Queen of Indy

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Start Reading QUEEN OF INDY

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Book Jacket

• Dakota Franklin WINS Best Action/Adventure at Best Independent EBook Awards

• Dakota Franklin's series RUTHLESS TO WIN has already won awards and enthusiastic reviews for fascinating characters and rivetting action. The six volumes already published in the series — LE MANS a novel, REQUIEM AT MONZA, TROUBLESHOOTER, NASCAR FIRST, QUEEN OF INDY and RACING JUSTICE — have all been international bestsellers.

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When the terrorist Mamoud attacks the house party, Raf Ferenghetti and Sally Samson, juniors at Armitage Racing, save the daughter and heir of Lydia Simpresi, the sponsor and friend of Armitage. As a reward, Raf and Sally are put in charge of Armitage’s run at the Indy 500 financed by Simpresi. Now Mamoud is free and wants revenge for the death of his comrades and his own public humiliation. Raf’s new job includes security.

All Raf wants to do is to protect Sally, help to turn her into a star racing executive—the Queen of Indy—by doing his own job as chief of operations superbly well, and then to return to his own dream of becoming a sculptor.

But Raf answers to the maximum Armitage trouble-shooter, the uncompromising Charlie Cartwright, and for assistance must count on the Armitage security consultants, the relentless Frank Harrington and the ruthless, violent ex-Presidential bodyguard, Joanne Bartlett.

And Mamoud has declared Sally a special target.

It is liberating to know that by Memorial Day you may be gorily dead.

Alongside its terrifying thrills, QUEEN of INDY counts among its other excitements a super love story and a seamlessly integrated insider’s look at the creation of a great auto racing team to contest the greatest automobile race in the world. As expected in every Dakota Franklin thriller, QUEEN of INDY abounds in sharply drawn characters on the edge of psychopathology—or over it.

***

I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read.

— Joo's Book Reviews

I thoroughly enjoyed this book — in fact, I started reading it again straight after I'd finished it.

— L. Rumbold

A wonderful story full of action and remarkable detail.

— Boyd S Drew

RUTHLESS TO WIN

Series Editor: André Jute

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QUEEN OF INDY

Dakota Franklin

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CoolMain Press

QUEEN OF INDY

Copyright © 2013 Dakota Franklin.

The author has asserted her moral right.

First published by CoolMain Press 2013.

This edition published at Smashwords 2014.

http://www.coolmainpress.com

info@coolmainpress.com

Series Editor: André Jute.

Associate Editor: Claudine van Wyk

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

QUEEN OF INDY

Dakota Franklin

*

"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

House guests

Afterwards, what I least believed about the entire affair was that the terrorists knew who everyone in the house-party was—and didn’t have the brains to conclude for themselves that such people would resist attack, and then counter-attack with devastating efficiency.

Some people don’t have even the brains they were born with. These poor bastards attacked a bunch of hard cases who consider terrorists no loss to the gene pool. As it happened, the members of the house party wiped the attackers from the gene pool without ever stopping to think about it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from the rest of us. So are automobile racers. You may object that auto racers are rich too, and that is true. But auto racers are different from us in all the ways the rich are different, and then in a few more ways. One obvious difference is that auto racers have no concept of their own mortality or, as far as I can make out, anyone else’s. Some of the rich may be careless of everyone else’s mortality but those I have met are acutely aware of their own mortality. My parents are both plastic surgeons so I know precisely how much people will pay for even the illusion of everlasting youth, a sort of fake immortality.

The house party was in the middle of the week. We arrived from Daytona Beach late on Tuesday night, having left Daytona Tuesday morning after our stunning 1-2-3-4 victory in the Daytona 500. After a day of flying into the sun we arrived by helicopter at an extensive villa on a vineyard in Tuscany so late at night that only a servant waited to greet us; we went straight to bed.

On Wednesday morning when I stuck my head out of my bedroom door to see if everything in the house was as lavishly decorated sometime in the 18th century as my bedroom, I saw Sally Samson, my boss, striding down the wide tiled floor of the passage, clearly on her way to somewhere.

Slapping my pockets to check that I packed my phone and my billfold, the tools of my job, I fell into step with her. I hide the fact that I am not on top of my job—in fact not even quite sure what precisely my job encompasses—by being the first to volunteer enthusiastically for any task and, when no specific tasks are offered, striding purposefully in the same direction as the bosses.

