Blood Wine (20 page)

She lay very still with her eyes closed, then opened them unblinking and looked solemnly up at him. When he smiled, she smiled back.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and continued to caress her forehead, letting the backs of his fingers flow gently against her skin until it relaxed and the lines faded and her face glowed in the soft illumination from the night-light seeping under the bathroom door.

Frankie Ciccone let her eyes flutter closed and she drifted into a deep sleep. Morgan lowered himself onto the floor and sat leaning with his back against the bed. His mind was filled with a lazy swarming like bees on a cloudless day, and no idea came to mind worth holding as he slipped into a light slumber.

When Morgan woke up, the room was filled with sunlight, and Frankie was lying on her side with her hand draped over his shoulder.

“Close the curtains,” she whispered.

He got up and drew the drapes closed, shutting out the light. He went into the bathroom for a few minutes then emerged to find Frankie had drawn the sheet down and was waiting for him.

Neither of them said a word. Morgan stripped off his clothes and lay down beside her, pulling the sheet up over them both.

Frankie drew him on top, spreading herself so his weight rested on his knees. They kissed passionately. She whimpered and he held her close under him, her breasts pressing deeply into the hardness of his diaphragm. He nibbled against her neck but she took his face between her hands and held it aslant to her own and kissed him deeply, drawing his mouth hard-soft against hers and at the same time shifting her weight to draw him into her. They rocked gently for a long time, their mouths locked and their bodies merged in warmth.

After a while, time gathered force and exploded in a shared orgasm and they were outside the moment, waves rushing through bodies and brains in a receding sequence of pleasure until their synergy subsided and they rolled away, still joined at the loins, and stared into each other's eyes.

Neither of them spoke when Morgan got up, and gathering his clothes went into the bathroom to shower and dress. When he came out, Francine was wrapped in a silk kimono and she had opened the curtains again so the room was flooded with light.

There was a complete English breakfast for two waiting on a side table by the window. Francine poured Morgan a coffee. She poured herself tea. They ate in comfortable silence, like an old married couple.

When they finished, they both sat back. It was time to talk.

“You think I betrayed you, I know that.” She spoke as casually as if she were commenting on the weather.

“Yeah, maybe that's what I thought.”

“Do you still think so?”

“Maybe.”

“Morgan, Vittorio and I were happy.”

“It didn't cross my mind you weren't. You're tough, you wouldn't be here otherwise.”

“Because we had separate rooms, doesn't mean, you know.”

“I know.”

“Right now I'm angry at him, can you understand that?”

“For leaving?”

“Yes, for leaving me.”

“It wasn't his choice. What happened, what went wrong with the warehouse thing? You tortured the guy, you cut off his pecker, you wanted him arrested.”

“We wanted him arrested, yes. But the last part, that wasn't us.”

“It wasn't you who ambushed me and killed him. Was it Mr. Savage?”

“He isn't one of ours.”

“And you're not his?”

“No, of course not.”

“But he is a very powerful man.”

“He is.”

“Why?”

“I can't explain.

“You can't, or won't?”

“Both. If I could, I wouldn't.”

“Before — you talked about Vittorio's killers. More than one. Who? How many?”

“You've got the Albanian.”

“Dead, yeah. We've got him. He's the shooter. But who else is involved, what's Savage's connection?”

“I told you,” she said, almost plaintively.

“You can't or won't say. Let's put it on the line, Frankie. The Ciccone family is boss. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“But someone is playing you, right.”

“Playing us?”

“Like you're the pawns, just like us, black and white pawns, robbers and cops, but someone else is game- master. This Mr. Savage, he's playing both sides.”

“Morgan, I know too much about my husband. He would come in here sometimes in the dead of night and crawl in beside me and we would talk until dawn. He trusted me — not just with business secrets. He trusted me with his emotions. He told me everything. He is dead, but I could still hurt him. I won't do that.”

“I'm not asking you to betray your husband. It would take more than me to bring down organized crime. And the emotional thing, that's between you and him. I know being dead doesn't mean it's over, not until you're both dead. I know that. But I need to get to Savage. There's a contagion of killing, and it's got to stop. You have to help me isolate him, bring him down.”

