The Taste of Fear (2 page)

She reached in the handbag again and fiddled around until she found the aspirin bottle she’d brought from the trailer on the CBS lot in Studio City. She tried to thumb the cap off but couldn’t budge it. Then she remembered it had one of those safety lids meant to prevent four year olds from developing aspirin habits. She lined the arrow on the cap up with the arrow on the bottle and tried again. This time the cap popped like a firecracker. Pills went everywhere. She cursed. When it was one of those days, it was one of those days. She glanced down at the triangular wedge of red leather between her inner thighs. Two white tablets were sliding toward the depression her rear was making in the seat. She scooped them up and returned her attention to the road—

Her eyes bugged out. Her mouth dropped open. A loud, hollow sound filled the air as the Vantage exploded through the cable-and-post guardrail. She stamped the brake, which did nothing. There was no road beneath her.

Scarlett had the sickening, unnatural sensation of going airborne. For a split second she thought she must be dreaming. The reality was too frightening to immediately comprehend. The hood of the sports car nosed forward. The gray sky disappeared. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Not a single breath. Fear had stolen her voice.

This was how she was going to die, a car accident, a statistic.

The Vantage crashed back down to earth with jarring force and plunged wildly down the ravine through a blur of crackling vegetation. There was no time to think. Too late to do anything. Branches slapped the car. Then the greenery parted to reveal the black trunk of a massive tree.

Impact.

Sunday, December 22, 9:30 a.m.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

“There are two police officers here to see you, sir,” Salvador Brazza’s secretary, Lucy, informed him over the intercom.

“Did they say what it concerned?”

“No, sir, only that it’s urgent.”

“Send them in.”

Sal swiveled his high-backed chair to face Edward Lumpkin, a tall, pale American lawyer who’d been in Dubai for the last six years and Oman for four before that. They’d been discussing the merits of a legal system, free of charge, for future guests of the hotel who were bound to cross cultural taboos while visiting the Emirates. “Why don’t you stick around for a few minutes, Ed,” he told the lawyer. “I might need your advice.”

The door to the office opened, and Lucy showed the two police officers inside. Sal and Lumpkin stood. The taller man introduced himself as Brigadier Khaled Al Zafein, the Deputy Director of the General Department of Criminal Security. He was dressed formally in a peaked cap and a light brown uniform with rank badges on the shirt collar and a red band looping under the left arm and through the left epaulette. The short fat one said he was Inspector Abu Al Marri. His beret was cocked rakishly, and he had a smug smile on his ugly moon face. Sal disliked him on sight. “To what do I owe the honor, gentleman?” he said without offering them a seat.

“I’m afraid we have some rather disconcerting news, Mr. Brazza,” Al Zafein said in fluent British English. “It concerns the fire at the Prince Hotel earlier this month.”

Sal frowned. “I’ve already spoken with the fire investigators.”

“Yes, of course. However, circumstances have changed. New evidence has surfaced that leads us to believe the fire might not be a result of faulty wiring, as initially believed.” He paused. “It’s now thought to have been set deliberately.”

“Arson?” Sal said, unable to conceal his surprise. “What are you talking about?”

Al Marri spoke in English as fluent as his superior’s, “Let me begin, Mr. Brazza, by saying arson is one of the easiest crimes to perpetrate, but one of the most difficult to identify and verify.”

“Forgive my bluntness, Inspector,” Sal said, “but I don’t need a lesson on arson.”

“Please, sir, if you would allow me to explain?” He smiled apologetically. “Generally speaking, investigators begin their investigation of a fire in a V-like pattern, from the area of least damage to that of the most damage, which is usually equated with the point of origin—and which, in the case of Room 6906 of your hotel, was the wall surrounding the electrical socket with the purportedly faulty wiring.”

“I’m aware of all this. As I’ve said, I’ve already spoken to the fire investigators.”

“Please, sir?” Al Marri offered up his practiced smile once more. It squashed his thick mustache between his upper lip and nose, giving the mustache the appearance of a fat, black slug.

“I said the area of the most damage is
usually
the point of origin. But that is not always the case. There’s any number of circumstances that can change the dynamics of the fire: ventilation, for example, fuel load, or the unique characteristics of the environment in question. Even the water and foam used by the firefighters can confuse typical burn pattern interpretation. In many cases—as was the case with Room 6906—the fire can reach the post-flashover stage, whereby it gets hot enough to destroy vital evidence and mimic the effects that can be caused by ignitable liquids, such as charred patterns on the subfloors, and concrete spalling. What is my point in all this?”

He opened his small, neat hands, as if in prayer. “It has recently come to our attention one of the first firefighters through the door claims to have seen black smoke near the electrical socket in question. Now, wood and most other combustible items in Room 6906 burn brown-gray smoke. Accelerants—including chemicals with low ignition temperatures such as gasoline, kerosene, and alcohol—burn black. In light of this new information, the investigators were forced to take a second look at the evidence. They reassessed their original conclusion of faulty wiring in favor of the theory someone had been trying to make it
look
like an electrical fire.”

Sal gave himself a few seconds to let this information sink in, a kind of delayed bewilderment washing over him. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would someone want to set a fire? The hotel was—still is—unoccupied. Why would someone want to burn it down?”

“According to your statement,” Al Marri said, “not all the rooms were unoccupied.”

