“That’s not very nice,” Sofia said with a pouty look. “Your brother’s not very nice, Tina.”
Tina seemed to be considering the statement. “No,” she finally answered, “he’s nice enough. It’s just that he’s a stuffed shirt.”
“Get walking, girls,” Tommy said.
He left some change on the counter for his meal, waved to the waitress, who had been clearly watching the whole episode with interest, stuck his book back in his jacket pocket, and took the two young women outside. He forced them to walk with him for one whole circuit of his patrol route. It was better, he thought, that they get home late than drunk. They would thank him in the morning.
It was a welcome break anyway from the dull, quiet routine of his late-night post, listening to the girls jabber.
“What are you going to do after graduation?” he asked Sofia.
“I don’t know. Not much. Probably work at the restaurant until … I don’t know, something else. Probably till I get married, I guess.” She sighed.
“Have you found somebody yet?”
“No,” Sofia said. “Nobody even knows I’m alive.”
“Aw, that’s not so. A lot of people know you’re alive,” Tommy said. “But isn’t there something you’d really like to do?”
“I used to think I’d be a nun but…”
“But what?”
“I just can’t do that anymore,” Sofia said. Her voice seemed sad, as if recalling a tragedy.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
Tina interrupted by announcing, “I’m never going to get married. I’m going to be a rich and famous opera singer and have scads and scads of rich, handsome lovers.”
Tommy laughed softly. “Papa will kill you.”
Tina looked crestfallen. “It’s all a dream anyway. No money for lessons. No piano.” She sniffed. “Oh, Tommy, I want that so much. I’m good. Really good. I know I am.”
Tommy stopped at one of his call boxes and again checked his watch by the light of the streetlamp. It was nearly 3:00 A.M.
“I’m going to have the dispatcher send out a cab to take you two home.” Eventually the taxi came, and just before it pulled away with the girls in back Tommy leaned inside and touched Tina’s cheek. “I bought you your piano,” he said. “They’ll deliver it tomorrow. Happy graduation.”
Justina squealed and leaned forward to hug her brother. When she let him go, she slumped back into the corner of the taxicab, sobbing. Tommy looked at her and then toward Sofia.
Tina’s friend was looking at him with a curious expression, one that almost seemed tender.
“The Falcone family,” she said.
“It’s not much of a piano,” Tommy said. “Used, out of tune, and with a broken leg at that.”
Tina was still crying as Sofia wrapped her arms about her friend and said, “It really doesn’t matter what kind of a piano it is. It’s just what it means.”
“I guess so,” Tommy said dully. He was not good at these kinds of oblique, psychological conversations.
He watched the cab roll away. Since coming home six months ago, he had not paid much attention to Justina. Apart from warning Nilo to keep his distance, he had basically ignored her life.
He guessed he had assumed that Justina was still like she had been when he went into the Marines a couple of years earlier—a nice family girl whose ambitions teetered between singing opera a having a hundred children or becoming a nun. He had always thought that Sofia was exactly the same, but maybe not. Maybe they had changed more than he knew.
* * *
THE DAY AFTER HE TORCHED the house and liquor still of the brothers Valenti, shot them and their mother to death, and managed to kill, in the fire, three other innocents who happened to be trapped inside when the tenement went up like a Roman candle, Nilo had appeared at Maranzano’s uptown office, expecting to see the don, hoping perhaps to get a word of congratulations for the fine night’s work. But he was intercepted at the red-haired receptionist’s desk by one of Maranzano’s bodyguards, who gave him a ten-dollar bill and directions by train to an address in Brooklyn.
“Is something wrong?” he had asked. “Is the don angry?”
“The don wants you to go to this address,” the other man answered gruffly.
The address in Brooklyn was a rather run-down real estate office near the corner of Saratoga and Livonia, right under the elevated train tracks. The office manager was frail and old with sweaty hands, and he nervously told Nilo that he had been expecting him and would personally train him to become a real estate agent.
“I don’t want to be a real estate agent,” Nilo said.
“Those are my instructions. If you don’t like them, your argument is with someone else, not me.”
Nilo grumbled but went to the desk the old man assigned to him. “Another thing,” the man said. “We speak nothing but English in this office.”
So Nilo had hunkered down, spending boring day after boring day looking at the pictures and trying to make out the words in Il Progresso and the Daily News and The National Police Gazette, copies of which were kept in the office for the convenience of customers. The first couple of days, he thought often of just getting up, walking out, and going to find a job on a merchant ship somewhere.
But on Friday, when the man handed him a small brown envelope containing five ten-dollar bills, Nilo decided he would wait this out and see what happened. He had never expected to be paid a fortune for sitting around.
Besides the old man, whose name was Mr. Ferrara, Nilo was the only employee in the office. Whenever customers came in, Ferrara took Nilo out with him as he showed houses to prospective buyers, and after the first month Ferrara let Nilo go out with customers by himself.
Despite his annoyance at what he regarded as a giant waste of his time, Nilo found that he was beginning to enjoy the selling of homes, especially when he was successful in peddling some run-down shack at a price far beyond its true value. He quickly got to be expert at steering people past the noisy pipes, the leaky toilets, the termite-infested basements, and convincing them that the house would be just perfect for their needs.
