Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “That is up to you,” Filomena said. Crumpled bodies, victims of the crush and the smoke, surrounded them. The tilt of the ship was forcing them to grip even deeper into the wet, soiled boards.

  “Push, my child,” Filomena whispered. “With all that’s left of your strength.”

  Francesca arched her head back and let out a scream loud enough to echo off the sweaty walls of the cargo hold. Her breath came in spurts and her eyes bulged from the pain. The midwife looked down between Francesca’s legs, her hands gently gripping the top of the baby’s head, and saw the large well of blood building up around her feet. It was more blood than she had seen in many a birth, and the old woman knew that only the kindness of a grudging God would allow her to walk from this with two lives intact. There was no feeling of time in the cramped hold, each moment gripping its own eternity, each second packed with a lifetime of dark memories. The fire strolled among a people accustomed to life and death entering their world without invitation. They all knew, each and every person in that room, what it meant to be touched by the cold hands of the unwelcome.

  • • •

  THE WAVE CRASHED hard, bending the side of the wall closest to Filomena and Francesca. The bolt sent them, along with Paolino, veering down the slope of the floor. Their backs touched flames, their hands cast aside the dead. Filomena ended up facedown, her head cut by a sharp piece of rusty iron. Blood rushed down the sides of her neck.

  “Let me help you,” Paolino said, tugging at the old woman’s shoulders.

  “Forget me,” she said in a groggy voice. “Get to the child. The infant is who needs you now. The only one you can help.” She reached up and grabbed Paolino’s shirt and forced his face down closer to hers. “The only one,” she said.

  Paolino turned to look at his wife, resting in a heap against the cold metal of an oil-slicked wall.

  “You’re wrong,” Paolino said in a voice that was filled more with fear than conviction. “She will live. They will both live.”

  “You don’t have the time,” Filomena said, thick plumes of smoke rushing by her face. “You must go and save what can be saved.”

  Paolino rested the midwife’s head on the floor and covered it with a patch of cloth torn from her dress. He crawled over to his wife, the smoke engulfing him, the flames spouting in all directions. He pulled at his wife’s back until she rolled over with a thud, splashing his face and chest with thick streams of dark blood. Paolino looked down at his wife’s legs and rubbed his hands against the waist of his shirt, his eyes searching for the face of his child among the ruin of her body. He pulled a rag from his back pocket, cleared some of the blood and sweat from his wife and then reached down to hold the baby’s head. His right hand gripped its soft top and for several long seconds he was afraid to do more than hold it. He looked up and saw his wife’s beautiful face, now smeared with grease and dirt, her cheeks glowing red, her lips tinged a dangerous shade of blue. He spotted the flutter in her eyes and wanted to reach up, hold her and tell her how much he loved her. Tell her how sorry he was for all the pain he had caused.

  But he said nothing. Instead, Paolino lowered his head and once again began tugging at his child, trying to ease the baby from the safety of a mother’s womb. The head was hanging silent and low as Paolino pulled the shoulders out and then watched as the rest of the body quickly slid forward. He ignored the screams and shouts around him. He closed his eyes to the explosions that now rocked the hold and the angry waves that lashed at the outside of the boat. He ignored the inferno surrounding him as well as the cold ocean waiting to swallow up anyone foolish enough to escape.

  He held the umbilical cord in the palm of his right hand, the final connection between mother and baby, and looked around for a sharp object with which to cut it. He stripped a wooden shank off one of the floor panels and began to cut frantically at the cord, desperate to break the baby free. With a final frenzied tug, he cut it clean away and lifted the child from Francesca’s body. Holding him at eye level, Paolino slapped him twice on the back with the flat of his palm. He waited for what seemed to be nothing short of a lifetime for a sign of life.

  He smiled when he heard the baby’s cry rise high above the screams and shouts, roar past the moans of approaching death. His son now cradled to his chest, Paolino brought him close to Francesca’s face.

  “Look, amore,” Paolino whispered. “Look at your son.”

