The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

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  For Francis Cristofano

  1928–2010

  Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the

  conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that

  something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

  —Václav Havel, from Disturbing the Peace

  A CHI DAI IL DITO

  SI PRENDE ANCHE

  IL BRACCIO

  (GIVE THEM A FINGER

  AND THEY’LL TAKE AN ARM)

  ONE

  When violence arrives, it rarely knocks. It seldom taps you on the shoulder, suggests you get ready. It creates change with the most capable tools in the toolbox: confusion, humiliation, destruction. And its survivors are lucky to have coughed out a raspy I never saw it coming.

  I learned this in my earliest days, like all great family traditions. Some mothers hand down a culinary talent, some fathers pass a skill to a son or daughter, the familial reverence for the Holy Bible or a football team. But I grew up in a Sicilian household steeped in the practice of influence over the lives of others. We are the Bovaros, one of the oldest and most respected families in organized crime, and the tradition passed down to me with faith and accuracy was violence. I first witnessed it at age eight, first delivered it at age twelve. In our world, violence is the fulcrum. It keeps everything in—or out—of balance.

  Perhaps no one has learned that lesson as well as James Fratello—known in our family as Jimmy “the Rat.” What Jimmy’s specific crimes against our family were I was never completely sure, though his coming and going—really, the going—kick-started events that altered the trajectory of my life. Jimmy was known as the Rat long before it turned out he really was one, named so for the stringy remains of oily hair that clung to the back of his meaty head. Whatever images of mafiosos your mind conjures from the movies, Jimmy would have been summed up like this: He wasn’t the strong one, the smart one, or the one with the good lines; he was nobody’s favorite; he was expendable, the one who might take a bullet and you wouldn’t waste the energy to shrug.

  I was ten years old when my father gave the Rat what became a fabled slicing. Glad to say I never saw the result of my father’s brutality that day. I was hanging around, bored out of my mind—a difficult age to be Mafia-bred; too old to be innocent, too young to understand what’s really happening around you. I eventually strolled downstairs to see if I could catch a glimpse of what it was my dad did for a living, which at the time I misunderstood to be the manager of various restaurants. I stayed out of sight, watching the two of them chat in the kitchen long enough to realize nothing interesting was going on anywhere around them, around me. My father and Jimmy talked quietly, shared a few jokes. I yawned as I quietly made my way outside to the sidewalk.

  All I can say is this: Jimmy never saw it coming.

  Had I been inside or still within viewing distance of that kitchen, my life would have been cemented; the only way I could’ve survived the horror of witnessing premeditated murder by my father’s hand would’ve been to herald it, embrace it as my own, to become a player in the same league. Instead I was outside kicking stones into the sewer, watching some yokel from Jersey parallel park his Oldsmobile, back and forth and back and forth. Here I was ten years old and I knew enough to want to yell, “You gotta turn the wheel! Turn your freakin’ wheel!”

  The guy spent close to three minutes inching his Cutlass closer to the curb, finished a good foot and a half shy of avoiding a citation. Then the suburban family slowly emerged. First the tall blond mother who would’ve had my adolescent brothers cracking crude jokes, then the father wearing an unseasonable wool raincoat and Yankees cap. But you can erase all of these images from your mind; that’s what I did as soon as I saw the little girl who wiggled out from the passenger side of the car. She was a few years younger than me, but I would never forget her. It was the first time a girl caught my attention, and she did so by staring up at the buildings with genuine admiration, inhaled the dirty air like a freshly lit cigar. A little Mary Tyler Moore, she was. A cascade of blond curls danced around her neck as she spun in circles on the sidewalk, her arms flailing about. She wore a short dress popular with the teenage girls in our neighborhood at the time and shoes that were black and shiny.

  I still cannot understand what captivated me; she was just a little girl and I a little boy. But I became aware of myself—fearful that she might sense my noticing her—so I slid between a pair of Chevys on Mulberry Street and hunched down, continued spying on her from a safe distance.

  Her old man stretched as though he’d driven straight through from Boston or Philly, threw his arm around his wife and planted one on her. The little girl seemed to adore this, giggled as though it embarrassed her but stared like it was her favorite scene in a film. They all chatted briefly about the restaurant—my father’s—then attempted to open the door.

  It was 7:12 a.m. on Sunday morning. The restaurant was closed; Mass was coming soon.

  Here is the first truly regrettable moment of my life: I stood back up and made steps their way in an effort to tell them the place was closed—but as I caught another glimpse of the girl, my feet faltered. Had I completed this mission, spoken a half dozen words, the story would have ended here, complete with a built-in happy ending.

  Instead it went like this:

  I slid back between the cars, rested myself on the hood of a Camaro, and watched them tug on that door with enough determination to loosen the hinges. Then came the conversation that suggested they might find somewhere else to go—a tough bill to fill on a Sunday morning in New York’s Little Italy. Instead, the father slipped down the narrow alley adjacent to the eatery and headed toward the kitchen, waving them his way; mom and daughter followed.

