A Quiet Vendetta

TWENTY-SEVEN

And so at last I had come full circle.

Ouroboros: the snake that devours its own tail, finally to disappear.

Here was everything I was, everything I became, everything I would ultimately be. Here was the beginning of every thought and deed, every action, every dream that soured and died some quiet and lonely death in the darkened shadows of my mind.

I arrived in New Orleans 6 April, 2000. The Mardi Gras was bursting the streets at their seams. The Vieux Carré was alive and throbbing with the sound of music and voices, the fireworks of color along rues d’Orléans, de Toulouse, de Chartres, de Sainte-Anne, de Sainte-Philippe, de Bourbon and de Bourgogne, the Halls of Preservation and Dixieland: the rolling syncopations of jazz blended with deep Southern gospel blues, and amidst all of this, my memories…

St James the Greater, Ougou Feray, the African spirit of war and iron. Serpent and cross in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, the spirited festival of Vyéj Mirak, the Virgin of Miracles, and her voodoo counterpart Ezili, the goddess of love. They drank to feed the spirit. Sacrificing white pigeons to the Petro loa. All Souls’ Day, Baron Samedi, loa of the dead…

Carryl Chevron, gold and diamonds in his teeth, a car filled with wisdom – Aardvark through Aix-La-Chapelle to Canteloupe – and somewhere, perhaps even now, a brassy act in high heels with too much rouge and too little class, who waited hours in a dusty roadhouse asking herself whatever might have happened to the trick that never showed…

The smell of the swamps and everglades, the canal intersections, the wisteria and hickory and water oak; Chalmette District, the edge of the territories, the edge of the world perhaps…

The Havana Hurricane, his red-raw face imbued with alcohol and rage and the madness of sex alight in his eyes.

And she whose name I could even now barely utter without feeling the tension of grief in my throat…

And somewhere out there, in a world I had left believing I would never return, was my own son.

There – in a hotel on Lafayette Street, standing on the first floor veranda, behind me on the bed Victor’s clothes scattered as if he had rushed to dress, to leave, to fill himself with the sights and sounds of this place – I stood quietly, my thoughts there for noone but myself, and I wondered how this would end. Seemed to me I had run from every place I had been; there had always been a reason to escape, behind me the deaths of people I had known and those I had not. Pietro Silvino, Giancarlo Ceriano, Jimmy Hoffa, Constabulare Luis Hernández; the dealers and druggies, the pimps and murderers and rapists and psychopaths. People whose lives had meant something of significance, and those whose lives had meant nothing at all.

I asked myself about my own life: if it had been something of value, or if I had truly been no better than those whose lives had been swiftly and expediently despatched. I had never been one to rationalize and introspect, and understanding that nothing would be gained by such thoughts I closed them down quietly and stowed them away. Perhaps those thoughts would surface some other time, perhaps not. It did not matter, what was done was done, and there was nothing I could do now to change it.

I stepped back into the room to get a cigarette and returned to the veranda to smoke. I looked down into the crowd of swelling people, bodies pressed against one another with no spaces in between, and I knew I would not see Victor until he was ready to return. He was a young man now, seventeen years old, headstrong and determined and full of life. There was nothing I could do to contain his energy and élan and neither would I try. He was my son, and so there would be something of me within him, but I prayed – once more to a God I hardly believed in – that he had taken from me only those things of worth. Some sense of loyalty, a respect for those who understood more of life than I did, an appreciation of the importance of family, and the knowledge that truth could be found no matter how much it might hurt.

I closed my eyes. My head filled with the sound of music, with the sound of the world and all it had to offer, and I smiled. I had been someone. That most of all: I had been someone.

I slept like a dead man that night, despite the noise, the heat, and the sound of the real world beneath me, and when I woke and put on my gown and walked through to the adjoining room, I saw Victor lying there on his bed, still fully clothed, beside him a girl, her skirt up around her thighs, her tee-shirt twisted almost to her neck. They were absent from this world, their faces flushed, their hair tangled from sweat, and I stood silently for a little while. Victor had not come back alone, and though my heart felt for him and I was in some way happy that he had found someone here, I also knew that this was the first sign of losing him. He was almost a grown man, and he would have his own dreams and aspirations, his own vision of how his life would be. And once he discovered that life, he would – inevitably – no longer be a part of mine.

I closed the door quietly behind me. I went back to the bathroom, I showered and shaved, and when I called down for breakfast to be sent up I once again returned to Victor’s room to see if he and his friend had woken.

My son was still collapsed on the bed, but the girl was seated in a chair by the window. In the moment that she turned, the way her hair fell across her shoulder, the brightness in her eyes, she could have been Angelina. For a split second she looked surprised, afraid even, and then it was gone in a single, simple heartbeat. She smiled. She was someone different, and I wondered how I could have imagined she looked like anyone I had known.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You must be Victor’s dad.’

I smiled and stepped into the room. ‘I am, yes,’ I replied. ‘And you are?’

She rose from the chair and walked towards me. She had on her skirt and tee-shirt, but her feet were bare, dirty from where she must have walked along the street, perhaps dancing, living life, loving all that New Orleans represented in this most passionate season.

‘Emilie,’ she said, and then she spelled it for me. ‘Emilie Devereau.’ For a moment she looked a little awkward. ‘I met Victor last night. We were a little drunk.’ She laughed, and the sound was beautiful, a sound I had perhaps heard too little of in this life of mine. ‘I live upstate, quite a distance away. I was going to get a hotel room… we went everywhere but they were all filled up to bursting. Victor said it would be okay if I just crashed here-’

I raised my hand; I smiled once more. ‘There is no explanation needed, Emilie. You are here with Victor and you are more than welcome. Would you care for some breakfast?’

