The Mezzogiorno Social Club
Page 13
“None of us got him out,” Carmine said. “We didn’t know about it. Any okay he got, he got over there.”
“And him. He didn’t know what would happen? Goes there like the peasant that he is. This is business, not cowboys and Indians. You been running things, keeping things good, peaceful. And I’m trying to keep peace too, Carmine, do things with all the crews. Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem. People losing money, cops wrecking our joints, people scared to even put a few pennies on a number. They know we’re sitting down, me and you, and they wanna hear what they wanna hear.”
“Whatever we gotta do,” Carmine said.
“The cops want who killed one of their own. I don’t blame them. You blame them?”
“No.”
“Then do the right thing.”
***
Raining now, Benny drove under the Third Avenue “L”.
Crossing 116th Street, Carmine pointed. “We got a couple of spots over there, Pleasant Avenue. You know them, you made them, you and Georgie Nuts.” He pointed with his chin. “Some of the market we got. The rest is Mo Zito’s. Good things came from Joe Morello and Patsy Stellato sitting down with Strachi and me. We did okay back then. It was that or a war, and Zito’s been good with it. Years now we been living rich. But now the cops killed all his spots.”
“Where is he? Strachi.”
“Upstate. With the cows, the milk. He thinks we’re getting things in order before he gets back.”
“They not gonna do it up there?”
“No. Don’t you understand? It’s ours.”
Benny, the guy who wanted nothing to do with breaking heads and busting knees, knew he’d have no problem putting one or two in Strachi’s head. Do it for reputation, yeah, but for Joe Petrosino too. All those times he called Joe his only friend, words that fell out of his mouth like yak — if it was yak then, it was honest-to-God now. When he got the word that Joe got hit, it felt no different than when they told him about his father frozen and dead under the snow.
***
The rain had left the neighborhood, let a warm breeze dry the streets and let the sun angle through the stained glass of the Patarama Holy Family Chapel.
“He’s giving it to Dominic,” Benny told The Ox.
“Why him?”
“To get him a button. What else?”
“How you figure that? He ain’t a siggie.”
“His mother is.”
“But Carmine ain’t.”
“He does this, see what happens. This is America, things are loose.”
“Rules don’t matter no more?”
“Not for this. That’s why you’re driving.”
“Me? If he wanted me in this, I woulda went to the meet up the Bronx with him. Something’s going on.”
“Maybe he’s trying you.”
“How about he tries you? You went with him up there.”
“He don’t want me.”
“Don Strachi’s good to me.”
“If you don’t do it, you gotta scram,” Benny said.
“Where the hell am I gonna scram?”
***
Then came the day the newspapers wrote about. The temperature dropped from warm to cold. The sky went gray, more like black. The street lights snapped on. The wind, forget about it. Sheets of plywood, doors and bundles of lathe from the top floors of construction sites sailed over Brooklyn and Manhattan and landed in Staten Island with laundry, horse blankets and plate glass.
Lightning blasted a smokestack in Brooklyn and flattened it in a brewery’s engine room, killed a guy. Two horses pulling a truck got zapped and they dropped.
Up near City Island fishing boats disappeared. In Washington Heights wind pulled a baby from its mother’s arms. In Harlem it ripped up a circus tent, tangled people in canvas and dropped a tent pole that cracked a little girl’s skull.
Subways got flooded. The bottom acres of the Central Park got to looking like swamp. Limbs snapped off trees, people ran into the Arsenal Station, or got herded by the floods to overpasses that arched above the water line.
A milk wagon nearly stalled, then bucked out of the park onto Fifth Avenue. A tree crashed down behind it and blocked 72nd Street. Dominic Tonno, The Ox, and the wagon rattled south.
“It stays dark, we don’t wait till tonight?” The Ox asked.
“Let’s see if we get through this shit.”
They zigzagged around stalled autos, trolley cars and downed wires. On the Bowery they moved under the “L”, creeping past storefronts lighted for night, turned into Broome Street, crossed Centre Street and Police Headquarters.
“What you think?” The Ox asked.
“Go around the front.”
They stopped where steps led into the new palace, left the wagon there. It sat a few hours before somebody looked inside. Then the phone call to the Italian Squad sent Detectives Charlie Corrao and Ugo Casadei to look into the wagon, smell rancid milk, and see the body of Don Cesare Strachi with a garrotte around most of his neck; and a scrap of paper pinned to the lapel of his suit: For Petrosino.
The body got to the morgue, Corrao and Casadei got to Mott Street for chicken with black bean sauce. After the fortune cookie, Casadei asked: “How we closing this one out?”
“The way Joe would close it out.”
The homicide stayed open and ignored.
***
The Digger watched the barber shave Strachi, give him a haircut, and helped put him in a suit. Then, in the coffin storage room with Vito Red, The Digger put his hand on a casket. “This one.”
Vito pointed to another. “That one is finer.”
“Okay, that one,” The Digger said.
