Authors: Jessie Keane
‘And I suppose you don’t know where Lucco is, either?’ she asked, watching the older woman’s eyes.
Gina shook her head.
‘Constantine used to talk to me about
omertà
, the Sicilian code of silence,’ said Annie. ‘That’s what’s happening here. Right?’
Gina said nothing.
‘You know what’s happened, so does Alberto. But nothing’s going to be said.’
Gina still said nothing.
Annie knew that she was right. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Aunt Gina who had been pulling strings here. She remembered Aunt Gina whispering on the stairs at Holland Park with Alberto. Aunt Gina had decided – she was sure of it – that Lucco’s destabilizing influence had to end. No doubt about it, the women of the Barolli family were every bit as dangerous as the men. Cara had spent her time plotting over real and imagined hurts, and Gina . . . well, who knew?
‘You won’t even tell me what’s been going on? Not even me, a member of the family?’
Aunt Gina’s lip curled slightly. Annie knew that Gina had never accepted her for one minute as a family member. To Gina, she would always be an incomer, an outsider. Gina had never liked her; and – to be fair – she had never liked Gina, either.
‘We both loved Constantine,’ said Annie.
Gina gently pulled her arm away from Annie’s grasp. Their eyes locked.
Finally, Gina said: ‘You’re right. We did. And for that at least I wish you good luck, Annie Carter,’ she said, and moved on.
‘It’s Carter-Barolli,’ said Annie faintly, but Gina was already gone, into the study where Alberto was taking on his father’s mantle of power.
Next day, Annie and Max left Layla with Gerda at the hotel and went to St John’s Cemetery in Queens. Annie placed a large bouquet of red roses on Constantine’s hugely elaborate grave and stood there for long moments, thinking about the man she’d loved, married and lost.
There was a cold easterly wind blowing today, ripping the leaves from the trees. Autumn had arrived and soon it would be winter. Annie stuffed her hands into the pockets of her black cashmere coat and shivered at the thought of Constantine lying alone beneath the cold earth.
Soon there would be another family funeral, another grave alongside this one when Cara was laid to rest; Rocco, however, was home in New Jersey, being buried by his own family there. Even in death, Cara and Rocco were apart. Constantine had been so right about that; they should never have been together in the first place.
‘So what now?’ said Max when she’d been standing there in silence for a while.
Annie looked around at him. She was Annie Carter-Barolli, Madam, gang boss, Mafia queen. Once she had stood hard-eyed and stared out at the world, living by her own motto of ‘dig deep and stand alone’. Once she had never cried, never weakened. But she felt real tears in her eyes now and a hard lump in her throat as she stood there beside Constantine’s grave. She had to blink hard to focus on Max’s face.
‘What?’ she asked blankly.
‘Where do we go from here?’ asked Max.
‘Well, I . . . you’re going back to London?’
And you’re going to take Layla with you, I know it.
She wiped irritably at her face as a tear spilled over.
‘So . . . are you planning to stay here?’ he asked.
Annie looked at him. Max Carter. She’d loved him just about forever, and had been through hell for it. Now he was pussy-footing around, playing mind games with her. She walked a few paces away from the grave, feeling the anger building up in her gut, feeling the exasperation, the sheer
powerlessness
of this situation.
She was in love with this man. But he was going to hurt her. That much was certain.
‘Look.’ Suddenly she turned and walked back to him, stood there, confronted him. ‘For fuck’s sake! This is doing my head in. Why are you dragging this out? You said you were going to take Layla away from me: why haven’t you done it yet?’
‘What?’ Max’s face was inscrutable.
‘You heard!’
Max stuck his hand in the pocket of his overcoat and stared at her.
‘When am
I
going to snatch Layla?’ he said. ‘Hey –
I
wasn’t the one who booked tickets on a night flight to California.’
‘I did that because I
had
to,’ Annie burst out, flinging her arms wide in exasperation. ‘I couldn’t go on with it, wondering and waiting and thinking, he’s going to take her, any minute now I’ll turn round and neither of them will be there and what the fuck will I do then? I had to do
something
.’
