A Quiet Vendetta (71 page)

I went back upstairs. I sat on the edge of my bed. I asked myself what I was going to do, what I
could
do, and after some minutes I realized that I had no idea at all.

Emilie stayed until a week before Christmas, and then she returned to her father’s home. She promised she would come back again for the Mardi Gras in April, and Victor made her swear that she would. They stood together in the front hallway for a small eternity, and Emilie shed some tears, and I believe Victor did also. It was as if I was watching two people being torn apart by nothing more than cruel circumstance and I asked myself why it always had to be so hard. Did we ultimately pay for what we had done? And, by default, by the mere fact that we were connected to those who had done wrong, did we pay for the sins of our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters? In that moment I believed I would have killed Emilie’s father. Without thought, without mercy, without compunction, I would have followed her to her house, waited silently until she left once again, and then stepped inside to murder him. He would be removed from the equation, and Emilie would have been free to choose what she wished to do. Perhaps Victor would go with her somewhere, out into the middle of America to lose themselves. Or perhaps she would have come here, and they could have spent the few years I would be alive living beneath this roof, aware of the fact that no-one – but no-one – would stand in the way of their happiness.

It was a crazy thought, a thought that belonged to the past, but the fact that I had even considered such a thing haunted me.

Victor let Emilie go, as did I, and we survived Christmas together. Once it had been enough that Victor was with me, but now I was so aware of how unhappy he was without her. It did not seem right. It was an injustice. I vowed that if there was anything I could do to redress the balance I would do it.

When Emilie returned in the latter part of March something had changed. There had been some difficulty between her parents, something that had rubbed off on Emilie, and for the first few days she seemed tense and quiet.

It was only at the start of the second week that both Victor and I understood what had happened, and how it was far closer to home than either of us had imagined.

‘He doesn’t want me to come down any more,’ she said. We were seated at the dining table, eating dinner together as we had so often done before, and it was merely as a result of a comment that I had made that she finally broke down and told us the truth.

‘I have thought about the summer,’ I said. ‘That we should perhaps arrange with your mother and father that you go somewhere other than New Orleans, perhaps a holiday in California?’

Emilie was silent; didn’t say a word.

‘Emilie? What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a great idea,’ Victor interjected. ‘We could go out to California and see Los Angeles.’ He turned and looked at Emilie. She had stopped eating. Her expression was distant and disconnected.

‘Em?’

It was then that she said it:
He doesn’t want me to come down any more
.

There was silence for the better part of a minute, and then Victor said, ‘Who doesn’t? Your father?’

She nodded. ‘My father.’

I leaned forward. I felt concern and anxiety. ‘What did he say to you? Why doesn’t he want you to come here any more?’

She shook her head slowly and looked towards the window. ‘He said that I spend too much time away from home, that I am coming to the end of my studies and I should be working more and taking less vacation time. He said that he had spoken to my mother and they both agreed that it was time for me to grow up.’ She smiled bitterly. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I hardly see them, and yet they feel they have the right to tell me what I can do with my life.’

‘They are your parents, Emilie,’ I said, and even as the words left my mouth I knew I did not agree with nor condone what they had told her.

‘Sure, they’re my parents,’ she replied. ‘But that doesn’t make me any less angry with them. What the hell do they know? What right do they have to tell me what I can and can’t do? I’m nearly nineteen for Christ’s sake! I’m an adult. I’m doing fine at school. I’ll get the qualifications they want me to get, qualifications I never even wanted in the first place and only did because they insisted. I’ve done everything they wanted me to do the whole of my life, and just because they made mistakes doesn’t mean they can force their opinions on me and make me do what they want me to do.’ She grabbed her serviette from her lap, bundled it up and threw it down on the table.

I looked at Victor. He was stunned into silence. I wanted to say something, anything that would make it alright, turn everything backwards and give us all a chance to start over again, but there was nothing. My head and my mouth were empty.

‘He said that this was to be the last time I could come down here until I finished school.’ Emilie said, and then once again she turned towards the window and fell silent.

‘It will be alright,’ I said, believing at once that it would not. I wished in some way that she had said nothing. I wished she had perhaps left this until she was ready to leave. Then, at least, the time that we would spend together now would not be overshadowed by this revelation.

‘He can’t do that,’ Victor said, and in his eyes was the certainty that Emilie’s father could do whatever he wished. He was a man of wealth and means, he could employ people to find her, he could have her grounded indefinitely, have her escorted to school and back again, and though in the process he might lose any remnant of love that his daughter might feel for him, the fact was that he could do whatever he wished and there was nothing Victor or I could do to change that. Emilie’s father was in control. She was a part of our life, but she was not under our control.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said, and she turned back to me. She reached out and took Victor’s hand. ‘I would ask you to come with me, but your life is here. You have to finish your own studies, and I know that my father would not approve of you.’

She glanced at me nervously, and then she smiled as if making some attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

I knew it was coming. I knew what she would say, and in my heart I felt the rushing wave of horror at where we would go from here.

‘I know my father would find out everything about you,’ she said. She looked at me. Her eyes were cool and emotionless. ‘I cannot make a judgement, but I know the truth, Ernesto. Victor has told me—’

‘Emilie!’ Victor snapped, but she turned and raised her hand and stopped him dead in his tracks.

‘I am going to say what I’m going to say,’ she interjected, and once again there was that steely fire of determination in her eyes. Here was the fiercely individual Emilie Devereau; here was the strength of character that at once made her so attractive, and yet again made her someone you could not fool or deceive. ‘I am going to say what I’m going to say, and whether it’s the truth or not doesn’t matter.’ She looked at me once again. ‘You could be the richest man in Louisiana,’ she said. ‘You could own a hundred thousand businesses and donate millions of dollars to charity. You could have a spotless personal reputation and the best public relations people in the world, but still my father would not approve of my being with Victor.’

