Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  Kid Sally Palumbo swung around in his chair with his eyes flashing wildly. “Your mother!”

  Gallagher smiled. “No, your sister, Sally.”

  Rogin’s hand slammed the desk. “I’ll do the talking here,” he said to Gallagher.

  When Kid Sally Palumbo left, Rogin told Gallagher, “I’m very interested in this guy we had here. I’m not interested in anything else. The sister doesn’t interest me. Am I understood? Leave the girl alone. I don’t do business this way.”

  Gallagher looked at Rogin the way every man who is fifty-nine looks at a twenty-nine-year-old who is above him in life. Driving back to the precinct, Gallagher said to the two detectives, “Bring the sister in tomorrow.”

  “Where do we get the warrant?” one of them said.

  “You don’t need a warrant for a guinea. Pick her up after school and bring her to the Charles Street house. I’ll use the office there.”

  Angela Palumbo was coming out the back door of the English 101 classroom at 3:40 the next afternoon. The ones in front of her were having some kind of trouble getting out the door. Angela stood in line and shuffled forward. When she saw the two faces in the hallway, her breath caught in her throat.

  Two Irish faces, tilted back to look past the crowd, and also tilted back with the sense of authority all policemen like to use. Angela stopped just outside the door. The other students were walking past, but going only a few steps and turning to watch. One of the detectives, the one in a black topcoat with the collar turned up, held out his right hand with a gold shield in it. Angela was shaking. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Robert Dineen stood with her.

  “Could you come with us, please?” the detective said.

  “It’ll just be for a little while,” the other one said.

  The hallway was crowded now. Faces were looking at Angela from everywhere. Her hands began to shake. She couldn’t speak.

  “Do you have a warrant?” Dineen said.

  “It’s okay, don’t worry,” the detective said. He was ignoring Dineen and looking at Angela. The other detective put a hand on Dineen’s arm. “You can go,” he said.

  “Let me see the warrant,” Dineen said.

  “Why don’t you come with her, then?” the detective in the black coat said. “Then you can see that it’s nothing.”

  With the crowded hallway watching her, Angela went with the detectives and Dineen. Outside on the sidewalk, all the heads turned to watch her get into a black unmarked Plymouth. She sat in the back seat with Dineen. They were driven to the Charles Street precinct house, which covers the NYU area. The precinct house is at the end of a block of warehouses. The flag hanging from the second-floor window whipped in the wind coming from the Hudson River, a half-block away. Angela Palumbo walked into the station with her schoolbooks huddled in her arms and her head down, and the detectives guided her toward the metal staircase in the lobby. One of them turned around and put a hand on Dineen’s chest. “You wait here,” he said.

  Cornelius Gallagher sat in a bare upstairs office. He wore a brown suit, a drinker’s stomach pressing against the middle button.

  “Sit down,” he said. He pointed to a chair next to him. You always sit next to a girl when you question her. It gives that little intimacy women need. If you sit across a desk from her, it puts everything on a cold business basis. Women cannot react to it.

  “Here, let me take your books,” Gallagher said.

  Angela shook her head.

  “All right. Would you like a cigarette?” He held out a pack of filter cigarettes. Angela’s hand shook and her fingers fumbled with the top of the pack while she took one. Gallagher lit it for her. He put a tin ashtray in front of her. He reached over and put the match into the ashtray. Always use the same ashtray with a girl.

  “Angela, I just wanted to ask you a few things,” he said. “You can answer if you want, and if you don’t want, you don’t have to answer. But you don’t have to worry about what you say. We’re just having a conversation here.”

  The cigarette shook in her fingers and she had trouble getting it into her mouth.

  “You know, Angela, I’ve been around a long time and seen a lot of things. There’s nothing you could tell me that I don’t know already. Oh, I tell you, the things I’ve seen in my life. I couldn’t be surprised by anything you tell me. I’ve heard it all. Why, you could sit there right now and tell me that your brother killed Georgie Paradise and I wouldn’t get excited at all. Sally killed Georgie Paradise? What’s it mean to me? I’ve been all through it.”

