The Prince

by Vito Bruschini

  She ran up the stairs, as excited as on a first date. She slid the key in the lock and turned it slowly. She heard the spring lock click and opened the door. It was just a little past noon; she might still find him in bed. Isabel took off her jacket and began unbuttoning her Army blouse. She continued down the corridor. Dixie wasn’t in the kitchen, nor in the living room. She was in luck, she thought. So she moved on to the bedroom, where the door was ajar. She took off her blouse and stood there in her slip and blue skirt. But all of a sudden deep sighs made her blood run cold. She froze, straining to hear. The sighs were moans of pleasure. She pressed her hands to her mouth to keep from screaming. In an instant, her joy turned to despair. The moans were growing more and more intense. Dixie’s voice was unmistakable. How often she had taken pleasure in the sounds of his coming. Now he was doing it with someone else. A strangled cry of collapse and climax put an end to the act.

  Isabel finally found the will to push open the door. Dixie whirled around. The woman covered herself, pulling the sheet over her head.

  Isabel stopped feeling sorry for herself and displayed her Irish temperament. She rushed at Dixie who, naked as he was, tried to hold her off.

  “You crummy piece of shit, goddamn you and the shitty Italian family you came from! How dare you! How could you bring this bitch into our bed!” She tried to strike him with her fists, but Dixie was adept at dodging her punches.

  “Hold on, Isabel, it’s not what you think! Calm down! Let me explain!” Dixie was dodging the objects that Isabel had begun throwing at him.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “For a while. But it’s not important—”

  “What do you mean, it’s not important!” Isabel yelled. “It may not be important to you, but it is to me! You have absolutely no moral scruples. How did I ever fall in love with a monster like you! I hate you, I hate you!” She burst into hopeless tears. He tried to kiss her, but Isabel drew back in disgust. “I told you not to touch me! You make me sick! In our bed . . . I never want to see you again! Get out! Better yet, no. I’ll go! This room makes me want to puke.”

  And she walked out of the apartment and out of his life.

  Chapter 40

  Contrary to all the rules that had always governed his life, old Tom Bontade paid a visit to Brian Stoker alone and unarmed.

  The elderly Stoker was surprised to see him. For a moment, he thought he had come to kill him, but Bontade quickly reassured him.

  “I’m here as a father, to talk as one father to another. Let’s leave the wheeling and dealing that have poisoned our lives outside the door,” Tom Bontade began, extending his hand.

  The other man approached him. “I’m shaking the hand that killed my son,” he said, his spirit broken.

  “That’s why I’m here. I want to understand what happened. Someone wanted to turn us against each other.”

  “And he succeeded perfectly,” Stoker concluded.

  “Right. He wiped out your family, making the blame fall on us Bontades. But I swear on my honor that I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Only you and we knew about the transaction,” Stoker said bluntly.

  “Someone must have leaked it. But it wasn’t us, I swear to you.”

  “I believe you, Tom. Still, my son is gone now. I had to bury him.”

  “A father should never have to bury his child. I know what that’s like.” The recollection of his son who’d been killed in a shoot-out with an enemy gang had never left Bontade. “It’s a memory you can’t erase. You’ll carry it with you forever.”

  “I feel old, I don’t want to live anymore,” Stoker said bitterly.

  “Old age is sad not because joys cease, but because hopes end. As long as you have a child, you hope to see him settled down, with a promising future. But when he’s taken from you . . . everything comes crashing down. Your life is over.”

  “I’m going to tell you a secret, Bontade. A decision I just made tonight: I’m going to retire. I have a nice nest egg set aside, which will allow me to live like a king to the end of my days. I’m going to Florida, to the elephants’ graveyard, and I’ll end my days there. I’m leaving New York.” Those words were heavy as boulders. The feisty Brian Stoker never thought he would have to say them.

  “But you can’t give up right now. Don’t you want to find out who played this loathsome trick on us?”

  “I made my decision. It’s final.”

