Swindlers (33 page)

Dinner that evening was nothing like what I
had experienced the first time, months earlier, when the Midnight
Sun was still the Blue Zephyr and a dozen people had sat at the
table. There were just the three of us and St. James did most of
the talking. None of it, however, was about what they had done or
what might happen because of it. If he was worried about whether I
might expose him, tell the world he was still alive – if he was
planning how he might stop me from revealing the fraud the two of
them had committed – he kept it to himself. He spoke instead as if
we were all great friends, on our way to a splendid little voyage
which he could not wait to preview in advance. In another side of
the resentment he felt toward all the overeducated fools, as he had
described them, whom he had beaten at their own game, he could not
rid himself of the insecurity he felt at his lack of a college
education. He talked about Sicily and what we were going to see,
but only after he had made a point of explaining that while he
seldom read much anymore, he always found people who could tell him
about the places he visited. He said it in a way that left no doubt
that he believed you could always learn more from hearing it
directly from someone who knew what they were talking about than
getting it second hand from the writings of someone you had never
met. And the truth was that he seemed to have learned quite a
lot.

The next day, he told us, after we passed
through the Straits of Messina and turned south past Taormina and
Catania, we were going to stop at the harbor in Syracuse, or
Siracusa as it was properly called, where one of the great battles
of the ancient world had taken place. St. James was intrigued. He
leaned on his elbows, his eyes glistening, as he explained that it
was not just that the Athenian fleet had been destroyed, and with
it the hope that Athens might triumph over Sparta in the
Peloponnesian War, that had struck his imagination so forcibly, but
that the battle had been watched by an Athenian army that knew that
without ships to carry them back they would never see home
again.

“Some of them did, of course – a few managed
to get back to Athens alive – but most of them perished in an
agonizing captivity. But I’ve often thought, since I was first told
about it, that worse than dying was watching while your fate was
decided by others.” Folding his hands together, he studied me in
the way of someone reasoning from an analogy, finding in some event
from the distant past an example that might be repeated. “Imagine
thinking one moment that you are going to win, and then, a moment
later, knowing for certain that you are going to lose.” His gaze
drifted down to his hands, and then he sat back. “On the other
hand, I suppose it isn’t so unusual to have your life in the hands
of someone else,” he said in a tone with a different significance.
He glanced at Danielle and then looked back at me. “We’re all
dependent, at some time or other, on what other people do. It’s all
in knowing who you can trust; that, and what they’re really capable
of. Don’t you agree?”

Despite the strange fascination the story of
the abandoned Athenians seemed to have for St. James, we stopped
the next afternoon not at Syracuse, where he had said we were
going, but at Taormina. He said it was nothing more than a slight
change of plans, a pleasant diversion, and a chance for Danielle to
get off the yacht. Taormina had the best shopping in Sicily, and
Danielle was always looking for something new.

“That was a lie,” said Danielle. She reached
into her purse for a cigarette. She tapped the end of it against
the back of her hand and snapped open a gold lighter. “He wanted
you off the boat. Someone is coming and he doesn’t want them to see
you.”

We were sitting at a table at an outdoor
café. The plaza was crowded with tourists - Germans and
Scandinavians, mainly, from the blonde, blue-eyed look of them –
standing along the stone balustrade from which, high above the
narrow Strait of Messina, they could see across to Italy on the
farther shore. Danielle looked around as she took a long drag.
Wearing dark glasses and a green silk scarf wrapped around her
head, she drew constant, puzzled stares from passersby who thought
she must be famous, an actress, a movie star, but could not quite
place her. I sipped on a glass of red Sicilian wine and pretended
not to notice.

“I imagine Niccolo Orsini has many guests,” I
remarked. Bending the half-filled glass to the side I watched the
way the sunlight danced on the surface and changed the color.
“Though I imagine whoever he has coming today will be disappointed
not to see his wife, the beautiful and mysterious Gabriella.”

Danielle took a quick, hard drag on the
cigarette and then stamped it out.

