Книга - Playing Dead
Playing Dead
Jessie Keane
Annie Carter is back…
She was a madam in a brothel and a gangster’s moll, but now her protection is gone and her enemies are closing in.
1971, London gang boss Annie Carter Barolli is living the New York high life with the feared mafia godfather Constantine Barolli. Then family tragedy strikes, leaving only Annie, Constantine’s sister Gina and his three children alive, and now they’re in terrible danger. And what’s worse – it signals a major shift in mafia power.
Annie returns to London with her daughter Layla, pursued by a hit man. Someone wants her dead and the only way she can stay alive is to find out who’s paying for the contract and to strike first.
Then, the reappearance of an old East End face sparks a shocking suspicion – the possibility that Max Carter, Annie’s first and greatest love, didn’t die two years ago, as she had been led to believe.
Has he truly just been playing dead?
JESSIE KEANE
Playing Dead
Dedication
To Cliff, with all my love.
Contents
Title Page (#uc1b7b8bb-a933-5c18-90e0-d46efbb27334)
Dedication (#u2f2442a6-0654-58bc-a911-23c8ecdb67cc)
America
Prologue (#u79fd8387-7a12-5de7-986a-7dae1e6bf447)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Majorca
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Long Island
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
London
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
New York
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jessie Keane
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
America
Prologue
Montauk, Long Island, USA
August 1971
Annie Carter-Barolli knew that there are some things you remember forever. Like your child’s first cry. Or your wedding day – or days, in her case: she’d been married twice. Or like the moment you stare death in the face and it’s not scary like you expected it to be, not a face of bones, not a reaper. Instead it’s bright red ribbon on a big square parcel of sunny sky-blue, and your husband is picking it out from the front of the huge pile of presents. He is turning towards you holding it, smiling at you and saying, Hey, wonder what’s in this one?
That moment stays with you. You want to rewind, replay, edit; take the hurt away. Splice the whole thing back together and make it come out another way. But you can’t. Once the jack-in-the-box is out, he’s out; there’s no going back.
Annie was standing out on the big terraced deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It was a hot August night but the breeze from the sea was cooling and sweet against her skin. Inside the house, Constantine’s oceanfront house out here in the millionaire’s playground of Montauk, there was the music of a mariachi band, and laughter.
Most times, this place was like a fortress, guarded day and night by his men. Sometimes police cruisers drifted by the gates at the front of the Montauk estate and the cops took pictures, exchanged hard-eyed stares with the men on guard, and moved on.
But today was a happy day; it was the day of her stepson Lucco’s wedding. The celebrations were likely to go on long into the night. Already she was tired. Layla, her little girl from her first marriage to Max Carter, was asleep upstairs at the back of the house, tucked in by her nanny Gerda. Annie clasped her hands over the bump of her pregnancy. Soon, there would be another child, Constantine’s child, a new brother or sister for Layla. She was five months gone now and the morning sickness had – thank God – subsided at last. But the new baby was hungry, draining her energy levels, robbing her of sleep.
‘Honey?’
She turned. It was him – Constantine of the sharp suits and the silver hair. Feared and revered Mafia godfather. Her husband, her lover, her friend. He had come to find her, knowing she loved it out here, that she liked to stand here sometimes, alone, and watch the sea at night.
Hey, wonder what’s in this one?
The pulsating roar and suck of the tide, the music, and his smile. Some things you really do remember forever. He lifted the parcel – it seemed to her that it was heavy, that maybe he felt a little resistance as he did so.
The actual explosion was too sudden and shocking to take in. A huge flash of light, a deafening, mind-numbing whumph, then smoke and a pushing out, a propulsion of hot air that made her ears pop as if she was on a mile-high flight, and brought with it the acrid smell of black powder.
She felt herself hit the balcony rail, but only distantly; her hearing was gone, everything was happening in some strange, detached, dreamlike state. Shrapnel sprayed. She felt a sting, distant pain in her arm, and then she was on the beach, lying on the sand, staring half-wittedly at a shell, her vision cutting in and out like a faulty light switch.
She could hear her own heart, that was all, beating very fast. The shell was ridged, pink, beautiful. A marvel of nature. Her brain felt scrambled. There were other things in the sand too, she could see that. Things charred and blackened, and she didn’t want to look at any of that so she kept looking at the shell. She would not look at the black things. The sand was soft and her ears felt sticky. She felt more than tired; exhausted, ready to sleep.
But someone was touching her shoulder; someone was turning her onto her back on the sand. She looked up at a million bright stars with blank wonder. Then a face loomed over her, blocking out the stars. It was Alberto, Constantine’s twenty-four-year-old son, her stepson. She loved Alberto, he was a total delight. Unlike Lucco, unlike Cara, Constantine’s other children. Now Alberto’s face was twisted in anguish. There were smears of soot on his chin. He was touching her cheek, checking that she was breathing. He was mouthing words but she couldn’t hear them.
Are you all right?
She could read his lips. All right? She didn’t know. She was alive . . . wasn’t she? Her ears were hurting now, really badly. She hoped it would pass. Everything did, in the end. Soon, she might even be reconnected to reality. A spasm of fear shot through her at the thought of that. She started to tremble.
She turned her head. The black things.
She screwed up her eyes, wished that she’d been blinded as well as deafened. She knew what the black things were. One of them was a hand, charred so badly it looked like a mummified claw, propped up in the sand not a metre from her head.
There was a ring on one of the bent, scorched fingers. The gold was tarnished, the diamond stars studding it were hidden beneath blackness. Somewhere inside her, she felt a scream building, but she hadn’t the strength to release it.
Chapter 1
Two Months Earlier
‘Hey, I’m home!’ Annie called out as she passed the guard on the door and hurried into the penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue with its spectacular views over the treetops of Central Park.
New York in June was stifling, hotter than the mouth of hell; but they had lingered. Constantine was doing business – among other things, he had bought a lease on a building in Times Square that by next September would be transformed into a new Annie’s nightclub. Annie herself had just been killing time until today, when she’d consulted her gynaecologist.
Nico, Constantine’s most loyal and long-standing foot soldier, was sitting on one of the huge couches, flicking through the New York Times.
‘Hi, Nico,’ she said.
‘Hey, you see this? They say the Supreme Court’s gonna clear Muhammad Ali of trying to dodge the draft. You know, Nixon’s right. We got to come out of Vietnam.’
Nico’s voice was deep, thunderous; it seemed to come from somewhere down in his boots.
She glanced over his shoulder at the headlines. It constantly amazed Annie how fascinated and involved with politics the Americans were; none of her English pals gave a stuff about it, and neither did she. But even she could see that Vietnam was a mess, and one that would have to be resolved soon.
She nodded in the direction of the study. The apartment was massive, and Old Colonial in its style of decor. It was one of only two apartments on this floor, with full-service white-gloved doorman, concierge and elevator operator.
‘Is he free?’ she asked.
‘For you?’ Nico rose to his feet with a courtly smile and a bow. ‘He’s free.’
Annie gave him a smile in return. She liked Nico. She felt he would throw himself under a ten-ton truck to protect Constantine, and she liked that; he needed good people around him.
Nico was a big friendly bear of a man with a thin scraping of darkish hair remaining on his big dome of a head. He had humorous and shrewd dark eyes, half hidden under thick eyebrows. In his gait and mannerisms he was shambling and casual, he always looked untidy. But he was loyal to the core and – this was the nailer for Annie – he had been hugely instrumental in recovering Layla when she had once been snatched away, and for that she was forever in his debt.
She went over to the closed study door. She knocked.
‘Come!’ came from inside, and she slipped in, closing the door behind her.
He was there behind the desk, replacing the phone on its cradle, looking up at her expectantly.
The silver fox. And he was a fox in every way. When Constantine Barolli was in a room, it filled with his presence. He was a man at the very height of his powers. Tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, he had thick silver hair, an all-American tan, and armour-piercing blue eyes. Anywhere he went, a cloud of bodyguards swarmed around him like gnats. They swarmed around her, too, and she hated that – but she knew it came with the territory.
Now they had this to look forward to. She was going to give him his fourth child. His first three had been born to another woman – his first wife, Maria – who had died over six years ago. Alberto, Lucco and Cara were his grown-up children. Now he was approaching fifty, and he would soon have a new baby to a woman not yet thirty. She was so much younger than him, and she knew that people talked, disapproved.
She was not from the old country – Sicily – and she wasn’t even American. She barely spoke a word of his native language, but it didn’t matter because he’d been raised in New York and his accent was pure Bronx. But he was the Don, Il Padrone, the godfather, so if people spoke of it, this scandalous second marriage of his, then it was only in whispers, never to his face.
Annie had heard some of those whispers. Caught the edge of them, before silence and watchfulness and fake smiles took their place. Puttana, she had heard them whisper. She’d looked it up in her phrasebook but it wasn’t there. She’d asked Constantine what it meant, and he’d told her, asking where she’d come across a word like that.
‘Oh, just something I overheard.’ She’d shrugged it off.
He told her it meant ‘whore’.
Well, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
Rich powerful men want young women, and young women are drawn to rich, powerful men, she thought. It was a story as old as time itself. Some people derided it as mercenary or shallow. But even if beauty was desirable, even if power was an aphrodisiac, there was still – in her case, and in his – more to it than that. There was still love. Loving him wasn’t always comfortable; frequently she was isolated, heavily guarded – and this ritzy apartment sometimes felt like a gilded cage. But then, had she ever thought this was going to be easy?
‘So what’s the news?’ he asked, pushing his chair back from the desk and beckoning her over.
‘The news is that both baby and mother are doing well,’ said Annie, coming around the desk, sitting down on his lap and linking her arms around his neck. She nuzzled into his shoulder, inhaling his own unique scent overlaid with Acqua di Parma cologne.
‘Twelve weeks,’ he said reflectively, putting his arms around her.
Annie nodded. He had wanted to tell the family at twelve weeks, when they could be sure the baby was safe, that it was truly there. And now here they were. Time up. ‘Yeah. Twelve weeks.’
She wasn’t overjoyed at the thought. She had loved it when the baby was their secret, just hers and his alone. Now it would be public knowledge; now things would get tricky.
More and more lately, she found herself thinking of her old London life. She missed her friends, Dolly and Ellie in particular. She hadn’t even told them about the baby yet during their occasional phone conversations. Soon, she would.
She thought of Dolly there, running the three Carter clubs and swanning around town in a chauffeur-driven Jag. Even the thought of it made her smile. Once Dolly had been the roughest of all Aunt Celia’s in-house prostitutes; now she was like the Queen. Wistfully, Annie thought of how good it had been, having her pals around her; but this was her life now, here with Constantine. Sometimes she did get a twinge of homesickness, but she always suppressed it.
‘We could call him Vito after my father, if it’s a boy.’
Constantine’s father had been killed in a hit from a rival family in Sicily. Although he rarely talked about it, she knew that he had lost his mother and brother the same way. It was said that Constantine’s hair had turned from black to white overnight with the shock of losing his mother and brother in so brutal a fashion.
‘What makes you think it’ll be a boy?’ she teased.
‘Fifty-fifty chance.’
‘Ha.’
‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, kissing her dark brown hair. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’ That was the deal. The family had to know sometime, after all. Annie expected ructions, nevertheless. She knew that – apart from Alberto – all Constantine’s grown-up kids and even his sister Gina resented her.
Right now, Gina was babysitting Layla, Annie’s daughter by her first husband Max Carter – not to please her, but to ingratiate herself with Constantine, as always. Alberto would be collecting Layla and bringing her home in an hour or so – because he liked her and Layla.
‘There was something else I’d been meaning to talk to you about,’ said Constantine.
‘Yeah? What?’ Annie cuddled in close to him, watching him with her serious dark green eyes.
‘My will.’
‘What?’ Annie raised her head, stared anxiously at his face. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’
He gave a smile. ‘Perfectly. But I have you to consider now. And our child.’ He leaned in and kissed her. ‘I just want you to know that it’s all in there. That this apartment’s your home for keeps, and the Holland Park place in London . . .’
‘Stop,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling a nervous shudder, as if someone was walking over her grave. She didn’t want to talk about this.
‘. . . and if anything happens to me, then my forty-nine per cent share of the Times Square club passes in its entirety to you . . .’
‘Stop it,’ she said, and quickly silenced him with a kiss. His words were raising memories, fearful memories – because once there had been another man she loved, and she had lost him. ‘Just stop it right there,’ she murmured against his lips.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stopping.’ He kissed her deeper, harder.
Annie clung to him. What was he doing, talking about wills? She didn’t want to hear it.
When he made the necessary calls to the family, she decided she didn’t want to hear those, either. She left the room.
Chapter 2
It was mid-afternoon and Lucco Barolli was lying in the super-king-sized bed in his chic, ultra-modern Upper East Side condo with its red-lacquered walls and black Oriental furnishings when he took the call from his father. He put the phone down and lay there, staring into space.
‘Wassup, sweetie?’ asked Sophie, her lovely nakedness tangled up in the red silk sheets after their marathon love-making session.
Lucco stared absently at her. Sophie was as fair as he was dark. Unlike his father, Lucco truly looked Sicilian, with straight black hair, nearly black deep-set eyes and olive skin as fine as any woman’s.
‘My father’s puttana of a new wife is expecting a child,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ The girl propped herself up on her elbow, her delectable tits swinging in his face. She was an English model and beautiful – he could afford the best and Sophie Thomson was renowned. He had pulled strings, got her the plum jobs using his connections. Nobody said no to a caporegime of the family. Now, with her tall athletic body and the face of an insatiable fallen angel, she could command ridiculous fees worldwide.
‘Well that’s good news.’ She smiled engagingly. What the fuck’s a puttana? she wondered. ‘You’ll have a new brother or sister.’
Lucco looked at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses.
‘The child will not be my brother or sister,’ he said coldly.
‘But . . . the kid’ll be your father’s, like you,’ she said.
Lucco suddenly sprang up and struck her hard across the face. Sophie fell back amid the tangled sheets. Lucco pinned her down there. He glared into her shocked eyes from inches away.
‘The child is not my brother or sister,’ he roared.
‘All right, okay,’ said Sophie hurriedly, tears of pain spilling out from her eyes. He’d slapped her once or twice before, just love play, but this time he was frightening her. She knew all about his connections, she knew he’d used them to help her up the ladder of fame, and she liked that. Or at least, she had. But now . . . her face hurt from the blow. She hoped he hadn’t marked her. She had work tomorrow.
‘You understand me? This kid is nothing to do with me.’
‘Yeah. Got it,’ said Sophie, and suddenly he released her and lay back.
She looked at him warily. She reviewed all that she had been about to say, and decided against saying any of it. Silently, she watched him. He had a big erection jutting up from between his thighs; hitting her always seemed to turn him on. She adored Lucco, but she was coming to realize – not to put too fine a point on it – that he was a bit of a shit.
Lucco saw her looking, and glanced down his impressive body. ‘Mount me,’ he ordered.
