The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 5

  “Good day,” he said, taking off the hat.

  “Good day,” Lucia said, sitting back from her work.

  “Perhaps a little oil.” His voice was soft and broken, his napulitan’ not as fine as hers.

  “Oil?”

  “For the machine.” He pointed his chin to the treadle.

  A shorter man with a broad face stepped in quietly, a cone of white roses in his square hands.

  “Oil, yes, I’ll find some,” Lucia said, nearly smiling.

  “You are the Signora Burgundi?”

  “Yes.”

  He bowed slightly, turned toward Rosina, bowed again, and took the flowers from the other man.

  “I am Cesare Strachi, to pay respects.”

  Lucia stood, her eyes on the man. “Thank you, but we do not know that paying respects are yet in order.”

  “Excuse my clumsy words.”

  Lucia took the roses, smelled them, and found it was his cologne that had been pleasing her.

  “They are beautiful,” she said and set them on the pattern table as Rosina made room for them. “Please sit.”

  “There is business, but perhaps it is not a good time?”

  “Please sit.” Lucia kept her smile polite, curious, cautious. She sat again, her back now to the sewing machine.

  Strachi moved quickly and smoothly for a man older than Enzo, who’d been ten years older than Lucia. He settled at the edge of a chair, the fedora on his lap.

  “Perhaps you have learned that I soon will own this building.”

  A rush of nausea. A thorn in her breast. She dropped her smile, flattened her eyes. “You will raise our rent. We have but a small business. There is barely enough.” She held open her hands as if to show nothing.

  “No, no, no, Signora. There is no raise to the rent.” Strachi shook his head. His jowls jiggled, then stiffened with an amused smile as he looked to bins stocked with fabric, to the sewing machines, one of them new, and to a scatter of incomplete coats and jackets pinned with invoices.

  “I regret I have concluded wrongly,” Lucia said.

  Strachi smiled. “I understand.”

  The ice man walked in, a block on his shoulder. The usually talkative man nodded uncertainly to Strachi, then walked to the rear room and loaded the ice box. As he left, kids scattered from his truck with stolen shards of ice.

  In a few quiet moments the church bell gonged nine hours.

  Lucia said: “But Giacalone has said that his children will someday own this building.”

  “Perhaps he has decided that they own other buildings. Be that as it may, I wish you to feel comfort with me. I intend to continue the same rental arrangements, and if that should prove troubling in this bad time, we will agree on others.”

  Lucia found it difficult to look into the slits of daylight in the black of Strachi’s eyes, but she did, and avoided the eyes of the man at the door, the one called The Ox, she came to realize, because she’d heard of these two.

  “And now I will leave you to your work.” Strachi stood. “May I have a card of business?”

  “There are no cards, but Rosina will give you one of our work orders. It will do for a card.”

  Rosina slid a work order from under the weight of a pin magnet and handed it to the man at the door.

  “Until next time,” Strachi said, a brightness in his face that Lucia had not at first noticed.

  When he left, The Ox stepped behind him folding the blank work order into a pocket.

  Rosina’s face went wide and she giggled nervously.

  “Peculiar, no?”

  Lucia put the back of a finger to her lips.

  “Mala vita?” Rosina asked.

  “Camorra.”

  Now Rosina held a finger to her lips.

  “You smiled sweetly for the one who gave the roses.”

  “He is Cesare Strachi,” Lucia said. “He wishes us well.”

  She stepped to the counter before the shelves of stock, reached for a vase and held it as Rosina arranged the roses in it.

  “Twenty-four,” Lucia said.

  “There is no perfume,” Rosina said.

  “Their beauty needs no perfume.”

  The Man in the Barrel

  Occhi sidled into La Stella di Napuli, a peacoat slung over a shoulder. He had on a black sweater worn thin at the elbows, and the stocking cap of a dockworker. He set a hand on a bottle of red at the bar and leaned forward.

  “Do you know me?” he asked the barman.

