Swindlers (29 page)

I had listened to everything Wiley said,
concentrating on every word; I had studied his face, peered into
his eyes, watched each gesture, each small change of expression,
trying to learn if there was something else, something he was
holding back; but if there was, I could not discover it. He stood
with his hand resting on the top of the wing-back chair, his eyes
somber and filled with regret. I wanted to tell him he was wrong,
that Danielle could never have been that calculating, that
ruthless, but it all was too close to what I had known was true and
had not wanted to believe.

“I’m sorry I had to tell you this, but I
thought you would want to know the truth. I owed you that much. I
meant what I said earlier: you’re the best trial lawyer I’ve ever
seen. We’ve all had clients who lied to us, and you and I have had
two of the best at that. They were two of a kind that way, Nelson
and Danielle. Even when you knew they weren’t telling the truth,
you wanted to believe them. That’s always the danger when you’re
dealing with beautiful and charming people who have a gift for
making you think they are whatever you want them to be. We all seem
to need someone or something to worship, don’t we?”

As soon as Wiley was gone, I picked up the
telephone and called the Mark Hopkins. I wanted to confront
Danielle, tell her what Wiley had just told me, and let her try to
lie her way out of it, but when I asked to be connected to her room
I was told that she had checked out an hour earlier. Danielle was
gone. Everything had been a lie, everything; not just all the
different versions of what had happened the night she killed her
husband, but everything that had happened between us.

Something snapped inside. I had lived like
some cloistered monk, trying to get better at what I did, and then
Danielle had come and shown me something closer to perfection than
anything I had imagined, the beauty I had seen not just on her
face, but in her eyes when we lay together a breath apart and
whispered to each other.

Folding my hands together I lowered my head,
blind to everything except the memory of what we had done the night
before, when we made love and then made love again. That at least
had been no deception, that look I had seen in her eyes, when I was
deep inside her and she did not want it to stop. No deception? She
had no need to disguise a feeling that would not last! If I had
learned anything it was that the only thing constant about Danielle
was her incessant need to change. That tender, bittersweet request,
that echo of a long farewell, that promise she made me give her to
remember, whatever happened, that though she had never been in love
with anyone, she was in love with me. In love with me! She had
played me like the fool I was, made me her all too willing
accomplice in what the world now thought the perfect murder. I did
not know what I was going to do, only that I had to do something. I
could not let it end like this. It hurt too much for that; because
despite everything she had done, I was still in love with her. I
hated her for that, hated that she had that kind of hold on me,
hated that I could not shake free. There is a reason why we only
kill the ones we love.

For the next few weeks I went through all the
hollow motions of my life. With a kind of manic energy I prepared
for the next trial, and, according to Philip Conrad, who was again
the court reporter, seemed to take an even greater pleasure in the
give and take of the courtroom. I ignored everything but what I was
doing. Tommy Lane called several times, but even though the
messages he left said it was important, I told myself I would do it
later and did not call him back. I had gone into hiding, from the
world and from myself. The immediate moment occupied all my
attention, and neither the past nor the future was allowed to
intrude. I suppose that is what they mean when they say that work
is the best therapy. There was certainly no time for idle, harmful
thought, no time for old memories, in the middle of a jury trial in
which the stakes were high and the evidence close. I lived on
euphoria, the inner thrill that comes with the consciousness of
doing something well, and doing it with all your powers. Instead of
dreading the long, sleepless nights with my mind racing through all
the possible things that might happen the next day in court, I
started looking forward to all the vain imaginings, the invented
spectacles of what might happen next in court. Some might think it
private madness, but it gave me the only relief I knew from
thoughts of Danielle and the awful, aching loneliness that kept
tearing at my heart. The trial kept me going, and with every
passing day drove what had happened farther back into the past.
But, finally, the trial was over, and though there would soon be
other cases and other trials, I knew I had to find out what had
happened.