I’m an operations assistant at Armitage America, which is the stock car racing arm of the British auto racing house Armitage Cartwright Racing Limited, where they cannot remember how many grand prix they have won or how many times they have won Le Mans outright. At its most basic, where I have no problem understanding it, my job is to see that the drivers and engineers and bosses never reach for anything before I put it in their hand. I’m a manner of body servant with an unlimited expense account.

Sally at 21 is one of two general managers. She is in charge of two of those racing teams that won so stunningly at Daytona. The other general manager is an attorney in charge of our administration and dealings with the racing regulatory bodies. The other two racing teams are handled by Sally’s boss, Simon Aron, president and chief operating officer of Armitage America.

‘Someone has sympathetically renovated a building several hundred years old, last redecorated no more recently than a quarter-millennium ago, to put a bathroom in every bedroom,’ I said.

Whatever the Italians may call it, in daylight the house is clearly more palazzo than villa. From my window vineyards stretch uninterrupted to and up the slopes of the mountain a couple of miles to the west.

‘Did you rate a porcelain chamber pot under the bed as well?’

‘I hope you didn’t… It’s a venerable antique.’

Sally turned her head to grin at me. She is truly exotically beautiful, as I imagine the Queen of Sheba or Cleopatra must have looked, with gleaming ebony skin, gleaming black hair to her shoulders, a straight nose between large gleaming eyes. Sally shines. She could be a model but I suppose that would be beneath her dignity. Judging by her position at a rich and clearly successful corporation like Armitage, it would be beneath her talents too.

‘You don’t want the servant troubles that come with a place this size.’ Sally knocked on a door and when there was no reply walked in. ‘It’s Sally and Raf,’ she called towards the bathroom door which was shoved to from inside, wafting steam towards us. She sat on the upholstered stool before the dressing table and I leaned against the wall by the door.

‘Those hinged mirrors reflect you about thirty times,’ I said. ‘Now that would be something to dream about if you weren’t my boss.’

It just slipped out.

She put her forefinger to her lips while she regarded me. After several moments she said, ‘I wouldn’t care about that if it were the right thing to do.’

Sally and I aren’t friends; in fact I hardly know her. So I nodded and let it slide. It wasn’t the time or the place, and the likelihood is that Sally will be too much woman for me. I’ve been with Armitage America just long enough to discover that she possesses a steely will.

But I did walk over to arrange the mirrors just so.

When I resumed my place at the wall, Simon stood in the room in his shorts, his hair brushed and the smell of Eau Sauvage wafting faintly into the room with him. He made the bed before he went into the shower. His hang-in-the-bag Samsonite hung on the outside of a huge carved monstrosity of a wardrobe that an antique dealer will kill for. Simon is well used to living on the road.

‘Nice tableau,’ he said, meaning either the two of us together or the multiple images of Sally in the mirror or both.

Simon is a tall, thin guy of 32 with the black-rim glasses and pipe of an intellectual, which serve him well as he’s a New York liberal, out of place in California, our home base, in his Wall Street attorney’s pinstripe three-piece suits. In his shorts you can see that he is not so much thin as whipcorded with the stringy muscles of an obsessive tennis player.

He already wore his socks.

‘Raf was just expressing lust for me, given only that I come by the dozen,’ Sally said, gesturing at the mirrors. ‘What are we doing here, Simon? We should be at the works making the cars ready for Las Vegas.’

‘Charlie told me to come.’

‘Why?’

‘Lydia Simpresi is a houseguest here this week. We’re flying the flag. We’ll be back in the States Thursday evening.’

Sally opened her mouth to argue but I opened the door to the knock and a servant came in with Simon’s suit, beautifully pressed, and shoes, gleamingly polished.

‘Meanwhile behave like guests,’ Simon ordered as he buttoned his shirt. He stepped into his pants and pulled the braces Sally attached over his shoulders. He bent his knees so she could reach to knot his tie, meanwhile slipping on and buttoning his vest, which he calls a waistcoat in the British manner. He stepped into his shoes and bent from the waist to tie the laces. I held his suit coat for him and then flung open the door as he scooped his billfold, phone, pipe and tobacco pouch off the bed.

In the passage I walked briskly half a step behind them as if I knew where we were going and why.

‘We’re the perfect house guests, very relaxed,’ Simon said as if to persuade himself. I guessed he was severely pissed off at being ordered to Italy like a flunky.

Charlie Cartwright and his wife Carolina came around a corner. ‘That way lie only bedrooms,’ Charlie said.

Charlie is a fraction over average height and slightly chubby with good living. He doesn’t look like any kind of an athlete, never mind a multiple Le Mans winner who retired from competitive driving only a year ago at the age of thirty-eight. He’s the youngest of the three partners at Armitage Racing. Carolina is a statuesque redhead taller than he is. He wore a seersucker suit and she wore a cream linen pants suit.

