Kiss of Hot Sun (12 page)

“Please, don’t talk so quickly...” I said anxiously. Then a phrase from a tourist handbook leapt into my mind. “
Non parli tanto presto.”

But the operator had caught and understood my English words. “Signor Zampini is wanted... A call from New York...”

“
New York!”
I was astonished. “Did you say New York?”

“Si si. Please, is the signore there?”

Zampini was a long time on the telephone. I hung around just out of earshot. Surely something must be dreadfully wrong to bring a transatlantic call in the early hours of the morning?

Much as I disliked the man, I thought I ought to be on hand in case he needed help.

But when Zampini finally emerged, he was white-faced with anger. He brushed past me without a word, without even a glance, storming on up the stairs. I heard a door slam violently.

Bewildered, I switched off the light in the telephone room, closed the door, and made my own way upstairs. I was just going back into my bedroom when I heard voices. Or rather, one voice. It was Zampini, raging at someone in a fury.

I listened anxiously. At first I couldn’t make out where the sound was coming from. Not Zampini’s own room—that was away down the corridor. Then another voice, feebly protesting, fixed it for me.

“No, Guido. No!”

What an impossible creature Zampini was! To burst in upon an old lady in the middle of the night. And when she was already in a badly shocked state about Carlo. It was sheer heedless cruelty.

I didn’t care who he was. I didn’t care what he was so angry about. Running down the corridor, I barged straight into Adeline’s room without knocking.

The poor old thing was in bed. She had propped herself up on one elbow, blankets clutched to her throat.

Zampini was bending over her. Without straightening, he swung his head towards the door. When he saw me, his face crimsoned into still deeper fury.

“Go away from here!”

“I want to speak to Miss Harcourt.” Feeling a lot less calm than I pretended I walked round to the other side of the bed, and sat myself on the edge. Adeline looked up at me tremulously. I put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked softly.

Her hand came up and covered mine, pinning it there. The gesture told me how much she needed support. “Perhaps you had better leave us, Kerry.”

“I shall stay here as long as you wish it,” I said stubbornly. I gave Zampini a challenging stare. “I don’t take orders from anyone else.”

He sucked in an impatient breath. “Tell the fool of a girl to go away, Adeline.”

“You had better do as he says, Kerry.” But I knew Adeline didn’t mean it. Those thin old fingers were still clutching tight to mine.

When I put my other arm around her shoulders I
felt
the violence of her trembling. I held her tighter, trying to be reassuring.

“I think
you
had better be the one to go, Signor Zampini,” I told him firmly.

“You say that to me?” His fat cheeks shook with anger, “How dare you!”

“My job is to help Miss Harcourt,” I said, with a sweet reason he certainly didn’t deserve. “Right now she needs rest. I don’t know exactly what your position is in this house, but I am asking you to leave the room, if you please.”

He looked as if he wanted to pick me up and fling me across the room. Shaken, I still found the courage to stare back at him defiantly.

After a bit he turned away. “Tell her to get out, Adeline,” he demanded for a second time.

The terrified old eyes found mine. I knew they were begging me to stay. “You must do as he says, Kerry darling.”

“No!” I chose to accept the message of her eyes. “Come now, Signor Zampini.
Please.
..!”

“You interfering little bitch,” he shouted at me. Then he lapsed into a flood of Italian. I waited until he had run out of words before insisting again that he should leave Adeline’s room.

“If you refuse I shall go and fetch help.”

Fortunately for me, Zampini decided I meant what I said. He went straight to the door.

“I shall see you in the morning,” he snarled at Adeline. Then his savage gaze clamped on me. “And you! I shall have something to say to you tomorrow.”

But he shut the door with surprising softness.

I tried to be briskly persuasive with Adeline, like a nurse. “Lie down and let me pull the blankets up. You must be cold...”

Very meekly, she did what I said. I had an idea she was glad to be taken firmly in hand.

“Now, is there anything I can get you?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, darling. But stay—please stay.”

I fetched a chair and sat down close beside the bed. “You mustn’t let him upset you so much, Miss Harcourt.”

