Ten in the morning, Joey was standing outside the villa smoking a Montecristo No. 4, waiting for Angela. At eleven when she still wasn't there, he called her apartment and got her answering machine. "This is Angela," a breathy voice. "Leave a message. Ciao."
Joey said, "Yo Cuz, you're an hour late. Where the fuck're you at?"
At noon Joey went into his uncle's office. The old boy was sitting on a couch, watching some foreign movie, the mistress, Chiara, sitting next to him, looking bored. "Hey, Unk, something's wrong, Angela was supposed to be here two hours ago."
His uncle glanced at him and paused the movie. "You think something is wrong you don't know her. Angela is never on time in her life. I think she is still asleep." He said it with an edge to his voice.
Joey said, "I'll go surprise her."
His uncle seemed to like the idea. He perked up and yelled Mauro's name and a few seconds later the little guy ran in the room like he was sitting out there waiting to be called. In the faint light Mauro now reminded Joey of Sammy Davis Junior, his build and skin color. Joey grinned, almost laughed out loud, wondering if Mauro could sing and tap dance.
His Unk told Mauro to give Joey a ride into the city. Joey left the old boy in his office with his mistress who looked like she needed attention, wondering now if he should pay her a visit, walk down the hall in the middle of the night, unsheathe the pork sword. Nothing against his Unk, but show her what a hard-on looked like.
In the car, a black Mercedes sedan, he looked across at Mauro behind the wheel. They were still on villa property, cruising on the pebble driveway that had to be a quarter-mile long. Joey said, "You take the oath?"
Mauro glanced over at him with a blank look on his face. This Sicilian hick had no idea what he was talking about. "Poke your finger, spill blood on a sacred image, picture of a saint?" Joey paused, thinking about his old man telling him it was one of the rituals of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, how they did it in the old country. Then the picture was lit on fire, you had to hold it while you swore to obey the rules of the family.
His dad had said, "May your flesh burn if you fail to keep the oath."
Joey thought it sounded pretty goddamn stupid. He wasn't going to hold a burning piece of paper. His old man had wanted him to be "made," but after what had happened it would be a while, if ever. There was also the law of silence called omerta, his dad said meant don't talk to cops, tell them your business, like he'd tell the police anything about anything. Mauro, the little man, probably took it literally, thought omerta meant don't talk to anyone.
Driving through Rome Joey would point to some ruins and say, "Hey, Mauro, what's that?"
Little fucker'd go, " Vecchia Roma."
Give Joey a smartass two-word answer in Italian. Joey wanted to give him a one-word answer: " Vaffanculo." Fuck you. Or a three-word answer: " Succhiami il cazzo." Suck my dick. That exhausted his knowledge of Italian but had come in handy in his old eastside Detroit neighborhood.
Joey liked looking at monuments and such, but it made him wonder what the Italians had been doing for the past two thousand years. They hadn't built anything close to the Colosseum or the Pantheon, or St Peter's. Most of the people, from what he could see, lived in second-rate apartment buildings outside the city the ancient Romans wouldn't have stepped foot in.
Mauro parked the Benz in front of a cool old building with arched windows and shutters. He could see the Colosseum right there. It looked a lot bigger up close, bigger than Comerica Park where the Tigers played. Bigger than Ford Field too. Jesus, six, seven storys high.
Mauro glanced at him and said, "The residence of the signorina."
That's the most he'd ever said at one time, got five words out of him — might be a Guinness Record. Joey also liked that he called Angela the signorina, like she was Italian royalty or something. But then again, as the daughter of Don Gennaro, maybe she was.
Peter Leonard
All He Saw Was the Girl