I want a hero…
Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto the First
Rome
July 1820
She led the way up the stairs to her bedroom, discarding articles of clothing as she went.
Marta Fazi was agile, certainly. Her dark gaze locked with James’s, she climbed backward without a misstep. Her teeth gleamed white against her olive skin as she laughingly flung away the mask, the veil, the cloak that concealed a frail excuse for a gown: a flimsy article, little more than an elaborate shift, held together with a few easily untied ribbons and strings.
She left the emeralds on: the heavy necklace with its great pendant stone dangling between her breasts, the matching earrings, the bracelet.
James paused to ease out of his coat, taking his time. He slung it over his shoulder as he climbed after her, maintaining the pose of mild curiosity he’d used to bait the hook.
Accustomed to getting what she wanted, Marta couldn’t resist a challenge, and James hadn’t to do much acting to become one. Given a choice, he wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole. Since he hadn’t a choice, he’d simply let his reluctance show. That, as he’d expected, had piqued her vanity.
She was handsome, admittedly. He’d heard that Lord Byron had written a poem about her, not for publication. She was of the type the poet admired: Dark and passionate, she was what he would call “a magnificent animal.”
James was not nearly so enthusiastic about the type. He was thirty-one years old, and Marta was not his first passionate, uninhibited, and sexually talented foreign adventuress. If he survived this encounter, though, she’d be the last. If he didn’t survive it—which was equally likely—she’d be the last.
Either way I win, he thought.
If he failed this mission, he’d die a slow and painful death. He would not be mourned as a hero. No one would know that he’d died trying to save the world. They probably wouldn’t even find his body—or what was left of it.
For bloody damned king and bloody damned country, he told himself as the door closed behind him, one last time.
He took off his waistcoat and dropped that and his coat over a chair near the door as he continued to advance and she continued to retreat, unerringly, toward the bed.
Clearly, she knew the way backward and in the dark, though the room wasn’t altogether dark. Servants must have readied it shortly before, because the candles were lit. They must have expected her to have company because they’d lit only two.
These offered light enough to show him her gleaming white teeth as her lips parted. It was light enough to make green fire of the emeralds and rainbow sparks of the small diamonds circling them. Even without light, he’d know where she was. Her perfume filled the room with a too-sweet aroma, like decaying roses.
She ran her hands over her full, firm breasts and down over her hips. She was magnificently formed, and knew it.
“You see, I keep nothing from you,” she said. “I give myself completely.”
Her speech told him she’d spent most of her life in southern Italy and had had a little—a very little—education. He detected, too, a foreign note: her native Cyprus, no doubt. Though his antecedents, like hers, were mixed, the Italian he spoke, his mother’s language, was flawless. Since he’d inherited his mother’s black, curling hair and his maternal grandfather’s Roman profile, Marta had no inkling that he was not only the son of an English nobleman but an agent of His Majesty’s government.
In short, James Cordier was an even greater fraud than this alluring panther. The trick was to make sure she didn’t find out.
“Not quite completely,” he said as he unfastened his trousers. “The stones are pretty, but your beauty needs no adornment, you know.”
Not to mention that heavy jewelry was a damned nuisance during a plogging. Yer could put yer eye out with one a them things, he might have told her, in the accents he’d learned in his eventful youth.
She laughed. “Ah, flattery at last. I thought I should never hear it from you.”
He stepped out of his trousers. “The sight before me stimulates my tongue,” he said.
“Good.” Her gaze lowered. “And the little man is stimulated, too, I see.”
Of course it was. James might have had his fill of her sort but he was a man, after all, and she was exciting. They usually were, the deadly ones.
She unhooked the earrings and laid them on the table by the bed. She unclasped the bracelet, and dropped it next to the earrings.
He pulled his shirt over his head.
She was fumbling with the clasp of the necklace.
“Allow me,” he said.
It was an old clasp, very probably the original, and wanted both care and a sharp eye. The parure had not been intended for ordinary evening wear but for state occasions: It had been created for a queen more than two centuries ago. Its current owners, ejected by Napoleon, had had to secret their treasures and themselves to a safe refuge. The treasures had been on their way home in the care of a trusted retainer when she and two confederates, garbed as nuns, had stolen it.
The age and history of the emeralds did not signify to her. Marta Fazi had grown up on the streets; she was literate—though just barely—amoral, and ruthless. She had a weakness for good-looking men and a passion for emeralds.
This was what James knew of her and all he needed to know to do the job he’d been sent to do.
Get the gems, get out, get them to their rightful owner, and let the diplomats sort out the details.
The jewels now lying in a careless tangle on the bed stand, James proceeded to business. “To battle” was probably nearer the mark.
He was a soldier, after all, though the army he belonged to was unacknowledged. Nobody pinned any medals on men like him, or mentioned him in dispatches.
And if he got caught, no one would rescue him.
So, Jemmy, my boy, whatever you do, he advised himself, don’t get caught.
Then he gave the girl what she wanted, and did it thoroughly. Whatever he felt about his work, he was at least still capable of enjoying a handsome, passionate female more or less as any other man would.
When at last she seemed reasonably sated—for the moment, at any rate—he whispered, “I’m famished. What about you?”
“Ah, yes,” she murmured. “Wine, something to eat…and then we regain our strength. The bell for the servant is beside you.”
“Let’s let the servants sleep,” he said. “I’d rather forage.”
She laughed drowsily. “So you would. I marked you for a hunter when first I saw you.”
You got that part right.
He rose from the bed. His trousers were near at hand, as he’d taken care they should be. He pulled them on, then found his shirt. His back to her, he pulled it over his head, then slid the jewels from the table, the billowing cloth concealing the movement.
The rest was absurdly easy. The bed curtains hid from her view the door and the chair where he’d left his waistcoat and coat. He collected the garments and slipped through the door.
Another man would have postponed his exit until she fell asleep. James, however, was of Lady Macbeth’s mind: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well/It were done quickly.”
It would be well to move quickly in this case. Marta would soon notice the stones were gone, and she took betrayal very ill, indeed. The last man who’d annoyed her had lost his privates first. He’d lost them slowly, in bits.
James might have minutes to get away. He might have mere seconds.
He hurried down the stairs.
One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven—
“Stop him!” she screamed. “Get him! Break his knees!”
As he left the landing, a burly ruffian barreled up the stairs. James flung his arm out sideways, stiff as a tollbooth bar. The servant saw it too late. He ran straight into it, the muscled arm catching him across the throat. He fell backward, down the stairs, landing head first.
At the top of the stairs she was howling in Greek for her men, telling them to keep him alive: She had plans for him.
A knife whizzed past his head.
In piercing shrieks she described what she’d do to him, which parts she’d cut off first.
James sidestepped the servant’s inert body and ran into the hall, toward the entrance.
A door burst open and another of her henchmen exploded toward him. James stiff-armed this one, too, but this time with a forward thrust, catching the brute in the chest. The man’s knees folded and he fell straight down onto his back.
James heard him yowl in pain. Kneecap broken, most likely.
His screams were nothing to Marta’s.
James kept moving.
In the next instant he slipped through the door.
And in the blink of an eye, he’d melted into the night.