‘Yeah, you’ve always been good at doing
something
,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Usually the
wrong
thing.’
Annie squared up to him. ‘Oh really? Like what?’ she demanded.
‘Where do I start?’ He turned away as if in deep thought, then spun back towards her. ‘Oh yeah.
I
know. Marrying Constantine and making a bigamist of yourself when you still had a husband, how about
that
?’
‘Are you ever going to let that go? For the love of God, I believed you were dead!’
‘Nice to think you sat around mourning me for . . . oh, how long was it? A few months. Fuck it, I was barely
cold.
’
‘You weren’t cold at all. You weren’t even
dead
.’
‘Oh, and that would have kept you happy, would it? If I really had been?’
Annie’s jaw dropped.
‘How can you
say
that?’ she spat out. ‘Look, I was in a hole. I had to act. You weren’t there. I had to think of Layla.’
‘Oh, the self-sacrificing mother,’ he mocked. ‘Prostituting herself to give her kid a roof over her head.’
‘I never prostituted myself. I
married
Constantine. I
loved
Constantine.’
‘Yeah, so you keep saying.’ For fuck’s sake, did she have to keep ramming
that
down his throat? She was standing here in tears beside the grave of her second husband, and yet he had no way of knowing if she had ever shed so much as a single tear over the loss of
him.
‘I’m just telling the damned truth.’ Annie was trembling with rage as they stood nose to nose, glaring at each other. She pointed back to the grave. ‘The
truth
is you owe him. You owe him for keeping us safe when you weren’t there to do it.’
‘I know that.’
Annie stepped back. ‘What?’
‘I said, I know that.’ Max drew in a calming breath. ‘For God’s sake, what do you think I am, some sort of cunt? I know all that he’s done. That makes me feel a fucking sight worse, not better.’
Annie shook her head. ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said mournfully.
‘That’s obvious,’ said Max, and turned away from her. She was just dashing after him when he turned back. ‘Look,’ he said, grabbing her with his good arm. ‘Layla needs us both.’
‘I know that,’ said Annie. ‘I’ve been going through seven kinds of hell thinking of taking her away from you. I know how much she loves you.’
‘Then we’ll
both
go back to London and make a life there with her.’
Annie felt the pit of her stomach sink at his words. For Layla, he was willing to tolerate her. That’s what he was saying. He would spend the rest of his life beating her over the head with her ‘lapse’, as he saw it, and they would grow old and miserable and bitter together, but Layla would have her mum and dad there, both of them.
She shook her head furiously. ‘No! I couldn’t stand that.’
With Constantine, she had known what it was to be loved. Once, with Max, she had known the same sweet, incredible intensity of feeling. She couldn’t just live a half-life, going through the motions of a marriage for the sake of her child, however much she loved her.
‘What? You couldn’t stand living with me again? After him?’ His face was blank, masklike.
‘I couldn’t stand us living a lie, even if it was for Layla’s sake!’
‘Is that what it would be? A lie?’
‘Yeah! It would! Because you can’t let this go, because you
don’t love me
.’
Max’s brows drew together as he stared hard at her.
‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded, shaking her slightly. ‘You think I don’t love you? You really think I’d have been so fucking cut up about you running off with Constantine if I didn’t love you? You really think I’d have thrown myself in front of a
bullet
if I didn’t love you?’
Annie stood there, frozen in shock.
‘Well say something, if it’s only “bollocks”,’ he snapped. ‘I love you, you stupid mare. If you don’t love me, then fine. I understand. You’ve moved on. So we’ll be bloody civilized about it, all right? We’ll live apart but we’ll sort out something so that we both see Layla. It’s not a problem.’
Annie was silent, staring at his face.
‘For fuck’s
sake
,’ growled Max.
‘It
is
a problem,’ she said at last.
‘What?’
‘Living apart but both seeing Layla.’
‘I might’ve known you’d be bloody antsy about it . . .’
‘I’m not being antsy. I’m being honest. I can’t live apart from you because I don’t want to. I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you, not for one moment.’
Max was very still, not even breathing.
Finally, he gulped in air. ‘But you married Constantine.’
