Red, White & Dead

by Laura Caldwell

  He took a step toward a stone wall and put his back against it, thinking. If this came out, it could fall on his own head because he should have seen it, he should have known. Somehow he would have to handle this before anyone in the System heard about it or understood it. And then there would be retribution for her. Then he would take care of her. Then it would finally end.

  When he heard her making plans to go back to the hotel, to pack her things and take the young woman to Roma, he knew he would be on that trip, only they wouldn’t be aware of it.

  38

  I said goodbye to Theo at the train station. His hair fell forward as he looked down at me. He tucked a lock behind his ears. I remembered when I had done that to him last night. It seemed aeons ago.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

  I looked up at him. “I have no idea.”

  “Is she really taking you to meet him?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “This is surreal,” Theo said.

  “Tell me about it.” My mind skittered about, unable to stop on one thought.

  Theo said once more, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  I turned back to him. “I honestly don’t know. Because here’s the thing. I don’t know who I am now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel like…I don’t know how to put it…” I thought about it, but my thoughts kept jumping one to another, different voices attached to them, all talking. One voice, who clearly didn’t care about my no-swearing campaign, was screaming, Are you fucking kidding me? He’s ALIVE? Another, who sounded as if she was softly weeping, said, I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

  “I feel like I’m not who I thought I was,” I said to Theo. “I’m not half-orphaned. If you really think about it, I’m someone who was, well, abandoned. I mean, my father is alive. He left us.”

  “But you don’t know why.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Elena. “She says she’s going to tell me everything on the train back to Rome. She says he’s there. In Rome.”

  I turned back again. I stared across the station. Passengers were hurrying to the track area. Everyone looked so normal.

  I gazed up at Theo. “Thanks so much for being here.”

  “Are you sure I can’t go with you? I don’t need to fly back. And I could have the pilot meet me in Rome.”

  I shook my head. “You have to get to work. You told me you could only be gone a day or two.”

  He stared at me for a moment, which gave me a second to stare back. His upper lip, perfectly shaped with two pink peaks, disappeared as his bottom teeth bit it, and he looked as if he was thinking hard.

  “I’ve never seen you make that expression,” I said.

  He stopped biting his lip. “What expression?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind.” There was still so much about Theo that I didn’t know, but whether it mattered now, I couldn’t tell. It seemed as if my life had been split in two big books-Before I Knew My Father Was Alive; After I Knew My Father Was Alive. I felt as if I was on a freaking soap opera. The shrill voice in my head piped up again. Who has a dead parent who’s not really dead, for fuck’s sake?

  “Look, I don’t care about work,” Theo said.

  “Of course you do. You have a company to run…” I trailed off, stumbling over another thing I didn’t know about Theo. I knew generally about his company, knew it was legit, but we didn’t talk about things like work. We didn’t talk that much at all, I suppose. And yet despite the absence of all the technical information about him, I felt I knew him. And that I adored him.

  “I’ll throw work to the curb right now if you need me to,” he said.

  “I don’t know what I need. All I know is she’s going to take me to him.” I said this as if by repeating it, it would sink in.

  Suddenly, I felt as if I had taken some kind of drug. I remembered in law school when Maggie and I thought it would be fun to take mushrooms. It wasn’t. The whole experience seemed enjoyable at the start, and then it had all gone bad, bizarre; it felt broken. And that was exactly what the search for my father had been like-almost exciting at first, fantastical, but then it had spun away from me and now seemed ugly, sinister, wrong.

  “Izzy!” Maggie called across the station. She held Bernard’s hand with one of hers and with the other pointed at the board, where lit-up track numbers and departure times were quickly changing and flashing. It was hard to know which one to concentrate on. “Our train is about to leave.”

  I looked at Theo and smiled. “You’re the best for coming. For putting up with all this.”

  “I didn’t put up with anything but some fun.”

  “Oh, you think getting chased by guys with guns is fun?”

  “Hell, yeah. It’ll make a good story for my boys back home.”

  “I’ve never met any of those boys.”

  Suddenly, I wanted to ask him, Who is your mom? Who is your dad? Where were you raised? What high school did you go to? Why did you leave college? Did you always know you would be a success? Who are your friends? I knew nothing about him. Nothing. And yet that realization didn’t leave me empty. Rather, it made me feel kind of hopeful, kind of excited about something to learn in the future.

  Meanwhile, the questions about my father? Those didn’t excite me. They left me cold with fear.

  “I know,” Theo said. “You need to meet my boys. And hey, I liked meeting Maggie and Bernard.” He nodded across the station in Maggie’s direction. She was standing on her tiptoes, clutching Bernard around the neck in a goodbye hug. “So when you get back,” Theo said, “we’ll set up something with my buddies, okay?”

  It sounded like such a normal request, one that I would have said “yes, of course” to yesterday or earlier this morning or even two hours ago. Now, I had no idea how to answer that question. What would it feel like after I met my father, after I heard the explanation of why he had done what he did? I had so many questions. The situation had too many potentials, too many avenues to crawl down. It could go too many ways and none of those ways seemed good.

