“He went to make a call.”
“What do you think, there’s no phones here?”
“We didn’t know.”
“He comes back, we go eat.”
“No time,” Benny said, eyeing Nicky’s belly.
“I’m aggravated, I eat,” Nicky said, his palms on his belt.
“Your brother-in-law?”
“My sister-in-law is an angel, God bless her, hooked up with a fucking misery. He don’t even say hello, this lazy bastard. I gotta chase him for the fucking rent. I heard — ”
“That door locked?” Benny asked, looking at the door he’d just come in.
“Yeah.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard him and Mootzi stepped on their dicks. They used Zito’s name.”
“You heard right. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yeah?”
“You gotta do something for us,” Benny said.
“Don’t tell me you want me to put them to work.”
“No, no.” Benny let go a chuckle, took a tear of paper from his pocket, gave it to Nicky. “Go look at this place. An apartment, a walk-in, it’s empty, the door is open. See about making it a speak.”
Nicky looked at the address. “Harlem.”
“Yeah. Zito’s good with it.”
***
Carmine had told Benny: “These two clear heads, they got a spot up in Harlem for a club.”
“Sonny told me,” Benny said. “I told him to cop a mope.”
“We’re gonna do it.”
Benny kept quiet long enough to be sure he’d heard right, and then be respectful. “Not for nothing, Carmine — ”
“We’re gonna do it. He’s my fucking son.” Carmine looked square into Benny’s face. “What can I do?”
“Look, I go with whatever you say, no disrespect, you know that. But Zito. I mean, Harlem’s his. These two did wrong by him and he did right by giving it to us to handle. But to give them a spot under his name?”
Carmine nodded. “I know, I know. But Zito knows the whole thing. We set it up, he calls it his, he gives them what they can’t steal, he keeps the problems.”
“He don’t ask why?” Benny asked.
“I told you, he knows the whole thing. They give him headaches, he does what he does, and we got no say.”
***
Nicky Coco drove into Harlem, up the side of a valley to Sugar Hill. He parked on Convent Avenue, walked into 143rd Street to a bottom apartment, alley entrance into a brownstone. He measured and sketched and found a phone in a candy store on the corner.
“Yeah, Benny, listen. I’m there now. The neighborhood ain’t bad, the place could make a nice speak. But the rest of it’s a whore house. A roulette wheel I seen, a crap table. You know that? All jigaboos. The guy who runs the place, colored guy too, came around. Nice guy. He owns the building, he says. Keeps it clean, quiet, gets along with the cops, he says.”
“When you gonna start the job?”
“Whenever you say.”
“Start.”
***
Bar, tables, mirrors, colored lights. Sugar Hill went big for Sonny and Mootzi’s spot that came to be known as Mootzi’s. The two of them grew responsible, stayed on top of the bills, out of the tills, and on time with Mo Zito’s cuts. They had a few dozen suits between them, nearly all from LuciaRosina. Sonny put on pounds, Mootzi seemed taller, and everything got good.
Things got good down in Nicky’s house too. Sonny hardly came home. Not because of the whorehouse — he didn’t like colored girls — but he laid down with the kind of dolled-up flappers fascinated with mob guys. And one in particular, a dream puss who looked like Clara Bow.
His face got to looking less sour, and he made good the rent to Nicky. He gave Antoinette whatever she needed, and she got to needing the colored girl, weeks before the baby got named and baptized Benito Burgundi by Uncle Nicky and Aunt Emma — and that happened about the same time the dream puss emptied a closet in her Riverside Drive apartment and hung suits and shirts in it for Sonny.
Bobbi
The colored girl, Bobbi Mercer. Talking, laughing and singing — always singing — from nine to whenever. She’d kept Antoinette rested and smiling right to the day Nicky drove her to the maternity ward. Bobbi stayed on, three days a week, and stayed late on Little Benny’s first birthday. Hats, cake, candles, and Happy Birthday to You.
