Lawless (10 page)

No need to mention Bianca, the longed-for girl Bella so wanted. Girls didn’t even figure in Vittore’s mindset, beyond their obvious talents for keeping house and popping out babies – and Bianca didn’t seem prepared to settle down and do
that
. She wanted to fiddle in the business instead, and of course Tito had yielded to pressure from Mama and given her the Southampton place to try.

For years Vittore had occupied the middle ground, the dead zone of the sibling forever doomed to go unnoticed by the father he always tried so hard to impress. Oh, his mother adored him. He was her favourite. He knew people saw him as dull, blockish, but Mama cooed over him, couldn’t bear the thought of him marrying, desperate to keep him all for herself.

‘Those dirty girls, you don’t want to mix with them, my angel, my little Vittore,’ Bella told him as a child, a teenager, a young man, all the while the music of Italy, of their homeland, playing in the background as Mama wore the old vinyl out.

‘
Torna a Surriento
’, that was a favourite of hers. And ‘
O Sole Mio
’.

‘They carry on like
puttas
, like whores these days! This “permissive society”, I spit on it. You could catch anything from them. Diseases. Your cock could drop off.’

Mama was right, no doubt about it. He’d had no interest in women, until Maria came along, black-haired, doe-eyed, a body like a fallen angel. For the first time in his life Vittore had felt the strong sexual pull of a woman. Maria had seemed so pure and innocent, and they had dated.

‘She’s a nice enough girl,’ said Bella after the first couple of dates.

At this point, Vittore had been allowed to kiss Maria, deep and long.

‘Still seeing Maria?’ Mama asked after the fifth date, the sixth. Not looking too happy about it, not really.

Around about this time, Maria had let him undo her bra, gaze at her amazingly full naked breasts and touch her large dark nipples. It drove him crazy, touching them, feeling how soft her breasts were.

‘I heard she’s a
putta
,’ came his mother’s warning after the tenth date. ‘You want to be careful. I won’t always be here to protect you, Vito. You know my health’s not good.’

Putta
or not, he wanted this. When Maria let him lift her skirt and stare at the dark bush between her legs, oh God, he wanted all there was of this.

‘How come you’re still seeing that girl?’ raged Bella after the twentieth date, when it was obvious that Vittore and Maria were ‘going steady’. ‘Are you trying to break your mother’s heart? Didn’t I tell you what these women are like?’

There were hysterical tears from Bella at news of the engagement, and then a flat refusal to attend the wedding.

‘I may not live that long,’ sniffed Bella, clutching at her chest when they named the date. ‘I have this condition, as you know. My heart.’

I have a condition too,
thought Vittore.
It’s a pain in the arse, and you know what? It’s you, Mama.

He knew there was fuck-all wrong with his mother’s heart. Her nose had been put out of joint by her favourite son finally growing a pair, that was all. He wanted a normal life, a family. And whether his mother liked it or not, he was going to have it.

Not that it had all been plain sailing. His mother’s drip-drip-drip of acidic words seemed to have penetrated deep into the core of him.
Girls are dirty,
he heard in his head.
You want to catch something off them, syphilis maybe? Your penis will rot with sores – you want that, Vittore?

Despite all that he wanted to bed Maria on their wedding night. Though he knew he was a bit undersized, on his own he could achieve a decent hard-on and jerk himself off to his complete satisfaction. But when they climbed into bed together, he couldn’t do a thing. She was so pretty, big-breasted, small-waisted, with opulent full buttocks. Jesus, he wanted to fuck her so badly! But his cock was limp.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Maria. ‘We have all the time we need, don’t worry.’

Maria couldn’t believe she’d finally got Vittore up the aisle. Bella had pulled all sorts of tricks to prevent it, but here they were at last – married.

Vittore’s little problem persisted for six, seven, eight months – by which time he was so desperate to have her that he felt he was going out of his mind. Then came the erections – full, amazing erections – but the mere sight of her naked body was enough to make him fire off too soon, before he could get in the bed with her.

