Present Day Hotel Rotoletti, Venice Two a.m.
The banging on Tom's bedroom door wakes him from a deep sleep.
He rolls out of bed, his heart thumping from the shock of the loud noise. 'Who is it?'
No one answers.
More banging.
Tom's alert now. On his toes. Wide awake. Life in Compton prepared him for all manner of surprises. He jerks the door open, ready to deal with whatever lies on the other side.
Valentina Morassi falls into his room.
She stumbles headlong and Tom only just manages to catch her.
She reeks of booze. White wine, by the smell of it. Her hair is a crazy mess and her make-up smudged so much she has panda eyes.
'Okay. Be careful,' he steadies her and kicks the door closed behind them.
She slurs something, then wobbles her way to the edge of his bed.
Tom guides her carefully, worried she might fall, and then realises he's wearing nothing but some black boxers Tina bought him. 'Excuse me.' He leaves her on the bed, quickly grabs his trousers off the back of a chair and steps into them. 'Are you all right?'
She forces a weak smile.
It's clear she's very much not all right. Tom scouts for a glass to pour water in and offers it to her. 'Here, drink this, it will help.'
Valentina takes a tiny sip, then just holds the glass. 'I'm sorry – sorry I woke you. I just can't be alone tonight.' She suddenly looks more flustered and embarrassed than drunk.
Tom sits alongside her and lifts the glass to her lips. 'It's fine. Come on, you need to drink it. I don't have coffee, so this is the only way I can help get you sober.'
She pushes his hand away. 'I don't want sober.' She peers up at him pitifully. 'I'm going mad, Tom. I hurt so much. I feel like I'm going to crack, just break into a million pieces.'
He takes the glass out of her grip, sets it on the floor and puts his arms round her.
She presses her face against his naked shoulder as if it's a relief just to touch someone. He holds tight and waits for her to unwind.
It starts as a tiny sigh, like the first whisper of a newborn breeze, then rises into a deep, long gale of sobbing. Valentina holds on to him so tightly and cries so hard that all her muscles ache with the strain of it.
When she's finished, he gallantly offers her his bed for the night and takes a brief walk outside to give her some privacy.
The sky is jet black. A handful of stars sparkle like diamonds spilled on black velvet cloth. The streets are eerily empty, and the deep silence makes Venice look like a film set that's been deserted. Tom spends a while thinking of Valentina's grief and the dangers that lie ahead for her as she learns to accept her loss while pursuing a career that's full of death and evil. He thinks briefly of Tina: her betrayal of him and, if he's honest, how much he misses her, and how his mind had tricked him into seeing her at Isola Mario. And he thinks of another woman, too.
Mera Teale, the billionaire's feisty PA.
Valentina is asleep by the time he creeps back in. He pulls the quilt up over her shoulder, switches off the light, grabs his cellphone and returns outside.
Mera Teale, the loudmouth with a teardrop tattoo identical to that of a Death Row inmate he'd met more than a decade ago at San Quentin.
For two months, he'd been posted there, listening to the lost souls trapped in the purgatory of an appeals process that had them hoping for a reprieve right until the second their sleeves were rolled up and a fatal fix of potassium chloride prepared for their veins.
One fiercely violent but strangely charismatic young man had a teardrop identical to Teale's.
Lars Bale.
Bale was a talented and passionate artist. Once, as a punishment after he'd broken some petty prison rule, guards had searched his cell and confiscated all his paints and equipment. Bale retaliated by using his own faeces to paint a portrait of the governor on his wall.
All in all, Tom had probably visited Bale close to twenty times. Although it was policy not to ask about the inmates' crimes, Tom knew. A guard walking him through on a visit had described Bale as a latter-day Charlie Manson. Said he was as mad as a frog on acid and had been the leader of a sect that had abducted holidaymakers from theme parks and murdered them in what the press had called the Disneyland Killings.
When they were done slaughtering their victims, Bale and his followers had smeared their blood over church altars in LA.