P
erhaps I had not heard it the way I remembered it; perhaps I had not heard it at all. It seemed suddenly fantastic, now that I was about to find out for sure. I had traveled all this way, halfway around the world, on the strength of nothing more substantial than a chance remark.
I checked my watch and closed the attaché case. Each of the documents was in the order listed in the sheet of instructions Albert Craven had prepared. The sole beneficiary of Andrei Bog-donovitch's will was to affix his signature in each of the designated places; then I was to give him the certified check inside the law firm envelope clipped to the front of the file. If I was wrong, the entire transaction would take less than ten minutes; if I was right … well, if I was right, things would become a good deal more complicated.
I got up from the lacquered table in the middle of the room, where, under the indifferent light of a tarnished and decrepit chandelier, I had made a quick review of what Albert Craven had given me. In an alcove, under a pair of shuttered French windows, Marissa lay asleep on a simple unframed bed covered with a light blanket of cream-colored lace. I got to the door and looked back. Her eyes came all the way open, as if, instead of sleeping, she had only closed them a moment before to rest.
“You'll be careful?”
I promised I would. She looked at me to make sure I meant it, then closed her eyes and, that very moment, fell back asleep.
Leaving the village behind, I drove along the hillside until I came to a gravel road that ran along the crest of a spur toward an enormous villa that, like some medieval fortress, dominated everything below it. I stopped the Fiat in front of two black iron gates held together with a heavy rusty chain. I got out of the car, untangled the chain, and pushed them open. Inside the gate, below the gravel drive, was a two-story stone cottage with a dusty tile roof, sheltered from the sun by the gnarled branches of twisted gray olive trees. A diminutive white-haired woman was sitting like a shadow on a faded blue-covered swing on the patio, bent over a book held open on her lap. The morning light filtered through the trees, painting bright the flowers that grew in pots scattered all around.
The long driveway ran out to the very end of the spur, then doubled back to a clearing in front of the tan-colored villa. Stepping out of the car, I walked under a line of thick, luxuriant palm trees to the front entrance, where I climbed a dozen stone steps to a bleached brown double door, taller than I could reach. The circular black metal knocker made a creaking sound when I lifted it up and a dull clanking noise when it struck the rock-hard wood.
The door was too thick to hear anything behind it. I knocked again and waited. With a slight vibration, the huge door started to turn on its ancient metal hinges. It opened slowly, and only just far enough to allow whoever was on the other side to look out.
“So we meet again,”said a voice that jarred my senses precisely because it was so unforgettably familiar.
The door swung all the way open and I was face-to-face with the dead. Andrei Bogdonovitch seemed genuinely glad to see me.
“I'm delighted, just delighted,”he insisted as he shook my hand like a long-lost friend.
Before I could say a word, he had me by the arm, walking me through a spacious hallway into an enormous living room with marble floors, tapestry-covered stone walls, and, set in deep casements, leaded windows that gave an unobstructed view of the sea.
“I can't tell you how happy I was when I received the cable telling me you were coming,”he remarked, an amiable smile on his broad, expansive face. He gestured toward a green silk davenport in the middle of the room.
Bogdonovitch waited until I was seated, as if he wanted to make absolutely certain I was comfortable before he sat down in a matching green silk chair. For a moment he stared at me, like someone who still can't quite believe in this wholly unexpected but completely welcome surprise. He leaned forward, rubbing his large hands together.
“When did you know?”he asked.
Before I could respond, a graceful young woman with discernible hips and a shy, provocative smile appeared with two glasses and a bottle of wine. A faint smile hovered over her mouth as she placed them on the coffee table and then, without a word, left the room.
“My housekeeper,”explained Bogdonovitch with a worldly smile. “I lease this place from the owner. She was not included,”he added as he began to uncork the bottle. “We have our own arrangement.”
Albert Craven would have understood completely.
Bogdonovitch handed me a glass. “I know it's early, but this is such an occasion.”
