by Jim Fusilli
Vito Benno reached under his apron and fished a roll of bills out of his pocket. Maguire took it without a word. He left, though not before spitting on the floor as Sal Benno watched, his eyes teary in angry defeat.
Leo Bell drowsed in his room, a book on his chest, his father asleep down the hall. He turned to the clock on the nightstand. Another half hour and it’s 1932. Horns will honk, whistles will blow, church bells will chime. The uptown Irish will bang spoons on the bottoms of pots and pans. Happy New Year! And then what? Everything’s the same. Last year, this year, a page on a calendar, and what changes? Unless you make a move, not a goddamned thing.
His hands clasped under his head, Bell stared at the ceiling. Earlier in the week, he toyed with the idea of a New Year’s resolution. He could be a better son, helping around the house while his father worked dawn to dusk on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. Though he was an excellent student, maybe he could overcome his shyness and be more helpful. Maybe he could find a way to share his secret with his best friend, Salvatore Benno.
He lifted the book. Jack London, a man who had been places and had seen things, held the black earth in the palm of his hand, felt the ocean’s salt on his cheeks. Over the hiss of steam heat, Bell heard a familiar rattle: the sound of tiny stones flung against the downstairs parlor window.
Outside, Benno shivered on the brownstone steps. Perched on the back of his head, his fedora seemed to float above his curly black hair.
In his robe and slippers, Bell went down to the door and stuck his head into the night air.
“I want you should see something,” Benno said. He shuffled, his fingers tucked under his arms.
Bell opened the door. “Get in here.”
“No. Hurry,” Benno insisted.
“Where are we going?”
“We got twenty minutes. Andiamo,” Benno replied, clapping his hands.
Soon they were in Church Square Park, which separated Narrows Gate, the Italians to the south, the Irish to the north. Snow mounds lined the concrete paths that cleaved the grass, and icicles clung to groping tree branches. The park was empty. Maybe a half-mile to the east, the Hudson River was frozen. A full moon hovered above the New York skyline.
“My uncle, he was going to see Mimmo,” Benno said, “but I told him no, don’t. Go higher. See Frankie Fortune. The shopkeepers, they all went.”
Though he wore gloves, Bell blew onto his hands.
“See, a thing like this, you’re going to need a big OK.”
“A thing like what?” Bell asked.
Benno pointed to the steeple above St. Matthew the Apostle, the cathedral-like redbrick church to the west of the park. “Watch,” he said.
“Watch what?” The tip of Bell’s long, thin nose was already numb. “Sal, what are we talking about over here?”
“Watch,” Benno repeated.
Bell removed his glasses, huffed on them, rubbed his handkerchief on the lens.
One late September morning three years ago, Sal Benno, a charmer even in kindergarten, entered the schoolyard at St. Francis of Assisi and saw somebody he’d never seen before, not in his uncle’s store, not on Polk Street, not nowhere. The kid was tall for his age and had a serious expression on his face. Also, a dimple in his chin.
“Who are you?” Benno said in Sicilian.
“Leo Bell,” the boy replied, his eyes steady.
“Bell?”
The new boy hesitated. His father had warned him of this. Don’t talk about your name, where you came from, who you are. If you have to, remember the story.
“Leonardo Bell,” the boy said.
Father Gregory watched the other kids running, shouting, playing. The rotund priest resembled an overgrown kid himself, his haircut from under a bowl, pink cheeks, sandals. He had a lip-gnawing purposefulness that downtown mothers hoped would also emerge in their sons. For most of them, the priest was the only native-born American adult they knew.
“Where are you from?” Benno asked.
Again, Bell remembered his father’s admonition. “Irpino, Italy.”
Benno frowned.
“I am Italian,” Bell added in English.
Benno’s English was pretty good, so he went along. “You don’t sound Italian.”
Bell didn’t waver. He’d rehearsed with his father, who considered keeping him out of school an extra year so his accent would diminish, but the boy was precocious. At age three, he could read in his native language, and now he picked out whole sentences from the Daily News. He was steady, mature even, and in that demeanor his father believed he saw the boy was carrying the burden of his mother’s death.
