Requiem For a Glass Heart (14 page)

Cate watched the two of them for a moment, and then as she started to close the curtains, she happened to see a third figure a few steps away. Sitting in a lawn chair in the shadow of one of the palms, Leo Ometov was calmly listening to Loder’s diatribe, his chin resting on one hand as he smoked.

L
IKE MOST COUNTRY HOMES IN THE
CAMPAGNA
, C
ARLO
Bontate’s villa was not actually in the little village of Marineo but well off in a valley to the northwest of the hamlet, which consisted primarily of two ancient chapels around which a small community had encrusted itself on the top of a hill. Irina could see the little whitewashed town with its terra-cotta roofs shimmering in the distance from the porthole of Wei’s jet as it touched down on the tarmac strip in the middle of a dusty plain.

The airstrip itself was a sign of the new generation that Bontate represented. Such a sign of wealth, even in the isolation of the Marineo valley, would have been forbidden a decade earlier. These sorts of extravagances were left to Mafia holdings outside Sicily. At home, humble appearances were the rule. The Sicilians differed in this from the Colombians, who flaunted their wealth under the dirty noses of their own impoverished peasants.

But youth and expediency often brought about changes soundly decried by tradition. Such was the way of the world, even for the families of the Sicilian Mafia.

When the plane made a slow turn at the end of the runway, Irina saw two Mercedes sedans sitting side by side along the edge of the tarmac. The familiar sight of bodyguards leaning
against the sides of the cars was not particularly comforting to Irina as the Falcon 2000 whined to a stop fifty yards from them.

Bontate’s young men were clearly not the local country boys who were so famously loyal to the older mafiosi. These sun-shaded and surly loyalists wore silk shirts and fashionably baggy suits, and seemed to consider accompanying their boss during retreats to the country house a hardship duty. Their black city shoes were caked with dust, and the expressions on their faces revealed an impatience with this country business and a desire to be back on the streets of Palermo, where a man’s shoes would stay shiny and he could get a
caffè corretto
at the snap of his fingers from a trattoria always close at hand.

Two handsome
palermitani
met Irina as she stepped out of the jet and ushered her into the back seat of their sedan. The pilot got into the second sedan with two other men, while two more remained behind with the plane and with Wei’s security guard, who always traveled with the pilot but never let the aircraft out of his sight. The two cars sped along the dirt roads of the valley toward the rising land and the foothills opposite Marineo itself.

Bontate’s country house was an old two-story villa of stone and faded ocher stucco. It sat atop a hill, like Marineo, and faced northeast across the valley to the bright little village eight miles away. On either side of the road that wound up to the villa were alternating fields of grain and olive groves and vineyards, and everything near the road was glazed in a chalky dust that baked under the summer sun. The villa was enclosed by a high wall, which was thickly planted on its outside perimeter with lemon and lime trees, punctuated here and there by tall palms whose fronds hung over the inside of the dun-colored wall.

The two Mercedes cruised through the gate in the wall and turned to a sudden stop on the gravel drive. Immediately the bodyguards were out, opening Irina’s door just in time for her to be engulfed by their own dust, which had followed them into the courtyard on the heavy summer air.

One of the young men, beckoning her with manicured fingers and a flashing diamond ring, led her across the gravel and into the shade of a portico. She sensed someone to her right and turned to see several people sitting in a garden under the dappled shade of trees. They were all women, three or
four of them in wooden lounge chairs, fanning themselves in the heat. Books and magazines were lying about, and on a small round table nearby were glasses and a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of some kind of iced drink. All of the women turned to look at her as well, as did a little girl in a baggy white dress, who was pushing her black hair out of her face with one hand while her other hand gripped a string attached to the neck of a speckled chicken.

Irina froze, her eyes fixed on the child. Then, almost instantly, she realized she was staring and quickly turned to follow the bodyguard into the villa’s gloomy entry hall.