‘Oh hell yes, I could eat a dead dog if it had enough ketchup on it.’

I laughed. She laughed too. She was more than pretty. She carried herself with elegance and grace. She was about the same age as Victor, a little younger perhaps, and there was something about her that told me here was someone who could capture his heart effortlessly. Here was someone who would teach him to forget Elizabetta Pertini.

I turned back to my room. She followed me. Within a minute or two room service came with breakfast – fresh fruit, warm bread, some cheese and baked gammon, eggs Benedict, orange juice and coffee. We sat facing one another at the small table by the open window, the breeze from outside lifting and separating the fine organdy curtains, and with it came the scent of bougainvillea and mimosa.

‘So what do you do?’ she asked as she poured juice into my glass.

I shrugged. ‘I am retired now,’ I replied.

‘And before you retired?’

‘I worked all across America, traveled a great deal.’

‘Like a salesman or something?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I was not a salesman.’ I paused for a moment. ‘More like a troubleshooter perhaps, a troubleshooter for businesses, you know?’

She nodded. ‘So you’d like go somewhere and if something wasn’t working right in someone’s business you’d fix it?’

‘Yes, I would fix things, make them work again.’

She nodded approvingly. ‘Cool,’ she said, and then glanced over her shoulder towards the door to the adjoining room. ‘You figure I should go call Victor or something?’

‘He’s okay… let him sleep. Seems you wore him out, young lady.’

She looked at me askance, and then she blushed. ‘We didn’t… we didn’t… well, you know-’

I laughed. ‘Victor is not used to dancing for hours on end. He has come from somewhere where dancing was not his first order of business.’

‘He’s cool though.. he’s a nice guy.’

I nodded. ‘I think so, yes.’

Emilie looked at me, her expression momentarily pensive. ‘Where’s his mom? Is she gonna come down for the Mardi Gras too?’

‘No, Emilie, she’s not. Victor’s mother died when he was a very young boy.’

‘Oh hell, that’s awful. What happened?’

‘An automobile accident,’ I said. ‘There was an automobile accident and his mother and his sister were killed. It was many years ago.’

‘Hell, I’m sorry, Mr Perry.’

I smiled. ‘Perez,’ I said. ‘It’s Ernesto Perez,’ and then I spelled it for her which she found very amusing, and the moment of sadness was gone.

‘So what you guys doing down here?’

‘We came for the Mardi Gras.’

‘Right, right,’ she said. ‘Me too. You been here before?’

‘I was born here,’ I said. ‘A thousand years ago I was born right here in New Orleans, a little town outside of the city.’

‘And Victor was born here too?’

‘No, he was born in Los Angeles.’

‘Like Los Angeles in California?’

I nodded. ‘The very same.’

‘Wow, that’s cool. So he’s like Californian, like the Beach Boys or something?’

‘Yes, like the Beach Boys.’

She nodded. She paused to eat her eggs. She glanced back over her shoulder towards the half-open door at Victor still collapsed on the bed.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘Go wake him up. Tell him to come and have breakfast with the family.’

She smiled wide. She almost fell off the chair and hurried back through to the adjoining room. She struggled to wake Victor, but finally he slurred resentfully into semi-consciousness, and when he realized that she was up, that I was right through in the next room sitting at breakfast, he rolled sideways off the mattress and hit the floor. She was laughing then, dragging him to his feet, pulling him across the room and to the table, where he sat down heavily. He looked as if he’d gone ten rounds with Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom.

‘Dad,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘Victor,’ I said, and smiled. ‘I think perhaps you should drink this.’ I handed him a bowl of hot black coffee. He took it, held the bowl between his hands, and then he looked sideways at Emilie and smiled sheepishly.

‘You met Emilie then?’ he said.

‘That pleasure I have had already, yes,’ I replied.

Victor nodded, looking at me as if he figured I might need an explanation. I smiled at him. I sensed him relax. ‘I’m gonna take a shower,’ he said. ‘If that’s okay with you guys.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Emilie and I will sit here and talk for a little while.’

I watched Victor head back to his own room. At the doorway he glanced back and smiled at Emilie. She waved him through the door and turned back to me.

‘We went everywhere looking for a hotel,’ she said. ‘Everywhere was booked out completely and I didn’t have anywhere to stay. My uncle is gonna be tearing his hair out.’

‘Your uncle?’ I asked.

‘Sure, my uncle. He brings me down here every year.’

‘And where is he?’

She shrugged. ‘Back at the hotel cursing me like God only knows what… probably have called the cops by now or somethin’ equally stupid.’

‘He’s at the hotel?’ I asked.

Emilie looked awkward. ‘Well, er, yes… at the hotel. It was quite a way from where we were and there was no way we could have gotten a cab at that time.’

‘I see,’ I replied. ‘Of course not.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence between us.

‘You should call him,’ I said, feeling the first sense of tension. The very last thing in the world I needed was to be tied up in some missing persons report with the New Orleans PD.

Oh sure, Officer, it was fine. I was over in the hotel with Victor and his dad. I slept there, and then I had breakfast. Sure, I’m telling the truth… go over there and ask them for yourself.

Emilie looked at me sideways. She smiled coyly. ‘Helluva liar I make, eh?’