  “Never seen you before.”

  “A glass.”

  The barman put a water glass on the bar and filled it. Occhi sipped slowly, watching drinkers come and go and seeing dusk darken to night.

  He must have seen the barman on the phone, must have seen The Ox come in, two guys flanking him. And he must have seen the drinkers leave and the barman lock the door behind them.

  Occhi turned to The Ox. “I don’t have it.”

  “Your brother has it.”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  “May I see Don Strachi?”

  “He gives his respects.”

  ***

  The cop walking the night post on Third Avenue stayed mostly bored through the quiet hours. Rain had stopped, but his rain gear, the sidewalks and streets still glistened wet.

  In a lumberyard littered with timber scraps and shredded billboards, a peacoat draped a barrel that the cop had not seen earlier. He stepped to it, lifted the coat, and staggered back from a face with eyes this way and that, staring out from a muck of sawdust and blood.

  The cop called it in; Central called Joe; Joe got out of the sack and to the scene about the same time the sun did. People stood at windows watching cops shuffle barricades, and a detective stoop under his camera’s darkening drape.

  “Make sure to show the eyes,” Joe said.

  From under the cloth the photographer said: “You got here fast, Joe.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Already I got the eyes, got the piece of paper in his mouth. And got a whiff of that guinea red. I mean, you know, wine.”

  The photographer flicked the cloth off his shoulders and squeezed the shutter bulb. “All done.”

  Joe called to the uniform guys: “Knocking on doors?”

  “Doing it now.”

  “I need reports right away.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  “Get some of this saw dust.”

  The photographer collapsed his tripod, lifted it to his shoulder. “This handsome fella’s all yours.”

  Joe lifted a short corner of the paper from Occhi’s lips, read its message — To never again write knife letters — written clearly on an invoice of Enzo Burgundi’s tailor shop.

  He ran it to the Squad room, got on the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Benny there?”

  “No.”

  “Tell him to call his uncle.”

  “Wait, here he is.”

  “Hello.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Last night, nine, ten o’clock,” Benny said. “La Stella di Napuli.”

  “How’d they find him?”

  “He found them. Showed up there looking for Strachi.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “No, who do you think?”

  “Had to be ... you know.”

  “What is it I know?”

  “They kill the tailor. Occhi and the brother get on a lam. Then Occhi ends up in a barrel and word moves around that Strachi’s a swell guy for making revenge, and the swell guy gets respect.”

  “Who’s talking to you?”

  “The Ox. Who else?”

  “He was there?”

  “He says no, but he’s been off the wine and his tongue is tight.”

  “The fingers,” Joe said.

  “What, the fingers?”

  “Cut off one hand.”

  “No shit. Trying to get that painting out of him
.”

  “Did he give it up?” Joe asked.

  “Nobody’s saying.”

  “When did you see The Ox?”

  “I didn’t. He called me before about the olive oil, told me don’t go far. Plates for funny money is the thing. Is what it is, I mean.”

  “Every day, no matter what, you call me. Every day.”

  “Okay, but how come you’re not asking me where the plates are now, who has them, how they getting here? You know, like you ask about the painting.”

  “Let me get this straight. You ask questions and I answer, or — ?”

  “All right, all right, Joe. But you don’t ask me because you already know. Right?”

  “Where’d the barrel come from?”

  “The ones under the bar came from the candy maker. He keeps barrels in the yard there.”

  “Get a handful of sawdust from the floor.”

  “They spit in that shit, Joe.”

  “Call me when you get it.”

  “Can’t you guys get it?”

  “Call me when you get it.”

  East Thirteenth

  Photos of Black Handers covered the walls of the Italian Squad room. Their knife letters, shaking down yeggs and boosters, madams and pimps, fattened case folders.

  But Joe spent most of his worry on the good guys: men with picks and shovels toted like carbines, leaving their families in the dark of mornings, returning in the dark of evenings. He worried for the grocers, shoemakers, barbers and tailors.

