A Prince Without a Kingdom

by Timothee de Fombelle

  At the end of the month, the first letter left Zefiro’s scaffolding and crossed the road, care of Tom Jackson, who was unrecognizable in his attire as a young gentleman. The secret operation had begun.

  So as not to be recognized, Tom kept his left hand (on which were tattooed the words “God Bless You”) hidden in his pocket: the tattoo contributed to his notoriety across a patch of five streets and three avenues. He crossed the lobby of the Plaza Hotel as if he were thoroughly at home. He had never set foot on the marble floor before, but had spent his life staring at it through the glass.

  Tom Jackson was the only person on Zefiro’s payroll. Aged nine, he earned fifty cents per week plus a clothing allowance: a fortune.

  Tom drank a glass of seltzer water at the bar, then moved off again, discreetly dropping the letter close to the reception desk. The security guards hadn’t recognized him.

  A Plaza employee picked up the letter and handed it over to the receptionist. Stamped with a European postmark, it was addressed to the occupant of the suite on the eighty-fifth floor. That same evening, it was presented to Dorgeles, who in turn gave it to Madame Victoria.

  From their observatory, Zefiro and Vango watched the reaction to their letter. A meeting was instantly convened. That night, a dozen men in dark suits gathered in the main reception room of Voloy Viktor’s suite. These men got out of their cars, posted vigilantes in the streets, and disappeared behind the Plaza’s doors to reappear a few minutes later, three hundred meters up in the guest apartments. Zefiro had spotted several of them before in Viktor’s entourage.

  None of them looked like gangsters. Zefiro recognized a tailor from Brooklyn, a senator, and some businessmen. They were wreathed in cigar smoke.

  “Let the show begin!” said Zefiro, with one eye glued to the telescope.

  It would take months, but this time he was going to destroy Voloy Viktor. He was convinced of it.

  Vango was getting ready to go out.

  “See you later, Padre.”

  “Where are you going?”

  The padre didn’t like it when Vango ran away like this.

  “Don’t forget they’re watching out for you in town.”

  “Look at me! Who would recognize me now?”

  And sure enough, in the midst of all the rubble, by the light of the oil lamps, Vango was transformed.

  Dressed in a brown suit, his hair slicked back and hat in hand, he swiveled on one foot and grinned. He’d had a pair of small tinted glasses made for him: they were all the rage on Wall Street that summer. Vango didn’t even recognize himself.

  Ten minutes later, he was heading down Fifth Avenue toward Madison Square.

  For the past few weeks, he had spent his nights in the Italian districts of New York. Vango had started with the cafés in the Bronx, combing one after another. Now he had moved on to southern Manhattan, where he had found a few restaurants that rose up like Sicilian islands in the middle of America.

  On this particular night, he walked through the door of La Rocca. One of those islands in Little Italy that smelled of capers and bird’s-eye chili, La Rocca was tucked behind brightly lit windows on the corner of Grand Street. It was Vango’s first visit.

  Toward midnight, the restaurant turned into a dive bar. The card players took over, and the lights were dimmed. But there wasn’t the usual hushed concentration you might expect to find in a gaming room. The chef did the rounds of the tables serving parcels of delicious pastry, stuffed with pungent sausage meat, that oozed cheese when he sliced them on the board. The restaurant was noisy, and the backyard was filling up with empty bottles.

  Vango settled over by the bar. He put his hat down beside him. There were only men in the room, apart from a young woman who stayed behind the stronghold of her bar.

  She was permanently on the move, going from the serving hatch to the storeroom door. One moment she was on tiptoes trying to reach the bottles, the next she had disappeared, crouched down by the ramparts. It was as if she were performing a dance.

  Vango thought of Ethel, whose eyes also landed on things deeply but fleetingly, like tiny daggers that were immediately withdrawn.

  Recalling Ethel’s gaze made him brush his fingers against the note in his pocket, which he had received from her a few days earlier. Three cold lines telling him to bide his time, not to return to Scotland without warning her, and making it clear that she was busy. Little daggers.