  The voice was rasping and unreal, and Angela Palumbo’s breath kept falling to the bottom of her stomach.

  “What’s he waiting for?” the desk sergeant asked a patrolman downstairs. The sergeant nodded at Robert Dineen.

  “I don’t know,” the patrolman said. “Hey, buddy, something you want?”

  Dineen had been standing against a rusted radiator. “I’m waiting for somebody,” he said.

  “Waiting for who?”

  “Somebody upstairs.”

  “Well, you better wait outside, then. This isn’t a waiting room.”

  The patrolman’s voice went through Dineen. It carried the sharpness a cop puts into his voice when he is carrying out an order for somebody he wants to impress.

  Dineen waited on the sidewalk. Newspapers blew down the street in swirls of dust. The flat late-afternoon sun came through a garbage-strewn alley between two warehouses. Late-afternoon sun in the winter depresses anybody watching it. After a short while it makes the person feel sick to his stomach. Dineen felt like he had been riding in a closed car filled with exhaust fumes. Fear and disgust mixed with the sickness. The detectives’ and desk patrolman’s voices kept running through him, and the fear grew stronger. What the hell was he doing in a thing like this? He could get in trouble in law school.

  The street was empty and the shadows were becoming longer when Robert Dineen began walking toward the subway five blocks away.

  It was 5:30 when Angela Palumbo came down the stairs alone. She had her face buried in the books. She had not spoken a word since she came into the precinct house. She had sat in a trance while this red pouchy face cooed at her and smiled and showed her reports she looked at but did not see. Now she walked through the lobby and stepped outside and she needed Robert Dineen badly, just to hold her arm and talk to her, and she came out into the evening on the sidewalk of the empty street.

  Angela Palumbo did not mention the precinct questioning to anybody when she got home. She went to her room. In the morning she did not go to school. She did not go to school for the rest of the term. When Big Mama and Sally tried to talk to her, she said she didn’t feel well. When they told her to see a doctor, she shrugged.

  “Girls,” Big Mama said to Kid Sally one night. “Girls can be strange sometimes. She get over it.”

  One day in late December, Angela was coming back from the store and as she came into the vestibule she heard shouts coming through the wall and the sound of somebody being slapped, and one of the voices started pleading. When she heard another slap, she spat a word out of her mouth.

  “Good.”

  In January she went back to school. Robert Dineen was not in any of her classes, and she did not see him in the hallway because she never looked up when she walked from room to room.

  On a Thursday night, at the midnight show at the Copacabana, she sat at ringside with Buster Capanegro, a bookmaker and shylock with the East Harlem mob. The comedian told a joke. “Kids from mixed marriages are very confused. I tell you. I know a kid who had an Italian father and a Jewish mother. Every time he passes a department store he doesn’t know whether to buy it or rob it.”

  “Hey! What’s so funny about that?” Buster Capanegro snapped.

  The comedian looked at him. Buster looked at the comedian. The comedian nearly fainted.

  “I didn’t like that at all, that fresh punk,” Angela said.

  When Big Mama told her one night that there would be some nic
e Italian boys around for a big bike race soon, Angela shrugged. When Big Mama told her it was important for her to go to a cocktail party and be Mama’s eyes, Angela was more interested.

  “It be good if you go,” Big Mama said. “You watch and come back and tell me what everybody does.”

  Angela nodded. Now she wanted to go to the party.

  Chapter 9

  THE PRESS COCKTAIL PARTY for the six-day bike race was held upstairs at Keefe’s Steak House. The crowd featured some newspaper and television reporters, many copy boys from the Daily News who passed themselves off as sports reporters and drank whisky with a beer motion, the president of the Queens chapter of a Greek society, and several stumpy members of the Polish Eagles of Greenpoint.