Would he hit her again if she refused? Sophie decided not to risk it.
Lucco lay back, sighing restlessly as Sophie straddled him and guided him smoothly inside her.
Everything he had feared since the day Annie Carter had come into his father’s life was coming to fruition. He tried to consider it all logically, furious though it made him feel. Constantine was forty-seven while his new English wife was twenty-seven – twenty years his junior.
The Carter woman – Lucco couldn’t bear to think of her any other way – was closer in age to him, his brother Alberto and his sister Cara than to their father. It was obscene. And now the worst had happened. Marrying the whore had been bad enough, but now his father had impregnated her; there would be a baby.
Why hadn’t his father just had her if he wanted to – she was just a cheap English gold-digger after all; she’d have been grateful to receive the attentions of a man like him. He didn’t have to go and marry her.
Lucco thought of Annie, his father’s new wife. Her glossy, cocoa-brown hair, her dark green eyes, her intriguing body, always discreetly hidden, but . . . oh yes, guessed at by Lucco. He didn’t doubt that she was hot between the sheets, to have snared his father so easily. And now she was going to give him a child; a new child who would supplant his grown-up children in his affections. He felt sick at the thought, furious.
‘You know what? My father’s right. It is time I got married,’ he said aloud. It was all arranged, anyway – not that he’d confided that to Sophie. Why the hell should he? The wedding was only two months away now. Of course it was expected of him, part of the process that would see him assuming control of his father’s empire one day. Already he was caporegime like Alberto, joint second-in-command beneath their father; but he, Lucco, was the eldest son, the rightful heir. It was good to appear settled, married, respectable; there would be children, his own children; family life.
Sophie stopped bouncing up and down on Lucco’s cock and raised her head. She looked at his face, her blue eyes wide with surprise and a sliver of hope; all right, sometimes he lost it, but so what? She adored him, and she was excited by his powerful family with its dubious links to the underworld. Was he proposing . . .?
‘Not married to you, obviously,’ said Lucco, correctly interpreting her gaze.
His marriage had been arranged ever since he was eighteen. He was going to wed his dull little second cousin Daniella. He’d been reluctant before, dreading the day, but now he could see it might be a good thing. Now he appreciated the need to get some kids off Daniella at the earliest opportunity. If anyone was going to inherit his father’s considerable fortune, he would make sure that it was his line, his sons – not hers. And not Alberto’s, either.
‘Harder,’ he said, and Sophie obeyed while Lucco closed his eyes and thought of Annie, his father’s wife.
Chapter 3
Cara Barolli Mancini, Constantine’s daughter, got the news just as she was finishing lunch with her girlfriends and her second cousin, who was fresh off the boat from Sicily. They were in the plush uptown apartment that Cara shared with her husband Rocco.
The second cousin, Daniella, was her brother Lucco’s intended, a laughably rough-around-the-edges girl with long frizzy black hair, big frightened eyes, lamentable dress sense and nothing of any interest to say for herself. She had been sitting there like wood all through the meal, her hands folded in her lap, her head bowed, the conversation of the assembled Park Avenue princesses buzzing around her.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked one of Cara’s friends, looking at her face when she came back into the room.
Cara shrugged and sat down again. Her pretty mouth twisted. ‘Apparently, my father’s wife is going to have a baby,’ she said.
‘Oh! Well . . . congratulations, darling,’ said the friend, looking at Cara’s stormy face with uncertainty.
Even Cara’s closest friends knew you had to treat her with kid gloves. The dreamy-eyed quality Cara possessed was a thin veneer. She was very beautiful, with her tumbling blonde hair, her heavy-lidded blue eyes and her voluptuous mouth, always half open, pouting, inviting. But she could be touchy and arrogant. Daddy was an important man in this city, and she never tired of letting everyone around her know it.
Cara couldn’t trust herself to speak, not yet. She was crazed with rage. How dare he get that tramp pregnant; how dare he foist a filthy half-sibling on his three truly legitimate children?
‘When . . . is the baby due?’ asked Daniella in her stumbling English.
Cara looked across at her with irritation. Poor stupid sacrificial lamb, shipped over here to marry elegant, arrogant Lucco with the razor-sharp tongue. Lucco would demolish the girl, Cara didn’t doubt that.
‘I don’t know that yet,’ she said.
‘She’ll have a baby shower, won’t she?’ another friend asked as the maid cleared their plates away.
‘She’s English,’ said Cara. ‘I doubt she even knows what that means.’
The friends were silent for a long, awkward moment. Cara’s own marriage had so far proved fruitless, and they all knew she wanted a child. It was whispered covertly among them that Rocco might even have some problems in the bedroom department. Which wasn’t surprising, really; Cara had a strong, vocal character, but Rocco was quieter – too quiet to put her in her place sometimes, which was what they all secretly thought she really needed in a man.
Cara was staring at Daniella. Lucco had met Daniella at the age of eighteen when he visited Sicily with Constantine. She had been sixteen then, virginal and shy, socially inept. She still was. The marriage had been agreed between Constantine and her father, and there had been celebrations, countless bottles of fiery yellow Strega consumed and many a tarantella danced because it was a huge honour for any daughter to receive a proposal from the son of a great Don.
Now Cara watched Daniella sourly. Lucco is going to eat her alive, thought Cara. She knew her brother.
Not that she much cared about the fate of this little paisan from the old country. She had her own problems.
Chapter 4
Alberto, the youngest son of Constantine Barolli, received the news when he went to collect Layla, his stepmother Annie’s bright and adorable five-year-old from her first marriage, from his Aunt Gina’s that afternoon.
Layla ran to him; she loved her big brother Alberto. He swept the giggling child up into his arms while Gina looked on sourly. She was putting the phone back on the cradle and she looked as if someone had just told her something really, really bad.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alberto in concern.
‘Your father’s wife,’ said Gina, her mouth pursing even as she uttered the words.
Alberto knew that Gina despised Annie. Gina would have despised any woman who came close to her brother. She had hated Alberto’s own mother, Maria – and after Maria’s death, he knew very well that Gina had hoped there would be no more women; but then along had come Annie Carter with her ‘whore’s tricks’, bewitching his father – according to Aunt Gina.
Privately, Alberto believed that his aunt was too possessive, clinging to Constantine in a way that was both selfish and faintly perverted. He for one was delighted that his father had found happiness with his second wife.
‘Annie? What about her?’ Alberto glanced at Layla.
‘Your father tells me she’s expecting a child,’ said Gina. She didn’t look overjoyed about it.
Alberto’s attention sharpened. ‘And it’s fine? She’s fine?’
Gina nodded tensely.
‘Well, that’s good news.’
‘Good? How can it be good?’
Alberto stifled a sigh. He knew Gina would never soften towards Annie, and he knew she thought him a fool for liking his father’s second wife so much. But, to him, Annie was family now. He could be the hard man, the tough caporegime when it was required of him, but at heart he was a family man, and both more reserved and more reflective than his elder brother Lucco.
Sometimes, he had to do bad things, difficult things, for the family good. Quiet and polite though he was, he had been responsible for many deaths while carrying out his father’s orders. But he could never delight in the pain and suffering of others, as Lucco did.
‘You hear that, Layla?’ Alberto bounced the little girl in his arms, smiled into her dark eyes. ‘You’re going to have a new little brother or sister to spoil, how about that?’
‘Yay!’ said Layla.
Gina watched her nephew with a glacial eye. Alberto was a good boy, but he was too amiable, too soft. Couldn’t he see how this would affect his own standing in the family; how it could affect them all? Constantine’s English wife had up until this point been an unwanted, isolated interloper with little say in the running of things. Now her status would radically change. She would be the mother of the Don’s baby; her position would be assured.
‘Are we going to go home and see Mommy now?’ asked Layla, watching her big stepbrother’s handsome face and not seeing the expression on Gina’s.
Alberto smiled. Mommy. Layla was sounding more American every day. ‘We sure are. And we’ll stop off on the way and get her some flowers, okay?’
Gina watched them, her expression surly. Flowers, for the love of God. She turned away, irritated. Personally, she would rather see flowers laid on the Englishwoman’s grave.
Chapter 5
‘Well,’ said Rocco Mancini reluctantly, signalling to the waitress for the check, ‘I must go.’
‘So soon?’ his dining companion pouted. They were tucked into a corner table beside the window at a seedy little diner on Lexington and Third, where neither of them would be known. It was a cheap place, tacky, charmless; full of losers and fat, contented mothers with shrieking infants. It wasn’t what either of them would have chosen, but that was simply the way it had to be. Snatched moments in random places.
‘Yeah, Cara’s got plans for this evening.’
Cara always had plans for the evening. Dinner with the Vanderbilts; the Nixons’ charity ball in aid of the Third World; the invitation – which had filled Cara with wild-eyed joy – to fly to Washington for the September opening of the Kennedy Arts Center, with the premiere of Bernstein’s mass for the late president.
There was always something – some silly social engagement they just had to be seen at. Rocco was not interested in any of it, but still he had to go.
The waitress came over, chewing gum and wearing a grubby white apron. Rocco paid, his aesthetic face pinched with distaste. The waitress withdrew. Rocco stood up, shrugging into his jacket. He was tall and very thin, with dark curly hair, bright lime-green eyes and a big sensuous mouth. He looked at his dining companion’s expression and sat down again, sharply.
‘Look, you know it has to be this way,’ he said, grasping the pale hand on the table.
‘I hate her,’ said his companion. ‘Cara has you all the time, at her beck and call. And what do I have? Just the dregs.’
There was nothing Rocco could say to this. It was true. But he knew he couldn’t afford to make waves. He had the lifestyle he had always craved, the cars, the apartments, everything. He summered in the Hamptons, wintered in Aspen, lived a life of ease and plenty. And that was all thanks to his marriage to Cara Barolli. If he tried for separation, or – God forbid – divorce, then all that would be over.
And he had no wish to make so powerful an enemy as the Don. Would Constantine Barolli just accept his daughter being dumped like so much excess baggage? Rocco didn’t think so. Already, Rocco was aware that he had been tested and found wanting by the Don. He wasn’t a made man, he wasn’t even a capo in his father-in-law’s organization yet, and he resented that. But he knew he had a lot still to prove.
And what about his own father, Enrico? He would be exceedingly angry if Rocco made waves. Constantine and Enrico Mancini went way back. There would be hell to pay.
‘My darling,’ said Rocco, ‘you know it’s you I love.’
‘But you’re with her.’
Rocco stood up. They’d had this same conversation many times; it never got them anywhere. ‘I’ll see you here on Friday. We’ll take the boat out on the Sound, how’s that?’ he said hopefully.
His companion was hard-eyed for a moment. ‘What, and you’ll screw me again in the cabin, where no one can see?’ Then the look faded to a faint smile, remembering . . . ‘Ah, all right. You got me, you know you have.’
Smiling, Rocco moved out of the booth. He looked around and then dropped a quick kiss onto Frances Ducane’s almost effeminately smooth cheek.
‘It’s you I love,’ Rocco repeated, against Frances’s skin. ‘Goodbye, my darling.’
And then he was gone, leaving the young man sitting alone at the table, wondering why he always, always had to play second fiddle in life. Now it was to his lover’s wife, but before that he had lived in the long shadow cast by his father, Rick Ducane.
Chapter 6
1938
Before Rick Ducane became a big Hollywood star and household name, he’d been Lionel Driver, a struggling British actor. Frances had inherited his russet hair; he had the identical penetrating grey eyes. Lionel had looked like an aristocrat. He had his own father to thank for that, a good-looking chancer who had married and then cheerfully abandoned his mother with her bad nerves and her whining little voice.
Lionel’s voice was the first obstacle of many he had to overcome. Born within the sound of Bow bells, he had a pronounced Cockney accent, and it was a bugger to lose. But lose it he did, practising his vowel sounds hour upon hour in the stone-cold and stinking privy in the backyard behind their tenement building.
‘Fuckin’ toff,’ his schoolmates snarled at him.
They’d shoved him against a wall, kicked him, then stolen his meagre pocket money.
Lionel didn’t care.
He had plans.
He worked in a series of dead-end jobs until his twenties, then, without regret, he left his mum and the slums of the East End to go to Stratford-upon-Avon and start trying his luck in auditions. He worked hard, even if it was mostly unrewarded, painting backgrounds, helping with props. But then he got a small break, and started treading the boards in walk-on parts, and was approached by an agent.
On the advice of his new agent, he then abandoned the stage and went to try to make his name in Hollywood. Once or twice he even hung out hopefully around the constellation of bright stars that haunted every party. Lana Turner, Spencer Tracey, Clark Gable – they were all there, and all far too high-powered to acknowledge the existence of a handsome starstruck stranger from quaint little England.
‘What we need here is an angle,’ said his agent.
Or for you to get me some fucking work, thought Lionel. But he asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’ve been a Shakespearean actor. A real thespian.’
‘Only in walk-on parts though.’
‘Who cares?’
So Lionel’s résumé now stated that he’d played the lead in King Lear to rave reviews. But even that didn’t get him off the breadline. Nobody wanted an English hero right then, and he was too good-looking to play the part of the hero’s chubby best friend.
One day he was waiting with around twenty other hopefuls at yet another audition, this time for a small part – a destitute man – in a Warner Brothers movie. It was only a walk-on, but he was desperate and bloody near destitution himself.
As usual, his bowels turned to liquid at precisely the wrong moment – he was next but one up – and he had to go off to find the toilet. He passed two men fiddling with one of the new smoke machines. A crowd of people hurried past. Was that brilliantly stylish blonde at the centre of them Barbara Stanwyck . . .? He walked on, looking back, entranced by the allure of stardom, the way that cluster of people stuck to her like iron filings around a powerful magnet. He wanted that. But was he going to get it?
He was starting to seriously doubt himself. Maybe these endless rejections were a sign that he was never going to make it. And Warners were a bunch of slave-drivers anyway. Everyone in the building called the place San Quentin after the notorious prison. Did he want to work for people who drove their staff – even their stars – so hard?
Well . . . yes. He did. Anything they wanted, he’d do. He had to get there. But this was getting to be the last-chance saloon now. This was his last audition, he’d promised himself. If he didn’t succeed today, then he was going home. Not to his old mum in the East End, sod that; but back to England, to try his luck again there.
He missed England. There’d been trouble there, he knew, rumblings from Europe over a jumped-up little German leader – Führer, he called himself – Adolf Hitler. But now Chamberlain had the new Anglo-German accord in his hand, everyone was relieved and peace was guaranteed.
But maybe – just this once – he’d break the mould, get the part . . .?
‘No fucking chance,’ he muttered, and found the john, did what he had to do, and then emerged. He might have missed his place, but if he hurried . . .
‘I don’t care what you say, a deal’s a deal,’ said a tearful female voice from further down the corridor.
Lionel hesitated and peered into the dimness. A vivid blonde was standing there with a man, and for a moment he thought it was Stanwyck herself, but he quickly realized it wasn’t; this was a red-nosed, teary-eyed kid, no shining star.
