The Mafia Boss Came For My Son

(Laura)

The bride has changed her dress three times, and it isn’t even ten o’clock.

Giulia leans over as the latest one sweeps past our table, a column of ivory silk with a train long enough to need its own seat at dinner. “That’s the dancing dress,” she says, as if any idiot could tell. “The first was for the church and the second was for photos.”

“And this one’s for getting changed into the fourth?”

“Don’t be so Australian about it.” She pinches an olive off my plate and pops it in her mouth. “Sicilians don’t do anything halfway. You’ve been here five days, Laura. Keep up.”

I have been keeping up. I’ve had five days of breakfasts that roll into lunches and lunches that roll into dinners, and great-aunts in black who pinch my cheek, tell me I’m too skinny and then load my plate as if they’ve personally taken on the job of fixing it. The reception is at a villa in the hills above Palermo, with fairy lights strung through the lemon trees, a string quartet beside the pool and a full band tuning up on the terrace for later. There are more waiters than guests. They all wear white jackets, and every time I put my glass down a fresh one appears before I’ve decided whether I want it.

I’m twenty-two, and the furthest I’d been from home before this trip was a week in Bali with my netball team. Tonight I’m in Giulia’s emerald dress, which fits everywhere except across my hips, and heels I’ll regret before midnight. Mum would call the whole thing showy. I reckon it’s the best night of my life.

“Rosa looks happy,” I say, watching the bride laugh at something her new husband has whispered.

“Rosa looks relieved. Her mother’s been planning this since Rosa was in nappies.” Giulia props her chin on her hand. “Next year my mother will start on me.”

“You’d hate it.”

“I’d love it. A dress for every course.” She clinks her glass against mine. “You’d be my bridesmaid, obviously, and you’d have to wear yellow, because my nonna says yellow brings luck.”

“I’d look like a jaundiced banana.”

“You’d look like a beautiful jaundiced banana.” She grins at me, the same lopsided grin she gave me in first-year anatomy when she leaned across and asked if I knew where the gluteus medius was, because she’d lost hers. We’ve been inseparable ever since. When she invited me to her cousin’s wedding she said it like a dare, and I spent four months working weekend shifts at the chemist to pay for my ticket.

I’m still laughing at her when I notice the man by the balustrade.

He’s hard to miss. He stands half a head above everyone around him, in a dark suit that looks as though it was cut for him and nobody else, with a dark shadow along his jaw and black hair pushed off his face. He isn’t dancing and he isn’t drinking. He’s holding a glass of water and watching the room the way my old netball coach used to watch a court, keeping count of who is where and what they’re about to do. Then his gaze lands on me and stays there long enough for me to forget I’m smiling at Giulia’s joke. The weight of it travels all the way down to my toes in their borrowed heels, and I cross my legs under the tablecloth without quite meaning to.

I look away first. Of course I do. When I peek again, he’s still looking. He has big hands, wrapped around that glass of water, and I wonder, with a flush of heat that has nothing to do with the champagne, what they’d be like at the small of my back on the dance floor.

“Who’s the giant?” I murmur.

Giulia follows my line of sight and rolls her eyes. “My cousin Matteo. Don’t bother. He doesn’t dance and he doesn’t smile. My aunty says he was born forty.”

“He’s looking over here.”

“He looks at everyone. It’s his hobby.” She drains her glass. “His brother’s the one who dances.”

As if he’s been called, a man appears at the end of our table. He’s shorter than the giant but still tall, handsome in a polished, easy way, with his collar open and his tie gone and a smile you can tell has had plenty of practice. He says something to Giulia in rapid Italian. She answers in a voice I haven’t heard her use before, flat and polite, and then he turns the smile on me.

“Piero,” he says, taking my hand and bowing over it in a way that should be ridiculous and somehow isn’t. “And you are the Australian. Everyone has been talking about the Australian.”

“Everyone’s had a lot to drink,” I say, and he laughs as though I’m the funniest person he’s met all year.

He asks me to dance. I glance at Giulia, half expecting her to rescue me or tease me, but she’s fiddling with her napkin and doesn’t look up. I put it down to family stuff. Cousins are complicated. I’ve got three of my own I’d happily push into a pool.

On my way to the dance floor I check the balustrade. The giant has gone.

Piero dances well. He spins me under his arm, tells me my eyes are the colour of the shallows at Mondello, more green than blue, which is cheesy, and makes fun of his uncle’s moustache, which is funny. The band is loud and the night is warm, and after three songs I’m sweaty and thirsty and my feet have started to complain. I excuse myself to find Giulia. She isn’t at our table, but there’s a full glass of champagne at my place, cold enough to fog, and I drink half of it in one go because it’s there and I’m parched.

After that, things stop joining up properly.

I remember the lemon trees leaning in a direction trees shouldn’t lean. I remember the band sounding as if it’s playing underwater, and searching for Giulia’s dark hair in the crowd and not finding it. I remember Piero’s hand on my elbow and his voice close to my ear, telling me I need some air, and I remember agreeing with him, because I did need air and my legs had gone strange. I remember the leather seat of a car, cool against my arm. A stairwell with a brass rail. A door.

Then there’s nothing at all.