Today’s pest was a pleasant diversion from the normal run. A modestly attractive young woman, rather too thin for Borneo’s taste, stood on the corner wearing an old-fashioned sunbonnet and long full dress of pioneer gingham, handing out leaflets. Most of those who accepted them did so out of native politeness or because it was easier to take them than it was to avoid her. The majority boiled past without acknowledging her existence or altered their course to steer wide around her, and this was what caused the warp in the flow of foot traffic. It was a rare pedestrian—one in ten, Borneo judged—who paused long enough actually to read the leaflet. One or two spoke to her briefly, as if asking a question. The woman responded without breaking rhythm, snatching the sheets one by one from the stack under her left arm and thrusting them at the passersby. This had happened a number of times before Borneo realized that all those who stopped were women, and that the ratio of one in ten corresponded roughly to the number of homeward-bound laborers who happened to be female. He became very curious to know what was printed on those leaflets.
This thought had just formed when someone knocked on the apartment door. He turned from the window and frowned at the face of the china clock upon the finished pine sideboard, the gift of a cabinetmaker whose daughter had recently married a young barber in a five-chair shop after Borneo had sent men to break the shins of a divorced Armenian to whom she had been engaged briefly. The time was ten minutes after six. In five minutes he would be sitting down to dinner with his wife. He could not think of anyone he knew who would violate the supper hour for any reason short of emergency.
He heard Graziella’s low voice in conversation with a male whose own tones were pitched slightly higher; a young man, then, asking if Mr. Borneo was at home. She replied in the affirmative—dissembling was an art she refused to practice, whatever her feelings about the interruption of the domestic rhythms she held dear—and a moment later Harlan Crownover walked into the dining room.
The stocky young man wore a suit and necktie, and the crested condition of his hair suggested that he had surrendered a hat but was sufficiently unaccustomed to the accessory to think to make the necessary adjustment.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” he said in lieu of greeting. “I missed you at the restaurant and they told me at the butcher shop where you live.”
“I must speak to Signor Grapellini about that. I never conduct business at home.”
“He didn’t want to tell me, but I convinced him you’d be pleased.” He reached inside his suit coat and slid out a thick envelope. When Borneo made no move to accept it, he turned up the flap and fanned out the corners of some of the bills inside. “Five thousand dollars was the amount I borrowed.”
“I will be in the shop tomorrow morning, and in the restaurant all afternoon. You could have waited and given it to me then.”
“I prefer to repay my debts right away.”
He smelled the aromas from the kitchen. He seldom ate meat, but he could not resist his wife’s veal. She got up very early Saturday to be sure and select the freshest cuts at the Farmers’ Market.
“There is a matter of interest,” he said.
“There is six thousand in this envelope. Is a twenty percent return satisfactory?”
He was silent for a moment
“Yes.”
When Borneo still did not take it, Crownover laid the envelope on the sideboard. “Do you give receipts?”
“It’s unnecessary. No paperwork changed hands when we arranged the loan.”
“This ends our association.” The furrow in the young man’s forehead was less certain than his tone.
“I’m happy you found it profitable.” There was another awkward silence. Borneo, who seldom felt the need to offer empty conversation, decided to fill it. “I suppose you are in the automobile business now.”
“I am.”
“What’s to become of Crownover Coaches?”
“The company will make more money than it ever has, as an adjunct to the Ford Motor Company. In five years—less, perhaps—we will have manufactured our last horse-drawn vehicle.”
“I wonder what we will do with all those horses.”
“Race them, I suppose. That should make you feel secure.”
“I’m secure as long as humans insist upon remaining human. I hope your new venture brings you wealth and great happiness.”
Harlan, Borneo saw, was not yet Abner II. Evidence that their encounter did not develop as expected appeared on his face for a bare instant before his expression smoothed over. “Thank you.” He waited. “You don’t want to count the bills?”
“Did you not count them yourself?”
“Twice.”
Borneo smiled. “Good-bye, Mr. Crownover.”
“Good-bye.”
When the meal was over and Graziella cleared away the dishes, Borneo announced that he was going for a walk. Although it was his long-established habit to spend the evening reading in the parlor, his wife did not question him. Her plump, pretty face was as free of lines and pouches as the day she had agreed to spend her life with him; he credited this to her charming lack of curiosity. The only disappointment she had ever caused him was the absence of a male child. He never dwelt upon this, however. The mystery of who should carry on when he was gone could only make him falter in his determination to acquire something beyond a partnership in a butcher shop and the fear and respect of a few hundred immigrants who lived only to maintain a roof above their heads so they could live.