I am truly a criminal now, he thought. I sell hovels to the unsuspecting.
Almost without knowing it, he began to learn from Mr. Ferrara the rules of buying and selling and some of the laws that had to be obeyed in transferring real estate from one owner to the next. He developed a better-than-passing acquaintance with two local banks that financed most of the mortgages and whose clientele seemed to be almost totally Italian-speaking.
Mr. Ferrara was very old-country, Nilo figured out, and jealous of his prerogatives as manager of the office and dedicated to preserving his authority, so Nilo learned quickly to smile and yes-sir him to death, in return for which he was allowed to do exactly what he wanted to do.
The fifty dollars came regularly in the Friday envelope—more money than Nilo had ever thought he could earn at any one time—and he used his newfound wealth to buy himself new suits and shirts and shoes.
He toyed with the idea of renting an apartment, instead of the furnished room at Mrs. Annacharico’s, but he wasn’t ready yet to leave the familiar confines of the Falcones’ neighborhood. Besides, he never knew when this magical fifty-dollars-a-week nipple might dry up, and so he dutifully stashed at least twenty-five dollars every week under the mattress of his bed.
He saw the Falcones less frequently than he used to. He would have found it very hard to explain to them how he was making so much money—more than Tommy or even his father earned—while selling so few houses. Even though he had finally figured out the reason: the money he was paid each week had nothing to do with real estate; it was his reward for killing the Valentis and for keeping his mouth shut about it.
One night he bumped into Tommy on the street while walking home.
“Look at you,” Tommy said, waving a hand toward Nilo’s neat tan suit. “The real estate business must agree with you.”
&nbs
p; Nilo grinned. “I am selling every house in Brooklyn.”
This is your blood brother, Nilo thought. Talk to him. Tell him the truth. Maybe he knows something you should know. Maybe you could even help him.
But he knew that was a foolish idea. How could he help Tommy? He could not even help himself. He was collecting his fifty dollars a week for doing little or no work, but what guarantee had he that one Friday the pay envelope would not be empty and someone would instead hand him a shovel and tell him to go back to digging ditches?
Maybe someday he could give Tommy advice, but not now. Instead, the two young men spent five minutes talking about houses, college, the weather, police work, and neighborhood characters until the conversation just grew old.
“Mario was asking about you. He says he hasn’t seen you at Mass recently,” Tommy said.
“Sunday is the big selling day for houses. I go to a church in Brooklyn when I get a chance.” The truth was Nilo did still go to Mass when he could, but he could no longer take communion since he refused to go to confession first. He had never been able to figure out how he could explain away the deaths of six people in the tenement fire.
Tommy invited him home for dinner, but Nilo made an excuse to get away. He is my blood brother and my friend, and his father too is my friend, but they are police. And police ask too many questions and I have no answers.
So he kept his own company, went to work every day, and waited to hear from Salvatore Maranzano. But month turned into month and no message came.
Nilo took to eating his lunch at a run-down little diner and candy store down the block from the real estate office, where conversations were routinely disrupted every few minutes by the elevated subway roaring by on the tracks overhead.
He liked the luncheonette because it was constantly filled with young men his own age who behaved as if the place were their own social club. All of them seemed to be involved in crime somehow, and they were impressed when Nilo stretched the truth a little to say that he was “a friend” of Salvatore Maranzano’s. Nilo said that primarily to gain acceptance into the circle. Mostly he talked little and listened a lot. He found out that criminals came cheap. One could be hired to kill a man for as little as three dollars.
Prohibition, he thought. It has created too many crooks and there are not enough jobs. They have to work cheap.
He often sat drinking coffee with another recent immigrant from Sicily. Nilo pitied the hulking man because his English was far worse than Nilo’s had ever been.
The young man’s name was Albert Anastasia and with his brother, Anthony, he had found a job right away on the nearby Brooklyn docks. But Albert Anastasia never seemed to work. Instead, he talked about beating people up when the union bosses told him to, of lending out money as a loan shark, of all the cargo he was able to steal and resell.
“You like it here?” Nilo said to him one day.
Anastasia smiled. “In Sicily, I nothing. Here, I be rich man. I be boss. Anybody tries to stop me, I kill.”
Nilo grinned. “Maybe we’ll go into business,” he said. “You kill people and I’ll sell their families plots in the cemetery.”
“You all right, Nilo. Maybe we do that.”
Nilo was surprised to realize that Anastasia was absolutely serious. But they had little chance to talk about it. A few weeks later, Anastasia was arrested for killing another longshoreman and soon after was sent to Sing Sing.
Nilo pitied him for the end of his criminal dreams. Another dummy sent away to break rocks with a hammer. He should have stayed in Sicily. And as summer rolled on, he often thought, Maybe I should have, too.
