Fury and the Power (27 page)

She spoke from the sadness of her depths, voice going dry over the last words.

They heard Tom in his bedroom, slamming an armoire door with a muffled curse. The belated anger of a man briefly humiliated in his own bath.

Gwen looked at the floor, chastised, hands clasped between her knees.

Bertie broke the tension with a smile. "Why don't you keep your dinner date?"

"You're sure?" Gwen said gratefully.

"I'll fix Tom a drink," Bertie said, getting up. "He's past due for a blast. Then we'll talk. As for His Holiness… just show up. Eleven sharp at the Gemelli clinic. Now you'd better get dressed. Borrow anything you like from my jewelry case. And say hello to the master magician for me."

"Sure. Does he have any moves I should look out for?"

"When Linc holds your hand by the fingertips and slips a little something on to your wrist and looks deeply into your eyes, probably his next move is straight to bed." Bertie gave this conclusion some thought. "Although I've heard, from a former member of Linc's troupe, that he has a reputation for being stuck in neutral sexually. He can levitate any number of stage assistants, but when it comes to his own—" Bertie threw off the rumor with a shrug. "Probably one of those stories that was started by an old flame who couldn't handle being dumped by Grayle. Showbiz can be evil." She glanced at Gwen, naively curious. "None of my business, but—"

"Yes, I can. No, I haven't. It won't be tonight, either. I may not get out all that much, but I'm no pushover."

D
inner turned out not to be the intimate rendezvous Gwen had anticipated. By the time she and Grayle made the scene at Il Fiorentino on a little street close to the Pantheon, there already were six guests at the table for ten he had reserved, seated amid magnificent frescoes and imperial columns of the choice dining room.

Three Italian men in late middle age, overdressed by the likes of Versace and Prada, all with the bearing of graven images. Two had hair as thick as ram's wool, and ringlet sideburns; the third man was bald as a pumpkin with a pugilist's nose, impudent green eyes, and two-carat round diamonds in each wing of his fleshy nose. Their women—second or third wives or new mistresses—were a symphony of pampered consonance, languor in their smiles. All spoke fluent-to-passable English and responded to Lincoln Grayle as if they long had been in the capture of his gravity. They responded politely to Gwen, but without curiosity.

Fascinating people
, Gwen reminded herself. They must be, if they were friends of Grayle's. But in a way they all made her skin crawl with an unexplainable animosity.

The other two places at the table were taken a few minutes later by the English actor Gwen had not been introduced to at Caffe Greco and his companion, also an actor, a lean handsome youth with the profile of a scythe, his expression a surfeit of self-love. He wore a velvet suit the color of an eggplant with a triple-collar shirt, open at the neck.

The older actor's name was Seth Foxe. He was in Rome, he let them know, working ("for condom money, my dears") two weeks that threatened to stretch into six in a historical drama. He was drunk, but apparently one of those alcoholics who could maintain a high level of comprehension and precision of speech until suddenly passing out on their faces. The glitter of his eyes was scary to Gwen when he looked at her.

After an unrewarding day on the set in the garden of an old Benedictine convent where he was playing a Renaissance pontiff, Foxe's emotional gutters were running full of bile. One of the men at the table, a financier experienced in the film business, egged him on.

"It must be gratifying, Seth, after some of the films you've appeared in lately, to have the opportunity to work with a writer and director of genius."

"Genius? What rubbish. The Chismas mystique is based on cult snobbery, and it is rather a small cult. Paul's script, old darling, is murky psychopathology, with a larding of kinky sex and grue to pump up the lagging box office. From my mouth to God's and Paramount's ears. I refer to those pages I have thus far been permitted to read; they are doled out on a need-to-know basis by our writer and director of genius. What
I
need to know is, when I do my big rape scene with Lucrezia Borgia, will they provide a body double? Not for me; for the dear little dimwit essaying Lu. She's such questionable goods I hate to lay a finger on her, let alone my withered old shanks."

"The script has some good ideas, what I've read," Seth's boyfriend murmured, with the sidelong look of one who senses he has invited trouble by venturing an opinion.

