Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Why not all of it?”

  Borneo smiled. The moustache he had started turned down at the corners, and the expression was melancholy. “Like you, I must live.”

  The cleaver came down slowly. “How much?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  Grapellini’s smile was not melancholy. Borneo saw in it that the butcher now considered him a tenth as important as Uncle Joe’s fat son.

  “Five hundred dollars a month for as long as Sorrato and everyone else leaves you alone to do business.”

  The smile went away. The cleaver ground curls of white maple out of the block.

  “I will let you think about it,” Borneo said. To aid him in his decision, he gave the butcher the names of three men to whom he might turn for references. One of them was Gilberto Orosco, the barber.

  When Borneo returned the next day, Grapellini did not pick up his cleaver. He finished wrapping a package of veal for a woman with thick ankles and a faint moustache, fumbling a little with the string, and thanked her for her order. When the bell tinkled behind her, he addressed Borneo as Signor Bornea and said that he was very much interested in the proposition he had made.

  Borneo was grave. “It was no less interesting yesterday. It is true that at the end of ten months you will have paid me as much as Carlo Sorrato is asking, and then the payments will continue. However, Carlo Sorrato does not offer a guarantee that he will not return in six months to demand another five thousand. Nor does he promise that you will not be bothered by others who will say that if Vito Grapellini can afford to pay Uncle Joe’s fat son five thousand dollars to leave him in peace, he can give us two hundred in return for the same service. It goes on, you see. There is no unity among these fellows. I will see that you are not bothered by them.”

  “I have no doubt that you can, now,” Grapellini replied. “The Sorratos are a different matter. The old man is dying, but Carlo has three brothers.”

  “A cockroach has six legs. They are harmless once you cut off its head.”

  “I will not pay for murder.”

  “I do not murder for pay. We are discussing an arrangement to insure your business and your person against loss and injury. Grapellini, I did not come here to say all over again what I said yesterday. Do you accept my proposition or not?”

  The butcher turned around. His cleaver and a number of knives with blue-edged blades were laid out on the back counter. When he faced Borneo again he was holding a thick envelope, smeared with bloody juice.

  Borneo did not take it. “You will pay me when we meet next. Do you open your cash register before you have cut and weighed your meat in full view of the customer? Satisfaction comes first.”

  The next day, Carlo Sorrato was found lying face-down on Riopelle Street, north of the Eastern Market, with his pockets turned inside out and his throat slit from ear to ear. The coroner’s physician who performed the autopsy, a young man named Edouard, reported that he hadn’t enough blood left in him to float a five-cent cigar. It was decided at the inquest that he had died at the hands of robbers. Salvatore Bornea was among those brought in for questioning. A salesgirl at Partridge & Blackwell’s department store named Graziella Carbone told police that at the time of the atrocity she and Borneo were watching the vaudeville show at the Temple Theater, after which they went roller-skating at the Pavilion. She produced ticket stubs in support of her claim. Borneo was released. Three weeks later, the couple married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. Vito Grapellini provided the meat for the reception at the Wayne Hotel.

  The murder of Carlo Sorrato was never solved. His brothers, Vincenzo, Gaetano, and Giuseppe Jr., offered a reward of a thousand dollars for the name of the perpetrator, but it was withdrawn after Vincenzo fell into the path of the Woodward Avenue streetcar and his right leg was amputated. His claim that he was pushed was investigated by the police, who reported that the incident was a regrettable accident caused by the eagerness of the homebound crowd to board the car. The same night, Gaetano found a note under his door advising him to forget about Carlo. A program for a dance recital featuring Gaetano’s five-year-old daughter was included in the envelope. Upon Vincenzo’s release from St. Mary’s Hospital, all three Sorratos and their families moved to Toledo, where they opened a market.

  Shortly after Vincenzo’s accident, other merchants began paying Sal Borneo to insure themselves and their businesses against injury and loss. He recorded the amounts in a ledger as dues paid to the Unione Siciliana, a benevolent organization of which he was founder and president. Two years went by, a period remembered as a time of peace within Detroit’s Italian community. Then Borneo entered Vito Grapellini’s shop on a day when his dues in the Unione were not expected. He said, “I have a proposition.”

