It occurred to Mitch that he didn’t really know Visconti as well as he thought. He’d never spent much time with him; there’d never been any discussions over drinks, or for that matter, any lengthy business dealings, just professional brushings every so often. Over the years it was actually their reputations that had mingled and thus, acquaintance was a sort of illusory effect.
On the whole, unless one was able to look close and long, Visconti didn’t appear to be what he was. He had the demeanor of a successful, legitimate entrepreneur, someone smartly on top of his game, comfortable in his skin, nervousness never apparent. That was the impression he hoped to achieve. He promoted it, campaigned, ever trying to have the exposed side of him accepted as a sensitive human being with utmost regard for life’s higher aspects.
For example, the poster he had hung in his office, better positioned than the Jasper Johns. Anyone entering would have to notice it right off. A large framed poster for a retrospective showing of films by the director Luchino Visconti.
The Leopard, The Damned, Death in Venice.
Furio Visconti claimed the director was an ancestor.
He backed up that claim convincingly with dates and places, fond memories and proved opinions gleaned from the extensive research he’d done. Luchino Visconti, the films and the man, was a topic Furio Visconti would cleverly bring a conversation around to and not allow to be quickly dropped.
Only once or twice was he questioned about the Visconti line that preceded Uncle Luchino. Each time he managed to parry and sidestep. He’d read and knew quite a bit about the Viscontis and how prominent they were in Northern Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Were, through the female side, related to such dynasties as the Valois of France, the Hapsburgs of Austria and Spain and the Tudors of England. No, he didn’t want to get into all that. It was too much of a better thing, too rich for his blood. And, regarding blood, while the Viscontis were a Milanese family, his own was Sicilian. Necessarily so for him to have been at such a young age conferred with the mob’s coveted made status. His true legal name was Vescotini. His grandparents, like so many others who entered the country around the turn of the century, had lost the proper spelling to the impatient processing on Ellis Island.
From the various efforts Furio Visconti put out and kept up, it might have been thought he was trying to polish away his capo self. Quite the contrary, he was new mob. He wanted the duality. But if ever he were to be confronted with having to make a choice between sensibility and menace he’d have, without a second thought, opted for the latter. Because he enjoyed it. Just as much as did his old-mob-style counterpart at the other end of the street.
“Tell you what, call your wife now and find out about the weekend. That way, if it’s okay with her, I’ll be able to look forward to it.”
Mitch did a glance at his watch. “She’ll be in the middle of a lesson.”
“What’s she taking?”
“Giving. Guitar lessons.” Actually this wasn’t one of Maddie’s lesson days. At that moment, Mitch thought, she was probably putting fresh water in the aviary and feeding her lady finches. He had no intention of mentioning Visconti’s invitation to her, knew that if he did she’d want to accept, insist on accepting. Not because of the social amusement or the possibility of an after-dark beach stroll, for some extemporary al fresco loving in the lap of a dune. Rather, the allure for her would be the prospect of sitting on a terrace until long after dinner with Visconti and a couple of his have-arounds, drawing from them recollection of mob escapades, smart moves, big scores, justifiable paybacks, graphic tall tales and short from genuine mob mouths, underscored by wafts of alyssum and the concussion of crickets. She’d love it.
Visconti stepped back to see if he’d corrected the hang of the Jasper Johns. It looked straight to Mitch but Visconti gave the lower right hand corner of its frame a slight tap before he was satisfied. He returned to sit, asking: “Ever play the big casino?” Meaning, of course, the stock market.
“Used to some, not recently.”
“Who’s your broker?”
“The Bear.”
“I get a good thing now and then, a can’t-miss thing. Next one I get I’ll give to you, as long as you promise it won’t go any further. Most guys, when they get something sure can’t wait to let others in on it. Like they’ve got a fucking list of people they want to have owe them. You’re not that way though.”
“How can you tell?”
“I got a sense about people. You, I want to get to know better. We’d get along.”
Mitch thought actually Maddie might not be seeing to her birds at that moment. She’d be making the bed, stretching, tucking, smoothing the sheets and plumping the pillows by spanking them as though they’d been naughty. Before Maddie he’d been a one-pillow sort and more often than not that one ended up tossed to the floor during the night. She’d turned him into a steadfast, multi-pillow man. The head of their bed was piled with as many as eight European squares filled with finest goose down and cased in high-count shams. Each night he and Maddie sunk together. He sometimes wondered how it felt to her in her black, that soft, sinking escape. He’d closed his eyes to help him imagine but he was sure it wasn’t the same.
“I’ve something I want to show you,” Mitch told Visconti. He reached for his folio to take out a set of the Kalali photographs.
But just then the tea came.
It wasn’t just tea, not just in mugs as Mitch had expected. One of Visconti’s young have-arounds wearing a fresh white waiter’s jacket brought it. On a huge silver tray, ivory handles. The matching silver service was of art deco design, unusually refined with hardly any surface decoration.
Mitch recognized the pieces as creations of Jean Puiforcat, believed by many to be the foremost French silversmith of the twenties and thirties. Worth plenty, Mitch thought, and wasn’t it miraculous that the swift who’d stolen the tray and tea set hadn’t banged them up? Usually such things were carelessly thrown into a knotted sheet where, in the lugging and all, they traded dents.
