The Mezzogiorno Social Club

by Ercole Gaudioso

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry. All right.”

  Benny let go, Sonny felt his face for blood, found some at his nose.

  “How she went with you, this kid, I don’t know. You sure ain’t Valentino. Then you give her a hundred to get rid of it? Get a fucking abortion, cocksucker?”

  “Let me get my handkerchief. I’m fucking bleeding.”

  “And a cheap fucking diamond to keep her quiet? You’re some fucking prize.”

  Benny let go, fixed his tie, sat half his ass on the desk.

  “You know why the mother came to me?”

  Sonny shrugged, eyes black and wide behind the handkerchief at his nose.

  Benny stood again. “Because she goes to her husband, he rips your face off. I told her I can’t keep this from him. She says wait, that maybe things could get better. Then she tells me the kid loves you. Loves a fucking hobo like you.”

  “She said she’d stay quiet,” Sonny said.

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t. Look, I can’t go to bat for you. Better get some scram money together. Or get a good diamond. What’s her name?”

  “Who?”

  “Who. Who we talking about, you fucking jerk?”

  “Antoinette.”

  “Antoinette a dog?”

  “She ain’t a dog.”

  “Marry her.”

  “You serious?”

  “The ring, candy, flowers, all that shit.”

  “A wife?”

  “If the father lets her marry you. Maybe you’ll get your speak then, or maybe he’ll do a favor and put you in a barrel.”

  “A fucking kid you want me to have.”

  “And pray he ain’t a jerk off like you. Now go do what you gotta do and don’t come back if you don’t.”

  ***

  Sonny seesawed between lamming and setting up house, then he hooked up with Mootzi, Happy Carmine’s nutsy kid, and Carmine got them near being legit running truckloads of factory whiskey out of Canada down to the Bronx for some guy they didn’t know and couldn’t get to know. They delivered a few loads, made a few scores, till Mootzi grew himself a brainchild.

  He had a way about him. A hard head and an iron look in his eyes that challenged, or threatened, or did something that kept Sonny from thinking for himself.

  “Look at all this money these guys are making with what me and you are moving for them, breaking our ass,” Mootzi said. “Money we’ll never make if we don’t get cugliones. So I say fuck these guys, and we make some moves, you and me.”

  They were hours out of Canada, hauling cases of Canadian Club.

  “Moves like what?” Sonny asked.

  “You just relax and you’ll see. Go to sleep.”

  Hours later Mootzi drove past the delivery spot in the Bronx.

  “Where you going?”

  “Did I tell you to relax?”

  Mootzi drove to a garage on Park Avenue. Cold like that, no deal, no invite. He says they’ll make bones with Dutch Schultz, and if they screw the guy who owned the truckload, Dutch would make it okay and they would start shoveling in some real money.

  “Are you fucking kidding?” Sonny said.

  “No cugliones, no gelt.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  Mootzi parked the truck in the garage’s driveway. “Go knock.”

  “You go knock.”

  “Come on, get balls.”

  “It’s five in the morning, Mootzi. What if somebody’s sleeping in there?”

  “So wake them up. What the fuck is it with you? Go knock.”

  Sonny knocked on the door next to the overhead. A guy with the face of a fist opened up. “What is it?”

  “We got something maybe you wanna see.”

  “What is it?”

  “Canadian.”

  The guy looked at the truck. “Who you with?”

  “Mo Zito.”

  “Zito hears you say that, he kills you.”

  “Maybe we got the wrong place.”

  “You fucking guineas.”

  Next day Benny caught the beef. These two kids, Benny. One of them is Carmine’s, the other one’s yours. They used Mo’s name. Carmine says for you to handle it.

  ***

  Soaping up his face at the bathroom sink, Benny got tickled that maybe the two jerks drove themselves into forever. Carmine Tonno would be better off without this son. Patsy Stellato’s daughter, Antoinette, and the baby in her belly would do better without Sonny Burgundi. But knowing Patsy, he’d give Antoinette whatever she wanted, and knowing Sonny, he’d take all he could.

