Playing Dead (2 page)

‘Honey?’

She turned. It was him – Constantine of the sharp suits and the silver hair. Feared and revered Mafia godfather. Her husband, her lover, her friend. He had come to find her, knowing she loved it out here, that she liked to stand here sometimes, alone, and watch the sea at night.

Hey, wonder what’s in this one?

The pulsating roar and suck of the tide, the music, and his smile. Some things you really do remember forever. He lifted the parcel – it seemed to her that it was heavy, that maybe he felt a little resistance as he did so.

The actual explosion was too sudden and shocking to take in. A huge flash of light, a deafening, mind-numbing
whumph
, then smoke and a pushing out, a propulsion of hot air that made her ears pop as if she was on a mile-high flight, and brought with it the acrid smell of black powder.

She felt herself hit the balcony rail, but only distantly; her hearing was gone, everything was happening in some strange, detached, dreamlike state. Shrapnel sprayed. She felt a sting, distant pain in her arm, and then she was on the beach, lying on the sand, staring half-wittedly at a shell, her vision cutting in and out like a faulty light switch.

She could hear her own heart, that was all, beating very fast. The shell was ridged, pink, beautiful. A marvel of nature. Her brain felt scrambled. There were other things in the sand too, she could see that. Things charred and blackened, and she didn’t want to look at any of that so she kept looking at the shell. She
would not
look at the black things. The sand was soft and her ears felt sticky. She felt more than tired; exhausted, ready to sleep.

But someone was touching her shoulder; someone was turning her onto her back on the sand. She looked up at a million bright stars with blank wonder. Then a face loomed over her, blocking out the stars. It was Alberto, Constantine’s twenty-four-year-old son, her stepson. She loved Alberto, he was a total delight. Unlike Lucco, unlike Cara, Constantine’s other children. Now Alberto’s face was twisted in anguish. There were smears of soot on his chin. He was touching her cheek, checking that she was breathing. He was mouthing words but she couldn’t hear them.

Are you all right?

She could read his lips. All right? She didn’t know. She was alive . . . wasn’t she? Her ears were hurting now, really badly. She hoped it would pass. Everything did, in the end. Soon, she might even be reconnected to reality. A spasm of fear shot through her at the thought of that. She started to tremble.

She turned her head.
The black things.

She screwed up her eyes, wished that she’d been blinded as well as deafened. She knew what the black things were. One of them was a hand, charred so badly it looked like a mummified claw, propped up in the sand not a metre from her head.

There was a ring on one of the bent, scorched fingers. The gold was tarnished, the diamond stars studding it were hidden beneath blackness. Somewhere inside her, she felt a scream building, but she hadn’t the strength to release it.

Chapter 1

Two Months Earlier

‘Hey, I’m home!’ Annie called out as she passed the guard on the door and hurried into the penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue with its spectacular views over the treetops of Central Park.

New York in June was stifling, hotter than the mouth of hell; but they had lingered. Constantine was doing business – among other things, he had bought a lease on a building in Times Square that by next September would be transformed into a new Annie’s nightclub. Annie herself had just been killing time until today, when she’d consulted her gynaecologist.

Nico, Constantine’s most loyal and long-standing foot soldier, was sitting on one of the huge couches, flicking through the
New York Times
.

‘Hi, Nico,’ she said.

‘Hey, you see this? They say the Supreme Court’s gonna clear Muhammad Ali of trying to dodge the draft. You know, Nixon’s right. We got to come out of Vietnam.’

Nico’s voice was deep, thunderous; it seemed to come from somewhere down in his boots.

She glanced over his shoulder at the headlines. It constantly amazed Annie how fascinated and involved with politics the Americans were; none of her English pals gave a stuff about it, and neither did she. But even she could see that Vietnam was a mess, and one that would have to be resolved soon.

She nodded in the direction of the study. The apartment was massive, and Old Colonial in its style of decor. It was one of only two apartments on this floor, with full-service white-gloved doorman, concierge and elevator operator.