  “Another one?” The butcher wiped his bloody hands on a rag.

  “This one will not cost you.” Borneo reached inside the coat of the suit he had ordered cut to his measure at C. R. Mabley’s in Cadillac Square and placed an envelope on the maple block. It contained $12,000 in crisp new hundred-dollar bills. “That is the money you have paid me for protecting yourself and your business since we made our agreement. I offer it back in return for controlling interest in your shop.”

  Grapellini smiled, but his eyes were troubled. He had grown to admire Borneo as a man of his word, but he feared him more than ever. “You want to be a butcher?”

  “Certainly not. I don’t know chuck from sirloin. I seldom even eat meat. I want you to go on running Grapellini’s Meats just as you have from the beginning. I will be your silent partner. We will share in the profits and I will not presume to tell you how a butcher’s shop should be run.”

  “Twelve thousand would buy the whole thing.”

  “As I said, I am not a butcher. I wish merely to share in the profits and to declare on government forms that I am a businessman in the city of Detroit.”

  “You could do that anyway. Who would dispute you?”

  “No one here, whom I can persuade by reason, or kill if he does not see things as clearly as I. The government is an ant heap. You can neither reason with it nor kill it.”

  The proposition was accepted, as both men knew it would be. Salvatore Bornea had himself listed in the city directory as a butcher, and entered the business community. Less visibly, he entered into Grapellini’s unspoken agreement with James Aloysius Dolan to furnish the Democratic Party with meat in return for 20 percent of the proceeds.

  Thus began the relationship that would carry the hidden city machinery into the twentieth century. The thing was not written about in the newspapers nor discussed except in back rooms in Corktown and in the public rooms of saloons among those who had nothing to gain or lose from it, but it was understood by people who could make neither head nor tail of the city charter, and accepted as far away as the state capital in Lansing as an essential ingredient in the grease that kept the democratic gears turning. At election time, young hooligans were paid by Borneo to tear down posters advertising the campaigns of candidates who opposed Dolan’s ticket; telephone lines into their headquarters were cut, vociferous supporters were beaten and robbed in the very streets their champions had pledged to make safe. Pugs employed by the Unione Siciliana plucked ballots from the hands of voters at the polls, made their marks next to the correct names, and dropped them into boxes, glaring silent challenges at would-be objectors. Dolan in his turn kept police away from Borneo’s brothels and horse parlors and, when the Sicilian received a note threatening the life of his newborn daughter if he did not put out ten thousand dollars with his empty milk bottles, stationed officers in front of his house twenty-four hours per day until the danger had passed. The officers were able to give witness to the fact that Borneo was secure at home the night an extortion suspect, a hooligan of Neapolitan descent, had his heart cut out on Mt. Elliott Street. (Two others involved in the attempt apologized, saying that they were forced into the scheme by the Neapolitan, of whom they were afraid. Borneo hired them to perform various err
ands, and was impressed with their efficiency and loyalty. He sincerely regretted it when they were taken by carriage to a point on the river near Flat Rock, forced to kneel on the bank, and shot in the back of the head. It was said in Sicily that your enemy is not your friend, no matter if he marries your daughter and fathers your grandchildren.)

  The Dolan-Borneo tie increased the wealth and influence of both parties, even as it caused grumbling among some of their acquaintances. Older Sicilians, not reconciled to Borneo’s ascendancy over the still-stricken Uncle Joe, referred disparagingly to him and his confederates as “the Irish,” and Assistant Party Chairman Brennan complained that you could trust a greaseball guinea to stick you in the kidneys when your back was turned and not a bit further; but even detractors could not dispute the advantages of the arrangement, and gave both men credit for not flaunting their association. Indeed, they had never met.

