crude, brutal, and they were the men who offered him their admiration of his brother. He lay back in the taxi. He believed he was the messenger boy of his elder brother, coarse and crude and brutal, who owned him.
The telephone was ringing. Charley had been back an hour. The telephone was shrill.
Charley was with the children in the bathroom, soaping them and trying to laugh with them. God, where was Angela to answer the phone? Charley was splashing water and making a game with the children and their shrieks did not drown the bell of the telephone. Angela had the second telephone beside her bed – the bloody pills. Charley wiped her hands on the towel. She hurried into the hall, past the closed door of Angela's bedroom.
'Pronto.'
'It's David Parsons. Could I speak to my daughter, Charlotte, please?'
'It's me. Hello, Dad.'
'Are you all right, Charley?'
'How did you get the number?'
'Directory enquiries – are you all right?'
'Didn't you get my card?'
'Just one card. We were worried.'
'No cause for worry, I am very well and having a wonderful lime.'
'Your mother wanted me to call, you know what your mother is for worrying. Charley, there was a policeman came, from London, he wanted to know about the American.
We-'
Charley snapped, 'Don't talk about it.'
She had heard the click on the telephone, and the sound of Angela's breathing.
'… wanted to know-'
'You are not to call me here again. It is very inconvenient for me to take a telephone call. I am fine, and very happy. I'll try to send more postcards. I'm a big girl, Dad, if you'd forgotten, so don't call me again. Love to Mum, and to you, Dad.'
She heard the breathing.
'Charley, we only wanted you to know-'
She put the phone down. Her fingers rested on the watch on her wrist, and she felt herself to be a cruel and vicious bitch. She could picture it in her mind, her father holding the telephone and hearing the purring of the dial tone, and then going into the little living room and away from the telephone on the table below the photograph of her at graduation, and then her father would have to tell her mother that their daughter had brushed him off, as a vicious and cruel little bitch would have, put him down… She was Axel bloody Moen's creature. She thought that, one day, she might tell her father of the dream, might tell her father of Benny's dream of dancing children and of an old man in handcuffs who suffered the humiliation of the children's contempt, one day…
Angela stood, sleep-devastated, pill-damaged, at the bedroom door.
'Sorry if it woke you, Angela,' Charley said, and the cheerfulness was a lie. 'It was my dad, I've been a bit naughty with the postcards, he was just checking I was all right.'
She went back into the bathroom and took the big towels from the hook. If it were their father in the handcuffs, and their uncle, would small Mario and Francesca be dancing with the dream children? She started to rub them dry.
'It took me time to recognize him – it was the guy who picked her off the street when she was mugged.'
'So she wanted to thank him – why the blow-out?'
'She was with him all day.'
'So she's lonely, and maybe it's her free day – maybe.'
'I could kick her arse, hard, with my boot. 'Vanni, she only goes to San Giuseppe Jato, and that's a poison place. Then she goes to Corleone, and that's a bad place. Where in Corleone? She only goes to the Anti-Mafia Co- ordination Group, meets up with those low- life deadbeats.'
'They are brave people, Axel, committed people.'
'Who achieve nothing, might as well jerk off. You know where she went after that, and you could see it on the guy's face, like he was shitting himself, she went to Prizzi.'
'So it's a pretty town, it's interesting.'
'It's a crap place, Prizzi – there's no scenery that's good, no architecture, no history.
She wasn't looking for anything good. For Christ's sake, 'Vanni, she only goes marching off down the little shit street where the big guy's parents are. Can you believe it, she walked down the street where Rosario and Agata Ruggerio live? I mean, is that clever?'
'She's got balls.'
'She's got a hole in the head where her brain fell out.'
'And you don't trust her?'
'To box clever? Not on this show, no, I do not.'
'But, Axel, you have to trust her. That's your problem isn't it, I hat's the shit on your shoe? She's all you've got. The criticism is irrelevant. And you had an interesting day?'
'A great day, what I really wanted, hiking round San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone and Prizzi.'
'But you were there, the chaperone.'
'It's my job to be there. She was endangering herself – she could have compromised me. That is not goddam funny.'
Back in Corleone, back where he had come with his grandfather. and his step-grandmother when he was a teenager. Back where his grandfather had found the
'opportunity' and taken the bribes and handed out the gas coupons. He had been dragged by them past the street where his grandfather had pointed out the wartime AMGOT office. He had tracked Charley past the street to which he had been taken as a teenager to meet his step-grandmother's family, and he had sweated that he might be remembered. Ridiculous to believe that he might be remembered, the features of his face recalled, but the sweat had run on his spine.
'Who is the man?'
' IHe dropped her off in the town. First goddam sense she'd shown, lie didn't march him up to the villa. She was going nowhere but home. I went back to his place, asked around.'
'Then you came running to me, like you're booked for a coronary.'
'He's Benedetto Rizzo, late twenties, built like a streak of piss – he's nothing. You know, she stood in the middle of goddam Prizzi after they'd walked the Ruggerio street, and she held his hand and she looked into his face, like she was hot for him.'
'Perhaps you're short of a woman, Axel.'
'I don't need shit from you.'
But Axel Moen had always been short of a woman. There had been women at the university, just casual… There had been a good woman when he was on the police in Madison, working in real estate in Stoughton, and he'd brought her flowers and wrapped chocolates, and she'd been of old Norwegian stock, and she'd made Arne Moen laugh when Axel took her up to the Door Peninsula, and it had finished the night he told her he was accepted by DEA, and going to Quantico, because she said she wouldn't follow him… There had been a good woman, Margaret, from a publishing house on East 53rd, when he had his head buried in New York with the earphones for the wire taps, and it had taken time but he'd persuaded her to come to the weekend cabins up-state, and they'd done the long hikes and they'd loved, and it was over when he told her he was posted down to La Paz, Bolivia… There had been a good woman in La Paz, out of order to mess with a Confidential Informant, a sweet soul and a dedicated mind and with guts, and it was ended when he found her crucified on the back of the door at the airstrip for the estancia… There had been a good woman, Margaret again, when he had returned to New York with the bullet-hole souvenir in his stomach flesh, and she liked to run her finger down the scar when they went back to the weekend cabins, but there hadn't been the love as before, and it had been trashed for all time when he'd said he was posted to Rome… There was a good woman in Italy, Heather, out of the Defense Attache's office in the main building, and she was wiser than the rest and kept him at arm's length, just convenience for both of them, and they went to the parties together, kept the matchmakers at a distance by showing up at the barbecues and the functions, were seen together when they mutually needed a partner, no loving and nothing to finish… And there was a good woman, Charlotte Eunice Parsons…