Also on the tray were several doileyed dishes precisely arranged with Sarah Bernhardts and cat’s tongues and madeleinettes and a variety of crustless half-slice sandwiches. Altogether quite a load that the have-around, as physically well-conditioned as he appeared, was relieved to place down on the low table between Visconti and Mitch.
“I’ll take it from here,” Visconti said, dismissing the have-around. He lifted the lid from the tea pot, peeked in, sniffed, before pouring into the two elaborately hand-painted bone china cups. “Sugar?” he asked.
Mitch didn’t have time to reply.
“You shouldn’t, you know. Sugar is bad for the prostate, and …” he grinned conspiratorially, “… the last thing we want to go is the prostate.”
“I prefer honey.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Plain is fine.”
They slurped. Mitch felt the rim of the cup click against his lower front teeth. Visconti seemed pleased to have company. Did he go to such elegant ritual when alone? Mitch wondered. It was certainly a far cry from Riccio’s dirty espresso cups and stainless steel spoons.
“What was it you were about to show me?” Visconti asked.
Mitch handed him the gray envelope.
Visconti slid the photographs from it. He looked through them, giving each a moment but coming back for a second, longer look at the two inscribed emeralds. “So?” he said.
Mitch told him what the photographs were, how these pieces of jewelry had been stolen three nights ago, that one of the owners had been killed during the robbery. It seemed to Mitch that Visconti only half listened.
“What do you want me to say?” Visconti asked.
“Nothing if these pieces have already found their way to you.”
“There’s blood on the fucking stuff. I wouldn’t touch it.”
Mitch doubted that was a line Visconti had ever drawn. He got Visconti eyes to eyes for a long moment. The man wasn’t easy t
o read. He was adept at hiding whatever he chose behind whatever he chose to reveal in his eyes and facial expression. Only when he allowed were his eyes and mouth in accord, so a person seldom knew which to go by.
Mitch decided to believe him in this Kalali matter. “All I ask is if these pieces come in or get offered you let me know.”
“Why?”
“Only so I don’t waste time trying to recover.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I got no problem with that. I’m not saying I’ll call you up and tell you straight out but I’ll let you know some way.”
“However.”
Mitch went for a couple of the madeleinettes. They were dusted with powdered sugar. He was sure his prostate could handle it.
“One condition, though,” Visconti said.
“What?”
“If and when you recover the stuff you let me know.” Visconti didn’t give Mitch a chance to ask why. He stood abruptly. “Now I’ve got something to show you,” he said and left the room.
Mitch poured more tea and had one of the Sarah Bernhardts and then two more by the time Visconti returned. Bringing a protective black flannel pouch drawn and tied by a scarlet grosgrain ribbon.
Visconti handed the pouch to Mitch, who gathered that he was expected to open it and that it contained something valuable.
Which turned out to be a bonbonnière or what was called a boîte à bonbon back in the 1700s. This particular one was circular, about three inches in diameter and an inch deep. It was finished in translucent pink mounted in borders of finely chased gold. The circumference of its lid was embellished with a row of old-cut diamonds. Such little boxes were used to hold dragées for sweetening the breath back then when most breaths were so badly in need of sweetening.
Mitch appreciated it, ran a finger delicately over the diamonds and pressed the one located at six o’clock. The hinged lid sprung open. Nothing inside.
“Lovely,” Mitch managed to say, hearing his voice as though it originated outside himself.
Visconti waited for more. When he realized that was all the reaction he was going to get, he told Mitch: “Don’t ask me. It’s natural you’d want to know but don’t ask. All I can tell you is it came in week before last and evidently the same guy, anyway the guy’s daughter, has had it all the while.”
Mitch did a shrug.
He clicked the bonbonnière shut and put it back into the pouch. Placed the pouch on the table. “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Can I assume we have an understanding on the Kalali material?”
“Yeah, sure. What’s Kalali anyway? Sounds East Indian.”
“Iranian.”
“They’ve got a hard-on for us, the Iranians.”
“Some do.”
“Let me know about the weekend.” Visconti did a goodbye smile. No handshake. They’d already done that and once a day was sufficient.
Mitch saw himself out, through the reception area with the eyes of the have-arounds on his back. He was about ten strides down the corridor when Visconti hurried out to catch up with him.
“I suppose you’re aware of what your brother’s into,” Visconti said.
An immediate, purely reflex nod from Mitch. “Andy and I never keep anything from one another.”
“I thought that’s how it was but I wasn’t sure so I didn’t mention it.”
“I wondered if you’d bring it up,” Mitch said, fishing.
“But why Riccio,” Visconti exaggerated slightly. “If he was going to run an errand, why not for me? Riccio’s no friend.”
“Andy’s decision,” Mitch said while thinking the long-shot wish that it wasn’t true, that it was only something Visconti had heard.
The street was like that.
Along with its held tongue there was always a lot of bad-mouthing.
Chapter 9
The first pay phone Mitch tried digested his quarter but didn’t give him a dial tone. On the next he and secretary Shirley could hardly hear one another.
