BELLA MAFIA Read online

  "I am not sneaking, Sophia, and if you had spent a little more time here, you would have known that financially we are in trouble anyway. And since—since—"

  "Since what?"

  Nino coughed, straightened his collar. But he couldn't resist a glance at himself in the gilt-framed mirror. He flicked his bleached blond hair into place.

  "Since your husband and—"

  "My husband had nothing to do with this business," she snapped, spilling her coffee as she put it back on the saucer.

  Nino raised one eyebrow, mincing slightly as he spooned sugar into his coffee. "Maybe he had more to do with it than you were ever aware. Look, Sophia, please, I don't want to go into details—"

  "What do you mean, more than I was aware? This is my

  business. My husband had nothing to do with it."

  Nino put his cup down carefully. Like Sophia's, his hand was shaking.

  "All right, maybe you should know a few facts. Your husband, Sophia, was very much a part of this business. You were simply never made aware of it."

  Suddenly her knees were trembling. She sat down in Nino's chair so he wouldn't see. Nino took another glimpse of himself in the mirror, then turned to face her. His overpowering cologne was nauseating her.

  "The deal, or my deal, was to make sure you never knew—"

  She interrupted. "What are you talking about? What deal?"

  Nino raised his manicured hands to stop her. "Okay, you may as well know it all. You were an innocent, my love, a married woman with more time than she knew what to do with—"

  "Don't tell me about my life, Nino."

  "You wanted to open a boutique, wanted to prove something to yourself, right? You also needed a good designer, one with contacts, a good clientele. Remember how you came to me, stole me from Vittorio's? I refused, right? How many times did I refuse? But you had set your heart on having Nino Fabio design for your boutique. Think about it, Sophia: Why would a young designer walk away from a big fashion house to start work with a partner with no credit?"

  "Why don't you tell me why, Nino?"

  He shrugged. "Money. After I refused, I was paid a visit by your husband. He offered me more, a lot more, Sophia, and he made it difficult for me to turn him down. So I accepted, and from then on, sweetheart, the only way I could have left you was to slit my throat."

  Sophia's mind whirled. She could hardly take it all in. Constantino, sweet, kind Constantino?

  Nino continued. "Now don't get me wrong, we've had a lot of fun together. But two boutiques and a couple of halfhearted fashion shows a year have hardly helped my career. Your two shops ran at a loss; they were never able to pay for themselves. We have a good clientele—we should have; we've got quality goods, and I am a good designer—but forced to do everything else at the same time—"

  Sophia's throat had constricted, and it was a few moments before she could speak. "So . . . my husband paid you on top of what you were earning from the boutiques. Is that what you are saying? He paid you on top of our contract?"

  Again Nino sighed. "I also run a lucrative mail-order business." He paused, cocking his head to one side. "You want to see for yourself?"

  He led Sophia into the small workroom where eight seamstresses made up the bales of cloth chosen by Sophia. The walls were covered by Nino's designs and notes.

  "All these girls worked for how many weeks on that wedding dress for your niece? Now, who do you think was running the boutiques, organizing the stock, while nothing else was being made up? New orders came in left and right and were ignored, right? Eight girls working flat out . . . That costs, Sophia."

  Sophia felt dizzy, trying to fight the picture in her mind of little Rosa floating down the stairs of the Villa Rivera in her wedding gown.

  They walked out of the building. Two warehouses away Nino opened a door with no sign on it and ushered Sophia ahead of him. The noise of sewing machines was deafening as they walked through to the main workroom. Thirty-two women looked up, then continued their work. Nonplussed, Sophia followed Nino along the narrow aisle as he held up see-through briefs and negligees, hideous brassieres and garter belts, tossing them aside on his way to the back of the room.

  They arrived at the open glazed door of an office. Nino turned and waved his hand at the workroom.

  "This is what covered the costs of your enterprise, Sophia, all of this. . . . Come on into the office."