  Brian Stoker was adamant. Reaching that decision had cost him great sacrifice. Above all, a sacrifice of pride. During his life, he had always struck back, blow for blow; he had never retreated, even at the riskiest moments. But now he had reached his limit.

  Without Damien and the men who formed his team, the person responsible for the slayings would certainly seize the territory before he could organize a new force.

  Tom Bontade, on the other hand, wanted to go back over the stages of the deal to try to figure out who had set the trap. He was now certain that scoring the cocaine was merely an excuse to wipe out the Stoker family and finance the new family through the sale of the drug.

  Bontade obtained Stoker’s permission to question the survivors of his group. Only Fryderyk Marek was still alive. Tom Bontade questioned him, but the Pole was clearly of no help.

  Still, Bontade had waded through lies too often not to know when someone was telling the truth or lying, and that Pole, who had saved his own hide in two shootings, wasn’t telling the truth. He ordered Barret, Cooper, Carmelo Vanni, and Vito Pizzuto not to let Marek out of their sight in the following weeks.

  The four men organized surveillance shifts around the clock, and at the end of the first week, their efforts were rewarded.

  * * *

  Fryderyk Marek left his house on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side one morning and got into a taxi.

  Maintaining a discreet distance, Vito Pizzuto and Barret tailed him to Bensonhurst. There Marek entered a little Italian cafe. As they passed in their car moments later, Pizzuto and Barret saw Jack Mastrangelo frowning as he spoke to Marek, evidently chewing him out about something.

  So Mastrangelo was the man who had conducted the negotiations on behalf of a mysterious client, and the Pole had been the informer who tipped him off that the Stokers were about to trade ten kilos of cocaine.

  When they reported the results of their surveillance of Marek to Tom Bontade, the old boss recalled that it had been Big Jordan who’d told him about the deal. He’d heard about it from his hooker. A certain Marta. She was the only one who could make him get it up. But how had Marta known about the offer?

  “I should have thought of it sooner,” Bontade reproached himself. “You have to find the hooker. We’ll ask her about her recent clients, not her regulars; our man is on that list. The one who orchestrated this whole production.” Cooper was familiar with Marta’s girlfriends. He had personally accompanied Big Jordan to her place on more than one occasion, taking advantage of the opportunity to do it with one of her coworkers.

  The girls told him that Marta had been attacked by a maniac the week before: some guy had killed her john and beaten her up, leaving her in a coma for several days. She was now at St. Vincent’s Hospital in critical condition.

  Barret had a cousin who was a paramedic at St. Vincent’s. He asked him to do him a favor and let him see the girl. Barret’s cousin was initially a bit reluctant because he didn’t want to get mixed up in his relative’s affairs, which he knew weren’t totally on the up-and-up. But when handed a ten-dollar bill, he managed to silence his conscience, and during his shift he let Barret into the poor girl’s room.

  Marta was unrecognizable, her face purple from profuse bruising. A bandage covered her forehead, and another supported her jaw. Her eyes were so swollen that the irises were barely visible through the slits. Her nose was also bandaged, and the skin around her ears and eyebrows bore numerous stitches.

  Barret, disguised as a nurse, approached and pretended to adjust the IV drip. Then he ben
t over her to see if she was awake. He saw her pupils flash. He realized that she was terrified by his presence.

  He moved close to her ear and whispered, “Marta, some friends are asking me if you remember the name of the man who told you he wanted to buy a batch of coke. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The girl didn’t move, but her eyes never left him.

  “Can you speak?”

  Marta made an imperceptible movement with her head, and Barret realized that it was a “no.”

  He saw a notebook and pencil on the bedstand. “That must be how they communicate with her,” he thought.

  Barret placed the pencil in her hand and held the notebook for her. With a great deal of effort, Marta finally managed to write “Ferdinando Licata.”

  * * *

  The name didn’t mean anything to Tom Bontade. But Vito Pizzuto knew him.

  “I know the big bastard,” he said, stepping forward. “It’s Prince Ferdinando Licata; he owns half of Salemi. He fled from Sicily too; we were on the same ship. Good for the prince, he’s managed to adapt to our way of life,” he added mockingly.

