Free The Valentino Affair by Colin Evans

P ROLOGUE
    August 3, 1917
    The driver squeezed his foot flat to the boards. His boss at the garage had warned him that the client sounded cranky, the way rich folks always seemed when they wanted a cab in a hurry. James Donner knew it didn’t pay to keep the well-heeled waiting. The car’s engine roared as he gunned it through the wooded outskirts of Roslyn, a sleepy upmarket village on the north shore of Long Island. High-priced real estate flashed by. It was eight o’clock, but it still felt like a Turkish bath. When his destination, a cottage called Crossways, finally came into view, Donner squealed to a halt.
    Two women were waiting for him by the main gate. One—small and dark, youngish, probably early twenties—bore the unmistakable stamp of authority. Despite the sticky weather, she was wearing some kind of buckled sweater with big pockets over her white silk dress. Anger pinched her ashen face.
    “You seem to be late,” 1 the woman said as Donner jumped down from behind the wheel and threw open the rear door. Donner apologized, explaining that his boss hadn’t called him till nearly eight o’clock; he’d driven as fast as he could. The woman brushed his excuses aside impatiently. “Do you know the Ladenburg estate?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “If you get there in time, I’ll give you a dollar tip.” 2 She climbed quickly into the car. Her companion—a maid, he guessed—had her hands full with a clumsy white English bulldog that she heaved into the passenger compartment before settling alongside her mistress. Donner closed the rear door, then took his seat behind the wheel. As he let the clutch in, the woman leaned forward and asked if he knew the shortcut across the plain to the Ladenburg estate. Yes—but she still insisted on giving him directions.
    The day had broiled into the eighties, and the last remnants of the fiery sun were just dropping below the horizon as Donner motored south across the scrubby grassland of Hempstead Plain. Since the declaration of war on Germany four months earlier, rumors had swirled that the plain would double as a training ground for whipping doughboys into shape before they were shipped off to the mayhem of Europe. For now, though, the fields lay open, deserted, desolate.
    At age forty-three, Donner was too old for the draft; he fought his battles with crusty passengers. Although the lady hadn’t specified what “in time” meant, she kept urging him to go faster. In between spells as navigator, she huddled in deep conversation with her maid. Not that Donner could catch what they said; the roar of the overworked engine devoured every syllable.
    Five hair-raising minutes brought them to Whaleneck Avenue, the long arterial road that bisected the island from north to south. Just ahead lay the Meadow Brook Hunt Club, famed for its yelping hounds that pursued Hempstead’s dwindling supply of foxes, closely followed by blueblood riders all decked out in their finest hunting pink: a fragment of old England transplanted to the New World. Tonight, a different kind of chase was under way. The woman squinted over Donner’s shoulder at the road ahead.
    “There!” she said, pointing to a barely noticeable turnoff. Donner braked hard and swung the automobile left onto Valentines Road. Thick trees and heavy shrubbery slowed him to a crawl as he threaded through the shadows, tires crunching the gravel. A privet hedge rose up before them.
    “Stop here,” the woman commanded. In the distance—about two hundred feet away—lights flickered. The woman let herself out of the vehicle. “Wait here, and look after the dog,” she told him. “I won’t be long.” She and the maid hurried off across a well-manicured lawn toward the lights. The murkiness swallowed them whole within a few strides.
    Donner watched them go, then turned the car around and switched off the engine. The dog lay curled up on the backseat, almost asleep. The cabbie reached inside his pocket for a pack of