  And for Ernesto Giacalone, respected landlord of a dozen neighborhood properties. A good man who spent much of the rent money he took in on battling roaches and rats and tolerating rents late and short. He had well earned the privilege for his wife and daughters to live in comfort on their first floor, two bedroom apartment on 11th Street.

  He had shown Joe the letter:

  Piece of carrion,

  We beg you warmly. We need $7,000. We know that you can sell your buildings and pay it. If you do not leave it in envelopes near your door tomorrow your entire property will be destroyed and then you have to pay the money anyhow.

  The landlord ignored the letter, ignored a second one, and days later his family and his tenants woke to a blast that shook and scattered the stoop and vestibule into a rubble of concrete and twisted iron.

  “Understand, Giuseppe,” Giacalone had said, his face pale and long, “what else is there to do?”

  “You will give them their way?” Joe asked.

  “They will leave me in peace.”

  “Give the devil your finger and he will have your hand.”

  “I will use the other hand. What else would I do? They have bombed the building of my home. Renters are leaving and no one can blame them. If I refuse what they demand, they will steal the building of the tailor’s shop, or someone will be killed.”

  ***

  The judge who’d signed most of Joe’s search warrants read his latest application to search a Thirteenth Street basement apartment. An anonymous phone call about a bomb factory, according to Joe’s fourth paragraph, initiated surveillance that corroborated enough of the phone caller’s information to apply for the warrant. The judge put the okay on it.

  Before daylight, the Squad toted a battering ram to the apartment door, but the door hung open like a welcome.

  They went in. The place smelled like sewer. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling, made glare and shadow on a guy on the floor, face down in a smear of blood as wide as his belly, teeth and brains in the blood. A twelve gauge double barrel lay near him. The sewer was in his pants.

  Another bomb maker sat on an empty crate stenciled EXPLOSIVES, most of him on a table next to a sheet of paper and a list of tenants of Ernesto Giacalone’s 11th Street building. Written across it: To never again write knife letters.

  Back to the Squad room, Joe pulled the Strachi folder. The ball breakers who’d signed the Valentine card had traced a black hand on the folder, made Joe grin.

  He opened the folder on his desk, found three knife letters and set them side by side: the one he’d removed from the black jacket in the tailor shop; the message in Occhi’s dead lips; the letter Giacalone found under his door; and now the scribble across the list of Giacalone’s tenants.

  Joe pieced together a new search application letting each letter of different handwritings show conspiracy. Then he plugged in a pattern that linked the Black Hand to the Camorra, to Cesare Strachi.

  Philomena Matruzzo One

  When Philomena Matruzzo, the strong, contented woman whom Lucia Burgundi envied and respected, got off the boat in 1903, she had no baby and one husband. A year later she had one baby and no husband.

  He’d kissed her goodbye one morning after Christmas to work silver mines in the Arizona Territory. She never heard from him again. Not a cent of what he’d promised to send, no concern for his son and, “if he is dead, may he be with God. If he is not dead, he should bust.”

  Thanks to the saints, she’d had the job before he left — cleaning Christ the King Church and rectory and preparing meals for its priest, Don Camillo. Her pay from the Irish — that’s what she called the bishop of the diocese — came every two weeks, but even adding the generosity of Don Camillo to her pay, she owed the bread store, the fish market, the grocer, butcher, and her landlord. Only their patience kept her and the baby Laurio fed and sheltered.

  She asked the saints, Anthony and Rocco the most responsive, for Laurio’s health and, not for money, but for work to earn money. “Please, just enough to show that I am not a beggar.”

  She lit fresh candles before each of them — Anthony on the small table near her bed, and Rocco on the shelf over the kitchen sink — and within that week, as she swept the front steps of the church, her landlord, Ernesto Giacalone, offered that she earn her rent by seeing to the halls and toilets of the building where she lived. “Unless it is too difficult,” he said apologetically.

