Stefan’s sitting on the front steps of his house. The windows to the house are open, and he can hear his mother bustling inside, singing a song in Ukrainian. The son knows the melody, but can’t remember the words. Then he sees a man coming down the alley who—well, he can’t tell who it is until the man gets close, because the transformation is so complete. The clothes. The shave. The cut of the hair. The walk, angular, jaunty. As if a certain part of the man’s personality slit the throats of the other parts, and now the edge of that knife is all that’s left. Even the voice is hard to place, because there’s not a trace of a Ukrainian accent. If not for the fact of his body—those are still his limbs, his muscles and bones, his eyes, pale and bright—you’d say there was nothing left of what he was.
“Hey, baby brother,” he says, in a sharp, city voice Stefan associates with Italians. With mobsters.
“Petro?” Stefan says.
“It’s Pete now. Pete the Uke. Petey Ukulele, if you’re in the mood,” he says. Then changes his accent again, to one Stefan only hears on the men and women who shop downtown, who have other people carry their bags for them: “Or Peter, if you prefer.” The accent is flawless. Stefan almost can’t contain how happy he is to see his brother, to know he’s alive. He wants to shout, to jump up and hug him, as if they were both boys again. He wants to call back into the house, Ma, Ma, come quick, Petro’s home, he’s home, he’s home. But he doesn’t do any of those things, because looking at his brother, the way he holds himself, the way his speech has changed, Stefan’s scared to death of him.
“Where have you been?” Stefan says.
“I don’t have time to tell you,” Pete says. He’s back to that street voice, the gangster, the hit man. Their mother’s still singing inside the house; then they both hear the back door slam shut, a screen door on a hinge. She’s out in the backyard now.
“You got chickens back there now?” Pete says.
“What have you been doing?” Stefan says. “Where did you get those clothes?”
“I told you, no time,” Pete says, “and don’t call Ma, either. I wanted to give you this.” He hands him a brown envelope. “Don’t open it until I’m gone.”
“Why?”
Pete’s already turning to go, already a foot away. Over his shoulder: “Because I don’t think you’ll take it if I’m still here. Just know you’re taken care of, okay? I’m still your brother.”
There’s a thousand dollars in that envelope, in neat crisp bills. Stefan takes it into the kitchen, sits at the table, opens it up and counts the bills. Doesn’t believe it. Takes out all the bills and fans them out on the table, and just sits there, looking at them. He’s still there when his mother comes in from the backyard with a bag of coal for the stove; when she sees what’s on the table, she stops and gasps, and her son looks up.
“What did you do to get all that money?” She says it in Ukrainian; her English can’t convey everything she wants, her excitement and her fear.
“Nothing, Ma, nothing,” he says. “It’s from Petro.”
“He was here?”
“He says he’s coming back,” Stefan lies.
She nods to herself, and Stefan sees something in his mother then, some of the bile that got her out of Europe, that married a man from Poland, that still wants something better for her family than she’s got right now.
“Hide it before your stepfather comes home,” she says. “We’ll figure out what to do with it later. You and I.” As if they’d reached that decision together.
Chapter 9
You see how fast it happens, Petro Garko becoming Pete the Uke, on his way to becoming Peter Henry Hightower. It happens in less than a year: It doesn’t even have time to snow, and this is Cleveland we’re talking about. It’s spring, and the young man is a factory worker; it’s the fall, and the man is a tony dandy, on the eve of his ascent to become a dark star in the city’s firmament. But wait, wait, you say. We’ve heard this story before, haven’t we, the one about the immigrant who makes good, really good, but at such a cost. It’s the story of the era, isn’t it? Sure, of this and every other; the names change, the languages, the cities, the jobs, the crimes, but the story’s always the same. It’s in every other book, in every other movie, and you might call it the story of America—a swath of the fabric of the American myth so worn out that there’s no patch big enough to repair it—except that it’s so old it’s in the Bible, too, right? For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? That’s the way we always hear it. Everyone knew that story even then, and knew they knew it, too, because whoever wrote down that line had already read this one: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. But we keep telling it, too, because it’s not really about the story, the history. It’s about that awful inevitability, the blood we know is coming. It’s about us.