* * *
IN JULY, SUMMER CRASHED in on the city with full force and fury, stewing New York in its own juices for day after blistering day. Bad everywhere, it seemed worst in the rabbit warren of human existence that was the Lower East Side. There, tens upon tens of thousands of Italians and Jews and Chinese and Greeks and Slavs sweltered ceaselessly in airless factory lofts under a sun so relentless that it burned the sky white. As many as four thousand humans lived in a single block. At night, those same vast numbers fled from their tenement apartments, out onto the streets and sidewalks, waiting for a breeze to come and carry away the heat of the day, but for more than a week now that breeze had not come.
Just after midnight, Sofia Mangini stood at her open bedroom window, looking out to the street below. Downstairs, the family restaurant would normally be closing—but tonight it had been visited by some of those shrewd young men whom her father fawned over and who would sit in a private back room for hours on end, talking softly over whiskey and wine, which were illegal but which they seemed to have no difficulty acquiring.
She had worked in the restaurant earlier in the night and was surprised to see the man known as Joe the Boss Masseria come in. He ate in the back room where the young men were camped out, and when Sofia brought in a fresh bottle of wine Masseria had slipped his hand under her skirt and rubbed the back of her leg.
Later he had walked into the storage room to talk to her father, and she knew that meant her father had paid the Mafia boss protection money, pretending it was a gift made in friendship. Then, led by two bodyguards, Masseria had left. He had winked at her as he went out the door.
The young men in the back room were noisier than ever after he left. It seemed that each one was trying to talk at the same time. She brought in a large pot of espresso, and as she left it on the table she heard someone say with great disdain, “The Mustache Petes will have to go.” She would have to ask Tina what the Mustache Petes were. Her friend always seemed to know such things. Across the street, the lights were on in the Falcones’ apartment. At least one light stayed on every night now, until Tommy came home from walking his police beat. Sometimes, if Sofia got out of bed early, she could look from the window and see him limping down the street toward his home.
She heard a truck driving down the street. It passed her building, then stopped at the corner; four workmen got out and began to lug into the truck the body of a dead horse, which had collapsed in the day’s heat and been allowed to lie where it fell. Watching out the window, Sofia wrapped her arms around herself and, despite the heat, tried to make herself shiver. Sometimes she was able to do that and it made the heat less noticeable. But tonight the shiver would not come.
Twice more since that first winter night, her father had come into her bed. She had not minded the one time because she felt sorry for him, but the last time—three weeks earlier—he had forced himself on her. Both times she had hated the thought of what she was doing, had known it was sick and evil, but after it was over her father lay next to her, holding her in his arms.
Sofia’s mind had told her to push her father away, to hate him, but her body wanted to be held, wanted to feel love. In some curious way, she blamed Tommy Falcone for her plight. Tina had been raised in a loving family, and as she grew up her thoughts had turned instantly, constantly to boys. Sofia’s thoughts never had. Somehow she had just expected that Tommy Falcone was going to marry her, and since that had already been decided in her mind, she did not have to think about other young men.
But now it was clear that Tommy had decided to chart his own path through life and Sofia was no part of it. He had destroyed her last decent chance to feel honest affection, and now she was stuck with only her father. She loathed what they had done—were still doing—together, and, yes, she suspected that if she kept on living here it would continue to go on.
The thought made her shudder.
This isn’t love, she thought, sleeping with your own father. It isn’t the way love is supposed to be. Love is warmth and sharing and friendship and poetry, and this is vile and sick.
And it is all I have … all I have ever had.
She had wanted to tell someone. She had thought of confessing her sin to Father Mario, but it was too unwholesome for even the church to forgive. She had not even been able to tell Tina, her best friend from whom she had no other secrets, although sh
e had wanted to day after day. But something always stopped her from speaking.
I will tell her and she will regard me as an animal, as something from a barnyard, and will no longer be my friend.
That was the explanation she gave herself. But there was another fear, too. If she told Tina, she and Tina would talk about it. Tina was still a virgin and she would want to know how Sofia did it and how it felt, and Sofia would eventually have to tell her the awful, frightening truth: that she hated it, but once it started sometimes her body took over from her mind and she wanted it never to stop.
She had become a wanton, an animal. What decent man would ever want to be with her? What woman? Anyone?
Since that night five weeks earlier when she and Tina had gone looking for him on his beat over in the Village, she had thought of Tommy often, tried to imagine them living Tina’s dream of everybody living in the same house. She lay in bed at night, thinking of Tina and Tommy, and she touched herself, but her body would not respond to images of Tommy.
She had always assumed that she and Tommy would wed, and had never spent time thinking of other boys.
It was not as if she could not find someone else. Sofia was good-looking and she knew it, and she had for years understood the lustful gazes she drew while walking down the street. Every day she saw men who would race to jump into her bed.
Even Tommy’s cousin, Nilo, still looked at her that way, and he now lived in the same apartment building with her, and his landlady was a dried-up old prune. Yet, while Nilo was undeniably good-looking and seemed to be working regularly, Sofia feared that down deep he was just another Sicilian peasant. But even Nilo would be better than what she had now, she thought sadly.
Perhaps if she met other men. Justina had a small part-time job in a nearby factory office—gotten for her by her policeman father—and for several hours every day when she wasn’t home, practicing voice and piano, she met other people, people who weren’t from the neighborhood, who weren’t even Italian. Young men had even started calling for her at her house.
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