True (37 page)

She looked up at her best friend. She was sure that once the temporary prosopagnosia passed, the obsessive cycle would have been broken, leaving Phoebe and the others who had been dosed with the NiL drug free of their fixations. 'Shock does strange things, Phoebe. But, trust me, the face-blindness will pass. I'll explain it later, but for now be glad you had a lucky escape.' It was best if everyone believed they were simply in shock. And it wasn't too far off the mark, considering what had happened: people had been drunk last night; the Northern Lights had upset everyone's brain chemistry; and Phoebe's wedding had ended with a traumatic bang. She tried to smile but she felt like crying.

Phoebe squeezed her good hand. 'Thank you, Izzy. Thank you for rescuing me from Helmut.'

'It was Max. He rescued all of us.' Isabella looked out across the frozen lake and felt a pain more acute than any inflicted by Helmut Kappel's knife. 'He wasn't like his father.'

Phoebe put an arm round her. 'I'm so sorry, Izzy.'"

As she listened to the whup, whup, whup of approaching helicopters, Isabella felt the tears come. 'So am I,' she said quietly.

EPILOGUE:

FOUR MONTHS LATER

IT'S REMARKABLE, DR BACCI, QUITE REMARKABLE.' ROBERTO Zuccatto, head of neurology at MilanUniversityHospital, adjusted his pince-nez and pointed to the illuminated region of the subject's brain on the PET scan monitor. 'Look at how the whole area of her inferotemporal cortex lights up when she recognizes a face. I've never seen this before with a prosopagnosic'

Through the glass partition Isabella kept her eyes on Sofia. All traces of the little girl's accident were gone. Her hair had grown back and there was no visible scarring. But that wasn't what made today so remarkable. The child wore a headset and sat in front of a large television screen as a series of human faces flashed before her. Her friends, family and herself were interspersed with strangers. And each time someone connected to her appeared, the area of her brain dedicated to face recognition lit up on the monitor. Sofia, who had been face-blind since her accident, was again recognizing the faces of those she knew and loved.

'I still don't understand how you managed to make so much progress in just a few months,' Zuccatto said.

'My father helped me,' Isabella said. 'He was working on a related area before he died, focusing on stimulating the facial-recognition area of the brain.'

"You should be proud of him.'

'I am.'

She was glad that something good had come of her father's misconceived love drug. It helped her forgive him for his betrayal and understand that although he had done wrong it had been for the right reason: to bring happiness. The prosopagnosia folder he had created for her had revolutionized her treatment of face-blindness, saving her decades of research. The treatment she had developed from his notes was still in the trial phase and the effects were only temporary, but in due course she was sure it would cure Sofia's and other sufferers' prosopagnosia. That was her father's true legacy -- the real love drug.

When she returned to her apartment that night she took pleasure in the fact that it was hers. She had enjoyed sharing with Phoebe, but it felt good to have her own place and move on with her life. Her left arm twinged as she poured herself a neat Scotch on the rocks -- an acquired taste that reminded her of Max. The severed tendons had healed but it would be some time before the pain and stiffness left her. She saw her reflection in the glass cabinet by the fridge and paused to study the thin silver scar that ran from her cheekbone to her jaw. The sharpness of Helmut Kappel's blade had meant that the scarring was minimal, but she was still conscious of it.

The evening was unseasonably cold and she lit the fire in the lounge. As she sat down, Phoebe's face stared out at her from one of the magazines on the coffee table. Like the others, Phoebe had recovered from her prosopagnosia with no trace of the NiL drug effects. If anything, her career had benefited from the mystery surrounding her aborted wedding and Helmut Kappel's death. Isabella reached for the red corner of the magazine beneath Phoebe's Vogue cover. Time showed a picture of Helmut Kappel captioned: Was this the face of the Swiss Mafia?' She turned to the cover feature. On its second page there was a blurred photograph of Max. As she read the article, she struggled to reconcile Max the killer with the man 'she had loved.

