The Boy Who Granted Dreams

by Luca Di Fulvio

  Happy birthday, thought Christmas.

  “Let’s get outa here,” Joey whispered in his ear. “I done my shoppin’ already.”

  Christmas turned to look at him. Joey’s eyes were even more deeply sunken now and the dark hollows around them were like mud-puddles, like a swamp, like dark quicksand slowly pulling his gaze under. And again, seeing himself mirrored in those pupils that were no longer a boy’s, he didn’t recognize himself. He quickly looked away, so that he wouldn’t give the question — or the answer — time to shape itself. There weren’t any questions or answers he wanted to hear. He felt a pang of nostalgia for Santo’s innocence. He hadn’t seen him for at least two years. It almost made him laugh to think about his pimply face and the day he’d recruited him, paying him half an ice-cream soda. He thought about how slow Santo was to understand and how scared he’d been when he was supposed to make the gang in Pep’s alley believe they were going off to meet Arnold Rothstein. And the pomade they’d sold Pep to put on — Christmas looked around wildly. What had happened to Lilliput? He squeezed past the policeman who tried to hold him back, and stood at the still red-hot door of the shop, feeling the hot damp bitter air in his face. He looked hard at the lumps of meat.

  The red-haired cop grabbed his arm and pulled him back. Christmas He glanced at Pep’s son, not knowing what to say, what to ask.

  “Wait,” said the widow to the policeman. “Did you know my Pep?” she asked Christmas.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Christmas.”

  The woman’s face moved into something that might have been a smile if it hadn’t been twisted by sorrow. “You the boy my Pep try keep off street, yes?”

  Christmas felt a pang in his stomach. He shook his head. “No, lady … you must be mixin’ me up with somebody else …”

  The widow looked him up and down. She passed her hand across the lapel of his jacket, with an intimacy and a confidence that Christmas hadn’t expected. “Is nice, your suit,” she said softly. And then, “You see what they do to him?” She looked back again. But she didn’t say anything more and after an instant she turned away.

  Christmas didn’t move. The red haired cop started yanking him back toward the crowd of onlookers again. “And Lilliput?” Christmas shouted towards the woman.

  The widow didn’t even hear him. But Pep’s son turned back. “She died last year. Of old age,” he said.

  The widow lifted her head towards her son, as if she were seeing Pep again, and she stroked his face. A slow caress, not taking place in that moment, but the repetition of an ancient gesture, that now belonged forever to the past. Mechanically her gaze went down to the feet of Pep’s son, as if she were looking for the horrid mangy pop-eyed dog who was Pep himself. And then a sob shook her again. Her eyes overflowed with tears and there was no anger, only sorrow, when she turned back to stare at Christmas. “You see what they do to him?” she said again to no one in particular, her gaze clouded, and perhaps no longer meaning anything but only trying to pronounce words that might bind her to earth, clinging to the son who was now the only thing left to her.

  Christmas couldn’t meet her eyes and twisted out of the policeman’s grasp. “Let’s get out of here,” he told Joey brusquely, shoving his way back through the crowd, angrily, as if he suddenly needed air. He stopped, breathless, only when they reached the opposite sidewalk. Again he stared at the whole scene — the rubberneckers, the fire truck hiding the shop, the smoke rising skywards — but now he knew every detail of it. Where were you? He asked himself. “Yeah, where were you?” he muttered again to himself. “Fuck it!” he said at last, out loud, to overcome the questions he could no longer push away.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck it!” shrilled Joey, but he was laughing. Behind Joey, he recognized boys from the gang who hadn’t wanted him, from when he was a little boy and had started Diamond Dogs. They had the same dark eye sockets as Joey. His same hard cold detached look. They kept their hands in their pockets. They were smiling. They smiled as they looked at him. And every one of those smiles was a message. They had become fourth-rate backups of the Ocean Hill Hooligans, always hanging out at Sally’s Bar and Grill, waiting for someone to tell them to do something.

  “Was it Dasher?” shouted Christmas, rushing towards them.

  But Joey held him back. The sound of a police whistle. Heads turning, watchfully. When Christmas looked for the gang again, the street was empty.