  A small, balding man in shirt sleeves held up by armbands stumbled to his feet in a cloud of cheap cigar smoke. He looked first at Nino, then at Sophia.

  "Silvio, this is Sophia Luciano."

  Sophia spent the rest of the morning looking over two sets of accounts, one for her boutiques and the other the lingerie mail-order business. Nino pointed to the figures.

  "Hookers and cathouses are the main buyers. We distribute to all the markets, the street traders."

  Somehow she kept her control, giving no sign of what this meant to her, but she felt foolish, inept. She had been proud of owning her own shops, independent of the Lucianos. Yet all the while, without her knowledge, they had been running her business, and she had been kept oblivious.

  Signor Silvio's body odor was overpowering. "The situation now, Signora Luciano, is that we don't know whether you wish us to continue. We've had no one directing us for six months. Nino Fabio has been overseeing everything here, but as he is leaving, we are not sure who will be responsible for the salaries, the outgoings. . . . We still have orders to fill, but we must bring out a new catalog. We can get better deals, cash transactions, as we have in the past, for photographs, studies, et cetera—"

  Sophia stood up and straightened her skirt. "This factory will be closed. Please pay everyone a month's salary."

  Silvio paled visibly. He shoved the books and ledgers toward Sophia. "But, signora, this is a very lucrative business. You can see for yourself, there's a big market for these garments, with the kind of woman who dares not buy in a shop. We advertise in sex magazines—"

  "The factory is closed."

  The sweating Silvio followed Nino and Sophia out of the office, bleating that if he had done anything wrong, if there was a fault in his bookkeeping. . . . He stood in the center of the workroom, among the seamstresses, shouting, "I've got orders; this is good-quality merchandise—"

  Sophia turned to see the man's red face as in one hand he held up a bright pink negligee, trimmed with swansdown. In the other hand was a brassiere with holes in the cups for the nipples to show through. She heard herself laughing, an alien, humorless laugh.

  Nino poured a large vodka and handed it to Sophia.

  "You will never survive without the sweatshop. Your shops have been running at a loss for years. If you want to continue, Silvio's a good, hardworking man. And consider the girls; you'll put them out of work, and hundreds of street traders—"

  "Why didn't you ever tell me? Why?"

  Nino's face hardened. "Maybe I valued my life."

  The neat vodka burned her throat. "Now?"

  He gave a shrug. "Now things are obviously different. If you wanted, you could find a buyer easily, but I want out, Sophia. Do you think I wanted to design that cheap shit downstairs?"

  She offered him one of the boutiques outright if he would stay, but he refused, saying that boutiques were out of date.

  "They will bankrupt you. Get out now, Sophia. Sell the stock. You make good money on the whores' gear, Silvio will take care of things—unless, of course, you don't need to keep it going?"

  Sophia drained her glass and poured herself another stiff measure. "What about all the designs we worked on?"

  "We?" Nino's face twisted. "Picking the fabric, my love, is not designing. Face facts, you've been allowed to play at business for years. Now why don't you grow up? I am taking my designs, and I am walking out of the door. If you don't like it, then—"

  "Then what, Nino?"

  "I've been treated like a piece of meat for too long, Sophia. You can't make me stay; if you try, I'll leak the s
tory of your whores' factory to the press. It'll ruin any chance of your holding on to the clients I brought with me. I doubt if they'll still be interested anyway, not after the things they've read in the papers about the—the—"

  She faced him, removing her sunglasses. "Not interested after what, Nino? Not after my entire family has been murdered}"

  He sighed. "You said it, not me. Look, give me a break. I've been trapped here; now I want out. Is that such a bad thing?"

  "There is nothing I can do to stop you."

  Suddenly he eased up. "I appreciate it. It's a big chance for me. I will get my own label. We'll have a show in Milan, try for the American market. Sophia, I can never even say that I worked for you, do you understand? I want to go to the States. If it gets out that I was connected with the Lucianos, it could blow any chance of a visa. Your family name and the obvious connection, it's been plastered all over the papers. . . ."

