It had thrown him completely, of course. She was supposed to panic, call out for help, even run. Old though she was he’d bet she could still run. As he watched, speechless, she took a second cup and began to fill it.
“I trust you like Earl Grey. It’s my favorite, a bit lemony tasting, y’know. Refreshing,” she added, with an upward glance and a smile as she offered him the cup and saucer. He noticed her hand did not so much as tremble.
He had enough sense not to accept it. Even though he was wearing gloves, the less he touched the fewer clues left behind.
“To answer an old woman would be polite,” she said, putting down the cup. “Of course you’d have to take off that ridiculous mask,” she added with a tinkling little laugh that annoyed the hell out of him suddenly. “Impossible to drink in one of those, I know from ski trips I made with my niece, Mirabella. I’m assuming you know of whom I speak?”
His confidence was being quickly eroded. She was treating him like a fuckin’ visitor, not a masked man with a knife in his hand and eyes that glared malevolently at her. Didn’t this woman understand she was about to be murdered? He’d never been in a situation like this before. It had always been get in, do the act, get out fast. Now she was offering him cups of tea for God’s sake.
She turned her back to put down the teapot, and at that moment he had her. The knife slid between her old bones to the heart. He knew his anatomy. Had to, a man with his job.
She remained standing for what seemed to him an eternity, then crumpled to the floor, as though her bones simply withered and gave way. A woman like that, an old woman, it had been her strength of purpose, of character, of dignity and position that had kept her upright. Until she was dead, that is.
For the first time the Russian felt what might have been a pang of remorse. He wasn’t meant to be killing old ladies. He was a wolf: fierce, feral, a street fighter.
He stared for a long moment. The urge to kneel next to her, to take her hand was almost overwhelming. In the end he simply said, “I’m sorry, ma’am.” Then turned his back, left the way he’d come in, through the open french windows.
When, he wondered, would people ever learn that an open french window was an open invitation to men like him? Too late now. What was done, was done. He would go immediately and collect his king’s ransom from the Boss. Plus the bonus he would demand. All remorse aside now, he considered it a job well done.
He suddenly realized there was only one problem. He’d left without the painting, which was an equal part of his commission. He glanced in the rearview mirror. People everywhere. Christ, too late to go back. He’d just have to bluff it out with the Boss. Claim there was no painting. It was already gone.
Part III
Jerusha and the Past
The Beginning
Mirabella
I spent days sitting at Verity’s bedside, at first simply staring at her, sleeping or in a coma, or perhaps something worse. I was afraid for her, afraid for myself. I could not stand it and finally I succumbed and took along Jerusha’s letter to read. What could be better than going back to the past to take my mind off the present day?
It began simply enough with Jerusha saying no one could imagine the love with which she’d built the Villa Romantica.
It was to be a place of refuge for me and my lover, she wrote, but there I go, starting in the middle again when I would be better off beginning at the beginning.
Jerusha
I was so young when I started out, I needed to lie about my age even to appear on stage. “Exactly how old are you?” producers would ask, giving me an up-and-down look as though they might be able to tell by the curve of my hips or the size of my breasts, which were small and of no help. Resisting the urge to fold my arms over my chest, to hide myself, I wished with all my might I could be the kind of statuesque woman they required to pose on stage. I wished I could at least dance or just jump crazily about, wagging real bananas around my middle like the wonderful Josephine Baker, the performer from Harlem in New York City, who had taken Paris by storm and was the main competition for any girl attempting to do the same.
Standing in the wings of yet another Paris theater, my mother lurked within earshot, “to protect” me she said, though she never told me from what I needed to be protected, and anyhow, innocence was my stock-in-trade. Not that I knew that either, but those producers, those stage people did. They recognized the real thing when they saw it and one of them, a successful director, inspecting me back and front, saw a fortune in his future.