The Scarlet Thread (8 page)

He hugged Steven close. Wounds healed, even the invisible ones. Time was what was needed.

He said softly, “We don't need to break heads, Steven. We oil wheels.” He rubbed his finger and thumb together. “It works better. So you don't need to worry. I need you, my son. It's been hard without you. I need you to take some of the burden off my shoulders. I'm not so young; I get tired these days.”

“I could go into business,” Steven said. “I could try banking.”

Lucca kept control. “You could. You could go out into the world and do whatever you wanted. But it would break my heart. Do me a favor. Come into the office next week and put in a few hours, just to straighten out some problems for me. And I swear to you, it's respectable, legitimate.” He looked at his son and pulled a wry grimace. “Well, almost legitimate,” he said. “We may have to bend the rules a little. Sometimes. But no violence. No hurt to anyone. That's all in the past.”

Steven said at last, “Let me think about it; give me a little time.”

“All the time you need,” his father promised. “Just an hour or so next week, that's all I ask.”

He opened a bottle of wine with his son and they talked of Piero's coming marriage. She was a good girl, from a neighboring family. They'd known each other since childhood. “There'll be children,” Lucca said. “Your mama will like that. And she'll steady Piero down. That's all he needs, a good wife and a family.”

Later, Lucca had a stern word with his younger son. “Steven's coming into the office. I'll get him down to work. But no heavy talk from you, or anyone. If it's needed, do it, but don't bring him in on it. You understand me?”

And to his wife he was comforting. “Steven's suffered. More than we realized. I remembered that poor boy of Giovanni's. Still in the psychiatric hospital. I was hasty, Anna. You were right. He needs to feel the family around him. Help him forget. There's the wedding.… He'll meet some nice girls, get back into the old life. Just give him time. He'll settle down. Next thing, he'll find a wife. Maybe that's what he needs.”

But it would be six long years before that part of his prediction came true.

On May 18, 1950, Steven Falconi got married. It was his little son Charlie's sixth birthday. Three thousand miles from the children's tea party in England, Steven drove his new wife away on their honeymoon and called out another woman's name as he took her virginity.

They had married in Palm Beach. First a full nuptial mass in the Church of Santa Margarita and then a huge reception at his uncle's house. She was a beautiful bride, with dark hair, brilliant black eyes and a voluptuous look about her. Clara Fabrizzi was the only daughter of Aldo Fabrizzi, who controlled the garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and had just acquired a string of hotels on the Florida coast. A marriage of dynasties, the Fabrizzis uniting with the Falconis. Both families were pleased; other alliances would follow as a result. She was an heiress and a rich prize, even for a man as important as Steven Falconi. They looked good together, leading off the dancing that evening. He was tall and a war hero. The Falconis' business was flourishing, and money was filling the family's coffers and finding its way across the Atlantic to Switzerland.

Clara's dress had cost a fortune, and there was another fortune in diamonds around her neck, her father's gift. She was twenty-one, her virginity guaranteed by her family to the Falconis, and she was passionately in love with the man they wanted her to marry. The men exchanged crude jokes about the wedding night, and the women, some of them well past their first blush, wondered what it would be like to be bedded by Steven Falconi. None of them could claim to know, because he hadn't looked at any of his own women since he came back from the war.

There was music and dancing, and a lot of men got drunk, while others slipped away and talked business in little groups. The weather was hot and sunny as in the old country, and the ocean lapped blue at the edge of the private beach. Special caterers had come down from New York with the best Italian dishes and the finest Italian wine and French champagne. Two rooms in the mansion were given up to displaying the wedding presents. The ice-blue Cadillac with bulletproof glass and armor plating was Aldo Fabrizzi's wedding present to his son-in-law. It waited outside, festooned in white ribbons.

The fathers stood together, watching their children circle the open-air dance floor as the band played the “Wedding Waltz.” Fabrizzi was small and stocky; in his youth he had been a boxer, and he still walked with the light spring of a man used to moving in the ring.

“They look good,” he said to Lucca Falconi. “Your boy and my little girl. They'll have fine-looking children.”

