Читать книгу Playing Dead - Jessie Keane - Страница 11

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.