But there’s something special, too, about how well Peter Henry Hightower does it. How far he goes in transforming himself. He does it first by being invisible. Doesn’t give the speakeasy’s customers any reason to glance at him, notice his existence. Never makes eye contact, never says a word. Wears clothes that look like the walls of the basement. Just watches everything: the way the patricians of the city carry themselves when they walk, how they open doors and close them, where they put their arms when they lean against a table, the angles of their wrists when they offer each other cigarettes. And he listens hard to the way they talk. The lengths of their sentences, the vocabulary they use. The way they talk about business, about women, when the gals are around, when they’re not. The sense of humor they have, a caged cleverness, breezy and lethal. Their almost tonal language; their syllables rise and fall in different cadences than anything you hear on the South Side, or from the mobsters who run the place. He understands, then, how much he’s been at the edge of English, even though he’s spoken it for as long as he can remember. In his old neighborhood, the language is shouting and ragged. It’s an old car, a house falling down. Words are always breaking, idioms flame up and die out like coals jumping out of a stove. Your speech slips away from you, runs you down, runs you over, until you learn how to catch it and bring it down, and even then it still bucks. But these people in front of him are at the language’s quiet center, where English is a glorious bird, and they’re all mimicking its call. They’ve all read the same books, had the same teachers, and now they’re pretty much doing the same jobs; they see each other all day. They’ve got in-jokes running for so long that they can piece together the last decade just by remembering who said it when. It’s just one happy little club, and Peter wants in.
He stays up all night, listening and watching, then sleeps for a few hours in the basement somewhere, anywhere but the room where he hit that boy; then, he stands under the dim light and practices. It’s not howarya. It’s how are you? It’s not I’m good. It’s I’m fine, I’m well. He stands in front of a mirror, making sure he’s holding himself up right. Checks his walk, checks the way he gets something out of his pocket. Practices combing his hair. It takes months to get every detail in place, and get them to where he doesn’t have to think about them every second to keep up the appearance, to fight so hard against who he was. And he doesn’t show anyone what he’s doing, not Cesare, not Rinaldo Panetti. The first one who sees it is his brother, that day in September 1921, and Peter revels in the look on Stefan’s face. Because his brother is so transparent to everyone. He can’t hide his surprise, his fear, and it’s then that Peter knows he’s ready.
He’s got his history all plotted out. Peter Henry Hightower is from Connecticut. Attended Cheshire Academy—it’s the Cheshire School then—just before it becomes a straight-up prep school for Yale, but he goes to Yale anyway. Gets through there in three years. His teachers tell him he should become a scholar, a professor, but he’s always thought he has more of a mind for business. So here he is in Cleveland, becau
se he knows Rockefeller was here, Carnegie was here. It’s a place where a man can make the kind of money he wants to make. And he’s an orphan. Which is only half a lie, though it’s the kind of half-lie, he knows, that hurts the people who are still alive.
It’s not a perfect story, and there’s not enough of it. If he’s unlucky and he meets just the wrong guy who blunders into just the wrong questions to ask, the whole thing’ll come apart on him, because he doesn’t know quite enough about Connecticut, Cheshire, or Yale to pull off a long conversation about them. But he’s betting nobody’ll ask. Not in the speakeasy, where they’re not in the mood to interrogate anyone about their past beyond knowing what school you went to. The talk’ll just be about business, and business, at the beginning for sure and maybe even later, is all about not digging too deep, isn’t it? About staying just a little bit ignorant, maybe more than a little, knowing just enough that what you’re doing seems risky and fun instead of stupid. Because if you know more than that—if you do your homework, work out for yourself on a piece of paper just how bad it can get—you never do anything. Besides, in the end the disguise is just a front to get them to trust him. As soon as they see how much money he has, no one will ask him anything.