I frowned. I did not understand where she was going.

She smiled. ‘But we all know that you don’t run a business, and you are not the richest man in Louisiana, don’t we? We know that there have been things that have happened in the past that none of us want to know the details of. We know that your wife and your daughter weren’t killed in a car crash. I’m not going to pretend I know everything, and I’m sure there’s a great deal more that Victor knows that he hasn’t told me, but all of that is irrelevant. The truth of the matter is that my father is a bigot and a racist and a stupid and ignorant man. The simple fact that you are not American is enough. The fact that you are Cuban would be enough to convince him to never let me see Victor again. Like I said one time before, it all comes back to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets. We are destined never to be together if my father has anything to do with it.’

Emilie turned and looked at Victor. ‘There have been things I haven’t been able to tell you. There are things that I won’t even tell you now. I love you. I want to be with you. But there is something here that is bigger than all of us combined and there is nothing I can do about it.’

Victor was pale and drawn. His mouth was half-open as if he was trying to think of something to say but nothing was forthcoming.

Emilie raised her hand and touched Victor’s face. ‘I didn’t want to talk about this. I wanted to wait until I had to leave, but I cannot bear the thought of carrying this alone any longer. My father has forbidden me to come down here again and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.’

Victor looked at me. He was waiting for me to say something, to make this terrible thing go away, but there was nothing I could do.

It was only later, after Emilie was asleep, that Victor came to me in my room.

‘You have to kill him,’ he said matter-of-factly.

I raised my hand. ‘We will not—’

He stepped forward. ‘You don’t think I know?’ he asked. ‘You don’t think I know who you are, what you have done? You think I have lived all these years without realizing what you did when I was a kid? I know who those people were, Uncle Sammy and Fabio Calligaris. I know that Mom and Lucia were killed by a bomb that was meant for Calligaris, and more than likely for you.’

I sat silently. I watched my son vent his anger and pain. I could say and do nothing. How could I deny the truth?

‘You don’t think I know what you’re capable of?’ Victor went on. ‘I don’t know all the details, and I don’t pretend to know.

Truth is I don’t
want
to know. But I do know that men are dead because of you, and now . . . now when I need you to do something for me you cannot. I am your son, the only family you have left. I love her. I love her more than life itself, and now I need something from you you are going to tell me that it cannot be done. Emilie’s father is nothing. He’s a crazy person, someone who knows less about caring for his family than you do. Christ, of all the people you ever killed he probably deserves to die more than any of them—’

‘Enough!’ I said. ‘Victor, that is enough! You sit down. You sit down and listen to me.’

Victor stood there, defiant and angry. I had never seen him so empowered with rage. He looked as if he would burst open at the seams.

‘Victor . . . now!’ I shouted, and hoped that my voice was not so loud as to wake Emilie.

He paused for a moment, and then sat down on a chair near the wall.

‘You cannot ask me to do this,’ I said. ‘I am not going to deny what you say. I heard you talking to Emilie on the telephone long ago. I heard what you told her about me. I am not going to waste my breath trying to defend myself or my life, but the past is the past. I have left all those things behind. I made mistakes, big mistakes, and given the time again I would not make the same decisions. I lost your mother and your sister because of the decisions I made, and I know from experience that if I did this then I would lose you too. Not only that, but you would also lose Emilie. This is no simple matter of killing someone who stands in your way and that’s the end of it. You go down that road and someone always pays the price. Look what I lost. The only woman I ever loved and one of my children. You think Emilie’s father will not fight for her? And who’s to say that with her father gone her mother would not feel the same way? These people, people with too much money and too little sense, they are perhaps the most dangerous people of all. You listen to what I have to say, you hear me on this. I am your father. I love you more than life itself, but I will not kill someone for you.’

Victor looked back at me. There was honesty between us, true honesty for the very first time in all the years we had been together, and something had changed.

He leaned forward. He started to cry. I crossed the room and knelt before him. He rested his head on my shoulder. I put my arms around him and held him while his body was wrenched with grief.

‘So what do I do?’ he asked eventually. ‘What do I do? I love her, Father, I love her more than anything in the world. I have lost enough . . . I don’t think I can bear to lose her as well.’

‘I know, I know,’ I whispered. ‘It will come right. We will think of something, Victor. We will think of something to make this right.’

‘Will we?’ he asked, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Will we make it right?’

‘We will,’ I said quietly, and believed that I had never been more certain of anything in my life.

The two weeks that Emilie spent with us unfolded without further event. I said nothing, and neither Victor nor Emilie asked anything of me. They went about their business, they visited places together. They spent a great deal of their time in Victor’s room and I respected their desire to spend their last days together and did not disturb them. I did not interfere in their life together, and I know that they were grateful to me for that. I did spend my time considering the problem. I looked at it from every angle and slant, and no matter the hours that I invested in this I could not think of a solution.

At last it was time for Emilie to leave. There were tears, of course there were, and both of them promised that they would speak and write at least once a day. I believed their feeling for one another was strong enough to see them through this, that the time would come when Emilie was old enough to make her own independent decision, her schooling behind her, perhaps her own career and home, and then she and Victor would be together once again. But I was also not so naïve as to dismiss the possibility that, separated from Victor, she would eventually miss the physical connection, that she would become a woman of means and methods, that she would perhaps find someone of whom her father approved, and then Victor would be left with nothing. He was loyal beyond question. Emilie Devereau was his first real love, perhaps the only one, and that was something with which I was familiar. After Angelina I could never have considered finding another wife. It had not been my age, it had not been the manner of her death; it was simply the fact that as far as I was concerned no-one could ever have come close to being what she had been for me. She was alive in my thoughts, as was Lucia, and with them gone there was no thought that they could ever be replaced.