“I couldn’t very well stay after Edward got married. Without him to stand between Father and me, I’d never be able to maintain the peace. I’m not placid like Ab or agreeable like Edward. Father and I would have been at each other’s throat in five minutes.”
“You’re too much alike.”
“We might have been, thirty years ago. When I read The Coach King, I thought it was about someone else. If Father were in charge then, running the company the way he does now, and a young man came to him with a new suspension system he’d designed, Father would have told him he was quite happy with the old one and sent him back to his bench.”
Edith drank some soup. They had put in too much onion. “Now that you’ve gotten that off your chest, you should have no trouble being civil to your Father.”
“How do you stand it, Mother?”
The question, and the desperate expression on Harlan’s usually guarded face, surprised her deeply. Close as they were, neither had ever attempted to trespass upon the other quite so directly before.
She slid her spoon back into her bowl, took a long draft of tea, and replaced the cup in its saucer without making a sound. Her eyes never left Harlan’s.
“I stand it,” she said.
chapter seven
The Procession
ON THE FIRST DAY OF June, Giuseppe Caesar Niccolo e Benedetti de Sorrato drew his last breath, a monster gulp of the kind that in times past he had used to finish off a plate of linguini in marinara sauce and a glass of wine poured from an earthenware jug from his own cellar. As he let it out, his sphincter released, as if he had passed gas at the end of a satisfying meal. The odor drew his wife, Dona Pronuncia, from the next room. Her subsequent wails attracted the attention of neighbors, and within thirty minutes all of Little Italy knew that Uncle Joe was dead at last. Twenty-two months and eleven days had elapsed since his last stroke, the one that had made a vegetable of Detroit’s most notorious greengrocer.
The next day, a photographic portrait that had been made at the time of his election to the presidency of the Sons of Garibaldi Lodge appeared on the front page of the local Italian-language newspaper, flanked by angels with trumpets, with the dates of his birth and death printed on a scroll beneath his airbrushed chins. The obituary that accompanied the picture celebrated his successful greengrocery business, his services to the Church, and his stature as a beloved mentor and benefactor to the Italian community of Detroit. No mention was made of his conviction of arson in a fire in the shop of a tailor named deBartolo in 1874, but it was noted that he had volunteered his services as a consultant to the Detroit police in a series of disasters that had befallen the owners of small businesses in the area between Gratiot Avenue and the river in recent years. A campaign was announced to finance a scholarship at Detroit College in Uncle Joe’s name, to be awarded annually to a deserving Italian-American reared in the city. The door-to-door drive to raise money for the scholarship would be chaired by Vincenzo Sorrato, Giuseppe’s oldest surviving son, who with his brothers Gaetano and Giuseppe Jr., was coming up from Toledo for the funeral. Vincenzo had vowed that every local Sicilian would receive the opportunity to contribute to the fund.