Foxe tapped on his water goblet with a salad fork. "Quiet, everyone! Randy has come to the defense of his film-school cohort. Randy and Paul are quite alike, I must admit, in that their brains occasionally do spawn ideas—like larvae in shit." He leaned toward Randy, sniffing. "Is that the scent I gave you for our one-month anniversary?"

"Yes," Randy said, almost inaudibly.

Foxe beamed at the other dinner guests. "Lagerfeld. I like for him to wear it all the time, so I can more easily tell if it's Randy or my Catahoula hound I'm in bed with." That earned him his biggest laugh; Randy just looked down with feverish cheekbones and a troubled jut of his lower lip.

Somewhere within a kilometer's range of Il Fiorentino there was a muffled explosion; the chandeliers in the rooms trembled and chattered. There was sudden silence throughout the restaurant, wariness or fear in the eyes of the diners. After a few seconds conversations began again, tentatively. Rustlings in the stillness, a man's gruff voice, louder than the others, a dropped glass on tile. Waiters resumed like dancers cued from a theatrical tableau.

"Car bomb," Lincoln Grayle said to Gwen. "Or truck, from the heavy sound of it."

"Third one in six weeks," one of the Italians said with a slight shrug.

"Who are they?" Grayle asked.

"Who knows for sure? They all have their causes, and civilization has a way of angering the uncivilized."

"Rome has always been a great city," the green-eyed man said. "What is another monument? Our true test of greatness is how well we survive our maniacs."

Seth Foxe finished the scotch in his glass. "A well-lived life must endure its little spasms of angst." He caught the question in Gwen's eyes. "
Angst
, darling; it's a delicatessen for neurotics." Now he decided to focus all of his attention on her. "American, are you?"

"Yes."

"In England and in the rest of Europe, we've lived with our bombings for many years. I suppose you Americans are still in shock, terrorism being such a recent import to your formerly unsullied shores. A wake-up slap in the face. I'm reminded of what dear Bogie said to Peter Lorre in
The Maltese Falcon
. 'You'll get slapped and like it.'" His eyes glittered maliciously as he concluded his dead-on impression of Bogart. She wished he would shut up or fall on the floor, but the others apparently found him to be a rare delight.

Foxe surprised her by smiling sympathetically. "You mustn't take me too seriously," he said. "I have my warmer moments. I danced at all of my weddings. I have a daughter, about your age. Strange, all day I've been trying to remember her name."

"The world can be quite a wonderful place after all," one of the wives or mistresses said with a winsome optimism.

"Too bad the human race is still around to fuck it up," Foxe replied instantly, returning to form for his encore.

Il Fiorentino's master sommelier appeared with the Tuscan vintage that Lincoln Grayle had selected earlier.

Grayle looked at the label, nodded. The wine was uncorked. But when the sommelier attempted to pour a little of it into his glass, no wine appeared. The distinguished server looked more shocked than if another bomb had exploded, this time at his feet.

Grayle smilingly took the bottle from his hands and tilted it above the glass. Water poured out. Grayle looked perplexed. He held the bottle upright and studied the label. The sommelier, expressing his sorrow and indignation in rapid Italian, was rigid and turning red. Grayle held up an index finger, smiled soothingly, then drew Gwen's glass to his place and tried again. This time the bottle yielded the appropriate
Castello Banfi Brunello di Montalcino
, a deep purple splash in the glass.

"Ahhh," the master sommelier exclaimed, belatedly getting the joke when the others laughed. "
Magìa
, yes?"

"You'd better bring us another bottle, Pietro," Grayle advised. "This one"—he stripped the label, revealing his picture on a label underneath—"is my private stock."

The trick had been a good tension-breaker. But now they were hearing sirens. Foxe seemed to nod off after his first sip of wine. Randy took him by the elbow and helped him out of his armchair.

"Couldn't manage to eat a bite anyway," the old actor apologized. "The odor of Semtex is ruinous for the digestion, and as it happens I do have an early call."

B
y ten-forty dinner was completed except for coffee, brandy, and dessert, none of which Gwen wanted.

