by Jessie Keane
‘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.
‘I don’t know,’ said Benito, his kind eyes watching as they attended the man. He was hot and dusty himself from the climb on the dangerously exposed rock face; he couldn’t imagine what the man had gone through, lying out there in the boiling sun. For how long? That thought tormented him. To think of the man out there in agony for hours, perhaps even days.
It was a shame, but perhaps death would be a release for him. Brother Benito knew that death was hovering very close to this poor stranger; perhaps it would be a mercy if he was taken.
The medics were glancing at each other. The man seemed to be a foreigner from what he was babbling, and he had no clothes with him. Who was going to cover the cost of his care?
‘The monastery will pay for his treatment,’ said Brother Benito, seeing clearly where their thoughts were straying. He was a lost soul, poor man; it was an honour to play the Good Samaritan, to offer whatever little help might be of use.
The man’s dark blue eyes were opening, and the medics hovered more closely over him, asking him who he was, where he was from.
The man’s eyes stared at them with blank pain. Then, slowly, he said, in English, ‘I don’t know.’
His eyes closed again.
The medics looked at Brother Benito.
‘He says he doesn’t know,’ the brother told them. Benito was a learned man; he spoke five languages, including English, which was clearly the man’s native tongue. ‘Perhaps the blow to his head or the lack of water has made him confused.’
They nodded. The man seemed to have lapsed back into unconsciousness; and Benito thought that those brief, bewildered words would probably be the last he ever uttered.
The man was in a very bad way; the doctors all agreed on this as they pored over the X-rays of
his feet. They put him on a drip at first, because he was so severely dehydrated. When he occasionally regained consciousness, he seemed to have no idea who he was or where he came from. More X-rays were taken of his head, his ribs, his arms, his legs.
He’d suffered a severe blow to the head, but there were no fractures in his skull, no dangerous build-ups of blood pressing on the brain. Two ribs were broken but had – by good luck – punctured no soft internal organs. They would be strapped up, and would heal. His arm was a bad break but a clean one, and it was quickly set, plastered, sorted.
His ankles, however, were quite another matter.
The man was lucid sometimes, then suddenly not. Sometimes he was hearing the rapid Mallorquin tongue being spoken as the medics clustered around the end of his bed; sometimes he was not even aware they were there. He knew – from the snatches he heard – what they were saying, though.
It wasn’t good.
One ankle was very badly broken. And the other – and here there were mutterings of Madre de Dios – the other ankle was so severely damaged that amputation might well be in order. There was little hope of this man ever walking again. Even after the necessary surgery, the outcome would be doubtful.
He heard that, but couldn’t believe it. Not to walk again?
He closed his eyes, felt a spasm of intense fear. He couldn’t feel the pain any more – they’d drugged him, he was sleepy and confused; and now he was also really, really afraid.
Who the fuck am I? he wondered. How did I get here?
But when he managed to ask a question, they just gave him some pile of shit about no damage to the temporal lobe of his brain, where language and memory were stored. They were more concerned with his ankle injuries.
Jesus! Is this right what they’re saying? Am I going to be a cripple?
But they just smiled reassuringly at him when he asked that and, fuck it, he was anything but reassured. He wanted to leap up and shout, tell them they weren’t making sense, but he couldn’t. He felt limp with weariness. Then there was the light sting of a needle entering his arm, and he was being wheeled down corridors, passing lights, nurses walking alongside him, smiling reassuringly.