“Where are you?” she asked.
He told her. He’d made it as far as the lobby of his building and almost into an elevator.
“You don’t sound like you,” she said, “not at all well.”
“I’m okay.”
“Perhaps, but you don’t sound it.”
“What’s happening?”
“Just Ruder.”
“So, close up.”
“I’ve some filing and a couple of letters you think I’ve already done.”
“Take off. Go somewhere and lay away something.”
“I might. You’ve probably got a touch of the summer flu. Do your bones ache?”
“I’m going home,” he told her, and within the minute he was outside heading up Fifth, dragging. He would, he thought, go straight home, get way up there in the Sherry with Maddie and forget there was a down here.
However, when he got to 50th and St. Patrick’s he went in, and it seemed that radical change of atmosphere would be a palliative for his condition with its meek light, votive candles jigging, serious prayers barraging the altar with supplications.
He sat in the very last pew, distant enough from everyone and practically hidden by a fat pillar.
To take it on.
All at once rather than have it eat at him a bite at a time.
He gazed down at his hands. They were empty, relaxed on his thighs, but felt as though they were still holding the past.
That bonbonnière.
Twenty years ago it was among the estate pieces his father, Kenneth Laughton, brought back from a buying trip to London. At first sight Mitch had been attracted to the box and, when his father tagged it and placed it along with other merchandise in one of the store’s display cases, he’d boyishly put a hex on it that he hoped would prevent it from being sold. At the same time he created a romantic story for the box, caring to believe it had early on belonged to a woman of nobility, a woman whose beauty and exceptional taste excused her numerous carnal caprices.
Mitch’s attachment to the bonbonnière was not unnoticed by his father. Hardly a day passed that Mitch didn’t wipe possible finger smudges and motes of dust from its pink and gold exterior, and press the six o’clock diamond on its lid to have it spring open, as though providing it with the exercise it required to keep agile.
His father understood.
Hadn’t he at one time or another experienced the same sort of fondness for a thing so pretty?
Mitch expected any day the bonbonnière would be sold. He was prepared to accept that event, but weeks went by and it didn’t sell and he noticed its coded price tag had been removed and he overheard his father inform a customer that it wasn’t for sale.
Thereafter the bonbonnière was spoken of as Mitch’s box. It hadn’t ever been formally presented to him, was only possession understood, but it was his. He kept Läkerol lemon mint pastilles in it. Right up to the last.
It was about that time that Kenneth Laughton made the move of his dreams. From on Lexington in the fifties to on Madison in the sixties. A corner location. What’s more, the oblong shape of the space and the relatively intimate size of it, only four hundred square feet, lent itself nicely to being made elegant.
K. Laughton and Sons.
Within a few months the business had established its cachet. No ordinary run-of-the-mill manufactured merchandise; it carried only estate jewelry and only the finer level of that.
Nearly every piece Laughton’s offered came with an interesting or colorful or notorious past. Much more appealing was a one-of-a-kind diamond choker that had known the neck of a one-of-a-kind demimonde, pieces of another age in their original fitted cases that had been the conciliatory gifts to the wives of caught-straying robber barons, pieces from the not so long ago when the daughters of scions were marrying for titles and diamond tiaras and crotch-length strands of pearls were de rigueur.
The precious bijouterie of snooty English ladies and stars of the silent screen and Zie
gfield show-offs who’d worn little or nothing else—could be found at Laughton’s.
There was, of course, only a limited supply of such finer jewelry. Kenneth Laughton had to seek it out. He went on what he called hunting trips, sometimes accompanied by Mitch or Andy or both, to Geneva, St. Moritz, Milan, Monaco and other likely places. He and his sons were also prominent at the Sotheby and the Christie auctions. They’d be pointed out and when a particular piece was knocked down to them that usually verified its value. “Laughton got it,” people would whisper and make that notation in their sales catalogues.
Often lovely pieces came to the store, brought by misfortunates embarrassed by the need to sell but rightly under the impression Laughton’s would not take advantage of their plight.
A pair of Winston ear clips for instance.
“Why certainly Mrs. Whoever, we’ll clean them for you.”
“That’s most kind of you.”
“No bother, no bother at all. It will take only a few minutes.”
“While we’re at it, I was wondering, could you give me an idea of what they’re worth? To you, I mean.”
Others, whose fortunes had ascended, brought in pieces wanting to trade or leave on consignment. In fact, much of the Laughton stock was left by owners to be sold.
“Why in the world would you want to part with such a lovely bracelet. It’s Van Cleef you know.”
“I never wear it. It’s a hand-me-down from my bitch-from-hell aunt. Anyway, I’m bored with it.”
Many of those were frail, spindly-looking, overdieted women with scalpeled features, addicted to self-indulgence.
Mitch had learned to recognize their requirements. He knew how to wait on them. For one thing they didn’t want him to be too well-mannered. Nor did they ever want to be called ma’am. At times he found them amusing, forgivable, and more often than not, his good nature was sincere.
All in all, Laughton and Sons was doing well, and there seemed to be no reason why it wouldn’t continue to do so.
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