A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “You have a date,” I said.

  She grabbed the files and looked at me with appealing bemusement. “Maybe I do.”

  I squeezed by her, taking the empty water bottle to the trash. “Well, you’re looking good, Jule. Good luck.”

  “Good luck?” she laughed. “What if it’s my boyfriend? A guy I’ve been seeing for three years?”

  The bottle hit the bottom of the barrel with a dull thud. “Everybody needs a little luck, right?”

  “Or what if I’m meeting my girlfriend for drinks?”

  I went for my jacket, edging near her, carefully avoiding the briefcase near her slim ankles, her black shoes. “So you don’t have a boyfriend for three years?”

  “No, Terry,” she huffed. “Not presently.”

  I slipped into my coat and felt for the cell phone. It was on and the battery was still good: No one had called. Not Bella, not Dorotea Salgado, not McDowell asking for cooperation on his badly drawn tail job.

  I looked at her and I asked, “You doing anything Saturday night?”

  She stared at me as if my eyebrows had burst into flames.

  “Not that I can think of,” she replied finally.

  “I’m going to this dinner at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central. Some thing for rock critics, believe it or not. A friend of mine is up for an award. Good guy,” I said, “you’ll like him. You want to go?”

  Whatever had shocked her seemed to have worn off. Now she seemed merely astonished.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “‘Yes’ as in you want to go?”

  “Yes, I’d like to go.”

  “Great. I think we’ve got to be there at eight, so seven-thirty, all right?” I zipped up my jacket and absently tapped the folded paper in my back pocket.

  “Great, yes.”

  She lifted her briefcase and started toward the corridor and I followed, flipping down the light switch and pulling the door behind me.

  This end of the D.A.’s was quiet, and as we headed down the hall toward the elevator, she looked up at me and said, “What do I wear to something like this?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Ask Bella. She knows everything about this stuff.”

  “Is she coming?”

  I nodded. “Though that may not be the word for it. She will be arriving at Grand Central. For her, this is the event of the season.”

  “I’ve never met your daughter,” she said as we passed an empty office lit only by a generic screen saver.

  God help us if Diddio doesn’t win, I thought, nudging aside the mental picture of Sixto I’d been framing. “Call her,” I repeated. “Ask her a question. She’ll tell you her life story.”

  She touched my arm. “Thank you, Terry,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, as thoughts of the Mango family returned in a rush. “Could be interesting.”

  NINE

  Ernest T. Mangionella, retired cop, lived at 200 Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. I was going to 200 Elizabeth Street.

  By now the sun was long gone and it had taken its heat with it. Cold, wet, I had my hands buried in my coat pockets, black-leather collar turned up to my ears, and I hunched forward whenever I went east and had to fight the wind from the river. The sonorous-voiced announcer on WNYC merely said it was going to rain tonight; “rain overnight” was how he put it, without mentioning that the temperature would plunge into the 20s. I had no idea when “overnight” began, but, at least aware of the rain, I tried but couldn’t figure out how to work an umbrella into this thing. And a trenchcoat didn’t go with running shoes and jeans.

  “At least take a hat, Dad,” Bella shouted. She and Eleanor, the sneering, scowling Grumpy E, were in the living room when I came down the creaking stairs, checking for wallet, cell phone, thinking about Leo’s .38 in the cabinet in my office.

  The “another kid” turned out to be a boy. Bella left it to her little friend Gloria Figueroa to make the introduction.

  “Mr. Orr,” said Glo-Bug. “Gabriella says you have never met Daniel Wu.”

  An enormously pudgy boy stood next to little Glo-Bug, who seemed as tiny as a doll next to him. His features were mushed to the center of his rotund head, and his glistening mop of black hair, sort of parted in the center, lay limp over his ears. If he was 14, he looked younger: I imagined his features hadn’t changed much since he was a baby. But when he stuck out his plump hand, his black eyes sparkled with confidence.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, Daniel Wu.”

  Under a black vinyl zip-up he wore an old hockey jersey, pale blue with black-and-white piping. FUBU, it said across the chest. For Us, By Us. I don’t think so, unless “us” had taken a new, more inclusive meaning.