The article focused on the now famous sea-green folders, which had begun to arrive at Interpol's Paris headquarters shortly after the aborted wedding in Valhalla. Each folder contained incriminating evidence on Kappel Privatbank and its Comvec offshoot, itemizing laundered money, secret accounts and other nefarious activities. One by one, the folders had incriminated each family member -- Helmut, Max, Joachim and Klaus -- in the most damning terms. To save himself, the last surviving Kappel, Klaus, had made a deal with the prosecutors and handed over all information relating to their clients. According to Time, almost eighty per cent of the bank's client base was engaged in criminal activities. Warren Hudsucker was thrown out of the Senate and jailed. Others, including Lysenko, were in hiding. For a time she had worried that Klaus might send someone after her to punish her for wrecking Ilium and the Kappels' plans, but it seemed he had more important things to worry about. Last month he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a litany of crimes, including murder.

Isabella's lawyers had also received a folder, but there was no mention of this in the press. It contained a letter, advising her that Kappel Privatbank and Comvec had signed over all the rights in her father's work to her. She had closed down the Turin laboratory, sold off all the equipment and - apart from research relevant to her prosopagnosia work -- destroyed his samples and records.

The Time article made no mention of her father or his drug. There was also no mention of Ilium or Venus. However, it highlighted two outstanding mysteries.

The first concerned what had actually happened at Valhalla. Unsurprisingly, once the guests' prosopagnosia had faded, none had wanted to tell the police much or, indeed, had had much to tell. It wasn't the kind of publicity Odin wanted and the Kappels' clients had their own dark secrets to hide. Phoebe, Claire, Kathryn and Gisele were more than happy to forget the episode and get on with their lives, and Isabella was no different. She had no intention of saying anything that might expose the existence of her father's nature-identical love drug. The latest theory, which the Time article explored, was that Joachim and Max Kappel had been engaged in a long-term power struggle over who should succeed Helmut. This rivalry had exploded into violence when their father had changed his mind over who should be his best man and heir.

The second mystery interested Isabella more, because it was also a mystery to her: who had sent the folders? A disgruntled employee or ex-employee?A rival bank? Or even a vengeful client?

Numerous candidates had been put forward but the truth was still unknown.

For a time Isabella had toyed with the notion that Max had somehow survived and sent them. She recalled watching him dive in Antibes and fantasized that he had been able to hold his breath under the ice until he reached the warmer outlet to the sea. His body had not been found. But that meant nothing - his father's body was missing too.

She placed the magazine on the coffee table, lay back on the couch and looked into the fire. Gradually her eyelids lowered, and as she dozed the dream returned. It had visited her countless times since she had returned from Valhalla. But this time it seemed even more vivid and complete.

She is an eagle soaring high above a frozen lake, looking down on a man trapped beneath the ice, moving where the current takes him. He is Max Kappel. As she descends to take a closer look, he opens his eyes and she sees his pain, reads his thoughts.

He has held his breath for minutes and is now blacking out. His first involuntary breath fills his mouth with water, choking him, shocking him back to consciousness. It is as though his body won't allow him to be absent from his own death and forces him to fight for survival-- whether he wants it or not. He retches and convulses as he swallows more water, then gags and, in a final bid for life, inhales one last time.

Bracing himself, he waits for his chest to fill with water and his lungs to collapse. But it doesn't happen. Instead, he vomits the water he has swallowed. Coughing and spluttering, he breathes in, gasping. He opens his eyes. He is on his back, surrounded by light. Suddenly he feels cold-- not the numbing chill of before but a dry, stabbing cold. And pain. His body is consumed with it.

Suddenly, mercifully, everything goes black. Then the pain returns and he is again retching water. He loses track of how long he lies there, passing in and out of consciousness. Eventually he looks up and sees that the light has faded. He raises his head and a rushing sound fills his ears. He extends his arms downwards, through the racing current, and his fingers scrape the river. Then his shoulder jars against something hard. The current accelerates around him -- and he realises its speed hasn't changed. Instead his body has stopped moving.