The stone walls were thick here, as were the shadows that kept the inside of the old villa cool. The yeasty odors of a wine cellar lingered on this bottom floor, but the bodyguard immediately started up the stone stairs that ascended on either side of the hall. Irina followed him up along the curving balustrade to the second-floor landing, where an open mezzanine wrapped around both sides. Immediately at the head of the landing double doors led into a large square reception room with parquet floors and heavy dark furniture. Tall windows along the walls let in muted afternoon light as they crossed to a second set of double doors, which opened onto a deep shady loggia. The view from here was stunning, a sweeping perspective of the valley and the mountains beyond, the rolling landscape brilliant in the summer light. Huge meringue-white clouds drifted in from the coast to the north, dragging behind them smears of stucco-colored shadows that moved over the groves and fields below.

“Signorina Serova.”

Irina turned to her left and saw a heavyset man in rumpled trousers and a short-sleeved plaid shirt getting up from a chair and coming toward her. She recognized Bontate from the photographs in Krupatin’s file.

“Welcome to the country,” he said, extending a hand without a smile.

“Thank you,” she said, glancing over his shoulder behind him. No one else was there.

“Let’s sit down over here,” he said, turning his back on her and walking to the small table with a chipped and discolored marble top where he had been sitting. There were several chairs and on the table a bottle of wine without a label and two glasses. There was also a pack of American cigarettes and
the tin lid from a widemouth jar, which he had been using as an ashtray.

“I was just out looking at my vines,” he said, motioning for her to sit down, “when I saw your plane. This isn’t the very best land for wine, here around Marineo, but I am experimenting with some
moscatos”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

An old brown fedora, its band stained with sweat and dust, was hanging on the back of his chair. The underarms of his shirt were dark with perspiration, and the upper part of his forehead was pale where the fedora had shielded it from the Sicilian sun.

He poured a small bistro glass of wine and set it in front of her without asking her if she wanted it. He did not ask if she wanted to freshen up or if she cared to have something cool to drink. He looked and acted like the caretaker of this property rather than its owner.

“This is a little unusual,” he said, getting right to the point as he poured wine into the other glass for himself. Like Wei, he spoke English, but Bontate’s English was heavily accented. In his early forties, just shorter than Irina, he had tousled dark hair with flecks of sandy brown. His face was round and sunburned and stubbled with a day’s growth of beard. But his most striking feature was his eyes. They were bright amber and shielded by long, soft lashes. The rich honey of their color seemed almost to glow in contrast to his deep Sicilian tan.

“Perhaps,” she said, setting her shoulder bag on the floor beside her chair. “But Krupatin was hoping that having me meet you would put your mind at ease.”

“My mind is not uneasy,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “All the same, this is a little unusual.”

“What strikes you as unusual?”

“Well, we have never done this before. Doesn’t that make it unusual?”

“Yes,” she said, “it does. I will be happy to answer any questions you might have.” She reached for the small glass of wine and took a sip. She was surprised to find that it was very smooth.

Bontate picked up the pack of cigarettes lying on the table and lighted one, blowing the smoke out his nostrils as he crossed his legs, grunting a little. He put his hand on his bistro glass,
hesitated, then picked it up and sipped the rich red liquid. He held the cigarette deep in the fork of his fingers.

“If he is so afraid of the American police, why doesn’t he just tell the Chinese we have to meet somewhere else?”

“Would you do that, Signor Bontate?”

He looked at her. “I would ask the Chinese to have the meeting somewhere else.”

“Maybe he did.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t. Signor Bontate, I should tell you that I do not work for Sergei Krupatin. I agreed to act as his emissary on this one occasion, for these negotiations only, in return for a favor I owe him. After this we are even, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with him.”

Bontate pulled on his cigarette, looking at her. “It must have been a pretty big favor.”

“It was.”

He turned his face to the valley, where the clouds and shadows were traveling south over his vineyards and groves, and squinted into the bright light.

“How do you know Sergei Krupatin?”

