Corsican Honor

by William Heffernan

  Ludwig’s eyes snapped to Bugayev’s reflection in the mirror. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Corniche President Kennedy wound along the edge of the sea, skirting the steep limestone cliffs and sandy coves almost as if intent on showing off the stark beauty of Marseilles’s coastline. Across the road, the rich villas of the bourgeoisie formed an opulent rampart, the large houses standing guard over sprawling lawns and gardens, the upper stories staring out toward the sea, blind to all else but the wealth and privilege of their owners. And amid that wealth, nearly dominating it in size and grandeur, was the villa of Antoine and Meme Pisani, the Corsican brothers who had ruled the Marseilles underworld for the past thirty years.

  Alex Moran watched the Pisani villa come into view as he drove along the coastal highway. He knew the house well; he had been present, as a boy, at the party that had launched it into this community of riches—a party roundly avoided by the other denizens, who, to a person, had found themselves conveniently elsewhere rather than be forced to offer offense to two men the newspapers regularly labeled as murderous.

  Alex smiled at the memory—he had not understood it then, although his father had tried to explain—but even more at the ongoing contradiction between the house and the men who owned it, and what it had been turned into by the very nature of those men.

  The house, though only twenty-five years old, had been built to conform with—but in most ways to outshine—its neighbors, many of which already had been in existence for over a century, having been built by the shipping giants who dominated Marseilles during its halcyon days as a port. It was a solid, gracious house, three stories of stucco, covered by a red tile roof, with long French windows, each opening on to a series of balconies. At each corner of the house large palm trees marked the beginnings of gently sloping gardens, bisected by a long driveway that began at the encircling spiked iron fence and ended in a loop around a simple fountain that stood before the front entrance.

  What viewers of this magnificent house could not see were the steel-reinforced shooting positions built into balconies at each corner and designed to handle incoming and outgoing automatic-weapons fire, and the metal plates embedded in the driveway, which at the toss of a switch would raise foot-long steel spikes capable of disabling any approaching vehicle.

  What viewers could see were the two solid-looking men who stood guard at the gate, each offering the promise of weapons not far from hand and making it clear that those who lived within were men to whom violence was neither uncommon nor unexpected.

  But that was only apparent to those who looked closely, those who truly understood what they were looking at. And the men who lived here were so much a part of Alex—had been so much a part of his life since childhood—that he often thought even he couldn’t see them clearly. See them as they really were. They were his uncles, and as a child they had often told him he had Corsican blood, that they had given it to him when he was just a baby. And sometimes he thought it must be true.

  Alex pulled up to the gate and allowed his eyes to follow the long drive up to the house itself. It was truly magnificent, he thought, again marveling, as he often had, at the difference between American and European gangsters. In the States a modern mafioso would never dare live in such obvious splendor for fear the IRS would swoop down on him like a starving vulture. Here, in Europe, and especially among members of the Corsican milieu, it was almost demanded, lest one’s competition view a lack of display as a lack of strength.

  Alex’s thoughts were interrupted by a light tap on the driver’s window, and he automatically pulled the latch that opened the trunk. Once the guard, whom Alex knew only as Angelo, had inspected both the trunk and the front and rear seats, he asked Alex to step from the car to be gently frisked. He then nodded to his companion, who manually opened the gate. No matter how many times Alex had visited the Pisanis—and always telephoning ahead, as he had this time—the routine had never changed. One simply did not survive in the milieu by assuming your friends—or your family—would never kill you.

  As he pulled the car around the fountain and stopped, the front door of the house burst open and Antoine Pisani exploded down the stairs. There was no other way to describe Antoine’s movements, unless it were to compare them to the release of a bull at a corrida. Even at sixty he moved like a man half his age, and his blustery warmth and energy always brought an amused grin to Alex’s face.

  “Alex, you donkey,” he roared in French, the only language the Pisanis and Alex used with one another. “You haven’t visited your uncle in years.”

  It had actually been six weeks since Alex had come to the house to have lunch with his two “uncles,” but he had no time to say it before Antoine gripped him in two bear-like arms and lifted him off the ground with bone-crushing affection.

  “Why don’t you ever visit me?” Antoine demanded, punctuating his question by kissing Alex on each cheek.

  “I do,” Alex insisted, returning Antoine’s kisses as the only way he knew of being returned to the ground. “It’s just that you’re getting old and you forget.”

  Antoine released him, stepped back, and conspiratorially tapped his nose with one finger. “I forget nothing,” he said. “I still remember you peeing your pants when we were boar hunting in Corsica.”

  “I never did,” Alex snapped, playing the game they had played out many times before. “And even if I had, I was only ten when it happened.”

  “A pants pisser at ten will be a pants pisser at ninety,” Antoine intoned. His piercing blue eyes bore into Alex, his long white mane of hair making his words seem like those of a prophet. But then his unusually ruddy complexion became even redder, and his face burst into a smile. One log-like arm encircled Alex’s neck and pulled him against the older man’s chest. “Damn, it’s good to see you,” he roared. “When I told Meme you were coming, he wouldn’t believe me, it’s been so long.”

