“Yes, but—”
“And besides that, I could outrun him any day of the week!”
Frankie shook her head. “You’re incorrigible.”
They cleaned up the dishes together, then spent the evening arranging and rearranging the furniture in the living and dining rooms. By the time it was ten-thirty, they were both so tired they could hardly keep their eyes open.
“G’night,” Ali mumbled as she shuffled off to her bedroom.
Frankie tousled her hair and kissed her on the brow. “See you in the morning, kiddo.”
It’s going to be okay, Frankie thought as she undressed in her own room and got into bed. Thank God, it was going to be okay. She had the feeling that everything was finally going to work out for them. She looked around at the unfamiliar shadows in her new bedroom, then rolled over and fell asleep with a smile on her face.
* * *
As the last light went out, a figure stirred in the woods behind the house. It lifted its head as though to test the wind for scents and slowly crept forward. When it reached the house, it ran its fingers along the paneling of the porch door, its nails making a slight rasping sound, then it backed away.
Starlight glinted on what might have been tiny horns pushing up from amidst its hair, or it might just have been reflecting from bone ornaments that the figure wore in its dark curls. An observer, had there been one present, would have been hard put to tell in that poor light.
Nodding to itself, the figure pulled a hat from its belt and pushed it down over its hair. It returned to the forest where it put the house behind it and bounded away through the trees, as graceful and quick as a deer.
2
After Ali left, Valenti went back to raking his lawn. He worked slowly, thinking about the girl. He didn’t know what it was about her, but she was the first person he’d been able to relax around since all the shit went down a couple of years ago. She was a cute kid—skinny, sure, but he wasn’t in the market for kids anyway. He just liked her. There was something about her that drained away the constant tension he felt around other people. He went back over their conversation, smiling when he remembered her “Mr. a-Tony.” He hoped she’d come back, hoped her old lady wouldn’t think he was some kind of pervertito looking to put the squeeze on her little daughter.
Yeah, he thought as he finished loading the cut grass into his wheelbarrow. He’d like to see her again. He was usually passably friendly with whomever he ran into in the area, but it was all putting on a show. He had to be careful—the fratellanza had their fingers in everything, everywhere. He should know. And if word ever got out that he was up here… But you couldn’t just hide out—being a recluse caused just as much talk as flash did. You had to balance it, play the game of fitting in, but never let your guard down.
“Don’t go for flash,” Mario had taught him. “Nobody likes a big shot, you know what I’m saying? But don’t be humble either, or you get no respect. Be clean and polite and everybody’s going to like you, nobody’s going to talk about you too much. In our business, Tony, that’s the way of the world. Così fan tutti.”
Which was okay when you had your family around, but it got lonely for a guy in his position. Sometimes you just wanted to sit down with someone and take it easy—not shoot off your mouth or nothing, but just relax. And if it had to be with a skinny little kid, well, that’d be the way it was in his world.
He dumped the grass out by the barn, stowed the wheelbarrow and rake inside, then went into the house to take a shower. When he was done, he cleared the fog on the mirror and studied himself. He’d seen the kid’s eyes on his scars. He should probably be more careful, but what the hell. If he had to walk around the place in a three-piece, he might as well be in the slammer.
The word on the street was that the feds had taken him in on their Witness Protection Program, that they were letting him cop a plea so long as he fingered a few of the bosses. Anyone who believed that didn’t know Tony Valenti. He had no fight with the fratellanza. All he wanted was the guy who’d set him up and when he got hold of that pezzo di merda…
Valenti sighed and unclenched his fists. He was working to forget that and getting pretty good at it. What good was remembering? He couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Yet when he tried to forget, he could feel himself changing, could feel the hardness inside going soft, and he didn’t want to hear nobody saying that Tony Valenti’d gone soft. Thinking about it, about what had been taken from him—that was all he had left. These days it all just confused him. Sure, the fratellanza was only providing services to people, giving them what they wanted, but the longer Valenti was outside the family influence, the more things didn’t seem so cut and dried.
The brotherhood was a system of isistemazione, giving order to chaos. It had its roots in the compagnie d’armi of eleventh-century Western Sicily—small private armies set up by the landowners to defend their families and estates from marauding bandits that eventually became the cosche that still rule the area today. The original men of honor were a rough peasant version of the knights of chivalry; the present-day Sicilian cosca, or family unit, took its name from a corruption of the dialect term for artichoke: a composition of separate leaves forming a solid unit. The similarities between them and their ancestors were only surface ones now, while the gap between the modern cosche and their counterparts in North America was immense.
It was a media fiction that the criminal families of North America were overseas branches of the Sicilian Mafia, that they were all directed by some capo di tutti capi, a boss of bosses who ruled from the island homeland. In order for the fratellanza to exist on such an international level, it would have to be disciplined and centralized, which would make it easy for police organizations to discover, penetrate and destroy. The true reason that the brotherhood could not be effectively fought was that it was many things at once, a many-headed beast that could live for some time without any head at all.