I was silent for a moment waiting for her to explain.

‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘I could have called my uncle and he would’ve come and fetched me, but… well, I like Victor, he’s cool an’ everything, and I figured what the hell, you know?’

‘Chi se ne frega,’ I said.

‘Key senna what?’

I laughed. ‘It’s an Italian expression. It means what the hell, who gives a damn, that kind of thing.’

‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I thought that very thing… not like I thought that we might-’

I raised my hand. ‘I believe your intentions were nothing less than honorable, Emilie.’

She smiled. ‘Right, Mr Perez, my intentions were honorable.’

‘Ernesto.’

She nodded. ‘Right, Ernesto.’

She reached for the coffee pot and refilled my cup. She was charming, bursting at the seams with life and energy, and I was pleased that Victor had found someone his own age here in New Orleans so quickly.

‘So you should call your uncle,’ I reminded her. ‘Use the phone here. Give him a call. He’ll be worried.’

Emilie was hesitant for a moment and then she nodded. ‘I can use your phone?’

‘Of course… over there on the stand.’

She rose and padded barefoot across the carpet. She called information and asked for the number of the Toulouse Hotel. She scribbled the number on the jotter pad and then dialed.

‘Mr Carlyle, please.’

She waited a moment.

‘Uncle David? It’s me, Emilie.’

For a second she looked surprised, and then she held the receiver a few inches from her ear and looked across the room at me.

I could sense the explosion that was occurring at the other end and I smiled to myself.

‘I know, I know, and you have no idea how sorry I am, but I’m okay… I’m fine, and that’s the main thing-’

Another blast from the uncle.

‘Okay, enough, Uncle David. I know you’re pissed beyond belief, but the fact of the matter is that I’m okay and no-one will be any the wiser. You let up on me and I won’t tell Dad that you let me get away from you, okay?’

There was silence for a moment. The girl was bartering for her freedom.

‘Okay, I promise.’

Another few words from Uncle David.

‘No, I promise, I really do. Cross my heart and hope to die… never again, okay?’

Uncle David seemed placated.

‘Okay, I will. Maybe an hour or so. I’ll get a cab and we can have lunch or something, alright?’

There were a few more words and then Emilie wished him goodbye and hung up.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘He was gonna wait another hour and then call the cops.’ She sat at the table, tucked her legs beneath her. ‘I’ll go back in a bit and get the third degree for a while. Where was I? Who was I with? Where did I stay? All that kinda crap.’

I nodded. I understood the third-degree kind of crap. ‘Your father?’ I asked her. ‘He doesn’t come down here with you?’

Emilie shook her head. ‘He’s like the busiest guy on the planet. Meetings all the time, all sorts of important stuff. I think he’s in the process of buying about eight trillion companies and if he leaves the office for like eleven seconds the world will end.’

‘A workaholic.’

‘A cash-aholic more like.’

Emilie tore a thin strip of bread from a roll and dipped it in her coffee.

I looked towards the doorway and wondered what was taking Victor so long.

‘So you guys here for a few days?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘Yes, we’re staying for a little while. If Victor likes it here we might stay for some months.’

‘That would be cool. I could maybe come down and see you.’

‘Yes, that would be good,’ I said, and I meant it, for here I believed was someone that would give Victor all that he had become so aware of missing in Cuba.

The door opened and Victor walked through. His hair was wet, combed back from his forehead. He had on a pair of jeans, a white tee-shirt. Somehow he looked older, as if in one night he had gained a handful of years.

‘Could I take a shower before I go?’ Emilie asked.

I nodded. ‘Me casa su casa,’ I said. ‘Go ahead, take a shower, and then we will arrange a cab to take you to your uncle.’

Emilie rose from the chair. She touched Victor’s arm as she walked past him. ‘Your dad is cool,’ she said. ‘Hell, I wish my dad was more like yours instead of this Donald Trump thing he’s got going on.’

Victor smiled. He seemed pleased. He turned and watched her disappear and then came to join me at the table.

‘Nothing happened,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I mean nothing happened between me and Emilie.’

‘But one day soon something will,’ I said. ‘And if it isn’t Emilie then it will be someone else, and I want you to understand that such an event will be important and that it is natural and normal and the way life is. My first girlfriend was the cousin of a friend of mine. Her name was Sabina and her hair was longer than anyone’s I’d ever known. It was perhaps the most important day of my young life, and it made me very happy.’

Victor looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘You’re not mad with me?’

I reached across the table and took Victor’s hand. ‘You are happy?’

He nodded, ‘Happy? Yes, I’m happy. I had a great time last night, and I really like Emilie.’

‘Then I am happy too, and she said that if we stay here a while she will come down and visit with us.’

‘We could stay here a while?’

‘Yes, if that is what you want.’

‘For real? We could stay here?’

I smiled. ‘Well, perhaps not right here in this hotel but maybe we will take a house somewhere on the outskirts of the city and stay for a few months.’

Victor smiled, seemed pleased. There was a light in his eyes, something new and youthful, something I had not seen the entire time we had been away from America. He was an American boy, perhaps more than I had ever been, and there were so many more things here that were right for him. Perhaps, truth be known, I had begun to realize that as my own life would come to an end so his would truly begin. Maybe that was now my purpose: to contribute to the life of another instead of contributing to their death.

Emilie reappeared. Her hair was wet, tied back with a colorful band, and she had on her deck pumps.

