Lawless - [6]

Blood will flow.

And God help them all, because it did.

5

There was something awesome about Bianca Danieri, with her straight fall of silvery white-blonde hair, her lily-pale skin and her turquoise-blue eyes. And she knew it. Exploited it, in fact. To emphasize the whiteness of her hair and skin, she always wore white. The woman in white, pale as the proverbial ghost; that was Bianca. Even her name meant ‘white’. She could nail a room in one second flat, turn the attention of everyone in it directly to her.

Bianca was twenty-five years old and for the first time ever her brothers had trusted her enough – or Mama Bella had nagged them sufficiently – to run one of the just-about-to-launch new Danieri family discos. This one was in Southampton at the Back of the Walls, where the ancient city fortifications still stood. Not a prime site in London’s West End like the ones the family already owned, oh no – not like Tito’s, or Fellows or Goldie’s; of course not. Bianca had to prove herself in the wasteland of the sticks first. Well, so what? Prove herself she would.

The disco was to be called Dante’s – Bianca’s own choice, she liked the idea of replicating an inferno in here – and the red, black and gold paint was still tacky and stinking the place out. The kitchens had been fitted over the past week, the black carpets (which wouldn’t show the inevitable stains) were being laid today, then the furnishings were coming in. The sparks were in now, fiddling with the strobes. It was all hands to the pump.

‘Hey, Cora, you listening?’ said Bianca. ‘Drayman’s delivering at eleven, you sort him out, OK?’

Cora, a tall redhead who’d been running bars since before Bianca was born, nodded.

‘And Tanya… where the hell’s Tanya?’

While Cora was in charge of bar staff, Tanya was here to manage the waiters and waitresses, or rather ‘hosts’ and ‘hostesses’. They would be working front-of-house, dressed in fetching little devil costumes, and red horns. Red wings had been discussed as an option, but Bianca had dismissed that idea. ‘Take up too much room,’ she said. ‘You turn around, knock a punter’s drink flying. Nah. Silly idea.’

‘Tanya had a hot date last night, I heard,’ said Claire, a tiny brunette already puffing on her twentieth cigarette of the day.

‘I told her to get in early.’

Cora and Claire exchanged looks. They both knew that Tanya had been moonlighting at Nero’s, a club in Portsmouth where the girls were all tricked out in dinky little togas. They also knew that if Bianca found out about this, she would grab Tanya by the throat and give her seven kinds of shit before kicking her smartly out the door. You didn’t mess with Bianca.

‘She’ll be in soon,’ said Cora loyally.

‘She’d better be.’ Bianca might look like a cool blonde angel, but she wasn’t up for being taken for a mug, not now, not ever. She’d been adopted into a fierce immigrant family, and had absorbed their ways; she wouldn’t take any shit. And it mattered so much to her that this went right. So much.

She was special and she knew it. Bella was always telling her so.

‘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…?’