by Mario Puzo
Sonny checked his wristwatch and said, “Cork’s gonna pick me up in a minute.” He glanced at the window, and when he saw that Mrs. Columbo wasn’t in sight, he touched Sandra’s hair, which he had been wanting to do since he first came to meet her and sit on the stoop with her. Sandra smiled at him before she looked up to the window nervously, and then took his hand, squeezed it, and pushed it away.
“Talk to your grandmother,” Sonny said. “See if she’ll let me take you out to dinner.”
Sandra said, “She won’t let me get in a car with you, Sonny. She wouldn’t let me get in a car with any boy,” she added, “but you”—she pointed at Sonny playfully—“you have a reputation.”
“What reputation?” Sonny said. “I’m an angel, I swear. Ask my mother!”
“It was your mother who warned me about you!”
“No,” Sonny said. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Madon’! My own mother!”
When Sandra laughed again, Mrs. Columbo reappeared in the window. “Sandra!” she shouted down to the street. “Basta!”
“What?” Sandra shouted back.
Sonny, surprised to hear the touch of anger in Sandra’s voice, stood up and said, “I have to be going anyway,” and then he looked up to Mrs. Columbo and said, “I’m going now, Mrs. Columbo. Thank you for letting me visit with Sandra. Grazie.” When Mrs. Columbo nodded to him, he said to Sandra, “Work on her. Tell her we’ll go with another couple, and I’ll have you back by ten.”
“Sonny,” Sandra said, “she has a fit just ’cause I’m talking to you on the steps. She won’t let me get in your car and go to dinner with you.”
“Work on her,” Sonny repeated.
Sandra pointed down the block to a corner store with a window that faced the street. It was a candy store/soda shop, with a booth in the window where people could sit and drink their sodas. “Maybe I can get her to let you take me there,” she said, “where she can still see us from the window.”
“There?” Sonny said, looking at the corner store.
“I’ll see.” Sandra yelled up to her grandmother, politely, in Italian, “I’m coming right up,” and gave Sonny a parting smile before disappearing into the building.
Sonny waved to Mrs. Columbo and then walked down the block and took a seat on another stoop to wait for Cork. Above him, a little girl was leaning on a windowsill and singing “Body and Soul” as if she were twenty years older and on stage at the El Morocco. Across the street an attractive woman, much older than Sonny, was hanging laundry on a clothesline strung from the top of her fire escape. Sonny tried to catch her eye—he knew she had noticed him—but she went about her business without once looking down to the street and then disappeared through her window. He straightened his jacket, rested his elbows on his knees, and found himself thinking again about the previous night, when his father had asked about Tom. Vito wanted to know if Sonny was aware of Tom’s fooling around, going to clubs in Harlem and picking up tramps. Sonny had lied, said he knew nothing about it, and Vito had looked at him with a mix of worry and anger, a look that stuck with Sonny and was coming back to him now, as he waited for Cork to take him to their next job. Sonny had seen worry and anger in Vito before, but there was something else in his expression, something that looked like fear—and that bothered Sonny most of all, that touch of fear in his father’s eyes. What would it be like, Sonny wondered, if Vito found out about him? Sonny himself felt something like fear at the prospect—and then he angrily pushed the feeling aside. His father was a gangster! This was something everybody in the world knew, and what? Sonny was supposed to bust his ass all day with the rest of the giamopes for a couple of lousy bucks? For how long? Years? “Che cazzo!” he said out loud, and then looked up to see Cork parked at the curb and grinning at him.
“Che cazzo yourself,” Cork said as he leaned across the seat and threw open the door for Sonny.
Sonny got in the car, laughing at the sound of an Italian curse on Cork’s lips.
“What do you hear, what do you say?” Cork flipped the glove box open, revealing a couple of shiny new snub-nose .38s. He took one, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and pulled out onto the street.
Sonny took the other one and looked it over. “Nico get these from Vinnie?”
“Like you said,” Cork answered. “Don’t you trust Nico?”
“Sure,” Sonny said, “just checking.”
“Jaysus!” Cork yelled, and he flung himself back in his seat as if he’d just been hit with a bolt of lightning. “I’m glad to be getting my arse out of that bakery! Eileen’s been on the rag for days.”
