The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 4

  ***

  The Hotel Monterey, eleven floors of class and old glitter, sat on West Twenty-third, at the foot of the Tenderloin. Its restaurant took reservations from the same crowds that fed at Delmonico’s, the Waldorf, Rector’s, and other palaces where theater swells ate and drank with judges and commissioners, and where Tammany Hall shysters and bagmen hustled favors and envelopes.

  Tourists, rounders and gentlemen poured in and out of the classy joint, putting down bets, picking up wins and chancing a gander at one or two of Broadway’s Florodora Girls, or Sam Clemens, or maybe Bat Masterson, the lawman, gambler, sports writer, and occasional partner to Benny, and the reason — according to Benny and the wide eyes who didn’t know better — for the Bats moniker.

  Joe liked the Monterey, far enough up on the 9th Avenue “L” from the neighborhood to keep Benny’s cooperation a secret. With thick-soled shoes that grew him an inch or two, Joe hoofed among tourists and the lonely headed for the sparkle and flesh of the Tenderloin. He crossed Twenty-third through a knot of top hats and tuxes, furs and satins, shining black Hansoms that were cabs, and a half dozen Franklins, Packards and Buicks.

  He spotted Benny’s pearly grin looking out from the lobby and went in.

  “Joe, not for nothing,” Benny said, “but what’s with that face? You need a woman or something.”

  “What you got for me?” Sometimes Joe didn’t like Benny.

  “Maybe you don’t like women.”

  Joe’s eyes went black. “I have no time for bullshit. What do you have for me?”

  “Easy, Joe, I’m breaking balls. Nice rig, fits you good. Who’s the tailor? Your father, your brother?”

  “Never mind my father, my brother. How do you know so much?”

  “I know what everybody knows. Let’s go sit. And take that pot off your head, or everybody in the joint’s gonna know who you are. Your picture in the paper all the time, and you ask how I know about your father, your brother. Cazz’.”

  They sat at the bar. Mirrors, marble and mahogany, brass and crystal. Joe set his derby on a stool, skated a palm across the top of his head, as if it had hair.

  “Let’s try the French,” Benny told the man behind the bar.

  The barman set down glasses, poured lightly, stepped away.

  “What you wanna know first?” Benny asked Joe.

  “The oil.”

  “I tried the wife. She says she knows nothing. I believe her. Anything I get comes from The Ox, and he says he’s stupid on the oil thing.”

  “The painting.”

  “The painting is a guy eating or something. Worth a few bucks, supposed to be a scheme for the communists. Sounds like bullshit, but that’s the word. They thought the tailor had it, but it got lost.”

  “Like the tailor got lost.”

  “No. The tailor got lost like this.” Benny made a gun with his fingers, dropped the hammer. “The stable next to the shop. Patarama. The father, a vicious bastard, and three sons. Junk dealers, horse thieves, blacksmiths. They sell rabbits, chickens, whatever. Horses, carriages, all that shit. They live in that fucking place, Joe. Swamp guineas eating and sleeping there.”

  Benny leaned forward, dropped his voice. “They’re with nobody, they’re with everybody. Siggies, Camorra. They’re looking for the painting, supposed to be that a priest gave it to the tailor to hide and hold. And to make a score with Strachi, they go for it, then write the knife letter for themselves.”

  “They killed him, why?”

  “Animals don’t need a reason.”

  “This came from who?”

  “The Ox, but Strachi was sitting right there when he’s telling me this, not real interested.”

  “Where’s Carmine Tonno with all of this?”

  “Nobody sees Happy Carmine. But he’s around, Strachi don’t make moves without him.”

  “Like Black Handing the tailor?”

  “Strachi had nothing to do with that. I told you, they were looking to make a score with him. Anyway, that ain’t major. Every zip off the boat that wants a ring on a pinky pulls that Black Hand shit.”

  “So, what’s Carmine do when he’s not around Strachi?”

