by Jessie Keane
Annie knew Daniella was hurting. But there was nothing she could say that would help that. ‘Look – Daniella – you must tell Lucco about the call when he comes up to bed, okay? And . . . if you need anything, I’m right here.’
Chapter 62
The Mancini household got the call in New Jersey at seven o’clock in the evening. Enrico was sitting on his lit back porch drinking beer and reading the day’s papers. He needed glasses for that, thick glasses. Jeez, he was getting old. But not too old to see and be glad that the Vietnam thing was over now, the troops were coming out of Da Nang. He heard the phone start ringing. Then it stopped. He turned the page for the next item, and then he heard the low hurried words – and then his wife started shrieking.
He sprang from his seat, spilling his beer, throwing the glass aside. He hurried inside. His wife was screaming in a monotonous high-pitched wail. He grabbed her and demanded to know what was wrong.
She kept on screaming. He slapped her.
‘Hey! What’s going on?’
Had anything happened to his oldest son, Jonathan? He couldn’t take that. That would kill him for sure. He had a bad heart and this would be too much for it, he knew it. Night and day the doc was after him with pills and blood-pressure checks: this would be too much.
With the shock of the slap, his wife’s face crumpled up and she started to cry hysterically.
‘Rocco! It’s Rocco!’ she shouted.
‘What about him?’ Rocco? That little squirt? What had he been up to now?’
‘Alberto Barolli just called. He’s dead, Enrico. Our son’s dead.’
Enrico was stunned into silence.
His youngest son, dead?
He called for the maid and she came and led his wife away upstairs. Better call out the doc and get her something to calm her down. Better call Alberto back and find out what the fuck was going on here. He hurried through the room to his study, his head whirling, his heart thudding away like crazy . . . all right, there was no love lost there. None at all. But this was his son, for Chrissakes.
Suddenly Enrico slumped down in his desk chair, feeling winded, breathless. A spasm clutched his chest and he put a hand there, thinking no. Not now, not yet . . .
And then he convulsed, and died.
Chapter 63
Annie woke up to shouting. She sat up in bed, groggy from sleep. When she had crawled, exhausted, into bed, she didn’t think she would sleep at all, but somehow she had, and now . . . Daniella was shouting and crying, and she could hear Lucco shouting too.
She leaned over and flicked on the bedside light. ‘What the hell . . .?’ she muttered, and was just wrapping her robe around her when the connecting door opened and Max came in wearing his robe.
‘What the . . .?’ Annie stared at him in surprise. ‘That door was locked.’
‘I took the key and put it on my side.’
She hadn’t checked it before she’d got into bed. He could have burst in here at any time.
And done what? she wondered bitterly. He’d already made it plain that he didn’t want her any more. He might have crept in here and choked the life out of her, though; but so far he’d managed to resist that temptation.
‘What is that? I thought it was you having the fucking nightmares again, but it’s in the next room,’ said Max.
‘That’s Daniella and Lucco’s room,’ said Annie.
They were silent for a moment, listening. There was a shout from Daniella, and then the sound of someone or something falling, all the while overlaid by Lucco ranting like a madman. Then Daniella started to cry loudly.
‘Fuck this,’ said Max, and went out onto the landing.
Annie dashed after him and caught his arm. ‘You can’t interfere,’ she warned. If Max did step between them, who knew what Lucco might do in retaliation?
‘Like hell I can’t,’ said Max, and flung open the door.
All the lights were blazing in the room. Daniella was half kneeling and half lying on the floor by the bed wearing a thin pink nightgown, sobbing her heart out and screaming with pain as she clutched at her cheek, and Lucco in his dressing gown had hold of her by the hair and was trying to pull her back to her feet, all the while swearing at her, telling her she was a stupid cunt, she should come to him first, she should tell him anything first, what did she think he was, some normal, everyday man?
‘I’m the Don,’ he roared at her. ‘You come to me. You answer to me. You understand?’
Annie stood in the doorway, aghast. Obviously, Daniella had told Lucco about Rocco’s phone call, and let slip that she had told Annie first. But for God’s sake, was he nuts? Was that really something to fly into a rage about?
