Chapter 2

Mafia Kings: Valentino: Chapter 2 I was the middle child of five kids. Our house was crazy – total chaos. The only peace I found was with my grandmother in the kitchen. She lived with us and cooked for the entire family.

My father was a bricklayer, and my mother was a schoolteacher. With so many mouths to feed, their salaries didn’t stretch nearly far enough.

My father was very serious. People used to joke that he was more German than Italian.

Always be early. If you’re on time, you’re five minutes late.

You owe your employer your very best efforts.

Never, EVER give less than 100%.

My mother prized getting good grades above everything else.

I was not serious at all, which irked my father – and I was terrible in school, which exasperated my mother.

Me?

I just wanted to cook.

My grandmother passed away when I was 11, and it was the saddest day of my life...

At least for another ten years.

But I kept on cooking and preparing all the family’s meals by myself.

I didn’t mind. I actually loved it. Working in the kitchen made me feel close to Nonna, like she was still with me.

I’ll say one thing: my parents never complained about my cooking. That was the one thing they didn’t criticize about me.

When I hit 12, I developed another obsession:

Boys.

I went boy CRAZY.

All I could think about was the cute boys at school. I would fantasize about kissing them.

I dreamed up ways of getting them to notice me. At first I tried making cannoli for them – hard pastry shells stuffed with sweet ricotta cheese and things like chocolate or nuts. They loved them, but they didn’t do anything but ask me for more cannoli.

When I finally got the attention I craved, it didn’t come from the boys in my own class – but older boys in school.

Much older.

I’m joking! They were only two or three years further along than me.

But they still seemed so worldly and cool.

Some of them even smoked.

Oooooh!

Real bad boys.

And I got plenty of their attention!

All it took was getting boobs.

I ended the school year flat-chested and came back the next fall more developed than every other girl in my grade level. All the older boys came flocking to me after that.

It was uncomfortable dealing with grown men leering at me, which felt icky and gross –

But cute boys a couple years older than me?

Bring it on.

I kissed a boy for the first time when I was 13.

I had sex for the first time when I was 14, with my first real boyfriend.

It was all downhill from there.

Sex and cooking and cute boys... that was all I could think about. Which distressed my parents to no end.

I kept my romantic activities secret by sneaking out at night. I’d learned from the best.

My older sister snuck out for years before she got married. She got pregnant at 18 from her boyfriend, which – since my parents were devout Catholics – meant automatic marriage. Her boyfriend would’ve been a dead man otherwise.

My sister was a huge cautionary tale for me. I knew I didn’t want to settle down yet, so I sure as hell couldn’t get pregnant. As a result, I always used condoms, and I got on birth control as soon as I could, just to be sure.

Anyway, my older sister had doled out a constant stream of candy to me and my sister so we wouldn’t snitch on her. Once she moved out, the candy stopped. But when I started sneaking around, I had to bribe my younger sister again, who demanded her cut every Friday afternoon. I used to tell her she was worse than the mafia about getting her ‘payments.’

I could hide my sneaking around... but I couldn’t hide my terrible report cards.

My mother and father both yelled at me non-stop, telling me I was ruining my life. But I already knew I didn’t want to go to university. University was for people who wanted to read and study – to become doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers...

Bleh.

In Italy, if you don’t want to go to university, you choose a profession while you’re a teenager and go to a school specifically for that. You basically choose your life path when you’re 15.

I went to a high school for the hospitality industry – an istituto professionale. That was the closest I could get to being able to cook all the time.

However, if my parents had told me there would be tons more cute guys at university, I might have done better in school.

My parents eventually found out about my ‘extracurricular activities.’ We lived in a small town, and people talked. Probably some boys bragged about sleeping with me, their parents overheard, they started gossiping about it, and then some busybody decided to inform my parents.

“I have to hear from other people that my daughter’s the town slut?!” my father raged.

That stunned me.

One, that he’d found out –

And two, that he would ever call me that.

It was horrible to hear him say it.

Not to mention it was totally unfair. Yes, I’d slept with a few more guys than other girls had – but almost everyone in my class was hooking up. It’s not like I was the lone sinner in a sea of saints. And I wasn’t sleeping with just anybody. Most of the time I had boyfriends, and I was always faithful to them while we were dating.

I just tended not to stay in relationships long. I got bored easily.

But once my parents knew, they clamped down hard. I couldn’t sneak out anymore at night, which sucked donkey balls.

My parents always compared me unfavorably to my brothers and sisters – my grades, my behavior, the way I dressed – but one day my mother said something that took the cake.

“Why can’t you be more like your sister and marry a nice boy?” she wailed.

“What, you mean the sister who snuck out just like I did, but got knocked up by one of the guys she was banging?” I said angrily.

My mother slapped me in the face.

I stared at her, stunned –

Then ran back to the bedroom I shared with my little sister and burst into tears.

Nonna would have never done that, I thought. Nonna NEVER would have hit me.

At that moment, I vowed to move out as soon as I possibly could.

