by John Florio
“And you’ve contacted the orphanage?” Father Stafford asked.
“Yes, I spoke with them. They’re taking the baby.”
This was the first lie Dorothy had ever told a priest, but handing her baby over to the Sisters of Charity would be the harshest punishment she could face—and she still wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to do it.
“Good,” Stafford said. “Only then will you have set yourself straight with God. Free the child to grow in the Lord’s world. Your humiliation will be punishment enough for you. There’s no reason to punish the child.”
The air inside the church carried a hint of incense that lingered from a funeral that morning.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t go see the child’s father?” Dorothy asked. “Just to let him know?”
“Visiting hell is no way to rid yourself of the devil,” Father Stafford said.
Like every priest Dorothy had ever known, Stafford couldn’t help but sound as if he were giving a homily, even in a private conversation.
“Forget the Negro,” he said. “Just worry about God.”
When he said the word “God” he nodded toward one of the stained glass windows. The church had fourteen of them, each depicting a different station of the cross. Father Stafford had picked the fourth, the one in which Jesus meets his mother, Mary, and Dorothy started to cry.
“The punishment that comes with sin always breeds tears,” Stafford said. “Let them flow. And let your child be what it will be.” He patted his knobby knees and nodded his head, indicating to Dorothy, in his way, that she had to leave.
“Don’t worry, Father. I’ll follow God’s way.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” he said. “When in doubt, look to the Bible. That’s where you’ll find your answers.”
Dorothy walked out of the church and sat on the front steps in the shadow of the steeple, weeping right out in the open on Aisquith Street. The Baltimore sun was succumbing to the chill of autumn, no longer strong enough to take the sting out of her tears.
Walter had never heard a lock get picked, but he knew the sound of metal on metal. He stood with Ernie inside the boxer’s room; the lights were out and their eyes had become accustomed to the dark. He’d convinced Ernie to come upstairs, but now he questioned whether they’d be safer out on the street. He kept his eyes on the doorknob as he listened to the clinking sounds coming from the keyhole.
As the lock popped and the door inched open, Walter held his breath and clenched the fingers of his right hand around the heaviest weapon he’d been able to find: a cast iron frying pan. He wished he could handle himself as well as Ernie—and he wondered why he had ever gone after a front-pager when the sports section had treated him just fine.
The hinge squeaked as a figure crept into the room, shadowed by the silhouette of a thin, broad-shouldered man whose head was topped by a homburg. When the first figure passed the window, the light from the streetlamp hit his face—he had a large nose and tiny chin under a wide-brimmed felt hat. Walter recognized him as a roughneck named Henry who had a scam going at Luna Park. The glint of a gun barrel twinkled in his hand.
Ernie didn’t wait for a hello. He planted himself and drilled his left fist into Henry’s gut. The roughneck doubled over, but quickly uncoiled and whacked Ernie below the ear with the butt end of his six-shooter. Ernie took three steps back before steadying his legs against his daybed. Then, while clutching his neck with his left hand, he raised his right fist, ready to brawl, even though he was one-armed, hobbled, and outmanned in the weapons department.
“Alright, calm down,” the crook in the homburg said. Walter knew the voice. It belonged to Albright.
“Drop the gun and we’ll go one-on-one,” Ernie said to Henry.
The roughneck didn’t move a muscle—he kept the weapon pointed straight at the boxer’s bruised forehead.
“He’s not dropping it, Ernie,” Albright said, “So sit down. You too, Wilkins, I’ll deal with you later.”
Ernie stayed on his feet, but Walter leaned against the windowsill, a cool draft chilling the sweat that was running down his spine. He held the rusty skillet at his side with no intention of letting it fall.
Walking over to Ernie, Albright said, “We have a problem.”
Walter heard his own heart beating so loudly he was surprised the others didn’t notice.
Albright took off his homburg and ran his fingers along its rim. “We’ve put a considerable amount of money into Higgins,” he said, “and you’re going to help us make him a world champion.”
“Higgins can’t even win Jersey,” Ernie said.