Vito, a steady earner with the unions, jobs and strikes, had wormed himself into the money end of the funeral business, Benny saying he climbed up Carmine’s ass like cheap underwear. The Ox saw that too, and everybody saw that the scrawny man had gotten scrawnier. His eyes got bigger and his pants got baggy. Sick over the guy in the coffin, maybe, but if he got to looking like a weed, it came after the fire of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
One-hundred-fifty girls, many from the first picket line he had broke, either burned, suffocated, or flew ten stories to the street and into pine boxes lined up on the North River pier at 26th Street.
Sick or not, Vito stayed the mercenary, sending strike breaker muscle to the pier, but to move slowly and softly through the lines of boxes, hustling Patarama compassion for families looking for what was left of wives and daughters.
Parades of hearses slunk back and forth from the funeral home to the pier, to the morgue, and to Gaga and The Digger. Traffic around Patarama got thick. The preparation room stayed up for most of a week, embalming machines clicked and hummed and, with cash overflowing the till, Carmine threw a salute to Vito, the reason for the overflow, and tossed him a key to the till.
Few knew about that till, a locked box bolted to a closet floor in the Patarama office. The Digger knew, Gaga didn’t. He just knew he got whatever The Digger gave him as long as he did what he was told.
Never had he failed to respect or pleasure The Digger. Mister Ulino, to him. But lately the boy’s face took on looks The Digger had never seen on it. Looks that made jealousy and worry, the way it grinned at the young ladies who came to mourn; the way he hummed to the girls whose hair he combed and cheeks he colored to look pretty in their coffins.
In the middle of a night, their bedroom dark but for the glow of street lamps outside, Gaga had been studying shadows slide along the walls and ceiling. He stayed quiet till The Digger stirred.
“Did you see, Mr. Ulino, that Mr. Strachi had no hair in his ears?”
“You put a little too much color in his face.”
“I’ll fix it now?”
“No, go to sleep now. He’s gone in the morning anyway. I just want you to notice. Women like a little more color, but not men.”
“Yeah, women. Pretty women,” he said. “Right, Mister Ulino?”
The Digger said nothing.
“Touch the dead ones. The alive ones are not for you. You will be in trouble with the police if you touch them and I will miss you when you are in jail.”
With a tone The Digger had never heard come from him, Gaga said: “You will be in trouble with the police if they knew what we do.”
“What we do in love is our secret,” The Digger said, tugging an end of his moustache at a corner of his grin. “You know that. And it is not wrong for us.”
“I want to love a pretty girl like the one in the back parlor.”
“You don’t hear? What did I just tell you?”
“I don’t care, I want to love one.”
“You don’t love me?
“I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“I will give you money. So much money that you can leave here whenever you want and find live girls.”
“Where would I go?”
“A stable with horses. One with rabbits.”
“Okay, I’ll love you again if you give me money.”
“Meet me downstairs.”
“Why not here, Mister Ulino?”
“Downstairs. Go and wait for me.”
The Digger found Gaga in the stock room, lying curled in the coffin they had used many times. He was sucking his thumb. The Digger backed off when tears got behind his eyes, but he regained, used chloroform, then held the coffin pillow to Gaga’s face.
The flimsy corpse fit neatly under the blanket of the girl in the back parlor. By noon, after a mass had been said for them, they were buried.
***
After a day of burials, The Digger walked the alley to the Mezzogiorno cellar, found nobody there, then went upstairs. Out front, beyond San Gennaro, he saw Benny Bats and the little boy, the son of Lucia Burgundi, talking with Vito Red.
He caught Vito’s eye, then waited for him in the kitchen.
“You have the money?” The Digger whispered.
“What money?”
“From the drawer. It is empty.”
“Did you look — ”
“I looked all over.”
“How much was it?”
“You counted last.”
“Where’s Gaga?”
“I have not seen him since yesterday.”
“The drawer was locked?”
“Of course it was. My keys are gone too.”
Gaga stayed gone and suspicions hung on. But both faded to history as the Patarama books went real black. Vito had parlayed the Triangle tragedy with Mafia and Camorra compassion and grief. Patarama funerals buried Sicilians, Neapolitans, Calabrians, and grudges that came from across the sea with them. It made for new alliances, new money, and succeeded at a pace toward what would come to be known as the Mafia-Camorra peace.
***
Rosina found success too. For the business and for the troubled Lucia. She felt it coming each time ladies of Madison Square turned into the Twenty-fourth Street to look beyond the fence of iron pickets at the shop signed LuciaRosina.
Now and then, one or two of the ladies came into the shop, fingered fabrics and oohed and aahed, studied sketches and oohed and aahed. But their visits resulted in polite conversation and limited fittings.
Then, on a Thursday in December, at the start of a snow, Rosina watched Benny leave Georgie Nuts in the car, quick step into the shop and toss packs of peanuts on their work table.
“Ladies, it will be a good Christmas. I promise.”
“For what, Benito?” Rosina asked, smiling at the promise, whisking snow from Benny’s shoulders. “For the peanuts?”
“More than peanuts, Beautiful,” he said, and yanked The Morning Telegraph from inside his coat. “Because of Louella Parsons.”
“Who is that?”
“She writes in this paper.” Benny slapped the folded newspaper with the backs of his fingers. “About actors and singers, moving pictures. And now you.”
