On the third day, Nilo testified. He said that when the boy was shot he was with his wife at the other end of the city. He denied ever being in the theater. On cross-examination, the prosecutor forced him to admit that he had known Selvini back in Castellammare del Golfo, and that they had in fact worked on a fishing boat together.
“Were you friends?”
“No. We were never friends.” Nilo was determined that he would say nothing about having been raped by the three fishermen, but the question never came up. The prosecutor seemed to feel that it was enough to show that Nilo had known Selvini back in the old country.
So did the jury. They took only ninety minutes to pronounce him guilty of both murders. Immediately after the verdict was returned, the judge sentenced him to death in the electric chair.
The new Mrs. Sofia Sesta never testified.
* * *
A HEAVY SNOW HAD STARTED to fall just as the train left New York City, and by the time it had reached the little upstate town of Ossining, the whole town was buried under a blue-white blanket.
A forlorn-looking Christmas wreath hung over the main door of the train depot as the train pulled slowly into the station.
“Looks like a white Christmas for sure,” the policeman on Nilo’s left said, and the other cop leaned across Nilo to look out the window.
“What about the prison?” Nilo asked sarcastically. “Is that decorated, too?”
“Sure. The electric chair has a big red ribbon. With your name printed on it.”
The warden’s office was in a separate building inside the gate, just a few steps away from the guardhouse reception area. Nilo’s escort knocked timidly on the door, then led him inside. To Nilo’s eye, it looked like a pretty normal office area, not especially pleasant but not terribly oppressive-seeming as he had expected.
The assistant warden who met him was a thin, rabbity-looking man with a heavy mustache and a severe case of prison pallor. He was leaning back in his chair, flipping through a brown covered folder.
“Not much here that I don’t know, Sesta,” he said. “I read about you in the papers. Killed a kid and then a guy in a movie house. Hmmm.” He looked up. “Now’s the time when I always ask the condemned man if he actually did it.”
Nilo stared at the warden. There was something about the man he did not like, so he did not answer.
“I asked you a question, Sesta. Now answer it. Did you kill those two? Are you really the Dago of Death, the way I heard you called?”
What’s he going to do? Nilo thought. Kill me?
The warden was waiting for an answer, and Nilo said suddenly, “No, no, I didn’t do it. I was framed. Those three hundred witnesses lied.”
Nilo saw a smile on the face of the guard who stood near the warden watching, but clearly the assistant warden had no sense of humor. He said solemnly, “I kind of figured you’d say that. Almost all you condemned men say the same thing.” He picked up Nilo’s file again.
“Says here your wife is expecting. Due in April.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You won’t still be here by then.”
“We’ll see,” Nilo said.
The assistant warden glared at him. “If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s a smart aleck.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Nilo said. This time he had meant no disrespect, but the warden reacted as if generations of his family had just been insulted. He came around his desk and stood in front of Nilo, then began to raise his hand as if to strike the prisoner.
“Don’t,” Nilo said. He spoke softly. “I have a large family. They might not appreciate you treating me that way.”
The warden hesitated, his hand suspended motionless in the air. He stared into Nilo’s eyes, then dropped his hand and turned to the guard. “You can take the dago baby-killer out of here. You know where to put him.”
Nilo preceded the guard down a long whitewashed corridor that led into the heart of the prison. At the end was a heavy steel door with a barred viewport in its top half. The viewport swung open at the guard’s knock, and a moment later the door itself opened and Nilo and his escort went inside.
Directly across from them was a green steel door. Despite himself, Nilo felt a shiver of fear chase through his body. This was the door leading to the electric chair. On either side of the green door were three cells. Directly opposite those cells, flanking the door they had just come through, were six more cells.
The inside guard opened one of the cells closest to the green door and beckoned for Nilo to enter. “This will be yours,” he said.
