Day Of Confession

71

Bellagio. Tuesday, July 14, 4:15 a.m.

Nursing sister Elena Voso stood in the grotto's main tunnel listening to the lap of water against the granite walls, hoping Luca and the others would come back.

Above her, the ceiling rose at least twenty feet, maybe more. And the wide corridor beneath it stretched another hundred to the canal and boat landing at the far end. Rudimentary benches, now fractured and worn by the years, had been hacked out of the natural stone walls and ran the full length of it on either side. Two hundred people could sit there easily. She wondered if that had been the purpose for cutting the benches in the first place, as a spot for numbers of people to hide. If so, who had done it, and when? The Romans? Or peoples before them or after? Whatever its origin, the cave or really series of caves, as one chamber opened onto another, was now wholly modern – with electricity, air vents, plumbing, telephones, a small kitchen and large central living room, off of which ran at least three private suites, decorated luxuriously and complete with opulent baths, massage rooms, and sleeping quarters. Somewhere there, too, though she hadn't seen it, was what was supposedly one of the most extensive wine cellars in all of Europe.

They had been brought there Sunday night by the soft-spoken, erudite Edward Mooi, moments after their arrival at Villa Lorenzi. Alone and at the wheel of a sleek, shallow-bottomed motorboat, Mooi had taken them south in darkness. Hugging the lake's shoreline for a good ten minutes, he had finally turned in through a narrow cut in what seemed the solid wall of a sheer cliff, then navigated through a tangle of rocks and overhanging foliage into the mouth of the cave itself.

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.