Playing Dead. Jessie Keane

revered Mafia godfather. Her husband, her lover, her friend. He had come to find her, knowing she loved it out here, that she liked to stand here sometimes, alone, and watch the sea at night.

       Hey, wonder what’s in this one?

      The pulsating roar and suck of the tide, the music, and his smile. Some things you really do remember forever. He lifted the parcel – it seemed to her that it was heavy, that maybe he felt a little resistance as he did so.

      The actual explosion was too sudden and shocking to take in. A huge flash of light, a deafening, mind-numbing whumph, then smoke and a pushing out, a propulsion of hot air that made her ears pop as if she was on a mile-high flight, and brought with it the acrid smell of black powder.

      She felt herself hit the balcony rail, but only distantly; her hearing was gone, everything was happening in some strange, detached, dreamlike state. Shrapnel sprayed. She felt a sting, distant pain in her arm, and then she was on the beach, lying on the sand, staring half-wittedly at a shell, her vision cutting in and out like a faulty light switch.

      She could hear her own heart, that was all, beating very fast. The shell was ridged, pink, beautiful. A marvel of nature. Her brain felt scrambled. There were other things in the sand too, she could see that. Things charred and blackened, and she didn’t want to look at any of that so she kept looking at the shell. She would not look at the black things. The sand was soft and her ears felt sticky. She felt more than tired; exhausted, ready to sleep.

      But someone was touching her shoulder; someone was turning her onto her back on the sand. She looked up at a million bright stars with blank wonder. Then a face loomed over her, blocking out the stars. It was Alberto, Constantine’s twenty-four-year-old son, her stepson. She loved Alberto, he was a total delight. Unlike Lucco, unlike Cara, Constantine’s other children. Now Alberto’s face was twisted in anguish. There were smears of soot on his chin. He was touching her cheek, checking that she was breathing. He was mouthing words but she couldn’t hear them.

       Are you all right?

      She could read his lips. All right? She didn’t know. She was alive . . . wasn’t she? Her ears were hurting now, really badly. She hoped it would pass. Everything did, in the end. Soon, she might even be reconnected to reality. A spasm of fear shot through her at the thought of that. She started to tremble.

      She turned her head. The black things.

      She screwed up her eyes, wished that she’d been blinded as well as deafened. She knew what the black things were. One of them was a hand, charred so badly it looked like a mummified claw, propped up in the sand not a metre from her head.

      There was a ring on one of the bent, scorched fingers. The gold was tarnished, the diamond stars studding it were hidden beneath blackness. Somewhere inside her, she felt a scream building, but she hadn’t the strength to release it.

      Chapter 1

      Two Months Earlier

      ‘Hey, I’m home!’ Annie called out as she passed the guard on the door and hurried into the penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue with its spectacular views over the treetops of Central Park.

      New York in June was stifling, hotter than the mouth of hell; but they had lingered. Constantine was doing business – among other things, he had bought a lease on a building in Times Square that by next September would be transformed into a new Annie’s nightclub. Annie herself had just been killing time until today, when she’d consulted her gynaecologist.

      Nico, Constantine’s most loyal and long-standing foot soldier, was sitting on one of the huge couches, flicking through the New York Times.

      ‘Hi, Nico,’ she said.

      ‘Hey, you see this? They say the Supreme Court’s gonna clear Muhammad Ali of trying to dodge the draft. You know, Nixon’s right. We got to come out of Vietnam.’

      Nico’s voice was deep, thunderous; it seemed to come from somewhere down in his boots.

      She glanced over his shoulder at the headlines. It constantly amazed Annie how fascinated and involved with politics the Americans were; none of her English pals gave a stuff about it, and neither did she. But even she could see that Vietnam was a mess, and one that would have to be resolved soon.

      She nodded in the direction of the study. The apartment was massive, and Old Colonial in its style of decor. It was one of only two apartments on this floor, with full-service white-gloved doorman, concierge and elevator operator.

      ‘Is he free?’ she asked.

      ‘For you?’ Nico rose to his feet with a courtly smile and a bow. ‘He’s free.’

      Annie gave him a smile in return. She liked Nico. She felt he would throw himself under a ten-ton truck to protect Constantine, and she liked that; he needed good people around him.

      Nico was a big friendly bear of a man with a thin scraping of darkish hair remaining on his big dome of a head. He had humorous and shrewd dark eyes, half hidden under thick eyebrows. In his gait and mannerisms he was shambling and casual, he always looked untidy. But he was loyal to the core and – this was the nailer for Annie – he had been hugely instrumental in recovering Layla when she had once been snatched away, and for that she was forever in his debt.

      She went over to the closed study door. She knocked.

      ‘Come!’ came from inside, and she slipped in, closing the door behind her.

      He was there behind the desk, replacing the phone on its cradle, looking up at her expectantly.

      The silver fox. And he was a fox in every way. When Constantine Barolli was in a room, it filled with his presence. He was a man at the very height of his powers. Tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, he had thick silver hair, an all-American tan, and armour-piercing blue eyes. Anywhere he went, a cloud of bodyguards swarmed around him like gnats. They swarmed around her, too, and she hated that – but she knew it came with the territory.

      Now they had this to look forward to. She was going to give him his fourth child. His first three had been born to another woman – his first wife, Maria – who had died over six years ago. Alberto, Lucco and Cara were his grown-up children. Now he was approaching fifty, and he would soon have a new baby to a woman not yet thirty. She was so much younger than him, and she knew that people talked, disapproved.

      She was not from the old country – Sicily – and she wasn’t even American. She barely spoke a word of his native language, but it didn’t matter because he’d been raised in New York and his accent was pure Bronx. But he was the Don, Il Padrone, the godfather, so if people spoke of it, this scandalous second marriage of his, then it was only in whispers, never to his face.

      Annie had heard some of those whispers. Caught the edge of them, before silence and watchfulness and fake smiles took their place. Puttana, she had heard them whisper. She’d looked it up in her phrasebook but it wasn’t there. She’d asked Constantine what it meant, and he’d told her, asking where she’d come across a word like that.

      ‘Oh, just something I overheard.’ She’d shrugged it off.

      He told her it meant ‘whore’.

      Well, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

      Rich powerful men want young women, and young women are drawn to rich, powerful men, she thought. It was a story as old as time itself. Some people derided it as mercenary or shallow. But even if beauty was desirable, even if power was an aphrodisiac, there was still – in her case, and in his – more to it than that. There was still love. Loving him wasn’t always comfortable; frequently she was isolated, heavily guarded – and this ritzy apartment sometimes felt like a gilded cage. But then, had she ever thought this was going to be easy?

      ‘So what’s the news?’ he asked, pushing his chair back from the desk and beckoning her over.

      ‘The news is that both baby and mother are doing well,’ said Annie, coming around the desk, sitting down on