“Giulia —”
Giulia Vannoni looked back up from below. Her glance followed Sydney’s eyes.
“You have a dagger very like the one that killed Toni on your family coat of arms — I presume that’s what this is.”
“Yes. The shield is on every bottle of olive oil we sell.”
“So, Giulia —” Sydney sat down on one of the iron steps. “— what’s going on? Is this some extremist group? Is it the Mafia? Is this an attack on your family and, if so, how does my husband fit into this?”
Giulia held out her hand. “Come,” she said. “I have something to give you.”
She pulled Sydney to her feet, then went over to a small desk near the kitchen area, took a key from the small purse she wore slung around her body, unlocked one of the drawers, and took out another key.
“Here,” she said, holding it out toward Sydney. This unlocks the door to my castello — and the gate. You don’t have a purse, but put it on that chain you have around your neck, and wear it under your shirt. If you ever need to, come here.”
“But why? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know the answer to your questions.” Briskly, Giulia unfastened the chain around Sydney’s neck. “Yes, it goes over the clasp. Good.”
“You said, come here. But where is here?”
“You take a taxi, and you ask to be driven to the tower on Icart Point. This tower is the farthest to the east, one of the few where the cliffs start to climb — he’ll know. And one other thing I will show you.”
Giulia took Sydney by the hand and led her toward the statue of the girl. She reached behind it and the black wall opened.
“Not magic,” said Giulia, laughing at Sydney’s startled face. “It’s a door, a second exit from this place. It leads to what was once a gun emplacement, connected to the tower by a tunnel. I’ll show you when we go out, but we won’t go down it now. We are not dressed for guerilla warfare.”
Outside, Giulia led the way around the curving wall of the tower and stopped.
“See?”
She pointed toward a flat metallic disc about three feet in circumference, set in concrete, that gleamed dully among the plants and grasses. “That can only be opened from the inside. It covers a circular dug-out area where they had a gun — the edge is serrated, very strong, so it was possible to close it off. They made it out of the turret ring of a French tank. But you have to be careful here, because all is not as it seems. Look.”
Giulia picked up a stone and threw it. The stone disappeared.
“Trenches. Overgrown trenches.”
“Esattamente. The stone walls are covered with flowers and plants, almost two feet of them in places.”
Sydney walked forward. Close up, it was comparatively easy to see the opening of the trench nearest to her, in spite of about two feet of ivy, ferns, and a small plant that looked like a miniature cream-coloured lupin. A cultivated rose from the garden of the original house on the property had gone wild, covering the native growth with deep pink double petals, now past their prime. A flash of movement overhead made her look up to see a wraithlike white bird flying silently overhead, its long legs trailing behind its body.
“Heron,” said Giulia. “You don’t see them too often. Like a ghost bird, no?”
A line of poetry that Gil once quoted to her floated into Sydney’s mind. The sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. His beautiful voice that could caress as well as castigate. She’d forgotten she had been wooed by more than the money. She had loved him once. Hadn’t she?
“But now, we can forget about all this.”
“Where are we going?” Sydney asked.
“You like jazz? That’s where we go — and to give you another surprise, I think. Avanti!”
It smelled right. It smelled like the boîtes on the Left Bank she had loved when she danced with the Paris Opera Ballet, the bistros and clubs of Milan when she guested at La Scala, a blend of smoke from Gitanes and Camel cigarettes, the vinous bouquet of wine and the dark golden aroma of cognac and whisky, the faint but sharp undertone of humanity: a tinge of sweat, threads of perfume. A gust of nostalgia for her lost dancing days engulfed Sydney as she and Giulia Vannoni went down the steps beneath an illuminated sign that read “Le Grand Saracen.” Drifting up from below came the sound of music — bass, drums, but mostly piano. The tune was a standard: Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.”
The room they entered was dimly lit, with a cavelike quality suggesting both a return to the womb and something faintly sinister. There was nothing remarkable about the decor, which mostly consisted of a variety of posters from art exhibitions, jazz concerts, and stage shows against dark walls. As they entered, the music ceased, and there was a smattering of applause. The place looked full.
“Well, look who’s here! Giulia Vannoni, la bella donna senza pietà!”
The speaker was a dark-haired woman about the same height as Giulia, but of a different build, slender to the point of almost emaciation. She was dressed in the de rigeur black of the avant-garde, with a pair of huge earrings not unlike the chandelier in Giulia’s castello, kohl-rimmed eyes and a slash of carmine on her long, thin mouth.
“Saluto, Deb. Meet Sydney.”
The two women shook hands, the dark-haired woman frankly appraising Giulia’s companion.
“Oh, yes, now I’ve got it — you’re the wife of —”
“I’m Sydney Tremaine.”
“Okay.” The dark-haired woman smiled, as if she understood the subtext. “I’m Deborah Duchemin. Welcome to the Grand Saracen. Let’s find you a table before they start playing again. Giulia drinks red wine — and you?”
“The same.”
Sydney watched Deborah Duchemin leave. “Why did she call you the pitiless beautiful woman?”
“Oh.” Giulia pulled off her heavy jacket, and around them, heads turned.
The clientele was a mix of very young men and women — a tube top, singlet, and jeans crowd — and a fair number of middle-aged couples still clinging in garments and ponytails to their golden hippie age. A couple of men in business suits seemed to have wandered in after a long day at the office. There were other women on their own or in groups, particularly among the younger set, but no one greeted Giulia, or even acknowledged her presence. She may have been recognized, but she clearly was not a local.
“She wants us to be — what do you Americans say? — an item.”
“And you’re not interested?”
“Of course. But Deb is a complicated woman — capricciosa. She is not for me.”
As Sydney turned round to put the art director’s jacket over the back of her chair, she glanced toward the little platform on which the jazz group was reassembling. There was a bass player, percussionist, pianist. Through the mists of cigarette smoke the pianist looked vaguely familiar.
“Is that — ? No, it can’t be. Can it?”
“It can. That’s the surprise. I recognized him when I saw him this morning. The group is called Les Fénions — which is, so I’m told, island French for do-nothings. La dolce far niente, no? Sometimes they have a sax player. The policeman plays piano. Interesting, don’t you think? The same man and yet one must be so different from the other.”
Sydney looked again. The policeman was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. She could see a jacket and tie hanging over his chair, and she wondered if he’d come there straight from work. Bent over the keys,