The Kaisho (24 page)

Had she received a message from Nicholas’s hateful assistant? Justine could not remember. She thought desperately. Which lie should she tell? “Yes, I got it. I tried him several times with no luck.”

“It’s not surprising, I expect. I have been unable to reach him either. We’ll just have to keep trying.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Call me anytime, Justine-san.”

“I will, Nangi-san. Thank you again.”

She broke the connection with a profound sense of relief. She really did not like lying to him, but what other choice did she have? When she put down the phone, she saw that it was moist with her sweat.

Rick returned, a grin lighting up his face. “All set,” he said as he sat down opposite her. “We leave tonight. That will give you just enough time to take me around the city like the tourist I am.”

“No. I’m sick to death of Tokyo. We’ll take a ride into the country where it’s beautiful. I have to return the car to the house, anyway.”

They ate in silence for some time, and Justine thought that she had not enjoyed a meal so much in a very long while.

Over more coffee and another order of toast that Rick slathered with more strawberry jam, they spoke of their new life together.

“Where do you think you’d rather live,” Rick asked her, “Manhattan or somewhere outside, like Long Island?”

Justine considered this. “From what I’ve heard of Manhattan these days, I’d say definitely not there.” Her eyes clouded for a moment. “But not the Island, either.” Too many memories of the house she and Nicholas had shared in West Bay Bridge. “What about Connecticut?”

“Good idea,” Rick said, sipping his coffee. “One of the firm’s veeps lives in Darien and it’s beautiful up there.” He grinned. “We won’t have to pay New York City taxes, which will be a relief.”

“You don’t mind giving up the apartment?” She recalled Rick had a co-op on Fifth Avenue.

He shook his head. “Not a bit. The truth is my ex-wife has been making my life miserable recently because she wants it.” He wiped his mouth. “God knows why she wants to live in Manhattan. These days you’re better off wearing a .45 on your hip.” He shrugged. “Anyway, this will simplify my life considerably. I can sell her the apartment and she’ll owe me big.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind giving it up?”

Rick laughed. “Are you kidding? I can’t wait. We’ll go house hunting the first weekend we’re home.”

That sounded so good to Justine she began to cry. House hunting in Darien. America. Home. Oh, my God! It was almost too good to be true.

Rick took her hands in his, leaned across the table, kissed her tenderly on each eyelid, tasting the saltiness of her tears. “No more pain, darling,” he whispered. “I promise you.” His lips closed over hers, and he felt her inarticulate cry echo through him.

“Tony,” Margarite Goldoni said as she entered their bedroom, “this Sicilian thing is
morte.”

Anthony DeCamillo, newly anointed godfather for the Goldoni family, lay naked—save for a small white nylon bikini—beneath a sizzling sunlamp. White plastic goggles over his eye sockets along with the bizarre shade of his flesh beneath the lamp made him seem to Margarite like one of those cheap saints made of molded plastic that many New Yorkers stuck on their dashboards.

A timer rang and he stirred as the UV light switched off. He sat up, removed the white plastic goggles. He stared at her voluptuous figure clad in the clingy nightgown and began to get hard.

“Margarite, it’s amazing, you look better now than you did ten years ago. Have I told you that lately?”

“Up until now, you’ve had no reason to,” Margarite said, coming toward him. She was massaging some of her own moisturizing cream into the skin of her hands.

Tony grunted, abruptly abandoning his attempt at a spurious reconciliation. “You know, my brother told me I’d regret marrying a girl who wasn’t Sicilian.”

“Your brother’s an idiot,” Margarite said flatly.

He sat forward quickly. “Hey, we’re talking Family here! Watch your fucking mouth!”

“I’m sorry, Tony.” She sat on the bed next to him and wondered if he would flinch away.

She felt split off, disassociated from herself. Part of her wanted desperately to undo the damage that had been done by her abduction, to make herself clean again in her husband’s eyes. And all the while, another, less familiar part of her savored the loathing for him she had tasted when he had sent her and Francie away to New Hampshire.

“We both know you’re in trouble,” she said. “The Leonfortes are going to come east and try to take away what was once Dominic’s sole province.”

