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“Then I see this car, big black thing, pulling up behind me. A door opens.” Her voice faded and Leah began to tremble in his arms again, lips quivering. “I just ran. I didn’t wait to find out, but I’m sure one of them was reaching out for me!”
“They didn’t give chase?” he queried.
She shook her head. “I can run fast, even in these shoes. If they had come at me, I was going to throw the bottle at them. I think somebody was cleaning their car on the driveway, he might have seen it all, scared them off chasing.”
He cradled her again, let her feel his hands about her body, holding her tight. Rick screwed his eyes up tight and cursed to himself. It was his worst nightmare come true. She might think the unwelcome attention was due to her wealth, but he thought differently.
He no longer could hide the truth from her. She deserved to know why she was vulnerable. He couldn’t protect her if she didn’t understand the risks to them both.
“I lied,” said Rick. “I didn’t go to Italy. I passed through it and went to Sicily.”
* * *
“Sicily!” Leah sat bolt upright in on his lap. The expression on his face had changed—darker with a layer of sadness descending hard onto his features. She levered herself off him and onto a nearby chair. He didn’t stop her.
“My full name isn’t Richard, it is Riccardu. A Maltese name, my mother insisted. I use it when I’m abroad because it is on my passport
. It is a familiar name to the Italians; they would understand its origins. Why else would they employ an Englishman?”
“To do what?”
“I thought it was the usual. Rich man with land, somebody with connections. I drove him, along with others on the roster. It is the lowest position in the hierarchy of his henchmen.”
“Henchmen?” said Leah, creeping forward on the edge of her chair, her tears forgotten as she listened enthralled.
“It was the best I could get. I really wanted to experience life on the Med, except I couldn’t face going to Malta. Bumping into my mother… Sicily, golden landscape, warm weather, and a slow idyllic pace, especially after the hectic one in Switzerland.” Rick buried his face in his hands for a few seconds. “How wrong. So bloody stupid.”
Leah waited, trying hard to keep her impatience at bay. Rick had to explain in his own time.
“All went well for the first couple of months. There was the legitimate side of his business and I saw only that at first: trips to Naples, other cities. The boss, he seemed friendly enough, most of the time. His wife, charming. What was there not to like? I lived in a bunker with others, my Italian improved, and they took me in without questioning my upbringing. Then one day I drove him, the boss, with another and they spoke at length about issues, problems with shifting money about. My Italian had reached the point when I could follow such complex conversations. I don’t think they realised how quick I am with languages, even dialects. I’m supposed to be the deaf foreign mute. What they said, it clicked into place. They were laundering money.”
“Laundering?”
“Washing dirty money through businesses and making it clean.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Drugs, racketeering, you name it.”
Leah understood; Rick’s boss was part of the criminal underclass, the mob, the mafia. “Shit.”
“Yes, my thoughts too. Naively, I thought I could just simply ignore it all. Drive, open doors, keep my eye on his wife while she went shopping. It became apparent why he was so protective of her. It is like a war out there, all of these so-called families, waiting to stab each other in the back. Nobody trusts anyone. I think they took me on because I was fresh, untainted.”
“So you left,” said Leah.
“How I wished I had done that straightaway. I was enjoying myself. Good food, sunshine, camaraderie. It was like being in the army, the career I missed out on. My asthma rarely troubled me. So I stayed. Then I found out what it really meant to be sucked into that life. One Sunday, I picked the boss up and drove him to this deserted farmhouse surrounded by lemon trees, and there was this other car.”
Leah had a growing sense of dread. Rick had gone strangely pale, his fingers rifling through his hair.
“They pulled him out of the boot,” he continued in a strained voice. “Just another, like me, a nobody, who had been foolish enough to take backhanders, pocketing money collected from the protection racket they ran. Caught, red-handed.”
“Oh, no,” said Leah horrified. “They killed him?”
“Not quite. Nearly. It is what I dream about, my nightmares come from that day and what I witnessed. I came so close to panicking, running off. I knew I couldn’t, I had to wait. I held out, drove the boss home, and then I threw up.”
“Thank goodness you left then.”
Rick sighed, a despondent noise. “Oh, I left, ran for it. It wasn’t that easy to do. They had my passport. At some point, they searched my belongings and took it. I asked for it back; they told me I couldn’t have it and that I was part of their family now. I couldn’t just leave, I knew too much. I had one friend out there, a true mate. He knew I was an outsider, and he understood I had not appreciated the nature of the people I worked for until it was too late. Sympathetic, he was able to get my passport back. He took me to the port and put me on a ferry to Naples. Giuseppe then fed some story that I had run off with a visiting tourist, had eloped. I came back to Liverpool believing it would be safe here; I didn’t think they would bother with me.”
