Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
London was overcast; a plunge through grey clouds as the plane descended into Gatwick. Nikki navigated the crowded airport, took the train to Farringdon, and transferred to the Elizabeth line. She did this numbly, routinely, a muscle memory from the decade she’d spent in this city.
—
Emerging from the station, she walked along busy roads towards the hospital.
—
Whitechapel Market, alive with Saturday’s lunchtime rush, barraged her with the scents of cut fruit and burnt sugar, spices and bread, hot oil, cooked meat, car exhaust, and the sour tang of trash.
Nikki stepped around a heap of wilting cardboard and past the parade of spindly stall poles draped in green-and-white-striped tarps.
Men and women in winter coats and sandals haggled over rugs and electronics, tunics and trousers, and crates of cabbage, pineapples, onions, radishes—while vendors and fishmongers hawked home goods and haddock.
—
The London streets were just as frenetic as Naples—chaotic and graffiti-tagged, a scrabble to gain or maintain a foothold in the slippery social landscape.
But these similarities were strangely superficial, and as Nikki’s heart began to once again beat in time to the pulse of this city, she seemed to understand the way each environment nurtured and suppressed different things in you.
London cultivated a peculiar stoic resilience: bracing against the dark chill of winter.
Damp mornings and long stretches of grey twilight.
Transplanted here long ago, Nikki had been forever changed from the girl reared in the furious sun and loamy earth in the shadow of a volcano.
She had a sense of that other self—arriving on Aunt Izzy and Uncle Preston’s doorstep like a stray cat; feral, terrorized by loss.
They’d opened the door to her, and invited her into their hearts. An unbearable kindness.
—
At the hospital, she found Izzy standing next to Uncle Preston’s bed, moistening his lips with a sponge.
His face was pale, twitching as he slept. A bandage covered his forehead, a blackened swelling around his right eye, his left leg bolted into a metal frame. His cheeks were sunken and his mouth gaped, a rasping sound as he breathed.
Izzy’s white hair, usually meticulous, was mussed on one side. There was a shallow scrape on her cheek, and her clothes were rumpled. Worst of all was the look in those eyes. Nikki had seen the same expression in her mother’s face in the minutes and days after she learned of Adriano’s death.
For a moment, Nikki felt helpless as she looked on the scene, unsure of what to say, a desperate ache in her stomach, shuddering into her neck, her arms and hands.
She wanted to run away. Instead, she willed her feet to move, and crossed to her aunt.
They held each other. Nikki breathed in the familiar warm vanilla perfume and stale hospital odor, and Izzy cradled the back of her head in that way that reminded her of Easter visits and one time when Izzy had cared for her during a bad fever.
—
They sat in chairs by Preston’s bed. On the bedside table, propped open, was a dog-eared copy of Beowulf.
“Bleeding in the brain,” Izzy whispered. “They won’t know the extent of the damage until he’s awake.”
“So he hasn’t…?”
Izzy caressed Preston’s cheek. “Not yet.”
“Do they know how long it will take?”
“No.”
They sat in silence for a long time. She held her aunt’s hand.
—
Nikki had always known Preston as a kind man.
Too proper and British for hugs, he instead offered a sort of erudite scholarly affection, dressing his advice and comfort in the forms of his beloved authors.
When she was a child, he’d taken a keen interest in her stories and thoughts, elevating them by drawing out their themes and comparing them favorably with the ideas of Shakespeare and Marlowe.
In recent years, that scholar’s mind had veered increasingly off track, and Nikki watched his attempts to navigate back by the light of his favorite books.
As she gradually lost her uncle, Nikki couldn’t tell whether her grief was about this loss, or for her aunt, who called him “my love,” and read aloud to calm his agitation.
Izzy and Preston had repeated their love story enough times that it had become a fixed point, Nikki’s mind supplying the details until she felt that she’d been there herself on that rainy afternoon in the British Museum.
Izzy had been a concert pianist performing in London, and Preston was guiding a group of disgruntled young schoolboys on a tour through the Sutton Hoo collection, quoting Middle English poetry to them.
“I was intrigued. He was so handsome, and so intellectual,” Izzy would say. “So of course, I stopped to listen.”
