The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 3

  Joe caught up with him in the walk-in box, cornered where a side of beef hung from a ceiling hook. The bomb thrower had about half a head on Joe, and being trapped must have got him balls. He pushed out of the corner and fired up a fist that Joe saw coming, got under it, let go a right that found the guy’s face, and a left that found more face.

  The guy took the clobbers till Joe tossed the beef into a sway, yanked the guy into its come-back, and watched him crumble, his face filled with stupid.

  Out on the sidewalk, Joe finished up with a half dozen slaps and slams. Then he cuffed him, held a pose like Kid McCoy and called to the street: “You see how tough is the Black Hand? See these fine clothes and rings of gold that you have paid for, this filth you are afraid of?”

  “You got nothing, Petrosino,” the oil can said.

  “I got you, scifoso.”

  “The gun is gone.”

  “There are others.”

  “You’ll put on me.”

  “And what do you think?”

  The Italian newspapers hammered Joe, complained that he knocked out more teeth than a dentist, but the American papers loved him, praised The Detective in the Derby, and admitted that Little Italy needed his kind of push-around. It was why victims, usually afraid to talk to cops, felt easy talking with him.

  ***

  The neighborhood still nighttime quiet, Joe stood on the steps of Christ the King Church, listening for a sign, a whisper from the street. The dim light of the tailor shop should have told him something, or San Gennaro, or the dummy with the black jacket. But no.

  Joe had sometimes sat in that shop with Enzo and a pot of coffee, while Enzo hemmed and measured and cut, and went on about the collusions of Verdi and Garibaldi; on and on about connected hits on President McKinley and King Umberto. But with all the chatter, the tailor never squawked on the two suited gorillas who gabbed bad on the Black Hand and pitched protection.

  Joe stepped into the candlelight of the church. With smells of recently burned incense pleasing him, he sat, still listening for a name, a face, a direction. But he heard only the voice in his mind — Lucia Burgundi’s voice, and the sadness in her gray eyes, the promise in her pouting lips, and the sway of her skirts as she stepped from the rear of the shop with a plate for her husband. She’d whacked him silly that day, kicked him under the heart with warm and cold thunder, a delight he would have held had it not come from the wife of an honorable man.

  He’d kept it buried, but when she’d run to him earlier, pulled him to where he could see tears behind her eyes — Giuseppe, come please ... Enzo ... knife letter — she nudged the thunder. She led him into the shop, to the Black Hand letter, and he read what was not written: the kidnappers seeing Lucia ignore the warning about going to the police, and that the beautiful wife would be a beautiful widow, alone and vulnerable to the fears and temptations certain to find her.

  As if he heard the message he’d been waiting for, he took the pad still in his inside pocket, turned to his notes. Enzo shop. Robbery? Kidnaping, ransom. No visible break. The shop searched, the tailor taken. Back door snap locked. Street door locked. From inside? Outside? Cellar, dark— bolt secure on the door to the stable ...

  ... And the stable’s tales of torture and murder, informants giving up stutters and shakes and nothing else. Now he’d see what Benny Bats could give up.

  Benny Bats

  Benito Carlucco. A smooth talker in English or in napulitan’, quick with a buck, a charmer. An all-alone bookmaker who never ducked a payoff. A good fellow for the kids who chased him for coins and for cripples who could not.

  Hair like patent leather, he dressed swell and flashed a set of choppers under a Puccini kind of moustache. Pushing fiveeight, he was a giant for a napultan’. Even with the two or three inches of scar that rimmed his left jaw — and maybe because of it — uptown dames with rich daddies, and neighborhood janes with rouged lips and shaded eyes kept watch for Benny, and Benny kept eyes for what could hurt him and what could help him.

  A loner since the blizzard of ‘88 dropped fifty inches of snow on his father — dead from a heart no one knew was bad, ten-year-old Benny grew up fast.

  No one had seen Papa in the whiteout, or heard him in the wind that blasted through the alley to the vacant lot. Then the thaw ... and Mama’s face screwed tight, screaming and growling that her coward of a husband had gone to hell and left her with the problem of Benito ... and beating the boy’s ass and legs with Papa’s strap because he had not gone to hell, too.