  That’s the last I saw of them for about forty-five seconds.

  I sat staring at the rear of their Oldsmobile, wondering what brought these folks in from Jersey, pretending to convert their license plate into a vanity tag. My brothers and I would fancy that the rich and famous were riding covertly through lower Manhattan disguised and hidden in average cars, slipping out of hotels and restaurants with no one being the wiser. It became a regular competition between us.

  783-JCM

  John Cougar Mellencamp, 783 concerts performed.

  025-SRL

  Sugar Ray Leonard, 25 wins by KO.

  1037-EVH

  Eddie Van Halen, 1,037 fully consumed bottles of Jack Daniel’s.

  I focused on that Olds with all my might but the combination of letters and numbers left me struggling: FNP-18X. Plates from New Jersey routinely stumped us, as the state had just started replacing the last digit with a letter on all their tags. I sat on the verge of progress—Florence Nightingale? Fig Newton?—when the screams startled me back to awareness. Down the alley came the three of them, the mother hobbling in front of the father, the little girl tossed over his shoulder like a sack of flour, the females screaming, the man a shade whiter than when he ventured down that alley, cap now missing. I remember thinking that people squeamish at the sight of rats shouldn’t go down alleys in New York.

  If the mother had been trying to loosen the hinges on that restaurant door, she was now attempting to co
mpletely rip off the door of the Olds with her bare hands. Dear old dad tossed the girl in the backseat like old luggage, then fumbled with his ring of keys to find the one that fit the ignition, all while staring down that alley of trash and shadows. He slammed the door, started the car, gunned the accelerator. And I guess the guy had it in him; it may have taken him forty-seven back-and-forths to parallel park his bomb, but it took him one to get out. Then the squeal of the wheels, the fishtailing, the coughing exhaust, the fade.

  That must have been one gigantic rodent.

  A minute or so later, my uncle Sal came strolling out. The guy was all salt and pepper: his hair, his freckled skin, his personality. Sal lit up a Camel, casually drifted my way, and blasted me one in the shoulder, messed up my hair. He blew a cloud of smoke in my general direction. “You stay out of the restaurant, kid, eh?”

  I stared at him, but he understood I was saying sure. “Rat in the kitchen again?”

  He took a drag long enough that he burned through a half inch of cigarette, two minutes’ worth of nicotine. He looked up and down the street looking for something, for the absence of something, exhaled slowly in both directions. Then, walking away from me, toward the restaurant, he muttered, “Yeah, big fat friggin’ rat.”

  I walked down the block to the corner store and got a Pepsi out of a near-historic vending machine resting alone on the sidewalk. This was my neighborhood, my town. Manhattan and Brooklyn combined into one beautiful myriad of possibilities. So many of the establishments my father and our family ran were in Little Italy, but home was a three-mile trek across the Brooklyn Bridge. The borders of my life existed on this side of the world, bounded by the Hudson, the East, the BQE. Everything was here: our home, our church, our livelihood. My entire family lived within these lines, every cousin, aunt, and uncle, each as thick and rich as their Italian accents. There was no reason to leave, and it never really occurred to us to try. The fact that people came in—from Jersey, Connecticut, upstate—made perfect sense. This was not merely the center of our world; it was the center of everything. New York remains the center still. I sipped that soda as I surveyed all that was around me. It was not unusual to get a nod from owners sweeping sidewalks or a Hey, Johnny from the folks we treated with respect. Everyone knew who I was—John Bovaro—and they always gave me space. I took my time; I had no motivation to hurry.

  But when I finally returned to Vincent’s, things had changed, though not as dramatically as you might imagine. Out front: three cops, one patrol car, two bystanders who wished they knew more. One of the cops I’d seen before, a kid whose folks were from Palermo and had commanded him to become a cop and ditch the life of a hoodlum. He rewarded them with partial obedience: a cop whose allegiance was to the Bovaro clan. The other two officers looked annoyed and eager, respectively. I approached slowly and Allegiant gave me a sly nod. I rolled a kink out of my shoulder. Who knows why the shakedown was occurring. It happened with regularity and never amounted to anything.

  As for the bystanders, these were the Kerrigans. A husband-and-wife team, both Irish, determined to take down not only the Bovaros, but sixteen other major crime families in New York, including but not limited to the Italians, the Greeks, the Russians, and the Irish, with whom they had some not so distant relatives. When anything went down in our neighborhood, the cops were provided one common response when they started banging on doors looking for information: I didn’t see a thing; I didn’t hear a thing; I don’t know nothin’. No one ever wanted to get involved. Unless the cops tagged the Kerrigans. They had an answer for every friggin’ question that was ever asked, except their success rate was around 15 percent. The cops always took a statement, though they knew it would pan out to more paperwork than product.

