But she knew that in good weather, Rosina pushed baby Enzo’s carriage down to the neighborhood, an hour away, for breads, cheeses, meats and fish unknown in Madison Square.
During a recent visit, Benny, as if a proud uncle, lifted the baby from the carriage and walked with him into the Mezzogiorno Social Club. Months old, the kid was a charmer. The guys in the club got to calling him “Sonny,” and Sonny charmed the neighborhood with his black curls and shining eyes.
Even the grumpy calabrese could not refuse a smile for him, and the barese managed singsong praise about the beauty of the boy, his mother and, of course, his aunt. “And tell Lucia we ask after her.”
Back home, in the shop, Rosina reported: “The people of our neighborhood ask for you and wish that you are well.”
Lucia, pinning a dress pattern, looked up. “I do not need their regards.” She motioned to the window at a young family passing by. “The Americans here are as fine as the DiStasis of our home. None talk with bad tongues, and speak only to praise our work.”
“And buy little.”
“Do you think our people, our own people, would give us even their good wishes? Would they not be envious? Or wear our work to strut and cackle like hens in those dirty streets?”
Rosina said nothing.
“When you speak of the neighborhood, my sister, I no longer think of those people or those streets. I think only that we have made Madison Square our home.”
Petrosino Does the Right Thing Again
Lina the Gnome, earrings glistening in the early morning sun, traveled the street as if her feet, hidden under her skirts, never touched the ground. She found Joe, as if he’d been waiting for her, on the steps of Christ the King Church, glancing now and again towards the tailor shop.
No hello, no smile, but an ambush. “Petrosino, as your thick head should now know, the widow has chosen to avoid fear. It is her way. Her future is unfortunate; she will find little peace while in this world. That her mind weakens is both a curse and a blessing for her. You have done your part. Now you must find peace for yourself.”
“Good morning, Piccerella.”
“I am sorry to be urgent. Good morning.”
“You are good to come to me with your concern.”
“There is a widow, soon to be your wife. With her you will have a child.”
“Adelina?”
“Aha, you already know.”
“I did not know of a child. That is good. Thank you.”
An ambulance stopped at the curb. Joe went to it and took a cane from the driver. He walked off, the cane resting on his shoulder.
Bulldog Joe, who’d made little time for women in his life, had been in and out of gaga for Lucia, and if any good came of women and thunderbolts, they had kicked up feelings of romance and family.
A few women had caught his eye over the years. Adelina Saulino was one of them. Not as pretty as Lucia, but pretty enough. No thunderbolts, but concern and interest for him. Not that he’d forgotten what Rosina had said, that if the dress business were more successful, it would perhaps bring peace to Lucia.
With that, he stepped quickly to Mott Street, passed Chinamen in doorways of hop dens and gambling joints. Where a small woman at a store’s street counter sold loose cigarettes, decks of playing cards from France, and sweetened pork rolls, he crossed Mott to the rear of Headquarters and an iron-gated tunnel.
In a basement corridor, with the property room, telegraph office and the sitting room, a cop and his prisoner stepped through a door with a heavy spring that bonged shut on rows of holding cells.
Joe turned into the property room, set the cane on the counter, and got the property cop to laughing.
“Joe, this is the cane you’re wanting to trade?” The cop had a brogue. “This thing is from one of the hospitals and couldn’t be cheaper.”
“So?”
“So? So somebody’s gonna catch on, and then what?”
“The case is finished.”
“And what will I do when its owner comes for it. Or the DA?”
“No one will come for it. I am to take it to its owner.”
“Then sign for it.”
“It wasn’t my case.”
“Then let the owner come for it with a release and he can have it.”
“Yes, but you see, the good this will do ...”
“I’d like to help, Joe, but I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. I don’t know.”
“The good it will do is more than the trouble that you fear.”
The cop folded his arms, looked hard into Joe’s eyes. “You’re a good dago, a good fella, all right, and I’d like to do it, but ...” He shook his head. “I’ll be sorry for this. But you’ll please forget about the gun.”
“That’s the same case.”
“What will you bring me to trade, a kid’s carpet gun?”
“All right, the cane.”
“It’s not a cane that you’re wanting, Joe,” the cop said as he made the trade. “You Eye-talian fellas wouldn’t know, but this here is the walking stick of a gentleman. Not a cane, Joe, a walking stick. And a handsome one.”
Joe gripped the stick’s silver knob with the tips of his fingers. This gentleman’s walking stick, like those of western cattlemen, was fashioned from ‘i cazz’ of a bull.
***
Joe headed for the French Quarter, its streets worse than any street, any alley, any Little Italy. Worse than Minetta Street, with the Africans and Italians ambushing each other; as bad as the African and Irish battles that named a neighborhood San Juan Hill.
The French, or the low of them, hung around basement dives looking dopey and sucking beer with some hocus in it. Absinthe or something. For the German and Irish cops, Give me the dagos anytime, then I could tell the good from the bad.
When Joe was a rookie, they flew the dago, the wop cop, out of the 13th Precinct up on 30th Street down to the prostitute posts on Mercer and Green Streets.
