by Jessie Keane
Vittore grunted a reply.
‘Where is Fabby?’ asked Bella, using her son’s baby-name. Her youngest son was always off doing something or other, mostly things that were best not known about. She had no illusions about her family; she knew what her husband and then her sons had become. What her daughter might be, too, now that she was finally getting involved in the business. Still, she loved them and excused them so much. But today, Fabio should be here.
‘Something to do with the funeral director,’ lied Vittore.
There was no trouble with the undertaker. Vittore knew that because he had handled all the arrangements himself. Fabio was off somewhere, doing something he shouldn’t. That was for sure. If he screwed up, today of all days, then Vittore promised himself he would kick Fabio’s stupid arse from here to the moon. ‘There were one or two things to be straightened out, that’s all.’
The doorbell rang, and Vittore went to answer it. A moment later, he returned, followed by Bianca – dressed in black today, not her usual white. She embraced Bella, who started to cry.
‘This is breaking my heart,’ she said.
‘I know, Mama. I know,’ said Bianca.
Maria appeared in the doorway. Pretty, curvy, dark-haired. Bianca went and hugged her briefly.
Bella ignored her daughter-in-law. ‘I don’t want Fabby to be late,’ she fretted. She was wondering whether she had done the right thing, phoning Ruby Darke. And she wondered whether the woman would even bother to show up.
‘He won’t be, Mama. Don’t worry,’ said Vittore.
Don’t worry! Bella had spent her lifetime worrying over her family, trying to maintain an iron hold over them. She couldn’t alter her ways. And now Tito was gone to join his father Astorre in heaven. In her mind’s eye, Bella always pictured her Astorre as he’d been way back in the days when they’d been young, and still living in their proper home, their true home – Napoli.
9
Naples, 1925
Bella came out of the church feeling deliriously happy. She was blinking in the blaring sunlight, her laughter drowned out by noisy trumpeters as friends and family showered her and her new husband with rice. Bella beamed up at Astorre, her groom. Astorre Danieri had done the decent thing and married her, his childhood sweetheart, and she loved him dearly.
‘Bellisima!’ everyone yelled at the bride.
Bella was twenty years old and for the first time in her life she felt beautiful. Astorre was twenty, too – and Bella was already pregnant, having succumbed to Astorre in one of her father’s olive groves and allowed him to lift her skirts and have her. Only once, it had happened – Bella always afterwards blamed the heat for her weakness that day, for why else would a good Catholic girl lie with a man unwed?
When she told Astorre of her condition, he shrugged. He’d half-expected this would happen: he was a stud – a stallion, the girls said of him in tones of admiration – and it came as no surprise to him that his arrow had found its mark. ‘We’ll marry,’ he said, and went immediately to see her father.
Now here they were, husband and wife at last! Bella was so happy she thought she would burst.
But life was hard, even if she was newly married, and in love. In the dry baking heat of an Italian summer, with Vesuvius rumbling and smoking on the horizon, it was a difficult time to be pregnant, and Bella suffered badly from morning sickness. She struggled to keep the house nice while, as camorristi, both Astorre’s father and then Astorre himself were drafted into the Fascist Party.
Four years earlier, Benito Mussolini, the blacksmith’s son from Romagna, had declared himself Il Duce and the leader of the Fascists. Astorre’s father, a widower, became involved in political life, but Astorre contented himself with trading in the port, where there were good profits to be made on the sly with cigarettes and drugs and other lucrative contraband.
It was a risky time and Bella was full of fear for her new husband. Just the year before their wedding, there had been unrest on the streets, many deaths. Yes, the Fascists were in power, but that communist bastard Matteotti had accused them of poll-rigging. After he was shot for his trouble, Casalini, Mussolini’s deputy, was gunned down in a retaliatory shooting.
‘Be careful,’ Astorre told his father Franco when at last he held his own first-born, Tito, safe in his arms. Bella’d had a bad time with both the pregnancy and the birth, but here was their reward. They had a son.