“You do not understand. It is not so simple.”

“Why not tell me about it?”

I was cracking with curiosity. I longed to know why that wretched man had so much power over Adeline. Even more, I reckoned it would calm her to confide in somebody.

But she shrank away from the mere thought of telling me. “No, darling, do not ask me. I must not speak...”

Should I press her, I wondered, or let the matter drop? If I was going to protect Adeline from Zampini’s wrath tomorrow, I had better know as much as possible beforehand.

The strikingly bold colours of the room were sombre now in the shaded light of a bedside lamp. I glanced around, lost for a moment in my thoughts. The pictures on the walls jolted me back to my talk with Philip. They provided the inspiration I needed.

I plunged straight in. “Is the trouble something to do with forged paintings?”

She reacted so violently that I knew I’d hit the target dead on centre. She gave a little sob and her hands flew to her face.

“I suppose Giles told you? The idiot.”

“Giles?” I exclaimed in dismay. “Is he tied up in this, too?”

She looked bewildered. “Then he didn’t...?”

“It was just a stab in the dark, Miss Harcourt.”

Adeline chewed that over. “I see,” she said eventually. “When you saw me with the Blunts up in the attic, you put two and two together?”

I didn’t disabuse her. There was no need to drag Philip into this. Not for the moment.

I had a feeling that after the first shock Adeline was glad I knew. Her fear seemed to have lifted a little. She shook an arm free from under the blankets, and clutched again for the comfort of my hand.

“You must believe me, Kerry darling, there is nothing really wicked... What we are doing, it is wrong, yes. But...”

I tried to soothe her down. Judgements could come later, if need be.

“It all began as a joke,” she went on earnestly. “Not to make money; not with the idea of cheating people. I myself have never profited from it. My share I have always given to the nuns.”

“Let’s get this straight. You’ve been selling forgeries as genuine old paintings...?”

She was denying it hotly. “Never! Not once have I made such a claim. But if I sold a nice painting, and the buyer paid much more than he would have done simply because he thought he had found a Raphael, well...” A spark of humour flickered back into her eyes. “The price we got was not a tenth the value of a genuine Raphael—not a twentieth! So who was cheating whom, darling? Tell me that.”

I had to know the worst. “Who painted the forgeries, Miss Harcourt? Was it Giles?”

“Yes, it was Giles.”

“But why? Why did he have to get himself mixed up in anything like this?”

Adeline rushed to his defence, her affection plain. “The poor boy found it so hard to make a living selling those little paintings to tourists. They will not pay very much for a souvenir. Then one day a couple of years back he showed me something he had done for his own pleasure. It was a portrait of a young woman, very much in the style of Raphael. Guido was staying here at the time, and it was he who thought up the whole scheme. He said it would be amusing to hide the picture in the attics amongst some old paintings I had up there, and persuade somebody to buy it believing they were getting an old master at a bargain price. And it worked without any difficulty.”

“The way you’ve been talking,” I said shortly, “it sounds like a regular business.”

She smiled faintly, “I’m afraid so. Guido has been sending people over here, ready primed with a story about a silly old woman who doesn’t realise she’s got a Raphael amongst the lumber in her attic. He would explain that because I know he’s an expert, I would smell a rat if he tried to buy it for himself. But for a consideration he will give them my address, to try their luck. The poor fools always fall for it.”

The answers to other puzzles were beginning to click into place. I could see now why there were so few visitors to this attractive guest house.

I said rather bitterly: “I suppose the only people you ever have staying here are prospective suckers?”

“No no, darling!” Adeline was shocked. “That would be much too suspicious. We always have a sprinkling of ordinary guests. Our little honeymooners, for example.”

So it boiled down to this—a sordid confidence trick! The mugs were cleverly blinded to an obvious fraud by their own monstrous greed. They all imagined they were putting one across a simple old lady, whereas in fact a very astute woman was outwitting them.

It was right up Adeline Harcourt’s street! A glorious charade, an elaborate performance to bedazzle the poor dupes Zampini prodded to her door. How she must have enjoyed stringing them along, first pretending reluctance, at last being persuaded...