“I can't, Morgan.”

“Or won't?”

“I can't.”

“Can you at least explain why not?”

“You know how the business works. We're a confederation of independent families. Usually, we co-operate. Collectively, in Canada and the States, we turn over more in a year than most countries. But we're not a single entity, Morgan, we aren't a collective.”

“And you're up against something that is?”

“Something like that.”

Morgan recognized she was not going to reveal more through that line of questioning. He looked across the breakfast table at her.
This might have been us
, he mused. He knew she was thinking the same thing. Not with regret, neither with regret. They each had to find the way out of Cabbagetown on their own.

“Why did you hire the Albanian?” he said. “He was working for you.”

A flash of unspeakable horror crossed her face. The abomination of his charge was beyond comprehension.

“Me! To kill my own husband! You think I arranged Vittorio's death?”

“No,” he exclaimed, realizing until that moment the idea might have been lurking in the back of his mind. “Absolutely not!”

“What then? You sure know how to break the mood.”

“I meant the Ciccone family. Frankie, there's no mood. We're not —”

“No, we're not. It just happened. I'm glad. Now we know what we've been missing. I took advantage of you.”

“Seducing the prowler?”

“And of course, you took advantage of me?”

“The grieving widow.”

“Which I am.”

“I know.”

“You're a good lover, Morgan.”

“We're good together.”

“And gracious, too.” she said. “It wasn't me who hired the Albanian.”

“Vittorio?”

“Yes. Branko appeared one day with credentials. He was a refugee in Italy, with experience in the business from Albania. A lot of them moved into the region around Taranto. He came recommended by a cousin Vittorio never met. It seemed reasonable to give him a chance.”

“Kind of like social work, was it?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“So, he could have been inserted by whoever, ready to take out Vittorio whenever they wanted.”

“Yes, so it seems. But Vittorio trusted him. He was the logical man to guard your partner. Vittorio's life depended on it.”

“That's heavy irony, Frankie. What about the driver?”

“He disappeared. He'll come back some day. Guys like that, they don't get far on their own. He'll come back and pay the consequences. He was a coward, nothing more. He could not have saved Vittorio, so he saved himself. He walked away, but he'll come back.”

“And take his punishment.”

“And renew his loyalty.”

“And what about the man under the bridge?”

“Gianni. He did odd jobs for us. He was a nice kid.”

“Who was about to execute Elke Sturmberg in cold blood.”

“Elke Sturmberg, the blond, is that her name?”

“You know that already.”

“Maybe.”

“And instead, she killed him.”

“So I hear. Gianni wasn't working for us, not then.”

“For Mr. Savage?”

“I couldn't say.”

Morgan started to rise from the breakfast table, then sank back in his chair. It would be difficult to imagine a more congenial setting, he thought, in stark contrast to their conversation about murder and betrayal. The sun played across the yellow and white gingham tablecloth, glinted off the flatware and plates. He could still pick up the womanly scent in the air when he flared his nostrils and drew in a few deep breaths.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I've got to go,” he said. “About last night?”

“It's okay, it was good.”

“No, I mean the night before, in the warehouse.”

“Yes.”

“That wasn't you?”

“You still need reassurance? It must be hard to trust so little, David. I promise you, it was not our people. We wanted the bastard arrested, we wanted him doing hard time, like a rat in a maze.
Our
maze.”

“The penitentiary, you think it's yours?”

“Some of Vittorio's associates call it ‘the college.'”

“Lovely.” He rose to his feet and stood still for a moment, admiring her in the morning light. Her eyes, still a little swollen from grieving, looked sleepily exotic. He stepped around, leaned down, and kissed her.

“Goodbye, Francine.”

“You take care, David Morgan. See yourself out.”

“What about …”

“No one will see you. I have never been unfaithful to my husband. What I do now is up to me. They understand that. Maria will come up the back way when I call. My couple in the carriage house, they will be busy, they will not notice you leaving.”

