Devil You Know Read online

  “I bet they are,” Roberto said. “And the mother?”

  “Mozel is doing wonderfully.”

  “I will arrange the christening, Luigi. Let me take care of everything.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for us, I feel like a new man,” Luigi said gratefully.

  “Don’t be silly,” Roberto said softly. “I’m family.”

  *

  Roberto took a few days to return to San Stefano and start some very public preparations for a grand christening. The cake was ordered, balloons and banners were bought, the Archbishop was booked; Roberto showed himself around town, passing out cigars, receiving congratulations, and ordering from as many suppliers as he could. The town took note of the unusual good humor of the Principe di Parigi. As he had intended.

  And then, finally, all was ready.

  *

  When Roberto arrived at the lodge, he was all smiles. Mozel, already back to her normal size three weeks after the birth, greeted him warmly, as if he were truly Luigi’s brother. She was wearing a blue dress that picked out the glossy raven hue of her hair, and he thought how delicious she looked, and how much he would enjoy finally having her.

  Mozel was wasted on a limp noodle like Luigi, Roberto decided. Of course, he would never have married her, but she would be good to fuck. He imagined all that wild passion squirming underneath him. Before he wiped out the stain of herself and her gypsy brats for good.

  Roberto cuddled the babies. They were ugly little pink morsels with blue eyes and scraps of dark fluff on their heads. He felt no compunction at the thought of what he was going to do to them. They would never know a thing. At this age, they were hardly people. Magnanimously, he decided to smother them with a pillow before the flames took them.

  “Aren’t they amazing,” he cooed, and Mozel leaned over to retrieve them, smiling at him. Her heavy breasts brushed against his forearm in her thin silky blue dress, and Roberto stiffened pleasurably, and thought that she wanted him.

  That night, after the happy parents had retired to sleep, Roberto poured the gasoline and accelerant he had kept in an outhouse into all the channels he had dug for them. A pity to waste such a magnificent little holiday villa, yes, but he was insured to the hilt; he could always plan another …

  *

  In the morning, Roberto ensured that he would not be interrupted. He waited for the postman to come, and the maid to leave, tipping her handsomely. Then, accommodatingly, Luigi himself suggested they head into the woods to shoot a few boar, maybe even a stag or two …

  It was like—what did the Americans say?—taking candy from a baby, Roberto decided, as he stood twelve meters behind Luigi, taking careful aim at his cousin and firing.

  Luigi crumpled to the ground in a slither of clothes and flesh. His own gun dropped harmlessly from his hand, and blood gushed from his head as he collapsed on the forest floor, branches and twigs cracking under the weight of his body.

  Roberto walked off, not even looking back. This forest was full of animals, wild boar in particular, which would take care of his cousin’s remains. He had hunted in it many times by himself, and many times with Luigi; the Count never suspected for an instant that Roberto was a danger. When death came, Roberto told himself smugly as he headed back to the house, Luigi had not known a thing. He was now in heaven. Or hell. Roberto didn’t care much either way.

  His crotch hardened as he emerged from the thick, green dark of the forest and walked into the house. What would Mozel feel, that treacherous gypsy slut, whose sex had stolen his cousin’s wits and let all the world see a Parigi united with a gypsy woman? She would be afraid, and he was looking forward to that. But would she be wet and hot when she was taken by a real man? Despite herself? That tramp … of course she would … she would love it …

  Roberto’s anger and hatred mixed with his lust. He strode past the patio, through the open doors of the living room. He was hard as a diamond now. Through into the kitchen, and then to the family room, where Mozel would be sitting with her brats …

  There she was. She had a child at the breast. The sight of them, usually large but now even more swollen with milk, turned him on so much it hurt. For a second, Roberto just stood over her, staring, his shotgun in his hand.

  She knew immediately.

  Of course, he thought triumphantly; she is a witch, after all.

  Mozel said nothing but snatched at the phone and started to dial for help.

  “There is no tone,” Roberto said. “The line has been cut.”

  “Why?” she screamed. “Why?”

  He shrugged and moved toward her. “I am a prince of the Parigi, befana slut. Put the child down.”