  Francesca looked at her baby through smoke-ravaged eyes and managed a weak smile.

  “E un bello bambino,” she whispered, gently stroking the infant’s forehead. She then closed her eyes for the final time, her hand slipping off her husband’s leg down to the floor.

  Paolino Vestieri stood, cradling his minutes-old son in his arms, his feet resting against his wife’s body, and looked around the hold. He saw the fire now raging out of control. Bodies rested in rows on the floor, many surrounded by the elderly, sitting quietly, resigned to their fate. Mothers rocked back and forth on their knees holding their dead while fathers blindly tossed their children toward the apparent safety of the crammed stairwell. The strength of the fire had reached the engine room, flames wrapping themselves around old pipes, churning pistons and rusty crankcases. The ocean continued its assault, intent on toppling the old ship and bringing her to rest.

  For such a young man, Vestieri had seen more than his fair share of death. He had killed a son and buried him in the dry soil of his native land, alongside the violated body of his own father. He had watched his wife die bringing new life into a world she had grown to despise. And now he stood, staring at an out-of-control fire that would so easily welcome him and his child. Vestieri lowered his head, held his child closer to his side and disappeared into the thick smoke of a sinking ship.

  There were 627 passengers aboard La Santa Maria, even though the official log registered only 176 names. Eighty-one of them survived the ice storm and the engine fire on that frigid February night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Paolino Vestieri was one.

  His son, Angelo Vestieri, was another.

  • • •

  I LOOKED AWAY from Mary and stared down at the old man in his bed. He had always told me that destiny was nothing more than a lie believed by foolish men. “You choose your path,” he said. “You decide the curves of your life.” But I couldn’t help wondering if he had been wrong. That maybe a life such as his, that began stained by the darkness of death, had already been placed on a preordained track. Such a start could place a hole in a man’s heart that no amount of time could repair. It would split his spirit in ways that might chisel it away from basic decency and harden his views and judgments. It could easily help turn him into the man Angelo Vestieri grew to become.

  Mary’s eyes caught mine and she nodded, our thoughts seemingly cross-linked. “It seems like he was doomed from the start,” I said to her.

  “That’s one way to think of it, I suppose,” she said, pouring herself some water from a plastic pitcher.

  “What’s another?” I asked.

  “That his life turned out exactly the way he wanted it to,” she said. “As if he planned it himself from the very start.”

  2

  * * *

  HE WAS RAISED amid rows of tenements crammed against one another like dusty sets of dominos, with as many as three families jammed inside each weary apartment. In the winter, the thin windowpanes cracked from ice caked on their sills, while children slept huddled against the arms of their mothers, shorn blankets their only layers of protection against the brutality of cold city mornings. The summers brought with them a heat so muscular that the walls would sag and the white apartment paint would chip and crack. Turn-of-the-century lower Manhattan was a place where no child was meant to be raised, especially one as poorly suited for its elements as Angelo Vestieri.

  As an infant, Angelo was dependent on the young mothers of the neighborhood for the excess milk from their breasts, the risk of serious infection ignored in return for a nourishi
ng meal. He lived minus the warmth of a mother’s embrace, in the company of a father who had grown to fear displays of emotion. It was an infancy that helped ease him into the comfortable stance of a loner, needing and seeking the affection of no one. Such beginnings are a common trait among gangsters, who are adept at turning external deprivation into inner strength. I met many men in the gangster life in my years around the old man, and never found one who could be described as chatty. I was known and liked by many of them, and yet knew I would never earn their trust. To trust someone is to take a risk. Gangsters survive by minimizing risk.