No, she thought. It ain’t. He’s just taking out his panic and frustration on her because she can’t fight back.
Max shot across the room, grabbed Lucco and threw him back against the wall. Then he pinned him there, lifting him clean off his feet, and hissed out: ‘Come on then, you little tit. You want the rough stuff? Try it on someone who can take it.’
For a moment, Lucco looked too shocked by Max’s intervention to speak. But then he started to smile. And then he started to laugh.
‘Good God, are you serious?’ he managed to wheeze out, but his eyes weren’t laughing. They spat venom. ‘You don’t know what you’re taking on.’
Max gave him a shake that wiped the smile clean off his face.
‘Oh, I think I do,’ he said. ‘A chicken-livered piece of scum who thinks he can use his wife as a punchbag. Well, not in my hearing you don’t.’
Annie was helping the sobbing Daniella back to her feet.
‘Ma . . . Mark, leave it,’ she said urgently.
‘What’s going on in here?’ asked Alberto from the doorway. He came in, his blond hair mussed up from sleep. ‘I heard noises.’ He looked at Max holding Lucco against the wall. He dashed into the room and grabbed Max’s arm. ‘Come on, enough! Haven’t we all had enough trouble for one day?’
Alberto glanced at Annie and then at Daniella. Annie saw him looking at the bruises on Daniella’s wrists and then at the red mark on her cheek where it was obvious that Lucco had struck her. She saw his mouth form a thin, angry line.
‘What’s been going on here?’ he said sharply.
‘Nothing,’ said Daniella. She straightened, pulled away from Annie, wiped at her eyes. ‘Nothing. Really. Just a . . .’ She faltered to a halt.
‘A misunderstanding?’ offered Annie. Fuck’s sake, someone had to calm this situation down, and thank God, Daniella had the sense to do it.
‘Sì,’ she said gratefully.
Max was staring into Lucco’s taunting eyes, still holding him pinned there, immobile.
‘Come on,’ said Alberto. ‘Enough now.’
Max let Lucco go. He dropped to the floor, angrily straightening the creased front of his robe.
‘Thank you,’ he said stonily. ‘And now perhaps you will all just fuck off out of my bedroom and let my wife and me get back to bed?’
Annie exchanged an anxious glance with Daniella.
‘You going to be all right in here?’ she asked, not caring that Lucco could hear. Fuck Lucco. ‘You can come in with me, if you want.’
‘I’m fine. Really,’ said the girl with a trembling smile.
‘Yes, let’s all get some sleep, shall we?’ said Alberto, going back to the door. His face was thunderous. ‘Goodnight, everyone,’ he said, and was gone.
Daniella went into the bathroom to clean up. Annie and Max headed for the door.
‘Oh – one moment,’ said Lucco.
They both turned back, looked at him.
‘What?’ asked Annie, her voice blank with dislike.
‘You’re not welcome here any more. Tomorrow morning, first thing – I want you gone.’
Chapter 64
‘Oh, here we go again,’ said Ellie mournfully when she found Annie standing on the doorstep at eleven o’clock next morning. Then she saw Max Carter standing behind Annie. �
��Holy shi— hello, Mr Carter.’
‘Mark Carson,’ said Annie.
‘What?’ asked Ellie, trailing after her into the kitchen. She glanced back. Max was coming in, too. What the . . .?
‘Max is acting as my security for the moment,’ said Annie, resting her heavy holdall on the kitchen table. ‘My bodyguard, right? If anyone asks, that’s anyone, he’s Mark Carson. The Carter boys already know about it.’
‘Right,’ said Ellie, as if she knew what the fuck Annie was talking about. Bodyguard? What the hell was that all about?
‘Sorry about the short notice, Ells, but I wanted somewhere Gerda could reach me.’
‘Gerda?’