“Anyway, that’s no good around here,” Benno told him.
“Italian is no good?” Bell said plainly.
“We’re Sicilian.”
Bell didn’t understand the difference. As bright as he was—and in the coming years, the Franciscan nuns would advise his father to skip him ahead at least one grade—he didn’t know the Sicilians considered their island a nation separate from Italy, even if the Italians didn’t. This was common knowledge in downtown Narrows Gate.
At that moment, Mother Maria appeared, clanging the school bell, calling the children to order.
Benno reached up and threw his arm around his new friend’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about nothing,” he said in English.
They walked together toward the line for the kindergarten class. Benno went to the front: He was the shortest boy. Bell, seeing how it was done, stood near the rear.
Benno looked back and winked.
Bell smiled in relief.
Benno and Bell. They were inseparable from that moment. From age five, they knew: you don’t find a friend like this twice and you don’t ask why something so true takes hold.
Now, with the prospect of welcoming 1932 with frozen feet, Bell said, “Sally, I’m looking but I’m seeing nothing.”
“Oh no?” Benno said triumphantly. He pointed toward the church.
At that moment, high on a ledge that surrounded the base of the spire, two men appeared, lit by thick moonlight. One man, the taller of the two, carried a bundle on his shoulder. The other, brutish and with the demeanor of a man in charge, peered to the street far below.
“Who is that?” Bell asked. He wondered if a stiff wind would send the two men off the ledge and onto the picket fence that surrounded the church.
“I don’t know the names,” Benno replied. “But the bundle? It’s Maguire. The cop Maguire.”
Bell turned. “The dirty cop?”
Benno held up his hand. “Are you gonna watch or you gonna talk?”
Up on the ledge, Maguire kicked frantically.
Struggling, the taller man turned to his stoic partner, who nodded.
The body dropped. A rope around its neck, it snapped back and began to bob.
“Whoa,” uttered Leo Bell, amazed.
Soon Maguire’s body swung like a pendulum.
“Would you look at that,” Benno said in wonder. “How come the head don’t come off?”
As the cop dangled limp and lifeless, the two men paused to admire their work. The short, brawny one was Bruno Gigenti, who came to Farcolini’s crew as an outsider, having been with Patti before he had his throat opened by a Jew. From his perch on the spire, he could see the piers on both sides of the river. Even on New Year’s Eve, ships were being offloaded, each piece of freight swollen with a tariff, part of which would end up in his pocket.
Gigenti had been asked to address the issue with the crooked cop, the request coming from the top. He was glad to do so, seeing as he felt a distance between himself and Don Carlo.
With a nod, he told his associate to move on. He shimmied to the bell tower, climbed back inside and dusted his hands before he shoved them into his coat pockets.
In the empty park, Bell said, “We should go, too.”
Benno shook his head, his hat bobbling. “I want to be here when the bells ring.”
“And when the cops come?”
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br /> “Hey, I’m down here. He’s up there.”
“Sally…”
Benno continued to stare up at Maguire’s body, satisfaction in his dark eyes.
The Irish woke up shaken. Most of them knew Maguire was for shit, but this affront couldn’t stand. There were implications.
Councilmen from uptown descended upon the mayor’s office. “My constituents are outraged,” they said. The police chief listened carefully and pledged a thorough investigation. Downtown would be turned on its head until the killers were exposed. The chief rested his hand on the butt of his gun for emphasis.
“They shouldn’t be allowed past Church Square,” said one councilman.
“What I’d like to know is who’s next?” asked another. “Maybe we all find ourselves up on St. Matty’s.”
“It’s that Farcolini,” a third said. “This is well-known. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s those who think he’s got a grip on this office, the same as he has on the piers, the truckers, the nightclubs…”
The mayor looked at the jowly men who filled the room, their tweed vests straining to cover their stomachs, the reek of self-preservation rising from the bloat. “We’ve got one rogue cop dead and you want to go to war,” he said. “Isn’t it true some of you in this room thought Michael Maguire a low sort? Isn’t that why you insisted he be assigned Polk Street?”
