Название: Mafia Princess
Автор: Marisa Merico
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Исторические детективы
isbn: 9780007332052
isbn:
Mafia Princess
THEY’RE LAWLESS.THEY’RE CRIMINAL.
THEY’RE FAMILY.
Marisa Merico
with Douglas Thompson
FOR LARA AND FRANK
‘The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.’
DODIE SMITH,
I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, 1948
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat:
‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat. ‘Or you wouldn’t have come here.’
LEWIS CARROLL,
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, 1865
Table of Contents
CHAPTER SIX COUNT MARCO AND THE DAPPER DON
CHAPTER TWELVE BETTER OR WORSE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN LA SIGNORA MARISA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN RAINY DAYS IN BLACKPOOL
CHAPTER FIFTEEN WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MEAN STREETS
CHAPTER NINETEEN FAMILY VALUES
‘Dream as if you’ll live for ever, live as if you’ll die today.’
JAMES DEAN, 1954
They shot dead my godfather with a 7.63 calibre pistol as he sat in his favourite barber’s chair waiting for a wet shave.
An explosive bullet from a high-precision rifle blew the top off my dad’s cousin’s head as he left his house, in the hurried moment between his front door and his armour-plated car.
An uncle of mine was gunned down by automatic fire as he was serving wine in his café-bar one lunchtime.
Soon after, the man who issued the orders for these murders was killed while in protective custody, as he took his Sunday morning exercise in the prison yard. A marksman aiming from a building outside the prison walls put a rifled, explosive bullet in his forehead.
With nearly seven hundred combatants and innocents already dead, the violence was escalating every day and my family was suffering. Which was why, at the age of nineteen, I agreed to drive South with a consignment of military weapons packed into the secret compartments of the family’s customised Citroën, the one that was usually used to traffic heroin.
We stacked machine pistols, handguns and rifles, clips of ammunition, bullet-proof vests and jackets on top of the heavier hardware: Kalashnikovs, those awesome AK-47S which can spray out 650 rounds a minute, and bazookas СКАЧАТЬ