About that money, though, and the things Peter has to do to get it: If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that, between working at the speakeasy and becoming someone else, there are still about four hours of every day left. Those four hours are the time Pete needs to put in for Rinaldo Panetti. There are people who end up in the hospital because of those four hours. People who don’t get to live out their allotted time on this earth. Until, at last, in May 1922, Pete figures out enough about Rinaldo to do a job on him.
For a few days, the official story—the one the police know—about Rinaldo Panetti is that he’s missing, leaving behind a wife and three kids that the rest of the family and the organization takes care of until they don’t need it anymore. There are a lot of stories running around about why Rinaldo Panetti leaves. Some of them are financial: He stole money from his boss, or got into a side racket that started making serious money. Some are romantic: He found another lady and ran off with her. That story’s closer to the truth, but to get to it, it’s better, maybe, to tell it backward.
Rinaldo Panetti’s corpse washes up a few miles south of Cleveland; they’re able to identify him by his fingerprints on account of a little petty theft he did once when he was a younger man that put him in jail for a bit. If he were a bigger deal, a bigger criminal, they would have been able to match him to a photograph, because apart from the slit throat, the body’s in pretty good shape. Pete gets three bigger guys to dump Rinaldo’s body in the lake, but it’s his own hand that slits Rinaldo’s throat, and right before he does it, he’s surprised at how calm he is. How easy it is for him to do it. Rinaldo’s sitting in that same speakeasy basement, in a rickety wooden chair. He doesn’t quite understand why he’s been brought there. Doesn’t say anything until he sees Pete with the razor.
“You son of a bitch,” he says. “Who ratted me out?”
“What business is it of yours now?” Pete says.
Rinaldo’s so angry. Pete takes off his jacket and walks around behind him. Puts his hand on the man’s shoulder like he remembers Father Tarnawsky doing. As if he’s blessing him, trying to comfort him. Then that hand moves to the top of Rinaldo’s head to hold it in place, and Pete the Uke draws the razor into the skin, easy as you please. The man just sits there, bleeding out, almost as if it doesn’t hurt. He looks so tired.
“Get this guy out of here,” Pete says. “And make sure you bury the handkerchief with him.”
That’s how Pete moves up. He sees how the operation he’s involved in is based on loyalty. For some of the guys, it’s loyalty based on family, on long friendships. It’s almost sentimental. For Pete, though, loyalty’s just another kind of currency. He sees how he can save it and spend it to make himself more valuable, and devalue the people in his way. It doesn’t take him long to see who’s screwing who; it takes him just a few weeks to discover that Rinaldo Panetti’s not only skimming some money off the top of the speakeasy’s nightly earnings, but fucking his boss’s girlfriend besides. His boss: Lou Rizzi, who’s a capo in Big Joe Lonardo’s operation, which is just getting started in Cleveland, though Big Joe’s already made it pretty big for himself.
In 1922, all the liquor everyone has left over is starting to go dry—I mean, for people who weren’t already making it in the first place, which is most people. Now a lot of people want to make it for themselves, and Big Joe’s got just the thing. He’s already been bringing corn sugar to Cleveland for years; people use it as a sweetener because it’s cheaper than cane sugar. Corn sugar is legal. After you get six pounds of it and distill it into a gallon of whiskey, it’s not legal anymore. But a lot of people around Woodland Avenue—that’s Cleveland’s Little Italy—aren’t too worried about that. So Big Joe gives a bunch of them stills, sugar, and whatever else they need to make corn whiskey, which they say tastes more like rum, but who cares? It’s alcohol. When it’s done, Big Joe buys it off the distillers, a kickback for being involved in the racket. Then he turns around and sells the product at a markup. He clears five thousand a week that way, and that’s in 1922 dollars, the same as making somewhere north of $65,000 a week now. They say you can smell the fermenting hash all over the neighborhood.
