He flicked his cigarette out the window, watched it spark and fall. Looked across the darkened Piazza di Madonna at the gray-stone building and its electric sign, Palazzo Splendour, blinking in the night like one of INTERPOL’s damn red notices.

12

New York City

His wife had already stripped off her makeup and applied a coating of some absurdly expensive cream on surgically tightened skin that made her flesh look shiny and radioactive.

“Nice party—you did a good job,” he said, although she had hired a caterer and waiters, so it was not exactly work or a job. Plus, he’d paid for it.

Without looking up or answering, she dropped her silk kimono onto the Empire couch where it slid to the floor in a heap. She made no attempt to pick it up, got into bed, switched on a lamp, and plucked a paperback off her night table, bloodred nails tapping the cover, something with murder in the title.

“Don’t strain yourself with the heavy reading,” he said.

“It’s a gangster story,” she said, “something you can relate to.”

He took a step toward her, hands twitching at his sides while a series of old images skittered through his mind: the back of a bookie shop, smoke-filled and crowded; late-night rides with his father where not a word was spoken, other times a lecture he dared not interrupt; slaps across the face and worse, much worse.

“Go ahead,” his wife said, angling her jaw, “hit me. I know you want to.”

But no, he would not give her the pleasure of seeing him lose control or anything she could use against him in a courtroom, this once beautiful young girl he’d stolen away from a much younger man, her beauty now more memory than fact. He considered how he might kill her, arranging her body into some artful pose out of Goya or Velázquez. But he would never do such a thing, dirty his own hands, though at sixty-four, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t have a third wife, one who would appreciate him.

“Are you going to read for long?” he asked.

“Why? Will it bother you all the way down the hall?”

They hadn’t slept in the same room for years.

He turned away, thinking there had to be a way out of the marriage and the prenup. An accident? Not difficult to arrange, though he had more important things on his mind these days.

He headed down the carpeted hallway, then the winding staircase to the first floor of his townhouse. Did not stop to look at the painting on the landing, one of Renoir’s fleshy pink nudes, too sweet for his taste, picked out by that thirty-nine-year-old gorgon upstairs. For a moment, he considered slashing it.

Another staircase took him into the finished basement and his home office. The only things on the desk, two books: a well-worn copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his favorite novel—the first half, when the hero, Raskolnikov, commits murder and considers himself a superman and above the law, but not the second, with its dreary meanderings on guilt and repentance, something he could not comprehend. One simply went after what one wanted, the message of the second book on his desk: Machiavelli’s The Prince.