Astorre was concerned about his father. The communists were still causing trouble, targeting those in power, and Papa had made a particular enemy of one of the scum, Corvetto. A hard-nosed thug who had once been camorristi, Corvetto was a turncoat and a braggart. Papa knew secrets about the man, secrets the communist did not want known.
‘No worries,’ said his father. ‘Il Duce has banned all the left-wing bastards now, they can’t form parties any more.’
Astorre didn’t believe that would make any difference. Nevertheless, he joined his father in politics.
And Bella worried all the more.
10
1975
‘Put the money in here! Right here, cunt, don’t you make one funny move or you’re DEAD, you got me?’
The terrified female bank teller behind the smashed counter stared in horror at the men, four of them, big threatening blocks of muscle clad in balaclavas and boiler suits, each one wielding a pick handle.
Some of the customers were screaming. Moira Stanhope had seen her kids off to school this morning, come into work as usual, set up her position – it was just another day. And now, all hell had broken loose.
The noise of the screens being broken, the sudden impact of the men’s entry into the bank, the shouting, the threats of violence, the bags being thrown across the glass-strewn counters, all conspired to make Moira and the two other tellers freeze, unable to function.
‘NOW! You hear me? Get the money in the bag NOW!’
Moira started fumbling the cash into the bag. Such was the shock of this intrusion, she didn’t even think to press the panic button that was connected straight to the nearest police station. The other tellers were doing the same as her, every one of them white with fear, moving like stuttering automatons.
Fabio Danieri watched with satisfaction, feeling so wired that he could barely keep still. Shout at anyone loud enough and they crumbled, anyone in the armed forces could tell you that. And sweet Jesus, could he shout. They all could, all his boys, all the little gang he’d grown up on the Clerkenwell streets with, they were swearing and screaming at the tellers, Move! Do it! Hurry Up!
And like dumb cattle the tellers were obeying, ladling the loot into the bags, pushing them back over the counter.
Piece of piss, thought Fabio.
Then they were leaving the building, hurrying out – not too fast – to the car where Derby their jockey sat at the wheel of the high-performance car, engine running. They whipped off their balaclavas as they went, piled in, and Derby was away, slowly at first, sedately, but soon . . .
‘Holy fuck!’ shouted Derby, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror.
‘What?’ Fabio strained to see. A cop car was nudging in behind them.
‘Shit,’ he said. They had the bulging bags of cash stacked up around them. Quickly Fabio and the others started stripping off their boiler suits. Fabio was wearing jogging shorts and a black T-shirt under his. He could hear the bank’s alarms going now.
‘It’s OK. No lights, no siren. Just a patrol car, it’s nothing,’ said Derby.
Then Fabio saw the customers running out of the bank, waving wildly to the occupants of the police car, pointing to the car stuffed with men and bags with Derby at the wheel.
‘Double shit,’ said Fabio. ‘Hit it, Derby.’
Derby wasn’t called that for nothing. Give him a few thou of stolen horsepower and he could outrun anything the filth could chuck at him. It was close, but they raced through the streets and finally Derby gave them the slip. The boys dumped the car and the bags in a coach depot car park, st
ashing the cash all over their bodies under their clothes. Then they split up – and shit here came the filth again, just as they were saying their farewells.
‘Leg it!’ said Fabio.
All the boys scattered.
‘Oi! Stop right there, arsehole!’ shouted one of the police, coming up fast at Fabio’s rear.
Fabio had no intention of stopping. He took to his heels, hurling himself down an embankment straight into a huge patch of brambles. The copper – no doubt dreaming of promotion – followed.
Both men started swearing and wincing. Shit, those things hurt.
It was the death of a thousand cuts. Flesh tearing, blood dripping off him like raindrops, Fabio hauled himself out of the damned brambles, seeing the copper still in there, trapped, struggling, trying to break free. Fabio sped off as fast as he could. He found himself in what appeared to be a deserted storage depot, surrounded by lorries in for repair.