This would prompt Preston to tell his part. “I was terribly awkward around women. But there was this angel suddenly before me…and what other words could I use, except from Chartier’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Mercy’? ‘Love has bound me to be your man, and leave all other pursuits.’ ”
—
“I’m so worried about him, I can’t think,” Izzy said. “I know there’s nothing to be done…but my mind is tied up in knots.”
“He’s strong,” said Nikki. “And he loves you. He’s fighting to come back. I’m sure of it.”
Izzy nodded, and took her hand. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”
“Have you slept?” Nikki asked.
Izzy brushed this off, and Nikki pressed, “You should get some rest. I’ll take this shift.”
Izzy squeezed her eyes shut. “What if he wakes, and I’m not here?”
Nikki didn’t say the thing they were both thinking: that he might not wake up.
“I’ll be here,” Nikki reassured. “Go home, shower, and catch a few hours of sleep. I’ll call if there are any changes.”
It took some persuading, but Izzy finally agreed. Nikki walked her down the hall, then returned to Preston’s bedside.
—
The hours passed slowly. She’d had a difficult night with little sleep, but her body flexed, agitated, and her heart pounded.
The hospital was anything but peaceful. The corridor was filled with people rushing past, conversations, beeps, rings, buzzings.
A strange cold pressure in the air popped her ears every once in a while.
Nurses came by occasionally to take measurements or administer medication, but there was no change in Preston’s condition.
—
Angelo had been angry when she asked for time off to fly to London.
“I can’t spare you,” he said. “I’ve taken myself off the shift schedule while I support the ambassador.”
At last, he’d capitulated on the condition that she coordinate the shift changes herself with the other men on the team before leaving. Nikki had made arrangements with her three most helpful colleagues: Pasquale, Iacopo, and Alfonso.
“Let me know if you need to stay longer,” Pasquale offered. “I’ll deal with Angelo. He can be an asshole, but he knows family is important.”
—
It was difficult to sit here, looking on the dreadfully grey face of her uncle, terrified of what the next hours would mean for him and Izzy.
Nikki did push-ups and lunges in the small hospital room while her thoughts spiraled perpetually inward, returning again and again to the fire in that storefront studio, the families displaced, homes reduced to ash.
She still smelled the smoke, the acrid stink in her pores and nostrils.
A sick, tight feeling flexed up the back of her neck as she considered the price those people had paid for her unwillingness to go along with De Rosa’s demand.
—
Nikki understood Tito better than most, had been there as he formed and tested his rules—had fought him, pushed against him. He’d hated and loved her for it. Was that why she’d somehow imagined she was exempt from his laws?
—
When she was twelve years old and Tito had just turned thirteen, and the clans were recruiting for lookouts and sellers and couriers, everyone in Tito’s gang talked incessantly about joining.
It was tempting: Boys who worked for the System were paid in cash and given motorbikes.
They talked big and swaggered, and carried guns—attracting respect and fear and favors, taking what they wanted.
Nikki lived in grim military housing with her brother Gianni and her parents—something she considered a hardship until she met Tito and his group, and saw where they came from.
Theirs was a poverty she’d never imagined, and she could understand the intoxicating appeal of sudden riches.
In their dares and games, they sometimes snuck into the expensive hotels and restaurants and resorts, marveling at the effortless elegance of the wealthy.
They relieved patrons of their wallets and, pockets stuffed with hundreds of thousands of lire, considered themselves kings.
One day, an older boy of sixteen, Armo, approached them, and asked if they were interested in joining his group. All the boys wanted to say yes, but they waited for Tito to decide. He vanished for a few days while he thought it through—and nobody dared act without him.
When he’d made his decision, they gathered together for a discussion in the ugly back room of a mattress shop owned by the family of one of the boys. Mattresses sealed in thick cellophane were leaned against the wall. Others were stacked nearly to the ceiling.
They wrestled a couple to the ground so they could sit, the creak of springs and the rustle of plastic as Tito spoke.
“They’ll pay us,” Tito said. “But we’re young, so they won’t think we’re worth much. There will always be a lot of boys who want to work for scraps.”
Those boys were zanzare—mosquitos—he told them. They would take the attention of the police, sting and torment, give them something to chase, and take all the risk, while the real players got away.
The gang understood what it meant to shoulder risk. They had brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins in Poggioreale, and yet others whose photos bleached and faded in the glass-fronted street shrines. Disreputable lives sanctified by violent deaths.