‘This is Edward and Trevor,’ Charlie introduced his two sons who appeared to be about six and five. ‘Mr Aron, Ms Samson, Mr Ferenghetti.’

They gravely shook hands with us.

We walked the other way, the two boys scouting ahead. We strode through a formal dining room with a table that would probably seat four dozen and out onto a terrace. Thirty paces along the terrace, in front of a recent wing of the same stone as the main building, there was a pool. Around the pool sat people though at ten in the morning in late February, even in Tuscany, no one was in it; everyone I saw was fully and smartly dressed.

We stopped by a long table with a white cloth and dishes on warmers.

‘I’m making oats porridge for the boys,’ Carolina said. ‘If you want some, speak up now.’

‘I’m in that,’ Simon said. He’s one of those skinny fellows who can eat anything, and does, in vast amounts.

‘I’ll stick to stewed prunes,’ Sally said.

‘I’ll have porridge,’ I said, ‘if it’s made with real Scots barley oats.’

A servant brought a gas stove and ingredients. I handed up a jug of milk to Carolina without being asked.

A servant brought a steaming whole haddock, ends overhanging the plate, for Charlie. ‘You want one?’ he asked me. ‘Carey had a crate sent from Lossiemouth.’

Carey Richards at 23 is a superstar of Armitage Operations back in Woking. The stories you hear in the canteen about his ability to wriggle out of scrapes are the stuff of urban legend. Flying out a crate of a partner’s favorite fish from the far north of Scotland to Tuscany is nothing worth commenting on, not by Carey’s standards.

‘No thanks. Porridge made the right way is a good meal.’

A sturdy little girl stopped next to Carolina and said, ‘Me too and Constanza.’

‘If there is enough to go around, and please, Vicky,’ a dark-haired woman said with a New York accent.

‘Don’t be such a nanny on holiday, Conchita,’ the little girl admonished her. ‘Please, Mrs Cartwright.’

The other one, a year or two older, Constanza, said, ‘If there is enough, please, Madame.’ Her English is perfect but I bet she is Swiss or French. In the background a handsome woman whose belted white dress was not quite a nurse’s uniform nodded as if in triumph over the American nanny with her unruly charge.

I ate a large plate of porridge standing up because everyone else did. Charlie, having eaten the entire huge fish, raised the lid on a dish of poached eggs but Carolina slapped his hand down. ‘Almost lunchtime,’ she said. I wondered if he burns a lot of nervous energy. His face gives so little away that I suspect he practices his blandness in front of a mirror.

People sat in a row of deck chairs facing the sun. Carolina took a deck chair with her back to the sun. I put my hand on the umbrella and she nodded. I moved it to cover her. She has skin to die for, cream and pink to go with her creamy red hair, but she clearly does not take a tan. She tapped the lounger next to her. ‘Sit here, Raf.’

I stretched out, glad for the cue. The newer Armitage operations assistants hover somewhere between servants and junior executives so that it isn’t always clear which is expected. Nobody tells you anything. I did ask what was required of me—and was told, ‘Initiative.’

Carolina said, ‘Opposite you, from the left, are Bobby and Louisa, Lydia and Gianni, Mallory and Richard, and the distinguished gentleman nodding off under the hat is Signor Bartolomeo. This is Rafael Antonio Ferenghetti, one of Charlie’s can-doers.’

I nodded at them, properly awed. Bobby Solara is a grand prix racer, last year second in the championship, this year going for it. Louisa, his wife, is the senior field engineer at Armitage grand prix. Lydia Simpresi is the sponsor. She spends about five hundred million dollars every year financing the Armitage racing teams as part of the marketing promotion for the products she makes. Indirectly, she pays my rather pleasing wages and impressive perks. Gianni, Count Orman, is her husband. Mallory is a double Le Mans champion and the boss of the Armitage sports car division; she won the Daytona 24-hour sports car race a fortnight before our stock cars won the Daytona 500. Her husband, Richard Cranborne, is a renowned cellist. Even Signor Bartolomeo appears on the cheat sheets I called up by computer and printed out on the plane to distribute to everyone as we flew across the Atlantic. He is the manager of the hotel in Milan where the European Armitage teams stay when they test and race at Monza.

‘Charlie tells me you’re a sculptor. Where’d you go to art school?’

‘Juilliard and Slade.’ Carolina is not the kind of American to whom you need to explain that the first is in New York and the second in London.

