Playing Dead

Alberto stifled a sigh. He knew Gina would never soften towards Annie, and he knew she thought him a fool for liking his father’s second wife so much. But, to him, Annie was family now. He could be the hard man, the tough caporegime when it was required of him, but at heart he was a family man, and both more reserved and more reflective than his elder brother Lucco.

Sometimes, he had to do bad things, difficult things, for the family good. Quiet and polite though he was, he had been responsible for many deaths while carrying out his father’s orders. But he could never delight in the pain and suffering of others, as Lucco did.

‘You hear that, Layla?’ Alberto bounced the little girl in his arms, smiled into her dark eyes. ‘You’re going to have a new little brother or sister to spoil, how about that?’

‘Yay!’ said Layla.

Gina watched her nephew with a glacial eye. Alberto was a good boy, but he was too amiable, too soft. Couldn’t he see how this would affect his own standing in the family; how it could affect them all? Constantine’s English wife had up until this point been an unwanted, isolated interloper with little say in the running of things. Now her status would radically change. She would be the mother of the Don’s baby; her position would be assured.

‘Are we going to go home and see Mommy now?’ asked Layla, watching her big stepbrother’s handsome face and not seeing the expression on Gina’s.

Alberto smiled. Mommy. Layla was sounding more American every day. ‘We sure are. And we’ll stop off on the way and get her some flowers, okay?’

Gina watched them, her expression surly. Flowers, for the love of God. She turned away, irritated. Personally, she would rather see flowers laid on the Englishwoman’s grave.

Chapter 5

‘Well,’ said Rocco Mancini reluctantly, signalling to the waitress for the check, ‘I must go.’

‘So soon?’ his dining companion pouted. They were tucked into a corner table beside the window at a seedy little diner on Lexington and Third, where neither of them would be known. It was a cheap place, tacky, charmless; full of losers and fat, contented mothers with shrieking infants. It wasn’t what either of them would have chosen, but that was simply the way it had to be. Snatched moments in random places.

‘Yeah, Cara’s got plans for this evening.’

Cara always had plans for the evening. Dinner with the Vanderbilts; the Nixons’ charity ball in aid of the Third World; the invitation – which had filled Cara with wild-eyed joy – to fly to Washington for the September opening of the Kennedy Arts Center, with the premiere of Bernstein’s mass for the late president.

There was always something – some silly social engagement they just had to be seen at. Rocco was not interested in any of it, but still he had to go.

The waitress came over, chewing gum and wearing a grubby white apron. Rocco paid, his aesthetic face pinched with distaste. The waitress withdrew. Rocco stood up, shrugging into his jacket. He was tall and very thin, with dark curly hair, bright lime-green eyes and a big sensuous mouth. He looked at his dining companion’s expression and sat down again, sharply.

‘Look, you know it has to be this way,’ he said, grasping the pale hand on the table.

‘I hate her,’ said his companion. ‘Cara has you all the time, at her beck and call. And what do I have? Just the dregs.’

There was nothing Rocco could say to this. It was true. But he knew he couldn’t afford to make waves. He had the lifestyle he had always craved, the cars, the apartments, everything. He summered in the Hamptons, wintered in Aspen, lived a life of ease and plenty. And that was all thanks to his marriage to Cara Barolli. If he tried for separation, or – God forbid – divorce, then all that would be over.

And he had no wish to make so powerful an enemy as the Don. Would Constantine Barolli just accept his daughter being dumped like so much excess baggage? Rocco didn’t think so. Already, Rocco was aware that he had been tested and found wanting by the Don. He wasn’t a made man, he wasn’t even a capo in his father-in-law’s organization yet, and he resented that. But he knew he had a lot still to prove.

And what about his own father, Enrico? He would be exceedingly angry if Rocco made waves. Constantine and Enrico Mancini went way back. There would be hell to pay.

‘My darling,’ said Rocco, ‘you know it’s you I love.’

‘But you’re with her.’

Rocco stood up. They’d had this same conversation many times; it never got them anywhere. ‘I’ll see you here on Friday. We’ll take the boat out on the Sound, how’s that?’ he said hopefully.

