The Mezzogiorno Social Club Read online

  “Your Enzo, he beats you,” she said.

  Lucia looked to the street.

  “For the wine?”

  Lucia shook her head. “He needs no wine.”

  Rosina offered her hand, Lucia took it, and set it under her breast. “I am with his baby.”

  “And still he beats you?”

  “He does not know.”

  “You must tell him.”

  “I do not want his baby.”

  “There is no choice, my sister.”

  “A child of Enzo’s is certain to be a curse.”

  “You must not.”

  “There is the gnome.”

  “You must not.”

  ***

  The car rumbled into the din and excitement that was the neighborhood. Teamsters and cabbies whistling and shouting over the racket of horseshoes and iron rimmed wheels; men jockeying drays to nighttime quarters; men, women and children weaving this way and that, as if in a ritual, some toting stacks of piecework on their heads; a crippled man with a stock of suspenders hanging from an arm; a boy on a ladder lighting a street lamp.

  “Here we are, then,” Lucia said.

  They helped each other from the car into air sweetened by a flash rain that had left puddles on the slate slabs of sidewalk. Men gazed as the sisters locked arms and stepped under awnings past storefronts crowded with sacks of beans and bushels of olives, salamis and salted meats hanging alongside bulks of cheeses, and shelves dusty with semolina from where the day’s macaroni had been sold.

  Rosina slowed at a window’s display of lanterns, candles, pots and pans, and a machine that, according to Lucia, sang with the voices of Caruso and Patti.

  The bell of a police wagon gonged in the distance.

  Lucia hurried Rosina past a saloon with wafts of stale beer that wrinkled their noses. At an intersection tangled in noise and traffic, a bank’s window advertised that inside one could manage money, send and receive letters, and secure a return across the Atlantic.

  Where they turned the corner, a stout man stood writing in a small notebook while listening to a woman’s battering dialect. The man’s face, meaty and pocked, kind and worried, brightened as he looked to the sisters. He tipped his derby.

  Looking over her shoulder, Rosina said: “He is Giuseppe Petrosino of your letters.”

  “From what I have written, you know?”

  “He is napulitan’?”

  “Yes, of Padula.”

  “He thinks fondly of you.”

  “He is a visitor to Enzo.”

  “Enzo has made Petrosino’s coat?”

  “His father is his tailor.”

  “He is not so short as you say.”

  “The derby lies for him,” Lucia said, as if to approve. “And the look of Cuccio, you don’t mention?”

  Rosina smiled quickly. “Yes, yes.”

  They found the tailor shop dark and locked. Lucia knocked on the glass of the door, then peered through the show window beyond San Gennaro.

  She called to a woman climbing the stoop next to the shop, a child asleep in her arms, his fingers tangled in her curls.

  “Philomena, he is so beautiful, your Laurio. Like an angel he sleeps.”

  “Hello, Lucia. Yes, my angel.” Philomena kissed the boy’s head and looked to Rosina. “And your sister has arrived?”

  “Yes, she has come.”

  “I am Philomena Matruzzo and wish you well.”

  “Thank you,” Rosina said.

  The church bell sounded seven times.

  “Aha,” Philomena said, her smile filled her wide face. Looking up to the simple bell tower across the street, she said: “Don Camillo tells us the hour and welcomes you.”

  “You have heard from the child’s father?” Lucia asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think no.”

  “And still no letter, no money.”

  “You have seen Enzo?” Lucia asked.

  “No,” Philomena said, looking around as if she’d find him. “The door to your shop has been closed. The barese says that all the day customers have turned away.”

  Lucia looked to the newsstand, at an expectant look on the face of the barese as he leaned over his counter.

  “We thought he went with you to greet your sister,” he said, and to Rosina: “Hello, Signorina.”

  “Hello,” Rosina said with a shy curtsy.

  “He took his newspaper and cigar this morning, but I have not seen him since. No one has seen him.”

  “I will be upstairs, Lucia,” Philomena said, pushing open the door to the building.

