Sixto turns angrily at The Swede, “What happened with your sister was well before my time.”
“Blackhanded,” The Swede growls.
“This. . . ” Sixto slaps at the paper and tosses it back on Dinny’s desk. “This would be terrorism. We are not Bolsheviks. This is America.”
Dinny languidly responds after working Sixto into a lather, “In a few mont’s the ILA will call upon both o’ us on a general strike for better wages an’ every dock an’ pier will be shut down. Manufactured goods will not be able to enter or leave New York. The Black Hand and the White Hand will be wrapped around the city’s throat. When this happens Wolcott will attempt to divide the ILA in two, Irish against I-Talian.” Dinny leans across the desk. “What I wanna know; does Frankie Yale an’ ya’self see Wolcott as an enemy? Or an ally? More importantly Paul Vaccarelli, a vice president within the ILA now on the same level as King Joe Ryan, does Vaccarelli see Wolcott an’ the Waterfront Assembly as the enemy?” Dinny points to the paper. “Do these things I ask now, prove to me who your true enemy is, an’ all o’ Red Hook will be yours when I beat Bill Lovett, one-on-one.”
“This. . . This cannot be done. It would professional suicide.”
“No deal then,” Dinny drops the cigar and matches and stands in place.
Sixto also then stands and places his hat on his head.
“Wait,” I yell to Sixto. “Don’t leave yet—”
“Liam—”
“No, we have to work something out, right now.”
“Wise words,” Sixto stares at Dinny.
“We can’t lose allies. If we lose them, we’ll only have the ILA and we don’t even know whose side Thos Carmody—”
“Liam!” The Swede raises his voice and steps in front of Dinny’s desk just as Lucy is standing. But Lucy forgot the horn-shaped red amulet in his lap and drops it on the floor where The Swede accidentally steps on it.
Lucy then speaks quickly, angrily in Italian.
“Wha?” The Swede says. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Sixto says, “But you touched it with the bottom of your shoe.”
“So? So what?”
Sixto collects his dignity and gently takes Lucy by the arm, then tips his cap before walking toward the door where he shakes Vincent’s hand and touches his face gently, “Farewell, my friend.”
Lucy the man turns round and eyes The Swede, mumbling something in Italian to Stick’em Jack.
The Swede barks out, “Hey, what did he just say?”
Sixto smiles and searches for the right words in English, “He says something like. . . Vendetta keeps me hungry, but eventually we all sit down to feast,” he closes his eyes and slowly nods toward Dinny, “Adieu, Germanicus. Vae victis.”
When the door closes I turn to Dinny, “What are you trying to do? Are you trying to lose everything on purpose?”
Dinny calmly turns his head to me, “If ya ever tip ya cap to outsiders again, I’ll banish ya. Ya didn’ trust me when it came to Tanner or wit’ Harry, an’ now this. If ya think ya know better, say so when we’re alone, but never show an outsider ya desperate. Ever.”
A Commitment
Why can’t I even put a name to a face? I’m such an idiot.
It was just as the sun was setting behind the Statue of Liberty. Darby Leighton climbed a factory on Union Street that abuts the train-house between the Baltic and North Red Hook terminals. When he jumped down onto the sloped roof, he landed soft as a cat. Unheard except for the flight of pigeons that leafed up into the sky, cooing. But no one could see him behind the shadow of a brick chimney. Down below, on the waterfront, a man stepped into the back of a tugboat and was handed a pregnant envelope.
It all happened on the same tugboat where Darby used to watch Detective Brosnan collect his own take.
I know I’ve seen that man before. He must be getting paid off by Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly because the giant Amadeusz Wisniewski was on the moored tug. Garry Barry was too, and all along I thought Garry Barry was dead. I’m such an Idiot.
The mysterious man was not wearing a laborer’s suit. He looked less like a simple laborer than the type of fellow who represents many laborers. He wore round-rimmed Windsor glasses, a double-breasted dark wool suit with thin, barely noticeable stripes. The mysterious man’s trousers were high-waisted and cuffed at the ankle, English style. His face was narrow and he had a commanding way of speech as if he were a man who gives direction, but does not take it.
