Mistress

Father was a spy? And that’s why Mother was so despondent all that time? She found out that her husband was a traitor. She didn’t know what to do.

When it’s over, when I’ve wiped my face and my nose and caught my breath again, I look over at Andrei. He opens a hand to me. I return to his bedside and hold it.

“My good…Benjamin,” he whispers. “If the…truth…came out…they said…they would kill…they would kill you next.”

“Father was protecting me?” I say the words as though they’re poison on my tongue.

“Your father came home…and found her dead. The Chinese told him…they could not…be implicated…nor could…he. You were…the only choice. Benjamin…your father…took every…step…to ensure your acquittal.”

No matter how my mind is spinning right now, no matter what avalanche of memories besieges me right now, even I would concede that point. I had the best lawyers and I did, after all, beat the charges.

“Is this why I never went to school? Is this why I had private tutors and hardly ever left home until college?”

Andrei nods. “He feared…for your…safety.”

Everything is upside down. Every belief I held about him-wrong.

“Years later,” says Andrei, “we finally…caught your father. It was…too embarrassing to publicly…reveal. He cooperated and…was placed…”

“Under house arrest,” I say. He was placed under house arrest at his cabin. That’s why he stayed there and never let me come, all those years, until he died. He didn’t want me to know.

“A traitor, yes,” says Andrei. “But a traitor who…loved his son.”

No. No. This is too much. Overload. System failure.

I hear myself speak but I don’t know what I said, and then I’m pacing around his den, and then the air outside is somehow cold, stinging my skin, up is down, down is up, someone else is inhabiting this body, it’s not me, I’m not Ben, and car horns are honking and tires are skidding and someone is cursing me, and then I’m running, I’m running as fast as I can and it feels good, it feels right, and I’m laughing and I’m crying, and it feels liberating, it feels normal-

Jimmy Carter is credited as the first president to routinely jog. He did it mostly for stress release. But since then almost every president has jogged except Reagan, who was probably too old to do it regularly, and George W. Bush, who had to give it up after knee pain. Reagan was a former lifeguard who preferred swimming, as did Kennedy to relieve back pain, and John Quincy Adams regularly started his days by swimming nude in the Potomac, funny story about that…

THREE THOUSAND MILES east of balmy Serra Retreat, it was cold and raining along the still-dark shore of southwestern Connecticut. Downstairs, in his basement workout room, Michael Licata, recently appointed don of the Bonanno crime family, was covered in sweat and grunting like a Eurotrash tennis pro as he did his Tuesday kettlebell workout.

As he felt the burn, Licata thought it was sort of ironic that out of all the rooms in his new $8.8 million mansion on the water in moneyed Westport, he liked this unfinished basement the best. The exposed studs, the sweat stains on the concrete, his weights and beat-up, heavy bag. Pushing himself to the limit every morning in this unheated, raw room was his way of never forgetting who he was and always would be: the hardest, most ruthless son of a bitch who had ever clawed his way up from the gutter of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The short and stocky fifty year old dropped the forty-pound kettlebell to the concrete floor with a loud crack as he heard the intercom buzz on the basement phone. It was his wife, he knew from bitter experience. Not even six-thirty a.m. and already she was on his case, wanting some bullshit or other, probably for him to pick up their perpetually late housekeeper, Rita, from the train station again.

And he’d imagined that by working from home instead of from his Arthur Avenue social club in the Bronx, he could get more done. Screw her, he thought, lifting the bell back up. The man of the house wasn’t taking calls at the moment. He was freaking busy.

He was stretched out on the floor, about to do an ass-cracking exercise called the Turkish get-up, when he looked up and saw his wife. She wasn’t alone. Standing there in the doorway with her was his capo and personal bodyguard, Ray “The Psycho” Siconolfi.

Licata literally couldn’t believe his eyes. Because how could it be possible that his stupid wife would bring Ray here, into his sanctuary, to see him shirtless and sweating like a hairy pig in just his bicycle shorts?

“You’re kidding me, right?” Licata said, red-faced, glaring at his wife as he stood.

“It’s my fault?!” Karen shrieked back at him, like his very own silk-pajama-clad witch. “You don’t answer the frigging phone!”