Chapter Six
Jack followed the butlers as they descended down a flight of tile stairs, opening their umbrellas over his head like flowering tulips.
He looked around, gathering his bearings.
A series of cream-colored guest houses with Spanish tiled roofs were scattered down the hillside, and the air around them smelled like rain and honeysuckle.
The porter led Jack to one nestled in between a landscaped grove of cypress trees and palms, flush with a wall of creeping bougainvillea.
Jack clutched the glass of mint lemonade in his hand as the porter deposited his luggage in a large room on the second floor with expansive views of the sea.
With a grimace of apology, he gestured toward Jack’s luggage.
“I’ll need to perform a quick search, sir.”
Jack took a long sip of his lemonade and drawled as casually as he could, “Go ahead.”
The porter clicked open the luggage and felt through Jack’s clothes with gloved hands, checking for weapons and secret compartments.
Jack stood in the center of the room and turned.
The room was well-appointed and flush with windows, and one wall led out onto a tiled loggia.
There was an elaborately carved oak bed and matching wardrobe, and a worn Oriental rug over marbled floors.
The ceiling was coffered in an interlaid pattern of hexagons, stars, and suns.
He eyed the painting on the wall, a dark still life of fruit, then stepped into the private bath and ran his hand over the smooth skin of his jaw, examining himself in the mirror.
He’d dyed his hair freshly dark again the day before, and it no longer caught him off-guard when he saw his reflection.
He’d done it for so long that it was now a part of him.
One more false element of who he had become.
“Thank you,” the porter said, clicking the suitcase shut. “Please dress and join Mr. Byrd in the Assembly Room at 5 o’clock sharp.”
Jack tried to slip him a tip, which the porter soundly refused. Jack shut the door behind him and exhaled.
He unlocked the glass doors and stepped out onto the loggia, breathing in the rain-tinged air.
The overhang was a Venetian-style colonnade that protected him from the elements.
He had heard from his source that there was a careful hierarchy to the rooms. The more Byrd liked a guest, the closer his or her quarters approached Byrd’s in the main house.
Each room had a nickname—the Sanctuary, the Venetian, the Meadow, based on the delicate masterpieces painted on each ceiling.
Rumor had it that whenever the prime minister of Britain visited, Byrd set up oil tubes and an easel on his balcony so that he could paint landscapes and smoke cigars in his bathrobe.
And the crown jewel, the Astral Room, was where Miss Garver always stayed.
Jack turned back to his room. He had grown up in the Catholic Church, and his gilded, formal suite reminded him a little of that.
He had once loved the earthy, sweet smell of incense.
The way his soul used to feel when the hymns started and human voices turned to bells.
He used to picture it almost turning colors, like the sun shining through the stained-glass windows.
Even as a child, he had loved being part of something that had gone on for thousands of years before him and would then continue on, cresting like a wave long after his own life was done.
He hadn’t set foot in a church since being sent to Pelican, and he would hate to see what color his soul was now.
Jack methodically unpacked his clothes, then showered, shaved, and dressed.
It had been thirteen years, and he still never took the private shower for granted, the ability to hold a razor blade.
He had once lived in a nine-by-five cell, able to stretch and touch the span of both damp walls.
He watched his hands now in the mirror as he tied his tie, then tied it again.
Part of this wouldn’t be hard. The part where he told the truth about where his fortune had come from.
Luckily, no one ever cared about what you did or who you were before you had money.
He had been able to avoid any outright lies when he met Byrd playing cards at a high-end gambling den in Reno.
Their meeting there wasn’t by happenstance, of course. Nothing was.
He split open a new deck of cards and shuffled them in a waterfall. He thought of his brother, Leo. His mother, Althea. The mosaic ceiling in the church of his youth, flashing gold with light. The way his mother used to quietly cry with joy over the music.
He thought of three different men as they had died in front of him, his hands covered in their blood.
Then he went over the blueprints of Enchanted Hill in his head one more time, and let the cards fall in an effortless arc.
Clementine slid the party dress over her body, feeling the satin caress her skin like chilled water. The rain was lessening, the clouds clearing off. Through the carved wooden openings of the Astral bedroom, she watched the stream of new guests arriving.
“You look lovely,” Truman said, leaning against the doorframe.
He’d ordered the dress she was poured into, its satin the exact shade of the lemon rinds that would soon be curled around the rims of the party drink glasses.
Clementine was glittering. Her earrings swung like miniature chandeliers.
She fit a bejeweled headpiece into her honeyed hair, a swollen jewel resting on her forehead, remembering as she often did how, when she’d first met Truman Byrd, she couldn’t even afford a bottle of perfume.