‘A taxicab,’ I said. ‘We will send you back to your uncle and you will take whatever words he has to give you, alright?’

For a moment she looked irritated.

‘If you are humble and tell him you are sorry then he will let you come back this evening and have dinner with us. Tell him he is more than welcome to join us if he so wishes.’

And so it was done. Emilie Devereau was despatched to the care of her uncle, and within an hour she called the hotel room to say that her uncle wished to speak with me. I introduced myself, told him that I was here in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras with my son, and that his niece would be more than welcome to have dinner with us that evening. He seemed satisfied that it had not been some fabrication by Emilie to rid herself of her uncle for another evening. He apologized for being unable to join us but allowed that Emilie should come. Would I take care to see she was returned safely no later than eleven? I gave my word and the call ended.

Emilie came. We spent some hours together, the three of us, and it seemed for all the world that here were two young people, one of them my son, attracted to one another, enjoying each other’s company, and perhaps, just perhaps, on the verge of falling in love. In Victor I saw myself, in Emilie I saw Angelina, and I vowed that I would do all I could to ensure this thing was preserved as long as it possessed a life of its own.

Emilie was in New Orleans another week. We saw her much of every day, and on two occasions I went with Victor to the Toulouse to collect her. There I met Uncle David, a remarkably serious man, and though he presented no opposition to his niece visiting with us I sensed an air of suspicion. I gave it no credence. It seemed to me that some people were born with such a slanted view of the world, and they were more than welcome to their fears and anxieties. Emilie was in no danger, for through her my son had found the greatest happiness I had witnessed, and for this I would be eternally grateful.

They stayed in touch once she returned home. He wrote often and she replied. On several occasions they spoke on the phone, and an arrangement was made for Emilie to visit once again nearer Christmas.

I rented a house on the western outskirts of New Orleans. I went about my days with nothing to concern me, and for some months it seemed sufficient that this was my life. Victor attended to the latter part of his schooling and enrolled at a college to study architecture. I supported him wholeheartedly, and he learned quickly and well.

Time unfolded quietly and without incident until the early part of 2001. It was then that I became aware of something that served to draw me back to my former life.

I was alone one afternoon. It was the second or third week of January. Victor was at college and I was eating lunch in a small restaurant. I had paid no particular mind to the people sitting at the adjacent table, but when I heard a name mentioned my attention was snapped towards them.

‘Of course Ducane will shake things up. He’s never been one to let these things go too easily-’

I turned and looked at them. I wondered if this was merely a coincidence, or if they were speaking of the same Ducane I had met so many years before.

I glanced towards them, and there, held up in the man’s hand, was the front page of a newspaper. The face of Charles Ducane – so much older, but so unmistakably the same man – looked back at me. And the headline over it, DUCANE LANDSLIDES GOVERNORSHIP, almost took my breath away.

I did not eat anything more, but called for the check, paid for my meal, and left the restaurant. I walked half a block and bought a newspaper from a street vendor, and there, in startling black and white, the same face smiled back at me from the front page. Charles Ducane, the very same man who had stood beside Antoine Feraud nearly forty years before; the same man who had orchestrated the killing of three people whom I had murdered through his indirect command, was now governor of Louisiana. I smiled at the dark irony of the situation, but at the same time there was something about this that unsettled me greatly. I had not liked Ducane, there had been something truly sinister and unnerving in his manner, and I could only imagine that he must have risen to such a credible position through the sheer quantity of money that was behind him.

I walked the streets, unable to identify what it was that disturbed me so about this man: his manner, his conceited attitude, the feeling that here was someone who had engineered his way through life and arrived at a governorship through Machiavellian deceit and murder? And he had been the one, alongside Feraud, who had attributed killings to my name. The thing about someone having their heart removed: that had been Ducane and Feraud. It angered me that I was now in hiding somewhere on the outskirts of New Orleans, unable to engage in life the way I wished, and yet this man – guilty of the same deeds – was now proudly smiling from the front page of a newspaper with his public reputation intact.

At some point I tore the newspaper in half and hurled it to the sidewalk. I went home. I sat in the kitchen and considered my reactions, but I decided that I could do nothing. What was there to do? It would not have served any purpose to expose the man. In order to do that I would have to lay bare my own soul, and what would that have accomplished? Ducane was the governor. I was an immigrant Mafia hood from Cuba, responsible for the deaths of countless men. I thought of my son and the shame it would bring upon him. Whatever happiness he had now discovered here in America would be obliterated by one single action. I could never do such a thing.

After a while I calmed down. I had a drink and felt my nerves settle. True, I was here in this small house living my quiet life, but nevertheless afraid of nothing. Ducane, however, was up there in his governor’s mansion, living with the ever-present possibility that someone might take an unhealthy degree of interest in his past. There would always be enemies, always be people who would find no greater pleasure than exposing the sordid details of some political figurehead’s past, and money – no matter how much he might have – would only keep such things away for so long. Someone else, I concluded, could bring Charles Ducane down, and that someone would not be me.

Nevertheless I took an interest in the man. I watched him when he came on the TV. I went to the New Orleans City Library and learned something of his route to the governorship. He had been involved in state and city politics his entire adult life. He had worked alongside and within the bureaux that handled land acquisitions and property rights mergers, civil litigation, state legislature and union affiliations for industry and manufacturing plants. At one time he had spent six months as legal advisor to the New Orleans State Drug Enforcement Agency under the auspices of the FBI. The man had been busy. He had used his money and influence to carve out a position for himself within the political ranks of Louisiana, and for his efforts, for his undoubted generous contributions to many important funds and campaigns, he had been rewarded with his current title. In some ways he was a man not unlike me; he had used what he possessed to make something of his life, but whereas I had come from nowhere and ended up nowhere, he had started somewhere and wound up in an even more elevated position.