  “Just looking like he’s not around. The Ox says it looks like he’s scheming all the time. Got ideas for himself. Whenever there’s a sit-down with Morello, Carmine’s right up their ass. I told you all this.”

  “How do they know about the stable brothers?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe from Gaga. Slow.”

  “That’s Apollo,” Joe said. “He’s around, but Carlo and the one with the eyes, they’re in the wind.”

  “So they must figure the whole story.”

  “Yeah, and what’s that?”

  “Strachi’s thinking that maybe they got the painting, and maybe they don’t, but he’s looking to whack these two for bringing heat on him.”

  Benny sat back and sipped, holding the wine glass with his pinky angled like highfalutin. “Hey, Joe, the wife. I got a gander at her.”

  Benny, quick and arrogant and cocky. Good liar, good stool. Sometimes Joe liked him.

  “Never mind the wife,” Joe said.

  “Hey, by the way, the marshal wants his gun back. Can you do that?”

  “Who?”

  “Masterson. The marshal, sheriff, whatever he is.”

  “A friend all of a sudden?” Joe asked.

  “What about it, the gun?”

  “Let him get a new gun.”

  “The cane too. They took his fucking cane, your guys.”

  “How does he connect you with me?”

  “The night you took me for the tickets, he got locked up for beating a pigeon out of some gelt. You forgot? In the cell we got talking.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I talk to you more than I talk to anybody. He uses me, I use him. Mostly he uses me. Not a friend. I got no friends.”

  “A swordsman like you, no friends?”

  “Just you. Who else could I trust? Nobody gives ‘ i cazz’ about nobody. That’s why this neighborhood is on its way out. But you, you got friends all over the place. All right, you got enemies too, but you got me to look out for you.”

  The bar began crowding up. Joe took his hat from the stool. “Why do you want to know about the tailor’s wife?” he asked.

  “A doll face.”

  “Your head is clear.”

  “If I got a clear head, then Strachi got a clear head too. He wants to know who she talks with, what men are chasing after her.”

  “He told you this?”

  “The Ox did. And maybe she got the painting.”

  “Does she?”

  “Who knows?”

  “What else you got?”

  “Maybe you want to see Lina.”

  “The neighborhood ending again?”

  “Maybe. But The Ox took Strachi to see her.”

  “The farmhouse?”

  “The Monkey House.”

  Lina in the Monkey House

  From the second floor windows of her farmhouse, Lina had watched the farms and woods around her become streets with elevated railroads, trolley tracks and tenements. She watched people make homes in the tenements, saw them crowd the streets, watched them build a church.

  They had known of her and others like her before coming to America. Healers of man and beast, of bodies and souls. Lina had counseled prostitutes off bromide, laudanum and alcohol. And though never with a baby in her belly (probably never been laid, according to Italian Squad romeos), her milk ended infection and chased off evil spirits. She comforted the phantoms who walked and wailed through the nighttime neighborhood; some of them, she’d told Joe, have escaped graves trapped under “the hooves of horses.”

  For Joe the hooves of horses meant those of the Patarama Stable. He believed in the graves and would have been glad to hear from the strolling spooks if they had anything to put in a search warrant that a judge would sign.

  He understood, too, Lina’s affectio
n for the neighborhood and her sadness that it would destroy itself.

  “You will fix that,” Joe had said.

  “I cannot.”

  “Then why do you speak to change what you call inevitable?”

  “To keep from despair.”

  “So fate is no longer inevitable?”

  “We shall see.”

  “How many years do you have?” Joe asked.

  “There are no years for me.”

  “You will not answer.”

  “I have answered.”

  Joe respected Lina and the fate that he’d stopped trying to understand. To keep her from troubling his mind, he’d visited her only when he had to solve a mystery, find a bad guy, make a case.

  There had been no secret that she had taken a liking to Bulldog Joe, so much so that the guys in the Squad broke his balls with a Valentine card signed with her name.

  Joe never mentioned it. Maybe it really came from her.

  ***

  Joe called from his desk: “Charlie, what are you doing?”

