by Dana Delamar
With a soft whine, her Rottweiler, Zeta, approached and bumped her broad head under Delfina’s hand, making her smile. “Silly beast, you always know when I need a distraction,” she murmured while stroking Zeta’s black fur, her fingers working around the dog’s ears. Her grandfather had given her and her brother Cristoforo two pups when Delfina was fourteen. Zeta had been by her side ever since, had offered Delfina comfort whenever she needed it, had licked away Delfina’s tears after Teo had been taken from her.
From her earliest days, Delfina had been told—reminded—that she had everything. She was an Andretti, and that name carried with it power, privilege, prestige.
But as with all gifts, there was a price to pay: her freedom.
When she was sixteen, she’d shared an infatuation with Teo Mancuso, the seventeen-year-old son of one of the family’s guards. She and Teo had snuck off together several times, stealing kisses in the olive grove, in the guest cottage, deep inside the hedge maze. Stolen kisses and hasty, fumbling caresses. Until they’d been caught by her grandfather Carlo.
Because Teo hadn’t taken her virginity, his life had been spared. But Carlo had branded Teo’s right hand with an “L” for ladro, forever marking Teo a thief. And she’d been forced to watch. Delfina had appealed to her father, begging him to spare Teo, and her. But Papà had been unyielding. She’d had to witness every minute of Teo’s ordeal.
After the branding, Carlo had told her, in gruesome detail, the story of his brother Remo, of how Remo had paid for his defiance of the rules. For putting his own needs above those of the family. At the end, Nonno had taken her by the chin and forced her to look into his cold dark eyes. “You are an Andretti. You are not some alley cat, lifting her tail for anyone who struts by. Do you understand?”
The scent of burnt flesh lingered on his fingers. All she wanted was to vomit. But she wouldn’t let him see her weakness. Delfina sniffed back her tears and nodded. She understood. Clearly.
That evening, after Teo had been driven away in a black car—at least she could be glad it hadn’t been a hearse—Mamma and Papà had taken her aside. “You must never defy your grandfather,” Mamma said.
Delfina looked to her father, but he averted his gaze.
“He has plans for you, and you cannot ruin them,” her mother continued. “You cannot.” Her voice took on a shrill tone.
She’s afraid. But all Delfina could listen to was Teo’s screaming in her head, how his voice had gone hoarse from begging her grandfather to stop, to have mercy on him. The scent of charred flesh seemed to fill her nose again.
“Delfi, are you listening?” Papà said.
“You’re a coward!” Delfina spat at her father.
His face turned stony, and he held up his maimed right hand. “This is how my father shows his love. He let Rinaldo Lucchesi do this to me. He gave my sister to Rinaldo Lucchesi’s son.”
She repeated the slur. “Coward.”
Mamma slapped her, the blow swift and stinging. “Stop it! Stop it now,” Mamma hissed, her lips quivering.
“It’s true. I can at least tell the truth, can’t I?”
“Not if you want to live.” Her father said the words slowly, his tone dry, defeated.
“Then kill him,” Delfina said. She was shaking inside, whether from anger or terror, she wasn’t sure.
Her mother sucked in a breath, then clamped a hand over Delfina’s mouth, mashing her lips against her teeth. “Basta! You stupid, stupid, child. Must you misunderstand?”
Delfina tore her mother’s hand away. “Oh, I understand. When it comes to your children’s happiness, the only thing that matters is what’s best for the family.”
Her father stepped closer, towering over her. “Don’t ever forget it.” His hands curled into fists before he jammed them into his pockets. “Or the next time, it won’t be the boy who pays.”
With a sharp whine and an insistent bump of her head, Zeta called Delfina back to the present. She scrubbed her fingers through the dog’s short fur and dried the tears that had crept down her cheeks. She needed to forget the past. Forget Teo. Forget everything that never was and never would be.
If her father had started bribing her with dresses, that meant he still cared what she thought. He still cared, at least a little. Now that her grandfather was in his grave, perhaps things would change for the better. Perhaps the dress was her father’s way of telling her that?