  “Move it, Diamond!” urged Joey.

  Christmas was walking fast behind Joey. Almost running. In a moment they were hidden in the grimy labyrinth of the ghetto. They stopped in an alley. Joey pulled his shirt out of his pants and dropped various objects on the ground: a woman’s coin purse, a wallet, a pocket watch, and a few coins. He laughed.

  “Like I said, I done some shoppin’,” he said, digging through the purse and the wallet, tossing away old photos and papers and coming up with a measly two dollars. “Lowlifes,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It was Frank Abbandando,” said Christmas.

  “So?”

  “Pep wouldn’t pay him protection.”

  “Asshole,” said Joey, shrugging his shoulders. He looked sulky. “Remember what that fuckin’ butcher said to me? He told me to get fucked. Yeah, well, fuck you, Pep! Go stick it up your ass. I’m here and you’re roast meat.”

  Christmas pushed his forearm against Joey’s throat, teeth clenched, and pushed him violently against the wall, almost choking him. But again he saw himself reflected in Joey’s black pupils. You the boy Pep want keep away from street, yes? And looking at Joey he finally recognized himself. He was like Joey. He was like the Ocean Hill Hooligans. He was like Frank “Dasher” Abbandando. He was a hoodlum. And he could be a killer. Because when your own life is worthless, when you don’t have respect for yourself, other people end up not being worth shit either. Like Pep. Dead, burnt meat. He loosened his grip on Joey.

  Joey coughed, spat, drew a couple of painful breaths. “What the fuck’s the matter with you? For cryin’ out loud!” he said, kicking the empty coin purse away. “What the hell’s eatin’ ya?”

  33

  Manhattan, 1926

  The black Type V-63 Cadillac pulled up to the sidewalk, tires screeching on the pitted asphalt of Cherry Street. Christmas turned toward the door that opened while the car was still moving. He saw a man of about thirty — blond, with pale eyes, big ears and a hooked nose that had been smashed by punches — jump from the running board, grab him by the lapels and slam a pistol butt into his forehead. Next he felt himself being shoved towards the car. Now he was in the back seat, with blood dripping into his eyes. He fell face down against the legs of a dark-haired man who looked like a cocker spaniel — open smile, big nose, good suit, gray hat. The man grabbed his shoulders and pushed him up while the blond got back in the car and the driver stepped on the gas, leaving fast.

  I ought to be scared, thought Christmas as his face fell against the shoulder of the man with the cocker face, staining his suit. The man pushed him away, the smile fading from his fleshy lips. He lifted his elbow to check on the bloodstain on his sleeve. Then Christmas felt the elbow crash into his face, opening his lower lip. And he heard cocker-face tell him, “Bastard.”

  Christmas let his head fall backwards, against the leather seat that smelled of cheap cigars and gunpowder. He looked inside himself for some glimmer of emotion, but came up empty-handed. He closed his eyes, listened. Nothing. I should be scared, he told himself again silently, turning towards the man who was staring ahead with a grim expression. But I don’t give a fuck.

  Pep’s death had unleashed a whole series of questions that Christmas never wanted to answer. He realized that if he had to tell anybody how he’d spent the last two years since Ruth left for California, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He had let himself live, that’s all, just as he was doing now, at this moment, letting himself live in the back seat of this car. He had passed from his car
efree youth to an equally youthful desperation without either of them having left him with any scars. But between these two ways, if anybody wanted him to describe some ongoing image of himself, some connection, something that bound his selves together, all he could have said would be about those moments at Grand Central Station two years before. And he would have talked about Ruth’s eyes, fixed on his. He would have told them about the long train that grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared, swallowed up by the skyscrapers it was leaving behind, bearing Ruth away from him, marking him with the one deep wound of his life, one that kept bleeding without ever healing. He would have recalled how he’d had to shove through people milling on the platform, how they didn’t even see him, as if he wasn’t really there. He could even have repeated, one by one, their thousand useless words, still echoing in his ears even now, even at two years’ distance, like the dark rumble of waves against a cliff, like the shrieks of gulls on a beach. A cacophony without any meaning or power, unable to drown out his own voice whispering, “Ruth …”