  Sal Borneo was built slightly and stood below the average height for his race, having survived a bout with smallpox at an age when most young men experienced their final growth spurt. The bones of his face were prominent, particularly the bridge of his nose, which hooked like a Sioux Indian’s. He had in fact grown out his moustache because it was less disadvantageous to be thought a foreigner than a New World savage. The pox had spoiled his complexion, made it mealy, but he had fine dark eyes with long lashes and excellent teeth, which he attended as closely as his diet. Some women thought him handsome. He was a good family man, however, and kept only one mistress, a waitress who lived in an apartment he maintained on Vernor Street and who led her friends to believe her benefactor was a stove-company executive living in one of the fine homes on Jefferson.

  What meals he ate outside his house he preferred to take in the little restaurant on Charlevoix Street. The food was only adequate, but the service was good without being effusive and he liked the wall murals, which reminded him of his boyhood in Siracusa. His father had been a fisherman there until he was mistaken by a vendettist for an enemy and murdered. Borneo was cheated of his vengeance when the man for whom his father was mistaken murdered the murderer. He shipped for America soon after to escape his grief and disappointment. New York City was too noisy for a boy from a small fishing village, and he had lacked the train fare as far as Chicago, where he had cousins; while stopping off in Detroit to seek employment to raise the difference, he had discovered something of home in the smell of the river, the elegant brick houses facing Canada, and the pushcarts and pomp of the saints-day parades in Little Italy. The stove makers and carriage builders were hiring immigrants and paying well. Chicago, he had felt, could get by without him. It had taken him just twenty years to rise from a common day laborer and street tough to a power in the city. In private, a great deal of argument would have been required to convince Sal Borneo that there was no gold beneath the asphalt.

  He had finished his meal and was reading the book he had brought, volume III of Gibbon, when he became aware that Bernardo, his waiter, was standing in front of his table. The old fellow was reluctant to interrupt his reading by addressing him or clearing his throat.

  “Yes?” He marked his place in the book with his finger.

  “Your pardon, Don Salvatore. A young gentleman wishes to approach your table.”

  Borneo looked past the fat waiter but did not recognize the stocky young man standing inside the entrance. He wore work clothes stained with grease and sweat.

  “Did he say what his business is?”

  “No, sir.” Bernardo appeared mortified that he had not this information to report.

  “What is his name?”

  The waiter closed his eyes, the better to concentrate upon the pronunciation. “Harlan Crownover.”

  “Crownover?”

  “Si, Don Salvatore. That is what he said.”

  Borneo closed his book. “Tell the young gentleman I would be delighted if he would join me. And please bring us a bottle of your best Chianti.”

  “Chianti?” The fat fellow beamed.

  “Yes, Bernardo. On certain occasions, health must walk behind.”

  chapter four

  The Prodigal

  AT THE DAWN OF THE century, news items relating to the manufacture and operation of automobiles were researched and written by sports reporters. Articles on “motoring” appeared beside photographs of gangle-jointed baseball pitchers and lists of first-, second-, and third-place finishers in the bicycle races on Belle Isle. Motormen were identified as fellows in goggles, ankle-length dusters, and leather gauntlets, a uniform as distinctive as the leather helmets and padding worn by college football players, and their arcane jargon peppered their interviews with the frequency of knucklers and breadbaskets in boxing pieces.

  Like most sporting men, these figures, manufacturers and race-car drivers alike, congregated in places that catered to them in herds. When Ransom Olds’s auto plant on Jefferson burned to the ground and the owner was sought for comment, when the rumor took flight that Henry Ford had decided to make a third run at the automobile business and reporters wanted to ask him why this attempt should be any more successful than the others, when one or the other of the Dodge brothers was out on bail on a complaint of discharging a firearm in a crowded restaurant and his side of the story was required, the men on the sports desks at the News, Times, and Free Press had only to send their reporters to one of five bars set yards apart along Detroit’s Campus Martius downtown. This was the toplofty designation set aside for the stretch of Woodward Avenue where the Seventh and Twentieth Michigan marched on their way to put down the Southern Rebellion, and where older residents remembered gathering in 1865 to bow their heads in memory of the martyred Abraham Lincoln.

