The Mezzogiorno Social Club Read online

  Strachi embraced him. “You are here quickly.”

  “It is a privilege.” Vito had a small voice. “You look well, Don Cesare.”

  “As well as one can hope.”

  Speaking softly, they strolled the narrow streets.

  “I have been eager to come,” Vito said.

  “And eager for New York?”

  “For unions, I am told.”

  “Our friends in New York will explain the unions. It will be good for Carmine to see you.”

  “You will be in New York?”

  “In a time.”

  “And the painting?”

  “The Sardinian has become a mystery.”

  “Do the police ask of the painting?”

  “It is as if there is no painting.”

  “I may go to Peppone?”

  “You believe he will tell you more than he has told us?”

  “May I try?”

  “Measure what you say. The fat man has two faces.”

  Madison Square

  Madison Square. Polish and prestige. The street cleaners and the mailmen looked like class. Cops too. The Broadway Squad, tall guys with helmets, leather gear and brass as polished as their manners, walked ladies and kids across the traffic-clogged avenues from Madison Avenue to Broadway.

  Gentlemen with a tilt to their hats carried walking sticks that made them swagger. They smoked half-dollar cigars and kept daughters, wives and mistresses in the latest wasp-waisted dresses that hung exact inches above the swept sidewalks they strolled in search of furniture, art, fashion and gossip.

  They gathered in tea rooms fitted with parlor chairs and potted plants, discussing the extravaganzas of Madison Square Garden and the new Hippodrome; the vocal pleasures of Lillian Russell and Marie Dressler; the accomplishments and failures of those not present; and the rumor that soon a new dress shop would open.

  “Italians, I’m told.”

  “Here? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Twenty-fourth Street.”

  “Oh, the last of the new houses. The one with the real estate office.”

  “Yes, and so nicely decorated.”

  “Those wonderful furnishings go with the house?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  On 24th, just in from Madison, the house began a shoulderto-shoulder row of brownstones with varnished doors and curtained windows that looked out on front yards with saplings and bushes squared off by swirled iron pickets.

  The row broke at Fifth Avenue and mixed with the architectures of old hotels, mansions and townhouses dressed with class and influence.

  It was from this avenue that Lucia and Rosina had stepped like greenhorns behind baby Enzo’s carriage.

  “These homes have clean faces,” Rosina said with a laugh and a surge of poetry. “It seems they smile.”

  “But will they smile for us?” Lucia asked.

  “We will cause them to smile.”

  Their home had a face too, clean and welcoming. Lucia handed Enzo to Rosina and led the way through a vestibule to the front parlor, the dining room and rear parlor, and the kitchen that had been moved from the cellar to make a place for the real estate office that would now be their dress shop.

  Oak stairs and bannisters connected the three floors of the house, each group of steps and landings lighted by sconces of pewter and glass.

  They climbed to the second floor and four large rooms, empty but for library shelves and the smells of lumber and shellac. Up to the third floor and a bedroom tucked into each of its corners, they chose two rooms next to each other that faced the street.

  Enzo would spend nights cribbed in the hall between their open doors. They looked at the boy now as if for the first time.

  “He will grow to be a gentleman in a home such as this,” Rosina said, hope and promise in her eyes.

  “He is a man, he will get what he wants.”

  “Not all men get what they want,” Rosina said.

  “I suppose we will see.”

  Lucia fluffed the baby’s curls with her fingers. “Petrosino says the curls are yours and people will say you are the mother.”

  “And more scandal.” Rosina laughed, covering her mouth with her fingers.

  “Sister, a diaper please,” Lucia said. “I put six in your bedroom, you will have to wash others.”

  Philomena Matruzzo Two

  Even after the Italian Squad found the tailor’s body in a stable grave, and the murderous Camorrista Strachi forced Giacalone to sell the building of Philomena’s flat and the tailor shop, Philomena’s dreams continued as did her concern for Lucia Burgundi.

  “I will miss our visits and walking by and seeing you at work,” she had said, holding Laurio.

  Lucia took the smiling baby to her arms and kissed his cheek. “The new shop is not far.”

  “It is not in the neighborhood, it is far,” Philomena said. “And Gennaro? Will he move with you?”

  “Gennaro was here before the shop and so he will stay.”

  “And that black jacket, so fine?”

  “If someone with interest in it arrives, see that they get it.”

  “It will stay in the window then?”

  “No, you take it. We will take the dummy. If someone inquires of the jacket, you will hear. See to the exchange of money and take for yourself what they give.”

  Philomena took the jacket from the clothes dummy and left with Laurio and the jacket in her arms. Into her building, she rushed up the four flights to her kitchen. Breathing heavily from the climb, she sat Laurio in his high chair at the table, and searched the jacket’s pockets to find not one gem of her dreams. “Nothing,” she said to Laurio, then sighed and shrugged and shook off disappointment, telling herself that perhaps the jacket is simply the promise that Laurio will be a priest.

  She looked to Rocco on the shelf above the sink and said: “All right, then, that’s good. But you understand, I will not yet thank you and the others.”

