“Does Belladonna know what she means to women like me?” Alison asks, interrupting my matchmaking thoughts.
“No,” I say, “I really don’t think she does.”
“Will you tell her for me?”
“Of course. And now one of our drivers will take you home.” I escort her outside, where Dickie G., one of our off-duty cops, is waiting in a Cadillac that seems to take up half he block.
I’d like to give you a hug,” Alison says. “Then I think I might believe this is really happening.”
“We’re not much on hugging in the Club Belladonna,” I say, not wanting to hurt her feelings. I know I am eminently huggable, but I am a little self-conscious about my girth. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
She smiles, gets in the car, and waves good-bye. She will be even more astonished, I know, when Dickie hands her three packages. “The envelope’s for you and the ladies you work with,” he says, “to be divided evenly for preparation expenses or anything else. The larger package is for your mother, and the small one’s just for you. I’ve got something for your son in the trunk.” Inside the envelope are eighteen crisp hundred-dollar bills; inside the large package is a pale blue cashmere shawl; and inside the smaller is a pair of Belladonna’s kidskin gloves in a shade of honey brown that exactly matches Alison’s hair. Her son will be amazed when he sees the electric train set. There are so many boxes, Dickie has to make three trips up Alison’s stairs.
It’s the little gestures that count.
At the Countryside Ball a few weeks later, one of the banquette tables is a vision, decked out with a dozen masked shepherdesses. No, I haven’t miscounted; we added three of our Washington Street “hookers” to round out the number and not cause any suspicions. One of the waiters confidentially tells Paulie and Suzie-Anne that the shepherdesses next to them are visiting from Iceland, so they won’t think the fetching creatures can speak English and recognize a telltale voice.
All we need are some sheep.
Paulie is dressed as a country auctioneer, while Suzie-Anne is dolled up as the auctioneer’s wife. Which means she is really not in a costume at all. She is, in fact, still complaining that the bitch of a coat-check lady made her check her beloved fox-head stole. “But foxes come from the country!” Suzie-Anne protested, to no avail.
Belladonna herself looks like a pink Dresden shepherdess as she climbs up onstage. Her bodice is pale pink satin, like her mask; her skirt, different shades of rose pink over cerise-pink petticoats. Her lipstick and gloves are a bright shocking pink, and her rings are glistening pink tourmalines.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she announces to rapt applause. “Thank you for joining me at my Countryside Ball.” She opens her fan, painted with what seems to be a bucolic scene of a fresh-cheeked Jack clambering up the hill with a blushing Jill, and begins waving it idly to and fro.
“The law of the countryside"of nature, I should say instead"is survival of the fittest, is it not?” she asks sweetly.
There is no immediate reply, because the guests in the Club Belladonna are puzzled. Is this meant to be a special Belladonna kind of rhetorical question? What if they give her the wrong answer? Will she lift the lid off one of her rings and drop some bubbling poison into their drinks?
“Only the fittest are allowed inside the Club Belladonna, are they not?” she goes on. “How many of you consider yourselves the strongest and most powerful creatures in the country? You, sir?” she asks, pointing her fan at one man, who turns as scarlet as Belladonna’s shoes. “Or you?” She points to another. “Or you? Are you the hunter, or the fox? The strong, or the weak?”
She takes a step closer to the edge of the stage. “If indeed the law of the countryside is survival of the strongest, what happens to the weakest? Where can they turn? Who will protect them? Must the hunter always catch the fox?”
She steps off the stage, the spotlight following her as usual. “Who looks after the weak?” she continues, the sweetness of her voice instantly hardening into a cold tremor. “Who punishes those who prey upon the weak? Who hunts the hunter who kills the fox?”
She walks slowly from table to table, pausing to ask each couple, “Who is strong, and who is weak?” Sometimes she stops before a group of terrified yet exhilarated guests, and they can sense her frigid smile taunting them. “Who is the hunter?” she asks. “And who is the fox?”
Who are you? Why are you here?