The roots of the brotherhood in North America stemmed rather from some few Sicilian immigrants who had been small-time mafia in their homeland. They brought with them the cosche’s unique ability to move in and out of written laws, a capacity to grasp situations immediately, to invent solutions to intricate tangles, to gauge exactly the relative strengths of contending parties, to work amazingly complex intrigues and coldly control their smallest acts while at the same time allowing themselves to abandon all those controls to generous enthusiasms when it was safe to do so.
Few ancestors of those original immigrants survived in the American fratellanza, but there were still some, such as the Magaddino family that Valenti had belonged to. Don Magaddino had been interested only in protecting his family, his property and business, remaining successful without having to resort to handling either prostitution or drugs.
Valenti was taught from the cradle that he must always help his family, first by his uncle—his own father being deceased—and then by Mario, who had sponsored his membership. He was taught to side with the friends of the family and fight their common enemies, even when the friends were wrong and the enemies right; to defend his dignity at all costs and never allow the smallest slight or insult to go unavenged; to be able to keep secrets—omertà, the law of silence—and always beware of official authorities and laws.
This he had always done, but now in the eyes of the fratellanza he had turned on those who had respected and worked with him, first by hitting Eddie Pinelli for personal reasons, and then hitting his own padrone. Neither was true, but the fact that the fratellanza believed it was true had outcast him. There was no court he could go to for justice. He was already sentenced, and in the brotherhood the only sentence was death. It was only now, forcibly cut off from all he’d known, that he had begun to question.
A man had to have honor, sure. And respect. But then Valenti thought back to how it was when he got into the business and what it was like now. When he thought of how easily the fear by which the fratellanza ruled had turned on him… He shook his head. He no longer knew what w
as right and what was wrong.
“Chi lo sa?” he asked his reflection. Who knows?
The only reason he was still alive today was because he’d worked under Mario Papale.
“You’ve got to trust in the family,” Mario had told him once, “but you got to trust in yourself first, capita? You take some of that money you’re making, just a bit at a time, and you invest it in a safe place where no one knows you, no one can reach you—not me, not your uncle, not even the padrone. You understand what I’m saying?
“Maybe—and I hope to God this is the way it works for you, Tony—maybe you’ll never need that place. You can use it for holidays, ’ey? But someday that place might be all that stands between you and being dead, Tony. So you keep it. You cover your ass going to and from it. You keep it under a name you never use for no deals. You keep some artillery there and you keep a lot of cash, and then you’ll have something the other soldati don’t—you got security then, Tony.
“The soldiers that got no place to go like that, they’ve got to walk around careful all the time. But you, you can be patient. You don’t have to kiss nobody’s ass you don’t want to. You get respect that way, Tony. All the time, you get some respect. You don’t talk with a smart mouth to the capi, you don’t throw your weight around with the other soldiers, but you got something special all the same. Capito?”
“Sure,” Valenti said to the memory. “I understand all too well now.”
He turned away, got dressed and went downstairs to make himself some dinner. Afterward he sat outside with a strong capuccino and watched the sunset. He sat there in the darkness for a long time, not brooding, just remembering.
Thirty-eight now, he’d never married and was glad of it, the way things had turned out. But time was that he should loosen up a bit. Nothing stupid, but he was lonely. If the kid came back in the next few days, he’d see if she and her momma’d take him up on his offer of a spaghetti dinner. Hell, maybe he’d just give them a call.
He wondered what the mother was like, then shook his head. That you don’t need, he told himself. Be a bit friendly, okay, but he didn’t need to complicate his life by putting the squeeze on a neighbor. For one thing, he couldn’t move away when things soured. And things, he thought on the basis of too many short-term affairs, always soured.
He was about to go back inside, but paused as he reached for his empty coffee cup. The sound was so soft that if he hadn’t been half-expecting it, he might never have heard it at all.
It came from the woods north of the house, a whispery piping that set the hairs at the nape of his neck a-tingle. The brooding thoughts that had been plaguing him since Ali left for home dissolved into a wash of quiet pleasure. He lowered himself slowly back into his chair and closed his eyes.
The life that had been his was gone and with it his worries, the music told him, but the strengths that had let him stay ahead of the pack were still there. There was no need to be rid of them. All he had to do was channel them into something different. Peace might never be his, but he could still know contentment of a kind.
He sighed, shifting in the chair. The movement broke his concentration and in the next instant the sound was gone. He opened his eyes to look at the forest.
“One day,” he said softly, “this leg’s not gonna give me so much trouble and then I’m coming to look for you.”
The first time he’d heard it, he’d thought it was some kind of a bird, but that was before he realized that the music was something that a bird could never make. Its melody dipped and shifted, now low and breathy, now high and skirling, but always quiet, always just on the edge of his hearing as it ran up and down the musical scale in shivering lifts and falls like no bird ever sang. Always so distant, so quiet.
Sometimes it was so quiet he couldn’t hear it at all. He could just feel it out there, calling to him. There was more than a mystery in it. It promised him something if he could ever discover its source. What, he didn’t know. But something. And he knew he would never regret finding it when he did.
