Title Page

The

White

Devil

––––––––

a novel by

Domenic Stansberry

Molotov Editions

San Francisco, California

Copyright Page

Molotov Editions

5758 Geary Blvd. #221

San Francisco, CA, 94121

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

The opening chapter of this novel, in much different form, was previously published  in The Massachusetts Review.

Copyright © 2016 by Domenic Stansberry. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any matter whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Cover design Domenic Stansberry with Darcy Fray. Book layout adapted from template licensed through BookDesignTemplates.com

Library of Congress Control Number:  2016903713

Hard Bound: 978-0-9967659-0-9  Trade Paper: 978-0-9967659-1-6

First Edition

The White Devil

“She hath no faults, who hath the art to hide them.”

John Webster

PART ONE

1.

There’s been another murder, this one in Los Angeles, in the sand under the Palisades. Both of my husbands are dead. I am young to have been married twice, let alone widowed.

Others are dead, too—a woman I admired; a boy.

I have taken refuge in a distant city, in a second-story flat off the Avenida. It’s an older neighborhood, where the once stolid houses now smell of decay. The front gate is iron, the windows barred. At the end of the Avenida the shanties start up, sprawling over the canyons and railroad gullies onto the pampas. Before this, I lived a different kind of life. There were stories.

I do my best to stay out of sight . . . to remain anonymous . . . but I get weary sometimes . . . reckless . . .

I wander onto the balcony in my nightgown, foolish, a little bit drunk. A car door slams.

I hear a man out in the street. He speaks in Spanish, “puta”—hissing in my direction, I think, but no, a woman staggers alongside him, a girlfriend or wife, a mistress, someone used to his insults. They muck along the dark avenue, insulting each other, then embrace in a dark cranny.

I envy them, even though it’s embraces like that which have gotten me in so much trouble.

I tell myself I am safe in this sprawling city, that I have escaped—but only a few days ago a woman recognized me, I fear, a cashier who studies the gossip sites. This has happened before. I let my guard down in the way I walk or dress. I remove my glasses while examining a necklace in a window or a menu at a café—and some clerk, some passerby, a couple two tables over, their eyes spark with recognition.

There is no such thing as a secret life.

Not for me.

Blink and I am captured. Whereabouts known.

With the cameras not far behind.

And others.

Who wish me greater harm.

2.

This all started in Rome, not long ago. It wasn’t quite the Rome of my imagination, full of motor scooters and ruins, an endless film set where I might wander in a sleeveless dress, immune to heat and noise. I was naive that way. The streets were dirty and hot. Flies swarmed the Colosseum. The spring was so short that year, nonexistent. Everything stank of itself. The Italians in their bright synthetics. The Pakistani vendors. The streets, too, the old stones, the restaurants, the English women with their toy dogs drenched in cologne.

It wasn’t what I’d expected, but I grew to like it: my own stink mixed with all the others, the dampness beneath my clothes when I went walking or sat with my legs crossed on the metro.

I lived with Frank Paris, my first husband, in a small flat by the Tiber. He was running out of money, but it wasn’t something we talked about. I had my own secrets. Maybe it’s the same with everyone, I don’t know: a place inside, an emptiness, where matters get lost. At night Frank would lie there and study my features. The curtain billowed and the shadows moved. He didn’t press me, not at first. I lay with my eyes closed, feigning sleep—but I felt him watching. He’d kiss my cheek, run a finger down my leg.

Frank was quite a bit older than me. He was a thin man with sandy gray hair and a nose something like a boxer’s—a bit crooked, pushed to one side. Despite that injury, or maybe because of it, his face had a wry character. I liked that about him. I liked touching his wide, battered nose and straddling him in the dark . . . I put my hand on his gray chest . . . He disappeared underneath me . . . Then he rolled me over and I disappeared, too . . . Eyes closed, falling into the darkness, we might have been anyone . . . his tongue, my tongue, his hands on my breasts, my legs in the air . . . Our sweat soaked through the sheets, the mattress damp like a riverbed . . . How I met Frank—he’d helped me out of a situation in Dallas involving my brother and an ex-boyfriend that had ended in a pretty ugly way.

I tried not to think about that, and Frank never mentioned it.

When we were done in bed, we’d go outside.