She had gone out and picked violets herself and crushed them against her wrists and her neck for her first film premiere.
She was an up-and-coming actress, and, at the party afterward, Truman had sidled up to her and told her she was like lightning on the screen.
“I’m flying tonight,” she’d admitted, soaked through with champagne and the feeling that she had caught a drift and nothing could stop her rise. “I suppose a Byrd must know what that feels like.”
He’d smiled, and she hadn’t known it, but she’d stumbled upon one of his favorite things—plays on words.
“That scent you’re wearing,” he’d said, sipping from the crystal tumbler in his hand. “It’s alluring. What is it called?”
“Do you like it?” she’d said. She’d raised her wrist to her nose and breathed in.
“I picked it myself.” He had mistaken her refusal to give him a straight answer as a flirtation.
She had picked up on that and leaned into it.
She wasn’t much for books, but she had a quick, sharp wit she’d inherited from her grandmother Tallulah, and she learned soon enough what an appetite Truman Byrd had for games.
The more complicated and higher the stakes, the better.
“Ronald is worried,” he told her now, coming to stand next to her. He kissed her neck. Reached up to touch the pulse beneath the skin of her jaw, and she closed her eyes.
“So we have to be extra careful?” she asked throatily.
He nodded against her hair. “Which makes me want you even more.”
She took a deep breath. “Truman. Aren’t you nervous about the rumors of the mafia hit?”
“No,” he said immediately. His voice was hard, but not afraid. He ran his hands down her shoulders, the dip of her clavicle. The hit was just another high-stakes game he expected to win.
Truman and his games. Sometimes she wondered if he wouldn’t divorce his wife because he just wanted to keep both her and Clementine guessing and vulnerable.
To play with Clem’s mind, to keep the power balance in his favor.
To see how much she would put up with, and for how long, before she would try to walk away.
She touched the jewel on her forehead and kissed him deeply, then turned and left him wanting more, always more, by walking to the bathroom vanity. Two years ago, he had cast her in a bit part in one of his films; and by the second one, when she had a more starring role, their affair had begun.
Now it felt like so long ago, but at first she hadn’t been certain where the line was—was there any part of her that was attracted to the man Truman was, or was it entirely his fortune, his unquestionable power over her career?
And if she ever wanted to succeed, did she even have a choice in the matter of attraction?
She didn’t waste much time thinking about that.
She pushed down those sorts of questions and watched Truman in the mirror’s reflection as she spread blush across the ridge of her cheekbones.
Somewhere in the last two years, part of her had grown to care for him.
He snored. He liked luxuriously soft cashmere socks and occasionally cooking himself a little snack in the kitchen.
He liked music and art, and he was so much wiser and more cultured than she was.
She wasn’t very educated but she was quick enough, a little feisty, and she knew he liked that. It kept him on his toes.
So she kept herself sharp and witty, laughed easily, and measured her waist every morning.
He could be like a little boy sometimes, with his love of train cars, and costumes, and animals.
And he could be as cruel as a little boy, too.
His words were like cut stones: glittering, small, and lethally precise.
They went right for the jugular when you least expected it.
From the snippets she’d heard, he had inherited that gift from his father.
Yet she liked to feel the rise of his chest and the soft whistle of his breath when he fell asleep beside her, until she woke him and he traipsed up the back stairway to his own room. Sometimes she wondered if he had come to love her, the way she sometimes wondered if she had come to love him.
“You look delicious,” he said from the doorway.
She blew him a kiss, and he disappeared, leaving a wafting scent of cedar behind him.
She examined herself one more time in the mirror.
Three other starlets were arriving that night.
She was excited to see Rita, whom she actually considered a friend.
But she wished the others weren’t coming, never quite sure if Truman was planning to wear her for a season like a coat.
It was true that he seemed more interested in keeping up with the latest in politics and news rather than trying out the latest in fashions, or in women.
But perhaps his first wife thought the same thing.
For now—Clementine daintily applied a set of false lashes—he kept putting her in his pictures and the Astral suite where, under Truman’s touch, even sunlight turned into bars of gold.
She smoothed the yellow satin of the dress against her body.
At some point later that night, she and Byrd would make the party rounds together, ostensibly as a star and her producer.
But for now she knew the rules. She would enter the party without his company.
She would keep a distance, careful to never quite touch him, secretly wondering all along if the game Byrd was playing was her.
She had long left the violets behind her. She spritzed a cut-glass bottle of Guerlain Shalimar Eau de Parfum on her wrists and walked down the staircase alone.