The Rich Shall Inherit (18 page)

He’d sat alone all night with a bottle of brandy, just the way he was now, staring into the fireless grate in his lonely house, thinking about his old friend and worrying about what to do, wondering whether Paolo would approve, and remembering that night, thirty-three years ago, when he’d confessed the truth about himself to Paolo.

He had first met Paolo one memorable evening at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at a performance of
Norma
, sung by Maria Callas. Carraldo had remained in his seat after the rapturous audience had departed, still under the singer’s dramatic spell, and finding that his neighbor was still in his seat and equally in love with “Norma,” he had suggested they share a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

When Paolo had told him about his great interest in the romantic poets, Carraldo had invited him to his apartment to inspect his collection of rare books and manuscripts. A friendship based on mutual interests had bloomed quickly, and they had spent many evenings together, discussing art and music as well as poetry, continuing their conversations by letter when Carraldo was at one of his many homes or away on his business travels.

Carraldo knew that the Rinardi family was an old one, but Paolo told him that after four centuries the family money was running out. His parents were both dead and he was hopelessly impractical, and when he received his allowance, paid from the family trust every three months, he spent it all immediately in a joyous whirl of old books, art objects, and good wine. But Carraldo thought he had a magic way with words. He had a beautiful resonant speaking voice, and just to hear him reading the poets in Italian, or reciting a Shakespeare sonnet in English, and Virgil in Latin, was like listening to music. He found him fascinating, and Paolo was equally intrigued by Carraldo’s air of mystery and his inexplicable wealth—the paintings in his house alone were worth a fortune. It was an attraction of opposites.
They enjoyed each other’s company and they never asked each other personal questions. They were good friends.

Occasionally, in the dark hours before dawn, over a bottle of good brandy, they talked about their innermost feelings—about women and love … and sex. And on one such night Carraldo realized he could no longer live with his conscience; he either must tell him the truth about himself—or else end their friendship. It was a momentous decision because Paolo was the only man Carraldo had ever allowed himself to come close to, and the only person with whom he’d ever dropped his guard and expressed his feelings. Now he stood to lose the man he loved as a true friend and brother. He knew he had no choice. Paolo must be the judge of that friendship.

The two were at his villa in Portofino. It was a chilly autumn evening and they had been out sailing all day. They had dined well and now, relaxed, were sitting companionably in front of a blazing log fire, drinking an aromatic marc brandy, when Carraldo said suddenly, “There is something I must tell you.”

His face was pale and his dark eyes serious, and realizing that it was important, Paolo listened, asking no questions while Carraldo related the story of his life.

He said he thought he must have been born in 1937, though he couldn’t be certain of the exact date because all the records had been destroyed. He hadn’t even been sure who his parents were as, from the time he was old enough to remember, he’d lived with a woman called Antonella in a dank, sunless tenement in Naples. He remembered that he had never called her “Mama”—it was always “Antonella,” so he assumed that she wasn’t his natural mother, but she must have been a cut above the other tenement dwellers because she had always kept him clean and neatly dressed. And for some reason, she had always called him “Antony,” and not “Antonio,” the Italian version of the name.

Benito Mussolini and fascism had already taken control and, swept along in the wave of hysterical enthusiasm for the German leader, Hitler, in April 1939, Italy invaded Albania. A few months later Italy, now aligned with Germany, was at war with the Allies and later with Russia.

As World War II raged through Europe, life became more difficult; food was in increasingly short supply because all the farm workers were sent to fight, but to young Antony, who knew no different, everything seemed quite normal. His playground was the grimy, littered streets of the
bassi;
his friends
were the children of peasant tenement dwellers; and he learned the dialect and coarse language of that environment. By the age of five, he had the vocabulary of a street urchin and knew his way through the maze of alleys and steps between the tall tenement buildings that were his home territory, and he could recognize whose apartment he was passing by the lines of washing strung overhead.