‘What sort of sculptor?’ Gianni asked. He is a tall, tanned fellow with receding hair still black but cut short to disguise the thinning, very fit even as he approaches sixty.

‘I weld together scrap iron, Count Orman.’

‘Gianni. How did a person of culture end up with Armitage?’

‘We have culture at Armitage,’ Mallory said lazily. ‘We ask Richard to play whenever we feel the lack.’ Mallory is from Texas, blessed with the wholesome blond good looks of a ranch girl, but she speaks like a Boston Brahmin rather than a cow-girl or an engineer.

I chuckled. ‘There’s something they don’t tell you at art school. It is that you must have something to say before you can say it. A little experience helps.’

Though he smiled at the joke, Gianni refused to be fobbed off with a generality. ‘How did you choose Armitage?’

‘I didn’t. It was an accident, a misunderstanding. I went to the Armitage facility in California to beg some deformed crankshafts, con-rods and so on, parts they break in their stress tests of racing engines. It was the day a new welder was expected. When I explained what I do the gatemen thought I was the new welder. The chief welder was in a hurry so he just gave me overalls and a helmet and told me where to start.’

‘So much for our security,’ Charlie said. ‘What happened when the right welder turned up?’

‘He didn’t,’ Simon said. ‘It was two weeks before an accountant asked just for the record to see the certificates our welders require. That was the first time we discovered Raf learned to weld at art school!’

Lydia Simpresi asked, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why did you not say anything before?’ She is probably into her middle fifties but looks less than forty. Today she wore a black pants suit that would not disgrace her office.

‘I was hungry and the food in the Armitage canteen is good and free. They even gave me clothes.’ I gestured to my team outfit of white leather basketball boots, parchment linen slacks, natural silk polo-neck shirt and red leather bomber jacket, same as Sally wore. ‘They also paid me well. I would have helped out with their welding for free just to get the interestingly contorted engines they wreck.’

Sally said, ‘We have a hard time finding enough lateral thinkers and self-starters so of course we hired Raf. Simon promised Raf that, if he stays with us three years, he’ll find him a gallery in New York and make him further useful introductions.’

‘So now I am an artist fallen among the auto racers and those who send them out about their gladiatorial deeds.’

Everyone relaxed. The stranger in their midst was not an ogre, nor awkward in elevated society. I presumed they knew all the others in our party.

‘Will the Senate confirm your father?’ Bobby asked Sally.

‘As a young man he was in the Phoenix Program. If some senator decides to make a meal of that, it could be dicey.’

‘Christ!’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t know why any decent American would want to go into public service, what with your idiot pols trying to lop the tall poppies.’

‘My mother agrees with you. She says this has to be his last public job. He has a chair waiting at Rutgers. She thinks he should take it while he’s still young enough to enjoy teaching.’

‘What job is he up for?’ Richard asked. He has masses of curly hair and piercing blue eyes set in a deep tan. If you have to imagine a star cellist at 35, you would imagine Richard.

‘DDI,’ Sally said. ‘Deputy Director of Intelligence.’

‘On the other hand, he will be the first black to rise that high in national security,’ Simon said.

Just then Flicka Revere came from the house. There was a small round of applause for her victory at Daytona on Sunday. I was halfway up to attend to her when she waved me back into my chair. She tested the porridge by sticking her finger into the pot but presumably found it cold because she brought a bowl of fresh fruit salad to a lounger.

Flicka is 26, a hillbilly stock car racer who as a teenager was the fastest bootleg-driver in three Appalachian counties. Don’t be misled by the book she always carries in her pocket. In another pocket she carries a switchblade: she knows how to use it. Flicka is short for Flick Knife. She’s an agreeable looking girl, slender, platinum-haired, usually smiling, but you have to watch the detachment in her eyes for warnings of when her temper flares.

Perhaps I should explain that, since Sally has beenŵ elevated to her present dizzy managerial height, I have been assigned that part of her old job which entails being Flicka’s special operations assistant. I imagine they gave it to me as someone who will stay with Armitage only a couple of years, rather than to a career-maker, because trouble follows Flicka like iron filings a magnet.

Gianni stood to be introduced. He bowed over Flicka’s hand. ‘I watched on television,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t go so near that wall at twenty kilometers per hour, never mind three hundred and twenty.’

‘It beats working for a living,’ Flicka said. ‘According to the cheat sheet Raf handed out so I won’t embarrass Simon and Charlie, you’re a mad skier. Is it difficult to learn?’

You see what I mean? It’s a tough job but someone has to do it.

