kind of even keel, Neri would cut him loose. Maybe find him an apartment somewhere else in the city, or move him on to Sicily where there were relatives who could keep him in check. Neri did this partly out of self-interest – Mickey had grown up inside the organization. He could cause some harm if he started blabbing to the wrong people. But there was a degree of paternal loyalty there too. Mickey was an asshole. Maybe he inherited this from his mother, an over-tanned American bit-part actress Neri had met through a crooked producer he knew when he was pumping hot money into a Fellini movie. The marriage had lasted five years, after which Neri knew he either had to divorce the bitch or kill her. She now basked in the permasun of Florida and doubtless bore a close physical resemblance to an iguana, a creature, Neri thought, which could probably out-think her in its sleep.
Mickey never wanted to be near mamma. Mickey wanted to hang around his old man. He thought he was a don in the making and never missed an opportunity to throw his weight around. He had problems with women too, just couldn’t leave them alone, whether they were married or not. His one saving grace was that he worshipped his father. Everyone else, Adele included, did Neri’s bidding out of fear. Mickey went along with everything his old man decreed for a simpler reason. Most kids idolized their fathers until they were seven or eight, and then started to see them for what they were. The scales had never fallen from Mickey’s eyes. There was some undying adulation stuck fast in his genes and Emilio Neri found it strangely touching. It led him to do crazy things, such as letting the kid wander around the house whenever he felt like it, even though he and Adele, who, at thirty-three, was just one year older, loathed the sight of one another. It led him to overlook the problems that came when Mickey got a little too close to the drugs and the booze, problems that were, on occasion, expensive to fix.
Sometimes Emilio wondered who was indulging whom. Since Mickey moved in, he’d begun to wonder that a lot.
It was now mid-morning and the two of them had been bitching at each other, on and off, since breakfast. Adele half reclined on the sofa, still in her mauve silk pyjamas, face in a fashion house catalogue. Emilio thought she looked gorgeous but he knew it was a matter of taste. She was sipping a spremuta of blood-red orange juice which was almost the colour of her expensively cut hair. She sent out one of the servants to buy these things by the kilo from the market then watched as Nadia, the sullen cook she’d picked herself, squeezed them in the kitchen. Adele almost lived off the stuff. It drove Mickey crazy. Maybe it was why she was so skinny, he said. He bugged his old man about that constantly. Why marry some redhead with the figure of a pencil when you could have just about any woman in Rome?
‘I still can have just about any woman in Rome,’ Emilio told him.
‘Yeah. But why?’
‘Because I don’t want the same picture over the fireplace everyone else has. Leave it at that.’
‘I don’t get it.’
Emilio had thrown a big arm around the kid. Mickey inherited the physique of his mother. He was lean, muscular, good-looking too. It was a shame he always chose clothes too young for him, though. And that he’d dyed his shoulder-length hair an overpowering, unnatural blonde colour. ‘You don’t have to. Just don’t snap at each other all the time. Not when I’m around anyway.’
‘Sorry,’ he’d replied, instantly deferential.
The old man never said as much but sometimes he didn’t get it either. Adele was unlike any woman he’d ever slept with: cool, adventurous, always willing, whatever he wanted. Young as she was, she actually taught him a few new tricks. Maybe that clinched it. He knew for sure it wasn’t her personality, which he didn’t really understand beyond her basic need for money and security. She was an expensive pet, if he were honest with himself, a living ornament to add some beauty to his life.
‘So,’ Neri declared, looking in turn at the two of them. ‘What does my family plan to do today?’
‘Are we going out?’ she asked. ‘We could have lunch somewhere.’
‘Why bother?’ Mickey said, smirking. ‘I could send someone down the Campo. Buy you a couple of lettuce leaves. They’d last all week.’
‘Hey!’ the old man bellowed. ‘Cut it out! And quit sending servants out to buy stuff you can get yourself. I don’t pay them to get you cigarettes.’
Mickey went back to the sports car magazine he was reading and said nothing. Neri knew what the kid was thinking: so what do you pay them for? Neri never liked the idea of servants in the house. Adele said their position demanded it. He was the boss. He was supposed to own people. It grated somehow. Emilio Neri grew up in a traditional Roman working-class family, fighting his way out of the Testaccio slums. He still felt embarrassed by these minions downstairs. A couple were made men, there for security. He had no problem with that. But a house was for family, not strangers.
‘I got work to do,’ Emilio said. ‘People to see. I won’t be back until this afternoon.’
‘Then I’ll go shopping,’ she answered, with just a hint of hurt disappointment in her voice.
Mickey was shaking his blonde head in disbelief. Adele did a lot of shopping.
‘You!’
‘Yeah.’ Mickey closed the magazine.
‘Go see that louse Cozzi. Squeeze his grapes and ask for some accounts. The creep’s screwing us somehow. I just know it. We should be taking more in one week than he hands over in a month.’
‘What do you want me to do if I see something?’
‘If you see something?’ Neri walked over and ruffled Mickey’s wayward hair. ‘Don’t play the tough guy. Leave those decisions to me.’
‘But—’
‘You heard.’
Neri looked at the pair of them. Adele was acting as if the kid didn’t even exist. ‘I wish you two could work up the energy to be civilized to each other once in a while. It would make my life a whole lot easier.’ He watched. They didn’t even exchange glances.
‘Families,’ Neri moaned, then phoned downstairs, telling them to get the Mercedes ready. He keyed in the security code that unlocked the big metal door. It felt like a prison sometimes, hiding behind the bodyguards, riding around in a car that had been discreetly filled with bullet-proof panelling. But that was the way of the world these days.
‘Bye,’ Emilio Neri grunted, and was gone, without even looking back.
Mickey waited a while, pretending to read the magazine. Finally he put it down and looked across at her. She’d finished the orange juice. She was lying back on the sofa in her perfect silk pyjamas, eyes closed, glossy red hair splayed out on the white leather. Pretending she was asleep. She wasn’t really. They both knew that.
‘Maybe he’s right,’ he said.
She opened her eyes and turned her head lazily, just enough to meet his gaze. She had very bright eyes, vivid green, never still. Not smart eyes, he thought. Just sufficiently expressionless to hide the odd lie.
‘About what?’
‘About us getting along a little better.’
She became alert, alarmed perhaps. She looked at the door. There was a hard cast in her face: fear.
Mickey
