The Chameleon (46 page)

Claire was lulled into a lapse of calm even as she sank onto the hard bench. Maybe Duccio had been right to insist upon having more than just immediate family present. The trio of schoolboys, classmates of Six, who recalled their friend with short stories of his athletic prowess and leadership, brought a twinge of pride to Claire's heart. Soon the remembered glories broke away, however, with the bitter realization that all the promise that Six had within him would never be fulfilled. She would never sit in a school chapel to listen proudly to his graduation speech or hear him take his wedding vows. She bowed her head, her shoulders shaking, wondering to what authority she could speak to to bring him back. Surely people like Harrison and Duccio were powerful enough to broker any deal. She held Sara's hand harder even as she wondered why, if one of her children had to be taken away, it had to be Six. She was immediately sorry for this thought and, her eyes resting on the sorrowful silhouette of her daughter, silently apologized to Sara for even thinking such a thing. Claire knew that even though Sara wasn't an easy child, she would have willingly given her life to save her brother. There was no blame there. If anyone was guilty, it was she and Harrison, who out of love had conceived a child in sin. Did God punish you for such a thing? Is that why Harrison hadn't come? Was he pushing her away along with his guilt? Oh, beautiful Six. Her golden child with his puckish laugh and big easy smile. Who had melted frozen hearts in Tuxedo Park and soothed troubled ones across the ocean.

My special child. Gone away forever.
The tears that fell from Claire's eyes blurred everything else that happened. The rest of the day went on behind a grim waterfall.

While the cocktail party continued all afternoon in the grand
salons,
upstairs Lorenza insisted that the mourners—Six's mother, sister, and grandmother—take their first nourishment of the day. They sat on a couch in Claire's private quarters, the still unspeaking Sara rigid between them, as they tried to get Sara to eat, though neither could swallow food herself.

Finally, Violet nudged them into motion. The sense of dread she felt propelled her with a strange energy. She knew she had to take her chicks and fly away. She pulled Claire into the dressing room to pack the few things that mattered and asked Sara, who wordlessly complied, to ready her traveling trunk. She instructed Lorenza to close up Six's belongings, reminding her to place school prizes and photos carefully into a separate case.

Lorenza rushed into Claire's closet, its Savonnerie rug littered with dozens of discarded Diors and tissue-stuffed Jacques Faths lying like well-dressed headless corpses amidst the open drawers and half-filled steamer trunks. Empty padded hangers swung wildly from the clothes rods overhead and one-of-a-kind jewels spilled out of the open vault. Lorenza threw herself at the signóra's feet, her arms around Claire's knees, and sobbed as she pled with her to take her with them. To America where she could look after her lady. Away from here so she could be safe.

“Safe from what?” Violet, a curtain of silk scarves hanging from her arm, stopped dead in her tracks.

“Safe from the dangers here.” Lorenza nervously scanned the satin-quilted walls as if they were hiding enemy eyes and ears.

“What dangers? What do you mean?” The delicate-boned Violet shook the big-shouldered peasant girl.

Lorenza, shuddering and quaking with emotion, told them what she knew to be true, so help her Holy Mary. Claire and Violet, wondering how their tragedy could get any blacker, didn't see Sara as she stepped silently into the dressing room. While Lorenza swore on the sacred souls of her dead mother and unborn babies that everything she said was true, Sara stood unseen behind a billowing New Look gown, its velvet-bowed satin skirt large enough to hide ten children, and listened wild-eyed.

Lorenza told them how she had heard the children laughing as they arrived home from riding in the park. Tutti was with them. She heard their happy voices and started down the stairs where she had been folding and packing their summer things for Newport. She'd passed a sulking Sara, who told her Six was teasing her nonstop because she had lost their horse race by a nose and she'd find a way to tease him back. He was laughing right behind her, wearing the smile that got him out of any mischief. Almost as an afterthought he turned and bounded back down the stairs, taking two at a time. Lorenza heard his voice clearly; she had followed just a dozen feet behind. He politely knocked on the library door and entered in that authoritative way he had—you know—like his grandfather. Poor Six walked straight into a shouting match, all the partners of the
Andrea Doria
were there loudly hurling blame at each other and frantically calculating up their losses. Duccio's brother's voice was the loudest after Duccio's, and they were both raising holy hell. When Six inquired as to what time you would be home, signóra— Lorenza nodded to a stricken Claire—Duccio had exploded.