‘Layla’s nanny. So I couldn’t do a hotel, it had to be somewhere Gerda had the number for. And I couldn’t do that to Dolly, push her out of her flat, she loves that place, and Queenie’s place is barely liveable in, and I wouldn’t even think about my cousin Kath’s, the dirty mare, and anyway there’s no phone line into Queenie’s and Gerda don’t know the number there and she don’t know Kath’s number, so I thought, who’ll have a room or two going begging? And I thought, I know – there’s always a spare bed in a place like this . . .’
‘You got it fixed then?’ Max was looking at the freshly painted kitchen door.
Ellie smiled nervously. ‘Oh, yeah. No problem.’
‘Business good?’
‘Brisk. Yeah. Thanks for asking.’
‘We’ll try not to get under your feet,’ said Annie tersely, thinking that Ellie was going to start curtsying in a moment, and that he was big-headed enough without that.
‘No problem,’ said Ellie, but she was thinking that it probably would be a problem, because Annie Carter was a problem with a capital P, and you were pissing against the wind if you believed otherwise.
‘Well, let’s get you sorted out with a room,’ said Ellie, trying to be cheerful about it. After all, they’d made up. She’d thought Max was going to rip Annie’s head off when he met up with her, but no, look – here they were, together.
‘Two rooms,’ said Max coldly.
‘One each,’ said Annie, equally cool.
Ah. So hostilities were ongoing.
She showed them up to their rooms. Little blonde Rosie, wearing skin-tight hot pants and a sheer chiffon blouse, passed them on the stairs, and gave Max the glad eye.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked Ellie when the Madam came back downstairs to the kitchen where Rosie was making tea. ‘That gorgeous guy. Not a punter, is he? Not this early?’
‘Him?’ Ellie sniffed and sat down heavily. She reached for the biscuit tin. Fuck it, she’d sworn off the things but this called for a chocolate digestive at the very least. ‘That, my girl, is a whole lot of trouble. Don’t even think about it.’
‘Well,’ said Rosie wistfully, bringing two cups of tea to the table, ‘a girl can dream.’
Ellie snorted and chomped down on a biscuit.
‘It was dreaming about that one that got her into trouble in the first place,’ she said, spitting crumbs.
‘Yeah? What happened?’
So Ellie told her most successful working girl about Annie, about Max Carter, and how she had pinched him from her sister, and all that had happened along the way.
‘But they’re back together now?’ asked Rosie finally, enthralled.
‘Separate rooms,’ said Ellie. Shit, she was on her fifth biscuit now and she didn’t feel like slowing down yet.
‘Ah.’ Rosie gave a grin. ‘But you could smell it in the air between them, couldn’t you?’
‘Smell what?’ asked Ellie in exasperation. Through the open kitchen doorway she saw Chris come in the front door and she watched him wistfully as he took his seat in the hall.
‘The sexual tension,’ said Rosie, who in Ellie’s opinion read too many Mills & Boon books when she wasn’t entertaining clients, and had some very airy-fairy ideas.
Ellie tore her eyes from Chris and shook her head. Rosie and her bloody stupid romantic notions. ‘I think you’ll find that was pure hatred,’ she said.
Chapter 65
‘Well, thanks a bunch,’ said Annie to Max as he dumped the bags onto the floor of her room.
Oh, she knew this room. It was the same one she had stayed in when she had moved in here with Aunt Celia, when she had been in disgrace over sleeping with Max. He had been the entire source of her trouble then, and things hadn’t changed a bit. He was still getting on her tits.
‘Meaning?’ asked Max, closing the door and leaning against it.
‘Meaning for fuck’s sake why did you have to go and do that?’ she demanded, rounding on him, furious. ‘You can’t take on Lucco Barolli. Do that and he’ll have your guts. Anywhere in the world, he’ll get you. Anywhere. You can’t needle him and think you’ll be safe, ever again.’
Max shrugged. He didn’t seem that perturbed. ‘That little bastard needed a lesson,’ he said.
‘Well, let’s hope he forgets that it was you who tried to give him one. Or, I tell you, you’re a dead man walking.’
‘I’m that anyway,’ said Max.
Annie flung her bag onto the double bed and unzipped it. She paused, looked around her. The place was neat and clean, but it wasn’t Holland Park, not by a long chalk. Her whole life felt like a board game. One moment up, the next down. She turned and stared at Max.