Hard toffs

The terrorists came in the middle of lunch.

After servants cleared the breakfast dishes and spread a clean tablecloth, and set up another long table, a tall slender woman over sixty came to inspect the settings on the second table. She came to a precise stop near the table. Behind her stopped an immensely tall, very beautiful woman in her late twenties.

‘What’s Joanne up to?’ I asked Charlie, next to me.

‘Learning to be a chatelaine,’ Charlie said, ‘at the hand of an expert, Signora Bartolomeo. Be afraid, be very afraid.’

Signor Bartolomeo chuckled under his panama hat. ‘The Signora has your measure, Charlie,’ he said in excellent English without taking the hat from his face. ‘And Joanne too!’

Joanne Bartlett isn’t one of us though the distinction is wafer-thin. She works for Harrington’s, our security consultants. Recently she has been Flicka’s bodyguard when the Ku Klux Klan took exception to a female—more, lesbian—stock car racer making jokes about Southern manhood and bombed Flicka’s house to express their disapproval. Like almost everyone who works for Armitage, Joanne is a star: when she worked in the Secret Service, the Treasury department which guards the President, she took a bullet for him.

‘You mean she’s our hostess?’ I naturally assumed the millionaire’s villa and vineyards and mountain views and well-trained hot and cold running servants who never require an order could belong only to a billionaire like Lydia Simpresi and her husband.

‘Joanne and Ludo are a couple,’ Carolina said. ‘This is Ludo’s ancestral vineyard. That’s him at the corner of the house there.’

Ludo is a tall, heavily built man of about fifty, impossibly handsome under his thatch of silver hair. When I’m fifty I want to look that distinguished. He supervised several men who carried poles on which rested common forty-four gallon oil drums cut in half. When they rested them in pipe cradles cross-staked into the ground, we could see why the poles were required: the half-drums were filled with red-hot coals. A man in a chef’s hat supervised four women bringing two huge platters from which kid half-roasted in the kitchen oven were transferred to spits over the coals.

‘Good. I like barbeque,’ Flicka said. ‘Ludo’s clearly the one nerd who isn’t useless.’

‘Flicka calls all our designers nerds,’ Sally said to Lydia.

‘Ludo is a poet among aerodynamicists,’ Mallory said.

Ludo, aka Ludovico dell’ Mira, it came to me, is another Armitage employee, the chief aerodynamicist of the grand prix cars. According to his bio in our corporate literature, he is an ex-sports car racer and has degrees in mathematics and engineering from the universities of Padua and Stuttgart and a doctorate from MIT. He is paid four million pounds sterling per year, around seven million dollars.

‘He’s a poet of roast kid, more to the point,’ Charlie said. ‘We used to come down from Cambridge to eat roast kid in a Greek restaurant near the top of the Edgeware Road.’

‘That area’s all Turkish now,’ Richard said. ‘The cuisine’s much more different than you would expect from just seeing how close the two countries are on the map.’

A drinks trolley was wheeled out. I went to it and introduced myself to Ludo, our host, then helped him serve drinks.

Joanne announced that lunch was served.

‘What happened to the children?’ Carolina asked. The nurse and the nanny sat in chairs at a table on the edge of our gathering.

‘Under the serving table,’ I said when no one else answered. I’d been watching just in case they went near the hot coals.

Conchita bent to raise the tablecloth. The four children looked guilty among several empty and half-empty bowls and plates of the desserts that the servants earlier stacked under covers at one end of the serving table.

‘Bloody hell,’ Charlie said to Conchita, ‘what does Bobby pay you for?’

‘To give Vicky space for initiative, sir, including the scope to make her own mistakes and be punished for them.’

‘You’re not going to punish us,’ said the younger Cartwright boy, Trevor, with absolute assurance.

‘Just this once,’ Charlie said.

I noticed that Lydia and Gianni watched all this carefully, as if they aren’t certain of their own parenting skills.

Carolina decided, ‘You can be sticky until after lunch.’

‘May we stay here?’ asked her eldest, Edward, recognizing that he was dealing with the firmer parent.

‘Children should be neither seen nor heard,’ the precocious Vicky said.

‘Absolutely,’ Louisa agreed.

‘You’re a worse suck-up to the kids than Charlie,’ Carolina said to her.

‘I’m trying to be the perfect stepmother. May Constanza stay with the others?’ Louisa asked Lydia.

‘Of course,’ Lydia said.

‘Thank you,’ Constanza said formally.

It’s a mistake the French and the Swiss make to turn their children into half-size adults.