I collected newspaper articles about Ducane. I made an effort to see him when he made public appearances, and though there was even a moment when I approached him at the opening of a new art gallery and shook his hand enthusiastically, there was no indication of recognition. I knew who he was, I knew where he had come from and what he had done, but of me he knew nothing. I had been a means to an end forty years before, and beyond that he had even used my name to cloud the facts regarding several killings that had taken place. Whereas he was in the public eye, I remained anonymous, and that fact in itself became a source of particular enjoyment for me.

The following year Emilie returned once again for the Mardi Gras. The first week of April, and the streets of 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 had known all along, if he had known these things for so long and still treated me as he had always done, then had anything truly changed? The only thing that had changed was that now I knew. Now I was aware that he knew of my past. Not the details, those he could never have guessed, but he knew enough to speak of how I might have killed people, how I might have been involved with organized crime, and how this involvement had brought the deaths of his mother and sister.

I took the stairs slowly. I had regained my balance, but still my chest was heavy and breathless. I reached the hallway below and heard Victor in the kitchen. He had switched on the TV, was watching some soap drama while he made a sandwich, and when I walked in and he saw me he did nothing more than smile.

‘Making a sandwich,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You want one?’

I smiled back as best I could. I felt tension in the muscles of my face and imagined I must have grimaced. I shook my head, ‘I’m okay,’ I replied. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I gotta go to the library,’ Victor said. ‘There’s some work I need to do, an assignment I have to get finished before the end of the week. We need anything? I could stop by the market.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s okay. We don’t need anything, Victor. We’ve got everything we need right here.’

I watched him as he ate his sandwich, as he surfed channels on the TV and drank a glass of milk, and then I sat for a long time after he’d left and wondered what I was feeling. Did I feel anything at all? I couldn’t be sure, and to this day I cannot remember what, if any, decisions I made. I believed I had disconnected from my former life. I believed that Fabio Calligaris and Ten Cent, Slapsie Maxie, Jimmy the Aspirin, the Alcatraz Swimming Team, and everyone that had walked through these past years… I believed that I had left them all behind. But I had not, for they were there in my mind, and also – to my horror – they were in my son’s memories as well.

Later he returned. It was dark. I had settled somewhat, had come to terms with some aspect of what I had discovered. I imagined that we could both survive this, that as time went by life would somehow become what it was in the present, and cease to be what it had been in the past.

I could not have been more wrong. I could not have been more wrong if I’d tried.

I did not speak to Victor of his phone call with Emilie. I did not question him as to what he knew, what he thought he knew, but I could not deny the fact that it was there, ever-present in the back of my mind. It was as if there was some closed box, and inside the box was all I had been, all I feared for what might happen, and only when I was alone, only when Victor was out, did I dare open that box and look inside. For the subsequent months, through his nineteenth birthday, beyond fall and towards Christmas, I wore a face for the world that was only half of my own. The man I had been was there, would always be there, but I did not let him loose. I could not dare to let him loose for fear of what might happen.

Emilie came down again after Thanksgiving. She and Victor spent a great deal of time away from the house, and only once was I aware of the fact that something more than teenage love occupied their thoughts and feelings. It was one evening, perhaps eight or nine, and she and Victor were downstairs in the kitchen. I had been upstairs reading and I came out of my room and started down the stairs as I was hungry. I stopped in the lower hall and could hear their voices. Perhaps it was innocent curiosity regarding what they might discuss when I was not present, perhaps a concern that once again Victor was detailing memories from his own past that involved me; whatever the cause I stopped there and waited to hear what they were saying.

‘David has his own thing going on,’ Emilie was saying. ‘He has someone down here, some woman that he sees, I am sure, and so he doesn’t really have a chance to complain about what I do.’

‘He has to call your father though?’

‘Sure he does, but what happens and what he tells him are not necessarily the same thing. He tells my dad what my dad wants to hear, and that’s the end of it. Me and David have an understanding. He knows I can take care of myself and he doesn’t want anything to upset his own plans. That’s why he’s always so willing to bring me down here.’

‘And what about your mom?’

‘Sometimes we tell her we’re coming, like for a few days or something, and we stay maybe two weeks. I see enough of her. I mean for Christ’s sake, all she does is spend her time telling me what an asshole my dad is, and there’s only so much of that I can take. I come down here for a break from all that crap.’ Emilie laughed. ‘So David says we’re with my mom and whatever, and my dad is happy with that because I’m not around the place bugging him while he’s trying to work, and as far as my mom is concerned, as long as she sees me a few days of the year she doesn’t complain. She’s too busy arranging other people’s lives to worry about what I might be up to.’

‘And your dad doesn’t know about me?’ Victor asked.

There was silence; I could only assume that Emilie was shaking her head.

‘How come you haven’t told him?’

‘Because he’d be all over you like a freakin’ rash, Victor. He’d have you investigated. He’d find out about your father. Before the week was out he’d know everything there was to know about you and that would be the end of my trips to New Orleans.’

It was quiet for a few moments, and then Victor said, ‘We could take off somewhere. I know where my dad keeps his money… I mean, it’s not like he puts the stuff in the bank or something. We could take some money and just disappear, vanish into the middle of America and no-one would find us.’

‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with,’ Emilie said. ‘My dad’s like this super-rich guy with all manner of contacts and your dad’s a fucking Mafia hitman… you think between them they wouldn’t have the wherewithal to find us if they wanted?’

Victor didn’t reply.

‘Victor, you gotta face the facts. My dad knew what I was doing down here he would have a coronary fucking seizure. I’m his sweet little teenage daughter, good grades, plays tennis, goes shopping in the mall with Daddy’s charge card… he knew I was down here in New Orleans screwing a Mafia hitman’s son he’d have me cut off from the family and put in a mental institution. We just got to accept the fact that it’s gonna be this way whether we like it or not. We just deal with it. We see each other as often as we can, and when things change we can do what we wanna do.’

‘Things change? Whaddya mean, when things change?’

‘Like when my dad dies or whatever.’

‘Dies? How the hell is he gonna die? You gonna kill him or something?’

Emilie laughed. ‘Hell, maybe I could steal some money off my dad and pay your dad to whack him!’

‘No, Em, I’m serious. You’re saying that to do what we want to do, to have people know about us, then we’re gonna have to wait until your dad dies? For God’s sake, that could be years and years.’

Emilie sighed. ‘That’s just the way it is… it’s fucking Shakespeare, isn’t it? The Montagues and the Capulets… the two families that could never be together. Romeo and freakin’ Juliet, you know?’

I stepped away from the door and made my way back to the base of the stairwell. My heart was cold and quiet, like a stone in my chest. Sweat had broken out on the palms of my hands, and there was a deep pain throbbing in my head, stealing all my energy and my ability to think clearly.

My son and his girlfriend, nothing more than teenagers, had become the murderous star-crossed lovers. I did not believe for a moment that either of them had seriously contemplated any aspect of what they were discussing, but that was not the point. The fact was that they were talking about it, and thus such thoughts must have been in their minds. Emilie was a strong-willed girl, fiercely independent, and Victor was in love. There was no doubting that fact, and I knew how swayed he could be by someone such as her. She was, in her own way, quietly dangerous, and for the first time in my life I feared for him. Not as a result of something I had done or some element of my own past perhaps coming back to find us, but because of something he had done. He had known this girl a matter of two and a half years, they had seen each other perhaps a dozen or so times, but their separations seemed to have made them anxious to be together even more. I believed, certainly in the case of Victor and Emilie, that it was the fact that they could not be together all the time that made them want each other so much.

I went back upstairs. I sat on the edge of my bed. I asked myself what I was going to do, what I could do, and after some minutes I realized that I had no idea at all.

Emilie stayed until a week before Christmas, and then she returned to her father’s home. She promised she would come back again for the Mardi Gras in April, and Victor made her swear that she would. They stood together in the front hallway for a small eternity, and Emilie shed some tears, and I believe Victor did also. It was as if I was watching two people being torn apart by nothing more than cruel circumstance and I asked myself why it always had to be so hard. Did we ultimately pay for what we had done? And, by default, by the mere fact that we were connected to those who had done wrong, did we pay for the sins of our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters? In that moment I believed I would have killed Emilie’s father. Without thought, without mercy, without compunction, I would have followed her to her house, waited silently until she left once again, and then stepped inside to murder him. He would be removed from the equation, and Emilie would have been free to choose what she wished to do. Perhaps Victor would go with her somewhere, out into the middle of America to lose themselves. Or perhaps she would have come here, and they could have spent the few years I would be alive living beneath this roof, aware of the fact that no-one – but no-one – would stand in the way of their happiness.

It was a crazy thought, a thought that belonged to the past, but the fact that I had even considered such a thing haunted me.

Victor let Emilie go, as did I, and we survived Christmas together. Once it had been enough that Victor was with me, but now I was so aware of how unhappy he was without her. It did not seem right. It was an injustice. I vowed that if there was anything I could do to redress the balance I would do it.

When Emilie returned in the latter part of March something had changed. There had been some difficulty between her parents, something that had rubbed off on Emilie, and for the first few days she seemed tense and quiet.

It was only at the start of the second week that both Victor and I understood what had happened, and how it was far closer to home than either of us had imagined.

‘He doesn’t want me to come down any more,’ she said. We were seated at the dining table, eating dinner together as we had so often done before, and it was merely as a result of a comment that I had made that she finally broke down and told us the truth.

‘I have thought about the summer,’ I said. ‘That we should perhaps arrange with your mother and father that you go somewhere other than New Orleans, perhaps a holiday in California?’

Emilie was silent; didn’t say a word.

‘Emilie? What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a great idea,’ Victor interjected. ‘We could go out to California and see Los Angeles.’ He turned and looked at Emilie. She had stopped eating. Her expression was distant and disconnected.

‘Em?’

It was then that she said it: He doesn’t want me to come down any more.

There was silence for the better part of a minute, and then Victor said, ‘Who doesn’t? Your father?’

She nodded. ‘My father.’

I leaned forward. I felt concern and anxiety. ‘What did he say to you? Why doesn’t he want you to come here any more?’

She shook her head slowly and looked towards the window. ‘He said that I spend too much time away from home, that I am coming to the end of my studies and I should be working more and taking less vacation time. He said that he had spoken to my mother and they both agreed that it was time for me to grow up.’ She smiled bitterly. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I hardly see them, and yet they feel they have the right to tell me what I can do with my life.’