‘Now what does that mean?’
‘Just that I should be dead. But I’m alive. And if you think I’m going to stand aside while Junior cuts up rough with a sweet young girl like Daniella, then you don’t know me at all.’
Annie paused.
‘Maybe I don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know why you’re not dead. You never told me.’
Max came over to the bed. ‘Do you even care?’
Yes. She did. This was the man she had once loved best in all the world, the man she had sacrificed everything for, even stopped a bullet for. So yes, she cared. But she couldn’t say that aloud, there was too much anger between them right now for that.
Annie shrugged, deliberately casual. ‘I’d like to know, out of interest. After all, there’s nothing else pressing, is there? You got us chucked out of Holland Park, now we’re dossing down in a whorehouse.’
‘You’re better off out of that snake pit. And anyway, this move might force someone to show their hand, come out in the open, and I’m on home territory now – my boys run these streets.’ He gave her a glinting look. ‘And as for dossing in a whorehouse – you should feel right at home here,’ he said.
Annie nodded slowly. ‘Say that to me just one more time and I swear, you’re going to get your teeth back in an ashtray.’
Now he did smile. ‘You and whose army?’
‘You think I don’t have clout? I’ve got connections.’
‘Nah. Your husband had connections. Your stepson’s got connections. Not you.’
‘Well, he’s thrown us out, thanks to you. And so my social diary’s taken a bit of a dip. So go on. Just to fill in the time. Tell me what happened.’
He sat down on the bed, just a couple of feet from her; but they were miles apart.
‘They threw me over the cliff edge at the villa,’ he said. ‘Smashed me up pretty good. But the doctors put me back together again.’
‘All that time . . .’ said Annie, feeling faintly sick. The sheer cruelty of doing something like that to anybody was beyond her. She could see it in her mind’s eye, so clearly: Max falling, plummeting, his body crashing onto the rocks far below.
It was a miracle that he had survived.
‘But you were gone for so long,’ she said.
‘It took a long time for me to recover. When I came to, I didn’t have a clue who I was. The doctors thought my memory would come back, but they didn’t know how long it would take.’
‘So for over two years you didn’t even know who you were?’
He nodded.
‘Then it came back in fits and starts. Almost the last piece of the puzzle to fall i
nto place was you, and Layla. And then, when I remembered what had happened, I thought you must both be dead. I came back to London and then—’
‘Then you found out I’d gone with Constantine,’ filled in Annie.
‘Yeah.’ He stood up, looking grim. ‘But then – knowing you – that shouldn’t have surprised me, should it?’
‘What does that mean, “knowing you”? I was always faithful to you.’
‘Until a better deal came along. I’d bet you a penny to a pinch of shit, if you’d met Barolli when we were married, you’d have gone for it then and there.’
Annie gritted her teeth. How the hell could he even suggest that? ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said stonily.
‘And if you’d known I was alive?’
‘Then I . . .’ Annie stuttered to a halt to stop herself from saying it. What she had been about to say was that if Max had been alive then no one, not even Constantine, would have even come close.
But she had loved Constantine.
There was no way he was going to make her deny that love.
These were two very different men – Constantine brought up in wealth and Max in poverty. But they had both learned to carve out their niche in the world, living on their wits, and Annie admired their toughness, their resilience.
‘You were about to say . . .?’ Max prompted.
‘Nothing.’ Annie stood up, busied herself with emptying her holdall. ‘I’d better get unpacked.’
‘What, is it too painful, thinking about him? Thinking about what you’ve lost?’ asked Max, standing up too.
Annie shook her head. She didn’t know what to say.
Suddenly Max grabbed her and turned her to face him.
‘Don’t shut me out like that. Tell me what’s going on in that stupid head of yours.’
‘Oh, this from the man who calls me a slut and says I’ll fit right in at a whorehouse? I don’t want to talk to you; all you do is use my own words to beat me up with. And don’t call me stupid.’ Annie tried to pull away. ‘And don’t—’