Shifting in their seats, the councilmen muttered uncomfortably.
The mayor continued. “If you’d like to bring your protest directly to Mr. Farcolini, I’m sure it can be arranged. Any takers?” He looked at each man, who responded with silence. “You go back to your folks and tell them the chief has this on highest priority. Tell them you insisted and we’ve heard.”
Over coffee and a crumb cake, the mayor told the police chief that nothing could be done. Surely, it was Farcolini via Fortune, Mimmo and their men at the candy store. One could say they were protecting their constituents, too.
But, the mayor added, the raw fact of the matter was that the numbers of Italians had swollen to 6,100 adults—and Hennie Rosiglino had registered them all to vote.
“We go after them and we’re all out of a job,” the mayor explained.
The police chief suggested a solution: Hennie would get Fortune and Mimmo to kick in to pay for the funeral. The chief would deliver the money personally to the Maguires, saying it came from a widows and orphans fund.
“Next time we find a floater in the river,” the chief said, “we’ll squeeze a bullet in his head and say he was the man who put down Maguire.”
“Good thinking,” the mayor allowed.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Back in 1923, when he was 8 years old, Bebe Rosiglino found himself in trouble. Two classmates, Sonny and Ray-Ray, had cooked up a scheme: They’d steal a basket of peaches from Garemoli’s cart and sell them over by the piers. They asked Bebe to distract the bowlegged Sicilian by taunting his horse.
Bebe readily agreed. Friends had been impossible to come by. Since the day he was born, his mother, Hennie, had spoiled him rotten. Her sisters did too, kissing him sloppy, their flabby arms pressing him to their bosoms. Hennie’s love came in waves: One day she thought he was heaven-sent—my “beautiful boy,” hence the nickname Bebe. The next day, he was a bum, good for nothing. A mistake. Get out of my sight.
Instead of hugs and kisses, Hennie gave him what the other downtown boys couldn’t afford: Buster Browns, Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, new knickers, butterfly-collar shirts, a fedora, garish jewelry. She bought him a bicycle and a baseball mitt, and the little boy with jug-handle ears sat on the porch, savoring ice cream with jimmies from a sugar cone—all of which guaranteed him a daily ass pounding he took like a suckling torn from the tit, wailing, frantic, rejected again. His father Vincenzo had been a boxer, so had his brothers Rocco and Lou. Toughs nobody fucked with but, as Hennie pointed out, everybody could outsmart. They tried to teach Bebe to at least throw one back—you never know, it could land. But what’s the point? A fly hit harder.
As far as the peach-stealing scheme went, everything was smooth until Sonny shoved Garemoli and the old man stumbled and fell. Suddenly, the agitated horse—named Tony, like Tom Mix’s in the pictures—reared high, upset the cart and bolted free. Hurdling along Polk Street, it trampled a half-dozen screaming people, breaking an elderly woman’s arm and upending a baby carriage. After crashing through the front window of Albini the Tailor’s, it raced out to the street, glass jutting out of its torso, skidding on the cobblestone, falling, getting back up. The neighborhood in terror, Pete the Butcher trailed the frothing horse with clothesline he struggled to turn into a lasso. Finally, a cop shot the horse dead, its blood running to the gutter. A crowd gathered but peeled back, sickened.
Soon a lawyer from City Hall walked toward the Rosiglino home, which was on the border of Church Square Park. As neighbors watched, the lawyer said, “Hennie, I hate to be the one to bear the news, but we got Bebe at the station and…”
In front of the mayor and his secretary, Hennie beat Bebe until his ears bled, her screams and curse words ricocheting down the halls. Pulling her off was like wrestling a bear. Finally, they shouldered her into the men’s room.
Later, the desk sergeant said, “Ooh, she’s lethal, that one.”
The mayor replied, “If I’m her husband, I blow my brains out twice daily.”
Sonny and Ray-Ray laid the thing on Bebe, a Sicilian after all, and the mayor agreed. Hennie would make good for Garemoli’s dead horse and the old widow’s broken arm, even though everybody knew the scrawny, insufferable kid hadn’t the wit for the scheme. Sonny and Ray-Ray were Irish. Their fathers wore suits to work and rode a bus to Newark.