  This morning, however, was quite different. Why? Because I arrived at the wrong time. I knew nothing about what had happened in the kitchen at Vincent’s—in fact, it would be days before I found out the truth and only because I read vivid headlines in the Times. So what could I possibly offer the cops? What value could a little kid standing on a city sidewalk offer regarding a crime that happened a building away?

  Eager caught Allegiant’s glance and slowly headed my way. Annoyed rolled his eyes.

  It was clear to everyone—except Eager—that whatever was going on was merely a matter of procedure. In today’s standards, it would be one drug dealer killing another, a matter of filling out the right forms back at the precinct, giving the coroner a heads-up, placing a check mark in the right box on the marker board outside the captain’s office. But Eager didn’t care, he came over and asked me questions anyway, a kid he had just watched walk down the street from a decided distance.

  “And what did you see?” Eager asked.

  I stared at him, understanding the inherent hatred my family had for cops. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Didn’t hear anything? Didn’t see anyone rush out of Vincent’s? Nothing strange or unusual?”

  Were I twelve or thirteen at the time, I would have shut down like a prison at lights-out. But I was ten. And the girl. And the panicked parents. And the screams. And the girl. And the gunning of the engine. And the frantic escape down Mulberry. And the dust cloud.

  And the little girl.

  I gave him a shrug/swallow combo. “Saw a family run down the alley a while back.” I tugged at my shirt a little bit. “They okay?”

  Eager took a step closer. “How’s that?”

  “I saw a man and woman and little girl come running down that alley.”

  “When?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Allegiant started making his way toward the discussion. Now he and Annoyed looked like fraternal twins.

  Eager threw up his hand as if to stop the two of them from getting an inch closer, and stop they did. He knelt before me, which made me the taller one.

  With a throaty whisper, he said, “Now, this is important. What can you tell me about them?”

  “Are they okay?”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I don’t know. Plain. The girl was pretty, had blond curls, danced on the sidewalk.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “Plain,” I said. “Did anything happen to them?”

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about them.” He hesitated, then, “I need to make sure they’re safe and sound.”

  That bastard. He used my obvious anxiety for the family, for the little girl, against me, manipulated the innocence of a kid to garner a pat on the back. I haven’t felt the same about cops since.

  I let out a nervous sigh and started rubbing my temples. “Um, they were from New Jersey.”

  He inched closer, his shoes making a scraping sound against the cement. “How do you know this?”

  “Their license tags.”

  Annoyed took a step in our direction, but Eager still had his hand up. As for Allegiant, he couldn’t have gotten back into Vincent’s faster if someone had loaded him into a shotgun and fired, though by his swagger he made it appear like his purpose was procedural.

  Eager swallowed like he’d been salivating. “Do you remember the license plates?”

  Fig Newton. Florence Nightingale.

  “FN… uh, FN something. Started with FN. Had an eight in it.”

  Eager started scribbling on a notepad.

  From the corner of my eye I could see a herd of Sicilians running in my direction. At that moment, the vertigo kicked in.

  From a distance I heard, “Questioning a minor without his parents’ presence or permission?”

  It turns out that means nothing, but it disabled me. A wall of olive skin was coming to rescue me—from causing irreparable damage.

  Eager leaned in and asked quickly, like I might take a bullet and he had one last shot to get the goods, “What kind of car was it?”

  The Italians were closing in.

  The little girl was fading out.

  The words dribbled from my voice as thoug
h they were my last. “Olds. Silver. Cutlass Sierra.”

  What occurred next is much like what a defensive tackle must feel like when he recovers a fumbled ball: bodies coming from every direction, along with a clear understanding that the best you can do is fall on the ball and take the turnover; leave the touchdown for the offense. The only difference here is that Eager did not get leveled, but merely surrounded.

  The discussion was over.

  The men shepherded me back into Vincent’s, never sent a harsh word my way. They spoke to one another in Italian about how I was the one that was wronged in this ordeal. Their deference and protection of me were pure, things I never doubted—though for the first time I failed to comprehend the justification. My father came to me and put his hand behind my neck, turned his mouth into a consoling half-smile as though I’d failed a test for which I’d spent my life preparing. “Let’s get you something to eat, Johnny,” he said, then kissed me on the head. I curled into his safe hands like a sleepy baby.

  The cops took pictures, swabbed drying puddles and stains, did a lot of head-scratching. People gossiped in the streets, in the stores, on the front steps of brownstones.

  I didn’t see a thing.

  I didn’t hear a thing.

  I don’t know nothin’.

  At 10:35 a.m. on that same Sunday, Eager performed a query on New Jersey’s Department of Transportation vehicle registration database.

  Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ:

  2,323

  Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra:

  675

  Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver: 177

  Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver, registered tags possessing characters F, N, 8:

  1

  At 11:08 a.m., Allegiant performed the exact same query.

  What followed was little more than a simple race: two sets of men attempting to acquire the same bounty.