He blinks and tries to sit up. His entire frame aches and his skin burns with cold, but no bones seem broken and his tortured muscles obey him. He finds himself sitting in an eddy of water, bounded by rocks, in the shallows of a river. High mountains loom to his left, and on the right bank a broad area of snow-covered open ground leads to a dark forest of dense firs. When he looks downriver, he sees only a flat plain in the far distance. The sea. He turns his head. Behind him there are more mountains, bisected by a a narrow fiord where the river cuts through from the lake.

He glances at his watch. He has no idea how long he has been in the river, but he must have taken a breath after he passed under the ice or he would have drowned. He has to have been under water for seven or eight minutes. Certainly for longer than he has held his breath in the past.

Only now, as he stands on shaky legs, does he believe that he has survived. He thinks of her, and experiences a rush of joy. He is alive. Immediately he is shivering uncontrollably. He looks down at his waterlogged, blue-white palms and realises that although the water did not kill him hypothermia soon will.

A distant whup, whup, whup intrudes on his consciousness, but instead of rushing into the open to hail the helicopters, he finds himself searching for cover. Stumbling over slick rocks on to the snow-covered open ground on the bank, he heads for the forest beyond. But when he tries to run, his legs tremble so violently he can barely move.

Something glints in the weak light. A few hundred yards away, a man with a sleigh and a team of dogs holds binoculars to the sky. He puts them away and cracks his whip, urging the dogs to pull the sleigh into the trees. He wears furs, carries a large rifle over his shoulder and his sleigh is laden with pelts and animal carcases. He must be a poacher or an illegal hunter.

As Max watches him head for cover, the man spies him. He seems to hesitate, weighing him up. But when Max collapses to his knees, the poacher cracks his whip and steers his sleigh towards him. Before Max knows what is happening, the man has bundled him on to the pile of carcases, some still warm, and taken him under the cover of the trees.

Max tries to speak but his jaw locks. The poacher's ageless, wind-burned face creases with concern. He draws a long knife from his thick belt and cuts off Max's saturated, frozen clothes, then wraps him in two large, still-bloody pelts. He takes a bottle from the sleigh and puts it to Max's lips. 'Drikke, drikke' he orders. As the fiery spirit burns Max's mouth and courses through his body, the man rubs Max's arms and legs, forcing blood to the extremities.

Gradually, painfully,the circulation returns to his limbs, and as the poacher's strong fingers continue to work he maintains an insistent babble of unintelligible words. Lying there, staring up at the man's face, Max feels like an infant. Eventually, the man studies Max's hands and feet, gives a loud exclamation of delight and slaps his shoulder.

Max sits up and the poacher passes him a fur hat and a strip of leather to tie some pelts round himself. Then he moves to the front of the sleigh and cracks his whip, galvanising the dogs into action. As Max lies back, watching the dogs pull the sleigh into the darkeningforest, an overwhelming sense of peace descends on him. He looks up and sees an eagle flying overhead.

Suddenly Isabella is the eagle again, but now she is looking down on a city. She is flying over her apartment in Milan and can see herself sleeping by the fire.

A knock on the apartment door wakes her. She rises from the couch and opens the door. 'Can I help you?'

The man is lean. His long hair almost reaches his shoulders, and his skin is tanned dark from the sun. He wears a crumpled hat, sunglasses, faded jeans, a creased linen jacket and a red shirt. He has stubble on his chin and holds a battered leather briefcase. He takes off his sunglasses and removes his hat. 'You don't recognise me?'

He looks so different.

'Sorry I startled you,' he says. 'The door to the block was open so I came up. I thought you might not agree to see me if I rang.'

For some seconds she can't speak.

'Can I come in?'

She steps back, dazed. He enters the apartment and closes the door. I thought you were dead,' she says.

'Max Kappel is dead' He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a green US passport and opens it. Beside a picture of his changed face is a name she doesn't recognise. She remembers his telling her how his mother had got him a US passport a long time ago, when she'd tried to take Max away from the Kappels and give him a different life.