittle rosemary bushes, purple-leafed sage and that old staple, parsley, and behind that flourished the three c’s, coriander, comfrey and chervil. But hours later, stiff and shackled by the onset of creative block, she eased her aching back with a few lengths in the pool, and decided to see how the casa was getting on.
It was swathed in scaffolding. Resting her arms on an old barrel—Diogenes, the cynic, that eccentric fourth century Greek philosopher, once destined to be a banker, like Luca, lived barefoot in a barrel, she remembered irrelevantly—Tamsin felt a tug of nostalgia that was almost painful and her eyes filled with tears. She knew she now inhabited a different world. Luca had drawn her excitedly into the architect’s vision to transform a disaster into a dream home, beguiling even the most discerning rock star without compromising its essential rural charm.
Back at the villa, Mirella, somewhat agitated, came running to say that Luca was trying to reach her and wanted her to call the minute she came in.
“Where’s the fire?” Tamsin said brightly.
He sounded a bit testy that she’d gone out without her cell phone.
“Cara, I need my original adoption certificate, as it’s an important link in my ID chain.”
“Where is it?”
“In the study safe.”
“There’re two. Which one?”
“The smaller. It’s inside a manila envelope. You can’t miss it,” he retorted, giving her the combination.
“No worries. I’ll have it couried over right away—” She wanted more than anything to prolong the conversation, but he’d already killed the call.
Holding her breath, she keyed in the combination, and was relieved to hear a satisfying click. On the top shelf lay an unsealed manila envelope. She took it over to the desk and sat down, knowing she’d better check the contents. She pulled out a document and the words “This is the last will and testament of Principessa Catarina Leopoldo Di Monte Valla” loomed dramatically, like 3D, out of the cream paper. No, this was definitely not what Luca had in mind. She laid it aside and got up, rummaging in the safe for other options and, lower down, scrambled up with a thick miscellany of bonds and share certificates, she found a second manila envelope, the adoption certificate within.
In case it went astray, Tamsin made a photocopy before restoring the original to the envelope that she then placed in a larger white one that she Sellotaped firmly and addressed to Luca. Mirella called through on the intercom to say the courier was waiting. Tamsin handed it to him personally and he assured her it would reach Luca the next morning. She texted him to confirm it was in transit.
She retraced her steps. Catarina’s will lay on the desk, speaking to her, chasing her, an open invitation to enter. No harm in turning the key. After all, I know she left me nothing and Luca mentioned she’d remembered old friends.
Oh yes, here’s that list of gifts—nothing new. Opening that door l
ed her to another and then…her heartbeat tripped, and she felt as though seized with sudden cramp. With trembling hands, she absorbed the narrative of Luca’s inheritance. She read it again and again…wondering if she’d misunderstood but reckoned her command of Italian couldn’t be faulted. She felt a lurch of nausea and the document fell from her hands as it came to her in a single red flash. Oh God, don’t do this to me, Luca. He’d bamboozled her, married her not for love but to get his hands on the money. He’d used her. Cheated on her. Ensnared her into a honeyed trap. She felt as if she’d been ripped open with a razor blade. Quickly she copied the will, then, thrusting it back into the envelope and on to the top shelf, slammed the safe door and secured it.
Crawling into the sitting room and ordering tea, she must have looked dreadful, because Mirella asked her if she was all right. How could she have been so naïve, so obtuse as not to suspect an agenda behind Luca’s unexpected proposal? Should she call him now and confront him or wait until he returned? What was he doing now, she wondered? Was he even thinking of her? She went upstairs and collapsed on the bed, her thoughts colliding with her wildly beating heart. She wanted out, and would tell him so.
* * * *
“All done, and I’m catching the red-eye this evening to Milan. There’s no need for you to meet me, as it arrives at crack of dawn. I’ll look out for Maurizio.”
“Would you let him know?” she said stiffly.
There was a silence. She usually did. “Of course. Is there anything wrong? You don’t sound yourself.”
Her hands curved round a half-empty bottle of pinot grigio and she burst to hit him with the discovery. “It’s nothing, just that time of the month. And the heat doesn’t help…” Her voice tailed off as self-possession deserted her.
Alchemy (Siren Publishing Allure) Page 10