  “Your daughter has told me much about you,” young Wu said.

  “Daniel.” Bella’s voice, in a tone that demonstrated the precision of her hearing, despite the spacy, oscillating music from her laptop now with her in the other side of the house.

  As if to dissociate herself from the conversation, Glo-Bug edged away from the smiling boy. Apparently, Bella has a level of authority in her little clique.

  But Daniel Wu wasn’t deterred. “You are a private investigator.”

  Little Glo-Bug looked away, looked down at her shoes, pursed her lips as if she would whistle, then walked off toward the vestibule that opened to the living room.

  “That’s it, Daniel,” I said. “You got it.”

  “Perhaps it is challenging,” he suggested with an agreeable nod.

  “You bet.”

  “Are you at work—”

  I snapped my thumb toward the door. “I’m going to do some private investigating now.”

  “Can I ask—”

  “Oh, no, Daniel.”

  Pressed by his clear, globular cheeks, his eyes twinkled. “That is why it’s called ‘private’ investigating.”

  “I like that, Daniel,” I told him.

  “OK, Daniel,” sang Bella as she returned to the kitchen. “TV time.”

  Daniel nodded politely and started to leave us. For some reason, I patted him on his broad back.

  He stopped when he reached the archway of the vestibule. “So this is one of your mother’s paintings,” he said to Bella as he looked up at “The Cliffs of Gargano.” His chubby finger hovered near tranquil blue-green waters, near limestone softened by Aleppo pines.

  “Daniel.”

  “Very beautiful,” he commented. Then he looked at us and made a sad face as he turned to go toward the pulsing music, his untied high-tops slapping the hardwood as he moved away.

  My daughter shook her head as she went to the cabinet for a flat bag of unpopped corn. She rattled it and tossed it into the microwave.

  “Bella, you said homework. Yet no one has a book, a pencil, a calculator …”

  “Dad, Hamlet, remember?” she said as she punched in the time code. “We’re watching the disk.”

  I went to the back of the laundry room closet for my coat. “Olivier or Branagh. Gibson. Burton?”

  “Branagh. Mrs. Crommyda says it’s definitive.”

  Branagh, I thought now as the raw beams of the headlights on Lafayette cut across my frigid face, sending red starbursts into my line of sight. He embodied Lavater’s observation: “Melancholic persons and mad men imagine many things which in very deed are not.”

  You bet they do.

  I zigzagged through Little Italy to escape the biting wind, passing few things Italian. Instead I saw upscale boutiques and shoe stores, French patisseries, organic-food restaurants and scores of Chinese businesses that once would’ve been stationed on the other side of Canal. Little Italy once filled a space from Broadway as far east as the Bowery, from Houston south to Franklin. Now it had been squeezed to less than half its size by SoHo edging east and Chinatown pushing north, by tenements cleared for condos in the area the travel magazines call NoLita (Christ). The remaining Italians who lived now on quiet streets
in contented anonymity were nestled in a much smaller area, perhaps no more than 25 blocks in total, with very few given exclusively to salumeria, pantetteria, quiet espresso dens, shops for tailors, barbers and other Old World craftsmen. Perhaps the Italians in New York City didn’t mind. They no longer required their own district: Fourth-, third-, even second-generation Italians refused to be confined to an area once populated by their ancestors who neither knew nor could afford better. “Yeah, well, we assimilated pretty fuckin’ good” was how I once heard a gravel-throated guy in a skin-tight black sweater put it moments before a brush-up at Leo’s old joint, Big Chief’s. The guy, so edgy that he seemed to dance in place when he spoke, may have lacked the eloquence of a Mario Cuomo, but he got it right.

  I’d had my head down against the cold and went back to Elsinore to entertain thoughts of Claudius’s boundless greed, and then I found myself in the bright lights and bustle of Broome Street at Mulberry, the small, bustling quarter of Little Italy that tourists come to see. I wanted to keep moving, but I had to stop as grinding traffic came together at the intersection as if trying to fight out of the end of a funnel, black cars and yellow taxis lurching to within inches of each other as they jockeyed to get ahead. I finally shuffled between rubber bumpers and protruding fenders until I reached the curb under the white lights and blue signage of Umberto’s Clam House. As I continued away from the tourists on Broome, I eased through a surprisingly subtle cloud of white clam sauce heady with fried garlic.