  The Mezzogiorno Social Club

  An evening of wine, music and card games ended with philosophy from a Sicilian stranger with a four-string guitar tuned like a banjo.

  “What to name the club?” he asked no one, but strummed chords while studying the two dozen or so faces around him. Then, as if with enlightenment, announced that the club be named to reflect the people of the neighborhood, the faces, the sweat, and the love and spirit of Sicily, Napoli and Calabria — the Mezzogiorno.

  No one agreed, and no one disagreed and, within the week, white and gold stenciling on what used to be the tailor’s show window spelled Mezzogiorno Social Club.

  From behind the letters, San Gennaro still watched the street. Behind the loyal saint, a room, about thirty feet square, had been fitted with a dozen chairs from a dozen kitchens, and three or four tables of different sizes and shapes.

  Every pay day, Vito Red sat at one of those tables, taking union dues from men spent by the week’s labor, and handed them their pay envelopes. “You want to keep working,” he said again and again, “you like a job, then do the right thing.”

  And doing the right thing, plumbers and carpenters on their own time put in a new kitchen, nobody asking where the stove came from, or the sink and the icebox. Electricians, wood lathers, plasterers and painters did the right thing too, sometimes working through nights and weekends because they believed Vito Red would do the right thing too.

  Masons poured a skin of sandy concrete over the cellar’s dirt floor, walled in a corner with cement block, and called the small room an office. In the office they set a safe in concrete, hung a padlocked steel door, and stored cash, loan-shark books and gambling slips. Happy Carmine kept eyes on those steady rackets, and kept bigger eyes on Benny Bats and Georgie Nuts, the guys already running the books and figuring the odds.

  Benny got in solid with Carmine, but not with Vito Red. He told Georgie that, when he shook hands with Vito, he let go as if the guy’s fingers were snakes. Happy Carmine
must have known the snakes from way back, and it looked like they didn’t bother him.

  Strachi had pulled in Vito for his know on unions, shakedowns, strikes and strike busting, and Carmine followed up with The Ox and a squad of muscle and prostitutes planted on the picket lines around the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

  The whores intimidated wide-eyed young seamstresses and button-holers, mostly Jews and Italians, just off the boat. The whores told the girls: A buck and a half a week ain’t so bad. We ain’t union either, you know. Go back to work, honey, before you end up with us.

  The muscle toted bats, jostled the men strikers, and ended the walkout without cracking a head or busting a knee.

  The only guy to take punishment was one of the Triangle partners, a weasel who stood a head taller than Vito. Vito slapped him around till the guy planked up the jack for the service and the first month’s protection from further strikes and building inspectors.

  That was how Vito earned his bones.

  In a suit manufactured by the ladies up on Madison Square, this sudden man of respect pranced to the front office of Mondo Nuovo. Its floor of oak, well swept, but stained with the black ink of newsprint, snaked a path around a printing press and stacks of shallow alphabet cases, to a desk crowded with books and periodicals, a typewriter, a phone, a pastry box, and the pear shape of Armando Peppone seated in a worn, upholstered parlor chair.

  “Peppone,” Vito said. “I am Vittorio San Martino.”

  “Ah, so we meet.” Peppone grunted as he struggled out of the chair at the desk, buttoning his suit’s white jacket. “When have you arrived?”

  “Only weeks.”

  They shook hands.

  “We have met before,” Peppone suggested, studying Vito’s face. “A rally perhaps? In Rome perhaps?”

  It had been Milan, years ago, before Vito hooked up with Strachi, but Vito stayed mute on it. “Possible,” he said. “There were so many of us.”

  “There are so many, my friend. It is not over.”

  “I suppose not,” said Vito, turning briefly, scanning a shelf of books and authors that had once meant something to him.

  “I expected you sooner,” Peppone said. “Coffee, a pastry?”

  Peppone’s napulitan’ tongue fell easy on Vito’s ears.

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  “So, you please your associates.” Peppone smiled, as if approving the strong arming of one his party’s unions. “And your interest in the party?”

  Vito Red dropped his face into a frown and shook his head. “There is no longer interest.”

  “So this visit has little to do with politics or unions?”

  “You separate the two?” Vito asked, an edge to his voice like the start of an argument. “But no matter, we will discuss personal profit.”

  “And profit of your associates?”

  “If need be.”

  “Please sit,” Peppone said, motioning to a chair next to the desk.

  Vito sat.

  “We have lost the Sardinian,” Peppone said. “I suppose you have heard.”

  Vito stayed quiet, then said: “Describe this mysterious Sardinian.”

  “I saw him but once. Here. Not a tall man, about fifty years, stout, walked as if with pain.”

  “That is my memory of him,” Vito said. “And the package?”

  “He showed the painting, but would not leave it with me as arranged. He claimed to have a buyer and that our cause would benefit greatly. You knew him?”

  “We met before he traveled for the painting.”

  “A time ago,” Peppone said.

  “A year.”

  “You know that he traveled as a priest?”

  “Yes. Do the police have interest in him or the painting?”

  “Police have not come to me if they do.” Peppone opened the box of pastries. “You know of the bodies uncovered in the stable.”

  “Yes.”