  Lucia keyed open the shop, a bell above the door jingling lightly. She fired the kerosene lamp that sat on a worktable among patterns and cuts of fabric, picked up Il Progresso from the floor’s black and white tiles, dropped it on the table, and returned to it for the date — 15 March, 1905; Wednesday.

  Moving the lamp to the counter in front of the shelves and bins, where bolts of material belonged, she found fabrics on the counter, others on the floor, with spilled boxes of collars, socks and garters. She skated her hand along the surfaces of the steam press. “It is too cold. No work has been done.” She looked to the door. “The door was locked.”

  In the back room she found a drawer of Enzo’s desk on top of the desk, another in the sink, one on top of the icebox.

  “See here,” Rosina called, pointing to a tear of paper pinned to the black jacket on the clothes dummy.

  Lucia stepped to the scrap of paper, its edges torn and soiled, crude sketches of coffins and knives bordering the trace of a hand blackened with pencil.

  You have more money than we have. We know of your wealth. If you do not like to be without a husband we want $500 that you are to enter into an envelope and put under the feet of the saint so we know you obey us. You will hear from us. We will know if you go to the police and you will no more see your husband.

  A calculation so quick. “I must go to Petrosino,” she said, and rushed to the street.

  The Black Hand

  Suddenly alone, Rosina sat, stood, sat again. The shop felt dark now, its shadows threatening, and when the bell above the door jingled it startled her. A child — no, a woman — in skirts of many colors, a bonnet the color of rust, a wave of black hair falling above amber eyes.

  Rosina had watched — from a distance, because she’d been wary — Lucia and the other children run to greet the grinning gnomes perched like fantoccini atop a road show’s donkey cart. This gnome, with a face that could have been a man’s, allowed no distance. And, like the gnomes of the road show, she wore finger rings of coral, copper and silver, while larger rings dangled from her ears.

  “Lucia is not here?” she asked, her voice that of a bold child.

  Rosina held a breath. “She is soon to return.” She moved the lamp to better see the gnome.

  “I think the husband is not here.” A corner of the gnome’s mouth curled down, hardened her eyes and squared her chin.

  “He is not here,” Rosina said.

  The gnome’s face softened. “I am Lina. Do you know of me?”

  “I have heard.”

  “You are the sister, then.”

  A careful smile broadened the gnome’s face, making delicate its husky features. From her skirt she took a small paper sack and, with the moves of a tin toy, set it on the worktable.

  “For Lucia,” she said, opening the door to the street and holding it. “It means nothing. Her baby will be healthy and cause much notice to Lucia.”

  As she left, her skirts lifted a whirl of dust from the door’s threshold, then settled before Lucia returned with Joe Petrosino, Detective Sergeant, boss of the Italian Squad.

  His coat hanging open in the warm evening, he lifted his derby, smiled shyly and said: “This young lady is Rosina?” Then let the hat drop back on his baldness.

  “Yes, my good sister welcomed with this trouble. No one would blame her should she leave.”

  “I would not leave — ”r />
  “I am sorry for this trouble,” Joe said, bowing slightly, as Lucia pointed to the letter pinned to a shoulder of the wool jacket.

  Leaving it in place, Joe read it, removed it, read it again.

  “They will kill him because I have come to you, Giuseppe?”

  “No one can say, Signora,” he said, shaking his head slowly, avoiding Lucia’s eyes. “But there is no mistake in coming to me.”

  Joe’s words had always been few, and these few stunned her, as if he knew and approved of what she had calculated so quickly, We will know if you go to the police— and become free of Enzo.

  She held her breath, forced herself to see Petrosino’s black eyes for a suspicion, an accusation, a recognition of guilt. But he calmly took his notepad from an inside pocket and folded the Black Hand letter into it. He motioned to Il Progresso on the table.

  “The newspaper he buys in the mornings?”

  “Yes. It was there.” Lucia pointed to the floor, her voice pitched. “The gas has not been lit; the smell of cigar is of last night. The drawers of the desk in the back are overturned.” She motioned to scatters of materials on the counter and on the floor, to upturned shirt boxes. “Garments have been disturbed and the fabrics too.”