I had heard nothing from Danielle after the
morning she left San Francisco and walked out of my life. She had
not written; she had not called. I assumed that she had gone back
to New York and, as Rufus Wiley had told me, made the arrangements
that gave her control over everything Nelson St. James had left to
their son. But what she had done after that, where she might have
gone, unless it was to visit her son in Europe, I did not know and
had no way even to guess. I would not have known how to find her,
or, when I thought about it, what I would do if I did.

I did not know what I was going to do, and
then, late one afternoon, a few days after that second trial was
over, Tommy Lane called and for a brief moment I forgot about
everything except how much he could make me laugh.

“Jesus Christ!” he cried; “I call, and you
don’t answer; I call again, and you don’t call back.” He was
laughing hard, a piercing, high pitched cackle. “Jesus, I sound
like some woman who let herself get laid on the first date: ‘You
don’t write, you don’t call,’” he mimicked in a sing-song voice,
the start of a manic dialogue in which he played not only both
parts but the audience as well. “‘I would have called, but I never
got your number – or your name!’ Oh, Christ, listen to me: I’m down
here all alone and as soon as I have someone to talk to I can’t
remember why I called. How are you? - Everything okay? I tried to
reach you soon as I heard the verdict; tried to reach you before
that, as soon as I found out….”

The boyish enthusiasm had left his voice.
Whatever he had to tell me, it was serious, and even
disturbing.

“What is it? What did you find out?”

“What she’s been up to – your client,
Danielle St. James. I started asking around, some of the people I
got to know when I was investigating her husband. She’s been seeing
someone. It’s not clear when it started, but at least six months
before she killed St. James. Yeah, I know,” he added quickly; “you
got her off. I’m glad you won, but only because it’s you; because
she did it, murdered him out there on that yacht of his, and we
both know it. I don’t know why she did it – this guy she’s seeing
isn’t exactly poor!”

“Who is he?” I asked, as a cold shiver ran up
my spine.

“An Italian, a Greek – I’m not sure. I don’t
even know his name. One of those shadowy types; lives in different
places; supposed to come from some old family; lots of money,
almost never seen in public. People here with money want everyone
to know it; over there they don’t want anyone to even know who they
are. He has a yacht – like St. James – but he doesn’t go very far
with it, just around the Mediterranean. That’s where they are
now.”

“Where?” I asked. “Where exactly?”

CHAPTER
Eighteen

I watched out the window as the black
Mercedes raced through the dark shadows of a tunnel and then
followed the highway that ran close to the sea. Mount Pellegrino,
rising straight up like Gibraltar, loomed in the distance, guarding
the coastline and the narrow, fertile valley that twisted inland
from the shore. I had not been able to sleep at all on the long
plane ride from San Francisco to Paris and then from Paris to here.
Perhaps that was the reason why my mind began to wander back to
things I had learned in college and, or so I had thought, forgotten
about as soon as I left. I began to imagine what Sicily must have
looked like, a three-sided island a mile from Italy and in the
middle of the sea, to the long line of invaders who had come to
conquer and, having conquered, stayed. It had been the constant,
unchanging motive for all the violence and all the wars, the forced
impositions, the revolutions, the new religions, all the changes
brought first by the Greeks and then the Romans, then the Arabs and
the Normans: the haunting sheer beauty of the place. Like the face
of a gorgeous woman, the face of a Helen, or the face of a
Danielle, it had driven men out of their senses and made them crazy
with ambition.

The driver gestured toward a small concrete
monument on the side of the road.

“This is where Falcone was killed, where the
Mafia blew up his car. That’s when everything started to change,
after they killed the judge; that’s when everyone had had enough.”
A cap pulled low over his eyes, the driver glanced in the rearview
mirror. “Falcone,” he repeated with respect. “He had no fear. They
killed him – But you know what? – They couldn’t kill his
example.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes before
he again glanced in the mirror.

“You’re American – yes? Have you been here
before?”

“No, my first trip.”

“Business, or vacation?”

“Neither one, really; I’m just here,” I said,
staring out the window, wondering now why I had come.

