Betrayal

  But in Bella Terra, that idiot chief of police ran the station downtown. Joseph didn’t think Bryan DuPey could do a thing against Liesbeth’s gang, except probably get himself killed, but he had sent out e-mails demanding to be rescued.

  He got answers, too. Police Chief DuPey said he would look into Joseph’s allegations that he had been kidnapped, while at the same time politely indicating that Joseph should go for a psychiatric evaluation. The FBI sent him a letter with a form for him to fill out and promised him that once he had done that, they would jump on the case in a mere six to eight weeks.

  He was joseph bianchin, Damn it. He was rich and important, and he needed help. The law enforcement agencies were required to pay attention to him.

  He had sent further, more sternly worded e-mail listing the important people he knew and acidly suggesting DuPey and the FBI check his references and mount a rescue immediately.

  He awaited their response, and he made his plans.

  He knew Liesbeth’s gang of hoodlums hadn’t found his bottle of wine yet. That was the one bright spot in his current existence: that Massimo’s wine had evaded her as thoroughly as it had evaded Joseph. Not that he didn’t want them to find it. He did, for when they got their grubby mitts on that precious bottle, he would take it from under their noses and make his break. That bottle rightfully belonged to him.

  At the same time… to know that Anthony Di Luca had made an international gang of accomplished thieves look like fools… that was grand.

  Not that Joseph remembered that damned Anthony Di Luca with any fondness, but in the end Joseph would cheer on a local rustic before that mob of sophisticated louts.

  Lifting his head, he listened to the new noises within the house.

  Even when he was gone, his team of housekeepers arrived to clean. He recognized the sounds of their industry now: the vacuum cleaner, the flush of toilets, the occasional sharp tone of that low-class Marino woman.

  With their usual disregard for those who they considered lesser beings, Liesbeth’s gang had apparently decided the housekeepers were no threat, for they locked him in his room, then allowed the housekeepers into his mansion. He thought about throwing a fit to alert them to his presence, but the housekeepers were no threat—if he managed a moment alone to tell that Marino woman he was being held hostage, she’d tell him he deserved worse. He had made enemies in this town; no one would put a hand out to get him out of this situation.

  She had the attitude of a woman whose high opinion of herself far outweighed her station in life. But housekeeping services in this town were expensive and seldom reliable, and Marino always handled everything without bothering him about it. And really, what did he care about Marino and her attitude? She was a servant.

  No, the real reason he didn’t try to get the attention of the housekeepers was because he remembered Hendrik’s big fist smashing through the canvas painting and into the wall, and he hadn’t a doubt Hendrik would love to do the same to Joseph’s face.

  Surely his last round of e-mail to the authorities would bear fruit soon.

  With a wary glance toward the closed door, he moved from his investigation of Liesbeth’s gang to an Internet site he had bookmarked: Pressure Points for Self-Defense. Every time he was alone, he studied the moves, because the first time he used a pressure point on Liesbeth, he’d better get it right.

  The sound of the key in the lock made him start. He slammed his computer shut as a petite young female, dark haired and dark eyed, opened the door and sidled in. Quietly she shut it behind her, and cleared her throat. “Mr. Bianchin? If I could speak to you for a minute?”

  She’d startled him, and he snapped, “What the hell do you want?”

  She took a few steps, just far enough to come across the threshold. Her forehead puckered with anxiety. “I… I… I just need to talk to you, to tell you—”

  He recognized her. “Aren’t you that girl who was at the gate?”

  She looked relieved. “That’s right.”

  “How the hell did you get in here?” God, he was sick and tired of people showing up when they wanted, doing what they wanted, without his permission or his consent.

  “I came in with the housekeeping crew.” She wore worn jeans, a dark T-shirt, and a light and careful application of makeup.

  “You work for that Marino woman?”

  “Not… really.”

  “Then why the hell are you here?”

  She walked over to stand before him, and in an aggravated voice said, “Because I need to talk to you.”