The cell was more comfortable-looking than Nilo had imagined it would be. There was a wooden-slat bed with a thick mattress, blankets, cotton sheets, and a feather pillow. In the corner was a washbasin and toilet. Toward the front of the cell was a writing desk with a small seat in front of it. Nilo looked around. In here, he thought, a man really felt as if he were buried alive under tons of rock. And the tomblike feeling was magnified by the deadly silence.
It doesn’t matter. Soon enough, I’ll be really buried.
“Is it always like this in here?” he asked the guard through the bars.
“Like what?”
“So quiet.”
The guard shook his head.
“Just on the nights they’re going to burn somebody.”
“You mean…” Nilo started to say, but he could not finish the sentence. Of course he knew that people came here to be executed, but he had not expected to come face-to-face with it so quickly.
“Yeah. Billy. That one over there,” the guard said, pointing to a cell holding a sandy-haired sweet-faced young man, who looked no older than Nilo.
“Oh.” Nilo went to his bunk and tried to read a book from his pack but could not concentrate. Within an hour, he saw a priest enter the condemned man’s cell. The priest looked barely old enough to have been ordained.
Nilo went to the bars and looked across the small cellblock. A guard waited outside the other prisoner’s cell, watching the meeting between the convict and the priest.
“God bless you, my son,” Nilo heard the priest say. “I’ve come to let you set your soul right with God before you die, to absolve you of your sins, and give you your last Communion.”
The priest spoke the words solemnly, as if they were a ritual in themselves. The prisoner laughed aloud at him.
“Get the hell out of here.”
The priest mumbled prayers anyway, then gestured to the guard and left.
Two hours later, six guards came into the cellblock from outside and moved quickly from one cell to the other, pulling the shades that covered the cells. Nilo squeezed into a corner of his little enclosure and managed to find a large enough crack in his shade that he could watch what was going to be his own fate.
The guards opened the door to the man’s cell. He backed away into a far corner and began crying. He held his hands out in front of him, seeming to want to fight them off but not having the physical strength to do anything. Four of the guards grabbed the prisoner and held him tight. He began to sag at the knees, but the guards kept him upright. The other two guards slit his trouser legs open from his knees on down, then began moving him toward the door.
Billy stopped. He grabbed the metal bars on either side of the door and jammed his feet into the corners. He stood spread-eagle, not moving.
“Oh, God,” he cried. “Please don’t let this happen to me.”
Two of the guards rushed him from behind, jarring him loose and knocking him out into the corridor, where he collapsed on the floor, crying.
Half-lifting, half-shoving, the six guards gradually moved him the twenty feet, past Nilo, to the green door and then shoved him through it.
The door clanged shut heavily behind them.
In a few minutes, a low droning sound came from the death chamber, but it was almost a half hour later before the green door opened again and the six guards came back out onto death row. They moved quickly from cell to cell, and with a
snap and a clatter raised the shades that covered the cells. A subtle smell of burned meat filled the air.
Nilo was still standing where he had been when the other prisoner was dragged out, but now he went across the cell and lay on his bed.
And what will I be like when my time comes? he asked himself. Please, God, let me die bravely at least.
It wasn’t until two days later, Christmas Eve, that the burning smell was completely gone.
* * *
TOMMY REMEMBERED THE FIRST YEAR he had been allowed to help his father carry the Christmas tree home. He was only eight years old, but how big he had felt holding the small end on his shoulder while his father up ahead of him carried the thick end—and almost all the weight—of the tree.
Some impoverished families in Little Italy tried to celebrate Christmas the American way by making do with ersatz trees, fashioned of a broomstick stuck into a bucket of rocks and festooned with coat hangers, from which they hung paper decorations. Most other families bought their tree on Christmas Eve from a corner vendor, hoping for rock-bottom prices. But Tony Falcone bought early and bought big. This year he started shopping for the tree several days before the holiday.
This is like being a kid again, Tommy thought as he walked with his father in search of a tree peddler whose wares seemed to meet Tony’s high specifications. At least, that was the reason the older man gave for passing up some of the nearby tree lots, but Tommy knew it was not the real reason.