  • • •

  YOUNG ANGELO SUFFERED from a variety of illnesses, but poverty meant he would not be soothed by proper medical care. He was plagued by a constant cough, the result, the neighborhood doctor claimed, of breathing in excessive amounts of smoke at birth. His weakened lungs left him vulnerable, his immune system under steady attack from the jet stream of contagious diseases that thrived in the overcrowded tenements lining Twenty-eighth Street along Broadway. Angelo spent large chunks of those early years in a small bed in the back of the three-room railroad apartment his father rented for two dollars a week. There, under an assortment of quilts and jackets, he coughed, shivered and wheezed through long days and empty nights. He never complained, always kept to himself, had great difficulty learning English and was very conscious of the chopped-up manner in which he spoke the language of his new country. Again, the severity of such a shuttered existence would serve Angelo well in his later years, when the ability to be isolated and silent for long periods of time would be perceived as a sign of strength.

  Angelo was always lost in waves of thought and most at ease when left alone in a world of his own design. It was only on rare occasions that he would venture out and join other boys his age to play the neighborhood street games on which they thrived—stickball, using shaved-down broom handles; Johnny-on-the-pony; ring-a-levio; stoop ball; penny pitching. “I was a bad fit from day one,” he once told me. “It just wasn’t important to me to be accepted. What those kids thought about me, what they believed to be true, meant nothing. I was a stranger to them and that was the way I wanted it. It was all I had in my favor back then.”

  Angelo was in and out of the poverty wards of the area hospitals, constantly forced to fight the effects of the ocean crossing and the flames that had seared his lungs. Three times during those early years he was pronounced days away from death, and each time he recovered. “For no other reason than to prove them wrong,” Mary said with a slight smile.

  Paolino would stop by the ward every morning before work and every night prior to the start of his second job. In the evening, he would bring along his son’s favorite meal, hot lentil soup poured over thick slices of Italian bread, and there, faces lit by the soft light of a nightstand lamp, father and son were warmed by good food and each other’s company.

  “Where do the ships you work on come from, Papa?” Angelo asked, his mouth crammed with a large chunk of bread.

  “Any place in the world you can think of,” Paolino said, holding a spoon close to his son’s lips. “They arrive every day from Italy, Germany, France, even some countries I’ve never heard of before. All filled with food and goods from their land. The ships are so heavy that sometimes they barely make it into the harbor.”

  “Where does all the food go?” Angelo asked, his mind alive with images of long lines of hulking cargo ships slowly slipping into port.

  “All across the country,” Paolino said. “Stores, restaurants, shops. It is a large country we are now part of, Angelo. There is plenty of food and work for everyone who wants it.”

  “Even for us, Papa?” Angelo said, scooping out the last of the lentils from the bowl his father held cupped in his hands.

  “This country is filled with people like us,” Paolino said, wiping at his son’s chin with the folded edge of a cloth napkin. “It is a special place for a boy like you. It can grant any wish and take you to places that go beyond any dream.”

  “Will I be able to work on the big ships when I’m bigger?” Angelo asked. “Like you do, Papa?”

  “Even better, little Angelo,” Paolino said with a wide smile. “One day, you can even own one of the big ships. Be a rich man. Sit back and let others work for you.”

  Angelo rested his head against the soft pillow, looked over at his father and smiled. “That would be nice, Papa,” Angelo said. “For both of us.”

  Paolino rested the bowl against the side of his chair and leaned over and held the sickly boy in his massive arms, rocking him gently until his eyes closed from the weight of illness and a healthy meal.

  • • •

  AFTER ONE FOUR-MONTH hospital stay, Paolino decided to move Angelo into the downtown apartment and care of Paolino’s great-aunt, Josephina, a widow who lived across the hall from the lonely duo. Josephina was a hefty woman, with thick, flabby arms and legs mapped from foot to upper thigh by ridges of swollen veins. She had dark olive eyes hidden under massive curls of black hair tinged with gray, and a quick and easy smile. She was a formidable-looking woman, with a quick-to-surface temper and a ragged scar streaming down both sides of her chin, the result of a decades-old dog bite. But she loved and cared for Angelo and sought to give him the mother’s attention the boy clearly lacked though never outwardly craved. She embraced the boy, welcoming him under the shade of her large wings not as a son but as a student. “She didn’t believe in the evils of the camorra or the mafia, which put her at odds with Angelo’s father,” Mary said. “But how could she believe otherwise? She was the proud wife of a slain crime boss. She respected and held to the traditions of their ways. And she passed those ways down to Angelo.”