When Zeta tired of the renewed attention, Delfina sat down at her desk and pulled out a pencil, going to work on a new sketch. Who was she kidding? She needed to stop fantasizing about her father changing. That was never going to happen. And she needed to stop thinking about him going to prison. That kind of thinking was traitorous. And she knew what happened to traitors.
Everyone did.
And yet, as her pencil outlined a new design, her thoughts kept returning to the same idea, worrying it like a loose tooth. What if she were free of her father? What might she become then? What kind of life might be within her reach?
After the phone call with Andretti, Nick spent the next couple of hours researching the man. Andretti hadn’t lied—he did have certain ties that made Nick think he couldn’t trust him. Mafia ties. Specifically, ties to the Calabrian Mafia, also known as the ‘Ndrangheta, the Honored Society. A prickle of unease made him shift in his seat.
The ‘Ndrangheta weren’t as well known as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, but they should have been. Due to the low profile they’d kept, few outside law enforcement had heard of them, even though they were arguably the most powerful organized crime element in Italy and Europe. Maybe even the world. Their reach had spread from southern Italy to the north, then on to strongholds throughout Europe, before branching off to Canada, South America, Mexico, even Australia. The recent recession had only furthered their influence, as desperate business owners, unable to get cash from legitimate banks, turned to the ‘Ndrangheta for loans and investments, thus giving the Honored Society more outlets for laundering their profits.
The main reason for their vast success was twofold: the ‘Ndrangheta recruited almost exclusively along blood ties, which ensured that the members of each criminal clan were also blood relatives. On top of that, they maintained a low profile: few public killings, especially of civilians, and few pentiti, or witnesses for the state. Almost no men who were captured were willing to turn on family members. Thus, law-enforcement efforts against them had little information to go on, little leverage over the members who had been apprehended, and little hope of ever infiltrating the organization.
If Andretti were telling the truth, Nick’s father was one of these men. Maybe even a don of one of the families.
His fingers trembled as they hovered over the keys. He’d delayed the search into his father long enough. Now that he was on the brink of knowing, an unending drop yawned before him. If his father were in the ‘Ndrangheta, Nick was in trouble. Big trouble. Interpol would consider him compromised, and his career would be over.
Nick typed in his father’s name, then snatched his hand back from the keyboard before pressing ENTER. Once he knew, he could never unlearn his father’s identity. Why had he never thought of this before? Was it because he’d hoped he was wrong?
“Bugger,” he muttered aloud. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.” He swallowed against the gastric acid burning his esophagus. The pain was piercing, immediate, and overwhelming. Why did stress always go straight to his belly?
“Fuck it.” He had to know. He had to. Curiosity would eat at him until he did. He pressed the key and waited for the search results, his stomach in knots.
What he got back on Enrico Lucchesi was a puzzle. Nothing definitive. He’d expected a long record of offenses compiled by the Italian Direzione Investigativa Antimafia. Instead, the DIA record on Lucchesi consisted of four entries, only one an arrest.
He reviewed the entries in chronological order. Several years ago, his father had come up on possible tax-evasion charges in front of an anti-Mafia judge, Federico
Dinelli, who had later been murdered, allegedly by Sergio Grantini, a man who was rumored to have worked for Enrico Lucchesi. But Grantini was missing, the murder weapon had been lost, and the case was in limbo due to a lack of new leads. The tax-evasion case had dissolved in the wake of Dinelli’s death.
The second entry regarded a suspected drunk-driving incident from April that was later dismissed due to missing blood-alcohol results. His father had been driving and lost control of the car. The young woman who’d been with him, Fiammetta Trucco, had been killed in the crash. A fresh rush of acid flooded his throat, and pain spread through his jaw and chest. The incident mentioned in Trucco’s letter was true. And once again, important evidence that might have implicated his father had disappeared.
He almost moved on to the next entry, but stopped. The incident was true, but he didn’t know if Andretti was telling the truth about his father’s identity. There was one way to know for sure. He pulled up the mug shot and exhaled hard.