Sitting lights-out in his room, welts throbbing, Bebe sobbed. Outside, the world continued without him: the flow of traffic, his classmates’ voices in Church Square, the Jew with his pots and pans, the rush of industry at the piers, the trains at the Lackawanna Station; in the old neighborhood, under the scent of frying peppers, Sicilians sang the old songs. Crouched on his bed, he reviewed the walk home from City Hall: his mother shoving and shouting at him, women leaning meaty arms on apartment window ledges to stare down, little kids on the sidewalk laughing when they passed. Everybody knew Bebe had fucked up, two Irish kids playing him for a stooge. Bebe tried to explain to his mother, he tried to say, “Mama, I—” He told her he didn’t plan it and he was sorry the horse broke free and she’d been embarrassed—humiliated—by what had happened. He was sorry. He was.
Alone in his room, he asked himself how could he ever get his mother to love him. Even before this, she didn’t. He knew that. She didn’t. And all he wanted to do was please her. He would trade all the hugs and kisses his nonni, aunts and cousins gave him for a word of kindness from his mother.
Instead, he got “I can’t stand the sight of you. Go away. Go.” Tossing him into the living room, she said, “Having you ruined my life, you know that? Ruined it.”
He’d heard it before. He was a waste, good for nothing. A bum in the making. It’d be a blessing she should never have to see him again.
Coming home from the Hook & Ladder, Vincenzo asked for his son, his tired voice dripping with trepidation. “Dove è Bebe?” he said as he slid out of his suspenders.
“Fuck Bebe,” Hennie replied.
A few minutes later, his father tried again. “He’s gotta eat, no?”
“Fuck him. I don’t care if he starves to death.”
“Hennie…”
“I curse the day he was born. I swear to God I do.”
Bebe worked on it throughout the night and waited until Hennie left the house in the morning. His Aunt Rosalie made peppers and eggs, the bread fresh from Dommie’s and snuck it upstairs. She told him his mother said he had to stay in his room; for how long, who knows? “Bebe, what you done…” she said, shaking the back of her hand. “Madonna mio…” Squeezing his cheeks, she kissed him cute on his olive-oiled lips.
; He dressed in pressed short pants and a striped T-shirt. When he heard Rosalie doing the dishes, he opened his bedroom window, climbed out and, shimmying along the edge, used the toothing-stone as a ladder. When he reached the ground, he scampered, hopped a fence, and soon he was crossing Buchanan Avenue, heading up toward Elysian Fields, which overlooked the piers and the Manhattan skyline.
Shortly after 10 o’clock, with little kids toddling around on the merry-go-round and slides in the playground behind him, Bebe jimmied through the park’s tall, fleur-de-lis guardrails and stood on a slate ledge above a rocky slope to River Road some 40 feet below. From his perch, he could see to New York City—the spire of Trinity Church, the Woolworth Building, the gilded dome of the Pulitzer Building. On the river, tugs nudged an ocean liner into position to head toward the Atlantic. Freighters crowded the busy piers, and men who knew his family pushed dollies stacked with cargo. Now and then, a car motoring along River Road fell behind a truck groaning to the Holland Tunnel. Seagulls circled at eye level.
A breeze rippling his dark hair, Bebe took a long look at the puffy clouds and then gazed down at his Buster Browns. Then, without regret, he stepped from the ledge like the air could hold his weight.
He plummeted to the soft earth below, landing on the soles of his feet, jarred but uninjured. But then he tumbled head over heels, just missing a tree that craned toward the river. Rolling over, he was turned sideways and, as he built surprising speed, his lower body slammed into a mossy rock jutting from the incline. The blow fractured his right femur, but he kept tumbling. Finally, he tore through the muck at the curb and landed on River Road. A Model T truck slammed on its brakes to avoid hitting him.
“For fuck’s sake, boy, what’s wrong with you—” Then the nut-nosed Irishman popped from the cab and saw Bebe’s thighbone poking through his skin.