She graciously took her leave, and Lincoln Grayle accompanied her outside the restaurant to his waiting limo. Same chauffeur, same two bodyguards. One of them said to Grayle, gesturing, "Montecitorio."

"This isn't necessary," Gwen said. "I could get a taxi."

"Not by yourself, in Rome. It's no sinkhole of depravity, but unescorted women at this time of the night are fair game for thieves, which includes some legal taxi drivers. You'll get an expensive tour of the palazzos and fountains before you're finally dropped at your hotel."

The hoo-hah of sirens; she glimpsed the blue lights of three police cars speeding through the Piazza della Rotunda. Past the Pantheon but at some distance in the yellow aura of the city, above the referenced piazza, one ringed with government buildings, there was a thick brownish cloud like a brutal djinn hovering over more glories of antiquity, now in flames and rubble. The large vehicular bomb random punctuation in the long, secretive history of zealotry. A disagreeable air of destruction had reached the Rotunda. Grayle produced a silk handkerchief for her, shaking it first as if to free a forgotten dove.

"See you tomorrow," he said. "Where are you going now?"

"The Gemelli clinic." In response to the question in his eyes she improvised. "Bertie has a... a fever we're concerned about, and they're keeping her overnight."

"Gemelli clinic," Grayle said to the driver. And to Gwen, "It's only a few minutes from here, if the cops aren't barricading bridges on the Tiber. See you tomorrow."

"Are we really going to Naples?"

"You bet?" He leaned into the backseat and kissed her. Gwen had a glow on when the limo pulled away from I
l
Fiorentino. Grayle watched until they were out of sight with a slight bemused smile, then returned to his remaining guests.

T
hey were now in a private room on the top floor of the three-story building. The tall balcony doors were closed. Venetian busts brooded in niches around the walls. There was a fourteen-foot ceiling. The men—now including the owner of Il Fiorentino and the small palazzo in which the restaurant was housed, a man of impeccable fashion that failed to detract from several afflictions, among them gout and palsy—and two of the women were enjoying cigars with their cappuccino and Napoleon served in crystal glasses that were three centuries old.

Lincoln Grayle stepped out of the cabinet-sized elevator and took his seat in a throne-like fifteenth-century doge's chair, a little distant from the others. He was offered a selection of cigars from a humidor by their host, who made recommendations in a hushed voice. The cigar that the illusionist chose, a Davidoff Millennium, was clipped and lighted for him.

One modern feature of the splendidly furnished if somewhat gloomy room was ashtrays that drew off the considerable smoke. Another was a handmade, organic-form light sculpture of some opaque material, nearly eight feet in sinuous height and a couple of feet in diameter. The fluidly changing tones of the sculpture provided the only light within the room.

Grayle's legs were stretched out in front of him, feet on a sculpted bronze footstool that, on examination, was the figure of a man in chains, crouched on all fours, jagged gouges where his eyes would have been.

"What do you think of her?" he asked, after several contented puffs on his cigar.

Their heads turned to the light sculpture, where a holographic image of Eden/Gwen had appeared, hands clasped at her waist, head slightly bowed.

"Delightful," one of the elegant women said. She wore a double strand of gray pearls that cost more than a thousand dollars a pearl.

"Extraordinary" another said. She was the wife of the man with diamonds in his battered nose. Her red coif complemented the brilliant, hectic green of his eyes. "Is she a perfect likeness?"

"Oh, yes."

"But how do you know" asked the third woman, who was heiress to a media lord's fortune, "that she is a doppelganger?"

"I couldn't have known," Grayle said, "if I hadn't met Eden herself in Kenya." He rubbed his wounded shoulder lightly; another day before it would completely heal, leaving no scar. In the meantime it served as a memento of his last night in Africa, his frustrated hunt at Shungwaya. The pain a promise. Someday soon he would have a second opportunity to kill the man who had shot him. But he had more urgent business, in Rome and elsewhere. "You see, Stephane, doppelgangers are mirror images of their homebodies. Our friend Gwen, as you may have observed at dinner, is right-handed."