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Except for me.
In the weeks following my visit with Ernest Adams, I am certain I will join the rest. The list of souls lost inmoy brat’squest for greatness.
Every move I make, as I go into deep hiding in Old Northam, I am questioning if today will be my last. The time he finally comes for me now that my betrayal is all but known.
It was not always this way.
Weenduredtogether. We shared the same dark spaces, and discovered the same freedom in that darkness.
My mother was not an innocent woman. A member of the Kozlov organization, she lost her standing when her husband, my father, was murdered in a violent gunfight against an Italian crime family known as the Crotones.
We found ourselves destitute. I was small. At my age, I did not understand what was happening. I was simply content to be with Mama. We lived in many villages, moving often with what little belongings we had.
Though she managed to keep me clothed and fed as a cook, she knew she could not be alone. Not if she were to raise me.
So she searched for a way to change her life and found it in a man that was visiting the country on business. He stopped by the shoddy café where Mama worked and delighted in the Russian foods she prepared for him.
Mario Maldini was whatLa Cosa Nostracall acapoin the Crotone family. In time, the Crotones and Kozlovs had worked out a truce to end their violent feud and agreed to join forces and flourish as allies. My mother was grateful when it dawned on her that she had caught the eye of another powerful man.
Even if it were one from a once rivaled crime family and a man not of Russian descent.
One of my first memories is of him. Someone was at the door of our weathered cottage, and I hurried in my boyish excitement to answer. Mario Maldini was on the doorstep, a round, tall man with a bulbous nose and grimace for a smile.
He told me to ‘scram’ and invited himself inside in search of Mama.
I did not like him. He had an evil spirit and beady eyes.
My childish instincts told me to run. For me to get away while I could.
But Mama loved him. Every time he showed up, she devoted attention to him. If I made myself a nuisance, she locked me in the closet, and told me to go to sleep. I listened until I could not sleep anymore—someonewas twisting the knob to come inside.
I liked Mr. Maldini’s visits even less after that.
Eventually, he invited Mama away. He said that we could live a very different life if we left with him. Mama had so little to her name, she agreed. I had never been to America. It represented a whole new world for us.
Though, I did not like my new step-father, I stayed out of his way. I hid in dark spaces and prayed he would not find me, though sometimes he would.
Closets did not make me invisible. Neither did the dark.
Hope came in the form of Mama’s full belly. She waspregnant!
I asked every day for a little brother. Nine months later, my prayers were finally answered.
A round baby brother almost a spitting image of his father. Beady eyes and a round body. What to name him?
Mama begged for his last name. For my baby brother to carry the Maldini name. She was denied. He was Volchok.
Aleksander Volchok.
Mr. Maldini would not even allow his first name to be after him. It was soon after that Mama discovered she was not the only lover in Mr. Maldini’s life. She was just thenewest.
He had other mistresses. He had a wife and children elsewhere.
We were not his family.
The same applied to baby Aleksander. Mr. Maldini did not truly see him as his son. He was Mama’s son.
A bastard son as it is so often called.