‘They are your parents, Emilie,’ I said, and even as the words left my mouth I knew I did not agree with nor condone what they had told her.

‘Sure, they’re my parents,’ she replied. ‘But that doesn’t make me any less angry with them. What the hell do they know? What right do they have to tell me what I can and can’t do? I’m nearly nineteen for Christ’s sake! I’m an adult. I’m doing fine at school. I’ll get the qualifications they want me to get, qualifications I never even wanted in the first place and only did because they insisted. I’ve done everything they wanted me to do the whole of my life, and just because they made mistakes doesn’t mean they can force their opinions on me and make me do what they want me to do.’ She grabbed her serviette from her lap, bundled it up and threw it down on the table.

I looked at Victor. He was stunned into silence. I wanted to say something, anything that would make it alright, turn everything backwards and give us all a chance to start over again, but there was nothing. My head and my mouth were empty.

‘He said that this was to be the last time I could come down here until I finished school.’ Emilie said, and then once again she turned towards the window and fell silent.

‘It will be alright,’ I said, believing at once that it would not. I wished in some way that she had said nothing. I wished she had perhaps left this until she was ready to leave. Then, at least, the time that we would spend together now would not be overshadowed by this revelation.

‘He can’t do that,’ Victor said, and in his eyes was the certainty that Emilie’s father could do whatever he wished. He was a man of wealth and means, he could employ people to find her, he could have her grounded indefinitely, have her escorted to school and back again, and though in the process he might lose any remnant of love that his daughter might feel for him, the fact was that he could do whatever he wished and there was nothing Victor or I could do to change that. Emilie’s father was in control. She was a part of our life, but she was not under our control.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said, and she turned back to me. She reached out and took Victor’s hand. ‘I would ask you to come with me, but your life is here. You have to finish your own studies, and I know that my father would not approve of you.’

She glanced at me nervously, and then she smiled as if making some attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

I knew it was coming. I knew what she would say, and in my heart I felt the rushing wave of horror at where we would go from here.

‘I know my father would find out everything about you,’ she said. She looked at me. Her eyes were cool and emotionless. ‘I cannot make a judgement, but I know the truth, Ernesto. Victor has told me-’

‘Emilie!’ Victor snapped, but she turned and raised her hand and stopped him dead in his tracks.

‘I am going to say what I’m going to say,’ she interjected, and once again there was that steely fire of determination in her eyes. Here was the fiercely individual Emilie Devereau; here was the strength of character that at once made her so attractive, and yet again made her someone you could not fool or deceive. ‘I am going to say what I’m going to say, and whether it’s the truth or not doesn’t matter.’ She looked at me once again. ‘You could be the richest man in Louisiana,’ she said. ‘You could own a hundred thousand businesses and donate millions of dollars to charity. You could have a spotless personal reputation and the best public relations people in the world, but still my father would not approve of my being with Victor.’

I frowned. I did not understand where she was going.

She smiled. ‘But we all know that you don’t run a business, and you are not the richest man in Louisiana, don’t we? We know that there have been things that have happened in the past that none of us want to know the details of. We know that your wife and your daughter weren’t killed in a car crash. I’m not going to pretend I know everything, and I’m sure there’s a great deal more that Victor knows that he hasn’t told me, but all of that is irrelevant. The truth of the matter is that my father is a bigot and a racist and a stupid and ignorant man. The simple fact that you are not American is enough. The fact that you are Cuban would be enough to convince him to never let me see Victor again. Like I said one time before, it all comes back to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets. We are destined never to be together if my father has anything to do with it.’

Emilie turned and looked at Victor. ‘There have been things I haven’t been able to tell you. There are things that I won’t even tell you now. I love you. I want to be with you. But there is something here that is bigger than all of us combined and there is nothing I can do about it.’

Victor was pale and drawn. His mouth was half-open as if he was trying to think of something to say but nothing was forthcoming.

Emilie raised her hand and touched Victor’s face. ‘I didn’t want to talk about this. I wanted to wait until I had to leave, but I cannot bear the thought of carrying this alone any longer. My father has forbidden me to come down here again and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.’

Victor looked at me. He was waiting for me to say something, to make this terrible thing go away, but there was nothing I could do.

It was only later, after Emilie was asleep, that Victor came to me in my room.

‘You have to kill him,’ he said matter-of-factly.

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 want to know. But I do know that men are dead because of you, and now… now when I need you to do something for me you cannot. I am your son, the only family you have left. I love her. I love her more than life itself, and now I need something from you you are going to tell me that it cannot be done. Emilie’s father is nothing. He’s a crazy person, someone who knows less about caring for his family than you do. Christ, of all the people you ever killed he probably deserves to die more than any of them-’

‘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 naïve 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 me. I felt a cold rush of fear pass through my body, and for a time I could not move.

He started walking towards the house. I backed away from the window and made my way to the front door. I opened it before he reached the end of the path. He stopped in his tracks. This old man, a man who made me see how far we had come, stood there for a moment and then held his arms wide and smiled.

‘Ernesto!’ he said proudly. ‘Ernesto, my friend!’

I felt tears in my eyes. I stepped out onto the path. I walked towards him. I hugged him. I held him for some small eternity and then I released him and stepped back.

‘Ten Cent,’ I said. ‘Ten Cent… you are here.’