In September 1943, under the command of Lt. General Mark Clark, the U.S. Fifth Army invaded the western shore of Italy at Salerno, and as the fighting gradually came closer, Naples was under constant bombardment. The city was a shambles, but somehow daily life went on. On a sunny morning in late September, the American forces shelled the city and within minutes Antony’s entire block of tenements had been wiped out, leaving only burning rubble and bodies behind. One of those bodies was Antonella’s. Antony had escaped death only because he had been sent on an errand to the baker’s to fetch fresh bread for lunch. He was six years old, skinny, with large brown eyes and a shock of dark hair; and he was alone on the wartime streets of Naples.

That night he discovered he wasn’t totally alone—there were other children in the same situation, dozens of them—hundreds maybe. He couldn’t yet count beyond twenty, so he wasn’t sure how many, but there were a lot. The other children warned him that the American soldiers were coming and they would take him away if they found out he was an orphan. Many had been taken by the authorities already, they said, and never seen again. The next day the city fell to the Allies and, terrified of the tanks and the guns and the marching foreigners, Antony lurked in the ruins of the bomb-scarred city, learning from the others how to beg for coins and food—and how to steal. They stole anything they could get their quick hands on—washing from the lines to be sold to dealers who funneled it back into the markets; purses from old ladies and food from careless grocers and bakers. They were small and sharp-witted and innocent-looking—who would suspect such tiny waifs? At night they slept among the ruins on the remnants of what were once mattresses and chairs. They were a group of twenty or more, united by a single aim—to survive.

After a year of dodging the authorities and learning to become a petty criminal, Anthony could barely remember any other way of life. One day, he stole a shoeshine kit from behind the back of its owner, who was sitting in a cafe enjoying a glass of wine with
his lunch. This time, instead of hurrying back with his loot to their headquarters in the ruins, he hid it behind a dusty velvet curtain in the vestry of a nearby church. That night he thought long and hard about his next move. He was seven now and he had learned a lot in the past year—he was a quick and accomplished thief, he knew where to get rid of stolen goods and how much they were worth; he knew how to steal and how to get enough food so that he could survive. And he knew what it meant to be alone. With that shoeshine kit he could have his own little “business,” earning proper money, not just the few odd coins he was permitted in the group. It meant abandoning his comrades, but it was an opportunity he could not afford to miss.

Antony was smart enough to move from his
bassi
to another, farther west. Italy had surrendered, and in no time he’d learned that a painfully thin, knobby-kneed, ragged waif with an orphan story could make a fair bit of money shining the shoes of the young GI’s who sat around in the cafes in the squares. He did a good job and they often tossed an extra coin into his outstretched palm, offering him chocolate and ruffling his untidy, louse-ridden hair genially as he departed. But Antony didn’t realize that he was being watched.

He was marching confidently up the steps at the top of the alley toward the particular ruins he’d adopted as his new home, when they pounced from behind. An arm was flung around his neck and he felt the chill of sharp cold metal against his ribs as his attacker forced him to the ground. He was scared but he was not going to give up his shoeshine kit without a fight, and arching his back, he leapt to his feet. Turning swiftly, he kicked his attacker in the groin. With a scream of agony the boy crumpled to the ground, but immediately two more took his place, kicking and punching him until the blood ran. “Okay, kid,
now
are you prepared to listen?” they growled. Antony was amazed that they were still there and hadn’t simply run off with his shoeshine kit, and he peered at them in bewilderment through rapidly closing blackened eyes. They were much older than he was and much bigger, and he knew he was beaten.

“Listen to what?” he snarled back. “Why don’t you just take the kit and leave me alone?”

“That’s not what we want,” the boy hissed, placing his foot in a soldier’s heavy boot on Antony’s chest. “Now just shut your mouth and listen.”

His eyes fixed on that dangerous boot, Antony did as he was
told, learning that he was to go out as usual with his shoeshine kit, but that in future for every lira he made, half would go to his new associates. There was to be no choice in the matter—these fourteen-year-olds were now his masters. In return, they told him that the area around the church square where he worked would be protected … no other shoeshine boy would be allowed to work there. His captor ran his thumb along the edge of his knife, resting the weight of his booted foot on Antony’s chest. “Do you agree?” he asked, holding the knife closer. Antony nodded. “I agree,” he choked.

