“Three, four times a year. To sell my line to American dealers. But also because I love this city.” He smiled. Beautiful white teeth. Marcello Mastroianni teeth. “Now I have reason to come more often,” he said, and squeezed Louise’s hand, squeezed Carella’s mother’s hand.
“To make a long story short,” his mother said, Louise said, “I was there having coffee with Katie when this taxi pulled up and Luigi stepped out …”
“This was in October,” Luigi said.
“He was wearing a gray coat with a black fur collar …”
Like a Russian diplomat, Carella thought.
“No hat,” Louise said.
Carella noticed that he had thick black hair, Luigi did.
“He came up the walk, and rang the doorbell,” Louise said. “Katie was expecting him, of course, but not until much later. He introduced himself …”
“I soon forgot I was there to say hello to my brother’s friend,” Luigi said, and squeezed her hand again, Carella’s mother’s hand, Louise’s.
“We went out to dinner, the three of us,” Louise said.
“I asked Katie to join us for the sake of courtesy,” Luigi said.
A beard, Carella thought.
“And that’s how we met,” Louise said.
“I came back the very next month.”
“Before Thanksgiving.”
“We talk every day on the phone.”
“We’ve known each other since October fifteenth,” Louise said.
Birthdate of great men, Carella thought, but did not say.
“Seventy-one days today,” Luigi said.
But who’s counting? Carella thought.
His sister’s eyes met his.
There was something like a warning in them.
Et tu, brute?he thought.
He’d played Caesar, too. And had gone to bed with Portia after the opening-night party. A year and seven months in college, and he’d been able to score with only two girls, big Lothario. How did he suddenly get to be forty? It occurred to him that he had never been to bed with another woman since the day he met Teddy. Nor did he ever plan to. Nor had he ever felt the slightest desire for any other woman. He wondered how many womenSignore Marcello over there had been to bed with,Signore Casanova, wondered if he’d already been to bed with Carella’s mother, Louise, with her stylish new clothes and her svelte new figure and her elegant new coiffure, wondered if his mother had already forgotten that once upon a time there’d been a gentle, loving man named Anthony Carella who’d been shot to death during a holdup in his bakery shop, wondered if sooner or later everyone who dies is forgotten, and thought, curiously, Shakespeare isn’t forgotten, I was Claudius, I was Caesar.
He poured himself another glass of wine.
This time, it was his wife’s eyes that shot a warning across the table.
He smiled at her and raised his glass in a silent toast.
She sighed and turned away.
SHE DID NOT SAY ANYTHING to him until she was certain the children were asleep. Carella was already in bed when she came to him. She sat on the edge of the bed, and in the light of the lamp burning on the night table, her fingers and her eyes told him what was on her mind.
You’re drinking too much,she said.
“Come on,” he said, “a few glasses of wine, what’s wrong with you?”
It started in November, when Danny Gimp got killed …
“Danny was a stool pigeon,” he said.
He was your friend.
“I never considered him a friend.”
He came to the hospital.
“That was a long time ago.”
He came when you were hurt. And now he’s dead. And you never cried for him.
“He meant nothing to me,” Carella said.
Did your father mean something to you?
Carella looked at her.