Morgan went out through the front door. He could hear voices in the kitchen. He felt reasonably sure no one saw him as he ambled down the flagstone walk and through the gate to the street — at least, no one connected with the Ciccone family. It was eight thirty in the morning. Other people in Rosedale were leaving their houses for work or school or their appointed rounds of civic responsibility and personal well-being. A pleasantly unkempt man emerging onto the sidewalk among them was of no more than passing interest except to the conspicuously unobtrusive pair hunched in the front seat of a car parked up the street.

Morgan turned and walked directly toward their car. As he approached, they drove off, looking away. He noted the licen
c
e number but knew it would lead nowhere. He shrugged and reversed his direction, figuring he would take the subway home.

Ladybug, Ladybug

A
t
virtually the same time as Morgan wakened on the blue sofa and responded to the call deep within that led him to Frankie Ciccone's bedroom, Miranda's eyes flashed open. In the darkness of the room, the illuminated digits of the clock shone like a strange temporal beacon. Three a.m. She looked across at Elke, who was lying on her side in deep shadow. Elke had slipped off her underwear and draped it over her headboard. Her pajamas lay in a crumpled shadow on the floor. Miranda rose and went into the bathroom. There was a strong enough glow from the night-light coming under the door that she could find her way without stumbling. In the bathroom, with the door closed, she switched on the overhead light, then, assuming there was a camera observing her, she turned it off again.

After using the toilet, she flushed, and then stepped into the shower. The showerhead was fixed to a vertical slide to adjust the height. She tapped the bar with her fingertips. The Sebastiani family did not stint; it was a heavyweight hollow steel rod. Even in the semi-darkness, it was not difficult to slip the bar free. It had a good heft as she slapped it quietly against the palm of one hand.

Turning off the night-light, she crept out into the blackness of the bedroom. She could hear the sullen hush of the soundproofing as she moved close beside Elke's bed. She raised the steel rod, but only to reinforce a sense of power. She lowered it, placing it carefully on top of her bed.

She reached to where the headboard should be and clasped Elke's brassiere in her hand. In the muted darkness she knew she had to be sure of her moves. Holding the brassiere between her teeth, she let her hands slowly descend and hover over Elke's invisible form, moving slowly within the radiant heat of her body without touching, until she was sure where she was.

Miranda suddenly clasped the other woman's arms and slid her hands down to her wrists, clasping tightly. Even before Elke yelled, Miranda had the brassiere wrapped around her wrists, binding them tightly together. Intuitively, she swung the woman's body around and jammed her open palm against her mouth to stifle Elke's protestations. Then she said in a calming voice that it was only her.

“Elke, I want you to be very quiet. I'm going to take my hand away.…”

“What are you doing?” Elke hissed in the darkness.

Miranda replaced her hand over Elke's mouth, gently this time. She waited. She wanted to know if anyone would respond to Elke's yelling. After a few minutes, she took her hand away again.

“It seems I'm right, no one is paying any attention. And the room is definitely soundproof — that's sinister.”

“Miranda, I —”

“Shut up!” Miranda again placed her hand over the woman's mouth, this time pressing her lips hard against her teeth. “I do not want to hear from you. Nothing, not a word. You are a dangerous woman.” Even while she spoke, Miranda could feel the sense of outrage rising within her at Elke's lethal duplicity.

“Mrmmmmmmmmmmpfh —”

Miranda gave her a sharp rap against the side of her jaw. The other woman fell silent, apart from the sound of her breathing, which was rapid, as if she were on the verge of a panic attack.

Miranda groped around until she found Elke's blouse and twisted its fine material into a makeshift rope, which she used to bind the woman's ankles.

She did not want to risk using the overhead. Someone might check the monitor. She went back into the bathroom and turned on the light, then returned to the bedroom, closing the bathroom door all but a sliver, which provided sufficient illumination for her purposes.

Still in her pajamas, she made her way along the walls of the room, starting at the bathroom door and working her way around. She was feeling for the coolest wall, an exterior wall. As she expected, given where the other doors were and what she remembered of the general layout of the house when Tony brought them down, it was behind the headboards of their beds.