  But the ten-year-old did the right thing for his father by doing the right thing for his mother. Summer, winter, Monday to Saturday, Benny got to the market before the sun, stocked the cart with fruits and vegetables, and set up on the corner that the old man had been working with a weekly shake to a crew of siggies — Sicilians — the brothers and half brothers of Clutch Hand Joe Morello, a bad man with a hand locked into a claw. These guys did counterfeit, gambling and loansharking.

  They stole and sold horses, ran bogus Italian lottery tickets, wrote Black Hand extortion letters, and packed revolvers. They ate from the top, but paid tribute to cutthroats in Sicily.

  Years on that corner, right up to Benny’s eighteenth birthday, profits going up and down, the shake going up and up, a Morello collector — a guy with the face of a mule and crust under manicured fingernails — bit into a plum, made a face and spit the mouthful into a bushel of cherries.

  A burn seeped into Benny’s gut and aced to his head. He went for a paper bag under the peaches, hurled it, and the wrench in the bag caught the guy on the side of the head, making a dent and a trickle of blood.

  The guy shook off the dizzy and fixed his hat. But two guys with bats caught up to Benny, shoved him into an alley, beat him into a seizure he’d never had before. Shaking on the concrete floor, his brain lost in some kind of black, the batters disappeared up Bowery, their legs dangling like play time from the tailgate of a rag picker’s truck.

  In a few days he limped out of New York Hospital, ribs and hips in the pains, but he checked his pearly whites a few times and each time they numbered thirty-two. The only rearrangement his face took were the stitches on his jaw. But he was still pretty, still spiteful, and limped when it rained or when he wanted to.

  With all the transactions in his head and in his pockets, he took action — policy and sports — all on his own, and built the book to four, six dollars a week, then fifteen or twenty. All he had to do was keep a glance for Louisville sluggers and guys like Joe Petrosino.

  But on a sunny afternoon, about a year before the tailor got grabbed, Joe jumped him. Benny was quick on his feet, and had he seen it coming, would have bolted into a wind. But Joe muscled him into a hallway on Houston Street and found pockets of his double sawbuck suit stashed with a poke of greenbacks and stacks of Italian lottery tickets.

  “They’re honest-to-God legit, Petrosino.”

  “Made in a cellar.”

  The lottery swindle worked before it got old and pigeons got scarce. Still, for renegade Benny it was pudding, and up the giggy to the Brooklyn Camorra clan that had been running the gyp for years.

  “What happened with the fruit wagon?” Joe asked.

  “They took it.”

  “Morello.”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe fanned the greenbacks. “Where’d this come from?”

  “You know where it came from. I gotta do something. My mother gotta eat.”

  “You got a felony here with these tickets.”

  “It ain’t a felony, Petrosino.”

  “A felony. But if I lose a few, it’s a misdemeanor.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Let’s see how we get along.”

  “What about the cash?”

  “Let’s see how we get along.”

  Joe booked Benny on the misdemeanor, talked a man-toman on the way to Police Court, got him low bail, and started pinching Morello joints and runners till the siggies got the message that, as long as they left Ben
ny Bats to his small book, Joe left their spots alone.

  That was how Joe did the right thing for Benny, and that was why Benny did things for Joe — like living in the dingy room above a grocery store that wholesaled olive oil. If he reached out the window near his bed he could have touched the sign — Rice, Dried Vegetables, Tinned Foods, Macaroni, Olive Oil.

  He picked his jacket off the bed and walked down the back stairs to the grocery’s kitchen. The grocer’s wife wiped her hands on her apron and flashed Bennie the smile that made dimples.

  The woman carried the kind of chubby Benny went for, her face pretty when her hair wasn’t falling over it, like when she was lying down.

  “Anything?” Benny asked.

  “He tells me nothing.” She made a face, threw up a hand.

  “Anybody talking about a painting?”

  She shrugged, held it. “What painting?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’m making the olive salad.” She made dimples again. “You want?”