  She could feel the tears coming and put her dark glasses back on. "Just go."

  He didn't need telling twice. She could hear him outside the office, laughing and joking with Celeste Morvanno. Then there was a strange silence. She wrote a brief note and then buzzed through to Celeste to come to her office.

  "Will you type this out, please, and put it on the bulletin board."

  Celeste pinned the notice up, and the women gathered around. Sophia was giving them a month's notice with six weeks' pay. The lingerie workroom and showroom would then be closed.

  Sophia found later that Nino Fabio had withdrawn all the cash from their business account. He had also removed bales of silk fabrics, racks of evening dresses, and all his designs from the factory. She was to discover that he had removed large amounts of stock from the boutiques as well, forcing her to give those staffs notice. Again she paid them off from her personal account, not caring that she did not have the resources to cover the costs.

  Her bankers became alarmed and requested an urgent meeting. Sophia could not even give her apartment as security, because it was part of Constantino's estate. Within two weeks she was millions of lire in the red.

  Sophia flew to Sicily and caught a train from Palermo to the small village of Cefalu, where she had left her child in the care of an orphanage.

  Having made the decision to find her son, she sat in the small hotel room trying desperately to form some plan of action. She had not registered as Luciano but had used her maiden name of Visconti.

  From the tiny high balcony she could see the harbor, the cobbled street where she and her mother had lived, the hotel where she had worked as a maid. Above the rooftops she could see the church spire, but to her consternation, there was a new glass and concrete hotel where the orphanage had been.

  Sophia threaded her way among the tombstones, unable to find her mother's grave. Eventually she laid the flowers she had brought beside a small wooden cross that bore no name and whispered a plea for her mother to forgive her.

  Walking from the cemetery up the narrow street, she found little that was familiar. Twenty-five years had brought many changes. She evoked curious stares from the locals; the woman in the fine clothes was a stranger to them. She had been a stranger then, too, little Sophia Visconti, the poor girl who had brought her ailing mother to Cefalu in the hope that she would recover her health.

  At first it was her beauty that they whispered about, but as the months passed, it became obvious that she was pregnant. Her mother did not live long enough to know of her daughter's disgrace, but she knew of Sophia's love for Don Roberto Luciano's eldest son. She had tried to warn her daughter that it would come to nothing, that a boy from a high-ranking family would not even contemplate marrying her, especially if it ever came out that Sophia herself was illegitimate. Signora Visconti had been relieved when the doctor in Palermo suggested the move to Cefalu; it would give Sophia a chance to forget Michael.

  The move had taken nearly all their small savings; the burial six months later had used the rest. Sophia was left penniless, and as her pregnancy neared its term, she found the work at the hotel too much for her. For the last few weeks she lived at the Convent of the Bleeding Heart, where other girls like her worked in the laundry and the bakery until their babies were born.

  It was growing dark as she stood outside the convent, looking up at the high roof, the narrow windows. A pale face peered down from one of the upper rooms. She had been there once, frightened and lonely, an outcast.

  She turned quickly away and hurried back to the hotel.

  In the small dining room a few of the residents whispered together about the beautiful woman with the fine jewels and clothes.

  Sophia hardly touched her soup or the fresh fish. She sat staring into space, her hands folded in her lap. She could feel the soft skin, the polished nails, the diamond solitaire ring on hands that had once been red raw from scrubbing floors. She remembered how she had met Michael Luciano at the little coffeehouse where she had worked as a waitress when she was fifteen years old. Of course, she had known who he was; everyone knew the handsome blond boy with the the wonderful smile.

  An elderly woman came to remove her unfinished meal, but Sophia was unconscious of the fact. Her past swept over her. She pictured Michael's young face, remembering how he had made love to her in the orchards before leaving for America. He had promised to come back to her, promised to write; but he never had, and she had never seen him again. That one night, that one dreamlike night, he had stripped off her cheap cotton dress and taken her virginity, leaving her with his child. That night had filled her dreams, kept her strong through her mother's death, her pregnancy, and the birth of her son.