‘Is he free?’ she asked.

‘For you?’ Nico rose to his feet with a courtly smile and a bow. ‘He’s free.’

Annie gave him a smile in return. She liked Nico. She felt he would throw himself under a ten-ton truck to protect Constantine, and she liked that; he needed good people around him.

Nico was a big friendly bear of a man with a thin scraping of darkish hair remaining on his big dome of a head. He had humorous and shrewd dark eyes, half hidden under thick eyebrows. In his gait and mannerisms he was shambling and casual, he always looked untidy. But he was loyal to the core and – this was the nailer for Annie – he had been hugely instrumental in recovering Layla when she had once been snatched away, and for that she was forever in his debt.

She went over to the closed study door. She knocked.

‘Come!’ came from inside, and she slipped in, closing the door behind her.

He was there behind the desk, replacing the phone on its cradle, looking up at her expectantly.

The silver fox. And he
was
a fox in every way. When Constantine Barolli was in a room, it filled with his presence. He was a man at the very height of his powers. Tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, he had thick silver hair, an all-American tan, and armour-piercing blue eyes. Anywhere he went, a cloud of bodyguards swarmed around him like gnats. They swarmed around her, too, and she hated that – but she knew it came with the territory.

Now they had this to look forward to. She was going to give him his fourth child. His first three had been born to another woman – his first wife, Maria – who had died over six years ago. Alberto, Lucco and Cara were his grown-up children. Now he was approaching fifty, and he would soon have a new baby to a woman not yet thirty. She was so much younger than him, and she knew that people talked, disapproved.

She was not from the old country – Sicily – and she wasn’t even American. She barely spoke a word of his native language, but it didn’t matter because he’d been raised in New York and his accent was pure Bronx. But he was the Don, Il Padrone, the godfather, so if people spoke of it, this scandalous second marriage of his, then it was only in whispers, never to his face.

Annie had heard some of those whispers. Caught the edge of them, before silence and watchfulness and fake smiles took their place.
Puttana,
she had heard them whisper. She’d looked it up in her phrasebook but it wasn’t there. She’d asked Constantine what it meant, and he’d told her, asking where she’d come across a word like that.

‘Oh, just something I overheard.’ She’d shrugged it off.

He told her it meant ‘whore’.

Well, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

Rich powerful men want young women, and young women are drawn to rich, powerful men
, she thought. It was a story as old as time itself. Some people derided it as mercenary or shallow. But even if beauty was desirable, even if power was an aphrodisiac, there was still – in her case, and in his – more to it than that. There was still
love.
Loving him wasn’t always comfortable; frequently she was isolated, heavily guarded – and this ritzy apartment sometimes felt like a gilded cage. But then, had she ever thought this was going to be easy?

‘So what’s the news?’ he asked, pushing his chair back from the desk and beckoning her over.

‘The news is that both baby and mother are doing well,’ said Annie, coming around the desk, sitting down on his lap and linking her arms around his neck. She nuzzled into his shoulder, inhaling his own unique scent overlaid with Acqua di Parma cologne.

‘Twelve weeks,’ he said reflectively, putting his arms around her.

Annie nodded. He had wanted to tell the family at twelve weeks, when they could be sure the baby was safe, that it was truly
there.
And now here they were. Time up. ‘Yeah. Twelve weeks.’

She wasn’t overjoyed at the thought. She had loved it when the baby was their secret, just hers and his alone. Now it would be public knowledge; now things would get tricky.

More and more lately, she found herself thinking of her old London life. She missed her friends, Dolly and Ellie in particular. She hadn’t even told
them
about the baby yet during their occasional phone conversations. Soon, she would.

She thought of Dolly there, running the three Carter clubs and swanning around town in a chauffeur-driven Jag. Even the thought of it made her smile. Once Dolly had been the roughest of all Aunt Celia’s in-house prostitutes; now she was like the Queen. Wistfully, Annie thought of how good it had been, having her pals around her; but this was her life now, here with Constantine. Sometimes she did get a twinge of homesickness, but she always suppressed it.

