Chapter 55
THE MARCELLO HOUSE, LITTLE ITALY
The next morning, Luca took a minute on the stoop to drink in the home he’d grown up in.
It wasn’t the only property the Marcellos owned.
There was the beach house at The Hamptons he hadn’t been to since he was thirteen and various other rental homes, some legitimately operated, others not…
He breathed deep, putting his fingers to a mark in the wood by the door.
He and Steffi had been playing on the sidewalk and she had got frustrated with him and launched a golf club that had thankfully missed him but had left this dent.
Their father had gone mad and Luca had told him he was responsible not his sister.
He’d always taken the rap and he was about to do it all again.
But before he could raise his hand to knock at the door, it was whisked open and there was his mother.
‘Luca, what are you doing out here?’ she exclaimed. ‘Standing and looking and not coming in.’
‘I… didn’t know you knew I was here.’
‘We have a new doorbell,’ Vittoria informed him, pointing at a device he hadn’t noticed on the wall. ‘It has motion detection and a video camera and something that can alert the police if I press a button.’
He swallowed. ‘That’s necessary?’
‘I don’t like to think about if it’s necessary,’ Vittoria admitted.
He nodded, understanding that completely.
‘So, are you coming in? Because the only people who stand on this step are either singing carols for charity money at this time of year or Ronnie smoking his way through your father’s cigars.’
‘Yeah, I’m coming in.’
* * *
‘So,’ Vittoria said, when they were in the kitchen. ‘I’m guessing you have something to tell me.’
Luca leaned against the countertop, the space still all manner of chaotic as it always had been – pots covering the counters, recipe books gathering dust on the shelves, the clock on the cooker flashing a random time… He didn’t answer straight away so his mother spoke again.
‘Steffi said you saw your father but she said she didn’t know what you talked about.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m not going to ask questions to get information, Luca. That’s not my style.’
‘I know.’
‘So, if you want to tell me then tell me. If you don’t want to tell me we can talk about the New York Giants instead or how I can say no to going to Auntie Marina’s for Christmas Day.’
He smiled. ‘You don’t really want to not go to Auntie Marina’s? She has the best limoncello.’
His mother didn’t answer but she put two steaming coffees on the table and pulled out a chair, sitting down. He followed suit, then wrapped his hands around the mug and took a sip. It wasn’t as restorative as he had hoped but there was no going back now.
‘Mom, what I’m going to say to you is going to be hard for you to hear but… I think it’s time you heard it.’
He saw concern flicker in his mother’s eyes.
‘Is it something to do with your sister? Is she OK?’
‘It’s not Steffi.’
‘You? Are you OK?’ Vittoria asked fast.
‘Yes, Mom.’
He watched a breath leave her and then she sat a bit taller in her seat. ‘Well, Luca, anything else is gonna be OK.’
He hoped that was true. Because he loved his mom, but equally, her love for his father was so woven into her psyche that morality significantly blurred for her. But not for him.
‘Mom… it was me who told the cops about Dad. All the things that got him convicted.’ He couldn’t stop, had to get it all out here and now.
‘And I did it because every time he went out that door something bad happened. He made something bad happen. To other people’s families and, if that wasn’t bad enough, I just knew that one day something bad was going to happen to him unless someone did something about it. ’
He stopped talking, watching his mother’s expression. There was nothing, no shock, no quivering of her lips that usually led to her tears, she was just static in her seat. And then she spoke.
‘Thank you, Luca,’ she said softly, nodding.
‘For telling you? After all this time?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘For doing what you did. For going to the cops and for trying to do your best to protect everyone in this situation.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re not mad at me?’
‘For what?’ she asked. ‘Doing what I should have done many years before? No.’ She wrapped her fingers around the mug.
‘It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it so many times before.
When I was cleaning up after an “incident”, when I was ringing Dr Sergio to pull bullets out of people.
Because I could only see one ending, your father in a grave or going missing, never to be seen again. ’
‘So why didn’t you?’ he asked.
She smiled and took her hands off the mug and held on to his. ‘Because I’m not as brave as you.’
He shook his head. ‘I disagree. You live this life every single day with no escape, lying, keeping secrets, raising me and Steffi in his abnormality, suffering—’
‘Not suffering, Luca. Not the way you think.’ She took a breath.
‘I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I started dating your father and when he asked me to marry him, I had a choice. And I made the choice. For love. But I was under no illusion about the man he is.’ She sighed.
‘It’s simple. I love him, not the things he does. ’
‘But how can you separate that?’ Luca asked.
‘Well, Luca, I like to think about it like an egg. Some recipes need the yolk, others need the white, but when it comes to the whole, you can’t have one without the other.
The part I love best is the yolk and, yes, perhaps in an ideal world I would like nothing more than to discard the white, but I accepted a long time ago that life with your father is always going to have conditions. ’
‘Did he tell you… that things are dangerous for him right now?’ Luca asked.
‘If he told you details, Luca, I don’t want to hear them. Knowing but not knowing, that’s another thing I’ve insisted on and, believe me, there have been times I’ve known way too much.’ She sighed. ‘And when has there been a time when things haven’t been dangerous for him?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. But, right now, things are a little different.’
Now his mother’s expression faltered just a touch. ‘OK, I’m listening. Does he have a plan?’
Luca nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ Vittoria said. ‘Tell me.’
He nodded again. ‘I will. And I’m going to stay here until Steffi gets home from work and we are going to tell her together.’