New Orleans exploded with life and color and sound. Once again her Uncle David brought her down, and once again he managed to be there without ever really being there at all. He was a strange man, quiet and aloof, and yet he seemed to have no difficulty permitting Emilie to spend much of her vacation with us. I believed that Emilie was more than a little responsible for his lack of opposition. We had seen her briefly a little before Christmas, but it had been a year since the previous Mardi Gras, and within that year she had grown. Victor would be nineteen in a couple of months, and in the following September Emilie would reach eighteen. She was a young woman, spirited and independent, and though I recognized her passion for life and all it offered, there was nevertheless an element of her character that I felt sprang from the strained relationship she seemed to have with her father. While she was with us she never called him, and he – apparently – never made any attempt to contact her. I questioned her one time, carefully, diplomatically, and her responses were dry and monosyllabic.
‘He runs his own business then, your father?’
‘And tries to run everyone else’s as well,’ she replied, in her eyes an expression of sour disapproval.
‘He is a driven man, it seems.’
‘By money, yes. By anything else, no.’
I was quiet for a time. I watched her. She seemed at her most unhappy when the conversation turned towards her own family.
‘But he cares a great deal for you, I am sure, Emilie.’
She shrugged.
‘He is your father, and despite the fact that he is a busy man I am sure that he loves you a great deal.’
‘Who the hell knows?’ Again the sour expression, the flash of irritation in her eyes.
‘All fathers love their children,’ I said.
She looked at me. ‘Is that so?’
I nodded. ‘Yes it is, and though there might be some people who find it difficult to express the way they feel it doesn’t change the fact that they still feel those things towards their own blood.’
‘Well, maybe my father is the exception that proves the rule, eh?’
I shook my head. She was stonewalling me. ‘And your mother?’
Emilie smiled bitterly. ‘She left him, couldn’t take any more.’
‘And where is she now?’
‘Around and about.’
‘You see her?’
‘Every so often.’
‘And she is perhaps a little more forthcoming in her affections for you?’
‘She’s as crazy as he is, but in a different way. She spends all her time worrying about what other people might think of her. She’s possibly the most introspected and self-centered person I know.’
I smiled. ‘Then tell me one thing?’
‘Uh huh?’
‘If your parents are so crazy, if they spend all their time either making money or worrying about what the world might think of them, then how come you turned out so good?’
She laughed, for a moment looked a little embarrassed. ‘Ernesto… stop it!’
I laughed with her. She relaxed. She asked me if we could go out, maybe see a movie or something, the three of us, and then have some dinner in a restaurant.
And we did, and there was no more talk of her crazy parents, and I knew better than to bring it up again. She was happy as she was, spending her time with Victor, the two of them like lovelorn teenagers, which is what they were, and I was happy for them both.
She left again the following week, and for a while it seemed that whenever Victor was not at school he was speaking with Emilie on the phone. I overheard a conversation. It was around the end of the following month, the last week of May, and I was downstairs reading the newspaper. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and as I passed Victor’s door I heard him speaking.
‘-like running away or something, right?’
He laughed as she replied.
‘And you could rob his safe and come back down here to New Orleans and we could elope somewhere and get married in Mexico, and you’d never have to see either of them again.’
Victor was silent again, and then once more he was laughing.
‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I understand exactly what you mean.’
I stepped away from the door to ensure I would not be seen.
‘Aah, come on, I know that they’re not involved in the same business, but can you imagine how it was for me? My dad was in the Mafia. He was a thug for the Mafia, for God’s sake.’
I felt the blood drain from my face. I felt my pulse quicken. Sweat broke out beneath the hairline above my forehead.
‘I’m serious… no, it’s not a joke. I’m telling you that’s the way it was. Why the hell d’you think that we kept on having to move from city to city? He was a hitman for the Mafia, Emilie, I’m serious. He might seem like a friendly old man now, but that’s because he’s retired. Jesus, we went from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Havana, and then we wound up in New York before we came here. I think something heavy happened in New York because we had to hightail it out of there so fast I couldn’t catch my breath. I think he killed someone important. I think he killed someone really important for the Mafia, and they gave him shitloads of money and he came back here to New Orleans because he thought no-one would find him here-’
I felt my world falling to pieces. I remembered things I hadn’t remembered for years. I felt my fists clenching and releasing. My heart thundered uncontrollably in my chest, and for a second I believed I would keel over right where I stood. I took a step back and leaned against the wall for balance. I could not believe what I was hearing. Had I truly, honestly, imagined that Victor had been blind to everything that had happened around him as a child? Had I imagined that my life had been of such little consequence to him that he had never figured out anything at all? Who had I been fooling? Certainly not Victor – and in that moment I realized I had been fooling only myself. I was speechless, dumbstruck, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt the like of which I had never experienced.
‘I mean, it took me some time, but I finally realized that my mom and my sister didn’t die in an accident. They were killed in a car explosion that was meant to kill the man my dad worked for, this heavy-duty Mafia boss called Fabio Calligaris.’ Victor laughed. ‘I had an uncle of sorts, a guy I used to call Uncle Sammy, but everyone else called him Ten Cent. You tell me who the fuck is called Ten Cent apart from a Mafia hitman? Where the hell d’you get a nickname like that, eh?’
I took a step sideways and reached for the stair banister. I took another two steps, and with my left hand behind me I found the bathroom door. I pushed it open and stepped inside. I closed and locked the door behind me. I sat on the edge of the bath and started to breathe deeply. A wave of anguish overpowered me, and before I knew it I had grabbed a towel from the rail and buried my face in it. I started sobbing, a feeling of nausea tightening my chest and turning my stomach. For a moment I could see nothing but thick waves of gray and scarlet before my eyes. The tears rolled down my face. I wanted to retch but there seemed to be nothing at all inside me. I felt hollow. I felt broken, obliterated, and when I tried to stand it took every ounce of my strength and concentration not to fall backwards into the tub.
I stood there for some time. How long I could not tell, but when I had finally managed to gather myself together I washed my face and combed my hair. I looked back at my own reflection and I saw a bitter and twisted old man. I was facing the truth, and the truth was ugly and distorted. How long had he known? Had this been some gradual accumulation of small things, like pieces of a puzzle that he had finally managed to assemble into a clear and evident whole? Or had there been one thing that had turned the light on in his mind? The death of Angelina and Lucia? How old had he been? Nine years old, all but three months. Had he known then? Had he been aware even then that there was something so very wrong about the business his own father was involved in? I could not bear to face the truth. My son, my only child, knew the truth about me. I was humiliated and distraught, crushed – much as my father must have felt when he realized he had murdered his own wife.
I stayed a minute longer and then I slowly unlocked and opened the bathroom door. I stood there silently, holding my breath. The house was silent. I edged along the hallway until I reached Victor’s half-open door. I saw nothing. The bed where he had sat while talking on the phone was empty. I heard something downstairs. He must have finished the call and gone down. I didn’t know how to face him. I didn’t know how he would see me. But if he
