Stiletto
The original Mafia novel, from America’s master storyteller…
“Harold Robbins is a master!”
—Playboy
“Robbins’ books are packed with action, sustained by a strong narrative drive and are given vitality by his own colorful life.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Robbins is one of the “world’s five bestselling authors… each week, an estimated 280,000 people… purchase a Harold Robbins book.”
—Saturday Review
“Robbins grabs the reader and doesn’t let go…”
—Publishers Weekly
Stiletto
Harold Robbins
Copyright
Stiletto
Copyright © 2014 by Jann Robbins
Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795341410
Many thanks to the man who wears the hat, Bradley Yonover.
This novel is only one of my loves, but the greatest love of my life is my beautiful wife, Jann.
Table of Contents
Foreword
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Harold Robbins, Unguarded
Harold Robbins titles from RosettaBooks
FOREWORD
Harold Robbins’s Memories
I began working in a grocery store on 125th Street near the corner of Convent Avenue in Harlem when I was seventeen years old. My job was a combination of delivering orders, cleaning the floor with a rag mop, dusting the shelves that held the cans and packages, and refilling the stock on the shelves when empty.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a very busy job because there were three other clerks who worked at the grocery store and helped the customers with their purchases. I had enough time to hide out in the back room and read the magazines that the clerks always seemed to leave open on the cases in the storeroom. They were exciting reading. I would take them home with me to my room at Mrs. Green’s boarding house. In a short time I had my room covered, wall-to-wall, with these magazines. I remember their names: Amazing Stories, Ace Magazine, and Detective Stories.
As I grew older, I was surprised that everyone knew and loved these stories. By this time, I had been introduced by a friend who worked for the library to reading hardcover novels. It was in the thirties that I first read a novel by Donald Henderson Clark called Louis Beretti. I loved it and found a new world. It was the story of an Italian boy growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, smoking opium with his Chinese friends, and learning about love and sex with his girl on the rooftops of the tenements. He grew up and became a killer. As soon as I finished reading this novel, I went to the library to check out another book by the same author. This book was Millie, all about a Lower East Side girl who worked her way up in society and married a very rich Fifth Avenue man who was president of a Wall Street bank. The two books were fantastic, and I soon learned that they had been made into movies.
I never thought I would become an author, but early in the forties I got a job working in the warehouse of Universal Pictures. Again, there was always plenty to read, books as well as movie scripts. While I was working as a shipping clerk, I discovered a way to save the studio a lot of money. As a result, I was transferred to the budget and planning department. I got lucky again and was soon promoted to assistant to the vice president of production. After I had been in this job for several months, my boss ordered me to write a check for $300,000 as payment for a book he wanted to make into a movie. I had read this book. I told him it was lousy and that anyone, even I, could write a better book than this one. He laughed and bet me one hundred dollars that I could not write anything more than checks.
Two years later, to my surprise, my first novel was published. As part of the publicity for the book, Never Love a Stranger, I was invited on an important radio program called Books on Trial, hosted by one of New York’s most important critics, Sterling Lord. It was a half-hour program broadcast during evening prime time. As I sat in the witness chair, my knees were already shaking. The cast included myself, as the author on trial for Never Love a Stranger; the prosecuting attorney, who was supposed to destroy the book; and the defense attorney on the side of the book, who was a well-known newspaper columnist who would appraise the novel and me as the author. I was sweating near the end of the program because the prosecuting attorney said it was stupid to think that readers would believe there was a crime syndicate in existence. It was then I had the best idea of my life. I told him that he was stupid to believe that there was not such a thing as a crime syndicate. He evidently had not read the newspapers, about the Kefauver Commission in Congress. The Mafia was all over the newspapers and if they were not a syndicate, what were they?
It was then that I began to develop an idea for a novel about the Mafia. In the back of my head I already had thought of an extraordinary character, but it would be many years and four novels before I would write Stiletto.
In that time, I read and learned a great deal about the Mafia, such as how its members came from Sicily to America and found their way into many businesses, illegal and legal.
Count Cesare Cardinali was ordered to go to the United States by his Sicilian Mafia don. To the outside world he drove dangerous, high-speed automobiles and owned a foreign car dealership on Park Avenue in New York. The world also knew that he was one of the most romantic playboys in New York society, one the newspapers wrote about every day. What the world did not know about him was that he was a deadly assassin who belonged to the Mafia.
Stiletto is one of my favorite novels. I feel even today, after many great novels have been written about the Mafia, that Stiletto was one of the most important forerunners.
1
It was after ten o’clock and there were only three men at the bar and one man at a table in the rear when the hustler came in. A blast of the cold night air came in with her.