  Carlo Corrao, tallest man in the squad, blue eyes, brown hair combed back in waves, always in a bright white shirt and collar. The young girls on Mulberry Street around headquarters called him “Handsome Charlie” and giggled when they did. He and Joe had worked tours together long before Joe picked him up for the Squad. They’d rolled around the streets fighting psychos and bad guys, busted down doors, watched operas, shared philosophies, meals, bottles of wine.

  He stepped to Joe’s desk, dropped a report on it.

  “Let’s go to the monkeys,” Joe said.

  Charlie wrinkled his nose.

  “We’ll be quick. New suit?”

  “Used to be. The new one’s in the closet standing by.”

  “New tie, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tall enough to see over the dome of Joe’s derby, Charlie picked up his boss’s step and the two walked through neighborhood noise and good-morning weather to the stoop on Baxter Street, where scents of simmering garlic and potted lilacs mingled with the used air of the Monkey House. Above the stoop and the storefront next to it, five stories of tenement windows, open even on days not dry and warm, moved with the figures of men and monkeys.

  Men and boys on the stoop, waiting to rent or buy monkeys from any one of six or seven flats, made way as the detectives climbed into the building — Joe watching Charlie lock his breath from the smells — then down a rear flight of cobwebs and wood steps that groaned like pain under their feet.

  Opening the apartment door before Joe knocked, Lina looked up. In her arms, wrapped in a baby blue blanket, a wide-eyed monkey was feeding at her breast.

  “Well, Signore Detective Petrosino has come to Lina as a policeman, has come for his future, or because he loves Lina?” She made a fake grab for Joe’s pescediel’ and he twisted away with a breath trapped in his throat.

  The monkey, annoyed, lost its meal.

  “Oh, so sorry little pupata,” Lina said, and helped him retrieve it. “He was near death, this poor thing. The putan’ that is his mother refuses him, and his padron’ comes to Lina for the milk that brings him life.”

  Behind Lina, under a window that looked out on a glasscovered garden of early tomato and pepper plants, half a dozen young monkeys bunched in the corner of a cage, curious with the visit. Two others, gray and bright eyed and not interested in the visitors, hunched on a table groping into battered pots and filling their mouths.

  “What is it they eat?” Charlie asked.

  “Milk and bread,” Lina said. “Stale bread the baker gives me. And they are grateful.”

  Lina stepped back to see the tall Corrao. “Your name I don’t remember.”

  “Corrao.”

  “Yes, Beautiful Charlie.”

  “Handsome.”

  “Handsome Charlie, yes. Serious like Joe.”

  Gold hoops swung from Lena’s ears as she exaggerated a curtsy that bunched her skirts on the floor’s linoleum. Still with the monkey, she closed the door. Inside smelled better than outside.

  Joe played with thinking that if monkeys talked, they’d sound like Lina. “Piccerella, put away the monkey,” he said. “Please.”

  Lina’s face went sad, connected her eyebrows. “Petrosino has no heart for you, motherless beast.”

  “Doesn’t he hurt you?” Corrao asked.

  “No more than any child.” She put the monkey in a cage and covered the cage with a cut of a horse blanket. She examined her tit and put it away. “Please sit so I don’t look up.”

  They sat, Lina exaggerating a look of importance. “You have come to Lina because Don Strachi has come to Lina.”

  “Why has he come?” Joe asked.

  “For the light, the protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “From others like him. And from Joe Petrosino” — Lina flicked a ringed finger at Joe — “whose name they cannot say without spitting.”

  “Who spits?”

  “I don’t see, I only know.”

  “Strachi talks of me?”

  “Only for protecting him from your police. But I only pretend. There is no light for male vita.”

  “That is not all he wanted.”

  “He thinks the widow of the tailor knows of a painting.”

  “He said that?”

  “I say that. But she knows nothing of it.”

  “You have talked with her?”

  “No.”

  “She is surely a widow?”

  “You know she is.”

  “Does she know?”

  “She is eager to wear black.”

  “Where is the painting?”