  But I couldn’t-wouldn’t-live my life just for my father or whatever I would soon learn about him, so I looked at Theo and said, “Yes. I want to meet them when I get home.”

  He smiled. He bent down and with those perfect lips kissed mine. He was such a beautiful kisser. At that moment, it was hard to remember kissing anyone but him.

  He tugged my bottom lip with both of his. And then he folded me into a hug.

  “You are fine,” he said. And, as if he knew I didn’t believe it, he said it again and again as he embraced me. “You are fine. You’re fine. You’re fine.”

  When he finally let me go, I had tears in my eyes.

  “Don’t,” he said, “or you’ll make me do that, too.”

  That made me laugh, the thought of him crying-for some reason I couldn’t envision it. He seemed like someone who always brought the sun with him, who brought the happy life.

  “I’ll see you when I get back,” I said.

  “Let me watch you walk away.”

  “You got it.” And with those words, for one moment, I felt some levity. I felt the way I always felt with him-sexy, amusing.

  I kept that feeling in my mind as I sashayed away from him, for a second almost believing I was one of those normal people walking through the Centrale station. I swung my hips a little in an exaggerated way, then I stopped and I tossed him what I hoped was a sensual look over my shoulder.

  Theo was beaming.

  He gave me a thumbs-up, and then he turned away.

  39

  My aunt and I sat on the train hurtling back to Rome. I was jumpy, moving around in my seat, almost rocking with anticipation, but Elena was as still as night. She looked out the window, her eyes obscured by her sunglasses, the silver braid on the arm of those glasses glinting occasionally with the disappearing sun outside. Once or twice, I attempted to make conversation,
first a stab at small talk, then a direct question about my father.

  She didn’t respond.

  I waited for ten more minutes, then said, “Please, Elena, please just tell me.”

  She didn’t react to my plea. She continued to stare out the window. We fell into silence, the train making a soothing, rocking motion. A few times, Maggie walked halfway down the aisle from her seat and gave me a questioning look as if to say, Need any help? Need anything?

  Each time, I only shook my head sadly. The sun slipped away, night fell. And yet Elena’s sunglasses remained on her face.

  When we were about twenty minutes outside Rome, Elena spoke. “I guess I cannot wait any longer.” She turned to me. “I was the one who caused this.”

  I sat and looked at her, wondering what she meant. I was about to ask, but she opened her mouth, and, finally, my aunt removed her sunglasses. Only then did she tell her story.

  She clasped her hands tight in her lap, gazing down at them. “When we were in high school, they killed my father because of your dad, Christopher.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Camorra wanted Christopher.”

  “In what way?”

  “Here, in Italia, they call the Camorra the System.” She shrugged as if this didn’t matter or she didn’t care. “The System wanted your father, because the Camorra was trying to establish a presence in the United States. The Rizzato Brothers were already in the States and they were doing well. But they needed more members. The right members. The System thought it would be perfect if someone like your father, who was Camorra but not Italian-looking at all, who had a name like Christopher McNeil, could be an active part of the Camorra. They wanted him to infiltrate businesses, to learn everything and then give everything back to the Rizzato Brothers and the Camorra. They had big plans for him. He would eventually help the Rizzato Brothers run the System’s operations in the United States. Eventually, he would be a boss, one that no one would suspect of being in the Mob. They thought it was perfect. But my father wouldn’t hear of it.”

  The train raced around a corner and everything in the car lurched to one side. For a second, I fell against my aunt.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She smiled a little. “Do not be sorry, Isabel.”

  “You were saying that your father wouldn’t go along with the Camorra’s plan?”

  “No. Christopher heard a conversation about it one night when he came home earlier than expected. He was a senior in high school then. Our parents didn’t know he was in the house, but he heard one of the Camorra bosses who’d come from Italy telling our parents of the plan to use Christopher. Our father told this man, in no uncertain terms, that his son would not be a pawn for the System.” She shook her head. “This is not my part of the story to tell, but you already know the facts. My father, Kelvin, was killed.”

  I felt a sick knowledge dawning. “They killed him because he refused to let his son work for the Camorra.”

  “Yes. It was a message. To my father certainly. The last message he would ever get. It was also a message to your father, Christopher. To our mother. The message was, We will ask and you will say yes, or there will be punishment.”

  “But there was no further punishing. My dad went off to college after your father died, right?”

  She dipped her head slowly in acknowledgment and seemed to be drawing in breath for strength. “Yes, Christopher went to college.” She looked at me, eyes unblinking. “He also joined the System.”

  I don’t know why I suffered such shock, but I felt it like a long, steady electrical charge through my whole body. “My father joined the Camorra?”

  “Sí. After what they had done to our father, he saw how strong they were, how unflinching. He knew they would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. And therefore he agreed to their wishes.”

  “He said he would work for them.” I had to say it to believe it. The electrical charge fizzled, and all I felt was disappointment.

  “But he also joined the FBI, Isabel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Christopher contacted the FBI as a freshman in college. He told them he wanted to work for them, but he said that he would be working for the Camorra, too.”