  Vango didn’t need to beckon the waitress. She shouted something he couldn’t understand.

  “What d’you want?” she repeated, moving in closer.

  “I’m waiting for someone.”

  She had called him Lupacchiotto, which means little wolf. And Vango did look like one of the young wolves that roamed New York, hoping to seize their chance.

  He was sitting near the sink. He knew that she would be back, sooner or later, to rinse the piled-up glasses. For now, she was filling five glasses from a bottle with no label. It was once again legal for bars to sell alcohol, after the bootleggers had thrived on fifteen years of Prohibition.

  The waitress put one of the glasses in front of Vango. He hadn’t ordered anything, but she slid it toward him. The manager came for the tray that was loaded up with the four other glasses. There were cheers on the other side for a win at briscola or poker.

  “I’m looking for someone called Giovanni,” Vango announced.

  The waitress, who had started washing the glasses, glanced up to take a good look at him.

  “Giovanni? Half my suitors are called Giovanni. So is my father, and my grandfather too.”

  “Giovanni Cafarello.”

  With her forearm, she pushed away a lock of hair from her eyes and stared at him.

  “Cafarello?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cafarello . . .”

  She stopped and dried her hands. Her black eye makeup gave her a slightly older appearance, but she couldn’t be more than eighteen. She shook her head slowly.

  “Is that who you’re waiting for? Cafarello?”

  Vango felt his fingers tightening around his glass. He had asked about this man a thousand times. It wasn’t the first time in two months that this name had gotten a reaction out of somebody. But this evening, there seemed to be an extra glimmer of hope.

  “Yes, I thought I might find him here. I’d like to speak with him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got something for him.”

  She signaled to the owner, Otello, who came over.

  “What’s going on, Alma?”

  The noise was swelling in the restaurant. Alma had to speak into her boss’s ear.

  “D’you remember Cafarello? This one’s looking for him.”

  The man turned his gaze on Vango.

  “Cafarello? Why?”

  “I’ve got something to give him.”

  “What?”

  “From his father, who stayed in the home country.”

  “Money?”

  Vango didn’t answer. The proprietor wiped a copper tap with a cloth.

  “Haven’t seen him for at least a year. Ask Di Marzo.”

  “Who’s Di Marzo?” Vango wanted to know.

  “The fat one sitting over there, at the back.”

  Vango left his glass at the bar and went over to Di Marzo, who seemed to be wedged between tables strewn with glasses, like a boat trapped in ice.

  “Signor Di Marzo?”

  In the man’s enormous hands, his cards looked tiny.

  “I’m looking for Giovanni Cafarello.”

  “Who?”

  “Cafarello.”

  Di Marzo started laughing, and this made the ice crack around him. He leaned toward his neighbor, a small man with slicked-back hair.

  “He’s looking for Giovanni Cafarello.”

  The other man rolled his eyes and smiled.

  “Cafarello . . .”

  Vango politely pressed his point.

  “Signor Di Marzo, I’ve heard that you can tell me where to
find Giovanni Cafarello.”

  “Sing Sing,” declared Di Marzo, slamming his cards down on the table.

  Vango pricked up his ears.

  “Sing Sing?”

  “Sing Sing,” the big man repeated.

  Next to him, the small man with the brilliantine in his hair explained, “He’s been at Sing Sing for months.”

  “But not for much longer,” added Di Marzo.

  They laughed again.

  “Sing Sing,” Vango echoed, feeling dazed. “Thank you, signore.”

  With a knot in his stomach, he made his way back toward the bar.

  “Have you found him, Lupo?” the waitress called out.

  “Maybe. Sing Sing. . . . What does that mean?”

  She nearly knocked over the pyramid of glasses on the draining board.

  “It means he won’t be eating here tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve got to travel up the Hudson. Two hours by boat. It’s easier to get there than it is to come back.”

