by Jon Cleary
But he was changed, different from the Philip who had gone away only two weeks before. Sally noticed it as soon as they were in the car on the way back to the city. Wishing to be with him before his meeting with her family, she had had Lucia’s nephew Enrico drive her out to the airport. Philip sat holding her to him in the back of the car, though now with the baby so big in her she found it difficult to lean into his encircling arms. At last she straightened up and sat back in the seat.
‘I’m too big for cuddling – we’ll have to wait a few more weeks. How was it? I mean – ’ She wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. ‘You look worried.’
‘I’ve just lost my father.’ He sounded defensive.
‘I know that. But it’s not just grief – Did something happen in Chicago?’
He nodded almost imperceptibly at the back of Enrico’s head. ‘No. I’m just worn out, that’s all.’
Perhaps so: but she knew there was more to it than that. She felt for his hand, held it all the rest of the way into the city. The meeting with her father and sisters was warm and friendly, restrained only by the awareness of his bereavement. Then he excused himself, saying he wanted a bath. Prue pulled Sally into one of the guest bedrooms.
‘He’s divine! God, he’s got that absolutely tragic look – ’ Prue had not previously met Philip.
‘Don’t be so extravagant. What’s got into you? You used to be so down-to-earth.’
Prue grinned: the kid Sally remembered peeped through the façade of the beautiful young woman. ‘I guess I’m trying to be European. I want to come back here and live, as soon as I get through college.’
‘Another three years. By then you’ll learn that the only Europeans who use extravagant adjectives are the English girls from expensive schools. What are you reading now? Barbara Cartland?’
‘Who’s she? No, I think I know everything I need to know now. About sex, I mean. It’s a dull subject, actually. To read about, I mean.’
‘It’s taken you a long time to find that out.’ Then, seriously: ‘Prue, don’t start practising it. I mean, not until you’re sure about the boy, whoever he is.’
‘I’ve already started. I went all the way when I was fourteen.’
Sally felt the baby jump. ‘For God’s sake –!’
‘I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? I didn’t mean to. I just can’t be hypocritical about it. I wouldn’t tell Daddy, but I thought I could tell you without you acting like some Mother Superior in a convent.’
‘Who was it?’
Prue shook her head. ‘I’m not telling his name. He was a track star at Rockhurst. When he found out I was only fourteen, he broke the marathon record getting out of the State. But he’s past history – ’ She waved an airy hand, putting a used lover down the waste disposal. ‘Don’t worry. I’m careful.’
‘Do Nina and Meg know about your – your lost virginity?’
‘It’s not lost. I know where it went.’
Sally stared at her sister, then she started to laugh. Prue also began to laugh and they lay side by side on the bed shaking with merriment. Then Sally felt the first pain and she froze with her mouth open, the laugh turning to a sob.
3
The baby was born at midnight on 20 August 1958 and died two minutes later before the doctors could save it. It was the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of Tim and Michael; Sally did not remark the coincidence, but Nina did. And so did Lucas, who had the date burned in his mind, the brand of his own guilt.
Independent of Nina and unbeknown to her, Lucas had never given up the search for his son-in-law and grandson. He would not have been at all upset if he had learned that Tim Davoren was dead and would have said so to Edith had she still been alive; he was no hypocrite, he told himself, and spoke ill of the dead if they deserved it. But Edith was dead and he had no one to confide in any more; so he said nothing to anyone about Tim. He knew that he and Tim had not been hypocrites when they had expressed their opinions of each other. Enemies are often closer confidants than friends.
He went to the hospital on the morning after the birth and death of his fourth grandchild. He asked to be alone with Sally; and Philip, Nina and Prue went out into the corridor. He sat down beside the bed and took Sally’s hand.
‘What is there to say? They tell me there was a malfunction in the heart. It would have been an invalid if it had lived.’
‘I wanted it so much, Daddy.’ She was wan with grief and exhaustion. ‘It was a boy, too. That would have pleased you.’
He nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself on that fact. ‘You’re still young.’ He continued to hold her hand; as he had not done since she was a child. ‘I’d like you to come home.’
Her hand contracted in his. ‘Daddy – not now. Please. I have to stay with Philip. We need to be together right now – ’
Lucas sighed, put her hand carefully back on the bed as if it were a fragile token. ‘I wish you’d think about it.’
‘Later, Daddy. In a few months.’
He kissed her, wanting to weep for her; and for himself. Then he went out into the corridor and jerked his head at Philip. ‘Could we go somewhere for a walk and a talk?’
‘The Borghese Gardens?’ The hospital was not far from the gardens. ‘I could do with some fresh air after sitting here in the hospital all night.’
The two men went out into the breathless summer morning. Two Vespas went by, coughing fumes; the girls on the pillion seats looked back, arrogant as circus bareback riders. A water truck laid a small rain on yesterday’s dust; two priests skipped aside, laying down a curse on the truck driver’s head. Overhead the sky was a bleached blue: it had been a long hot summer.
It was early but the tourists were already appearing, stretching the day as far as it would go. The two men walked past them, oblivious of them. ‘Well, I suppose it’s time we had our talk,’ said Lucas. Philip looked sideways at his father-in-law, a man he did not know. ‘What talk is that?’
‘About you. I’m sorry the baby was born dead – that’s a shock that both of you should have been spared. But in a way I’m glad. I’m sorry to be so blunt and, I guess, callous.’
‘Callous sounds about right. But go on, Mr Beaufort.’
Sun filtered through the trees, reviving yesterday’s heat which had not really died; ducks, their jewelled heads shining, glided lazily on the artificial lake. A gardener swept up yesterday’s leaves and discarded candy wrappers; he longed for winter when he and the ducks would have the gardens to themselves. Across the river the dome of St Peter’s caught the sun, God’s morning blessing for the One True Church; Protestant churches in Rome got the sun a little later in the day. On the Spanish Steps the artists and flower-sellers set up their competing colours and the tourists flowed down the steps to them like lemmings. But Philip, watching his father-in-law closely, was aware of none of it.
‘What are you going to do now your father is dead?’
‘I’d like to go on living here in Rome. But I don’t know if it will be possible.’
‘Have they asked you to take over your father’s position?’
‘They?’
‘When Sally married you, Philip, I had you looked into. Investigated, if you like. The only time I’d met you, that night we had dinner in Paris with Sally and Nina, you hedged too much when I asked you what you did. I didn’t worry then, because I didn’t think Sally was serious about you. But when she married you and neither you nor she was forthcoming in telling me any more about you, I had you looked into. It seemed strange to me that I was never invited to meet your father. I only understood it when I found out he was Tony Gentleman.’
The gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked, the sound of tiny bones being ground to dust. From a nearby church there came the sound of a bell tolling: a requiem Mass was being said. An attendant went by carrying a dead duck that he had fished from the lake. Philip suddenly had a premonition of death: the sun cooled, though there was no cloud.
‘Do you belong to the Maf
ia?’
‘Yes.’ He said it fatalistically and made no attempt to correct Lucas on the terminology.
‘Does Sally know?’
Philip hesitated, then said, ‘Yes. I don’t think she knows to what extent I’m involved.’
‘How involved are you?’
‘More than I wanted to be. Much more.’
He had worked for the Society but had never thought he had belonged to it. That, he knew, had been self-delusion. His father had protected him, always keeping him dealing only with the clean business side; the other capos besides his father had seemed in agreement to the arrangement. He had worked in a situation that had had its own slow-burning fuse; he was intelligent enough to know it but too sentimental to escape it. He had loved his father with a devotion that he had never attempted to explain to Sally; even the long separation while he had lived here in Italy had not lessened the love. He had stayed with his father, working for him and the Society, because there had always been the hope at the back of his mind that some day they could both retire honourably from the Honoured Society. He knew now that that hope had been futile and stupid.
