1 AUGUST, 1963 ithin only hours of her husband’s burial, Mrs. Pearce Wclimbs Pepper Tree Lane. Gusting, incendiary Santa Ana winds shake giant live oak and hickory and sycamore trees, but beneath their tumultuous high canopies, the night air barely rustles through the branches of modest pepper trees said to have started out as fence posts—then in true movie-magic fashion sprouted, budded, and grew into full-sized trunks gnarled with knots and burls. Now arching limbs with fronds of slender pepper leaves form a shadow-fretted allee at the entrance lane to the deserted Hollywood Bowl. The newly-made widow glances about in fear of trespassers more sinister than herself, lurking, she fears, in pitch shadows between boarded-up concession stands, or on empty café terraces. She hesitates in a pool of chalky light cast by an art deco lamp pole. Her tiny, oval-shaped Cartier watch hasn’t worked in years, but it must be near midnight. All afternoon long she had tried to tell herself that this was a hoax, some sort of hideous prank—but no, the elegant copperplate script of her bizarre summons could only be Vita’s!—besides, who else would bring her out at this hour to so outlandish a place! From her purse Mrs. Pearce slips a piece of paper and for the umpteenth time reads the sole communication in twelve years from her remaining child. She holds the paper up to feeble light, Vita and squints. Fifty-eight, she looks seventy. Strands of prematurely thin white hair straggle from beneath a mink toque, while the diminished frame is droopily draped by a matching jacket with matted fur and padded shoulders. Either unashamed, or unaware of the shabbiness of the demode outfi t (still her best), Mrs. Pearce stands erect with a graceful, resolute set to her head and shoulders. In reduced circumstances she is not someone to be mocked. Nor is her former beauty entirely destroyed by glare from the lamp pole, or by too-lavishly applied makeup. Hers was never the beauty you see on movie posters, rather more the somber ethereal beauty of a stone face you might expect to fi nd inside a niche on a French cathedral. Tonight Mrs. Pearce’s heavy-handed maquillage betrays a desire to mask—not a widows’s grief—but a mother’s need to conceal the imprint of drinking—to look her best for her daughter! “Forget her, Edith, to hell with her.” Those were Ken’s last words. “She’s not coming back, ever.” ‘But she has,’ Mrs. Pearce thinks. ‘Did it take her father’s death to bring her home!’ She stares at the much-crumpled paper in her hand, delivered in so disgusting a fashion. She’d seen it as soon as she looked down into the coffi n—folded many times, compacted into a tight knot...tucked between poor Ken’s dead, cold knuckles. Instinctively she had reached to pull free the paper wad. Glimpsing the fl orid strokes of familiar copperplate, she was fazed not at all by her daughter’s sadistic outrageousness. She had long experience of that—why, she fi rst heard of Vita’s astonishing East Coast marriage by chance, reading of it in Vogue’s society column. Tonight she has to settle for six stark but artistically scrawled words: ‘MIDNIGHT AT THE BOWL COME ALONE’ She climbs past box offi ce ticket booths up a concrete ramp to a row of chain-link barricades. One gate, Mrs. Pearce sees, is nudged open, its padlock dangles loose—‘Does she have anything to do with this? What should an ambassador’s wife know about picking locks!’ 3 She searches nearby shadows for signs of movement. A night guard? Had she imagined hearing footsteps? She listens to her own ragged breath, of that she can be as sure as she is of the irritating susurration of winds overhead in parched pepper tree branches. A gust comes ripping up the ramp, rolling and twisting and piling fallen leaves in creaking heaps against chain-link. The ramp seems longer, and steeper, but then it’s been twelve years since she was last here. With a sharp intake of breath she confronts the great amphitheater. She squints to make out in darkness the hundreds of concrete tiers with wood-slat benches that spiral up the mountainside. On a high ridge, wind-breaker circles of eucalyptus trees writhe against a sky smoldering red from wild fi res. Lower on the mountain’s fl ank, hissing winds cause heavy boughs of Aleppo pines to rise and fall with the majestic slowness of a funeral dance. Mrs. Pearce enters Promenade 2, behind garden box seats piled with folded canvas chairs and collapsible picnic tables. In the black hollow of Daisy Dell, the hulking acoustical concert shell glows with ghostly luminosity. Cautiously Mrs. Pearce negotiates steep, low-rise steps descending between box stalls. Wind