  “How is Uncle Meme?”

  “Ahh,” Antoine snorted, waving one hand in disgust. “He’s a pain in the ass, like he always is. How do you expect him to be?”

  Alex thought of his other Corsican “uncle.” Antoine’s brother, Meme, was a man as different from Antoine as nature could make him. Meme was a year younger, but frail and aesthetic, a quiet, balding man with a simmering violence beneath his calm exterior, shown only in dark brown eyes that became nearly black when angry. Said to be a wizard in financial matters, he was no less violent than his elder brother. But where Antoine would kill with a club, it was said Meme would use a stiletto, and he would make sure that death was a long and painful process.

  But those were in the old days, Alex reminded himself. Long ago when they had worked for his father. Now there were minions who did the killing. Hundreds of them. He wondered if that meant Antoine and Meme had mellowed.

  He smiled to himself as Antoine bundled him through the front door. He had stopped trying to analyze his feelings for these two men. He understood the personal affection he felt for them, feelings ingrained in him since boyhood. And he knew how much he despised what they did “to earn their bread,” as they put it: the drugs, the prostitution, illegal enterprise atop illegal enterprise, and the ever present violence that seemed a common thread through it all. So, on a business side, he dealt with them only as intelligence assets—who, as a rule, were seldom ideal. And on a personal level he ignored who and what they were. It wasn’t the easiest of tightrope acts, but so far it had worked. He had become adept at disregarding the truth.

  Antoine ushered him into the study, where Meme was seated on one side of a massive partner’s desk the two brothers shared. The room, unlike the rest of the house, was what a film director would have—and had—offered as a gangster’s study: Spacious and dark, heavy with wood paneling and leather furniture, a place of sinister brooding and filled with the residue of planned mayhem.

  Meme jumped to his feet as Alex entered, a broad smile on his narrow, gaunt face, a
nd all images of the gangster’s lair disappeared from Alex’s mind. He rushed across the room and embraced his “nephew,” kissing his cheeks and being kissed in return. He stepped back, held Alex’s shoulders at arm’s length, and nodded his head. “You look tired,” he said in French. “And it’s too early in the day to look as tired as you do.” Meme turned and guided Alex across the room toward a seating area before an unlighted fireplace. “Come. Sit. Have an aperitif. We will talk, then we will have lunch.” He smiled with uneven teeth, the gift of an impoverished youth that he had never tried to alter. “But, first, tell us what news you have of your father. He is even a greater stranger here than you are.”

  They sat and talked for nearly a half hour before adjourning to the dining room for lunch. Alex told them of his last letter from his father, and of the quiet life he professed to be living in Palm Beach, spending most of his days at the exclusive Everglades Club, a ritual interrupted only by the occasional meetings demanded by his position as a director of the bank his elder son, Richard, headed.

  Both brothers nodded sagely at the news, not believing a word of it but accepting Alex’s need for discretion. CIA executives—like men in their own profession—simply did not retire, their manner said, and Alex wanted to laugh and assure them it was true, as far as he knew. But that was it. As far as he knew. It was a phrase he would have to add in all honesty, and one he knew they would interpret in the only way they could.

  After a lunch of poached salmon they returned to the study and resumed their places before the nonexistent fire. It was time for business, the unexplained help Alex had said he would need when he had telephoned that morning.

  “So tell us, nephew, what small service we can do for you,” Meme began. By the simple use of the fictitious familial term it was clear whatever Alex asked would be done. No true Corsican, they believed, could refuse a family member any service, up to and including the slitting of an offending throat.

  “There is a man in Marseilles that I must find,” Alex began. “It’s business, and my people are working on it. But the time I have is short and I need more assets on the street.”

  Alex went on to explain who Ludwig was, the help he was receiving from the Soviets, and the belief he was en route to Libya or another radical middle eastern nation. He could see from the look on both men’s faces that the words terrorist and communist had made all additional discussion unnecessary. Alex fought back a smile. Like most of the gangsters he had ever met or heard of, they were ultra conservative and highly patriotic. It was a complete contradiction, especially when one considered they had spent most of their lives trying to subvert the very principles they espoused.

  When he had finished, Meme leaned forward in his chair, looking like an aging bookkeeper about to make some point about the company accounts. “You want this man alive? Or is this unimportant?”

  “Alive would be better. We could learn a great deal if he were able to talk,” Alex said. “But I don’t want any of your people hurt unnecessarily. The man’s killed every agent who’s gotten close enough to dust him or collar him. And every one of those agencies is looking for him right now. So I’d rather have him dead than add to his body count.”

  Meme and Antoine nodded. They understood the American terminology and appreciated the sentiment. Meme stood and adjusted the dapper suit he wore, light-years away from Antoine’s rumpled sack. “I’ll make arrangements now,” he said. “If the man stays in Marseilles even a few days, or is foolish enough to leave his hole, we will find him.” He shrugged. “If we knew what he looked like, we would not even need a few days. We’d simply put his description out on the street and watch every possible exit route. This fish would never swim out of our net. Now we will just need time to filter through the strangers in the city.” He shrugged again and left the room. The accountant off to do his sums, Alex thought.