“Like I said, we have a problem. And we’re not leaving here until we come up with a solution.”
Walter couldn’t take Albright’s cat-and-mouse game any longer. “What’s your deal, Albright? You gonna kill us like you killed Caroline Barker?”
It was a guess, the only thing Walter knew of Caroline Barker was that her name had been carved on the tombstone that had brought Albright to his knees.
Albright’s eyes narrowed, but Walter couldn’t enjoy the moment. Just then, Henry socked him square in the breadbasket, a blow so hard that Walter thought he would crap his pants. He dropped to his knees, the frying pan clanging on the floor beside him. Unable to catch his breath, he wrapped his arms around his midsection and panted through his nose. His eyes stung as he fought off the impulse to cry.
“Leave ’im alone,” Ernie said. “You wanna go a round, go with me.”
“The big nigger’s going to fight for his master?” Henry said, mugging at Ernie, taunting him to take a swing.
“Shut your ignorant mouth,” Albright barked at Henry and the mocking expression dropped from the goon’s face.
Albright rested his homburg on the worn seat cushion of Ernie’s armchair. “Ernie, one way or another, you’re going to give Higgins the Jersey title. If Walter here had left things alone, then we’d all be going about our business. But now you’ve got the belt and we want it. You see our predicament?”
Walter lay on the floor, his knees pulled to his ribcage and his arms clamped around his shins. Henry had been right, he needed his big brother to take on the town bully. He wished he’d taken the job at H. Grant’s and left the newspaper business to bolder men. Everybody involved would have been better off had he never written a word.
“I see your problem,” Ernie said to Albright. “You need me to lose to your white boy.”
“That white boy cost me a lot of money and he’s going to become the champion.”
“Good luck to you.”
“We’re willing to pay you for your services,” Albright said.
Walter managed four words between short breaths. “Don’t do it, Ernie.”
Albright shook his head. “Wilkins, you really have to learn to keep your nose out of my business.”
Henry picked up Walter by the lapels of his sack coat and flung him against the wall, then pounded him with a relentless combination of rights and lefts to the body and head. Walter was as helpless as a marionette—he held his forearms in front of his face and squeezed his eyes shut. He felt as if he were tumbling down a mountain, rolling over rock-hard boulders.
Ernie grabbed Henry’s shoulder and spun him around. “I said deal with me.”
He tucked his head into his chest and charged at Henry, throwing hooks and haymakers. Henry wrapped his arms around Ernie’s head and the two grappled like kids in a schoolyard, kicking over an ashtray and tumbling on top of the side table, sending it in splinters across the room. Walter’s right eye was swelling so quickly he felt as if he were looking through a keyhole, but he could still see Albright pull a .38 from the pocket of his topcoat and aim it at Ernie, who had Henry’s shoulders pinned to the floor with his knees.
“Get off him, Ernie,” Albright said.
Ernie stood up, but not before slapping Henry across the face, an open-palmed smack that let out the spanking noise of flesh on flesh when it hit the roughneck’s cheek.
“If anybody here is stupid, it’s you. I already told the commission they can have the belt, so long as I keep the prize money. You’re tryin’ to fix a fight with the champ, and I ain’t the champ no more.”
Walter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He could only guess that Ernie had given up the belt because it hadn’t brought him anything but misery.
“That may be the smartest thing you’ve ever done,” Albright said. “Although you could’ve saved us all a lot of trouble by letting us know sooner.”
“How do we know he won’t change his mind?” Henry asked, obviously itching to go at Ernie one more time.
“We have a deal then?” Albright asked Ernie.
“It’s no deal. It’s just the way it is.”
“Then I owe you one,” Albright said, putting his pistol back in his pocket. “You stay out of the way and I won’t forget to repay you.”
“You don’t have to repay me nothin’, because I ain’t doin’ it for you.”
“Just the same,” Albright said. “Come see me if you ever need a favor.”
He picked up his homburg and nodded to Henry. The two walked out of the room and Ernie locked the door behind them, as if that would stop them from returning.