There was no doubt: Enrico Lucchesi was his father. Nick would have recognized him anywhere. He hadn’t changed much in the nineteen years since Nick had last seen him. There were faint lines around his eyes and on his forehead, but his hair was still black and thick, and the face that stared back at him was nearly a mirror of his own.
Andretti hadn’t been lying.
Taking a deep breath, Nick read the third entry, which concerned a murder committed in self-defense at Lucchesi’s home on 15 September—just shy of one month ago. Apparently, he’d gotten involved with an American woman who’d been married to Vincenzo Andretti, one of Dario Andretti’s cousins. Vincenzo had broken into Lucchesi’s home and attacked them. The woman, Kate Andretti, had shot her husband. The physical evidence supported self-defense, and the case was closed without arrests.
The fourth entry detailed the murder of Rinaldo Lucchesi, Enrico’s father. Nick’s grandfather. The man’s severed head and hands had been delivered to Enrico on 4 October—just twelve days ago. There were abundant signs of torture, with extensive damage to all ten fingers, all of which had also been severed ante-mortem. The investigation was open, but the rest of the body hadn’t been found, and there were no leads. Nick started to open the file with the crime scene photos then stopped. He hadn’t known his grandfather, but he didn’t want those images in his head. Reading about the case was bad enough. Even if the man had been a mobster, that was no way to die.
Nick moved from the legal details to the business ones. His father was listed as CEO of a major Italian bank, Banca di Falcone, and apparently owned a number of other businesses throughout Milan and around Lake Como, where he lived. Aside from the notation regarding tax evasion, and the missing evidence in the two cases that might have resulted in arrest, he appeared to be clean.
Except there was another curious tie to the Andretti family. Lucchesi had been married to Dario Andretti’s sister, Antonella, now deceased a little over a year ago from ovarian cancer.
Why would Andretti hate his former brother-in-law? Could it have something to do with the recent death of his father, Carlo Andretti, who’d been killed in a possible Mafia hit? Andretti had been found shot dead along with several associates in a burned-out house in the hills above Lake Como. There were no leads in the case and little physical evidence. The bodies had been identified through dental records.
A detail gnawed at him. The letter had been postmarked 29 September. Trucco’s body was found on 1 October and Carlo Andretti’s on 4 October, the same day Enrico Lucchesi found out his father was dead. That could not be a coincidence.
Trucco didn’t write the letter. Dario Andretti did. Had Trucco supplied him the details?
Something dark and twisted was going on between the two families, the Andrettis and the Lucchesis. A silent war of sorts.
And now Andretti was trying to draw Nick right into the middle of the conflict.
CHAPTER 2
They should talk face to face, if Nick wanted to catch Delacourt in a lie. But the trip to Lyon would take too long. And Nick had to be careful not to get caught in a lie himself. How was he going to convince his boss to let him meet with Andretti, without revealing his father’s identity?
He dug out his secure mobile, the one he used to discuss Interpol business only, and hit Delacourt’s speed-dial number. The man answered straight away, as if his wrinkled hand had been resting on the sleek black phone on his desk. “Nicolas, it is good to hear from you.”
A grin crossed Nick’s face in response to the smile in Delacourt’s voice. “You as well.”
“I am sorry you had such a rough time in Sicily, and nothing to show for it.” Delacourt’s English flowed smoothly, his native French seasoning the words.
Nick swallowed, the grin fading. “I wanted to talk to you about that.”
Delacourt paused a beat too long. “What about?”
“Émile, be straight with me. You sent me down there for a reason, but it wasn’t to follow leads, and it wasn’t to collect information.”
Delacourt laughed. “Your imagination is quite fertile. Perhaps you should write for the cinema?”
“I’m not imagining things. First off, I was too junior for an assignment on my own. Second, I haven’t trained as a field operative. Third, everything our so-called informant gave me was rubbish, the whole lot.”
“I do not know what to say.”