The mortal remains were consigned to the care of the Palandrino Brothers Mortuary on Orleans Street. Augusto, the firstborn Palandrino and senior partner in the enterprise, personally accepted the challenge of making the corpse presentable for the visitation. Nearly a decade of illness had reduced Uncle Joe from a robust three hundred pounds to an emaciated 140; yards of loose skin hung from his frame like the canvas of a deflated balloon. First, Augusto stuffed the sunken cheeks with wads of newspaper and cotton. To prevent the padding from escaping, he dislocated the jaw, joined the upper and lower mandibles with platinum wire, and used guttapercha to stop up the tiny holes he had drilled for this purpose. The torso itself he wound with butcher paper and unbleached muslin, around and around, augmented with a mohair cushion he had prudently saved from the last time the slumber room was refurnished; the master mortician was noted for never throwing out items which might later be put to use, thus sparing his bereaved customers the added expense of costly prosthetics. (It was whispered about the neighborhood that one client, a Mr. Tosca, who had fallen beneath the wheels of an outgoing freight on the Michigan Central tracks, was but 20 percent Mr. Tosca and 80 percent upholstery when it came time for friends and family to pay their respects.) In this way Augusto managed to fill out the trademark Sorrato white linen suit. Working from photographs, he filled in the deep wrinkles in the forehead with damp flour, inserted black rubber stoppers in the nostrils to eliminate pinching, and used a mixture of petroleum jelly and bootblack to smooth back Uncle Joe’s fine hair and cover the cobwebby gray of neglect. Once he had applied powder and rouge, restored the backs of the hands to their former plumpness with an injection of Miracle-Flex Florentine Embalming Solution, and stood back to inspect his work, Augusto Palandrino reflected for the five hundredth time upon the sad fact that such artistry must eventually be concealed forever beneath six feet of earth and sod. With resignation he directed his brothers Domingo and Giovanni to transfer the corpse from the worktable to the casket and remove it to the slumber room, where he wound a rosary around Uncle Joe’s hands and arranged the candles at the head and foot. The casket, made of gray-green olivewood with a gray Italian silk lining and solid gold handles, had been imported from Firenze and retailed for four thousand dollars, establishing a new record for the city of Detroit. He had obtained it for fifteen hundred dollars and placed it in storage for just such an illustrious passing. It was a source of private satisfaction that he should be able to realize so large a profit from the heirs of Giuseppe Sorrato, to whom he had been paying a premium of five hundred dollars per month for eleven years as insurance against fire and theft. In addition he charged full price for prosthetics and cosmetics he had not actually employed.
The funeral mass took place in SS. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church on East Jefferson, the oldest place of worship in the city, Monsignor Santino Calabria presiding. From there, the procession commenced east along the river toward Mt. Elliot Cemetery, where a six-foot granite angel waited with wings spread to receive Uncle Joe in an eight-hundred-dollar reinforced-concrete vault guaranteed to resist seepage for a century.
Leading the procession was the Palandrinos’ new hearse, fashioned of black lacquered hickory on wheels with hard rubber tires, with plate-glass windows on the sides affording a clear view of the splendid casket, hung all around with black tassels and crepe. The horses were matched blacks with plumes attached to their bridles, and the driver, a ten-year veteran named Caspar, wore an immaculate morning coat and a tall silk hat brushed to a liquid shine. The honorary pallbearers who loaded the casket onto the hearse were Gaetano and Giuseppe Sorrato Jr., the deceased’s sons; Dr. Francis Zangara, Uncle Joe’s oldest friend, a companion since Sicily and the physician who had signed his death certificate; his cousin Augustino; a brother-in-law named Olini from Cleveland—and Sal Borneo, also called Salvatore Bornea. Son Vincenzo’s missing leg excused him from this duty.
Vincenzo had approached Borneo on his new pine leg at Borneo’s table in the restaurant on Charlevoix to extend the invitation. With tears in his eyes he had shaken Borneo’s hand and delivered a pretty speech in which he hoped by honoring years of loyal service to his late father to heal the breach between them. He had drunk a glass of wine to confirm the peace and hobbled off to seek out his brothers and finish plotting the assassination of the murderous pig who had killed their brother Carlo.
Borneo, who did not own a vehicle, had hired a Crownover brougham for his part in the procession—a choice made in the interest of solidarity with young Harlan, in whom he had invested five thousand dollars. The wood was enameled black and the upholstery was red velvet, against which the elegance of his midnight worsted was concealed from a public who could not see inside. He did not fear exposure to assassins, there being specific rules of conduct among Sicilians prohibiting murder
at family occasions such as weddings, baptisms, first communions, and funerals. Since the time of his arrest, he had sought to be less visible than Uncle Joe and his kind, marching on foot as they did at the head of the Columbus Day parade and riding about the city in open phaetons, waving to admirers, and bellowing traditional greetings and good wishes at acquaintances on the street. He was not and would never be as popular as the fat don, and his association with James Aloysius Dolan had demonstrated to him that fame and a conspicuous visibility were regarded as exclusive privileges of sporting figures and public servants, who were jealous men and never forgot a moment spent in someone else’s shade. Borneo was determined to cultivate a reputation for humility, but not to the extent that he attracted attention to his sackcloth; a delicate performance that required concentration and a keen sense of balance. His name had not appeared in a newspaper and he had not been photographed since his apprehension in the Orosco affair.
