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hurt .”
    At least until
the merger papers are signed, Scarne thought uncharitably.

 
    CHAPTER 5 – VILLA VENDELA
    As she sat in
her study at her computer checking her Swiss bank account underneath the
massive Roka Fujimoto painting of a Japanese courtesan, Vendela Noss could hear
pot and pan noises from her kitchen downstairs. Giusi Rinaldi and Angelina
Casale were busily preparing the evening repast. Soon the house would fill with
unbelievable aromas from the five-course meal they were arranging. At dinner,
those aromas would mix with the floral perfume coming from her garden and
adjacent fields, where borage, buttercups, clover and crocus were blooming.
    While an accomplished
amateur chef in her own right, this night Noss had delegated the cooking to
Giusi and Angelina, two of her closest friends in Camucia. The two women
supplemented the incomes of their husbands, both professors at the University
of Alberta in Cortona, by preparing meals for the tourists who rented local
Tuscan villas. They brought in the food and wine, took over the rustic
kitchens, and turned out feasts so notable that they had been featured in the
American magazine, Bon Appetite . Giusi and Angelina, cosmopolitan women
who looked as if they should be starring in the Italian cinema, wanted to try
out some new dishes and Noss was only too happy to turn her evening’s guests
into, as she called them, laughing, “guinea pigs.” 
    Camucia is a
small frazione, or village, that sits at the base of the mountain below the
more famous city of Cortona in central Tuscany. Its railway station offers easy
access to the rest of Italy. That was one of the major attractions the town
held for Noss, who, while German, loved all things Italian, from the exquisite
cuisine to the men she bedded to help burn off some of the calories. What
vigorous sex did not accomplish in that regard, the verdant hills surrounding
Camucia and Cortona did. A committed runner and bicyclist, she was a familiar
sight on the roads. In a region that did not lack for beautiful women, Noss,
with her short blond hair and fair skin, nevertheless stood out. 
    As a small
child she had vacationed in Tuscany for many years with her parents and older
brother. After the motor accident that killed them and left her in a coma for
six weeks, Vendela had gone to live with her mother’s sister in Zwickau, in
East Germany. It had been a wrenching change for a gentle young girl raised in
Dortmund, West Germany. That city, in Westphalia, was surrounded by waterways
and woodland, and contained beautiful parks such as Westfalenpark and the
Rombergpark. Zwickau, on the other hand, was a dreary Saxon mining and coal
city also infamously known for the Sachsenring Automobilwerke, the factory that
produced the millions of clunky and noxious Trabant automobiles that became
symbols of centralized-planning inefficiencies.
    Her aunt
Gretchen was a kindly woman but childless herself. Neither she or her husband
knew much about raising a pre-teen. For his part, Walfrid Schlössinger, a
colonel in the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit, or Ministry for State Security,
the hated and feared East German secret police agency, thought it his duty to
eliminate whatever liberal Western ideas his niece had picked up in the
decadent West. All he succeeded in doing was to inculcate in Vendela a visceral
disdain and hatred of authority in all forms. At 15, she started hanging out
with some young thugs in the “Hammerskins,” one of the neo-Nazi street gangs
that gave even the Stasi trouble. She eventually broke with the skinheads over
their anti-Semitic philosophy, which she thought was nonsense, but not before
she engaged in a series of robberies, one of which resulted in the death of her
accomplice and an elderly shopkeeper. Only her uncle’s position saved her from
a long prison sentence. But her career path had been established. For despite
what she had told the authorities, she had not been an unwilling participant in
the