Lucca nodded. He was pleased, happy about the whole arrangement, happier still because his son had found a suitable wife and would settle down at last. The war had been bad for him in many ways. Still, he had come back and taken up his responsibilities in the end. A very good organizer and a real moneyman. He owed the first to the army and the second to his college education.

“He'll be a good husband,” he assured Fabrizzi. “He doesn't run around with women. He doesn't gamble. You know my son—no vices.”

“No vices,” Aldo Fabrizzi agreed. “Except he likes to work all the time. But my Clara will teach him how to play. He's going to be a lucky man.”

“Talking of luck, and talking of gambling,” Falconi said, “what did you think about my proposal? You know, for opening a new casino in Nevada?”

“Musso runs the gambling there, you know that.” Fabrizzi had a habit of pulling at his lower lip when he was thinking about business.

“Together,” Lucca suggested, “we are bigger than Musso. Why the fuck should he have all the cake? Think about it. He's not so young, and that son of his is eyeballed on dope. He wouldn't give us trouble.”

“I'll think about it.” Fabrizzi nodded. “We'll talk tomorrow, maybe. I better dance with my wife.”

Fabrizzi's plump little wife had only managed to give him the one daughter. If she knew about his passion for big-breasted blondes, she never said anything.

Falconi took some champagne. Pity he hadn't had a chance to try out the idea on Steven. Gambling was very big money and getting bigger. It was time to give Tony Musso a push and see what happened. He might just take a fall.

“I'm so happy,” Clara whispered to Steven as they circled. “You love me, don't you, Steven?” She had beautiful eyes, and they were limpid with her love for him.

“You know I do,” he answered, and drew her closer to him. She was everything a man could want. There was passion in her. It had smoldered during their courtship. Steven was the one who drew back. They would have children.

He had bought a magnificent brownstone on East Fifty-second Street. His father was building them a vacation house at Palm Beach as his wedding present. And together the two families would enlarge their business interests.

Clara was an educated girl—that was important to him. He couldn't have married a girl with no interest beyond her home and the bambinos. Clara liked going to concerts and the theater. She had an eye for modern art, which he couldn't understand, but if she wanted pictures, that was okay by him. He desired her. No man could help but want her, and he pressed her closer still until the waltz blended into one of Sinatra's popular romantic songs. There'd been no significant woman in his life since he came back from the war. Nothing had filled the void in his life, not even the devotion to business that occupied every moment of his days. The empty space was there inside him. He had tried to get himself killed in battle because the pain of losing Angela and his child was driving him mad. When he came home, he couldn't tell anyone what had happened. It was his private grief, a secret anguish he carried inside. He still dreamed of that dreadful dust-filled wasteland, with the smell of burning corpses in the air, and woke up sweating.

He held his new bride tight against him and believed that love for her would grow and fill the emptiness.

They had rented a house at Boca Raton for the first part of their honeymoon. The staff was hand-picked. They were Falconi's people, and the house was guarded day and night. The family had enemies along that coast. Later, the couple would fly off to Europe, where the bodyguards weren't necessary. Clara had grown up with armed men watching her father and dogging her wherever she went. It was part of the life-style of a Mafia chief's family. It had made her feel important as a child.

That first night, they had dinner on the terrace, with the moon rising like a silver medal in the sky and the sound of the waves whispering against the shore. Steven raised his glass to her.

“
Carissima
. How hungry are you?”

“I'm hungry for you,” she said. “And I've no shame about it. I don't want food, my darling. I want you to make love to me.”

He didn't need to undress her, to teach her anything. She stripped off her clothes and stood white and naked before him. In the blaze of passion that engulfed him, she became another woman in his arms, another voice that cried out under him, and the name escaped him without his knowledge. “Angelina.” The silk-sheeted bed felt like the dusty earth of Sicily, and the sun of long ago burned his back.