And all of it neatly justified in Adeline’s mind by giving the profits of crime to a convent. The nuns would be distressed to know the true source of those freewill offerings.

I had thought Adeline had dozed off, but when I shifted in my chair her eyes flashed open. There was more to tell, and having got started she was determined to tell it.

Giles, I learned, had been keeping up a steady trickle of the forgeries, always in the style of the same painter. He had the knack of Raphael, she explained artlessly. Afterwards, when the deal was done, Zampini would be at hand to warn the buyers that the painting must be smuggled out of Sicily. He would tell them they’d never get official permission to remove such a fine work of art.

“We could not risk an intelligent Customs man asking awkward questions,” Adeline pointed out.

The answer, it emerged, was simple. Giles would obliterate the ‘masterpiece’ with a scene of Taormina bay. Hey presto! It had become just another of Giles Yorke’s souvenir pictures, well known to the Customs. Who would ever guess what lay concealed underneath?

To me it all sounded highly complicated. And I couldn’t see where it got them.

Adeline made an impatient cluck. “For the overpainting, Giles used materials that can easily be removed; and Guido furnished the buyers with an address in their own country where the work can be done. He has contacts everywhere.”

“And has nobody ever brought charges against you, when they eventually discover the fraud?"

Her lips curled into scorn at my innocence. “A man will not easily admit to the world that he has been hoodwinked. And of course there is nothing criminal in what we do. I have never so much as hinted that a painting might be genuine.”

“You didn’t need to. Zampini had already done that job for you.”

Reluctantly she admitted it. “I have been wanting to stop for some time. But it is so difficult. What started as a mere amusement has got out of hand.”

“How can you call it amusement?” I asked reproachfully. “It’s downright dishonest, whatever you say.”

There was a silence before she answered slowly: “You are right, of course, Kerry darling. I should never have started this silly game.”

Even now, I doubted if Adeline could really understand the wrong in what she’d been doing. Her need to
perform
was so strong-rooted; it justified almost anything.

I said firmly: “Tomorrow you must tell the Blunts it was all a mistake. And then finish with the whole wretched business.”

Despite her obvious guilt, Adeline had been telling the story with a sort of inner amusement. She was still half-enjoying the joke. But my suggestion stunned her. She looked really frightened again.

“But Guido would never agree to that.”

“So what?” I asked impatiently. “Just tell him you’re not prepared to carry on any longer.”

In a snap she became a feeble old lady once more. Her words jerked out in little sobs. “I cannot do that... You don’t know him...”

“There’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t
force
you.”

“I dare not!” she cried. “I dare not tell him...”

“Then I will.”

“No!” She yelped the word in startled terror. “You must not say anything, Kerry. It is too dangerous. You must not allow Guido to know I have told you so much.”

“I don’t see why not. If he knows that I know, he won’t risk carrying on.”

She had lifted her head from the pillow, shaking it wildly from side to side, refusing to listen to me.

“Why are you so afraid of Zampini?” I asked, puzzled. “It’s as if he’s got some kind of hold over you.”

“Oh, you do not understand,” she moaned. “He is my friend. He was poor dear Vittorio’s friend too.”

“A funny sort of friend to have! Terrifying the life out of you.”

Very quietly Adeline whispered: “In Sicily, it is like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The villa is isolated, you see.” She spoke as if this accounted for everything. But I didn’t catch on.

“We need protection,” she explained. “We must have a friend in the... the Old Movement.”

It took a second to click. “The Mafia, you mean?”

Nervously, she skated away from the word. “Guido was Vittorio’s contact. His friend. After Vittorio’s death, when I inherited the villa, Guido became
my
friend.”

I was appalled. “But you treat him like a real friend.”

“It is something one learns to accept.”

“And if you refuse to accept it?”

She put up her hands to her cheeks. “I am so afraid of Guido. He will stop at nothing...” She hesitated, and then added quietly under her breath: “Look what happened to Carlo.”