Montauk, Long Island, USA, August 1971
It started with the explosion. Or, rather, it finished. Annie’s life with Constantine Barolli, her married life with him, finished right there, on the day of his eldest son Lucco’s marriage to his dull little second cousin Daniella from Sicily.
It was a hot August night and the party was clearly going to go on into the small hours. The mariachi band was playing, the oceanfront house in the millionaire’s playground of Montauk was heaving with happy, laughing guests.
Annie stood alone on the deck, just a little light spilling out from inside the house, not much, and she thought of that later, realized that her eyes had played tricks on her. She was standing in the darkness by the edge of the terrace, and she was five months’ pregnant with Constantine’s child, and she was tired; she was relishing the cool breeze blowing in off the Atlantic Ocean, which stretched out, black as oil, to the lighter grey of the horizon.
Then the French doors opened and Constantine stepped out.
He smiled at her and picked up a present from the pile on the trestle tables just beside the door. Later, at ten o’clock, Constantine, the Godfather, the Silver Fox, would hand out the presents to Lucco and his new bride; but for now he was smiling at Annie and shaking the present as he lifted it from the table.
‘Hey, wonder what’s in this one?’ he said, and then it happened.
The explosion. Sudden, shocking; a mind-crippling upswelling whumph of sound and sensation.
She felt herself blown off her feet, lifted over the rail and dumped on to the sand of the beach, all the air punched out of her. She couldn’t hear, and her brain couldn’t offer up any logical reason for why she was lying there, staring at a seashell while black things rained down around her, scorched things, and fire was erupting on the balcony above her; the whole deck was quickly turning to matchwood.
To the world at large – more importantly, to the FBI and to other rival families and to those who worked even more closely against him – that was the point at which Constantine Barolli died.