  “Because of the current?”

  “No. It’s the penitentiary for the north of New York. The prison for men on death row.”

  She no longer held his gaze. He suddenly seemed very far away.

  Vango was trying to picture his parents’ boat. The sound of footsteps on the bridge. The first shots fired at the sailors . . . a night of terror. He was thinking about Cafarello, the next day killing Bartolomeo Viaggi in cold blood, to steal his share of the plunder. Viaggi had a wife and three little girls in Salina. Had he sensed that he was out of his depth given what had taken place? Had he perhaps even felt remorse? In any event, Cafarello had killed him. Vango knew that only one of Viaggi’s three daughters was still alive. Poor girl. He recalled Mazzetta’s death as well, and pondered all these people’s engulfed secrets. So many ravaged lives.

  Finally, his mind turned to Cafarello in his cell at Sing Sing. The haunting racket of loud knocking on doors. Shouting in the corridors.

  Several minutes went by.

  “Lupacchiotto!”

  Vango looked up.

  “Leave the bandits alone,” the waitress was telling him, with both hands on the counter. “Little wolves shouldn’t go hunting in the thick of it. Go back home; forget about Cafarello and Sing Sing.”

  Vango stood up. He took a large bill from his pocket and slid it clumsily under the waitress’s fingers. He knew that she was right about everything.

  “Keep it!” she said, pushing the money away.

  She turned her back on him. Alma had had enough of the banknotes that circulated from night until morning, leaving her fingers as black as her eyes. She wanted something else: hands that touched without any transaction taking place.

  “Alma! Did he pay, the little one?” the proprietor asked behind her.

  “Who?”

  She turned toward the door.

  “The one that just left.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He paid.”

  Vango found himself at the port at three o’clock in the morning. The first boat would leave two hours later. The dockside was deserted. He knocked on the window of one of the huts there.

  A man pushed the door ajar. They exchanged a few words. He seemed hesitant at first, but when Vango emptied his pockets, the ferryman grabbed his cap and stepped outside.

  They went over to the boat. Vango helped the ferryman push it out from the dock and then jumped on board just in time. The engine took a while to start up. Vango was huddled in the stern, eyes closed.

  How was this going to play out?

  All he knew was that when he got to Sing Sing, he would request a meeting with Cafarello in the visiting room. I’ve come on his father’s behalf, he would say. At Salina, in the Aeolian Islands, people talked about Cafarello abandoning his father in cowardly fashion, leaving him behind in his small house between two volcanoes while the son set out for America with the treasure. But who turns away his father’s messenger when he’s behind bars?

  Vango didn’t have a plan. What would he do when Giovanni Cafarello appeared behind the grille? He had no idea. But he was sure that on returning to the New York dockside in the evening, he would possess the knowledge he was after: the great mystery of his life.

  The only thing he promised himself was that he would know.

  At that very moment, in the small hours of the twenty-eighth of August 1936, in a corridor of Sing Sing prison, a man was waiting, flanked by four guards. They had woken him in the middle of the night.

  “It’s today; it’s now.”

  He had stood up. The chaplain had spoken into his ear for a few minutes. The man had rested his head on the priest’s shoulder. He wasn’t even able to cry.

  The voice of Lewis Lawes, the prison warden, had cut short that final humane moment.

  “Giovanni Valente Cafarello, it is time.”

  He was in the corridor now. Even if he started shouting, the other prisoners might not wake up. It was all part of the ordinary prison routine at Sing Sing. Never, in the history of America, had there been so many death sentences as this decade. A few months earlier, four criminals had been executed in a single night at Sing Sing.

  The warden led the condemned man and his guards into the room at the end of the corridor.

  It didn’t take long.

  Fifteen minutes later, it was all over.

  Lewis Lawes returned to his office and collapsed into his leather armchair. Despite running this prison for fifteen years, he was still openly opposed to the death penalty. He was always careful to note the final words of each condemned man in a white notebook. What he had heard in the early hours of that morning was something he had never heard before at the point of execution.