  “He would be a double agent?”

  “Yes. It was the FBI who put him through college and then paid for his master’s degree in psychology. It was the FBI who moved him and your mother to Detroit and placed him in a government job with the Detroit police, although the Camorra took credit for it. They thought they had an inside man. But what your father was doing was reporting on them and consulting on any cases having to do with the Mob, particularly with the Camorra. As I said, the Camorra wanted desperately to establish a foothold in the United States in the seventies. Because of your father’s work, because of what he knew, the FBI was always able to find the men who were in the U.S., and those who were coming to the U.S. They were able to shut them down. The Rizzato Brothers were killed, we believe, by some men whom they had stolen from. And many Camorra members eventually gave up and returned to Italia.”

  Until now, I thought, thinking of Dez Romano and Michael DeSanto. But I didn’t want to stop Elena from talking.

  But she did anyway. Her words died away and she dropped her head into her hands. My aunt began to weep softly. For a moment or two, I didn’t move, didn’t do anything. I stared at the empty seat in front of us. Then I looked back at Elena. I didn’t know how to comfort her, didn’t understand exactly what she needed comforting about. Her tears grew more powerful then, her back began to tremble.

  I saw Maggie stand in the aisle, a number of seats in front of us, a sad, concerned look on her face. She held up her hands. Do you need anything?

  I shrugged then shook my head no.

  It was killing me to see my aunt in that state, so I put my arm around her shoulder. I tried to pull her close, but aside from the sobs that shook her body, she was as stiff as a block of wood. I kept squeezing her a little, kept drawing her ever so slightly nearer. Finally, she seemed to succumb. She crumpled a little, her shoulders sagging farther. She turned her head and placed her forehead on my shoulder. And then, even though I didn’t know why, tears began to stream down my cheeks, as well.

  Maggie was kneeling in her seat now, turned around and watching us. She looked agonized.

  Eventually, Elena’s sobs were reduced to gulping tears, and eventually those diminished into sniffles. But finally, she’d had enough. My aunt sat up.

  “Grazie,” she said to me.

  “Prego.”

  She took a tissue from her bag and dabbed at her eyes, rimmed in red now. “Allora,” she said. “Now I will tell you more.”

  40

  According to my aunt, my father was careful while he worked for the FBI, so careful, she said, that the System did not seem to realize it was Christopher McNeil, the Camorra’s star whose cover was being a police psychologist, who was the cause of their undoing. And so it was all going fine, Elena said, until Christopher brought down the wrong person-the brother of her husband, Maurizio.

  Elena knew the whole time what Christopher was doing. She was the only one, aside from his FBI handlers. He’d told her so she would understand that he was not truly in the System, that he was trying to right the grave wrong of their father’s death.

  “But when he told me that he had targeted Paulo, Maurizio’s brother, and that they were about to bring him down, I begged him not to do it,” she said. “I told him, you cannot do this. This is my husband’s brother. Paulo is like you are to me. Maurizio loves him as I love you. If you do this, the entire family will collapse. Paulo is the patriarch of this family. He is the reason we all have money. Paulo takes care of everyone.”

  “Is Maurizio part of the System?”

  “Yes.” Elena dabbed her eyes again. “I didn’t know it when I met him. I didn’t know that nearly everyone I met when I moved to Italy was Camorra.”

  “Did you ever live in Naples? I though
t the Camorra was only in Naples?”

  She smiled grimly. “The Camorra’s stronghold is in Napoli. Their home is Napoli, but they are everywhere. They are in Rome. In fact, it is easier for them to operate from Rome, where they are still not expected to be strong.”

  “So you and Maurizio stayed in Rome after you were married?”

  “Yes, but the family had a house in Napoli, too, and so we went back and forth. It was a very good life.” She sighed. “You must understand that I have known Maurizio since I was seventeen. When my family had all deserted me-or at least that’s how I felt when I was moved to Rome -it was Maurizio’s distant family who took me into their fold, introducing me to him.”

  “Your father was killed by the Camorra and yet you moved to Italy and moved in with them? I don’t understand.”

  “Isabel, please don’t try to understand this in a simple frame. There is nothing simple about the Camorra. As I told you before, my mother’s family was traditionally Camorra, but many members of the family did not want to be defined by that. Many chose not to participate, others did, but even if someone did work with the Camorra, it didn’t mean that the entire family was a part of it. I believe my mother thought I was safe, because I went to her family in Rome, not Napoli, and all the Camorra members that she knew were from Napoli.”

  A pause. Then I decided to say what I was thinking. “It sounds like you were a sacrificial lamb.”

  The muscles in her face tensed, then she laughed. “That is what your father once said, too. But by then it was too late. I was part of Maurizio’s family-my only family, it felt like-and they were part of me. And it was okay for a long while, because although your father knew Maurizio’s family was Camorra, his clan wasn’t trying to work in the United States, so he wasn’t part of any operation that your father was focusing on. But then Paulo began to move into America, and it came under your father’s jurisdiction, and then there was this operation to bring him down. As I said, I begged him not to.”