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slim with enormous, sometimes awe-inspiring, breasts. He didn’t seem to discriminate with regard to nationality or colour. As long as they had the legs and the tits.
    Marco Donato Junior clearly loved life and it seemed to love him right back.
     
    Though the photographs of this Marco’s philandering grandfather had intrigued and amused me, I was surprised to find myself feeling slightly ruffled when I looked at these newer pictures. Every image seemed to tighten an invisible band around my heart.
    Was I envious? Jealous? Perhaps. There was no rational reason for it. Good-looking but obviously far too pleased with himself, Marco Donato Junior was hardly my type. My overall impression was that he was an over-privileged boy with too much time on his hands. Likewise, I knew I wouldn’t have matched up to his feminine ideal. I’m slim but I have the figure of a boy. Much as I like my breasts, I know they’re never going to stop traffic. I certainly couldn’t compete with the groomed beauties of Donato’s world. I didn’t want to in any case. It shouldn’t have mattered in the least how Marco Donato conducted his private life. I didn’t need him to fancy me. I just wanted him to allow me access to his library. I didn’t really need to know anything about his personal life at all. But I couldn’t help delving further. I told myself it wasn’t prurient; it was the historian in me that made me want to know more. And Marco Donato Junior did have a certain mystery to him.
    It was odd, given how gregarious the man had obviously been in his younger days, that he was so very secretive now. The photographs of the young Italian, louche and delicious as any dark-eyed stud in a Caravaggio painting, stopped around 1999. There was simply nothing after that. Nothing at all. No pictures. No gossip items. I wondered what had happened to make the playboy stop playing, but my searches on the Internet proved fruitless. There was no mention of a wife, who might have put her foot down about his partying. It was as though he had just vanished. From the party scene, at least. He was obviously still alive, since he was sending emails to my inbox. Well, someone using his name was.
    That morning, I sent one more polite email to confirm I would be at the library at the appointed time.
     
    I am very much looking forward to meeting you,
    I concluded.
    And I found I was very much looking forward to meeting him, to the extent that I put on make-up before leaving the house, as though I was heading out on a date rather than a library visit. I was not just casually interested, I was intrigued. Though I was barely conscious of the feeling at the time, seeing all those photographs of Marco Donato draped in beautiful women had made me want to experience what those girls must have felt in his orbit. A psychologist would have recognised my reaction at once. There is a little part of every woman that wants the man who has already been approved by the sisterhood. You would think that knowing a man had had so many partners would be off-putting, but in fact it can have quite the opposite result.
    They call it the Casanova effect.

Chapter 8
    The Palazzo Donato was a beautiful place – even by standards in Venice, where everything is astonishingly beautiful. Rising four proud storeys above the waterline, the house was built in the Byzantine style popular in the fifteenth century, when connections with the Near East were strong and influence flowed back and forth between Venice and Constantinople like the tide. The details round the extravagantly arched windows on the terracotta-coloured facade were picked out in fresh white paint. In front of the house was a well-scrubbed wooden deck, surrounded by the candy-striped mooring poles that littered the city. Tied to one of the poles, which were painted in the burgundy and yellow Donato colours, I recognised the old water-taxi that had been the first step in building the family fortune. It still looked well cared