When he helped his wife Graziella, attired in a simple black dress with modest matching hat and half-veil, into the brougham and boarded behind her, the facing seat was already occupied. The early passenger was a small man of indeterminate age, in a rumpled gray suit with crumbs in the folds and a homburg hat rather too large for him, so that only his outward-turned ears and long thick nose seemed to prevent it from slipping all the way down to rest on his narrow shoulders. With his nail-bitten hands resting on the scuffed and splitting leather briefcase in his lap, Maurice Lapel resembled a thousand other local attorneys and businessmen whose parents and grandparents had come over from Germany with the first wave of Jewish immigrants seventy years before. Upon closer inspection, his quiet courtesy, listening attitude, and in particular his black eyes that appeared to absorb light without reflecting any back, bore out his reputation—known to only a few—as one of the finest legal minds of the age. He had offered his services to Borneo at the time of the Carlo Sorrato murder investigation, and was the man who had presented Graziella and the ticket stubs bearing the date of Carlo’s death to the police, who accepted Borneo’s alibi and released him. Borneo’s first act upon obtaining his freedom was to hire Lapel away from the two-room law firm where he was employed and place him on permanent retainer as the Unione Siciliana’s chief consultant in matters of law. In the two years since his appointment, fifteen members of the Unione had been arrested for crimes ranging from malicious destruction of property to murder in the first degree. None had been bound over for trial.
“You should have worn black,” was Borneo’s greeting upon taking his seat beside his wife. “The Sorratos will say you lack respect.”
“They won’t notice me. No one does.” Lapel worked very hard to eliminate a lifetime in the downtown Jewish corridor from his speech. He spoke in short sentences with almost no intonation, and thus marked himself forever as a member of a foreign culture. “We can talk?” He did not look at Graziella.
Borneo nodded. His wife’s English was limited to routine exchanges with customers at Blackwell’s department store, where she had worked until their marriage. They spoke Italian exclusively at home and he was reasonably assured that she had forgotten most of what she’d known.
“Vincenzo Sorrato is offering a thousand dollars for your head,” Lapel said. “I heard them talking in the barbershop.”
“What language were they using?”
“Italian. Sicilian dialect.”
“It must be true. Sicilians think only Sicilians understand Sicilian.”
“I’ve never found reason to put them straight. What do you intend to do?”
“To keep my head.” Borneo waited.
Lapel unbuckled his briefcase and drew out a cardboard folder, from which he removed a stiff sheet of paper with holes punched in the left margin. “Handle it carefully. It needs to be back in East Park today.” East Park was the site of Detroit Police Headquarters.
Borneo took the sheet and turned it toward the window. It contained photographs taken from the front and side of a man with a thick mantel of bone overhanging eyes with bloated lids and ropes of scar tissue on both cheeks. His nose was pushed flat to his face; it did not exist in profile. The man’s name was George Zelos. He had been tried twice in the beating death of a quarry foreman named Constantine Butsikitis, released after his second hung jury, and had served six months in the Wayne County Jail for aggravated assault in connection with a fight at the same quarry. Note was made that the U.S. State Department was reviewing his immigration status for possible deportation. He was twenty-seven years old.
Borneo handed back the sheet. “What happened to his face?”
“He fell thirty feet into the bottom of the quarry. He was pronounced dead at the scene and woke up in the morgue wagon. His troubles with his fellow employees began when he went back to work.” The attorney returned the sheet to the folder and put it away in his briefcase.
“Can a Greek be trusted?”
“I think so. I’ve promised to represent him at his deportation hearing if he cooperates. He’s under a king’s order of execution back home. Something to do with revolutionary activities against the crown.”
“What do you suggest?”
Lapel said nothing, communicating much.
Borneo shook his head. “Vincenzo is smarter than Carlo was; it’s often that way with second sons. Zelos will never get near him with that face.”