Exhausted, he ran to the nearest shed door, slid it open. He slipped inside and slumped down on the floor, sweating, bleeding, shaking with the force of the adrenaline pumping madly through his veins. Minutes passed. He got his breath back, and . . . then he heard it.
A police radio, crackling, coming closer.
Shit.
He had to get out of here. He had the cash stuffed down his underpants. He inched open the door. No one in sight, but they were there, he could hear the bastards.
Fabio slipped outside, looking around for a way out. Quickly he pulled himself up onto the low roof of the building and nearly messed himself when a policeman went straight by the door, talking into his radio. A couple of seconds earlier, and he’d have seen Fabio coming out.
But Fabio had been lucky. And he meant to stay that way. When he was sure the copper was out of sight, he jumped from the roof onto a wall, and then almost fell down onto the other side, which turned out to be a main road. A road he knew.
Thank you, God.
He grinned triumphantly then broke into an easy loping run, heading homeward. He was fit as well as handsome, he took care of himself. He was just a jogger now – so long as nobody looked too closely at the scrapes and the bloodstains, and the black top hid a lot of it anyway. All around him, bedlam was breaking out. Cop cars sped past, blue lights flashing, sirens wailing.
Fabio trotted on, knowing precisely where he was going. In fact, he was getting tired of this, getting away with things by the skin of his teeth, these little bank jobs. But he’d accumulated a good bit of stake money in the process. Soon he would start getting into something far more lucrative and less risky.
Fabio had been working on a plan. The smash-and-grabs at the banks had brought in cash, but he was making a name for himself and that was dangerous: it was time to quit while he was ahead. The drugs game was a much better bet. Friends in the trade had told him the figures, and they were mind-blowing. He could buy a load of coke in Colombia for three or four grand, then sell it on for thirty grand in the UK. What was not to like?
Furthermore, he had a ready market in the clubs his family already owned. He could get people in his pay circulating among the socialites, the carefree daddy’s-little-rich-girls-out-on-the-town, and they could knock it out for a thousand pounds an ounce, netting him a clear thirty or forty grand profit on every deal.
Compared to that, bank jobs paid peanuts.
No need to enlighten Vittore as to this new status quo though. Big brother might think he owned the world now that Tito had gone off to run heaven, but Fabio liked having this secret, hugging it to himself. He would make a fucking fortune and it would all be his. No way was the family taking a share.
11
Kit was on his way out when he saw the woman. There must have been a smash on the road; the traffic was crawling in both directions. He sat at the wheel of his Bentley, gridlocked, and stared out at the God-awful weather. It had stopped raining for now, but it was still as cold as a witch’s tit out there. He wondered when this bastard headache was going to let go. Occasionally he sipped out of the open bottle of Scotch on the seat beside him.
He was too drunk to drive, he knew that.
He didn’t care.
Places to go, things to do kept turning over and over in his mind.
That was when he saw her. Traffic crawling along in the other direction, his own car going nowhere fast. And there was her face, in the back of a big black limousine – she was pale as ivory, with huge turquoise-blue eyes and . . . hadn’t Marilyn Monroe said she had a body for sin? Well this woman had a mouth like that. Sensual, full-lipped, you could imagine her doing all sorts of things to you with that mouth. Her hair was so white it was almost silver, falling straight to her shoulders, a black veil pushed back from it. He couldn’t see any lower, only that she was all in black and it drained the life out of her features. Drunk as he was, he still felt the swift urgent tug of sexual attraction.
Her head turned a little, and her eyes met his. She didn’t look away, just returned his stare. This was no shrinking violet: her gaze was direct, intelligent. Then the traffic in her lane moved on, and she was gone. He turned in his seat, wanting to maintain the eye-contact, but that was it, folks: end of show. She was gone, off across the city, one more person moving around the vast metropolis.
He picked up the bottle again and drank.
This is a nightmare, thought Bianca.