Immediately Darby recognized the man’s face, but can’t put a name to it. An important man. A man Bill will want to know is in Wolcott’s employ.
What good is a reconnaissance agent if he can’t remember names? I can’t find Sadie, I can’t figure out who bedded Anna, and now this. Idiot.
Darby grits his teeth. His eyes are fixed and seemingly unconcerned as he stares out the window through the fire escape. Below, down on Flatbush Avenue the black motor cars move silently, as well as the street trolleys in the center lane and the elevated trains. Across the street and beyond the factories are an endless succession of rooftops and water towers with advertisements scrawled across them. Above, slanted smoke belches into the sky from factory chimneys and tenements alike. But it is only the mysterious man on the tug that worries at his thoughts.
A factory whistle calls out, unheard.
It announces the end of a shift across the street, though Darby cannot hear it. Behind, Ligeia mimics the sound of the shift whistle, “faweep, faweeeeeep,” she sings with a loving smile to their Colleen Rose in her arms. Lost in the thought of the mysterious man, when Darby sees his fiancé and daughter, only then does he faintly hear the whistle outside and realize where he is; the building where they squat.
The Socony gas factories loom across the busy intersection with trolleys and pushcarts meandering both Tillary Street and Flatbush Avenue. It also has a hundred workers going at it day and night. During a shift change they look like soldiers with floppy hats and lunch pales charging in waves against each other; half of them heading into work, the other half heading home, beat.
Opposites colliding, yet working in unity, Darby blinks that thought away. It would be good if I got a job there. Punch in. Punch out. No rat race.
But he knows you have to know somebody who knows somebody to get in at Socony. Recently it had a fifteen-percent reduction in work force, while at the same time thousands apply for any and all openings due to layoffs elsewhere in Brooklyn.
Hopeless. There are less jobs now than I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn. I need to concentrate on the opportunities I have with Bill’s new gang. And I need to put a name to that face.
That night he dreamed he was chasing the man, but he had no face at all. Only when Darby looked into a black, rain-dappled puddle could he see a reflection of the Windsor glasses on the narrow face. All night and into the morning he was plagued by it. But in this tiny room, there is no place he can pace. Darby moves his eyes round the room: The metal bed longwise against a sloped wall, the wooden bassinet with tiny blankets hanging over its side, the brick wall, the window with a fire escape outside, a sink and toilet and a nightstand overflowing with unfolded clothes.
“Darby?” Ligiea says.
But when he does not answer, she eventually walks away.
The building where they squat had been condemned for almost four years. Once upon a time it was a textile factory, but the ceilings had collapsed on five floors since then and most of the window frames had rotted, the glass gone or broken.
When Ligeia told him she was pregnant, Darby had walked into the building, went upstairs, came into a water closet and noticed there was a window in it with a fire escape outside. He then got water and mortar and sealed the entrance door with leftover bricks as if it were one long wall. Even if someone walks into the abandoned building and comes up to their floor, they would never notice that behind the wall a family of three squats in what was once a men’s water closet.
Unless they hear the baby within. O
r find Darby carrying pales of water up to flush their waste down the toilet.
Behind him he faintly hears Ligeia humming to Colleen Rose. He had forgotten where he was again.
I’m home. If you can call this a home.
He turns to her, “Can I hold the baby?”
Ligeia moves closer to Darby and gently passes Colleen Rose over to him. She rubs a hand down Darby’s shoulder, then touches his face, “What is it you think about-eh so much, Darby?”
“Nothin’, I’m fine.”
Ligeia pulls her hand away stomps off.
“What?” He says to her back.
“I no like when you no talk to me,” her fingers make detailed gestures until she waves her fists in the air and raises her voice. “Why you no talk-eh to me, eh? I ask you question and you say ‘Nothin’, I fine, nothin’, I fine.’ Is that your favorite thing to say? You lock me up in here with the baby all day, all night I sit around like a cow, feeding her, feeding her. But what about me? I starving in here. In here? Here? No kitchen? Just toilet and window and walls. I want you take me to ristorante. I want to go out! Darby, my love, what we do here? We stay forever here? No, no we cannot stay forever here. No, no!”
