The Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I rather like it,” Marks said. “Tell me, Mr. Gerosa, is the Ambrose Corporation ‘Family’ oriented?”

  “If I knew, do you think I’d be fool enough to tell you?”

  “I’d consider it confidential.”

  “I’d consider it suicidal.”

  “Why do you think he retained you to close the property deal?”

  “Because I was the one honest lawyer he could be sure of.”

  “But surely, Gerosa, there was something wrong with the deal: forty-six thousand dollars for a chunk of Manhattan?”

  Gerosa looked at Marks mournfully. “Would you say today, lieutenant, that he got a bargain?”

  An artful dodger. Marks glanced at his partner: “Any questions, Tommy?”

  “I was wondering, Mr. Gerosa: did you tell his story around—say at the christening party, the concentration camp part?”

  “I don’t remember to who, but I didn’t make any secret of it, not in my frame of mind in those days.”

  “So he could’ve been blackmailed? Say somebody’s relatives died because of him.”

  “If I were in your shoes, I’d consider the possibility.”

  Marks felt a rankle at the smugness, which he smothered. He got up. “Was he a good violinist?”

  “We thought he was. We used to call him Rubenoff and his violin. Do you remember on the radio?”

  Neither detective did.

  “I’m getting old,” Gerosa said.

  Marks was a long time silent on the way back to the city. He was thinking of blackmail, reprisal … He thought again of the square of clean glass at the height of a woman’s face.

  “It was like a history lesson back there,” Tomasino said, “Mussolini and all that.”

  Which turned Marks’ thinking back to something else. “Remember in Miss Borghese’s statement this morning, Grossman’s calling the teen-agers baby fascists: do they fit in this picture as you see it, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know. What I thought—there’s a lot of clubs in the area, the kids making like their old men. Which I don’t mean makes any of them fascists. What’s a fascist? A left-wing name for patriotism? Our kids are pretty strong on that. We Italian-Americans take a lot of crap these days.” The young man lapsed into silence.

  Perhaps he had thought of Gerosa’s integrity. Marks probed, “You did notice the swastikas in the hallway?”

  “Yes, sir, and there’s something else I noticed: Grossman’s is the only shop in the block without a flag in the window. I mean even an American flag. You wouldn’t think it would make any difference to him. Go along with the kids, right?”

  “I’m missing something in there. How does it connect with the kids?”

  “They went around with the flags. They got people to close up shop on Italian American Day. Two thousand people turned out from Little Italy alone.”

  “I wonder if Grossman closed up.”

  “I can find out.”

  “I’d like to get acquainted myself in the neighborhood, Tommy. I’ll buy you dinner. Then let’s look in on some of the youngsters’ clubs.”

  “Tonight?”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  “Don’t you have a family, Dave?”

  “I moved out years ago—it’s made for a very good relationship.”

  “Don’t you ever think about getting married?”

  “Sometimes. My mother thinks of it oftener, my getting married.”

  “Same here. I hardly knew I proposed to the girl when the women set the date.”

  “The folks want grandchildren,” Marks said. “That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Mine already got seven.”

  “Then maybe it’s not what it’s all about,” Marks said.

  He stopped at Hester Street, and when he learned that Ruggio had not come home by his regular hour, Marks fed the information on the Ambrose employment form through Center Street for verification from the appropriate government sources.

  9

  ANGLE’S IMAGINATION PLAYED TRICKS on him all afternoon. Everywhere he rested, people seemed to be looking at him. Every time he passed a cop and looked back at him, the cop was also looking back at him. He would get a number of things straightened out in his mind, a sequence of events, say, that proved he had nothing to do with the murder, and the whole thing would fall apart. He thought he could forget about the coat, Alice—he didn’t think she would go volunteering what she’d done about the plane ticket to the police—and even that the man was a priest. Up to this point his reasoning soothed him. Then Ric moved into the picture with his attitude of owning Angie. It was as though the whole ordeal, the whole Killing Eye ritual had been made up as the perfect trap for Mr. Grossman and Angie Palermo. If he did get questioned about the murder, Angie realized, he was going to have to tell about stealing the coat. He wouldn’t say the man was a priest, but he’d have to tell the rest to prove where he was from eleven o’clock on.

