“You’ll burn in hell before I give you an annulment,” he said.
“Keep a spot ready for me,” Sofia snapped. “You’ll be burning long before I get there. I live for the day when I am the Widow Sesta.”
Nilo reached for the penknife in his pocket. His hand closed around it, but with a ferocious act of will, he dropped it back into his pocket, walked to the door, and knocked. A guard came and took him back to the weaving plant.
“Must have been a lousy visit,” Harry said. Nilo studied the big man for a moment before answering. There was something about him that he liked, even if the man was a Jew. He had a solid, reassuring quality. Nilo told him what had happened.
“That’s just like a broad,” Birchevsky said. “That’s what happened with both of my wives, what happens to most guys in here. Their wives are off screwing around, and we’re supposed to stay in here, playing with ourselves.”
They had come to a small storeroom and let themselves inside.
“I’m going to ask you something, kid,” Birchevsky said, “and I don’t want you taking me wrong. Okay?”
“Sure, Harry.”
The big man shifted his weight on the box on which he was sitting.
“How long’ve you been in? A couple of years?”
“Counting the time in The Tombs, goin’ on two years.”
“And you’re still a young kid. What? Twenty-three? Twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five,” Nilo said.
“And you ain’t no punk or no sissy,” Birchevsky said.
Nilo moved uneasily. He was beginning to guess what was coming.
“So you haven’t been laid in a hell of a long time?” Birchevsky said. “Right?”
“Right.”
Birchevsky took a deep breath. “Listen, kid,” he said, “don’t get any strange ideas about me. On the outside, I’m as square as the next guy. Even in here, I don’t mess around.”
Nilo nodded.
“What I’m trying to say is this. And I wouldn’t be saying this if you was a happily married man. What I’m saying is I need a good buddy—you know—one who won’t blab to anyone. But somebody to help me work off the tensions. Somebody who’s got tensions of his own, too. Not too often. No sissy, punk stuff. Just somebody to help relieve the tensions. Somebody who won’t talk.”
Nilo did not answer at first.
“Well?” Birchevsky said finally.
Nilo moved over beside him, and Birchevsky began unbuttoning the younger man’s trousers.
“Only for now,” Harry said. “Only inside.”
• Charlie Luciano bought three new touring cars, two Packards and a Buick. His prostitutes and brothels were earning him a million dollars a year, and he paid cash for the cars. Tina Falcone still headlined at Luciano’s speakeasy, although she missed an occasional show when she was suffering from an opium hangover. Luciano never complained, although he spent fewer nights now at her apartment.
• After killing Dion O’Banion for Al Capone, Frankie Yale returned to Brooklyn and his bootlegging business. Soon Capone decided that Yale, his old buddy in the Five Points gang, was double-dipping—selling liquor to Capone, then “hijacking” his own trucks and selling the same liquor to Capone a second time. He sent a spy, Jimmy DeAmato, to New York to find out; Yale killed the spy. On July 1, 1927, one of Capone’s men tried to shoot Yale, but missed. One year to the day later, Yale left a speakeasy and drove his roadster down Forty-fourth Street in Brooklyn. A large touring car pulled alongside and four gunmen opened fire. Yale died immediately; his car crashed and tore the porch off a house. The killers’ guns were found a few blocks away; one of them was a machine gun that was bought in von Frantzius’s gun shop in Chicago. Frankie Yale was the first New York gangster killed with a machine gun. Luciano said, “That crazy fuck, Capone, will get us all killed. Everybody’s going to get one of those Chicago Pianos. They’ll be shooting the town up.” Privately, he told Capone that Yale needed killing. Twenty-eight hearses of flowers accompanied Yale’s body to the cemetery.
• Air passenger service started in 1926 and on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic nonstop to France.
• The new hot dance was the Black Bottom, but in every speakeasy in America, the most requested song was “The Gang That Sang ‘Heart of My Heart.’”
• Father Mario Falcone was promoted to assistant pastor at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. His brother, Tommy, was promoted to sergeant in the police department.
• America wept when its greatest matinee idol, Rudolph Valentino, died. He was thirty-one years old.
• On March 18, 1927, thirty-year-old New Yorker Romeo LaRocca, formerly of Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily, was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. When doctors gave him no more than three months to live, he wondered what would happen to his wife and children and went to seek advice from Don Salvatore Maranzano.
CHAPTER 8
Spring and Summer 1927
After a while, Sofia had actually begun to enjoy the accounting classes she took at NYU. There was something pure about working with numbers; it was a world in which things were right or they were wrong, and in a life in which she had found so few things coming out right, this held a powerful attraction for Sofia.
Even Salvatore Maranzano had seemed pleased with her progress, and he was certainly aware of it—of that there was no doubt. He knew, before she even told him, how well she had done in her classes, and on his regular visits to see her, he often praised both her brains and her diligence, before he got down on the floor to play with two-year-old Stephen.
She wondered if he had people spying on her, and she got her answer one day when several of the students decided to go out for coffee after one of their classes. There were two young men and Sofia and another young woman. They sat in a public restaurant, surrounded by scores of people, for no more than forty-five minutes, talking and laughing, and that night Maranzano again cautioned her against “unseemly, unwifely” behavior.
