Second Skin (22 page)

Mick, pulling the brim of the black fedora down over his forehead so the wind wouldn’t take it, rang the bell at the side of the gate and was admitted. Not knowing the proper protocol, he took the fedora off as soon as he was in the grounds.

A nun in habit met him at the front stoop. She smiled quietly at him as he approached.

‘I’m here to see Jaqui,’ he said, his throat suddenly tight. And when the nun looked at him quizzically: ‘Jaqui Leonforte.’

The nun smiled and bowed him in. ‘You must be Michael,’ she said in her soft voice. ‘Follow me, please.’

She led Mick down a series of dark stone corridors whose walls were completely unadorned. He passed a pair of French doors that led out onto a small courtyard opulently bedecked with flowering shrubs and vines. He caught a glimpse of a stone bench and a small fountain before the nun led him farther down the corridor. At its end, she opened high wooden double doors but did not go in herself.

‘The mother superior will see you.’

Mick went into a surprisingly small room that had been turned into something of an office. A small niche held a plaster Madonna, and on the wall behind the desk hung a wood and gilt crucifix.

‘I am Bernice,’ a woman in her late fifties said as she rose from her chair. ‘You must be Michael Leonforte.’ She stuck out her hand, shook his forthrightly with a grip as firm and dry as a man’s. ‘Marie Rose has spoken of you often.’

‘Who?’

Bernice took off her steel-rimmed spectacles so that he could feel the full impact of her extraordinary pale blue eyes. ‘I thought you knew. Your sister is a full novitiate, a permanent member of the convent now. Her new name is Marie Rose.’

Mick, holding his grandfather’s fedora tightly in both hands, shifted nervously from one foot to the other. ‘Does this mean I can’t see her?’

‘It is not usually allowed,’ Bernice said in her steady voice that neither rose nor fell.

‘But, see, I’m going away. For a long time, maybe.’ He ground the brim of the fedora against his thighs. ‘I gotta see her.’

‘Sit down a moment, won’t you, Michael?’ Bernice said, indicating a straight-backed chair. And when he had done so, she smiled. ‘I don’t mean to make you uneasy.’

‘Oh, it’s not you,’ Mick said hastily. ‘It’s this place. It’s so quiet.’

‘Deliberately so.’ Bernice paused for a moment, as if debating with herself whether to go on. ‘I understand you had a close and unusual relationship with your grandfather.’

Mick nodded. ‘Jaqui, um, Marie Rose told you.’

‘No,’ Bernice said, sitting down at her desk. ‘I knew your grandfather quite well.’

‘You did?’

Bernice smiled again. ‘You seem surprised.’

‘Well, uh, you know, Astoria, it’s a little out of his territory,’ Mick said, recovering quickly.

Bernice laughed, a low, astonishingly joyous sound. ‘I suppose that is one way of putting it.’ She reached into a drawer, took out something that she spread upon the desktop. ‘Four twenty-dollar bills,’ she said, and those pale blue eyes impaled him again.

‘I asked him to invest them.’

‘Are you surprised that he chose to invest your money with me rather than with the funeral home or the insurance companies he controlled?’

Mick squinted at her. ‘What do you know about all that?’

‘Everything,’ Bernice said, swiping the money off the desktop as deftly as a Las Vegas dealer. The smile wreathed her face. ‘I think, in the end, you will be pleased with the return on your investment.’ She stood up. ‘Now, go back the way you came to the meditation garden. Novitiate Marie Rose is waiting for you there.’

‘Thank you, Mother Superior,’ Mick said, stumbling to his feet.

‘You’re quite welcome, Michael.’ At the door to her office, she said in the hushed voice of a confidante, ‘I loved him, you know.’ Then she softly closed the door.

As Mick went down the corridor, he heard the soft chanting of prayers. What on earth had the mother superior meant by that last cryptic statement? In what way had she loved Grandfather Caesare? And why would she tell Mick?

He was still pondering these questions when he opened the French doors. The sound of songbirds greeted him, along with the heavy perfume of roses, and he was immediately plunged into his dream. He walked out into the courtyard, and though it was in Queens, it might just as well have been that terrace cantilevered out over the unknown coastline of his dream. The prayer, stronger now because it emerged from an open window fronting the courtyard, was like music.