‘And I don’t care what you say.’ The man leaning over her was a big bruiser, dark-haired and red with fury, shouting into her upturned face. ‘There’s no job. There never was.’
‘You said there was,’ she insisted.
‘You got proof of that?’ He let out a bark of laughter. ‘No? Thought not. So why don’t you just fuck off, sweetheart. Don’t come around my place of work making accusations again or you’ll be sorry.’
‘You bastard,’ she sobbed. ‘You promised . . .’
‘I promised nothing.’ Now he was grinning down at her. He slipped one hand inside her blouse and roughly squeezed her tit. The girl let out a yelp of pain. ‘But if you want to try and read through again, be my guest. The last reading was shit, but baby, you were hot.’
Lionel stepped out from the dimness of the corridor. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he asked loudly.
Stupid question. It was clear as day what was happening.
‘What’s it to you?’ asked the man, instantly pushing the girl away from him.
Lionel found himself going forward, even while his brain was saying: The audition, you’ll miss the audition . . .
Are you all right?’ he asked the girl.
‘She’s fine,’ said the man bullishly. ‘Just sore ’cos she didn’t get the part.’
‘He promised me a part,’ said the girl. She was pretty, Lionel saw. Her tears had dried and now she just looked furious. ‘If I . . . you know.’ She went red and stopped speaking.
‘What we have here is a little misunderstanding,’ said the man. ‘We had some fun together and the lady thought that meant—’
He didn’t even finish the sentence before Lionel hit him, hard. He went crashing back against the wall, and slid to the floor.
‘Come on,’ said Lionel, grabbing the girl’s hand.
‘Is he going to be all right . . .?’ They were walking away, but she was glancing back, worried.
‘Do you care?’ asked Lionel, hurrying away.
‘No.’ A smile appeared briefly on her face.
‘I’m Lionel Driver, by the way,’ he said.
‘Vivienne Bell.’
‘And I think I’ve probably missed my audition . . .’
Having failed spectacularly at the Hollywood dream, Lionel took Vivienne home to England with him and married her there. She was a chatty bottle-blonde and tired of being pawed over by fat old producers on the casting couch, tired of being wild at heart while presenting a carefully virginal image to the outside world, tired of the coke-fuelled merry-go-round that Hollywood truly was.
Vivienne was charmed by his English gentility, thinking that here was a real gentleman. He’d played at Stratford, for Chrissakes. He quoted the Bard’s love poems to her, and she melted. Accustomed to encounters like the one Lionel had interrupted, lifting her skirts for quick, sweaty couplings in draughty backstage corridors on the promise of a part – after which the part always failed to materialize – Vivienne was entranced by his old-fashioned charm and amazed that he actually took the trouble to woo her. Before a year was out, she was pregnant with Frances.
It was such a touching story, such a happy tale, it should have ended with bliss everlasting. Lionel and the lovely Vivienne waltzing off into the sunset together. But Vivienne quickly got bored with daily life in England. She was a good-time girl; she loved the bright lights. And Chamberlain’s famed ‘piece of paper’ had been proved worthless. War was declared on Germany, so Lionel went off to fight.
Feeling lucky to be alive and not maimed when so many of his comrades had died or had their lives altered forever at the hands of the Nazis, Lionel returned home when it was all over and thought, What the hell? He would give the acting dream one last shot.
He ditched his old agent and acquired a new thrusting one called LaLa LaBon, who was bursting with energy and unscrupulously single-minded in the pursuit of a deal. LaLa was a rampaging, cheroot-puffing dyke with black bobbed hair and a vulpine, predatory face. She appreciated beauty in her male clients and was now pushing him westwards with manic enthusiasm.
‘Think of it! Hollywood! You heard of an actor called Archie Leach?’ she asked him one rainy day in her poky little London office.
‘No,’ he said, feeling dubious but finding her enthusiasm infectious. He’d already told her he’d tried Hollywood before, but LaLa was not to be deterred. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘And you fucking well won’t,’ she said, busily puffing on her cheroot. She stabbed the air with it, making her point. Her eyes gleamed diabolically through the smoke-haze. ‘You know why? Because he changed his name to Cary Grant and look what happened to him. He’s English, he’s charming, he’s handsome. And so, Lionel my pet, are you – and your time is now.’
So he went back to Hollywood not as Lionel Driver (‘My God – so dull!’ said LaLa) but as Rick Ducane.
He was back on the party circuit again in no time. LaLa went with him and worked long and hard to get him into the best places. He was rubbing shoulders with people like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner now, and the dirt was they were having a hot affair, with Sinatra singing and shooting out streetlights as he walked her home.
As for Rick’s affairs – well, he had taken Vivienne and sulky little baby Frances with him; he owed them that much, surely? The gloss had already gone off the marriage thanks to Viv’s drinking, but he couldn’t just abandon them, now could he? LaLa insisted he could. Rick insisted he couldn’t.
Finally, LaLa won the vote. And she laid down the ground rules. Rick rented a modest house in the hills and Vivienne had to stay there with her little boy. To the outside world, to Hollywood, Rick Ducane must be a single man. There must be no mention of any marriage, none at all – not unless he wanted to fuck up his career before it had even started. He needed to be free to escort older ladies, the fading stars who needed ‘walkers’ and could thereby get him into the most desirable parties.
‘Jesus,’ complained Vivienne. ‘That fucking woman dictates our whole life. What, are you ashamed of me? Ashamed of your son?’
Vivienne took a lot of placating, but she agreed in principle to just keep her head down and later, much later, when he’d made it, LaLa promised that the announcement would be made and wife and son could begin to appear in public.
He’d be paid to schmooze the movers and shakers, an opportunity that many a struggling actor would kill for. What more could LaLa do for him? she demanded. Hold his fuckwit little hand?
So Rick Ducane started schmoozing. He schmoozed so hard he felt as if his head was coming off. He chatted with directors, producers, gofers and lighting men; he attended so many auditions that he became bewildered about which part he was reading for.
He resented it. He was back here again, chasing bit parts and walking old female farts who usually got falling-down drunk or hopped to the eyeballs on drugs, and groped him. After a year of exhausting failure and domestic discord he was all but ready to call it a day.
‘You’re never going to make it,’ Viv told him in one of her drunken rages. She was hitting the bottle harder than ever. ‘You’re a loser.’
But the war had taught him endurance in the face of adversity and so he went on, sparkling, entertaining, handsome, until one night he exerted his charm on the right person and then . . . well, next day on his dressing-room door they hung a star. They really did.
Chapter 7
1971
Saul Jury watched Rocco Mancini and Frances Ducane from his car, which was parked across the street. Idiots, he thought. They were sitting there in a window seat in the diner, thinking themselves unobserved. Touching hands all the time – Jesus, he hated faggots.
A woman’s instinct, he thought grimly. Hadn’t his own mother told him it was lethally accurate, whenever he’d tried her out with some scam or other? Didn’t his own wife tell him it was infallible, when he tried to get away with his own little minor indiscretions?
And look at this; they were both right. And so was Cara Barolli Mancini. Only she was right in a way that was unexpected; probably it was going to shock her. However, he took the pictures, particularly pleased with the one that clearly showed Rocco Mancini kissing his little fag friend Frances Ducane’s cheek as he left. If Mrs Mancini was going to snoop on her ever-loving husband, then she had to accept that the consequences might not be pleasant.
The private detective knew the identity of Frances Ducane because he’d already trailed him twice, once to Rocco’s cruiser out in New York Sound, and had even given Mrs Mancini his name. She was paying him plenty for all this work; he was a happy man. Frances was a good-looking kid, an actor – and, like ninety-five per cent of all actors, he was spending a lot of time ‘resting’. His father Rick had been a big noise in Hollywood in the Fifties, before a spectacular fall from grace. Saul hoped little Frances wasn’t going to go the same way, but the way things were shaping up, it didn’t look so good for him.
Rocco had married a whole heap of money – apparently the Barolli family were huge importers of wine, olive oil and fruit from all around the world – and Frances was reaping the benefits, happily accepting not only Rocco’s manhood in places where Saul didn’t even like to think about, but accepting expensive presents too.
Of course it was the presents that had given him away. Woman’s instinct.
Yeah, his mother and his wife were right. If a woman got a feeling about something, probably there were some grounds to it. Cara had been going through Rocco’s pockets for weeks, looking for evidence to back up her theory that he was playing away from home; finally, Rocco got careless and she found receipts. Incriminating stuff. And then she had hired Saul. And Saul had done his work, and now . . . now he was going to spin this out just a little longer, bump up the tab. She could afford it.
Rocco got back to the apartment at six. He’d wasted as much time as he could, walking around, just kicking his heels, but finally he had to go home.
‘Where have you been?’ Cara called from the bedroom the instant he walked through the door.
‘I had some business to attend to,’ said Rocco, coming to stand in the open doorway. His expression was closed-off, guarded. She was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, wearing a raspberry-pink silk negligee and matching peignoir.
‘Oh.’ Cara stared at him in the mirror until he looked away.
Did she suspect anything? No, he was sure she didn’t. She turned away, yanking the brush through her long blonde hair and Rocco took the opportunity to stare at his wife. Her hair was beautiful; she was beautiful. But there was an unsatisfied pout to her mouth, and an avaricious look to her dreamy blue eyes that said, Whatever it is, I want it. Right now. Her body was splendid: tall, statuesque. He ought to be a happy man. But he wasn’t.
‘Annie’s going to have a baby,’ said Cara, her lips growing thin.
‘Oh?’ Rocco sat down on the bed. ‘Your father must be pleased.’
‘Pleased?’ Cara gave him a disgusted look. ‘Really, I think he must have lost his mind, marrying that foreigner.’
Rocco said nothing. He was indifferent to his father-in-law’s second wife, but she seemed to make the Don happy, and wasn’t that what counted most?
Cara put the brush down and stood up with a hiss of silk. She came over to the bed and sat down next to him. ‘My lovely husband,’ she said, smiling, and leaned in and grasped his lightly stubbled chin in one elegantly manicured hand. ‘You need a shave,’ she purred, rubbing her fingers over his chin. ‘We’re going out tonight.’
As usual, thought Rocco.
‘To visit the expectant mama,’ said Cara.
Rocco looked at Cara in surprise. She shrugged. ‘We have to keep my father sweet.’
Of course. Rocco knew that the Don’s family hated the Englishwoman, but they had to be seen to fawn over her. Cara’s face was inches from his own. She was beautiful. He leaned forward a little, lightly brushed his lips over hers. Cara gave a smile.
‘So you were busy with work?’ she murmured against his mouth. ‘All day?’
Rocco nodded.
Liar, thought Cara.
She’d already taken a call from Saul Jury. Cara knew exactly where Rocco had been today, and with whom. That woman called Frances Ducane again. Hadn’t there been a film star once, Rick Ducane? Maybe some relative, but who cared? What concerned her now was that soon, very soon, Jury would have all the information she needed to hang Rocco out to dry.
Chapter 8
1950
Rick Ducane was the toast of Hollywood, an action hero with a Brylcreemed slick of British smoothness who could hold his own alongside Flynn and Lancaster. The audiences loved him, like they loved to hear about the young Princess Elizabeth having her second child, a daughter named Anne.
‘The Yanks love all things English,’ said LaLa. ‘We have to capitalize on that.’
Rick knew she was right.
The studio loved him too. He wasn’t beset by women trouble like Flynn, he wasn’t egotistical like Lancaster; he was easy to manage, a workhorse. He arrived promptly for his read-throughs, learning his lines with punctilious care.
Born in poverty, he adored and quickly became adapted to the high life – the private planes, the twenty-four-hour limos and bodyguards, the great house and the swimming pool high up in the Hollywood hills; he’d earned it.
The only slight shadow upon his otherwise dazzling life was his wife, Vivienne – and his son, Frances – now installed in a wing of his palatial house in the Hollywood hills. Vivienne drank to while away the time in her comfy Hollywood prison. She had started having drinking buddies in – Christ alone knew where she met them. That disturbed Rick. Suppose Viv got legless and told one of these wasters who she was married to? The studio would string him up by the balls. But Rick was away so much on location that he frequently – and blissfully – forgot that his wife and son were there at all.
When he did come home he was harangued by Viv for being late, absent, uncaring.
‘You’ve got a child,’ she ranted at him, gin bottle swinging from her hand, her bleached-blonde hair showing an inch of black untended roots and her once-pretty eyes slitted and mean with drunken rage. ‘Don’t that mean a thing to you, you cocksucker?’
Rick cast a look at the child. Nearly ten years old now, and watching them with hunted eyes as they shouted and swore over his head.
Actually, it didn’t mean much to Rick. He’d been brought up by a chilly, unmaternal woman, and as a consequence he didn’t feel particularly bothered about kids. He’d had her, she’d got pregnant: the luck of the draw.
Or not, depending on your viewpoint.
His viewpoint was that he wished he had never met her, wished he had never stuck his dick up her in the first place; then there would be no Viv staggering around the place night and day giving him earache, when all he wanted was peace and quiet after a hard day’s work, and no kid skulking in corners watching him with hostile eyes.
‘You bastard,’ she was shouting. ‘We’re just your dirty little secret, aren’t we? You’d rather we didn’t exist at all – wouldn’t you!’
Frances looked on the verge of tears.
Viv was raging.
‘Fuck this,’ said Rick.
He turned on his heel, left the house, got back in his car – she followed him out, shrieking and cursing at him as he started the engine and then drove away.
Rick called one of the older, dimming stars he’d once been a walker for at the Oscars. Chloe Kane was no old fart. She was still beautiful, but calls from screenwriters and producers and the press had all but dried up. What the hell – she was forty and everyone knew that once a woman hit the big four-oh in this town, she was done for.
But Jesus, she was still so beautiful, even if her allure was waning. Thick glossy red hair – which must be dyed, but who cared? – and a mouth that still invited trouble. A body that would make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, even if she had let her personal grooming slide and her bush was a tangle of red and grey that extended down her thighs and up to her navel. But so what? She was stacked, and last time they’d spoken she’d said call me – please.
So here he was, calling her. And she liked that. It soothed his sour mood, how pleased she was to hear from him. When had his wife ever sounded like that? She invited him over. Poor cow had nothing going on except an evening in on her own with her pet pooch for company; he was doing her a favour.
‘Darling,’ she greeted him at the door in that famous, breathy tone she had used to such good effect up on the silver screen. ‘How lovely. Come on in.’
There had followed a wild night in which they had made out in the hall, on the stairs, in her huge, imposing bedroom (‘Strictly for press shots, darling; actually I sleep in a teensy little room down the hall’), much to the pooch’s annoyance.
It was gone two in the morning by the time he got home. He crept in, fearful of waking Viv. The last thing he wanted now was another argument. He was exhausted. Chloe was very demanding.