“Vincenzo knows all the men we would use under ordinary circumstances. That’s why I chose the Greek.”
“You should have chosen one with a more pleasing countenance.”
“It’s all I had to work with. To bring someone in from out of town would take too much time. You could be dead within a week.”
Borneo turned to his wife and asked her in Italian if she were not too hot in so much black. She smiled and replied that as the color was kind to her she would suffer a good deal more before changing. Then she returned her attention to the preparations taking place outside her window.
Borneo shifted back to English. “I think we should make use of Zelos’s face rather than look for a way around it. I did not see Vincenzo’s daughter at the funeral. Did she come up with him from Toledo?”
“He brought his entire family. Theresa is four, too young to behave herself during a long Mass. When he lived here, Vincenzo used to place his children in the care of the sisters at St. Anne’s.”
“I doubt he’s’ had time to make different arrangements. Ask Zelos to bring Theresa Sorrato to her father’s hotel after the burial. Make certain he knows that she is not to be harmed.”
“The sisters will not give her up to that face.”
“Of course you will accompany him. I wouldn’t have had you make donations to the Catholic Fund there in person these past two years if I did not want them to know you at sight.”
“I’d wondered about that.” Lapel’s black eyes gave back nothing. “Shall I have Zelos give Vincenzo your regards?”
“No. We will not insult the man’s intelligence.”
The carriage began moving. From far ahead drifted the strains of the brass band, distorted by wind and distance into a swelling and fading drone. The horses’ hooves clip-clopped, slow as a grandfather’s clock.
“What happened on Gratiot?” Borneo asked.
“That one took some finding out. The police can be admirably obtuse when a mistake has been made. It seems an acting precinct commander named Hearndon asked for a free crack at one of the women. Ordinarily we’re flexible about that kind of thing, even though the arrangements we made with Dolan don’t include gratuities to the locals. However, the man was drunk and abusive. The door was shut in his face. He smashed a carriage lamp before he left and came back with a flying squad an hour later. It could have been worse. Councilman O’Dell had just left.”
“Don’t sprinkle sugar on it. Was the commander punished?”
“He was temporary. The department reassigned him to the Second the next day in his old position as lieutenant at the special request of Mayor Maybury.”
“All the charges were dropped the next morning. The arrests themselves were erased from the blotter. It was a snag in the system. Dolan depends a great deal on the support of the police. His intervention could cost him a lot in the off-year elections.”
“I’m curious to know how well that support will hold up when Vito Grapellini delivers a hundred pounds of rotten beef to the police picnic.”
“You don’t want to go to war with Dolan. You’re not that strong. The neighborhood needs six weeks to realize Uncle Joe’s dead and the Unione is their only friend. Even then you have to be discreet. Dolan’s still on the way up. As powerful as he is, he isn’t as powerful as he will be.”
“We have that much in common.”
“He won’t be pleased to hear you’ve thrown in with Harlan Crownover. He gets nervous when his partners take on partners. Especially when the new partner is the son of the richest man in town.”
Borneo, who had learned never to be surprised by anything, least of all the wealth of the lawyer’s information, assumed that young Harlan had been talking.
“My personal speculations are no more threatening to Dolan than they are his business to know them.”
“He might not see it that way. He’s been buying up land in the path of the Toledo-Detroit interurban for a year. He stands to make a fortune when he sells the right-of-way. He won’t be happy when he finds out you’re funding a form of transportation that will compete with the streetcar system.”
The Sicilian laughed, showing his full set of even white teeth, as rare among his people as laughter itself was to him. Graziella, startled, smiled at her husband, only to divert her gaze to the window when she realized he was barely aware of her presence.
“The automobile stands as much chance of taking business away from streetcars as the hot-air balloon. I didn’t lend money to Abner Crownover’s son because I thought his ideas had merit.”
The lawyer, too discreet ever to begin a sentence with the word why, said nothing. Perhaps for this reason, he was the only man to whom his client ever explained himself.
Thunder City Page 10