  “Deliver it.”

  “When?”

  “Late. Knock on the door.”

  ***

  On the street Benny found the usual noise and horseshit-dust floating in the late slants of sun. On the corner, under the red and yellow umbrella of his peanut wagon, Georgie Nuts Pugliesi looked like a Macy’s Santa Claus. Short and round and redfaced, a gray scarf hanging from a pocket of the brown corduroy jacket that he’d worn since crossing the Atlantic years back, he handed a bag of peanuts to a junkman, his horse annoyed with the smoke and whistles of the roaster.

  “Hey,” Benny said.

  “Hey, Benny Bats. You look sharp.”

  “I always look sharp.” Benny took a bag of peanuts off the top of the roaster.

  “Put those back, take the others. Hot.”

  “Getting too warm to sell these things?”

  “No, this weather’s good. I gotta stay here anyway. I leave, I lose the spot. You know how it is.”

  “Who you see for this corner now?”

  “Some guy, supposed to be with the Sicilians. Mafia, he says. Who knows? For a dollar a week, nobody bothers me and I don’t ask. When you gonna let me work with you?”

  “Siggies hear you’re with me, we both catch a beating.”

  “Ain’t what I hear.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A truce with Strachi,” Georgie said.

  “You hear that, huh?”

  “And you’re on your way up.”

  “How do you hear what I don’t hear?”

  “Can’t be you don’t hear, Benny.”

  Benny grinned. He’d heard. “I gotta go.”

  The roaster whistled.

  “Wait, Benny. I’m looking to get an okay up the Central Park, get some roasters up there. Maybe the Bronx Zoo. Maybe you’ll get to know somebody.”

  “That’s the city.”

  “Yeah, so? Still you need somebody.”

  “What about the siggie who takes your dollar?”

  “They’re all horseshit, these cowboys.”

  “Give me time. Things are happening.”

  “I thought you didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, but let me go see what I don’t know.”

  Georgie tossed Benny another bag of nuts. Benny snatched it and hoofed a block out of his way to skirt a Morello joint on Prince Street. At Elizabeth Street he quick-turned into an alley that took him to the door of La Stella di Napuli.

  The place looked the same as what Petrosino had told him. Planks spanning three beat up barrels made the bar. Working guys, their shovels and picks in a corner, stood gabbing and pouring red from bottles without labels.

  On a rough plastered wall across from the bar a faded print of the Madonna hovering over the Bay of Naples looked down at a table topped with linoleum and at men playing cards without eights, nines and tens.

  Sawdust on the floor, fresh and acidic, tickled Benny’s nose. He stepped to an alcove near the kitchen, where The Ox sat at a table with a steak and the bottom of a bottle of red, this one with a label. He wore a pampered moustache, a head of dense black hair, a keg of a chest.

  The table was round, draped by a cloth of coarse linen. The Ox wore a mappin’ of the same linen, corners of it tucked under a stand-up collar.

  He looked up at Benny, motioned with a fork to a chair. “Sit.”

  “How the hell did you find this place?” Benny asked.

  “I told you it was a dump,” The Ox said, his dialect from the streets of downtown napuli, his tongue loose with the bottle at his elbow. “But the food’s good.”

  “I almost didn’t find it. Why here?”

  “The building is his, keeps a cumare up the stairs.” The Ox picked up the bottle by its neck and showed it to somebody behind Benny. “Forty-five years old, he wants to be twenty. And he’s asking about the tailor’s wife, wants to know who’s out after her.”

  “The husband isn’t even cold yet,” Benny said.

  A blast of heat and a skinny kid with an apron as long as his legs came out of the kitchen. He delivered a bottle, opened it and walked off.

  The Ox forked the steak, lifted it, showed off two inches of medium rare. “You want?”

  “Steak. No more macaroni?”

  “You want, yes or no?”

  “No. What’s up over here?”

  “Something for you.”

  “Yeah, you said.”

  The Ox sat back and shrugged. “I said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I talk too much.”

  “I say nothing about what you talk,” Benny said.