We reached the outskirts of Palermo and the
driver turned off the highway and started down a city street jammed
with cars. Honking the horn, swearing under his breath, he inched
along until, twenty minutes and a few miles later we reached the
open gates of the hotel.

“The best we’ve got,” said the driver with
pride. “You heard about it in America? Someone recommended it?” he
asked, as pulled to a stop at the bottom of the front steps. I paid
him and took my bag.

“There’s a marina just around the other side,
isn’t there?” I asked him. “Some people I know keep a boat
there.”

The Hotel Villa Igeia had the look of a
Moorish castle, with sand colored walls and a flat, crenellated
roof. It had been built, as I later learned, as a seaside villa for
the only daughter of an Italian nobleman, a private sanatorium in
which, it was hoped, the ocean air and quite surroundings would
remedy the chronic ill-health which all the science of some of
Europe’s most famous physicians had been unable to cure. Whether
her health improved, or she died an early death from an undiagnosed
disease, remained hidden behind a veil of obscurity, subject, like
much of Sicilian history, to interpretation and doubt.

Sometime near the end of the 19th century,
the villa was turned into a hotel and quickly became a favorite
gathering place for European royalty. A century later their
photographs, as large as life-size paintings, decorated at discreet
intervals the long and elegant corridors that ran the length and
breadth of the hotel. Kings and queens of countries still famous,
kings and queens of countries that no longer exist, came here, to
the Hotel Villa Igeia, to take the sun in the warmth of a Sicilian
spring or winter, oblivious, or so it seemed from the world-weary
look caught on their faces, to how near they were to Armageddon,
the Great War, the first world war, that would sweep many of them
off their thrones, and in the case of some of them, like the
Russian Czar, into their graves.

It seemed to me, as I glanced at their
photographs on the way to my fourth floor room, that even though
they could not know that war was coming, they had a sense that they
were all living in a vanishing age, that the world was changing and
there was nothing they could do about it, that no one could. The
forces at work, the machinery of modern life, had gotten too big,
too powerful, for that. Or perhaps I was only seeing in their faces
what I myself had started to feel: that I was caught in a downward
spiral, playing a part written by someone else that I did not yet
quite understand.

His back bent with age, the porter opened the
curtains and pushed the blue wooden shutters back inside the window
casement.

“One of our finest rooms,” he said, gesturing
toward the palm lined gardens below and to the marina just beyond.
A yacht, the size of the Blue Zephyr, and close enough to be its
twin, but painted black instead of white, lay anchored a couple
hundred meters outside the breakwater of the small harbor. There
was nothing else even half its length.

“The Midnight Sun,” explained the porter.
“The owner keeps a suite here.”

I gave him a tip, the same as I would have
given in an American hotel. It was larger than the Sicilian custom
and his aging eyes lit up with friendly gratitude.

“Keeps a suite here – you mean all the time,
whether he is here or not?”

“Yes, of course; all the time. Señor Orsini
is -”

“Orsini – that’s the name of the owner?”

I gazed out the window at the Midnight Sun,
shining long and sleek and black as night. Several people, members
of the crew probably, were moving about on deck. I glanced over my
shoulder.

“There’s a woman with him – a young woman,
quite beautiful?”

A look of quiet admiration and subdued
enthusiasm for a woman impossible not to notice flickered at the
wrinkled corners of the old man’s sad and gentle mouth.

“Señor Orsini is seldom without her.”

The porter finished showing me the room and
then, alone, I tossed my jacket over a chair and kicked off my
shoes. Leaning against the deep stucco casement I adjusted the
focus on the small pair of binoculars I had brought with me until I
could see quite clearly anyone who ventured out on the deck of the
yacht. From time to time I put the glasses down and peered into the
courtyard below. The tables had begun to fill up with men and women
who had decided to have a drink outdoors and enjoy the weather. In
the soft echo of Italian voices, I felt a comfortable stranger,
come to a place I did not know, surrounded by a language I did not
speak, but still somehow drawn to it, as if the scented Sicilian
air itself carried the timeless promise of betrayal and
revenge.