“Angelina.” She froze as he lay beside her afterward. He stroked her breasts and murmured to her in Italian, but she couldn't move or answer. It had been painful, but she rejoiced when he hurt her because it fused them together. It was a fierce and primitive satisfaction, as much emotional as physical, when he spent himself inside her. And then she heard another name, uttered twice, at the moment of fulfillment.

Steven was asleep, one arm anchoring her to the bed. She lifted it and slid away. The salt taste of tears was in her mouth. She was naked and cold, with sweat drying on her body and a soreness from the ruptured hymen. There was a little blood, as proof of her purity. She should have been so proud of that. She pulled the unworn nightdress over her head and got back into bed. Unhappiness welled up in her, until she rolled away to the very edge and sobbed into the pillow.

When he woke in the morning and drew her toward him to make love again, she stiffened and drew back.

“I hurt you,
carissima
,” he whispered. “Forgive me. It'll be better for you this time. Come here to me.”

He tried to take the rigid body in his arms, to soothe and stroke her into responsiveness. She turned her pale face up to him. There were great dark circles under her eyes.

“Tell me about Angelina,” she said. “You called her name last night. Tell me about her.”

I owe it to her
, Steven convinced himself.
I've hurt and humiliated her, and I've got to put it right between us. She's my wife now. I'll make her understand
.

He took her out onto the terrace in the early-morning sunshine and held her hand while he spoke of what had happened in Sicily seven years before. Clara listened, watching his face, judging every intonation in his voice. She saw the pain in his eyes as he relived the nightmare of the devastated hospital. When he spoke of finding the watch stained with her blood, he looked away.

“You married her,” Clara said. “You married her in the Church.”

“She was pregnant with my child,” he repeated. “What else could I do?”

“Nobody told my father about this,” she said. “That wasn't very honorable.”

“Nobody knew,” Steven protested. “You are the only person in the world I've told about it. They're dead, and it's over. I love you, Clara. I don't know how it happened last night, but you've got to forget it.”

“You didn't have to marry her.” She spoke quite coldly now. “She wasn't Sicilian. How did you know the child was yours? How many other men did she fuck besides you?”

The crudity astonished him. He felt a sudden flare of anger. “Don't ever use that kind of word again, Clara. And don't talk about her that way. I've told you, she's dead and you don't need to be jealous. Now get changed and we'll go for a swim.”

“What did she look like?”

He felt the anger come again at her persistence. He wanted to hurt her for what she'd said about Angela and the child. “Not like you. Blond and blue-eyed. Very pretty.”

He saw her flinch.
I love her
, he said to himself,
but she's got to learn not to go too far with me
. “I said we'd swim.” He turned to go inside. “I told you to get changed.”

Women didn't disobey their menfolk. If it wasn't a father, it was a brother and then a husband. She got up and followed him inside. They went down to the beach side by side. He didn't hold her hand or say anything. He dived in ahead of her.

Fiercely she argued with herself, trying to be calm.
I don't have to be jealous. She's dead, she and her child. But I heard her name cried out instead of mine, and I saw the look on his face when he talked about her. But I love him so much I'll have to submit
.

She followed him up to the house and into the bedroom, stripped off her bathing suit, and then threw herself on the bed. She lay there with her legs apart and her breasts swelling as she looked up at him.

“I'm your wife, Steven, and I love you so much I could die. Forgive me.”

He made love very kindly and gently, trying to gain her forgiveness, but she clawed and bit like an animal, as if her ferocity could bind him to her and drive out the dead. And she said, gasping in his arms, “You'll forget her. I'll make you forget her.… I'll eat you alive till you can't think of anyone else.”

Desire drained away from him. “Behave yourself,” he commanded her, and she shrank back, wounded. “That's not what I want from you. I pay for that, Clara. I don't want it from my wife.”

She spat a vile Sicilian insult at him, and he slapped her across the face. Two of the men patrolling the outside of the house heard their raised voices, looked at each other and shrugged. They were in shirtsleeves and slacks, shoulder holsters unfastened to allow instant access to their guns if anyone approached. They heard the new Donna Falconi shrieking hysterically at her husband, and one of them sucked up his saliva and spat.