  Benny shaved and toweled his face and stayed at the mirror. Forty-five years looked back at him. Choppers still pearly, eye pouches just coming on, black hair dappled with white, same with the moustache.

  On the handle end of the rake, an apartment up in midtown— same building where actor George Raft lived and partied with guys from Harlem — closets and drawers crowded with clothes. A new car once in a while, the newest one a Lincoln with eight cylinders and Georgie Nuts steady at the wheel.

  The connection with Georgie and Benny had been remade by Dominic Tonno. Smart and careful like his father — and nothing like his wacky brother — he kept markers on all his crew (the bigger the earner, the bigger the marker), and kept them knowing only what they needed to know.

  Patsy Stellato had put Happy Carmine on the speakeasies operation, with the okay to give it to Dominic. Buying and selling boot couldn’t keep too many secrets, but it made a lot of whispers.

  Dominic sent guys upstate to rent and buy houses and storefronts for cooking bootleg. They picked spots for the speakeasies, garages for cars and trucks, guns, ammo, cash. Truces and heads got broke, fixed, broke.

  Stellato got to running the family the way things got run in Sicily: Boss, Consigliere, Capos and Soldiers. He kept his family small. That was his way, the trusted and familiar. Like with Happy Carmine, who he couldn’t call Consigliere because he wasn’t Sicilian. But Consigliere was what he’d made of himself since the good things that came out of the Camorra-Mafia sitdowns.

  Then Dominic got made. A lot of talk, envy and jealousy, but no surprise.

  He ain’t a Siggie, so what. He’s Happy Carmine’s son, he’s Patsy Stellato’s nephew.

  Carmine had been keeping the kid’s head low, waiting for the right time, and the right time came when he’d whacked Strachi and got himself a button. Nobody disapproved. Nobody ignored The Ox either, recognized him and feared him, but none of Strachi’s old Camorra crew got made. Then, who’s made, who’s not made, nobody kept count as long as barrels of booze got poured into barrels of cash.

  The enterprise filled the neighborhood with cash it never had before. Buying and selling real estate got expensive, but if you could sleep through sirens and shots fired in the middle of nights, it made for a solid place to live.

  ***

  Benny got dressed, called Georgie Nuts.

  “Hello.”

  “Yeah, George. Me. Listen. That call I got about the Bronx beef?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Find out where Nicky Coco is and come get me.”

  Philomena Matruzzo Four

  By now the bank book under Philomena’s bed counted up to nearly one hundred dollars, and the hatbox got crowded with Laurio’s certificates of Birth and Baptism, First Communion and Confirmation, and photos of Laurio with other boys, acolytes to Don Camillo. His graduation certificates were in there with a studio photo of him, broad shouldered and handsome, in a white shirt and a tie hand-tinted red by the photographer.

  Mother and son had learned the language of America together, and together they spoke it. Laurio barely had an accent.

  “I need to keep some money from my pay this week,” he said.

  His pay came from Armando Peppone and Mondo Nuovo.

  “For why you need?”

  “I need a shirt.”

  “And for why you need a shirt?”

  “A special shirt, Ma. Black one.”

  She as
ked no more questions. The years of novenas and talks with the saints were paying off. Laurio had said nothing further, and to keep the evil eye from hearing about it, neither did she.

  Days after he brought home the shirt, a hot Friday afternoon, she’d been preparing Don Camillo’s dinner, and she had Laurio, just home from work, try on what she still called the priest’s jacket.

  “Ma, again?” Laurio said. “It’s too short. What do you think, it grows?”

  “Maybe I fix.”

  He put it on. She smoothed the material at his shoulders, tugged on the sleeves and lifted the cuffs to see if any length had been sewn under. “Good, maybe take out,” she said.

  She tugged on the hem at the back of the jacket and, folding it up to see the lining, said: “Yeah, maybe I fix. From where you come I no know. You Papa short like me.”

  “You cook the good foods and I grow like the Americans. In Italia, they gonna grow long too.”

  “Why they gonna grow?”