Lorenza apologized for repeating what she'd overheard. “That whore!” he'd cried. “That unfit wife, that woman is not here when I want her!”

Six had shaken his boy's fist at Duccio. “Don't you dare speak about my mother like that!”

Claire could envision the scene clearly. Sir Six riding to her rescue.

“If I ever hear you speak against my mother again you'll have me to fight! She's better than you any day!”

At first, Duccio had only laughed. And then he'd struck the fatal blow.

“Signdóra,” Lorenza said, “I saw it standing in the doorway. It was like a chop to the neck with the side of his hand.” She illustrated. But Claire already knew about those hands.

Lorenza wept as she told how she had heard the crack of bones as she saw Six fall onto the floor. And then she'd backed away on her crepe-soled shoes and run silently across the marble.

She ran afraid for her own life. She feared that Duccio's brother, Zio Duccio, saw her.

What could she have done? What should she do? Whom should she tell? Lorenza pleaded. Zio Duccio had already given her a tip of fifty thousand lire just for bringing him a ginger caramel. She held the paper money, two months’ wages, in her outstretched hand.

“Signóra, take me with you, please.”

Claire slowly looked from the money to the girl, replaying the horrible scene in her head. She looked around the closet for a weapon, anything sharp she could use to drive through the heart of her son's killer. Her eyes landed on a silver shoehorn. She picked it up, then dropped it. If she killed Duccio, who would take care of Sara? No, she needed to rescue them, not make matters worse. She could avenge her son's death some other way. Later. But he would be avenged. “Mother, we're leaving now. Get Sara. I'll call a hearse to bring Six's coffin with us. Lorenza, after you've shipped our bags you'll join us. We're getting out of this godforsaken house now.” She turned so fast in every direction that the heavy cross around her neck swung like a hangman's noose.

Violet looked very faint. She couldn't find Sara anywhere in Claire's apartment, the little rooms that were supposed to have been the family's sanctuary. She sank into Claire's Recamier couch, her face the same green as the grapes on the table, her breath coming in erratic spasms.

“Find Sara,” she gasped, but Claire was already out the door.

It was like running into a tunnel. The long arched passageway connecting the rest of the palace to Duccio's wing was only vaguely illuminated by the courtyard clerestory. It was that strange time of late afternoon once again. The sounds of the well-dressed condolence callers drifted up the stairs and followed her down the tunnel. One of the iron double doors to Duccio's private quarters was open. Wide enough for a child to slip through, Claire thought, her heart pounding in her head. She could hear her own high heels click against the terrazzo as she passed his reading room, his sitting room, his guest room, and ran breathless into his bedroom suite. She was too late.

Duccio lay sprawled on his bloodied turquoise rug with the yellow stars. One arrow pierced his heart, another had torn open his jugular. He looked crooked and angry lying there and Claire was glad he was dead. He deserved a violent end. But it was Sara standing over him with Six's speargun in her hand.

Sara's tongue wagged silently, trying to coax the barely audible word, the first she'd spoken in days, out of her contorted mouth.

“Mommy.”

Finding her voice at last, she shrieked again. “Mommy!”

It should have been me, Claire thought. If I couldn't have been there to save my son I could have at least avenged him. I should have killed Duccio. I should have been there first. Sara, so devastated by Six's death it had taken days for her to utter a single word, would never survive the stigma of being Duccio's murderer. At age thirteen, in America, they might put her under psychiatric care, in a clinic endowed by the Harrisons. But here in Italy, with all of Duccio's powerful family against her, God knows what would happen to the child. Claire had only seconds to think before Lorenza's piercing screams broke the silence, bringing with them a stampede of the curious up the stairs.

“Oh, signóra, hurry! The chief of police is here, the archbishop is coming!” She crossed and recrossed her heart, jumping up and down on her rubber-soled shoes as if she were stamping out a fire. “You must not be in the room when they come. They will blame you!
La Poverina
is small; soon she will be forgiven.”

Claire turned gently to Sara, who still gripped the speargun with all her might. The child's eyes were whirlpools of fear and hatred. Only a mother could read in them a quiet plea for help. If I couldn't have been there to save my son I should at least save my daughter, Claire told herself. She didn't hesitate a moment more. Pushing Sara hard out of the way, she grabbed the speargun from her so that she was the one standing there with the weapon in her hand when the archbishop and Zio Duccio rushed into the room, a swirl of black and scarlet.

Chapter fifteen

Notorious

In spite of even the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.