Holding the baby, Darby stares at her.
“What you say? Anything? Talk to me, Darby. Say something, anything. Please, Darby,” she rushes over to him again and grabs his free hand. “Tell me when you come to America, tell me.”
“I already—”
“Tell me!”
Darby rattles off the main points, “Yeah, so I was born in Ireland but we moved to London when we was babies on account o’ the fam’ly could get work there. We have a big fam’ly an’ we all travelled together. Thirty, forty o’ us at once.”
“Your mother? What she like?”
“I dunno, I never met her. Or my father. When I was five I came wit’ my aunt Rose an’ my brother Pickles to Brooklyn. But she abandoned us here.”
“When you were five-eh year old, abandon you both?”
“Yeah.”
“Come orrible,” she says in Italian. How horrible. “How do you eat?”
“I learned to steal, we both did. Gangs taught us. Later on, we sent for Frank an’ my cousin, Sadie.”
“I like Frank. He so nice, that man. He bring flowers when Colleen Rose born, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Frank is older brother, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“What Pickles like? Why you call him Pickles?”
“Ah, it’s a long story. My younger brother Pickles, he ain’t as nice as Frank, that’s for sure.”
“Why you say he no nice?”
Darby does not want to tell her so much about Pickles that she is scared of him, “Well, when we were kids he always used to say to me, ‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.’”
“That no nice. Why he say that to you, Darby?”
“I dunno, it’s a quote from some poet or somethin’.”
“What about Sadie, she have baby too?
“Well, he’s not a baby anymore but—”
“Where they now?”
Darby tilts his head, “I’m not sure. I have to find her though.”
“Yes, you do. I want to meet her, how can I help find her?”
“She’s in hidin’.”
“Hide? Why?”
She is scared of me, Darby thinks. She knows I am after her to pay for Pickles’ retrial.
“Her husband is a gang leader,” he says instead.
“Sadie, did she travel from London to America together with Frank?”
“Yeah.”
“Where Frank move you say? Conn. . . Connect—”
“Connecticut.”
“Yes, Conne-ti-cut, Sadie will go there. She want to be with Frank, her family. The family she trust. A mother go to people she trust.”
“I hadn’t thought o’ that,” Darby says.
“See what happen when you speak with words instead of thinking, thinking forever?”
Darby almost smiled at that.
He had never witnessed anybody learn a new language. But Ligeia made it seem easy. Plus, communicating with her is much simpler than with others. Every exaggerated movement of her hands, every large-eyed revelation is easy to translate. From her full lips, he can read all the English words she learned. He had never met anyone who makes their thoughts more obvious in facial expressions and hand gestures than Ligeia. It is a match made in heaven.
They should make a theater show about us, Darby thinks. And call it “The Lonely Lipreader and the Playful Pantomime.”
The way she speaks reminds Darby of the Italian men he witnessed being murdered when Bill’s gang took them by surprise after the storm. But they weren’t just Italian men. They were regular, normal men with wives, children, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Figlia, figlia, the Italian man’s words haunt in a trance-like chant. Figlia, figlia. Darby remembers when the crier looked back at him with a thankful look on his face when the .45 was pulled away from the back of his head. That was his last emotion, because he never even saw Bill point it at his temple and fire.
Darby looks down on his linen shirt with the rust-colored blood stains.
Italian blood. Ligeia is someone’s figlia too.
“Darby?” She comes to his face again and holds it in her palms. “Don’t go away, Darby. Stay with me. Sometimes you get a eh-look on you face, and then you go away and talk no more. I no like that.”
But he does not answer her. Instead, he looks at the ring he gave her that Frank loaned him the money for. It is so thin that he worries it might snap. It is only a band and does not have a diamond on it. A diamond, Darby could not afford. He reaches with his free hand and holds her ring finger and his fiancé’s smile warms him. She walks over to the window to shed light on it and holds her hand out flat.