  “Was there anything of exceptional value?” Joe asked.

  “Silks and taffetas of high quality,” Lucia said, shuffling through fabrics that had been tossed. “But they are still here.”

  “The door was locked when you arrived?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think there is a rear door,” Joe said, stepping into the upset of the back room, and finding the door to the back alley locked. He turned to the cellar door, slid open its bolt, and asked for the lantern. Climbing down the dark stairs, he called: “The door to the stable, it is always bolted?”

  “Yes,” Lucia said. “It is locked now?”

  “Yes, from both sides.”

  Joe climbed back up. “You have been offered arrangements of protection?”

  “Yes. Two men spoke with Enzo. He said he would speak with you.”

  “They were here, when?”

  “Three or four weeks. Enzo said they were polite and spoke badly of the Black Hand. He did not speak with you?”

  “No. And for weekly amounts they would guard you from danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No.”

  “And he refused them?”

  “It is difficult for Enzo to part with money.”

  ***

  For a few more dollars a month Enzo Burgundi could have done the right thing. A nickel ride on the “L” or a trolley to an apartment with steam heat, a bathroom, electricity, a telephone.

  Instead he and Lucia lived on the second floor of a fivestory tenement with damp, dark stairways, an unheated toilet on each landing shared by four flats, each with rooms hooked together like box cars. Eleven dollars a month (he spent nearly as much on the cigars) for 325 square feet of kitchen, front room and bedroom. Airless and hot in summer, its walls sweated dampness that in winter steamed with the heat of the coal stove.

  Lucia spent hours in that kitchen. Cooking, washing dishes and clothes, wiping coal dust from walls, sweeping and scrubbing bare wood floors on hands and knees before the relief of Mass on Sundays.

  During morning hours, when a narrow angle of sun brightened the kitchen, she’d spent peaceful moments at the window tending her pots of mint, basil and oregano, or gazing out at mothers with babies and children shouting and laughing with street games. But only after having lived there for three years, and on a morning during the January last, did she learn of the hollow under the windowsill.

  Awakened, but still in bed that morning, she’d heard Enzo moving about. He had not berated her in some days, had not forced himself upon her, and she would not break the peace if she quickly prepared his breakfast.

  Setting her feet on the cold floor, she held closed her nightdress and, seeing into the kitchen, her pots of herbs had been moved from the window to the table’s porcelain top. The windowsill had been removed also, and Enzo, still in his night clothes, reached into the exposed hollow, took from it a cracker tin and dropped something into it.

  As he replaced the sill and the herbs, Lucia returned to bed and waited for him to demand breakfast. This he did not angrily, though neither he nor she spoke as he dressed, drank the coffee she poured, and ate toasted slabs of bread she’d sprinkled with olive oil and sugar.

  She helped him with his coat and hat, and he responded with a closed-mouth grunt. She held open the door as he stepped into the building’s hall, closed and locked it behind him, and stayed at the window till he walked from her view.

  Quickly, quietly, as if someone were to hear, she removed the potted herbs from the window, and a vague significance of the old penny she’d picked up from the sidewalk some days before came to mind.

  She jiggled away the sill, bared the hollow. Cold from it chilled her. She reached in, removed the cracker tin and, from it, plucked a brown envelope that held a fold of dollars many times the amount Enzo had refused her for Christmas.

  The hurt twisted her mouth. “Not a tree, not a table cloth, not a sweet word.”

  Her gift had been some few yards of material from the shop. A canceled order, but a sturdy wool of tan and green plaid — at forty cents a yard, Enzo noted — that did not become her. But it was warm and needed no lining, and from it she fashioned herself a coat, cutting it to fit loosely, though she’d not yet known of a baby.

  “Not a candle, not a glass of wine. Stingy bastard. Not a card.” Then tears, and a return of the bitterness that had soured her breath and renewed itself as when she’d set eyes on the knives and coffins of the Black Hand letter.