‘Could you pass down a large bowl of zabaglione, please,’ Edward said. ‘And some spoons.’

Joanne reached for the yellow dish, then caught herself. ‘There’s liquor in it. You get more dessert after you’ve eaten some real food, okay? You’ll love the roast kid and French fries are coming.’

‘We call them chips,’ Trevor said.

‘You also call crisps chips,’ Vicky said. ‘That’s very confusing. Why can’t the English speak English, like people?’

‘Drop the tablecloth, Conchita,’ Bobby said. ‘If you fight, you’ll have to sit up at the table, understand?’

‘No fighting,’ Vicky said from behind the tablecloth. ‘We’re negotiating.’

‘Ron, Yvonne’s new husband, is a congressman,’ Bobby explained as they walked around the table to their seats. ‘He’s teaching Vicky to get her own way without ever throwing a tantrum.’

‘It passes with age, surely,’ Gianni said.

‘Ron doesn’t think we need to wait for it to pass,’ Louisa said.

Sally curtsied to Signora Bartolomeo, who nodded her approval. ‘You may introduce your friend.’

When Sally did, I bent over the old lady’s hand, just touching the tip of my nose to it—resisting the mad impulse to wipe my nose on the back of her hand—and said in the Italian I learned from my grandmother, ‘An honor, Signora. The table you and Joanne set today will surely become a legend.’

She offered me an austere nod to note the flattery. ‘Can I trust you to circulate with the wines, young man?’

When I finished pouring the only empty chair was beside her. She patted it. I sat down. The plate in front of me held a prize selection of antipasto. I don’t want to bore you with the culinary details: let’s just say that everyone at Armitage is permitted to eat in the best restaurants on their company credit cards and that both my mother and my grandmother are first-class cooks. And, even given all that, it was the finest meal I ever ate.

Or at least as much of it as I managed to eat. First La Bartolomeo wanted to know where I learned such old-fashioned Italian, though she called it ‘serious and correct’, and I didn’t dare talk with my mouth full. Then I was up with the wines again while the two wine stewards hovered in the door of the villa as the old lady made the smallest gesture to hold them there. As a reward she pointed to a choice piece of beautifully crisp kid she wanted her husband, carving at our end of the table while Ludo carved at the other end, to put on my plate.

She looked disapproving when I let the many no doubt worthy fresh salads pass me by to grab a second large charcoal-baked potato and lather it with a mixture of sour cream, herbs, chopped capsicum, possibly capers, and some unidentified bits. Charlie and Joanne and I between us finished a large dish of this mix on our potatoes. Joanne, I should mention, is a trencherman quite in Simon’s class. God alone knows where such a slender woman puts it though I imagine a high-risk job like hers burns kilojoules in stress-calories alone.

‘Come on, Signora,’ Charlie said to La Bartolomeo. ‘Ever since Raf left his father’s house at eighteen he’s been a hungry student and then a hungry artist. He doesn’t need the cholesterol police on his case.’

‘As if the cholesterol police would let Signora Bart join,’ Joanne said, grinning wickedly, waving her hand over the table. ‘She’s Number One on their Most Wanted List.’

The old lady smiled fondly at her protégé, then looked up angrily when the idyll was shattered by the racing engines of three vans barreling much too fast down the hill through the vines, through the gates and past the ornamental gardens, to make sliding turns below the terrace on which we sat. Men piled out and ran up the steps.

‘They’re armed,’ Joanne said.

I slid off my chair and under the table. The cloth was heavy muslin, not quite diaphanous but with more than reasonable visibility through it if one looked outwards into the light. I saw Signora Bartolomeo’s hand smooth the tablecloth, stilling its motion where I passed through.

I wriggled past the guests’ feet to the end of the table and around the chair Joanne occupied at the top of the table, which she moved aside as soon as she saw me go under. Under the serving table I found the four children, surrounded by many more dishes, looking somewhat glazed with the good fortune of unlimited desserts. When she sees the state of Constanza’s clothes the Swiss nurse will throw a fit, I thought irrelevantly a moment before the woman screamed as she realized the men now appearing on the terrace pointed firearms at her.

For sure, the screamer wasn’t the calm Conchita who gives Charlie backchat. Nor did the other guests strike me as screamers and whimperers.

‘Hey, time for a game,’ I said brightly but softly to the children. ‘This is a silent game. The first person to make a sound loses out on the Belgian pralines, that’s chocolates to you, Trevor, Edward, and candy to you, Vicky. Okay?’