With Colleen Rose sleeping in his left arm, he goes down on a knee and looks up to Ligeia’s eyes, “Will ya marry me?”
“I already say yes, Darby. Stand up, the baby no breath so good like that.”
“I’m gonna ask ya every day,” Darby’s face is an unflinching mask. “Every single day, because I want the commitment we made to each other fresh in my mind until the day comes when we can afford to raise ourselves up from here as a true fam’ly in our own home. This ring represents my commitment to ya, because my commitment is true. But no matter what, we do it together. Ligeia. . . Will ya marry me?”
“Yes, yes, just stand up.”
And Darby does, “Ya saved me from. . . From myself. I will always be in ya debt, Ligeia. I love ya so much. I’m sorry I’m still kinda lost sometimes. Ya brought me this angel. An angel o’ hope. Now I want to live again. I want to provide for us, but—”
“But what?”
But I think I’m too damaged already. I am an idiot. I don’t deserve you.
“But what Darby, tell me?”
“No, you tell me somethin’,” Darby says to her as they stand in front of the window. “Where were ya born.”
“Ellis Island,” she waves a hand over her head.
“No. It’s there ya was reborn. We’re both immigrants to this country. Colleen Rose will one day want to know o’ our lives. Tell me again.”
“It’s no good, my-eh story.”
“I won’t tell nobody but Colleen Rose, it’s just me an’ her, that’s all.”
“I’m eh-gonna cry if I—”
“I wanna listen.”
Ligeia takes a deep breath, “I was eh-born in back of a wagon that carry fresh-picked apricots on a dirt road on border between the regions Basilicata, where my peasant mother was born and raised, and Calabria where my father, a married politician come from. I was born Ligeia Guida DeSantis, and they say I am not only figlia de puttana, a whore’s daughter, but also without a region. An Italiano’s region very, very important, you understand. In America it no matter so much where you mother or father were born or what class they c
ome from or even if they married. But in Italy very, very important. Class, status. And I come from bottom, a bastard. Not even a boy bastard. Bastardo ragazza. Infamia. A girl bastard.”
Darby reads the words that come out of her beautiful lips and repeats the Italian word he learned recently, “Figlia.”
“Yes, figlia. la figlia nessuno vuole. No one want this type of daughter.”
“I do.”
Ligeia gives a half smile and flicks impatiently at a tear on her cheek, “When I arrive at Ellis Island, I never find my cousin who sent for me. I was eh-twenty years old when I step off plank of the big steamer. I search desperate for my cousin but no one hold a sign that read “Ligeia DeSantis.” When they pull my ship away from Ellis Island by three loud little tugboats, and a new ship take its place along the eh-pillars that hold up the dock, I worry so much. And I wait so long. Then wait more. I sit on the luggage in a dress that still have the scent of the Italian countryside. One man with a fat belly and paper approach me, ‘Where ya goin’? Manhatt’n? Brooklyn? Bronx? Queens? Where?’ Ligeia pushes her belly out to impersonate the Ellis Island employee and does her best at a New York accent too. “Where ya goin’? Eh?’
“I never know where my cousin live. My cousin was supposed to bring me there from Ellis Island. I never knew the name of the place. Was it Brooklyn? Bronx? The words sound same to me. And back then, I have no English so I say, ‘Brooklyn?’
She pushes her stomach out again, “‘Take that ferry, g’ahead,’ he tell me and walk away.
“In Brooklyn, I see through the fog the big buildings and the Statue Liberty and more buildings beyond. Then I go hungry. So I walk and walk. I walk around the South Brooklyn Italian neighborhoods by day and sleep under stairwells and benches for the night. No one help me. Even they know infamia when they see her.
“One day a Sicily woman named La Sorrisa come to me on Sackett eh-Street and help carry my luggage. She have a accent in Italian even me no understand.”
“‘Ti porterò dal principe, I take you to the Prince,’ she say to me. I did not know America have prince and princesses, kings and queens.
“‘Si, si, the Prince o’ Pals,’ La Sorrisa say to me again. ‘Vieni con me. Come with me. The Prince o’ Pals always knows what to do.’
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 32