  Several young girls were interspersed through the crowd as hostesses. Name cards were pinned to their dresses. When Angela Palumbo came up the stairs to the room, she automatically looked away from the table that had the name cards. She knew there would not be a card for her. If one happened to be there by mistake, she knew enough not to wear it. She was dressed in a short canary-yellow coat. Her black hair fell onto her shoulders. Joseph DeLauria saw her and left the bar and came up to her.

  “I’m Joseph DeLauria,” he said. “Here, let me take your coat.” She turned and began to come out of the coat. She was wearing a matching dress. “God bless, you’re pretty,” DeLauria said. She saw his eyes go to her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t wearing a name card. Then to her hands, to make sure she wasn’t holding one of the cards and about to put it on.

  She went to the bar and ordered ginger ale. She was not going to start drinking around this DeLauria, He began introducing Angela to people: a gray-haired man who was the New York correspondent for Il Giornale of Milan, one of the Polacks from Greenpoint, and a chubby kid with a crewcut whose face was beet-red from the unfamiliar brandy hitting a system used only to tap beer. He said his name was Tommy something and that he worked for the Daily News. Angela looked away. Another Irisher drunk.

  She stiffened when DeLauria took her arm. “I want you to meet some of the great riders from Italy,” he said. He began showing her around the room. “Here, Carlo Rafetto, I’d like you to meet Angela.” DeLauria was careful to give only the first name. “And, hey, this is Mario Ciariello. Mario, meet Angela. And now where's the other Mario? Mario Trantino. Oh, there he is in the back. Look at this.”

  Mario was sitting alone at a table in the back of the room. He was bent over and had the tablecloth pulled up, and he was working with a pencil. Under his left hand there was a small picture, torn from a sightseeing book, of a $35,000 Modigliani which had hung in a Madison Avenue gallery. With his right hand Mario was just doodling a little, trying to see if he could copy even a bit of the Modigliani. Who knows, Sidney says they all have the taste of a pig. Maybe you just make a little change here and there and they don’t even know.

  When Mario saw DeLauria leading a girl in a yellow dress toward him, he quickly pulled the red-checked tablecloth back into place over his work.

  DeLauria made introductions and patted Angela on the back. “Why don’t you sit down and visit with Mario? He’s all alone here. We can’t have that, can we?”

  “Am I supposed to make him buy me champagne?” Angela said.

  Joseph DeLauria laughed with his mouth and called her a son-of-a-bitch with his eyes. He walked away.

  As Angela started to sit down, she looked directly at Mario. The casualness went out of her body and she slipped into the chair with her hands smoothing her skirt and coming up gracefully and her eyes staying on Mario’s face. Mario caught an impression of her as she started to sit down, and his eyes ran from her hips to her chest and onto her face. A picture of his hotel room came into his mind.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  She thought for a moment. “Uh, si recreon’?” She said it stiffly and with the key syllables slurred. Her Italian was terrible.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Oh, you know English?”

  “From the school and this man teaches me home.”

  “That’s good. Do most of the young people speak English where you come from?”

  “Young people go away.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet they do. But they have to go to Germany or Australia, don’t they? Nobody can get in this country any more.”

  “You must do a special thing to stay here,” Mario said.

  “Well, if you win the race that will make you special maybe,” she said.

  Mario pulled the tablecloth back and looked down at his drawing. He took a pencil from his breast pocket and copied a little curve from the Modigliani. This was the something special that was going to keep him in the country.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Nothing, nothing.” He pulled the tablecloth back quickly.

  He’s sitting there probably drawing dirty pictures for the whole time, Angela thought. I’ll bet you he’s got me in them. She picked up the glass to finish it. It’s always easier to leave when the glass is empty. Moron, she said to herself.

  “Well, have fun,” she said. She got up.

  He looked up, flustered. “No, I just was …” his hand made a pinwheel motion.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Oh …” His hand said it was nothing.

  “Oh, what is it?” she said. She decided she’d embarrass him. She came around the table. He put both hands on top of the cloth. Angela grabbed an edge of the tablecloth and pulled the whole thing out from under Mario’s hands.

  When she saw what he had been doing, she was surprised. “Oh, I couldn’t imagine,” she said. “You’re an artist?”