Darkness had come to Little Italy, broken by the corner lamps and the yellow glow from the windows of buildings and the absurd aloof illumination of the city system stretching above the rooftops like ineffectual Eiffel Towers. There was a sweet, tarry smell that was absent during the daytime, or more accurately lost in the olfactory jumble of ripe fruit, cheap pipe tobacco, cheaper cigars, frying meat, stale undershirts, fresh fish, wet laundry, and horseshit. As a good family man—for he loved his wife and daughter and was discreet about his mistress—he was not often abroad after sundown. Nevertheless he preferred this time to the confusion of the day, the urgency to accomplish as much as possible in a race against the sun. Night accepted one as it found one. Night expected nothing.
The woman in the bonnet was long gone. He had anticipated nothing else. In truth he had no desire to make contact with her. He was alone on the street with the sounds of domestic chatter falling out of open windows, the bubbling tinkle of a piano that wanted tuning, the nasal strain of some anonymous tenor drifting from a phonograph. (Rollo Fischetti’s machine, he guessed; courtesy of a horse named Caesar’s Rubicon. Borneo had taken a beating in that particular race and had learned his lesson, to place layoff bets whenever a horse with a locally popular name came to the post.)
As he had predicted, the sidewalk around the corner from the one where the woman had stood handing out leaflets was a plain of discarded paper, solid white, as if it had been hit with a fall of snow. He picked up one of the leaves and held it under the corner light. It was a song sheet, ruled and dotted with musical notes. The legend at the bottom read, “Distributed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America.” The melody appeared simple, but not as simple as the printed lyrics:
Stand up for pro-hib-i-tion,
Ye patriots of the land;
All ye who love your coun-try,
Against saloons should stand.
Be bold against this traffic,
Your country’s greatest foe;
Let word and deed and bal-lot
Proclaim, “saloons must go.”
There were two more choruses along the same lines as the first. He read them all, finding himself humming as he did so; marches were contagious, particularly among new Americans, who lined Woodward twelve-deep on Independence Day, souvenir flags in hand, to see the parade. The primitive two-beat rhythm, the homely naiveté of the words, were visceral. He could imagine a drunk singing the song as he wobbled home.
No war had ever been won based upon the composition of a great master.
Sal Borneo folded the sheet three times lengthwise and slid it into his inside breast pocket.
Whatever the extent of the effect recent events had had upon his tightly controlled life, Big Jim Dolan remained secure in the knowledge that he loved his children. How else explain his willingness this Sunday afternoon following church and noon dinner to don his gabardine and boater and hike down to Fred Sanders’ ice cream shop and entrust the generous Dolan rear end to the inquisition of an infernal chair with twisted iron legs and a twisted iron back, merely to remind himself every time he took a spoonful of vanilla in caramel sauce that one of his gold fillings needed replacement? The light in the faces of Sean in his Sunday serge and cap with black patent-leather bill and Margaret in her white sailor suit was impossible to resist. And Charlotte was delighted to parade her new seersucker dress and picture hat for the first time. True, it did not hurt his reputation to be seen, a man in the bosom of his loving family, participating in a Detroit summertime tradition; but he had finished a particularly busy week of Rotary Club speeches, testimonial dinners, and one photographic pose at Bennett Field, showing Red Donahue how to line up one’s fingers with the stitching on a baseball for the throwing of a proper curve, and he complimented himself that the added exposure was hardly necessary. What he was doing today he was doing as James Aloysius Dolan, husband and father. Later he would reward himself with a beer and perhaps a game or two of billiards at the Shamrock Club.
“James, that funny little man is staring at me,” reported Charlotte over her strawberry sundae.
She had been brought up not to point, and so he was forced to follow her gaze across the room, which was jammed to the counter with chattering families on this first truly hot day of summer. The ice cream melting on his tongue turned to sawdust when he identified the slight Italian standing with his hat in his hands just inside the door.
At first he didn’t recognize him. His presence downtown was out of context, and he looked and stood far different when not in his customary surroundings; more like one of the supplicants who came to Dolan’s door asking for money or favors than the dark prince of his community. Here he was just Salvatore Bornea, immigrant, and the cut of his suit did not disguise the hunched shoulders and outward-turned elbows of a wop on Woodward. Dolan found strength in that, and transferred his napkin from his collar to the round iron table with a decisive snap. “It’s not you he’s staring at, dear,” he said. “I’ll go and have a talk with him.”
“Don’t these people know you’re not to be bothered on the Lord’s day?”
“I’ll remind him.” He rose, and made a business of tugging down the points of his vest, shooting his cuffs, and shifting his bamboo cane from his left hand to his right before starting toward Borneo. It would give the man time to absorb the knowledge that he was in Dolan’s park.
Borneo disarmed him somewhat by surrendering the point. “I am sorry, my friend, to interrupt your family excursion. Your houseboy told me I would find you here.”