Walls
, she assured herself,
are a convention
.
We are imprisoned behind cement blocks. Oh please God, may it
not
be poured concrete
. Cement blocks break easily with a sharp blow against the hollowed chambers. When she was in her early teens, she had helped her father build a garage beside the house in Waldron. They tore down the old garage and burned the wood. Then they poured cement for a floor. When the wall was going up, she carried blocks to him, one at a time. She was astonished at how easily he split them to fit the corners with a few taps from a cold chisel.

“They're not built to resist sideways pressure,” her father had explained. “They'll hold up more weight than we could ever put on them, but from the side, they'll crack without hardly trying.”

“Could you kick them in?” she had asked, and before he responded she gave the blocks behind him a good kick with the side of her foot.

“Well, there you are,” he said when she let out an agonized shriek. “You made the damn wall move. What a girl!”

Still doubled over to help assuage the pain through histrionics, she managed to catch a glimpse of a gaping seam in the damp cement. She had moved the blocks a good half inch. But, damn, as her father would say, it hurt.

“Now there's a lesson for you,” he said, rubbing her scalp like a puppy's. “Windows and walls are conventions. They work only because we believe they work. So go on, get us a beer. One Labatt's, one ginger.”

She could see them both in her mind as two people, sharing things. She could see herself the way she had looked in photographs as a teenager, and him, vividly remembered as long as she did not try too hard to focus. If she did, he became blurry. He died a year after the garage was finished.

Miranda felt along the surface of the wall, tapping with her fingers every few inches. She picked up the hollow steel bar and gouged into the drywall. The sharp edge penetrated easily. Using the bar, she pried slabs of drywall away, leaving thick strips of wooden lath exposed with Styrofoam between them, covered with a thin sheet of plastic. Pulling off chunks of the insulating foam and strips of plastic, she exposed cement blocks.

“Damn,” she mumbled, “that's good.”

After tapping to see where one of the blocks at eye-level was thinnest, she drove the bar with all her strength against the cement. The steel reverberated in her hand, sending pains shooting through her arms and up the back of her neck.

She changed her approach. Retrieving towels from the bathroom, she draped one over the block, pinning it in place against some of the remaining Styrofoam. Then she wrapped another towel around the bar to protect her hands, and again lining up the weak point on the block, she drove the steel home, straight into the cement. It cut through like the cement was ice cream.

Using the bar as a lever, she pried away a large chunk of the block, then repeated the procedure, over and over, until she was drenched in sweat and cement dust, and there was a hole in the wall the size of four blocks. Outside, there was a pressure-treated green sheet of wood that already had holes punched through it here and there by the time she had removed the cement. The wood was harder to open up than she expected; she could not get a grip to pry and it was flush up against dirt, outside, making it resist blows from her steel rod, which, by now, was dulled at the edges.

Suddenly the last hold on the wood gave away, and her tool sank deep into earth, which came sliding down over her in a soggy avalanche. She had calculated the height correctly and had opened the hole just below ground level. She stood amidst the earth and detritus, proud of herself. The clock read 4:37 a.m. Elke Sturmberg, who had been a silent observer, looked dismayed in the half-light.

Miranda took her clothes into the bathroom and showered quickly — in case the sounds of water running disturbed anyone upstairs, it would seem like nothing more than a toilet flushing. She dressed, checking herself in the mirror. She wanted to look presentable once she got out. She had no identity, no money, and she would need to rely on the charity of strangers.

Back in the bedroom, she carried a chair over to the hole in the wall. Then, peering into the darkness, anticipating the filth and abrasions when she climbed up through the ground, she stripped to her underwear. She put her clean clothes and sandals inside a pillowslip. Picking up Elke's pajamas, she paused then slipped out of her underwear and added it to the pillowslip, put on the clean pajamas, paused again, went back into the bathroom, donned her own filthy pajamas as an outer layer, and prepared a clean, damp towel, which she stuffed into another pillowslip, which she then put inside the first. Satisfied she had the resources to make herself presentable, she smiled. Standing on the chair, she tossed her bundle up and out, then, before climbing through the hole, she looked back at Elke.

She was surprised to see an indecipherable look on the other woman's face in the gloom, something between terror and incredulity. But Elke said nothing. Miranda nodded, then turned and clambered out into the pre-dawn air.

