Free Playing Dead by Jessie Keane Page B

fucking bitch! How am I going to find acting work now? I’m a freak. And this is all down to you.’
    Frances stared with hate-filled eyes at his lover. Self-pity flooded through him and he flopped back against the pillows in despair. In his heart he knew that this was the end of it. Tears splashed down his cheeks, soaked his bloodstained bandages.
    ‘I didn’t do this,’ insisted Rocco, patting Frances’s unbandaged hand and wondering when he could decently leave. He wouldn’t be coming here again. It was over.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Frances, snatching his hand away. ‘Right.’

Chapter 18
     
    Rocco said nothing to Cara, except that his friend was recovering and would be fine. He wanted to grab her, to break her stupid head against a wall for damaging something so exquisitely beautiful. All right, he had been tired of Frances. But what she had done was like smashing a Ming vase or defacing a Renoir: a crime against a work of art.
    But he bit his lip and said nothing, although he felt sick with a mingling of loss and terror. If she had told her father about this, then he believed he was a dead man. Only last week that sadistic bastard Lucco had been laughing about Roy Giancana, who the Barolli mob had sent out to Vegas to handle business and who had tried to cheat them on the skim. He’d ended up in an oil drum at the bottom of the sea, just off the coast of sunny Florida.
    And there had been others, many others Rocco knew of; men who had once been called friends and had been dispatched to meet their maker for stepping out of line in one way or another.
    Now he had stepped out of line and he knew it.
    Cara, the daddy’s girl, would run weeping to Constantine with any trouble, he knew that, and what would the Don do? Let it rest? No way. Rocco knew that once the word was given by the Don, his life was over. He was wracked with terror. Frightened of Lucco, who could in an instant switch from charming to deadly; and equally frightened of Alberto, whose urbane politeness concealed a businesslike efficiency when it came to conducting his father’s business.
    Brother-in-law or not, he knew that neither of them would baulk at giving the word for an enforcer to take him out. He had to make moves of his own, to preserve his own safety.
    He drove up to New Jersey to pay a visit to his father, Enrico Mancini.
    His mother greeted him with all the usual hugs and cries and kisses.
    ‘You’ve lost weight!’ she tutted, fluttering around him, pinching his sallow cheeks.
    It was true, he had lost weight, such had been his anxiety over the mess he had gotten himself into. He’d been under so much stress: keeping out of Constantine’s way, tiptoeing around Cara, and worse, much worse, fielding the unwanted and increasingly desperate calls from Frances, yelling accusations and wild declarations of love down the phone at him. He felt as though he was under seige. Food had been the last thing on his mind.
    ‘Son.’ His father greeted him without enthusiasm. He was watching the Boston Red Sox play the Yankees on TV. He glanced up, waved Rocco into an armchair and looked back at the screen.
    Rocco glanced at it too. He had no interest in sports. His older brothers, Jonathan and Silvio, did, they were always in their father’s favour, but Rocco was the youngest and had clung to his mother’s apron-strings as a boy and even – yes, he admitted it – as a young man. He didn’t doubt his father loved him, but it was in a remote and dispassionate way.
    Enrico Mancini shot a sideways look at his son. ‘Is your mother fetching us something? You look thin.’
    ‘Had a virus,’ lied Rocco.
    ‘Bad things,’ said Enrico, shaking his head, and returned his attention to the game.
    Rocco looked at his father. He was balding and relaxing into old age in a beige cardigan and carpet slippers. His heart was bad, too; he couldn’t do too much these days. His father had no style, but Rocco understood that even so he was a great man. Rocco had a