“All depends on what Danny and Bascomb say,” she said. “We need a reason to talk to him or the PBA will come down on us. And once we bring him in, Internal Affairs will be involved. They have to be.”
“I see.”
She took a sip of her tea and pronounced it lukewarm. I noticed a lemon pit as it floated to the surface.
“You think someone might call in his brother Jimmy?” I asked.
“Why?”
“He’s the one who hired Bascomb to keep me away from Hassan.”
“Really?” she asked thoughtfully. “Does anyone know this?”
I learned it from Bascomb and hadn’t told Addison. “No.”
She paused, “An interesting way to find out what Tommy’s been thinking.”
“Maybe,” I said, then added, “Couldn’t hurt.”
“Sure it could,” she replied. “Could make big brother upset.”
“And?”
“What are you saying?”
“Sooner or later, Tommy’s going to be upset.”
She nodded and, as I dug for the bills in the pocket of my jeans, she lifted a cell phone from her purse.
“Tell them to try Elizabeth Street,” I said. “Either the old man’s place or a bar up the block. Marco’s.”
She nodded as she pressed buttons.
I decided go to Little Italy via Second, passing Stuyvesant Square and the East Village, avoiding the temptation to turn west on St. Mark’s Place and revisit Sonia’s now-silent apartment. I was still holding back something from Julie, from Sharon, and I wanted one more shot at it before I turned it over. I needed to do this part of it myself.
Taking my time to avoid running into blue that Julie and Sharon sent, I reached Elizabeth Street just before 1 P.M. and, since I came from the north, I went to Marco’s first. To my surprise, it wasn’t open yet for business. Inside, Lil’ M was working over its terrazzo floor, slopping the heavy mop back and forth, a determined grimace on his face.
I kept going on Elizabeth. The street was quiet; fat meatballs, hot sausages, maybe a few braciole were simmering in the sauce in the deep, tempered pot. Fresh bread and a chunk of Pecorino sat next to a short blade, a curved grater with an old wooden handle. The old women, back from Mass and all wearing the same familiar apron, were cracking open heads of iceberg lettuce under rushing cold water over a tin colander; slicing tomatoes, draining jars of black olives; humming a song sung 60 years earlier by other women working in their kitchens as they’d gotten their family feasts ready, and by their mothers before them back in Naples, in Bari, in Foggia. Their husbands were wading slowly through the newspaper, waiting for their children to get back from the bakery with pignoli cookies, chocolate biscotti, a heavy cheesecake rich with ricotta.
That is, unless the old man lived alone, his loving wife gone to the grave, one of his sons prowling alleys trying to erase the remnants of his greed, of a decision made long ago that now had caused two violent deaths, and the other son at Centre Street, telling one of the D.A.’s bureau chiefs to go fuck himself. That old sorry man is staring at yellowed old wallpaper, dull, faded flowers in uneven rows, acid and liquor swishing around in his empty stomach, still flying on last night’s fuel. He’s wondering if he should bother to shave. Eat the tonno out of the can or scrape it onto a chipped saucer with a few crackers, maybe. Hair of the dog. I always drink out of a glass, he says to no one, and that—and that—makes me a drinker, a man who likes a drink. Not a … Four Roses, always out of a glass, sitting down. (Pause here as he throws back the liquor.) And I—Did I take my pills before? Ah, shit. Now I got to get up and go in the fuckin’ bathroom to see if—
Now who the hell is that, knocking on the goddamned door Sunday afternoon?
“You remember me?“
He looked at me and hoisted his thin suspenders up onto his bony shoulders. He wore a sleeveless undershirt and baggy gray slacks. Slippers. He coughed twice and I could smell the liquor.
“No,” he said softly.
“I’m the guy you have to tell it to, Officer Mangionella.”
He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed beneath his gray stubble.
“Sergeant Mangionella,” he said.
“We’re going to sit down and you’re going to tell me all about Luis Sixto and Asher Glatzer and Sonia Salgado—”
“Yeah?”