He stayed listening for a long while after, but it was gone for the evening and at last he went inside. His dreams were full of hidden presences that night, of things that stayed just out of sight, the way the music stayed mostly just beyond his hearing. He’d never been able to remember his dreams before coming here from Malta that last time. Now he often had those kinds of dreams, and he always remembered them in the morning.
3
Lewis Datchery was reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. His lips moved soundlessly as his gaze followed the line of print across the page. His book was propped up on the kitchen table and he was sitting on a plain-backed wooden chair that his father had made. The light of the lamp made a circular spill, leaving most of the one-room cabin in shadow. From the walls, the spines of thousands of books faced out, the lamplight glinting off the titles of those with gilt lettering. A cup of tea sitting at his elbow had long since gone cold. Absorbed in what he was reading, it was a moment or so before the scratching at the door registered.
His gaze lifted to the old clock on the mantle as he removed his glasses and laid them on the book to keep his place. It was just past eleven. He rose slowly, the weight of his eighty-six years weighing heavier on his thin frame late at night than it did in the morning, and went to open the door.
“’Lo, Lewis,” his visitor said.
She came in like a cat, taking a few quick steps inside, then paused to study the cabin’s shadowed corners. A floppy wide-brimmed hat hid most of her features, and the tangle of hair that spilled from underneath it had twigs and bits of leaves caught up in its dark curls. Burrs and thorny seeds had attached themselves to the bottoms of her jeans. Her jacket was at least a size too big for her.
When she was satisfied that the room was empty except for Lewis and herself, she sidled over to the chair across from where Lewis had been sitting and settled her diminutive form upon it. She immediately looked as though she’d been there the whole night, as though the cabin were hers and Lewis the newly arrived visitor.
Lewis smiled and stirred the fire awake in the cast iron stove. He added some wood to the coals, then set a kettle of water on top. His visitor showed no sign of impatience at his slow movements, nor any inclination to break the quiet that lay easily between them. Not until the tea was brewed and a steaming mug was set in front of her did she move.
“I found this for you,” she said.
From the pocket of her jacket she took a paperback book and offered it to him. He smiled his thanks and turned it over in his hands. The book looked almost new. There was a white wolf in the foreground of the cover. Snow was falling. An almost nude woman, pendulously breasted, stood behind the wolf. Behind her was a satyr and a full moon. The title of the book was Wolfwinter; the author, Thomas Burnett Swann. Lewis didn’t ask where she’d “found” it.
“It ’minded me of Tommy’s dog, that wolf.”
“It does look a little like Gaffa, doesn’t it?” Lewis said.
She nodded. “Is it a good one?”
“Well, now. I don’t know that yet.”
“Will you read it to me?”
Lewis smiled. “Sure. But we won’t get through it all in one night.”
“That’s all right.”
Lewis put his glasses back on and used a proper bookmark to keep his place in the book he’d been reading. Pushing it to one side, he held the paperback up to the light and cleared his throat. Then he began to read to her.
* * *
“I like it,” she said later when Lewis’s throat started to get scratchy from reading aloud and he decided to stop.
“Do you understand it all?”
She shrugged. “The names are funny, but I do like it. Will you read me some more tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
She regarded him for a long moment with her unblinking green eyes, her whole body languid and relaxed in the chair, then with a sudden graceful movement, she was on her feet and by the door.
/> “I’ve got to go now, Lewis,” she said. She opened the door, turning before she stepped outside. “I’ve seen them,” she added. “In the dark man’s house.”
“Did you go inside?” Lewis asked.
He was still facing the table and turned slowly when she didn’t answer. By the time he had turned around, the doorway was empty, the door ajar. Shaking his head, he rose from his chair and made his slow way to the door. He stood there for a long time, watching the darkness and listening, before he closed it. At the table again, he picked up the book she’d brought him and turned it over in his hands once more.
She could move like a ghost when she wanted to. He wondered how the new people in the house would feel about being haunted by her.
He stayed there for a while, thinking of her, about what the new people might be like, then he laid the book down again. He left their mugs in the sink, meaning to clean them in the morning when he’d drawn some more water. Taking the lamp, he went upstairs to his bed in the loft overhead.
4
On Sunday Ali and her mother continued to work at organizing the house. On Monday they went into Perth for the day, shopping and looking around, breaking for a late lunch at the Maple Drop Bakery before they came home. It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon, after spending a couple of hours studying for her exams, that Ali was free once more to follow the side road that led up to Tony’s place.
When she got there, she followed the sound of hammering to the back of the house where she found Tony putting together a fence for his vegetable garden.
“Hey, kid! How’s it going?”
“Okay. I had to study this morning—history.” She pulled a face. “But now I can do what I want for the rest of the day.”
“What’s so bad about history?” Valenti asked. “It’s important to know the history of things. How are you going to know what to respect if you don’t know where it came from? Everything’s got its place, and only history’s going to tell you how it got there.”