So Big Joe Lonardo’s operation is pretty big, and bad, because Lonardo doesn’t just beat his competitors; he kills them. The first bootlegging murders happen right at the beginning, in January 1920. Two men found in a snowdrift, shot in the head. One of them is carrying a letter from his father. I understand the situation in which you are but you must have courage and face things as they come. There is no advice I can give that will save you. A third one gets away, leaves his hat in the snow, a kernel of corn stuck to the inside brim with dried blood. People say it’s a sign. Cleveland’s murder rate starts to rise. In November 1924 Louis Rosen and his brother-in-law, Adolph Adelson, are killed with handguns and a shotgun in Rosen’s garage, Rosen for having the nerve to steal corn sugar from Lonardo after Lonardo stole from him, Adelson just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; he’s an accountant from Pittsburgh, just in Cleveland for a wedding. In June 1925, August Rini gets seven bullets to the face on the sidewalk in front of his office on Woodland Avenue. Salvatore Vella is shot in his car in front of a funeral parlor on the same avenue in 1927. You could say the violence creeps up the chain of command, because early in 1927, Big Joe goes back to Sicily for a few months to visit his mother—and, they say, have an affair with a Sicilian girl, another affair—and when he comes back to Cleveland in October, he and his brother John are shot to death in the back of a barbershop. They say Salvatore Todaro, Lonardo’s right-hand man, orchestrates the whole thing while Big Joe’s away, because when Lonardo dies, his main competitor, Joseph Porrello, who also goes by Big Joe, takes his place. Which is why Angelo, Big Joe Lonardo’s son, shoots Todaro in 1929. It’s the son avenging the father, and dooming himself.
The whole thing is a massacre for anyone involved in it; it’s pretty obvious to anyone on the outside looking in. You don’t have to look any farther than the thick stripe of blood John Lonardo leaves on the sidewalk when he staggers out of the barbershop and dies on the steps of the meat market, twenty yards away. So it can seem just as obvious to ask, if Pete’s so smart, what makes him go in; or once he’s in, how he ever thinks he’ll get out again. That’s an easy question to ask now. We have the luxury of asking it. But Petro Garko can’t afford that, not when he’s starting from the South Side. For him, there’s just the way off the South Side, across the river, the way forward. He’s not blind: He can see the carnage on either side, the corpses on the ground. But he can’t see where it all leads to, and neither can anyone around him. We couldn’t have, either, if we were there with him. Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. In 1922, Petro Garko,
Pete the Uke, Peter Henry Hightower thinks that maybe if he’s careful, if he stays sharp—if he moves when he can, when he has to—and if things can just fall into place around him, he can escape. Dodge all the bullets and knives Cleveland points his way and end up with just a little blood on his shoes. He’s got a good plan, after all. He thinks it should get him out within a decade. It’s only years after that, many years, in his big house in Bratenahl with his wife and children, and the avenging angels of his past closing in on him, that he can see what we see now: that maybe it was possible to do what he set out to do, and maybe he was lucky, and maybe he was smart; but he wasn’t lucky or smart enough.
Rinaldo Panetti’s funeral happens a couple days after his wife goes down to the morgue to pick him up. It’s not as grand as the Lonardo brothers’ funeral will be, but it’s a pretty big deal. A small procession of cars down Woodland Avenue to Calvary Cemetery. A brass band. The wife and mother in clothes of black silk. A couple of open flower cars. Everyone from the organization is there, including Pete the Uke, who buys Rinaldo a wreath for the grave. At the edge of the street, he sees a gaggle of South Side boys, who have come to gawk. They’re talking a little too loud for a funeral, loud enough for Pete to hear. Looks like a pretty swanky life, one of them says. Another of them turns and shakes his head. Yeah, but what’s the point if you don’t live to enjoy it?
“I want to thank you for what you’ve done for this organization,” Lou Rizzi says later. They’re in the back room of a bakery, playing cards.
“It was nothing,” Pete says.
The Family Hightower Page 17