“—and then you’re going to feel much better. Better than you have in years, Sergeant.”
He didn’t have as much punk and swagger as he did when he had his full load on. He looked every bit the old man far into his fall, a man whose life long ago lost its direction.
He hung his head, cocked an eyebrow. “Tommy says—”
“Yes he does,” I nodded. “But it’s me and you now.”
Peering up, he studied me with his unsteady eyes.
I said, “And I know you didn’t want it to happen this way.”
“Listen you …” But he stopped and whatever remained of his natural defiance drained away. “No,” he said softly. “No I didn’t.”
“You didn’t kill anybody.”
He shook his head. “No. Not really.”
“OK if I come in, Sergeant?”
“This is my home,” he answered.
I leaned against the door frame. “It’s time you get this off your chest.”
He looked at me, sagged, and then stepped aside.
I found in his cabinet a can of Progresso chicken soup with escarole and I heated it for him in a dented saucepan, using a stick match to light the gas flame. His favorite chair in the living room was the one that slumped in the center, the one with the cable box on the arm, the one that faced the old RCA TV. I put the push-button box back on top of the old brown TV, swinging the thin cable behind it, where it dropped among balls of dust on the hard wood.
“You sit, Sergeant,” I said.
He did.
I set up the tottery TV tray in front of him. His heels and knees fell together under it between its thin gold legs.
The scent of the canned soup relieved the stale smell of sickness, of lethargy.
In the kitchen, I put away the pint of Four Roses and, using paper towels as a pot holder, poured the hot soup into a bowl. I put the bowl on a plate and brought it to the old man who, defeated by time, sat alone among faded memories and artifacts neither ancient nor antique but merely old.
I sank into the sofa and watched as he blew across the spoon before he sipped.
“Is this your wife?”
Ernie Mango had a stereo cabinet on spikelike legs, a gold waffle-pattern covering the speaker built into the front of furniture that held a turntable and maybe a few vinyl albums behind a sliding door. On top was the bleached color photo of a short, heavyset woman. She was in her mid-twenties, and she had on a black coat and wore a big, hopeful smile. There was snow in the background, piled at the curb across the street. The cars on Elizabeth Street behind her were models from the ’50s and ’60s, with snow on their roofs. The photo had been blown up to fill the 8 x 10 Woolworth’s frame, but it hadn’t held its focus and it was soft under the dusty glass.
“Yes,” he said, as he blew on the soup. Steam rose from the bowl into his face.
“Rosa, wasn’t it?”
“How do you know?”
“I know someone who knew her,” I replied, thinking of Mrs. Maoli. “Said she was a lovely woman.”
He nodded as I put the photo of Rosa Mangionella back in its place. Then he said, “I could use something to drink with this.”
He didn’t hide his disappointment when I returned with a glass of tap water.
As I sat again on the sofa I said, “So how do we do this, Sergeant?”
He shrugged impassively, though not defiantly.
And I realized I was close to playing it wrong. Kindness was anathema to hard men, a weakness. I’d had the edge when I hovered over him and he was on shaky legs. I had it still, but I saw it could get away from me, as he rested in his familiar chair and I sat on f
oreign ground, as the hot soup worked on settling his stomach, reviving him, sobering him. Instead of facing a weary man clamoring to flood his conscience with drink, I might be talking soon to the guy who sired Tommy and Jimmy Mango, who gave them the merciless values that governed their small, callous lives.
“Let me tell you how I think it went.”
He made a gesture. He wanted something to dip in the brodo. A piece of bread, a cracker.
“I make it like this,” I said. “One morning you see it clear: Twenty years and out with half pay isn’t going to do it for you. You’ve got ideas, you and Rosa, dreams, and you don’t want to wait. Meanwhile, on the Bowery, where you spend hours every day, there are men with diamonds. So many diamonds …”
He took another taste. A sliver of escarole hung from the spoon.
“But how to do it? Everybody on the Bowery knows you. You’re the man who helps them, protects them.”
