R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

‘Uh huh?’

‘If your parents are so crazy, if they spend all their time either making money or worrying about what the world might think of them, then how come you turned out so good?’

She laughed, for a moment looked a little embarrassed. ‘Ernesto… stop it!’

I laughed with her. She relaxed. She asked me if we could go out, maybe see a movie or something, the three of us, and then have some dinner in a restaurant.

And we did, and there was no more talk of her crazy parents, and I knew better than to bring it up again. She was happy as she was, spending her time with Victor, the two of them like lovelorn teenagers, which is what they were, and I was happy for them both.

She left again the following week, and for a while it seemed that whenever Victor was not at school he was speaking with Emilie on the phone. I overheard a conversation. It was around the end of the following month, the last week of May, and I was downstairs reading the newspaper. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and as I passed Victor’s door I heard him speaking.

‘-like running away or something, right?’

He laughed as she replied.

‘And you could rob his safe and come back down here to New Orleans and we could elope somewhere and get married in Mexico, and you’d never have to see either of them again.’

Victor was silent again, and then once more he was laughing.

‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I understand exactly what you mean.’

I stepped away from the door to ensure I would not be seen.

‘Aah, come on, I know that they’re not involved in the same business, but can you imagine how it was for me? My dad was in the Mafia. He was a thug for the Mafia, for God’s sake.’

I felt the blood drain from my face. I felt my pulse quicken. Sweat broke out beneath the hairline above my forehead.

‘I’m serious… no, it’s not a joke. I’m telling you that’s the way it was. Why the hell d’you think that we kept on having to move from city to city? He was a hitman for the Mafia, Emilie, I’m serious. He might seem like a friendly old man now, but that’s because he’s retired. Jesus, we went from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Havana, and then we wound up in New York before we came here. I think something heavy happened in New York because we had to hightail it out of there so fast I couldn’t catch my breath. I think he killed someone important. I think he killed someone really important for the Mafia, and they gave him shitloads of money and he came back here to New Orleans because he thought no-one would find him here-’

I felt my world falling to pieces. I remembered things I hadn’t remembered for years. I felt my fists clenching and releasing. My heart thundered uncontrollably in my chest, and for a second I believed I would keel over right where I stood. I took a step back and leaned against the wall for balance. I could not believe what I was hearing. Had I truly, honestly, imagined that Victor had been blind to everything that had happened around him as a child? Had I imagined that my life had been of such little consequence to him that he had never figured out anything at all? Who had I been fooling? Certainly not Victor – and in that moment I realized I had been fooling only myself. I was speechless, dumbstruck, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt the like of which I had never experienced.

‘I mean, it took me some time, but I finally realized that my mom and my sister didn’t die in an accident. They were killed in a car explosion that was meant to kill the man my dad worked for, this heavy-duty Mafia boss called Fabio Calligaris.’ Victor laughed. ‘I had an uncle of sorts, a guy I used to call Uncle Sammy, but everyone else called him Ten Cent. You tell me who the fuck is called Ten Cent apart from a Mafia hitman? Where the hell d’you get a nickname like that, eh?’

I took a step sideways and reached for the stair banister. I took another two steps, and with my left hand behind me I found the bathroom door. I pushed it open and stepped inside. I closed and locked the door behind me. I sat on the edge of the bath and started to breathe deeply. A wave of anguish overpowered me, and before I knew it I had grabbed a towel from the rail and buried my face in it. I started sobbing, a feeling of nausea tightening my chest and turning my stomach. For a moment I could see nothing but thick waves of gray and scarlet before my eyes. The tears rolled down my face. I wanted to retch but there seemed to be nothing at all inside me. I felt hollow. I felt broken, obliterated, and when I tried to stand it took every ounce of my strength and concentration not to fall backwards into the tub.

I stood there for some time. How long I could not tell, but when I had finally managed to gather myself together I washed my face and combed my hair. I looked back at my own reflection and I saw a bitter and twisted old man. I was facing the truth, and the truth was ugly and distorted. How long had he known? Had this been some gradual accumulation of small things, like pieces of a puzzle that he had finally managed to assemble into a clear and evident whole? Or had there been one thing that had turned the light on in his mind? The death of Angelina and Lucia? How old had he been? Nine years old, all but three months. Had he known then? Had he been aware even then that there was something so very wrong about the business his own father was involved in? I could not bear to face the truth. My son, my only child, knew the truth about me. I was humiliated and distraught, crushed – much as my father must have felt when he realized he had murdered his own wife.

I stayed a minute longer and then I slowly unlocked and opened the bathroom door. I stood there silently, holding my breath. The house was silent. I edged along the hallway until I reached Victor’s half-open door. I saw nothing. The bed where he had sat while talking on the phone was empty. I heard something downstairs. He must have finished the call and gone down. I didn’t know how to face him. I didn’t know how he would see me. But if he had known all along, if he had known these things for so long and still treated me as he had always done, then had anything truly changed? The only thing that had changed was that now I knew. Now I was aware that he knew of my past. Not the details, those he could never have guessed, but he knew enough to speak of how I might have killed people, how I might have been involved with organized crime, and how this involvement had brought the deaths of his mother and sister.

I took the stairs slowly. I had regained my balance, but still my chest was heavy and breathless. I reached the hallway below and heard Victor in the kitchen. He had switched on the TV, was watching some soap drama while he made a sandwich, and when I walked in and he saw me he did nothing more than smile.

‘Making a sandwich,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You want one?’

I smiled back as best I could. I felt tension in the muscles of my face and imagined I must have grimaced. I shook my head, ‘I’m okay,’ I replied. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I gotta go to the library,’ Victor said. ‘There’s some work I need to do, an assignment I have to get finished before the end of the week. We need anything? I could stop by the market.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. We don’t need anything, Victor. We’ve got everything we need right here.’

I watched him as he ate his sandwich, as he surfed channels on the TV and drank a glass of milk, and then I sat for a long time after he’d left and wondered what I was feeling. Did I feel anything at all? I couldn’t be sure, and to this day I cannot remember what, if any, decisions I made. I believed I had disconnected from my former life. I believed that Fabio Calligaris and Ten Cent, Slapsie Maxie, Jimmy the Aspirin, the Alcatraz Swimming Team, and everyone that had walked through these past years… I believed that I had left them all behind. But I had not, for they were there in my mind, and also – to my horror – they were in my son’s memories as well.