  “Mussolini.”

  “Go away, Mussolini.”

  “Mussolini is good for Italy.” Laurio took off his tie. “And for us here too.”

  Used to be that Philomena rarely heard mentions of Benito Mussolini without someone making a face. But talk had changed. His pictures filled American newspapers with those eyes like Vito Red’s eyes and that sour mouth.

  “One minute,” she said. “For why you have the black shirt?”

  “Because that’s what I am. A Blackshirt.” He said it as if to please her.

  “And you no tell me.”

  “I just told you.”

  “How stupid I am.”

  “Stupid? What?”

  “No for be a priest?”

  “It is more important to be with Mussolini. Together we will make these Americans afraid to call us names.”

  “Who? You and him?”

  He stuck out his chest, squared his shoulders and distorted his mouth into a look of Mussolini that made Philomena turn away.

  “Nobody want Mussolini,” she said with a short scream.

  “Even the Pope says he was sent by God, Ma.”

  “Look, no black shirt, please. See how nice you look with the white shirt.”

  She took his hand and examined the white shirt’s sleeves. Since first working for Peppone, printer’s ink kept the cuffs stained.

  She had asked: “It is clean at the newspaper?”

  “Sure. I clean it.”

  “Why the shirt gets like this?” Gripping his arm, she showed him a cuff. “I no can wash.”

  “The ink, Ma. From the press. I’ll take it to the Chinks.”

  “No Chinks. Roll up the cuffs, keep from the ink.”

  “I’ll buy another shirt.”

  “Just like that you spend money?”

  He took his mother’s hand from his arm and kissed it, then took off the white shirt, hooked it on a finger and held it before him.

  “This shirt, Mama, is for work,” he said, and tossed it at the sink. He took the black shirt from the hook near the bedroom door. “And this one is for you and me and Italia.”

  “Italia no care for you and me. And tie you shoe or you fall.”

  Laurio sat to tie his shoe and Philomena poked his head with a knuckle. “Peppone finds what’s in this head of yours ...” She tugged at his curls.

  “Ouch. Come on, Ma.”

  “... He take job from you.”

  “Il Duce says Italians will make our own jobs, even in America. Peppone and his Russians can’t promise that.”

  “Never mind Duce and the Russians. They for other people. You work, save money, and take care for yourself.”

  Laurio stood and put on the black shirt. “Okay, I’m going.”

  “Where you go?”

  “A meeting.”

  “You no look like my son with that shirt.”

  “I’m your son, Ma. I’ll see you later.”

  “Wait. The fish for Don Camillo. You bring.”

  “I’m late. See you later.” He opened the door, stepped out.

  Never before had Laurio’s footsteps sounded like the footsteps of his father, those years ago, falling fast and faster down the stairs. But when her husband had gone to dig silver in the west, she locked the door behind him, then scrubbed the pans that had made his breakfast, scoured the sink, and never cried for him.

  Now, with the footsteps of her son too distant to hear, she didn’t lock the door and didn’t scrub, but the door latched itself and she let go the tears behind her eyes. Sobbing into her apron, she paced, asking the saints what she’d done wrong. She felt no reply and, angered at their betrayal, shut her lips to lock in the curses running through her head and held the black jacket, first to her breast, then onto the kitchen table.

  She sat, slid her glasses to the tip of her nose, scissored the stitching in the cuffs, and measured a new length. About to do the same with the hem at the back of the jacket, she found a repair had already been done. Perhaps work that the tailor did for the priest those years past.

  Then, feeling something — a flat irregularity, maybe a patch, a wrinkle or a fold in the material. She opened the hem’s stitching, put her hand under the lining and took out a purse of a fine black silk that recalled her dreams of gems and gold.

  Her breathing pitched, she removed the purse, kneaded it, felt something, but not gems and not gold. She stood, her knees soft. She checked the door locks, rushed Saint Anthony from the bedroom — you see this too — lit fresh candles before him and Rocco, then sat at the table and fixed herself in the moment.