She climbed up on a stool and let her thin winter coat fall from her shoulders. “Gimme a beer,” she said.
Silently the bartender drew a glass of beer and placed it in front of her. He picked up the quarter and rang it up.
“Any action tonight, Jimmy?” she asked, her eyes searching the men at the bar for a response to her question.
The bartender shook his head. “Not tonight, Maria. It’s Sunday night and all the turistas are home in their beds.” He walked away and began to polish some glasses under the bar. He watched her sip at her beer. Maria. He called them all Maria. The little Puerto Rican girls with their bright shiny black eyes and their hard little breasts and buttocks. He wondered when she had had her last shot.
The hustler gave up on the men at the bar. She turned to look at the man seated at the table. She could only see his back but she could te
ll from the cut of his clothing that he wasn’t local. She looked questioningly at the bartender. He shrugged his shoulders and she slid off her stool and started back to the table.
The man was looking down at his whisky glass when she stopped beside him. “Lonesome, señor?” she asked.
She knew the moment he lifted his head to look at her what his answer would be. The dark ice-blue eyes and tanned face and hungry mouth. Men such as he never bought their pleasures, they took them.
“No, thank you,” Cesare said politely.
The hustler smiled vaguely, nodded her head and went back to the bar. She climbed up on the stool again and took out a cigarette.
The stocky little bartender held a match for her. “Like I said,” he whispered, smiling, “it’s Sunday night.”
The girl dragged deep on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. “I know,” she said tonelessly, the first faint sign of worry appearing on her face. “But I gotta keep workin’. It’s an expensive habit.”
The telephone in the booth beside the bar began to ring and the bartender left her to answer it. He came out of the booth and walked over to Cesare’s table. “Para usted, señor.”
“Mil gracias,” Cesare answered, going to the telephone. “Hello,” he said as he closed the door of the booth.
The woman’s voice was almost a whisper. She spoke in Italian. “It will have to be in the morning,” she said, “before he appears in court.”
Cesare answered in the same language. “There is no other place?”
“No,” she said, her voice very clear in the receiver despite its softness. “We have not been able to learn where he is coming from. We only know that he will appear at court at eleven o’clock.”
“And the others?” Cesare asked. “Are they still in the same place?”
“Yes,” she answered. “In Las Vegas and Miami. Are your plans made?”
“I have everything in readiness,” Cesare replied.
The woman’s voice grew harsh. “The man must die before he sits in the witness chair. The others too.”
Cesare laughed shortly. “Tell Don Emilio not to worry. They are all as good as dead right now.”
He put down the telephone and walked out into the dark Spanish Harlem night. He turned his collar up against the cold winter wind and began to walk. Two blocks away on Park Avenue he caught a lone cruising taxi. He climbed into it. “El Morocco,” he said to the driver.
He sank back into his seat and lit a cigarette, an excitement beginning inside him. It was real now. For the first time since the war it was real again. He remembered how it was the first time. The first girl and the first death. Strange how they always seemed to come together. The reality of living was never greater than when you held death clutched tightly in your hands.
***
It seemed a long time ago. He was fifteen years old and the year was 1935. There had been a parade in the little Sicilian village at the foot of the mountain that day. The Fascisti were always having parades. There were banners and pictures of Il Duce everywhere. His scowling face and angry clenched fist and piglike bulging eyes. Live Dangerously. Be Italian. Italy Means Strength.
It had been evening when Cesare reached the foot of the mountain on his way home. He looked up. The castle stood there on the edge of a promontory near the peak. Ornate and ugly. As it had been for almost six hundred years. Since some long-gone ancestor, the first Count Cardinali, took to wife a daughter of the family Borgia.
He had started up the mountain past Gandolfo’s vineyard and the heavy smell of the black grapes came out to him. He could still remember the drums beating and the excitement inside him that night. His mind was filled with the old recruiting sergeant’s lewd stories of the orgies that took place in Il Duce’s palace.
“Collones!” the old soldier had chortled. “There never was such collones in all the history of Italy! Five different girls he had in one night. I know for it was my duty to bring each one of them to him. And each girl left bowlegged, as if she had been mounted by a bull. While he, he was up at six o’clock in the morning, strong and fresh, leading us in two hours of drill.” The spittle ran down his cheeks. “I tell you young fellows, if it’s women you want, the uniform of the Italian Army will get them for you. It makes every girl think she’s getting a piece of Il Duce!”