The truth was that Tony was too well known in his neighborhood and so well respected that none of the tree merchants in the area would quibble with him over the price. They all knew him; they knew that his reputation was one of the things that helped make the streets safe enough for them to do business, and if he offered two dollars, they said “sold,” and if he offered one dollar, they said “sold,” and every year Tony wound up going farther and farther afield to find a merchant who didn’t know him, who didn’t want to do the neighborhood cop a favor, and who would argue the price of a tree down to the last penny.
They found such a peddler almost a half mile from their apartment. He did not know Tony and clearly did not want to. He immediately rejected any offer that was not up to his stated price. It took thirty minutes of concerted haggling, laced with Sicilian invective, dire threats against each other’s family, and vague entreaties to a God cruel enough to put such bandits on his own good earth, before the deal was struck. Meanwhile, Tommy stood nearby, smoking cigarettes, warming his hands over a wood fire the peddler kept burning in an old oil drum. He finally heard his father say, “Okay. Deal. Tie it up.”
“Tie it yourself, you thief,” the peddler said. Tommy laughed and took the rope from the man and began to tie the branches flat against the trunk so the tree would be easier to carry.
Tony helped him and mumbled, “A dollar and a quarter is all it cost. The man’s a fool. This is the best tree ever.”
“He probably thinks it’s worth taking a loss just to get rid of you, Papa.”
“He’s never going to get rich chasing away good customers,” Tony answered with a grunt.
They lugged the tree home together. It did not seem nearly as heavy as it had when Tommy was eight years old, but it still presented serious logistical difficulties navigating the narrow apartment steps, and both men were sweat soaked when they finally got their precious cargo onto the living room floor. Tony decided that a glass of wine was called for to celebrate the occasion.
They sat at the kitchen table, drinking homemade red out of water glasses, and Tommy asked, “Did you ever read Dickens’s Christmas Carol?”
“Of course I have,” his father answered. “Just because you’re a college boy, do you think I’m an uneducated clod?”
Which meant, Tommy knew, that his father had not read it, had probably never even heard of Dickens, but was embarrassed to admit it.
“Sorry,” he said. “But I was just thinking about Scrooge in that story. When he finally gets the Christmas spirit, Dickens says he really knew how to keep Christmas, and I was thinking that you’re like that, Papa. You really know how to keep Christmas.”
“I’m like Scrooz. I like celebrating Christmas. Especially now, with Mario busy at the church and Tina maybe off someplace on her career and you someday probably getting ready to leave us, it’s even more important to celebrate right.” He sipped his wine. “Tradition maybe is the ribbon that ties us to our memories.”
Tommy considered the thought for a moment and said, “That’s very beautiful, Papa.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Not me. Not ever,” Tommy answered truthfully. He sipped his wine, then refilled their glasses. “I wish sometimes that Nilo could be with us.” He saw his father’s face cloud over.
“It was in his blood. He went bad and brought it on himself.”
Tommy shrugged. “I know that. It’s just … well, I think there’s something wrong that he was convicted because of perjured testimony.”
His father said, “Maybe those witnesses were not at the scene. But what they said was true. Nilo killed that child. He deserves to rot in hell for that crime.”
“Only if he’s rightly convicted,” Tommy said. “Liars should not be allowed to send men to the electric chair.”
His father stared into the bottom of his wineglass for a long time before speaking. “What do you expect me to say? That that’s the difference between a lawyer and a cop?”
Tommy shook his head, but Tony shrugged him off. “In the real world, things don’t run according to neat theories. You have to balance things. How many gees did I arrest who got off because the fix was in? This time, the result was right. Nilo chose to run with the criminals in this city. They didn’t call him Kid Trouble for nothing. He was one of Maranzano’s killers and he killed that boy and the electric chair is where he should be. That’s reality.”