In the lounge he found empty bottles and upturned bowls of nuts and nibbles that crunched under his feet as he walked. A thousand-dollar rug and she treats it like this, he thought. Nat King Cole was stuck singing ‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa’ over and over again. He went over and switched Nat off.
Then he went through to the master bedroom. The coverlet was perfectly in place, the bed still made.
Now what the hell?
Had she gone out somewhere? He hoped not. She was a crazy driver in her too-visible red Corvette at the best of times – oh, and the arguments they’d had about that – but today she’d had a skinful. What he didn’t need was her wrapping her damned car around a tree and the press getting wind of her existence. She was just a nobody.
He hurried along the hall, past the closed door of Frances’s room.
That kid. Strange little fellow: he wanted to be an actor when he grew up like his dad, and Rick was flattered by that, but – for fuck’s sake – the kid didn’t have the talent; all he could manage was a few lines of amateurish mimicry. He would deter him from entering the industry if he could – do the kid a favour. Bad enough when you had that special touch of stardust; it was still hard, gruelling work all the way. But without it . . . Hollywood would break your heart. No doubt about that.
He opened the bathroom door.
Maybe she was ill? Puking up all that gin, no doubt. He heard water flowing.
‘Viv? Honey?’ he said softly.
Through the half-open window the moon cast its silvery light into the room. He could see the bath filled to the brim and overflowing. Something was lolling in there, arms akimbo.
Shit! Had she fallen asleep and fucking well drowned? How the hell were they going to hush that up if she had? He felt a spasm of fear at the thought. His career, his fabulous career, in ruins, and for a gormless whore he’d been stupid enough to get the hots for, and marry.
He flicked on the light with a movement that was half panic, half anger, and fell back instantly.
Vivienne was in the bath, but her head was above the water. Her eyes were open, but they weren’t going to see anything, ever again. There was a long gash across her forehead. Her face was a blanched, vacant mask. The water in the bath was bright red.
He made a noise in his throat, horrified.
No. She was just playing dead or something; he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
But . . . it was true. He reached out, picked up one limp, cold hand. Felt for a pulse and found none.
She was dead. Now how the fuck were they going to keep this quiet?
He heard a movement. Letting out a half-strangled shriek, he turned and saw Frances standing silently in the hall, watching him.
Chapter 9
1971
Constantine Barolli’s estate on Long Island’s stylish Montauk peninsula would be a stunning location for Lucco Barolli’s marriage to Daniella Carlucci. The house itself was massive, clapboarded in soft duck-egg blue-and-white trim; it was fronted by huge decks and terraces that overlooked and led down onto the long white beach and into sand dunes thick with the billowing fronds of marram grass.
Cara had told the men on the gate to expect Saul Jury at four, that he had business with her, and that they were to show him straight in; she’d be waiting in the waterfront lounge. The roar of the Atlantic breakers pounding the beach was a throaty, ominous counterpoint to her black mood.
Saul Jury arrived promptly at the agreed time. He always did; with high-end clients you learned early on not to fuck around too much. Shame her husband hadn’t learned the same lesson, because Saul suspected that this was not a lady who’d take betrayal lightly; she didn’t have the look of a gentle, forgiving sort of girl.
As he was shown in to the huge lounge with its big expanse of glass that displayed the ocean out there beyond the white stretch of the beach, Saul felt overawed. He’d had wealthy clients before, but these folks lived like the Rockefellers. Schlepping home to his little apartment in the Bronx, he had often glanced up and wondered about the flashy Manhattan types and the rarefied air they breathed – that special, radiant space they occupied. He knew he was in the presence of great wealth here. But seeing the scary people on the gates and patrolling the grounds, he also knew that these were not the sort of people you would ever want to upset. Olive oil and fruit importers, for fuck’s sake. Saul knew what that meant. He was starting to feel more than a little sorry for the erring Rocco.
When she’d first taken him on they’d met up in Central Park, neutral territory, but now Saul was seeing Cara in her natural environment, and it made him feel like the small fry he was. Hell, he was happy to be small fry. He didn’t want to be up too close and personal with people like this.
She looked vindictive and trigger-happy; he’d thought that the very first time he’d seen her: Here is a woman who won’t take prisoners. What if she now decided to shoot the messenger?
Cara stood up as he was shown in by Frederico, who waited around the house when he was not driving for her father. Frederico – or ‘Fredo’ as he was affectionately known by the family – was the son of one of Constantine’s gardeners and a cook. He was her own age and she knew he adored her – he had been making cow-eyes at her ever since kindergarten; but he was beneath her and they both knew it. It was Fredo who had driven her to the meeting with Saul in Central Park. He had asked no questions, but she had seen the curiosity in his eyes. Idiot, she’d thought, as if I would tell you anything.
Dismissing Fredo with a wave, Cara swept imperiously towards Saul – dwarfing him in will and in size too. Cara winced as she shook his limp, ineffectual hand. She hated using the services of this cheap little man, but he was a nobody, he was outside her family’s normal circle of influence, and that was good: she didn’t want any of this getting back to Rocco’s ears before she was ready. ‘What have you found out?’ she asked.
For a split second, Saul thought of saying that he’d found nothing, that Rocco was clean, and high-tailing it out of there; fuck the money. But the thought lasted a split second only, because he needed that money. He had a bit of a gambling habit, and yes, both his mother and his wife knew about it and nagged him day and night.
There was some professional pride involved here, too. He had caught Rocco red-handed doing the dirty with his fag boyfriend. He had pictures, dates, information, everything gathered together; he’d done a good, thorough job, like he always did. But now, being here, seeing this place, these people, the look in Cara’s eyes, he thought he would just as soon not get involved because what he might be doing by staying out of it was saving Rocco Mancini from a whole heap of trouble.
Professional pride won. Saul fished out the photos and the neatly typed information; he handed them to Cara. And as Cara looked at them in growing disbelief, slowly her face emptied of colour, her hands tightening on the sheets of paper and the damning photos until her long, beautifully manicured nails dug in.
‘But . . .’ Cara glanced up at him. ‘What is this? You said he was seeing someone called Frances Ducane . . .’
Saul nodded. ‘That’s him. That’s Frances Ducane.’
‘But . . . for God’s sake! I thought you meant a woman.’
‘No. A man. I’m sorry if you misunderstood, Mrs Mancini. That’s Frances Ducane. His dad was a big Hollywood star; then there was a scandal and . . .’ His voice trailed away.
Cara was silent, staring at the pictures of her husband betraying her with a man. Finally, she said: ‘You can go.’
‘I’ll send the bill on,’ he said.
She said nothing. She was still staring at what he’d shown her: her husband of only a year, kissing a handsome young actor. Not even a woman. Her husband was cheating on her with a man called Frances Ducane, son of the more famous Rick.
Chapter 10
1950
Mud sticks. Oh, so true. Rick knew it. The first thing he’d done when he’d found Viv’s body was to phone the studio, tell them. They would know what to do; they would help him.
Only, they didn’t. He couldn’t get hold of anyone.
As he was going apeshit trying to figure out what to do, Frances came into the lounge and said, ‘I phoned.’
Rick stopped his anxious pacing and stared at the boy. ‘. . . You what?’
‘The ambulance. I phoned.’
Oh shit.
He could see it all caving in on him. Could see it all hitting the fan.
He phoned the only one he could truly count on. He phoned LaLa.
‘Rick? What the fuck? It’s four o’clock in the morning.’
‘LaLa. You’ve got to help me. Viv’s dead.’
‘She’s what?’
Rick was standing in the hall. ‘She’s dead,’ he said again. LaLa would help. She would know what to do. ‘Looks like she slipped or something getting in the tub. Cut her head open. Either that or one of her drinking cronies whacked her. Either way, she’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh? Is that all you can say? LaLa, the woman’s dead . . . Shit a brick . . .’
The ambulance was pulling up, and the police. Frances opened the door to them.
‘Oh dear. Are the police there?’ asked Lala.
Then the press were crowding into the hallway, flashbulbs were popping in his face.
‘Yeah. And the press. Some bastard must have tipped them off.’
LaLa hung up.
‘LaLa? Hello?’ He redialled, but she didn’t answer. Anyway, the police wanted to talk with him . . .
Within days – hellish long days when the press camped outside, trapping him inside his own home with nobody but Frances for company – the studio heads wrote and very politely told him that he should consider his contract terminated, with immediate effect.
He phoned LaLa, but her secretary said she was in a meeting.
The day after the studio heads dumped him, LaLa dumped him too.
The papers came, and he flinched at the headlines.
‘Secret wife of dashing movie star Rick Ducane in suicide drama’, they shrieked.
‘Mystery death of Mrs Rick Ducane.’
‘Did he do it?’ Beneath that one, there was a picture of him standing in his hallway, white-faced with shock, holding up a hand to fend off not only the photographers but also disaster. But he couldn’t stop this.
Vivienne had killed him. Killed his career, killed his life.
The police questioned him endlessly, but his alibi was watertight. They hauled in a couple of her drinking buddies and questioned them, too, but nothing stuck. Finally, they seemed to be satisfied that Viv’s death was nothing but a tragic accident.
Within a month he fled back to England with Frances, and he never acted again.
Chapter 11
1971
Once she had recovered from the shock of it – for Christ’s sake, a man? – and had stood there for several minutes, staring out with sightless eyes at the sunlit sea and wondering how he would dare do that to her, Cara went quickly to her father’s study. He was busy of course; Nico, his right-hand man was there, standing beside him as he sat at the big walnut desk, and there were other men with him too. Her father was doing business, but there was no business that could be more urgent than this.
Constantine looked surprised at the interruption, but he quickly read her expression and apologized to the three men who were there with him and asked them to wait outside while Cara spoke to him.
‘Nico, can you go too please?’ Cara said, and flung herself down in a chair.
Nico looked at Constantine. He nodded, and Nico quietly left the room.
‘So what’s so important?’ asked Constantine mildly.
Cara flung the brown envelope containing the photos and the reports onto her father’s desk. Constantine looked at his daughter’s face for a long moment, then picked up the envelope and tipped out the contents. Cara watched him as he looked through them, giving each document and each photograph his full attention. Finally, he put the items back in the envelope and pushed it back into the centre of the desk.
‘I’m sorry, Cara,’ he said.
‘Not as sorry as I am, Papa,’ fumed Cara. ‘I knew. I just knew he was up to something.’
‘You used an outsider for this?’
‘I used a private detective. I didn’t want all the family and their friends knowing my business.’
Constantine gazed at her levelly. ‘But now you don’t mind, uh?’
‘Only you, Papa. I only want you to know this. I couldn’t stand to be made to look such an idiot.’ Cara stared at him and her eyes filled with tears. ‘He has insulted me, made a fool of me.’
‘So now you bring this to me. Why?’
‘Why?’ wailed Cara, red-faced with temper, the tears flooding over and running down her cheeks. She looked like a large, angry child – which, he thought, was effectively what she was.
Constantine loved his daughter. He loved all his children. But he wasn’t blind to their faults. Since her mother Maria’s death, Cara had taken on the role of only daughter with an almost missionary zeal. She had clung and cuddled close to her father, fawned over him; and maybe, to be fair, he had fawned over her too – rather too much, in fact. Annie Carter had come as an unwelcome shock to Cara, but maybe it was partly his fault that she was so hostile to Annie.
Now she thought . . . what? That he was going to solve her problematical marriage with a magical wave of his hand? He had warned her against Rocco before she rushed into wedlock with the boy. A few background checks had quickly shown that Rocco was lazy, feckless and inclined to fuck around. He’d warned her of this. But Cara, so used to getting her own way, had been obdurate. She wanted to marry Rocco; no one else would do.
Now she was coming to him for help. He had many, many problems – the Cantuzzi family was trying to muscle in on some of his businesses, and they were going to have to learn the hard way that this was unacceptable behaviour. Always there were concerns.
He was the protector of many Italian families in New York, shielding them from the worst excesses of the American legal system by employing many useful people in the judiciary and the Police Department.
The Barolli organization had a system of payoffs in place, and a large ‘sheet’ or list of officials on a monthly wage, so no friends of the Barollis would ever face the trauma of prosecution.
The whole operation was unbelievably slick; Constantine had over many years made it so, and now it was an empire with him at its head and many layers of power beneath him. His sons had, of course, followed him into the business; Lucco and Alberto were caporegimes, or captains, and everyone beneath them was a soldier. He had his legal counsellor, or consigliere. It was a smooth, well-oiled system. He gave his orders to Lucco and Alberto, and those orders filtered down and were carried out; rarely did Constantine have to issue a direct order to anyone.
But such a complex business didn’t run itself. There were always problems to be resolved. Added to that, he had a gorgeous pregnant wife, and no time to spare for rescuing a silly situation that should never have arisen in the first place.
‘He’s insulted me. He deserves to die for it,’ said Cara.
Constantine sat back in his chair and stared at her.
‘The Mancini family are old friends to us,’ he pointed out. ‘Rocco is their youngest boy and he’s been spoiled. He wasn’t a good choice for you. As I told you, when you decided to marry him.’
‘I want you to do something to him, Papa,’ said Cara, sobbing now, nearly incoherent with rage. ‘I want you to hurt him. Break his legs. Do something.’
Constantine shook his head slowly as he looked at her. ‘You’re missing the point here. I told you. The Mancinis are friends of ours. We have reciprocal arrangements going all over town, all over the country. And you expect me to wound, maybe kill their youngest boy?’
‘If you love me, you’ll do it,’ hurled Cara.
Constantine leaned forward. His blue eyes held hers in a hard, laser-like gaze.
‘You know I love you. That isn’t in question here. What is in question is your choice of husband and what’s to be done about him if he’s looking elsewhere for his enjoyment.’
Cara jumped to her feet, overturning the chair. ‘Well you are obviously going to do nothing,’ she spat out.
Constantine sighed and leaned back. ‘I’ll talk to his father. Maybe between us we can come to some sort of arrangement.’
‘So you think all this is my fault?’ shouted Cara.
‘You made a bad marriage.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens.’
‘You don’t understand anything,’ she complained. ‘You’re too wrapped up in your new little cosy domestic setup. You don’t care about the fact that your daughter is being humiliated, that all my friends will laugh at me.’
Constantine rose to his feet in one swift movement. The look on his face shut her up in an instant. She’d gone too far; she knew it.
‘I understand this. My domestic arrangements are my business,’ he said coldly. ‘And if your friends laugh, then d’you really think they’re friends at all? And I also understand that only a fool shits on his own doorstep. Do you? The Mancinis are good people and I will not be damaging their youngest son to gratify your injured pride.’
Trembling, Cara nodded. She brushed angrily at her tears and glared at him. Why couldn’t he see that she had every right to be affronted? But she knew she’d hit a nerve; he was so totally absorbed with that English whore and her brat that he was neglecting his own family, his true family.
She felt that no one was on her side now, that everyone was more appreciated, more valued, than she was. Lucco was getting married to a girl of his father’s choosing and so he was, for once, very much in favour. Alberto was always in favour – that went without saying. And now – and this was the worst thing of all – the English bitch was going to present Constantine with a brand-new child. And as for Cara . . . well, she used to be the apple of her father’s eye. And then along had come Annie Carter, and all that had changed overnight.