  He sat a long part of the afternoon in Washington Square, watching the summer students come and go with their books. He had almost flunked out of junior high, and yet he had a high I.Q. His happiest distraction was the singing of the young people in the park and the way they made love to their guitars, and that brought him back to Alice … only last night, a century and a half ago.

  By suppertime he knew he had to go home and the sooner the better. He didn’t think his mother would go to the police looking for him, but you could never tell with her what she would do. He could never guess it right. A clout or a kiss: he just wouldn’t know till he got there. She was bound to have put the whole neighborhood on the lookout for him.

  He listened at the door before he put the key into the lock. There was a tingling kind of stillness to the whole building. At any minute the doors would burst open, a population explosion. Now every family was in the kitchen at the back, the only things in the hallway, empty baby carriages and the smell of the pasta sauce. He heard voices in his own apartment, which started the pulse drumming in his head again. Then he heard his mother’s laughter climb the scale. It gave him relief, then hurt, then anger, an instant-mix of feelings which made him wish again for the plane ticket.

  He opened the door to silence and then called out as though he didn’t know, “Anybody home?”

  More silence. They had heard the key, her and Mr. Rotelli. He was sure that’s who was with his mother. There was a light under the kitchen door. He imagined them looking at one another, his mother rolling her knowing eyes toward the door. The smell of oregano sweetened the house. He lit the floor lamp. The New York Post lay beside the chair where Mr. Rotelli had dropped it, page by page. He could get away with it, not Angie. Angie wanted to look in the paper to see if there was anything new, but there wasn’t time. His mother pushed open the kitchen door and switched on the light over the dining room table. Nobody ever ate at the table, and the bowl of fruit which sparkled under the light was made of glass. She didn’t say anything, just waited. Angie calculated that if the police had been there it would be different, and she’d not have been laughing.

  “Hello, mama.”

  “Good morning, Angelo.” The false smile he hated reinforced the sarcasm.

  “Did you worry about me?”

  “No. I don’t worry about you no more. I don’t worry about your brother. I worry about me, nobody else.”

  Angie approached her cautiously. “I’m hungry, mama.” It wasn’t so, but his appetite had got him out of scrapes before. She wanted him to eat, to get some shape to him.

  “Ha! You were right, Mr. Rotelli,”—this over her shoulder to the man in the kitchen—“His heart is in his belly. That’s how he remembered his mother.”

  Angie edged toward the door. He didn’t think she would strike him in front of Mr. Rotelli, and if she did, he’d use his father’s words, the ones he’d been holding back for years. But she did not raise a hand. She moved out of the doorway and let him pass. He caught the scent of perfume, and just for a second wished she would
grab his head as she used to and hold it against her bosom. That wasn’t going to happen with Mr. Rotelli around.

  “Good evening, Mr. Rotelli.”

  The table was set for two, Rotelli sitting in Angie’s place. Angie sat down opposite him.

  “Mr. Palermo,” Rotelli said solemnly, making a little mock formal bow. He took a cigarette from a silver case and tapped it on the case. He was a smaller man than Angie remembered his own father, but with the large mustache, a thick head of carefully combed hair, and long sideburns he looked up to date and very sure of himself. He made a big thing of his hands: the way he used them put Angie in mind of dancers. The nails shone. They were probably polished, him being a hair dresser in a hotel shop where there was a manicurist.

  Angie’s mother stood, her hands on her hips. “Angelo, are you in trouble?”

  “No,” he said, as though the idea was ridiculous.