  “Yeah, I think so. Don Strachi trusts you. Still I must keep my tongue quiet.”

  “Keep it quiet, or let it talk, makes no difference to me. But why does he trust me? There must be others he trusts.”

  “He is not done distrusting them yet.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re an earner, he says. A victory over his enemies.”

  “Morello? The Sicilians?”

  The Ox nodded. “He will protect you from them and you will be grateful and loyal out of fear of losing Camorra protection.”

  The Ox went back to his steak, cut a triangle and forked it. “There is talk of the painting?” He stuck the triangle in his mouth.

  “Nobody knows about a painting. Nothing. I don’t either.”

  The Ox rubbed a thumb against bunched fingertips. “Gone. Lost.”

  “From where?”

  The Ox shook his head. “A priest had it. A Sardinian. He was with the tailor, so maybe the tailor knew something.”

  “Did he?”

  “Nobody knows.” The Ox shrugged

  Benny sipped wine. “Don Strachi is late?”

  “Over there.” The Ox pointed with his chin.

  Benny twisted to see Don Cesare Strachi at the door, puffed and smiling like enter-stage-right. Light gray suit as fine as any in Benny’s closet, straw porkpie hat in his hand, bright white shirt and collar. Maybe forty, maybe forty-five, black cone eyes, nose square, scarred and broken; skin the color of roasted pork, close cut red hair on a head like a melon.

  Even with the melon head, the comical space in his front teeth, he looked good for the up and coming camorrista Joe and the Squad had made him for, with histories as an earner, enforcer and loyal soldier — reports that went from The Ox to Benny to Joe Petrosino.

  Taking the fall on a kidnap he didn’t do, Strachi got fiftyfour months. Then, part of the deal: The siggies are strong in New York. Make a run up their backs. Construction, unions. Make respect.

  The right money got spent on the right people, court orders got hidden, and Strachi got sprung to New York with a wad of American cash and a passport.

  Benny began to stand.

  “Sit, sit,” the Camorrista said, his voice wind and sand. He sat, picked up his glass, saluted The Ox and Benny, looked back to The Ox. “What, you don’t shave?”

  “The barbers. You closed them on Mondays.”

&nb
sp; “You have no razor?”

  The Ox shrugged, looked ashamed. “I’ll go now.”

  “Never mind now.” Strachi motioned to the empty bottle. “You drank that?”

  The Ox shrugged.

  “Drink, and the tongue takes over the mouth,” Strachi said and faced Benny. “So Benito is here.”

  “You call for me, I come, Don Strachi.”

  Strachi set his palms flat on the tablecloth, and in the usual mix of napulitan’ and English, said: “Men like you — like us” — he motioned to include The Ox — “we earn, there is greed and jealousy, and fear that we cut into Morello interests. So we must sit again with them in that pigsty they call a restaurant, and accept the swill they call food. You have been there?”

  “No,” Benny said.

  “So it is true what they say, that they have nothing to do with you.”

  “Not since they gave me a beating.”

  “A year now. They suspect that you are in the protection of the police. Morello is jealous for percentages that should be his.”

  Benny started to speak, Strachi cut him short.

  “I have told him that you are with me.” Strachi nodded, satisfied with the maneuver. “And with me you are protected from his bandits.”

  “I thought I was already with you.”

  “Yes, the olive oil. But you are valuable elsewhere too.” Strachi set his hand on Benny’s hand. “Valuable, Benito, and loyal, very important for new business.” He took back his hand. “You well speak the languages of two countries. Men take quickly to you. Women also, I understand.” He grinned and nodded. “And you share with no one.”

  “No one.”

  “You will now see to our books, our operations, and share with us. No. We will share with you. Earn with us and keep more than you now keep for yourself.”

  “You have much trust in me, Don Cesare.”

  “I make a generous offer, but you are uncertain.”

  Benny caught a flash of anger in Strachi’s eyes.

  “I am uncertain only of myself. My operation is small and my books are simple. Yours is big and I fear failure.”

  “With me there is no failure.”