  Another smart-mouthed woman. He didn’t have to put up with this. “Don’t take that tone with me. I pay your wages!”

  Her spine snapped upright. Her eyes narrowed. She said coolly, “Actually, you don’t. I am not part of the cleaning crew. My name is Penelope Caldwell, and I came in with them so I could talk to you—since you wouldn’t let me in, in any normal way.”

  He should have yelled at her, slapped her down for her insolence, thrown her out the door. Hell, he could have practiced one of those pressure-point moves on her to see how well it worked. But… there was something about this girl. She had power, she knew he was here, and she wanted something. Perhaps she was his ticket out. If he could strike a bargain… “What do you want?”

  Reaching into the pocket of her apron, she pulled out a photo and placed it on the tray in front of him. “Do you recognize her?”

  He barely glanced at it. “Of course I do. I’m not senile. That’s the Alonso woman.”

  “Yes. My mother.” The girl waited like that was supposed to mean something to him.

  “Yes. So?” This girl held his attention. In her, he caught glimpses of someone in his past. Not the Alonso woman, though. Someone else…

  “She had an affair with you when she was eighteen, Penelope said. “I’m the result.”

  He stared at her without comprehension.

  “I’m your daughter,” she clarified.

  Rage rose in him, the same rage that had accompanied him every time he thought of his childlessness—and how much the people of Bella Terra sneered at him. Did this girl imagine she could pull off this scam? He was far too canny for that. Throwing back his head, he burst into derisive laughter. “Pull the other leg. I’ve never fathered a child in my life. Slow sperm, they told me.”

  She flushed, a gradual build from beneath her collar up over her cheeks and up to her hairline. “Slow sperm doesn’t mean no sperm. I’m your daughter.”

  He glanced down at the photograph, then up at the girl’s distinctive features. “What’s your name again?”

  “Penelope Caldwell.”

  “What happened to Alonso?”

  “I’ve been married.”

  “Divorced already?”

  “Widowed.”

  “That’s a shame.” He didn’t really care. “You don’t look like your mother.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Not the way I remember her.”

  “I’m now ten years older than she was when you seduced her.” Clearly, this Penelope had judged him and found him wanting.

  The rage rose hotter, higher. “You don’t need to make it sound like she was unwilling.”

  “You were over fifty. She was eighteen. That’s… disgusting.” Her lip curled in scorn. For him.

  She had quite the attitude, considering who and what she was—illegitimate, the daughter of an easily seduced whore, and a scam artist trying to get in his pocket. “The whole thing is bullshit. I told the Alonso woman that if she was pregnant, she was to bring the child to me and I would raise it.” Although… when he’d seen this girl at the gate, he had thought she looked familiar.

  “She didn’t like you,” Penelope said. “She didn’t want you to raise her child.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” It was a great line, but—“I’m rich!”

  “I know. For all the good it’s done you.”

  He didn’t like the contemptuous tone in her voice. “Don’t pretend that my money isn??
?t the reason you’re here.”

  “I don’t have to pretend anything. I’ve got a degree in interior design and a good job. I don’t need you. And from the look of the folks downstairs in your study, I’d say you don’t need any more hangers-on.”

  He’d forgotten. He wanted to bargain with her to get out of here.

  Yes. He should say something about his uninvited guests. He meant to… but it stuck in his craw to be the focus of her pity—especially since she really did look eerily familiar.

  “You’re my only surviving relative, and unless I’m much mistaken, I’m your only surviving relative, so”—Penelope pulled a padded envelope out of her other pocket and handed it to him—“here.”

  “What’s this?” He viewed the envelope with suspicion. It was addressed to him.

  “It’s a DNA test. You and I scrape the inside lining of our mouths with the cotton swab, seal it in a plastic tube, and send it to the lab.” She saw the expression on his face and smiled kindly, as if he were senile and she felt sorry for him. Or something. “You don’t have to do it,” she said. “You can pretend I don’t exist. You can pretend we never had this conversation. But”—taking the swab out of her sealed package, she ran it over the inside of her mouth, put it into the tube, sealed it, and held it out to him—“here’s my DNA.”