—
Edith Wharton

I
want the one with the handcuffs.” Ophelia Harrison, who had never mixed with the people before, let alone had anything to do with the people's press, had taken Anita Lace, former war correspondent for Grant Publications and now its society editor, to her bosom. Anita was serving up lurid details of Claire and the Duccio murder to America in her weekly column and making Claire as unpopular as Lizzie Borden.

Magnifying lens in hand, Ophelia studied the photographs of Claire wearing the Medici cross at her son's funeral.

“Over the top,” Miss Lace purred.

“Oh, use this one. She's practically grinning.” Ophelia thought the pictures of the smiling, veiled murderess most suitable for her public relations campaign. Almost as good as Claire in cuffs. In her plot to save her marriage and gain legal custody of Sara, she didn't mind a few ugly mentions of the family in order to throw Claire to the dogs. She almost had what she wanted. The still-feeble Harrison was in his bedroom under the watchful eye of Rudy, his physical therapist, learning to squeeze a tennis ball with his left hand. Sara was on the terrace, silently working on her remedial math at an iron garden table. Ophelia had declared her Italian schooling inferior to Miss Westcott's of Tuxedo Park and had arranged for an army of elbow-patched tutors so Sara would be up to snuff for the fall semester. They, along with the psychiatrists and grief counselors, were smuggled up the back stairs of Charlotte Hall, so as not to encourage any rumors that Sara had gone a bit “off” since her brother's fatal accident. Sara was certainly allowed to be sad. Ophelia had told her as much. However, she also let Sara know that she was behaving in the best Harrison tradition, buttoning up her sorrow and keeping a stiff upper lip. Even though some of the more Freudian child psychiatrists warned Ophelia that an overheated vortex was bubbling beneath the thirteen-year-old's quiet facade, Ophelia took their advice with a grain of salt. Most of these shrinks were Jewish, she reasoned, and what could they possibly know about upper-class WASP behavior?

In Italy, passions were unashamedly worn on everyone's sleeves. There was a great communal wail across the boot at the loss of Europe's most colorful financial pirate. The city of Rome hired a seaplane to drop a thousand white carnations and gladioli, a thunderstorm of petals, over Palazzo Duccio, and the mayor decreed an official day of mourning. Even Italy's president attended the funeral, whose pageantry rivaled that of
Aida.
Duccio's bereft mistress, the opera soprano, refused to perform for two nights, standing up SRO audiences, and when she did go on, she performed Desdemona in Verdi's
Otello
dressed head to toe in black. The crowds cheered her for it. Duccio was hailed as a mythic god of riches and eulogized as the man—no matter what means he used—who gave Italy back its pride. Other Europeans hadn't dared joke about Italy's pathetic behavior during the war, not when Duccio was around to buy and sell them.

Once Fulco Duccio was properly canonized, attention turned to Claire, the white-gloved murderess. Here was a real Greek tragedy, better than any opera at La Scala. The beautiful lady's son had died, and two days later she was found standing in dumb shock over Duccio's corpse. Even the murder weapon, a speargun from Abercrombie and Fitch, could have been an operatic prop. Had she gone mad? Had there been an unseen murderer in the house, an enemy of Duccio's? Was she the beleaguered heroine in a mythological tragedy? It was like watching
Madame Butterfly
performed in modem costume. Would the thin lady sing and then plunge a dagger into her own heart?

Full-page photos in
Oggi, Paris Match,
and Grant Publications’
U.S. Week,
of a magnificently coutured Claire and jaunty Duccio in a conga line with a laughing duke and duchess of Windsor, toasting Ambassador Luce at Palazzo Duccio, and christening the
Andrea Doria
with champagne, were all passed around at every barbershop and ladies’
par-rucchiere.
Recirculated pictures of the murderess and her children posing with Evita Perón, and even a color photo of Claire and Duccio kissing the ring of Pope Pius XII only fed the frenzy. The Italians gobbled up every picture of the refined Claire with their nightly cappuccino and then queued up at the magazine stands in the morning in case there was a new slant on the big story. Perhaps there would be a picture of Claire they hadn't seen before, one of her in a different Dior or with a new hairdo they could copy or in an expensively decorated room in one of her houses. And if there was a photo of her with an arm around her almost preternaturally beautiful son, teary housewives bought two or three of the glossy rags from the newsstands. There was nothing more fascinating to the hordes hungry for gossip than to see one of the untouchable rich toppled from her pink marble pedestal.