The Charmers: A Novel(66)

He grabbed his suitcase and boarded his expensive plane with its cream leather upholstery and its top-of-the-line equipment. He settled into the pilot’s seat and checked the briefcase containing his papers: a passport with a foreign name, scattered with stamps from various cities around the world, and a photo of the man he had become. It would not have done to have a brand-new passport, though he did not expect to encounter any immigration officials, not where he was going to land, and flying under the radar as he would. Still, it had become a lifelong habit to be prepared for any eventuality. Any emergency.

He had flown planes since he was twenty years old, been taught by a Russian pilot who flew an ancient propeller plane back and forth to tourist locations in the Crimean resorts. After that, when he’d started on his upward climb, he’d had a professional teach him all over again and afterward he had always chosen to pilot his own aircraft. It had been, he told himself now, facing the long journey ahead, a good decision.

He filed no flight plan, skimming the French coast under the radar, then soaring high above the clouds, away from the commercial jet routes, away from the world that knew him as the Boss.

He was smiling as he left all that behind, though he did still regret not making Mirabella his own woman. Still, there was always time for that. Maybe later. In some new life.

It was then he remembered the painting, the Turner landscape, the cause of all his troubles in the first place. He’d left it in the boat. He’d lusted after that painting, a man in heat for it. And he’d lost everything because of it.

The smile disappeared. And then the plane’s engine began to stutter. The plane shook, wiggled its wings from side to side.

The Boss groaned. No problem, he told himself. Nothing I can’t take care of. I always can. Can’t I?





55

Verity

I’m a miracle, or at least that’s what Mirabella tells me. I certainly don’t feel much like a miracle, certainly nothing as grand as that. What I do feel is alive. If anyone had been intended for the other world, whatever that might be, it was me. I escaped that fate thanks to Chad and the Colonel, who I shall now call “my Colonel,” and of course to my friend Mirabella’s determination to save me, and to both Chad and the Colonel’s own instincts about “the super man” himself. The Boss. The Colonel said even the police dogs, the German shepherds, bristled and sniffed and growled when out searching for him. A good dog knows a bad guy, my Colonel told me. I knew he was right.

When I was in that terrible room with the donkeys’ heads skewered to the wall next to me, the intense light trained on my face, blinding me, too weak to so much as voice a protest or even to scream, I’d thought there was no way out. I’d waited for that burst of strength, the energy surge that would make me leap from my lofty place; waited to find “myself” in all the destruction heaped upon me, but it had taken my friends to save me.

How can I ever thank you, I asked Mirabella later, when it was all over and done with and the Boss was gone.

“Thank me?” she’d said, astonished. “Why, if you had not met me on that Paris-to-Nice train you never would have gone through all this. You never would have suffered…”

She’d burst into tears. My Mirabella. The brave one who never cried, except at weddings, as she told me, once again, when I passed her the tissues. And only then it was because it was not her own.

You can throw all the arrows fate can conjure up at Mirabella and she stands tall and strong and figures the way out, saves you from the certain hell that awaits if she doesn’t. Now, that’s a person you call a friend.

I’m sitting here, on the terrace of the Villa Romantica, where I never expected to be again, reluctantly tasting Mirabella’s latest concoction. A vermouth-cassis she calls it. It’s sort of reddish and clinking with ice cubes and tastes I think vaguely of paint remover, but I’m polite and I say thank you and sip obediently. I think maybe she got the proportions wrong, or used the wrong liquor. Ah well, she can’t be good at everything. I think I shall tell her in the future to stick with champagne.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the bizarre events that took place in the Villa Mara. Chad tells me it will leave an emotional scar, and Chad should know because he’s a doctor. He’s dealt with kids who have lost half their faces; he’s put them back together as best he could, and he tells me that after a while they smile again, they talk and laugh and behave just like regular kids. Trauma is internal as well as external. Just look at Mirabella’s hands, which finally, she has left bare. No more gloves. No more hiding the scars. But that is her story to tell, not mine.

Mine is very simple. I came here, to the villa, running away from a ruin of a life, not knowing what I wanted, believing I had lost everything that mattered, my husband, my home, my small amount of savings, my very identity. Mirabella took me in hand, she picked me up from the lowly place I had fallen, she saved my life in the car crash, she saved me again and again, ultimately from the Boss. An evil man.

I ask over and over how I could have imagined I was falling in love with him. I remind myself he was good looking, in that dashing, big man, important person, richer-than-thou way. I remembered the thrill of being on the Boss’s arm, a woman to be reckoned with. Nobody would dismiss you or turn you away. Now, coming out at the other end of the story, with the truth known to the world, the Boss’s reputation gone, his entire secret life exposed, my own story a media scandal that I’m lucky to have survived. I am thankful there are no more TV journalists with cameras, no more celebrity hunters thrusting cell phones in my face. I am anonymous again, and that is exactly how I want it.