‘We could call him Vito after my father, if it’s a boy.’

Constantine’s father had been killed in a hit from a rival family in Sicily. Although he rarely talked about it, she knew that he had lost his mother and brother the same way. It was said that Constantine’s hair had turned from black to white overnight with the shock of losing his mother and brother in so brutal a fashion.

‘What makes you think it’ll be a boy?’ she teased.

‘Fifty-fifty chance.’

‘Ha.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, kissing her dark brown hair. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’ That was the deal. The family had to know
sometime
, after all. Annie expected ructions, nevertheless. She knew that – apart from Alberto – all Constantine’s grown-up kids and even his sister Gina resented her.

Right now, Gina was babysitting Layla, Annie’s daughter by her first husband Max Carter – not to please
her
, but to ingratiate herself with Constantine, as always. Alberto would be collecting Layla and bringing her home in an hour or so – because he liked her and Layla.

‘There was something else I’d been meaning to talk to you about,’ said Constantine.

‘Yeah? What?’ Annie cuddled in close to him, watching him with her serious dark green eyes.

‘My will.’

‘What?’ Annie raised her head, stared anxiously at his face. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’

He gave a smile. ‘Perfectly. But I have you to consider now. And our child.’ He leaned in and kissed her. ‘I just want you to know that it’s all in there. That this apartment’s your home for keeps, and the Holland Park place in London . . .’

‘Stop,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling a nervous shudder, as if someone was walking over her grave. She didn’t want to talk about this.

‘. . . and if anything happens to me, then my forty-nine per cent share of the Times Square club passes in its entirety to you . . .’

‘Stop it,’ she said, and quickly silenced him with a kiss. His words were raising memories, fearful memories – because once there had been another man she loved, and she had lost him. ‘Just stop it right there,’ she murmured against his lips.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stopping.’ He kissed her deeper, harder.

Annie clung to him. What was he doing, talking about wills? She didn’t want to hear it.

When he made the necessary calls to the family, she decided she didn’t want to hear
those
, either. She left the room.

Chapter 2

It was mid-afternoon and Lucco Barolli was lying in the super-king-sized bed in his chic, ultra-modern Upper East Side condo with its red-lacquered walls and black Oriental furnishings when he took the call from his father. He put the phone down and lay there, staring into space.

‘Wassup, sweetie?’ asked Sophie, her lovely nakedness tangled up in the red silk sheets after their marathon love-making session.

Lucco stared absently at her. Sophie was as fair as he was dark. Unlike his father, Lucco truly
looked
Sicilian, with straight black hair, nearly black deep-set eyes and olive skin as fine as any woman’s.

‘My father’s
puttana
of a new wife is expecting a child,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ The girl propped herself up on her elbow, her delectable tits swinging in his face. She was an English model and beautiful – he could afford the best and Sophie Thomson was renowned. He had pulled strings, got her the plum jobs using his connections. Nobody said no to a
caporegime
of the family. Now, with her tall athletic body and the face of an insatiable fallen angel, she could command ridiculous fees worldwide.

‘Well that’s good news.’ She smiled engagingly.
What the fuck’s a puttana?
she wondered. ‘You’ll have a new brother or sister.’

Lucco looked at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses.

‘The child will not be my brother or sister,’ he said coldly.

‘But . . . the kid’ll be your father’s, like you,’ she said.

Lucco suddenly sprang up and struck her hard across the face. Sophie fell back amid the tangled sheets. Lucco pinned her down there. He glared into her shocked eyes from inches away.

‘The child is
not
my brother or sister,’ he roared.

‘All right, okay,’ said Sophie hurriedly, tears of pain spilling out from her eyes. He’d slapped her once or twice before, just love play, but this time he was frightening her. She knew all about his connections, she knew he’d used them to help her up the ladder of fame, and she liked that. Or at least, she had. But now . . . her face hurt from the blow. She hoped he hadn’t marked her. She had work tomorrow.

‘You understand me? This kid is nothing to do with me.’