That night, Antoinette put the kid to bed, got into a robe and her chair at the window to watch a new snow, and dozed till a commotion at the front door sent her into the hallway. From the top of the stairs she looked down to see Emma whisking snow off an upright piano.
“Why’s it smell of beer?” Emma asked Tulio Pastina, one of the three guys who’d hauled it in.
Tulio grinned, looked up to Antoinette. “Good kraut beer.”
Emma said: “Come down, let’s try it.”
With Nicky and Emma and the three guys around her, Antoinette played chords.
“Needs tuning,” Emma said.
“Not that bad,” Antoinette said and kept playing. “Where should we put it?”
“We figure we put it up in the stanzin’,” Nicky said. “Good up there, Antoinette?”
“Yes, good.”
“Bring it up,” Nicky told the guys.
Tulio, strong, even with legs pained with shrapnel, helped hump the piano up eleven steps to ‘a stanzin’, a small room in nobody’s apartment at the top of the stairs.
They had the piano cleaned up, tuned up and refinished, and giggled when the low notes let go a smell of stale ale. The piano could have been family, the way they made it belong, Antoinette or Emma banging out songs the radio, the phonograph, or Bobbi taught them.
“Where’d you learn to sing like that?” Emma asked Bobbi.
“Just sing, that’s all.”
Months passed before Sonny got home enough to know Bobbi sang. Antoinette watched the way he ogled her like Barney Google, as if seeing her each time, for the first time, stacked and spirited, growling come-get-me notes that lit up her green eyes.
“She always sing like this?” Sonny asked, Antoinette seeing his eyes warm and excited as they’d once been for her.
“Always,” Emma said.
“She comes here on time, does what she has to do?”
“Always.”
“She’s clean?”
“Yeah.”
“Think she’d work the club?”
“Ask her.”
***
Bobbi kept the Sugar Hill crowd drinking, dancing, and slapping fives and tens on the bar while Mootzi watched the biggest spenders hit on her.
The sun coming up one morning, Mootzi told her: “Sing is what you do. Talk too. Tease is okay if it keeps them spending. But don’t get involved, we don’t need headaches.”
“You telling me what to do now, but what gonna be when drinking get to be legal again?”
“When that happens we worry about it.”
“But what you gonna do with me?”
He put a hand on her ass and a hand under her chin. “You keep singing and smiling, and keeping that sugar covered.”
“‘Cept for you, I suppose.”
“You suppose right.”
She wriggled close. “That a gun I’m feeling, or your bully bone is happy to see me?”
“Gun. Bully bone is later.”
“What you need a gun for?”
“What do you think?”
“Don’t be shooting nobody.”
“Good idea.”
“I be needing shoes.”
He took a wad of bills from a pocket, peeled off a short stack. “Here. Get a dress too.”
“What about when the dress don’t fit no more?”
“What do you mean?”
She began a smile, then knocked it off. “You put a baby in my belly, Mootzi.”
“Bullshit.”
“Ain’t bullshit.”
“So,” he said, shrugging, “get rid of it.”<
br />
“Why I need to get rid of your baby if you love me like you says?”
“Get rid of it and shut the fuck up.”
***
Nicky getting home, Bobbi on the porch hanging laundry on the line, Emma coming out to the driveway.
“She says she’s pregnant.”
“So?”
“Mootzi’s the father.”
“So?”
“He don’t want to know about it and she doesn’t know what to do. She’s afraid of him.”
“Give her some money, chase her away.”
“She doesn’t want money.”
“Abortion? Stay out of it.”
“Mootzi sent her to a woman to do that. She didn’t go; she wants a home for the kid.”
“She got no family?”
“Aunts or something down south. Her mother’s dead; she never knew her father.”
“Let her go crying to Carmine.”
“She says Mootzi would kill her. She just wants the baby in a good home.”
Nicky’s face went firm and he shook his head. “No, no, no, Emma. You can’t do that. Your father puts up with enough shit around here and so do we. Now you want to bring a colored kid into this house? Don’t even ask.”