It was then that Cesare had seen the girl. She had come from in back of the Gandolfo house. He had seen her before but never when his senses had been so aflame. She was a tall, strong, full-breasted animal, this daughter of the wine-maker, and she was carrying a skin of wine from the cooling house in the back field near the stream. She paused when she saw him.
He stopped and looked at her. The heat of the day was still heavy in him and he wiped the beads of sweat from his face with the back of his arm.
Her voice was very soft and respectful. “Perhaps the signor would like a drink of cooling wine?”
He nodded, not speaking, and walked toward her. He held the skin high and the red wine ran down his throat, spilling over his chin. He felt the grape bite into him and warm him inside and cool him at the same time. He gave the skin back to her and they stood there looking at each other.
Slowly a redness crept up from her throat and bosom into her face and her eyes fell. He could see the sudden thrusting of her nipples against the thin peasant blouse and the swell of her breasts over the top of it.
He turned away from her and began to walk into the woods. From the generations of knowledge deep inside him came the command that had no doubt about its ability to possess.
“Come!”
Obediently, almost as if she were an automaton, the girl followed him. Deep into the woods where the trees were so thick one could hardly see the sky above. She sank to the ground beside him and never said a word while his fingers stripped the clothing from her body.
He knelt there for a moment, studying the strong muscular lines of her body, the full plum-tipped breasts, the flat muscular belly that rose and fell, her heavy strong legs. He felt a torrent rise inside him and he threw himself across her.
It was the first time for him but not for her. Twice he screamed in an agony as she locked him tightly to her then, spent, he rolled away and lay breathing heavily on the moist ground beside her.
She turned toward him silently, her fingers and mouth exploring, probing. At first he pushed her away, then his hands touched her breasts and froze there. Involuntarily he squeezed and she cried out in pain.
For the first time now he looked into her face. Her eyes were wide and moisture was full in them. He squeezed again. Again she cried out. But this time her eyes were closed. There were tears in their corners but her mouth was open in a gasping ecstasy as if she sought to gulp strength from the air.
A sense of power he had never known before came up in him. Cruelly now, he tightened his fingers. This time her scream of pain sent the birds shrilling from the perches in the trees. Her eyes flew open and she stared at him, then worshipfully she bent her head to his suddenly reawakened body.
It was dark when he began to walk away from her. He felt strong and complete and the grass was like carpet beneath his feet. He was almost at the edge of the small clearing when her voice stopped him.
“Signor!”
He turned around. She was on her feet now and her nude body gleamed in the dark as if it sprang from the very earth itself. Her eyes were luminous pools in her face. She half smiled to herself, a pride and satisfaction deep within her. The others would be jealous when she told them of this. This was no laborer, no itinerant crop worker. This was the blood, the true blood, the future Count Cardinali.
“Grazia!” she said sincerely.
He nodded curtly and plunged into the woods and was gone from her sight before she could bend to pick up her clothing.
It was six weeks later at the fencing school down in the village that Cesare next heard of her. The Maestro had long since given up teaching Cesare who was far superior to his ageing skills and only attended
classes to keep in practice. The door had opened and a young soldier entered.
He came into the small gymnasium and looked around, his modern Il Duce’s guard uniform oddly out of place in this ancient atmosphere of swords. His voice was tense. “Which one of you is known by the name of Cesare Cardinali?”
There was a sudden silence in the room. The two young men who were fencing put down their foils and turned to the newcomer. Cesare came slowly from the wall where he had been practicing with the weights.
He stopped in front of the soldier. “I am,” he said.
The soldier stared at him. “I am the affianced of my cousin, Rosa,” he said tightly.
Cesare looked at him. He knew no one by that name. “And who is she?” he asked politely.
“Rosa Gandolfo!” The name tore angrily from the soldier’s lips. “And I am called from my post in Rome to marry her because you have made her with child!”
Cesare stared at him for a moment as the understanding came to him. Then he relaxed slightly. “Is that all?” he asked, a strange feeling of pride beginning to come up inside him. “I will speak to my father, the Count, about some money for you.”
He turned and started to walk away. The soldier spun him around again. “Money?” he shouted. “Is that all you think I want? Money? No!”
Cesare looked at him coldly. “As you wish. Then I will not speak with my father.”
The soldier’s hand slashed across his face. “I demand satisfaction!”
The handprint stood out clearly on Cesare’s suddenly white face. He stared at the soldier without fear. “The Cardinalis find no honor in fighting with a commoner.”
The soldier spat forth the words venomously: “The Cardinalis are cowards, pimps and despoilers of women! And you, the bastard son, are more like them than they are themselves! Il Duce was right when he said that the aristocrats of Italy are sick and decadent and that they must give way to the strength of the paisanos!”
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