Joe liked telling war stories about his early years on patrol. Stories that started: “When I had my hair ...” and tales of wine bottles imported from France sailing from roofs and windows that sent him with screeching whores under the cover of fire escapes and into hallways. “Bottles, bricks, rocks. Some of those streets over there, the buildings put you in a box.”
Few in the French Quarter liked a cop. The kids did, and the magdalenes did. And the restaurant owners, like Simone with the dancing mammaries that seemed to cheer at the sight of Joe, fed the men on post, kept them around to keep out the stickup men.
Joe never remembered Simone’s married name that she dropped after her frog husband, Maurice, got himself collared during Joe’s second winter on the job, ‘84 into ‘85. Walking the night post on Mercer, Joe sidled into the broken shadow of ashcans and fire escapes to take a leak. He never got to it, because across from him, out of an alley that elbowed to the rear of Simone’s restaurant, Maurice crept like a felony in progress, the handle of a bulky valise in his hand and a weighted sack sagged over a shoulder.
Bull Dog Joe locked onto the scent. An easy tail, the street empty and still, Joe hugging the building line, the thick soles of his shoes keeping quiet. On Clinton Street Maurice set down his cargo at the door of a dry goods store and stepped to the side alley of a haberdasher’s shop. He needed to pee too.
But Joe was already there, nightstick hanging by its thongs from his badge, finishing his leak and waiting for Maurice to finish his before snatching him for whatever he was up to.
If Maurice felt life in the dark with him, it took him some seconds to drop his aim, leap into a sprint not as quick as Joe’s nightstick, and fall under Joe’s boot planted in the small of his back.
Not to roll in weeds and gutter with a guy who’d just peed all over himself, Joe bopped him a few short head whacks with the nightstick — vaffanculo — till he stopped squirming. Then he rapped the cobbled street with the nightstick that brought the man from a nearby foot post.
They walked to the stat
ion house with the swag — bolts of silks and folds of bed linens — and Maurice, who smelled like overcooked asparagus.
It turned out that the silk got lifted off an East River pier and precinct detectives got interested. They went with Joe to Clinton Street, broke into the store, found its owner and more of the silk, then got the search warrant.
By dawn they’d filled a Black Maria with property, and Joe learned the value of newspapers. Under a photo of the detectives who snatched his stolen-property-felony collar, The World said:
After a night of investigation at 79 Clinton Street, Detectives Coffey and Killeen flank the hefty figure of Marms Mandelbaum, alleged to be the city’s most successful dealer in stolen goods.
Marms traded three thousand dollars worth of bail for a lam to Toronto. Maurice made his bail and followed her, leaving Simone and her dancing tits jilted and happy with the Restaurant Du Grand Vatel, where Joe now headed to meet Benny Bats.
In window reflections he watched himself strut — ’na bella figura — derby, suit, fresh shirt and collar, and the bull’s cazz’ that he now gripped without scheeving. He turned into the restaurant, its front windows stocked with a half dozen noisy parrots, canaries and cockatoos.
At a table away from the birds, Benny Bats sat with coffee and cognac.
“What’s with the circus stick, Joe?” Benny asked.
Joe sat, poured coffee and splashed cognac into it. “Walking stick. You know it?”
“No.” Bats put a paper sack on the table. “Sawdust.”
“We don’t need it, we got it.”
“What the hell.”
“What the hell? When was the last time you called?”
“They’re watching me like a hawk since you nabbed Strachi.”
“Getting too successful without the guy you say is your only friend?”
“All right, all right. Come on, have coffee. You’re my friend, I know.”
Joe set a finger on the sack of sawdust. “When did you get this?”
“Just before.”
“Anything interesting?”
“One or two guys at that shit bar. I had a glass of wine that gave me agita. I been guzzling Brioschi.”
“Cognac, coffee and Brioschi. Nice. Strachi been in touch?”
“Letters to Carmine Tonno, some for the house uptown that I deliver.”
“What’s he saying?”
“I don’t read the letters, Joe.”
“Any word about him getting out?”
“Not that I hear.”
“What’s Carmine saying?”
“Nothing. He don’t like me, but he likes what I bring in. His kid likes me.”
“Mootzi?”
“No, fuck him. The other one, Dominic.”
“What about him?”
“He’s making his father proud. He’ll do good.”
“Vito San Martino. What’s he been doing?”
“Vito Red’s up Carmine’s ass all time. Carmine’s the only guy who likes the little fuck. He’s still with the unions, nothing new there, keeps things secret, except when he makes and breaks strikes, and he strong arms membership dues with The Ox.”
“Ulino?”
“The Digger. I don’t think he knows too much, except to keep his mouth shut. Him and Gaga, fags, I think.”
“Anybody talking about the painting?”
“Not that I hear. But Vito visits the fat man.”
“Peppone?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that mean?”
“There was talk after you guys hit the stable, that the guy who smuggled it in the country was one of the bodies. Was it?”
Joe shrugged. “How do you know what you know?”
“Who else? The Ox. But he don’t know more than that, how much it’s worth, how they got it ... was supposed to be for the communists, I told you that. So maybe Peppone knows.”
“How’s that?”
“Vito was an organizer, you know that too.”