“I met him when I was a university student in St. Petersburg, years ago. We got to know each other. A few years passed, and I decided I didn’t want to know him anymore.”

Bontate was still staring out into the light. “That happens.”

“He didn’t like it, but he had a certain regard for the way I saw things. He still does.”

“What is he paying you?”

“Nothing. I told you, I owe him this.”

“You don’t like this man, but you still think you owe him something? If you don’t like him, why do you respect an old debt?”

“For some people, an old debt has little to do with the person it’s owed to. It has more to do with something inside the person who owes it.”

Bontate turned to look at her, his amber eyes glinting out of his dark face. He picked up his glass and lifted it in salute to her and took a drink. He smoked, continuing to look at her.

“I have a picture of you, did you know that?”

“No.”

He shook his head. “Krupatin. Shrewd bastard.” He sighed. “Did you see those women down there?” “Yes.”

“My wife. Her sister, My mother-in-law. I married three women.”

Irina couldn’t help herself. “And the little girl?”

Bontate looked sharply at her. “My daughter. A better woman than all three of them put together. Did you see her chicken?”

“Yes.”

A slow smile grew on Bontate’s face, the first expression besides a scowl since Irina had arrived. He laughed silently, his stomach moving under the plaid shirt.

“The hooli-booli man gave it to her.”

“Who?”

“Oh, a street magician in Palermo. He put a black seed behind her ear, and when he brought it out, it was that damned speckled hen. For some reason she thought it came out of her head, and so she says they are sisters. This chicken … She has taught this hen to peck out the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same order you cross yourself. You know.” He made the sign of the cross. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

Irina watched this Italian don laugh at his beloved daughter’s religious chicken and tried not to think about what she was supposed to do to him, or what he would do to her if he ever discovered Krupatin’s traitorous intentions. There was so little distance between one and the other that she could hardly believe what she had gotten herself in the midst of.

As if Carlo Bontate had read her thoughts, the smile on his face faded, and he once again soberly pondered the light on the slopes of the land below his house. He smoked his cigarette. Pigeons fluttered and burbled along the eaves of the loggia, and as if the little girl knew she was in her father’s thoughts, she laughed somewhere near the mimosa where her mother and aunt and grandmother were lazing in the lacy shade.

“No,” Bontate said, as if interrupting himself in the middle of a conversation, “it’s logical that the Chinese wants to meet in Houston. Once the arrangements have been settled, we are going to want to talk to our people. Being the kind of men we are, we are not going to want the others to get ahead
of us. The Chinese is impatient. And Krupatin, he has already proved that he can move very fast.”

He took one last pull on his cigarette and mashed it out in the tin lid. Letting the smoke roil from his nostrils, he picked up his glass and drank, swallowing a mouthful of wine and smoke. He looked at her quickly.

“What do you think about the Chinese?”

“In what way?”

“In any way you wish.”

“I’m not supposed to think about him. It’s not part of what I have to do.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Deliver messages from one party to the other and keep my mouth shut.”

“Oh.” Bontate nodded. “Very strict instructions from Sergei.”

“Yes.”

“Well, as a woman, then. Forget your job. What do you think of the Chinese?”

Irina looked at Bontate. What was he trying to do? Surely with all that was at stake here, he wasn’t going to play a macho game with her. But why did she think that he wouldn’t? Wei had only played a smoother version of the same thing.

“He’s an interesting man.”

Bontate laughed softly and turned to her. “Signorina Serova, I do not believe that Sergei Krupatin does anything-—
anything
—without first counting the benefit to himself. Is he ignorant of the penchant Signor Wei has for European women? I don’t think so. You are a nice marzipan heart for the Chinese. This is good for Krupatin, for negotiations.” He paused, shaking his head thoughtfully. Then he resumed. “Now, I can only expect that Sergei has something special in mind for me too. Something to appeal to my special tastes as well. But what can that be?” He raised his eyebrows and dropped his face in mock consternation. “What can that be? The same woman? I don’t think so. But what can it be?”