  They tell the tourists that the ghost of Joey Gallo hovers above Umberto’s, I knew. Tourists from Tennessee, from the UK, from Helsingör, Denmark, even, they want to believe. They find this appealing; the cult of personality extends to criminal-as-celebrity now. It’s thrilling, the tourists say, to move through the aura of evil. They come to see the Ravenite Social Club, made famous in grainy, black-and-white footage shot by the FBI. Gone now: no John Gotti, no Sammy the Bull. And it’s so damned hard now to spot a regular old made man on the street if his picture hasn’t been on CNN or Entertainment Tonight. So, to get their fix, these tourists pass by Umberto’s, oblivious to the tender calamari (Squid? No thank you), the Seafood Marechiaro over handmade linguini, to see where a member of the Colombo family was shot and killed. “He died here,” they say, whispering, pointing, as if the pool of blood still lay on the sidewalk. They stand tall and have their photos taken with disposable cameras.

  I moved on until I was alone again, under thin, leafless trees, under violet lights, under vanishing stars.

  What is Bella doing? I could call. …

  I told her not to call me unless she had to. I didn’t want to have the phone buzz if I was hanging in jagged shadows near the old cop’s place on Elizabeth.

  “Not even if Dennis calls back?” she asked.

  I’d told Diddio we’d be a foursome for the critics’ bacchanalia. He said, “Yippee.” He meant it. “I am fulfilled. Man, I spell relief T—E—R—”

  I told him I’d see him Saturday.

  Leaning against the frame of my office door, Bella watched as I cut the line and dropped the handset onto the cradle.

  “Everybody’s happy?” she asked. She was wearing a lime-and-black bowling shirt with the name “Donnie” on the breast, over khaki parachute pants.

  “He is. Are you?”

  She nodded.

  “Then me too,” I told her.

  She handed me the Nursery of Crime manuscript. “Stash this in here for me, please?”

  I took the neatly stacked pile, which was held together with a red rubber band, a thicker brand than Bella wore on her wrist.

  “I don’t want it on the table when my friends get here.”

  “Any of them read it?”

  “Daniel.”

  “And?”

  She smiled.

  “And you’re OK with Julie and Saturday night?”

  She ran her hand through her hair. “I’ll still have plenty of face time with Dennis.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  “I have faith, Dad,” she nodded. “I’m a serious believer.”

  At its core, Little Italy was still a closed enclave that would be reluctant to give up one of its own, so I reached Elizabeth Street expecting no help and intending to ask for none. To me, the whole place was a storefront social club where silent old men with gnarled cheroots and bitter espresso would look up from their penny-a-point gin game only to give me the mal occhio. I had to go right at it

  Long, narrow Elizabeth Street was empty, except for parked cars and the diffused glow of the streetlamps. White light came through the glass windows of a store on the west side, and then the light went dead and, a moment later, a young woman in a smart black coat came from the store, locked its front door and, without looking behind her, went north on clicking heels, adjusting her oversized handbag, bringing up her pink Pashmina wrap to cover her ears. I edged toward the darkness she’d left behind.

  Translucent clouds drifted high above me, tracing across the pale moon.

  The center of the east side of the street was occupied by a stoic row of plain tenements, their once-golden bricks now soiled to brown. Their five-story façades wore rusted fire escapes that were home to struggling houseplants and sturdy flowers in large crocks. And Italian flags, standing tall, flapping hard in the night wind. Two plastic geese were tied to one railing, yellow ribbons painted on their necks. Behind the fire escapes, the snapping flags, fat plastic geese, old-fashioned window shades had been pulled shut, revealing only the occasional flickering blue glow of a TV.

  The rush of traffic came from the distance now. From inside a seafood warehouse on the corner behind me, a dog growled, barked sharply, then went silent, leaving only the disturbing sound of the thrashing wind. To my left, dangling in the haze off in the distance, were stark lights from the massive skyscrapers that dominated the ever-changing midtown skyline.