God, how she hated that bitch.
And right now, how she hated him, her father.
Whatever he said, she was going to get her revenge on Rocco, one way or another. If her father refused to punish the bastard, she would. She was going to find a way to do it. She thought of Rocco and his fag lover, and vowed that Frances Ducane was going to pay for this. She wasn’t Constantine Barolli’s daughter for nothing.
Chapter 12
1960
‘What you need, my boy, is an arsenal,’ Rick Ducane told his son over and over again.
Frances was thirteen when it first occurred to him that his father was . . . well, more than a little screwy. He missed his mother. He couldn’t talk to his father about anything.
When they’d come back to England, Rick had become a bitter recluse. He’d bought a house called Whereys, an old red-brick Victorian pile with a big cluster of barley-twist chimney pots soaring high above its gabled roof. It was impossible to heat – Frances always felt cold there – and it was deep in the Kent countryside, miles from anywhere. Secretly, to himself, Frances called the house Where-The-Fuck, Kent.
He could still remember that wild night when his mother had been drunk, reeling, strange men drinking on the sofa, cavorting naked with her in and out of the bedrooms in the house; and then the next thing, Dad was home and there were police and ambulance men and press swarming over the place like ants.
That was the last time he ever saw his mother. Now, all he had in the world was dear old Dad, and Frances strongly suspected that Dad was Looney Tunes. Had a screw loose. Was barking mad.
That worried him.
And this thing his dad had about weaponry. He’d built up a vast collection of arms. A bayonet knife that – he never tired of telling Frances – he’d taken off a dead Nazi during the war.
‘Rigor mortis had set in,’ said Rick. ‘Had to break the bastard’s fingers to get it off him.’
Nice, thought Frances.
There was also a Prussian officer’s dress sword. And guns, he was a maniac for guns.
‘People will try to hurt you in life, people will pull you down,’ he told Frances.
Yeah, you got that right, thought Frances. No one could ever hurt him as his dad did, mocking his efforts at amateur dramatics, saying he didn’t have ‘the ear’ when he attempted accents, telling him that stardom was a false mistress and would always break your heart, grudgingly listening to Frances’s readings of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and then telling him that his diction was poor, that he didn’t ‘enunciate’ or ‘project’ enough.
Oh, Frances knew he could never be the star his dad had once been. He knew he was lacking. But he tried hard, and he hoped he could get somewhere – with or without his dad’s blessing. And it would be without, he knew it.
‘So what you’ve got to do, son,’ said Rick, his eyes wild with enthusiasm, ‘is protect yourself. Get a store like I have. Because if you’ve got anything worth having, people will resent it and try to snatch it away from you. Friends, colleagues – even loved ones. You can’t trust a living soul. You understand?’
Frances nodded. Sure he did. He understood his dad was cuckoo; he understood that all right. He understood that he was always delighted to get back to school, away from the crazy old coot. He understood that he preferred to huddle in his freezing-cold bedroom listening to Elvis Presley crooning ‘It’s Now Or Never’ on his Dansette, rather than spend time with him.
Jesus, he so missed his mother. There was no way he could tell Rick that he was getting these feelings for boys and not girls. Maybe his mum would have understood, maybe not. All Frances knew was that he had to keep his particular sexual leanings to himself. He’d read Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and knew Wilde had been put in the slammer for consorting with men; and if any of his friends knew or even suspected he was homosexual, he knew they wouldn’t be his friends for much longer.
Now it was a dreary Saturday morning, raining hard, and Frances was dreading the weekend to come, closeted here in the backside of fucking nowhere with his dad when he would rather have been somewhere – anywhere – else.
But he couldn’t escape. Dad had said he had something to show him, something exciting, and Frances had thought, yeah, big news, another fucking handgun.
But it wasn’t a handgun this time.
Maybe a sword then?
No. His dad’s eyes were dancing with merriment as he made Frances guess, over and over, as they trudged out to the workshop. Frances saw that his dad had hung a horseshoe over the door. Rick saw his son looking at it.
‘For luck,’ he told him with a grin. ‘Go on then. Keep guessing.’
‘A Buffalo Sharps?’ hazarded Frances. His dad had enthused about the rifle; it could pick off a target a quarter of a mile away.
‘No. I said. Not a gun.’
‘What then?’ asked Frances, slightly intrigued despite himself.
His dad was going to give him a demonstration of something he’d picked up during the war, he told him. Something really exciting.
‘Come on then. What?’
Frances was smiling so hard his jaw was aching. And his dad said he was a bad actor? He thought he was good. After all, he acted as if he could stand the loopy old goat. And he couldn’t.
Frances had already decided that once he left school he was off, back to America. He was half-American after all; he loved it there. But his dad’s dire warnings about the toughness of Hollywood had penetrated, and his mum had been desolate and lonely there, he knew she had; so he’d decided he was heading for New York, and Broadway. Just as soon as he could.
‘So come on,’ he said to his dad. ‘Give. What is it?’ Like he cared.
Dad winked. ‘Explosives,’ he said, and showed him a box full of . . .
Oh shit. Were those live grenades?
Yes. They were.
It was then that Frances really knew his dad had flipped.
But it wasn’t going to happen to him. No way. He was sane.
Chapter 13
1971
Cara stood alone in the hall while Nico and the others filed back into the study. The door closed behind them, and it was like a door slamming shut on Cara’s damaged heart. She felt diminished, dismissed out of hand. She went outside onto the drive, feeling thwarted, furious, bitter; she walked until she found herself outside the multiple garage block.
That idiot Fredo was there in his shirtsleeves, polishing the bonnet of the limo in the hot midday sun. It was a huge, heavy, armour-plated car, bulletproof and grenade-proof. Her father’s car. Sometimes – not often – Fredo drove Constantine; but more often it was Nico who took the wheel when the Don was in the car. Still, Frederico was as proud of this large heap of black metal as a mother with a new baby, cleaning it – and the other cars in which he ferried various members of the family around – constantly.
He didn’t see her standing there, but Cara watched him, and slowly she began to formulate a plan. She walked over and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Oh!’ He whirled round, startled.
Cara smiled. ‘Sorry, did I surprise you?’ She came in closer, close enough for him to smell her perfume. She saw his eyes dip to the deep V neckline of her white cotton shirt. ‘I think I left my purse in the other car. Is it in the garage?’ she asked, walking that way.
Frederico followed her, frowning; he was thinking that she was beautiful and that he adored her. He found his eyes resting on the enticing swell of her buttocks beneath her tight-fitting cream-coloured pencil skirt. Ah, if only . . . but she was married; she was the Don’s daughter; she had no feelings for him. It could never be. And he had cleaned the car two or three times since her trip to Central Park; if the purse had been there, he would have found it.
‘I don’t think it’s there,’ he said as they passed from the hot glare of the sun outside into the cool, dark shadows of the garage.
‘Oh, maybe I’ve just put it somewhere,’ she shrugged, then looked at him intensely. ‘Fredo,’ she said, using the baby-name that everyone used for him, the name she had never used, not once. ‘I’ve got to talk to you about something,’ she told him.
‘Oh?’ Now Fredo was confused. Cara never wanted to talk to him; she barely grunted a civil word to him in passing.
‘Yes, something important. Can you close the doors? Lock them?’
‘What is this . . .?’ He was frowning.
‘Please, Fredo.’
‘All right,’ he said, and turned away and went to the doors. He locked them and turned back.
His mouth dropped open.
Cara was standing there wearing only her skirt and high-heeled shoes. She had removed her blouse and her bra and was clutching both garments in her hands in front of her tits. He could see the soft upper swell of her skin there, paler skin, not tanned. Fredo’s eyes bulged in his head.
‘Wha . . .?’ he started to say.
‘Do you want to see them, Fredo?’ she asked him.
‘I . . .’ Fredo was lost for words. He’d adored her for so long, and now she was here, flaunting herself in front of him. It was like a miracle. He felt so unbearably aroused that he was afraid he was about to come in his pants.
‘I’ll show you, if you want,’ said Cara.
If he wanted? There was nothing on God’s earth that he wanted more.
‘Only you have to say please. And . . . you have to promise to help me with something, something special.’
Fredo gawped at her. ‘I would do anything for you,’ he said at last. ‘You know that.’
‘You promise?’ Suddenly Cara’s eyes were sharp as they rested on his.
‘Of course I promise.’
Cara seemed to relax then. ‘Say please.’
‘Please,’ said Fredo unsteadily.
Cara gave a small, secret smile and tossed her shirt and bra onto the grubby garage floor, while keeping one arm across her chest to conceal her treasures.
‘Please,’ said Fredo, a little more desperately.
‘You give your word,’ said Cara sternly.
‘I swear.’
‘Then . . .’ said Cara, letting her arm fall to her side, exposing her voluptuous naked breasts to his view. They were much fuller than he had imagined – and he had imagined Cara’s breasts a lot. The skin there was as silken and white as snow, giving a startlingly erotic effect against her slender tanned arms and belly. Her nipples were small, hard and rosy-pink.
Fredo made a half-strangled noise in his throat.
‘Next time,’ said Cara, putting her hands brazenly on her hips, ‘I’ll let you touch them. Would you like that?’
Fredo could only nod. The front of his trousers was tenting up so much it was painful.
‘And when you’ve helped me with the secret thing,’ said Cara, ‘I’ll let you do more. Touch me anywhere. Here on my breasts, or even down there. Fredo, I’ll let you have sex with me. When you’ve done it. You understand?’
Fredo nodded again, then clutched desperately at his groin. He came in his pants.
Chapter 14
Rick told Frances about blowing up German emplacements with the grenades, then he set up a little demonstration and blew up an old tree root in the garden.
The noise of the explosion was one Frances would never forget. The old tree had rocked and then collapsed sideways, revealing a tangle of blackened root.
‘See? Easiest thing in the world,’ said Rick.
It was. Frances could see that it was, but he wasn’t greatly interested. He just wanted to be gone. His father was a deranged egotistical monster, twisted first by fame and then by a spectacular fall from grace.
As soon as he’d finished school at eighteen, Frances picked his moment and told his dad that he was going to New York to try to get an agent, try to get some parts on Off Off Broadway if he could.
‘You’re going back to that place?’ said Rick, hearing his son’s words with disbelief. ‘It’ll kill you, boy. I’m telling you.’
‘I’m not talking about Hollywood, I don’t want to go there. I was never happy there, I don’t have good memories of it. I’m talking about the Big Apple. Broadway.’
Rick was watching him, his mouth moving querulously, his eyes astonished.
‘But do you think you have the talent?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Actually, I do.’ Frances felt his face colour as his father smashed his ego yet again, with his usual casual indifference.
But this time he was fighting back. He did have talent; he knew he did. It wasn’t as great a talent as his father’s, but what could you do? Stay at home and weep? He wanted to act. He was going to do it.
‘I’d like to think I have your blessing,’ said Frances.
‘Well you haven’t,’ said Rick, eyes darting. ‘I think you’re mad.’
Ha! Coming from the fruitloop of the year!
‘Next time I come home, I’ll show you. I’ll prove you wrong.’
And maybe even make you proud of me, thought Frances, but he doubted such a miracle could ever occur. Frances knew that he could come back here with a bunch of plaudits from the critics, with a sodding Oscar, and his father would still dismiss his son’s achievements with a shrug of his shoulders. In Rick’s eyes, Frances knew that he would always be a failure.
Broadway wasn’t an easy nut to crack. Frances had to work long hours in delis and restaurants to make ends meet, to pay for the modest – actually pretty tatty – apartment in Lower Midtown.
He loved New York. He found an agent – not the best, but Solly was the first agent in a list of twenty who would even meet him. He told him he was Rick Ducane’s son. He didn’t want to, but he knew that agents and PR firms always craved an angle and, if you had one, you’d be damned stupid not to use it.
Solly’s hawklike eyes sharpened to pinpricks over his squashed nose.
‘You’re Rick Ducane’s boy? Hey, that’s good.’ Solly wrote it down. Then he looked up with a frown at his new client’s face. ‘Wasn’t there a scandal with him? A dead woman, something like that?’
Frances nodded. ‘My mother.’
‘Oh – hey, sorry.’ Solly paused and delicately cleared his throat. ‘Would you mind if I mentioned it?’
‘What?’
‘After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Did you see anything . . .?’
‘No. I didn’t.’ Hey, why don’t you just cut a hunk of flesh out my arse, you fucking hyena?
‘I have to ask these things,’ said Solly.
‘Of course.’ Frances smiled.
Solly worked hard for him after that, pushing the name forward, Rick Ducane’s son, getting him bit parts. It was a start. It was the most fun he had ever had in his life, although it was – admittedly – tough. He worked the years away and tried to believe he’d make it big one day. And he had his admirers: the critics were kind and people loitered at the stage door sometimes, pretty young girls, hormonal matrons, stylish young men, to say how much they’d loved his performance, he had pitched it just right, and would he just sign this . . .?
When Frances signed his first batches of autographs at the age of twenty-four, he felt powerful, delighted. The two-week run was slow to start, but eventually packed out by people who’d read favourable reviews. He’d even got a mention from one of the critics best known for his harsh, unforgiving words. So what if all the posters proclaimed him to be the son of Rick Ducane, the once-great Hollywood star? He had got a good review.
Time went on. The admirers still came, and he was easy now about signing the autographs – he was casual, he smiled and was charming. He noticed the tall, thin, sallow-skinned and handsome young man waiting outside the theatre for three evenings on the trot, and when he moved forward to shake the man’s hand, he said: ‘Good grief, you must really like this play.’
The stranger went red in the face. ‘I do like the play,’ he said earnestly. ‘But your performance was the thing that drew me back. You were wonderful in it.’
‘Oh! Well . . . thanks. You’re very kind to say so.’
‘Just truthful,’ said the man. He looked down. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘Oh, I don’t . . .’ said Frances nervously. He’d met his fair share of crazies since coming to the city; he didn’t know this man from Adam.
‘Just a drink,’ the stranger persisted, and he looked up and smiled straight into Frances’s eyes.
He was very handsome, almost Latin in appearance. Frances distinctly felt his stomach do a little back-flip of excitement.
‘Well . . . I don’t see why not.’
‘Excellent,’ said the man. He held out a hand. ‘I’m Rocco Mancini, by the way. Is it true you’re Rick Ducane’s son?’
Within days they were lovers, meeting up at every opportunity. Frances even found he could forgive Rocco for the Rick Ducane question. It seemed to Frances that Rocco avoided the more populated areas of the city whenever they were together. But he didn’t care. They were together, and delighted in the time spent strolling in quiet places, or eating bagels bought from a street-corner vendor. When they were in bed together, it was as if it was always meant to be.
It was bliss.
‘I love you,’ said Frances, as Rocco and he lay entwined in a hotel room one afternoon.