“Noche should have known better.” He managed to make it sound more imperious than biting. The day belonged to God, after all.
“I managed to convince him my purpose is not frivolous. May I have five minutes with you?”
Dolan looked around. Three young ladies in smart hats and bustles were rising from a table ten feet away. He and Borneo reached it just ahead of two youths in linen suits and boaters carrying banana splits. One of them glared and opened his mouth, but his companion whispered something to him and the pair withdrew.
“Fame has its compensations,” remarked Borneo as they sat down.
“A wee bit off your run, isn’t it?”
“It is a beautiful day.”
Which was no explanation at all; but Dolan chose not to ask the question again a different way.
“Harlan Crownover paid me a visit Friday night.”
“Did you lend him more money?”
“No. In fact, he paid back what I’d lent him before. With interest.”
“He didn’t get it from his father. I hear the old boy’s in a bad way. Not long for this world.” This saddened him more than he let on. The Crownover plant, with its huge sign painted right on the brick tagged “A. Crownover, Prop.,” had been the first thing he saw when he came to Detroit, a knob-knuckled mick switchman full of beer and piss and not much savvy about the way the gears turned. Although they had spent their lives laboring in enemy camps, Abner Junior and Dolan were both self-made men in a country that hailed the phenomenon on paper while discouraging it in practice. From the beginning, Big Jim had fixed his eye on Abner’s example, the one sure landmark that would guide him out of the Yankee wilderness that had buried so many of his compatriots. A city in which an insignificant grease boy could climb hand over hand into the big office on the top floor could be made to deliver anything. He would sooner expect to see Ursa Major spill from the sky than Abner Crownover II on his deathbed.
“No, I gather it came from his first-quarter profits providing bodies for Ford,” Borneo said. “People appear to want to buy Ford’s machines despite the threats from the A.L.A.M. Or perhaps because of them. When judging Americans you must never overlook the fact that they are the grandchildren of rebels.”
“Horseshit.”
“Soon to be an antiquated phrase.”
“So you made some money on the deal, and now you’re a believer. When can we expect to see you operating your own horseless carriage?”
“Not soon, I fear. All that cranking.” He wasn’t smiling. “The time has come, my friend, to admit we made a bad investment and cut our losses.”
“Just because you lost your hold on young Crownover is no reason for me to jump the fence. You came out ahead. You’re forgetting all that Ohio farmland I’m stuck with.”
“Oh, that. Ford’s case comes up in September. It’s a New York court. When the ruling goes against him all the streetcar companies will be screaming for that property. You’ll make more off it in a month than all the farmers who have worked it combined.”
Dolan squinted, trying to see the Italian in an objective light. “If that’s the case, why am I paying a Pinkerton detective to prune Ford’s hedges?”
“He’ll appeal the ruling, of course. He’ll take it all the way to Washington if he’s forced to. By that time it won’t matter whether he wins or loses. He’ll go on doing what he has since the start. He’ll pay the fines out of petty cash just like Standard Oil. He’s a hero to the people, like Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry. At this point a dirty little scandal might take some of the shine off his monument, but I doubt it will help. We started too late and moved too slow. We didn’t know we were trying to smash quicksilver with an iron hammer.”
“So you’re out.”
“I am out. I came here to tell you and spare you the trouble of coming to see me. I know Little Italy is not your favorite place.”
“You came here to make sure we still have an arrangement.”
“Grapellini really is the finest butcher in Detroit,” Borneo said. “Sometimes the man who knows all the right people also knows his work.”
There was a long silence, which Dolan came to conclude was wasted. The Sicilian would not be made anxious. “I see no reason to make any changes at this time,” he said.
Their business was finished, but Borneo made no move to rise. Dolan could feel his wife’s eyes on the back of his neck. The children would have emptied their dishes by now and would be growing restless. “Well?”
Borneo looked apologetic. “I feel that I have cost you time and money. I have a proposition.”
“The last time I accepted one of your propositions I wound up in bed with a nigger.”
“This would be an equal arrangement.” Borneo reached inside his coat and laid a rectangular fold of paper on the table between them. Dolan picked it up and unfolded it. It was a song sheet.
He slid his glance over it, then tossed it back. “
I’ve seen these before. Dried-up old prunes hire church halls to sing this horseshit. Are you temperance?”
“I enjoy a glass of Chianti on rare occasions. In any case I consider it poor policy to impress one’s habits upon others. The woman who was handing these out in Little Italy Friday night was no prune. Neither were the women who took them. And every woman who passed her took one.”
“What’s the point? Women can’t vote.”
“We’ve spoken of this before. Married men who vote have to live with their wives.”
Thunder City Page 21