“She’s the strong one,” one man says, pointing to his wife with such alacrity that Belladonna laughs, and the room breathes a collective sigh of relief at that delicious sound. How quickly they forget that only seconds before her voice had chilled the marrow of their bones.
Belladonna moves on, trailing her fan over one milkmaid’s wig and pulling a piece of hay from her date’s straw hat to chew on. Everyone is laughing now, indulging Belladonna’s little joke. She stops before a group of farmers, and their wives, dressed for a square dance, their costumes clearly homemade. “They’re the hunters,” one of the farmer’s wives proudly announces, linking her arm in her husband’s.
“Hunting for his two left feet, you mean,” another wife says, and everybody giggles.
“Then you must dance for us,” Belladonna tells them, and they look at each other with happy amazement while she whispers instructions to one of the waiters.
She continues around the room, stopping to talk at every table, as all her guests volunteer to be either the fox or the hunter, amid much merriment. Just as the band is beginning to warm up for a toe-tapping reel, she pauses between two tables near her own. One is full of shepherdesses in brightly colored costumes, their blond braids tied with gingham ribbons; a rather portly and self-important couple is sitting at the other. “Country auctioneers, I see,” Belladonna says to the couple. “Who, then, is the hunter, and who is the fox?”
Lucky for Suzie-Anne she isn’t wearing her beloved fox stole right now. Still, she blushes deeply.
“Aha, the fox,” Belladonna says to Suzie-Anne, her voice still low and mellifluous. Then she looks at Paulie. “You must be the hunter. How splendid. A rare sight in the countryside. A rare sight indeed: the fox and the hunter, peacefully side by side.”
Paulie and Suzie-Anne have no idea what to do. No one’s paying much attention to them, with the fiddle tuning up and the raucous conversation ringing in their ears, but Belladonna’s strangely calm presence is making them nervous. They wish fervently that she’d go away, when only minutes before they’d been gloating about being seated so close to the goddess’s banquette.
“Tell me, kind sir, what do you hunt?” Belladonna asks Paulie.
“I don’t know"” he starts to say.
“Oh yes, you do,” Belladonna replies, leaning over to him and placing her fan sharply under his chin. “You know very well indeed. You, the strong. You, the hunter.” She moves her fan over to Suzie-Anne’s many quivering chins. “And you, fine lady, you, too, know very well indeed. Does that make you, the fox, strong or weak?”
Then Belladonna quickly pulls her fan away and returns to the table of square dancers. “Where’s my little haystack gone?” she calls out. “It’s time for him to watch the dance.” Everyone laughs once more. Everyone except Paulie and Suzie-Anne.
“I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense,” Paulie is saying, his cheeks stained a deeper pink than Belladonna’s kidskin gloves as he moves to get up. “Those bitches must have"” He freezes, though, startled by the sudden appearance of my darling big brother, who is blocking their intended exit. Matteo signals to them to stay put, and they have no choice but to obey the sinister doorman. All they can see are his eyes glowing behind his mask and the mocking downturn of his lips.
“Paulie and Suzie-Anne Baldwin, I presume, of Baldwin Import-Export?” Matteo asks. “Well, well, the fox and the hunter, Paulie, the hunter of women. Suzie-Anne, his little pet fox.” Matteo’s voice is pleasantly conversational, loud enough to be heard only at the next table. He is hardly lisping,
so intent is he on making his point. “I have a few words of advice for you,” he goes on. “If you hunt any woman in your employ, any woman whatsoever, I am personally going to hunt you down and chop your balls off.”
This specific topic is my suggested addition for the evening’s entertainment. Matteo didn’t want to say anything like this any more than I wanted to think it up, but I knew it would add a special kind of resonance to his warning.
“Then I am going to take a butcher knife and cut your balls up into tiny pieces while you watch,” Matteo continues. “And then I am going to pry open those lips that spill lies and cause pain, and I am going to shove them down your throat.”
All the shepherdesses are listening intently, but Paulie doesn’t notice them. His cheeks are now dead white.