“You will meet us every afternoon at two,” said the boy, “and again at eleven at night to make your payments. And don’t think you can cheat—you will be watched. If you try anything”—he ran the knife along Antony’s throat with a menacing grin—“you know what you can expect.
This
was just a warning, to let you know we mean business.”

As they disappeaed into the night Antony struggled to his feet. He wiped the blood from his face with a grimy rag and, with his shoeshine kit clutched under his arm, limped back into his refuge. It took him only a couple of weeks to realize that he was on the wrong end of the deal—
he
did all the work and
they
profited.
They
were using their
brains—he
was only using his
hands!
For the first time he understood what it meant to be a boss—and he vowed that before too long, that’s what he would be.

One night his associates failed to show up for their take, and he heard that they had been rounded up in the latest attempt by the military to get the orphaned young criminals off the streets. He was free again—and ready to expand his business.

Antony’s “home” was adjacent to a ramshackle funeral parlor and on cold nights he shared the straw bed in the stable with the decrepit pair of black funeral horses who somehow—through superstition and fear—had survived being made into steaks. With black plumes on their heads, they still pulled the ancient hearse to the local graveyard. Though the horses were worn and puny, the funeral business was thriving, and Antony would watch as the hearse, followed by its tribe of wailing, black-robed mourners, wended its way through the streets to the church. He noted that many of the old people, suffering from the privations of war, were now dying off, but there were also many children’s coffins. Disease in war-damaged Naples was rampant and there was still a shortage of food. And, too, there were many accidents in a newly remechanized city. Only the strongest survived.

No plans were made by the families of the deceased for their funerals—it was a question of what was immediate and convenient, just the closest funeral parlor to home. It would be easy to channel their business, Antony thought, if the director of a funeral parlor arrived opportunely and offered to remove the final burden of arrangement from their shoulders in their time of sorrow. But obviously, only the local funeral director ever heard of the death. Someone would have to get the information about who was dying or had just died, and then he could quickly tell a rival funeral parlor so that they could claim the business. And if he, Antony, could be that person, then he could demand a percentage of each funeral. It would be easy enough to scout the neighborhood—everyone always knew everything about everyone else, the neighbors gossiped incessantly in the market or at the baker’s, or from their tenement windows—but speed was of the essence. He would need to be
fast
if his plans were to work.
He would need a bicycle.

The next day, a young GI, hot and sweating in his khaki T-shirt, heavy wool pants, and boots, locked his bicycle securely to the iron grill of a doorway before stepping inside a bar in search of a cold beer. Emerging from the shadows, Antony glanced carefully up and down the empty street. Kneeling, he juggled with a bunch of keys “traded” for the day from an acquaintance in return for a day’s use of his shoeshine kit. After six tries the lock turned and he was on the bike and away.

He made his first “deal” with the funeral parlor next door and he asked only five percent. Flashing up and down the tenement’s mean alleys on his bicycle, he became an expert on the health of the inhabitants of the
bassi.
Business was brisk at the funeral parlor and soon he was able to sell his shoeshine kit for a handsome sum—plus a weekly percentage of the take—and expand his activities to include a second funeral parlor. His first client upped his percentage to ten, fearing the competition, and it was then Antony knew that the tide had turned.
He was now a boss.

He recruited boys in other
bassi
to work for him, until he had a team of a dozen covering the city. Before too long he was making more money than he knew what to do with.

When Antony was ten, he looked like a stocky fourteen-year-old, and he decided to add a convenient four years to his age. He had a rent-free apartment over a funeral home with a woman who came in to clean and cook occasional meals, and a good deal
of money that he kept concealed beneath the floorboards. By the time he was fourteen, and claiming eighteen, he had arranged through a lawyer to buy a small two-room apartment of his own. He paid for it in cash.