‘I love you too,’ said Rocco, although he didn’t.
He had a real weakness for beauty both in men and women. His own wife Cara was exquisitely lovely and he’d fallen in ‘love’ with her on sight. Only later had he discovered what a spoiled, controlling bitch she was.
If he saw another beautiful boy, another lissom woman, in the next week or so, then – Frances or no Frances – would he have the willpower to turn it down?
Rocco didn’t think so. He knew he was weak. He knew he was an emotional lightweight. He hoped Frances wasn’t expecting too much. Frances had told him about his uncaring father and his mother’s unfortunate death.
‘That’s so tragic,’ said Rocco, thinking of his own doting mother and how awful it would be to lose her.
‘If you love someone, you’re open to all sorts of hurt,’ said Frances. Dad had been wrong about nearly everything else – he was crazy, after all – but he’d been dead right about that. But Rocco had said he loved him.
And right now, right here, maybe he really did . . . although Rocco was growing tired of Frances and finding him clingy.
They took lunch together in the diner on Lexington and Third next day, and Rocco was, for once, a little careless. They sat in the window, smiled and laughed and joked a lot. They looked like what they were – lovers. Rocco knew he’d have to end it soon, but for now, what the hell? It was just fun.
Meanwhile, Saul Jury, the private detective hired by Cara, watched them, and took photographs, and sealed both their fates.
Chapter 15
1971
‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Fredo. There was sweat beading along his upper lip, although the air conditioning in the car was on full blast to counter the humid summer heat of New York.
Cara looked at him coldly. They were sitting in the front of the car watching customers going in and out of the diner. It was evening, and Rocco had told Cara that he was playing poker with friends, and she’d thought, Ha! You’re certainly poking something, my friend.
They had followed him twice before. Fuelled as she was by her need for revenge, still Cara was sick of this. She felt humiliated beyond belief that her husband should do such a thing. Oh, she knew their once passionate marriage had quickly dissolved into mere tolerance on both sides as she discovered that Rocco was pure Jello at the core: vain and stupid and with an almost girlish appreciation of all things beautiful. Maybe that was why he’d married her. Cara knew the value of her own looks; after all, hadn’t she used them to get her own way ever since she’d learned to bat her eyelashes? And she’d used her beauty to ensnare Fredo, because she wanted – needed – his help with this.
But shit, she hated it so much. Following Rocco and persuading Fredo to do what had to be done had stretched her almost to the limit. Fredo had quickly realized that she needed him for the first time ever, and he had sensed an opportunity.
‘I want more,’ he had said when they’d first followed Rocco and she’d explained to him what was to be done.
‘More?’ Cara had stared at him. What was the idiot talking about? Did he want money now?
But Fredo was nodding, smirking. ‘I want sex now. Full sex. Before I do it.’
‘That wasn’t the deal,’ said Cara.
But Fredo – and this was the Fredo she thought she knew; the one who had followed her around like a puppy-dog since childhood; the one whose chain she yanked on a regular basis – only shrugged and smiled.
‘Hey, it’s nothing to me if the bastard cheats on you. But it is to you, and I’m willing to help you, so what’s in it for me?’
‘I told you.
When it’s done . . .’ ‘When it’s done you’ll say thank you very much, Fredo, and get lost,’ he said.
Which was precisely what she had been intending to do. And if Fredo by some chance got named by anyone, and incurred any heat over this from her father, she was going to look all wide-eyed and innocent and say, No, Papa, what, me? No, Fredo must have realized how much Rocco had upset me, and decided to do this on his own. You know how he’s always adored me, the silly thing. I had nothing to do with it.
And who would Constantine believe? Her, or Fredo? She knew the answer to that one.
‘How can you think that?’ she demanded, feigning a hurt expression.
Fredo looked at her and he didn’t seem like an adoring boy any more.
‘I know you, Cara, remember? This is Fredo you’re talking to, not some stranger who’ll be taken in. So I want sex first, not after. When we get back tonight, I want it. Or the deal’s off.’
So what could she do? After the first time they’d followed Rocco, seen him there in the diner with what was obviously his male lover, discussed what they could do, Fredo drove them back to the Montauk estate in her father’s car, drove it into the garage, then got out and locked the garage doors.
‘In the back,’ he said to her, and Cara wondered how it had happened that Fredo, of all people, was ordering her about like this.
Still, she knew she had to comply if she was to get him to help. It was semi-dark in the back of the car, and quiet but for the ticking of the engine as it cooled down. Fredo got in the back too and closed the door. He was up close to her – Jesus, he was trying to kiss her. Cara turned her head away.
Fredo pulled back, uttered a low curse. Suddenly his hands were on her, pushing her skirt up and reaching under, scratching her, bruising her, grabbing her pants and pulling them down, and off. Quickly he got between her legs and then with a groan he unzipped himself. Cara looked away, trying not to feel even his breath on her, but she felt the big hot tip of his penis parting her flesh, felt the hard jolt as he drove it all the way into her cringing body, was pummelled by every manic thrust of it as he had her.
He was finished very quickly. He moaned as he came, and lay there for a moment against her. Then he withdrew, zipped up, flopped back onto the seat beside her. Cara sat there, feeling his disgusting wetness on her thighs. She was trembling, sore, aware that she’d just been raped and that she had brought it entirely on herself.
‘Now,’ said Fredo imperiously when he’d got his breath back. ‘Get your tits out. I want to touch them.’
Shivering and nearly crying, Cara unbuttoned her blouse, unfastened her bra. When she was naked to the waist, Fredo fell upon her, pinching and pulling at the tender flesh of her breasts until he was too aroused to stop. Then he raped her all over again.
The second time they trailed Rocco and finally agreed how the thing would be done, this pattern repeated itself. Fredo drove them home, locked them in the garage, and had Cara forcibly in the back of the car.
Now, it was time for him to keep his part of the bargain. And he was saying: I’m not sure about this.
After all that she had done, all that she had let him do, he wasn’t sure?
She had to breathe deeply to keep her voice from shaking, so ferocious was her hatred of him at that moment.
‘You’re not sure? What do you mean?’ she asked, and she was surprised to hear her own voice emerging from her body with that cool, calm sound to it. Inside, she was raging. She wanted to kill him, she was so angry.
Fredo was silent for a moment. He had the upper hand and he knew it. She would never want her father to know she planned anything like this. Rocco was a Mancini. The word had got around among the boys; they had overheard a shouting-match between Cara and her father, with Cara threatening all sorts. Constantine had said the Mancinis were not to be touched. And okay she wasn’t touching them, but it was a moot point. She would still be doing Rocco harm, if only indirectly.
‘I’m not sure you love me,’ said Fredo, and turned his head and grinned at her. ‘Joking,’ he said.
Cara had to look away or she was afraid she was going to throw up all over the bastard.
‘Look,’ she said, swallowing hard. ‘You know what you’ve got to do, yes?’
‘I know,’ said Fredo.
Cara glanced at her watch. ‘They should be out soon.’
And then it would be over, she thought.
But, she wondered, would it? She felt she had descended straight to hell to wreak her revenge on Rocco. Maybe the price had been too dear. Maybe not. Only time would tell. Now all she wanted, all she was here for, was to be absolutely sure that what she needed Fredo to do, was done.
‘There’s Rocco,’ said Fredo.
They watched silently as Rocco came out of the diner and walked quickly away down the block.
Minutes passed. Fredo casually laid a hand on Cara’s thigh. She let it stay there, but only by an extreme act of will. God, he disgusted her.
‘There he is,’ said Fredo, and left the car.
Frances Ducane was walking back to his car, thinking happily about the coming weekend. Under the pretext of a golfing break with the boys, Rocco and he were going to take off alone to a cabin in the Rockies. Frances loved Rocco and he wanted more time with him, but he understood that Rocco’s witch of a wife came with the money, and the money was what they enjoyed, so she had to be tolerated.
Cow, thought Frances in disgust. Swanky Upper East Side Princess with her nose in the air, busy spending Daddy’s money. And he knew from Rocco there was plenty of it. Why else had Rocco married her? For love? Frances didn’t think so.
‘Hey – faggot,’ said a voice behind him.
Frances felt a shudder of fear jolt up his spine to the top of his head. He half turned and then felt the first stinging lash of the blade as it struck the edge of his mouth. Blood splattered out and gushed down over his clothes. Frances screamed with pain. He staggered back, half running, desperate to get away, and Fredo came after him, shoving him back against a building wall, slashing in with the knife that glinted in his hand.
‘No!’ Frances wailed, hardly able to speak now, raising his hands to protect himself.
Fredo waded in, slicing fingers and palms indiscriminately. Two digits spun off into the gutter, blood spurting, and when Frances lowered his hands to stare at them in horror, Fredo came in close again and slashed the other side of Frances’s mouth wide open.
Frances fell to his knees, groaning. The crimson slashes on either side of his mouth looked like a clown’s painted-on smile: grotesque.
Fredo knelt down too, grabbed a handful of hair and yanked Frances’s head back.
‘That’s a present from Rocco and Cara Mancini, you little shit. Now back off,’ he hissed. Then he wiped the knife on the front of Frances’s once-pristine shirt and left the man there, blubbering and bleeding.
Fredo slipped the knife back in his pocket and made his way back to the car. He got in.
‘Well?’ said Cara. ‘Did you . . .?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘Show me the knife.’
‘Jesus,’ said Fredo. He’d already wiped it clean, what the hell, didn’t she trust him?
But there were traces of blood still on the blade. Cara sat back, satisfied. ‘And it went okay?’ she asked.
Fredo slipped the knife into his pocket and grinned at her. ‘It went fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home and fuck.’
Chapter 16
When Annie left the massive master suite with its sprawling ocean view, she walked straight into Cara.
Annie groaned inwardly. Her relationship with her step-daughter had never got off the ground. She had tried hard to befriend Cara, but she found her snobbish, vain and unlovable. She spoke to Annie hardly at all, and Annie thought that was just fine, if that was the way Cara wanted it.
But today, something about Cara seemed different. She looked . . . well, Annie wasn’t exactly sure how Cara looked. Usually, Constantine’s daughter exuded an icy poise that left no room for even an attempt at civility. But today, Cara looked shattered. She looked as though someone had just given her a scare that had rocked her world. She looked sick.
‘Cara?’ Annie caught her arm as Cara was about to pass right by her without a word. ‘Are you all right?’
Cara’s eyes met hers and in that instant before her guard went up, Annie saw something there; something bruised, something covert and uncertain. But then the shutters were in place again and Cara just stared at Annie coldly.
‘Like you care,’ she said, and looked pointedly at Annie’s hand resting on her arm.
Annie removed it. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’
But Cara was right: Annie’s words were a lie. There was just something about Cara’s own personal fuck-you demeanour and the swanky pea-brained friends she hung around with that put Annie’s back up.
‘I told you. I’m fine.’
Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Sheba, thought Annie. But fuck it. Did she really want to know what petty concerns went on in the life of someone so vacuous, spiteful and vain?
Answer: no.
Cara hurried on by. Annie heard her go into the bathroom at the head of the stairs, slamming the door behind her – and then she heard retching.
Annie paused there on the stairs, frowning. Maybe Cara was pregnant? But Annie sort of doubted that. So maybe Rocco had upset her . . . but then, Rocco was so mild, so practically invisible as a personality, that Annie couldn’t imagine him upsetting anyone, far less his notoriously difficult wife.
In the downstairs hall, Annie found Nico sitting patiently on guard outside Constantine’s study.
‘Is he free?’ Annie asked him.
Nico rose to his feet and gave her a smiling half-bow. ‘For you, yeah – he’s free.’ He turned and tapped at the door.
‘Come!’ came from inside the study.
He looked up as she came in. She stood there leaning against the door. He pushed himself back from the desk and stared at her.
‘Mrs Barolli,’ he said, his eyes playing with hers.
‘Mr Barolli,’ Annie greeted him.
‘And to what do I owe this unexpected honour?’ Constantine made a ‘so come here’ gesture with his hand.
Annie went over to the desk.
‘Closer,’ said Constantine.
Annie stepped nearer.
‘Not close enough,’ said Constantine.
Annie went around the desk, sat in his lap and put her arms around his neck. ‘Close enough now?’ she asked.
‘Barely,’ he complained, nuzzling her neck with his lips. ‘Something bothering you?’
‘Not really.’ Annie thought briefly of Cara’s face, but then it was gone, forgotten.
‘The baby?’ said Constantine, anxiously. He glanced down, concerned, at the small neat bump beneath her light lilac shift dress.
‘I just wanted to see you.’
‘Mrs Barolli, I love you very much,’ he said, and kissed her, and Annie found herself remembering her first pregnancy, when she had been expecting Layla; and Max had been so delighted, just as Constantine was now.
A sharp pang of sadness and regret struck her heart as she hugged her second husband and whispered her love for him, because once there had been Max, owner of the East End streets around Bow in London; Max Carter, gang lord, lover – and her first husband, her first true romance. And she had loved him too. Oh, so much.
She shivered, and clung to Constantine.
Chapter 17
Rocco got called to the hospital at two in the morning. Cara was asleep beside him when the phone rang. He flicked on the bedside light. She stirred sleepily and looked at him as he spoke into the phone. When he put it down, his face was ashen.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Cara.
‘It’s . . .’ Rocco paused, shook himself. His eyes were distant. He looked like a man who had seen a brief glimpse into hell. ‘It’s one of my friends. He left the poker game and he’s been attacked in the street.’
Now Rocco was throwing back the sheets, getting out of bed, hurrying to pick up his trousers and put them on.
‘Is . . . is it bad?’ asked Cara innocently. She knew exactly how bad it was. Here was the reward for all her suffering; here was her revenge. Fredo had slashed up Rocco’s little fag friend . . . before driving her home and then forcing himself on her once again in the garage. She shuddered to think of it.
She had told Fredo that this would be the last time. And, chillingly, he had laughed and said fuck that, not unless she wanted her father to hear all about what she had made him do to her husband’s fag boyfriend.
Now she was in a mess and she knew it. She despised Fredo for all that he’d done to her, but worse than that was the fact that she despised her father too, for making her sink to such levels of depravity with his refusal to help.
Would Fredo really dare tell her father? She didn’t know. And if she told Constantine first, blaming Fredo rather than carrying the blame herself for the attack, would her father believe her? She couldn’t take the risk, because Constantine would be so angry if he discovered she’d wormed her way around his warnings and found another way to get to Rocco.
‘This don’t stop until I’m ready,’ Fredo had told her, crudely slapping her on the arse as she emerged once again, shaking and abused, from the back of the car.
The bastard!
But the deed was done. And here was the result. Wasn’t it worth it? Yes, she knew it was.
Now Rocco was fastening his shirt and almost running for the door.
‘I hope your friend’s all right . . .’ Cara called after him, but he was gone, slamming the door closed behind him.
Cara lay down, a catlike smile playing over her pretty features.
