The Charmers: A Novel(26)

“Somebody at my back, you mean.”

“Try the front as well,” he said. “Bullets are not choosy.”

I refused to believe he was serious. “I’m just a woman who inherited a beautiful villa, a few hectares of land, a small fortune. I write novels about stuff like this. I mean, it doesn’t happen in real life. At least not to people like me.”

He was still giving me that long look that was sending shivers down my spine. “Cute,” Verity had called him. And she was right, but there was more to him than that. This was a man who knew his role in life, who gave of himself. He was not just another member of a summer South of France playboy society. He was the real thing, and I was lucky to have met him, to have been rescued by him, even though it meant he’d spent a night in the local jail.

“I hope the Colonel fed you properly, in the clink,” I said.

“Pizza, half bottle of red. Not bad, these local French jails, when you know the proprietor, so to speak.”

“So to speak,” I agreed.

“Look, I’m serious about you.” He stepped forward and took my gloved hands in both of his, gripping so hard I almost yelled out.

I gasped, half in pain, half in wonder. What could he mean by “serious”?

“There’s a danger here, something is wrong, somebody has it in for you.”

“That’s what the Colonel said.”

“I believe he’s right. Ask yourself, Mirabella, what’s wrong? Who wants what you have?”

I loved the way he said my name, pronouncing each syllable so precisely it almost sounded like a woman other than me.

I thought for a second, had no answer, and I told him so. He was still holding my hands in his.

“Then we shall have to find out.”

“Wait I minute.” I snatched my hands away. “I said it before and I’ll say it again now. You are the one that wants something from me. You want my land.”

“My land,” he said with equal firmness. “Remember I have the letter from Aunt Jolly in which she gave it to me.”

“An old woman like that, she could not think clearly, she did not know what she was doing.”

“I wonder,” he said, looking as though he was thinking hard. “I wonder if she did it to try to keep you out of danger.”

I stared blankly back at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Is it true or not true that since you inherited the property there have been attacks on your life?”

I thought about it again. “True,” I admitted. “But that could be a mere coincidence. Somebody made a mistake on the corniche road, and some cat burglar thought I’d have jewels, wanted my pearls.”

“You’ve seen too many movies. There are no cat burglars anymore. Everything’s done by computer, shifting stuff from vaults, from bank accounts. No one’s risking life and limb for a pearl necklace now.”

“That’s just as well, since the only one I have is fake. I’ll wear it to the Boss’s party.”

He nodded and turned to walk away. “Hope you’ll wear some clothes too,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll pick you up. And Verity, of course.”

“Are we going in the British racing green Jag?” I yelled after him.

He turned, standing there looking very Greek godlike with his floppy blond hair, his lean body, his friggin’ pastel shorts, and white polo.

“Of course,” he called back. “Can’t let the parking valets down, amongst all the Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, can we?”





19

The Boss

Sitting at his usual terrace table, third row back, closest to the building, at his favored seafront café, the Boss added more ice to the tall glass of lemonade. He stirred a lemon segment into it with a long spoon and took a first sip, assessing its acidity. He liked it best when it hit his throat in a sharp rush that a lesser man, or one less experienced in the ways of lemon, might have choked on. It was one of the many small ways he tested himself, though some were tougher, like, for instance, the knife, honed to the thinnest of points that he would hold to his own throat while watching himself in the bathroom mirror. The slightest move, a blink, a tremor, or God forbid, a sneeze would have done him in. He enjoyed that feeling. Danger was a dangerous game: living on the edge, feeling every moment.

He also enjoyed playing that game with other people, reallive people whose death he could enjoy with no danger to himself. Of course when he said “people” he meant girls, young women, teens—older too, though forty or thereabouts was his limit. He preferred the tight body of youth to the overblown tumultuous flesh of the older woman. Like, for instance, the young blonde racing across the street, dodging traffic with a cheeky wave and a big smile as cars screeched around her, making for the very café where he sat, sipping his lemonade.

Folding his arms across his massive chest, the Boss leaned back in his chair—the extra-large one the café kept specially for him—enjoying the sight. Medium-tall, slender, with long legs shown off to perfection in short white shorts that also showed off her pert butt, and a black tank top with, thank God, no insignia inscribed across it. Instead he could take note of her small high breasts, bouncing attractively as she skipped through the traffic, noticed, of course, by every man in the café, as well as by the irate drivers. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. Cars screeched to a halt, windows were lowered, angry shouts made her shake her head and point down at the small sausage dog tangled in its lead around her own ankle.