  “No!” she shrieked, and started to run. But Roberto raised his shotgun and pointed it at the other babies.

  “Unless you want me to blow their brains out, you will do exactly as I say.”

  She stopped dead. “Yes,” she said numbly. “Yes. Yes.” She laid her baby gently down on the couch, where it started to squall with fury, because its lunch had been interrupted. Roberto found the sound annoying.

  “Walk into the bedroom,” he said, “and strip your clothes off, slut.”

  Mozel obeyed him, trembling, and went into the bedroom. She would fight. Maybe she could get away. Her mind was thinking only of one thing, to save her children, Luigi’s children. She would mourn him later …

  Roberto stood before her, shotgun pointed at her breasts. She was a slight, skinny little thing; he had ninety pounds on her. He was lean and muscled, his body reflecting the discipline of his life.

  “Slowly,” he said, enjoying himself. She obeyed him. She slowly removed her clothing, letting the dress slither to the floor, her tits already out of the bra, they were magnificent, the tiny white silk panties peeled off, and she was absolutely nude. Roberto, his hard-on full to bursting, shoved her roughly back on to the bed, tugged his pants half-down, and mounted her.

  Mozel shrieked and tried to struggle, but he had her fast. Roberto raped her savagely, thrusting deep. She scratched at his face and tore it with her nails, so he slapped her, hard, on the head.

  That was a mistake. He was stronger than her, and she blacked out, which stopped her struggling, and shrieking, and now he was fucking a limp body. No fun. He cursed and shook her awake.

  “My children,” she groaned, “spare my babies!”

  “Of course I’m not going to,” Roberto said, grinning and thrusting. “Let some gypsy take what is mine, inherit what is mine? You and your filthy line die tonight, witch.”

  She looked up at him, with those gray wolf-eyes. She stopped struggling, and started to move with his rhythm. Roberto was shocked, then he smirked. She was enjoying it. He knew she would. She could not resist …

  And then, looking directly into his eyes, Mozel loudly and clearly pronounced a curse on him, a curse that seemed to go on and on, speaking the words in her barbaric language, until he wanted to throttle her.

  Roberto felt his belly crisp with fear. Inside the witch, his hard-on shriveled and died. He felt himself become limp and small, and slip out of her. Enraged and red-faced, he lifted his hand to strike her again, to beat all the life out of her …

  “Wait!”

  Her voice was strangely calm. Despite himself, Roberto Parigi hesitated.

  “You can break the curse,” Mozel said calmly, “if you spare my infants, Roberto. Then it will not come upon you.”

  He hesitated. The spell … the spell … he did not like it.

  “It is impossible,” he said, reaching for her throat.

  Mozel spoke fast, the words tumbling out of her. “No! Not impossible. Give them to churches, leave them on doorsteps, who will know? Separate them. Nobody will know, they are Italian girls…”

  “They have your eyes, witch,” he snarled. “All would know them!”

  “Their eyes are blue,” she pleaded, “blue!”

  Roberto felt his limpness flop against his clothes. His rage and frustr
ation burst, and he screamed “Silence!” and moved forward, choking her until she stopped breathing and lay dead and quiet on the bed, unable to torment him with more of her words and spells.

  He sat there for a few minutes, panting. Now both Luigi and Mozel were dead. Calm, calm, Roberto, he told himself. Relax … don’t let the slut get to you.

  But she had, he knew she had.

  When he said “witch,” Roberto Parigi believed it. Modern times did not mean modern attitudes, not in this land of long memories, where superstition was a way of life. The look in the gypsy slut’s eyes as she spoke that curse …

  Dimly, he heard the sound of crying from the other room. He stumbled back in there, zipping himself up. There were the two in their cots and the third on the couch.

  Curiously, Roberto gazed into the small eyes of the squalling one. Yes, the slut had spoken the truth. They looked like ordinary Italian brats, with dark hair, blue eyes, olive skins …

  He picked up a cushion from the couch and stood over the screaming one. But then he hesitated.

