Sons of Thunder (15 page)

He thumped over the curb as another spray of bullets took out one of his tires. The rim ground into the dirt as he muscled the car toward the water. He clipped the edge of a Model T, slammed past it onto the dirt lot.

He tharrumphed the car over the edge of the walkway, the clear lake before him, the sun now carpeting it with a bath of gold.

“Friends?” Lucien held his hand out to him.

The coupe broke through the wooden railing.

And then, for a second, he was flying. Weightless, as the car sailed out into space. Like a giant albatross, soaring above the troughs and ridges. Above the darkness and into the gilded morning. O God, deliver me….

No, Lucien. Brothers. Always.

PART TWO

Dino

CHAPTER 11

He had fooled them all.

Because Dino Stavros, a fisherman’s son, would never be welcome in the home of Dr. Lionel Spenser, with the gilded ceilings, the gold wallpaper, the dark mahogany columns, the embroidered draperies. The three-story mansion emanated wealth, even from the street, the snow piled on each side of the cobblestone walk like the walls of a fortress, the electric lamppost sentries splashing light upon the cobblestone path as he’d forayed to the door for the annual Fairview Hospital Thanksgiving party.

But he wasn’t Dino Stavros, penniless immigrant who should, by all rights, be huddled over some open fire in a snow-banked alley off Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue, homeless, starving, his body riddled with worms: living a life of crime and deceit.

No, he’d left that life behind in Chicago. It hadn’t a hope of finding him anymore.

He’d even scoured out of his diction his Greek accent, waxed his long hair back with Brylcreem, and tonight, dressed like a man of means in his pressed khakis, a pair of loafers, a white shirt, and a tie. Thanks to his roommate’s tweed jacket, he’d turned into a regular Dapper Dan.

Dapper Dr. Daniel Scarpelli.

A rising surgeon who had not only scored an invitation…but after tonight, if he played it right, just might be a member of the family.

Yes, he’d left Dino Stavros, penniless, vagrant immigrant, a lifetime behind.

“Quite the digs, huh, Danny?” Reg St. John lifted a martini glass as he eased up beside Dino where he stood in the library, trying to make sense of one of Dr. Spenser’s oil paintings.

From the radio in the next room, Glenn Miller’s band belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The song filtered into the hallway, ribboning against the soaring two-story ceiling and along the corridor toward the library. A few feet away, the chief of pediatrics lounged in a cigar chair, flirting with one of the charge nurses from the TB ward. A klatch of other nurses perched on the wide stairs leading to the second floor of the mansion, chattering about the doctors and perhaps the interns too.

How strange to see them out of uniform—in holiday dresses, their hair dolled up.

A few even moved their feet to the beat.

He should probably ask Lizzy to dance. Dino searched for her and found Dr. Spenser’s daughter leaning against the open French doors to the living room, her beautiful lips parting to laugh at a joke from a fellow nursing student. For a moment, he traced the shape of her neck, her blond hair knotted at the nape of her neck, usually fitted with a nurse’s cap. She appeared anything but a nurse tonight in a calf-length black party dress that nearly bared her shoulders. He had the urge to find her mink stole, put it around her.

That or simply settle his arm around her.

“Did you hear that Spenser even hired extra wait staff? And somewhere around here is a cigarette girl that will make your eyes pop out of your head.” Reg lifted an unlit cigar, rolled it between his fingers.

“I saw her.” Or at least the back of her. Fishnet stockings, a short,
scandalous dress, a pillbox cap. Dino shook his head. “My eyes belong to Lizzy.”

Reg laughed, turned to survey the piece of so-called artwork that Dino had been trying to figure out for the better part of ten minutes.

Well, to be accurate, he’d been trying to figure out exactly how to ask Lizzy’s father for her hand in marriage and trying to keep the voices of his past from talking him into bolting.

“Have you figured out what you’re going to say to the old man?” Reg asked, his eyes darting to Dr. Spenser as he worked the crowd. Not a big man, he wore the salt-and-pepper of wisdom around his temples, a sternness in his eyes that made even the best intern’s hand tremble when he hovered over him in the operating theater.

Whatever made Dino think…

No. For all Reg and the rest of his fellow interns knew, Dino was the son of the chief-of-staff, Dr. Antonio Scarpelli. After all, a poor immigrant—one without citizen status—would hardly attend university. Hardly become a doctor.

