Jessie Keane - Lawless

But miracles did happen. His love life might have been blighted, but other things were going good. Tito’s debauched reign had been swept away. The sign over the door of the club had been changed from Tito’s to Vito’s. Petty drug dealers who had circulated in the club selling their wares were ousted, and now Vittore’s own doormen did discreet deals instead. The sex palace Tito had run above the club, pimping highly paid prostitutes to his upmarket friends, Vittore had quickly, with a shudder of distaste, swept away.

At long last he was in charge. But he’d come home to find that Maria hadn’t even cleaned the place up. Was it too much to expect that she should keep their rooms clean and tidy, the way Mama would? Maybe Mama was right: all girls were dirty slovens.

‘You think I want to live in a place like this, in a tip ?’ he shouted.

This was supposed to be where she would bear and raise his children; the place should be pristine, the way he liked it. That was all he wanted in life – a wife who did as she was told, as any good wife should. But today he’d come home to find the clumsy bitch had dropped a pot plant and now there was dirt all over the living-room carpet, the carpet he’d paid for, sweated for, and there was orange juice spilled on it by the fireplace and not mopped up, for God’s sake, and the mantelpiece was caked in dust. Mama always kept an immaculate home.

Vittore was still seething over Kit Miller showing up at the funeral. He had promised the bastard that retribution was on its way, but when he had taken Mama home, she had told him, yet again:

‘You won’t touch him, Vittore. I told you, and you swore to behave yourself. This ends here, you understand?’

Actually he didn’t understand. Actually he thought she was crazy and he was sick of hearing her opinions about what didn’t concern her. Who was the boss now, after all? She was just an old woman, her time was done. He loved her but at the same time he hated her for what she had done to him, ruining him as a man. And was she crazy? That bastard Miller had insulted them, having the audacity to show up at Tito’s funeral and crow about his death. There had to be revenge for that.

And what if the low rumble of rumours and suspicion should prove to be true? What if it wasn’t one of Tito’s other enemies but Miller himself who snatched Tito’s life away? Wouldn’t they be justified in taking action then? But no. His hands were tied by an old woman’s apron strings, and he resented it, hated it.

He was sick of listening to Mama.

Why should he pay attention to what an old woman had to say about anything? Tito might have done. And Fabio might, too. But he , Vittore, was the boss.

Now all he wanted was to release this pent-up resentment, and here was Maria, who didn’t seem to have a clue how to keep a house decent and tidy, and whumph , he slapped Maria, knocked her down, and suddenly he was aroused, he got down on the dirty floor with her and slapped her again, then pulled her pants down and unzipped himself, wild with lust now, he knew his cock wasn’t very big but now to him it looked huge, impressive. He pushed her legs open and thrust it into her, pushed once, twice, three times, and then came.

‘Dirty whore ,’ he groaned. ‘Dirty fucking whore !’

Maria lay there sobbing as Vittore pulled out of her, zipped his trousers, scrambled to his feet.

‘ Basta! Get this place cleaned up, for God’s sake,’ he yelled above her crying, and went off into the bathroom to clean up.

He slammed the door shut after him, still furious, and kicked the white-painted wooden bath panel. It rattled, and one end flopped out of position.

‘ Madonna! ’ Vittore cursed loudly, and stooped down to see what was happening, had the screw come loose?

But there was no screw there, just the hole where it should be. He looked around on the floor: nothing. He pushed the panel back into place, but it swung out again at the tap end, leaving a gap six inches wide this time. Vittore’s eyes caught a glint of something in the gap – maybe plastic or silver. He reached in, and pulled out a foil packet of pills. Looked at it, and realized.

That bitch.

Maria lay there stunned, wondering why the man she had once thought she loved could only achieve an erection when he beat her, shouted out his hate for her, called her a dirty whore. She sat up slowly, her face burning, her thighs trembling from the force he’d used on her.

I hate him , she thought. I hate him and I hate her , that old bitch. We will never be free of her .

It galled her that Vittore hadn’t had the guts to break away from Mama Bella after they’d married. Maria had envisaged a home of her own, but what had she got? A few rooms inside Mama’s own home, so Bella could keep control of her favourite boy – and of his wife. Bella bullied her mercilessly; nothing Maria ever did was good enough. All it took was a few ‘spasms’ of Bella’s supposedly frail heart (which to Maria’s knowledge had never been proven to be frail) and Vittore caved in, agreeing that he and his new wife would stay under the family roof.

Numbly she sat up, crawled aching and sore to her feet.

She wished – so much – that they had buried Vittore today, not Tito.

Oh yeah – and that fucking old bitch Bella. She wished they’d put her in the ground too. That day couldn’t come soon enough.

Naples, 1927

‘The man’s untouchable,’ said Gilberto.

‘You think?’ asked Astorre.

‘For sure.’

Despite the trauma of his father’s death, Astorre was doing well in his business life. He had sussed out Corvetto’s security arrangements and seen how good they were, how thorough. But he would wait. He was of the opinion that everyone was vulnerable, everyone had a weak spot; it was just a matter of finding Corvetto’s, and he had all the time in the world to do that. Revenge truly was a dish best served cold.

Astorre’s home life was troubled. After successfully delivering Tito, who was a strong boy, Bella had a succession of miscarriages and one painful, awful stillbirth – a daughter! – that broke her heart clean in two. Finally, after an eight-year wait, there came another son, a living son, Vittore, and Bella couldn’t believe it; she doted on this unexpected child, lavished all her love on him. Even her husband felt pushed aside by this new, tiny interloper and when their love life resumed after a year or so Astorre still felt unwelcome in his own bed. So he took a mistress, and seldom attended to his marital duties with Bella.

More miscarriages followed Vittore’s birth; but after a twelve-year gap at last the news was good. Bella was pregnant again, and this time it would be the girl she longed for.

‘Look how the baby carries all the way round, not just a little bump at the front,’ she said gleefully to anyone who would listen, when she was huge and in the seventh month of her pregnancy. ‘It’s a girl. A little bambina, at last.’

When she went into labour, there was a ferociously long struggle to bring her daughter into the world. Exhausted, wrung out with the agony and blood loss, Bella gave one final desperate push and then looked down as the child spiralled out of her body. Her triumph turned to ashes in her mouth as she saw squirming there not the girl she had wanted so much but a puny little boy. Her heartbreak at being denied a daughter yet again was compounded by the doctors warning her and Astorre that this should be her last child.