It was his turn now to refill the wineglasses. “This is a great country, Tommy, and it’ll be a great country for all the Italians who move here. But it won’t be so great if we come over here and we bring our Mafia and our vendettas and our blood feuds with us. Did you see how easy it was for the newspapers to call Nilo the Dago of Death? That’s what we’re becoming in the eyes of the people—a race of criminals. And it just shouldn’t be. We’re the newcomers. We should be more American than the Americans. I don’t care about criminals. There are always criminals. There are always cops. They commit a crime, we lock them up. What’s wrong here is that these criminals are giving an entire race a bad name. And Nilo, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, was one of them. I never liked the boy, that’s true. But I never expected him to become one of them.”
They had never talked about it before, and until that moment Tommy had not realized how deeply his father had been hurt by Nilo’s entrance into gangster life.
“It was him, Papa, but it could have been me. It could have been Mario that joined the mobs. What if it had been us?”
“Then I would have put you in jail, too,” Tony answered instantly. “I believe in justice, Tommy. I would have wept for your soul, but I would have put you away.”
“Would you? Would you really?”
His father waited a long time before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
“Everybody can’t make his own laws, Papa. There has to be one law and the courts have to apply it. And it has to be fair for everybody. For you, for me, even for Nilo.”
“You’re right. I hope someday we live in a world like that.” He grinned. “Now shut up. You college boys are too smart, and arguing with you always gives me a headache.” He stood up and drained his wineglass.
“Come on. We’ve got a tree to put up.” He turned toward the living room and threw open his arms in a large theatrical gesture, and Tommy saw that he was more than a little bit intoxicated. “Make way, world,” Tony called. “Here comes Scrooz.”
“Scrooge.”
“And his son, Little Scrooz.”
WHEN SHE HAD LEFT LUCIANO’S CLUB, Tina had almost vomited in the street, because, despite all her brittle, worldly, sophisticated talk, she was frightened to death of facing an abortion.
A few days later, Luciano had called and told her he had made an appointment for her under the name of Miss Ross with a doctor up on Park Avenue. The doctor’s offices were elegant, and the procedure itself was quick, professional, and relatively painless. But when she had asked the doctor for his fee, he smiled at her in a superior way and said, “It’s a favor for Mr. Luciano, Miss Ross.”
“I’d rather pay,” Tina had answered.
“And he’d rather you didn’t,” the doctor said. “Please work out your settlement with him.” He had looked down at the sheaf of papers he was carrying, signaling her that the discussion was at an end.
She had recuperated in her room for a few days but had delayed calling Luciano, knowing he would be calling her very soon.
And I will do what he wants me to do because a deal is a deal, she thought.
But Luciano had not called, and as the days stretched into weeks, then into months, she began to feel more and more like an ingrate who had been done a great favor and who had failed to acknowledge it even with a simple thank-you.
Twice she had gone uptown to Luciano’s speakeasy but both times had failed to muster the nerve to go inside and speak to him. Maybe, she thought, she had been mistaken and Luciano had no interest in her. Maybe I was just another slut from the neighborhood that he did a favor for.
Meanwhile, Tina’s mind was taken up with other problems.
In the last two months, Uta Schatte had taken on two new students, who had also moved into the big house with them, and since that time she had seemed to have little time for Tina.
Of course she still got her twice-daily lessons—now, it seemed, with even greater intensity than they had had before—but when there were recitals to give, Tina was no longer asked to go. Instead, the two new girls would accompany Uta and Flora, the maid, on the trips, while Tina was left behind to rattle around the big house by herself. And Frau Schatte had suddenly become cold to her. It was the feeling of being left out that bothered Tina. She certainly did not mind passing up the recitals because, in truth, she had begun to question just how legitimate all of them were. They were generally held in hotel suites or in large private homes, and the audiences were usually only a handful of men. Frau Schatte showed up with Tina and Flora, and a handful of pretty, overdressed girls Tina had never seen before. Even with Frau Schatte accompanying on the piano, the music was rather perfunctory and seemed merely to be a prelude to a kind of cocktail party, which led to a lot of drinking and carousing and finally the young women pairing off with men and heading off toward other private rooms.
Bloodline: A Novel Page 29