“Go on.”
“And Peppone’s a communist too, and they got together.”
“When?”
“A few weeks back.”
“You said nothing to me about them being together.”
“You didn’t ask anymore about the painting, I figured it for bullshit.”
“The widow. You ask her about the painting?”
“Yeah, I told you right after I asked her. Months ago, when I got a couple of suits. That maybe the tailor had it, but she says no.”
“How’s their business?”
Benny made a frown, shook his head. “Not good. Carmine got me picking up what they’re short for the bills, and Lucia is getting too dopey to know it. Rosina don’t like the set up, but she’s stuck. She won’t leave the sister.”
Joe lifted his cup, gulped and poured again.
“A good woman, Rosina — Hey, that cane.” Benny tapped the table with a knuckle. “The Marshall’s.”
“Take it to the dress shop and tell Masterson to pick it up there. Today, do it.”
“Okay.”
“Tell him to call me after he picks it up.”
“But then he knows that we talk, you and me.”
“I bet you can dance through that.”
Lieutenant Petrosino
Since 1862, when the Police Department moved Headquarters into 300 Mulberry Street, its façade of classic stone got the neighborhood and its cops to calling it the Marble Palace. It was not the department’s first Headquarters, but it was the one where the neighborhood went to make a beef, look at lineups and mug shots, or get booked.
From tenements across the street used as news offices, reporters watched, if not for a headline, then for the kids on its stoop tossing jacks or picking-up-sticks. Now that the palace doors stayed shut, kids played on the stoop, but the newspapers moved their offices to buildings around 240 Centre Street, the new Headquarters.
Joe lived a block from the new building, a stone rectangle mounted on a narrow wedge of earth near the north end of the neighborhood. He’d passed there frequently, looking to the top of its four floors, at the windows of the Police Commissioner’s office, and at its copper cupola that kids and cops called the rabbi’s hat.
The office spanned the width of the building, with windows at each end of it. The view at one end let Commissioner Theodore Bingham see across Centre Street, at beat-up tenements, stores and stables. Windows at the other end looked down on Centre Market Place, with new gun shops and saloons crammed between tired buildings of lath, plaster and lumber.
The tall Bingham had made a recent problem for himself with an article that quoted him blaming half of the city’s crime rate on the Jews. He was way off, had taken hits for it, and laid blame on the Italians by beefing up Joe Petrosino’s Squad from six detectives to more than two dozen, titled it the Italian Legion, and promoted Joe to Lieutenant.
“Such a politician,” some Jews said.
“Phony bastard,” some Italians said.
The orders promoting Joe went citywide on a Thursday, and by dinnertime, the windows of Vincent Saulino’s Restaurant steamed with the mix of cold November and the warmth of wine, cooking and celebration.
Detectives watched the new lieutenant at the table where he’d often sat with a meal and a glass of wine, charmed by Adelina, who did not know she’d helped chase Lucia from the warm corners of Joe’s mind.
Adelina was thirty-seven, nine years younger than Joe, had already assured him she was eager for babies, and thought it a good time for him to leave the job.
“Twenty-six years is enough.”
“Twenty-five,” he said, and the next day figured his pension and priced a ring.
***
The doctors had known little of the sickness Mama had suffered, and knew little of Lucia’s suffering. Rosina had heard some of the words the doctors threw around, and she asked one to write them for her: depressive disorder, premature dementia, precocious madness.
Maybe because it had been too cold and
windy to spend time in the sun, Lucia’s face had paled, the luster in her eyes had dimmed, and her work in the shop became no more than adequate.
Rosina helped her from the bathtub into her bathrobe.
“Do you think the warm bath brings color to my face?” Lucia asked. “Yes.”
“Did the doctor say it would?”
“Yes, I think so. And now to bed. First Enzo, then you.”
Rosina put the baby to bed, kissed him, and smiled because she felt no fever. She stepped into Lucia’s room, found her folding down her bedcovers.
“Do you want your slippers, or are you getting in bed now?”
“It feels too early for bed.”
“Your slippers then?”
“Yes.” Lucia sat on the bed.
Rosina helped her with the slippers and said: “There seems to be no fever.”
“Fever?”
“Yes. We thought Enzo was getting sick.”
“He is asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no fever, good.”
“How do you feel?” Rosina asked.
“All is well.”
“Your color is stronger,” she said, lying.
“The warm bath brings the color.”
“And the men still gaze at you.”
“When they come into the shop?”
“Yes.”
“I could not go on without you.” Lucia said. “But you are tired.”
“I will sleep well,” Rosina said through half of a yawn. “Are you cold?”
“I am comfortable,” Lucia said, holding the bathrobe closed at her neck.
“I have news.”
“Yes?”
“Philomena called to me on the street.”
“You were with our boy?”
“Yes.”
“What does the good Philomena have to say?”
“Petrosino is to be married.”
Lucia stood from the bed and stepped behind a wing chair that looked to the fireplace. She smoothed the doily at its top and sat.
“It would be nice to have a fire, to sit again with Cuccio in the kitchen and watch the flames in his eyes. There is wood?”
“This fireplace is gas. I will light it?”
The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 11