So Rocco Mancini thought he could make a fool of his wife, did he? He was about to discover how horribly he had miscalculated her capabilities.
Rocco got to the hospital at nearly three a.m. They let him in and Rocco had to hide his shock at the state Frances was in. His face – oh, his beautiful face! – was a mess of stitches and bloody smears and bandages. His mouth had been slashed almost neatly on both sides, widening his lips so that they were hideously elongated. Two of the fingers on his right hand were missing.
Rocco tried to cover his disgust at the sheer ugliness of Frances’s appearance, but he couldn’t quite conceal it from his wounded lover. He sat down beside Frances and, while Frances sobbed, each sob muffled beneath the wadding and stitches around his mouth, Rocco asked him who had done this to him, who could have done such a thing?
‘You’re saying you don’t know?’ said Frances indistinctly. His eyes were red and accusing. ‘It was you, you fucker.’
Rocco looked aghast. His eyes went to Frances’s face, and he had to look quickly away.
‘What? No, I swear—’
‘It was a man,’ said Frances. ‘You must have paid him. He said it was from Rocco and Cara Mancini. For the love of God, you only had to say if you wanted to end it. You didn’t have to do this.’
Rocco sat back in his chair, feeling dizzy from the shock.
Cara must have instigated this. Cara must have known about their affair. He felt his insides clench with fear. If Cara knew, had she told her father? My God, if the Don knew . . .
Clearly, she had somehow discovered his secret. He felt consumed with horror at that thought, at the dangers inherent in this situation for him. Again his eyes strayed to the damage she’d wreaked on his once-exquisite lover, and again he had to look away, frightened that he might actually be sick. He was no good in hospitals. His grandmother had been an invalid for much of her life, languishing in bed; he had a horror of sickness. And as for any sort of disfigurement . . . well, he knew it was shallow. He knew it was bad. But he couldn’t help it. Just to look at Frances, the repulsive state of him, was making his stomach heave.
And he could see – oh, and wasn’t this the worst bit? – he could see that Frances’s beauty was comprehensively wrecked. These wounds were too severe to be anything other than permanent. Frances was ugly now. And if there was one thing Rocco couldn’t stand, it was ugliness. He only liked beautiful people around him. Men or women, he didn’t much care which, but they had to be flawless.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told Frances.
‘But look at me,’ wailed Frances. ‘You vicious fucking bitch! How am I going to find acting work now? I’m a freak. And this is all down to you.’
Frances stared with hate-filled eyes at his lover. Self-pity flooded through him and he flopped back against the pillows in despair. In his heart he knew that this was the end of it. Tears splashed down his cheeks, soaked his bloodstained bandages.
‘I didn’t do this,’ insisted Rocco, patting Frances’s unbandaged hand and wondering when he could decently leave. He wouldn’t be coming here again. It was over.
‘Yeah,’ said Frances, snatching his hand away. ‘Right.’
Chapter 18
Rocco said nothing to Cara, except that his friend was recovering and would be fine. He wanted to grab her, to break her stupid head against a wall for damaging something so exquisitely beautiful. All right, he had been tired of Frances. But what she had done was like smashing a Ming vase or defacing a Renoir: a crime against a work of art.
But he bit his lip and said nothing, although he felt sick with a mingling of loss and terror. If she had told her father about this, then he believed he was a dead man. Only last week that sadistic bastard Lucco had been laughing about Roy Giancana, who the Barolli mob had sent out to Vegas to handle business and who had tried to cheat them on the skim. He’d ended up in an oil drum at the bottom of the sea, just off the coast of sunny Florida.
And there had been others, many others Rocco knew of; men who had once been called friends and had been dispatched to meet their maker for stepping out of line in one way or another.
Now he had stepped out of line and he knew it.
Cara, the daddy’s girl, would run weeping to Constantine with any trouble, he knew that, and what would the Don do? Let it rest? No way. Rocco knew that once the word was given by the Don, his life was over. He was wracked with terror. Frightened of Lucco, who could in an instant switch from charming to deadly; and equally frightened of Alberto, whose urbane politeness concealed a businesslike efficiency when it came to conducting his father’s business.
Brother-in-law or not, he knew that neither of them would baulk at giving the word for an enforcer to take him out. He had to make moves of his own, to preserve his own safety.
He drove up to New Jersey to pay a visit to his father, Enrico Mancini.
His mother greeted him with all the usual hugs and cries and kisses.
‘You’ve lost weight!’ she tutted, fluttering around him, pinching his sallow cheeks.
It was true, he had lost weight, such had been his anxiety over the mess he had gotten himself into. He’d been under so much stress: keeping out of Constantine’s way, tiptoeing around Cara, and worse, much worse, fielding the unwanted and increasingly desperate calls from Frances, yelling accusations and wild declarations of love down the phone at him. He felt as though he was under seige. Food had been the last thing on his mind.
‘Son.’ His father greeted him without enthusiasm. He was watching the Boston Red Sox play the Yankees on TV. He glanced up, waved Rocco into an armchair and looked back at the screen.
Rocco glanced at it too. He had no interest in sports. His older brothers, Jonathan and Silvio, did, they were always in their father’s favour, but Rocco was the youngest and had clung to his mother’s apron-strings as a boy and even – yes, he admitted it – as a young man. He didn’t doubt his father loved him, but it was in a remote and dispassionate way.
Enrico Mancini shot a sideways look at his son. ‘Is your mother fetching us something? You look thin.’
‘Had a virus,’ lied Rocco.
‘Bad things,’ said Enrico, shaking his head, and returned his attention to the game.
Rocco looked at his father. He was balding and relaxing into old age in a beige cardigan and carpet slippers. His heart was bad, too; he couldn’t do too much these days. His father had no style, but Rocco understood that even so he was a great man. Rocco had a lot of style, but he knew in his heart that he had no real substance at all.
His mother came in, carrying a tray of verdure fritte, arancini, olives and cheese. She set the appetizers down on a low table in front of them, along with strong coffee laced with anisette, tweaked Rocco’s pallid cheek once more and left the room.
‘So, what’s the news?’ asked Enrico. ‘You don’t phone home much. It upsets your mother. Now suddenly you do, so what’s the beef?’
Rocco swallowed. This was very delicate, very embarrassing; he wasn’t quite sure how to start.
‘I’ve . . . been having an affair,’ he said.
Enrico looked at him. ‘And this is news?’
Rocco paused. Both his elder brothers were married, and both had their fair share of little popsies on the side: it was expected. What the hell, they were men, weren’t they?
‘Cara found out about it,’ said Rocco.
‘And? You telling me you can’t keep control in your own household, Rocco? Give her a sweetener or two and lay it on the line; you do what you do. Who’s the man of the house, you or her?’
Rocco was sweating; this was even more difficult than he had imagined it would be.
‘She found out and she had this person worked over – really badly – as a warning to me.’
Now he had Enrico’s full attention. ‘She did?’
‘Her name was mentioned when it happened.’ And so was mine, he thought, but didn’t say it.
Enrico paused for a beat. Then he picked up an olive and popped it in his mouth. Chewing, he looked at Rocco and said: ‘Don’t sound like any woman I know, to do that. And for sure this ain’t Constantine.’ Then he spat out the stone.
‘We can’t know that.’
Enrico gave a laugh. ‘You kiddin’? I’ve known that man thirty years. He’s a good friend to this family. A thing like this, over his son-in-law having a little fun outside wedlock? He wouldn’t stoop so low.’
‘Cara wouldn’t act without his approval.’
‘You think so?’ Enrico’s old eyes stared at his son in disbelief. ‘I think you’re wrong. She’s been overindulged since her mother died – she’s become too headstrong. I told you so when you married her, but would you listen? You would not. Now you see the sort of woman you married. She thinks she’s too special to have her husband playing around. I did warn you. I told you you’d be pussy-whipped for the rest of your life if you married her.’
Rocco thought about that. His father was right; but it was Cara’s looks that he had fallen for. He had been stricken by her blonde beauty and, before they married, she had curbed and concealed the worst excesses of her spoiled and dominating nature. Once they were wed, she had dropped her guard, let it show who was the boss; and that was her.
‘Men have women on the side,’ Enrico shrugged. ‘We all do it. Why should the girl take offence at an affair? It don’t affect her standing as your wife and that’s what matters. You got to keep the wives sweet, Rocco, that’s what I’m telling you.’
Rocco’s heart was thumping in his chest. His mouth was dry. He knew Cara had taken the whole thing badly because it was a man he’d slept with; had it been a woman, she would probably have ignored the situation, even accepted and eventually maybe welcomed the focus of his sexual attentions being elsewhere.
‘It . . . Papa, it wasn’t a woman,’ he managed to say.
Enrico was silent. The teams were rampaging around the pitch to the cheers and shouts of the crowd. Slowly, Enrico levered himself out of his armchair with an elderly grunt of effort. Then he leaned down and struck Rocco, very hard, across the face.
Rocco recoiled in pain and surprise. His cheek stung. He sprang up, furious.
Enrico looked him dead in the eye.
‘Oh, you think you want to hit me back, uh?’ he scoffed, his eyes running over his son with contempt. ‘You ain’t hard enough to even try it. Now I understand. You deserved that. And Rocco, you deserved to have your fag boyfriend worked over. I always knew there was something off about you, you little . . .’ Enrico looked disgusted. He flicked his ear in the Italian sign for homosexuality. ‘How’s any woman going to take that, her husband playing away with another man? You know Cara’s nature. And you’re surprised she did this?’
Rocco was almost crying with humiliation. ‘I think the Don himself ordered it,’ he panted. ‘If he knows, I’m as good as dead.’
‘Yeah, maybe he did. For this? Maybe he’d feel his daughter had been insulted; maybe you’re right.’
‘Well, what are you going to do?’ demanded Rocco.
‘Me?’ yelled back his father. ‘I’ll tell you what I am going to do: precisely nothing. You think I’d raise a hand against one of my oldest friends over a little fucker like you?’
Rocco’s mother came into the room and stood just inside the door, looking anxiously from one to the other. ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked.
‘What’s going on is that your milksop little baby has had his nose smacked and he don’t like it. Well, he had it coming,’ Enrico told her sharply. He turned to Rocco. ‘Now get outta here. I got a game to watch.’
And he sat back down in his armchair and gazed once more at the screen.
Rocco’s mother stood there, staring at her son. After a second, Rocco managed to get his legs working, and he pushed past her, out of the door, out of the house. He heard her concerned cry drift after him but he ignored it. He got in his car and drove back to the city.
His father was going to do nothing to help him – so what else was new? His father never had. Cara must have told the Don about this. After all, who among Constantine’s soldiers would dare do her dirty work for her without first securing her father’s permission? No one would do that, would they? No one would risk incurring Constantine’s wrath by acting without his say-so. The Don must know. And if he knew . . . then he was just waiting to pick Rocco off at his leisure.
Chapter 19
Cara was shopping, as she often was, when the man with the scarf hiding the lower part of his face came up to her.
‘Cara Mancini?’ he asked, his voice muffled.
Cara was both startled and puzzled. How did he know her? He sounded English. And why the hell was he wearing a thick knitted scarf on a summer’s day? He looked cloak-and-dagger, like a spy in one of the old movies. Now she wished she’d had Fredo come in with her today, but she hated his guts, hated him anywhere near her; she hadn’t wanted him trailing after her.
‘You’re married to Rocco Mancini, that’s right?’ he said, and she was struck now by how attractive his clear grey eyes were, how thick and glossy his chestnut-coloured hair. But the scarf . . .?
He saw her looking at it.
‘Neuralgia,’ he said, patting it. ‘I’m a martyr to it, sadly. I’m an old friend of Rocco’s. Can we go somewhere and talk for a moment?’
Cara suppressed an impatient sigh. She didn’t want to sit somewhere with this weirdo and talk about the cheating yellow-bellied shit she was married to.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to go.’ She was moving past him, moving away.
He stopped her with a hand on her arm.
‘Please,’ he said desperately. With fumbling fingers – two of them were no more than stumps, she noticed in horror – he pushed the scarf aside.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Cara as she saw the puckered purple slits on either side of his mouth.
She pulled back, revolted. And then she thought, oh shit, it’s him. It’s Frances Ducane, that actor Fredo cut up, Rocco’s lover.
All the blood left her face and she felt as if she was going to faint. He’d found out she’d instigated that. He knew she’d set Fredo on him. She started to pull away, to flee. He was going to hurt her, scar her too. She’d been through so much, had to tolerate Fredo pawing at her, sliming over her, and for what? Now it was all backfiring on her, it was all going bad. She opened her mouth to scream, but she was so terrified that she couldn’t even draw breath.
‘Please don’t go,’ said Frances, and something in his voice arrested her, made her freeze to the spot. She looked into his eyes, which were brimming over with tears.
‘You see what he did to me?’ he sobbed. ‘You see what that son of a bitch Rocco had someone do, just because he’d had enough of me?’
Cara took a breath as his words sank in. He didn’t think she was responsible; he was blaming Rocco.
Cara gulped in air, composed herself, tried to get her racketing heartbeat back under control.
‘How could he have done anything so awful?’ she demanded. ‘Look, there’s a café over there. Let’s go get a drink, and you can tell me all about it . . .’
Chapter 20
Annie Carter-Barolli was slipping on a pale blue silk shift in front of her dressing-table mirror. She turned sideways, slid a hand over her full belly.
‘Shit,’ she said as she glanced at her reflection.
‘What’s that for?’ asked Constantine, coming through from the dressing room shrugging on his jacket, shooting his cuffs. His tie was hanging loose around his neck.
‘I won’t be able to wear even these slightly fitted things soon,’ she sighed.
The day of Lucco Barolli and Daniella Carlucci’s wedding had dawned bright and clear, as if the gods were smiling upon Long Island. The bride, with her mother, her sisters and her cousins, was up in the guest wing, putting the finishing touches to her ensemble. The house was in happy chaos, with the garden being set out for the ceremony with elaborate rose arches all the way up the pathway leading to the altar, where the priest would perform the ceremony. Small gold chairs had been set out in neat rows; florists were hurrying around. The caterers had arrived and taken over the kitchen. At the side of the house, long trestle tables were being covered in pink damask. Elaborate floral arrangements were placed down the centre to form a cascade of white, cream and lemon. The best silverware was being laid out with military precision; glasses were being polished by uniformed waiting staff until they sparkled in the sunlight.
By early afternoon the guests were taking their seats for the ceremony. As Annie checked her appearance, Constantine came and stood behind her, his eyes meeting hers in the reflection.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’ll look beautiful when you’re as big as the side of a house, too.’
Layla came running in. She was wearing a long pink taffeta dress with a matching headdress of pink and white roses. She was going to be flower girl today, scattering rose petals beneath the feet of Daniella the bride. Her dark green eyes, an exact match for Annie’s, shone with excitement. ‘Mummy, I’ve lost my flower basket!’