‘That I am,’ he said. ‘And as this is such a special occasion I have brought you your car!’ He turned and indicated the Cruiser. It was the same as it had ever been. Three miles of silken paintwork and burnished chrome. My gift from Don Giancarlo Ceriano after the deaths of Pietro Silvino and Ruben Cienfuegos. I remembered everything, the past, all the things that had brought me here to this point, and I was overcome with emotion.

I started to cry, and then I was laughing, and then the two of us were walking into the house and closing the world out behind us.

We ate together, we drank wine, we spoke of things that had been, a little of things that were to come. Ten Cent asked after Victor; I showed him some of Victor’s work and Ten Cent was pleased and proud like an uncle would be of a talented and bright nephew. Ten Cent was family, had always been, would always be, but at the same time he represented everything that I had so much wanted to leave behind. I realized then that such things could never be left behind. They were always there, and it was simply a matter of time before they found you once again. The present, even the future – these things were always and forever only a mirror held up to the past. The man I once was had now been reflected, and though time had passed, though the mirror was aged and spotted with distortions and discolorations, it was still the same man who looked back at me: Ernesto Cabrera Perez, killer, absentee father, indirectly guilty of the deaths of two of the people whom he had loved most.

Later, three, four hours perhaps, Ten Cent was quiet for a moment. He looked at me seriously and I asked him what was wrong.

‘I came for a reason,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you. I brought the car also. But there is another reason I came.’

I fell quiet inside. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

‘Don Calligaris is dead,’ he said. ‘He died three weeks ago.’

I opened my mouth to ask what had happened.

‘He was an old man, and despite everything he survived all the world could throw at him. He died in his own bed, surrounded by the people who cared for him. It has taken me all this time and a great deal of money to track you down, Ernesto, but in his last moments Don Calligaris wished that I find you and tell you the truth.’

‘The truth?’ I asked, fear roiling up inside me like a tornado.

‘The truth,’ Ten Cent said, ‘about Angelina and Lucia… the night they died.’

I felt my eyes widen.

‘The bomb, as you know, was meant for Don Calligaris, and he did not tell you about it for fear of what you might do. But he is dead now, and before he died he wanted to know that you would discover the truth of who was responsible for their deaths.’

Ten Cent shook his head. ‘It all went back to Chicago, the friends we made back then, the people we were involved with. There were disagreements, people in New York who were unhappy with the way things turned out, and the responsibility for resolving the differences was given to Don Calligaris.’

‘Differences?’ I asked. ‘What differences?’

‘The differences between those within the family and those outside who we were involved with.’

‘What people?’ I asked.

‘Don Calligaris was charged with the responsibility of closing down any business agreements we had made with Antoine Feraud and his New Orleans operations.’

I looked at Ten Cent. I was struggling to understand what he was telling me.

‘Don Calligaris, as he died, wanted me to tell you who was responsible for attempting to kill him… who was responsible for the murder of your wife and your daughter.’

‘Feraud?’ I asked. ‘Feraud was responsible for the car bomb?’

Ten Cent nodded and then looked down at his hands. ‘Don Calligaris did not tell you, and made me swear that I would not tell you, because he feared that your vengeance might begin a war between the families that he would be held accountable for. Now he is dead, and he does not care what happens, and he loved you enough to want you to know the truth. He told me to tell you that you should take whatever action you felt was just in order to revenge the deaths of your wife and child.’

I sat back in my chair. I was emotionally and mentally overwhelmed. I could not find any words to describe how I felt, and thus I said nothing. I looked back at Ten Cent. He looked back at me unblinkingly, and then I nodded slowly and lowered my head.

‘You understand I will do what I have to,’ I said quietly.

‘Yes,’ Ten Cent replied.

‘And if I die doing this then it is not on your head.’

‘You will not die, Ernesto Perez. You are invincible.’

I nodded. ‘Perhaps so, but this thing I am going to do will be the undoing of everything. It will mean losing Victor perhaps, and it will mean trouble for the families.’

‘I know.’

‘But even so, you tell me this and you are prepared to let the cards fall where they may?’

‘I am.’

I reached forward and took Ten Cent’s hand. I looked up at him and saw the washed-out pale blue color of his eyes: the eyes of a tired man.

‘You have done what Don Calligaris asked you to do,’ I said, ‘and for this I am grateful. Now I think you should leave, you should forget me and Victor and pay no mind to what happens now. This thing of ours is done.’

Ten Cent nodded. He rose from his chair. ‘Give me your car keys,’ he said. ‘I am leaving the car I brought and I will take yours. You do what you have to do, and do it with the blessing of Don Fabio Calligaris.’

‘I will,’ I said quietly, and my voice was nothing but a broken whisper. ‘I will do this thing, and that will be the end.’

I watched him drive away. With him went everything I had worked to maintain; the falsity of my present situation dissolved beneath the weight of this knowledge.

I felt ageless and indestructible. I felt the years roll away from me and vanish into nothing. I wandered through my house, my thoughts racing in circles, and I found myself challenging everything I had striven to become.

I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez. I was a murderer. I had reached the end of my life but there was now one more thing that had to be done. I would go to my grave knowing that justice had been served.

Like the Sicilians had told me so many years before: Quando fai i piani per la vendetta, scava due tombe – una per la tua vittima e una per te stesso.

Yes, I would dig two graves – one for Antoine Feraud, and one for myself.

I slept well that night, secure in the knowledge that my life had turned full circle. I would swallow my own tail, and finally, silently, irrevocably, everything I had been, everything I had become, would magically disappear.

I would find Angelina and Lucia once more, and this thing of ours would be done.