As he walked down the narrow, mossy brick path to the single stone bench, Jaqui turned toward him. Her face was radiant and he felt his heart lurch in his chest. Nothing had changed on this score, he saw. He felt about his sister as he always had.

She smiled and, instead of embracing him, took his hands in hers. ‘Michael, it’s so good to see you. I wasn’t certain you’d come before you left.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried to talk to Caesare. But you know your brother.’ She gave him an almost embarrassed smile. ‘He never listened to a word I said.’ She put a hand to his cheek. ‘You look tired.’

She led him to the bench, where they both sat in silence for some time. All Mick could smell were the roses. For a time, he tried not to breathe, but that didn’t work, either.

‘Jaqui, you sure this is what you want?’

‘It’s right for me, Michael.’

He sighed. ‘I guess I just don’t understand.’ He gestured up at the white stone walls. ‘All this.’ He shook his head in bewilderment.

‘You met Bernice.’

‘The mother superior. Sure.’

‘Then you know why I’m here.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Grandfather knew.’

‘He did?’

She nodded. ‘From the very beginning. And Mom’s been very understanding.’ She glanced away, at a songbird that flitted among the vines, looking for something to eat.

‘Jaqui –’

She turned back to him. ‘I’m Marie Rose now.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ He disentangled his fingers from hers and stood up. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. This wasn’t what he wanted. ‘I gotta get going.’ Why had he come here, anyway?

‘I know.’ She continued to sit on the bench as if willing them both to remain here in this odd limbo for at least a while longer, and for a flash, he had the profoundly disquieting sense that she was aware of his dream.

‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

She turned her face up to him. ‘But we’ll see each other.’

‘You bet.’

He turned, leaving her there with the sun in her eyes, but in all the years afterward of never seeing her, the deep Mediterranean green of her eyes never left his mind or his dreams.

A thousand hearts are great within my bosom.

Advance our standards, set upon our foes!

Richard III, act 5, scene 3

Richard III,
William Shakespeare

A mockingbird’s insouciant calling ushered in Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo’s return to Astoria. Despite her apprehension and fear over her current predicament, the sight of the familiar streets and stores began a flood of memories inside her.

She parked in front of the bakery and went in just as it was closing. It looked the same as it always had, with its sawdust over the tiny white floor tile, so scratched and cracked it might be somewhere in Italy. Fluorescent lights bounced off the large glass cases, though oddly they didn’t seem as huge as they once had.

‘Can I help you?’ asked a chubby little woman who bustled out from the back. Her gray hair was tied back in a bun. She had a doughy face with thick eyebrows that arched like a clown’s. She broke into a smile. ‘Margarite?’

‘Yes, Mrs Paglia. It’s me.’

‘Madonna!’ Mrs Paglia cried, coming around from behind the cases.
‘Bella
! So good to see you! Poor darling, how are you?’ She pulled Margarite’s head down to her ample bosom. She smelled of flour and starch. ‘Such a tragedy about Tony. It was on the news this morning, so terrible I couldn’t believe it! I said to Luigi, “Can you believe this about our Tony D.?”’ She bit a knuckle. ‘It’s an
infamia
!’

‘I know. I’m still in shock.’

Mrs Paglia waved her pudgy hands. ‘But don’t worry,
bella.
You’re here now. You’re home.’ She turned back behind the counter, began picking through the bread and rolls. ‘But you’re so thin.’ She handed a fistful over the countertop.
‘Mangia,
angel.
Mangia!’

Margarite, far from hungry, took several bites of the roll. It would have been disrespectful to do otherwise, but she could already feel her tightly knotted stomach rebelling.

‘Now don’t you worry about a thing,’ Mrs Paglia was saying, as she brought some grappa from the back and poured it into a water glass. ‘Here, angel. Fortification. Drink up.’ She waved her hands again, as if with the gesture she could get the rim more quickly to Margarite’s lips. ‘Drink it all,
bella,
it will do you good!’

Then she bustled around the cases again to put her arm around Margarite. ‘I know why you’re here,’ she whispered with a glance toward the back where her husband, Luigi, must have been working on the bakery’s books. ‘Instinct, angel. That’s why you’ve come here in your hour of need.’ She squeezed Margarite’s shoulders. ‘The men think they have it all figured out, right? But we know better. All they’ve figured out is what we give them.’ She cackled a little. ‘You finish your roll and then you go next door like you planned. It’s the right thing.’