Hardly dare to ask for the hand of Elizabeth Elaine Spenser in marriage.

Run.
The little voice in his head had nearly stopped him cold on the sidewalk outside the house. Had nearly frozen his hand on the brass knocker.

What had made him think he could pull this off—showing up at Dr. Spenser’s home, slicked up, like he belonged in a place with velvet drapes, crystal vases filled with poinsettias, and the smell of roast turkey roaming the halls and stirring his stomach?

Reg clapped him on the shoulder with his delicate surgeon-to-be hand. “What do you think he’s gonna say, champ? No? To Dr. Antonio Scarpelli’s kid? C’mon. He’ll be dancing for joy.”

Dino sucked in a breath and stared at a bold, somewhat grotesque painting of what seemed to be a woman dressed in a toga sitting on a beach. A deformed woman, huge shoulders, tiny head, black flowing hair. “I’ve been trying to figure out if this is a real painting or a joke.”

Reg laughed, sipping his martini.
“Femme au bord de la mer. The Woman by the Sea.
It’s a Picasso. Cubism. Supposedly set in Greece.”

“It’s ugly.” And certainly not the shadowy Greece that sometimes found him. The one with the wind that reaped the tang of the olive groves and filled his memory with the heat of golden sand mortared between his toes, the taste of the cool, salty blue sea, the smells of roasted lamb on a spit inside the taverna. In it, he might even hear his mother’s stern voice, the echo of a song embedded in his memory.

And, if he stopped long enough, Markos… “
I’ll find you.”

Oh, how he hoped not.

“It’s art. It doesn’t have to be pretty,” Reg said.

“Are you sure it’s supposed to be Greece?” Dino asked.

Reg lifted a shoulder. He finished his martini and set it on the tray of a servant who passed by, taking a second to rearrange his cuff inside his tux. Of course, Reg had a tux. And a Mercury Sport sedan. And his own apartment on Franklin Avenue instead of a boardinghouse room downtown shared by a fellow intern. But the boardinghouse had been Dino’s choice. He had to stop living off the Scarpellis sometime.

But not tonight, when everything he wanted ranged just beyond his fingertips.

“I think so. I’d like to go there sometime. You know, just for a vacation. Maybe after my residency.” Reg gave Dino a wink. “I hear they have beautiful women.”

“I…wouldn’t know.”

Reg picked up an envelope opener from the credenza. Ivory-tipped, it looked like a keepsake from one of Dr. Spenser’s travels—something that accompanied the gazelle head mounted to the wall. He picked his fingernails with it. “I know you only have eyes for Lizzy. But it wouldn’t hurt you to look around, mate.” Reg nudged him. “You don’t have the old ball-and-chain yet.” He put his hand out to stop another waiter, a dark-haired chap dressed in the white jacket of a hired servant.

“I’ll take one of those.” He lifted another martini from the tray. “I ’spose old Scarpelli is at the polio clinic again?” Reg’s gaze travelled past him, landing on a fresh crop of nurses from the Swedish Nursing School.

Lizzy had wandered into the foyer and now stood staring at the fifteen-foot Christmas tree. She swayed to “In the Mood.” The memory of her twirling in his arms, her scent—lavender and rose water—twined suddenly in Dino’s head. That, and the press of her lips on his, soft and surrendering as they’d stood on her back step, the cold brisk wind around their ankles, their noses brushing like Eskimos.

“Danny?” Reg brought him, reluctantly, back.

“Yeah. He and Mother do their annual Thanksgiving day rounds.”

“Figgers. They’re a couple of do-gooders.”

Dino shot him a look.

Reg held up a hand. “No offense. Your folks are okay. It’s just that, if anyone should be here, it’s the chief-of-staff.”

Yes, Dino could have used the old man’s affirmation that he, indeed, belonged in the room with the rest of the blue bloods.

And sometimes Doctor and the Missus actually made him believe it. Especially when Mrs. Scarpelli greeted him as if he might really be her son, filling his skin-and-bones with homemade gnocchi. Her adoring
smile could beguile him into forgetting the moment he’d stood on their doorstep, exhausted, hungry, and yes, not a little scared.

Dr. Lionel Spencer walked by them, nodding to Reg, smiling. “Good to see you here, Daniel. My regards to your folks tonight.”