Walter’s eye was swollen shut and blood trickled down his throat. His knee throbbed and he felt as if a cold, steel knife had slit open his gut. But just when he thought he wouldn’t have the strength to walk out of Ernie’s room, he looked out the window through his bleary left eye and remembered why he needed to get back to his typewriter. There, underneath the streetlamp in front of the cigar shop, a newspaper boy was hawking the Evening-Star.
I’m sitting with Old Man Santiago in my booth at the Hy-Hat, the tall one by the back window, telling him that his son is dead.
I got here fifteen minutes ago—I let myself in with the spare key behind the iron lamp and then double-locked the door to be sure I was safe. I found Old Man Santiago in the kitchen; the top of his balding head was glazed with a coat of sweat as he made sandwiches for tonight’s Christmas party. When he looked up, a smile crossed his face and he wished me a Merry Christmas. Now he’s staring out the window, his nostrils quivering and the dark, olive skin of his face drooping, almost as if it were buckling under the weight of the news.
I can’t spill the straight facts onto the one man who has always opened his arms to Harlem’s teenagers, so I spew a story about Santi defending Tommy Sudnik. He doesn’t need to hear that his son died protecting a hopeless misfit.
He covers his watery eyes with his hands. I want to hug him, but my forearm is wrapped in thick, stiff gauze and bound in a blue and white cloth sling. Doc Anders cleaned me up at two in the morning, stitching up the three stab wounds left by the steel blade of Joseph Gazzara’s knife. According to the doc, the muscle in my forearm was punctured down to the bone.
Old Man Santiago speaks but his voice is raspy. “His mother,” he says.
I tell him I don’t understand.
“We have to tell his mother.”
“Okay, we’ll tell her,” I say. I’ve only met Santi’s mother once, when Santi and I swung by his family’s apartment to pick up his chess set and bring it to the Pour House. She barely spoke English and I didn’t do much better in Spanish, but her face beamed when Santi introduced me as his boss. I’m ashamed that a much different memory is about to replace that one.
Old Man Santiago stares straight ahead as if there’s a movie playing twelve inches in front of his face and he’s afraid to miss a scene.
“Mr. Santiago?” I say.
His gaze is unmoving. “He never was a fighter,” he says into the empty air.
“He wasn’t looking for a fight,” I say. “He stood up for a kid who had nobody protecting him.”
Old Man Santiago breaks down, bawling into his hands, and I go to the kitchen to get him some water. I’ll stick around as long as he needs me. The old man wouldn’t leave me in the lurch and I’m not about to do it to him. Besides, I’m safe here. Johalis is down in Philly sorting things out as best he can. I’ll stay with Old Man Santiago, and at some point later today, I’ll go to the Pour House and hand Jimmy the blood money from Gazzara’s safe. That’ll settle our score and allow me to cross one mobster off my list.
On my way to the sink I hear the front door open. Very few people have the key, so I duck behind the arch that separates the back area from the game room and poke my head out. It’s Pearl. A brown hat sits atop her tiny ears and a long black overcoat is draped over her full figure. She’s weeping and a shiny stream of mucous is leaking out of her nose. I’m tempted to tell her to stay out of my sight until she can keep her tongue off of other guys’ necks, but I swallow the urge. I step into the game room.
“Your father told me what happened,” she says between sobs. “Thank the Lord you’re okay.”
She walks over and hugs me, sandwiching my wrapped right arm between us. Then she says into my ear, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? Sorry that I had to send a bullet through a man’s skull to stay alive? Sorry that she led me on and then dropped me like yesterday’s racing form? Sorry that she can’t bring herself to fall in love with a zebra-nigger-lackey-coon?
Every cell in my battered brain is screaming at me to turn away, but I can’t. As of this moment she’s the only person in my life who isn’t stained with blood.
“Santi’s dead,” I tell her. “So’s Gazzara and so’s Hector.” I leave out the bartender because she doesn’t know him, and I don’t want to get into the whole story, especially the part about the bargain-basement hooker.
