I raised my hand. ‘We will not-’
He stepped forward. ‘You don’t think I know?’ he asked. ‘You don’t think I know who you are, what you have done? You think I have lived all these years without realizing what you did when I was a kid? I know who those people were, Uncle Sammy and Fabio Calligaris. I know that Mom and Lucia were killed by a bomb that was meant for Calligaris, and more than likely for you.’
I sat silently. I watched my son vent his anger and pain. I could say and do nothing. How could I deny the truth?
‘You don’t think I know what you’re capable of?’ Victor went on. ‘I don’t know all the details, and I don’t pretend to know.
Truth is I don’t
‘Enough!’ I said. ‘Victor, that is enough! You sit down. You sit down and listen to me.’
Victor stood there, defiant and angry. I had never seen him so empowered with rage. He looked as if he would burst open at the seams.
‘Victor… now!’ I shouted, and hoped that my voice was not so loud as to wake Emilie.
He paused for a moment, and then sat down on a chair near the wall.
‘You cannot ask me to do this,’ I said. ‘I am not going to deny what you say. I heard you talking to Emilie on the telephone long ago. I heard what you told her about me. I am not going to waste my breath trying to defend myself or my life, but the past is the past. I have left all those things behind. I made mistakes, big mistakes, and given the time again I would not make the same decisions. I lost your mother and your sister because of the decisions I made, and I know from experience that if I did this then I would lose you too. Not only that, but you would also lose Emilie. This is no simple matter of killing someone who stands in your way and that’s the end of it. You go down that road and someone always pays the price. Look what I lost. The only woman I ever loved and one of my children. You think Emilie’s father will not fight for her? And who’s to say that with her father gone her mother would not feel the same way? These people, people with too much money and too little sense, they are perhaps the most dangerous people of all. You listen to what I have to say, you hear me on this. I am your father. I love you more than life itself, but I will not kill someone for you.’
Victor looked back at me. There was honesty between us, true honesty for the very first time in all the years we had been together, and something had changed.
He leaned forward. He started to cry. I crossed the room and knelt before him. He rested his head on my shoulder. I put my arms around him and held him while his body was wrenched with grief.
‘So what do I do?’ he asked eventually. ‘What do I do? I love her, Father, I love her more than anything in the world. I have lost enough… I don’t think I can bear to lose her as well.’
‘I know, I know,’ I whispered. ‘It will come right. We will think of something, Victor. We will think of something to make this right.’
‘Will we?’ he asked, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Will we make it right?’
‘We will,’ I said quietly, and believed that I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
The two weeks that Emilie spent with us unfolded without further event. I said nothing, and neither Victor nor Emilie asked anything of me. They went about their business, they visited places together. They spent a great deal of their time in Victor’s room and I respected their desire to spend their last days together and did not disturb them. I did not interfere in their life together, and I know that they were grateful to me for that. I did spend my time considering the problem. I looked at it from every angle and slant, and no matter the hours that I invested in this I could not think of a solution.
At last it was time for Emilie to leave. There were tears, of course there were, and both of them promised that they would speak and write at least once a day. I believed their feeling for one another was strong enough to see them through this, that the time would come when Emilie was old enough to make her own independent decision, her schooling behind her, perhaps her own career and home, and then she and Victor would be together once again. But I was also not so naive as to dismiss the possibility that, separated from Victor, she would eventually miss the physical connection, that she would become a woman of means and methods, that she would perhaps find someone of whom her father approved, and then Victor would be left with nothing. He was loyal beyond question. Emilie Devereau was his first real love, perhaps the only one, and that was something with which I was familiar. After Angelina I could never have considered finding another wife. It had not been my age, it had not been the manner of her death; it was simply the fact that as far as I was concerned no-one could ever have come close to being what she had been for me. She was alive in my thoughts, as was Lucia, and with them gone there was no thought that they could ever be replaced.
The subsequent weeks saw Victor burying himself in his schoolwork. He spoke with Emilie regularly, and I know that she wrote frequently because I was always there to see the mail arrive. But something was missing. The hope of when she would next come, the anticipation in our house as the weeks between her visits dissolved – that sense of promise had vanished. Victor was strong, and never again did he ask of me what he had asked that night. Nor did he question me about my past. It was as if we had all accepted the truth, and the truth – painful though it might have been – was now out in the open. It had evaporated, and there seemed to be no purpose in returning to it.
Towards the end of the year, my sixty-fifth birthday reminding me once again that time seemed to disappear effortlessly, more rapidly with each passing month, I resigned myself to the fact that the future of Victor and Emilie’s relationship had been consigned to destiny. We shared Christmas together, Victor and I, but ever-present was the awareness that this was our first Christmas in New Orleans without her. It was different, but Victor seemed in good spirits, and it appeared he was coping reasonably well. On Christmas Day she called him, and Victor spent more than an hour talking to her. I did not listen to their conversation, but every once in a while I could hear him laughing and this pleased me. She had not found someone else it seemed, and perhaps her patience and loyalty were of the same caliber as Victor’s.
I believed that everything would settle then. The New Year came, it was 2003; I was beginning to feel the weight of my years, that this life I had chosen could perhaps not have suited me better. I imagined that I would gradually fade out like a guttering candle, that I would be forgotten in the slow-motion slide of time and Victor would go on without me and find his own passage. He had done remarkably well with his schooling. He showed great promise and vision as an architect, and already there were possibilities opening up for him. He spoke of traveling to the east coast, that there were projects in Boston and Rhode Island he was interested in, and I encouraged him to go out there and make his mark, to make his own individual presence felt in the world. He had not become his father, for this I was grateful, and though he knew more of me than I would ever have wished, it did not change the fact that he loved and respected me. Whoever I had been before, Victor had never considered me anything other than his father.
It was then, in the early part of June, that the ghosts came back to find me.
I was alone that night, Victor was away with friends at the cinema and I did not expect him back until late.
I was in the back room smoking a cigarette, and now I cannot remember what I was thinking about. I heard a car passing in the street beyond the front door, and then the car slowed and started to reverse. What made me rise and walk through to the front I do not know, perhaps some preternatural sense of foreboding, but I did rise, and I did walk through, and there I drew back the curtain and looked out into the street.
My breath caught in my chest. I could not believe that I was awake, that this wasn’t some awful dream, some nightmare sent to punish me. Ahead of my house a car had come to a halt, a deep burgundy car, a 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, a car that had once belonged to Don Pietro Silvino and had been stored in a lock-up in Miami in July of 1968. A thirty-five-year-old memory surfaced like a dead body through black and turgid water.
The driver’s door opened. I strained to see who was getting out of the vehicle. I could barely stand when I saw him. I leaned against the edge of the window and started to breathe deeply. There, on the sidewalk, no more than ten yards from where I struggled to maintain my balance, was Samuel Pagliaro, a man I had only ever known as Ten Cent.
He turned, and though he could not have seen me there behind the curtain, it seemed he was looking right at
