David Morrell: Burnt Sienna

He was reminded of Sophia Loren, and not just because she, too, was a voluptuous brunette with full lips and arousingly dusky eyes, but also because their skin color was the same, a smoldering earth color to which Malone had always been attracted. It made him suspect that the woman had something else in common with Sophia Loren – both were Italian.

The car hit another pothole.

“She’s Bellasar’s wife,” Jeb said.

Malone looked up in surprise.

“The woman whose portrait Bellasar wants you to paint,” Jeb said.

“I feel as if I’ve seen her before.”

“Because she was featured on about a hundred magazine covers, not to mention thousands of ads for lipstick, shampoo, eyeliner, you name it. Newsweek, Time , and People did articles about her. She had a best-selling bathing-suit calendar. She had a once-a-week fashion-tip segment on the Today show. She was so famous, all you had to do was mention her first name and people in the fashion industry knew who you were talking about. Sienna.”

“The color of her skin.”

“The first thing I thought of was the city in Italy,” Jeb said.

“You’re not an artist. Burnt sienna’s the most brilliant earth color, reddish brown and fiery.”

“Fiery. Yeah, that describes the impression she creates all right,” Jeb said. “She was as super as super-models get. Five years ago, she gave it all up.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? She was twenty-five, almost past the prime age for a model. Maybe she thought she’d get out while she was ahead. Or maybe she fell in love.”

“With Mr. I Won’t Take No For An Answer?”

“That could be exactly what happened. Maybe Bellasar wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“But now he wants me to paint two portraits of her, one of her face, the other full length? Nude? I get the feeling I’m missing something.”

“Yes.”

The way Jeb said it made Malone shift his gaze from the magazine’s cover.

“Bellasar was married three times before.”

Malone frowned.

“All of his wives were gorgeous, and all of them died young.”

“What?”

“The first lost control of her sports car and went over a cliff. The second broke her neck while skiing. The third drowned in a diving accident.”

“It sounds like it’s bad for a woman’s health to be Bellasar’s wife,” Malone said. “With a track record like that, who’d be foolish enough to marry him?”

“You’re assuming the other marriages were publicized. Bellasar’s a hundred times more sensitive about his privacy than you are about yours. In his case, it’s a survival trait. Believe me, the facts about his marriages and the subsequent quiet funerals are hard to come by.” Jeb paused to emphasize what he was about to say. “Before each wife died, Bellasar hired a noted painter to do a portrait of her.”

Malone felt a cold ripple along his skin.

“The paintings hang in a secluded room in Bellasar’s mansion in southern France. They’re a private collection of his trophies. He can’t stand imperfection. When his wives get to be about thirty, when they start to lose the bloom of youth and show the slightest blemish, a faint wrinkle around the eyes or an isolated gray hair that hints of aging, he wants nothing more to do with them. But his suspicious nature prevents him from merely divorcing them. After all, they’ve been around him too long. They’ve seen and heard too much. They could be a threat.”

“I don’t understand. If he knows he’s going to get rid of them, why does he take the trouble of marrying them? Why doesn’t he just ask them to be his mistresses?”

“Because he’s a collector.”

“I still don’t -”

“The way he looks at it, if he didn’t marry them, he wouldn’t own them.”

“Jesus.” Malone glanced down at the magazine cover. “And after they’re dead, he still owns them as portraits.”

“Painted by masters, their beauty immortalized, never aging,” Jeb said.

Malone kept staring at the magazine cover. “So now he’s getting ready to have this wife killed.”

“Sure looks that way to us.” Jeb let Malone think about it. “But if you go in and paint her, you might be able to figure a way for us to rescue her. The things she knows, she could be very helpful to us.”

Dusk cast shadows. The car’s headlights illuminated the vine-covered trees.

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m sorry this woman has a problem, but I don’t know her,” Malone said. “She’s a face on a magazine cover. She doesn’t have any connection with me.”

“But you can’t let her -”

“I don’t want to get mixed up with you guys.”

“Even if it’s a way to get even with Bellasar?”

“I can do that myself. I don’t need to let anybody use me.”

“I can’t believe your attitude. You’re just going to stand back and let her die?”

“Seems to me that’s what you’re doing,” Malone said. “Don’t push the responsibility onto me. I didn’t know anything about this woman until a few minutes ago. If you think she’s in that much danger, send in a team right now and grab her.”

“Can’t. The timing’s wrong. The moment we play our hand, Bellasar will tighten his security even more. We’ll lose our chance to get someone close to him.”

“So when it comes right down to it, you don’t care about the woman, either.”

Jeb didn’t respond.

“She’s only a device you’re using to try to recruit me,” Malone said. “Getting me in there to look around is more important than saving her.”

“The two go together.”

“Not as far as I’m concerned. I won’t be manipulated. I’ll get even with him on my own.”

“If you’d just listen to reason for a -”

“Damn it, you and Bellasar have something in common. You won’t take no for an answer.”

Jeb assessed him a moment. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“That’s how it’s going to be.”

“Fine.” Jeb’s voice was flat. He frowned toward the lights of San Miguel ahead of them. His voice became flatter. “I need a drink.”

“No hard feelings?”

“It takes more than an argument to end a friendship.”

But Malone couldn’t help feeling that the end of a friendship was precisely what had happened.

They headed along the main street of the picturesque town and stopped at a restaurant called Costa Brava across from the waterfront. All the while Malone drank a beer with Jeb, he barely tasted it. They both had trouble making small talk. The specialty of the house, a lobster dinner, was everything it should have been, but Malone couldn’t help wishing he was back at the Coral Reef. He was only now beginning to realize the full force of what he had lost.

They returned home earlier than they usually would have. Malone offered a nightcap, but Jeb excused himself, claiming travel fatigue. Malone went out to his shadowy courtyard and stared at the savaged dunes and palm trees. He slumped on a hammock, closed his eyes to the stars, and brooded about Bellasar, about the woman called Sienna and the death sentence she didn’t know had been given to her.

When he had first seen the magazine’s cover, the face on it had struck him as being commercially beautiful, no more than that. But as he had looked harder, he had begun to notice the subtlety around the lips, the nuance of the way she cocked her head and positioned her eyes. Her eyes. There was something about them – something in them – that spoke of a deeper beauty.

Now that face and those eyes hovered in his memory. He kept thinking about her fiery brown skin: burnt sienna, his favorite color. He dozed and woke several times, continuing to brood about the beautiful doomed woman he’d been asked to paint. In an uneasy state between sleeping and waking, he imagined her perfect sensuous features – imagined, not remembered, for it wasn’t the face on the magazine cover that occupied him. Instead, it was his conception of that face, his depiction of the beauty behind it, a beauty that would be destroyed if he didn’t help her.