“If I’m in trouble, it’s because of your fucking brother,” he said angrily. “He never had a formal
consigliere.
He never confided in any of his lieutenants. He never allowed anyone to get close to him. He kept his own counsel. The secrets he used as leverage to influence all his high-powered contacts in Washington are history now.” Tony’s hands flew through the air, describing complex arabesques. “Mary Mother, how many times did I beg him to give those secrets to me for safekeeping? ‘If I’m to succeed you, I’ve got to know everything,’ I’d say. ‘You can’t tie my hands like this.’”

He shook his head, sad and angry at the same time. “I swear I loved him like a brother, Margarite, but he was a damned stubborn man, your brother. He left me with
ugatz,
and now I’m twisting in a fucking wind that stinks to high heaven of Bad Clams and his whole West Coast machine.”

“You have me.”

“That madman brother of yours, giving you all his secrets! A fucking woman!” He threw his hands into the air. “It’s enough that I’ve had to sit through meetings with Dom’s contacts knowing you were the one who’d report to him, who’d make the decisions that came out of my mouth. Now I gotta live with the fact that Dom gave
you
everything!”

He got up, began to dress, throwing on a white shirt, charcoal trousers. He shook his head. “I don’t mind telling you, I got to hand it to the fucker. That sonuvabitch Caesare Leonforte finally got his wish. He’s wanted Dominic dead so bad he’d probably incorporated it into his Sunday prayers. But I’m not gonna let him get away with it. I know he hired that bastard who you think has us under his thumb. I’m gonna—”

“You and I both know you’re no match for Caesare. I think it’s time you gave up trying to hypnotize yourself into believing you’re really the head of the Family.”

Tony watched her for some time as he slid his belt through the waist loops. “I’m gonna tell you something, babe. I know you’ve had a shock—especially since Dom’s widow and kids have been spirited out of the country so the feds can keep them under lock and key. I know it’s been tough, them hanging on to the corpse and all—and us making like Dom’s body was actually in that goddamned coffin we buried yesterday.”

She wondered if he was going to bring up the subject of Robert, actually had bet with herself that after what had happened he wouldn’t. She won.

“But for Christ’s sake, ever since you came back from that Magical Mystery Tour to nowhere you’ve changed.”

“Of course I’ve changed.”

“No.” He shook his head, stepping into tasseled Italian loafers. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re a different person altogether. The Margarite Goldoni I married doesn’t seem to exist anymore.”

“Your imagination’s working overtime,” Margarite said, but she wondered as she heard another voice in her head:
And what else have I given you, Margarite? Now you know you have the strength of purpose… to do
anything. She shivered, but as much with anticipation now as dread.

“You think so? Before this your own business has always been enough for you.”

“Business is business, Tony. I’ve proved I’ve got a good head for business.”

He snorted. “Well, I’ll say this for you, you were never a girl to keep a bun stuck in her oven.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “Bastard, to bring up what I couldn’t help. I had three miscarriages trying to give you the son you wanted so badly. The last one almost killed me.”

Tony shook his head. “Maybe it was physical, and maybe it was psychological, too. You never wanted to be tied down by kids. Look at our daughter. Having her never slowed you down. Did you ever think of staying home with her when she was little?”

“Did you ever think of coming home at a decent hour to be with her?”

“That’s different,” he shouted. “I worked my balls off to afford an estate of substance for you and her, so I wouldn’t be in your brother’s debt. And where do I end up? Living on his fucking estate with a daughter who doesn’t even know how to say hello to me properly.”

“I see. So it’s okay for you to absent yourself from the family because you’re the man?”

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he screamed, “if I had a wife who knew what her priorities were regarding her child! If she knew how to be a mother!”

“Oh, Christ, I’m so tired of you and your bullying.”

He gave her a rude Sicilian sign. “So leave.”

She put her head down, sobbing now. “I just might.”

“You’re fucking full of shit!”

Margarite’s face went white and her head came up. “Don’t you talk to me like that! You don’t talk to any of your men friends that way.”

“That’s because none of them are fucking women!”

She tried to slap him, and he caught her wrist, slammed her back against the wall. The pain came. It was an all too familiar feeling.

He stood over her, menacing. “I’m going to make sure that whatever’s going on comes to an end.” He slipped his belt out from around his waist. “It’s been too long since I last gave you a lesson.”