Finally, a year into the marriage, consummation was achieved. He got drunk, fell into bed one night and there she was, his wife, and the drink relaxed him enough – not too much – to allow him to roll onto Maria – who was still a virgin – and shove his cock hard into her. It was over in three seconds.

Thereafter, that was the way it always seemed to be. And by that time, he suspected that Maria really didn’t care any more.

But miracles did happen. His love life might have been blighted, but other things were going good. Tito’s debauched reign had been swept away. The sign over the door of the club had been changed from Tito’s to Vito’s. Petty drug dealers who had circulated in the club selling their wares were ousted, and now Vittore’s own doormen did discreet deals instead. The sex palace Tito had run above the club, pimping highly paid prostitutes to his upmarket friends, Vittore had quickly, with a shudder of distaste, swept away.

At long last he was in charge. But he’d come home to find that Maria hadn’t even cleaned the place up. Was it too much to expect that she should keep their rooms clean and tidy, the way Mama would? Maybe Mama was right: all girls were dirty slovens.

‘You think I want to live in a place like this, in a
tip
?’ he shouted.

This was supposed to be where she would bear and raise his children; the place should be pristine, the way he liked it. That was all he wanted in life – a wife who did as she was told, as any good wife should. But today he’d come home to find the clumsy bitch had dropped a pot plant and now there was dirt all over the living-room carpet, the carpet
he’d
paid for, sweated for, and there was orange juice spilled on it by the fireplace and not mopped up, for God’s sake, and the mantelpiece was caked in dust. Mama always kept an
immaculate
home.

Vittore was still seething over Kit Miller showing up at the funeral. He had promised the bastard that retribution was on its way, but when he had taken Mama home, she had told him, yet again:

‘You won’t touch him, Vittore. I told you, and you swore to behave yourself. This ends here, you understand?’

Actually he
didn’t
understand. Actually he thought she was crazy and he was sick of hearing her
opinions
about what didn’t concern her. Who was the boss now, after all? She was just an old woman, her time was done. He loved her but at the same time he hated her for what she had done to him, ruining him as a man. And was she crazy? That bastard Miller had insulted them, having the audacity to show up at Tito’s funeral and crow about his death. There
had
to be revenge for that.

And what if the low rumble of rumours and suspicion should prove to be true? What if it wasn’t one of Tito’s other enemies but Miller himself who snatched Tito’s life away? Wouldn’t they be justified in taking action then? But no. His hands were tied by an old woman’s apron strings, and he resented it,
hated
it.

He was sick of listening to Mama.

Why should he pay attention to what an old woman had to say about anything? Tito might have done. And Fabio might, too. But
he
, Vittore, was the boss.

Now all he wanted was to release this pent-up resentment, and here was Maria, who didn’t seem to have a clue how to keep a house decent and tidy, and
whumph
, he slapped Maria, knocked her down, and suddenly he was aroused, he got down on the dirty floor with her and slapped her again, then pulled her pants down and unzipped himself, wild with lust now, he knew his cock wasn’t very big but now to him it looked huge, impressive. He pushed her legs open and thrust it into her, pushed once, twice, three times, and then came.

‘Dirty
whore
,’ he groaned. ‘Dirty fucking
whore
!’

Maria lay there sobbing as Vittore pulled out of her, zipped his trousers, scrambled to his feet.

‘
Basta!
Get this place cleaned up, for God’s sake,’ he yelled above her crying, and went off into the bathroom to clean up.

He slammed the door shut after him, still furious, and kicked the white-painted wooden bath panel. It rattled, and one end flopped out of position.

‘
Madonna!
’ Vittore cursed loudly, and stooped down to see what was happening, had the screw come loose?

But there was no screw there, just the hole where it should be. He looked around on the floor: nothing. He pushed the panel back into place, but it swung out again at the tap end, leaving a gap six inches wide this time. Vittore’s eyes caught a glint of something in the gap – maybe plastic or silver. He reached in, and pulled out a foil packet of pills. Looked at it, and realized.

