“Bitch — you bitch!”
“You just said that, darling. Are words failing you? Dear me, I hope not, or why should I stay with you? I’ll go be someone else’s muse.”
“Muse? If you’d taken a minute out from examining your own navel over the past few weeks you might have noticed I haven’t written a bloody word — be it good, bad, or indifferent. You’re no muse, woman, you’re a — a — pestilence, bringing death, disease, famine of the imagination and writer’s block. Damn you to hell!”
Sydney winced. “Don’t scream. Hysteria doesn’t suit you — you sound like a cross between a hyena and a eunuch.”
“Doesn’t suit your hangover, you mean. So the great detective thinks he can screw my wife on the job, does he? I’ll show him! I’m getting on to that prissy-mouthed Chief Officer Hanley and letting him know that one of his officers has compromised a murder investigation!”
Gilbert Ensor crossed to the phone.
“Oh, I’m so scared! Please, Gil, you’ll have to do better than that.”
Sydney Tremaine did not feel as calm as she hoped she sounded. Unable to resist turning the tables on her husband, she had revealed much of the previous night’s events, with some added embroidery that involved much more than merely abandoning Ed Moretti’s suggested version.
As Gil picked up the phone she added, “If you do this, I shall tell them I spent the night with Giulia Vannoni, and your accusation is vindictive and groundless.” Sydney placed herself in front of Gil, hands on hips. “Do you want the whole world to know that the wife of superstud writer Gilbert Ensor is having an affair with one of the highest-profile lesbians in Italy? I’d quite enjoy that, myself.”
“Fucking bitch.”
Gilbert Ensor’s hand fell limply from the phone that crashed back on its cradle. She had him by the proverbial short and curlies and he knew it. Screaming had got him nowhere this time. Usually in their relationship, she screamed back and eventually surrendered one way or another — sexually or emotionally. Gilbert Ensor was a bastard, but he was a highly intelligent bastard, and he knew that something had changed in the balance of power. He decided to try pathos.
“Syd, darling, do you really hate me that much? Do you want revenge so badly you’d go against your nature to make me suffer?”
His unrepentant wife gave a short, sharp laugh laced with sarcasm. “Which nature is that, my darling? My heterosexual one, or my lesbian one? When it comes to navel-gazing, you know nothing about my nature because it has never interested you. Anyway, may I remind you that last night — I did both!”
With a theatrical toss of her auburn hair, Gilbert Ensor’s scarlet woman turned away from him and started unbuttoning the accursed blue shirt that hung loosely over her slim torso. “I’m going to soak in a bath,” she said.
As the shirt fell from her shoulders, Gilbert Ensor saw she was wearing yet another shirt underneath. The slippery fabric gleamed a luminous green in the sun slanting in through the window, making her look like a mermaid washed up on the island’s shore, to hurt him and to haunt him with her bedtime stories.
“Bitch,” he said again, weakly.
“That’s right,” she called back over her shiny green shoulder. “Bitch in heat. That’s me.”
He could hear her humming as she closed the bathroom door; she had a pretty singing voice. He recognized the tune: it was Snow White’s theme song, “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Gilbert Ensor collapsed into an elegant gilt chair that squawked beneath the sudden arrival of his dead weight. So preoccupied had he been with her disappearance from the manor and her subsequent reappearance at the hotel, smelling of another woman’s perfume and another man’s cigarettes, he had not got around to telling Sydney about Monty Lord’s visit.
This, he thought, has to be one of the worst days of my life. So far. With a promiscuous wife, an unbalanced director, and a nutter on the loose with a knife, who knew what fate might yet have in store for him!
When there had been a rap on the door at about nine o’clock that morning, he had assumed it was Sydney. Rage filled him, accelerating his heartbeat and filling his mouth with spittle and venom.
“Where the fuck have you been, you whore?” he spat through the door.
“Gil?” said a surprised voice. “It’s Monty Lord. Is Sydney not there?”
“Monty?”
Shit, he thought. Now he knows my wife stayed out all night. I’ll be a laughingstock. A second or so later he admitted a concerned-looking Monty Lord.
“Hi, Gil. What’s happened to Sydney?”
“Oh —” Gilbert Ensor made a valiant attempt at nonchalance and failed miserably. “She’ll turn up — she always does. Night on the town, I should think.”
“You knew she left the manor with the marchesa’s niece?”
“The one with the motorbike?”
“Yes. Giulia Vannoni.”
“Oh.” Gil’s relief was palpable. “Girls’ night out — she’ll like that, Syd will.”
Monty Lord looked mildly amused. “Yes,” he said. “So will Giulia.”
A nasty suspicion crossed Gil’s mind, but faded swiftly into insignificance when he heard Monty say, “I didn’t want to do this on the phone, but in person, Gil.”
“Christ almighty, not another rewrite.”
“No, no. In a way, this will interfere less with your original work.”
“This? In what way can any change interfere less? At least, I presume that’s what this is about — another change.”
“No, Gil — you know, and I know, that we’re both fortunate to have Mario Bianchi on board for this project. The man’s a genius, with an instinctive sense of what works on the screen.” Monty Lord gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “When he says ‘jump’ — creatively, that is — I say ‘how high?’”
“Do you? I don’t. And it makes no difference who’s on board, as you put it, if the ship’s the frigging Titanic! We should all be jumping, or looking for bloody lifeboats.”
The tone of saintly patience left Monty Lord’s voice and it became undisguisedly unpleasant. “You can sink a project by talking like this — is that what you really want, Gilbert?”
“I’m beginning to think I do, Monty — I mean, hell, what’s left of my work?”
“Everything. Never doubt it. This is Rastrellamento by the incomparable Gilbert Ensor. But it became clear to Mario when he started shooting the scenes between Clifford and Vittoria that the movie needs another deus ex machina, as it were.”
“As what were? Why doesn’t Mario have the balls to tell me this himself?”
“Look, Gilbert —” Monty Lord took Gil by the elbow and guided him to a nearby sofa. “— I’m going to have to share this with you, I should have done before. In confidence, this is a very fragile man.”
“I’m a very fragile man, for God’s sake!”
“You’re not fighting a serious drug habit and you’re not under the permanent care of a psychiatrist, are you?”
“Is Mario — Jesus Christ!”
Monty Lord sighed. “We’ve both paid the price for my choice, I grant you. But I must tell you I agree with the changes to the script. They have made this a stronger movie without compromising the