“Yeah?” Sonny said. “About what?”
“What do I know?” Cork said. “This, that, and the next thing. I ate a cupcake without asking—like I only been doin’ all my bleedin’ life—and isn’t she screamin’ at me like I’m sending her to the poorhouse? Mother of God, Sonny! I’m takin’ one of those expensive bottles of wine for myself. I deserve it.”
“The hell you are,” Sonny said. “Not at a hundred bucks a bottle.”
Cork grinned and said, “Now, isn’t this the life? And that car’s coming through the tunnel all by its lonesome, you say? You’re sure about that?”
“That’s the word,” Sonny said. “Two-door Essex-Terraplane, new, black, with white walls.”
“Now, isn’t this the life,” Cork repeated, and he pulled a wool cap out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on the seat beside him.
Sonny said, “Let me ask you something, Cork. You think I should just go to my father and tell him what we’re doing?”
Cork had pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and he bobbled it comically in exaggerated shock. “Have you lost your mind, Sonny? He’ll rip your heart out!”
“I’m serious,” Sonny said. “Listen, I either got to give this up or I got to go to him eventually. Especially if we want to get any bigger than once-in-a-while hijackings and stickups. If we want to get into the big money.”
“Ah,” Cork said. “You are serious… I tell you what I think,” he added, his tone and manner quickly changing. “I think your dad doesn’t want you anywhere near this business, and I think you might be putting all the rest of our lives in danger if you tell him.”
Sonny looked at Cork as if he were out of his mind. “You really think that?” he asked. “What kind of a guy do you think my dad is?”
“A tough guy,” Cork said.
Sonny scratched his head, looked out the side window at the Hudson River and a tugboat chugging by, and then turned back to Cork. “You think my father’s the kind of guy would kill my friends? Really?” Sonny said. “That’s what you think?”
Cork said, “You asked me, Sonny.”
“Well, you got it all wrong.” Sonny leaned toward Cork as if he might slug him, and then, instead, fell back in his seat. “I’m tired,” he said, and he checked his wristwatch. “We’re getting there early just to be safe. We’ll have to wait around.” He looked out the window and figured they had a while yet before they got to the tunnel. “Park where you got a good view of everybody coming out. The rest of the guys will meet us in about a half hour.”
“Sure,” Cork said. “Listen, Sonny—”
“Forget it,” Sonny said. “But I’m tellin’ you, you got my old man all wrong.”
Sonny stretched out his legs, threw his head back, and closed his eyes—and ten minutes later, when the car slowed and came to a stop, he sat up again and looked around. The first thing he saw was a black Essex with white walls coming out of the tunnel. “Son of a bitch!” he said, and pointed out the car to Cork. “That’s it.”
“The guys aren’t here yet,” Cork said, and he spun around in his seat, looking up and down the block for any sign of the others.
“They ain’t gonna be here for a while,” Sonny said. He scratched the top of his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “What the hell,” he said. “We’ll do it ourselves.”
“Us?” Co
rk said. “You’re not supposed to be seen.”
Sonny took a knit cap out of his pocket and pulled it down low on his forehead.
“Oh, that’s good,” Cork said sarcastically. “No one’ll ever recognize you.”
Sonny adjusted the cap, trying to stuff his hair into it. “We’ll take a chance,” he said. “You willing?”
Cork pulled the car onto the street and started toward the tunnel and the Essex.
“Follow it,” Sonny said.
“Good plan,” Cork said, and laughed, meaning what else was there to do but follow it.
Sonny shoved him and said, “Don’t be a wise guy.”
Once out of the tunnel, the car headed crosstown on Canal. Cork followed, keeping a car or two between them. The Essex was being driven by a stocky guy with gray hair who looked like he could be a banker. The woman next to him looked like a banker’s wife. Her hair was pinned up and she wore a white shawl over a dowdy gray dress.
Cork said, “You sure that’s the car?”
“New black Essex-Terraplane, two-door, white-wall tires…” Sonny stuck his hand under his cap and scratched his head again. “It’s not like you see a new Essex every couple of blocks.”
“Jaysus,” Cork said. “So you have a plan, genius?”