“I know,” she says, her weighty top lip shaking. “Your father told me how you rescued that young boy.”
Knowing my father, he stopped at Pearl’s place this morning, a white bandage plastered across the back of his head, and told her I was a hero. He wanted to help, but it’s too late for me and Pearl.
“He also told me you saved his life,” Pearl says.
I’d love to take credit for saving the champ, but he wouldn’t have even been in the cellar club if it weren’t for me.
“I think it was the other way around,” I say.
“How’s your arm?” she asks.
It feels good that she’s asking.
“I’ll be okay,” I say, rubbing my bandages with my left hand. “I owe the doc one. He cleaned us up, no cops, no hospitals, no paperwork.”
I try pouring a glass of water for Old Man Santiago with one arm but Pearl has to do it for me. When we get back to the booth, the old man is just the way I left him—he’s got his face in his folded arms, sobbing.
“I’ve got to tell my wife,” he says again. He gets up and walks through the game room, wobbling from side to side, like a ginned-up rummy after a night at the Pour House. I walk him to the door, and when Pearl’s not looking I reach into my pocket and pull out the blood money Johalis had earmarked for Jimmy. I put it where it belongs.
“Here,” I say to him, slipping the wad into his hand. “You need it more than I do.”
He nods and takes it. He’ll pull that money out of his pocket in a day or two and not even know where it came from.
He leaves and I lock the door behind him—he’ll never be back now that Santi is gone. I don’t care that I’ve got nothing to hand Jimmy now. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give the old man the dough to bury his own son.
I walk over to Pearl and she asks me what I said to Old Man Santiago.
“I gave him a couple of bucks,” I say, knowing I’m screwed. Now I’ve got to face Jimmy with nothing. I might as well have put a gun in my mouth. Luckily, I’m getting used to the taste of metal.
Johalis swigs a shot of bourbon. We’re sitting in cabin 11 at Gwendolyn’s Cozy Cottages off Route 27 in New Jersey. Outside, a blue and brown sign says we’re in a roadside family hotel, but it’s nothing
more than a handful of log cabins blanketed by a foot of snow and surrounded by frosted oak trees. The place should be called the Getaway because nobody would consider coming here unless they were running from something. The regulars seem to be truckers and hookers, and now they can add to their register a one-armed albino hiding from a stuttering bootlegger and his roster of crooked cops.
Our cabin feels no bigger than a telephone booth and looks like a cross between a cheap hotel and an abandoned ski lodge. The air smells like damp cedar and the brown carpet stinks of stale whiskey. The smoke from Johalis’s Lucky Strike isn’t helping.
“Right now every cop in Philly is out for our hides,” Johalis is saying, sitting on the edge of the bed. “The clean cops are doing their jobs and the dirty ones are hunting us for Denny Gazzara. Either way, we’re cooked.”
I’m slumped in a tattered armchair across from Johalis, my bandaged right arm resting helplessly in my lap. My father is next to me, sitting on a worn orange couch.
“I’m only concerned ’bout the clean cops,” my father says, no doubt wishing he could wash the blood from his hands and the guilt from his soul.
“Squaring it with the clean ones is easy,” Johalis says. “It’s not like they weren’t after Joseph Gazzara, too. I got some news on that creep.”
He’s holding a flask of whiskey and a Lucky in his right hand, the cigarette wedged between his first two fingers.
“Joseph Gazzara could’ve cared less about the devil—he was nothing but a two-bit thief. He worked the docks, lifting entire containers of Cuban sugar cane. He even went to Cuba and set up bogus shipments, so nobody ever knew the sugar was missing. At some point, when he was down there, he ran into a witch doctor with connections. He cut a deal to ship albino bones to Cuba for sugar, tobacco, rum, whatever he could get. He got a Santerian sicko up here—Hector—to do his dirty work, and he probably made some big bucks for a while. To him, it was nothing but another grift. But to the people in Philly, it was a lot more than that. Every albino in the city owes you one.”