“Half colored.”
“Look, she ain’t our business. She helps out, we pay her, she goes home.”
“She’s been with us so long, Nicky.”
“Emma, I’m telling you, forget it.”
***
Months later, a morning cold and wet, Emma answered a knock on the door, found Bobbi standing there in a coat Antoinette had given her. Her lip bruised and busted, she held a bundle of baby in her arms.
“See my child, Emma,” Bobbi said and moved a corner of a blanket from the baby’s face. “Ain’t she beautiful?
“Beautiful,” Emma said. “So beautiful.”
“Doctors say she gonna have green eyes like me. Beautiful child, and Mootzi don’t wanna know about her,” Bobbi said, talking quickly, her breaths short. “See my face, what he did. ‘Ugly little nigger,’ he calls her and he ain’t never even seen her. Good baby, too. Don’t cry but sometimes. I ain’t got but some clothes and a diaper, but please let her be here.”
“Bobbi, that can’t be, I told you. Come inside,” Emma said, then called up the stairs: “Antoinette, come down and see Bobbi’s baby.”
Bobbi stepped in. “Something bad awful gonna happen if she stay with me, Emma.”
“What do you mean?” Antoinette asked, coming down the stairs. “What will happen?”
“Mootzi say he gonna kill me if I don’t go away. But see my baby, Antoinette. She don’t cry but sometimes.” She handed the baby to Antoinette. “And the police say there ain’t nothing they could do. He say he gonna kill me, but he gotta kill me before there be something to do about it.”
“So stay here,” Antoinette said.
“Just my baby to stay here. I got to go find my aunts. I ain’t got nobody else.”
“Where are they?”
“Don’t know yet, but I’ll come for my baby when I know.”
“Mootzi’s father won’t let him hurt you.”
“That man knowing is why he gonna kill me. He get crazy, he beat on me. Look at where he hit my mouth with his gun.”
“Leave the baby with me.”
“I don’t know, Antoinette,” Emma said. “Think about this—”
And Bobbi said: “Thank you, Antoinette. I find someplace to go and I call you.” She kissed the baby and hurried away, the door closing on a final thank-you.
From Sugar Hill to the neighborhood, nobody doubted Mootzi for the baby’s father. Nobody but Antoinette.
“Emma, you don’t understand. Sonny maybe has something to do with this. You didn’t see the way he was looking at her that night?”
“No, Antoinette. That’s your imagination. She says Mootzi’s the father. She should know. You better talk to Mommy.”
“It doesn’t matter what Mommy says.”
“What about Sonny?”
“Up his ass.”
“This is not his baby, Antoinette.”
“Maybe no, maybe yes. And if it’s a sister to my son, I can’t turn my face.”
“What about Daddy?”
“Just tell him I won’t name her after him.”
***
Bobbi couldn’t come back. The super of her building on Lenox Avenue found a charred version of her in the coal furnace.
“Eye-Italian fella,” he told detectives. “Got the speak up on the hill, Hunret-forty-three, Amsterdam. He pay her rent. Lovely girl don’t make no trouble, ain’t never hurt nobody.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Last night. First time in a long time. He be drunk and fussing and shit.”
They looked for Mootzi, never found him.
Dominic Tonno Loves Bernadina LaScala
Bernadina LaScala, the only child of a druggist and an art teacher, dressed better than most of the neighborhood women. She looked classy because she was classy. She stood taller than many of its men, and pretended little notice of their eyes following her wherever she went. She had grown up in the neighborhood, an apartment up on 10th Street — nice apartment, and a summer house up in the Bronx. A pale and babyfat-chubby kid, until she turned seventeen and her hair took on a glisten on sunny afternoons, and her complexion brightened from olive to pink and white.
She had known Dominic Tonno since their mothers had taken them to masses at Christ the King Church, then to its school, where they spent eight years not noticing each other.
