Fifth Avenue was empty when they got to her apartment. The wind had blown itself out and the snow was falling almost straight down, filling the ruts in the street. A gentle hush had settled over everything. He gave the driver three ten-dollar bills, jumped out of the cab and gallantly swept his lady out over the soggy curb and under the apartment awning, and she took his hand and led him into the lobby. Behind them, the crack of the young woman’s whip was swallowed up by the snowdrifts. When they entered her apartment she immediately excused herself and went into the bedroom.
Her apartment, which was on the fourth floor overlooking the Park, was a small but tastefully decorated one-bedroom flat with an open fireplace in the living room. But there was something missing, and it was a few moments before he realized there were no personal effects in the room. No pictures, no mementos. It was almost as if the room were a showcase in a department store.
He stood and appraised the apartment for another moment or two, then stepped into the guest bath and closed the door. He lowered his pants. A leather belt was strapped high on his left thigh with a sheath on the inside of his leg. The handle protruding from the sheath had been planed until it was flat and narrow, and then it had been grooved out to fit his fingers. He wrapped them around the handle and drew out a wood chisel, the kind used by sculptors. He inspected it. The curled edges of its gutterlike shaft gleamed with evil promise. The blade had been cut off about five inches from the handle and honed to a needle point. He tested the point with a forefinger, barely touching it before it broke the skin. Tie sucked a bauble of blood from his fingertip, pulled his pants back up, and reaching around his back, slipped the awl into his belt. He checked himself out in the mirror and returned to the living room.
A radio was playing softly in the bedroom. She called to him and he went in. The lights were out, the only illumination coming from a half-dozen candles flickering in the room. She was seated in the middle of the bed, leaning forward with her head lowered, her long black hair cascading down almost to her lap, a lacy gown thrown over her shoulders. He squinted his eyes, trying to make out details in the dark room.
No mirrors behind him.
Good.
Approaching the bed, he slipped off his jacket and threw it over a chair, unbuttoned his shirt and started to pull out his shirttail, moving his hands around his belt, freeing the shirt.
As his hands moved around to his back, she sat up abruptly and shrugged her shoulders. The gauze gown fell away. The sight startled him and he hesitated for an instant and as he did, she swung her right arm up and held it straight out in front of her.
She moved so fast that he didn’t see the gun, only the brilliant flash from the muzzle, and he felt the awful blast of heat on his face a moment before the bullet blew his brains out.
As Colin Bradley fell, he gasped a single, final word:
‘Chameleon?’
BOOK ONE
Murder may be done by legal means, by plausible and profitable war, and by calumny, as well as by dose or dagger.
—LORD ACTON
I
It was still dark when Marza awoke — that last minute or two before dawn when the sun was still caught behind the church spire out on Venezia and the first sanguine fingers of the day stretched out between the buildings and reached across the lagoon toward them. His wife lay beside him, asleep on her side, her flaming red hair fanned out on the yellow satin pillowcase, and for several minutes, his eyes half open, he admired her as she slept.
Hey, Marza, you lucky bastard, he thought. You have it all and this time it is all working. It is a good time for you, the best time of your life.
His eyes caught a glimpse of the silk nightgown lying on the floor where she had thrown it the night before, and he laughed very quietly to himself. They had been married for ten years, and she still surprised and delighted him with her recklessness in bed. Milena de la Rovere, the tempestuous actress, the red-headed tigress who had driven every director in Europe and Hollywood crazy, yet with him, after ten years, she was still his temptress and his lover.
Looking at the tattered nightgown, he remembered her kneeling over him on the bed, yelling raucously, at the top of her lungs, all the English ‘feelthy words’ he had taught her, and then popping the thread-thin straps at her shoulders and pulling the champagne silk gown down slowly, painfully slowly, over her breasts, until finally they could be held no longer and burst free, the nipples erect and waiting for him as she continued taunting him, patiently wiggling out of the gown and letting it drop around her knees, swinging one leg free and straddling him with it, then tearing the gown from the other leg and throwing it carelessly across the room.
‘Three hundred thousand lire,’ he had bellowed, laughing, ‘and she treats it like a Holiday Inn towel!’
‘The sheet Holeeday Eenn,’ she yelled back and started to laugh too. Then she leaned over Marza, and taking one of his nipples between her teeth, she began to move very slowly around, and he felt it get erect in her mouth before she began to suck it and then she looked at him. ‘Va bene?’ she asked mischievously.
‘Molto bene...’
She slowly ran her tongue from his nipple down to his navel, ringing it with her tongue. ‘E permesso...’
It was a whisper, and she concentrated on his stomach while awaiting the answer.
Marza groaned and then said, almost as quietly, ‘Don’t mention it.’
He lay on his back and smiled at her for a long time, feeling the tips of her fingernails, as light as butterfly wings, stroking his abdomen. Then her tongue, just as vague, a sense rather than a feeling. This was for him. It was a thing she loved to do to start things off. Then her lips brushed across the tip of his penis and he rose to her and then she enveloped him and began humming, a deep monotone, and Marza was lost. She seemed to be everywhere. With her tongue, her fingers, her lips. He began to move in rhythm with her, an almost involuntary response to her erotic overture. He could feel his heart pulsing in his throat. His fingers searched her lair, then she began to move her head and the moaning increased and he could feel the deep rumble in her throat vibrating against him as he grew harder and harder.
‘II tempo si è fermato per me’—’A small death,’ he breathed. ‘Time has stopped for me.’
And she answered, muffled, ‘Time does not exist.’
And then there was no more talking, and finally, when he felt he was about to explode, he slid down, pulling her up toward him as he did, and he ran his hand lightly down her stomach, felt her hair, then he squeezed her between two fingers and began moving his hand in slow circles and then both of them were moving and she was stroking him, still, drawing him closer and closer to her until he felt her fire envelope him. Her arms slid around his back and clutched him and as he was about to burst inside of her he chanted, over and over, ‘I give it up.
give it up... give it up...’ and finally, I love you.’
When they were married, the international gossips had given them a few months, a year at best. She was twenty and had been one of Italy’s brightest movie stars since she was seventeen. Marza was thirty-eight and was making a comeback. He had just won his third race in a row after having been written off as a washout by most of the sports writers and sponsors in the business. For three years he had been considered unbankable, a failed driver it thirty-five.