  Fuck it, Roberto thought. Nobody will ever know, and I will break my curse …

  He scooped the three children up and carried them out to his Rolls-Royce, laying them in the backseat.

  Then he walked back to the start of the first trough he had laid and filled with gasoline, struck a match, then tossed it in.

  Within a few seconds the entire building was ablaze. Channels of fuel were laid all through the house, and it was a wooden structure. Within an hour, nothing would be left but that brand-new pool.

  Prince Roberto Parigi turned the key in his ignition and started to drive up the winding road that led into the hills, with the three little contessas screaming annoyingly in the back of his car.

  *

  Roberto thought he had arranged things perfectly. He had cultivated some connections in the Cosa Nostra, low-level men with no morals and a fierce love of money. He had also made sure he kept his own band of thugs on the Parigi payroll; “security,” of course, but not for the company, for himself.

  His connections already had a racket going in the sale of children. Infants were highly sought after in Europe and America, and parents were prepared to pay for them. Roberto was cautious; he instructed that each child should go to a different orphanage, and that no fee should be charged to adopt them. He didn’t want anything getting in the way, he wanted the gypsy brats dispersed around the globe, far from each other, and far from himself.

  It was done smoothly and with a minimum of fuss. A place was found in England for one girl, and, in America, Brooklyn for a second, and L.A. for a third. Fly-by-night operations that charged heavy “expenses” for the most part, washed a little money, and closed down when the Feds came looking.

  The Prince expected reports on who chose the brats, and he got them. He was expecting there to be a delay; they were only females, after all, and who would want one of those, given a choice? But the girls went fast, and pleasingly so, to the kinds of families he had hand-selected; boring, ordinary people with enough to raise a child, who were neither especially poor nor exceptionally rich. An Italian worker from New York, a middle-class English couple, and a lawyer from Los Angeles.

  After that, he forgot about his tiny cousins. They were gone from the picture, removed from being a threat, from taking the inheritance that was so rightfully his.

  And he had done right by them, he thought self-righteously. They were alive, which was more than the children of a witch deserved to be.

  Prince Roberto Parigi busied himself with a very public funeral, mourning the tragic loss of the new family he had been so close to. He had a service in the Cathedral in San Stefano, and the Archbishop remarked in his sermon how he had been looking forward to performing a baptism, and instead here he was, presiding over a funeral …

  Roberto, last of the Parigis, wept bitterly, and was inconsolable. He mourned all that year, never removing his black suit, and refusing to dine out. He even wept as his cousin Luigi’s will was read, making him the default heir of the entire Parigi fortune: the houses, the apartments, the villas, the cars, the private jet, and, of course, all the stock of Parigi Enterprises.

  His first act as Chief Executive was to rename the company. It was now to be known as Venda Incorporated. He did not wish the ancient name of Parigi to be tainted with trade. Roberto was happy to take charge of all the money, but he regarded the means of obtaining it as beneath him. Murder was acceptable; working for a living was not.

  People wondered about the name. “I just like the way it sounds,” Roberto told them.

  In fact, it stood for vendetta. His private joke.

  Roberto moved back to the Palazzo after installing some very competent men to run his business affairs. He poached the brightest talent from America, even some executives from Japan, where an incredible revolution was taking place in business. Venda was known for paying huge salaries and bonuses; Roberto knew that the Capos made the organization.

  His judgment was sound. He grew richer and more powerful as the years rolled by, and he did not have to lift a finger for it. As a prince, his job was to be social, to attend the masked balls of Venice, to play in the casinos of Monte Carlo, to restore the glamor and luster of the House of Parigi that his uncle and cousin had tarnished.

  The gypsy brats were no longer a danger, and they faded from his mind.

  One

  “Are you hungry?”

  Rose Fiorello smoothed down the pleats of her skirt and glanced over at her mom. Mrs. Fiorello was standing there with that worried look on her face, the one that used only to be there when Rose left to walk to school, and now was there almost every night. “You have to be. Look at you, you’re so skinny, it’s dreadful.”

  “I’m not skinny, Mom.” She really wasn’t hungry, but anything to make her mother feel better. “But I could eat, I guess.”