Vicky stuck out just the tip of her tongue at me. Then she held up all the fingers of one hand and, after a moment’s thought, two fingers of the other hand. She was telling me she knows seven words for candy.

I nodded and mouthed, ‘You can only eat them one at a time.’ I pulled my phone and logged on to the main operations computer of Armitage America in California, in the mountains back of Santa Barbara. I found the simulator program the drivers use for practice and set it to the entry-level of difficulty. With the sound turned off, I gave the phone to Constanza, then put my finger across my lips to remind her of the rule of rules: silence.

Thank God at least one of the children is disciplined, I thought, though earlier I thought her somewhat repressed by comparison to the other three.

Constanza’s fingers flickered across the pressure pad. The other three crowded around her to watch her progress.

I sat facing everyone in the entire party. The two tables at right angles to each other formed a square with the grand house as a backdrop. Past the children I enjoyed a panoramic view of the terrifying tragedy unfolding.

Swarthy men screamed at everyone except the five of us under the dessert table. ‘On your feet! On your feet!’

Signor Bartolomeo, who seemed such a harmless old man, took a handful of the Swiss nurse’s dress, pulled her towards him and paddled her face. Instead of slapping her hard, his hand moved on her cheek as if administering a skin-toning massage. Outraged at the indignity of it, she shut up and reared back to pull her dress from his hand. ‘You filthy old pig!’ she said (or something like it—I don’t actually speak German), pulling at the front of her dress as if she feared the touch of his hand would permeate through the fabric onto her skin.

Joanne, rising before the machine pistols, grasped the tip of the carving knife between her fingers and slid the knife handle-first up her sleeve.

‘Stand in place by your chairs!’ a bearded man with a fine hooked nose and fierce eyes said. Such was the force of his personality that the other armed men fell silent.

My artist’s eye noticed something even more crucial than the danger and my permanent observer-status to the human race translated it into a question: I wonder if the invaders notice the lack of hysteria at their situation in their captives, even now in the Swiss nurse.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Charlie said to the leader, not looking up until he finished wiping his hands on his napkin which he threw on the table.

‘Shut up!’ one of the underlings screamed.

‘You’re Charles Cartwright of the Trevelyan Bank and Armitage Cartwright Racing,’ the leader said. ‘What do you think you’re worth to our cause? A ransom of ten million, twenty? And your wife, the red-haired woman over there, Carolina of the Santgiannini Bank in New York? A hundred million?’

Charlie pursed his lips. He looked around the terrace, counting the invaders. ‘You will have to share many ways. If you collect a penny.’

‘You’re chickenfeed,’ the leader said, dismissing Charlie. ‘We have the billionaire Lydia Simpresi!’ He pointed at her. ‘We have the trust fund Jew Simon Aron. We have the Presidential bodyguard Joanne Bartlett. We have taken Sally Samson, the daughter of the new chief of the CIA! This is a great day for our jihad!’

Edward held up two fingers to Constanza to indicate he wanted to speed up the game. She nodded. He leaned over to press a button on the keyboard.

‘And your jihad is?’ Signora Bartolomeo asked politely. She still sat in her chair, a harmless if astringent old lady.

I noticed that Sally now stood between the serving table and the nearest terrorist, the leader, but off to his side a little where he could see that she was no threat. Ooh, clever, I thought. That Sally has her head screwed on right. She provides a calm point of reference—and he expects no threat from her direction, so he doesn’t look under the table.

‘A Jew-free Palestine! Death to America!’

‘How utterly lacking in originality,’ Signora Bartolomeo said. ‘All the same, Ludo, you should perform your obligation as host and offer your new guests food.’ While Ludo picked up the carving fork, the old lady added, ‘The roast kid is very fine.’

Ludo spread his hands with the carving fork in one hand, saying, ‘But where is the knife?’ Then, in the same fluid motion, he simply stabbed the prongs of the carving fork either side of the nose and through the eyes into the brain of the terrorist nearest to him. The man was dead before Signora Bartolomeo finished her accolade for Ludo’s barbecued baby goat.

‘Hands in the air!’ the leader screamed, catching on too late that his captives were not intimidated.

Joanne’s arms rose smartly as if she were complying. Before her hands reached shoulder height the carving knife slid out of her sleeve, she caught the handle and the point of the knife flashed through the throat of the terrorist standing before her with the barrel of his weapon pressed into her stomach. Joanne stepped to one side and pulled the firearm from his hands by the barrel with her free hand even as he fired. She paid no attention to his dying gurgle. The knife flipped in the air, she caught the point, and with a flick of her wrist she threw it into the throat of a terrorist turning his machine pistol towards her.