Lifting his glass, he proposed a toast, and I wondered if he intended the irony.
“ To long life.”
I brought the glass to my lips and then hesitated. When he saw I was waiting for him to go first, he gave me a wounded look and drank from his glass.
“How could you think such a thing?”protested Bog-donovitch, amused, and not the least offended, by my suspicion.
I had been holding the attaché case on my lap. With my thumb, I brushed the cylinders until they moved out of their coded position and the case was again securely locked.
“You've done rather well for a dead man,”I remarked, gazing around the room as I set the case on the floor next to my feet.
Bogdonovitch continued to sip on his wine.
“How did you know I was still alive?”he asked when he finished.
I was sitting less than three feet away from him, close enough that if I concentrated in the silence between our words I could hear his breath; and yet, there was a sense in which I still could not quite believe he had not really died in that explosion.
“It never occurred to me that you were anything but dead,”I told him truthfully. “I was there; I had just crossed the street at the corner. The whole building blew apart. No one could have survived it. Besides that, a dead body—or what was left of a dead body—was found in the wreckage. We were alone, you and I, and I had only left a few short seconds before. Why would I think you were somehow still alive?”
Bogdonovitch listened avidly, proud of what he had done and, as I suddenly realized, glad there was someone with whom he could share the story of his adventure. He was particularly glad it was I. Even if he had ever dared tell anyone else, I was the only one who could never doubt that he had not made the whole thing up. Now that he had me as an audience, he could not wait to let me know the full range of his talent for subterfuge and deceit.
“It was done rather well, wasn't it? No,”he added quickly, trying to assure me that he had done nothing unnecessarily dishonorable. “I had nothing to do with that stranger's death. Dead bodies—unclaimed dead bodies—are brought into morgues every day. I knew some people,”he remarked vaguely, “who could take care of things like that.”
“So after I left … ?”
“It was not difficult,”he said modestly, shrugging his large shoulders. “The body was in the storeroom, just behind the door, next to the gas line where I had already set the mechanism.”
“The door was the only thing left standing,”I told him. “It was just hanging there, teetering on what was left of a splintered post that was all that was left of the frame.”
We exchanged a glance and saw reflected in each other's eyes our own knowledge of the brief uncertainty of existence.
“As soon as you left,”he went on, “I set the timer for fifteen seconds and got away up the alley behind the building. It wasn't difficult.”
Bogdonovitch reached for the bottle and poured more wine into his glass. It was an excuse to take his eyes away from mine, a way to give himself time to consider what he wanted to say next.
“It was not just that I wanted you there as a witness to my death,”he said, slowly raising his eyes. “Everything I told you was true: I was in danger because of what I knew about Fullerton, and so were you. I wanted to warn you. I felt responsible. I had to do what I did. I hope you understand that. After a lifetime of dealing with people like this, I knew the only way I could stay alive was to make them think I was already dead.”
Bogdonovitch tossed off the wine, put down the glass, and slapped both knees.
“Now tell me! How did you know?”
Before I could answer, he shouted something in Italian, and, as if she had been standing there the whole time, invisible, the woman immediately appeared. He nodded toward the table. She picked up the half-empty bottle and his empty glass.
“Would you … ?”he asked me as she waited noiselessly. I shook my head, and she was gone.
“When we first met, I asked you what it was like living away from your country. You said it was not as difficult as it would have been if you had any family left. You told me that both your parents were dead and that you had been an only child.”
He seemed surprised and a little chagrined. He sat back and looked up at the ceiling, his mouth twisted into a smile of self-mockery.
“And so when you learned from my friend Albert Craven that I had left everything in my will to my brother, Arkady Bog-donovitch, you of course remembered what I had said and concluded—quite logically—that if I had invented a brother, I must have invented my death.”
He began to laugh, a deep, booming laugh that echoed off the high ceiling and filled the room.