  “It is dark, I cannot see.”

  “What is it?” Joe asked. “From where does it come?”

  “I cannot see it, so I don’t know.”

  “And your books say nothing?”

  “It is not important enough for the books.”

  “What else has he asked?”

  “To know who killed the tailor.”

  “Who did?”

  “You already know.”

  “But what do you know?”

  “I see no faces.”

  “You told him that?”

  “I did not tell him that I know they did it to please him.”

  “With the painting?”

  “Yes, but he never will see it. It is less valuable to him than the charms of the widow.”

  “And she?”

  “Hunger drives the wolf from the forest.”

  “She is hungry?”

  “She believes she is.”

  “Where is the tailor?”

  “Under dirt that is trampled by the feet of a horse.”

  Joe smiled quickly. “But is it not too dark for you to see under the dirt?”

  “You find fun in what I say.”

  Lina seemed hurt; Joe let go the smile. “No, no, Piccerella.”

  “The stable ground holds many bodies,” she said. “I don’t see them, but I know what many know.”

  “There is torture?”

  “For those who ignore the Black Hand letters.” Her face became rigid. “You must know this.”

  “And the writers?”

  “There are many writers.”

  “Like the men of the stable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Piccerella, why didn’t you come to me with what you know?”

  “I have told you of the phantoms, but you turned your face.”

  “You have told me more now.”

  “You are listening now. And there is more on your mind, I think. The widow Lucia?”

  Joe felt a blush. “It’s not true that she is confused with sadness?”

  “I have said she is eager to wear black. The face of the tailor was kind to most, but to her it was the mask of the goat.” Lina lifted gentle eyes. “You show warmth for her.”

  Joe glanced at Corrao, Corrao looked to the monkeys.

  “For all her charm,” Lina said, “she i
s unhappy with believing that no one will have her. She is afraid of being alone, and worries that her sister will leave her. But Lucia needs more than the sister or you can give. For her sister, good sister, she is merely a burden that cannot be neglected. For you she is heartache.”

  “She is frightened.”

  “Her head is not clear, and for that she is frightened. She is not as unwise as you think, though not as wise as she thinks.”

  Joe stood, hands at his back.

  “So, Petrosino, you have learned more of your heartaches than of Strachi.”

  Joe felt locked in Lina’s gaze. “What else must I know of Strachi?”

  “He fears you and vows to kill you.”

  “You will keep me safe.”

  “From those who would kill you. But the softness of your heart and the thickness of your head are the most dangerous.”

  The Camorrista Visits Lucia

  The rain had rinsed sidewalks, streets and gutters, and left a breeze that stirred the smells of bread stores, bakeries and the fish market into something almost pleasant. Lucia wedged open the shop’s door to let freshness help soothe the upset the baby in her belly had been kicking up.

  Pleasant to her, as if she’d not heard them before, were the yelps of a clothesline pulley, the softened clangs of a distant trolley, and the chatter of mothers and grandmothers bargaining at sidewalk pushcarts.

  But then came the fractured rhythms of a street organ. My Merry Oldsmobile scraped at her ears and the man cranking it annoyed her. She didn’t like his monkey either, with those fingers of a spider. She hurried to the cash register, snatched a penny, and dropped it in the monkey’s tin cup. “Now go someplace else, little beast. Please.”

  She explained to Rosina what a son-of-a-whore the song, the organ, the man and the monkey were. And what an Oldsmobile was and that it too was a son-of-a-whore. The both of them laughing, Lucia scooped sleeves and collars from her sewing machine and set them in front of Rosina at the pattern table.

  Lucia returned to sewing, the machine’s treadle squealing under her feet. Because the door was open, the bell had not jingled, and when this man entered the shop, his sudden presence startled her. She stopped sewing.

  His face was gruff and unattractive, but his smile was not, even with the black rectangle between its two front teeth. Built stoutly, with the head of a zuccon’ — a pumpkin — topped by a fedora, an overcoat draped his shoulders as if it were a cloak of aristocracy.