gusts lessen. She breathes in the bittersweet scent of pine and realizes why her daughter set their reunion in this place—to taunt her! To provoke, annoy, and show ill will. Her eyes strain to pierce darkness inside the shell, where Vita had stood alone, center stage, backed by the philharmonic orchestra. The Young Artists’s Concert had been underwritten by Edith’s, Inc., the lucrative family restaurant chain cruelly mocked by Vita. Again, as often in the past, Mrs. Pearce—Edith Pearce— visualizes how young, how beautiful her daughter had looked with her auburn hair loosely waved over bare shoulders, how fl awlessly her milk-white skin gleamed in the wash of spotlights. Thousands and thousands of faces spreading up the mountainside had beamed as her child winged her way through dizzying high notes and thrilling trills. Edith crosses plywood covering a drained refl ecting pool, ripe with the fungoid stench of decay. Using utility steps she Vita climbs onto the shell’s huge stage. Sensor device lights fl icker. The famous concentric acoustical panels curve overhead like claws. Edith whirls—rats?—another trespasser? Her hand fumbles to grasp what she’s carrying inside one voluminous pocket of the mink jacket. Tears and perspiration cause heavy liner to streak. She sobs out loud in fear and in despair at her guilt, her loneliness, her longing to make everything different from the way it was. High on the Bowl’s uppermost rim, a fi gure dressed in all- black watches from beneath heaving Aleppo boughs. Nostrils fl are as they fi ll with burning-acrid, pine-sweet air. The beautiful face is pale, but radiant against a sky pulsating rose from out-of-control fi res. Vita can make out the fi gure on the stage far below: seen from this height and distance her mother is less than an inch tall—so trifl ing, piffl ing an adversary. Gripping the Davis 32 cal derringer inside her leather jacket pocket, Vita strides down into the amphitheater. 5 BOOK ONE ATHENS (Three Months Earlier) Vita 7 1 ita betrayed few signs of nervousness, or irritation, when Vasked to lift her single Vuitton suitcase onto a low counter and open it for inspection. Resigned to not meriting immunity when unaccompanied by Christian or his embassy minions, she stood still and erect. Her beautiful face remained expressionless as a cavalier customs offi cer fl ipped through the over-sized, ornately embossed U.S. State Department diplomatic passport that she handed to him. Furtively she tapped the Pentelic marble fl oor with the spiked iron tip of her sturdy umbrella, surely an odd thing to be bringing into arid Athens. Vita permitted the corners of her lightly lip-sticked mouth to tilt upwards, in a fl icker of a smile, as the offi cer fl ushed: spread before his eyes, covering the top layer of the fully packed suitcase, was a cornucopia of the skimpiest, most translucent underwear imaginable, minuscule panties and brassieres of peach-colored lace so gossamer as to be described by Arabs as “woven air.” The offi cer perfunctorily ran his hands around outer walls of the suitcase, snapped it closed, and returned the diplomatic passport to Vita’s haughtily extended hand. Cleared, she did not advance with other disembarking passengers into the lobby. She waved away a porter and lugged the heavy suitcase herself along a corridor out toward domestic island fl ight gates. Her stalker watched from behind the glass barrier Vita separating customs queues from the lobby. The man failed to register any peculiarity in the sight of a woman immaculately coifed, wearing a Chanel travel suit and Ferragamo pumps, and toting a big suitcase with no signs of physical strain. Not especially perceptive, her husband’s operative did not sense Vita’s intensely focused energy or note that she was uncommonly strong. And brazen. But but not so brazen as to dare risk fl ying an unnecessarily indirect route from Los Angeles through Singapore and Bombay to Athens using anything other than her own diplomatic passport—not to mention her correct gender! The transformation had to be made now as certainly Christian had tracked use of her passport. Leaving the Air India 707 on the tarmac Vita had intuited his agents watching. Palpably, she’d sensed the invisible tentacles of surveillance rising hairs along the nape of her lovely neck. Inside a remote public she bolted the door shut. She opened her suitcase and swept aside the diversionary layers of underwear that had concealed a knapsack pre-packed with peculiar creativity. Out came a man’s shaving kit, and on the sink’s ledge she lined items having nothing at all to do with grooming for either female or male.