But the next moment he was staring down at the barrel of a snub-nosed .45-caliber pistol.

“You goddamned Sicilians only understand one thing,” she said, struggling to her feet.

“Margarite!”

“And don’t make the mistake of thinking I don’t know how to use this.”

What new emotion had she felt then? Rage? No, she had felt that before, bottled up like a demon clamped tight against her soul. What then? She felt beneath the rage and the terror a kind of iron core she never believed she had, a will coalescing from out of the nightmare maelstrom that had become her life. She reached out and grasped it with the desperation of a swimmer exhausted past all limits.

A voice she only vaguely recognized said, “For so long I’ve been—what is it? I’ve been afraid of you.
Afraid.
I say the word now and can hardly believe it. You hit me and I took it, silently bit my lip and said not a word, not even to my brother. Because I was
afraid.”

Tony was backing up as she advanced on him.

“Now come on, babe. Chill out. You’ve been under a tremendous strain with your brother’s death and this man breaking into—”

“And not a kind word to me when I came home, our baby in my arms, no sympathy. I saw the hatred, Tony. You thought—no, no, you
knew
—he had raped me. In your mind I had been soiled. Just by
being
with him. You had that look on your face—oh, Christ, it crystallized everything inside me I’d refused to acknowledge; it made me feel like a piece of—”

“Babe—”

He stopped as she brought the gun up. She stayed far enough away from him so that he couldn’t overpower her by sheer brute strength. There was a strange light in her eyes that frightened him.

“Margarite, you’ve made your point. Why don’t you put that thing away before someone gets hurt.”

“No, Tony. No more ‘babe,’ no more screaming at me, no more beatings. All of that is finished. It’s a new world order. Because I have the power to kill you now. I
can
pull this trigger, just give me one more reason, as if I don’t have enough already.
That’s
how I’ve changed: I’ve been given this power—no, it’s been restored to me. My self-respect. You took it away, Tony, and God help me, I let you.”

Tony licked his lips, his eyes flicking from the gun barrel to her face. “Hey, come on now. I don’t think you’ve really got a grip on what’s happened to us over the past few days. I know you’re upset about the kid. And the shock of Dom’s—”

“You bastard, I know what’s really happened here—to Dominic, to Francie, and to me! But you’d never understand.”

“I understand how we’ve all been violated. My own home—my family—”

Her eyes blazed and she hit the side of her head. “I get it now. This isn’t about Francie or my brother or me. This is about you, you macho prick! You can’t stand what he did to
you!”

And now she knew: it was her brother’s voice, coming out of her mouth. As part of her marveled at this seeming miracle, another part was remembering the time she had seen Dominic put a loaded gun to the head of Rich Cooper, her business partner. Margarite wanted to expand Serenissima, her cosmetics company, overseas, but Rich thought it was too risky. Dominic had spent all afternoon using every argument he could think of to persuade Rich to change his mind. To no avail. Afterward, with the signed contract in his breast pocket, Dominic had said to her,
You see, Margarite, there is a correct persuasion for every sort of man.

Now, looking at her husband’s respect for the weapon she held firmly in her hand, she knew she had found the correct persuasion for him.

“What we need,” Nicholas said, “is a mirror.”

“A mirror?” Celeste asked as they broke out again along the
riva.

“Yes. A place we can disappear into where we can look back at our pursuers.”

Celeste smiled at him as she took his hand. “I think I know just the place.”

She took him over the Ponte della Paglia, the Straw Bridge, where, in ages gone by, boats filled with straw were unloaded, and past the Bridge of Sighs, where prisoners of the doge were led to prison and, often, worse fates. They ducked down, going through a
sottoportego,
an archway leading into an underpass, and very shortly they came out upon a
campo
fronted by a stone church, rather unprepossessing by Venetian standards, and a secondary building.

“This is the Convent of San Zaccaria,” Celeste said, leading him out of the
campo
via the only other egress. “It has an interesting history, since the sisters have historically embroidered the ceremonial hat of the doge.” They made a sharp right at a tiny square, hurrying down a narrow street that bent like the back of an old woman around to the right. “Since the ninth century the reigning doge made a short pilgrimage here at Easter to vespers at the church.”