  ***

  She lowered the shop’s lamps and looked to the street, still and silent, no moon, no stars, shadows like folds of wool. She let go a sigh and took the old penny from a dusty corner of her bag. “This I return to you,” she whispered, and placed it at Gennaro’s feet.

  She looked to Rosina. Worn by three weeks of ship’s travel and by the trouble of this day, she’d dropped into slumber, her head in her arms on the work table. Lucia wiped dribble from the sleeping sister’s lips, then sat, comforted by sounds of childhood sleep.

  Until Lucia left, they slept in a corner room, under a window filled with the smells of the farm, while the Mastiff, Cuccio, with eyes of a jealous lover for all but the sisters, slept at the door.

  It had been a DiStasi daughter — ’a zia to the young sisters — a patient tutor who taught them the culture and ancient language that flourished in her core napulitan’; the respected zia, who had tutored in her students a similar heart.

  Mathematics came easy to Lucia, but the younger Rosina had been the better student, eager for literature and history, and for one aged book that moved her to sketching its woodcuts of saints and angels.

  She had overheard ‘a zia joke of a DiStasi cousin with five children, blessed with catching the seeds of conception by simply holding the hand of a man; and Rosina, impressive at fourteen years, held only the sleeve of any boy with enough nerve to ask her to dance.

  Lucia watched this precious sister lift her head quickly, awakened perhaps by the rattle of the Bowery’s elevated train, just blocks away.

  “Sister, you are certainly a widow?” she asked.

  Lucia turned and stepped to where fabrics still lay strewn on the floor. She gathered the finest of them, placed them on the counter, then let a length of black taffeta unfurl before her.

  “This would make an attractive dress for a widow.”

  “What of the baby?”

  Lucia darted her eyes into the eyes of her sister. “The gnome visited here, I think.”

  “Yes,” Rosina admitted.

  “And she left something?”

  Rosina stood, stepped around the table, folded her arms. “You must not have what she left.”

  “It would be difficult to love a child of Enz
o’s.”

  “Together we will love it,” Rosina said.

  Looking to where the knife letter had been pinned, Lucia clasped Rosina’s hands in hers and held them to her heart. “Then you will help me love it.”

  Bulldog Joe

  His detectives called him Bulldog Joe. They bragged that he spoke the dialects of the Mezzogiorno— Naples, Calabria, Sicily; knew Latin of the Church and librettos of Italian opera. He charmed cooperation from good guys, muscled it from bad guys, dazzled the press, and went to Mass nearly every morning.

  Built like a johnny pump, his neck was a no-neck, his shoulders heaps of muscle, his legs sturdy and short. Too short. Remarks, usually in a brogue, boomed that when the chubby dago got his vertical measured for the job, he must have been standing on three or four inches of greenbacks.

  That’s the way things were in 1883, the year a bridge connected the City of New York with the City of Brooklyn. Since then, the Brooklyn County of Kings and three other counties got pulled into the city, and the city promoted its shortest cop from Patrolman to Detective Sergeant and boss of the small, six-man Italian Squad. Black Hand cases, knife letters, kidnaps, bombs and murders.

  Bulldog Joe found it necessary, the Squad liked to say at the bottom of a bottle of wine or a pitcher of beer, to kick Black Hand ass and let people watch him do it. And people watched when he’d caught a gander at a Black Hander, an oil can suited in a well tailored rig, a foot on a shoeshine box, a dirty kid slapping a rag on a boot that didn’t need shining.

  Joe’s Squad had collared the guy months before — he’d firebombed a drug store and beat the druggist who ignored a Black Hand letter, and Joe walked him from a fancy whore house to a station house — in no rush, to give reporters time to show up, kicking him in the ass once in a while. But the worst thing that happened to the guy was that he beat the arson charge and Joe needed to square that.

  The guy flipped the shoeshine kid a coin, flashed a pinky ring, and hoofed down the street. He must have felt eyes on him. He turned and caught Joe trying to look like sidewalk and, feeling a frisk coming, he sprinted, dumped a gun in the gutter and scrambled through a knot of mothers and grandmothers into a butcher shop.