‘I loved Constantine. But I never forgot you, and I never stopped loving you. And the minute I saw you there in the Palermo, and you called me a slut, I thought, that bastard, how dare he say that to me? I was so mad I wanted to kick your teeth straight down your throat. But, you know what? Fool that I am, I fell in love with you all over again, right then.’
He said nothing.
The wind gusted icily across the graveyard. Annie wrenched a shaking hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. ‘Please say something,’ she moaned.
Now Max started to smile. ‘Like what?’
‘Like you love me.’
‘I just said that.’
‘Well, for God’s sake – just say it again, will you?’
For a long moment, he was still, just staring at her. Then, using his one good arm, he pulled her in tight against the front of his body. ‘I love you, Annie Carter,’ he said, and kissed her hard and long.
‘It’s Carter-Barolli,’ she corrected him when she came up for air.
‘No it ain’t. Not any more,’ said Max, and he put his arm around her and they walked back to the limo.
Just once, he glanced back. He knew he’d never come here again. He could see the blood-red roses lying there, starkly beautiful beneath the headstone and against the windswept greenery. His friend and colleague Constantine Barolli. Without him, would Annie have been able to save Layla? Would Annie herself have survived? He didn’t think so.
You owe him
, she’d said.
And she was right of course. Constantine had trod on his territory, claimed what was Max’s for his own . . . but now Constantine was gone. And it was time to let the grudge go, or let it eat him alive and ruin what was going to be a good life with her and their child.
He couldn’t afford to let that happen. Not after they’d been through so much, not after they’d come so far and, against all the odds, found each other again.
He looked back at the grave and thought,
All right, you old bastard. Thanks, okay? Thanks, pal. Rest easy there. Rest in peace.
And then he put his arm around his wife, kissed her, and together they walked away from the grave of Constantine Barolli.
Brother Benito had been expecting them; he’d received the letter two weeks ago at the monastery, and ever since then he’d been happily anticipating their arrival. Max hadn’t specified an
exact
date, but Benito held himself in readiness.
On the day when it finally happened, he’d been to prayers, had breakfast, gone out into the garden to dig the soil over for next season’s crops. Then he washed, had a small lunch with the brothers, and took his Bible out to his favourite shady spot in the garden to sit quietly and read and contemplate.
When the call went up from one of the younger monks, he left his seat and went smiling to the gate just as their car pulled up outside. Max Carter got out from the driver’s side. From the passenger’s side there emerged a tall, slender woman dressed in a plain white shift dress. Her long straight dark hair was being blown about in the wind, but she didn’t fuss with it. Benito saw that Max and the woman were arguing.
‘All right,’ Max was saying. ‘I’ll give you Dolly Farrell, okay? She can stay, she’s done a good job. But the signs stay too.’
‘Max . . .’ the woman said, her tone exasperated.
‘Don’t “Max” me. I’ve met you halfway, that’s fair. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘No. Actually, I wouldn’t.’
A little girl of about five years old tumbled out from the car, and quickly took the woman’s hand, looking uncertainly ahead to where the grizzled old monk stood waiting.
‘Max! My friend!’ called out Benito.
Max and the woman looked ahead to where Benito was waiting beside the gate. Max gave a grin and raised his hand in greeting. The three of them walked up the dusty pink track towards him, Max with his arm casually thrown across the woman’s shoulders. When they reached Benito, Max stepped forward and gave him a hug, slapping him on the back.
‘You old bastard!’ He laughed as Benito embraced him.
‘That
can’t
be the way to talk to a monk,’ said Annie, scandalized.
Max glanced back at her. Layla was hiding behind her skirts now, overcome with shyness.
‘He’s very difficult to offend,’ said Max, grinning. ‘I told him to fuck off lots of times, and he never did.’
Annie’s eyes met Benito’s and she relaxed slightly. He really didn’t look too bothered by this irreverent behaviour. ‘This is Layla,’ she said, indicating the little girl.
‘She’s adorable,’ said Benito.
‘This is Brother Benito, the man who saved my life,’ said Max to Annie, drawing her closer. ‘This is Annie Carter,’ said Max proudly to Benito. ‘This is my wife.’