His companion was hard-eyed for a moment. ‘What, and you’ll screw me again in the cabin, where no one can see?’ Then the look faded to a faint smile, remembering . . . ‘Ah, all right. You got me, you know you have.’

Smiling, Rocco moved out of the booth. He looked around and then dropped a quick kiss onto Frances Ducane’s almost effeminately smooth cheek.

‘It’s you I love,’ Rocco repeated, against Frances’s skin. ‘Goodbye, my darling.’

And then he was gone, leaving the young man sitting alone at the table, wondering why he always, always had to play second fiddle in life. Now it was to his lover’s wife, but before that he had lived in the long shadow cast by his father, Rick Ducane.

Chapter 6

1938

Before Rick Ducane became a big Hollywood star and household name, he’d been Lionel Driver, a struggling British actor. Frances had inherited his russet hair; he had the identical penetrating grey eyes. Lionel had looked like an aristocrat. He had his own father to thank for that, a good-looking chancer who had married and then cheerfully abandoned his mother with her bad nerves and her whining little voice.

Lionel’s voice was the first obstacle of many he had to overcome. Born within the sound of Bow bells, he had a pronounced Cockney accent, and it was a bugger to lose. But lose it he did, practising his vowel sounds hour upon hour in the stone-cold and stinking privy in the backyard behind their tenement building.

‘Fuckin’ toff,’ his schoolmates snarled at him.

They’d shoved him against a wall, kicked him, then stolen his meagre pocket money.

Lionel didn’t care.

He had plans.

He worked in a series of dead-end jobs until his twenties, then, without regret, he left his mum and the slums of the East End to go to Stratford-upon-Avon and start trying his luck in auditions. He worked hard, even if it was mostly unrewarded, painting backgrounds, helping with props. But then he got a small break, and started treading the boards in walk-on parts, and was approached by an agent.

On the advice of his new agent, he then abandoned the stage and went to try to make his name in Hollywood. Once or twice he even hung out hopefully around the constellation of bright stars that haunted every party. Lana Turner, Spencer Tracey, Clark Gable – they were all there, and all far too high-powered to acknowledge the existence of a handsome starstruck stranger from quaint little England.

‘What we need here is an angle,’ said his agent.

Or for you to get me some fucking work, thought Lionel. But he asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’ve been a Shakespearean actor. A real thespian.’

‘Only in walk-on parts though.’

‘Who cares?’

So Lionel’s résumé now stated that he’d played the lead in King Lear to rave reviews. But even that didn’t get him off the breadline. Nobody wanted an English hero right then, and he was too good-looking to play the part of the hero’s chubby best friend.

One day he was waiting with around twenty other hopefuls at yet another audition, this time for a small part – a destitute man – in a Warner Brothers movie. It was only a walk-on, but he was desperate and bloody near destitution himself.

As usual, his bowels turned to liquid at precisely the wrong moment – he was next but one up – and he had to go off to find the toilet. He passed two men fiddling with one of the new smoke machines. A crowd of people hurried past. Was that brilliantly stylish blonde at the centre of them Barbara Stanwyck . . .? He walked on, looking back, entranced by the allure of stardom, the way that cluster of people stuck to her like iron filings around a powerful magnet. He wanted that. But was he going to get it?

He was starting to seriously doubt himself. Maybe these endless rejections were a sign that he was never going to make it. And Warners were a bunch of slave-drivers anyway. Everyone in the building called the place San Quentin after the notorious prison. Did he want to work for people who drove their staff – even their stars – so hard?

Well . . . yes. He did. Anything they wanted, he’d do. He had to get there. But this was getting to be the last-chance saloon now. This was his last audition, he’d promised himself. If he didn’t succeed today, then he was going home. Not to his old mum in the East End, sod that; but back to England, to try his luck again there.

He missed England. There’d been trouble there, he knew, rumblings from Europe over a jumped-up little German leader – Führer, he called himself – Adolf Hitler. But now Chamberlain had the new Anglo-German accord in his hand, everyone was relieved and peace was guaranteed.

But maybe – just this once – he’d break the mould, get the part . . .?

‘No fucking chance,’ he muttered, and found the john, did what he had to do, and then emerged. He might have missed his place, but if he hurried . . .