Vittore had hired a trio of limos from the funeral directors. One, of course, for Mama and himself (he was her favourite, they all knew that), while Fabio would have a limo to himself, leaving Bianca to share with Maria, Vittore’s poor doormat wife, who didn’t comment but must surely notice that she had been relegated, separated from her husband by his overbearing mother, yet again.
Now the limousine Bianca and Maria were travelling in was stuck in the traffic, crawling along, prolonging the agony of this day. The other two limos, travelling behind the hearse, were lost to view. The driver had said he knew a better route to the church, and had turned the car around. He was sweating, the idiot, he didn’t know the way at all. Now they were sitting, unmoving, in yet another line of cars.
Inch by inch, the car crept along. Bianca sat there like wood, gazing out at the matt dove-grey of the sky, thinking This cannot be happening.
But it was.
Today the family was saying its final farewell to Tito, who had been murdered in cold blood by some piece of scum – she spat on them, whoever they were.
Tito was dead.
She couldn’t believe it, but it was true.
Her eldest brother, the one she’d loved so much, idolized, was dead and gone. She knew that it was mostly Tito’s doing that she had been entrusted – at last – with Dante’s. Vittore would never have entrusted her with any responsibility. Vittore had always seemed indifferent to her; he was secure in his position as Mama’s firm favourite. As for Fabio, he had mocked the very idea.
‘Bianca? What, you joking, Tito?’ he’d laughed when the possibility of her running a club had first been broached.
All her life, Fabio had mocked her. Resented her. Cuffed her around the ear, punched her when Mama wasn’t looking, because she was the interloper, the new baby, and she’d taken his privileged place.
Only Tito had loved her as a brother truly should, indulging her, showing her the noble old Italian ways, accepting her unstintingly into the family. He’d taught her everything, even how to shoot. She remembered how he’d taken her hunting rabbits on farmers’ fields, and how she had treasured that time alone with him.
Now, her heart was broken. He was gone.
A sleek Bentley paused alongside the limo, heading in the other direction. Her eyes caught and held the stare of the man sitting behind the wheel. Even sunk deep in grief, she was arrested by how amazingly handsome he was: dark-skinned, black-haired. And his eyes were a startlingly clear bright blue – but they seemed full of some private pain.
Then the limo edged forward and the man slipped out of her line of sight. She turned to look back, but he wa
s gone.
Maria was taking her hand, squeezing it. Bianca snapped back to the present, looked at her sister-in-law, the poor cow.
‘He’s in a better place, you know. Tito, I mean,’ she said.
Bianca took her hand away.
A better place?
She knew that plenty of people would think Tito was destined for hell, particularly the one who’d killed him. And she wanted to know who that was; she was desperate to know who the bastard was who had robbed Tito of his life and brought such devastation on her family. Adopted or not, she had absorbed the culture she’d been taken into. She was a true child of the Camorra, and that was a proud and unforgiving heritage.
When she found out who was responsible, she would have her revenge.
She swore it.
12
It was freezing cold and windy as the mourners filed inside the church. Outside, some brave early daffodils were being tossed in the breeze and flattened into the muddy soil. It was scarcely warmer inside the building. The atmosphere was grim. The organist was playing a dirge, appropriately sad for a Requiem Mass.
Many had come to pay their respects, because they had to. The Danieris expected it. Tito might be gone, but there was still Vittore; there was still Fabio. Failure to attend would be noted, and frowned upon. Everyone knew that.
Loitering outside were a couple of plain-clothes policemen, noticed but ignored by the bulk of the mourners. The police had only recently released the body, and ‘enquiries were ongoing’ into Tito’s murder. But so far no one had been arrested and everyone knew that the police wouldn’t dig too deeply or trouble themselves too much: obviously it was another gangland killing, one of many that occurred every year around the city, nothing too remarkable.
Bastards, thought Bianca, walking up the aisle beside Maria, both of them curtsying and crossing themselves before the altar before joining Mama in the front pew.
‘Where have you been?’ demanded Bella of her daughter.