“That's wonderful!”he exclaimed, springing forward until he was sitting on the very edge of the chair, both feet planted firmly on the marble floor. “You're quite an extraordinary man, Mr. Antonelli. I knew it the moment I met you. How many people would have remembered something like that—a single sentence, a passing reference to a biographical fact of no conceivable importance? I mean that—it's really quite extraordinary. And it in no way reduces my admiration that you drew your conclusion from what was, unfortunately, a lie! I do have a brother— Arkady. I haven't seen him in years. He lives in Moscow. I told you what I did because it's always been safer to make people think I had no living relations: No one could threaten them as a way of getting to me.”
He looked down at his hands, chuckling to himself. “Well, I suppose in a way it's appropriate that a lie helped you find out the truth,”he said, a shrewd look in his eye. “In any event, I'm glad you did.”
He flashed a smile and, to underscore the sincerity of what he had said, nodded emphatically. He glanced at the attaché case on the floor.
“But you didn't tell anyone else that you thought I was alive, did you? Albert Craven is far too honest to send along the proceeds of a dead man's estate when the dead man isn't dead,”said Bogdonovitch, his eyes narrowed down into a searching look. “You did bring the check with you, didn't you?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “No. I brought the papers that have to be signed before the proceeds can be released, papers that have to be signed by Arkady Bogdonovitch.”
I could not tell if he believed me. I think he was not sure. He acknowledged the point about his brother with a smile.
“Yes, Arkady. Fortunately, he also signs his name: 'A. Bog-donovitch.' Well, what do you propose we do?”
“There isn't much we can do, is there? You're not dead, and it's difficult to inherit from someone still alive. Insurance companies frown on that sort of thing; more to the point, courts don't like it at all when a lawyer helps someone commit a crime. They send you to prison for things like that.”
The piercing, intelligent eyes of Andrei Bogdonovitch seemed to draw close together. He leaned toward me.
“Perhaps we could come to some kind of arrangement.”
I gave him a blank look and said nothing. My silence was all the encouragement he needed. A cryptic smile formed on his mouth.
“It's such a nice day. Why don't we sit outside?”
Bogdonovitch led me out the way I had come. At the top of the front steps, he took my arm, the way he had when he first answered; but as we began to go down them, I became aware that he was leaning on me for balance and support. He stopped at the bottom, slightly out of breath, blinking into the light. A moment later he seemed fine again. His eyes were clear and he moved with a steady, rolling gait. He pointed toward the end of the promontory at what looked like a stone watchtower.
“It was built in the thirteenth century to give warning against the Saracens. It has a more recent fame, however. Monet did one of his best paintings from there, a picture of the old village below.
Bordighera,
he called it. If you know the painting, you can almost feel what he must have been thinking when you see the view. Come, I'll show you.”
We crossed over the driveway, the white gravel crunching beneath our feet, and followed a narrow footpath through a small grove of olive trees. With narrow apertures cut along the ascending stairwell that curled up inside and crenellated battlements at the top, the watchtower rose three stories into the air, high enough to see anything that might suddenly appear on the horizon. An oak plank door, with the top hinge missing and the middle one bent and broken, was wide open at the entrance, too heavy to be closed. Inside, rusty shovels and splintered spades littered the ground next to the rotted boards of the wooden staircase. A wheelbarrow lay on its side, encrusted with concrete, two long wooden handles covered in a single spider web. A fly buzzed lazily somewhere overhead.
We sat on a stone bench in the high grass against the side of the tower, looking down on the village Monet had painted and, beyond that, across the sea to the very edge of the visible world. Bogdonovitch removed the thick round glasses he had been wearing and put them into the side pocket of his rumpled brown coat. Leaning back against the tower wall, he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. His head sank down between his shoulders, and for a moment he seemed to crumple up, deflated, as if he had let go of the last breath he was ever going to take. When he opened his eyes again, he did not look at me, but gazed instead into the open distance of the infinite sky.
“I thought there was a chance you would win the trial,”he said. “I'm sorry that you didn't. Shall I tell you what really happened? Would you like to know why Jeremy Fullerton was killed?”