But she had no idea what Maranzano thought or knew about her relationship with Nilo. The don did not gossip; but he often told her to be strong because Nilo would soon be freed. And he told her not to judge harshly a man who had spent so much time in prison. “He will be a different man when he returns,” Maranzano said.
She could not understand why Maranzano, whose power throughout the city was growing every day, would care so much about the wife of one of his underlings, and that one no more than a useless thug. But Maranzano always talked about Nilo as if he were the heir to some kind of crown, now just briefly detained in a foreign land before returning home to take up his throne.
When her classes ended and she was ready to put her talent and education to use, Sofia had not been sure how to broach the subject to Maranzano. She decided to be direct, and one night she said, “I don’t want to keep taking money from you for nothing. I want to get a job. I want to work.”
Maranzano had nodded. “I agree. It will be good for you. At least until your husband returns home.”
The next day, Sofia had gotten a newspaper to read the want ads for bookkeeping and accounting jobs, but before she could answer even one advertisement, the giant Maranzano henchman named Rock had shown up at her apartment with an armful of ledger books.
“Don Salvatore says you work on these,” the man had said. “I pick them up Friday. I bring you new ones next Monday.” Without waiting for an answer, he had placed the ledger books on the living room table and left.
The ledger books were from Maranzano’s legitimate businesses, and Sofia realized as she worked on them just how far-flung the soft-spoken gangster’s empire was becoming. He owned stores and warehouses and theaters. There was a boxing club in the Bronx and a women’s garment manufacturer in Midtown. In New Jersey, he owned a small cereal company and garages and auto dealerships and even held part ownership in several banks.
The books were a window into Maranzano’s world, and it was a much more interesting world than Sofia had ever ex
pected it to be, so much so that she looked forward to balancing the books of those businesses.
She worked diligently every day, still often placing Stephen with a babysitter for a few hours, but one warm spring day, she answered a knock on the door to find Tina standing in the hallway with a baker’s box in her hand.
“Hi,” Tina said. “Still got a sweet tooth?”
The two young women had not seen each other in more than a year, and that last meeting had been cursory, a chance encounter at the Manginis’ restaurant, where Tina had been driven to pick up Luciano, who was dining there. They had not had any chance to speak, because Luciano was in a hurry to leave and dragged Tina along with him. Sofia was surprised at her friend’s appearance; She looked weary. There were the first faint traces of wrinkles alongside her eyes. But she was still beautiful; nothing could change that.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Oh, Tina, I’m sorry. My mother took Stephen with her today to go visit one of my aunts out on the Island. They won’t be back until late.”
“Oh, damn.” Tina took a small gift-wrapped box from inside her pocketbook. “Well, they say it’s the thought that counts. Give him this from Aunt Tina. I bet he’s getting big.”
“Getting? He already is big. He’s two years old, and already runs around this place like it’s a racetrack. You’ll love him.”
A few minutes later, Sofia brought coffee into the living room, where Tina had already spread out cookies and small pastries on a fresh linen napkin on the table in front of the sofa.
“You have anything stronger for that coffee?” Tina asked.
“Brandy?”
“That sounds good.”
“My friend, Tina, the drinker. That’s a switch.”
“Times change.”
“Yeah, everything changes. Except my life. That never changes.”
She brought a bottle of brandy back to the table and sat next to Tina on the sofa.
“Things aren’t well?” Tina asked.
“You know, I’ve got a theory.”
“You always had theories.”
“I haven’t had any in a long time. But I’ve got this one. I think that maybe some people are put on this earth to be victims, to be sport for other people. Like rabbits. There’s no use for a rabbit, except to be hunted by dogs and wolves and coyotes and foxes and eagles and hawks and owls. That’s their only purpose. I’m like a rabbit.”
“Well, they’ve got another purpose,” Tina said.
“What’s that?”
“To make more rabbits.”
“They just do that while they’re waiting to be eaten,” Sofia said. “No, they’re professional victims. So am I. I’ve been roughed up by family, by criminals, by the law, by the governor. I ought to go out and lie down on the street with a sign that says KICK ME, I’M DIRT. Do you know I’ve never seen you sing? Not once since you’ve been at the club.”
“I invited you enough times,” Tina said.
“I know. But I’m not allowed to go.”
“Sofia, you’re twenty-four years old. You’re as old as I am. You can go anywhere you want.”
“No. You can go anywhere you want. I can go anywhere Salvatore Maranzano thinks is proper, and he doesn’t think a proper Sicilian wife like me belongs in a speakeasy.”
“He’s told you that?”
“In just that many words. He keeps telling me that Nilo’s going to get out soon and I have to be a virtuous wife and mother. He doesn’t understand how much I hate your son-of-a-bitching cousin and hope he dies in jail.”
“No boyfriends then?”
“Men are the least of my worries. I never liked them and I like them even less now.”
“Do you think there’s anything Charlie can do? Could he pull some strings for Nilo?”
“No, it’s a lost cause. Mr. Maranzano is this tight with the governor’s office.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “But first they couldn’t let Nilo out because they were running for reelection. Then they couldn’t let him out ’cause they were running again for something.”
