A Quiet Vendetta (70 page)

I smiled. ‘Then tell me one thing?’

‘Uh huh?’

‘If your parents are so crazy, if they spend all their time either making money or worrying about what the world might think of them, then how come you turned out so good?’

She laughed, for a moment looked a little embarrassed. ‘Ernesto . . . stop it!’

I laughed with her. She relaxed. She asked me if we could go out, maybe see a movie or something, the three of us, and then have some dinner in a restaurant.

And we did, and there was no more talk of her crazy parents, and I knew better than to bring it up again. She was happy as she was, spending her time with Victor, the two of them like lovelorn teenagers, which is what they were, and I was happy for them both.

She left again the following week, and for a while it seemed that whenever Victor was not at school he was speaking with Emilie on the phone. I overheard a conversation. It was around the end of the following month, the last week of May, and I was downstairs reading the newspaper. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and as I passed Victor’s door I heard him speaking.

‘—like running away or something, right?’

He laughed as she replied.

‘And you could rob his safe and come back down here to New Orleans and we could elope somewhere and get married in Mexico, and you’d never have to see either of them again.’

Victor was silent again, and then once more he was laughing.

‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I understand exactly what you mean.’

I stepped away from the door to ensure I would not be seen.

‘Aah, come on, I know that they’re not involved in the same business, but can you imagine how it was for me? My dad was in the Mafia. He was a thug for the Mafia, for God’s sake.’

I felt the blood drain from my face. I felt my pulse quicken. Sweat broke out beneath the hairline above my forehead.

‘I’m serious . . . no, it’s not a joke. I’m telling you that’s the way it was. Why the hell d’you think that we kept on having to move from city to city? He was a hitman for the Mafia, Emilie, I’m serious. He might seem like a friendly old man now, but that’s because he’s retired. Jesus, we went from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Havana, and then we wound up in New York before we came here. I think something heavy happened in New York because we had to hightail it out of there so fast I couldn’t catch my breath. I think he killed someone important. I think he killed someone really important for the Mafia, and they gave him shitloads of money and he came back here to New Orleans because he thought no-one would find him here—’

I felt my world falling to pieces. I remembered things I hadn’t remembered for years. I felt my fists clenching and releasing. My heart thundered uncontrollably in my chest, and for a second I believed I would keel over right where I stood. I took a step back and leaned against the wall for balance. I could not believe what I was hearing. Had I truly, honestly, imagined that Victor had been blind to everything that had happened around him as a child? Had I imagined that my life had been of such little consequence to him that he had never figured out anything at all? Who had I been fooling? Certainly not Victor – and in that moment I realized I had been fooling only myself. I was speechless, dumbstruck, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt the like of which I had never experienced.

‘I mean, it took me some time, but I finally realized that my mom and my sister didn’t die in an accident. They were killed in a car explosion that was meant to kill the man my dad worked for, this heavy-duty Mafia boss called Fabio Calligaris.’ Victor laughed. ‘I had an uncle of sorts, a guy I used to call Uncle Sammy, but everyone else called him Ten Cent. You tell me who the fuck is called Ten Cent apart from a Mafia hitman? Where the hell d’you get a nickname like that, eh?’

I took a step sideways and reached for the stair banister. I took another two steps, and with my left hand behind me I found the bathroom door. I pushed it open and stepped inside. I closed and locked the door behind me. I sat on the edge of the bath and started to breathe deeply. A wave of anguish overpowered me, and before I knew it I had grabbed a towel from the rail and buried my face in it. I started sobbing, a feeling of nausea tightening my chest and turning my stomach. For a moment I could see nothing but thick waves of gray and scarlet before my eyes. The tears rolled down my face. I wanted to retch but there seemed to be nothing at all inside me. I felt hollow. I felt broken, obliterated, and when I tried to stand it took every ounce of my strength and concentration not to fall backwards into the tub.