“You really despise me, don’t you? You think
I’m lying when I tell you that I only slept with you because I
wanted to; you think I’m lying when I tell you I was falling in
love with you.”

There were people all around, bunched
together at tables with barely room to move between them. Danielle
bent closer. Pulling her white blouse a little to the side, she
exposed a deep purple bruise at the base of her throat.

“The other night, the night you showed up at
the hotel, the night you took me out on the dance floor – this is
what he did when we got back, this and a few of his more twisted
perversions!”

She fumbled in her purse for another
cigarette; but then, as she started to light it, she changed her
mind.

“I slept with you because I wanted to. You
don’t believe me, but Nelson knows, or thinks he knows, and he’s
furious.” She shook her head in disgust. “I meant what I said. I
should have killed him instead of doing what I did.”

“Leave him!” I took her wrist and held it
tight. “Leave him – right now! We’ll get up from this table and
walk out of here and never look back. Come with me. There’s nothing
that can stop us.”

A wistful smile floated over her lovely
mouth.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to think that we
could?”

I did not understand at first what that smile
really meant. And then I did, and my heart went cold. I let go of
her wrist and looked at the face of a stranger, a beautiful woman I
did not know.

“I’ve put too much into this,” she was
saying, trying to explain. “I’ve spent too many years, too much has
happened. I’ve….”

But I was not listening. I had heard all I
needed to hear.

CHAPTER Twenty
One

“They stood right there,” said St. James,
gesturing toward the vacant hills of Syracuse that circled the
harbor. The evening sun had slipped down from the sky and left
behind a brilliant scarlet glow. “Thousands of Athenian troops,
come to conquer Sicily, forced to watch as their navy lost the
battle and Sparta won the war. The Athenian fleet tried to break
the blockade – probably over there,” he said, pointing toward the
narrow strait that led to the smaller, inner harbor. “It was 406
B.C. and none of it should have happened. The Athenians would have
won, if they had been willing to do everything they needed to do to
win.”

He turned and looked at me, standing with my
back to the railing a few feet away. He expected me to ask what he
meant. I jiggled the ice that was left in my glass and took another
drink.

“Because they recalled Alcibiades and left
Nicias in charge?” I said indifferently when I finished
swallowing.

St. James was surprised. His mind worked in
categories and he had me down as a lawyer; and lawyers, in his
experience, knew nothing outside the narrow confines of their
craft. He was surprised, but not disappointed. It made what he had
to say easier. His eyes lit up with anticipation.

“You know about this – good. Then perhaps
you’ll see the point I’m trying to make. The Athenians loved
Alcibiades, but they could never quite trust him: he was too
brilliant, too much better than the rest of them. They knew he was
the one who could conquer Sicily, but at the last minute they held
back, decided they had to send someone along more cautious – more
respectable, if you will. So they sent Nicias, old, God-fearing
Nicias. Even with that joint command, they might still have won;
but then they charged Alcibiades with impiety, with desecrating the
statues of the gods, and sent a ship to bring him back to stand
trial -”

“But instead of going,” I interjected,
irritated at the way in which with his smattering of passed on
knowledge he tried to make himself sound important, “he went over
to the Spartans and helped them in the war. Is that your point? –
That you’re like Alcibiades because he refused to go back and stand
trial?” I gave him a cold, dismissive look. “But no one chose you
to lead anything; and if your tour guide didn’t bother to mention
it, the story didn’t end with what happened here in Syracuse.
Alcibiades eventually went back to Athens, helped give it the best
government it ever had, and almost won the war.”

A smile full of danger creased St. James’
mouth. His eyes became hard and unforgiving.

“My point isn’t just that Alcibiades reminded
me of my own situation, but that he reminded me of yours. I can’t
go home again, but neither can you.”

He moved away from the railing and pulled up
a deck chair. He sat there, rubbing his upper arm, though more from
habit than from any pain he might be experiencing, and for a long
time did not say anything, considering, as it seemed, what he was
going to do.