  “That’s what you think,” she exploded. “Let me tell you, you are making one big mistake. I got everybody in the neighborhood looking for you, everybody feels sorry for your mother. But Angelo is such a good boy, they say, something must have happened to him. The good ones, the quiet ones, they get beat up, they get the knife in the back. Everybody’s got a knife if they don’t have a gun. Mr. Rotelli’s got a gun. What good will it do him? …” She ranted on, less and less sensible as she let the anger out. What about? It wasn’t all about him, Angie felt. If she had been all that scared on his account, she wouldn’t have been laughing before she knew that he’d come home.

  Angie glanced at Rotelli and caught a smile under the mustache. Angie felt he knew then: she was mad—since he was safe—that he’d come home when he did. She’d been all set for an evening with Mr. Rotelli: the flowered napkins and the silver forks, even if it was the kitchen table. There was a big fan in the kitchen window. The gold-stemmed wine glasses from Murano were out, and only two places set, not three in case the prodigal son came home.

  To hell with both of them, Angie decided. His eyes took in the wine bottle, something special Mr. Rotelli had brought. The man’s eyes followed his. Rotelli reached out his graceful hand to the bottle and poured wine into his and Angie’s glasses. His mother was raving on now about the nice boys she thought he had taken up with. She was talking about the Little Brothers and Angie tried to listen, to get some sense out of what she was saying: she’d gone to the clubhouse on the way home from work. Nobody would tell her anything but she could feel they all knew something, all of them so mysterious. Mr. Rotelli touched his wine glass to Angie’s making a little bell-like tinkle. It shut off the flow of his mother’s words. Rotelli winked at the boy.

  His mother struck his arm when Angie reached for the glass. “Not a drop until you tell me.”

  “Katerina,” Rotelli said softly, “you have not given him a chance to tell us anything.”

  Us. Angie had heard it.

  His mother waited, her arms folded. She was wearing a dress he had not seen before, a misty red dress that you could see her slip through and the shape of her big breasts.

  “I was with a woman,” he said. He had intended to say a girl friend, but changed his mind at the last minute, wanting to make sure she got the point, smack, like a slap in the face.

  It worked. He could almost hear shock in her breathing. Her face puckered up as though she was going to cry. She pulled out the chair and sat down.

  “So,” Mr. Rotelli said, “a boy goes out of the house one day, and a man comes back the next. Congratulations.”

  If looks could have killed, Angie would not have had to worry about Mr. Rotelli anymore.

  His mother laid her hand on Angie’s on the table. “Why?” she said, and there were real tears in her eyes.

  Rotelli threw up his hands. “He’s a man, that’s why! Let me tell you, you can thank God, the way things are in the world today, it was a woman.”

  “You shut up,” his mother said. She turned back to Angie. “An older woman. She picked you up.”

  Angie pulled his hand out from beneath his mother’s. “She’s not that old.”

  Rotelli gave a bark of laughter.

  Angie wished he had never said the thing in the first place. “She’s a very nice person. We went … to the Palisades Amusement Park.”

  “In my day,” Rotelli said, “it was Coney Island. Under the Board Walk.”

  “Is she Italian? Do I know her? Where did you meet her? On the street? Tell the truth, Angelo.”

  Angie got the feeling that all of them were talking to themselves. Even he was. “She’s not a prostitute,” he said.

  “You will go to a doctor the first thing in the morning.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Rotelli exploded, and pushed away from the table. He got to his feet. “You are a crazy woman, Katerina, and I am beginning to understand. I’m going home.”

  “Sit down and explain to me why it is crazy that I worry about my own son?”

  “How can I explain? You can explain to an ear, but not to a tongue. Do you know what the trouble is, Katerina? I can explain to you in one word: Irish priests. Two words. In Italy when a boy turns into a man, everybody knows he would go to a goat or a bishop, but better a woman. And the young people today all over the world, they go to one another and they say, Let’s make love, not war, and I say God bless them and to hell with the priests.”

  Angie sat stunned. He had not known Mr. Rotelli was like that at all. Now he didn’t know what to make of him. He took a sip of the wine. He liked it a lot better than Alice’s. The sweet stuff turned his stomach.