When Seymour Clancy picked her up at the Teaneck Police Station in New Jersey, he was astounded to hear that Elke might have been complicit in the abduction, but even more that Miranda had left her behind.

“You're a cop, you should have brought her in.”

“That's easy for you to say. I don't think you grasp the human mole thing.”

“You crawled through some dirt. Good, and if you're wrong about her, she's in deep trouble about now.”

“She is, trust me.”

“In trouble or guilty?”

“Both.”

“Well, we'd better find her, hadn't we, and sort out where you both fit in to the grand scheme of mayhem and murder?”

Was he implying Miranda had been complicit in the hostage drama, she wondered, or was he just as confused as she was? “They told me you'd know where we were,” she said.

“Meaning what!”

“No, no, Sebastiani insisted you're as honest as I am. Only he didn't put it that way. He did say you'd know enough not to worry.”

“We didn't even know you were gone.”

“And might never have. Elke would have turned up safe enough, with a sad tale of my mysterious demise. She's good at spinning tales. Or would she simply say I unaccountably vanished? Sometimes least is best.”

“Or less is more.” He seemed to chuckle at a private joke as they slid into his car. He handed her a crumpled bag with a nondescript fast food breakfast sandwich. “Here,” he announced. “I had mine on the way. The coffee's yours.” There was a cardboard cup in a holder attached to the dashboard. “I hope you can find your way back. It's what they call a safe house, meaning we're not supposed to know about it.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“That makes it pretty secure. Look, with Elke, I had no idea where I was. I knew I'd need help and I didn't know how she'd be, whether she'd make a scene if I flagged down a car. I just didn't know, I had no reason to trust her.”

“You're reading a lot into eye contact between her and your Tony guy.”

“Intuition, yeah. But when I questioned her, she didn't deny it. She wasn't blindfolded, she wasn't handcuffed. I'm sure of it. She played me, she's played me through bloody hell and back.”

“Finish the damned McMuffin, I don't want crumbs in here. We're going to pay the Sebastiani family a social call. I've got a feeling there's no such thing as a safe house. You were a guest in their family home, and I use the word
guest
advisedly. Pressing charges for abduction would not be a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because they've got lawyers, they've got lawyers for their lawyers. You could be hanging around New Jersey for the rest of your life. Remember, you're not in your own jurisdiction.”

“As I'm constantly reminded.”

“You'd have to lay charges as a citizen, which you're not. You're a foreigner.”

“So much for the world's longest undefended border.”

“New Jersey isn't a border state. And it's foreign territory, even for a New Yorker from Queens.”

“Gotcha. Let's go.”

“Do you need to stop for clothes?”

“Clothes?”

“Clothes, do you want to change? You're still wearing your clothes from dinner. Simple skirt, designer T-shirt, very nice, but very last night.”

“Are you offering to buy? I don't have any money … do I smell? I washed my underwear. I'm a bit scuffed up, but I'm not dirty, Captain Clancy.”

“You smell just fine, Detective.”

“I'd take a pair of new shoes,” she suggested, looking down at the garden mud on her designer sandals. As they drove she rubbed them clean with a couple of tissues. They looked almost new.

When Clancy pulled through the open gates of the Sebastiani estate, they were surprised at the easy access. He parked close to the steps leading up to the massive front door. Miranda had not seen the house from this angle before, having emerged from her garden burrow around the back into relative darkness and slipped away over a wall into a neighbour's yard before making her way to the street. The first car that had come along was a taxi, relieved to have a return fare at such an ungodly hour, the driver only a little disconcerted to be told she wanted to go to a police station, where he would be reimbursed, with tip, which he was.

“Looks quiet,” Miranda said.

“Looks can be deceiving. Remember, we're just making a social call.”

“And if we all pretend, then that's all it is,” said Miranda. “Let's do it.”

There was a long delay after they heard the chimes through the door, then it opened and Carlo Sebastiani smiled broadly in greeting. He was wearing a loose- fitting silk kimono over his clothes.

“Hey,” he said with forced bonhomie, “good to see you, good to see you. How are you? It's been a long time.”