  Cooper entered the room of the apartment that Bontade used as an office and meeting place, went over to the boss, and handed him a newspaper. Bontade read the banner headline: “Gangland-Style Killing.” The morning papers had published news of the discovery of three corpses in a shed on the bank of the Harlem River, killed execution style with a bullet through the head. Their description matched those of three men seen by an eyewitness leaving the Paraguay Star around the time of the massacre. The authorities believed them to be associated with the slayings, even though no weapons had been found in the shack.

  The scenario was becoming increasingly clear to Bontade. The three had evidently been used as hired guns; then the one who had enlisted them must have also killed them. In order to understand whether the Sicilian prince was responsible for the two mass executions, he had to go back to Brian Stoker. What had occurred had all the appearances of a vendetta.

  When Tom Bontade went to see Stoker for a second time, the old man was getting ready to leave for Florida.

  Bontade approached him with open arms, as if to embrace him.

  “So you’ve come to say good-bye?” Brian Stoker asked.

  “Life can be understood only if you look back at it in perspective. We were at war for all these years, when we could very well have lived in peace, without bothering each other.”

  The two men embraced. They actually seemed like two old friends, even though one of them had killed the other’s son. “I may have found out who set us against each other,” Tom said, breaking away.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late,” Brian said dejectedly.

  “Still, I have to make him pay for it. Does the name Ferdinando Licata mean anything to you?”

  Brian Stoker mentally reviewed the people who had run up against his family in recent months.

  “Licata . . . Kevin spoke to me about him. He’s the old guy at La Tonnara, a restaurant run by some Italians. We had some problems with those people, and one night we had to teach them a lesson. Water under the bridge. All our troubles started there. Kevin was tortured, then we started getting threatening phone calls—threats against the Stokers. Then that massacre . . .

  “My time has come, my friend.”

  When he got home, Bontade met with Vito Pizzuto alone. “Why do you hate Prince Licata so much?” he asked.

  “When we were on the ship, he insulted me in front of my friends. You don’t disrespect someone like me. He called me a pimp.”

  Bontade felt like smiling but restrained himself. “They say a mosquito’s sting itches less after we’ve managed to crush the mosquito. Licata has to die.”

  Pizzuto smiled.

  “Prepare a plan,” said his boss. “But you have to hurry if we want to take over the territory vacated by the Irishmen.”

  * * *

  Ferdinando Licata had actually been established for some time in the territory to which Bontade referred. After the disappearance of the Irish gang, and particularly with Damien’s death, the residents of Tompkins Square and the surrounding neighborhood had begun to breathe freely again. Mothers allowed their daughters to go out without being escorted by their fathers or older brothers; shopkeepers had lowered the prices of goods, now that they were no longer harassed by the Stokers’ demands; and restaurant owners were able to smile again, released from the disagreeable presence of Damien and his buddies. And when Ferdinando Licata ran into some neighborhood friend who had benefited from his actions, he was greeted with the old title of Father. In fact, the older people continued to address him in the original dialect: “I nostri rispetti, Patri.” “Our respects, Father.”

  When he’d decided to enter the fray, the prince had moved out of his room at La Tonnara. He’d done so to relieve his niece Betty of his presence but, most of all, because he didn’t want to involve her in his new activities. The apartment he had rented near Tompkins Square Park was not far from the restaurant. Not a day went by that he didn’t see his beloved grandniece, Ginevra.

  These were extremely busy days for him and Mastrangelo, because together they were organizing the structure of a solid “family.” This meant searching for loyal “soldiers,” which was the hardest task. It meant gaining people’s acceptance by creating an image of absolute efficiency, so that they could replace the previous crime family seamlessly.

  The last piece of the puzzle he needed to put in place was selecting a right-hand man. But Jack Mastrangelo already had someone in mind.

