Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [103]
Once inside, he had turned on the boat’s powerful searchlight and taken them through a maze of waterways until they reached the landing, a thirty-foot platform cut out of the stone at the far end of the tunnel where she stood. Then their supplies had been unloaded and she and Michael Roark brought to the suite where he was now, two large rooms—one, a bedroom where she slept, the other a small living-entertaining area where Michael Roark was settled—the spaces divided by an ornate bathroom cut from the cavern walls and inlaid with marble and accented with gold fixtures.
The cave, or grotto, Mooi had told them, was on property belonging to Villa Lorenzi and had been discovered years earlier by its celebrated owner, Eros Barbu. His first venture had been to turn it into an immense wine cellar, and then he’d added the apartments, the construction done by workers imported from a villa he owned in southern Mexico and afterward returned there. It was a way of keeping the cave’s existence secret, especially from the locals. At age sixty-four, Eros Barbu was not only a highly successful and distinguished author but was equally celebrated as a man whose legend mirrored his name; his subterranean grotto becoming an intimate and most discreet destination for erotic dalliance with some of the world’s most beautiful and prominent women.
But whatever the grotto’s history, for Elena it now held only fear and aloneness. She could still see Luca Fanari’s eyes bulging in horror and rage as he took the call. His wife was dead, tortured, her body left to burn to cinders in a fire that ravaged the apartment where they had lived all of their married life. Moments after hanging up, Luca was gone, returning to Pescara for her funeral and to be with their three children. Marco and Pietro had gone with him.
“God bless you,” she had told them as they left for Bellagio and the first hydrofoil to Como, taking the only transportation they had—a small, outboard-powered dinghy.
And now she was alone with Michael Roark sleeping in the room behind her, praying to hear the sound of the outboard coming back. But there was no sound other than the gentle lap of the water against the rock walls.
She was turning back for the room, determined her only course was to pick up the telephone and call her mother general in Siena, tell her what had happened and ask what she should do, when she heard the distant rumble of a motorboat echo off the grotto’s walls.
Certain it was Luca and the others, she walked, nearly ran, down the corridor toward the landing. Then she saw the bright beam of the searchlight, heard the cut of the engines, and then the sleek hull of the flat-bottomed motorboat slid into view. It was Edward Mooi.
72
THREE OF THEM CAME OVER THE BOAT’S gunwale. Edward Mooi and a man and woman Elena had never seen before.
“The men have gone,” she said quickly.
“I know.” Mooi’s look was intent as he introduced her to the couple with him. They were trusted, longtime employees of Eros Barbu and had come to stay with Michael Roark while she went into Bellagio.
“Bellagio?” She was startled.
“I want you to meet someone—a priest from the United States—and bring him here.”
“Here, to the grotto?”
“Yes.”
Elena glanced at the man and the woman, then looked back to Edward Mooi. “Why me?—Why not go yourself?”
“Because we are known in Bellagio and you are not…”
Again Elena looked to the man and woman. Salvatore and Marta, Edward Mooi had called them. They said nothing, only stared back at her. They were probably in their fifties. Salvatore was tanned, the woman, Marta, was not. Which meant he probably worked outside at the villa, while she worked inside. Both wore wedding bands, but there was no way to tell if they were married to each other. It made no difference, their eyes told everything. They were frightened and apprehensive and at the same time alert and determined. Whatever Edward Mooi asked, they would do.
“Who