Sonny took the snub-nose out of his pocket and checked the cylinder. He ran a finger over the Smith & Wesson engraved on the short barrel. “Wait till they turn onto a side street,” he said, “cut ’em off, and take the car.”
“And if there’s people around?”
“Then we do it quietly,” Sonny said.
“Quietly,” Cork repeated. A few seconds later, in a delayed reaction, he laughed.
When the Essex turned on Wooster, Sonny said, “Where’s he going? Up to Greenwich Village?”
Cork said, “Jaysus, look at those two. They look like they’re on their way to a Rotary dinner.”
“Sure,” Sonny said, a smile growing on his face. “Who’d stop those two, right?”
“Sure,” Cork said. “Good point. Unless of course you’re wrong.”
Cork drove slowly along a cobblestone section of Wooster, directly behind the Essex. The street was quiet aside from a handful of people walking along the sidewalk and a few cars going by in the opposite direction. Sonny looked behind him, and when he saw no one, he said, “You know what? Go ahead. Cut ’em off.”
Cork grimaced as if to say he wasn’t at all sure about the plan, and then gunned the engine, jumped in front of the Essex, and cut it off.
Sonny leapt out of the car before it was fully stopped, went around to the driver’s door of the Essex, and yanked it open.
“What is this?” the driver asked. “What’s going on?”
Sonny kept one hand on the snub-nose in his pocket and the other on the steering wheel. Cork, at the front of the car, opened the hood.
“What’s he doing?” the woman asked.
“Hell if I know,” Sonny said.
“Young man,” the driver said, “what’s going on here?”
The woman said, “Albert, I think they’re stealing our car.”
Sonny looked to Cork as he came around behind him. “I think we might have the wrong car.”
Cork pulled a knife from his pocket, snapped it open, and slashed the side of the driver’s seat. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Château Lafite Rothschild,” he said, reading the label.
Sonny slapped the old guy lightly across the top of the head. “You had me going there,” he said. “Get out of the car.”
The driver said, “I figured you knew what you were doing, but…”
“Just for the record,” the woman said, sounding like an ordinary dame, all the former haughtiness gone from her voice, “you do know these are Giuseppe Mariposa’s goods you’re stealin’.”
Sonny took the guy by the arm, frisked him quick, and then pulled him out of the car. “Like the man said—” He winked at the woman, got in behind the steering wheel, and motioned for her to get out of the car. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Your funeral,” the dame said, and slid out of the car.
Sonny watched the guy join the woman on the sidewalk. Once Cork latched the hood, he waved to them and honked twice before driving off.
Sean O’Rourke held his mother in his arms and patted her back as she sobbed, her face buried in his chest. They were outside Donnie’s bedroom door, and all around them others were speaking softly. The apartment, crowded with friends and family, smelled of fresh baked bread, which the Donnellys, Rick and Billy, had brought with them and left on a kitchen table crowded with gifts of food and flowers. Word of Donnie O’Rourke’s murder had spread quickly through Hell’s Kitchen—though Donnie was not dead. He’d been badly beaten, suffering cracked ribs and internal bleeding, but he wasn’t dead. He was in his bed at that moment, being attended by Doc Flaherty, who had already reported that nothing afflicting Donnie was life threatening. His sight, though, could not be saved. He was blind and he would remain blind. Flaherty had told Willie, “It was the bacterial infection that did it. If you’d have found him sooner, I might have saved his sight, but as it is… there’s nothing I can do.” Willie had gone looking for Donnie after he failed to show up that evening. He’d searched everywhere he could think, everywhere except the basement, where Donnie had spent that night and the following morning lapsing in and out of consciousness, blindfolded with a disease-infested rag. Willie didn’t find him until the superintendent came knocking at his door.
Above the crowded apartment, Willie sat on the ledge of the roof facing his pigeons, where the birds cooed and pecked at a mixture of seed and grain he had just fed them. Pete Murray sat on one side of him, and Corr Gibson on the other. Beneath them, on the street, the last cars of a freight train clattered toward the yards. The sun was bright, and the men had all taken off their jackets. They held them folded in their laps as they spoke. Willie had just vowed to kill Luca Brasi and his gang, every one of them. Corr and Pete had exchanged glances.
Corr tapped his shillelagh against the tar-paper roof in a way that suggested both sadness and anger. “What about Kelly?” he asked. “Why isn’t she here?”