Matteo turns to Suzie-Anne. “Shall I tell you what I’m going to do to the fox?” he asks. She shakes her head nervously, her lips beginning to blubber. “Very well. Have I made myself perfectly clear?” They both nod vigorously. “We’re going to be watching you, the fox and the hunter, and I can assure you that it’s not nice being the hunted, wondering when we’re coming to get you. Rest assured, my dear Baldwins, we will get you.”
Matteo straightens up, smiles, and ushers them out, giving them a complimentary bottle of perfume they don’t know how to refuse. Josie gently drapes Suzie-Anne’s beloved fox stole over her shoulders. For some reason, Josie neglects to tell her that she’s been busy sewing frozen baby shrimp into the heads of the little foxes. As soon as they thaw and begin to decompose, Suzie-Anne’s adored fur is going to stink with a most mysterious stench. One that makes the sulfurous waters of Saturnia seem like a summer bouquet of honeysuckle rose.
When I tell this to the table of shepherdesses, we laugh for a good long time. Even Norma is laughing.
Let me add only that, not long after the Countryside Ball, the nine female employees of Baldwin Import-Export walk out of the office one day and never come back. They’ve all gone to work for higher pay and better jobs at Paulie’s most hated rival, taking his biggest client in the process. It wouldn’t surprise me if Alison ends up running the company herself one day. She’s always had the savvy. All she needed was a small steer in the right direction.
I’ll ask Jack to keep an eye on her progress. Besides, it isn’t too difficult to ask for a slight favor or two in the import-export business, you see. There are still a great many people who owe one to a certain shipping magnate named Leandro della Robbia.
Ah, Leandro, the very thought of you nearly breaks my heart. Can you see us? Can you send us a sign? What would you have said to us as the bewigged shepherdesses erupted in joyful celebration?
If only the Baldwins were people more important to Belladonna. Someone, anyone, just one member of the Club. It is so hard to be patient. She will get him. Of that, I have no doubts.
It’s just taking a lot longer than any of us would like.
8
Voices That Could
Melt a Glacier
Matteo seems to have found his voice. It is all because of Annabeth, and I’m happy for him, truly I am. So is Belladonna. Don’t doubt me on this one. We never dared dream that one of us might find some measure of normalcy, to be surrounded by comfort and love. Belladonna is not so cruel that she would deny it to my brother.
Except there is one minor problem.
It’s not that Annabeth is pressuring him, or, indeed, expecting Matteo to share her bed, but the issue is going to come up"or not, in this case"and there’s no getting around it
“What am I going to do?” he asks me one afternoon. “She deserves a whole man.”
“She had a whole man, and look what he did to her,” I retort. “Besides, she has children already, so that can’t be too much of a worry.”
“It’s not having children. You know what I’m talking about”
“I have vague recollections that there are other ways of giving a woman pleasure, you know.”
“Of course there are. I just don’t know how to tell her. What if she doesn’t want me?”
My heart flips over with tenderness for my darling big brother. “How could she not want you?” I say with some indignation. “She’s madly in love with you. This is just a tiny little glitch.”
“Don’t be a fool, Tomasino. It’s a lot more than a tiny little glitch.”
“I’m not a fool. I’ll be glad to tell her, if you want me to. It won’t bother me at all,” I say brashly, lying through my teeth. Anything for Matteo, anything to get this over with. The shame of our condition and the secrecy we impose upon ourselves are terrible burdens, especially when a person thrives on sympathy and concern the way I do. “And you know what, it’s about time that Jack heard this story, so we’ll ask him to join us. Let me do all the talking.”
“What else is new?” Matteo asks, and I know his feeble comment is his way of trying to console me.
I’ll need his consolation when I am through, looking at Annabeth’s and Jack’s stoic faces a few days later as we sit and have tea in Belladonna’s banquette in the club a few hours before opening. They know something’s up. I decided we should meet in neutral territory, as Belladonna is not yet ready to have a woman"even one so dear to Matteo"come to the house and blow our cover. This way, Annabeth can leave if she wants to, and Matteo can put his mask on and cover his misery at the front door. He’s sitting now at the edge of the banquette, staring down at the highly polished dance floor. I try not to look at his face.
