think that I don’t wish you well?”
“I’m a nuisance to you, Avvocato Trevini. An annoying inheritance from my aunt, and you have to battle it as best you can.”
“Do I look to you as if I want to fight anyone?”
“Why did you send me that video?”
“As a warning. And before you misunderstand that, too: a warning not against me, but against the company you keep.”
She turned her face to the wind and closed her eyes for two or three seconds. “You know, I’m really sorry to hear that. My family is consumed by fear of the Carnevares. The women managing my companies in Milan, my so-called advisers, they all predict disaster after disaster. And a great many older men make a great many conjectures about my sex life. Maybe I should worry about that rather than my relationship with Alessandro Carnevare.”
There was a glint of mockery in Trevini’s one good eye. “I have never taken the slightest interest in what the Alcantara women do behind closed doors. I am concerned only with the business of the clan: its financial prosperity, profit margins.”
“But the responsibility is mine.” Big words, but she didn’t believe them herself.
“The Carnevares are not to be trusted. You ought never to forget that.”
“I’m not sleeping with the Carnevares, avvocato. Only with one of them.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
She stared at him. She thought she was going to have to punch a defenseless old man in the face, here and now. With immense difficulty she controlled herself, understanding that provocation was one of his strongest weapons. The realization didn’t make what he had said any less hurtful, but it did lessen its poisonous sting.
“I know exactly what happened on that occasion,” he said. “At Eighty-Five Charles Street, wasn’t it? Michele and Tano Carnevare, along with a few others. It’s no secret, even if you may wish it were, Signorina Alcantara.” He slowly shook his head. “I wonder how you can still stay close to a Carnevare, that’s all.”
“I wasn’t raped by Alessandro,” she managed to say tonelessly.
“But he’s one of them, and he always will be. He was present that evening.”
For a moment, doubt entered her mind, and she hated herself for it. She was letting him force her on to the defensive. She couldn’t allow that.
“How did you get hold of that video?” There was cold fury in her voice, and a chill was spreading through her.
“You know me a little, Rosa.” He used her proper name for the first time, and although she didn’t like it, she didn’t tell him not to. That would have been admitting that she felt too young for the part she had to play. Let him call her what he wanted.
Cristina di Santis was watching them from the far end of the terrace.
“You know me,” Trevini repeated, as if that made it truer. “I would love to tell you about a clever plan that allowed me to acquire that video. But the truth is much more mundane. The cell phone with the video on it was delivered to you at a Palermo branch of the Alcantara bank. The employees there didn’t know quite what to do with it. Simply putting it in an envelope and mailing it to the other end of the island may not have struck them as entirely appropriate.” He shrugged his shoulders, which looked odd, because he had difficulty with certain movements. “Or else they felt it their duty to let someone who has been a buffer between the Alcantaras and the harsher side of life for thirty years see it first.”
She wondered whether she could manage to haul him out of his wheelchair and throw him over the balustrade. He couldn’t weigh much; he was only skin and bone under his elegant gray suit.
“That’s how I came by the recording. I saw you on it, Rosa, you and young Carnevare, and I thought it must have some deeper significance, or someone wouldn’t have been so anxious to get the video into your hands. So I had a few inquiries made of the New York police. It didn’t even take an hour for my capable contessa to find all the information.” He was beaming. “Ah, I love to call her that—my contessa…Well, be that as it may, an apparently unimportant snippet of film showing some party or other suddenly became a highly explosive pictorial record.”
Rosa glanced at his assistant again. She was standing motionless in her chic skirt suit and elegant high heels. One of the bodyguards