  The Normandie, around the corner on Congress, offered a Louis Quatorze atmosphere of gilded paneling, a Brussels carpet, and bottles of imported liqueur, sparkling in rainbow colors along the back bar. On Woodward, Louie Schneider’s served dark ale and bitter German beers beneath Wagnerian prints, with the smell of sauerkraut sunk stud-deep into the walls. The Metropole was redolent of good cigars and aged brandy, its woodwork polished to an improbable finish, as if mirrors had been melted and poured over every horizontal surface. Up the block, across from the white porcelain and gleaming stainless steel of Sanders’ ice cream store, stood Churchill’s, paneled in mahogany, trimmed with brass, and decorated with cut crystal and Julius Rolshoven’s Brunette Venus reclining in nothing but a beaded frame behind the bar. The illuminati of the motor crowd went to the other places to celebrate the invention of a new fuel pump or to commiserate with one another upon a bank foreclosure; the vintage wines and single-malt Scotches of Churchill’s were reserved for impressing prospective partners or closing a deal involving thousands. Most of the auto men were separated by only a few years from a time when the batwing doors at the end of the entryway were as close as they dared come in their greasy overalls and muddy work boots.

  But ever and again they returned to the Pontchartrain. In the bar of that upstart hotel, in the company of prizefighters in photographs and Theodore Roosevelt’s abstemious portrait scowling above the beer pulls, they drank, ate the free lunch, compared war stories, and to the chagrin of hotel manager Bill Chittenden, who feared for the Persian rugs in the lobby, occasionally brought in pieces of their engines for the admiration and advice of their colleagues. There were dents all over the bar’s glossy oaken top where pistons had slipped through oily fingers and where manifolds and short blocks had been heaved up and slammed down with too much force. Most bars smelled of beer and cigars and moustache wax; the Pontchartrain smelled also of gasoline.

  Harlan Crownover found the bar nearly deserted at half past three Saturday afternoon. He’d expected nothing else, but he’d hoped for better. His news was too good not to share, but too big to wait until evening, when the ball game let out at Bennett Park and the room filled with friends and strangers stinking of bleacher sweat and mustard, rushing the season by wearing straw boaters before Memorial Day; the Jefferson Avenue elite, most of
whom would not set foot in the Pontchartrain, sniffed and said the next thing you knew some motorman would show up at the opera house in a woolen bathing suit.

  At that hour, Harlan shared the dim interior with the bartender, a new man whose name he hadn’t yet learned, a pair of strangers in derbies smoking cigars over brandy snifters in a booth at the back, and Horace Dodge, seated at the bar with a shot glass in his hand. Harlan sighed and went over to sit next to him. In general he found the Dodges, John and his brother Horace, loud, obstreperous ruffians, whose natural inclination to seek trouble wherever it resided, and to create it where it did not, was refined by drink into methods of torment not normally encountered outside the child’s battlefield of the playground. No one who told the story was sure whether it was John or Horace who had fired his revolver at the feet of a bartender at Schneider’s in order to persuade him to demonstrate an Irish jig, but it sounded more like John, who of the two was the more honest bully. Horace was the kind who crept up behind a victim on hands and knees for his partner to push the fellow over his back.

  This Harlan had learned from observation rather than experience, for he was exempt from their hectoring by reason of his birth. These two sons of the owner of a machine shop in rural Niles, Michigan, were always polite in their rough-hewn way to Harlan, a second-generation heir to an American business dynasty, whose father had saved the company from ruin and in the process created a national institution. To them he was old nobility, and their behavior toward him was the traditional bowing and scraping of the typical bully before a power greater than his. If they called him by his first name and pounded him on the back in greeting, it was merely an American face-saving substitute for tugging their forelocks. They were equal parts proud of having attracted his company and contemptuous of him for having lowered himself to associate with the likes of them. He in his turn found them as comfortable to be around as a pair of iron stoves stoked up to white heat.