‘She’s there?’

Mrs Paglia nodded and crossed herself. ‘Thank God. He looks after her. Though she’s in her nineties, you’d never believe it.’ She tapped the side of her head with her stubby forefinger. ‘She’s no longer mother superior, of course; another has taken up those duties. But she is sharp as ever, angel. You’ll see.’

Outside, the mockingbird’s clear notes pierced the night air. Margarite glanced at her watch. Two hours left before she had to make the meet so she could save her daughter’s life. But what would happen to them then? Nothing good. Far from ending things, turning herself over to Bad Clams would be just the beginning. He wanted all of Dominic’s secrets: his contracts with truckers, wholesalers, judges, cops, bankers, and manufacturers across the country, his contacts in Washington, and most of all, he coveted the power of the Nishiki network, which had provided Dominic with personal dirt on enough high-level government officials to get whatever he wanted from them. Mikio Okami was Nishiki, mysteriously providing the secrets of other people’s lives in order to keep them under the Goldonis’ thumb.

The complex mechanism for gaining this information Margarite now had in her head. Bad Clams would use Francie for as long as he could as the goad that would make her spill her guts to him.

She staggered as she walked down the street. Then, rushing to the curb, she doubled over, vomiting up everything she had just eaten and drunk. When the spasms had subsided, she opened her purse, wiped her mouth with a couple of Kleenex. The gun glinted evilly in the sodium streetlights.

Christ,
she thought.
What am I going to do?

She knew exactly what she must do at this moment. She went to the wrought-iron gate protecting the large white stone building that took up most of the block. The images of Mary and the baby Jesus flanked the gate, just as they had when Dominic had first taken her here six years ago to begin her education.

She rang the bell and was admitted at once.

A strange kind of peacefulness stole over her as she stepped into the grounds of the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria Convent. Above her head, sitting high in a magnolia tree, she saw the mockingbird peering down at her with its head cocked at a comical angle. Then it began to sing, sounding like one, two, three, four other birds. The master of disguise, protecting its young with its ventriloquist’s voice.

She walked up the marble steps and the doors opened inward.

‘Welcome, my child,’ a familiar voice said from the shadows.

Margarite, who had for a moment been lost in the past, said, ‘Bernice?’

‘Yes, my child.’ Bernice wrapped her in her loving embrace.

‘Oh, Bernice!’ Margarite began to sob. The tenderness of those arms, the warmth of that body in her moment of crisis, were too much for her. ‘God in heaven, what is happening to my life?’

‘That is what you have come to find out, my child.’

Bernice closed the wooden door behind them, walked with her arm around Margarite down the corridor. Once again, Margarite was struck by the magisterial silence of the convent. What other, less attuned visitors mistook for austerity, she recognized as an absolute serenity at the center of the spirit.

‘Everything that’s happened – I just feel so helpless. It’s all spinning out of control –’ She broke off, unable to go on.

Bernice stopped before a mirror. Her strong hand grasped Margarite’s chin, turned her face up so that she was staring at her reflection. ‘Look. What do you see? Your face is stained with tears,’ Bernice said softly. ‘But I see deeper than that. Your soul is choked with tears. This is not just from the events of the past few days, my child. You must recognize this before you can go on.’

‘I can’t. I –’

‘Ah, Margarite, you can. And do you know why? It is because you are your brother’s sister. You have so much of him inside you, though you are not of the same blood. No doubt, he saw that kinship of temperament in you.’

Margarite and her sister, Celeste, who lived in Venice, were the daughters of Enrico Goldoni, a manufacturer and exporter of fine Venetian silks and brocades, who had residences in Venice and Astoria, Queens. In 1964, when his daughters Margarite and Celeste were nine and six respectively, he remarried. The woman, Faith Mattaccino, came to him with a son, Dominic, whom he adopted a year later. Faith had been married to Black Paul Mattaccino, by all accounts an exceptionally scary New York Mafia don, who died under mysterious circumstances. One of the many rumors that had swirled around Black Paul was that Dominic was not his son.

‘I doubt if he was ever this out of control.’