That
bitch.

Maria lay there stunned, wondering why the man she had once thought she loved could only achieve an erection when he beat her, shouted out his hate for her, called her a dirty whore. She sat up slowly, her face burning, her thighs trembling from the force he’d used on her.

I hate him
, she thought.
I hate him and I hate
her
, that old bitch. We will never be free of her
.

It galled her that Vittore hadn’t had the guts to break away from Mama Bella after they’d married. Maria had envisaged a home of her own, but what had she got? A few rooms inside Mama’s own home, so Bella could keep control of her favourite boy – and of his wife. Bella bullied her mercilessly; nothing Maria ever did was good enough. All it took was a few ‘spasms’ of Bella’s supposedly frail heart (which to Maria’s knowledge had never been proven to be frail) and Vittore caved in, agreeing that he and his new wife would stay under the family roof.

Numbly she sat up, crawled aching and sore to her feet.

She wished – so much – that they had buried
Vittore
today, not Tito.

Oh yeah – and that fucking old bitch Bella. She wished they’d put her in the ground too. That day couldn’t come soon enough.

21

Naples, 1927

‘The man’s untouchable,’ said Gilberto.

‘You think?’ asked Astorre.

‘For sure.’

Despite the trauma of his father’s death, Astorre was doing well in his business life. He had sussed out Corvetto’s security arrangements and seen how good they were, how thorough. But he would wait. He was of the opinion that everyone was vulnerable, everyone had a weak spot; it was just a matter of finding Corvetto’s, and he had all the time in the world to do that. Revenge truly was a dish best served cold.

Astorre’s home life was troubled. After successfully delivering Tito, who was a strong boy, Bella had a succession of miscarriages and one painful, awful stillbirth – a daughter! – that broke her heart clean in two. Finally, after an eight-year wait, there came another son, a living son, Vittore, and Bella couldn’t believe it; she doted on this unexpected child, lavished all her love on him. Even her husband felt pushed aside by this new, tiny interloper and when their love life resumed after a year or so Astorre still felt unwelcome in his own bed. So he took a mistress, and seldom attended to his marital duties with Bella.

More miscarriages followed Vittore’s birth; but after a twelve-year gap at last the news was good. Bella was pregnant again, and this time it would be the girl she longed for.

‘Look how the baby carries all the way round, not just a little bump at the front,’ she said gleefully to anyone who would listen, when she was huge and in the seventh month of her pregnancy. ‘It’s a girl. A little bambina, at last.’

When she went into labour, there was a ferociously long struggle to bring her daughter into the world. Exhausted, wrung out with the agony and blood loss, Bella gave one final desperate push and then looked down as the child spiralled out of her body. Her triumph turned to ashes in her mouth as she saw squirming there not the girl she had wanted so much but a puny little boy. Her heartbreak at being denied a daughter yet again was compounded by the doctors warning her and Astorre that this should be her last child.

‘But I want a little girl to complete my family,’ she cried when they broke the news.

‘It’s not safe,’ said the doctor, and she was forced to accept that.

But it grieved her, the lack of a daughter. She had Tito. And she had Vittore, her favourite, her own little love. Now she had baby Fabio too, but he was a disappointment, always pushed away. She craved a girl. Longed for one. Without a daughter, her family would never be complete.

22

1975

Someone was knocking at the front door. No, they were
hammering
on it, in perfect counterpoint to the steady throbbing of Kit’s head.

‘You’d better open this door,’ said a voice. ‘Or else I’m going to get Rob to kick it off its hinges.’

Kit closed his eyes again. Now where was he . . . ? He looked around him with sore eyes. He was in his own living room. He was dressed. He had . . . oh yeah. He’d got out of the shower, got himself all ready to roll, and then he’d come downstairs, sat down on his huge brown leather sofa – and fallen asleep. And there was the bottle, right there beside him, his ever-useful and strictly non-judgemental companion.

He reached for it.

Empty.

Fuck.

‘Kit! Open this bloody door! I know you’re in there!’