They went to different high schools, graduated on the same day, and the neighborhood saw them hand in hand, strolling beneath the lacelike arches of bulbs that brightened the gambling wheels and food stands at the street Feast of San Gennaro.
From the first days of this romance, to picking the maid of honor and the best man, family and friends reminded Bernadina that Dominic’s father was Happy Carmine, that Patsy Stellato was his uncle, and that Dominic’s future must take up a few pages in one of Lina’s books.
Friends and relatives were probably right, so Bernadina avoided them. She would not break away from the handsome Dominic, his power and generosity, the respect others gave him and gave her because of him. Anyway, he said he loved her, bought a ring, and told her they would marry. If he had asked, she wouldn’t have known what to say, so she put on the ring, picked a date, and started to make a baby.
***
Ever since he could remember, Dominic Tonno wanted to be like his father. Both stood the same five and a half feet tall (an inch or so shorter than Bernadina) walked with the same strut, and carried the same gaze in eyes as blue as the sapphires they both wore on their fingers. His head was less square than his father’s, and his teeth more white; his mother had told him not to smoke, and maybe that was why he didn’t. His hair whitened soon after marrying, and stayed an attraction to the impressive and obedient Bernadina who gave Dominic a boy.
Dominic never denied respect for his father, though at times the father needed to remind him that respect involved patience, and that doing the right thing wasn’t always the right thing. Like after brother Mootzi disappeared.
“Mootzi’s not around, we don’t know what happened,” Dominic had said, “and we don’t say boo. It ain’t right, Pop.”
“Zito didn’t do anything we didn’t expect,” Carmine said.
“Yeah, but what about Sonny? What did he do that’s so right?”
“He didn’t kill anybody, that’s what he did. Your Uncle Patsy don’t like him, didn’t want him near Antoinette, but he went soft because that’s what he does for his kids.”
“And that’s right?”
“I didn’t say it was right.”
“Yeah, well, from what I hear, Antoinette don’t care what happens to her husband.”
“It ain’t our business, Dominic, and there’s other things I got on my mind right now.”
Other things like
the cancer in his mouth from those greasy black stogies that he still puffed down to stubs. And on his mind was Dominic and the future.
“Mootzi never gave a fuck about Dominic,” he had told Patsy Stellato, “but Dominic always did the right thing for him. Protected him, got him out of shit that I didn’t want to get him out of, and Dominic never talked about it.”
“Dominic’s a good boy.”
“Who knows how long I got, and so I ask you how he stands.”
“Yeah, well, your wife came to my house,” Stellato said.
“Yeah?”
“She’s your wife, she’s my wife’s sister, I listen to her. She says I’m the uncle, she already lost one son, and with all the aggravation that he was, she would die to lose the other, and I should chase him from this life.”
“I hear the same thing,” Carmine said.
“I told her you’re the father, you got a lot on your mind, but I said I’ll talk with you. The thing is, Carmine, I got nothing to say about what you do with this, but you tell me what I could do. Hide him or help him make his way up.”
“You know what I want.”
***
In the meantime, what was going on with Sonny, nobody cared, not even Aunt Rose. Since before Prohibition he avoided her and his mother, slow, gray and bent. Whatever they could do for him wasn’t worth scheming for. Lucia talked and smiled whenever she recognized him, and a mumble came out of her mouth that annoyed him into a scowl.
Aunt Rose had turned on him, saying that he did nothing for his mother while for years she fed and washed her, ran the business, and worried about him for her.
He knew from years back that Benny Bats had no use for him, so forget about a score coming out of there. He stopped wishing his mother dead, there was no percentage in it.
After Prohibition ended, he talked to Mo Zito about making the speak an after hours joint. Zito turned him down, but okayed a loan through one of his crew — one point a week back then — and picked up one of the old spots in the neighborhood. It went good for a few years, paid the rent for him and the used-to-be flapper, too old now to look like Clara Bow, but young enough to write checks that covered the vig, and then the principal on the loan.
The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 16