  He sat there, gripping the arms of his chair, and stared at her, captured by a memory so old and precious he barely recognized it. In Penelope, he had caught a glimpse of someone else. Not her mother, but his. His mother, dead for seventy-two years.

  The poor woman had been abused by his father, treated like a beast who had failed in her primary function, for despite repeated pregnancies, she had borne only one child who lived, and that was Joseph.

  He had been cherished by her, loved and cosseted, her little boy. Her baby. She had stepped between him and his father when his father got too free with the belt; she had told off his bigger cousins when they teased so much they made him cry; she had been his bulwark against the world. And when she died…

  He had forgotten her.

  He had to. His father told him to. Told him life was tough and only the tough survived.

  And he did survive. In fact, he thrived.

  But now he was looking into this girl’s face… and his mother’s eyes stared back at him.

  In slow motion, he reached out and took the tube she offered.

  “Okay. I wrote a check to pay for the lab work. So fill out the forms. It takes two days after the lab receives the package to get an answer one way or another. You can access the results online, and the lab will send you something official through the mail, too. I’ll wait to hear from you. Or not.” She tossed her head, turned away from him, and headed toward the door.

  “Wait!” he called. Damn it. He should tell her about Liesbeth’s gang. But to do that was to admit he had lost control of his life, and that humiliation he could not bear. It was worse than being kept captive in his own house. Because he thought… Well, perhaps she was… his daughter. “Where will you be?”

  “My job is in town.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I told you. I’m an interior designer.” She seemed very proud of that fact. “I’m redesigning one of the old Victorian houses for Rafe and Brooke Di Luca.”

  “What?” He came to his feet. His computer slid off his lap, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was halting this outrage. “You can’t work for the Di Lucas.”

  She swiveled slowly to face him. “I beg your pardon?”

  He shook his gnarled finger at her. “If you are my child, you’ll have nothing to do with those thieves, those—”

  She laughed. “It’s a little late for that kind of discipline… Father.” She laughed again—laughed at him—and walked out, leaving Joseph shaking with rage and something else. Shock, perhaps.

  Or perhaps… an old hope resurrected.

  Chapter 41

  Downstairs in the den, Grieta sat staring at her computer screen. “Liesbeth, we’re going to have to kill the old man.”

  Liesbeth looked up from the panel of her tapestry. “Why’s that, dear?”

  “Every so often, I check what he’s been up to.” Grieta swiveled her desk chair and faced the room. “He’s found us.”

  “What do you mean, he’s found us?” Hendrik paused his latest computer game, Zombie Zombat.

  “He went poking around the Internet, looking for unsolved robberies of note, and by God, he managed to isolate a few of our jobs. The old fox is smart.” Grieta sounded admiring. “Smarter than the police, that’s for sure.”

  “Not that smart if he didn’t realize you’d put a worm on his hard drive and are diverting his e-mail.” Klaas’s voice was slurred by the foam inserts he had stuffed in his cheeks.

  “All that means is, he doesn’t realize what I’m capable of,” Grieta said.

  “I’ll be glad to get rid of him. His wrinkled, sour face always looks like he bit into a bug.” Hendrik tossed his computer tablet aside and headed for the door. “I’ll do him now.”

  “No!” Liesbeth slashed him with the single word. “Bodies smell.”

  Hendrik didn’t so much as turn back. It was more of an off-kilter swivel fueled by sampling too much of Joseph’s fine wine cellar. “He already smells.”

  Liesbeth recognized the danger signs. The boy was bored by his enforced leisure and resentful of her continued dominance over their little family. She wanted to pat his pudgy cheeks and tell him it was all right, that soon he’d see action aplenty and have his chance to prove himself worthy of the name Propov.