  Chapter 41

  For days and days, Isabel wandered through the city looking for help. Friends, acquaintances, companions, no one paid enough attention to her despair. They were all too busy finding food, a bed, a woman, a job. Everyone was running and had no time to stop and commiserate with a brokenhearted woman.

  Isabel asked everyone for support except the one person who might have sympathized with her: Saro. She didn’t have the nerve to go see him. A friend had even told her where he lived. She’d passed by his door many times but continued on her way so as not to have to swallow her pride. “Pride, the inevitable vice of fools,” Isabel thought.

  But one day she got up her courage and, instead of walking past, entered the door on Great Jones Street. She climbed the stairs to the top floor and knocked on apartment 4B.

  The radio was on, broadcasting a performance by Cab Calloway’s orchestra from the Apollo Theater in Harlem. But voices could also be heard, and soon the door opened.

  Saro certainly didn’t expect to see her and froze with the door partly open. With the most impish smile she could muster, Isabel gave him a wave. “Hi there, Saro.”

  The young man kept staring at her, stock-still, as though hypnotized.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Isabel was still gorgeous, despite the days she’d spent sunk in depression. “You know, things didn’t work out with Dixie.”

  Saro continued to gaze at her, captivated. Then his expression gave way to consternation.

  “Won’t you even say hello?” Isabel went on, not understanding his dismay.

  She heard footsteps behind Saro, and a female voice asked: “Saro, sweetie, who is it?” A girl appeared in the doorway: thick black hair; dark, unwavering eyes. She came up to Saro and took his arm. Then she saw Isabel. “Who is she?”

  This time it was Isabel who was left nonplussed. Saro helped her out of the awkward situation.

  “No one. The lady has the wrong address.” So saying, he sadly closed the door in her face.

  After a few seconds, Isabel walked to the stairs and burst into tears. No one wanted to have anything to do with her anymore. She felt faint and leaned against the wall, weeping uncontrollably, releasing her despair.

  * * *

  “That girl was desperate,” Agnes said to Saro, going back to the kitchen.

  “How can you say that? You barely saw her.”

  “You’re forgetting my
outstanding sixth sense,” she smiled ironically.

  “Then tell me the winning lottery numbers, Miss Sixth Sense.” Saro went to her and put his arms around her from behind. He tried to hide his sadness.

  Suddenly the music stopped, and the radio announcer said gravely: “We interrupt this performance to bring you news of Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in Berlin earlier this morning.” Seconds later, all of America learned the details of the Führer’s speech.

  Agnes turned and instinctively clung to Saro, as if seeking protection. As the announcer spoke, the Führer’s guttural voice, shouting forcefully in the background, aroused her fear. “What does it mean?” she asked, looking into his eyes.

  “It means war has broken out in Europe. But we don’t have to worry. America won’t get dragged into their bickering.”

  Saro was right. That day, Friday, September 1, 1939, Hitler launched his Panzer tanks and his Stuka dive-bombers against the Polish cavalry. In less than three weeks, German armed forces—the Wehrmacht—reached the Polish capital of Warsaw, leaving the other European nations astounded by the speed and efficiency of its military action. Political analysts were also left stunned by the destruction wreaked on cities by air raids. Entire villages disappeared, and cities crumbled under the aerial bombardments. This was just a taste of what would happen in the following years.

  New York, unlike Warsaw, continued to be the lively city that everyone knew. The Führer’s speech didn’t worry the people there all that much. In general, the American public said that Europe was remote, far way across the ocean.

  A few days after the news of the invasion of Poland, Little Italy was observing the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Ciro, the patron saint of emigrants from Marineo, a small village in Sicily. The Sicilian community that had made its home in the area around Elizabeth, Bleecker, Houston, and Prince streets had long ago decided to commission a statue of Saint Ciro similar to the one they had left behind in Sicily. When they had collected enough money, they ordered a Sicilian metalsmith to fashion it in solid silver, since back in the mother church of Marineo, the urn with the statuette safeguarding the skull of the saint was silver. Sent to America, the statue turned out to be a perfect replica of the original.