“That’s the joint. I warn you, I don’t have the chops anymore for up-tempo stuff.”

“Okay, we’ll keep it sedate.”

“So we have ourselves a trio,” Dante said, taking out his phone. “I’ll get on the search for what agency is supplying the music and what caterer has the job, then we’ll start threatening them.” He walked to one side of the room and began speaking Italian into the phone.

“Problem,” Stone said. “Casselli knows me—we had lunch, remember?”

“Don’t worry,” Jim said, “one of the great skills harbored in our Agency is that we are masters of disguise. We have a guy who can turn you into Ray Charles.”

“I don’t do blackface,” Stone said.

“You could do George Shearing,” Viv contributed.

“I don’t look anything like Shearing.”

“Just the dark glasses. You can play blind—you just never look directly at anybody. If you’re talking to someone, you look over his shoulder somewhere. But you can’t look at your hands when you play.”

“Dark glasses and a mustache might do it,” Jim said. “Maybe a better nose.”

“What’s wrong with my nose?” Stone asked.

“It’s too good,” Viv said. “Jim’s right. His makeup man could mess it up a little, give your face character.”

“Casselli will never make you,” Jim said. “I promise.”

47

Hedy was stunned for a moment but quickly recovered. She could hear footsteps on the wooden deck behind the house. An outside light came on.

Hedy got to her feet and climbed over a rock to her left. She cowered in a crevice as footsteps went past her on the path, then they retreated back to the deck.

“Nobody out here,” a man said in Italian. “Where did the key go?” He went inside, and she heard the door lock behind him.

Hedy discovered a niche under her rock and crawled into it. She was dry, if not warm, and she was in no mood to go blindly along that path in the rain. Soon she was asleep.

When she woke the rain had stopped, and the sun shone intermittently, enough to warm the air comfortably. She was hungry, but she wasn’t ready to risk the trail in daylight. She’d wait until dark, and if it wasn’t raining, try it again. She crawled out of her shelter and looked around. A few feet away was the rope handrail on the path, which led along a sheer cliff face and seemed to narrow to almost nothing. In the other direction was a lovely view of the sea and mountains and, a few feet away, what seemed another sheer drop-off. She was trapped on a peninsula of stone, with the path leading to the house, and in the other direction, God knew what awaited her.