I pour a rather large shot of single malt into my tea, even though a nice bracing hot toddy is hardly enough to get me through what I’m about to say.
How many years has it been since that damp afternoon when my brother and I were tortured and cut? Ten? Yes, ten, that’s right: It was 1943, and we were up in the mountains near the Italian/Swiss border. What month was it? I don’t want to remember. It was cold, that’s enough. I have blanked out the very worst, although I have always coped with our situation better than Matteo. Must be my naturally genial disposition, or maybe because my much-maligned powers of speech thankfully remain intact. Bored with all the screaming, they casually snipped the tip of Matteo’s tongue when he still wouldn’t talk. I’ve never seen so much blood. Or at least I hadn’t until they cut us where it hurt the most, then threw our most cherished flesh to the dogs to stop their barking.
Then they left the room abruptly, and never returned. How His Lordship stumbled upon us"how an Englishman like him even got to the Germans in that part of Italy at that point in the war"remains a mystery, but I decided he was double-dealing with the Fascisti, or whoever was expedient, and they crossed him. Then he crossed them worse, killed them all, took their prisoners, their money, their guns, and disappeared.
When we heard the click of the lock on our cell we steeled ourselves for death, which considering what had befallen us might not have been such a horror for yours truly, as I had been a gloriously sex-obsessed young buck. Instead, we looked up from the blood-soaked floor to see the glossy polish of leather brogues and the hem of a loden cloak, wrapped around a bearded man wearing, surprisingly, sunglasses, the rest of his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat and a scarf. He beckoned to us with gloved fingers, and we crawled after him.
It was a terrible blur; I don’t want to remember the journey, bouncing, bleeding still, and trying not to moan too loudly in the back of a convoy of long cars with fluttering flags. It was a marvel indeed that this man and his gang managed to drive through Switzerland and into occupied France; with what conniving connections, bribes, and thievery they arranged the gasoline and the route at the height of the fighting, I didn’t want to know, for fear that the knowledge would be lethal. Why us? I wondered. Why bother? Perhaps it was our American accents, or just plain dumb luck. Perhaps he did it simply because he could, or to prove something to the double-crossers. Whatever it was, I figured, he needed loyal foot soldiers for some nefarious purpose, and assumed we’d be blindly devoted, forever indebted to the man who’d saved u
s from certain death. Who he was or what he really looked like"we never did see his face clearly"was of little consequence. “I’ve freed the slaves, so you can call me Mr. Lincoln,” he said to us when the journey was over. We’d been deposited at a crumbling château hidden so deeply in the Belgian forest near the River Meuse that we never left the immediate perimeter. Not that we could have even if we’d wanted to, but had we tried I know we’d never have found our way back. When we could get up out of bed and started walking around the overgrown gardens, Mr. Lincoln showed us the barbed wire running the length of the stone fence that encircled the dozens of acres of the property. Then he introduced us to Markus, whose grimace meant to be a smile set me, weakened and no longer myself, to trembling. He was living with his equally hideous wife, Matilda, the housekeeper, in the stone house guarding the only gate out. Markus’s cousin Moritz had a room upstairs and down the hall from us, and his disposition was even worse.
We didn’t ask, and we didn’t want to know.
Mr. Lincoln told us we were safe as long as we remained under his protection. He expected us to take all the time we needed to get our strength back, and then to start rebuilding and repainting the rooms damaged by departed soldiers. He told us Markus and Moritz would make sure we got whatever we needed, but they had very bad tempers, especially if they didn’t know where we were at all times. So once we figured out what was most essential and gave Markus our shopping list, he and Matilda would disappear down the curving forest road to the nearest village on wobbly bicycles, returning silently with whatever they could scrounge from the black market.
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