  “Good. We need to use up these cold cuts,” Daniella Fiorello replied, turning back to their tiny kitchen countertop. “I’ll make you a nice sandwich.”

  “Sounds great.”

  Rose eased her heavy, threadbare knapsack off her back and perched her slender frame on one of the whitewashed chairs in the cramped room. There was never any space in their Hell’s Kitchen apartment, but as her father kept reminding her, it was Manhattan. Plus, it was rent-controlled. Even if the area wasn’t of the best, there were plenty of people who would kill for this space. You only got into trouble around here if you looked lost or frightened. And Rose never did. Even when she was dressed in the cute little uniform of Our Lady of Angels—navy pleated skirt that hovered just above the knee, white socks and shirt, which most of the girls wore unbuttoned to try to look like Madonna—nobody wanted to mess with Rose. She was fifteen, tough, and pissed off. And she was beautiful.

  The Fiorellos had always gotten by, up until now. But it had been at a cost. Surviving was expensive, and it meant somebody had to go without. That somebody was usually Rose, and she didn’t mind that, at least not much. Sometimes she wanted stuff: new Nike sneakers, a VCR, Whitney Houston CDs, movie tickets; it was hard not to, right now, in the booming Eighties, when the Wall Street flyboys paid three hundred dollars a month just to park their Corvette convertibles, and it seemed that everybody else was getting rich. Rose told herself she was content to bide her time. She was doing great at school, even if she hated it. School was a necessary evil. She would ace her SATs, get a scholarship to Columbia or NYU, and get a high-paying job as a lawyer or an investment banker. Then she would be able to move her parents out of their shitty little apartment, and buy all the cool makeup and CDs she wanted.

  Rose spent so much time being mad, she didn’t really understand just how gorgeous she was. She was coltish, with long legs, dark glossy hair which looked like it came out of a comic book—so black it was almost blue—an oval-shaped face, and full, sensual lips with a natural pout. She was five feet seven, she weighed one-twenty, had a cinched-in waist, firm, full breasts, and had just bought he
r first C-cup bra. Her nose was aquiline and arrogant, her skin was a rich olive, and her eyes—her incredible eyes—were a startling ultra-pale blue, almost white, even wolfish.

  Her parents didn’t have those eyes, but no wonder; Rose was adopted.

  Men catcalled when she passed in the street, but usually didn’t accost her. They didn’t dare. That stride of hers was pure Bronx, pure menace. Rose Fiorello was permanently mad: at her mom’s disease, at her father’s long hours, at their filthy streets, at the Mayor, at her birth mom, at the world.

  But today she had a focus. And the hatred she felt burned as strongly as the first love felt by most other girls her age.

  Rose tossed her head, sending a waterfall of sleek, raven-black hair flying through the air.

  “Sounds good.” She tried to temper her tone. “More cold cuts from the deli? Did they turn off the power again?”

  Daniella nodded sadly. “Your dad’s called Con Ed already. But it’s another day’s worth of stuff ruined.”

  “I could eat Dad’s stuff all day long,” Rose said loyally. They both knew she already did. Today would just be one more day of it, before the choice Italian meats and cheeses and fish turned bad and had to be thrown out. Before her father lost even more money.

  Paul Fiorello was fifty, and had run Paul’s Famous Deli for twenty-five years. Despite the optimistic name, the Deli wasn’t famous: it was in the wrong neighborhood and too small ever to attract the new foodie crowd that would pay twenty dollars for a thin bottle of organic olive oil. But it was good, and the food was fresh and the tastiest for ten square blocks. Her father had a regular clientele, and he’d kept his head above water all these years. The Deli paid for the medications for Mom’s arthritis, and Rose’s Catholic school. It was cheap, but it wasn’t free. Plus, there were costs; the uniform, for one thing. The Deli took care of all that, plus their rent.

  Up until last month.

  Manhattan property prices were going through the roof. Even the worst areas which they said would never gentrify were already being bought up; the East Village and Hell’s Kitchen to name but two. Some people said Alphabet City and even Harlem would be next. Whatever. Rose didn’t give a damn about the demographics.