I graduated a few months later at 17. By the way, all Italians who aren’t on the university track graduate at 17. It’s not like I did anything impressive.

As soon as school was over, I went looking for a job so I could get the hell out of my parents’ house.

The problem was that I came from a small town in Tuscany, the vast countryside in central Italy. Our town wasn’t a tourist attraction, so there wasn’t a lot of work in the restaurant business.

That’s why I moved to Florence, the nearest big city with tons of tourists.

My parents were happy to see me go. They made a lot of snarky comments about my sex life, but I just ignored them.

I was overjoyed to move to Florence. I lived with two roommates in a tiny apartment, but it was still less cramped than my family’s house.

And I could date as many cute guys as I wanted. And there were plenty of cute guys in Florence.

I went to parties and discos, drank too much, had fun with boys –

Everything was awesome. Except for one thing.

No good restaurants in Florence would hire me as a cook. Sure, I could work in a tourist trap and make 2000 gallons of spaghetti per day – but I didn’t want that. I wanted to work in a really good restaurant.

I didn’t mind chopping vegetables for two years and working my way up, but that wasn’t even a possibility. Everybody I interviewed with said I had to go to a fancy culinary institute first.

I told them I’d already learned how to cook from my grandmother, but they all laughed in my face.

Every girl who comes in here learned how to cook from her grandmother. You need more than THAT.

I didn’t have the money for a culinary institute, and I couldn’t ask my parents.

More accurately, I WOULDN’T ask my parents. I didn’t want to owe them anything or give them any sort of control over my life again.

Besides, I already knew they wouldn’t give me a cent. They’d say that if they gave me money, they’d be supporting my ‘loose lifestyle.’

The reality was they didn’t have any money to spare, anyway.

So I worked crappy jobs making 2000 gallons of spaghetti a day and tried to save my money to go to a culinary institute.

Unfortunately, I was as good at saving as I’d been at school.

I tried – I really did! It’s just that what little money I had left over every month magically disappeared.

For the first three years in Florence, life was great... until it wasn’t anymore.

I felt trapped in my horrible job.

I had fun with boys, but I never fell in love.

I began to get depressed...

And then one random bit of information changed my life forever.

I was visiting my parents for Christmas (always a fun time as they nagged and criticized me endlessly) when Aunt Giovanna came over for a drink.

Giovanna wasn’t my real aunt but my mom’s best friend. I’d known her all my life, and she treated me like her own daughter. And she wasn’t nearly as critical as my own mother.

Plus she had a bawdy sense of humor, which I loved.

As she was sitting there at our kitchen table, she bit into one of the pastries I’d made. That was what I did when I came home: I did all the cooking and baking for my family. I enjoyed it, and it (usually) kept my parents off my back.

“Mmf,” she moaned, her eyes rolling back into her head. “Caterina, your cooking is better than sex.”

I laughed.

Momma cried out indignantly, “Giovanna!”

“Well, it is. At least better than sex with Federico.” Federico was her husband of 30 years; they quarreled all the time. “When I can even get it, it’s over in three minutes – but I could eat your pastries all night.”

I laughed even harder. Momma scolded Giovanna some more.

“Tell me, piccolina,” Giovanna said, using the nickname she’d called me since I was a baby. It meant very small one. “Are you conquering the restaurant business in Florence?”

I snorted. “Hardly. I have a crappy job at a tourist joint that pays me minimum wage.”

“Well, if it’s money you want, my sister told me she heard the Rosolinis are hiring for their kitchen.”

Everyone in town knew about the Rosolinis. They were the richest family in Tuscany and lived about 30 minutes away from my town.

The Rosolinis lived in a palace – or so said the handful of men lucky enough to have done odd jobs on the property. The men would gossip about it over glasses of grappa in the town square, insisting that the mansion rivaled the Vatican in its splendor.

It had to be an exaggeration... but I was always curious about how big an exaggeration.

However, it was widely known that the Rosolinis were mafiosos.

There wasn’t any proof, exactly. They didn’t extort money from local businesses, which is what you would expect out of the mafia.

But the patriarch of the family was known as il Mostro – ‘the monster’ – because of stories about how he’d had some people killed 20 years ago.

Why, nobody knew for sure. But everybody would nod their heads knowingly and say, Mafia.

Several years ago, it was in all the newspapers that the oldest son went to jail for bribing judges in Florence.

He took the fall for il Mostro, everybody said. Mafia.

So the Rosolinis were not only rich...

They were dangerous.

As soon as she said they were hiring, my mother hissed, “Giovanna!”

“What?” Giovanna exclaimed indignantly. “That’s what my sister said!”

“No daughter of mine is going to work for – for them!” my mother snapped.

She couldn’t even bring herself to say the word ‘mafia.’

But I was intrigued.

Hesitant, yes –

But if I could make a lot more money than what I was making now –

And actually cook in a rich family’s kitchen?

I knew I had to find out more.

When Aunt Giovanna hugged me goodbye later that night, I whispered, “How would I apply for that job you mentioned?”

She gave me a sly smile. “I’ll ask my sister. She knows all the gossip.”