  And yet it was what Cafarello had always maintained.

  Spoken from the electric chair, however, these words had a new impact. Lewis Lawes grabbed the small white notebook from the shelf behind him.

  He leafed through his most recent notes. There were prayers, cries of hatred or love, pleadings. Some condemned prisoners had begged for forgiveness. Others had proclaimed their innocence. And some had called out for their mothers with all the strength they could muster.

  On the last page, he noted the name of Giovanni Cafarello in capital letters, and just below it he wrote:

  Lewis Lawes closed his notebook again. Outside the window, day was breaking over the Hudson River. There was the sound of a boat approaching.

  Everland, Scotland, August 29, 1936

  Ethel kept rummaging through the underwear in her chest of drawers. The silk slipped through her fingers while she continued to cast her eye around her bedroom. Her nails came to rest on a groove in the wood. The bottom of the drawer lifted up to reveal a small packet of letters, which she pressed to her stomach. She turned around, pushing the drawer shut with her back.

  Ethel stared at the envelopes in her hands. There were five of them tied together. She unfastened the packet, opened one of the letters, and went straight to the last line, where the letter V was written. Absentmindedly, Ethel moved word by word up the rivulet of blue ink, before looking up to survey her bedroom. The wooden floor creaked beneath her feet. Why did she have the feeling that she wasn’t alone? For several weeks now, she had been convinced that someone was coming into her bedroom. She had spoken about this with Mary, who had assured her that she was mistaken.

  Mary was even prepared to stake her honor on it. She had raised her arms and sworn blind that she was the only person to go in there and that no one could get past her beady eye.

  But Ethel was sure about it. From morning to evening, the papers and books moved. And when she had walked in through the door a few moments earlier, the drawer was half open.

  Ethel closed the envelope again. The fire was spluttering, unless it was the rain at the window. These brief messages, one or two pages long, weighed almost nothing in her hands. Next, she strode solemnly over to the fireplace, tossed Vango’s five letters into the flames, and watched them burn. Sitting
back on her heels, she nudged a triangle of paper that was trying to escape the furnace. It flared up all of a sudden. Then there was nothing left.

  Ethel stood up. She had kept her coat on, and her expression was both serious and relieved. The wooden floor creaked again as she went over to the window and leaned against it. The engine of her beloved car was purring down below.

  Nicholas was sitting on the hood, waiting. He wore a cape to keep off the rain. For the first time in her life, Ethel had given someone else permission to drive her Napier-Railton. Nicholas was allowed to go into town to do her shopping. He could be seen at the steering wheel of the racing car, speeding through the countryside. Sometimes, both of them were squeezed into the only seat as they set off in the direction of the lake.

  Nicholas spotted Ethel at the window. He gave her a nod, but she didn’t respond. Turning back to face the fire, she saw that the flames had died down now.

  Shortly afterward, Ethel joined Nicholas in the car. The gravel flew out from under the wheels as they drove away from the main driveway of Everland Castle. Mary ran after them, to no avail. She was shouting. She wanted to know which bedroom to prepare for the Princess of Albrac, who was expected the following day.

  A princess!

  Mary was delighted about the visit. Ethel never invited anyone to Everland. There was just the Cameron boy, who paid a neighborly call from time to time without telling his parents. Now that he understood there was no point in holding out hope, he sometimes had tea with Ethel instead. She would smile as she listened to him talking about the girls who were presented to him. The most recent one was very rich, but so shy that he had only seen her hair and perhaps a hint of a nose between two locks.

  Apart from these Sunday visits, the castle remained deserted. Paul was never there: he was off fighting somewhere in Spain. Mary was nostalgic for the days when, on autumn evenings, she had twelve chambermaids under her orders heating up forty beds with warming pans. Back in those days, Ethel’s mother had fires lit all around the castle. One day, she had hosted Lord Delamere, who had arrived with two elephant tusks as a gift.