  As the Cadillac rushed towards its unknown destination, the words “bastard” and “Ruth” were superimposed in his mind that was confused by the blows; now they mingled into a single thought. You’re still the bastard who loves Ruth, he told himself. Then he closed his eyes and felt like smiling. And at the same time he felt like weeping for the stubborn constancy of his love that had nailed him to the platform that night at Grand Central Station. That still kept him from living his own life. Sucking him under — hopelessly, like a whirlpool — in that instant in which he couldn’t even take a step towards Ruth, to touch her hand through the cold glass of the window, to cry out all his love to her.

  The Cadillac rushed through the ghetto’s dusty streets. Christmas felt his head throbbing, his lip swelling. The man with the spaniel face scrubbed at the bloodstain on his shoulder with a handkerchief.

  “Where ya takin’ me?” asked Christmas in a flat voice.

  The blond man put a finger to his lips, signaling him to keep quiet.

  “Whaddya want?” Christmas asked next, not really even wanting to know.

  The blond guy gave him a sudden and violent punch in the stomach.

  Christmas folded in two, unable to breathe. The driver laughed, barely missed a pedestrian, and skidded. Christmas fell against the blond guy’s legs.

  “Say, you really are a bastard!” the blond guy shouted, and hit Christmas’ back, hard.

  I don’t give a fuck, Christmas thought for the third time, whimpering with pain.

  A few weeks after Ruth had gone away, Christmas, aided by Joey, managed to break into the doorman’s lodge at the Park Avenue apartment. He found a letter waiting for the next morning’s mail, addressed to the Isaacsons at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 9641 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. Christmas wrote Ruth a letter, but got no reply. Then he wrote another one, and yet another. And he didn’t resign himself to Ruth’s silence until one day his latest letter came back to him, stamped MOVED, NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. But Christmas didn’t give up. He went to the A T & T building and called the Beverly Hills Hotel. They asked his name, and after an endless wait — that cost him two dollars and ninety cents — they elusively told him that the Isaacson’s hadn’t left a forwarding address. But Christmas guessed that his name must be on a list of undesirable callers. And so he made his mother help him. He took her to A T & T, having instructed her to tell the concierge at the Beverly Hills Hotel that she was Mrs. Berkowitz of Park Lane, and that her neighbor Mrs. Isaacson had left her mink coat at her apartment in a moment of distraction. As if by magic, the address of a mansion in Holmby Hills emerged. But Ruth still didn’t answer his letters.

  “Park by the door,” cocker-face told the driver.

  “Huh? Not back behind?” the driver asked.

  “What the fuck did I just say? What you talkin’ about doin’, Lepke?” snarled the blond man, spitting out his words at an incredible speed and punching the driver’s neck. “You drive like shit and then on top o’ that you try t’ break my balls. Besides, when I say do somethin’ you do it, period.”

  The driver hunched his shoulders and gave Christmas a quick glance in the rear view mirror. He must be around twenty years old, guessed Christmas. Same as me. How many cars had he driven doomed rats in? How many corpses had he already seen? How many faces blue from being choked with a wire had he glimpsed in that same rearview mirror? Too many, Christmas guessed. And now there was no way he could turn back. Maybe twenty years old. His own age.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked again. He could hear the worry growing in his own voice, coming out of thinking about this driver who was somehow like him.

  “Hey, Gurrah, this whole car is full o’ ballbreakers,” said cocker-face calmly, tossing the bloodstained handkerchief out the window.

  The blond hit Christmas. A fist to the mouth, quick and mechanical. Then he jabbed the driver’s shoulder. “Now,” he said.

  The V-63 stopped with a jerk in the middle of the street. The blond with the prizefighter’s nose yanked Christmas out of the car and shoved him towards the sidewalk, making him squeeze between a brown Pontiac and a brand new La Salle sedan. Christmas tried to pull away. But the blond held on to him firmly, steadily. He kicked Christmas’ legs, sending him flying face down on the ground. Then he pulled him back up, still holding him by his jacket lapels. Christmas saw that they were in front of the Lincoln Republican Club, at the corner of Allen and Forsythe. Then suddenly he knew who the man with the cocker spaniel face was. And the fast-talking blond guy. And whom he was about to meet.