I walked beside him with nothing in my head—no past, no future—feeling just barely outside myself in the Italian night. I liked being empty like that. I liked the sultriness of the night, the dampness and the heat. We ended up under the umbrellas by the Tiber. Frank drank. Sitting there—in that black night, watching the people, listening to them laugh and flirt—I ached with vagrant desire. A longing to become someone else, to disappear. Afterward, we strolled along the glistening river.

All of that now seems like it happened to someone else.

Frank stopped on the bridge. He got morose all of a sudden, and whatever youth remained fell out of his face.

“There’s something I need to tell you . . .”

“Hush,” I said.

He let it go. He kissed me instead. That was how it was between us. He put his arm around my waist and dropped his hand onto my hip. He liked to feel me move against him as we walked. Meanwhile I could feel the young Italian men, loitering there along the river wall, watching as we passed.

––––––––

After my brother, Johnny, came to Rome, things changed. It would be easy to blame Johnny: his smile, his brown eyes and tousled hair. Strictly speaking, Johnny wasn’t my brother but my half brother. We were very close: almost inseparable.

My brother had always been a bit of a delinquent, but he knew how to take care of himself. He had his own apartment across the Tiber, and work that took him back and forth from Naples. He spoke Italian well and had a way of getting around, slumming it, working both sides. He moved in circles you might not expect.

I went with him sometimes to the clubs. On one of those nights Johnny introduced me to Paolo Orsini, an Italian senator who’d spent time in New York. Because Orsini was a bit of a celebrity—nice-looking and married to a famous woman—Johnny thought we should meet.

“Mia sorella bella,” my brother said. “The actress and poet. Vittoria.”

This was typical Johnny. I’d done some acting, it was true—more modeling, if I am honest—but I wasn’t a poet. That was just Johnny talking. The name, one I’d taken since coming to Rome, wasn’t mine, either.

My real name was Vicki.

Vicki Wilson.

“We’ve met,” said Paolo.

“Oh?”

The man’s eyes went shy. He had black, unruly hair. The way he looked at me, dark eyed and glassy, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with himself—I hadn’t expected that.

“Not actually . . . but I saw you, at the Cinema Aventine,” he explained. “So I’ve admired you from a distance . . .”

He was speaking of my brief appearance in a film by the Italian director Marino. It was a small role, won partly by chance: because of a night like this, some time back, stumbling into a casting director, a small, ruddy man I hadn’t taken seriously at first. I looked the part, the man said. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact my husband was a writer, or had been once. Though I was American and my Italian could be clumsy, the audience had found the moment arresting. I had been written about in the expatriate newspapers and featured in Roma, one of the Italian gossip sites.

Stellita, they called me.

“Little star.” Or “little knife.” I was never quite sure of the translation.

In the scene my hair was pulled back from my face, and the camera lingered on the knowing expression in my character’s eyes, the flirtatious engagement I held with the camera.

Like I said, it hadn’t amounted to much. There’d been some modeling afterward, for an Italian department store, but that was all done.

––––––––

We were at the Purple Café, an American bar in the Testaccio district not far from the Circus Maximus. The Purple was an older place no longer in the guidebooks. Its heyday had passed, but the place could still come alive. Going there, you felt as if you had slipped back into another decade. I often felt like that. At the moment, a jazz group from Barcelona was playing.

My brother had gotten to know Orsini through one of his clients in Naples. Johnny did procurement work for a cruise line catering to wealthy travelers. He had his own reasons for introducing us, but I didn’t mind. Orsini was somewhere in his forties, not young exactly, but a good deal younger than Frank, and I was flattered by his attention. The jazz played in the background, an old tune I couldn’t quite recognize, mixed with something else, a fusion of sorts, the melody playing as if on the verge of falling apart. I could smell the crowd, the perspiration and the alcohol. Their smartphones glowed in the dark. It was a warm night, and people were looking at us, recognizing Orsini and muttering his name, his name and his wife’s, about whom there were always stories.

Orsini touched my shoulder. I wore a strapless dress and turned at his touch.

“My husband . . .”

“What about him?”

“He should be here soon,” I said. “He’s a little late.”

Orsini gave me a look. The shyness was gone. He had brown eyes, almost black. Every woman sees eyes like these on occasion—or imagines them in the shadows, like the eyes of those Italian boys down by the river. Most often, you don’t look back.

This time was different.

It was one of those moments when you feel like you are meeting a familiar, someone you knew in another life, for better or worse, and are destined to know in this one, as well.

I saw myself from that place outside myself: standing there in my strapless dress, dark eyed and foolish, a little bit gangly.