  Josephina would sit him up in bed, his back against her side, a heavy hand gently stroking his thick hair, and tell him stories about the land where his bloodlines rested. “It all began because of the French,” she told him one morning, both of them sharing a cup of hot chicken broth. “That’s what the word mafia means—Morte Alla Francese in Italia. Death to the French in Italy.”

  “Perche?” Angelo would ask, in his half-English, half-Italian way of speaking. “Why dead?”

  “Centuries ago, they came in and took land that did not belong to them,” Josephina said. “It belonged to us, to the Italians. The police, they did nothing, out of fear. The politicians did nothing, because that is what they were paid to do. That left it up to the men of the towns to form a group that only they could trust.”

  “Did they win?” Angelo asked. “Did they get their land back?”

  “Much blood was spilled, but yes, they won their fight,” Josephina said. “And no one ever touched their land again.”

  “Was your husband in the group?” Angelo asked, reacting to the story as most children would to a favorite fairy tale.

  “Yes,” Josephina said. “He was capo of the town where we lived and where he died.”

  “Papa says that it was to get me and Mama away from men like Uncle Tomasso that we came to America,” Angelo said.

  “Your father is weak,” Josephina hissed in a dismissive tone. “He will never be more than what he is, a piece of furniture moved about by other people.”

  “I am weak, too,” Angelo said, sad eyes peering up at Josephina.

  “That will change,” Josephina said, a large hand reaching out and caressing the boy’s face.

  • • •

  ALL THE GANGSTERS I have known are superstitious, and it stems from childhood days spent with women such as Josephina, who spoon-fed them hand-me-down tales that have no weight in a modern world yet have lingered for centuries. Their everyday fears go miles beyond the simple black cats and open ladder phobias most people demonstrate and are driven by dreams, numbers and suspicion.

  “Do you know his biggest fear, courtesy of Aunt Josephina?” Mary asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Maybe I do,” I said. “If you came into a room with your jacket buttoned it meant you were planning to kill him.”<
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  “That was a good one,” Mary said. “But the one I got the biggest kick from was that he would never sit at a table or even be seen with a woman who had red hair.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was the color of the devil,” Mary said. “And Josephina believed that they had the power to turn the hearts of the most loyal of men.”

  “Do you think he really believed all that?” I asked.

  “I hope to God he did,” Mary said, the smile gone from her face. “He had more than one man murdered because of them.”

  • • •

  ON SUMMER AFTERNOONS, Angelo would sit on the middle step of his tenement stoop, staring at the faces in the crowds that squeezed their way past. The street was congested with human and horse-drawn traffic, and thick piles of manure and litter lined both ends of the sidewalk. Across the street from Angelo’s building was a dilapidated saloon with an unhinged front door, chipped walls and an uptown name.

  It was called the Café Maryland.

  Inside its dark, beer- and bloodstained interior, local gangs met to plot their murders and burglaries, map out hijacking routes and collect on their cash loan-outs. In the summer of 1910, three men were shot and killed after a long and loud argument over a woman whose company many of the bar patrons had already shared. The morgue attendants pulled their black van up to the front door soon after the final shots had been fired, scooped up the bodies and vanished back into the darkness, shrugging their shoulders and laughing after another night of battle between “the dagos and the micks.”

  Angelo was warned by his father never to step near the Maryland. “The people in that bar and the people we escaped from are one and the same,” Paolino said. “There is no difference.” Paolino ached to spend more time with his son, but the need to work two jobs that barely brought in enough money put an end to such fatherly desires. He worked three full day and night shifts at the midtown piers, helping unload the ships that flooded in and out of the packed harbor. For that, Paolino earned seven dollars a week, but he had to kick back half of that to Chick Tricker’s enforcers, who guaranteed the work in return for the payoff.