‘Then I am going to take my daughter away from you.’
A nun came towards them, held out some holy cards. Each of them gave her some notes, Philip giving his with a silent prayer. The nun shoved a holy card on them and moved on like a dark spirit. Again Philip felt cold.
‘You can’t do that, Mr Beaufort,’ he said evenly. ‘There’s such a thing as the law.’
‘Don’t quote the law to me. Not you.’
‘Then we’ll leave it to Sally to decide.’
Lucas nodded after a moment. ‘All right. But I’ll tell her everything she should know.’
You don’t know even the half of it. ‘I’ll tell her. I promise.’
‘Can I trust you?’ Lucas looked at him, at first quizzically, then confidently. He had had confrontations with all three of his sons-in-law; he wondered if other fathers had had so much bad luck in the draw. Philip had the worst handicap of all of them; yet he liked him the most. He felt sorry for Sally, though he wondered why she had risked so much for love. ‘All right, you tell her. Everything. But you and I will still have something to talk about even then.’
They walked back to the apartment on The Corso. The city, invaded over the centuries by Gauls, Goths, Arabs, French and Germans, was just about to be invaded by the motor car, the worst of all because every citizen wanted to be a collaborator. Horns bugled arrogantly; the older, poorer natives fled before the charges; traffic cops became field-marshals. The decline and fall of Rome had just begun again, but Lucas and Philip, brought up to be wheel-borne, saw it only as progress. It was the one thought they had in common as they walked back through the seething traffic.
That afternoon Philip went to the hospital alone. As soon as he was beside her Sally reached for him and held him to her. ‘Darling – ’
He had no words for the moment, yet he knew that the next few minutes would bring from him the most important, the most difficult words he had ever had to speak. He laid his head on her breast, still full of the milk that would not be needed.
‘Are you terribly disappointed?’ she whispered. ‘God, I just wanted to die when they told me – ’
Now was not the time to tell her; but he had to. He lifted his head, held her hands cupped in his ‘We’ll try again. But first – Darling, we have to go back to Chicago.’
She looked at him in puzzlement, her lips murmuring some vague word of query. This was not what she had expected them to be talking about: not now.
‘They killed my father.’
‘They?’
He was aware of the echo of his own voice that morning with Lucas. The world was full of echoes, he guessed: time and history were made up of them. ‘My father’s – ’ He searched for the word, let it fall as if it were phlegm: ‘Friends. The pall-bearers at his funeral.’
‘How did they kill him? You said it was cancer.’
‘He had cancer. But he might’ve lived another year, two, even three. But they weren’t prepared to wait for him to die, they wanted him out of the way. They poisoned him.’
‘Poisoned?’ She thought all Mafia murders were by the gun. ‘How do you know?’
‘The doctor told me. He’d been my father’s friend for years. He signed the death certificate as death from cancer, but he told me the truth.’
‘Why didn’t he tell the police?’
He wanted to smile, but couldn’t. ‘We never tell the police anything. He didn’t belong to the Society, but he was a Sicilian. He came from the same town as my father. If he had gone to the police they’d have killed him, too.’
All the time she had been married to him words like these had been in her mind, whispers that had been like a migraine. But she had hoped, with the desperate hope of the helpless, that if she turned a deaf ear the whispers would go away. But they hadn’t; and she had known they never would. She lay back on the pillow, less from shock than from resignation. Her life was doomed: the dead baby had been only another proof of that.
‘Why do we have to go to Chicago?’
‘There are some men in the Society, younger guys, who want me to take over. They are tired of the old men – ’
‘No!’
He could not tell her the real reason why he had to return to Chicago. She would never understand the need – no, the command to avenge. His father had asked for it with his last breath: he had known, somehow, that he was dying of more than cancer. Tony Gentleman, eyes dimmed by approaching death, acting on instinct out of tradition, had forgotten that he wanted his son to be respectable. A true man of honour had to be avenged. And Philip, honour inherited in his blood, bound by love to his father, had given his promise.
‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I’ll say no to them. But I have to go back – just for a while. There are things to do.’
‘What things?’
But he had already told her too much. More, he knew, than his father would ever have told his mother. He was becoming secretive, as his father had been: silence was the best defence, the old proverb said. ‘Just business.’
‘Will we go on living here then?’
Ah, he thought sadly, that’s another matter. There were three old men to be killed. If the deed were done, then he himself would already be dead: the premonition this morning had really been precognition. They could not change their name and disappear: she, being who she was, would always mark him, like a flare above a target. A Beaufort son-in-law might disappear (he knew about Nina’s husband), but Lucas Beaufort would never allow one of his daughters to disappear without trace. He realized sardonically that he would have been safer, just as respectable, if he had married someone other than a Beaufort.
The only way to survive would be to take over as capo in Chicago, as the younger men wanted. And that would always be a fragile survival; the vendetta did not wither away with the victory of one side or the other. He had talked with the doctor in Chicago, the man from the Sicilian mountain town, and he knew now things his father had never told him. The vendetta had started fifty years ago; there had been truces but it had never died. One of the old men, posing as a friend, had been his father’s enemy all those years. Just waiting, as only a mafioso could wait.
Sally held his hand tightly. ‘Darling – don’t go back. Let them have whatever’s there.’
‘I don’t have any money.’ He used the first excuse that came to mind. ‘Not enough.’
His father had left him money but he had no idea how much. Most of it was in a bank in Zurich and he had not yet had time to go there.
‘Philip – if the baby had lived, would you still go back to Chicago?’
She had no right to ask such a question. She was like a surgeon who had blundered on to a nerve. He had wanted a son, even though that would have increased the risk against a safe future. There had been a mixture of grief and relief last night when they had told him the baby was dead; but the former had ou
tweighed the latter. He believed in a son succeeding his father: that was why he had to go back to Chicago now.
‘How would I know?’
But Sally knew: the answer was there in every expression in his eyes, every nuance in his voice. She let his hand go, put her own hand on her empty belly. There was still pain there, despite the drugs they had given her; and between her legs. The doctors had had difficulty in taking the baby from her; they had wanted to perform a Caesarean, but she had objected strongly to that. She had gone through all the agony for nothing.
He kissed her, not with love but with tenderness. He had tried to love her, if for no other reason than to repay her for her love for him. He had had doubts at first that she really loved him, but the doubts had soon evaporated. He felt ashamed for what he had done to her. There was no way of repaying her. What a pity she wasn’t poor: the money in Zurich, however much it was, might have been some compensation.
She returned his kiss, trying to hide the fact that she did not love him. She had tried, so hard at times that it had been almost like a physical pain. He was kind and considerate and he had rescued her from despair after Michele had left her. But always there had been something in him that she had not been able to reach and she had not succeeded in loving him. But she would never let him know. She owed him that.
‘I’ll be back tonight. I’ll take your father and Nina and Prue to dinner afterwards.’
‘Don’t tell them you’re going back to Chicago. They’ll be going home in a few days.’
‘I don’t want you left alone. Maybe you’d better ask Nina to stay on.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
4
He came down into the street from the apartment, glad to escape from Lucas Beaufort. At last night’s dinner nothing had been said between the two men. It had just been a family gathering, subdued but pleasant. Nina and Prue had looked elegant and beautiful and, despite the sadness they felt at Sally’s losing her baby, they had been good company. Philip had found himself looking at Prue, attracted by her as he had been by none of the other Beaufort sisters, but he had been careful not to give himself away. He had wondered if, in other circumstances, he might have fallen in love with her. But then, a man of honour, as he now saw himself, he had chided himself for being untrue, even if only in his mind, to Sally.