“He got reelected just last year. What’s he waiting for now?”
“Now he wants to run for president, and so he can’t let Nilo out ’cause it’d look bad. And in the meantime, I’m sitting here, like some dried-up old prune.”
“You don’t look like any prune to me,” Tina said. “You look like a pretty fine-looking plum.”
She held her hands out in front of her bosom in a silent, joking comment on Tina’s large breasts.
Sofia felt her own breasts. “The only thing these were ever good for was feeding Stephen. No, I don’t think Charlie can help. If Mr. Maranzano can’t, I guess no one can. Oh, I’m tired of complaining. How’s the family?”
“I don’t see too much of them,” Tina said. “Tommy will be finishing up law school after the summer. Mario’s busy with the church. My father and mother are well.”
“Do you see them?”
“Family’s a funny thing,” Tina said. “No matter what kind of fight you have, eventually it passes away and you’re still family. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But Papa—he just can’t take the thought that I’m with Charlie. It’s like I’m driving a stake into his heart every day. So I see them at big holidays, birthdays, once in a while, but we don’t talk, and I get out of there as quickly as I can.”
“I’m sorry, Tina. Here I’ve done nothing but complain, and you’ve got your own problems, too.”
“Nothing like yours.”
“Is Tommy getting married?” Sofia asked.
“I don’t think so. Why? Did you hear something?”
“No. I was just wondering.”
“No. He studies all the time. He doesn’t have any time for girls.”
“When I was young, I always thought I’d marry him,” Sofia said. “Until I figured out I hate men.”
Tina smiled as she sipped her coffee. “I love them. All sizes, all shapes.”
“And what does Charlie think about that?” Sofia said, and watched Tina’s face seem to cloud over.
“Charlie wasn’t my first man. And since I’ve been with him, I’ve been with others. With women too. And Charlie’s always been there. He likes it. He likes to watch sometimes.”
“Oh, Tina, that’s so depraved.”
“You’re the poet. You’re the one who was always telling me that depravity was good.”
“That was talk. A lot of things in my life were talk.”
The brandy had seemed to heat up the room. Tina unbuttoned the top two buttons of her dress.
“Brandy does that to me,” she said.
“Just brandy?”
“Brandy. Opium. Sex. I spend most of my time overheated.”
Sofia looked at her and wondered suddenly if Tina was really as happy as she was trying to appear.
“And you and Charlie?”
Tina shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“If you don’t, who does?”
“It’s just … it’s not something we talk about. I sing at his club. Some nights we go out afterward. Once in a while, we have sex. But that’s all.”
“He doesn’t talk to you?” Sofia asked.
“Oh, he talks enough. He introduces me to all his cronies. He’ll talk business in front of me. I hear more sordid stories in a week than I ever imagined happened.” She sipped her drink. “He talks enough. But I never know what he’s thinking. Not once have I gotten a look inside his mind.”
“Maybe it’s just the way he is. He doesn’t like to talk about what he’s thinking.”
“You know, it’s not like I expect him to marry me. God, I know he’s got other women. A lot of them. One night I heard someone say that Charlie was a philanthropist because he had given work to five thousand women. He meant all the whores in Charlie’s houses. I’ve met some of them at the club, and it’s like Charlie owns them. They’re furniture. And sometimes I feel like I am, too. Maybe I’m his best sofa, but I’m s
till just a sofa.”
“And you never ask him about any of this?”
“You can’t ask Charlie things. You try to make conversation about what the future holds, about someday retiring and living on a farm, about slowing down and touring Europe, and he looks at you like you’re a bug. ‘That’s for crumbs,’ he says. ‘I’d rather die than be a crumb.’ End of discussion. The other night he got mad at me and said I was butting into business that didn’t concern me.” She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just getting tired of me.”
Tina finished her drink and poured another. She looked out across the living room to the street beyond, her thoughts somewhere Sofia could not reach.
She’s just like me, Sofia thought. Just another piece of property.
She rose to get more coffee, wincing at a sudden pain that jabbed at her back.
“What’s the matter?” Tina asked.
“Since the baby. My back hurts a lot.”
“I had a wonderful thing the other night called a massage. It might be just what you need.”
“I can just see myself getting out of here to go get a massage,” Sofia said.
“No need to go anywhere. Just leave it to me.” Tina stood up, took Sofia’s hand, and steered her toward the bedroom. Sofia felt her heart racing.
* * *
SINCE TOM DEWEY, his law-school roommate, had moved, the rent on their apartment had been too much for Tommy to handle alone, and in the summer of 1927, he found a smaller apartment uptown in an area already being called the Upper West Side.
He would have been welcome to move back home, but at twenty-eight, Tommy thought it was time to really start living his own life. He had only a few more law classes before he had his degree.
So without a girlfriend, without much furniture, without much of anything but his police uniforms and his lawbooks, Tommy had moved uptown—helped in the manual labor by brother Mario, who for that hot July day at least had disdained his Roman collar so he felt free to swear at the cheap help who were dropping Tommy’s boxes all over the street.
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