  He thought that we wouldn’t be able to turn back either, once he’d gone inside. Like the nameless driver. Like Pep. Like Ruth.

  He felt afraid.

  “I haven’t done a thing to you fellas.”

  “Move it, asshole,” said the blond, pushing him towards the entrance to the Lincoln Club.

  “Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro,” muttered Christmas, letting terror grip his stomach.

  “Shut up,” said the blond, throwing him violently against the door.

  Inside the club, Greenie — the gangster old Saul Isaacson had hired to protect Ruth after the threatening letter from Bill — was sitting in a chair with a cigarette in his mouth. Christmas looked at him, blood still coming out of his forehead and his mouth. Greenie was wearing a two hundred dollar suit, bright as a parrot.

  “Greenie …” he said softly.

  Greenie looked at him, without any emotion. He barely curled his lip, sent out a smoke ring, and shook his head.

  “In here, schlemiel,” and the blond shoved him forward again, into a room where a man with his back to them was shooting pool by himself.

  Look where you ended up, thought Christmas. His eyes filled up with tears. And in an instant — as they were forcing him to sit down in a chair — he saw the street again. That world Joey had revealed to him and into which he had let himself be dragged without protest, without thinking of the consequences. He thought about his own life, the last useless two years. He saw the street and he knew that he was in a blind alley.

  The man with his back turned landed the eight ball in the side pocket with a hard clack. The white ball, struck low, barely nudged the eight ball and stopped; then, obeying its momentum, rolled slightly back, ending up a few inches from the five, next to a corner pocket.

  “Great shot, boss,” said a short dumpy man with thick eyebrows and a pug-nosed face that made him look like cross between a monkey and idiot. A huge pistol bulged out of the holster in his armpit.

  The man didn’t deign to look at him or answer. He turned towards Christmas, He looked at him without speaking, pool cue in hand.

  From the first day Saul Isaacson’s Rolls stopped in front of Sal Tropea’s building on Monroe Street, the whole of the Lower East Side had believed the story Christmas had invented. Everybody had whispered — for four years now — the name of this man, sure that Christmas was working for him. The man known as Mr. Big, or Th
e Fixer, or The Brain. The man who always had a big roll of bills in his pocket. The man who’d fixed the 1919 World Series, creating the Black Sox. The boss Christmas had never really met. The Man from Uptown. Christmas recognized him at once. He’d heard about the diamond stickpin and the solid gold watch. And the long tapered fingers and slender wrists.

  The man came over, staring at him. He was thin, with a shadowy beauty, a high forehead and an aquiline nose, thin lips, long eyes that angled slightly downwards, and a mole on his left cheek. He had a natural elegance; he didn’t look like a gangster or like the men around him. His fine wool suit was tailor made and not flashy, but classy. He looked like a businessman. And Christmas knew that was what he was. But what impressed him the most was the way he kept on looking at him in silence. With grace and violence together, as if in his eyes bluff and arrogance, elegance and brutality were all mingled together.

  The man turned back to the pool table without saying a word. When he landed the five in the corner pocket and fell to studying the pattern of the other balls, as if he were all alone in the room, Christmas knew he wouldn’t be able to control his fear.

  “Mr. Rothstein,” he said in a thin little voice.

  Arnold Rothstein didn’t turn to look at him. He tapped the white ball, sending it sideways. It hit the bank and rolled back, hitting the thirteen ball which followed the downward slant into the pocket. Rothstein sighted along his cue at the three, in the opposite corner. Between the white ball and the three was the nine.

  I don’t give a fuck, thought Christmas. And the fear that had tightened his throat suddenly dissolved. Suddenly he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, and that for two years he’d been throwing his life away. That, like the balls on the green felt field, he was destined sooner or later to vanish into a dark hole. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said, in a clear voice that made him sit up straight in the chair.