I stood there for some time. How long I could not tell, but when I had finally managed to gather myself together I washed my face and combed my hair. I looked back at my own reflection and I saw a bitter and twisted old man. I was facing the truth, and the truth was ugly and distorted. How long had he known? Had this been some gradual accumulation of small things, like pieces of a puzzle that he had finally managed to assemble into a clear and evident whole? Or had there been one thing that had turned the light on in his mind? The death of Angelina and Lucia? How old had he been? Nine years old, all but three months. Had he known then? Had he been aware even then that there was something so very wrong about the business his own father was involved in? I could not bear to face the truth. My son, my only child, knew the truth about me. I was humiliated and distraught, crushed – much as my father must have felt when he realized he had murdered his own wife.

I stayed a minute longer and then I slowly unlocked and opened the bathroom door. I stood there silently, holding my breath. The house was silent. I edged along the hallway until I reached Victor’s half-open door. I saw nothing. The bed where he had sat while talking on the phone was empty. I heard something downstairs. He must have finished the call and gone down. I didn’t know how to face him. I didn’t know how he would see me. But if he had known all along, if he had known these things for so long and still treated me as he had always done, then had anything truly changed? The only thing that had changed was that now
I
knew. Now
I
was aware that he knew of my past. Not the details, those he could never have guessed, but he knew enough to speak of how I might have killed people, how I might have been involved with organized crime, and how this involvement had brought the deaths of his mother and sister.

I took the stairs slowly. I had regained my balance, but still my chest was heavy and breathless. I reached the hallway below and heard Victor in the kitchen. He had switched on the TV, was watching some soap drama while he made a sandwich, and when I walked in and he saw me he did nothing more than smile.

‘Making a sandwich,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You want one?’

I smiled back as best I could. I felt tension in the muscles of my face and imagined I must have grimaced. I shook my head, ‘I’m okay,’ I replied. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I gotta go to the library,’ Victor said. ‘There’s some work I need to do, an assignment I have to get finished before the end of the week. We need anything? I could stop by the market.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. We don’t need anything, Victor. We’ve got everything we need right here.’

I watched him as he ate his sandwich, as he surfed channels on the TV and drank a glass of milk, and then I sat for a long time after he’d left and wondered what I was feeling. Did I feel anything at all? I couldn’t be sure, and to this day I cannot remember what, if any, decisions I made. I believed I had disconnected from my former life. I believed that Fabio Calligaris and Ten Cent, Slapsie Maxie, Jimmy the Aspirin, the Alcatraz Swimming Team, and everyone that had walked through these past years . . . I believed that I had left them all behind. But I had not, for they were there in my mind, and also – to my horror – they were in my son’s memories as well.

Later he returned. It was dark. I had settled somewhat, had come to terms with some aspect of what I had discovered. I imagined that we could both survive this, that as time went by life would somehow become what it was in the present, and cease to be what it had been in the past.

I could not have been more wrong. I could not have been more wrong if I’d tried.

I did not speak to Victor of his phone call with Emilie. I did not question him as to what he knew, what he
thought
he knew, but I could not deny the fact that it was there, ever-present in the back of my mind. It was as if there was some closed box, and inside the box was all I had been, all I feared for what might happen, and only when I was alone, only when Victor was out, did I dare open that box and look inside. For the subsequent months, through his nineteenth birthday, beyond fall and towards Christmas, I wore a face for the world that was only half of my own. The man I had been was there, would always be there, but I did not let him loose. I could not dare to let him loose for fear of what might happen.

Emilie came down again after Thanksgiving. She and Victor spent a great deal of time away from the house, and only once was I aware of the fact that something more than teenage love occupied their thoughts and feelings. It was one evening, perhaps eight or nine, and she and Victor were downstairs in the kitchen. I had been upstairs reading and I came out of my room and started down the stairs as I was hungry. I stopped in the lower hall and could hear their voices. Perhaps it was innocent curiosity regarding what they might discuss when I was not present, perhaps a concern that once again Victor was detailing memories from his own past that involved me; whatever the cause I stopped there and waited to hear what they were saying.

‘David has his own thing going on,’ Emilie was saying. ‘He has someone down here, some woman that he sees, I am sure, and so he doesn’t really have a chance to complain about what I do.’

