Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

“That you can’t,” said Carmine gravely.

“Blue Bear can’t stay here either.”

“He’s off to a bank vault this afternoon, sir. I’ll bring the paperwork around for you, then you can put him in your own vaults.”

“What do you think, Carmine?” M.M. asked as they departed.

“About what, Mr. President?”

“Blue Bear’s house.”

“Ask your wife to chair the approval board. She’ll know.”

“You have a beautiful house,” said Fernando Vasquez to his host that Saturday night, ensconced in Carmine’s leathery study. “So much oriental art, such rich colors.”

“And like the men of ancient Rome, I deal with the decor,” Carmine said, smiling contentedly. It had taken longer to have a dinner for Fernando and his wife than was strictly polite, but Desdemona had to want to do it, and she was only now, in early December, really getting back to her old self.

She was in the kitchen with Solidad Vasquez, leaving the two men to their port and cigars in peace.

“Maureen Marshall thinks that Corey’s been promoted,” said Fernando with a grin.

“His pay is up some,” Carmine said, “and he’s got a very pretty uniform. I give it six months before Maureen starts chewing about some new imagined slight.”

“Know thine enemy,” Fernando said.

“She won’t get through your defenses, will she?”

“Nope. She doesn’t know me the way she knows the rest of you. A large part of your difficulties was due to familiarity, and you know what they say about familiarity-it breeds contempt. My strong suit is the sheer number of my men.”

“I can see the point and the strength of your argument, but don’t forget that Corey was a uniform for eleven years. Some of your most senior men know him very well.”

Fernando laughed. “I can handle Corey-and Maureen.”

Solidad Vasquez was a willowy beauty with that iron backbone most wives of ambitious men seemed to own. It hadn’t taken Desdemona long to discover Solidad’s metal, or to admit that her own backbone was of the ordinary kind. But then, thank God, Carmine was not an overly ambitious man. Though it ate at him sometimes, he liked the job he had. Listening to Solidad’s artless but crafty chatter, Desdemona found it easy to trace the upward rise of the Vasquezes, and, reading what wasn’t said, understood the prejudices and insults that followed those of Hispanic origins. Fernando and Solidad Vasquez were going to get there, hand their children an upper middle class existence.

Desdemona’s extreme fairness and height fascinated her guest.

“Your skin is like milk!” Solidad exclaimed.

“Comes of no sunshine as a child,” said Desdemona, smiling. “The part of England I come from gets a lot of rain and little sun. As for the height-my ancestors were Vikings.”

The Vasquez children, two girls and a boy, were older than the Delmonico pair, but not by enough to kill a burgeoning friendship. For the first time in her American career, Desdemona was choosing a friend for herself, someone unconnected to Carmine’s huge family. Solidad too was a stranger, it made sense for them to stick together, and they liked being opposites in so much, from size and coloring to background and nationality.

The Vasquezes had bought a house on East Circle four doors down, which meant a jetty and a boat shed.

“I liked them, especially Solidad,” Desdemona said to Carmine after their guests had walked home.

“Good,” said Carmine, not blind. “How’s your mood?”

“Back to normal, I would say. No, leave the dishes. Dorcas is coming in tomorrow morning to tidy up.” She huffed. “I can’t thank my Aunt Margaret enough,” she said in a whisper as they passed through the nursery to check on the boys.

“You’ve decided what to do with your legacy?” Carmine asked as they reached their bedroom.

“Yes. It’s going on domestic help. By rights it should go on college fees, but I have a funny feeling that domestic help is more beneficial. I’m such a hygiene freak.”

“Anything that gets you through your days more happily is better,” he said. “I love you, Mrs. Delmonico.”

She snuggled close. “And I love you, Captain.”

“How are you coping with the guns?”

“Quite well. The Taft High business opened my eyes a little. New countries take people from so many different places. Slavery was a part of the people movement too, involuntary though it was. Eventually it will all settle down, just not yet.”

He held her tightly. “You won’t leave me?”

Her head reared up in shock. “Carmine! Whatever made you think that? My goodness, I must have been depressed!” She slid into bed. “Now that Alex is weaned, I’m a box of birds, truly.”

There was no more talk. Words were simply sounds. Passion, tenderness and a delicious familiarity of touch and sensation sometimes meant more than any words.

December wore down toward Christmas in racial discontent and several attempted riots provoked by Black People’s Power; that they came to nothing was due to the city’s small size and careful management. But the BPP continued to create persistent disturbances that no one wanted publicized by arrest and arraignment. The Holloman PD was very busy.

And, as is perpetually the way with people, individual griefs, problems, troubles and dilemmas outweighed the larger picture; a family’s budget was more important than the national one, its members more treasured than anonymous millions.

For Carmine the year tottered to an end in an inevitable mixture of the personal and the cop. Desdemona was commander of her domestic ship again; there were no more attacks of despair, no more delusions of inadequacy, but, having had her fingers burned, Carmine’s wife lost the last of her beloved independence. She was inextricably bound to her family, she would never be free again. Wishful thinking to yearn for it, yet sometimes, in the very remotest watches of the night, its ghostly summons sounded, a tattoo from a distant, youthful battlefield. For Carmine himself this life of watching his sons grow and his wife change was near idyllic, for he sensed that their need of him was greater.

His people settled down in their new configurations, though some of the senior uniforms noticed that the men of Detectives avoided Corey Marshall as if he were a leper. Memories were long; he would always wear the odium of Morty Jones’s suicide and the unhappy fate of Morty’s children. He was, however, a good chief lieutenant for an autocratic martinet like Fernando Vasquez; as he had a staff of his own, paperwork was a breeze.

The problem Helen MacIntosh posed was solved thanks to her ability to suck up huge amounts of professional information; when Carmine told the Commissioner that he thought her ready to move on at the end of January, Silvestri blandly agreed, readying himself to do battle with Hartford over a replacement. As he would have M.M. on side, he anticipated victory.

Judge Thwaites had her measure.

“She’s feral,” he said over Christmas drinks in his chambers.

“Interesting word,” Carmine said.

“As wild as she is cunning, and capable of evading every trap set for her.” His beady old eyes glittered; he sipped his Kentucky bourbon. “A fantastic instinct for the kill.”

“You make her sound a criminal, Doug,” said Silvestri.

“She would be, given a different upbringing. As it is, I predict she’ll be governor of the state before she’s forty-five.”

“Or governor of someone else’s state,” said Carmine. “She’s going to one of the New York Manhattan precincts.”

“Vindicated,” His Honor said with a chuckle. “All of this was only to return from whence she came-as who she wants to be.”

People were looking at her differently since she had shot and killed Kurt von Fahlendorf; Helen was never as conscious of it as when she was with the male detectives. Not overtly from Abe Goldberg, so immensely professional that he could subdue every emotion. And not at all from Carmine Delmonico, who understood her predicament, Helen sensed, because his wife had twice been threatened by a killer with a gun. Some superstitious atavism, buried deep, told Carmine that Helen’s peril had deflected evil intent away from Desdemona.