Lawless - страница 8

‘We chose you out of all the little girls we could have brought home from the orphanage,’ Bella would say.

Bianca had no memory of the orphanage. All she did remember was a blonde woman, smiling. One of the nuns or matrons or whatever they were called, no doubt. And Tito, cuddling her in the family kitchen, saying she was his little sister, his precious one – with Vittore looking on, uninterested, and Fabio looking furious. Oh – and a bead of blood, dripping from a blade of grass. Weird. She must have fallen over when she was small, cut herself perhaps. Something like that.

‘Speak of the devil!’ said Claire, as Tanya came in the door, looking washed out.

‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘What the fuck time d’you call this?’ asked Bianca.

Tanya looked truculently up at the clock on the wall, brand new and still without its batteries, both hands stuck at the vertical.

‘Twelve,’ she said.

There was a brief, freezing silence.

‘Don’t even think about being bloody funny,’ said Bianca. ‘Carpet fitters are coming in today, and they’re late too, so get on the sodding phone and hurry them up, capisce? And you keep an eye on them when they get here, I don’t want to see any joins in awkward places, I want this to look the business.’

‘And what will you be doing?’ asked Tanya. It wasn’t her job to balls around looking at carpets. She was supposed to be in charge of the waiting staff, wasn’t she?

Bianca looked at her. ‘You got a hangover?’

‘A bit.’

‘Then I’ll make allowances. Not that it’s anything to do with you, but I’ll be interviewing doormen, if that’s all right with you, Tanya?’

Tanya shrugged. Sure.

‘OK, get on with it then, the lot of you. I’ll be up in the office.’

Bianca went upstairs. Cora and Claire looked at Tanya.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You don’t half push your luck,’ said Claire. ‘She ain’t in the mood for fun and games.’

‘She never flaming is,’ said Cora.

‘She’s on edge with all the decorating and stuff going on. She wants the place to look right. Tito’s trusted her with it, and she wants to impress him.’ They all knew how Bianca worshipped her eldest brother, Tito. Claire took a long pull at her cigarette, then stubbed it out in a black ashtray on the bar. ‘Let’s get on then, shall we…?’

Half an hour later, the carpet fitters arrived. And half an hour after that, Vittore Danieri showed up.

‘Bianca here?’ he asked the three women, who were pausing by the bar for a fag and a coffee.

Vittore had an authoritative way about him, like Bianca; he was big, blockish like Tito, robust and tough-looking and ugly with a hooked nose, receding black hair and bulging dark brown eyes. There was a stillness, a hardness about him – and he looked somehow polished like Tito too, in the way that rich guys did.

‘Why hasn’t he got a neck?’ they’d joked between themselves when they first set eyes on him. Vittore’s head was set low on his shoulders and it poked aggressively forward; he didn’t seem to have a neck, it was true, but then he didn’t seem to have a sense of humour either, so they maintained a show of respect in his presence.

‘Bianca’s upstairs,’ said Tanya, her eyes catching his.

She thought of it as turning on the headlights. She turned them on now, gave him full beam, eyelashes fluttering, You want some of this? She knew he was married, but she didn’t give a toss about that. Of course, she would prefer to have Tito, but Vittore would do. The family was loaded, and all the brothers – even that vain little tit Fabio who’d come down here once trying to chuck his weight about – had an aura of power that appealed to her.

‘Right,’ said Vittore, and passed by all three of them without a second glance.

‘Shit,’ said Tanya, shaking her head. ‘Am I losing it, or what?’

‘Girl, you never had it to lose,’ laughed Cora.

‘Yeah, funny,’ said Tanya, and Claire gave a smirk.

‘Come on,’ sighed Claire. ‘Work to do…’

Bianca wasn’t particularly surprised to see Vittore show up unannounced. She was thrilled that Tito had entrusted her with the start-up of Dante’s, after she had spent several years learning the business up in London; but she was under no illusions. He was expecting her to fail, to need bailing out at any moment.