  She looked around.

  The once mighty Propov family had dwindled to so few, and none of them were concerned about this all too common struggle between Liesbeth and Hendrik.

  Twenty-two-year-old Brigetta was calibrating the gunpowder to load into hollow-point bullets just in case they got into a gun battle with law enforcement wearing bulletproof vests. She was intense, a proper Propov, who said the family needed to be prepared at all times.

  Forty-five-year-old Grieta worked the computer, a faint smile on her lips. “I’m erasing all the evidence Bianchin found. If the old man could figure it out, so could Interpol. I mean, they’re incompetent, but let’s not make their job any easier.”

  Thirty-two-year-old Klaas stood in front of a gold-framed, full-length mirror and stuffed small buckwheat pillows on his shoulders under his shirt, giving him a hunched appearance that worked well with his puffed cheeks.

  Fifty-year-old Rutger relaxed in a chair and read a book taken from Joseph’s library on famous historical robberies, occasionally putting down the book and using his tablet computer to do research. Catching Liesbeth’s gaze on him, he shrugged. “A bottle of wine is nice, but I think the next job should be something more exciting.” He lifted the book. “Maybe a private art collection stocked with stolen art. Then they can hardly complain to the authorities, can they?”

  Liesbeth smiled at him.

  They were good children, intelligent and practical, visionaries in their own way, and each of them knew he or she didn’t have the chops to be the leader.

  For so many years, she had pinned her hopes on Hendrik. She had believed he would mature, observe her as she planned their jobs and learn from her skills, and move into the position of director without undue upheaval.

  Hendrik was now forty-two, and more and more she had begun to suspect he would be their ruin.

  Yet… she had done her time. She had brought them this far. The little group either flew or they faltered, and she would not be around to see whether they fell. “With a little twist of the arm, I can get information out of Joseph about the Di Lucas. He’s not very brave.”

  “I thought that was what your son was for.” Hendrik strolled closer to Liesbeth and wiggled his fingers and his eyebrows. “Information was the reason you spread your legs for the actor, you said, and gave birth to his child who we trapped so neatly.”

  “Noah will be useful soon enough
. The timer is ticking, and I think that sooner or later, he’ll surrender the bottle. Its value is worth our time. But for now, we have to take care with him.” She smoothed the tapestry in her lap. She had created the glorious golden story of the Propov family in canvas and thread, and this was the last of eight panels to be carefully folded and stored in a trunk, and transported to her new home in the Crimea. “He has morals.”

  In unison, her entire family said, “Ooh, morals.”

  Liesbeth plunged her long, sharp needle once more into the tapestry. “He’ll die rather than betray his family.”

  Hendrik swaggered forward. “We are his family, too.”

  “He doesn’t see it that way,” Liesbeth said with a smile. “His loyalty is to the people who are loyal to him.”

  “Are you sure he hasn’t told them?” Hendrik didn’t like her son. Probably he suspected she preferred her son.

  Probably he was right. “Noah is mortified by his behavior when he lived with us,” she said coolly. “He doesn’t want the Di Lucas to know. And he made a proposal—if he can find the bottle and pass it to me, we’ll make sure the world knows it has passed out of Bella Terra and beyond their grasp.” She laughed contemptuously. “He wants his little town back to its safe, humble self.”

  “How do you know he’s not lying?” Hendrik asked. “That bottle of wine is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Liesbeth heard the greed in his voice. She understood it—she felt a similar greed, although her avarice was fired by a different motive.

  He wanted to auction the wine, to drive the price up by revealing its intriguing history.

  She wanted the rock-solid proof of the Propov family legend.

  Years ago, she had done the research. She had spent hours and days and weeks in libraries and in newspaper archives. She knew what was inside that bottle. She yearned for the pink diamonds that had been stolen from her family. She lusted after them. And after all these years, she was close. So close. Her plans were coming to fruition at last. She would soon see the Beating Heart, and hold it in her hand.