“No one’s seen Kelly for weeks,” he said, and he spit on the roof, closing the subject. “All I’m interested in now is seeing Luca Brasi dead.”
“Ah, Willie,” Pete Murray said finally. He grasped the ledge with both hands, as if to steady himself. His shirtsleeves were pulled taut over muscles thickened by years on the docks and in the yards unloading freight. His weathered face was red and splotchy, covered chin and cheek and neck with speckles of gray and black hairs. “Will O’Rourke,” he said, and paused, looking for the right words. “We’ll get them,” he said. “This I promise you—but we’ll do it the right way.”
“What’s right or wrong about killing somebody?” Willie said, and he looked first to Corr and then back to Pete. “We find ’em and blast ’em.”
Corr said, “Think about that, Willie. How’d that work out last time you tried it?”
“Next time I won’t miss,” Willie said, and he jumped to his feet.
“Sit down.” Pete took Willie by the wrist and pulled him to the ledge. “Listen to me, Will O’Rourke,” he said, with Willie’s wrist still firmly in his hand. “We went after Brasi half-cocked, just like the Irish, and you see where that got us.”
Corr leaned over his shillelagh and said, almost as if he was speaking to himself, “We need to take a lesson from the Italians.”
“What’s that mean?” Willie said.
“It means,” Pete said, “that we need to be patient and to plan, and when we make our move, to do it right.”
“Ah, Jesus.” Willie yanked his arm free from Murray’s grip. “We need to do it now,” he said, “while we’re all together—before we go off our own ways and forget about it, like always.”
“We’re not going to forget about what Luca did to Donnie,” Pete said. He took Willie’s wrist in his hand
again, but gently this time. “It’s disgusting what he did, and we’ll make him pay for it. For that and fifty other things. But we’ll be patient. We’ll wait for the right time.”
“And when will that be?” Willie asked. “When do you imagine the right time will be to take on Luca Brasi and all the rest of the dagos?”
“The Italians are here to stay,” Corr said. “That we have to live with. There’s too many of them.”
“So?” Willie said to Pete. “When’s this right time coming?”
Pete said, “I’m makin’ some connections of my own with the mob boys, Willie. Right now, Mariposa and Cinquemani have a beef with Luca Brasi. And there’s trouble between Mariposa and the Corleones and with what’s left of the LaConti family—”
Willie said, “What’s any of this got to do with us, and with killing that son of a bitch Luca Brasi?”
“See,” Pete said, “that’s where the patience comes in. We wait and see. We wait to see who winds up on top before we make our move. We have to wait,” Pete said, and shook Willie by the arm. “We have to wait and listen and when the time is right to make our play. When the time is right.”
“Ah,” Willie said, and he looked to his pigeons and then to the sky and the bright sunlight warming the city. “Ah,” he repeated, “I don’t know, Pete.”
“Sure, you do, Willie,” Corr said. “Aren’t Pete and I here to give you our solemn word on the matter? And we speak for the others too. For the Donnellys and even that little punk Stevie Dwyer.”
“Luca’s a dead man,” Pete said, “but for now we wait.”
WINTER 1934
13.
Snowdrifts two and three feet high piled up along the water’s edge like dunes as snow continued to fall through moonlight onto sand and over the choppy black skin of Little Neck Bay. Luca’s thoughts were running away with him, and he figured it was the mix of coke and pills. One minute he was thinking about his mother and the next about Kelly. His mother kept threatening to kill herself. Kelly was almost seven months pregnant. He didn’t usually mix coke and pills and now he felt as though he was walking through a dream, and he figured it was mostly the pills but the coke probably was part of it, and he figured out here in the cold and snow along this strip of sand overlooking the bay he might walk it off, but he was freezing and he still couldn’t keep his thoughts straight. A couple of lines from “Minnie the Moocher” popped into his head—“She messed around with a bloke named Smoky / She loved him, though he was cokey.” He laughed and quit laughing when he heard the crazy high cackle like some lunatic nearby. He wrapped his arms around his chest as if he was trying to keep himself from flying apart, and he walked a little closer to the water, which was dark and choppy and something about it disturbing, the black expanse of it rushing at the shore.