  Philomena, with eyes black and sharp in a face soft and earnest, said quickly: “No, no, it is not difficult.”

  So with the baby Laurio bundled in an apple crate with pictures of Indians and teepees pasted to its sides, she scrubbed the five stories of floors and stairs on hands and knees.

  Giacalone saw this and said: “Philomena, the mop, use the mop.”

  Philomena kept scrubbing. “It is not so good as the brush.”

  “If you use the mop you will have the time for another building.”

  Now she stopped and looked up. “For you? For pay?”

  “For pay, of course.”

  ***

  Philomena paid all she owed, got herself a bankbook, and whenever she walked into the bank with a few coins to deposit, she stepped proudly, smiling for the tellers, who greeted her with nods and said: “Good day, Signora.”

  She bought a small silver medal of San Gennaro, had Don Camillo bless it and, each time she pinned it on something of Laurio’s clothing, she admonished the silver saint, the wooden Anthony and the plaster Rocco. “He will be a priest, this baby. You must see to that.”

  It was not until October, months before the knife letter to Lucia, that Philomena became distracted, first by dreams of Laurio as a young priest wearing a black jacket, and then by seeing a priest she didn’t know walk into the tailor shop wearing that jacket.

  Later, from her window, she watched him, no longer wearing the jacket, shake hands with the tailor in front of the shop, then walk past the Patarama Stable and out of sight. The next day she saw the jacket — a fine, handsome one, she thought — on the clothes dummy in the tailor’s window.

  After some days, the jacket still in the window, Philomena asked Lucia about it.

  “A fine garment,” Lucia said. “Not one that should be forgotten. But the priest has not returned, though he has asked that Enzo rush to repair a tear.”

  “Don Camillo knows nothing of him,” Philomena said. “What do you know?”

  “Only that he is Sardinian, and that someone will see his jacket in the window
, inquire of it, and will pay us for our trouble.”

  Not Lucia, and perhaps not the tailor knew as much about the jacket as did Philomena, because in her latest dreams its pockets ballooned like full stomachs and overflowed with gems and gold she’d seen only in magazines and moving picture shows.

  The Murder Stable

  Arnie The Swede, twenty-three years old, wore the same plaid shirt and brown tie every day. He stood tall and slim, with eyes blue and soft, and never wore a hat to cover his head topped with a scatter of nearly white hair. He had a pretty wife and they lived with their baby boy in the apartment over their Portraits and Miniatures Studio on the Bowery.

  Before Headquarters had a Photographs and Records Department, Portraits and Miniatures contracted for prisoners’ mug shots on the way from booking to arraignment. Arnie got to know cops and cop talk. He liked these gritty men, felt comfortable with them and, as a matter of business, so he told his wife, spent an occasional evening with them in gin mills around Headquarters.

  That was how he got word of the search warrant and why he left his home at first light, camera and tripod on a shoulder, headed for the Patarama Stable.

  The day already hot and damp, he got there in time to watch Joe and the Squad, in old clothes and overalls, get there in a paddy wagon that cops and prisoners called a Black Maria, carrying shotguns and battery lanterns. Three uniform cops from the reserve platoon sat with them. Three other cops and a sergeant rode in a sanitation truck pulled double harness.

  They all rolled into the stable gate onto a rutted driveway that elbowed to the rear yard, where sections of roofs, panels, buggies and carriages made pyramids among the rusty remains of a sled on runners and leaf springs. Three or four sheep huddled where oak wheels hung on a plank fence; a keg of horseshoe nails, an anvil, and lengths of chain lay in a crop of poison ivy.

  Out of the stable burst a flurry of chickens and Fausto Patarama, a growl in his throat and a pinch bar in his bearlike hands.

  A detective leveled a shotgun at Patarama’s face. He dropped the bar, but then kicked like a horse, shook off nightsticks and blackjacks, and whined like a cat when they cuffed him to a rabbit hutch.