  “I am going to be one,” Mario said. “I am going to stay here and work to be an artist. This is—uh—just—uh—trying to— uh—”

  “Practice,” she said.

  “Yes, practice.” He stuffed the two sheets of paper in his jacket pocket.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Where did you study? What university did you attend?”

  “In Catanzia nobody goes to the university,” he said.

  “Mario,” Joseph DeLauria called. “Mario, come over here for a minute. I want you to meet somebody.”

  “Don’t get up,” Angela said.

  “He wants me.”

  “Don’t get up.”

  Mario shrugged. Angela glanced at DeLauria and turned her head from him. She sat and thought about what she could do to upset DeLauria. She had met him today for the first time. He was a bastard, and he also worked for Baccala. She didn’t know Baccala, either. But she knew he was the “people” her brother and grandmother were arguing about.

  “Why don’t you go somewhere where you can do what you want?” she said to Mario.

  “I stay?” he said.

  “No, let’s go some place else,” she said.

  She got up and began walking through the tables. Mario bent over quickly. He pulled his shoelaces open. He got up and followed Angela. Joseph DeLauria caught a glimpse of them while they were leaving. “Smart,” he said to himself. “That’s nice and smart.”

  Out in the street, Mario put on his uncle’s glasses. He took a step and tripped on a lace and bumped into Angela.

  “Excuse,” he said.

  They began walking down the street. She glanced down. “Your laces are untied,” she said.

  “That is the way I have them,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. She saw he was walking with his eyes closed. “Do you have something the matter?” she said.

  “I save my eyes for looking at colors,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He had no coat.

  “You’ll freeze,” she said.

  “I think of hot colors and they make me warm,” he said. “I sweat.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  He felt good. He was impressing her very much that he was an artist.

  They rode the subway downtown and came onto the narrow tenement streets o
f Little Italy. On Mulberry Street, Italian music came from a record shop. Cheeses hung in the store windows. A meat-delivery truck was parked in front of an Italian butcher’s. The white-coated deliveryman was carrying sheep’s heads, capozzelle, into the store. The red vein lines ran in a spiderweb over the white bone and fat of the sheep’s heads. Water was dripping from the back of the truck and turning to ice on the curb. The butcher from the store was shaking a bag of rock salt onto the freezing water. Mario put his hands deeper into his pockets.

  “Oh, you’ll freeze,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. “I think of hot colors,” he said.

  She took him into a place called Raymond’s, which is on a corner. Raymond’s has a bar on one side and a clam bar on the other. Tables are in the rear. Three men work behind the clam bar, putting breaded shrimp and calamare and blowfish tails into wire baskets. They drop the wire baskets into boiling grease and the grease turns to brown foam over the cold breaded fish, and in a minute or so one of the men pulls the wire basket out and dumps the fish on a plate. He covers it with red sauce and slaps it on the counter. The sauce is made of red peppers and cayenne primarily, with a little tomato in passing. The signs behind the counter say: SAUCES: 1. HOT. 2. MEDIUM. 3. LIGHT.

  Raymond’s is one of the places in New York tourists and out-of-town businessmen hear about. One of the hobbies of the people in the neighborhood is to sit in Raymond’s and watch one of these visitors go against the sauce. Angela slid onto a stool at the clam bar. Mario sat next to her. Angela nudged Mario when a man in a plaid hat called out in a flat Midwestern accent for number-one sauce on his shrimp. They put the plate in front of the man. The plaid hat forked a shrimp dripping with number-one sauce into his mouth. His mouth clamped down on the shrimp. He started his first chew. He then made a face as if he had just been shot. He opened his mouth and made a sound like a trombone. The counterman automatically gave him a glass of Coke. The man swallowed it. The plaid hat now bellowed as the sauce bit into his tongue. The counterman gave him another Coke. The man drank it, paid for the shrimp, and walked out of the door. He stood on the sidewalk. Everybody inside could see the man’s shoulders heaving while he gulped in the cold air.