  “One of them the tailor, who some suggest had possession of the painting,” Peppone said, looking quickly away.

  “Yes.”

  “Still, his murder was the result of a Black Hand kidnaping. His shop was searched thoroughly at the time the knife letter was left. If anything was found, no one knows. Unless Don Strachi ...”

  “So clearly you speak,” Vito Red said, an eyebrow cocked.

  Peppone stammered, then recovered. “I have not been advised against speaking with you, by your friends or by my friends.”

  “I’m told to be cautious of you,” Vito said.

  “Not to my surprise. But while I am curious as to the fate of the painting, the party views its worth, as I do, but with less interest, now that our unions have otherwise become more secure with success and profit.”

  “Be that as it may,” Vito said with a quick laugh.

  “You find that difficult to believe.”

  Vito shrugged. “No matter. But if one were to look for the painting, where would he begin?”

  “The stable fire allows no reasonable speculation.”

  “It is gone to ashes?”

  “If the stablemen had it, yes, and you must know of their fate,” Peppone said.

  “I know nothing. What do you know?”

  Peppone looked into the bakery box. “They seem to be making their pastries smaller and smaller.”

  “Peppone, where would one look for the painting?” The edge in Vito’s voice came and went.

  Peppone answered quickly: “The tailor’s widow.”

  “Surely you have spoken with her.”

  “She claims she knows nothing of it, but what can we expect?”

  “Tell me of this lawyer you praise in your newspaper.”

  “LaGuardia, Fiorello. He assures us he knows nothing of the painting.”

  “What is his interest with the party?”

  “He is sympathetic to the workers, though rejects the label of communist. At times he works for us without fees.”

  “A dreamer,” Vito said.

  “A clever politician.”

  “What is the worth of the painting?”

  “Its disappearance has brought the estimate to thousands of international dollars,” Peppone said. “But as I say, given the stable blaze — a blunder by the police by all accounts — estimates are meaningless.”

  “Why do you imply that Don Strachi had interest?”

  Peppone nodded and smiled, then put his hand on the telephone. “From this ugly invention come gossips of jealousies and envies. From where the voices come I rarely have need to know.”

  Vito stood.

  Peppone stood. “We will talk again. For matters of personal profit, we agree?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The communications of this newspaper are at your service, should you seek a means to negotiate a private transaction.”

  “You speak as if I have the painting,” Vito said.

  “I speak with the hope that you — that we will have it. Perhaps news in Mondo Nuovo about missing works of art would incite some useful results.”

  Philomena Matruzzo Three

  Since the steam shovels cleaned up what was left of the Patarama Stable, Mondo Nuovo had been reporting progress of the funeral parlor construction, giving praise to the unions, never mentioning the unions that had been strong-armed from Peppone’s comrades.

  Peppone wrote the place into a palace, printed a photo of the handsome two-story brick and stucco building, and described the “experienced and compassionate Marcello Ulino” as a licensed and caring funeral director.

  The eight parlors, all on the first floor, fitted with chairs and couches on carpets of floral design, encouraged sorrow. In the room labeled Holy Family Chapel, a trio of stained glass windows, half a dozen mahogany pews, and statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, facilitated the Tuesday night exchange of envelopes, or settle-ups.

  Top floor living quarters for The Digger and Gaga looked down at the alley that connected all the rear yards in the block. Front offices looked over the din of tr
olleys, trucks and wagons, their roars and rumbles muted to the parlors.

  The storage room, still with only a small stock of coffins, sat in the basement. Next to it, the preparation room had been installed with lead pipe plumbing, marble counters and sinks, electric refrigerators, and walls of white tile.

  The city directory listed the place as the Ulino Funeral Home. But to some, despite Ulino Funeral Home printed in white on the black awning that extended from the front door to the street, it remained the Patarama Stable, and it took little time before it became known as the Patarama Funeral Home.

  ***

  Philomena Matruzzo ignored Mondo Nuovo’s columns about the funeral parlor, but did read a story about art stolen from museums and studios of Europe, and about recovered art, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Missing for five years from the Louvre in Paris, it showed up in the hands of a man with no demand for a ransom, but with a Christian duty to return the masterpiece.

  She found the man interesting. Not a rich man, she conjured, but a man of study and honor. Tall with clear eyes and, wearing the black jacket of her dreams, he looked something like Laurio would likely look when once a priest.

  She finished scissoring the article when a knock brought her to the door and a kid with a message to see a man of the club. Philomena had known some of the men, their goodmornings and good-evenings, and she best knew the charming Benny Carlucco. But it was the peculiar Vito Red, with those eyes of a merry-go-round horse, who greeted her and sat with her at a table.

  His tone was pleasant, saying that the work she does in the building and in the church may be too much already. “But you live here and perhaps you will allow some hours in the week to clean this club.”

  She became excited that the saints still thought well of her. “I am busy it is true, but it is difficult to turn work away, and I will begin when you like. Thank you.”

  Though malavita, Vito and the others treated her respectfully and generously, and three days every week she opened the club, Laurio with her, seated at a table with his breakfast of milk and honeyed polenta and staring at the broken sounds of the wireless.