No reaction; then, he blinked and an eyebrow twitched.
“Then you meet Luis Sixto. A fantastic coincidence.”
I was going to ask him who flipped who. I wondered if Sixto tried to talk his way out of the tickets in Alphabet City by offering Mango a deal—I could hear him, Spanish accent, lots of attitude, “Maybe we can work something out here, Officer. Man, what do you think?”—or maybe Mango gave him an opening: “There’s a way to lose these, chico,” he’d say, leaning against Sixto’s car, holding the tickets in the late-night crosstown wind. But I decided to press on. I knew this much: Asking one of the Mangos a question, father or sons, was giving them an opportunity to lie.
I said, “You knew when Glatzer went on his late-afternoon delivery runs, a few hundred K in diamonds in a pouch. You probably kept an eye on him every now and then.”
“Damned straight.” With a limp hand, he used the dripping spoon to point at me.
“He expected it, you at his back.”
“Fuckin’ Jews,” he muttered.
“Worse when they’re connected?” I led.
“Wouldn’t give you sand in the fuckin’ desert.”
“Sixto could rip off Glatzer.”
“Why the fuck not?” he said. “Wet my beak, you know what I’m saying?”
“He had enough.”
“More than enough.” He wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist.
“Sixto brought in his pal, Bascomb.”
He frowned. Then he remembered. “Big kid. Liked to mix it up.”
“They’d take him down into the station at Chrystie and Grand.”
“That’s the idea,” he said.
“But the girl …”
“The dip,” he said, as if correcting me. “Sixto’s got her trained. She can lift a wallet from anybody, anybody, she wants to.”
“But not diamonds from a pouch.”
“No, not diamonds from a pouch.”
“So they go back,” I said.
“Glatzer, he had balls, this guy,” Mango said. “Fought. A fighter.”
“Having his wallet stolen wasn’t going to chase him off his own street.”
“’Cause I got his back. That’s the job.”
“Right. But they didn’t have to kill him,” I suggested.
He shrugged.
I tried it again. “He should’ve given up the diamonds.”
“He—Yeah, right. But he fights.” The old man punched at the stale air.
“It was your idea to put it on the girl.”
“Yeah, my idea,” he sneered. “Sure. Right.”
“So it was Sixto—”
He dropped the spoon into the bowl. “Sixto,” he said over the sudden clatter. “All of it.”
“Sixto—”
He tapped his temple. “Smart kid. Very smart kid.”
“You didn’t hear from him.”
“Oh, yeah,” he laughed darkly. “Christmas cards. Hamiltons in a picture window. Yeah. Right. Feliz fuckin’ Navidad.”
“What about Bascomb?”
“He never got a dime. Not a dime. Nobody.”
He tried to push aside the tray, but it wobbled as if it would tumble and he gave up.
I watched as he fell into his thoughts. Then he burped and looked at me.
“Sergeant,” I said, “do you know Danny Villa?”
He frowned in confusion. “No. Who’s that?”
“Tell me about Sonia Salgado.”
“He put it on her. Sixto.” He nodded, nodded, pointed with a crooked finger. “Him.”
I scuttled to the edge of the sofa. “But thirty years … Thirty years and no one says anything.”
“They told me she was, you know …” He put his thumb and forefinger at the side of his head and twisted his wrist. The Italian-American sign for someone who’s not right upstairs, someone who’s simple.
Hassan said Sonia wasn’t bright. So did Villa.
“Besides, the Jews … Beame is mayor, Koch then. She don’t see the sun, you know what I’m telling you? The parole board?”
I nodded.
“So what I am supposed to do? It goes like that,” he said finally, letting his eyes slowly close, open. “Life. Everybody knows that.”
“You’ll have to explain it to me, Sergeant.”
“Some poor, dumb … She’s unlucky.” He ran his tongue over his top teeth and, as his eyelids sagged, he said, “Who cares, right? I mean, I never got mine, so …”
“Your Rosa wouldn’t let you get away with that talk, Sergeant.”