“Of course they were—” Sal clamped his mouth shut. The hotel hadn’t been completely unoccupied. He had been staying in it for most of December, in the Royal Suite, which was on the seventieth floor, directly above 6906. The night of the fire the alarm had woken him at 4:12 a.m. By the time he’d gotten dressed, the stairwell had been full of smoke. He couldn’t go down so he went up, to the roof. Fifteen minutes later his ex-Mossad security chief, Danny Zamir, picked him up in a helicopter and got him the hell out of there. From the air he had a clear view of the blaze, which by then had consumed the top two floors and the one-hundred-foot script sign. If Danny had been even a few minutes later, Sal knew he likely wouldn’t have made it.

“So you’re telling me someone was trying to murder me, Inspector?” Sal shook his head. “Forgive my skepticism, gentlemen. I find that extremely difficult to believe.”

“We have already ruled out the motive of financial gain,” Al Marri said. “That leaves either random violence or pyro-terrorism or revenge.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have some sort of vendetta against you, Mr. Brazza?” Al Zafein asked.

“I’m not in the business of speculation, Mr. Zafein.”

“You should know, sir,” Al Marri added gravely, “this has become an attempted murder investigation. It would be in everyone’s best interest to get it solved.”

“I’m not a crook, Inspector. Nor do I associate myself with criminals.”

Al Marri glanced briefly at the deputy general, then returned his attention to Sal. “I am sure you are a very busy man, sir.” He handed Sal a business card. “If you should think of anything, anything at all, please do not hesitate to contact me.”

The two police officers left.

Edward Lumpkin shifted in his seat, his gangly arms folded across his chest, his face pulled down in thought. “Christ, Sal. I don’t know what to say.”

“Will this have any impact on the hotel’s opening?”

“Hard to say, but I’d keep an eye on the reservations during the first few weeks of operation. An attempted murder in the hotel could potentially turn off a lot of families. Thankfully, that’s not our core demographic.”

“This is going to be a bloody circus.”

“I heard what you told the cops, Sal. But be straight with me. Can you think of anyone who might have something against you?”

“Everybody has enemies, Ed.”

“But someone serious enough to, you know, want you dead?”

Sal didn’t reply.

“Could it be a union thing?” Lumpkin asked suddenly.

When Sal went non-union with the Prince last summer, labor picketed and sent death threats. One had threatened to blow up
After Taxes,
his $60-million, 155-foot yacht docked over at the Marine Club, while another had promised to gouge out his eyes while he slept.

“These union guys, they talk the talk,” Sal said simply. “But they’re neither inclined nor capable of pulling off something like this.” He shook his head. “If you’ll excuse me, Ed, I have some calls I need to make. Write up what we discussed, and we’ll get together again next week.”

When Lumpkin left, Sal called up his security chief, Danny Zamir, and summarized the last twenty minutes. “I want you to find out everything you can,” he concluded. “Understood?”

“Yeah, capo, understood.”

Sal hung up and gazed out the bank of windows overlooking Dubai’s Business Bay, the city state’s latest multibillion-dollar project. As he watched a crane atop an ambitious skyscraper swivel to the east, he thought about everything the two cops had told him.

Someone wanted him dead.

The intercom on his desk buzzed. He punched the talk button. “What is it, Lucy?”

“The car’s waiting to take you to the airport.”

“Fine.”

He shrugged on his blazer, grabbed his briefcase, and left the office. He suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of Dubai.

It all came back to her in a rush of images: Laurel Canyon Boulevard, bursting through the guardrail, her stomach in her throat as she plummeted to the ground. She remembered the crushing landing, bouncing wildly out of control down the ravine, the tree.

But I’m alive.

The door to the room opened and there he was, Mr. Salvador Brazza, her husband, strolling in with his head down, his eyes glued to a story below the fold of the
Wall Street Journal.
Seeing him, Scarlett felt a burst of gratitude and affection. He was here, back from Dubai. If she had the strength, she would have jumped up and hugged him.

Sal wore a crisp white shirt and navy merino wool suit, one of his made-to-measures from appointment-only William Fioravanti in Manhattan. It was something Al Capone might have fancied had he been around today. In fact, she often kidded Sal he resembled an Italian gangster. He had short-cropped black hair, hazel eyes, and a generous Roman nose. And he was Sicilian, which sort of sealed the deal.

“Scarlett!” he said, tossing the paper onto one of the leather chairs and rushing over. He knelt beside the bed and took her hand.
“La mia bella donna.”

After so long apart, the feel of his touch and the sound of his voice and the smell of his cologne all hit her like a truck, smashing through the cobwebs in her head, and she realized suddenly just how close she’d come to never experiencing any of those sensations ever again. The reality of her situation sank in with numbing force: she’d been in a car accident, one bad enough to knock her unconscious and land her in the hospital. She felt very fragile. Life felt very fragile.

“Is that all I am to you?” she said, teasing him, happy to find she could speak. “Beautiful?” Her throat was dry. The words were a papery whisper.

“What else is an actress but a pretty face to look at?”

She wanted to laugh, but a sob escaped instead. A tear tripped down her cheek. “Sal—” She swallowed, tried to work up saliva. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

She didn’t know. For speeding? For not paying attention to the road? For all the terrible things she’d said to him after discovering the affair? She shook her head.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Groggy. But okay, I think. Am I okay?”

“You’re fine.”

Relief swamped her, and something inside her chest that had been very tight loosened. “What about this?” She touched the bandages around her head.

“It’s just a bump.”

“How long have I been here? What time is it?” She glanced toward the window. The blinds were drawn. No sunlight slipped in between the cracks.

“You came in this afternoon. It’s about midnight now.”

Less than twelve hours. Not as bad as she’d feared. “How long have you been here?”

“A couple hours. I would have gotten here sooner, but we ran into some bad weather over the Atlantic and had to detour.”