  The rain started to fall again, thin streaks crossing the streetlamps’ lights like speeding comets before some far-off star. Chilled to the bone, I took my hands from my pockets, wiped the raindrops off my face, and started toward 200 Elizabeth.

  But before I reached the front door, I heard a familiar voice echoing down the quiet street.

  Up ahead, at the middle of the next block, was a bar, a bullet-and-beer joint for neighborhood guys. At its front door, a thin man with frizzy hair, an orange V-neck sweater and blue jeans had his hand out to confirm what his eyes told him.

  When he caught the rain, Jimmy Mango wiped his hand on his jeans.

  “What’d I say?” he spit bitterly over his shoulder. “Yeah, Pop, it’s still fuckin’ raining.”

  I made a quiet bet: “Memories Are Made of This” on the jukebox. A black-and-white shot of Michael in his Army uniform, with Sonny, Fredo and the Don smiling proudly, arms hung on each other’s shoulders.

  He saw me as soon as I walked in.

  Besides the young bartender, there were three men in the place: a guy in a UPS uniform with the Post folded under his elbow at the bar, and two at the only table in the small, square room. One was Jimmy, the other, with his back to the wall, had to be his old man. The guy looked like Tommy shrunken down by age, by life, by memory’s echo voices. He wore a red flannel shirt that swam on him and a gray sweater-vest and dark blue slacks. He was drunk.

  Jimmy came out of the chair.

  I turned down my collar. Rain beads ran off my shoulders.

  “Forty-four,” he said loudly, as if he was glad to see me. “Forty-four comes to Little Italy. What a surprise.”

  He stuck out his hand and I shook it and held it, keeping an eye on his left. Jimmy was quick, but he wasn’t as strong as he might’ve thought.

  He stepped back.

  “Nice eye,” he said, looking up.

  “So I’m told.”

  “That’s what happens you go to Broadway. Crazy people, they go to plays and shit. Fantasy.”

  “Jimmy, you know, I’ve never met your dad.”

&nbs
p; “My dad?” the incredulous Jimmy repeated. “What he is, like, Tom fuckin’ Bradford? There’s no dads here, Four.” He looked at the bartender. “Lil’ M, you got a dad?”

  Lil’ Marco ignored him. But the UPS man, apparently an Eight Is Enough fan, chuckled.

  The radio prattled. These jerks in Washington …

  “Jimmy, I’m here,” I said. “We don’t have to fuck around.”

  “You ain’t talkin’ to the old man, Terry.”

  I put my back against the bar. I could see Lil’ M and UPS out of the corner of my eye.

  “Somebody’s going to do it, Jimmy.”

  “No, they ain’t”

  He moved his right hand slowly to the front of his old jeans, then he started to slide it toward his back pocket.

  “Jimmy, you come up with something besides five fingers, you won’t walk home,” I said plainly.

  Mango lifted his empty hands. He smiled darkly. “Not tonight, no. Not after you handled that big guy in midtown, Four.”

  “You saw that, Jimmy?”

  The worm shrugged.

  “What happened to Sixto?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  The old man called him. “Sonny, dove siete?” he muttered.

  Jimmy turned. “Pop, I’m right here.”

  I reached and snapped the railroad spike out of his back pocket. It clanked when it hit the floor.

  I kicked it and it slid across the room, banging against the bar, then scooting toward what had once been a fireplace.

  Jimmy watched it go. Then he looked hard at me.

  “Sonny?” I asked.

  “You’re in over your head, Four,” Mango said bitterly. “This ain’t St. John’s, this ain’t the fuckin’ NBA. Throwing elbows under the boards ain’t near enough.”

  “You being here, Jimmy, and following me to midtown tells me that,” I said. “Tommy hounding my ass tells me that.”

  “You made me a few large, Terry, I like you. But Tommy, he don’t give a shit. You and your whole thing, your woes or whatever, it don’t mean a fuckin’ thing.”

  “There’s a dead woman and your father’s name on a ticket. Why is this a big deal?”

  Jimmy shifted and he ran a thumb across his eyebrow.