  Sophia was smiling, her slender hand stroking her neck gently. Michael had given her a little gold heart on a fine gold chain.

  "Coffee, signora? Signora?"

  Turning, Sophia gave the waitress a sweet smile that brought a dimple to her right cheek.

  "Grazie, grazie ..."

  The following morning the same waitress noticed that Sophia Visconti still wore black and gave a kindly smile of recognition. The beautiful woman with the madonnalike smile she presumed was, like herself, a widow.

  The coolness was as Sophia remembered. The stone walls, the floors, the heavy oak doors had not changed. In a whisper the sister had asked her to wait in the corridor. After a short while she returned.

  Sophia followed the sister down a narrow passage. The nun paused at a small bishop's door, where she knocked. Without waiting, she opened the door and ushered Sophia inside.

  The mother superior was seated behind a large, ornately carved desk. She wore small, rimless glasses.

  "Signora Visconti, please sit down." She watched with interest as Sophia's delicate lace veil was slowly lifted.

  "Sister Matilda? Do you remember me? It's Sophia."

  They talked of the time when the mother superior had been simply Sister Matilda. There had been many changes since then; sadly the orphanage no longer existed, but there was a new school and a new wing for poor and needy girls like Sophia. It was hard for the mother superior to recall Sophia as a young girl—so many had come and gone—but when Sophia told her the reason for her visit, she remembered very clearly. Sophia wished to trace her son, the child born in the convent.

  "I am sorry, but all our adoption records from 1950 up until 1974 were destroyed in a fire, almost thirteen years ago."

  "Is there no other record? What about the church register?"

  The mother superior apologized; the boy would be impossible to trace. She offered to show Sophia the new buildings, and almost without realizing she had agreed, Sophia followed her.

  The sun streamed in through the main doors as the mother superior opened them. She shaded her eyes. "Come, let me show you our new school."

  In a trance Sophia followed. She stood and smiled at the rows of little children, and all she could think of was her baby, the little heart-shaped gold locket. . . . During her labor she had caught the locket in her mouth, had bitten on it until her teeth had left small ind
entations. When she left her baby, she had put the chain and heart around his neck.

  She caught the sleeve of the mother superior's gown. "He had a locket, a small gold locket. He used to like me to swing it back and forth and would reach for it with his little hands. . . . I'd swing it for him until he slept—"

  "I'm sorry, Sophia. If you recall, you left the baby at the orphanage to enable you to go to work." The mother's eyes glinted behind her eyeglasses, and Sophia could hear the coldness in her voice. "There were many children at the orphanage; their mothers all promised to return. I believe when you left Cefalu, you must have signed papers giving permission, if you did not return for your child, for him to be adopted. Did you sign such documents?"

  Sophia nodded. "Is there no one I can speak to, no one who would possibly remember? There must have been more than one set of records. The doctor?"

  "He died more than ten years ago, God rest his soul."

  Sophia wanted to scream but forced herself to follow the black-clad figure, who was now proudly showing her the gymnasium.

  "Our benefactor was a very generous man. All this he donated and, of course, the new chapel. We are dependent on charity, as you must be aware."

  They walked across the small courtyard and back to the main building for coffee. The mother superior asked calmly if Sophia took cream, sugar. . . .

  Sophia stood up. "Sister Flavia, the sister at the orphanage. I remember when I called to see if my son was still there, I spoke to her; she knew of my baby's adoption. It was Sister Flavia."

  The mother superior dabbed at Sophia's spilled coffee with a tissue, then tossed it into the wastebasket. "Why now, Sophia? Why now? You released him, and may God forgive you, but would trying to trace your son now be fair to him? Unless there is a particular reason to find him?"

  Sophia's voice broke. "He is my son."

  "He was your son when you left him. I know you were just a child yourself, but you made the decision." She folded her white, smooth hands as if in prayer. A gold wedding ring was her only adornment. She glanced at Sophia's wedding finger.