Flicka sobbed loudly and put her hand into the pocket of her chinos as if to find a hankie. Instead of a handkerchief, her opening switchblade ripped through the pocket and into the heart of a fourth terrorist from below his short ribs. The foolish chauvinist was already turning away from the sobbing woman, towards Ludo, his machine pistol barrel leading. With her free hand Flicka jerked his gun arm up and spun the terrorist. The knife still in him cut from his side to the middle of his chest, guided against the shortest rib at the bottom. His heart was cut into two.

A sculptor has to know anatomy if he is to be any good.

A terrorist whose brain wasn’t quick enough to keep up with events turned towards the nearest youthful male. Despite the evidence before his eyes, he too ignored the women as beneath the notice of fighting men. It was his last mistake. Richard actually hit him on the head with an earthenware water jug, but by then he was dead.

Mallory simply launched herself at him from behind, both knees in the small of his back, her forearm under his chin jerking his head back past her own so that he fell backwards, already dead with a broken neck even as Richard hit him on the temple with the jug. The dead terrorist fell on top of Mallory.

With the machine pistol she took from the terrorist whose throat she slit open, Joanne shot a sixth terrorist between the eyes as he turned his weapon towards her.

Throughout all this Charlie just stood in front of the leader, doing absolutely nothing but holding his attention. The leader dare not look elsewhere or Charlie, only three paces away, would attack him.

Now the leader broke the impasse by taking three steps sideways and putting his arm around Sally’s throat. He also put the barrel of his machine pistol in her ear.

‘Stop or I kill your friend!’ the leader shouted.

‘Shoot the hostage, Joanne,’ Sally said calmly.

‘I will shoot the bitch!’ the leader screamed hysterically. ‘Lay down your weapons.’

‘See, I put down the carving fork,’ Ludo said. ‘It will have to be disinfected, anyway, before I can use it again.’

Richard pulled the terrorist with the lolling head off Mallory.

Joanne, far from putting down her weapon, pointed it dead center at the chest of the other surviving terrorist.

Flicka pulled her knife free and let the dead terrorist fall. She made no effort to wipe his blood from her. She clearly did not intend putting the knife down though she held it casually to one side. She also took a step to her left to give her a better view of the terrorist leader past Sally.

‘They sent the second team,’ Signor Bartolomeo said in Italian to his wife as he pulled out a chair and sat down on it. His tone was mildly disappointed, as if his Sunday afternoon in front of his television tuned to the football (soccer, actually, in Europe) was ruined. ‘Let Sally go and save your own life,’ he added in English to the terrorist.

All of this took only seconds. What happened next took fractions of a second.

Simon bent and pulled the carving knife Joanne threw from the throat of the terrorist who was in its way. He was not dead yet. His blood gurgled in newly unobstructed flow. Simon held the knife by its point, as if he knows how to throw it. I don’t believe he does. But the terrorists didn’t know that.

Bobby took a step to his right. The terrorist leader took a step the other way, which brought him up against the dessert table, pulling Sally with him. The man on whom Joanne held a machine pistol swung his own weapon up at Bobby who was nearer to him than anyone else. Louisa launched herself into the air. Her ankles crossed around the terrorist’s neck, uncrossed through it, then she somersaulted and landed on her feet while the terrorist, his neck broken with a loud snap that could be nothing else, fell to the nicely veined marble paving.

The leader was permitted no time to consider his loneliness now that his seven companions were dead.

‘Leave Daddy and Louisa deal to with them,’ Vicky said to me in a crisp, clear voice, as if she suspected I would do something rash and thereby deprive her of her turn at the game.

But I was already rolling out from under the table. I sank my teeth into the leader’s ankle as he turned to the hidden threat behind him. He screamed. At the same time Sally shoved one flat hand up between his chest and the machine pistol to sweep it out of her ear—and simultaneously climbed backwards with her heels up his leg, her arm hooking behind his head to pull him forward. I hit the small of his back with my shoulder as I rose, just at the moment Sally with both her feet and the indignation of being manhandled found his knee.

The terrorist fell forward screaming as his knee snapped under our combined weight jerking the joint in opposite directions. Sally fell on her hands and knees. I put my thumb into the trigger guard of the terrorist’s machine pistol behind the trigger, so I perforce fell with him. Standing on all fours either side of the prostrate terrorist, our eyes met, Sally’s and mine, over the terrorist’s head.

‘Still need the mirrors, Raf?’

Massacre at the Villa dell’ Mira

‘Move the children into the house,’ Charlie said to