“We should find a table?”

All this while my brother stood close by watching. He smiled at me in the way only Johnny could.

––––––––

Because of the way Johnny and I are with each other, people make insidious comments. Nasty things I will leave to your imagination. It’s always been that way, ever since we were kids. We touch, we hold hands, we go places together. You’d think the Italians, with their love of family, would understand this kind of thing, but their minds, too, roam the gutter.

There are reasons Johnny and I are so close.

We grew up in Houston, in one of those aging suburbs meant by the original developers to look like Palm Springs, except the houses were smaller, without central air, and the effect—of all those sharp angles hovering over the shrubbery—was of a place that didn’t quite exist. We didn’t fit in. We weren’t Texans, not really. Our accents were wrong. Our mother was from a little town outside Chicago—a good family, she insisted—but Johnny’s father had ditched out before he was born. Afterward, my mother married an oil engineer. That man was my father. I don’t remember much about him—just a vague shape, a face hovering over me—but there were other men after. Some of those men were good to us, some weren’t.

Like I said, there are reasons Johnny and I are so close.

My mother did what she could. She found money for private schools. When Johnny was older he had to go away for a while, but he caught up with me later, in Dallas, when I was in college.

That was where the incident occurred . . . that ugly business I didn’t much want to think about . . .

It involved a young man, the close-cropped type you see at places like SMU . . . thick shoulders, gray eyes . . . polite on the surface, like all those Texas boys . . . yes, ma’am, no, sir . . . but brazen underneath . . . I was used to that, but this one, there was something off . . . Not in the usual way but somehow else . . . not entirely stable . . . Johnny brought him over after a long night in a bar, high as a kite . . . That’s how I met him . . . His family had money. He liked to buy me things . . . jewelry . . . clothes . . . but eventually, well . . . He was obsessive and had a hard time letting go . . . He followed me to the grocery, to class . . . He paced around outside my apartment building . . . Johnny tried talking to him, telling him it was over, to let me be. They got pretty loud . . . pushing and shoving . . . The guy disappeared for a while . . . Then late one night he came back . . . he got into the building . . .

The maintenance woman found him the next morning, around dawn, heaped on the concrete, in the service alley six floors beneath my balcony.

There was a good deal of confusion about what had happened. Johnny and I weren’t home when the police came by, not the first time. The girls next door, sorority sisters, said they’d heard noise in our apartment the night before, the sound of a scuffle, someone running down the hall. The forensics—the nature of the injuries, the shattering of the skull, the broken neck—together with the state of congealment—confirmed the impression that he’d fallen to his death from some sixty feet above, the distance from my balcony to the pavement, and that this had happened about two in morning. The lab tests showed alcohol in his blood, also Risperdal and amphetamines. The police found latents on my railing but of course there would be. He’d visited more than once.  His parents were wealthy, like I said, and insisted on a full investigation.

Despite the sorority girls, the detectives could not put Johnny and I at the scene, not definitively. Meanwhile, the dead boy had a history. A key to my apartment he’d never returned. Manic episodes, suicidal behavior. He‘d overjuked on his meds before, after a broken engagement, and driven his car into a pylon on the Galveston causeway. There was nothing to say he hadn’t come unhinged again. Suicide: entering the apartment while I was gone and pitching himself from the balcony.  Ultimately there was not enough evidence to prove either way. Even so, the investigation might have remained open if Frank Paris hadn’t stepped forward, insisting that on the night in question my brother and I had been with him at his apartment. Frank had a position at the university then—a one-year post. The parents called him a liar. They were grief stricken and wanted to blame their son’s death on someone. On Johnny and me, I guess, for luring him into our lives.

“This man,” my mother said. “This Frank Paris. Just because he testified, it doesn’t mean you owe him anything.”

“He has an apartment in Rome.”

“Rome?”

Her black eyes fluttered. She had a nice figure, my mother, more voluptuous than mine. She filled her dresses in way I’d always envied, ever since I was a child, but would never match.

“You’ve always been this way,” she said. “Off in some world of your own. But you get yourself in these situations with men. And your brother, he . . .” She hesitated. “Your poor brother, he does his best to get you out.”

I said nothing.

“This Frank Paris . . . a man his age . . . It might be good now,” she said. “But in a few years . . .”

I understood where she was headed. Most men don’t die all of a sudden but slowly, like old trees rotting from the inside—but I didn’t care. After what had happened, I couldn’t live in Dallas anymore, or even Houston. Texas society is a small town.