He put a finger on the Parsons column and read:
LuciaRosina, a shop of elegance run by two talented and lovely sisters of Italy, has been gaining attention from the ladies of the stage. Good rumor has it that the Floradoras have been fitted for the sisters’ Milano inspired fashions.
Benny ran a finger down the column. “And here she says she comes here herself.”
“Nobody come here,” Rosina said. “No Louella, no nobody.”
“What is the Floradoras?” Lucia asked. “Cigars, no?”
“No. The Floradoras are girls that sing and dance in the theaters. Everybody knows them. Show girls.”
“No Floradora,” Rosina said. “Something is a mistake.”
“No, no, no,” Benny said. “If Louella Parsons says they come here, they come here.”
A group of ladies, their eyes wide with anticipation walked in.
“Aha,” Rosina said.
Prohibitions
That year and years after, the dress shop profits grew. So did Benny’s thoughts for Rosina. His first sight of her so long ago — those gray eyes, true and sincere, smart and innocent — had sent him into hot and cold shivers that she must have felt when she measured him for his first suit with her. He’d sensed she feared him then, or just didn’t like him.
But then came the Sunday drives, lunches, dinners, and picnics up in City Island, or down at the Battery. It was in the Central Park, during a walk that should have been shorter, that his limp got to showing itself.
“I think you are sometimes in pain?” Rosina asked.
“A little, yeah, but it’s nothing.”
“You do not like that I ask?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“It is no shame to have pain.”
“Marry me.”
“No.”
The soft spot in his heart for Rosina — most called her Rose by now, Benny stuck with Rosina — tried to toughen, but it stayed mushy. No jealousy from her, no demanding, no whining, but a pain in the ass with the kid, Sonny, all the time. Being with her meant being with him. Out to Jersey, down to Coney Island, a boat around Manhattan and, finally, a Sunday in the Bronx and a building lot on the Williams Bridge Road.
They left the kid sleeping in the car and kept eyes on the car as they stepped into a wooded parcel on ground spongy with melting winter.
Benny said: “Rosina, look. Over here could be the kitchen, or it could be the dining room. The guy’s doing the plans.” He stepped close to her, his eyes locked on hers. “The house could look this way so the kitchen would get the sun in the morning. Unless you want it looking that way, whatever you want.”
“But, Benito — ”
“I’m talking a house for you, Rosina.”
“We have a house, Benito.”
“That’s Strachi’s house.”
“Lucia says it will be hers.”
“Don’t make book on it.”
“What?”
“Never mind. But this house will be yours. All you gotta do is ... here, look.”
He took a ring box from his pocket, opened it. “White gold, like what my father got for my mother. But the guy says he could put the diamond, three carats, he says it is, in regular gold if you like. Or change the stone. The trains are coming up this way. The house will be worth ... forget about it.”
She let him slide the ring on her finger and let him lock her hands in his. She let go a tear and an embrace, and set a cheek on his shoulder.
“You have so many women, Benito.”
“But not the woman I want.”
“And once you have her?”
“I’m talking a wedding, Rosina.”
“Oh, Benito ... my obligations ...” She looked to the car. “It is impossible.”
Benny said: “The boy has a mother.”
“His mother and I are one now,” Rosina said. “Lucia cannot be alone, her life is my life.”
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br /> “The ring promises your future to brighten.”
“The future is written.” She pushed herself from his shoulder and handed him the ring.
The gold felt warm in his palm. Angered, he turned to walk away, but stopped and faced her.
“You will wear it some day.”
“By then I will be fat and you will not care to have me.”
“Not fat. Chubby. And still I’d want you. How could I not want you, with that face so — ”
“Oh, look, the boy is awake. He will be frightened,” she said, and scrambled quickly to the car.
Forget about it.
PART TWO
The Problem
Forget about it. How many times he must have said that since before Prohibition and the years into it. He still had the ring and the problem, the problem pretty much a man now, knocking on the door to the cellar office of the Mezzogiorno.
“Come in.”
“You wanna see me?”
“Yeah.”
Sonny came in, stood near the door. His black curls were not combed, they didn’t have to be. His clothes, probably measured, tailored and cut by his Aunt Rose, fit him well. The punk looked sharp.
Benny took a paper sack from a desk drawer, put it on the desk.
“I was gonna ask you something anyway,” Sonny said.
“What?”
Sonny stepped to the desk. “Me and Mootzi, we been thinking about a spot. A speak.”
“Think about this.” Benny tossed him the sack.
Sonny caught it, held it like he knew what it was. “What?”
“Look at it.”
Sonny opened the bag, dumped a diamond broach and a hundred dollar bill on the desk.
“Her mother came to me with this,” Benny said.
“Yeah, so?”
“Crying, she comes to me, because everybody connects me to a misery like you.”
Sonny shrugged, made a face like I don’t care. “Come on, you cuzzy with my aunt, everybody does things.”
Benny percolated real fast, wound up the punch before he bolted out of the chair, hammered Sonny on the chin, grabbed a handful of shirt and a handful of curls, shoved him against the concrete wall, and connected a few more punches.
“You got nothing to say about your aunt. You understand me?”