  Rotelli set his cigarette on the crimson ashtray, and went behind Angie’s mother. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently rubbed the back of her neck with his thumbs. She was always complaining of how much it hurt there. “Katerina, my dove, you cannot have it both ways. You want him to grow up and stop dreaming. The next minute you sing him a lullaby.”

  “He is a dreamer,” she said, but she closed her eyes and let her head loll back.

  “So, Angelo, what do you dream of? What do you want to be besides a great lover?” Rotelli said.

  Angie hesitated, and then took the cunning plunge his instinct prompted. “One of the things, I’d like to be a dancer.”

  “A dancer?” the man repeated thoughtfully.

  “Sometimes I think of it, the way you use your hands, you know?”

  Rotelli looked at his hands and turned them round and round slowly. “I have always been very proud of my hands,” he said.

  “Don’t stop,” Angie’s mother said, but of the massage. “Last week he wanted to be a priest.”

  Not last week, Angie thought. That’s when he had started thinking about Mr. Grossman. The sick, hopeless feeling came over him again.

  “I have a customer,” Mr. Rotelli was saying, “a big macher on Broadway. He won’t let anybody dress his hair except Rotelli. Or trim his beard. I will speak to him.”

  “What kind of a job is it to be a dancer? In Sicily the gipsies dance for money.” His mother straightened up and opened her eyes. “Do you want to be a gipsy?”

  Angie thought he would love it, but he did not say so.

  Rotelli said, “What I’m afraid is, it is already too late for you. I have heard him say dancers must start before they are twelve years old.”

  “I always dance when I’m alone,” Angie said.

  “How can you dance alone?” his mother said.

  “That’s the kind of dancer I want to be.” His spirits were coming up again. He had not really done anything wrong. Not anything terribly wrong. “Mr. Rotelli?”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see,” Rotelli drew back the cuff of his silk suit and looked at his watch. “It is almost eight o’clock, Katerina.”

  “I’ll put the light under the water. The salad is ready.”

  Rotelli sat down and sipped his wine, his eyes humorous as he explored Angie’s face over the rim of the glass. Angie knew he was looking at him. He did not meet his eyes. As though reading his mind, the man said,
“So Rotelli is not the worst guy in the world after all?”

  Angie gave a shake of his head and grinned.

  “Get a knife and fork and a place for yourself, my little dancer,” his mother said, “and somebody pour me a glass of wine.”

  Angie did not feel hungry in spite of the fact that he had not eaten since the fancy breakfast with Alice. “Mama, I didn’t tell you the truth. I had something to eat before I came home.”

  “What does she do, this lady friend of yours?”

  “She works in a restaurant.”

  “So you will eat,” Rotelli said. “But not too much if you want to be a dancer. Meat and salad. Forget the bread and the pasta.”

  “His mother’s a baker and you tell him to forget the bread.”

  Angie wanted to ask Mr. Rotelli about his friend, the one he was going to speak to, but before he got the chance, the phone rang, and Angie was sure just from the way it rang that it was for him. It might even be the police.

  “It’s probably for me,” Angie said, before his mother could get to the door. The phone was in the dining room.

  Rotelli laughed. “Look at his face, as pale as a turtle dove.”

  Angie prayed and let the door swing closed behind him. If it was the police they would come to the house. “Hello?” He could hardly hear his own voice.

  “You better come right over to the clubhouse, Angie.”

  “Ric?”

  The phone went to a buzz, but Angie knew it was Ric. He put the phone back in its cradle and watched the moisture disappear from where he had held it in his hand. He was sure it was Ric. He didn’t know how he felt about facing the Little Brothers. If only the police had arrested somebody by now, Angie Palermo would be a hero in the club. But if Angie Palermo was going to be a hero, Ric Bonelli would not be calling him to come to the meeting that way. He pushed open the door a few inches and said, “It was for me. I’ll see you later, mama. Thank you, Mr. Rotelli.”

  “Where are you going?”