“How about the truth?” There was a long pause, during which Nick pictured Delacourt running his free hand through his snow-white hair, pulling it into tufts, as if he took his styling tips from Albert Einstein.
“Nicolas, if we are to continue this discussion, it must be in person. Certain things cannot be discussed on the telephone, even on a secure line.”
Nick needed something to counter the sudden dryness in his mouth, the uptick in his heart rate. What couldn’t Delacourt discuss on the phone? He took a sip from the steaming mug of tea sitting on his kitchen table. “Shall I come to you?”
“No need. I have business in London tomorrow.”
“What time shall I see you at SOCA then?” The Serious Organised Crime Agency was the National Central Bureau for Interpol in the United Kingdom and Nick’s home office in London.
“I do not wish to meet at the Agency.”
Nick’s pulse accelerated again. They’d often met before at Nick’s office. Why was Delacourt avoiding SOCA? “Then where?”
“Trafalgar Square, next to Nelson’s Column. Thirteen hundred hours. We will talk more then.” Delacourt ended the call without a goodbye. Odd. The old man was typically the picture of decorum and politeness. Something had him rattled. Something he didn’t want his colleagues to know.
Something that affected Nick as well. That case had definitely been a ruse.
Since he couldn’t make further progress with Delacourt, it was time to talk to Edmund Tyrell again. Now that Nick knew his father’s real name, Tyrell could no longer deny the Mafia connection. Maybe he could trick Tyrell into giving him something useful. The man had a silver tongue, but even the devil made mistakes.
If she hadn’t already had lunch planned with her best friend, Delfina might have been tempted to continue driving north into Switzerland, to go somewhere her father couldn’t find her. If such a place existed.
Brushing off her gloomy thoughts, Delfina ascended the stone steps that led to her favorite trattoria in Bellagio. She was nearly to the top when she heard Giovanna’s excited voice. “Delfi!” She waved at Delfina from one of the outdoor tables and jumped up and gave her a quick hug and kiss on the cheek.
Like Delfina, Giovanna d’Imperio loved fashion, and she always had all the latest styles; however, that didn’t mean she had the best taste. Today Gio was in a crisp black miniskirt and five-inch black platform heels; the riveted straps of leather criss-crossing her feet gave her the air of a dominatrix. She’d topped off the outfit with a conservative silk fuchsia blouse that was tucked in but only half buttoned, so that the sheer lace of the black cami she wore underneath peek
ed out through the deep V. Her black bra was clearly visible.
Delfina surveyed her up and down and put her hands on her hips. “Gio, really. What did your father say when he saw you in that?”
Giovanna wrinkled her nose in distaste. “You too? Next you’ll be commenting on my scandalous lack of underwear.”
“Tell me you’re making that up.”
“I have a date.”
Delfina couldn’t help smiling. “And what did your father say about that?”
Gio grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “Papà doesn’t know.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Gio plopped down in her chair, crossed her legs, and swung her foot. “Well, I think I have a date.”
“You think?” Delfina took her seat. “What’s gotten into you?”
“It’s more like what hasn’t gotten into me. You know him better than I do.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Antonio Legato. Your ‘good friend’ Antonio.”
When would Gio learn? They were both off-limits to Antonio. Delfina laughed. “Okay, now I know you’re teasing me.”
Gio studied her manicure. “I am not. He asked me out.” She picked at one of her cuticles. “At least I think he did.”
The waiter brought their standard orders along with steaming cups of espresso. Delfina picked hers up and took a sip. Perfect, as always. “Gio, if he asked you out, you’d know. Antonio is a big flirt. With everyone, including me.”
“He said I should meet him tonight at Barfly.”
Delfina laughed. “That means he just wants to make sure he has someone to dance with. Not that he ever lacks in that department.”
Gio pushed her lips into a pout. “Davvero?”
“I hate to disappoint you, sweetie, but yes. Really.”
Sinking back against her chair, Gio twirled a few strands of her blond-streaked dark brown hair around one finger. “You really know how to wreck a party, Delfi.”