The nanny, Gerda, a thin, solemn-faced Nordic blonde, came dashing in after Layla, looking embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Barolli. Come on, Layla, I know where it is.’
‘You like my dress?’ asked Layla, twirling around.
‘Spectacular,’ said Annie, and Layla sped off with her nanny. The door closed behind them. Annie turned to Constantine with a slow smile. ‘Do you think they’ll be happy?’ she asked, knotting his tie for him.
‘Who? The bride, Layla . . .?’
‘The couple.’ Annie completed the knot and smoothed her hands down over his chest.
Constantine’s mind was suddenly full of an image of Cara, in tears over the state of her marriage. He sighed. ‘I hope so.’
‘But you don’t think so?’ she asked.
He linked his arms around her waist, nuzzled her neck. ‘I know you haven’t found Lucco the easiest person to get on with.’
There was an unspoken world in that simple sentence. Lucco hated her: always had, always would. She tolerated him, no more than that. Constantine was no fool; he had seen the friction between them – he could scarcely fail to.
‘I hope they’ll be happy,’ said Annie. For Daniella’s sake.
‘Have you considered the diplomatic corps as a career?’
‘Since marrying you? About once a day.’
‘We met on Cara’s wedding day,’ he said. ‘You remember? In London.’
Annie thought of the grey rainy streets, the old Palermo club that was now called Annie’s. She thought of Dolly running it, with Tony ferrying her around town, and Ellie in charge of the Limehouse knocking-shop where once she herself had reigned as queen. A hard pang of homesickness hit her. She was having a baby in a foreign country with a Mafia boss. Her friends were far away and her new husband’s family had not welcomed her – well, Alberto had, but that was all.
Oh, she kept busy here. She was going to launch the club in Times Square next year, and meanwhile she saw to the running of this household, and to the elegant, sprawling New York penthouse by Central Park where she spent a greater part of her time when Constantine was busy. She’d made many acquaintances but no real friends. In fact, she felt she was viewed more as a temporary curiosity than a permanent fixture, accorded politeness and respect because she was Constantine’s wife, certainly; but the warmth was only a veneer, not truly felt.
‘I remember,’ she said. London was a world away. This was her life now. She sighed and put her head against his chest. He kissed her hair, inhaling the clean, sweet scent of it.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Something up?’
‘Nothing.’ She looked up at him. She was the luckiest woman in the world. She had Layla; she had this stunning man in her bed; she was carrying his child; she had her own business interests – funded partly with Mafia money, but so what? – and she lived in comfort and security. What more could any woman want?
Constantine glanced at his Rolex. ‘It’s time we were downstairs,’ he said. He turned her in his arms and kissed her mouth.
‘Ruining my lipstick,’ she complained against his lips.
‘Yeah? Sue me,’ he said, and kissed her harder.
Chapter 21
Lucco made an impressive bridegroom. He was as smoothly, slickly handsome as always, his dark hair gleaming, his elegant bearing showing off his white jacket and bow tie to its best advantage. Daniella, an averagely pretty girl, looked almost beautiful today, her face flushed with happiness. She had many gifts of money pinned to her bridal gown, in the Sicilian tradition.
‘She looks gorgeous,’ said Annie at one point to Cara as they were standing beside each other. ‘So happy.’
Cara turned her head and gave a tight little smile to her stepmother.
‘That won’t last,’ she said. ‘Not with Lucco. She’ll soon learn.’
Annie went to ask her what she meant – she thought she knew, anyway – but when she looked at her stepdaughter’s face, Cara was staring across the garden at one of Constantine’s men. Annie recognized him as one of several drivers who ferried the family around, a tall young man with a sullen look to him. Cara’s face was set in an expression of extreme dislike. The young man – Annie thought his name was Fredo – gave a sneering half-smile in return.
Before Annie could speak again, Cara moved away.
‘Stepmom,’ said a male voice behind her.
Annie turned. It was Alberto. She smiled. Alberto was so like Constantine to look at; nothing like him in character. Constantine was an authoritarian with an edge of fire; Alberto was smoother and, if he had aggression – and she knew he must – it was more rigorously controlled than his father’s.
‘Stepson,’ she greeted him.
He kissed her cheek. ‘Having a good time?’
‘Oh, spiffing.’
‘Spiffing?’ He laughed. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means great.’ They stood side by side, looking at the happy couple at the high table.
‘Isn’t she lovely?’ marvelled Alberto, watching the bride. ‘Just think of it – Lucco, married. You know what, that’s scary. It’ll be me next.’
‘Anyone in mind?’
‘Would you divorce Papa and marry me instead?’
‘That’s a tempting offer, but no, I don’t think so.’
‘Then I don’t have anyone in mind.’
Annie smiled at him. She liked Alberto’s ways. In business he was polite and efficient. In his social life, she had found him to be the same. When he had women in his life – and there had been a few – he treated them well and somehow always managed to part from them on good terms.
‘Is Cara all right, do you think?’ she asked him.
‘Cara?’ Alberto looked over to where Cara was now standing, deep in conversation with Aunt Gina. ‘Why? Has she said something?’
‘No, nothing at all. It’s just a couple of times she’s seemed . . . I don’t know, sort of upset.’
‘She hasn’t said anything to me. I think maybe Rocco and she have been going through a rough patch again. Happens a lot, believe me.’
That probably explained it. Or did it? Annie thought again of the look that had passed between Cara and the young driver. Sick and furious on Cara’s part; sort of gloating on Fredo’s.
‘Well, better mingle,’ said Alberto, and was off among the crowds again. He met up with Rocco.
And there’s another miserable face, thought Annie.
Rocco was more than miserable. He soon made his excuses to get away from his brother-in-law. He was feeling too tense and unhappy to socialize, but he’d had to come today. It was expected of him; there was no way he could back out. Frances was making a thorough pest of himself. He’d only phoned at first, and then, when Rocco had blocked all his calls, he’d written letters, pouring out his heart, saying that he still loved Rocco, why had Rocco hurt him like that, why didn’t Rocco love him any more?
Rocco certainly did not. He ripped up all the letters and didn’t bother to reply. And then Frances had shown up at his door.
‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ he’d screamed at him, distressed by even looking at him.
My God, the ugliness of his face now. His mouth looked as though it reached his ears. There was purple mottled scarring, and the marks where the stitches had come out, and two of his fingers ended in stumps. Jesus, he was a mess!
‘I wanted to see you. That’s all,’ said Frances, trembling with the force of his love and desire for this heartless son of a bitch.
‘Well I don’t want to see you,’ said Rocco coldly. ‘And I’m warning you . . .’
‘What?’ Frances couldn’t believe it. The man he loved, the man he’d thought loved him, had defaced him, and was now threatening him again?
‘You heard. Try to come anywhere near me again and you’ll be sorry.’
Then, shaking, Rocco had slammed the door in that repulsive face. Frances had stayed there for almost half an hour, hammering on it, begging, crying, pleading. Rocco had stood there listening to it all, trembling all over, chewing his nails, wondering how the hell he could get rid of this monster.
But finally Frances had gone. And – so far – he hadn’t come back. But Rocco’s biggest fear was that he would. And he blamed his wife over and over in his mind, cursed her name, because she had caused this thing to be unleashed upon him – her and her father. As for his own father – well, nothing new there. His father didn’t give that about him.
Annie saw that the light was going now. A cool evening breeze was coming in off the ocean. Gerda came over, ushering a tired-looking Layla in front of her.
‘Say good night to your mama, Layla,’ said Gerda.
‘Night-night, Mommy,’ said Layla, holding up her arms for a kiss and a cuddle. Annie happily delivered both.
‘You had a good day, sweetie?’ she asked, hugging her tight, inhaling the sweet scent of her skin.
‘Yeah, good.’ She grinned.
‘I’ll be up later to tuck you in, okay?’
The evening stars were winking on up in the blackening heavens. The mariachi band struck up and the bridal couple took to the floor to cheering and clapping. Other couples started to drift onto the dance floor. She saw Constantine in a huddle with several other men, talking intently.
She watched him, concerned. She’d heard the rumbles about the Cantuzzi clan; there had already been trouble. Shit, there was always trouble. But he seemed to handle it well; nothing ruffled him. At least, nothing appeared to. Sometimes she found it hard to equate the two strands of his personality – the cool, controlling Don, and the tender, considerate husband. Sometimes he seemed like two different men entirely.
She went to slip upstairs but, as she passed the doors onto the terrace, she saw that there was no one out there. She went outside onto the decking, and was instantly enveloped in the rush and thunder of the ocean, the stiff breeze riffling through her hair. She walked to the edge of the terrace and looked over the deserted beach, breathing deeply of the fresh, tangy air. The presents were piled up on the table at the end of the terrace, ready for the Don to present them to the couple at ten o’clock.
God, she was tired! The pregnancy was taking a toll on her energy levels. She gripped the rail and looked up at the nearly full moon. It was so weird to think that men had walked up there; that Apollo 15 was in orbit right now, gliding through space.
‘Honey? What are you doing out here all alone?’ asked a voice behind her.
‘Just taking a moment,’ said Annie, turning to smile at Constantine as he stepped out onto the deck and closed the French doors behind him. He looked at the pile of presents and picked up the one at the front of the table, the biggest, with a red bow over sky-blue paper. ‘Hey, wonder what’s in this one?’ he asked, walking towards her.
Then her whole world exploded.
Majorca
Chapter 22
February 1970
The first thing the man knew was pain. Pain, then blinding light. Something was moving through the light. Shapes. Maybe birds.
Buzzards?
They were circling overhead, like in an old Western movie when the gunman’s been laid out to die by the Sioux or the Apache. He’d been laid out to die too, and die he would, because for sure he couldn’t move. Everything was pain. Any movement – oh, and how he had tried to move – hurt like a bastard. So he’d just lie back and let it all unravel. He had decided that was the best thing to do. Let the buzzards come down and pick him clean. Get it over with. No more struggling, no more fighting.
Thoughts, though. His thoughts said move. His guts said move.
Couldn’t. No good.
Images too, drifting through his brain. A shot. A man falling into the pool, a spreading stain of crimson tinting the water. A girl, screaming.
Move, you sod. Come on.
But his body wouldn’t listen to the urgings of his mind. It said no. You kidding? Lie there and die, man, we are all out of alternatives.
His mouth was so dry. His lips felt cracked. The sun was burning him. Burning him up. He closed his eyes.
Bells.
Tiny tinkling bells – now he was hearing things. Maybe this was what it was like, dying; maybe everything went blank, like his mind was blank right now. Why couldn’t he think straight, what was wrong with him . . .? Maybe the blankness came first, and then the bells. They were getting louder. He’d be hearing heavenly choirs next and, frankly, that would be nice. He could just give up, and die.
But for now, it was just bells. Getting louder and louder. And now . . . a little movement, a little wetness nudging at his neck. Something was there. An angel, must be. Bringing him water. He forced his eyes to open.
He looked into slitted eyes, devil’s eyes.
Ah shit.
Not heaven then, and no angel coming to fetch him. He was bound for hell. This was an imp, a tool of Satan, here to bring him home to eternal damnation.
He tried to move again then, to protest, to say no, I’ve been a good man.
But . . . had he?
He didn’t know. Couldn’t think. Again, there was that frightening blankness, pressing upon his mind like a white wall of fog.
The thing’s face was brown, hairy. The eyes were yellow. The face loomed over him, terrifying. Leaned closer, closer, touched his neck again. Coldness, moistness. An icy brush of metal.
Bells.
A bell on the neck of the thing: jangling, deafening.
A groan escaped him and the thing twitched back, startled by the sudden noise.
A goat. He was looking at a goat, not a devil.
He could almost have laughed at that, if he’d had the strength. But he didn’t. All he could do was lie there. Exhausted. Damaged. His eyes fluttered closed, and he hardly even heard the soft footsteps of the boy coming closer. Damned goat nudging him again. His eyes came open, the glare of the sun, buzzards, a nut-brown human face coming in close, blotting out the unbearable heat and light.
‘¿Señor?’ said the face. ‘¿Se cayó?’
He closed his eyes. He understood. Did you fall? the boy was asking him. But he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything.
The goatherd gave the man water, then went to alert the monks at the nearby monastery. The boy was shaking with fright because he thought that by the time he returned with the help of the brothers, the man might be dead. But, when they got there, the brothers having struggled and panted and sweated with effort as they traversed the uneven and, in parts, treacherous rocky ground, the man seemed still to be clinging to life, even though his injuries were horrendous.
The brothers looked him over while the boy watched them nervously. They’d brought a stretcher from the monastery’s small sick room, but one look at the man – who wore nothing but a brief pair of swimming shorts – made them doubt he would survive the journey back up to the monastery.
Both ankles were shattered into bloody pulp.
His left arm was broken, the bone protruding through the skin, so bad was the break.
There was a deep, nasty-looking gash on his head. Flies buzzed there, feasting on the drying blood, laying their eggs in the open wound. His lips and the skin on his face were cracked from the extreme heat of the sun. He was feverish. God alone knew how long he had lain there on this precarious rocky platform above the sea, because the man was making no sense. He needed water, and shelter. And even then, the brothers warned his young rescuer, there was every chance that he would die.
‘Be warned, child, he might not get through this,’ one of them told him.
The boy, distressed, looked at the man. He had found him, rescued him. He felt an attachment for him, of course he did.
‘I don’t want him to die,’ he told the monks.
‘God may spare him,’ they said, and they looked at the man and thought that perhaps it would be better if God took him. He looked athletic, fit; he would not, they felt sure, relish a half-life. And they could already see that, if he survived, he was going to live out the rest of his life as a cripple.
Chapter 23
The monks had a long, hard and perilous job getting the man stretchered off the cliff and onto the nearest dirt track of a road. Once there, one of the younger brothers ran ahead to take the one battered old car the monastery possessed down to the village so that an ambulance could be called to take him to hospital in Palma. There was no phone at the monastery.
Brother Benito went with the poor wretch, who seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, murmuring foreign-sounding words under his breath.
‘Who is he?’ asked the medics.
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- Жанр: Зарубежные приключения, Книги о приключениях, Современная зарубежная литература
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 370 стр. 1 иллюстрация
- ISBN: 9780007332960
- Дата выхода книги: 29 декабря 2018
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
Annie Carter is back…
She was a madam in a brothel and a gangster’s moll, but now her protection is gone and her enemies are closing in.
1971, London gang boss Annie Carter Barolli is living the New York high life with the feared mafia godfather Constantine Barolli. Then family tragedy strikes, leaving only Annie, Constantine’s sister Gina and his three children alive, and now they’re in terrible danger. And what’s worse – it signals a major shift in mafia power.
Annie returns to London with her daughter Layla, pursued by a hit man. Someone wants her dead and the only way she can stay alive is to find out who’s paying for the contract and to strike first.
Then, the reappearance of an old East End face sparks a shocking suspicion – the possibility that Max Carter, Annie’s first and greatest love, didn’t die two years ago, as she had been led to believe.
Has he truly just been playing dead?
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