  “Now, put your mind to rest on this,” Antoine said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands over his sizable but rock-hard paunch. “Tell me of your beautiful Stephanie, and when there will be a child for me to play with.”

  Alex quickly masked the pain that flashed across his eyes, but not before Antoine had noticed. “We both work such long hours, I don’t know how we’d manage a child right now.”

  Antoine leaned forward, prepared to pursue the matter, then thought better of it. Alex would talk to him when he was ready. And then he would tell him everything, not just what was forced from him.

  “You must tell Stephanie that we miss her. And that I refuse to let you make her a stranger to our home,” he said.

  Alex smiled and nodded, but the smile was a weak one.

  “I’ll tell her,” Alex said.

  Antoine and Meme stood side by side on the front steps as they watched Alex’s car retreat down the driveway.

  “Something is wrong with him,” Meme said. “Inside, something is very wrong.”

  “Yes, I think you are right,” Antoine answered.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Alex poured himself a drink, his second since he had got home—two in less than an hour, a lot for him. He looked at the clock. In ten minutes Stephanie would be an hour late, although he wasn’t sure what time she normally arrived, since he always got there later than she. He knew what time she finished work, and how long it should take her to reach their apartment from the consulate. He was basing it on that. If she came straight home. If that were her usual thing to do. If she wasn’t tied up with something else. … Someone else. He pushed the thought away. Hating it. Hating himself for thinking it. Knowing he had every right to, every reason. Hating that as well.

  The sound of the key turning in the lock stiffened his back, and he turned to watch Stephanie enter. Beautiful. Always so beautiful.

  She seemed startled to see him. Surprised? No, startled. Of course, he was never home early. To check up on her? On when she got home? Was this the way it was going to be now? Fuck her. Let her think and worry about whatever she wanted.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “This is a nice surprise. What finally got you home early?”

  “Just couldn’t stand the office anymore,” Alex said.

  “Good. I hope the feeling continues. I’m glad this Ludwig thing isn’t driving you crazy.” There was an all’s right with the world smile on her face.

  Alex returned it. “Want a drink?” he asked.

  “Love one.”

  She sat on the sofa and watched him pour a glass of white wine he had already set out on ice.

  “Usually something like this Ludwig matter leaves you so tense and single-minded. Is it over already?”

  He came toward her, handed her the glass of chilled wine. “No, it’s not over. Something else has taken precedence.”

  “Oh. What’s that?”

  “My wife sleeping with another man.”

  The color drained from her face; the wine glass trembled slightly.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Someone saw you going into a hotel with someone, saw him register, and saw you both go up to a room.” He stared at her. “Then come down a few hours later.” He studied his own drink. “All the intelligence services—the French, the British, everyone—have watchers in every hotel. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I forgot.” Her hand was still trembling, the wine shaking in her glass. But she kept her eyes on his, almost as though she were unable to look away.

  “How long has it been going on?” He watched her eyes blink, then look away. She seemed suddenly different to him, more like a young girl forced to explain something she had hoped no one would ever know.

  Stephanie looked back at him, her eyes and voice soft. “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me.” His voice cracked slightly and he hated that it had.

  “Oh, Alex. That’s just torturing yourself. Next you’ll want to know how many times, and where. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  She tossed her long blond hair back with a twist of her h
ead. It was a practiced gesture, something that drew attention to her, something he had always thought she had rehearsed, standing in front of a mirror as a young girl. He had always liked it. It was part of her. And was this part of her too? He didn’t know. But he knew she was right. Knowing the details would only make it worse. But maybe he needed to know. Know how deeply he’d been cut. Maybe it would make him understand the pain he felt, eating away at his guts like a hungry animal.

  He stared at her, unable to speak for a moment. She looked tall and willowy, even now seated across from him on their living room sofa. The dark blue eyes, the high cheekbones. Sculpted features that still made his breath catch at times, just looking at her. And she was dressed so perfectly, always was. Ever since he had first seen her. The fine silk blouse she wore now, the striking blue setting off her coloring so well. The tailored slacks and stylish shoes. Even here at home, alone with him, she always dressed extravagantly. But never jewelry. The only jewelry she wore were the engagement and wedding rings he had given her. She never took them off. Never.

  They had married five years before, only months after they had met. She had been twenty-five then, a newly arrived translator at the consulate. Fresh out of Vassar and Columbia. He had teased her about that. And she had laughed, enjoyed it. But she had known she was everything he had ever been taught to look for in a woman. And she had told him so.

  Alex stood and walked to the wide windows that looked out onto the Mediterranean, the azure waters glistening under a bright sun. It should, be dark and overcast, he thought. Like it is when the mistral blows in winter. But it was summer now, and the days were warm and bright and beautiful, one after another.

  Behind him another bank of windows looked out over the city and the rising bell tower of the nineteenth-century Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde. It was the perfect place to live. A towering apartment on the Corniche President Kennedy. The perfect place for the perfect couple, living out the fantasy of a government posting in the south of France.