He puffed up as if ready to come back hard at me. But he stopped and he looked away.
“Sometimes, they’re our conscience,” I said.
We sat. After a minute in the sepia glow from Elizabeth Street, the silence was heavy.
“Not sometimes,” the old man said. “If it’s sometimes …”
“I’m with you, Sergeant.”
I watched as he ran an index finger under his eyes.
He said, “I didn’t know this Sonia. I didn’t ask for her. I didn’t—”
“But you knew.”
He sat still, then he nodded slowly.
“It’s a huge burden, Sergeant, a secret like that. A secret you can’t share with anybody.”
The old man sank back into his favorite chair and he looked away from me.
“I got to make my peace,” he said.
“That’s right, Sergeant. We all do.”
“I got to make my peace now.”
I nodded.
“Thirty years … So I went to see her.”
“You went to see Sonia? When?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“They put her in a halfway house,” he said. “Over in the Village.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t know nothing. What I was saying, she didn’t know.”
“You told her about you and Sixto?” I asked.
“She didn’t know. She thought he ran … that he ran because somebody was going to set him up for Glatzer. Like they did her.”
“She didn’t know he had taken off with the diamonds.”
“She didn’t know nothing,” he said. “She’s thinking love and he’s going to come back, if he can pull it off. She’s thinking he wants to, you know, ’cause it’s love.”
“Until you explained.”
“She said I was wrong, I was crazy. She was going to call the cops.”
“So you …”
He peered down into his lap.
“What did you do, Sergeant?”
He said, “What else could I do? I said I’m sorry. What I wanted to do.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me to leave. She pushed me. Shouted. Screamed.”
“That’s it?”
He looked at me and held up his palms.
“After thirty years, you go to see her?” I asked.
“I couldn’t go up to the prison. They would know.”
“Thirty years …”
“She’
s out and the world’s gone fuckin’ wacky with the World Trade Center and, you know, good people, heroes, doing …” He hesitated, then he pointed to the faded photo on top of the old stereo cabinet. “And I’m here, looking at that picture. Rosa.”
“Did you tell Tommy you went to see her?”
He thought for a moment. It was one thing to tell the man sitting across from him about a dark thing that happened a long time ago, about his obligations, memories of his late wife. It was something very different to talk openly about what was said to Tommy the Cop.
“Sure you did,” I said. “You can’t keep a secret from Tommy. He’s got your back now.”
“Let me tell you something about my Tommy,” he said sharply. “My Tommy, he don’t take shit from nobody. Tommy, he knows.”
I stood. I’d heard all I needed to and I didn’t want to listen to a testimonial for Tommy the Cop, not from an old fuck who let an enfeebled girl languish in prison for 30 years so he could play Mr. Big at the dinner table or buy a bungalow down the Jersey shore.
“I got to go,” I told him.
He tilted his head. “Who are you?”
I lifted the bowl and spoon from the tray. “I’m the guy who’s cleaning up.”
He said, “Oh.”
NINETEEN
I closed the old man’s door behind me and walked down the short hall to the stairwell. As I trotted down the stairs, I saw the pale curtain ripple on the glass below me and watched the front door open with a crash. Jimmy Mango stormed in and, without stopping, jumped the first few steps.
He looked up at me, first at my sneakers, then my face, and didn’t try to hide his hostility, his disgust. He stopped, backed down the stairs, and waited for me with his left hand on the newel post.
“Who said you could hassle him?” he charged. He tapped his fingers on the wooden knob.
“Your asshole buddy McDowell,” I replied as I kept coming down the stairs. “He gave me a note. After he planted the books at Villa’s.”
As he slowly moved his right hand around toward the small of his back, Mango let the wisecrack slide.
“You going to tell me how it went at the D.A.’s?” I asked. “Or do I have to watch you cry on tape?”
“Don’t bait me, Four,” he said through gritted teeth. “You got nowhere to go now and you are in way over your Ivy fuckin’ League head.”
A Well-Known Secret Page 25