“I’m a pariah now.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll fly out to see you.”

“In Italy?”

“I’ll visit you in Rome.”

“His apartment is small.”

“We can walk the Spanish Steps.”

“Not right away.”

“Pardon?”

I could hear in her voice the flat, sad sound of the midwestern town where she’d grown up.

“As soon as we get settled.”

“I’m not planning to move in with you.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I want you to come. I miss you already.”

Maybe everyone feels this way after the fact, I don’t know. Truth was I didn’t miss her, at least not as much as I should have. Rather I felt her disappear into that empty space inside me, in the dark hollows, in one of her tight-fitting dresses that flattered her figure. Then one day my brother stopped by Frank’s place in Rome, on the Campo de’ Fiori, to tell me she’d died in a car accident along the Biloxi coast. She had been riding in a convertible with the top down, in the passenger seat, her latest husband behind the wheel.

“It’s just us now,” Johnny said.

“Poor Mama.”

I didn’t cry, not then. Johnny let loose and I petted him. He put his head against my chest. I stroked his hair. He could be very sweet, and I comforted him the best I could.

––––––––

I should have stepped away then—from Paolo and my brother, that night at the Purple Café—but people at the tables nearby were cutting glances in our direction and bending their heads toward one another, whispering. Paolo Orsini attracted attention. He was a good-looking man whose face was often in the news, and in the scandal sheets, too. Much of the attraction had to do with the fact he was married to Isabella.

Maybe that attracted me, too.

Isabella was an actress, famous for her dark-eyed pout, her round cheeks, her role as the ingenue once upon a time, stumbling about the ruins in a tattered dress. She was older now, but her allure hadn’t faded. She might no longer appear in American films, and Italian directors, too, might have abandoned her for younger stars, but the Italians themselves clung to her. At the same time, the tabloids relished Paolo’s inconstancies.

The marriage was on the skids.

Paolo was a gigolo and a brute.

He had taken control of Isabella’s estate, owned an interest in an online casino, and played silent partner in a construction firm controlled by the Mafia.

The truth of such stories was hard to know. The details of his life with Isabella were often contradictory.

“Over here—a table,” said Johnny.

We started moving, the three of us, toward a table my brother had found in another corner of the room, and as we moved I felt myself stepping into some old-fashioned world—full of glamour and gossip, striped beach chairs and cocoa lotion and mint drinks in tall glasses. Gangsters in swimming trunks and sunglasses.

Johnny winked at me.

My brother had curly hair and soft eyes. Because of those eyes, he could communicate inexpressible things with a nod of his head. Though my brother had his flaws, he watched out for me. We had that bond. I looked where he was looking and saw Frank Paris making his way across the room. Frank hadn’t spotted us yet. The way he walked, his posture, you could tell Frank was American. He wore a white shirt open at the collar, and jeans. He was a vigorous man but these last months that vigor had started to fade. He’d been drinking more, slipping into old habits, gambling.

His face still held that wry smile.

I made room for him at the table.

“What kept you?”

“Correspondence.”

“Business?” my brother asked. His eyes met mine. Johnny knew about Frank’s money problems.

“An old friend,” Frank said. “E-mail. That’s all.”

“I hear you are a famous writer,” Paolo said. “Your brother-in-law has told me all about you.”

When he was younger, Frank had written a novel about a young man who ruined himself gambling on horses. It was a book of an autobiographical nature, neglected in America but adored by the French, who’d made it into a movie that had a lingering reputation. The interest in horses was something Paolo and Frank shared. Paolo kept a small stable outside his villa in Florence and owned a stallion who had run in the Palio di Siena a few years earlier.

“The stallion is a handsome animal,” Paolo said. “You should see him.”

“I’d like to ride him.”

Paolo hesitated. “He can be hard to handle.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Frank. He grew up around horses,” said Johnny. He often flattered Frank a little too much, overdoing it. “And anyway, he’s quite the famous writer.”.

“Just the one book,” said Frank.

“And influential with the Roman clergy.”

“Hardly,” said Frank.

“What do you mean?” asked Paolo.

“Cardinal Whiting is his uncle.”

“Well, then, perhaps he will make me pope,” said Paolo.

We laughed then, and Frank Paris laughed too—though uncomfortably, since his uncle was an embarrassment to him, a public moralizer, influential in certain circles but with a worldview inimical to his own.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!