‘He has to call your father though?’

‘Sure he does, but what happens and what he tells him are not necessarily the same thing. He tells my dad what my dad wants to hear, and that’s the end of it. Me and David have an understanding. He knows I can take care of myself and he doesn’t want anything to upset his own plans. That’s why he’s always so willing to bring me down here.’

‘And what about your mom?’

‘Sometimes we tell her we’re coming, like for a few days or something, and we stay maybe two weeks. I see enough of her. I mean for Christ’s sake, all she does is spend her time telling me what an asshole my dad is, and there’s only so much of that I can take. I come down here for a break from all that crap.’ Emilie laughed. ‘So David says we’re with my mom and whatever, and my dad is happy with that because I’m not around the place bugging him while he’s trying to work, and as far as my mom is concerned, as long as she sees me a few days of the year she doesn’t complain. She’s too busy arranging other people’s lives to worry about what I might be up to.’

‘And your dad doesn’t know about me?’ Victor asked.

There was silence; I could only assume that Emilie was shaking her head.

‘How come you haven’t told him?’

‘Because he’d be all over you like a freakin’ rash, Victor. He’d have you investigated. He’d find out about your father. Before the week was out he’d know everything there was to know about you and that would be the end of my trips to New Orleans.’

It was quiet for a few moments, and then Victor said, ‘We could take off somewhere. I know where my dad keeps his money . . . I mean, it’s not like he puts the stuff in the bank or something. We could take some money and just disappear, vanish into the middle of America and no-one would find us.’

‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with,’ Emilie said. ‘My dad’s like this super-rich guy with all manner of contacts and your dad’s a fucking Mafia hitman . . . you think between them they wouldn’t have the wherewithal to find us if they wanted?’

Victor didn’t reply.

‘Victor, you gotta face the facts. My dad knew what I was doing down here he would have a coronary fucking seizure. I’m his sweet little teenage daughter, good grades, plays tennis, goes shopping in the mall with Daddy’s charge card . . . he knew I was down here in New Orleans screwing a Mafia hitman’s son he’d have me cut off from the family and put in a mental institution. We just got to accept the fact that it’s gonna be this way whether we like it or not. We just deal with it. We see each other as often as we can, and when things change we can do what we wanna do.’

‘Things change? Whaddya mean, when things change?’

‘Like when my dad dies or whatever.’

‘Dies? How the hell is he gonna die? You gonna kill him or something?’

Emilie laughed. ‘Hell, maybe I could steal some money off my dad and pay your dad to whack him!’

‘No, Em, I’m serious. You’re saying that to do what we want to do, to have people know about us, then we’re gonna have to wait until your dad dies? For God’s sake, that could be years and years.’

Emilie sighed. ‘That’s just the way it is . . . it’s fucking Shakespeare, isn’t it? The Montagues and the Capulets . . . the two families that could never be together. Romeo and freakin’ Juliet, you know?’

I stepped away from the door and made my way back to the base of the stairwell. My heart was cold and quiet, like a stone in my chest. Sweat had broken out on the palms of my hands, and there was a deep pain throbbing in my head, stealing all my energy and my ability to think clearly.

My son and his girlfriend, nothing more than teenagers, had become the murderous star-crossed lovers. I did not believe for a moment that either of them had seriously contemplated any aspect of what they were discussing, but that was not the point. The fact was that they were talking about it, and thus such thoughts must have been in their minds. Emilie was a strong-willed girl, fiercely independent, and Victor was in love. There was no doubting that fact, and I knew how swayed he could be by someone such as her. She was, in her own way, quietly dangerous, and for the first time in my life I feared for him. Not as a result of something I had done or some element of my own past perhaps coming back to find us, but because of something
he
had done. He had known this girl a matter of two and a half years, they had seen each other perhaps a dozen or so times, but their separations seemed to have made them anxious to be together even more. I believed, certainly in the case of Victor and Emilie, that it was the fact that they could not be together all the time that made them want each other so much.