  She shuffled to the edge of the chair. Carefully, quietly, as if someone could hear, she opened the purse and removed a painted canvas about the size of Laurio’s handkerchiefs. She set the canvas flat, then angled it to better see a skinny man, with features sad and grotesque, sitting at a table with a meal of poor people before him. She tilted the canvas this way and that to find treasure, but found only disappointment.

  But not in the saints, not in the dreams, and not in the painting, only in herself, too dull to recognize meaning. But, she concluded with satisfaction, that what she could not recognize now, would make itself known, if not to her, then to Laurio. If not now, then in time.

  Her breathing eased, the sad man back in the purse, she put him in a paper sack and dropped the sack into the important hatbox. Then she removed Peppone’s article about lost art being returned by a good and honorable man. She read it again, put it back and slid the hatbox under the bed.

  “Keep an eye on it,” she told the saints.

  Back in the kitchen she put Don Camillo’s dinner in a shopping bag, folded the jacket over her arm, and began the walk to the Mondo Nuovo storefront window.

  She had passed here many times, looked beyond its gold and red letters to Laurio sweeping the floor, cleaning the press, or inspecting the tabloid sheets that the press coughed into stacks. She slowed now to see more carefully the worn surfaces of the machinery and the alphabet clumped in bins of a shallow wood tray. In a corner at the rear, a desk sat angled, a telephone and a typewriter on it with scatters of paper fluttering under a ceiling fan.

  Behind the desk, a beat-up easy chair held Peppone, his girth, all his chins and his waxed mustache, and the same stained collar and white flannel he wore in all weather. Philomena did not like the man, but for more than a year he’d paid Laurio a fair and steady salary. She managed a smile and walked through the door.

  Peppone stood, wiped sweat from his face with a handkerchief that had been at his neck. “Signora Matruzzo, it is good to see you.” He made a show of closing the top buttons of his shirt, fixing his collar. “So many times I see you pass. May I get a drink for you?”

  “No, nothing, thank you.”

  Peppone motioned to a kitchen chair facing the desk. “Please sit and tell me what I may do for you.”

  She took the jacket from her arm, hung it on the back of the chair, sat and looked to the doughy face of the man.

  “Tell me, Signor
e Peppone, Laurio is doing his job so that you are pleased?”

  The question seemed to surprise Peppone. “He does well.”

  “He is polite, he listens to what you say?”

  “He is a good boy. If he is not happy ...”

  “No, no. I am a mother checking on her son.”

  The talk had turned into a mix of American and napulitan’. “He is done for the day, you must know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Philomena said, lifted a sleeve of the jacket and brushed it with her fingers.

  “This jacket must be Don Camillo’s,” said Peppone. “You have done work for him?”

  “No work and no his jacket.”

  A new look came over Peppone. His lips fell open and his eyes wandered. He leaned back, then forward, and asked: “How long have you had it?”

  “The wife of the tailor, you remember?”

  “Yes. Poor thing is not well, I hear.”

  “Not well, no.”

  “Then you have had the coat for some time since she gave it to you.”

  “She no give. It stay when she go, and I keep because maybe the priest gonna come.”

  “Priest?”

  “A priest, yes. You don’t know?”

  “I know of a Sardinian, who said he was a priest, but was not.”

  “Why you say he no priest?”

  “Many whispers come to me, Signora.”

  “Where he is now?”

  “Some say he was a thief and ran off, others say he was killed for the value of art that he had.”

  “Art like a picture?”

  “A painting. Of a blind man.”

  “Blind. Poor thing. You see him?”

  Peppone’s round face got long for a moment. “Perhaps you know something more of this story?”

  “What could I know?”

  “Something someone may have said?”

  “Nobody say. Ask the one who told you.”

  Peppone sat back, folded his hands at his chest. “The painting has become more valuable now than when this jacket came to the neighborhood.”

  “And one is something for the other?”

  “Signora, you must go to no one with the painting.”

  “What you say? I no have painting.”

  “But the artist has made a larger version and it has become famous. There will be much money for someone who has the first one.”