Jessie Keane: Playing Dead

‘When . . . is the baby due?’ asked Daniella in her stumbling English.

Cara looked across at her with irritation. Poor stupid sacrificial lamb, shipped over here to marry elegant, arrogant Lucco with the razor-sharp tongue. Lucco would demolish the girl, Cara didn’t doubt that.

‘I don’t know that yet,’ she said.

‘She’ll have a baby shower, won’t she?’ another friend asked as the maid cleared their plates away.

‘She’s English,’ said Cara. ‘I doubt she even knows what that means .’

The friends were silent for a long, awkward moment. Cara’s own marriage had so far proved fruitless, and they all knew she wanted a child. It was whispered covertly among them that Rocco might even have some problems in the bedroom department. Which wasn’t surprising, really; Cara had a strong, vocal character, but Rocco was quieter – too quiet to put her in her place sometimes, which was what they all secretly thought she really needed in a man.

Cara was staring at Daniella. Lucco had met Daniella at the age of eighteen when he visited Sicily with Constantine. She had been sixteen then, virginal and shy, socially inept. She still was. The marriage had been agreed between Constantine and her father, and there had been celebrations, countless bottles of fiery yellow Strega consumed and many a tarantella danced because it was a huge honour for any daughter to receive a proposal from the son of a great Don.

Now Cara watched Daniella sourly. Lucco is going to eat her alive , thought Cara. She knew her brother.

Not that she much cared about the fate of this little paisan from the old country. She had her own problems.

Chapter 4

Alberto, the youngest son of Constantine Barolli, received the news when he went to collect Layla, his stepmother Annie’s bright and adorable five-year-old from her first marriage, from his Aunt Gina’s that afternoon.

Layla ran to him; she loved her big brother Alberto. He swept the giggling child up into his arms while Gina looked on sourly. She was putting the phone back on the cradle and she looked as if someone had just told her something really, really bad.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alberto in concern.

‘Your father’s wife,’ said Gina, her mouth pursing even as she uttered the words.

Alberto knew that Gina despised Annie. Gina would have despised any woman who came close to her brother. She had hated Alberto’s own mother, Maria – and after Maria’s death, he knew very well that Gina had hoped there would be no more women; but then along had come Annie Carter with her ‘whore’s tricks’, bewitching his father – according to Aunt Gina.

Privately, Alberto believed that his aunt was too possessive, clinging to Constantine in a way that was both selfish and faintly perverted. He for one was delighted that his father had found happiness with his second wife.

‘Annie? What about her?’ Alberto glanced at Layla.

‘Your father tells me she’s expecting a child,’ said Gina. She didn’t look overjoyed about it.

Alberto’s attention sharpened. ‘And it’s fine? She’s fine?’

Gina nodded tensely.

‘Well, that’s good news.’

‘Good? How can it be good?’

Alberto stifled a sigh. He knew Gina would never soften towards Annie, and he knew she thought him a fool for liking his father’s second wife so much. But, to him, Annie was family now. He could be the hard man, the tough caporegime when it was required of him, but at heart he was a family man, and both more reserved and more reflective than his elder brother Lucco.

Sometimes, he had to do bad things, difficult things, for the family good. Quiet and polite though he was, he had been responsible for many deaths while carrying out his father’s orders. But he could never delight in the pain and suffering of others, as Lucco did.

‘You hear that, Layla?’ Alberto bounced the little girl in his arms, smiled into her dark eyes. ‘You’re going to have a new little brother or sister to spoil, how about that ?’

‘Yay!’ said Layla.

Gina watched her nephew with a glacial eye. Alberto was a good boy, but he was too amiable, too soft. Couldn’t he see how this would affect his own standing in the family; how it could affect them all? Constantine’s English wife had up until this point been an unwanted, isolated interloper with little say in the running of things. Now her status would radically change. She would be the mother of the Don’s baby; her position would be assured.

‘Are we going to go home and see Mommy now?’ asked Layla, watching her big stepbrother’s handsome face and not seeing the expression on Gina’s.

Alberto smiled. Mommy. Layla was sounding more American every day. ‘We sure are. And we’ll stop off on the way and get her some flowers, okay?’

Gina watched them, her expression surly. Flowers , for the love of God. She turned away, irritated. Personally, she would rather see flowers laid on the Englishwoman’s grave.

Chapter 5

‘Well,’ said Rocco Mancini reluctantly, signalling to the waitress for the check, ‘I must go.’

‘So soon?’ his dining companion pouted. They were tucked into a corner table beside the window at a seedy little diner on Lexington and Third, where neither of them would be known. It was a cheap place, tacky, charmless; full of losers and fat, contented mothers with shrieking infants. It wasn’t what either of them would have chosen, but that was simply the way it had to be. Snatched moments in random places.

‘Yeah, Cara’s got plans for this evening.’

Cara always had plans for the evening. Dinner with the Vanderbilts; the Nixons’ charity ball in aid of the Third World; the invitation – which had filled Cara with wild-eyed joy – to fly to Washington for the September opening of the Kennedy Arts Center, with the premiere of Bernstein’s mass for the late president.

There was always something – some silly social engagement they just had to be seen at. Rocco was not interested in any of it, but still he had to go.

The waitress came over, chewing gum and wearing a grubby white apron. Rocco paid, his aesthetic face pinched with distaste. The waitress withdrew. Rocco stood up, shrugging into his jacket. He was tall and very thin, with dark curly hair, bright lime-green eyes and a big sensuous mouth. He looked at his dining companion’s expression and sat down again, sharply.

‘Look, you know it has to be this way,’ he said, grasping the pale hand on the table.

‘I hate her,’ said his companion. ‘Cara has you all the time, at her beck and call. And what do I have? Just the dregs.’

There was nothing Rocco could say to this. It was true. But he knew he couldn’t afford to make waves. He had the lifestyle he had always craved, the cars, the apartments, everything. He summered in the Hamptons, wintered in Aspen, lived a life of ease and plenty. And that was all thanks to his marriage to Cara Barolli. If he tried for separation, or – God forbid – divorce , then all that would be over.

And he had no wish to make so powerful an enemy as the Don. Would Constantine Barolli just accept his daughter being dumped like so much excess baggage? Rocco didn’t think so. Already, Rocco was aware that he had been tested and found wanting by the Don. He wasn’t a made man, he wasn’t even a capo in his father-in-law’s organization yet, and he resented that. But he knew he had a lot still to prove.

And what about his own father, Enrico? He would be exceedingly angry if Rocco made waves. Constantine and Enrico Mancini went way back. There would be hell to pay.

‘My darling,’ said Rocco, ‘you know it’s you I love.’