“Can’t go home,” he said, almost as I was not
there and he was thinking out loud. “We’ve gone to too much
trouble; there’s too much at stake….” He paused, a puzzled
expression in his eyes. “It was a stupid thing to do, Morrison. For
the life of me, I don’t know why you did it. What did you think was
going to happen when you found her? She left – right after the
trial ended. Didn’t that tell you…? You thought you were in love
with her; that much I can understand – But you couldn’t have
thought she was in love with you; at least not after she left.”
Suddenly, he understood, or thought he did. “Yes, of course: You
couldn’t help yourself, could you? Couldn’t let go of it, couldn’t
forget her; couldn’t get her out of your mind?”

He made a slight abrupt motion of his head,
confirming the devastating effect she could have on anyone too
reckless, or too foolish, not to keep their distance. Narrowing his
eyes, his gaze drew in on itself in the way of someone nursing a
grudge, or rather, as in this case, a deep resentment at his own
weakness. He was in love with her, and he hated her for that,
because he knew that she could never feel the same way. She was too
beautiful, too perfect, to need anyone else to make her feel whole.
She was a changeling, always eager to see, and to hide behind,
another side of herself. You went running after her, but she was
too elusive to ever let you get close to knowing who she really
was. Even in the act of submission, when she let you have her, you
never knew, as I had discovered, if she was really there; whether
she was not, in her imagination, making love with someone else. It
must have made St. James every bit as crazy as it made me, and he
was married to her. I think he would have divorced her, if he had
not gotten in trouble and decided to fake his own death. Better to
get rid of her, and do it all at once, than to lose day by day a
little more of your self-respect, knowing that the last thing the
woman you had to have ever thought about was you.

St. James slowly rose from the deck chair. He
put his hand on my arm, but looked past me toward the far horizon,
marked now by a single narrow band of light, a scarlet remnant of
the vanished sun.

“You think that if it were just the two of
you, everything would be perfect, that nothing would ever
change.”

I was not sure at first if he was saying this
about my assumption, or his experience; but I suspect he meant
both, and something even more than that.

“But then, after a while, you begin to get
the strange feeling that, without quite knowing how it happened,
you have disappeared, that you’re not anything anymore except what
at any given moment she wants you to be. That is the mistake
everyone makes. You can’t change Danielle; she changes you. And you
do it, become whatever she wants, because you think it’s the only
way that she might still want you. You know the story of Medusa – a
face so awful, so terrifying, that it drives men mad. The same
thing happens when it’s the face of a woman you can’t resist.”

We left Syracuse and its ancient memories the
next morning, sailing around the southeastern corner of the
Sicilian triangle and then west along the southern shore. That day,
and the day after, while I was free to roam the ship, I was left
alone, without contact with anyone. I did not see St. James again,
and I did not see Danielle. Something was going on, I could feel
it; the two of them, sequestered in their own, private part of the
yacht, eating their meals in their cabin, while I sat by myself in
that elegantly appointed dining room served by a single, silent
waiter. Several times I thought I heard loud voices, but whether
raised in anger or to emphasize a point I could not tell. I was
almost certain they were talking about me, but that did not answer
anything. The question, the only one that mattered, was how my
sudden and unexpected appearance would either end their marriage or
begin a new, and final, conspiracy in which the object would be a
real murder instead of fraud.

I did not see St. James or Danielle and I
began to wonder if I would. For two days we sailed west, following
the sun, in no great hurry to get anywhere, until we reached
Agrigento and word was sent that Mr. and Mrs. Orsini wanted me to
join them on a tour of the Greek ruins in the Valley of the
Temples. They were waiting for me when I stepped into the motor
launch, Danielle radiant in a pale green summer dress, and St.
James, dressed in casual clothes, relaxed and full of easy
confidence. He chatted amiably about nothing in particular as we
headed toward the shore and the sand colored columns that marked
the shape of what had once been a place of ancient worship.
Danielle seemed distant, distracted, her mind on other things. She
smiled at me once, but without significance. I was not even sure
she had been aware she was doing it.